By Lt. Cmdr. Matthew A. Stroup, USN

“This is information war, and it’s official.” –”Maxim” (a former employee of the Internet Research Agency – a Russian troll factory – as reported in LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media)

“No naval policy can be wise unless it takes into very careful account the tactics that ought to be used in war.”– Commander Bradley A. Fiske, USN, 1905

Great Information Power Competition

While the United States is not at war with Russia or China, the U.S. is in a persistent “shadow war” below armed conflict across the globe with these strategic adversaries.

Russia and China made the strategic choice to use information as an effective instrument in their effort to create strategic imbalance within great information power competition. Exponential growth in the information environment (IE) – and a convergence of technologies that rapidly distribute information at high-speeds across the planet – leveled the international playing field due to the low opportunity cost of competing in the marketplace of information versus spending on traditional military hardware. Russia and China leverage low barriers to entry of the IE to achieve their objectives by employing tactics that have the potential to influence citizens of all nations, expand societal cracks, and enable achievement of their objectives, if not necessarily the adoption their ideology or values. 

“The very ‘rules of war’ have changed. The role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness,” said General of the Army Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Federation Armed Forces.

Information is a core domain of Russia’s efforts to re-assert itself as a significant competitor against the United States and NATO. Russian use of disinformation yields results by exploiting societal fissures through traditional and social media to polarize and “destabilize society, and to undermine faith in democratic institutions.“ Russian information operations combine with maneuver to strike fear and unrest into neighbor states in pursuit of a modern vision of the former USSR.

Similarly, state-owned, and controlled media in China quells dissident voices through an Orwellian digital dictatorship that includes facial recognition and artificial intelligence while persistently delivering narratives supportive of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 

“China maneuvers in the information space in a way that undermines everything we do, factually, informationally, everywhere…Throughout the region there is a China daily insert, which is Chinese propaganda appearing in newspapers, over more than half the population of the globe. It’s quite pernicious,” said the Commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Adm. Philip S. Davidson. 

History as a Guidepost

Navy leaders at all levels today intuitively understand they are not operating in the same information environment they served in when they joined.

“The character of modern warfare is changing to a multi-domain battlespace with significant emphasis on space, electronic, information and cyber domains. Consequently, the need to conduct increased and different missions in these domains drives a requirement to increase our associated skills,” said Adm. Michael M. Gilday in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee before his confirmation hearing to become the 32nd Chief of Naval Operations (CNO). 

Outside of a command social media page or Type Commander-hosted website, however, most commands employ systems and tactics that fall short of public affairs practices that evolved during IE expansion that combined digitized imagery, video, and graphics with high-speed connectivity. Rather, they compete using turn of the century public affairs (PA) / visual information (VI) manning levels, training, and equipment without codified doctrine and tactics to fight in all phases of war. Recent Navy-wide guidance titled “OPTASK VI,” updated and standardized reporting requirements, but generating 21st century, Information Age, PA requires a more deliberate approach.¹

To seize the strategic information initiative, the Navy must invest in PA to compete effectively in an increasingly fast and complex battlefield of information. The time to include PA considerations holistically in the fleet readiness development cycle is now – and the Navy’s expansion of the Vietnam-era TOPGUN model to Warfighting Development Centers (WDC) is the way to do it. 

Deep Roots

What we now know as Navy PA traces its lineage to two previously separate career fields – PA and VI.²

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox established the Navy’s Office of Public Relations in 1941. The office changed names to the Office of Public Information in 1945, and again to its current name, the Office of Information, in 1950. Rear Adm. William Thompson became the first public affairs specialist to lead the office as the Chief of Information (CHINFO) in 1971.

The birth of the Navy’s VI community resulted from developments in naval aviation and in recognition of a need for photographic intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. The father of Navy photography is Lt. Walter L. Richardson – a prior-enlisted cook and hobby photographer aboard USS Mississippi (BB 23). Richardson’s imagery caught the eye of Capt. Henry C. Mustin in 1914. Mustin later placed Richardson in a full-time role as the Navy’s first photo officer in recognition of the value of the medium to communicate effectively. 

As technology advanced, the Navy increased its VI capacity and capability to address tactical and strategic challenges. In the 1930s, the officer in charge of Battle Force Camera Party –then-Lt. Arleigh Burke– leveraged motion picture technology to record and analyze shipboard weapons systems. During World War II, the Navy Combat Camera program began with the Combat Photography Section of the Office of Public Relations and the establishment of Combat Photographic Units #1 through #13.

Similarly, Academy Award-winning director and future Rear Adm. John Ford’s leadership and filmmaking expertise at Midway and D-Day had lasting domestic and international impact, directly supporting Allied victory through VI delivered from the front lines. In 1951, then-CNO Forrest P. Sherman established Combat Camera Group Pacific to “obtain still and motion picture photography in the Pacific Fleet, for public information, historical record, and intelligence purposes, and specific motion picture training film and stock footage requirements.”³

The PA and VI communities merged in the mid-2000s when the Defense Department required a flag officer from each service to provide oversight to VI. In 2005, CHINFO assumed that responsibility – a logical choice given CHINFO’s role as the Navy’s chief communication officer and the reliance of the PA community on VI products.

One significant impact of the merger was the disestablishment of the photo limited duty officer (LDO) program. The 2009 disestablishment message said that future PAOs would have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to fill the “critical public affairs core capability [VI]” – a tall order for new fleet accessions without years of experience synchronizing VI from surface and air platforms to support communication capability.

Most photo LDOs were career photographer’s mates who earned commissions after spending a career honing the skills to capture, edit, and transmit VI products. They were also experts at creating requirements to maintain and improve the technical communication systems in conjunction with professionals at systems commands.

At approximately the same time as the community merger, the world’s information and data markets exploded. Recognizing the approaching tsunami of information and shifts in the IE, future CHINFO, then-Lt. Cmdr. John Kirby wrote, “Though it will always retain its traditional supporting roles – such as media escorting and internal information – public affairs today boasts new operational relevance as its impact on the conduct of military operations intensifies.” He was not wrong.

From 2000 to 2016, the number of worldwide internet users increased from 413 million to 3.4 billion. According to Pew Research, from 2005 to 2019 the percentage of Americans who use at least one social media site exploded from 5% to 72%. Further, the average American adult user’s use of digital media increased from 2.7 hours per day in 2008 to 6.3 hours per day in 2018. PAOs raced to keep pace with the expanding IE. Even so, the Navy PA community’s overall manning to support institutional engagement in the information environment (active duty enlisted, officer, and civilian) remained steady at around 3,000 from FY02 to date, though end strength dipped to just over 2,000 in FY15.

67 years after the establishment of the Combat Photography Section and Pacific Fleet Combat Camera Group – and one year after the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs codified information as the seventh Joint Function on par with command-and-control, intelligence, fires, movement-and-maneuver, protection, and sustainment – Fleet Combat Camera units shuttered their doors as a “budget- saving initiative to eliminate billets that do not directly contribute to improving warfighting capability.” 

PA ‘Tactical Excellence by Design’

CHINFO is the leader of the Navy’s PA community, which includes the Navy’s VI Program. Like developing Mine Warfare capability across aviation, surface, subsurface, expeditionary, and special warfare communities, a maze of C2, alignment, authorities, and budget submitting offices make proponing Fleet-wide PA force generation difficult. Therefore, to support CHINFO, Fleet Commander, and TYCOM efforts to develop Fleet-wide PA/VI warfighting capability, PAOs and mass communication specialists should serve at each of the Navy’s five WDCs to develop PA warfighting capability and align tactics across the readiness generation cycle with the Afloat Training Groups in the basic phase of training, and Carrier Strike Groups 4 and 15 in the integrated phase. 

