The Navy Under Attack
Richard Rodgers' Victory at Sea comes lilting over the loudspeakers as the men prepare for war. It is not real war -just a game -but the men are very serious as they take their places in the wide, two-story room. More than 100 of them, in dark-blue uniforms with the gold sleeve stripes of admirals, commanders and captains, move to the banks of computer terminals in the center of the room and along the sea-green walls.
They are in the Center for War Gaming of the U.S. Naval War College at Newport, R.I., and they are about to fight one of the institution's most frequently simulated battles: a clash with the Soviets along the oil routes of the Indian Ocean. The "scenario" behind it says that U.S.-Soviet relations have become tense because of Soviet military buildups in Aden and Iraq. The U.S. believes the Soviets aim at cutting off oil supplies, and it "surges" an eastern task force into the Indian Ocean. This includes an aircraft-carrier strike group, a convoy escort group, attack submarines and antisubmarine patrol planes. The Soviet forces in the area include land-based bombers, missile-firing submarines, cruisers, destroyers and high-speed missile boats. The computer -the Warfare Analysis and Research System (WARS) -projects a display of the positions, speeds and courses of the ships involved on two 15-ft. screens on the back wall of the big room.
As the U.S. warships steam toward the Persian Gulf, intelligence reports warn that a large number of Soviet bombers have left their bases. At the same time, an American P-3C antisubmarine patrol plane detects a Soviet sub north of the carrier group and within missile range.
Reacting to what surely appears to be an imminent enemy attack, the U.S. commander orders two of his F-14 Tomcat supersonic fighters into the air. With their Phoenix missile system, the F-14s can shoot down both the Soviet jets and the missiles they fire. Into the air too goes a U.S. propeller-driven Hawkeye warning and control plane whose sophisticated radar sees everything within a 250-mile radius. The plane's computers can monitor up to 300 targets simultaneously and report their location, speed and course to a computer aboard the F-14s.
When the Hawkeye reports "multiple radar contacts inbound" to the carrier, the U.S. commander sends more F-14s aloft. And on his direct line to the Pentagon command center, he requests permission for "weapon release" so that he can order his men to fire before being attacked.
In its war games, the U.S. Navy just about always wins. That is part of a tradition that goes back more than 200 years to the day when John Paul Jones, with his ship ablaze and sinking beneath him, shouted to the apparently victorious British, "I have not yet begun to fight!" It is the gallant tradition of the Constitution ("... and many an eye has danced to see/That banner in the sky"), three times victorious over proud British frigates. Of the Olympia leading Commodore Dewey's fleet to the liberation of the Philippines, of the Yorktown and the Lexington grievously damaged as they blocked the Japanese imperial armada at the Battle of the Coral Sea.
Today, as Admiral Thomas Hayward prepares to assume command as the new Chief of Naval Operations, his service is again embattled, not on the high seas but in the landlocked halls of Congress and the Washington bureaucracy. Long confined inside the Pentagon and waged with confidential memos, this acrimonious fight has now burst into the open. It is perhaps the nastiest battle on the banks of the Potomac in decades. Caught squarely in the middle of it is the only Annapolis graduate ever to reach the White House, Jimmy Carter, whose budget restrictions triggered the fight but who recently told a Navy audience: "I'm still one of you." And as a key House committee voted last week to support the Navy, one congressional aide predicted: "There will be blood all over before this is finished."
At stake are the nation's security and its traditional control of the seas, claim Navy officials, both civilian and uniformed. They have been leaking secret memos and giving background briefings warning that the huge Soviet naval buildup of recent years requires a matching growth in U.S. seapower. These tactics have enraged the Navy's adversaries, primarily civilian aides in the office of Secretary of Defense Harold Brown. Some of them now refer to the Navymen as "bastards" and describe them variously as "stupid," "narrow" and "anachronistic." This name calling has not deterred the Navy from sounding general quarters and manning battle stations as if it were fighting for its life. In a sense it may be, for the eventual resolution of this bitter dispute could determine not only what the U.S. Navy will look like as the nation steams into the 21st century, but whether there will be much of a surface fleet at all.
