SECDEF’s Faulty Analysis of Aircraft Carrier Requirements
In a speech last week at the Navy League Sea-Air-Space Expo, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates argued that “the Department [of Defense] must continually adjust its future plans as the strategic environment evolves” and that thanks to “hard fiscal realities” there is unlikely to be “any significant top-line increases in the shipbuilding budget beyond current assumptions.” The bottom line, according to Gates: “we have to ask whether the nation can really afford a Navy that relies on $3 to 6 billion destroyers, $7 billion submarines, and $11 billion carriers.”
That’s an unfortunate question, but given the current administration’s spending priorities, it is one the secretary has to ask. In making his point, however, Gates furthers a popular but specious line of argumentation, whose continued repetition is a disservice to the armed services. After offering up a brief quantitative comparison of the U.S. fleet and foreign navies (what he calls “context”), Gates asks, “do we really need eleven carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?” By posing the question in this way, Gates implies that the answer is ‘no.’
But Gates is asking the wrong question. The United States has different interests and different responsibilities than those states armed with only one aircraft carrier. The U.S. Navy does not have 11 carriers so that it can outmatch Thailand or France (obviously) or even China (which will likely have one or more carriers in the next decade). Rather, the Navy has 11 carriers because the United States has long required a capability to project power globally.
If Gates wants to ask if that requirement is changing or if it can be met in a different way, that’s fine. But to put forth an attractively simple but errant argument for transforming the fleet in favor of one that is intellectually and strategically sound is irresponsible.