In 2014, almost fifty-years after then-CNO Adm. Thomas H. Moorer ordered the Air-to-Air Missile System Capability Review and its resulting Ault Report led to the establishment of TOPGUN, the Navy expanded the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center (NAWDC) model, where TOPGUN now resides, across all major warfighting communities. WDCs in aviation, surface, undersea, information, and expeditionary warfare directly support Type Commander (TYCOM) readiness generation – the Fleet leads for man, train, and equip functions – by sharpening the Navy’s warfighting edge. The WDCs also maintain the Navy’s doctrine and tactics library through Navy Warfighting Development Command (NWDC).

WDC alignment and synchronization of PA tied to the fleet’s readiness generation cycle stands in stark contrast to current models primarily focused on pre-deployment, integrated phase certification exercises. This updated method also moves communication to the center of organizational behavior, leadership decision making, training, and planning – a recognized hallmark of excellent, high-performing organizations.

Most importantly, this construct operationalizes PA so that the seed-corn of the Navy’s most senior leader ranks – O-5 commanding officers – gain relevant support and experience with PA/VI and deploy with greater levels of competence and confidence, long before future assignment as flag officers.

Developing Maritime Strategic Communication Superiority

Operationalization of PA already started at one of the WDCs – Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC). While the command focuses on developing surface warfighting competency along four lines of effort, as the only one of the five WDCs with a full-time PAO supporting their commander in a traditional PA role, their PAO also supports development of PA readiness.

They accomplish this along three of the command’s four lines of effort – (1) advanced tactical training, (2) doctrine and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP), and (3) capability assessments, experimentation, and future requirements development. This relatively new concept is yielding results and is exemplary of how limited investment in PA/VI alongside inside of fleet operations positively impacts fleet warfighting and messaging capability.

Advanced Tactical Training

The fleet has long clamored for standardized equipment lists for PA. However, technology and gear alone will not resolve the challenge of delivering results, unless personnel can capture the action, edit the imagery, and transmit it such a way that it is quality, timely, and relevant. A material only solution also leaves commanding officers who often have limited tactical PA experience to either find independent or non-standard ways to execute the mission set in phase 0 and phase 1 operations – not a great position for any commander in the South China Sea or the Mediterranean when OSD wants imagery of the PLAN destroyer who just crossed your bow or the jet that just buzzed your ship’s mast.⁴ An AEL is a needed start, as was OPTASK VI, but neither independently nor together holistically support long term development of these critical warfighting skills without the rigor that a WDC can deliver.

Fleet leaders have surmised that that rapid proliferation of VI in technology (every Sailor’s smartphone is also a camera, for example) assuages the need for rigor in fleet PA training. However, smartphone technology has not transformed every individual with an iPhone into a studio quality photographer or videographer capable of capturing high-quality products in a high-intensity, strategically relevant tactical engagement. Further, the trusting relationships between PAOs with reporters and outlets will continue to be important to deliver VI and provide clarity and context as needed. Increased focus on training can and will improve PA professional skill levels in support of commanders who need them to lead and fight effectively.

Operational PA development through the WDCs will serve as an aligning function across the readiness generation cycle beginning with unit training and culminating in integrated phase training exercises. In practice, this also means that commanding officers, warfare commanders, and strike group commanders all receive consistent PA training and manpower throughout the training cycle instead of just during Composite Unit Training exercises. This ensures that ships and squadrons can match PA doctrine and policy to harness the imagery from electro-optical and weapons systems required to communicate with myriad audiences faster than our strategic competitors.

Doctrine and TTP Development

Continuous training aligned to the readiness generation cycle would also provide opportunities for PA instructors at the WDCs to develop and implement joint and fleet policy and guidance in the training cycle. Important considerations remain to implement principles from the recent Joint Concept for Operating in the Information Environment. Similarly, Fleet Forces Command published the VI Concept of Operations in 2014 includes items ripe for implementation still today – something WDCs can support.⁵

Advanced training at the WDCs would also provide opportunities to develop, test, break, or validate doctrine and TTPs for PA/VI, helping align Fleet standards of excellence. At SMWDC, for example, this means that ships across the fleet have standardized and constantly re-evaluated standards for warfighting areas such as anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare. Rapid investments in capabilities and emerging technology will accomplish the same for PA across all domains.

PA doctrine development will also codify relationships between PA, VI, military information support operations, and other information related capabilities within the service – all in the constellation of Information Operations within Joint Doctrine. This area of concern is a familiar bogeyman and subject of discussion for anyone with relevant fleet experience. Codifying relationships will serve both commanders and tacticians well, removing unneeded ambiguity during real-world operations.

Capability assessments, experimentation, and future requirements

The sunsetting of Navy’s most robust PA operational capability development cadre – the photo LDO community – took place at the same time as rapid advancements in digital imagery and technology. Although the Navy’s PA community harnessed advances in technology, particularly in web-based apps and platforms, it is nearly impossible to keep pace. This is exacerbated by shipboard communication systems that are not always compatible or conducive to 21st century media engagement. To turn the tide, PA instructors at WDCs tied to the Fleet and working closely with systems commands, operational analysts, and the technical community will provide CHINFO and the Navy with tactically astute experts who can inform annual OPNAV budget submissions.

Shoal Water

Close alignment without deliberate and clear relationships between PA and information warfare communities is a relevant concern for traditional public affairs officers and senior military leaders who must diligently protect and maintain the trust they have with those they serve. 

The most prevalent concern often cited is a PAO’s professional, ethical obligation to maintain trust with media outlets and by extension the American people. This results in a strong aversion to proximity to psychological operations, military deception, or similar capabilities. Blurring lines between public affairs – which maintains a professional commitment to providing accurate, timely, relevant, and truthful information – and those capabilities can lead to damaging misperceptions and erode trust with reporters and the American people if a PAO is or is perceived as fulfilling multiple roles simultaneously. Quite simply, they cannot afford to risk the hard-earned trust they strive to maintain. History is rife with examples of the consequences of the breaking of trust between the military and the people they serve, and the Navy’s public affairs community is wise to draw clear boundaries to prevent similar missteps in the future.

CHINFO maintaining position in the approval chain for Fleet PA doctrine and TTPs prior to incorporation into the Navy’s warfighting library will mitigate these concerns. Additionally, instructors at WDCs will be intimately familiar with the relevant Defense Department PA governing documents, which lay out clear guidelines to ensure important legal lines such as the Hatch Act or ethical lines such as violations of the Navy’s Canon of Ethics for Public Affairs and VI practitioners are not crossed. While doctrine and TTPs to codify relationships will not prevent mistakes from happening in the future, not codifying them deliberately also increases risk for commanders and the institution.

Some may also take the recommendation to operationalize PA holistically as an invitation or recommendation for PA to fully merge with the information warfare community. That would be an overreach, and likely lead to the blurred lines and misperceptions noted above.

