With U.S. naval leaders more choosy amid fiscal austerity, a two-ocean strategy may be a luxury the U.S. can no longer afford. What does it mean for the Pacific?
A couple of weeks back, my first ship (briefly, from long, long ago), the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson – last seen hosting an NCAA basketball game on its flight deck in honor of Veterans’ Day, with the First Family in attendance – deployed overseas for seven months. It did so only five months after returning from its last seven-month cruise. Navy officials depicted the quick turnaround as part of the service’s “Fleet Response Plan” scheme designed to place more of the fleet at regional commanders’ disposal. Around a third of the U.S. Navy is fully combat-ready at any given time. The plan’s goal is to boost that to two-thirds.
Uh-oh. That sounds nice, but the devil’s in the details. At its inception back in 2004, the Navy portrayed the Fleet Response Plan as a temporary expedient, a way to surge additional combat power in times of trouble. In atypical times, in other words. The Navy flexed the new arrangement that year. Seven of the Navy’s 11 carrier strike groups took to the world’s oceans during Operation “Summer Pulse.” Summer Pulse constituted an impressive display of operational readiness. But even the maneuver’s title – referring to a “pulse” – indicated that such deployments were never meant to become routine.
This is a distinction with a difference. A hoary yet sound maxim holds that the Navy needs three hulls to keep one on foreign station. Under the standard rotation, a ship deploys for six months, undergoes six months of rest and major overhaul afterward, and then launches into six months of work-ups culminating in its next cruise. Lather, rinse, repeat. That’s a sustainable operating rhythm. It upholds operational readiness while keeping wear-and-tear on hardware to manageable levels and letting sailors, marines, and their families live bearable lives. The third of the fleet working up for deployment can absorb occasional short-term surges, as the Fleet Response Plan (as originally conceived) envisioned.
The Carl Vinson’s recent history indicates that this system is under stress. Upkeep, training, and crew R&R were crammed into less than half the time normally allotted, while the forward deployments bracketing that abbreviated down-time exceeded the usual length. At 284 ships – the fewest in raw numerical terms since before the First World War – the U.S. Navy fleet may simply be doing too much. The submarine force, for example, already fulfills only 50 to 60 percent of customers’ – i.e., regional combatant commanders’ – demand for its services. The story is largely the same in the surface and aviation communities. Ever-increasing demands on finite means generate a helter-skelter operating tempo. Ultimately, the demand may outpace available ships, aircraft, and human capital, wearing out materiel before its time while driving down recruitment and reenlistment rates. The quality of the fleet – measured not only in equipment readiness but in human standards of seamanship and tactical acumen – will suffer.
The chances of boosting the size of the fleet appear slim in austere fiscal times. It’s more likely to dwindle further. If it does, missions may have to contract with it to restore some equilibrium to fleet operations. Indeed, one gets the sense that the Navy’s “two-ocean strategy” of the past seven decades is being repealed – if not by conscious choice, then by dint of heavy demand, soaring shipbuilding costs, and the resultant downward pressure on the fleet’s size. Congress and the Franklin Roosevelt administration passed the “Two Ocean Navy Act” in 1940 in order to confront two hostile sea powers, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. In effect, the United States built a second navy so it could keep one self-sufficient battle fleet in the Atlantic Ocean and another in the Pacific. FDR & co. inaugurated a strategic approach that endures to this day yet looks increasingly perishable.
If the United States can no longer afford two navies, it may have to resurrect an older tradition for managing commitments, assets, and risk. Naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan was a founding father of this tradition. Writing a century ago, before successive world wars and a Cold War impelled the United States to construct a “navy second to none,” Capt. Mahan urged Washington to base its naval strategy on a “one-power standard.” British history was his guide. During its imperial heyday, Great Britain sized its Royal Navy by a “two-power standard.” That is, it maintained a navy equivalent to the next two strongest navies combined. It did so lest powerful rivals combine forces, as they had in past conflagrations such as the War of American Independence and the Napoleonic Wars. British commanders trusted to superior seamanship and gunnery to make the difference in encounters with the likes of the French and Spanish navies.
Photo Credit: U.S. Navy
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Shawn
I believe we should maintain a full 16 Carrier force
Liang1a
Darren P wrote:
I find it interesting that you defend China’s practice of theft of the Su-27 design by claiming that the Chinese copies are superior.
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Liang’s response:
Darren P and many foreigners often demonize China for “stealing” foreign technologies. Much of this is simply due to the combination of basic hatred of China and ignorance of what patent laws are. Patent laws allow certain “inventions” to be patented and disallow others. Below is a quote from the given link about what can and cannot be patented.
The item 5 in the quote indicates anything that is an improvement can be patented. Many foreigners have accused China of reverse engineering their products and innovated something new and improved. They accuse China of having “stolen” their products based on the Chinese reverse engineering of their products. But this is a lie. China or anybody may reverse engineer anything and patent any new and improved invention so long as the new invention is not something immediately obvious. Since Chinese products are all significantly improved they are allowed to be granted new patents and therefore cannot be “stolen” from foreign technologies. For example, if China studied the CPU of some foreign design and then created a new CPU that is 2 times or more faster then it is a new invention and deserves to have its patent. Similarly with new types of jet engine, radar, avionics, missiles, space ships, etc. While China has studied these foreign products it has not merely copied these products but has created new and improved products in new and non-obvious ways. Therefore, China has not “stolen” anything from foreign technologies. And all such insults and denigrations are only mean spirited sour grapes of losers.
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http://www.uspto.gov/inventors/patents.jsp
What can be patented ━ utility patents are provided for a new, nonobvious
and useful:
1. Process
2. Machine
3. Article of manufacture
4. Composition of matter
5. Improvement of any of the above
What cannot be patented:
1. Laws of nature
2. Physical phenomena
3. Abstract ideas
4. Literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works (these can be Copyright
protected).
Inventions which are:
Not useful (such as perpetual motion machines); or
Offensive to public morality
Invention must also be:
Novel
Nonobvious
Adequately described or enabled (for one of ordinary skill in the art to
make and use the invention)
Claimed by the inventor in clear and definite terms
PJ
Professor Holmes: I’d be tempted to take you up on an argument on the usefullness of a Fleet in being, along the principles outlined by Corbett. Such a fleet was extremely capable in harrassing the Japanese in WWII.
However, a comment along those lines would be fruitless. For a force to open access against a top tier competitor in the waters surrounding them would take an enormous force. So yes, it is clear that a CVN force must be prioritized (more than it is today) to be placed in the Pacific if nothing more than for its own credibility. A 3.0 force presence would seem appropriate to be credible in the face of Chinese aggression. This would essentially require 9 CVNs in the Pacific. Facing a drop from todays numbers then then would mean that they all would have to be stationed the Pacific.
To avoid this would require a significant fielding of not yet production offensive weapons deployed on surface combatants and submarines with the aim at detering aggression. Such a force would have to be CREDIBLE at destroying mobile short duration targets like IADS (read short-medium range ballistic missiles, attriting large numbers of landing craft or the ships carrying them (read ballistic missiles and sub-launched torpedoes), a large number of armed UAVs launched from short runways in the region to patrol over water and detect/ID/attack Chinese anti-access threats like Houbei small craft and submarines.