Preface

Preface

once they have been recruited.”

The draft, he says, “might ease the recruiting problem but it would not improve the quality of recruits—it would not magically produce recruits who can read any better than today’s recruits, nor would the draft improve the motivation and work-ethic of this essentially unsettled age group. A return to the draft would reopen social wounds which have now healed; would not save money unless pay scales were to be drastically reduced, which is an unlikely possibility; and would reduce much of the incentive leaders now have to improve the conditions of military service.”

That incentive seems not to have been notably effective, with the result that “years and years of doing more with less in the guise of improved efficiency has long passed the point of efficient operation and has produced, instead, a potentially and dangerously fragile manpower base.”

Plainly, the need for people and what to do about it is a highly controversial issue in the Pentagon this spring.

Another much-discussed issue has to do with “powered-lift” aircraft, of which one type is VSTOL.

“Powered lift” is a term used by R. James Woolsey, the Under Secretary of the Navy, in “The Central Issues of Sea-based Aviation.” He uses it, in part, "because the VSTOL debate has, in the past, often centered around enthusiasm or lack thereof for very specific types of aircraft . . . (and) there is some utility in broadening the normal debate.” He points out that if aircraft "could be based on smaller ships, this would help make it easier for us to introduce flexibility into the fleet in the same way it has been introduced into the carrier forces for many years: changing the missions and capabilities of ships by changing the aircraft that are assigned to them. We have already been doing this for several years by putting helicopters on our surface combatants.” Mr. Woolsey is not among those who believe that conventional aircraft are about to be driven off the decks by powered-lift aircraft. But, “for those who think they have the last word on range and payload limitations of such aircraft

... I suggest that in the interest of avoiding self-embarrassment they check out the results of the British work with the ski-jump. It would not be the first time they’ve shown us the way of the future in sea-based aviation.”

More optimistically, a former CNO, Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, writes in “Total Force” that “if it were supported at this time, an effective VSTOL aircraft could be developed as early as 1986.” He shares with the Under Secretary the desire to “disperse our offensive power into many ships, rather than limiting it only to aircraft carriers.” Admiral Zumwalt’s timetable carries a higher degree of urgency than does Mr. Woolsey’s. Indeed, he says, when he was CNO he was anxious to build a 17,000-ton, 25- knot carrier that was “to be the first step in returning to credible sea control.” To be effective in the struggle at sea, Admiral Zumwalt believes, the Navy must have “a large number of effective, smaller ships.”

The current CNO, Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, holds substantially different views on these matters. In “The Future of U. S. Sea Power,” he writes: “we can easily substantiate a requirement for greater numbers of ships but attaining quantity at the expense of quality (which is another name for capability) simply invites the piecemeal defeat of units which are incapable, either individually or collectively, of coping with the threat. Unfortunately, this conclusion runs immediately afoul of the attractive proposition that the future force posture of the U. S. Navy should rely on many more ships, much cheaper and smaller and less capable.”

The U. S. Navy, writes Captain A. L. Larzelere in “Future War and the U. S. Coast Guard,” “has fewer men, fewer ships, and fewer resources of all sorts than it has had for a long time.” Furthermore, “when one looks at the modest number of ships whose construction is begun in any given year, it becomes clear that in war, the Navy would be glad to get all the help it could find.”

The Coast Guard could add about 37,000 officers and enlisted personnel immediately, and a fair number of reservists beyond that. But most of these people are committed to tasks that will remain as important in war as they are in peace; the rest are committed to new tasks that the Coast Guard will have to take on as soon as war begins.

In the meantime, as Commander Brent Baker tells us in his final entry in “Naval and Maritime Events in 1978,” only “90 percent of the total DOD quarterly recruiting objective for October-December 1978 was reached.” It was information of this sort that prompted the Chief of Staff of the U. S. Army, General Bernard W. Rogers, to suggest early this year that a modified draft would be helpful. General Rogers was concerned mainly with his own Service, of course, and, in fact, mainly with its reserve elements. Something else that Commander Baker has to report on the subject of recruiting, however, is of direct concern to the naval services: “Navy and Marine Corps quarterly figures were: 18,400 or 85 percent of objective and 8,200 or 86 percent of objective, respectively.”

Clearly, the number of qualified people now making themselves available to the Navy and Marine Corps is too small to meet the need.

In his examination of this crucial question, “How Will We Man the Fleets?,” Captain Brayton Harris agrees that recruiting is difficult: "the Navy has fallen short of its annual goal by about 5 percent for the past two years and is not doing even that well this year.” However, he points out, “the eventual success of the All Volunteer Force . . . will not be measured by recruiting but by the ability of the Navy to keep people

Further on in his text. Admiral Hayward says that "our primary aim must be to preserve the essential capability of our 12 battle groups and keep them responsive to the threat. The fiscal margin for development and deployment of radically new platforms and systems will be small, indeed, severely limiting our ability to innovate in major ways. This means we must carefully select those initiatives which appear to offer significant pay off—such as non-CTOL aircraft—and pursue them in a deliberate and care-the enemy and deliver a weapon at long range, it is as unreasonable to require all surface antisubmarine warships to attain speeds greater than those of the fastest submarines as it is to require antiaircraft cruisers to be able to steam supersonically.”

