July 28, 2024: The U.S. Navy is arguably ceasing to be the most powerful fleet in the Pacific Ocean though American allies like South Korea, Japan and Australia have contributed a growing number of warships and submarines. The Australians made a deal with the United States and Britain to build a fleet of seven nuclear powered submarines as well as a force of fast frigates that can reach areas where an attacking Chinese fleet would show up. Meanwhile the Chinese Navy is growing at a rapid pace. Currently the U.S. Navy has 293 warships and expects to expand that to 309 by 2030. In that time period China expects to have twice as many warships, though Chinese corruption and rapid population decline make the effective numbers and manning of its purported 2030 fleet suspect.

Because China is currently the largest builder of commercial ships in the world, it is nominally capable of building more warships and doing it quickly than the United States. Right after World War II, and into the 1950s, the United States had the largest shipbuilding industry in the world. That was eventually overtaken by rebuilt European shipbuilding firms and by the end of the 20th century. Now it is China’s turn to produce half the commercial shipping in the world.

Over a decade ago the U.S. Department of Defense told the U.S. Navy that it must be more mission oriented, and less concerned about maintaining certain quantities and types of ships. In short, the navy leaders were being warned to build, and maintain, forces needed for current, and likely, missions, and to forget about refighting World War II or the Cold War.

At the end of World War II, the United States possessed the largest and most powerful navy the world had ever seen. Even with the massive demobilization after World War II, the U.S. still deployed most of the world's active sea-going warships. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the Soviet Union tried to create a fleet large enough to threaten American naval dominance but came close only on paper. The Soviet fleet was too expensive for the Russians to maintain, and it largely disappeared within a few years of the Soviet Union's demise (in 1991).

American admirals were asked to reassess which ships are worth what cost for what jobs. For example, a 36,000 ton, World War II Essex class carrier cost $540 million, adjusted for inflation, and 24 were built. These ships were crucial for winning control of the seas. But times have changed. We think of World War II in the Pacific as the war of the carriers and the beginning of the carrier age. Well, that's technically true. But keep in mind that only five carrier to carrier battles were fought during the entire war, all between May 1942 and June 1944. There hasn't been another carrier versus carrier battle since the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944. That's over seventy years, and another one doesn't look too likely any time soon. The carrier versus carrier era lasted only twenty-five months. In fact, the last carrier to carrier combat that was anything like an even fight was the Battle of Santa Cruz Islands. This was also the last time an American carrier was sunk in a carrier battle. In effect, the Golden Age of Carrier Battles lasted from May to October 1942. Five months. Four battles.

Carriers proved to be more useful against everything but other carriers. Attacks on enemy bases, shipping and in support of amphibious landings comprised the bulk of carrier activity throughout the war. Although land-based aircraft were two to three times as effective as carrier planes, the carriers could be swiftly moved across the vast expanse of the Pacific. It was this mobility that made carriers less effective. The carriers could not lug around as much avgas or munitions as a land base could stockpile. Operating at sea caused more damage to the aircraft, and the shortage of space on a carrier made aircraft maintenance more difficult. But despite these limitations, the aircraft carrier reigned supreme across the Pacific. As long as the carriers stayed away from more numerous land-based aircraft, something the Japanese weren't able to muster by 1944, the carriers could slug it out with anything they came up against. Note that the last American carrier lost in combat was a victim of land-based aircraft. And the second most dangerous foe of carriers was submarines. Thus, since late 1942, the carrier situation hasn't changed. The U.S. carrier fleet is supreme and its only foe is a large number of land-based aircraft and submarines. But with longer ranged land-based aircraft, thanks to inflight refueling, how many carriers are needed. A Nimitz class carrier, which is four times larger, by internal volume, than an Essex class carrier, costs $6 billion, and ten were built. Is the Nimitz eleven times as effective as the Essex? A World War II U.S. diesel-electric submarine cost $36 million adjusted for inflation. A modern diesel electric costs ten times as much. Nuclear attack subs cost $2 billion.

