“This is one of the things that gets revisited again and again, and I’ll tell you now that I will fight for the same outcome as last Congress,” said House Armed Services Committee Vice Chair Elaine Luria, D-Va., said Monday at a Hudson Institute event. “We’ve invested a lot in our carriers, and it’s not time to decommission them halfway through their life.”

Retiring an aircraft carrier early would save the Navy several billion dollars in both planned maintenance, personnel and operating costs over the remainder of the ship’s life, but such efforts have repeatedly been quashed by Congress going back at least a decade.

The Pentagon is expected to propose a budget that is essentially the same as last year’s, and to save money it is revisiting a Trump Administration proposal to cancel the carrier Harry S. Truman’s mid-life overhaul and nuclear reactor refueling, according to a report from USNI News.

In 2019, the Navy said it could save as much as $1.5 billion just in planning costs for the refueling, and when the Navy tried to cancel the George Washington’s midlife overhaul in 2013, it was estimated that retiring Washington would save a total of about $5 billion total for the years-long maintenance period.

But retiring a carrier with a planned 25 years left of service has always been a bridge too far for Congress, and there is little reason to believe a renewed attempt to retire Truman would be any more successful than the last two times DoD tried.

To Luria, considering retiring an aircraft carrier is a puzzling move in light of a building consensus that the Navy will, in some way, need to grow to meet an ever-expanding Chinese fleet, which already surpasses the U.S. Navy in raw ship count.

With less than four months left in the Trump administration, then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper unveiled a new vision for the Navy, called Battle Force 2045, that eclipsed previous plans to grow the fleet to 355 ships to instead grow it to more than 500 manned and unmanned vessels.

“The bottom line is getting rid of ships when you’re trying to build the Navy is not a smart decision, and I would like justification as to why,” Luria said.

Virginia home fires

In 2019, President Donald Trump’s Pentagon proposed cutting Truman as part of a plan to pivot to more unmanned technologies and to free up money for a planned two-carrier block-buy for the follow-on Ford class. But Trump reversed course after a bipartisan group of lawmakers opposed it, arguing the Truman has more than 20 years of life left and that U.S. law requires 11 carriers be in service.

Then, as now, lawmakers from Virginia – home to the country’s largest naval base and where spending makes up more than 10 percent of the economy – were leading the charge.

“As was made clear to the previous administration, retiring the USS Harry S. Truman two decades ahead of schedule would be a serious mistake given the capabilities it provides to the Navy,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in a statement to Defense News.

In broader remarks Monday, Luria recommended extending the service-life of older types of ships while new classes of ships are being brought online. As opposed to the Battle Force 2045 plan, which called for aggressively decommissioning cruisers, Luria wanted a deeper analysis.

“In our pursuit of a larger fleet and more presence in the Pacific, you need to build more ships, we also need to maintain the ships that we have, and operate them as efficiently as possible,” she said. “And we need to quit getting rid of the ships we have that still have operational life left.”

The Virginia delegation’s opposition to retiring carriers is long lived. In 2010, when then-Defense Secretary Bob Gates suggested that the Navy didn’t need 11 aircraft carriers, then-Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va.,

Senate Readiness and Management Support Subcommittee Chair Tim Kaine, D-Va., pointed to the cost of recycling the nuclear carrier Enterprise ($1.5 billion) and recent 11 month deployment of the USS Nimitz to the Mideast and Pacific as proof carriers are “expensive to retire and remain in constant demand.”

“I am skeptical this proposal will yield savings or avoid severe operational impacts,” Kaine said in a statement.

Both Luria and the House Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee’s top Republican, Rep. Rob Wittman, also pointed to recent, lengthy carrier deployments to meet the demands of combatant commanders.

“It is obvious based on deployment schedule that we are breaking the fleet trying to supply the COCOMs the volume of carriers being requested — and now the Department is mulling removing one from circulation earlier?” Wittman, of Virginia, said in a statement to Defense News on Monday.

“I understand looking for savings, but this doesn’t pass the smell test. If the Department decides to attempt a to cancel an RCOH again, I am confident they will be met with a strong Congressional rebuke.”

Luria and Wittman each represent districts that touch the Hampton Roads region of Virginia. The Truman is homeported there at Naval Station Norfolk.

At a hearing last week, Wittman asked U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s chief, Adm. Phil Davidson, if he thought it would make sense to remove a carrier from the fleet. Davidson replied, “There is no capability that we have that can substitute for an aircraft carrier in my view.”

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy has transferred authorities over networks and IT systems to a newly created office dedicated to Project Overmatch, the service’s plan for a connected force for future battles, C4ISRNET has learned.

The Navy shifted several network and IT-related technical authorities held by Naval Sea Systems Command, Naval Air Systems Command and Naval Information Warfare Systems Command to the direct report program manager for Project Overmatch, according to a memo C4ISRNET obtained.

“As a DRPM, effective immediately, Project Overmatch has all program authorities for Research and Development, Acquisition and Sustainment programs related to warfighting networks, including the networking needs for unmanned systems and long range fires,” stated the memo dated Feb. 23. “In addition, the DRPM is responsible for developing a unified approach to the data, infrastructure and tools and analytics needed at the operational and tactical levels to execute DMO [distributed maritime operations] as envisioned.”

Under that vision for potential conflicts with advanced adversaries, the Navy’s ships could be dispersed across a wide area but connected by a secure network.

