The best part of the strategy is that it talked about what the plan would be at the end of hospitalities to stabilize the European continent… Reassure allies but on ready footing. I don’t see that type of forward thinking from our public strategies. They actively avoid saying conflict is a strong possibility.
Bring back Lehman. America needs a committed Navalist in the OSD. Since GN reduced the power of the services to design and develop grand strategy, it’s all gone down the tubes.
I have increasingly come to wonder whether centralization under the DoD was a mistake and maintaining a cabinet level Secretary of the Navy would not be worth it, if only to increase public visibility and the bully pulpit; Americans seem to be out of touch with the fact the United States is still fundamentally a naval power.
It is unclear that the US can compete with China in terms of naval production. As CDR Salamander has well explained, we lack the industrial base even to support the present US fleet, never mind to build a bigger one that could compete with larger Chinese naval forces (which include grey hulled naval vessels, white hulled coast guard vessels, and blue hulled maritime militia vessels). We also appear to lack the political will to fund a larger force, and indeed, inflation means we are in fact funding a shrinking one, in spite of nominally growing funding. Worse, we appear not to grasp the significance of modern detection systems, and that they imply for easily detected, gigantic surface ships. Considerable thought in studies of future ship designs appear not to have much impact on actual planning processes. As well, calls for conventional submarines from the Special Operations community in particular, are being totally ignored. Only miniscule funding is going into minor surface combatants, even if it is fairly clear they are the only viable surface forces going forward. It will take a significant intellectual effort to conceive a force that can compete in the near and medium term. Until that is done, no one is going to present a plan of the sort called for.
Excellent and timely reminder that we do not have to keep re-creating the proverbial wheel. What is needed is an OPNAV agency dedicated to studying past strategies, overlay with the realities of global priorities that use near and future term analyses and wargame the shit out of them. Current non-DOD entities such as the Navy League and other maritime-focused organizations and think-tanks need to assist in developing a maritime strategy that is not only inclusive of future requirements but can be consistently modified as variables change. And finally involve congressional bodies that will introduce legislation that is non-parochial and holistic in ensuring we have the industrial base needed to produce, modernize and repair those warships, manned and unmanned, in peace and wartime.
Since the North Atlantic was mentioned., and for those haven't seen it, the whole FIXEDIT Red Storm Rising series on YouTube has some great visualizations using DCS.
At its core, it appears to this non-naval type that the Chicoms are a mercantilist nation, and as such, we should threaten their merchant ships and in particular the tankers. In the run up to a Taiwan invasion, I assume that there will be a plethora of differing PR/Info War campaigns designed either to defuse or heighten tensions. We should put the world on notice that we are prepared to lay "defensive Naval Mines" near ports that are being used to support the invasion. Further, we should now be mapping the CCP Great Underwater Wall of SOSUS gear in the SCS and placing both taps and demo now. Lastly, our naval academics should write articles on "Unrestricted Submarine Warfare". My thinking is that the Indonesian and Malayan straits ae the best choke points. Far from CCP SOSUS, and dangerous for CCP anti-sub air assets
I wouldn't be optimistic about any old maritime strategy getting re-purposed or any getting ginned up anew by good competent people getting a stamp of approval from whatever constitutes Biden Admin in some basement in Delaware. Any worthwhile new plan would be harder to get into print and into action than an upgrade to the 1611 King James version of the Bible at a Southern Baptist Convention. The citizenry has to embrace legal Constitutional regime change before anything happens in this regard. Which is not to say that our Navy can't come up with a sound strategy even if it's probably going to get monkey-wrenched by those with another agenda. Time might be better spent planning a delaying action at the Rockies and Appalachians. My own plan involves a fortress I've been working on since 1986 and some SKS's, MRE's an canned goods.
What is it that we actually want to do? Is our goal just to keep the SLOC open to our partners, allies and friends? Are we proposing to push our enemies back? Maybe we are content just to blockade chokepoints to crash our foe's economies? What exactly do we have on hand to do these things? I suspect that we are going to burn through a lot of material and manpower very quickly in the event of a world war - and we do not have a lot of backstops to prop up our forces. Is it going to be like the war in the Pacific after the campaign in the Solomons (a holding action while we were waiting for a new and improved fleet to come online)? We had better hope that our potential enemies don't have the capabilities to reequip faster than we do - otherwise it is going to be a long, painful slog. Maybe our strategy needs to be something that exceeds our current abilities, and that gives us a goal to shoot for? If we are waiting for our political class to wake up and start rearming, I fear we are going to be disappointed. The next world conflict is going to be truly global (from the poles to every corner of the planet). Airlift is not going to ultimately win this type of war. We need more imagination and less dogmatic thinking here.
