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RUN SILENT - CUT DEEP
By ARTHUR HERMAN
SOMETIMES the biggest threat to a nation's security comes from its own military planners.
After World War One, British bureaucrats decided the Royal Navy no longer needed to be biggest in the world, and to save money shrank away the fleet that defended the world's seaways. The result was the rise of totalitarian Japan in the Pacific, fascist Italy in the Mediterranean and Hitler's U-boat wolf-packs roaming the North Atlantic.
In 1922, the United States signed the Washington naval treaty, thereby limiting the growth of its fleet in order to promote world peace. The result was Pearl Harbor.
Now short-sighted Pentagon planners are determined to repeat history. The drastic cuts they are making in our navy's size, strength and support are unprecedented for a nation at war. And nowhere will the new Incredible Shrinking Navy be more apparent, and do more harm, than in our dwindling submarine fleet.
The Navy's top submarine commander, Vice Adm. Charles Munns, has told Congress the cuts will leave us with too few subs for too many vital jobs around the world, including fighting the War on Terror. Some experts are saying we may end up with less than one-third of the submarines we need. "That's not a risk that anyone thinks we should take," Munns adds yet that is exactly where we are heading.
For all its Tom Clancy and "Hunt for Red October"-inspired glamor, America's "silent service" has become the Pentagon's favorite target at budget time. This began with the Clinton administration. When the Cold War ended, planners were quick to scrape the bulk of our nuclear missile subs and scores of conventional or attack subs, arguing that they were no longer needed to counterbalance their Soviet counterparts.
They forgot that submarines were going to be vital for gathering electronic intelligence on rogue states like North Korea and Iran; for stealthy SEAL-team special operations against terrorist bases; for providing support for naval allies like Britain and Australia in peacetime, and launching cruise missiles in wartime (one out of every four Tomahawk missiles used in the Kosovo conflict, for example, was fired from a submarine).
The Clinton cuts were breathtaking. The nuclear-armed "boomer" fleet shrank by half; the number of attack subs dwindled from 103 to just 56.
Now the Bush administration plans to build only one advanced Virginia-class attack sub per year in order to replace the aging Los Angeles-class. This means that our attack sub fleet will soon number less than 30, although Adm. Archie Clemins, former commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, was insisting back in 2000 that at least 72 were needed to discharge all the Navy's commitments.
And that was before 9/11.
Yet the cuts still go on, with naval planners hoping that hi-tech weapons and sophisticated communications on boats like the Virginia can make up for their diminished numbers. It's the same calculation the British Admiralty made between the world wars, with "advanced design" ships like the Hood and Prince of Wales. It nearly cost them World War Two.
And now we have the plan to eliminate the naval base at New London, Conn., which America's Atlantic submarine fleet has called home since 1915. Closing "the submarine capital of the world" will cost more than just thousands of military and civilian jobs with the end of General Dynamic's building yard at Groton just around the corner. It also means America will have only two naval bases left big enough to handle large numbers of conventional or nuclear submarines.
A lucky shot by a rogue state nuclear missile, or a surprise attack by a naval power like China, could disable 40 percent of our remaining sub fleet at a single stroke.
For the threats out there are real, and already at sea. North Korea has the fourth largest submarine fleet in the world. China's much publicized military expansion has concentrated on building up its submarines. The Chinese already have more conventional subs than we do, and will build 20 more advanced ones by the end of the decade.
China's naval-warfare gurus and high-ranking officers see their nation's underwater fleet as crucial to victory if war breaks out over Taiwan. With swarms of attack subs roaming at will in the Pacific, American aircraft carriers would have to think twice before entering the conflict. What the Pentagon planners would do then, without enough subs to fight back, is not clear.
Iraq and the War on Terror demand the headlines and our strategic attention right now, and rightly so. But just how vulnerable do we want to be in the face of long-term threats like China or a nuclear-armed North Korea?
We went through this once. Let's not make the same mistake again. We face enough dangers in the world today without becoming one to ourselves.
Arthur Herman is the author most recently of "To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World."
