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Is the US Navy Overrated? A
Discussion Paper DRAFT: 15.5B The
US Navy is the largest, most impressive navy in the world, but is it really
undefeatable? (Some Disconfirming Findings) An Updated
Knightsbridge Working Paper Copyright 2005 By Roger
Thompson, Professor of Military Studies, Knightsbridge University This is a draft. Do not quote
without permission from the author. The opinions expressed herein are those of
the author, and are not to be construed as the opinions of Knightsbridge
University. This is a work in progress and supercedes all previous versions.
Former US Navy submariner Dr. Robert Williscroft cited an earlier version of
this paper in his article
“Is the Nuclear Submarine Really Invincible?” DefenseWatch, Oct. 4,
2004. Acknowledgements I would like to
thank Dr. Andy Karam, former US Navy nuclear submariner and author of the book Rig
Ship for Ultra Quiet; Captain John L. Byron, US Navy (retired), former
nuclear submarine commander; Dr. Robert Williscroft, former US Navy Nuclear
Submarine officer; Colonel Douglas Macgregor, US Army (Retired), author of the
book Breaking the Phalanx; Lieutenant Colonel David Evans, USMC
(Retired), former Military Correspondent for the Chicago Tribune;
Rear-Admiral Fred Crickard, RCN (Retired); Jon E. Dougherty, investigative
journalist and former US Naval Reserve sailor; Squadron Leader J. R. Sampson,
RAAF (Retired); Henrik Fyrst Kristensen; Carlton Meyer, former USMC officer and
Editor of G2mil Magazine; and Dr. Emilio Meneses (who provided me with
much information on exercises between the Chilean Air Force/Navy and the US
Navy), for their input, comments, suggestions, and constructive criticisms of
earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank Captain Dean Knuth,
US Naval Reserve (Retired) for providing me with background information on the
sinking of two aircraft carriers in Exercise Ocean Venture 81 and for reviewing
the section titled “David vs. Goliath”, Colonel
Everest Riccioni, USAF (Retired), the father of the F-16 fighter program, and
Lt. Col. Pierre Rochefort, Canadian Forces (Retired) for their advice on fighter
combat, Major Lew Ferris, Canadian Forces (Retired) and Major Leif Wadelius,
Canadian Forces (Retired) for their advice on ASW matters, Lieutenant Commander
Aidan Talbott, RN, for his comparisons of the US Navy and the RN, and Captain
Jan Nordenman,
Royal Swedish Navy (Retired) for information on Swedish diesel submarines. My
special thanks also go to Dr. Debora Shuger of the UCLA English Department, who
kindly gave permission to use her late husband Scott Shuger’s unpublished book
manuscript Navy Yes, Navy No. Finally, I offer my thanks to all my other
sources, who will remain safely anonymous, for their generous assistance. “The
power of the United States in the early twenty-first century is greatly
overrated. It is true that it deploys amazing cultural, economic, and military
resources, but their efficacy is very limited. Culturally, there is no
instrumental power. Economically, U.S. power is awesome and is very good for
forcing bad deals on Third World countries, yet it too is difficult to bring to
bear consistently and directly, especially on the other great powers. And the
United States is as dependent on the world economy as the world economy is
dependent on it. But it is in terms of
military power that the United States is most overrated.” (emphasis mine). Professor Chris Hables Gray, 2005 As far as his comments in general, he feels that the Navy systems are oversold, overpriced, and undercapable. He is generally more pleased with the Air Force, but sprinkled criticism of us rather freely.” – Major General Perry M. Smith, USAF (Retired), reading his notes on a 1974 job interview with Secretary of Defense Dr. James Schlesinger. Dedication Let me begin by stating that the US Navy is an important fighting
organization, but it is not a person. It is not the flag, and it is nobody’s
mother or child. It is an employer of hundreds of thousands of people, but
importantly, one that has extracted billions of dollars from the taxpayers. It
is not a religion, it is not sacred, and as such, it can and must be subjected
to rigorous criticism when warranted. It is in the spirit of sincere and
constructive criticism that I write this paper. I say this because, despite good
intentions, and extensive documented evidence, often provided by current or
former US Navy officers who want to turn this organization around, there are
some who are apparently incapable of engaging in constructive but intellectually
honest discussion on their current or former service. To these folks, the US
Navy is America, and to criticize the former is to mock the latter. I
dismiss this paradigm, along with any and all counterarguments that are based on
emotion, hyperbole, willful ignorance, fideism, that rely on the Ad
Hominem Abusive, the Ad Hominem
Circumstantial, Ignoratio Elenchi, those without specific and documented
countervailing arguments (in other words, those based on assumed facts that are
not in evidence, better known as the old “I think you took these statements
out of context, but I cannot rebut them because I do not know the actual
context, and basically I do not like your argument so I am just grasping at
straws to deflate it” gambit), and those based on disingenuous and
unauthenticated contumacy or prevaricating bromides that do not wash with reality, common sense,
or precedent. In this age of rampant jingoism in the US, in which even the most
thoughtful and well-reasoned criticism of the US military is sometimes
inexplicably equated with contempt or polemical disrespect, some reactionaries
might even go so far as to claim a paper such as this must ipso facto be tinged
with “anti-Americanism.” Indeed, Michael Parenti said recently that “With
the link between militarism and patriotism so firmly fixed,” in America,
“any criticism of the military runs the risk of being condemned as
unpatriotic.” I eschew this simplistic, linear thinking as well, but as a
counter to those who do not, I do offer much praise for other branches of the US
military, especially the US Air Force, for their professionalism, relatively
high selection standards, and excellent aircraft. To borrow a phrase from a well
known Jack Nicholson movie, if “you can’t handle the truth,” or are one of
the many who are “blinded by hype about our technological and ethical
superiority” then I suggest, respectfully, kindly and sincerely, that you go
no further. No one should take what I am about to say personally. Besides, if
you disagree with my thesis, and if the US Navy’s way of doing things is
somehow validated in a future war, without too much “dumb luck” involved,
then you have nothing to worry about, and hence, nothing to be angry about,
either. If I am right, however, you have reason to be angry – at the US Navy,
the Pentagon, the Congress, the President, and the defense contractors – but
not me, for I am merely the narrator, and I will be kind enough not to say “I
told you so.” Thankfully, there are many US Navy officers (serving or retired) who are
willing to speak about their navy’s failings. These men and women are the true
patriots, not the credulous and defensive “Everything’s just fine, we’re
the best, thank you” types who populate the Brobdingnagian US
military-industrial complex, the Pentagon spin-doctors pumping out warmed-over
double-talk, and all others who cannot see the reasonable forest for the trees.
These reformers and thinkers try to make a difference, and they are the ones who
are truly loyal for they realize that one does need to be an unquestioning
reactionary to be a loyal and effective officer or sailor. One will find such
men and women in the pages of the US Naval Institute Proceedings
from time to time, but the most influential in these ranks are such men as the
Late Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Admiral Stansfield Turner, the Late Rear Admiral
Eugene Carroll, Captain John L. Byron, Captain Dean Knuth, the Late Scott Shuger,
and former F-14 Radar Intercept Officer Jerry Burns, all of whom are quoted in
this paper. To these men, and the men and women like them in the US Navy, I
respectfully dedicate this paper. You have heard all the hype about the US Navy,
I am sure, so this paper will give you the other side, the side that does not
often make it into the mainstream media, or the US high school textbooks. Introduction
and Objective (Quaere Verum) “I never did give
them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.” For many reasons, Americans
are a justifiably proud people, and it goes without saying that many Americans
take great pride in the US Navy. Pride, naturally, is not always a positive
thing, however, especially when it is excessive or misplaced. Excessive pride,
or hubris, can blind its partisans and lead to overconfidence, and jingoism.
Jingoism, substantiated by a prosperous economy and worldwide interests, a more
warlike familiar to traditional national pride, was once very much in the domain
of the British Empire. Now it has found a more affluent and comfortable home in
America, the only major industrialized country that was lucky enough not to
endure large scale attacks on its homeland in World War II. A goodly number of
our American friends have made, over the past 60 years, many over-the-top
statements about the prowess of their Navy and their armed forces in general. In
recent years, as an example, I have rolled my eyes after seeing young Americans
wearing t-shirts proclaiming: “United States Navy: The Sea is Ours.”
American presidents and statesmen routinely assert that the US military is
“the best trained, the best equipped, the best led…” (One American admiral
(Skip Bowman) recently claimed that US sailors are also the “best-educated”
in the world!) and a substantial number of Americans have bought into this
boosteristic choplogic. These folks, unlike their more liberal countrymen, are
sometimes quite unabashedly hawkish, and some brag that their grand fleet of
supercarriers, cruise missiles, nuclear submarines and surface ships absolutely
and unquestionably rules the seas now as Britannia once did, and more than that,
that this fleet is practically unchallengeable. After all, they say, with the
former Soviet Navy largely immobile, divided, decaying, deceased, or remaining
indefinitely at dockside, who can challenge American naval dominance today? The US Navy is absolutely
the biggest and most expensive navy in the world, that is true, but if one looks
back over time, and is objective, emotionally detached and, most importantly, intellectually
honest, one can plainly see an embarrassing pattern of failure and
underachievement, with pivotal combat climacterics (such as the victory at
Midway) resulting mostly from the miscalculations of enemies rather than from
any other single factor. The purpose of my disquisition is to describe and edify
this historical pattern of failure and underachievement (not just the issues
facing today’s Navy), and then to ask a very pertinent but controversial
question: Is the US Navy truly the most capable navy in the world, or is it
closer to being an overrated paper tiger whose dominance can be at least
partially attributed to the mistakes of former adversaries? This is a touchy
subject, and I will touch a few nerves in the process, but rest assured I will
do my best to perform the task at hand with all due respect and sensitivity.
Please also note that this is not so much a comparison test between the US Navy
and any or all others, as a “Let's look at the claims made that these people
are absolutely the best and see if we cannot find some examples of them not
being so”. Thus I am not arguing that the US Navy is, for example, inferior to
the Chinese Navy, or any other per se, but I do wish to challenge the basic and
widespread assumption that American sea power is as singularly dominant or
powerful as some people claim. This paper will be a “reality check” for a
great many people. I will begin by discussing
various international naval exercises that have pitted the supposedly hegemonic
US Navy against foreign diesel submarines (SSKs), with many ending with very
poor results for the Americans, and how US Navy officers are told to lie about
exercise defeats, especially those involving aircraft carriers. I will also
discuss how the US Navy benefited handsomely from the mistakes of both the
Germans and the Japanese, plus the ASW experience and
equipment of the British and Canadians, to buy enough time to establish itself
as the dominant naval power, but one with many subtle and not so subtle
weaknesses. I will describe the US Navy’s nearly continuous neglect of ASW,
and how its obsession with supercarriers and nuclear submarines has retarded the
combat capability of the surface navy, and forced the US Navy to rely on allies
for essential services. I will demonstrate through historical case studies how
bigger is not better in war, and that US naval pilots frequently do not measure
up to those from various air forces. I will also discuss how racism, overwork,
and the unpopularity of the Vietnam War eroded US naval power in the 1970s,
which led one admiral to confess the US Navy would have lost a war against the
Soviet Union. I will discuss how drug addiction, a bloated personnel structure,
and an overweight and poorly educated populace has undermined the fighting
skills and capacity of the US Navy, and how other, “lesser” navies have done
better in some ways. Throughout, I will provide
examples, some based on unscripted exercise scenarios, and others from real
life, that illustrate the many unfortunate and often ignored (or deliberately
concealed) deficiencies of the US Navy. Among other things, it will become
painfully apparent that unscripted or free-play exercise evolutions strongly
suggest, almost ineffaceably, that foreign diesel submarines are quite dangerous
to the US Navy, and that it needs the help of smaller allies in several key
areas of naval warfare. I will also suggest that there is good reason to believe
that the mighty US Navy is, with all due respect, simply overrated; a golden
calf. In doing so, I will present a long list of woes that have afflicted or
still afflict the US Navy, and one should keep in mind that these woes should
not be viewed in isolation. Other navies have similar problems, or even worse;
the Soviets/Russians are well known for having alcohol and morale problems, the
Japanese, for all their ferocity in battle and iron discipline, have a tradition
of thinking inside the box only (in other words, creativity and independent
decision-making are not their strong suit). The difference is that not every
other navy goes out in the world and tells everyone, and instills in its
personnel, the notion that they are unbeatable, and then makes sure to gloss
over or even hide deficiencies. The US Navy and the Pentagon seem to be the
leaders in this particular realm, and my job here is to call them on it. Before asking you to
consider the documented examples below, I would like first to offer a counter to
the most likely argument against my findings. The “Exercises Aren’t Real” Argument: My Riposte The examples below are from exercise scenarios, but some will say that one
cannot draw conclusions from exercises because they cannot fully duplicate the
reality of combat. Some might also say, erroneously, that exercises are only
instructional, or academic, using scripted situations with predictable
conditions and rules to train the crews on drills and procedures rather than to
actually “fight the ship.” According to the DOD Dictionary of Military
and Associated Terms, a controlled exercise is “an exercise characterized
by the imposition of constraints on some or all of the participating units by
planning authorities with the principal intention of provoking types of
interaction.” In this kind of exercise, the crews are basically just
practicing their various skills, such as gunnery, Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW),
damage control, and learning how to operate damaged or degraded systems. In
other words, they are about learning
about combat, not engaging in it. In these controlled, unimaginative, scripted
exercises, there are not supposed to be any winners or losers, and certainly no
one worth his salt calls the media to report a “success” in such exercises.
This is just part of the complex exercise equation, and it is not the part that
interests me (except in those cases in which the rules, while appearing on paper
to be restrictive or unfair, truly reflect the political realities faced by
democracies in war, or that conform to the historical reality that many
expensive weapons often do not work as advertised.) Furthermore, I am engrossed by those controlled exercises in which enemy
submarines disregard the rules to see if the US Navy is really as good as it
claims to be. Such was the case in the September 1998 UNITAS exercise, which
involved the US Navy and several South American navies. During the exercise,
enemy diesel submarines were supposed to keep running at all times, making them
easier targets for American sonar teams. This script was unrealistic and so
enemy diesel submarine commanders decided to violate the rules by sitting
silently on the bottom, which, apparently, nuclear submarines cannot do.
According to reporter Bradley Peniston, the Americans were irritated by this
unscheduled and uncalled for realism. “Local pride can get in the way of
useful practice. Helicopter crewman Harder was eager for the rare opportunity to
hunt foreign diesel submarines but found some of the Unitas navies weren’t
playing by the rules, which insist the subs keep moving. ‘It’s all pride,’
the helicopter sensor operator said. ‘If they’re on battery sitting on the
bottom, I’m not going to get them.’” The American actually complained that
his side would have found the diesel submarine and attacked it -- if only the
enemy submarine and her devious commander had cooperated! Harder was vexed that
what was supposed to be an unrealistically easy target had a mind of its own,
just like a bona fide enemy. This
is just like playing darts and expecting the bulls eye or triple 20 to move
about in order to be where your dart impacts, then making a fuss when you find
they do not play according to unrealistic expectations. I am also very interested in the so-called “force-on-force” exercises
(or evolutions, during otherwise controlled exercises) in where there are indeed
victors and the vanquished. In these exercises, which closely simulate combat,
no ship, submarine or aircraft has any special advantage or disadvantage. NATO
and DOD define a free play exercise as “an exercise to test the capabilities
of forces under simulated contingency and/or wartime conditions, limited only by
those artificialities or restrictions required by peacetime safety
regulations.” The purpose of these evolutions is not to train crews, but to
fight and hopefully win. As Robert Coram put it, “In a free-play exercise –
no scenario and no rules – the orchestrated performance was tossed out. There
is no better way to select and test combat leaders than by free play. Free play
means winners and losers; it means postexercise critiques…Careerists hated
free-play…True combat leaders loved it.” In these evolutions, rival crews do
their very best to win, as there are considerable bragging rights endowed to the
winners. Realism is important in these exercises. Exercise Tandem Thrust 99, an
unscripted multinational “free-play” exercise, was “as close to war as we
can possibly get,” said Commander Al Elkins, US Navy. “We’re in this
exercise like we’re in a hot war. When our aviators take off, they have no
idea what kind of threat is coming.” No reasonable person would suggest that a ship that regularly fails in
free-play or unscripted exercises is nevertheless in good shape for combat, and
vice-versa. Now assume for just a moment that, rather than a list of failures, I
will present a detailed list of US Navy successes in exercises instead.
Suppose a modern US Navy destroyer had “sunk” an “all gun” World War
II-vintage Turkish destroyer in a hypothetical free-play exercise. It would be
outrageous for the obviously outmatched Turkish Navy to say “Yes, but
exercises aren’t reality. In a real battle, my old ship and her guns would
have clobbered that new American destroyer and her Tomahawk missiles.” That
would be preposterous, and so is the claim that free play exercises, like the
ones described below, are inherently meaningless. The fact is that consistent
unscripted exercise results (successes or failures), are useful, meaningful, and
provide reasonable analytical tools. And if free play exercises are not
meaningful, then why does the US Navy invest so much time and money to
participate in them? Because these types of exercises frequently reveal both the
good and the bad news about how a navy might fare in a real war. I would
propose referring a couple of the many interesting quotes one gets when googling
'purpose naval exercise'. I did not see a single 'just having a good time' and
‘shooting the breeze' statement. While not always the case, the standard,
antediluvian excuse employed by the Navy’s apologists that all defeats (even in free play or unscripted exercise evolutions)
are purely because the US ships or
aircraft involved were operating under some sort of artificial restriction,
unrealistic limitation or handicap is also often rather spurious, exaggerated,
overly convenient, deceitful, and just a cop-out, and I will deal with that
matter in due course. I
also do not fully accept the whole “These exercise defeats only involved
allied submarines, and our allies are much better than our potential rivals,”
argument, either, for the US certainly has a long tradition of underestimating
its enemies (North Korea, China, and North Vietnam come to mind), and besides,
if a friend driving a quiet diesel submarine can sink a carrier or nuclear
submarine, what’s to prevent a rival from developing the same skills to do so?
Courage, motivation, training, leadership and professionalism are not
proprietary objects owned and trademarked by the western countries. The
technology can be purchased from any number of countries, and the skills can be
developed by any nation with the political will to do so, be they big or small,
rich or poor, friend or foe. On
yet another level, some will also claim that since exercises are conducted in
relatively small areas, it is easier for diesel submarines to detect and attack
surface ships. In real life, the oceans are much bigger and it is more difficult
for a diesel submarine to position itself to attack a much faster carrier battle
group. I would ask those who support this argument to consider two things. Firstly,
many US surface combatant ships were sunk in the open ocean by slow, primitive
diesel submarines in World War II, including the carriers USS
Yorktown, USS Wasp, the escort carriers USS
Liscombe Bay, USS Block Island,
the cruisers USS Indianapolis and USS
Juneau, the destroyers USS Mason, USS Reuben James, USS
Satterlee, USS Jacob Jones, USS
Hammann, USS O'Brien, USS Porter, USS
Henley, USS Buck, USS Bristol, USS
Leary, USS Leopold, USS Fechteler,
USS Fiske, USS Eisele, USS Shelton, USS
Eversole, USS Frederick C. Davis, and many other types of surface ships. US
battleships were damaged by submarine attacks and taken out of action for long
periods of time as well. In the case of the 35,000 ton battleship USS
North Carolina, one of the most powerful and up-to-date ships of her time,
and far more advanced than the ships destroyed at Pearl Harbor, she was taken
out of action for two months by a single
torpedo fired by the Imperial Japanese Navy’s submarine I-19. The carrier USS Saratoga, which was “the largest warship in the world” when
she was launched, “was torpedoed on
two separate occasions early in the war and was out of service for months.” In
one battle, a single torpedo from a Japanese submarine left the 33,000 ton
carrier “dead in the water” for several hours and she had to be taken under
tow by a cruiser. In addition, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s 71,890 ton supercarrier
Shinano was also sunk by a diesel
submarine, as was the 36,000 ton fast battleship Kongo. Submarines also claimed five of the largest British carriers.
One
more thing about exercises. I have noted over the years that our US Navy
colleagues expect to always win, by virtue of possessing what they earnestly
believe is superior technology (on which some say the US Navy has grown
overly-dependent, and consequently, rather sloppy) and/or superior training.
They simply cannot fathom the results when things do not go their way all the
time. When a real crackerjack US Navy F-18 squadron beats a foreign squadron in
a dogfight, for example, the US Navy’s supporters do not ask questions about
exercise parameters. They just assume that American technology and training were
better, so case closed. However, when a US Navy ship or squadron loses in a
competitive free-play or unscripted exercise, the response is rarely "Well,
you can't win them all," or "You win some, you lose some." Sadly,
the more typical response is to call a foul at the very concept of being beaten.
Were the conditions unfavorable to the US Navy? Did the US Navy fighters lose
because they had to carry more fuel tanks and were therefore less agile, or had
fewer landing bases available, than their land-based opponents? Was the exercise
unfair to US forces? (As if war could ever be “fair.”) Remember former Vice
President Bush, a Navy veteran, who said the following after a US ship shot down
an Iranian airliner: “I will never apologize for the United
States of America. I don't care what the facts are." I find this quote very
much in keeping with the nihil ad rem
culture of evasion, excuse-making, obfuscation, blame-shifting, buck-passing,
and denial in the US Navy, and I urge you to keep
this in mind as you read this paper. Denial, in the words of military
commentator Stan Goff, is indeed “the grandest of American appetites.” As
for methodology, the first section relies on qualitative rather than
quantitative data. The reason for this is simple. As Captain Dean Knuth, US
Naval Reserve (Retired), will attest later, the US Navy keeps a tight lock on
its exercise evaluation data, especially on the ones that include potentially
embarrassing failures. These exercise reports, note well, are not available to
the general public, and attempts to make them public have been suppressed by the
Navy. Under these conditions, a statistical analysis is not likely. In fact,
after conducting a thorough search of the available unclassified materials, I
could not locate even one such study, and one can be sure that is just what the
US Navy wants. This is a discussion paper, and thus my purpose is merely to ask
questions and raise issues, rather than to comprehensively answer all of them.
My task here is to try to put the pieces together, and see if any conclusions
can be supported or extrapolated. Although helpful, one does not always need
reams of statistical data and tables to recognize a plain fact especially when
history, common sense, and credible authorities support the conclusion. We do
not require a statistical analysis to understand universal truths. I always
liked the way Bruce Russett lucubrated his methodology, so I shall indicate my
concurrence by quoting him directly: “My intention is to be provocative... The
argument is not one subject to the principles of measurement and the strict
canons of hypothesis-testing – the mode of inquiry with which I feel most
comfortable. Nevertheless the subject is too important to leave untouched simply
because the whole battery of modern social science cannot be brought to bear on
it.” Like Fallows, my mission here is to be “suggestive, rather than
encyclopedic or definitive…” and as was the case with Fallows’ 1981 magnum
opus National Defense, “Much of the story is told through
anecdotage and case history, but these particulars are meant to suggest certain
casts of mind, certain rules of organizational life…” I
would also add that it does not require a leap of faith to know that there is no
such thing as an unsinkable ship, no matter how big it is, how many water-tight
compartments it has, or how much armor plating it has. Nor does it require much
imagination to comprehend that a nearly silent diesel submarine can most
definitely stalk and sink even the largest surface warships (or, these days,
noisy nuclear submarines) with relative ease. Diesel submarines were and are not
necessarily restricted to home or coastal waters, either, contrary to what many
nuclear submarine advocates emphasize. In fact, many diesel submarines have been
“forward deployed” thousands of miles from their home bases, and operated
against the enemy on the other side of the ocean. Such things happened in both
World Wars, and during the Falkland Islands War of 1982, and they can happen
today. Even Compton-Hall, whose writings avouch a pro-nuclear submarine slant,
once cautioned: “It is a great mistake to denigrate SSKs: they will continue
to be a menace for the foreseeable future and the Soviet Navy knows it.” Those
who deny these facts are in fact denying reality. As Aldous Huxley once said,
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” David
vs. Goliath: Do Diesel Subs Feast on the US Fleet? “Even
in the open ocean NATO fleet exercises demonstrate, time and again, that a
proportion of SSKS (diesel subs) will get through the screen.”
- Commander Richard Compton-Hall, Royal Navy (Retired) “U.S.
Navy exercises with diesel submarines since the mid-1990s have often proved
humbling.” – John
Benedict, National Security Analysis Dept., Johns Hopkins University Applied
Physics Laboratory, 2005. There have been many other exercises in the years since, but only a handful of these have become public knowledge, usually in the pages of a few periodicals and base newspapers. Another such exercise that drew public attention was in 1973. The exercise was code-named Uptide, and according to Thomas B. Allen, during this exercise the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga (which has since been retired and the name now inherited by a cruiser) was sunk twice by enemy submarines and taken “out of action”. This defeat, however, remained officially unreported and strictly “off the record.” Later, in 1981, the NATO exercise Ocean Venture ended much the same way for the US Navy, with submarines destroying US Navy carriers, but this time, something very different and controversial happened -- an exercise analyst had the audacity to try to report the truth, and he paid for it later. Before I get to the ugly details of the matter in hand, here is a little background information from the Exercise Senior Analyst, Lieutenant Commander Dean Knuth, US Navy: “In September 1981, the largest exercise in Atlantic Fleet history reached a peak after a two-carrier battle group completed a transit across the Atlantic. The ships entered the Norwegian Sea and their planes struck simulated enemy positions in waves of coordinated air attacks. The NATO exercise was Ocean Venture/Magic Sword North, and it was the first time that-the Commander in Chief Atlantic Fleet had amassed two American aircraft carriers, the British through-deck cruiser Invincible, and a large supporting force which included Royal Navy, Canadian Navy, and U.S. Coast Guard ships — all for the purpose of demonstrating the ability of the free world ‘to control the Norwegian Sea and contain Soviet sea power.’” During the exercise, a Canadian submarine slipped quietly through a US Navy aircraft carrier destroyer screen, and conducted a devastating simulated torpedo attack on the carrier. The submarine was never detected. A second carrier was also reportedly destroyed by another enemy submarine during this exercise. Later,
Knuth tried to use material from his official report in a magazine article, but when Navy officials read a draft of it,
his work was promptly censored to minimize the potential fallout. Some might
argue that the Navy had good reason to do this because it was ostensibly a
matter of “national security,” but I find that claim a bit of reach because everyone
knows that diesel submarines sank big aircraft carriers and other major
combatant ships in World War II, as I mentioned at the beginning, and there have
no great breakthroughs in surface ship survivability since then. The article was
never published. Said Knuth in a subsequent newspaper interview, “The fact is
our aircraft carriers were successfully attacked by torpedoes or missiles from
submarines in our major exercises.” In 2005, Captain Knuth, US Naval Reserve (Retired) told me that “We were interfered with by upper echelons of the Navy who wanted us to delete all references to sub attacks against carriers.” According to Knuth, Navy Secretary Lehman was trying to convince Congress to fund two new additional aircraft carriers and his case could have been seriously undermined if Knuth’s original manuscript came into the public eye. In Ocean Venture 81, “90 percent of the first strikes were by submarines against the carriers,” and this fact did not sit well with many naval aviators, or Lehman. In fact, Lehman resorted to Ad Hominem Circumstantial attacks and cheap shots against Knuth in the media, dismissing him as merely a “retired Lieutenant Commander” -- even though Knuth was still serving on active duty. As we all know, such tactics are commonly used when someone does not like hearing the truth, and thus they simply bypass the opposing argument altogether and just attack the person making it. At that point, Knuth said he got “fed up with the politics” of the Regular Navy, and transferred to the Naval Reserve, where he was eventually promoted all the way to Captain and became the Commodore of Naval Coastal Warfare Group Two (Atlantic). Had he stayed in the Regular Navy, Knuth doubts that he would ever have gotten another promotion, let alone two. He became Persona Non Grata in the regular Navy. Although the Navy tried to hush the matter up, and ordered Knuth to destroy his original manuscript, he kept a copy of the censored version, and even in its expurgated form, it is interesting and titillating reading. In the censored version, titled “Lessons of Ocean Venture 81,” Knuth expatiates that the carriers Eisenhower and Forrestal “would never have made it to Norway in a wartime situation” because of the submarine threat. He continued: “The first major event of the exercise was strictly a World War II leftover not likely to take place in the future: carrier against carrier. The Forrestal's battle group steamed in total emission control and sneaked toward the Eisenhower group which was on track for the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gaps. This event was parochialism personified. In Battle of Midway style, the aviator admiral relied on long-range tactical air strikes against the Forrestal, with little or no fighter air support. The surface admiral dispersed all of his surface combatants away from his carrier and sent them quite effectively on an anti-surface mission against the Eisenhower. Unfortunately, in doing so, he unrealistically left his own carrier open for submarine and air attack.” He also noted “The most exciting part of the exercise was the transit of the Iceland-United Kingdom gap. In the previous five autumn NATO exercises, the carriers have always been attacked going through the gaps.” It is often said that in war the first casualty is truth, but in this case I would say the first naval casualty in a general war with the Soviet Union would have been the lie that US Navy aircraft carriers are invulnerable. Fallows made the same argument in 1981, saying those big ships will be the first to go down when things get nasty. The USS Eisenhower was successfully attacked by a surface ship, said Knuth, but official reports by the commanders on scene seem to have overlooked this success: “An Orange missile ship sneaked to within weapon-firing range during the night and maintained station on the Eisenhower. At sunrise, the ship simulated emptying her missile load into "Ike" without herself being engaged until after signaling that she was engaging the carrier. The surprise attack was well described in traffic among warfare commanders on the satellite circuit, but when the carrier striking force summary report was received by the fleet commander, it stated that the Orange ship had been tracked and that a Blue ship, stationed between the carrier and the Orange ships, had been watching his actions. The report described a far different action than the confusion that had existed at the time of the engagement.” There was also an apparent “friendly fire” incident in which “a guided missile destroyer in Ocean Venture mistakenly harpooned the Eisenhower, mistaking a carrier for an Orange surface combatant. The composite warfare commander was so furious that he threatened to excommunicate the ship from the battle group.” Knuth
was remarkably sedulous in offering thorough criticism of US Navy battle group
tactics, organization, intra-navy parochialism (aviators versus surface warfare
and submarine rivalries) but spoke very highly of the British contingent: “The
British force employment, asset management, commands and action reports were
superlative and a model for our battle group to emulate.” He also conceded
that British officers and men “are better trained than our best and their
battle group commanders and staffs are highly proficient in tactics. My
professional note in the December 1981 Naval Institute Proceedings
explains in depth why this is the case.”
Finally, Knuth admonished that “Our battle groups
continually prostrate themselves before the hard-to-find enemy because of our
perception of our own invulnerability… The enemy can locate battle groups
easily, and with a large fleet of submarines, set up for a pre-planned attack.
Our policy is normally to head straight for danger and not shoot until shot at
first. When the Orange force makes a preemptive attack, it is usually of such a
magnitude that the battle group is overwhelmed and lost.” Despite the Navy’s
censorship of the Ocean Venture ’81 article, and the fact that the redacted
version was never published, the story became public knowledge in Canada. An
anonymous Canadian submariner leaked the story to a Halifax newspaper, and
indicated that this successful Canadian attack on an American carrier was by no
means an isolated incident. It was a simple ambush in the North Atlantic, and it
worked perfectly. Indeed, the article concluded that the Americans never knew
what hit them, that they were embarrassed by this failure, and that they wanted
to bury the matter then and there. The Canadian submarine did not fire the
customary green flare to indicate a hit, for reasons unknown to anyone except
for the skipper of the submarine, but instead simply took periscope photos of
the carrier to prove its point. In doing so, the diesel submarine ambushed a
surface ship in the same way that Germany’s U-boats had done it decades
before. This news and Knuth’s original uncensored report, which ended up in
the hands of Senator Gary Hart, caused quite a stir in Congress, and the US Navy
had a lot of explaining to do. Why had not one but two American carriers been
sunk, and why were the submarines responsible not detected? Why indeed had a
small, 1960s-vintage diesel submarine of the under-funded and
multi-dimensionally “bantam” Canadian Navy been able to defeat one of
America’s most powerful and expensive warships, and with such apparent ease? Conjointly,
why were the Canadians able to do essentially the same thing to the US Navy in
subsequent exercises in the spring of 1983? The Winnipeg Free Press
reported that the submarine HMCS Okanagan “snuck to within a kilometer
of the USS John F Kennedy, went through preparations to fire a salvo of
torpedoes and slipped away unnoticed by the carrier or the destroyers…” The
submarine got close enough “to score a lethal hit, Defence Minister Jean
Jacques Blais said…” Blais went on to say, “This is a matter of some pride
for submariners and shows the strength of our underwater boats at a time when
satellite detection can identify surface ships more readily.” There are several possible
explanations. Firstly, the Canadian submariners have a long-standing reputation
for being well trained and professional. Supporting this argument is
Compton-Hall, one of the world’s leading authorities on submarines, who
evaluated the Canadian submariners as “first class, aggressive and
innovative.” Secondly, the Oberon-class submarines used by the
Canadian, Australian, British, and other navies, built in the UK, but based on a
German design from World War II, were probably the quietest in the world at that
time. Of course, adverse acoustical conditions produced by temperature
variations (thermal layers) and other factors may temporarily cloak even the
noisiest submarines, but the nearly silent Oberon-class
diesel boats running on batteries were still harder to find in such conditions
than many nuclear boats. And in any case, Knuth described the acoustical
conditions as being “excellent” for detecting submarines, so the answer
probably lies elsewhere. A third possible reason is perhaps that the powerhouse
US Navy just is not very good at hunting submarines, especially the ultra-quiet
diesel boats available today. It is the last explanation that intrigues me, and
it is the one on which I shall focus much of this article. While Canadian submarines
have routinely taken on American carriers, other small navies have enjoyed
similar victories. The Royal Netherlands Navy, with its small force of extremely
quiet diesel submarines, has made the US Navy eat the proverbial slice of humble
pie on more than one occasion. In 1989, naval analyst Norman Polmar wrote in Naval
Forces that during NATO’s exercise Northern Star, “…the Dutch
submarine “Zwaardvis” was the only orange (enemy) submarine to
successfully stalk and sink a blue (allied) aircraft carrier…” The carrier
in question might have been the USS
America, as it was a participant in this exercise. Ten years later there
were reports that the Dutch submarine Walrus had been even more
successful in the exercise JTFEX/TMDI99. “During this exercise the Walrus
penetrates the US screen and ‘sinks’ many ships, including the U.S. aircraft
carrier Theodore Roosevelt CVN-71. The submarine launches two attacks and
manages to sneak away. To celebrate the sinking the crew designed a special
T-shirt.” Fittingly, the T-shirt depicted the USS Theodore Roosevelt
impaled on the tusks of a walrus. It was also reported that the Walrus
sank many of the Roosevelt’s escorts, including the nuclear submarine USS
Boise, a cruiser, several destroyers and frigates, plus the command ship USS
Mount Whitney. The Walrus herself survived the exercise with no
damage. Talented and wily enemies, of course, usually do not play by the rules,
and they do not stick to a script. Truthfully, it should come
as no great eye-opener that Dutch submarines would do well against the US Navy.
