John Lehman was U.S. Navy secretary from 1981 to 1987. Bing West was assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs from 1981 to 1983.
Drones are changing the face of battle. Unmanned surface vessels pave the way fora combined force of crewed and uncrewed ships. Lasers add new capabilities to the fleet.
Technology is a common topic when discussing the U.S. Navy, and America’s sailors need the best technology to wage war. They also need a strategy that tells the Navy what kind of war it must be prepared to fight, what forces are required and what risks the nation accepts when it cannot afford everything the Navy needs.
But for decades, the Navy has not maintained an authoritative strategy with real influence over force planning, programming and the budget. It has produced strategic documents, but those have failed to set priorities, connect them to forces or make trade-offs.
Strategy should determine what the Navy needs. The budget should determine how much of that the nation can afford. Increasingly, however, the budget makes both decisions, and the Navy’s budgeteers and programmers have become its de facto strategists.
The Navy once produced effective strategy. In the 1980s, the Maritime Strategy gave the Navy a coherent framework for thinking about the war it might have to fight, and the fleet would then need to execute that strategy. It shaped program development, sharpened strategic and tactical thinking, concentrated fleet exercises, and gave budget proposals a standard against which they could be judged. The circumstances that produced that strategy are gone, and reproducing its substance would be a classic exercise in planning for the last war. What’s worth recovering is the connection it drew between strategic thought and the decisions that determine what the Navy becomes.
Once the Cold War ended, the Navy’s strategy function diminished, career paths for naval strategists narrowed, and international politics and joint professional military education displaced the study of warfare and sea power, which had been at the center of Navy officer education. The budget process filled the space of discarded strategic focus, but a process built to allocate resources is not equipped to decide what strategy those resources should serve.
The evidence of this is visible in the Navy’s spending. Shipbuilding budgets have roughly quadrupled in unadjusted dollars over two decades, yet the fleet has not grown significantly, and its survivability against China has not improved proportionately. The officials who built the Navy’s program had little relationship with its strategists, and the documents that were labeled strategies arrived after funding decisions were made. This does not mean the Navy has been sufficiently funded; it means additional money cannot substitute for strategic judgment.
This is why the answer cannot simply be more resources. Rather, resources should constrain strategy, not replace it. A Navy that says every mission matters, every capability is necessary and every program should be funded has provided a shopping list, not strategic guidance.
Part of the problem is the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols legislation, which reorganized the Defense Department. The law assigns important responsibilities to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, their multitudinous staff and the combatant commanders. But it also limits the Navy’s — and other services’ — ability to formulate what naval and military tasks the national strategy requires and what forces those tasks demand. But the greater barrier is institutional habit and culture, not statute.
The consequences of naval expansion unmoored from strategy appear in two choices the Navy faces.
The first is how far to shift from crewed to unmanned forces. That choice cannot be made by comparing the price of a destroyer with that of an unmanned vessel. It requires judgments about how the fleet will fight, how much combat mass it needs, what can survive in conflict and how quickly the industrial base can replace losses.
The second is how much of the fleet’s defensive firepower should shift from missiles to directed energy. A laser cannot be judged apart from the ship that carries it, any more than a ship can be judged apart from the fleet or a fleet apart from the strategy that decides its employment. Both choices require an idea of how the fleet is meant to win. That idea is absent today.
The Navy’s most senior civilian and uniformed leaders should be held accountable for crafting a coherent maritime strategy before making another generation of major force decisions. And they must not repeat the wish-list, unprioritized approach of documents like 2020’s Advantage at Sea.
Aspirations are not strategy, and strategy that sets no priorities cannot govern a budget. The secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations (CNO) should develop a plan for the Navy’s employment as a component of the Joint Force. It should state assumptions about each major adversary, establish a theory of victory, determine the forces required and set priorities among competing missions. It should say what the Navy will not do, what it will divest and what risks it accepts when resources fall short. Its working core should be classified and continually maintained, built on the best assessment of adversary objectives and capabilities and detailed deterrence options.
That strategy also needs institutional continuity of its own. It should restore a career path for officers who specialize in strategy. But there should be no confusion: Making strategy is the most important responsibility of the secretary and CNO. Together, they must sit down with the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to ensure agreement about fundamental principles.
Congress can reinforce the change. The statutory 30-year shipbuilding plan of hoped-for hull numbers does not tell Congress why those ships are required or what risks follow if they are not built. Congress should insist that Navy leadership testify periodically, naming the nation’s maritime objectives, its lines of operation and the forces required over the next five years.
The choice between crewed and unmanned forces, and between missiles and directed energy, is waiting right now. Future advantage at sea belongs to the fleet that can preserve its firepower and keep fighting. Endurance depends on weapons, the ship that bears them, the fleet that supports the ship, the industrial base that replaces what is lost and the strategy that decides where those forces are employed.
Our sailors need the right weapons. They also need the Navy to decide what war they must be ready to fight, and what fleet gives them the best chance of winning it.
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