Next Saturday, October 13, the United States Navy will celebrate its 249th anniversary – marking its founding on that day in 1775 when the Continental Congress established the Continental Navy. The sea service has already announced big plans for its 250th anniversary next year, but right now it may just want to move past what hasn’t been a good few months for the U.S. Navy.
It was just a week ago that the Henry J. Kaiser-class replenishment oiler USNS Big Horn (T-AO-198) ran aground in the Middle East, putting into question how the U.S. Navy will supply its warships in the region with fuel – including the aviation fuel needed by the Nimitz-class nuclear-powered supercarrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72).
If that wasn’t bad enough, there were reports of faulty welds on aircraft carriers and submarines produced at the HII Newport News shipyard. Lawmakers have been reviewing internal reporting after it was discovered that workers may not have utilized the right techniques to weld joints. The Department of Justice has since launched an investigation.
As previously reported, there have been several incidents of sailors sharing classified documents with foreign agents, while the U.S. Navy has been forced to play a form of “musical carriers” rotating the flattops to the Middle East to deal with threats from Iran and its regional proxies, which in turn has left a “gap” in the Indo-Pacific.
Rough Seas Ahead
In addition to those other woes, the U.S. Navy – like all the branches of the military – continues to deal with recruiting shortfalls, while the production of new warships is also running behind.
“Some of that is related to focus on huge costly warships; some of it is related to mismanagement, internal tensions over priorities, and supply chain disruptions,” warned Irina Tsukerman, geopolitical analyst at threat response firm Scarab Rising.
“The Navy is also struggling to hire and retain workers to build new ships,” Tsukerman told ClearanceJobs. “There are obstacles related to the quality of workers, competitiveness, and high turnover. Separately, the Navy is also struggling with recruiting its members, due to a general lack of interest, health issues, and increasing rates of criminal records among applicants. These shortages in turn lead to additional safety concerns. Retention rates are also being challenged by the promise of the private sector: greater flexibility, better salaries, less rigid hierarchy.”
Several other factors are now contributing to the service’s shipbuilding challenges, and those include shifting defense priorities, last-minute design changes, and cost overruns. There may be no quick fix, however.
“Some of these concerns arise from the perceived dilution of responsibility and the fact that the Navy has turned over strategic planning to other organizations, such as the Joint Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense,” explained Tsukerman. “It would either work closer with those offices to ensure its needs are being met and that the planning is aligned with the specific requirements, or it may need to find a way to revert to the original structure and reassert its authority in planning.”
Global Threats – The Middle East or China?
The U.S. military spent many of the early years of the 21st century embroiled in the Global War on Terror (GWOT) but has shifted in the past decade back to a great power competition with near-peer adversaries including Russia and China – with the latter now engaged in a massive naval expansion. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is now larger, at least in terms of total vessels than the United States while it is now engaged in sea trials of its third aircraft carrier, the second to be domestically built.
There has been an effort to move the focus away from the Middle East, but then a year ago when Hamas launched its raid into southern Israel and ignited the largest conflict in the region in years, the Pentagon found it necessary to maintain a presence.
“The Navy is facing expanding global threats, and the gap between the number of ships the Navy has and China is widening. There is no flexibility to react quickly towards these expanding new crises and additional flashpoints, nor a specific mandate to focus on bridging the quantitative and qualitative gap with China,” Tsukerman added.
“The reason for that is that there is still not a clear uniform policy that would mandate to see China as a clear maritime threat to the U.S. specifically, nor is there a clear red line policy regarding freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, or vis-a-vis Taiwan,” she continued. “For now, the response to these challenges is being tested in a very limited way that falls within the current capabilities, but whatever the wargaming scenario of more serious confrontations and additional demands, they have thus far not translated into specific targeted spending, funding, or allocation of resources.”
Doing More With Less
At least in the short term, the U.S. Navy will operate with an aging fleet that requires additional maintenance and upkeep while struggling with budgetary restraints and priorities skewed toward optical deterrence.
“There is also under-preparedness for asymmetrical and innovative threats,” Tsukerman suggested. “Part of that is due to the fact that Congress is more impressed by a show of power than in funding mundane upkeep issues or what is seen as speculative spending on a variety of options for various risk scenarios that have not yet come to pass.
She further warned that there remains a “huge communications gap” that is ongoing between policymakers and the maritime security community, while the funders appear more at ease with funding air power than maritime security issues, because air strikes may be easier to understand than complex maritime maneuvers, chokepoints, and the specificities of various types of vessels for unclear needs.
Yet, the Houthi militant group’s attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden have served to highlight that disruption to freedom of navigation needs to be taken seriously. The U.S. military continues to be reactionary to these crises – and it may need to be more proactive.
“Rapidly changing global dynamics can outpace strategic planning, leading to gaps in preparedness for emerging threats,” said Tsukerman. “To be flexible and innovative in its approach, the Navy, like other agencies, needs to shift the focus from reactionary and somewhat outdated singular approaches to preemption of emerging and transnational threats, first assessing these threats as networks rather than singular challenges, and second, being ahead of the game in prognosticating likely threats and needs ahead of time based on a combination of intelligence, imagination, and data-based projections.”
Too much of a focus on specific regions or missions can also lead to neglect of others, creating those vulnerabilities.
“In theory, it’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time, but if the U.S. policymakers throw most of their weight behind one crisis, the remaining flashpoints end up being forgotten,” Tsukerman emphasized. “It is then up to the Navy to bring the resulting issues to the attention of the power that be, and explain how neglecting some of these crises degrades capabilities, emboldens bad actors, furthers the crises, and impacts even the priority challenges.”
