Readiness, modernization, people top priorities for Naval aviation

Sea Power,  Jun 2001  

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Rear Adm. Michael J. McCabe, the director of air warfare on the staff of the chief of naval operations (CNO), has told Sea Power that he is greatly encouraged by CNO Adm. Vern Clark's interest in the future of naval aviation and his advocacy in leading the force into the 21st century.

"Admiral Clark has been a strong supporter of naval aviation, current readiness, and future readiness," McCabe said. "He asks hard questions, but he is willing to support us."

McCabe said that today's naval aviation community has a clear vision for its future, with top priorities centering on current readiness, balancing the modernization of an aging force with recapitalization, and recruiting and retaining the best people possible. "Overlapping this," he said, "our deployed warfighting capability and performance have been exceptional."

McCabe noted, however, that those achievements and service to the country have "come on the back of our nondeployed forces-both in terms of equipment and the challenge in maintaining an aging force."

A Cottage Industry

January's change of administrations, coupled with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's decision to launch a broad range of internal national-security reviews early in his second tour as defense secretary, have generated a number of independent think-tank defense reviews and fueled speculative media reporting on the future of U.S. defense strategy and force structure.

The recent proliferation of private-- sector defense studies and seminars seems to border on a cottage industry in the most venerable traditions of the nation's capital. As a part of this process, questions have been raised about the future size and design of the Navy's force of aircraft carriers-in part because Andrew W. Marshall, Rumsfeld's advisor for net assessment, is playing a key role in DOD's ongoing review.

"Mr. Marshall questions the Navy's need for new, huge carriers," wrote Rowen Scarborough in The Washington Times in April, "arguing they are too vulnerable to foreign arsenals of antiship cruise missiles."

Dr. Andrew Krepinevich, the executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), hosted a conference on "The Future of Maritime Competition and Naval Innovation" in Washington, D.C., on 8 February that was cosponsored by the Naval War College and Marshall's Office of Net Assessment. Marshall, Krepinevich's former boss when the latter served on the net-assessment staff in the Pentagon, was the final speaker at the conference.

Addressing the process of innovation, Marshall made note of the special challenge associated with forging major changes in doctrine, force structure, and operations. "Real change takes so long," he said, "and we must start down the road before there is a sense of urgency. I'm not sure we're passing the test too well."

During his remarks, Marshall credited the Navy's use of its first aircraft carrier during the 1920s, the USS Langley, as "the first exemplar of a new way of fighting." He criticized today's armed forces, however, for failing to engage in "anything like that level of activity today." Some attendees wondered why Marshall made no mention of the Navy's ongoing series of fleet-battle experiments, the designation of the U.S. Third Fleet flagship USS Coronado as the Navy's Sea-Based Battle Laboratory, or the Atlantic and Pacific Fleet's aggressive innovation-and-experimentation exercise program.

Streetfighters, SAGs, and UCAVs

In January, Krepinevich joined two other CSBA staff members to publish a call for the U.S. military to "transform" itself to maintain a significant margin of superiority over any potential rival. CSBA's "A Strategy for a Long Peace" faulted DOD for doing little to transform the military to provide a "strategic blueprint" to meet emerging threats to U.S. national security.

CSBA's assessment of the changing security environment facing the United States concludes that U.S. maritime forces "will probably play an increasingly important role in supporting power-projection operations in the absence of forward bases."

Navy supporters noted with considerable concern that CSBA's proposed formula to transform the Navy would reduce the current force of 12 big-deck aircraft carriers, which are used to provide a part-time forward presence in critical geographic hubs in East Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the Mediterranean Sea.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have told Congress that 15 large-deck carriers are needed to provide a full-time carrier presence in each of those regions. Nonetheless, CSBA said that "It is not clear why [emphasis added] the Navy could not maintain a forward-deployment posture of eight months in all three regions. This could reduce its carrier requirement from 12 to 10, with a corresponding (although not identical) reduction in requirements for other naval combatants."

CSBA estimated that the funding "thus liberated" by the reductions would enable the Navy to cover the four-month gaps in carrier presence: (a) through the use of surface action groups (SAGs) armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles or other advanced systems, including extended-range surface gunfire support systems or unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs); or (b) through the deployment of guided-missile Trident submarines (SSGNs) kept permanently on station.