The Bolivian Crisis, Epilogue: The World-Fleet Beckons
Politics can no longer exist when it is subsumed by myth. The Bolivian Crisis is a catastrophe precisely because it has led Americans and Europeans alike into its inviting thrall.
-Ernst Cassirer
Myth is not the negation of politics but politics’ remembering of its original vocation.
-Martin Heidegger
If the true aim of Socialism is to replace the rule of myth with the rule of man, we are still a far ways off from achieving it.
-Theodor Adorno
An enemy in the thrall of myth cannot be reasoned with on equal terms but only disabused through force.
-Carl Schmitt
We possess a perfectly adequate civil religion here, of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, and we need not invent a fresh and foreign one to live up to the task of securing our republic.
-Lewis Mumford
A myth may be false as an explanation and true as an instrument.
-Max Weber
I don’t believe the Americans want to attack us…but they do desire to make us dispensable to their purposes, which may amount to the same thing in practice.
-Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
I do not know how the British can be trusted, but it appears we will have little other choice but to renew the old alliance, and hope that it remains clandestine.
-Anonymous Japanese diplomat, following the passage of the World-Fleet Act, October 1933
The World-Fleet: A Genealogy of an American Institution, Walter LaFeber
The concept of a World-Fleet did not have its originary point in Congressional Hearings, Newspaper Editorials, or the unsettled musings of an outraged nation. The World-Fleet was first proposed in the Journal of American Foreign Policy, the interregnum institution which contributed so much to the American understanding of geo-politics. Its inventor was not a German but an American in conversation with them, Isaiah Bowman. The idea was ventured forth in a 1927 analysis of “world-space” - like so many of the concepts we have inherited from the learned German emigres, it was two ideas fused into one in a manner which seemed both invigorating and slightly uncanny. World-fleet had the same ring as Weltpolitik. To conceptualize such a device was, in Bowman’s words, to think of a Navy that could “encompass and prove adequate to a new world-space”. The naive may have thought this nothing more than to imagine a fleet which operated at a global scale. Yet the World-fleet did not “merely signal a desire to project naval force” - it was an “instrument designed not simply to inhabit space but to reorder it”.
The world-fleet found a healthy hearing in the Journal of American Foreign Policy and among intellectuals associated with the Republican Party. However, before the Bolivian Crisis it was mentioned only rarely in the halls of power. When it was mooted, it was in unsystematic and unprogrammatic fashion, by politicians in shipyard districts looking for a newfangled idea to justify increased naval appropriations. Importantly, the world-fleet idea was given little consideration by the American Navy and its associated institutions.
The Bolivian Crisis changed everything. The socialists violated the Monroe Doctrine not in deed but in word. A clandestine battle over shipping certificates and smuggling was one matter; another was the open declaration by the socialist powers that they did not recognize America’s sphere of influence in South America and intended to puncture it. When the crisis began, one could see conservative outlets like the Wall Street Journal spoke primarily in terms of “protection of American nationals and assets and international commissions to supervise compensation.” This was the language of legal order, not of civilizational confrontation. As the crisis continued and the Europeans made public their defiance, newspapers - even liberal and centrist ones - spoke instead of a “test” of the Monroe doctrine and the regrettable necessity to expand the blockade to meet it.
What truly transformed the perception of the conflict was the increasing realization that it was being lost. America was failing the “test” it had set for itself. The incendiary rhetoric of the socialists heightened the feeling of moral injury, and the visit of the Pope amplified the perception that the battle had become a truly civilizational one. The leakiness of the blockade became a metaphor; American space was being invaded, contaminated by a foreign adversary that sought to destroy it. Yet no red scare happened: this was an enemy not within America proper but within American space more broadly; weakness was not a reflection of a lack of national unity but of an attachment to cherished illusions in the face of a ruthless and belligerent enemy bloc which did not tolerate the American way of life.
