Force Structure Perspective Series

By Robert C. Rubel

Soon the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) will issue the Future Naval Force Study (FNFS), which he commissioned after rejecting the Navy’s draft Force Structure Assessment (FSA). In his view, the FSA contained invalid assumptions and hewed too closely to traditional fleet design.¹ He then commissioned two groups to redesign the fleet: the Hudson Institute and the Department of Defense Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office. Both efforts produced designs that envisioned a fleet that consisted of fewer aircraft carriers but greater numbers of smaller combatants and unmanned vessels.²

How may the Hudson fleet in particular perform in applying U.S. naval strategy and American grand strategy, and what changes may be needed to employ this new fleet?

Origins of a Distributed Fleet Design

From one perspective the results of the Hudson and CAPE studies are encouraging. Some in the community of naval strategy and policy have been advocating for such a redesign since the late 1990s. Notably, the late Professor Wayne Hughes, long-time chairman of the Operations Research Department at the Naval Postgraduate School, advocated for what he called a “bi-modal” Navy consisting of a mix of ships similar to what both Hudson and CAPE came up with.³ The notion of a mixed fleet was at least euphemistically embedded in the 2007 national maritime strategy “A Cooperative Strategy for 21^st Century Seapower” (CS21). It called for “credible combat power” to be concentrated in the Middle East and the Western Pacific with “globally distributed, mission tailored” forces being dispatched to other areas to carry out an array of peacetime missions including maritime security, disaster relief, and humanitarian assistance. This concept was the result of an input to the strategy development process by Prof. Hughes. It seemed congruent with the document’s sweeping assertion that the sea services would deploy globally to “…protect and sustain the peaceful global system comprised of interdependent networks of trade, finance, information, law, people and governance.”⁴ Such a comprehensive approach to defending a favorable world order clearly called for a large and strategically dispersed Navy.

But in 2007 the Navy was already feeling the pinch of too much mission and too few ships, with no real prospect for increasing fleet size, at least with the all-big-ship fleet design then in place. Thus Hughes and others, including this author,⁵ advocated for a mixed design that featured a large number of smaller ships so that a strategy of robust forward presence did not compromise maintenance schedules and personnel tempo as well as other aspects of the Navy’s infrastructure, in addition to increasing fleet lethality.

However, this concept was opposed by a number of senior naval officers, as well as the resource bureaucracy within the Navy. Fleet size thus continued to decrease as the Budget Control Act (BCA) strangled military spending, the cost of ship construction increased faster than inflation, and units originating from the 1980s “600-ship Navy” reached the end of their service lives.

Some specific factors underpinning fleet design need to be considered. There are essentially two reasons for having more numerous, smaller ships to compose at least part of the fleet vice a relatively smaller number of larger ships, with one being strategic, the other operational/tactical, and both having to do with dispersal. At the strategic level, as was implied by CS21, a comprehensive defense of the global system requires the Navy to be in many different places, some continuously, for plenty of reasons. In most forward presence cases, high-end warfighting capability is not required, so “constabulary” units could be smaller, cheaper, less capable but thus more numerous for the same price as larger, traditional combatants. Having a large fleet of these would relieve mission pressure on those large warfighting ships. The objection to such ships is precisely that they have less combat capability, so in effect such a fleet design could be seen as reducing the overall warfighting power of the Navy.

At the operational/tactical level, dispersion is mostly about warfighting. In previous eras, bigger was stronger. The capital ship, be it a four-decker under sail, a dreadnought with major caliber guns, or a nuclear aircraft carrier, each was able through its superior offensive power to defeat any other class of ship. Of course, there were always caveats to this presumption of dominance, from fire ships to mines, to submarines and Kamikazes. But the capital ship has persisted through it all, with the current instantiation being the Ford-class nuclear aircraft carrier.

Capital ships represent both concentration of capability and concentration of investment, which is why there are always relatively few of them. The inverse of the capital ship is the flotilla: a large number of small craft whose modus operandi is to swarm, perhaps like a pack of wolves harassing and eventually bringing down a bull bison. The idea of many platforms and payloads attacking from different directions complicates the defense of the capital ship. Critically, the weapons possessed by units of the flotilla must have sufficient range and lethality to offset and overwhelm the defensive capability of the capital ship and its escorts.

