Krepinevich criticizes our defense procurement policies by pointing out the proliferation of missiles and rockets in the hands of our potential enemies:
In wars of the future, “smart” rockets and missiles will be readily available to non-state forces such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, let alone traditional powers such as Russia and China, which already have the technology and the ability to sell it on. Despite this, the Pentagon is spending billions on short-range strike aircraft that need to operate from forward land bases or aircraft carriers vulnerable to missiles, submarines and drones.
In 2006, China sneaked one of its submarines into the middle of a US carrier group — to the mortification of the US navy.
The marines, Krepinevich notes, are developing an amphibious expeditionary fighting vehicle (EVF) that can navigate ashore and fight on land. Not only is it at great risk from roadside bombs, but “the fleet that would launch these is being forced to operate ever further from the shore, far beyond the distance for which the EVF was designed”. It should be cancelled, he advises.
Traditionally safe rear bases such as Camp Victory in Iraq and Bagram in Afghanistan, which provide a sanctuary for US land forces, could also be vulnerable, Krepinevich warns, citing the example of the recent war in Lebanon as the “harbinger” of the future. Hezbollah’s non-stop rocket attacks forced the evacuation of 300,000 Israelis.
He makes a good point but the conclusions are too broad.
Yes, the EFV (not "EVF" in the article) is a waste of money. Outside of Hainan Island, I don't see likely scenarios for large-scale opposed landings any time in the next couple decades. And dozens of EFVs sailing toward a defended shore from below the horizon will suffer catastrophic casualties in the face of precision weapons.
Yes, we will need active protection for our rear areas--and we are working on that. And a base is composed of many targets that can be hardened if important enough. Further, like any ground unit, it can endure lots of hits and still be an effective fighting force.
Keep in mind that Israel lost the 2006 Hezbollah War not because Hezbollah rained down dumb rockets on Israeli civilian areas but because Israel screwed the pooch and failed to use their ground forces in a fast-moving offensive to get around the enemy bunkers and penetrate into the rocket launching areas. Instead, Israel attacked from the air and carried out half-hearted, broad, and shallow attacks with insufficient strength on the enemy prepared defenses.
Even if Hezbollah gets precision rockets, Hezbollah will lose if Israel fights more like last winter against Hamas in Gaza than against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006.
And the argument against short-range fighters and fighter-bombers is ridiculous. If we can't build and defend air bases near an enemy, how will we ever fight that enemy on the ground? This complaint only makes sense if you assume the only fighting we ever need to do is bombardment. Is war to be only Kosovo in 1999 but using Missouri-based long-range bombers?
Will we be unable to use precision weapons against their strike assets?
And are we really going to go back to the days where we believed the heavy bombers will always get through? Good grief.
Most basically, have we learned nothing in the decade since then of the importance of holding the ground?
But aircraft carriers is the question of the day. On this issue I think Krepinevich has the compelling argument that strikes at the heart of our national power. We rely on our Navy to protect us and to project our ground and air power. We must get this right. And carriers are no longer the way to go in defending ourselves.
Or rather, they are going to be a less and less important asset and one suitable only for fights against relatively primative foes:
Our next carrier will be the giant CVN-21. Aircraft carriers are wonderful weapons for fighting small nations without significant air or naval power. Afghanistan and Iraq are good examples of how this has worked well for us. North Korea would be another. Any little brush fire around the world would, too. The problem comes with fighting a country with significant air and naval power.
In addition, will UCAVs displacing manned aircraft mean we need large or even medium carriers to haul these smaller aircraft around? Will more smaller carriers work? Will we be able to scatter UCAVs on amphibous warfare carriers and even surface ships the way anti-ship missiles are now throughout the fleet? If we truly can fight networked, we will be able to mass effect from widely scattered assets unlike today's carriers which are the pinnacle of needing a single platform to mass effect.
Right now, our carriers with manned aircraft are still a tremendous asset. But as the years go by, cheap precision missiles will erode their value. Several decades in the future, carriers may be too big and expensive to risk enterring an enemy's array of sensors that can detect and guide missiles to overwhelm a carrier's defensive systems. Since carriers last five decades or more, the carriers we have now could last through the period of their fighting value and phase out as their vulnerability becomes too great. Should we build large carriers anymore?
Luckily, even if we fail to scale back the outsized role our big carriers have in our fleet, it has been many decades since they were the sole source of offensive firepower:
Once upon a time, America's carriers represented our sole long-range offensive punch. They were the ultimate platform in platform-centric naval warfare. Submarines, even nuclear-powered subs, still had a comparatively short attack range. Our surface vessels had guns with short ranges and at best primitive missiles. Their most important role was to protect the carriers.
With Harpoon we gained a missile that could be--and was--put on all our surface ships and submarines. We reduced the critical importance of our best platform--the carrier--and distributed our offensive power throughout the fleet (and in the air with air-launched missiles). Our enemies could no longer hope to cripple our offensive power with a dozen large missiles striking our carriers. The Soviets trailed our carriers during the Cold War so they could try to decapitate us. But this is no longer possible since our carriers aren't the sole source of offensive power.
But to exploit this trend, we have to dethrone the carrier. Let me be clear, the super carrier is still tremendously useful since we don't face any real naval competition. But the trend of technology is clear and that trend will make our super carriers the most expensive target ever. I believe that the next carrier we build will not last anywhere near its full five-decade life as our main platform. We must prepare for the day when we fear to send carriers into harm's way:
As the Navy works on network-centric warfare, the ability to mass effect both offensively and defensively from widely scattered platforms, the importance of individual platforms is decreased even more. This reduces our vulnerability to the loss of individual platforms. Other assets can fill in the hole seamlessly and our Navy's targets will never know that a missile from a different platform destroyed it. It will be an irrelevant detail.
Not all rockets are created equally because not all targets are created equally. Ten high value aircraft carrier targets are far cries from the hundreds of thousands or millions of targets that our military personnel and civilians represent in our bases and cities.