Project Overmatch is the Navy’s effort to enable that all-connected force for the Pentagon’s priority plan of Joint All-Domain Command and Control, in which sensors and shooters are linked across domains. Rear Adm. Douglas Small, who leads the project, was named the direct report program manager in an October memo, and he reports to the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition.

The move will give Small authority over the “applicable” war-fighting networks, technical architectures and standards, and will “expand authorities to include data management designs and standards for platform integration and data interoperability.”

The memo is signed by Frederick Stefany, acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, and Adm. William Lescher, vice chief of naval operations.

“The memo signed by Mr. Stefany and ADM Lescher is the next step in codifying CNO’s October 2020 memo.  This recent memo enables the transfer of requisite authorities to RADM Small so he can effectively and efficiently execute the CNO’s directives,” said Lt. Courtney Callaghan, spokesperson for the Navy. “Critical to Project Overmatch is the development of networks, infrastructure, data architecture, tools and analytics that support the operational and developmental environment that will enable sustained maritime dominance using manned and unmanned systems.”

The Project Overmatch DRPM will also be tasked with developing a unified approach to the data, infrastructure, tools and analytics “needed at the operational and tactical levels to execute DMO as envisioned.”

The DRPM will also include a senior executive service deputy director position that will focus on Overmatch and staffing needs, working with leaders inside the Navy’s Digital Integration Support Cell and necessary program integration offices “to ensure a ‘whole of Navy’ enterprise team across Program Executive Offices (PEO) and System Commands (SYSCOM).”

Additionally, all science and technology efforts related to war-fighting networks and advanced data architectures and analytics will fall under the DRPM, according to the memo.

The Navy’s move to consolidate Overmatch responsibilities underneath one office is important as the military services look to break down stovepipes to move toward Joint All-Domain Command and Control. The Army and Air Force have similar projects, Project Convergence and Advanced Battle Management System, respectively.

In the memo, dated Feb. 23, Berger said the 27,000 Marines based in the Indo-Pacific region “require significant modernization and redesign … to continue to play a role against the evolving threat” from China, the memo reads.

Berger wrote that the redesign is being financed in part by retiring the Marines’ tanks and heavy bridging equipment and also reducing end strength by 12,000 Marines. But cuts to the civilian workforce are also in the offing.

“We will … reform and reorganize many of our headquarters organizations and processes to gain the institutional agility this era of long-term global great-power competition demands,” the memo reads. “These initiatives have the common goal of producing the smaller by more mature, resilient and highly trained Fleet Marine Force of the future, backed by a headquarters and supporting establishment stripped of redundancy and bloat.”

The cuts will result in a roughly 15 percent “reduction in civilian personnel structure,” the memo said.

Berger has been on a quest to reshape the Marine Corps to operate inside the range of Chinese rockets and air forces — in other words, inside the chain of islands that bounds the South and East China seas. The Corps is aiming to have the redesign done by 2030.

Part of the effort has been to build “Marine Littoral Regiments,” that Berger hopes to station in Guam, Japan and Hawaii. These would be small units able to distribute throughout the theater on smaller amphibious warships, packing its own surveillance drones and communications, and bringing anti-ship missiles to hold Chinese surface vessels at risk.

The Marine Littoral Regiments are envisioned at roughly 1,800 to 2,000 Marines.

Berger’s plans to transform the Corps have received wide, but not universal, praise. Former Marine and Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb criticized the plan as being too narrowly focused on China and fighting in the South China Sea, which Webb would reduce the Marines’ utility if that’s not, in fact, the war the U.S. needs to fight next.

Berger rejected the criticism, however, saying that the China threat demanded that the Marines keep pace and that the capabilities needed to defeat China would be broadly applicable.

“Are we too narrowly focused? I would argue absolutely not,” Berger said. “We’re pacing, in terms of capability, against a very rapidly developing adversary so that we’re never overmatched.

“But that’s not geographically constrained; that’s not nationally constrained. The Navy and Marine Corps operates around the world and I am very confident that will continue. The force that we end up with, you can apply that force to any mission set. It will be very capable.”

Speaking at a recent Hudson Institute virtual event, House Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee Chairman Joe Courtney, D-Conn., said the Pentagon is at an “inflection point” over whether the Navy, Air Force and cyber “are going to take a larger portion of the pie chart” when the fiscal 2022 budget is released this spring.

“That conversation has to happen,” he said.

The comments align with a growing consensus inside the Pentagon that to meet the challenge from China’s rapidly expanding blue water fleet, paired with investments in long-range anti-ship missiles and bombers, the Navy must grow substantially.

In the waning days of the Trump administration, the Pentagon floated the idea of a Navy in excess of 500 ships, which would include a heavy investment in submarines, smaller frigates, and a suite of unmanned surface, underwater and aerial vehicles. Today’s fleet stands just shy of 300 ships.

In December, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said he would advocate for “heavy investment” in sea-, air- and space-centric platforms, suggesting there will be “bloodletting” in other areas of the budget.

Courtney and the sea power subpanel’s ranking member, Rob Wittman, R-Va., pointed to China’s emerging plans to further militarize its Coast Guard and grow its aircraft carrier fleet as the two lawmakers outlined where they want to see increased investments.

“I’m optimistic that we’re going to have a solid shift that is really overdue, but clearly that first budget [from President Joe Biden is where] we’re gonna do everything we can to make sure it’s in a good place for this Congress,” Courtney said.

