During the Reagan military buildup of the '80s, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman set a specific goal for the U.S. to have a 600-ship Navy. With the end of the Cold War and the virtual dominance of the U.S. Navy on the high seas, it’s much smaller now… but how small, exactly? How many ships does the Navy now have, using the criteria Lehman used? (I assume small or relatively minor auxiliary ships weren’t counted, but I may be wrong).
Now onto the debate. Is the Navy as big as it should be, given the world naval situation? Or is it too big?
Is the Navy now structured as it should be, given the challenges it’s likely to face in the foreseeable future?
If you check Wikipedia they put the Navy’s current strength at 281 ships and 4,000 aircraft. Knowing what I do about the Navy I too doubt that includes the small support ships.
Personally I think our Navy is the one branch where we really do pretty well across the board. We have excellent force projection, in terms of raw strength no other country really compares, one of our carrier battle groups is as strong as most other countries’ entire naval force.
The one big issue that is coming up though is we have an unparalleled Navy without many real challenges in blue water. Most of the other powerful navies belong to our allies. The Chinese obviously really want to enhance their naval power, but a navy isn’t something that you can just build overnight, it takes decade upon decade upon decade, because ships are so expensive and require so many trained specialists to operate when it comes to the larger ships.
More important than its traditional Cold War role is the Navy’s ability to ferry marines and other rapid response type forces or special ops type forces around the world very quickly. Our Navy as it is now isn’t necessarily designed for close-shore operations (under the Cold War plans NATO allies were supposed to specialize in that while we specialized in deep sea craft), although we do it well we don’t do it perfectly. And while the battleship is a relic of the past, it would be nice to have a surface ship capable of laying down a crapload of fire onto shore positions for situations where we might need to make an amphibious assault.
For example if we were to ever go to war with North Korea, it’s probably likely that we’d take a play from MacArthur’s playbook, eventhough it’s already been done once an amphibious assault to establish a presence deeper in NK territory would be devestating even if then NKers knew it was comin.
I was part of Lehman’s 600 ship Navy. I think he was one of the best SecNavs ever.
His book “On Seas of Glory : Heroic Men, Great Ships, and Epic Battles of the American Navy”{ISBN: 0684871769} is a great read on the US Navy from the Privateers of the Revolution through the creation of the “600 ship Navy”.
I cannot improve on anything that **Martin Hyde ** said. It sums it up beautifully except that Battleships are really expensive to run and maintain and that is why they are the first to be mothballed. They are wonderful Flag Wavers and excellent Beach Pounders but just not worth the cost of running them in peacetime.
Let’s not forget the U.S. Coast Guard (A.K.A. “the Jewish Navy”* ), which would qualify as the sixth-largest navy in the world**, although if it ever fell to them to fight a war single-handedly, it’d be a decidedly defensive one on the Coasties’ part. (And God help us.)
*Sorry if anybody takes offense at this, but it has a grain of truth to it. My father was in the C.G. during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he’s said that everybody jokingly called it that then, because of the high numbers of college students and future professionals in its ranks. (My Dad went on to become a dentist.) I have no idea if that joke has survived to the present day, though.
**See paragraph four; it’s a four-page PDF document.
), which would qualify as the