Ships are a lot more expensive today because they are larger and a lot more capable. Better weapons, electronics and machinery have made them deadlier. These new ships have smaller crews, but even with that cost savings, these ships are much more expensive. The Department of Defense is telling the navy, in rather strong terms, that there will not be enough money to pay for replacing many of the major warships currently in service. The navy must plan to get by with fewer than 11 aircraft carriers. These 100,000 ton vessels are unique to the United States. No one else has ever had anything like them. These large Nimitz class carriers have been very useful, especially since smart bombs became cheaper and more reliable. With Nimitz class carriers, the navy can put accurate firepower on where most of the world's population lives, which is near a coast. In late 2001, carrier aircraft provided most of the bombers over Afghanistan. But the navy won't get enough money to keep eleven of these carriers in service. The last time there were 12 of these carriers in service was in the 1990s and the navy is more likely to have fewer large carriers rather than more in the next few decades. The large carriers are too expensive and the navy has less and less shipyard capacity to build any ships. The government refuses to invest in more shipyards and that prevents maintaining the current size of the fleet, much less expanding it.

Same deal with the dozen large amphibious support ships, which look like small aircraft carriers. Only three others exist, all operated by allies. And then there is the American nuclear submarine fleet, or 50 boats, which is more than the rest of the world, including lots of allies, combined.

Meanwhile, new technologies make robotic ships, submarines and aircraft affordable and effective. The navy is being told to buy more of this stuff. Robotic equipment is cheaper and, well, more expendable. If the navy needs this new gear and is scrambling to find the cash to replace the old-school ships and aircraft, something has to give. The Department of Defense brass are telling the admirals that the old is out and the new should be at the top of the shopping list. Just a suggestion, of course.

Over the last two decades the U.S. Navy has been trying to compel the firms that build its warships to deal with persistent issues of poor quality, delays and inflated prices. For decades, there have been growing problems with low balling. This is where the shipbuilder gives the navy a very low estimate of what a proposed ship is going to cost. Then, when construction is underway, costs creep up, often resulting in the ship costing more than twice the original estimate. When this practice began, after World War II, it was with the cooperation of the navy that wanted to have an easier time convincing Congress to allow construction of new ships.

For over two decades the navy has been saying, no more, while the ship builders say, OK. But the low balling continues. All current ship building projects are over budget. The worst case was the LCS (Littoral Combat Ship), which was to be the poster boy for doing it right. Didn't work out that way. When building plans for the LCS were first announced, each one was supposed to cost $223 million. That soon escalated to $460 million, and the navy is confident that the ultimate price would be higher. Congress was outraged and demanded that the admirals do something. The admirals did nothing and ordered their public relations experts to portray Congress as the cause of all these problems.

The real problem is sole source procurement of big deck vessels, plus the Navy's penchant for changing designs frequently, often weekly. The real reasons for the problem goes back to when the navy destroyed the Navy Yard system, which was the best check on corruption and carelessness in shipbuilding. How does one bring back quality production, or even prove it can be done better, if there are no government owned shipyards that enable the navy to find out how it can be done better?

The shipbuilding industry will sometimes blame the unions. But Norway, Denmark, Japan, Korea, etc., maintain effective, efficient shipbuilding operations and have strong unions. The principal problem with the US Navy's yard system was that there were too many yards, more than the Royal Navy had. But the basic notion of having navy-owned yards was so that the service and the taxpayer could have an independent authority on ship construction and repair.

Examples abound. Back in the '30s, with substantial construction contracts being let again, the Navy placed orders for three very similar classes of destroyers, two to be built in private yards and one in navy yards. There were about a dozen ships all together. The end result was that the navy-built ships came in on time, on budget, and with few teething problems, while the privately built ones ran over in time and money and required some additional work after completion.

Post-World War II, the shipbuilding industry decided it needed the work more than the navy's yards did, and convinced Congress to pass a series of interesting laws that marginalized the navy's yards. One good one was a law that came out of the Virginia congressional delegation that mandated that modernization, maintenance, and repair jobs be done at yards in proximity to where ships were based. This was very good for Newport News, but meant that navy yards in places like New York, where there were usually no ships based, became uneconomical. We've only got a few navy-owned yards now, and none of them do construction.

