Force Structure Perspectives Series

By Dmitry Filipoff

As a part of CIMSEC’s Force Structure Perspectives Series, CIMSEC discussed the Battle Force 2045 fleet design with CDR Phil Pournelle (ret.), who served as a surface warfare officer and in the Office of Secretary of Defense Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation and at the Office of Net Assessment. In this conversation, CDR Pournelle discusses getting away from exquisite legacy platforms, getting fresh perspectives in force structure assessment, and adapting the Navy to the National Defense Strategy.

The Secretary of Defense recently announced a new fleet plan for a future U.S. Navy of 500 ships, a major increase over today’s fleet of around 300 ships. Among many changes, the fleet emphasizes substantial additions in areas such as sealift, unmanned warships, submarines, and smaller surface combatants. What do you make of the size of this fleet and its mix of platforms?

There are two challenges to answering this question: we don’t know what the actual plan is, and we don’t know what the fleet is intended to do. The 30-year shipbuilding plan is overdue to Congress and apparently has been overridden by the Secretary of Defense and others outside the Department of the Navy. Based on the Secretary’s recent public comments it would appear the best guess in the public realm is a report by the Hudson Institute which lays out their own long-term plan and description of how the fleet is intended to operate.

The Hudson report does describe in detail the number and type of platforms to be in the fleet by 2045 based on a modest increase of the Navy’s budget over inflation. This new fleet incorporates a number of new hulls: an optionally manned missile corvette (DDC), an unmanned support vessel (MUSV), an unmanned subsurface vessel (XLUUV), a small amphibious vessel (LAW), and a small Combat Logistic Force Vessel (T-AOL). Unfortunately, the Hudson report provides a very cursory description of these platforms, leaving out details which would be required to provide a proper answer to the question. Therefore any assessment of these vessels must draw upon descriptions of these vessels from other sources and an educated guess regarding the DDC.

Based on all of these assumptions, one would assess that if the Secretary is moving in the direction of the architecture and operational constructs of the Hudson report, then this is a step in the right direction, but there is still plenty of work to be done.

The most important contribution of the Hudson report is the substitution of the ill-conceived Large Unmanned Surface Vessel (LUSV) with the optionally manned (but should be permanently manned) missile corvette (DDC) to provide numbers of potential strike platforms and act as relay missile magazines for the forward forces. When paired with Maritime Sealift Command (MSC) logistics platforms to reload Vertical Launch System (VLS) cells on the DDC close to the scene of action, such platforms will offer a weekly volume of fire which greatly exceeds that of a carrier air wing (CVW) on a per unit cost basis. The DDC and T-AOL combination are nearly the epitome of the concepts of Distributed Lethality and distributed logistics crucial to the survival of a fleet in the modern maritime precision strike regime.

What appears to be lacking is a low cost, low signature, risk-worthy missile boat which can operate in the littoral regions and frustrate our competitor’s reconnaissance strike complex (RUK) and the means to deploy and sustain these platforms. Existing candidates for this mission include the Juliet Marine Ghost Missile Boat (PHM), the Ambassador class fast missile craft (PTM), the M80 Stiletto, and the Naval Postgraduate School Minute Man (PFM).  Existing candidates for the role of transport and mothership include the Auxiliary Crane Ship (ACS), the Lighterage Aboard Ship (LASH), the Montford Point class Expeditionary Transfer Dock ship (ESD), and crane operating Offshore Supply Vessels.

This new force structure may be used to execute Navy and Marine Corps warfighting concepts, including Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO), and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO). These concepts and the new fleet design embody leadership’s thinking on the nature of future warfighing tactics and operations. Are these warfighting concepts mature or flexible enough to provide a long-term foundation for building this redesigned fleet? Are trends in tactics and technology adequately captured?

The Hudson fleet construct is very dependent on the mosaic theory of warfare, a “decision-centric” concept employing Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is an outgrowth of maneuver warfare. While the authors are correct in stating the United States and her allies would be ill-advised to conduct attrition warfare against a large continental power close to their shores, mosaic warfare is still in its infancy and much work needs to be done.

EABO is still in development and the Marine Corps is putting considerable effort into its development, particularly through wargaming. However, many of their challenges arise due to their efforts to perform missions which the Navy should be doing and is not. The Navy seems unable to take on the missions and deploy the proper platforms for littoral warfare which Captain Wayne Hughes identified more than 20 years ago. The Hudson report does a great service in proposing a fleet capable of executing Distributed Lethality instead of shoehorning legacy platforms into the general idea and calling it DMO. Adding numbers to our fleet is crucial as the sensors, reach, and lethality of smaller and smaller platforms both ashore and at sea continue to increase.

