The Navy's Dilemma

The Navy does not have enough money to do everything it knows it should do: support the existing forward-deployed force, finance research into likely valuable future technologies, recruit and train personnel suited to a high-technology military world, and modernize. Yet the new administration seems convinced that the Navy, though dancing as fast as it can, isn't dancing to the right tune. No enemy of the Navy, it nonetheless is frustrated with the current service policy. Why?

First, it is important to understand why Andrew Marshall, charged now by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with assessing the state of the nation's defense programs, has been critical of the Navy. Mr. Marshall, the director of the Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, is concerned that the service is not using the first two decades of the new century to experiment with new technologies and forces. The Navy's response to Mr. Marshall's criticisms must be bewilderment. Didn't its leaders press for experiments and also endorse the so-called revolution in military affairs in the 1990s? What more can the Navy do? How can it be criticized for overlooking opportunities to adopt new technologies and tactics?

Some history will make the problem facing the Navy clearer. In its authorizations and appropriations of June and July 1940, Congress paved the way for the greatest navy the world had ever seen. It granted the Navy permission and resources to construct ten new large carriers, seven battleships (five of which were too broad to fit through the Panama Canal), and a host of cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and auxiliaries. By 1945, the Navy expected to field a force of 17 new battleships and 14 large aircraft carriers. Instead, it had only 10 new battleships at the end of 1945 but 22 new Essex (CV-9)-class fleet carriers. And there would have been 26 Essex-class carriers if two had not been canceled at war's end and two others decommissioned because of combat damage. Two new, very large Midway (CV-41)-class carriers also had been commissioned, and another was nearing completion. In addition, the Navy had commissioned 9 fast light carriers and built 86 escort carriers during the war—9 more light carriers and 81 more escort carriers than had been planned in 1940.

Carrier aviation exploded during the war. Carrier aircraft became the Navy's dominant striking force. What happened? Why did the admirals in 1940 tell Congress they needed more battleships than carriers? The answer is that the carrier, known to be extremely vulnerable to attack by an enemy aircraft in 1940, became, by fall 1943, a mobile and deadly strike weapon. Linked first to at-sea refueling and later to underway replenishment, carrier task forces took the initiative away from Japan's Imperial Navy and then sliced through Japanese land-based air forces to penetrate to Japan's very doorstep.

How did this happen? Effective radar, coupled with innovations in communications and shipboard command and control, allowed a carrier to defend herself against the air attacks of land-based and carrier-based enemy aircraft. The change in the composition of carrier air groups shows this clearly. In 1940, when carriers lacked radar and the ability to coordinate their own defending fighters, three-fourths of a carrier's air group was composed of attack aircraft. Carriers had an awesome punch, but they also had glass jaws. Exercises had suggested that, like the Imperial Japanese Navy's carriers at Midway in 1942, U.S. Navy carriers would have one shot at their opponents and then—if they missed—would be knocked out by the opponent's response. Carrier battles would be quick and deadly, leaving surface ships and submarines to carry on the struggle or retreat.

By 1945, strike aircraft composed only one-fourth of a carrier's air group. The need was to wipe Japanese suicide aircraft from the skies, and carrier combat direction centers were capable of monitoring and coordinating many dozens of aircraft simultaneously. The carrier and her air group had changed from a vulnerable target to a veritable buzz saw.

Before the war the Navy laid down a foundation that could take advantage of this unanticipated change. There were yards to build new carriers, an adequate carrier design (the Essex), new aircraft with more powerful engines, effective training programs for pilots and the personnel who kept the planes in the air, and an electronics industry that could mass produce radars and radios. Andrew Marshall, however, knows there also was something else: an organization that fostered and encouraged innovation in the field of naval aviation generally and carrier aviation in particular. Even before 1940, the Navy had aviation-qualified officers capable of tapping the industrial and technological strengths of the United States. These officers understood the potential and the weaknesses of America's aviation industry, and some of them had been among the first aviation pioneers—both as pilots and as engineers. Marshall worries that today's Navy isn't fostering a new generation of officers who are in the center of the technological innovations that will shape future warfare.

