7th Fleet and Deterrence

Despite having thoroughly discredited the notion of deterrence (see, “Forward Presence Deterrent EffectDisproved”), there is a faction of naval observers who continue to insist that deterrence is real and works despite the overwhelming evidence of China, Russia, Iran, and NKorea’s expansionism, terrorism, and general disregard for international laws, treaties, and norms which more than disproves the validity of deterrence.  In fact, many of these people believe that the only thing wrong with the Navy’s approach to deterrence – if there is anything wrong – is that we aren’t devoting enough ships to it.  If only we’d use even more ships our deterrence would be even more effective, they say.
 
Well, it’s time to take an analytical approach to the Navy and deterrence as regards our main enemy, China.  Is deterrence working?  What assets are we devoting to deterrence?  Do we need more? 
 
Is deterrence working?  -  Well, this one is easy to answer.  China has, for all practical purposes, annexed the entire South and East China Seas despite them being mainly international waters.  They’ve built illegal artificial islands and militarized them.  They’re continually encroaching on the territorial waters and air space of Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and other countries in the region.  They’ve made public claims about ownership of Japanese territories and most or all of the second island chain.  There are even reports stating that China has made claims on a third island chain which includes Hawaii and most of the Pacific.[2]
 
In addition to territorial expansion, China has also engaged in the seizure of US military assets and ignores the UNCLOS treaty to which it is a signatory (demonstrating that China’s word is worthless).
 
 
What assets are we devoting to deterrence?  -   The US Navy’s entire 7^th Fleet is devoted to deterring China.  As a reminder, 
 

It is headquartered at U.S. Fleet Activities Yokosuka, in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. It is part of the United States Pacific Fleet. At present, it is the largest of the forward-deployed U.S. fleets, with 50 to 70 ships, 150 aircraft and 27,000 sailors and marines.[1]

Seventh Fleet includes a permanently forward deployed aircraft carrier, currently the USS George Washington, CVN-73.  Yokosuka, alone, typically includes a command ship, an aircraft carrier, Ticonderoga class cruisers, and a dozen or so Burke class destroyers.
 
In addition to the 7^th Fleet, numerous other carriers, ARG/MEUs, and aircraft regularly rotate into the 7^th Fleet’s control.
 
We are devoting an enormous number of ships, aircraft, and personnel to deterring China.
 
 
Do we need more?  - 
 
The facts are crystal clear.  If the 50 to 70 ships, 150 aircraft and 27,000 sailors and marines aren’t deterring China, no additional forces will suddenly, magically alter the situation.  Think about it, though, that’s a lot of ships, aircraft, and personnel.  Why isn’t China deterred?  Why aren’t they behaving very cautiously, in not cowering?  The answer is simple and painfully obvious:  China does not believe we’ll use our forces.  If your enemy does not believe you have the will to act, no amount of forces in the region will alter their thinking.  We could pack the entire US Navy into the South China Sea and it wouldn’t deter China for one second.  They believe, correctly, that we won’t use our force so any gathering of naval forces is a hollow, empty gesture.
 
The only force we’ve ever used in peacetime is against third rate countries and China does not see themselves as a third rate country.  In fact, history proves their view of things is correct.  China has seized US military aircraft and drones while they were in use, disrupted naval operations, successfully threatened and chased away US ships in international waters, established and militarized illegal islands while the US Navy stood back and watched, enforced illegal territorial water claims, violated the air space of Taiwan, etc.  All the while, the US Navy did nothing.  Ironically, the only substantive action the US Navy has taken, Freedom of Navigation exercises according to the conditions of UNCLOS Innocent Passage, has only reinforced the validity of China’s illegal territorial water claims!
 
No will to act means no deterrence and no amount of additional forces will change that.
 