Further signs that China will start its war. The length of the Ukraine War has surprised and dismayed the Chicoms. They thought they would have a quick war and then it would be back to normal which means importing 40% of the plant protein their diet relies upon. They could feed themselves on a strictly vegetarian diet but there would be hundreds of millions of unemployed, meatless people in their cities. Their partial solution is to attempt to increase grain production by 50 mtpa. This includes clearing forest to do so. They had spent about a billion building parks around Chengdu which are now being ripped up and turned into farmland. Bill Gates was in Beijing last week to attend Xi's 70th birthday. Xi will start his war before he gets too old. Guess who else had a big birthday bash before starting a world war? Adolf had a nationwide 50th birthday party in 1939.
Nobody wants to set foot in China in this war and nobody has to. All we have to do is sink their ships and we don't need ships to do that. All we need is ASCMs which will cost about 5% of the value of the ships being sunk. It is time to take some lessons from the Ukraine War and Serbia before that. The Patriot and S400 systems are shooting down most of the incoming missiles. In Serbia, NATO fired 743 HARMS at Serbian SAM sites. Of the 389 HARMS fired at SA-6 batteries, only three succeeded in destroying the SAM battery. Most of the Ukrainian HARMS fired at Russian SAMS sites are being shot down. So we need either a technical solution that gets past their missile defense or a cheap way of depleting their SAM inventory.
The good news is that Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines are all buying India's Brahmos system. Supersonic is more likely to get through. We should also have a plan for who gets which Chicom bases in the South China Sea in the peace settlement. With respect to the three 10,000' airfield bases, I suggest that the US gets Mischief Reef, Japan gets Subi Reef and Vietnam gets Fiery Cross Reef.
NWC prof John Hattendorf and 1980’s Maritime Strategy writer CAPT Peter Swartz take you through the iconic 1980’s series here: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/newport-papers/21/ and https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/zhukov/files/19.pdf Definitive accounts, and along with John Lehman’s “Ocean’s Ventured” required ready if interested in the 1980’s. Too bad 1986 Second Fleet fighting instructions of VADM Hank Mustin remain classified.
I think the Navy knows how to fight. It's the politicians that will gum up the works. Politicians are feckless and spend too much time worrying about what other people think.
A carrier won't fit in the fjords, you'll need smaller frigates and cutters.
Pining for the fjords?
The best part of the strategy is that it talked about what the plan would be at the end of hospitalities to stabilize the European continent… Reassure allies but on ready footing. I don’t see that type of forward thinking from our public strategies. They actively avoid saying conflict is a strong possibility.
Might work. Then again, lots of people at the time thought it was a dumb idea to "antagonize" the opposition, and their numbers have increased.
Bring back Lehman. America needs a committed Navalist in the OSD. Since GN reduced the power of the services to design and develop grand strategy, it’s all gone down the tubes.
I have increasingly come to wonder whether centralization under the DoD was a mistake and maintaining a cabinet level Secretary of the Navy would not be worth it, if only to increase public visibility and the bully pulpit; Americans seem to be out of touch with the fact the United States is still fundamentally a naval power.
It is unclear that the US can compete with China in terms of naval production. As CDR Salamander has well explained, we lack the industrial base even to support the present US fleet, never mind to build a bigger one that could compete with larger Chinese naval forces (which include grey hulled naval vessels, white hulled coast guard vessels, and blue hulled maritime militia vessels). We also appear to lack the political will to fund a larger force, and indeed, inflation means we are in fact funding a shrinking one, in spite of nominally growing funding. Worse, we appear not to grasp the significance of modern detection systems, and that they imply for easily detected, gigantic surface ships. Considerable thought in studies of future ship designs appear not to have much impact on actual planning processes. As well, calls for conventional submarines from the Special Operations community in particular, are being totally ignored. Only miniscule funding is going into minor surface combatants, even if it is fairly clear they are the only viable surface forces going forward. It will take a significant intellectual effort to conceive a force that can compete in the near and medium term. Until that is done, no one is going to present a plan of the sort called for.
Excellent and timely reminder that we do not have to keep re-creating the proverbial wheel. What is needed is an OPNAV agency dedicated to studying past strategies, overlay with the realities of global priorities that use near and future term analyses and wargame the shit out of them. Current non-DOD entities such as the Navy League and other maritime-focused organizations and think-tanks need to assist in developing a maritime strategy that is not only inclusive of future requirements but can be consistently modified as variables change. And finally involve congressional bodies that will introduce legislation that is non-parochial and holistic in ensuring we have the industrial base needed to produce, modernize and repair those warships, manned and unmanned, in peace and wartime.
Since the North Atlantic was mentioned., and for those haven't seen it, the whole FIXEDIT Red Storm Rising series on YouTube has some great visualizations using DCS.
