US Navy Sizes Up Future

US Navy Sizes Up Future

Does the Navy have the right strategy and resources to meet future threats?

by Ted McKenna

Aug. 19, 2005

eDefense

The US Navy still wants to fight the Battle of Midway, some critics say. Does it have the money to field a fleet that can, though, as well as fight the "global war on terror"?

A growing percentage of the world's population lives in littoral areas, near the water, often in poverty and amid ethnic strife. The Navy must prepare to fight conflicts in such areas and wants to be fast and flexible in deploying forces, vehicles, and other assets on shore.

As senior officers in the service point out, the Navy must prepare itself for a whole range of contingencies, from major combat to regional conflicts, interception of weapons of mass destruction on the high seas and in ports, and other, unforeseen developments. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed caught many off guard, and there could be some other surprise in the future that changes the world's outlook on security.

In preparing a rationale for its future structure – how many ships, aircraft, sailors, and other resources are needed, and what kind – the Navy has issued a strategic vision that it calls Sea Power 21. But like most strategies, this only paints the Navy's future in broad strokes and lacks specifics numbers, including the size of the Navy's future fleet. Given the Navy's broadening mission – and its limited budget – this is proving a problem.

Right now, at least a couple of different plans for Navy fleet size by the year 2035 or so are floating about, including one consisting of 260 ships and another of 325. During the Cold War, the Navy had some 600 ships, but with the cut in personnel the Navy underwent in the 1990s and the accompanying "procurement holiday," in which relatively little investment was made in building new ships, the Navy has had to adjust to its diminished size, with an estimated 282 ships at present, though the new Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Mullen says that the US Navy today is the most capable that it's ever been.

Gradually, senior planners in the Navy in recent years have been lowering their estimates for the size of the future fleet. From 375 previously mentioned by officers to members of Congress and now with talk of as few as 260, the exact number is still not decided. In fact, Admiral Mullen, having only recently replaced ADM Vern Clark – who over the past five years has worked to reform the Navy's acquisition processes and business practices – is reportedly working on a new plan to be completed over the next couple of months that lays out exact numbers of ships to be built and maintained by the Navy over the next few decades.

The basis for deciding exact numbers of ships and what types lies in the Sea Power 21 doctrine, which has a number of elements but essentially involves shaping the Navy so that it can better participate in all manner of joint operations using new "network-centric" capabilities (see "Computing a New Plan of Attack"); protecting the US and theaters of military operations from missiles (see "Early Deployment of Missile Defense"); and more quickly and efficiently participating in operations through "sea-basing," in which supplies are kept at sea and closer to the area of operations instead of onshore, far away from the action, whatever that might be.

The various ships the Navy now plans to begin or continue building, or at least maintaining, include the CVN-68 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the SSN-688 Los Angeles-class submarines, the LHD-1 Wasp-class amphibious ships, the DDG-51 Aegis destroyers, the SSN-774 Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines, the LPD-17 San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ships, the planned DD(X) multimission destroyer, and the planned high-speed Littoral Combat Ship.

Overly Optimistic

Aside from the question of whether these ships are the best ones for meeting the Navy's various duties, and despite the metamorphoses occurring in the various programs (see "Course Correction on US Navy's DD(X) Program" and "LCS Program Taps International Expertise"), some experts say the Navy is simply too optimistic about what it can build. For example, Dr. Eric J. Labs, principal analyst for national security at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), said that, assuming the Navy's annual budget holds steady at its current approximate level of around $10.4 billion, and allowing for inflation, the future fleet will actually number around 200.

The widespread emergence of "asymmetric" tactics, including the use of improvised explosives, means that minesweeping and other means of detecting hidden bombs have emerged as a new priority for all of the US military services.

Describing the factors contributing to the Navy's excessively sunny estimates about its shipbuilding capabilities, Labs said in a presentation on "Capitalizing the Future Fleet" at the Sea Enterprise 2005 conference, held Aug. 9-11 in Washington, DC, that the Navy simply hasn't learned from cost overruns for other ship programs in the past. It continues to underestimate the cost of individual programs, and it assumes more money will be coming from Congress than it should, given, for example, the heavy resources the US Army and Marine Corps are drawing on for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unrealistic, inconsistent plans from the Navy hurt its influence with lawmakers, who control the funding, Labs said, and will make getting what the Navy wants more difficult.

"Absence of a coherent plan and explanation puts the Navy in a weak position in DC's money competition," Labs said. "The changes to programs that seem to be without rhyme or reason hurt."

