Walk and Chew Gum

The Navy Must Invest in Current Readiness and Future Capabilities

In order to do its job, the Navy must maintain a large fleet in a high state of readiness for war. In order to do so year in and year out, it must continuously invest in new platforms and capabilities that take a decade or more to be fielded. It is my judgment that the Navy is being denied sufficient resources to achieve these requirements—current readiness and future capabilities—as the Biden Administration (and the Trump Administration before it) defers future investment in favor of insufficient spending on near-term readiness.

This essay is likely to be a bit much for those not interested in my day job, but this is the kind of stuff I spend a lot of time thinking about.

The Admiral in charge of the United States Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) recently testified before Congress as to the growing and proximate threat posed to U.S. security interests by China. One quote from ADM Aquilino’s testimony found its way into virtually all reporting of his appearance:

Admiral John Aquilino, USN, Commander, United States Indo-Pacific Command

“All indications point to the PLA meeting President Xi Jinping’s directive to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027,” Aquilino said. “The PLA’s actions indicate their ability to meet Xi’s preferred timeline to unify Taiwan with mainland China by force if directed.”

I know of no person in a better position to make such a judgment, and I know of few people I would trust more in MAKING such a judgment. Aquilino is not saying that China will invade Taiwan by 2027. He is making a military judgment as to the degree to which the stated desire of China’s President to be READY to move by 2027 has been achieved. Here is reporting on that point:

These years have been singled out partly because Mr. Xi has instructed China’s armed forces, the People’s Liberation Army, to have the capability to fight and win a regional conflict by 2027. By 2035, it should be a “world-class” military power.

Xi’s ultimate assessment as to whether China has achieved the readiness he exhorted will necessarily involve his own armed forces’ capabilities, but also those of nations potentially arrayed to frustrate such an ambition. The United States is one of those nations, and the United States Navy is one of the primary elements of that frustration. To be prepared to do so, the Navy must maintain forces forward in the region at a high state of readiness—ammunition, parts, fuel, training, and personnel. The nature of forward-deployed naval power requires a rotation base of forces recently returned from being forward, forces in extended maintenance, and forces conducting training to return forward. These “non-deployed” forces are maintained in various states of readiness, readiness that generally increases the closer a unit is to being deployed.

Because defense spending—now, as ever—is finite, decision-makers at the highest levels (President, Secretary of Defense et al) have made a choice, and that choice is to privilege spending on forward deployed forces. Evidence of this can be seen in the stellar performance of naval forces in the Red Sea, but that readiness is matched by forward deployed forces in the Indo-Pacific and European theaters. Resources programmed against the needs of non-deployed forces are “the losers” in this near term focus, but enough is spent so that enough of them are ready (enough) to move forward when it is their turn. Over time, readiness of those non-deployed forces declines, making the climb to deployment levels of readiness come later and at higher cost. It is my judgment that this is where we are today, and it is unsustainable in the absence of additional resources.

A quick aside—it is easy for me sitting in my ManCave to make statements like this and to sound (and be) critical of the decisions of those in government. There should be no mistake—if I were required by oath of office to carry out the existing National Security Strategy, I would almost certainly come down on the same side of many of these decisions. But that is the beauty of not being on Active Duty or in government. I can (and do) question the wisdom of the strategy these men and women are oath-bound to implement, one that is derived of a grand strategic goal of managing great power contention rather than winning it.

The Other Loser

The readiness of non-deployed forces is not the only loser in the straightforward strategic decision to focus on managing conflict with China. The near-sighted desire to push China’s readiness point outside a second Biden Presidential term is having real and important consequences on the Navy’s ability to field a fleet architecture appropriate for its missions in the future. The plain truth is that it takes consistent investment over decades to change and implement a fleet architecture, and that investment is being harvested in order to “keep the plates spinning”. What do I mean?

The Navy we are operating today was conceived of, designed, and acquired from the late 1970’s through the late 1990’s. Cruisers and destroyers, submarines, aircraft, and missiles procured during the Reagan buildup and afterward are ageing out, and their retirement leaves holes in force structure. That Reagan buildup—among other things—should be remembered for what it was, and that was the instantiation of Reagan’s “we win, they lose” approach to great power contention.

