Читать книгу Seablindness - Seth Cropsey - Страница 9

CHAPTER I

WHAT IS A HOLLOW MILITARY?

Mao Zedong dismissed the United States as zhilaohu, a paper tiger. All imperialist states, he said, were weak because of their appetite to enlarge. Their militaries looked strong, he admitted, but overextension had gutted them. Mao’s description missed the mark. Overextension did not tax the United States or its allies. America’s economic and military strength allowed its resolute policy to win the Cold War. The system of purges that strove for ideological purity and of an absolute embrace of a centrally controlled economy died with Mao. It was replaced by one that, while still authoritarian, repressive, and ruled by a single party, encouraged the Chinese people’s enterprising character.

A couple of decades after Mao’s “paper tiger” expression became common usage, Army Chief of Staff General Edward “Shy” Meyer coined another phrase along parallel lines, “hollow army.” A troubled economy helped created the vacant space at the core of U.S. forces. After President Nixon ordered and then gradually lifted wage and price controls in the early 1970s, and following the Federal Reserve’s historically low interest rates, companies sought to make up for lost earnings. Inflation began to rise.

At this point, the administration replaced conscription with the all-volunteer force (AVF). Military salaries couldn’t keep pace with inflation rates, which ballooned from nearly 9 percent in 1973, the year that the AVF began, to 14 percent in 1980, the year that President Carter lost his campaign for reelection. Sailors who helped launch and recover planes aboard aircraft carriers earned less than hamburger flippers at McDonald’s. Among some of the youngest enlisted personnel, salaries fell below the federal government’s poverty level,¹ which made the military less attractive to new recruits and more likely to lose qualified people, along with their experience and skills.

In 1979, the Navy reported that it had 20,000 fewer petty officers than it needed.² The Army missed its recruitment goal by 15,000 soldiers.³ In that year, six out of the ten Army divisions on U.S. soil were deemed “not combat ready.” This was troubling because the burden of stopping and reversing a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe rested on the ability of U.S. forces to return to the continent and fight. If the U.S. Army’s predicament at home wasn’t sufficiently alarming, in Europe itself, one out of four U.S. combat divisions were rated as “not combat ready.”

The military responded by filling the ranks with large numbers of the unqualified. As the 1970s drew to a close, fresh recruits caused enough disciplinary problems or proved so unqualified that 40 percent of them had to be fired. Combat unreadiness was central to the military’s hollowness. General Frederick Kroesen, who had commanded U.S. troops in World War II and risen to become commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, described the U.S. Army in Europe as “obsolescent.”⁴

What the military calls “modernization,” the replacement of old equipment with new and more technologically advanced hardware, added to the hollowing effect of the 1970s. A chart of money spent on procurement since 1948 looks like jagged wide-angle pictures of Wyoming’s Grand Teton Mountains: sharp peaks divided by deep precipices. The summits occur during the Korean conflict, the Vietnam War, the Reagan buildup, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. As the defense budget started to climb out of the trough that followed the end of the Vietnam War, Defense Department leaders wanted to replace antiquated weapons with new technologically superior ones.

The bottom of the post–Vietnam War dip in weapons procurement occurred in 1977 and 1978. New systems such as the Navy’s Aegis radar—which integrates a ship’s tracking and fire control systems—had been developed to replace twenty-five-year-old technology. The Defense Department started purchasing these and other systems, such as the Air Force’s F-15 fighter and the Army’s Apache attack helicopters, to modernize the entire military.

But there was a cost. Defense budgets couldn’t pay for both modernization and readiness. Fuel, flight hours, spare parts—all part of the large amount of logistics needed for training—are some examples of what’s required to keep a military force ready to fight.

The same logic applies in other competitive human activities. If an aspiring Olympic downhill skier can’t find financial support for training, lodging, food, and transportation—in addition to equipment—the athlete will lack the necessaries to hone his competitive skill.

Insufficient resources for readiness compounded the problem of attracting the high-quality personnel who are needed to operate more technologically advanced equipment and magnified the weakness that Army Chief of Staff General Meyer described as a hollow military.

Fundamental differences between the Navy’s idea of its role in protecting the nation and basic security assumptions of the Nixon and Carter administrations cannot be separated from the especially acute readiness problems that U.S. seapower faced. The Navy saw its mission as responding to crises around the world, while the White House, throughout the 1970s, concentrated on shoring up the central front in Europe against the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. Naval leadership would align its strategy later, but at the time the Navy had yet to articulate a strategic idea that fit administration policy.⁵ An official from the Carter administration’s Office of Management and Budget told the Navy “to get its act together.”

