What is on Sal's New Year's List?

...nice XLUUV you have there...

2025…another year closer to that singularity where the leadership of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will receive the brief that, “The pre-conditions for war are now in our favor.” and the decision will have to be made if it is time for the coming out party for the PRC’s global military capabilities.

At that point, the USA will have to make the decision to either meet the challenge or retreat to second or third island chain.

I don’t think we can afford to do that without a stand, so … what more can we do today to make that stand.

I continue to be a supporter of the “give me the third best option” approach to weapons procurement for a conflict close at hand. As the phrase goes, the best option probably will not work in the field or is unaffordable and the second best option will not show up in time. The only option that you can rely on to get there in time and in number will be the third best option.

The PRC challenge is an interesting one. For thousands of years, China has been a land power, with varying interests seaward. The USA is a maritime power, with varying interests ashore.

The PRC’s challenge to the USA is at sea, playing to the USA’s comparative advantage.

On paper, that looks good, but then you have the almost criminally misaligned investments in the USA’s national defense that allowed it to lose its place as the world’s #1 navy to the PRC a few years ago. Yes, there is a capability gap, but that has narrowed significantly the last decade, and if you realize that the PRC is working with interior lines of communication and the USA with exterior lines of communication—then the sea power dynamic localized to the Western Pacific becomes a very near run thing.

OK, there is the problem to appreciate, but what do we do about it?

Were war to kick off over Taiwan or the West Philippine Sea or some other under-appreciated flash point no one expects, to keep the PRC from venturing further east and south than it already has to the waters of the Western Pacific, we need to find a way to keep her ships in port or significantly limit their freedom of movement.

What can do that?

The first step when looking forward is to look back.

Mike Turner over at the Naval Historical Society of Australia has a great article titled The Effectiveness of Torpedoes and Mines in World War II, that is a good place as any to start. In it, you can find this helpful graphic.

Since WWII, other anti-ship weapons have been developed and used successfully; Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles (ASCM), Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles (ASBM), and attack drones (surface and air) to add to aircraft, torpedoes, mines toolkit.

The USA’s options don’t cover that full spectrum. We don’t have ASBM (I would include here hypersonics) or attack drones. We may in a few years, but nothing at IOC yet.

We have ASCM, and are expanding options soon by bring back an anti-ship version of TLAM, but you have to get them there. How? By surface ships or aircraft. Surface ships would have to fight through layers of ASBM, air, and subsurface defensive barriers to get within range, and that does not even get to the challenge of locating/tracking/attack/reattack a moving surface target. We are bringing back shore based ASCM, but that limits where they can be used and are defensive assets. The game is already in your face when you have to use those.

Torpedoes? No one loves MK-48 HWT more than I do, but we have a limited number of SSN to deliver them and a limited number of ships you can attack on a cruise after you get the first one inside the first island chain…even with the less capable ASW assets the PRC has.

How do you take the anti-ship fight to the PRC before they are already in your face? That leaves mines.

Ah, yes, the red-headed step-child of naval warfare. Regardless of how effective they are in sinking and damaging ships—they get no love because they are not sexy. Few win a Navy Cross for laying a minefield.

Speaking of which, the USA has very limited ways of laying minefields. We don’t have surface minelayers, but they are only really useful for defensive minefields. I’m talking about offensive minefields in the manner of the American Operation Starvation against Japan, German U-boats in WWII, and British plans during the Cold War.

The days of having mastery of the air enough that you can send long range B-52H and P-8A in to lay offensive minefields of any use against the PRC are long gone. If we can get TACAIR close enough to the PRC to lay a mine field, I would have a hight-and-better use for those wing racks than a mine. I’m not sure I want a SSN to get that up close to the shallow coastal waters to lay an offensive minefield either. As far as I can tell in open source, only our rapidly decommissioning remaining Los Angeles Class SSN can lay mines, even if they still train for the mission. Virginia and Seawolf Class boats don’t.

So, do we have to simply accept that we can’t have this capability?

No.

This is when I get to make a New Years Wish. I have a way that, if you squint a bit and open up your aperature, with a little more juice to the XLUUV program and a POM cycle or two (if we have time), I have a way to make the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) think twice before leaving port.

