CSBA's Clark on "Restoring American Seapower"

welcome to the defense and aerospace report I'm Pavarotti and at the Center for Strategic and budgetary assessments in Washington DC one of the top think tanks in town and we're meeting with Brian Clark who is one of the town's top C power thinkers and strategists you're just fresh off from Capitol Hill where you did some did a little bit of testimony and we want to talk to you about that but more importantly Brian I want to start with your report restoring American sea power it's one of the three parts the three reports that are going into sort of mapping the future of American sea power was in the NDAA last year obviously the Navy did its own assessment and found that the the future Navy needs to be at 355 ships Trump administration has put a target of 350 ships MITRE Corp FFRDC a federally funded research and development center found for 14 you guys found between what there's about 342 up to 380 depending on how the rules go what I want to start off with is what are some of the most salient features of your report what are some of the things that you guys are recommending as it goes into this whole wider fleet architecture mix well thanks Rocco for having me on and I'll say right off the bat that the two major features that are different about our fleet architecture compared to the other two was one we have a larger surface combatant fleet that's more diversified than the today's surface fleet that the Navy has or the one that they even recommend in the future the Navy has got a very large number of large surface combatants destroyers cruisers and then a small number of small surface combatants or littoral combat ships we recommended diversifying that's lead in the future to have a fewer number of large surface combatants destroyers a large number of frigate type small surface combatant so something slightly larger than LCS and then a large number of very small surface combatants which would be fast missile craft that are kind of like the visby class or like the fast missile craft that the Egyptians have so each of those three classes of surface combatant give you this ability to do more distributed surface operations and exploit new technologies for weapons and sensors that would enable a small surface ship to have just as much firepower or capability as a larger one maybe just not in the same numbers that a large surface combatant might do what are some of the technologies that you find that are going to be critical because there are those who say range range range is the most important thing especially as we're looking at a Pacific threats there is always been a concern the LCS the littoral combat ship doesn't have that range although there have been a number of modifications that are being made to the follow-on versions of the ship to give it a little bit of that extra range but technology what are some of the key enablers that you guys are looking at that say that hey look there's greater feasibility for some of these smaller ships the US Navy has always been reticent about so the key thing is not necessarily weapons range all the weapons range is important you have to also be able to fire effectively at that range if you think about Wayne Hughes idea of fire effectively first well the effectively comes into play now because if I cannot effectively target my enemy and understand exactly where he is and maybe understand exactly what kind of defensive disposition you might have I might shoot a salvo and miss him or I might shoot or salvo that's not large enough to be able to defeat his defenses in which case I've wasted those weapons so firing effectively involves some degree of ISR and targeting that maybe you need it you know we need to think about putting as a priority over just weapons range itself so what we've put into our fleet architecture is unmanned vehicles like the turn which is a DARPA program to build a long endurance vertically launched UAV that could be shipboard as well as smaller UAVs like the ScanEagle which is a lot of endurance and that can be a very capable targeting sense or even a search sensor in the future fleet so having UAVs like turn and scan eagle on smaller surface combatants gives them the ability to target the enemy effectively and if their remaining in emission controls or eMCON themselves and not using active sensors they can try to remain undetected or may be able to rain undetected so they could get the first shot on the enemy even if their weapons aren't quite the same range is what the enemy might have and what about vessel range though I mean you know there's a you know you're a nuclear submarine or by background so obviously you know the gas tank is not as much of a primary concern of yours but it is for almost everybody else and the concern there has been that for example littoral combat ship you know does give you that speed but then at speed its burning gas you need more Oilers and those are actually the most cherished commodity in the fleet or actually the Oilers you know what about vessel range now how important is that in this mix so it's hugely important in terms of just endurance not some of of range but it's endurance that's the problem so one thing we focused on with regard to our small surface combatants in particular was ensuring that we were proposing ones that had long range so a frigate in replacement of an LCS would be able to have a longer range because it could carry more fuel because it's a larger ship but it might also have a propulsion