Washington Naval Treaty 2.0

Torpedo: The Complete History Of The World's Most Revolutionary Naval Weapon

by Roger Branfill-Cook

BETWEEN THE WARS

In the early 1920s the USN decided to withdraw the underwater tubes from its battleships, followed by the removal of their above-water tubes, deemed too dangerous in a big-gun battle. Above-water torpedo tubes remained standard fittings on all new cruiser designs, but except for the Omaha-class ships — which could be used in the role of destroyer flotilla leaders as in the IJN — the tubes were removed from all US cruisers in the mid 1930s. This move was not the result of a desire to reduce top-weight, as all the early Treaty cruisers came in under weight, but on the grounds that their tactical deployment did not require them, cruisers being reserved for gunfire support of destroyer flotillas.

Meanwhile, major moves were made in terms of the propulsion units. By the end of the Great War the standard British torpedo engine was a wet-heater four-cylinder radial made of bronze, with integral cylinder barrels and heads as in contemporary automobile practice. Because of the increasing weight of the air flask, required to withstand ever higher pressures, experiments were made with hydrogen peroxide, which needed a lighter containment vessel, to produce oxygen via a catalyst. These developments were shelved by the British, but taken up by the Germans, the Japanese and the Americans in the latter part of the Second World War.

To obtain more power from existing pressure vessels, thought was given to using air enriched with oxygen — up to 57 per cent by weight, or even pure oxygen. The British 21in Mark VII of 1928 was the Royal Navy’s first enriched air torpedo, carried by the London-class heavy cruisers, and this led to the 24.5in Mark 1 installed in the Nelson and Rodney. Before the outbreak of the Second World War, however, due to corrosion problems with the air vessels, both enriched air models were changed to run on normal compressed air.

At around the same time, the British were perfecting the burner-cycle reciprocating engine, which retained the classic four-cylinder radial layout. The bore/stroke ratio of these compact radial units bore little resemblance to the contemporary automobile long-stroke inline reciprocating engine, with its inherent disadvantages of piston friction and heavy, out of balance, reciprocating weights. The radial engine could thus continue to rival the American preference for the turbine engine. The first British torpedo to use the burner-cycle engine was the long-lived Mark VIII for submarine use. It was a modernised model of the Mark VIII which would be fired against the General Belgrano fifty-five years later. The corresponding torpedo for surface ships was the Mark IX.

The Brotherhood burner-cycle engine was fed with compressed air at around 840psi. A small amount of paraffin was atomised in the air and burned. The resultant gas was fed into the cylinders at a temperature of 1000 °C, and additional fuel was injected just before the piston reached top dead-centre. The compression caused the fuel mixture to detonate, driving the piston down as in a diesel engine. The exhaust gas was evacuated through ports in the cylinder, but there were also two auxiliary exhaust ports in the piston crown. By 1945 this impressive power unit would have been tuned to produce up to 465bhp, sufficient to propel a 21in torpedo at 50 knots. Plans to run a version of this engine on nitric acid promised to produce 750bhp, but the outbreak of war meant that it was never built.

In 1923 German experiments with electric torpedoes continued in secret in Sweden, and the design was finalised six years later. Since the Versailles treaty banned Germany from possessing submarines, the electric torpedo was held in readiness until Hitler came to power and began repudiating the terms of Versailles.

Magnetic influence exploders had been developed during the Great War, and the Duplex exploder was fitted to Royal Navy torpedoes from 1938. But the old problem of insufficient live-firing tests cropped up, and was to seriously affect their performances. The only navy to carry out large-scale live torpedo firing was the Imperial Japanese navy, which had expended many obsolete warships in tests in the lead-up to the Second World War. The Japanese saw in the torpedo the weapon they needed to give them an edge over the numerically superior US fleet in the Pacific. Japanese war strategy involved wearing down the US Navy in a series of actions across the Pacific Ocean until parity had been reached with the Japanese battle line, when the dreadnoughts would move in for the decisive final battle. A major part of this strategy depended on the torpedo: they set to work to produce the best in the world, and in this they succeeded.

Japanese development of an electric torpedo for submarines began in 1921, inspired by the model the Germans had introduced to their U-boats just prior to the Armistice. The design was finalised by 1925. The 21in torpedo was powered by two 54-cell lead-acid batteries feeding a 95ehp motor. It could run at 28 to 30 knots out to 7000m (7660yds), carrying a 300kg (660lbs) warhead. It became the Type 92 in 1934, but manufacture was suspended, ready for mass production in the event of war.

The Imperial Japanese navy studied other German late war developments, including the 600cm 23.6in torpedo. They had previously tried out the 27.5in Fiume torpedo produced in around 1900, and in 1905 they had ordered 24in torpedoes from Fiume for coastal defence. Now they decided to produce a heavyweight torpedo of their own for the anticipated conflict with the Americans. The result was the 24in Year 8 torpedo of 1919, capable of 38 knots over 10,000m (11,000yds) and carrying a 345kg (759lbs) warhead. Ten years later the 24in Type 90 appeared, capable of 46 knots over 7000m (7660yds) with an explosive charge of 375kg (825lbs).

They had briefly tested oxygen-enriched torpedoes in 1917. Future Admiral Oyagi, during the two years (1926–27) he spent at the Whitehead factory in England, heard rumours that the Royal Navy was fitting oxygen-fuelled 24.5in torpedoes in Rodney and Nelson. In fact the 24.5in Mark 1 originally ran on oxygen-enriched air, but on his return to Japan, Oyagi headed up a team to work on producing a version of the Japanese 24in torpedo to run on 100 per cent oxygen.

