National Affairs: Rebuilding the Navy

The U. S. Navy at present has in commission:

18 battleships 5 second line cruisers 13 light cruisers 3 aircraft carriers 106 destroyers 83 submarines

Last week Secretary of the Navy Wilbur asked Congress to authorize the President to add the following ships to the U. S. Navy:

25 light cruisers 9 destroyer leaders* 32 submarines 5 aircraft carriers

Secretary Wilbur’s list represented the first of four successive programs planned by U. S. Navy men for the next 20 years. Each program is to take five years to complete. The “speculative” cost of the first five-year program, submitted last week, was put at $725,000,000. The U. S. could pay that sum in two years out of its tobacco taxes alone. The cost of the entire 20-year Navy building plan was estimated at $2,900,000,000 or about one-sixth of the present national debt. In advocating the new program, which was transmitted by Secretary Wilbur to Speaker Longworth of the House and thence to the Naval Affairs Committee, President Coolidge assured questioners that it did not conflict with the economy program of his Administration. Four new battleships, costing some $148,000,000, were omitted from the Wilbur list, though building up the U. S. Fleet to a strength permitted under the limitation treaty of 1923 with Britain and Japan was the obvious purpose of the program. The psychology behind the program was apparent. The Geneva conference to discuss further limitation of naval armaments having failed, the Coolidge Administration was determined to build the kind of U. S. Navy which would probably have been built had no Geneva conference ever been held. Few observers credited the understanding of the London Times, which greeted the new U. S. Navy announcement with an editorial to the effect that Britain could not be threatened into another fleet-reducing conference.

* Squadron leaders, of similar design but larger, more heavily armed than line destroyers.