Restoring Our Maritime Strength By Jerry Hendrix & Brent Sadler
The “first hundred days” myth has had a hold on American politics ever since Franklin Roosevelt’s first inauguration. In March 1933, the president summoned Congress to a three-month special session in which it passed 15 major bills to correct the downward trends of the Great Depression. Nearly every Democratic president to succeed him, and even a handful of Republicans, has tried to recapture the magic of FDR’s accomplishment. As the nation confronts numerous threats amid a deteriorating security environment, that magic is needed more than ever.
The next administration, in its first hundred days, will face an urgent problem: the need to rebuild the U.S. Navy to deter China, which, in its global push for dominance, is backed by a rapidly expanding modern navy, maritime constabulary, and commercial fleet. But an effective effort will involve more than just the Navy. It will also require investing in the broader maritime industry and ensuring that the nation has adequate shipping in peacetime to prevent China from dictating our terms of trade and subordinating our economic interests to its own.
What would a successful maritime first hundred days look like?
It should begin well before the president takes office. The first thing that a president-elect must consider is the national-security team. As is often said, personnel is policy: Without the right people, good ideas remain just ideas. In his first term, despite a campaign commitment to increasing the Navy’s fleet to 350 ships, President Trump was never able to “build the bench” by fully staffing the Pentagon, including the Department of the Navy, and hence was never able to build the fleet that he had promised. As for President Joe Biden, the low priority he has placed on defense, and on the Navy specifically, resulted in a failure to staff the Navy’s political leadership before the final year of his term. Whether Trump or Kamala Harris wins the White House this time, the nation cannot afford to repeat such mistakes.
The secretary of defense and the senior civilian positions in the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force are important, but so too are the Senate-confirmed undersecretaries and assistant secretaries who implement decisions. The day after winning the election, the next president should begin building a national-security team supportive of his or her overall policy goals, possessed of the knowledge and experience to drive required changes through, and able to be confirmed by the Senate. A second priority during the transition should be to review all the Biden executive orders to ascertain whether they impeded the operational or material readiness of the fleet.
When retired admiral Arleigh Burke attended the commissioning ceremony for his namesake ship in 1991, he famously said to its crew, “This ship was built to fight. You better know how.” The Navy needs to burn away the regulatory and administrative layers that have adhered to it like so many barnacles on a ship’s hull and sharpen its focus on the warfighting challenges immediately at hand. On Day One, the next president should establish that the re-expansion of the Navy will be the highest priority, to speed up lower-level Pentagon decision-making when it comes to budgets and defense-program rankings. A precedent for such prioritization can be found in the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, who oversaw the accelerated creation of the nation’s intercontinental-ballistic-missile program during the early days of the Cold War.
Also on Day One, the president should order a review, to be completed within 60 days, of the material readiness of the current fleet, its supporting shipyards, and the associated industrial base.
If a newly elected President Trump, in particular, wants to pursue the substantial changes to the Navy that he advocated at the end of his first term, he should transmit a slate of nominees for Navy secretary, undersecretary, and the five assistant-secretary positions to the Senate as soon as the new Congress is sworn in. To help revive the nation’s defense–industrial base, he should also consider appointing a maritime special assistant to the national-security staff or reestablishing the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM), which was stood up in 1950 and got the nation onto a Cold War industrial footing. The ODM leveraged authorities established under the Defense Production Act to align the nation’s industrial base to meet wartime and later peacetime defense requirements. The still-existing Defense Production Act has been invoked by the Biden administration ten times to accelerate the production of everything from baby formula to components for hypersonic weapons, but the role of overall coordination of critical production decisions that once resided inside ODM has been spread throughout the executive branch. It should be refocused once again in a single office.
During the Cold War, President Reagan called for a 600-ship Navy. We need another numerical goal today. Given current limitations on shipbuilding, the next president should call for a battle force of 333 warships before the end of his or her term in January 2029 — a goal achievable through investments in the nation’s commercial-shipbuilding capacity.
Currently, much of the fleet is sidelined because of backlogs in maintenance. Surface ships are deploying with many weapons systems operating in degraded modes. Over a third of the force of submarines, with higher “sub-safe” requirements imposed by their use of nuclear reactors, cannot leave the pier because of a nearly three-year backlog in maintenance. By law and by regulation, submarines must be maintained in public (Navy) shipyards or in the shipyards where they were built, and there aren’t enough dry docks to hold all the “boats” that require servicing.
