Diesel Submarines: The Game Changer the U.S. Navy Needs
By James Holmes
September 24, 2018, Real Clear
Defense
One of the world's best naval
strategists presents all the reasons for acquiring diesel submarines to
augment the existing nuclear fleet. And the navy needs to listen.
Among the more-than-ample
reasons for acquiring a flotilla of diesel-electric submarines for the U.S.
Navy: SSKs could help deter war by demonstrating American resiliency should war
come in the Western Pacific. Deterrence comes from capability and visible
resolve to use it. And from staying power. Foes blanch at starting a fight if
they fear they can do little to blunt an antagonist’s warmaking capability. In
short, resilient contestants deter. And should war come anyway, an artfully
employed diesel contingent could help the United States and its
allies—principally Japan—prevail in that war.
To recap the case for conventionally powered submarines : SSKs could comprise the nucleus of an allied fleet. Procuring a
common platform with the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF),
constituting a combined silent service, and stationing that fleet permanently
in the theater would show that America has skin in the game of defending Japan. Tokyo would draw confidence from such a fleet.
The alliance would emerge refortified.
In other words, Tokyo need not
fear being left in the lurch if American sailors stand shoulder-to-shoulder
with their Japanese brethren—and if the Japanese state and society know for a
fact the United States will always be there during a rumble in the Pacific.
It’s hard to overstate the value to Washington of keeping faith with allies and
friends. America has no strategic position in Asia without bases on Asian soil.
Merging part of the U.S. Navy into a genuinely multinational fleet would make a
powerful statement about multinational solidarity—and help guarantee access to
those bases.
Moreover, these are the right
subs for the strategic environment. That’s doubly so if allied maritime
strategy aims at bottling up Chinese or Russian shipping within the first
island chain— as it should .
It’s commonplace for nuclear proponents to claim that diesel boats are unfit
for the job of closing straits and narrow seas to surface and subsurface
traffic. For proof they run through the laundry list of advantages SSNs boast
over their diesel-driven cousins—advantages such as their ability to stay
underwater for indefinite stretches and cruise at high velocity. Case closed.
Well, no. SSKs have no need to
match SSNs; they need to be good enough for the job, and cheap enough to buy in
bulk. In effect champions of nuclear submarines deny that diesel boats can do
what they have done for many decades. The U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet sub force tormented
the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II, including along the island
chain. Undersea warfare could have proved decisive in that conflict. The JMSDF unleashed similar tactics vis-à-vis
Soviet and Chinese shipping during the Cold War. Both navies prosecuted an
island-chain strategy to good effect, and with more rudimentary diesel boats
than today’s to boot. Denying historical fact doesn’t add up to a terribly
convincing case against SSKs.
An allied sub squadron wouldn’t
need SSNs with breakneck speed and unlimited underwater endurance to defend a
static island perimeter. SSNs excel at open-ocean combat, but they represent
excess capacity and expense—and thus waste—for sentry duty. A U.S.-Japanese
squadron would need subs to man the barricade in concert with surface craft,
missile-armed troops on the islands, aircraft roving overhead, and well-placed
minefields. Picket subs thus need to hover silently and stealthily along the
island chain, awaiting their chance to strike.
Diesels can do that. The
alliance needs enough sentries to keep up a constant rotation, assuring enough
subs are always on guard, along with a reserve to shore up the line when
vessels are lost in action. A U.S.-Japanese sub fleet would boast enough hulls
to keep up a rotation along the Ryukyus. The JMSDF gets by with nineteen
boats after a modest buildup, but the
leadership wants more. Add a dozen or so American boats to the combined order
of battle, and you’d have an undersea fleet able to hold the line with enough
units to spare for offensive missions such as raiding shipping within the
Yellow or East China Sea or the Sea of Okhotsk.
So this is the right force for
the times, and it can be had at a low, low price compared to an SSN contingent.
Affordability translates into mass for the fleet. The more boats the better. It
appears that the price of the latest Japanese-built Soryu diesel boat
is one-fifth that of the latest American Virginia-class SSN ( $631 million v. $3.2 billion ),
but let’s assume you get four hulls for the price of one after the navy and
Congress muck around with the program. That suggests the navy could outfit a
twelve-boat squadron for the cost of three Virginias.
Or, rather than pit SSKs
against SSNs within the shipbuilding budget, back-of-the envelope arithmetic
suggests the navy could swap out littoral combat ships with negligible
offensive capability for SSKs on a one-for-one basis. The latest LCS runs $646 million , to $631 million for
a Soryu. Each LCS sacrificed—including three the navy never requested
that this year’s defense budget foists on the service —would render good service by never being built.