While operationalization of PA is critical when competing against informationally savvy state actors as part of Great Information Power Competition, it is equally as important that the Navy not lose traditional PA expertise in the process of increasing operational relevance. Developing a cadre of professional communicators who are widely respected and trusted by civilian and uniformed leaders within the government – as well as with the press – took time and treasure that is not easily replaced. The Navy is a recognized PA leader within the DoD in more traditional public affairs practices that continue to serve the Navy well. To eschew core competencies of strategic advisement, media operations, social media, and community outreach would be an oversimplification. This proposal is a both/and, not an either/or; further investment is needed to increase information power.

Conclusion

Aligning much needed investment in PA through the WDCs is a historically sound method that will deliver high return on investment at low opportunity cost. Similarly, contemporary books such as Singer’s LikeWar and literature on the development and growth of AI paint a picture of the opportunities available to nations who actively engage – and the challenges on the horizon for those that do not. Victory in the shadow wars will be won through aligned and synchronized use of information supplemented by technology and maneuver.

In today’s information environment, PA/VI practitioners must simultaneously be information warfighters, readiness generators, special advisers to commanders, and staff officers. Modest investments in PA/VI through an existing WDC construct will deliver peak value for commanders and the nation.

America’s competitors have taken a proactive posture on the battlefield of information, and commanders are right to invest in the Navy’s ability to deliver PA/VI capability and products at sea today. The information environment is a critical domain in all phases of warfare, and maritime PA capabilities can lead to non-kinetic victories. There is a path to achieve maritime information superiority – all that is left to do is to take it.

Notes

1. Message, 271025Z MAR 12, COMUSFLTFORCOM NORFOLK VA. subject: NAVY WIDE OPTASK VISUAL INFORMATION.

2. Since the Navy’s PA and Visual Information (VI) communities merged under PA in 2005, the use of the term PA community in this article includes both PA and VI.

3. Sherman, Forrest P. (1951). Pacific Fleet Combat Camera Group; establishment of (Op- 553C/aa, Serial: 298P553) [Memorandum].

4. Sailor Bob, (2018 September 13), “VI Battle Orders,” [Weblog], retrieved from http://www.sailorbob.com.

5. U.S. Department the of Navy, COMUSFLTFORCOM Concept of Operations, “Fleet Visual Information” (2015 July 2).

Featured image: BALTIC SEA – A Russian Sukhoi Su-24 attack aircraft makes a low altitude pass by the USS Donald Cook (DDG 75) April 12, 2016. Donald Cook, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, forward deployed to Rota, Spain is conducting a routine patrol in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of operations in support of U.S. national security interests in Europe. (U.S. Navy photo/Released)

By Ben DiDonato

There is a long-running debate in the United States Navy over building smaller aircraft carriers. These arguments generally focus on cost and hull count. Rather than dive into these arguments and attempt to argue for what should be done, we will instead explore how we use these arguments to rethink requirements and produce a more robust concept.

A new thought process illustrated here in the context of a small aircraft carrier is applicable to many other complex problems. As such, while a hypothetical design for a small carrier to supplement the current supercarrier fleet will be presented, part of its purpose is to illustrate how this thought process can proceed to unconventional conclusions. The question remains as to whether the merits of this design justify its substantial cost, and follow-on studies and wargaming may be required to explore this concept further.

How Can We Make a Smaller Carrier?

In order to determine the requirements for a small carrier, we must begin with the requirements for a modern supercarrier. Fortunately, the one-sentence mission statement for the Ford-class carriers defined this clearly:

“The critical capability of the aircraft carrier is that the aircraft carrier’s air wing must simultaneously perform surveillance, battlespace dominance, and strike and sustain combat operations forward.”

Form must follow function, and studies repeatedly show ‘bigger is better’ according to this mission statement. If we want to make a smaller carrier viable we must find a way to alter that mission statement without rendering the resulting carrier irrelevant.

This discussion focuses on omitting ‘strike’ from the mission statement. This does not mean the carrier will be completely incapable of performing strike missions, but it does mean any strike capability will be largely incidental and context-dependent. While omitting the strike mission may be jarring to the modern Navy, it has a strong historical precedent in the escort carriers of the Second World War, and was revisited in the  Sea Control Ship concept of the 1970s. Like these historical examples, this ship would primarily be an escort with a focus on protecting convoys, and feature extensive anti-submarine capabilities. However, it could also perform other missions like forward surveillance, chokepoint defense, and troop support.

Most critically, the removal of the ‘strike’ objective from its mission statement means that the carrier is no longer expected to divide its limited air wing capacity. This bypasses the otherwise crippling weakness commonly referred to as ‘the small carrier problem,’ where having a small air wing forces a hard choice between offense and defense. By changing goals and expectations in this manner, we can tailor the ship and its air wing for defensive operations and leave major strike operations to the supercarrier fleet. It should also be remembered that this omission does not preclude offensive operations because the ship could be sent forward in certain contexts.

One issue that limited the utility of the Sea Control Ship was the aircraft of the day, especially the Harrier. Unlike the modern F-35B, the Harrier had serious deficiencies in air combat capability, range, and payload. These deficiencies resulted in a relatively inflexible air wing. A modern small carrier would be much more capable thanks to the improvements the F-35 brings to the table. It is fully capable of defending the carrier from air attack, has the range to intercept targets, and the payload to strike targets if the opportunity arises. The F-35’s sensors and networking also let it perform many tasks which previously required a dedicated early warning aircraft, allowing it to replace the helicopters envisioned for this mission on the Sea Control Ship. It may not provide the same degree of situational awareness as a dedicated platform like the E-2D, but it is far more survivable and does not give the enemy a large, easily detected radar signature to point them toward the ship.

The Escort Problem

The other major factor in any discussion of carriers is the cost of escorts. Even if serious savings were reaped in fielding the carrier itself, immense costs are incurred by fielding a major combatant that necessitates additional escorting platforms.

An undesirable solution to this problem is to reduce the number of supercarriers in the fleet to free up escorts for the new ships. This might come from the concentration of even more aircraft into a substantially larger class of future CVNs, generating savings by exploiting the efficiency of very large carriers. However, this option is inherently limited since it would allow the addition of only a handful of smaller carriers. This approach will not be discussed further here, but future fleet composition studies should closely examine the possibility of even larger supercarriers, since that has been largely omitted in recent studies.

Another less conventional solution is to take a page out of the Soviet playbook by adding a heavy weapons and sensor suite to allow the ship to potentially defend itself without escorts. Modern weapon and sensor systems have substantially reduced the design conflicts associated with this concept. This helps address the historical Sea Control Ship’s inability to defend itself against anti-ship missiles, and substantially improves the flexibility of the resulting ship.

A Hypothetical Design

Now that we have established the mission and design goals, we will move into the hypothetical design process starting with the hull.

Since convoy escort is the primary mission, and there is no need to keep up with the supercarriers, a top speed in the 20-to-25 knot range should meet mission requirements. The ship will be some combination of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and the historical Sea Control Ship plans, so adding these two vessels’ displacement together for 20,000 to 30,000 tons is a reasonable estimate for this modern escort carrier. The San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock fits into this range, so its base hull and propulsion plant form the basis of this concept, and the superstructure will be completely replaced. This selection would allow a single test ship to be inserted into the existing production line without too much trouble and avoid many of the problems normally associated with unique ships. This enables the construction of an initial prototype to identify and correct any shortcomings prior to serial production.

For weapons and sensors, the Flight III Burke can serve as a template. As the most capable Aegis platform in the fleet, it provides an excellent, full-spectrum capability set. This makes a separate escort more redundant than necessary, and also provides vertically-launched land-attack and anti-ship missiles to provide a degree of strike capability. Naturally, it also offers the same type of logistical and industrial advantages provided by the use of the San Antonio hull.

