The U.S. Navy has two primary missions: to win a war if our country gets into one, and to keep the sea lanes open for travel and commerce during peacetime. Our Navy does not have the hardware capability to do either if the Soviet Union either starts a war or starts to intercept our peaceful use of the oceans.
That land-locked country of Russia, which historically didn’t even have a warm-weather port, has in the last ten years built a larger, more modern, and more powerful Navy than ours. The U.S. Navy has only half the ships we had in 1970.
Yet even if our Navy were equal to the Soviets’, that wouldn’t be good enough because of fundamental facts of strategy and geography. It takes many ships to guard a ship safely across the ocean, but only one to sink it. It takes many ships to guard long undefended coastlines against surprise attack at an unknown time and place.
The Russian Navy has a tremendous advantage over us in modern naval weapons with nuclear capability. The Soviets have more submarines than all of the rest of the world. The revised Carter budget for naval construction calls for 60 ships fewer than the procurement plans of the Ford Administration. But even the Ford program was not designed to equal the Russian naval building program.
The new proposals in the President’s shipbuilding plans are proposals which call for ships of lower capability than we are now producing. Some critics believe these deficiencies amount to culpable negligence.
We have only one Trident submarine in the water while the Soviets have at least 27 Trident-class submarines now prowling the oceans. Under the Carter Administration program, the plan is to have only 15 Tridents by 1992, and they would be armed with inferior missiles not capable of counterforce missions.
The current snail’s pace of Trident construction should be increased immediately to at least two submarines a year. The costs of accelerating production will be less than the costs of delaying production and then building with further inflated dollars. The Trident II missile program should be fully funded now and not arbitrarily delayed for another four years, as planned by the Carter Administration. Trident submarines are large boats designed to carry large missiles, and there is no justification for putting the smaller Trident I missiles in the large Trident II launchers.
The Trident II missile would be 75 percent more capable than the Trident I and is strategically comparable to the MX missile. Trident II can be a counterforce weapon and is essential in any plan to try to catch up to the superior Soviet submarine force.
The Russians have made remarkable progress in high-speed, deep-diving submarines. Yet the Carter Administration proposes to build a less capable SSN-X submarine (Fat Albert), the only submarine in history deliberated designed to be inferior to the enemy’s.
The Carter Administration has fought as hard as it could to prevent construction of a new large nuclear aircraft carrier. One has finally been authorized, but we probably need four, and they take a long time to build.
Our attack submarines, which are the world’s best, are our main hope of destroying Soviet ballistic missile submarines at sea before they can launch missiles against us. But they are grossly outnumbered by the Soviets and the Carter Administration plans to build only one SSN-688 in FY 1981 and a total of five through 1985. We need four in the coming year and 20 over the five year period.
The U.S. Navy has only three modern mine countermeasures ship and plans to build only nine more during the next five years. We need at least 15 MCM vessels and probably should have more than that.
The CAPTOR deep-ocean mine would be an important element of the U.S. effort to combat Russian submarines, but Defense Secretary Brown killed the program completely. This program should be restored to full funding.
Substantial increases in naval aircraft are badly needed. About 300 new planes a year must be acquired to maintain current naval aircraft inventories, but the Carter Administration has requested only 104 aircraft for FY 1981, a reduction of 23 from the inadequate level of FY 1980.
Rebuilding our Navy will cost money, of course. But the lives we save may be our own.
