Recently the Secretary of Defense made the decision to reduce the number of aircraft carriers in the US Navy from 11 to 10. This transition will take place in 2012/2013 with the retirement of the USS Enterprise. While the Secretary’s statement goes on to say that the US will return to a force of 11 carriers later in the next decade, anyone who believes that is being naïve; the possibility that having reduced our force structure and reallocated that percentage of the Defense budget that a future administration, short of massive effort, will find a way to again realign the budget is hard to believe. Further underlining this point is that the Secretary stated that the US will move to a five year build program. Simple math thus yields a force structure of 10 ships, in as much as these ships will last at most 50 years, and even then only at very high and accelerating maintenance costs beyond 35 years of age. (USS Enterprise was commissioned in 1961 and will be 51 or 52 years old if retired in the 2012-2013 time frame.)
Nevertheless, the option has been presented that this, or any other future administration and the nation can save money in the coming decades by no longer building aircraft carriers. One point that is often raised is that it has been decades since carriers have been used in the role for which they were designed – that is, fighting other fleets and establishing sea and air control, they have seen the end of their useful life, and are now are nothing more than fantastically expensive targets for sophisticated Chinese weapons.
The problem is that these arguments don’t quite hold water. Working in reverse order, the issue of ships as targets is, in a sense, undeniable. If the US were to go to war with the Chinese (or any other maritime power), every ship put into the Western Pacific would be a target. The distinction is that an Aegis cruiser or destroyer (like the ships that shot down the satellite early in the year) would have difficulty surviving any hit from such weapons; carriers, while being damaged, have much greater survivability then do smaller ships. Eliminating ‘capital ships’ from the fleet simply and substantially reduces overall survivability. Nor does not begin to address the difference in offensive firepower that an aircraft carrier has over a cruiser. To put it simply, it’s substantial.
As to the issue that carriers are easily targeted, this is less true than it looks. Certainly, they can be found by a dedicated adversary who is willing to commit the assets to find them. Is it easy? That depends on a long list of items. At the same time, they are more difficult to target then the fixed air bases that the US would fly out of in any and every theater in the world. All of them are on Google Earth, where you can easily get fairly precise latitudes and longitudes. How moving aircraft from a mobile field that at least has to be ‘re-found’ every day, to a fixed airfield where not only the aircraft, but the machine shops, the weapons storage areas, the fuel pumping facilities, etc, are not only known, but are subject to both attack and sabotage – how this makes for an increase in security and survivability is not intuitively obvious to this author.
Another argument is that carriers are extremely expensive. Again, yes and no. As percentages of national wealth (GDP) they are roughly the same cost as battleships were 75 years ago. More importantly, the real cost of the Navy (and the Air Force, for that matter) is not in the ships (or aircraft), but in the personnel. Over the course of the lifetime of any large warship, the crew is more than 50% of the cost. When we consider that less than one-third of the US Navy is on ‘sea duty’ (that is, those forces that actually deploy overseas, even when not attached to a ship), and that the rest is what might be called the shore establishment, the real way ahead for the Navy to save money is to alter that ratio, something the Obama administration should absolutely do. As an historical note: in 1941 the Navy had a similar number of ships, but 75% of the Navy was on sea duty, resulting in a Navy that was considerably less then 1/3 the size of today’s Navy in personnel and less than ½ the cost. Certainly, by eliminating the carriers the Navy could reduce manning by 5,000 sailors per carrier, but rarely do any of these discussions say anything about reducing the manpower of the Navy (or any of the other services).
Another issue is left unasked and unanswered: should the Navy continue to build cruisers and destroyers, the ‘protective ring’ that surrounds the carrier? Or should these also be terminated? If there are to be fewer carriers, would we reduce the number of other ships? Is there any other platform, present or postulated, which can take the place of a carrier in all its many roles? What ships would take the role of USS Abraham Lincoln following the tsunami in 2006? And if the replacement solution requires more than one platform, what is the total cost of the replacement?
