The Future Shape of the U.S. Navy

1. It can be argued that recent articles by the chief of the Soviet Navy, Admiral Cherniavin, on anti-shipping warfare, indicate this sort of trend. Current Soviet submarines are ill suited to anti-shipping campaigns, however, because they carry so few torpedoes. Note, for example, the Soviet claim that the sunken Mike submarine, whose combat system was surely typical of current practice, carried only 12 torpedoes. A typical Western submarine of similar displacement would carry at least twice as many. One reason is that the Soviets have adopted very much larger torpedoes than those of Western navies. The basic reason, however, is their emphasis on attacks on Western warships.

2. The author is well aware that the U.S. Air Force has suggested that long-range bombers, which may be able to fly from the United States, are the necessary attacking element to support such a forward AWACS. But the bombers often require support from forward-based tankers, and in addition they can make only a single pass—at very great cost. They are, moreover, an invisible form of projection until they actually attack. There must be many more cases in which the United States cares to threaten than in which the United States actually wishes to kill foreigners. On this basis, the bomber-AWACS combination is less than attractive. Given planning and flight time, the bombers do not really arrive all that quickly in a surprise situation, and often, as in the case of the F-117s in Panama, their distant command and control may be unable to use them effectively. For example, it seems most unlikely that bombers flying from U.S. bases could have had much immediate impact on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait—unless, of course, they delivered nuclear weapons, which are essentially taboo in such cases.

3. For example, a carrier operating at maximum tempo typically requires replenishment every three or four days. That is why the carriers in the Persian Gulf area drastically reduced their operating tempo; they had to maintain sufficient reserves to conduct a few days of intense operations in the event that the Iraqis went ahead to invade Saudi Arabia. For the first several months of the crisis, the carriers were the only really effective forces in the area. That airplanes could be flown in very rapidly created the illusion that the burden had shifted to the land-based air forces. They could not have sustained more than a few hours of intense operations because they still lacked fuel, ammunition, and spare parts.

4. One Air Force F-111 was lost, but quite possibly to an internal electrical failure—the flight from the United Kingdom was very long, and the airplanes were elderly; several had to abort.

Smaller carriers have much smaller capacities, so these arguments would not hold for the British, Italian, or Spanish carriers currently in service. For cruise missile details, see this author's Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapons Systems (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1989), esp. pp. 42-46. The issue is really lethality: the missiles are efficient only if the target array is a series of point targets each of which can be destroyed by the equivalent of a 500-pound bomb; despite much advertising to the contrary, there is as yet no reliable means of greatly magnifying the effect of conventional munitions. Even then, the targets must be well known in advance, since the missile must be directed toward them, and they must be amenable to whatever guidance system it uses. These are not trivial problems, as any student of World War II bombing can attest. My view would be that it is far better to bet on numbers of bombs than to bet that one very precisely delivered weapon can solve any problem.

6. Skeptics on this point should note that computers have become virtually maintenance free, whereas at one time it was common for them to require almost daily visits from their doctorlike maintainers. From an electronics point of view, a modern personal computer is not too different from a modern tactical missile, although in the missile's case there are many other parts that can break down. One saving grace in the case of the missile is that its effectiveness will depend on tactical factors and coordination that may be beyond the abilities of many Third World forces.

7. This was written in mid-November 1990, before any such invasion had occurred. At the time, however, such an operation seemed nearly certain.

8. This debate was complicated by the push for very fast sealift specifically to reinforce ground forces in Europe; at one time there was pressure to build fast surface-effect ships. They would have had just enough range to reach Europe but not enough to reach much of the Third World. The problem is that very fast merchant ships tend not to be economically viable, so they must be purely government sponsored.

9. During World War II, the military transport fleet was large enough to provide both assault and follow-up shipping. This situation lasted through the mid-1960s, as much of this fleet was laid up and preserved postwar. Then it was discarded. The overall size of the amphibious fleet shrank drastically, partly because individual units were made larger but much more because greater reliance was placed on commercial shipping. In 1950, the U.S. Navy had 945 large amphibious ships. The United States controlled a total of 3672 merchant ships, including 3025 dry cargo and passenger ships—most of which were owned by the federal government. Many were in reserve. In 1965, 135 amphibious ships were in commission, with another 270 in reserve. The U.S.-controlled merchant fleet—including the Maritime Administration's reserve ships and ships flying “flags of convenience”—totaled 3127. J.C. Fahey , The Ships and Aircraft of the U.S. Fleet (reprint ed., Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1980). As described in Baker, Combat Fleets, the United States now has 75 major amphibious ships, including 12 under construction. In July 1988 the Commission on the Merchant Marine and Defense found that the United States had a total of only 147 active dry cargo ships, plus 10 in reserve and ready for sea, 81 in the Ready Reserve Fleet, and 116 in the National Defense Reserve Fleet, most of the latter dating from World War II and hardly operable. There were also 130 active, militarily useful—i.e., under 100,000 deadweight tons—tankers, plus 24 in the Military Sealift Command, 9 inactive in the ready reserve, and 19 in the National Defense Reserve Fleet. The number of active ships has sunk much lower since 1988.

10. Ship costing may be changing. In the past, the bulk of combat system cost went into hardware, such as computers. Two computers cost twice as much as one, so that the marginal cost per ship was very nearly fixed. Now the bulk of the cost goes into software, which can be reproduced very cheaply. Thus the marginal cost per ship may finally be falling. These changes are certainly visible in the civilian world, where individual computer systems are cheap largely because the high cost of software development is spread over many ships. This is much the same as the difference between the economics of hand-reproduced books and printed books. The implication may be that we can afford larger numbers of ships as long as we can hold down fixed hardware—including hull and propulsion—costs. Larger numbers are particularly attractive if we must operate for lenghty periods in the Third World, since crews would be able to rotate home more often.

11. There is a common misconception that escorts somehow prevent submarines from firing torpedoes. That is not the case. Rather, the presence of the escorts tends to deter a submarine commander, since he must expect to be counterattacked if he fires. He may, therefore, fire from a greater range and thus fail to hit. That is probably what saved the British from embarrassment in the Falklands, when an Argentine submarine actually shot at HMS Hermes. The fact that the cruiser Belgrano had two escorts in company did not save it from the British submarine Conqueror.

12. The problem is a high rate of false contacts. It generally takes a considerable weight of ordnance to be sure of killing a torpedo, and the more false contacts there are, the higher the price of protection. Both the U.S. and the Royal navies made considerable efforts to develop antitorpedo weapons during the 15 years after World War II, and projects of this type are currently being pursued.

13. For a more complete account, the reader is referred to this author's U.S. Maritime Strategy (Alexandria, VA: Jane's Information Group, 1988).

14. The case in point is the dispatch of the British nuclear submarines, including HMS Conqueror, to the South Atlantic early in what became the Falklands crisis. The British had done much the same thing in 1977. In the earlier crisis, they were surprised that submarines exercised no presence effect—they were invisible. This time, they capitalized on invisibility to send a force into palce in time; by their nature, naval forces take a long time to arrive.

15. New Threat Upgrade is a modification to existing missile ships that greatly increases their firepower—their ability to deal simultaneously with multiple targets—albeit not to the degree possible with an AEGIS ship.

16. They have to be small so as to minimize their signatures and thus their susceptibility to influence mines. Fast sweepers, such as hydrofoils or surface effect craft, have been proposed—a few have been built—but their size limits their endurance.