Reflecting Upon US 193

Today was a great day for the Navy. If you are feeling proud of your Navy, make sure you drop an email to say thanks to the good folks on the USS Lake Erie (CG 70).

This event is a reminder that the United States Navy is the most capable, smartest, most educated Navy in the world. The US Navy is an all-volunteer service, conscripts and draftees won't do. This event, particularly with the media attention and success, is a reminder that the US Navy remains very capable to the challenges that face our nation. In this case a unique mission presented itself, and yet the Navy was able to overcome the technical challenges in a short amount of time to hit a small piece of a school bus sized target, a fuel tank, which was reportedly only 40 inches wide, and hit it at around 133 nautical miles above the ground while it was racing across in orbit at a speed of over 4.7 miles per second.

Regardless of intentions or politics, that is a powerful capability no other country in the world can accomplish. While this isn't a capability that scales into a naval tactic, it highlights extraordinary flexibility of US naval forces at the high end of warfare. The inventive spirit of Lt Col James Doolittle is alive and well today in our armed forces.

In the context of the Maritime Strategy, we believe this event sends a powerful signal of deterrence to those who threaten with ballistic missiles, indeed it could be said a signal was sent that these new unsophisticated ballistic missiles like those being deployed by North Korea and Iran were highlighted as obsolete upon delivery. This doesn't mean the Navy can let down its guard or pull back its research and development, but we see an opportunity for the Navy to reassess its capabilities on a comprehensive level.

Based on the success of this event, particularly with the media attention focused on the event, conventional wisdom implies the Navy should move full speed ahead with more of this type of capability. The existing program for AEGIS ballistic missile defense will produce 18 capable warships by 2010, and follow that up with AEGIS ballistic missile defense modernizations on all 62 Arleigh Burke class destroyers. In our opinion, this builds an extraordinarily capable fleet, and unless the Missile Defense Agency would like to increase funding for the Navy, we see no need to adjust these plans.

What we do observe however is the need for the Navy to insure its capabilities in other areas of warfare are as flexible and capable in facing the nations challenges as the surface fleet proved it is today. As we look around, we are not so sure we believe that is true. The nation is at war, and we observe the naval capabilities required to fight the nations current war are woefully inadequate.

Take brown water capabilities for example, we continue to hear about the Riverine forces and their importance to the Navy in the 21st century. We observe the rotation of squadrons to Iraq, and how these rotations get plenty of media attention in the Navy, but few realize a riverine squadron is only 12 boats and around 200 sailors. The Navy has the expectation to control a river in a country the size of Iraq with a single squadron, with its 12 old reused boats, and hypes this as a priority capability?

We would suggest to the Navy to recognize the incident with US 193 demonstrates that the high end of the fleet capability mix has an amazing degree of flexibility. We believe the Navy should utilize its sizable technological lead over competitors to build up other aspects of the force that lack the same flexibility. We find the argument that this demonstration validates the investment of more large destroyers as counter to logical application of what we witnessed, as the existing force appears quite capable.

We see this demonstration as an opportunity for the Navy to invest in the low end of its capabilities mix, which clearly lacks flexibility. We believe this investment will help 'polish the edges' in dealing with other aspects of the Maritime Strategy, many of which focus on the low end of the warfare spectrum and are more likely scenarios in the near term. A few years of resource dedication at the low end of capabilities can go a long way, in fact for the cost of a single DDG-1000, the Navy could upgrade existing Riverine squadrons and actually build many more with modern equipment.

Roughead has been using the word balance often with the media recently, but we observe that there is no balance within the force, as everything weighs towards the most capable aspect of the existing fleet, and away from the forces that require a few years of attention with budgetary resources in a sound way that reflects the desires of the new Cooperative Maritime Strategy for 21st Century Seapower.