The State of the Navy

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Each year, the Chief of Naval Operations delivers his posture statement to Congress, and that message has been a uniformly gloomy one in recent years. The Navy is stretched thin now, and if present trends continue, the Soviet Navy will be superior to ours by the mid-80s. Somehow, this ominous message does not seem, to be getting across to Congress or the people.

On 3 1 January 1980, the Chief of Naval Opera­tions, Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, appeared before the House Armed Services Committee to appraise the current state and future prospects of the U. S. Navy- His testimony, reprinted in A Report of the FY81 Military Posture and FY81 Budget of the U. S. Navy, should be required reading for all naval officers.¹

Admiral Hayward told the House committee that ours is the best navy in the world. He cited our ex­cellent air and submarine forces, the ongoing mod­ernization of our surface force, improvements in combat readiness, and the skill and dedication of our people. But he pointed out that the Navy “is stretched thinner than at any time since the late 1940’s,” and he expressed concern about our ability to meet growing worldwide commitments if force levels continue to decline and if we cannot retain enough experienced officers and petty officers to man our ships and squadrons.

Admiral Hayward also noted an ominous trend in the U. S.-Soviet naval balance. The Soviet Navy, al­ready larger than ours by more than 3 to 1 overall, is increasing its lead, expanding its operating radius, and improving its staying power. It has several new classes of large and capable cruisers, amphibious as­sault ships, and submarines (including the titanium­hulled “Alfa” class) under construction. Introduction of the “Backfire” bomber, soon to be equipped with air-launched cruise missiles, has significantly ex­tended the reach of Soviet land-based naval air; de­ployment of a second Kiev-class carrier and construc­tion of others in that class indicate that the Soviets value and are acquiring the flexibility of a sea-based tactical air capability. At the same time, a new class of modern replenishment ships and expanded access to overseas port facilities have improved the Soviet Navy’s capacity for sustained operations. Reflecting both this growing capacity and an expansionist naval

’Adm. Thomas B. Hayward, USN, CNO Report: The Fiscal Year 1981 Military Posture and Fiscal Year 1981 Budget of the United States Navy (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1980).

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^poI‘cy, Soviet out-of-area ship deployments now ex­^Ceed our own.

testimony before Congress in the early 1970s, a ^rmer CNO, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, warned that trend of increasing Soviet versus U. S. force ^evels and capabilities threatened our naval preemi­^nence. His warning was taken up and repeated by his successors. Last year, in his fiscal year 1980 posture statement, Admiral Hayward stated, “. . . we can Project a point in the not-too-distant future when the ^trend lines will cross, and we will lose our margin of superiority to [the] Soviet Navy. ...” Admiral ^ayward went on to suggest that the “not-too- ^dlstant future” is the mid-1980s.

In the interim, the CNO asserted, we have a slight u^rgin of advantage over the Soviet Navy. We have ^ewer ships, submarines, planes, and sailors than the °^viets, but our capabilities are about equal when ^0rce levels and mix are adjusted for differences in JU'ssions and functions. Our margin accrues in sea- ased tactical air systems; in superior submarine, ^antisubrnarine warfare (ASW), and amphibious forces; 'u our staying power; in advanced technology; and in ^{c e} quality of our people.

. ^h*s margin should be comforting, but somehow U *s not. Except for sea-based tactical air (the Soviets ^ave only experimental vertical/short takeoff and ^anding planes [v/STOLs] operating from their two tw-class “carriers”), our margin is qualitative. Cer- ^ta‘uly quality is not to be discounted; the history of Warfare teaches us that it can count for more than Quantity. But quality is subjective, and the measure of ^tI^)e U. S. Navy’s quality is largely our own. No matter how hard we try to prevent it, our evaluation is bound ^t0 be biased.

A case in point is our comparative ranking of the American and Soviet sailors. We give ours high marks: he is well-educated, highly motivated, com­petent, and hard working. Admiral Hayward consid­ers him “one of our major advantages over the Soviets.” In our eyes, the Soviet sailor is the archetypical Russian: apathetic, fatalistic, culturally backward, and lacking in imagination or initiative.² But are these objective assessments or the value judgments of our democratic Western society? To his officers, the Soviet sailor is not apathetic, but obe­dient; not fatalistic, but inclined to heroic self­sacrifice. His cultural backwardness frees him from capitalist decadence, and his plodding is persistence and single-minded determination. Add to these at­tributes great physical and mental stamina (those Russian winters!) and intense patriotism, and the Soviet sailor looks like a formidable fighting man. He is no less a product of his society than is the American sailor, and in his highly structured, cen­tralized navy, under the close supervision of his commanders, he is every bit as effective. The point is that when we size up the relative strengths of the Soviet and U. S. navies, we must be careful to com­pare capabilities, not ideologies.