Our third best option may be our best option.

Before we go further, let’s look at the globe for a moment.

That red line is the great circle route from San Diego to the PRC shoreline opposite Taiwan, about 6,150nm. I’ll let you do the 20-kt SOA math for yourself.

So, what do we have at 2025’s cutting edge that I think could get across the Pacific and have a realistic chance of laying an offensive minefield or two…or a dozen…off the major PRC ports and naval bases?

Well, let’s start with something that may have this capability already. I assume it does. If not, then fire anyone who prevented it from saying so. We don’t have a lot of them right now, but in a few years?

Let’s first take something just at the edge of “being a thing” sexy thing that looks solid. Second, we’re going to mate it with an unappreciated but turn-key but unsexy ready asset.

I give you something I have been sceptical of but a lot of people whose opinion I value are excited about, Boeing’s “eXtra Large Uncrewed Undersea Vehicle” (XLUUV), or “Orca.” As I prefer real names to acronmys…usually…I will refer to her as Orca from here on out.

Orca is 51 feet long, 8.5 feet across and has a 34-foot payload section that can hold up to 8 tons of capacity (dry weight). Depending on the weight of the mines, that isn’t bad.

Right now, our off the shelf submarine delivered mines are:

• Mk 67 Submarine Launched Mobile Mines (SLMM). She weighs 1,750 pounds, so we’ll call that a ton. Let’s assume Orca can carry eight.

• That’s it. That’s all we have. From what I have found, that 45-year old weapon is the only thing we have of the shelf that can be delivered while submerged. The exact number in inventory is unknown, but is generally believed to be but a “handful.”

• Yes, the Hammerhead and Clandestine Delivered Mine (CDM) are in development, and are even getting funding—will they be ready in number at the start of any conflict, or should we make sure Orca can deliver what we have, instead of, like the NLOS void on LCS, being engineered only for something we think we’ll have?

My planning assumptions:

1. No existential defect that prevents reliability.

2. Can be produced at scale starting this FY.

3. Autonomous underwater navigation problem solved.

4. Engineering autonomy solved.

One critical assumption isn’t an assumption. See that MIW? Other people see this utility, though I do worry about the NLOS trap I outlined above.

Remember my earlier statement, about getting SSN up close and personal off Chinese ports. We don’t have that many 688i left, and that is not their highest and best use.

If we want to do that near the end of the decade when the danger to our SSN up close to PRC ports will be even greater, than Orca will have to be it.

How do you get them there and back?

I’m not sure what the effective round trip range of the Orca is, but I believe it would be foolish for a whole host of reasons just to dump them out the mouth of Pearl Harbor or San Diego and say, “good luck!”

We’d need to get them closer if for no other reason than to minimize mission loss due to time underway. We are talking about MOD-0 use of a new weapon system. Assume less then ideal performance in this regard.

We need a mothership. Don’t worry though, we don’t need a decade long development for this. We already have this.

I give you the US Navy’s Expeditionary Transfer Dock USNS John Glenn (T-ESD-2). She and her sister ship are in mothballs right now, tanned, rested, and ready.

765 feet long with a 164 foot beam.

If you are not familiar how an Expeditionary Transfer Dock gets its cargo in the water, this video will help.

As per the below, you can see that at a minimum, you can fit a two dozen of the 51 foot by 8.5 foot on the John Glenn. In theory, you could put almost 8 dozen on it…but let’s assume for a host of reasons you are limited to two dozen.

24 x 8 = 192

192 mines. If the Hammerhead and CDM show up in time for the show, perhaps more…a lot more. You can make a lot of mischief around ports with that many mines.

So, with just a little extra love and luck for Orca, using legacy mines and mothballed ships…we have a capability that has a proven record of making life difficult for anyone going to sea. Everything here is ready to go if Orca can meet the minimum expectations of my planning assumptions.

If that cannot work, we need to find other ways to conduct offensive mining of PRC ports and naval bases. If not, we have intentionally taken that option off the table. Foolish.

Final note: I hope Orca have a self-destruct capability. We should assume that for either mechanical failure or discovery, that the PRC will have a chance to recover any unmanned system.