architecture that's maybe more amenable to longer range longer endurance but slower speed operations we don't believe that the speed at the LCS can do is necessarily what you need to have in a future small surface combatant and that a ship that's got a diesel generator based you know propulsion system might be more affordable efficient than what you would have with this combination of code a gas turbine and and diesel generator like you have on the LCS is the reason that the endurance is important is because the way that we postured our fleet in our fleet architecture which is one of the other features that we found that we did differently than the other two studies did this we postured forces permanently in regions where they would remain for the entire duration of their deployment cycles so ships and crews would do multiple deployments to the same region year after year as opposed to going wherever the the do particularly demands might take them so that allows them to focus on their missions and the threats and objectives in that area but it also means they don't need range as much as they need endurance to improve the efficiency and reduce that the tax on the Oilers and and also you're reducing transit you know a whole bunch of other things everybody's forward and folks are falling in on those on those crews let me go to your LCS decision I mean they're number of folks have suggested sort of curtailing that program you guys also have talked about their tailing the program you know what are some of the attributes you'd like in this if you will frigate heavy frigate there is a little bit of a groundswell of support for something that's longer range greater capacity than an LCS there are some folks who are very very big advocates of the Danish design the hyper houet felt or Absalon or some modification of those classes there are others who look at for example an Abe alized national security cutters very very high endurance ship that the Coast Guard already has in service there's a hot American production line for where are some of the attributes you think this ship needs so the ship needs to have like we just talked about long endurance so it's got to have the ability to go four to six thousand nautical miles on a tank of gas at a reasonable speed which is something that a lot of these ships may not be able to do because they're not large enough to carry that much fuel or the propulsion architecture doesn't lend themselves to that they also need to be able to do anti-submarine warfare that's a key frigate mission back through World War two so they have to be able to carry it variable tip sonar and a passive towed array similar to Pat the the package that the LCS would carry so that needs to be a feature of our future frigate and as the feature of most of the frigates you see and European navies today the last thing it needs to be able to do is air defense of a ship that's nearby which means it's got to have more than simply a self defense air air air defense system like a ram or a sea ram it's got to be able to do something with air defense that's more like five to ten nautical miles away in defense of another ship which is more like you would get with ESSM or a similar missile so you would need a vertical launch system set of missile tubes in order to carry the ESSM and you would need a radar that's sufficient to be able to accomplish that air defense mission both of those drive size also in the frigate so we arrived at something like the 4000 ton to 5000 ton range which the National Security Cutter based frigate would be within it be or Oliver Hazard Perry Redux if you wanted to go and rebuild that ship again or the frame frigate or the f100 they all kind of fall in that range the the Danish frigate would be one that might fall in that range the difference being the Danish frigate isn't designed to be this much more multi mission modular thing your ship that you can change the mission of over time as opposed to being purpose-built or permanently quick with certain capability so even if you bought the the Danish frigate design you'd want to permanently equip it with a set of mission modules essentially yeah and one of the things the Danes will tell you is that they skip the VDS the variable depth sonar on it in part because of cost considerations and and when it goes for range I think one of the all-stars have got to be the national security cutter that at low speed is is 9,000 plus miles let me take you to submarines on this there are those who are looking at the undersea environment as being something that requires much more investment we're looking at a bathtub getting down to 41 boats there admiral murders the whole leadership of the submarine forces talk van richardson has talked about you know how we work our way out of the bathtub how many nuclear-powered attack submarines do we need and what does your mix look like and more broadly can the industrial base support that higher level of build there are some folks who even in the industry sort of wonder whether or not we can get to for example three attack submarines a year and ORP you know and and Virginia payload module and and added nuclear carrier construction so we arrived at a very similar number of the Navy so we had 66 submarines in our fleet architecture which is the identical number to what the Navy did we came out up with a totally different mechanism a totally different posture because of the approach that we took with regard to the strategy and the operational concepts behind