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Any nation should expect two “absolutes” from its navy: to ensure that friendly shipping can continue to flow and hostile shipping cannot. This is clearly illustrated by the Leyte Gulf (CG-55) and Conolly (DD-979) as they conduct the 9,606th and final boarding in the Red Sea while enforcing U.S. sanctions against Iraq.
Our instant picture of naval warfare may be that of a dramatic carrier duel in the Pacific, or perhaps that of the long, dreary struggle between submarines and convoys in the Atlantic.
Such things did happen and they were important. But the wars in which those things happened were fought long ago and much has changed since then. Now most of the world’s carriers, and all its big ones, belong to one navy, our own. Now most of the world’s best submarines belong to one navy, our own.
For these reasons, among others, duels between opposing carriers and long struggles between submarines and convoys will likely recede ever further into the past. For a time it seemed possible, should war break out between NATO and the Soviet Union, that another submarine struggle might erupt. But that possibility also has faded.
Now, although almost every country with a seacoast has a navy, there is only one big capable navy—our own. What is it for? What should we expect it to do for us? Against what kinds of forces should we expect it to fight?
There are no easy answers. All we can be sure of is that from time to time, from place to place, the United States will be at war. At such times it will expect its navy to do the things a navy should do for it during a war.
What are those things? There appear to be only three: two absolutes and a conditional. The absolutes are to ensure first that friendly shipping can flow and second that hostile shipping cannot. Once the flow of friendly shipping is assured, then if it is necessary or desirable, navies can risk landing an army on a hostile shore, and supporting it then and thereafter with fire and logistics.1 That
sounds like the old wars, when there were other navies to fight. But it also describes the wars fought since hostile navies have diminished or disappeared. That, in turn, describes the wars yet to be fought.
The term “shipping” includes commercial ships of all sorts: oil tankers, dry-bulk carriers, barge carriers, automobile carriers, container ships, old-style mast-and-boom or “break-bulk” freighters, drilling rigs and their supporting craft, seagoing tugs and barges, short-sea ferries, long-distance passenger liners, vacation cruise ships, fishing craft, and fish factory ships.
“Shipping” also includes scientific ships and craft of all sorts, military logistic ships such as those the United States has positioned around the globe with arms and supplies for the Army and Marines, naval auxiliaries, amphibious ships, and ballistic missile submarines. Certain naval types are on this list because, whatever their precise function, they do not fight for and gain mastery of the sea or any of its parts: instead they either support the forces engaged in that struggle or they take advantage of the success of those forces to affect affairs ashore, in a direct and unambiguous fashion.
This emphasis on shipping may seem archaic in an age when soldiers and civilians alike—and even Marines— fly rather than sail across the oceans, when the flags of the famous maritime powers are noted at sea mainly for their scarcity, and when the flags there in great numbers— as well as the men who man those ships—come mostly from the Third World.
When the world was in peril in 1940 its population was two billion, the number of seagoing and coastal merchant ships worldwide was 12,000, and their combined deadweight tonnage was 80 million. Deadweight tonnage tells how much one ship—or in this case 12,000 ships—can carry in one voyage. In half a century our population has doubled, and then some. The number of ships has also doubled. But chiefly because today’s ships are much larger than those of half a century ago their collective deadweight tonnage has gone up seven times, to 650 million tons. Per person, three times as much material travels at sea now as it did when sea travel often was the only way to go. Moreover, today’s tankers are about 50% faster than they were in 1940, and container ships are twice as fast as the old freighters. Every year, they can make from half again to twice as many voyages and carry half again to twice as much cargo per deadweight ton as their predecessors. By using containers afloat and ashore and high- capacity cranes at the quay where sea and shore meet, dry- cargo ships reaching port need to stay there only hours rather than the days and weeks formerly required. This further multiplies the tonnage each ship can carry over a Period of time.2
It has become almost invisible to us in the United States, even in well-known ports (or former ports) such as New York and Boston, but shipping counts more than ever. It will continue to be the business of navies to ensure that when it is friendly, shipping can flow; and when it is hostile, it cannot.
Moreover, the evidence of two recent wars makes clear that, for purposes of naval attack and defense, transport and cargo planes overflying the sea must now be included under the title of “shipping.”