The Dutch submarine service has an enviable reputation, and has been praised by
people such as the Late Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, Jr., US Navy, who was
Commander, Submarines Pacific during World War II. Lockwood said in 1945 that
Dutch submarines in the Pacific were “thoroughly effective. They handled their
boats with great skill and do not need to take off their hats to anyone…”
The admiral also mentioned his “high regard for their ruggedness and fighting
skills.” Nowadays, many navies, including the US Navy, send their submarine
officers to the Netherlands to undergo the legendary Netherlands Submarine
Command Course. In November 2002, the Royal Australian Navy’s official
newspaper described the Dutch course for prospective diesel submarine commanders
as arguably “the best submarine training in the world.” US Navy students who
have taken the course have also found it extremely challenging (in 2002, naval
officers from the US, Australia, Canada, Israel and the Netherlands took the
course, but unfortunately, the American officer failed due to a safety
violation. The US Navy officer was the only one to fail that year, but in
fairness, he was a nuclear submariner, naturally, and ergo was much less
familiar with the workings of a diesel submarine and its battery operations.) Reassuringly, Lieutenant
Commander Todd Cloutier, US Navy, did graduate from the Dutch course in 2003,
and he too elucidated the program’s “legendary reputation” and described
it as “perhaps some of some of the toughest training a submariner can get.”
Although this course is for experienced officers who wish to command a diesel
submarine, he was also very impressed by the overall training received by Dutch
junior officers. “A Dutch Junior Officer (JO) with three years at sea is quite
proficient with the periscope. During my familiarization ride on Bruinvis, I saw
a non-qualified JO take the conn and conduct a task-group penetration against a
multinational task force. It wasn’t perfect, but quite impressive for a JO
with less than two years on board.” This suggests that a US Navy officer of
comparable rank would have been less capable. The
preceding section concerned aircraft carriers and surface ships only, but the US
Navy has long maintained that its nuclear submarines are clearly and
unambiguously superior to any and all diesel submarines. This dogma has been
perpetuated for decades, said Rear Admiral C. Mendenhall, US Navy (Retired) in
1995, because the nuclear submarine force leadership “has been brainwashed by
the Rickover nuclear-only philosophy.” Nuclear submarines are so superior,
allegedly, that some US submariners have long said that they need not even worry
about conventional submarines. In a 1998 report by Ivan Eland, he cited an
article in which “One
U.S. submarine commander reported that he would not even bother to destroy a
diesel because he could detect the boat before it detected him; he said that he
would simply avoid it.” Although this oblivious and antinomian thinking has
finally begun to change, there is still much that needs to be done. What follows
is intended to challenge that old establishment nonsense, and hopefully in a
small way, contribute to its reform. Like
the Canadians and Dutch, the penumbral Australian submarine force has also
scored many goals against US Navy carriers, and nuclear submarines as well. On
September 24 2003, the Australian newspaper The Age reported that
Australia’s Collins-class diesel submarines had taught the Americans a
few lessons during multinational exercises. By the end of the exercises,
Australian submarines had destroyed two US Navy nuclear attack submarines and an
aircraft carrier. For the Australians, all three ships were easy targets.
According to the article: “‘The Americans were wide-eyed,’ Commodore Deeks
(Commander of the RAN Submarine Group) said. ‘They realized that another navy
knows how to operate submarines… They went away very impressed.’” In
another statement attributed to Deeks, it was expostulated that: "We
surprise them and they learn a lot about different ways of operating
submarines... The Americans pour billions into their subs but we are better at
practical applications." However,
officially, the US Navy, a true military opsimath, soon went into damage control
mode and oppugned that the Australians could beat an American nuclear boat in a
fair fight. Said The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “The United States is justly proud of its military prowess, but
apparently a little defensive when anyone else shows a bit of talent. Defense
Week's ‘Daily Update’ on October 1, 2003, reported that the commander of the
U.S. Pacific Fleet was trying to downplay the fact that an Australian
diesel-electric submarine had ‘sunk’ an American submarine during recent
training exercises, and said the Australians were making too much of the
simulated hit. Adm. Walter Doran said that the outcome ‘certainly does not
mean that the Collins-class submarine in a one-on-one situation is going
to defeat our Los Angeles-class or our nuclear submarines.’" But
even if the American submarine was “supposed” to be sunk, or was using a
noise augmenter to simulate a Soviet sub, or purposefully running with
“degraded” Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) systems, (and there is no available
evidence to support any of these excuses) then why did an experienced Australian
submariner like Commodore Deeks, an officer in one of the most professional
navies in the world, make such unsubstantiated, out-of-context, and unfair
statements to the media? As Compton-Hall said, the Australian submarine service
is “outstandingly efficient,” and has an excellent reputation. Because, I
would wager, like the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, the Australians had actually
caught the Americans off guard and unawares. As we will see later, Captain
Richard Marcinko, US Navy, strayed from the rules during exercises in the 1980s,
and he achieved incredible results. War, as they say, is not fair, and anyone
familiar with polemology knows that pre-emptive or surprise attacks have often
proven devastatingly effective, as the Israelis demonstrated in 1967. In
October 2002, the Australians also reported that their diesel submarine HMAS
Sheehan had successfully “hunted down and killed” the nuclear submarine USS
Olympia during exercises near Hawaii. The commander of the Sheehan
observed that the larger American nuclear boat’s greater speed and
accelerability were no advantage because “It just means you make more noise
when you go faster.” In the previous year, during Operation Tandem Thrust,
analyst Derek Woolner set forth that HMAS Waller sank “two
American amphibious assault ships in waters of between 70-80 metres depth,
barely more than the length of the submarine itself. The Collins-class
was described by Vice-Admiral James Metzger, Commander, U.S. Seventh Fleet as 'a
very capable and quiet submarine…” Although the Waller was herself
sunk during the exercise, the loss of a single diesel submarine, in exchange for
two massive amphibious assault ships, is quite a good bargain, and very cost
effective. Finally,
during RIMPAC 2000 it was disclosed that HMAS Waller had sunk two
American nuclear submarines and gotten dangerously close to the carrier USS
Abraham Lincoln. Even more ominous, asserted researcher Maryanne Kelton, is
that: “Even though the exercises were
planned and the US group knew that Waller was in the designated target
area, they were still unable to locate it. New Minister for
Defence, Robert Hill, recorded later that the ‘Americans are finding them
exceptional boats…in exercises with the Americans they astound the Americans
in terms of their capability, their speed, their agility, their loitering
capacity, they can do all sorts of things that the American submarines can’t
do as well.’” In 2003, Commander Peter Miller, US Navy, spoke about his
experiences with the Australian diesel submarines, and he paid the greatest
(politically correct) compliment that a nuclear submariner can make. He said
that the Australian diesel submarine was “on a par” with US nuclear
submarines, and that “The Collins are great submarines.” The
Collins-class submarines were designed
in Sweden, and naturally, the Swedes themselves have been able to raise some
eyebrows in the US Navy. In a 2004 presentation in Stockholm, Vice Admiral
Kirkland H. Donald, US Navy, affirmed that “Today, Sweden manufactures some of
the best built and equipped submarines and surface ships in the world. The
GOTLAND class is not only quiet, but has a most impressive combat system. If I
remember correctly, in the fall of 2000, there was a multi-lateral, blue-water
ASW exercise where CDR. Gumar Wieslander and his crew in HSwMS HALLAND
demonstrated remarkable prowess exercising against one of our finest ships USS
ANNAPOLIS. That exercise, along with many others, reinforced the difficulties in
prosecuting a well built, well maintained diesel submarine, with a well trained
crew.” He did not say that the Swedish boat “sank” the Annapolis, but the subtle implication might be there if one reads
carefully between the lines. The Japanese have also
proven to be formidable in their modern diesel submarines. Nuclear submariner
Dr. Andy Karam noted in 2005 that: “During exercises with Japanese diesel
submarines (I believe it was during the 1988 Team Spirit exercises), Plunger had some problems that led to our being beaten several
times. We eventually learned how to fight against diesel boats, but by
then, we probably would have been sunk. Part of the problem was the
inherent quietness of diesel boats that made them very hard to detect on sonar. In
addition, the Japanese crews were very disciplined - I got the impression that,
if told to go to their bunks and stay there without moving, the crew would have
done so indefinitely, without complaint and without breaking discipline.” The
Japanese tradition of strict naval discipline goes back a long way. In the
1920s, “Foreign observers noted that even when Japanese ships were in dock,
sailors not on duty were kept constantly busy with calisthenics. ‘We never
dared to question orders, to doubt authority, to do anything but carry out all
the demands of our superiors,’ recalled one former seaman.” The
Chileans deserve to be on the list too, as their diesel submarines have
successfully attacked US Navy ships during exercises. In 2001, the
unusually candid skipper of the nuclear submarine USS Montpelier
(Commander Ron LaSilva, US Navy) recounted that a Chilean diesel submarine
"Shot him twice during successive exercise runs.” As a result, LaSilva
learned that “bigger and nuclear is not always better.” Commander LaSilva
should be commended for his courage, for as we shall see later on, this kind of
honesty is usually not the best policy for US Navy officers. Interestingly, that same year, a Pakistani submarine also tried to approach
an American carrier operating in the Arabian Sea. So many other minor naval
powers have done it, as we have seen here, so why shouldn’t the Pakistanis
take a crack at it? Fortunately, though, this time one of the carrier escorts, a
Canadian frigate, detected the sub and escorted it from the area. This is a good
thing of course, but it still raises a question for many American civilians;
namely, what exactly was a Canadian ship doing in a US Navy Carrier Battle Group
(CBG)? Surely, the world’s largest navy can fight its own battles, yes? Well,
for years, Canadian ships have been integrated with US Navy CBGs, but the
rationale for this arrangement is not purely political, as some might
automatically suppose, nor is it tokenism. It has much more to do with the
pronounced shortage of US surface combatant ships in the post-Cold War era
(thanks, in no small way, to the US Navy’s dogmatic obsession with big-ticket
supercarriers and huge nuclear submarines). This would tend to explain why, contrary to popular opinion
stateside, the US Navy, at least numerically, did not play the truly dominant
naval role in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm. Morin and Gimblett
stated “These other (non-USN) naval forces have often been overlooked or
dismissed as lesser participants because, when taken individually and then
compared with the American naval deployment to the region, they looked
insignificant. Even the British and French task groups were small. Taken
collectively, however, the other forces totaled nearly fifty ships,
approximating the American effort…” Indeed, “out of the total vessels
dedicated to sanction enforcement, the Americans accounted for only one-third
(15 out of 45), and even then the cruisers and destroyers were charged primarily
with providing defence against air attack, effectively reducing their
availability for other tasking.” They concluded “The relative balance of
forces at sea between the USN and their allies meant that the Americans did not
enjoy the same dominant position on the seas as they did on land…”
Additionally, as we will see later, the fact is that Canadian ships are more
capable in certain areas than are US ships. Retuning
to our friends from Chile, in 1998, U.S. News and World Report noted
“In two recent exercises with Latin American navies, a Chilean sub managed to
evade its U.S. counterparts and ‘sink’ a U.S. ship.” To be more specific, during RIMPAC 1996, the
Chilean submarine Simpson was responsible for sinking the carrier USS
Independence (this event was chronicled in the 1997 Discovery Channel TV
documentary “Fleet Command.”) In a 1998 article, Robert Holzer, the Outreach
Director at the Office of Force Transformation, provided more detail: “a
Chilean diesel sub penetrated the perimeter of a U.S. Navy battle group and
moved among its ships for several days. U.S. forces knew the sub, participating
in an exercise with the Navy, would operate in an attack mode. Yet the Pacific
Fleet could not find it. The Chilean sub demonstrated that it could have
targeted and fired on U.S. Navy ships at any time. In exercises over several
years, the U.S. Navy’s most advanced antisubmarine warfare (ASW) ships have
been unable to detect the South African Navy’s Daphne (-class
diesel-electric) subs, which were built 30 years ago.” To wit, in a 1995
articled cited by Benedict, “Two U.S. Navy ships reportedly exercising against
a South African Daphne-class submarine were unable to detect it even at short
ranges; a U.S. observer on the submarine commented to its crewmembers, ‘There
is a $1B warship above you that doesn’t have a clue where you are.’” In short, the US Navy would have its hands full if it had to fight diesel
submarines. U.S. News and World Report also quoted Rear Admiral W. J.
Holland, US Navy (Retired) who maintained if the US Navy had to deal with a
hostile diesel submarine today, “It would take a month to handle that problem,
including two weeks of learning.” Strangely though, Admiral Holland remains
completely opposed to any plan that would involve the US Navy acquiring its own
diesel submarines! In any event, the moral of this naval story is that the
American sea service really needs “a healthy dose of humility and caution in
future operations.” Not
surprisingly, NATO and allied diesel submariners (and probably some others who
are not so friendly) are extremely confident in their ability to sink American
carriers. In his 1984 book The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine,
Andrew Cockburn wryly noted that European submariners on NATO exercises were far
more concerned about colliding with noisy American nuclear submarines (running
fast, and therefore, blind) than about being attacked by American ships. Despite
the vast amount of propaganda put out by the US Navy, well-run diesel submarines
running on batteries are quite capable of outfoxing nuclear submarines. As
former Royal Navy submarine officer Ashley Bennington
said in his 1999 response to an article on the Virginia-class submarines:
“…You mention that the new Virginia class of nuclear submarines
will easily detect diesel submarines, implying that diesels are noisy. As a general rule, however, diesel
submarines, which use an electric motor that runs on
batteries, are quieter than
nuclear-powered subs, which constantly run coolant pumps.” One US nuclear
submariner of my acquaintance had a slightly different take on this: “More
specifically, nuke boats have the 60-cycle hum from an AC electrical system, the
steam noise, main coolant pumps, and the turbines and reduction gears. Even when
sound-mounted, these make noise a diesel boat lacks…” However, he disagreed
with Bennington’s statement that coolant pumps must be kept running at all
times. “The Ohio-class boats can run
in natural circulation at low power; the LA class can do so only for emergency cooling only.” Former
nuclear submarine officer Michael DiMercurio noted that both the Seawolf class and Ohio
class boats can run in natural circulation, “below 35 percent power,” which
certainly reduces tonal output and thus, makes the submarines more difficult to
detect. This applies only to low speeds, and when a nuclear submarine runs
at higher speeds, as many probably would in order to stop a Chinese surprise
invasion of Taiwan, for example, those noisy coolant pumps would need to run,
and therein lies the problem. DiMercurio said that when a nuclear submarine runs
at high speed, those coolant pumps are as “loud as freight trains,” which
not only makes them much easier to detect and attack, it also makes it much more
difficult for the speedy nuclear boat herself to hear possible adversaries, such
as diesel submarines waiting to ambush. Compton-Hall once remarked that a
nuclear submarine running at high speed is “deaf, dumb and blind,” and thus
quite vulnerable. The nuclear submarine’s high speed advantage is indeed a
double-edged sword, for it can cut both ways if not used with great discretion. Bennington’s sentiments
were echoed in late 2004 by Captain Viktor Tokya of the German Navy. Toyka said
that conventional submarines, especially those with Air Independent Propulsion
(AIP), are more difficult to detect than nuclear boats. Captain Li Chao-peng of
the Taiwanese Navy also concurred that diesel submarines are more cost-effective
and are still quieter than any nuclear submarines. His navy has Dutch Zwaardvis-class
diesel submarines and in 2002 he told the Taipei Times: “The
only advantage that a nuclear submarine has over a conventionally-powered one is
its endurance under the sea… But a diesel-powered sub like ours is much
quieter than a nuclear one." He added that the Taiwanese diesel subs can
definitely “compete” with nuclear boats. To be fair, though, Captain John L.
Byron, US Navy (Retired), who served in both diesel and nuclear submarines,
states that right now, the main advantage a diesel boat has is her captain and
crew, rather than the boat herself. As he told me in 2005, “In 1960,
then-Commander, now retired VADM Yogi Kaufman (my CO in USS
Cavalla SSK 244, where I was a Sonarman Second Class) described
submarine-vs-submarine operations as well as has ever been done: “Two blind
men in a darkened room, each with baseball bats.” Having an acoustic advantage
is useful, but it’s not a brick-bat certainty that the quieter boat wins. And
when both are so quiet that detection range may be within 1000 yards, matters
like problem geometry, speed, tactics, luck, and the minimum arming distance of
weapons play in a large way. I’ve routinely seen diesels take out nukes, but
it has more to do with a lack of skill mixed with hubris on the part of the SSN
skipper and smart diesel guys than anything inherent in the platforms (it’s
the wetware)…Diesel vs nuke still favors the nuke, if well operated by a smart
& wily skipper. But the diesel guys tend to be smarter and wilier, so it’s
a pretty fair fight than can go either way.” Why are diesel submarine
commanders generally smarter and wilier than those driving nuclear boats? Part
of the answer is based on the relative ease of operation. Diesel submarines, as
Scott Shuger told us, “require fewer men, and their crews don’t have to
undergo as much time-consuming and expensive physics and engineering training.
And if a submarine is simpler to operate, crew members can concentrate more on
tactics. It’s long been suspected that the Navy’s all-nuke sub force is very
strong on running submarines but not as strong at it should be on fighting
them.” Although, as we have seen
here, naval officers often disagree on which type of submarine tends to be
quieter, the smart ones agree that, for one reason or another, the modern diesel
submarine is a worthy and dangerous foe for a nuclear submarine. As Aristophanes
prophetically cautioned, “The truth is forced upon us very quickly, by a
foe.” In this instance the foe is the conventional submarine and the truth
could be rather awful for the US Navy, if it is ever revealed. Karam also opined
that “Now, and when I was in the Navy, I firmly felt that we would prevail in
any war, from sheer numbers if nothing else. But I also felt (and continue
to feel) that any war would cost us more dearly in people and ships than need be
the case. Finally, my assessment of our state of readiness when I was in the
Navy and Reserves was similar to the situation that faced us prior to WWI and
WWII - on paper, we looked great, but I was not sure that our administrative
readiness was mirrored by our actual war-fighting readiness.” Today, the US Navy has no
diesel submarine combatants, and this means that although the diesel submarine
is a very dangerous threat, the Americans must rely on smaller allies and
friendly nations like Sweden, Canada, Chile, Peru, Columbia, Australia, and
others to provide this vital training. This, it can be argued, is a very serious
handicap for any blue water navy, much less the world’s largest. As Shuger
deplored in 1989: “We currently depend on the diesel subs of our allies to
perform the missions diesels do best. It's foolish to rely on the British,
German, and Italian navies for our security. There are crucial scenarios in
which having friends with diesels won't do us much good. The Soviets maintain
missile sub patrols off both our coasts, and we can't expect Britain to help us
patrol them.” Although there are fewer Russian subs stalking the US coast now
than there were in 1989, they, the Germans and the Japanese made a nasty habit
of doing so at various times, and future adversaries may well do the same. Likewise, the anaclitic (for
a superpower) US Navy has traditionally been very weak in mine countermeasures,
and has often had to ask allies for those capabilities as well (because the US
Navy considers it unglamorous). Remember the words of Rear Admiral Allan Smith,
US Navy, who admonished his navy’s inexcusable inability to deal with
primitive North Korean mines in the 1950s? When a major amphibious invasion had
to be postponed because those crafty North Koreans laid mines in their path, the
cocksure US Navy, which had pretty much abolished its substantial mine warfare
forces, was profoundly embarrassed. Admiral Smith said “We have lost control
of the seas to a nation without a Navy, using pre-World War I weapons, laid by
vessels that were utilized at the time of the birth of Christ.” As the years
went by, the embarrassment faded away, and the Navy’s mine countermeasures
(MCM) assets dwindled and atrophied, and many of them were eventually stowed
away in the low profile Naval Reserve. But in 1989, with insufficient mine
countermeasures available, the USS Samuel
B. Roberts struck a mine in the Persian Gulf, and was taken out of action
for 17 months. In 1991, the USS Tripoli
suffered a similar fate, and she was only carrying the only MCM helicopter (an
MH-53E) available in her area of operations. Just a few hours later, “The USS
PRINCETON (CG-59) hit two mines. Luck was with the crew - only three of the 364
members aboard were injured. But the damage was substantial. The ship's
superstructure was torn in two pieces at the midships quarterdeck. The gun and
missile-launching systems were knocked out. The rudder, propeller, and main
shaft on the port side were damaged, and her port engine had to be shut down.
She was out of the war for good.” When the Princeton was disabled, Rear Admiral Dan March, US Navy, sent a
request for a ship to escort the Princeton
back to port. The admiral specified that the escort ship must have a helicopter
and “a good anti-mine capability” and, interestingly, he also said “I’d
prefer it to have a Canadian flag flying from the stern.” The Canadian
destroyer HMCS Athabaskan and her Sea
King helicopters quickly obliged and were thus dispatched to husband the
American ship back to port. Now then, why, exactly, did the American admiral
specifically want a Canadian ship to do the job? According to Commodore Duncan
Miller, Canadian Forces, the Americans knew that the Canadian ships “were the
best prepared of any of the warships in the Gulf to counter the mine threat.”
The Canadian ships had another advantage over their American friends in that the
Canadian Sea Kings, although not dedicated as MCM platforms, were the only
helicopters in the Gulf with Forward-Looking-Infra Red sensors for night
missions, and that truly specialized in low level flying. Luckily, they were
good enough for the job at hand, and were the best available. Canada has since
developed a “world-leading” remote mine-hunting system, which drew praise in
2005 from Rear Admiral D. A. Loewer, US Navy, who is Commander, Mine Warfare
Command. Some speculate that the US Navy will purchase the Canadian technology
to improve its own MCM forces. All told, said Commander
Frank G. Coyle, US Navy, since the end of World War II, “14 U.S. Navy ships
have been sunk or damaged by mines – more than triple the number damaged by
air and missile attack.” Did the Navy learn from these unpleasant remedial
lessons in mine warfare? As of 2004, “Our current mine warfare force consists
of 14 Avenger (MCM-1) class
minesweepers, 12 Osprey (MHC-51)-class
coastal mine hunters, and two Squadrons of MH-53E helicopters.” All of these
platforms are quite good, actually, but one wonders if there are enough of them
to meet the needs of the world’s largest and most globally involved navy. That
is not a very big force considering that America has a very long coastline, and
that the US Navy is supposed to be the guardian of the oceans and primed for
combat in the littorals. And it is unacceptable to make excuses or
rationalizations such as “Well, our allies are supposed to do that,” which,
for a superpower, is really just passing the buck. As one of my colleagues said
recently, “A properly balanced
blue-water Navy should have sufficient MCM capabilities instead of relying on
its allies or coalition partners to provide them.” In contrast, the much
smaller Royal Navy has a much smaller coastline to protect, but it has three MCM
squadrons, with a total of 21 mine hunters and mine sweepers. Unlike the
Americans, all British MCM units are in the regular navy, not the reserve. The
Americans also have destroyers and other helicopters that
offer organic mine detection and/or sweeping capabilities, but they are not
dedicated MCM platforms, and therefore are probably not especially well trained
in that specialty. The same goes for the new Littoral Combat Ships (LCS). The
Navy recently signed contracts to build the first Littoral Combat Ships (LCS),
and these ships can be customized with one of three mission packages, one of
which will be MCM. These ships will be fast enough to keep up with carrier
battle groups, which is commendable, but they will not be permanently dedicated
to MCM (at times, they might be configured for ASW or ASUW). So, in a nutshell,
yes, the US Navy is getting new MCM ships, but apparently only on a contingency
basis, so all in likelihood, they too will be far less than ideal. One of my
colleagues recently said that the MCM situation is in fact much worse now than
it was 10 or 15 years as regards to the Navy's doctrine and training for
neutralizing the growing mine threat in the littorals. Many believe that the US
Navy's recent decision to embrace organic MCM is the wrong move as it will do
nothing to rectify its deficiencies in countering the mine threat, and it would
also create a dangerous illusion that perhaps there is no need for dedicated MCM
forces. The most recent BRAC (Base Realignment And Closure) report suggests
moving surface MCM forces to San Diego and MCM helicopters to Norfolk, VA (both
are based in Texas). This is another bad decision. The fact is that MCM ships
and helicopters should never have been based in Texas; the US Navy really needs
adequate MCM capabilities on both
coasts. ASW: A Low Priority? “Our
ASW capabilities can best be described as poor or weak…”
– Vice Admiral John Grossenbacher, US Navy, 2002 "ASW
officers and enlisted men are more often treated like the Rodney Dangerfields of
the air wing. They get no respect…” – George C. Wilson, onboard the USS John F. Kennedy In the last section, I
presented a list of US Navy ships and submarines that had been “sunk” in
free-play exercises by diesel submarines. As any expert will tell you, however,
there are a great many variables in ASW, and to be fair, it is quite possible
that, because of adverse acoustical conditions, no navy in the world could have
found some of those diesel boats. And while US submarines may sometimes use
Noise Augmenters (NAUs) to simulate Soviet/Russian submarines, which until
recently tended to be much noisier, there is no published evidence that this was
the case in any of the exercises cited. Further, the use of NAUs is not
especially common in multinational exercises (they are most commonly used in US
national exercises for training surface ships and P-3 crews). Several Canadian
ASW senior officers I consulted (with almost 70 years of combined service)
indicated that they had never
conducted an exercise with a US nuclear submarine using NAUs or operating under
a handicap. One of them said that, for US Navy nuclear submarines, “Their job
was to stay quiet to avoid us most of the time, even during exercises. Sounding
like a Soviet would certainly have attracted our attention!” In the few instances in which
his nuclear submarine was asked to simulate a Soviet sub during multinational
exercises, Karam said that the ship “simply
operated as normal (i.e. without rigging for ultra quiet).” Also note well
that diesel submarines often use NAUs in exercises as well – to make it easier
for US ships, aircraft, and submarines to find them (more on that momentarily).
Furthermore, most of the diesel versus nuclear submarine scenarios described
occurred in the last five years, by which time Russian submarines had made great
strides in quieting. As Cote articulated, by the mid 1980s, the Soviets had “a
nuclear submarine that could elude SOSUS and frustrate efforts by tactical ASW
platforms using passive sonar to establish and maintain contact with it.” The
submarine in question, the Victor III,
was an unpleasant surprise to the US Navy when it was first encountered. The
boat was described by former CNO Admiral James Watkins “as quieter than we
thought --- We learned that they were hard to detect.” Subsequent Russian
designs were even better. Polmar said in 1997 that when the Improved Akula-class submarine first appeared in 1990, “Admiral J.M.
Boorda, the Chief of Naval Operations, told the House: ‘This is the first time
since we put the NAUTILUS to sea that (The Russians) have had submarines at sea
quieter than ours. As you know, quieting is everything in submarine
warfare.’” Was this perhaps just a case of “threat
inflation,” dreamed up by the admirals to extract more money from the
taxpayer? I am not inclined to think so, for in 2003, DiMercurio, who usually
tends to favor US submarine designs over the Soviets, admitted that the Russian Akula
class submarine is “very capable,” and earlier in his career, he was candid
enough to say that, at least in some ways, “The Russians were amazing and
talented designers, and their submarines were the best in the world.” Polmar
went on to say that the Navy’s claims that its new Seawolf-class
submarine “is the quietest submarine in the world” were based on highly
questionable or sparse intelligence. The Seawolf-class
was cancelled after only three boats were delivered, but perhaps that is just as
well as there were reports that these boats were not properly tested. In 2002,
Diehl recalled that “The Navy has refused to perform shock tests on all the
components of its newest type attack sub, the three-billion-dollar Seawolf.
These supposedly required tests were designed to insure that all components
would survive the stresses of most underwater explosions. The Navy apparently
had diverted some of its testing funds to other uses. Such decisions continue to
place those who volunteer to go in harm’s way at exceptional risk.” Keeping all this in mind, and unless or until
verifiable evidence proves otherwise, the tired, jejune supposition that the US
ship that got sunk “must have been simulating a really bad old Soviet sub by
running with a noise augmenter or some other handicap” should be considered
knee-jerk rhetoric or wishful thinking, especially in recent years, and as such,
an intellectual cul-de-sac. Also, as we will see in this
section and others, there is evidence to suggest that the US Navy’s ASW forces
are definitely not as good as they should be, nor are they as good as those of
certain allies. This traditionally insouciant attitude toward ASW can certainly
make US Navy forces more vulnerable than those of other countries, and
consequently, less combat effective. The Navy’s standard argument on its
long-term neglect of ASW is, in so many words, that “We rely on our allies to
help us with that,” and/or “The Soviets are gone now” which is ludicrous,
considering that the US Navy has been the world’s largest navy for a long time
now, that “The
US military budget is almost as much as
the rest of the world's”,
that it did not rely on British or Canadian ASW assets in its deadly battles
with the Japanese in the Pacific, and the Soviet Union was certainly not the
only potentially hostile country with submarines, but I digress. Since the end of the Cold
War, and the demise of the Soviet submarine fleet, the US Navy has admitted that
it has not made ASW a high priority, especially in shallow water, and it shows.
Perhaps the most obvious recent evidence is the demise of the Navy’s
carrier-based fixed wing ASW aircraft, the S-3B Viking. In 1999, the Navy
discontinued the S-3B’s ASW mission, and now the aircraft are being retired,
without a dedicated carrier-based fixed wing ASW plane to replace them.
Furthermore, between 1991 and 2004 the P-3 Orion force has been reduced by 50%,
and will suffer another cut, a further 33% reduction in 2005, and as Goldstein
and Murray pointed out, the remaining P-3s “no longer focus on ASW as their
principal mission” in most areas. For example, in 1998, Vice Admiral Richard
W. Mies, US Navy, excoriated the laggard ASW training typical of the Navy's P-3
Orion crews. "'Take the average P-3 air crew,''' he said. ‘How much time
do they have on top of a friendly submarine or a potential adversary submarine
just tracking them? You'll find that many of the crews have very, very little
operational proficiency time. And that's true across all the elements of ASW.'''
(Incredibly, Caldwell reported in 2000 that the missile-equipped Orion, a large,
four-engine turbo-prop patrol aircraft, with an airframe based on a 1950s
passenger plane, was actually being used to subrogate for much faster and agile
jet fighter aircraft on Combat Air Patrols). Finally, the SOSUS warning
net has been “effectively mothballed,” thus depriving the Navy of a much
needed early warning system. The US Navy’s inability to deal with quiet
non-nuclear submarines was made quite evident in 2004, when Crawley wrote that
“During sonar training with other navies’ diesel submarines, a noisemaker or
pinger is often installed to increase the sub’s noise level so that U.S.
warships and submarines can find the quieter vessels.” The Gotland-class
boat is “a very good submarine,” added naval analyst A.D. Baker III, editor
of The Naval Institute Guide to Combat Fleets of the World series,
“Unless we enhance the (Gotland’s) acoustic signature, we won’t find
it.” Mind you, there is also a
new initiative to improve and coordinate ASW tactics, units, training, and
equipment, which includes the recent loan of a Swedish Gotland-class diesel submarine. Although the temporary loan from the
Royal Swedish Navy is a step in the right direction, some fear the Navy’s
recent reemphasis on ASW skills does not go far enough, and by that they refer
to the Navy’s steadfast refusal to build and develop even a small number of
its own non-nuclear submarine forces (Admirals Zumwalt and Woodward, US Navy and
Royal Navy, respectively, have both recommended buying diesel boats, and even
Navy Secretary Lehman once said “These submarines are extremely quiet when
operated at low speeds and for this reason substantial helicopter, subsurface,
and surface anti-submarine warfare defense is required…”), the
aforementioned retirement of the S-3 Viking, and the CNO’s requirement that
spending for the new ASW initiative must not “break the bank.” One should
also take note that even during the Cold War, when
there was a clear and present danger projected by a potential foe with hundreds
of submarines, both nuclear and diesel-powered, the US Navy was still not the most proficient navy in this specialty,
even in deep water. It remains true to this very day that other forces, such
as the Canadian Navy and Air Force, were and are arguably more committed to and
more skilled in ASW (in deep or shallow water) than the US Navy, despite having
some old equipment like the Sea King helicopter. A few cogent examples from
history will further illustrate my point. In 1942, after several years of
sitting on the sidelines of combat, America was finally at war with Germany and
Japan. German U-boats prowled the Atlantic under the cloak of ocean, fog and
darkness, attacking and sinking an incredible number of allied ships (by some
accounts, they disposed of approximately 12,000,000 Gross Registered Tons of
merchant shipping in the Battle of the Atlantic). The British and Canadians had
considerable experience dealing with U-boats, but the US Navy initially did not
want to take ASW advice from its more experienced allies. Gannon wrote that as a
result of “inexperience and poor training,” US Navy ASW was thoroughly
ineffective during the first half of 1942. Not only were the Americans poorly
trained, their ethnocentrism prevented them from adopting proven tactics
developed by the British and Canadians (Gannon described the American CNO,
Admiral King, as “The Imperious Anglophobe Admiral,” which is all the more
interesting since, as Padfield pointed out, King’s mother was born in England
– so one might wonder what Dr. Freud would have said about this). Germany’s
Admiral Doenitz had a low opinion of American ASW at the start of the war: “By
mid-April, the U-boats had been attacking the American east coast for three
months. It appeared that their successes would continue indefinitely, and
Admiral Doenitz could not resist crowing about it. ‘Before the U-Boat attack
on America was begun,’ he wrote, ‘it was suspected that American
anti-submarine activity would be weak and inexperienced; this conjecture has
been fully confirmed… The crews (on anti-submarine vessels) are careless,
inexperienced and little persevering in a hunt. In several cases escort vessels
–coast guard ships and destroyers – having established the presence of a
boat, made off instead of attacking her… On the whole… the boats’
successes are so great, that their operation near the coats is further justified
and will continue.’” Eliot Cohen and John Gooch
noted that “The Germans believed that organization and doctrine, not lack of
materiel, were the roots of the American problem. The war diary contains such
entries as ‘enemy air patrols heavy but not dangerous because of
inexperience.’ ‘(The enemy is not) able to make allowances and adjustments
according to prevailing submarine operations.’ ‘The American airmen see
nothing, and the destroyers and patrol vessels proceed at too great a speed to
intercept U-boats, and likewise having caught one they do not follow up with a
tough enough depth charge attack.’" The Japanese also thought the US Navy
was badly trained in ASW. In late December 1941, a Japanese submarine prowled
off the coast of Northern California, and was eventually detected. However,
according to her skipper, Captain Zenji Orita, “We heard a number of patrol
boats, and our radiomen listened in on many plain-language uncoded message
exchanges. This made it easy for us to dodge the hunters.” Orita later
pronounced that “The American ASW technique at that time was very poor…” The British essayed to coach
the recondite and insular US Navy on ASW, but their efforts were rebuffed for
months. “Americans must learn by their own mistakes,” said Rear-Admiral R.S.
Edwards, US Navy, to a British Commander. “…and we have plenty of ships to
spare.” This egregious statement betrayed a callous disregard for the safety
and lives of both Americans and allied sailors and merchant seamen. At that
point the Briton told the higher-ranking American officer: “We are deeply
concerned about your reluctance to cooperate and we are not prepared to
sacrifice our men and ships to your incompetence and obstinacy.” Things got
even less pleasant when Admiral King had to deal with the British directly. In
his 1981 memoirs, Rear Admiral Jeffry Brock, RCN (Retired) described a noisy
altercation he witnessed between Admiral King and a British Admiral named Noble.
King had stormed out of a meeting with Noble, and looked emotionally drained
from the experience. The normally calm and affable Admiral Noble then emerged
from the room, also looking exhausted, and said to Brock, “I’m sorry you had
to witness such a disagreeable scene. What stupid, ignorant uncouth bastards
some of these people are. God preserve us from this sort of leadership if the
Americans are going to be of any assistance in winning this war.”