our fleet architecture but we came to about the same number which would indicate that it's probably not a bad number so mid-60s is probably what the Navy needs in order to be able to service the demands that are likely be placed on the future the industrial base when we looked at the industrial base we built a shipbuilding plan to accompany our fleet architecture study and the industrial base great now could support two virginia per year plus no higher replacement or a columbia class SSBN it looks like there might be additional capacity to get 2/3 per year potentially based on the studies that we had from both Congressional Research Service and also what electric boat and hii were telling us so we believe that you can get 2/3 attack submarines per year once Columbia class construction has gotten to the point where the learning curve is allowing those chips to be produced as efficiently as possible what that does though is that you get you get 266 submarines even with that ramp up in production until the late 2030s but we think that's the appropriate number to arrive at and there could be some investment made in the shipyard infrastructure but more importantly to get to that 3 attack submarines plus one ssbn per year you absolutely have to make some investment in the supplier industrial base to begin helping them to ramp up their own production capacity where do you fall on carriers so we had a 12 carriers was our requirement which is the same requirement the Navy came to which again is interesting because we had a totally different operating model and posture for our carriers compared to what the Navy had but we both arrived at a similar number which would tell you that that 11 or 12 number is probably pretty good in terms of what the carrier requirement is likely to be in particular we took into account the fact that carriers might in the future have a different operating models and what they have today today they're kind of our front line of defense and they're the first thing that we sent in to be able to deal with crises in the future that the threat of vanish of missiles and associated you know weapons that we call anti accessory denial could suppress the operations of a carrier for some period of time and the initial onset of hostilities so you'd be smart to have something else be that front line of defense like missile based kind of firepower so on surface ships and submarines and then bring the carrier in after the initial exchanges of fire when maybe you've gotten the enemy at least identified and you've understood his capabilities and maybe you've softened them up a little bit and the carrier can come in and begin generating the sorties that allows it to sustain firepower for an extremely long period of time but we found that the Navy really should be separated out and you think of it into as two separate forces one that's kind of missile based that's really good for short notice high-volume short duration firepower that has then go reload and then the carrier based forces and to some degree the fibbies forces that are able to sustain combat operations for an almost indefinite period but at a lower level of overall you know firepower in any given period of time and for unmanned aircraft I mean you obviously talked about unmanned surface ships as a fleet Bogmen tation tool and talked about things like ScanEagle for example which have a high degree of persistence but what about long-range combat striking power off of carrier decks this is something you guys have written about for years that the aircraft carrier really should be equipped with something that's much much longer range much heavier payload it talked to us both from a strike capability air but also from an undersea because you guys also have been talking about ultra large extra large unmanned underwater vehicles not just large diameter unmanned underwater but something that's really extra-large talk to us on both ends of these on what you guys are envisioning as additions to the force so we advocated and in our fleet architecture which is similar to what we've advocated elsewhere for the Navy to buy a stealthy unmanned combat air vehicle au CAV with a range of at least five or six hundred miles unrefueled and an overall range of 2,000 miles the reason being that we think about the operating model we're likely to have to put our carriers into in the future you can end up with this missile based force that's up forward to conduct initial operations against an enemy like a bunch of surface combatants using distributed lethality and some surface or some submarines then you bring in the carrier to relieve those guys after they've had the initial period of combat well the period the time period in which those ships will run out of weapons is going to be one to two days and the carrier then needs to be able to conduct some initial strikes within one or two days when you do the math which we did in the study you put you at about a 2,000 mile sortie and the only way to get to 2,000 miles sortie out of a aircraft carrier is to have an unmanned airplane do it so that's where a good drives you to view CAV as an operational requirement based on how we're likely to have to fight in the future and then in addition that there's a lot of benefits to having a stealthy ISR and targeting as well as a TAC platform off of an aircraft carrier we also found the need for the tanker that the Navy is already pursuing the MQ 25 to be able to support combat air patrols out at the distance as your cruise