There were severe problems to overcome. The oxygen had to be prevented from coming into contact with any of the lubricants in the torpedo mechanism, to avoid the risk of explosion. More serious were the explosions which occurred in the engine combustion chambers as soon as the oxygen and kerosene fuel were injected. The design team overcame this hazard by starting the torpedo on compressed air, stored in a ‘first air bottle’ and only then gradually changing over to pure oxygen. They succeeded in producing a working torpedo, which was designated the Type 93, from the year 2593 in the Japanese calendar when the design was finalised.

The Type 93 oxygen-fuelled engine produced 520 horsepower at 1200rpm, compared with the 240hp of the British 24.5in and the 320hp of the initial Mark VIII. It could run at 49 knots for 20,000m (22,000yds), an exceptional performance. At 36 knots it would reach out to a phenomenal 40,000m (44,000yds). It carried a 490kg (1078lbs) warhead, capable of inflicting devastating damage. And it was practically wakeless. To profit fully from its deadly characteristics the IJN introduced power-reloading gear to their large fleet destroyers, following the provision of multiple reloads on board their cruisers.

Since the Japanese had previously had difficulty in forging the air vessels required for their licence-built Whiteheads, they constructed a special 4000-ton press to forge the body and after end of the flasks for the Type 93 out of steel billets. The air flask forward end cover was fixed with a large copper washer, the internal pressure keeping the joint gas-tight, and the arrangement proved extremely satisfactory.

The Type 93 was too large to be carried in submarines, so a smaller 21in oxygen torpedo was designed for them in 1935, the Type 95. It could run at 49 knots for 9000m (9840yds) and at 45 knots it reached out to 12,000m (13,000yds). The Type 95 carried a 405kg (891lbs) warhead. In 1943 the Model 2 would carry a warhead of 550kg (1210lbs). The Type 95 first air bottles often leaked, and while in the tubes on cruisers and destroyers it was a simple matter to verify the pressure of their oxygen-fuelled torpedoes at regular intervals and, if necessary, top it up, in a submarine this was not so easy, a factor leading to the electric Type 92 being resuscitated.

In 1937 the Japanese designed their third oxygen-fuelled torpedo, this time an even smaller 18in model, the Type 97, designed for midget submarines. It carried a 350kg (770lbs) charge at 45 knots over 5500m (6000yds). The original Type 97 would see action only once, during the attack on Pearl Harbor, as its leaky first air bottles were impossible to check and recharge, since the torpedoes were muzzle-loaded into the tubes before the start of a mission, and the crew had no access to the torpedoes when under way.

The Japanese pre-war torpedo arsenal was completed by the excellent Type 91 aircraft torpedo, and this is fully described in Chapter 8. They experimented with highspeed torpedoes for destroyers, the two built reaching 56 knots, and also with turbine torpedo engines, but neither development was pursued. Up until 1940 they used round-nosed torpedo heads, but in that year the Italian streamlined torpedo head was introduced and used on all types, with a claimed increase in speed of around 2 knots, with no increase in engine power.



The Italian-Designed Streamlined Nose Introduced From 1940 On Japanese Torpedo Types. The Dimensions Are In Millimetres. (Drawing From US Naval Technical Mission To Japan, Japanese Torpedoes And Tubes, Article 1, ‘Ship And Kaiten Torpedoes’, April 1946)

The US Navy produced three new torpedo designs in the 1930s, which would continue to serve throughout the Second World War. The Mark 14 submarine torpedo was designed in 1931, and was a development of the previous Bliss-Leavitt designs. The destroyer version was the Mark 15, which was longer with a larger warhead, but otherwise differed in minor details only. The wartime experiences with these two types will be described in Part IV. The Mark 13 aerial torpedo is described in Chapter 8.

The US Navy had begun experiments with alternative fuels as early as 1915, and in 1929 had started a research programme at the Naval Research Laboratory. By 1934 they had produced ‘navol’, a concentrated solution of hydrogen peroxide in water to provide an oxygen source, burning alcohol as fuel. The projected Mark 17 Navol torpedo for destroyers was interrupted by the attack on Pearl Harbor and the urgent need to produce torpedoes of the existing types.

After February 1924, When Fiume Became Part Of The Kingdom Of Italy, The Italians Constructed A Torpedo Testing Tower Beside The Torpedo Factory. This Is Its Reinforced Concrete Structure Photographed In 2003. The Lower Level Had Two Torpedo Frames Which Could Be Lowered For Underwater Launches; The Next Level Up Carried Out Deck-Level Launches; And The Third Level Simulated Aircraft Launches. The Wooden Structures On Top Contained Measuring Instruments And Observers. (Photo Courtesy Of Erwin Sieche)

Torpedo

Mk 16 DEVELOPMENT DATE:
1943
APPROXIMATE IN-SERVICE DATES:
1943-1975



In 1943, the Naval Torpedo Station, Newport, R.I., and the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C., began development of a submarine-launched, antisurface ship torpedo designated Torpedo Mk 16. The decision to use "Navol" (concentrated hydrogen peroxide (H2O2O)) as an oxidant came as a result of research on chemical torpedoes which began in 1915. Torpedo Mk 16, which was also produced at the Torpedo Station in Newport, and at the Naval Ordnance Plant, Forest Park, Ill., had the same physical characteristics as the Mk 14 Mod 3 torpedo. As a result of World War II, production began before development was completed on this torpedo. None of the Mk 16 torpedoes were used in combat, although 60 units were completed prior to the end of the war. Production continued in post-World War II years, however, with over 1700 Torpedoes Mk 16 manufactured. The final version was Torpedo Mk 16 Mod 8 which was withdrawn from service use in 1975.

