Ever since 1907, when then-President Theodore Roosevelt sent a Great White Fleet of U.S. Navy battleships to pay port calls in dozens of countries around the world, Washington’s ability to project naval strength on a massive scale has been the crucial linchpin of U.S. global hegemony. Yet a structural crisis that is now overwhelming the U.S. Navy presents as much of a threat to Washington’s geopolitical position as the wave of isolationist populism fueled by the rise—and potential return—of former President Donald Trump.
From a distance, the U.S. Navy still looks like a formidable force that can outclass any potential rival. With 296 ships and 340,000 personnel, the fleet at Washington’s disposal vastly outguns every other great power, apart from China. And even if China’s accelerated ship-building over the past decade has enabled Beijing to boast the world’s largest fleet, the sheer firepower the U.S. can wield through dozens of submarines, 7 amphibious assault ships and 11 aircraft carriers still provides Washington far greater global reach. With the navies of the European Union and the U.K.—numbering a combined 116 surface combatants and 66 submarines—as well as Japan’s similarly sized fleet, 2 the U.S. can also count on support from allies with substantial naval resources of their own.
The extent of Washington’s dependence on the strength of the U.S. Navy is frequently underestimated because of a widespread fascination with special operations forces and high-end strike capabilities that neglects the logistics, maintenance and prepositioned storage such military assets need. For a continental state in the Western Hemisphere whose economy is deeply intertwined with developments in other global regions, the ability to control oceans linking its network of bases and prepositioned military storage sites is essential to managing simultaneous operations in the Middle East, Europe and the Indo-Pacific region. Without the global platform provided by its navy, the U.S. would be unable to deploy the overwhelming airpower that provides the freedom of action its land forces need to impose outcomes on the battlefield.
Similar to the dilemmas faced by Washington’s European partners, the creeping structural crisis that threatens to paralyze the U.S. Navy has its roots in budget cuts imposed in the early 1990s. During the brief period when the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to herald the arrival of a new era of global stability, the desire for a peace dividend led the administrations of former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton led to halve the size of the fleet from its Cold War peak of almost 600 ships. After the attacks of 9/11 and the so-called Global War on Terror that followed, U.S. defense spending focused on expanding land forces and airpower, even as constrained finances and efforts to outsource key planning and production functions had begun to atrophy the U.S. Navy’s capabilities.
Faced with stagnating budgets and land wars that led to the redeployment of thousands of sailors to Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Navy leadership in the 2000s pinned its hopes on technological innovation that some argued could secure a dominant position with fewer ships and smaller crews. This quest to solve structural challenges through untested design concepts culminated with the Littoral Combat Ship, or LCS, program, which burned through $100 billion dollars only to end up with a handful of ships plagued with engine breakdowns, making it one of the greatest procurement disasters in recent military history. Though other efforts to modernize on the cheap did not produce quite such catastrophic results, the institutional weaknesses that helped bring about the LCS fiasco fueled delays and ballooning costs around other crucial projects, including new Ford-class aircraft carriers and Columbia-class submarines.
The damage done by three decades of stagnation and neglect will continue to undermine the U.S. Navy’s readiness for years to come.
Though a dysfunctional procurement process easily swayed by industry lobbying has become the most visible indication of an institution in crisis, it is part of deeper structural trends to which the U.S. Navy has struggled to find an answer. Mounting labor shortages and antiquated supply chains in the few remaining shipyards the U.S. has available make it difficult to keep new projects on time and on budget. But they also cause severe backlogs when it comes to maintenance and repair schedules for ships that are already in service. As shipyards struggle to replace experienced workers lost to retirement, delays in getting vessels operational have often meant that Washington can rely on fewer ships at any given time than official figures might suggest.
