Reserve Fleet – Nuclear versus Conventional Power

In times past, we kept conventional ships in reserve after they concluded their active service but we never kept nuclear ships, as best I can determine.  This makes sense, I suppose.  I assume that leaving nuclear reactors unattended for years on end, as a reserve ship, is not safe or feasible.  This leads to an obvious question:  is this an additional argument against nuclear ships and for conventional ones?
 
Admittedly, the argument is moot as we no longer maintain a reserve fleet (see, “What Reserve Fleet?”) but, still, it’s an interesting question.
 
As an isolated example, the conventionally powered carrier USS Kitty Hawk stayed in various ‘reserve’ status from her retirement in 2009 to 2017 when she was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register.  In contrast, the nuclear powered Enterprise (CVN-65) began defueling and scrapping almost immediately upon retirement and never spent time in any reserve status.
 

USS Kitty Hawk

We’re beginning to reach the retirement age of the Nimitz class.  With the rising threat of China, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a reserve fleet of supercarriers?  Unfortunately, even ignoring the Navy’s policy of no reserve fleet, it would appear that nuclear ships can’t be held in reserve status.
 
If we ever returned to maintaining a reserve fleet, the inability to include nuclear powered ships – carriers, obviously – might suggest that conventional power would pay an additional benefit upon termination of a ship’s active status and that future carriers should be conventionally powered.  What do you think?

Logistics Surge Exercise

You recall hearing about the recent Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) surge exercise, no doubt.  ComNavOps has been eagerly awaiting the results and they’re beginning to trickle in.  USNI News website reports that 80%-85% of the vessels were able to meet their underway requirement.

TRANSCOM officials are still reviewing the results of the turbo activation, but initial reports indicate that between 80 percent and 85 percent of the ships targeted to participate were able to successfully meet the underway evaluation criteria, Navy Capt. Kevin Stephens, a TRANSCOM spokesman, told USNI News. (1)

To briefly review, here’s a description of the exercise.

Overall, 33 surge sealift ships left Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf Coast ports last month as part of the turbo activation. Most of the ships were part of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration (MARAD) Ready Reserve Force.  …

The purpose of the test was to gauge how effectively the Ready Reserve Force – the fleet of civilian-operated ships that would be called upon to deliver personnel and equipment – could be activated in an emergency. The ships have five days to be fully crewed and set sail for what is typically between a three and five-day sea trial. The turbo activation involved nearly 1,000 merchant marines who were called to work on ships usually maintained by skeleton crews. At sea, each ship has between 30 and 40 crew members. (1)

The question, of course, is whether a 80%-85% success rate is good or bad.  It’s supposed to be 100% success but that’s unrealistic.  There will always be some unexpected breakdowns that prevent sailing.  On the other hand, these ships are supposed to be checked and maintained on a regular basis, as I understand it, so even one failure to sail should not happen.  So, is that fact that several ships were unable to sail acceptable? 

I guess I’d call the result disappointingly average.  It’s not horrible – 50% success would be horrible – but it’s not great.  What do you think?  Good or bad?

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(1)USNI News website, “TRANSCOM Stress Test Practiced Cargo Delivery Through Mine- and Sub-Filled Waters”, Ben Werner, 16-Oct-2019,

https://news.usni.org/2019/10/16/transcom-stress-test-practiced-cargo-delivery-through-mine-and-sub-filled-waters

Filling the Gaps

We spend a great deal of time arguing over the LCS and F-35 and other pieces of highly advanced military hardware.  However, can we win a future major war with just military equipment?  Presumably, a major war will not be over in 90 days.  Presumably, it will last years since both the US and China/Russia/Iran/NKorea all possess large inventories of military assets and sufficient resources (to greater or lesser degrees) to build new ones as losses occur.

Consider, now, the rate at which we can replace combat losses.  It’s not fast!  A single ship takes years to construct.  We won’t be replacing many combat losses.  Even modern aircraft take quite awhile to build.

ComNavOps has previously suggested that the winner of a major war will be the side which has the greatest number of second tier assets.  Think about it.  The initial period of a major war will see both sides throwing their best units at each other and attrition will ensure that after that initial period both sides will be left with many lesser units.  The side with the most, wins!  Also, building lesser (meaning less complex and, thus, easier and quicker to build) assets as replacements for top level units may be a way to achieve a relatively quick and cheap advantage.

This ties directly into one of our previous posts in which we stated that numbers are the most important factor in winning a war.

How else can we sustain an effective military force in the face of attrition and insufficient replacements?  Well, one way is by conscripting civilian equipment and painting it green.  Our fathers made extensive use of civilian ships, small craft, and equipment during WWII.  Consider the many amphibious ships of WWII.  They were either purely or essentially civilian ships.  The landing craft, while built exclusively for military use, derived from civilian small craft and were built to civilian standards using common materials.