Experiences of War
The last time two great fleets fought was at Leyte Gulf in October 1944. The fleets were those of Japan and the United States. Japan’s fleet was vanquished and its few surviving ships were hardly found at sea thereafter. That did not mean that the end of the war had come; it meant that the U.S. Navy would no longer have to fight any other navy in order to approach a hostile shore.
What was waiting on that hostile shore? In the Philippines, on Okinawa, and on the islands of Japan itself, there were big well-entrenched armies and on bases not far distant, the most powerful, determined air foe any seaman ever faced: The Kamikaze Special Attack Corps. That corps of thousands of pilots and airplanes formed in effect a force of intelligent, dedicated guided missiles whose sole purpose was to crash into and sink American warships. That was the force destined to struggle against the U.S. fleet for the mastery of the local seas. If the Kamikazes succeeded early, no U.S. troops could invade Mindoro, Luzon, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, or the home islands of Japan. If they succeeded later, the invading troops who managed to reach their destinations likely would meet the same fate the Japanese had dealt their isolated predecessors at Bataan, three years earlier.
The role of the amphibious ships and merchant ships was to land those armies on the hostile shore and to provide logistical support. The role of the combatant ships of all sorts was to keep those ships safe from the Kamikazes and, secondarily, to support the troops with fire. The final struggle in the Western Pacific lasted for ten months. Each time the fleet and the Kamikazes met, the fleet won— though at fearful cost to itself.
Five years after the Japanese surrendered, war broke out anew, this time in Korea. Neither side had much of an air force; both had even less of a navy. Kim II Sung’s large North Korean Army, however, was both better armed and more skillful than Syngman Rhee’s South Korean Army. Soon there was nothing left of South Korea but an ever-shrinking perimeter around the southern port city of Pusan. Through that city, U.S. reinforcements and supplies poured out of ships—-mainly merchant ships—first from Japan and then from the United States. The U.S. Navy’s first contribution to the defense was to ensure that the troops in Japan got from there to the Pusan perimeter. Its best-known contribution was the daring and skillfully conducted amphibious assault landing of a Marine division, followed by an Army division, from 120 merchant and amphibious ships at Inchon. The success of that operation did much to turn the war from the desperate defense of a single seaport to an exultant victory over an invading army. Nevertheless, the victorious Allied commander-in-chief pushed his Army a mountain range too far into North Korea and a large Chinese Army counterattacked, the Navy and Merchant Marine rescued the surviving elements of the U.S. X Corps (more than 100,000 troops—including the same Marines who had led the assault landing at Inchon) at the port of Hungnam— and returned them to the south, whence they soon returned to the front.
What were the carriers doing? At Pusan, carrier-borne Marine squadrons showed everyone else how to conduct
close-air support. At Inchon, too far for fighters based in Japan to provide either cover or close air support, every carrier in the Pacific Fleet—five ships, plus one from Britain—provided all the help that was needed, and more. When the enemy overran all the airbases at and near Hung- nam, four large carriers and a small one provided all the help that was needed, and more. After the struggle ashore settled into a static war, in which there was no further call for maneuver on a grand scale, there was no work for the amphibious force. Meanwhile, unimpeded by the foe who had no navy, merchant ships kept the Allied armies and air forces supplied with arms, ammunition, fuel, and replacement troops. Because all the enemies’ supplies came overland, an Allied naval blockade was largely a precautionary measure. Thus the fighting ships only could help the armies marginally, with fire support. Naval gunfire ships did what they could within the short range of their weapons. Further inland, carrier-based aviation contributed fire support chiefly as part of the Air Force’s interdiction effort. To a great extent because there was little movement on the ground to cause the North Korean and Chinese armies to use up their fuel, ammunition, supplies, and replacements, this effort was not a success.
Probably the most important naval contribution to the Allied success in Korea was not at all the work of the U.S. Navy. Rather, it was the work of the tiny new South Korean Navy. In the dark of the first morning of war, a coastal patrol boat on station off Pusan encountered, challenged, and sank a darkened steamer. When the steamer perished she carried with her 600 North Korean troops intended for the capture of Pusan. Had the raiders succeeded, the war would have ended before it had fairly begun, for by the time the Americans could have gathered themselves together to land their troops somewhere, there would have been no friendly place to receive them.
