On Friday the White House released its new Maritime Access Plan, laying out a comprehensive strategy for addressing shortfalls in the maritime-industrial base.
The plan highlights a number of innovative programs for rebuilding America’s commercial fleet and could lead to partnerships with cost-effective, reliable partners like Korea and Japan.
It could also bolster President Donald Trump’s development of a “Golden Fleet” to restore American naval supremacy.
Trump’s instincts are right: America needs to invest in its Navy, its ship-building capacity and its maritime industrial base and supply chain.
His prioritization of the Navy’s surface fleet, which has been ignored for far too long, is also spot on.
Unfortunately, the Navy’s existing plans for the Golden Fleet rely on a tired, over-extended US shipbuilding base that won’t deliver needed results.
Start with the construction of the next generation of small surface combatants, or frigates.
After wisely canceling work on the Constellation-class frigate, Navy Secretary John Phelan hastily announced a new frigate, sourced without competition, built from the existing US Coast Guard “National Security Cutter” design.
Without time-consuming and price-busting alterations, this new frigate won’t have the anti-submarine warfare capability, local air-defense suites or the survivability features such ships demand.
The Constellation-class frigates met many of the warfighting requirements but sank under the challenges of excessive government changes and a shipyard too small to adapt to them.
Yet the proposed new frigate won’t even get the warfighting capabilities right. If the president wants to revive the Navy’s surface fleet, he could look to Asian partners to assist in building a reasonably priced and proven multi-mission frigate, such as the South Korean FFX Batch IV class or the Japanese upgraded Mogami class frigates.
Both of these ship designs meet the Navy’s warfighting-capability needs in a cost-effective manner.
This sort of partnership can be modeled on the president’s icebreaker deal with Finland: Build the first few warships in Asia, while training US workers there, then build the remaining 20-plus ships at an existing US military or commercial shipyard modernized with Korean or Japanese technology and processes.
Another opportunity for Asian partnership is in building support vessels — ammunition ships, refueling ships, hydrographic ships, etc.
When the Navy had 600 ships, 200 were support vessels — historically, they’ve been about 30% of the fleet.
As the Navy tries to grow back to 350 or 400 ships, it’ll need 100 to 125 support vessels to meet this ratio. Today, it has only 65.
Yet existing US military shipyards are not scaled to build these, and when they try, they tend to deliver them at double the cost of Korean or Japanese shipyards.
The most expensive element in the Golden Fleet plans is the Navy’s next generation of “large surface combatant,” and this design has also veered off course.
With unprecedented input from the president, the design morphed from a 15,000-ton destroyer to a supersized 35,000-ton “battleship,” likely costing $20 billion for the first ship and $13 billion per follow-on.
For the lower of those prices, you could buy five Aegis-equipped destroyers (DDGs).
And with the “battleship,” the Navy would get only 140 missile cells (as opposed to 480 cells with those DDGs) and one AEGIS air-defense system (as opposed to five with the DDGs).
At a time when the Navy needs to boost capabilities, an oversized ship like the battleship is tactically regressive, and consolidates more eggs in one basket.
A more effective way to maintain America’s dominance in large surface combatants is a three-pronged strategy.
1) Build more of the latest Aegis DDGs in Maine and Mississippi.
2) Extend the life of Flight 1 DDG-51s, ships that are 25 to 30 years old today but that could be upgraded with the latest AEGIS weapon system and refreshed to last another 10 years — at just 5% of the battleship’s cost.
3) Again, turn to Asia and consider purchasing the new 14,000-ton Japanese AEGIS super destroyer.
The president knows he needs to invest in a Navy, but if he wants to get the Golden Fleet right, he should reject much of what he’s hearing from the Pentagon and look to his Asian allies for help.
Rear Adm. (ret.) Mark Montgomery is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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