Between the Obama administration’s goal of a 355-ship Navy and the 500-ship target, Wittman touted the idea of 405 manned ships by the end of the 30 years ― which also emerged in Trump’s final days in office ― as a more feasible path.

But that idea for 500-plus ships — which was a rhetorical 500-ship Navy that included unmanned vehicles that would not meet any reasonable definition of a battle force ship, but were intended as a means of framing the scale of the undertaking required — has not sat well with everyone in Congress.

“When you talk about now 500 ships, sometimes some members of Congress kind of get turned off by that,” Wittman said. “I think we need to be talking clearly about the plan, [which] will have 405 manned ships, and what does that do for us to counter the Chinese. The communication needs to be simple and straightforward.”

‘The only way you do that is with ships’

Growing the Navy will be a challenge, especially as some high-capacity Cold War-era ships begin to retire over the coming decade.

In January, Defense News reported that a wave of ship retirements built at the end of the Cold War means the Navy is facing a decline in both the number of ships and the number of vertical launching system missile tubes it can field by the early 2030s.

Between the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, the first-generation Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, the Ohio-class guided-missile submarines and the Los Angeles-class submarines, the Navy stands to lose about 70 ships with nearly 5,500 vertical launching system cells. Today, based on the last official 30-year shipbuilding plan, it appears the Navy will replace those ships ― and their tubes ― with about 65 ships and submarines that have anywhere from 1,800 to more than 2,000 fewer VLS cells.

Both Courtney and Wittman have a significant stake in the Pentagon’s push to start building more Virginia-class submarines. The Navy has stretched the supplier base and labor force in the submarine-building industry just to reach two Virginia subs per year.

The Virginias, which are a joint undertaking between Connecticut’s General Dynamics Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News shipyard in Virginia, are seen as core to maintaining the Navy’s presence inside areas such as the South China Sea, which is within reach of Chinese anti-ship missiles and bombers.

In October, then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the Virginia class must be the Navy’s top priority.

“If we do nothing else, the Navy must begin building three Virginia-class submarines a year as soon as possible,” he said during an event at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Both lawmakers plan to continue pushing for an increase in Virginia-class submarine production, and they support planning for the next-generation submarine.

“The question is what do we need and the next generation of submarine that has the right extension of capability that gives us that continued undersea strike advantage,” Wittman said. “But how do we do that at a at a price tag that allows us to build the number of platforms that we need.”

In an interview with Defense News in early February, Wittman said he was encouraged by the Biden administration’s continued focus on China, but added he will continue to push for a larger fleet. That conclusion, he said, should be obvious to anyone who looks closely at the strategic situation.

“I have been pleased so far in the preliminary conversations that I have had with the secretary of defense, [Lloyd Austin], with the deputy secretary of defense, [Kathleen Hicks], and others in the incoming administration about what their plans are,” Wittman said. “I think if you look at Gen. Milley’s comments, you see that if we’re going to be serious about countering the Chinese threat, it’s going to be in the Pacific. And the only way you do that is with ships, and the capability to create a risk for China through the payloads on those ships.

“So I think that [the Biden administration] will probably come to the same conclusions.”

In its opening weeks, the Biden administration has signaled it will continue many of the Trump administration’s hardline policies toward China. And it has not backed off heavy naval presence in the Indo-Pacific region, after a U.S. ship conducted “freedom of navigation operation” (FONOP) earlier this month. Then Feb. 9 the Navy announced that two carriers were operating together in the hotly disputed South China Sea.

The destroyer John S. McCain transited the Taiwan Strait Feb. 4, which China denounced as a provocation, and the following day the McCain performed a FONOP challenging competing claims in the disputed Paracel Islands, a patrol that was accompanied by what experts noted was an extraordinarily detailed explanation.

On Feb. 9, China’s Foreign Ministry slammed the Navy’s two-carrier exercise in the South China Sea, saying it was “not conducive to peace and stability in the region,” and that China would “work together with regional countries to safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea.”

Just 21 days into Biden’s presidency, and with a remarkably small sample size, the emerging policy on China looks nearly indistinguishable from the Trump policy, which has led many China watchers to believe that a policy of strategic competition with Beijing — in the maritime realm and beyond — is here for the long term. Or at least for Biden’s.

“What we’re seeing across the board is a new administration that isn’t going to throw it out of the playbook of the last four years and that accepts sort of the logic of prioritizing China and competition towards Beijing,” said Eric Sayers, a vice president at Beacon Global Strategies and a former Asia hand at the Senate Armed Services Command and at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

“They’re saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to have our own grammar, we’re going to do things a bit different and put our priorities in different places,’ but at the same time they haven’t backed off from some of the areas that that their skeptics said they would.

“There is continuity in the South China Sea, but it’s its continuity of the Trump approach, not a return of the Obama approach.”

Critics have argued that the Obama administration failed to take stronger measures to oppose China’s increasingly aggressive stance in the South China Sea, and was slow to react as China began building military bases on disputed features there.

But Biden’s approach appears more assertive. In the wake of the McCain’s FONOP in the Paracels, the Japan-based U.S. 7th Fleet released a detailed statement Feb. 5, specifically calling out a Chinese claim that dates to 1996 and would extend China’s territorial sea out to the features there. By extension, this logic would grant them most of the infamous-yet-ambiguous “nine-dash-line” claim seeking expanded rights.

