No Cut To The Carrier Force?

The Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that the White House has pressured DoD into dropping its plan to cut a carrier from the force--citing political pressure from the Congress as the reason, including the possibility of pressure from Democrats already spooked in an election year.  A key paragraph in the story follows:


"Defense Department officials currently are negotiating final elements of the Pentagon budget with the White House Office of Management and Budget, ahead of next month's release of the administration's budget proposal for fiscal 2015. The offer of additional money to pay for the refueling in 2016 came as part of those discussions, though it wasn't clear where White House officials planned to get the extra funds. Caitlin Hayden, the National Security Council spokeswoman, declined to comment."

Interesting.  My (admittedly limited) experience with this kind of thing is that no "new" money will come into the system; rather, OSD will turn to the Navy and say "find the money for the carrier in your own budget".  No real strategic decision will be made balancing the requirements for forward presence and conventional deterrence against infrastructure, a too-large Army, or mounting personnel costs. Instead, we (navalists) become cannibals, figuring out what aspect of seapower needs to be cut to accommodate another element of seapower.  I have been guilty of this recently on another debate, the cost of the SSBN(X) and its impact on the conventional force.

No more.

No more "negotiating with ourselves".  No more "well, I can get three submarines if I cut this carrier out of the force".  The debates should start with the proposition that the Navy is too small to accomplish its conventional and strategic missions, that what the Navy does for the country is simply more important that what other aspects of the military do (in a time of relative peace among great powers but tension on the horizon), and that we are making grave and irreversible mistakes as our maritime industrial base hangs in the balance.  No one argued that the Army had to get bigger and more robust to fight the wars we were in...the Navy needs to make a principled argument that now is ITS time for sunlight and growth, that what IT does is uniquely suited to our security and prosperity, and that cutting it increases what are now manageable, but growing dangers. 

It is time to go to the mattresses.

Bryan McGrath