Navies remain divided, as they have been since the dawn of the Second Industrial Age, into aircraft carriers, submarines, and surface ships. The major difference is that blue-water naval competition has disappeared after more than five hundred years. No one even tries to challenge the U.S. Navy anymore on the high seas. Virtually every other navy in the world is little more than a coastal patrol force.
The U.S. has twelve aircraft carriers, nine of them Nimitz-class, nuclear-powered supercarriers that can carry more than seventy high-performance aircraft such as the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. A tenth supercarrier is in the works. No one else has a single one. France has the world’s only other nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, but it’s half the size of the Nimitz. Russia has one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, that rarely leaves port, and it has sold another one, the Admiral Gorshkov, to India. Britain has three small Invincible-class aircraft carriers that are used only for helicopters and vertical-takeoff Harrier jets. France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and South Korea have similar helicopter carriers in the works. These ships are comparable to the U.S. Navy’s twelve amphibious assault ships, which transport helicopters, jump jets, and marines.
Whenever they leave port, U.S. capital ships are surrounded by surface and submarine escorts. Twenty-four Ticonderoga-class cruisers and forty-five (and counting) Arleigh Burke–class destroyers come equipped with Aegis phased-array radar that can track up to nine hundred targets in a three-hundred-mile radius. These surface combatants can also operate on their own or in conjunction with smaller vessels such as frigates and minesweepers.
In World War II, ships that didn’t carry aircraft were limited to firing torpedoes or heavy guns with a range of less than thirty miles. Starting in the 1960s some submarines were equipped with intercontinental range ballistic missiles, but their targeting was so imprecise that it made no sense to equip them with conventional warheads. Ballistic-missile subs became a mainstay of nuclear deterrence. The development of accurate cruise missiles starting in the 1970s allowed submarines and surface combatants to hit land targets hundreds of miles away with conventional ordnance. Improvements in torpedo design, including the development of rocket-propelled supercavitating torpedoes, also allow submarines to do more damage in their traditional ship-fighting role.
The U.S. has the world’s largest fleet of nuclear-powered attack submarines (54) and nuclear-powered ballistic-missile subs (16). Russia is next, with 37 attack submarines and 14 ballistic missile subs. Britain has 15 nuclear-powered submarines, followed by France with 10, and China with six. Not only are U.S. submarines more numerous but they are also more advanced, the most sophisticated being three 1990s-vintage Seawolfs described by one defense analyst as “the fastest, quietest, and most heavily armed undersea vessels ever built.”
Because of the growing power of each of its vessels and the lack of competitors, the U.S. Navy has consolidated its high seas hegemony even while its fleet has shrunk from almost five hundred ships in the 1980s to fewer than three hundred in the early years of the twenty-first century. The potency of U.S. naval vessels is increased by linking together sensors and weapons systems with a tactical Internet known as FORCEnet.
While the U.S. Navy probably will remain unchallenged in blue waters, it faces greater threats as it gets closer to shore. Here water currents, thermal layers, and various obstacles can interfere with even the most advanced sensors, and a variety of defensive weapons systems lurk in wait.
More than seventy-five thousand antiship missiles are owned by seventy countries. A few are ballistic, but most are of the cruise-missile variety. Their potency was proved in 1987 when French-made Exocets fired by an Iraqi aircraft crippled the USS Stark, a Perry-class frigate, killing thirty-seven sailors. Earlier, Argentinian-owned Exocets sank two British ships during the Falkland Islands War (1982). Newer antiship cruise missiles such as the Russian-made Yakhont, Sunburn, and Uran are even deadlier because they have faster speeds, greater stealth capabilities, and more accurate, GPS-enhanced targeting. Russia is selling these missiles to customers abroad and some nations, such as China, are developing their own versions.
U.S. warships have sophisticated defensive systems to guard against air attack: Incoming missiles can be deflected by electronic countermeasures, flares, or chaff, or destroyed by naval aircraft, sea-to-air Standard missiles, or, as a last resort, by rapid-fire, radar-guided Phalanx guns. But, like the Stark, a warship could be caught by surprise or overwhelmed by a flurry of missiles coming from different directions.