“Unlawful and sweeping maritime claims in the South China Sea pose a serious threat to the freedom of the sea, including freedoms of navigation and overflight, free trade and unimpeded commerce, and freedom of economic opportunity for South China Sea littoral nations,” the 7th Fleet statement said.

China has never fully articulated what rights it claims in the South China Sea.

China’s Parcaels claim led to a violent clash with Vietnam in 1974 that left China in de facto control of the features, though it has remained contested ever since. That claim almost certainly infringes on Vietnam’s rightful exclusive economic zone, which, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, extends 200 miles, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and former senior aid to the chief of naval operations.

“What they’ve been trying to do is argue that the Paracels are an extension of China and, therefore, allow you to draw a straight line around the features,” Clark said. “So, this essentially supports their argument about the nine-dash line, because the Paracel’s are south of Hainan Island. Essentially, you’ve got this extension of Chinese sovereignty well into the South China Sea as a result of drawing a straight line from the Paracels to Hainan to the Chinese mainland. And then it’s the same thing on the other end of the Chinese coast, which infringes on the [exclusive economic zone] that rightfully belongs to Vietnam.”

In response to the McCain FONOP, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered a muted response, saying China monitored the operations, and called on the United States to have a more constructive role in the region.

“China will continue to stay on high alert and is ready to respond to all threats and provocations at any time, and will resolutely safeguard its national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” said Wang Wenbin, the spokesperson. “We hope the U.S. side will play a constructive role for regional peace and stability, rather than the opposite.”

The competition continues

Despite radically different positions on a range of national security issues, when it comes to the China relationship, Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump have charted similar courses thus far.

Both Biden and new Secretary of State Antony Blinken have signaled the need for some cooperation, particularly on tackling climate change. But the Biden administration has also held the line on the 2020 decision by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to formally reject China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea and has backed Pompeo’s late-hour determination that China’s actions against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province constituted genocide.

During calls with counterparts in Vietnam and the Philippines, new Secretary of State Antony Blinken made clear the U.S. was not backing off its rejection of excessive Chinese claims of maritime rights and that the U.S. was committed to maintaining a rules-based order in the South China Sea.

In a State Department readout of a Jan. 27 call between Blinken and Philippines Secretary of Foreign Affairs Teodoro Locsin, Blinken said the United States rejected China’s maritime claims in the South China Sea “to the extent they exceed the maritime zones that China is permitted to claim under international law as reflected in the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention,” according to a statement from State spokesman Ned Price.

“Secretary Blinken pledged to stand with Southeast Asian claimants in the face of PRC pressure,” the statement reads.

It also made clear the U.S. would defend against attacks on Philippines military or government assets.

“Secretary Blinken stressed the importance of the Mutual Defense Treaty for the security of both nations, and its clear application to armed attacks against the Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft in the Pacific, which includes the South China Sea,” the statement reads.

The direct language and restating of U.S. policy so early in the Biden White House was a deliberate signal that there has been no significant shift in policy with the new team, said Bonnie Glaser, who leads the China Power Project at Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It is essentially a restatement of Trump policy, articulated by Pompeo in mid-2018 and mid-2020,” Glaser said. “It reaffirms that the Mutual Defense Treaty applies to the South China Sea and that the U.S. opposes Chinese maritime claims that are inconsistent with UNCLOS.

“The fact that U.S. policy was stated very clearly within the first week of the Biden administration demonstrates U.S. commitment to alliances and U.S. willingness to push back against Chinese actions in the South China Sea that undermine the interests of the U.S. and its allies and partners.”

Realigning priorities?

What remains unclear is how that will impact Defense Department acquisitions priorities going forward.

On Feb. 4, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin launched a force-wide posture review to address if the military has the right capabilities in the right places to address the threats the country faces. And in comments Feb. 10 at the Pentagon, Biden said Austin had ordered a China task force to ensure the DoD is pursuing the right concepts and technologies.

“Today I was briefed on a new DoD-wide China task force that Secretary Austin is standing up to look at our strategy, operational concepts technology and force posture and so much more,” Biden said. He added that the task force would map out the course that would incorporate allies and partners and a whole-of-government approach to meet the China challenge.

There have been some clues as to what the administration is thinking coming in the door. In response to a question about the Trump administration’s late-hour force structure assessment, new Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said she was inclined to support many, but not all, of the themes in the assessment.

“There’s some really interesting operational themes that I’m attracted to,” Hicks said. “There’s a focus on increasing use of autonomy. There’s a focus on dispersal of forces and there’s a focus on growing the number of small surface combatants relative to today.”

Hicks’ discussion of “dispersal of forces” is seemingly a reference to the Navy’s plans to fight in a more spread-out manner, using sensors on unmanned autonomous platforms linked to manned platforms to push capabilities to more places for less money than it would cost to spread those sensors around on manned platforms.

That likely means the Navy’s networking effort, Project Overmatch, upon which the whole concept depends will go forward. By extension, the broader Air Force-led Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control network will likely be a priority as well.

She also pointed to increasing investments in small surface combatants, which is another means of starting to reduce the cost of spreading around significant capabilities for less money.

The next-generation Constellation-class Frigate was awarded last April to Fincantieri and its Wisconsin shipyard Marinette Marine.