CHARACTERISTICS
PHYSICAL
Length 246 inches
Diameter 21 inches
Weight 4000 pounds
Propulsion Turbine
Guidance Gyro
Enabling Yes
Homing No
FC Settings Electrical
Warhead Mk 16 Mod 7
746 pounds HBX
Exploder Mk 9 Mod 4
Contact/Influence

PERFORMANCE
Speed 46.2 knots
Range 11,000 yards

Torpedo

Mk 17 DEVELOPMENT DATE:
1940

APPROXIMATE IN-SERVICE DATES:
1944-1950



Development on Torpedo Mk 17 began in 1940 by the Naval Torpedo Station, Newport, R.I., and the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C. A long-range, high-speed torpedo, the Mk 17 was a destroyer-launched, antisurface ship weapon using "Navol" (concentrated hydrogen peroxide (H2O2O)) as an oxidant. Torpedo Mk 17 development, halted in 1941 due to pressure to produce Torpedoes Mk 13 and Mk 15 for the war effort, was resumed again in 1944. (Detailed knowledge of the Japanese type 93 "Long Lance," a 22,000-yard, 49-knot oxygen torpedo became available about this time.) As in the case of the Mk 16 torpedo, the Mk 17 went into production before development was completed. The producer was the Torpedo Station in Newport. Although there were 450 Mk 17 torpedoes completed before the end of the second World War, none were used in combat. Torpedo Mk 17 was discontinued around 1950 after seeing only limited use in post-war years. Main factors in the early demise of the Mk 17 were its contribution to destroyer topside weight, similarity to the Mk 16, and, also, the emerging role of destroyer as an antisubmarine warfare platform.

CHARACTERISTICS
PHYSICAL
Length 288 inches
Diameter 21 inches
Weight 4600 pounds
Propulsion Turbine
Guidance Gyro
Enabling No
Homing No
FC Settings Mechanical
Warhead Mk 17 Mod 3
879.5 pounds HBX
Exploder Mk 6 Mod 1
Contact

PERFORMANCE
Speed 46 knots
Range 18,000 yards

Chiefs of the Bureau of Ordnance

Rear Admiral Ralph Earle, 1916–1920........................gladhander.
Rear Admiral Charles B. McVay Jr., 1920–1923...............politician.
Rear Admiral Claude C. Bloch, 1923–1927....................competent.
Rear Admiral William D. Leahy, 1927–1931...................idiot.
Rear Admiral Edgar B. Larimer, 1931–1934...................competent.
Rear Admiral Harold Rainsford Stark, 1934–1937.............criminal imbecile.
Rear Admiral William R. Furlong, 1937–1941.................competent.
Rear Admiral William H. P. Blandy, 1941–1943...............atomic playboy.

Secretary of the Navy
Josephus Daniels, 5 March 1913 – 4 March 1921..............racist bigot and idiot.
Edwin Denby, 6 March 1921 – 10 March 1924..................indicted criminal.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr., 10 March 1924 – 19 March 1924......brought in to clean up after Denby.
Curtis D. Wilbur, 19 March 1924 – 4 March 1929.............competent.
Charles Francis Adams III, 5 March 1929 – 4 March 1933.....extremely competent.
Claude A. Swanson, 4 March 1933 – 7 July 1939..............racist bigot and idiot.
Charles Edison, 7 July 1939 – 24 June 1940.................succeeded Swanson after that idiot died, but was unable to do the job.
Lewis Compton, 24 June 1940 – 11 July 1940.................followed Edison after that gladhander ean for New Jersey governor, incompetent.
Frank Knox, 11 July 1940 – 28 April 1944...................one mean son of an expletive deleted. Was handed the manure sandwich.

God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.
-Otto von Bismarck

The Americans are a very lucky people. They're bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish.
-Otto von Bismarck

HOW THE FLEET FORGOT TO FIGHT

By Dmitry Filipoff

Series Introduction

“Fleet level processes and procedures designed for safe and effective operations were increasingly relaxed due to time and fiscal constraints, and the ‘normalization-of-deviation’ began to take root in the culture of the fleet. Leaders and organizations began to lose sight of what ‘right’ looked like, and to accept these altered conditions and reduced readiness standards as the new normal.” –2017 Strategic Readiness Review commissioned in the aftermath of the collisions involving USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and USS John S. McCain (DDG-56)

The U.S. Navy is suffering from self-inflicted strategic dysfunction across the breadth of its enterprise. This series seeks to explore the theme of the normalization of deviation in some of the most critical operations, activities, and attributes that prepare the U.S. Navy for war. Because the U.S. Navy is the senior partner in its alliance activities many of these problems probably hold true for allied navies as well.

Part One below looks at U.S. Navy combat training and draws a comparison with Chinese Navy training.

Part Two will examine firepower relating to offense, defense, and across force structure.

Part Three will look at tactics and doctrine with an emphasis on network- and carrier-centric fleet combat.

Part Four will discuss technical standards.