missiles could be launched so back to the outer air battle sort of model of the Cold War and then if you look at undersea like we talked about extra large unmanned undersea vehicles we saw the need for those to be able to take on a lot of the surveillance and maybe mining and other missions that submarines could do but that you could have an unmanned system do or autonomous system do better probably and with less risk to the submarine itself we also saw that you could use the XL uuv in concert with a submarine to be able to provide additional weapons capacity we thought we found that to be the model that works best as opposed to thinking of an XL uuv or an autonomous and receive vehicle autonomously attacking targets that we saw that as possible in the future but in the 2030 timeframe that we were tasked to look after this study maybe not necessarily feasible on a pretty on a regular basis you might have to you know think of other ways to be able to lash up that command and control network and when you're talking about extra large you are talking roughly the size of what another nation might use as their conventional submarine right so you're talking about like the boeing echo voyager or some of the other ones that are being developed by Huntington Ingalls and and and Northrop Grumman a large vehicle that's 90 feet long 100 feet long 9 or 10 feet wide so that might displace several hundred tons so you're talking about something that other countries would call a mini-sub or you know small diesel submarine and let me ask you about the strike missiles you know there's there is a lot of debate I mean surface Navy Association was just a couple of months ago obviously one of the hot programs is how to equip the littoral combat ship or the frigate version of that with with a missile with some reach obviously Raytheon is in that mix with Kongsberg Boeing is in the mix as as well as Lockheed Martin obviously they're all competing for that but when you look at it from a range perspective there are those who say that even those weapons of taking something that's for example a harpoon that's at 62 take it out to even under 20 or 200-mile is not the kind of strategic striking reach that we need what's the kind of strategic striking reach the United States is likely to need in order to be able to take this battle particularly in an anti access area denial environment for example off of optic china for example right so I I think we need to consider that the surface ships if you think about how your surface combatants are going to deploy they're going to be mostly going after targets in their immediate vicinity partly because of the targeting limitations that can be placed on them and partly because it's just not feasible for them to launch strikes deep inland into into a country like a China because they're going to be under in a threat environment the missiles they launch are going to be at risk their entire travel time so the idea of launching a missile from a surface combatant whose position will be more or less identified pretty quickly and try to get it deep inland without being shot down those are pretty low so the idea is that the surface combatant should be focused on coastal targets and shipped at sea which maybe limits you to a need for about two to three hundred miles of range on your surface combatant launch missiles now submarine-launched missiles you might say well maybe the since the submarine can offer this ability to get in closer Limited warning time for the enemy to get his air defenses in line to defeat the missile you might be able to launch missiles from the submarine and have them go deep in London expect with an expectation they'll reach the target so maybe for submarine launch missiles we can think about longer range missiles that go like tomahawk range you know a thousand miles and how do you break the defensive cost curve because if you look at DF twenty one DF twenty six these are relatively low cost weapons with enormous range whereas what we're using our enormous ly expensive interceptor missiles very very good very capable but very bespoke very expensive how do you break that kind of cost curve because this is a typically Andy Marshall problem here right the other guys using very very inefficient means to impose enormous costs on you so one of things we came up with in wargames we did for Andy Marshall a couple of years ago before he retired was dialing in our air defense range to a shorter range so if we instead of shooting down an incoming weapon with a weapon is all that goes 200 miles or something or 100 miles that costs three or four million dollars instead we want to shoot down that incoming missile with something that goes thirty miles and only cost me you know $500,000 or hypervelocity projectiles shot from a gun that cost even less than that so the key though is to being able to reduce your cost of cost exchange ratio is by is to go to a shorter range air defense system that's maybe got higher density or higher capacity but can have the same lethality as that longer range system now it means you've got to change your operating concepts and accept the fact you're going to get shot you know you're going to accept weapons coming in at a closer range before you engage them but that's the essential trade-off it's just physics if I want a weapon that's going to engage another weapon at hundreds of miles away that that's going to be an expensive weapon obviously one of the important features of the submarine force are the four