Fleet Size Determination

The Navy has been engaged in a seemingly endless pursuit of an increased fleet size with proposals ranging from 300 on up to several hundred with recent proposals seeming to cluster around 355 to 400+.  The Navy has initiated study after study with none of them tied to a geopolitical or military strategy.  In fact, the only purpose of the studies seems to be to justify a larger budget slice for the Navy.

 

Why do we want any particular size fleet?  If we could answer that question, the required size would reveal itself without needing pointless studies.  Unfortunately, the Navy has no answer and is simply trying to get the biggest budget slice it can.

 

The Navy’s floundering aside, there are several possible answers (rationales) to the fleet size question.  Broadly speaking, there are three rationales: 

• Peacetime requirements as established by the Combatant Commanders
• Initial war requirements
• Extended war requirements … recognizing that we have very little capacity to build new ships in a useful time frame

 

Let’s look at each answer/rationale:

 

Peacetime Requirements – We’ve covered this in past posts (see, “Combatant Commanders and OpTempo”).  The Combatant Commander system is a badly flawed, failed system that rewards excessive claims of need (requirements) that serve no purpose other than to enhance the perceived importance of the individual Combatant Commander.  Placing the requirement generation responsibility with those who have no accountability for resource utilization is illogical, unworkable, and just plain wrong.  Requirements and accountability should never be separated.  That path invariably leads to misuse and abuse, as we’re now seeing with ships doing double deployments and maintenance being routinely deferred.  Thus, peacetime requirements – at least as established by the Combatant Commander system - are a very dubious means of establishing fleet size and the legitimate requirements can be met by a variety of means that do not require major ship types.

 

For example, we’ve discussed one viable alternative to major peacetime fleet commitments and that is a two tier, peace/war fleet structure where the peacetime commitments are met by very low end, non-combatant, commercial vessels akin to civilian yachts (see, “Hi-Lo, War-Peace”).

 

Another viable means of meeting peacetime commitments is to simply eliminate the worthless, routine deployments that accomplish nothing and home port the fleet for enhanced training and maintenance (see, “Deployments or Missions?”).  This is essentially recognition that there are no valid peacetime requirements beyond some very low level anti-piracy and policing patrols which can be met by the peace/war concept cited above.

 

Notwithstanding the previous discussion, one clarion fact when trying to determine peacetime fleet size is the recognition that our peacetime fleet is utterly impotent.  Our rules of engagement prohibit using naval force for anything other than a cruise missile attack every few years against some hapless target in order to send some sort of half-baked political message.  When push comes to shove, our Navy’s policy is appeasement and you don’t need a navy to appease someone.  In fact, the Navy just gets in the way of appeasement.  For example, the Iranian seizure of our riverine boats demonstrated that we won’t forcefully use our Navy even when another country commits an illegal act and seizes our vessels.  We won’t even defend ourselves so why even have a navy?

 

Initial War Requirements – This is a legitimate determiner of fleet size.  Obviously, we want to be prepared for the start of a war but what size fleet does that require?  The determinant of an initial war fleet size and structure is, of course, a war with China.  Unfortunately, simply knowing that does not, immediately, lead to a fleet size since it depends on what type of war we want to fight which is another way of asking, what is our geopolitical strategy and its derivative, our military strategy?  Disturbingly, we lack both.

 

Lacking absolutes to blame base a decision on, timid, incompetent leaders will fall back on a never ending, open-ended, ‘more of everything’ position.  The obvious problem with this is that it’s patently unaffordable in addition to lacking any link to strategic reality.  You can readily see the signs of this mentality from Navy leadership, right now.  Our ‘professional warriors’ are simply asking for more of everything with no idea (meaning, no CONOPS) of how to use it;  hence, the LCS, Ford, Zumwalt, JHSV, MLP, etc.

 

What we can explore, even without a concrete strategy, is the fleet size needed to weather the initial year of war until our industry can begin producing on a wartime basis.

 

Unfortunately, even this approach and examination requires at least some degree of anticipated strategy.  Will we implement a fairly passive, long distance blockade which requires relatively few resources, risks relatively little, and leads to an eventual negotiated peace where we try not to give up too much and call it a victory or will we implement a hard hitting, aggressive attack as a prelude to the path to total victory?  The two approaches, and every variation in between, have radically different requirements.  So, you need some glimmer of a strategy.  Again … we lack that so we’re left to guess and theorize on our own.

 

As always, it is instructive to examine history for insight as to peacetime fleet size.  The obvious place to look is the Navy just prior to the start of WWII.  The table below shows the fleet size and structure in the years leading up to WWII and a few years into the war.

