At risk is the unquestioned dominance of the U.S. Navy

The American retreat on the seas

By Christopher M. Lehman

The United States is at a crossroads, and the American people must consider carefully an issue that has been creeping up on us for two decades. For most of the past 70 years, America enjoyed unquestioned naval global superiority, and we could be confident that the U.S. Navy could establish and sustain maritime dominance wherever and whenever needed.

However, since the early 1990s, America's Navy has been in decline with our fleet shrinking from almost 600 ships to just 283 ships by the end of 2012. Now in 2013, President Obama has announced a new defense strategy for America that threatens to accelerate the continued decline of U.S. naval power, particularly relative to a burgeoning Chinese fleet.

We don’t have to look far for a cautionary tale. Two year ago, The Wall Street Journal published a front-page article entitled “Sun Setting on British Power: From Ruling the Waves to Waving Goodbye.” The article documented the path of Great Britain from “an island whose forces once dominated continents and ruled the waves to a nation with an army, navy and air force no longer capable of “full spectrum” military operations.”

In the years after World War II, Great Britain's military declined to a point where the British Army and the Royal Navy were (and remain) a shadow of what they used to be. Great Britain’s power and influence around the world waned in parallel, and the once-feared Royal Navy atrophied into what can perhaps best be described as a coastal defense force.

Is the United States headed down the same path today? Like Great Britain, America is under tremendous fiscal pressure and, as in Great Britain, powerful voices are pushing for drastic cuts in defense spending — some in order to avoid drastic reductions in social spending and others in order to stem further expansion of our national debt.

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