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A U. S. guided missile frigate steaming in the wake of a Soviet guided missile cruiser through the Sea of Japan seems to symbolize the growing gap between the two navies. As the U. S. Navy slips toward second place among the world’s navies, there are some missions which it must forsake—and others that it can renounce only at great peril.
The nation’s mood and diminished economic strength, measured against the realities of Soviet power, give clear signs that the United States can no longer support a Navy that will be supreme upon the seas. Profound advantages of seapower, as well as historic missions, must be relinquished as the Navy restructures itself to perform well those missions that are within its grasp and ceases to expend resources to fulfill those no longer possible.
In a newspaper of a major city, a recent editorial noted the declining military power of the nation and soberly accepted the fact that soon the United States would be second to the Soviet Union. Moving on from sober acceptance, the tone of the editorial warmed to cheerfulness, welcoming the prospect as though vague, but somehow benign, benefits would grow out of these altered circumstances. Unfortunately, the editorial did
44 U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, November 1972
not represent merely a rare sentiment, rather it expressed the nation’s most fateful wound from a decade’s involvement in an ambivalent and divisive war: how far belief in the necessity for military strength has fallen.
The irresponsible newsman is only one voice. We do not have to strain our cars to catch others. All about us we encounter a plethora of views, ranging from embarrassment to hostility at the idea that the United States should strive to maintain an edge of military power over the Soviets. It has become fashionable to rationalize away the value of "superiority,” to turn it into a dirty word, indeed—by intellectual legerdemain— to establish it as morally disadvantageous. We have had superiority for a long time now, some arguments assert, anti look at the hangover it has brought us. So why not give the Soviets a try at being Number One for a while and see how they like it, eh? As to what happens if the Soviets like it all too well and find that it pays off handsomely, the advocates of the new laissez faire in national security are not too specific. We are left to hope that, presumably well before going under as a free people, some intolerable provocation will jolt us into awareness of our peril and that at the last moment we will be spurred into a burst of furious energy to those actions essential to our salvation.
Through the sounds of debate many themes contend. A beguiling one is the call for a "reordering of national priorities,” as if the world, in response to the fervor of people’s wishes, had lately become very different from what it has been and that choices are always ours to make. As if, upon judicious consideration of a list of good things we would like to have, national survival could be slipped in somewhere down in the middle.
Across the nation, there is a weariness with war and the military and the whole business of defense. Responsible men rise on the floors of Congress to call attention to our declining military strength and their words are unheard by all but a few fellow believers, the bored junior journalists, and the tourist groups in the galleries who come and go in fleeting acquaintanceship with the ways of their government. Newspapers find such speeches at best worthy of no more than minimum and back page reporting. Such speeches have become a bore. Most citizens simply do not care.
But let us depart the present, with its recognizable cycles of enthusiasm and indifference. Let us try to glimpse the future in the thoughts of a nation’s people under 25. Visit the campuses of our colleges and universities, and, by listening to their ideas, get the feel of their world. The campuses are indeed quieter, the violent causes of immediate yesteryear subsident. It is a calm, however, that may be deceptive; it is more like the aftermath of a storm in which people gather
up the pieces, the thoughtful quiet of something settled and decided. The shrill voices have lowered and the anti-draft posters on the dormitory walls grow tattered. And, in the talk of the students, the Vietnam war and the draft (except in its procedural aspects and as a matter of bad luck) no longer loom large. Their attitudes generally manifest fair fulfillment of the prophecy that columnist Joseph Kraft made some years back when he concluded that the single, unbearable cost of Vietnam—beyond the human tragedy of dead and wounded, beyond the massive diversion of resources— would probably be in the disillusion, and consequent political indifference and negativism, of the brightest and best of the coming generation, to responsibility toward their country and the world. No small part of that disillusion is the massive disinterest among the young both as to the necessity for military security itself and realization of the citizen’s own personal obligation to contribute towards it. Theirs is a knowing scorn for the shallower aspects of patriotism, as well as ignorance of the deeper, and disbelief that they, too, will have to serve and sacrifice for their country.
To be sure, they will learn otherwise—and hopefully not too late. Granted that it is easy to read too much in the attitudes of the young and to remember only that the students at Oxford in the 1930s who applauded the affirmative of the debated proposition that they would never again fight for King and country were, not so many years later, deep in World War II and fighting well. Yet rather than extract undue consolation from the fact, we should be reminded that the naive and blindly pacifistic attitudes of the 1930s contributed much towards the tardy military readiness of the Western powers and that paralysis of will which made World War II inevitable.
