There are so many ways to criticize President Obama’s now-infamous “horses
and bayonets” comment from last night’s foreign policy debate that one hardly knows where to start.
The snarky attitude alone is worth a column. What
is Obama, a blog troll? If he has a case to make about having a smaller Navy, he could surely have made it without
being snide, specious, and condescending.
At any rate, there are the obvious points, such as the fact that the
US military still uses bayonets. Some
of the first U.S. military and intelligence personnel into Afghanistan operated in the prohibitive mountainous terrain on
horseback. Horse
cavalry
may be a thing of the (recent) past for classic battlefield engagements,
but terrain and local living patterns are dictatorial when it comes to
military operations. For
some applications, you need a horse.
The
key question implied in all this is what kind of operation you
envision, as you consider which military forces to develop and buy. (In
August 2011, no one envisioned
the US military needing horses for special operations in Afghanistan.)
The president’s statements about our inventory of naval combat ships imply much the same question.
Obama’s
statement suggests that aircraft carriers and submarines (“ships that
go underwater”) have made the surface combatant – the cruiser,
destroyer, and frigate – less necessary.
If we have only as many of them as we had in 1916, that’s not a problem, in Obama’s formulation, because technology changes.
US Policy
But what is it we are trying to do
with these naval forces? Mitt
Romney’s approach is to assume that we intend to exercise control of
our ocean
bastions – the Atlantic and Pacific – and effectively resume our
position as the primary naval influence on the world’s strategic
chokepoints: the approaches to Central America; the maritime space of
Northwestern Europe; the Mediterranean; the chokepoint-belt
from the Suez Canal to the Strait of Hormuz; and the Strait of Malacca
and South China Sea. Being
well briefed,
Romney no doubt has in mind as well the increasingly maritime
confrontation space of the Arctic, where Russia and Canada are
competing, but the US – with our own Arctic claims – has in recent years
been passive.
Romney thus sees the Navy as a core element of our enduring strategic posture. For
national
defense and for the protection of trade, the United States has from the
beginning sought to operate in freedom on the seas, and, where
necessary, to exercise control of them.
We
are a maritime nation, with extremely long, shipping-friendly
coastlines in the temperate zone and an unprecedented control of the
world’s most traveled oceans, the Atlantic and Pacific.
We
have also chosen, since our irruption on the world geopolitical stage a
century or so ago, to project power abroad as much as possible through
expeditionary operations
and offshore influence. Indeed,
seeking the most effective balance between stand-off approaches,
temporary incursions,
and boots-on-the-ground combat and occupation has been a perennial
tension in our national politics and our concepts of war throughout the
life of our Republic. We
have
always naturally favored offshore influence and quick-resolution
campaigns, from which we can extricate ourselves just as quickly.
The
character of these preferences and military problems has changed with
the passage of time – but in comparison to the United States in 1916,
they are all bigger
today, as well as faster-moving and more likely to be our problem than, say, Great Britain’s.
In the modern world, America’s favored posture requires the sea services: the Navy and Marine Corps.
It also requires the Air Force, in virtually any theater where we might operate. That
said,
in the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom, the Navy was able to
put strike-fighters into Afghanistan from carriers in the Arabian Sea,
while the Air Force didn’t have a base close enough to get
strike-fighters into the fight at the time.
That
situation is rare, and was soon corrected, but it does highlight the
point that the Navy can get tactical assets in, even where we have no
bases close to the tactical battlespace.
For
completeness, we should note that in addition to its greater depth of
air assets, the Air Force can get long-range bombers into a fight
anywhere from the continental
United States. For full effectiveness, that capability does depend on the ability to recover and refuel abroad
(e.g., in Guam, Diego Garcia, the UK). But the B-2 or B-52 strategic bomber brings a different order of combat
power to a fight. The differing capabilities of the Navy and Air Force are complementary, for the most part,
rather than being in competition.
As
silly, parochial, and partisan as the infighting gets over defense
planning and procurement, there is a reason why we have the forces we
have, and it maps back to
the basic, enduring strategy of the United States. We intend to control the seas that directly affect us and
deter hostile control over the world’s other key chokepoints. And to do that, we need surface combatants.
What Obama would know if he paid
attention to how our armed forces work
That
reality of sea control hasn’t changed since the ancient Romans locked
down the Mediterranean, and it’s not clear that it ever will.
As an environment for power and confrontation, the sea is sui generis. Modern
threats from the air and under the sea have not made the surface combatant obsolete; they have merely driven it to adapt.
And the surface combatant has adapted,
transformed
from a platform that was largely about bringing guns to a fight into a
platform whose effective purpose is to multitask 100% of the time. The
US
cruiser or destroyer can fire Tomahawk missiles hundreds of miles
inland; it can deploy helicopters for a variety of missions; it can use
guns large and small, and anti-ship missiles, against other surface
ships; it can hunt submarines (if not as effectively
as US Naval forces did during the Cold War), and attack them if it
identifies them; and it can manage maritime air space for any combat
purpose and shoot down enemy aircraft and missiles.