The central issue in this battle, as in most Washington disputes, is money. Pentagon budget planners accuse the Navy of waste and mismanagement and of failing to set priorities among its various missions. The Navy's $41 billion slice of next year's proposed $126 billion defense budget is the largest allotted any individual military service and is an increase over this year's $39.5 billion. The admirals, however, are not satisfied. They correctly complain that inflation will turn this modest increase into an actual reduction. But what distresses them most is that shipbuilding funds, which they consider the backbone of the service, have been dramatically slashed, from $5.8 billion this fiscal year to $4.7 billion next. This will permit the construction of only 15 new vessels instead of the 29 planned by the Ford Administration's budget projections. Not since Pearl Harbor, protest some Navymen, have so many ships been sunk at one time. This reduction, moreover, appears to be only the first of many. The Administration's five-year shipbuilding plan, submitted in late March, gives the Navy 70 new ships, costing $32 billion, through fiscal 1983. This is only half of what the service says it needs. But, says Secretary Brown, "a larger shipbuilding program would jeopardize our current readiness by diverting the funds we need to maintain and operate the ships we already have."
Secretary of the Navy W. Graham Claytor disagrees, and he has carried the fight for more ships to Capitol Hill, where he has been appearing before the sympathetic Armed Services committees of the House and Senate. Backing him has been Admiral James L. Holloway III, the outgoing C.N.O., who warned in a message to Congress: "The balance of maritime superiority could tip substantially in favor of the Soviets in ten years." Holloway, in fact, had originally planned to state categorically that the balance "will tip," but Secretary Brown pressured him to substitute the word could, To prevent this "tip," the Navy wants a 3% annual increase (after inflation) in shipbuilding funds until the end of the century. This would finance 395 new vessels, at an annual average cost of $8.8 billion, and result in a 535-ship Navy, in contrast to the 450 that are expected from the Administration's proposed program.
At present, the Navy has 459 ships, down dramatically from 976 in 1968 during the Viet Nam War, to say nothing of the 5,718 at the end of World War II. Today's 13 aircraft carriers, 156 major surface combatants, including cruisers, destroyers and frigates,*63 amphibious warships, 101 supply and support vessels, 8 minor ships and 118 submarines are responsible for fulfilling the nation's global commitments. In the Atlantic and Caribbean, the Second Fleet is on constant patrol. The Pacific east of Hawaii is assigned to the Third Fleet, the Mediterranean to the Sixth Fleet, and the western Pacific and Indian Ocean to the Seventh Fleet. Serving them is a network of 69 bases strung from Yokosuka, Japan, to Piraeus, Greece. But shadowing them with increasing and unnerving frequency is the Soviet Union's 800-ship ocean fleet.
The Navy's plea for more money is hardly new. Although the Constitution authorized Congress "to provide and maintain a navy," the newborn service was viewed with suspicion by Thomas Jefferson, who considered it aristocratic, imperialistic and expensive. Once elected President, Jefferson slashed Government spending by halting shipbuilding and selling nearly all of the existing warships. In this century, the major attack on the Navy has been technological. The proud admirals were stunned by the public demonstration in 1921 when eight of Billy Mitchell's primitive bombers sank the German battleship Ostfriesland in exactly 20 minutes. The Navy fought back by developing the aircraft carrier, but after World War II, Air Force officers claimed that B-36 bombers armed with atomic weapons could strike just about anywhere in the world, making the Navy's aircraft carriers a pointless extravagance. Persuaded by this argument, Defense Secretary Louis Johnson in 1949 halted work on the U.S.S. United States, a 65,000-ton carrier then being built at Newport News, Va. So fiercely and openly did the Navy resist these cuts that the episode, which contributed to the eventual firing of C.N.O. Louis Denfield, became known as "the revolt of the admirals."
Many of the same arguments are raging today. At the core of the current controversy is an implicit challenge to the Navy's raison d'etre: Can the surface fleet continue making a major contribution to the nation's security in an age when ships are threatened by long-range bombers, highly accurate cruise missiles and lethal nuclear-powered attack submarines?