The World-Fleet, already gaining currency in conservative newspaper and among local Republican activists, became a genuine mania following the Beijing Conference. A compensatory logic governed its basic structure: the United States had been humiliated at sea, so it must rule the sea; the Monroe doctrine had been punctured, and so a new, global doctrine of containment was necessary; the regional fleets had proven inadequate to their task, so a world-fleet was required; Britain and Japan had proven unreliable and greedy partners - the world-fleet would force them into a junior status; the cordon of paperwork had proven insufficient, but a cordon of steel would now lay an unbreakable ring around America’s adversaries.
In this situation, Bowman, Haushofer, and Schmitt, the most well-known public intellectuals associated with the fleet proposal, became genuine celebrities almost overnight. Schmitt’s oracular pronouncements became newspaper headlines and Haushouver’s carefully phrased doctrines were received as the wisdom of an older, more sober culture. The World-Fleet turned into the answer to the Bolivian crisis.
The World-Fleet could not have become a reality without it serving a political as well as psychological need. Try as he might, Hoover could not wholly displace responsibility for the settlement at Beijing from Vandenberg to himself. It was during the first weeks of Vandenberg’s presidency that the settlement was reached, and it appeared to contradict everything the man had campaigned for. Key constituencies - middle-class anticommunists, eccentric right-wing industrial magnates - were infuriated. Hamilton Fish, the New York Congressman, claimed he had been “duped” by Vandenberg. The President looked for some way of reconciling with his supporters, and found it in the World-Fleet.
At first, he did not openly embrace the doctrine as stated, suspicious of its German intellectual provenance and its grand claims to world-dominion. But practically, he called for a “vast new naval bill which will ensure the safety of the Republic”. He spoke a language of national unity and shared sacrifice to “make secure our republic and its way of life from its enemies abroad, who respect neither the distance of the seas nor the laws of god and man.” Vandenburg may not have endorsed the idea, but by now it had gained sufficient currency to become the organizing principle of any new naval bill. When Congress began taking up the matter, it was almost inevitable that the intellectuals associated with it were called in to testify. A portion is reprinted below:
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
EXTRACT: JOINT HEARING - COMMITTEE ON NAVAL AFFAIRS & COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Subject: The Geopolitical Situation and the Security of American Commerce
Date: August 17, 1933
(Portions broadcast in excerpt by major radio networks)Present:
Rep. Carl Vinson (D–GA), Acting Chair, Naval Affairs
Rep. Hamilton Fish (R–NY), Member, Naval Affairs
Rep. William B. Bankhead (D–AL), Member, Foreign Affairs
Rep. Emanuel Celler (D–NY), Member, Foreign Affairs
Rep. Arthur Vandenberg (R–MI), Member, Foreign Affairs
Rep. James W. Wadsworth (R–NY), Member, Naval Affairs
Rep. Thomas L. Blanton (D–TX), Member, Naval Affairs
…and others.WITNESSES:
Prof. Karl Haushofer, Editor, Journal of American Foreign Policy
Prof. Carl Schmitt, Lecturer in Jurisprudence, University of Chicago; Contributing Columnist, Chicago Tribune
Rear Adm. H. C. Yarnell, U.S. Navy (General Board liaison)
Mr. R. Walton Moore, Assistant Secretary of State (Commercial Affairs)Click to expand…
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QUESTIONING
Rep. Hamilton Fish (R–NY)
REP. FISH: Professor Schmitt, I want to begin where the newspapers have begun, by discussing this “German doctrine.” People hear your accent and they hear the word “geopolitics” and they assume it is foreign mischief. State it simply: what is geopolitics?PROF. SCHMITT: The study of the relation between the earth - its seas, lands, distances, and resources—and political decision.
REP. FISH: Decision meaning what?
PROF. SCHMITT: The capacity to choose a course and enforce it against resistance.
REP. FISH: So if America lacks that capacity at sea—
PROF. SCHMITT: Then it will be decided for.
REP. FISH: Professor Haushofer, do you agree with that?