With these design decisions, the author built a 3D model of the concept ship to improve granularity and assess the layout. Most notably, it is possible to wrap the superstructure around the vertical launch system (VLS) to shield the flight deck from exhaust, or more importantly, foreign object debris, avoiding serious conflict between missile launch and flight operations. This model also demonstrates that it is possible to fit enough hangar capacity for an air wing of 12 F-35Bs, 12 MH-60Rs, 2 MQ-8Cs, and 1 MV-22 to provide persistent air cover, plus a few extra utility aircraft. Furthermore, while the vast majority of the San Antonio’s amphibious capabilities would obviously be eliminated, the model shows that it is possible to leave a reduced-height well deck to support UUV, USV, and small boat operations if desired. These sea launch capabilities are a particularly notable example of the need for prototyping, because testing may show the need to remove the well deck or replace it with another type of launch facility or critical spaces.

The notional armament is 96 Mark 41 vertical launch cells, a Rolling Airframe Missile launcher, two Mark 32 triple torpedo tubes, a laser, a railgun or 5-inch gun, and five Javelin/Browning pintle mounts. Anti-ship missiles are launched from the VLS or embarked aircraft instead of top-side mounted launchers to improve upgradeability. The bridge is also clearly visible on top of the forward end of the superstructure, as is Primary Flight Control at the aft end, which protrudes over the sloping superstructure to provide excellent visibility of the flight deck without interfering with flight operations. Finally, it is possible to retain a small portion of the San Antonio’s infantry capacity for EABO and special operations support.

The larger America-class amphibious assault ships, the commonly discussed example in light carrier concept discussions, are not well-suited to serve as a basis for this concept. Most notably, while they carry more aircraft, the incremental improvement is not enough to provide a major step-change. An America-class hull configured in this manner would likely provide an additional six MH-60Rs and four F-35Bs. The extra anti-submarine helicopters would allow three of these aircraft to be airborne at all times, but this does not provide a dramatic performance improvement because the Sea Control Ship demonstrated that two are adequate to maintain sonobuoy barriers on both sides of a convoy for early warning of submarines. The additional F-35Bs are not enough to increase the standing combat air patrol from two to four, so the additional aircraft would functionally provide a reserve force that could either be held to respond to threats or sent on small strikes without compromising top cover. While that is certainly useful, as are the larger magazines and fuel storage allowed by a larger hull, the America costs an additional $1.5 billion and hundreds of crew, a one third-to-one half increase in cost to $4.5-5.5 billion for limited gains. One final point that applies broadly against a larger hull is that in any environment dangerous enough to require a doubled air wing, carrying it in two smaller hulls with full defensive suites provides a major survivability advantage. 

With all that said, it is still worth examining the cost to rebuild the USS Bonhomme Richards (LHD-6) as a prototype carrier of this type. Since the ship would require a new, much larger superstructure to house the weapons and sensors, the old superstructure and underlying structure would have to be completely replaced regardless, making the extensive damage there irrelevant. That could make the rebuild more affordable since it would be competing with a new-build prototype, and it would allow the Navy to act more quickly on the stated goal of acquiring small carriers without the risks associated with developing a new class of ship.

Costs and Benefits

The next step is to examine this design’s impact on the Navy. The San Antonio and Arleigh Burke each cost around two billion dollars, so it is reasonable to assume that the overall cost of this hypothetical ship will be in the $3-4 billion range after accounting for the savings from eliminating duplication and the extra cost of the aviation equipment. The San Antonio and Burke have about 300-350 crew each, so this ship will probably need about half-again (500 personnel). With the addition of air wing personnel, the crew complement increases to a total of roughly 800. Crew count could likely be reduced from this number with modern automation technology, as was done on the Zumwalt-class destroyer. However, it is difficult to automate aircraft maintenance, so a crew of less than 500 seems unlikely. Finally, it should be noted that this cost represents a complete task force since no separate escort is required. That said, it does omit the optional ground combat element in the crew count and makes no attempt to address logistics requirements due to the complex interactions with the rest of the fleet.

While that cost is substantial, this hypothetical ship does offer plenty of capability which might justify the investment. As an escort, the aerial targeting information from its F-35Bs will make it much more capable than traditional surface combatants against most surface and air threats, while its large helicopter complement offers similar advantages for anti-submarine warfare. Defensive employment would be similarly effective for closing chokepoints to enemy movement, and would be particularly effective against submarines since it could maintain an extensive drone and sonobuoy field. They could also be used to support distributed operations in a variety of ways, such as forming a distant screen to expand overall situational awareness or supporting expeditionary operations with forward air cover and light sealift. 

Alternatively, they could conduct a variety of special operations from a single hull by backing up ground elements with organic airlift, air support, and missile strikes. Finally, the use of common systems means they could easily be incorporated into any conventional task force to provide additional mass, although they are not particularly efficient in this role. In peacetime, these ships would offer flexibility to the fleet because they could fill in for essentially any kind of ship needed, provide a distributed rapid reaction capability, carry the diplomatic prestige of being an aircraft carrier, and free supercarriers from low-end operations. When everything is said and done these benefits may not outweigh the costs, but it should illustrate how rethinking a small carrier’s mission set can lead to interesting alternative solutions.

This concept may also benefit international navies. Since these ships would cost substantially less than a fully escorted carrier, they may appeal to smaller navies that may be unable to afford super carriers and may be willing to sacrifice some capability to reduce cost. For example, Norway might choose to replace the Helge Ingstad with a ship of this type since they already operate the F-35. This would more than fully replace its defensive capabilities while adding unprecedented power projection, giving them much greater capability. Politically, acquiring an aircraft carrier would be a dramatic signal of intent and commitment to defense out of proportion to its cost, and would go a long way toward addressing longstanding tensions with the U.S. over NATO spending.

Finally, it is important to reiterate that this is only one possible outcome. The Sea Control Ship concept would also be a valid application of this reduction in mission scope, and there are plenty of other alterations to explore. Similarly, the concepts presented using a small aircraft carrier are just as applicable in other contexts. The output may be unexpected and may need to be integrated with other platforms or concepts to be truly viable, but it can open up alternative solutions to bypass seemingly impossible problems.

Ben DiDonato is a volunteer member of the NRP-funded LMACC team lead by Dr. Shelley Gallup. He originally created what would become the armament for LMACC’s baseline Shrike variant in collaboration with the Naval Postgraduate School in a prior role as a contract engineer for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. He has provided systems and mechanical engineering support to organizations across the defense industry from the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) to Spirit Aerosystems, working on projects for all branches of the armed forces.

Featured Image: The amphibious transport dock ship USS San Antonio (LPD 17) steams through the Red Sea June 16, 2013. The San Antonio was part of the Kearsarge Amphibious Readiness Group and was underway in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of responsibility supporting maritime security operations and theater security cooperation efforts. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons, by GySgt Michael Kropiewnicki)

By Collin Fox

Increasingly powerful strategic competitors and a flat defense budget call to mind this pithy quote, often misattributed to Winston Churchill: “Gentlemen, we have run out of money; now we have to think.” The United States Navy’s historical annual shipbuilding budget can either maintain the fleet size at status quo or build a hollow force with more ships. Wargames suggest that either such fleet, as part of the joint force, would not prevail in a conflict with China. This troubling consensus has spurred the Navy to develop Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) and to overhaul the fleet in order to implement the new operational concept.

