The U.S. Navy has struggled to maintain personnel and readiness across the fleet, which makes its new plan for the Military Sealift Command to lose 17 ships under a “force generation reset” deeply troubling.
The Military Sealift Command keeps the Navy supplied and operational. By losing ships, the Navy is severing critical sinews of combat power that will jeopardize deterrence across Eurasia, making it harder to threaten China. The Navy must persuade Congress to modify pay, leave and benefits for MSC to increase personnel. Congress also should appropriate funds to repair the antiquated Merchant Marine Academy in King’s Point, N.Y., thereby increasing the pool of qualified mariners.
To evaluate U.S. Navy combat power, the public and analysts often look at the number of fighting ships. That tally is shrinking. Since 2022 the Navy has decommissioned 10 Ticonderoga-class cruisers and plans to decommission the remaining 12 by 2027. Those cruisers are the Navy’s top air-defense assets, with more missile-launch cells than their Arleigh Burke-class destroyer counterparts. Typically, the Navy’s Carrier Strike Groups deploy with a Ticonderoga as the key air-defense platform. These ships are old, having entered service late in the Cold War. Retiring them nevertheless cuts into the Navy’s deployed missile-cell numbers, while forcing the Arleigh Burkes to cover another full mission, that of fleet air defense, which will further strain the destroyer fleet.
Less discussed but crucial for combat power are the Navy’s support ships. MSC operates these ships with some 5,500 civilian mariners and naval reserve officers, the latter group mostly U.S. Merchant Marine Academy graduates. MSC ships include several special-mission units, namely missile instrumentation ships and undersea surveillance and cable repair ships, alongside all the Navy’s oiler, ordnance, cargo and heavy-lift ships.
These 125 vessels sustain U.S. military operations, providing supplies to American warships from the Mediterranean to the Pacific and to ground forces at coastal bases. Without MSC ships, absent a robust logistical system, the U.S. Navy can’t fight for more than a few weeks. The Air Force’s heavy-lift aircraft are more flexible, but physical capacity constraints make it impossible to replace ship-based logistics with aerial logistics.
Personnel shortages are common across the fleet. The Navy missed every recruitment goal in 2023, even after raising the maximum enlistment age to 41 from 39 and lowering mental aptitude and physical fitness standards. Retention fared better: new promotion programs and higher re-enlistment bonuses encouraged experienced sailors to stay.
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Seth Cropsey is the founder and president of Yorktown Institute.
