The Navy Gets the New York Times Treatment

On occasion, I use this platform for professional writing and naval advocacy. This essay is of that nature. If you are here for my light-hearted glimpses of everyday life and are bored by matters of national security, it would be best for you to move on to other things.

My friend Commander Salamander wrote a wonderful essay on the same subject yesterday. It is well worth a read.

The Seapower world woke up this week to a post-Labor Day Weekend bomb delivered by the New York Times (it would be best if you read this story before you read my analysis of it) in the form of a story targeting Navy leadership (uniformed and civilian), Congress, the defense acquisition system, the defense industry, lobbying, and warships (destroyers, submarines, and aircraft carriers). When the nation’s newspaper of record deems the Navy worthy of its attention, it is important to address the story’s shortcomings, as the opinions of great numbers are influenced by the Times’ reach. In my everyday life, I am a defense consultant, and I count among my clients both the Navy and the defense industry. These thoughts are my own.

In this essay, direct quotations from the piece are addressed in turn, with summary comments to close.

But the focus from Washington on producing a stream of new warships is also creating a fleet that some inside the Pentagon think is too wedded to outdated military strategies and that the Navy might not be able to afford to keep running in decades to come.

There is a basic misunderstanding of the mission of the Navy at work in the narrative put forward in this piece and the comments selected to support it. That the Navy “…might not be able to afford to keep running…” this fleet is a sign of insufficient resources being applied to that misunderstood mission. That mission is:

The Navy shall be organized, trained, and equipped for the peacetime promotion of the national security interests and prosperity of the United States and for prompt and sustained combat incident to operations at sea. It is responsible for the preparation of naval forces necessary for the duties described in the preceding sentence except as otherwise assigned and, in accordance with integrated joint mobilization plans, for the expansion of the peacetime components of the Navy to meet the needs of war. (10 USC Sec. 8062).

This mission changed in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, as members of Congress sought to enshrine critical peacetime functions of the Navy alongside its wartime role, which was the sole focus of the previous Title 10 language. The result is that in addition to warfighting, the Navy must be planned, sized, and resourced to address other important missions such as naval diplomacy, crisis response, conventional deterrence, and war termination. The criticisms detailed in the Times’ piece apply primarily to what happens after the shooting starts, ignoring the things the Navy does to protect and sustain our security and prosperity.

Half a world away, at a U.S. Navy outpost in Bahrain, a much smaller team was testing out a very different approach to the service’s 21st-century warfighting needs.

Three paragraphs into a story that is highly critical of the Navy for being “arrogant” and hidebound, we are introduced to a significant and ongoing effort under the direct command of a three-star admiral designed to test a “very different approach to the service’s 21^st-century warfighting needs.” We will return to this effort later but suffice it to say that what VADM Cooper presided over in the Fifth Fleet with the full support of Navy leadership was anything but outdated and arrogant thinking. On the other hand, what was under test was a “…very different approach…” to a small slice of the service’s 21^st-century needs and not a wholesale repudiation of current operational thinking. Indeed, Cooper’s insightful approach was born of a Navy grown too small, having to prioritize other areas of the world more highly.

Bobbing in a small bay off the Persian Gulf was a collection of tiny unmanned vessels, prototypes for the kind of cheaper, easier-to-build and more mobile force that some officers and analysts of naval warfare said was already helping to contain Iran and could be essential to fighting a war in the Pacific.

The suggestion that “tiny, unmanned vessels” are containing Iran is dubious at best. The architecture that VADM Cooper has stitched together has contributed to a better sense of where Iranian forces are, but the suggestion that Iran’s behavior is altered as a result is unproven. In fact, recent reports indicate that vessels whose value is directly questioned in the NYT piece (and which Cooper has had only limited access to) are remaining there in order to deter Iran from continued attacks on shipping in the Arabian Gulf.

At no moment since World War II has the service faced a more urgent demand to embrace new technologies and weapons systems, given the rising threat from a now formidable Chinese military.

This is a true statement, as far as it goes. The urgency to embrace new technologies and weapons systems is manifest, but so too is the need for mass (or numbers). Any legitimate approach to fleet design cannot choose between capability and capacity; it must do both. Since the end of the Cold War, defense planners have come down on the side of capability at the expense of capacity, and the current battle between those forces is playing out in the annual budgeting process. Congress has added to Biden Administration shipbuilding budget submissions not by cutting capability, but by providing additional resources from elsewhere in DoD.

But the Navy, analysts and current and former officials say, remains lashed to political and economic forces that have produced jobs-driven procurement policies that yield powerful but cumbersome warships that may not be ideally suited for the mission it is facing.

