Six Arguments Against a Strong Navy, and Why Each One Sinks

Every few years someone discovers that ships are old and announces that the ocean has been cancelled. The ocean, which covers most of the planet and carries most of its commerce, has so far declined to comply.

The arguments against a strong American Navy deserve better than a wave of the hand. Some come from the left, which prefers the money elsewhere. Some come from a restrainer strand on the right, which wants America to come home. Some come from serious defense analysts who think the Navy is buying the wrong things. Each has a core of truth. Each, I will argue, fails as a reason to let American sea power shrink.

Let me define terms. Sea power is the ability to use the sea for your own purposes, move forces and trade across it, and deny the same to an enemy. A navy is the instrument. Command of the sea, in the old phrase, is not owning the water. It is being able to do those things when it matters. The question in this post is whether America should keep that ability. My answer is yes, and what follows is the case, one objection at a time, each stated as strongly as its defenders would state it.

Objection one: carriers are obsolete

The strongest version. A carrier costs billions, carries thousands of sailors, and floats in the open ocean where long-range anti-ship missiles, submarines and satellites can find it. China has built missiles designed to hit carriers at long range. Why bet the Navy on a target the size of a small town? Battleships were once the unquestioned queens of the sea, and aircraft ended their reign. Something will end the carrier's.

The answer. The history point is true and proves less than it seems. Battleships were displaced, and the thing that displaced them was another navy's ship, the carrier. Naval power did not shrink. It changed its form. A claim that some future weapon may threaten the carrier is a claim about how to build and defend it, not a reason to stop having sea-based airpower.

Second, a carrier does not sail alone. It operates inside a group of cruisers, destroyers, submarines and aircraft built to detect and stop the very threats critics name. A missile that must find, track and hit a moving ship at sea through layered defenses is a more complicated problem than a missile hitting a fixed airfield.

Third, and this is the point critics most often skip, the alternative to a carrier is not an invulnerable platform. It is a land base. Land bases are fixed, known, within range of missiles for years and, most important, dependent on the permission of the host country. America has been refused that permission before. When American aircraft flew to strike Libya in 1986, France and Spain refused overflight, and the aircraft flew a very long detour. In March 2003 the Turkish parliament voted against allowing American ground forces to cross its territory to open a northern front in Iraq. A carrier needs nobody's permission. Four and a half acres of sovereign American territory can sit in international waters.

Fourth, the objection is a case for reform, not abandonment. If missiles threaten surface ships, then the answer is more submarines, more long-range aircraft on carriers, better defenses and a more distributed fleet. Nobody who understood the problem would answer it by scrapping the fleet and saying "see, no carriers to hit." That is the logic of the man who responds to a rising crime rate by repealing the locks.

Objection two: sea power is a relic of the age of empires

The strongest version. The great naval theorists wrote for a world of colonial empires and imperial trade routes. Modern wars are fought with missiles, cyber weapons, drones and satellites. Land-based forces and information networks matter more than fleets. The Navy is a monument to a vanished era and a drain on a defense budget that should be funding the new domains.

The answer. Begin with the founding text of the field. In 1890 Alfred Thayer Mahan, an American naval officer and lecturer, published The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. His argument was that nations that command the sea gain commercial and strategic advantages that decide the fates of states: trade flows to them, their enemies are blockaded and their armies and allies can be moved. His book was read by the leading statesmen of the age and shaped a decade of American naval building. Whatever critics say about its imperial context, the argument was not about colonies. It was about geography. The sea is a highway, and the one who controls it controls the economics of war.

The geography has not moved. By most standard estimates, something on the order of four-fifths of world trade by volume goes by sea. Oil, grain, fertilizer, containers of everything from the sneakers on your feet to the components in your phone: all of it sails. America is a trading nation with allies and treaty obligations across two oceans, and its prosperity depends on that traffic flowing. A cyber weapon cannot carry an armored brigade to Poland. A satellite cannot escort a tanker.

The Second World War proves it. The Battle of the Atlantic was a contest over whether Britain could be supplied, and therefore whether Europe could be liberated. German submarines sank thousands of merchant ships. The Allied answer was convoys, escorts, long-range aircraft and, in the end, industrial production that outbuilt the losses, including the fleet of Liberty ships described in How America Built 2,710 Liberty Ships and Why It Could Not Do So Today. The tide turned in the spring of 1943, "Black May," when U-boat losses mounted so badly that the German admiral withdrew his boats from the North Atlantic late that month. D-Day, a year later, was an amphibious assault supported by thousands of ships. There is no land power in history that could have won those campaigns without sea power underneath it.