It is unclear if hypersonic missiles, a key Trump-era priority aimed at giving the military the ability to rapidly strike Chinese targets at extremely long ranges, will endure as a priority in the Biden administration.

‘A little tougher than what I thought’

But to date, national security-minded conservatives have welcomed the Biden team’s embrace of many of the Trump administration’s hardline China positions.

In his confirmation hearing, Blinken drew some distinctions between his views on the China relationship and the Trump administrations’ but largely said he agreed with many of the steps the previous White House took, including the recent declaration that China was engaged in genocide against the Uighur population in Xinjiang. The response seemed to catch Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, off guard.

“You do agree?” a seemingly surprised Graham asked, adding haltingly that “we’re on a good start here. So, this … Really, I … I just very much appreciate that.”

In the highest-level to date interaction between the U.S. and China since the new administration took office, Blinken released a statement saying the U.S. was not backing down on China’s destabilizing role in the region.

“Secretary Blinken stressed the United States will continue to stand up for human rights and democratic values, including in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong, and pressed China to join the international community in condemning the military coup in Burma,” Price’s statement read.

For its part, China released a statement saying it wanted the U.S. to “uphold the spirit of no conflict, no confrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation, focus on cooperation and manage differences, so as to push forward the healthy and stable development of bilateral relations.”

Seth Cropsey, a Reagan and George H.W. Bush-era DoD official who is now a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, said that so far Biden’s policies have been encouraging.

“They are a little tougher than what I thought I was going to see,” Cropsey said. “For example, I don’t think that any of Taiwan’s representatives to Washington had been invited to attend the inauguration and Biden did that. They have said that they’re going to continue to arm sales to Taiwan … and we don’t know that that means but it’s a positive thing to say.”

Cropsey said holding off on high-level engagements with China until consulting with allies in the region was a smart move, and he was impressed with Blinken’s upholding of Pompeo’s determination that China was committing genocide against the Uighur population in Xinjiang and the continuation of naval activity in the South China Sea.

“Look, it’s impossible to tell where this is going to lead and whether it is the keel of the Biden administration policy, but it looks encouraging so far.”

Mark Vandroff, the senior director for defense policy at the National Security Council and a retired Navy captain, did not cite a reason for his departure in a letter sent to national security adviser Robert O’Brien and obtained by Defense News.

Vandroff’s resignation follows the resignation of deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger on Wednesday. Media outlets have reported that several top national security aides are also considering resigning.

Vandroff declined to comment on his resignation. The White House did not respond to a Thursday afternoon request for comment on any resignations in the wake of yesterday’s violent confrontation at the Capitol between a pro-Trump mob and police.

In his year in office, Vandroff worked on the Abraham Accords, an agreement brokered between the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel that extended official recognition of the state of Israel. A former major program manager for the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer program, Vandroff was also instrumental in shaping the administration’s push to kick off a major buildup of the fleet as part of a naval arms race with China.

In a letter, Vandroff thanked O’Brien for the opportunity to serve on the National Security Council.

“In the last year is has been a great pleasure to work for you on the staff of the NSC to implement the President’s policies and work to make America and the world safer and more secure,” Vandroff wrote. “I was privileged to work alongside the most talented, dedicated, and patriotic group of colleagues a person could imagine, here at the NSC, within the broader EOP [Executive Office of the President] and across the inter-agency in the Departments of Defense and State, and the Intelligence Community. I will always be grateful to you for the opportunity you provided me to serve our great nation.”

Joe Gould in Washington contributed to this report.

However, major questions remain about the plan to grow the Navy’s strength, not the least of which is whether the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden will follow through or scrap the strategy.

The fiscal 2022 planning framework, released late Thursday alongside the 30-year shipbuilding plan, proposes a $759 billion top line for national defense, including $721.9 billion for the Pentagon, a 2.3 percent increase from the FY21 budget request. Pentagon leaders have repeatedly stated they need 3-5 percent budget increases to have “real” budget increases beyond inflation.

The plan outlines a fleet of more than the current stated goal of 355 ships by the early 2030s by investing in new classes of logistics ships for the Navy and Marine Corps, accelerating production of the newly awarded Constellation-class frigate, and boosting submarine production. The fleet would hit 405 ships by the end of the 30 years, documents showed.

But experts and analysts who reviewed the plan for Defense News were skeptical of the mechanisms that the White House Office of Management and Budget used to pay for the increases, including assuming a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, back office savings and cutting legacy equipment.

“This looks like they are trying to box in the Biden administration when it comes to the shipbuilding plan by showing that they can fund it even in a budget that is flat with inflation,” said Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But the savings they tout to pay for this will be difficult to achieve and/or are not realistic, like $35 billion from getting out of so-called endless wars and $6.6 billion from cutting unspecified legacy systems.”

In a call with Defense News, senior Trump administration officials said the long-delayed shipbuilding plan, originally due with the FY21 budget submission in February, was held up by an effort to piece together an affordable approach based on constrained resources.

“We didn’t want to provide it without the context that is going to be on the minds of those policymakers, which is: Is it affordable and is it credible?” the official said. “The work that we’ve done in concert with the nine months of study at DoD has been to answer that question: How do we pay for and what are the necessary resources that are needed to be able to scale in a realistic top-line framework?

“And so what we’ve put forward is planning guidance … with our fiscal assumptions about what we could be looking at. And that’s why, from the standpoint of the overall number, we think it’s very credible. The easiest thing that we could have done was to assume a large increase in the top line to pay for it. We did not do that.”

