Secretary of the Navy Kenneth Braithwaite has called for the U.S. military to establish a new naval fleet in the Indo-Pacific region, perhaps based in Singapore, to more comprehensively address the challenges facing the U.S. Army’s Indo-Pacific Command, USNI News reported Nov. 17.
Braithwaite said, “We want to build a new U.S. military fleet. We want to deploy that fleet at the crossroads between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and we want to really leave a footprint in the Indo-Pacific.” He continued, “We can’t just rely on the Seventh Fleet in Japan, we have to look to our other allies and partners, like Singapore and India, and God forbid, if we ever get involved in any disputes, that’s going to be very important.” Braithwaite offered, “More importantly, it would provide a stronger deterrent. So we’re going to build the First Fleet, we’re going to deploy it at, or at the bottleneck where Singapore is, and we’re going to look to make it more expeditionary and cruise it across the Pacific until our allies and partners see that it can best assist them as well as assist ourselves.”
Braithwaite said he hasn’t had a chance to talk about the plan with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller. But a Pentagon official told USNI News that Braithwaite had floated the idea of rebuilding the First Fleet months earlier and had met with former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who had just been fired by Trump, and that Esper had reportedly endorsed the proposal.
Braithwaite announced his intentions at the annual Naval Submarine Alliance symposium on Tuesday, the newspaper reported. Significantly, he began his speech by mentioning that “China has shown the world their ‘aggressiveness.'” He further stated, “I dare say that not since the American-British War of 1812 has American sovereignty been under such pressure as we are now seeing.” Braithwaite, who will visit India in the coming weeks to discuss the “security challenges” the two countries share, made it clear that “the United States cannot compete with China alone, and that countries in the Pacific and around the world need to help each other militarily and economically to have any chance of deterrence against China. It worked.”
Historically, the U.S. Navy’s First Fleet began early operations in 1946 and became operational in 1948, originally under the U.S. Pacific Fleet, with responsibility for the Western Pacific. The First Fleet was formerly part of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, primarily responsible for the Western Pacific, and was decommissioned on February 1, 1973, with responsibility taken over by the Third Fleet. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was the first commander of the First Fleet.
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