On Sunday USS Enterprise, the first nuclear powered aircraft carrier, arrived at Naval Station Norfolk, Va. after its final deployment. For 50 years Enterprise was involved in every major U.S. conflict and is now scheduled for decommissioning.
Cid Standifer is a freelance reporter, web designer and translator based in Arlington, Va. She has written for Military Times, Inside Washington Publishers and the Roswell Daily Record.
In the run-up to Election Day, both campaigns have put an increased focus on national security, foreign policy and defense spending. President Barack Obama has touted, among other things, the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, a strategic pivot to the Asian-Pacific and the killing of Osama bin Laden. Republican nominee Mitt Romney has criticized the President for his policies in the Middle East, decried defense-spending cuts from the Department of Defense efficiency push and the congressionally mandated sequestration process, and said he plans to pump more money into the Pentagon budget.
Most recently, Obama and Romney have clashed over Navy force structure. The President’s plan invests in nearly ten new ships a year, bringing the aggregate to 307 vessels by 2042. The Romney camp is advocating a 350-ship Navy based on a procurement rate of 15 ships per year.
Both Obama and Romney want to buy more submarines, destroyers and aircraft carriers, but Romney also wants a new frigate and a dedicated missile-defense ship. Both the President and his challenger are advocating more tactical fighter aircraft, including a mix of F/A-18s and F-35s. Romney advisers have said they want more of the legacy Hornets, in addition to the new joint-service platform and want to add an 11th carrier air wing, to match air units to each of the Navy’s eleven aircraft carriers.
The two also differ on the total number of ships the Navy needs. At the 19 October foreign policy debate, Romney stuck by his call for a 350-ship fleet. “Our Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917,” Romney said. “I want to make sure we have the ships that are required by our Navy.”
The stand prompted one of the more terse exchanges between the two candidates during this cycle.
The Ohio-class Replacement nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) is the Navy’s planned sea-based strategic nuclear deterrent. U.S. Navy officials outlined the capabilities of the boat this month.
“The Ohio Replacement is not, is not, a multi-mission platform,” Capt. William Brougham, US Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) Ohio-class Replacement Program Manager, said at the 2012 Naval Submarine League Symposium in Falls Church, Va. on Oct. 18.
“We don’t turn into a multi-mission platform that’s going to go off and do things that you see on television,” he said.
The Ohio Replacement is scaled back from the initial Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) for the program, then dubbed SSBN(X), conducted by NAVSEA in 2009. The initial AoA called for a boat that would have cost $6 to 7 billion but with the reduction in capability the Ohio Replacement drove costs down to $5.6 billion a copy. The eventual goal of the reductions is to produce the boats at $4.9 billion a copy.
On late October 1963, USS Andrew Jackson launched first Polaris A-3 missile from a submerged submarine, off Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Polaris program served as the template for the current Trident missile program which forms the backbone of the US strategic sea-based deterrent.
Cid Standifer is a freelance reporter, web designer and translator based in Arlington, Va. She has written for Military Times, Inside Washington Publishers and the Roswell Daily Record.
Proceedings, October 2012
We must reconsider our strategic perspective and organizational culture amid an emerging naval revolution.
Today’s U.S. Navy faces trying times in every dimension. Accelerating technological trends are stressing naval development and adaptability, while the Army and Marine Corps contend with costly rebuilding after the long wars in southwest Asia. Yet domestic economic and infrastructure demands and the growing national deficit are cutting into defense resources. After a half-century of U.S. maritime dominance, rival naval powers are emerging. While technological developments threaten accelerated depreciation of the Navy’s capital assets, growing international competition, rising costs, and declining resources all pose severe challenges.
The rules of the game are changing in fundamental ways. Is the Navy organizationally and culturally prepared? Specifically, will the systems currently under development help expand or reduce the range of scenarios in which the service can be effective? What balance should be struck between investing in legacy systems rather than emerging technologies? These are questions we should be investigating.
Naval support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been critical for a decade, but the Navy has been unable to focus on sea control and naval warfare at the same time. Marines and sailors with Regimental Combat Team 8 conducted Operation Eastern Seal in Helmand province in November 2011. U.S. Marine Corps Photo
During the past ten years, naval support for the land wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been substantial and critical, even if largely unnoticed by the American public and political leadership. But this effort has come with a cost: the Navy has been unable to concentrate on its broader missions of sea control and naval warfare. Future strategic perspective will have to shift from one of small wars to the full range of naval warfare. In this process, history can play a productive role. Scholars believe history helps us empathize with the past and see it on its own terms, while decision-makers often look to it for lessons that shape solutions to real-time problems. Even though that approach runs the risk of superficial and inappropriate analogies, properly conducted case studies can broaden perspectives, illuminate issues, and structure questions that are key to informed and creative problem-solving.
