The late former president may have served honorably as a sailor, but his instincts as president were to shrink and deprioritize America’s naval forces.
The late former president may have served honorably as a sailor, but his instincts as president were to shrink and deprioritize America’s naval forces.
R eading the recent obituaries honoring the late president Jimmy Carter, including some from official U.S. Navy sources, one would think he was a powerful Navy supporter. Carter certainly had Navy bona fides; as a graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy and an early selectee for nuclear power training by nuclear Navy father Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, Carter served honorably on active duty for six years before departing active service in the wake of his father’s death from cancer, whereupon he took over the family peanut farming business in Plains, Ga. Carter counted himself a Rickover disciple throughout his life and often spoke of how his Navy training shaped his desire for public service.
Yet Carter’s presidency was not friendly to the Navy. His senior defense department officials, including Defense Secretary Harold Brown, under secretary of defense Bob Komer, and deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Randy Jayne, were vociferous opponents of a larger and more capable Navy. Carter sought major cuts in the Navy throughout his presidency and only reversed those in the face of Soviet aggression in Afghanistan and the military disaster of the failed Iranian Hostage Rescue Mission. Those military-related foreign policy reverses played a significant role in Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. President Carter was a caring individual who set new standards of service to others for former presidents and should be justly honored for those efforts, but he was no friend of the U.S. Navy when serving as president.
Carter began his term dedicated to the idea of reducing defense spending and, in particular, limiting the size and offensive missions of the U.S. Navy. Carter’s team opposed nuclear-powered aircraft carriers throughout his term of office and fought both the Navy and Congress to prevent the authorization of what became the fourth Nimitz-class carrier, USS Theodore Roosevelt, in 1979. Carter also pushed to reduce the U.S. fleet to just 400 ships, a number that one maritime history said “reflected the idea that the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet should be designed for peacekeeping operations and for conflicts in which the Soviet Union chose not to be involved.”
The Carter administration, in general, desired that the Navy primarily undertake the defense of Atlantic convoys for the resupply of NATO, even though it knew from highly classified intelligence procured by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and unclassified observations from the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA), that the Soviets placed attacks on NATO convoys at the bottom of their military priority list in the event of war. The Carter administration’s under secretary of defense for policy, Bob Komer “Blowtorch Bob,” was a strong advocate for this navy mission and continued it during the Reagan administration, arguing against the navy’s offensive capabilities and aircraft carriers. The associate director for national security and international affairs at OMB, Randy Jayne, (also an Air Force Reserve Officer,) gave a toxic speech at the Naval War College in 1978 where he accused the Navy of incoherent and unrealistic planning for new weapon systems.
Carter’s own Navy secretary, Graham Claytor, a World War II Navy combat veteran and escort vessel commander, broke with Carter and Brown and commissioned his own study on Navy force design and structure entitled “Sea Plan 2000.” This study, conducted by the Navy under secretary, James Woolsey, found that far from 400 ships or fewer, the Navy needed a force approaching 600 ships. This study’s findings mirrored those conducted during the Ford administration and by Chiefs of Naval Operations (CNOs), admirals Elmo Zumwalt and James Holloway. Carter’s own Department of Defense took a dim view of Claytor and Woolsey’s study. Assistant Secretary of Defense Fred Wacker dismissed Sea Plan 2000: “It does not recognize that force planning efficiency can be properly evaluated only in the context of the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS) and the total force development process. Sea Plan 2000 was written in a relatively short time by an ad hoc group convened by the Secretary of the Navy “for the purpose of examining a special set of options,” rather than be a real force planning document, apparently something reserved only for non-navy, OSD bureaucrats.
The highest end of these options would become the model for the Reagan administration’s 600-ship navy at the core of the maritime strategy that defined its uses.
Carter’s allocations for military spending were subpar even after the wake-up calls of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan later that year. In May 1980, the Joint Chiefs of Staff publicly stated that Carter’s FY81 defense budget was too small to counter the Soviets.
Chief of Naval Operations Thomas Hayward was frustrated at the lack of growth in the Navy and the Carter administration’s refusal to sanction a more aggressive role for the fleet in a war with the Soviets. Hayward’s Sea Strike Concept, developed during his tenure as Commander of the Pacific Fleet in the 1970s, was based on this mission. In the Navy’s last internal white paper before the advent of the Reagan administration in 1981, entitled “The Future of U.S. Seapower,” Hayward resigned himself to less support from the Carter admin. He attempted to steer the conversation away from purely budget issues to one of “why do we need a Navy?” and “What kind of Navy should it be, anyway?”
It was sad that Hayward had to campaign for “maritime superiority” as the fundamental touchstone for the service, even as it faced a growing Soviet threat into the early 1980s. Such was the legacy of the Carter presidency for the Navy.
President Carter served honorably in the United States Navy. His administration included some prescient naval thinkers (Graham Claytor and James Woolsey) who helped to somewhat alter the heading of the Carter administration’s naval policy and strategy by its end, specifically in again confirming the need for 600 ships: a goal aggressively pursued by the Reagan administration.
Despite those efforts, Carter and his close OSD advisers made every attempt to reduce the size and capability of the Navy in favor of pouring more resources into a potential European ground war against the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies. A 1990s CIA report actually confirmed that the aggressive, offensive exercises of the Navy during the Reagan administration played an appreciable role in convincing the Soviets that they could not win a war with the West. Carter and his OSD team were wrong to reduce offensive naval capabilities. Let that be the final word on the Carter administration’s interaction with the U.S. Navy.