PROF. HAUSHOFER: I agree with the practical core. Dependence exists whether one praises it as “cooperation” or denounces it as “submission.”
REP. FISH: Let’s speak of dependence. Are we dependent on Britain to maintain the world’s key sea routes?
PROF. HAUSHOFER: In certain corridors, yes. And more importantly, dependent on Britain’s diplomacy, its tolerance, its calculations, its fiscal capacity to maintain forces at distance.
REP. FISH: Which is to say, dependent on the internal politics of the British Parliament.
PROF. HAUSHOFER: Internal politics always becomes foreign policy when an empire is financially strained.
REP. FISH: Thank you. Now: is there any serious alternative to building an American fleet capable of operating in all oceans?
PROF. SCHMITT: There are alternatives. They are all varieties of hoping that others will carry burdens for you.
REP. FISH: That is the clearest sentence we have heard in years.
(Murmurs. A few laughs. Gavel.)
ACTING CHAIRMAN VINSON: Order.
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Rep. Robert Taft (R–OH)
REP. TAFT: Professor Haushofer, I want you to clarify a point. You said America cannot choose whether it is a world power. Many of my constituents believe we can choose restraint. Are you saying restraint is impossible?PROF. HAUSHOFER: Restraint is possible as a style. But it does not change the structure of exposure. If your industry produces for global markets, you are already implicated. If your credit is lent abroad, you are already entangled. If you possess the capacity to intervene and refuse to do so, you still shape expectations by your very refusal.
REP. TAFT: So restraint is not innocence. It is simply one form of action.
PROF. HAUSHOFER: Precisely.
REP. TAFT: Professor Schmitt, you speak of defending America as a political form. Do you believe this requires militarization at home?
PROF. SCHMITT: It requires clarity at home. Militarization is sometimes the symptom of clarity. Sometimes it is a substitute for it. The danger is not a strong navy but a nation that uses the navy to avoid political self-understanding.
REP. TAFT: That is almost… prudent.
PROF. SCHMITT: Prudence is not the enemy of decision. It is the manner of its endurance.
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Rep. Emanuel Celler (D–NY)
REP. CELLER: Mr. Chairman.ACTING CHAIRMAN VINSON: The gentleman from New York is recognized.
REP. CELLER: Professor Haushofer, I listened carefully to you. You speak as though geography is fate and power is arithmetic. Yet you also speak of doctrine. Doctrine is not geography. It is will. It is imagination. It is, if I may, politics.
Let me put it plainly. Your “world-fleet” and “world-space” sound uncomfortably like German Weltpolitik dressed up in American vocabulary. We have been told for twenty years that the old world’s disease is imperial ambition. Why should we import its diagnosis and its cure?
PROF. HAUSHOFER: Because the disease you fear is not ambition. It is weakness combined with ambition—overreach without coherent capacity. This is what produces panic and brutality. A coherent doctrine, properly understood, is not a license for conquest. It is a method for avoiding improvisation.
REP. CELLER: A doctrine for avoiding improvisation can become a doctrine for justifying whatever one wishes. You spoke of “natural borders”: China, the Persian Gulf, Western Europe. Those are not borders. Those are other peoples.
Is your program compatible with self-determination, or only with dominance?
PROF. HAUSHOFER: Self-determination without security is a phrase that collapses the moment it encounters force.
REP. CELLER: And who decides what counts as “security”? The people in Shanghai? The people in Basra? The people in Berlin? Or the American fleet?
PROF. HAUSHOFER: In the last instance, the actor with capacity decides. That is not an ethical claim. It is a description.
REP. CELLER: It is a description that, once accepted, becomes an ethic by force of habit.
Now, Professor Schmitt. You speak of “friend and enemy” as though politics cannot be politics without an enemy. Do you believe democracy can endure if it is permanently trained to see the world through that lens?
PROF. SCHMITT: Democracy endures only if it knows what it is, and therefore what threatens it.
