When Your VLS Hobbyhorse Goes Mainstream

the more the merrier

If you have made the horrible error of not reading every post here, over at the OG Blog and listening to every Midrats, then you may be new to the issue of being able to reload our warships’ VLS cells forward.

Slowly…a bit too slowly…Big Navy has decided that those people in the 1970s (who still remembered fighting a contested war at sea) might have been right all along. With SECNAV Del Toro’s encouragement, we continue to try to find a way to get the surface force a capability to reload forward.

There is plenty of room on the bandwagon and we’re glad to hoist everyone onboard the reload/rearm party-bus. If you need to catch up, the issue continues to break above the background noise, and WSJ has a very well produced article on it that requires your attention.

However, I got a little bit of an eye twitch at this pull-quote:

Until recently, the Navy didn’t feel much need for speed in rearming its biggest missile-firing warships. They only occasionally launched large numbers of Tomahawk cruise missiles or other pricey projectiles.

Now, Pentagon strategists worry that if fighting broke out in the western Pacific—potentially 5,000 miles from a secure Navy base—destroyers, cruisers and other big warships would run out of vital ammunition within days, or maybe hours.

Seeking to plug that supply gap, Del Toro tasked commanders and engineers with finding ways to reload the fleet’s launch systems at remote ports or even on the high seas. Otherwise, U.S. ships might need to sail back to bases in Hawaii or California to do so—putting them out of action for weeks.

Yes, I am going to do this, and you’re coming along for the ride.

In the name of great Neptune’s trident … THIS IS NOT A NEW REQUIREMENT!!!

My first "…shit, we need to be able to do this…” was during the DESERT FOX strikes against Iraq in 1998. I cannot remember if it were USS Stout (DDG 55) or USS Gonzalez (DDG 66) that we put Winchester on TLAM by the third day…but except for the ships we left on the other side of the Suez (who we would put to good use later), the rest of our TLAM ships and submarines were about done.

The fact we threw away an ability to reload/rearm forward was an old story inside the surface Navy when I picked it up in the last years of the previous century. We had a clunky erector set like contraption that was hard to use and took up VLS cell space, but instead of finding a better way, we just chunked the whole idea, slid in our Jesus Jones CD, and figured we had ownership of the seas until the crack of doom.

There is nothing “until recently” about this. Not to get off topic, but the real story here is why time and again this century’s senior leadership decided it was “too hard” or “too dangerous” while they were in full knowledge not just of the operational experience demanding this capability, but what we discovered over and over again in wargames.

Heck, let’s take a stroll down memory lane from here, X, and the OG Blog.

• June 2009:

  ... but for both surface and sub-surface units, how are our WESTPAC reload ability looking for sustained combat?

• July 2017:

As an old TLAM guy who managed to empty every operational TLAM out of one DDG and left a few DD & CG with only a handful of D1 & D2 warhead TLAM left - the inability to reload puts you in a pickle.

• May 2020:

OK. I feel better.

We do not need to take a few POM cycles to appreciate the problem some more. This is a decades old requirement screaming for a solution.

More. Now. Faster. Duplicate. Redundant. Fleet wide.

I get so tired of these worn out arguments of the weak and lazy:

The Navy only reloads the launchers from solid ground or in sheltered harbors because it is a delicate operation. Engineers in the 1990s proposed systems for reloading at sea, but available technology wasn’t precise enough to transfer missiles from a platform constantly in motion, such as a ship or floating dock.

We don’t ask you to do the unimportant and easy things, but the important and hard…and other generations have done greater things with fewer resources.

If we could fold this in to another decades long hobbyhorse of mine. Can we have our Destroyer Tenders (AD) back? Look what submarine tenders can do.

You know how many countless calm harbors there are in the western Pacific you can do this? Look at where we did repairs in WWII or around 1900 where the world’s navies had their coaling stations. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

What a great graphic. I’ll let you do the math with an 18 knot speed of advance.

More voices are coming in to the conversation.

While it is great to have Admiral Stavridis in the fight at the end of 2024 and quoted in the article…he has access to a lot of ears…but where was his voice when he was on active duty? Maybe I missed it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he’s bringing up the issue now, and that is a good thing, but could he have expended a little personal capital on the topic. He knew the topic. Oh well, the past is the past.

“We should have developed this capability fully decades ago,” said retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis. “Again and again, after firing a significant load of Tomahawks…I had to pull my warships off the line to rearm,” said Stavridis, a former Supreme Allied Commander Europe of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

This is like watching people rediscovering how to build cities after the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

A new generation of leaders are just discovering what their great-grandfathers knew instinctually.

At the Dewey’s deployment base in Yokosuka, Japan, missiles are reloaded from a barge that meets the destroyer at an anchorage in the harbor, but it is a sheltered area and the waters are calm. In a war, ports the U.S. uses in Japan and Guam could be targeted by Chinese missiles, prompting the Navy to seek havens further away.

“If conflict were to erupt, or if something were to happen, being able to go to various different locations around the Indo-Pacific, it makes it much faster for us to reload,” said Cmdr. Nicholas Maruca, the Dewey’s captain.

From the South China Sea, Darwin is a roughly 4½-day journey under normal sailing conditions, compared with a roughly three-week journey to the U.S. West Coast.

Every CNO of this century, amongst other things, should be held to account for the damage they have done to the institutional knowledge we once had as our inheritance. All were thrown away as “old think” amongst all the vanity of offset TomorrowLand transformationalist snake oil. Look at what they invested their personal, professional, and institutional capital in: not what the future actually needed to defend our nation’s interests at sea.

Who here needs more LCS, DEI nomenklatura, unarmed auxillaries, and 100 hour workweeks for 11 months? We are all allowed to get something wrong now and then, goodness knows I do. But, the parade of unaccountable error and smug assumption that no one will bring it up. How will future leaders know where the landmines and swamps are if we hide how past leaders found themselves there? Gobsmacking.

Just a crime.

…but again, that was then, this is now. We cannot change the error of the past, but we are responsible for our action now and the results of it tomorrow.

Time is not our friend. Faster. Now.