CSBA in the News

According to the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, China has “by far the largest military, coastguard, and maritime militia presence in the region — they are deploying strong surveillance, anti-air, anti-shipping, and strike forces onto the artificial islands they occupy — and they are actively intimidating other parties in the area”. Report author and former senior Australian Defence Department official Ross Babbage argues the Federal Government must take stronger action in response. “Our northern approaches are becoming much more questionable,” Professor Babbage told the ABC. “Ever since the Second World War we’ve assumed the United States and its close allies have really dominated the maritime environment — I’m afraid that’s really no longer the case.”

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced the results of a much-awaited internal review of fleet size known as a “Force Structure Assessment. It appears that the Navy is setting its sails to the winds of renewed great power competition. The assessment states a requirement of 355 ships that Mabus declares must “continue to protect America and defend our strategic interests around the world, all while continuing the counter terrorism fight and appropriately competing with a growing China and resurgent Russia….”

Enunciated in 2014, the navy’s officially stated goal [5] is 308 hulls. Three independent “fleet architecture [6]” studies are revisiting that number, however. The Navy Staff [7], the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments [8], and the Mitre Corporation [9] are surveying the strategic environment—the rise of China’s navy, an increasingly troublesome Russia, and on and on—and gauging how large a fleet it takes to handle such challenges.

Many analysts outside of government have also converged on about 350 ships. “Independent analyses have been calling for a fleet of roughly that size for some time, to include the 2010 QDR Independent Panel, as well as CSBA’s recent alternative fleet architecture study,” said Tom Mahnken, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analyses, which Congress commissioned to do an (as yet unpublished) force structure assessment. 

“When you’re the CEO of a corporation, your job is to advance the interest of the corporation and the shareholder,” said Eric Edelman, a former ambassador who also held posts in the defense and state departments, “and that might not be your same view when you are representing the United States.”