REP. CELLER: That is still evasive. I will ask a simpler question. If the American people decide the world-fleet is too expensive, too provocative, too imperial—do you accept their decision?
(A pause.)
PROF. SCHMITT: The people may decide many things. But a people that decides it will not defend the conditions of its own political existence decides only once.
REP. CELLER: There it is. A trap. Agree with you or be accused of national suicide. That is not counsel. That is intimidation dressed as theory.
(Murmurs. Gavel.)
ACTING CHAIRMAN VINSON: Order.
REP. CELLER: One more point, Mr. Chairman. Professor Schmitt, your argument has a convenient feature: it makes every limit on power into treason, every skepticism into cowardice, every budget question into existential crisis.
PROF. SCHMITT: You mistake me. Skepticism is healthy when a people is secure. When a people is not secure, skepticism becomes an accomplice of pressure.
REP. CELLER: And who declares the moment of insecurity? The Executive? The Navy? The press? A professor?
PROF. SCHMITT: Reality declares it, Congressman. The question is whether you will recognize it before it recognizes you.
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Rep. Thomas L. Blanton (D–TX)
REP. BLANTON: Professor Haushofer, I want to ask about money, because poetry doesn’t build ships. Your journal receives funding. Who funds it?PROF. HAUSHOFER: Subscriptions, patronage, private citizens.
REP. BLANTON: That’s elegant. It’s also fog. Are any patrons connected to steel, shipbuilding, armaments—anybody who would profit from this program we’re discussing?
PROF. HAUSHOFER: Congressman, I am a scholar, not a bookkeeper.
REP. BLANTON: And yet you are here to urge expenditures of a magnitude that will shape our whole economy. We are bookkeepers. Answer the question.
PROF. HAUSHOFER: There are patrons who are industrialists, yes.
REP. BLANTON: Are any bidding on naval contracts?
PROF. HAUSHOFER: Many American industrialists supply the government in some capacity.
REP. BLANTON: That is still a refusal.
Let me ask it another way. If the world-fleet is adopted, your patrons will gain. If it is rejected, your patrons will lose. Is that correct?
PROF. HAUSHOFER: It may be true, Congressman, that an industrial society’s security program benefits industry. That is not corruption by definition.
REP. BLANTON: It becomes corruption when doctrine is purchased like advertising.
PROF. SCHMITT: Congressman, may I add something?
ACTING CHAIRMAN VINSON: Briefly.
PROF. SCHMITT: In every era, those who benefit from defense will be accused of conspiracies. This accusation can be a substitute for political judgment. The relevant question is not whether industry benefits, but whether the political community maintains control of the decision.
REP. BLANTON: That’s a fine distinction, Professor, and we are here precisely because many of us worry control is slipping.
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Rear Adm. Yarnell is pulled in
REP. WADSWORTH (R–NY): Admiral Yarnell, set aside the professors. In naval terms, can the United States secure its commerce without global operational reach?ADM. YARNELL: Congressman, commerce is global. If our fleet is not capable of sustained operations beyond the coasts, we will be dependent on others for the protection of our routes.
REP. WADSWORTH: Thank you. Professor Schmitt, is the Admiral’s point your point?
PROF. SCHMITT: The Admiral describes the technical skeleton. I describe the political flesh.
REP. CELLER: Or the political fever.
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Closing exchange
ACTING CHAIRMAN VINSON: We will have order. We are near the end of this panel.Professor Haushofer, one final question from the Chair. You have said the ocean is the medium of modern life. If Congress builds what is being discussed—a fleet of unprecedented scale—what happens to our politics?
PROF. HAUSHOFER: Your politics will become commensurate with your reality. A nation that lives globally and pretends it lives locally will be governed by surprise. A nation that accepts its scale can govern itself with fewer panics.
ACTING CHAIRMAN VINSON: Professor Schmitt, same question. What happens to our politics?
PROF. SCHMITT: The question is not what happens to your politics if you build the fleet. The question is what happens to your politics if you do not. If you do not, you will be forced into choices later—under duress—without preparation, without unity, and without the dignity of decision.
