How Useful is the US Navy?

By BJ Bjornson

The rescue of Captain Phillips has got the intertubes burning up, but it certainly hasn't slowed the pirates down any so far.

Undeterred by U.S. and French hostage rescues that killed five bandits, Somali pirates brazenly hijacked four more ships with more than 60 crew members in the Gulf of Aden, the waterway at the center of the world's fight against piracy.

Pirates have vowed to retaliate for deaths of their colleagues — and the top U.S. military officer said Tuesday he takes those comments seriously. But Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC's "Good Morning America" that "we're very well prepared to deal with anything like that."

Perhaps its true. Certainly one would hope that for the amount of money spent on the US Navy, that it would be able to deal with a bunch of AK-toting fishermen in little motorboats, but there has been a large international naval presence in the area for some time already, and it hasn't made much difference yet.

For myself, it is something that Steve put in his post on the subject below that caught my attention in regards to the cost-benefit of these naval actions.

. . . it took three US warships, FBI negotiators and, evidently, a hostage rescue team. That's a lot of effort for something that may have negative consequences.

A lot of effort, and a lot of very expensive hardware to take down 4 Somalis, and the ultimate takedown of said individuals was performed by a group of men, Navy SEALs, trained to fight from a very similar platform to the pirates.

It almost makes you wonder if all those big, bad warships are really as useful as they're made out to be. Then again, maybe they are actually just as useful as they say they are, you just have to really listen to what they're saying.

“The purpose of the Navy,” Vice Admiral John Bird, commander of the Seventh Fleet, tells me, “is not to fight.” The mere presence of the Navy should suffice, he argues, to dissuade any attack or attempt to destabilize the region.

Perhaps the Vice Admiral should chat with his colleagues off the coast of Africa. It doesn't appear that their mere presence is having the dissuading affect Bird thinks they should have.

The link to the above article is via this piece by the War Nerd, in which he notes that decades after the ballistic missile became a threat, the US Navy admits that its ships have no defense against it.

That’s right: no defense at all. The truth is that they have very feeble defenses against any attack with anything more modern than cannon. I’ve argued before no carrier group would survive a saturation attack by huge numbers of low-value attackers, whether they’re Persians in Cessnas and cigar boats or mass-produced Chinese cruise missiles. But at least you could look at the missile tubes and Phalanx gatlings and pretend that you were safe. But there is no defense, none at all, against something as obvious as a ballistic missile.

The Somali pirates are unlikely to get their hands on a bunch of ballistic missiles or mass their boats for a suicidal swarming assault anytime soon, but the threat is genuine, and the prestige of taking out even a small US naval vessel might tempt some of them into investing some of their loot into a handful of anti-ship missiles. In any case, it does make one wonder why the US keeps building such vulnerable and expensive toys, and the War Nerd has the answer for that as well.

All day I’ve been thinking about the Navy and the fact that it has no defenses at all against ballistic missiles. The main point, the one I was trying to make in my last story, is that when something comes along like this and you’re tempted to say, “Well, they must have thought of that already, they must have some defense in mind…”-when you start talking like that, just slap yourself and remember all the other military traditions that kept going long after anybody with sense knew they were finito.

The most obvious example is European heavy cavalry trotting into longbow fire again and again. Crecy demonstrated that knightly charges were suicide against the longbow in 1346. But the French aristocracy had so much invested in prancing around on their damn steeds that it took another demonstration, at Agincourt in 1415 to even start to get them thinking about it. I’m no math wiz but I think that 1415 minus 1346…yup, that’s 69 years between catastrophes. Lessons learned? None.

These dodos always have one thing in common: whether it’s knights charging with lances on very expensive horses or top gun brats like McCain zooming onto carrier decks in history’s most expensive aircraft, you’ll always find that the worst, most over-funded services are always the ones where the rich kids go to show their stuff. Seriously: why are there aircraft carriers? For asses like John McCain to crash on. Why do they keep getting funded long after they’ve been shown up? The same reason knights were galloping around pretending that the longbow hadn’t turned half their friends into pincushions: because it was a way of life for the richest and dumbest people in the country and they weren’t about to let it go.

