Submarines Must Learn to Play Zone Defense

James Holmes

Security, Americas

One-on-one is no longer good enough for today's bubbleheads.

“Zone defense”? In submarine warfare? Fuhgeddaboudit: that’s basketball and football stuff, not maritime strategy. And yet the sports metaphor—the handiwork of U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove—instructs. It suggests the U.S. Navy needs to bulk up its fleet of nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs). Otherwise a growing mismatch between the demand for and supply of SSNs may force the “silent service” into suboptimal tactics, degrading the navy’s mastery of the seas and compromising America’s strategic position in important theaters. That would be a Bad Thing.

Last February, General Breedlove, then the overseer of the U.S. European Command (EUCOM), sketched a somber picture of the undersea naval balance. U.S. House Armed Services Committee members inquired whether the navy could furnish enough attack submarines to meet EUCOM’s demand for them. His unequivocal reply: no. Increasingly sophisticated and numerous competitors—navies on the make, notably the Russian Navy and China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN)—have amplified the demand for U.S. Navy SSNs around the western European periphery. As the number of prospective foes surges, the demand for attack boats has come to outstrip the supply.

No longer, that is, can the navy allocate an SSN to trail every red-team boat making its way into the open sea, the way it did during the Cold War. Adds Breedlove’s U.S. Pacific Command counterpart, Adm. Harry Harris, the Indo-Pacific theater “suffers from a shortage of submarines today,” owing both to resurgent Russian naval ambitions and to a China making its seaward turn. “My requirements are not being met,” declares Harris. Seas washing against the East and South Asian rimlands are going partly unpoliced—impairing America’s posture in these all-important marginal seas.