REP. CELLER: Dignity. That is the word that frightens me. Empires always call their appetites dignity.
PROF. SCHMITT: And republics sometimes call their evasions virtue.
(A long murmur, the kind that a stenographer can hear but cannot write.)
ACTING CHAIRMAN VINSON: The panel is excused. The Committees will reconvene at two o’clock with the Assistant Secretary of State and the General Board.
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…The Congressional testimony was listened to over radio and became a subject of fervent public conversation. The subsequent debate between the World-Fleet’s supporters and a fragmented and ultimately ineffective opposition revealed a shift from a pluralistic, interest-based politics to an increasingly existential one.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages became the venue of many of these debates; fiscal conservatives and foreign policy realists joined together in a withering attack on the proposed 16.5 billion dollar naval bill. Yet the terrain of the debate had already shifted beneath their feet. The proponents of the World-Fleet did not argue in terms of industrial capacity or diplomatic relations. “Means cannot be a barrier when the matter is one of national survival,” one editorialist opined, sharing a sentiment which was widely felt. Nor, another hawk wrote, “can we accept the current international system if this is itself a concession to America’s enemies.” Once the debate was framed in terms of survival rather than strategy, practical objections could be dismissed as failures of nerve or imagination. The very act of calculating costs became evidence of insufficient commitment to national security. Thus the internal opposition within the Republican Party—fiscally cautious, diplomatically pragmatic, suspicious of grand schemes—found itself quickly marginalized, unable to compete with a rhetoric that made prudence sound like cowardice and calculation like betrayal.
Even skeptical congressmen found reasons to acquiesce. For them, the fleet project became a means of securing patronage for their districts. A gigantic programme of naval construction promised steadily rising industrial employment—this was particularly important in an era of slowly rising unemployment due to the collapse of agricultural prices and the inability of large cities to completely absorb their new denizens. For the patriotically-minded, the World-Fleet also promised something else: a new national project of shared labour which would commit both the elite and the upper rungs of the middle class to a regime of taxation reimagined as civic virtue. Above all, however, it appeared to be the language of the World-Fleet itself which was tantalizing. Congressmen, donors, and ordinary Americans all adopted it. America would rise to the occasion after the Bolivian disaster. A vast, globe-spanning fleet—a ring of steel laid down across the entire earth—would vouchsafe security for the American heartland and prosperity for American commerce.
The World-Fleet succeeded not because it was necessary but because it was believed to be necessary. As we have witnessed, belief, once institutionalized in steel and doctrine, creates its own reality. Whether the threat was as dire as claimed, whether the response was proportionate, whether alternatives existed - these questions were foreclosed by the dynamic that transformed a policy debate into an existential civilizational imperative.
Robert Keohane, “The World-Fleet and American Security in the 1930s”
The World-Fleet was not, as revisionist historians would have it, a fever dream born of wounded pride. It was a rational response to a genuine strategic crisis: the emergence of a hostile superpower in Europe, the unreliability of traditional allies, and the vulnerability of global order to coordinated socialist disruption. That this response involved unprecedented mobilization of resources and assertion of American power reflects not mythic grandiosity but the scale of the challenge itself. Nor did the policy process resemble the frenzy revisionists describe.
America was not gripped by the mass fever which produced a so-called “Proletarian Public”. Debates, while passionate, remained within the bounds of rational deliberation, a fact which is reflected in the actual naval appropriations which occurred. Demands made for a fleet larger than all other powers placed together were rejected. So were those of the battleship enthusiasts, who wished to build a vast fleet of 40,000 ton juggernauts. Instead, a fleet was built that was clearly a rational response to the outcome of the Bolivian crisis: 320 destroyers were the headline item of the bill, along with 12 light carriers - a force structure dictated by operational requirements rather than prestige. This was a fleet built for the protection of American commerce and the interdiction of hostile arms shipments.
