Our Sea Services Need Us

Who could miss the spectacular performance of our US Navy ships deployed to the eastern Mediterranean and Red Seas during this past year? Dozens of ships from the Ford, Eisenhower, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt Battle Groups, along with the Wasp Amphibious Ready Group variously layered in, showed up, and executed flawlessly.

Our Navy was joined at times by allies from over a dozen countries, working through offensive and defensive challenges our Navy has not seen or undertaken in decades. The positive press coverage would lead the average American to admire their work.

Similarly, our US Coast Guard continues to demonstrate presence and action around the world, including across our local Gulf waters. Ships assigned to Coast Guard Area Atlantic and working within Sector St Petersburg routinely score impressive drug busts at sea. Around the globe, today’s Coast Guard is shouldering Chinese warships, operating in the Persian Gulf, interdicting drug shipments at sea, and performing impressive lifesaving missions.

It would be easy to conclude that our nation can perform these myriad and complex missions at will, and in perpetuity. That would be a mistaken conclusion.

Beneath these impressive but surface level performances are serious challenges to readiness, sustainment, and industrial base health. Recruitment efforts across the military force continue to plague the services. Lowering the entry standards has not helped significantly. We must continue to inspire new entrants to step up and serve. Local JROTC, Young Marine, and Sea Cadet Programs are where such flames of inspiration first spark. There are many right here in our community.

Notable Navy ships operating recently in the Red Sea like USS Carney and USS Laboon, to name just two, are approaching traditional end-of-life at 30 years of service. There are no longer cruisers accompanying those carrier battle groups, a traditional form of air warfare coordination support, as we have retired those ships from service without replacements.

Right here in Bradenton, Coast Guard Station Cortez feels the manpower pinch with empty billets despite a vigorous search and rescue mission to perform. Multiple lifesaving and ship or boat rescue missions deploy from station Cortez every month.

Coast Guard Cutters Venturous and Resolute based in St Petersburg, are 58 and 60 years young, respectively. That each performs their missions as they do is a testament to each crew. The material condition is what you would expect of ships twice the age at which Navy ships are retired. Our Coast Guard modernization program remains troubled and underfunded. Coast Guard Cutter Shrike, also formerly based in St Petersburg, was quietly moved to retirement in Baltimore and will be sold internationally.  Crew distributions allow a stretched Coast Guard to do more with less.

Our defense industrial base has been contracting since 2010 when Congress took the drastic step to impose the budgeting axe of sequestration, a method whereby deep cuts were made without deep thought. The impact lingers and was compounded by inconsistent funding of critical shipbuilding and ship maintenance programs, as well as the supply chain snarls that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic.

Further, a complex acquisition process makes entry into the defense industrial base particularly daunting. Transit through the well identified Valley of Death is intimidating for any small business. A startup must embark on a three-year trudge through unfunded terrain as an innovative idea moves from drawing board to funding in the federal budget. Efforts to reform federal budgeting are years, if not decades, from fruition.

The Chief of Naval Operations is presently evaluating a plan to remove crews from 17 ships of the Military Sealift Command, the backbone of logistics that allows global deployments to succeed on a timeline of our choosing. The crews are leaving through voluntary retirements; their reliefs are not trained or even identified. We can no longer properly crew the few military logistics ships we do have.

Our Sea Services need our support locally, nationally, and globally. The Suez Canal remains a choke point, allowing but a fraction of goods to pass as compared to one year ago. The additional transportation costs are passed to consumers who, often unknowingly, get over 80 percent of their daily consumables because they come to stores by ships through commercial sea lanes. The headlines label inflation as the cause of higher prices. Look beyond the headlines. 

The Navy League of the United States, founded under the auspices of President Theodore Roosevelt, exists to support our sea services in communities around the world. The Sarasota-Manatee Council supports active-duty Coast Guard units in St Petersburg and Bradenton; nine JROTC programs across Sarasota, Manatee, and Charlotte counties; as well as US Navy Sea Cadets, the Maritime Eagles. Scholarship opportunities, field trips, and immersive training and educational experiences require funding, access to schools, experienced veterans, and volunteers.

The need for the support of the Sea Services is right in our hometown. Please join us in the cause.

Gene Moran is a retired Captain in the US Navy and President of the Sarasota-Manatee Council, Navy League of the United States.