But Vice Admiral Lou Crenshaw, deputy chief of naval operations for resources, requirements, and assessments, disagreed that the Navy is doomed to have a significantly smaller fleet. Asked whether the US Navy historically has underestimated the cost of building ships and whether it continues to underestimate their cost, VADM Crenshaw said: "I don't buy the idea that we will be a prisoner of history here. I don't agree that the path we will be on will be 200 ships." Provided the Navy can learn to resist the temptation to add newly developed technology to ships as they are being built and that it can do adequate research and development ahead of time so that the shipbuilding process proceeds smoothly, costs can be kept down. "I'm pretty hopeful," he said.

The type of ships being built and what they are equipped with obviously can affect how many can ultimately be built. Terry Pudas, acting director of the Defense Department's Office of Force Transformation, said that Sea Power 21 may not be the right strategy for the Navy. "It ought to be looked at," he said when questioned about Sea Power 21 at the Sea Enterprise 2005 conference. Discussing the two main types of threats the Navy wants to prepare for – littoral warfare and major combat operations – Pudas said there are "enormous challenges" in trying to plan the future fleet. "Do we have to build two fleets?" he asked. "Or are there either/or choices forced on us?"

From irregular warfare to "traditional" large-scale warfare to catastrophic events, such as the detonation of a nuclear weapons, to some unforeseen "disruptive" capability that is not yet anticipated, the Navy will probably need to be able to move quickly from one type of crisis to another and have weapons, communications, ships, aircraft, and other resources that can be used in many different ways. The Navy's problem is this: it has more potential responsibilities than it did in the past, but it can't expect its budget to increase.

Technology provides the means to make weapons more accurate and deadly and allow one aircraft or one ship to accomplish much more than one aircraft of ship of the past, but it also adds greatly to costs. Thus, Pudas argued that the Navy should consider building smaller ships and more of them, given the increased firepower and other capabilities that each one can carry compared with the past. Instead of the current fleet of 282 or so ships the Navy has, Pudas said, it could have as many as 1,560 eventually, according to a plan that the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) has developed and that was first introduced last year.

Getting Ship-Shape

Other Navy planners argue that new efficiencies in business practices, from payroll and other human resources functions to more cost-conscious practices in general by managers throughout the organization, along with reforms in program development, should leave more money for the Navy to spend on ships and material. VADM Crenshaw noted that, like other military services, the Navy spends a lot of money on integration, and it also suffers from the temptation of adding new technology to platforms as it becomes available, which, of course, means higher costs per ship.

But the Navy is looking to change the old mentality that permeates many bureaucracies, where managers seek to hold onto their budget allocations year to year, whether or not their spending is efficient. Admiral Robert Willard, vice chief of naval operations, said that ADM Clark, when he first took over as chief of naval operations, considered the Navy to be in a crisis. Funding was dropping, and personnel were being cut, yet new business practices to make the Navy more efficient had not been adopted, nor was there an intelligent strategy for planning development of the Navy's future resources. "We were a culture of 'spend what you got.' I remember that we would fly aircraft just to burn up remaining gas," ADM Willard said. The fear that any money left over at the end of the year for a particular program or line item would be taken away the following year meant officers and program managers would spend all of their budget whether they really needed to or not.

The missions of the US Navy and the US Coast Guard are converging, as both are being called upon to keep US maritime areas secure from attack. Experienced in conducting ship-boardings and patrolling ports, the Coast Guard also assists the Navy in overseas operations, including in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere in the Middle East for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

So ADM Clark sought to reform the Navy in its various business practices, ADM Willard said, and achieving a modern, cost-efficient organize continues to be a struggle. As for the size of the fleet, ADM Willard said that "when we do come out with a force-structure plan, it will be for the future," but he did not provide specifics. Will more efficient business practices really permit the Navy to buy more ships? "I'm not convinced you will get savings that will allow you to buy 20 more ships over 10 years," said the CBO's Labs. "Also, it may be that, if you save money, the Navy won't get to keep it. It may go to other services like the Army, given the geopolitical situation and all the resources it needs to maintain operations."

Senior Navy leaders argue, though, that reforming business and product-acquisition practices not only save the service money but allow it to be a lot more responsive to crises than it might have been in the past. For instance, cheap, fairly non-technical threats like improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are proving a significant threat to high-tech US forces, as seen with the bombing of the USS Cole and all the bombing attacks occurring in Iraq today, and solutions to counter these threats, if they are based on technology, are ironically increasingly high-tech (see "Shutting the Bomb Factory"). Defeating such threats may ultimately be done not by instituting some new development program but by through some creative, as-yet-unknown approach to the problem.

Expect the Unexpected

Thus, given the unpredictable nature of threats to US interests around the world, creativity is important to planning in general, noted Vice Admiral John G. Morgan Jr., the deputy chief of naval operations for information, plans, and strategy, since obviously no one can be certain what will happen in the future. "I don't know what the Navy will look like 30 years from now," VADM Morgan said in a speech during the Navy-Industry R&D Partnership Conference 2005, held July 26-29 in Washington, DC.

