Does Size Matter?

   Unmanned US Navy Ship

“Right now, [US shipbuilders] are still building a largely 20th-century Navy.” 

 Bryan Clark, former Navy budget planner who serves as a consultant to the service.

“The U.S. Navy is arrogant... We have an arrogance about, we’ve got these aircraft carriers, we’ve got these amazing submarines. We don’t know anything else. And that is just wrong.”

Lorin Selby, recently retired rear admiral and the chief of naval research after a 36-year career in which he helped run many of the Navy’s major acquisition units.

On December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched an unprovoked aircraft carrier-based aerial attack against the American Naval fleet docked at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The US entered WWII. Thousands of sailors and soldiers were killed. Dozens of ships sunk, including several major battleships. But to the shock and surprised to Japanese naval commanders, not a single US carrier was sunk. Our Pacific floating airfields were on a mission far to the north. The pride of the US Navy, the dreaded mega gun platform used to strike fear in the hearts of all who saw them, able to lay siege with massive guns from miles offshore, the most feared naval vessel for many decades – the battleship – suddenly began a rapid and steady march into obsolescence. The era of two fleets battling it out without ships from either side able to see their enemy – the new fleets built around aircraft carriers – had just begun.

Today, a mainstream aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion plus to build, costs between $6 to $8 million dollars a day to operate and years to design and build. Three to four thousand sailors are required to man a modern US carrier. Maintenance costs run $2 to $4 billion every 32 months. Add another $5 billion to cover the cost of the aircraft onboard. The United States has 11 of the 25 major operating carriers in the world, stationed in major fleets deployed in oceans and seas around the world. Oh, and one more thing: US carriers only operate in fleets, including a dozen or more accompanying vessels, ranging from fast attack submarines, frigates, destroyers, supply ships, perhaps a cruiser and other specialized vessels. Most of these fleet ships have one primary mission: protect the carrier. Just think what a rich target a carrier has to be to a well-equipped (or a stealthy smaller nation) foe to take out. Not just the military cost but the massive economic damage.

The US Navy has also wasted billions of dollars designing and building ships designed to operate offshore in shallower water (the contract to the “deep water Navy”), but the results of this littoral effort have been disappointing to say the least. Generally, the United States has prioritized its Navy when it comes to military budgetary allocations, under the assumption that our massive fleets offer the greatest deterrent force we can deploy. While China and Russia deploy a few, smaller and less sophisticated aircraft carriers, their efforts have instead been focused on drones and hypersonic missiles designed to disable our massive carrier fleets.

But building big carriers and the accompanying modern defensive support vessels is huge business. The shipyards that build these vessels, from Maine to Mississippi, are often the largest private employers in some states. The pressure on those elected to Congress, where such industrial power dominates, to vote for big, expensive ships for our Navy is immense and hardly partisan, even as the GOP is the most consistent voice in growing our military budget. Eric Lipton, writing for the September 4th New York Times, presents a most detailed analysis of the rear-guard effort from shipbuilder lobbyists, most senior Navy officers (“we’ve always done it this way”) and members of Congress protecting local jobs: “The 800-acre Huntington Ingalls complex in Pascagoula, Miss., is one of seven major Navy shipbuilding yards across the country…

“A symphony of sorts echoed through the sprawling shipyard on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi — banging, hissing, beeping, horns, bells and whistles — as more than 7,000 workers hustled to fill orders fueled by the largest shipbuilding budget in the Navy’s history… The surge in spending, $32 billion for this year alone, has allowed the Huntington Ingalls shipyard to hire thousands of additional people to assemble guided missile destroyers and amphibious transport ships. ‘More ships are always better,’ said Kari Wilkinson, the president of the shipyard, pointing to the efficiencies that come with a steady flow of contracts and the jobs they create.

“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.

“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… 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.

“Operating on a budget that was less than the cost of fuel for one of the Navy’s big ships, Navy personnel and contractors had pieced together drone boats, unmanned submersible vessels and aerial vehicles capable of monitoring and intercepting threats over hundreds of miles of the Persian Gulf, like Iranian fast boats looking to hijack oil tankers… Now they are pleading for more money to help build on what they have learned… ‘It’s an unbelievable capability — we have already tested it for something like 35,000 hours,” said Michael Brown, who was the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, which helped set up the unmanned drone tests in Bahrain. ‘So why are we not fielding that as fast as possible?’…

“The Navy’s top brass talks frequently about the need to innovate to address the threat presented by China. The Defense Department’s own war games show that the Navy’s big-ship platforms are increasingly vulnerable to attack… 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.

“An aversion to risk-taking — and the breaking of traditions — mixed with a bravado and confidence in the power of the traditional fleet has severely hampered the Navy’s progress, several recently departed high-ranking Navy and Pentagon officials told The New York Times.” China has a larger navy than ours based on numbers of vessels, but it is the swarming capacity of smaller ships, the loss of any one of which is a tolerable cost, that suggest that it is China, not the United States, that is building the navy for the foreseeable future. Protecting Taiwan just might not be dependent on having a large US fleet deployed in the region.

While the US Navy is developing unmanned, drone ships (above and below the surface) as well as all sorts of sea-launched drone aircraft – clearly the future of warfare – we continue to build truly large target fleets whose time does seem to be coming to an end. We may not have a Pearl Harbor attack to force the paradigm shift, but we better begin to escalate that transition immediately. We need to stop wasting billions on ships that are obsolescent the day they are launched.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as the rightwing House Freedom Caucus presses for severe budgetary austerity, they are indeed the leaders in continuing the most wasteful and least effective major “big ship” building programs.