This leads to several thoughts about civilian equipment usage.  For example, once we run out of giant amphibious ships and turn to civilian transports, how will we get troops and equipment on and off the ships?  Perhaps, amid our fixation on LCACs, we should pause momentarily and think about a landing craft that can operate from and with civilian ships.

The flip side of the civilian usage issue is that perhaps we should be requiring that all civilian ships be built with certain military interface capabilities such as RO/RO or helo flight decks.  The Chinese do this – their entire civilian merchant fleet is military compatible.

We’ve already seen that the military made an extensive effort to maintain the tooling and expertise required to reconstitute the F-22 production line.  Perhaps we should also be maintaining the ability to reconstitute the A-4, A-6, F-14, F-15, F-16, and similar lines, assuming that they can be produced faster than an F-22/35.  Again, if we devolve to second tier assets, the side with the most, wins.

And, of course, it goes without saying that we should be maintaining an extensive reserve fleet of ships.  Consider what we could have in a reserve fleet right now:  the entire Spruance class, the Kidd class, the entire Perry FFG class, Forrestal, Saratoga, Independence, Ranger, Constellation, Enterprise, America, Kennedy, Kitty Hawk, the Tarawa class, and so many others.  The nine supercarriers that have been retired would be completely capable of being reactivated for emergency war duty and would totally outmatch any enemy capability.

It may not be our best, frontline assets that win a major war;  it may be our second line and civilian assets.  Maybe we should begin planning accordingly and preparing for war with secondary, civilian, and retired assets.

FY15 Battle Force Changes

From the FY 2015 DON Budget Highlights book, we note that in FY 2015, 8 battle force ships will be delivered:

(1) Nuclear Attack Submarine (SSN)

(4) Littoral Combat Ship (LCS)

(2) Joint High Speed Vessel (JHSV)

(1) Mobile Landing Platform (MLP)

We also note that 13 battle force ships will be retired:

(10) Frigate (FFG)

(1) Nuclear Attack Submarine (SSN)

(1) Amphibious Warfare Assault Ship (LHA)

(1) Combat Logistics Ship (T-AOE).

In addition, the Navy will stand down half the Aegis cruiser force and I don’t think anyone realistically believes these will ever go to sea again:

(11) Aegis Cruiser (CG)

The totals:

Added = 8

Deleted = 24

This is the Navy’s assured growth towards a 300 ship fleet??!  But wait, it gets worse.

Here's a small note attached to a battle force count table.

“*Note: Starting in FY 2015 ship count includes eight OCONUS Mine Warfare (MCMs) ships, and twelve Non-Battle Force ships--two Hospital Ships (T-AHs) and ten Forward Deployed Patrol Crafts (PCs)—based on new ship counting rules.”

Do you see that?  We're now going to start counting hospital ships, Avenger class MCMs, and Cyclone class patrol vessels as battle force assets.  If you can't maintain actual combat ship numbers, just count non-combat ships.  Could this be a more blatant and transparent scam to make us think the Administration and Navy are maintaining the fleet size?

It’s important to recognize what’s happening here.  ComNavOps has been pointing out repeatedly that the Navy’s 30 year shipbuilding plan was a work of pure fiction based on wishful thinking and budgetary miracles that don’t have a snowball’s chance of happening.  The trend, as documented above is painfully clear.  The fleet is heading towards a 220 ship force with much of that force being non-combat or marginally (LCS) so.  The reason is spiraling construction costs resulting in ever fewer ships which means ever larger costs which means even more expensive ships which means …  a death spiral.  This is why ComNavOps has repeatedly called for simpler, single function ships.  The alternative, meaning the status quo, is destroying the Navy.

Well, at least that’s the worst of it, right?  Ahh …

For FY 2015, 20% of required depot level ship maintenance is unfunded and will be indefinitely deferred.  So, not only is the fleet shrinking and becoming less combat effective but the fleet is also degrading due to deferred maintenance and this is on top of previously backlogged and deferred maintenance.  As we all know, it is much harder and more costly to attempt to make up deferred maintenance somewhere down the road.  The problems just get that much worse.  This is what a hollow fleet is.

C’mon, now, there’s no way it can get any worse.  Well …

The abysmally small Reserve fleet which consisted of only 8 ships in 2013 is being reduced to 0 (zero, none, no reserve fleet) in 2015.  There is now no reserve to call on if we get into a scrap, suffer attrition, and need immediate replacements. 

I’m not going to lay this on the President and Congress.  Instead, the blame lies with Navy leadership.  They’re the ones who are hollowing the fleet to maintain new construction funding.  They’re the ones who have chosen new toys over training, spare parts, and maintenance.  They’re the ones who continually present only more and more expensive ship proposals to Congress instead of solid, basic designs.  They’re the ones who are early retiring Aegis cruisers and amphibious ships.  They’re the ones who allowed our mine countermeasures ships and capability to nearly vanish.  They’re the ones who allowed our ASW to atrophy and our Aegis systems to degrade fleetwide.  They’re the ones …  Well, you know the litany as well as I do.  This is purely the Navy’s fault. 

