Future of US naval supremacy

20 April 1998
ANA Hotel, Washington, D.C.

As Congress considered President Clinton’s Fiscal Year 1999 request for the Department of Defense, the Center for Security Policy convened a High-Level Roundtable Discussion on one of the most worrisome aspects of that request: Its potentially deleterious impact on “The Future of U.S. Naval Supremacy.”

Specifically, this Discussion — involving over 60 past and present senior military officers, industry leaders, members of the press and the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Seapower Subcommittee, Sen. John Warner (R-VA) — addressed the growing importance of power projection from the sea and the danger that adequate provision is not being made to assure that the Nation will have the means to project such power over the long-term. (See the attached List of Participants.)

The Roundtable featured important contributions by its lead discussants: Vice Admiral Al Burkhalter (USN, Ret.) who served in a number of senior positions in the U.S. intelligence community, including that of Director of the Intelligence Community Staff; Admiral Wesley L. McDonald (USN, Ret.), former Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic and Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command; Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., Director of the Center for Security Policy who acted as an Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Reagan Administration; and Ronald O’Rourke, an internationally recognized authority on naval matters who is a Specialist in National Defense at the Congressional Research Service. The Roundtable was capped by a working luncheon featuring remarks by Keynote Speaker Senator John Warner (R-VA). Sen. Warner has had a life-long and intimate association with the naval services thanks to his previous roles as an officer in and Secretary of the Navy and his current responsibilities as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Seapower Subcommittee.

The following pages summarize many of the important insights arising from this Roundtable Discussion regarding: the continuing — indeed, growing — need for global naval power in the post-Cold War world; the current state of the U.S. Navy; new missions that the Navy should be taking on, notably world-wide ballistic missile defense; and the adequacy of present and projected defense budgets to permit the Navy to satisfy its present requirements, let alone those likely to arise in the future. Where possible, edited versions of direct, albeit unattributed, quotes from participants are provided; the passages not in quotation marks paraphrase key points made during the Roundtable.

While no effort was made to formalize a consensus, the clear sentiment of most — if not all — of those participating in this event was that, under present circumstances, the Nation is simply not investing what is required to maintain a fleet of sufficient size and capability to meet the United States’s long-term security requirements.

Post-Cold War Challenges to U.S. Security Interests

Vice Admiral Burkhalter opened the Roundtable with an informative look at the “big picture” — the strategic environment in the post-Cold War era and its implications for U.S. security interests. Highlights of this portion of the Roundtable included the following:

• “[Among] the most telling things today that causes us to have challenges from so many parts of the world is a rapid increase in technologies that lead to weapons of mass destruction; the rapid increase in communications technologies that are easily available to almost any country in the world…; and the spread of these capabilities into so many third-world countries.”

• “…Take the submarine threat that our Navy may be faced with in the future. Today, there are over 25 nations with submarines of varying capabilities, as many as up to 600 ships that our Navy could be faced with. And in a great majority of these countries, as their own capabilities and as their own resources increase, they are able to acquire these [advanced] technologies today. They are able to acquire submarines, as we have seen most recently in the case of Iran, India, other parts of the Middle East, and combining these threats with the weapons that are available from either a submarine-launched torpedo or from cruise missiles that can be launched from not only submarines, but relatively small platforms, it gives our Navy a challenge, in many cases larger than we have faced when we had a large Russian fleet deployed in many parts of the world.“

“It is a visible challenge that is growing every day. When we remember that 85 percent of the population of the world is within 100 miles of the oceans of the world, it gives us even more pause to realize why we need a strong military, a strong maritime [capability] to be able to support our national interest and to be able to challenge these threats wherever they may occur.”

• “The biggest part of the problem, at the moment, is the complacency that is induced in most of our countrymen, in no small measure by our leaders who are failing to take note of some of the trends, if not all of the trends.”

