Yes, the Navy has all it can do to face China's growing fleet, Russia's residual fleet close to Russia, and Iran's forces in the Gulf region. Supporting special ops from the sea is a lower priority mission for the Navy:
The struggle between managing resources for the United States’ counterterrorism fight and an emerging great power competition has quietly begun.
While the U.S. Navy is building up the fleet, the focus on peer-level adversaries like Russia and China is at contention with the responsibility to provide off-shore staging areas for special operations forces.
The issue was put forward by Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst at a hearing on Navy and Marine Corps readiness Wednesday.
And while special operations forces can and do operate from other Navy vessels (and subs), any deployment on a warship effectively chains that warship to non-sea control missions while the special forces are based on the ship.
The article notes that special operations command has chartered a commercial vessel for this purpose.
Special operations could get much more with The AFRICOM Queen concept based on commercial container ships. As I argued even before the shift in our strategy to oppose China and Russia, the Navy is too small to routinely assign scarce amphibious assets for missions in AFRICOM--or indeed in any mission in a higher military priority region. The situation is worse now even if the Navy is expanded.
