As 2020 ground to a close, the Air Force’s Deputy Chief of Operations, Lieutenant General Joseph Guastella, made the case for American sea power: “If you want airpower, if you want space power, then you have to be able to defend [it]. . . . What requirement does the Air Force levy upon the Joint Force? I’ll tell you, it’s called protection.” What in the world does the general’s call for protection have to do with sea power? The answer lies in America’s atrophied naval capabilities.

Reliance Brings a Cost

The context for Guastella’s remarks, as with most strategic assessments these days, is the rising prospect of superpower conflict. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seeks to enforce excessive territorial claims across East Asia, particularly in the East and South China Seas, pursuing a sea denial strategy coupled with an insurgent-like approach, slowly turning international waters into territorial seas governed by Chinese naval power. ^[1] The Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) pursues “carrier-killer” ballistic missiles, upgraded bombers, dense sensor networks on artificially-enhanced sea features, and a growing fleet of new warships.

Pundits express much hand-wringing angst over the future of the U.S. Navy in the face of these threats.^[2] Although perhaps infused with too much schadenfreude, their assessments point to a haunting truth. After two decades of expeditionary adventures in Southwest Asia, America’s Navy has withered to an increasingly exquisite force, pushed to (and over) the brink of disaster many times. The 2017 ship collisions in Seventh Fleet, a recent report on the problems plaguing aviation safety, the disastrous fire on board the USS Bonhomme Richard, and a string of programs, from DDG-1000, to LCS, to F-35, are manifestations of a twenty-year problem: The Navy has already paid plenty in taxes to the Joint Force.

The Navy literally pays for airlift, fuel, and basing at U.S. Air Force bases, reimbursing costs through the budget process, and the Navy has figuratively paid a price, allowing its strategic capabilities to erode steadily because in the Joint World, the Air Force supports movement on land and at sea, and this support is always available when needed.

Ideally, each service supports the others around the globe under the philosophy of “supporting/supported” relationships, i.e, the objectives of the force doing the fighting are supported by the other forces, which make sure supplies, ammunition, communications, and other supporting elements arrive when and where they are needed. The supporting force can include combat shooters, like fighter planes or bombers, or anything else that helps the supported force destroy the enemy.

For 20 years, the Navy has been in high demand in the Middle East as a supporting force in missions as diverse as airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; deterring Iran; or operating with allies. This “demand signal” for naval forces (particularly aircraft carriers) by U.S. Central Command has been incessant.

The Navy and Air Force simultaneously support the land war in the Middle East. “In the wars of our generation over the last few decades, airpower has been in many cases viewed as a supporting service,’” General Guastella said, justifying his call for a tax on those who rely on the Air Force. However, the Navy has already paid the price of relying on Air Force support.

For example, when Nelson Mandela—icon of liberty and civil rights, and the first black president of South Africa—passed away in 2013, President Barack Obama rightly paid tribute to the great man at his funeral. to support the President’s trip to South Africa, the Air Force withdrew a number of tankers from combat operations in Afghanistan.

In a Joint World—characterized by mutual support between services, rather than self-sufficiency—the other branches were in the lurch, none more so than the Navy. Carrier Air Wing Three, deployed on board the USS Harry S Truman, canceled combat sorties into Afghanistan during the visit because its F/A-18s could not operate in Afghanistan without tankers specifically configured to refuel Navy aircraft (i.e., KC-10s and some KC-135s).

The dirty secret was that the Navy was too reliant on the Air Force. Higher priority tasking pulled the tankers away and the Navy was left to burn holes in the sky over the Arabian Sea.

Some will see this as evidence that the U.S. military needs more tankers, especially with an Air Force tanker fleet drained by two decades of continual global operations. That is certainly true. But many of those tankers should have “NAVY” painted on the side. In the Mandela example, the Navy was unable to support itself and was therefore unable to support American troops in combat.