• “One very profound concern…has been the approach that the Clinton Administration has taken towards the transfer of militarily relevant technology, even American militarily relevant technology, to some potential adversaries….“⁽¹⁾

• The role of some American businessmen in permitting such strategic technology transfers was also addressed by the Roundtable’s participants. In this connection, a recent essay by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman received favorable mention. The Friedman article criticized in particular computer industry executives for their inattention to national security factors: “Silicon Valley’s tech-heads have become so obsessed with bandwidth, they have forgotten balance of power. They have forgotten that without America on duty, there will be no America online.”

There appeared to be considerable support among those attending Roundtable participants for a forceful critique by Robert Kagan, which was favorably cited by Friedman: “The people in Silicon Valley think it’s a virtue not to think about history because everything for them is about the future, but their ignorance of history leads them to ignore that this explosion of commerce and trade rests on a secure international system which rests on those who have the power and the desire to see that system preserved.”⁽²⁾

• “[The U.S.] is hardly the only source of such technology. Russia is, of course, a very important ‘arsenal for roguery.’ But, it is the case under our present approach that even our own Government is turning a blind eye to, if not actively supporting, the movement of technologies whether they are in the communications area, relevant to guidance, missiles and other weaponry, jet engines, aerospace-relevant machine tools, and the like that will come back to haunt us, not just on the world’s oceans, but particularly there.”

• “It is also not only the transfer of technology from the Russians to many of the Middle Eastern countries, but the large amount of technology that they have transferred to the Chinese in the past few years, the agreements that they have made with the Chinese in the last 2 years, to continue that transfer of technology. It is being noted today in their submarine programs and their missile programs, and, further, the proliferation and transfer of missiles from the Chinese to other parts of the Middle East.”

• “Our submarine building rate is the lowest it has been in decades …. If we don’t increase that force level, we’ll be to the point where the number of submarines we have that can face [the] challenge…will be dangerously low in the very near term.”

• “[The] proliferation of these challenges worldwide puts…more stress on our limited naval forces today than any time…in the past 40 years.”

• A recently released analysis of today’s Navy produced by Admiral Paul Reason, Commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, and David G. Freymann, a retired naval officer, entitled “Sailing New Seas” was the subject for much discussion. According to this study, the U.S. Navy is “anchored in the strong holding ground of our successful past, yet already we feel and see the leading indicators of a storm that threatens to wreck us at our hard-won anchorage. We face not a small squall and some temporary discomfort, but a typhoon more ominous than any we have encountered since 1944. This time it is a typhoon of change.”

The study notes that, “Those who have been at sea on the ships of other excellent navies know that in some regards the pre-eminence of the U.S. Navy is already being challenged in quality though not [yet] in quantity.”⁽³⁾

The discussion of the contribution the U.S. Navy will be asked to make to protecting American interests and security in this challenging post-Cold War strategic environment was led by Admiral Wesley McDonald, a highly decorated and regarded naval aviator and combatant commander. Highlights of this portion of the Roundtable included the following:

• “Unless we address carefully where we are going with our force structures — by all the services — driven by the budget and our present national security planning, [we] will fall into the high-risk area in the near time frame.”

• “Shortly after the Berlin Wall started coming down, in fact just before then the Navy had grown to about 575 ships, plus or minus 5….the Navy, like the other services, responded [to the end of the Cold War] and in the early ’90s came down…to something under 500 ships, like 450. This was total ships. [There was] a very rapid transition of putting out of commission a lot of older ships that weren’t quite up to speed, as compared to some of the new technologies that were now hitting the fleet. Nothing wrong with that — as long as a threat never appeared or we could explain away threats for the future.”

“The [size of the Navy] has continued to go down. So that, as of a couple of years ago, we were down to about 300 ships in the United States Navy for projection of power, for presence, and other requirements that the Navy uniquely can fulfill when called upon.”

“If you look at the FY ’99 budget, you will find that there is funding for 116 combatant ships in the United States Navy …. [When] support ships are [factored in], there will probably be a total Navy of just over 200 in round figures.”