Budget justifications portray Medium Unmanned Surface Vehicles (MUSV) as both “attritable assets if used in a peer or near-peer conflict” and “key enablers of the Navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations concept.” American industry must build these and other key enablers even faster than the enemy can attrite them, but where? To overcome the limited capacity of American shipyards in pursuit of this requirement, Congress should develop a distributed shipbuilding industrial base through a variety of structured incentives.

Seeing First, Shooting First: the Quality of Quantity

Skeptics of the Navy’s shipbuilding plans may wonder how a small, attritable, unmanned, and presently unarmed vessel has become a “key enabler” in the Navy’s foremost warfighting concept. MUSVs will initially support “Battlespace Awareness through Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) and Electronic Warfare (EW).” Scouts have always been the eyes of the fleet, enabling the commander to see the battlespace better than the enemy, win the critical ISR fight, and then fire effectively first. In the age of hypersonic anti-ship weapons, taking that first accurate shot is more important than ever. DMO relies on having many sensor nodes that are widely distributed in order to see first and shoot first, but the enemy will attrite many of these scout-sensors as they navigate the maritime battlespace. The fleet will need an abundance of these scouts to begin with, and will need to acquire more at the rapid pace of attrition through a prolonged conflict.

This raises the industrial base problem, or as it were, the opportunity: How many vessels can be built, how quickly, and where?

Industrial Capacity, Lost and Gained

Eleven American shipyards cranked out 175 Fletcher-class destroyers during the Second World War – over 400,000 tons of just one class of combatants – even as the arsenal of democracy produced incredible quantities of auxiliaries, vehicles, aircraft, weapons, munitions, and many other warships. Most of those shipyards have long since closed; those that remain have little spare capacity. After COVID-19’s fiscal devastation plays out, the paltry seven ships authorized in FY21 may represent the underwhelming high water mark of the “terrible twenties.”

China has the maritime industrial base to surge into dominant overproduction. The United States clearly does not, and even struggles to coordinate routine peacetime maintenance between sea services. This industrial asymmetry could spell disaster: The U.S. Navy could not repair battle damage, conduct maintenance, replace lost ships, and grow the fleet during a prolonged war with China. The industrial base just isn’t there, and shipyards take far longer to build than ships.

The existing shipbuilding base must be strengthened to maintain the legacy force structure and continue to produce substantial warships, from aircraft carriers down to the corvette-sized large unmanned surface vessel (LUSV). The shipbuilding expansion for smaller vessels such as the medium unmanned surface vessel (MUSV) must not compete for the already limited industrial capacity. The Congressional Research Service concurs, noting that such unmanned vessels “can be built and maintained by facilities other than the shipyards that currently build the Navy’s major combatant ships.” But if not existing shipyards, then where? This seeming challenge offers a unique opportunity to both grow the shipbuilding defense industrial base and broaden the sea power political base through distributed manufacturing.

The factors that have traditionally concentrated production within a shipyard have shifted over the past few decades: Computer aided design (CAD) allows engineering teams to span continents and work around the clock on the same project. Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) machines create parts that fit together as precisely as they appeared on the monitor, even if the parts came from facilities thousands of miles apart. Supply chain engineering then brings these disparate parts into a faster and potentially more robust assembly process.

However, the feasibility and economy of transporting large and heavy objects has changed little. Size matters: just because a given component or subassembly can be produced down the road or across the country does not mean that it should be. Until recently, the vessels that mattered in naval warfare – or even their major subassemblies – were just too big and heavy for overland transport. Vessels that could be transported overland lacked the range and payload to count for much in combat. The convergent effects of miniaturization, automation, and fuel efficiency have changed that calculus, as exemplified by the Sea Hunter’s increasingly capable autonomy and 10,000 nautical mile range. The Sea Hunter and future MUSV classes will indeed contribute to the fleet in meaningful ways, yet at 45 to 190 feet long, they can also be transported (in whole or in part) from places that only Noah would recognize as a shipyard. 

The Navy should develop and incentivize a more robust and distributed shipbuilding industrial base by expanding far beyond traditional shipyards and deliberately incorporating non-traditional suppliers. Not only would such an expansion increase competition and manufacturing capacity, but it would also allow ship production to quickly accelerate in crisis or war. Thanks to digital manufacturing, such a shift in production could happen overnight, unlike the laborious retooling and retraining process that civilian factories undertook to produce war materiel in the previous century.

Many different American manufacturing facilities with advanced industrial tools, such as large CNC routers, CNC welding machines, and 3D printers, could produce the bulk of each attritable vessel. Such facilities could even produce complete knockdown kits for metal-hulled MUSVs, or partial kits for the innards of composite-hulled vessels. The hulls of the latter, like Sea Hunter and Sea Hunter II, could be produced by any maritime, automotive, or aerospace company with the space to store a large mold and the competence to pop out the composite hull forms on demand. Facilities with appropriate workforce and machinery would assemble these widely sourced components into major subassemblies for larger MUSVs, ready for final assembly in the shipyard. These facilities would likewise assemble vessels on the smaller end of the MUSV range, up to about 70 feet and 40 tons, for direct transport to a launch site and subsequent deployment.

All of this would require a large number of small- and medium-sized manufacturers to participate in a responsive and agile defense logistics supply chain. Few would use such words to describe the defense logistics supply chain today; improving it will take foresight, investment, naval initiative, and congressional action.

A Vincent-Trammel Act for the 21st Century

Industry has long lamented how hard it is to work with the Department of Defense. Many small companies vote with their feet after a few failed attempts, forgoing the DoD’s labyrinthine processes, extensive contracting requirements, and uncertain – if sometimes substantial – cash flows. A dwindling number of prime contractors act as a lucrative boundary layer between the byzantine defense acquisition requirements and the subcontractors, who find their niche exotic technology far easier to understand than defense contracting. Building a broader shipbuilding industrial base will require creative incentives and even fiduciary seduction to break through this status quo.

Inspired by the Department of Transportation’s very modest Small Shipyard Grants program, the proposed Distributed Manufacturing for Seapower Grants program would offer partial grants, competitively bid, to small companies for the purchase of advanced manufacturing machinery. However, this industrial equipment subsidy would also come with a contractual catch to integrate the manufacturer into the defense supply chain, or even – if required – compel production on the subsidized equipment. Some portion of the equipment subsidy would be recouped through an initially reduced contractual profit margin, reflecting the government’s capital financing investment, after which a higher profit margin would apply.

As with any contract, the incentives would be critical for success. This scheme would incentivize small manufacturers to join the defense industrial base with an initial contract and the means to perform it, while also establishing the relationship and familiarity to the larger process that can produce many items beyond the parts and pieces of modest vessels such as the MUSV.

The challenges of defense logistics are less about producing a part and more about the rest of the supply chain. Punching out a widget is just the beginning.

Creating Responsive Supply Chains

The Navy can help start improving the industrial base now by drafting modest vessel designs that incorporate manufacturing speed and ease of production as key performance parameters, and then contract a few of each model as a means to mature the design. The program office would also establish supply chain management targets and constraints for production optimization, such as required vessel deployment location, shipping costs, required installation date, manufacturing base health, item cost, and net time to build.

