The Europeans are losing their navies and risk being fleets that can't absorb losses and continue to sail and fight:
Several trends are evident among the major NATO navies. First, they are getting smaller. All of the navies analyzed here have fewer ships today than in the year 2000—in some cases, significantly fewer. And while ship counts do not tell the entire story of a nation’s naval might (especially in the age of networked operations), they remain a useful proxy for naval capability, especially with respect to blue-water operations far from home waters. The primary reason these navies are getting smaller is a decline in general defense spending, including shipbuilding.
Second, the ships that are being built are increasingly capable and sophisticated—and therefore expensive—which serves only to drive down fleet size in an era of fiscal restraint.
And the Europeans have the luxury of being able to build small combatants since many of their patrol areas are close by or in relatively sheltered waters like the Baltic or Mediterranean Sea. We don't have the option of building many small warships (and the few Cyclone-class patrol craft we have are being permanently stationed in the Persian Gulf region) because we need size just to safely sail to our distant patrol areas and have time on station.
One result is that our fleet is top-heavy. In World War II we had relatively few capital ships like heavy cruisers, battleships, and aircraft carriers, with lots of smaller destroyers, destroyer escorts, light cruisers, submarines, and light carriers to supplement the heavies. Today our fleet is composed of Aegis destroyers the size of World War II heavy cruisers, capable nuclear subs, super carriers, and flat-deck amphibious warships that put other nations' carriers to shame.
So in theory we have the option to go to a high-low mix of ships. But our attempt to build Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) as the low part of the mix isn't really working since the ships are expensive and the mission modules that are to be built to plug into these hulls to make them more capable for specific missions are more expensive than we thought.
But the mission module seems like a decent way to get numbers of reasonably capable ship, in theory. Indeed, the Marines and Special Operations Command are doing this with C-130 transport planes (or KC-130 tankers) and gunship-in-a-box modules that turn a transport plane into an effective gunship for ground support:
U.S. SOCOM (Special Operations Command) has equipped and deployed 14 MC-130W "Dragon Spear" gunships in the last three years. The first MC-130W arrived in Afghanistan in late 2010 and a month later it had fired one of its weapons (a Hellfire missile) for the first time (killing five Taliban). Getting 14 new gunships into action so quickly was only possible because SOCOM adopted an idea developed by the U.S. Marine Corps; the "instant gunship." Called "Harvest Hawk," the marine instant gunship system works using weapons and sensors that can be quickly rolled into a C-130 transport and hooked up. This takes a few hours, and turns the C-130 into a gunship (similar in capabilities existing AC-130 gunships). The sensor package consists of day/night vidcams with magnification capability. The weapons currently consist of ten Griffin missiles and four Hellfires. A 30mm autocannon is optional.
Can't we do this with ships? We already have a lot of good large ships. We can't really rely on smaller vessels for numbers because of the need for sea-keeping and endurance (and life span since we like our ships to last many decades and smaller ships take a bigger beating at sea). But why can't we supplement our sophisticated ships with large but cheaper vessels? In the past, I've proposed Modularized Auxiliary Cruisers to provide numbers when we need them. We'd use container ships enrolled in a Navy program like the Civil Reserve Air Fleet which can provide civilian aircraft adapted to be of military use in emergencies. As large ships, they'd have the seakeeping qualities and endurance to make them useful to us in a global role.
We'd turn these large civilian ships into auxiliary cruisers by using weapon and system modules built inside shipping containers that could be set on the decks of the container ships.
I wrote about this here (and still regret that the United States Naval Institute declined to publish it back in 2007):
The system modules for Modularized Auxiliary Cruisers would have to be self-contained because they would not be installed on a ship designed to incorporate the modules, as the LCS is envisioned. This limits capabilities to what the modules contain, but auxiliary cruisers have never been intended to replace warships. Modularized Auxiliary Cruisers would be plugged into our naval network to fight within a task force or for missions not needing the capabilities of a conventional warship.
Armored standard (20' l x 8.0' w x 8.5' h) general purpose shipping containers would be the building blocks for system modules. Other sizes are available as well, including 40' x 8.0' x 8.5' containers, "hicube" containers measuring 40' x 8.0' x 9.5', and 40' x 8.0' x 4.25' half-height containers. Because Containerized Modules would not be stacked to create a Modularized Auxiliary Cruiser, weapons, sensors, or other equipment could extend above the container roof.
We would build Containerized Modules using shipping containers that include missiles (surface-to-air and surface-to-surface) as well as modules with gun turrets for smaller weapons, up to 57mm. Other modules could support helicopters for anti-submarine (ASW), mine counter measures (MCM), or anti-ship missiles, as well as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) and Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV). Still others would contain power supplies and the command and communications systems to plug a ship into the Navy network. ...
The hulls that could be adapted for Modularized Auxiliary Cruisers are the world’s container ships. Of the nearly 48,000 ships in the world trading fleet, 3,524 are container ships. The American share is even smaller, with only 86 in private hands (and only 74 U.S.-flagged). Still, this is a potential pool far larger than the foreign warships that could contribute to a thousand-ship Navy.
Containerized Modules would be the building blocks for Mission Packages installed on a container ship’s deck to create a Modularized Auxiliary Cruiser tailored for the specific mission. One or more Mission Packages would be fixed to the deck of a container ship and connected to each other for power and communications.
Indeed, given the increased mission of Navy missile defense since I wrote that piece, this role could also be put on Modularized Auxiliary Cruisers, freeing our scarce Aegis destroyers from these static defense missions for offensive missions and forward presence.
The possibility of leveraging allied ships into a virtual "thousand-ship Navy" that we would lead is even less likely given the European declines noted at the beginning. We'll be lucky to achieve a "300-ship Navy" using allied help at the rate we are all going.
Further, if we can adapt the modules for our LCS to fit in standard shipping containers for these modularized auxiliary cruisers, we could reduce the per-unit cost of these modules by producing more of them, making the LCS ships cheaper.
Even the Army could make use of such vessels, lessening the burden on the Navy to respond to Army calls for naval support.
The ability to expand our ship numbers in peacetime or wartime for missions that require more numbers than our high quality, multi-mission can provide (and which will get worse as funding fails to keep up with Navy shipbuilding wishes) can be accomplished by using Modularized Auxiliary Cruisers. Not every mission requires a sleek warship and some missions would be better accomplished with a lower profile warship, anyway. And Modularized Auxiliary Cruisers would supplement the high quality ships in many situations.
UPDATE: Published version of this idea (see page 50, "The AFRICOM Queen").
