The US Navy Keeps Advocating a Fleet at Odds With the Pentagon’s New Strategic Vision

U.S. President Joe Biden’s Pentagon is beginning to lay out its vision for a future defense strategy that balances responsiveness to the mix of traditional and asymmetric threats the United States faces, especially from China and Russia, with fiscal and resource realities that will likely constrain the numbers of advanced and increasingly expensive weapons systems that it can field. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy is making the case for a fleet even bigger than the one the Trump administration promised but never figured out how to pay for.

In a late April speech at the ceremony where Admiral John Aquilino took over as the new head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin outlined a new approach that he called “integrated deterrence.” He went on to explain that this meant that the military did not – could not – provide standalone deterrence solutions for new national security threats but needed to support diplomacy and other facets of America’s power to, as he put it, “create advantages for us and dilemmas for [our adversaries].”

As an example, Austin cited “employing cyber effects in one location to respond to a maritime security incident hundreds of miles away.” This type of indirect response is sometimes known as “horizontal escalation,” the logic being to punish an adversary asymmetrically when confronting it directly over the issue in dispute is deemed either to be too dangerous or infeasible. Austin framed the idea thus: “Any adversary thinking about pressing for advantage in one domain must know that we can respond not just in that arena but in many others as well.”

Critics contend that this sort of response, a type of deterrence-by-punishment, is unlikely to deter a major power like China or Russia because it is difficult to credibly threaten an unrelated prize that they value less than the object they might seize.

Such critics prefer deterrence-by-denial – which rests on an adversary’s knowledge that one has the power and ability to directly prevent them from seizing their objective. Deterrence-by-punishment relies on an adversary knowing that if they seize that objective, they will receive a punishment after the fact (nuclear retaliation is a form of deterrence-by-punishment). The risk of punishment strategies is that when the stakes are non-nuclear, an adversary may simply choose to accept the indirect punishment as the price of achieving their prize.

The U.S. Navy believes it has more to contribute to strategies of denial, especially in the maritime regions of dispute with China, but that to do so effectively requires a substantially larger fleet that it has today.

China’s growing fleet surpassed the U.S. Navy in numbers, if not overall tonnage, sometime in 2019 or 2020. There is debate over how much those raw numbers matter given the qualitative and size advantage of many U.S. warships, and the challenging geography that the PLA Navy would have to navigate in a conflict, but it remains true that a ship can only be in one place at a time and at some point, as Stalin is supposed to have said, quantity has a quality all its own.

For that reason, many U.S. Navy advocates were initially encouraged by the Trump administration – at least in terms of his military plans – if then ultimately disappointed. Throughout Donald Trump’s tumultuous presidency, plans were teased for building a fleet of 350, 400, or more  – at one point as many as 500 – ships, but there were never budget proposals to match those headline-grabbing announcements. At the end of Trump’s time in office, the Navy’s battle force was smaller than the last shipbuilding plan published by the Obama administration had projected it would be.

And with broad agreement among both officials and Washington observers that the Pentagon’s overall budget will not significantly increase in the next several years, some fleet-size advocates are making louder cases to increase the U.S. Navy’s share of that budget to pay for more ships. That would necessarily come at the expense of either the Air Force or Army budget, something so politically fraught that, ultimately, it is unlikely to gain the necessary congressional support.

The head of the U.S. Navy explained in recent remarks that his service had a strong case to receive a greater share of the U.S. defense budget. The money would be used to build and maintain a larger fleet to balance increasing Russian and Chinese assertions of power and influence. Admiral Mike Gilday said that he “truly believe[s] that the Navy is providing substantial lethality and capability to the joint force and contributing ... to the kind of fights that we're going to [face] in the future.” He argued that “to be relevant, we got to be there [in the regions contested by Russia and China]... Forward operations are important. They make a difference. Virtual presence is actual absence – we’ve got to be there."

This advocacy of traditional, symmetrical style of deterrence is somewhat at odds with Austin’s concept of using indirect, multidomain responses to adversary aggression, even while the U.S. Navy has a critical part in his vison of the Pentagon playing a supporting role to a broader, so-called “whole of government” or “whole of nation” approach to deterrence and competition.

Even if there are risks attached to the sort of indirect deterrence that Austin advocates, what he must do, that his critics do not, is actually implement a strategy, which means it has to be one that can be paid for. This is the part that the Navy has not been able to provide a credible answer for, even, perhaps even especially, with schemes for soaking up part of the Army’s budget.

Crucial members of the U.S. Congress remain skeptical of building an especially larger fleet – perhaps even one of 355 ships – let alone cannibalizing another service’s funding to do so.

Adam Smith, the head of the congressional committee that authorizes all shipbuilding contracts, has long chided the Navy’s shipbuilding plans and warned against its unrealistic goals. When the Navy first presented its (unfunded) plan to build-up to 355 ships sometime in the 2050s he called it “fantasy.” When asked about the 355-ship number again last month, he described it as “arbitrary.”