A Larger Navy is Not in the Cards

...not with the mindset aspic everyone is set in...

After my initial flush of optimism with CNO Franchetti’s Navigation Plan for 2024 that I wrote about shortly after it came out, something has been nagging at me. I was ignoring the rational side of my brain—the one I focused on in undergrad and grad school—economics.

The CNO on page one was clear, but I just read over it. Let me stitch a few things together from the NAVPLAN.

We cannot manifest a bigger traditional Navy in a few short years, nor will we rely on mass without the right capabilities to win the sea control contest. We will continue to partner with Congress to invest in our industrial base capacity and secure the necessary budget growth to deliver a larger, more lethal force. Without those resources, however, we will continue to prioritize readiness, capability, and capacity—in that order.

…

Without substantial growth in Navy resourcing now, we will eventually face deep strategic constraints on our ability to simultaneously address day-to-day crises while also modernizing the fleet to enhance readiness for war both today and in the future.

…

This 2024 Navigation Plan reflects our current emphasis on readiness and capability considering near-term budgetary and industrial realities, while continuing to advocate for the resources needed to expand all aspects of the Navy’s force structure necessary to preserve the peace, respond in crisis, and win decisively in war.

She sees no path to 350/55 or anything north of 300. In today’s environment and structure, she’s correct. Accepting reality is the first step in making the best of what you have.

Bad on my part for not discussing that early on, but I guess I was having a happy day or something. My bad. After all, this is right in my lane being that I started to write about The Terrible 20s coming up on 15 years ago.

Let me quote myself from April of 2010 linked to above that explained what we could expect to see in the distant future of the mid-2020s.

- The fiscal nightmare of the series of deficits we are building and the debt service they will bring - along with the budgetary realities of building a Social Democracy (only tremendous political changes in '10 and '12 elections will change this), will create budgetary pressures that will drive defense spending to below 3% of GDP by 2012 (it is 4% now).
- The largest shipbuilding pressure in the 2020's will be the re-capitalization of the SSBN force.
- Don't forget the new Nuclear Posture Review ...

Holds up pretty well.

Here is the headwind we are looking at. As I mentioned on yesterday’s Midrats, this graph has haunted me since I saw it. Not the first time I’ve seen something like it, but for some reason it is sticking.

Forget the Navy’s budget growing along with the general DOD topline, with that curve no one in DOD can expect a larger budget if we keep the pie pieces the same. We have financially painted ourselves into a corner.

Should the Great Pacific War come in the next decade—which I believe has a better than even chance—we will either have to decide to pass on the fight and resign ourselves to decline, or fund the fight that will find ourselves as bankrupt as the British Empire was in 1945, with a decline to follow. These debt levels simply are not economically, culturally, or morally sustainable.

A few more graphs from FRED that underline the issue.

I hope everyone understands what these graphs represent. Back in 2011 or so in San Diego when I was able to get a minute of Admiral Foggo’s time, I mentioned to him that we need warfare qualified officers with PhD’s in economics on every major planning staff. This is why.

We haven’t even brought in the aging workforce etc.

Looping back to the CNO, I have to give her good credit here on including the items I quote at the beginning of this article. We need to speak clearly with each other as adults. She did that; I just missed it on the first read.

If you still want a larger Navy budget, then we have a different battle to fight—one no one in power has even started.