Enter the anti-ship missile (ASM). Current versions can travel hundreds of miles, have various characteristics that makes them difficult to shoot down, and have demonstrated lethality. The ASM broke the historical linkage between weapon power and ship size needed to carry it. Now several ASMs can be carried by craft displacing less than 500 tons.

Wayne Hughes, who was renowned for developing missile salvo combat models, provides the mathematical basis for the advantages of a dispersed flotilla of missile craft in his book Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations.⁶ A wargame held at the Naval War College in 2013 convinced the then-commander of the Navy Surface Force that the fleet’s offensive power should be distributed more widely. The subsequent concept of Distributed Lethality,⁷ now more fully evolved into Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO), called for more ASMs to be placed on destroyers, cruisers, submarines, and perhaps other ship types.⁸ Since most of those vessels already carried Tomahawk land-attack missiles, the move was focused on war-at-sea. This was, however, only a partial move toward the distribution of combat power since it was still being applied to a Navy of relatively few large ships.

It is beyond the scope of this commentary to go into all the factors affecting the advisability or inadvisability of adopting a true flotilla approach to battle fleet design, including the issue of unmanned vessels and systems, but it appears that both the Hudson and CAPE studies have adopted that approach to some degree.⁹

American Grand Strategy and U.S. Naval Power

Strategic dispersal has been practiced by the U.S. Navy for most of its history. Part of the reason is that the U.S. has two coasts separated by 3,000 miles of land, so even that ardent advocate of fleet concentration, Alfred Thayer Mahan, had to acknowledge the need for some kind of division of the fleet between the coasts (the East Coast getting the lion’s share at the time though). Secondly, even since the earliest days of the Republic, the U.S. has had global commercial and political interests that the Navy has routinely been called upon to protect. Even in the years between the world wars, when the bulk of the Navy was concentrated in home waters, there were still small squadrons operating overseas. The Cold War forced the Navy to establish a ring of steel around Eurasia in support of containment of the Soviet Union. That ring was not disassembled after the collapse of the USSR, and any number of reasons have been offered for why, but there seems to be one overriding purpose that most do not recognize, but which bears heavily on fleet design.

The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz asserted the intimate relationship between war and politics, where war is a means to political ends. One of the rather mechanical linkages he describes is what he terms “culminating point of victory.”¹⁰ Among its facets is that every offensive must ultimately end in some kind of defense in order to defend what was seized in prior victories. Extrapolating this idea beyond the purely military arena, especially if the victory is complete, some kind of political defense must be established, otherwise, as Clausewitz admonishes, the result in war is never final. The monumental example of this was, of course, the two world wars of the 20^th Century. As it became clear in late 1944 that the Axis powers would be defeated, American and allied statesmen gathered at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to consider how to defend their hard-won victory. Their answer was to establish a framework of international institutions and rules that would, collectively, prevent the causes of the world wars from recurring. The United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and World Bank were several of these measures. While the U.S. proceeded to demobilize its massive military establishment in late 1945, events soon forced the U.S. to recognize that the political and economic defense of the victory over the Axis would have to be supplemented with military force. By the early 1950s, the Navy had established its ring of steel around Eurasia.

Despite being widely studied in U.S. war colleges, Clausewitz is a difficult and esoteric read, and his concept of the culminating point of victory remains opaque to most, even senior military officers and statesmen. Therefore any number of justifications were advanced for the routine and extensive deployment of U.S. forces around the world that essentially described bunches of trees without seeing the forest. Deterrence, dissuasion, reassurance, engagement, and contingency response were all invoked at one time or another. Only in the 2007 CS21 document was there a glimpse of the forest: the defense of the global system. The Soviet Union, rogue nations, and terrorist organizations could come and go, but the system, always seemingly threatened somewhere by someone, endured. But the system, being the foundation of the defense of the 1945 victory, must have military protection and thus spurred an open-ended global commitment of U.S. naval power.

