
DATE: Wednesday, November 12, 1997          TAG: 9711110294
SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 

SERIES: Future of the Fleet

        Each Wednesday through November, The Pilot will offer a vision of the

        Navy's service of the early 21st century. Today, we look at the

        threats the Navy faces around the world, including low-tech and

        unconventional

SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  455 lines

NAVY FACES LOW-TECH, HIGH-RISK ADVERSARIES

TOMORROW'S CHALLENGE: A fleet built for the high seas now patrols the shallows, where mines lay in wait, missiles stud the coastline and the line between war and peace can be fuzzy. The Cold War's end may have wrapped up one challenge facing the Navy, but it spawned a host of others.

Maybe the future of warfare is the Navy's ``Cooperative Engagement Capability,'' a computer network able to track a hostile plane or missile far over the horizon, select the U.S. ship best able to intercept the intruder, and launch and guide a counterattacking missile - all in seconds.

Maybe the future is VGAS, the ``Vertical Gun for Advanced Ship'' that Navy leaders say will fire rocket-assisted shells up to 200 miles inland and have them guided to their targets by a satellite 200 miles overhead.

Maybe the future is dozens of other technological marvels, from lasers that can disable satellites to cruise missiles that can be re-targeted in mid-flight or ordered to fly lazy circles over an enemy stronghold before hitting whatever target looks juiciest.

America's military leaders are planning such a high-tech future, urged on by a Congress and a public that admired how the Pentagon used ``smart'' bombs and satellite guidance systems to win a quick, decisive and relatively bloodless victory in the Persian Gulf War.

But maybe the future of warfare also is a $5 billion aircraft carrier, its deck bristling with state-of-the-art warplanes, sitting badly damaged a few miles off a hostile coast after steaming into a minefield.

Maybe it's a squad of 19-year-old Marines, advancing on foot into a Lebanese neighborhood and supported from the air by a Navy pilot whose best sensor for warning the Leathernecks about rooftop snipers is his sharp eyes.

Maybe it's close brushes, with navies that lack America's technical sophistication, but can throw fleets of cheap gunboats at American ships from coastal havens.

As a Navy without peer on the high seas steams into shallow waters, it is finding that the rules of war and peace are murky in the post-Cold War world, that friendships are uncertain, and that low-tech foes can be high-level risks.

CMDR. CRAIG E. LANGMAN, skipper of the destroyer Nicholson, knows firsthand how unsettling things can get when America's high-tech Navy must confront even a primatively armed adversary.

Last February, while on patrol in the northern reaches of the Persian Gulf, Langman and the Nicholson encountered a Chinese oiler that five times had flouted United Nations sanctions by smuggling diesel fuel from Iraq.

Ten of the Nicholson's sailors boarded and took control of the Hai Gong You in international waters. But as both ships waited out a storm, word reached the Norfolk-based destroyer that despite the choppy seas an Iranian gunboat was headed their way.

Within minutes, the Iranians pulled alongside the Chinese ship and hailed its captain. Their ship, puny by U.S. standards, had a 76mm cannon and Harpoon missile launchers bolted to its deck and sailors manning its machine guns.

``The Hai Gong You didn't answer, of course,'' Langman recalled, ``because our people were on the bridge.'' The Iranians radioed again. And again.

Then, as Americans on both destroyer and oiler grew increasingly uneasy, rifle-toting Iranians began preparing a skiff, evidently planning to board the Hai Gong You themselves.

The Nicholson had firepower sufficient to oblitatate the Iranians in an instant, but Langman knew he had plenty to lose if the encounter turned ugly. America's Arab alliances are fragile, its U.N. mandate in the gulf narrow.

``Our whole interest was in trying to de-escalate this thing,'' he said. ``We did not want this to get to the point where anybody was firing shots.''

The captain radioed the gunboat to stand clear. Tense minutes passed before the Iranians halted their preparations to board. The gunboat stayed put, however, its cannon at times trained on Langman's ship.

Eventually, the destroyers Cushing and Cowpens arrived and joined the Nicholson in escorting the Hai Gong You to Bahrain. But the Iranians followed, staying in close range of the U.S. ships and helicopters thwacking overhead for a full 15 hours. FACING ALL CHALLENGES \ As the Pentagon pushes development of a dizzying assortment of next-generation weapons, a growing number of mid-career officers and independent analysts are warning that despite their technological dominance, American forces must be prepared to deal with an assortment of threats like those the Nicholson found in the gulf that day.