On Oct. 29, 1814 The U.S. Navy launched its first steam powered warship, designed by Robert Fulton.
Naval History Magazine, August 2011
After inventing weapons for foreign powers, Robert Fulton built the world’s first steam warship for America, a vessel that might have transformed naval warfare if fate had allowed.
The outpouring of public mourning when Robert Fulton died, on 23 February 1815 at age 49, was unprecedented for an American private citizen. The passing of a mind that was considered a major national asset caused The New York Evening Post to lament, “His is the only loss for which the public has no indemnity.”
Fulton’s best-known achievement, the development of steamboat travel, largely centered in his last decade after he had spent nearly 20 years in Europe. Leading a sometime unconventional life overseas, Fulton developed and employed naval armaments for France and Britain at a time both countries posed threats to the new nation. Fortunately for his reputation and ambitions, it was an age when private lives of the famous mostly stayed private and citizens could negotiate deals with foreign nations that now might be considered treasonous. Redeeming himself during the War of 1812, Fulton built the world’s first steam warship to defend New York City. However, events prevented a demonstration of the vessel’s unique qualities in battle and an opportunity for Fulton to revolutionize naval warfare as he did transportation.
Influenced by his father’s bankruptcy and family hardship after the father’s early death, Fulton avidly pursued material success all his life. An early ambition was to win fame and fortune as an artist. To obtain training and exposure at the center of the art world, Fulton journeyed to London in 1787 armed with a letter of introduction to noted American artist Benjamin West. Generous in his support of young American artists, West was just one in a succession of influential people who, charmed by the handsome, diligent, and self-assured Fulton, helped to advance his career. Commissioned to paint the portrait of Viscount William Courtenay, a flamboyant young homosexual, Fulton stayed with him a year and a half, winning further commissions from Courtenay’s companions. Although little else is known about that time, Fulton probably participated in his host’s activities to some extent, which might help to explain his unconventional lifestyle later.
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral George W. Anderson Jr. was part of the inner circle of military officers advising President John F. Kennedy on how to deal with the Soviet Union’s shipping missiles to Cuba.
In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union perched precariously on the brink of nuclear war. At this time of extreme challenge for U.S. leadership, there were serious disagreements within that echelon. In the event, the United States prevailed.
In 1983, the U.S. Naval Institute published The Reminiscences of Admiral George W. Anderson , an oral history in which the former Chief of Naval Operations reflected on his role in the crisis and on the controversial nature of his one-term tour as CNO. Excerpts from those recollections presented here are of enduring value.
President John F. Kennedy and a new generation took office in January 1961. If there were hopes for improved relations at the outset, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev soon found themselves on a road turning rocky. In April, the U.S. move to oust Fidel Castro from Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion failed miserably. In June, during their summit talks in Vienna, Austria, Khrushchev measured Kennedy as weak and pushed ahead on three fronts: strengthening the Soviet strategic nuclear arsenal; cutting off East and West Berlin with the Berlin Wall; establishing a stronger presence in the Western Hemisphere; and introducing a growing array of arms to Cuba.
On 1 October, the President appointed Army General Maxwell Taylor, center, to take over for General Lyman Lemnitzer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Taylor had been serving in the White House as military representative to the President. Flanking Taylor, left to right, are Army Chief of Staff General Earle Wheeler, Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral George Anderson, and Commandant of the Marine Corps General David Shoup. Navy History and Hertigae Command
Naval History Magazine October, 2012
From manning quarantine lines to flying reconnaissance missions to preparing for an invasion, the U.S. Navy played instrumental roles during the Cuban Missile Crisis 50 years ago.
On a tense day in October 1962, the USS Allan M. Sumner(DD-692) was about 500 miles off the northern shore of Cuba, trailing a Soviet freighter. President John F. Kennedy, after learning that the Soviet Union was sending ballistic missiles to the island nation, had proclaimed a quarantine against ships carrying offensive arms there. The Cuban Missile Crisis had moved from the White House and the Kremlin to the sea, and suddenly the crisis was focused on the Sumner .
