http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB994801299373912580.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------------ July 11, 2001 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Debate Surrounding Small Ship Poses Fundamental Questions for U.S. Navy By GREG JAFFE Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL NEWPORT, R.I. -- The U.S. is at war with China, and U.S. Navy commanders are using a new breed of ship called Streetfighter to sail perilously close to the Chinese coast. There, the small, fast, inexpensive warships -- designed to go into harm's way and, if necessary, be lost -- hunt down Chinese subs and missile launchers hidden among fishing boats and cargo ships. Some Streetfighters are sunk by enemy fire, and casualties are high, but they help the U.S. win earlier than the military pros had projected. The "war" was a computer simulation set around 2015, carried out in windowless rooms at the Naval War College here about a year ago. The Streetfighters existed only on paper. But their performance in that mock battle was enough to convince the war college's director, Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski, that a fleet of Streetfighters could give any foe fits -- provided the Navy is willing to endure casualties. "Streetfighter is alive, well and an inevitability," he crowed. 'Throwaway Boats' Thus did Adm. Cebrowski, who is soon expected to take a new position as the Pentagon's director of military transformation, trigger a debate about what the Navy should look like. His ships, derided by critics as "throwaway boats," have forced the Navy and the Pentagon to confront the question of whether the military has become too fearful of casualties, and whether a hesitancy to put troops at risk is making the world's most formidable fighting force vulnerable. In recent months, Streetfighters have won the support of some of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's closest advisers. Meanwhile, Adm. Cebrowski's new job helping oversee the Bush administration's promised overhaul of the military would give him an important say in what the force of the future will look like -- and whether it will include such ships. That hardly means Streetfighters are a sure thing. Some top Navy commanders have grave doubts. "I look at the Streetfighter concept and worry that we are saying, 'It's OK to lose ships,' " says Vice Adm. Michael Mullen, commander of the U.S. 2nd Fleet in Norfolk, Va. Others question whether sailors in an all-volunteer force would sign up to serve on the ships, or whether Congress would approve the money to build them. Wrapped in a Debate The controversy is such that Adm. Cebrowski has spent much of this year wondering whether he could simply get some money wedged into the Pentagon budget to build a few prototypes. Inevitably, he has found himself wrapped up in a debate that revolves around two questions. One is technical: How will technology transform warfare? The second is far more emotional: How many deaths are Americans willing to accept in war? Even as casualties rose during World War II, support for the war seemed to increase with the prospects of a decisive victory. Vietnam, however, changed everything. Senior military leaders became convinced that lives were needlessly sacrificed in the war and that the military should avoid putting troops at risk unless absolutely necessary. In the Persian Gulf War, politicians prepared Americans for more than 10,000 casualties; the U.S. suffered 293 deaths in battle. That conflict seeded the belief that major wars could be won with few casualties if the U.S. used overwhelming force and state-of the-art weaponry. How Many Is Too Many? Today, U.S. military leaders -- and some potential adversaries -- believe Americans can't tolerate casualties. But studies suggest that both groups may be overstating Americans' reluctance to put troops at risk. Asked in one survey how many casualties would be acceptable to restore democracy in the Congo, the public said about 7,000. Senior military leaders, however, insisted in the same survey that Americans would accept only about 300 deaths before demanding the withdrawal of troops, according to the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, a think tank in Chapel Hill, N.C. Whether it's real or a myth, the widespread belief that Americans won't tolerate casualties has a major impact. It emboldens potential adversaries. And as the debate over Streetfighter shows, it can drive the style of war the U.S. is willing to fight and the kinds of weapons it buys. When Adm. Cebrowski was tapped to be president of the Naval War College in 1998, the Navy's leaders knew they were picking someone who wouldn't shy away from debate. He had a reputation for speaking his mind -- even to the point of irritating senior leadership. "The Navy worries about anything associated with Cebrowski," says Thomas Barnett, a professor at the war college. Avoiding casualties, however, wasn't on the minds of the top brass. They were far more concerned that the sea service had sunk into complacency. "We had somehow tuned out the sloppiness and discomfort