The capture of Nicolás Maduro — and the accompanying admirable demonstration of advanced U.S. military proficiency — stand in contrast to President Trump’s delayed action against Iran: With major U.S. naval forces committed elsewhere, U.S. options are constrained. Yet just as the Navy needs more ships, not fewer, the service plans to retire the USS Nimitz. The 50-year-old carrier’s final deployment included stints in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East, providing the U.S. with flexibility and deterrence credibility against Iran during its war with Israel this summer.
Pulling a key warship from the fleet just as the U.S. needs even more combat power indicates that the Navy is
already losing a war of attrition — not against an enemy, but against its own bureaucracy. The Navy offered no
explanation for why USS Nimitz — like the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise — could not
have remained in service for one year past its scheduled date of retirement. Righting the ship demands not only
the significantly larger defense budget Trump has floated, but a serious cultural change in the service that puts
combat readiness back at its core.
The recent termination of the Constellation-class frigate, in a decades-long cycle of failed designs and shifting
requirements, is a blunder that immediately preceded the USS Nimitz’s untimely inactivation. An abundance of
operational, acquisition, and leadership mistakes further underscores the point. In the past year, the aircraft
carrier USS Harry S. Truman strike group lost two aircraft overboard and collided with a merchant vessel.
Insufficient training, manning, and communications were responsible, according to the official investigation, the
same causes that were identified in the 2017 collisions of two U.S. destroyers with merchant ships in Asian
waters.
These operational debacles mirror the needlessly convoluted process of designing and building ships. The Navy’s
late November cancellation of its Constellation-class frigate is but one of several expensive, delayed, and finally
aborted combatant-ship construction programs. More importantly, the mistakes indicate a crisis within the
service most critical to deter and defeat China in Asia’s waters. If the Trump administration is serious about
deterrence, the Navy requires a shot in the arm, starting with both a prolonged shipbuilding budget boost and a
real strategy.
China’s combat fleet currently exceeds the United States’ by 83 ships: 370 People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN)
vessels to 287 for the U.S. Navy. The PLAN possesses a coherent, clear strategy. It combines thousands of longrange missiles, land-based naval aviation, surface combatants and submarines, dual-purpose merchant and
fishing ships, cyberwarfare, and satellite reconnaissance to keep U.S. naval forces out of a thousand-mile bubble
extending from China’s coast. Beyond that range, the U.S. struggles to launch operations in the Western Pacific.
American naval planners recognized this as far back as the 2010s, when the Navy released its Air-Sea Battle
operational concept. But there is little evidence that they have any idea how to surmount today’s challenge.