 

 

 

 

	Jun ‘38	Jun ‘39	Jun ‘40	Dec ‘41	Dec ‘42	Dec ‘43	Dec ‘44
Battleships	15	15	15	17	19	21	23
Carriers, Fleet	5	5	6	7	4	19	25
Carriers, Escort	-	-	-	1	12	35	65
Cruisers	32	36	37	37	39	48	61
Destroyers	112	127	185	171	224	332	367
Destroyer Escorts	-	-	-	-	-	234	376
Submarines	54	58	64	112	133	172	230
Amphibious	-	-	-	-	121	673	2147
Combat Fleet	216	241	307	345	552	1534	3294
Mine Warfare	27	29	36	135	323	551	614
Patrol	34	20	19	100	515	1050	1183
Auxiliary	101	104	116	210	392	564	993
Total	380	394	478	790	1782	3699	6084

 

 

Table adapted from:

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/us-ship-force-levels.html#1938

 

 

 

We see, then, that we didn’t have a large navy prior to the start of WWII.  The fleet had only 216 combat ships just three and half years before Pearl Harbor.  However, what we did have was plenty of shipyards and the capacity to quickly build new ships as demonstrated by the total fleet size increasing from 380 ships in June 1938 to 6,084 by December 1944.

 

Simplicity was also a key as compared to today’s highly complex ships which take much longer to build.  We need simple, easily produced ship designs and if that means accepting simpler, less capable equipment, primarily electronics, then so be it.  For example, what’s wrong with WWII optical fire control for large caliber naval guns?  At the very least, it should be a backup capability.

 

Finally, one of the characteristics of the pre-WWII fleet was that ships were designed to be survivable with heavy armor, extensive redundancy, and large crews for attrition and damage control.  Our current ship designs lack all of those characteristics which suggests that initial ship losses will be far more than was experienced in WWII.  This implies that we would need a much larger fleet than the pre-WWII fleet in order to absorb the expected greater losses.

 

 

Extended War Requirements – It is obvious that any extended war will require a massive increase in fleet size.  Unfortunately, we currently have very little capacity to build new ships in a useful time frame.  China’s shipbuilding capacity far exceeds our own.  We can counter this one of three ways:

 

Option 1.  Build a very large initial fleet that can weather the initial battles and still have enough ships to constitute a powerful force for years into the war.

 

Option 2.  Continue our policy of appeasement so as to avoid a war and any need for a fleet.

 

Option 3.  Drastically increase our shipbuilding capacity.

 

 

Option 1 is patently unaffordable among many other problems with the concept.

Option 2 ensures Chinese global domination.

Option 3 is the only one that makes sense.

 

 

It is evident that the combination of poor (non-survivable) ship design, overly complex ship designs resulting in drawn out construction times, and the severe lack of shipyards (for both new construction and battle damage repair) means that the extended war requirements method of fleet sizing is not realistic.  We simply won’t be able to replace our losses, let alone increase the fleet size, in any useful time frame.  Thus, we’ll essentially fight the entire war with only the fleet we start with plus a few odd, occasional replacements.  This, in turn, means that we either need a much larger fleet or a much more survivable fleet.

 

Building, maintaining, and operating a much larger fleet during peacetime is not a viable option given our dysfunctional ship acquisition process.

 

What we’ve just concluded is that there is no realistic, militarily relevant fleet size that can meet both our peace and war needs.  That’s a depressing conclusion but one we need to face before we can begin to look for solutions.

Carrier Deployments and Combat Readiness

USNI News website has a lengthy article about carrier deployments and maintenance.(1)  It makes for sobering reading and I urge you to read it.  I want to analyze the implications but, first, it is necessary to understand the fundamental conditions so here are some of the main points from the article (this does not relieve you of the responsibility of reading the entire article for yourself!):

 

• Carrier operations are up 40 percent this year over last year;  from Jan. through Oct. 31, U.S. carriers had spent a combined total of 855 days at sea – 258 days more than all of 2019.
• Carriers are regularly conducting back-to-back, double deployments and suffering shortened or skipped maintenance periods as a result.
• The East Coast has just one deployable carrier for the next year and that one is the Eisenhower which has just returned from deployment and will have to execute a double deployment with a shortened maintenance interval.
• Carrier maintenance is routinely running significantly longer than planned due to the deferred maintenance resulting from double deployments and longer deployments. 

 

The current status of our carriers illustrates the problems.  Right now, two carriers are tied up with mid-life refueling and complex overhaul (RCOH) activities instead of the normal one carrier at a time: USS George Washington (CVN-73) is in the second half of its four-year overhaul, and USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74) is in pre-RCOH activities and should begin its overhaul late next year. 

 

A third, the Ford, is still trying to achieve operational status and is years away from doing so.  The first deployment is likely 2024 and that assumes that all goes well, including shock tests.

