NAVAL WAR COLLEGE NEWPORT PAPERS 32 NAVAL WAR COLLEGE WAR NAVAL Major Naval Operations NEWPORT PAPERS NEWPORT N ES AV T A A L T W S A D R E C T I O L N L U E E G H E T I VIRIBU OR A S CT MARI VI 32 Milan Vego Cover The Naval War College complex on Coasters Harbor Island, in a photograph taken about 2000, looking roughly north- east. In the center foreground is Luce Hall, with Pringle Hall to its left and Mahan Hall hidden behind it; behind them, to the left, are Spruance, Conolly, and Hewitt halls. In the center, partly ob- scured by Conolly Hall, is McCarty Little Hall. On the extreme right in the fore- ground is Founders Hall, in which the College was established. In recent years the College has expanded into parts of several buildings of the Surface Warfare Officers School Command, on the north- ern part of the island. In the middle dis- tance are facilities of Naval Station Newport (the decommissioned aircraft carriers ex-Forrestal and ex-Saratoga are visible at Pier 1) and, beyond that, of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. In the far distance can be seen parts of the towns of Portsmouth and Tiverton, Rhode Island. Photograph Ó 2008 by Onne van der Wal Photography, Inc. Major Naval Operations Milan Vego © 2008 by Milan Vego N ES AV T A A L T W S A D R E NAVAL WAR COLLEGE PRESS C T I O N L L U E E G Newport, Rhode Island H E T R I VI IBU OR A S CT MARI VI Naval War College The Newport Papers are extended research projects that the Newport, Rhode Island Director, the Dean of Naval Warfare Studies, and the Center for Naval Warfare Studies President of the Naval War College consider of particular Newport Paper Thirty-two interest to policy makers, scholars, and analysts. September 2008 The views expressed in the Newport Papers are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the President, Naval War College Naval War College or the Department of the Navy. Rear Adm. Jacob L. Shuford, USN Correspondence concerning the Newport Papers may be addressed to the Director of the Naval War College Press. Provost/Dean of Academics (Acting) To request additional copies, back copies, or subscriptions William R. Spain to the series, please either write the President (Code 32S), Dean of Naval Warfare Studies Naval War College, 686 Cushing Road, Newport, RI Robert C. Rubel 02841-1207, or contact the Press staff at the telephone, fax, or e-mail addresses given. Naval War College Press Reproduction and printing are subject to the Copyright Act Director: Dr. Carnes Lord of 1976 and applicable treaties of the United States. This Managing Editor: Pelham G. Boyer document may be freely reproduced for academic or other noncommercial use; however, it is requested that Telephone: 401.841.2236 reproductions credit the author and Newport Papers series Fax: 401.841.1071 and that the Press editorial office be informed. To obtain DSN exchange: 948 permission to reproduce this publication for commercial E-mail: [email protected] purposes, contact the Press editorial office. Web: www.nwc.navy.mil/press © 2008 by Milan Vego Printed in the United States of America ISSN 1544-6824 ISBN 978-1-884733-50-5 Contents Foreword, by Carnes Lord v Preface vii List of Figures ix Introduction 1 CHAPTER ONE Major Naval Operations 7 CHAPTER TWO Types of Major Naval Operations 23 CHAPTER THREE Decision Making and Planning 41 CHAPTER FOUR Operational Design 63 CHAPTER FIVE The Operational Idea 77 CHAPTER SIX Preparation and Execution 105 The Future 119 Appendix: Major Naval Operations in World War II 121 List of Abbreviations and Acronyms 135 About the Author 137 The Newport Papers 139 Foreword Naval history as generally recounted is a story of battles at sea. However, it has to be admitted that since 1945 neither the United States nor any other contemporary naval power has had much of a naval history in this sense. Domination of the oceans by the United States and its allies, together with the fortunate failure of the Cold War to cul- minate in a test of strength between the American and Soviet navies, meant that classic naval battle gradually faded from center stage in the education and professional orien- tation of American naval officers. Beginning in the early years of the Cold War, the Navy became preoccupied largely with technology and the tactical proficiency that rap- idly advancing naval and weapons technologies made increasingly necessary. At the extreme, of course, the advent of nuclear weapons seemed to many to leave the Navy littleroleinamajorglobalconflictotherthantoprovideinvulnerablelaunchplat- forms for these weapons—and thereby a powerful deterrent that would, as it was thought, obviate their actual use. Beyond that, though, the switch to nuclear propulsion for the Navy’s capital ships laid