On the offensive came Defense Secretary Brown, who arrived at the Pentagon last year determined about two things: first, that the huge military budget would be tightly controlled and, second, that his highest priority was to shore up NATO's land and air power. The Navy discovered what this meant early this year, when it received a document entitled Draft Consolidated Guidance for Fiscal 1980. It was drafted by Russell Murray, 52, a former Pentagon systems analyst who is now Assistant Secretary of Defense for program analysis and evaluation. Said he: "Our near-term objective is to assure that NATO could not be overwhelmed in the first few weeks of a blitzkrieg war, and we will invest and spend our resources to that end." As for the Navy, it should concentrate on "localized contingencies outside Europe."
Navy Secretary Claytor was horrified. He retorted to both Brown and Murray that this amounted to a "fundamental change in national strategy," and he resisted "the conclusion that a smaller and less capable Navy is somehow logical." Claytor got strong support from General George Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (whose term ends July 1), who denounced the tendency to make policy and strategy "secondary to programming and fiscal considerations."
To the Navy's backers, who include a number of powerful Congressmen, U.S. security depends on surface vessels capable of performing the two major missions that have been assigned to them since the end of World War II. They are: >> Projecting power abroad. This primarily means using the warplanes and Marine Corps detachments aboard aircraft carriers stationed in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic to help repel any Soviet attack against the relatively poorly defended flanks of NATO. The Sixth Fleet's two carriers, for instance, can rapidly commit more than 100 fighter-bombers, about half a dozen early-warning command-and-control aircraft and 1,800 Marines to battle on eastern Mediterranean shores in support of Greece and Turkey. From the North Atlantic's Second Fleet, planes could strike the mammoth Soviet naval facilities on the Kola Peninsula or dispatch amphibious landing forces to Norway to help blunt a Red Army invasion. One advantage of relying on carrier-based power, according to Senator Gary Hart, a Colorado Democrat who chairs the Military Construction and Stockpiles Subcommittee, is that "we may be evicted [from land airbases] with a change of government, or not be permitted to operate even in support of a NATO ally under certain circumstances."
>> Keeping the sea lanes open. Unlike the Soviet Union, which borders on nearly every one of its client states, the U.S. is separated by oceans from all its NATO allies except Canada. The Atlantic Alliance's ability to repel a Soviet invasion depends on reinforcements and supplies arriving from the U.S. after the fighting starts. Since airlifts can transport only a tiny fraction of this, the bulk of the critically important resupply could be sunk by Soviet submarines, land-based aircraft and surface vessels. To prevent this, contend Navy officers, U.S. warships, armed with antisubmarine and antimissile weapons, must escort supply convoys across the Atlantic. Not only is this naval capacity needed in case of all-out war, it could be required in some future Middle East crisis, for example, if the Soviet navy attempted to embargo all oil shipments leaving the Persian Gulf.
The Navy argues that this twin role is being torpedoed. Explained C.N.O. Holloway, a decorated naval aviator, to TIME Pentagon Correspondent Bruce Nelan: "I think that a balanced, 600-ship fleet, with 14 or 15 battle groups, would give us substantial assurance of being able to carry out our strategy with confidence of victory. With a twelve-carrier force [in a 525-ship fleet], it is worrisome." And a fleet smaller than this, according to some admirals, could mean a tacit wartime "abandonment" of some key allies, including Japan, Norway, Greece and Turkey. Declared Navy Secretary Claytor in a confidential memo to Defense Secretary Brown: A reduced fleet would "concede the Norwegian Sea 9 to the Soviets" and restrict us to "the defense of a sea lane from Norfolk to the English Channel." States Sea Plan 2000, an official Navy analysis of its needs at the end of the century: "Major reduction in carrier levels, the heart of U.S. naval capabilities, will reduce the ability of a President to respond rapidly to crisis ... Should the U.S. draw down its forward deployments, this could leave the Soviet Union as the dominant naval power in the vacated region."
