Vessels and physics
Only one at a time
No, we have not migrated to Hawai’i though it is tempting. The clouds put on quite a show this morning, including providing us some ‘liquid Aloha’ as they passed east, then reversed themselves back in our direction. Ten hours later the sky is Carolina blue so few things last indefinitely here.
We also travelled to Pearl Harbour midday, a place infamous in American history yet essential to our future as well. We were not visiting for the historic sites; I was on tours twice the year before last with my husband on one. He has also been to sites countless times when still in uniform as he had the privilege of participating with many foreign navy visits over his distinguished career.
Instead, we went to the Naval Base at Pearl. As a veteran, he can access such locations. I am similarly entitled as a spouse. We did not board any of the ships nor did we enter any classified spaces, of course. For all the discussion last year about classified documents, I found too little of it, especially in looking at Air Force Airman Jack Texeira who stands accused of publishing volumes of material online in violation of his oath and his security clearance agreements, reminded the casual reader that the system authorizes people with appropriate clearances to access material ‘on an need-to-know’ basis rather than because the individual wants to see some document.
My husband was subdued as we looked at the paltry number of ships at the long pier. There were fewer than half a dozen surface vessels out of the entire U.S. Navy inventory of about 283 ships of all kind. Two hundred eighty-three. The People’s Liberation Army Navy, without even counting its extensive maritime militia, has about a hundred more vessels but the comparison between raw numbers of hulls in the water may not be that relevant in a conflict. A range of factors such as geography, training, decisionmaking, and other conditions at work when a scenario occurs mean raw numbers don’t guarantee anything except that we have a vastly smaller navy than in the Cold War or World War II.
The fleet at Pearl is certainly dramatically different from when my husband passed through Pearl in the mid-1960s. Back then, the U.S. fleet was a thousand or so ships, (admittedly many still World War II craft). Many were deployed in the Atlantic while a substantial number in the Pacific among several home ports. He described seeing ships often moored in the ‘ 60s three abreast from the pier rather than single hulls we drive past today. The Cold War gave the Navy a focus—defeating the Soviet Navy imperiling us—and the relative bipartisanship of national security policymakers meant we funded the Navy that either party’s presidents said were needed.
Huh? How did we get to what I saw this morning? Actions create consequences. Several notable changes, largely but not entirely tied to budgets, happened over the past sixty years. They have altered the Navy and defense as a whole.
Fifty years ago last fall, the United States ended the draft. Excellent decision by Richard Nixon for preventing rioting in the streets as thousands of young men tried to avoid their required service which could lead to potential injury or worse. Devastatingly expensive for the nation as an all volunteer force is significantly more expensive.personnel costs to recruit, retain, offer incentives for families to support this lifestyle, etc.; making an All Volunteer Force work is tres expensive. 23% of the Fiscal Year 2022 defense budget of $715 billion funded personnel needs, or roughly one in every four dollars. We want and need better troops, seamen, and Marines. We have to incentivize joining and staying to defend the nation; turns out appealing to patriotism alone doesn’t give us what we need. This is a complicated issue tied to many societal and economic questions but the costs definitely escalated after we ended conscription. (By the way, Taiwan has both an existential threat and an all volunteer force so imagine their expenses—and failure to meet needs).
In the 1970s, weapons platforms became much more capable—and more costly. As DoD leadership sought to create more capable Navy (or substitute any other service here) such as building fewer vessels capable of doing a great deal more but with fewer of in numbers after Vietnam, it became more costly. Admiral Elmo ‘Bud’ Zumwalt’s revolutionary and turbulent tenure as Chief of Naval Operations between 1970 and 1974, emphasised technology, staffed by better educated recruits and officers, required more money, and eliminating the vessels from World War II that were no longer as useful in our changing navy. Submarines, which one of our readers for this column calls the most complex vessels ever after the Space Shuttles, for which we have paid highly for decades to assure their safety, that they recruited the right personnel, and the like have always been and remain incredibly expensive. But the explosion in technologies, computerization, microchips, and overall capacities made it easy to see each navy vessel as much more capable (we now know especially so relative to the decaying Soviet fleet of the same era) but that meant building and deploying fewer of them as we thought that a better technology would compensate for fewer numbers. Yes, yes, but that physics thing about being in one place at one time kept cropping up.
