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The Navy is ready for 20th Century style war. For the rapidly evolving battle space of today? Nope. [1]

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Date: 2023-09-04

Eric Lipton writing at The NY Times has a look at how the U.S. Navy, bound by politics, money, tradition, and bureaucratic inertia is effectively building a fleet we won’t be able to put anywhere near harm’s way for fear of losing it to cheaper, faster, more adaptable ships, missiles, and drones of assorted types. (Full access via the link below.)

A new generation of cheaper and more flexible vessels could be vital in any conflict with China, but the Navy remains lashed to big shipbuilding programs driven by tradition, political influence and jobs.

While the Navy is embarked on a program of building more of the ships it has always built — because in part it’s a huge jobs program members of Congress like to boast about for their voters, in part because of inertia, other programs are struggling for the resources they need to cope with emerging threats.

In Bahrain for example:

Bobbing in a small bay off the Persian Gulf was a collection of tiny unmanned vessels, prototypes for the kind of cheaper, easier-to-build and more mobile force that some officers and analysts of naval warfare said was already helping to contain Iran and could be essential to fighting a war in the Pacific. Operating on a budget that was less than the cost of fuel for one of the Navy’s big ships, Navy personnel and contractors had pieced together drone boats, unmanned submersible vessels and aerial vehicles capable of monitoring and intercepting threats over hundreds of miles of the Persian Gulf, like Iranian fast boats looking to hijack oil tankers. Now they are pleading for more money to help build on what they have learned. “It’s an unbelievable capability — we have already tested it for something like 35,000 hours,” said Michael Brown, who was the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, which helped set up the unmanned drone tests in Bahrain. “So why are we not fielding that as fast as possible?”

Gunboat diplomacy and showing the flag are two traditional reasons for a big surface navy. However, as a t-shirt that used to be sold at the The Submarine Force Museum in Groton, CT pointed out, “There are two kinds of ships — submarines and targets.”

And now the kind of tools described above make ships even more vulnerable to threats.

The latest Ford class super carriers come with a price tag of $13+ billion and climbing. The eight minute video at the link shows how complex the new carriers are, how long they take to build, and the pressure to maximize their offensive capabilities. Keep in mind that carriers don’t operate alone either; they are surrounded by other ships whose sole function is to protect the carrier from rude strangers.

Despite the dress-up here, the Phalanx CIWS (Close In Weapons System) can put out an astounding rate of fire. It’s being upgraded to cope with the increasing variety of threats, including aerial drones and surface craft. The question is, what does it take to saturate those defenses?

So what happens if they come within range of land where dozens, hundreds, or even more suicide drone boats or ship killer missiles can be launched at them? The mission in Top Gun Maverick depended on the carrier getting close enough to the target to keep flight time for the attackers down to minutes. What would have happened if they had to launch 500 miles out, or a thousand to keep the carrier safe?

The loss of the HMS Sheffield in the Falklands war showed what one anti-ship missile could do, as well as how badly the defenses that should have been brought into action failed due to a number of failures and missteps. The attack on the USS Cole by suicide bombers in a small boat showed how much damage could be done by one such. Although the Cole was a sitting target at the time, the prospect of facing a swarm of remotely operated or even autonomous suicide drones built for high speed attacks and stealth is a nightmare for naval planners.

Automated systems like the CIWS gun systems are one defense and now lasers are being tested as well. Lasers have a particular advantage — they don’t run out of ammo as long as they can be powered up. How they will cope with low visibility in bad weather is a question.

The prospects of large numbers of relatively inexpensive attack weapons is not one to be ignored either. The NY Times report states that war game simulations and practice exercises have shown the U.S. Navy would not be able to survive operating near the coast of China if it came to open conflict. There would be huge losses of ships and crews because of the volume of missiles and other weapons they'd be going up against.

This isn’t just a problem with mainland China for the Navy either. China has been building up a number of military bases in the South China Sea on fortified artificial islands, and making expansive territorial claims. It’s not just a concern for neighboring countries; major international shipping choke points are located in the region.

It’s one reason there is a project to develop an amphibious C-130 Hercules. It’s seen as a way to rapidly deploy troops and other assets into the kind of archipelagos found in the region. There’s also projects to build upgraded Albatross amphibians and even bring back the Catalina! The ability to operate without needing runways can be very useful — especially in a conflict where runways can be taken out. (Again, see Top Gun Maverick) It's one reason China is developing the AVIC AG600 four engine amphibian.

Another incentive to invest in the kinds of small ships and drones being developed isn’t about offensive capabilities. It’s their ability to gather information and relay it, multiplying the ‘eyes and ears’ in an area of interest. In the modern battle space, if a target can be ‘seen’ it can be taken out. (The role of drones in Ukraine has made this painfully clear.)

What these development programs have shown is that the people working on them for the Navy get more innovation faster and more cheaply by going with small companies and startups, rather than the arteriosclerotic giant conglomerates of the military industrial complex.

To sum up some of the conclusions from The NY Times Article, the Navy is too bound to the those companies and their army of lobbyists, big expensive programs that take years or even decades to produce anything, a Congress that sees these programs as valuable political pork, Navy traditions and careers built around them, and just sheer bureaucratic inertia.

This isn’t new — the Navy’s historic resistance to the efforts of Billy Mitchell for AirPower, and the historic fights over naval budgets between battleship admirals, carrier advocates, and submarine proponents are an old story.

Every military has the same problem — the temptation to fight the last war can be overwhelming, Military culture seldom rewards innovators and risk takers over “The way we’ve always done things” — until lessons from the battlefield can’t be ignored.

To summarize some observations from the end of the report, the contractors building these new innovative drones are not seeing major orders — even though commanders in the field want their share of these new tools. There’s no urgency coming from the upper levels to push ahead. The company that builds Saildrones says they could produce 400 a year — but they only have orders for 16.

The Air Force is being a bit more proactive than the Navy with their own drone development efforts. Unlike the Navy, they’re already having to recognize that maintaining air superiority with manned fighters and bombers, even with stealth technology, is increasingly difficult against advanced air defense systems and missiles — and they’ve been using drones for surveillance and attacks for some years now.

Will it take another Pearl Harbor to shake up the Navy’s leadership? Let’s hope not.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/4/2191441/-The-Navy-is-ready-for-20th-Century-style-war-For-the-rapidly-evolving-battle-space-of-today-Nope

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