To Get Tougher on China, Trump Needs U.S. Navy, Which Is Straining

How ships are deployed is a process of negotiation between Navy commanders and senior Defense Department officials, and some officials and observers say the Navy may have been too quick to agree to send ships around the world for exercises and operations to maintain their position as the U.S.’s primary means of projecting force around the world.

“The Navy is predisposed to say ‘yes,’ primarily because they see forward presence as central to their conception of what the Navy provides this nation,” said Robert Work, a retired Marine Corps officer who has served as deputy Defense secretary and Navy undersecretary. “And I just think they have taken that too far.”

Navy Secretary Kenenth Braithwaite, in an interview, described the setbacks in recent years as dissociated incidents that don’t indicate a broader problem.

“You’re never perfect. But the Navy is far from broken. And I would say at this point, the future looks very bright,” said Mr. Braithwaite, a retired Navy admiral.

While shifting attention to Asia, the Navy has expanded its presence in the last year in Latin America and the Middle East and is fielding requests to address  potential threats in Europe from Russia .

The Navy is also still implementing changes it said were needed after two ship collisions in 2017. The USS Fitzgerald collided with a commercial vessel that June near Japan, killing seven U.S. sailors. That August, the USS John S. McCain collided with a commercial vessel near Singapore, killing 10 U.S. sailors. Those collisions came after less-serious incidents earlier in the year that damaged two Navy cruisers.

The two destroyers recently have completed repairs costing hundreds of millions of dollars, the Navy said. The John S. McCain returned to operations in June, and the crew of the Fitzgerald is undergoing training to eventually return to operations.

Another Navy setback came last month, when a fire in San Diego  nearly destroyed the Bonhomme Richard , one of the Navy’s premier amphibious assault ships.

An investigation is under way into the cause of the blaze that burned for five days, damaging or destroying 11 of the 14 decks of the ship, which had just been updated to carry F-35 fighter jets for missions in the Pacific.

After the 2017 collisions, then-Navy Secretary Richard Spencer ordered investigations  into the causes as well as into the overall training, staffing and command culture of the ships—how they communicate, assign and delegate duties and address problems.

Those  reports concluded  that Navy crew members weren’t adequately trained, lacked basic knowledge of navigation and often were overworked and fatigued.

“There is real institutional defensiveness and resistance to thinking outside the box,” said former Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly. “So the default position often becomes, ‘This is just the way we do things in the Navy,’ and that is a woefully inadequate attitude given how rapidly the world, and the security environment, are changing today.”

The investigation of the Bonhomme Richard fire also is expected to delve into what went wrong before the blaze, likely including decisions made regarding the ship’s fire-suppression system, which had been suspended during the update work, when the fire occurred.

Concerns about the Navy predated the 2017 collisions, with  audits that found  sailors had been overworked and underprepared. The Navy also has continued to struggle to complete maintenance on time, compared with other military branches such as the Air Force, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The Navy’s handling of this year’s  coronavirus outbreak  on board the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt—which sickened more than 1,000 of the 4,800 crew members and led to the removal both of the ship’s captain and  the head of the Navy —also drew national attention. One crew member died after contracting coronavirus in the outbreak, and the ship has returned to service.

Navy leaders said they have learned from each of these incidents, especially from findings that crews had been overworked amid frequent deployments.

“It’s something that we always have to be conscious of, that we don’t put ourselves in the same position we were in 2017,” Adm. Mike Gilday, chief of naval operations, said in an interview. “We leaned too much. We had the ‘can-do’ out of balance with the ‘should-do.’ ”

Mr. Braithwaite is President Trump’s fourth Navy secretary within a year, a pace of turnover that hasn’t allowed for long-term strategic planning, Navy officials said.

Mr. Braithwaite told senators during his May  Senate confirmation hearing  that the Navy had a tarnished culture. Since then, he has changed his view, he said.

“I’ve been pleasantly surprised that the concerns that I had have not been as deep as what I thought they might be,” Mr. Braithwaite said.

As the administration looks to the military to step up operations in Asia, the Navy and other military services will have to decide how to meet the need, military experts said. Military officials have begun to  reduce forces in the Middle East and Germany , in part, they have said, to reinforce the U.S. focus on Asia.

World-wide, the Navy has tried to keep about 100 ships deployed at any given time, even as the number of ships in the fleet decreased. At its peak of 600 ships four decades ago, it had 125 ships deployed at any time. Today’s Navy has roughly 300 ships and keeps 100 ships deployed, adhering to a policy of doing more with less.

The Trump administration advocates a Navy fleet of 355 ships, a level Navy officials have endorsed, although it hasn’t proposed funding for them.