WASHINGTON REPORT

England Tells Congress: Review of Shipbuilding Accounts "Highest Priority"

By GORDON I. PETERSON, Senior Editor

President George W. Bush has nominated Gordon R. England to serve as the 72nd secretary of the Navy. England served from 1997 to 2001 as the executive vice president of the General Dynamics Corp.

Testifying at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on 10 May, England said that it is "bothersome" that the size of the Navy's fleet has continued to decline in recent years. He pledged to review how Navy shipbuilding accounts are funded and to determine what the right mix of ships should be. "This is a priority--the very highest priority of mine is to look at our shipbuilding accounts," England said. "Ships ... are the foundation of the Navy."

In response to questioning by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), England also said that force-protection for U.S. personnel, bases, and families is a serious problem and that, if confirmed, he would give it his attention and "necessary resources."

At a time when the quality and availability of military training at ranges across the United States are being threatened by growing local political opposition and continued commercial encroachment, England made it clear that the need for realistic, demanding training for Sailors and Marines is a critical requirement.

"If you don't have a chance to scrimmage as part of practice," England said by way of a sports analogy, "then you don't do well when it comes to game time." England reconfirmed that the use of Navy ranges on Puerto Rico's Vieques island is "very important today" because they offer the only suitable location for Navy and Marine Corps combined-arms live-fire training.

England, a native of Baltimore, Md., began his career as an engineer in the 1960s following graduation from the University of Maryland. He first worked with Honeywell Corp. on the Gemini space program before joining General Dynamics as an avionics design engineer in its Fort Worth, Texas, aircraft division. He also worked with Litton Industries as a program manager on the Navy's E-2C Hawkeye early-warning aircraft.

While serving as General Dynamics' executive vice president, England was responsible for two major sectors of the corporation--information systems and international business. Previously, he had served as the executive vice president of the company's Combat Systems Group and, before that, as president of General Dynamics Land Systems, which builds land combat vehicles.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) praised England's qualifications, reflecting on her association with him in the business world. "He is the most qualified person to serve in this position and in the Pentagon," she said, "because of his longtime experience and expertise in engineering and the equipment that we are going to need as we go into this century."

Several SASC committee members noted England's lifelong ties to defense companies and the potential, therefore, of a future conflict of interest. In response to questioning from Levin and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), England and other Bush nominees for the Department of Defense (DOD) appearing before the committee confirmed that they would divest themselves of all business interests associated with the defense-contracting industry.

Readiness, Modernization, People Top Priorities for Naval Aviation

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.

CSBA also advocated the design and construction of a new class of relatively small "Streetfighter" prototype surface combatants so that the Navy could enable its commanders to address emerging challenges and "increase the variety of capabilities" in their hands.

"Proof is Left to Student"

Criticism of CSBA's transformation strategy for the Navy was not long in coming. One observer said that the CSBA proposal for carrier aviation reminded him of the standard textbook entry for a problem in high school Euclidean geometry: "Proof is Left to Student."

Notwithstanding the potent anti-air capabilities of a SAG composed of today's Aegis guided-missile cruisers and destroyers, the history of the 20th century offers numerous examples of why it would be imprudent not to meet the stated JCS validation of 15 aircraft carrier battle groups as the minimum needed to meet U.S. forward-presence requirements.

The hazards of placing surface warships within the reach of shore-based aviation in potentially high-threat regions without organic fixed-wing air cover was first demonstrated in December 1941 when the Royal Navy lost both the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser HMS Repulse to Japanese aircraft--operating from land bases in Indochina--in a single day. As the Royal Navy again learned--to its distress and at the cost of many sailors' lives--during its Falkland Islands campaign against Argentina 20 years ago, the large-deck aircraft carrier's multimission air wing provides an unmatched search-and-surveillance umbrella extending many hundreds of miles in all directions. Advanced warning translates into early acquisition, targeting, and the destruction of enemy threats before the battle group is jeopardized.

Significant "opportunity costs" to U.S. national security associated with the lack of immediately employable sea-based air power also are apparent when considering the regions of the world of vital interest to the United States. During the height of U.S. counterterrorist operations in the Mediterranean region during the 1980s, for example, a flight of F-14 Tomcats--guided by an E-2C Hawkeye--launched from the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga and intercepted an Egyptian Air Lines Boeing 737 bound for Tunisia with the PLO terrorists who had hijacked the Italian liner Achille Lauro.

The Tomcat fighters forced the Egyptian Air flight to divert to Naval Air Station Sigonella, Italy, where the terrorists were apprehended and later brought to justice. The operation--planned, coordinated, and executed within hours by the U.S. National Command Authority (NCA) in Washington, D.C., Navy European headquarters in London, and the U.S. Sixth Fleet at sea in the Mediterranean--was a total success. As Robert W. Love notes in his History of the U.S. Navy, President Ronald Reagan said that the Sixth Fleet's spectacular capture of the hijackers sent a message to terrorists everywhere: "You can run, but you can't hide."

