Old Salts and Pollywogs are cringing

Watching our US Navy commit ritual suicide is painful. Even for a guy who spent a lot of time in Marine uniform gleefully harassing sailors, the draconian cuts in our fleets are unfunny and potentially disastrous. I’ve heard all the whining about manpower shortages in the active Navy and the Military Sealift Command. And I’m just about up to my beady eyeballs in stories about maintenance failures, budget overruns, and a penny-pinching Congress. None of this addresses the elephant in the room. Or the shark in the swimming pool which is an expanding and increasingly aggressive Chinese deep-water fleet. They’ve got a lot of ships and sailors. We’ve got fewer of both with plans to reduce our numbers even more.

Recently, I was trying to keep a steady course, surfing news sites, when I ran aground at an article out of Washington that talked about our planned fleet additions and subtractions. Without getting too far into the seaweed here, it breaks down something like this. The Navy wants to add one attack sub, one guided-missile frigate, two destroyers, and a couple of amphibious support ships in the next fiscal year. That’s plus six.

On the other side of the equation, our Navy wants to retire two cruisers, two littoral combat ships, four expeditionary transports, and two other amphibs of different sizes and potential missions. That’s minus ten. Even an unlettered politician—and we’ve got plenty of those—should be able to do the math. Big Navy says it’s a rob Peter to pay Paul situation where the cuts fund the gains, but that hat-in-hand approach won’t work facing current Navy commitments and potential deep-water conflicts in the future. What’s needed right now are some fighting Admirals, some Nimitz/Halsey/King clones to fire a broadside outlining the dangers and demanding Congress pony up the bucks to purchase and maintain a mighty American fleet.

Brass-button Admirals and their toadies say our Navy is “ready to fight tonight.” Not without sending a bunch of our sailors on impromptu swim calls they aren’t. Big-deck carriers, sneaky subs, high-tech missiles, and swoopy Naval Aviation advances won’t be enough when an adversary like China decides our surface Navy is an empty threat without enough hulls or sailors to challenge them in a fight at sea. You know their internet hackers and satellite watchers are counting. War at sea is a nasty business in any era or on any level of sophisticated weaponry. If it comes, it will involve losses of ships and sailors we simply can’t afford with any expectation of winning.

Pondering all this puts me in mind of a much-loved and admired sailor in my own family. My Uncle Ade was a staunch advocate of a powerful American fleet, and he had every right to feel that way given his experiences in World War II. He joined the Navy before the start of the war and did his apprentice time as a Gunner’s Mate striker aboard the battleship USS Tennessee then at Pearl Harbor. When the Japanese attacked on Sunday morning Dec. 7, Uncle Ade was asleep in his rack somewhere amidships. Like his startled shipmates, he scrambled to answer the General Quarters/Battle Stations alarm and climbed to his post as a spotter above the number two 14-inch turret. He watched in shock as the Japanese planes made bomb, torpedo, and strafing runs on battleship row where Tennessee and six other battleships were moored. He saw Arizona, California, Oklahoma, and West Virginia hit hard and sunk while his ship was relatively unharmed except for two bomb strikes. One of those blew Uncle Ade off his perch and into the roiling waters off the south side of Ford Island.

He was picked up by a yard boat and spent the next couple of weeks helping repair damage all over Pearl Harbor and the environs. Eventually, the Navy recovered enough to establish a replacement depot full of homeless sailors, and my uncle wound up assigned to a destroyer flotilla heading for the South Pacific to counter an increasingly aggressive Japanese fleet. He knew they were outnumbered and outgunned. He knew it was going to be a long, bloody battle there in the Pacific.

Uncle Ade was aboard a Fletcher Class can, the USS Chevalier, during a hectic and bloody night action off Vela Lavella in the Solomons when he wound up in the water again. The Chevalier was sunk by Japanese gunfire, and my uncle floated around with other survivors until they were picked up by a Swedish destroyer and transported to Espiritu Santo where Uncle Ade got a billet on another American destroyer. He finished the war bouncing around the US fleet on whatever battle-damaged ships needed hands.

“They were pumping tin cans out of stateside shipyards by the dozens,” he once told me. “And sinking ’em just as fast. A destroyer sailor had to keep his seabag packed.” Uncle Ade knew how costly, savage, and bloody a war at sea could be. He’d lived through it and survived.

In a blue-water duel with a Chinese fleet, we would be faced with a similar situation. I’m fairly confident there’s enough US Navy sailors in uniform or standing by to enlist in a wartime crisis. The question I have—and the one salty old Uncle Ade would want answered—is where will we get the ships to replace our losses? The answer can’t always be “technology trumps quantity.” Our Navy needs to settle for a little less in the costly high-tech gizmo area to get more fighting ships ready for battle at sea. It’s time for us to wake up, step over the bovine excrement, and rebuild a large, strong American surface fleet. We did it once and we desperately need to do it again right now.

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