We must also be careful not to overrate our more sophisticated technology. We may have occasional doubts, as evidenced by the current debate over commercial nuclear power, but deep down, Ameri­cans trust technology. We grow up with it, forget- ing that it is a double-edged sword. Planes that fly higher, submarines that dive deeper, and weapons that are “smarter” are also more complex and costly. Their costliness means there must be fewer of them; their complexity means they are more difficult to op­erate and maintain. For the sake of a performance edge, we forgo simplicity, flexibility, redundancy,

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²See Capt. W. H. J. Manthorpe, Jr., USN, “The Influence of Being Russian on the Officers and Men of the Soviet Navy,’’ Proceedings. May 1978, pp. 128-143; and Capt. James Kehoe, USN, "Naval Officers: Ours and Theirs,’’ Proceedings, February 1978, pp. 50-60.

and survivability. We compound our training prob­lem, create a dangerous dependence on civilian con­tract maintenance, and increase our ties to the repair depot ashore.

Perhaps the strongest argument against basing our margin of advantage on technology is that the technological lead is volatile and difficult—not to mention expensive—to sustain. Major breakthroughs in acoustics and the ocean sciences may still be possi­ble, but the cornerstone of our combat capabilities, electronics, is a relatively mature technology. Greater potential for increased capabilities now lies in the physical integration and tactical cooperation of our sensor and weapon systems rather than in exotic new hardware. We respect the Soviet Navy’s expertise in electronic warfare; what makes the Soviets so good is not technological superiority but their skill in coor­dinating and exploiting their collection opportuni­ties, plus the fact that a greater proportion of their ships is equipped with active electronic countermea­sures (ECM) equipment.

So our margin of advantage is, in part, qualitative and subjective. But it has a far more troubling as­pect: it is scenario-dependent, varying with the scale and type of conflict. For example, we have in our carrier battle groups a proven capability to project power ashore in contingencies short of general war. But, as Admiral Hayward points out, we have until now rarely had to deal with more than one crisis at a time. Confronted with simultaneous crises in several geographic theaters over the past year, we are, Ad­miral Hayward notes, “trying to meet a three ocean requirement with a one-and-a-half ocean navy.” The outlook, in the near term at least, is for continued geopolitical instability and heightened worldwide tensions. In this changed international environment, numbers of ships become as important as, or perhaps more important than, individual ship capabilities.

Military planners expect that any conflict with the Soviet Union will be worldwide. In fact, the U. S. Navy’s force structure and strategy of forward de­ployment are predicated on a global war. Certainly such a conflict would be protracted and difficult, but this is the “worst case” scenario for which we plan and train, and for which we are, by our experience in World War II, better prepared. Our qualitative margin of superiority just might hold up over a nu­merically superior Soviet Navy that is also stretched geographically. Then our sea-based tactical air sys­tems and staying power could be decisive. But there is another conflict which would pit our Navy against the Soviets’, and in which we would have grave dif­ficulties bringing our qualitative margin to bear. This is precisely the conflict many planners think is most likely: war on NATO’s central front.

Soviet intentions have been the object of exhaust­ive analysis and endless conjecture, much of it obtuse and highly classified. But with the publication of General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War: August 1985, laymen have been admitted to NATO’s councils of war.³ The Third World War traces the buildup of a political crisis in Yugoslavia following Marshal Tito’s death. At the invitation of Yugoslav Communist partisans, Soviet forces invade that coun­try. NATO counterattacks, and there follows the rapid, inexorable escalation to global nuclear war. Most planners share Sir John’s hypothesis that World War III is inevitable, and many are questioning the Navy’s traditional wartime role—or whether we need a navy at all.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the planners have more often been wrong than right. In every era, they have consistently overrated their own ability to end war quickly and have underestimated their enemies’ capacity to continue it. French elan was interred in the trenches of the western front, German blitzkrieg mired in the Russian mud, and America’s light at the end of the Vietnamese tunnel flickered and finally went out. Yet today’s planners persist in their predictions that the next conflict will be brief and decisive. It seems not to have occurred to them that nuclear deterrence might work after all. Cer­tainly, if in accordance with its current, explicit pol­icy, NATO uses its tactical nuclear weapons, the Warsaw Pact nations will retaliate in kind. But the Soviet Union might refrain from widening the nu­clear exchange so long as there exists at least an/ im­plicit understanding that the United States will as well. The Soviets’ motives, as they contemplate the nuclear holocaust and wanton destruction of cities and populations, may not be very different from our own. Or they may simply conclude that they can

³John Hackett, The Third World War: August 1985 (New York: Macmil­lan and Co., 1979).

to seek out and destroy the enemy weakens.