Though such structural dysfunction has not yet forced Washington to abandon its strategic priorities, it has heightened the impact of the U.S. Navy’s high operational tempo, putting enormous strain on sailors and vessels that increases the risks of fatal blunders. With leaders throughout the 2010s more interested in looking good on Excel spreadsheets than maintaining long-term institutional sustainability, many ships were left chronically shorthanded in ways that led to declining retention of burned-out personnel and a succession of high-profile accidents. These strains have led to a belated effort to make adjustments, including acquiring off-the-shelf designs from successful ship-building programs in Japan, South Korea and Italy. But it could take over a decade to fix the institutional bottlenecks that have overwhelmed the handful of shipyards the Pentagon is dependent on.
As with many other institutions in a state of crisis, the U.S. Navy also became vulnerable to corrupt practices that exacted a further toll on budgets and morale. That Singapore-based contractor Leonard Glenn Francis—nicknamed “Fat Leonard”—was able to charm and bribe Navy officers in the early 2010s to embezzle over $50 million dollars from the U.S. Navy’s supply system represented another form of institutional hollowing out. Alongside such egregious corruption, the incompetence on display in responding to the fire that destroyed the USS Bonhomme Richard—a $1 billion amphibious assault ship—in 2020 provided further evidence of frailties within the U.S. Navy.
Since 2019, new leadership under Adm. Michael Gildray and now Adm. Lisa Franchetti has proved willing to acknowledge the extent of the problems the U.S. Navy faces. But the damage done by three decades of stagnation and neglect will continue to undermine its readiness for years to come. While these negative trends can be reversed over time, resolving the many factors that have converged to generate such a fundamental crisis for the naval foundations of U.S. global power will require a hugely costly and complex effort. And although Washington’s vast military budgets are far larger than anything partners or adversaries can muster, the immense challenges surrounding efforts to restore naval resilience will inevitably have an impact on funding for the U.S. Army, Marine Corps and Air Force.
In the meantime, the hollowing out of the U.S. Navy could trigger a recalibration of Washington’s priorities, with substantial knock-on effects for the U.K. and member states of the EU and NATO. Having long taken U.S. naval power for granted, European states now face possible scenarios in which an overstretched U.S. Navy might be forced to withdraw the bulk of its ships from the Atlantic and Mediterranean in response to an escalating crisis in the Indo-Pacific region. Moreover, additional investment to bolster U.S. Navy and Marine Corps assets needed to match Chinese military efforts across the Indo-Pacific may well come at the expense of U.S. Army structures that still play a crucial role in the defense of Europe.
As a result, rather than just worrying about populist isolationism in the U.S. fueled by Trump, the EU and U.K. also need to prepare for how the crisis of the U.S. Navy and other structural factors may similarly hamper Washington’s ability to continue to project power on a global scale. If the hollowing out of U.S. naval power is not tackled before 2030, Europeans are likely to discover that even the friendliest U.S. president no longer has the resources to provide the level of military support that has defined the trans-Atlantic alliance since the end of World War II.
In order to avoid such a sudden shock, the EU’s efforts to achieve greater military self-reliance must move beyond just a reactive focus on land power in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and also engage with European naval vulnerabilities. The declining reliability of U.S. governments coupled with a faltering U.S. Navy now make a coordinated effort to bolster U.K. and EU seapower an essential building block toward protecting Europe’s stability and prosperity. If Europeans do not boost investment in their navies and put contingency plans in place to handle the impact of the U.S. Navy’s time of troubles, the EU and U.K. will end up rushing to find ad hoc solutions sooner rather than later in response to another predictable mess.
For the EU and other global powers facing their own security dilemmas, the U.S. Navy’s crisis provides a stark case study in how even the most powerful institution can run itself aground through arrogance and complacency. Now, with the U.S. political scene consumed by populism and culture wars, the more attentive naval leadership currently at the helm will struggle to generate wider public engagement with the challenges the Navy faces. If policymakers in Washington do not confront these strategic dilemmas, then the era of U.S. naval dominance built so carefully by Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet will be carelessly lost.
Alexander Clarkson is a lecturer in European studies at King’s College London. His research explores the impact that transnational diaspora communities have had on the politics of Germany and Europe after 1945 as well as how the militarization of the European Union’s border system has affected its relationships with neighboring states. His weekly WPR column appears every Wednesday.