by Navy Capt. Peter O’Brien
On the north side of a runway, at an airfield about 60 miles west of Gdansk, Poland, about 10 miles from the Baltic, lies a US Navy operated installation. It is a missile defense base – known as AEGIS Ashore. It was just declared fully operational just a week or so ago, though it has in fact been up and running for 2 years. It consists of an Aegis radar (the billboard-like radars found on the Ticonderoga class cruisers and Burke class destroyers) and a series of launch tubes holding missiles that can shoot down ballistic missiles. It is manned by US Navy personnel and it cost somewhere on the order of a billion dollars.
Do the Russians know where it is? Yes. And if they have access to Google earth they can get the precise coordinates without leaving their dacha in the woods outside of Moscow. So?
There have been a series of articles lately in several prominent policy journals about the US Navy, especially aircraft carriers, the China threat, and survivability. The point of these articles is that Chinese “anti-ship” ballistic missiles, hypersonic reentry vehicles and the entire range of the Chinese “Anti Access Area Denial” approach has rendered the carriers as nothing more than death traps.
The articles insist that carriers are defenseless against a whole host of weapons. And that a wide range of tactics and technology – all of it cheaper than the carriers – can defeat the carriers.
But, there are, in fact, a whole host of tactics and technologies that can be used to defend against these weapons. To give just one example, with the right airwing – to include tankers, drones and longer range strike assets (consider F-18s with conformal tanks (which the Navy for some reason doesn’t want to buy)) – carriers can conduct operations into an area such as the South China Sea while lurking among the islands of Indonesia and the Philippines.
Anyone who has ever spent any time in those waters is aware of just how difficult it can be to find a ship – of any size. Unfortunately, there is lack of understanding of the simple facts of geography: Indonesia has 17,000 islands spread over a huge area – an area that the maps simply do not convey. From the north-west corner of Indonesia – the port of Banda Aceh, to the south-east boundary – the border with Papua New Guinea, is a bit further than the distance from Juneau, Alaska to Disney World in Orlando. The Philippines represents another 7,400 islands spread over some 300,000 square miles. Together they represent 21,000 islands spread over an area of nearly 2 million square miles. And two countries that not only are solid US allies, neither will ever be an ally of Beijing.
How hard would it be to dig out a dispersed fleet operating among those islands, striking at ships and facilities in the South China Sea, moving from island to island and from destroyer and submarine tenders support ships, resupplied and refueled while hidden among the islands?
Consider that in comparison to the difficulty of targeting bases ashore, most of which, if I recall, haven’t moved appreciably in the last 100 years or so. The missile base west of Gdansk won’t move; a Burke class destroyer can easily move 500 miles per day.
That is more than just a poor attempt at humor. As the recent drone intrusion incidents at Langley AFB demonstrate, even when we “respond,” we find it difficult to defend against drones. How hard would it be to attack US airbases with drones on any given morning? Ask yourself how many people have snuck into the US illegally in the last year or two? How many might be keeping watch on US military assets? How many could have access to small drones?
Is it reasonable to expect that the Chinese have watched the war in Ukraine, where both sides are already employing AI chips to allow for small, inexpensive drones to operate autonomously in finding and striking targets? Is it possible that in the initial phase of a war with China that US airbases would be subject to swarm drone attacks?
It may well be that the strike assets represented by those aircraft carriers at sea will be the bulk of the operational assets the US will have 2 days into a future war.
Aircraft carrier are just that: ships that carry – and launch and recover – aircraft. The important word is aircraft. The one difference that aircraft carriers bring to any situation is that they move. This has associated risk – they can sink. But it also has associated gain: they can be moved to where they are needed; they can be moved to where they are not at risk. To state or even to imply that “aircraft carriers are obsolete” is to state that aircraft are obsolete. If there is going to be a flat denial of the viability of aircraft carriers, shouldn’t we be looking at getting rid of the Air Force? Stated that way, it is plainly ludicrous.
But the real point here is to deter major war. And with the proper Defense Policy effort, and State Department effort, the US, and in particular the US Navy, working with the Philippines, Indonesia, Fiji, Samoa, the Solomons and all the island nations of the Pacific could turn the Central and South Pacific into a veritable safe haven for US Navy assets, and a never ending trap for a hostile Chinese Navy.
