On 28 May 1942, in advance of the Battle of Midway, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz wrote to his strike force commander, “You will be governed by the principle of calculated risk, which you shall interpret to mean the avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without prospect of inflicting, as a result of such exposure, greater damage to the enemy.”1 Nimitz was referring to the tactical and operational risk of encountering a superior enemy force without an opportunity to damage the enemy significantly. At the strategic level, this concept guided Nimitz’s decision to commit his three-carrier force to defending Midway Island. Nimitz was weighing the risk to the fleet as a whole in committing three carriers to battle against a potentially superior force.
In the fall of 2017, headlines touted the first U.S. three-carrier strike group assembled in the western Pacific since Exercise Valiant Shield in 2006.2 The large-scale exercise, involving coordinated efforts on the part of three Navy carriers and Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard units, can be seen as having its roots in the task force Nimitz assembled to fight the Imperial Japanese fleet. Modern warships are significantly more capable than their 1942 counterparts, but the tactical coordination involved allows for some comparison with Nimitz’s strategy. In comparing options and opportunities, one must ask: If the Battle of Midway were to be fought in today’s maritime environment, would Nimitz’s strategy work with a modern three-carrier strike force?
THE THEATER AND ITS PLAYERS
The Battle of Midway was fought from 4 to 6 June 1942, almost exactly six months after the decimation of the U.S. battle line at Pearl Harbor. Nimitz, aided by excellent intelligence, boldly committed a significant portion of the Pacific Fleet to counter the Japanese attempt to invade Midway.
At left: Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz observes the combat gear and tactics of 3rd Marine Division with his staff officers during World War II in the Pacific.
The month prior, the United States had lost one of its precious aircraft carriers, the USS Lexington (CV-2), at the Battle of the Coral Sea, and the USS Yorktown (CV-5) limped back to Pearl Harbor severely damaged. After heroic efforts to get her ready for battle were completed, Nimitz sent the Yorktown and Task Force (TF) 16 under Rear Admiral Frank J. Fletcher to join TF 17 with the USS Enterprise (CV-6) and USS Hornet (CV-8) under Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance at Point Luck northeast of Midway. There they prepared to ambush the Japanese four-carrier strike force, the Kidō Butai. On the afternoon of 4 June, aircraft from the three U.S. carriers caught the Japanese carriers rearming and refueling their air groups, and in a matter of minutes destroyed three of the four Japanese carriers, sinking the fourth carrier later that day, but not before the Japanese fatally damaged the Yorktown.
In October and November 2017, Nimitz’s modern-day successor as commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Scott H. Swift, assembled a three-carrier strike group in the western Pacific. The three carriers involved were the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76), the carrier permanently forward deployed to the U.S. Seventh Fleet; the USS Nimitz (CVN-68), returning from a scheduled deployment to the Middle East; and the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71), on the early end of her scheduled deployment. While assembled, the carrier force operated with ships from the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force and the Republic of Korea Navy.3
Although no adversary opposed this modern-day carrier force, the exercise was meant to display how U.S. and allied forces would operate against a resurgent People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA-N) or North Korean aggression. Neither of these potential adversaries currently possesses a credible aircraft carrier threat, but both wield significant sea-denial weapons, and the PLA-N recently has commissioned highly capable surface combatants and is building more, along with a new class of aircraft carrier. The threat posed by these potential adversaries is as significant as the Japanese threat to Nimitz’s force in 1942.
So how do these two strike forces compare? First, consider the number of ships present (see Table 1 on page 34). Each group consisted of three carriers and a mix of cruisers and destroyers. More U.S. ships were present at Midway and, some might say, that was because the United States was at war. But before dismissing the difference in numbers, compare the size of the battle groups relative to the Pacific Fleet at the time (see Table 2 on page 34). The mythology of Midway stresses how Nimitz risked a significant portion of his fleet to surprise the Kidō Butai. That is true of his aircraft carriers, which by this point in the war had proven to be a critical warship type. The Yorktown, Enterprise, and Hornet represented 75 percent of the carriers available in the Pacific and 50 percent of the total U.S. aircraft carrier inventory. Loss of one of these carriers represented a significant blow to the Pacific Fleet’s ability to do battle. But other ships present were not the preponderance of their types. In fact, the 17 destroyers at Midway represented nearly the same portion of the destroyers in the Pacific as today’s nine. When compared to the entire fleet inventory, both Atlantic and Pacific Fleets, the total commitment of forces in Midway and today’s three-carrier strike force is nearly the same.