Concretely, the decline of U. S. military strength is measured in shrinking numbers of ships and planes and men-at-arms, in diminished readiness, in a drawing back from overseas, and in adverse trends of strategic nuclear capabilities relative to those of the Soviet Union. The specifics need no repetition here; they are tallied by concerned nations, friendly and otherwise, around the world. How far that strength will ultimately decline, at what point countering factors will coalesce to bring a halt, cannot be foretold. The fluidities in current world affairs preclude prediction, and, to use a current catchword that expresses our retreat, the insipidity of "parity” has replaced the comforting sound of "superiority.” All but meaningless in a realistic military sense, but as a notion—not to dignify it as an idea—it is appealingly inoffensive. Convenient for the politician, palatable to a species of intellectual, undisturbing to the majority, it is likely to be around for a while. That
Toward a Navy Second to One 45
it masks harsh truths with profound implications is little noted.
Expressing succinctly and without rhetoric one fundamental limit of U. S. power is the report of the Senate Armed Services Committee in the fall of 1971 on the problem of paying for our armed strength. Calling attention to the soaring costs of procurement of new weapons systems, it forecasts that if the trend cannot be checked, inevitably the United States, in the event of future conflict with the Soviet Union, will find itself at a sharp disadvantage numerically. Which truth leads us, by its close relationship, to last year’s dramatic and still-continuing efforts of the U. S. government, both domestically and internationally, to shore up the strength of the U. S. economy and to sustain the value of the dollar. And beneath the surface of such news, beyond the concern of the average citizen for its implications towards his standard of living and fulfillment of his aspirations, there can be perceived the outlines of a momentously changing role for the United States in world affairs. For current happenings can be understood only in the light of a quarter-century °f struggle between the Free World—its strength long embodied in, and financed by, the United States—and the pressures of Communist nationalism whose spiritual capitals are Moscow and Peking. And, taking the measure of our present financial problems, they represent, as well, confirmation of the underlying soundness of Communist long-term strategy and the fundamental strategic problem, as alive as ever, of the United States. The United States has yet to learn how to counter the thrust of the challenge without having to expend far more resources in the effort than does the challenger. A basic premise of this article, given the achievement of that challenge thus far in dragging the United States ever closer to the poorhouse, is that the thrust and momentum of Soviet and Chinese tactics will continue. And that, furthermore, although it will still fall upon the United States to continue to provide the primary leadership and resources to withstand those challenges, it cannot do so much longer unless other nations rapidly assume a far greater share of the burden of security in proportion to their own stake in freedom.
The U. S. response, its posture and policy, is going to become markedly different because it will have to he. Militarily it will be less because the United States cannot—or will not—afford more. There is no real chance that the costs of defense will come down. High costs and the sophistication of our defense systems are hred deeply into our standards, our technological base, and the tastes and economic structure of a luxurious civilization and a hedonistic people, and the most we can do is try to modify the slope of these upward trends. And when we must couple the greatly added
costs of attracting and holding the diminishing numbers of motivated citizens to serve in that All-Volunteer force, which is at once both the nation’s official goal and unofficial expression of its lack of interest in military service, the full dimensions of the problem of U. S. security become all too clear. A weary and anxious giant is laying down a part of its burden and hoping, somehow, that everything will turn out all right. For, though a war-weary and anxious world may applaud the ebbing U. S. commitments to Southeast Asia, the President’s journey to China, and such other initiatives as a proposed mutual limitation of naval forces in the Indian Ocean—and even grant the United States the possibility of a certain decency and a genuine concern for peace—the cold-eyed strategists in the Kremlin cannot but smile with satisfaction at the altogether valid interpretation that these are all signs of our weakness. Looking beyond the anger and dismay of the professional military' man of the United States, the fact that his country simply cannot compete financially with totalitarian and militarily determined governments is a reality that should be incorporated in his planning as much as the threat itself.
