Spencer said the use of unmanned technologies could offset some of the ships the U.S. Navy said it needed in its recent force structure assessment that set the bar for its ship count at 355.

That answer raised alarms in some circles where building a 355-ship Navy is a high priority. Spencer’s backpedaling on the Navy’s own stated goal of 355 ships was a similar dance to the one performed by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis when pressed in June about the larger fleet.

Mattis has prioritized filling readiness gaps in the current fleet over building ships, but some members of Congress and Navy observers believe Spencer should throw his whole weight behind shipbuilding, including with the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va.

“[Secretary-select Spencer’s] comments the other day in the SASC, I think, need some refinement,” Wittman said. “I think being ambivalent about 355 ships is not where the SecNav needs to be. … He has too much of the Washington disease of being soft — well, 350 may be a good number, and we’re going to do all this other stuff, these complimentary pieces.”

“I think you need to be strong and unambivalent as a signal to industry, as a signal to our adversaries that this is where we’re going to go. … Hopefully, as time comes along, he will see things from that perspective.”

Capabilities vs. Capacity

The debate over capacity — the number of ships available to perform missions — versus capability, or how effective the weapons and systems on those ships are, is a carry-over from the Obama administration. During the waning days of the last administration, the debate between Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus turned downright ugly.

Prior to leaving office, Carter ordered Mabus to cut $17 billion from the Navy’s budget over the five-year plan in the fiscal year 2017 budget and invest in more lethal weapons over shipbuilding. Mabus defied the order and sent up a budget that added money to the shipbuilding budget. Mabus had long argued that shipbuilding cuts were the least reversible thing the Navy could do with its budget.

Since taking office, Mattis has been focused on filling readiness gaps and getting the fleet the country already has back to peak readiness. Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that the Navy needs a larger fleet but that the readiness deficit created by years of overuse and budget cuts had to be addressed first.

“The challenge is that we’re in a position right now where we’ve got to get the fleet back to sea that we have now,” Mattis said. “We’re trying to address this, trying to eat this elephant one bite at a time.”

Getting to a larger fleet would require annual budget growth of about 5 percent, Mattis told the members, which under the Budget Control Act would be impossible.

Wittman, along with his Senate seapower counterpart, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., have been vocal advocates for the 355-ship Navy, recently introducing a bill that makes it national policy to maintain a 355-ship Navy.

The Securing the Homeland by Increasing our Power on the Seas Act, known as the SHIPS Act, was introduced in June and is still in the committee.

To some observers, the focus on readiness is misplaced and not aligned with the promises made by candidate Trump, who pledged to build a 350-ship Navy.

“I think this 350-ship Navy is in desperate trouble,” said Bryan McGrath, a retired destroyer skipper and consultant with The FerryBridge Group. “Everyone has to first understand that we are 32 ships short of the Obama administration’s goal of 308 ships. And just getting there in the budget environment that prevails in Washington is going to be a hard slog.”

For McGrath, a longtime advocate for a larger fleet who contributed to one of the force structure assessments the Navy used to set the 355-ship goal, Spencer’s backpedaling was disappointing.

“I think it was unimpressive,” McGrath said. “I think his testimony did not convince me that Mr. Spencer understands the value of sea power to this country’s security and prosperity.”

“When you blithely dismiss the political notion of a 350-ship Navy and say it could be 300 with some unmanned capabilities, you are not doing the job of the secretary of the Navy. The job of the secretary of the Navy is to ensure that everyone knows why we have the Navy, what it does for our security and prosperity and how underinvesting in that Navy is disproportionately bad for the country.”

Joe Gould in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

According to a report in the Taipei Times, the decommissioned Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates Gary and Taylor were signed over to Taiwan on March 9 at a ceremony in Charleston, South Carolina.

The two ships were reactivated in Charleston by VSE Corporation. Following the handover, they are scheduled to enter service with Taiwan’s Republic of China Navy, or RoCN, by the end of May. Taiwan had initially requested four decommissioned Perry-class frigates, which the Obama administration approved in late 2014, but the East Asian island nation eventually settled on only two for an estimated cost of $177 million.

According to Michal Thim, a Taiwan defense specialist with the Prague-based Association for International Affairs, the reactivated frigates are being earmarked to replace some of the six Knox-class frigates that serve in the anti-submarine role. 

