Is This Any Way to Run a Navy?

It’s important to acknowledge that the U.S. military is always responding to new and evolving threats, and that can often require developing new technology. But that push has to balance desires with needs and to acknowledge that every dollar spent on some pie-in-the-sky scheme is a dollar that can’t be spent on more prosaic things like boots, bullets and destroyers that work.

Sometimes, those in charge have to learn to say “no.” The Navy, for example, can never do all that the nation’s war-fighters ask of it. In 2015, in fact, it was able to meet only 44 percent of their requests. Political judgments are needed to weigh the risks the nation is willing to face when it trims its sails. The Navy has been trying to do more with less, leading to disastrous results highlighted by two collisions in the Pacific that killed 17 U.S. sailors in 2017.

Sound political judgments also need to be made about how complicated a twenty-first century warship needs to be—especially if the opportunity cost of chasing contractors’ dreams means forfeiting dozens of good-enough warships. In late September, the Navy awarded Bath and Ingalls—the two companies that flubbed the Zumwalt—contracts to begin work on 10 new-and-improved $2-billion-apiece Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. That’s the 30-year old design that the DD-21/DD(X)/DDG-1000 was supposed to replace.

With budgets stretched—they’re always stretched inside the military—we can’t afford to waste funds on aborted programs. The Navy likes to say that the lessons learned in DDG-1000 will be applied to future warships, perhaps salvaging some of the investment. But that’s a little like crediting the Titanic for having plenty of ice aboard.

The Navy also can keep its ships sailing longer. The service lusts after new platforms, and routinely retires ships early to free up funding for new ones. But the Navy, apparently recognizing the economic folly of such premature mothballing, announced in April that instead of retiring its Burke destroyers after 35 or 40 years, it plans to keep them steaming for 45. Retired Navy captain John Cordle argues that’s not good enough: The massive taxpayer investment in building warships means that the Navy should invest in maintenance and upgrades to keep them steaming for a full half-century. “Older ships cost more to maintain,” he wrote in Proceedings in September, “but still less than building new ones.”

In June, the GAO trained its heavy guns on the Navy and fired away in what it called a “special product“ based on its work over the past decade. “While the Navy is continuing to accept delivery of ships, it has received $24 billion more in funding than originally planned but has 50 fewer ships in its inventory today, as compared to the goals it first established in its 2007 long-range shipbuilding plan,” the GAO said. “Additionally, the Navy’s shipbuilding programs have had years of construction delays and, even when the ships eventually reached the fleet, they often fell short of quality and performance expectations. Congress and the Department of Defense have mandated or implemented various reform efforts that have led to some improvements, but poor outcomes tend to persist in shipbuilding programs.”