Modern conflicts seem to favor agile, smart weapons, but where’s the money in that?
The U.S. Navy, its policies guided more by inertia than by changes demanded by emerging threats, gives a new meaning to inertial guidance. It’s still a navy of big ships made in big shipyards for big money. The biggest shipyard of all is not in some high-tech haven, but in the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It’s Huntington Ingalls Industries, or HII, a sprawling 800-acre expanse of rusty metal that looks more like a junkyard than the trusted maker of the Navy’s Arleigh Burke guided-missile destroyers.
“Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are the backbone of the surface fleet and one of the most successful shipbuilding programs in the history of the Navy,” said Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, who in August 2023 awarded contracts to build several destroyers to HII and Bath Ironworks in Maine.
However, in the wars and conflicts we face today, big ships, flotillas of carriers, battleships and destroyers have not been a factor. From several studies that have been done, the big ships that our shipyards produce are at extreme risk and highly vulnerable targets. Guided missiles, fired from air, land or sea, have already changed naval tactics. The HMS Sheffield, a guided missile destroyer and part of a British force that intended to take the Falkland Islands from Argentina, was downed by one of two Exocet AM39 cruise missiles launched from Super Étendard fighters. One Exocet missed, the other ripped a hole in the side of the ship but failed to explode. It didn’t need to. It started a fire that consumed the ship.
Drones will change tactics even more. And then there are the threats—both cheap and plentiful—like rubber dinghies loaded with explosives piloted by zealots such as the one that blew a 40-by-40 foot hole in the side of the USS Cole, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer that was refueling in a Yemeni port in October 2000. With such low-cost but effective weapons available to most ragtag navies and well-heeled terrorists (Osama bin Laden orchestrated the attack in Yemen) as well as high-tech, large-volume threats (drones, missiles) available to most governments, what on Earth is the U.S. Navy to do?
Currently, the U.S. is looking down the barrel of a China that is determined to “reunite” with Taiwan. The combined forces of Taiwan, the U.S. and Japan are determined to resist. Most war games start with an amphibious and aerial assault on Taiwan. Naval analysts believe that instead of rushing to assist Taiwan with its defense, the ships of the Seventh Fleet, with the nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier at the center, will retreat to safer waters, out of missile range. It makes sense. Why risk a $4.5 billion carrier? The U.S. Navy has not lost a carrier since World War II.
But that will remove the U.S. Navy as a factor in the conflict, concludes a RAND study. Up to a thousand miles from the action, it will be difficult for Navy fixed-wing aircraft on board the carrier or missiles from its destroyers to reach their targets, leaving the conflict to the U.S. Air Force, which has long-range bombers.
The days of sailing into view with big battleships and having people capitulate, such as Commodore Matthew Perry did when he sailed his four warships into Tokyo harbor, are long gone.
Of all the branches of the military, it may be the U.S. Navy that is most bound by tradition. Tech companies grow frustrated by the Navy’s reluctance to adopt the latest technology, choosing instead to keep funding big ships and supporting big shipyards.
Ben Rich, who took over Lockheed’s Skunk Works from its creator, the legendary Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, tells how Kelly made him promise to not have anything to do with the Navy. The “blue suiters” (Air Force) were much more appreciative of what the Skunk Works had to offer. After the success of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, their ability to deliver on the impossible, aircraft that were invisible to radar (the F-117 Nighthawk) and cruised at Mach 3 (the SR-71 Blackbird), similar operations popped up for government agencies and companies.
The U.S. Navy may have its own skunk works. It is their robot operations center that operates in Bahrain. It has an annual budget equal to the cost of one year’s fuel for an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.
Here in the Persian Gulf’s warm waters is a shoestring operation by the U.S. Navy that is conducting experiments for future Navy unmanned vessels and AI programs. While the U.S. Navy buys destroyers for $2 billion each, the undermanned and underfunded operation goes begging for money.
The T-38 Devil Ray, faster than anything the Navy sails, is being tested in Bahrain. Nearby is a solar-powered, autonomous vessel that can go 3 months without being refueled, potentially giving the Navy an unmatched ability for coverage, such as the Fifth Fleet needs to detect Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf.
The experiment in Bahrain started after Admiral Lorin Selby (now retired), then the chief of the Office of Naval Research, suggested the Navy try using unmanned vessels in a naval exercise off San Diego in 2012. Selby lobbied to get the Navy to procure thousands of unmanned vessels and create a new post, a high rank with the authority and budget to build a next-generation fleet consisting of both manned and unmanned vessels, but he encountered too many roadblocks.
“You now run up against the machine—the people who just want to kind of continue to do what we’ve always done,” Selby said in an interview in the New York Times. “The budgeting process, the congressional process, the industrial lobbying efforts. It is all designed to continue to produce what we’ve already got and make it a little better. But that is not good enough.”
