Seth Cropsey
The United States is a maritime power in disarray, as the U.S. Navy’s current woes indicate: the Navy cannot build enough ships, with designs from the 1980s, to maintain the fleet’s current size, nor can it keep ships in the active battle force to preserve a fleet large enough to even maintain an acceptable balance of forces against China.
Yet the issue of sealift may be more critical, and more eroded, than that of active combat capacity. American political figures should take note, and resource the U.S.’ maritime transport capabilities as thoroughly as what is required to sharpen the U.S.’ naval combat fleet’s power.
America is a bizarre maritime power. From the view of national interest, the U.S. is indisputably a maritime nation. It exists at significant remove from Eurasia, but fundamentally depends upon the free flow of goods along Eurasia’s littorals, and between Eurasia and the Americas, for its political-economic model to be sustained. In this sense, the U.S. is a maritime power in the same mold as the UK or Imperial Japan, with a distinct interest in the freedom of the seas, stable international chokepoints, and most fundamentally, an existential interest in the denial of any power or coalition hegemony upon the Eurasian landmass.
Yet the U.S. is also a continental power, one that has a historical industrial heartland, massive agricultural capacity, and energy reserves large enough to sustain domestic and international consumption. There is a distinct strain in American strategic thought, driven by this hybrid nature, that downplays the role and relevance of Eurasia in American policy and towards American interests. This strain has sought all sorts of quick-fixes to the American strategic problem, including the overwhelming deployment of nuclear weapons, the exclusive use of airpower, and the continuous underestimation of naval power.
Even American navalists misunderstand the role of maritime strength in U.S. policy. The U.S. must fight every war in an expeditionary manner. The reality of a great-power war, or even a limited war on the Eurasian rimland, is that it will be fought thousands of miles from the United States, and therefore requires the U.S. to transport men and materiel over those thousands of miles of the open ocean, and do so continuously – after all, even the Korean police action of 1950-1953 required hundreds of thousands of troops, multiple aircraft carriers, and a continuous “tail” of ships to support the forward-deployed force in the field.
America’s strategic “tail”, the critical link between the continental United States and the Eurasian landmass, is as brittle as a thin sheet of ice. U.S. TRANSCOM, the umbrella for each service’s transportation functions, is far smaller than what it was during even the Gulf and Iraq Wars. Most critical among TRANSCOM’s service elements, however, is Military Sealift Command (MSC), the U.S. Navy’s logistics component. The U.S. Army’s Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command (SDDC) manages supply flows to units on the ground and ensures they reach port rapidly and in the correct numbers. Meanwhile, the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command (AMC) maintains rapid-deployment capacity and the essential tool that is the U.S. tanker fleet of range-extender aircraft. But MSC, given its maritime nature, carries the bulk of the materiel needed in any major conflict.
MSC maintains a number of ships under its continuous control for sustainment of peacetime operations. But these ships are grossly insufficient to support a wartime surge. For that, MSC would need to turn to chartered ships, almost invariably crewed by U.S. Merchant Mariners. This has been the case, whether the U.S. charters a major supplementary fleet or moves mothballed ships out of storage, since the Second World War.
The distinction today is that the U.S. Merchant Marine lacks the ships and mariners to execute a major expansion in a great-power conflict, while the U.S. Navy and military more broadly has no experience defending American logistics from enemy predation.
The U.S. Merchant Marine is comprised of under 200 vessels that can carry over 1,000 tons, of which 152 the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) considers as having military utility. Even in 1996, decades after the U.S. Merchant Marine’s 1950s-1970s global market peak, the U.S. Merchant Marine still maintained 320 relevant ships. The U.S., to sustain major Eurasian combat operations, and assuming no damage to American logistics, would need some three times this force at minimum for a large-scale Eurasian war and, of equal relevance, to ensure that U.S.-bound shipping remains regular enough to sustain the American economy.
The U.S. could purchase several hundred ships from foreign buyers. American allies, most notably South Korea and Japan, are both major shipbuilders. Japan in particular is expanding its merchant ship construction industry to compete with South Korea and China, specializing in liquified natural gas (LNG) powered ships, which the U.S. would be especially suited to use considering its domestic reserves.
Yet this would solve only part of the issue. Only one institution, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy (USMMA), trains mariners with a service obligation in crisis. The USMMA produces just over 200 graduates per year and has not received a funding injection in decades – one of its major academic facilities quite literally lacks in-building toilets and heating. It will take several years for the U.S. at minimum to train enough mariners to crew new ships, assuming the USMMA were to maximize class capacity and receive funding to sustain training programs.
In turn, the issue of adversary logistics targeting comes to the fore. The most vulnerable and least adequate part of the American military is its logistics system. The same system is the lynchpin in conducting successful expeditionary warfare. U.S. adversaries, particularly China in the Indo-Pacific, will target American and allied ports and logistics vessels to disrupt the U.S.’ long-term sustainment capacity and cripple U.S. military power after just weeks of war.
The solution is as clear as it is difficult. The U.S. must expand its merchant capacity through foreign purchasing, ensure that the USMMA has the financing to produce the merchant mariners the U.S. so desperately requires, and construct the warships needed to defend American logistics during a great power war.
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