During the “peace dividend” days of the 1990s, when base-realignment and -closure commissions abounded, Congress shut down too many shipyards. Today the Navy requires at least three, but more realistically five, additional dry docks. The next secretary of the Navy should immediately request from Congress authorization to pursue a private–public partnership (PPP) to establish one or two new shipyards with sufficient repair capacity to meet all current and projected maintenance requirements. These PPP arrangements should be structured as “rent-to-own” opportunities whereby private operators, backed by public, state-sponsored bonds, would effectively build and outfit the yards to Navy standards, allowing the service to rent them over a 30-year period to retire the debt. Such an approach skirts the high up-front costs that, under current law, accompany base-infrastructure investments.
The Navy also does not have enough ordnance — missiles, shells, and torpedoes — to arm every ship in the fleet. The next administration must therefore make a significant investment in the ordnance-manufacturing industrial base by authorizing overtime and additional factory shifts and by directing, through a dispersal policy, the establishment of new production capacity in currently underused parts of the nation. To help attract needed investment, “maritime prosperity zones” could be created on the model of Trump’s first-term “opportunity zones” but with a focus on waterfront communities all over the country — on the East, West, and Gulf Coasts, in the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys, and certainly around the nation’s Great Lakes.
Expanding the Navy to 333 ships would require adding almost 40 warships to the fleet. The Biden administration has ordered too few ships and not supported authorizations to accelerate the delivery dates of ships already under construction. Given that it takes between three and five years to commission a ship into the Navy from the time a contract is signed, simply planning to build more ships will not guarantee the necessary expansion over a four-year presidential term. The next administration should therefore recommend a “five-ocean Navy act” along with a 35 percent increase in the Navy’s budget, or about $90 billion more in spending, in line with the pre–World War II and Reagan-administration precedents. The Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940 effectively began the construction of many of the ships that entered the fleet in 1943 and turned the tide of World War II, and Reagan’s massive investment in the Navy during his first term helped to win the Cold War. A new naval act should fund the building of proven stable-design warships currently planned for construction. Naval shipbuilders could be assured that orders are fixed, making it both necessary and financially smart to make capital investments in labor and shipyards to increase shipbuilding and repair capacity.
The most important step for the Navy to take immediately is to stop retiring ships. In March 2024, the Navy announced that it planned to decommission 19 ships, including ten that would be retired ahead of schedule. The next secretary of the Navy should stop all decommissioning of ships before their end of service life and should request supplemental funding from Congress to cover repairs, operating expenses, and activation of naval reservists to serve on the ships being retained. These new monies should facilitate the signing of contracts with ship-repair yards around the country capable of extending ships’ service lives and modernizing older vessels.
Taking a page from the Reagan administration’s buildup, which added 73 ships to the fleet over eight years, the next administration should survey all ships currently retained in the unmanned “ghost fleet” and the 116 ships on the Navy’s “stricken” list. This survey should be completed within the first 30 days and include cost estimates for manning and operating the ships. Not every ship in the battle force is required to proceed to the first island chain of the western Pacific or into the Red Sea. There are many missions in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the South Atlantic that can be performed by hulls equipped with older sensors and weapons systems. Once the Navy’s leaders have a good idea of the material state of the inactive fleet, they can request funds from Congress in line with its Article I responsibility to “provide and maintain a Navy” sufficient to “provide for the common defense.”
To monitor all of these initiatives, the secretary of the Navy and his subordinates should establish a war room within the offices of the civilian secretariat, where reports of progress or regress can be gathered and assessed on a daily basis. Every aspect of the first-hundred-days plan should be reported on to the secretary each week, and the secretary should issue a monthly report to the secretary of defense, who, in turn, should report to the president.
In October 2023, the U.S. Navy took station in the Red Sea to defend merchant shipping. It was a modest first step, after 20 years of counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, back toward a focus on war at sea. The Houthis in Yemen, however, must be understood as presenting nothing like the threat that the Chinese military does. While the Navy has done well in the Red Sea to date, its operations don’t come anywhere near the intense requirements of fighting a major battle in the South China Sea. Thus, on Day One of the next administration, the secretary of the Navy should direct that the commanders of the Pacific Fleet and Fleet Forces Command execute major exercises, off Hawaii and in the North Atlantic, respectively, within a hundred days. These exercises should be designed to stretch strategic, tactical, and logistical limits and should use no less than 20 percent of the active and reserve naval forces assigned to each region. Such an exercise, on a scale reminiscent of the fleet exercises of the 1930s, would provide the Navy’s top brass with an opportunity to evaluate leaders at all levels of command and assess fleet readiness for a modern major naval war.
