AirSea Battle: Colby v. Hammes (Continued)

My friends Bridge Colby and T.X. Hammes are continuing to fight out their superbly argued sides on the AirSea Battle front, Colby making points similar to the one's I've made in this space but doing so more effectively and eloquently. 

It is hard for me to get around feeling that T.X. Hammes' "Offshore Control" strategy is a recipe for hastening the decline of U.S. power and influence in Asia.  If that's ok with you, then you won't find Hammes' approach questionable. 

Some may find it opportunistic for a guy who wrote the words "preventing wars is as important as winning wars", but too much emphasis on this debate is placed on the war-fighting capacity of ASB and too little is placed on the war-deterring aspects of the concept.  We need to continue to sustain the conditions under which the PLAN East Sea Fleet Commander wakes up every day and says "today is not the day" (hat-tip to VADM Joe Sestak, whose words those are).  AirSea Battle can be a critical part of an approach that leads him to that conclusion.

Bryan McGrath

Try This One Weird Trick to Cut Organizational Redundancy!

Over at Medium: War is Boring, I take another unhinged screed at the Air Force:

With the Iraq War over and the fighting in Afghanistan winding down,why does the United States need to maintain two large land armies, the Army and Marine Corps? The question seems perfectly reasonable given the apparent absence of large terrestrial threats, but it leads us down the wrong path. 

The United States military is all about redundancy; in addition to two armies, it also fields two navies — the Navy and the Coast Guard — and five or six air forces, depending on how you count the aerial arms of the various branches. 

The real problem isn’t that the Army is marginally more or less useful that it was 10 years ago, but rather that the institutions that were designed in 1947, when the Army and Air Force split, are insufficiently flexible to negotiate the modern security landscape.

This serves as a backdoor announcement that Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (in lieu of a webpage, I've set up a twitter feed), will be published this spring by University Press of Kentucky.  The introductory piece has generated a couple good responses, first from Michael Auslin:

The other services may indeed use their air arms to support their missions, but fulfilling the strategic objectives of the United States will depend ever more heavily on an independent Air Force that is able to exploit every advantage from the air domain, just as the Navy exploits every advantage from the sea. To expect global airpower without the Air Force is a fantasy, especially in today’s budget environment. If Mr. Farley wanted to be truly radical, he would have called for abolishing the Army and Navy’s air wings and folding them into the only airpower service that can make the full use of their ability.

And from Robert Goldich:

There are some very practical reasons why an independent Air Force is a good thing. First, not all airpower is used in support of operations over land or water. Strategic air and space power, whether with manned aircraft or missiles, most notably our strategic nuclear forces, can be employed in support of ground and naval operations, but need not be. Furthermore, strategic air and missile forces are projected from the continental United States, not from an overseas theater of operations. To assign the strategic airpower function to either the Army or the Navy would make no sense. Second, we need a central repository for doctrine to manage the air battle in a theater of operations. To assign that responsibility to aviation assets of the Army or Navy would create an unbalanced situation where the interests and concerns of one service outweighed the other.