After receiving congressional budget appropriation for producing a given vessel, the program office would send requisitions for specified parts, subassembly production, and final vessel assembly to an automated clearinghouse, where these jobs would be offered to the capable manufacturers. Those manufacturers would bid on each job. If no one bids for a given job, the program office could compel manufacturing but pay a higher profit margin for the option. The winning bid may not be the lowest nominal bid because it should be the lowest total cost to government, to include considerations of production speed and shipping costs. All of these considerations would be continually integrated into the optimization model through machine learning.

Inspired by the Military Sealift Command’s turbo activation drills, the program office would hold component production drills and then stockpile the resultant knock-down kits near shipyards within vessel self-deployment range of likely trouble spots. The systems and internal components of a composite-hulled vessel – the engines, steering gear, sensors, electronics, etc. – would be assembled into compact kits, ready for the hulls to come out of molds and join them at the assembly site. Turbo activation for final vessel assembly from these pre-assembled kits would demonstrate the ability to churn out vessels at an incredible pace, and also help further refine the production process. In wartime, this process would be exercised in earnest to meet the furious pace of naval attrition.

With a demonstrated competence in rapidly producing, assembling, and deploying these vessels, the Navy could forego the anticipatory construction of a large fleet of wasting assets, which eat up operations and maintenance funds as they slowly degrade pierside.

Policy Engineering and Distributed Political Operations

Shipbuilding has an understandable association with maritime states, which can limit its political appeal for certain landlocked constituencies. Although the proposed expansion in the defense shipbuilding industrial base has a strategic logic founded in resiliency, competition, and flexibility, the investments and skilled jobs accompanying this expansion far beyond the usual maritime districts would also broaden the congressional shipbuilding caucus. Witness how the F-35 program spread economic benefits throughout 45 of the 50 states, gathering predictably broad congressional support. The LCS program did one better, in defiance of all programmatic logic, by never even down-selecting to a single seaframe. The LCS program’s budgetary-political logic, on the other hand, was airtight: All else being equal, an industrial base that is widely distributed will receive better budgetary consideration, particularly if it has concentrations in certain key districts.

With a growing bipartisan consensus that the nation needs a larger Navy to meet growing global security challenges, the time to act is now.

Lieutenant Commander Collin Fox, U.S. Navy, is a foreign area officer who recently served as the Navy and Air Force Section Chief at the Office of Defense Cooperation, U.S. Embassy, Panama. He earned a master of systems analysis degree from the Naval Postgraduate School and a master of naval and maritime science degree from the Chilean Naval War College. He has also published with the U.S. Naval Institute and War on the Rocks.

Featured Image: September 16, 1989 – The guided missile destroyer Arleigh Burke (DDG 51) enters the Kennebec River after being launched down the ways at the Bath Iron Works shipyard. (U.S. National Archives, photo by PH2 James Saylor)

By Ryan Hilger

“‘I am forced,’ said Mr. Balfour, ‘to the conclusion that now, for the first time in modern history, we are face to face with a naval situation so new and so dangerous that it is difficult for us to realize all its import.”¹ Germany had launched its fourth dreadnought in four years and Britain was nervous. The Royal Navy had ruled the waves since Admiral Horatio Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar. But the international situation in the early 20th century was anything but certain as Britain and Germany embarked on an arms race, and with the United States and Japan close behind. After World War I, most of the major naval powers realized these enormous ships would only get larger, keeping all of them locked in an arms race when the world was supposed to be permanently at peace.

Today, the United States finds itself again in a multipolar world, with the Chinese and Russian navies looking more threatening by the day. Yet the Navy continues to wrestle with defining target ship counts and fleet sizes, and is struggling to find enough funding to substantially grow the fleet while adequately maintaining it. An op-ed in Breaking Defense called it the “spectacular collapse of Navy force planning.”²

In response to mounting tensions after WWI, the five major powers negotiated the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, limiting capital ship development to stabilize the arms race. The treaty, followed by the 1930 London Naval Treaty, created a new class of ship—treaty cruisers—and launched a long period of innovative naval development. The Navy responded with tremendous shipbuilding activity, producing 18 cruisers across five classes in 20 years. Treaty cruisers would go on to play a pivotal role in the outcome of World War II in the Pacific and were present at every major fleet action. The story of the treaty cruisers offers lessons for today’s Navy to creatively solve problems around hard constraints and innovate at the fleet level while building up for great power competition.

Early Cruisers

In 1915, the Navy learned through its annual fleet exercises that it needed a ship somewhere in stature between a destroyer and a battleship. Before this, the major maritime powers focused primarily on building ever-larger battleships and small destroyers to fight between them. At the time, cruisers served primarily as long-range scouts for the battle fleet—an important role. But the Navy only had a few of these ships. In an annual letter to Congress in 1915, Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Frank Fletcher, noted that on two fleet maneuvers, conducted while en route to Guantanamo Bay, the lack of cruisers for scouting allowed inferior forces to evade the battle fleet. Several days later, that same battle fleet found itself being tracked by destroyers for lack of cruisers to provide advance warning and keep the destroyers at bay.³ Admiral Fletcher noted:

[T]he lack of heavily armored fast vessels and light cruisers was especially felt for seven days from the start of the problem until it ended. The Blue commander in chief has no reliable information of the position or movements of the enemy while the enemy due to superior cruiser force was well informed of our movements and dispositions at all times.⁴

Admiral Fletcher noted that destroyers filled an admirable role here, but that their performance and seakeeping, especially during the winter months, made them unsuitable for long-range scouting and attack.⁵ Destroyers had vital roles to fill, but scouting was not one of them. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels noted in his letter with Admiral Fletcher’s report that “fast armored ships and fast light cruisers” were his third-highest priority, only behind the shortage of officers and Sailors.⁶ Out of this would rise the 10-ship Omaha class. It was a start.

The Battleship Holiday

In 1922, as the USS Omaha (CL 4) was being fitted out prior to commissioning, the United States negotiated the Washington Naval Treaty with Britain, Italy, Japan, and France. It contained a number of provisions designed to lessen the tensions between great powers by ensuring approximate tactical parity existed between them and that no fleet could become overly dominant.

The treaty limited the total tonnage and armament of capital ships, generally seen as battleships and battlecruisers, limited aircraft carriers, and set tonnage and armament limits on a non-existent class of combatants: 10,000 tons and 8-inch guns.⁷ Importantly for the United States, Article XIX forbade improvements to shore fortifications in the Pacific, meaning that bases in the Philippines and Wake Island could not be strengthened further. This played a major role in shaping the strategic purpose of the new class and the decision to retire the oldest, most-costly, coal-burning ships in the fleet to free up tonnage for these new ships.⁸ The five powers immediately set to work developing this new class.

This new, unknown class presented a number of constraints for the Navy, in particular the General Board, to wrestle with. Combined with the 10,000 ton and 8-inch caliber gun limits, the prohibition on improving fortified shore bases in the Pacific and the limits on capital ship tonnage created additional degrees of complexity. The ships had to fill a strategic role, and wargaming War Plan Orange against Japan revealed that the fleet needed to be much larger than previously thought. The treaty’s 5-to-3 American advantage in capital ship tonnage over the Japanese was driven by the Navy’s desire to have at least a 7-to-6 advantage on reaching the Western Pacific, assuming the fleet lost 10 percent of the battle force for every thousand miles steamed.⁹

Ship readiness became of paramount concern. Planners quickly realized that they needed readiness levels in peacetime of greater than 90 percent to achieve the required wartime superiority against Japan.¹⁰ That threshold, especially when factoring in modernization, maintenance, and overhaul periods, became a pipe dream. Therefore the General Board worked aggressively to maximize combat power in the treaty cruisers, where individual ships would have a lesser individual impact on readiness figures. Simply put, they needed many more ships coming off the building ways than previously thought.