And it has ever been thus. The Constitution gives us this relationship, vesting the Executive with Commander-in Chief authority and Congress with the power of the purse. Our system tolerates inefficiency in order to achieve consensus. Authoritarian governments do not have these inconveniences, which in the case of China, has freed the PLAN to pursue a massive building program in peacetime. As for ships not being ideally suited for the mission, point solutions in shipbuilding are an expensive luxury. Because ships last for decades, they must be engineered with growth in mind, and they must be capable of contributing to mission success across a broad swath of operations. This fundamental requirement to retain utility over time favors large(r), multi-mission ships over platforms optimized for limited use.  Again, a war with China may be the most important thing for the Navy to plan to, but it is not the only thing.

In just the past eight years, Congress has added $24 billion in extra money to build ships, more than any other part of the Pentagon budget, even as lawmakers have cut spending on repairs to the fleet, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Congress has also balked at efforts to retire older ships that the Navy says provide only marginal warfighting capacity, leaving the service at risk of not being able to afford basic maintenance and staffing costs.

Additional context is required to appropriately address these two paragraphs. First, one of the reasons Congress added shipbuilding funding in the past 8 years was that for most of the Bush and Obama Administrations, the Navy—and shipbuilding in particular—became a billpayer for ground forces. Had China decided to invest in internal improvements or its own welfare state rather than in its navy, it is doubtful the U.S. shipbuilding account would have grown. Instead, as the U.S. Navy contracted (from 318 ships at the start of the Bush Administration to 299 ships today—after dipping to 275 at the end of the Obama Administration) the PLAN grew to 360 battle force ships.

As for Congress balking at the retirement of ships that the Navy says provide only “…marginal warfighting capacity…”, it must be remembered that until the 2023 NDAA was passed, the Navy’s mission applied exclusively to combat operations (warfighting), and so when budget cuts needed to be made, ships that were more vulnerable (or less capable) became liabilities. The watershed change to the Navy’s mission carries with it the responsibility for DoD to plan to its expansion and the Congress to resource it. Congress must demand of DoD officials details on how the change to the Navy’s mission is reflected in upcoming budgets.

No one is arguing that the Navy no longer needs traditional warships; in fact, a large fleet of fast-attack submarines would be particularly vital in any conflict with China.

To many analysts, industry executives and current and former military officials, the open question is how quickly the Navy can embrace the tactical opportunities by also arming itself with a new generation of weapons that are more maneuverable, cheaper to build and less devastating to lose. Even as the big shipyards are booming, companies that make unmanned platforms like those being evaluated in Bahrain are struggling to remain afloat.

The statement that “no one” is arguing that the Navy no longer needs traditional warships is gratuitous. Much of the article displays a zero-sum approach in which vulnerable warships are harvested to reap resources for the “…new generation of weapons that are more maneuverable, cheaper to build and less devastating to lose.” Never mind that this new generation has little or no impact on the actual behavior of other nations. Lipton’s citation of the need for a large fleet of fast-attack submarines in a China conflict is a perfect example of myopic fleet design. While these submarines are arguably the crown jewel of the fleet that would actually fight China, the stealthy nature of their operations and their limited mission sets make them unsuitable for conventional deterrence, naval diplomacy, crisis response or disaster relief. These are the things the Navy spends most of its time doing.

The biggest barriers to transforming the Navy include its antiquated procurement system, which takes years to build out detailed specifications for new ships and then years more to get money allocated to build them.

This statement is true but incomplete. Indeed, the procurement system is a barrier to transformation. More importantly, the procurement system is a barrier to simply providing, sustaining, and maintaining the Navy we have. This is the “inefficiency” cited elsewhere. The kluge of statutory requirements that make-up our procurement system stands as a monument to previous mistakes and overcorrections. Would that the New York Times loosed an ace reporter on a deep treatment of this house of horrors.

The problem is that despite their awesome power, these types of destroyers, like certain other traditional warships, are increasingly vulnerable — especially in a conflict with China over Taiwan, according to repeated war game exercises conducted by the Pentagon, its contractors and outside consultants.

If the Navy ships choose to approach China, many will be hit by Chinese missiles and damaged if not destroyed, resulting in lost U.S. ships and casualties on a scale unseen since World War II, the war games repeatedly concluded.

Yes, destroyers and other traditional warships are increasingly vulnerable. The number and capability of threats arrayed against the fleet is considerable. But then, everything else on the modern battlefield is also increasingly vulnerable. What critics fail to mention when tallying up the losses (and they would be considerable) is that in the wargames cited by this piece (especially this) China is often unable to achieve its objectives. While the U.S. loses scores of ships and thousands of servicemembers, China loses more ships and considerably more people. It is hard to conceive of China not conducting similar games and reaching similar conclusions, including the likelihood of not taking Taiwan at the cost of its Navy, while the U.S. still has two-thirds to three-fourths of its fleet left (not to mention the capabilities of participating friends and allies).

