The Navy has had long-established conventions for naming ships. But the Navy has increasingly named warships for living people, including political figures, which has become a divisive issue. The next Navy secretary needs to get control of the dysfunctional naming process and restore a sense of order.
With the looming prospect of war with China in the near future, it’s time to focus on what the U.S. Navy’s Littoral Combat Ships can do for the Navy and Marine Corps.
The next Navy secretary should create a group of upwardly mobile Navy, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine captains and Marine Corps colonels to experiment with new concepts of naval strategy and operations. The increasing tensions with China demand it.
Among the first actions it takes in the Pentagon, the incoming Trump administration should commission a top-to-bottom review and reform of the Navy bureaucracy that develops new warships.
The next U.S. president will be faced with a stark choice – whether or not to rebuild what was once a vital commercial merchant marine fleet to support U.S. trade interests around the globe and buttress U.S. military operations when needed.
The Navy’s more diverse ecosystem of maintenance has seen its shipboard, tender-based and local-homeport components decimated since the end of the Cold War. Bringing back a maintenance and repair system at multiple levels might ease the burden on shipyard-level maintenance and repair.
Neither commission is headed by a senior retired military officer or a senior civilian who has the credentials to promote meaningful recommendations and persuade government bureaucracies to act. A senior leader is essential to spur change.
If the nuclear triad is to remain viable into the 21st century, then all three of its elements ought to endure the same level of programmatic scrutiny. The Air Force’s troubled Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile is one such program that demands greater scrutiny.
China has been in pursuit of a carrier aviation capability for nearly 40 years, using every imaginable method to acquire carriers via deception, amusement park attraction and finally domestic carrier production.
While the United States should not be in the business of fighting the Houthi movement in Yemen, U.S. joint forces can step up their operations and inflict significant defeats on the group to force them to cease attacks on merchant trade.
