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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.
He is also a novelist of tales of near-future
warfare featuring nuclear submariners and
Navy SEALs in action at their bravest and
best. Two of Joe's non-fiction articles on
future submarine technology and tactics, which
appeared in The Submarine Review, received
literary awards from the Naval Submarine League.
His recent novel Crush
Depth made the Military Book Club's
Top 20 Bestseller List after being selected
as a Featured Alternate of the Club in late
2002. Tidal
Rip was released from Wm. Morrow in
hardcover in November, 2003, and quickly made
the Amazon.com Top 100 General Thrillers Bestseller
List (paperback edition due in October, 2004).
Joe's next book, Straits
of Power, is scheduled for hardcover
publication in November, '04.
Joe is a member of the Society for Risk Analysis,
a non-partisan international scholarly body
headquartered in McLean, VA. He is a Life
Member of the following 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. 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. In
August, 2004, Joe was 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.
Joe
Buff Article & Column Archive
Joe Buff Contact Info:
readermail@joebuff.com
http://www.JoeBuff.com
Joe Buff Books:
Straits
of Power
Tidal
Rip
Crush
Depth
Thunder
in the Deep
Deep
Sound Channel
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October 15, 2004
[Have an opinion on this column? Sound off in Military.com
at the Frontlines.]
The question of how big a navy is "big enough but not too big" challenges and torments politicians and military commanders in every nation, around the world, that has a coastline. Several recent news events, seemingly unrelated to one another, all point to how pervasive and important this key question is. (More on each news item will come below here, but first let's take a broader perspective on the entire topic.)
The problem of naval planning and procurement is highly complex: not just how many ships overall, but what mix of types (destroyers, supercarriers, submarines, etc.), and what mission capabilities to emphasize for each type -- anti-submarine, anti-surface, anti-air, amphibious assault; mid-ocean major engagements, power projection through enemy littorals (near-shore areas) and onto and across contested land, or homeland defense. Having a few warships, big and expensive, or many ones, smaller and cheap, is another dimension to the issue that, in almost so many words, dates back centuries. And we mustn't neglect that crucial planning dimension, time. Analysis and decision-making have to take a multi-year or even multi-decade forward looking view.
Two historical examples will help explain what's truly at stake in getting the answers to these questions right.
Example 1: Soviet Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, head of (and some say, almost father of) the USSR's fleets at the height of their strength in the early 1980s, stated openly how critical it was for sizes and numbers of total naval vessels to achieve a proper balance vis a vis two contradictory factors: external threats real or potential, and domestic limits on affordability. Faced with the superior technology and budgetary might of Reagan-era capitalism -- with its stated goal of a 600-ship U.S. Navy -- the Soviet's evil empire bit by bit melted away.
Example 2: In the early 1800s, President Thomas Jefferson opted for many small coastal gunboats instead of a handful of ocean-going sailing ships of the line. This proved to be a major miscalculation. America couldn't protect its commerce from the ravages of hostile armed vessels way out in blue water, nor could it prevent its own coast from being menaced by unfriendly frigates or huge three-deckers that could (and did) come close inshore with near-impunity. Jefferson's resulting Embargo Act, which confined all U.S. merchant shipping to port as the only solution, was economically disastrous. The fiasco at sea was a major contributor to the conflicts with Great Britain that caused the War of 1812. The devastation of maritime businesses in New England, caused by a commander-in-chief whose perspective was deeply rooted in the landsman's values of the agrarian South, laid open the earliest cracks in a growing fissure that decades later helped trigger America's bloodiest war, the most-uncivil War Between the States.
The recent news items on naval affairs prove that the problems of structuring navies are still very much alive:
News item 1: Secretary of the Navy Gordon England said in a public speech recently that the Global War on Terror calls into question how many ships the United States needs. He noted, quite rightly, that other naval assets -- air wings, Marine Corps brigades, advanced electronic systems -- are also important, both as major tools of warfighting and as competitors for finite budget money. I would add that buying a ship involves much more that merely its price tag at the shipyard. That warship must be provided with a series of well-trained crews and captains for its entire useful lifetime; it must be replenished constantly with stores and munitions of many kinds; and it requires periodic trips into dry-dock for maintenance and upgrades. All of this costs a great deal of money. However, as Mr. Jefferson and a youthful America both found out the hard way, and to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, "Battleships are cheaper than battles." How does a country strike the proper tradeoff between dollars spent on defense today, against dollars and blood spent fighting in combat tomorrow? Weak deterrents, and a mixture of seagoing platforms unsuitable for wars of unimagined forms now lurking beyond the horizon, could turn into very false economies. Right now the U.S. Navy has 294 ships and submarines in commission; SECNAV England declined to say how many he thought was enough.
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© 2004 Joe Buff. All opinions expressed
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