NAVY LEAGUER
Navy League Releases Maritime
Policy Statement 2008 – 09
Policy Addresses National Imperative to Preserve Sea Power

The Navy League officially released its 2008–09 Maritime Policy Statement, “Preserving Sea Power: A National Imperative” at the Sea-Air-Space Exposition in Washington, D.C. in mid-March. This year’s statement sounds an urgent call to “reset” the nation’s maritime services’ personnel and equipment, which are experiencing “burn-out” as a result of ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and operations that support the War on Terror. It also outlines the need to revitalize our maritime industry and strengthen the overburdened Marine Transportation System, which is vital to our nation’s economic interests. The annual statement represents the Navy League’s commitment to ensuring that continued high priority is given to maintaining strong national maritime forces. Below is the Executive Summary, as excerpted from the Maritime Policy.

PRESERVING SEA POWER
A NATIONAL IMPERATIVE
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Navy League of the United States believes that providing for the common defense must always be the most important responsibility of the federal government. A strong maritime capability is an historical characteristic of great nations and vital to our economic well-being. Today, we are seeing emerging challenges to our maritime dominance. To remain secure, we must maintain our maritime supremacy. The most important reform that can be made in the field of national defense is to provide adequate funding for America’s maritime services, which are today the greatest force for peace in the world.

The conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and the broader War on Terror continue to burn-out military equipment and personnel. We are at the cusp of not being able to carry out the primary mission of our armed forces … to fight and win a full-spectrum conflict. Therefore, in order to preserve our sea power, it is imperative that we “reset” the force— rebuild, recapitalize, replenish and re-equip our forces while recruiting and keeping the people we need to win our wars and defend our national interests.

The Navy League supports the imperative resetting of the Sea Services by: Increasing the Marine Corps’ personnel end-strength to 202,000 and recapitalizing its combat and support equipment

Providing adequate ship construction and modernization budgets for the Navy to achieve a fleet of at least 313 ships

Progressively funding the Coast Guard’s Deepwater program and growing the service to an end-strength force of 54,000 personnel

Training, equipping and manning to successfully engage a major nation state in all-out-combat must remain the core competency and focus of our armed forces. If we are to ask our young Sailors, Marines, Coastguardsmen and Merchant Mariners to go in harm’s way, we must ensure that they have the equipment and training to survive and prevail.

The Navy League believes that we must protect the Maritime Services’ ability to train in the same environment that an adversary will exploit.

Additionally, the Navy League remains gravely concerned about the deteriorating health of the nation’s maritime industrial base; the loss of skilled U.S. citizen mariners as the number of critical U.S.-flagged commercial ships continues to drop; and the intensifying congestion on our overburdened Marine Transportation System (MTS) — the land, port, water passenger and

freight delivery systems — as international and domestic trade doubles by 2020. Therefore, the Navy League further urges:

Development and adoption of an industrial base cooperative strategy for government and industry stakeholders to ensure we have the capacity to build and maintain an affordable fleet capable of surge to meet emergent demands in a crisis.

Budgetary and legislative measures — including capital and operations-related changes in U.S. tax and maritime regulations — needed to maintain a viable U.S.-flag Merchant Marine.

Efforts to ensure that the MTS is, and remains, adequate and safe to conduct maritime commerce and U.S. military deployments.

The Navy League of the United States believes it is a national imperative to provide the funds needed to preserve our sea power capability by resetting our maritime forces to a state where they can carry out their primary missions of deterrence and, should deterrence fail, fighting and winning against any enemy, anywhere and at any time. To that end, we believe that a defense budget of four percent of the Gross Domestic Product is the minimum to ensure that all of our Armed Forces are ready to fight and win our nation’s wars.

Copies of the Policy Statement will be mailed to councils and an electronic version is available online at www.navyleague.org. A limited number of copies are available upon request from the Public Relations office.