Maritime outlook for a decisive U.S. election

On Tuesday, November 5, the United States will once again stake its future for the next four years in the 2024 presidential election. Both candidates, Kamala Harris for the Democratic Party and Donald Trump for the Republican Party, will face a very complicated geopolitical landscape if elected. One of the most important issues that the new Administration will have to face, in light of the growing deterioration of global stability at sea, will be the reconstruction of the maritime power that has sustained Washington for decades as a global superpower - a power that, for some years now, has been progressively degrading. Thus, among other things, Americans will decide who will be their nation's president in a term that will coincide with the window in which many have been arguing for years could be the one chosen by China to invade Taiwan.

Deterioration of the Global Order at Sea

With the end of the Cold War, the navies of the Atlantic Alliance entered a period of relative maritime stability, which led many of them to reduce budgetary investments and to a significant decrease in the naval capabilities of their fleets. The negative consequences of these reductions surfaced in 2014 with the Russian invasion of Crimea (a move that, in large part, responds to Moscow's strategic need for ports with access to warm waters such as Sevastopol, a key strategic enclave for the Soviet navy) and the resulting conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

In recent months, the crisis in the Red Sea resulting from the conflict in Gaza has put the world's Economics at serious risk. Through attacks on international maritime trade transiting the region, the Houthis have managed to divert much of the conflict that transits one of the most important routes today. Specifically, before the attacks began, 53% of the trade between Asia and Europe transited through the Suez Canal, 23% through the Panama Canal, and 23% around the Cape of Good Hope. One year later, these figures have been drastically transformed: traffic in the Suez has dropped to 15%, while in Panama it has risen slightly to 26%, and at the Cape of Good Hope it has soared to 58%.

Faced with such threats, many shipping lines have decided to redirect their vessels to the route around the Cape of Good Hope, a route that involves longer sailing times, and thus higher economic costs. The United States launched Operation Prosperity Guardian in December 2023, which was joined by several other countries deploying warships to escort merchant ships and intercept any anti-ship ballistic missile or unmanned drone attacks. Shortly thereafter, in February 2024, the European Union followed suit by launching operation 'Aspides', in which the participation of France and Italy is being B .

However, neither operation has succeeded in deterring the Houthis in Yemen from stopping their attacks, so their results have been more modest than initially desired. Moreover, despite constituting a threat of relatively leave intensity (the time gap between attacks has been sufficiently wide to allow warships to intercept them effectively), the crisis has highlighted the notorious inability of allied warships to deal with higher intensity threats (such as might be expected, for example, in a hypothetical conflict in Taiwan vis-à-vis China). Many of the warships exhausted their arsenals within a few days and were forced to leave the theater of operations to resupply.

China and the sea

The navy of the People's Liberation Army of China (PLA Navy) entered a new stage of its development with the arrival of Xi Jinping to the presidency of the PRC. Under the auspices of the new leader, and following the path set decades ago by Mao for the reconstruction of China's naval power, the Asian giant has become the largest navy in the world by issue of ships (a factor that, although it should not be considered as decisive, gives an important weight). Its shipbuilding industry has established itself as the leader in the construction of merchant ships, and Chinese state-owned companies control close to 100 ports strategically located around the globe. Both give China a potentially huge strategic advantage in the event of a large-scale conflict, in which maritime communications would be a key element.

For decades, China has been devoting great efforts to building the military (and particularly naval) capabilities that will enable it to establish itself as a major regional power. To this end, in addition to massive investments in its navy, Beijing has also devoted much attention to building the world's largest Coast Guard, as well as contributing to the growth of the so-called maritime militia (a fleet of hundreds of civilian fishing vessels that are employed for military purposes in a coordinated manner) to exert pressure in those regions where China and other neighboring countries have disputes over the control of some islands and atolls. This paramilitary fleet, used assertively against the Philippines, Vietnam or Japan, among others, allows Beijing to pursue its strategic objectives without employing its warships, thus diminishing any possibility of appearing too hostile.