The Navy has long been concerned about whether it can sustainably increase the size of the fleet within traditional levels of shipbuilding funding. How can we view the affordability and sustainability of this fleet?

The Navy cannot increase the size of the fleet and meet the needs outlined in the National Defense Strategy (NDS) if it continues to build the same exquisite and expensive legacy platforms. I continue to hear from colleagues who are still on active duty about the challenges of maintaining the fleet we currently have. Meanwhile, the traditional way of building the fleet appears to be piecemeal, with decisions based on the requirements of each individual ship, particularly survivability, and not on the fleet as a whole. This results in a deadly and costly spiral where ships increase in size and cost resulting in a smaller overall fleet, where each ship becomes more precious. Such precious ships must then be defended more vigorously, adding more systems, increasing size and costs…

Wargaming and analysis must continue looking at the fleet and the threat from a holistic perspective. The acquisition of the fleet must then be viewed from an annualized cost (amortizing the acquisition costs over the expected service life, adding the annual operations and maintenance costs, plus manpower costs) compared to the lethality, resilience, and sustainability of the total force in the face of a capable opposition.

This process was notable for including the direct involvement and direction of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which initially rejected the Navy and Marine Corps force structure assessment delivered in January. What is unique about how this process played out and what can we learn for making future assessments?

This is unique in the fact that the Secretary of Defense did not defer to the Navy staff. The writing was on the wall several years ago when Congress demanded multiple perspectives on future fleet architectures, suggesting dissatisfaction with continuing to build the same fleet regardless of trends shaping the future combat environment. Further, I don’t think the Navy really addressed the National Defense Strategy’s four-layer construct of contact, blunt, surge, and homeland defense when they submitted their planned architecture. They appeared to have shoehorned in the same force design and not make the fundamental changes called for.

Future fleet architecture development should take advantage of modern wargaming, modeling, and analysis techniques to assess multiple force structures and approaches in the future. The nation would benefit from a continued competition of these ideas against potential competitors’ actions to determine how effective such forces will be in the range of future security environments.

What does it mean for U.S. naval strategy and great power competitiveness to build this fleet, and to build it soon? Does it address a gap between national strategy and the navy needed to execute it?

Again, we don’t know exactly what the Secretary is proposing, and the Hudson report leaves much to be desired, but the concepts as described are certainly a step in the right direction. Our competitors have watched how the U.S. way of warfare remained relatively static for over 40 years and have developed ways to counter it. The key to an effective fleet is reversing a trend toward a small number of exquisite and expensive ships, and the Hudson architecture moves in that direction. The Hudson architecture appears to match platforms and formations to the NDS layers and increases the number of deployed forces capable of conventional deterrence needed in the contact and blunt layers. There is still a need for littoral combat missile boats which are effectively invisible to our competitors RUK in the contact and blunt layers and thus good additions to the overall force structure.

Previous force structure assessments conducted in 2016 were later considered by some to be overly optimistic with respect to certain factors, such as available resourcing. How can we be confident in this new assessment, and that it will spur the change it recommends? What comes next to build this fleet?

Until we actually see the Secretary’s final assessment, a description of the assumptions which went into it, and the analytic rigor it was subjected to, we can’t be confident in it. There are outstanding questions in the Hudson report I described earlier. Analysis from think tanks like Hudson can have their own elements of excessive optimism. However, just the fact there were competing force structures put forward and each subjected to a competitive analytic process should provide a greater level of confidence.

The changes recommended in the assessment will require experiential learning for the key decisionmakers in the form of wargaming. Recent games have provided participants a visceral understanding of the impact of decisions to continue to build our forces in the same manner. It is not enough to just read the reports. Key lawmakers and other leaders need to participate in these wargames. They will then quickly understand the need to move away from the few exquisite and expensive legacy ships of today and toward a new force structure able to compete and win in the modern precision maritime warfare environment. Then there will be an impetus to address the shipbuilding industry and force architecture – that is, once we see what the Secretary is actually proposing…

Commander Phillip Pournelle retired from the U.S. Navy after 26 years of service as a Surface Warfare Officer. He served on cruisers, destroyers, amphibious ships, and an experimental high speed vessel. He served on the Navy Staff doing campaign analysis, at the Office of Secretary of Defense Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, and at the Office of Net Assessment. He is now a Senior Operations Analyst and Game Designer at Group W. The opinions expressed here are strictly his own.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Content@CIMSEC.org. 

