Navy Ill-Equipped to Fight a Restricted War in Gulf

For years, the Navy has commissioned weighty studies and picked the best brains it can find on “low-intensity conflicts,” the less-than-total wars that erupt when superpowers become militarily engaged with lesser nations.

Yet in many ways--after all of the studies and after spending $582 billion to build toward a 600-ship fleet--the Navy finds itself ill-prepared to handle just such a delicate mission in the Persian Gulf. Indeed, some naval specialists believe, the Navy’s problems with limited warfare have grown greater, not smaller, as a result of policies encouraged by the Reagan Administration.

Supercarrier armadas are too big to use in the gulf’s cramped waters. Nuclear submarine fleets are irrelevant there. Even many of the Navy’s smaller warships lack the versatility and self-defense capabilities needed to operate against Iran’s seagoing guerrillas without running serious risks.

And the Navy’s love affair with the carriers, which form the centerpiece of its offensive maritime strategies, has left the service short of the kinds of equipment and training it needs most for defensive activity in the Persian Gulf--minesweeping, helicopter combat and special operations.

“This kind of warfare is really not our strength,” conceded one top Navy official. “It’s psychological: It’s at a relatively low order of force. And we’re just not focused on that kind of warfare.”

In part, defense experts say, this is the inevitable result of the Navy’s focus on its primary missions: deterring nuclear war, protecting ocean supply lines to Europe in the event of a major conflict and--under the Reagan Administration--preparing to stop the Soviet navy before it could leave its North Atlantic sanctuaries if war between the superpowers should come.

But other factors, some of them harder to justify, are adding to the Navy’s troubles, experts and some government officials say. And the result is that U.S. forces in the gulf may prove vulnerable to attack by the far less sophisticated forces of Iran.

One persistent problem is that the Navy’s historic insistence on blue-water, go-it-alone strategies has made it resist working closely with other military services--an attitude that has been especially troublesome in planning for so-called special operations.

Navy Balks at Army Copters

Early this month, that resistance drove Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to override Navy objections and order the Middle East Force to accept Army special operations helicopters. These helicopters quickly scored two of the Middle East Force’s most notable tactical victories against Iran’s hit-and-run tactics--the capture of the mine-laying vessel Iran Ajr and the swift crippling of Iranian speedboats that fired at a U.S. helicopter.

The argument over using the helicopters started after U.S. intelligence analysts became suspicious that Iran was seeding the gulf with mines under cover of night. The Army offered the services of a special team of Army helicopter forces trained and equipped with night-vision gear. Navy officials balked, according to Pentagon sources, arguing that the helicopters might not be able to operate from Navy flight decks.

It was not until Crowe intervened that the Navy agreed to let the Army choppers aboard. “At a certain point, Crowe became incensed,” recounted one knowledgeable source. “He said, ‘Damn it, I don’t care whether those are Air Force or Army assets; we’ve got to have some of those (helicopters) out there.’ ”

The Navy’s attitude toward working with other services was also a major factor in the Oct. 1 firing of Adm. James A. (Ace) Lyons Jr. Navy sources say Lyons, who was Pacific Fleet commander, was forced into retirement after he scuffled with the Defense Department’s top brass over which of the military services should run the Persian Gulf escort operation.

In August, Lyons argued the Navy should retain control over the operations of all ships in the Middle East Force. Instead, control of the escort operation went to the Florida-based Central Command, which has been responsible for running U.S. operations throughout most of the Middle East since it was established in 1983. It is commanded by Gen. George B. Crist, a Marine.

The Navy has also refused to place its own special operations forces, the Sea-Air-Land, or SEAL, commandos, under the command of the armed forces’ joint-service military unit, the Special Operations Command, established on April 16 by congressional action and based in Tampa, Fla.

“The Navy has traditionally defined SEAL units as a fleet asset, and they’re great at doing reconnaissance, onshore sabotage and other fleet missions,” said one congressional expert. “But the fleet has not projected that they’d be zipping around looking for speedboats or swatting at (Swedish-manufactured) Boghammar patrol boats.”

Beyond the problems created by the Navy’s independent ways, that branch’s preoccupation with its primary missions has produced forces so specialized that they cannot readily be adapted to meet the particular problems of low-intensity conflicts, especially against Iran in the gulf.