Bowing to these attacks, Brown's office revised the Guidance so that it now reads: "We do not advocate abandoning the flanks of NATO." On most other points, however, the Navy's critics continue to reject the service's arguments, stressing that the carriers have become extraordinarily vulnerable when they push close to the Soviet Union. Just as the introduction of sea-based aircraft eventually ended the battleship's reign, so the cruise missile, with its potential for pinpoint accuracy at long range, will doom the big-deck carrier. The Consolidated Guidance maintains it has become "dubious at best" that the Navy's carriers could survive off the coast of Norway, where they are certain to be blitzed by swarms of Soviet submarines and land-based bombers as soon as hostilities erupt.
The Navy's unconcealed rage against the Guidance and the proposed shipbuilding cutbacks has jolted the Administration. At background briefings all around the Pentagon Harold Brown's aides have been straining to explain their reasons for issuing the controversial document. While many of their arguments are practical and plausible, they prove one of the Navy's charges: strategy has become a product of budget requirements and not vice versa, as ideally and theoretically it should be. One of Brown's aides admits: "The Commander in Chief has decided that the defense budget is $126 billion and that the emphasis must be on NATO and its readiness to fight a conventional ground war. There the Navy plays a secondary role. Given that, the Navy's plans just aren't very realistic."
It is this kind of reasoning that prompts the frequently heard complaint from the Navy that it is being unfairly singled out to make good on Carter's campaign promise to hold down defense spending. Indeed, with ships taking six to eight years to construct, the strategic impact of a cutback in building them does not become immediately apparent; the monetary savings do.
One basic reason for the Navy's current crisis over new ships is that the ships have grown incredibly complex and their costs have soared. A Spruance-class destroyer costs $134.2 million; its World War II destroyer counterpart was only $5 million. The price tag on attack submarines has risen from $3.9 million in 1946 to $284 million. Even more startling are the cost overruns of new ships still in production. The projected price of a Trident missile-firing submarine, for example, has shot from $793 million to $1.2 billion in the past three years, while that of the Vinson nuclear-powered carrier has climbed from $973 million to $1.3 billion in five years.
Inflation accounts for part of these huge increases, but mismanagement by the Navy of its shipbuilding program is certainly also a major cause. Construction of warships has fallen a year or more behind schedule, and relations between the service and its major suppliers have sunk to their lowest point in many decades. The Navy, in fact, has been slapped with claims demanding $2.7 billion in payment for cost overruns by the nation's major shipbuilders -General Dynamics' Electric Boat Division, Tenneco's Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co., and the Ingalls Shipbuilding Division of Litton Industries.
These builders blame the overruns on poor planning by the admirals. Repeated changes in specifications, for instance, have been made after a contract has been negotiated and even while the ship was being built. According to Electric Boat, this plan-as-you-build technique caused at least 40,000 alterations in the design of the Los Angeles-class attack submarine. Most of these changes created a ripple effect, because shifting the location of one piece of equipment usually meant modifying dozens of other parts of the ship.
The Navy maintains, however, that the builders share much of the blame for what it calls "cost growth." The admirals cite low worker productivity at the shipyards, long delays in deliveries from subcontractors and an uneconomical and unwise expansion of productive capacity. Nonetheless, Navy Secretary Claytor concedes that "there is enough blame for everyone concerned."
It is generally accepted, in fact, that the Navy must become a better manager of its multibillion-dollar shipbuilding effort, if for no other reason than that the current mess has seriously hurt the service's case for more vessels. Edward ("Randy") Jayne, of the Office of Management and Budget, bluntly warned some of the Navy's top officers at a recent conference: "If you remember nothing else, please remember this. The present shipbuilding difficulties represent in my view the single most influential reason why President Carter chose not to accelerate Navy ship purchases in the 1979 budget."
Also boosting the cost of warships, of course, have been the advanced weapons, data processing centers and more comfortable accommodations that have become standard on the vessels. In the case of submarines, part of the price hike is because of the replacement of diesel engines by nuclear generators.