heavy technical demands on new generations of naval officers, with concomitant impact on their education and training. The result—or so contends Milan Vego in On Major Naval Operations, the thirty-second volume in the Naval War College Press’s Newport Papers series—has been a long-standing neglect by the U.S. Navy of major naval operations and,morebroadly,ofthe“operational”level of war or of naval “operational art.” The term “operational art” is apt to be unfamiliar to most Americans. American mili- tary officers encounter it routinely as a fixture of contemporary joint military doctrine, but even today the concept has substantially less traction within the U.S. Navy than it does in the other services. The reason is plainly that its origins are in land warfare— specifically, in large-scale land warfare as theorized by the German and (especially) Soviet militaries during the interwar period and practiced by these countries in World War II. From the latter, it migrated to the U.S. Army in the late 1970s, as the Army sought novel ways to grapple with the increasingly formidable prospect of a Soviet ground assault against Western Europe. Essentially, “operational art” refers to a level of command intermediate between the tactical and the strategic, one associated with ground command at the level of field army or corps and with the conduct of “cam- paigns” that unfold as a series of interconnected battles over time. That many naval officers remain unconvinced of its applicability to their own domain is not surprising, given the narrowly tactical focus of much naval warfare of the past. (Wayne Hughes’s vi THE NEWPORT PAPERS classic treatise Fleet Tactics, for example, begins by dismissing the utility of the concept of operational-level warfare for naval combat.) On the other hand, it is difficult to deny that naval command and control doctrine and practice today are insufficiently atten- tive to what in Army parlance would be called a “combined arms” approach to warfare. The tenuous relationship between the three principal naval warfare communities remains the strongest argument for a serious reconsideration by the Navy of major naval operations and operational art. Dr. Milan Vego is a professor in the Joint Military Operations Department of the Naval War College. He has published widely on the history of German and Soviet military doctrine, and he is the author of Operational Art (2001) and Joint Operational Warfare (2008), an authoritative textbook currently utilized in the department’s curriculum. In this work, he looks back to the richly instructive experience of the U.S. Navy in World War II (as well as in more recent operations during the Korean and Vietnam wars and in the Persian Gulf) in order to develop a taxonomy of naval operational art that can help inform the thinking of the Navy as a whole today. CARNES LORD Director, Naval War College Press Newport, Rhode Island Preface Major naval operations are the principal methods by which naval forces achieve opera- tional objectives in a conflict at sea. The U.S. Navy and other major Western navies planned and executed numerous major naval operations in World War II as part of maritime and, in several cases, land campaigns. Major naval operations have been con- ducted on relatively few occasions since 1945, because of the absence of a war between major naval powers. Yet the U.S. Navy has conducted several major naval operations since then. For example, in the Korean War (1950–53) UN naval forces conducted a major amphibious landing at Inchon in September 1950 (Operation CHROMITE), a major evacuation from Hungnam in December 1950, and a naval blockade of North Korea. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Navy conducted major operations aimed to stop the flow of fighters and supplies by the sea from North Vietnam to South Vietnam in 1965–70 (Operation MARKET TIME) and conducted massive strikes and attacks by its carrier forces from “Yankee Station” in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Navy’s mining of North Vietnam’s ports in May 1972 (Operation POCKET MONEY) was also a major naval oper- ation, in terms of the scale of the objective. In January 1991, in the opening phase of the Gulf War (Operation DESERT STORM), the U.S. Navy and its coalition partners con- ductedaseriesofactionsthatcouldbeconsideredamajorcombinednavaloperation, aimed at obtaining and then maintaining control of the northern part of the Persian (Arabian) Gulf. Likewise, coalition forces conducted a series of tactical actions in the northern part of the Gulf in the opening days of the war against Iraq in March 2003 (Operation IRAQI FREEDOM). The steady decline in the numbers of U.S. naval combatants over the past decade will most likely continue.