The ships at Midway also represented the most modern and capable in the U.S. inventory. Nimitz purposely kept older, less capable ships on lower-risk missions near Hawaii or near the West Coast of the United States. While this increased Nimitz’s operational risk in the case of loss, it reduced tactical risk by ensuring the U.S. fleet was best prepared for battle.
AGING OUT OF THE GAME
The Five Party Treaty of 1922 limited naval construction for a decade and a half after World War I and defined a ship more than 20 years old as “overage.” The treaty allowed for replacement of overage ships as an acknowledgment that they no longer were viable combatants. Today’s surface combatants are designed for 75 percent longer service lives, up to 35 years with a planned midlife upgrade.4 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers are designed to operate for 50 years or more, including a refueling overhaul about halfway through their life span.
The USS Yorktown (CV-5) was dead in the water after being hit by Japanese bombs on 4 June 1942. If a modern-day Nimitz were to lose a carrier such as the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76), the results could be catastrophic.
The age of a warship is important for several reasons. First, while newer is not always better, newer ships are more likely to incorporate the latest technologies. Engineers can incorporate only so many upgrades into an older ship before her baseline systems are incapable of receiving anything further. In addition, though combat systems, sensors, and control systems are likely to be upgraded, as much in 1942 as today, the ship’s hull and machinery often are not, and operation at sea degrades these systems over time. The older the ship, the less capable it is relative to newer vessels.
Looking at the relative ages of the two battle groups, a stark difference becomes apparent: Today’s ships are on average four times older than the ships Nimitz employed at Midway (Table 3). This comparison considers only the two fleets of surface combatants (including aircraft carriers), but an evaluation of submarines, fleet auxiliaries, and aircraft yields similar results. With statistics, outliers can skew an average one way or another, but in this case, there are none. Only two of the modern warships, the USS Kidd (DDG-100) and USS Sampson (DDG-102) are newer than any of Nimitz’s ships at Midway, and at ten years old, they are newer than just Nimitz’s two oldest cruisers, the USS Pensacola (CA-24) and USS Northampton (CA-26). The modern carriers are, on average, ten times the age of Nimitz’s carriers, and the USS Nimitz, at 42 years old, is nearly 85 percent of the way to the end of her service life.
While the ships at Midway were newer, they were not built, as one might think, as a result of the U.S. entry into World War II. All but one were part of the fleet before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Except for the aforementioned cruisers, the ships present at Midway were the products of two significant pieces of government legislation. The Yorktown and Enterprise were built as a result of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6174 in June 1933, when he used $238 million authorized in the National Industrial Recovery Act to pay for construction of 20 warships.5 Roosevelt justified this dramatic increase in shipbuilding by its resultant increase in employment across a wide range of industries, but it resulted also in a resurgence of U.S. naval strength. The other critical legislation, the Vinson-Trammel Act of 1934, made it U.S. policy to build warships to the maximum number allowable by treaty and to replace ships as they became obsolete.6
Crucially, the Navy had a coherent plan to build ships to meet these requirements. The General Board’s 1922 U.S. Naval Policy, updated by Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) William Pratt’s “Balanced Fleet” approach, served as a guide for the naval rebuilding program in the mid-1930s, allowing the Navy rapidly to award contracts for new ships upon receipt of funding.7 The combined effect of these efforts resulted in the addition of 122 ships to the fleet in the second half the 1930s. The increase in naval construction provided the United States with a shipbuilding base that allowed for rapid warship production when war came.
BUILDING THE FLEET TAKES TIME
It takes time to build large, complex warships, and the fleet must be in service or under construction before it is needed. In the 1930s, the construction time for a destroyer averaged just under two years, shrinking to a little more than a year by the end of the decade. The carrier Hornet was commissioned just over two years after the laying of her keel in 1939. A modern destroyer takes more than 40 percent longer to build than its 1930s counterpart, with the newest carrier in the Pacific Fleet, the Ronald Reagan, taking more than twice as long to build as Nimitz’s newest carrier.