"Full-Spectrum Capability"

Responding to the CSBA suggestion that a 10-carrier force could be "adapted" to meet U.S. security requirements, a Navy spokesperson told Sea Power that a force of 10 aircraft carriers would further reduce the Navy's forward-presence capabilities and could not meet the unified combatant commands' crisis-response and warfighting requirements. "Forward-deployed carriers provide a significant, sustained, full-spectrum capability for timely and powerful crisis response," the Navy said in a prepared statement.

Time and again during the post-Cold War era, it has been demonstrated that a force of at least 12 carrier battle groups (CVBGs) offers the president a broad range of alternative courses of action during times of crisis. During Operation Desert Thunder in 1998, for example, the NCA ordered the Navy to deploy two CVBGs to the Persian Gulf to maintain a continuous presence for more than six months. The Navy met this requirement without exceeding its standards for deployment length and time between deployments, but the operation did strain its ability to meet other global commitments and presence requirements.
Navy officials are on record that a reduction to 10 carriers would adversely affect the Navy's ability to "surge" carrier battle groups in the interdeployment training cycle to reinforce the CVBGs already forward-deployed in times of major crisis. According to the Navy's spokesperson, "The Navy's current ability to surge up to nine carriers within 90 days out of a force of 12 would be reduced to just seven carriers with a force of 10."

The results of Rumsfeld's security, strategy, and force-structure reviews will be revealed later this summer. Even as those reviews are being finalized, Navy leaders are emphasizing that naval aviation has today a clear roadmap to meet the future uncertainties and complex national-security challenges of the 21st century.

That roadmap envisions not only continued reliance on improved big-deck carriers, but also increasingly greater emphasis on a network-centric total force broadly centered on all platforms--air, surface, and submarine--in the CVBG.

New sensors and networked systems are being developed even as older variants are being modernized. The transition to "effects warfare" continues with the growth of an entire family of all-weather precision-guided munitions. The firepower of a future battle force at sea will be so networked that its collective reach will extend across vast distances of the ocean and of adjoining land masses as well.

Standoff precision munitions are the norm in every Navy air wing today, and the result is increased lethality, greater accuracy in all weather conditions, and reduced risk to Navy aircrews.

The real challenge faced by naval aviation today, Navy leaders say, is to sustain current capabilities even as its truly revolutionary transformation continues into the 21st century. They are in agreement, moreover, that aircraft procurement funding must be significantly --and immediately--increased so that production rates are raised to so-called "economic-order quantities" for replacement aircraft--even as next-generation recapitalization programs like the Joint Strike Fighter move forward.

The last 11 CVBGs to deploy overseas all have gone into combat during their deployments. That stark reality must certainly weigh heavily during the current DOD review of strategy and force structure.

Vieques Update

Enterprise Battle Group Deploys at Higher Readiness

Additional training conducted in late April at the Navy's training ranges on Puerto Rico's Vieques Island enabled the Enterprise Carrier Battle Group to deploy to the Mediterranean Sea and Arabian Gulf at a higher readiness level than was originally projected when live-fire exercises were postponed earlier this spring.

"I was very pleased that we were able to get the Enterprise Battle Group down to Vieques for more training prior to their trans-Atlantic crossing, " Vice Adm. Michael G. Mullen, commander, U.S. Second Fleet, told Sea Power. "The essential air-to-ground work they accomplished there improved their overall readiness."

Mullen noted, however, that the Battle Group and the Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group would have deployed at an even higher level of readiness if all required combined-arms training had been conducted at Vieques as originally scheduled instead of during last-minute substitute exercises in North Carolina in March (Sea Power, May 2001). "We simply must have a range like Vieques to effectively replicate the integrated nature--and stress--of actual combat," he said.
Training was interrupted a number of times during the four-day exercise as demonstrators used stones, sling shots, and iron bars to injure nearly 20 Sailors and U.S. marshals providing security on the range. Demonstrators' allegations of mistreatment at the hands of security officials were described as "patently false" by Navy spokesman Lt. Jeffrey D. Gordon. "Most of the 178 detainees cooperated," Gordon said, "but dozens resisted, and it was necessary to restrain them physically."

Rear Adm. Kevin P. Green, commander, U.S. Naval Forces, Southern Command, reemphasized the importance of live-fire, combined-arms training to the Navy. "It is fundamental that a service that carries out its mission through a process of rotational deployments depends on very thorough preparation for those deployments," Green told Sea Power from his headquarters at Naval Air Station, Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico. "A big part of those preparations involves training--realistic, effective, and challenging combat training. That's what this range at Vieques is all about."

Reflecting on the challenge of communicating this message to the citizens of Puerto Rico and the United States, Green voiced some frustration and agreed that the combat capabilities of today's Navy-Marine Corps team appear to be taken for granted among many segments of American society.
"The argument for national security is not a tremendously compelling one at the local level," Green said.

Editor's Note: Sea Power will publish a special report on Vieques in September.