Hope isn’t a plan, but for those responsible for getting our Navy ahead of the PLAN bow wave surging through the 2020s, that seems to be their primary line of operation.

As outlined in Brent Sadler’s latest over at Defense One;

…the administration is doubling down on its bet that conflict will wait until sometime in the distant future. Yet all indications are that conflict is a scant few years away. Certainly that was the testimony of the current and last Indo-Pacific Commanders to the Senate Armed Services Committee this March.

If you want to see how that bet is manifesting itself, look no further than personnel;

The budget also inexplicably cuts sailors, reducing manpower by 1,600 even though the end-strength must grow by 27,712 to man the 355-ship fleet. Yet, the same week the administration proposed these cuts, the Government Accountability Office reported that persistent crew manning shortfalls—as high as 15 percent on some ships—was producing widespread crew fatigue. Fatigue was a contributing factor to two fatal collisions in 2017.

 

At a time when inflation is surging above four percent, the administration proposes a paltry 2.7 percent pay raise. This would surely compound the difficulty of attracting people to the Navy—especially when you consider that we will need additional sailors to man a larger fleet by 2034.

 

The training budget is also problematic. It prioritizes sexual assault prevention training—a noble effort, but one that has thus far not succeeded in producing the desired results. Moreover, while it boosts the budget for sexual assault prevention and response, or SAPR, by $47 million, it shrinks higher education and entry level programs, such as the Reserve Officer Training Program, by $391 million.

 

And, it misses an opportunity to bring back BOOST—Broadened Opportunity for Officer Selection Training—as recommended in the February 3, 2021, Task Force One Navy report, to improve accession of minority and underserved recruits who want to become naval officers.

Another data point that we have really decided, against the experience of killing 17 Sailors in their racks the summer of 2017, that we want to accept significant risk in insufficient manning and under-trained Sailors.

If people are our #1 asset, we sure have a funny way of showing it.

Pray for peace, because if this is the plan we will not be ready for war if it comes this decade.

Divesting now to invest in 2045 Tomorrowland won’t do you any good if you are swept west of wake in 2025.