We cannot possibly comment on every argument and imagining which made its way into the newspapers and radio. Bolivia was indeed a national trauma, but it was a wound because it revealed the depth of the challenge that the American republic faced. The nation did not ask for an enemy who sought to undermine, overthrow, and subvert every existing political order. A temporary breach of the Monroe Doctrine may even have been permissible if it was not joined with a public declaration directed at its permanent destruction. The Bolivian Crisis clarified the character of the adversary, and it demonstrated that America could no longer rely on the good-will of its allies, who had their own interests to attend to and their own internal weaknesses. It was clear that America was the only power with both the capacity and the will to defend the liberal world, and America rose to its historic responsibility. The fleet was an assurance not just for American security but for what must be called, without embarrassment, the civilizational order of the west—the constellation of liberal institutions, market economies, and democratic practices that the socialist bloc explicitly sought to destroy.
Critics of the World-Fleet program have never articulated a coherent alternative. Continued dependence on unreliable allies? Acceptance of socialist penetration of the Western Hemisphere? Retreat to fortress America while global commerce collapsed? Each alternative was either strategically untenable or morally unacceptable.
The Haushofer/Schmitt obsession misinterprets their thought and overplays their role. Neither thinker was a mythmaker, and both were hostile to myth as a tool of politics. If anything, the older, isolationist conception of an American city upon a hill, which would compel by mere force of example, sits more comfortably in a mythic register. The Congressional hearing that revisionists frequently cite as evidence of ‘existential politics’ in fact demonstrates the opposite. Representatives asked hard questions about costs, alternatives, and strategic necessity. Schmitt and Haushofer provided answers grounded in geopolitical analysis. That some found their arguments convincing is not evidence of mass hypnosis by foreign, ‘German’ thinkers - it was not Haushofer and Schmit that wrote the bill but Congress, and this legislation, although an important achievement of the American polity, displayed the same interest-brokerage politics and playing for appropriations as any other piece of legislation from the time period.
There is no denying that the bill constituted an unprecedented expenditure. But the cost of inaction would have been greater: the collapse of American credibility, the encirclement of the United States, and the eventual triumph of a hostile, anti-American ideology dedicated to the destruction of Liberalism. The 16.5 billion dollar sum was amply repaid not just in security, but also in the booming industries it created and technical innovation it spurred on. Liberalism, still struggling to square the doctrine of free market exchange with the demands of security in an age of ideological competition, found in the World-Fleet Project a means of coordinating industry to ensure its survival and global influence. Revisionist characterizations of this project as ‘imperial’ confuse the defense of a liberal international order. The fleet existed not to attain colonies or tribute, but to keep sea lanes open and prevent the forcible imposition of an alien universalist creed on unwilling peoples. If this is an empire, it is one of a fundamentally different, and more consensual character than others.
Finally, Japan and Britain might, and would indeed protest, but the existence of the World-Fleet itself served as evidence of their futility: neither had the capacity to build a force that could meet the World-Fleet and do the work of defending against an expansion of socialism from its Eurasian heartlands. The differential distribution of maritime duty was itself grounded in a differential distribution of both industrial capacity and political will: Britain’s fiscal straitjacket and Japan’s regional focus left only America capable of global maritime leadership. The force of this logic may have offended national pride, but it could not be dismissed by rational minds.
…Writing in the late 1970s, revisionists enjoy the luxury of retrospective criticism. They know what the World-Fleet became, what consequences followed, what costs accumulated. Those who made policy in 1933 had no such luxury. They faced an immediate crisis with incomplete information and had to act on the basis of reasonable projections, not certain knowledge.
The World-Fleet represented American liberalism’s answer to the socialist challenge: not retreat into isolation, not surrender to totalitarian expansion, but the assertion of power in defense of the international order. That this required unprecedented mobilization and assertion of American primacy was a consequence of the threat’s magnitude, not a failure of imagination or a surrender to myth.