It was one thing for the U.S. to undertake such an epic mission when the national resource/requirement equation was in rough balance. But progressively, since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has constricted the resources dedicated to the comprehensive defense of the global system while also being unwilling to modify that mission. In one sense, the Navy is the canary in the coal mine: its operational and strategic problems, most recently manifested in the rejection of its FSA by the Secretary of Defense, are indicators of the requirements/resources mismatch at the level of grand strategy.

The Hudson Fleet

Viewed through the lens of this mismatch, what can be said about the suitability (i.e., if adopted , would the course of action achieve the mission), feasibility (able to be executed with available resources), and acceptability (involves an acceptable degree of risk) of the Hudson fleet design? It features nine nuclear aircraft carriers, eight large-deck amphibious ships, 64 large surface combatants, 52 small surface combatants, 80 corvettes, 22 other large amphibious ships and 26 smaller amphibious ships, and 60 nuclear attack subs, in addition to 12 Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. In addition, the plan calls for 99 medium unmanned surface vessels (MSUV) and 40 extra-large unmanned undersea vehicles. For the rest, there are commensurate numbers of logistic and support vessels.¹¹

The fleet must be first examined with respect to operational and tactical dispersion, which is mostly associated with warfighting. To begin with, the number of large and small surface combatants advocated by Hudson (116) is actually smaller than the current fleet inventory of 120 (if including active Littoral Combat Ships – LCS). The major difference is the plan’s 80 corvettes and 99 MSUVs. Assuming that the corvettes and at least some MSUVs will be capable of carrying long-range ASMs, the potential for operational/tactical dispersion exists, especially if projected Marine Corps ASM detachments are folded in. Depending on how these units are deployed in wartime, they would potentially constitute a very difficult problem for China, assuming that U.S. fleet operations were knitted together by a robust and resilient battle force network. In peacetime, as a consequence, they could enhance deterrence by elevating the credibility of U.S. combat power. These same principles would apply, perhaps in different ways, to other regions.

Strategic dispersion becomes more complicated. If the U.S. clings to its grand strategy of defending the system and cannot generate any significant increase in allied assistance, then the Navy must somehow make forces available in all regions. With fewer aircraft carrier strike groups and amphibious ready groups, the “unit of issue” for forward presence will have to change. The burden of presence will then fall on the Hudson fleet’s corvettes, small surface combatants, and small amphibious ships. Unmanned systems will play a limited (but in some cases, important) role in strategic dispersion.

Even at 581 total vessels, the Hudson navy would be challenged to achieve effective presence in all the required areas if current deployment practices are followed. Recall that some number of these units would be required for operational and tactical dispersion. This leads to the idea that a new organization of the fleet would be required. The new structure would consist of forward-based regional flotillas, the assigned units being able to contribute to operational and tactical dispersion in the region. In fact, Bryan Clark, lead on the Hudson study, was also lead on an earlier Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) effort, one of three 2016 Congressionally-mandated fleet architecture studies that recommended a similar arrangement. The CSBA study called for a series of regional “deterrent” forces coupled with “maneuver” forces consisting of carrier strike groups.¹² That bifurcated framework would be nicely supported by the Hudson fleet. Forward-based regional flotillas would constitute the key presence tool, supplemented at intervals by a pool of deployable forces, mainly the carrier strike groups and amphibious ready groups.

Such a structure would require some adjustment of the Unified Command Plan (UCP). The regional flotillas would constitute the forces for the regional combatant commanders (COCOMs), much like current practice. The difference would be in how deployment pool forces are handled. Current practice is to assign a share of a service’s forces to each COCOM, which is strategically inefficient in an era of constrained ship numbers. The Hudson fleet has too few carriers and large deck amphibs to make that process viable. Rather, there should be some kind of staff located in Washington, D.C. that controls the assignment of deployment pool forces. Such a staff would structure such operations on a global view of national strategy, deploying with a specific mission vice simply keeping station. Once dispatched to a region they would come under COCOM command but would not be “captured.” The flow of global deployers would be controlled from the SECDEF group, which would be in a better position to also integrate the range of non-military elements to support national strategy.

