Top Navy Officials Brief at Pentagon

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael M. Gilday speaks at a Pentagon press briefing, Washington, D.C., April 2, 2020. (DoD photo by Lisa Ferdinando)

SEA AIR SPACE 2022: Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday argued today that the Navy needs to “keep it real” in terms of the number of ships it seeks to add to the fleet, arguing capability trumps capacity.

His remarks at the Navy League’s annual Sea Air Space exposition come just one week after the Pentagon published the Navy’s new budget request that seeks to add only eight new warships, and separately decommission 24 vessels, some of which are not even two years old yet.

“We need a ready, capable, lethal force more than we need a bigger force, less ready, less lethal and less capable,” the Navy’s top officer said. “We’ve had to make some very difficult decisions about divesting of some platforms. It’s more than just a numbers game. It’s a capabilities and a numbers game about fielding a combat credible force that can deter.”

The message is likely to be key to the Navy’s narrative this spring as service leadership defend its fiscal 2023 budget request to lawmakers who are keen to see the fleet reach its 355-ship goal, some of whom have been vocal about what they say are costly naval missteps.

The service chief acknowledged the conscious choice to build less ships is “not popular” with folks in the room — many of whom were industry shipbuilders — or on Capitol Hill. “But I believe it is the responsible path,” he added.

In defending the service’s strategy, Gilday also took a dig at Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“If we want to talk just about capability and you want a force that can — that’s ineffective, take a look at the 125 BTGs in Vladimir Putin’s position around Ukraine,” he said. “That’s not the force that any of us want.”

A BTG, or battalion tactical group, is a unit in the Russian military consisting of approximately 800 personnel.

Gilday’s remarks are not wholly unexpected. Under the Trump administration, the Navy began to embrace the White House’s push for 355-ship goal, if only in principle, laying out a vision for a future fleet buoyed mostly by destroyers. If that fleet was funded as the Navy laid out, it would have achieved 355 ships in the 2030s.

But even during that administration, then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson would make similar arguments to Gilday’s about capability compared to capacity when trying to satisfy lawmakers’ incessant complaints that the fleet would not reach 355 fast enough.

With Congress and the White House having shifted to Democratic-control, at least until the mid-term elections, there has been an acknowledgement in the Pentagon wholesale that it cannot expect the budgets necessary to build the massive fleet that some on Capitol Hill desire.