Fleets Win Wars With Firepower and Mobility

Milan Vigo reminds us what wins naval wars as he examines the shrinking US Navy and the shipbuilding strategy heading into the future. From National Defense Magazine.

The Navy needs a larger number of ships, not only for winning a war at sea against a stronger opponent but also for carrying out diverse missions in peacetime, ranging from humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, security assistance, enforcement of maritime agreements, counterpiracy, vessel traffic service, multinational exercises, countersmuggling and counterdrug, to regional deterrence through forward presence in selected parts of the world’s oceans. In operations short of war, the Navy’s mission includes prevention of transnational terrorist acts on the high seas and in international straits and larger ports, support of counterinsurgency or insurgency, and peace enforcement operations.

The Navy today lacks both the numbers and the type of combat ships to successfully carry out all its diverse missions in times of peace and war. The reasons for such a long-standing unfavorable fleet structure include the Navy’s preference for building an ever-larger number of high-capability but large and expensive ships optimally suited for operations on the open ocean; the associated costs of building such large ships; the use of purely business considerations in determining fleet size/composition and deployment patterns; the belief that new technologies are a substitute for numbers; and a false reading of the future strategic environment.

...The Navy’s efforts to increase the number of ships in the battle force are also greatly complicated by the widely held belief among high Defense Department and Navy officials that in the information age, the number of ships is not as important as their combat power based on the new technologies. The belief that technology by itself can substitute for the quality given by numbers of platforms is based on sheer ignorance of both military history and strategy. Above all, it is based on misplaced confidence in the powers of technology.

...In the past, the Navy had a large number of decommissioned destroyers and frigates in reserve that could be put into active service in the case of a national emergency. This is not the case today. Over the past six years, some 80 decommissioned naval vessels were sunk. This number included a 31-year-old fleet of 27 destroyers, while 22 others have been scrapped or sold. In contrast, during the Clinton administration only, eight 46-year-old hulks were sunk. Many of these ships could have been reactivated by undergoing a life-extending refit and returned to service for another 15 years. This policy of scrapping relatively new ships should be reversed soon to provide additional ships for the fleet.

...The gains in combat power of a netted force essentially depend not on raw organic power, such as firepower and mobility, but on one’s ability to decide and act faster than one’s adversary. Such an increase in one’s combat power depends on many intangible factors, but primarily on the human element. Among other things, micromanagement, excessive command and control, and poorly educated and trained commanders and staffs can not only drastically reduce but also even eliminate any potential gain achieved through superior information technologies.

Experience has repeatedly shown the fallacy of relying exclusively on technological superiority and arbitrarily reducing the size of one’s forces. Technology must always be properly integrated with other, mostly intangible, elements of one’s combat power — specifically, combat leadership, unit cohesion, morale and discipline, doctrine, and training. Otherwise, the new technologies will be of little or no help in defeating a stronger and more agile opponent. Experience conclusively shows that numbers have their own quality. Hence, the importance of the numerically larger fleet should not be dismissed as irrelevant in the information age.

The entire article is excellent. Regulars to this blog will recognize several themes covered in the past. Well done, very well done.

- Milan Vigo is a professor of operations in the Joint Military Operations Department at the U.S. Naval War College.