Given all the teeth-nashing and hair-pulling over Obama's increase to the defense budget recently, one shouldn't expect to see the big toys disappear anytime soon, unless of course, they actually try to fight a real enemy with them. Until then, they sure do look swell, don't they?

Comments

[Curmudgeon]

You're being a little sloppy with details and terminology.

The Chinese might, allegedly, have developed a ballistic missile system capable of hitting ships at sea. This, however, is cutting edge technology and most certainly has not been around for decades. Using ballistic missiles to hit a moving target is a very hard problem that might not ultimately be solvable in a militarily useful way. Until the alleged Chinese weapon is at least test fired (or used in anger), it's not clear if their weapon will work.

Every other known anti-ship missile follows a non-ballistic trajectory. Most of them are sea skimmers. The USN believes it has effective defenses against non-ballistic ASMs, including sea skimming missiles, but these defenses have never been tested in anger. It's anyone's guess if they'll work.

Somali pirates might be able to get their hands on some smaller ASMs--good for damaging ships--but the larger ship killers--e.g. Granit--are out of their league.

[BJ Bjornson]

Curmudgeon, read the update in the linked War Nerd article. In it, he talks about the US Navy’s own Harpoon anti-ship missile, which entered service in 1977, and whose “pop-up” attack profile is a ballistic maneuver. So we’re talking at least 30 years for the Navy to have seen ballistic-type missiles as being a threat given they were building them themselves. And the offensive capabilities of such missiles are only getting better.

[fester]

I think Brecher is getting the Harpoon wrong --- it does have a pop-up attack option, but that is more to generate random vector changes as well as getting its sensors a better look at the target than to make it immune to point defenses.

I think Brecher is too entranced with the jeune ecole torpedo boat model of naval power projection to really think the problem through.

If you want/need to be able to deploy naval forces and power across an ocean or in 'northern' seas, then you need big ships. And those big ships will look to be underarmed and underarmored compared to a coastal defense force that figures that it can get back to port whenever the winds are above 30 knots and resupply every three or four days no matter what. However those big ships have to ride out heavy seas, and can not rely on getting to port once a week for resupply.

Now there is the mothership/sea basing models of small ships operating in the littoral quasi-independently of big ship support EXCEPT for the honking big mothership/C2 node that is several horizons away. Galhran at Information Dissemination is pushing this viewpoint pretty damn hard. But it is still a big-ship centric deployment strategy.

This entire discussion is moot if the purpose of a navy is local coastal defense and patrolling the EEZ --- then small ships with oversized offensive batteries make a whole lot more sense. But if a navy is engaged in long distance power projection, then big ships are a neccessity --- just ask the Greeks and Turks why they are deploying frigates to the Western Indian Ocean instead of their shoals of fast attack craft.

[Andy]

BJ Bjornson,

War Nerd is completely wrong about "ballistic missiles." Besides, a "pop-up" maneuver is not a "ballistic" maneuver as the weapon is powered and guided over its entire flight path.

The US Navy does have defenses against these and has long had defenses against them. Most Soviet ASM's used pop-up and other maneuvers to complicate defenses.

Finally, the reasons the Navy has not dealt with the pirates has nothing to do with Naval capabilities. If the US Navy wanted to, or was directed to, it could end 95% of the piracy in a few days by sinking all the pirate motherships and most of their skiffs. So the problem is not one of capabilities, it's one of politics.

Now, if you want the Navy to be able to prevent all pirate attacks by escorting/patrolling then that simply isn't going to happen, anymore than police can prevent crime when all they are allowed to do is arrest criminals caught in the act. The history of piracy clearly shows that defensive tactics can only manage the problem and then only to a limited extent.

[Curmudgeon]

Brecher is wrong. He has mistaken the possibility of the Harpoon flying a (semi?) ballistic trajectory during its terminal dive with the name for a completely different class of weapon.

When the military-industrial-lobbyist complex talks about ballistic missiles, they're talking about missiles that fall from 100km+ at speeds between mach 6 and mach 15. When commentators say the USN has no defense against ballistic missiles, this is the kind of weapon they're talking about.

There is a very big difference between a mach 6+ missile and the subsonic Harpoon, regardless of what kind of trajectory the latter follows as part of its terminal maneuvering.