Dr. Norman Friedman, whose “Speed in Modern Warships” covers this subject, shares Captain Taylor’s view: “very high tactical speed has always been valuable because it permitted ships to close to deliver their relatively short-ranged weapons, or else to escape the short-range weapons of an enemy.” But now that the range of weapons is long, the need for very high bursts of speed has passed.

“However,” Dr. Friedman goes on, “there is an important range of naval missions in which what matters is placing forces at a given point in short-order—not weapons, but men. ...”

“A 100-knot amphibious force would restore to seaborne forces that advantage over forces moving on land which they enjoyed so effectively in the time of which Mahan wrote. Such forces could be particularly useful in operations around the periphery of the Soviet-held Eurasian land-mass.”

It is of just such operations that Rear Admiral Sayre A. Swartztrauber writes in “The Potential Battle of the Atlantic.” Analyzing the essentials, he reports that “Iceland must be defended. . . . Defense could be conducted by tactical air units and ground forces, marine or army. Speed is the critical element here. The weather and terrain are so forbidding in Iceland that the area would be fairly easily defended by whoever got there first.

“Similarly, NATO must reinforce North Norway, denying it to the Soviets. Like Iceland, terrain there favors the defender. It would be Striking Fleet carriers and marines that would force their way into the Norwegian Sea. ...”

"Since 1492,” Admiral Swarztrauber says, “America’s dear lifelong friend, the Atlantic,” has “probably been the most important of the oceans of the world.” Lieutenant Commander Kenneth R. McGruther does not necessarily agree. As he

writes in “Two Anchors in the Pacific: A Strategy Proposal for the U. S. Pacific Fleet,” because “more than half of all American trade is with Pacific nations, to win in Europe but to lose in the Pacific would be not to win at all.” Further, he asserts that “whatever is happening in other theatres, American naval forces in the Pacific must be firmly committed to go on the offensive upon the outbreak of hostilities. They must not be used as reinforcements elsewhere. ”

Indeed, Lieutenant Commander McGruther, Rear Admiral Swarztrauber, and Admiral Hayward all see a need to employ our forces, and especially our carrier battle groups, offensively against the bases from which the enemy’s war fleets would spring. Admiral Hayward seems to speak for all three when he writes that “projecting power against the sources of Soviet naval strength may well be the most rapid and efficient way to gain control of the seas. ...”

In presenting this issue of Naval Review, the Naval Institute does not pretend to do more than offer tools, with the aim of helping men to add to their knowledge of professionally important and interesting things and, perhaps, to sharpen their own thinking. Those who disagree, in part or in whole, with what is expressed here, explicitly or implicitly, are invited to take issue with our writers. The pages of the Proceedings are open to them.

<0- V, 1^,

Frank Uhlig, Jr.

Editor

fully structured way. ..."

The helicopters which Mr. Woolsey notes we have been flying from our surface combatants for years have become essential for, as Captain William D. Taylor observes in “Surface Warships Against Submarines," in most circumstances “surface ships’ sensors have a reasonable chance of detecting and tracking a submarine, and weapons can then be delivered by aircraft or rocket.” With an aircraft— and there is no better way to ensure the presence of one when needed than to have it on your own deck—the surface ship can “attack over the full area of her power to detect and localize. . . Indeed, “because she has little chance of delivering a surprise attack at short range, the surface ship should always endeavor to attack at maximum range, thus minimizing the danger of counterattack.” The technical and tactical development of long- range sonars and shipborne helicopters were, and are, expensive. One worries whether the small “fiscal margin for development and deployment” that Admiral Hayward foresees as “severely limiting our ability to innovate in major ways” will permit us more such large, doggedly pursued, and ultimately successful programs as these. Certainly, if it doesn’t we shall fall behind, for science moves ahead ruthlessly, relentlessly, and remorselessly. Rapidly, too. Those who do not keep up will be as doomed as the three British armored cruisers that fell victim off the Dutch coast in 1914 to the U-9, as the ships of the American battle line that fell victim in 1941 to the Japanese carrier planes, and as the Israeli destroyer Eilat that fell victim in 1967 to Egypt’s Soviet-built missile boats.

There seems to be general agreement, however, that great advances in the range of our weaponry have made it unnecessary for us to exert great and expensive efforts to increase further the speed of the surface weapon carriers. Captain Taylor puts it this way: "In ASW the primary need for speed in a surface warship is to contain a submarine within range of her sensors and her weapons for a long enough time for her to sink the submarine.” If such ships “have the ability to detect

Preface

7

28 March 1979