In the case of the Navy, the shallow, coastal waters in which it expects to operate in the coming decades are expected to harbor dozens of different types of mines and provide cover for slow-moving diesel submarines that American ships could easily destroy in the open ocean.

In many areas, those waters are bounded by rugged coastlines, perfect for hiding sea-skimming cruise missiles that could strike American vessels with conventional, chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear warheads.

Within 20 years, most analysts assume, Iran, Iraq and a variety of other ``third world'' states that are technologically inferior to the United States will have access to radars and satellite-based sensors that will improve dramatically their ability to track U.S. ships.

Those countries also will be able to buy - if they haven't already - an assortment of mines, small submarines, cruise missiles and gunboats.

Having outlived the open-ocean Soviet threat it was designed for in the Cold War, the Navy is coming closer to shore to maintain its relevance.

In 1993, with the publication of a paper entitled ``From the Sea,'' the service declared that its mission for the post-Cold War era would be to support attacks ashore. With the Army and Air Force closing most of their overseas bases, only the Navy-Marine Corps combination of forces can be expected to be at or near the scenes of future hostilities when the fighting actually starts, the two sea-based services argue.

Moving close to land also lets the Navy play a more prominent role in peacekeeping and humanitarian operations ashore. The carrier America shed its air wing for the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1994, replacing fighters with Army helicopters; other ships have served as command posts for peacekeeping or evacuation efforts from war-torn African countries.

``The Navy is saying, quite rightly, that we now have an enormous capability to influence the battle on land,'' said Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

But ``we really have to come in close if we're going to sustain strike operations from carriers,'' he said. That makes the big flattops and the destroyers and cruisers that sail with them much easier to locate and attack.

``If you're the Iranians or the Iraqis, you should be able to see if the carrier is trying to move through the Strait of Hormuz,'' the narrow passage into the Persian Gulf, Krepinevich said. In such tight quarters, a rogue state with even limited power - Iran has bought three Russian-made submarines in recent years - may find it has the ability to inflict considerable damage on the Navy.

``It's not going to be easy to sink a carrier,'' unless perhaps the attacker has and is willing to use a nuclear weapon, Krepinevich said. ``But they'll be easier to get at than they are today (and) you also have that issue of: Is the president going to put five or six thousand sailors in harm's way?'' SHALLOW-WATER DANGERS

In an unclassified report issued last March, the Office of Naval Intelligence estimated that 50 countries now own a total of 150 different types of naval mines, 60 nations have 60 different types of torpedoes, and 75 countries have more than 90 types of cruise missiles.

In many coastal areas, cruise missile launchers can be concealed in rugged terrain just a mile or two from the shoreline. When they're fired, ships that may be sitting just off the coast will have only moments to locate them on radar and launch interceptors.

To date, the Navy has ``done reasonably well'' with cruise missile detection and defense, said Dave Altweeg, deputy director of the service's Theatre Missile Defense program in Washington. But after 2000, he warned in an interview, the job will get tougher.

Altweeg said the Navy anticipates that missile-marketing countries such as Russia and China will make increasing use of the radar-absorbing coatings that the United States has developed for its Stealth planes, including B-2 bombers and F-117 and F-22 fighters. Those missiles probably also will get faster, he said, shortening the Navy's response time.

In addition to defending itself from anti-ship cruise missiles, the Navy also is being pushed by Congress to develop a shield to protect U.S. and allied forces ashore from ballistic missile attacks like the Scuds Iraq employed during the Persian Gulf War.

In February, a modified version of the Navy's Standard missile successfully intercepted a dummy missile fired at the White Sands missile range in New Mexico. Altweeg said he is optimistic about a follow-up test scheduled for early next year against a faster-flying attacker.

Less evident than the missile threat, but perhaps just as dangerous, is the challenge the Navy faces in shallow water from mines. The mines range from World War II-era devices that float near the beach and threaten amphibious landings to Chinese and Russian-made warheads that rest on the sea bottom, up to 300 meters down, until activated by the noise of passing ships and then are rocket-propelled toward those targets.

Also reportedly under development are remote-controlled mines, which could be switched off by their owners when friendly ships are in the area, then activated to strike a passing American warship or tanker carrying oil to the West.

Priced in the tens of thousands of dollars, the new ``smart'' mines may be easily affordable for small countries. Older designs are even cheaper, and a Navy analyst noted that just about every country has the technology and materials needed to produce them.

In a study done last year, Krepinevich noted that 14 of 18 Navy ships seriously damaged during operations since 1950 were victimized by mines.

The Navy has invested heavily in mine warfare since the gulf war exposed its relative inability to deal with a serious mine threat. It has 24 mine warfare ships and two more under construction, plus two squadrons of mine-hunting Sea Stallion helicopters.

But the mine hunters typically don't deploy or even exercise with the Navy's carrier battle groups.

``There were some hitches'' when a group of mine hunters and killers took part in a major U.S. and allied naval exercise put together earlier this year by the Navy's Atlantic Fleet, acknowledged Cmdr. Jim Hildreth, a mine countermeasures officer who took part in the effort.

It took about half of the exercise for the mine warriors and the rest of the naval forces to form a cohesive team, Hildreth said, though he said the exercise demonstrated that the Navy can use sonars, other sensors and mine-sweeping plows to clear a beach area large enough to land a contingent of Marines.

Hildreth said that while the Navy's mine-detection capabilities are improving, they're far from perfect. Particularly in coastal areas, where sea bottoms are likely to be littered with everything from scuttled pleasure boats to discarded refrigerators, picking out mines is a challenge, he acknowledged.

Hildreth said even sensitive sonars may have to go over suspected minefields several times to detect all of the mines.

``In the past five years, we have made leaps forward,'' said another Navy official involved in the service's countermine effort. ``(But) we haven't found a magic mine warfare bullet. It's still a tough and time-consuming warfare area. . . . Winning in the shallow-water mine threat area is at the top of our list of challenges.''

Still, countermine warfare commands a smaller slice of the Navy's budget today than it did just a few years ago, Krepinevich said. A NEW WAVE OF THOUGHT

More and better mine hunters, improved missile defenses and other new weapons, combined with the computing power of systems like CEC, can help with at least some of the dangers the Navy will find in the littoral regions.

But a growing number of analysts suggest that what all the services really need is new thinking, and a determination to insist that the new tools of war be fashioned to fit it.

Signs of a push for new thinking can be found in every military branch, but they're most evident in the Marine Corps. Gen. Charles C. Krulak, the Marine commandant, is pushing an innovative spirit through a ``warfighting lab'' established at Quantico two years ago and a series of experimental war games called ``Sea Dragon.''

Krulak also has scores of Marines - from lance corporals on Okinawa to colonels in the Adriatic to his own office at the Pentagon - using e-mail to share ideas about everything from warfighting to the quality of Marine medical care.

Such top-to-bottom electronic dialogue ``is where the information revolution is going to change the military,'' argued Navy Cmdr. Dan Moore, a former F/A-18 squadron leader now assigned to the warfighting lab and working with Marine students at Quantico's Amphibious Warfare School.

``We feel innovation at this point should come from the bottom up,'' said Col. Rick Barry, the school's director. With the world enjoying relative peace and America's military dominance clear to everyone, ``this is the time to experiment,'' he argued.

Encouraged by Krulak, Moore and Barry are quietly using what the latter man calls ``C-cubed'' brainpower - ``captains, concepts and capabilities'' - to fashion a small, inexpensive ``Aviation From the Sea'' war game scheduled for early December on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

About 40 Marine captains, students at the amphibious school, are planning the game. Barry likes using captains because they're seasoned - most have been in the Corps for 10 to 12 years - but still young enough to be full of energy. ``They make a difference and they speak their minds,'' he said.

In the exercise, a group of Marine reservists from Pennsylvania and Navy fliers out of Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach will use aircraft, light-armored vehicles, and communications links the Corps and the Navy have employed for years. But the forces, Barry promises, will be pushed to think differently about how they work together.

Barry and Moore want the captains to come up with ways they can use naval air power as a ``maneuver element'' in a coordinated but quickly planned and executed assault by small, highly mobile Marine ground units.

The assault, to take place on the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula, is aimed at quickly cutting off ``enemy'' access to Richmond before the enemy can move in forces that would make the city particularly hard to take.