Featured Image: The aircraft carriers USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71), right, and USS Nimitz (CVN 68) participate in dual carrier operations, June 23, 2020. (US Navy photo)

Force Structure Perspectives Series

By Dmitry Filipoff

As a part of CIMSEC’s Force Structure Perspectives Series, CIMSEC discussed the Battle Force 2045 fleet design with Capt. Sam J. Tangredi (ret.), currently the Leidos Chair of Future Warfare Studies and director of the Institute for Future Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval War College. In this discussion, Capt. Tangredi discusses uncertainties facing the new fleet design, possible intentions behind the Defense Secretary’s rejection of the Navy’s force structure assessment, and alternative means to revamp the fleet for great power conflict.

The Secretary of Defense recently announced a new fleet plan for a future U.S. Navy of 500 ships, a major increase over today’s fleet of around 300 ships. Among many changes, the fleet emphasizes substantial additions in areas such as sealift, unmanned warships, submarines, and smaller surface combatants. What do you make of the size of this fleet and its mix of platforms? 

It is hard not to be cynical about Secretary of Defense Esper’s remarks on a 500-ship Navy given how late it is in this presidential term, how he publicly handled his rejection of the Navy’s earlier proposed force structure, and the fact that he has not identified a plan for acquiring the necessary financial resources. For now, the plan seems more aspirational than actual. And in that particular aspect, it really doesn’t differ much from the previous plans offered by the Navy.

I don’t see that much of a force structure plan, since the details from the study that have been released thus far suggest it is based on unproven and undemonstrated capabilities that require an investment in development and prototyping that dwarfs what is being done today. We have been down that path before with LCS and the Zumwalt class—that is, building ship classes that cannot operate in the ways they are envisioned, and which eventually become cancelled, truncated, or sidelined. We cannot confidently envision a future fleet employing what are, as of today, unproven capabilities, and an autonomous warship that could operate under networked battle conditions is an unproven capability. We cannot build a fleet based on unproven capabilities unless we are willing to first build one-of-a-kind vessels with which to experiment. And that goes against all current DoD acquisition principles, which center around large-program economies of scale.

My critical assessment is based on the fact that SECDEF has been unclear about where the financial resources will come from—and, in particular, he gives no indication of any willingness to reassign budget share within the current DoD budget level. He gives no indication that he is willing to go to the mat with Congress for a larger fleet, or the president for that matter. SECDEF has warned throughout his tenure that the DoD should not expect or plan for any real budget growth. How then can he fund a 500-ship Navy? It would be unkind to suggest that his plan is designed to preserve budget share for the U.S. Army, which is struggling to figure out its role in Esper’s number one planning scenario of potential war with the People’s Republic of China (with the Chinese Communist Party, (CCP) actually). If the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps (and U.S. Air Force)—which would bear the operational brunt in that conflict—have an unworkable force structure plan, then there is not a good reason to make tradeoffs within the current budget space that affect the other services and defense agencies.

SECDEF has hinted that somehow the Navy can come up with internal savings through efficiencies to fund a larger fleet, which I find highly dubious. Every SECDEF claims to be able to wring out money from the existing budget if “efficiencies” are enacted. Sometimes sweep-up money can be squeezed out on the margins—but nothing that could ever fund a 320-ship Navy, let alone a 350-ship Navy, and especially a 500-ship Navy. And you generally have to invest more money up front to modernize and digitize existing processes if you are going to gain real efficiencies. That seed money needs to come from somewhere. “Efficiencies” aren’t free.

Given the resources expected, the ideology of jointness which requires all services to be equal in missions and budget, and several decades in which OSD lacked interest in the Navy, the only real way to get to a 500-ship fleet by 2045 is to re-designate very small unmanned systems as ships.

The plan to have a mix of manned and unmanned vessels has been part of the Navy’s conceptual plan for some time, and the Navy has been doing a succession of studies on alternative fleets since Senator McCain put that requirement in the FY2016 defense budget act. SECDEF’s studies seem to merely repeat options from this series of studies. The reason the Navy has had difficulty in putting such ideas into the 30-Year Shipbuilding Plan is that the capabilities under discussion—small carriers, arsenal/magazine ships, large-size surface unmanned vehicles, and so forth have yet to be proven, and to base future fleet structure on the assumptions they can be made to work effectively is the same as basing it on LCS or Zumwalt.

