The 2018 National Defense Strategy recognizes the U.S. strategic competition with Russia and China—two regional powers looking to “shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model.” The Navy developed distributed lethality and distributed maritime operations to meet these challenges, but has not done enough to operationalize either concept.
To meet the challenges of great power competition, the Navy must leverage its current fleet, weapons, and capabilities to increase surface force lethality in a high-end fight. The current fleet of Aegis cruisers and destroyers should be rearmed with offensive weapon systems and employed primarily as hunter-killers, rather than to defend the Navy’s carrier strike groups.
This combination of offensive-oriented surface action groups (SAGs), carrier air wings for long-range attack, and submarines provides “offense in-depth.” Carrier strike groups maintain a stand-off distance from long-range, land-based missiles; SAGs enter contested waters in a hard-to-detect emissions control posture; and submarines attack close to the enemy’s fleet.
The Fight the Navy is Facing
Arguably the greatest threat to the Navy today is China’s ability to assert sea control from land by using thousands of antiship cruise and ballistic missiles. In some cases, these missiles are capable of striking targets more than 1,500 miles away, overreaching the 1,000-mile range of Tomahawk cruise missiles and the 650-mile range of carrier air wings. If the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force successfully detects and targets U.S. ships, it can shoot more missiles, from more directions, and from farther away than U.S. ships can respond.
U.S. forces may need to fight their way through waters defended by Chinese surface combatants and land-based missiles to get close enough to attack land-based missile batteries. Navy leaders must think about which assets should be used in which combinations to accomplish this mission.
Distributed Maritime Operations
Since World War II, the surface navy has had a “defend the carrier” mentality. Today, instead of being hunter-killers, U.S. surface combatants are designed around the Aegis combat system—built for air defense. To better meet current maritime threats, the Navy should shift its mentality and apply the principles of distributed maritime operations (DMO): integration, distribution, and maneuver. While the current pace of DMO implementation is insufficient, its overall objective is simple and effective: increase a fleet’s lethality by enhancing the offensive capabilities of individual platforms, and network them together. Then, geographically distribute the force, thereby providing more mechanisms for attack while decreasing vulnerability.
To meet the objectives of DMO today, U.S. surface forces must be networked, dispersed, and offensive-oriented. Networking naval forces allows for the rapid concentration of offensive firepower from different nodes, and allows for the geographic and domain dispersion of Navy assets. In this way, an enemy is forced to locate, then select which nodes to attack, causing him to waste resources trying to overwhelm individual defenses, while leaving more nodes—in the form of SAGs and submarines—to continue the attack. Ultimately, this integration of mutually supporting naval forces allows for the concentration of the same amount of firepower in a given geographic area, but from multiple axes, as a large capital ship, for a fraction of the political risk. Aircraft carriers would be used conservatively during a conflict because of the cost of human life—over 5,000 souls on board—and national pride if one were sunk.
Doing More with What We Have
The Navy has the assets and capabilities to fulfill the spirit of DMO today. First, fleet commanders should change theater policy by embracing surface action groups (SAGs) based around small surface combatants, namely cruisers and destroyers. Second, the warships encompassing the SAGs should have a missile loadout that prioritizes antiship and strike capabilities. Finally, the Navy should employ these SAGs in a new manner.
The SAG would consist of cruisers and destroyers, but the employment and missile loadout of the warships should be different than those attached to carrier strike groups. The SAG flips the defensive carrier model on its head: the central asset of the SAG—the cruiser—is the defender, not the defended. Thus, one cruiser serves as the air defense unit—loaded with SM-2s, SM-6s, and Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles (ESSMs). Conversely, the destroyer’s missile loadout would prioritize offensive capabilities. Their silos would hold Tomahawks, Maritime Strike Tomahawks, SM-6s, and a limited number of ESSMs for close-range air-missile defense. There are not enough of these offensive missiles now, but a change in strategy is needed to prompt Congress to appropriate money for more.
