Since the last Quadrennial Defense Review, I've said—and believed—that a force of 305 ships—fully manned, properly trained, and adequately resourced—would be sufficient for today's requirements—within acceptable levels of risk.
But ... mounting evidence leads me to believe that 305 ships are not likely to be enough in the future....
Prudent competitors have analyzed our capabilities and deduced a range of economic responses centered on their own strategic imperatives and interests. Said another way, our indomitable strength has created the asymmetric competitor, and as we move to the Navy after Next, two important changes are required to keep ahead of him.
First, we must rebalance our future capabilities for the information age .... from increased sensor capability to increased combat staying power.
Second, we must reverse our current downsizing trajectory. Continuing to cut our numbers raises the relative target value of each individual ship and accentuates the threat of the asymmetric competitor. Simply put, numbers do matter, especially when it comes to contested littoral warfare.
Our current fleet has awesome striking power, but it must be mixed with combat power derived from maneuver forces and increased sensor capabilities. As the number of ships in the littoral increases, the threat of the asymmetric competitor is diminished. Such a competitor finds that he now has to bear the cost of more difficult surveillance problems, reduced reaction time, defending against a combined arms force, and simultaneous operations.
The Navy after Next must blend the best capabilities of our current force with the capabilities of one specifically designed for assured access in the contested close littoral—speed, maneuver, sensing, and robustness. It must be a fully networked force, capable of dispersed firepower—and with the netted sensors necessary to preserve our weapons' reach advantage. It must be capable of servicing mobile and time critical targets and it must have a high degree of adaptivity so that it can be responsive in a rapidly changing environment....
But none of this will come to pass if we allow ourselves to be constrained by the rules that guided fading paradigms. We must take the opportunity presented to us in the next Quadrennial Defense Review to meet the congressionally mandated requirement to field force levels appropriate to the security environment that we envision. In my view, it is improper to think that Congress charged the Department of Defense with quadrennial reviews simply to reduce the size of the military.
We must analyze our experience in the years since the last QDR; specifically, in terms of how the force has been and will be used, to arrive at a credible, confident, and coherent plan to make sure we've got the force sized correctly. Are 116 surface combatants enough? Are 12 carrier battle groups and 12 amphibious ready groups enough? Do 50 fast attack submarines really meet the requirements of the unified commanders-in-chief? Are we still comfortable with our definition of acceptable levels of risk? If the answer to these or other force structure questions is no, we must be able to articulate the emergent requirements and characterize the risk involved in not meeting them.
Admiral Johnson is Chief of Naval Operations. These are excerpts from an address he delivered at the Current Strategy Forum, U.S. Naval War College, on 15 June 1999.