Constraints Foster Innovation

Given the complex constraints, the debate within the Navy and the General Board was understandably heated. The differences between “the General Board, and various bureaus representing the engineering, ordnance, and ship design communities” led to a protracted design process, and by the time the Pensacola was finally laid down in 1926, “work had already begun on an alternative design with a radically different hull configuration and armament layout,” which would become the Northampton class.¹¹ Budgetary pressure from Congress in 1924 and 1925 complicated matters further as Congress refused to appropriate funds for the recommended eight new Pensacola-class cruisers.

Common wisdom considers the freedom from constraints to produce more creative solutions, but constraints actually produce better outcomes. Creativity is enhanced by embracing constraints.¹² The Navy knew that it needed a new class of warships rapidly—the competing powers were all doing the same. The General Board felt international pressure to produce an affordable, minimum viable design to the maximum limits allowed by treaty as quickly as possible. Only an iterative approach would work to optimize these constraints, and the Board knew that it could not wait for new technologies to mature before producing the new class. The Pensacola-class cruisers were therefore designed for fast, independent steaming and long-range gunnery performance, reflecting the Board’s desires. Achieving this required the Board to sacrifice much of the armor and cram as much weaponry as they could into the design, earning the class the nickname ‘tinclads.’

Today’s Navy faces a similar predicament. In an eerie parallel, the Navy has about the same number of surface combatants as it did in the mid-1920s when the Pensacolas were being built. It faces an even more complicated strategic environment and the curse of geography. Similar concerns over unrealistic force generation models, such as those that drove the 5-to-3 advantage, are echoed by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s recent comments to Congress. When asked why he rejected the Navy’s proposed shipbuilding plan, Secretary Esper said because in part “it kept the old deployment and readiness model, which is broken: It hasn’t worked for years, so why should we assume it will work in the future?”¹³ Current congressional budget challenges, especially with the coronavirus pandemic and the lagging Large Surface Combatant (LSC) timeline, are reminiscent of the challenges faced by the General Board and the ship design community in 1925.

The interwar Navy found a constrained solution through the iterative design and production of classes of ships. In fact, the recent award of 10 ships for the next generation frigate, FFG(X), could be considered the first iteration on a previous design.¹⁴ With longer construction times than in the 1920s, the Navy should consider iterating on the industry-proven frigate design to continue the production of successive flights when the first ten ships complete to keep the production lines hot.

Innovating Ship by Ship 

From 1922 to 1941, the Navy commissioned 18 treaty cruisers. While that seems like a good production run when compared to today’s Arleigh Burke destroyers, those 18 ships were from five different ship classes. By 1926, the General Board had approved the design for the Pensacola class and the first ships began construction. The Pensacola cruisers featured four 8-inch gun turrets—two turrets with three guns, and two turrets with two guns—extensive, but thin armor belts, two seaplanes, and a host of smaller armaments. In terms of dimensions and handling, she was comparable to the Ticonderoga class cruisers in service today: nearly 600 feet long, almost 60 feet wide, and top heavy with mediocre seakeeping.¹⁵

At the time cruiser production took approximately three years per ship. The Navy would normally have waited for the Pensacola to deliver and be put through sea trials and a myriad of experiments before making revisions or designing a new class. But other major powers were laying down cruisers just as quickly, forcing “successive classes…to be designed and ordered before their predecessors had been completed (or even launched), so modifications had to be made on a theoretical basis without the benefit of trials and operational service.”¹⁶ Thankfully the Navy only ordered the Pensacola and the Salt Lake City. The class did not keep well at sea. Their dimensions and top-heavy design made them prone to large rolls and the low freeboard meant that water shipped over the sides easily.¹⁷

The Navy quickly modified the base design to eliminate the unusual turret configuration and correct the stability issues before the Pensacola even launched from the New York Navy Yard. The six-ship Northampton class delivered with three triple turrets and vastly improved seakeeping. The class also delivered 1,000 tons below the treaty threshold, an unexpected bonus, allowing the Navy to proactively add armor and other enhancements after commissioning. Taking advantage of the improved seakeeping that Northampton displayed, the Navy ordered the two Pensacola cruisers be retrofitted in the 1930s to match. Retrofitting the classes of treaty cruisers with designs from newer classes would be a hallmark of the Navy’s cruiser fleet through World War II.

CNO Admiral John Richardson learned these lessons and incorporated them into the Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority. Admiral Richardson thought that “the large combatant and others could be designed and fielded rapidly through an approach that focused on a good hull design and significant power margins now, and worried less about systems that would be upgraded throughout the life of the ship.”¹⁸ But today, the Large Surface Combatant program continues to slip further right as the Navy seems focused on getting mostly everything right in a single step. Admiral Eugene Black, recently the Director of the Surface Warfare Directorate OPNAV N96, stated that the Large Surface Combatant was pushed to the right as part of a broader, lower risk approach while waiting for other technologies, like directed energy and advanced combat systems, to mature.¹⁹

The Navy has the opportunity to evolve its surface combatants more rapidly, and it must do so. While the Flight III Arleigh Burke has some improvements over previous flights and will continue building to pace the threat from China, the Zumwalt-class destroyer represents the best opportunity for the Navy.²⁰ Despite their success, the Burkes have reached maximum structural capacity for innovation—there is simply no margin left.²¹ But there is hope. Recent at-sea testing of the Zumwalt, with its tumblehome hull, shows excellent stability in high seas.²² The class has many advantages and drawbacks, similar to what the Navy experienced with the early Pensacola and Northampton cruisers. In many ways, the improved seakeeping characteristics, integrated electric propulsion system, and large surplus of design margin gives the Navy an excellent platform on which to innovate. Indeed, the drawbacks for the Zumwalt class, such as the procurement costs and the armaments, are excellent constraints to build a better ship. The Navy has done this exercise before in transforming the improvements from the Seawolf class submarine into the more affordable and more capable Virginia class.²³

A Twist

As the General Board iterated on the Northampton class, seeking to improve seakeeping and armaments, the world situation took another turn. In April 1930, the five naval powers met in London and signed the London Naval Treaty. The treaty created two distinct classes of treaty cruisers, with no limitations on ships with armaments under 6.1 inches and more restrictive limitations on the heavier treaty cruisers with 8-inch guns.²⁴ The Navy gained an 18 to 12 advantage in heavy cruisers over Japan.

The Portland class, originally planned for eight ships, had already started construction on the first two ships of the class when the London Naval Treaty was signed. The General Board allowed Portland and Indianapolis to complete and again suspended the rest of the class. The twist reflected the slow deterioration of the international environment and the attempt to prevent a future war by enforcing a further degree of parity among the competing powers. The Navy, with great foresight, took the opportunity to shift the remaining Portland hulls to the fresh New Orleans class design.

Rapid Innovation

The New Orleans class proved pivotal. The Pensacola and Northampton cruisers attracted widespread criticism for their lack of armor, but these designs reflected Captain Frank Schofield’s 1923 General Board decision that the cruisers “forsake nearly all attempt at passive defense of these vessels—armor—in order to have weight available for the full development of steaming radius and gun power.”²⁵ Before the London Naval Treaty, the General Board envisioned the future New Orleans class to show only modest changes from the Northampton class, but the treaty changed all of that.