that comes with true innovation," Adm. Cebrowski says. The brass envisioned the war college as an incubator for challenging new ideas. Adm. Cebrowski, a smart, outspoken man who flew 158 combat missions in Vietnam and commanded an aircraft carrier during the Gulf War, seemed like the perfect officer to shake things up. The 58-year-old admiral immediately homed in on one of the most vexing weaknesses in the current fleet. In the past 10 years, the proliferation of cruise missiles and cheap diesel subs has made it easier for enemies to strike U.S. vessels. A recent General Accounting Office report concluded that the Navy's ability to deal with the threat posed by cruise missiles and diesel subs in coastal regions was "marginal" and that nothing the Navy is currently buying will "provide adequate protection against improved versions of these weapons." To protect its precious ships and crews, the military leadership is pushing them farther and farther out to sea, where they are safer but not nearly as effective. "We've become risk-averse," Adm. Cebrowski says. For example, during the Kosovo War, the Pentagon was forced to move an aircraft carrier when the Navy briefly lost track of a cheap and relatively unsophisticated Serbian diesel submarine, say defense officials familiar with the classified incident. The Beginnings of an Idea The idea of building a new class of small ships had been kicking around at the Naval War College and the Naval Post Graduate School, where retired Navy Capt. Wayne Hughes, one of Adm. Cebrowski's former commanding officers, had been playing with some concepts. Adm. Cebrowski had been thinking about the need for a new class of small ship as well. So he and Capt. Hughes put the concept on paper. Because Streetfighters would be cheap -- one design would cost only about $70 million a ship, compared with as much as $1 billion for a new destroyer -- the Navy would be able to buy hundreds for the price of one 10-ship carrier battle group. The ships would operate along crowded coastal waters, hiding in coves and springing out to destroy enemy subs, hunt down mines and disrupt enemy missiles that could more easily target larger, slower ships. After a few days or weeks of heavy fighting, the bigger ships would move in and take over the fight. Some Streetfighters would be lost, and some sailors would die. "Streetfighters must be designed to lose," Capt. Hughes wrote at the time. "If the ships become too costly or too heavily manned, commanders will be unwilling to put them at risk." In March 1999, Adm. Cebrowski pitched his idea to the Navy's then second-in-command, Vice Adm. Donald Pilling. The ships didn't even have a name, so Adm. Pilling suggested Streetfighter. "It tells you they are small, tough vessels designed to go nose to nose with the bad guys in the worst neighborhoods," he says. Two days later the now-retired admiral introduced the concept at a meeting of the American Shipbuilding Association. The reaction from the Navy and the shipbuilding industry was swift and negative. Some of the concerns were legitimate. Larger vessels are more stable in rough seas, can stay out for weeks at a time without being replenished, and carry far more firepower. But much of the negative reaction was parochial. The U.S. defense industry was ill-equipped to build the small, fast ships Adm. Cebrowski envisioned. The Navy brass, struggling with an underfunded shipbuilding budget, was worried that the small cheap ships would drain resources from established programs such as the Navy's DD-21 destroyer, a huge $1 billion ship designed to blast away at a coastline with precision weapons. Opponents began using obscene nicknames to refer to Streetfighters. "It seemed to get pretty personal pretty fast," Adm. Cebrowski says. By spring 2000, Adm. Cebrowski had developed a pretty clear idea of what Streetfighters might look like. New, wave-piercing catamaran hulls, made of kevlar and carbon fiber, would allow the small ships to navigate rougher seas and carry far more weapons than previous generations of small ships. Working with the engineering faculty at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., Adm. Cebrowski sketched out designs for some Streetfighter ships. Tested in a Game Three months later, he introduced a class of them, based on the designs, into the Navy's annual war game, a computerized mock battle. Initially, the Streetfighters inspired confusion. China's commanders, played by intelligence specialists and retired officers, began the war wanting to hit something that would produce a big body count -- "something that would make the folks in Dubuque ask, 'Why are we doing this?' " says George Price, a defense intelligence specialist who led the Chinese forces. Streetfighters were relatively easy to hit, compared with the Navy's big ships hundreds of miles off the coast. But with their crews of 13, killing them wasn't going to yield many casualties. The Chinese commanders were never sure whether they were worth hunting down. "They represented a problem for me because I couldn't get the shock value I wanted from killing them," says Dr. Price. "To be