At its core, it appears to this non-naval type that the Chicoms are a mercantilist nation, and as such, we should threaten their merchant ships and in particular the tankers. In the run up to a Taiwan invasion, I assume that there will be a plethora of differing PR/Info War campaigns designed either to defuse or heighten tensions. We should put the world on notice that we are prepared to lay "defensive Naval Mines" near ports that are being used to support the invasion. Further, we should now be mapping the CCP Great Underwater Wall of SOSUS gear in the SCS and placing both taps and demo now. Lastly, our naval academics should write articles on "Unrestricted Submarine Warfare". My thinking is that the Indonesian and Malayan straits ae the best choke points. Far from CCP SOSUS, and dangerous for CCP anti-sub air assets
I suspect the Pacific is going to look very similar to Plan Orange.
All we need now is 1986's Navy.
And, while we're talking about ideas from the 80's, four words: Six Hundred Ship Navy.
I wouldn't be optimistic about any old maritime strategy getting re-purposed or any getting ginned up anew by good competent people getting a stamp of approval from whatever constitutes Biden Admin in some basement in Delaware. Any worthwhile new plan would be harder to get into print and into action than an upgrade to the 1611 King James version of the Bible at a Southern Baptist Convention. The citizenry has to embrace legal Constitutional regime change before anything happens in this regard. Which is not to say that our Navy can't come up with a sound strategy even if it's probably going to get monkey-wrenched by those with another agenda. Time might be better spent planning a delaying action at the Rockies and Appalachians. My own plan involves a fortress I've been working on since 1986 and some SKS's, MRE's an canned goods.
https://imagizer.imageshack.com/v2/777x580q70/r/924/BZVIpV.jpg
What is it that we actually want to do? Is our goal just to keep the SLOC open to our partners, allies and friends? Are we proposing to push our enemies back? Maybe we are content just to blockade chokepoints to crash our foe's economies? What exactly do we have on hand to do these things? I suspect that we are going to burn through a lot of material and manpower very quickly in the event of a world war - and we do not have a lot of backstops to prop up our forces. Is it going to be like the war in the Pacific after the campaign in the Solomons (a holding action while we were waiting for a new and improved fleet to come online)? We had better hope that our potential enemies don't have the capabilities to reequip faster than we do - otherwise it is going to be a long, painful slog. Maybe our strategy needs to be something that exceeds our current abilities, and that gives us a goal to shoot for? If we are waiting for our political class to wake up and start rearming, I fear we are going to be disappointed. The next world conflict is going to be truly global (from the poles to every corner of the planet). Airlift is not going to ultimately win this type of war. We need more imagination and less dogmatic thinking here.
Further signs that China will start its war. The length of the Ukraine War has surprised and dismayed the Chicoms. They thought they would have a quick war and then it would be back to normal which means importing 40% of the plant protein their diet relies upon. They could feed themselves on a strictly vegetarian diet but there would be hundreds of millions of unemployed, meatless people in their cities. Their partial solution is to attempt to increase grain production by 50 mtpa. This includes clearing forest to do so. They had spent about a billion building parks around Chengdu which are now being ripped up and turned into farmland. Bill Gates was in Beijing last week to attend Xi's 70th birthday. Xi will start his war before he gets too old. Guess who else had a big birthday bash before starting a world war? Adolf had a nationwide 50th birthday party in 1939.
Nobody wants to set foot in China in this war and nobody has to. All we have to do is sink their ships and we don't need ships to do that. All we need is ASCMs which will cost about 5% of the value of the ships being sunk. It is time to take some lessons from the Ukraine War and Serbia before that. The Patriot and S400 systems are shooting down most of the incoming missiles. In Serbia, NATO fired 743 HARMS at Serbian SAM sites. Of the 389 HARMS fired at SA-6 batteries, only three succeeded in destroying the SAM battery. Most of the Ukrainian HARMS fired at Russian SAMS sites are being shot down. So we need either a technical solution that gets past their missile defense or a cheap way of depleting their SAM inventory.
The good news is that Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines are all buying India's Brahmos system. Supersonic is more likely to get through. We should also have a plan for who gets which Chicom bases in the South China Sea in the peace settlement. With respect to the three 10,000' airfield bases, I suggest that the US gets Mischief Reef, Japan gets Subi Reef and Vietnam gets Fiery Cross Reef.
NWC prof John Hattendorf and 1980’s Maritime Strategy writer CAPT Peter Swartz take you through the iconic 1980’s series here: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/newport-papers/21/ and https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/zhukov/files/19.pdf Definitive accounts, and along with John Lehman’s “Ocean’s Ventured” required ready if interested in the 1980’s. Too bad 1986 Second Fleet fighting instructions of VADM Hank Mustin remain classified.
I think the Navy knows how to fight. It's the politicians that will gum up the works. Politicians are feckless and spend too much time worrying about what other people think.
A carrier won't fit in the fjords, you'll need smaller frigates and cutters.