Personally, I support experimentation with small carriers, arsenal/magazine ships, intermediate-range ballistic missiles at sea, large-size surface unmanned vehicles, and other platforms. But we need to build a few first before we bet future force structure on them. As the Navy’s second-greatest program manager (Rickover being the first), RADM Wayne E. Meyer, the “father of AEGIS,” would say: “build a little, test a little, learn a lot.” DoD needs to be willing to fully fund one- or two-of-a-kind ships before it redesigns the entire fleet. And I mean full acquisition, program-of-record type funding, not DARPA-scale experiments.

If the Navy itself has been debating these same issues, why did SECDEF “take away” future fleet design from the Navy (as it has been described in the media and elsewhere) and commission his own study? I will play the cynic—but it is based on 30-plus years of being involved in DoD analytical studies. SECDEFs do these things when they already have an answer in mind, but existing studies don’t really justify their answer. SECDEFs need to intellectually justify their answers to Congress, hence they need a “study” to support it. The current SECDEF apparently believes that large nuclear aircraft carriers (CVNs) are not part of the answer, but the existing, off-the-shelf Navy studies would not go so far as to justify cutting the number of CVNs in order to fund alternatives.

Even if Navy leadership was committed to reducing CVNs to fund other platforms, they would not make it part of their plan out of fear—a justifiable fear given the ideology of jointness—that any savings from reducing CVN acquisition would not come back to the Department of the Navy. Their fear is that CVNs—a proven operational capability—would be cut, but no alternatives actually funded.

That fear may seem parochial, but it is very realistic given the focus on building a joint force capability optimized and specialized for a short war against the People’s Liberation Army. If that war scenario is the driver in developing U.S. joint force capabilities, then buying land- and sea-based (and air-launched) hypersonic missiles (and their infrastructures) would seem a priority over CVNs. I think that is what SECDEF envisions as far as priorities and tradeoffs, and he needed to shop for a study that can justify that argument to Congress.

I would disagree with the approach of using a short war against the PLA as the driver of future force design (for one thing, such a war would probably not be short), and I fear that trading hypersonic missiles with the mainland of China will result in hypersonic missiles falling on Guam, Hawaii, San Diego, and other territories of the United States.

I would, however, agree with two major ideas that have been linked with SECDEF’s recent study. First, we need to address the issue of combat logistics, which is always an afterthought. The previous Navy studies were grappling with that, but if one assumes a short shooting war, combat logistics (as in the form of resupply) is not in the opening discussion. And yes, the attack submarine fleet needs to be substantially increased.

If SECDEF Esper really wants to significantly improve U.S. joint capabilities based on the likely scenarios that could occur between the joint force and the PLA (particularly concerning Taiwan and the South China Sea), then he should commit himself to work toward reprogramming near-term money from DoD overall to double the size of the attack submarine force (possibly with a supporting large-size unmanned underwater vehicle component—vessels capable of torpedo and missile attack) and buy tons of the most sophisticated naval mines we can develop. That would greatly enhance deterrence without gambling with a trade-Hawaii-for-Hainan force posture. After those commitments, then he could be concerned about the future fleet mix. He will have already gone a good way toward solving the problem.

Do I think there might be a 500-ship navy in 2045? Yes I do, but given current trends, budget realities, and OSD priorities—that fleet won’t belong to the U.S. Navy. 

This new force structure may be used to execute Navy and Marine Corps warfighting concepts, including Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO), and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO). These concepts and the new fleet design embody leadership’s thinking on the nature of future warfighing tactics and operations. Are these warfighting concepts mature or flexible enough to provide a long-term foundation for building this redesigned fleet? Are trends in tactics and technology adequately captured? 

Although these Navy and Marine Corps concepts are promising, they are not mature enough to be the basis for a naval force structure in the near term.

In discussing Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) with proponents and analysts, I have yet to determine a common understanding of what exactly is “distributed.” How far are the ships, aircraft, units to be dispersed? How does one concentrate the effects? What will be done if communications are jammed or degraded? Who is going to command the dispersed fleet? If it is the fleet commander operating out of a Maritime Operations Center, then what prevents the enemy (in a real war) from dropping a hypersonic warhead on their head?

