The U.S. as a Naval Power

A reflection on six frigates

March 27 is an auspicious day for the United States as a maritime power. Today marks the anniversary of the Naval Act of 1794. This act authorized the construction of the first six frigates designed and built as a specific class of ships laid down by the U.S. The names of these six frigates are well known in U.S. naval circles: Constitution, Constellation, Congress, President, United States, and Chesapeake. You can to this day visit the reconstructed and preserved Constitution in Boston Harbor. These ships are notable thanks to a design philosophy slightly different from that of the frigates of the major European powers at that time. Unlike the European navies’ ships, these were built with between 38 and 44 guns, while the European frigates were largely standardized at 36 guns per ship. To do this, design compromises were made in the flotational stability of these new frigates. They were considered top-heavy, which was problematic during storms, since the ships might be at greater risk of capsizing. But it worked, and their combat performance, as demonstrated by the class’s performance against pirate states in North Africa during the Barbary Wars and also against the British during the War of 1812, proved their design concept as valid.

These ships represent the true spirit of the United States: that of a true maritime power, whose characteristics were present from the very beginning of the nation. Typically, nations are divided by their geography, and the geography of a nation determines largely how it behaves geopolitically. A nation can be a land power or a sea power. These two types of powers often come into conflict, and this conflict frequently is described as a war “between an elephant and a whale.” The great examples of land and sea powers can be remembered from Greek antiquity — most notably, Athens and Sparta. The land power has no large navy, and the sea power typically has a smaller, or sometimes part-time, nonprofessional army. The land power cannot contest the seas, and the sea power cannot find military victory on land. The United States has fundamentally misunderstood its role as a sea power, not just in shipbuilding, but in theory as well. Alfred Thayer Mahan, who wrote The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, was an American, but his book influenced every major European naval power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Americans are influential not just in naval engineering, but in naval theory. As a country with no major geopolitical rivals on adjacent land borders — indeed, sharing land borders with only two relatively friendly countries — and with access to both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, the United States is clearly a sea power.

In its hubris after World War II and the Cold War, the U.S. has sought to be a power both on land and at sea. That strategy made sense during those periods when the United States had the industrial base to maintain high levels of industrial weapons production. No longer. We are not the same nation that could prefabricate the so-called “liberty ships” of World War II and build at least one of those ships in a little over four days. Even President Reagan recognized the pre-eminence of the United States as a naval power, calling for the increase of the U.S. Navy to 600 vessels during the 1980s. That never happened, probably due to the collapse of the USSR, but you get the point. In contrast, the fleet has currently been expanded to 306+ active-duty ships, utilizing the oft-maligned LCS (Littoral Combat Ship) series of Freedom- and Independence-classes to get over the 300 marker. The LCS series has been plagued with mechanical problems due to its overly ambitious modular design concept and its revolutionary propulsion plant. It has been criticized for its lack of long-range naval missile weaponry, which has been rectified somewhat by retrofitting Harpoon missiles onto it. This lack of vessels is notable because of the example of British policy in the early twentieth century. The British Empire’s policy was to tie its strategic geographical position as a maritime power into planning fleet construction. Britain maintained a fleet that had at least twice as many ships as the two other competitor powers in Europe at the time.

The lack of ships has been partially obscured by the total tonnage of ships constructed. For reference, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer displaces 9,700 tons. Since we have historical memory, this is awfully close to the 10,000-ton limit imposed by the naval treaties of the 1920s. Fletcher-class destroyers in World War II were around 2,500 tons. But what has been gained in size and capability has been lost in total numbers. For reference, in Jane’s Fighting Ships, Arleigh Burke-class DDGs have an advertised speed of 30+ knots (around 25–28 miles per hour), so it takes time to get these ships to where they need to go. With the long-term trend of deindustrialization, our construction capacity is lagging, and there are only so many dry-docks to perform long-term intensive maintenance and repairs. This follows almost three decades of unrelenting operations which have negatively impacted maintenance and training. We can especially see this following the Comprehensive Review, which chronicled the multitude of problems plaguing the fleet which led to multiple ship collisions and groundings. We are simply over-committed, and we have too few vessels for the amount of global surface area to cover.

The main problem is military force structure. If the U.S. is a naval power, it should focus on the fleet and aerospace forces as the primary departments within the DOD. There can be no power projection abroad using the Army if the Navy is not sizable and capable enough to deliver that Army and keep its logistics chains unbroken. Our rivals, China and Russia, understand the connection between tactical and operational planning, force structure, and strategic goals. The Chinese in particular, given their local maritime geography, have been very good at quietly building their fleet in accordance with those strategic goals. They have the industrial capacity to replace combat losses quickly. We don’t. If the United States wishes to remain a respected world-class power in an increasingly multipolar world, it will need to recognize itself and return to its true nature.