Part Five will look at the relationship between the Navy’s availability and material condition.

Part Six will examine the application of strategy to operations.

Part Seven will look at strategy and force development, including force structure assessment.

Part Eight will conclude with recommendations for a force development strategy to refocus the U.S. Navy on the high-end fight and sea control.

Combat Training

“This ship is built to fight; you’d better know how.” –Former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke (ret.) at the commissioning ceremony of the destroyer USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51)

The training strategy of a military service is one of its most fundamental responsibilities. Training is central to piercing the fog of war as much as possible before combat exacts its price. Training is what forges people into warfighters.

Soon after the Cold War ended the Navy announced a “change in focus and, therefore, in priorities for the Naval Service away from operations on the sea toward power projection.”1 A new operating focus on low-end missions such as partner development missions, striking land targets, and deterring rogue regimes came to dominate its focus. Different training followed. This training and operating paradigm replaced the high-end threat focus the Navy was originally made for in an era of great power competition against the Soviet Union. But the shift was wholesale, and did not attempt to preserve a responsible minimum of important skills that still held relevance. Perhaps worst of all, somehow this shift allowed U.S. Navy training to fall to incredible lows and remain there for most of a generation.

So much valuable corporate memory has evaporated. Extremely unrealistic training exercises starved Sailors of opportunities to learn important skills and prove themselves. And while the U.S. Navy slipped for years its latest rival, the Chinese Navy, made strong gains in the very same skills the U.S. Navy was losing.

Realism and the Nature of U.S. Navy Exercising

“The mission of the fleet in time of peace is preparation for war, and in this preparation tactical training heads the list of requirements…No matter how perfect we are in every other respect, if we cannot make good here we might as well not exist.” –Captain William S. Sims, “Naval War College Methods and Principles Applied Afloat,” 1915.

For years the Navy’s training exercises took on a scripted character where the outcomes were generally known beforehand and where opposing forces were usually made to lose. Scripted training is not inherently wrong if it is used as a stepping stone to more open-ended and complex exercises. However, such events were very few and far between. As a result most U.S. Navy high-end combat training remained stuck at an extremely basic level that barely scratched the surface of war. As a report from the Naval Studies Board described Navy training, “There is little free play, and exercises are typically scripted with little deviation allowed.”2

One of the most important methods of making exercises realistic is facing off against opponents that can win. Going up against a thinking and capable adversary creates a level of challenge that simple target practice cannot approach. Red teams and opposing forces can be highly specialized units that incorporate key intelligence insights to make their behavior more like that of a foreign competitor. Opposing forces can also be more simple when using scratch teams where training units can be divided into opposing sides and told to challenge each other. Scratch opposition forces are not as realistic as using teams informed by intelligence on competitors, but scratch teams can pose a real challenge because it is still troops competing against troops.

It appears Navy exercising was devoid of opposition forces that stood a chance. In “An Open Letter to the U.S. Navy from Red,” Captain Dale Rielage, the intelligence director of U.S. Pacific Fleet, writes from the perspective of an opposing force commander to the U.S. Navy and offers insight into how the Navy minimized challenge in its training by handicapping its Red teams:

“Your opposing forces often are very good, but you have trained them to know their place…our experience is that they have learned to self-regulate their aggressiveness, knowing what senior Blue and White cell members will accept. As one opposing force member recently told us during a ‘high-end’ training event, their implied tasking included not annoying the senior flag officer participating in the event. They knew from experience that aggressive Red action and candid debriefs were historically a source of annoyance. They played accordingly.”3

Rielage invoked the infamous Millennium Challenge exercise. This exercise was a massive warfighting experiment that became a controversy after the opposing force commander Lt. Gen Paul van Riper quit in protest. Riper at first inflicted devastating losses on the Blue team through unconventional means, but subsequent rounds cemented parameters that forced Red to lose.4 According to Rielage, “The entire event generally is remembered as an example of what not to do…The reality is that we repeat this experience on a smaller scale multiple times each year.”

Rielage then goes on to suggest the problem is extremely pervasive and longstanding:

“You talk about accepting failure as a way to learn, but refuse to fail. It is instructive to ask a room of senior officers the last time they played in—or even heard of—a game or exercise where Red won.”

If the Red teams of Navy exercising are so constrained they rarely ever win then what are they being used for? Admiral Scott Swift, recent commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, gives a clue in “A Fleet Must be Able to Fight.” Swift points out that “Our warfighting culture focuses on kill ratio—the number of enemy losses we can inflict for every loss we take.”5 However, Navy exercising usually results in extremely favorable tradeoffs. Swift argued that the Navy’s “reliance on high kill ratios” causes it to focus on “exquisite engagements,” or “firing from a position of minimum uncertainty and maximum probability of success (emphasis added).” Swift concludes that in high-end operations “it is not possible to generate the number of exquisite engagements necessary to achieve victory.”

Warfighting culture is a product of training. If the Navy’s warfighting culture was focused on easy (“exquisite”) engagements that always earn high kill ratios then perhaps the reason opposing forces almost never won is because they were relegated to the role of cannon fodder.