“Anglophobia did, no doubt, animate King in some measure,” wrote Cohen and
Gooch. “On a number of occasions he went out of his way to inform admirals of
the Royal Navy that Britannia no longer ruled the waves and that the United
States Navy was the largest and best in the world. He rejected British
cooperation in the final drive on Japan (partly on logistical grounds) – a
rejection later overruled, luckily for the American forces in the Pacific. It is
even said that he wished to change the navy uniform in an effort to eradicate
any resemblance to Royal Navy uniforms.” This, ironically, came from a man
who, as we will see in just a moment, eventually had to accept help from the
despised British and Canadians for convoy escort in US territorial waters. As noted above, the US
Navy’s reluctance to cooperate with or listen to the British was not merely an
issue in the Atlantic. British and Australian soldiers and marines had similar
obstacles when dealing with the US Navy in the Pacific also. Russell Parkin
offered the following: “The reports of British officers seconded to Australia
to assist with the establishment of amphibious training, such as
Lieutenant-Colonel Walker of the Royal Marines, are filled with frustration at
being unable to institute what they considered to be useful training, After one
exercise involving the RAN’s Landing Ship Infantry (LSI) HMAS Manoora and the USN’s APA (large amphibious transport) USS Henry
T. Allen, Walker wrote acerbically: ‘It was quite a good exercise but, all
the same, there is a lot which they (the Americans) could learn from us (the
British) – if only they would!... What worries us is the American
unwillingness to learn anything from British methods or to let the Australians
and British have any say in running preparations for amphibious ops. For
instance: Manoora was made to lower
her boats empty and to go through that fatuous American boat-circling drill
before the boats left to go inshore; from the beach we could hear the roar of
landing craft engines five miles out to sea for one hours before the 0200 hrs
landing.’” During a shore bombardment mission, an Australian officer named
Vickery stated that the US Navy personnel on the USS
Lamson were “‘unwilling to depart from set and standard ideas on
procedure’ and ‘did not seem to appreciate the Army’s problems.’” Although Anglophobia was
obviously widespread in the US Navy, Admiral King was the main culprit. And,
reassuringly, the British were not alone in their reaction to the man; some
senior US commanders also took quite a dim view of Admiral King. According to
Hickam, “Even General Dwight D. Eisenhower would say of his fellow American
officer: ‘He is an arbitrary stubborn type, with not too much brains and a
tendency toward bullying his juniors. One thing that might help win this war is
to shoot King.” US Secretary of War Henry Stimson did not think very highly of
the US Navy’s senior leadership in general, either. Cohen and Gooch said that
Stimson “sketched the most biting portrait of hidebound American admirals,
adamant in their refusal to look at the experience of others or even common
sense, men who ‘frequently seemed to retire from the realm of logic into a dim
religious world in which Neptune was God, Mahan, his prophet, and the United
States Navy the only true Church.’” Returning to the issue of
ASW, and just as an aside, Dan van der Vat professed that unlike the Germans,
the Japanese submarine force never made a concerted effort to eradicate American
merchant shipping, and for that the United States should be eternally grateful.
“The United States was also singularly fortunate in that the Axis seldom
functioned as a military alliance in the Far East: Admiral King’s troubles,
had be been faced with coordinated submarine campaigns in both oceans
simultaneously, hardly bear thinking about.” Astonishingly, “German urgings
and appeals for attacks on American merchant shipping with the outstanding
Japanese torpedoes (originally developed for surface vessels) persistently fell
on deaf ears” in Tokyo. Like the Americans, the
Canadians, too, had serious ASW deficiencies, especially in the early years.
However, by 1942, the Canadians had become more efficient and aggressive at
fighting the U-boats, and as a result, the German U-boat commanders soon
discovered that it was much easier to hunt in American waters rather than off
the coast of Canada. Sarty noted that for a time Royal Canadian Navy warships
actually escorted convoys out of New York City and through U-boat infested
American waters because the much larger US Navy was totally unprepared for such
operations, and even the signate President Roosevelt once confided to Winston
Churchill that “My Navy has been definitely slack in preparing for this
submarine war off our coast…You learned the lesson two years ago. We still
have to learn it.” Roosevelt also quipped that “The admirals are something
to cope with – and I should know… To change anything in the Na-a-vy is like
punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right, and you punch it with your
left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it
was before you started punching.” The tenacious German U-boat
commanders took great liberties in the poorly protected waters off the US
Atlantic seaboard, insulting the hapless US Navy at every possible opportunity.
One such skipper, Kaleun Johann Mohr, was especially enthusiastic about hunting
American ships in American home waters in March, 1942: “He had not only mauled
the American merchant fleet, but a recent observation had convinced him that he
would have no trouble finding more targets for his remaining torpedoes,” wrote
Hickam. “The American freighters and tankers had begun sailing close to shore,
practically steaming over the buoys that marked the dangerous shoals off the
capes of North Carolina. Mohr believed there could only be one reason for this
foolhardiness. The merchant masters must believe that the U-boats could not
operate in such shallow water. If it had been the coast of the British Isles,
Mohr knew this might be sound reasoning. The
U-boats needed depth to maneuver and hide when the Royal Navy was around. But
the American Navy? Mohr only needed 30 feet of water, perhaps less, because he
and the rest of the U-boat commanders were willing to attack from the surface in
American waters. This meant all they had to do was go to a buoy and wait.”
(emphasis mine). In the first six months of
1942, there was “an aggregate of 397 ships sunk in U.S. Navy-protected waters.
And the totals do not include the many ships damaged. Overall, the numbers
represent one of the greatest maritime disasters in history and the American
nation’s worst-ever defeat at sea.” In return, the US Navy was only able to
sink six U-boats! (During the same period, the British et al. were credited with
32 U-boat kills.) So dire was the situation that at one point General George C.
Marshall, US Army, wrote to Admiral King to say “‘another month or so of
this’ would so cripple their means of transport they would be unable to bring
US forces to bear against the enemy.” Indeed, the Germans had a very good
chance of disabling the entire US east coast, as Hickam told us, if only Hitler
had permitted Doenitz to have the required numbers of U-boats, and the time to
do it. If that had happened, Hickam speculated that the losses to the US
“might have proven terminal.” During those deadly months of 1942, “The
American Atlantic coast no longer belonged to the Americans. It quite literally
had become the safe hunting ground for the U-boats of Nazi Germany,” said
Hickam, with U-boats destroying US ships “just a few miles off Norfolk,
practically within sight of the American fleet.” Admiral Doenitz told a
reporter in 1942 “Our submarines are operating close inshore along the coast
of the United States of America, so that bathers and sometimes entire coastal
cities are witnesses to that drama of war, whose visual climaxes are constituted
by the red glorioles of blazing tankers.” By the end of June, Captain Wilder
D. Baker, US Navy, finally said something about his Navy’s poor showing in the
Atlantic – “‘The Battle of the Atlantic is being lost.’” After much destruction, the
seemingly intransigent Americans began to listen to the British and Canadians,
but only because of direct orders from the President himself, who told Admiral
King to establish a convoy escort system, as the British had long suggested. At
the beginning, though, British ships were far better equipped and trained for
ASW and convoy escort than were the US Navy’s ships. In 1939, said the Late
Harvard Professor Samuel Morison, only about 60 US destroyers were equipped with
sonar, whereas the RN had 165 such destroyers, plus 54 other ships. Hard to
believe this could happen in a Navy that was destined to be “second to none”
by President Wilson back in 1916. Morison also noted that in 1942 “The British
were still far ahead of us in the use of asdic (as they called sonar); their
sound operators on escort vessels were giving their officers more and better
information than was supplied by ours. An American observer at the British
Anti-Submarine School at Dunoon reported in June 1942 that lack of a specific,
standard operating procedure for search and attack, such as the Royal Navy had
had for some time, was the outstanding cause of our weakness in anti-submarine
warfare.” Interestingly, Morison, (an
American) referred to “asdic” as the British term for “sonar”, when in
fact it was the British who invented ASDIC (Anti-Submarine Detection
Investigation Committee), in 1917, then gave it to the Americans years later,
who in turn gave it their own name, sonar. Brock, a Canadian who had served both
in the RN and the RCN, noted that because of this change of names, and the fact
that American-made sets were proudly labeled “Made in USA” many Americans
came to believe, incorrectly, that it was an American invention, rather than a
British one – whilst, I am constrained to point out, the earliest ASW sonar
set was actually developed in 1915 -- by the French. “Our asdic gear, called
today sonar, and used for locating submerged submarines, had been invented by
the British Navy some twenty years before, and was still considered a secret. In
fact we did not hand this invention over to the United States Navy until after
they joined us after Pearl Harbor,” said Brock. The Americans apparently
already had similar systems, but they were obviously not as good, hence the
transfer of technology from Britain. “The same thing happened with our radar,
which we had originally invented and deployed, calling it RDF. It is highly
probable that the modern USN officer believes that these modern essentials of
maritime warfare were invented in his own country.”
It took time, but eventually
the Americans were able to hold their own with the British in ASW prowess. US
Navy ASW skills improved dramatically (but temporarily) and it is frequently
understated in the US that most of the ASW operations in the Atlantic were, in
fact, conducted by the British and Canadians. For its part, the US Navy is
credited with destroying 127 U-boats at sea from 1941 to 1945, and that is a
very high number indeed. But it pales in comparison to the work done by the
British and Canadians from 1939 to 1945. The combined British/Canadian total was
491 (Canada started the war with a navy of only 11 ships, 5 of which were
minesweepers, and just 1,800 men in the regular Navy, but by the end, the RCN
accounted for the destruction or capture of nearly 50 German submarines, whereas
the US Navy began the war with over 337,000 personnel and hundreds of ships),
and thus it is an overstatement of the highest order for America or the US Navy
to take sole credit for winning the Battle of the Atlantic, or for defeating
Germany. I say this only because many Americans have been taught that it was so.
Admiral Sir Max Horne, RN, who served as Commander-in-Chief Western Approaches
during World War II, was said to have been “cynical about American methods and
a little resentful about the way in which the American press and other news
media continued to ascribe the credit for our successes to the efforts of
American forces alone.” And much of what the
American public was told were outright fabrications, said Regan. “If the
propaganda campaign next launched by the US Navy had been perpetrated by Josef
Goebbels in Germany or Josef Stalin in Russia, Americans would have nodded
sagely and reflected on the virtues of democracy and a free press. Instead the
campaign was all-American and was used to conceal the failures of the same navy
department and of its leader, Admiral Ernest King. Basically, the Navy
department began issuing lies. They claimed twenty-eight U-boats had been sunk
off the east coast whereas the correct figure was nil.” Regan summarized that
“…the Navy PR officers were not so easily defeated as their anti-submarine
operation,” in what amounted to a vast spin campaign to protect negligent
senior admirals from public disgrace, and possible dismissal. As Sadkovich said, at the
end of World War II, with both Germany and Japan defeated, the US Navy emerged
as "the most successful navy ever--although its success clearly owed
something to the British and Canadians." Even Morison applauded the Royal
Canadian Navy’s contribution in the Battle of the Atlantic: "Too much
praise cannot be given to that gallant, efficient force of our nearest
neighbor." The Imperial War Museum in London went even further, saying in
one of their publications that “Without the Royal Canadian Navy, the Battle of
the Atlantic could not have been won.” The American historian Ronald Spector
also concluded that although few Canadian ships participated in the key North
Atlantic battles of April-May 1943, “had it not been for the brave and
tenacious efforts of Canada’s largely amateur sailors, who at times were
providing nearly 40 percent of all North Atlantic escorts, there would have been
no time or opportunity to assemble the decisive components of the Allied victory
of 1943.” The little guys here clearly made a big difference (As I do my best
to be intellectually honest, however, one should also read Marc Milner’s more
critical account of the RCN’s performance).
As we all know, the US supplied ships to Britain and Canada during the war, and
much ado has been made of this in the US, and there have been many statements
that US ships were better equipped than those of other countries, which was true
in some cases, but Brock also noted that even some of the newly constructed
American-made ships were, in point of fact, rather poorly designed. His ship, HMS
Bazely, was built in the US for the Royal Navy, and during construction he
noted that “The United States Navy yards abounded with technical experts of
every description who had never been to sea. They did not understand my
reluctance to embark upon a long ocean voyage without a magnetic compass of some
sort.” The US Navy insisted that only a gyrocompass was needed, but Brock’s
small Captain-class frigate had been
equipped with a gyroscope intended for a battleship or an aircraft carrier.
“It simply couldn’t take the punishment required of any gyrocompass in a
small vessel encountering heavy seas.” He also complained about the
American-designed ship’s ridiculously unwieldy communications equipment. The Bazely
had 102 telephones and an automatic switch board, whereas a similar British ship
would have been able to manage with just six. “These elaborate internal
communication arrangements filled me with dismay because I had no idea how we
were going to keep such a plethora of flimsy instruments fully operational under
seagoing conditions,” he reported. “I asked one of the navy yard electrical
engineers what we would do, for instance, with our bridge telephones in a heavy
sea when our open bridge was being washed down with salt water. His reply was
simple, and I guess, logical: ‘If the bastard busts, throw it overboard and
plug in a new one. There’ll be plenty in your central stores. We mass produce
them, you know, and they only cost twenty-three cents apiece.’ Such startling
revelations as these in all departments of the ship gave us an entirely fresh
outlook on how Americans get things done.” Brock’s disdain for US Navy
communications equipment continued even after the war, when he did his best to
sideline Canadian attempts to adapt US Navy systems. As he said “As far as I
was concerned, we already had a better communications system than anyone else in
the world except, possibly, the Royal Navy.” It is also ironic to note
that the US Navy also apprompted or bought warships from Canada and the UK
(including an aircraft carrier, HMS
Victorious). This last comment is a minor, perhaps trivial point of course,
but it, along with the U-boat hunting statistics mentioned above and the reality
that Canadian and British ships had to escort allied shipping through American
waters, surprises many who espouse the traditional “If it weren’t for us,
you’d all be speaking German” polemics so often recited in certain lay
circles. Actually, when the British deployed some two dozen ASW trawlers to the
US east coast in 1942, the British viewed it as a “rescue mission.” That was World War II, but
some things never change, or they change only temporarily. In fact, “By 1958,
the CNO, Admiral Arleigh Burke, wanted ‘to know why the Navy’s ASW effort,
despite all the high tech, was so weak and ineffective.’” In 1959, during
the US Navy’s first test of a carrier task force’s ability to deal with
nuclear submarines, the submarine USS
Skipjack was chosen to play the enemy. According to Lieutenant Commander
Stuart Soward, RCN (Retired), the Skipjack
was “unrestricted in movements” and she proved to be too much for the US
Navy surface ships and aircraft during the exercise. However, a single
experimental Tracker aircraft of the RCN, with its new Canadian-designed ASWTNS
(Anti-Submarine Warfare Tactical Navigation System) was also involved, and it
was the only aircraft that could detect and maintain contact with the Skipjack. Sadly, the Canadian tracker was not carrying any exercise
weapons, and could not attack, however if it had, Soward said the submarine
would have been finished. The US Navy apparently agreed, and was so impressed
with the performance of the Canadian plane and its systems that it almost
immediately placed orders for the ASWTNS system. Most Americans do not know
this, but the US Navy found itself, once again, dependent on the Royal Canadian
Navy for essential ASW forces during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. When Kennedy
decided to quarantine Cuba, the US Navy, still far superior to the Soviet Navy,
at least on paper, had to seek a coadjutor because it did not have enough ASW
escorts to do the job (a familiar story). An American admiral came to Canada to
request assistance in dealing with Soviet submarines, and the Canadians obliged
by deploying much of their Navy, RCAF ASW aircraft, and the two British
submarines under their control, to sweep the North Atlantic for Soviet
submarines. According to David Robinson, the US Navy established a 600 mile
submarine barrier south of the Grand Banks, and “It was a huge undertaking,
and with American naval forces stretched to the limit with the Cuban blockade,
major Canadian participation was essential to its success.” Later, the
Canadian ships were asked to move further south, and just as they did in the
early days of 1942, they patrolled the waters approaching New York Harbor. As
the historian Tony German articulated, “The RCN took over a very substantial
segment of what would have been a U.S. responsibility and certainly allowed at
least one (anti-submarine) task group to move down further south.” In
gratitude, the US Chief of Naval Operations (Admiral George Anderson, US Navy)
and his wife came to Canada to have a private dinner at the home of the Canadian
Chief of Naval Staff, just to say “thank you” for the help. It’s great to
have allies, and the RCN also depends greatly on the US Navy (obviously), but
one must wonder why the world’s greatest navy was not able to fight its own
battles in its home waters, no less,
not once, but twice since the beginning of World War II. And as I mentioned
before, even now, the US Navy relies on Canadian escort ships to supplement its
Carrier Battle Groups because it does not have enough of its own. Is this what a
superpower’s navy is supposed to do? The embarrassment for the US
Navy does not stop there. If we look back at the early 1980s, we would see that
Canada’s cheeseparing, anti-military federal leadership had allowed the
Canadian Navy to almost rust out, yet due to its intensive training and emphasis
on ASW excellence, it was still better at hunting submarines than the US Navy.
In 1983, a retired British naval officer and Senior Fellow at the Brookings
Institution, Mike MccGwire, told a Halifax newspaper that “ship-for-ship,”
the Canadian Navy’s elderly ASW destroyers were still “better equipped,
maintained, and trained” and “infinitely better” at ASW than American
surface ships. At the same time, the new Canadian CP-140 Aurora aircraft was
arguably far superior to its elderly cousin, the American P-3 Orion, and the Oberon-class
submarines were much better listening platforms than the US Navy nuclear
submarines of the time. During his service on the elderly nuclear submarine USS
Plunger during the late 1980s, Karam offered that “We
were almost never detected
during games with our own Navy, and then only
when we approached on an agreed-upon
bearing at a given time and usually
cavitating or going active on sonar. I
took many photos of our surface
ships at close range at a time when they
were unaware of our presence… Plunger
made successful attacks against US carriers, cruisers, destroyers, frigates and
a battleship during my time on-board.” Lugubriously, not much has
improved in the US Navy since, and US submarines, ships, and aircraft today are
often not as well prepared for ASW as Canadian units. Today, Canada’s incoming
Victoria-class diesel submarines (formerly the UK Upholder-class),
Halifax-class frigates, AKA the Canadian Patrol Frigate (CPF), both of
which are or will be equipped with the AN/SQR-501 CANTASS towed
sonar array system, are world-class ASW assets. Deployed in the mid 1990s,
CANTASS weds the existing US-designed SQR-19 towed array with a “breakthrough
technology” Canadian processor (the AN/UYS-501), and at that time both
American and Australian naval officers called it the best in the world, as was
demonstrated in many naval exercises. Both of those countries subsequently
bought variants of this processor from Canada. In addition, the modernized Tribal-class
destroyers, which were “the first warships in the world to depend entirely on
gas turbine propulsion,” and the updated CP-140 aircraft are or will be in
many ways better equipped, better designed, more suitable, and better trained
for ASW than their current American equivalents, although the US Navy’s P-3
Orions will soon be replaced, if all goes well. If one compares contemporary
US nuclear submarines to the small Canadian diesel submarine fleet today, again
one finds reasons to believe that the Canadians have better undersea ASW
platforms. For example, contrary to the misleading agitprop now in circulation,
some diesel submarines have excellent weapons systems, comparable to those found
in the much more expensive nuclear submarines. Compton-Hall has said that the
Canadian Victoria-class submarine has
“an exceptionally good weapon system, equivalent to an SSN with
Ferranti-Gresham-Lion DCC fire control… the submarine is extremely quiet,”
and David Miller, formerly of Jane’s Information group, postulated in 2002
that the Canadian submarines “are the most sophisticated and capable
diesel-electric submarines ever built.” Said Commander Jonathan Powis, RN, who
commanded one of the Victoria-class boats while they were in British
service: “The greatest strength of the class is its small acoustic signature.
Benefiting from 35 years’ money and effort expended in quieting
nuclear-powered submarines, they are extraordinarily quiet. On main motor they
were shown repeatedly to be all but undetectable by passive sonar. Even when
snorkeling, they had a signature comparable to a modern SSN… They presented a
difficult target to active sonar as well because they were small and fully
acoustically tiled, and much of their superstructure was made from composites.
Moreover, because of their size, adversaries could not easily exploit magnetic
anomaly detection and other nonacoustic signatures.” A small quiet diesel
submarine can be exceptionally good at detecting an enemy, while not being
detected herself. The same cannot be said of
US Navy nuclear submarines, which are considerably larger and, depending on what
submariner you choose to believe, perhaps somewhat noisier. During RIMPAC 2004,
for example, a Canadian CP-140 detected and tracked the redoubtable nuclear
submarine USS Charlotte using sonobuoys and her magnetic anomaly
detector. The ostensibly mighty Charlotte was depicted simply as “a
huge metal object disrupting the earth’s magnetic field.” The initial stage
of the hunt was scripted (the Canadians knew that the Charlotte was at or
near the surface in a specific area), but after submerging the Charlotte
did her best to evade the plane, and even tried to leave the designated exercise
area. Nonetheless, the Canadian plane was able to maintain contact and track the
submarine. As one pleased Canadian officer reflected, “This was good
training… we had him early and we held him at an extended distance.” The Charlotte
tried to shake the patrol plane, but she did not succeed. As the submariners
say, “Aircraft, mark on top!” Fortunately,
these ASW failures and wantages are finally and slowly becoming public knowledge
in the United States, for as the Congressional Budget Office revealed in 2001:
“Some analysts argue that the Navy is not very
good at locating diesel-electric submarines, especially in noisy, shallower
waters near coastal areas. Exercises with allied navies that use diesel-electric
submarines confirm that problem. U.S. antisubmarine units reportedly have had
trouble detecting and countering diesel-electric submarines of South American
countries. Israeli diesel-electric submarines, which until recently were
relatively old, are said to always ‘sink’ some of the large and powerful
warships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet in exercises. And most recently, an Australian
Collins class submarine penetrated a U.S. carrier battle group and was in a
position to sink an aircraft carrier during exercises off Hawaii in May 2000.
Thus, if a real opponent had even one such submarine with a competent commanding
officer and crew, it could dramatically limit the freedom of action of U.S.
naval forces in future conflicts.” For more on the relative deficiencies of US
Navy ASW, please see the section titled “Lack of Training, Overrated Technology…” A Lucky Break at Midway & the Big
Carrier Navy
“I’d rather be
lucky than good.” - Vernon “Lefty” Gomez Verily it is a fair comment
to say that foreign navies openly and unashamedly flaunt when one of their
submarines “sinks” an American carrier on exercises. They have no problem
letting the news media know about their triumphs. With a few courageous and
candid exceptions, such as the people quoted in this paper, American nuclear
submariners generally do not publicly reveal their own accomplishments
against US Navy aircraft carriers. If they do, they do it anonymously, usually
after they leave the service, or they provide only the sketchiest of details.
Why is this so? Former US Navy officer Jerry Burns gave a pretty straightforward
answer in 2000 -- because “Anyone who says something is wrong gets thrown out
of the Navy.” Also, as Professor Thomas Etzhold pointed out, the US Navy does
not want anyone to know that its carriers have been sunk (or even seriously
damaged) in exercises. Ergo, officers are strongly encouraged to keep quiet
about such incidents. Obviously, these gag orders only apply to US Navy
personnel, not to foreign crews. The author of the 1987 book War Games,
Thomas B. Allen, described this naval censorship during an interview with the
American NPR network in 2003. “The Navy had a kind of unwritten rule: You
can't sink an aircraft carrier in a war game. And if you talked to any
submariner who had been in either an exercise or a war game, you get a whole
story about how many times they really sank aircraft carriers.” In 2000, Gutmann observed
that “People on active duty do not tell reporters the truth if the truth is
something they know their COs will not want them to say. Many, many service
people have ruined or lost their careers testing this rule.” The Navy’s
Public Affair Officers (PAOs) closely monitor interactions between journalists
and Navy personnel to ensure that no one complains or says anything that does
not tow the company line. In Gutmann’s experience: …”The PAO’s very
presence, his dogged insistence on gluing himself to the reporter’s side, puts
a wall between the reporter and the world he is trying to understand. When one
does manage to corner an Actual Sailor (with the PAO a couple of feet away,
trying to appear as if he really is just suddenly concerned with the condition
of his finger-nails or the patch of linoleum he’s found himself standing on),
the sailor will stand rigidly at attention (while the PAO is watching the sailor
out of the corner of his eye), and then proceed to spout a lot of boilerplate
that the reporter might as well have copied off the official DOD-sponsored Navy
Web page. Going ‘off script’ in today’s military is too often a career
killer, and nobody’s ready to take the risk of saying what they really think
unless they’ve signed their resignation papers.” Hard to believe, but to me
this does not sound very much different (or better) than life in the old Soviet
Navy, with its Political Officers and GRU agents aboard ship, watching and
listening for any sign of free, unstructured thought. Thankfully, in the US
Navy, this PAO surveillance only pops up when journalists are aboard ship. In this world in which great
effort is made to conceal the truth, it is not surprising that a carrier cannot
be “sunk,” even if it really did
happen, such as in 1964, when an enemy UDT team sank the old escort carrier USS
Card while she was in shallow water in the Saigon River. According to
Dunnigan and Nofi’s 1999 book Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War,
she did sink, and everyone knows it, but at the time the Navy could not bring
itself to officially admit that one of its carriers, even a small one that had
been converted to simply haul helicopters and planes (not operate them), could
possibly be sunk so easily. The headline “US Carrier Sunk in Vietnam” would
not look good in the US newspapers, but the North Vietnamese felt otherwise, and
issued a postage stamp that proclaimed “Aircraft carrier of America Sunk in
Harbor of Saigon.” Although by no means a supercarrier, the sinking of the Card
was especially hurtful since she won a Presidential Unit Citation in World War
II, so instead of saying she had been sunk, the Navy said she had only been
“damaged” and quickly “repaired,” rather than sunk and refloated. In
other words, the gist of all this is that the truth is suppressed for “the
good of the service.” We can therefore deduce that the good of the service is
the paramount concern in the US Navy; not the good of the country, and not the
good of the taxpayers who bankroll these expensive platforms. The US Navy’s aircraft carriers have plenty of
supporters and wagtails, of course, including many politicians who cash in
politically on the jobs that naval contracts provide to their constituents. One
of their most common defenses is to invoke a sophism and imply that since no big
American carrier has been sunk since World War II, America’s big carriers
cannot be sunk. This is tantamount to saying “My residence is in one of the
most dangerous areas of Washington, DC, and in 60 years, it has never been
burglarized. The only possible explanation is that it must be burglar-proof.”
The real reason that no big American carrier has been sunk in the past 60 years
could simply be that no one in the area had the motivation, necessity and
opportunity to try. Every time I hear this specious reasoning, or some variation
of it, I quote the Late Newton D. Baker, former Secretary of War in the 1920s.
Baker scoffed at Billy Mitchell’s claim that the so-called “unsinkable”
and “invulnerable” battleship could be destroyed by air-delivered bombs.
When Mitchell suggested doing a bombing experiment with aircraft and a
stationary German battleship, Baker said “That idea is so damned nonsensical
and impossible that I’m willing to stand on the bridge of a battleship while
that nitwit tries to hit it from the air.” Had he done so, Secretary Baker
might well have been killed, because as we all know now, Mitchell was right, the
battleship went down, and Japanese aircraft did even better by later sinking two
British battleships that were fully manned, equipped, and underway, but once
again, I digress. John Lehman was quite right when he said that no
big American carriers were sunk during the war, but it is a fallacy to
assume that this is because of some special quality of the American aircraft
carrier (which, by the way, were more vulnerable to kamikaze attacks than
British carriers because the American ships did not have armored decks), for if
the Japanese had succeeded at Midway or Guadalcanal, and the US Navy should
thank its lucky stars that they did not, we might not even be discussing the US
Navy supercarrier today. Nor is it necessarily true that US carrier task forces
have been a successful deterrent either because, as the Malayans aptly say:
“Don’t think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm.” Those
carriers did not deter the North Koreans or the North Vietnamese, either, for
that matter. As former naval
intelligence officer
Scott
Shuger reminded us, the world’s largest carrier in World War II, the
71,890 ton Imperial Japanese Navy Ship Shinano, was sunk in 1944 “by
four torpedo hits from a single American submarine” (the USS Archerfish).
According to the sophic Captain Joseph Enright, US Navy, the skipper of the Archerfish,
the Shinano was heavily armored and well-protected from torpedoes: “The
weight of the steel installed for defensive purposes totaled 17,700 tons –
about one-quarter of Shinano’s displacement and equal to the tonnage of
many light cruisers… As for the watertight integrity of the ship, there should
have been little cause for concern. Since 1935 Japanese warships were tested
first by filling the underwater compartments with water, then, after the
equipment was installed, by conducting air tests. The compartments of Shinano,
which had been tested hydrostatically, were structurally sound, and watertight
doors had been installed.” And even though the Shinano
was unable to run at full speed because some of her boilers were unserviceable,
she could still make more than 20 knots; faster than any diesel submarine. Like
the Americans do today, The Japanese considered their first and only
“supercarrier” to be virtually unsinkable, and yet four torpedoes violently
disproved that claim on November 29, 1944. (If four US torpedoes could do this,
imagine what horrors the Japanese could have inflicted at Midway, with the best
torpedoes in the world, if only they had employed their submarines as
effectively as the Germans did.) This achievement lends credence to the
statement of French novelist Honore de Balzac that “Power is not revealed by
striking hard or often, but by striking true.” Yes, the Shinano was not fully tested and
cleared for combat duty, but the US Navy has most definitely sent carriers to
sea when they were less than fully ready for combat, too. In the 1970s, the
carrier USS Saratoga almost sank,
twice, simply because of poor maintenance. Williscroft attested that the USS
Independence was far from shipshape during her deployment in early 1998 (the
conditions aboard were described as “atrocious”, with “critical
maintenance being neglected… decks were waxed, but the crew was incapable of
handling a real emergency.”) Such large but poorly maintained ships would be
relatively easy to destroy, as was the Shinano. Four years later, the carriers USS John F
Kennedy and USS Kitty Hawk failed a major readiness inspection and a light-off assessment (respectively), with the Kennedy’s propulsion system declared “unsafe for
operation.” In late 2001, the Kennedy was a deeply troubled ship that
had failed a scheduled INSURV inspection just a few months before deployment:
“…three of the ship’s four aircraft elevators, used to bring aircraft from
the hangar deck to the flight deck, were inoperable; two of the four catapults
that launch aircraft were in bad shape, and the flight deck’s firefighting
equipment was ‘seriously degraded.’” Even worse, one of the Kennedy’s
men said that the dilapidated ship, which required extensive emergency repairs
to make ready, was not the worst ship he’d seen in his 19 years of US naval
service. After the repairs were made and the Kennedy deployed in 2002,
some Navy wives were still not sure that their husbands would be safe on such a
run-down ship. “‘Will the Kennedy come home after it leaves?” wrote
Karen Moore, whose husband is attached to the ship. ‘I worry that this ship is
destined for disaster.’” Such a disaster, arguably, is more likely if the US
Navy continues to deploy poorly maintained, undertrained and undermanned
aircraft carriers. The Japanese did this sixty years ago with the Shinano,
and it could just as easily happen to ships like the Kennedy and the Independence
today. Even worse, at least the Japanese did not have to contend with attacks by
nuclear-tipped torpedoes or cruise missiles, a fate that could now befall the US
Navy at any time. While
on the subject, US Navy battleships have also been deployed in poor materiel
condition, and during the US Navy's halcyon days of ample spondulicks under
Ronald Reagan, to boot. According to military historian Geoffrey Regan, the
battleship USS Iowa, launched in 1942,
then modernized and reactivated in 1984, was nevertheless in many ways still an
ancient vessel that was "basically unreliable." By the late 1980s, as Regan put it: "the Iowa was not in good shape. The new captain found a loose hatch in
one of the turrets that had been leaking hydraulic fluid for two years. The crew
in the turret used twenty-five watt light bulbs for fear of blowing fuses if
they used fifty watt bulbs. In the gun-loading areas, bags of explosive
propellant were torn and were leaking black powder. Nor was the crew up to
scratch, quantitatively or qualitatively. The ship was short of good petty
officers, had an annual turnover of crew of forty percent, and in one turret was
short of thirty-seven of the 118 men who usually served there." Not only
was the ship short of men, many of the men she did have were “dopers, marginal
personnel” said the Iowa’s skipper,
Captain Fred Moosally, US Navy. The Iowa’s
deficiencies were obvious to many of her officers, including Lieutenant
Commander Dennis Flynn, US Navy, the director of the ship’s strike warfare
center. Flynn predicted in 1988 that the Iowa would be “sunk” in free-play
exercises, and he was proven right. As former naval officer William C. Thompson
II (no relation) recorded, in the fall of 1988, “The Iowa
engaged NATO forces and was ‘sunk’ by a Dutch frigate hiding lurking behind
a civilian oil tanker.” A few months later, in the Caribbean, the Iowa
was again “trounced by the British, Canadian, and West German forces.” In
April, 1989, as the story goes, the novice crewmen in the Iowa’s number 2 turret were put on the spot during an exercise
because they had to fire the guns with little or no experience with the
equipment or procedures, and to complicate matters even more, they had never
worked together before. The resultant explosion killed 47 men. As journalist
Peter Cary concluded, “If ever there was a ship seemed fated for catastrophe,
it was the U.S.S. Iowa.” A poorly
maintained ship, like the aircraft carriers aforementioned, was sent to sea too
soon, and it was theoretically destroyed in two exercises, and then partially
destroyed in real life. A very sad story, but a strong reminder for the US Navy
that even their most impressive ships can be destroyed easily, especially if
they are not well maintained and their crews not well trained. (And no study of
this kind would be complete without referencing the USS Pueblo debacle of 1968, in which a poorly trained, badly
maintained, poorly equipped and overmanned US spy ship was sent on a badly
planned mission to North Korea, was quickly captured (without a fight) and the
crew was incarcerated for almost a year. The US did not retaliate, and North
Korea still retains the Pueblo as a
war trophy to this day. Perhaps this incident can explain why the North Koreans
appear to have absolutely no fear of the US Navy.) The pro-carrier argument I mentioned above loses
even more strength when we consider how easily the US Navy might have lost the
Battle of Midway in 1942. In his brilliant work “Our Midway Disaster: Japan
Springs a Trap, June 4, 1942 ” Professor Theodore F. Cook theorized that had
the Japanese been just a little bit more diligent and skeptical about the phony
radio reports about Midway’s water problems, there would have been a very high
probability that they would have won the ensuing battle. “Given the deadly
suddenness of carrier warfare,” he noted, “How easily might it have been the
U.S. Navy mourning the loss of three carriers… in exchange for, perhaps, one
or two Japanese flattops on June 4, 1942?” Furthermore, he recommended that
his readers ponder a rather unpleasant theoretical possibility: “What would
have happened if the Japanese had won at Midway? With only one carrier left in
the Pacific, how could we have resisted their advance?” One should never
forget that the American victory at Midway was far from certain, and has been
often been called a “miracle.” Heavily outnumbered and, much more
importantly, thoroughly outclassed by pilots with substantially more flight
experience and presumably much higher morale, the Americans prevailed, but this
was largely due to the gullibility of a few Japanese naval personnel. The Japanese were trained to much higher
standards than were the Americans, especially in night fighting, and were better
equipped in many categories, especially, said Morison, in “pyrotechnics and
optics. Their starshells and parachute flares were brighter and more dependable
than ours; their binoculars were so much better, especially for night work, as
to be eagerly sought after by American officer and bluejackets. Their naval
officers were excellent navigators.” Also, “The Japanese Navy conducted its
battle training in remote waters where it could not be observed, and where they
would be hardened by exposure to the elements. That this rigorous and realistic
training under combat conditions paid off, was all too evident in the first
months of the war… In contrast, the United States Navy normally carried out
peacetime maneuvers and exercises in southern waters or where fine weather
prevailed. Extra precautions had to be taken to avoid casualties and consequent
unwelcome publicity.” He also spoke of Japanese superiority in torpedo
training, “Moreover, the Japanese Navy fired torpedoes freely in practice and
at maneuvers, thus improving them constantly; while the United States Navy had
to economize when testing warheads and exploders, and never found out what was
the matter with its torpedoes until the war had been going on many months.” Orita, interestingly and provocatively,
articulated that Midway could have been salvaged if only the Japanese had
properly deployed its submarines to locate and attack the American carriers:
“Had our submarines been used properly and effectively, the history of the
Pacific War might have been written quite differently.” And as Captain Mitsuo
Fuchida, IJN, observed, the losses at Midway could have been quickly avenged and
the vestigial components of the US Pacific fleet erased if only Admiral Yamamoto
had the nerve to order his additional carriers to Midway to continue the fight,
but instead he sent them to the Aleutians. For the Japanese, a battle that
should have been a cake walk was lost because, by their own admission, it was
they who made “all the errors in this action,” despite overwhelming tactical
superiority in most areas. This might lead some to conclude that the US Navy did
not so much “win” at Midway, as much as the Japanese simply botched what
should have been a certain victory. By the way, although most historians believe that
Midway was the turning point in the war against Japan, not everyone agrees. Some
believe that the Japanese had a second chance to neutralize the US Navy in the
Pacific at Guadalcanal in September, 1942. Orita conjectured that had the
Japanese done what the Americans had expected at Guadalcanal, and that was to
confront the Americans with a vastly superior force, both morally and
materially, the Americans would have lost the battle, the remaining US carrier
in the Pacific would have been destroyed, and Japan would have been unfettered
and unrestrained in the Pacific for a very long time. Losing the carrier Wasp
in September, 1942, to the Imperial Japanese submarine I-19,
the US Navy had only a single carrier left in the Pacific, which had luckily
avoided the torpedo that took her escort, the battleship North Carolina, out of action. During that month, “One air strike
and two submarine attacks had very nearly wrecked what part of the American
fleet could be used against us. Now they had only one (carrier) left in the
pacific that could fight, USS Hornet.
