World naval developments May 2018
By Norman Friedman*
In May the U.S. Navy announced that it was reactivating Second Fleet in response to growing Russian aggressiveness. The Second Fleet area of responsibility is the North Atlantic and the U.S. East Coast. During the Cold War, the Second Fleet was probably most important for its support of the forward-deployed Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. Had the Cold War turned hot, it would have generated Strike Fleet Atlantic, which would have attacked the Soviet Northern Fleet bastion.
Late in the Cold War, this capacity became a key element of the U.S. Maritime Strategy. By that time it was clear that the Soviets considered the strategic submarines in the bastion were a crucial strategic asset. The threat to attack them provided enormous leverage. The Soviets would have had to focus their Northern Fleet against the Strike Fleet, and the new systems entering service, most prominently Aegis, the F-14/Phoenix combination, and submarines wielding the Mk 48 torpedo, promised the ability to defeat that fleet. That defeat in turn would have gained sea control in the North Atlantic and would have freed U.S. and other NATO naval forces to operate against the flanks of any Soviet ground force advancing into Western Europe.
In 2011, as the United States pivoted towards Asia, the Second Fleet stood down. That must have seemed, among other things, a conciliatory gesture towards the Russians. Now that it seems that no gesture can (or, perhaps, should) conciliate Mr. Putin, the Second Fleet is back. For that matter, so is a Russian threat to enter Central Europe either by force or by subversion. If anything, Mr. Putin’s Russia relies much more on strategic nuclear firepower than its Soviet predecessor, and that means greater reliance on strategic submarines operating in bastions which a badly shrunken Russian navy may find it difficult to protect. The existence of a Second Fleet which can generate a wartime Strike Fleet may offer the United States and the West a valuable measure of leverage. Against that, Mr. Putin may imagine that a new generation of super-weapons, such as hypersonic missiles, has wiped out the key advantages which made the strike element of the Maritime Strategy operable.
All of this is happening against a background of far fewer ships than there were in the 1980s, and far larger commitments. Normally the sheer number of ships available to the navy is not a good measure of seapower; what matters is what kinds of ships there are. However, there are two important exceptions. One is that a fleet which has to cover more and more parts of the world at the same time needs numbers. No ship, no matter how impressive, can be in three places at once. A second is that in a protracted war loss and damage are inevitable. Ships take time to build. An early wave of losses, such as the United States suffered in the Pacific during 1942, has to be made up.
We face both problems. The great consequence of the end of the Cold War is that crises are likely to be far less concentrated than in the past. In the 1980s it was likely that any crucial crisis would be the result of action by a single enemy – the Soviet Union. The Soviet leadership did have the option of igniting multiple simultaneous crises, but it was generally argued that it would hesitate to do so for fear of triggering some sort of nuclear escalation. The Soviets controlled virtually all the governments which could threaten the West, so this was a reasonable argument.
Now there are multiple governments which dislike us. Although they may be mutually supportive, they certainly are not centrally controlled. It would not be difficult to imagine, for example, a crisis in Korea (with nuclear implications) used by the Russians as cover for some sort of aggression in Central Europe, while Iran triggered a Middle East War. Where would we concentrate? Each player in this sort of scenario would certainly benefit from the acts of the others, but there would be no central controller to decide how and when (or whether) to dial up the crisis level.
Potential loss is also a post Cold War issue. During the Cold War, it was widely if not explicitly assumed that any war which mattered would either quickly escalate to the nuclear level, or would soon end in the face of that possibility. Ships would certainly be damaged and sunk, but on that time scale nothing could be done to replace them. That perception affected design practices throughout the West. It also affected the attitude towards reserve ships. There was little point in preserving large numbers of ships for wartime reactivation if that could never happen in time to matter. After the Cold War, it was unlikely that any enemy could sink or damage enough ships to make much of a difference. Those, like USS Cole, which were damaged, could be repaired while the substantial number of other ships filled in. It takes a large war – or a simultaneous series of crises — to make it impossible simply to fill in from other places.