A third, vastly under appreciated change actually happened after our nemesis, the Soviet Union, disappeared in January 1992. As the United States assumed the position-the seemingly envious one—of sole global superpower during the ‘unipolar’ moment, we encountered (or discovered?) a never ending list of global concerns for which our nation turns to the armed forces to answer. We began relying ever more on the military instrument During the 1980s and have not looked back. Ships, submarines, and everything else are definitely more highly skilled and staffed by women and men of higher education, talent, and self selection to serve, the list of demands is far outstripping the platforms called upon to carry out missions of any and every sort.
No military officer I have met in thirty plus years wants to say we cannot do something— these people have a problem-solving, ‘can do’ ethos but this means we do everything and anything, regardless of stated priorities proclaimed in a raft of Congressionally-mandated documents like the National Security Strategy, the National Military Strategy, the Defense Strategy, the Quadrennial Defense Review, and others.
The missions are almost invariably decent, well-intended, often humanitarian, but require assets. DOD doesn’t want to put its exquisite men and women into harm’s way unnecessarily, nor should we but that means costly, slowly developed ships and aircraft are used in some peculiar ways. These are the same assets needed at Pearl Harbour or Norfolk or some other base for the fleet to conduct our more traditional defensive missions. Then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine K. Albright challenged then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin L. Powell in 1993 by asking ‘What is the point of having this superb military that you are always talking about if we can’t use it?’, hoping to use it for ‘peacekeeping operations’ in the Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Albright’s question revealed a fundamental schism within the United States: does the country use its assets strictly for a single purpose such as warfighting which is a finely tuned instrument or are these same tools multi-purpose to allow us capability to be the global policeman/provider of crisis assistance/ pfirst responder to everything?
The use of the defense assets is neither a Republican or Democratic issue. Clinton did send troops as peacemakers to the Balkan’s while George W. Bush used service personnel as Provoncial Reconstruction Teams for Afghanistan. Obama announced in Australia in 2011 we would refocus our efforts on stabilizing Asia as we saw China’s prowess expand yet he continued American troop deployments to Afghanistan and to the Middle East, when necessary, as did Trump.
Certainly defense spending has grown since my husband saw ships three abreast at the Pearl piers years back but the use of those ships, smaller in number but more capable, has expanded. Costs to entice and keep sailors with skills and commitment to meet the extended deployment schedules while wrecking havoc on families aRe far higher. We are also depleting the actual assets themselves, for which maintenance costs have grown substantially.
In the end, any asset is only available in one place at any given time; it is one of those laws of physics that we cannot wish away. There are other factors you could probably cite that also play into this complex dynamic which is so different from 1966. But, we have largely ignored considering the implications of these changes as if they are irrelevant. They definitely are not.
Our hubris ignoring these issues is dangerous. I most definitely am not advocating that we dramatically increase a Defense budget kissing a trillion dollars. I am sadly recognizing that our aspirations and our willingness to pay do not match. THAT is a big deal. We have to scale back something by genuine parioritisdation, or pay more in taxes, or both. But we don’t want to recognize that reality according to our current political conversation.
Thoughts? rebuttals? Suggestions? I welcome any and all as I don’t pretend to know the right answer but I sure see disconnect.
Thank you for reading this column. That you made it this far means you see we have work to do.
Be well and be safe. FIN
‘Department of Defense (DOD) Budget: an Orientation’, CRS Reports, 12 November 2021, retrieved at https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/r/r46965
Kelley Vlahos, ‘Remembering Powell’s revealing exchange with Albright”, Responsible Statecraft, 18 October 2021, retrieved at https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/10/18/remembering-powells-revealing-exchange-with-madeleine-albright/