Decades of global policing and crisis response have taken a toll on the U.S. Navy. If the United States wishes to deter China, Beijing must believe Washington can fight a sustained, brutal war, one in which the U.S. Navy can take major losses and still fight on. Today, that is not the case, and the concept of “naval forward presence” bears much of the blame.
Naval forward presence remains popular with foreign policy elites and the military brass, but the election of President Donald Trump provides a chance to break its hold on conventional wisdom. Trump arrives with a mandate to reshape American foreign policy. His new team, having learned from his first term, is more determined to enact revolutionary change.
Naval forward presence — the practice of maintaining combat-credible naval forces worldwide to deter adversaries, reassure allies, respond to crises, and perform constabulary functions for the global commons — has dominated U.S. foreign policy since the 1990s. Few critics dare question it. The concept’s supporters — under the illusion that “credibility anywhere is credibility everywhere” — darkly warn that rolling back presence operations will embolden America’s adversaries.
The opposite is true. A navy tasked to do all these things cannot do them all well. Rolling back presence will strengthen, not weaken, deterrence. For too long, short-term thinking has taken priority over managing long-term risk. It’s time to flip the script. Readiness for great-power conflict — peace through strength rather than global policing — should once again be America’s primary grand-strategic aim.
Too Busy, and Too Small
Few Americans appreciate just how busy their navy is. At any time, over one-third of U.S. Navy ships are deployed — the greatest proportion in history. Sometimes these ships are training with allies and partners, buttressing American power. Sometimes they are responding to crises where legitimate American interests are at stake and force may be necessary. But many of the Navy’s overseas duties are unrelated to coercion or deterrence, including humanitarian operations, freedom of navigation transits, “maritime security” patrols in far-flung regions, or various missions under the nebulous banner of norms enforcement.
As my research has shown, these operations come at a cost: They have shrunk and weakened the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet to a shadow of its former self. The reasons lie in politics, poor strategic foresight, and bureaucracy. While critics usually describe the problem as a mismatch between operational “demand” and the “supply” of ships, this mismatch is itself a symptom of an underlying national confusion about the purpose of the Navy itself. The hard truth is that stale ideas about America’s proper role in the world have outlived the geopolitical circumstances in which they germinated.
After the Soviet Union dissolved, U.S. policymakers saw a new world marked by brush-fire conflicts, civil wars, and economic dislocation due to globalization. Global policing, albeit under more the palatable terms like “engagement” or “liberal internationalism,” became the dominant foreign policy consensus. To offer flexibility for these brush fires, the Navy designed its fleet around carrier strike groups and amphibious readiness groups. The Navy made this case — that an uncertain world required presence, and presence required carriers, amphibious ships, and supporting multi-mission combatants — in its own planning documents, and led a public relations campaign to this effect. The 1993 Bottom-Up Review (the Department of Defense’s seminal assessment of required force structure for the post-Cold War era), under a section entitled “naval presence,” explicitly stated that naval forward presence would require more large-deck ships than the Navy would need if it used the same force-planning metric as the other services (the two “major regional contingency” standard). In other words, “presence” as an idea was good for the Navy’s bottom line — at first.
Circumstances soon changed. First, the large, exquisite ships that carrier strike groups and amphibious readiness groups required were expensive. Over time, this drove up customer costs and lifecycle costs, and inhibited alternative force structures and platform choices, because the coalition of contractors and policymakers benefiting from the presence-oriented force structure objected to changes. Accordingly, with time, the Navy purchased fewer vessels overall, and the fleet began to shrink.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military’s geographic combatant commanders — empowered a few years earlier under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act — began demanding surface ships for nearly every crisis that arose in their theaters. Policymakers, too, grew accustomed to “showing the flag.” Sending a carrier strike group to a hot zone was appealing, as it avoided the political risk and financial cost of overseas basing and was an easy way to ratchet diplomatic pressure up and down.
