500 Ships: The Drift, S. II, Vol. XL

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Navigation Brief

This is an e-newsletter first published Sept. 24.

WASHINGTON – Good Evening, Drifters

This will not be a formal “Express Drift,” but it will indeed be a quicker-than-normal Drift.

The reason being I started this late because my compadre Aaron Mehta and I were working on a story about what I want to talk about tonight.

The Pentagon is eyeing a 500-ship Navy, documents reveal

That’s right, 500 ships. Actually, the upper limit on the documents we reviewed was 534 ships, but we’ll get to all that. We’ll get in depth about this in future editions of The Drift, but for tonight, I kinda want to give you an outline of the questions the Navy needs to answer to get to this goal.

Strap in, this is going to go fast.

Let’s Drift!

DBL

So. Many. Questions.

If you didn’t read the story above, please do. For the lazy, let me break it down for you:

The Defense Secretary Mark Esper commissioned a force structure assessment to be conducted by the Navy, OSD CAPE and The Hudson Institute. Each of the three submitted a fleet to the study. Aaron and I dug up the CAPE and Hudson Institute numbers from preliminary inputs in April.

The point of the story is not to give you hard numbers but to show you the kinds of force structure that OSD and the Navy are looking at, which is radically different from today. The fleet gets a big boost in numbers from unmanned surface vessels and robot submarines, as well as an expanded logistics force.

The fleets from Hudson and CAPE both cut the carrier fleet to nine carriers, which is probably where they find the money for a lot of this.

Here are five big questions I have:

• Where we putting these things? The Navy is talking about building up this enormous fleet with small logistics ships, unmanned surface vessels and large unmanned underwater vehicles that will almost certainly have to be forward based to be of any use. We’re not going to design and build these systems to have to make a Pacific transit every time, that would be too expensive. This is going to require some serious diplomatic heavy lifting.
• How we maintaining these things? We’re going to need to reinvent our maintenance system to maintain 500+ ships, even if they are smaller. Or maybe even ESPECIALLY if the ships are smaller. And if we are placing lots of stuff overseas, that adds another wrinkle to the maintenance system.
• Can we even do this? The big bet here is that all the tech that would enable a force structure like this will work out. If history is a guide, some of this stuff will work out, other stuff wont and other stuff will be developed for years longer than it should and finally reach the fleet less capable than the system we were trying to develop. The issue is that we’re kind of betting the farm on enough of the tech working out to make this fleet viable, especially if the Navy starts trading in force structure like carriers to pay for it.
• Can we afford this? I told you last week about how Esper’s prepared remarks called for boosting shipbuilding from 11 to 13 percent of the Navy’s annual budget. Is that really enough to do all this?
• Is Congress going to buy this? Congress has been mightily skeptical of the Navy’s pivot to unmanned, pointing to the Navy’s long-standing tendency to put the technological cart before the horse. Congress has, the last two years, deliberately slowed down the Large Unmanned Surface Vessel, expressing misgivings about just how much the Navy has thought this through and questioning whether its going too fast with an unproven capability. This whole fleet is based on the concepts Congress has been somewhat skeptical of.

And that’s it, those are my questions. We will get into them more over the next few weeks.

On to The Hotwash!

The Hotwash

This story gets to one of my questions above about where we’re planning on putting all this stuff.

America’s top Marine says the US must shake up its military presence in the Pacific

Excerpt: The way the United States military has had forces arrayed in the Pacific for the last 70 years must change to meet a new threat environment, the US Marine Corps' top general said Wednesday, arguing that the force must be in more places and spread across a wider area.

After WWII and the Korean War, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps have had their forces set up to respond to a possible crisis on the Korean Peninsula, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger said, but with the rising Chinese threat that force laydown is no longer going to cut it.

"I know we are taking a look at the posture of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Berger told the virtual audience at the annual Modern Day Marine conference. "They were well designed and well crafted, pointed from California to Japan like an arrow at the Korean Peninsula to make sure that if there was another problem on the Peninsula we’d be well positioned to handle it.

“It’s not a good laydown for 10 years from now or 20 years from now. We need to look at it again.”

More Reading

Some day. The hapless attack sub Boise could return to the fleet in 2023 after 8 years sidelined

Two Super Hornets have suffered in-flight engine fires this month

Did the US Marine Corps give up on a big ship-based surveillance drone too soon?

Navy: Norfolk Naval Shipyard CO Removed Over Poor On-Time Maintenance Rates

Marine Corps’ Builds New Littoral Regiment, Eye On Fake Chinese Islands

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