Pentagon Plan For Amphibious Warships Would Violate Law, Hobble Crisis Response

This week the Marine Corps released its “unfunded priorities list” for the fiscal year beginning October 1, meaning the programs it most needs that were not funded in president’s budget request for the year.

To the surprise of no one who has been paying attention, the top unfunded priority on the list is another San Antonio-class amphibious warship.

Amphibious transport docks, or “LPDs” as they are referred in naval nomenclature, are essential to the movement of Marine forces in wartime and peacetime.

A San Antonio-class LPD is crewed by 383 sailors and hosts 700 Marines along with the equipment they need to respond effectively in crises. The ships are generally considered to be the most reliable, survivable and habitable amphibious vessels ever built.

However, Biden administration political appointees at the Pentagon want to halt their manufacture and study whether there are other ways that Marine transport needs can be met.

That plan, combined with a proposal to decommission three aged “amphibs” that the LPDs are supposed to replace, would result in the number of large amphibious warships in the U.S. fleet falling from the current 31 to 24.

There are several glaring defects in this plan:

• It would violate a law requiring that the amphibious fleet not shrink to less than 31 large warships.
• It would hobble the ability of the Marine Corps to respond to overseas crises by limiting coverage of locations where threats are likely to arise.
• It would devastate a maritime industrial base that has continually improved its ability to build the technologically advanced warships.

In summary, it is a bad plan. The defense department says it wants to “pause” construction of LPD’s to evaluate other possibilities, but it has failed to advance a credible rationale for doing so.

If you scrutinize the Navy’s fiscal 2024 budget request, it makes frequent reference to facilitating the transformation of the Marine Corps into a more agile and capable fighting force.

However, you can’t transform a sea-based force unless you provide an adequate fleet of warships, and the current Pentagon plan would shrink the fleet to only three-quarters of what the Marine Corps says is its absolute minimum requirement for lift.

What that means in practical terms is that some places, like the Chinese littoral or the Persian Gulf or the Levant, might not have Marine forces afloat nearby when an unexpected crisis arises.

That is an unacceptable outcome for the military service traditionally viewed as America’s 911 force—the first responders who arrive at an emergency in time to prevent it from getting out of control.

Key players on Capitol Hill have repeatedly signaled that they will not allow such an outcome to occur. Last year, Congress passed legislation requiring that “not less than 31 operational amphibious warfare ships” be in the active fleet, and that at least ten of those vessels must be assault ships—small aircraft carriers—bigger than the LPDs.

One implication of that language is that the remaining 21 amphibs probably would be LPDs, since the aged warships they are being built to replace must soon exit the fleet.

However, at present only 12 LPDs have been built and three more are under construction, so the Navy needs to continue funding construction of an LPD every other year.

The 2024 budget request doesn’t do that. It cancels a ship planned for funding in 2025 and provides no further funding in later years. As for the larger assault ships, it foresees a grand total of one being built for the rest of the decade, when in fact a new vessel needs to be funded every four or five years to sustain the size of the current amphibious fleet.

To put it bluntly, the 2024 plan would begin dismantling the amphibious fleet, and with it the role of the Marine Corps in responding to crises around the world.

The Corps had a plan for buying smaller, “medium” amphibs potentially useful near China, but that too has been delayed.

It would be hard to formulate a plan more at variance with congressional intent unless Pentagon planners proposed making the Marine Corps part of the Coast Guard.

But there’s more: Congress mandated last year that the Commandant of the Marine Corps “shall be specifically responsible for developing the requirements relating to amphibious warfare ships,” and that the Commandant should be consulted on all major decisions concerning the amphibious force structure.

Obviously, the Pentagon is not planning to comply with that part of the law either. General David Berger, the Commandant, has made it clear he disagrees with the plan to stop building LPDs and stretch out construction of larger assault ships.

It isn’t apparent that the Commandant will even be invited to participate in the study of alternatives to the San Antonio class of warships.

So who is responsible for this egregious violation of congressional intent and common sense? Certainly not General Berger, nor the leadership of the Navy. The impetus for derailing modernization of the amphibious fleet comes from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, specifically Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks.

If and when Secretary Hicks testifies on her amphibious vision during this year’s round of budget hearings, the questioning will likely be quite intense. A number of members on the relevant committees are exercised about her plan, and the economic harm that will inevitably befall their states.

It isn’t common for the defense department to simply ignore the law when making plans, but that seems to be where we are.

Several companies that build and equip amphibious warships contribute to my think tank.