SH-60B Sea Hawk helicopter and helicopters from U.S. Army 35th Combat Aviation Brigade fly in formation over guided-missile destroyer USS Jason Dunham (DDG 109) after US Army-Navy interoperability training. (Getty Images)

Gray zone operations have become increasingly common among U.S. adversaries. Under Xi Jinping, China’s paramilitary forces have killed soldiers and fishermen in border disputes, constructed bases on artificial islands that Xi promised not to militarize, and have attacked U.S. and allied forces with non-kinetic weapons. These gray zone operations have allowed the Chinese government to stay below the level of violence that would trigger an international response or large-scale retaliation.

In "American Sea Power at a Crossroads: A Plan to Restore the U.S. Navy's Maritime Advantage," Hudson experts Bryan Clark, Timothy Walton and Seth Cropsey argue that as revisionist powers grow in strength and ambition, America's Navy must keep pace.

The authors propose an affordable fleet architecture that rebalances the Navy towards smaller, less-sophisticated, and less-manpower-intensive platforms. The new plan would strengthen the Navy’s offensive and defensive capacities while enabling a broader and more effective range of escalation options in response to gray zone tactics.

See key takeaways from the report below, and join us next week as U.S. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy joins Bryan Clark to discuss the U.S. Army’s Project Convergence on Wednesday, while Senator Tom Cotton sits down with Walter Russell Mead for a discussion on the future of U.S. global leadership.

Key Takeways

Highlighted takeaways from the new report, "American Sea Power at a Crossroads: A Plan to Restore the U.S. Navy's Maritime Advantage."
 

1. The Navy is facing a once-in-a-century challenge:

The Navy is arguably facing a once-in-a-century combination of challenges and opportunities as it embarks on its new family of ships. Today its leaders, like their predecessors in the years after World War I, are reconsidering the relevance and survivability of the fleet’s premier capital ship. In addition, emerging technologies are enabling new platforms and tactics that could disrupt the design of today’s fleet; rising adversaries are threatening U.S. allies and the international order; and budget constraints prevent the Navy from countering revisionist powers by simply growing the fleet with better versions of today’s ships and aircraft.

2. Grey zone tactics require the U.S. Navy to shift its strategy:

Hudson’s proposed fleet architecture rebalances the Navy from a small number of large platforms to a larger number of small platforms. More distributed formations will dilute adversary attack salvos, reducing the number of weapons each ship or force package may face. The proposed fleet architecture will combine disaggregated operations with air defense tactics that focus on shorter ranges, allowing greater reliance on electronic warfare, directed energy weapons, and smaller surface-to-air interceptors that can be carried in larger numbers.

3. The advantages of a disaggregated force:

A disaggregated force incorporating many small units and a few large, multimission units would be better able than today’s U.S. military to cause dislocation of enemy aggression. The disaggregated force would have fewer readily identifiable nodes and would be more capable of reorganizing to confuse enemy sensing and compensate for losses. The adversary would therefore need to attack most or all of the U.S. units or take more time to understand the U.S. force disposition and tactics. Either approach would put the adversary at a disadvantage. A disaggregated force could conduct more effective feints and probing operations, something rendered almost impossible by the need to protect today’s manned multimission platforms.

4. The disruptive strategy used by the People's Liberation Army (PLA): 

The PLA is guided by its concept for systems destruction warfare, which intends to “disrupt, paralyze, or destroy the operational capability of the enemy’s operational system.” To implement this approach, the PLA assesses U.S. and allied operational systems in detail to identify potential vulnerabilities, and builds organizational and operational structures to exploit the most advantageous shortfalls. 

In response, new approaches are being developed by the DoD and Navy to establish a decision-making advantage over adversaries. Drawn from maneuver warfare, this approach would combine defensive operations to foreclose enemy attack options with a diversity of offensive capabilities and complex force presentations to degrade adversary decision-making.

5. The Iranian Threat:

Among Iranian forces, the irregular units garner the most attention. The IRGC operates a fleet of fast attack boats and midget submarines in the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf that are intended to counter Saudi and U.S. naval forces with the threat of cheap missile barrages. Ground-launched anti-ship and anti-air missiles support this irregular fleet from the Iranian coast.

Iran’s maritime capabilities further its interests by jeopardizing oil transit from the Near East and more broadly undermining US and allied sea control in the Levantine basin. By controlling the Strait of Hormuz and placing forces along the Bab el-Mandeb in Yemen, Iran can contest energy flows to US allies as well as to China.

6. Why North Korea’s Navy must be taken seriously:

Although financial sanctions constrain North Korean weapons development and procurement, Pyongyang continues to selectively modernize the North Korean People’s Navy, fielding new submarines and corvettes. These ships do not possess the same level of capability or capacity to contest access as Chinese or Russian platforms, but North Korea’s ballistic missile and midget submarines are capable enough to require significant US and allied ASW operations during a conflict.

7. An imperative for change:

The Navy will need a new fleet design to affordably address its challenges and exploit its opportunities while maintaining today’s operational tempo. Unfortunately, its current plans fail to deliver on these goals. The force structure reflected in the PB 2020 Shipbuilding Plan and FY 2021 budget, by continuing to emphasize large multimission combatant ships, includes too few ships to distribute the fleet or create sufficient complexity to slow or confuse an enemy’s attacks. Moreover, the fleet’s weighting toward large manned platforms creates unsustainable O&S costs that the Navy is even now struggling to pay.

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity

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