• “The Navy is spread awfully thin, not even awfully thin, but unable to respond in more than about one area at the same time. It is really going to be very, very difficult to cover the Korean theater, Southwest Asia, and any other hot spot that might come up, Latin American or name any others that you can think of in today’s world. As the requirements continue to climb and the numbers come down, we are just going to be running out of people, running out of ships, and into a business of non-responsiveness.”

• “The Navy Department has come recently with a review of what their cost to operate the Department will be. Their requirements to operate the Navy Department, which includes the Marine Corps, is $88 billion per year in the near-term …. The funding that is now planned is for $81 billion as a top-line budget funding. So there is a $7-billion delta sitting out there that has to be addressed or we are just not going to be able to carry out what is perceived to be a response to those requirements.”⁽⁴⁾

• “The Navy has put a stake in the ground — the CNO and other Navy military leaders — that we absolutely have to have for national security 12 carrier battle groups.”

• “Unless there is some shooting taking place, forward presence doesn’t mean very much. But forward presence does have an impact when you have a carrier battle group someplace in the area with its power projection — not only from its flight decks, but from the missiles that are on the supporting ships that are in that carrier battle group — as an almost immediate response to whatever the trouble may be.”

“A visible presence of U.S. naval forces sends a signal to friends, allies, and potential aggressors alike that the United States has interests that we can and will protect. For example, U.S. presence in the Arabian Gulf helps guarantee the free-flow of oil upon which the dynamic economies of the world’s free markets rely.”

• “It is about time that in the review of the national security strategy that the roles and missions of each service be looked at to the point of what is truly best for the Nation, what forces are best equipped to do what we see that the threat will be in the next 20 years. I would offer to you…that the Navy and the Air Force stand very powerfully in place to respond to what those threats can be in a broad, broad area.”

• “What we are doing is talking about a redistribution of insufficiency here rather than making sure we have sufficiency.”

• “An alternative approach would be] to expand the pie … There are still responsible people in the Congress who, if equipped with the facts, are prepared to do the right thing, and it is certainly the case, at least in my judgment, that the American people, if acquainted with the facts, will want their elected representatives to do the right thing.”

• “It seems to me one of the things which we might debate a little later is instead of trying to do this on the idea of strictly what the budget might allow, just say a great Nation like ours needs a floor of 3 percent of its gross national product [for defense], which would seem to me, for the short run, to take care of a lot of our problems.”

An Emerging Mission: Missile Defense from the Sea

Mr. Gaffney led an interesting discussion of the role the Navy can play in mitigating the ever- increasing danger posed by ballistic missiles — not only to American troops and allies abroad but to the United States, itself. As a prelude to the discussion, the Roundtable viewed a 15-minute film produced by the Center for Security Policy, entitled “America the Vulnerable.” This video features some of the Nation’s foremost security policy practitioners — both past and present, including: House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Governor Pete Wilson, Sens. Jon Kyl and Thad Cochran, Rep. Bob Livingston, Amb. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Edwin Meese, Jim Woolsey, Richard Allen, Richard Perle and Dr. Henry Cooper.

The film and ensuing discussion called particular attention to the opportunity to take advantage of the roughly $50 billion investment already made in the Navy’s AEGIS fleet air defense system to begin providing near-term and affordable protection of the American people, as well to their forces and allies overseas, against short- and long-range missile attack. Highlights of the subsequent discussion follow:

• “This is a problem, in part, of our own making. It is as a result of the policy of the United States Government to leave its people vulnerable to various forms of attack that we now find ourselves in a situation where I believe we are very gravely at risk.”

• “In the final analysis, the problem is a policy problem, not a technical one …. One of the things that will absolutely, positively happen if someone decides to take advantage of the vulnerability that was just discussed by putting a ballistic missile with a chemical weapon or a biological weapon or a nuclear weapon on it into an American city is that we will build a Navy-based missile defense system very rapidly. Cost will be no object. Technology will be no limit. And, certainly, a treaty with a country that no longer exists will no longer be considered a constraint.”