The
surface combatant creates an envelope of multi-use combat power that
moves around with it and acts variously as reassurance or a deterrent.
There is a sense in which the aircraft carrier does that too, but from the maritime
power perspective, the carrier doesn’t do all the things the surface
combatant does – and that means it requires a protection provided by the
surface combatant. If
you want survivable, effective carriers, you need escorts.
Today’s
carrier doesn’t have any antisubmarine warfare capability, nor can it
reliably defend itself against a barrage of enemy missiles.
Its close-in defenses are not the equal of the Aegis combatant’s anti-air or anti-missile capabilities. Nor
can the carrier launch an anti-ship or Tomahawk cruise missile. The carrier is there to launch and recover
aircraft. Its power envelope is singular; the surface combatant’s is multifaceted.
The
carrier’s air wing has a key role in maritime combat, but that role –
like the Air Force’s – is complementary; it can’t replace the surface
combatant, which remains the basic unit
of naval power.
The
submarine is a tremendously capable platform – in a face-off between a
US submarine and a surface combatant I’d back the submarine every day of
the week – but the
sub’s role is also limited. In a geopolitical world in which “gray hulls” often exert their most proximate influence
through sheer, obvious presence, the submarine’s purpose is to be invisible. The fear of a sub you can’t find
is a more powerful motivator than the sight of a sub you can see, which is the opposite of the surface combatant’s effect. The
attack
submarine can collect intelligence, launch Tomahawk missiles, and hunt
other submarines – and is by far the most effective anti-ship platform
known to man. What
it doesn’t do is integrate influence in all the dimensions of naval warfare – subsurface, surface, air,
space, the littoral interface, geopolitics, and suasion – as the surface combatant does.
If you want to control the seas, you still need surface combatants. And
since
the seas are the pathway to most of what we do outside our borders,
there is no such situation as one in which we will only need to do what
aircraft carriers do, or only what submarines do, or only what
minesweepers or oilers or merchant ships do.
If we do not control the seas, we do not control our security conditions or our strategic options.
Numbers and priorities
How many surface combatants do we need? Romney
proposes a number
– a total of 328
ships (the current total is 284), of which surface combatants would
represent about 130 – and backs it up with reasoning about a strategic
purpose.
Obama’s approach has been budgetary. Under
the constraints of the defense budget reductions proposed by Obama – $487
billion through 2022 – the Navy proposed decommissioning
11 ships in 2013, including four Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruisers whose service life has another 10-15 years left.
Three additional cruisers with more than a decade of service life remaining are to be decommissioned in 2014.
As
noted at the Navy-oriented Information Dissemination blog, when the
proposed cuts were first outlined in late 2011, the decommissioning plan
will take out of service cruisers
that can be upgraded with the ballistic missile defense (BMD) package – now a core capability for the Navy – while keeping five cruisers that cannot
receive the BMD upgrade.
Other
ships to be decommissioned include two Whidbey Island-class dock
landing ships, or LSDs, which transport the Marines and support their
amphibious operations.
With the planned decommissioning
of USS Peleliu, a Tarawa-class amphibious assault ship – although the date is now pending – the loss in capability would amount to the loss
of an amphibious ready group, the combat formation in which a Marine Expeditionary Unit deploys. The loss of
Peleliu, a “big deck,” which anchors an amphibious group, would drop the number of big decks from nine
to eight.
Congress has moved to rescue
the four cruisers
proposed for decommissioning next year – and has also (see last link)
stepped in to ensure the full funding of aircraft carrier USS Theodore
Roosevelt’s nuclear-plant refueling overhaul. Theodore
Roosevelt
has about 8 months left in the 3.5-year overhaul, but the lack of a
federal budget in the last three years has jeopardized her funding.
With the decommissioning of USS Enterprise
in 2013, and USS Abraham Lincoln’s scheduled entry into a refueling overhaul in December, the combat-ready
carrier force will be down to eight in a few weeks.
In
the end, the difference between Romney’s approach and Obama’s isn’t a
difference between buying a 328-ship force and having no Navy at all.
It never is; the difference is always between one policy and another. Obama’s
policy is to cut defense spending, even when that leads to the decommissioning of some of our best ships. Yet
in 2010, the Navy could only fulfill 53% of the requirements
for presence and missions levied by the combatant commanders (e.g., CENTCOM, PACOM). Cutting this Navy will
reduce further its ability to fill warfighter requirements.
Given the constraints of Obama’s budgetary priorities, DOD envisions eventually sustaining a Navy whose size averages
298 ships through 2042. Romney
has
articulated a national-security policy that emphasizes building faster
and having a larger Navy, one that can better meet the requirements of
US policy and the combatant commanders for naval power.
Obama has used sophomoric sarcasm to imply that Romney’s approach is ignorant and outdated. That
pretty much sums up the choice the voters have between them.
J. E. Dyer
CDR, USN (Ret.)
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