USS Benfold: Harbinger Not Anomaly

The recent troubles aboard USS Benfold (DDG 65) have produced precisely the wrong lesson in the public sphere.

The Arleigh Burke-class destroyer lost power in the South China Sea on July 24 and spent four days without normal electrical service before being towed to port in the Philippines. A 10,000-ton American warship adrift in the South China Sea is not an image either the United States or the Navy wishes to project.

But treating Benfold as an embarrassing anomaly misses the larger story.

The more important question is not simply what went wrong with Benfold. It is why we are increasingly asking American warships to operate at a tempo the fleet was never designed to sustain.

The answer has less to do with one destroyer than with how the United States has chosen to use a shrinking Navy.