The same can be said for the doctrine of favorable attrition, the principle that commanders should en­gage only if the odds are favorable. Admiral Hay­ward argues that . . with our numerically inferior forces, achievement of favorable attrition ratios offer the only prospect of progressively defeating the Soviet Navy.” But will our commanders always be allowed to choose the time and place? The wider strategy of the conflict, or the exigencies of war, may demand that we undertake operations of great risk. That was the situation that led to the Battle of Mid­way, a turning point of the war in the Pacific. It was the clearly superior Japanese fleet that carried the battle to the U. S. forces. Admiral Chester Nimitz scraped together what forces he could find to contest the Japanese landings, not with any prospect of vic­tory or even of achieving favorable attrition ratios, but because Japanese expansion in the Pacific had to be stopped. Our victory resulted not from adherence to strategic doctrine, but from our knowledge of Japanese intentions (we had broken their code) and the fortuitous timing of the USS Enterprise's (CV-6) air strikes. The doctrine of favorable attrition ratios seems inconsistent with the fundamental principles of an aggressive, offensive naval strategy. We cannot carry the war to the Soviet Navy and threaten that there will be no sanctuaries for its forces if we intend to seek them out only when the terms suit us.

If we are to slip out of the strategic straitjacket of favorable attrition ratios, we must reverse the last decade’s trend of declining force levels, regain nu­merical superiority, and reassert our willingness to risk our forces in decisive battle. If we heed the les­sons of history, we will reject the proposition that we can fight with what we have. We will increase the ready reserve and begin to build the broad industrial base (including a mix of private and naval shipyards) required for the rapid modernization, repair, and construction of ships and naval aircraft. We also need a larger Navy if we are to continue in our role as principal guarantor of U. S. interests abroad. In his military posture statement, Admiral Hayward sum­marized the problem this way: “Geography requires numbers.” While our navy has grown smaller, the number of trouble spots has increased. This has forced us to draw down forces in other vital areas in order to respond to any new crisis. The expanded worldwide presence of the Soviet Navy, and its new­found willingness to counter our deployments, have further stretched our inadequate numbers.

The fiscal year 1981 budget is a tentative first step toward the larger Navy we need. It proposes a mod­est increase in new ship procurements—17 versus the 12 requested in FY 1980—but buys 23 fewer aircraft. However, this rate of new ship construction is just enough to sustain current force levels, while combatant ship strength will actually decline. Simi­larly, the planned procurement of attack aircraft will not replace losses caused by attrition and retirements. Not until the last two years (fiscal years 1984-1985) of the current Five-Year Defense Plan will our force levels begin to increase, and then only if Congress votes the funds to follow through on the plan. Ad­miral Hayward is not optimistic that it will, noting, “The historical track record is not good in that re­gard.” Even if we complete the program, our Navy will number only about 550 ships by 1990. That is nearly 100 ships larger than today’s Navy but still one third the size of the Soviets’. Through the next decade, then, we will maintain a small Navy and trust to the quality and capabilities of our people and weapon systems for a margin of superiority. Given the subjective, situational nature of our qualitative margin, we must recognize that our naval supremacy is at risk.

What should be done? First, we must look to our allies to provide a larger share of the free world’s de­fense; specifically, we should ask them to increase the number and offensive capabilities of their conven­tional naval forces. Over the past year, U. S. national interests have been shifting away from Europe and toward Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean. We are realigning our forces and deploy­ments accordingly. Now we must let our NATO allies and Japan know that we will do less and they must do more in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. We have long given lip service to this intent, so our al­lies have had time to accommodate themselves to it. For a number of mostly selfish but still excellent rea­sons (not the least of which is the respite it would bring our hard-pressed personnel), we should begin to cut back on our traditional commitments.

Second, we must face up to the fact that the all­volunteer force (AVF) does not provide the numbers or the skills needed to man our Navy. Whether the