The Military as Industrial Policy

The real reason we have a large military and huge defense budget isn’t really that America has a large role to play in the world or that we are going to use all this stuff in war. These things are important, yes. But it’s that the military is what passes for both an industrial policy and a working class jobs program in this country. Anything threatening those things makes people freak out and even more so when they are in a congressional district that benefits from an outsized military. It hardly even matters where the military wants this stuff. Thus, the case of the aircraft carrier.

Carriers may be the Navy’s centerpiece, but their steep cost and growing vulnerability to missile attack cast doubt on whether they will remain so for much longer. “The question,” James Holmes, a maritime strategist who teaches at the U.S. Naval War College, told me, “is whether [supercarriers] are defensible in battle, and whether they deliver enough return on our public investment if we get into a scrap.”

A more mundane question is whether an unofficial bipartisan supercarrier caucus can be dissuaded from building more supercarriers. As with much of defense spending in the United States, the trouble is some combination of inertia and parochial interests. And defying the stereotypes of the two parties, if anything, support tilts Democratic. The strongest advocates in the House include Democrats Joe Courtney of Connecticut, who sits on the seapower subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee, and Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, a liberal Democrat from Newport News, where every aircraft carrier since the 1960s has been built.*

Members of Congress support supercarriers not for reasons of strategy but because they create civilian jobs. Yes, carrier assembly takes place only at one shipyard, Newport News Shipbuilding, in only one state, Virginia. But, as the state’s Democratic Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner pointed out last year when they introduced a resolution celebrating the aircraft carrier’s centennial, the Ford Class supply chain consists of 2,450 companies in 48 states and 364 congressional districts, employing 13,100 people along the way. And the Newport News shipyard alone employs 25,000 more. The resolution cleared the Democratic Senate by unanimous consent but never made it out of committee in the then-Democratic House. Even though many experts on military strategy have come to agree that it’s time to forget the Ford, the political class that decides how Pentagon money is spent just can’t quit their love of expensive and oversize vessels.

The aircraft carrier’s heyday came during World War II. When six Japanese aircraft carriers attacked Pearl Harbor, they destroyed or damaged eight battleships, sidelining most of the Pacific fleet. But the U.S. Navy’s three aircraft carriers were spared; two were at sea and one was docked in San Diego. From then on, carriers played a leading role throughout the Pacific theater, displacing the once-dominant battleship. One of these, the USS Enterprise (Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry fancied its name), participated four months later in Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle’s carrier-launched retaliatory bombing raid on Tokyo. Carriers were similarly crucial in the Korean War, and played smaller, but still significant, roles in the two Iraq wars.

Trouble was, the damned things kept getting bigger and more expensive. Gerry Doyle, an editor at Thomson Reuters, and Blake Herzinger, a Navy veteran and a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, document these changes in Carrier Killer: China’s Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles and Theater of Operations in the Early 21st Century. In the two decades after World War II, carriers got 25 percent bigger and 100 feet longer. The USS Midway, commissioned one month after V-J Day, weighed 45,000 tons, took only 17 months to build, and cost $90 million—or $1.5 billion in current dollars. The USS Gerald R. Ford weighs 100,000 tons, took 12 years to build, and cost more than eight times as much (accounting for inflation).

This is obviously much more Farley’s bailiwick than mine, but it sure seems like something worth discussing to me.