There is something else on Andrew Marshall's mind. In 1853, the U.S. Navy "opened" Japan to contact and trade with the nations of Europe and the Americas. At that time, Japan was a feudal society by choice. Its leaders deliberately had rejected or suppressed innovations that might threaten its dominant culture and the social order associated with it. Yet Japan soon pursued an intense, sometimes brutal, policy of industrialization. Its leaders abandoned a traditional way of life and forced change on their fellows—a change so rapid that, by 1905, Japan's Imperial Navy soundly defeated its Russian opponent. Put another way, Japan progressed from swords and sailing ships in 1853 to battleships and torpedoes in 1904. By 1940, Japan's navy was the strongest in the Pacific Ocean and in some forms of combat the finest fighting force of its kind on earth. That's from nothing to world class in 87 years, perhaps three—maybe four—generations. An astounding performance for a land so poor in natural resources.

It is that sort of rapid change that concerns Andrew Marshall. It's not just that it happened in one place. It happened in many places—in nations with different cultures and governments, such as the United States, Japan, Germany, and the Soviet Union. The lesson of such widespread and rapid change is that you can't keep technology out of the hands of societies that work to get it and use it.

The only way to stay ahead of such societies (assuming there is a need to do that) is to innovate constantly. And the only way to innovate is to encourage and support experimentation and the organizations that make experimentation possible. Indeed, it would seem Mr. Marshall would agree that it is worth sacrificing readiness to invest in innovation. Innovation will pay off in the long run, especially against the most serious enemies that a nation such as the United States will face. Marshall's beef against the Navy today is that it is not investing enough in real innovation. Instead, it is improving existing technology. Serious investment in really new concepts just costs too much money, given the need to sustain the forward-deployed carrier force.

If this is so obvious, why isn't the Navy doing something about it? There are two reasons. The first relates to something that mattered in 1940. Why did Japan go to war with a nation whose economy was ten times as large? In 1945, the military forces of the United States were starving Japan's population and burning down its cities, one after the next. It was systematic, calculated destruction. Why hadn't Japan's leaders foreseen this inevitable outcome in an age of industrialized warfare? The answer is that too many of Japan's leaders in 1940 and 1941 had not seen firsthand the industrial might of the United States. Even the U.S. fleet, which their navy would soon take on in an epic struggle, was a stranger to them. Would the Japanese have been so eager for war if they had seen more of the U.S. Navy? Would the whole world have benefited from a U.S. Navy that deployed in strength in the face of its country's possible enemies?

The trade-off isn't just between deploying (or readiness) and innovation (or experimentation). It also is between deterring a potential opponent and investing in the future. A benefit of the U.S. Navy's policy of deploying its forces forward is that other governments see that the Navy can sit on their doorsteps, confident that it can act to influence events. This isn't about "shaping," the current term in favor. It is about a form of education that alerts leaders of other nations or organizations to the capability of U.S. forces (and not just naval forces). It does no one any good if the great technological and industrial potential of the United States remains distant and vague. Yet to place the products of that potential on the doorsteps of other nations to "educate" their leaders costs great sums.

The second reason the U.S. Navy isn't conducting the experiments that Andrew Marshall believes are essential to military innovation (and military strength) is the commanders-in-chief in the field—the CinCs with regional responsibilities. They have no choice, it seems, but to be peacekeepers and peace enforcers. As a consequence, they must be able to employ ready forces that are in their areas or that can be sent to them quickly. The CinCs want—and can always use—forward-deployed naval forces.

How can the Navy experiment as it did in the 1920s and 1930s unless it does what that distant Navy did—slash readiness? And if it sacrifices readiness, how can its forces support the regional CinCs and show potential opponents that U.S. armed forces field modern technology that they should avoid challenging? The Navy did experiment and innovate successfully in fields such as carrier aviation before World War II, but that work was to some degree wasted because the leaders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan did not recognize what the United States could—and with the help of its allies, did—do in the event of war: destroy them both. One of the Navy's jobs is to demonstrate its capability, again and again, in port after port, so that others have an accurate idea of what U.S. military forces can do. This saves the world from some unpleasant surprises.

Andrew Marshall and the Navy need to combine forces. They know the issues, and they know that, absent an unlikely major increase in funding for the Navy and the Air Force, there is no way to resolve them all. So they need to spend their time being clever instead of piling up bulwarks of computer bytes behind which they accuse their opposite numbers of being stubborn or captives of technological fads. The enemy is not the other tribe in the Pentagon.