“It will be the utmost tragedy if we wait until that happens to take such a step, when by taking such a step now, we might prevent it from happening.”

• “…Congress has asked for the facts — what can the Navy contribute to a defense of the American homeland against missile attack — and that is fundamentally a technical judgment and analysis, not a political statement.“

• “The Grand Forks land-based system can’t handle…threats from [sea-launched] missiles from the Gulf of Mexico from the Southern Pacific. San Diego, Washington, Miami are all vulnerable. The sea-based defense is actually, probably the only one that can handle those [in the near-term], and that should be emphasized, as well as all the other advantages when we talk about a sea-based defense.”

The Arms Control Dimension

• “The President of the United States has repeatedly described the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as the cornerstone of strategic stability, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense and other entities like the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, that wants a decision-making role in what we develop and buy for our military, have this as an absolute theological commitment.”

“The American people must remain vulnerable in perpetuity, no matter what. It is the doctrine of the United States Government under the Clinton Administration. It is incredible, and what I think is gratifying about the officials, former and present, that you saw in the film is that there are more and more people willing to say this is criminally irresponsible. Still, it remains the policy of the executive branch, and I am afraid for the time being — unless we see some changes –the Navy is going to continue to be under some very severe constraints.”

• “The Navy can do [the missile defense mission] uniquely, effectively, inexpensively, if they increase the intercept rates, if they tie into other sensors. But those two things that I have just mentioned have been forbidden in the New York agreements of September 26th last year where our Government signed onto the Russian veto of our effective defenses. For example, we cannot go above [interceptor velocities of] 4.5 kilometers per second, according to those agreements. We cannot test against longer-range missiles. We are not allowed to do a number of things. We are not, of course, allowed to use space-based sensors or forward-based sensors.”

“If the Senate does not reject those treaties — if, in fact, it doesn’t get a chance to vote on them and the policy that was set in September by these really preposterous arms control agreements is maintained, then the Navy’s emerging theater system cannot be all it can be, and we would not have any chance whatsoever to defend against longer-range threats — whether land-based or sea-based. So I think the situation is very critical, and we need to get [the Senate to address] these agreements…for the American people.”

“They have not been sent forward. It’s been 6 months since they were signed. The discrepancy between what those agreements require and what, on the other hand, is required to make a robust defense possible, a sea-based defense, is enormous. It needs to be brought before the Senate and the House and others, and it also needs to be factored, I believe, by the Navy leadership at the four-star level into their current planning.”

• “A very key point is that, in the absence of Senate advice and consent, these agreements are becoming constraints on the Navy’s programs, even the theater [missile defense] program, which is just adding insult to the injury I believe that is already being inflicted on a treaty that has long since outlived whatever usefulness it had.”

Will Present Trends Provide an Adequate Navy for the Future?

Perhaps the highlight of the day’s event was the singularly informative presentation given by Ronald O’Rourke on the impact of current budgetary trends on the Navy, today and tomorrow. Key points made in connection with the adequacy of projected resource levels included the following:

• “The near-term requirement is one of preserving readiness, while maintaining a very high tempo of operations around the world. And the far-term element of this challenge is to develop and procure the new weapons and equipment at a rate that is sufficient to modernize and maintain the force at a given size over the long run. For some time now, there has been concern about the Navy’s ability to fully accomplish this…goal.”

• “With regard to the near-term portion, which is the part about maintaining near-term readiness while you undertake all these high-tempo operations, the Administration’s budgeting strategy for all the services, not just for the Navy, has been to try to preserve funding for current readiness, even at the expense of funding for procurement of new weapons and equipment. But the Navy’s operational tempo for several years now has been very high. In fact, it’s been gliding upward at a slight rate for the past several years, and there is now anecdotal evidence of difficulty in maintaining readiness in the fleet.”

