Last month, Paul McLeary of Aviation Week’s blog Ares observed how
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen seems a little annoyed that he has all of these great ships, but doesn't have enough people to put on them. During a brief Q&A with reporters following his address at a Navy League conference in Washington, he groused that “I’m six or seven years into a time where I had an awful lot of amphibious ships without Marines on them.”
He said that while he recognizes that “we need that [amphibious] capability for the future,” the question is how much amphibious capacity does the United States need on a “day-to-day” basis. In the end, like everyone else, he’s waiting on the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review to come out before making up his mind what kind of amphibious capacity the Navy and Marines need.
The admiral may be able to use more of that amphibious capacity than he realizes, as long as he realizes that it’s capacity for more than just amphibious assaults.
Yesterday was the fourteenth anniversary of the rescue of USAF Captain Scott O’Grady, which rather reminds me of this issue. O’Grady was shot down while patrolling over Bosnia in his F-16, but his rescue was affected not by an USAF rescue squadron, or an Army commando unit, but by a Marine task force flying off the helicopter carrier Kearsarge. As the Navy’s on call amphibious flotilla in the Adriatic Sea was closer to the crash area than the other services’ bases in Italy, the Marines on board got the call. As Robert Gates grouses out loud as to why the USAF needs a dedicated fleet of combat search-and-rescue (CSAR) aircraft, the incident of recent history is worth recalling. Over the next few years, those helicopter carriers will routinely be deploying with squadrons of V-22 Osprey tiltrotors, which may have some unresolved issues as CSAR aircraft, but which will fly further and faster than the Chinooks that the USAF was hoping to buy for this purpose.
This hasn’t been the only alternative use of the asset. The Navy and Marines used the Nassau in 1991, and the Bataan and the Bonhomme Richard in 2003, as “harrier carriers”. The two embarked several fighter squadrons of Marine Air Group 13, and flew hundreds of combat sorties over southern Iraq, substantially in support of advancing troops of the British Army and the Royal Marines. It’s rather analogous, for that matter, to how the Royal Navy employed its Invincible-class carriers before the commissioning of HMS Ocean, its own dedicated helicopter carrier.
I could discuss the recent article in Naval Institute Proceedings on “influence squadrons”, but the real question for industry is how to use this evolving openness towards asset flexibility to strategic advantage. For the US Navy, an unfortunate artifact of the Clinton Administration’s encouragement of a duopoly in domestic military shipbuilding in the 1990s is the concentration of aircraft carrier production at Northrop Grumman. Northrop is building the Gerald Ford-class ships in Newport News, and the Wasp-class ships in Pascagoula. For General Dynamics, trying to build a helicopter carrier at NASSCO could be quite a stretch.
For the builders of smaller ships, such as littoral combat ships (LCSs) and joint high-speed vessels (JHSV), however, there’s something here. The modular nature of these vessels means that they are already used or meant for uses as varied as minehunting, submarine-hunting, shore bombardment, commando infiltration, general troop transport, and the most laudable suppression of piracy. Even more is possible: Lockheed Martin has been advertising a smaller-scale Aegis system for its version of the LCS-type: the ship might not carry much more, but would pack a powerful air defense suite for coastal applications.
Of course, this is not the only market segment in which we find this dynamic. Military automotive firms sold blast-resistant armored vehicles (MRAPs) for more than just shuttling foot soldiers on the inside: from early on, they were meant to carry bomb-disposal robots, electronic jammers, and remotely-controlled machineguns and grenade launchers. They were soon fitted out as ambulances and battlefield surveillance vehicles. Note that there was no need for the manufacturers to have all the capabilities for these applications in-house; sourcing the modular components from subcontractors proved more than workable. The drone aircraft business grew similarly: after Insitu realized that the plane it marketed for monitoring weather and finding tuna would have military applications as well, it didn’t go about building a sensors business to enter that line of business.
Improving the marketability of smaller, modular platforms—air, land, or sea—is rather like selling computers or smartphones. The base platform requires an architecture sufficiently open for interested parties with plug-and-play subsystems to invest in your success. Sometimes, the learning curve or the marketing challenges are serious enough that the platform builder itself needs to blaze a trail by investing in demonstrations of those capabilities in advance of customer demand. That can be a foreign concept to traditionally-minded military suppliers, but how many of the more successful medium-sized contractors in this business got going in the recent past.
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