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.
With its unassuming foreign policy, fin de siècle America needed nothing so grandiose as a two-power standard. North America, observed Mahan, occupied a “central position” between seaborne threats from Europe and Asia. If the United States had “an enemy in the Atlantic and one in the Pacific,” it must have “a fleet stronger than either the one or the other singly.” He saw little point in investing in a navy strong enough to vanquish two opponents simultaneously. Accordingly, U.S. leaders ought to station the entire U.S. Navy battle fleet on the coast under greatest threat. If Washington guessed wrong – if an antagonist made trouble on the opposite coast – the fleet would have to “swing” into the other ocean to put matters to rights.
Mahan’s chief worry was that politicians would divide up a middling-sized navy into standing Atlantic and Pacific fleets, creating two lesser fleets and in the process forfeiting the advantages of concentrated naval might. Partitioning a navy built to the one-power standard, that is, would leave each contingent weaker than its hypothetical enemy. Russia had fragmented its navy among Baltic, Black Sea, and Far Eastern fleets before fighting Japan (1904-1905). The Russian Navy paid the price for St. Petersburg’s strategic illiteracy. Wreckage from its Pacific and Baltic fleets littered the bottom of the Yellow Sea and the Tsushima Strait following disastrous encounters with the Japanese Combined Fleet, which was inferior to the combined Russian Navy but superior to every detachment hurled at it.
In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Mahan, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt debated where to station the fleet. The three sea-power proponents agreed that it should concentrate in the Pacific. Their rationale: Imperial Germany, one potential foe, had all it could handle with Britain’s Royal Navy lying across the North Sea. North America, then, faced little peril from the east. But to the west, Japan might take advantage of European powers’ distraction with war to snap up territory. Tokyo might do so at U.S. expense. Better to accept risk in the Atlantic than neglect the Pacific.
Today’s strategic questions represent a throwback of sorts to the debate among Mahan, TR, and FDR. For Mahan the benchmark for naval preparedness was “the estimated force which the strongest probable enemy can bring against you,” factoring in not only the size and capacity of his maritime forces, but also political entanglements that siphoned his forces to far-flung parts of the world. A glance at the map reveals two prospective adversaries for the United States and its allies, namely China and Iran. Both worry mainly about managing their own surroundings. Both can mass forces close to home. Neither has compelling interests that disperse its military forces to faraway theatres. And the chances of their ganging up on the U.S. Navy are remote.
So the U.S. Navy must prepare to face – or face down in crises short of war – a single opponent fighting with full force near its own shores. And it must do so with diminishing resources. As the Carl Vinson example implies, naval leaders and their political masters must be more choosy about priorities amid fiscal austerity.
Here’s how things shape up geo-strategically. Cold War theatres like the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea no longer appear that menacing, while the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean could witness exciting times indeed. U.S. leaders now look to Asia, but not wholeheartedly – yet. Navies are can-do services. They find it hard to part with longstanding habits and commitments. Washington’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review prodded the navy in that direction, directing the service to reposition 60 percent of its nuclear-powered attack submarines to the Pacific Ocean. That realignment is now complete.
But the time may come when U.S. political and military leaders must make the painful choice to concentrate the whole battle fleet there, embracing anew the logic of the Roosevelts and Mahan. Safe expanses to North America’s east, turbulent waters to its west, and an ever-shrinking fleet: the case for a one-power standard looks more compelling by the day.
James Holmes is an associate professor of strategy at the US Naval War College. The views voiced here are his alone.
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.