We Doing this Right?: The Drift, S. II, Vol. XXXVIII

Sponsored by:

Navigation Brief

This is an e-newsletter originally published Sept. 10

ALEXANDRIA – Good Evening, Drifters

Today is the day that endless force structure assessments broke my mind. At our annual Defense News Conference, Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist announced that the Navy’s latest force structure assessment was due to the Secretary of Defense soon, and a source tells me it will be before the end of September.

I wrote about some of this here:

US Navy’s long-delayed plan for its future force is nearing the finish line … sort of

I took up Navy reporting full time in 2014, after a one-year stint between 2010 and 2011 at Navy Times. Since returning to Navy reporting six years ago, this will be my fourth force structure assessment. Essentially, that is every other year. And it’s not like they’ve all been about the same number. The first two were close: 306 and 308 ships. But then it jumped to 355 and supposedly this next one will be even more ships, only mixing in unmanned and lighter ships.

[The ultimate assessment published Dec. 10 called for 405 ships]

Given the long lead times associated with building ships this seems like a bad approach. That’s what I want to walk through tonight.

Let’s Drift!

-DBL

Endless Assessment

As a reporter, I have the luxury of never really having the address or answer the questions I raise. But at this point, more people should be asking hard questions of the Navy. There’s little doubt in my mind that the Navy must necessarily change its force structure to meet the Chinese threat. But the abject failure of DDG-1000 and CG(X) to produce platforms in numbers, combined with the LCS’s deep conceptual flaws that have led to a ship that is suboptimal for most missions for which the Navy might need a small surface combatant should give us pause.

Even if we identify the kinds of ships we want to buy, can our system produce them? Can we restrain our appetite for large, resource-sucking multi-mission surface combatants we can’t afford to own and operate? What gives us the confidence that this fleet of unmanned ships (never been tried before on this scale) is even a workable concept? And how long do we give ourselves to figure that out given that China is churning out ships left, right and center while we try Extreme Fleet Makeover?

Tell you one thing that doesn’t inspire confidence is the fact that the Navy can’t let a force structure assessment last more than 18 months before its launches a new one. The timeline for building a ship is 10 years-plus. Shouldn’t the document that serves as a guide for what kind and how many ships we need last more than one full budget cycle?

I’ll show you what I mean here:

In March 2015, the Navy released its 308-ship assessment, topping its FY2014 assessment of 306 ships. But a year later, the Navy launched a new assessment and in December, with Trump entering office on a promise of a 350-ship Navy, low and behold a 355-ship force structure assessment graces us.

That FSA certainly captured the imagination of Congress, with both Republicans and national security-minded democrats latching on to it – even passing the SHIPS act in 2017 with the National Defense Authorization Act that essentially mandated that the Navy would work toward 355 ships.

See my story on that here:

Trump just made a 355-ship Navy national policy

But here’s the deal with 355, and here’s the cold, hard truth of it: Mattis didn’t want 355 ships. He said as much to Congress, without you having to read too far in between the lines in testimony. Several sources who have spoken to have told me over the years that Mattis was firmly against the services creating capacity they couldn’t afford to make and keep ready.

The Navy’s plan, which leaned heavily on manned platforms, wasn’t going to be built just to be hollow, in Mattis’ view, so the political shelf life of that 355-ship Navy FSA inside the Pentagon was probably less than a month.

But while lawmakers continued to want to pursue 355 ships, the Navy was hard at work soft-pedaling their own assessment at every turn:

The Navy, once again, soft-pedals its own 355 ship-count assessment

By September of 2018, the cat was out of the bag that the Navy was going to redo its assessment to be more in line with what the Office of the Secretary of Defense wanted. Bear in mind that what OSD and what the White House (nominally in charge) wanted are two different things.

The whole basis of the OMB passback memo that ruined my Christmas was basically a “WTF, Over” from OMB to DoD about cuts to force structure when the White House said it wanted 355 ships. If the White House had been paying closer attention, they might have seen that DoD had merrily ignored that goal, choosing instead to boost readiness.

