Trump Navy Pick Commits To Rebuilding America’s Depleted Fleet

Revitalizing America’s depleted maritime fleet will be a major focus of the new Trump administration, Navy Secretary nominee John Phelan told lawmakers on Thursday.

Speaking at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Phelan, a former private investor and businessman, emphasized his and President Donald Trump’s commitment to increasing the number of ships that comprise the military’s naval fleet. As The Federalist previously reported, the size of America’s naval fleet and the country’s shipbuilding capacity have diminished significantly in recent decades, going from a fleet of more than 500 ships at the end of the Cold War to less than 300 as of this month.

In his opening statement, Phelan highlighted the Navy’s shipbuilding crisis and other “systemic failures” facing the service. He noted that these failures cannot be permitted to continue if America is to remain a leading maritime power.

“The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps remain the most formidable expeditionary force in the world. But the U.S. Navy is at a crossroads,” Phelan said. “Extended deployments, inadequate maintenance, huge cost overruns, delayed shipbuilding, failed audits, subpar housing, and sadly, record-high suicide rates, are systemic failures that have gone unaddressed for far too long. And frankly, this is unacceptable.”

Strengthening America’s naval industrial capacity has generated bipartisan support in recent years.

In December, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle from the House and Senate introduced the SHIPS Act, a bill that aims to “reform the commercial maritime and shipbuilding sectors so the U.S. can better compete with China,” according to U.S. Naval Institute News. One of the measure’s original authors was then-Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., who now serves as Trump’s national security advisor.

During Thursday’s hearing, Phelan also fielded questions from GOP senators about the Navy’s recruiting crisis.

The issue rose to prominence under the Biden administration, in which every branch of the armed services (with the exception of the Marine Corps) regularly struggled to meet their recruiting targets. Military specialists have, in part, attributed the prior administration’s advancement of racist DEI ideology and disastrous foreign policy agenda as reasons for the service’s failure to bring in new personnel.

Phelan told the committee’s chair, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., that the upcoming 250th anniversary of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps offers a “great opportunity” to highlight the “benefits of service” and that the commemoration is “something [he] intend[s] to take advantage of from a recruiting perspective” if confirmed by the Senate. He also suggested improvements to “digital recruiting” and adopting successful strategies from the Marine Corps as ways of enhancing the Navy’s outreach.

While questioning Phelan, Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., noted how, in response to the recruiting crisis, the Navy and other branches of the service under the Biden administration lowered standards to widen the pool of applicants eligible for service. The Navy secretary nominee acknowledged the importance of maintaining “standards that are high,” and added that it’s critical for the force’s success to “have people who can meet those standards.”

“The business is warfighting, and there’s no margin for error in that. So, you need the most capable and best people, and we need to have high standards to meet that,” Phelan said. “What happens to a lot of organizations is you hire for that immediate need, and then that person can’t grow [into] that job. … In this business, we … need to be hiring the ‘Mr. and Mrs. Tomorrows’ to make sure they can compete and do.”

While some of the committee’s Democrat members probed Phelan about legitimate issues facing the Navy, others took the time to take dishonest potshots at the Trump administration and its efforts to remove waste, fraud, and abuse throughout the federal government.

Democrat Sens. Jeanne Sheehan of New Hampshire and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut engaged in fearmongering over the recent announcement that the Pentagon is examining possible reallocation of 8 percent of its existing budget. Specifically, these senators attempted to make it appear these proposed plans are “cuts” that would drastically harm America’s defense industrial capacity and naval readiness.

As recently explained by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, however, the Pentagon has not cut anything, and the aforementioned directive is simply “asking the services to plan” for reallocation of department resources.

“This is planning for this year, that we will move away from woke, Biden-era non-lethal programs and instead spend that money on President Trump’s America First, peace-through-strength priorities for our national budget,” Hegseth said. “It’s not a cut. It’s refocusing and reinvesting existing funds into building a force that protects you, the American people.”

Blumenthal also falsely classified Trump’s firing of pro-DEI military officials as a “purge” and dishonestly portrayed the move as an attempt to politicize the military. The Democrat senator (unsurprisingly) failed to reference how the Biden administration’s injection of neo-Marxist ideology into the service and promotion of radical leftist military officials politicized the armed forces.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood