Drones and Naval Warfare
As we have seen in Ukraine, drones currently work powerfully in favor of the defense. The reason is simple: the attacker has to move while for the most part, the defender can remain in fortified positions (although his counterattack forces must still move). This is nothing new; despite the claims of the airpower lobby, air attack has not been very successful against stationary ground forces. In NATO’s war with Serbia over Kosovo, vast amounts of the most modern airports bombarded Serbian forces in Kosovo for weeks on end. NATO claimed to have destroyed over a hundred Serbian tanks; the actual number, revealed when the Serbs withdrew, was thirteen. The Serbian tanks were dug in and did not have to move.
But how do drones affect naval warfare? The only way to dig ships in is to build a navy of submarines. If we look at surface shops, their vulnerability is such that, like the armies of 1914 in the West, we will find on the sea “the emptiness of the battlefield.” The French, Germans, and British were all taken by surprise by this phenomenon. But after suffering monumental casualties in the opening months of the war, they all realized they had to dig in. By Christmas, you usually did not see a single soldier, because if anyone showed himself, he died.
The experience of the Russian navy in the Black Sea appears to have been similar. It has been driven off the sea and even out of Crimean ports by a Ukrainian combination of anti-ship missiles and drones. Its remaining ships, after heavy losses including the fleet flagship, are hiding in port in the easternmost Black Sea waters. In terms of warships, we see the emptiness of the battlefield (some commercial shipping is still moving). Ukrainian warships have played no role in this successful campaign of sea denial.
We see something similar in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen. A tribe, not a state, the Houthis, has used a similar mix of drones and anti-ship missiles to cripple commercial shipping through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. The U.S. Navy has tried to shut them down and failed. So far, only merchant ships have been hit, but U.S. warships have repeatedly come under attack. If they remain in those waters, at some point the Houthis will get lucky and we will have a warship sunk or damaged along with human losses.
The implications for Fourth Generation war of a win at sea by tribes over the world's most powerful navy are very interesting, but that is a topic for another day.
The problem, quite simply, is that is difficult to hide a ship floating on an ocean. The smaller the warship and the more island-strewn the waters, the easier it is for a ship to hide, and Scandinavian navies are built around that fact. But the U.S. Navy only wants big ships, and its skippers are terrified of operating in coastal waters where the cover is best because if they touch ground they are relieved of command, an absurd policy that can and should be changed.
Where does the emptiness of the naval battlefield leave the future of ship design and the composition of fleets? Obviously, it tilts the latter toward submarines. The submarine, not the aircraft carrier, has been the capital ship since the first true submarine, the German type XXI, went off its first war patrol in April of 1945. The proliferation of drones over the naval battlefield just reinforces that fact.
But to use the sea, not just control it, we will still need surface ships. Not the fragile cruisers, destroyers, and frigates that make up the bulk of most navies, but ships that can take hits and keep on fighting. We have seen, in the tanker wars of the 1980s in the Persian Gulf and also at present in the Black Sea, that big merchant ships can take hits. In the tanker wars, the tankers ended up escorting our frigates because they could take hits and the warships couldn't. Future surface warships should be merchant ship hulls and propulsion plants protected against drones and missiles (which usually have shaped-charge warheads) by water armoire, with modular sensors and weapons. The latter, if hit can quickly be replaced, and if the bulk of the hull is filled with something fireproof that floats, the ship can take hits and continue with its mission. Our assumption must be that against enemies with drones and anti-ship missiles, we will take hits.
Despite watching the Russian Black Sea fleet get driven into port by Ukrainian drones and anti-ship missiles, the U.S. Navy is unlikely to adjust its force structure or ship designs to accommodate the new reality. Once the coming debt and financial crisis hits, budgetary realities may force it to do so.