In these possibly waning days of the Trump Administration, big news has been made of Defense Secretary Mark Esper's fleet plans for the US Navy. Half of the attention focuses on how many aircraft carriers the service should have—Esper's waffling of "eight to eleven" seems pretty much a way of saying eight, but I don't want to completely agitate Virginia's congressional delegation just yet. The other half of the attention focuses on the unmanned portion of that fleet, which could number nearly a hundred little ships. Reliance on many more, smaller, cheaper, and often unmanned platforms will be important because the Navy's current approach isn't scalable against an increasing threat. That is, chasing things with destroyers that cost $2 billion and require crews of more than 200 won't continue working. What's partly missing is a frank analysis of why this all matters.
Even so, I greatly appreciate Esper's taking something of a stand has advanced the conversation for the next congress and the next administration. A great deal of the thinking behind Esper's plan relies on two studies, which interestingly had pretty much the same authors:
Bryan Clark, Timothy A. Walton, and Seth Cropsey, American Sea Power at a Crossroads: A Plan to Restore the US Navy’s Maritime Advantage, Hudson Institute, October 2020.
Bryan Clark and Timothy A. Walton, Taking Back the Seas: Transforming the U.S. Surface Fleet for Decision-Centric Warfare, December 2019.
Shortly after publishing the work for the CSBA, Clark and Walton moved to Hudson to continue the good work, helping Esper rethink his navy's ongoing failure to produce a coherent and affordable shipbuilding plan. (And by the way, the authors want nine aircraft carriers.) I attended the event in January at the CSBA that previewed some of this, including the idea taken up in the study Hudson, that the US Navy needed about 80 ocean-going missile corvettes. From Hudson, the team is also now recommending 99 (not 100, not 98) robotic submarine chasers. Yes, they like to say "Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels" (MUSVs), but my phrasing is more eloquent. Anyway, here's what the summary of the later report said about "Anti-submarine Warfare (ASW)":
Today, submarines and surface combatants contribute to ASW, but they will need to devote more of their effort to strike and air defense in the future fleet. The Navy will therefore need to increase its reliance on unmanned vessels and sensors to conduct ASW sensing, supported by unmanned and manned aircraft to pounce on targets with affordable suppression weapons, rather than large, expensive torpedoes. (p. 8)
This is because, as they note later,
A particular weakness of the current US ASW approach is tracking or trailing of enemy submarines after they pass through choke points such as the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) gap or Ryukyu Straits, where US and allied ASW sensors will be concentrated. Although US SSNs [nuclear submarines] or DDGs [guided-missile destroyers] could trail high-priority submarines for their deployment, other submarines would eventually become un-located and pose a potential threat to US or allied forces and territory. (p. 30)
The corvettes are mostly viewgraphs so far, but the robo-sloops are well into the phrase of practical experimentation: DARPA and the Navy have been working with that Sea Hunter drone ship (the ACTUV, or ASW Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel) since 2016. Good on them.
The suppression weapon that Clark et alia are discussing is also somewhat advanced in development. Also in 2016, as Joseph Trivithick recently wrote for The War Zone ("Northrop Grumman Reveals New Mini Torpedo Aimed At Arming And Defending Navy Submarines," 21 May 2020), the Applied Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University sent defense contractors design documentation for a "Common Very Lightweight Torpedo," from which to build prototypes. Amongst others, Northrop Grumman now has one, and Trevithick's article shows the photograph. It's remarkably small, which is great for carriage on smaller ships and aircraft, and presumably a shaped-charge warhead would get the point across. The torpedo would also serve as an anti-torpedo interceptor for US and allied submarines. Trevithick has an earlier article as well, with more detail ("U.S. Navy Looking To Arm Its Subs With Tiny Torpedoes That Intercept Incoming Torpedoes," 11 April 2019).
Clark and his coauthors acknowledge that the Navy has had concerns about the lethality of the Mark 54 lightweight torpedo since the 2010s. Afterward the event, Byron Callan of Capital Alpha Partners covered some of the discussion in a note to investors. (If you don't get Byron's newsletter, and you're in this business, figure out how to get it.) Amongst others, he offered the following observation:
Former senior Navy commanders on the Hudson event were supportive of the study. One push-back was the notion that the lighter unmanned systems may not be able to employ Mk. 48 heavyweight torpedoes (Raytheon Tech is prime, though the program is immaterial to the overall financial outlook of RTX). Russian nuclear submarines have double hulls and are made of titanium so lighter weapons won’t enable a “mission kill.” However, lighter weapons could still damage a hull and thereby entail a submarine has a noisier signature, which reduces its prospects for survival.