At What Price, Another Round of Real Carrier Choices

Sea Control Ship

CVV medium carrier design

CVN-78 class

      It seems that whenever defense budgets shrink, the big deck aircraft carrier becomes a principle target of budget cutters and technological enthusiasts. Whether in late 1940s, the late 1970s, or today, a group of carrier critics has emerged, armed with budgetary and technological arguments forecasting the vulnerability and impending doom of the big flattop. With the shadows of continuing sequester and advanced anti-carrier weapons now darkening the late summer in Washington DC, another group of carrier critics in the tradition of Louis Johnson, Stuart Symington, and ADM Stansfield Turner have taken the stage to deride the big flattop in budgetary talks. They demand that it go the way of the battleship and make way for some cheaper, less vulnerable weapon system that will accomplish the same effects as the supercarrier. It is surprising to note that few, if any of these critics reference the last thought-provoking study done on the aircraft carrier as both a strategic platform and instrument of war at sea. Former Navy Secretary John Lehman's Aircraft Carriers, The Real Choices, which appeared in 1978 before his tenure as Secretary of the Navy asked the significant strategic questions that seem to elude today's carrier critics. In addition to budgetary and vulnerability concerns, Lehman sought to understand what the government expected carriers to do; could land-based aviation supplant any carrier roles; how many flattops were really required by the U.S. for peace and wartime operations, how big they should be and finally how technological advancements in aircraft such as vertical take off and landing (VSTOL) capabilities might change carrier missions and design. Whether the United States decides on big carriers, small carriers, a mix of types, or something else, the strategic needs of the nation, tempered by financial realities ought to drive the process and not the fear mongering of the latest group of carrier critics.
     Lehman's 1978 analysis on carrier choices is equally relevant in 2013 and while the technology of naval weapons, sensors, communications and avionics has significantly advanced since that time, the threats to the flattop, its strategic, operational and tactical uses, and the choices in shape and size of carrier remain remarkably constant. In the late 1970s's the threat of the Soviet combined cruise missile strike from air, surface and subsurface platforms was believed to be just as deadly to the U.S. carrier battle group as the Chinese-made DF-21(D) is today. Many experts then as now advocated smaller, less detectable carriers like the CVV and Sea Control Ship to augment or supplant the big carrier. Others recommended land-based aircraft and cruise missiles as less vulnerable and less costly substitutes for sea-based naval aviation.
      Lehman agreed that the big carrier was vulnerable and its steep construction and operating costs were good reason for at least augmenting the carrier fleet with smaller, less costly aviation-capable warships. The problem he discovered however was that if carriers were even fractionally smaller then the big flattops, the effectiveness of their airwing rapidly deceased, their vulnerability to mission-kill or loss exponentially increased, and their lifetime maintenance cost (primarily due to the smaller ships' dependence on fossil vice nuclear fuel) was much higher over 30+ years than that of the big deck nuclear-powered carrier. These factors have not appreciably changed. The price of fossils fuels remains problematic and maintenance costs have appreciable risen.
    While vulnerable to attack, the big deck carrier is still arguably one of the toughest ships to sink. The damage incurred to USS Forrestal in 1967 and that suffered by USS Enterprise in 1969 in accidental detonations of multiple pieces of ordnance testifies to the extreme survivability of the big carrier. The ex-USS America (CV-66) was recently sunk as a target and some open source accounts say the ship took a tremendous beating before being purposely sunk after the test. The Navy has also not rested in its drive to protect the carrier from emerging threats. U.S. carriers were indeed vulnerable to cruise missile attack in the late 1970s, but development and fielding of the Aegis system for air defense significantly improved the ability of the carrier battle group to defend itself against this threat. The U.S. has pursued an equally aggressive program to defend against ballistic missiles like the DF-21(D) and there is no reason to believe this threat cannot also be countered by a technological response.
     The size and composition of the carrier's air wing were important to Lehman in determining what missions the ship could legitimately accomplish. Sadly the longer-range assets of the carrier including strike aircraft like the A-6 Intruder, and the antisubmarine warfare S-3 Viking were retired and not replaced. The relative weakness of the current carrier air wing in long range strike is one of the carrier critics' strongest arguments against the bigger flattop. That point alone however is not enough to argue for the ship's replacement by submarines or surface ships as the principle strike asset. The potential of longer-ranged unmanned aircraft is enormous and could redress the balance lost with the retirement of longer-range manned platforms in the last two decades.
   Land based air has been popular and easy to use in U.S. conflicts since 1990, but the same vulnerabilities Lehman discovered remain. As during the Cold War, the U.S. can no longer assume conditions as it has possessed in both of the Iraq conflicts, Afghanistan, and most recently Libya. These past conflicts were characterized by a ring of near-invulnerable airbases encircling the opponent, little if any resistance from the adversary, and a focus on strike verses a more conventional wartime campaign to reduce opponents and protect friendly forces. Overseas U.S. airbases in future conflicts against peer or near-peer opponents would be subject to attack from a variety of means and friendly host nations could rapidly become potential adversaries as demonstrated by such recent events as the so-called "Arab spring." The U.S. Air Force's stable of long and medium range strike aircraft has also significantly declined in number since Lehman's time and if war or revolution prevent the use of airbases that support shorter-range strike aircraft, the carrier would quickly become the sole aviation asset in a region of conflict.
     The U.S. again needs to ask Lehman's big strategic questions before making any final choices on its carrier fleet. The aircraft carrier has been a controversial platform since its emergence nearly a century ago at the end of World War 1. It has always been vulnerable to attack, but remains capable of flexible, continuous delivery of high volumes of ordnance albeit at a shorter range then in the past. Previous threats to the carrier have been successfully managed through technological improvements in the carrier's construction and defenses. New threats such as antiship ballistic missiles need to be fully countered, but the carrier remains less threatened than any land base. This relative safety allows national command authority the ability to deploy significant striking power without placing U.S. aircraft at risk in bases outside U.S.sovereign control. The recent success of the X-47B offers the potential of large numbers of unmanned aircraft being deployed from carriers. Land-based air can still play a significant role in any campaign, but in the likely contested conflicts  of the future its regional bases could be threatened. The lack of medium range strike assets in the U.S. Air Force inventory place a further burden on carrier-based aviation to carry a contested campaign. No matter the final number or composition of the carrier fleet, it is vital that decision-makers determine what role carriers should play in the nation's national security and how many are needed to fulfill that requirement. Carrier critics have a role to play, but a review of history since 1945 shows they are not offering any new arguments. The mission for the last twenty years may have been strike, but twilight is descending on that period of history and the next conflicts the U.S. faces will require flexible weapon systems that offer decision makers maximum freedom of choice. A cruise missile launch platform does not meet this goal, but an aircraft carrier can and will continue to meet this requirement. Lehman bemoaned the "executive/legislative drift" on carrier choices in the late 1970s. The nation cannot now afford a similar delay.
    