As we know, neither North nor South Vietnam focused on anything but their armies, Hanoi more successfully than Saigon. Neither North nor South Vietnam made any of the instruments of their war. All of those things had to be brought great distances in freighters and tankers. When Saigon faltered and the United States sent its own forces into the war, the volume of goods the cargo ships and tankers brought expanded geometrically. Under the distant cover of the U.S. Pacific Fleet those merchant ships, many of them old and slow, made thousands of voyages across the ocean unmolested by the foe.
Because China was neither a good source of arms for North Vietnam nor a reliable forwarding agent of those supplied by the Soviet Union, more and more—eventually, three-quarters—of Hanoi’s arms, fuel, and supplies also went to war by ship. Tankers and freighters were loaded at Odessa or Vladivostok and sailed right past— unmolested by—the U.S. Seventh Fleet, and into Haiphong Harbor, for seven years.
Only after those Soviet weapons, sensors, and all the rest were on the shore and on their way to their combat destinations in little packets did the United States try to halt their passage: by bombing trucks and bicycles through the rain clouds, through the jungle’s triple canopy, through the flak. Consequently, what should have been easy was hard; and what should have been cheap was expensive, what should have been a success was a failure.
Eventually, in April 1972, after the Americans had taken their large Army back home, North Vietnam struck South Vietnam again. This time, Hanoi’s troops were armed not only with imported infantry weapons and field artillery, but also with imported tanks. Saigon’s surprised troops fought back. Aided by heavy strikes flown by U.S. shore- based and carrier-based aircraft and naval gunfire ships offshore, they halted the invasion and regained some of the territory they had lost with U.S.-supported amphibious assaults by South Vietnamese Marines.
The U.S. bombers attacked not only enemy tactical targets in South Vietnam but also logistical targets in the North—a great many more of them than before. The defenders responded vigorously with antiaircraft artillery and surface-to-air (SAMs). The struggle went on for months. But now, something had changed fundamentally. That April, the U.S. Navy had mined the approaches to
Haiphong. Thereafter, not one of the 27 Soviet ships in that harbor, emptied of cargo, dared sail out in order to go back for more. Not another ship, no matter what her cargo, no matter what her flag, tried to sail in. The North Vietnamese would have to make do with what they had. What would happen when sooner or later they ran out of something important?
After particularly heavy bombing of logistical targets in Hanoi and Haiphong in December 1972, the North Vietnamese ran out of SAMs. Because the Americans still had plenty of bombers and lots of bombs, the men in Hanoi were ready at last to talk about peace in a way agreeable to the United States. And peace of a sort—satisfactory to the Americans, though not to the unfortunate South Vietnamese—was signed in January 1973. So far as the Americans were concerned, the war was over.
By itself, the blockade of Hanoi would have achieved little. But in combination with vigorous action in the air, which required the North to fire its irreplaceable air-defense ammunition, it achieved all the United States could hope for. It is regrettable that long beforehand the U.S. government had not taken the easy, the inexpensive, and the successful route.
There had been a vague fear in Washington—fed by threats from a deposed premier in Moscow—that if the United States so much as nicked a Soviet merchant ship, the Soviets might do something frightful. That was why our government chose to leave Haiphong open to enemy traffic so long. And for all that time, the world’s greatest Navy was essentially put out of business by clever politicians in Moscow and less clever ones in Washington. A more strongly based fear—stemming from our terrifying experience in North Korea in the autumn and winter of 1950—that China might enter the war if our armies crossed into North Vietnam caused our amphibious weapon to rust in its scabbard. We even refused to let our forces operating below the DMZ move into the country from which they were being attacked.
Here is the pre-eminence in war, especially in a war of modest purpose, of political concerns over military imperatives. The nation’s political and military leaders should see this as a permanent condition. When faced with the Possibility of having to send the men and women under their command into battle they first should understand the Particular meanings of that condition.
We also see here, as we focus on our subject of what navies can do for their owners, that a navy’s essential job is to make sure that friendly shipping can flow and that enemy shipping cannot—regardless of the presence °r absence of an enemy fleet.
