Balancing the Navy's Near- and Long-Term Needs.

• Author: Bayer, Michael J.
• Position: NDIA PERSPECTIVE

April marks the beginning of the annual congressional budget process in Washington, this year with an intense focus on how the Defense Department's budget request will continue to reorient the services' requirements and acquisition strategies to an era of great power competition. As a kick-off to the season, the House of Representatives Select Committee overseeing strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party held a primetime hearing. At it, the chairman of the Select Committee framed the competition as "an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century."

Reinforcing that urgent framing, the 2022 DoD Report on the Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China highlighted that the PRC's navy is aggressively modernizing its capabilities and improving its proficiencies across all operating domains of warfare--air, land and sea--as well as in the functional domains of nuclear, space, counter-space, electronic warfare and cyberspace.

Therefore, our magazine is taking a deeper look at each of the services, with this issue focused on the Navy. U.S. naval forces are daily conducting a high operations tempo around the world, creating an intense demand for attack submarines, destroyers, aircraft carriers and missile defense cruisers. That demand is consuming crucial platform readiness and Navy budget dollars. This is certain to continue debate regarding the appropriate shipbuilding profile as the Navy faces difficult choices between near-term support of ongoing operations, readiness and ship repair, and the competing long-term demands for creating new platforms, hypersonic and directed energy weapons and disruptive autonomy.

Getting this balance right for the long term is essential. The Defense Department reports the PRC navy has become numerically the largest navy in the world. According to the chief of naval operations' testimony last year to the Senate Armed Services Committee, the PRC has rapidly grown its navy from 262 to 350 ships, with modern surface combatants, submarines, aircraft carriers, amphibious assault ships and polar icebreakers. Its focused, strategic modernization efforts align with the PRC's growing emphasis on the maritime domain and indicates the PRC navy intends to project a blue-water navy at increasing distances from its mainland.

Despite being one of the principal beneficiaries from free and open seas for decades, the PRC is now actively...