According to the plan, OMB is looking to pay for the fleet buildup by:

Withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan: Officials for the Trump administration have stated that they would like to be entirely out of Afghanistan in the next year. While it’s unclear if that will happen under the Biden administration, the Trump team estimates $35 billion in savings over the Futures Years Defense Program, or FYDP, through “planned drawdowns in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Africa.” Part of those savings would come through reducing the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund and eliminating the the Counter-ISIS Train and Equip Fund.

Notably, the Trump administration says it would like to eliminate the overseas contingency operations, or OCO, funding stream starting in FY22, with war costs shifted into the base budget.

Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, is skeptical that this would play out the way the Trump administration expects.

“Whether we have 5,000 or 150,000 forces overseas in any given country, so much of the costs are fixed. There’s no savings until the number is essentially zero,” she said. “Even after that happens, while OCO is appropriated through regular order, it is considered supplemental spending — so it’s debt-financed. You don’t save money by putting less spending on your credit card.”

Congress has been reluctant to fund a complete drawdown of troops in Afghanistan, and the lawmaking body has sent its 2021 National Defense Authorization Act to the president’s desk with a veto-proof majority blocking a partial drawdown there. In other words, until Congress has a change of heart, it appears unlikely it will allow a full withdrawal to reap those savings.

Cutting legacy equipment: The document calls for divesting $6.6 billion of legacy systems over the upcoming FYDP in order to put those resources elsewhere. “By discontinuing the use of older and less capable ground systems, surface ships, and aircraft, DoD can more effectively focus resources on modernized platforms and systems that support both high-intensity conflict and operations in highly contested environments,” the document read.

Eaglen pointed out that every year, the department tries to retire equipment, only to be turned back by Congress. She pointed to the recently completed National Defense Authorization Act, which was full of prohibitions on retiring gear such as the Air Force’s Thunderbolt II close-air support aircraft, as evidence that this is “wishful thinking.”

Find internal reforms: Although this section does not come with projected FYDP savings, there have been ongoing series of reform efforts inside the department. The Government Accountability Office has validated $37 billion in reform-driven savings since the start of FY17, while Chief Management Officer Lisa Hershman said she found more than $6 billion in FY21 alone. However, the CMO’s office is set to be disbanded by Congress, which could impact reform.

“The road to defense budget efficiency savings for modernization is paved with the skulls of erring Pentagon officials who believe this fallacy,” Eaglen said, noting luminaries such as Defense Secretary Bob Gates tried and failed for years to find real, meaningful efficiencies.

Cutting Army end strength: Compared to FY21 budget request figures, the plan would cut 900 soldiers from the active-duty component, 500 from the National Guard component, and 300 from the Reserve component — which the document claims would save $2.6 billion over the current FYDP.

“Constraining end strength is one means of protecting the rest of the DoD’s budget to ensure America’s servicemembers have the modernized equipment and weapon systems to defend the Nation and prevail on the battlefield,” the document read.

This is one area where Eaglen thinks cuts are realistic, as the shift toward the Pacific combined with the extreme costs of personnel make the Army a ripe target for cuts.

Realistic changes?

Ultimately, this budget document is more of an exercise than prescriptive, as the Trump team will be replaced Jan. 20 by the Biden administration. It is unlikely the Biden team will follow through with the ambitious shipbuilding increases laid out in the document.

But defense budgets tend to be largely put together by the end of the calendar year, and while a new team at the Pentagon will be able to tinker with the details, a wholescale rewriting of the budget request seems unlikely until it is in the hands of Congress.

Speaking last week, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged the need for realistic budget planning going forward.

“I suspect that, at best, the Pentagon’s budgets will start flattening out. There’s a reasonable prospect that they could actually decline significantly, depending on what happens” with the broader economy, Milley said. “So we have to — we the uniforms, we here at the Pentagon, civilian and military alike — we’ve got to do a quick reality check on the national budget and what is likely to happen in the not too distant future.”

Said Eaglen: “Most of the budget cake is baked, but that’s true every year — not just when one administration hands off a budget to another. The new team will tweak the ’22 [program objective memorandum] and ‘put its stamp on it,’ but I doubt there will be major [tweaks] — aside from shipbuilding.”

At the same time, she does expect at least one similarity to play out between this document and the incoming administration.

“I do think the Biden team will try some of this magical math to balance the defense books, too,” Eaglen said. “These tricks are employed by both parties regularly once those in power see how hard it is to even manage a defense enterprise that doesn’t grow with inflation.”

Ultimately, though, the administration believes the primary threat to U.S. security is a maritime threat from China, and that to combat it effectively under limited budgets, a realignment inside the DoD is necessary.

“The safest assumption is that we’re going to be spending at freeze levels going forward,” the senior administration official told Defense News. “So at that point you’re talking about a reallocation. You can’t really say something’s not affordable if all that is required is trade-offs.

“If there’s a bipartisan commitment to preparing and modernizing for the China threat and providing for the needs necessary in [the Indo-Pacific region].”

The so-called “Organic Precision Fires – Infantry Light” program is seeking ground-launched drones that can be deployed with no more than two people, have a range of up to 20 kilometers, loiter for 90 minutes, swarm, be jam resistant and be able to take out enemy troops and materiel, according to a November request for information.

