Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

122 • The NavyAt the same time, the U.S. Navy must come to understand that war in coastal andinland waters is qualitatively different from naval warfare in blue water. The inland andcoastal waters regime is far more complex than the blue water environment, thanks tothe multitude of civilian ships, boats and aircraft. The Navy had an unfortunate buttypical encounter with that complexity when the Aegis cruiser U.S.S. Vincennes shotdown an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf that it had mistaken for an attacker.Afterward, a designer of the Aegis system wrote a letter to the U.S. Naval InstituteProceedings in which he said, “Of course, it was never designed to deal with ambiguity.”Ambiguity is a constant in coastal and inland waters.For any of this intellectual progress to take place, the Navy must first begin tothink. It has been a long time since it thought about anything beyond budgets andhardware (here, again, we see the dominance of technicians at work). The renaissanceof thinking about land warfare that began in the U.S. Marine Corps and, to a lesserextent, in the U.S. Army in the 1970s had no naval counterpart. The Navy’s aircraftcarrier battle groups have cruised on mindlessly for more than half a century, waitingfor those Japanese carriers to turn up. They are still cruising today, into, if notbeyond, irrelevance.HardwareWhile people and ideas are more important than hardware in navies, just as they arein armies, hardware is a more powerful tool for shaping navies (and air forces) thanarmies. If you give an army tanks, it can use them in radically different ways dependingon whether it is a Second or Third Generation army. In contrast, if you give a navysubmarines instead of aircraft carriers, you shape the institution in ways it cannotavoid. The German navy of World War II, whose main strength was in submarines,could not fight the kind of naval war the Imperial Japanese Navy fought in the Pacificwith its aircraft carriers.Reformers can shape the U.S. Navy in ways that lead it away from Mahan and towardCorbett, which in a 21st century context means toward 4GW in coastal and inlandwaters, by altering its mix of ships and aircraft. To see what those alterations might be,let us open the pages of Jane’s Fighting Ships and see what we have to work with.SubmarinesSubmarines are today’s and tomorrow’s capital ships, the ships that most directlydetermine control of blue water. Only a fleet of submarines can drive both enemysurface ships and enemy submarines from the high seas, clearing the way for ourown surface forces to cross the oceans with impunity. That is what is called controlof the sea, and the ability to establish it has been the hallmark of capital ships sincethe age of sail. The submarine indisputably ended the aircraft carrier’s brief reign asthe capital ship with the advent of nuclear-powered submarines in the 1950s, and