Then events intervened. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the failure of the Carter administration’s attempt to rescue American hostages held in Tehran, the hollow force’s emergence as an issue in the 1980 presidential campaign, and Republican president nominee Ronald Reagan’s arguments that peace depended on strength occurred in less than a year. These events prepared a solid base for popular support of large increases in defense spending. The defense budget measured 5.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1979. Seven years later it had climbed by over a fifth to 6.8 percent of GDP.⁶ In constant (2015) dollars, defense spending during the same period rose from slightly over $400 billion to slightly over $600 billion annually.⁷ The hollow force disappeared.

But not before the new administration learned the scope of naval unpreparedness. When John Lehman became secretary of the Navy at the beginning of the first Reagan term, he found that the Navy had “less than a week’s supply of most major defensive missiles and torpedoes.”⁸ The magazines of the fleet’s 479 ships were incomplete, and the shelves of logistics dumps were not full enough to replenish them. The media reported that $9 billion was needed to buy enough ammunition to reach authorized levels.⁹

Spare parts for ships and aircraft were one-third of the amount required. Such critical aircraft as the anti-submarine carrier-based S-3 Viking were so poorly supplied with spare parts that only three out of ten were capable of performing their missions.¹⁰ The Navy was so short on reserve aircraft that if they were used to fill gaps in the service’s twelve existing air wings—one wing per carrier—there were enough planes for only nine carriers.¹¹ Insufficient funding was responsible for a backlog of twenty-six ships awaiting overhaul. The new Navy secretary reported that maintenance had been put off at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center’s gym for so long that the building “collapsed flat on the ground in 1981.”¹²

A similar hollowing affected the Navy’s fleet size. Measured in displacement, the U.S. Navy possessed more tonnage—3.5 times as much—in every category of combatant than the Soviets in the mid-1960s. Then, the U.S. Navy decommissioned aging World War II ships, and the Soviet fleet increased modestly. By the mid-1970s, absent resources to preserve the U.S. lead, the Soviets had caught up sufficiently so that its surface and submarine fleets, excluding the immense U.S. lead in aircraft carriers, out-displaced that of the United States.¹³

Displacement comparisons don’t tell the whole story. At the height of the hollow force of the 1970s, about 1978, the Soviet fleet consisted of 446 surface combatants to the United States’s 217. The advantage that the United States enjoyed in aircraft carriers, twenty-one to three, could never compensate for a numerically superior surface fleet’s ability to cover key global choke points, maintain presence, conduct convoy operations, deny access, or challenge denied access.

Other comparisons give a better picture. Ship-days measure the amount of time a single naval ship spends on patrol out of its home waters. Fewer ships mean fewer possible ship-days. In 1965, Soviet ship-days in the Caribbean and Mediterranean Seas as well as in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans numbered 7,500. For the same places and in the same year, the United States recorded almost 110,000 ship-days. Nine years later, U.S. ship-days had dropped to 61,300. Soviet ship-days had increased to 53,100.¹⁴

In other words, just as the Navy needed to modernize a fleet that was being decimated because of age, the Johnson administration was shifting defense budgets away from military hardware needed in the future and spending money on current operations in Vietnam. Its pre–Vietnam War level of shipbuilding funds was halved throughout the war.

The prospect of a hollow military has returned. Beginning with Leon Panetta, President Obama’s first secretary of Defense, all three secretaries of Defense of the Obama administration pointed out this possibility. A few months after taking office, Panetta, responding to the administration’s plan to decrease defense spending by $350 billion over ten years, said that additional cuts “would have devastating effects” on the Defense and State departments. As the Obama administration ended, those cuts totaled at least three times as much. Panetta added that going beyond the proposed $350 billion reduction would “result in hollowing out the force,” and “weaken our ability to respond to the threats in the world.”¹⁵

Robert Gates followed Leon Panetta as secretary of Defense. As he was preparing to leave office, Gates told the graduating class at Notre Dame in May 2011 that an adequately funded U.S. military “cannot be taken for granted.” Specifically, he said, “our military credibility, commitment and presence are required to sustain alliances, to protect trade routes and energy supplies, and to deter would-be adversaries.” Gates warned that across-the-board spending cuts—like sequestration—such as those that followed the Vietnam War and the Cold War, would hollow out the military.¹⁶