Maneuver or Die

Decades of relatively fixed locations for fleet deployments have had two disastrous consequences. First, the fleet’s current architecture does not permit aggressive fire and maneuver in the face of sustained attack, and second, the fleet’s ability to sustain this maneuver is too dependent on other services (particularly the Air Force). In the previous example, the lack of tanker support largely sidelined Navy planes, but the availability of proximate land bases kept Air Force fighters, the preponderance of strike assets in Afghanistan, in the fight. A few lost Navy sorties were a bump in the road. In the South China Sea, however, Air Force tankers may not be able to operate at all.

General Guastella is approaching this problem backwards by arguing for joint protection of forward Air Force bases. These installations are vulnerable to PLA weapons, so he wants the other services to come ashore to help defend them. However, those fixed defenses may ultimately prove monuments to our own stupidity.^[3] The slowly dawning lesson of the past 25 years of PLA expansion is, if you cannot maneuver and sustain your own maneuver, you are a sitting duck.

CCP propaganda portrays the Navy as vulnerable to increasingly capable antiship ballistic and hypersonic missiles. Clickbait headlines and armchair admirals bemoan the certain death of the American fleet in any conflagration; the flat-tops especially are relics of the past, doomed to destruction. All the while, Chinese shipyards crank out ships, submarines, and aircraft carriers (those mementos of a bygone era!) at a furious pace. The PLA understands General Guastella’s problem as well as he does: If you cannot move and stay mobile, you die.

Were the reader to open their favorite mapping app and search for “aircraft carrier,” they would get a handful of results in the United States, most of which are museums. No result would point to an active aircraft carrier because they do not have fixed addresses. Even scrolling to Norfolk, Virginia, and finding the carrier pier holds no guarantee that there actually is an aircraft carrier present at that precise moment in time.^[4]

Conduct this same exercise but type in “Andersen Air Force Base.” Up comes General Guastella’s nightly headache in living color. Chinese targeting and missile-guidance systems that would have to search thousands of square miles for an U.S. aircraft carrier maneuvering on the edge of detection limits or missile range only have to check Baidu Maps to find likely (and immobile) targets within Andersen’s approximately 30 square miles.

Navalists should rein in their glee, however, because as the tanker story illustrates, the Navy is in a poor position to capitalize on its own mobility.

In Harm’s Way

Navy watchers decry the “retreat from range” by the Navy’s carrier air wings: the disappearance of long-range aircraft from the aircraft carrier (a list of missions hampered by short range aircraft would devolve to “all of them”). Aerial examples are easy to find, given U.S. naval aviation’s current dire state and General Guastella’s airpower argument. However, the carrier air wing is hardly the only debtor to the Air Force tax collectors.

Shipbuilding missteps over the past two decades have deprived the Navy of frigates, once heralded by Lord Nelson as the eyes of his fleet. Small, heavily armed, maneuverable, lightweight punchers are notably absent from the U.S. arsenal, and attempts to shoehorn LCS into this role have been shelved. One can only hope that ample numbers of Constellation-class frigates reach the fleet quickly, dispersing across the seas, complicating the PLA’s targeting dilemma.

In this way, the Navy would protect the Air Force’s fixed bases: by providing targets more dangerous to the PLA fleet than any facility on Guam. This requires what General Guastella hopes to avoid: placing service members directly in harm’s way. Fortunately, sailors know that this is what ships are for.

Like glass jewels in a tin crown, side by side with LCS sits DDG-1000. A land-attack destroyer that cannot currently attack anything on land and truncated to only three ships in the class, DDG-1000 has entered a second life as a test platform, and so might be salvaged. However, the failure to field a larger surface combatant over the past two decades should keep the Air Force awake at night. Launching a credibly armed antiair cruiser would ease these anxieties, and the Air Force could sleep soundly under the umbrella of the fleet’s air defenses. Enough cruisers, extending protection over carrier strike groups and land bases alike, would achieve distributed operations and lethality, concepts currently struggling to transform from PowerPoint ideas to reality.

