Declining U.S. Navy facing Chinese challenge

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U.S. Navy

A growing Chinese fleet could keep the declining U.S. Navy out of the Western Pacific, according to an expert cited in a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

The U.S. also could be faced with new military challenges around the globe because of the projection of power a growing Chinese navy would present.

Yet, the U.S. Navy has cut back the number and type of ships to the level it was prior to the Reagan administration. Indeed, the Navy hasn't been as small since the administration of William Howard Taft, according to naval expert Seth Cropsey.

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The dire development leaves the U.S. vulnerable to "proliferation, resource scarcity, environmental change, the emergence of new international power centers including non-state actors, significant changes in relative U.S. power, failed states and demographic change … (in) an increasingly unstable future and a challenging international strategic environment," Cropsey said.

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Cropsey, who served during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations as a principal deputy under the secretary of the Navy, said the U.S. Navy is "in distress."

He said the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have "sucked the oxygen" out of any effort to understand the connection between the large changes strategic planners see in the future or the ability to wield global influence through U.S. naval power.

"The size, shape and strategy of the U.S. Navy are a critical element of America's position as the world's great power," Cropsey said. "Our ability to protect or rend asunder the globe's ocean-going lines of communication is inseparable from our position as the world's great power.

"But very few outside a small community of naval officers and selected military and foreign policy analysts appreciate the strategic results of American sea power's slow but steady diminution," he added.

Globally, Cropsey said, the U.S. Navy's continued attrition also means a serious threat to the security of the world's sea lines of communication and the choke points such as the Straits of Hormuz near Iran through which some 40 percent of the world's energy and other trade pass.

"The consequences of a much-diminished U.S. fleet are complemented by the American public's ignorance of them, the slow yet steady pace of naval deterioration, and the increasing time and dismayingly large resources needed to recoup sea power surrendered slowly over decades," Cropsey said.

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The gradual decline in the U.S. Navy comes hardly as a surprise to Congress. Last May, Adm. Gary Roughhead, chief of naval operations, told the House Armed Services Committee the Navy was stretched in its ability to modernize and "procure the Navy for tomorrow."

He said the Navy would reduce its carrier fleet from 11 to 10 for at least three years, which would increase the interval between a departing carrier and its replacement's arrival "along with the associated risk of absence during a crisis."

A separate Congressional Research Service report by naval analyst Ronald O'Rourke told Congress that China has built or is in the process of building four new classes of nuclear and conventional-powered attack and ballistic-missile submarines.

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