Strengthening the US Navy: Can America Unite and Rally for the Cause?

By James Holmes, Warrior Contributor, Navy

The Case for a Bigger Navy: How Do You Make It?

I’m not sure you can. Not under current circumstances, anyway. The threat to shipping seems amorphous, abstract, and remote to your average Everyman on the street. Why, he would ask, should we sluice more taxpayer dollars into shipbuilding accounts to meet it?

And yet my friend’s question is a sound one. Commerce represents both the purpose and the engine of maritime strategy, and maritime strategy is the natural choice for a seafaring republic like the United States. 

Commerce is the purpose because trading societies want to enrich themselves, and overseas trade charts a sure route to prosperity. That being the case, wise practitioners of statecraft enact laws and policies that nurture mercantile pursuits in important trading regions. The government harvests revenue from trade that it can invest in a navy to protect merchantmen hauling goods from port to port.

That’s how commerce acts as the engine of maritime strategy: it produces the wherewithal to fund its own guardian. Setting the virtuous cycle between commerce and the navy in motion and keeping it churning forever ranks among the foremost tasks for the leadership of a maritime society.

Sea-service grandees get that. A standard U.S. Navy talking point holds that 90 percent of global trade travels by sea. (The percentage varies depending on whether you’re talking about the bulk or the value of trade goods, but either way it’s a hefty percentage.) 

Safeguarding nautical thoroughfares is thus a national interest commanding the utmost importance. And yet the talking point always seems to fall flat with lay audiences. It has generated no groundswell of popular support for shipbuilding, at any rate.

Why is that?