What Reserve Fleet??

In recent decades, America has grown used to short wars:  Desert Storm, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan (if you don’t count the protracted nation building and policing after the initial combat), Libya, and so forth.  However, this short-war mindset has had a detrimental effect on many aspects of our military.  For example, many munitions have insufficient inventory for a protracted affair, spare parts inventory and supply chains are sized for peacetime, ship design/construction/cost has become so exaggerated and complex that ships can no longer be replaced in a “quick” time frame, and R&D programs require years or decades to come to fruition, if ever, and so on.

What happens if we ever get into a protracted war given that “protracted” almost certainly means heavy attrition of ships, planes, and supplies?  Seriously, though, is a protracted war likely?  Well, I don’t think China is going to be defeated in 90 days.  In fact, there has been a great deal of discussion in professional journals of this very concept as regards a war with China.  Strategies have been put forth whereby we fight a stand-off war around the periphery of contested areas, never really attempting to penetrate or deliver a decisive blow.  Instead, the strategy would be to slowly strangle the enemy’s warfighting capability over time.  Whether this is a viable strategy or not (ComNavOps thinks not) there is no question that attrition would be a major factor.  From the Navy’s point of view this is going to lead to a steady decrease in available ships and planes with little capability to build replacements in any useful time frame.  Of course, one assumes that attrition would be two-sided;  China would also suffer attrition.  However, unlike the U.S. Navy, China is trending towards much greater numbers of platforms than the U.S. and has recently demonstrated markedly faster development and construction cycles.  In other words, China is much better positioned to win a war of attrition and that advantage is only going to grow over time. 

One of the traditional solutions to this type of scenario is to maintain a reserve fleet (Mobilization Category B) from which units could be reactivated in relatively short time periods.  Additionally, reserve units could be used to take over lower intensity tasks thereby freeing up more modern and capable units for front line duty.  Sounds good and obvious, right?  Well, there’s a problem.  We don’t have much of a reserve fleet. 

It’s difficult to get accurate listings of reserve ships partly because there are many different classifications of inactive ships and administrative responsibility is shared by several different organizations with sometimes overlapping responsibilities.  Ultimately, it appears that only those ships classified as Mobilization Category B (Cat B) are actually maintained in a state that would allow a reasonable opportunity for reactivation.  These would be the ships that one would typically think of as reserves or “mothballed”.  Unbelievably, examination of several sources indicates that the Cat B fleet consists of only 10-20 ships of which only half a dozen or so are combat ships – the remainder being amphibious or logistics.  For practical purposes, the U.S. has no reserve fleet!  Unwisely, for the last several decades we’ve been scrapping, selling, or SinkEx’ing our more capable potential reserve units.

 



Reserve Fleet - No More?



For example, the entire Spruance destroyer class was SinkEx’ed.  They were the best ASW units ever built and with software systems upgrades would be more effective, even today, in the ASW role than the current Burkes.  With a New Threat Upgrade (NTU) type of upgrade they would still make formidable platforms in a Chinese war especially later on when both sides had suffered attrition (in other words, our old ships would be better than their old ships). 

The Perry FFG’s are being sold off to other countries as fast as we can find buyers.  Perry’s would be a perfect example of filling low intensity roles that would free up more capable units.

Retired Los Angeles class nuclear attack subs are being scrapped rather than placed into a reserve status.  These SSNs are still superior to most or all current Chinese subs.

The retired Ticonderoga Aegis cruisers appear to all be slated for scrapping as opposed to reserve status.  Truly baffling!  Even the older, non-VLS cruisers are highly capable Aegis AAW platforms and ought to be upgradeable to VLS if it came to that.

The USS Kitty Hawk is the only non-nuclear inactive aircraft carrier being maintained in Cat B status.  The Ranger, Independence, Forrestal, Constellation, Kennedy, and Saratoga are all in various stages of scrapping or donation as memorial/museum ships.  The Enterprise is already slated for scrapping.

So, if we become engaged in a protracted war of attrition, where are the replacement ships going to come from?  Clearly, it won’t be from a reserve fleet.  I’m assuming that the lack of a reserve fleet stems from the costs of maintenance that such a fleet entails.  As we’ve discussed previously, Navy leadership is so focused on new construction that they are unwilling to allocate any funds towards reserve fleet maintenance.  This is a very short-sighted policy that could prove costly down the road.  In the relatively near future, the Burke class destroyers will begin to retire along with the remaining Ticonderogas and Los Angeles subs.  These ships, along with Enterprise, would form the basis of a viable reserve fleet.  The Navy needs to look beyond new construction and start building a reserve fleet especially given the downward trend in active ship numbers.