Future Fleet

uring an experiment in March to test the Navy's ability to respond to an insurgency in a nation friendly to the United States, the greatest threat to the service's powerful combatant ships didn't come from other ships. Instead, the biggest problem was defending against divers attempting to attach explosives to ships anchored offshore.

The experiment, which took place in the San Francisco Bay area and also involved the Marine Corps conducting urban warfare exercises ashore, demonstrated some of the tremendous challenges fleet operators face when confronted with operations in coastal regions. Navy assets that guarantee strength at sea become negligible--or even liabilities--closer to shore.

"Some of the threats are very tough to defend against," says Capt. Robert Buehn, deputy director of the Navy's Maritime Battle Center and executive coordinator of the experiment. Besides divers with explosives, the Navy faced assailants on jet skis, in small, fast boats, and in low-flying aircraft. The experiment also tested its ability to support Marines ashore in a city where combatants and civilians are easily confused. In short, it was an operation not so different from those in which the military has been engaged in recent years in Haiti, Somalia and the Balkans.

In the experiment, "a friendly coastal city had asked the Navy for help," Buehn says. "You couldn't just go in and level a city block to get at somebody in the corner of a building." In fact, the Aegis cruiser in the harbor couldn't even turn on its radar fully because doing so would have knocked out all cell phones and television and radio stations in the city.

The experiment was the third in a series of fleet battle experiments the Navy began 15 months ago to test new operational concepts. One of the strengths of the program is that experiments are conducted with real sailors using assets currently in the inventory, not with engineers or senior commanders in a simulated situation, Buehn says. "The difference between an experiment and a demonstration or exercise is that in an experiment, it's OK to find out that things don't work," he says. That should be good news to Navy planners coming to grips with problems that promise to dominate future operations.

Charting a New Course

The Navy is a victim of its own successful past. After Japanese bombers devastated the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 by wiping out all the fleet's battleships, the Navy built a powerful force around aircraft carriers, revolutionizing naval warfare. Following World War II, during the Cold War, the Navy built bigger, better carriers, and vastly improved its aircraft and supporting ships and submarines. But with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the economic decay of Russia and no comparable naval power on the horizon, the Navy is left with a far more formidable force than any of its enemies.

"Our force today certainly was designed around the open ocean and warfare that went along with the Cold War," says Rear Adm. Bernard Smith, commander of the Navy Warfare Development Command. "It doesn't take a military individual to understand that the challenges do differ [in coastal operations]," says Smith.

The command Smith heads was established last year at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., to serve as the "custodian of our Navy's future," in the words of Adm. Jay Johnson, chief of naval operations. As such, the command oversees the experimentation process.

"As the War College and the Warfare Development Command move concepts through creative processes toward implementation, the Navy After Next will emerge," said Johnson at the service's Current Strategy Forum in Newport in March. He has charged the command with exploring the capabilities and technologies necessary to assure naval access to coastal areas. Specifically, the command is to experiment with rapidly deployable networked sensors, unmanned vehicles in the air and under water, and capabilities to quickly attack mobile targets ashore and afloat.

Since World War II, the centerpiece of Naval operations has been the fleet's huge aircraft carriers. Because carriers operate in international waters, their aircraft do not need foreign landing rights, enabling carriers to perform a range of missions, from showing the flag to attacking targets in the air, sea and on land. Escorted and supported by a battle group of support ships--typically consisting of two guided missile cruisers with long-range strike capability, a guided missile destroyer, a destroyer and a frigate for anti-submarine warfare, two attack submarines, and a combined ammunition, oiler and supply ship--carriers establish a naval presence capable of supporting a wide range of national interests.

A carrier's air wing typically includes about 80 aircraft: three F/A-18 squadrons for attacking enemy targets; one F-14 fighter squadron; one S-3 multi-mission support squadron; one EA-6B electronic warfare squadron; one E-2C surveillance, command and control squadron; and one SH-60 multi-mission helicopter squadron.