And only one battleship, USS Washington…
Against this single carrier in mid-September, our navy could range eight. While Hornet
could put about 75 planes into the air against us, Zuikaku,
Shokaku, Zuiho, Taiyo, Hiyo,
Unyo and Shoho could
launch more than 360, all told. Against Washington
we could pit Mushashi and Yamato,
mightiest battleships ever built, plus eight other battleships far superior to
the obsolescent ones America was keeping well to the rear. Mid-September of 1942
was the period of golden opportunity for the Combined Fleet.” The Japanese
were still much better trained than the Americans at that point, and it looked
as though the failure to crush the US fleet at Midway would be rectified in the
Solomons. Happily for the Americans, it was not to be.
Instead, cautious Japanese officers did not use all the means at their disposal,
and consequently lost a great strategic victory. As Orita put it, “We still
had such superiority in forces that it seems almost unbelievable now that the
chance to race down to Guadalcanal with overpowering strength was not seized. A
swift and overwhelming blow could have been struck at Guadalcanal at any time
between Sept. 15 and Oct. 1. There would have been absolutely no way for the
Americans to counter it... in September, 1942, we had America nearly beaten in
the Pacific. President Franklin Roosevelt at that time was actually considering
whether or not to move his marines off Guadalcanal before they were
slaughtered…Mr. Roosevelt was lucky. He put off making an immediate decision
at all. Our high command solved his problem by not
doing what Mr. Roosevelt feared most we would do – bringing down upon
Guadalcanal all the force Japan could exert.” Once again, a devastating
strategic victory was denied to the Japanese, even though their forces were
superior in most aspects except that they did not have radar, but even this was
not a fatal deficiency because as Overy said, “against mass air attack even
radar warning was of limited value.” Lieutenant Colonel Forrest R. Lindsey, USMC
(Retired) did not cover the possibilities of an American defeat at Guadalcanal,
but he did agree that if the Americans had not been so lucky at Midway, the
Japanese would have been “essentially unopposed from the Indian Ocean to the
California coast.” The only thing standing in their way would have been the
American submarine force, but in the early years of the war American submarines
were severely handicapped by poor training, overly-cautious skippers (many of
whom were relieved of their commands; in fact Padfield said that proportionately
more American submarine COs were fired than those of any other major navy), and
what Spector called the “worst torpedoes” in the world. Harris used the word
“abysmal” to describe the performance of American submarines during the
first two years of the war, and backed up this assertion statistically: “The
U.S. submarine score for 1942 was 180 ships, 725,000 tons (about equal to a
monthly U-Boat total). The Japanese replaced 635,000 tons in the same period.”
As history tells us, US Navy torpedoes and
submarine tactics improved markedly in the final years of the war, and the
American submarine force played a decisive role in the allied effort to beat
Japan. Even so, Compton-Hall argued that over the course of the war, British
submarines were, boat-for-boat, generally more combat effective than American
boats, and German submarines seized at the end of the war were found to be
technically superior to American boats in a number of ways. Orita also ventured
that much of the success of American submarines in the waning years of the war
was because the US Navy copied a torpedo developed by the Germans. It really is
incredible that the American submarines did as well as they did in the final
years of the war because, in addition to the aforementioned shortcomings, and
quite unlike the other major navies, US Navy submarine skippers “had to file a
contact report and get permission to fire before engaging a surface vessel. This
often meant the prey escaped.” According to Granatstein, “Admiral Jeffry
Brock recalled that the fleet signal book employed by the RCN had one code for
going into action: ‘Enemy in Sight. Am Engaging.’ The comparable USN code
translated as ‘Request Permission to Open Fire on the Enemy,’ something that
Brock was convinced was part and parcel ‘of the determined resistance of
American officers to make any move at all without the written and signed
authorization of someone senior.’” Had the Americans lost at
Midway, the possible consequences for the US Navy could have been rather
substantial. Lindsey projected that the Japanese could have moved on to capture
Hawaii, and then proceeded against the American mainland: “Japan’s enormous
striking power could reach and severely damage the cities, factories,
transportation, and fuel reserves on America’s west coast. Strong enough
attacks would also convince America’s leaders that continued war against Japan
was impossible… The major American aircraft companies were well within
carrier-based aircraft range and some were even within range of (Japan’s)
battleship’s guns from fire support areas along the Pacific coast.” If this
had happened, and it certainly was a strong possibility, then the modern day
“big carrier” US Navy might have evolved quite differently, to say the
least. Orita suggested that the Japanese submarine force was actually quite
successful in the Indian Ocean, with one of their submarines destroying 13 enemy
ships, totaling 78,000 tons: “(Commander) Fukumura got 9 of these – an
excellent example of what the Japanese 6th Fleet might have
accomplished had the Battle of Midway been won by us and all our other
submarines loosed for attack operations in the west. Australia and India would
have been cut off by sea. Years might have passed before any kind of major
offensive could have been mounted against Japan, if at all!” Imagine what it
would have been like if only the Japanese had coordinated with the Germans (who
easily could and should have continued their U-boat campaign in American waters
for at least a full year), then won at Midway, as they easily should have. As
suggested earlier, both coasts of the US would have been subject to intensive
and relentless attacks simultaneously during the second half of 1942, with
German U-boats destroying oil tankers in the Atlantic, and Japanese battleships
and carriers off the coast of California, blasting San Diego, Los Angeles, and
San Francisco, all the while facing little resistance from the decimated and
emasculated US Navy. Imagine the carnage. Some opine that America
would have won the war in the Pacific easily anyway simply because it was able
to “out produce” Japan, or as one apologist said recently: “From January
1942 to August 1945, the United States launched 37 fleet carriers, 83 escort
carriers and 349 destroyers. The Japanese built three fleet carriers, six
small-carrier conversions, and 63 destroyers. Even if those sneaky, treacherous
(Japanese) could have destroyed 50 percent of the West Coast production
facilities, the war effort would not have been slowed, much less crippled.” Case closed? Well, not
quite. Lieutenant Burdick Brittin, US Navy, was a code breaker, and just before
the epic Battle of Midway was to transpire, he confided in his diary “We have
history in the palm of our hands during the next week or so. If we are able to
keep our presence unknown to the enemy and surprise them with a vicious attack
on their carriers, the U.S. Navy should once again be supreme in the Pacific.
But if the (Japanese) see us first and attack us with their overwhelming number
of planes, knock us out of the picture, and then walk in to take Midway, Pearl
will be almost neutralized and in dire danger – I can say no more – there is
too much tension within me – the fate of our nation is in our hands.”
Apparently, Brittin was not fully convinced that the superior industrial
capacity of the United States would make any difference, since it would clearly
take much time to recover, rebuild, train and deploy a new fleet to replace one
that was obliterated. As Shuger said in 1988,
“even the briefest review of military history also reveals that for every
battle decided by superiority of weapons, there are ten in which the outcome
depended on differences in intelligence, planning, tactics, communications,
logistics, or resolve.” Indeed, if simply building more (and technologically
more advanced) ships, tanks, and airplanes than your enemy, in and of itself,
were a guarantee of an easy or inevitable victory, then how could Afghanistan,
one of the poorest countries in the world, repel the gargantuan Soviet armed
forces in the 1980s? Why is the US still there fighting the remnants of the
Taliban? How could North Vietnam endure the most ferocious air assault in
history long enough to force the world’s richest country to withdraw from
South Vietnam? (During the air war over Southeast Asia, the US dropped the
conventional equivalent of 640 “Hiroshima-type” atomic bombs, yet it did not
win. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia fell to the communists.) Sadly, for the
Americans, we must discredit the commonly held suppositions of people like the
Late Admiral Arleigh Burke, US Navy, who in 1964 asked, “Do we really believe
that a nation that’s starving can field a more powerful force in South Vietnam
than we- the most powerful nation in the world?” Physically, definitely not,
but morally, yes, absolutely. Moreover, how does Israel,
badly outnumbered by its neighbors, manage to survive, let alone be the dominant
military power in the Middle East? As Dixon put it: …”there is the Israeli
Army, the David of two and a half million Jews who in six days defeated the
Goliath of 100 million Arabs. By its competence and vastly superior direction
this miniscule army, drawn from a country poor in resources and gravely
disadvantaged by its geographical position, managed to defeat an enemy from
countries possessing inexhaustible reserves of natural wealth (including one
half of the world’s hydrocarbon reserves).” How too were the Finns able
to vanquish the Russians in 1939-1940? How on Earth could resource-poor Japan
squarely defeat Russia in 1905, and then invade and occupy China in the 1930s?
Going further back into history, how was it possible for Hannibal and the
Carthaginians to route the much superior Roman Army at the Battle of Cannae, or
for Napoleon to clobber much larger Austrian and Russian forces at the Battle of
the Austerlitz in 1805? War production is only one factor among many in the
combat equation, and it is frequently a rather misleading one at that. Biddle
declared in 2004 that, contrary to popular opinion, “predominance,” as
measured by military expenditures, war materiel, and the number of personnel
are, as independent variables, very poor predictors of victory. “Real battle
outcomes cannot be explained by materiel alone; in fact, materiel factors are
only weakly related to historical patterns of victory and defeat,” he noted.
Using sophisticated mathematical models, Biddle demonstrated that the outcomes
of combat in the twentieth century clearly detract from the outdated notion that
“bigger and more expensive are better” in battle. As he said, “All told,
the data show no support for a simple assumption that preponderance
predetermines capability.” War production is a salient factor, but one cannot
ascribe it to be the sole and direct reason for victory any more than one claim
that cows and pigs are the cause of obesity, or that automobile manufacturers
are the sole cause of car accidents. Think Mogadishu or “Black Hawk Down” if
one needs a more recent example. And in 1998, Greider pointed out that “A
still-classified study by the Defense Science Board concludes that a regional
adversary, by spending $10 billion a year on defense and such things as
missiles, commercial space satellites, and hardened underground facilities,
could insulate itself against a U.S. invasion. ‘They could really screw up our
current forces’, Vickers concedes.” (Vickers was the Director of Strategic
Studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington). This
is a key point -- one that needs to be kept in mind – that just because the US
Navy has no direct challenger right now does not mean that it cannot be defeated
by a smaller enemy that knows how to exploit the US Navy’s weaknesses. When in doubt, always
remember the immortal words of Mark Twain: "It's
not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the
dog." It could be argued that, even if Midway had ended in its
favor, Japan would have been defeated anyway, but not for the reasons commonly
supposed. Overy argued convincingly that Japan’s defeat had more to do with
the loss of its warrior spirit due to its long and pernicious war
with China, which began in 1931, and by the stratocracy on the home front rather
than from any other single factor. In other words, the Japanese public, not so
much the ordinary soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen themselves, many of whom
were quite willing to sacrifice themselves to protect the Emperor, was simply
tired of making war and was not truly stalwart when things began to sour for
them after the loss at Midway. A few of their most senior military leaders too,
such as the crepehanger Admiral Yamamoto, had, shall we say, “defeatist”
tendencies from the very beginning, which probably did not help. Reluctance, diffidence,
aboulomania, lack of coordination with the Germans, and insecurity also robbed
the Japanese of many additional opportunities for victory, and right from
beginning, with the abbreviated attack on Pearl Harbor. The prevailing wisdom in
western circles is that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a mistake, but this
theory has its critics. Russett agnized that the attack on Pearl Harbor was
rational, well-planned, and from a Japanese standpoint, quite necessary and
irrecusable to counter American and allied attempts to cut off Japan from its
overseas natural resources. The attack itself was well executed, but it did not
go far enough, and the Japanese did not press on when they clearly had all the
means to do so. Hoyt criticized the Japanese for putting too much emphasis on
hitting the American battleships at the expense of easier and possibly, more
strategically valuable targets. “So eager were the Japanese fliers to sink
battleships,” he related, “… they ignored the tanker Neosho, which was loaded with high-octane aviation fuel, If they set
her afire she might have burned down the whole harbor,” thus denying the
Americans the use of one of their most important bases. In addition, Hoyt
maintained, “The more important error was the failure of the Japanese to
cripple the Pearl Harbor submarine base, which they could have easily done with
another attack…Also, four-and-a-half million barrels of oil had been
stockpiled at Pearl Harbor, located in dumps above ground, made an easy target.
The Japanese ignored them.” All of these opportunities were extinguished
simply because Admiral Nagumo lost his nerve and halted the thoroughly one-sided
Battle of Pearl Harbor much too soon, when his enemy was very much at a
disadvantage. (According to van der Vat, Nagumo “was prone to bouts of anxiety
which prevented him from sleeping; even the smallest decision caused him
stress.”) An extra day of attacks would have been all that was necessary to
put the whole base and its ships out of action, or even out of existence, which
in turn would have made life much easier for the Japanese in the years ahead.
Luckily for the Americans, “because of tactical failure, the strategic victory
was lost.” And finally, while there is
no doubt that, as it happened, America's carrier task forces and submarines did
play a decisive and integral role in the eventual defeat of Japan, many
Americans overlook the significant contribution of the Soviet Union to that same
end. In actuality, the Soviet Red Army was responsible for neutralizing
approximately 32% of Japan's army personnel, but this fact seldom appears in the
typical American discourse on the war. The
Russians Mug the Kitty Hawk, the Saratoga, the Constellation,
the Carl Vinson, and others… “If
there was any doubt about Soviet intentions… one had only to read the speeches
of the Soviet naval commander, Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, who had boasted that the
United States had made a strategic miscalculation in relying on large and
increasingly vulnerable aircraft carriers to project power in the world. The
U.S. strategy would fail in wartime, Gorshkov alleged, because ‘the combat
potential… of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers is inferior to the strike
potentials of submarine and air forces.’” –
Patrick Tyler The examples above from
unscripted naval exercise evolutions provide ample evidence of the vulnerability
of US Navy carrier battle groups to attacks from diesel submarines, but of
course there are other ways to sink a carrier, as the Russian Air Force knows
well. In October 2000, the smart-looking aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk
was “mugged” by Russian SU-24 and Su-27 aircraft, which were not detected
until they were virtually on top of the carrier. The Russian aircraft buzzed the
carrier’s flight deck and caught the ship completely unprepared. To add insult
to injury, the Russians took very detailed photos of the Kitty Hawk’s
flight deck, and very courteously, provided the pictures to the American skipper
via e-mail. In a story in the December 7, 2000 edition of WorldNetDaily,
one US sailor exclaimed, “The entire crew watched overhead as the Russians
made a mockery of our feeble attempt of intercepting them.” Russia’s air
force is now only a faint shadow of what it once was, but even now, they can
demonstrate that they can, if necessary, do significant damage to the US Navy.
It is little wonder then that a Russian newspaper gloated that “If these had
been planes on a war mission, the aircraft carrier would definitely have been
sunk.” Perhaps they are right. As
Howard Bloom and Dianne Star Petryk-Bloom advised in 2003, both the Russians and
Chinese now have the deadly SS-N-22 Sunburn missile at their disposal. This
massive long-range missile, equipped with nuclear or conventional warheads, is
extremely difficult to detect or destroy. According to Jane’s Information
Group, it is more than capable of destroying any US aircraft carrier. More to
the point, Timperlake (a former USMC fighter pilot and US Naval Academy
graduate) and Triplett warned that the Sunburn missile is “designed to do one
thing: kill American aircraft carriers and Aegis-class cruisers. The
SS-N-22 missile skims the surface of the water at two-and-a-half times the speed
of sound, until just before impact, when it lifts up and then heads straight
down into the target’s deck. Its two-hundred-kiloton nuclear warhead has
almost twenty times the explosive power of the atomic bombs dropped on
Hiroshima…The U.S. Navy has no defense against this missile system… As
retired Rear Admiral Eric McVadon put it, ‘It’s enough to make the U.S. 7th
(Pacific) Fleet think twice.’” The only caveat, said Karam, would be the
possibility of US nuclear retaliation against the enemy’s homeland. Some would say that this
example does not validate the anti-carrier
argument because in a real war, the
carrier and her escorts would have been more careful, and at a higher level of
readiness. Indeed yes, but what if this mock attack had been the opening shot in
an unexpected war? In that case, the arrogant and myopic thinking of the US Navy
probably would have cost it one multi-billion dollar carrier and probably some
of its escorts on the very first day. Multiple coordinated surprise attacks by
aircraft, cruise missiles and diesel submarines could quickly emasculate many of
the American carrier battle groups. And I feel obligated to point out that even
if the carrier’s Aegis-equipped escorts had been on high alert, and indeed
been running with their radars at high power, this could have made the group
vulnerable to Russian anti-radar missiles. Holland noted in 1997 that
“Ironically, the highly sophisticated computer and strong radar systems that
compose Aegis also make an Aegis carrying ship an easily recognizable
target…” And as one naval aviator told Wilson during his visit to the USS
John F. Kennedy, the Russians “can make it rain longer than we can
swim.” A politically incorrect
statement for a naval officer, to be sure, but others have gone further. Captain
T.S. Teague, US Navy, broke one of the cardinal rules of the US Navy when he,
the skipper of the Kitty Hawk in the early 1980s, told Stevenson that
yes, the Russians could “take out” his ship if they made an effort, and this
was long before the Russians developed the SS-N-22. For some reason, possibly
convenience, or wishful thinking, many US analysts tend to overlook or downplay
the fact that the Soviets had deployed submarines with nuclear-tipped torpedoes
more than forty years ago, and if even a few dozen of these weapons could be
used effectively, the surface forces of the US Navy could be incinerated in
short order. This is not new technology at all, and it wise to predict that
eventually these weapons will fall into the hands of many nations, and some of
them might wish to oppose the US. It would be apt to say that not only can
US Navy carriers be destroyed, as evidenced by combat actions involving various
battleships and big carriers in World War II and the frank admissions of US Navy
officers; they can definitely be destroyed
by a determined enemy, with good diesel submarines, good crews, and good
torpedoes or cruise missiles. And supercarriers can even
be rendered harmless, at least temporarily, by things far less impressive than
cruise missile or torpedo attacks, nuclear or otherwise. In 1975, for example,
the Kennedy was rendered dead in the
water for four hours, and therefore almost useless, and extremely vulnerable to
a potential adversary, and all as the result of relatively minor “fender
bender” with one of her escorts. According to Vistica, the CNO, Admiral James
Holloway, US Navy, “was terrified the press would find out” about this, as
it contradicted his own statements that nothing short of a nuclear weapon could
stop a supercarrier. Getting
back to the Kitty Hawk incident, a
Navy spokesman said that the Kitty Hawk had not been surprised, that they
knew the Russian planes were not going to attack, and that the Russian aircraft
were tracked almost from the moment they took off. In other words, “We were on
top of things, no need to intercept, and certainly no reason for alarm.” When
the Russians over flew the Kitty Hawk, the carrier was “in the process
of refueling and therefore was not going fast enough at the moment of the
refueling to launch planes.” It took 40 minutes for the first American
aircraft to be launched, and the Russian Air Force was delighted with the
results: “‘For the Americans, our planes were a
complete surprise,' said Gen. Anatoly M. Kornukov, the Russian air force's
commander in chief. ‘In the pictures, you can clearly see the panic on
deck.’'' This episode sounds somewhat like what happened to the Japanese Navy
at the Battle of Midway, where its aircraft carriers were caught off guard and
attacked while their planes were being rearmed. Clever
enemies often prefer to attack during periods of low readiness, or during poor
weather. Just for the sake of
argument, let us assume that the US Navy had indeed tracked the Russian planes
and fired at them (and/or their attacking cruise missiles). Even if this had
happened, it still does not mean that the crafty Russian attack would have
failed. The reasons for my pessimism were contained in a foreboding 2000 report
by the US General Accounting Office. The report cast great doubt on the
survivability of American surface ships because the Navy has continuously
exaggerated “the actual and projected capabilities of surface ships to protect
themselves from cruise missiles because the models used in the
assessment…include a number of optimistic assumptions that may not reflect the
reality of normal fleet operations.” For example, in its highly questionable
testing of ship borne defensive systems, the US Navy assumes any such attack
would occur in perfect weather, with a perfect American crew, and flawless
equipment, which is a highly unlikely scenario. Even if there had been F-14s
on CAP above the carrier during the Russian penetration, their outrageously
expensive Phoenix or Sparrow missiles might not have made any difference,
either. According to a 2001 paper by Colonel Everest Riccioni, USAF (Retired),
“The long range US Navy Phoenix missile was fired twice in combat in 30 years
and missed both times – a zero return on a large investment.” Riccioni’s
research indicated a clear inverse correlation between expense and the
probability of getting a kill, or to put it another way, the more expensive the
missile, the less reliable it is. The Phoenix missile (now retired) was easily
the most expensive air-to-air missile in the world, and it was much less
reliable than cheaper missiles or guns, and it was never properly or
realistically tested. Said Fallows “…because of prohibitive costs, we have
never conducted realistic operational training with the F-14 firing Phoenix
missiles in the presence of jamming and tactical countermeasures. ((Secretary of
Defense) Brown was saying that the biggest question about sophisticated,
precision-guided weapons – whether they can overcome the efforts any competent
adversary would make to thwart them, by jamming or deception or anything else
– has never been answered in realistic practice). Nor have we demonstrated
that we can load and launch the large number of Phoenix missiles against
multiple targets that would be required to defense against a
determined…attack.” That was written in 1981, but those nagging questions
remain, even today. Thank goodness the US has chosen only incompetent enemies
since Vietnam. David Isenberg was not
enthusiastic about the Phoenix, either. In 1990, he penned “The Phoenix has
long been plagued by design and mechanical defects… Even if Phoenix missiles
were consistently free of defects, they would still have several serious
disadvantages. Radar-guided missiles such as the Phoenix emit powerful
electronic waves that enemy weapons can home in on, a feature that makes targets
out of the ships, planes and artillery units that fire those missiles.” As we
will see later on, these powerful radar emissions can be exploited by the enemy.
Additionally, said Shuger, “The 1981 shootdown of two Libyan Su-22’s by two
F-14s was hardly a significant test. It was a mismatch if there ever was one:
Leading edge fighters with fully exercised crews against clumsier ground attack
aircraft flown by pilots so nervous they fired their missiles well beyond
range.” If there had indeed been a
fight in the air that day in 2000, we should keep in mind two things. Firstly,
there was always a small chance that a US missile might have homed in on the Kitty
Hawk herself (these things can happen). Secondly, in Vietnam, Soviet AA-2
air-to-air missiles actually had a higher “probability of kill” per launch
(about 22%) than the three most commonly used US missiles of the time (averaging
about 11.2%). And despite the lopsided dogfighting success of the USAF (not the
Navy) in Operation Desert Storm (during which it was obvious that Saddam Hussein
and many of the fleeing Iraqi pilots had neither the courage nor the tenacity of
a thoroughly committed opponent, like the Japanese Kamikazes, or today’s
Islamic extremists, for example) it might not be a good idea to take for granted
that today’s US air-to-air missiles are more reliable than their Russian
counterparts. Indeed, many say a recent Russian missile, the AA-12 Adder, is
comparable or even superior to the US AIM-120 AMRAAM. Another question now comes
to mind. If the crew of the Kitty Hawk really knew of the impending
Russian visit, why did the US Navy decline to release the Russian photos? If the
crew had truly not been surprised, the photos of the flight deck should surely
reveal this, and clear the US Navy. If there had been some classified equipment
or activity depicted in the Russian photos, surely the Pentagon could have
censored the photos as required, then released them to show the world a crew at
sea going about routine business. Why
also did the Kitty Hawk, 40 minutes later, finally launch aircraft to
intercept the Russian planes that had already flown over, but did no physical
harm to the ship? Why was it necessary to belatedly intercept the Russians if
the US Navy was so confident that the Russians were no threat? And why did the Washington
Times impart that the “Kitty Hawk commanders were so unnerved by
the aerial penetration they rotated squadrons on 24-hour alert and had planes
routinely meet or intercept various aircraft?” Because in asymmetrical
warfare, the very concept is to strike when the larger, more powerful enemy is
least prepared. This is what the Japanese did when they attacked Pearl Harbor in
the early morning hours on a Sunday. This is why the 1968 Tet holiday offensive
was launched when the Army of the Republic of Vietnam was in a low state of
readiness. But then, perhaps it would have been more sporting of the Russians to
have called in first before launching their mock attack. As
an aside, although the foregoing concerns fast jet aircraft, the US Navy has had
troubles dealing with slower planes as well. Shuger told an interesting story in
his 1988 unpublished book manuscript Navy Yes, Navy, No: “The Navy has
established a classified radius X nautical miles around a carrier within which
all aircraft will be escorted by airwing planes. As you might expect, not every
intercept is perfect, so there are occasions when the bogey isn’t intercepted
until less than X. (I know of at least one occasion in 1981 during the hostage
crisis, where an Iranian P-3 patrol craft – which conceivably could have been
carrying US-made Harpoon anti-ship missiles – flew more or less undetected and
unintercepted within visual range of a carrier.) But fleet message writers feel
that their job security requires that no reports top that effect ever leave the
ship. So there is a definite party line about intercepts: They always
take place at X nautical miles.” A
colleague recently reported a very similar incident between a Royal Australian
Air Force (RAAF) P-3C Orion and an American aircraft carrier, also in the early
1980s. In the words of retired Squadron
Leader J R Sampson, RAAF: “When I was an RAAF liaison/briefing officer en
route from Diego to Perth for R&R sometime in 1981/82, I dined in the
(American) admiral's suite and the admiral gave me a copy of a message that
censured an air wing commander for allowing an RAAF P-3C to get in undetected
amongst the CVBG (Carrier Battle Group) screen a few days earlier. According to
the message the commander himself was in an F-14 cockpit checking out the TCS
(Television Camera Set) that had just been installed as a new piece of F-14 kit.
TCS enables long-range visual identification of targets. He was adjusting the
FOV (Field of View) when he saw a P-3 swim across his screen, right on the
carrier's bow at about 300 feet above sea level. He'd just come from CIC (Combat
Information Center) and knew that no cooperating P-3's were due so he queried
the FLYCO who queried the CIC who asked the on station E-2C. They didn't even
have the capability to launch an F-14 intercept. Very embarrassing but the
admiral gave me a copy of the message to take back to headquarters…”
Embarrassing yes, and it proves that an enemy doesn’t even need speedy jet
fighters to get through a US Navy battle group’s defenses. A large and
relatively slow turboprop aircraft like the P-3 can do it just as well. It
almost goes without saying that even the older and relatively noisy
Soviet/Russian submarines have a long tradition of tracking and stalking
American carriers, but the American public occasionally needs reminding. The
Soviets maintained a huge force of both nuclear and diesel submarines, and their
boats were able to locate, pursue and close with US Navy carrier battle groups
on many occasions. In 1966, the noisy Victor-class nuclear submarine
K-181 trailed the carrier Saratoga and her escorts in the Atlantic for
several days, and made “nine simulated conventional torpedo attacks on the
aircraft carrier, from different directions and distances, and sent twenty
radiograms on the task group actions to fleet headquarters. The K-181’s expert
radiomen recorded the sound of the aircraft carrier’s turbines at different
depths, invaluable information for another cruise.” Although the Soviet
submarine was eventually detected, it was not by the carrier or by her escorts,
but by the SOSUS warning net. Regardless, “it was a considerable triumph to
put K-181 within killing distance of the aircraft carrier…” Although
the Americans did detect the K-181, it was not until well after she conducted
her simulated torpedo attacks. In a real war, the carrier probably would have
been destroyed before the Soviet sub could be localized and attacked. Something
very similar happened in late 1967, said Tyler. A US carrier task force in the
Atlantic “had been shocked by the sudden appearance of the conning tower of a Victor-class
submarine. The Russian had popped up to thumb his nose at the Americans and to
demonstrate a Soviet capability to penetrate the carrier battle group. It was a
secret and unreported victory for the Soviet Union and an embarrassing and
ominous moment for the U.S. Navy,” he said. Of course, the US Navy did the
same thing to the Soviets as well, but most of us in the west either do not know
or do not want to know the other side of the story. Indeed,
Shuger wrote in 1989 that the US Navy sometimes had great difficulty locating
even the oldest Soviet submarines: “More than a decade ago, when there were
dozens of U.S. ships and planes in the South China Sea looking for the one
Soviet submarine then on patrol there – and it was obsolescent one at that;
this was before the big Soviet naval build-up of the Cam Ranh Bay naval base in
Vietnam – it would still go unlocated for weeks on end. Imagine the
difficulties presented nowadays by the increased numbers of quieter Soviet
subs.” Even the ill-fated Russian submarine Kursk
gave the Americans a good run for their money. Truscott noted that in 1999,
“According to the Russians, the US spent tens of millions of dollars trying to
track the Kursk in the Med, with mixed
success. The US Sixth Fleet, based at Naples, became extremely active in the
search for the Kursk. By Russian
accounts, the US Sixth Fleet restricted operation of its large ships and
aircraft-carriers to stay out of the Russian sub’s possible area of activity.
Captain Lyachin was certainly proud of the Kursk’s
performance, later saying that the boat received a lot of attention from
NATO’s subs, ships and planes, but ‘we almost always spotted them first.’
NATO found it difficult to establish prolonged surveillance and contact with the
Kursk.” Given the US Navy’s
tradition of substandard ASW, Captain Lyachin’s claims are not difficult to
believe. Specific
encounters between Soviet/Russian subs and American ships are rarely publicized
or described in so much detail, but Sontag et al. detailed that during the Cold
War “Soviet subs seemed to be waiting to monitor U.S. naval exercises even
before U.S. ships and subs arrived on site. A few times, Soviet subs had shown
up in waters where U.S. exercises had been scheduled, then cancelled. Other
times, Soviet subs barreled right into the middle of exercises almost as if they
were trying to see how the U.S. forces would react.” In 1985, said Weir and
Boyne, the Soviet submarine K-324, taking advantage of temperature variations in
the Gulf Stream, “detected American SSBNs (nuclear-powered ballistic missile
submarines) on three different occasions, maintaining a combined contact time of
twenty-eight hours” while another Soviet nuclear boat surreptitiously tailed
another American SSBN for five days. In these cases, we can see that the US
Navy's traditional belief in the inherent superiority of American nuclear
submarines and tactics over their Soviet/Russian adversaries is not always
justifiable or realistic. Along
those same lines, Kaylor reported that in 1986, "a U.S. attack-submarine
skipper received a shock while tracking a Soviet sub in its home waters. The
U.S. commander expected to hear his quarry long before it heard him. But
suddenly the American sonar men heard a single loud, metallic 'ping' in their
earphones. Listening with passive sensors that make no sound of their own the
Soviets had picked up the American sub, then transmitted a single 'active' sound
wave to fix its exact location. It was the Soviet captain's way of saying,
'Gotcha!' But in wartime, it would have been followed swiftly by a
torpedo." Some have declared that between 1965 and 1975, “there had been
more than 110 possible detections of US surveillance subs actively operating
against the Soviet Union.” A
Canadian warship also surprised and pinged the very modern Ohio-class
SSBN USS Michigan during filming of the informative 1992 NOVA documentary
“Submarine.” This, of course, flies right in the face of the US Navy’s
standard ballyhoo that its SSBNs cannot be detected by non-US forces. A US
nuclear submariner, who wished not to be identified, also told me recently about
an incident in which his elderly and relatively noisy nuclear attack submarine
(launched in the early 1960s) had stalked and launched a simulated attack on a
supposedly undetectable Ohio-class
SSBN using passive sonar, “because our Sonar Chief steered us towards a part
of ocean with lower-than-expected background noise, from the boomer screening
the ambient noise. We were able to creep into their baffles to fire a water
slug…” In
addition, the American media learned in September 1997 that a Russian nuclear
submarine had gotten uncomfortably close to the carrier USS Constellation
and other ships during a Pacific cruise. So close, in fact, an anonymous US Navy
source “concluded later that the submarine would have sunk the Constellation
near Seattle if there had been a conflict.” Holzer also mentioned that the
same Russian submarine stalked “the
USS Coronado, flagship of the U.S. Third Fleet, for several days. The
U.S. Navy never knew it was there...” And Gertz recorded that “The
submarine… loitered off the Washington coastline and practiced attack
operations against the [USS] Carl Vinson during the carrier's training
mission.” He concurred that the US Navy had great difficulty tracking the
elusive submarine, and as he put it, “the Russian Oscar II-class guided
missile submarine spent nearly two weeks in September about 100
miles off the Washington coastline and sailed undetected for days, eluding U.S.
surveillance vessels and aircraft.” And even though their nuclear boats were very noisy until
sometime in the 1980s, in 1997 Polmar said that the latest Soviet nuclear
submarines were actually quieter than
the US Improved Los Angeles-class, at
least at tactical speeds of 5-7 knots. In any case, the Soviets/Russians, like
so many others, have many high quality photos of American carriers taken by
surprise and at close range. The
Chinese Know Thy Potential Enemy The
Chinese too have a strong interest in neutralizing American aircraft carriers,
and in his 2000 book China Debates the Future Security Environment,
Michael Pillsbury demonstrated that the Chinese have completed detailed studies
of the vulnerabilities of US Navy carriers. He documented that the Chinese have
noted the following possible weaknesses: lack of stealth due to the large number
of radar reflections plus infrared and electromagnetic signatures, all of which
make the carrier “very difficult to effectively conceal,” flight
restrictions during bad weather, the inability to safely operate in shallow
waters, decreased readiness during regular at-sea replenishments, poor ASW and
mine countermeasures capabilities, and the structural vulnerabilities of
catapults, elevators, and arresting gear. Sun Tzu put it best when he said the
immortal words “Know thy enemy and know thy self and you will win a hundred
battles.” It seems the Chinese have taken Sun Tzu’s advice to heart when it
comes to their potential rivals. These
days, many analysts are quite concerned about a possible confrontation between
the US and China over Taiwan. While O’Hanlon suggests that China does not have
the necessary means to invade and occupy Taiwan, others feel the Chinese might
still attempt to do so. If that does happen, it would be well for the US not to
underestimate the Chinese. One need only recall Appleman’s book Disaster in
Korea: The Chinese Confront MacArthur to see that the low tech Chinese have
been a most dangerous and wily opponent for American forces. In 2004, Goldstein
and Murray (The latter is a former US Navy submarine officer) predicted that if
the US Navy comes up against Chinese AIP and diesel submarines blockading
Taiwan: “…we find a plausible worst case would yield nearly fourteen U.S.
ships sunk after a single tactical exchange. Playing out this model to its
logical conclusion (iterations until all submarines in the People’s Liberation
Army Navy are destroyed) with these revised inputs suggest that more than forty
U.S. Navy (USN) ships could be sunk.” Thus, in their view, the Chinese
submarine deployment of roughly 24 non-nuclear submarines would be destroyed
eventually, but they could take as many as 40 American ships down with them, and
that American aircraft carriers would “not be immune from submarine attack,”
even if they remain in the comparatively low risk deep waters to the east of
Taiwan. The main reason for the
predicted relatively heavy US losses is the degradation and withering of US ASW
capabilities since the end of the Cold War. The Chinese have noted all of this
and keep it in mind when they plan their exercises. The Chinese, for good reason
I should suppose, are growing more and more confident in their ability to tangle
with the US Navy. Said one Chinese senior officer in 2002, “We have the
ability to deal with an aircraft carrier that dares to get into our range of
fire… The U.S. likes vain glory; if one of their aircraft carriers could be
attacked and destroyed, people in the U.S. would begin to complain and quarrel
loudly, and the U.S. President would find the going harder and harder.” Lax
Security One would think that the US
Navy would spare no expense to protect its bases, especially those in which
their nuclear submarines, both attack and missile boats, are stationed. One
would think that effective, vigilant, round-the-clock, airtight, multi-tiered
security would shroud an installation in which Trident missile submarines are
based. One would think that the security around these nuclear missile-launching
platforms would be almost impregnable. But if one also thinks that strong
security measures were the norm in the US Navy during (and after) the Cold War,
one should think again. In June 2001, Lieutenant
Commander Jack Daly, US Navy, told the audience of a radio broadcast called Judicial
Watch that American nuclear submarine and aircraft carrier bases were
becoming increasingly vulnerable to attack due to lax security measures. He
cited an incident in April 1997, in which a Russian spy ship reportedly used a
laser to attack a helicopter in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, near two Navy bases.