Taiwan’s other main naval combatants are four Kidd-class destroyers, which like the frigates are also decommissioned U.S Navy vessels. The RoCN also has six French La Fayette-class and a further eight license-built Perry-class frigates. These are fitted with Taiwanese Hsuing-Feng II anti-ship missiles, and will eventually include the supersonic HF-3, which is being retrofitted on the latter ships.  

It is unclear if Taiwan intends to bring the two frigates up to similar standards as their locally built equivalents, although the 2015 notification issued by the Defense and Security Cooperation Agency on the transfer of the ships includes the AN/SQR-19 Multi-Function Towed Array as part of the transfer. Taiwan had previously been blocked from acquiring the AN/SQR-19, and the retention of the system onboard the ships points to an anti-submarine focus in line with the Knox-class ships they will replace.

While not exactly cutting edge, the two ships add much needed capability to Taiwan’s Navy, which has found itself at the end of a determined effort by China to diplomatically isolate Taiwan. China uses its substantial economic and political clout to restrict the sale of advanced weapons to Taiwan, which it sees as a renegade province.

The U.S. does, however, maintain strong de facto diplomatic relations with Taiwan’s government, and the Taiwan Relations Act enacted by Congress in 1979 commits the United States to “make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability.” Although in reality that has meant the most advanced U.S. weapons are out of Taiwan’s reach so as to avoid incurring China’s wrath.

This has resulted in Taiwan trying to build up its indigenous defense industry, which has made strides in the research, design and development of advanced weapons. Although as Thim and Taipei-based military and cybersecurity analyst Yen-Fan Liao wrote in The Jamestown Foundation’s “China Brief” last year, Taiwan “will still need U.S. assistance in regards to sales or technology transfer of key components.”

Taiwan previously had an ambitious list of 12 new shipbuilding and force modernization programs spanning 23-years and costing almost $15 billion. This list included new amphibious ships and submarines, as well as the eventual recapitalization of the RoCN’s surface combatants.

However, Thim told Defense News that priority should also be given to the development of the Hsun-Lien combat system. Similar to the U.S. Navy’s Aegis System that Taiwan has previously tried unsuccessfully to acquire along with the Mk 41 Vertical Launch System, the Hsun-Lien combat system will be paired with a locally developed phased-array radar to provide fleet air defense against adversarial aircraft and anti-ship missiles.

The Alamogordo Daily News reports that the 6th Attack Squadron at Holloman Air Force Base is transitioning to the MQ-9 Reaper from the MQ-1 Predator, some of which remain in operational status.

A Predator will be put on static display at Heritage Park on the base, which held a retirement ceremony Monday to mark the transition.

The missile-firing MQ-1 has seen combat in Bosnia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa and other locations.

The Holloman squadron has trained hundreds of pilots and senor operators since being activated in 2009 to provide Predator operators their initial qualification training for the aircraft.

In a speech last month, Carter unveiled what he called the third phase of the “rebalance to the Pacific.” Key components of that plan involve building up cyber capabilities for allies in the region and increasing maritime security exercises, both of which were echoed in Thursday’s comments.

The two nations agreed to create a bilateral cyber working group task force to look for areas of bilateral cooperation, which Han indicated would begin work this month. The countries also pledged to create what Han called an “integrated research team” to seek specific maritime areas of cooperation.

Notably, Han also announced that tri-lateral cooperation between the US, Korean and Japan will expand in 2017, both on the maritime front and in terms of intelligence sharing.

“We will continue to conduct a missile warning exercise, a search-and-rescue exercise, maritime-extradition exercise that was hosted as part of this year’s RIMPAC exercise in the coming year,” he said.

Added Carter, “There are a number of ways in which naval cooperation can strengthen the alliance in general and the ability to respond to provocations and to conflict. So naval cooperation is very important, even as we have great cooperation already in our navies and in the air and on land, and as I mentioned, expanding into cyberspace.”

Towards the end of the press event, Han was asked about recent reports that North Korea is developing a 3,000 ton submarine capable of launching ballistic missiles. While not confirming its existence, the minister said, “We’re not ruling out the possibility. And we’re making preparations for any potential circumstance that we may face.”