 
 
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[1]Wikipedia, “United States Seventh Fleet”, retrieved 18-Aug-2025,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Seventh_Fleet
 
[2]The National Interest website, “China’s Next Territorial Claim: Hawaii and Almost the Entire Pacific Ocean?”, Harry J. Kazianis, 10-Sep-2016,
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-next-territorial-claim-hawaii-almost-the-entire-17658

RIMPAC 2022

The 2022 iteration of RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific), the international Pacific naval exercise, will get underway soon.  This is the 28^th iteration and this year’s exercise will consist of

 

… 26 nations, 38 surface ships, four submarines, nine national land forces, more than 170 aircraft and approximately 25,000 personnel … [1]

 

The 26 nations and 38 ships is an average of 1.5 ships per nation.  Is that really an effective and worthwhile exercise when each nation commits a mere one or two ships to the exercise?

 

I don’t know, yet, how many US ships will be involved.  The absolute US maximum if each nation contributed just one ship is 12 ships, so it’s much less than that but it won’t be many.  Among the US ships will be the unmanned trimarans USV Sea Hunter and USV Seahawk along with two Ghost Fleet support vessels Nomad and Ranger so there’s at least four US ships that are not fleet combat vessels.

 

How does it prepare our 290 ship fleet for combat when half a dozen or so ships are all that participate?

 

Our job, as a Navy, is not to make other, smaller countries feel good about themselves.  Our job is to prepare for high end, all out war.  RIMPAC does not do that for us.

 

Who is planning, hosting, and subsidizing the lion’s share of this exercise?  That’s right … the US.  We’re paying for this exercise.  That’s money we don’t have being spent on an activity that does almost nothing to enhance our combat capability.

 

Fight like you train … train like you fight.

 

We’re not going to fight with a couple of ships and a flotilla of other country’s small fry vessels so why are we training that way?

 

RIMPAC planning has been on-going for the last two years.  If we’re going to take the time and spend the money to dedicate staffs for two years to prepare for a major exercise [does it really require two years to plan an exercise?  we planned full blown amphibious assaults in WWII in a matter of months], shouldn’t it be one that reflects exactly how we’ll fight in a real war and shouldn’t it involve every US ship in the Pacific?

 

I have no problem with the occasional port visit to a foreign navy or the occasional officer exchange.  It doesn’t do anything for us but it doesn’t cost us much, either.  However, when the biggest exercise in the Pacific accomplishes almost nothing for us, I do have a problem.

 

Stunningly, Taiwan, arguably the focus of the Pacific pivot and China’s main objective in any war, has not been invited to participate.  Let me see if I understand this  …  we want to train for war with China (as predicted by the US Navy to be imminent) and Taiwan will be the focus of that war but we don’t include Taiwan in the training?  What single digit IQ moron thought that was a good idea?

 

Let’s face it, RIMPAC is just a giant photo op with very little relevant combat enhancement for the Navy.  At a time when we’re early retiring ships left and right due to budget concerns and we’re cutting 10,000 sailors from the force while we’re gapped several thousand at-sea billets, is this really the best use of our limited training time and budget?

 

When are we going to get serious about preparing for war?

 

 

 

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[1] https://breakingdefense.com/2022/06/us-prepares-for-rimpac-exercise-against-backdrop-of-russian-chinese-tensions/

Multi-National ASW Exercise

Here’s the headline:

“Maritime forces from Japan, UK, US practice submarine hunting in Philippine Sea” (1)

Very nice.  I can envision it.  Ships crisscrossing the ocean, searching for submarines.  Aircraft dropping sensors.  An ASW commander coordinating and directing the overall effort, vectoring multiple ships and aircraft to suspected submarine locations.  The submarines working to evade and attack.  This is what an ASW exercise should be!

Unfortunately, it appears that this is not what the exercise was.  From the Pacific Fleet website article, the participating forces consisted of

• 1x Japanese helo destroyer
• 1x Royal Navy Type 23 frigate
• 1x US submarine
• 1x P-8 Poseidon

That’s it.

That’s not an exercise, that’s a photo op.

The US Pacific Fleet has a hundred or so ships and several hundred aircraft.  Of those, we assigned one sub and one aircraft to the exercise.  Were the rest too busy to participate?

If someone went to the trouble of organizing this, why not make a significant event?  Even better, why not make it an unannounced, no-notice, come-as-you-are, scramble exercise for multiple squadrons of ships and aircraft and let’s see what our first day of war capabilities look like?