(It has to be said that at the outset of the Administration, you’ll recall, it really did look like we might be going to war with North Korea so investment in readiness was probably appropriate.)

And that’s basically where we are now. The assessment was supposed to be done in 2019, but then the Marine Corps decided it was all about being Navy again and so we redid the first crack at an FSA to make the “integrated naval force structure assessment.”

So, the Navy turned that homework over in January and Esper, apparently, did not like what he saw. As a result, he took control of the FSA and commissioned three studies to create three fleets that would then compete to see what elements worked best. This is the homework that Norquist is turning in this week.

So, what has happened in this past five years of FSAs calling for a bigger fleet? We’ve added more than 20 ships, the bulk of which are littoral combat ships with two mission modules missing in action. Trump will end his term having not even met the Obama-era goal of 308 ships.

We’ve awarded the FFG(X), the first new surface combatant class, but we still have no clue what a next generation large surface combatant will look like. We’re desperately trying to figure out if unmanned surface vessels can help us cover some urgent areas of need such as mine hunting and anti-submarine warfare. But there’s no guarantee those will work out, and history, as I’ve pointed out already, doesn’t give us a lot of hope in that regard.

My question overall here is: If our assessment of what kind of fleet we need didn’t change every two years, would it be easier to develop requirements that stick as well? Look, nobody should fool themselves that whatever Norquist’s team comes up with will survive a Presidential transition. If Biden is elected, there will be another FSA. Another probably another right after that, when Biden’s first SECDEF steps down. On and on, forever and ever: Amen.

[Biden has been elected since the publication of this email]

Anyway, a reasonable observer would see the Navy making significant course corrections every two years and wonder if it has any idea where it’s going.

Let’s go to The Hotwash.

The Hotwash

Eye on China

Meanwhile, while we build imaginary fleets on PowerPoint, China is building a real fleet and its freaking huge. The recent China Power Report found the PLAN will likely have about 400 ships by the end of this decade.

Another issue for the Maritime-minded reader, as I assume you all are, is the increasingly large, increasingly aggressive Chinese fishing fleet.

From Voice of America:

Excerpt: China’s distant-water fishing vessels have long caused controversy in waters around Asia. As the fleet has grown, so have complaints. Recently, about 340 large Chinese trawlers ventured into waters near Ecuador, triggering protests over possible threats to the Galapagos Islands, a UNESCO World Heritage site and home to many unique species.

There are also ongoing conflicts involving Chinese fishing vessels in waters off Africa and the Korean Peninsula.

Miren Gutierrez, a research Associate at the London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI), told VOA that China now has the largest distant water fleet in the world, and it’s on the move.

“Having depleted fish stocks in domestic waters and encouraged by subsidies, China’s distant-water fishing fleets have been traveling farther and farther afield, and its companies have been building more and more vessels to meet the rising demand for seafood,” she said.

ODI research has documented nearly 17,000 Chinese fishing vessels, making it nearly impossible to sufficiently monitor all of them worldwide.

Don’t sleep on this one, this is a big deal. Food insecurity = instability, and that’s in our Hemisphere. We don’t want that.

Read more here: Is China’s Fishing Fleet a Growing Security Threat?

More Reading

Fair Winds and Following Seas: Navy Ends Search for Missing Sailor from USS Nimitz

Retired Navy captain and trailblazer for women’s equality in the service dies at 76

Navy planning unmanned ‘fleet battle problem’ for next year

Iran begins expansive annual war games amid tensions with US

US Navy to get new cyber commander

Sponsored by:

Our Mission, Your Success. Telephonics - globally recognized for our maritime surveillance & weather avoidance radar systems which are designed to meet the rigorous mission demands of our customers for littoral and overland surveillance. Today we are developing the next generation of radar technology with the introduction our MOSAIC® Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar.
Visit https://www.telephonics.com/product/mosaic to learn more.