Globalization of Navy shipbuilding: a key to affordability for a new maritime strategy

Naval War College Review, Autumn, 2007 by Robert J. White

One of the most important challenges facing the U.S. Navy is recapitalizing the fleet for the future. Whether the service decides to remain based on nuclear aircraft carriers or change its focus to alternative vessels, it will need to build ships--and shipbuilding costs continue to rise. The Navy understands that it is unlikely to receive additional shipbuilding funds. Therefore, its current approach to building the fleet involves "nested" strategies to contain shipbuilding costs, generate business efficiencies, and free up funds from other areas. To do so the Navy must, as we have seen, limit increases in personnel costs, prioritize shipbuilding budgets and stabilize construction rates, limit increases in operations and maintenance costs, reduce research and development funding, and prevent requirements creep and cost growth. This shipbuilding strategy is fraught with risk. It is contingent upon factors the Navy may influence but cannot control. Worse still, it does not exploit U.S. defense industry strengths; it trades away high-tech competitive advantage for what is at best heavy industry parity.

In 1988 President Ronald Reagan stated, "Even if we could afford, economically and militarily, to chart our National Security Strategy without allies--which we cannot--we would not want to do so." (57) Twenty years later, the "Thousand-Ship Navy Global Maritime Network" and the global production of new ships both support that implied desire for cooperation in a new maritime strategy. (58) In the thousand-ship navy, cooperation is achieved as a "fleet" regionally coalesces behind common security goals and objectives. In global production, cooperation is further enhanced by market economics. In the worldviews of the United States and its partners, security and economics are mutually supporting, and both are compelling. They are two sides of the same coin. If a "thousand ships" can work, so can a "thousand shipyards."

NOTES

(1.) Jeffrey D. Sachs, "The Geography of Economic Development," in Strategy and Force Planning, ed. Security, Strategy, and Forces Faculty, 4th ed. (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 2004), p. 266.

(2.) Ibid., p. 264.

(3.) For the purposes of this article consideration of foreign shipbuilding will be limited to conventionally powered surface craft and will exclude nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines.

(4.) The National Strategy for Maritime Security (Washington, D.C.: White House, September 2005), p. 1. Available at www.whitehouse.gov/homeland/maritime-security.html.> (5.) U.S. Navy Dept., Report to Congress on Annual Long-Range Plan for Construction of Naval Vessels for FY2007 (Washington, D.C.: 6 February 2006).

(6.) U.S. Navy Dept., CNO's Posture Hearing FY 2007 Budget, statement of Admiral Michael G. Mullen, Chief of Naval Operations, before the House Armed Services Committee, 1 March 2006, p. 17, available at www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/mullen/testimony/[original emphasis]. FORCEnet: "The operational construct and architectural framework for Naval Warfare in the Information Age, to integrate warriors, sensors, networks, command and control, platforms, and weapons into a networked, distributed combat force, scalable across the spectrum of conflict from seabed to space and sea to land." Naval Network Warfare Command, FORCEnet, forcenet.navy.mil/fn-definition.htm.