Written evidence submitted by Professor James Holmes (DIS0020)

Testimony of Professor James Holmes, J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy, US Naval War College

1. Credentials. I am providing testimony to the Scottish Affairs Committee at the invitation of committee staff who were in attendance during my Zoom remarks to the Royal United Services Institute Sea Power Conference on 5 April 2022. I am a former US naval officer and combat veteran of Desert Storm with background in engineering, damage control, and naval weaponry. In 1996 I opted to leave active duty after nine years and study for a Ph.D. in international affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts. I am a veteran of the think-tank world, served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs, Athens, Georgia, and have served on the Naval War College Strategy & Policy faculty, Newport, Rhode Island, since 2007. My books on maritime strategy appear on the US Navy, Marine Corps, and Indo-Pacific Command Professional Reading Lists and thus are available on demand to any member of the sea services or the Indo-Pacific joint force. I should note that I am presenting my own personal views here, not the official views of any US government agency.

2. Summary. The immediate prospects for constructing warships or merchant vessels at Scottish shipyards appear dim, chiefly because of longstanding US laws and policies that mandate that the US government “Buy American” and otherwise favor the US shipbuilding industry. Such measures discourage procuring ships (and other weapon systems) even from close allies such as the United Kingdom, in hopes of promoting the domestic defense-industrial base and merchant marine as well as the navy. This state of affairs could be changing, however. The world’s return to great-power strategic competition seemingly warrants a rapid buildup of seagoing forces to prosecute the competition. Accordingly, the environment seems auspicious for concerted outreach on the part of the UK government and maritime-industrial complex. A persuasive appeal could induce Congress and US presidential administrations to welcome UK and Scottish shipbuilders into the American market, on the logic that doing so advances vital US interests. In other words, this is a political process that UK leaders could pursue while industry leaders take practical measures to lay the groundwork for entry into that market.

3. Increasingly Troublesome Strategic Environment. The reason US law and policy could undergo a paradigm shift is straightforward: the political and strategic seascape is changing around the United States, its allies, and its partners. A new age of great-power strategic competition is upon the West and its partners in the Indo-Pacific, demanding that they take a more competitive approach to maritime strategy, operations, and force development. The rise of Russia and China in particular has exposed how Congress, successive presidential administrations, and the sea services themselves have let capabilities crucial to successful strategic competition atrophy since the Cold War. In 1992 the US Navy and Marine Corps leadership in effect declared that naval history had ended. Once the Soviet Navy vanished from the high seas, service chieftains instructed the services to transform themselves into “a fundamentally different naval force” that had little need to fight peer navies to win the prerogative to use the sea for military purposes. It would overstate matters to say that the sea services lay down arms. But under that directive, which proclaimed the maritime commons a safe sanctuary for Western fleets, the services let important hardware and skills for surface, air, and undersea warfare lapse to an alarming extent. The inventory of merchantmen available for mobilization in wartime to transport manpower and resources to Europe or Asia in times of crisis likewise dwindled to a perplexing degree.

This self-induced belief that the sea services’ primary reason for being had lost credence had dire impact on the force structure. Why invest in a force equipped for battles that top leadership says will never take place? The US Navy’s fleet inventory has shrunk to half its Cold War numbers, while the US merchant fleet now has fewer ships available for service than it lost to damage or sinking during the opening months of US involvement in World War II in the Atlantic. It is an open question whether the current naval and merchant fleets are up to the rigors of competition with Eurasian great powers in those great powers’ own geographic neighborhoods, where they command advantages by virtue of short distances to points of confrontation; having their forces, bases, and resources close at hand; intimate knowledge of the physical and human terrain where a showdown may take place; and on and on. It takes capable and sizable fighting and combat-logistics forces to overpower a even a weaker “home team” making a home stand in wartime, or to deter or coerce a home team in peacetime. Knowing that, over the past quarter-century China and Russia have designed and fitted out forces explicitly meant to deny the US military, its allies, and its partners access to marginal seas and skies around the Eurasian periphery, and to hamper movement within those regions for sea forces already forward-deployed there, such as the US Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea and the Seventh Fleet in Japan.

4. Bipartisan Responses in Congress and the Pentagon. There is good news amidst this bleak survey of the competition, however. Successive US presidential administrations representing both major political parties have gone on record favoring a much bigger navy, as has a bipartisan navalist bloc in Congress. The need for increased numbers in the merchant fleet has attracted less scrutiny, perhaps because of the attention commanded by high-profile glamour platforms such as aircraft carriers, guided-missile destroyers, and submarines. Nevertheless, a vibrant fleet of mundane-seeming commercial ships is pivotal to sustaining “away games” in Eurasia, where they are most likely to take place. Navalists are well aware of the need to bulk up the logistics force should a new military struggle erupt for control of Europe or Asia. Consequently, political support seems to be swinging in favor of a buildup of naval and commercial sea power, much as it rallied in favor of such a buildup in 1940. That summer the fall of France to German arms precipitated the Two-Ocean Navy Act. The act appropriated funds to build the US Navy that won World War II in the Pacific, setting in motion a 70 percent expansion of the navy eighteen months before the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor brought America into the war. It allowed the United States to operate what amounted to a self-sufficient navy in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Russian invasion of Ukraine likewise seems to have amplified naval advocates’ voice in Washington DC, arousing consternation about the prospect of war in Asia as well as Eastern Europe. The Russian onslaught makes it plain that military aggression is no longer hypothetical.