The U.S.S. Hewitt is typical of the new style of U.S. warship. Officially, it is classified as a destroyer, but its 7,000-ton displacement is more than three times that of a World War II Fletcher-class destroyer. One deck below the bridge on this modern ship, inside the dimly lit combat information center, highly trained specialists bend over computer consoles that monitor the sonar and radar and control the guns, torpedoes and antisubmarine weapons. The 5-in. cannons fore and aft are fired by two men sitting at a console rather than by eleven World War II sailors scrambling with cradles and chains. The guns are loaded automatically by elevators instead of manually. Says Commander Edward Alexander, the Hewitt's skipper: "Our gunner's mates are no longer crowbar mechanics; they are hydraulic and electronics specialists. With our four turbine engines, we can routinely be under way in 30 minutes -five in an emergency -from a cold start, instead of the eight hours it took on the older ships." When addressing his 243 crewmen, Alexander does not muster them on the deck, but broadcasts over the ship's closed-circuit television system, which is also used for showing training films and a nightly movie.
In even sharper contrast to their forebears are today's amphibious assault ships. They are the size of World War II battleships. Costing $311.7 million and displacing nearly 40,000 tons, the U.S.S. Tarawa can carry 1,900 Marines in addition to its 900-man crew. With room in its hangar for 30 troop-carrying helicopters, the ship is designed to put two reinforced Marine rifle companies ashore by H-hour plus three minutes. It boasts color-coordinated bulkheads and decks, snack bars, hobby shops, a gymnasium, and dental and medical facilities complete with laboratories and two main operating rooms.
But the centerpiece of today's Navy -and the center of controversy about its role -are its 13 aircraft carriers, from the 40,000-ton Lexington, built in the early days of World War II, to the 90,000-ton, nuclear-powered Eisenhower, commissioned last year. With their warplanes they project the bulk of the nation's sea-based offensive firepower. Because of this, notes Sea Plan 2000, "they contribute heavily both to control of the seas in high-threat areas and to the outcome of battles ashore." The supercarrier Nimitz, for instance, has hangar room for about 100 tactical warplanes, a 4 1/2-acre flight deck and bunks for nearly 7,000 men. Its attack aircraft, such as the A-6 Intruder and A-7 Corsair, can hit enemy ships and land targets and provide the crucial air cover for its Marine units.
The major problem of such mammoth warships may be their vulnerability. Although the Navy acknowledges a mounting Soviet threat to the carriers, the admirals insist that the floating leviathans can still defend themselves. In exercises at sea involving simulated Soviet strikes, a carrier's warplanes -interceptors and early-warning and electronic countermeasure aircraft -and escort ships have kept "enemy" vessels, planes and missiles too far from the carrier to strike it. Navy officials believe any Soviet units that could penetrate the defensive screen would face almost certain destruction from ship-launched missiles.
By 1983 the carrier task forces will be equipped with the AEGIS, a computer-run defensive weapons system that can track, target and destroy dozens of incoming warheads. States C.N.O. Holloway: "We have built 44 big-deck carriers, and all but two of them have been in combat. I would expect that in any war carriers not only would be damaged, some would be sunk. But I would also expect that the other fellow's nose would be much bloodier than ours."
While conceding the carriers' formidable capacity for self-defense, the Navy's critics contend that these elaborate measures leave the carriers virtually unable to fulfill either of their two main missions: sea control and power projection. If so, and this is denied by the Navy, it becomes questionable whether there is any justification for constructing a new $2.1 billion nuclear-powered carrier, plus spending the $1.2 billion for its aircraft.
What makes the question of carrier vulnerability extremely pressing is the growing strength of the Soviet fleet. Today it officially numbers 2,410 ships. About 1,500 of these are small and auxiliary craft, but the rest form a powerful armada: 233 surface warships, including 37 cruisers, 90 destroyers and 105 frigates, plus 260 attack submarines. In addition, some 400 long-range bombers, including the new Backfire, are based around the rim of the U.S.S.R., from where they can strike targets at sea.
This is a vast increase in naval power since World War II, when the Red fleet hardly existed; even as recently as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the Kremlin had to back down in the face of U.S. naval supremacy. That, presumably, was a humiliation the Russians decided would never happen again. Since then Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, commander of the Soviet navy for the past 22 years, has modernized his fleet, increased its firepower and greatly extended its range. At one time his ships rarely ventured far from Russia's shores. But as he has commissioned new vessels that seem designed primarily to attack U.S. ships, they have gradually pushed down the Norwegian Sea and into the North Atlantic. They have steamed through the eastern Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, even the Caribbean. By 1973 Gorshkov was able to boast: "The flag of the Soviet navy flies over the oceans of the world."