The Marine Corps has been trying to reshape itself as a primarily maritime force that can distribute forces over a massive battlefield such as the South China Sea, operating inside the Chinese weapon engagement zone that may be too dangerous for many military assets to operate inside until certain key objectives can be seized or neutralized. This has led the force to look at ways to pack as much capability into small, disbursed groups of Marines, something the portable drone swarms could support.

Special operations forces have used small loitering munition drones in combat for some time, said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and senior fellow at The Hudson Institute, pointing to the AeroVironment Switchblade system. But the swarming effect is something that would take the system a step further, he added.

“The swarming idea would be, ‘How do I overwhelm the enemy’s defenses and cut off lines of escape,’” Clark explained. “If I’m a Marine unit, I’m generally going after a group of people, not just one or two guys the way SOF might be. But the idea here is to cause an area effect. You want to overwhelm defenses or cause explosions over a wider area to try and herd your adversary or cut off lines of retreat.

“You might create a blast pattern or detonate in some kind of order that herds your adversary into an area that you want to be a kill box. So, swarming for the Marine Corps would be about driving your enemy’s behavior in ways advantageous to yourself.”

Marines might also be able to use a swarm as a decoy and try to get the adversary to look for the unit in the wrong locations.

In some ways, this kind of unmanned system could be more effective than traditional Marine implements of war such as a .50 caliber machine gun, said Dakota Wood, a retired Marine and analyst with The Heritage Foundation.

In a future fight, Marines will need to think about units that are “as effective as possible with as small a signature as possible,” Wood said.

“You are looking for weapon systems that can maximize the effectiveness of finding and eliminating a target while minimizing the logistical burden on the unit,” he said. “And you want to maximize the range and any intelligence that system can deliver to you.

“If I have a .50 cal: Hugely heavy, massive logistics burden to carry around the ammo, its very effective on target but I got to get it on target first, and it’s certainly revealing my position. If I have a man-portable unmanned system that I can launch with a camera, it’s small in size so its detectability is reduced, it can send that information back to the unit and it can also hit a target with great precision: That’s an awesome capability to have.”

The swarming capability makes it even more lethal, Wood said, because the drones can communicate with each other to maximize the effectiveness of the strike by attacking from different axes.

Both Clark and Wood agreed that this isn’t a science fiction project but technology that exists today, which means it could be available much more quickly than a typical long-duration DoD acquisition program.

“It’s another indicator of the Marine Corps looking for current technologies that can allow small units to operate autonomously with a low logistical burden,” Wood said.

The U.S. Navy’s chief of naval operations and First Sea Lord Adm. Tony Radakin intend to “sign a future integrated warfighting statement of intent that sets a cooperative vision for interchangeablty,” CNO Adm. Mike Gilday announced at the virtual Atlantic Future Forum, being held on board the RN’s new aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth.

“We will synchronize pioneering capabilities, strengthen operating concepts and focus our collective efforts to deliver combined sea power together. By organizing our cooperation on carrier strike, underwater superiority, navy and marine integration and doubling down on future war fighting like unmanned and artificial intelligence, we will remain on the leading edge of great power competition.”

It is unclear what the specifics of the statement of intent will be, but the U.S. and Royal navies have been focusing heavily in recent years on aligning its capabilities to be useful to each other in combined maritime operations. The message from both navies is that this will continue into the future.

Throughout the Royal Navy’s effort to get the Queen Elizabeth ready for deployment, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps have been working closely with the service, training British pilots on the F-35B and getting the ship certified to operate them. The Marine Corps’ Fighter Attack Squadron 211 embarked on Queen Elizabeth earlier this month during the ship’s group exercise ahead of a deployment next year.

The Marines will also mix in with Royal Air Force F-35Bs during the QE’s 2021 deployment.

In remarks at the forum, Radkin echoed Gilday’s remarks, saying the two forces needed to continue to work to align efforts.

“Throughout our careers we have had a drive for interoperability with allies,” Radkin said. “But increasingly it feels to us that bar has to be raised. … The obvious example is the U.S. Marine jets on board the QE carrier. That is an obvious example of interchangeability.

“So, we are trying to drive a new standard. Partly to drive all of us to strengthen our interoperability but to go even higher and recognize that interchangeability is going to be an even stronger feature in the future.”

Radkin said the services would focus on four areas to grow this “interchangeability”: undersea warfare; carrier operations; aligning the efforts of the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy to become a cohesive fighting unit; and on advanced warfighting programs such as artificial intelligence and cyber.

The United Kingdom is in the middle of an integrated defense review, initiated after Boris Johnson was elected prime minster. It was interrupted during the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak but appears to be running again. The review could have sweeping impacts on the British defense budget, but it is unclear where the budget ax will fall.

When the review was announced, however, the government promised a “radical reassessment” of Britain’s place in the world.

The U.S Marine Corps and U.S. Army are both working toward fielding long-range strike and anti-ship missiles to hold Chinese targets at risk within the first and second island chains. Both have talked about putting supplies, gear and forces forward to be able to rapidly respond in a crisis, and both are actively discussing sacrificing older equipment and upgrades for current equipment to help pay for the modernization they need.

The expectation in the Pentagon, however, is that the military will see flat defense budgets at best going forward. Some defense watchers argue that limited resources means gets the funding may depend on whose concepts carry the most weight among defense planners. Others, however, believe a potential China problem is big enough that there are plenty of missions to go around.

