The U.S. Navy Still Has Problems

The U.S. Navy continues to ignore elephants in the room regarding its deep military vulnerabilities. Also, mostly as a result of weak management of the service, the U.S. Navy does a poor job of running the assets it has as a "tight ship" (as evidenced by major screw ups outside of wartime situations) and does a poor job of procuring new major military systems. 

[I]n war games and mock attacks from 1966 to 2006 — a forty year span — submarines and surface warships from the Soviet Union and Russia, China, Chile, Holland, Australia, and Canada theoretically destroyed the carriers Saratoga, Independence, John F. Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Forrestal, Constellation, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Kitty Hawk and Abraham Lincoln. Nor is this ancient history. More recent articles . . . refer to the continuing problem of the Navy’s inability to protect its high-cost core assets. . . .  aircraft carriers are becoming vulnerable to China’s anti-ship ballistic missiles and other systems. Part of the problem is also the Navy’s poor anti-submarine systems (ASW) systems. This all must be given much more serious attention by anyone who thinks everything’s just fine.

But the problems the Navy has today go way beyond the utility of its carriers. Leadership has come under increasing scrutiny. . . .  recent Navy disasters such as the tragedies involving the McCain, Fitzgerald, and the Bonhomme Richard amphibious vessel, which was destroyed in port last year by fire, bear many of his criticisms out. . . . the service [is]. . . “cumbersome, vastly overmanned, stolidly managed, with massive institutional inertia and hobbled by internal and external politics.” . . . [with] “monstrous levels of inefficiency in many respects”[.] . . . According to a 2021 survey of current and retired Navy officers: “Concern within the Navy runs so high that, when asked whether incidents such as the two destroyer collisions in the Pacific (McCain and Fitzgerald), the surrender of a small craft to the IRGC (Iranian Republican Guard Corps) in the Arabian Gulf, the burning of the Bonhomme Richard, and other incidents were part of a broader cultural or leadership problem in the Navy, 94% of interviewees responded ‘yes.’” . . .

The problems plaguing the Zumwalt-class destroyer and Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) programs, for example, represent moral as well as material failures. . . .

it is difficult to see this organization continue to blunder and make mistakes that go uncorrected decade after decade. 

From here.

The losses of the Russian Navy's Black Sea fleet in the Ukraine War were due to vulnerabilities to anti-ship missiles to which U.S. warships are also highly vulnerable.

In addition to anti-ship missiles and hypersonic missiles deployed from land, aircraft, surface combatants and submarines, U.S. surface warships are vulnerable to submarine launched torpedoes, sea mines, and swarm attacks by small boats and drones.

Almost all U.S. Navy destroyers and frigates have naval guns that are basically unguided shell lobbing howitzers with a range too short to be useful in supporting grounds forces in coastal areas, or in combat against missile armed enemy warships, although they might be effective against the kind of militarized civilian pirate and smuggler opponents generally reserved for coast guard vessels. Naval guns are also ineffectual against submarines, drones, and enemy aircraft.

The U.S. Navy and the Marine Corps devote immense resources to maintaining a non-permissive amphibious assault capability that hasn't been utilized in a militarily important way since the Korean War in the 1950s. Long range missiles, aircraft carrying guided bombs and missiles, and paratroopers, have largely made that mission obsolete.

The U.S. Navy devotes immense resources to blue sea warships capable of striking other warships with anti-ship missiles, even though submarines and warplanes are just as effective or more at doing so, at a comparable or lower cost, and are far less vulnerable to enemy attacks than U.S. Navy surface combatants in that mission.

Similarly, submarines and warplanes just as effective or more than surface combatants at launching missiles at land targets, at a comparable  or lower cost, and are far less vulnerable to enemy attacks than U.S. Navy surface combatants in that mission.

Even anti-submarine warfare is an area where patrol aircraft like the P-8 together with submarines, both of which are comparable in cost or less expensive than, and far less vulnerable than U.S. surface combatant aircraft in this mission.

The U.S. Navy has a long neglected sea lift function, that has avoided disaster mostly because no one has seriously tried to take it on militarily. These sea lift resources, as demonstrated in the 1980s and 1990s, is mostly too slow, and has too little capacity, to get ground forces to the battle in the time frames that matter in modern warfare. And, many of the sea lift ships it has are just civilian freighters with U.S. Navy logos painted on their sides with no significant military capacity of their own. Also, the heavy tanks that were once at the core of what used to need to be sea lifted are increasingly of less importance in ground combat.

U.S. Navy surface combatants have crews that are two or three times as large as they would need to be with modern automation technologies and many of their functions can be performed just as well by unmanned surface and submarine drones.

Basically, going to war in a U.S. Navy surface combatant is like going into a battle on land in an armored RV, that is slow, vulnerable, has a small tooth to tail ratio, and puts large numbers of sailors at unnecessary risk.

Yet, the U.S. Navy is extremely expensive. Its budget alone, setting aside the Marine Corps within the Navy, the Army, and Air Force, is still larger than the budget of the entire military of any other country in the world. 

The U.S. Navy is far larger than any other naval force that could conceivably be an opponent of the U.S. Navy in the foreseeable future, even without considering allied support that is likely to be present in any foreseeable conflict. And, it isn't particularly efficient in utilizing the resources that it has, with only about a third of its warships deployed at any one time.

Despite the fact that Russia is one of the main blue sea navy adversaries of the U.S., military lobbyists rarely even bother to portray it as a serious threat for the U.S. Navy to counter any longer. Its allies in Europe and East Asia who are closer to Russia are more than capable of handling that threat themselves. Naval threats from Iran and North Korea, two of the most formidable potential naval opponents of the United State Navy also barely get a mention in debates on funding the U.S. Navy.

Almost all contemporary policy and lobbying arguments for maintain the current high levels of U.S. Navy funding focus on the ability of the U.S. to defend Taiwan from an amphibious invasion from the People's Republic of China, a single potential conflict, about which Taiwan itself vacillates about fighting at times. But the U.S. Navy, with its World War II era derived force structure, which it doubled down on in Ronald Reagan's Navy buildup, isn't even particularly optimized for that mission.

In sum, U.S. spending on the U.S. Navy, and especially its fleet of surface combatants, is probably the single best place for the U.S. to cut its grossly excessive defense budget, without undue harm to U.S. national security.

The U.S. does require a navy appropriate to its needs as a global military power. But it needs to stop throwing good money after bad to address hypothetical adversaries that don't exist. And, the U.S. military needs to far more seriously consider the extent to which ground and air based forces would be better alternatives for carrying out many of the missions to which the U.S. Navy has been assigned.