SS GN submarines you know what what's the plan for that because on the one hand you know if you look at it from a Navy perspective the Virginia payload module address as part of that by putting four of those large diameter tubes on each one of the virginia-class attack submarines so the thing is it's relatively late in the program each one of those are still a little bit on the expensive side around seven hundred million dollars each in terms of something you're adding to the ships and there are those who say that it still doesn't give you that mass fire capability that you get from those four SS GN what what's what's the right way around that to have sort of these heavyweight guided missile shooters that have proven so effective and important for us including in a Special Operations support capacity so one thing we found in the wargaming we've done and the analysis could get for the suite architecture study is that if I'm going to put missiles in the vicinity of territory and I want to get them there as inexpensively as possible I should put them on surface ships so to the discussion we just had earlier if you want to be able to attack targets deep inland then maybe you do want to put longer range missiles on your surface ships for that express mission you know so you don't want to waste them on surface ships that are a hundred miles away but maybe put a limited number of deeper strike missiles on there that you would use for those missions because the payload capacity on a surface ship is much less expensive than that on a submarine that that real estate is cheaper and that you maybe want a small number of submarines that are able to carry some number of missiles that give you that extra ability to the mass fires from an unknown location or maybe to carry specialized weapons that have a really high degree of survivability but we found in our study though is that we didn't need every submarine to have the Virginia payload module tubes because we had all these surface combatants they were able to deliver missile based fires that you know can do the missions that we were looking to do also it depends you know how much how many missile strikes do you think you need to do deep inside of a country like a China or Russia to accomplish what you think the objectives would be in a likely war fight we also found that there may not be as much need for those high volume strikes deep inland as we might have done in a conflict that we were thinking about fighting you know ten years ago so that's that's that was a factor that drove us to think about the fact that maybe didn't need as much missile payload capacity on submarines so that we could accept the fact that we're going from the verge it from the SSG ends to the Virginia payload module equipped submarines and one last question you were up on the hill what are the key messages you were delivering senators you you testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee yes so they were looking at ways to reishi reshape and grow the military in answer to obviously the challenges we're getting right now from great powers like Russia and China or even regional powers like North Korea and Iran and the three things I told the committee that we really needed to focus on were changing the posture of today's military to get it more forward to get it into locations where we'd be able to intervene to deny or defeat aggression rather than responding to it after the fact if a Russia goes into the Baltics we're not going to come in after the fact and try to push them back we'll have to accept it as we did with Crimea the second thing I'd talk to them about was the need to reshape the military so we've got to really develop different capabilities and operating concepts so you can operate inside these areas if you're going to be up there close to intervene you've got to survive there and you've got to be able to deliver firepower there in a way that's going to be able to deter the enemy from the year in the first place and the last thing I talked about was the need to grow the military the fact that the size the military just as insufficient today to maintain the posture we have now much less even more robust posture and that's causing the readiness crisis we're experiencing today in the force because we don't have enough forces to be able to rotate them through and have sufficient time for training and maintenance between deployments and so they go back out and they're not ready but doesn't that present kind of a budgetary challenge because if you look at it there is even some of the smartest minds in Washington are saying that this budget bump increase is probably to three years obviously the table goes up but we're not going to have that degree of intensive spending is there a concern that you run out of money before you can execute this growth plan so yes but so you have to make some choices so one choice I talked about with the committee was the need to reduce our level of current operations so we can improve the readiness of the current fleet to try to extend its life for as long as possible so we're not having to recapitalize as well as rebuild the military or grow the military's they're not having to do the recapitalization and growth at the same time the other thing I talked about is the need to maybe you not invest in some of the capabilities that will not be as useful in the future so there are some you know capability sets within the each of the services that may not be as useful in the future scenarios