One example of Red teams being used for simplistic target practice is seen in how submarines were often pitted against warships. Only three years ago did the surface fleet finally open a fully integrated tactical center of excellence for itself, the Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC, or the TOPGUN of the surface fleet as they often say), whose responsibilities include improving training and tactics.6 One SMWDC commander spoke of how the Navy was using the surface fleet as an opposing force to train submarines in certain exercises, where according to Admiral John Wade, “Up until two years ago, surface ships were kind of just targets…They told you to go drive from Point A and Point B…The submarines were just crushing us.”7

How else can one reduce an opponent to easy prey? The Navy accomplished this in part through a linear style of training. Navy training took the form of a series of events that focused on individual warfare areas. These include mission areas such as anti-air warfare, anti-surface warfare, and anti-submarine warfare. Exercise and certification events mainly focused on working only just one skillset at a time. Admiral Swift suggested Navy training amounted to “ticking off a discrete schedule of individual training objectives” and argued that this is why the Navy could not execute critical warfighting tasks with confidence. While the Navy did manage to train individual skills, “…we as a force never practiced them together, in combination with multiple tasks…”8

This limits the freedom to play an accurate opposition force. Capt. Rielage remarked that Red teams are most often constrained and used to only “perform a specific function to facilitate an event” (such as an individual training certification event) rather than behave like a thinking adversary.

Many naval platforms are multi-domain in nature, with the ability to attack targets in the air, on the ocean, and beneath the surface. Cross-domain fires are the norm in war at sea, such as how a submarine can fire missiles at a ship from underwater. Sinking a modern warship is at least a matter of knowing how to fight targets on the surface and in the air at the same time, simply because ships can fire missiles at each other. Naval warfare involves sensors and weapons that can reach out to hundreds of miles from a single ship. The scale of this multi-domain battlespace can be enormous while containing numerous types of threats. Through this complexity war at sea can be filled with an incredible scope of possibilities and combinations. Even in an era absent great power competition rogue regimes like Iran still field multi-domain capabilities such as submarines and anti-ship missiles. Practicing only one skillset at a time using cannon fodder opposition forces that almost never win barely scratches the surface of war, yet this is exactly how the U.S. Navy has been training its strike groups for years.

In recent decades it appears the Navy did not have a true high-end threat exercise until Admiral Swift instituted the Fleet Problem exercises two years ago.9 It must be recognized that because the Fleet Problems are so new they still may not accurately represent real war. Instead, they simply set and combine the basic conditions to present a meaningful challenge to train for the high-end fight.

The Fleet Problems are large-scale, long-duration, and open-ended events. Large-scale, in that the unit being tested can be a strike group or larger; long duration, in that the exercise is at least several days long instead of less than 24 hours; open-ended, in that they give wide latitude to the troops involved rather than narrowly constraining them to execute proscribed methods.10 Perhaps most critically, the Fleet Problems include an opposition force that is capable of inflicting painful losses. They also force the Navy to exercise multiple warfighting areas in combination rather than one at a time, which was the standard design for the Composite Unit Training Exercise (COMPTUEX) that was considered the peak of high-end sea control training in every deploying strike group’s workup cycle.11 The novelty of the Fleet Problems suggests the Navy’s overseas exercises on deployment were not much better. While these individual training conditions are not totally unprecedented in the Navy the Fleet Problems appear to be the first events in many years to effectively combine them on a large scale.

Before the Fleet Problems the Navy’s training system stood in stark contrast to the exercise programs of other branches. Both the Army and the Air Force are keenly aware of the need to use dedicated and capable opposition forces to hammer warfighting competence into their units through high-end threat training.12 Hundreds of aircraft participate annually in the Air Force’s Red Flag exercise where opposing aggressor squadrons often impose high cost. Nearly a third of the Army’s brigades rotate every year through the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin where Army units are regularly challenged by dedicated opposition forces. The table below shows how Army Brigade Combat Teams do not always score high kill ratios at the NTC.13



Original caption from source: This table captures the lethality of four armored BCTs (ABCTs) that trained under live-fire conditions at NTC by outlining the total number of threats presented to the ABCTs and the effects of the BCTs’ weapon systems. Of note is that greater than 94 percent of the “enemy” destroyed during these live-fires were destroyed with direct-fire systems (including attack aviation), meaning that our formations fought a “fair” fight.

The National Training Center and Red Flag exercises have existed for decades and are among the highest priorities for their respective military branches. Evolving real-world threats frequently combine with new technology to introduce fresh challenges into these capstone training events. Yet in spite of everything that was changing about the Navy’s technology and advances being made by foreign competitors the Navy’s premier pre-deployment exercise stagnated. Admiral Phil Davidson suggested, “we’ve made more changes during the last 18 months to COMPTUEX than in the last 18 years.”14

The problem of military training becoming so scripted that victory is assured is not unprecedented. The Marines also have some history with this issue. In 1990, Marine William Bradley blasted the Corps for unrealistic training, questioning exercises that “smack of ‘zero defect’ artificiality,” and charging “who among us can say he has participated in major exercises where ‘success’ was not artificially preordained?”15 More recent writing suggests that opposing forces in the Marine Corps have been often made to simply “die in place.”16

Scripted training might come from some organizational pathology born from a zero-defect culture, a failure to evolve target practice into something that resembles dynamic battle, or some other combination of complacence and lack of imagination. What is certain is that it bears little resemblance to the sort of wars the military of a superpower can be asked to fight.

