President Trump is vowing to grow the Navy's fleet to 350 ships -- a nearly 26 percent boost over its existing inventory of 276 -- but naval experts and members of Congress are questioning whether he's focused on the right metric.
In campaign rallies, including one at the Philadelphia Navy Yard last year, Trump promised to expand the Navy, saying it would take 350 ships to meet demand.
"Our Navy is the smallest it's been since World War I. My plan will build the 350-ship Navy we need," Trump said in an October speech. "This will be the largest effort at rebuilding our military since Ronald Reagan and it will require a truly national effort."
The Navy too has presented an optimal ship number -- 355 in the latest assessment, up from 308 in the previous analysis.
But analysts and officials say the number of ships might not be the right focal point for the service. It's not just how many ships the Navy has, they say, but the mix of ships and the capabilities they contribute.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) late last year described the ship count as "an incredibly simplistic and naive way to look at our national defense."
"What matters is: What are the capabilities of those ships and what are the capabilities of our entire defense establishment to deter and defeat our enemies?" he said, speaking at the Reagan Defense Forum. "So if we're living in this old world where we simply say, 'Oh well, look at the Reagan Navy and how many ships they had compared to the Obama Navy,' we're really missing the point."
Growing the Navy
In an Oct. 21 memo, "Trump Announces Nation-Wide Shipbuilding Plan To Create 350 Ship Navy," the campaign detailed its plans to increase the size of the fleet. The memo was penned by Alexander Gray, a senior military adviser to the Trump campaign who previously worked as a spokesman for former Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA).
Trump's plan would grow the Navy's surface and undersea assets, modernize a significant number of Ticonderoga-class cruisers and invest in the Flight III variant of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, according to the memo.
Though the Congressional Budget Office has not specifically scored Trump's plan, a new report estimates the Navy's 355-ship requirement may cost the service $26.6 billion per year in 2017 dollars over the next 30 years, which is 60 percent more than the Navy's average spending over the past 30 years. This equates to an additional $112 billion in total, according to the report.
Trump has said he wants to grow the Navy because of increased threats in the Middle East and Asia Pacific regions, where sailors continue to have their deployments extended. In April, for example, the Carl Vinson carrier strike group was directed by service leadership to stay on its deployment in Asia for 30 days longer than planned as tensions increased with North Korea.
Trump's planned build-up would not be the first time a presidential administration has significantly ramped up the size of the Navy.
During the Reagan administration, the United States went from 538 ships in the Navy's inventory to 594 over a six-year period, former Navy Secretary John Lehman told Inside Defense in an interview.
"We built on average 28 ships a year of different types," Lehman said.
But analysts have argued the Reagan fleet isn't necessarily a model for the Trump administration.
Bryan McGrath, deputy director for the Center for American Seapower at the Hudson Institute, says the Navy should take a measured approach when growing the fleet.
"Short of a major war . . . we should do this slowly and methodically as a way of demonstrating to our allies and other great powers that we mean business," he told Inside Defense.
The Navy should achieve the 350-ship goal over 20 years, McGrath said.
He particularly criticized one technique used during the Reagan era to add to its number. The service reactivated mothballed ships, which he called "a money pit."
Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told Inside Defense that when he was working on the Navy staff in the early 2010s, there was talk of reactivating the John F. Kennedy (CV-67). The estimates of getting the aircraft carrier back into service were about $1 billion.
"If you reactivated it, it would take some of the pressure off the carriers in the fleet," he said. "The problem though is, it's steam powered. We don't have any steam plants in the Navy so we would have to create" maintenance and training infrastructure to support the ship.
The Navy would need about 3,000 sailors to operate the ship, including boiler technicians and other specialties that are no longer in the service. Moreover, the Navy determined the cost was not worth the less than 10 years the service would get out of the aircraft carrier. It would also take three to five years before the Kennedy would be ready to deploy, according to Clark.
"The Navy would be better off funding and doing these cruiser modernizations than in bringing in any ships out of mothballs," he added.
Reaching the 'magic number'
Clark also said simply adding ships won't mean a more capable Navy. "You could reach your magic number, but really have no better Navy than you have today," he said.
Clark said the most important metric for the Navy is the combination of presence and capability it achieves once the ships are deployed. Traditionally, the service has had a small number of "highly capable" ships in its inventory, he said.
"But maybe that's not as effective in the future because [the ships are] targets. An enemy can just keep raining weapons down on and suppress [the ships] while they conduct an operation elsewhere," Clark said. "The number doesn't really directly relate to the ability of the fleet to do its job, which is primarily deterrence."
Additionally, he pointed out that unmanned systems provide an affordable way to do a number of tasks, including mining, mine clearing, surveillance and survey missions, at an affordable price.
McGrath said the number of ships in the fleet is an effective proxy for capability when making a political argument. But it's not so simple when making an operational argument.
There are early signs Richard Spencer, tapped to serve as Navy secretary, agrees. In his July 11 nomination hearing, he backed the Navy's 355-ship objective as a good figure, but said he'll be focused on capability.
"What I will tell you is that, whether it's a 355-ship [fleet] or not, what we also want to get our head around is, can we have a capacity number, but have a capability that's even greater than that, so having the capability of a 355[-ship fleet] -- that might be a 300-ship Navy," Spencer said.