The advantages in having command afloat in a carrier and with the fleet within ultra-high frequency relay range (which we could extend using UAVs) is that it can move and avoid weapons targeted by mere latitude and longitude, GLONASS, or the PRC equivalent, or inertial guidance. Right now we cannot target from long-range with the weapons we currently have in the inventory without relying on satellite data. Is that going to be available? How can one be dispersed if one doesn’t have the systems yet to support it? In what stage is the engineering necessary for this new(ish) warfighting concept and fleet design?

Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO), as opposed to forcible amphibious assault, is an elegant concept. But exactly where are those bases proposed to be? In the often war-gamed South China Sea scenario, the assumption is that the Marines are going to be operating out of the Philippines. Putting aside whether the Philippines would allow that, there is nothing in the South China Sea actually worth fighting over. The more probable conflicts would be to the north. As for NATO scenarios, if we can’t defend a NATO ally from contiguous land bases, we will need to do a forcible entry assault to get around Russia forces. Where would there be an archipelagic defense for NATO?

The reason we are grasping for these concepts is because we perceive our “traditional” concepts of operations to be too hard in the case of a naval war against the CCP. Well, that would be a very hard war in any case, and we stand a chance of losing even with being distributed, archipelagic, or concentrated.

The most important task in that scenario is a sea denial campaign in the Taiwan Strait and East China Sea to prevent any CCP ship from reaching Taiwan (or Japan, if it came to that), as well as the air and missile fight above it. That would be an attack submarine-dominated campaign. Of course, we don’t have enough attack submarines right now, which is why, if SECDEF Esper really wanted to deter a conflict over Taiwan, he would be reprogramming resources from the Army and other defense agencies into submarine construction as well as building unmanned air combat (not strike) vehicles in scores. That would do much more in the scenarios he is focused on than a 500-ship fleet. Now is also the time for the Navy to commit to building unmanned air combat vehicles for CVNs and LHA/LHDs.

The Navy has long been concerned about whether it can sustainably increase the size of the fleet within traditional levels of shipbuilding funding. How can we view the affordability and sustainability of this fleet? 

The reason there is not more shipbuilding infrastructure (or defense industry infrastructure overall) is that it is considered almost criminal in defense acquisition for a shipbuilder to make over a 10 percent profit margin. Since software companies routinely make over 30 percent profit, what are larger, diverse corporations going to invest in? Shipbuilding or software? Why does one think Northrop Grumman spun-off Huntington Ingalls? Not because they thought it is a particularly profitable sector in the long-term.

If the Navy and the nation want a stronger shipbuilding base, we need to bring back the construction capabilities of public (Navy) shipyards. We were building attack submarines in them into the 1970s. That would also bring back those high-paying blue collar jobs that almost every politician claims should be a national priority. Would that be expensive? Of course. But you are not going to get industry to ramp up without giving them a greater profit incentive. Over the long run, that will cost even more than a public-private mix in shipbuilding.

This process was notable for including the direct involvement and direction of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which initially rejected the Navy and Marine Corps force structure assessment delivered in January. What is unique about how this process played out and what can we learn for making future assessments?

SECDEF went shopping for a study that matched his established conclusions. You tell me who is doing the study and I can tell you (based on their previous studies and their analysts) what their study is going to say (at least roughly). So can most analysts in OSD.

Of course, any Navy staff-written study will be conservative, and it is their job to be conservative. The Navy has to maintain a multi-mission, multi-scenario, multi-capability fleet that can be re-purposed in a changing future security environment, a fleet that will last beyond the next ten Defense Secretaries. That means we have to be biased toward what already works, not what might work if enough resources are spent. SECDEF should expect—and respect—that sort of study. And the resources will likely not be spent—or at least not enough to make the planned major change effective. We experienced that with LCS and the Zumwalt class.

That is not to say every idea in SECDEF’s preferred study is bad, in fact it identifies some changes that should be made in a patient, thoughtfully, and fully engineered manner. But taking away the study from the Navy and including the OSD Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office (CAPE) and an outside think tank so prominently indicates that there was impatience that the Navy would never conclude what OSD wanted concluded. Otherwise, SECDEF could simply turn it back to the Navy and say, “this is what I want also included”… and also, “these are the resources I will put up for these new systems/changes.”

