The US Navy has abandoned classic sailing skills — and it could lose its next war

The US Navy overly relies on electronics and automation, according to the US Naval Institute, and it could be its downfall in a war against a major foe like Russia or China.
US Navy figures have been warning for some time about a lack of fundamental skills that could lead to the US losing its next major sea conflict.
Russia and China both have a strong focus on countering the US's ability to access electronic and automated systems.

The US Navy has some of the world's most advanced ships with electronics and automated systems that handle much of the manual tasks involved in the millenias-old craft of sailing — but that same technological strength may be its downfall in a fight against Russia or China.

"The next war will be analog, and the surface Navy is unprepared for it," Jonathan Panter, a former US Navy Surface Warfare Officer begins an article in the US Naval Institute's April edition of "Proceedings," its monthly publication.

"Reliance on digital technologies is particularly acute in the realms of communications, propulsion systems, and navigation and has produced a fleet that may not survive the first missile hit or hack," Panter writes.

Panter's comments follow a 2017 that saw two US Navy destroyers suffer massive collisions with container ships. These ships are among the world's best at tracking and defending against incoming missiles flying at hundreds of miles an hour, yet they failed to steer well enough to avoid getting hit by a relatively slow container ship the size of an urban neighborhood.

"Navigation and seamanship, these are the fundamental capabilities which every surface warfare officer should have, but I suspect if called to war, we’ll be required to do a lot more than safely navigate the Singapore strait," US Navy Capt. Kevin Eyer, former skipper of the cruisers Shiloh, Chancellorsville, and Thomas Gates said in December. Eyer was speaking in reference to the USS John McCain's crash with a container ship in the Singapore strait, as Breaking Defense noted at the time.

"If our surface forces are unable to successfully execute these fundamental blocking and tackling tasks, how can it be possibly be expected that they are also able to do the much more complex warfighting tasks?" Eyer asked.

The Navy responded to the two major crashes by replacing the commander of its Pacific fleet, but concerns about its reliance on mutable, fallible electronic and automated systems remains an issue.

From Panter:

Navigation, that quiet background endeavor without which missiles cannot be launched or guns fired, is similarly teetering one casualty away from disaster. For a loss of GPS, you switch to another; for a loss of a VMS console, you switch to another. But what happens in a total loss-of-power casualty? Wait until the 30-minute batteries on the GPS and VMS wind down, then switch to a laptop version—also battery-powered. The assumption, of course, is that help will be on the way.

China has deployed jamming equipment to the South China Sea. Russia has already begun jamming US Air Force platforms over Syria. All expert accounts say that electronic warfare, possibly even space-based attacks on GPS infrastructure in the sky will factory heavily into future warfare, making Panter's assessment all the more ominous.

Russia operates a more analog fleet than the US in both at sea and in the air, and China's sea power is concentrated near its own shores where ground assets can back it up.

Through electronic warfare and a misstep in US Navy strategy, the world's biggest, most powerful Navy could lose its next war as its strengths turn to weaknesses in the face of technological over-reliance.