https://warontherocks.com/2020/06/the-100-ship-navy/Um artigo sobre uma potencial redução do número de navios da US Navy. Um exercício especulativo muito interessante.
THE 100-SHIP NAVYFinally, given narrowed mission sets, what would a 100-ship Navy look like? This is an unlikely scenario but serves as a useful thought experiment. The number “100” is intentionally restrictive; it tests what trade-offs are possible if assumptions about future force levels are not just slightly wrong, but catastrophically so. And when it comes to imagining a future where defense dollars are scarcer, ship quantities are easier to grasp — for policymakers and practitioners alike — than labyrinthine defense appropriation categories, all operating on different timelines.
These younger Americans’ foreign policy preferences bode poorly for military spending. For instance, a 2020 poll found that among millennials and Generation Z (Americans born after 1996), only about 14 percent believe America is “exceptional.” That proportion is two to three times higher among their elders. Faith in American exceptionalism has underpinned decades of consensus in the U.S. foreign policy community on the wisdom of America’s overseas security commitments.
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Meanwhile, at least half the members of the silent generation (born between 1928 and 1945) believe that the rise of China and political instability in the Middle East are serious threats to the United States. For millennials, those numbers are 35 percent and 27 percent, respectively. By contrast, 62 percent of millennials consider climate change a grave threat. Millennials are also the least likely generation to support deploying American troops if South Korea, Taiwan, or a NATO ally were invaded. The new voters, Generation Z, also care more about climate change than most other threats. At the same time, they are both less confident in the military and more supportive of redistributive economic policies.
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Some of these missions are already diminishing in importance. During the first Gulf War, the United States was a net energy importer; today it is a net producer, with oil imports at their lowest level since the 1980s. Natural gas, which the United States has in abundant supply, will comprise most growth in hydrocarbon usage in the coming decades, and worldwide demand for oil will likely start declining by 2030. The transport of hydrocarbons through the Persian Gulf will remain important, but its disruption may not require the instantaneous response that justifies today’s forward presence.
The urgency of U.S. contributions to missile defense and deterrence has also fallen as regional partners’ capabilities grow. Israel has fielded the Arrow 3 missile system, capable of exo-atmospheric engagement of ballistic missiles. It already has nuclear and conventional deterrent capacity, deliverable by ballistic missile and strike aircraft. Saudi Arabia will soon acquire high-altitude intercept capability with the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. The kingdom has also upgraded its air force and embarked upon domestic ballistic missile production to supplement existing inventory.
The growth of Israeli and Saudi organic capacity in strike and missile defense reduces the demand for on-station U.S. Navy guided missile submarines, aircraft carriers, cruisers, and destroyers. This could permit the Navy to retire aging platforms or redeploy others to different theaters. Strike capacity will remain possible with the U.S. Air Force’s “Global Strike” capability, which already provides the bulk of coverage. Finally, given Americans’ evaporating interest in Middle Eastern escapades, maintaining local expeditionary capability (with amphibious warfare ships) is a declining priority.
In U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, the objective is ensuring a stable balance of power that dissuades China from making revisionist territorial claims. To this end, ships conduct freedom-of-navigation operations, ballistic missile defense of allies and U.S. territories, and theater security cooperation. Relying on dispositions like the carrier strike group and amphibious readiness group, these activities aim to reassure partners of U.S. commitments.
The challenge is that China’s attempts to outmaneuver U.S.-led partnerships often summon nonmilitary instruments of national power, such as tactically oriented trade agreements exemplified by its Belt and Road Initiative. Many of these economic agreements carry security implications. Beijing undermines local states’ diplomatic ties with Taiwan, eroding their incentive to aid Taiwan militarily and limiting U.S. capacity to use these states as staging areas for the same purpose. Kiribati, for instance, the site of the Battle of Tarawa, severed diplomatic relations with Taipei prior to joining the Belt and Road Initiative.
