The "New Republic" Blog.
Yesterday we said no to the fabulous-flying, ridiculously overpriced F22 Raptor. Today we ponder the Littoral Combat Ship.
Looking like a techno-update on the Union's Monitor ironclad of the Civil War, the Littoral Combat Ship is designed to sail close to enemy shores; be relatively hard to detect on radar (all current surface ships make excellent radar targets); be mostly automated so that the crew is almost weirdly few (perhaps as few as 25); be very fast; have a shallow draft; and sink submarines, shoot down aircraft, destroy mines and hit shore targets, perhaps with an upcoming new weapon, the small cruise missile. Basically, Littoral Combat Ship is a junior version of the recently shelved Zumwalt-class destroyer. (Zumwalt destroyers, designed to deliver hundreds of cruise missiles quickly, might make a comeback once Littoral Combat Ship is accepted.) The Littoral Combat Ship prototype proposal goes by the zoomy name Sea Blade.
Littoral Combat Ship reflects an upcoming choice for the Navy, which is whether to continue building "surface combatants"--that is, non-submarines. Already the United States Navy has nine supercarrier battle groups, nine more than the rest of the world combined, with the Ronald Reagan just commissioned. A tenth supercarrier, the George H. W. Bush, is under construction, as are its escort ships. (You can lay odds there will not be a supercarrier William Jefferson Clinton.) With the United States on track for ten times the carrier strength of the rest of the world combined, it's hard to see how to justify funding for more surface warships. Unless somebody invents a fundamentally new class of such vessels--enter the Littoral Combat Ship.
All current U.S. Navy fighting ships are designed for the "blue water," or deep ocean. Littoral Combat Ship would be pretty much the first American vessel in more than a century intended to hold coastal areas and bombard shore emplacements. Lockheed Martin, the contractor, is currently running radio ads in Washington implying that Littoral Combat Ship would be used to protect the American coastline. That's nonsense. All the navies of the world combined could not get within 500 miles of the American coast; if a hostile naval force approached the United States, any one of our supercarrier battle groups could overtake and systematically sink it far at sea. That's the beauty of having more naval power than all other nations combined. In conventional naval terms, the United States is invincible. (Innocent-looking freighters with terrorist weapons are another story.)
How would Littoral Combat Ship really be used? Most likely, to prowl the waters off the Western coast of Africa. Here is a topic for another day, but over the next one or two decades, U.S. oil purchases are likely to decline in the Persian Gulf and rise in the Gulf of Guinea, where significant new fields are being found. West African oil would be much preferable to Persian Gulf oil--fewer entanglements, no Arab despots to suck up to as their princes stab us in the back. In military terms, the West African coast is a much better environment for tankers than the Persian Gulf. Tankers leaving West Africa for the United States would simply sail due West into the blue-water ocean, where the United States Navy has total domination: avoiding the Strait of Hormuz, never passing within gunnery range of Iranian positions at Gazdan and so on.
If Littoral Combat Ship's real purpose is to control West African waters at affordable cost, it is a good sign that the Navy is looking ahead to this mission, because substitution of Western Africa oil for Gulf State oil will be a huge political advance. The Navy does sort of admit the project's purpose in code: It says the Littoral Combat Ship will "ensure maritime access in any environment." Why Washington isn't already twisting Saudi arms with the prospect of a switch to use of West Africa oil isn't clear. Perhaps it is because institutional Washington has not yet realized what the real purpose of the Littoral Combat Ship project is.
If there is another Arab-Israeli war, Littoral Combat Ship might also be useful in providing emergency fire support to Israeli forces. Though a word to the wise to the IDF. Should Israel, deliberately or accidentally, decide to fire on a Littoral Combat Ship in the way it fired on the U.S.S. Liberty during the 1967 war, attacking forces are not likely to last more than a few minutes before being reduced to hot slag. So, presumably, Israel would both benefit from any Littoral Combat Ships entering its waters, and have considerable incentive to cooperate with them
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