But the case for diesel attack
subs is even more compelling than their fit with alliance politics, the
strategic environment, and budgetary realities indicates. A friend and former
colleague likes to say that the combatant able to regenerate combat power the
swiftest is the likeliest victor in war. Maritime illuminati such as Alfred
Thayer Mahan and J. C. Wylie agree.
Mahan and Wylie prophesy that the United States will suffer heavy reverses in
the opening phases of any great-power war—the type of war, that is, that the
Trump Pentagon has instructed the armed forces to gird for.
And so it may. The upshot: the
armed forces and the defense-industrial sector need to amass sufficient
capacity to ride out Chinese or Russian haymakers in the opening rounds without
suffering a knockout. After getting staggered they must regenerate strength in
bulk, and in a hurry, so the U.S. military can deal out crushing counterpunches
of its own. How will the U.S. Navy silent service replenish its numbers after
incurring the wartime losses it will incur in the order of things? Not—or at
least not entirely—by laying down new SSNs. The U.S. Navy will need to
replenish its subsurface combat power by mass-producing new submarines in
haste.
Yet nuclear propulsion plants
and hulls to house them are assembled neither quickly nor cheaply. Purchasing
two Virginias per annum has strained the industrial complex’s capacity for
nuclear work, in part because shipwrights are also fashioning a new class of
nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines to replace the
aging Ohio class. As a consequence the SSN tally is more or less
stagnant even without battle casualties to make up. If builders find it hard to
sustain fleet numbers in peacetime, it’s doubtful they have surplus capacity to
step up SSN construction when boats start descending to Davy Jones’ locker.
That leaves conventional
propulsion. SSKs may find a role in open-ocean combat out of sheer necessity.
Overseers of U.S. maritime strategy, then, must search out infrastructure and
methods for adding new conventionally powered hulls to the fleet in large
numbers in short order. U.S. shipyards built their last diesel sub in the 1950s . Accordingly, naval magnates should open conversations about
buying Japanese, taking advantage of the settled Soryu design and hot
production line. Manufacturing diesel boats at American yards in tandem with
Japanese firms is another possibility. Or the navy and shipbuilders could do
both. Granted, coaxing Congress and the America First presidential
administration into such a departure from longstanding practice would take
determined diplomacy. So let the coaxing begin.
Deterrence and warfighting
exigencies demand it. The U.S. Navy and its political masters must expand
capacity by any means necessary, and start pronto. Regenerating combat power in
slow motion charts a surefire route to defeat. As with so many naval topics,
looking back to World War II constitutes a starting point for wisdom. The sheer
volume of war materiel needed to vanquish the Axis forced U.S. Navy fleet
designers to eschew the natural preference of military folk for armaments and
platforms that are topflight in all respects. The republic needed good-enough
gear en masse, and it needed it right away.
That meant drawing up adequate
but simple designs, reaching out to as broad an array of manufacturers as
possible— think Detroit auto factories retooling to churn out a finished
B-24 bomber every hour —and
getting the biggest head start possible. The U.S. Navy embraced a satisficing attitude that’s worth rediscovering. It also started
regenerating combat power before it lost any. Thanks to sage leadership in
Congress and the Franklin Roosevelt administration, builders started riveting
new ships and planes together not after Japanese aviators rained destruction on
Pearl Harbor in 1941, but a year before under the Two-Ocean Navy Act of
1940 .
Preemptive reconstruction of
battle strength ought to be the watchword for U.S. fleet architecture from now
on. And there’s one final advantage to building up reserve capacity: it
empowers fleet commanders to handle the existing fleet aggressively at the
outbreak of war rather than act cautiously to conserve irreplaceable assets.
Knowing replacement ships and planes are on the way lets commanders court
risk—much as Admiral Chester Nimitz could fling the remains of the Pearl Harbor
fleet into aircraft-carrier raids in 1942, knowing a brand-new U.S. Navy would
arrive in Pacific waters starting in 1943. If you have a spare, why not risk
what’s on hand in hopes of scoring a major triumph?
So there you have diplomatic,
strategic, budgetary, operational, and tactical reasons for acquiring diesel
submarines to augment the existing nuclear fleet. Let’s get to it.
James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of
Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific (second edition forthcoming in November). The views voiced here
are his alone.
This article appeared
originally at The National Interest.
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