In an era when the United States is closing bases overseas, the carriers would seem ideally suited to the Navy's mission of maintaining a forward presence and the ability to project force quickly. But the huge costs associated with carriers and the sheer concentration of assets on a single ship or within a few ships in a battle group make them attractive targets for foes.

"The Navy has put a lot of eggs in one basket with carriers," says Retired Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll, deputy director of the Center for Defense Information. "We're now up to $6 billion for one ship, because [the Navy] wants great big ships off which they can operate very high performance, very expensive, complex airplanes, which they feel they need to compete with the Air Force on deep interdiction."

Dangerous Waters

Weapons technology has changed to the point where U.S. carriers won't be battling enemy carriers in the future, Carroll says. "Nobody else in the world is foolish enough to spend the kind of money we do for those ships, but they [potential enemies] certainly can invest in anti-shipping cruise missiles, as most nations have.

"You don't have to sink a carrier to eliminate it as a military force. If you get several hits with cruise missiles and start fires on the ship or damage the [aircraft] catapults the ship is going out of action, because it can't function without the catapults and its aircraft. You can always get the ship home and repair it and send it out again, but in the meantime you have billions of dollars of capabilities that have been damaged and put out of action."

The vulnerability of ships to mines and missiles in coastal regions is not lost on military officials. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraqi mines caused considerable damage to two ships and prevented Marines from landing on Kuwaiti beaches. Three years earlier, a moored mine worth a few hundred dollars in the Gulf caused nearly $100 million in damage to the frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts.

For would-be enemies, the equation is simple: A small investment in mines and explosives can reap a huge payoff in damage to U.S. ships and constraint of naval operations.

The phenomenon has been exacerbated by the Navy's efforts to become more efficient, says Smith. "Over the years I've been in service, the Navy has looked at the most efficient way of conducting warfare. Efficiency has meant that we created multi-mission platforms. As an example, on an Aegis cruiser, we expect that ship can perform everything from theater ballistic missile defense to surface warfare to undersea warfare and so on. The result is you have a very large, very capital-intensive investment in a platform that covers multiple warfare areas.

"And if you lose a multi-mission platform, the impact on your overall warfighting capability [is more significant] with the remainder of the force. Those are all things we're investigating here through the fleet battle experiment process," Smith says.

While the Navy has some dedicated countermine assets, they are not nearly sufficient for the threats it faces. A couple dozen helicopters equipped with minesweeping systems and more than 20 mine-clearing ships are in the inventory, but depending on where they are when the need arises, it could take days or months to deploy them where they are needed. The requirement for better tools to counter mines has existed for decades, but the Navy, under pressure from Congress and the Clinton administration, has only recently made investment in countermine measures a priority.

In the past, Carroll says, "the Navy has always made the mine warfare area a [professional] ghetto. Any officer who acquired competence in mine warfare was automatically at the end of his career, essentially. We should be paying more attention to it, both offensively and defensively."

Officials at the Navy Warfare Development Command are determined to draw attention to the issue. In December, the Navy will conduct another experiment with the Fifth Fleet in the Arabian Gulf to look specifically at the threat posed by mines.

Numbers Count

The fleet experimentation program was deliberately headquartered away from Washington in Newport, says Buehn, to keep it free from the influence of both the acquisition community and the fleets.

"Our product is ideas that will lead to change," he says. To be well received by the field, the ideas have to be seen as divorced from special interests within the Navy. Some of the changes the Maritime Battle Center is likely to recommend will be controversial. While it hadn't yet issued formal recommendations from the March experiment as of early August, early findings suggest the Navy could make some organizational changes that won't be universally applauded.

Specifically, the center is likely to recommend that the control of sensors and the data they generate should be held as close to the tactical operators as possible. That could mean turning over the control of information traditionally in the purview of intelligence personnel to tactical operators. Or it could mean restructuring intelligence operations. In a bureaucracy, information is power, and any time the control of information shifts from one center to another, there likely will be resistance.

