United States Navy

• 1. Introduction

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  The United States Navy controls 51 percent of America's nuclear stockpile. Not in silos buried in the plains, but aboard submarines that prowl the world's oceans, silent and largely invisible. On V-J Day in August 1945, the Navy was operating 6,768 ships simultaneously. Today it fields eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, a fleet so large it exceeds the total displacement of any other navy on earth by a wide margin. Yet the institution that achieved all this began with a single borrowed schooner and a congressional resolution that barely passed. How did a nation that once debated whether to have a navy at all build the most powerful maritime force in history? The answers reach from the Revolutionary War to present-day deployments across the Western Pacific, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean.

• 2. Born from Debate

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  On the 13th of October 1775, the Continental Congress authorized the purchase of two vessels to be armed for a cruise against British merchant ships. That resolution is now counted as the founding moment of the U.S. Navy. But it nearly did not happen. In the Second Continental Congress, supporters argued a navy would protect shipping, defend the coast, and help the colonies win foreign support. Detractors called it foolish to challenge the British Royal Navy, then the world's preeminent sea power. Commander in Chief George Washington broke the deadlock when he commissioned the schooner USS Hannah to intercept British merchantmen and reported its captures to Congress. The Continental Navy achieved mixed results. It won engagements and raided merchant vessels, yet it lost twenty-four of its own ships and at one point was reduced to just two vessels in active service. In August 1785, after the Revolutionary War ended, Congress sold off the last remaining ship because it lacked the funds to maintain a fleet. The United States would be without a navy for nearly a decade.

• 3. Six Frigates

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  The absence of a navy had immediate consequences. With no warships to protect American merchant ships, Barbary pirates attacked them freely. The only armed maritime presence between 1790 and 1797 was the U.S. Revenue-Marine, the forerunner of the Coast Guard, and it was not equal to the task. Congress passed the Naval Act of 1794 on the 27th of March 1794, establishing a permanent standing navy and ordering the construction of six heavy frigates. By October 1797, the first three were in service. Because of his strong posture on maintaining a standing Navy during this period, John Adams is often called the father of the American Navy. The new Navy moved quickly into action. From 1801 to 1805, during the First Barbary War, it blockaded Barbary ports and executed attacks against their fleets. The Navy also participated in an undeclared Quasi-War with France in 1798-99, and later fought numerous engagements with the Royal Navy in the War of 1812, winning the Battle of Lake Erie and helping prevent the region from threatening American operations there. After the Africa Squadron was established in 1819, it seized 36 slave ships before the Civil War, though it remained far smaller than the Royal Navy's equivalent effort.

• 4. Civil War and Ironclads

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  During the American Civil War, naval power gave the Union a distinct advantage it pressed hard. A Union blockade shut down all major Confederate ports, strangling exports and the coastal trade, though blockade runners kept a thin lifeline open. The brown-water navy components controlled the river systems, making internal movement difficult for the Confederacy and easy for the Union. At the Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862, ironclad warships met in combat for the first time. Despite these achievements, the Navy paid a price after the war ended. For two decades its fleet was neglected and became technologically obsolete. Recovery came through a modernization program beginning in the 1880s, when the first steel-hulled warships were built, stimulating the American steel industry and giving rise to what was called "the new steel navy." A decisive victory over Spain in 1898 brought new respect for American technical quality. In 1907, most of the Navy's battleships, dubbed the Great White Fleet, completed a 14-month circumnavigation of the world ordered by President Theodore Roosevelt, a demonstration that the Navy could project power on a global scale.

• 5. World War II and Carrier Doctrine

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  Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on the 7th of December 1941 reshaped naval doctrine more than any strategic argument ever could. The attack destroyed or took out of action a significant number of U.S. Navy battleships, placing the burden of retaliation on the small number of aircraft carriers that had not been present. Before the war, the U.S. Navy had followed the British and German model of concentrated battleship groups as the main offensive weapon. After Pearl Harbor, carriers took that role. The Navy grew to a size that eclipsed every other fleet on earth. By 1943 it was larger than the combined fleets of all other warring nations. At its peak in August 1945, it operated 6,768 ships on V-J Day. By war's end the Navy had added 18 aircraft carriers and 8 battleships and held over 70 percent of the world's total numbers and tonnage of naval vessels of 1,000 tons or greater. Some 4,000,000 Americans served in the U.S. Navy during the war. The aircraft carrier had replaced the battleship as the dominant weapon at sea, a shift the Navy has not reversed since.

• 6. Nuclear Deterrence at Sea

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  The Ohio-class submarines are assigned 1,895 nuclear warheads, representing 51 percent of the U.S. nuclear stockpile and 19 percent of the global nuclear stockpile. That concentration of destructive power beneath the waves is the product of Cold War strategy. Facing rivalry with the Soviet Navy, the U.S. Navy developed ballistic missile submarines as a key component of nuclear deterrence. The Ohio-class carries the Trident II D5 missile, a three-stage submarine-launched ballistic missile with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle capability, expected to remain in service past 2020. During the Cold War the Navy also blockaded Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis and conducted combat operations in the Persian Gulf against Iran in 1987 and 1988, most notably Operation Praying Mantis. After the Cold War ended, the strategic emphasis shifted from preparation for large-scale war with the Soviet Union toward special operations and strike missions in regional conflicts. In 2010, Admiral Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations, noted that demands on the Navy had grown even as the fleet had shrunk, and that future budget pressure would require relying more heavily on international partnerships.

• 7. Scale and Structure Today

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  With 336,978 personnel on active duty and 101,583 in the Ready Reserve, the Navy is the third largest of the U.S. military service branches. Its 290 combat vessels include the world's largest fleet of nuclear-powered ships, consisting of eleven aircraft carriers and 70 submarines. The naval aviation force fields 4,012 operational aircraft, including 471 F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and 458 Sikorsky MH-60 Seahawk helicopters. Lieutenant Theodore G. "Spuds" Ellyson became the first naval aviator on the 28th of January 1911, and the Navy commissioned its first aircraft carrier in 1922. The F-35C entered service in 2019, and the Navy is developing the F/A-XX program as an eventual successor to the Super Hornet. Shore establishments span the country, from Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, homeport of the Atlantic Fleet occupying over 36,000 acres, to Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California, which covers 1.1 million acres and accounts for approximately one-third of the Navy's total land holdings. Overseas, the largest foreign base is the United States Fleet Activities Yokosuka in Japan, homeport for the Navy's largest forward-deployed fleet, a position reflecting the Navy's declared goal, stated in 2015, of deploying 60 percent of the total fleet to the Pacific by 2020.

• 8. Beyond Combat

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  Grace Hopper, the computer scientist whose work shaped modern programming, served in the U.S. Navy. So did John Coltrane and astronaut Neil Armstrong, Yogi Berra and novelist Thomas Pynchon, and six U.S. presidents: John F. Kennedy, who commanded PT-109 in World War II, followed by Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush. The Navy's reach extends into areas less visible than carrier strike groups. Its postal clerks established the first U.S. government post offices aboard ships during World War I; before email, naval mail was considered almost as valuable to crew members as food and ammunition. Among the notable examples of naval postal history are letters sent from the USS Arizona before and on the 7th of December 1941. In 2007 the Navy joined with the Marine Corps and Coast Guard to adopt a strategy called A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, presented at the International Sea Power Symposium in Newport, Rhode Island on the 17th of October 2007, which elevated the prevention of war to the same philosophical level as the conduct of war. The Navy celebrates its birthday on the 13th of October each year, a date authorized in 1972 by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, honoring the Continental Congress resolution of 1775.