a standard 5-inch naval gun—are no longer viable because of the project’s high cost compared to its volume of output.46
The Ford-class has been plagued by delays to its new technological systems. To keep the Navy at the congressionally mandated eleven-carrier minimum, the service commissioned the Gerald R. Ford while retiring the Enterprise, even though the Ford is not combat ready.
The littoral combat ship (LCS) project has also experienced major cuts. A December 2015 memo from the secretary of Defense ordered the Navy to cut its LCS procurement from fifty-two to forty ships. This reduction is significant: after much wrangling over its initial design, which was deemed insufficiently defensible, the LCS’s firepower was increased with the expectation that it would become the Navy’s future frigate.47 Questions about the LCS’s lethality in combat remain. However, there is no doubt that frigates are indispensable to commanding the sea in such strategic places as the South China Sea.
Force hollowness is also evident in the Navy’s tactical fighter fleet. The F-35 project is unhappily famous for its cost overruns and major delays. Slated for initial operational capability in 2006, the F-35 was not fielded until 2016, and even then in limited numbers. The project is over $160 billion above its initial budget projections.48 Concurrently, the Navy’s fighter fleet of F/A-18 Hornets, Super Hornets, and Growlers is degrading over time: the service must rely on airframes from the Cold War.
When discussing the Navy’s difficulties during the post–Vietnam War drawdown, Admiral Thomas Hayward, the twenty-first chief of naval operations, said:
The Admirals back in Washington had so many pressures on them, so many diversions, they forgot their primary job is to make sure that the fleet is ready to go with highly trained and motivated sailors. The problem particularly manifests itself when the budget is way down.49
Just as after the Vietnam War, morale and motivation in today’s fleet has significantly declined. A combination of high operational tempo and poor funding has created force hollowness among personnel, a phenomenon even more dangerous than material hollowness.
Officer retention rates are telling. The junior officer corps combines technical knowledge with command authority, overseeing specialized warrant and petty officers in their various subspecialties. Not only is the junior officer corps the future of the service but its morale and quality are also an immediate concern for the Navy’s combat efficacy. The Navy commissioned a study in 2013 that discovered startlingly low retention rates for its junior officer corps throughout the service. Naval aviation had a retention rate of 36 percent, far below the 45 percent minimum acceptable threshold. Electronic warfare officers and strike fighter pilots were the hardest hit by the shortfall.50
The surface warfare community had an even lower retention rate of 35 percent.51 Junior surface warfare officers have begun leaving the service after their first shore tour. Junior officers who leave the service are meaningful indicators of force hollowness and morale issues. Unlike senior officers, who have spent two decades or more in uniform and have earned retirement options, junior officers choose to exit the Navy after nearly a decade, but with no retirement benefits. They see better opportunities outside of the military, despite the lack of financial compensation on retirement. Post-command retention has also declined. From 2010 to 2012, the number of naval aviators who retired after their first command assignment jumped from seven to twenty.52 A study of twenty-five executive officer prospects revealed that 70 percent were preparing to transition out of the military.
Just as hard ship numbers can mask material force hollowness, so retention numbers can mask human force hollowness. Despite the issues noted above, the Navy has been able to fill all its billets in each of its subspecialties. However, as officers with extensive operational experience in Iraq and Afghanistan retire, the Navy will begin to lose its most experienced leaders. This is likely to produce a negative effect on the junior officer corps, which is likely to influence the enlisted ranks.
A combination of low funding, long deployments, decreasing commitment to overseas conflicts, and increasingly competitive pay as the private sector returns to life are leaching top talent away from the Navy. When this talent drain is associated with an aging fleet and a Navy that lacks the funding to operate enough modern combatants, the signs of force hollowness are evident.
Pundits and politicians frequently remind Americans that the United States has the largest and best military the world has ever seen. No other nation fields eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, can deploy a division anywhere in the world in a matter of days, and can maintain a constant strategic deterrence.
However, America’s multiplying adversaries can see the signs of force hollowness. Just as Spain, Holland, and England did, America will face increasing challenges to its maritime power. A hollow military increases the risk of folding under this pressure, catching fire like a paper tiger at the light of a match.
For a maritime state, which the United States—bounded by water on three sides—assuredly is, an overseas bulwark of vigorously supported allies helps contain dangerous enemies, limits their ability to use the oceans as an invasion route, and allows the United States to apply power around the globe. A healthy network of politically like-minded allies also discourages the rise of hegemonies and the spread of their often inimical ideologies that would have unfavorable economic, security, and political consequences for America. A wisely fashioned alliance structure helps a global maritime power secure key choke points in the world’s oceanic trade routes, on whose safety the United States depends for the health of its foreign trade.
Alliances are expensive to maintain, frustrating to preserve, and risky when promises to defend them must be honored. Alliances are also very useful, especially in persuading a hostile state not to test them. America’s allies are a retaining wall that lies flush against potential adversaries on the Eurasian continent, from Russia to Iran to China and North Korea. U.S. alliances fortify the broad geographic girdle composed of states that border both the world’s great oceans and the heartland of the Eurasian continent, from which the most serious current and likely future external threats to American security come.
“The British army should be a projectile to be fired by the British Navy.”1 Were the United States required to take the offensive at some future point, this observation by Lord Edward Grey, a British foreign secretary in the early twentieth century, would have strategic meaning. Its network of global alliances provides the United States with the space to insert U.S. ground troops onto the Eurasian land mass. Where allies are found wanting, for reasons of either geography or politics, the U.S. Marine Corps, an integral portion of American seapower, would be a “projectile,” insofar as Lord Grey’s remark applies to us.
The presence of American seapower sustains and inspirits our allies, all of whom are weaker than we are. Seapower protects the ever-increasing volume of global trade and, in an extremity, the transportation of military supplies. It deters conflict and succors the international order on which increasing prosperity rests. Strategically located allies—as all of ours are—offer logistic support for U.S. military power in the troubled neighborhoods where it matters. Allies create a defensive barrier that adds diplomatic, economic, and military power to the geographic advantage the United States enjoys from the oceans that separate us from Eurasia. For a maritime nation, the symbiotic relationship of
