MORGAN MURPHY: It’s time to make the U.S. Navy the fighting force it should be

There’s an old saying in the U.S. Navy: “If it moves, salute it.” If it doesn’t, paint it gray.”

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Navy Secretary John Phelan, announced this week, will be widely praised. As he takes the helm of the world’s second-largest navy, the savvy investor and businessman will likely order plenty of haze gray paint, too.

Phelan will have one of the hardest, if not the hardest, jobs of Trump’s second term.

America’s Navy is in bad shape.

First of all, the United States has long since ceded the title of largest navy to China. We are still the heavyweight champion with larger tonnage (read: bigger ships), but the Chinese far surpass the United States in producing commercial and military ships. America’s 285-ship combat fleet is spread across the globe, from Djibouti to Guam and every port in between. China’s ships mainly sail in domestic waters.

Second, many of the ships America owns are old, leaky, and rusting. Long-time naval officers know that ships rust after long deployments and often look rough. But the current poor condition of the American fleet is a direct result of the Biden administration’s stupid policy of declaring war on climate change.

Sailors are not allowed to use toxic (but effective) paint. Because of their location on America’s coasts in states like California, Washington, Rhode Island and Hawaii, shipyards are subject to regulations that prioritize climate change and workplace safety regulations over national security.

American taxpayers could be forgiven for expecting pristine, fully functioning ships from the 87,000 people of the Navy’s Sea Systems Command.

While our allies like South Korea and Japan appear capable of building an American-built destroyer for half the cost of American shipyards, the United States is struggling to fulfill the cornerstone of our national security: the Columbia-class and the Virginia – Class attack submarines.

The U.S. Navy needs a modern-day Chester Nimitz to order the shipbuilders to get our ships out of dry dock. In 1942, Nimitz was informed that the USS Yorktown had been hit in the Battle of the Coral Sea by a 551-pound armor-piercing bomb that penetrated the flight deck and destroyed six compartments and much of the ship’s lighting, radar, and cooling systems. When the Navy told Nimitz that the Yorktown would require 90 days of repairs, he replied, “We have to have this ship back in three days.” To achieve this goal, Nimitz abandoned safety regulations and ordered 1,400 repair workers to work around the clock work. The power demand of the repair work was so great that there were power outages in Honolulu. But the Yorktown made it out of dry dock as ordered and ultimately turned the tide in the U.S. Navy’s most decisive naval battle: Midway. The modern U.S. Navy must follow the example of its most famous admiral in cutting red tape.

Third, America relies too heavily on a technology that is now over 100 years old: the aircraft carrier. Every Navy man loves an aircraft carrier, and the U.S. fleet of 11 nuclear-powered supercarriers dwarfs the rest of the world. At $13 billion per person, they should. A single aircraft carrier has more firepower than most countries’ entire arsenals.

But unlike our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the country no longer faces adversaries lacking air power. China is countering the threat from our aircraft carriers with thousands of “ship-killer” missiles – making it likely that the U.S. Navy would not be able to get the USS Ronald Reagan or the USS Gerald R. Ford within a thousand miles of Taiwan. Just as it took World War II for aircraft carrier proponents to finally win the battleship battle, let’s hope it won’t take another hot war to finally get the U.S. Navy and Congress to adopt drone technology like Saildrone on a large scale to introduce quantities.

After all, many of America’s best sailors are in sad shape. The Navy no longer requires two physical exams per year. Sailors wear camouflage (yes, camouflage) when doing office work because it is “more comfortable.” Trump’s last Secretary of the Navy, Kenneth J. Braithwaite, banned sailors and officers from wearing camouflage clothing in the Pentagon – what should they do? Hiding behind the potted palms on the E-Ring? A sensible first step in restoring good order and military posture would be to reinstate this policy in all coastal commands and return to yesterday’s physical standards.

Let’s hope decisive leadership from above corrects the course of the powerful U.S. Navy into the fighting force it should be.

Morgan Murphy is a military thought leader, fFormer Press Secretary to the Secretary of Defense and National Security Advisor in the US Senate.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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