If one goes through the exercise of allocating ships to three regional flotillas and the deployment pool, few are left for the rest of the world, including Africa, Latin America, Oceania, and the Arctic. Also in short supply are forces available for warfighting experimentation and force development, although deployment pool forces could be used. But regional flotillas would have to be thinned out to integrate operational and tactical dispersion into fleet experiments. In going through this exercise, a reasonable number of units must be allocated to long-term maintenance rotations. One potential wild card would be to use logistic and support ships for routine constabulary duty, especially outside flotilla regions.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that the Hudson and presumably CAPE studies offer fleet designs that are potentially suitable, feasible, and acceptable, if and only if organizational adjustments accompany them. Presumably, both studies were based on a shipbuilding budget no greater than today’s. If not, their feasibility is compromised. It also likely matters how they are implemented, the dynamics of how the Navy gets from its current design to the recommended one while avoiding the perception by adversaries of opening or closing windows of opportunity for aggression.

Beyond those considerations, many decision-makers within the Navy bureaucracy still remain deeply wedded to the current fleet architecture. This source of inertia and resistance will have to be overcome if fleet design is to be changed. Similarly, changes to the Unified Command Plan will face opposition within both the Pentagon and Congress. It will take strong, committed, and persistent leadership from a succession of Secretaries of Defense and Chiefs of Naval Operations to achieve it.

Robert C. Rubel is a retired Navy captain and professor emeritus of the Naval War College. He served on active duty in the Navy as a light attack/strike fighter aviator. At the Naval War College he served in various positions, including planning and decision-making instructor, joint education adviser, chairman of the Wargaming Department, and dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. He retired in 2014, but on occasion continues to serve as a special adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations. He has published over thirty journal articles and several book chapters.

References

1. Megan Eckstein, “Pentagon Leaders Have Taken Lead in Crafting Future Fleet From Navy,” USNI News, June 24, 2020. https://news.usni.org/2020/06/24/pentagon-leaders-have-taken-lead-in-crafting-future-fleet-from-navy

2. Congressional Research Service, Navy Force Structure and Shipbuilding Plans: Background and Issues for Congress, 1 October, 2020, pp 7-9. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL32665.pdf

3. Hughes, Wayne P. Jr. (2007) “A Bimodal Force for the National Maritime Strategy,” Naval War College Review: Vol. 60 : No. 2 , Article 5. Available at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol60/iss2/5  and Wayne Hughes, Jeffery Kline, et.al., The New Navy Fighting Machine: A Study of the Connections Between Contemporary Policy, Strategy, Sea Power, Naval Operations, and the Composition of the United States Fleet, Naval Postgraduate School, August 2009.

4. US Navy, US Marine Corps, US Coast Guard, A Cooperative Strategy for 21^st Century Seapower, October, 2007. https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=479900

5. Robert C. Rubel “Cede No Water: Naval Strategy, the Littorals and Flotillas,” US Naval Institute Proceedings, September 2013. http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2013-09/cede-no-water-strategy-littorals-and-flotillas

6. CAPT Wayne P. Hughes Jr., USN (Ret.) and RADM Robert P Girrier, USN (Ret.), Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations, (Annapolis, MD: US Naval Institute Press, 2018), pp. 141-162 and pp. 282-284.

7. Vice Admiral Thomas Rowden, Rear Admiral Peter Gumataotao, and Rear Admiral Peter Fanta, “Distributed Lethality,” US Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2015. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2015/january/distributed-lethality

8. Ronald O’Rourke, Navy Force Structure and Shipbuilding Plans: Background and Issues for Congress, Congressional Research Service, July 24, 2019, pp. 8-9. https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20190724_RL32665_7bea2e4f25267bb1883fa3ecdf1583d268bf457a.pdf

9. For a more extensive discussion on flotillas, see Robert C. Rubel, “Cede No Water: Naval Strategy, the Littorals, and Flotillas,” US Naval Institute Proceedings, September, 2013. http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2013-09/cede-no-water-strategy-littorals-and-flotillas

10. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 566-573.