There also seems to be some confusion as to the real combat role of the Navy. The Navy’s role in combat is to establish control of an ‘undeveloped’ theater. Simply put, the Navy is responsible for entering an area, eliminating key elements of the threat, establishing sea and air control over that area, and thereby providing an entrée into the area so that the Army and Air Force can move in large, sustained forces. Following that, the Navy then acts in support of the ground forces, as it has, for the most part, done in Iraq for the last 17 years and Afghanistan for the last 7 years. In doing so, the Navy provides the policy maker a wider range of options than do the fixed air bases (air bases which are – again - much more easily targeted by sophisticated weapons (or terrorists) then are ships). President Elect Obama need only engage in a brief review of history to see when his predecessors have relied on carriers – which can operate without anyone’s approval – to conduct certain operations, rather than be hamstrung by trying to act from an air base in someone else’s country.
Which leads the key issue: what do these people think a Navy is for? There are those who suppose that Navies are simply for fighting wars at sea. History doesn’t really support that. In the 232 year history of this nation we have had real war at sea, that is, an adversary who could engage US ships with their own ships, in only seven wars: the Revolutionary War, the confrontation with the Barbary Pirates, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I and World War II – a grand total of 22 years of naval combat.
In fact, the history of the Royal Navy and the US Navy over the last 300 years suggests that the role of these two navies at least is something else again. Navies provide strategic presence, they make the maritime ‘by-ways’ secure; they make the global market place possible. They do this my assuring friends and allies, dissuading those who are thinking other thoughts, and deterring those who already have ulterior motives. The anti-carrier crowd denies or ignores this.
A further argument is that while the Navy claims carriers provide deterrence, in fact they have failed to do so in any number of circumstances, such as Korea in 1950, etc. Such arguments really underlie ignorance about deterrence, not the weakness of aircraft carriers. Deterrence is not a product of a weapon system; deterrence is a product of the words and deeds of a nation. Weapon systems are tools of deterrence. Deterrence failed in Korea for a host of reasons, not the least of which was a serious error on the part of the Truman administration in clarifying what it would and would not do to prevent the spread of Communism in Asia. The presence or absence of carriers had little if anything to do with the failure. In the case of North Vietnam (and presumably the case with Iran right now) it was a case of a perception by one side of lack of will in the other (the US) that marked the failure of deterrence.
US law says that the Navy must be prepared to conduct sustained combat operations at sea in support of US interests. But, what happens between the wars is an equal, and perhaps greater, justification of a Navy. The ‘globalized’ world we live in today is the product of two great forces: the Royal Navy and the US Navy. The role of the capital ship, whether a line of battle ship like HMS Victory, or a 20th century dreadnought or an aircraft carrier is first and foremost to present such a calming influence on the international maritime environment that there is no war. For more than three centuries the two great navies of the world – the US Navy and the Royal Navy - have been largely successful in doing that. The capital ships – yesterday’s battleships and today’s carriers - have been, and continue to be, the cornerstone of that success.
Nevertheless, the option has been presented that this, or any other future administration and the nation can save money in the coming decades by no longer building aircraft carriers. One point that is often raised is that it has been decades since carriers have been used in the role for which they were designed – that is, fighting other fleets and establishing sea and air control, they have seen the end of their useful life, and are now are nothing more than fantastically expensive targets for sophisticated Chinese weapons.
The problem is that these arguments don’t quite hold water. Working in reverse order, the issue of ships as targets is, in a sense, undeniable. If the US were to go to war with the Chinese (or any other maritime power), every ship put into the Western Pacific would be a target. The distinction is that an Aegis cruiser or destroyer (like the ships that shot down the satellite early in the year) would have difficulty surviving any hit from such weapons; carriers, while being damaged, have much greater survivability then do smaller ships. Eliminating ‘capital ships’ from the fleet simply and substantially reduces overall survivability. Nor does not begin to address the difference in offensive firepower that an aircraft carrier has over a cruiser. To put it simply, it’s substantial.
As to the issue that carriers are easily targeted, this is less true than it looks. Certainly, they can be found by a dedicated adversary who is willing to commit the assets to find them. Is it easy? That depends on a long list of items. At the same time, they are more difficult to target then the fixed air bases that the US would fly out of in any and every theater in the world. All of them are on Google Earth, where you can easily get fairly precise latitudes and longitudes. How moving aircraft from a mobile field that at least has to be ‘re-found’ every day, to a fixed airfield where not only the aircraft, but the machine shops, the weapons storage areas, the fuel pumping facilities, etc, are not only known, but are subject to both attack and sabotage – how this makes for an increase in security and survivability is not intuitively obvious to this author.
