The Stories We Like to Tell…

As one might imagine, Erik’s post referencing Tim Noah’s article about battleships, submarines, and aircraft carriers generated… thoughts. In progressive journalism you can still tell only a few stories about national security. These generally involve:

• Crooked contractors over-charging the government
• Hidebound generals/admirals who refuse to understand technological change that is obvious to any outsider
• Ignorant Congress critters only interested in feathering their own beds.

None of these are quite wrong, but across them they don’t encompass the universe of thinking and planning between the uniformed military services, the civilian workforce, and the defense industrial base. Oversight is important, but the DoD budget is probably the most oversight-heavy budget in the entire world and this degree of oversight can have dramatic negative effects on the structure of the industry (entry level firms don’t have a chance because they can’t afford the legal departments they need in order to actually understand a contract bid). Concepts of action that are entrenched in the bureaucracy can impede change, but for literally every argument you’ll want to have about military affairs you will find three and four star officers on both sides of the question. Congress critters wanting things for their districts are… doing their jobs and if you hate democracy please move to Hungary.

Searching for these underlying stories often obscures what’s actually going on. A lot of this comes down to (and this can be awfully boring) good faith arguments between well-informed interlocutors regarding how to manage innovation is exceedingly large, unwieldy bureaucratic organizations. It’s really hard to report out debates like this for a lay audience because the important questions are often highly technical and bound up in decades of historical experience and organizational practice.

The thing is we don’t know what will happen when a supercarrier encounters an anti-access system of systems, in part because much will depend on the details of the encounter and in part because we don’t know how well the technologies on either side will work together. No one should ever compare the cost of an aircraft carrier to the cost of the missile or torpedo that could sink that carrier. The appropriate comparison is between the carrier and the system of systems that is capable of detecting, identifying, targeting, and striking the carrier. That system of systems is colossally expensive and tends not to be as mobile or flexible as an aircraft carrier.

Regarding the specific claims in the article, Noah is wading into an extremely complex debate and is not taking the time to seriously engage with that debate. For example,

Starting in the 1990s, China embarked on a rapid naval buildup that by 2020 gave it the largest navy in the world, with about 340 ships to America’s 292. China’s warship binge constitutes a natural experiment on the question, “If you were starting the world’s largest navy from scratch, how many supercarriers would you build?” China’s answer is three, with just two more expected by 2030. The United States has 11 supercarriers, with three more on the way.

First, that China is building or has built five large aircraft carriers isn’t exactly evidence in favor of the proposition that aircraft carriers are obsolete. Second, Noah gives the impression that the US is expanding its supercarrier fleet to 14 ships, which ignores the actual schedule of projected carrier retirements (Nimitz and Eisenhower will leave service this decade). Third, carrier aviation is hard, and from a standpoint of technological integration and human capital development it’s absolutely sensible for China to expand its carrier fleet more slowly than the rest of its navy. Moreover, “drones” isn’t an argument against a big deck, because big-decked carriers will always be able to launch larger, longer-ranged, and more capable aircraft than small-decked carriers.

Noah grants that there are arguments in favor of big carriers, although he doesn’t take them very seriously and doesn’t grant them any causal weight in explaining why we’re actually building Ford class ships:

The ultimate reason we still make supercarriers is all those jobs. Naturally, we wouldn’t want the 13,100 workers in 48 states and 364 congressional districts who participate in the Ford Class supply chain or the 25,000 more who work at the Newport News shipyard to lose their jobs. 

I mean, it’s not wrong, exactly. It’s just incomplete. The Way We Have Done Things necessarily generates a particular political economy that can be difficult to change. But it’s not obvious how the approach Noah describes (lots of smaller ships) would affect supply chains, shipbuilding infrastructure, and shipyard employment; it could easily go either way in terms of impacts on these communities. It’s also necessary to grapple with the fact that if you stop building super-carriers it becomes incredibly difficult to start building super-carriers again in the future, due to the loss of the experienced workforce and the supply chain network

A couple of asides:

President Jimmy Carter, himself a former naval officer, tried to begin that shift, but backed down in the face of overwhelming congressional opposition. (When the Navy named a vessel after Carter a few years later, it chose a nuclear submarine, not a supercarrier.)

Because… Jimmy Carter was a serving naval officer on a nuclear attack submarine, not an aircraft carrier.

And this is so wrong:

“Historically, the top leadership of military organizations has not abandoned obsolete prestige weapons until compelled to do so by a calamity,” Stephen Wrage, who teaches political science at the U.S. Naval Academy, says in Gregg Easterbrook’s 2021 book, The Blue Age. Easterbrook draws a comparison with the British Royal Navy’s fixation on its giant battleships on the eve of World War I. Told that the Germans were building newfangled underwater ships called submarines, “rather than adjust to a new reality, some in the British admiralty hoped that gliding below the waves could be declared piracy so that captured submariners could be hanged as common criminals.”

I don’t know if the problem here is Wrage, Easterbrook, or Noah, but this passage is so at odds with both general and specific that I’m surprised the ghost of Jackie Fisher himself hasn’t struck all of them down. On the general claim there are plenty of technological transitions during the 20th century which were embraced by the leadership of military organizations without “calamity,” including (to mention a few) jet propulsion, nuclear submarine propulsion, surface-to-air missiles, radar, sonar, unmanned aerial vehicles, anti-tank guided munitions, tactical nuclear weapons, and more than a few beyond that. On the question of Royal Navy doctrine specifically, the RN of course was a leader in submarine and torpedo technology well before the Kaiserliche Marine deemed “newfangled underwater ships called submarines” to be a priority, and it is hardly unusual historically for services such as the RN (or the USN, or the USAF) which have access to massive reserves of financial and human capital to take forward looking approaches to technological innovation. It’s also hardly absurd for Royal Navy leadership to have thought quite a bit about the legalities of submarine warfare (the Germans effectively adopted the RN legal approach in 1915 and 1916), just as it wasn’t absurd for RAF and US Army Air Corps leadership to ponder legalities during the interwar period. And finally, Germany’s primary response to the Royal Navy’s fleet of giant battleships was… to build its own fleet of giant battleships!