Thirty-five years after the end of the Cold War, there is no officer in the United States Navy who has experience in managing an aggressive, expanding Navy. Bending the downward curve of the nation’s maritime strength back upward will require a change in leadership and culture. Every service has its mixture of bean counters and warfighters, and during the 40 years of the Cold War these two groups were kept in balance according to the shore- and sea-based requirements of the service. During that period, however, the Pentagon always kept an “in case of war, break glass” list of warfighting officers to move into fleet- and strike-group-command slots in the event of conflict. These commanders were often not adept at giving testimony to Congress or sitting for media interviews, but they could be counted on to fight and win a war.
Accordingly, the next Navy secretary and undersecretary should undertake a series of one-on-one interviews of current three- and four-star admirals to determine their potential as wartime commanders and their readiness to execute an aggressive program of national maritime rejuvenation. If some are found wanting, they should be offered reassignment or retirement in grade without prejudice. Simultaneously, the five assistant secretaries of the Navy should survey the warfighting character of the Navy’s current two- or one-star admirals, as well as its senior captains, with an eye toward their potential for promotion to senior roles. When, in 1955, Secretary of the Navy Charles Thomas found Admiral Robert “Mick” Carney lacking in support for innovation and modernization, Thomas forced him into early retirement and selected Rear Admiral Arleigh Burke for promotion to admiral, naming him chief of naval operations (CNO) over the heads of 100 more-senior admirals. Burke ended up serving six years as CNO and was instrumental in helping the Eisenhower administration ready the Navy for a long-haul Cold War.
The challenge for the next administration in the maritime environment will not end with reforming and rebuilding the Navy itself. When Captain Alfred T. Mahan ushered in the sea-power era in the 1890s, his argument wasn’t that if we built a large Navy, the nation would become a great power. Rather, he argued that power came from wealth and that wealth had been tied historically to free trade protected and encouraged by a strong Navy. Mahan also pointed out that nation-states that invested in sea-borne trade reaped the largest returns on their investments, resulting in exponential rather than lineal economic growth. This is a lesson that we have forgotten, with less than 0.4 percent of our trade now carried on U.S. ships. Such strategic vulnerability passes on to other nations both the responsibility and the gains associated with transporting our goods over the world’s seas. Today, China is the largest builder of commercial ships and controls almost 100 strategically placed ports around the globe, holding our trade and access to markets in peril. In a war with China, this situation would likely cost us victory.
As elections approach, U.S. citizens must heed the lessons of the past to prevent sea blindness from turning into a national calamity. We must pick leaders committed to returning our nation to maritime viability through both the building of commercial ships and their operation under the U.S. flag. Many in Congress are beginning this process, and it should be championed in the next administration. A bicameral and bipartisan effort has been launched by Senators Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Representatives Mike Waltz (R., Fla.) and John Garamendi (D., Calif.) to begin the revitalization of our nation’s maritime sector. It has been supported by the current secretary of the Navy but inadequately by the White House. Their bill, which has been named the “Ships for America Act,” would modernize U.S. commercial shipyards, create industrial-job-training programs, and provide incentives to once again make it profitable to move goods on U.S. ships. Ushering in a revolution in shipping could allow the U.S. to realize comparative advantage and enjoy a renaissance in the maritime sector that protects American security and economic interests put at risk by China.
As we move toward becoming a net exporter of liquefied natural gas, it makes economic sense for it to be transported on U.S.-built and -operated vessels. Moreover, Vladimir Putin’s suspension of energy exports to Western Europe following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine makes clear that our nation must provide allies with energy-supply resiliency. Therefore, if the Ships for America Act is not passed in the current Congress, it should be reintroduced in the first 30 days of the next administration to re-shore shipbuilding jobs and industrial capacity back to the United States.
But state-led industrial policy alone will not suffice to outcompete the Chinese Communist Party’s nonmarket forces; also required is a market approach, in league with like-minded allies such as Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, that allows America to benefit from other nations’ comparative advantages even as it nurtures its own critical technologies. Within the first hundred days, the next president should establish an informal group of like-minded maritime nations — a maritime G-7.
Our nation has been in dire straits before, but it has always found a way to get ahead of our adversaries. The next president will need to act quickly to avert what could be a disastrous war with China in the next few years and prevent the ignobility of having domestic political decisions foisted on us by the economically coercive communist regime in Beijing. Committing to a maritime national-security strategy that will restore our naval and commercial fleets would allow us to influence events abroad and strengthen ourselves economically without necessarily becoming entangled in drawn-out wars. The United States was founded as a sea-power state. The first hundred days of the next administration provide a perfect chance to remember that fact.
Jerry Hendrix is a retired Navy captain and a senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute. Brent Sadler is a retired Navy captain and the author of U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century.
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