Navy announces new strategy to counter China

The U.S. Navy on Wednesday released a new strategy designed to ensure the force is ready to meet the rising challenge from China by 2027, with efforts aimed at increasing recruitment and deploying advanced technology.

The new strategy, called the Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy, will focus on overcoming hurdles in shipbuilding to accelerate construction and leverage new technologies to enhance the fleet.

“By 2027, the Navy will be more ready for sustained combat as part of a Joint and Combined force, prioritizing the People’s Republic of China as the pacing challenge,” the report says.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti said in a statement that the strategic plan is meant to create an “overarching strategic guidance to make our Navy more ready.”

The strategy “continues where my predecessor’s Navigation Plan left off and sets our course to raise our Fleet’s baseline level of readiness and put more ready Players on the Field – platforms that are ready with the requisite capabilities, weapons, and sustainment and people that are ready with the right mindset, skills, tools, and training,” she said.

The plan focuses on raising the readiness of the Navy to meet China by 2027, the year Chinese leader Xi Jinping has told his forces to be ready for a potential invasion of the self-governing island nation of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own but the U.S. backs with arms and support.

The new guidance also focuses on enhancing long-term advantages for the U.S. Navy to steer the force through decades of growth.

Both goals will follow the seven guidelines laid out in Project 33, another set of objectives to ready the force.

The seven guidelines include reducing delays in ship, submarine and aircraft maintenance, scaling autonomous weapons systems and boosting recruitment efforts, among others.

A large goal will be to eliminate “maintenance overruns that cannibalize force availability,” the report says, with a plan to sustain an 80 percent combat surge to enable a ready posture for deployment.

That goal will be crucial to fulfill as China already boasts the world’s largest navy, allowing the U.S. to maximize its available naval assets.

The U.S. Navy’s strategic plan says it will continue to invest in building up its fleet but that it “cannot manifest a bigger traditional Navy in a few short years, nor will we rely on mass without the right capabilities to win the sea control contest.”

The Navy also said it will integrate autonomous weapons systems by 2027 for routine use by commanders, along with mature capabilities for aircraft carriers and strike groups.

The U.S. has been working across the armed forces to develop autonomous weapons under the Pentagon’s “replicator initiative” announced last year. The artificial intelligence systems are expected to completely change the nature of warfare, and possibly allow the U.S. to counter Chinese mass.

The strategy sets an ambitious target of a 100 percent rating fill for the Navy active and reserve components, a tough goal as the U.S. struggles with historically low recruitment levels across the armed forces.

The Navy also plans to enhance quality of life for sailors by eliminating involuntary living requirements for ships at homeport and investing in quality housing, and it calls for making operations centers more efficient, repairing critical infrastructure the fleet uses and boosting training.

Franchetti said in a foreword to the strategic report that she was “filled with confidence” in the Navy after visiting every fleet.

“I could not be more proud of the hard work done by our team, our active and reserve Navy Sailors and our civilians, to give us that advantage,” she wrote. “But as with any long journey, we must also be prepared to adjust course and speed. In some cases, we are behind our projections. In others, the world has forced us to reevaluate our chosen path.”