11. Megan Eckstein, “Hudson Recommends 581 Ships, New Class of Corvette as Part of Input to Pentagon Fleet Plan,” USNI News, September 30, 2020. https://news.usni.org/2020/09/30/hudson-recommends-581-ships-new-class-of-corvette-as-part-of-input-to-pentagon-fleet-plan

12. Bryan Clark, Peter Haynes, Bryan McGrath, et. al., Restoring American Seapower, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, February 9, 2017, pp. 41-48. https://csbaonline.org/research/publications/restoring-american-seapower-a-new-fleet-architecture-for-the-united-states-

Featured Image: PHILIPPINE SEA (July 21, 2020) The Royal Australian Navy destroyer HMAS Hobart (DDG 39), left, the frigate HMAS Arunta (FFH 151), the landing helicopter dock ship HMAS Canberra (L02), the fleet replenishment vessel HMAS Sirius (O 266), the U.S. Navy forward-deployed aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76), the guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam (CG 54), the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer JS Teruzuki (DD 116) and HMAS Stuart (FFH 153) steam into formation during a trilateral exercise. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Codie L. Soule/Released)

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. Robert Rubel (ret.), who served as the chair of the Naval War College’s wargaming department and dean of the College’s Center for Naval Warfare Studies. In this conversation, Capt. Rubel discusses the Navy’s longstanding aversion to distributed force structure elements, why the Office of the Secretary of Defense may have seized the process of fleet design, and how to move the fleet toward move effective strategic and tactical dispersion. 

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? 

From one perspective, the Secretary’s plan is encouraging. A number of us armchair admirals have been advocating for such a redesign since the late 1990s. Notably, the late Professor Capt. Wayne Hughes, long-time chairman of the Operations Research Department at the Naval Postgraduate School, advocated for what he called a “bi-modal” Navy consisting of a mix of ships similar to what both the Hudson Institute and Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office came up with.

The notion of a mixed fleet was at least euphemistically embedded in the 2007 national maritime strategy, A Cooperative Strategy for 21^st Century Seapower (CS21). It called for “credible combat power” to be concentrated in the Middle East and the Western Pacific with “globally distributed, mission tailored” forces being dispatched to other areas to carry out an array of peacetime missions, including maritime security, and disaster relief and humanitarian assistance operations. This concept was the result of an input to the strategy development process by Prof. Hughes. It seemed congruent with the document’s sweeping assertion that the Sea Services would deploy globally to “…protect and sustain the peaceful global system comprised of interdependent networks of trade, finance, information, law, people and governance.” Such a comprehensive approach to defending a favorable world order clearly called for a large and strategically dispersed Navy, and this prospective fleet design appears to deliver such a force.

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? 

If the Secretary’s design adopts provisions in the Hudson study, it will contain a different approach to the application of new technology. While the number and types of ships in the design are clearly congruent with DMO and EABO, there are other underlying factors that the numbers in and of themselves do not capture. The Hudson study advocates a fundamentally different approach to air and missile defense, for example, substituting closer-in engagements for the long-range layered structure in current doctrine.

Perhaps most fundamentally, the Hudson fleet design is based on what they call “decision-centric warfare” which, based on the DARPA concept of mosaic warfare, seeks to impose insoluble dilemmas and confusion on the enemy. Therefore the new fleet, in a Taiwan invasion scenario for example, would focus on disruption of enemy plans rather than just attrition of enemy forces. This necessarily incorporates a multi-domain approach and seems to mesh well with the emerging joint command and control concept. Whether the decision-centric “theory of victory” will work is an imponderable, but in any case, the projected force composition seems flexible enough to accommodate other approaches if necessary.

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? 

I have been a budget skeptic for quite some time and thus far my skepticism has been justified. I am encouraged by Secretary Esper’s assertion that he will augment the Navy’s Shipbuilding and Conversion (SCN) account, but his remaining time in office might be measured in months. In any case, it is a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul, and “Peter” – other Services and programs that stand to lose money – can be expected to put up a fight. Meanwhile, COVID relief expenditures will prevent any significant increase to the defense budget.