Daly and his Canadian Air Force pilot suffered permanent eye damage because of
the attack, and Daly said it was now routine for Russian spy ships to go
snooping around the US Navy bases at Bremerton and Everett, Washington. He also
propounded that the spy ship that attacked his helicopter had “come to within
1,000 yards of the nuclear-missile-armed U.S.S. Ohio.” The reason why
the Russians had gotten so bold, he argued, was that the US Navy had grown
complacent and unconcerned about espionage and security. With the end of the
Cold War, he said, the US Navy had basically let its guard down. Lax security was also
evident in October 2000, just a few weeks before the terrorist attack on the USS
Cole, when a news team from WABC TV New York completed a two-month
investigation on security at the naval stations at Norfolk, Virginia, New
London, Connecticut, and Naval
Weapons Station Earle in New Jersey. In
all cases, the news team had absolutely no difficulty gaining access to the
bases, were never asked to produce identification, were able to sail a small
boat within a few feet of American ships without detection, and in Norfolk, the
world’s largest naval base (home port for 78 ships) the journalists roamed
freely, unnoticed and unchallenged, for four hours. They shot video of their
incursion, and when Representative Jim Saxton of New Jersey saw the shocking
tape, he said, “What you have shown me is absolutely incredible, it’s
unbelievable!” It is hard to understate how much damage a team of terrorists
could have done to the US Navy if they too could have penetrated the security at
Norfolk and attacked the ships concentrated at the world’s largest naval base.
Although it is certainly not common, according to GlobalSecurity.org, at times
there have been up to five nuclear-powered carriers simultaneously in port at
Norfolk. Of course, both these
incursions happened after the Cold War ended. However, it must be pointed out
that even during the Cold War, security at US Navy bases was often very
exiguous. Probably the most qualified man to speak on this issue is a former US
Navy senior officer, Captain Richard Marcinko. Although he was once
court-martialed for misuse of government property, it is hard to discredit a man
like Marcinko when it comes to military operations. A former SEAL, with over 300
combat missions to his credit, he earned 34 citations and medals, “including
the Legion of Merit, The Silver Star, and four Bronze Stars with a combat
‘V’ for Valor.” He is now an acknowledged expert on terrorism and is
frequently consulted on US national TV news and current affairs programs. In the
1980s, during the watch of CNO Admiral James Watkins, US Navy, Marcinko and his
SEAL Team Six were assigned to test security at major navy bases, and the
results of his simulated terrorist raids were very disturbing. His team
infiltrated the New London Naval Base, where nuclear submarines, including
missile boats, are based. Marcinko’s team had little difficulty infiltrating
the base, and it made a mockery of the militasters of the base security forces.
In his own words: “I rented a small plane, and Horseface flew us under the
I-95 bridge, wetting our wheels in the Thames as we swooped low. We buzzed the
sub pens. No one waved us off. We rented a boat and flew the Soviet flag on its
stern, then chugged past the base while we openly taped video of the subs in
their dry docks, capturing classified details of their construction elements.
The dry docks were exposed and unprotected – if we’d decided to ram one of
the subs, nothing stood in our way.” Marcinko’s team did far
worse during his visit to New London. His men infiltrated several nuclear
submarines, and thereby proceeded to wreak havoc therein. “First, they found
the sentries – who were secure in their shacks drinking coffee – and
silenced them. Then, they concealed explosives behind the diving planes of one
nuclear sub. They boarded another Boomer sub and placed demolition charges in
the control room, in the nuclear-reactor compartment, and in the torpedo
room.” They were challenged by base personnel, but explained that they were
just doing maintenance, and amazingly, they were never asked to identify
themselves. Marcinko later briefed a very unhappy admiral and boasted, “I blew
up two of your nuclear subs, and if I’d wanted to, I could have blown ‘em
all up.” Karam also reminisced that
the SEALs also clobbered his submarine, the USS
Plunger, during an annual drill. “One year, they swam across the shipping
channel from North Island, ‘shot’ our topside watch and were in control of
Control and Maneuvering within a few minutes.” To be fair, the US Navy is now
taking security much more seriously, but only as a result of the attack on the USS
Cole and the September 11th attacks. Despite the lessons taught
by Captain Marcinko and his SEALS in the 1980s, little was done to improve
security in the interim. Apparently the US Navy prefers to learn its lessons,
when it does actually learn, the hard way. The US Navy also has a
rather spotty record when it comes to keeping sensitive information secret. For
example, Shuger wrote that “while all information about Russian equipment is
Secret, squadron cryptographic material – which might provide the only viable
means of communication between friendly forces during wartime – is merely
marked Confidential and accordingly, is subject to much looser controls… As a
result, Navy squadrons are constantly misplacing or losing crypto. One of my
skippers almost refused to assume command of the squadron because of this
problem.” A Few Realistic
Men
“My own experience
(in war games) is that I never have any problem getting a carrier… those
fleets are going to get ground into peanut butter in a war.” –
Anonymous US Navy submarine commander on how easy it is to find and sink a US
Navy aircraft carrier. “One enemy diesel
submarine lucky enough to get one torpedo hit on a CVN (nuclear powered aircraft
carrier) or an AEGIS cruiser could easily turn US resolve and have a huge impact
on a conflict… the challenge of finding and destroying a diesel submarine in
littoral waters can be nearly impossible… In general…a diesel submarine
operating on battery power is quieter, slower, and operating more shallow than a
nuclear submarine.” - Lieutenant Commander Christopher J. Kelly, US Navy Earlier,
I discussed how easy it is for foreign diesel submarines and air forces to
attack American carriers. But it is not just the Russians, Chinese, Canadians,
Chileans, Dutch, Australians, and former Secretary of Defense Dr. James
Schlesinger who have reason to think the US Navy’s carrier battle groups are
oversold, expensive and extremely vulnerable. Such arguments have been made
often enough by US Navy officers. In the 1930s, a US naval aviator said:
“Carriers combine great power with extreme vulnerability.” In 1939, another
senior US Navy officer remarked “The vulnerability of our carriers constitutes
the Achilles heel of our Fleet strength.” These remarks were true then, and
they remain true today. It is also well known that the cantankerous Late Admiral
Hyman Rickover, US Navy (Retired) did not think much of his own carrier-centered
navy. When asked in 1982 about how long the American carriers would survive in
an actual war, he curtly constated that they would be finished in approximately
48 hours. Former President Jimmy Carter, a former US Navy officer, and Annapolis
graduate, was also none too keen on the big carrier Navy, either. Vistica
mentioned that Carter did not want any more new carriers, and for the existing
fleet to be cut dramatically. The
atypically unreticent and plainspoken submarine commander, Captain John Byron,
US Navy (Retired) also intimated in the early 1980s that American nuclear
submarines had little difficulty operating against carriers. “Operating
against a carrier is too easy,” he quipped. “The carrier’s ASW protection
often resembles Swiss cheese.” In a 1985 exercise in the Pacific, this was
confirmed when one US nuclear submarine sank two aircraft carriers and eight
other ships, and as per standard operating procedure, these painful results
"were never publicly disclosed." Shuger, in 1989, noted: “I’ve
seen enough photos of American carriers through periscope crosshairs – most
sub crew offices feature one – to become a believer. Despite all the
antisubmarine warfare equipment that carrier groups take with them to sea, in my
own experience most exercises against subs ended up with my carrier getting a
green flare at close quarters, the standard simulation for a successful torpedo
or cruise missile attack.” The respected naval affairs
analyst Norman Polmar said in 1998 "It's just too easy for a diesel sub
with even conventional torpedoes, let alone high-speed advanced torpedoes...
that the Russians are selling, to get a shot and hit a carrier...That could
really cause us problems." Former CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner,
US Navy (Retired) has proffered many dire warnings that the US Navy’s
continuing policy of building and deploying “big, over-powered aircraft
carriers” is “ill-advised.” In his 2003 article “Is the U.S. Navy being
marginalized?,” Admiral Turner submitted that “The day of large aircraft
carriers with large numbers of high-performance aircraft is simply drawing to a
close…With more accurate weapons, the ordnance-carrying capacity of the large
carrier will no longer be as important. On the defensive side of the technology
coin, we must recognize that technologies that make our forces more lethal will
be available to others. When opponents acquire remote sensing and precision,
long-range targeting capabilities, as they are bound to do, the huge detection
signature of the hundred thousand tons of steel in one of today’s aircraft
carriers will be a tremendous liability.” He also noted: “Our existing
carriers will have plenty to do for the remainder of their operating lives, but
a Navy built around these ships will not carry us into the emerging era of
warfare any better than did the USS
Arizona into World War II. To procure
more large carriers today and expect them to be useful into mid-century is to be
blind to reality.” (Emphasis mine). The Late Rear Admiral Eugene
Carroll, US Navy (Retired), himself a former aircraft carrier skipper, was also
an outspoken critic of the Navy and its infatuation with big aircraft carriers and its collective fear of change. He
once said that if the United States continues on its path to build ever larger
and ever more expensive aircraft carriers, it will eventually degenerate into a
“bankrupt nation.” The most damning comment ever made by a senior officer
was that of the Late CNO, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, US Navy, who in 1971 confessed
that with the advent of long-range Soviet anti-ship missiles, if there had been
a US-Soviet conventional naval war, the US Navy “would lose.” If Zumwalt was correct, the only
way the US Navy could handle the Soviet Navy was through the use of nuclear
weapons, which in turn would provoke a Soviet response, and then, in all
likelihood, both sides would be destroyed. Apparently, Admiral Thomas Moorer, US
Navy, was worried also. When Soviet and US ships confronted one another in the
Mediterranean during the October War of 1973, Goldstein and Zhukov observed:
“Soviet battle groups were using the actual U.S. aircraft
carriers in the area as virtual targets, an act comparable to holding a cocked
pistol to an adversary's temple. Adhering to a kamikaze-like, "battle of
the first salvo" doctrine, the Soviet force of 96 ships was poised to
launch approximately 13 surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs) at each task group in
the U.S. 6th Fleet deployed in the Mediterranean. U.S. Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, then
chief of naval operations, recalled a Washington Special Action Group meeting at
the peak of the crisis, during which Adm. Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, estimated: "[W]e would lose our [expletive] in the Eastern
Med [if war breaks out]." Indeed,
decades later, a submariner who was aboard a participating Soviet nuclear
submarine stated that US ASW forces were not able to defeat the Soviet forces:
“During the events of 1973, our submarine carried out its service for sometime
in the vicinity of the Sidra Gulf, by the Libyan coast. Here, a group of U.S.
Navy antisubmarine ships, evidently acting on some intelligence, or maybe
presuming that there might be a Soviet submarine about, was vigorously carrying
out a search operation for two days. However, we gathered the impression that
the ships achieved no success. Nothing suggested that our boat had been
discovered, even though we were thoroughly listening to their hydroacoustic
transmissions and sometimes the hum of the ships’ propellers…” He also
said: “I think that (the Soviet submarine fleet) would have withstood (a U.S.
first strike)… There was no reason to believe that our submarine had been
discovered by the probable foe… in October 1973. If so, then it is entirely
possible that we could have been the first to deliver the below…” Given the
American predilection for letting the enemy strike first (or, as in Vietnam, to
“claim” the enemy struck first), it is reasonable to assume that the Soviets
might well have struck first, and if they had, the American ships in the area
would probably be destroyed or incapacitated very quickly, possibly before they
could fully retaliate. Another senior American
officer who might agree with Zumwalt, Rickover, Turner, Carroll, Byron and
Shuger is Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, USMC (Retired). In Exercise
Millennium Challenge (2002), Van Riper, playing the role of Saddam Hussein, used
small boats to destroy 16 US Navy ships, including an aircraft carrier and two
helicopter carriers, in the Persian Gulf. As usual, the US Navy was not pleased
with this successful attack against its most powerful ships, and so it stopped
the exercise, “reactivated” the dead ships and continued as though nothing
had happened. “‘A phrase I heard over and over was, ‘That would never have
happened,’ Van Riper recalls. And I said ‘Nobody would have thought that
anyone would fly an airliner into the World Trade Centre’… but nobody seemed
interested.’” The irrepressible Stan Goff, is his own erudite yet polemical
style, explained why this had to be: “The reason Van Riper’s victory had to
be overruled is that it tears the scary mask off the bully and lets the whole
world see the fundamental weakness of the vastly complex and expensive U.S.
military monstrosity – the one that will invite not less but more
‘asymmetric warfare,’ the very monstrosity that is already mortgaging our
children’s future.” Sadly, this kind of official denial is standard
operating procedure in the US Navy. Consider also the American submarine
commander who once said that, during war games, he “put six torpedoes into a
carrier, and I was commended – for reducing the carrier’s efficiency by 2
percent.” The battleship admirals played the same mind and word games when
they ran the navy, and we all know what happened to the battleship. Many of the criticisms of
the carrier-centered Navy come from US Army officers who see the Navy as a rival
more than as a partner in national defense. One might dismiss army criticisms of
the US Navy as merely parochial slander, but some Army critics make good sense.
Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Macgregor, US Army, made a number of convincing
arguments in his ground-breaking book, Breaking the Phalanx. Macgregor is
a vocal critic of American military strategy, and his criticisms are not
restricted to the Army. He argued that with the US Navy’s new focus on
littoral warfare, the big carrier Navy is in even more danger now than during
its days as a high seas fleet designed to face the Soviet Union. The fact that
American aircraft carriers are so big, and so much firepower is concentrated on
them, makes them attractive and worthy targets for weapons of mass destruction
in littoral waters: “The concentration of several thousand sailors, airmen,
and Marines in an amphibious or Nimitz-class aircraft carrier risks
single point failure in future warfighting.” Also, as the quality and
availability of cruise missiles increase, so do the chances of a successful
attack on carrier battle groups: “The survivability of large carriers and
amphibious ships depends on antiship missile defenses, which must perform
perfectly within a few seconds of a missile alert. In both cases, very expensive
platforms can be destroyed by relatively inexpensive weapons…” Williscroft said in
September 2004 that there are several possible nightmare scenarios that face the
modern US Navy, and they most certainly will involve quiet conventional
submarines: “The bad guys can station one of the new ultra-quiet AIP subs at a
choke point, and seriously damage or even sink a carrier. An AIP sub can sneak
up on a Virginia-class (nuclear submarine) deploying a Seal team with
devastating results. A hunter-killer pack of several AIP subs can take out any
nuke we have, once they find it.” Macgregor also noted that at a cost of
approximately $4 billion for construction alone, the loss of even one Nimitz-class
carrier would be morally and financially devastating. The loss of one or more of
the $2 billion Virginia-class nuclear submarines would also be a
tremendous burden on the United States Treasury. This
isn’t “Top Gun” & Watch Out for the Little Guy “USN pilots worry
more about being able to come aboard than about their tactics. It is not totally
unreasonable, especially in bad weather, night operations. Fortunately, for the
USAF, a landing makes about the same demand as breathing, and frees them to
concern themselves with the tactics and doctrines of aerial combat." - Col. Everest Riccioni, USAF (Retired), e-mail to author, February 2005 As
we have seen, US carriers are remarkably vulnerable to attacks by submarines and
aircraft, but what about the much-vaunted American naval aviators? How would the
US Navy pilots fare in a dogfight with a much smaller, less powerful, but
well-trained enemy? The evidence is not encouraging. Consider Canada, for
example. Often criticized by US and NATO officials for very low defense spending
(about 1.2% of Canada’s GDP is spent on defense), Canada’s armed forces are
among the smallest in the alliance (currently at about 60,000 in the regular
Army, Navy and Air Force, combined).
These days, America’s northern neighbor, as Charles Moskos observed, comes
close to fitting into the “Warless Society” classification in his national
military taxonomy, in which military expenditures remain small in peacetime, and
“the bulk of the military budget consists of personnel training costs…” Despite
this chronically low peacetime funding, (and even when both countries were
fighting World Wars I and II, and Korea, Canada’s military budget was never
even close to that of the US) Canadian pilots have routinely outperformed US
Navy and Air Force aircrews in combat and in peacetime exercises. It is easy to
understand why if one also comprehends that training and professionalism are the
major factors in combat success, neither of which need to be excessively
expensive, and the Canadians have a strong record in this area. Here, just for
illustration, if you will indulge me for just a moment, are a few surprising
highlights related to the Canadian war record, of which most Americans are
unaware. In World War I, a group of just ten Canadian fighter pilots was
responsible for shooting down a jaw-dropping 438
German aircraft. Even though many Americans sincerely believe that it was
latecomers like the dapper Captain Eddie Rickenbacker in
his stylish, French-designed Spad VIII
that won the Great War, the Canadian, French and British pilots were the true
eagles flying over the Western Front. Of the top ten allied aces (pilots with
five or more air-to-air victories), four were from Canada, (the top-scoring
Canadian had 72 confirmed kills), one was from France (the Frenchmen was the top
ace), and the others were British. Canada, which at the time had fewer than
eight million people (which is roughly the same number that New York City has
today), produced 185 aces. The renowned British
military historian Sir John Keegan has made reference to the “legendary
fighting qualities of the Canadians” in World Wars I and II, and described the
Canadian Forces of today as being “highly professional.” In World War II,
Canadian Spitfire pilot Buzz Beurling shot down 27 enemy aircraft (confirmed,
plus 3 other probable kills, and 8 damaged) in
only 14 flying days. He was nicknamed “The Falcon of Malta,” and as
Lieutenant Colonel Rob Tate, USAFR, explained in 2004, Beurling’s triumphs
were “one
of World War II's memorable aerial-combat achievements.”
In the 1950s, Canadian pilots flying the Canadair Sabre Mk. VI with its
souped-up Avro Orenda engine “flew circles” around every fighter plane in
NATO. From 1955 to 1958, Colonel Everest Riccioni, USAF (Retired) said he
“used to instruct my squadron mates in F-100Cs operating against experienced,
gutsy, competent Canadian pilots flying Mark VI Sabres…” He praised the
Canadian pilots as being highly skilled and so aggressive that they “would
rather fly through you than lose.” During the days of Royal
Canadian Navy carrier aviation it was well known that the pocket carrier HMCS
Bonaventure could at times put more planes in the air than much larger
USN ASW carriers of the Essex-class. Said Lieutenant Commander Roland
West, RCN (retired) in 2005, “Having served in Bonaventure on many occasions, I can attest to the fact that there
were times when our aircraft flew operational missions when our NATO allies
decided to keep their aircraft on the deck. You can be rest-assured that at no
time did our operational commanders put our aircraft and crews in flight safety
jeopardy. As far as performance is concerned, there was always that pride in
carrying out a role in such a manner that encouraged good competition
and success in the operation at hand.” This was confirmed by Soward in his
description of a 1969 exercise: “The operations of VS 880 and HS 50 meanwhile
continued with the scheduled sustop, in spite of the high wind states and
increasingly rough seas. Other NATO units terminated their carrier flying but Bonaventure
pressed on with ASW operations and continued prosecuting submarine contacts and
recording ‘kills’. In keeping with past performance, the carrier logged more
flying hours with the Trackers and Sea Kings than any other carrier involved in
the exercise… Unfortunately, about the same time, the USN carrier USS Yorktown, also a major participant in the exercise, suffered the
loss of a Sea King and three crew members.” In
the early 1980s it was revealed that the average pilot in the Canadian Air Force
flew about 300 hours a year, whereas his US Navy counterpart flew only
about 160 hours annually. By the late 1980s, Canadian fighter pilots were at the
top of the charts in NATO, flying more hours per year than all other allied
forces in Europe (German pilots came in second, and USAF pilots placed third.)
Since the late 1990s, Canada’s new military pilot training center has
established a new standard of excellence, and is recognized internationally as
having the most advanced pilot training regimen in the world. The official
Canadian Air Force Web site makes it clear that Canada’s pilot training system
is far ahead of the US Navy: “To
date, Canada has sold more than $1-billion in training to pilots from Britain,
Italy, Denmark, Singapore and Hungary since the inception of NFTC (NATO Flying
Training in Canada) training in 1999. Using the most advanced and effective
integrated pilot training system at the most modern training facilities
currently available in the world, Canada has become the benchmark in military
pilot training. ‘We have the leading edge, most advanced technology for pilot
training in the world. It is well ahead of everyone, Britain, the United States,
everyone. It is the model for other countries so we are very proud of
that,’” said Lieutenant-Colonel Brian Houlgate, Director of the Canadian
Aerospace Training Project. Canadian
fighter pilots, in particular, receive certain training benefits that are simply
not readily available to many US Navy aviators most of the year, simply because
Canada has huge, under populated areas that are ideal for flight training.
American naval aviators at bases such as Oceana Naval Air Station (the largest
US Navy fighter base on the east coast) must deal with massive military and
civilian air traffic congestion, plus the close proximity of civilian living
areas, and thus, very limited air space. As a result, according to journalist
Jack Dorsey, their training, particularly at low levels, suffers because of
safety and noise concerns. Canadian pilots training at Cold Lake, Alberta,
Canada’s largest fighter base, have far fewer restrictions due to the base’s
relative isolation, and have access to “five separate air-to-air ranges and a tactical
air weapons range covering 700,000 square kilometers” (or 270,272 square
miles, slightly larger than the State of Texas). That is one reason why many US Navy
pilots covet the opportunity to fly at the Canadian base during the annual Maple
Flag air combat exercises. But it is not just the vast air space that attracts
the interest of American pilots. The new Canadian air combat training system now
in place at Cold Lake “is the first system of its kind” to integrate a
“rangeless” Air Combat Maneuvering Instrumentation system (ACMI) “with an
electronic warfare system - the Surface Threat Electronic Warfare (STEW) system,
which simulates surface-to-air and other ground-to-air threats.” “Together,
these systems make up the most modern training system in the world today,”
said Keith Shein of Cubic Corporation in June 2004. “The combination of these
two training systems enables pilots to realistically view their performance and
tactics on each mission.” Better training makes better pilots. Canada has a
tradition of excellence in aircrew training, and that is why President Roosevelt
once called that country “The
Aerodrome of Democracy.” In
1996, the famous American pilot and author, Colonel Walter Boyne, USAF (Retired)
rated the Canadians and Israelis as the two most challenging foes for top US
fighter pilots on exercises. That same year, a Canadian fighter team defeated
all comers (six US Air Force and Air National Guard teams) at the prestigious
William Tell competition. Some say no team in history had been as dominant as
the Canadians were (they won accolades for Top Gun, Top Team, Top Operations,
Top Element, and Top Weapons Director Team.) In 2001, US Secretary of State (and
former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs), General Colin Powell, US Army (Retired)
informed the new US Ambassador to Canada that the Canadian Forces, despite their
tiny budget, are “quite good.” And in 2005, Brigadier General Jack Sterling,
US Army, said “The Canadian Forces are a world-class, fully capable,
professional force, and it will be a privilege to work alongside them...” All
of this goes to show that the little guys should not be taken lightly nor should
they be underestimated just because they do not spend a lot of money. As Brock
once said, “In the U.S. they spend more on their retirement pensions for
senior officers than we do in our whole national defense budget.” Even
though the US defense budget is thirty to thirty-five times greater than
Canada’s these days, Canadian naval and air units are often better trained,
and in some instances, better-equipped than US Navy units. Now,
in the interests of full disclosure, I am Canadian and my Great, Great Uncle was
one of the ten Canadian World War I fighter pilots described above. But the
foregoing is not idle boasting, ethnomania, or a manifestation of the so-called
“Canadian inferiority complex” because I certainly have published articles
that were quite critical of the Canadian military (I have indeed thrown a few
stones at my own house, but luckily, I am thick-skinned and I am no flag-waving
partisan. I do not mind at all that my house might have some glass in it). As I
see it, the Canada/US military comparison follows the same asymmetries as the
classic David and Goliath contest, and I have focused largely on Canadian
examples because, simply by default, I just know more about the Canadian
military than I do about other minor military powers (although, for good
measure, I have also included examples from Australia, Chile, Sweden, the
Netherlands, and other countries that have modest but professional armed
forces). The point I am trying to make is that, contrary to what most Americans
believe, and despite Canada’s puny numbers and low funding, the Canadians
(David, if you will) have indeed had great success competing against US Navy
(Goliath) pilots. As for the reason why, perhaps part of the answer is, as
Colonel Kalev Sepp, US Army (retired) conveyed, “Smaller often allows for
better in key skills, the meager Canadian defence budget notwithstanding.” Smaller,
more parsimonious countries like Canada do not have to nor wish to incur the
extravagant costs associated with supercarriers, intercontinental ballistic
missiles, and the like, which siphon money from the training budget, and so they
can devote more money and time to training than do the American forces. Nor can
Canada and most other nations afford to pay $640 for a military toilet seat, let
alone $435 for a claw hammer, which the US did in the early 1980s. And, contrary
to what the mandarins in Washington would have one believe, this gouging by
rapacious US defense contractors most emphatically did not end in the 1980s,
despite the passing of the 1984 Competition in Contracting Act. In 2000, thanks
to sloppy fiscal controls, the Pentagon paid $76 a piece for screws that
actually cost only 57 cents. And as former Senator Gary Hart once recorded,
“History suggests that it is possible to spend great sums and actually weaken
one’s defense…” In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that
the Pentagon could not account for $1,000,000,000,000 (yes that is one trillion
dollars) of the taxpayers’ money. Perhaps this can help explain why the US
Navy has so much trouble finding the money for training, despite having a much
bigger budget than any other navy. Unsurprisingly, Mark Zepezauer noted the only
way the Pentagon could have accomplished this would have been through
“world-class incompetence or unparalleled deceitfulness (or both)”. “When
it comes to throwing money away,” he said, “The Pentagon has no peer.” Like
the Canadians, The Israeli Air Force, quite probably the best-trained and most
experienced in the world, has outshined the US Navy, and they have done so more
than once. A joint USN-IAF air combat exercise in 1999 underlines and highlights
the thesis that the US Navy is overrated. On September 14, 1999, The
Jerusalem Post announced that the Israelis soundly dispatched the air wing
from the USS Theodore Roosevelt (which, incidentally, was the same
carrier the Dutch destroyed in 1999). Israeli F-16s squared off against American
F-14s and F-18s. The final results were astonishing. The Israelis shot down a
whopping 220 US aircraft while losing only 20 themselves. The 10:1 kill ratio
was so embarrassing that the results were not “officially published ‘to save
the reputations of the US Navy pilots.’” The magazine article on which the
article was based, however, reported the kill ratio to be about 20:1. Some
dispute these figures, and claim that the Israelis had an “unfair
advantage,” and did not include American victories from “stand-off missile
hits.” Responding to claims by a US Navy spokesman that the aforementioned
victory by Israel was meaningless, former F-14 Radar Intercept Officer Jerry
Burns retorted “He gets paid to say that.” And as The Washington Times
reported on September 15, 2000, the Navy Inspector General, Vice Admiral Lee F.
Gunn, US Navy, was unimpressed with the Navy’s performance and its banal
excuses. “Navy pilots were thoroughly beaten in an exercise against Israeli
fliers. ‘An air wing commander was proud the Israelis only achieved a 6-to-1
kill ratio during simulated air-to-air combat maneuvers against a carrier air
wing during a recent exercise, instead of the 20-to-1 kill ratio initially
claimed.’” Regardless of the exercise parameters and conditions, it is
likely that Israeli F-16s would have had the upper hand against US Navy F-14s
and F-18s because the Israeli aviators were much more experienced and the F-16
is simply a more maneuverable and agile aircraft. Tests done in the mid-1970s
confirmed that prototype YF-16 had “generally shown superior performance” to
that of the YF-17, which became the F-18. F-16 pilots often say that the F-18 is
a worthy opponent, with its excellent AOA (Angle Of Attack) capabilities, but it
is also “a little underpowered with its smaller engines, and decelerates
quickly.” And as we will see below, the soon to be retired F-14 “Tom
Turkey” (especially the original A model) was never a particularly good
dogfighter, even with the more powerful engines in later models. This incident was not the first time the US Navy has found itself
running behind the Israelis in air combat. In 1983, significant qualitative
differences between the Israeli Air Force and US naval
aviation became obvious when the US Navy botched a raid over Lebanon to suppress
Syrian forces there. Aircrews from the USS
John F. Kennedy were not properly briefed, launched with the wrong weapons,
used outdated tactics, lost twenty percent of their aircraft, and in return, did
very little damage to the Syrian positions. The Israelis,
conversely, had enjoyed great success during hundreds of missions over the Bekaa
Valley with negligible losses.
Yes, the Israelis had far more experience flying over the region, and thus a
major advantage, but even Secretary Lehman, himself a Naval Reserve aviator,
granted that the Israelis were simply more organized, more creative, and had far
better planning and tactics than the Americans did. “Their loss rate is much
lower because they plan. They don’t do things on the spur of the moment. They
have preplanning… And they use imagination. They’re damn good,” Lehman
surmised. As Wilson blazoned in very colorful terms, US Navy pilots were shocked
and mortified by their poor showing over Lebanon, especially when compared to
the almost immaculate performance demonstrated time and again by the Israelis.
One pilot on the Kennedy indicated his disgust with the Navy’s execrable performance by shouting “What a fucked-up mission.”
Another confided to Wilson: “If the American people ever find out that we sent
ten airplanes over there from this carrier to do what one plane could do,
they’ll never forgive us. I’m embarrassed… I wonder if we learned anything
at all from Vietnam.” Lehman
mentioned a lack of planning, which often reflects poor intelligence gathering
and/or dissemination, and Shuger said the US Navy is notorious for this. The
Navy, he remarked, really has no interest in or respect for the role of its own
intelligence community, and that “Navy pilots launch from carriers on
nationally significant missions without learning much of the relevant
intelligence available to them.” This negligence goes right to the top of the
Navy pyramid, in Shuger’s view, who illustrated this conclusion with the
following: “One example of how this blasé attitude runs rampant even at high
levels is the ‘Admiral’s brief’ at the Miramar air base where I was
stationed when not overseas. Although we squadron intel officers spent
considerable time preparing and presenting these weekly briefs, over the three
and a half years I attended and/or gave them, neither the fighter wing Admiral
nor his Chief of Staff ever showed up. In fact, in all my time at
Miramar, I only spoke to an Admiral once. That was when I was more or less
ordered to participate in a skit for his farewell party at the ‘O’ Club.” Curiously,
that same year (1983), the US General Accounting Office revealed that the US
Navy had consistently exaggerated its aircraft “mission capable rates.” The
GAO said “Current guidance allows aircraft to be reported mission capable
although they – cannot perform the primary warfare roles for which they were
designed and procured, and – have been designed for certain systems the Navy
deems mission essential, but are missing the systems. It is possible therefore
for an F-14 fighter aircraft, for example, to be rated mission capable even
though it cannot launch air-to-air missiles, or if it is missing an APX-76
identification friend or foe interrogation set.” When a fighting organization
uses such loose and meaningless readiness indicators, it is bound for trouble. The
Israelis, on the obverse, have no need to exaggerate their readiness. Consider
their combat record in the 1960s and 1970s. As Shlomo Aloni recorded in 2004,
Israeli fighter pilots flying the French-made Mirage IIIC and the Nesher (made
in Israel, but very much a Mirage V type aircraft) and badly outnumbered, scored
397.5 air-to-air kills between 1966 and 1974. “Compared with the US air combat
experience in Vietnam, the Israeli aerial kill exchange rate and overall
air-to-air performance was phenomenal…” Aloni commented that the French
Mirage IIIC was technically inferior to its contemporaries serving in the US
Navy, but luckily, it did have a cannon, and in the hands of skilled Israeli
pilots (who knew how to use obsolete weapons like a cannon to great effect) it
became the most successful fighter of its era. Aloni’s
statement, while impressive and sincere, needs some qualification. If we look at
the performance of the US Navy and Air Force’s primary fighter of the 1960s,
the F-4 Phantom, against Soviet-designed North Vietnamese fighters in the early
years of the war, the overall victory-loss ratio in aerial combat was only about
2:1 in favor of the Americans. Meanwhile, between July 1966 and the end of 1969,
the Israeli Mirage and Nesher pilots shot down 116 Soviet-built Mig fighters
(mostly with cannon fire) while losing only 9 to enemy fighters (a ratio of
almost 13:1). Many of the enemy fighters faced by both the Israelis and the US
Navy were the Mig-21 Fishbed aircraft. The Israelis, as you might expect, had
little difficulty handling this opponent. According to Cockburn: “The Israeli
Air Force consistently outclassed the Fishbed in the Middle East wars in 1967 up
to the engagement with the Syrians over the Bekaa Valley in 1982, destroying an
average of 20 for every Israeli plane lost.” The US Navy pilots also handled
the Fishbed over Vietnam, but not quite as easily. As Rendall posted, the US
Navy and Air Force pilots had far more restrictive “Rules of Engagement”
than the Israelis did, and this no doubt undermined their performance. While
these engagement restrictions were certainly not the fault of the pilots, they
nevertheless were a key weakness for the US Navy, the US military, and other
western nations who try to fight wars with lawyers as well as warriors.
