The Navy is failing at its most
basic responsibilities.
French fur trappers
reported in the sixteenth century that the St. Lawrence River freezes hard in
the winter. You’d think that word might have filtered through to Washington by
now. But the U.S. Navy sent one of its newest warships, the USS
Little Rock, to Montreal in
December—where it now sits trapped in thick ice, probably until mid-March, marking
an inauspicious beginning of a new year for a sea service coming off a
horrendous 2017. Indeed, news of the Little Rock’s humiliation arrived with word that the Navy
has referred the commanding officers of two destroyers involved in fatal
high-seas collisions last summer for prosecution on charges including criminal
negligence.
That nimble ships like
the USS Fitzgerald and USS
John S. McCain could be run down
at sea by lumbering cargo vessels three times their size—the McCain in broad daylight—is outrageous. Seventeen
sailors died in these collisions, which occurred within weeks of one another
and followed other, nonfatal accidents involving warships homeported at
Yokosuka, Japan. The Navy subsequently termed the Fitzgerald and McCain incidents as “avoidable”—a substantial understatement, given the
circumstances—and began a disciplinary process that turned the Seventh Fleet’s
command structure on its head. Dozens of officers and senior enlisted personnel
have been relieved of their duties. Most recently, the admiral in charge of the
sea service’s entire surface operation was fired.
Whether all this will
change anything remains to be seen. The accidents revealed a maritime service
so dysfunctional that it seems unable to get out of its own way, let alone to
execute its duties in an increasingly threatening world. One negative official
report, however scathing, plus a few high-stakes courtroom dramas won’t fix
that.
Defense Secretary James
Mattis seems to have embarked on a clean sweep-down of the Navy, a fighting
force capable of great things but institutionally underfunded, operationally
overextended and—during the Obama administration—fixated on policies that
stressed gender integration and other progressive goals at the expense of basic
seamanship. Obama administration Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’s efforts to bend 240
years of naval tradition to contemporary social-justice goals were enormously
disruptive to an institution heavily dependent on cultural continuity.
His insistence that women be integrated into Marine Corps infantry units
augurs tragic consequences (unless the Trump administration
reverses the policy). Mabus’s obsessions distracted from the business at hand:
tending to America’s maritime security needs by dealing directly with the
debilitating effects of more than a decade of low-intensity but costly warfare,
budget sequestrations, and a resultant decline in preparedness and operational
efficiency.
Retired admiral James O.
Ellis, writing last month for the Hoover Institution, summed up the
consequences succinctly, if bloodlessly: “The Navy has often found itself in a
downward trend of extended deployments and training and maintenance reductions
which have contributed to mishaps, material casualties, readiness failings,
and, in turn, further shortfalls.” Among the shortfalls, of course, must be
counted the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions. Both incidents, the Navy
admits, were driven by heavy operational demands that resulted in inadequate
crew training and incompetent seamanship. With only 275 ships in commission—far
short of the 355 it deems necessary—the Navy has been hard-pressed to
meet the challenges posed by an expanding Chinese fleet and an increasingly provocative
Russian maritime service.
“Over the past 25 years
the number of ships in our Navy decreased by nearly half,” writes retired admiral Gary Roughead, a former chief of naval
operations. “Although the fleet is significantly smaller, the expectation
remains for the Navy to be present in areas of strategic importance, to project
power when prompt, assured access to land bases is problematic, and to
persistently defend our interests and those of our allies and partners. Today,
that means twice the percentage of the fleet is deployed than was at the height
of the Cold War.”
That would be a
formidable challenge under any circumstances, but the Navy’s continuing
inability to control ship-construction costs contributes substantially to its
problems. Some of this may be the price of maintaining maritime supremacy in
the twenty-first century—an imperative, as China seeks to turn the South China
Sea into its own lake—but the Navy needs self-discipline if it is going to
build an adequate fleet.
Meantime, the human
costs of an undersized fleet continue to grow. Fewer ships mean longer
deployments, leading to high-profile accidents caused by inadequate training
and poor leadership. Unreasonably long cruises also depress crew morale and
exacerbate personnel-retention problems. The Navy has waived physical fitness standards for
tens of thousands of sailors. Operationally, the consequences have ranged from
the bizarre (a captain ordering a sailor to be confined on bread and water)
to the sadly predictable (a black sailor fabricating a “hate crime,” whereupon
an aircraft carrier’s entire crew was lectured on “racism”), to the tragic—fatal drug overdoses at
a West Coast naval base and an onboard suicide at
Naval Submarine Base New London. How many marriages have been torn asunder from
extended deployments can only be guessed at.
Retired captain Kevin
Eyer, who commanded the cruisers Shilohand Chancellorsville, has doubts about the
basic competence of the average sailor. “Navigation and seamanship, these are
the fundamental capabilities which every surface warfare officer should have,”
he writes, “but I suspect if called to war, we’ll be required to do a lot more
than safely navigate the Singapore strait,” where the McCain collision occurred. “If our surface forces
are unable to successfully execute these fundamental blocking and tackling
tasks, how can it possibly be expected that they are also able to do the much
more complex warfighting tasks?”
The need for
accountability—and simple justice—demand that specific responsibility for last
summer’s collisions be assigned. Lives were lost. But getting an answer to
Eyer’s question is even more fundamental.
Happily, the Navy now is
under sound civilian leadership. Defense Secretary Mattis, a former Marine
Corps general, may have difficulty marshalling the resources needed to put the
sea service back on course. But there is no doubt that he grasps the urgent
need for deep reform. A nation with global interests, America has always needed
a strong navy. It still does.
Bob McManus is
a City Journal contributing
editor. Email: bmcmanus@city-journal.org.
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