Here’s some phrases from the article:

• “for the first time”
• “trilateral exercise”
• “unprecedented opportunity”
• “support of a free and open Indo-Pacific"
• “Working together”
• “cooperate more effectively at sea.”
• “exciting opportunity”
• “improve upon our combined capabilities"
• “first trilateral exercise of its kind”
• “shared commitment to enhance maritime cooperation”

Sounds like a ground-breaking, mammoth, multi-national exercise, doesn’t it?  …  Since when did creative writing become a Navy mission? 

What’s that old saying?  - Don’t talk about, be about it. 

Well, it appears that the Navy is substituting talking for doing.  What was the rest of the Pacific Fleet doing that was more important than ASW combat training?  Seriously, one sub and one aircraft?  Pathetic.  Even worse was bragging about it.  Very disappointing.

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(1)Commander, US Pacific Fleet, Ensign Jacob Dirr, 21-Dec-2018,

https://www.cpf.navy.mil/news.aspx/130406

Fleet Problem Exercises

The US Navy famously conducted extensive, full scale fleet problem exercises in the pre-WWII years and those exercises served to validate battle doctrine, explore scenarios, develop carrier operations and tactics, and even predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor (Fleet Problem V conducted a carrier attack on Hawaii).

The Fleet Problems were conducted from 1923-1940 (I – XXI) and were then abandoned after WWII.  Recently, the Pacific Fleet has revived a much scaled down version of Fleet Problem exercises beginning with Fleet Problem XXIII and continuing through XXVIII.

The resumption of Fleet Problems, even if scaled down and limited to the Pacific Fleet rather than the entire Navy, is welcome news.  The exercises were, apparently, reinstituted by Adm. Scott Swift.  He describes a bit of the impetus for the resumption,

Adding to my concern was the clear message from my intelligence team that our potential adversaries were investing in training that was ever more complex and challenging. We needed to raise our training bar. As fleet commander, I needed to know what we could do, exploring the art of the possible and testing our assumptions about fleet capabilities in a fight against a high-end adversary. (1)

It’s encouraging that Adm. Swift seemed to have recognized that many of our operational concepts (ConOps) were more fantasy than reality.

In other cases, as we considered how our ConOps would play out in reality, it became apparent there were warfighting tasks that were critical to success that we could not execute with confidence. This gap was not because deployers did not practice these tasks individually—the efficiency of the OFRP ensured they could—but because we as a force never practiced them together, in combination with multiple tasks, against a free-playing, informed, and representative Red. (1)

In one case, during an exercise planning session, we discussed a critical operational tactic that is used routinely in exercises and assumed to be executable by the fleet. In the course of the brief, a lone voice said, “Sir, you know we can’t actually do that.” (1)

One of ComNavOps’ criticisms of Navy training is that it is broken down into simplistic, scripted exercises and then the assumption is made that the limited result is applicable to an entire war.  For example, if a single ship can launch a single missile and hit a single, unrealistic drone surrogate target, then the assumption is made that our entire air defense concept is valid and has been ‘proven’.  Adm. Swift appears to have grasped the fallacy in this type of training.  For example,

For example, it is critical that we be able to operate carrier strike groups (CSGs) in areas of significant submarine threat. Our traditional approach to this challenge would be to create an antisubmarine warfare (ASW) exercise, tasking submarines to act as targets within a set geographic area. In a Fleet Problem, we instead would task the CSG to conduct a combat mission (“NLT 01100Z, conduct strikes on…”), giving it maximum flexibility in timing and mechanism. We then would create an environment rich in submarine threats. The CSG’s mission would not be ASW, but rather conducting a core combat mission (strike) in support of the joint fight in a robust submarine threat environment.

Managing the submarine threat is the means to the end —strike. (1) (emphasis added)

Brilliant!  This is how training should be.

Swift’s use of Fleet Problems also embraces failure.  He seems to recognize that failure is not only the best teacher but also a requirement for learning.  This is outstanding especially in today’s risk averse, zero-tolerance command environment.  I only hope that he is successful in implementing this philosophy of embraced failure.

