Michael Gilday, the chief of naval operations, has argued that the Navy needs to accelerate the decommissioning of its older cruisers and littoral combat ships to free up money for vessels and weapons that will be critical in the future. Indo-Pacific Command until he retired this spring, observed in March that China could invade Taiwan in the next six years-presumably setting the stage for a major military showdown with the United States-while Adm. Leading voices simultaneously recognize the rising China threat while also arguing that the United States must shrink its present fleet in order to modernize. Now, with defense budgets flat or declining, leading Defense Department officials are pushing a “divest to invest” strategy-whereby the Navy must decommission a large number of older ships to free up funds to buy fewer, more sophisticated, and presumably more lethal platforms.Ĭhina, meanwhile, is aggressively expanding its naval footprint and is estimated to have the largest fleet in the world. Navy to create a shortsighted peace dividend. With the end of the Cold War, policymakers went a step further, slashing funding to the U.S. government at the time cut subsidies for the nation’s commercial shipbuilding industry, eventually hobbling the shipyards it would need to build a bigger fleet. The 1980s and 1990s marked the beginning of this downward trend. ship numbers have seen a dramatic overall decline. Still, on the high seas, quantity has a quality all its own. Other factors, of course, play a role: The types of ships it has-submarines, aircraft carriers, destroyers-the manner in which they are deployed, the sophistication of their sensors, and the range and lethality of their weapons all make a difference. The number of ships a country possesses has never been the sole measure of its power at sea.
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