Adversaries that are less concerned with such legal niceties will prove to be
quite challenging. Hallion
also cautioned that Surface-to-Air Missiles (SAMs) were much more prolific in
Vietnam than in the Middle East in 1967, and that complicated matters for the
Americans as well. Others have noted that the Israelis, ironically, had an
easier time shooting down enemy planes because there were so many available
targets; Vietnam, to the contrary, was not a “target rich” environment for
the Americans. As Riccioni detailed, the Arab pilots flying against Israel were
not of the highest caliber, either. However, there were other major purely
self-imposed obstacles that the Americans faced, such as having poor dogfighting
skills and using missiles when guns would have been more appropriate (even the
most advanced version of the F-4 used by the Navy, the J model, did not have an
integral cannon). Spector grieved that “During the spring of 1968, F-4s from
the carriers America and Enterprise
fired a total of twenty-seven of these $150,000 (Sparrow) missiles without
obtaining a hit,” and Cockburn also ruminated
that
the US over-reliance on missiles in Vietnam sometimes verged on the tragi-comic:
“On one occasion during the Southeast Asia war, a U.S. F-4 pilot fired a
Sparrow missile at an Australian destroyer because his look-down radar had
informed him it was a low-flying helicopter. Luckily for the seaman in whose
bunk the Sparrow ended up, the fuze was not working and the missile failed to
explode.” The US Navy put too much faith in missiles and
technology, but nowhere near enough in training, said Spector. “As one senior
officer observed, ‘The point is, we sent our people out there not trained for
dog fighting. We sent aircraft out there not equipped for dog fighting… and
occasionally (I probably should use the word frequently) we got into a
nose-to-nose combat situation where neither the guy flying the airplane nor the
airplane had ever fired a missile.’” Unnecessarily high losses were the end
product of all this, and some US Navy carrier squadrons were badly mauled by
North Vietnamese SAMs and aircraft: “Between July and October 1967 the carrier
Oriskany lost nearly 40% of her combat aircraft. One squadron ‘went out
with 14 brand new A-4s and something like 12 were shot down. Of course we picked
up replacements, but really only one or two of the original planes were with us
when we came home.’” The Oriskany was not the only carrier to absorb
big losses. “In the last year of the war,” noted Vistica, “Saratoga
lost seventeen of its planes. Between 1963 and August 15, 1973, when the war
ended, 859 Navy aircraft were lost in combat or operational accidents.” Stevenson
further repined that the Phantom also had smoky exhaust, making it an easy
target, plus the canopy restricted the crew’s field of vision, hence it had a
very large blind spot. Plus, even Top Gun
graduate Robert
L. "Hoot" Gibson, who had flown both the Navy F-4 (in combat) and
the Mig-21, said
that, given a choice, he actually would have preferred flying the Mig-21 in
daytime visual flight conditions. Ironically,
if the US forces had used an older fighter, the Canadair Sabre Mark VI, a more
powerful version of the USAF Sabres used in Korea, they actually might have
gotten better results in air combat over Vietnam. The Sabre started out as an
excellent all-gun fighter, although later versions were equipped with missiles,
and its canopy gave the pilot a 360-degree view. Its engines were smokeless as
well. These features probably assisted the Pakistani Air Force’s elderly
Sabres in defeating Indian Mig-21s by a whopping 6:1 ratio in the 1971
Indo-Pakistani War (although one would have to wonder how the Sabre would have
fared against North Vietnamese SAMs). Acknowledging
its poor performance in air combat over Vietnam, in March 1969, the US Navy
opened its famed “Post-graduate Course in Fighter Weapons, Tactics and
Doctrine,” better known as the “Top Gun” course. Here, happily, is an
instance in which the US Navy understood it had a weakness and actually did
something about it. However, it can be argued that the Top Gun course, offered
to only a very few select F-4 crews, who then refreshed their squadrons with
what they had forgotten (or never learned) about the art of dogfighting, was
only necessary because the US Navy had not fully trained (or equipped) its
pilots in the essentials of close air combat. In effect, at least in the
beginning, it might be considered a remedial course (not the so-called
“Ph.D.” in air combat tactics) that taught US Navy pilots many of the
tactics that the Israelis apparently learned years before, even though both
countries were fighting air wars since 1966. The
impact of Top Gun, within the limits
of Vietnam, is frequently overstated. As Hallion enumerated, even with Top Gun graduates in the skies at the end of
the war, the overall victory-loss ratio for all US Navy and US Air Force F-4
crews in Vietnam was still disappointing (it never topped 3.38: 1. The 12:1
ratio some pundits offer only applies to Top Gun graduates collectively, a very
small number of men). Shuger added that “Schools like Top Gun are considered
such plums that entrance to them is generally restricted to the career-committed
‘top one percenters…’” and that it is not really necessary for
promotions because “as long as an officer shows minimal competence in his
specialty, he will probably continue to move in step with his peers for a long
time, even if his overall military development is totally arrested. All he has
to do is come to work and get more senior.” “So,” he chided, “the great
majority of Fleet Average Aviators have been given no good reasons to care about
the real nuts and bolts of the next war. For them, flying is prestigious and
fun. Isn’t that enough?” He also said, “Working on your landing or other
airmanship skills show you have the Right Stuff. Working on your knowledge of
enemy tactics and weapons doesn’t. That’s why most fleet pilots know less
about what they’d face in combat than they do about suburban real estate
prices.” That
3.38:1 ratio may not truly reflect the skills of the US Navy crews because it
includes both Navy and Air Force F-4 crews, and the Air Force, remarkably, was
slower to provide its pilots with advanced ACM training. Even if we discard the
Rules of Engagement and SAM issues, Navy pilots in general lacked the training
and weapons necessary to excel in close combat, and thus probably would not have
achieved the same exchange ratios as the Israelis. And despite launching Top
Gun, the top ace of the war was nevertheless a North Vietnamese pilot named Nguyen Van Coc, with nine air-to-air kills (including several F-4 Phantoms). All together,
North Vietnam produced 16 aces, whereas the US Navy took seven years to produce
its first and only ace team (pilot Lt. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and his Radar
Intercept Officer, Lt. J.G. Willie Driscoll) who together were credited with
five victories. The Vietnamese pilots had a certain advantage in that they
stayed with their units and engaged in combat for longer periods of time than US
Navy pilots. As we will see later, the relatively fast rotation of American
pilots from unit to unit has been a serious problem. Cunningham and Driscoll
earned distinction by shooting down three Migs in one day, but in turn were shot
down that same day by a North Vietnamese SAM. Not exactly a Hollywood story, but
they were the best the US Navy produced, and Cunningham was a Top Gun graduate. All
this makes the US Navy look pretty bad in comparison to the Israelis, but is it
a condign comparison? Some say that the two organizations and the conflicts they
have engaged in are apples and oranges, and perhaps they are correct, at least
to a certain extent. This does not let the US Navy off the hook, or allow it to
disculpate itself though, because it is also fair to say that the Israeli air
combat record is second to none in the post-war era, whereas the US Navy’s
record is considerably more mixed. Lehman was not just being kind when he said
that the Israeli Air Force is “Damn good.” In the 1973 Yom Kippur War,
“The Israeli Air Force had the fastest turnaround time from takeoff to takeoff
of any nation on earth,” declared American author Rodger Claire. Analogously,
the Israeli
student pilots who converted to the F-16 in the late 1970s astounded their US
mentors with their in-depth technical knowledge of the aircraft, and often knew
more about what-was-to-them the brand new F-16 than the experienced American
instructor pilots did. To
summarize, most analysts would concur that the Israelis have been highly
successful. Contrarily, a goodly number of analysts would
also agree that US naval aviation has suffered many setbacks and humiliations
over the years, and has had to open special schools to rectify its self-admitted
deficiencies. Finally, it would be very difficult to accept that US naval
aviators were or are better-trained than their Israeli peers, especially in
1983, and considering the US Navy’s combat experience over Vietnam, this in
itself should be a disgrace. The core issue here, or so it seems to me, is an
apparent inability or unwillingness to learn from mistakes in the long run.
Lieutenant Dave Draz, US Navy, served as an exchange pilot in the RCN in the
1950s, and he cut to the heart of the matter: “I soon learned that the RCN
worked just as long and as hard hours as the USN, and just as skillfully. But
more importantly, I became ware that ‘lessons learned’ were a part of every
day life in the RCN. Quite frankly, while the USN was speaking around the clock,
the next op order was being written by staff types with little or no attention
being paid to the trials, tribulations and errors being made as events went on.
Hence the USN was committed to making or repeating errors without taking any
time to say ‘what if we did it this way.’” Now
let us briefly compare this somewhat negligent US approach to learning lessons
with that of the Israelis. As Cockburn alluded,
during the Six Day War, Israel lost one of its largest ships, a destroyer, to
Egyptian anti-ship missiles. The Israeli Navy learned its lesson and promptly
implemented a solution “by scrapping their few large destroyers and rebuilding
their navy around small, fast, and highly maneuverable patrol boats.” Although
the Israeli Navy is not in any way comparable to the US Navy in terms of
missions, responsibilities, or strategic purpose, this example does show that
one navy is capable of intelligent and rapid change, even if it means
sacrificing the greatest symbols of naval might available (Germany’s Admiral
Doenitz once thought about getting rid of his navy’s big surface ships too,
but was talked out of it by his fellow admirals). The Israelis do indeed learn
from their mistakes. One cannot always same the same for the US Navy. Unlike Israel, Chile is not a great military
powerhouse, but its air force is well trained, and they too have given the US
Navy reason for pause. In the August 1989 issue of Air Combat magazine,
author Jeffrey Ethell reported that Chilean Air Force
pilots, flying the relatively unsophisticated but nimble F-5E, had trounced an
American carrier air group and its hauteur confidence (including F-14s and
F-18s) from the USS Independence in air combat exercises. The initial
kill ratio was reported as 56:16 in favor of the Chileans, although later
revised to 36:20, and as one might expect, this incident did not receive much
press coverage in the United States. It
should be noted that in this exercise, not unlike the one with the Israelis
previously discussed, pilots were not allowed to engage targets that were Beyond
Visual Range (BVR), which obviously restricted the use of the US Navy’s long
range Phoenix and Sparrow missiles. In addition, aircraft were not permitted to
engage in “head-on” or “face to face” missile attacks, which meant that
pilots had to maneuver into missile firing position behind
the enemy, in the target’s rear quarter. Now this raises an interesting
question; namely, were these restrictions unrealistic? In my view, the answer is
not really. After all, US fighters in Vietnam and elsewhere were not permitted
to engage in BVR combat, and even in Operation Desert Storm, most of the US air
combat kills were achieved within visual range out of concern about possible
fratricide. And as Riccioni pointed out earlier, the Phoenix and Sparrow
missiles are far less reliable than the shorter-ranged Sidewinders, which both
sides used in this exercise. Riccioni also mentioned that no one has yet come up
with a truly reliable way to differentiate between friends, foes, and neutral
aircraft with anything except the Mk. I Eyeball, which is also not perfect
(recall the 1994 case in which US F-15s came within 1,000 feet of US
helicopters, mistook them for Iraqis, and then shot them down with missiles). This
being the case, firing at targets that are BVR, especially with a $1.9 million
Phoenix, or the $386,000 AMRAAM, is likely to remain risky, certainly expensive,
and therefore, often discouraged in real life and in exercises. As for the
restriction on using missiles against the enemy’s forward quarter, once again,
Riccioni pointed out that “Good Navy pilots, smart pilots, prefer to remain
away from the enemy’s lethal forward quarter”, and the vast majority of
air-to air kills in modern combat have been secured by attacking the rear
quarter anyway, so this too was probably of no great salience. Ethell reported
that the Chileans got the jump on the F-14s and F-18s by listening for (and
hearing from quite a distance) US radar emissions while simultaneously keeping
their own radars on “standby” and flying low to avoid detection themselves.
In this scenario, the Chileans attacked from the rear quarter anyway, as it was
an ambush, not a joust, so the restrictions on the usage of the Sparrow and the
Phoenix mentioned earlier would, in all likelihood, be mostly irrelevant in many
of the individual engagements. Victory in air combat frequently depends on the
element of surprise, which the Chileans definitely had and ruthlessly exploited
in this scenario. Surprise,
said Fallows, remains the key to victory in air combat. As he pointed out,
“The most lethal ‘ace’ of all time, the German flier Eric Hartmann, did
everything he could to avoid prolonged ‘dogfight’ engagements. He claimed
that of the 352 planes he destroyed during World War II, fully 80 percent were
‘kills’ by surprise. On the allied side, one air commander filed a report in
1944 that might as well have been taken from accounts of Korea or Vietnam: ‘90
percent of all fighters shot down never saw the guy who hit them.’” The
problem with BVR, Pierre Sprey indicated, “is that the other plane is also
looking for you, and these same radar systems serve as giant beacons, alerting
any other plane in the region to your presence. If other planes are equipped
with a “radar warning receiver” (that is, a ‘fuzz-buster’), they are
quickly aware that someone is beaming radar toward them, and from what
direction. The price of powerful radar, then, is to sacrifice off the top the
element of surprise that determines 80 percent of all results. And for what? In
Vietnam as in all other recent wars, the great majority of ‘kills’ was not
based on radar detection but on the pilot’s own visual observations.” The
Chileans quickly took down two F-18s, and they were very surprised at how easy
it was to detect, stalk, evade, and kill F-14s in particular (The F-14 is a much
larger aircraft than the F-5, and thus easier to find). Ethell also noted that
the Chilean pilots ranged from very experienced to relative novices, so they
were not an elite unit, yet he described them as being as good as or better than
the intrepid and highly trained US “aggressor” squadrons. This outcome tends
to support Nordeen’s consentient statement of 2004 that “It has been
demonstrated during air wars of the past 50 years that skill, determination, and
effective battle planning and tactics have allowed pilots of an outnumbered
force of inferior aircraft to overcome the odds and emerge from an air battle
– if not an air campaign – as the winner.” The
legendary Late Colonel John Boyd, USAF (Retired) was no fan of swing-wing
airplanes like the Navy’s F-14, and there was much criticism of the F-14 in
his 2002 biography. “Hollywood and the movie Top
Gun notwithstanding, the F-14 Tomcat is a lumbering, poor-performing, aerial
truck. It weighs about fifty-four thousand pounds. Add on external fuel tanks
and missiles and the weight is about seventy thousand pounds. It is what fighter
pilots call a “grape”: squeeze it in a couple of hard turns and all the
energy oozes out. That energy cannot be quickly regained, and the aircraft
becomes an easy target. Navy admirals strongly discourage simulated battles
between the F-14 and the latest Air Force fighters. But those engagements
occasionally take place. And when they do, given pilots of equal ability, the
F-14 always loses.” In 2003, for instance, Robert DeStasio confirmed that USAF
F-15s took on Navy F-14s in a series of three “2 versus 2” engagements, in
which all the F-14s were targeted, and no F-15s were lost. Studies have also
indicated that although both the F-14 and F-15 are complex and unreliable
aircraft, the average number of daily sorties that an F-14 can fly is just .028,
but the F-15 can fly roughly 0.5 (and the less sophisticated land-based
fighters, like the F-5A, can fly 1.25 sorties per day). All this lends support
to what even the former CNO, the Late Admiral Ernest King, USN, quietly admitted
in World War II, that land-based aircraft are, in fact, naturally “superior”
to carrier-based planes. The USAF certainly played the dominant role in the air
war during Desert Storm, even though several carriers were involved. The
F-14 is now fading into the pages of history, and it is being replaced by the
F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. While certainly much newer than the F-14, some say the
Super (expensive) Hornet is no improvement over the existing F/A-18C/D, or the
F-14 itself, in fact in many parameters, it is actually less capable than its predecessors. Critics have roasted the new
aircraft for its compromised “do-it-all-with-one-platform” philosophy, and
in 1999, the US Marine Corps even stated that it would flat out refuse to buy
the aircraft. Even compared to the stylish but overpraised F-14, the
ill-regarded and oversold Super Hornet falls short in key areas. Consider
payload and range, for example. Said Bob Kress and Rear Admiral Paul Gillcrist,
US Navy (Retired) in 2002, “Though it's a whizzy little airshow performer with
a nice, modern cockpit, it has only 36 percent of the F-14's payload/range
capability. The F/A-18E Super Hornet has been improved but still has, at best,
50 percent of the F-14's capability to deliver a fixed number of bombs (in
pounds) on target. This naturally means that the carrier radius of influence
drops to 50 percent of what it would have been with the same number of F-14s. As
a result, the area of influence (not radius) drops to 23 percent!” “The
Super Hornet program is still not the performance champion among combat
aircraft,” echoed another critic, Bill Sweetman, in 2004. “The F-15 and
Rafale will carry more weapons and fly farther, and the Rafale, F-16, and
Typhoon will out-accelerate and outmaneuver the F/A-18E/F at high speeds.”
Stan Crock pontificated that a great many naval aviators appear to be quite
unimpressed with the new airplane, and consider it a step backward, not forward:
“‘If the Joint Strike Fighter dies,’” frets one airman, “‘we're
stuck with the Super Hornet.’” One
cannot talk about modern Navy fighters for very long without bringing up the
movie that made them famous. Top Gun
is just a movie, clearly, but it was made with the full cooperation of the US
Navy, which then exploited its popularity to boost recruiting. “Indeed the
Navy liked the film so much that Navy recruiters set up recruiting booths inside
some theaters that were showing the film. According to the Navy, recruitment of
young men wanting to become naval aviators went up 500 percent after the film
was released,” said David L. Robb in his book Operation Hollywood: How the
Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies. Thus, it is probably fair to say
that this film and the perceptions it created were quite influential in the
United States. This movie was very much directed by the Pentagon, but Robb noted
that most Americans “have no idea that the government has any say whatsoever
in the content of films and TV shows.” But it does. In order to make use of
Navy aircraft, bases, personnel, and such, movie producers must surrender some
of their creative license to Navy officials who act, in effect, as script
censors, removing scenes and dialog that might reflect poorly on the US Navy.
When it comes to Hollywood productions, the Pentagon will indeed “change the
facts to make the military look better than it really is.” In
Top Gun, the Navy nixed early story
ideas about a mid-air collision and told the producers to change Kelly
McGillis’ dishy and toothsome character (Charlotte) to a civilian so it would
be safe for the Tom Cruise character (Maverick, a naval aviator) to court her.
Curiously, though, several not-at-all favorable elements were left untouched and
uncut by the Navy. The dentigerous Maverick, in his gossypine white Navy
uniform, followed Charlotte into a Ladies’ Room at the WOXOF Lounge at Miramar
NAS, and propositioned her. Maverick, a brilliant flyer with somewhat of an
Icarus complex, is depicted as emotionally unstable, unreliable, glory-seeking,
sophomoric, insubordinate (his wearing of that colorful leather flight jacket
off base was against regulations), undisciplined, ungentlemanly, immature,
reckless, overly aggressive, and “dangerous and foolish.” His trusty Radar
Interceptor Officer and sidekick, Goose, is more mature and responsible then
Maverick, and serves as the voice of reason, but is killed off for dramatic
purposes. Despite these massive character flaws, Maverick is only slapped
lightly on the wrist for his many, many transgressions, and nevertheless becomes
a hero for his unyielding and unpredictable flying skills. The US Navy
apparently had no problem with this. No matter what Maverick tried to do, he
always got away with it, and was even rewarded. To some cynics out there, this
sounds reminiscent of the USS Vincennes incident, in which members of the crew received
citations for shooting down an Iranian airliner. Unhappily,
the relationship between Top Gun and
the Navy goes far beyond recruiting and aerodynamic showmanship, however,
because as Oscar Wilde once said “Life imitates
art far more than art imitates Life.” Case in point, said Diehl, is the
behavior of real Navy fighter pilots after Top
Gun became a hit: “Navy Secretary John Lehman (himself a party-loving Navy
flier) was once photographed congratulating Tom Cruise, star of the block-buster
movie Top Gun. In the film, the Tom Cruise character flies the F-14 Tomcat
at the Navy’s elite fighter weapons school. Cruise’s character repeatedly
takes chances, such as buzzing an air traffic control tower. He enjoys being
called dangerous and flies ‘at the edge.’ Unfortunately, the real Tomcat
fliers would try to emulate this devil-may-care Hollywood image. The F-14 mishap
rates would more than double in the years following the movie’s release – in
numerous not-so-great balls of fire, to borrow from the Jerry Lee Lewis song in
the soundtrack.” There
are other things one will not see in a Pentagon-controlled movie like Top
Gun. Take the French Navy, for example. The French military and its
technologies are often completely and utterly disparaged in the US, which is
strange in that, a)
French ships, ground forces, and gunpowder proved instrumental in
defeating the British during the American Revolution, b)
that the Emperor Napoleon once conquered much of western and central
Europe, and has been described as a “military genius” by many, including
Americans like Jay Luvaas, Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army War
College, c)
that as David F. Trask (Chief Historian at the US Army Center of Military
History) once said, US units were heavily dependant on French weapons,
ammunition and training during World War I, d)
that in the final months of the same war, said Trask, the French Army
captured many more prisoners and guns (139,000 and 1,880, respectively) than the
Americans did (43,000 and 1,421, respectively), e)
that the French invented ASW sonar, hydroplanes, compressed air-activated
ballast tanks, altimeters, seaplanes, gyroscopes, parachutes, diesel engines and
SCUBA equipment, and the famous Mirage III aircraft, which the Israelis used to
absolutely dominate the skies over the Middle East in 1967, f)
and that, as John Lehman said, “the origins of the U.S. Navy owe much
more to the French Navy than to the Royal Navy.” Please note that I am not
saying the French are wonderful; merely that their poor reputation in the US may
not be fully deserved. Be
that as it may, the French Navy recently also scored some points against US Navy
fighters. In December 2002, a French magazine reported that Rafales from the
much derided new carrier Charles de Gaulle
tangled with American F-14s and F-18s from the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and the combat-proven US Navy planes got
their money’s worth out of the novice French fighter: “According to the 12F
pilots, the low-speed maneuverability of the Rafale surprised their American
counterparts. ‘Results were positive,’ modestly adds Lieutenant Commander
(Philippe) Roux…. ‘Our training focused on close combat, which emphasizes
the Rafale’s maneuverability, including rate of turn, turning radius,
acceleration, deceleration and vertical maneuvers… The Rafale proved superior
in each of these areas. The American F-14s and F-18s are proven,
high-performance machines, and their crews know them inside-out, but they are
still previous generation planes.” Another French publication also noted in
2004 that “The results of engagements against other fighter aircraft used by
allied countries exceeded the highest expectations. According to the pilots of
12F Squadron, the Rafale is indeed an exceptional aircraft, and the score of
victories obtained against F-14 Tomcats, F-15 Eagles and F/A-18 Hornets is
remarkably high.” US
naval aviation is truly “up the creek without a paddle” these days, even
against the allegedly inferior French military, but the fact is that US naval
aviation has had serious deficiencies for many years. In 2000, Burns rued “We are a much less effective force than we were seven or
eight years ago.” “At the start of the Kosovo conflict, says Burns, who at
the time was stationed at the Strike Weapons Tactics School in Virginia Beach,
U.S. Navy pilots hadn't been trained in using laser-guided weapons. ‘That's
why we had such high miss rates in the opening phases of the war. We had to
dispatch someone [to tutor pilots] in laser-guided bomb delivery techniques.’
Burns, who retired in 1999, says that when he last served on the Eisenhower in
the Mediterranean, the carrier was ‘undermanned’ by 450 to 500 sailors.
‘They didn't have enough people to keep the [approach] radar fully manned at
all times.’ If the weather closed in, he adds, someone would have to be sent
down to the bunkroom to wake up a radar operator. ‘The Navy says operations
are safe. But they aren't safe. Planes were running out of gas and they couldn't
come on board.’ Flight training hours have been cut back so much, says Burns,
that the last time his carrier fighter squadron went on deployment, its aviators
were only getting 10 to 15 hours a month.” Under these circumstances, it
should not be shocking to hear that during the Bosnian campaign of the 1990s, US
Navy carriers were only able to generate 8,290 sorties, far less than the French
Air Force (12,502), the RAF (10,300), and of course, the mighty USAF (24,153). In September 2000, Lieutenant Commander Steve
Rowe, US Naval Reserve, desponded that “During my 12 years as a naval flight
officer, I took great pride in the unique contribution of naval aviation. Navy
air was the nation’s enabling air arm. This unique capability is arguably no
longer credible today. And will almost certainly become a paper tiger in the
near future. Why? Because the leaders of naval aviation and the Navy as a whole
have forgotten what the Navy is about. In the mad rush for dollars in an
underfunded military, the leaders have neglected our core competencies, and
grossly unbalanced support and force protection capabilities to favor strike
aircraft.” In so doing, as noted earlier, the Navy has gutted its ASW aviation
assets, but one might disagree with Rowe’s statement that the US military is
underfunded. How is this possible, when the US military budget will soon be
equal to the military budgets of every other country in the world combined?
What this suggests is that even outspending the rest of the world is not enough
if the money is not spent wisely. The cuts in flying hours have continued, even
after President Bush took over and dramatically increased the defense budget. As
Captain Bob Scott, SC, US Navy, said in 2005: “The Navy flew 17 percent fewer
hours in fiscal 2004 compared to fiscal 2003 and has forecast slightly fewer
flying hours in fiscal 2005.” Without a doubt, the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan have been a drain on the budget, even though so far the US has not
lost very much equipment or very many personnel in either of these theaters, at
least compared to what it lost in Vietnam, where thousands
of US planes and helicopters were destroyed, and almost 60,000 US personnel
died. Given the multiple Achilles Heels already
documented in US naval aviation, it may not be terribly preternatural that a few
contemporary naval aviators now bestow great esteem on their historic rival, the
USAF. The perceptive Commander Bob Norris, US Navy, flew F-18s in the Navy and
also did a three-year exchange in the USAF, flying F-15s. When asked if an
aspiring fighter pilot should go to the Naval Academy or the Air Force Academy
in Colorado, he actually encouraged the prospect to consider the USAF.
Incredibly, for a naval officer, Norris was quite enthusiastic about the USAF:
“The USAF is exceptionally well organized and well run. All pilots are groomed
to high standards for knowledge and professionalism… Their aircraft are
top-notch and extremely well maintained… Their enlisted personnel are the
brightest and the best trained. The USAF is homogenous and macro. No matter
where you go, you’ll know what to expect, and you’ll be given the training
and tools you need to meet those expectations.” The Navy, he said is
“heterogeneous and micro… Your squadron is your home; it may be great,
average or awful. A squadron can go from one extreme to the other before you
know it… The quality of the aircraft varies directly with the availability of
parts. Senior Navy enlisted are salt of the Earth; you’ll be proud if you can
earn their respect. Junior enlisted vary from terrific to the troubled kid the
judge made join the service… The quality of training will vary and sometimes
you’ll be in over your head…” The only truly positive aspect of flying in
the Navy, according to Norris, was that “You will fly with legends and they
will kick your ass until you become a lethal force.” So, in Norris’ opinion,
unlike the US Navy, USAF training and aircraft are consistently excellent, and
USAF enlisted people are better trained than Navy personnel. “Bottom line,
son, if you gotta ask… pack warm & good luck in Colorado.” Major Gregory Stroud,
Arizona ANG, a former Navy pilot, “jumped ship” to fly F-16s in the Air
National Guard in 1988, and he too was less than exuberant about naval aviation.
Major Stroud has the great distinction of graduating from both the Navy Top Gun
course and the Air Force Fighter Weapons School, and his comparison of the two
courses was not flattering to the Navy. “The F-16A School (Air Force) was a
much more comprehensive and difficult school which takes five months to complete
and covers every tactic and mission the F-16 is capable of… Top Gun was fun
and easy in comparison.” This news about Top Gun being overrated will surprise
a lot of Americans, as will the disclosure that in 1999, the finest air combat
training facility in the US was not at the Top Gun school, nor any of the other
naval air stations, for that matter. No, that honor actually went to the Air
National Guard’s Combat Readiness Training Center in Alpena, Michigan.
According to James McCrone, of National Guard magazine, the technology
provided to the part-time airmen of the Air National Guard at this range would
have made Maverick and Iceman quite jealous…. Lack of Training,
Overrated Technology, Bad Policies, and Technocratic Leadership Despite its vastly superior numbers, resources and expensive weapons,
the US Navy, the world’s only true heavyweight navy, continually fails to
vanquish welterweight and lightweight naval powers. This would indicate that
training and good officers, not big, expensive ships and bloated budgets, are
the key to naval power. It is training, or lack thereof, that truly undermines
the performance of the US Navy. For example, even though the United States maintains the largest
submarine fleet in the world (because the Russian fleet is mostly tied up at
dockside), American submariners do not currently receive escape training. The
Canadian submarine force has only 4 boats, and yet it has managed to acquire the
most advanced submarine escape training facility in the world. In November 2003,
it was reported that the US Navy was considering sending its submariners to
Canada for escape training. (According to Karam, the US Navy closed its free
ascent training facility, but even if it had been open during his tour of duty
in the late 1980s, he, an enlisted “Nuke,” would not have received such
training because the US Navy apparently felt that only the non-nuke sailors, and
the officers, needed it). I for one think it is rather strange that the richest
kid on the block might need to visit his poor cousin to go swimming. The British
also have an excellent submarine escape training facility, and after touring
that facility, Truscott remarked “it is hard not to be impressed with the
quality of training offered to British submariners.” One can only imagine his
reaction if he knew that American submariners no longer receive this kind of
training. In response to these
criticisms, some US Navy boosters will say, defensively, that the number of days
spent underway (“steaming days”) per year is strongly correlated with the
overall combat readiness of a navy, and by that standard the US Navy does very
well, and I agree. Yet, if the number of steaming days in itself is a true
stand-alone way to evaluate readiness, then probably the best-trained navy in
NATO in the late 1990s was the pocket-sized Belgian
Navy. In 1996, a US Navy officer visited a Belgian ship during exercises in the
Baltic Sea, and reported that “Belgian sailors seem never to stop sailing,”
averaging 280 steaming days a year. The following year, the US Navy average for
deployed ships in the Atlantic was only about 200 steaming days, and in
Operation Desert Shield/Storm, elderly Canadian ships detached to the
Multinational Interception Force in the Persian Gulf maintained higher “on
station availability” than did the US Navy ships, and were praised by US Navy
senior officers for being “an example for others to follow”. In 1990,
authors Dunnigan and Nofi rated the Royal Navy’s overall seamanship as
superior to that of the US Navy, but then that really should be no surprise. The US Navy also opines that its officers and crews are
the most professional in the world, yet media reports have indicated a startling
number of American ship commanders have been fired or suspended in recent years,
including the captain of the carrier John F. Kennedy, whose ship collided
with a small dhow in the Persian Gulf in 2004. Accidents happen in every navy,
as was the case in Canada with the recent disaster aboard the submarine HMCS
Chicoutimi, but in his discussion on why so many US Navy commanders are
getting fired, Raymond Perry said "I believe that the spate of CO firings
is an indicator of the decline of professional warfighting skills of naval
officers." Perry, who served for 29 years as an officer, said that when he
was at the US Naval Academy in the 1950s, one of his professors observed
"operational competence was no longer a true priority in the US
military." This assertion was verified by Rear Admiral
Jeffry Brock, RCN (Retired), who reminisced about an exercise he observed in the
1950s. During the initial phase of the exercise, he reported that the US Navy
Admiral (and staff) commanding the US Second Fleet, whilst en route to the UK,
“lost almost two-thirds of their own forces. Furthermore, the exercise
referees concluded that most of this damage to the United States Atlantic Fleet
had been brought about by disastrous mismanagement and the misdirection of their
own attack forces." Brock also let on that, even before losing most of the
US ships in simulated combat, the American admiral had asked him to discreetly
arrange for a Canadian ship to "pass across one or two charts of the
northern-west approaches to the United Kingdom and the entrance to the
Clyde." (Note that this happened after
the fleet was already underway). Brock obliged, and soon thereafter, he observed
something peculiar -- helicopters from the Saratoga were frantically
delivering hand messages to the rest of the US Second Fleet. Then someone
quietly informed him of what he had already suspected, that "the whole
United States Atlantic Fleet had sailed without proper charts of their
destination," and the Canadians had saved the day. Brock concluded,
laconically, "I was appalled." He also said the American version of
the post-exercise review was, to put it mildly, “a white-wash.” That was more than forty
years ago, and perhaps not much has changed since. Both the professor and Perry
argued that then and now, political maneuvering and impressing the brass take
priority over war-fighting skills in the peacetime US Navy. Many conscientious
officers quietly agree with them. The reason why stultifying careerism runs
rampant among US Navy officers is directly related to the Navy’s “Up or
Out” policy, enacted in 1916, and used in all branches of the US military.
This system, unlike those used in other English-speaking navies, requires US
Navy officers to be promoted “on schedule” or face early retirement. This in
turn creates insecurity, competition, a desire for impossible perfection, which
in turn encourages dishonesty, a zero-defects mentality, which applies to
everyone except the crew of the USS
Vincennes (more on this in a minute), and ticket-punching taken to almost
absurd levels. This American ticket-punching bemused Brock during the Korean
War: “…I was intrigued by the frequency with which the command and fleet
organization structure would be changed. I was eventually forced to the
conclusion that much of this was due to an American desire to give as many
senior officers as possible what they called ‘battle command experience.’
But it happened with such regularity and for such periods that it accomplished
little for the war effort except to confuse this peregrinating band of heroes as
much as it did the rest of us. Furthermore, there was no enemy at sea to provide
the ‘battle experience.’ I believe, however, that these movements of USN
ships and Flag Officers in and out of the war zone also had something to do with
the kind of paper records needed for promotion – to say nothing of the
acquisition of more medal ribbons, for which there was keen competition.” Interestingly, though, the
desire for battle experience is only strong when it is perceived as glamorous
and/or career-enhancing. When Admiral Zumwalt was Commander, Naval Forces
Vietnam in the late 1960s, he oversaw the brown water navy campaign on the
rivers. Zumwalt was utterly dismayed at the poor quality officers that seemed to
be prolific in his command. He wrote that “the level of competence hovered
around zero. Vietnam was a dumping ground for weak naval officers at the
commander and captain levels.” At the headquarters in Saigon, “Many officers
were more concerned about their tennis dates and dinner plans than putting out a
maximum effort to fight.” As for the reason why this was so, one need consider
only thing: “Obtaining good officers was difficult since many good naval
officers perceived that Vietnam service would be of no help to their careers,
and more likely a step backward. I had always thought that when your country was
at war, you sent your best men to fight it. I knew there were personnel
detailers in Washington telling good naval officers not to go to Vietnam, and
offering them a year at the Naval War College instead. In effect, these military
officers were dodging the war just liked the young men who ran off to Canada.”
