Three authorities on naval warfare argued July 25 that the Navy needs to dramatically revise its operational concepts and acquisition policies to make the surface fleet more capable and relevant to the rapidly changing and increasingly dangerous global security environment.
One urged the Navy and Congress to reverse decisions to stop buying new Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles or risk losing the ability to project force ashore from long range.
Another argued for a return to the “offensive sea control” strategy the Navy embraced during the Cold War and to take the burden of low-order naval missions, such as anti-piracy, from the large surface combatants so they can concentrate on the offensive duties.
The third stressed the need to improve the surface force’s ability to defeat the growing threat to the fleet from aircraft and missiles or risk losing the ability to project power and control the seas.
The three spoke at a Capitol Hill forum sponsored by the Hudson Institute’s Center for American Seapower.
Seth Cropsey, the center director and a former Navy and Defense Department official, warned that the decision announced this year to stop buying Tomahawks in fiscal 2015, while seeking to develop a replacement land attack weapon, would force Raytheon and its suppliers to lay off the engineers and technicians who maintain the existing weapons, resulting in a gradual loss of combat readiness.
In congressional testimony earlier this year, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said the 4,000 Tomahawks in the inventory are sufficient to cover likely needs until the new weapon is available.
But Cropsey noted the high expenditure rate of Tomahawk land attack missiles in recent conflicts, including 725 in the opening days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and said the requirement of the missiles with an effective range of 800 to 1,500 miles would be crucial as a counter to China’s anti-access, area-denial (A2AD) capabilities.
Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer now with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, also cited the growing A2AD threat from China, Iran and Russia, which he said is selling long-range precision weapons to other nations.
Clark said the larger combatants — the Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Arleigh Burke destroyers — cannot focus on the offensive sea control mission, which includes power projection, because they are saddled with so many lesser missions. Those lower-order missions should be performed by the smaller combatants, which he noted are rapidly declining in numbers with the retirement of the Perry-class frigates.
He suggested assigning more of those lesser missions to the littoral combat ships (LCSs) and to the proposed combat frigate, which he said probably would be a variant of the LCS.
Clark also urged the Navy to field new ship defensive weapons, including lasers and electromagnetic railguns, so the large combatants could carry more offensive missiles in their vertical-launch system tubes.
Bryan McGrath, a retired surface warfare officer now with the Seapower center, focused on the need to improve the fleet’s air and missile defense capabilities by fielding the air and missile defense radar now under development, continuing to upgrade the existing Arleigh Burke destroyer and maintaining as many of the cruisers as possible.
McGrath said the Navy’s proposal to put 11 of the 22 cruisers out of service until they can be modernized is “the least bad plan I can think of."