The Hudson plan can theoretically be executed within current SCN guidelines and so I am less skeptical of it. But the Secretary’s plan is more expansive, and while I do like it, I do not think it will be possible to achieve. There are going to have to be difficult internal tradeoffs, most notably reducing the number of nuclear aircraft carriers to bankroll other programs.

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? 

There seems to be some kind of “deep state” within the Navy that is wedded to current fleet design. There is not room here to go into all the ins and outs of this matter, but since the late 1990s the Navy has repeatedly rejected calls for a less carrier-centric and more distributed fleet. The LCS is kind of the exception that proves the rule. The need for a smaller, cheaper combatant that could be built in larger numbers became evident in that period, but the Navy acquisition process could not tolerate a truly small, cheap vessel. And so it rushed into production a ship that was designed around too much and perhaps too irrelevant to new technology, and whose cost bloated to several times what was envisioned. Then it rolled the dice again on the Ford-class carrier program and the Zumwalt-class destroyer, both representing ruinously expensive technological overreach. The Optimized Fleet Response Plan, designed to squeeze more readiness out of an insufficient inventory of ships, also has not worked.

Predictably, the Navy’s process produced a fleet structure assessment that was still wedded to these types of approaches, and SECDEF blew the whistle on this. It might be the case that this is simply a one-time interrupt and if a new administration takes office things will snap back to the way they were. Or perhaps OSD will now keep the fleet design process in its hands permanently.

Ideally, in my view, this episode will break up the Navy’s fixation on the aforementioned force structure concepts and approaches, and it will adopt a new approach to fleet design that is freed from the strictures of machine-based campaign analysis based on canonical contingency scenarios. There has been a struggle for the last several decades within the Navy between the strategy shop and resource shop over this, with the resource shop always winning. I hope SECDEF’s intervention will alter that balance of power.

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?

Clearly the Navy does not have enough ships and other resources to support the national grand strategy of comprehensively defending our desired international order. That strategy requires both strategic dispersal and operational concentration. The 2007 CS21 document expressed this succinctly when it called for concentrated credible combat power in the Middle East and Western Pacific, and “globally distributed, mission tailored” forces to conduct presence elsewhere. The problem is that the nation either cannot or will not make the kind of investment necessary to generate a Navy of sufficient size to do this based on the current fleet design. Moreover, trends in weapons and technology make the current concentrated nature of the fleet vulnerable.

Therefore the Navy must shift to a fleet design that is based on both strategic and tactical dispersion. Doing so would permit a more rapid adjustment, since smaller combatants could be built at more yards. Now the question is whether the lumbering acquisition process could also adjust. The problem is likened to the LCS debacle, in which the process proceeded on the basis of “ready, shoot, aim,” which made the Navy wind its way forward to some extent. And so it will want to be more deliberate in the next round of ship design and procurement. But geopolitical events are outpacing us in that respect. The Navy really needs to find a way to increase its combat lethality in the short term, regardless of what overall fleet design is adopted.

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? 

Navy shipbuilding plans have almost always been based on a “bow wave” of anticipated future shipbuilding budgets, and I suspect the latest one SECDEF rejected was no different. But even SECDEF himself seems to have caught a mild form of the disease based on his statements that he will increase the shipbuilding budget. But current-year increases are one thing, sustained national commitment to a larger fleet is quite another.

It seems that only looming existential threats can spur such a buildup, and there do not seem to be any of these on the horizon, at least in the public’s view, and notwithstanding the exhortations on great power competition contained in both the current National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy documents. Moreover, it seems that the cost growth of ships has been outpacing inflation, so even modest increases over time will not be enough. In order to achieve effective strategic dispersal through greater numbers of ships and also increase combat lethality through tactical dispersion, the Navy will have to fundamentally change its attitude toward small, cheap ships that are armed with smart, long-range missiles, and soon.

