In November 2007, in The Atlantic magazine, I warned of the Navy’s “elegant decline.” I emphasized that the number of hulls in the water would eventually be more important than the number of boots on the ground. But naval power was the furthest thing from people’s minds amid all the fevered discussions about counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to reverse the downward trajectory of our fortunes in the chaotic deserts of the greater Middle East.
This is troubling, since the most accurate measure of our national capacity has always been sea power. The U.S. Navy is the nation’s primary strategic instrument, not our nuclear arsenal. Nuclear weapons are like trophy items that can never be used, according to Western military doctrine since the end of the Cold War, whereas the Navy is our “away team,” as a Pentagon official once told me. You can move an aircraft carrier strike group — with its cruisers, destroyers, frigates and submarines, not to mention its thousands of officers and sailors manning enough weaponry to destroy a city — halfway across the globe without a debate in Congress or in the news media. You can’t do that with land forces.
But it’s all frightfully expensive. A single fully operational Ford–class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, with its up to 90 fighter jets and helicopters, costs almost $20 billion. The United States maintains 11 carriers at any one time. The cost of a new ballistic missile submarine can be over $10 billion, and that of a new guided-missile destroyer well over $2 billion. The Navy operates roughly 70 submarines (most are cheaper attack submarines, not ballistic missile subs) and 80 destroyers, plus cruisers, frigates, supply ships and more.
All these vessels get old and have to be replaced every few decades. The cost of maintaining our Navy, let alone improving it or expanding it, is a matter of trillions of dollars. It is no exaggeration to say that the money spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could have built a whole new Navy.
The Yale historian Paul Kennedy in his 2022 book, “Victory at Sea,” shows how America’s rise as a great power can be told through the number of warships it built. Whereas the Navy had under 800 ships at the beginning of World War II, it had nearly 7,000 at the end, while the other competing world navies had collapsed or were severely reduced in size. Now we have, at the latest measurement, about 290 ships in active service. Though they have vastly more firepower than the fleet of the mid-20th century, only about a third of them are deployed on the high seas at any time, since another third is on training maneuvers and another third is undergoing repairs. By comparison, the Chinese Navy has grown to around 400 ships, plus hundreds of supply vessels. Though the quality of our Navy is higher, China has been swiftly closing that gap, too.