As soon as I heard CAPE had a prominent role, I knew a prominent recommendation would be to cut nuclear aircraft carriers. Why? Because the CAPE staff consists of programmers and budgeteers, not strategists. Carriers are frightfully expensive, and if you want to cut budget there is no bigger target.

And perhaps carriers should be cut—but I have seen no thorough study that goes option-by-option through all the alternatives, whether from hardening land air bases or through mobile offshore platforms. That is the sort of study that needs to be done first, before such a proposal to cut carriers is put forward.

What does it mean for U.S. naval strategy and great power competitiveness to build this fleet, and to build it soon? Does it address a gap between national strategy and the navy needed to execute it?

Since it is doubtful we will build it so soon, that is a bit of a moot question. But the gap between long-range national security strategy and the navy is in the number of long deployable, long-range, self-sustaining multi-mission platforms, and not just capabilities for a short war with the CCP. Any shooting war with the CCP won’t be short—it will be more like World War II in the Pacific than anything we faced since the Cold War. Unless we give up. They are not going to without a serious fight, especially when the future “legitimacy” of CCP control over China will be on the line. And they would see time as being on their side, not ours. To deter them requires a fleet that can operate globally and continuously project a global presence. I don’t think that is what SECDEF envisions—though I would be happy to be proven wrong.

Previous force structure assessments conducted in 2016 were later considered by some to be overly optimistic with respect to certain factors, such as available resourcing. How can we be confident in this new assessment, and that it will spur the change it recommends? What comes next to build this fleet?

Unless we want to designate small units as ships, this study is also overoptimistic. If OSD is not willing to break the ideology of jointness that dictates 25 percent of budget share goes each to the Navy, Army, Air Force, and defense agencies, then the Navy is going to stay the size it is and possibly even shrink. Conceptually, OSD currently thinks of a navy as if it was an army, which it is not. That’s part of the tyranny of the ideology that “jointness” (as necessary as it was in the 1980s and 1990s) has become in the past two decades.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Content@CIMSEC.org. 

Featured Image: PHILIPPINE SEA (Oct. 23, 2020) An E/A-18G Growler, attached to the Shadowhawks of Electronic Attack Squadron (VAQ) 141, launches from the flight deck of the Navy’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76). U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Gabriel A. Martinez)

Force Structure Perspectives Series

By Dmitry Filipoff

As a part of CIMSEC’s Force Structure Perspectives Series, CIMSEC discussed the Battle Force 2045 fleet design with Capt. Trip Barber (ret.), who was the Navy’s chief analyst of future force structure and capability requirements on the OPNAV staff as a civilian from 2002 to 2014. In this conversation, Capt. Barber discusses the Navy’s longstanding resistance to new ship types, whether Battle Force 2045 can be afforded, and how to begin building this new fleet.

The Secretary of Defense recently announced a new fleet plan for a future U.S. Navy of 500 ships, a major increase over today’s fleet of around 300 ships. Among many changes, the fleet emphasizes substantial additions in areas such as sealift, unmanned warships, submarines, and smaller surface combatants. What do you make of the size of this fleet and its mix of platforms?

The public dialogue about Navy force structure assessments focuses too much on total ship count. A force structure assessment is actually a set of a dozen or so separate requirement numbers, each for a specific class or general type of ship, that happen to add up to a total. Having a surplus of one ship type does not generally compensate in capability terms for having fewer than needed of a different type, even if the total fleet number matches the overall goal.

The Navy is at about 300 ships today and there are 20 or more budget cycles that will pass before the aspirational number of 500 or so can be reached. Political leadership, the world situation, and technology will change a lot over those 20 cycles, and new numbers will emerge. The total is irrelevant. Whether large seagoing unmanned vessels are counted or not counted in this number is a political issue.

What really matters about the latest force structure assessment is that the proportional mix among types of ships has significantly changed, and multiple new types of ships, including unmanned, appear in the new fleet mix. All previous assessments had been constrained to only address the types of ships that were in the established shipbuilding program of record, and the overall proportional mix within their totals did not change much, except for submarines. This type of more fundamental change has not happened at this scale in any force structure assessment since the 1980s, and it is a big deal.