**Excerpts from the “World Fleet Act of 1933”, Passed October 3rd, 1933.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS AND DECLARATION OF POLICY.
Findings.** The Congress finds that—
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The security of the United States, the integrity of the Western Hemisphere, and the freedom of lawful commerce depend upon secure access to the oceans and to the principal maritime routes and chokepoints of the world;
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Treaties and understandings concerning naval limitation, however useful in calmer times, cannot substitute for sufficient force to deter coercion, protect American citizens and shipping, and prevent the interruption of trade by threats, embargoes, or blockade;
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The industrial power of the United States is capable of producing naval forces and auxiliaries at a scale commensurate with its responsibilities, and the present condition of underemployment and idle plant makes large-scale construction both practicable and urgent;
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The Navy must be sustained not only by fighting ships, but by the supporting fleet —oilers, tenders, repair ships, transports, floating docks, and the air and communications facilities without which modern fleets cannot operate.
Policy. It is the policy of the United States that—
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The United States shall maintain a naval establishment sufficient to operate decisively in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and in such other waters as the protection of American life and commerce may require;
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The United States shall maintain a fleet train and merchant auxiliary sufficient to sustain continuous operations at great distance from the continental United States;
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The construction authorized herein shall be carried out with maximum speed consistent with safety and sound engineering, using American labor and American materials to the fullest practicable extent.
SEC. 3. WORLD-FLEET CONSTRUCTION PROGRAM AUTHORIZED.
(a) Authorization. The Secretary of the Navy is authorized and directed to procure, by construction in Navy yards and by contract with private shipbuilders, the following vessels and craft, to be laid down on a schedule commencing in Fiscal Year 1934 and continuing through Fiscal Year 1941, inclusive:
(1) Capital Ships.
(A) Battleships: Ten (10) new battleships of not less than 35,000 tons standard displacement each, capable of sustained high-speed fleet operations, to be armed and armored in accordance with the latest naval requirements.
(B) Large Cruisers (Fleet Scouts): Eight (8) large cruisers of not less than 20,000 tons standard displacement each, designed for long-range scouting, commerce protection, and carrier screen operations.
(2) Aircraft Carriers.
(A) Fleet Aircraft Carriers: Twelve (12) fleet aircraft carriers, of not less than 20,000 tons standard displacement each, with aviation facilities capable of operating not fewer than 80 aircraft each.
(B) Light/Utility Carriers: Eight (8) light aircraft carriers or aviation ships of not less than 12,000 tons each, suitable for convoy air cover, training, and reinforcement.
(3) Cruisers.
(A) Heavy Cruisers: Thirty (30) heavy cruisers of not less than 10,000 tons each.
(B) Light Cruisers: Forty (40) light cruisers of not less than 8,000 tons each.
(4) Destroyers and Small Combatants.[
(A) Fleet Destroyers: Three hundred and twenty (320) destroyers, including leaders, of modern design suitable for anti-submarine, anti-aircraft, and surface screening operations.
(B) Escort Vessels: One hundred and sixty (160) escort vessels (including destroyer escorts and corvettes) suitable for convoy protection and coastal defense.
(5) Submarines.
(A) Fleet Submarines: One hundred and ten (110) submarines suitable for long-range patrol, commerce interdiction, reconnaissance, and fleet support.
(B) Coastal Submarines/Training: Forty (40) smaller submarines for training and coastal defense.
(6) The Fleet Train and Service Force (Auxiliaries).
(A) Fleet Oilers: One hundred (100) fleet oilers and fuel tankers suitable for underway replenishment and long-range support.
(B) Ammunition Ships: Thirty (30) ammunition ships.
(C) Repair Ships and Tenders: Thirty-six (36) repair ships and tenders (including destroyer tenders, submarine tenders, and general repair ships).
(D) Fast Transports: Forty (40) fast transports for Marine and Army detachments, emergency reinforcement, and evacuation.
(E) Hospital Ships: Twelve (12) hospital ships.