Once American sailors enter that narrow finger of water, they have crossed into a shadowy world of hit-and-run attacks in which zealotry can be as potent a force as weaponry. It is a world in which the best-laid naval plans can be swept away by hopeful martyrs and ships bristling with electronic gadgetry can be foiled by a single errant fighter pilot or a boatload of World War II-vintage iron mines.

It is a far different world from the one that dominates the thinking of the Navy’s sprawling planning bureaucracy.

During the Administration’s military buildup, experts say, the Navy’s traditional preference for building an offensive, go-it-alone fleet has been virtually unchecked by the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. And the centerpiece of that naval expansion has been the Navy’s 15 aircraft carriers.

But the 73,000-ton aircraft carriers, which are at the heart of the Navy’s planning, are too clumsy to operate in the gulf’s cramped waters. Last week, as four destroyers leveled an Iranian oil platform with five-inch naval gunfire, the nuclear carrier Ranger was steaming in the comparative safety of the North Arabian Sea, hundreds of miles away.

As a result, the destroyers Kidd, Leftwich, Hoel and John Young--which most often operate as part of a carrier battle group--had to carry out their retaliatory mission with a defensive shield that was thinner than usual. Although the Pentagon said carrier-based aircraft were flying nearby, experts question how long they could maintain continuous patrol so far from their home decks.

“When you lose defense-in-depth--that ring of defenses that carrier escorts are accustomed to operating with--you lose a great deal of your safety margin,” said retired Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll, now deputy director of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information. “In the Persian Gulf,” added Carroll, “you’re just darned near down to your last-ditch defenses.

“As a result,” Carroll said, “a lot of elements favor the attacker.”

That thinning of the defensive shield contributed to disaster on May 17, when an Iraqi fighter aircraft fired two Exocet missiles at the U.S. frigate Stark, killing 37 Americans. A formal Navy probe concluded that the Stark could have defended itself with the warning and the weapons it had. But the investigators suggested that while operating apart from their usual complement of carriers, the ships of the Middle East Force need to coordinate their defenses under a single destroyer squadron commander.

At the outset of the reflagging initiative, several Navy officials warned the White House that to operate U.S. warships as many as 600 miles away from carriers would leave them too vulnerable to attackers. One of them--Adm. Lyons--urged that the Navy send its warships no farther than Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura pumping facility.

The Saudi facility marked the farthest point up the gulf at which carrier-based fighters could fly round-the-clock patrols over the ships for protection, Lyons warned. Like several lawmakers and independent naval analysts, Lyons fretted that Iranian pilots flying suicide missions would zero in on U.S. convoys and breach the American warships’ thin defenses.

Offensive Strategy

In the face of such vulnerabilities, some of the Navy’s top brass say they would prefer to defend against Iranian naval harassment with the same offensive strategy devised to protect Atlantic convoys from the Soviet navy during a European conflict. In such a plan, the Navy would use carrier-based strike aircraft to hit Iranian missiles and patrol boats before the attackers leave the safety of their home bases.

But the White House has firmly overruled such proposals. It did so most recently last Sunday, when President Reagan chose to retaliate for an Iranian missile attack on the Sea Isle City by using ships inside the gulf to destroy the Iranian oil platform in international waters. He rejected options favored by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including an attack on an Iranian navy vessel or on missiles sites such as Iran’s Silkworm missile emplacements.

Already Paying the Price

The Middle East Force, however, has already begun paying the price for the Navy’s limitations, critics charge. When the U.S.-flagged Kuwaiti tanker Bridgeton hit a mine in the Persian Gulf on July 24, defense officials realized with a jolt that the production of purely defensive ships such as minesweepers had won relatively low priority in the Navy’s buildup.

At that time, the Navy had three active minesweeping ships and 18 in its reserve force--all commissioned in the mid-1950s--as well as two squadrons of minesweeping helicopters ready to deploy. Five of those ships have been making their way to the Persian Gulf since late August.

The Navy rejects the charge that it continues to neglect such forces. The Avenger, the first of 14 new minesweeping ships now planned, was commissioned on Sept. 12, and a third squadron of minesweeping choppers has begun training on MH-53E Sea Dragons in Alameda.