By Nicholas Mazzucchi*
Navies of free and open nations have focused too much on the high-end tactical capabilities for Day One of a conflict, and not enough on the resilience and industrial capacity needed for an attritional fight. They have therefore fallen into the ‘Lepanto trap’ which may see them winning a battle but losing the war.
Experience in the Red and Black Seas has shown that conflict is likely to be prolonged, requiring a rapid surge in building new ships to replace losses, repairing damaged ships (or even recommissioning recently retired ships) into the fleet, and the ability to regenerate sailors and officers to crew them. Greater and deeper standardisation of ships, submarines, aircraft, weapons and sensors – and the associated training – must be a priority for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).
The naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 is seen as a turning point in the long confrontation between the Ottoman empire and the Holy League, an alliance of European Christian states. With more than two-thirds of the Ottoman ships destroyed or captured, it is celebrated as the revenge of European navies over the dominating Turkish forces. However, though it was undoubtedly a major tactical victory, the strategic outcomes were less clear cut. Even before the battle was fought, the last Venetian stronghold on Cyprus had fallen to the Ottomans, the very outcome the Christian alliance had been formed to prevent. Moreover, the Ottoman shipbuilding industry, heir to the Byzantine-era shipyards in Thrace and Asia Minor, was able to reconstruct their naval forces in just a matter of months. As the Ottoman Grand Vizier pointed out to the Venetian ambassador: I would have you know the difference between your loss and ours. In wrestling Cyprus from you, we deprived you of an arm; in defeating our fleet, you have only shaved our beard. An arm when cut off cannot grow again; but a shorn beard will grow all the better for the razor.
Winston Churchill highlighted the need to think about naval warfare at a strategic level in his March 1912 Navy Estimates speech in the House of Commons. He said: “…in times of peace we measure the relative naval construction of two navies by percentages…Battles are not decided by ratios or percentages. They yield definite and absolute results, and the strength of conflicting navies ought to be measured, and is measured, not as in peace by comparison, but by subtraction. We must expect that in a fleet battle between good and efficient navies equally matched, tremendous damage will be reciprocally inflicted. Many ships on both sides will be sunk or blown up. Many more will sustain injuries which will take months to repair…Further, with a reciprocal destruction of the newer ships, the older vessels will rise swiftly in value. When the Ace is out, the King is the best card, and so on…All this must be considered in judging the standards of new construction which are appropriate to our needs.
Churchill was right, and we need to think differently between peace and war. A different logic applies. If free and open countries today continue to think of future naval conflict using peace time logic, they will fall into a Lepanto trap. They will overestimate the value of tactical outcomes and underestimate the strategic value of industrial capacity and training in depth. Of course, navies tend to focus on their main duty, preparing for and conducting military operations at sea, and it is fair to say that the strategic level issues are best managed at a political and industrial level, yet it would be a major mistake to create an ever-wider gap between operational, industrial and training issues.
A modern-day Lepanto trap would consist of over-focusing on the tactical outcome of a major naval confrontation (e.g. Carrier Strike Group vs. Carrier Strike Group), without having a real plan for the aftermath in both shipyard capacities and human resource management.
Therefore, naval strategy has to consider on the same level war-fighting capabilities and generation/re-generation capabilities in the evaluation of global naval power. Euro-Atlantic allies tend to over focus on the former over the latter, perhaps because of the limited importance placed on legacy naval platforms. The de-industrialisation of shipyards and the loss of specific trained personnel has been underestimated in terms of immediate consequences in the hypothesis of major naval confrontation.
When looking at the Indo-Pacific situation, the United States’ (US) and Chinese long-term trends in shipbuilding and training capacities appear in total opposition. At the end of the Second World War, the US had 11 naval and 64 private shipyards. This figure was sharply reduced by the end of the Cold War due to the rise of Asian shipbuilding industries and the post-Yom Kippur economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Today, only four US naval shipyards remain in service alongside around 22 private shipyards, with diverse contributions to the construction, maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) of the US Navy. Moreover, these four outdated naval shipyards are not all able to contribute to the MRO of major capital units – aircraft carriers, nuclear powered attack (SSNs) and ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs). Regarding submarines, the situation has immediate consequences for the SSN AUKUS programme, leading to a dilemma: continuing to build Virginia class SSN for the US Navy or prioritising SSN AUKUS to strengthen US alliances in the Indo-Pacific. The size and capacity of dry docks, able workers, and up-to-date infrastructure are major hurdles to overcome if the US is to be able to engage in the naval renaissance needed to face strategic competition at sea. Conversely, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) surge in shipbuilding capacity gives Beijing a strategic advantage in the long-run, with the ability to build the tonnage equivalent of the whole Royal Navy or French Marine Nationale in two to three years.