Even more worrisome from an American viewpoint is the fact that transport ships and fuel tankers which have to replenish a fleet at sea have no protection when they are outside the defensive range of a battle group. They are as vulnerable as supply convoys on the roads of Iraq. Because a supercarrier has only about a three-day stockpile of JP-5 jet fuel (6,500 barrels a day are needed during combat operations), the most powerful warship in history could be rendered useless if its fuel tankers were sunk. The cargo container ships upon which global commerce depends also have no antimissile protection. A country or even a subnational group armed with cruise missiles could wreak havoc on the world’s shipping lanes at chokepoints like the Straits of Hormuz or Malacca.
The threat to shipping, civil and military, is increased by diesel submarines. The latest diesel submarines have ultraquiet electric engines that make them hard to detect with sonar, and they are much cheaper to buy or produce than a nuclear-powered submarine. Russia has exported Kilo-class diesel-electric subs to China, India, Iran, and Algeria, among others. China is producing its own Song-class diesel submarines in a bid to challenge U.S. naval hegemony by using the same strategy that Germany, with its U-boats, once used to challenge British dominion of the waves. U.S. antisubmarine defenses are quite sophisticated, especially in open waters, but even American sensors can have trouble tracking quiet diesel subs in noisy coastal waters.
Mines, which can be scattered by submarines or other vessels, represent another major threat to shipping. More than three hundred different varieties are available on the world market. They can be triggered by changes in magnetic fields, acoustic levels, seismic pressure, or other factors. Some come equipped with microelectronics that allow them to distinguish between different types of ships, while others have small motors that allow them to move around. This makes it difficult to certify that a shipping channel is free of mines—it may have been safe an hour ago, but not anymore. Demining technology has lagged behind; the U.S. Navy, for one, has never placed much emphasis on lowly minesweepers. It has paid a price for this neglect. In 1987, during operations to prevent Iran from closing the Persian Gulf, an Iranian mine of World War I design nearly sank the frigate Samuel Roberts. Four years later, in the Gulf War, the cruiser USS Princeton and the amphibious landing ship Tripoli were nearly blasted apart by Iraqi mines. And even a cheap motorboat packed with explosives can pose a significant threat to a modern warship. The USS Cole, an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, was badly damaged in such a terrorist attack in the port of Aden, Yemen, in 2000.
All of these threats could be largely negated if U.S. fleets were to stay far out at sea, but they have to approach fairly close to land to launch aircraft or missiles with operational ranges of only a few hundred miles. Moreover, the places where the U.S. Navy is likely to fight in the future are dangerously narrow. The Persian Gulf is only thirty miles wide at its narrowest point, the Taiwan Strait only one hundred miles wide.
To maintain its dominance, the U.S. Navy regularly updates the electronics and weapons aboard its warships even as the hulls and propulsion systems remain unchanged. It also plans to build a variety of unmanned vessels along with a CVN-21 aircraft carrier to replace the Nimitz-class, a Zumwalt-class DD(X) destroyer to replace Oliver Hazard Perry–class frigates and Spruance-class destroyers, a CG(X) cruiser to replace the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, and a smaller and speedier Littoral Combat Ship with no direct parallel in today’s fleet that would focus on clearing mines, hunting submarines, and fighting terrorists in coastal waters. All of these new vessels will have improved defenses and information-processing tools as well as “plug and play” capacity that will allow them to be quickly reconfigured for different missions. They will also incorporate composite materials, stealthier designs, and electric propulsion to make them harder to detect, though an aircraft carrier with a 4.5-acre flight deck can never exactly hide.
Whether all of these warships are truly needed, given the U.S. Navy’s already substantial lead over all competitors, remains an open question. A program to develop giant sea bases—perhaps akin to offshore oil platforms—that would allow American ground and air forces to operate overseas might be of greater use, given the growing difficulty the U.S. has had in gaining basing and overflight rights from other countries.