In essence, the Navy did its job too well: It designed a fleet and promoted a concept for operating it that policymakers and combatant commanders found addictive. So, throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, the surface fleet got busier and busier while becoming smaller and smaller.
Like a car, a ship can only be run so hard until it becomes too expensive to maintain. As the Navy overused its ships, they retired early. Other ships picked up their slack and were then overused themselves. To support the rising tempo of operations, the Navy repeatedly delayed maintenance on ships. America’s shipyards, which required predictable contracts to remain economically viable, bled skilled laborers, driving up costs in an endless cycle.
The result was that the surface fleet shrank from over 400 ships in 1994 to an all-time-low of 272 vessels during the Obama administration (today, it sits at around 300). Even with an ongoing multi-decade, multi-billion-dollar investment in the nation’s public shipyards, the U.S. Navy will not clear its maintenance backlogs until at least 2040. Even the chief of naval operations recently acknowledged that the fleet will not grow any time soon. Wargames indicate that, were the United States to fight China, the U.S. Navy might eke out a nominal win, but one that blurs the line between victory and defeat, setting back American military power for a generation.
The Readiness Trade-Off
How was all this allowed to happen?
Everyone, from the combatant commanders to the Navy, lost sight of the trade-off between operational and structural readiness. “Operational” readiness refers to the ability of existing military units to fight tonight. “Structural” readiness refers to a military’s ability to generate sufficient mass for multiple rounds in a prolonged fight, including factors like the health of the defense-industrial base. In basic terms, an extremely high level of operational readiness is required for global policing duties; whereas if the goal is fighting a long war against a peer competitor, structural readiness is more important. If resources are finite (which they always are), the two trade off.
In brief, for three decades, the U.S. Navy traded its structural readiness (for great-power conflict) for operational readiness (to support naval forward presence). It burned through its ships, and debilitated its shipyards, to make sure it could respond to whatever policymakers wanted, whenever they wanted it, no matter how irrelevant it was to deterrence and warfighting.
This was not a problem in the 1990s, when the same fleet busy with presence operations could still fight off any foreseeable challenger. But by 2015, given the rise of China, the Navy, oversight agencies, contracted research organizations, and think tanks were all sounding alarms. Navy leaders begged Congress, time and again, to reduce the frequency with which Navy ships were deployed, so that the force could recoup its readiness.
Then came the collisions. In 2017, two U.S. Navy destroyers, in separate incidents, crashed into commercial ships, and 17 American sailors lost their lives. Two investigations — Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer’s Strategic Readiness Review and Chief of Naval Operations John M. Richardson’s Comprehensive Review — offered recommendations to restore the Navy’s readiness. The Navy’s highest-level investigation even recommended “condition[ing] congressional and executive branch leaders to accept that the higher cost and time to achieve established readiness standards will mean less Navy presence worldwide.” This never happened, because Congress continued to assume the Navy could balance both operational and structural readiness, as my research delineating the hearings after the accidents has shown.
Legislation passed after the collisions resolved none of the Navy’s presence-induced headaches. Congress enacted reforms to restore operational readiness but ignored the Navy’s proposed reforms to improve its structural readiness. The Strategic Readiness Review had proposed changes to the Navy’s readiness commands (such as eliminating the so-called “Inouye Amendment”) and changes to the adjudication of combatant commanders’ requests for forces. Instead, what the Navy got was a little more officer training here, some sleep requirements for officers there. After dipping for one year after the collisions, the Navy’s operational tempo continued its inexorable annual rise that began in the 1990s. Presence was simply too popular an idea.
Shipbuilding is Not Enough
The U.S. Navy’s readiness for sustained combat — and hence its ability to deter China — is in a catastrophic state. The Trump administration should give the U.S. Navy a fighting chance to rebuild itself.