Since the coming leaner defense structure for the United States must include, as a sine qua non, a nuclear deterrent credible beyond doubt—this being the singular contribution that the United States can confer upon the Free World—it is plain that its existence will be at the expense of its other military forces. For the U. S. Navy, incident to its own reductions, the most profound meaning will be the necessary relinquishment of a number of major roles and missions which have belonged to it so long as to have assumed in people’s minds the status of eternal duties. Recognition of this truth, which in some aspects even now represents only belated notice of what is already occurring, should be both early and explicit rather than taking the familiar bureaucratic form of a protracted and unadmitted backing away from the impossible. For the Navy’s adaptation to diminished roles obviously implies far more than a scaled trimming down of what it formerly believed possible: a fractional reduction of all things in proportion, e.g., two-thirds as many strikes deliverable, one-half as much mercantile tonnage guaranteed, so many less submarines accounted for, and the like. A smaller Navy demands fundamental restructuring, evolution into a different kind of Navy, in order to have the types of ships and planes to do well the jobs that they can do—and at the same time ensure that they are not burdened with systems for missions that cannot be carried out and which therefore would be genuinely at the expense of those capabilities they do possess. The general philosophy for the creation of this U. S. Navy of the future will have to change from an
automatic presumption that the Navy can achieve widespread supremacy upon the seas, for the new Navy will have to concentrate on countering the strength which will increasingly be in the possession of a rising Soviet seapower. Parts of former missions will remain, but they will be smaller in scope, selective and temporal, and will be reserved for those weighed circumstances where their exercise may be plausible.
We can perceive, for example, a whole spectrum of current missions of waning validity which are based upon successful control of the submarine threat. Upon that presumed control uneasily rests a whole sequence of impossible scenarios, some of great import towards certain fundamental premises of U. S. foreign policy. Among these are plans that call for continuing somehow to transport, at advancing stages of a posthostilities time frame, millions of tons of material and delivering them to our European allies. That a golden haze of fantasy surrounds this picture has long been apparent. In addition to the immense Soviet submarine threat that our escort forces would face, there would be large forces of Soviet air and surface arms massed in opposition and, with land war presumably occurring, manifestly the ports, the docks, transportation marshaling areas, and rail lines would also be prime targets for Soviet air power working in close conjunction with its armies. For significant amounts of material effectively to reach the right hands would require an unbroken succession of favorable events, marvels of meshing time, sluggish Soviet response and inept execution, plus an extraordinary mutual forbearance in the employment of nuclear weapons, this last being at odds with the premise that only by their use can NATO forces compensate for the otherwise overwhelming preponderance of ground forces of the U.S.S.R. and the Communist bloc nations.
Disagreement within the Navy concerning the capabilities, or lack thereof, of certain ASW vehicles and sensors is recognized. In the matter of ASW escort, however, the U. S. Navy’s generally held position (in part formally stated, in part implicit) has been that, while admittedly the individual effectiveness probabilities of various ASW units are quite low, this has long been a fact of life and, as in the past, sufficient numbers of forces can prevail to ensure accomplishment of today’s ASW missions. The validity of this position is profoundly questioned in many quarters; but the vital point—one which ought to provide common ground for contending viewpoints to unite—is that the requisite numbers of ASW escort forces do not now exist nor are we going to have them. The era of abundant, simple, low-cost aircraft and ships, the thousand-fold, familiar escorts of World War II—many of whose obsolete hulls, still floating in lifeless nests of Reserve Fleets,
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Accepting, therefore, that it can no longer be a realistic part of U. S. strategy to plan to deliver large amounts of surface-borne supplies across a hostile Atlantic, it follows that the nation, and hence the Navy, should drop the pretense that it is possible to do so. How the United States informs its allies of this fact, and reorients its political strategy, is, of course, primarily the concern of our civilian leaders. But, for the Navy, it means appropriate modification of its own plans and liberation from the driving requirements for the kind of forces and configurations that such a mission demands. That the foregoing oversimplifies a complex situation is, of course, true, but now we are led directly to the core of the dilemma. For this particular naval mission derives, as do all of them, from the highest levels of the U. S. government and is bound up with treaties and other implicit ties, cultural, traditional, and moral. It can hardly be up to the Navy, so the obvious argument goes, simply to declare unilaterally that it can no longer perform such a mission. Presumably, it has no choice but to continue to press its case, however vainly, to be provided with the forces it deems necessary to perform the tasks that have been laid upon it. This takes a narrow and legalistic view of the responsibilities of naval leadership, however. For the Navy obediently to respond with cheerful affirmative to all commitments that political leadership may too casually take on, or unreasonably prolong, is a travesty on the tradition of civilian control of the Armed Forces. Moreover, it too neatly absolves the military man of responsibility for his considerable influence on the course of events. Simply by going along with the creation of commitments, and certainly by failing to discourage them, the military are perfectly aware that such, circling back to meet them, prove justification for the forces they would like to have in the first place. It is, recognizably, a delicate balance— between the ills of acquiescence and dominance—this matter of how far the military should go to ensure that its judgments are weighed in the formulation of policy. But it can never be less than an essential part i of its mission to educate, to explicate, and to keep alive a rational dialogue by which the wishes of the policymakers and the realities of power, present and future, are kept in plausible alignment.
