The submarine as a case study in transformation: implications for future investment

Naval War College Review, Summer, 2005 by James H. Patton, Jr.

It's not the strongest that survive, but the ones most responsive to change.

CHARLES DARWIN

The Department of Defense is sometimes guilty of glomming onto a buzzword or catchy phrase and wearing it thin. "Revolution in Military Affairs," or RMA (a term derived, incidentally, from Soviet military writings concerning a "military-technical revolution") certainly came close to crossing that threshold. Today, the word "transformation"--a marvelously useful and intellectually descriptive word--could similarly be at risk of exhaustion.

When such a phrase represents an apparently desirable property, there exists a tendency to attach that phrase to every conceivable defense system, thereby enhancing the program's attractiveness to senior decision makers. "Transformation," defined by the Department of Defense as a process shaping the way future wars are fought, including elements of concepts, technology, and organizations, clearly also includes the contemporary adoption of the Global Positioning System, precision weapons, and the ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) to guided missile submarine (SSGN) conversions--just as naval aviation and the Blitzkrieg were transformational when they were first introduced.

Though these programs may not be so abrupt or dramatic as to warrant the term "revolutionary," it is important to note that there is also a significant evolution in military affairs under way, in that certain platforms and systems are adapting to changing conditions. Throughout the twentieth century and to the present, the submarine has been a prime example of evolution, largely owing to its inherent flexibility and sometimes unintentional nonmission specificity. For example, many who were not submariners thought that the U.S. submarine force had lost its raison d'etre when the Cold War ended, which was not the case. The following will show, therefore, that there has always been a next "most important mission" for these warships.

THE SUBMARINE AS A CASE STUDY

The U.S. submarine has a history of adaptation since its incorporation into the fleet in 1900. In a macroscopic sense, the figure below graphically depicts how the submarine's most important missions have continually changed in a hundred years. It is significant that it also alludes to how, at any one time, the submarine was likely to have current missions of high priority, missions of waning importance, and missions of increasing gravity. In almost every case, the time constants of these changes were shorter than the life cycle of the existing platform. To avoid obsolescence, it was sometimes necessary for extreme variant requirements to be made technically (and tactically) during a ship's (and crew's) lifetime. As a result it can be safely said that no U.S. submarine has ever been employed for its designed purpose, and no commanding officer ever performed that for which he was trained.

A partial list of examples for platform employment:

* S-Boats designed in the 1920s for coastal defense and fleet boats designed in the 1930s as battle-fleet scouts found themselves in 1942 as distantly deployed commerce raiders.

* The Skipjack class, designed to provide terminal guidance for nuclear-tipped Regulus cruise missiles fired from a large fleet of Halibut-class SSGNs, never materialized because of the advent of the Polaris ballistic missile.

* The Thresher/Permit-class SSNs, designed to operate in pairs while firing rocket-propelled nuclear depth charges at distant Soviet subs, never carried out that mission, due to the failure of Sesco, a secure acoustic communications system needed for information exchange and the triangulation of sonar bearings for target localization.

* Escorting carrier battle groups was the justification for the high speed of the Los Angeles class in the late 1960s. Even though submarines were used in direct support of battle groups in a 1977 Pacific Fleet exercise (RIMPAC), and a Navy warfare publication was published in 1980 based on further experimentation in RIMPACs 1978 and 1979, this mission was not routinely assigned until after the Cold War ended, when many of the class were being decommissioned.

With this sort of historical precedent, one can appreciate the wisdom behind the decision to widen the mission range of the Virginia class so that it could be somewhat better acclimated to joint operations in shallow coastal waters rather than, as some had insisted, optimized as specifically a "littoral combat submarine." There have been few failures in U.S. submarine design, but the designs that did fail were those that were overoptimized for a narrow mission set, thereby losing their intrinsic adaptability.

A traditional approach to the kind of anti-access (AA) and area-denial (AD) scenario likely to be encountered by U.S. naval forces in the littorals would be an "outside-in rollback" of these maritime AA/AD networks. (1) However, when a key element of the forces is entirely capable of passing directly through (over/under) these networks, much as F-117s and B-2s have routinely gone "right downtown" before air defenses have been degraded, it makes enormous sense to do just that. Stealthy aircraft were and are technologically transformational, but it is tactically transformational to employ a characteristic of an existing system (i.e., a submarine's intrinsic ability to covertly penetrate AA/AD defenses) for a different reason. In a previous life, submarines penetrated AA/AD defenses to collect intelligence or engage "bastioned" Soviet SSBNs. They can now do it actively, to take down AA/AD measures from the inside out, enabling other forces to enter the contested area. Here once again, the submarine has adapted to a different set of tasks than those for which it was originally created.