After Gates left office, he spoke more candidly. About sequestration, he told CBS that “there may be a stupider way to do things, but I can’t figure out what it is. . . . The result is a hollow military and we will pay for it in the same way we paid for it every time we have done this in the past. And that is, in the next conflict, and there will be a next conflict, with the blood of our soldiers.”¹⁷

Until now, the current form of U.S. military hollowness has been a matter of will rather than of financial embarrassment. The U.S. military as a whole replicates the deficiencies of American seapower that were sketched earlier. Hobbled by budget-induced problems of readiness, maintenance, operational capacity, and an inability to modernize, the military is hard-pressed to carry out the national military strategy of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Where two Army corps were once stationed in Europe, the United States today maintains two permanent brigades, with a rotating armored brigade to be added in 2017.¹⁸ One corps is made of two divisions and includes between 40,000 and 100,000 troops. One brigade is made up of between 3,000 and 5,000 troops. The Army reports that only twenty of its sixty brigades—with members from active duty, reserves, and the National Guard—are combat ready, eleven of which are committed to ongoing missions.¹⁹ Russian forces in the regions that abut Eastern Europe are at least twenty times the size of U.S. ground forces. They are equipped with modern and effective weapons, both offensive and defensive.

The Air Force chief of staff, General David L. Goldfein, told Congress in 2016 that, contrary to the nation’s military strategy, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) is not fully prepared to handle more than one of the required two major regional contingencies.²⁰ The United States has been shrinking the size and, by failing sufficiently to modernize, the capability of its entire armed forces as our potential adversaries grow in numbers and combat ability.

These facts inclined the Obama administration’s third secretary of Defense, former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, to share his immediate predecessors’ views. His experience in the Vietnam War as an Army infantry soldier also contributed to his understanding. He spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in July 2013 on the sixtieth anniversary of the armistice that ended the hostilities of the Korean War: “Many of you—especially those veterans of the Korean War—have seen the costs, measured in precious American lives, that come with sending a hollow force into battle. We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past.”²¹

Hagel meant that we should not repeat the mistakes of the past. We did.

IT’S AN OLD STORY

History warns of the consequences. The falls of the Dutch and English from their positions as great seapowers and great powers are commonly cited. The eclipse of Spanish naval power was more dramatic. It shows how seapower is linked to superpower status and how quickly—and simultaneously—both can unravel.

The Spanish Empire of the sixteenth century was so extensive that a priest, Fray Francisco de Ugalde, earned a small place in history when he told his sovereign, Charles I, that Spain had become “el imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol,” the empire on which the sun never sets. The Spanish Empire extended from its northern and southern European possessions, including the Kingdom of Naples, to the Atlantic islands, widely separated African outposts, and millions of square miles in the Americas. Charles’s son, Philip II, solidified and expanded Spain’s imperial holdings in the islands named for him, the Philippines.

But reach exceeded grasp. Empires must be held together, and only ships could link such large and glittering imperial jewels with the crown in Madrid. Alfred Thayer Mahan writes in The Influence of Sea Power upon History, “Spain . . . afforded an impressive lesson of the weakness caused by . . . separation when the parts are not knit together by a strong sea power.”²²

Key to the collapse of Spain’s maritime dominance was the disastrous Spanish Armada of 1588. The “Invincible” Armada was ill-prepared and poorly equipped. Built amid consistent royal bankruptcies and a treasury stretched thin by Spanish struggles in the Netherlands, the Armada that sailed for England was short on leadership, training, and tactics. Notwithstanding advances in naval weaponry that improved the range and accuracy of its guns, the Spanish navy’s doctrine required Spanish ships to travel in tight formation.

The Armada, weighed down by its lumbering troop transports, proceeded very slowly and was at a serious disadvantage to England’s swifter and more maneuverable warships.²³ In the event, this mattered little. Only six Spanish ships of the 129-vessel invasion force were destroyed as a direct result of naval combat. Dirty weather favored the English. So did the fighting spirit of England’s indomitable queen. Elizabeth I told her forces, assembled at Til-bury to quash a possible Spanish march up the Thames, that “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king—and of a king of England too.”