In a traditional Marine attack, a large force would hit the beach en masse, secure it and then move inland, following a carefully mapped route and getting support from Navy guns offshore and aircraft above. For the exercise, Barry and Moore want to use naval airborne reconnaissance to help the small Marine units make a quick, late decision about where they can come ashore with little or no resistance.

And once the Marines have landed, they'll split up as Navy planes help guide them inland, directing their fast-moving vehicles around enemy defenses between the ``penetration point'' and the Richmond access roads that are the attack's ultimate objective.

What he'd like, Barry said, is to have Marines and Navy pilots thinking together so seamlessly that before a ground assault, he could simply send the air boss ``a statement of commander's intent'' and rely on the Navy to do whatever could be done from the air to facilitate it.

Barry and Moore argue that future U.S. opponents are unlikely to repeat Saddam Hussein's mistake in 1990 of giving America months to plan a massive ground attack, preceded by weeks of bombing.

Instead, they said, U.S. and allied forces must train to strike lightly and quickly, without taking the time needed to draw up detailed lists of targets for attacking planes or establish a long front line for the Army.

``You have to make the enemy deal with the unpredictability of eager lance corporals and sergeants and lieutenants and lieutenant commanders,'' Moore said. ``We're trying to so thoroughly confuse the enemy that he gives up.'' THE POWER OF PRESENCE

While some in the military are thinking about how they fight, others are debating how best to use America's military prowess to avoid fighting in the future.

The Navy's official view is that the presence of American naval power just offshore is the most effective reminder a rogue state can receive of the nation's determination to keep the peace. Operating in the littoral regions, U.S. ships often are visible from coastal cities and carrier-borne aircraft can hit targets well inland, often within an hour.

The notion that such U.S. presence shapes the thinking of potential foes, deterring them from conflict, is the foundation of the Navy's forward-deployment strategy, and it is the reason ships like the Nicholson are on station off faraway shores.

That thinking has dominated Navy planning since the end of World War II, when the threat was an expansionist Soviet Union rather than the smaller ambitions of Saddam Hussein or Iran's mullahs.

At the heart of the argument today, as it was throughout the Cold War, is the service's fleet of 12 aircraft carriers. Their sheer bulk and the warplanes that buzz around them, Navy leaders insist, make an indelible impression on potential U.S. foes and pack the combat power that other American forces would require in the opening stages of a war.

America's military planning calls for one carrier to be on station constantly in the western Pacific, while two others give the U.S. almost-constant presence in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea. The carrier Independence is based permanently in Japan to fill the Pacific requirement and the Atlantic Fleet shuttles carriers from Norfolk into the Med every six months. The Atlantic and Pacific Fleets share duty in the Persian Gulf.

But the need for so much presence - and the dangers it brings - is not universally supported, either by those in or out of uniform.

Before his retirement in September, Marine Gen. John J. Sheehan angered the Navy's top echelons with a persistent challenge to the Navy's insistence on constant forward deployment. The Navy should stay close to home more often, he argued, saving its money to invest in new, modern systems and experiment with new ways of warfighting.

``Shaping today's world is not just about military forces,'' Sheehan said in an interview shortly before he stepped down as head of the U.S. Atlantic Command, based in Norfolk. ``It is about economic engagement, political engagement. . . .

``So how do you use that force rationally to shape what you want to achieve? Our constant carrier presence in the eastern Mediterranean did absolutely nothing to prevent the dissolution of Bosnia, nothing to do with what occurred in Albania, nothing to do with (U.S.) ability or inability to keep the Greeks and Turks from developing an adversarial relationship. It did nothing to the PLO and Israelis.''

The U.S. is ``sending our ships to places where things often don't happen,'' acknowledged Ronald O'Rourke, a Congressional Research Service analyst on naval issues. ``But like the policeman that patrols the neighborhood, that can be taken as evidence of the effectiveness of the operation rather than as an argument that it's not needed.''

O'Rourke agrees with Navy leaders that ``the presence of those (naval) forces probably does influence the thinking'' of foreign powers, though he cautions that it's impossible to say how deep the influence extends.

Sheehan, however, contends that carrier groups generally should deploy only when there's a specific threat.

``If you want to maintain a ready force, one of the ingredients is sending Navy task forces where it is interesting,'' he said. ``A kid walks away from that saying, `That was good. I did something.'