Here is one more example of modern naval warfare. In October 1973, Egyptian and Syrian armies broke through Israeli defenses at the Suez Canal in the south and the Golan Heights in the north. Amid fears that Israel Would be overrun, there was a whiff of nuclear weapons in the air.
What part did navies play in those dramatic days? Little has been written about their role, but on the war’s first night, Israeli missile boats swept north, and sank most of Syria’s small force of missile boats. Two nights later, they swept south and did the same to Egypt’s missile-boat squadron.
These small victories meant that Israelis coastal cities were free from attack by enemy missile boats, while Syria’s were not; and that ships filled with the goods of war (or peace) could lie safely in Israeli harbors while similarly laden ships in Syrian harbors could not. To make this point clear, the Israeli boats sank several neutral freighters—one of them a Soviet ship—in Syrian ports, and battered targets ashore.
Then the Israeli boats chased away an old Egyptian destroyer from the mid-Mediterranean narrows where she threatened to halt the flow of shipping bound for Israel. Israeli and Arab accounts of what happened in the Mediterranean for the rest of the war are contradictory, but an account by an Israeli journalist in 1988 states that:
. . . merchant shipping to Israel was halted at the outbreak of war but resumed after a few days when it became evident that the Arab surface vessels were bottled up. . . . As the war stretched into its third week the seaborne cargo, including tanks, artillery, shells, and other armaments, became increasingly vital to Israel’s staying power. The freighters coordinated the timing and route of the final leg with the Israeli navy. During the three weeks of the war more than a hundred merchant ships entered and left Haifa harbor.3
That was in the Mediterranean. In the Red Sea, however, the Egyptian Navy had its own successes, not only by closing with mines the short tanker route between the Israelis’ only oil field, in the Gulf of Suez, and the port of Eilat in the Gulf of Aqaba, but also by means of destroyers at the Bab el Mandeb in the southern Red Sea. Those ships closed Israel’s vital oil route from Iran. As the war neared what appeared to be a dreadful climax, the Israeli government refused to agree to a truce until the Egyptian destroyers lifted that blockade.
Two other navies, those of the United States and the Soviet Union, were also engaged in that war. After the Israelis sank a Soviet freighter laden with supplies for Syria, the Soviets began to move military cargoes to Syria in their navy’s amphibious ships, while combatant ships protected both Syria-bound supply ships and Syria-bound cargo aircraft from further attack.
At about the same time, the United States began to send supplies to Israel in C-5 and C-141 cargo planes, and shortly thereafter in deep-sea freighters. The United States also flew A-4 and F-4 attack and fighter aircraft directly to Israel, using the Azores in the eastern Atlantic as an interim base. The U.S. Sixth Fleet strung itself out in a line under the aviation flight path from east of Spain to south of Cyprus, offering navigational aid, protection from interdiction originating in North Africa, help in the event of a mishap, and tanker support for the small aircraft. The A-4 attack planes landed for a night on the carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt (CVA-42). While the carriers and their escorts were so engaged, the fleet’s amphibious task force readied itself to rescue U.S. citizens endangered by the war.
When it looked to the United States as if the Soviets might airlift a division of troops to Egypt, the Sixth Fleet concentrated its carriers where they could both protect Israel-bound shipping and attack Soviet aircraft and ships bound for Egypt. The Soviets in turn placed their missile ships within shooting range of the American carriers while they sent other ships south to protect the air transports, should they take off for Egypt.
There, the action stopped as a cease-fire ensued. What we had seen on both sides, however, was naval action aimed at ensuring that friendly shipping, including air transports, could flow and that hostile shipping, including air transports, could not.