As free and open navies shrink numerically and Chinese capacity continues to grow, this timescale will inevitably reduce.
A 2024 unclassified presentation from the US Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) suggests that the PRC has 232 times more shipbuilding capacity than the US. It means that Beijing has a tremendous advantage when thinking about naval strategy as a whole military-industrial issue.
In Western Europe, the situation appears more or less the same with a decreasing number of major naval shipyards. Moreover, many of those which still exist have a dual purpose, and have to deal with the overlap of naval and commercial maritime backlogs. For example, the same dry docks of the Chantiers de l’Atlantique in Saint-Nazaire are being used for landing helicopter dock (LHD) and auxiliary oiler replenishment (AOR) construction and maintenance, as well as for building giant cruise ships and methane carriers. Nearly all European countries are facing the same issue, leading to entrenched structural limitations over a potential naval rearmament policy. As NATO and the European Union (EU) advocate for a stronger European defence stance and investment in armed forces to deter and counter hybrid or symmetric threats, the shortcomings of the naval industrial base will have tremendous impacts on the future of European naval power. It would take years to restart a proper naval industrial base and it would need significant funding to make it competitive. Yet a potential solution could consist of strengthening the partnerships with countries that still maintain a strong shipbuilding industry.
Northeast Asia, particularly South Korea and Japan, is crucial to the US when considering a potential direct confrontation in the Indo-Pacific. As these countries maintained top-level shipbuilding facilities, with dry docks able to house the largest ships in the US Navy order of battle, they have the ability to deal with the aftermath of a naval battle. South Korean shipyards are particularly important for US forces, as their industrial capacity and the high skill level of their workers could provide an efficient MRO capacity. Rapid surge in building new ships to replace losses, and the ability to regenerate in a short amount of time sailors and officers to crew them, are central to prolonged naval war. In light of recent experience in the Red and Black Seas, we should not assume short, sharp conflict. The number of able seafarers is dramatically decreasing in Euro-Atlantic countries, as a side effect of globalisation pushes maritime companies to look to the so-called ‘Global South’ for cheaper personnel. Nowadays, when considering the creation of a strategic reserve of seafarers fit for service in military ships in time of need, the issue of the number of available people immediately appears. The 2023 French Parliament report on the ‘Strategic Fleet’ underlines the major challenge of training a reserve force when very few crews today could consist of only French nationals.
The ability to generate and maintain both an industrial capacity and an adequate reserve of people is critical in the hypothesis of a future naval confrontation. The Euro-Atlantic dynamics of de-industrialisation and economic specialisation towards the service sector are, in this view, major drawbacks when considering the reality of the geopolitical landscape. Of course, the obvious solution is to invest in the naval industrial base – and the civilian one with a dual-purpose view – and in maintaining training capacity. However, the obvious solution seems unrealistic considering the political, economic and social situation in which the advanced economies have evolved.
A naval strategist should consider the problem as a whole. Navies of free and open nations have focused on technology to solve the wrong problem and assumed that a smaller number of more capable platforms could accomplish the same amount of missions. The result of this assumption could have been workable when the Euro-Atlantic powers enjoyed a very high level of naval superiority over its competitors, but this era is now over. The pocket-sized high-technology navies are walking into the Lepanto trap. We now need to think about naval strategy in a more integrated way, linking military, industrial and education and training capacity, and accepting that a war will not be over after the first salvo. Churchill was right. The new ships built to replace the losses won’t be at the same level. Repaired ships won’t necessarily have the capabilities of the pristine. We should not advocate for outdated platforms, but promote the idea that we may have to accept that in times of military crisis after the first shock that a new balance between sophistication and mass-production will be found. Greater and deeper standardisation of ships, submarines, aircraft, weapons and sensors – and the associated training – must be a priority for NATO.
Dr Nicolas Mazzucchi is a European Fellow at the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre.
