The Navy is getting its turn this year to get an independent assessment on its future with a congressionally-mandated commission on its future. While the commission’s mandate is wide, there’s one overarching question the group will need to answer: What can Congress do to support the aging fleet as the defense industrial base works to catch up to demand?
Though the service’s ideal ship count is a moving target, the real problem is that too few of the ships it does have are actually able to get underway, commissioner Trip Barber, chief analyst for Systems Planning and Analysis, Inc., said Wednesday at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference.
“The problem is that there are so many demands and there’s so little Navy to meet them,” Barber said. “The Navy we have today is smaller than the demand and the level of pressure on the force, as a result, is unsustainable.”
Just over the past year, Navy ships have been engaged in combat operations in the Red Sea, the Caribbean and now in the Persian Gulf, putting strain on the service’s notoriously overextended carrier strike and amphibious ready groups.
“Part of the reason the Navy is too small is that the deployable part of the Navy is too small,” Barber said. “Too much of it is stuck in maintenance. It’s not being recapitalized at the rate at which it’s wearing out.”
The service is in the midst of a plan to streamline its maintenance periods and has bumped its request for shipbuilding funds up 50 percent this year, but those are longer-term plans that will take years to pay dividends as the fleet continues a relentless deployment schedule.
“The Navy is as busy as I’ve ever seen it in my career, just as an observer,” said commissioner Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “And it’s historically way too small.”
It’s going to get smaller, the commissioners said, while the defense industrial base ramps up to meet the service’s demand.
“How do we cover that risk?” Barber said. “In the interim, we’ve been looking at unmanned options, because that’s really the only way we can get more capability out there.”
But the Navy needs a clear unmanned strategy, he added.
“So if unmanned is key to the near-term, because we can’t build enough large ships fast enough to meet the capability needs, we’re going to have to use smaller things that are unmanned,” he said. “How are we going to focus and manage that? And I don’t think the Navy currently is doing a very coherent job of doing that.”
If remote and autonomous systems are not only the bridge to a higher ship count, but the future of warfare, the Navy needs to start thinking about what that means beyond the capabilities they could bring, said commissioner Tommy Ross, head of global public policy at Alteryx, Inc.
“We need to think about not just the equipment, not just the platform, but also the people that are needed to support,” he said. “Even though they’re uncrewed, there’s going to be a lot of people that support these systems.”
Details like where they be home-ported and what they need in terms of maintenance facilities have yet to be worked out, he said.
“I can go on, but I worry that … we’re much further ahead in our thinking about the technology than we are thinking about all those other elements,” Ross said. “So I think that’s an area that I hope the commission will dig into.”
And though the Navy and presidential administrations have often focused on ship count, Barber said it’s a meaningless number if it isn’t the right balance of ships, from carriers to amphibs to submarines.
“Each of them has a number that makes sense, and having too much of one doesn’t compensate for having too few another. We need to have a set of numbers that, in the aggregate, describe what the Navy needs to be able to do,” he said. “And whatever they happen to add up to at the bottom line does not matter, because you have to hit each one of those to have the right Navy, with the right capability.”
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