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In the
mid-1980s there were almost 600 ships in the Navy's active fleet. Today,
there are just over 320, and that number is expected to drop over the
next 3-4 years to 305 ships, the total mandated by the Clinton
administration's Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR).
Here it is
worth pointing out that the QDR has been widely criticized as being
budget-driven, overly optimistic, and based on a best-case scenario
rather than validated military requirements. Moreover, the
administration's current and outyear budget projections will support a
fleet of, at best, somewhere between 200 and 250 ships, depending on the
operational scenarios selected.
There is some
additional funding for shipbuilding in the outyears of the latest FYDP
(future-years defense plan), but not enough to build the active fleet
back up to the numbers required to maintain a full-time Navy presence in
what are usually considered to be the most likely areas of future
conflict: the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean and Adriatic,
the waters off North Korea, and the Taiwan Straits.
The Joint
Chiefs of Staff have told Congress that the Navy needs 15 aircraft
carrier battle groups (CVBGs) to carry out all of its overseas
commitments. There are now only 12 CVBGs in the fleet. They represent an
awesome power-projection capability and, in many areas of the world,
are--with the Navy/Marine Corps amphibious ready groups (ARGs)--the only
combat-ready forces immediately available to the National Command
Authorities and the regional commanders in chief in times of
international crisis.
To compensate
for the continuing mismatch between requirements and resources the Navy
has adopted--i.e., has been forced to adopt--what is euphemistically
described as a "gapping" strategy. Which means, in plain
language, that one or more areas of potential conflict are without the
protective presence of a CVBG for 34 months of the year. Critics, both
inside and outside the Navy, of the gapping strategy accurately (but not
always publicly) describe it as "playing musical chairs with the
fleet."
Our Navy
League's own position has been both clear and consistent, and was most
recently enunciated in the Maritime Policy resolutions unanimously
adopted at the Annual Meeting of Members during the 1999 NLUS national
convention in Chicago: The Navy needs an active fleet of "at least
350 ships, including 15 aircraft carriers; at least 72 nuclear-powered
attack submarines; and more mine warfare, amphibious, and auxiliary
ships."
The NLUS
position on the gapping policy is equally explicit: The
"gapping" of forward-deployed naval forces "is not a
'prudent risk,' as it is sometimes described [by Navy as well as DOD
officials]. ... It is an invitation to conflict."
The recent
out-of-area deployment of the conventionally powered carrier USS Kitty
Hawk serves as a timely case in point. The Japan-based carrier
departed the Yokosuka naval base on 2 March for what was expected to be
a routine three-month deployment. But, as an article in the 21 August
edition of Pacific Stars and Stripes noted, the deployment
schedule changed "when fighting in Kosovo forced the
[nuclear-powered carrier] USS Theodore Roosevelt to steam to the
Adriatic Sea in support of Operation Allied Force. The Kitty Hawk
was ordered to the Persian Gulf to fill that gap, extending its
deployment to six months."
Adm. Archie R.
Clemins, commander in chief U.S. Pacific Fleet, was quoted in the
article as promising that, "short of an international crisis
[emphasis added]," the Navy plans to keep the Kitty Hawk
"away from the Middle East for at least two years.
"No one is
unaware of what they have had to go through," Clemins said.
"There are people on that ship who have been out for 267 of the
past 365 days."
Unfortunately,
Navy plans, no matter how logical and how well-intended, almost always
give way to global realities. The Kitty Hawk's principal missions
are to help deter the outbreak of conflict between Taiwan and the
People's Republic of China and between North and South Korea. Those
missions became even more important in recent weeks as relations
continued to worsen in both areas.
What makes the
overall defense situation in the Western Pacific even more worrisome is
the 23 August report in Navy News & Undersea Technology that
China has already decided to build at least three conventionally powered
60,000-ton carriers, with construction of the first probably starting in
2001. One wonders how effective a deterrent the gapping policy might
provide when these new units are fully operational.
Earlier this
year, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jay L. Johnson said that he is
"on record" that "going below 300 ships" would lead
to "unacceptable risks" to the Navy--and to the United States.
"I have told that to the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of
Defense, Congress, and the President." The CNO said that he had
"raised this warning" because "the current shipbuilding
level is insufficient to preserve even that level of fleet [300 ships]
in the coming decades."
The Navy League
is already working to arrest the perilous decline in the Navy's
shipbuilding program and, with support from the American Shipbuilding
Association, is sponsoring a Sea Power Ambassadors program to educate
the American people--and their elected leaders--about the importance of
sea power, commercial as well as naval, not only to U.S. national
defense but also to America's economic well-being. We must keep our
fellow citizens informed of this defense crisis so that they can ensure
that the Congress does indeed properly provide for the common defense.
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