So, Do Ship Numbers Matter or Not?

...a tale of two fleets...

If you are in uniform, it is important to remember that you are “in” DC and not “of” DC.

Even the very best senior uniformed leadership will, if they spend too long in DC run into the danger of picking up the habits of the political appointees they work for.

It seems a simple thing that they would remember that they are not supposed to be part of the political party apparatus of whoever happens to be elected during their PCS cycle.

However, humans are human and will bend to one degree or another in the political wind if they are not careful. The system of incentives and disincentives - and promotion filters - are too strong.

I don’t need to review for readers here the state of our poorly capitalized and supported fleet as it faces the People’s Republic of China.

To get the resources we need to not just maintain the fleet we have but to grow it, we need a firm, clear, and consistent message from our uniformed leadership to the American public and their elected representatives. Everyone who serves relies on their leadership to make the argument to gather the support to make sure we are trained, manned, and equipped to fight the next war.

Whoever is coaching the CNO needs to be reassigned. They are not helping her or the Navy she leads. We need the leader of our Navy to be an advocate of seapower, not repeat talking points picked up in JPME-II.

How does this reflect the reality we see?

Via Justin Katz at Breaking Defense;

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti today said “it’s not about numbers” when asked about China’s shipbuilding capacity relative to the United States,

How many times through history have we seen this kind of cope?

“It’s platforms on, under and above the sea. It’s the networks that enable them. It’s cyber. It’s our work in space. It’s work with all the joint force.”

That is simply Joint-cant. It is spoken like it is some magic word. I’m sorry, it is deflection.

“1,000 ship Navy” … “…the Joint Force…” - slight of hand and verbal chaff does absolutely nothing to move the ball in building the fleet everyone knows we will need should war come west of the International Date Line.

We see g in real time that we don’t have enough surface ships to even do basic convoy escorting through waters contested by a sub-4th rate power known as the Houthi insurgency.

Facing the world’s largest Navy - the People’s Liberation Army Navy - in their own backyard along a 2,500nm arch from Japan to Australia that is almost exclusively maritime in nature?

Though for a long time I thought it was a bit reactionary, I am becoming more and more convinced that what we have is a bleed-through of domestic politics in to what should be non-partisan; a strong Navy for the maritime power we are.

However, it seems as with many things, if the Trump administration was for something, then the Biden administration has to be against it;

…the number of ships in the fleet, has become a political football in recent years with Congress during the Trump administration setting 355 as a minimum number of ships that the Navy is required to maintain. The current fleet hovers between 295 and 305 vessels depending on the timing of retirements and commissionings during a given year.

With each passing month, I think this is the primary headwind.

Before the next pull-quote, review the CNO’s comments above, then read the below;

On paper, Navy leadership are publicly supportive of a larger fleet, and Franchetti said that explicitly during her speech. “It’s clear that we do need a larger Navy,” she said. “Every study that has been done… our battle force structure assessment reports, they all show that we do need to have a larger Navy.”

She undermines this statement of fact with her earlier comments. Just to make it worse, she goes back to the Joint-cant;

“If you look at some of the things that all of our sister services are doing to get after this challenge of China, and you put all that pieces together, we are the dominant combat warfighting force,” she said.

We will never win the argument for a larger, better supported fleet if even the CNO won’t make it.

What do the American people and their elected representatives need?

Clear, direct talk that we can all see with our own eyes.

Our good friend Matthew Hipple over at CIMSEC is doing that for the 4-stars. This is what we need to hear;

The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) recently assessed that the China’s shipbuilding industry fields 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States, representing almost 50% of total global shipbuilding capacity.

…

China’s modern shipbuilding behemoth is only 20 years old, the result of a deliberate Chinese Communist Party (CCP) campaign of maritime expansion begun in response to the US Navy’s Summer Pulse 2004 exercise when China represented only around 10% of global ship production.

…

the U.S. Navy’s often minimalist approach to procurement shows how limited quantity limits development of quality in arenas like tactical and technical development. As an example, the 10-years-behind-schedule LCS Mine Counter-Measures (MCM) Mission Package (MP) has still yet to certify Full Operating Capability. When I was OPS with LCS Crew 206 in 2020, when the package was only seven years behind schedule, we could only field a single unmanned surface vessel (USV) for limited periods to conduct basic testing – let alone tactical development. This was after the disastrous attempt to base the MCM mission package off the Remote Multi Mission Vehicle (RMMV) – a corner-cutting approach that tried to repurpose a program from 1999 for DDGs into an LCS minehunting system into the 2020’s.

Among numerous other programmatic issues, the paucity of resources always limited the speed of development. The U.S. Navy is making strides learning from that failure on the unmanned front with CTF 59 in Bahrain, USV DIV One in San Diego, and a new approach for 4th Fleet. Nonetheless, the US Navy remains well short of needed manned surface vessels. As the qualitative lag in the MCM MP caused by a paucity of USV assets demonstrates, the same applies to manned surface vessels. But unlike the U.S. Navy, the PLAN has nothing if not extra ships, ordnance, and unmanned systems to train and experiment with.

Matthew is only getting started. You need to read the whole thing.

Layer upon layer of happy-talk from our uniformed leadership sounding “of” DC and not “in” DC is what got us in the mess we are in today.

We have enough politicians. Politics, spin, and happy-talk - that is what the SECNAV and other political appointees are supposed to do. Our senior uniform leadership? The more they sound like the politician, the more they alienate half the population, earn the distrust of their subordinates, and degrade the institutional capital their position holds.