honest, the ships were a nagging sore." The U.S. commanders, sitting in a control room filled with high-speed computers and kept at a chilly 62 degrees, were locked in a different debate. Early in the game, they used the small, stealthy craft to test the waters for enemy subs, mines and missile launchers before they sent in the big ships. "We were far more callous in our use of them. We wanted them to go out and do good things, and if they didn't come back, well ... ," says Cmdr. Dave Wilson, trailing off. Ships often didn't come back. But even when they went down in flames, they were brutally effective. On several occasions, a Streetfighter was struck by a Chinese sub that only minutes earlier had been hidden on the ocean floor. As soon as the sub fired, the other Streetfighters, all linked via a wireless network to powerful radar, satellites and sensors, pinpointed the enemy sub's position and killed it. It was a bad trade for China, which was desperate to use its quiet subs to get a shot at a bigger target such as an aircraft carrier or an amphibious vessel loaded down with 1,200 Marines. But was this style of high-tech attrition combat any way to fight a war? The U.S. commanders were divided. "In large-scale conflict, combat losses are inevitable. If you do suffer losses, it is better to lose a Streetfighter with a crew of a dozen than a cruiser with a crew of 250," writes Rear Adm. Steven Kunkle, who led the U.S. forces in the war game, in a recent e-mail. But others questioned whether the American people watching a war on CNN would allow such tactics, which amounted to using Streetfighters as "cannon fodder," in the words of one participant. "What responsibility do we have to the crews of these ships?" asks Chris Gieser, a Navy analyst who participated in the game. "Morally, how can we use them? Those were the questions everyone was asking." Ultimately, the debate over Streetfighter is an argument over how new long-range weapons and space-age satellites and sensors will transform warfare. "Technology should allow us to reduce risk and losses," says Adm. Mullen, the 2nd Fleet commander, reflecting a view held by most of the military brass. A recent survey of 2,000 officers found that more than 60% believed new technology would allow the U.S. to fight "high intensity" wars with substantially reduced risk of U.S. casualties. More than 70% of the officers also believed that U.S. adversaries wouldn't be able to use long-range weapons in the future to knock out U.S. ships blasting away at their shoreline, notes Tom Mahnken, a professor at the Naval War College who conducted the survey. Adm. Cebrowski concedes the officers could be right. "But it is just as possible that the new American way of war in which we pummel the victim senseless from a distance is at risk," he says. If enemies can use long-range weapons to push the big ships out to sea, future wars could turn out to be "bloody, close-in fights." Streetfighters don't have to be cannon fodder in such battles, Adm. Cebrowski insists. He envisions squadrons of small ships that are digitally linked to powerful radar, unmanned spy planes and robotic sensors strewn around the battlefield. When the enemy is spotted, the Streetfighters will attack simultaneously from multiple directions and then disperse -- ideally, before the enemy can get off a clean shot. A Second Life Until this summer, Adm. Cebrowski's Streetfighters appeared dead. Briefings, prepared by the Navy staff in the Pentagon, had concluded that the service won't be able to build low-cost ships with the speed and weapons payload that Adm. Cebrowski wants any time soon. Now, however, Streetfighter is staging a revival. The idea has caught on fast among American allies, who are driven as much by shrinking defense budgets as strategy. Earlier this year, the Swedes launched the Visby, a small land-attack ship built largely around Adm. Cebrowski's vision of the future. Closer to home, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's pledge to transform the military has given the ships new life, both in the Pentagon and in Congress. Rep. Ike Skelton, a lawmaker influential on defense issues, has lauded the concept in speeches. "I know that some find it hard or even distasteful to imagine a Navy with smaller ships," he says. "But it isharder and even more repugnant to imagine a Navy rendered irrelevant or shrunken to Lilliputian proportions by a tunnel-vision fealty to large platforms." Finally, on a warm day last month, Adm. Cebrowski was leading a Navy forum on military transformation when he got a welcome piece of news: The Navy was going to set aside money in its 2003 budget for a handful of Streetfighter prototypes. "It's all pretty exciting, isn't it?" he gushed to a visitor. Building a prototype is a long way from putting a ship into the fleet, of course. But the Cebrowski boast of many months ago -- that Streetfighter was alive -- has come true, for now. Write to Greg Jaffe at greg.jaffe@wsj.com      ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Return to top of page Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Copyright and reprint information.