As a kind of analogy for illustrating the difficulties in planning for the future, whether to restructure the Naval force or simply anticipate an enemy attack, whatever it might be, VADM Morgan showed a black-and-white video from the Internet of people running in a circle passing two basketballs back and forth to one another. Focus only the guys in the white shirts and their basketball, not the other set of people, he said. After the video ended, he asked how many times had the ball been passed among the guys in white shirts. Seven or eight, most people counted. Then he asked, "How many of you saw the lady holding the umbrella?" Out of more than 200 people in the audience, just a few people raised their hands.

With the video running again, a lady holding an umbrella could clearly be seen walking through the circle as basketballs passed back and forth around her. Why had so few people seen the lady? ADM Morgan asked. "Because I primed you ahead of time to look for something specific," he said. The events of September 11, 2001, and subsequent the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not foreseen by the Navy or many others, and there may be other events developing that, like the "war on terror," could be as obvious as the lady with the umbrella. By better anticipating future threats, better planning of the Navy's future force should result, if only people learned to look for other than what they expect to see.

Coast Guard Charts Course With Navy

US Coast Guard (USCG) Admiral Thomas H. Collins is steering clear of specifics about funding changes to the Coast Guard's Deepwater acquisition program (see "US Coast Guard Ventures Into Deepwater"), the plans for which are being affected by budget limits. But along with shipbuilding and aircraft purchases, long-term planning for the USCG also involves changes to its relationships with other US military services and government agencies.

Following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, on Sept. 11, 2001, the US Coast Guard began devoting some 50% of its budget to US homeland security. With all of its expanding duties, the USCG is having to rethink its ship-acquisition plans.

Speaking at the conservative Heritage Foundation research group in Washington, DC, on July 18 on the topic of "The Future of the Coast Guard: A View From the Top," ADM Collins said that in the midst of its effort to acquire a range of new ships, boats, aircraft, helicopters, and surveillance technology, among other items, the Coast Guard has had to reallocate about 50% of its assets to national-security purposes, such as port security, as a result of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

This has meant adjustments in its plans to update its resources. The Deepwater plan currently calls for about $24 billion to be spent over the next 25 years on a variety of aircraft and ships, including 350-foot Offshore Patrol Cutters, 418-foot National Security Cutters, 140-foot Fast Response Cutters, 35-foot Long Range Interceptors, and 123-foot Maritime Patrol Boats. The exact number for these ships and boats, along with planned aircraft and other resources the Coast Guard wants to acquire, are in the process of being adjusted, just as the Navy is having to fiddle with numbers to support its Sea Power 21 strategy.

Like the US Navy, the USCG has a multitude of missions to cover, so it needs to build a fleet that can be used for many types of operations. Though the Coast Guard may be best known for its work assisting ships in distress, monitoring boater safety, and the like, law-enforcement and military operations are nothing new for the Coast Guard, which was established by the US Congress in 1790 to enforce tariff and trade laws, prevent smuggling, and protect the collection of federal revenue. Today, the USCG's duties cover everything from interception of weapons of mass destruction on the high seas to protecting US ports and assisting the US Navy in ship-boardings (see "Armed and Ready").

But why should the Navy and Coast Guard have totally separate shipbuilding and aircraft programs when a lot of their missions are the same? Some policy analysts advocate basically combing the two services and consolidating their shipbuilding plans to a large degree, given that some of the ships each plan to build are relatively similar. Bruce Stubbs, the technical director of the Anteon (Arlington, VA) Center for Security Strategies and Operations, said in a paper prepared for the Heritage Foundation that "full integration between the Navy and the Coast Guard with respect to maritime-security capabilities, planning, and operations is warranted, especially in light of current and foreseeable budget realities."

Officials from the Coast Guard and Navy note that integration of the services is part of their discussions in connection with the latest Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), due for release next February (see "Guessing Game: Quadrennial Defense Review 2005"). ADM Collins, for instance, said that in his talks regarding the QDR, which is a Congressionally mandated report from the US Defense Department on its planned future spending and overall development strategy, one area of focus has been the creation of better "maritime domain awareness," which means closer integration of intelligence collected from various sources, including different services like the USCG and Navy.

That doesn't mean the USCG and USN will merge, though. US Navy Admiral Robert Willard, vice chief of Naval Operations, noted at the Sea Enterprise 2005 conference, held Aug. 9-11 in Washington, DC, that integration is a word, like "transformation" or "networking," that is often bandied about but can mean different things to different people. Certainly, the QDR will tout closer integration of the various US military services in the sense of being able to more quickly share information and coordinate missions. Aircraft from the US Air Force should be able to fly smoothly with aircraft from the Navy, including exchanging information quickly, but that doesn't mean there are any plans to combine services.

"That is totally off the table. I can tell you that," ADM Willard said. "There is no talk about merging the services."