The logical and indispensable missions which the U. S. Navy can and realistically ought to assume in the future are sea control and projection of naval power. Of 1
Toward a Navy Second to One 47
the two, the latter is the most readily grasped and is, as well, the one that has received far the greatest visibility (having been until recently able to take the former for granted) in repeated demonstration through a quarter century of post-World War II struggle. Its forms, though varying widely, present themselves in a manner that facilitates measure and choice, e.g., how many strikes per day do we want, how much amphibious assault lift, how much presence and for how long? There seems no doubt, on the basis of past performance and benefit, that this capability to exert power swiftly on a distant shore, to measure it, and to disengage it readily, must exist in the U. S. Navy into the indefinite future. In this superlative capability, not yet possessed by the Soviets to any significant degree, the United States has repeatedly found the only reasonable choices it can make in a variety of situations—always complex and usually sudden and surprising—where its will and intentions will be measured primarily by its actions. Just when regard for the Navy appears to have reached some new cyclic low, it is an inherent virtue that keeps working to restore it to fresh esteem.
Less tangible, but not least, among aspects of the projection of naval power, is presence, manifested through port visits of naval forces, or their offshore readiness near areas of interest. It is not to be discounted even in this age—clearly the Soviets do not— wd there can be few naval officers who have not somewhere shown the flag who did not depart with renewed conviction of the unique value of such visits. These arc missions which should also endure as long as the United States has interests beyond its shores; in fact, as U. S. naval forces diminish, and our task forces can no longer be sustained indefinitely in distant areas, it will devolve upon individual ships to convey at least occasional evidence of U. S. goodwill and concern in those places where once we were able to sustain power.
Determination of how much naval power the nation will be able to project, how much presence, what kind and how long sustainable, must come out of dialogue between the Navy and its civilian superiors. A significant capability must be able to reach throughout the Lttoral of the North American continent, the Caribbean, nearer portions of the South American continent and somewhere well out into the mid-Pacific. The capability to maintain indefinitely a major Fleet and five aircraft carriers in the Western Pacific in support of a major conventional war on the edge of the Asian continent, however, will be well beyond the outer limits of our future projection power, given the nation's mood and bank balance.
When we go from projection to sea control, we move from a comparatively well-defined set of ideas to a sliding scale of situations which must always be
defined by time and distance factors, and qualified further by circumstance. The complexity of its definition is evident when we perceive that varying degrees of sea control are an integral part of projection. Sea control is thus not an absolute; and even in the heyday of supreme naval powers it has meant only the ability to assume control of as much of the seas, and for as long as wanted, to get a job done. What is changing for the U. S. Navy in this regard, then, is not its fundamental nature, but the shortening distances to which it can reach out and exert its dominance, and in perception of those conditions that are equally indispensable for realistic definition of sea control, in which the submarine threat may be contained.
For the former case, the numbers of our forces and their logistical factors, how many we can keep on station and for how long—and the spirits of our officers and men, whose tolerance for long and repetitive deployments also has limits—impose their own restraints which we face every day. And these arcs of our naval power, their radii altering fractionally with the particular situation and state of national alarm, increasingly will come up against the expanding areas of challenge which the Soviets find they can afford to maintain. Where they meet will roughly establish where U. S. naval influence ceases to be decisive.
