SUB BASE DEFENDERS POUR IN

It’s not just the locals who are gnash­ing their teeth about the Pentagon’s pro­posed shut down of the giant sub base in New London, Connecticut. Key mem­bers of Congress and under­sea war­fare experts are mad, too.
I sup­port keep­ing the base open, House Armed Service Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-​​CA) told Defense News. In dis­cussing base clo­sures with Secretary Rumsfeld, the only facil­ity I talked to him about other than Southern California instal­la­tions is the Submarine Base New London.
So far, objec­tions to the Pentagon’s base clo­sure plan have come in two fla­vors, mostly. Either folks don’t want their neigh­bor­hood instal­la­tion closed. Or they think that the Defense Department’s larger con­sol­i­da­tion strat­egy is flawed. Base Realignment and Closure com­mis­sion­ers, for exam­ple, are tak­ing a page from Phil Carter’s note­book, and voic­ing con­cerns that fewer national guard depots “would make it even harder to retain their forces if mem­bers have to travel more than 50 miles to report to their bases,” accord­ing to The Hill.
But the Naval Submarine Base New London home to 18 sub­marines and 33,000 sailors, civil­ians and fam­ily mem­bers — seems to be an excep­tion to the rule, gen­er­at­ing far wider sup­port than other instal­la­tions.
“The Navy’s [need for] advanced train­ing is so great that it is hard for me to believe that there would be a sig­nif­i­cant sav­ing in shut­ting down Sub Base New London,” Rear Admiral Hank McKinney, the for­mer com­man­der of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s sub­ma­rine force, tells Defense Tech. “If the issue is to relo­cate [the] sub­marines to Norfolk [Virginia] and Kings Bay [Georgia, the other two sub instal­la­tions on the East Coast], where there are bet­ter main­te­nance facil­i­ties then there prob­a­bly is an argu­ment for shut­ting down the sub­ma­rine sup­port side of the base. But I am not con­vinced that it makes sense to shut down and relo­cate the train­ing estab­lish­ment. The Navy kept [the] Great Lakes Naval Training Center [near Chicago] open to sup­port train­ing and I believe we should do the same in New London.“
Undersea author­ity Joe Buff is a whole lot less gen­tle, call­ing the ratio­nale for clos­ing the base “deeply and dan­ger­ously flawed.” Click here to read what he has to say.

The report’s main jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for clos­ing the New London base is that exist­ing naval berthing space (piers and docks) on the East Coast is in excess of required capac­ity. The report also states that the reduc­tion from 3 to 2 bases sup­port­ing U.S. Navy sub­marines on the Atlantic seaboard will main­tain ade­quate fleet dis­per­sal with­out affect­ing oper­a­tional capa­bil­ity. Let me pick this “logic” to pieces.
Firstly, America’s sub­ma­rine fleet is barely half the size it was at the end of the Cold War, and is rather badly over­stretched due to too many world­wide mis­sion com­mit­ments. Slow, mea­ger future sub­ma­rine acqui­si­tion plans only promise to make the prob­lem more severe. Our Silent Service fast-​​attacks may dwin­dle to 28 boats by 2029, only half of what we have today — and what we have today is barely enough.
The Navy itself has stated that in essence every sub­ma­rine must act as a two-​​ocean war­ship, tran­sit­ing between the Atlantic and Pacific very rapidly in any cri­sis sit­u­a­tion. The most covert route is also the short­est — through the Arctic, north of Canada. Were New London not avail­able, a round trip from Atlantic to Pacific would be 1,000 miles longer from Norfolk, Virginia, and 2,000 miles longer from Kings Bay, Georgia. The added travel time and wear and tear, over a pro­tracted period of high-​​tempo ops, become seri­ous crew reten­tion, safety, and cost con­cerns.
Worse, with weapons of mass destruc­tion in play and con­tin­u­ing to pro­lif­er­ate, the idea of con­cen­trat­ing indis­pen­si­ble skills and instal­la­tions in very few places defies mil­i­tary com­mon sense. Suppose a ter­ror­ist or rogue does suc­ceed in nuk­ing Norfolk or Kings Bay, with New London closed. If one Atlantic Coast base were destroyed, only one would be left, and badly over­taxed. How will new sub­ma­rine crews be trained? How will vital research be per­formed? Where will subs that sur­vive the attack, or were at sea dur­ing the attack, go as an interim home port that has the unique resources required to ade­quately sup­port them? Imagine how vul­ner­a­ble they’d be if they only had one pos­si­ble refuge, rather than a choice between two. When viewed in this con­text, the BRAC Report’s sup­posed “excess berthing capac­ity” sud­denly doesn’t appear so expend­able, does it? To me, it’s quite the oppo­site: New London becomes more vital than ever, not sim­ply as a fully active facil­ity in its own right, but also as a reserve against a future threat of unknown source and nature, whose effects in a sin­gle sur­prise attack could dev­as­tate a whole base.
Couldn’t this same argu­ment be applied to every mil­i­tary instal­la­tion? Not really. Submarine bases must be on a coast, and aside from the three exist­ing ones on the Atlantic, all the other ones are on the West Coast or in Hawaii or Guam — much too far away to pro­vide ade­quate redun­dancy.
Planes can use a civil­ian air­port, and troops can live in tents. Nuclear sub­marines are tem­pera­men­tal, need­ful beasts that just don’t have these sorts of options and protections.

May 17th, 2005 | Money Money Money | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.