This realization could constitute opportunity for foreign suppliers of warships or commercial vessels. Congress has long favored American industry through measures such as the Jones Act (1920). Among other things the act requires that only US-flagged ships carry goods from US port to US port. Lawmakers hope such measures will sustain a large merchant marine, although recent results have disappointed. Various “Buy American” measures, moreover, restrict procurement of shipping and weapon systems of all types from foreign builders. However, the US Navy and Marine Corps have embarked on a strategy of “distributed maritime operations” meant to break down the navy’s battle fleet and the fleet marine force into more, smaller, cheaper combatant ships and fewer large, high-end, expensive ships. The reasoning for such a strategy? A force founded on large numbers of hulls can lose one or a few vessels in action yet fight on, whereas a force whose combat power resides in a few major combatants loses a major percentage of its overall strength should one vessel be put out of action—a near-certainty should war erupt with China or Russia, or even with lesser antagonists such as Iran that possess substantial arsenals of shore-based anti-ship weaponry.

In other words, the demand for shipbuilding may soon be on the upswing. Accepted wisdom in Washington increasingly acknowledges the need for a distributed fleet numbering over five hundred crewed and uncrewed warships, up from under three hundred today, accompanied by a robust logistics fleet able to supply such a fleet operating amid intricate, dispersed, and contested nautical geography. Accepted wisdom also acknowledges that the US shipbuilding infrastructure desperately needs renovating after years of neglect, and that the shipbuilding sector may not be able either to construct the inventory America needs in a timely fashion or, just as important, to repair battle-damaged vessels in wartime and return them to the fight. Congress is considering a bill, the SHIPYARD Act, that would appropriate substantial funding to begin the process of rehabilitating public and private maritime infrastructure, but putting things right will take time assuming the bill is approved by Congress and the White House. Meanwhile the US Navy, Marine Corps, and merchant fleet need hulls in the near term to guard against a Chinese attack on Taiwan or a Russian attack on some other European neighbor. In other words, political pressure to act is mounting as the strategic environment deteriorates and awareness of past neglect of the sea services sets in among lawmakers and administration officials. Sheer necessity may prompt US leaders to set aside old attitudes, rules, and practices vis-à-vis buying foreign.

5. Outlook for Scottish Shipbuilders. So while the situation remains unfavorable for constructing shipping at Scottish and other foreign yards, it is conceivable that that could change—perhaps in a hurry. Two other factors are at work along with the fraying strategic outlook. First, renewed US emphasis on the importance of alliances has become a catalyst for noteworthy departures from past naval practice. Most conspicuously, a US Marine Corps F-35 stealth fighter squadron made up the bulk of the fixed-wing air contingent on board HMS Queen Elizabeth during the carrier’s maiden deployment to the Indo-Pacific last year. UK and US leaders have celebrated such initiatives as a worthwhile venture in “interchangeability,” which mingles allied crews and goes beyond “interoperability,” meaning compatible technology, tactics, techniques, and procedures. It is little stretch to extend the principle of interchangeability to maritime-industrial collaboration. If fighting forces should be interchangeable, so should the industries that produce allied fighting forces.

And second, official Washington seems increasingly receptive to allies’ involvement in furnishing the US sea services with shipping—albeit shipping constructed by overseas firms at US yards. For instance, the US Navy’s sizable contingent of “littoral combat ships” is built at an Austal-affiliated facility in Mobile, Alabama, and at a Fincantieri-affiliated facility in Marinette, Wisconsin. Austal is an Australian company, Fincantieri an Italian company. The US Navy, furthermore, has awarded Fincantieri Marinette Marine a contract to construct the first two Constellation-class guided-missile frigates, which derive from the Franco-Italian FREMM frigates. A warship of European origin thus will comprise an important element of the distributed US fleet now taking shape. A second yard may be named to help build the Constellation class once the initial design proves out. The Marine Corps, meanwhile, is pushing to procure a new class of “light amphibious warships,” small transports for ferrying bodies of missile-armed troops from island to island to help deny a peer adversary—chiefly China—the ability to use the sea for such purposes as an amphibious assault on Taiwan. At this stage it remains unclear which shipbuilder will be awarded a contract to build light amphibious warships, but recent history shows that European firms should be competitive. They should be competitive in the realm of merchant shipbuilding as well.

So there is some scope for Scottish shipbuilders to take part in this common enterprise. I would recommend that UK and industry leaders (1) acquaint themselves intimately with the strategic imperatives driving the US push for more numerous, more dispersed naval and merchant fleets, so that they can express themselves fluently in interactions with US leaders; (2) make themselves familiar with US laws and policies that impose constraints on foreign vendors of naval hardware; (3) study how foreign builders such as Austal and Fincantieri made their entry into the US shipbuilding market despite these barriers; (4) look for partnerships with US or foreign suppliers already active in the US market; and (5) start small and incremental, concentrating on simpler hulls such as merchantmen, the light amphibious warship, or perhaps uncrewed surface or undersea vessels. In so doing they can fashion a convincing political appeal to US decisionmakers while taking pragmatic steps toward competing for future contracts. Parlous strategic conditions make this a good time to mount such an effort.

April 2022

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