Underlying all premises of the U. S. Navy’s major missions of the future, and threatening alike to all, is the question of the submarine. Earlier the point was made that insufficient numbers of naval escort forces alone would make it impossible to guarantee reasonable delivery of trans-oceanic shipping. It is equally true that neither will the requisite numbers exist for accomplishment of the even broader and more difficult task of offensive ASW, i.e., the seeking out, the detection, the localization, and the killing of submarines as opposed to waiting defensively for the submarine’s initiatives. Offensive ASW also encompasses the ASW problem of ultimate difficulty: the capability to locate and continuously to track for a prolonged period of time— with instant readiness to respond—the ballistic missile submarine prior to the inception of hostilities. And no capability is further from our grasp. Looking then at ASW in its broadest compass, and weighing its objectives in the light of what is reasonably attainable, it is apparent that the one primary ASW goal—both realistic and indispensable—that the U. S. Navy must strive to meet is creation of the forces and the tactics to ensure a degree of survivability that grants naval surface forces a good chance of being able to accomplish their missions. This is an ASW goal that still holds promise, and obviously it will have to be attainable. If not, the usefulness of our surface forces inexorably shrinks to
48 U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, November 1972
the doubtful bluffs of a cold war environment, or to operations against nations possessing neither significant submarine strength nor likely to receive support from those who do.
Inevitably, in consideration of the Navy and its future, at some point we think of the Mediterranean and its bordering lands with whose destinies the Sixth Fleet has come to seem inseparably bound. For within that historic and crucial sea—where present tensions are currently a greater threat to peace than anywhere else in the world—most of the virtues, the paradoxes, and the challenges of U. S. naval power converge. There, both as fact and symbol of the rise of Soviet power, we see the long reign of the U. S. Navy’s supremacy ended.
In some ways, of course, the confrontation—perhaps, more accurately, the friction—of U. S. and Soviet naval power in the Mediterranean has certain elements of theater with unexpressed rules of behavior.and restraint. On a smaller scale, it has something of the ambivalent quality that frequently characterizes the overall nature of the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. In that bowl of a sea, even more cramped when we consider its focal areas of the Ionian and Levantine Basins, a readiness for conflict contends with an air of disbelief. On the one hand, the presence of U. S. naval power unquestionably remains the indispensable stabilizing factor in a fluidly complex and dangerous situation. And yet, on the other, for all the skill and subtlety which the Sixth Fleet may employ in its tactics, and even with its possession of still formidable forces, stringent geographical limitations deny it the mobility that is naval power’s greatest asset. The concentration of Soviet power possible makes it apparent that, in the event of actual hostilities of even limited and conventional nature, the period of major Sixth Fleet effectiveness would probably be at most a few days. Not, it should be added, that the prospect of the life of the Soviet surface forces is any longer. But, simply because its power may be fleeting, it is not therefore to be scorned. On the contrary, it is a special kind of military power, uniquely suited to the flexibility necessary for the exercise of U. S. influence in the world today, and it foretells the probable, and yet paradoxical, truth that the crucial role of the U. S. Navy in the future will not be in any of those imagined scenarios of large-scale war, but in keeping the peace. It is the kind of power that might, for instance, in some sudden and gravely deteriorating mid-East situation- say, in supplementing Israeli air power against Soviet beefed-up Egyptian air—be able to preserve a precarious balance just long enough to permit emergency diplomatic action to check a wider and engulfing war. It is a value for the United States, and for the Free World,
that can hardly be measured, and such questions as the duration of the Sixth Fleet’s life in a shooting war with the Soviet naval forces would recede to insignificance against the larger background of cataclysmic events sure to be taking place elsewhere.
In light of the foregoing discussion, we can begin to see some implications for the types of U. S. Navy forces that should evolve. We start, naturally, by consideration of the aircraft carrier, for over 30 years the backbone of U. S. naval power and, within one hull, being at once the most powerful embodiment of both sea control and projection force. She represents presently, in maximum form, that indispensable amalgam of the airplane and the surface warship without whose close association the latter has no realistic meaning in modern seapower. The aircraft carrier’s dilemma lies, paradoxically, in her very size and value. In present configurations her costs have risen to heights that guarantee that their numbers shall be few. And, being immensely valuable, they represent a great proportion of naval strength in a few hulls, an indivisible concentration of assets at variance with modern tactical concepts which makes it plain that only in dispersal and wide separation of forces can acceptable probabilities of survival be attained. Our carriers are vulnerable, but vulnerability arguments do not significantly alter their value. In the nuclear age, what on the face of earth is not vulnerable? Our cities are ludicrously so, but we do not abandon them. And the importance of our carriers, as of the Navy itself, is primarily in a Cold War and limited conflict, not in nuclear war—if a nuclear exchange is even believable as simply another kind of war instead of a catastrophe which, should it ever take place, will likely render irrelevant all other lesser modes of war.
