It’s been 439 days since the deadline for the establishment of the National Commission on the Future of the Navy was to be formed and set sail. But time stops for no one, including the United States Navy. Despite the congressional mandate that the Commission’s findings be delivered to Congress by July 1, 2024, elected officials have only just now finished appointing the panel’s eight members, leaving the Commission dead in the water.

As part of this year’s defense policy bill, Congress will need to extend the mandate from the fiscal year (FY) 2023 National Defense Authorization Act to allow the Commission to begin work in earnest.

Two years ago, Congress openly worried about a service going hollow before its eyes. Policymakers established this panel to assist by “…[undertaking] a comprehensive study of the structure of the Navy and policy assumptions related to the size and force mixture of the Navy,” culminating in a report with key recommendations on future force structure, necessary funding levels, the fleet’s readiness, training, personnel, and ship maintenance, and a detailed review of Navy shipbuilding. 

These are all issue areas where significant disagreements exist between the Navy, the White House, Congress, and industry. The Commission is meant to referee this debate and forge a (hopefully) bipartisan and concrete path forward for the Navy and its partners. This is only more important as a year later, debates continue and blame games abound in Washington. 

Earlier this year, for example, an internal Navy review revealed one-to-three-year delays for nearly all major shipbuilding efforts across the fleet. The effort is rife with finger-pointing: The Navy blames industry for not making realistic bids on contracts and industry blames the Navy for budgetary uncertainty and order instability. 

Viable solutions have evaded administrations of both parties for decades. The Navy is right: Industry has atrophied and is struggling to build ships. However, shipbuilders operate in a monopsony market, selling ships solely to one customer. The Navy’s year-to-year fiscal instability in shipbuilding orders and constantly-shifting construction plans fail to inspire confidence—and therefore investment ahead of contract—by industry partners. These same companies can only follow the investments and right-size their workforces and scale down production facilities to stay profitable accordingly. This results in a hollowing out of domestic shipbuilding capacity that limits the nation’s ability to build the fleet of the future. 

Congress is worried that shipbuilding is entering into a “doom loop” with a budget today that shrinks the fleet further while new ship investments for tomorrow are cut to pay for readiness now—limiting options for recovery to grow the fleet. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Navy’s FY 2025 shipbuilding request, which plans to procure just six new battleforce ships, while retiring 19 others. 

True, the Navy and Congress have historically disagreed on the ideal size and strength of the Navy’s amphibious warship fleet, leading to a legislative showdown last year when the Navy nixed a congressionally-mandated amphibious warship from the budget only for the Marine Corps to put the ship at the top of its unfunded priority list for Congress to later salvage. 

Even when Congress and the Navy do agree, issues still emerge. Despite widespread agreement across government on the necessity of a continued two submarine per year production cadence to maintain stability for industry partners, President Biden’s FY 2025 budget request asked for just one Virginia sub next year. Though House authorizers have already been working to quickly reverse the decision, this serves to illustrate once again that Congress sometimes finds itself “building a stronger fleet” than the Navy. 

These issues are well known around Washington, yet real change still alludes all sides of the debate. The Commission’s mission of independent analysis and recommendations is one reason why it is so important. 

The Army and Air Force have both previously had outside, independent reviews which offered valuable recommendations and actionable insight. The Commission on the Future of the Army was tasked with attempting to resolve a so called “civil war” between active and reserve components and worked diligently to find solutions towards “balancing competing roles and missions objectives between the Regular Army and the Reserve Components.” 

In the end, the Army took 42 of the 63 of its commission’s recommendations for action, resolving many of the cross-cutting policy disputes. Similarly, despite initial delays in the Air Force implementing its own Commission’s findings, the recommendations were widely hailed as constructive by Air Force leadership and the service has worked to implement many since. 

Though Congress has already included language in the 2025 National Defense Authorization bill, to save the Commission and provide the Navy with similar actionable recommendations, Congress must act to preserve and extend the life of the Commission and ensure the panel has the necessary time and resources to complete our work.

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