With missions and technologies growing faster than resources, the naval services must determine their priorities within the overall framework of U.S. defense. One unique strength is their ability to be present overseas with quick-responding, combat-credible forces without regard to politics and sovereignty.
The U.S. military is facing a dilemma born of its own success. Each operation and strategic review since Desert Storm has led us to new requirements for capabilities to make future operations even more successful, precise, and casualty free. Our ultimate goal, as stated in "Joint Vision 2020," is full spectrum dominance, and we continue to pursue this with ever-better technologies and more capable systems, each more costly than the one it replaces. There appear to be no limits to the technological capabilities we can achieve, but there are real limits to our resources. We cannot afford all the capabilities we have declared to be required.
Like other globally dominant powers before us, we are exhausting ourselves. We have created a military requirement that exceeds our defense budget by more than $50 billion per year. The Navy's requirements alone are $10-15 billion per year more than is in our budget. And we often state that our real requirement is a fleet of even larger size, which would make this mismatch even greater. Because of the high priority and ever-increasing costs of maintaining current readiness, the shortfalls always migrate forward in the budget process, to the accounts that buy the next generations of capability: procurement, construction, research, and development. As a result, our equipment and bases are getting progressively older and more expensive to sustain because we cannot afford to recapitalize them at healthy rates. We cannot sustain what we are doing, the way we are doing it.
Spending more money certainly is the easiest answer, and the only one that permits us to avoid hard self-examination of our requirements. But the fact that we already spend as much money on our military as the next ten or more largest militaries in the world combined, or that we spend about twice as much as the combined total of every nation in the world not formally allied to us, makes this a tough sell to the public in peacetime.
It also is hard to explain why a 1.4-million person active-duty military is overextended when less than 10% of its people are on overseas contingency operations, and only a small fraction of its combat force was needed to win the real wars we have fought recently. The Navy, which has the peacetime deployment business down pretty solidly, usually can sustain only one of every five U.S. homeported ships on station forward deployed over the long haul within the operating tempo goals that ensure equipment serviceability and sailor quality of life. We do not appear to be very efficient at putting enough of the right capability on the point of the spear. Our claims of shortfalls ring somewhat hollow in the face of this, and as the overall federal deficit situation worsens, there will be great pressure to limit defense spending.
The Dilemma
Driven by the competition of the stream of strategic reviews since 1990, each service has expanded its congressionally assigned missions while yielding none voluntarily. Each has self-defined an expensive set of force postures, policies, and concepts of operations to meet these missions, and has thereby created a set of capability requirements it cannot afford. For the naval services, this has left us unable to invest adequately in the technologies needed to transform and meet important future warfighting demands of asymmetric threats. The Defense Department is unlikely to get the money to let all the services buy their way out of their dilemmas, or to shift enough money to the Department of Navy to let us get well at others' expense. It is therefore our problem to solve, internally. It will be neither easy nor comfortable.
The Navy's core assigned mission from Title 10, U.S. Code, is to "conduct prompt and sustained combat operations at sea." We have expanded it, for good reasons, to include projecting defensive power and offensive strike and land-combat power deep inland from the sea. Neither the Army nor Air Force have agreed to relinquish targets, mission share, or resources to us merely because we have declared an expanded domain. Neither the Secretary of Defense nor the Joint Staff has intervened to settle this by disapproving the mission growth or by shifting resources to us to sustain our vision. We have simply added to our list of required capabilities, removed none, and spread our resources thinner.
The naval services' posture is one of immediately employable rotational forward deployment. The inexorable time-distance relationship of things that travel on the ocean means that the naval forces that count most (the ones that are available early) are the ones that already are forward deployed. Conversely, it means that the majority of our forces, those not forward deployed, are unlikely to make it to the sudden and short military operations that many predict will characterize our future.
The Navy's personnel tempo policy and practice of maintaining permanent crew-ship relationships lead to a requirement to have five or more expensive ships and crews in inventory to keep one full-time on station overseas. Interestingly enough, the naval aviation community has moved beyond such permanent unit-equipment relationships. And our policy of holding service manpower levels constant in recent years has meant that expensive automation and outsourcing manpower savings have been used to fill other, long-unmet manpower desires rather than to reduce our demand for the rarest and most expensive of all Navy resources, the high-quality volunteer sailor.
