The U.S. Navy continues to order cumbersome warships despite facing an urgent demand to embrace new technologies and weapons systems to combat the rising threat from China, The New York Times reported.
Navy personnel, analysts, and current and former officials remain tied to political and economic forces that have produced jobs-driven procurement policies resulting in warships that may not be ideally suited for future missions, The New York Times reported Monday.
Several former high-ranking Navy and Pentagon officials told the Times that hubris, the breaking of traditions, and an aversion to risk-taking has hampered the Navy's progress.
"The U.S. Navy is arrogant," said Lorin Selby, who retired this summer after a 36-year career that included being a rear admiral and the chief of naval research.
"We have an arrogance about, we've got these aircraft carriers, we've got these amazing submarines. We don't know anything else. And that is just wrong."
Another factor is that Capitol Hill leadership on Defense Department budgets is dominated by lawmakers from shipbuilding communities. The industry sends tens of millions of dollars of campaign contributions to key lawmakers and mounts lobbying campaigns pushing the Navy to build more ships.
The U.S. Navy's focus on producing new warships — with a budget of $32 billion for this year alone — is creating a fleet that's too reliant on outdated military strategies, some Pentagon insiders say.
"Right now, they are still building a largely 20th-century Navy," naval consultant Bryan Clark, a former Navy budget planner, told the Times.
The building of guided missile destroyers and amphibious transport ships as part of the Navy's largest ship-building budget ever also could mean the Navy might not be able to afford to keep the fleet running in decades to come, the Times reported.
However, at a U.S. Navy outpost in Bahrain, a collection of small, unmanned vessels, was helping to contain Iran and could be essential to fighting a war in the Pacific, the Times reported.
Those vessels, built on a budget that was less than the cost of fuel for one of the Navy's big ships, are prototypes for a cheaper, easier-to-build and more mobile force.
Navy personnel and contractors that built the drone boats, unmanned submersible vessels and aerial vehicles, are pleading for more money, the Times reported.
"It's an unbelievable capability — we have already tested it [unmanned drone] for something like 35,000 hours," Michael Brown, who was the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, told the Times. "So why are we not fielding that as fast as possible?"
The unmanned drone contractors await major orders. One company, Saildrone, could deliver as many as 400 of its vessels annually. So far, it has Navy contracts for only 16, including the six currently being used around Bahrain.
"There just is not the leadership at the top to say, Get it done," Saildrone founder and CEO Richard Jenkins, whose surveillance vessel Navy officials said had been one of the most valuable tools demonstrated out of Bahrain, told the Times.
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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