One of President Trump’s signature campaign promises to the American people was a 350-ship Navy. The Navy itself has stated unequivocally that it needs a bare minimum of 355 ships to meet the missions with which it has been tasked by our regional combatant commanders. Yet, sadly, it is becoming clear that no real budgetary steps have been or will be taken to fund this promise. Further, there is nothing on the horizon to suggest that anything will change on this front.

The failure to rebuild America’s fleet could not have come at a worse time. The world has grown increasingly dangerous, with a nuclear madman in North Korea testing an ICBM a month, mullahs in Tehran plotting the takeover of the Middle East, Russia engaging in "frozen conflicts" in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, a very hot civil war in Syria, and China appropriating a vast swath of the Pacific to itself. The forgoing list does not even take into account the United States’ continuing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and dozens of other remote locales where we are in daily combat with al-Qaeda, ISIL, the Taliban, and their assorted jihadi fellow travelers.

Although both the House and the Senate Armed Services Committees have endorsed a significant increase in military spending at President Trump’s behest, Congress sidestepped procedural opportunities that would have ended the 2011 Budget Control Act’s caps on defense spending. The caps led to disastrous cuts in military spending. Defense sequestration severely affected the overall readiness of our forces, a result for which American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have paid a heavy price. There seems to be no desire in the House Ways and Means Committee or the Senate Appropriations Committee to partner with the authorizers to fix this situation.

The Navy has demonstrated time and again that it is unwilling to embrace innovative approaches that are both efficient and effective with regard to its force structure.

The Navy has not helped itself either. It has not pursued service-life extensions for retiring ships, such as the Ticonderoga-class cruisers or Los Angeles–class attack submarines scheduled for decommissioning in the next few years. Nor has it recalled into service ships such as the ten sturdy Perry-class frigates that are in the ready-reserve fleet. In fact, with regard to the reserve fleet, the Navy has acted precipitately either to sell off useful hulls, such as the Osprey-class mine-hunters—ships that could have accompanied the fleet during operations off the coast of North Korea or Iran—or to outright scrap or sink, in target practice, ships such as the Spruance-class destroyers, many of which had years of life left in their hulls.

Neither has the Navy pursued low-cost/high-impact solutions such as building missile-patrol boats or installing vertical-launch-system cells on its new amphibious ships to give its smaller fleet a bigger punch. The Navy has demonstrated time and again that it is unwilling to embrace innovative approaches that are both efficient and effective with regard to its force structure.

The combination of congressional budgetary irresponsibility and the Navy’s passivity with respect to platforms is occurring even as Chinese shipyards are launching warships at record rates and Russia continues to invest in exquisitely effective submarines that, though produced in low numbers, can dominate the North Atlantic. As Admiral Dönitz almost proved in the last century, a submarine blockade of Western Europe could render the purpose of the treaty organization that bears the North Atlantic name moot.

The policy of "doing more with less" was exposed as a sham that has resulted in the firing of multiple senior naval leaders.

Key adversary naval and aviation platforms look remarkably similar to their U.S. counterparts because of massive ongoing campaigns to steal advanced U.S. military technologies. Both cyber and old-fashioned human-intelligence industrial espionage has occurred for decades without any significant retribution by the United States. There has been, perhaps, no greater demonstration of strategic lassitude since the West watched passively as Germany rearmed in the 1930s.

The simple fact is that the Navy is too small to do all that is asked of it. The service is attempting to maintain its historic average of 85 to 100 ships deployed, but the recent spate of groundings and collisions in the western Pacific has pulled back the curtain on the dire state of American naval training and readiness. Ships are being deployed with more than a third of their training requirements and certifications unmet. Sailors are working in excess of 100 hours a week and getting less sleep than the human body can bear. The Navy has mismanaged its enlisted end strength.

The cost of this conduct has been high. In less than a year we have lost the lives of 17 sailors who slept in their bunks while their destroyers collided with massive merchant ships. The policy of "doing more with less" was exposed as a sham that has resulted in the firing of multiple senior naval leaders. While the human toll of "doing more with less" is beyond bearing, the hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to two destroyers alone—McCain and Fitzgerald—would have been more than enough to refit all ten Perry-class frigates in the reserve fleet and return them to active service.

Read the full article at the National Review.

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Robert C. O'Brien is a Pacific Council member and a partner at Larson O’Brien LLP. He served as a U.S. representative to the United Nations. He was also a Senior Advisor to governors Scott Walker and Mitt Romney as well as Senator Ted Cruz during their presidential campaigns. His book While America Slept: Restoring American Leadership to a World in Crisis was released in September.

Capt. Jerry Hendrix (ret) is a retired U.S. Navy captain and award-winning naval historian. Hendrix is senior fellow and director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for a New American Security.

This article was originally published on the National Review.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.