A former partner in a top-10 global management consulting firm, Joe Buff is a seasoned risk analyst and professional writer on national security and defense preparedness. Two of his non-fiction articles received annual literary awards from the Naval Submarine League. He is also a national bestselling author of tales of near-future warfare featuring nuclear submariners and special operations forces in action at their bravest and best. Joe holds a master's degree in math from MIT, earned under a National Science Foundation Fellowship. He worked as an intern at the Argonne National Laboratory. Previously a qualified actuary for twenty years, with extensive experience at interpreting policy implications of dire "what if" scenarios, he is now a member of the Society for Risk Analysis, a non-partisan international scholarly body headquartered in McLean, VA.
Joe's father was an enlisted man in the Navy (Seabees in the Pacific Theater) from 1946 through 1951, and his uncle was a merchant mariner on the North Atlantic convoys late in World War II, before being drafted into the U.S. Army to serve in the Occupation of Nazi Germany. Joe is a Life Member of the following Navy-related organizations: U.S. Naval Institute, the Navy League of the United States, the Fellows of the Naval War College, CEC/Seabees Historical Foundation, and the Naval Submarine League. During 2004, after having been a guest luncheon speaker at their Annual National Convention, Joe became a sponsored Life Associate Member of the U.S. Submarine Veterans, Inc. He was recently made an Honorary Life Associate Member of the Navy Seabee Veterans of America, partly in recognition of his pro bono work for Operation Seabees Knowledge.
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June 1, 2005
[Have an opinion on this column? Sound off in Military.com
at the Frontlines.]
A lot of you know that ASW stands for antisubmarine warfare. It's a complex art and science using multiple military platforms, connectivity, and other assets, whose mission is to render hostile submarines ineffective as threats to America, our global interests, and our allies. But there's a whole different sort of "anti-submarine warfare" being fought right now on dry land -- at the Pentagon, in Congress, around naval bases and shipyards, and in the media. The central themes of this battle, in which the enemy is definitely us, are:
1. How many subs does the U.S. require in the world of today and tomorrow? (Projected needs have ranged as high as 75 -- and that was before 9/11/01 -- while projected building and decommissioning schedules might leave us with less than half that number in being by 2030.)
2. What's the ideal force structure of these subs, in terms of the tradeoff between total numbers and individual ship capabilities on the one hand, and overall costs on the other?
These vexed questions, difficult to answer properly under the best of circumstances, seem to have recently become so politicized that I can't help labeling the current debate as a "silly season" -- a professional high-stakes blood sport of the type we're all used to watching unfold around major election campaigns. Indeed, a Two-Party System prevails: Among the activists engaged, one's either in favor of a large and powerful U.S. Navy submarine component, or one's not. (It's the "not" folks who put the "anti" in "anti-submarine," a bit of word play for which I accept full blame.)
Much as with the tone of the 2004 presidential race, hidden or biased assumptions, rhetoric instead of rationality, ignoring nuances or telling only half of a story, oversimplifications, myths, self-contradictions, and occasional errors abound and are (in my opinion) obscuring the path to choosing an ideal balance in the naval context. No segment of our various information-age outlets holds a monopoly on the fog of elucidation and confusion. Reports by committees and pronouncements by members of government, newspaper and magazine articles, blog and discussion board postings, books, even a controversial paid ad contribute to and subtract from clarity over the most essential task: somehow figuring out what our submarine fleet should look like.
If that isn't bad enough, further muddling things is that different timeframes apply at once. For instance, some commentators think our country might need to confront China's growing People's Liberation Army Navy in a new Cold War (or Hot War) at sea around 2020. Yet equally important is selecting the right answers in a big matter with a deadline looming as close as this September: The BRAC decision on whether to close the Naval Submarine Base New London and the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.
Don't get me wrong: Nobody's perfect, everyone means well in their own way, and an entirely thorough exposition of every angle and argument would fill an encyclopedia. Few folks have time or the attention span for that, and no media venue (except maybe for an encyclopedia publisher) has the word-count room. What can be achieved with relative speed, and economy of ink and pixels, is to give examples of this raging "homeland anti-submarine warfare campaign," in which there's an equally vocal pro-submarine side.
I'm the first to admit I hold strong opinions -- but I do try to be objective. I won't name names, or cite citations, because none of this is personal and Military.com essays don't use footnotes. My previous Military Opinion piece, "Why Subs Matter Now," was partly meant to set up this discussion. You may want to skim through it, since there I address and rebut some anti-submarine blather such as "Satellites and drones can do all the surveillance missions a sub can do," and the thinly veiled insinuation (with obvious implications) to the effect that "The secrecy which prevents confirming submarine special operations missions is a cover that such missions don't really exist."
With preliminaries out of the way -- and pun intended -- let's dive right in.
Risk management paradigm: Given an unstable world and uncertain future, it's important to start with proper analytical tools. Bear with me for a minute as I show you what I mean.
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In strategic planning, for any endeavor, the natural instinct under pressure is to pick whichever environment you believe to be most likely, conducting your affairs as if that particular outcome is essentially guaranteed. But this isn't the right approach. Modern best practices for risk management, alas, require more work. "Pathwise immunization" is a technique employed by many risk analysts today, ranging from Wall Street trading-desk hedgers, to corporate executives, to think tank fellows studying foreign relations. Pathwise immunization involves developing a spectrum of scenarios which aren't merely the most probable, but which also extends to the broader envelope of the "not implausible." Then, these scenarios receive equal examination in seeing which ones could do the greatest damage. Lastly, policy is drawn up, and resources are allocated, to mitigate (immunize against) whichever scenario paths appear most dangerous. It's like buying insurance against catastrophes you hope never occur, but which you realize might occur.
Yes, this perspective can give you a headache. It requires thinking the unthinkable, and preparing for the worst. But it's a healthy mind-expanding exercise, and it's necessary. In the context of national defense, deciding on a single type of armed conflict (scenario) as the only one the U.S. will ever have to face (i.e., deeming it most probable, or even certain) violates the principles of risk management best practices. The point is that we don't know what type of conflict(s) we'll have to fight during the next generation or so. Counter-terror, counter-insurgency, cold wars, hot wars, quasi-wars, drug wars, nuclear wars, and then some, they're all on the table and none are "not implausible."
Tremendous flexibility in American military force structure is therefore required, not fixation on what's optimal for a single type of contest or disaster. Hitting power and staying power are as crucial as agility. Yet you'd never know it if you look at what's being said in some quarters both inside and outside the Beltway.
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