Two years later, in their ambitious OKEAN-75 naval exercise, the Soviet admirals demonstrated an ominous ability to coordinate global fleet operations, including drills in anticarrier, convoy and submarine tactics. Says Sir Peter Hill-Norton, admiral of the British fleet: "The U.S. had never previously faced a global threat to its sea-lane communications from a mix of subsurface, surface and maritime-air naval forces. This is a strategic change of kind, not of degree."
Comparing mere numbers of vessels can be misleading in assessing relative strengths. U.S. ships are larger, can cruise for longer periods and have greater battle endurance than the Soviet vessels. Russian submarines are noisier than their U.S. counterparts and therefore easier to detect and destroy. Before firing their missiles, some of these vessels must surface, betraying their positions. The Soviets' sole carrier, the 40,000-ton Kiev (two more are being built), can launch only subsonic vertical-takeoff planes and helicopters, and thus lacks the offensive punch of the U.S. big-deck carriers. These disadvantages, however, do not significantly reduce the Soviet threat at sea because Russia's wartime aims are easier to achieve than America's. Explains Professor Brian Ranft, a University of London expert in naval affairs: "The Soviet Union does not have to use the sea for strategic or economic purposes; the U.S. does. What the Russians are doing now is creating the capability to deny the use of the sea to the West."
The main threat to U.S. sea lanes would come from the Soviet submarine fleet, which is 25% larger than World War II's Nazi U-boat force. To combat the Soviet subs, the U.S. has devised a complicated strategy involving its own submarines, surface ships and planes. Because the U.S.S.R. lacks ports on the open sea, its ships can reach the oceans only by passing through narrow waters such as the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom Gap, the Dardanelles and the Sea of Japan. As they do so, their trails are picked up by lurking U.S. submarines. U.S. P-3C Orion patrol planes sweep above huge swaths of the ocean to detect additional Soviet underwater ships. The planes carry listening devices like sonobuoys and instruments to measure changes in the magnetic field caused by the metallic hull of a ship beneath the water's surface. Once located, the Soviet subs are vulnerable to torpedoes, bombs and missiles.
In its development of complex and expensive weaponry to counter the Soviet challenge, the Navy has now reached the limits of what the nation's budget makers will allow. Warned Jayne of the Office of Management and Budget: "I will state categorically that there is not room in anyone's navy budget for all nuclear-powered combatants, all F- 14s, more total surface ships, more and bigger submarines, and an all-out push for VSTOL [vertical-or short-takeoff and landing aircraft]. Some things on that list will have to go."
Perhaps the most controversial of the Navy's building plans involves the use of nuclear engines. Their advocates stress the strategic advantage of a power plant that does not depend on expensive oil and enables a surface vessel to stay at sea for a dozen or so years without refueling. But nuclear propulsion is far from cheap. Says former C.N.O. Elmo Zumwalt: "We can build three conventionally propelled carriers for every two nuclear carriers, and five conventionally powered escorts for each nuclear-powered one." This simple arithmetic leads Zumwalt and others to emphasize that overall capabilities of the Navy would improve if it acquired a large quantity of relatively modest vessels rather than a small number of highly sophisticated nuclear ships. The larger fleet could cover a much greater area of the ocean and in case of war would offer widely dispersed targets.
Another difficult choice for the Navy will be the replacement for the big-deck carrier. While one last leviathan is certain to be built before the end of the century, it is widely expected that all subsequent platforms for sea-based aircraft will have to be less vulnerable and hence much smaller. Estimates for these new ships range from versions of today's 7,000-ton Spruance-class destroyers to 60,000-ton cut-down models of the supercarrier. The size eventually chosen will probably depend on the Navy's progress in developing the VSTOL plane, which would not require enormous decks. With this plane, claims Rear Admiral D.F. Mow, boss of the Navy's VSTOL program, "there will be a whole new Navy. There will be dispersed operations, with every ship an aircraft carrier, great changes in antisubmarine warfare, and there will be great peacetime presence." But the first supersonic VSTOLS are not expected to be operational until 1997, and the Navy wants to keep its big-deck carriers until then.