At least fifty ships were lost during the North Atlantic storms that decimated the fleet as it attempted to return to Spain past Ireland’s west coast. More than 13,500 sailors and soldiers died, not from English cannon fire, but as the result of insufficient supplies, disease, and deficient leadership—a hollow military if ever there were one. Had Spain’s 27,000-strong invasion force reached England, the survival of Elizabeth’s Protestant realm would have been at serious risk.²⁴

While the riches of the Western Hemisphere still flowed across the Atlantic, the Spanish treasury was pushed time and again to its breaking point. The debt of the Spanish Empire had become crippling. The royal bankruptcies of 1596, 1607, 1627, and 1645 weighed heavily on a nation engaged in land campaigns against England, France, and various opponents in the melee of the Thirty Years’ War.²⁵ Spain’s attachment to the Mediterranean tactics of boarding enemy galleys blinkered its high command to the lessons of firepower and maneuverability. The English understood these tactics and applied them on the high seas. The distraction of continental warfare left Madrid seablind.

The Council of Finance’s reluctant and consistently slow financial support to the Junta de Armadas, a royal advisory group with directive powers over the navy, resulted in a naval force that experienced sharp rises and declines in size and capability. As do his successors the world over, Martin de Aróztegui, the secretary of the Spanish navy, argued that the consistent provision of money was the “principal foundation” of naval preparations, and without proper funding nothing could be accomplished.²⁶ David Goodman writes in his analysis of the decline of Spanish naval power that every aspect of Spain’s naval planning and preparation was subject to delay and collapse owing to insufficient funding. It is rare to encounter documents, he writes, that are free from warnings of serious consequences if funds were not forthcoming.²⁷

By 1663, the Spanish treasury had become so strained that the president of finance, Juan de Góngora, announced that he had not one real to give to the fleet.²⁸ The Junta de Armadas warned that the fleet was being left with “only the bones and scraps” and, shortly after Philip IV’s death, announced it had no funds, only debts.²⁹ The term “hollow force” did not exist at the time, but Spain’s was a hollow force caused by the twin enemies of a robust one: strategic distraction in the form of land wars and accompanying impoverishment.

The Council of War and the Junta de Armadas had failed to establish a fleet that could answer imperial commitments, a goal they struggled to achieve for almost half a century. Spain never recovered from the rout of its great Armada. While there were limited successes in the early seventeenth century, Spain’s navy had begun a decline from which neither it nor the state recovered. In less than a century, Spanish seapower descended from the top drawer to a third-rate force. So low had Spanish naval power fallen that, by the late seventeenth century, the Spanish coast was navigated by a few Dutch ships and seamen hired by the Spanish. Shipping from the Indies to Spain could be conducted easily by Dutch shipping in peacetime but was easily interrupted in time of war.³⁰ Spain maintained skeletal parts of its former global power, holding lands and influence in the Americas until the early nineteenth century. But seapower hollowed by penuriousness withered the muscle and rotted the empire’s connective tissue.

FROM GALLEONS TO GUIDED MISSILE CRUISERS

The initial signs of a hollow U.S. naval force existed long before sequestration. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan redirected U.S. military spending priorities throughout the 2000s, just as the Vietnam War had affected subsequent military budgets and resulted in a hollow force. The United States’s post–Cold War military drawdown shrank the Navy from its 594-ship high to 316 ships by September 2001.³¹ Combat operations from then on shifted funding away from the Navy and Marine Corps. U.S. ship numbers steadily declined during the Iraq War as the Navy pared its surface warship fleet down from 127 to 118, cut its submarine fleet by four boats, and trimmed its amphibious fleet from 41 to 33 ships.³² Force cuts alone might not create a hollow navy, but, combined with the concept of “transformation” and the financial squeezes of the Iraq and Afghan wars, these force cuts indicate that this is exactly what happened.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and much of the U.S. national security establishment championed the idea of force transformation.³³ This harkened back to the “military revolution” of the early modern period, when the combination of gunpowder technology, massed infantry tactics, and improved logistics transformed how wars were fought. The 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review defined transformation as the result of “the exploitation of new approaches to operational concepts and capabilities, the use of old and new technologies, and new forms of organization that more effectively anticipate new or still emerging strategic and operational challenges and opportunities and that render previous methods of conducting war obsolete.”³⁴ President Bush expanded on this concept, stating that the force should be “defined less by size and more by mobility and swiftness, one that is easier to deploy and sustain, one that relies more heavily on stealth, precision weaponry, and information technologies.”³⁵ This force would “redefine war on our terms.”³⁶