China’s drive for “reunification” with Taiwan threatens the regional balance of power not just because of Taiwan’s strategic location but because Japan and South Korea consider Washington-Taipei relations a barometer of U.S. credibility. If Japan began to question the U.S. security commitment, Tokyo might finally adopt a more muscular defense posture. A militarized Japan would upset already-fraught Seoul-Tokyo relations, and a South Korean counter-buildup could destabilize the Korean peninsula.
But survey data indicate that U.S. military intervention on behalf of Taiwan is highly politically unpopular. So how could the United States prevent Chinese aggression against Taiwan if U.S. amphibious warfare ships, with their ability to provide air and ground support, were withdrawn from the region? The key will be raising the costs of a Chinese invasion.
First, this means increasing Taiwan’s self-defenses on its west coast. Next, the U.S. Navy could shift away from “big deck”-centric operations, since China has already prepared for that fight. Rather than aspiring to the increasingly difficult mission of sea control, which relies on multiple carrier strike groups or amphibious readiness groups deployed simultaneously, the Navy could flip the script. Shifting to denial capabilities provided by multimission surface action groups, subsurface forces, and unmanned technologies could help make it prohibitively expensive for Chinese forces to cross the strait.
Ballistic missile defense of Japan, Guam, and the homeland would remain a core mission area due to the persistent North Korean threat. A redeployment of ballistic missile ships from Central Command, as described previously, could help meet this need in addition to augmenting Japanese capacity through its Kongo-class destroyer. Secondary missions like maritime security, humanitarian response, and protection of shipping can shift to regional partners like India and Australia, whose capacity-building efforts the United States must continue to support.
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If shifting public attitudes forced the Navy to limit its ambitions to immediate natural security priorities, the following might be possible: in Central Command, reducing ballistic missile defense and deterrent strike forces while retaining minimal multimission surface combatant capability for response to oil-shipment disruptions; and in Indo-Pacific Command, meeting ballistic missile defense requirements with redeployed assets from Central Command while replacing sea-control capabilities with sea-denial ones. Given these reimagined missions, we consider the impact of simultaneously freezing essential capabilities in place, eliminating the platforms underlying the most politically unpopular mission sets, and proportionally shrinking the remaining force.
The first consideration is what missions are both essential and beyond political reproach. Nuclear deterrence is a safe bet; even strict isolationists assume the United States will maintain secure second-strike capability. The nuclear industrial base must also be retained because it is among the most difficult sectors to rapidly scale in the event of full mobilization. Moreover, preserving nuclear vessels is advantageous because they do not depend on combat oilers, although carriers will still need to be supplied with aviation fuel. The ballistic missile submarines will thus remain untouched; per the 355-ship plan, their numbers will settle at 10 in 2037.
The second parameter is the cost-effectiveness of programs. Among the large surface combatants, the Navy will need to decommission the aging and maintenance-intensive Ticonderoga-class cruisers favored by Congress. In contrast, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are cost-effective, especially with multiyear procurement and block-buy options.
Third, proportions matter. Individual ships do not exist in a vacuum; they are organized into task-oriented groups, chiefly the carrier strike group. Perhaps the simplest way to reduce the Navy’s size is to reduce its number of carriers, which scales down the required number of escorts. Managing fleet size by proportional adjustment to a fixed number of capital ships is consistent with historical practice.
Because the carrier’s primary mission is power projection, reducing carriers to six would dovetail handily with the public’s declining taste for American presence abroad. The Navy can then reduce escort coverage with cruiser retirements and controlled replacement of older destroyers with the newer Flight III variants. Indeed, the carrier’s future role in U.S. Navy force structure, given advances in anti-access and area-denial technologies, is already under debate.
Similarly, expeditionary missions are increasingly unpopular. Amphibious warfare ships could be reduced to parity with the new number of aircraft carriers, allowing similar maintenance, training, and operational rotations while retaining limited forward-basing and joint forcible entry options. The Marine Corps itself has acknowledged the obsolescence of the requirement that previously determined the number of these ships.
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