The Coming Platform Crunch

Something something professionals think logistics

The small size of the U.S. Navy is a popular topic, with any navalist worth their salt is sounding the alarm. I’m unfortunately here to tell you it will get worse.

The Navy is showing all the signs of an overstretched, underfunded force. If you’re not up on how we got here, here’s Kori Schake discussing it at The Bulwark.

As with any underfunded force, it’s the boring stuff that gets cut first. Like tenders. Operating warships is maintenance heavy: they are essentially floating buildings with a communications tower on top. And some of them also have an airport on top. They can’t just be pulled into the motor pool for motor stables once a week. Maintenance is an ongoing, constant battle and it is tender ships that fight it. Except there aren’t enough anymore.

This places additional stress on the warships themselves and just as importantly the crews, leading to accidents and mishaps. There’s no “peace time” for the Navy. It guards the entire global economy, both its shipping lanes and the transoceanic cables that underpin the global financial system, always. Not just in war. Every day.

And there’s just not enough of them to do that. This led to the Navy attempting to reduce the number of amphibious warships, a fight which they predictably lost, but the issue is framed in the press as a requirement that the Navy has to meet for the Marine Corps. While true, it’s only part of the story.

It’s only part of the story because a sufficient number of amphibs is not just critical to the Marine Corps, but critical to the Navy as well.

The Navy, like all the services, is appropriately about to bet big on unmanned systems. While claims that unmanned systems will change warfare as we know are it are mostly overblown, they’ve proliferated to the point where they’re absolutely necessary for a modern force, air, land, or sea. They do some things better than manned platforms and are therefore a necessary augmentation to traditional platforms.

The Navy’s upcoming Silent Storm 2024 event is just one facet of the Navy’s development of uncrewed systems. While focused on electromagnetic spectrum capabilities, there are many more areas that uncrewed systems will be applied. Collaborative Combat Aircraft is another, a joint effort with the U.S. Air Force. The Department of Defense’s Replicator effort is another. Replicator tends to create the infrastructure necessary to rapidly build large numbers of uncrewed systems for emergent problems.

Which begs the question, at least for professionals: where are these systems going to go? How are they going to get to theater? Where will they deploy from once they get there? How will the supporting systems and equipment get to theater?

The answer is ships. Lots of ships. And if we’re talking about contested environments, the answer is amphibs. Lots of amphibs. Fully 90% of what the military uses overseas travels there by ship. That’s the number right now, and once the joint force starts getting augmented by all manner of unmanned systems and their crews and their equipment, that sealift burden will be higher. And most of those ships are not warships that can travel in contested waters. The ability to sail into contested environments, carry a lot of systems and their equipment, and deploy aerial, surface, and subsurface drones simultaneously is met by one and only platform in the U.S. inventory: the amphibious warship.

Since the planned 31 amphibious ships are not enough to meet Marine Corps requirements anyway, and now the Navy and the Department of Defense are levying even more demands on the platform, we’re about to have a self-created dilemma. There’s a real chance that the Navy and DoD create a number of capable drones that will turn heads at stateside testing grounds but can’t deploy forward in any meaningful capacity because no one thought through the logistics of deploying them.

While the Navy persists in viewing amphibs as just a Marine Corps platform, other navies are not.

The Turkish Navy recently unveiled their new amphibious assault ship which was specifically designed to double as drone platforms, in additional to all the amphibious and aviation capabilities that an amphib has.

The UK Royal Navy and the Royal Netherlands Navy recently announced an effort to collaborate on new amphibious warships called “multi-role support ships” which highlight their ability to support not just amphibious warfare but also mine countermeasures, soon to be an uncrewed system heavy endeavor.

Even the Russian Navy, a navy that is not exactly having a good time right now, is ahead of the U.S. Navy on reconceptualizing the role of the amphibious warship. It’s Project 23900 LHD amphibious assault ship is also being designed specifically to support uncrewed systems.

Comrade I’m straight up not having a good time.

That the U.S. Navy is so far behind other navies on maintaining a fleet of amphibs sufficient to exploit the new capabilities of uncrewed systems is a self-inflicted wound, but one that threatens the viability of the entire joint force, especially in the Indo-Pacific theater. For decades, the Navy has not had enough platforms for amphibious warfare nor for mine countermeasures. Now, as it invests more in uncrewed systems, it will find that it needs even more of these platforms. If DoD’s “replicator” project comes to fruition, the Navy will need even more platforms to support it.

What remains to be seen is if anyone is going to fix it before the crunch comes.

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