The General Board acted boldly, ordering seven ships with three different designs to try out experimental technologies and configurations. The New Orleans class featured a complete redesign of the propulsion spaces, to spread the boilers and engine rooms out to improve performance, and the introduction of “immune zones,” which hardened vital areas, such as magazines, to better protect them without armoring the entire ship.²⁶ The reduction in weight from redistributing armor allowed the designers to improve protection in key areas. As a class, these ships featured a better layout and continued the use of dedicated command spaces for flagship activities, which the Board first inserted in the truncated Portland class.

Overall, the highly successful New Orleans class laid the foundations for the light and heavy cruiser classes, the Cleveland and Baltimore classes, that the United States would produce in large numbers after the passage of the Naval Expansion Act of 1938 (more commonly known as the Two Ocean Navy Act) which authorized the U.S. Navy that won World War II. The mature design and features of the New Orleans, which were included with one eye toward looming conflict and the other on the lessons from the prior classes, allowed the Navy to rapidly upgrade these ships as new weapons and radar-directed fire control systems came online, with devastating combat effectiveness.²⁷

Prompt and Sustained Combat at Sea

 The evolutionary improvements in cruisers in the interwar period helped the Navy hold the line against the Japanese early in World War II. All classes of treaty cruisers, from the unstable, ‘tinclad’ Pensacola to the New Orleans classes, the last of the official treaty cruisers, fought in every major fleet engagement of the war, and their names are some of the most hallowed in naval history: Vincennes, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco.

Had the Navy waited, whether to perfect its requirements, for radar systems to mature, for the treaties to expire or to be renewed, it would have been deprived of ships that proved badly needed when war broke out. The General Board shows today’s Navy the path forward as it looks toward an era of renewed great power competition and constant congressional pressure to increase the battle force count. Several specific lessons include:

• Older ships cost more to sustain. Aggressively aim to retire them in favor of new ships.
• Embrace constraints to accelerate innovation while still delivering the needed ships.
• Long production runs produce stable build times and lower procurement costs, but iterating through smaller production runs across multiple classes allows the Navy to deploy newer capabilities sooner.
• Take modestly successful designs and continue to improve on them with each successive ship to the limits of naval architecture.

The Navy has already laid the groundwork to leverage our history with the new frigate class and the Zumwalt class. The Navy should not wait for new technologies to fully mature, but continue the evolutionary improvements to each successive flight of ships, inserting the technologies, like directed energy, when they are combat ready. As Vice Admiral Joseph Taussig remarked: “good men with poor ships are better than poor men with good ships.” We cannot predict when war might emerge, but should it start, we know that we will need more ships than we have today. Start building them now.

Lieutenant Commander Ryan Hilger is a Navy Engineering Duty Officer stationed in Washington D.C. He has served onboard USS Maine (SSBN 741), as Chief Engineer of USS Springfield (SSN 761), and ashore at the CNO Strategic Studies Group XXXIII and OPNAV N97. He holds a Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School. His views are his own and do not represent the official views or policies of the Department of Defense or the Department of the Navy.

References

1. “Germany’s Navy Scares Britain.” New York Tribune. 17 March 1909. Page 1, Image 1, Column 3. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1909-03-17/ed-1/seq-1/

2. Mark Cancian and Adam Saxton. “The Spectacular & Public Collapse of Navy Force Planning.” Breaking Defense, 26 January 2020. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/01/the-spectacular-public-collapse-of-navy-force-planning/

3. “The Atlantic Fleet in 1915: Letter from the Secretary of the Navy.” United States Congress. 64th, 1st Session, Senate Document No. 251, 1916, pp. 14-15. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015025950596&view=1up&seq=7

4. Ibid, p. 15.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid, p. 26.

7. “Limitation of Naval Armament (Five-Power Treaty or Washington Treaty).” 43 Stat. 1655. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: 1922, Vol. 1, Treaty Series 671, pp. 351-371, https://www.loc.gov/law/help/us-treaties/bevans/m-ust000002-0351.pdf

8. John Keuhn. “The Influence Of Naval Arms Limitation On U.S. Naval Innovation During The Interwar Period, 1921 – 1937.” Ph.D diss., Kansas State University, 2007, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/5164353.pdf.

9. Trent Hone. Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898–1945. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018, pp. 124-125.

10. Edward Miller. War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897-1945. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1991, p. 144.

11. John Jordan. Warships after Washington: The Development of the Five Major Fleets, 1922-1930. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011, p. 110.

12. Oguz A. Acar, Murat Tarakci, and Daan van Knippenberg. “Why Constraints are Good for Innovation.” Harvard Business Review, 22 November 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/11/why-constraints-are-good-for-innovation

13. Paul Mcleary. “SecDef Esper Seeks Detente With HASC; New Navy Plan This Summer.” Breaking Defense, February 28, 2020. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/02/exclusive-secdef-esper-seeks-detente-with-hasc-new-navy-plan-this-summer/

14. Megan Eckstein. “Fincantieri Wins $795M Contract for Navy Frigate Program.” United States Naval Institute News, 30 April 2020. https://news.usni.org/2020/04/30/fincantieri-wins-795m-contract-for-navy-frigate-program

15. James Stavridis. “Handling a Ticonderoga.” Professional Notes. United States Naval Institute Proceedings. January 1987. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1987/january/professional-notes

16.Jordan, p. 113.

17. Ibid, p. 122.

18. Megan Eckstein. “Future Large Surface Combatant Pushed to Late 2020s, Navy Takes ‘Measured’ Development Approach.” United States Naval Institute News, 14 January 2020. https://news.usni.org/2020/01/14/future-large-surface-combatant-pushed-to-late-2020s-navy-takes-measured-development-approach

19. Ibid.

20. Megan Eckstein. “Navy’s Next Major Ship Program Sees Challenges Balancing Requirements and Cost.” United States Naval Institute News, 17 March 2020. https://news.usni.org/2020/03/17/navys-next-major-ship-program-sees-challenges-balancing-requirements-and-cost

21. Joseph Trevithick. “The Navy May Use One Hull Design To Replace Its Cruisers And Some Destroyers.” The Drive. July 13, 2018. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22138/the-navy-may-use-one-hull-design-to-replace-its-cruisers-and-some-destroyers

22. David Larter. “Here’s how the destroyer Zumwalt’s stealthy design handles stormy seas.” Defense News, 23 January 2020. https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/01/23/heres-how-the-ddg-1000s-stealthy-hull-design-handles-stormy-seas/

23. John Schank, Cesse Ip, Frank LaCroix, Robert Murphy, et. al. Learning from Experience: Lessons from the U.S. Navy’s Ohio, Seawolf, and Virginia Submarine Programs. RAND National Defense Research Institute. 2011. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2011/RAND_MG1128.2.pdf

24. “Limitation and Reduction of Naval Armament (London NavalTreaty).” 46 Stat. 2858. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: 1930, Vol. 3, Treaty Series 870, pp. 1055-1075, https://www.loc.gov/law/help/us-treaties/bevans/m-ust000002-1055.pdf

25. Hone, pp. 144-145.

26. Jordan, p. 149.

27. Hone, p. 145.

Featured Image: The U.S. Navy heavy cruiser USS New Orleans (CA-32) steams through a tight turn in Elliot Bay, Washington (USA), on 30 July 1943, following battle damage repairs and overhaul at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. (Photo via Naval History and Heritage Command)