The Navy has made moves in the right direction only recently though much of Navy training probably remains a heavily scripted affair. Truly difficult exercising for the high-end fight at the strike group level has begun with the advent of the Fleet Problems. COMPTUEX is becoming more challenging, although through more virtual means.17 Two years ago SMWDC instituted a new training event called Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training (SWATT) that finally gives the surface fleet its own integrated training phase prior to joining capital ships for larger events in the workup cycle.18

Given how new they are however the extent to which the Navy will sustain and make the most of these activities remains unclear. What is certain is that they are taking place within a context and a culture shaped by a generation of neglect. As Admiral Swift succinctly put it, “There is no classroom instruction and little doctrine or guidance for fighting a fleet.”

The Structure of U.S. Navy Training

“Peacetime maneuvers are a feeble substitute for the real thing; but even they can give an army an advantage over others whose training is confined to routine, mechanical drill.” –Carl von Clausewitz, On War.

After deploying beyond its means for years the Navy was facing unsustainable growth in maintenance backlogs, yet rising demand for naval power meant the Navy would hardly budge on delaying deployments. As ships went through their usual phases within the workup cycle to prepare for deployment something had to give as pressure built from both sides. Navy leadership characterized the situation as a “rise in operational demand, maintenance availabilities going long, and training getting squeezed in the middle.”19 According to Navy officials cutting weeks of training became the preferred remedy to get ships out on time.20

Cutting training time is not necessarily wrong however because training could go on forever. Even with cuts ships still have months of time devoted to training within the workup cycle and more opportunities when deployed. The Navy cannot blame operational demand or maintenance backlogs alone for compressed training. Instead, it is the fault of poor decision-making on how to structure the training process and assume risk.

Sailors feel constantly rushed while training, especially within the workup cycle, because they are being forced to do hundreds of training events in order to satisfy an impossible number of requirements that only seems to grow.21 As training and certification events grew more numerous they were forced to become more shallow because they were stuffed into fixed or even shrinking timeframes. As the Naval Studies Board lamented, “There are no empty blocks on the exercise and training schedules.”

Time pressures encouraged scripted events because training can be passed more quickly. Hard training involves repeat attempts after failure, a larger selection of open-ended scenarios, and a thorough after-action review process. All of these things cost time. Scripting can help make time for more events and cut corners when needed. Scripted training became an important means to help Sailors stay on schedule in a system that was overburdened with too many requirements.

These excessive requirements come from a desire to cover too many bases. A warship, being an advanced machine, can experience technical failure and take damage in numerous ways. Ships can also be employed in a wide range of missions. Training to manage the degradation of a ship and the complexity of naval warfighting is an incredibly difficult task. However, it is impossible to train to every kind of scenario or prevent every kind of failure. A training system represents calculated risk where strong proficiency in some areas must come at the expense of skill in many others.

An example of poor risk calculation with respect to tactical training can be seen in the submarine force where according to LT Jeff Vandenengel:

“…virtually every officer on board can explain complex engineering principles, draw diagrams of entire reactor systems, and have conducted countless complex engineering-casualty drills, but few to no simulated attacks on an enemy warship. So much time, energy, and effort is spent on engineering issues that the study, development, and practice with tactical systems and techniques are often treated like afterthoughts.”22

The Navy has allowed the technical complexity of its ships and the flexibility of naval power to overwhelm the ability of Sailors to effectively train for war. Miscellaneous administrative burdens have also ballooned. Risk aversion has been mistaken for due diligence where a risk averse culture prone to adding training and inspections sought to mitigate risk that should have been accepted. Now it has become impossible to expect Sailors to become skilled at core warfighting tasks when there are too many boxes to check.

The training certification system has become so backward it is inhibiting the very sort of skill it should be promoting. According to Vice Admiral Joseph Tofalo, recent commander of the U.S. submarine force, they were “…really working hard by taking a hard scrub of our assessment and certification process” just to make only 10-15 days’ worth of time to insert high-end threat training into the months-long workup cycles of submarines.23 The bloated certification system is suffocating the ability of senior leaders to implement meaningful training reform.

But even with a bloated system why is it such a struggle for the Navy to make so little time for one of the most important types of training there is?

Training and Evaluation

“You cannot allow any of your people to avoid the brutal facts. If they start living in a dream world, it’s going to be bad.”–James Mattis

Most of the Navy’s training is not actually training in the fullest sense of the term. Rather, most events appear to be readiness evaluations. The intent of a readiness evaluation is not necessarily to create an in-depth learning experience, but to pass an event and earn a certification that indicates a unit is competent at a certain task. The term “certification” is almost always used in relation to the intent and end result of Navy training. Sailors in the fleet are often worrying about maintaining their numerous certifications because they require periodic refreshing.

Good training is about pushing to failure, testing limits, and taking risk head on. This makes it necessary to have training events that do not culminate in a pass/fail evaluation that can reflect poorly on a participant. When under evaluation one will likely fall back on previously known methods instead of using the opportunity to try something new. By frequently conflating readiness evaluations with training the Navy has failed to create enough space where Sailors can safely experiment and learn from their mistakes.

A singular focus on certification can encourage scripting because the goal simply becomes passing the next event rather than genuine improvement over time. Scripting away risk makes the chances of passing certification events much better. Yet much of the point of military skill is in knowing how to manage violent risk.

The Navy’s scripted style of training calls the trustworthiness of the certification system into question. In reference to unit-level training LT Erik Sand described a training and reporting system that allowed for “easy gaming and cheating” and that “because ships design their own drills, they can hide their weaknesses.” Ships were able to write the training packages they would be evaluated on and rehearse them enough to minimize surprise in advance of their inspections. LT Sand felt compelled to argue for the obvious: “In combat, a ship cannot pick where she takes a hit. The crew should not be able to do so in an inspection…the ship’s crew should not have specific foreknowledge of drill scenarios.” The end result was not an inspection process that seriously tests warfighting skill, but instead “evaluates the crew’s ability to stage-manage a show.”24

The quality of any certification is based on the standard of training it was earned through. How credible is a warfighting certification earned through scripted training?

