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Fifteen years ago, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, stimulated by the Carter administration’s lack of enthusiasm for carriers, hosted a series of high-level meetings and predictably restated the value of sea-based power projection forces in deterring Soviet adventurism. At one session, however, a participant asked how we would justify a robust Department of the Navy (DoN) if the Soviet Union did not exist? No one had a good answer then—and the Navy does not seem to have one today.
Fortunately for fans of maritime forces, there really is a compelling reason: it is to maintain the capability to create and protect a military doormat on the beachfront property of a foreign power. [See the author’s “Littoral Warfare: Back to the Future,” Proceedings, pp. 48-55, November 1990.]
In the joint arena, the DoN still is charged with creating this doormat, to enable the introduction of ground and air combat units heavy enough to prevail against a strong enemy. It would be foolish to predict when the United States next will choose to insert forces where not invited—and just as foolhardy for anyone else to say that it will never happen again. I can say confidently that this capability requires a dedicated architecture that stays abreast of the threat and contains all of the basic elements required for the task, and that displaying the necessary equipment and demonstrating the ability to perform this mission is a prerequisite for credibility.
. . . From the Sea proclaimed a renewed—and encouraging—DoN focus on warfare in the littorals. Navy budget priorities, however, have not kept pace. The top priority is still the ability to strike deep into the enemy heartland, using sea-
based strategic bombers or missiles from a forward location
read presence even though it has yet to be demonstrated that such a conventional capability can influence a hostile political power.
Naval advocates of the strike mission, moreover, would do well to remember that current technology permits Omaha-based bombers to do this job. The U.S. Air Force briefing paper Global Reach-Global Power points out that the United States can generate all required striking power without help from forward- deployed carriers, surface combatants, or subs. As I warned in “Time to Fold’em,” [Proceedings, pp. 37-41, July 1991], the Navy s dedication to strike merely amplifies and validates the mission that served as the basis for creation of the Air Force.
During the past three years, the Department of the Navy has produced impressive rhetoric in support of littoral warfare while doing relatively little to back it up. The most blatant inconsistency was the deactivation of the world’s most effective coastal fire-support system—the Iowa (BB-61)-class battleships—without first putting in place a capability to fill the void.
Simultaneously, the Navy is funding strike systems with such enthusiasm that little money is left to create dedicated fire-support combatants or the systems to protect the fleet as the troops transition from sea to shore. Neither are there funds available to explore the possibility of designing an aircraft that can provide effective aerial fire support for engaged ground forces in the midst of chaos and marginal weather.
The future for man in air warfare lies in close air support (CAS), battle field air interdiction (BAI), and air-to-air combat where the level of confusion will always require on-the-
scene adjustment. Strike is a loser in justifying manned aircraft-
Dedicated fire-support ships and fixed-wing CAS aircraft seem foreign to those with a strike fixation. To mask this discontinuity, planners suggest that strike covers any and all missions. Decision makers are led to believe that funding strike systems covers CAS, BAI, and local air superiority in addition to strategic bombing. Becoming clear, however, is that even where strike is worthwhile, there is declining justification for employing man in the cockpit. The life-cycle cost for manned strike systems and mission support aircraft that must practice continually is three to five times that of unmanned options.
The inconsistency between Navy rhetoric and Navy program funding has led to confusion about the expression “littoral warfare.” Littorals are the strips along the edges of continents that contain most of what is worth fighting over. Their depth inland varies from 20 to 50 to 100 miles. A photographic map of the world pieced together from images taken at local night time is revealing; city lights show where most wealth is concentrated.
But according to Naval Doctrine Publication (NDP)-l, a potentially useful product of the new Navy Doctrine Command, the term littoral as it applies to naval operations “ ... is not restricted to the limited oceanographic definition encompassing the world’s coastal regions. Rather, it includes that portion of the world’s land masses adjacent to the oceans within direct control of and vulnerable to the striking power of sea-based forces.” If one considers the strike radius of a submarine- launched D-5 missile, that striking power covers the world. Ergo, the littoral warfare arena has no boundaries and the DoN is compelled to allocate whatever level of funding is required to pursue this most expensive of all missions.
The cultural pull of the age of nuclear strike persists. It spawned a mind set, language, and concepts that have provided a basis for large expenditures to create a family of air weapons and delivery systems based on effects not demonstrated since 1945. When, during the 1950s and 1960s, aviation’s nuclear war aircraft had to be used to deliver millions of tons of conventional ordnance, the effort again failed to fulfill the promise of the strategic prophets. The returns from the heavy investment in strike continue to be illusive at best. A review of the Gulf War Air Power Survey by Thomas Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen (a case where the Coalition had almost every advantage imaginable) is sobering—its results echo the post-conflict findings for Vietnam, Korea, and the strategic bombing campaign of World War II.
But the doctrine, training, and delivery mode for nuclear strike has ingrained expectations and a pattern of thinking about conventional weapons from which we may be unable to deviate until some future disaster awakes us from our dream and reminds us of the real military value of tactical aviation.
Aviation’s leaders, encouraged by their industrial constituency and supported by myths about aviation’s past contribution to war, are pressing forward into a region of insufficient funding to support misplaced mission requirements. Time is running out for the DoN to bolster the missions that are key to military dominance along the coast lines that will fit within projected budgets, and that will reflect an understanding of the best use of pilots.
Mr. Myers is the president of Aerocounsel, Inc. A pilot in World War II and the Korean War, he was the Department of Defense Deputy Under-Secretary for Tactical Warfare Programs during the development of the F-16, F/A-18, and stealth programs.