Oiler Debacle Shows How the Navy Is Running Aground

In this dirty business, you run the risk of becoming boring—repeating yourself every week, becoming a curio shelf of obsessions and tics. Yet sometimes you don’t get a choice, because the news is itself boring and repetitious, a dull student’s punishment on the blackboard of reality.

In my own case, I’ve been banging the gong of the abject condition of These States’ seapower for some weeks, both in terms of the Formosa war everyone seems to be itching to have and our abandonment of the Red Sea to the irrepressible Houthis. On the cover of our current print issue, there’s a survey of the shabby state of our merchant fleet from your humble correspondent. I’m getting stale! And I don’t like it. I have beautiful thoughts I’d like to share about architectural history, mushroom-hunting, and how men’s pants should be cut. I’ve got an original insight on an intertext between Hobbes and Fortescue that could change the reading of Leviathan and modern political science forever. I wish I could tell you about piano concerts, the Yankees, or my favorite German restaurant. I am like you; I have a rich inner life; I’d like to hold your eye up to the keyhole of my consciousness and shriek, Look! Look inside! Look at these beautiful things!

But, instead, we’ve got to stick to the sorry state of American seapower, because this week the Navy crashed a ship. The maritime press puts it more delicately—“ran aground,” they write—but I am not a mariner. If I were to hop a curb in my trusty Mazda and tear enough of the bottom off that it fills with water and has to get a tow to the nearest garage, I would feel justified in saying that I crashed the car. 

I would also feel extremely bummed, as I must imagine our naval brass do. The ship in question, the USS Big Horn, was the oiler accompanying the USS Abraham Lincoln’s carrier group in its long schlep to the Pacific from the Persian Gulf region, where we’ve been idly mustering naval forces for about a year on the apparent theory that we might want to get into it with the Islamic Republic. (As mentioned, the actually existing American maritime interest in the Middle East, keeping the Red Sea shipping lanes open, has been left to the ineffectual attentions of the French and the British.) The Navy has 15 oilers, which are responsible for making sure ships in a given group stay fueled. These are bad tidings; for one thing, the Abraham Lincoln and co.’s schlep gets much trickier without fuel. For another, the Navy is already on the verge of retiring an oiler and 16 other support ships because of the shortage of mariners who can operate and service them.

The details of the Big Horn’s little accident have yet to be disclosed, so we will keep our inexpert speculations about causes private. I do not think, however, that it is controversial to say that crashing large, irreplaceable ships is undesirable and ought to be unusual. Yet it seems to be the latest instantiation of a long pattern. The hapless state of the Navy and its support services is not news. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK) released a report in 2021, following a spate of high-profile naval mishaps, in which he detailed the shabbiness of training, discipline, and physical maintenance in this sorry epigone of the Great White Fleet. The Maritime Administration began to trumpet the shortage of civilian mariners available to help with sealift in case of war in 2017; it has been too embarrassed or incompetent to conduct any surveys since. The supposedly revolutionary program of the Obama administration, replacing our aging frigates with “littoral combat ships,” has gone badly awry; we can’t retire the widely hated LCS quickly enough, and the replacement frigates are running about six years behind schedule. 

What does it all mean, Mr. Natural? It don’t mean—well, there are actually a few points to be made here. You’ll forgive me if they are things you have read before here or elsewhere, but, as I said, sometimes life’s problems are evident and unchanging. First, anyone who thinks we are going to fight a serious naval war in the next five years is a boob, and possibly a danger to himself or others. Forget the never-arriving 500-ship fleet; we can’t even keep the ships we have manned, operational, and not crashed. If policymakers think Taiwan is important for American security, they’d be better off cutting Palmer Luckey a personal check for $500 million (Memo: “Figure it out!”) and giving him a one-way ticket to Taipei. Second, the grotesque bloat of the military–industrial complex needs actually serious attention. The proportion of funding that has gone to R&D has plummeted, while the part devoted to the obscure liturgies and rights of contract leveraging continues apace. If an enterprising congressman who isn’t worried about getting on the board of a Big Five contractor is reading this—you have your brief. Contracting reform is basically virgin territory.