in the form of land wars and accompanying impoverishment.
The Council of War and the Junta de Armadas had failed to establish a fleet that could answer imperial commitments, a goal they struggled to achieve for almost half a century. Spain never recovered from the rout of its great Armada. While there were limited successes in the early seventeenth century, Spain’s navy had begun a decline from which neither it nor the state recovered. In less than a century, Spanish seapower descended from the top drawer to a third-rate force. So low had Spanish naval power fallen that, by the late seventeenth century, the Spanish coast was navigated by a few Dutch ships and seamen hired by the Spanish. Shipping from the Indies to Spain could be conducted easily by Dutch shipping in peacetime but was easily interrupted in time of war.30 Spain maintained skeletal parts of its former global power, holding lands and influence in the Americas until the early nineteenth century. But seapower hollowed by penuriousness withered the muscle and rotted the empire’s connective tissue.
FROM GALLEONS TO GUIDED MISSILE CRUISERS
The initial signs of a hollow U.S. naval force existed long before sequestration. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan redirected U.S. military spending priorities throughout the 2000s, just as the Vietnam War had affected subsequent military budgets and resulted in a hollow force. The United States’s post–Cold War military drawdown shrank the Navy from its 594-ship high to 316 ships by September 2001.31 Combat operations from then on shifted funding away from the Navy and Marine Corps. U.S. ship numbers steadily declined during the Iraq War as the Navy pared its surface warship fleet down from 127 to 118, cut its submarine fleet by four boats, and trimmed its amphibious fleet from 41 to 33 ships.32 Force cuts alone might not create a hollow navy, but, combined with the concept of “transformation” and the financial squeezes of the Iraq and Afghan wars, these force cuts indicate that this is exactly what happened.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and much of the U.S. national security establishment championed the idea of force transformation.33 This harkened back to the “military revolution” of the early modern period, when the combination of gunpowder technology, massed infantry tactics, and improved logistics transformed how wars were fought. The 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review defined transformation as the result of “the exploitation of new approaches to operational concepts and capabilities, the use of old and new technologies, and new forms of organization that more effectively anticipate new or still emerging strategic and operational challenges and opportunities and that render previous methods of conducting war obsolete.”34 President Bush expanded on this concept, stating that the force should be “defined less by size and more by mobility and swiftness, one that is easier to deploy and sustain, one that relies more heavily on stealth, precision weaponry, and information technologies.”35 This force would “redefine war on our terms.”36
Proponents of transformation argued that the overwhelming victory of the United States in the First Gulf War was due to the nation’s major technological edge over its adversary. Precision-guided missiles and bombs, along with stealth aircraft and immediate air supremacy, ensured America’s victory over Saddam Hussein’s million-man army. By combining these advanced technologies with the power of computer networks, U.S. force planners hoped to create a better-informed, more advanced military that could apply precise force at any location on the planet. Maintaining this technological advantage was therefore the key to preserving American military dominance and deterring future threats to U.S. power. By revolutionizing warfare, the United States could ensure its dominance for decades to come.
Asymmetric conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan only encouraged these ideas. In urban operating spaces crowded with noncombatants, minimizing collateral damage was, and remains, a crucial U.S. military objective. “Smart weapons” were meant to achieve this objective.
Transformation affected every service. While the F-22 and F-35 tactical aircraft are the most public demonstrations of the approach, the strategy had the greatest impact on the Navy, since fleet construction takes place over decades, not months or years. Transformation called for placing experimental technologies on platforms under construction in order to get ahead of America’s adversaries, much as the innovative Royal Navy Admiral Jacky Fisher did when constructing the HMS Dreadnought.
Two important examples are the Gerald R. Ford–class supercarrier and the Zumwalt-class destroyer. The Ford-class substitutes a highly efficient electromagnetic catapult for the old steam-powered ones. The new ship’s reactors generate over three times more power than its Nimitz-class predecessors, allowing it to use directed energy weapons.37 The Zumwalt-class was designed as the nation’s first stealth fighting ship and can fire a guided land-attack 5-inch shell.38
None of this was cheap. Both projects have seen major cost overruns: the Ford-class is $2.3 billion over its projected cost,39 while the three ships of the Zumwalt-class are expected to cost nearly $12.8 billion, a result partly caused by greatly reducing the number of ships purchased.40 Such overruns also delayed the delivery date of the new ships.
President Bush’s defense budgets accelerated the hollowing out of American seapower. The Bush administration’s critics still fault the former president for his high defense expenditures, arguing that the economic costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan outweigh strategic benefits. Bush’s supposedly bloated defense budgets, his critics argue, undermined American prosperity and stability while giving the military too much power in setting foreign policy.
This view of Bush-era defense spending misses the most important issue. President Bush came into office promising a $1.35 trillion tax cut. A modest defense budget would be only part of a broader policy to shrink the U.S. government and keep debt under control. Bush inherited the advantage of the Clinton-Gingrich revenue surplus from 1997 to 2001.41 Executing the president’s transformation vision would require subordinating operational and manpower budgets to high-tech advances in network warfare. The military services as a whole resisted such efforts, emphasizing already low operational budgets.42
The September 11th attacks forced the new administration to act quickly and decisively. The military was shifted to a war footing as the administration poured funds into operational budgets, particularly for the Army and Air Force. The Navy proved its worth as a rapid reaction force: carrier-based aircraft flew three-quarters of the strike missions in the opening phases of the Afghan War.43 However, the service was encouraged to act as a support element for ground troops rather than as a global force with an international role and strategy. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vern Clark’s Fleet Response Plan reconfigured the Navy for this role. The service was now redesigned to “surge” when needed, leaving unnecessary ships in port to decrease operational costs.44
The Navy was caught in a bind. Expensive transformation projects continued, but the service was required to maintain a high operational tempo to support engaged ground forces. An evaluation of the Bush administration’s defense budgets purely by the numbers thus yields a skewed picture. Despite high defense budgets, the Navy was hollowed out during the first decade of the twenty-first century.
President Obama’s cuts simply continued to squeeze the Navy. Sequestration—explained in full in chapter 8—extended the hollowing process by further reducing funding. Since the Navy’s global missions have remained static, the sea service has been forced to choose between funding current operations and long-term procurement. As a result, operational efficacy, future development, and personnel funding have suffered.
Force hollowness has had a material effect on the Navy. The major projects of the past decade—the Zumwalt-class destroyer and Ford-class carrier—are good demonstrations. Initial plans for construction of thirty-two Zumwalt-class destroyers were slashed to three.45 This has had a major impact on available weapons systems. Weapons like the Navy’s guided land-attack 5-inch shell—a rocket-assisted
