America's fleet needs numbers if it wants to survive and win. Is the Navy going to finally choose to do that because it has no other choice now?
This is a dark but pretty fair assessment of the state of the Navy:
There are not enough ships to do the mission nor enough manpower to man the ships optimally. Deployments are too long, and our people and ships are wearing out. Recruiting is stagnant. Too few ships, not enough people, not enough shipbuilding, or repair capacity have us on the brink of mission failure.
And a call for Navy distributed lethality:
The U.S. Navy needs to intensively shift towards uncrewed platforms if it is to remain the world’s premier maritime force. Over the last two centuries, like other navies and air forces, it has increasingly concentrated combat power in ever fewer, more capable, more expensive assets. This trend cannot continue: the Navy’s main assets have become not only scarce, but also too valuable—in human, operational, and financial terms—to put at substantial risk. This problem is exacerbated by high sensitivity to mass casualties and rapidly escalating costs for acquisition and maintenance. Moreover, experiences of naval combat over the last few decades demonstrate that high casualty rates are the norm, as they often are for air and ground forces. The environment is becoming more lethal due to the proliferation of discerning sensors and effective long-range weapons. While deception, defenses, and damage control can mitigate the threat, the Navy’s ships and aircraft must be numerous if they are subjected to rates of attrition that otherwise preclude mission success.
I was on that issue in pre-USV days. Because I too want numbers in the fleet. We don't need to wait for the USVs because we have options for numbers in the short run. If we don't do it, our enemies will. I suggested auxiliary cruiser-style ships converted to escort carriers for drones in this post, mirroring one of the author's suggestions.
The move to distributed lethality is important because platform-centric warfare has an emerging problem. And technology is clearly creating the means for network-centric warfare (regardless of the term of art you want to use now) and the higher threat to the high-value platforms. Let's not allow the carrier's long tradition of existence send them into a battle they cannot survive. Don't pretend naval warfare is "clean" in contrast to bloody ground warfare:
We like to think of land warfare as casualty intensive and air and naval warfare as cheap in lives. But lose one carrier battle group in the middle of the ocean and we could lose more sailors in one day than we lost in the entire Iraq War on the ground over years.
No matter how much more capable and expensive they get, they sink.
Seriously, how much time and effort do we have to spend helping the super carrier simply survive before we even think of how to make the enemy worry about surviving? Notwithstanding the whistling-in-the-dark talk about how hard it is to sink or even disable a carrier, if it floats it can sink--and sinking isn't necessary to knock it out of all but the longest war.
The Royal Navy is not what the U.S. navy should aspire to become. Quantity has a quality of its own. So let's concentrate effects and not targets at sea.
While I'm not a panty-flinger about small USVs that are essentially surface torpedoes, shipbuilding and recruiting woes combined with the expense of the capital ships we build now in too few numbers to achieve missions without exhausting the fleet seem to be forcing the Navy down the path of doing the right thing.
NOTE: The image was made from DALL-E.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
NOTE: I'm adding updates on the Last Hamas War in this post.