Our concept of operations is to deliver naval capabilities using ever-larger, manned multimission ships and aircraft, whose combat loss is unacceptable. Network-centric operations and similar new warfighting concepts mostly do not change this underlying principle; they just make a force made up of such units more effective. As the number of missions we expect our forces to perform and the sophistication (if not numbers) of the threats they face both have increased, the overall capability and acquisition cost of our platforms have gone up steadily and the numbers we can afford has gone down. Because of the realities of time-distance, numbers still matter, no matter how capable the units become, and the decline in numbers has left us with too few units to be all the places that we want to be simultaneously overseas.
The Realities
With each budget cycle, many of our core requirements go unmet, with pleas for more resources. As leadership personalities change, the choice of which requirements are to be unmet also changes. This contributes to overall program instability and further increases the acquisition cost of our systems. The situation is the same within all the services, and the cross-service elbowing for new missions or new shares of current missions compounds the problem. Perhaps we should step back and look to some basic realities of physics and system design to help us determine what the priorities ought to be for the naval services within the overall framework of U.S. defense. With these priorities in mind, it might be easier to decide what requirements and systems ought to get the naval services' always-limited resources.
- Time-Distance. The naval services' unique value is their ability to be present overseas with quick-responding combat-credible forces that are available for use every day, without regard to politics and sovereignty. Those missions that must be done in the first hours or days of a crisis, or missions that require sovereign in-theater basing to accomplish, are our strength. If a mission can be done by someone else and needs to be (or can be) done later, by out-of-theater forces, perhaps someone else should do it.
- Basing. An always-moving, heavily defended, sovereign, tactical, in-theater operating base always will be more usable and survivable than one that is stationary or on someone else's territory. Only the naval services have mobile or sovereign bases overseas; our forces that operate from them are our strength, and the ability to use and defend them is a core mission. Forces that require fixed or slowly relocatable (expeditionary) bases on other people's territory, or close concentration of formations in the littorals, are likely to be of decreasing value as antiaccess threats and limitations on our use of overseas bases increase.
- Heavy Missions. Missions that use high-energy sensors and/or long-range or large volumes of munitions (e.g., ballistic missile defense, airborne early warning, hardened-target strike, and fire support for large land formations) require large, expensive platforms to carry their heavy payloads. We should be mindful of the cost implications when embracing new missions of this type, and in setting the number we commit to do. There are many things that networking will make better, but it will be a long time before small platforms with limited-size payloads will meet the requirements of heavy missions.
- Delivery Cost. Any military mission that requires large volumes of fuel, ordnance, and other logistics ultimately will require sealift to sustain—even if airlift gets the force to the fight initially. The Navy must be able to get this sealift there safely. And fights that go beyond a few days or that require prompt, persistent surveillance and kill capability ultimately will require in-theater basing for reusable (not necessarily manned) air vehicles. Barrages of long-range missiles will remain a more expensive, and in many cases ineffective or unsustainable, means of supporting such fights.
- Stealth. Stealth is many times more expensive than counterstealth, except perhaps in the undersea realm, and like all technological advances, its advantages are perishable. If we significantly compromise mission performance or pay excessive prices to achieve platform stealth, or discard other defensive capabilities on the assumption that stealth will be effective alone or forever, we will regret it once our adversaries reach where we are today in signal-processing technology.
- Manning. The sailor is increasingly the most expensive part of any manned weapon system over its life cycle. It is in our interest for affordability (among many other reasons) to push technology to achieve better capabilities with minimally manned or unmanned systems, and to gradually reduce the number of sailors needed in the Navy.
A Path Ahead
When we face the facts of finance and the implications of technology trends, it is clear that many of the new requirements we are pursuing or old ones we are perpetuating need to be reexamined. A naval force with every possible capability, all poorly funded, could be less effective than one with only the right capabilities, well funded, that depends on other elements of the joint force to fill in the gaps. The difficulty, of course, is figuring out which are the right naval capabilities, having the strength of purpose to give up the rest, and overcoming the reluctance to rely on another service for a capability vital to our own operations.