• “The congressional defense oversight committees have been very concerned about this. They have had a general concern about readiness for several years now, but they have been particularly concerned about it in their questioning of DOD and Navy witnesses this year.”

“When questioned this year, Navy officials have testified that while readiness of the deployed forces is okay, readiness of the non-deployed forces has been allowed to drop steeper or more deeply than has been in the case in the past and has made it more difficult for those forces to once again attain their high level of readiness when they are preparing to deploy.”

• “In fact, an article in the Navy Times…that came out in the April 13th issue…talk[ed] about two different carriers going to sea with crews that were considerably short of what you might expect to be on board a deployed carrier. A deployed carrier might have somewhere between 5,500 and 6,000 people aboard. These two carriers went to sea with 4,600 people and 4,200 people. So the shortages were on the order of a thousand people or more.”

“There have also been reports of ships that have had to return to port early for lack of fuel or which have not been deployed because of lack of availability of fuel or other sorts of repair problems among mine warfare ships and so on.”

“So I think there is a fair amount of concern on the Hill and a lot of anecdotal evidence on the issue of the Navy’s ability to maintain readiness in the near term at the levels that it has been able to in more recent years.”

• “For several years now, the Navy has, in fact, been procuring new weapons and equipment at fairly low rates, rates that are below those which would be required to replace the planned force on a steady-state basis, and this is particularly true in the key area of shipbuilding.”

• “The Reagan Administration set a goal of 600 and got fairly close to that by the end of fiscal ’87. They were at about 570 ships. The Bush Administration in its earlier years seemed to plan without articulating it to explicitly on a Navy of maybe about 550 ships. In the second half of the Bush Administration, the base force review lowered that goal in the near term to about 450 ships, but the long-term planning was to glide down to about 416. The bottom-up review in 1993 set a goal of 346 ships, and over the next 3 years, the Navy supported between 330 and 346 as its planning goal. And now, following the Quadrennial Defense Review, which came out last May, the new goal is about 300 ships.”

“If you take that number 300 and you divide it by a fleet-wide average service life of about 35 years for your ships, then you come up with a long-term required average procurement rate, a steady-state replacement rate of about 8.6 ships per year. We have been below that rate since fiscal ’94, and we are programmed to remain below that rate through the end of the FYDP, through ’03, and that’s a 10-year period during which we will be below this steady-state replacement rate of 8.6 ships per year.”

• “So, by the end of the FYDP, we will be 29 ships short of the amount that would have been procured under a steady-state procurement policy …. Last year, the Administration released to industry a projection of what it thought its shipbuilding rate would be for the 12 years beyond the FYDP. That would be for the years ’04 through ’15, and it showed a projected rate of 6.3 to 7.7 ships per year, which is, again, below the stead-state replacement rate.”

“[If this situation persists] you will be 22 years into a 35-year shipbuilding period, at the end of which you will be 40 to 56 ships short of what a steady-state replacement rate would get you to maintain a 300-ship Navy.”

• “This shipbuilding effort — and the fact that it falls short of what a steady-state replacement rate would require — is currently being masked in force structure terms by the presence of a large number of ships that we have purchased during the 1980’s.”

“Soon after 2015, when you get into the 2020’s, those ships are going to start leaving the service in large numbers. Your average age will drop rapidly, but then you are going to encounter the fact that the size of the Navy is going to be doing down significantly because those ships will disappear at a very high rate.“

“The force size could, in fact, drop below 300, and if you are 40 to 56 ships short of where your steady-state replacement rate would have brought you, that suggests that the Navy might fall to a total of about 250 ships by the mid-2020’s.”

• “Now, 2020 sounds like a long time from now, but in terms of naval procurement and naval force structure planning, it is really right around the corner because the timelines for these things are so long.“

“Now, by the 2020’s, we might not need a Navy of more than about 250 ships. The world by then might be a fairly benign place, but we don’t know that. The world of the 2020’s could instead present us with significant security challenges from a variety of countries, including, for example, China was one of those that was mentioned earlier.”