One of the strengths of the new Fleet Problem series is that it does not involve future weapons and capabilities.  Participants use only the existing capabilities of their assets.  Thus, for example, there is no hand waving to magically sense enemy assets due to the anticipated, future all-seeing sensor.  The participants must fight with what they actually have – you know, kind of like how you have to fight an actual war.

An Opposing Force (OpFor) has, apparently, been created, the Pacific Naval Aggressor Team (PNAT).  Unfortunately, the article does not go into detail about the structure and assets of the OpFor or the degree of dedication and training they have.  The strength of the Navy’s famous Top Gun program was the core of people dedicated to nothing but studying the enemy’s tactics and capabilities and then using that knowledge to develop and teach tactics.  It is unknown to what degree this model is being followed.  Without a competent OpFor, the training loses much of its value.

Adm. Swift sums up the value of realistic Fleet Problems nicely,

Fleet Problems allow us to learn those lessons with bruised egos instead of combat losses. (1)

Unfortunately, there are some notable shortcomings with the Fleet Problem as currently practiced:

Limited Assets – The Pacific Fleet, though large, is still just a subset of the Navy and has a limited number of ships and aircraft assigned to it.  For example, it typically has only a single carrier or, occasionaly, two.  This means that any exercise will not be representative of how we’ll actually fight.  We’ll conduct carrier operations with groups of four and it just isn’t possible to simulate multi-carrier groups with only a single ship.  Further, it’s impossible to provide multiple carriers to both the OpFor and the Blue (US) groups.  Thus, we run the risk of developing bad habits.  We may develop tactics suited for a single carrier that are entirely unsuited for multiple carriers.  We certainly aren’t learning how to effectively command and utilize twenty or thirty escorts, for example.  By way of comparison, Fleet Problem XX in 1939 involved 134 ships, 600 planes, and over 52,000 personnel, according to Wiki. (2)

Limited Geography – Pacific Fleet can only operate in the Pacific Fleet area although given that China is the ultimate enemy this is not as bad a limitation as it might be.  It does, however, limit the ability to exercise in an area or against land targets that are better simulated elsewhere around the globe.

Limited OpFor – there just aren’t enough assets to properly equip a realistic OpFor.  Again, the Pacific Fleet normally has only one carrier assigned or, temporarily, perhaps two.  It just isn’t possible to provide multiple carriers to both the OpFor and the Blue (US) groups.  The same applies to submarines and aircraft.  Thus, the exercises are inherently limited in scope.

Limited Applicability – The ‘doctrine’ developed from the Pacific Fleet exercises is limited to just the current Pacific Fleet personnel.  It is not, to the best of my knowledge, adopted or applied Navy-wide.  Thus, the local commanders may benefit but the Navy, overall, does not.  The next logical step would be for the Navy to reinstitute Navy-wide Fleet Problems.

ComNavOps loves to report good news but there are so few opportunities.  Well, this is one such opportunity.  The resumption of Fleet Problems, even on a limited basis, is a great development.  The Navy needs to reinstitute this practice on a Navy-wide basis and provide the larger numbers of assets that a truly useful Fleet Problem requires.  Well done, Adm. Swift. 

Now, Admiral, get the Navy to expand this to a true Fleet Problem and let’s find out what 4-carrier battle groups can do.  Let’s put that distributed lethality concept to a large scale test.  Let’s see if we can sustain our logistical support for the fleet during combat.  Let’s explore what the Chinese will attempt to do.  Let’s see if we can retake Taiwan.  Let’s figure out how to penetrate the Chinese A2/AD zone.

Peacetime is our golden opportunity to prepare for the next war and we’re squandering it.  Let’s get back to the business of preparing for high end, peer war.

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(1)USNI Proceedings, “Fleet Problems Offer Opportunities”, Mar 2018, Adm. Scott Swift,

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-03/fleet-problems-offer-opportunities

(2)Wikipedia, “Fleet Problem”, retrieved 28-Dec-2018,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_problem