There is, of course, more from current events that we need to learn. As the war in Ukraine has shows, as has the missile attacks on Israel and the missile attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, the technology exists to defeat ballistic missiles not simply one at a time but also in large numbers.
Are Chinese missiles a serious threat? Yes. Do we have the tactics and techniques to address them. Yes, at least in part. Do we have the numbers and readiness and training? The answer there is, shall we say, less clear. The new administration, the next Secretary of the Navy and his deputies need to address that head on: to improve Navy training, to keep improving the technology as the follow-on radars and missiles seek to do, to expand the current ammunition stockpiles, to raise US Navy ship readiness, to rebuild US shipyard capacity while maintaining the highest quality production, to address the rapidly disappearing US commercial shipping industry.
Hopefully, incoming Navy leadership will muster a more coherent argument for a rebuilt, more robust, and more imaginative Navy that will allow the nation to bring the right tools to the task of deterring war in the South China Sea, and defeating the threat in the Red Sea.
The nation has a need to be able to operate across, and deter across, the full spectrum of conflict, from a minor disturbance around a US embassy to a single act of piracy to a border conflict between an ally and an unfriendly nation, all the way up to great power confrontations and great power war. The US needs that capability because we don’t want to have to build it; the US Navy presence, the aircraft carrier presence, covers nearly the entire spectrum of war. Nor do we want to rely on someone else to protect US interests. And it is US interests that we must first consider – always. The Navy mission considers US, protects US interests, around the world. Its presence keeps the peace, its presence maintains freedom of navigation. If the US backs away from that role, it will be filled by someone else, and in all likelihood we won’t like how it is being filled.
But, it is well to consider that many of these journal articles – and the war games that prompt them, begin from a spot removed from reality: the sense that we need to come up with answers that are painless. No war between great powers is going to be short, precise and painless. If you go back and look at the “maritime strategy” of the 1980s there was a recognition that there would be losses. Establishing de facto control of the seas was going to involve losses, and everyone who took a hard look at it knew that to take control of the seas meant the loss of 3 – 5 carrier battle groups (out of 15).
That number, presumably from some war game, was reportedly acceptable if the end result was we won the war.
But we have lived in a bit of a dream land since the end of the Vietnam War. Over the course of 50 years we have been engaged in 4 major efforts (Desert Storm, OAF, OEF, and OIF), and a host of smaller ones, and have suffered some 6,500 killed and 53,000 wounded. As sad as each death is, these are, as a whole, insignificant numbers. The Ukraine – Russia war reminds us what great power wars really involve: in 33 months of fighting each side has suffered more than 100,000 KIA, and 400,000 WIA. Each side has suffered more casualties in less than 3 years than total US combat related casualties in 79 years.
No matter how well a war with China might proceed, we should be under no delusions: there will be substantial casualties. And we also will need to get our heads around the idea that the Beijing government is likely to be much more “comfortable” will high casualty counts. Said differently, in any fight with the Chinese we need to be prepared to kill a great many Chinese before the will in Beijing shows any sign of weakening. Only through real Navy combat capabilities can we deter that war.
Fighting a war in a desk-top war-game always begins with the end in mind. In the last 40 years virtually all of them have been built to show that the US Navy (and Army, and Air Force) need to buy something new. What is missing is clear thinking, and with it clear gaming and planning, to figure out how to win with what we have.
The first step is to build a real maritime strategy for the US. And we can’t begin to build a maritime strategy until we have a national strategy that realizes that we are, in fact, a maritime nation that has allowed much of its maritime infrastructure to atrophy.
Restoring Navy and maritime capabilities must be the goal of the incoming Secretary of the Navy and his deputy. The Navy must be more aggressive than the Navy Departments of most of the last 20 years and with it the DOD Policy office of the Trump administration in working to dramatically improve Navy and United States maritime strategy and policy in the next 4 years.
But if we were to have a coherent maritime strategy, with the resultant war plans, and the necessary training, the improvements in ship maintenance and force readiness, and the focused training of the sailors – officers and enlisted – we could produce a Navy that is again clearly second to none, one that will deter China or any other potential aggressor.