“The point is that the current planned shipbuilding rate will, if implemented, make it very difficult for us to head off this eventual drop in fleet size, and we will simply be confronted with that fact, whichever way the world develops, between now and then.”

• “The industrial base that we have grown used to having to support shipbuilding…won’t be there.”

“The industrial base that you remember from the Cold War days…doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gone. It’s been much more streamlined, much restructured from that time frame. But you’re still living off the luxury of that backlog and from the Cold War, and you need to really solidify what you want the industrial base to look like for the future.”

• “We are down to just six shipyards that are very downsized companies, each and every one of them. If we are going to meet the requirements of the Navy to build 10 to 12 ships per year, we need the industrial base that we currently have. Yet, six ships will be inadequate to sustain the base.”

“When you have a very reduced industrial base, it is important to sustain the industrial base that the Nation has left — and the critical skills and capabilities of the yards that are currently in place.”

• “The submarine force is perhaps the component of the fleet that is going to feel this problem most acutely, and that is because the drop-off in the submarine construction rate started earlier, and it has been proportionately deeper than it has been for most other parts of the Navy.”

• “One of the Navy’s great frustrations today is that…we do not have a real good way of looking at that industrial base in an integrated manner and trying to get to where we need to go. By not looking at this issue as an integrated whole, you are slowly deteriorating the capability of that base, just because of the nature of how you get smaller. You continue to shrink. It’s typically done by seniority. The work force is getting older and older, and so you really need to start to rejuvenate this work force for the future.”

• “It can be done relatively simply once you decide what it is you want, what are the force structures that you’re driving towards, are you committed to maintaining those levels, and then the key becomes establishing a stable and predictable production program on which you can size facilities around.”

“[You] need to commit to where you’re trying to go and then have the policy follow — you need the national security policy; how does that equate down to weapons platforms, weapons systems; and then you need to set in place long-term acquisition strategies towards getting there, so you get the best bang for the buck.”

“The Navy is, in my view, struggling mightily, trying to come through those issues. They need help. They need congressional help. They need help from the people across the country that basically will get behind the national security strategies and saying good, let’s go do it, but right now sometimes, I’m sure, they feel like they’re pushing a rope on that issue.”

• “…There is a growing consensus that [several] measures [the Navy is taking to reduce its costs⁽⁵⁾], though helpful, will not by themselves be sufficient to square this budget problem fully, and this seems to be particularly the case in light of evidence that the readiness portion of the Navy’s budget is also now coming under some pressure compared to the level of operations that it is being asked to sustain.”

“You need to probably look at increasing the Navy top line if these other measures are not going to be sufficient, and you can do that either by increasing the DOD top line or by increasing the Navy’s share of the DOD top line.“

Over an elegant luncheon in the ANA Hotel’s Colonnade, Senator Warner spoke candidly of his concerns about: the public’s inattention to the growing importance of U.S. maritime power; the absence of serious scrutiny being given to national security issues by many of his colleagues on both sides of Capitol Hill; and the serious shortfalls arising as a result of years of deferred investment, attrition of skilled personnel and excessive commitments of U.S. naval forces.

These trends are especially worrisome given the changing nature of the international system — notably, the fact that a number of countries (including many that have, heretofore, been steadfast American allies) are less and less willing or able to help the U.S. maintain stability. This puts a premium on naval forces which are uniquely capable of providing forward presence without relying upon host nation permission and/or support. Highlights of the Senator’s remarks included:

• “The country is totally unconcerned because we are at a period of remarkable peace and tranquility in their minds, but you know in your [experience] and your studies that that is a false premise.”

• “In the Senate today, less than 50 percent ever had an opportunity or a desire to wear the uniform of the United States, and in the House, it’s around 32 percent. Now, that makes it exceedingly difficult for those of us who are trying to get added funding for the armed services…[to develop support for] our case. We start from a base that is rapidly dwindling in terms of interest and in terms of background association with military and security affairs.”

