Pentagon to Release its New, China-Focused Plan for the US Navy

Since Donald Trump became president of the United States, the Pentagon has had a dual focus – “China, China, China,” as one short-lived acting defense secretary put it, but also to cut costs in anticipation of flattening budgets in the coming years.

The Navy was supposed to release an updated force structure assessment at the beginning of 2020, outlining a future fleet to meet the missions it anticipates in the coming decades, and from which the service would develop its multi-decade shipbuilding plans. But Defense Secretary Mark Esper, dissatisfied with the Navy’s plans and progress toward its most recent goal of a 355-ship fleet, halted the report’s release and put his own office in charge of generating a new study, the Future Naval Force Study. That report may soon be ready for public release.

In recent remarks to the RAND Corporation, a top defense think tank and research organization, Esper left no ambiguity that his new plan for the Navy is motivated by the threat of China’s rapidly growing military, and especially the ships and long-range missiles that can threaten the U.S. Navy and its allies in the Western Pacific: “[I]n the face of destabilizing activities from the PLA, particularly in the maritime domain, the United States must be ready to deter conflict, and if necessary, fight and win at sea.”

To achieve all that, Esper said the Navy’s future fleet required five qualities: distributed lethality and awareness; survivability in a high intensity conflict; adaptability for a complex world; ability to project power, control the seas and demonstrate presence; and the capability to deliver precision effects at very long ranges.

It will also probably need to accomplish all that without a significant boost to the Navy’s budget.

Under the leadership of Esper, the Pentagon has focused its energies on finding cost savings and bureaucratic efficiencies. In many ways the search for savings is in service to the Pentagon’s focus on China. Even before the economic hit from COVID-19, defense experts expected that the Pentagon’s budgets would remain flat in the coming years, and potentially shrink. If the U.S. military is going to get all the new capabilities it says it needs to confront the PLA, it will likely have to shed other assets to pay for them.

While Washington D.C.’s growing skepticism of China is bipartisan, the prospect of strong Democratic gains in this November’s elections increases the likelihood of new pressures on the Pentagon’s budget.

Senator Bernie Sanders, a progressive who campaigned to be the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2016 and 2020, is the senior minority member on the Senate’s powerful Budget Committee. If Democrats take control of the Senate in 2020 or 2022, he will likely assume the committee’s chairmanship, giving him immense influence and power over the budgets debated and ultimately passed in Congress, regardless of who is president.

If Joe Biden is elected president in November, the Pentagon may see significant shakeups, but not wholesale cuts. Biden is not averse to the use of the United States’ military might, but is a skeptic of the “forever wars” waged in the Middle East for the past two decades. He advocated for significant reductions to the forces deployed there during his time as Barack Obama’s vice president. During the campaign this summer, he repeated his desire to draw down in the region, but not make a complete withdrawal. He has also said that he does not foresee major reductions to the Pentagon’s budget, but no major boosts either.

This is why Esper was careful to qualify that the future Navy his office has designed “must be affordable in an era of tight funding; sustainable over the long term; and operationally ready and available at higher rates,” and that the money to build it will have to come from “within the Navy budget and elsewhere.”

What he envisions building is even more ships than the 355 the U.S. Navy has said its needs (the U.S. fleet stands at around 290 today). But a more numerous fleet may not mean a heavier one. In a major departure from past plans and the Navy’s longstanding preferences for large, multi-mission vessels capable of operating across oceans, Esper said that fleet will be made up of “more and smaller” warships with a mix of manned and unmanned vessels.

The move to integrating unmanned vessels isn’t new; the Navy has pursued an ambitious research program for unmanned surface ships and submarines for years. But the service has so far resisted counting those unmanned vessels toward its 355-ship goal.

Nevertheless, that 355-ship plan was revealed to be unrealistic almost as soon as it was announced in late 2016 after Trump was elected. The United States’ diminished shipbuilding industry, whose potential regeneration is hobbled by a scarcity of the specialized, skilled labor force that naval construction relies on, likely isn’t able to maintain the pace needed to reach 355 ships in less than 15 or 20 years.

In a tacit recognition that the plan’s ambition outstrips the means to achieve it, the Navy’s own 30-year shipbuilding plan admits that it can’t get 355 of the types of ships it wants until the 2050s – unless large unmanned vessels built at under-utilized yards, and yards that have not traditionally built warships, are counted toward that number. At least one major shipyard that builds the controversial littoral combat ship (LCS) is expanding in anticipation of a bevy of new contracts for unmanned and autonomous vessels.

But the bigger shipbuilding budget that Esper proposes to build this fleet will come largely at the cost of something else the Navy probably thinks it needs. That diminishes the chances that Esper’s budget plan will really come to fruition. The Pentagon merely proposes its budget, which must be approved by Congress; Congress also exerts much greater control over the shipbuilding budget and contracts than other areas of military procurement and the Navy’s ability to make adjustments to shipbuilding funds without Congressional approval is extremely limited.

At the same time, despite the increased reliance on unmanned ships and submarines, there is room to doubt whether the future fleet the Pentagon has designed is sufficiently futuristic.

The Future Naval Force Study, while not officially released, allegedly highlights the need for carrier aircraft in the future to fight at much longer ranges than they can today. Just weeks ago the Navy revealed that they have established an office to begin design work on a next-generation fighter jet, and that it would be manned. Futurists have complained for at least a decade that manned jets have reached the practical limits of the performance they can achieve with a live pilot onboard. In addition to tactical performance, manned aircraft also sacrifice the range that studies say they will need.

The U.S. Navy also cancelled a “Future Carrier 2030” study this summer that had begun to investigate whether the new $13 billion-each Ford-class super carriers were the right choice to reflect the technical, budgetary, and strategic realities anticipated in the next decade or two.

For now, conventional wisdom about aircraft carriers appears to hold on both sides of the burgeoning Pacific contest.

Admiral Chris Grady responded to new reports on the progress of China’s third aircraft carrier, the Type 002A, saying, “Good on ‘em. It makes the argument that carriers are important. We have them. They want them and they’re building them.”

Both China’s and the United States’ next generation carrier programs have been hampered by budget concerns and technical issues. China’s next carrier, the Type 002A, may be completed a decade before an advanced carrier-optimized fighter jet is ready to fly off them. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the U.S. Navy’s next generation super carrier, is finally expected to deploy for the first time in 2022, five years after it was commissioned, following extensive fixes for unresolved technical problems.