On the other hand, the Chinese navy has spent years training and developing the necessary doctrine to confront the U.S. Navy and its allies, considering the former as the main threat to the achievement of its objectives. In addition to increasing the pace of its deployments and naval exercises, which have been growing in quality and quantity over the last few years, China has built up a coastal defense system (eminently offensive in nature) with which to deny any adversary access to the South China Sea region, and potentially sink 'enemy' ships thanks to missiles such as the Dong Feng-21D (DF-21D), nicknamed the 'Carrier Killer'. The main source of dispute between the two major players is the status and future of Taiwan, something for which, as we have already highlighted in the past, both countries could trigger a conflict with catastrophic global consequences. Among the estimates made by some of the top U.S. military and political leaders, Admiral Davidson's warning a few years ago stands out, which established as the most likely window for an invasion sometime between 2026 and 2029.

NAVPLAN 2024 and the U.S. maritime crisis

At the same time that the strategic status at sea has been deteriorating and China's maritime capabilities have grown exponentially, the status in the United States at the domestic level has experienced an opposite trajectory in certain respects. One of the most significant aspects in this regard is the B advantage China holds over Washington in terms of domestic merchant shipping. The capacity of its merchant marine has been degrading over the past three decades as China has been gaining ground and establishing itself as one of the world's leading countries.

But at the same time, the problems are also significant for its navy. The US Navy has been shrinking over the years, currently standing at close to 300 ships (one of the lowest numbers in many decades). Many of the units in service today are the result of the new wave of classes planned and commissioned during the Reagan Administration years (1980s), such as the destroyers of the class 'Arleigh Burke', the cruisers of the class 'Ticonderoga' or the nuclear-powered submarines of the class 'Seawolf'. Many units of these classes, as well as the aircraft carriers of the class 'Nimitz', have been given away from leave during the last two decades, without immediate replacement. Thus, along with the drastic reduction of units that saw the navy cut in half between 1990 and 1999, it has found itself unable to grow again when the need to do so has come.

This reduction, in part caused by budget reductions, has also been significantly influenced by the deficient status of its military and naval industry. The absence of programs to replace the units built during the last decade of the Cold War, coupled with the emphasis of the peace dividend on redirecting part of the military budget to other areas of greater need, had very negative effects for a shipbuilding industry that lost a significant part of its skilled workforce, and closed several shipyards that until then had been an important element of national shipbuilding. The result of these mistakes has been clearly shown in the successive disasters experienced by the department of Defense with the construction of programs such as the Littoral Combat Ship (Littoral Combat Ship, a platform of smaller size and with greater maneuverability to operate, as its name indicates, in maritime theaters close to the littorals, prepared also as a modular ship),[1] or more recently, the future frigate program class 'Constellation' (whose design, based on the European multi-mission frigates, or FREMM, operated by Italy and France, has been modified to such an extent that it has become a completely different ship, which in turn has generated delays and complications in the construction of several units)[2].

Like the surface fleet, the Navy's submarine fleet is also going through a difficult time (in part, as are many of Europe's navies, including Spain with its S-80 Plus submarine program). As retired Navy Captain Jerry Hendrix recently pointed out, "if any Chinese invasion force is to be defeated, then almost all Western naval strategists and planners are certain that much of the responsibility would fall on submarines." However, the current status of the fleet is far from desired. The aforementioned peace dividends that came at the end of the Cold War also had an impact on the naval industrial base of many countries, including the United States.

The submarine force was reduced by half in a few years, leading in turn to a massive reduction of staff in the shipyards where they were built. In this way, qualified and experienced manpower was lost in the construction of the most modern units, something that, when the time came to launch new programs such as the ballistic missile submarines class Columbia, or the attack submarines class 'Virginia', the shipyards were unable to meet the accumulated demand between new units and those already in service, which required maintenance in the middle of their operational life.

