If China strikes our fleet, it won't be a simple air-sea battle fought in a vacuum. China will strike our forward-deployed fleet in order to gain temporary freedom of action in the seas near China. What would the objective of the war be? Absorbing North Korea? Seizing Japanese islands in the East China Sea? Invading Taiwan? Taking over the islands of the South China Sea?
The Chinese navy is growing and their naval construction capabilities are becoming more capable in quantity and quality of ships and submarines built.
Our fleet struggles to maintain numbers. And we have to make decisions on using what we can build to defeat changing threats, making do with what we have or can reasonably expect to have in the near future:
Instead of increasing the number of aircraft carrier groups near the Persian Gulf, as Romney proposes, look for ways to station Air Force fighter jets on land in Persian Gulf states. ...
Base more ships abroad. Maintaining a constant presence with a ship in the western Pacific takes four or five ships in the fleet. If they are based in California, as they are now, time is lost in transit. But if home-ported instead in the region, that ship is considered to be constantly on station because sailors can always get to ship within a few hours.
Rotate fresh crews of sailors from the U.S. to forward theaters by airplane every six months or so, leaving ships deployed abroad for a year or two at a time. This is another way to reduce time wasted in transoceanic transit and can improve the number of days per year a given ship can stay on station by a third, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Remember, that these are suggestions that avoid the question of what size our fleet should be in an effort to make do with what we have. What of these suggestions?
Land-based air power is certainly an alternative to sea-based air power. But it relies on host nations allowing us to use their sovereign territory for missions that we want to execute. We may have no alternative to our own sea-based air power in many circumstances.
Yet we should probably look to alternatives to our big deck super carriers. Would we be better off transitioning to medium carriers that don't put so many eggs in one basket, leveraging both network centric naval warfare and precision weapons to allow us to concentrate effort from many different coordinated platforms rather than relying on platform-centric warfare concepts that need the concentration of assets on one carrier (or one task force with multiple carriers sailing together) to concentrate the effort?
In a way, we're doing both, which gives me a feeling of security even if I worry about affording the big deck carriers.
In the Pacific, with land bases available in South Korea, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore, we could have options for air power that do not rely on carriers, depending on the war we are in. If our Air Force can put together composite expeditionary squadrons that can rapidly deploy to warm bases that we can turn into an operational base in war, we could quickly begin attriting the Chinese fleet surge to sea.
If the Navy, Army, Marine Corps, or Air Force can put together anti-ship missile batteries (a different form of air power) that could be dispatched to even small islands that would add firepower and sensors to a surveillance and strike grid extended to the Chinese coast, we'd add to the attrition capabilities.
These assets could aid or replace the efforts of our forward deployed ships to inflict attrition on the Chinese offensive surge while we gather forces from around the globe and surge our own ships in port to meet the threat.
Basing more ships abroad can make up for ships in day-to-day presence missions by making sure more of their days at sea are in the operational area. This would even allow us to build some smaller ships just for that purpose.
But this would only work to make our already forward deployed ships more effective. If we want 20 surface ships forward deployed, this could perhaps mean that we could have 20 or 25 ships forward deployed in order to keep 20 at sea or available to go to sea rather than needing 20 ships forward deployed with 40-50 at home in order to keep 20 ships at sea forward deployed at any one time.
Nobody is suggesting that larger portions of our fleet should be forward deployed so that even reinforcements are already there. We'd still need larger ships mostly in home waters to reinforce in case of war.
Further, forward deployment is great for peacetime engagement, but in war time just exposes the ships to a surprise attack by an enemy that chooses the time and place of war. We don't want too many ships exposed to that type of attack.
Rotating crews is really just part of the forward home-porting idea. Again, it is only applicable to a small portion of our fleet.
Further, home porting forward and flying in crews mean that we can no longer use the transit voyages between home ports in the United States and their operational areas for show the flag visits. We'd need other ships to carry out those peacetime missions that reassure friends and impress foes--or not carry out those missions.
Remember, too, that our 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean largely relies on ships transiting between the east coast and CENTCOM to remind people that our fleet is there--it is a virtual fleet in many ways relying on a Cold War reputation.
So these are real suggestions, but they only have an effect on the margins of required fleet strength and they have their own problems.
I'm of the opinion that we should pick a number for how many ships we need and build a high-low mix to carry out the full spectrum of missions. I freely admit, however, that the need for larger hulls just to sail from America to global patrol areas may mean that it makes no sense to build a less capable ship once we've invested in the hull.
It may be that the incremental cost of more weapons and radar capabilities is too insignificant to make it worth building too many smaller ships. I don't know enough to say where the theoretical line is, whether for surface combatants, subs, or even carriers where you'd think the calculation would be easier.
Yet modular designs that we are using with Littoral Combat Ships give us a way to deal with issues of cost by building larger hulls with good sea keeping characteristics and range, yet which for peacetime presence missions do not deploy with a full weapons and sensor package. They'd be built with hull-mounted basic offensive and defensive systems but rely on mission packages rapidly inserted into the hull for more capabilities. But again, this is just living room pondering and not cost analysis and engineering. I could be way off. I'm not the first to ponder the question of Navy quality versus quantity in our history.
It is no easy task to build and deploy a Navy that has the numbers to engage in day-to-day presence missions and survive losses while continuing their missions; and the quality to survive damage or even sail to distant patrol and war stations; while balancing the fleet between forward deployed elements vulnerable to enemy surprise attack and safer home ports far from the theater but too far away to quickly intervene.
Clearly, with China's growing air and naval power, we need non-ship assets capable of quickly deploying to the western Pacific to engage the Chinese fleet early in a war to frustrate their war objectives and buy time for our fleet to gather and to inflict losses on the Chinese fleet so that it is easier to defeat by our fleet once it arrives. Ship quantity versus quality is only one question for figuring out how we can survive and counter-attack in the western Pacific.