The Future
It is almost certain that in any future war the U.S. forces will be operating near the enemy’s homeland rather than near ours; therefore, it is unlikely that a future foe will attack our shipping either in our waters or on the high seas.[1] Rather, he will attempt to halt the flow of that shipping when it approaches his own territory. He is likely to use short-range aircraft, as Iraq did against Iranian and neutral tanker shipping in the first Persian Gulf War; or mines planted in narrow channels, as Iran did to attack neutral shipping supporting Iraq in that same war; or missile boats, as Israel did against shipping in and near Syrian ports in the Levantine War of 1973. He might use shore-based cruise missiles, as the Argentines did against a British destroyer in the Falklands in 1982. There are many submarines in the world, but few of their owners have shown that they know how to use them. Aside from Russia, therefore, threats to either shipping or naval combatants from that source seem less likely now than in earlier times. In the immediate future, the enemy is much more likely to attempt to halt the flow of air transports if they come within range of his SAMs, or perhaps of his fighters.
How does the navy protect the flow of those ships and transport aircraft? First, by routing and keeping track of them so they can be kept clear of dangerous waters or airspace—and protected if they cannot be kept clear. Those subject to possible air attack must be guarded by fighters or SAM ships; those subject to attack by missiles fired from boats or ashore must be protected by fixed-wing or helicopter attack aircraft; and by ships armed with antimissile weapons, antiship weapons, and rapidly deploying decoys. Those ships unavoidably passing through mineable waters must be protected first by the destruction of the enemy’s minelaying ships, boats, and aircraft, and his mine storage depots. Because that effort may fail, or may not be allowed, they also will need the protection of reliable mine hunters and mine destroyers. Eventually, these might be bottom-crawling devices controlled from ships at a safe distance. Such things, however, are years away. For the time being, the dangerous and tedious tasks of hunting and destroying mines must be carried out, as they are now, by men in small, slow, but expensive ships—
or actually operating in the water not far from such ships.
One of the recurring problems we face in getting minefighting and coastal combat craft to the scene of action in a timely way is their slow speed of advance over long distances. The remedy lies in providing ourselves with large ships resembling LSDs, which can provide such craft both strategic mobility equal to that of the amphibious force and, when on scene, command-and-control capability, tender services, and other support.
An enemy who owns—and knows how to use—submarines, especially in shallow, narrow seas, will pose a substantial threat. This may be overcome best by attacking those submarines with missiles while they are still in their bases, or by mining the channels through which they must pass to break out of those bases. It may be our own submarines that launch those missile attacks and lay those mines.
How do we halt the flow of enemy shipping? Because of serious concern in many countries—especially our own—about pollution of the sea and unnecessary loss of life, and also because large modern merchant ships are not easily sunk by missiles, boarding parties, to inspect and if necessary seize offending ships, may be the most common method in the future. Today, merchant ships often have large, open decks, where helicopters can hover or perhaps land on while the boarding party swiftly debarks. Moreover, modern merchant ships’ crews are too small to resist for long—even if they are interested in doing so. Most destroyers and frigates carry at least one helicopter. A large amphibious assault ship such as an LHA or LHD—or any other ship with a large flight deck—could provide many helicopters and many boarding parties for use in a busy stretch of water. Important enemy ships that are unreachable by this means can be dealt with by the same instruments we use to protect our own ships: antishipping weapons borne by aircraft or combatant ships.
For reasons already stated submarines, once the great destroyers of merchant ships, are likely to be only bit players in any antishipping campaign of either our side or our enemy’s. But just as we did off Haiphong in 1972, we can lay minefields that will end the flow of enemy shipping— and it may be submarines that put those fields in place.
What about halting the flow of enemy transport aircraft over the sea? First, one must identify them for what they are. Except—perhaps—in huge wars, the downing of civilian airliners will not be forgiven. It is not foolproof, but there is no better way to identify an airplane than to look at it. Fighter planes can do that best, and if the object of interest is indeed an enemy aircraft, the fighter also is capable of downing it quickly. On the other hand, if the circumstances are both clear and compelling—as they were in the Falklands in 1982—ships armed with surface-to-air missiles should not hesitate to fire at large, relatively slow, multi-engine aircraft.
It has been a long time since the United States landed a division-size force on a hostile shore, at Inchon in 1950. Some people see that as evidence that we can let the skills and materiel associated with such landings rot away. But, it has been even longer since the U.S. Navy last fired a submarine torpedo into an enemy ship or the Air Force dropped a nuclear weapon on a foe’s city, and we still expect our armed forces to be able to do those things. More-
over, if in 1982 the British had not been able to land their troops on a hostile shore, the Falkland Islands would not again have been theirs.