In this context, with several accumulated failures in the construction of new classes of ships, and the need to put in place a new concept of maritime operations to meet the Chinese threat (the Distributed Maritime Operations Concept)[3], in September 2024 the Sailing Plan 2024 was published. Shortly after the one-year anniversary of Admiral Lisa M. Franchetti's appointment as Chief of Naval Operations (the highest military authority in the US Navy, equivalent to the Chief of Staff of the Navy in Spain), the Chief of Naval Operations NAVIGATION PLAN 2024 document has been published, which is customary for US Navy CNOs to publish to provide a vision of the goals being set and ambitions for the Navy. In the case of the 2024 document, the imperative need to transform the current status to meet its Asian antagonist is clearly stated:

"The leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC) has directed his forces to be ready for war in 2027 - we will be more ready. China's challenge to our navy now goes far beyond just the size of its navy [...] China's defense industrial base is operating at wartime tempo, including the world's largest shipbuilding capability now in the hands of the Chinese navy," the document notes in the opening pages.

NAVPLAN makes it clear that preparation for such a hypothetical scenario will be the center of gravity of the U.S. Navy's work going forward. The rather brief document is structured in three sections, "Why the NAVPLAN update ," "How We Fight," and "How We Accelerate." The two strategic ends central to the subsequent definition of ways and means are "preparing for the possibility of war with China by 2027" and "strengthening the Navy's long-term advantage." Both of these are agglomerated in what the plan defines as its "lodestar," around which everything else is articulated: "By 2027, the Navy will be more ready for sustained combat as part of a joint and combined force, prioritizing China as the pace-setting challenger and focusing on enabling an integrated warfighting ecosystem."

In broad strokes, the commissioning of Admiral Franchetti's NAVPLAN 24 brings with it great promise for a navy that is once again seeking to establish its status as a maritime power with real and serious global projection capability. But like the motivation and ambition that characterize project 33, Washington has a big challenge ahead of it that will require large investments to bring it to fruition successfully.

Elections 2024 and the future of the US Navy

Thus, in view of the above, the United States faces one of the most decisive elections in many years regarding its maritime posture and its future as a superpower. In a sense, important parallels emerge with the status they experienced in the early 1930s, after Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected after the Great Depression, and the 1980s, when Donald Reagan was elected president at a time when military tensions with the Soviet Union were reaching a climax.

On both occasions, strengthening the country's maritime posture through a renewed emphasis on protecting its maritime and merchant industry, as well as increasing the capabilities of the navy, were formulas that ensured the nation's continued presence at sea. In the first case, it allowed Washington to be in the right position to be able to build up the navy after the Pearl Harbor disaster and thus face the threat of the Imperial Japanese navy. In the second case, the radical change that the country's naval policy underwent, embodied in the Maritime Strategy published during Reagan's term of office, contributed decisively to the defeat of the Soviet navy, which found itself unable to cope with the rapid and aggressive expansion of its antagonist at sea (as shown in films of the time such as 'Top Gun' or 'The Hunt for Red October').

As a result, U.S. Navy and merchant marine circles are already beginning to assess the path to be followed by whoever enters the White House next January. Retired Navy Captains Jerry Hendrix and Brent Sadler recently stated that "the next Administration, in its first 100 days, will face an urgent problem: the need to rebuild the U.S. Navy to deter China". Among the various items on the to-do list for the nation's next leader, they say, are the configuration of a national security advisory team, defining rebuilding the Navy as one of the central priorities (with all the administrative and legal implications that entails), or a thorough review of the Marine Corps and Navy general officer and admiral corps, examining their capabilities and vision to determine whether they remain on status to serve efficiently in the event the Navy were to face a larger-scale conflict.

At final, the United States stakes much of its international position as a global superpower on the status and capabilities of its maritime and naval projection. As the country's more than three hundred years of history show, on the occasions when its maritime power has been weakened, its position at the international level has been threatened by other actors. Therefore, much of the success or failure of the next administration will depend, to a large extent, on the new president's ability to revive one of the fundamental pillars of U.S. foreign policy, and its main deterrent tool .

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