“What do we do about it? Well, I think we have got to do something in the very near future as it relates to seapower. As I look out at the world today and the growing number of threats to this country, they’re in remote areas. They are largely of nationalistic problems, ethic problems, religious problems, some political, and the only force really that’s in place and forward-deployed and has the mobility to respond quickly is the Navy-Marine Corps team.“

• “[We need to place a] greater emphasis on the need for sea power because we cannot count on other nations to give us the beachheads, the ports, the terra firma on which to put ground forces in the case of an operation. We have to rely on the sovereign U.S. ship, wherever they are afloat in the world.”

“…Within a year or two, the Secretary of Defense and the President — maybe not this one, maybe the next one — have got to come to grips with reality, with…what is present in the world to assist us and what the attitude is at home to sustain a military operation and reconfigure our forces to meet those two realities at home and abroad.”

“I think that will require a changing of the roughly one-third/one-third/one-third allocation and a greater emphasis on the maritime forces of the United States and on certain elements of air to respond to these contingencies worldwide.”

• “I think there are sufficient members of the Senate that we would conduct a filibuster before we’d accept those [Clinton-negotiated ABM Treaty-related] agreements, and we are going to press ahead with the national missile defense …. I doubt if those things will ever see the light of day in terms of ratification.”

“This year, we are going to try and put greater emphasis on the Navy because the Navy, particularly with its Aegis system, has the capability of performing — as best we can with any element of U.S. defense today — a missile defense program.“

The Center for Security Policy’s High-Level Roundtable clearly underscored the need to make additional resources available to ensure the readiness of today’s Navy and the ability of tomorrow’s fleet to meet the myriad tasks the Nation will require of it. If present levels of investment are not adjusted to reflect this reality, history appears likely to look back on this period as the time when the United States took actions that significantly eroded its military power and that, in turn, resulted in the loss of its global pre-eminence, endangered its abilities to protect its vital interests and encouraged others to fill the vacuum of power at America’s expense.

— End of Summary —

1. This symposium took place before allegations concerning the Administration’s transfer of sensitive missile technology to China became known. Those allegations have now made it all the more important that there be a wholesale reconsideration of the Clinton policy with respect to export controls. See the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled Broadening the Lens: Peter Leitner’s Revelations on ’60 Minutes,’ Capitol Hill Indict Clinton Technology Insecurity (No. 98-D 101, 6 June 1998) and Clinton Legacy Watch # 21: Efforts to Help Chinese Missile Program Reek of Corruption, Betrayal of U.S. Interests (No. 98-D 61, 6 April 1998).

2. For more on the Friedman column, see Mirabile Dictu: Tom Friedman Is Right on American Industry’s Shortsightedness Concerning U.S. National Security (No. 98-C 66, 20 April 1998).

3. Adm. Reason’s study illustrates the significant contribution to the budget debate that can be made by those currently serving in the Navy, in particular, and the armed forces more generally. The unique perspective of the former on present trends is invaluable to ensuring an informed debate about the role of the Navy in the future and its ability to fulfill that role.

4. One participant noted that the problem may be substantially greater.

“There is apparently a mismatch in the scoring that has been used by the Office of Management and Budget, on the one hand, and by the Congressional Budget Office, on the other, which I am told leaves us with the CBO projections $3.5 billion higher in outlays than the Administration claims they would be in this budget year. Of course, the outlays number is the tip of the iceberg. That translates, by some estimates, into many times that number in terms of total obligational authority (TOA) — I have heard as much as $25 billion …. Since Congress has to go with the CBO number, the effect would be to drive down or to have to find offsets for this excess amount. It is a huge problem.”

5. For example, the Navy is counting on reducing its inventory of bases and facilities, regionalizing and outsourcing maintenance activities, reducing manpower requirements with new ship designs and the like to lower its overhead and free up resources for shipbuilding and readiness purposes.