By stopping his army at the Saudi border after seizing Kuwait in August 1990, Saddam Hussein set the stage for the continental campaign that in a few months would oust him from Kuwait.
If, instead, Saddam’s armored columns had continued to roll southward on the coastal road another 200 miles to seize the almost undefended Saudi ports of Jubail and Damman, he would have changed the nature of the war radically. Whatever light, essentially unarmed forces that the United States had by then flown in to Saudi Arabia would have had to escape either in the aircraft that had brought them there or by assembling on the coast where, much as at Hungnam 40 years beforehand, U.S. and other U.N. amphibious and merchant ships could embark them and bring them to safety. The rest of the campaign to rescue Kuwait, as well as those parts of Saudi Arabia by then in Iraqi hands, would have had to have begun with an amphibious landing, opposed—or, preferably, unopposed— somewhere on the Saudi coast with an initial goal of gaining possession of at least one deep-water port on the mainland.
Two points become clear:
^ To quote retired Navy Captain Frank Snyder, of the Naval War College faculty, “History is just one pass through the possibilities.”
^ Not only our own leaders’ decisions govern the activities of our armed forces, but also the decisions of the enemy’s leaders.
Nowadays we have a large Marine Corps and naval amphibious forces well versed in small unopposed or lightly opposed amphibious landings.
They have come to depend heavily on helicopters to get the assault waves ashore, inland of the high-water mark.
A new type of aircraft, the tilt-rotor MV-22, looks as if it will be the helicopter’s successor, but not soon. In the meantime, the Marines must continue to hope that a helicopter on which they have depended for almost 30 years, the CH-46, will still be up to the challenge when the challenge must be met. Moreover, heavy arms and equipment must still be landed, either in a harbor or over a beach. To do the latter there must be a lot of beaching ships and plenty of landing craft. But soon there will be no more beaching ships in the U.S. Navy; landing craft will be present, but not in large numbers.
The way to make the most of those landing craft we do have, notably the swift but space-hogging air-cushion craft, is to launch them from as close to the beach as possible. Now that our destroyers and cruisers can engage incoming cruise and ballistic missiles successfully, the fear which a few years ago drove our landing ships far from the beach need no longer—indeed, must no longer—consume us.
The new ability to defend a beachhead from missile attack also means that ports can also be defended from such attack. But since the enemy will understand the landing force’s need for swiftly gaining control of either a harbor or a beach, he will do his best to foil our efforts to that end with minefields, shore defenses, and perhaps ships and craft scuttled in the fairway.
As we saw as recently as 1991, we have little power to clear mines in a timely fashion from anchorages or boating lanes, surf zones, or beaches. Though some new weapons are on the horizon, our current ability to provide gunfire support for infantry going or fighting ashore is nearly at the vanishing point. And our ability to salvage sunken ships blocking our entrance into a port, or to rescue our own ships that have been severely hurt by enemy fire or mines—tenuous at best four years ago, when the cruiser Princeton (CG-59) was crippled off Kuwait—has faded still further and may soon be extinguished.
In our Marine Corps and our amphibious force, we still have the will to conduct a powerful amphibious assault, once the need makes itself plain. But it appears that the wherewithal to do so is shaky at best. And what about providing fire and logistical support to ground forces which, one way or another, have established themselves ashore? We have plenty of aircraft carriers but not as many aircraft for this purpose as might be needed. The splendid high-endurance A-6 all-weather medium attack plane is old now and will not long be with us. Its electronic- warfare sister, the EA-6B, is equally old and tired, and scarce. The A-6’s replacement is the F-14, another old airplane, designed nearly a quarter of a century ago for a very different purpose. The A-6’s little sister, the F/A-18, has been in the fleet for ten years or more, and is still in production. But it is capable of carrying only a modest load, and without tanker support it cannot stay in the air long. Perhaps, with the conversion of some S-3s, the Navy will have enough tanker aircraft to keep it aloft. Though the forthcoming E/F version of the F/A-18 is said to be a night -capable attack plane, the version we have now is in essence a clear-weather aircraft only. All those considerations aside, how useful it will be against enemy troops armed with Stinger-like SAMs has yet to be seen. Still further in the future, the Stealth aircraft will be bulky, scarce, easily subject to crippling damage by enemy fire or accident, and by its very nature filled with secrets we would not wish an enemy to learn. It would seem an unsatisfactory aircraft for close-in attack upon an army’s combat forces.
