Donald Trump's administration has been warned its future plans for the navy are handing China victory in the sea.
Paul Giarra, a former U.S. Navy aviator and Navy-designated strategic planner, has urged the president and his staff to reconsider the decommissioning of the USS Nimitz, the oldest aircraft carrier in the world. A report from The Hill confirmed the ship had been ordered to return to the Naval Base Kitsap in Bremerton, Washington. Giarra believes this is a huge mistake.
"Retiring Nimitz is driven by long-range plans formulated years ago, immune to change, and designed to make room in the budget for new ships," he said. "To even the most casual observer, the decision to decommission Nimitz was made with no regard for readiness, China or warfighting capacity."
"The decision to take Nimitz out of service in the face of a massive Chinese navy buildup is a reflection of the unsustainable U.S. Navy planning process that is distributed over numerous organizations and over such long periods of time that it is impossible to have a single directing purpose driving the procurement process with any sense of strategic coherence."
Giarra would go on to say the decision to decommission the USS Nimitz would have longer-term consequences for the US' naval dominance.
He said, "That the U.S. Navy’s right hand does not know what the left hand is doing is excruciatingly evident. The decision to decommission Nimitz makes absolutely no sense when every U.S. Navy and allied flight deck and missile tube and torpedo are needed to balance the explosive and threatening growth of China’s navy."
Late last year the president announced a new class of Navy ships which would bear his name. A Pentagon official familiar with the proposal confirmed the "Trump class" battleships were set to feature as a core of the "Golden Fleet".
Retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery called the new $5 billion ships "exactly what we don't need."
"We do not need ships that are not optimized to provide lethality against the Chinese threat," Montgomery told the Journal, noting that the ship had "zero tactical use."
"That is not what these are focused on—they are focused on the president's visual that a battleship is a cool-looking ship," Montgomery said.