Although the Trump Administration made a lot of noise about growing the Navy and addressing the retirement of the Reagan Navy force structure, it did little to achieve it. The Biden Administration did not even make noise. Quite the contrary, here’s what the Acting Secretary of the Navy directed in June of 2021 when faced with the prospect of recapitalizing the Navy’s surface (DDGX), carrier-based air (NGAD), and attack submarine (SSNX) programs:

In a memo dated June 4, acting Navy Secretary Thomas Harker called on the Navy to choose one of the three programs to initially pursue in earnest in the Program Objective Memorandum 2023 budget cycle.

“The Navy cannot afford to simultaneously develop the next generation of air, surface, and subsurface platforms and must prioritize these programs balancing the cost of developing next-generation capabilities against maintaining current capabilities,” the memo reads. “As part of the POM23 budget, the Navy should prioritize one of the following capabilities and re-phase the other two after an assessment of operational, financial, and technical risk.”

THIS is what managing great power contention looks like. We cannot afford to move forward with the future ship, the future submarine, and the future jet all at the same time, so pick one and we’ll continue to build the present versions of those things in insufficient numbers. But it gets worse.

The quote above is three years old, ancient history in budgeting years. It matters not that Russia invaded Ukraine in the interim. It matters not that Hamas’ murderous terror strike into Israel has dramatically heated up the Middle East security environment requiring a sustained naval response. It matters not that China continues its aggressive behavior in waters it illegally claims as its own. No—the situation must be MANAGED, and so if one dives into latest defense budget delivered to Capitol Hill (FY 2025)—one can see that ALL THREE of the next-generation platform programs have been deferred.

Ultimately, this boils down to money, and it boils down to will. We are not spending enough on the Navy to ensure we have a Navy that can do what we want it to do. Because of the inefficiencies and overhead associated with the defense budget achieved from our political processes, the likelihood of the Navy getting the resources it needs to be ready today and tomorrow without the Air Force and Army also getting significant increases is low. We will address these insufficiencies one way or another—either a large, broad-based defense buildup over time achieved with political consensus in restive peace, or a massive defense buildup once great power conflict is forced on us. We DO get to choose.

One More Thing

This is a point of personal privilege. At a time in my once meaningful life, I was the Commanding Officer of an ARLEIGH BURKE Class Destroyer, the USS BULKELEY (DDG 84). At the time (2004-2006) it was one of the newer destroyers in the fleet and among the most capable. But because of a series of budgetary decisions made in the post-Cold War drawdown, my ship could not kill another ship over the horizon with its own weapons. The HARPOON Missile (roughly 75 miles) had been removed from the class beginning with hull # 79, and so the only things I could shoot at another ship was my five inch gun and a specialized engagement using surface to air missiles in an anti-surface role—which were horizon limited. A destroyer that could not destroy another ship struck me then as underweight.

To its credit, the Navy has addressed this need, in a big way, and the ship I once commanded can now employ Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAM) (that we have all seen strike targets ashore at ranges of up to 1000 miles) modified to hit ships moving at sea. Additionally, the SM6 surface to air missile has been modified for anti-surface missions at extended ranges.

But there’s a hitch.

In order to shoot at ships that far away, you have to know where they are, you have to have a “track” on them. There are lots of ways for a modern destroyer to hold a track on a ship at extended ranges, which for the purposes of this discussion we’ll say is 500 miles. Most of those ways involve some other US platform having some form of contact with the ship (radar, visual, electronic means, etc.) reporting the location of that ship over data links. If a US asset has a high confidence track on an enemy ship and transmits that track to me, it would be possible for me to shoot a missile at it from hundreds of miles away and hit it. The likelihood that I hit the target is directly related to how time late the information is, but then again, you knew that. Bottom line though, is that for these long range engagements to be effective, SOMETHING needs to know where that enemy ship is.