(F) Seaplane Tenders: Twenty-four (24) seaplane tenders and aviation support ships.
(G) Cable, Survey, and Communications Ships: Twelve (12) specialized vessels.
(H) Floating Drydocks: Twelve (12) floating drydocks capable of receiving cruisers and smaller combatants, and four (4) floating drydocks capable of receiving capital ships, to be stationed as provided in section 6.
(b) Aircraft Procurement. The Secretary of the Navy, acting through the Bureau of Aeronautics, is authorized to procure naval aircraft sufficient to equip the carriers and patrol squadrons authorized herein, including reserves, training aircraft, and shore-based patrol aviation, in quantities not less than 8,000 aircraft over the life of this program.
(c) Replacement and Modernization. The Secretary of the Navy is authorized to modernize existing vessels and to replace obsolete ships retired during the program period, provided that replacement tonnage shall not diminish the numbers authorized in subsection (a).
(d) Standardization. To accelerate production, the Secretary of the Navy shall, to the maximum practicable extent, standardize hulls, machinery, armaments, fittings, and ordnance across classes, and shall adopt “repeat” designs where such repetition materially increases output.
SEC. 4. APPROPRIATIONS; WORLD-FLEET CONSTRUCTION FUND; BONDS.
(a) World-Fleet Construction Fund. There is hereby established in the Treasury a fund to be known as the World-Fleet Construction Fund (hereinafter “the Fund”), from which expenditures may be made to carry out this Act.
(b) Total Authorization. For the purpose of carrying out this Act, there is authorized to be appropriated—
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$12,000,000,000 for hulls, machinery, armament, aircraft, and naval stores;
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$2,000,000,000 for shipyard construction and expansion, industrial tooling, and naval production facilities;
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$1,500,000,000 for bases, drydocks, depots, fueling stations, and communications;
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$1,000,000,000 for the merchant auxiliary and sealift program authorized in section 7;
Total: $16,500,000,000.
(c) Annual Scheduling (Program Targets). The Congress declares the following as program targets for obligation authority, recognizing that actual obligation may vary according to industrial capacity and design completion:
- Fiscal Year 1934: $1,750,000,000
- Fiscal Year 1935: $2,000,000,000
- Fiscal Year 1936: $2,250,000,000
- Fiscal Year 1937: $2,250,000,000
- Fiscal Year 1938: $2,250,000,000
- Fiscal Year 1939: $2,250,000,000
- Fiscal Year 1940: $2,000,000,000
- Fiscal Year 1941: $2,000,000,000
(d) World-Fleet Bonds. To meet the obligations authorized herein, the Secretary of the Treasury is authorized to issue “World-Fleet Bonds” in an aggregate principal amount not to exceed $10,000,000,000 , bearing interest at rates not exceeding 3½ percent per annum , with maturities not exceeding 30 years , the proceeds of which shall be deposited in the Fund.
(e) No Impairment of Existing Naval Appropriations. Amounts authorized in this section are in addition to, and shall not be construed to reduce, ordinary annual appropriations for the maintenance and operation of the Navy.
SEC. 8. OVERSIGHT; REPORTS; PROGRAM MANAGEMENT.
(a) World-Fleet Board. There is hereby established a World-Fleet Board , chaired by the Secretary of the Navy, consisting of senior naval officers, naval constructors, and not fewer than five (5) civilian members with experience in industry, labor, finance, and engineering, to advise on schedule, bottlenecks, and industrial coordination.
(b) Quarterly Reports. The Secretary of the Navy shall submit to Congress quarterly reports stating—
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Vessels laid down, launched, and commissioned;
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Expenditures and obligations;
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Shipyard capacity additions;
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Bottlenecks and corrective measures;
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Expected delays relative to targets.
(c) Emergency Procurement Authority. When necessary to prevent delay, the Secretary of the Navy is authorized to expedite procurement, to prioritize naval contracts, and to standardize designs, provided that such authority shall be exercised with due regard to safety and long-term maintenance.
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