Creating a network of sensors with increased capability to detect and respond to threats, such as those posed by mines and ballistic missiles, is critical to operating along coastlines, said Johnson earlier this year.

Also, the Navy must consider increasing the size of its fleet to further diminish the threat of an attack along a coast by forcing an enemy to bear the cost of more difficult surveillance problems, reduced reaction time, defending against a combined arms force and simultaneous operations, Johnson said. "Simply put, numbers do matter."

The Navy now has 323 ships, of which 49 percent are currently at sea and 30 percent are forward-deployed at any given time. Within a few years, the fleet is expected to decline to 305 ships as more ships are retired than built every year. While Navy officials have said they cannot go below 300 ships without jeopardizing the service's ability to perform its missions, Johnson said even 305 ships may be too few.

Through the current experiments, the Navy Warfare Development Command will track the effect of reduced numbers of ships and personnel in operations, says Smith.

New Balance of Forces

In addition to the size of the fleet, the command also hopes to affect the types of ships the Navy acquires in the future, Smith says. In the near term, the carrier battle group will look very much as it looks today; in a few years, that could change.

While all the services are pursuing information technologies that will dramatically increase battlefield awareness, Navy planners want to knit together all forces and platforms to create a "network-centric" environment, shifting the focus away from individual weapons systems and platforms to the network itself. Believing the capability generated by the whole network will be greater than the sum of its individual parts, Navy officials say creating such an integrated network will revolutionize naval warfare.

A fully networked operating environment would likely spawn new organizations, new patterns of decision-making, and ultimately new weapons and platforms, as better real-time data about the entire theater of operations becomes available.

Smith says that in 15 to 20 years, such concepts could radically change the way the Navy operates. "Our hope is through the process of the command we can influence the acquisition process so that future [budget planning documents] will include systems that will lead us in an evolutionary way to this very revolutionary new way of fighting wars through information superiority," he says.

Others have encouraged the Navy to take somewhat more mundane steps to upgrade its operations in the shorter term. In a paper published in February, Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, encouraged the Navy to increase its firepower and reduce its risk in coastal zones by converting four Trident ballistic missile submarines into "stealth battleships" carrying large numbers of extended-range precision weapons instead of nuclear missiles. The submarines, which are slated for decommissioning, could operate for at least another 20 years.

Converting the subs, which CSBA estimates could be accomplished for roughly $500 million per submarine, has clear advantages, Krepinevich wrote: "Tridents are far more difficult to locate than surface combatants, making [them] ideal for penetrating into [coastal areas] and conducting initial strikes against enemy defenses ashore, and for covert insertion of Special Operations Forces. The [converted submarines] thus confer the advantage of surprise, and the ability to strike deep inland targets at low levels of risk."

In addition, while surface combatants must distribute their missile loads to address defensive as well as offensive needs, the converted subs, because of their inherent stealth, could fully dedicate their payloads to attack missions--each firing more than 150 missiles in fewer than six minutes, with greater range than the surface combatants, according to Krepinevich.

By operating at a fraction of the cost, with 2 percent of the staffing requirements, the conversion of the subs could also alleviate some of the pressure on carriers and offer a cost-effective alternative to the Navy for meeting its requirements to be present around the globe.

"Trident stealth battleships offer the Navy a means for thinking more creatively about strike operations and forward presence. In doing so, they can help the Navy alleviate its recruitment and retention problems. Finally, [the converted submarines] cost an order of magnitude less than carriers to procure, and would produce a stream of long-term operations, maintenance and personnel savings relative to [carrier battle groups]," Krepinevich argued.

The proposal has merit, Smith says, and is the sort of idea his command will explore in the future. But whatever the outcome regarding the conversion of nuclear submarines, Smith is sure of one thing: "There's a good probability the Navy of the future will have a different balance of forces than is evident today."