Robert C. Rubel is a retired Navy captain and professor emeritus of the Naval War College. He served on active duty in the Navy as a light attack/strike fighter aviator. At the Naval War College he served in various positions, including planning and decision-making instructor, joint education adviser, chairman of the Wargaming Department, and dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. He retired in 2014, but on occasion continues to serve as a special adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations. He has published over thirty journal articles and several book chapters.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at [email protected].

Featured Image: South China Sea (Oct. 15, 2020) An F/A-18E assigned to the “Royal Maces” of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 27 launches off the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) while conducting security and stability operations in the South China Sea. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Codie L. Soule)

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 Col. T.X. Hammes (ret)., a Distinguished Research Fellow at the U.S. National Defense University. In this conversation, Col. Hammes discusses whether this fleet can be afforded, how novel warfighting concepts provide a point of departure for experimentation, and how the increasing lethality of modern weaponry is driving changes in fleet design.

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 increase in submarines and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) is a positive sign. As SecDef noted, submarines remain our most survivable platforms today. When combined with unmanned underwater vehicles, new mines, and new torpedoes, they can dramatically increase the PLA Navy’s problems in penetrating the first island chain.

The jury is still out on unmanned surface vessels (USVs). One issue will be how to prevent their seizure during peacetime by manned commercial surface vessels – whether simply pirates or state sponsored. While it remains unclear how unmanned surface vessels with be protected and armed, it is encouraging that the Navy is currently examining different ways to increase the number of platforms available for a wide variety of missions. Although not mentioned by SecDef, the Navy is exploring the concept of missile merchants to provide major increases in lethality (increasing the number of missile tubes at sea) and numbers of distributed assets at relatively low cost. Since these ships will need crews of only 40-50, they may be an interim step to fully unmanned surface vehicles. They also address the major issue facing all the services – the increasing cost of personnel. 

Given the rapid diffusion and marked increase in the range of anti-ship missile systems, the reduction in the number of very large platforms – carriers and large-deck amphibs – is also a positive development. But the cuts seem to be minimal. The Chinese have modified the H-6 bomber to deliver a modified DF-21 anti-ship ballistic missiles to a range of well over 2,000 miles. Even the air wing of the future will not be able to reach anywhere near that far when (if) it is fielded a decade from now. The Secretary stated that the primary roles of the carriers and potential light carriers will be deterrence, power projection, and sea control. Power projection will be problematic due to the fact land-based air and missile systems continue to outrange naval aviation. Deterrence is in the eye of the beholder and may well work against medium or small powers, but China has clearly worked hard to neutralize the carriers.

Sea control remains a vital role for air-capable platforms. This will provide a continuing role for the large-deck carrier, but one has to question whether we need eight to carry out this mission. The enormous cost of the carrier, its air wing, personnel, operations and maintenance cost, and long expensive training pipelines makes this an enormous investment. Given projected budget constraints, we need to consider if using increasingly capable Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) capable drones on smaller platforms can’t achieve the same mission at a vastly reduced cost while freeing the escorts from protecting the carrier. We should be seeking to impose costs on our opponents, not ourselves.

Major cuts in large surface combatants with concurrent increases in small surface combatants also reflect significant changes in the character of naval warfare in an age of mass missile attacks. It is in keeping with Captain Wayne Hughes’ concepts of missile age warfare. The combination of more small missile capable ships, potentially missile-armed USVs, and missile merchants could provide the U.S. Navy with many more missiles systems at much less cost. This creates more problems for our competitors.

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 Navy and Marine Corps warfighting concepts address the “core operational concept” the SecDef noted in his speech. The most important aspect of these concepts is the recognition that they require major force structure changes for the services to be effective in the emerging operational environment.

In fact, the concepts are not mature. Nor should we expect them to be. They are an initial attempt to respond to what the Secretary noted is a fundamental change in the character of warfare as it expands into new domains. The intellectual logic has been debated and gamed quite a bit, but the ultimate proof is in experimentation and adaption. A key attribute must be flexibility so that the concepts can quickly evolve as the Navy and Marine Corps experiment and learn.

