OPINION:
Growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s near Willow Grove Naval Air Station, I was often exposed to the sights and sounds of military aircraft flying overhead, and I often dreamed about how awesome it would be to be a naval aviator.
My father served in the surface Navy in World War II in the Pacific, and in my youth, it was pretty much a mandatory family ritual to watch the TV show “Victory at Sea” every week. The Navy won the war in the Pacific, and for the next 50 years, America’s Navy ruled the waves with unquestioned maritime superiority, and U.S. military power kept the world at peace. It was impressive.
Things have changed. The Navy no longer has unquestioned maritime superiority, and our politicians have allowed this to happen by pursuing a “head in the sand” strategy of hiding from the real threats we face.
In military affairs, there is a reality that can be seen by what are called indications and warnings. Indications and warning. or I&W, intelligence is an important and time-tested methodology employed by intelligence analysts to warn military officers and policymakers of emerging threats.
For anyone who wants to see it, the I&W light is flashing brightly, as it was in the 1930s as Hitler was coming to power and the Japanese were invading China. Much like America in the 1930s, however, our politicians have their heads in the sand and don’t realize how bad things are.
The world is becoming more dangerous, with a war in Ukraine, Russia rattling its nuclear sword and China becoming more provocative in the Pacific with a new and growing navy that is more modern, more numerous and potentially more lethal than our Navy. Nevertheless, our politicians fail to take the actions that can prevent a future war by returning to a policy of “peace through strength.”
We as a nation need to learn from history. Our nation and the countries of Europe failed to head off World War II, and we are in danger of doing too little too late now.
My focus is on the Navy, but the other military services have the same kinds of problems. I believe that today’s Navy is in trouble, and its current status is that of an organization that has lost its way. We have a Navy that is underfunded, undersized and underappreciated by Americans.
It is also a Navy whose uniformed and civilian leaders have been quiescent. They have accepted their weakened status without clarifying to Congress and the nation that this path will lead to war if it is not fixed. They accept the shibboleth that “we can’t afford to do more,” and they toe the line so that they don’t get fired instead of putting their stars on the table and walking away.
Aside from this reality, the Navy also suffers from bureaucratic bloat and a terrible case of paralysis by analysis. The Navy’s ability to build ships and submarines has atrophied to the point where every ship program of the past 20 years has been plagued with huge delays and huge cost overruns. The two most recent ship programs — the littoral combat ship class and the Zumwalt class — have been nothing short of a disaster, wasting tens of billions of taxpayer funds and providing little combat capability.
Another sign that the Navy has lost its way is in its infrastructure. The Navy has allowed its facilities and industrial base to decline to the point where we have too few dry docks and ship repair contractors. As a result, billion-dollar ships and submarines cannot go to sea because we have a huge backlog in maintaining them. Billion-dollar assets sit idle, waiting for their turn in the dry dock.
To make matters worse, the Navy bureaucracy has been working on a plan to modernize the Navy’s ship repair sites. This plan will take decades to complete and cost more than $20 billion just to overhaul four Navy shipyards.
In the four years during World War II, we built thousands of ships, tanks and aircraft and dozens of military bases and ship repair sites worldwide. Still, we are going to take decades to modernize four shipyards.
The reason is that bureaucracy and government regulation have gone wild.
Our nation’s leaders must wake up and get their heads out of the sand. The war clouds are gathering, and America is not ready. We have planes that can’t fly and ships that can’t sail, and our armed forces are in a sad state regarding readiness. To make matters worse, our ammunition lockers are almost empty.
Winston Churchill wrote in “The Gathering Storm” that World War II didn’t have to happen. He called it an “unnecessary war.”
If our nation’s leaders don’t wake up and acknowledge the threats that are out there, we may see another unnecessary war — one we could lose.
• Christopher M. Lehman served in the Navy and is a national security analyst and an author who was special assistant for national security affairs to President Ronald Reagan from 1983 to 1985.
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