To out it another way, a tour in Vietnam might be a ticket to “Out” rather
than “Up” in the minds of these careerists. This “Up or Out” system
also ensures that some of the Navy’s most experienced and mature officers will
be lost to the civilian world because, after all, only a very few officers in
any navy will ever make flag rank. Even Defense Secretary Rumsfeld trenchantly
called the US Navy’s officer promotion policy “lousy” in 2003, yet it
remains in place at the time of writing. This is a systemic problem. In addition, one should also
recall the attack on the USS
Stark and the shoddy damage control procedures used by her crew (men
were fighting fires while wearing improper clothing and there was not enough
equipment), the accidental and inexcusable attack on an Iranian airliner by the USS
Vincennes, and the more recent collision between the nuclear submarine USS
Greeneville and a Japanese vessel. When the Japanese government found out
that untrained civilian guests were actually at the controls of the Greenville
before the collision, they were most undiplomatic. “It
is outrageous. The US Navy is slack,” said the Japanese Defence Agency Chief
Toshitsugu Saito in response. Also
note that the Japanese have gone through this before: “In 1981, the nuclear
submarine USS George Washington, en route to a liberty port, hastily surfaced
in the East China Sea. It rammed and sank a Japanese freighter. Unbelievably,
the sub did not report this collision until the next day.” Paul Beaver,
Military Editor at Jane’s Defence Weekly, told National Public
Radio’s Lisa Simeone in 2001 that the US Navy is quite probably the only navy
in the world that has a “civilian ride-along program.” Although civilians
can visit British and Canadian warships, for example, they may only do so when
the ships are at dockside, and they must leave the ships before they get
underway. He added that Britain’s Royal Navy would never even consider such a
ride-along program because of the inherent risks involved. Regarding the Vincennes
incident, former Chicago Tribune military correspondent Lieutenant
Colonel David Evans, USMC (Retired), said it was "An operationally inept
tragedy that caused the loss of 290 civilians, when the skipper had electronic
(transponder) evidence that the 'target' was not an Iranian F-14 but a
commercial airliner, not to mention that the captain was in Iranian territorial
waters, where he had no business being since he was not under attack. Many US
Navy officers feared this sort of thing could happen, calling their apprehension
a case of 'Aegis arrogance.'" Even though nearly 300 innocent civilians were killed, the
captain of the Vincennes, who
also ignored a direct order to hold her position, was soon
decorated with circumstantially dithyrambic praise in the form of the Legion of
Merit for “exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of an
outstanding service." Shuger stated that the Vincennes
tragedy was bound to happen sooner or later because “During my own experience
in the Navy from 1979 to 1983, I repeatedly found defects in the Navy’s
planning and preparation, defects that were individually exasperating and,
collectively, indicate that the mental confusion on the Vincennes was especially severe but not uncommon.” He also said
that this incident “offers an illustration of how the Navy’s readiness
problems stem from human, rather than mechanical, deficiencies,” and as an
example, he offered the following: “In reacting to what it took to be an
Iranian F-14, the Vincennes crew
displayed inadequate knowledge of a US-made threat aircraft. Captain Rogers and
the crew thought they were aiming at an American-made plane, yet from what we
know about what happened aboard, the crew displayed remarkably little
understanding of how the F-14 works.” To wit, “The F-14 is a
fighter/interceptor designed to shoot down fighters and cruise missiles… In
other words, it is not a bomber and the odds of one of its Sparrow missiles
successfully looking down into the electronic clutter produced by any body of
water and locking onto a surface target are as low as the odds of a torpedo
hitting a low flying-plane. In addition, nobody on the Vincennes
seems to have noticed that or wondered why the ship’s radar-detecting
equipment didn’t spot any sweeps of the unique F-14 radar coming from the
blip.” Nevertheless, the airliner was targeted and destroyed. After the USS Vincennes
outrage, many agreed that the impenitent US Navy is fundamentally flawed in a
number of cogent areas, and many wondered about the Navy’s so-called
“wonder” technology, as well as the training deficiencies outlined above.
Actually, many believe that the US military’s claims of a vast
“technological edge” over other countries are lacking in substance. Captain
Larry Seaquist, US Navy (Retired) said in the 1993 book War and Anti-War
that the United States “has no technological monopoly in virtually anything…
I’ve never found anyone to respond to my challenge to name three technologies
which are under the exclusive control of the U.S. military. There’s nothing
left.” In their controversial 1991 book, The Coming War With Japan,
authors Friedman and Lebard argued that “the Japanese are in the forefront of
high technology maritime construction,” that Japanese destroyers are the
equals of US Navy ships (of course, Japan had access to US technology to
accomplish this, however, it is rather unlikely that the US would sell Japan
sensitive military technology unless US officials knew the Japanese already had
the wherewithal to develop it themselves), and that “in certain technologies,
such as electronics miniaturization – useful in advanced avionics, and
fire-control systems, Japan is ahead of the United States.” They also described
Japan’s indigenously designed Type 90 main battle tank as “the finest main
battle tank in the world,” and that with a well trained crew, it would be a
very dangerous opponent for the American M-1 Abrams tank. The Russians also have
a rocket torpedo, known as the Shkval, which “travels so fast that no US
defence or countermeasures can stop it. It is particularly designed to attack
large ships like aircraft-carriers. The rocket torpedo also enables Russian
submarines with inferior sonar to knock out American subs before the slower US
wire-guided torpedoes can hit their target. The Shkval’s high speed means it
can punch a hole in most ships without the need for an explosive warhead.”
Furthermore, Morin and Gimblett offered that even though Canada sent older ships
to patrol the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, the Canadian ships had
far better communications equipment than did the US Navy, and unlike the US
ships in theatre, the Canadians were able to communicate easily with most of the
allied coalition participants. A British naval officer who
recently completed a two-year exchange assignment with the US Navy told me in
2005 that even though he has great respect for the US Navy, “The RN is an
incomparably better navy than the USN.” While Burns complained that American
ships are sometimes under-manned, which is true, some US Navy units have far too
many personnel. Lieutenant Commander Aidan Talbott, RN, described the US Navy as
“cumbersome, vastly overmanned, stolidly managed, with massive institutional
inertia and hobbled by internal and external politics.” He went on to say that
he endured “monstrous levels of inefficiency in many respects” during his
two year tour, and that in some ways even the most modern American surface ships
were technologically “old-fashioned and manpower intensive” compared to
British ships. “The engine control room of my last RN ship, a Type 23 frigate,
was much more advanced than the Arleigh
Burkes (DDG 51s) I went onboard. T23s and DDG51s are of (again, I think)
similar design and procurement vintage yet the Arleigh Burke control room was very much valve wheels and dials
compared to a T23 with remote operated control and digital displays. Don't get
me wrong - T23s are hardly the latest technology by any means, but it was a
significant change from an Arleigh Burke.”
Not only is the US Navy’s
technological lead over others now largely illusory, that very technology, which
is often used in an attempt to compensate for poor training, can certainly be a
weakness and not a strength, especially against an intelligent, and better
trained, enemy. For example, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the US Navy,
along with many other high technology military organizations, faced a
potentially debilitating supply problem related to memory chips. At that stage,
the US Navy had become almost totally dependent on Japan for semiconductors, and
as TV journalist John Chancellor put it in 1991, “These tiny chips are needed
for everything from supercomputers to jet aircraft, and makers of the most
sophisticated electronic equipment, including military contractors, must depend
on Japan for supplies. You can’t run today’s world without chips, but more
and more, the United States, including its military, is dependent on Japan.” One Japanese politician even
said that if Japan decided to sell its memory chips to the Soviet Union rather
than the US, the balance of power would have been jeopardized. Thankfully for
the US military, the Japanese gradually lost their stranglehold on the
semiconductor market, and the American industry rebounded. Notwithstanding this,
for a time, the US Navy was almost completely dependent on its former enemy for
essential computer hardware, and this supply weakness could theoretically have
been exploited by adversaries. Obviously, the US (and all its high technology
allies) would have needed to maintain a very good relationship with the
officially pacifistic Japanese if they had to fight a protracted war during that
era. A small, highly mobile, low technology enemy who had the savvy to exploit a
falling-out between the US and Japan could have been very dangerous indeed. An
unlikely scenario, yes, but still possible and plausible. Even with a steady supply of
semiconductors, the US Navy’s technology has not always been universally
admired. In the early 1990s, for instance, the US Navy was one of more than 30
navies that visited South Africa. The Chief of the South African Navy kept
careful notes on all the visiting warships, and the admiral gave the highest
points for technology and personnel to the navy that impressed him the most. The
winner was not the US Navy, nor the Royal Navy, nor any of the other usual
suspects. Instead, the South African admiral gave the top honors to the modest
and understated navy of America’s northern neighbor, Canada, for reasons that
will be detailed below. This honor confirmed what many knowledgeable and worldly
naval experts already knew about the Canadian Navy, whose ships regularly
outmatch US Navy warships. Although most Americans do
not associate Canada with high technology military or naval systems, US Navy
officers fawned over the new Canadian Patrol Frigates in the late 1990s,
frequently stating that they were, in most respects, better than US frigates and
destroyers. In a July 1997 report by the US-based Center for Security Strategies
and Operations (CSSO), the Canadian Halifax-class frigates were compared
to similar vessels from five allied nations. The CSSO argued that the Canadian
ship had better self-defense systems than US ships because of its unique
“completely automated combat system.” “Of all the frigates analyzed the Halifax
class emphasizes survivability to the greatest extent,” the report
declared. “The Halifax is the only frigate analyzed that has an
advanced, state-of-the-art, fully distributed combat system with a distributed
command and control system linked by redundant data buses.” The Canadian ship was also
rated the highest in ASW capability. The US periodical Forecast
International chimed in by stating that “…the Halifax class
frigates have matured into fine warships. The lead ship of the class has been
the subject of unstinting praise from the US Navy, following visits to American
naval bases.” In 2004, Wajsman recorded that the Canadian ships have a
communication system that is “The envy of many NATO countries. It allows calls
to be made from a compact console to anywhere on the ship or to anywhere in the
world at the touch of a button. And it operates with multiple inter-face
capability.” He also said that the Canadian Zodiac
fixed hull light boats are the finest in the world, and that the CANTASS system
remains “highly regarded” in the international arena. It turns out that the
only major shortcoming of the Halifax-class
is that it does not have 3D radar. These capstones were a major coup for a navy
with only 9,000 sailors and a 1998-1999 budget of less than $1.5 billion (US). If one compares the Halifax-class
frigate to the US Navy’s premiere destroyer, the Arleigh
Burke-class, the Halifax arguably
has some distinct advantages in ASW. For example, all the Halifax-class ships have a world-class towed array sonar system,
whereas only the first flight of the Arleigh
Burke-class ships have a towed array. All the Halifax-class ships have an embarked ASW helicopter (the CH-124 Sea
King), which, although quite old and in dire need of a replacement, is large,
fully autonomous and therefore able to search for and attack submarines
independently. Only the updated version of the American ship (the Flight IIA
version) has embarked ASW helicopters, but the Americans prefer not to use their
ASW helicopters as autonomous assets but rather as tethered extensions of the
mother ships. For ASW, the US Navy LAMPS III SH-60 Seahawk helicopters relay
acoustic data back to the ship for processing and receive operational directions
from the ship through a datalink, which in wartime could be vulnerable to
failure, jamming or spoofing. In doing so, the US Navy LAMPS III helicopter
crews are quite limited in taking the initiative, and are not true “force
multipliers” like the autonomous helicopters of the British and Canadian
navies. Interestingly, although the Canadian Forces make great efforts to remain
inter-operable with their American brethren, the US Navy Seahawk failed to
impress Canadian officers during the recently completed competition to replace
the Sea King. With some exceptions, Canadian senior officers much preferred the
European-designed EH-101 Merlin over the American models, but were compelled to
accept the Sikorsky H-92 (a larger and improved version of the Seahawk) because
the more powerful and capable Merlin was too expensive. Talbott also noted that US
Navy officers were much more familiar with the technical aspects of their jobs
than the principles of good leadership, and he felt that officer training is
“excessively narrowly specialized,” and “extremely stove-piped.” He
suggested that US Navy surface ship sailors are usually not trained to
multi-task as well as their peers in the RN: “A British sailor would be
trained to multi-task more, running X, W and Z systems whereas my experience was
that a US sailor would only be trained to manage Y system. Note that I say
it is only what they are trained to do - they may well be as capable given the
equivalent training.” Even the US Army, which is also inefficient and
oversold, is better at multi-taking than the Navy. In 2003, Nate Orme reported
that the soldiers manning the US Army’s experimental heavy-lift catamaran were
not like the Navy’s sailors. He said that “Army engineers have to be
jacks-of-all-trades. Unlike the Navy, which has a specialist for nearly every
task aboard a ship, Army sailors must multitask, since the crew size, about half
that of a comparable Navy vessel is small and operational doctrine is still
being written…” Many others have also
referenced overmanning and overspecialization in the US Navy, and the Blue
Angels are sometimes criticized for this. The US Navy boasts that the Blue
Angels flight and maintenance teams are the world’s best, but when one
examines their very large, and seemingly bloated maintenance team, one really
has to wonder. The Blue Angels perform with only six modern single-seated F-18
jets, whereas the Canadian Snowbirds fly nine two-seated Tutors, which are very
much older. In an average year, each team usually does the same number of
performances throughout Canada and the continental US (According to the
Snowbirds’ official Web site, “On average they will fly approximately 70 air
shows at fifty different locations across North America,” whereas in 2004 the
Blue Angels were scheduled to fly 70 shows at just 34 locations.) The Canadian
team flies more airplanes, and has only two spare planes (the Blue Angels have
three) but it still manages with a much smaller maintenance team at each show.
When the Blue Angels pilots do an air show, they bring along an additional 35-40
personnel in their very own C-130 Hercules, which, for no practical reason I can
think of, is custom-painted in the same blue and gold scheme as the F-18s, but
the Snowbirds only need to bring along about 10-11 people and obviously they do
not have nor need their very own “airliner” (of course, both teams have more
personnel at their home bases). Clearly, the two-engine F-18
is a more complex aircraft than the 40 year old single-engine Tutor, and that
might partially explain the manpower difference (although this explanation
failed to fully convince some of the Canadian aviation technicians I
interviewed) it is also true that US Navy technicians are very specialized, and
as a result they need lots of them to do the same job that just one Canadian
technician can do. Said Master Corporal Frank Gough, Canadian Forces, (US
equivalent E-4) in 1993, “We have only five major trades which work on the
aircraft. We have people who are more diverse and they can work on many systems
at the same time.” Note: by 2005, the Canadians had only three major aircraft
“maintainer” trades, based on land and on destroyers, whereas the US Navy
had seven comparable trades:
Corporal Wes Cochrane (US
equivalent E-3), an Aero-Engine Technician (now reclassified as an Aviation
Technician) in the Canadian Forces, told Air Force magazine that US Navy
aircraft technicians are awestruck when they meet Canadian technicians to compare skill sets and
training. “They’re surprised when they hear me list off the systems that
I’m qualified to work on: the engines, drive-train, fuel systems, flight
controls, hydraulic systems, and so on. They’re quite amazed,” Cochrane
related. In 2005, Canadian Air Force training curriculum developers surveyed and
compared Canadian courses with all the other military aircraft technician
training programs in the United States, and found that the Canadian Air Force
Aviation Systems Technician course provides “the most comprehensive basic
aircraft technician training in North America today.” Withal, some Canadian
Forces aviation technicians have said that a trained Canadian Private (US
equivalent: E-2) is in some ways comparable to an American E-6 in terms of their
knowledge of aircraft systems. Thus
the Canadians are practically omnicompetent, while the US Navy training system
produces disproportionately large numbers of specialists with relatively shallow
and compartmentalized training. If the
Blue Angels ground crew were really trained to multitask, as Canadian techs are,
they would probably not need to send 35-40 technicians for each performance. Nor
would they need 15 crew chiefs, when the Snowbirds have only one. This does not
sound like an efficient or cost-effective arrangement, to say the least, and it
may have something to do with US government’s policy of using the US military
services as “job training” or “make work” platforms for the economically
disadvantaged. In other words, the Navy and the rest of the US military often
employ more people than they really need so as to provide more employment
opportunities to the youth of America. Lieutenant Jason Hudson, US Navy, said in
2003 that the US Naval Service should not be a “Remedial Social Program” for
troubled or unemployed youth, but it frequently is, nevertheless. As
for the Snowbirds and Blue Angels aircrew themselves, both are world-class, and
very highly trained, although diminished standards were clearly evident in the
Blue Angels in the 1990s. In 1996, the Commanding Officer of the Blue Angels,
former F-14 pilot Commander Donnie Cochran, US Navy, resigned because he did not
feel that his flying skills were up to the task. Other Blue Angels pilots
described Cochran as “…a solid but not outstanding pilot who was not of the
caliber needed to excel in the extraordinary maneuvers for which the team is
famous.” Remember, Cochran was not just a Blue Angels pilot, he was the CO,
and as such, he should have been the
most experienced and skilled pilot in the squadron. He was not, and it does not
reflect well on the Navy or its training and selection systems that he was
nevertheless selected to lead the Blue Angels. Overmanning affects not just the enlisted personnel, but
younger officers as well. In 2003, Lieutenant Kevin M. O’Neal, US Naval
Reserve, stated that there were only supposed to be 18 officers on his frigate,
but there were in fact, 38. In his words: “This
situation has serious ramifications. Division officers are showing up to no
jobs. On day one, they lose faith in the system. They lose the incentive to work
hard because they know the system is going to ask very little of them. ‘What
is my job going to be?’ ‘You're going to be the assistant safety officer.’
‘What does that entail?’ ‘I don't know; you're the first one. Oh, we don't
have a place for you to sleep either.’ Welcome aboard.”
This means that many officers will be denied the training and experience they
need to become leaders because there are simply too many officers and not enough
real jobs for them. Ironically, this is not an accident, either. This
overmanning is actually the byproduct of a policy intended to improve officer
retention. In other words, instead of trying to improve retention, the Navy just
commissions more officers than it would otherwise need! O’Neal summed up by
saying: “Leaders of the surface warfare community must address this serious
issue. We need to reduce first-tour division officer manning on surface ships.
More people does not equal better product. I am failing my junior officers. This
is not acceptable.” Overmanning
was also a concern for Shuger, who served in an E-2 squadron (VAW-116) aboard
the carrier USS Constellation. Even
though intelligence officers are not treated with great respect in the Navy,
every carrier seems to have far too many of them. “Each squadron had at least
one air intelligence (AI) officer and the medium bomber squadrons had two. And
the airwing commander has his own intel guy. On top of that aviation complement,
the ship had its own intelligence division of several dozen enlisted specialists
headed up by a commander and staffer by four or five other officers. And the
Carrier Task Group Commander (a two- or three-star admiral) had his own intel
staff – usually several commanders and/or lieutenant commanders. On paper, our
job was to manage information about any potential task group enemy. But in
reality there was rarely enough enemy to go around.” Shuger attributed this
“intelligence bloat to “pointless empire-building,” and I think many would
agree. It clearly degrades individual training and experience, as O’Neal said,
and these are key elements in combat. I do not like saying this,
and I not wish to offend anyone, as members of my family have been attached to
the US Navy, but poorly trained and inexperienced personnel are evident in many
US Navy units these days. Williscroft said crewmembers of the USS
Independence were “poorly trained” in 1998, and this, combined with
broken-down equipment, impaired her readiness. Captain Ronald H. Henderson, Jr.,
US Navy, who took over command of the Kennedy after she failed her INSURV
readiness inspection in 2001, had harsh words for some former members of the
ship’s company, especially the chiefs and officers. “It was clear to me that
there were a few chiefs in Kennedy who were, in fact, incompetent. But
there were a lot of chiefs who weren’t getting any support from the chain of
command,” he noted. His predecessor, Captain Maurice Joyce, US Navy, was
relieved of his command, as was the ship’s chief engineer. “What makes me
really upset is when we make the same stupid mistake over and over again,”
admonished Henderson. Stupid mistakes are easy to
make when a ship has an inexperienced and undertrained crew. Said Henderson of
the Kennedy crew in late 2003, “45 percent of my crew has never been to
sea, ever, in any ship, on any ocean.” In 1999, Dorsey reported that 50% of
the officers on the destroyer USS Arthur W
Radford (a ship that suffered a serious collision) were just ensigns, the
lowest-ranking and least experienced officers in the Navy. A 2002 study by the
RAND Corporation confirmed that the experience levels of US Navy personnel do
not compare favorably with French Navy and British Royal Navy and Royal Air
Force (RAF) personnel. The study compared the skills and experience of US Navy
F-18 pilots with RAF Tornado pilots and French Navy Super Etendard aviators, and
found that “The British and French pilots have greater experience levels and
more continuity in their units than the U.S. pilots.” In the same vein, a
visit to a US Navy F-18 squadron by defense analyst Franklin Spinney in 1994
revealed “deteriorating readiness” and alarming training deficiencies.
“According to the squadron commander, pilot training (particularly for those
junior officers embarking on their first cruise) was barely adequate prior to
the deployment… Furthermore, over the last 12 months of the cycle (the last
six months of workup plus the six months on cruise), junior officers averaged
100 instead of the normal 120 carrier ‘traps’”. Another report issued in
January 2000 confirmed that US Navy pilot skill levels in general were declining
at the Navy’s air combat training facility at Fallon, Nevada. As the author
noted, “Because incoming pilots are less proficient, Fallon basically uses its
first week of flight training to bring pilots up to where they should be.” The
RAND study also compared American P-3 Orion crews and DDG-51 destroyer crews
with their French and British ASW counterparts and concluded, once again, that
the American ASW crews were, on average, the least experienced and the least
cohesive. The French and British units were more cohesive and provided greater
continuity because “While the typical career pattern for U.S. Navy officers
takes them away from the operational ship world to various headquarters and
staff assignments, French and British naval officers may stay in the operational
community throughout their careers.” (Note: the French are actually much
better than most Americans think. In 1999, the captain of the USS
Halyburton, for example, appraised French (and German) sailors as being
“the consummate professionals,” and applauded their “crisp radio calls and
sharp ship maneuvers.”) Spector noted that even Soviet officers “spent far
more time in each assignment than their American counterparts and often remained
in the same ship for four or more years.” Soviet officers also stayed in their
Navy much longer, on average, than their US Navy peers, with roughly 90% of
Soviet Naval officers staying in the service for 20 years or more. And back in
the days when Canada still had an aircraft carrier, naval air crews manning the
Tracker ASW aircraft stayed together for four years, much longer than their
counterparts in the US Navy. This apparently unique 4 year crew cycle allowed
the men to form highly cohesive units, and as such those crews were said to be
“profoundly superior” to US Navy aircrews in ASW. One
of the main reasons for this lack of continuity is that career US Navy officers
are required, by law, to complete “Joint Duty” assignments (in the other
branches of the armed forces), which as Perry said in 2005, require “specific
education… and years spent away from an officer’s chosen specialty. My own
experience has confirmed that this significantly reduces an officer’s
available time for professional development in his critical specialty…”
Perry also said this was a key factor in the recent and nearly catastrophic
accident involving the nuclear submarine USS
San Francisco. The CO of the badly damaged ship, which collided with a
seamount, he suggested, did not have “enough time on the pond” because of
the joint duty obligation. Here we have yet another systemic problem that
interferes with training to add to the list. US
Navy enlisted men are also rather frequently shuffled from unit to unit, and new
sailors have shorter enlistment contracts than do their counterparts in the
French and British navies. The result is low standards of training and
professionalism. The constant shuffling or rotation of personnel in the US Navy
was a great concern to Gabriel, who said that it prevents people from becoming
experts. “Most American officers,” he decried, “are amateurs… Amateurism
is, of course, directly associated with rotational turbulence. Officers who move
frequently are just about reaching a level of expertise where they can stop
learning their job and carry out their tasks effectively when it is time to move
to another assignment.” Captain Neil Byrne, US Navy (Retired) said much the
same thing in 2001, and Captain Larry Seaquist, US Navy (Retired) also pointed
out that during the course of any given year, the average US Navy warship will
replace 50% of her crew with newcomers. The report also observed
that unlike the British and the French forces, US Navy aviation units do not
maintain consistent readiness to go into battle throughout the fiscal year. As
Scott Shuger said, “Amazingly, it’s not uncommon for navy squadrons to cut
back their flight hours drastically or even to be grounded due to the scarcity
of aviation fuel near the end of the fiscal quarter. This even happens to
squadrons already at sea. Several times during my carrier service we had to drop
anchor and wait for more fuel money.” In 2000, an anonymous Navy officer
informed Dougherty that during a recent exercise in Asia “five U.S. warships
– including the flagship for the U.S. Seventh Fleet—(were) restricted from
getting underway due to steaming-dollar shortfalls.” This inconsistent
readiness is due to the US Navy’s rigid deployment cycle system and its
“training philosophy.” The authors concluded that this “readiness
bathtub” has “caused concern at the Chief of Naval Operations level.” The
French and British do not have this problem because they do not use “fixed
deployment and training cycles” and also because they strive to have their
naval and air units consistently ready for combat at all times of the year.
Spinney, on the other hand, verified that US Navy carrier-based squadrons
receive no combat training at all for the first two months after returning from
a cruise, during which “flying operations are limited to maintenance check
rides and instrument flight/airways navigation training.” In the December 2001 issue
of Sea Power magazine, moreover, Peterson found substantial differences
between US and UK naval training programs, and the differences did not make the
US Navy look good. The article told the story of the lessons learned by the crew
of the USS Winston S. Churchill, an Arleigh
Burke-class destroyer, as she underwent Flag Officer Sea Training (FOST)
Tier I training for two weeks in England. The Americans came away deeply
respectful of the RN and its highly realistic training regime. Said one US Navy
sailor, “The Royal Navy brings realism to the next higher dimension… The
aircraft are flying below the bridge wing, the artificial smoke makes you gag,
the voices on the ‘comm’ (communications) circuit are harried like they are
under attack, and the OPFOR (Opposing Force) seems to come from nowhere – and
that is just the Thursday War!” Lieutenant Steven P. Murley, US Navy, remarked
“It’s top notch. We’ve done a lot of things we don’t do in the U.S. Navy
– an opposed port breakout with aircraft attacking us in the breakwater, for
example… Our ORM (Operational Risk Management) would not allow it.”
Commander Guy W. Zanti, US Navy also said “This training is
outstanding…I’ve witnessed many of the drills firsthand. The antiterrorism
and force-protection drills were superb – no other ship in my 19 years of
experience has had an antiterrorism and force-protection exercise to the depth
and level that this crew received.” The American officers also recommended
that more US ships should undergo British FOST training, which is commendable,
but one has to really wonder why the United States, the world’s only naval
superpower, has to rely on the now second-tier Royal Navy (at least in terms of
hardware) for training. Low Morale,
Racism, Drugs, Sabotage, plus a few Illiterates and Felons
"The US Navy is
now confronted with pressures...which, if not controlled, will surely destroy
its enviable tradition of discipline. Recent instances of sabotage, riot,
willful disobedience of orders, and contempt for authority...are clear-cut
symptoms of a dangerous deterioration of discipline." -
The House Armed Services Committee’s statement on the US Navy in the early
1970s There are several other
factors that must be considered in evaluating the readiness of the US Navy since
World War II. Although most American sailors are decent and hard-working, over
the years, a significant number of them have proven to be not only unreliable,
but actually detrimental to combat readiness. During the Vietnam era, the
combination of institutionalized racism against black sailors, a long unpopular
war, the draft, and an over-worked fleet, contributed to serious morale
problems, violence aboard ships, disruptions of operations, mutiny and sabotage.
In 1971, “The Navy reported almost 500 cases of arson, sabotage, or willful
destruction on its ships, while 1000 sailors on the USS Coral Sea
petitioned Congress to stop its cruise to Vietnam. These ‘flattop revolts’
expanded the next year, as sailors signed petitions or disrupted operations on
the Kitty Hawk, Oriskany, Ticonderoga, America, and Enterprise.
Sabotage on the Ranger and Forrestal prevented their scheduled
port departures while pilots became increasingly concerned about their role in
the bombing campaign and questioned the war openly.” The USS Ranger,
one of the mightiest warships in the world at the time, was taken out of action
for more than three months, and all it took was a single disgruntled US Navy
sailor to do it (who was later acquitted). Suspected sabotage has also been
detected on nuclear submarines in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, including the
famous USS Nautilus (apparently on
more than once occasion), and the USS Spadefish, again, more than once. These issues are strongly
related to an overall lack of motivation. It is safe to say that most sailors in
western navies join because their respective navies offer job security,
training, and opportunities for travel and advancement. This is true in the US
Navy also, but there was one major difference between US Navy sailors and other
professional navy men, at least during the 1960s and early 1970s. As Freeman
pointed out in his book about the disastrous fire that broke out on the USS
Forrestal in 1967, most of the young sailors on the ship went into the Navy
simply because they did not want to get drafted into the Army and sent to
Vietnam. Many of these young American sailors hated the military and never
wanted to join the Navy, but felt compelled to do so to avoid more dangerous
duty elsewhere. Like the National Guard and Reserve forces, the US Navy was
considered a safe and legal choice for those who wanted to avoid direct combat.
In effect, they were, in a manner of speaking, voluntarily “conscripted”
into the Navy so that they would not be involuntarily conscripted into the Army.
This provides some additional context for understanding why the US Navy had so
many personnel problems in the Vietnam era. Every navy has malcontent (although
it has been said that Japanese sailors were so loyal to the Emperor during World
War II that they had few if any morale problems, even when the tide turned
against them), the US Navy had much more than its usual share. For these
unmotivated US Navy sailors, sabotage and protests were just a means of
registering their dissatisfaction with the draft, and all things military. This
is the price a democracy pays when its foreign policy starts taking on seemingly
imperialistic undertakings in distant lands. Making things even worse,
during the Vietnam era the US Navy did little to discourage senior,
predominantly white, officers, from really and truly living the good life,
whilst the enlisted men they commanded, who often belonged to minority groups,
toiled in unnecessarily overcrowded conditions below decks. In the case of one
carrier task force commander, the admiral’s upscale cabin was described as
being “‘like a New York Central Park South luxury apartment… The
Admiral’s dining room… could seat ten comfortably around an oval table
covered with starched white linen. The silverware was heavy and glistening. The
meals were served with painstaking etiquette by white-coated attendants…’”
Whilst the admiral lived in relative opulence and dined luxuriously,
“‘Belowdecks, the crew was jammed together, 150 men to each open windowless,
poorly lighted, ill-ventilated bay. They lived one atop the other, three bunks
high, with no privacy and little storage space, with the constant noise of the
ship’s operations jarring them. They took their meals in windowless,
low-ceilinged mess spaces that doubled as warehouses for the bombs and rockets
the airplanes would use.’” Naturally, disparities
between senior officers and enlisted men are found in every fighting organization, but the problem is especially severe in
the larger ships of US Navy. This is because larger ships tend to be more
socially stratified and less cohesive then smaller craft, and US carriers are by
far the largest warships in world. In addition, as Spector told
us, unlike some other cultures, Americans tend to be less class-conscious, and
do not easily accept that someone is “superior” just because he or she has a
higher rank. British sailors, for example, have generally had less comfortable
ships, and have many of the same complaints, but “Where the American sailors-
and the American public – emphatically differed was that they refused to
tolerate the notion that officers were in any way superior to enlisted men, save
in rank and responsibility.” Thus perhaps there are luxuries that a British
admiral may have that might not be advisable for an American admiral to have. There are a lot of unhappy
people in the US Navy these days, and, as in the 1970s, sabotage is one way of
indicating one’s displeasure. Let me be clear that sabotage is not a major
problem these days, but every so often, someone does not want to go to sea for
yet another six month deployment, and so sabotage pops up from time to time. In
a recent case that the Navy called one of “national security,” an American
submariner was convicted of 23 counts of “property destruction, conspiracy,
theft, obstruction of justice, and drug use.” In 2001, Petty Officer 2nd
Class Ernesto Cimmino, US Navy, admitted he sabotaged the nuclear ballistic
missile submarine USS Alaska. All US Navy personnel serving aboard
submarines carrying strategic nuclear weapons are supposed to undergo a most
thorough and rigorous screening process, including very intrusive background
checks and constant monitoring and surveillance by shipmates and superiors to
ensure high reliability and good character. Somehow, the opsimath Cimmino
managed to slip through the cracks of the system. In addition to being a
saboteur and a drug user, he was also an adulterer (his girlfriend was the wife
of another sailor), a thief, and generally a man with little common sense. When
he found out that the Navy suspected him of sabotaging the Alaska, he
actually “telephoned investigators to ask if the Navy had caught him on
videotape cutting cables and wanting to know if polygraph results could be
admitted in a court martial.” Cimmino plea-bargained the 23 counts, which
could have earned him 300 years in prison down, almost unbelievably, to just
five. In some other countries, such as China, such crimes by a sailor would
almost certainly invite the death penalty. Sabotage by American sailors
has been a powerful and recurring guest character in the ongoing story of the US
Navy (I am now looking into the issue of sabotage in the Royal Navy, the Royal
Canadian Navy, and the Royal Australian Navy since World War II, but have not as
yet found anything substantial or concrete on the public record that would match
the events described in the US Navy, especially during the draft and the Vietnam
eras), but racism, as the Late Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, US Navy, posited, was an
“integral part of the Navy tradition” until the early 1970s, and perhaps
even later. In 1972, Lehman noted that on the USS
Saratoga, “no white officer would walk unescorted on the second deck,
where the enlisted mess was. There were many incidents of racially inspired
muggings and beating by both blacks and whites and including some officers.”
Certainly the institutionalized racism that rocked the fleet in the early 1970s
is thankfully no longer so common, blatant or obvious, but morale problems
linger for other reasons. In the past six years there
has been compelling evidence of serious morale problems among Navy junior
officers. “In the fall of 1999,” reported Jack Spencer of the Heritage
Foundation, “the Navy surveyed its junior officers to gauge morale. They
expected a 15 percent response rate, but, to their surprise, over 55 percent of
those surveyed responded. Of these responses, 82 percent responded negatively.
Citing poor leadership, inadequate pay and compensation, and insufficient spare
parts and equipment, only one-third said they planned to reenlist.” Notice
that the primary reason listed for low morale is “poor leadership,” which,
one might suspect, is a nice way of saying “bad senior officers and bad
politicians, in that order.” Overmanning is probably also a factor in this
equation. Another problem is the US
Navy’s low educational standards for enlisted sailors. In the dark days of the
early 1970s, the Navy was forced to accept large number of “Category IV”
recruits; the least intelligent people that are allowed to serve. “…in
fiscal year 1971, 14 percent of new recruits were classified as in Group 4,
while in fiscal year 1972, 20 percent fell in this group.” In 1977, “30
percent of all Navy recruits read below the 9th Grade level, although
the majority were high school graduates.” Former Navy Secretary Lehman
submitted that in the late 1970s the US Navy enrolled recruits “who were
illiterate, convicted felons, drug users, and worse.” In 1985, Gabriel wrote
that “the quality of personnel tends to be low” in the US Navy, and that
many critical and highly technical positions in the US Navy could not be filled
because of a shortage of well-educated sailors. To compensate, the Navy hired
civilian CETS (Contractual Engineering Technical Service) people to handle these
duties aboard ships. Distressingly, the Navy became dependent on these
civilians, who were not under any legal or contractual obligation to stay when
the ships deploy. The commanding officer of an aircraft carrier even lamented
that he could not take his ship to sea unless he had civilian contractors aboard
to maintain some of the ships combat systems. This too, is a serious weakness,
although it may not be unique to the US Navy. The
admirals gloried about their “high quality” all-volunteer force in the late
1980s and early 1990s, but in 1993 it was reported that the Navy still had
thousands of sailors who could not read material designed for a junior high
school audience. The Navy confessed that despite its efforts to attract high
quality people, “a quarter of their recruits can’t handle manuals geared to
a ninth grade reading level.” These days, the required AFQT (Armed Forces
Qualification Test) scores required to join the Navy are still relatively low.
