The Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Symposium, like the other service equivalents, is supposed to be an opportunity for the Navy to get its story out, flood the defense industry tabloids with good news stories, and generally communicate to the entire maritime community that the Navy is headed in the right direction.
Boy did it not do that this week.
Over last weekend, Politico broke the news that an internal report on shipbuilding timelines is so bad that the Navy cancelled briefings on it. Every, I mean every single, Navy shipbuilding program is delayed by years. This isn’t entirely the Navy’s fault; the shipbuilding industry is struggling to compete for workers with companies like Amazon that pay more for easier work, and they don’t know how to fix it. Chaotic and inconsistent funding from a Congress held hostage by performative politics is another issue that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Meanwhile the Nation’s seapower and its blue-collar worker base atrophy away.
The answer is to pay them more, by the way.
These delays and problems were revealed by a 45-day SECNAV directed review of the issues. Now that the issues have been reviewed, SECNAV has ordered…. another review.
The never-ending series of U.S. Navy reviews is a self-licking ice cream cone: going nowhere for no reason. That’s because the Navy’s major problems are structural. The National Security Act of 1947 downgraded the Department of the Navy from a cabinet-level organization to one under the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense, focused only on warfighting and not the economic or diplomatic functions of navies across history, broke the connection between the nation’s executive and its leading maritime arm. Combine that with the fact that the other facets of American seapower are spread scattershot across the Department of Transportation (the Maritime Administration) and the frankenstein’s monster Department of Homeland Defense (the Coast Guard), and you have a structural, institutional hobbling of American seapower that has now reached a crisis point.
But while it isn’t all the Navy’s fault, it’s also the Navy’s fault. The Navy foists as many requirements onto its shipbuilding programs as it can, maintaining that this won’t cause delays. But they do. The Constellation-class frigates are the latest victim of the Navy’s requirements meddling. The Navy took a proven, pre-existing design and foisted changes and additional requirements on it to the point that it might as well be a new design, leading to delays. The LSM is another. The Navy took what should be the most simple ship in its inventory, one that literally just has to float and move, and levied additional requirements that have nothing to do with its mission. Now it may be too expensive. The Navy is too small and needs more ships, but cannot get out of its own way enough to get any shipbuilding programs actually underway.
The Navy is stuck in a doom loop: putting off risk until a more favorable budget environment arrives, but one never does. No CNO, SECNAV, or CNO/SECNAV combination is going to get it out. The Navy dug itself into this hole, and you can’t expect the problem to fix the problem.
The Navy’s been here before of course and it always takes legislative AND executive recognition that the American Project cannot succeed without seapower to change the trajectory of defense investment. The history of the Navy is of repeated boom and bust cycles, but it’s not the Navy that digs itself out. It’s Congress.
President Biden doesn’t seem to be that executive. Former President Trump definitely wasn’t. This Congress, stuck in interminable Speaker drama or the waning days of a gerontocracy, isn’t that legislature. It would have to do more than just criticize the Navy, it would have to fix it itself. There’s no Teddy Roosevelt on the horizon. But shipbuilding is too important to a nation to be left to admirals.
Yes, we absolutely need more floating targets.