were likely to experience with these countries as they might have been in previous scenarios so we might have to think about making some choices with regard to the kinds of force structure that we invest in and what are some of those trade-offs that you would make well so we may have to in the Navy's case decide between submarines and surface combatants and between you know does aircraft carriers and light carriers so some of those choices maybe will indicate to us that perhaps we need to slow down the production of aircraft carrier aircraft carriers for example just because we can't afford to maintain that large carrier flea and and you know use the smaller sea BLS that we advocate in our fleet architecture study to pick up some of that slack in the meantime until we can go and devote more resources to larger carriers and and tell us a little bit about that because that's you know obviously Senator McCain has been very interested in smaller he had a lot of experience flying off of s with class carriers and flag flew off of the intrepid which was one of you know the hero of World War two obviously modified in the 50s as so many of those ships were to the 27 Charlie configuration that made them so effective off the coast of Vietnam legendary names like Hancock Bonham Rashard obviously intrepid and others served with distinction in that conflict giving that you know extra firepower and these ships could put a lot of aircraft out there and and sustain them in fact I think the intrepid still holds the fleed record two two catapults most number of launches what what kind of characteristics do you think that light carrier needs and how do those interact with the big deck amphibs in your guys thinking so initially we advocate that the big deck amp is be used as like carriers so they would have f-35 Bravo's on them predominantly and so that'd be the larger part of their Air Wing as opposed to today where they are only going to carries five or six aircraft so that would give them enough f-35s to be able to support strike missions and fires missions for Marines that are being deployed by mv-22 is that can go so much farther than their existing fires capabilities the other thing we would talk about is at some point transitioning from this CV the CBL that's based on the the amphibs of today and decide whether we want to maintain the well deck or if we want to go and take maybe that same hole form and put catapults and arresting gear on it and make that a light carrier that could carry you know 30 or 40 aircraft or do we want to then you know transition to a larger aircraft carrier that would be like a sixty thousand ton aircraft carrier that's more like the Midway or the Forrestal class that was built up to be a larger carrier what we thought would be appropriate was to stay in the 40 to 50 thousand ton range use a hull form that's more or less like the LH a LHD but maybe don't have the the well deck on the future variants or future iterations of it so that you could carry more equipment and fuel for the for the air wing but we have to do some more analysis on that because there may be value in keeping a well deck but shrinking the well deck so that you could use the well deck for logistics to support the carrier and you can bring on fuel and equipment and ordnance all that stuff via the well deck and then carry it up into the ship rather than having to do it via unwrapped or via error to live so they're looking at the trades now on that but there's clearly a value in having this smaller carrier with catapults and arresting gear that can fly pretty much all the variants of aircraft the Navy has today but do it in a smaller package than when you get with the larger CBN conventional or nuclear power so we enter is conventionally powered the one thing we'll have to you know used to work through is with the Stovall aircraft that isn't a problem because you don't need to go really fast to launch those aircraft if your launch catapult based aircraft then you need to be able to go fast enough to generate wind across the deck and so you may not be able to get that kind of speed out of a diesel-powered ship and so then you need to have gas turbines and maybe that makes it more expensive or the propulsion architecture gets more complex and so at a certain point you then maybe look at look at possibly nuclear power but right now we're looking at it being conventionally powered Brian thanks very much and I just also want to give a shout out to all the other people who participated with you on this which was Tim Walton Jesse Loman Brian McGrath of course who was also associated with the Hudson Institute C power Center and Pete Pete Haines also Craig and Craig Cooper I'm sorry about that yes didn't didn't mean to leave them out Brian thanks very very much thank you for appreciated [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Defense & Aerospace Report

Views: 3,619

Rating: 4.9285712 out of 5

Keywords: Bryan Clark, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, CSBA, Restoring American Seapower, US Navy, Future Fleet Architecture, Surface Combatants, US Naval Surface Forces, Destroyers, Frigates, Littoral Combat Ship, Nuclear Submarines, Nuclear Attack Submarines, Nuclear Ballistic Missile Submarines, Long-Range Strike Weapons, Strike Missiles, Amphibious Forces, Naval Logistics, Long-Range Targetting, China, Anti-Access/Area Denial, A2AD, Vago Muradian

Id: l9PRKI8cDn0

Length: 27min 48sec (1668 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 19 2017