On balance it would appear then that neither can we afford, nor will it be strategically sound to build more giant carriers as we know them today. Rather we should work towards seeing the idea of the carrier evolve into a smaller, less-costly, and hence potentially more numerous, type of warship whose modest losses in a sea war—if held within sane limits—could be regarded as not-unbearable attrition rather than, as now, when even a single loss means a severe reduction in overall strength. In variations of a smaller carrier, it is not difficult to envision the Navy moving toward creation of a versatile warship, melded of a number of capabilities, which could far better assume many of the roles and the missions that our present escorts and frigates now have nominally, but which, in fact, they cannot perform, since they will have only token amounts of integral air capability. In the presently planned sea control ship, if we let our imaginations
Toward a Navy Second to One 49
roam more broadly and freely, it is apparent that we could move towards not simply a single kind of warship but rather conceive the prototype of what the central, even capital, ship for naval surface forces in coming decades should be. Indeed, the designation "sea control ship” itself probably ought to be abandoned for one that would better convey flexible capabilities, because the ship, by varying her aircraft load, could undertake not only sea control but projection of naval power as well.
Regarding our inventory of generalized surface warships, that broad range of middleweights which run from the smaller escorts to the large frigates, obviously we face considerable reduction in their numbers as the roles for these types are brought into conformity with what they can best perform. A primary ASW mission will, of course, cease to exist. Those ships that remain, to justify their existence, must be made as versatile as possible, not specialized, but individual instruments of power, formidable in themselves, and capable of ranging far to perform a variety of tasks and to establish meaningful presence. If we need models, the Soviets can provide them. Defenders of certain of our newer destroyer types, which are recognizably ill-suited for the missions of war for which they were built, find partial justification in the fact that a number of ships will always be needed to carry out many peripheral missions such as showing the flag. While true enough up to a point, some of our present types represent an extraordinarily expensive means of providing a warship able to do no more than take a ceremonial platform to distant parts. Keeping in mind the total aspects of such visits, and Soviet warship visits to those same ports, there is no avoiding the inevitable comparisons to be made between the impressively armed Soviet warships and those of the United States. To hold that such direct comparisons may not always be valid is to ignore persuasive psychological truths and value judgments to be formed in the eyes of the people of those nations we hope to impress. And if we play down the importance of their relative strengths, expressing the minimum likelihood that they would ever encounter each other in conflict, we come close to wondering why we bothered to incorporate in those types the capability for combat at all.
As for the handful of cruisers that still remain, those handsome anachronisms, with the last of the big guns and the bygone grandeur they still convey in their usual flagship role, they now stand out as expensive luxuries at the price of more needed capabilities. Passing out of existence too before long should be virtually the entire Reserve Fleet, a collection of obsolete metal representing less military potential than a drain upon
our resources in retaining them. Even assuming that we could put them to good use, future conflicts will not grant the time to drag them back to meaningful life and effectiveness.
There are certain specialized surface forces, not glamorous, for whose importance we seldom hear the drums beating, but which nevertheless represent capabilities that we must not give up. Foremost among these is adequate amphibious assault capability. The ability to put land forces ashore swiftly, even though the numbers be not large, has been an asset which has far outweighed the comparatively modest investment in those forces; it will continue to be so as long as an unsettled world goes on providing small fires that are worth putting out. In mine warfare, it would be a repetition of folly to allow our capabilities to atrophy in this old, and potentially still devastating, form of naval warfare. As an obvious minimum, we must guard against the possible closing of our major ports by someone else’s own small investment in mines. And the capability gained in our coastal and riverine warfare in Vietnam should be kept alive both for our own benefit and possibly for other nations who may need to know what we have learned the hard way.
Surveillance capabilities and long-range patrol aviation must remain strong as our naval emphasis continues to shift away from trying to counter all potential enemy activity, both above and below the sea, to the lesser objective of at least knowing about it. Minimizing the probabilities of surprise, the more passive quality of simply being aware, will be the aim. In the combination of advanced surveillance systems and long-range patrol aviation we have the most efficient capability to exert considerable constraint over the otherwise virtually unchecked freedom of the Soviet submarine forces.
