New Missions for Submarines after the Cold War

VIRGINIA CLASS (2005)

The U.S. Navy’s submarines have not been immune to the pressure to look at new missions, and this pressure has arguably been greatest in the area of strike warfare. One manifestation of this pressure is the Trident SSBN to SSGN program, which, when completed, will dramatically increase the submarine force’s capabilities in this mission area. A Trident SSGN program will also demonstrate a repeat of the submarine force’s post World War II experience, when radical innovation made it a key player in a new mission, assuring its continued relevance in a new security environment.

Trident SSGNs are being converted because new precision weapons, new platforms for launching them, and new concepts for using them are needed to help the U.S. Navy meet the demands created by new geopolitical and technological trends in America’s external security environment. Geopolitics and technology are conspiring to pull the Navy ashore from the sea, without eliminating the traditional and irreducible need for a navy that is capable of controlling the sea. The tension between “From the Sea” and controlling the sea is real, but a wholehearted embrace by the Navy of one orientation to the exclusion of the other is neither desirable nor necessary. New ways of performing precision strike from the sea, if vigorously exploited, will reduce the need for tradeoffs between sea control and power projection.

Long-range precision weapons can dramatically reduce the mass that must be projected from the sea in order to produce a given effect ashore, while at the same time expanding the power that can be projected by a given naval force. They reduce the requirements for mass by making target destruction possible with one or two precision weapons rather than ten or a hundred unguided bombs; in addition, by allowing long standoff ranges from the target, they increase the number of platforms that can serve as precision weapon launchers. This means that both surface ships and submarines can join aircraft carriers to form a triad of naval strike warfare assets. It also means that each weapon launcher, whether it be an aircraft or a ship’s vertical launch system for missiles, is capable of achieving much greater and more precise effects. Future improvements in long-range precision weapons will occur at the steep rate characteristic of technologies still in their infancy, as compared to the more sedate rate at which more mature systems improve.

In principle, these new capabilities can be used in one of two ways. At one extreme would be an effort to maximize the Navy’s overall contribution to the precision strike from the sea mission area. This is tempting, because it gives each of the Navy’s major platform communities a role in a mission that is clearly of central national importance in the new security environment and which, therefore, is easier to fund in a time of declining or steady budgets. At the other extreme, the Navy could aim only to meet the minimum demands for precision strike from the sea, and exploit new precision weapons to minimize the investment in this mission area rather than maximize capabilities. The advantage of this approach would be that it would allow the Navy to focus more on sea control, as well as other missions which only it can perform, leaving greatly increased precision strike largely to the other services.

It is impossible today to predict with certainty where on this continuum the Navy will be tomorrow, but there are two variables which will largely determine the need. First is the question of access to overseas bases, and second is the evolution of future threats to American sea control. Assuming continued access to a robust overseas base structure in both crisis and war, the other services (notably, the Air Force) will continue to be able to provide the bulk of the required precision strike assets in a future contingency. If, on the other hand, that assured access ashore is denied or sharply limited, the Navy will be forced to fill the void from the sea. At the same time, future adversaries may continue to cede the United States control of the seas, as Iraq did during Desert Shield/Desert Storm, which in turn would allow the U.S. Navy to continue its current deemphasis on sea control. Alternatively, these adversaries might discover that the best way to blunt American power projection capabilities is at sea, and that the highest leverage sea denial capabilities are provided by modern, undersea warfare weapons, as both the Iranians and the Chinese may have already decided, as suggested by their recent purchases of Russian Kilo-class submarines.

The most challenging scenario for the Navy is one where U.S. access to overseas bases is greatly reduced, and where the proliferation of relatively low cost and easy to use access denial weapons—such as modern diesel-electric submarines, anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles, and naval mines—continues to grow. This is a world in which the Navy will have to provide a larger portion of national power projection capabilities, while also placing much more emphasis on sea control than it does now. Indeed, it is arguable that this is the security environment the United States is already beginning to face along the great arc of the Indian and Pacific Ocean littorals. In it, the U.S. Navy’s relevance is likely to exceed its currently projected capabilities by a wide margin, and dealing with this “crisis of relevance” will demand innovation, particularly in precision strike from the sea.

This has led the Navy to explore how best to improve its submarine force’s capabilities in precision strike from the sea; deepen its commitment to developing improved precision weapons for use on all naval platforms—and notably its submarines and surface combatants; and ensure that all naval platforms enjoy connectivity sufficient to link into future intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance nets. The combination of submarines and long-range precision weapons is particularly relevant to this problem, because it links a weapons platform whose inherent stealth makes it easy to defend and a weapon against which defense is extremely difficult. It is this combination of inherent survivability and lethality which the SSBN force brought to the nuclear deterrence mission; given the rapidly growing lethality of modern precision weapons, this is what makes a conventional SSGN force such an important opportunity.

The size of this opportunity can be measured directly in terms of the added strike warfare and special operations capabilities it provides, and indirectly in terms of the capabilities it liberates in the other platforms with which it shares missions, since they are normally multimission platforms as well. In the first case, an SSGN assigned to a battle group would double or triple its strike assets and give the battle group commander a means of suppressing opposing air defenses and shore-based sea denial forces from a stealthy, secure, forward-based platform. Used in this way, an SSGN would increase the effectiveness of and reduce the danger to other battle group strike assets early in a conflict.

Less obviously, by improving the submarine force’s contribution to precision strike from the sea, an SSGN would also help create additional ASW, air, and tactical ballistic missile defense capabilities in the air and surface forces by giving the Navy more flexibility to focus on those mission areas should the need arise. This could be reflected physically in terms of finite magazine space allocations, by allowing other platforms to carry fewer strike weapons, or tactically and operationally, by giving other platforms more freedom of maneuver in space and time early in a contingency when multimission pull is highest.