Ah, the Russians. As I wrote in my recent essay about Stanford University's new course on military innovation, I am not enamored of the "2+3" trope—"the notion in declared policy that the US faces threats from not just China and Russia, but Iran, North Korea, and a wide range of insolent guerrillas, [because] really, anything but China is a lesser problem by far." Because I think it can be easy to overestimate the Russian threat, I thought that I should challenge the assertion that the Russians are the forcing function. I clearly spent too much time with Wikipedia, but that's not always grossly misleading, and so may be somewhat useful here.
From what I understand (and I invite correction!) it seems that only the famed Alpha class (Project 705) and the later Sierra class (Project 945) submarines had titanium hulls. The titanium alone made them fabulously expensive, and titanium isn't as metallurgically forgiving as steel, so each deep dive tended to revise upwards the test depth. The Alphas are all gone, and only four of the Sierras are still with the Russian Navy. Two of those are undergoing modernization, and the last one was commissioned in 1993. Those are, though, with the Northern Fleet.
More broadly, I also note that the Russian Navy has only commissioned six nuclear-powered submarines in the past 20 years: four Borei-class (Project 955) ballistic missile boats, the cruise missile submarine Severodvinsk (a Project 885 boat), and the attack submarine Gepard (a Project 971 "Akula" boat) in 2000. Those are all with the Northern Fleet.
In the same time frame, the Russians have commissioned seven diesel-powered Kilos (877/636) and that single Lada, the Sankt Peterburg (677). Almost all the new ones seem to be with the Black Sea Fleet. Are the Russians that afraid of the Turks? The Georgians? The Bulgarians? It's not clear. Regardless, and while I haven't toured one of those boats and taken measurements, I suspect that they do not have double hulls. They're just not big enough. So, a lightweight torpedo should be more than enough to sink one, or at least damage it so badly that it will cease to be a threat, and instead become a comparatively easy problem for clean up. Generally speaking, with lots of targets around the world, less expensive precision weapons would be rather helpful.
But think about the overall procurement pattern as well—the Russians have built basically no new carriers, cruisers, or destroyers in the past twenty years. In the long run, the Russian Navy is becoming a force of diesel-powered corvettes and submarines. I happen to think that's a good idea for them, but it's not as deep-water threatening as the Old Great Red Banner Northern Fleet. Those little ships do carry very long-range cruise missiles, as used to some effect in Syria. The Kilos have good range, but they have to snorkel the whole way, and when doing so, they are rather more trackable. What's really remarkable is that Russian military spending is not exactly rapidly increasing right now. Whatever else might surge out of Murmansk these days would be a pack of roughly 30-year-old submarines.
Against that threat, the concern over "scaling" seems rather less disconcerting. But that still doesn't mean that the US Navy should want to track these Russian boats with Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, or even Constellation-class frigates. Instead, if one Constellation could control a flotilla of Sea Hunters, or something similar, a few such groups could keep watch over much of the dangerous parts of the Russian Navy. As for the Iranians, someone on that side of the world might consider just instrumenting most of the bottom of the Persian Gulf, and chasing their boats with helicopters from ashore. In those narrow waters, submarines cannot survive for long without air cover, and the Iranians are preciously short on air cover.
This is what classic military theory calls economy of force. Why does it matter? Because as it takes junior grade lieutenants and civilian think-tankers to tell the admiralty, your strategy isn't bad, it's just flatly missing. Here, I recommend two more essays which directly and indirectly address the problem. The titles should say enough, but by all means read them:
Artem Sherbinin, "A Fleet without a Rudder," Proceedings of the US Naval Institute, October 2020.
Mackenzie Eaglen, "Just Say No: The Pentagon Needs to Drop the Distractions and Move Great Power Competition Beyond Lip Service," War On The Rocks, 28 October 2019.
In contrast, with a real strategy, the US Navy might actually deploy robotic systems to track and even attack Russian submarines in the Atlantic. If might actually drop its obsessions on deterring the Iranians from all the mischief they undertake even when those carriers are nearby all the time. Then, if the great power of concern really lies across the Pacific, the Navy could focus its procurement, basing, and deployment plans should reflect the severity of that challenge. Because with about four times as many of them as there are of us, we'd better build those robots, and then put them in the right places.
James Hasik is a senior fellow in the Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University, and a senior fellow in the Scowcroft Center on Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.
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