21st Century Mahan

I recently had an opportunity to read 21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era by Benjamin Armstrong. Below is the official book description on Amazon.

Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Seapower upon History is well known to students of naval history and strategy, but his other writings are often dismissed as irrelevant to today's problems. This collection of five of Mahan's essays, along with Benjamin Armstrong's informative introductions, illustrates why Mahan's work remains relevant to the 21st century and how it can help develop our strategic thinking. People misunderstand Mahan, the editor argues, because they have read only what others say about him, not what Mahan wrote himself. Armstrong's analysis is derived directly from Mahan's own writings. From the challenges of bureaucratic organization and the pit falls of staff duty, to the development of global strategy and fleet composition, to illustrations of effective combat leadership, Armstrong demonstrates that Mahan's ideas continue to provide today's readers with a solid foundation to address the challenges of a rapidly globalizing world.

It is probably expected that as an American blogger on naval history and naval strategy, I would be a big fan of Alfred Thayer Mahan. The truth is, I am not. AT Mahan may be known as America's great strategist, but he takes subjects I love like naval history and naval strategy and does what I consider impossible - he makes the subjects boring to read. While reading most of his books, I'll find myself on paragraph seven and sentence ten on some various subject screaming at AT Mahan to "get to the f-in point already you long winded...". AT Mahan's style of writing books is one where he goes so far out of the way to be so precise in what he is saying that it's like driving from Maine to Montana to get to New Jersey. With that said, some of my favorite articles are written by AT Mahan, but in every single case those articles are for periodicals, not his books.

21st Century Mahan is a very clever book. The book combines five articles written by AT Mahan for periodicals specifically for public audiences, thus presenting AT Mahan in a way that is more approachable by those like me who can get annoyed by his difficult to read classical writing style. All five articles are very well written, but they are also relevant to the discussions surrounding the US Navy today. Benjamin Armstrong is a Lieutenant Commander in the US Navy today, so the author intentionally draws no conclusions from Mahan's work and applies them to current events. And yet, because of the presentation and delivery within the book, the reader can't help but think about Mahan in a 21st century context applicable today. I am not sure if that was how LCDR Armstrong intended to write the book, or how the USNI editors helped arrange the book, but it is very clever and works well.

I really enjoyed the book. It helped that I had never read any of the five AT Mahan essay's covered in the book, and it also helped that I enjoyed each of the essay's. In particular the way the chapter involving Naval Administration and Warfare, Some General Principles came together early in the book was so well done I had to read it again with my yellow marker I was so impressed. To give one a sense of just how much easier this book is to read on Alfred Thayer Mahan than most works of AT Mahan, my 18 year old daughter actually finished the book when I asked her to read it just for an opinion. I assure you, if this was a typical Mahan book, she would not have made it past chapter 2.

If you are looking for a book with a strong authors opinion that draws conclusions for you in applying AT Mahan to the 21st century, this is not the right book for you. This book asks readers to draw their own conclusions. That detail actually defines the style of the book better than any other detail of the book, because the author doesn't tell the reader what to think, rather asks the reader to think for themselves.

Final note on this book. Availability of this book at Amazon for the paper copy has been hit and miss, but the electronic versions are always available. I note this because I have purchased two copies of this book since its release in late June and both copies arrived over 2 weeks later, so if you are expecting this book to be a last second quick gift idea, my experience suggests you should expect delays. With that said, there does appear to be copies available on Amazon again today.

Foreign Entanglements: The Myths of AirSea Battle

On this week's episode of Foreign Entanglements, Bryan and I spoke about his recent War on the Rocks post about AirSea Battle:

In particular, we give attention to whether ASB should be regarded as an anti-Army power play, whether it would increase the chances of war with China, whether it demands a particular strategic outlook, and whether the United States could afford ASB.