Comparing Chinese Navy Training

“He who can modify his tactics in relation to his opponent and thereby succeed in winning, may be called a heaven-born captain.” –Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Winning is not about being the best, but simply being better than the opposition. In this vein, how does the U.S. Navy stack up against its chief rival, the Chinese Navy?

The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) regularly releases unclassified reports on foreign navies. Its reports on the Chinese Navy (People’s Liberation Army Navy – PLAN) criticize training shortcomings that the U.S. Navy is itself committing. However, these reports also paint a picture of a force that is serious about training harder and working to overcome past disregard for realism.

In its 2015 report ONI stated the PLAN is “rectifying training methods by avoiding formalism and scripting in exercises.”25 As it looks to improve, less scripted training events that aim to “stress tactical flexibility, are occurring on a regular basis…” ONI’s 2007 report indicates the PLAN was making similar reforms earlier. The report said a limitation of the PLAN was its “reliance on scripted training events” and that new training guidance emphasized opposition force training and injecting surprise. In what the PLAN calls Naval Combat Readiness Exercises the exercise plan is “kept from the unit being exercised until just before orders are issued, or until the warning or signal is given.”26 The 2015 report said that a key goal of opposing force training exercises happening “on a regular basis” is “to evaluate a leader’s ability to develop and execute operational plans according to loosely defined objectives.”

Compare this to how Admiral Swift described the reaction of U.S. Sailors being presented with a Fleet Problem exercise: “Some teams clearly were uncomfortable, looking for the gouge on how the problem would go down. Many seemed astonished that the part of the order tasking them (‘Here is my intent. Your charge is to develop the required tasks to achieve it.’) often was less than a page long.” Swift said the fleet staff had to urge these leaders several times to “Stop asking for the plan; plan your solution.”27

The 2007 ONI report noted that “Typically, PLAN units previously conducted only one training subject per sortie in a building block approach” and that under new training standards units “now conduct more than one training subject per sortie.”

Compare this to how Admiral Swift described Navy training in his recent writing, in that “Much of the process of unit training certification consists of performing individual techniques, often in a set sequence and a reduced tempo. In a fight, these techniques need to be combined and executed with speed.”

In addition to being chief of intelligence for U.S. Pacific Fleet Captain Rielage also serves as the senior member of the Pacific Naval Aggressor Team (PNAT) that was created a few years ago.28 PNAT seeks to incorporate intelligence insights on adversaries to create accurate representations of their thinking and behavior. PNAT then puts these insights into practice by leading opposing forces in certain events such as the Fleet Problems where Admiral Swift says PNAT “frequently surprises” leaders all the way up to the four-star level “unlike current strike group training.”29 Capt. Rielage also has interesting insights into how Chinese Navy training is evolving.

In “Chinese Navy Trains and Takes Risks” Rielage writes that PLAN units often engage in force-on-force exercises that incorporate key elements of surprise such as where live opposing forces do not know the “exact composition or disposition of the adversary.”30 Units that exercise initiative to increase the difficulty of their training events are regularly praised in official PLAN media. According to Rielage, “The clear impression is that the PLAN is more willing to accept risk in its training evolutions than its U.S. counterparts.”

There is also a stark difference in the sort of missions the U.S. Navy and the Chinese Navy are focused on training for. Rielage claims the PLAN is “underpinned by an institutional emphasis on training for high-end naval warfare” and that “there is a strong argument that success in this mission is the PLAN’s primary and defining priority.” Compare this to how Admiral Swift characterized U.S. Navy training in the power projection era:

“A quick glance at a Composite Training Unit or Joint Task Force exercise schedule showed maritime interdiction operations, strait transits, and air wings focused on power projection from sanctuary. But despite the best efforts of our training teams, our deploying forces were not preparing for the high-end maritime fight and, ultimately, the U.S. Navy’s core mission of sea control.”31

For years the U.S. Navy has not tried to practice destroying modern fleets, but the Chinese Navy has.

The importance the PLAN places on training is also reflected in its leadership. While serving as Commandant of the Naval Command College and prior to becoming the current chief of the PLAN Admiral Shen Jinlong helped create a “Blue Force Center” that seeks to improve the realism of opposition force training. Earlier in his career he served as director of a naval vessels training center and was credited for establishing a training system for new-type ships.32 The current leader of the Chinese Navy is no stranger to training innovation.



Vice Adm. Shen Jinlong tours USS Blue Ridge (Original U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Samuel Weldin)

The rate of tactical learning in the PLAN compared to most other navies is especially high, and not just because of its training values. With a hint of condescension the 2015 ONI report said that before the PLAN expanded its distant operations in 2009 it was “largely a training fleet, with very little operational experience.” But a force focused on hard and realistic training can certainly be effective when it will count most in war. The PLAN still has very few steady overseas commitments, and can afford to spend the bulk of its readiness on force development just like the interwar period U.S. Navy.33 On the other hand the modern U.S. Navy is stretched thin across the globe, and chooses to spend most of its readiness on overseas operations which are not the same as focused force development conducted close to home. The American and Chinese Navies have been spending their time on very different priorities.