When we come to consider the U. S. Submarine Force, alone among a broad seascape of diminishing numbers, we arc looking at an area of naval capability where the case is strongly for growth. Of the desirability of expanded use of the submarine to carry ballistic missiles, there is no doubt. In the combination of the nuclear powered submarine and the missile there is a harmony and a military perfection free of any hobbling compromise. And the likelihood of serious counter to its unique effectiveness as a military system is beyond our vision, dipping below the horizons of the 20th century. Politically, as well as militarily, there is rare unanimity, a wide spectrum of views uniting on the merits of taking all possible nuclear deterrent power to sea. And, keeping in mind that one of the primary objectives of a reduced U. S. naval power must be the countering of Soviet power, it is clear that in the advanced nuclear attack submarine, configured with
50 U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, November 1972
the right weapons, there is the best capability of placing limits on how far the Soviets may presume they can go in exploiting the heady sensations of their newfound power. But the key challenge to the U. S. Navy submariner in the 1970s is neither primarily technical nor tactical nor strategic, but conceptual and managerial; viz, how to grapple successfully with a multiplicity of choices and the specter of high costs so that, with the enormous promise and challenge of the future beckoning, the United States can afford to buy what the submarine has to give.
Another matter, already touched upon, demands careful weighing in deciding the future course of the Navy. For almost every way we approach it, the idea appears solid that the logical roles of the future Navy, except for those of the ballistic missile submarine, are those confined to peacekeeping, cold war, and small, limited wars of conventional nature. Considering as well, in any event, the towering improbability that tactical nuclear weapons would ever be released other than too late for usefulness, it must be asked if they are worth all we go through in the Navy to retain them. In ASW, their potential value appears at first glance attractively large but, on the other hand, we cannot logically imagine ourselves employing them without realizing that the advantages of those weapons would be equally, and more potently, available to the submarine. As for the strategic mission still assigned to our attack carriers, it must be asked how important is retention of that small fraction of our nation’s deterrent capability?
For the cost is very high in terms of weapons development, support systems, security requirements, resources in personnel, and in training, and the continual headache they are to all connected with them. All this takes priority at the expense of readiness for more probable tasks. The Navy must ask itself how much it holds onto these weapons from outmoded reasons of prestige, as opposed to valid need.
In summary outline, we see the Navy abandoning its mission of keeping the sea lanes open for mercantile traffic against major Soviet submarine opposition. We discard, too, as beyond practicability, our aims of nullifying the effectiveness of their ballistic missile submarines. And we keep, as an indispensable minimum, significant ability to project conventional naval power in the form of carriers and amphibious assault capability. Finally, we seek to be able to maintain as much sea control as our reach can give us and to keep in our thinking and our priorities always the creation of the kind of Navy that can most economically counter the Soviet’s rising power upon the seas.
It may appear that this writer has been willing to surrender many of the advantages of seapower too
readily, and without sufficiently considering the consequences. This has not been my intention. Rather I have tried to see the reality of the future and to discern how the Navy may best meet it. It is not a question of wanting or recommending many of these things; it is a matter of seeing that certain things are going to happen and adapting to them as best we can, whether we like it or not. Indeed, the boons that will accrue to the Soviets are only too plain. As Soviet seapower grows, the opportunities for expansion of their influence grows accordingly. Representing not an ascendant ideology, but typifying the muscle of a fine old 19th century aggressive nationalism, they will find in seapower an excellent tool for their ambitions. The Soviet submarine force, with all but unchallenged power to interdict, selectively, any and all of the oceans mercantile traffic, will hold a powerful and flexible trump card in their international maneuvering.
A danger for the United States is that, although its seapower has to be less, it may be permitted to fall so low that we are forced to rely on the old doctrine of massive retaliation. And the trouble with it—or to many, perhaps, its virtue—is, oddly, that for all the talk of credibility, it is in no way credible. In his gut the rational man cannot believe in it. A thousand different provocations, coups, and indignities the United States will endure before, if ever, releasing on earth a major nuclear exchange. Which means that under the awesomely tight umbrella of nuclear deterrent strength, a strength held by the United States in such a grip of restraint that it will never be used except in the case of retaliation for an unequivocal first strike by the other side, Communist nationalism can still continue to probe, to push political subversion, to generate its "wars of liberation,” to pursue "salami' tactics, and to leave the United States grinding its teeth in frustration. And if it all sounds familiar, it should- It was why, after all, that not so very long ago we went through all the reasoning that led us to "flexible and graduated response,” strengthened conventional forces, and an altered philosophy of defense. And, in putting it to a test, we began to discover that as an idea it also contained its own flaws of devastating magnitude.