[BJ Bjornson]

Fester,

No question that for power projection you need big(ger) ships, but big ships make for big targets however you slice it. And Brecher isn’t the only source I’ve read that makes the case that the US surface fleet isn’t all its cracked up to be. I believe the expression is, “The US has two types of ships, subs and targets”.

There was also, I believe, a certain war game scenario before the second Iraq War where the Red Team leader used the “Cessnas and cigar boats” tactics against the main naval group and cost them quite dearly before being “disqualified”, so to speak. How much real power they can project may be similar to that of US ground forces before the Iraq War. As in, far more impressive when they don’t actually have to follow through.

It does lead to some interesting debates about just how you are to project naval power without using the big boats. Again, I doubt we’ll see an actual definitive answer anytime soon, because it would require a pair of true adversaries to test, and guided missile cruisers versus RPGs just don’t make the cut.

Andy,

So do all these expensive ballistic missiles people have been building over the last several decades have no more guidance control than a bottle rocket? Ballistic missiles can certainly be guided as well as those that skim along the surface. The “precision” of such weapons is probably no better than that of other types of guided munitions, but we’re not talking simple rockets or mortars anymore either.

In any case, I seriously doubt the Somalis are going to provide much of a threat to the navies of the world as it stands. They made about $80 million last year if I what I read is correct, which would be enough to acquire a considerable arsenal were it not so dispersed among different groups and other uses. As it is, the best weapons they have would be hard-pressed to sink a cargo freighter let alone a warship. Well, unless they were take a lesson from the USS Cole attack, but again, I don’t see them making suicidal swarming attacks anytime soon.

As to the Navy’s being able to rapidly sink the entire pirate fleet in a few days, how bloody stupid do you think these pirates are? Much like the Iraqi and Afghan insurgents, they aren’t going to float around waiting to get slaughtered by superior firepower. They’ll scatter and avoid the big guns.

Curmudgeon,

ICBMs aren't the only type of ballistic missiles out there, and they don't all reach space during their flights. There are far shorter and intermediate-range types, though those trying to pretend the Katyushas of Hezbollah during the 2006 war fell into that category where pushing things greatly, at least as far as guidance was concerned.

[Peter G.]

The pirates seized four more vessels did they? I'm willing to bet they don't go after any one flying a French or US flag bluster notwithstanding. I think they got those messages at any rate. As far as the debate regarding the utility of large ships you'd better look at the cruising range of the smaller ones. Unless nuclear powered smaller ships require extensive at sea support for both fuel and other supplies. I very much doubt that Somali pirates will ever be able to muster the power to dent a warship of whatever size.

[BJ Bjornson]

I'm willing to bet they don't go after any one flying a French or US flag bluster notwithstanding.

You'd lose that bet, Peter.

[Andy]

BJ Bjornson,

So do all these expensive ballistic missiles people have been building over the last several decades have no more guidance control than a bottle rocket? Ballistic missiles can certainly be guided as well as those that skim along the surface. The “precision” of such weapons is probably no better than that of other types of guided munitions, but we’re not talking simple rockets or mortars anymore either.

Yes, the "guidance" of ballistic missiles is much worse than conventional weapons. Ballistic missile accuracy is measured in terms of hundreds or thousands of meters - for conventional weapons it's measured in terms of a few meters. Hence, ballistic missiles are not particularly well suited for mobile targets like ships and only the most recent, highest-tech ballistic missiles have accuracies within the tens-of-meters.

As to the Navy’s being able to rapidly sink the entire pirate fleet in a few days, how bloody stupid do you think these pirates are? Much like the Iraqi and Afghan insurgents, they aren’t going to float around waiting to get slaughtered by superior firepower. They’ll scatter and avoid the big guns.

Ships are not insurgents. Ships can't hide among a civilian population like insurgents can. They are not comparable. Yes, the pirates can scatter their ships, but they can't hide them. The Navy is very good at finding and sinking ships - that's what the Navy does. The Navy could sink all of the large "motherships" in a day or two. You can't hide them. Destroying just those ships would prevent the pirates from operating very far from the Somali coast.