Precision Strike from the Sea: New Missions for a New Navy
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PRECISION STRIKE FROM THE SEA: NEW MISSIONS FOR A NEW NAVY A Report of the M.I.T. Security Studies Program's Second Annual Levering Smith Conference By Owen R. Cote, Jr. This report is a summary of an MIT Security Studies Conference entitled Precision Strike From the Sea: New Missions for a New Navy, organized by Harvey Sapolsky and Owen Cote, Director and Associate Director of the MIT Security Studies Program (SSP). It is the second in an annual MIT/SSP conference series held in honor of the late Vice Admiral Levering Smith, USN, the first technical director of the Navy's Fleet Ballistic Missile Program and from 1965-1977, its director. Held on December 8 and 9, 1997 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the conference explored new developments in long range weapons for use in precision strikes from the sea. The author would like to thank those who commented on prior drafts of this report; including Vice Admiral Richard Mies and his staff, Paris Genalis, Thomas Maloney, Al Malchiodi, James Fitzgerald, Alan Berman, James MacStravic, Captain Karl Hasslinger, Captain John Morgan, Commander James Foggo, Commander Dave Norris, and Colonel John Turner; as well as those who helped with its production; including Sara Berman, Rafael Bonoan, Kristen Cashin, and Tim Wolters. MIT/SSP would also like to thank the Electric Boat Corporation for its support in defraying the conference costs. The views expressed within the report are the author's alone and should not be attributed to any other conference participants. An electronic version of the report is available at http://web.mit.edu/ssp/. Executive Summary New precision weapons, new platforms for launching them, and new concepts for using them are needed to help the U.S. Navy meet the demands created by new geopolitical and technological trends in Americaís external security environment. Geopolitics and technology are conspiring to pull the Navy ashore from the sea, without eliminating the traditional and irreducible need for a Navy that is capable of controlling the sea. The tension between ìFrom the Seaî and controlling the sea is real, but a wholehearted embrace by the Navy of one orientation to the exclusion of the other is neither desirable nor necessary. This report argues instead that new ways of performing precision strike from the sea, if vigorously exploited, will reduce the need for tradeoffs between sea control and power projection. Long range precision weapons can dramatically reduce the mass that must be projected from the sea in order to produce a given effect ashore, while at the same time expanding the mass that can be projected by a given naval force. They reduce the requirements for mass by making target destruction possible with one or two precision weapons rather than 10 or 100 iron bombs, and by allowing long standoff ranges from the target, they increase the number of platforms that can serve as precision weapon launchers. This means that both surface ships and submarines can join aircraft carriers to form a triad of naval strike warfare assets, and it also means that each weapon launcher, whether it be a VLS tube or an aircraft, is capable of achieving much greater and more precise effects. Future improvements in long range precision weapons will occur at the steep rate characteristic of technologies still in their infancy, as compared to the more sedate rate at which more mature systems improve. In principal, these new capabilities can be used in one of two ways. At one extreme would be an effort to maximize the Navyís overall contribution to the precision strike from the sea mission area. This is tempting, because it gives each of theNavyís major platform communities a role in a mission that is clearly of central national importance in the new security environment, and which therefore is easier to fund in a time of declining budgets. At the other extreme the Navy could aim only to meet the minimum demands for precision strike from the sea, and exploit new precision weapons to minimize the investment in this mission area rather than maximize capabilities. The advantage of this approach would be that it would allow the Navy to focus more on sea control, as well as other missions which only it can perform, leaving precision strike largely to the other services. It is impossible today to predict with certainty where on this continuum the Navy will need to be tomorrow, but there are two variables which will largely determine the need. First is the question of access to overseas bases and second, the evolution of future threats to American sea control. Assuming continued access to a robust overseas base structure in both crisis and war, the other services will continue to be able to provide the bulk of the required precision strike assets in a future contingency. If on the other hand, that assured access ashore is denied or sharply limited, the Navy will be forced to fill the void from the sea. At the same time, future adversaries may continue to cede the United States control of the seas, as Iraq did during Desert Shield/Desert Storm, which in turn would allow the U.S. Navy to continue its current deemphasis on sea control. Alternatively, these adversaries might discover that the best way to blunt American power projection capabilities is at sea, and that the highest leverage sea denial capabilities are provided by modern, undersea warfare weapons, as both the Iranians and the Chinese seem to have decided with their recent purchases of Russian Kilo class submarines. The most stressing case for the Navy is one where U.S. access to overseas bases is greatly reduced and where the proliferation of relatively low cost and easy to use access denial weapons such as modern, diesel-electric submarines, anti-ship and land attack missiles, and naval mines continues to grow. This is a world in which the Navy will have to provide a larger portion of national power projection capabilities, while also placing much more emphasis on sea control than it does now. Indeed, it is arguable that this is the security environment the United States is already beginning to face along the long arc of the Indian and Pacific ocean littorals. In it, the U.S. Navy's relevance is likely to exceed its currently projected capabilities by a wide margin. Given the likelihood of such a security environment, the Navy can deal with its ìcrisis of relevanceî in one of two ways; by seeking larger budgets, or by developing and exploiting new concepts of operation. This report focuses on new concepts of operation in precision strike from the sea. A major conclusion is that the Navy should explore how best to improve the submarine force's capabilities in precision strike from the sea; deepen its commitment to developing improved precision weapons for use on all naval platforms, and particularly its submarines and surface combatants; ensure that all naval platforms enjoy connectivity sufficient to link into future intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) nets; and ensure that mission areas likely to face asymmetric threats have effective warfare area sponsorship. Regarding these objectives, it recommends specifically that the Navy convert excess Trident SSBNs into conventional guided missile submarines (SSGNs) with an advanced special operations capability and assign its Strategic Systems Programs Office (SSPO) the budgets and responsibility for R&D and program management commensurate with a long term, multiplatform Navy tactical ballistic missile development program. The report starts with a discussion of technical and operational trends in strike warfare inherited from the Cold War. This provides context for current debates about how best to perform precision strike from the sea. Next, the report discusses the rationale for taking a new look at precision strike from the sea, and provides a series of questions that were used to organize the conference this report is based on. Finally, the main body of the report summarizes the results of the conference and closes with a brief set of conclusions and recommendations. Strike Warfare During the Cold War Methods of performing the strike warfare mission during the Cold War varied largely according to changes in the offense-defense relationship between combat aircraft and air defenses, because during much of that period, aircraft were the dominant strike platform. Changes in this relationship affected both the Air Force and naval aviation. In the beginning, aircraft were designed to simply fly over enemy defenses, using a combination of speed and altitude. This trend reached it's extreme manifestation with aircraft like the B-70, which was designed to exceed Mach 2 at 60-70,000 feet. In the Navy, the progression from Savage (AJ-1), to Skywarrior (A-3), to Vigilante (A-5) in heavy attack squadrons illustrates the same trend. This approach was rendered obsolete in the early 1960s by the surface-to-air missile (SAM) which, by using a rocket motor, finally eliminated for good the high altitude sanctuary that aircraft designers had pursued since the dawn of the air age. There were two main responses to the SAM. One led to the adoption of ballistic missiles, which restored to the offense the advantage in height and speed, albeit in a platform that was limited to delivering nuclear weapons because of its relative inaccuracy compared to aircraft. The second led to the adoption of low level penetration tactics by aircraft. These relied on the fact that terrain obstructions masked a low level penetrator from surface radars, and that background clutter masked it from airborne radars looking down at it. The classic example of an aircraft designed for this mission was the F-111, which sought survival in fast, terrain following flight.