The types of changes in the most recent force structure assessment are pretty much aligned with what I wrote in my January 2019 Proceedings article on fleet design, so of course I think they are a good idea! The proportional increases in logistics ships, unmanned, and undersea warships and the rebalancing of the surface combatant force toward a greater fraction of smaller but still multi-mission warships are all the right general direction to go. So is the shift to smaller amphibious warships and the consideration of incorporating larger numbers of smaller carriers in the aircraft carrier force.

The devil is in the details for all of these – what characteristics and capabilities (and cost) do we give these new types of ships as they march through our acquisition process, and go from the concepts in the assessment to the requirements that go to the shipbuilders for execution? It is the natural tendency of this process to pile capability requirements (and cost) onto anything that passes through, which could exacerbate the force affordability issues that already are a concern.

This new force structure may be used to execute Navy and Marine Corps warfighting concepts, including Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO), and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO). These concepts and the new fleet design embody leadership’s thinking on the nature of future warfighing tactics and operations. Are these warfighting concepts mature or flexible enough to provide a long-term foundation for building this redesigned fleet? Are trends in tactics and technology adequately captured?

The way the naval services have been planning to fight, with concentrated Navy battle force formations and Marines storming ashore for forcible entry, has been made irrelevant by threatening military technology developments and proliferation, at least against great power adversaries. We are in a world of hider-finder competition and precision missile strikes, so distributing forces and firepower and making the units of the force somewhat smaller and more numerous is a better approach. That is what the new fleet and Marine Corps design is based on.

Whether this works and how well it works will depend on things still to be decided and developed, such as how to network a distributed force that includes unmanned systems to the degree and with the resilience needed, and how to get the force in place on the timeline needed in wartime and then support this force logistically. These are hard, unsolved questions. CNO Gilday’s recent memos initiating the “Project Overmatch” and “A Novel Force” efforts are the steps needed to begin coming to grips with these hard questions in order to develop (and fund) real solutions. This level of focused work should have begun earlier, but at least it is now beginning.

Could this design be resilient against a competitor’s adaptations once they see a new fleet being built? Could this fleet spur changes in the threat environment that diminish its competitiveness by the time it would be fielded around 2045?

I hope we do not declare this force structure assessment and fleet design to be the perpetual endstate. It will need to adapt and adjust over time in our ongoing and dynamic move-countermove strategic competition with an adversary that is much richer and smarter than the Soviet Union ever was. And this in an environment where, due to our digital networking of everything and where cybersecurity is always playing catch-up, our moves are seen and understood far faster by the other side.

We have long been building a Navy of platforms (ships and aircraft) that are large and expensive, and necessarily have very long service lives to amortize that capital expense. So our rate of change at the major platform level is dragging a huge “sea anchor” that slows it down. We can either reduce the size and cost of this capital equipment and give it shorter service lives so we turn it over more rapidly (such as the 1950s “Century Series” approach for jet fighters the Air Force wants to emulate), or we can make our larger capital equipment more rapidly adaptable so that its sensors, weapons, and systems can turn over rapidly, and then actually fund that rapid turnover of non-capital equipment payloads. We have not been doing either of these sufficiently over the past two decades and the right answer to pace adversary responses is probably some balance between them – a set of smaller, short-life platforms (probably largely unmanned) and a complimentary set of larger manned warship “nodes” designed with the space and margin for rapid system modernization.

The decisive battlespace in future warfare will be in the information domain and it will powerfully affect the outcome in the maritime domain, so our response to threat adaptations has to start there, not with ships. We are not focusing on this dimension of warfare as seriously as our adversaries are and it is hurting the competitiveness of our fleet.

The Navy has long been concerned about whether it can sustainably increase the size of the fleet within traditional levels of shipbuilding funding. How can we view the affordability and sustainability of this fleet? 

The fleet size of 500-plus ships of the new mix and types, like the fleet design of 355 program-of-record ships that preceded it, is unaffordable to either procure or to crew and sustain within any reasonable estimate of what funding the nation will provide to its Navy over the next 20 years. The nation needs a capable Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force, and intelligence community in addition to a Navy in order to meet the full range of challenges from our defense strategy. A seismic-scale rebalancing within the existing defense topline, always the hope of those who see the need for a bigger Navy, is unlikely. So is a much greater overall defense topline.

The discussion of fleet affordability to date has been focused on acquisition cost, but a fleet this large will have enormous sustainment costs as well. “Unmanned” systems are not completely unmanned – the people who operate them and keep them seaworthy are just not embarked and their numbers are still significant.