 

Of the remaining 8 carriers, 4 are home ported on the West coast, 3 are on the East coast, and 1, the Reagan, is ported in Japan.  The West coast carriers are generally adhering to the planned operational schedule although the Roosevelt is scheduled for a double deployment.  The East coast carriers have Bush in the 20th month of a planned 28 month maintenance period, Truman is in a maintenance period after undergoing a double deployment, and Eisenhower is halfway through a double deployment.

 

The carrier status is summarized in the table below. 

 

 

Carrier	Assigned	Status
Nimitz	West Coast	deployed
Vinson	West Coast	training
Roosevelt	West Coast	executing double deployment
Lincoln	West Coast	maintenance after record deployment
Eisenhower	East Coast	executing double deployment
Truman	East Coast	maintenance after double deployment
Bush	East Coast	20 months into 28 month maintenance
Ford	East Coast	unusable
Reagan	Japan
Washington	RCOH
Stennis	RCOH

 

 

Deployments, and double deployments, are eating up our carrier lifespans, ruining their material condition, and reducing readiness.  Why are we doing this to ourselves?  Deployments are intended as a deterrent but they do not accomplish anything.  I know that’s trying to prove a negative but we do have evidence.  If carriers are what’s preventing Iran, Russia, NKorea, and China from initiating hostilities with us or our allies then hostilities should have occurred during any of the extended periods of carrier coverage gaps that have occurred over the last decade or so in the various regions.  The fact that they haven’t demonstrates that the presence of a carrier has no deterrent effect and the absence of a carrier has no detrimental effect.  In other words, carrier deployments serve no purpose. 

 

If carrier deployments serve no purpose, why are we burning up carrier readiness conducting deployments?  Why are we conducting double deployments with deferred maintenance that is worsening the readiness situation?  At the moment, our carrier combat readiness is abysmal. 

 

Deferred maintenance in order to conduct double deployments is robbing Maintenance Peter to pay Deployment Paul and Deployment Paul isn’t giving us anything for our effort.

 

It is important to understand the devastating effects of double deployments and deferred maintenance.  Let’s look at one example:  storage tanks.  Carriers have enormous numbers of tanks that store all manner of fluids.  Those tanks corrode and need regular maintenance.  If the maintenance is performed on a regular basis, the tanks never get too bad and the work is fairly straightforward, easy, and quick.  However, if the regular maintenance is deferred then the tanks are much more corroded by the time maintenance is performed and what should have been a fairly straightforward, easy, and quick effort becomes much more difficult and time consuming.  An analogy would be if you take care of little spots of rust on your car as they appear, it’s no big deal but if you wait until the car is covered in rust and the corrosion has eaten through some panels then the repair is a major effort and cost.

 

This is exactly what’s happening with the carriers.  The planned maintenance work is being hugely increased as the extent of the deterioration is revealed when the equipment is actually opened up and examined.  Maintenance time is being doubled from what was planned.

 

We are generating crippling maintenance requirements faster than we can perform the required maintenance.  Every deployment increases the carrier maintenance backlog and makes the situation worse.  We need to step back, take a pause in carrier operations, focus on maintenance, and then return to operations with a sane concept of use instead of the blind attempt to fulfill the Combatant Commander’s ego-driven requests for carriers.  

 We need to say no to the Combatant Commanders.  I know that some of you are going to say that the Navy has to obey orders and can’t just arbitrarily say no.  Well, that’s incorrect.  The National Defense Strategy in January 2018 called on the military to prioritize building up readiness and lethality for a future fight over routine low-end operations today.  There’s the permission to say no.  Combatant Commanders do not ‘outrank’ the National Defense Strategy.  The Navy has, essentially, been given an order to prioritize readiness over routine operations.  Instead, we are doing the opposite of that. 

 

There you have it … Deployments (generated by the Combatant Commander’s pointless requests for carriers) are degrading our carrier readiness to an alarming state and the situation is getting worse with each deployment and double deployment.  Carrier usage is increasing while maintenance is decreasing.  This is insanity and must stop.  The National Defense Strategy gives the Navy the ‘cover’ they need to say no to the endless and pointless requests for carriers from the Combatant Commanders.  Now we just need a Chief of Naval Operations with the courage to actually say no.  Unfortunately, CNO Gilday has demonstrated that he is not that man.

 

 

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By the way, we only have 9 air wings. 

 

By the way, the same problems are happening with all ships, not just carriers and the problems are only going to get worse.  If we can’t maintain 280 ships how are we going to maintain 350-500 ships?

 

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(1)USNI News website, “No Margin Left: Overworked Carrier Force Struggles to Maintain Deployments After Decades of Overuse”, Megan Eckstein, 12-Nov-2020,

https://news.usni.org/2020/11/12/no-margin-left-overworked-carrier-force-struggles-to-maintain-deployments-after-decades-of-overuse