Objection three: we can rely on allies' fleets

The strongest version. America does not need to be the world's lifeguard. Wealthy allies in Europe and Asia have navies of their own. Let Japan, Britain, France, Australia and others handle their regions and free American taxpayers from the burden. Burden-sharing is a conservative principle.

The answer. I agree with the principle and want allies to carry more, which is why the burden-sharing debate matters; see The 2014 Wales Pledge Explained, Where NATO's Two Percent Came From. But a principle does not make a fleet. Allied navies are valuable, often excellent and generally small. A European navy with a handful of modern escorts cannot protect global shipping lanes. Most allied fleets are designed for regional tasks and depend on American logistics, intelligence and heavy lift. Many have shrunk over decades of cuts of their own.

There is a deeper problem. A navy is not interchangeable with a treaty. Allies join coalitions when they judge that they will win or that their interests are at stake, and an ally who has been told that America will be absent has an incentive to make its own accommodation with the dominant local power. The American fleet is what makes the alliance real. Take away the ships and what remains is a collection of documents.

The 1987 and 1988 tanker escorts in the Persian Gulf illustrate the point. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran attacked neutral shipping, and Kuwait asked for protection for its tankers. In 1987 the United States began escorting reflagged Kuwaiti tankers, an operation sometimes called Earnest Will. The frigate USS Stark was hit by Iraqi missiles in May 1987 with the loss of thirty-seven sailors, and the tanker Bridgeton struck a mine in July. In April 1988, USS Samuel B. Roberts hit a mine, and the Navy responded within days with Operation Praying Mantis, one of the largest surface naval engagements since the Second World War, which destroyed Iranian naval assets and oil platforms used to attack shipping. The story is in Operation Praying Mantis and the Day the Navy Answered Iran in 1988. The point for this argument is simple: when the lanes were threatened, the force that had the ships, the doctrine and the will to do something about it was American. The coalition was possible only because there was a core.

Objection four: the Navy cannot buy ships on time or on budget

The strongest version. The record of recent shipbuilding is a catalog of cost overruns and cancelled classes. The Zumwalt-class destroyer was meant as a series and was cut sharply. The Littoral Combat Ship disappointed in service. If the Navy cannot build what it plans, why feed it more money?

The answer. This is the objection I take most seriously, and I begin by conceding it. The procurement record is poor, and conservatives should say so. The story is told in Zumwalt, the Littoral Combat Ship and the Lessons of Procurement Failure, and it is not flattering.

But look at what follows. A failure of management is an argument for reform, competition, fixed-price discipline, and stable orders that let shipyards invest. It is not an argument for fewer ships. If your plumber botches a job you fire the plumber, not the plumbing. And the cost of building ships is tied to the very problem described in The Shipbuilding Gap with China Is an Industrial Story Before a Navy Story: when orders come in fits and starts, yards cannot hold a trained workforce, and prices rise. Starving the program makes it worse.

The Constitution has a view of this too. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power "To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than Two Years." The next clause, in the same section, says Congress shall "provide and maintain a Navy." No two-year leash on the Navy. The Founders had just lived through a war in which the lack of a fleet had mattered, and they understood that ships take years to build and cannot be improvised in a crisis. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 11, made the case for a federal navy as an instrument of both commerce and influence. The framers treated the Navy as a permanent institution because they understood its time horizons.

Objection five: China's missiles make the Navy useless near China

The strongest version. In the western Pacific, Chinese land-based missiles, aircraft and submarines can hold American ships at risk. In a Taiwan Strait war, the argument goes, the Navy would be shut out or sunk. A deterrent that cannot survive the first day deters nothing, so why pay for it?

The answer. This is a serious strategic claim and the answer is not to wave it away. It is to see what it implies. If China's weapons make surface operations near its coast dangerous, then the response is to adapt: more submarines, which are the hardest ships to find and the foundation of what Admiral Rickover Built the Navy That Made Nuclear Deterrence Survivable describes; more long-range strike; more dispersed forces; more mines and counter-mines; more resilient logistics. It is not to hand the sea to the rival and hope.

