Military Experimentation - navy operations

Naval War College Review, Wntr, 2001 by Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr.

Creating Options for the Future. Experimentation that identifies new forms of military operations and new force elements can permit the military to exercise those options quickly when the threat emerges. For example, in the early 1960s the U.S. Army conducted extensive experiments to assess the potential of air-mobile and air-assault operations. These experiments gave the Army an important option when, in the summer of 1965, it was ordered to send large forces to Vietnam. The first division selected for deployment was the newly formed 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Similarly, the U.S. Navy that entered World II was, first and foremost, a battleship navy. However, through its Fleet Problems the Navy created the option of carrier-based operations, a capability that it pursued quickly following Pearl Harbor.

Complicating the Planning of Would-Be Enemies. Importantly, experimentation that enables the U.S. military to "buy options" can also complicate the planning of potential adversaries. For example, in the 1930s the Imperial Japanese Navy had to plan counters against a U.S. Navy that was exploring a range of options for naval aviation, including both large (Saratoga and Lexington) and small (USS Ranger [CV 4]) carriers, the use of seaplanes, airships, and land-based aircraft, and proposals for a class of "flying-deck" (partial flight-deck) cruisers. By compelling a would-be adversary to stretch resources thin in order to cover all possible options, or to concede that there are options for which it cannot prepare a counter, experimentation can play an important role in dissuading other militaries from entering into a competition in the first place.

Avoiding Legacy-Force Lock-In. Experimentation through war games, simulations, and field exercises provides a means of avoiding the purchase of large numbers of legacy systems under the assumption that since they are important today, they will remain so for the foreseeable future. For example, German military exercises led many senior leaders to conclude that horse cavalry had a very limited future.

Avoiding False Starts. Experiments can help military organizations avoid "buying in" too early during a period of transformational change in military capabilities. The U.S. Navy's first carrier designed from the keel up, the Ranger, was commissioned in 1934. Although some Navy leaders had pressed for construction of five Ranger-class carriers, game analysis and fleet problems soon indicated that the Ranger, at roughly fourteen thousand tons, was far too small to meet many of the demands of future fleet operations. As it turned out, the Essex-class ships that formed the backbone of the Navy's fast carrier task forces in World War II displaced nearly twice as much tonnage.

Avoiding Dead Ends. Military systems or capabilities that appear promising, even revolutionary, sometimes fail to live up to their promise. In this case, the is sue is not to avoid "buying in" too early; rather, it is to avoid buying in at all. Again, the experience of the U.S. Navy during the development of naval aviation in the interwar period provides an example of how rigorous experimentation and operational exercises can help avoid accumulating military capabilities that lead not to transformation but to dead ends. In 1930 the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics proposed the construction of eight ten-thousand-ton flying-deck cruisers. The ships-half cruiser and half flight deck-were subjected to war game experiments at the Naval War College and to some experiments with surrogates in the fleet. The results painted a distinctly unfavorable picture of the hybrid ship, and it sank beneath the Navy's programmatic waves, never to be heard from again.