Most surface combatants and many submarines can fire Tomahawk land-attack missiles. The most common version of the Tomahawk carries a 1,000-pound warhead for up to 1,400 miles. The new Global Positioning System offers hope of great accuracy. Still, the Tomahawk, too, is large, expensive, and scarce. In the entire 43-day period of the air attack on Iraq in 1991, the Navy launched fewer than 300 of them, or an average of eight per day. Even if this weapon is made suitable for direct support to an army, that is not enough to provide significant support to a force engaged in a struggle of any magnitude.
If the merchant ships can make it to a developed port, their cargo can usually be unloaded and moved overland. Then it is no longer a naval responsibility. But if—as in much of the Pacific in World War II—there is no developed port; if—as at Anzio in Italy in 1944—the enemy stands between your port and your engaged troops, or if— as in I Corps in Vietnam—the friendly natives turn into enemies when your supply trucks try to get by; then the problem may again be the Navy’s. The air base at Chu Lai 50 miles south of Danang, and the troops on the DMZ 100 miles to the north of that city depended for their very lives on sea supply carried from Danang in flat-bottomed, blunt-bowed LCUs and LSTs of the World War II era. Now all such LSTs are gone and LCUs are scarce. Do we have something equal to them or better? One hopes so; one doubts it. All this assumes that somehow friendly merchant ships, manned by friendly, or least non-hostile seamen, will be there when we want them. In the war against Iraq they were; in the war against North Vietnam they were not.
Clearly, the need is greater than ever for the U.S. Navy to continue thinking about how it can best serve its owners—not only from the sea, but on, over, and under the sea, as well.
‘This article stems from and in part restates briefly the evidence and findings of the author’s recent book, How Navies Fight: The U.S. Navy and its Allies (Naval Institute Press, 1994).
:I am indebted for the basic figures cited here to Dr. R.E. Blouin, Office of National Security Plans, U.S. Maritime Administration, Washington D. C.
“Abraham Rabinovich, The Boats of Cherbourg (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 297-98.
Frank Uhlig was the Founding Editor of the Naval Review and the Senior Editor of the U.S. Naval Institute. He is the Editor Emeritus of the U.S. Naval War College Review.
COAST GUARD ESSAY CONTEST
The U.S. Naval Institute will award cash prizes of $1,000, $750, and $500 to the authors of the three winning essays in its annual Coast Guard Essay Contest.
This essay contest was created to encourage discussion on current issues and new directions for the Coast Guard. Essays must be postmarked on or before 1 June 1995.
Essay Contest Rules
1. Essays must be original and no longer than 3,000 words.
2. All entries should be directed to Editor-In-Chief, Proceedings (USCG Contest), U.S. Naval Institute, 118 Maryland Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21402-5035.
3. Essays must be postmarked on or before 1 June 1995.
4. Letters notifying the three award winners will be mailed on or about 30 September 1995.
5. All essays should be typewritten, double-spaced, on 8-1/2" x 11" paper. If typed on a computer, please also submit the entry on an IBM-compatible disk,
indicating word-processing software used. Address, phone number, biographical sketch, and social security number are to be included with each entry.
6. The Naval Institute will publish the winning essays in Proceedings, its monthly magazine. Some entries not awarded prizes may also be selected for publication. Their authors will be compensated at regular rates.
7. The Naval Institute Editorial Board will judge the competition.
DEADLINE: I JUNE 1995
[1]Though it would be a great political and naval triumph for such a foe to sink or damage a ship of even modest importance in the approaches to an American harbor, and an equally great embarrassment to this country’s national, military, and naval leaders, the difficulties in the way of achieving such a success would probably turn an aggressive enemy leader’s attention towards some form of terrorism ashore which, with bearable effort, would be more likely to yield a spectacular result. Should this be so, the problem would be one not for the Navy and Coast Guard, but for the police and the intelligence agencies.