Think about what deterrence needs. It does not require that America win every engagement. It requires that a Chinese planner looking at the plan to seize Taiwan sees costs he cannot be sure of controlling. The presence of the American fleet creates that uncertainty. In March 1996, when China fired missiles near Taiwan during the island's first direct presidential election, President Clinton sent two carrier groups toward the area, and the crisis subsided. The story is in When Clinton Sent Two Carrier Groups to the Taiwan Strait in 1996. Whatever China's military was capable of then, the lesson of 1996 is that visible naval presence works as a message, and the lesson of the years since is that Beijing took the message as a reason to build a fleet of its own.

That matters because of the scale of the competition. According to the Pentagon's own annual reports on Chinese military power, China's navy has passed America's in the number of ships. The numbers hide quality differences, but they do not hide a trend. A rival expanding its fleet while America debates whether the idea of a fleet is outdated is not a rival that has concluded the ocean is irrelevant. For the legal and treaty background on Taiwan, see The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 Is Not a Treaty, So What Does It Promise.

Objection six: a strong Navy tempts America into adventures

The strongest version. Capability invites use. A country with a large fleet finds reasons to send it, and the history of American intervention shows what happens when the tool is at hand. Restraint is easier if the tool is smaller.

The answer. The premise is fair and the conclusion does not follow. A fleet's main function in peacetime is not to fight but to be there, so that others do not try. And America's naval record at its best is not adventurism. It is the maintenance of a public good, the freedom of the seas.

Consider the founding generation's first great naval enterprise. The Department of the Navy was created in April 1798 during the undeclared Quasi-War with France. In the early 1800s, Thomas Jefferson, hardly a militarist, sent ships to the Mediterranean to face the Barbary states, whose corsairs had been seizing American merchant sailors and demanding tribute. The principle was that a trading republic would not pay protection money to pirates. The Constitution anticipated this with a power to "define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas." And it is worth pausing on Letters of Marque Are Still in the Constitution and Here Is Why They Matter, because the framers gave Congress an entire toolbox for maritime conflict, from privateers to the formal navy.

A restrained foreign policy and a strong Navy are not opposites. The Navy is in fact what makes restraint possible, because it lets America respond at sea without committing ground armies to distant wars. The alternative to a Navy that can deter a crisis is not peace. It is a crisis that arrives on land, which is more expensive in every currency.

I would add a sixth observation about debate itself. The loudest case against a strong Navy is often delivered by people who also want the trade, the supply chains and the sea lanes to remain open, with someone else paying. That is a wonderful policy. You get a global economy and a free ocean without the receipt, like walking into a restaurant, ordering for the table and discovering that the kitchen runs on goodwill.

What the six objections have in common

Notice the pattern. Each objection starts with a true observation: carriers are vulnerable, procurement is bad, allies are valuable, intervention can be reckless, the world has new domains. Each then draws a conclusion that does not follow: so shrink the fleet. In every case the true observation points to a different action: change how the fleet is built, spread the burden, discipline the budget, define the missions. None points to doing without sea power, because none of them changes the fact that America is a maritime nation whose security and prosperity depend on a sea it must be able to use.

Here is the shape of the premises, numbered as an argument should be:

1. America's prosperity and alliances depend on the free movement of ships.
2. Free movement is not automatic. It is guaranteed by a force able to protect it.
3. Only a few nations can field such a force, and rivals are building theirs.
4. Therefore reducing American sea power transfers the guarantee to someone else, and not necessarily to a friendly party.
5. The objections to the Navy are objections to how, not whether.

The debate resembles the arguments of earlier decades about whether a great power needs the instruments of a great power. The answer has been the same every time it has been tested: it does.

The case in brief

1. Carriers face real threats, but sea-based airpower needs no host nation's permission and the answer to the threats is better defense, not no fleet.
2. Sea power is not a relic. Most of the world's trade by volume moves by water, and Mahan's argument and the Atlantic convoys of the Second World War show that the sea decides wars.
3. Allied fleets help but cannot replace an American core, as the 1987 and 1988 tanker escorts showed.
4. Poor procurement is a management scandal to fix, and the Constitution singles out the Navy for permanent maintenance.
5. Naval presence deters, as the 1996 Taiwan Strait episode showed, and the free sea is a public good America has defended since Jefferson sent ships against the Barbary pirates.

What you can do: look up your representative's votes on the annual defense authorization on Congress.gov, and write to ask what the committee is doing to stabilize shipbuilding orders so yards can keep their skilled workers.