``When you go to Naples for the 52nd time it kind of looks the way it did the 2nd and 3rd times.''

Sheehan's relentless advocacy of such unconventional views may have cost him a chance this fall to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation's highest-ranking military officer. But it made him something of a hero to a corps of civilian analysts who contend the military should risk dramatic cost-cutting now so that it can afford more modern weapons tomorrow.

``We don't need to have a forward presence at the level we have today because of our ability to get there when we want to,'' said retired Vice Adm. John J. Shanahan, a Sheehan fan who is director of the Center of Defense Information, a Washington think tank.

Shanahan, a former commander of the Norfolk-based 2nd fleet, argues that insistence on maintaining forward presence is ``driving pilots out'' of the services.

``We're out there flying around on make-work missions, with no real justification, no real reason,'' he said, ``because you can move a carrier battle group from Norfolk into a crisis area while you're analyzing whether you really want to go there or not.'' FOES CHANGE STRATEGIES

Whether it stays on station around the world, or moves into position only when there's trouble, the future Navy will confront a world in which America's adversaries probably also have thought about how they should change the way they fight.

There is ample evidence those adversaries already have made adjustments for the American way of war, said Franklin C. Spinney, a Defense Department analyst.

Spinney, whose blistering critiques of Pentagon plans to develop new tactical aircraft have made him its most prominent internal critic, argues that the Persian Gulf War taught U.S. foes not to confront America or any other technologically advanced force on an open battlefield with massed armies or in mid-ocean with naval forces.

Instead, in Somalia, leaders of tribal gangs found they could get around America's high-tech communications jamming equipment simply by writing their orders in code and posting them on the sides of buildings to look like graffiti. The enemy's plans were in plain sight but U.S. forces couldn't see them.

And in Chechnya and Afghanistan, Spinney said, heavily armed, technologically advanced Russian forces found themselves defeated by fast, light, but hard-hitting tribal irregulars.

Spinney noted that even Israel, whose modern Army and Air Forces have crushed Arab opponents in every conventional battle, has suffered heavy losses at the hands of lightly armed but highly mobile groups of urban guerrillas in groups such as Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist organization.

But despite the effectiveness of such ``asymmetric'' attacks, as military planners call them, Spinney contends that the U.S. military continues to devote most of its planning and its cash to preparations for more-traditional wars.

Indeed, with the exception of the V-22 Osprey, a turboprop plane that can take off like a helicopter but flies like a conventional aircraft to ferry Marines quickly over long distances, every major new weapons system the United States has under development will have only limited application to asymmetric threats.

Military planners say the unpredictability of future conflicts dictates such an approach, and America's new weapons will be versatile enough to deal with a range of threats. With China and other countries continuing a conventional arms build-up - the Chinese are believed to be interested in building an aircraft carrier - America can't be content to work just on asymmetric conflict, they say.

Krepinevich argues that the Navy should reduce its reliance on carriers, with their close-to-shore vulnerability to cruise missiles, torpedoes and mines.

In a report released last year, he argued instead for accelerated development of a missile-laden ``arsenal ship'' for the surface fleet and an undersea ``stealth battleship.'' The latter vessel would be a Trident submarine outfitted to carry up to 162 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, and to secretly put ashore teams of Navy SEALS or Marine snipers.

The arsenal ship and stealth battleship could use their precise fires to disable the command and control apparatus an enemy might use to track a carrier and direct attacks on it, Krepinevich said. Then the flattop could move in safely.

But the Navy has shown little interest in the converted submarine idea, and in late October it scuttled development of the arsenal ship, saying other priorities and limited funds would not permit it.

At the top of that list of other priorities: another new carrier. MEMO: Staff writers Jack Dorsey and Earl Swift contributed to this

report.

Related full-page graphic on page A11. ILLUSTRATION: U.S. NAVY color photo\

A jagged hole marks the spot where the assault ship Tripoli met an

Iraqi contact mine in 1991, during Operation Desert Storm. No one

died and injuries were few, and the Tripoli's crew stemmed flooding

so quickly that the ship was able to return to its mission. Still,

the hole took a month to repair.

KRT photo

Rifles at the ready, Marines from the assault ship Nassau safeguard

Americans fleeing Albania. Ordered when the country tumbled into

anarchy, the rescue was one of two in 1996 for the warship.