Long-range missiles, missile defenses, and robotic ships will be essential adjuncts to the big, expensive “Death Stars” that dominate the Navy budget, says Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute.
By BRYAN CLARK on January 09, 2023
A Navy submariner turned seapower strategist, Bryan Clark has written for Breaking Defense since 2015. As Navy officers, defense officials, and industry executives convene in Washington this week for the Surface Navy Association conference, Clark says they must seize the moment to reform the surface fleet and confront the rise of China.
After 30 years focused on maritime security in peacetime and defending carriers and amphibious ships in wartime, the US Navy’s surface force is entering uncharted waters without a clear vision for the future and fielding a shrinking fleet that becomes less adaptable by the year. So as they convene this week to discuss their future, the Navy’s surface warriors must rise to the triple challenge created by China’s rise as a modern naval power, tight budgets, and the emergence of new technologies to begin reshaping the force for 21st Century warfare.
The first step is recognizing you have a problem. For the surface force, the most prominent one is improving and proliferating anti-ship missiles. No missile defense scheme stops every incoming weapon, and a single “leaker” can take a ship out of action, for a critical period if not permanently. And breaking the enemy’s kill chain from sensors to commanders to weapons is only getting harder with the explosion of commercial and military sensing platforms across every part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
One way to adapt to this new reality is by building “Death Stars” whose defenses will be more costly to defeat that the enemy is willing to spend. This path, represented by the future DDG(X) destroyer concept, may be appropriate to protect something like an aircraft carrier that can deliver significant firepower from long range. But Death Stars like DDG(X) will likely be too costly to build and operate for the wide-ranging sea control and maritime security missions the surface fleet will also need to do.
So the surface force must reimagine its approach to naval warfare for the more contested oceans of the 21st century. Missile-armed submarines, which faded as a threat when the Cold War ended, are returning with a vengeance. The US submarine fleet, now the front line of US power projection against well-armed adversaries like China, cannot simultaneously fight off enemy undersea forces. Although effective sub-hunters, P-8A Poseidons – big, unstealthy planes based on the Boeing 737 – will depend on vulnerable bases and face enemy fighters above the Western Pacific chokepoints that are their best hunting grounds.
Mines, a hardy and oft-overlooked perennial in naval warfare, also loom in the surface fleet’s future. Even surface combat, which practically disappeared as a mission during the 1990s and 2000s, is now back as Russia fields new missile frigates and corvettes while China builds the world’s largest surface force.
As the Navy retires its Ticonderoga cruisers and Littoral Combat Ships, while concentrating shipbuilding dollars on Arleigh Burke destroyers and oversized frigates, it will have too few ships that are too expensive to risk hunting submarines, clearing mines, or fighting close-range missile battles with Chinese warships. Countering these threats and controlling the seas will depend on a more diverse surface force that includes uncrewed vessels, small combatants, civilian vessels, and airborne drones alongside traditional large combatants.
For example, crewed US warships will need to continue carrying weapons and on-scene commanders, but they will require the greater reach of new missiles – such as Maritime Strike Tomahawk, SM-6, or the HALO hypersonic weapon – to avoid counterattack and disperse their operations. Finding targets for those weapons at long range, degrading enemy sensors, and suppressing undersea threats will require uncrewed vessels, which will also be essential for defending allies in highly contested areas like the Taiwan Strait.
The Navy has at hand the raw materials for this transformation, from the much-criticized Littoral Combat Ships, to medium and small uncrewed surface vessels, to a wide variety of airborne drones and loitering munitions. However, almost none of these tools is available to the surface fleet’s nascent concept development and experimentation organizations such as Surface Development Squadron One and Unmanned Surface Vessel Division One, and those they do have are not equipped with mission systems for sensing, electronic warfare, or attack operations.
The surface fleet’s experimentation arm also lacks the engineering, analysis, and programmatic experts needed to create a rapid development-operations (DevOps) cycle that translates the needs for addressing commanders’ operational problems into solutions. Without such a cycle, the surface fleet is trapped by years-long Pentagon requirements and acquisition processes and unable to exploit the opportunities presented by new technologies and the urgency of China’s rising assertiveness.
When US surface force leaders and their industry partners meet this week, they should consider how to make the most of a historic moment. Without the tyranny of the carrier deck or the challenges of undersea communications and endurance, the surface fleet has the greatest potential for rapid adaptation. Improving enemies and tighter budgets may help by making big changes easier to sell. But embracing the opportunity requires investing in the organizations and processes that enable change. Otherwise, the US surface fleet will remain in the 20th Century while its rivals pass it by.
Bryan Clark is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and Director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology.
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Navy aims for 75 ‘mission-capable’ surface ships amid readiness drive
By Megan Eckstein
Jan 11, 05:00 AM 88
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy wants to keep nearly half its surface fleet in a deployable state, as it aims to raise the overall readiness of the force in case it’s called upon to fight.