The private shipbuilders and the shipping lines, plus their local members of Congress, have also contributed to the decline of the merchant marine, though they blame the unions, OSHA, EPA, cheap foreign labor, and so on. The problem, as in so many areas of military procurement, is politics. The defense budget is seen as a source of votes, above all. No politician will admit it, but the facts speak for themselves.

At sea the navy has its own problems. In 2021 the U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet, which then and now controls most of the warships in the U.S. Navy, had a lot of embarrassing personnel and leadership problems since 2010. These only became visible to the general public when there were major mishaps, like ship collisions or anything that involved loss of life. In 2017 these problems became so bad, and public, that the commander of the Pacific Fleet was fired for failure to do his job.

Then it became public that the Pacific Fleet, which not only contains most American warships, but also most navy personnel and overseas bases, suffered a more serious but generally unpublicized problem. Between 2016 and 2018 Pacific Fleet submarines, and their two support ships did not receive the required computer and computer network security inspections. A recent navy-wide audit of cybersecurity found that the Pacific Fleet Submarine Command was unable to get enough qualified cyber security specialists to carry out the required inspections and deal with any problems discovered. Pacific Fleet policy was to concentrate available network security personnel on servicing surface ships and land installations, which were connected to the Internet all the time. The submarines had no Internet access most of the time because while at sea the nuclear subs rarely operated on the surface. Submarine crews have limited email access, which means no attachments and low risk of malware getting into the submarine network.

The Pacific Fleet was also dependent on the fact that many systems in submarines were independent of each other and the only ship-wide network was based on Linux, which is less frequently attacked by hackers than computers using Windows, Apple OS or Android. The U.S. military, especially the navy, switched from Windows to Linux over twenty years ago in part because of reduced security risks. But those risks did not disappear, which was why the navy mandated cybersecurity inspections every three years to assess the security of shipboard systems. In a similar fashion and for similar reasons many large companies, especially in banking and finance, also switched to Linux and were the first to realize hackers had noted the shift. Those hacking groups that specialize in attacking large businesses had found it worth the effort to spend more time and money finding exploitable vulnerabilities in Linux. American military cyber security experts noticed this but the Pacific Fleet and COMSUBPAC did not take note of how critical these new vulnerabilities were. The cybersecurity audits provided an early warning of vulnerability because the first thing a hacker that got into a submarine network would do is carry out an extensive, and time consuming, exploration of the network to find vulnerable areas and develop a plan on how to get into those areas to plant hidden system monitors and system destroying software that can be activated remotely or if certain warlike actions are detected.

Many militaries and governments, like China and North Korea, also switched to Linux to reduce network security vulnerability. Chinese military cybersecurity experts have a list of known vulnerabilities and potential ones that their hackers could use to get into U.S. Navy systems. Cybersecurity on submarines is very important because most American nuclear subs are in the Pacific and are a major threat to the growing Chinese fleet.

It wasn’t just the Pacific Fleet commander who was negligent. Higher-ranking admirals than the relieved Pacific Fleet commander are also responsible for this problem developing. Some of them were competent enough to order the navy-wide audit, which found a lot of problems the navy would prefer to keep out of the news, at least until they are fixed. The Pacific submarine force cybersecurity problems are still not completely known, much less being fixed.

The current problems in the Pacific Fleet are a side effect of the post-1991 shift of U.S. Navy forces from the Atlantic to the Pacific. During World War II most of the Navy was operating in the Pacific but after 1945, the Atlantic Fleet grew more powerful. This was in preparation for a potential battle with the growing naval power of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, their fleet wasted away within a decade. The American Atlantic Fleet no longer had a major opponent. Meanwhile, China, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran provided plenty of work for the Pacific Fleet, which normally supplied ships for Middle East and South Asian emergencies.

As the Pacific Fleet grew in size the Atlantic Fleet gradually disappeared until it was renamed, and reorganized, into the U.S. Fleet Forces Command, which is responsible for the training, maintenance, and operation of naval forces including ships, aircraft, and land installations on both coasts plus providing support and coverage of less vital areas. By 2020 there was only the Pacific Fleet and the rest of the navy.