Mark Helprin Notes The Decline Of The Navy

Conservative commentator Mark Helprin takes note of the U.S. Navy's shrinking size.

Helprin does not note that the shrinkage of the Navy dates from the end of World War II: it's a long trend. Large fleets are very expensive to maintain, and there is constant, persistent downward pressure exerted on their size, to which we usually yield.

It's quite curious how the Navy has shrunk despite the gargantuan growth of the military budget. Part of this paradox can be explained by the way we have focused on nation-building efforts in recent years, particularly in places like Vietnam, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan (like Helprin, says, the efforts of a gendarmerie) rather than on military projection. Part of the paradox can be explained how we have sunk investments into fewer, but larger aircraft carriers. Part of the paradox can be explained by the shift to air rather than naval power. And part of the paradox is how the projection of power - the real purpose of a military - depends less on hard military force these days and more on communications technologies (Twitter, cell phones, and the like). So, to some extent, we have needed a navy less than we used to. But we still need one, though.

Some commentators have noted how the development of cheap, short-range missiles have made aircraft carriers obsolete, and that we need to shift to many more, smaller vessels in a future navy. That shift has not happened yet, and may not happen at all without a profound military defeat, along the lines of Pearl Harbor. Flyboys like John McCain will support their aircraft carriers long past the point when aircraft carriers become white elephants because of their vulnerability to missiles.

While conservatives tend to pay more attention to the military than liberals do, liberals need to pay attention too (mostly since conservatives usually get things so wrong and so bass-ackwards, that they need liberals to set things straight).

First, we must stop most of our efforts regarding missile defense. It has long been understood (by physicists like Freeman Dyson) that the costs and demands of missile defense are so high - unreachably high - that workable defense systems won't ever be devised. Missile defense is part of the decadence that is driving the U.S. military into impotence. Missile offense, as always, is the name of the game.

We must also get out of the War on Terror mindset. In the end, the War on Terror will be seen as a huge waste of time. Al Qaeda has always been a sideshow, and by aiming all our efforts at wiping it out, and by promoting the War on Terror as a substitute for the Cold War in order to keep appropriations high, we may well have starved the rest of the military - the important parts of the military, like the navy - of what they require to function well.

Helprin states:

And yet the fleet has been made to wither even in time of war. We have the smallest navy in almost a century, declining in the past 50 years to 286 from 1,000 principal combatants. Apologists may cite typical postwar diminutions, but the ongoing 17% reduction from 1998 to the present applies to a navy that unlike its wartime predecessors was not previously built up. These are reductions upon reductions. Nor can there be comfort in the fact that modern ships are more capable, for so are the ships of potential opponents. And even if the capacity of a whole navy could be packed into a small number of super ships, they could be in only a limited number of places at a time, and the loss of just a few of them would be catastrophic.

The overall effect of recent erosions is illustrated by the fact that 60 ships were commonly underway in America's seaward approaches in 1998, but today—despite opportunities for the infiltration of terrorists, the potential of weapons of mass destruction, and the ability of rogue nations to sea-launch intermediate and short-range ballistic missiles—there are only 20.

As China's navy rises and ours declines, not that far in the future the trajectories will cross. Rather than face this, we seduce ourselves with redefinitions such as the vogue concept that we can block with relative ease the straits through which the strategic materials upon which China depends must transit. But in one blink this would move us from the canonical British/American control of the sea to the insurgent model of lesser navies such as Germany's in World Wars I and II and the Soviet Union's in the Cold War. If we cast ourselves as insurgents, China will be driven even faster to construct a navy that can dominate the oceans, a complete reversal of fortune.

Here is a speech by Helprin in 2008. He takes gratuitous shots at liberals in the speech, and defends a lot of foolish conservative ideas like missile defense, but he also implicitly takes shots at conservatives too. Here, he urges increasing reliance on the concept of deterrence. In the 1980's, Reaganites derided deterrence as complacency in the face of Soviet expansion, but Cold War liberals knew that deterrence saved the peace in the Cold War. Deterrence retains its relevance in this century, despite the damage done by Reaganites.