Jerry Hendrix makes a great argument for abandoning boots on the ground imperialism and returning the military to it's constitutional mandate of being a sea power. Even better, he ties it into infrastructure, job creation, blue collar workers, union jobs, free market capitalism, and opposition to China and Russia. Below is a piece of the much longer essay.
https://www.nationalreview.com/maga...be-a-sea-power/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
world we have created is not the world that China and Russia wish to live in. Its very openness and expansive freedoms threaten the domestic stability of these authoritarian powers, which recognize that the free sea can no longer be defended by the U.S. Navy. Having fallen from 6,000 ships in 1945 to a bare 296 deployable ships today through a series of ill-informed assumptions regarding an enduring ideological victory and the value of “peace dividends,” the American fleet is no longer large enough to persistently protect its interests across the globe. Through underinvestment in its Navy, the United States has created a vacuum and invited a competition in the large maritime global commons, one that it can ill afford to lose.
Because the United States has presented itself as a global leader, it must continue to lead globally so that the security structure it has created can sustain itself. Should China in the South China Sea or Russia in the Arctic successfully create and then sustain a carve-out to the concept of the free sea, should either create a local sphere of influence, it will make a lie of the entire American-led global system, introduce instability, and most assuredly lead to a disastrous and costly war. But there is an alternative to such a cascade of failure: a decision to return to the Founders’ intent of placing naval power first in our national strategy, reduce Ameri*can boots-on-the-ground continentalist commitments around the world, and focus on investing in maritime commercial trade and a naval offshore-balancing military strategy.
Recognition of the need to reduce boots-on-the-ground commitments should be quick. Our strategic situation is not at present aligned with a continentalist, land-power approach to the world. On our own continent, situated between two friendly, unthreatening, and much smaller states (in terms of their population and economic power), we have no need for a large standing army. Maintaining one over the past 70 years has, in some cases, served as an excuse for nation-building and foreign-policy adventurism. While some might also state that our alliance commitments force a requirement for a large land component upon us, we should recognize that the size of our army has served all too often as an excuse for allies to underinvest in their own security as well as to shift resources toward their own domestic social-welfare programs. Ultimately, a focus on a sea-power strategy will assist other nations by encouraging them to right-size their own national-security apparatus to meet the current generation of threats.
It is important, even critical, to understand that investment in commercial maritime trade is crucial to returning the United States to its historical position as a sea power. Before 1981 the United States government recognized its civilian merchant fleet as a core strategic reserve of maritime power. Commercial ships could carry merchant trade, but they could also carry logistical supplies for the military in wartime. Shipyards could build new ships for civilian fleets as well as the Navy, but they could also repair ships damaged in wartime operations. Shipyards also drove other portions of the economy. For every shipyard blue-collar job, five to seven well-paying positions were created in upstream parts and component suppliers.
It was a complicated industrial process that was subsidized as a longstanding policy by the federal government, which recognized that a robust and resilient shipbuilding sector was a critical component of a comprehensive national-security strategy. These subsidies, however, were ended in the 1980s, and U.S. shipbuilding subsequently withered even as other nations in Europe and Asia continued to subsidize their own shipbuilders. Today China, the world’s largest shipbuilding nation, has over 1,200 shipyards, one of which produces more tonnage per year than the entirety of U.S. shipbuilding. Today China, South Korea, Japan, and Europe control and profit from their participation in a growing and thriving global shipping market while the United States sits largely on the sidelines.
Critics may say that returning to a policy of providing subsidies to our shipbuilding industry would go against free-market principles. But we must recognize that every other shipbuilding nation provides such subsidies, to the great benefit of its industries, its economy, and its national security. Returning subsidies to American shipbuilders does nothing more than provide a level global-competitive playing field for them and increase the resilience of our overall national-security infrastructure. Additionally, any strategy to confront China on the high seas must include a detailed investment and management plan for the nation’s shipbuilding infrastructure so that we can quickly and efficiently rebuild this part of the nation’s economy while strengthening its security. The nation is perhaps fortunate that there is already an acknowledged need to reenergize the civilian shipbuilding base, because most of the nation’s strategic sealift fleet needs to be recapitalized.
An expanded civilian shipbuilding capacity will make it easier to take the next step to once again becoming a sea power: rebuilding the United States Navy. The modern fleet is highly complex. Phased-array radars, passive sensors that constantly scan the expanded electromagnetic spectrum, ballistic-missile-defense systems, and hypersonic cruise and boost-glide systems all include technologies that exceed the imaginations of most Americans. These systems and the ships that integrate them are expensive to build and are made more so by the lack of capacity and competition within the shipbuilding sector. Today there are just two American shipyards that build destroyers and two others that build submarines. While that may seem like competition, it’s not much, and there needs to be more.
The nation needs to expand its fleet if it is to maintain its position in the world and its notion of the free sea and free trade. We will need a Navy battle force of around 450 ships, up from the previously mentioned 296 ships. We can accomplish it along two paths: building new ships, and extending the lives of the ships we already have. To do this, we need more shipbuilding yards and more drydocks to perform complex overhauls and ship-modernization programs. During World War II the Navy operated ten industrial shipyards and could contract building and repairs to 50 additional commercial drydocks around the nation to service large combatants. Today the Navy operates just four shipyards and can call upon fewer than 20 commercial drydocks, and many of those are in the wrong locations. Aside from one yard in San Diego, there is not much shipbuilding or ship-repair capacity on the nation’s west coast, where most of the demand for these services would occur in a potential war with China.