“I was in the wheelhouse,” Quartermaster Third Class Bob Bourassa remembered. “The freighter was about 1000 yds off our port side.” When the transport failed to respond to an order to stop, Commander William J. Flynn, captain of the Sumner , sent a handwritten message down to the radio shack “and after the first message was returned to him, he instructed the guns to be turned toward the freighter.” After a while, Commander Flynn sent down a second message. Before it was answered, “the freighter came to a stop . . . backed down for some time, stopped and then turned around and sailed eastward.” 1
That was the Navy on the quarantine line—ships ready for action and a command system that reached from the Pentagon and President Kennedy to destroyer captains and their crews. Before the crisis ended, the Navy would have more than 140 ships in the Caribbean and over 350 combat aircraft at area airfields. 2 They were responding to a Cold War confrontation that had begun in September 1960 when the Soviet freighter Atkarsk arrived at Nikolaev, the Black Sea port used for exporting weapons and military equipment from the Soviet Union.
This week in a speech in Virginia, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney talked about his plan to build a 350-ship Navy, boosting spending on current programs and creating two new ship designs. But affordability is a key detail in any procurement discussion, and it’s one piece of the puzzle that the Romney camp is still fleshing out. Romney also did not identify any new requirements for a 350-ship fleet.
There is no doubt shipbuilding is a priority for whomever occupies the White House for the next four years. The Navy’s current roster of ships is near its smallest since 1916, when then-President Woodrow Wilson signed the Naval Act authorizing a massive build-up. At Wilson’s behest and with congressional approval, the Navy built 10 battleships, six battlecruisers, 30 submarines, 50 destroyers and other support vessels over three years, tripling the size of the sea service by 1919. Wilson’s 752-ship Navy was the high-water mark for decades, and his push leading up to World War I is credited with establishing U.S. naval dominance in the 20th century. But the expansion came at a cost — some $500 million at the time or a mere $10.2 billion in current-year dollars. But today’s ships are different by nearly all metrics — mission, capability, sophistication, size and cost among other factors.
Nearly a century later, Congress finds itself in much the same quandary as Wilson — an aging fleet of warships in need of modernization and, some say, expansion. The U.S. fleet as a whole has been on a slow decline since the late 1980s, bottoming out at 278 ships in 2007. The Navy says it needs between 310 and 316 ships to meet all its obligations around the world, a number that has remained roughly unchanged since the 1994 Quadrennial Defense Review.
Proceedings, Oct. 2012
In August, the Royal Navy released details of its next surface combatant, the Type 26, a modular ship. Announced plans are to build 13 of these vessels to replace the surviving 13 Type 23 frigates. All were intended primarily for antisubmarine warfare (ASW); the Type 23s were conceived as minimum towed-array ships to work in the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) Gap mainly in support of maritime patrol aircraft. With the end of the Cold War, this mission disappeared, and the Type 23s found themselves carrying out a wide variety of peacetime missions, such as drug interdiction in the Caribbean and anti-piracy work off Somalia. An incidental effect of the change from harsh GIUK waters to calmer ones is that the ships’ hulls have lasted far longer than expected. (Cynics may suspect that the ships’ longevity is really the consequence of successive governments’ reluctance to buy replacements on a timely basis.)
Comparing the Type 26 to the U.S. Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) shows how wide a range the concept of modularity covers. The Type 26 is a 5,500-ton frigate that can be built in one of at least two versions. In appearance it is a scaled-down Type 45 destroyer with the same sort of tower foremast, in this case topped by the Artisan three-dimensional radar rather than the big Sampson of the Type 45. The Type 26 was conceived as part of a long-running project to design a Future Surface Combatant, which was originally to have been built in three versions of varying capability (and cost).
The Type 26 is apparently the ASW variant, presumably a direct replacement for the current Type 23, with much the same systems as the projected modernized Type 23. They include the Sea Centor vertically launched suface-to-air missile (replacing the current Seawolf) and the Type 2087 low-frequency active-passive sonar (towed pinger plus array plus medium-frequency bow array). Sea Centor is an active-radar-guided derivative of the current British short-range air-to-air missile, also known as CAMMS (Common Modular Missile System). It uses an uplink for mid-course guidance. The ship will have a single gun, either the 4.5-inch currently standard in the Royal Navy, or perhaps a derivative of the U.S. 5-inch/62 (BAE owns United Defense, which makes the U.S. gun). There may be provision for a more powerful gun; in the past BAE has advertised a 155-mm gun within the footprint of its 4.5 inch.
