OPINION:
This month, the coronavirus did what the Japanese fleet could not do in all of World War II; it neutralized much of the deployed firepower on the Pacific Fleet, and it did so without firing a shot.
When the USS Theodore Roosevelt (TR) docked in Guam to evacuate members of the crew who had contracted — or probably contracted — COVID-19, many times the firepower of all the battleships lost at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, was sidelined. Navy spokespersons claim that the ship can be redeployed quickly in an emergency, but health and morale issues render its combat readiness questionable at best. The Navy’s problem in this incident goes far beyond the controversy surrounding the relief of the TR’s captain for going outside of the chain and the subsequent resignation of the Navy secretary for his mishandling of the incident.
The TR situation highlights two critical problems that have undermined the Navy for at least two decades, and the proverbial chickens came home to roost in the second week in April when a Chinese aircraft carrier sailed into the South China Sea without an American carrier to counterbalance it. That alone doesn’t give China sea control, but it raises questions.
The first problem is that the Navy has too many eggs in too few baskets. Aircraft carriers are the heart of the Navy’s striking power; there are only 11 of them, and they are increasingly easy to target because most of our potential adversaries have reconnaissance satellites and long-range, high-endurance unmanned scout aircraft.
Today, what can be seen can be hit. Our potential adversaries — particularly China — know this and are developing access denial/anti-access strategies. The heart of these plans is to take out the offensive power projection capabilities residing in our aircraft carriers and amphibious landing ships. If a satellite photo of the U.S. Navy deployed in the Indo-Pacific in 1985 existed and was compared with a similar photo today, the ships would look remarkably similar except there would be fewer aircraft carriers and far fewer amphibious ships today.
Although we have seen the Iranians and Chinese forging anti-navy capabilities for at least two decades, our admirals have consistently resisted the need to build a larger number of smaller power projection platforms in order to disperse naval combat capability. This is particularly true of the amphibious fleet. Despite promises to the Marine Corps over the years to keep up an amphibious assault capability, the “barons” who run the Navy’s shipbuilding have disgracefully short-changed our ability to send Marines ashore.
This should have rung alarm bells within the Obama administration when — post-Benghazi — the Navy was forced to admit that it did not have enough landing ships to react to such situations worldwide. The Marine Corps saved the Navy’s bacon by finding innovative ways to pre-position reaction forces by non-traditional means. The Marines are also adjusting their force structure to deal with anti-access situations while the Navy tries to deal with the problem with traditional platforms.
A second problem that plagues America’s Navy is careerism. This breeds a lack senior-level initiative and imagination that has a chilling effect throughout the chain of command. The relief of the Roosevelt’s captain is a special circumstance, but the lack of imagination in handling the TR debacle is astounding.
When they realized that it had a serious problem, the senior Navy leadership could have done what the submarine force and Marine Corps have done for years. As the ship was being decontaminated, the Navy could have flown the entire crew of one of the carriers in home port to Guam and fallen in on the TR. All carriers are slightly different, but not that different. Once at sea, the replacement crew could shake down on its equipment.
In addition, not every captain who has a mishap at sea should be relieved. If he or she was trying something innovative and something didn’t go right but no one was killed or injured; perhaps relief for cause is not always the answer. If the pre-World War II Navy had been a zero-defects outfit, we wouldn’t have had Nimitz, Halsey and King.
The next Navy secretary should begin a bottom-up review of shipbuilding policies, education and leadership practices. In addition, the other services and joint commanders should have a say in what ships get built. The days of the Navy fighting alone are long gone; and if we are building a Navy to make only the admirals happy, the Navy is charting the wrong course.
• Gary Anderson lectures on Alternative Analysis at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
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