Ships at sea that can fight, take damage, and maneuver independently will give PLA targeters a “target rich environment,” but this is a two-edged sword. Every decision to attack one target leaves another untargeted, and unlike the Burger King at Andersen (found at N 13° 34.12’, E 144° 55.87’), these targets may not be there when the missile salvo arrives.

Support the Joint Force with a Stronger Fleet

The Navy must wean itself off the Air Force’s largesse. Depending on support outside the Navy’s lifelines invites delusion at best and disaster at worst. Years ago, the author participated in a carrier strike group war game set in the southern reaches of the South China Sea. “Mom’s” defensive air patrols included Air Force F-22 Raptor fighters that simply appeared in theater, placed there by the game’s planners. No one mentioned how these fighters managed to arrive overhead the carrier, 500 nautical miles from the Philippines, just in time for battle.

In a conflict in the South China Sea, there is no guarantee the Air Force would be able to operate from bases in the Philippines, Vietnam, or even Japan. Those countries’ governments might have justifiable reasons for avoiding World War III and deny U.S. access accordingly. The one-way trip from Guam—the closest U.S. territory—to the conflict zone clocks in at 2,300 nautical miles.

In this wargame, though, eight pristine Raptors arrived on station, fully armed and fueled with well-rested pilots, thanks to the lack of a 16-hour round trip. Of course, in reality, these Raptors (and the Navy fighters on station) would need help from Air Force tankers to arrive exactly on time, in the exact right place. To reach the area, the tankers would themselves have to brave the Chinese surface-to-air missile sites that now dot the South China Sea.

Critics will point out that stationing a strike group in the South China Sea would be a foolhardy disaster at this point, to which this author responds: “precisely so.” For two decades the seaborne maneuver warfare ideas that animated fleet development beginning in the interwar era have been ignored or shuffled to the back burner, while the Navy paid the Joint Force’s taxes on the Asian mainland.

The result is a fleet that can only operate in an environment where supply is never in danger and stand-off range is never needed. After all, our friends in the big gray tankers will be there to help us out, we will never be far from a friendly port or airfield, and we will have full access to the electromagnetic spectrum that keeps the daily PowerPoint updates flowing to fleet headquarters.

Time and Tide

The static, Joint Force-dependent Navy of the 21st century will lose a war of maneuver and attrition, and then all the individual augmentees guarding Air Force bases across the Pacific will be in the same position that the Marines were in at Wake Island in 1941: isolated and outgunned.

The need for heavy-hitting, distributed surface combatants and long-range carrier aircraft is, at this point, a well-worn shoe. Less discussed, but more important, is the need for forward sustainment and supply.

The author attended a recent brief to NROTC midshipmen where a submarine officer glibly informed the crowd that in any war, the silent service would cover itself in glory. One hopes this will be the case, but considering the sustainment challenges for submarines, ships, and personnel in an “away game” in East Asia, the picture for U.S. submarines is hardly rosy. Vertical launch system (VLS)-equipped surface ships and submarines cannot currently be rearmed at sea. A friendly port is needed, and if the nearest one available is in Guam, the logistical “tail” becomes both long and predictable: relatively easy to attack.

The Navy must build maneuver into its supply, and the woeful state of the U.S. supply fleet may ultimately be what loses a war in the Pacific. After all, even if the Navy provides hearty jack tars to defend the gates at Geneneral Guastella’s base of choice, they will be hard pressed to do so once they run out of bullets (or surface-to-air missiles, or food . . .). The Navy must rediscover massive, mobile, unpredictable supply at sea.

At the height of World War II, the United States had a merchant force of more than 200,000 mariners and 2,700 liberty ships, compared to 11,600 mariners and 120 sealift ships today.^[5] The Government Accounting Office concludes that U.S. sealift now “may not be sufficient to support sustained military operations.”

Severing U.S. maritime logistic links to the Far East is a price that no tax paid to the Air Force can recoup. While a KC-10 can refuel an F/A-18, it cannot refuel a ship, nor resupply a submarine. Air Force aircraft alone cannot resupply an Air Force base with enough materiel, antisurface missiles, or rations for the company of Marines on guard duty outside the base Starbucks. Only sealift can keep the United States in a war fought far from home, and only well-protected sealift can survive in contested waters.

