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Flotilla Warfare

A workshop sponsored by the Secretary of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment on retaining American influence in East Asia led to a report published in October 2011. The workshop participants advocated four force elements to reduce the chance of Chinese aggression and a shooting war. One component is a flotilla of small, highly lethal combatants that can be sent on the surface into the China Seas. Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and war gaming at the Naval War College independently saw the potential of such low-cost missile combatants and the need for a more detailed examination.

The "flotilla” (from Spanish, diminutive of flota (“fleet”), from French flotte, meaning a small flota of ships, or a fleet of small ships), first came to prominence at the beginning of the 20th Century in the form of deadly torpedo boats, submarines, and mines. Battleships that ventured into littoral waters paid a dreadful penalty, notably illustrated by the loss of three of them and a battlecruiser to mines in March 1915 in the Dardanelles. The first salvoes were with torpedoes. Then, starting with the sinking of the Israeli destroyer Eilat in 1967 by Soviet-built Osas and Komars, the salvoes became cruise missiles and navies entered the missile age of warfare.

In World War II, the US Navy became aircraft carrier and submarine centric. Carrier task forces plus submarines—acting independently or in wolf packs—had grown in importance after World War I. Simultaneously the “flotilla” was distinguished by leading strategists like Sir Julian Corbett as an entirely different fleet component distinct in function and capabilities from capital ships that gained command of the high seas, and submarines that conducted a guerre de course against shipping.

The weight of ordnance to put a warship out of action increases only as the one-third power of its displacement, making smaller missile ships a cost-effective offensive capability. In other words, the historical evidence is that if a 300 foot ship will be put out of action be a certain kind of missile or quantity or ordnance, then it takes only three hits with the same missile or three times the ordnance to incapacitate a 900 foot ship. For detailed wartime data see R. L. Humphrey, “Comparing Damage and Sinking Data for World War II and Recent Conflicts,” presented to the 13th General Working Meeting of The Military Conflict Institute, McLean, VA, Oct. 1992; T. R. Beall, The Development of a Naval Battle Model and Its Validation Using Historical Data, Naval Postgraduate School Masters Thesis, Monterey, CA, 1990; and J. C. Shulte, An Analysis of the Historical Effectiveness of Antiship Cruise Missiles in Littoral Warfare, Naval Postgraduate School Masters Thesis, Sept 1994, Monterey, CA. Their results and BuShips data (on sinkings only) are summarized in Hughes, Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 2000, pp. 156-164. Most of the data is taken from World War II battles when much attention and construction costs went into staying power as armor, compartmentation, and system redundancy. But evidence from actual battles at sea after 1945 is sparse.

The salvo equations are the successors to Lanchester Equations whose square law was applied to a formation of battleships. Lanchester thought the square law would apply in aerial combat. It did not; Morse and Kimball in 1953 concluded air-to-air combat followed a linear law which says numbers and individual aircraft performance have equal value. An othewis obscure Russian officer named Osipov tested their applicability with historical battle data and concluded that for ground combat the casualty generation rate on the two sides lies more or less half way between the square and linear laws.

Specifically the salvo equations apply when missiles or torpedoes are fired in batches instead of “continuously.” The salvo-like phenomenon was also seen in the five big Pacific carrier battles in World War II in which each side endeavored to detect and attack first with all its air wings simultaneously in a single pulse, or “salvo,” of aircraft attacking as a coordinated unit.

The salvo equations show that if your fleet has three times as many combatants as mine, then for parity in loss ratios (in other words, which side will have ships remaining when all of the opponents are out of action), to overcome your numerical advantage each of my ships must have thrice the offensive power, thrice the defensive power, and thrice the survivability (the “staying power”) of yours. Brief reflection shows why. If the enemy puts one friendly ship out of action, friendly forces simultaneously lose its remaining offensive missiles, its power of defense, and its contribution as a target that the enemy now no longer needs to shoot at.

Another general truth quantitatively demonstrated by the salvo equations is the advantage of out-scouting the enemy and launching a first effective attack. This phenomenon first occurred in the aforementioned Pacific carrier battles of World War II, but the payoff of an unanswered first attack is even more pronounced in the missile era.

The third general property of missile warfare shown by the equations is that if ship numbers and staying power are both small, then an unstable combat situation arises, in which the shift in results of an exchange moves from total victory to total loss within a small change in the number of ships on either side.

Measuring defenses by measuring ASCM leakers (leakers being the small number of incoming missiles that penetrate a capable defense) counts both offensive and defensive missile expenditures. A stark and seemingly realist outcome is that frequently one side expended all its defensive missiles and was denuded of active defenses. It is very important to determine the sufficiency of (1) the missile load out in a single Aegis ship, (2) the missile mix in a task force, and (3) the total inventory of all categories of missiles in the entire fleet, when compared with best estimates of enemy inventories of missiles such as DF-21s.

In the 1973 Arab-Israeli War the 250-ton Israeli Sa’ar boats were 100% successful in defending themselves and all losses were suffered by Egypt and Syria. A defender was either highly effective or highly ineffective.

The battle-tested first generation Israeli Sa’ar boats of 250 tons designed in 1970 are worth close study, not only to see why the original design was so combat-effective but to observe the rapid learning and development processes in the Israeli navy before and after it fought in 1973. Among many other designs are the Finnish Hamina’s, (250 tons), Greek Roussan’s (600 tons), Swedish Visby’s (650 tons), French La Combattante FS-56 (400 tons), Norwegian Skjold’s (280 tons), Singaporean Victory’s (600 tons), and the U.S.-built Egyptian Ambassador III’s (500 tons).

The Sa’ars grew in size because the Israelis need to deploy farther and carry a helicopter aboard for scouting. Later the Israeli navy adopted a 2,800 ton German design, but for distant blue water deployment, not for flotilla operations. The US Navy’s problem is the opposite. The US has blue water warships with ample range and air capabilities for distant operations but need small combatants to fight and sometimes suffer losses in confined waters.

There are several ways a squadron can be deployed. One is to carry it in a large commercial vessel. The MV Tern carried four 1,400 ton Avenger class mine countermeasures ships to the Persian Gulf. The same ship could easily lift eight or more vessels of 500 tons when circumstances precluded their crossing the ocean. The MSC class minesweeper of 450 tons (crew 35) is of a different design and era, but in the 1950s it easily sailed independently, for example, from Charleston SC to New London and back in both fair and foul weather.

The Naval Postgraduate School’s Sea Lance design of 600 tons was rather carefully costed at $60 million in 2001 dollars. Today the same design would probably cost $75 or $80 million, but the Sea Lance has expensive features, including a low observable, wave piercing catamaran hull and 45 knot speed.