The Navy’s Plan To Modernize Military Sealift Makes Sense. Congress Needs To Keep It Funded.

The United States has a knack for getting involved in fights far from home. The vast majority of countries, if they go to war at all, do so close to home. Not America.

Fortunately, most of the places Washington chooses to fight can be accessed directly from the sea. That means wartime logistics for the joint force is largely about using ships to get weapons and supplies into war zones.

In fact, about 90% of U.S. combat equipment and supplies in major contingencies typically reaches troops by ship. It isn’t feasible to bring it any other way.

The generic term for such shipping is “sealift.” Without sealift, U.S. forces ashore would be hard-pressed to sustain a war effort for more than a few days.

The task of maintaining an adequate fleet of oceangoing sealift vessels is mainly the responsibility of the Navy’s Military Sealift Command, supported by the Transportation Department’s Maritime Administration.

If the U.S. had a robust merchant marine, this would be an easier task to accomplish—the military could turn to the commercial sector for sealift in an emergency, perhaps providing subsidies to make militarily useful modifications on some of the vessels in commercial trade.

However, the U.S. commercial fleet has steadily dwindled for decades. Less than 200 oceangoing commercial vessels today fly the U.S. flag and are crewed by U.S. merchant mariners. The global fleet is dominated by foreign carriers.

That means the Navy must fund a government-owned sealift fleet that is adequate in size and ready on short notice to move military supplies to foreign shores.

Because this fleet is only called on in wartime, there is a tendency to neglect it in peacetime. Its ships are not counted in the Navy’s inventory of battle force vessels such as destroyers, and they are crewed by civilians rather than sailors.

This presumably explains why the average age of military sealift vessels exceeds 40 years, and readiness levels are chronically below what planners deem acceptable. Some of the ships are so ancient that it is becoming difficult to find civilian mariners who know how to operate them.

The joint force’s stated goal for organic (government-owned) sealift capacity needed during the initial phases of combat is about 15 million square feet of deck space. At present, a third of that capacity consists of “afloat prepositioned” ships stocked with materiel near likely trouble spots. In a crisis, U.S. troops would be flown into such areas and matched up with equipment already afloat nearby.

The other two-thirds of initial sealift capacity, known as “surge” capacity, is located in fleets maintained domestically by the Military Sealift Command and the Maritime Administration.

The portion of the Maritime Administration’s fleet that is prepared to move on short notice is called the Ready Reserve Fleet; it consists of 46 ships, mainly “roll-on/roll-off” vessels that can be loaded by driving military vehicles onboard via a ramp.

All of the sealift vessels, including the afloat prepositioned ships, are commercially operated. Thus it is a hybrid fleet, spread across two different cabinet agencies and crewed not by government personnel but private-sector employees.

Nonetheless, responsibility for having the sealift fleet ready to move in a crisis ultimately lies with the Navy, and whenever there are signs the fleet might not be adequately prepared for war, it is the Navy that Congress blames.

In an effort to address the looming challenges of an aging fleet, the Navy in 2018 proposed a plan to modernize military sealift. It consisted of three parts:

• Service-life extensions for 26 vessels in the Ready Reserve Fleet that still have at least two decades of useful service remaining.
• Acquisition of used foreign commercial vessels for modification as military sealift in the Navy’s organic fleet and the Ready Reserve Fleet.
• Construction of new, purpose-built domestic vessels to begin recapitalization of the prepositioned fleet with a larger number of somewhat smaller ships.

This is not a short-term plan. Conversion of used vessels, which commenced in 2021, would continue through mid-century to keep up with retirements of existing vessels. Construction of seven new, domestically-built prepositioned ships would commence at the rate of one per year in 2028 and continue through 2034—with more needed later.

Members of Congress from shipbuilding states were not enthused with this plan at first, questioning why the vast preponderance of sealift vessels to be acquired would be second-hand ships originally built in foreign yards. The answer, in a nutshell, was that buying used ships would only cost about a tenth of what it would cost to buy new, domestically-built vessels (that according to the Chief of Naval Operations).

While there is something to be said for using sealift funds in maintaining domestic shipbuilding capacity, the cost differential is so pronounced that money would have to be shifted from other shipbuilding accounts to fund a larger complement of new, domestically-produced vessels.

At a time when China is building new warships at a furious pace and the U.S. Navy has not managed to get the size of its own fleet of warships above 300 in two decades, that was a non-starter.

The unfortunate reality is that the United States is not cost-competitive with other countries, particularly Asian ones, in any facet of commercial shipping—not in ship construction, not in ship crewing. U.S.-flagged ships are well-built and well-crewed, complying with demanding safety standards, but that effectively prices the domestic fleet out of international trade unless it is subsidized.

The Maritime Administration does in fact subsidize five dozen U.S.-flag ships in international trade so that they are available for military sealift missions in an emergency, under what is known as the Maritime Security Program.

But those ships comprise most of what’s left of the U.S.-flagged fleet still engaged in overseas trade, and because they are so engaged they would likely not be available during the early weeks of a conflict.

The Maritime Security Program vessels thus are better suited to what is called sustaining sealift rather than surge sealift. The joint force’s full requirement for sealift capacity, including prepositioned, surge and sustaining sealift, is nearly 20 million square feet of deck space.

This is far from being an ideal situation, but Congress shows little inclination to greatly increase funding for the sealift fleet. Simply finding a sufficient population of experienced merchant mariners to crew the vessels the Navy and Maritime Administration already own is becoming a challenge.

So, the Navy’s plan seems to be the best option available for sustaining the 15 million square feet of prompt sealift capacity required by the joint force in a major conflict, and the additional capacity needed if the conflict becomes protracted.

It is not hard to imagine shortfalls in sealift during a longer war, but other facets of the military force structure could prove more problematic if they are made bill-payers for a bigger sealift fleet.

In addition to being a practical solution to a pressing logistical challenge, the Navy’s sealift plan looks to be the least expensive option among the various approaches proposed. It is important for Congress to keep the plan funded, because without adequate sealift, the United States could lose the next overseas war in which it engages.