Proponents of transformation argued that the overwhelming victory of the United States in the First Gulf War was due to the nation’s major technological edge over its adversary. Precision-guided missiles and bombs, along with stealth aircraft and immediate air supremacy, ensured America’s victory over Saddam Hussein’s million-man army. By combining these advanced technologies with the power of computer networks, U.S. force planners hoped to create a better-informed, more advanced military that could apply precise force at any location on the planet. Maintaining this technological advantage was therefore the key to preserving American military dominance and deterring future threats to U.S. power. By revolutionizing warfare, the United States could ensure its dominance for decades to come.

Asymmetric conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan only encouraged these ideas. In urban operating spaces crowded with noncombatants, minimizing collateral damage was, and remains, a crucial U.S. military objective. “Smart weapons” were meant to achieve this objective.

Transformation affected every service. While the F-22 and F-35 tactical aircraft are the most public demonstrations of the approach, the strategy had the greatest impact on the Navy, since fleet construction takes place over decades, not months or years. Transformation called for placing experimental technologies on platforms under construction in order to get ahead of America’s adversaries, much as the innovative Royal Navy Admiral Jacky Fisher did when constructing the HMS Dreadnought.

Two important examples are the Gerald R. Ford–class supercarrier and the Zumwalt-class destroyer. The Ford-class substitutes a highly efficient electromagnetic catapult for the old steam-powered ones. The new ship’s reactors generate over three times more power than its Nimitz-class predecessors, allowing it to use directed energy weapons.³⁷ The Zumwalt-class was designed as the nation’s first stealth fighting ship and can fire a guided land-attack 5-inch shell.³⁸

None of this was cheap. Both projects have seen major cost overruns: the Ford-class is $2.3 billion over its projected cost,³⁹ while the three ships of the Zumwalt-class are expected to cost nearly $12.8 billion, a result partly caused by greatly reducing the number of ships purchased.⁴⁰ Such overruns also delayed the delivery date of the new ships.

President Bush’s defense budgets accelerated the hollowing out of American seapower. The Bush administration’s critics still fault the former president for his high defense expenditures, arguing that the economic costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan outweigh strategic benefits. Bush’s supposedly bloated defense budgets, his critics argue, undermined American prosperity and stability while giving the military too much power in setting foreign policy.

This view of Bush-era defense spending misses the most important issue. President Bush came into office promising a $1.35 trillion tax cut. A modest defense budget would be only part of a broader policy to shrink the U.S. government and keep debt under control. Bush inherited the advantage of the Clinton-Gingrich revenue surplus from 1997 to 2001.⁴¹ Executing the president’s transformation vision would require subordinating operational and manpower budgets to high-tech advances in network warfare. The military services as a whole resisted such efforts, emphasizing already low operational budgets.⁴²

The September 11th attacks forced the new administration to act quickly and decisively. The military was shifted to a war footing as the administration poured funds into operational budgets, particularly for the Army and Air Force. The Navy proved its worth as a rapid reaction force: carrier-based aircraft flew three-quarters of the strike missions in the opening phases of the Afghan War.⁴³ However, the service was encouraged to act as a support element for ground troops rather than as a global force with an international role and strategy. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vern Clark’s Fleet Response Plan reconfigured the Navy for this role. The service was now redesigned to “surge” when needed, leaving unnecessary ships in port to decrease operational costs.⁴⁴

The Navy was caught in a bind. Expensive transformation projects continued, but the service was required to maintain a high operational tempo to support engaged ground forces. An evaluation of the Bush administration’s defense budgets purely by the numbers thus yields a skewed picture. Despite high defense budgets, the Navy was hollowed out during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

President Obama’s cuts simply continued to squeeze the Navy. Sequestration—explained in full in chapter 8—extended the hollowing process by further reducing funding. Since the Navy’s global missions have remained static, the sea service has been forced to choose between funding current operations and long-term procurement. As a result, operational efficacy, future development, and personnel funding have suffered.