It can start with the unfinished business of 2017, reforming the global force management process (the process by which the Department of Defense adjudicates combatant commanders’ requests for military forces) to prioritize structural readiness over emergent demands. In this process, the service chiefs and the joint staff consider combatant commander needs in their theaters and recommend service assets that can be made available to them. Should a combatant commander need forces in excess of this established allocation (an “emergent requirement”), he or she can submit a “request for forces.” The idea that the services should “just say no” to such requests is aspirational, but difficult. Why? Because — as the Strategic Readiness Review noted — the Navy has developed a culture of meeting non-stop (presence-driven) operational demands.
As the review also points out, the multiple overlapping authorities and the adverse growth of staffs within the Navy has made tracking the long-term effects of operations on structural readiness a nightmare. In addition, the staff of the chief of naval operations, located in the Pentagon, appears biased towards operational demands and can lose sight of long-term readiness. The problem is not that the Navy lacks input in global force management, but that the Navy still does not “say no” enough. To resolve this, the review recommended establishing the initial force availability as the “maximum supportable peacetime force,” such that any further combatant commander requests for forces can only be met with forces moved from other theaters. This is, in essence, a hard cap on what the Navy can do, ensuring that unready units are never sent to meet the latest and greatest combatant commander request.
But emergent demands aside, Navy operational tempo will still remain too high to restore structural readiness. The Trump administration should therefore reevaluate the idea of naval forward presence itself: the notion that America’s Navy is foremost a provider of global goods, and a global policeman, rather than the preeminent warfighting force of a maritime power whose primary goals ought to be deterring — and if necessary, winning — a great-power conflict.
First, allied navies and coast guards should do more. The U.S. Navy should not be in the business of sanctions enforcement in the Middle East, for example, if NATO and regional partners have the means to handle it — which they will, if they step up their defense spending. Second, naval power need not be the default diplomatic tool it has become. The Navy can reduce freedom of navigation operations, for example, if the United States wields economic sanctions, tariffs, and issue linkages to pressure regional actors to play their part in enforcing this norm, or to punish China (and others) for excessive and illegal maritime claims, resource extraction, and other violations. This is the moment to seize the initiative. The second election of Trump has shocked allies and partners, who realize that America’s skepticism of liberal internationalism is no passing phase. The president’s national security appointments, as they emerge, are beginning to reflect this emphasis on restraint and realpolitik.
Congress, for its part, can immediately pass the SHIPS for America Act, which provides financial incentives for restoring the nation’s domestic shipbuilding capacity — an important complement to the ongoing Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program, focused on America’s public shipyards. But building traditional (manned) ships, while a worthy aim, will take time: Even the Navy’s most optimistic shipbuilding projections suggest that presence demands will exceed the fleet’s capacity well into the 2050s. Meanwhile, the gap between China’s industrial and manufacturing capacity and that of the United States remains enormous. While novel initiatives like purchasing ships from allies (which Trump supports) will help bridge the gap, it will not be resolved overnight.
And that is before considering cost overruns, rising deficits, the growing share of mandatory spending in the budget, and Congress’ unfortunate overreliance on continuing resolutions (which disrupt shipbuilding). Equally sobering are the Navy’s unfortunate systemic problems, reflected in several recent shipbuilding design fiascoes. While freeing shipbuilding from the tyranny of ballooning requirements is a separate issue (one also on the president’s radar), this is yet another challenge to ramping up ship production.
In sum, everyone’s favorite solution to the mismatch between operational demands and ship supply — increased shipbuilding — will not work on its own. Operational demands should fall in tandem, to buy time to increase the fleet’s size and restore the structural readiness of the existing force. The stigma around questioning naval forward presence should end. Global policing, and the reflexive elevation of near-term goals over long-term risk, no longer works.
Paring back naval forward presence will be hard. The United States will have to communicate to allies and partners that a new era has arrived. But in the end, that hard truth is as important for them as it is for the United States. Because if deterrence fails, and the United States goes to war with China — by the time the smoke clears, the U.S. Navy won’t have enough ships left for presence anyway.
Jonathan Panter, Ph.D., is a Stanton nuclear security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an American conservatism and governing fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He previously served as a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy.
Image: Chief Petty Officer Mark D. Faram via Department of Defense
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