Commander of Naval Surface Forces Vice Adm. Roy Kitchener last year unveiled a data-driven effort to better understand ship and crew readiness, with a focus on the specific factors keeping ships from being combat credible and the costs associated with addressing those deficiencies.
After a year of crunching the numbers, Kitchener announced this week at the annual Surface Navy Association conference his “north star” goal is to keep 75 surface ships at either “mission capable” or “full mission capable” readiness levels.
Kitchener, in a call with reporters ahead of the conference, said today’s number of mission capable ships is classified. He declined to say how far the Navy is from its 75-ship goal, only saying “we have some work to do” but that the goal is achievable within two years.
The number represents nearly half the total 164 surface ships in the fleet today, according to Naval Surface Forces.
Kitchener told reporters the “goal is not arbitrary. It’s not random. It was born from our investments in our data analytics; we had a really good, thorough assessment across the fleet’s operational requirements.”
Having 75 mission capable ships would not only meet the surface fleet’s requirement to routinely deploy under the command of joint force combatant commanders, but it would also mean additional ships ready to respond to a conflict, conduct experiments with new gear or concepts or participate in fleet exercises.
The 75-ship figure includes the core of the surface navy: Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, cruisers, littoral combat ships, all classes of amphibious ships and the Avenger-class mine countermeasures ships.
It does not include the Zumwalt-class destroyers or expeditionary sea bases, of which the Navy has three of each that are not yet fully integrated into the surface fleet. Those classes could be added into the mix once the Navy learns more about their readiness and costs. It also does not include aircraft carriers, submarines or Military Sealift Command auxiliary ships.
Ways to boost readiness
The Navy views its ships and their readiness through the lens of the Optimized Fleet Response Plan, the force-generation plan that guides most surface ship and aircraft carrier deployments. Ships are either in maintenance, in training, deployed, or in sustainment, a time when they’re meant to keep up the high level of proficiency they attained during the deployment.
As the fleet seeks to improve its mission-capable rate, ships in sustainment will be best positioned to help Kitchener meet his goal, his office explained.
Ships on deployment are already mission capable, and those figures are unlikely to change. Ships in deep maintenance are inherently not mission capable — though the Navy could move the needle slightly by driving down maintenance delays and getting ships out of the shipyard faster.
Ships in sustainment, though, often bear the brunt of lack of resources, whether it’s operations and maintenance money running low at the end of the fiscal year, a lack of certain spare parts or shortage of capacity in repair yards. The Navy generally prioritizes ships next to deploy, and though ships in sustainment are supposed to remain ready for any contingency, they’re often the billpayer when one is needed.
In a separate interview, Naval Surface Forces executive director Steve Mucklow told Defense News tracking readiness data will significantly help ships in sustainment.
With this data, the Navy will be able to see what’s needed to get four destroyers up to the mission-capable status and ready to participate in an exercise, for example. By understanding the deficiencies of each ship, the fleet could also prevent any given ship from straying too far from the mission-capable threshold, meaning even non-mission-capable ships would be in better overall condition than many are today. And, if the Navy wanted to take future steps to become more combat credible, such as conducting more fleet exercises or training on high-end tactics, leaders would have an exact price tag and could work that into budget plans.
During a Jan. 10 speech at the conference, Kitchener said the data has already pointed to several specific ways to increase the number of mission-capable ships.
During fiscal 2022, he said, the Navy filled more than 1,200 requests for ship parts by cannibalizing other ships because the parts couldn’t be acquired through the supply system. That’s up 50% from years, he said, and suggests certain spare parts should be better funded and get closer attention.
In a specific example, he said two communities use the SeaRAM weapon: the littoral combat ships and the destroyers forward-based in Rota, Spain.
“We are having a horrific time keeping our SeaRAMs up on the LCS,” he said, noting he looked into why the LCS was struggling to maintain the weapons but the destroyers were not. “It came down to having the parts onboard, quite frankly. And the right parts onboard.”
Kitchener, speaking to reporters ahead of the conference, outlined a multi-tiered plan to increase readiness: Both Naval Surface Force Pacific and Naval Surface Force Atlantic established Surface Maintenance Operations Centers that will look at trends in ship readiness, prioritize resources to build up current readiness and crunch the data to better inform future funding requests.
Each homeport will receive a new Surface Group unit that will be focused on helping ships get through maintenance and basic training and ensuring they enter pre-deployment training fully ready.
And an upcoming Surface Response Plan will prioritize ships on the waterfront, outlining which ships in sustainment would be the first ones called upon if a crisis arose, allowing the waterfront to ensure those on-call ships are kept in the highest state of readiness.
“This transformation, particularly in the organizational structure, is going to be a journey,” Kitchener said. “We cannot deviate, lag or delay. We’re going to need industry, we’re going to need Congress, and we’re going to need Big Navy all to support us in this effort.”