This time lag between keel laying and commissioning gives Nimitz a significant advantage over today’s fleet. As shown in Table 2, the commitment of three carriers and associated escorts represents about the same percentage of the fleet in 1942 and today. But in the event of combat losses—and the Yorktown and the USS Hammann (DD-412) were lost—replacements were already in production. In fact, the second USS Yorktown (CV-10) was commissioned and operating in the Pacific 13 months after her namesake’s loss at Midway.
That is not the case today. Admittedly, by 1940, when Congress passed the Two Ocean Act authorizing the first phase of the massive naval buildup, much of the world was already at war, with U.S. involvement on the near horizon. But that surge would not have been possible without the decision in 1933–34 to restore naval construction capability. Were Nimitz to have lost the entire Midway battle force, the overall fleet would have suffered a significant setback. But were a modern-day Nimitz to lose today’s three-carrier force, the results would be catastrophic (Table 4).
Japan’s losses at Midway illustrate this point. With limited industrial capacity, exacerbated by the U.S. concentrated effort to deprive it of raw materials, Japan never replaced the four carriers lost in the battle, and as a result was unable to retake the initiative in the war.
KEEPING PACE IN PRODUCTION
Today’s Navy operates 279 deployable battle force ships. In May 2017, CNO Admiral John Richardson called for a 355-ship Navy, arguing that “the Navy must get to work now to both build more ships, and to think forward—innovate—as we go. To remain competitive, we must start today and we must improve faster.”8 As a result of this call to action, by January 2018, 23 surface combatants and an aircraft carrier were under construction for the U.S. Navy, along with 20 submarines, amphibious ships, and naval auxiliaries. But getting to 355 would not be easy.
A 2017 Congressional Budget Office study proposed four alternatives for achieving a 355-ship Navy, requiring annual shipbuilding rates to increase over the next ten years from the current 8.3 ships per year to an average of 12 to 15 ships per year.9 The Navy’s fiscal year 2019 shipbuilding plan envisions achieving the 355-ship “Navy the Nation Needs” in 2060, when a 12 aircraft carrier fleet finally is a reality. Over the five years forecasted in the current future years defense program, the Navy proposes building only ten additional ships over the previous 308-shipbuilding plan, a mere two ship annual increase to about ten ships per year. The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 increased that to 2.5 additional ships annually, or nearly 11 ships per year. Both the Navy’s plan and Congress’s additional funding fall short of the 12 to 15 ships per year needed to get to 355 in a timely manner.
In 1933, before the interwar rearmament began, seven private shipyards and five government navy yards built warships at a rate of roughly ten ships per year. By 1941, 40 private shipyards and eight government navy yards built 254 ships. During World War II, some 80 shipyards built more than 1,500 warships.10
Today, only four companies are building naval vessels at seven shipyards (Table 5). The four remaining government navy yards no longer build ships, and instead focus on maintenance and repair.11 A number of small shipyards support maintenance and repair of the fleet, but none have any recent construction experience.
To achieve the required production rates, U.S. shipyards would need to experience a massive overhaul. The CNO claims “multiple shipbuilding and aircraft production lines are ‘hot’—currently producing. They can do more, building additional ships of the types already under construction, more economically.”12 But industry leaders remain reluctant to invest in capital improvements or work force expansion without guarantees of steady shipbuilding contracts. During the 1930s, the increase in shipbuilding gave shipyards the ability to fine tune the construction process and enabled them to build warships faster. Today’s limited production rates preclude that improvement, further amplifying the strategic risk to the fleet’s ability to replace combat losses.
In the 1920s, the loss of private shipyards and underemployment of navy yards resulted in the loss of critical skilled workers. With few jobs available in the shipbuilding industry, colleges saw severe declines in enrollment in marine engineering and naval architecture programs. The closing of shipyards also closed critical apprenticeship programs, which, combined with the lack of employment opportunity, severely reduced the number of tradespeople training in the specialties necessary in shipbuilding. Skilled workers drifted away from shipyards to other industries as they sought high-paying jobs. This drain
in skilled workers presented “one of the most serious handicaps to revival of shipbuilding.”13 A similar situation exists today. Limited employment opportunities in the shipbuilding industry have resulted in a depletion of skilled workers. This loss affects the rate at which the United States can produce ships, and more important, severely affects the ability to expand shipbuilding capacity. Worse, the decades of limited production rates restricted the number of people entering apprenticeship programs, leaving an experience gap in the traditional progression from apprentice to journeyman to master. As the current crop of master shipbuilders retires, an insufficient number of journeymen exists to take their place. Without an increase in shipbuilding rates, the industry will soon lose the ability to expand to the scenario Admiral Richardson claims is possible.