Given this perception, at the end of the Cold War the navy chose to discard many ships rather than mothball them. The argument was that their weapons were not relevant to the new threats (this applied particularly to anti-air missile systems) and that their steam powerplants were too manpower-intensive and should not be perpetuated. These were reasonable arguments. For the missiles in particular, the post Cold War threat was pop-up attacks, mainly by missiles fired from ashore. The discarded ships had systems attuned to the main Cold War threat, which would have been bomber-launched missiles detectable at a distance. These ships would not have solved our likely future problems. The big mothball fleets of the past were valuable because their technology was not obsolete (although their communications systems soon were).
In the wake of 9-11, the Navy pointed out the potential of simultaneous crises, which might have to be addressed by a limited force. It knew that it could not multiply its capital ships, but it could reshape forces to cover more places simultaneously. That was the origin of Expeditionary Strike Groups and also of the LCS, which was conceived as a less expensive surface combatant which could quickly be built in greater numbers. It now seems that the LCS has not turned out to be nearly as robust as it should have been, and the projected future frigate will probably be considerably more expensive. It is difficult at the least and probably impossible to build an inexpensive but survivable and effective surface combatant.
These points miss an essential reality. We can inject more money and buy more ships, and we should be doing that. But ships need sailors. Sailors are increasingly expensive. For years naval development has been driven by the desperate need to cut manning. That is why ships are driven by gas turbines. The initial requirement for the Zumwalt class was not the stealth which ultimately dominated the design, but dramatically reduced manning (the goal was 150).
Unfortunately many current policies exacerbate the manning problem. One is the growth of staffs ashore, not least in response to the Goldwater-Nichols requirement that officers spend time on joint staffs. When that Act was being debated in the 1980s, it was pointed out that in peacetime as in war, the navy spends its time operating. It needs line officers much more than it needs staff officers. The army and air force are in an opposite position. They also need a lot more staff in wartime to manage the details of deployment and logistics. To treat all the services identically is to forget that they differ because of the different environments in which they operate. Goldwater-Nichols was supposed to reduce waste by curbing interservice rivalry – which some might see as the vital plurality which has been rather useful in the past. It is certainly true that interservice staff experience produces officers with a better idea of the contributions the other services can make, but every such assignment costs operating time which may be vital to the fleet — and to an officer perfecting naval skills.
What can we do? We certainly need more ships, but we also need a better means of replacing those which are lost or damaged. That probably requires a shift in design towards more modular ships, parts of which can be built outside shipyards and then assembled as needed. This is not particular radical, and it should be easier with the advent of computer-aided design and construction. Shipyards already use modular techniques; the question is whether, in an emergency, some of those techniques can be moved to non-traditional suppliers such as metal fabricators.
In the past, the most obvious solution to a shortage of ships was to rely on allies with large fleets. For example, in the early 1930s the Naval War College played war games representing major naval wars. Losses were enormous. The War College had an analyst – a navy Captain — on staff; he pointed out that a naval war without a ship-rich ally would be disastrous. That meant the British. The Captain’s conclusion was remarkable in an era of stark U.S. isolationism. In fact what saved the U.S. Navy in World War II was that it had two years of prewar mobilization. We are most unlikely to enjoy that kind of advantage again. We do certainly have allies, but their fleets are relatively thin. We don’t have a potential peer ally like the pre-1939 British. Nor do we have the sort of heavy industry which we had in 1940-42.
As for personnel, part of what we can do is rethink the value of the many staffs we have created (or have had to join). Part may be a reform of the personnel system to provide more sea time. Part may also be to shift more to unmanned systems. For example, much of the crew of a carrier is needed to maintain aircraft which have to fly every day, not least to maintain the pilots’ skills. Unmanned aircraft would fly only as needed, which would cut maintenance dramatically. How many expensive, valuable crewmen would be affected? Is this a direction into which we should be heading, or is it a mistake?
* Norman Friedman is author of The Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapon Systems. His column is published with kind permission of the US Naval Institute.