According to Rod Powers, the minimum acceptable score for the Navy is just 35
(and prior to 2003 the Navy’s standard was even lower), whereas the Coast
Guard and Air Force each require scores of at least 40. The Navy will also
accept 5 to 10 percent of recruits who are high school dropouts with GEDs as
long as their AFQT scores are higher than 50. The US Air Force is far more
selective, and does a relatively good job at compensating for the unreliable US
education system in that it rarely admits anyone who does not have a high school
diploma, and even these folks must have an AFQT score of 65 or greater. Even
though the vast majority of American sailors today are high school graduates, it
must not be forgotten that due to low standards in the US public school system,
“American high school graduates are among the least intellectually competent
in the industrialized world.” Correspondingly, and predictably, “Americans
are at or near the bottom in most international surveys measuring educational
achievement,” especially in math and science. American universities, with some
very notable exceptions, are not much better than the high schools as regards
producing intellectually competent graduates. With the exception of certain Ivy
League schools (but not all of them) and a few others, American universities are
generally not very selective. Almost anyone in the US with a high school diploma
(and the money to pay for it) can gain admission to a college or a university
because many US institutions of higher learning actually have very low
standards. “A College Board survey of 2,600 colleges showed that only forty
percent required any minimum grade point average for admission and only thirty
percent set minimum cut-off scores on the SAT,” said Anelauskas. And while
fewer than 10 percent of US high school graduates will get accepted into
Harvard, Anelauskas commented that European schools are even more demanding.
“According to literacy studies by the National Assessment of Educational
Progress, fewer than five percent of American high school graduates would meet
the entrance standards of European universities.” Even
some people who graduate from US colleges have very poor reading and critical
reasoning skills (and apparently, at a least of few of them have managed to
become officers in the US Navy. Karam noted that one of the junior officers on
his ship was “barely literate,” and needed his help writing reports). This
crisis in education was illustrated well in recent studies by researchers at the
Educational Testing Service. According to one of the researchers, “the
literacy levels of U.S. college graduates ‘range from a lot less then
impressive, to mediocre, to near alarming,’” and as Anelauskas surmised:
“Surely if illiterate persons can graduate from American universities, it is
not far-fetched to say that something is uniquely wrong with the American
education system.” According to the The Times Higher Education Supplement
of November 5, 2004, 35 of the 100 top rated universities in the world are in
the US, but as Professor David VandeLinde of Bath University has said, there are
tremendous variations in quality throughout the US system, and we must temper
this statement with the knowledge that the world’s 100 worst universities are probably also American. Grade inflation and
easy classes are to be found in almost every major American university these
days. Even US doctoral programs, long considered the “gold standard” of
education, are sometimes of poor quality, for as sociologist Dr. Barbara Lovitz
declared: “Evidence suggests that poor quality dissertations are often passed.
Adams and White (1994), in a study that looked at dissertations abstracts, found
that a significant number of dissertations that had passed had obvious and
sometimes fatal flaws.” Dr Yoon Tae-Hee,
President of Seoul University of Foreign Studies and an Adjunct Professor at
Clemson University, South Carolina, said in 2005 that "Anyone
who is not mentally retarded can get a Ph.D. in the United States." The
Naval Academy itself is also far from innocent in these matters. In 2002,
Commander Gerald L. Atkinson, US Navy (Retired), indited "…there is
documentary proof of lowered academic standards at the Naval Academy. In 1990, a
civilian chairman of the electrical engineering department was relieved of his
post in mid-semester because he refused to raise preliminary grades in two
electrical engineering courses and refused to raise grading curves 'across the
entire (electrical engineering curriculum.)'" Atkinson exhorted further
that "It is clear that the U.S. Naval Academy has been slowly and subtly
but determinedly lowering standards over time at the Navy's premiere source of
naval officers." In a 1996 interview with Annapolis professors, he noted,
"They explained that '…fully 30 percent of the midshipmen in their
classes were not qualified to be in any college, much less the Naval
Academy.'" Finally, "In the early 1990s, the Academy added a
Counseling Center, remedial courses, outside contracting for teaching remedial
reading and writing… Courses that have been identified as too challenging have
been eliminated or 'redesigned to be more reasonable to the needs of today's
midshipmen.'" The Naval Academy is still considered to be one of the most
selective universities in the United States, and one of the most distinguished. In sharp contrast are the
sailors and officers of today’s Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force. Japanese
sailors are universally and highly literate, and are exceptionally
well-educated. Japanese schools are notoriously tough academically, and
“Experts believe that an average high school education in Japan can be equated
with an average college education in the United States.” It is very rare
indeed to see overweight Japanese sailors, and even now the drug abuse rate in
Japan is “still very low compared to that in other counties…” On the other hand, drugs
have most definitely undermined the combat readiness of the US Navy, and the
problem was especially noticeable in the 1970s and 1980s. The drug situation
aboard ships in the 1970s was described well by Spector: “Cheap and plentiful
supplies of drugs were available to sailors when their ships visited Subic Bay
and in many Mediterranean ports. Aboard many ships there was an elaborate
substructure for the acquisition, concealment, sale, and distribution of drugs.
At the top of the underground structure was ‘the boss or head pusher,’ most
likely a ‘petty officer of E-4 to E6 level. He is in business for money…’
The head pusher presided over a network of drug runners, addicts, and habitual
and casual users… One senior officer noted that at least ‘a few of the more
stable and intelligent experimenters and moderate users (may) have become senior
petty officers,’ and that abuse among commissioned officers was far from
unknown.” In 1981, it was revealed
that 15% of the crew of the submarine USS Parche, including three of her
officers, failed a drug test just before a scheduled deployment. The Parche
was used for spying operations, and many of these covert visits to Soviet waters
were extremely dangerous. Sontag et al. explained that some American submariners
turned to drugs to help deal with the stress of dangerous intelligence gathering
deployments, or to avoid going to sea altogether. “Parche wasn’t
unique in her personnel problems, and the drug bust had intelligence officials
worried,” they adduced. “Seawolf’s crew was disintegrating under
the mounting frustrations of serving on a broken-down and cursed boat. The
pressure inspired some of her crew to lose themselves in a marijuana haze. Some
even proclaimed their drug use openly and loudly, just to get off of Seawolf.”
(Emphasis mine.) Karam also reported that more than one US Navy nuclear powered
ship has been “shut down from time to time because of sloppiness or in one
case, (a submarine), for excessive drug use by the crew.” None of this should be
really surprising to anyone who has paid attention to the US Navy for the past
25 years, except possibly Tom Clancy. At that time, “Drug and alcohol abuse
was rampant throughout the fleet,” wrote Gregory Vistica. “Forty-seven
percent of the Navy’s personnel was smoking marijuana. Another 11 percent was
snorting cocaine.” A 1981 crash on the deck of the USS Nimitz killed 14
sailors, and half of their bodies contained traces of marijuana. The Navy
introduced mandatory random drug testing to counter this problem, but random
testing by urinalysis definitely has its limitations. In recent years, naval
aviators, SEALs, and other officers have been arrested for drug trafficking or
usage, along with thousands of enlisted personnel (between 2000 and 2003, at
least 10,000 American sailors have failed drug tests). Not even the great
bastion of American navalism, the US Naval Academy, is immune to the scourge of
drugs. In his famous 1971 article “The Collapse of the Armed Forces,”
Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., USMC, wrote that drug use at the Naval Academy was
“anything but unknown,” and almost thirty years later Burns further
lamented, “It used to really mean something to be a Naval Academy graduate. In
recent years they’ve had pedophiles, car theft rings, drug rings, cheating
scandals and murderers.” Four years ago, Admiral
Robert Nader, US Navy, admitted that there is a serious problem with designer
drugs like ecstasy in the US Navy. “We have a problem. I don’t want to hide
that problem,” he conceded. This problem was evident on the infamous USS
Vincennes in November 2004, when a total of 18 sailors were charged with
drug offenses. “In one instance, two sailors used drugs while the ship was
underway, endangering other crew members and potentially affecting the ship’s
readiness.” Notwithstanding this, the Navy’s figures indicate the drug
problem has been reduced substantially since the 1980s, but the evidence
supporting that claim is quite unreliable, and in a warship disaster can result
if even a few sailors are high while underway. Why am I skeptical of the
Navy’s claims of “winning” the drug war in its own ranks? Well, it should
be pointed out that certain designer drugs now available pass through the body
very quickly, and are more difficult to detect than others by urinalysis. In
addition, the drugs of choice have changed since the 1980s. As the American
Civil Liberties Union reported in 2002, “Because urine testing is based on an
analysis of metabolites associated with the drug in question, and because
alcohol and cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine all pass through the body within
24-48 hours, leaving no metabolites, marijuana is the only substance that is
easily detected with urinalysis. Drugs that have a more significant impact on
employment or work performance, such as alcohol and other illegal drugs, are not
effectively tested for with urinalysis.” This, along with the evidence
uncovered by a 1994 National Academy of Sciences report that random drug testing
actually has little or no deterrent effect, makes it easy to speculate that the
number of actual drug users in the US Navy could be much greater than the
number that is caught these days. Other navies certainly have drug problems,
however no navy in the world is more closely associated with the drug problem
than is the US Navy. When one acknowledges that the US Navy has knowingly
accepted felons and drug users to fill its ranks, that American teenagers have
the highest “alcohol-and drug-abuse rate of any industrial nation,”
including liberal countries like the Netherlands, then drug abuse in the US Navy
is just another manifestation of a massive US criminal subculture. Drug abuse is
undeniably self-destructive behavior, and even the US Congress has proclaimed
that America is “the most violent and self-destructive nation on Earth.” For
these reasons, I remain unconvinced that the US Navy no longer has a serious
drug problem. (In all fairness though, the Soviets/Russians have also had very
serious alcohol problems in their navy, too.) Poor physical fitness is
also evident in the ranks of the US Navy. In a 2001 column, investigative
journalist John E. Dougherty revealed that a survey conducted by a team of
doctors at Marywood University found that many personnel in most branches of the
US military were unfit, overweight, and physically inactive. Abdominous US
military personnel were almost as unfit and inactive as American civilians, in
fact. The survey reckoned,
“Military personnel do not exercise any more than the general population, even
though some amount of physical training is required in all branches.” This is
unsettling news to be sure, especially for Americans, who on average are among
the most overweight people in the world (According to the OECD, in 1999, 22% of
Americans were obese, versus about 20% in England, about 10% in France, Denmark,
Sweden, Italy, and Norway, and 3% in Japan and Korea.) Dougherty, who served as
a corpsman in the US Naval Reserve found a simple, but valid explanation for
this embarrassing situation: “Our overweight, undertrained, physically unfit
military is little more than a reflection of American society as a whole, I
fear.” In 2005, a US Army nutritionist warned that the increasingly mastadonic
average American is “quickly becoming a national security issue for us.” As
the sage old saying goes, “The apple does not fall far from the tree.” To put it as delicately as
possible, and with all due respect, there is nothing in the US Navy that does
not exist in American society, and that includes a substantial and lingering
historical legacy of racism, substandard public education, widespread obesity
and drug abuse. What Tom Clancy Does Not Know or Will Not Say… “We
are inclined to overestimate our ability and underestimate our vulnerability.” -Commander Dale
Sykora, US Navy, former skipper of the nuclear submarine USS Dallas, 2004 Through his many
best-selling books and movies, author Tom Clancy has created a crisp, sharp,
spit-polished, efficient, and patriotic image for the US Navy. Some think he
should be a paid public relations consultant or recruiter for the American
submarine force. It may come as a shock to some of his readers, however, that
the American ships, submarines, aircraft, equipment and sailors in his books are
too good to be true. In 2001, Shuger suggested that Americans have placed too
much stock in Clancy’s writings, and that is perhaps especially damaging since
Clancy has moved from novels to non-fiction. The result, Shuger exclaimed, was
that “millions and millions of people… have gotten most of what they know
about warfare and the U.S. military from an ex-insurance agent who never served
a day on active duty.” Furthermore, “Does he know what he's talking about? He certainly seems to know a lot
about how planes, subs, and missiles are supposed to work, and how we and the
Soviets intend to use them. And this makes his books that much more seductive.
But is there any reason to think that he knows what will happen when those
weapons and those intentions are put into the pressure-cooker of combat? The
more complex war has become, the more ways there are for missions to go bad, and
the graver the consequences. The history of modern warfare is replete with
counterexamples to Tom Clancy's vision. The problem is that history hasn't sold
20 million copies. How unlike fiction is real war! Clancy has it in his
head--and his readers are getting it drummed into theirs--that the U.S. military
is a precise instrument, capable of almost effortless accuracy.” Luckily, however, Clancy has
competition, and what is more the competition is much more candid and realistic.
Several recent books have effectively stripped off much of the shiny Hollywood
polish on the American submarine force, most notably former Petty Officer Dr.
Andy Karam’s account of life on the USS Plunger, Rig Ship for Ultra
Quiet (2002), and Douglas C. Waller’s Big Red (2001). Both authors
made it known that there is a lot of hype regarding US submarine training, but
the reality is much less impressive. As for the legendary assertion that all US
submariners are experts on “every system” in their boats, one sailor told
Waller that was “All bunk.” Waller explained “The (submariner’s)
qualification only made you familiar with the rest of the boat. It
didn’t mean you could actually run other parts. If (the sailor) and the other
missile techs suddenly died, those nukes in the back wouldn’t have a clue how
to fire these rockets.” Former Petty Officer Karam, an Engineering Laboratory
Technician, who eventually became a Chief Petty Officer in the Naval Reserve,
concurred, and acknowledged that he could only work on other systems “in a
pinch.” He continued “The Plunger, and, for that matter, any nuke
boat, was sufficiently complex that one person simply could not learn everything
to that level of detail in the 14 months we were given to qualify. Not if they
were doing their own jobs, too.” One will not find this awful kind of truth in
any Tom Clancy book. The non-fiction he produces on submarines is well written
and detailed, but it is still essentially, at its core, Navy PR fluff. British
allies, of course, have long ridiculed American submariners for spending too
much time and effort on nuclear reactors. Surprisingly, Waller wrote that some
US Navy officers quietly agree. The Drill Coordinator on the USS Nebraska,
Lieutenant Brent Kinman, US Navy, told Waller that American submariners talk too
much about the reactor, like mechanics, and not enough about how to fight the
ship effectively: “That was the problem with today’s submariners, Kinman
thought. They were technicians rather than warriors. The average lieutenant
riding these boats considered himself a nuclear engineer first and a submarine
officer second. ‘It almost feels like we’re out there just driving the
reactor around…’” Said Spector, “Critics also charged that nucs
neglected seamanship and navigation. A report by Commander, Submarines, Atlantic
Fleet in 1979 cited fourteen major submarine accidents that were, in whole or in
part, dues to ‘less than sufficient performance with respect to seamanship.’
A retired nuclear submarine skipper declared than ‘an American submarine might
run aground due to total incompetence in navigation and ship handling, but the
reactor-control division records would be perfect as it hit.’” This
overemphasis on engineering might explain why diesel submarines are so often
triumphant against American nuclear submarines during exercises. In
his controversial “loved-or-hated” 1986 book Running Critical,
Patrick Tyler presented evidence to suggest that the mainstay of the US nuclear
submarine force, the first flight of the (688) Los Angeles-class, was not a first class attack
submarine, and like the F-4 and the F-14 fighters, it was possibly more
expensive than combat effective against potential adversaries. According to
Tyler, the Late CNO Admiral Zumwalt was not impressed with these submarines:
“To Zumwalt, the 688 submarines were
a begotten class; shallow-running, unstable in tight turns, vulnerable at high
speed, and too costly for the marginal advance they had given the navy over
previous alternatives.” US Navy crews complained that the boats were
incondite, built by reportedly lazy and indifferent shipyard workers, and based
on a compromised committee-driven design that was demonstrably inferior to
Soviet contemporaries in all areas except stealth, and even in that parameter,
they were still inferior to diesel submarine contemporaries, of which the
Soviets and many others had plenty. The result was a thoroughly mediocre
submarine. Karam also thought the original Los
Angeles-class boats were less than stellar performers, especially when they
were deployed on “spec-ops” (spying). “At the time I was in, LA-class
subs were fairly routinely detected on spec-ops – it seems they had a tendency
to lose depth control at periscope depth because their fairwater planes were too
high on the sail. I understand the improved 688s
are better. The USS New York City was
apparently detected routinely on one mission every time they streamed their
floating wire antenna because sea gulls sat on the wire and hitched a free
ride.” Even Admiral Rickover once said, in the early 1970s, when the US Navy
was in particularly bad shape, than if he had the choice of commanding either
the Soviet or the US submarine fleet in war, he would prefer the Soviet fleet. Of course, American nuclear
submarines have successfully attacked allied surface ships and diesel submarines
on exercises too, and it would be unfair and remiss of me not to mention that,
but nevertheless many allied and NATO officers are not overly impressed by
American nuclear submarines or their crews. Compton-Hall, for example, lavished
all but unqualified praise on the Dutch, Canadian, German, Australian, and
Scandinavian submarine services, but his comments on the American silent service
were decidedly mixed. Praise was included, but it was infrequent and sincerely
qualified. For example, like Shuger, he said that the US Navy submariners are
superb engineers, “but there is a case for saying that fighting capabilities
took second place over a long period during the Rickover reign.” Sprinkled
through his discussion on the Americans are terms such as “Rickoverized,”
(which means obsessed with engineering), “dogmatic,” “conformism,”
“conservation,” and “complacency.” He also took issue with the US
Navy’s “habit of overstating fitness reports which is no kindness to the man
or to the service. The effects have been felt far beyond deserved or undeserved
promotions. A serious result has been that the cold-blooded, highly critical
post-attack autopsies to which British command teams are traditionally and often
embarrassingly, subjected have generally been avoided. Avoidance has led to
over-confidence and lessons not being learned…” Shuger agreed that Navy
Officer Fitness Reports are often far from candid. “Almost everyone who
hasn’t been court-martialed gets mostly A’s in the set categories. And the
narrative material is supplied by the officer himself and then mega-hyped by his
immediate superiors into a superlative-soup that renders distinctions
difficult.” This same oblivious behavior
was noted by a former captain of the Canadian pocket carrier HMCS
Bonaventure, who reminisced
back to the year 1968: “I do remember an American nuclear submarine getting
his comeuppance when he was attacked by one of our Trackers. They thought they
were absolutely foolproof. This guy was discovered, pinged on and attacked and
nailed, the whole schmeer, and he couldn’t figure out why. We weren’t
anxious to tell him either…” He concluded by saying that the defeated US
submariners were amazingly and unjustifiably “overconfident.” And in the
joint Indian Navy-US Navy exercise MALABAREX in 2003, the frigate INS
Brahamaputra took on the seemingly formidable Los Angeles-class
nuclear submarine USS Pasadena. The Indian ship “was able to detect Pasadena
‘from over 8 miles away’, and engage it, ‘getting a mission kill’ in the
process,” said the Indian magazine Frontline. It would be reasonable to
assume that the crew of that sub was also surprised by the result. One last thing that you will
not find in any Tom Clancy book is any substantive discussion on the US Navy's
safety record since the loss of the submarines Thresher
and the Scorpion. During the past
fifty years or so, it was quite fashionable for US sailors to mock the Soviets,
especially as regards to safety. Soviet nuclear submarine reactors were often
poorly designed, and not as safe as their American equivalents, and I do not
think anyone would dispute that. What some forget, or perhaps discount, is that
the US Navy's safety record has also been frequently been called into question. In both 1989 and 2000, the
US Navy has had to order all units to stand-down from normal operations to
review basic safety procedures, in both cases, after a string of serious
accidents. Everyone familiar with the US Navy knows about the losses of the Thresher
and the Scorpion in the 1960s, which forced the US Navy to improve its
submarine safety programs, but there have been other, one might say, “near
misses” since then that have not gotten quite so much attention. According to
Arkin and Handler, in 1973, the USS
Greenling sank below her test depth for a short time simply because one of
her depth gauges malfunctioned. Such a descent can be fatal, needless to say,
but luckily, this time, it was not. In the following month, the USS
Guardfish “experiences a primary coolant leak while running submerged…
The submarine surfaces and is ventilated and decontaminated, and repairs the
casualty unassisted. Four crewmen transferred to the Puget Sound Naval Hospital
for monitoring.” This was a serious accident, for as Shay Cullen put it,
“Without this vital fluid (the coolant) the reactor will overheat and melt
down, the worst nuclear disaster possible…” The crew “barely managed to
avoid a meltdown. There was a serious radioactivity leak but what was more
serious was the cover up, the deck log book and the command history were
falsified.” In a situation like this, in
which there is loss of coolant, the repercussions can be very serious. Said
DiMercurio: “The fuel in a nuclear reactor is ‘bomb grade,’ unlike a
civilian reactor; it uses U-235, the high-octane variety, instead of natural
uranium… If a U-235 bomb-grade uranium core melts in a loss of coolant
accident, there is a possibility that it could form a critical
mass at the bottom of the core. It is further possible that an uncontrolled
nuclear reaction would then take place. In the least likely case, it would
explode like a fission bomb and vaporize the ship. In the more likely case, it
would cause a ‘prompt critical rapid disassembly,’ which is an uncontrolled
runaway reaction that causes the nuclear fuel to thud in less than a full
explosion but that is strong enough to blow open the reactor vessel and the
hull.” This is not very reassuring,
but there is more. In 1975, “The USS Haddock (SSN-621) develops a leak during
a deep dive while on a test run near Hawaii. The U.S. Navy confirms the
incident, but denies the vessel is unsafe as crew members had charged in late
October. A number of enlisted men had protested sending the ship to sea,
claiming it had cracks in the main cooling piping, leaks, and malfunctions and
deficiencies in other systems, including the steering mechanism.” Fortunately,
there was no loss of life. Interestingly, it should be noted that a near fatal
accident on the USS La Jolla in the
1981 was caused by none other than the father of Nuclear Navy, Admiral Hyman G.
Rickover, US Navy, himself. As Tyler tells it, thanks to Admiral Rickover, a
bureaucratic tyrant par excellence, the ship went out of control, and nearly
reached her test depth, and if she had continued her uncontrolled dive much
longer, “That would have been it – another Thresher.” A few years later,
DiMercurio, then a nuclear submarine officer, admitted that he “almost melted
down a nuclear reactor,” although he did not say where or how (but he did
mention that he served on the nuclear submarines USS
Pargo and USS Hammerhead,
however). In 2002, additionally, the research submarine USS Dolphin was also nearly lost because of a fire and flooding, and
the crew had to abandon ship. And of course, there have been quite a few
collisions (more than 20, by some accounts) between US and Soviet/Russian
submarines, and while it would be unfair to place the blame entirely on the US
Navy, it is well known that “the gung-ho attitude of American sub commanders,
who regularly ignored the rule that they should maintain a constant distance
from their ‘target’ of at least five miles,” was probably a salient
factor. What does
all this mean? It means, by all accounts the US Navy has been lucky, very
lucky, for as one US submariner who served on the USS Sargo said in 1983, “I’m really surprised we only lost two
subs…There were times when we weren’t sure we were coming back.” As I said
before, every navy has accidents, but given that the US Navy has had not one but
two official safety stand-downs since 1989, mistaken an airliner for an F-14,
and shot it down, accidentally fired a missile at a Turkish destroyer, and let
us not forget the 1986 misfiring of a Tomahawk cruise missile by the USS
Iowa, (The missile was supposed to fly within the Florida panhandle, but
instead veered into Alabama, catching some unlucky marijuana farmers off guard.
The Navy, amusingly, tried to pass it off as a carefully planned “drug bust”
rather than an accident), one might actually form the impression that the US
Navy is somewhat symphoric and bunglesome, and its denials and cover-ups only
serve to reinforce Shuger’s 1996 statement that it is not a
“reality-based” organization. In
addition to the aforementioned submarine accidents and near misses, there have
been others involving nuclear weapons. According to the Center for Defense
Information, in 1959, “A U.S. Navy P-5M aircraft carrying an unarmed nuclear
depth charge without its fissile core crashed into Puget Sound near Whidbey
Island, Washington. The weapon was never recovered.” Six years later, “An
A-4E Skyhawk strike aircraft carrying a nuclear weapon rolled off an elevator on
the U.S. aircraft carrier Ticonderoga and fell into the sea. Because the
bomb was lost at a depth of approximately 16,000 feet, Pentagon officials feared
that intense water pressure could have caused the B-43 hydrogen bomb to explode.
It is still unknown whether an explosion did occur. The pilot, aircraft, and
weapon were lost. The Pentagon claimed that the bomb was lost ‘500 miles away
from land.’ However, it was later revealed that the aircraft and nuclear
weapon sank only miles from the Japanese island chain of Ryukyu.” Although
some doubt the weapon could explode simply because of water pressure (at that
depth, roughly 7000 PSI, or that if it did explode, we would not know about it),
the loss of a hydrogen bomb in itself is disquieting. Incredibly, or perhaps not
so incredibly, the US Navy did not inform the Japanese of this accident until
the mid-1980s! In 1992, a leaked US Navy document (“OPNAVINST 3040.5B. Nuclear
Reactor and Radiological Accidents: Procedures and Reporting Requirements
for”) indeed gave the commanders of US Navy ships visiting foreign ports the
discretion not to inform the host
nation in the event of a nuclear accident. Perhaps this is why New Zealand still
refuses to allow US Navy ships to visit its ports, and has done so since 1984. Finally, going back to World War II,
there was also a friendly fire accident involving the battleship USS
Iowa and one of her escorts that every American should know. The destroyer USS
William D. Porter accidentally launched a torpedo at the Iowa, which just missed. The near miss was bad enough, but even
worse, there were VIPs aboard the Iowa during
that cruise, including the President of the United States and the Chief of Naval
Operations! The captain of the Iowa
wanted to court-martial the skipper of the destroyer, but was over-ruled by
President Franklyn Delano Roosevelt so as to avoid “adverse publicity.” Both
presidents FDR and George W. Bush have in some way tried to gloss over the
Navy’s friendly fire problems, and that too is scandalous. Misleading Congress and a Cultural
Explanation
“… and you’ve
got to consider the psychology of the Navy itself… The Navy, traditionally,
technically, doesn’t do anything wrong.” – Former Army Research Director
Raymond Walker on the Navy’s flawed investigation of the USS Iowa explosion in 1989 The question that now
remains is: How has the US Navy managed to conceal all its glaring faults, bad
policies, and weaknesses for all these years? Part of the answer is that the
Navy has a history of not telling the full truth to Congress. It is well known
that senior US Navy officers have a tradition of omitting information about the
Navy’s weaknesses and deficiencies during public testimony. For example, in
the early 1980s, wrote Scammell, Navy officers tried to conceal the shortcomings
of the new Aegis system by using unrealistically easy operational tests, then by
classifying the poor results: “An amalgam of sophisticated seaborne radar,
computers, and surface-to-air rockets ten years in development, Aegis was built
to simultaneously track up to two hundred aerial targets and to control thirty
killer missiles. But in sea tests against sixteen easy targets – easy because
they were lobbed in one after another instead of all at the same time, as they
would arrive in combat – the supershield missed all but five…”
Consequently, “The results of the sea trials were immediately classified,
ostensibly for reasons of national security, and it was announced that the tests
had been successful. When Congressional overseers eventually learned they had
been duped –a gain because not everyone in the fiasco interpreted ‘patriotic
duty’ as ‘staying silent’—the Aegis program was very nearly scuttled.”
According to Representative Denny Smith, a Republican from Oregon and former F-4
fighter pilot, Navy officers deliberately deleted key passages from their
initial test reports on the Aegis system to keep him in the dark on its
failings. This attempted cover-up was
certainly not an isolated incident. Indeed, attempts by the Center for Naval
Analyses to evaluate the Navy’s way of doing things have been subjected to
political pressure not to let on about any “implied weaknesses in current
hardware or doctrine,” said Shuger. And I suppose by now no one should be
shocked to hear that in the mid 1990s, during tests of a new guided missile, the
missile “melted its on-board guidance system. ‘Incredibly,’ an Army review
said, ‘the Navy ruled the test a success.’” Another part of the answer
is that building ships, submarines and aircraft for the US Navy is big business,
and with a few salient exceptions like Smith, pork-barreling throttlebottom
politicians may not want to hear that the systems being built in their districts
(and providing many, many jobs to voters) won’t work or are not really needed.
When Representative Smith tried to hold the Navy accountable for the botched
tests of the Aegis system and the attempted cover-up, “Trent Lott, the House
Republican whip, asked Smith if he knew that killing the Navy’s Aegis cruiser
program could affect sixteen thousand jobs at Ingalls Shipyard in Lott’s home
state of Mississippi.” Lott is well known for his devotion to the shipyard in
question, where his father once labored. He even forced the Navy to buy an
additional ship that it did not request so as to keep jobs at the facility, and
said “I’ll do anything for that (Ingalls) shipyard.” On top of that, noted
Holland, “The case of the Navy’s F/A-18 (Hornet) strike fighter program also
demonstrates that even legislators generally critical of the military will act
to protect a program in which constituents’ jobs are at stake. When President
Carter threatened to cut the Hornet program in 1978, Representative Tip O’Neil
(D-Mass.) and Senators Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), and
Thomas Eagleton (D-Mo.) intervened. The planes are constructed by Northrop
(California) and McDonnell-Douglas (Missouri), and the engines are built by
General Electric (Massachusetts). In 1972, when Senators Lloyd Bentson (D-Tex.)
and Thomas McIntyre (D-N.H.) led resistance to Defense Secretary Melvin
Laird’s request for production money for the Trident submarine until the
military produced an approved design, Senator Henry Jackson (D-Wash.) organized
congressional support and was rewarded with a Trident base in his state.” With politicians who are
much more interested in jobs than effective and properly tested weapons, and
officers who do not always like to reveal the truth (Of course, as we have seen
here, some of today’s naval officers, especially the reformers, are more
candid about the Navy’s deficiencies), the US Navy has great difficulty
maintaining its credibility both in government circles, and at sea. There is one final
possibility that comes into play, and it is cultural, deeply-entrenched, and
difficult to remove. My maternal grandparents were American, and I went to
public schools in the US. I have also had experience as a student or as a
lecturer in two other countries, and as such, I have a reasonably sound basis
for making comparisons, both educational and cultural. It has been my
observation (and that of many others) that American public schools and culture
place much more emphasis on cultivating self-esteem than do those of other
countries. This has led to a false confidence, or bravado if you will; a false
sense of self-importance and to a certain extent, plain old fashioned
narcissistic egotism. As a matter of fact, this streak of overconfidence goes
back a long way in American history. Samuel Huntington, in his erudite book The
Soldier and the State, made a scorching reference to it during the time of
the great American navalist Alfred Thayer Mahan. “Not only were Americans
bellicose, but they suffered from an overweening and highly dangerous
self-confidence. The military officers expressed great alarm at the “national
conceit” rampant in the United States…” This overconfidence is
manifested today in several ways. It manifests itself in international
mathematics competitions in which American teenagers get the highest scores in
“self-confidence” but the lowest scores on the actual exams. It is
manifested when young Americans, with absolutely no musical talent whatsoever,
audition on TV shows like American Idol,
and then break into tears when a judge tells them something painfully obvious,
like “You’re just awful. You have no talent. This was a waste of my time.”
-- things they should rightly have known long beforehand. And it is also
manifested in naval exercises, where American units are sometimes shocked that
they can be easily defeated by a competent enemy with good tactics. Sadly, this
over-confidence, combined with a misinformed and pork-loving Congress, may
someday have profound consequences for the US Navy. Conclusion The US Navy is the largest
navy in the world, and on paper, certainly the most powerful. Many believe it is
the best navy the world has ever seen, and it is also unmistakably the most
expensive navy the world has ever seen. On the latter point at least, there is
no doubt. With the Russian Navy all but gone, and the Chinese Navy still
ascending, the American Navy remains the dominant sea power in the world. Yet,
as we have seen here, this heavyweight navy often has great difficulty handling
the little guys. Indeed, if the US Navy were a boxer, one might say that his
dominance is due mostly to his sheer size because he punches well below his
massive weight. In this era of asymmetrical warfare, of David versus Goliath
conflicts, perhaps it is time for America to rethink its naval strategy, lose
some weight, and as sports announcers say, “focus more on the fundamentals.”
For all the money America spends on its huge navy, it really needs to be much
better. Edmund Burke once said “A nation without the means of reform is
without the means of survival.” So, too, I would add, is a navy. The
Author Roger
Thompson is Professor of Military Studies at Knightsbridge University and a
Fellow of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society. He
is an internationally recognized authority on combat motivation, military
sociology, regular/reserve total force issues, and military bureaucratic
politics. His seminal work on combat motivation in naval forces was endorsed by
the US Chief of Naval Operations, SACLANT, CINCPACFLEET, best-selling novelist
and submariner the Late Captain Edward L. Beach, US Navy (Retired), and the
German, Australian, Chilean, Italian and Spanish Admiralties. His work in this
area was translated into Spanish under the authority of the Commander-in-Chief
of the Armada de Chile, Almirante Jorge Martinez Busch. He also received an
Admiral's Medallion from the Chief of Staff of the Italian Navy, Admiral Guido
Venturoni, for his contribution to military sociology. His work has also been
acknowledged in writing by General Colin Powell. His
1994 MA thesis Brown Shoes, Black Shoes and Felt Slippers: Parochialism and
the Evolution of the Post-War US. Navy was published as a book by the US
Naval War College in 1995, and again by the Mine Warfare Association in 1997.
The original publication was endorsed as "essential reading for
professional naval officers" by the late former US Navy Chief of Naval
Operations, Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr. Professor
Thompson's contribution to military studies was recently summarized by the
famous military
sociologist, Dr Charles C. Moskos. Moskos, whose scholarly writings have been
published in 19 languages, said: "Simply put, Professor Thompson is the
leading scholar in the sociology of naval institutions. His book, Brown
Shoes, Black Shoes and Felt Slippers: Parochialism and the Evolution of the
Post-War US Navy, is a classic in the sociology of the armed forces and
civil-military relations. It was my honor to give an endorsement to this book
upon its publication." He concluded that Professor Thompson is a "most
remarkable scholar and teacher." Professor Thompson has also published
numerous military affairs essays in periodicals such as Canada's Navy Annual,
Air Force, Conference of Defence Associations Institute Forum, Canadian
Defence Review, International Insights, Esprit de Corps, and
the Defence Associations National Network News. He has presented papers
on military studies at international conferences sponsored by the Turkish
Military Academy and York University, and has been invited to present a paper at
the United States Naval Academy. Appendix A USN Ships Theoretically
Destroyed in Unscripted Exercise Evolutions or Operations as reported by the
Media since 1959 Note: This table is based on publicly available English
media sources such as newspapers, magazines, books, journals and broadcast
media. Only ships that have been named have been included. There have been many
others, but unfortunately these ships were not specifically named in the reports
Appendix B (Glossary)
AFQT
Armed Forces Qualification Tests AMRAAM Advanced
Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile ANG
Air National Guard ASUW
Anti-Surface Warfare ASW
Anti-Submarine Warfare ASWTNS Anti-Submarine
Warfare Tactical Navigation System BVR
Beyond Visual Range CAP
Combat Air Patrol CETS
Contractual Engineering Technical Service CF
Canadian Forces CBG
Carrier Battle Group CO
Commanding Officer CVN
Nuclear-powered Aircraft Carrier DDG
Guided Missile Destroyer DOD
Department of Defense GED
General Equivalency Diploma GRU
Glavnoe Razvedovatelnoe Upravlenie (Soviet Intelligence) NAS
Naval Air Station NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization OECD
Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development OPFOR
Opposing Force (simulated) RAAF
Royal Australian Air Force RCAF
Royal Canadian Air Force RCN
Royal Canadian Navy
RDF
Radio Direction Finding RN
Royal Navy SAM
Surface to Air Missile SAT
Scholastic Aptitude Test SC
Supply Corps SOSUS
Sound Surveillance System SSK
Diesel Submarine
SSN
Nuclear-powered Submarine UDT
Underwater Demolitions Team USAF
United States Air Force USMC
United States Marine Corps |