Force hollowness has had a material effect on the Navy. The major projects of the past decade—the Zumwalt-class destroyer and Ford-class carrier—are good demonstrations. Initial plans for construction of thirty-two Zumwalt-class destroyers were slashed to three.⁴⁵ This has had a major impact on available weapons systems. Weapons like the Navy’s guided land-attack 5-inch shell—a rocket-assisted round with a range of 100 miles, fired by a standard 5-inch naval gun—are no longer viable because of the project’s high cost compared to its volume of output.⁴⁶

The Ford-class has been plagued by delays to its new technological systems. To keep the Navy at the congressionally mandated eleven-carrier minimum, the service commissioned the Gerald R. Ford while retiring the Enterprise, even though the Ford is not combat ready.

The littoral combat ship (LCS) project has also experienced major cuts. A December 2015 memo from the secretary of Defense ordered the Navy to cut its LCS procurement from fifty-two to forty ships. This reduction is significant: after much wrangling over its initial design, which was deemed insufficiently defensible, the LCS’s firepower was increased with the expectation that it would become the Navy’s future frigate.⁴⁷ Questions about the LCS’s lethality in combat remain. However, there is no doubt that frigates are indispensable to commanding the sea in such strategic places as the South China Sea.

Force hollowness is also evident in the Navy’s tactical fighter fleet. The F-35 project is unhappily famous for its cost overruns and major delays. Slated for initial operational capability in 2006, the F-35 was not fielded until 2016, and even then in limited numbers. The project is over $160 billion above its initial budget projections.⁴⁸ Concurrently, the Navy’s fighter fleet of F/A-18 Hornets, Super Hornets, and Growlers is degrading over time: the service must rely on airframes from the Cold War.

When discussing the Navy’s difficulties during the post–Vietnam War drawdown, Admiral Thomas Hayward, the twenty-first chief of naval operations, said:

The Admirals back in Washington had so many pressures on them, so many diversions, they forgot their primary job is to make sure that the fleet is ready to go with highly trained and motivated sailors. The problem particularly manifests itself when the budget is way down.⁴⁹

Just as after the Vietnam War, morale and motivation in today’s fleet has significantly declined. A combination of high operational tempo and poor funding has created force hollowness among personnel, a phenomenon even more dangerous than material hollowness.

Officer retention rates are telling. The junior officer corps combines technical knowledge with command authority, overseeing specialized warrant and petty officers in their various subspecialties. Not only is the junior officer corps the future of the service but its morale and quality are also an immediate concern for the Navy’s combat efficacy. The Navy commissioned a study in 2013 that discovered startlingly low retention rates for its junior officer corps throughout the service. Naval aviation had a retention rate of 36 percent, far below the 45 percent minimum acceptable threshold. Electronic warfare officers and strike fighter pilots were the hardest hit by the shortfall.⁵⁰

The surface warfare community had an even lower retention rate of 35 percent.⁵¹ Junior surface warfare officers have begun leaving the service after their first shore tour. Junior officers who leave the service are meaningful indicators of force hollowness and morale issues. Unlike senior officers, who have spent two decades or more in uniform and have earned retirement options, junior officers choose to exit the Navy after nearly a decade, but with no retirement benefits. They see better opportunities outside of the military, despite the lack of financial compensation on retirement. Post-command retention has also declined. From 2010 to 2012, the number of naval aviators who retired after their first command assignment jumped from seven to twenty.⁵² A study of twenty-five executive officer prospects revealed that 70 percent were preparing to transition out of the military.

Just as hard ship numbers can mask material force hollowness, so retention numbers can mask human force hollowness. Despite the issues noted above, the Navy has been able to fill all its billets in each of its subspecialties. However, as officers with extensive operational experience in Iraq and Afghanistan retire, the Navy will begin to lose its most experienced leaders. This is likely to produce a negative effect on the junior officer corps, which is likely to influence the enlisted ranks.

A combination of low funding, long deployments, decreasing commitment to overseas conflicts, and increasingly competitive pay as the private sector returns to life are leaching top talent away from the Navy. When this talent drain is associated with an aging fleet and a Navy that lacks the funding to operate enough modern combatants, the signs of force hollowness are evident.

Pundits and politicians frequently remind Americans that the United States has the largest and best military the world has ever seen. No other nation fields eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, can deploy a division anywhere in the world in a matter of days, and can maintain a constant strategic deterrence.

However, America’s multiplying adversaries can see the signs of force hollowness. Just as Spain, Holland, and England did, America will face increasing challenges to its maritime power. A hollow military increases the risk of folding under this pressure, catching fire like a paper tiger at the light of a match.