The fleet we actually get the funding to build and operate will be smaller than 500-plus ships, but needs to be larger than today’s 300, and it should have some numbers of the new types of ships that the new fleet design calls for. The proportional mix of types within a smaller, more cost-constrained overall fleet size may not be exactly the same as this assessment. That is a subject for follow-on work once the real level of long-term funding that will get bipartisan support becomes clearer.

This process was notable for including the direct involvement and direction of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which initially rejected the Navy and Marine Corps force structure assessment delivered in January. What is unique about how this process played out and what can we learn for making future assessments? 

The Navy lost control of this process by hanging on for too long to the existing program of record ship types as the basis for its long-term force structure assessment and by failing to fully accept the fact that the changing strategic and technological environment meant that the time had come for a wholesale change in the shape of the fleet and its ship types.

This level of change is institutionally very hard to accept and will never earn an internal consensus. It threatens community beliefs and disrupts the shipbuilding industrial base. However, multiple outside evaluations of the Navy’s fleet design over the preceding four years had said that the time had come for this level of change, and OSD finally stepped in to make it happen when the Navy did not move aggressively enough.

As a result of this top-down intervention the assessment now reflects multiple new classes of ships with significant uncertainty in their design and cost, and an overall size that is hard to reconcile with a long-term shipbuilding plan (especially considering the massive Columbia-class SSBN replacement) that is based on likely levels of funding. Ideally, in a Navy-driven change of this magnitude, the processes for doing this detailed translation of the new ship types into well-engineered shipbuilding programs would have been in place when the force structure assessment process ended. But as a result of the top-down OSD actions they are a bit out of synch.

What does it mean for U.S. naval strategy and great power competitiveness to build this fleet, and to build it soon? Does it address a gap between national strategy and the navy needed to execute it? 

This new fleet will not be built soon no matter how much we wish for it. Requirements and designs for the new ship types the force structure assessment envisions are in many cases not mature. A skeptical Congress remains to be convinced that the Navy has thought these new ship types through in sufficient detail to justify near-term production funding. OSD does not go to these discussions, and so the Navy has to prove it knows what it is doing to Congress and that the timeline is realistic. Our track record has not earned their trust.

Our industrial base capacity to produce significantly more warships faster or to design multiple new complex ship types simultaneously does not exist, except for smaller craft such as unmanned vessels. The money to fund a much greater level of shipbuilding on a sustained basis is probably not in place or sustainable. And the fleet we have and what is currently under construction is made up of ships that will mostly last 30-50 years and will be the majority of any U.S. fleet for the next 20.

The Navy’s principal near- to mid-term response to great power challenges will have to come more from rapid enhancements to the systems, networks, and weapons of the current “legacy” fleet, and perhaps the first generation of fleet unmanned systems. There are many options for near-term means to achieve the expansive and ambitious ends that are stated in the national strategy, and a vastly larger Navy is just one of them. 

Previous force structure assessments conducted in 2016 were later considered by some to be overly optimistic with respect to certain factors, such as available resourcing. How can we be confident in this new assessment, and that it will spur the change it recommends? What comes next to build this fleet?

Do not focus on the total number of ships in this assessment, that number is unaffordable and will not be reached (with the right mix of ships making it up) for decades, if ever. Many things will change before then. What mainly matters is that the Navy has said it needs several new types of ships soon, and fewer of several ship types that are currently in production. We should focus today on getting the requirements and designs right for these new types and start building the first ones as soon as we do. We should develop the industrial base plan that rebalances the types of ships we make so we can slow down the old and start the new without major disruption.

These are here-and-now issues. Someday, 20 or more years from now, we may build the last of these new ships and we will know then what that final number is. We do not need to know that today. What matters now is getting started on making these significant changes happen. They are the right thing to do and it is time to do them.

Trip Barber is a retired surface warfare officer and Navy Senior Executive Service civilian. He was the Navy’s chief analyst of future force structure and capability requirements on the OPNAV staff as a civilian from 2002 to 2014 and did 25 years of Pentagon time in his 41-year Navy career. He is an engineering graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Naval Postgraduate School. He is currently the Chief Analyst at Systems Planning and Analysis, Inc.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Content@cimsec.org.

Featured Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (May 14, 2020) The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Ralph Johnson (DDG 114) and USS Sterret (DDG 104) transit the Pacific with aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68) during a composite unit training exercise (COMPTUEX). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Andrew Langholf/RELEASED)