Another argument is that carriers are extremely expensive. Again, yes and no. As percentages of national wealth (GDP) they are roughly the same cost as battleships were 75 years ago. More importantly, the real cost of the Navy (and the Air Force, for that matter) is not in the ships (or aircraft), but in the personnel. Over the course of the lifetime of any large warship, the crew is more than 50% of the cost. When we consider that less than one-third of the US Navy is on ‘sea duty’ (that is, those forces that actually deploy overseas, even when not attached to a ship), and that the rest is what might be called the shore establishment, the real way ahead for the Navy to save money is to alter that ratio, something the Obama administration should absolutely do. As an historical note: in 1941 the Navy had a similar number of ships, but 75% of the Navy was on sea duty, resulting in a Navy that was considerably less then 1/3 the size of today’s Navy in personnel and less than ½ the cost. Certainly, by eliminating the carriers the Navy could reduce manning by 5,000 sailors per carrier, but rarely do any of these discussions say anything about reducing the manpower of the Navy (or any of the other services).
Another issue is left unasked and unanswered: should the Navy continue to build cruisers and destroyers, the ‘protective ring’ that surrounds the carrier? Or should these also be terminated? If there are to be fewer carriers, would we reduce the number of other ships? Is there any other platform, present or postulated, which can take the place of a carrier in all its many roles? What ships would take the role of USS Abraham Lincoln following the tsunami in 2006? And if the replacement solution requires more than one platform, what is the total cost of the replacement?
There also seems to be some confusion as to the real combat role of the Navy. The Navy’s role in combat is to establish control of an ‘undeveloped’ theater. Simply put, the Navy is responsible for entering an area, eliminating key elements of the threat, establishing sea and air control over that area, and thereby providing an entrée into the area so that the Army and Air Force can move in large, sustained forces. Following that, the Navy then acts in support of the ground forces, as it has, for the most part, done in Iraq for the last 17 years and Afghanistan for the last 7 years. In doing so, the Navy provides the policy maker a wider range of options than do the fixed air bases (air bases which are – again - much more easily targeted by sophisticated weapons (or terrorists) then are ships). President Elect Obama need only engage in a brief review of history to see when his predecessors have relied on carriers – which can operate without anyone’s approval – to conduct certain operations, rather than be hamstrung by trying to act from an air base in someone else’s country.
Which leads the key issue: what do these people think a Navy is for? There are those who suppose that Navies are simply for fighting wars at sea. History doesn’t really support that. In the 232 year history of this nation we have had real war at sea, that is, an adversary who could engage US ships with their own ships, in only seven wars: the Revolutionary War, the confrontation with the Barbary Pirates, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I and World War II – a grand total of 22 years of naval combat.
In fact, the history of the Royal Navy and the US Navy over the last 300 years suggests that the role of these two navies at least is something else again. Navies provide strategic presence, they make the maritime ‘by-ways’ secure; they make the global market place possible. They do this my assuring friends and allies, dissuading those who are thinking other thoughts, and deterring those who already have ulterior motives. The anti-carrier crowd denies or ignores this.
A further argument is that while the Navy claims carriers provide deterrence, in fact they have failed to do so in any number of circumstances, such as Korea in 1950, etc. Such arguments really underlie ignorance about deterrence, not the weakness of aircraft carriers. Deterrence is not a product of a weapon system; deterrence is a product of the words and deeds of a nation. Weapon systems are tools of deterrence. Deterrence failed in Korea for a host of reasons, not the least of which was a serious error on the part of the Truman administration in clarifying what it would and would not do to prevent the spread of Communism in Asia. The presence or absence of carriers had little if anything to do with the failure. In the case of North Vietnam (and presumably the case with Iran right now) it was a case of a perception by one side of lack of will in the other (the US) that marked the failure of deterrence.
US law says that the Navy must be prepared to conduct sustained combat operations at sea in support of US interests. But, what happens between the wars is an equal, and perhaps greater, justification of a Navy. The ‘globalized’ world we live in today is the product of two great forces: the Royal Navy and the US Navy. The role of the capital ship, whether a line of battle ship like HMS Victory, or a 20th century dreadnought or an aircraft carrier is first and foremost to present such a calming influence on the international maritime environment that there is no war. For more than three centuries the two great navies of the world – the US Navy and the Royal Navy - have been largely successful in doing that. The capital ships – yesterday’s battleships and today’s carriers - have been, and continue to be, the cornerstone of that success.
No comments:
Post a Comment