The Navy does too much with too little for too long
One curse of an all-volunteer military, like that fielded by the United States in far-flung regions of the world, is the out-of-sight-out-of-mind chasm between the broad American public and the few who stand in harm’s way.
With maybe 1% of the public related to someone in uniform — a far tinier fraction than existed during great periods of conflict in the past — most Americans have no clue when military systems start to break down until sailors start dying in sea-lane collisions or soldiers commit suicide in ever larger numbers.
So it was a shock that 10 sailors were lost when the USS John S. McCain collided with a tanker ship near Singapore on Sunday, just two months after another destroyer, the USS Fitzgerald, lost seven sailors in a flooded berthing compartment after an accidental ramming by a container vessel. The events were the latest of four Navy accidents in the western Pacific this year.
One such accident can be a fluke. Four incidents are a warning flare that something is seriously amiss.
The Navy is looking into whether bedrock issues of training, leadership and deployment are to blame. The commander of the 7th Fleet, Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, was relieved of command. But there’s already ample evidence that the Navy has been
doing too much with too little for too long, much as the Army and other service branches have done fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
After the Cold War ended, the U.S. military reduced ranks. Navy ship numbers fell from 400-plus in the early 1990s to 274 today. But America wasn’t done with war. The twin conflicts that followed 9/11 lasted far longer than expected, and the U.S. military pushed its people to keep pace.
The 7th Fleet, based in Japan, has been run ragged. It operates in a high-tension area where China’s navy is challenging naviga- tional rights and North Korea is threatening war.
Government Accountability Office studies detail what happens in a Navy under stress: Daily mechanical breakdowns for overseas fleets such as the 7th doubled in five years. Sailors spend more time at sea and work more than 100 hours a week, leaving little time for sleep. Training is conducted “on the margins.” Ships arrive late for maintenance with more problems and take longer to fix.
Americans have seen this movie before, and it doesn’t end well. As land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grew longer, the Army kept cycling soldiers back into combat. Amid the repeated deployments, the number of soldiers suffering physical and mental health problems skyrocketed, families fractured, and suicide rates doubled.
“We’re an Army that’s in uncharted territory here,” Gen. Peter Chiarelli, then the Army vice chief of staff, said in 2011.
The Army was well into those waters before realizing it was trouble. The Navy seems to be nearing similarly treacherous shoals.
One of the best ways to honor the fallen sailors is to ensure that the tragedies of the USS Fitzgerald and the USS McCain serve as beacons for guiding the Navy out of trouble.