In modern data architectures, the thing that knows where the enemy ship is can be a satellite. Or it can be an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) transmitting its data to a controlling station via a satellite. Bottom line is that satellites are really important to the targeting web that would help close these fire control loops. What happens when those satellites are unavailable (tasked for higher priority missions) or destroyed in battle? The Surface Force must operate organic aircraft that allow it to employ weapons at the outer edges of their performance envelopes in the absence of broader satellite enabled networks.

Back in the olden days when I commanded a ship, I took two helicopters to sea with me. These helos could take off with a little over three hours of fuel onboard and cruise at around 120 MPH. Their maximum tactical altitude was about 10,000. We had a secure line of sight means to talk with the helo and over which it could send its radar picture to me. At 10,000 feet, that line of site is 122.5 NM. Therefore, I was pretty much maxed out by a mission profile in which the helo could fly for an hour, loiter for an hour 122.5 miles away, and then return home. The helo could theoretically “see” (radar) out another 122.5 miles (less because of the power available)—and so what I could get on the very best of days was a helo that could tell me along one line of bearing out to about 250 miles if there was a bad guy out there. This was barely acceptable when I had no weapon I could shoot at him, but now that there are weapons available that can kill that guy at ranges far in excess of 250 miles, the ability of that ship to employ those weapons is utterly dependent on third parties—including satellites. I think this is unacceptable.

Not only is it unacceptable, but even the 250 miles is in jeopardy as the helicopters that perform that mission will begin going out of service in 2035. Which means, we either have to get hot with a replacement, or we’re going to have to have some kind of program to extend the service lives of these insufficiently capable aircraft, which I am unaware anyone is thinking about.

To its credit, the Navy is thinking about a replacement, and the program name they’ve given it is “Future Vertical Lift/Maritime Strike”. In theory, manned and unmanned craft would act in a systemic manner to provide organic (that is, operated from the ship and reporting information back to the ship) intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance, targeting, and communications relay to the fleet, even in the absence of supporting satellite support. Here’s a dated video from a (since cancelled) DARPA/ONR Project called TERN that kind of gets at some of the things that FVL/MS might want to address

What I see in this video (and what I saw in this program eight years ago) is something the Navy’s Surface Force desperately needs—an aircraft that an take off and land on ship’s flight decks, can be stowed in the hangar, can operate its sensors for several hours several hundred miles from the ship, can operate at higher altitudes than traditional helicopters, and can move at higher cruise speeds. Such a capability would lessen the dependence of the ship on third party platforms and networks to locate and eliminate adversary ships.

This program—FVL/MS—is—to this former destroyer captain—one of the most important programs in naval aviation. But it TOO has been pushed to the right in the budget schedules, with a bit of life support funding for the next couple of years but little in the way of moving forward with acquiring the capability. Given that the Navy’s foray into 6th Generation aircraft (NGAD—the primary aircraft desire of the Navy) also moved to the right, it is hard to be critical of naval aviation’s prioritization. What I can be critical of is the lack of appreciation at the highest levels of our government for the continuous development and acquisition of new capability.

The recent grounding of V-22 variant aircraft across DoD has caused a great deal of second guessing as the efficacy of tilt-rotor technology, and it is difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff in these discussions. But it is also difficult to ignore the great advantages this technology offers over traditional rotorcraft from a mission perspective, and I am hard pressed to conceive of a future in which tilt-rotor aircraft—manned and unmanned—are not central to Fleet ISRT.

Summary

The Next Generation Destroyer. The Next-Generation Air Dominance Program. The Next Generation Attack Submarine. Future Vertical Lift/Maritime Strike. All of these programs are critical to the future fleet architecture and ALL are delayed (some with funding cuts) in the 2025 budget, a budget that purports to hone in on near term readiness to meet the challenge of China’s Taiwan desires.

The Navy submits a budget that does things like this because the controls it is given by the Secretary of Defense require it. The Secretary of Defense makes these requirements because the Office of Management and Budget determined what OSD’s share of the budget would be as part of a broader menu of politically-driven policy choices and National Strategy. We are managing great power contention, not winning it. A nation serious about winning this competition would privilege the readiness of its Navy for the near, middle, and long term, ensuring ships and aircraft have what they need on the tip of the spear, even as it plants the seed-corn for its future. We are eating that seed-corn.