America at Sea: Voices That Matter is a conversation hosted by Americans for a Stronger Navy, supported by U.S. Maritime Action and moderated by Capt. Brent Sadler, USN (Ret.). Shipbuilders, mariners, industry, the Navy community and policy experts answer the same three questions about rebuilding America at sea: What’s working? What’s in the way? What would you fix first?
Our guest is CAPT Bill Hamblet, USN (Ret.), Editor-in-Chief of Proceedings, the U.S. Naval Institute’s flagship magazine [1][2]. He spent nearly 30 years as a Navy intelligence officer, serving with an F/A-18 squadron, a SEAL team, a carrier air wing and a carrier strike group. Ashore, he served as naval attaché to Russia, led the China Division at the Joint Intelligence Operations Center in the Pacific, and was in the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, where he helped lead the initial intelligence response [1]. His views here are his own, not those of the Naval Institute.
Question 1: What’s working now?
Bill starts with the people. Carrier strike groups, destroyers and logistics ships have been deploying for 10, 11 and even 12 months at a time over the past year or two, with one or two port visits or none at all. He calls that unheard of since the Vietnam War. The fleet has run combat operations, blockades, strike warfare and mine warfare at the end of long supply lines.
He points to Operation Epic Fury, when Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain, also a key logistics hub, was lost on day two. The fleet adapted and kept its carrier strike groups armed, fueled and on station.
“For any graybeards or veterans out there who want to say that today’s sailors are just a bunch of snowflakes, I would challenge you to go on a 9, 10, 11, 12 month deployment with 0, 1, 2 port visits.”
He is just as clear that this pace can’t last. Navy leaders, including Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle, have been saying the fleet will need a reset after being “ridden hard and put away wet” [3]. But credit goes where it is due: the sailors and officers of today’s fleet “have performed magnificently.”
Question 2: What are the barriers?
Bill names two. The first is that America took sea power for granted after the Cold War, and that cut across both parties. The Navy shrank from almost 600 ships in 1988 to fewer than 300 today. As he puts it, borrowing a line he has heard from others, we are running an 11-carrier Navy in a 15- or 17-carrier world.
Open sea lanes, he reminds us, were never a given. They were bought and guaranteed by the U.S. Navy and its closest allies in World War II, then patrolled through the Cold War. The Reagan buildup toward a 600-ship Navy helped defeat the Soviet Union. Then the country drifted.
“Free trade isn’t free. Its price is a strong Navy working in concert with strong like-minded allies to keep global sea lines open and protected.”
The second barrier is that the government has been a bad customer. Budgets fluctuated, requirements and designs changed, and the Navy tried to do too much with the lead ships of several classes. Building carriers, destroyers and submarines takes heavy capital and a large skilled workforce. Telling a builder like Huntington Ingalls or General Dynamics Electric Boat “five, no two, no one, and four in three years” is, in his words, hell on those companies and their workers.
“It’s really important that Congress, the Department of Defense and the Navy specifically send consistent demand signals, pass budgets on time and minimize change orders.”
Question 3: What would you fix first?
Bill’s answer starts with the public. Americans need to understand that China, and to a lesser extent Russia, Iran and North Korea, are already at war with us in the gray zone, below the threshold of open conflict, while preparing to fight if they must. China’s navy already outnumbers ours in ships, and he expects it to pass us in total tonnage within about five years.
“They’re putting new ships in the water like dumplings in the soup.”
During the Cold War, he says, most Americans understood we were in a long game with a serious adversary: the space race, the military buildup, NATO and the defense of Western Europe. We need to get back on that footing and understand what China wants the world to look like by mid-century.
“Without a strong Navy, nothing the United States wants to accomplish is possible. If our citizens and their elected leaders understood that we’re in a serious contest, and that naval power were key to their security, key to their way of life, I think appropriate strategy and investment would follow.”
More from the conversation
After the three questions, we kept talking, and Bill added a few points worth sharing.
“The strongest military in the world.” Presidents of both parties, he noted, routinely tell military audiences that America has the strongest military in the world. Repeated often enough, that message tells the public there is nothing to worry about. When he tells family that naval power is not trending well, the answer he sometimes gets is, “I saw Top Gun: Maverick. Looked pretty good.”
What a broken demand signal costs. On a tour of General Dynamics Electric Boat, he was told that during the 1980s buildup the U.S. was buying about four and a half submarines a year, and Electric Boat had about 26,000 workers. After the Cold War, orders fell to roughly one submarine in five years and the workforce fell to about 6,000. A decade later, when the Navy wanted one Virginia-class boat a year again, the yards struggled to deliver, and they still are.
Too much on one hull. He pointed to the Zumwalt-class destroyer and the Ford-class carrier as examples of packing too many new technologies onto a single class at once.
A book to read. He recommended Arthur Herman’s Freedom’s Forge, which tells how industrialists like William Knudsen and Henry J. Kaiser turned American industry toward war production before and during World War II, and why the companies doing that work had to be able to turn a profit [4].
The takeaway
Bill sees a fleet performing remarkably under heavy strain, and a country that forgot sea power has to be paid for. His fixes run from Washington to the kitchen table: steady demand signals and on-time budgets for the builders, and a public that understands the contest we are in. As always, these are the guest’s views, and featuring them is not an endorsement. What do you think?
About America at Sea: Voices That Matter
America at Sea: Voices That Matter is a conversation hosted by Americans for a Stronger Navy, supported by U.S. Maritime Action and moderated by Capt. Brent Sadler, USN (Ret.). Shipbuilders, mariners, industry, the Navy community and policy experts answer the same three questions about rebuilding America at sea. Views expressed are the speaker’s own, and featuring a view is not an endorsement.
Join the conversation on X. What’s working? What’s in the way? What would you fix first?
About the Guest
CAPT Bill Hamblet, USN (Ret.), is Executive Vice President for Periodicals and Editor-in-Chief of Proceedings at the U.S. Naval Institute, which he joined in 2016 as deputy editor-in-chief. A 1987 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he served nearly 30 years as a Navy intelligence officer, including tours with an F/A-18 squadron, a SEAL team, a carrier air wing and a carrier strike group, on the Joint Staff J-2, as naval attaché to Russia, as head of the China Division at the Joint Intelligence Operations Center, Pacific, and at the National Counterterrorism Center. He holds a master’s in national resource strategy from the Eisenhower School at National Defense University [1].
References
[1] U.S. Naval Institute, “CAPT Bill Hamblet, USN (Ret.).” https://www.usni.org/about-us/executive-staff/capt-bill-hamblet-usn-ret
[2] U.S. Naval Institute, Proceedings. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings
[3] USNI News, “New CNO Caudle Calls for New Fleet Design in First Speech,” August 25, 2025. https://news.usni.org/2025/08/25/new-cno-caudle-calls-for-new-fleet-design-in-first-speech
[4] Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (Random House, 2012).