Combining surface combatants into a SAG would magnify Navy ships’ lethality by increasing offensive missile density within a geographic area. Moreover, SAGs afford afloat commanders redundancy options by sectoring offensive engagement responsibilities, similar to how a carrier strike group allocates air-missile defense responsibilities along a threat axis.
The SAG’s model for air-missile defense would be different from the current “defense-in-depth” approach, which is designed to give an air-defense unit multiple shots, taken at different ranges, at an incoming missile. The SAGs should employ a simpler “shoot, look, shoot” doctrine which would increase the number of missiles, such as SM-6s, available to conduct offensive strikes.
Multiple SAGs could be deployed to the same geographic region in the event of a crisis. In this scenario, each SAG is a node, linked together via the Navy’s Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) using an airborne E2D Hawkeye or unmanned aerial vehicle. Sensor netting allows these SAGs to maintain near real-time surface, air, and subsurface contact pictures without the need to operate in close proximity, thereby improving an individual SAG’s chances of survival by increasing the complexity of an adversary’s targeting problem.
On the offense, SAGs would be able to use CEC’s “engagement on remote data” capability to partake in geographically dispersed engagements along multiple attack vectors. Two SAGs composed of one cruiser and three destroyers each could operate in restrictive emissions control until they are fed intelligence from national assets on local enemy surface combatants. Then, one could briefly radiate its SPY radar to provide target data on the enemy ships for its still-silent partners. This setup in the South China Sea could generate offensive kinetic fires from the Spratly Islands to the Paracel Islands—a capability that currently requires the deployment of the Seventh Fleet’s entire carrier strike group.
Consequently, these SAGs should revert to an offshoot Cold War-era concept of “shooting the archer, not the arrow.” Though attacking land-based, non-nuclear antiship missile batteries will be a long term goal of any conflict, the SAGs will “shoot the eyes of the archer”—People’s Liberation Army Navy surface combatants and long-range over-the-horizon radars capable of generating fire-control-quality data for the long-range land-attack missiles of the PLA Rocket Force. Unfortunately, the inability to rearm missiles at sea, the dispersed nature of SAGs, and the increased risk posed by loitering within the engagement zone would limit the time SAGs could operate in contested waters. These issues will require new platforms and concepts to resolve the logistical challenges
The Future of Surface Warfare
The Navy’s current plan for a high-end fight at sea, which centers on CSGs, is too expensive, strategically risky, and inefficient in the age of missile warfare. Proponents of the aircraft carrier argue that it is “the most survivable airfield [rather than the most vulnerable].” However, an F-35C taking off from a Ford-class carrier surrounded by Aegis-equipped destroyers in 2019, is not fundamentally much different than a Dauntless dive bomber taking off from an Essex-class carrier surrounded by Fletcher-class destroyers in 1945. If the Navy wants to win in 2030, its senior leaders should stop thinking back to the glory days of World War II, and look toward the future of combat operations at sea.
An offense-in-depth plan imagines three layers extending outward from a key geographic objective. The first layer would be patrolled by submarines hunting enemy surface combatants, subs, and even land-based targets. The next layer holds SAGs, capable of avoiding detection and enemy targeting using emissions control, then using their offensive capabilities to prevent enemy ships from providing missile-targeting data. The farthest layer holds carriers, which can launch far-ranging attacks while staying outside of the adversary’s targeting range.
This operational shift won’t occur overnight and requires more ships, weapons, logistical resupply, and a more offensive mind-set. Nonetheless, a stop-gap solution to the Navy’s shortcomings is available. Upgunned and networked SAGs provide geographically distributed nodes capable of concentrating firepower at a moment’s notice. With cruisers providing air defense for several destroyers, and destroyers bringing to bare hundreds of missiles, the Navy can hold enemy forces at risk anywhere at any time, without being weighed down by a strategically vulnerable and operationally limited aircraft carrier.
Overall, the future of surface warfare is bright, but the Navy cannot wait for the next technological advancement to fix its problems. Operational and doctrinal changes are needed now or the Navy might find itself at the next Jutland wondering what’s wrong with its [bloody] carriers.