Adversaries can see the anemic U.S. shipbuilding capacity and become encouraged in their own efforts. As noted in the CNO’s “A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority,” the United States faces renewed competition at sea as “Russia and China both have advanced their military capabilities to act as global powers.”14 The Chinese are building modern warships and possess the capacity to expand production rates rapidly in a time of crises. Within the PLA-N, all Type 054 frigates are less than ten years old, with two under construction. Ten highly capable Type 052C and improved Type 052D destroyers were commissioned within the past five years, with seven more in various stages of construction. The first unit of the new cruiser-sized Type 055 launched in June 2017, with at least four units planned before 2020.15 And China is working to expand its own aircraft carrier force, having launched the indigenously designed Type 001A in April 2017. When combined with a range of sea-denial weapons, China will soon be in a position to assert its force in the South China, East China, and Yellow seas without fear of U.S. interference.
Russia too is taking strides to rebuild its naval forces. In 2017, 53 naval vessels of all types were under construction in Russian shipyards, 19 percent more than currently in the United States.16 In the 1920s and 1930s, the United States allowed Japan to build a modern navy while the American fleet atrophied, emboldening Japanese designs in East Asia. The PLA-N and Russian Navy today enjoy a similar advantage as they add state-of-the-art ships to their fleets while the United States continues on a shipbuilding pace more befitting the unipolar world of the 1990s.
In 1942, Admiral Nimitz faced a choice. Risk more than half the Navy’s aircraft carriers with the opportunity to strike a severe blow to the Japanese carrier force, or husband his assets to ensure they remained available to fight. Knowing that he had 11 more carriers and other warships on the way, Nimitz leveraged the principle of calculated risk to attack boldly. If a modern-day Nimitz were forced to make a similar decision, the principle of calculated risk would likely prevent him or her from committing that force. While the risk to the current force may appear similar to that of 1942, there is no reserve, no bench, on which the commander can depend. Without ships in production and a viable shipbuilding industry, the inability to replace combat losses significantly increases the strategic risk of committing the fleet to battle.
1. Commander-in-Chief, United States Pacific Fleet to Commander Striking Force (Operation Plan 29-42), Serial 0114W, “Letter of Instruction,” 28 May 1942.
2. Geoff Ziezulewicz, “Three Carrier Strike Groups to Unite for West Pacific Exercise,” Defense News, 9 November 2017.
3. Franz-Stefan Gady, “3 US Carrier Strike Groups Enter Asia-Pacific Ahead of Trump’s Visit,” The Diplomat, 25 October 2017.
4. In April 2018, Vice Admiral William Merz, Deputy CNO for Warfare Systems, announced the extension of DDG service life to 45 years for the Arleigh Burke class.
5. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Executive Order 6174 on Public Works Administration,” 16 June 1933. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.
6. Vinson-Trammell Act of 1934, Pub. L. 73-135, 48 Stat. 503 (1934).
7. John T. Kuehn, Agents of Innovation: The General Board and the Design of the Fleet that Defeated the Japanese Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008), 170–1.
8. John Richardson, “The Future Navy,” Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, 17 May 2017.
9. Congressional Budget Office, “Costs of Building a 355-Ship Navy,” Washington, DC, April 2017, 5–6, 9.
10. Clinton H. Whitehurst Jr., The U.S. Shipbuilding Industry: Past, Present, and Future (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1986), 143.
11. Shipbuilders Council of America, “U.S. Navy Shipbuilding.”
12. Richardson, “The Future Navy.”
13. Julius A. Furer, Administration of the Navy Department in World War II, (Washington, DC: Naval History Division, United States Navy, 1959), 213–5.
14. John Richardson, “A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority,” Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, January 2016.
15. Global Security, “Chinese Warships.”
16. “Over 50 Warships Under Construction for Russian Navy in 2017,” TASS, 5 December 2107.
Captain McGrath is a nuclear-trained surface warfare officer who commanded Maritime Expeditionary Security Squadron Seven in Guam. After staff tours at Seventh Fleet, Naval Forces Europe, and the Joint Staff J7, he currently serves as a military professor of Joint Military Operations at the Naval War College in Newport, RI.
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