Like all previous attempts to adapt radical changes in the character of warfare, they are not the final answer, but provide a basis to start the cycle of innovation, test, and experimentation that has marked all major force transitions. Trends and tactics are probably not adequately captured because predicting the future, as that great American strategist Yogi Berra noted, is very difficult.

In the 1930s, faced with the challenge of a Pacific War, the Marine Corps started experimenting with major amphibious operations before it had an effective landing craft, good radios for coordination, appropriate command and control structures, and dozens of other techniques and pieces of equipment needed to succeed. By doing so, it drove many of the technologies that would be needed by taking advantage of the changes still being driven by the third industrial revolution.

In 1947, while struggling to adapt to a potential nuclear battlefield, the Marine Corps started to experiment with regimental-sized helicopter assaults when its largest helicopter could carry only three passengers. Both concepts were flexible and adapted as the environment changed and the Corps learned from its experiments. And the concepts both took advantage of new technologies and drove technological development in the directions needed to execute them.

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? 

Due to funding restraints, it is questionable whether the fleet can reach the proposed size. The Congressional Research Service provided its usual high quality analysis of cost not only for construction but also maintenance of the proposed 355-ship fleet in its report Navy Force Structure and Shipbuilding Plans: Background and Issues for Congress. While CRS does not take a position on affordability, it notes that in 2019 navy leaders stated that the best they could achieve without a major budget increase was a fleet of 305-310. The CRS report noted that while the current budget is among the highest in history, it can only support a fleet of about 300 ships. 

To date, there are insufficient details concerning the composition of the 500-plus ship navy to give a hard analysis of the affordability. But given the fact the Navy could not support a fleet of over 310 without major increases, it seems the plan as currently configured is not affordable unless the U.S. Navy ruthlessly scrubs its priorities and reallocates its resources toward shipbuilding and not manned aircraft and its associated training and maintenance infrastructure.

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? 

Obviously this much larger fleet would make it easier to execute almost any strategy than the current, much smaller, force structure. The fact the proposed fleet is not affordable within today’s parameters of naval budgets means there can be no coherent discussion as to its impact on strategy. Fortunately, this fleet structure is not the only and certainly not the least expensive way to execute that strategy.

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?

This plan seems to ignore the budget in the same way the plan for the 355-ship fleet did. The 355-ship navy plan was more of a political statement of aspiration than an actual plan. The old but very true saying that a strategy without resources is a fantasy applies. Achieving this plan would require not only maintaining the record high DoD budgets but also reallocating major resources from other services to provide the funds the Navy needs to execute this plan. The record of DoD budgets post-Eisenhower indicates our system is extremely unlikely to reapportion major budgets between services. Compounding the problem, the U.S. federal budget will be under increasing pressure from increasing interest payments on the national debt, increasing costs of current medical programs, infrastructure needs, and social security costs.

The first step is to design a fleet within fiscal constraints that recognizes the emergence of long-range, precision missiles as a potentially dominant weapon in naval warfare. This means shifting from a building program based on platforms to one based on the weapons systems they carry. These weapons will have to be autonomous and with much longer ranges to be strategically and operationally relevant.

Vested interests will make this an extremely difficult task. Many will object due to a sincere belief that current platforms can be upgraded to thrive in the emerging environment. Others will object because shifting to new concepts means older systems will have to be phased out. Many of these systems – particularly carriers and their aircraft – have aggressive Congressional and industry support. This is an inherent part of the system since Congresspersons are bound to represent their constituents and CEOs have responsibilities to their shareholders. But to make the plan a reality, and to increases the Navy’s contribution to strategic competition, the shifts discussed here need to be pursued.

Dr. T. X. Hammes is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the U. S. National Defense University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the views of the U.S. government.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at [email protected].

Featured Image: U.S. 5TH FLEET AREA OF OPERATIONS (June 4, 2017) The amphibious assault ship USS Bataan (LHD 5) pulls alongside the dry cargo and ammunition ship USNS Washington Chambers (T-AKE 11) during a replenishment-at-sea (RAS) as Sailors from deck department prepare to man the phone and distance line. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Mutis A. Capizzi/Released)

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 [email protected]. 

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)