Biden's plan to cut Navy ships: Handing China victory at sea
By Seth Cropsey
April 4, 2022
The Hill
The Biden administration's 2023 defense budget request falls far short of America's strategic needs. The administration remains committed to concepts like "Integrated Deterrence," a notion that the invasion of Ukraine showed to be strategically vacuous. Of equal importance is the budget's proposed dollar amount, $813 billion: Given inflationary projections of above 7 percent, Biden's proposed 4 percent increase amounts to a defense spending cut.
More relevant are the individual services' budgets, which dictate the actual resource distribution between military capabilities. Specifically, the administration's budget request for the Navy and its ship-retirement plans are cause for real concern. These suggest that the Sea Services have been tied to irrational political-economic and construction timelines that pay insufficient attention to the strategic consequences of their budgetary choices. A shrinking fleet does not simply send the wrong message to our foes in the abstract. In the concrete, the administration's budgetary plans will diminish American combat power precisely when China is hungrily eyeing Taiwan.
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Just as NATO military weakness invited Russian aggression, American Indo-Pacific weakness will invite Chinese aggression. Moreover, China will learn from Russia's mistakes in Ukraine. Russia's 190,000-man offensive has failed spectacularly so far because Putin never expected serious resistance. Consequently, China will redouble its efforts to destroy Taiwanese defenses as rapidly as possible, presenting the U.S. and its allies with the fait accompli Russia could not achieve.
This underlines the strategic folly of the administration's proposed Navy budget and, particularly, its plan to retire Navy ships — 24 of them, 16 before their scheduled retirement. The Navy would cut nine Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ships, five Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers, two Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered attack submarines, two Dock Landing Ships, two oilers, and two Expeditionary Transfer Docks.
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If China is preparing to strike Taiwan, why would it wait to attack until 2032 or 2035 to fight a more modern, potentially larger U.S. Navy? Retiring ships today creates a window of vulnerability in the immediate future, one for which the Navy is not prepared.
Third, by pulling its support ships — specifically its oilers, Dock Landing Ships, and Expeditionary Transport Docks — the Navy is hamstringing itself and the military more broadly in the event of a long war with China. Combat operations may be rapid and violent, but warfare in general is as likely to be fast as it is slow. It is entirely conceivable that, with American intervention, China could fail when assaulting Taiwan, and that this could lead to a sustained conflict.
It is also conceivable that China could achieve its military aims in short order but then face an American-led coalition that constrains its gains, again leading to a sustained conflict. Large transports and oilers are precisely the ships the U.S. would need for an extended war, especially considering the poor state of American logistics, the dearth of American-flagged merchant ships, and the scarcity of qualified merchant crews. By retiring these ships today, the Navy threatens to upend U.S. military strategy in any war longer than a few weeks.
Cutting back on fleet size now, in the hope of regaining combat strength in a decade or more, is the strategic equivalent of waiting until your roof leaks to fix it. But roof leaks seldom end in disaster.
The war in Ukraine ought to remind us that great-power competition is real and likely to expand. It is not merely an idea acknowledged in official policy guidance. "The future" means every moment from tomorrow to ten years hence and beyond. U.S. and allied security should not rest on the hope that funds will appear to reshape the fleet by the end of this decade.
A more inopportune time to cut the fleet cannot be imagined, especially because a conflict in the West Pacific would be chiefly a naval/amphibious one. Congressional action is required to maintain the current fleet, change its future shape as the threat posed by China continues to grow, and assert its constitutional responsibility for the nation's security.
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