What many critics of the Navy’s fleet design are trying to sell is the notion that if it did come to combat with China over Taiwan, technology—especially unmanned technology—could provide combat power that puts fewer lives in jeopardy. This is a reasonable position. What they fail to grasp is that by harvesting conventional combat power to achieve these unmanned capabilities (the kind that provides a visible and ready deterrent), they are making that war more likely to occur, as China would calculate a higher opportunity for success. Put another way, deterrence depends on having skin in the game, and the degree to which the U.S. conventional deterrence posture removes Americans from that posture, the less likely it is to achieve its ends.

In a statement to The Times, Mr. Wicker said he had pushed the Navy to embrace unmanned vessels as well as to build traditional ships. “Backing traditional platforms or shifting completely toward advanced technology is a false choice,” he said.

And if the Navy—with OSD forbearance—came forward with a program that properly funded its current fleet design while incorporating advances in technology, I have a feeling Senator Wicker would be an enthusiastic supporter. This is the most important quote in this piece, as it points out the fact that Congress understands the problem better than several experts quoted in this story.

The experiment in Bahrain started after Admiral Selby, then the chief of the Office of Naval Research, proposed that the Navy try out some of the unmanned vessels as part of an annual Navy exercise off San Diego in early 2021. He said he found enormous enthusiasm for the idea among frontline commanders in the Pacific and the Middle East.

If frontline commanders in the Pacific and the Middle East are as enthusiastic as Rear Admiral Selby suggests here, who are the people in the Navy he refers to earlier as “arrogant”? There is very little that gets more attention in the acquisition system than urgent needs of forward-based commanders, and if they are as enthusiastic as he suggests, goodness will follow.

We are trying to improve Navy power, but we need to do more than that: We need to reimagine Navy power,” he (Selby) said in an interview this summer, just after retiring from the Navy. “We’re kind of at a pivotal point in history. It is vital that we throw off old conventions.

One of the ways that old conventions become old is that they remain relevant over time. I would suggest that what Selby meant here is that irrelevant old conventions be thrown off, but he does not make that distinction.

The team in Bahrain took a very different approach, turning to smaller, more entrepreneurial companies and sidestepping the bureaucracy that slows and complicates big weapons programs. It found partners in companies like Saildrone, Anduril, Shield AI and Martac, which had never built a major Navy ship.

Maybe the antiquated acquisition system is not so antiquated after all? It seems clear that whatever mechanisms that were used were found in extant acquisition law and regulation. One additional source of capability to the CTF 59 effort was partner nations, where the U.S. acquisition bureaucracy held no sway at all. Partners offered up systems and capabilities that their indigenous industries were producing, and CTF 59 gave them a real-world operational problem to help solve.

“They refuse to take money from the legacy programs,” Mr. Perry said. “The Navy, big industry and other key stakeholders are vested in the current shipbuilding enterprise.”

Mr. Perry’s comment provides a fine segue upon which to conclude. In two sentences, Perry lays out the battle lines in this fratricidal internal conflict. There is no greater insult to a 21^st century platform or capability than to be called “legacy”. Legacy means old. Out of date. Not cutting edge. Among a certain subset of defense thinkers, there is no greater dragon worth slaying than a legacy system, no matter how useful it is when compared to a broad spectrum of threats and missions. That “The Navy, big industry, and other key stakeholders are vested in the current shipbuilding enterprise” should surprise no one. In fact, if they were not invested in something they are spending $32B a year on, something is dreadfully wrong. When it comes to the pace of change, we must be able to differentiate between the accumulation of wisdom and being risk averse. Not all who have gone before are wrong or misguided. Not all in power today are greedy, corrupt, or incompetent. Not all worthwhile conflicts feature industrial Goliaths squaring off against plucky start-up Davids.

The fleet design of the future is not an “either/or” proposition. It is a fleet that is large enough to carry out the Navy’s mission—all of its missions--globally, one that recognizes the value of numbers even as it strives to be in the forefront of technology. We have been slow to respond to the changed and increasingly dangerous security environment, and while we have never spent more on defense, we have never had more to defend. Continuing to advocate for worthwhile technologies with discrete, wartime utility at the cost of platforms that are in demand around the world every day is the road to conflict. Worse, this approach is a failure of imagination, one that conjures a nation that adequately resources its Navy to achieve the ends that it has been given. We can do better.

One final note: the same piece of legislation that changed the mission of the Navy created a “National Commission on the Future of the Navy”. This Commission was to be appointed (8 members) and up and running 90 days after the legislation was passed. This would have been March 22, 2023, which was five and a half months ago. The Commission is required to report on many of the issues raised in the NYT article by 1 July 2024. No work has been done, as the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, the Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee, and the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee have yet to make their nominations.