It always is difficult in the Pentagon environment to make hard choices in the near term. Generally, the "out years" are projected to bring the higher budgets needed to avoid hard choices today, and procurement unit costs are projected to remain at or below current estimates. Both projections usually are wrong, and this results in fiscal shortfalls and crises in the years of budget execution. After years of this cycle, hard decisions about what capabilities and forces must stay and which may go no longer can be deferred. And current Defense Department leaders seem inclined to make these decisions for the services if the services are unwilling to do so for themselves. The path ahead for the U.S. military, and the role of naval forces within that military, lies on the other side of answers to some very uncomfortable questions, such as:
- Should the Navy take on high-volume surface ship fire support for the Army or for large formations of Marines if this requirement does not occur until the point of a campaign when joint air power with far greater firepower capacity is available?
- Should the Navy proliferate expensive, heavy ballistic missile defense capability to large numbers of ships, to defend many places simultaneously with a thin screen, or concentrate it on a few ships with large magazines to defend a few places more completely and let the other services handle the rest once they arrive?
- If we limit the demand for land fire support and ballistic missile defense, can we shrink our surface combatants while retaining their capability to do the core maritime missions of the Navy, perhaps with more effective use of networking? Or should more of these maritime missions be done by unmanned vehicles operating from mother ships that remain of significant size to carry them?
- Should the Marines continue to operate tactical fighter aviation ashore, requiring significant logistic footprints? Or could naval aviation be consolidated from amphibious ships and shore bases to fill the already acquired but underutilized deck capacity of current aircraft carriers and expand the air wing's close air support role? Will significant Marine forces ever be committed ashore in a place where the carriers are not, or where they dare not remain?
- If the naval services increase the amount of sea-based tactical aviation-shown to be of powerful utility in Operation Enduring Freedom-does the nation need as much land-based tactical aviation? Should the Air Force then shift emphasis and resources away from super-stealthy fighters and close air support and toward what they do near-uniquely, such as space systems, long-range airlift and bombing, and land-based tanking and surveillance? If the Air Force does this, can the naval services forgo land-based fixed-wing aircraft other than for sea control?
- Should the Navy proceed more rapidly toward incorporating unmanned tactical combat aviation into carrier operations and toward broader use of long-range off-board (UAV- or space-based, not necessarily Navy) airborne early warning and target acquisition systems? If we do, can we reduce the size of carriers, and perhaps increase their numbers, without loss of total joint capability?
- Should the naval services shift resources and emphasis away from the lift requirements of a rare mass amphibious assault and toward the capability to sea-base Marine operations from enhanced maritime prepositioning forces and the ever useful amphibious ready groups? If the Marines do this, does the Army need to continue toward establishing a similar U.S.-based force and seeking more airlift and ever-faster sealift to speed it to where the Marines already are prepositioned?
- If the Navy will not have the funds to build the nuclear submarines its current structure goals require over the next 20 years, should the subs it does build be made more aggressively into mother ships for unmanned undersea vehicles to extend their reach?
- Can the Navy change its organization and culture (and ship designs) to keep a greater fraction of an inevitably smaller fleet forward deployed, by rotational crewing and by use of technology to reduce crew size? Can we then get matching patterns of efficiency with ship-embarked units such as carrier air wings and Marine expeditionary units? Can we keep more of those ships that are not deployed at a readiness state sufficiently high to be employed at homeland defense?
These are some of the seldom-confronted questions the Navy and Marine Corps should focus their internal program assessment and planning efforts to address. Taken to their logical conclusion, the answers probably would lead to a smaller Navy and Marine Corps; a Navy with a greater fraction of its ships (but not its people) forward deployed; a Navy with smaller ships and far more unmanned vehicles; and a Marine Corps focused more on expeditionary operations and less on amphibious assault, and whose fixed-wing air support comes primarily from carriers. Such changes, while uncomfortable, would provide a naval service whose remaining requirements would more closely match realistic resource levels, and whose capabilities would be better shaped to the things that only naval services can contribute to the U.S. joint force.
If we do not challenge and shed some of our too-numerous new and legacy requirements, we will leave to our successors a crippled force, spread too thin over too many priorities. Or we will have others tell us what the affordable answer must be. Neither is in our interests, or in our tradition. It is time to be uncomfortable for a while and let our "transformation" begin from within.