Previously, long-range strike was the domain of the Navy and Air Force from carriers, vertical launch missile tubes on submarines and surface combatants and from land-based fighters and bombers. But the demise of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty has opened up long-range, ground-based fires as a means of countering China’s capabilities in that area — China was not a party to that treaty, and U.S. Pacific Command for years bemoaned as unfair the advantage the treaty gave the Chinese in the theater.

Gen. David Berger’s plan for the Marine Corps seeks to change the force from a land-heavy force to a light, primarily maritime force that can fight, maneuver and threaten Chinese forces inside the South and East China seas, and has said he wants to do it at no extra cost. Part of that plan: divest fully from tanks, and cut the number of tube artillery batteries from 16 to five. For that trade, the Marines are looking to massively grow the number of mobile rocket batteries from seven to 21.

In addition, the Marines are adding both the Navy’s new anti-ship Naval Strike Missile and its Tomahawk missile to its ground-based fires quiver, in order to threaten Chinese ships.

But the Army is also getting into the strike game, and has made long-range precision fires its top modernization priority.

The service is working toward a 2023 fielding of its Precision Strike Missile, which will have a range of as much as 550 kilometers. (The minimum range prohibited under the INF Treaty was 500 km.) The service is also working on a new seeker to be able to target ships, which should be fielded by 2025.

In a 2019 interview, the Army’s lead on long-range precision fires, Brig Gen. John Rafferty told Defense News that as much as 750 kilometers or further was possible.

The Army is also working toward fielding its Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon in a battery by 2023, which will be shot from a road-mobile launcher.

In August, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said the Army, like the Marine Corps, was ready to make cuts to existing capabilities in order to make its future investments a reality.

“We know we need long-range precision fires, that is our number one priority and so we are developing hypersonic capability right now,” McConville said. “One of the things that we are taking a look at is how we divest, and this can be a challenge as you look at some of these systems we have that some would like us to continue to purchase.”

In comments this month to Defense News, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said that by 2023, the Army was going to start seeing significant divestment in older systems.

“We’re basically lining ourselves up for the ’23 program where you will see a much more aggressive effort,” McCarthy said. “The choices are going to get bigger and tougher, but that’s necessary” as modernized programs begin to be fielded, he said. “That will force us to make harder calls with legacy systems that will have to be forced to end their service life.”

‘Encouraging’

The focus on Pacific-focused capabilities is a matter of the Army reading the writing on the wall, but it doesn’t mean they are necessarily trying to steal missions from the Marine Corps, said Dakota Wood, a retired Marine officer and analyst at The Heritage Foundation.

“The services are always trying to prove their relevance,” Wood said, adding that as “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan start to wind down, the next big bogie is China. And, so, the cynic might say that the Army is just trying to invent missions because they do not want to lose budget share, lose their prominence among the services.

“But I think it’s more accurate to say that you have a service full of military professionals who want to make sure the country is defended. So, they’re looking for where the next challenge might be. And if you are called up to perform a mission in the Indo-Pacific, you have to get that right. The cynic might say they’re just trying to maintain relevance, but the advocate would tell you they’re just doing what they are supposed to do.”

But to some, both the Marine Corps and the Army are starting the blur the lines between traditional roles and missions played by the services. In comments to Breaking Defense, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, who heads the Mitchell Institute think tank, said that the Army’s pursuit of long-range strike was bad for the force.

“It’s ridiculous, to be quite candid. It is encroachment on roles and missions,” Deptula told Breaking Defense. “The fact of the matter is the services need to adhere to their core competencies. And the United States Army reaching out to develop weapon systems that operate at thousand-mile range truly is encroachment.”

“While some people have said: ‘well, you know, it’s nice to have a variety of different capabilities’ — well, sure, in a world where you’ve got unlimited budgets,” he said.

But others find that kind of service protectionism to be misdirected. Eric Sayers, a former aide to former Indo-Pacific Commander Adm. Harry Harris who is now a vice president at Beacon Global Strategies, said the services should actively be competing for missions.

“I find it encouraging that we’re at a place now where these services are competing for the best ideas to contribute to a role that traditionally the Air Force and Navy have played in the theater,” Sayers said.

Ultimately the services will probably end up fielding complementary capabilities, Sayers said.

“The Army will have a larger footprint and have more types of munitions and at a longer range,” he said. “I think if it’s the Marine Corps, we’re talking more mobile, expeditionary capabilities at shorter ranges between 500 and 1,000 miles. I could see the Army having a longer-range anti-ship missile, a ballistic missile and maybe a land-attack missile: Overlapping capabilities.

“That’s the kind of thing we should be encouraging: Not having the same capabilities but complementary capabilities with varying ranges and missions.”

Tom Karako, a missile defense expert and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, agreed that the mission will likely end up being shared.

“The problem set that we face from major powers is disproportionately missile rich, and the real question at issue isn’t whether one service or another service does long-range strike the best,” Karako said. “It’s a question of how serious we are about implementing the new joint concept … which includes all the services being able to defend themselves and strike deep.

“[Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. John] Hyten has articulated this on multiple occasions, and a lot of the inter-service rivalry here seems to be stuck in the roles and missions conversation of 60 years ago, rather than thinking about how we can seriously adapt for the future,” Karako added.

“It may end up making a lot of sense for long-range strike to be shared among multiple services, rather being one particular service’s rice bowl.”