The reassessment of the Navy's role does not involve its strategic nuclear missiles. There is near unanimous agreement that the multiwarhead missiles aboard the 41 Polaris and Poseidon submarines are the nation's least-threatened means of retaliating against a surprise Soviet attack. For this reason there is little opposition to modernizing the strategic submarine fleet by building 14 Tridents, at a cost of about $1.2 billion each. The current budget, in fact, provides $2.9 billion for the Trident program.
There is widespread support for maintaining the Navy's ability to engage when necessary in some old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy, especially in situations in which there is no direct U.S.-Soviet confrontation. An American warship making a port call or steaming off the coast of a Third World country might indeed bolster a regime friendly to Washington. In a period of mounting local tensions, sending naval units to strategically important regions, such as the Persian Gulf and eastern Mediterranean, could dissuade the Soviets from intervening.
The Navy has been the nation's favorite means of flexing its muscles. A 1976 survey by the Brookings Institution found that in the 215 cases since World War II in which military force was used for political goals, the Navy was deployed 177 times. A visit by the battleship Missouri to Istanbul in 1946 countered mounting Soviet pressures on Turkey, for example, while in 1958 U.S. amphibious activity off Lebanon's coast bolstered a friendly government in Beirut. More recently, the rescue of the U.S. freighter Mayaguez in 1975 after its capture by Cambodian Communists demonstrated America's continuing interest in Southeast Asia. "Ships are easier to move about than are Army or land-based aircraft units," the Brookings report said. "Naval forces can remain near by but out of sight. Thus naval forces can be used more subtly to support foreign policy incentives -to underscore threats, or warnings, or promises or commitments -than can land-based units, and they can do so without necessarily tying the President's hands."
Whether the Navy will receive enough money to maintain its 13 carriers and expand the fleet to the nearly 600 ships that Holloway feels will be needed at the end of the century is a question that will be heatedly debated by Congress in the weeks ahead. To reach the Navy's goal would require spending about $5 billion extra annually. Even bringing the fleet up to the more modest level of 500 ships, which the Administration believes should be sufficient, would cost about $500 million a year more than Carter has requested.
Most of the Navy's battle for more ships will be fought behind the closed doors of congressional committees, on which sit passionate Navy supporters. Florida Democrat Charles Bennett, chairman of the seapower subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, has proclaimed that the shipbuilding program "ought to be about 20% more." Charles Mathias, the Maryland Republican who wields considerable influence on the Senate Appropriations Committee, has declared: "I intend to ensure that this country has a strong Navy in the 1980s and beyond."
Because of its staunch congressional backers, the Navy has already scored a number of successes. The House Armed Services Committee last week added $2.13 billion for a new nuclear-powered carrier and $1.1 billion for a nuclear-powered cruiser. It restored $93 million for the development of a "surface-effect ship," which, like a Hovercraft, will be able to skim the water at high speeds. In addition, the committee voted $200 million extra for the purchase of F-14 Tomcats, bringing the total to 36, a dozen more of the carrier-based warplanes than the Administration had requested. The Senate Armed Services Committee has recommended boosting the defense budget by $1.7 billion.
Such actions infuriate Defense Secretary Brown and the Carter Administration's other civilian defense officials, who will have to make repeated trips up Capitol Hill to defend their budget proposals. The continuing debate about the Navy is sure to become increasingly open, perhaps even reminiscent of the revolt of the admirals. Ultimately, therefore, it may be the public that will determine the Navy's role and the fate of the surface fleet.
C.N.O. Holloway, as he prepares to retire after 36 years in uniform, sums up the Navy view: "The American people have to decide. If they don't want to keep the leadership in the world, then we can change our strategy."
*Gone forever is the battleship. The last of them, the U.S.S. Wisconsin, was retired in 1958, although the U.S.S. New Jersey was briefly taken out of mothballs ten years later and deployed off the coast of South Viet Nam until December 1969.
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