While the Navy has paid the joint tax collector in the currency of sacrificed maneuver, sustainability, and range, its potential adversary in East Asia has built an umbrella of long-range protection, designed to enable its own maneuver and sustainment in the “near seas” inside the first island chain.^[6] China has fielded more than 70 percent of its surface force in the last decade, including new classes of every major warship type, while the Navy has failed to field any new class of destroyer, frigate, or cruiser, to say nothing of minesweepers and hunters, and small combatants like patrol craft or corvettes.^[7]

This is not to say that newer is fundamentally better. There is no doubt that America’s old Nimitz-class designs are better aircraft carriers than China’s Type 001. Meanwhile America’s relatively new, aluminum-hulled LCS may be fundamentally flawed beyond repair. However, quantity has a quality of its own, and China’s furiously paced shipbuilding programs threaten to produce more ships than the United States could sink without suffering its own irreplaceable losses.

Two decades of relying on the Joint Force to always be there, years of ideas that never left the PowerPoint slides, years of dwindling industrial and supply capacity—these are the taxes that the Navy has already paid its service partners. When the tide shifts and the Navy becomes the supported force, the danger that the fleet will be unable to support itself long enough to survive, let alone emerge victorious is real. If misery loves company, General Guastella should have plenty of admirals joining him for lunch in the Pentagon’s E-Ring.

Better Late Than Never?

The Navy must assertively claim the role of the supported force, an idea that would have sounded heretical mere months ago but is now echoed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Notions of paying protection taxes to the Air Force only reinforce the importance of sea power to U.S. deterrence: Without a credible force at sea, the targets at Air Force bases in the Pacific become too enticing for PLAN missile forces to ignore. Improving the Navy’s ability to fight and maneuver half a globe away must be prioritized by naval, defense, and political leadership.

For decades no other navy could challenge the United States, but that is no longer the case. One hopes that China, Russia, or other revisionist states will not gamble on the Navy; but the gap between U.S. naval presence and PLA naval power is dwindling rapidly. To realize the lessons of overreliance on joint support and lack of maneuver capability, the Navy must focus its efforts by:

1. Developing a way to quickly rearm VLS-equipped vessels at sea.
2. Increasing sealift capabilities to permit transpacific resupply under fire.
3. Rapidly fielding the MQ-25 drone tanker and emphasizing long-range air-to-air combat as the primary mission of the FA-18E/F replacement.
4. Producing Constellation-class frigates at multiple shipyards to get hulls in the water quickly, while exploring a mature cruiser design as a replacement for the Ticonderoga class.

These are big problems to solve, exaggerated by failures to address the problems through evolutionary and incremental changes rather than the early 2000s emphasis on “transformation.” Big swings produce big misses, and LCS, DDG-1000, F-35, and CVN-78 have failed to live up to the PowerPoint hype.

Furthermore, these solutions are only material ones and cannot repair the broken trust the Navy faces on Capitol Hill and on the deckplates in the wake of so many bungled programs, systemic failures, and double-pump deployments. Without concerted effort to repair the damage of two decades of taxes paid to the Joint Force, the Navy may find material solutions to be too little, too late. However, changing the military’s mindset from protecting the Air Force ashore to sending ships into harm’s way may mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Endnotes

^[1] Toshi Yoshihara and James R. Holmes, Red Star Over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy, 2nd ed. (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2018).

^[2] The author recommends searching online for “aircraft carrier” and “The National Interest” for innumerable examples.

^[3] Franklin J. Schaffner, Patton, Drama (20th Century Fox, 1970).

^[4] This point is likely self-evident to the reader, but please pardon the sophistry for the sake of example.

^[5] This number only includes Liberty ships. The United States fielded upwards of 5,000 cargo and troop ships by the end of the war.

^[6] Yoshihara and James, Red Star Over the Pacific, 54.

^[7] Claude Berube, “Claude Berube on Twitter.”