But the United States will make another grave mistake if, in its dismay at the results of our involvement in Vietnam, it fails to separate and identify the parts of the problem. For a maritime strategy remains one of the pre-eminently valid goals of the United States and obviously it cannot work without a U. S. Navy equal to its requirements. A flexible and graduated response, properly applied, has much good sense still- The trouble on Vietnam was not in the idea of containing Communist nationalism but in how we went
Toward a Navy Second to One 51
about it. The line should not have been drawn on the Asian continent, the instrument should not have been an army.
Yet for all the benefits of a navy, the knowledge of the American people continues to remain oddly thin and askew. One has to smile wryly at the reaction to the 1971 incursion of the Soviet naval force in the Hawaiian Islands. The editorial writers tumbled over themselves to reassure their readers that it was entirely legal and that indeed the Soviets had every right to come and go as they did; they made it all seem very friendly. The underlying significance of the Soviet act was missed and the only aggrieved note was that the Soviet ships had spilled a bit of oil!
In concluding this article, it is useful to note that things forecast are not necessarily all cause for gloom and pessimism. There are possibilities of healthy results. It will become increasingly plain that other nations which value their freedom will see that they must start to pay for it. If the Free World is to prevail, its navies, too, must grow while that of the United States becomes less. Inevitably, Japan must come to the fore as a stabilizing force, not only in the Western Pacific, but also in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. In Burope, and particularly the Mediterranean, the navies of the NATO nations are challenged to assume a more positive and active stance, coalescing into a real force from the aggregation of paper that has too long been its custom. It is ironic that NATO, which has so long publicly focussed upon countering the mass of Soviet ground forces, has found its challenge by the back door upon the seas.
The Navy is forced to be competitive once again. There ought to be stimulus and excitement in the sure knowledge that an unready Navy must change itself. The opportunity is now ours to rethink our naval problem from scratch, to liberate outselves from the Burden of habit and custom, and to recreate our Navy *n plausible relationship to needs and capabilities. And our naval shore establishment, with its tight unions and sluggish empires, should have ample incentive to rouse itself to build the right Navy.
Because it really can become that better Navy we seek. Let us not forget, though, in reckoning our re
sources, that money is never foremost among them; dedicated and talented people are. These are a nation’s truest treasures, always in short supply. Without them, no matter what other resources and priorities a project has behind if, it cannot succeed. And the U. S. Navy, whatever our wishes for it may be, realistically is only going to have a certain, and insufficient, share of people of excellence.
A faith in America is that all things are possible, and indeed they may be—but not all at the same time. Some things always have to go by the board, even as we learned that we could not simultaneously fight a war in Southeast Asia, conquer inflation at home, rebuild our cities, inspire the young, lift up our poor, put men upon the moon, and deliver all the washers and color TVs we crave. In the case of the U. S. Navy, we have seen that we were able to create great air wings for our attack carriers, a superb nuclear submarine force, and a Polaris Navy. But for most of the Navy’s forces, we have not been able to create the right systems, nor train and hold the men to use them in accomplishing their rightful missions. We have limped along, trying to do too much—seeking things beyond us—and have succeeded only in frustrating ourselves and losing a fair measure of the nation’s respect.
In reducing our Navy to smaller size and to attainable missions, within the reasonable grasp of man and materiel, we shall find a key to the pride that men can find only in a worthy organization in whose goals and methods they can believe. If we focus on the reality of what the Navy can do, and not attempt to reach vainly for more, the United States should develop the sort of wisdom it so desperately needs to solve some of its most pressing problems.
A graduate of the U. S. Nava! Academy with the Class of 1947, Captain Smith has served at sea primarily in destroyers, with tours in mine and service craft. His most recent sea tour was in command of the USS Wilkinson (DL-5) from 1966 to 1968. His shore tours of duty have been mostly oriented towards ASW and Research and Development, including assignments with the Key West Test and Evaluation Detachment and the Operational Test and Development Force. Prior to his retirement on 1 July 1971, he was Assistant Chief of Staff* for Analysis on the Staff* of Commander Antisubmarine Warfare Force, U. S. Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He is now President of Pacific Analysis Corporation.
North ‘/2 East
A young officer, fresh from the battleship Navy, was standing his first Officcr-of-thc-Deck underway watch in a minesweeper. During the course of the watch, he ordered the helmsman to "Come right to three-six-five!”
The startled helmsman replied, "But sir, I only have three-hundred-and-sixty!”
—Contributed By Capt. J. W. Purcell, USN
Whereupon the young OOD was heard to mutter, "That’s the trouble with these small ships.”