Regardless of where they stand in relation to one another on the continuum of military excellence it appears the Chinese Sailor is learning and becoming a more lethal professional at a rate that far outstrips his American rival.

Training and Satisfaction in the Profession of Arms

“If we fight our fleets in mimic fights against each other, every officer and seaman, and fireman, and ward-room boy will understand enough to become interested. What we need more than anything else is to make our people interested…certainly no profession gives the opportunities for continued interest that ours does…yet is there anything more heartbreaking in its dullness than a man-of-war is often made to be!” –Commander Bradley A. Fiske, “American Naval Policy,” 1905.

A key distinction between institutions that provide security and most other organizations is that they rarely get to apply the full scope of their potential until an immediate threat demands a response. Most other organizations operate under a steady grind where they regularly apply foundational skills and often in direct competition against many others who are doing the same. Until an imminent threat appears an organization focused on security must remain in a self-imposed state of vigilance. This comes with unique challenges of promoting professional satisfaction and morale.

Being a sentry, as important as that may be, is hardly gratifying. The logic of promoting deterrence is often not tangible enough to be professionally fulfilling on its own to most who wear the uniform. After spending an ungodly amount of time filing paperwork, attending sessions, and conducting so many other preparations warfighters crave the opportunity to do their job and put their skills to the test. An organization focused on security should conduct hard training not only for the sake of preparedness but to give its people opportunities to push their limits and enjoy the fulfillment of becoming a better professional. In the absence of a pressing mission that demands the immediate use of specialized skills a focus on growing those skills is the next best thing.

While the Navy featured prominently at the opening of many campaigns and saved lives in humanitarian disaster the emphasis on low-end missions and training hardly helped Sailors experience the full potential of the powerful Navy they joined. The power projection era precluded Sailors from practicing many of the core high-end missions and skills a superpower Navy is usually built for, yet Sailors were still responsible for the extensive maintenance that high-end capability required. Scripted training under the bloated certification system has turned most tactical training into just another chore on a checklist rather than a stimulating exercise that focuses on quality learning and professional development.

The professional development opportunities that come with joining the most powerful Navy should be especially unique. In how many places can someone practice warfighting skills and operations using some of the most advanced warships ever made? How many jobs allow someone to become the best in the world at taking command of the seas through skill of arms? Surely there is some connection between the level of opportunity to grow as a better warfighter through hard trials and the unique job satisfaction that comes with being a military professional. Has the Navy harmed retention and morale by letting too many requirements, inspections, and low-end missions crowd out time for hard training? Clearly people joining the Navy would much rather be “forged by the sea” instead of forged by their inbox.

Training and Human Capital in the Profession of Arms

“…I would argue that nothing takes precedence over the peacetime commander’s job of finding combat leaders.” –Captain Wayne P. Hughes, Jr. (ret.), Fleet Tactics, Theory and Practice

The training certification system is unable to maintain a consistent standard across the force because luck plays an important role in how well the American Sailor gets trained. The fixed nature of the workup cycle and the variety of deployment experience create a roulette wheel of training opportunity. A Sailor can report to a ship only to spend the entirety of their assignment stuck in drydock with limited operating time. A Sailor that happens to report aboard closer to a deployment will have far more opportunity to conduct at sea operations, especially integrated training within a larger group of ships.34 One Sailor can deploy to mainly exercise with numerous third world navies while another’s deployment can feature exercises with more capable allies. The nature of the workup cycle and the variety of overseas experience sends a hodgepodge of training experience throughout the Navy’s ranks. This creates the need for major training events that are disconnected from the deployment cycle to better standardize proficiency. By the time a combat arms leader becomes a general officer in the Army or Air Force they have usually paid multiple visits to Red Flag and the National Training Center across their career.

While machines reflect learning as they grow in capability corporate memory is mainly carried forward by people. In this respect the Navy’s wholesale shift toward power projection not only inhibited its ability to practice war well, but failed to preserve a responsible minimum of institutional memory for full-spectrum competence. As Cold War-era personnel retired and separated from the service the Navy hemorrhaged skills and experience born from a time of better warfighting standards.35 Those with Cold-War era experience who still serve today saw their tactical skills atrophy under a new strategic focus. The result is that on average American Sailors know far less about high-end combat and sea control than they did 30 years ago. An organization that often describes its training in terms of “reps and sets” should have also understood the concept of use it or lose it.

American Sailors can put their training into a different “reps and sets” context. How many times have they run the exact same scenarios? How many times have they seen a live opposing force defeat a strike group? Are scripted exercises the defining training experience of a generation of American Sailors? In a system where everyone gets a trophy it is hard to know who is any good.

But training should not always be about winning or passing a test. Training is supposed to be a learning experience where failure is welcomed as an opportunity to learn and further prove oneself. Scripted training inhibits arguably the most important part of the training process – the after-action review. In the after-action review troops are expected to confront their mistakes, reflect upon alternatives, and contemplate their thought process. Without failure or the fear of future failure there will be less to question and reflect on. A solid after-action review process is necessary to give people a space where they can distinguish themselves as learners.

The after-action review of a training exercise can be a most humbling experience for the military professional where leaders are forced to take responsibility for mistakes that would have gotten their people killed in war. How a leader accounts for such consequential errors can reveal something about their command philosophy and leadership style. There is also a large difference in taking responsibility for failure within view of hundreds if not thousands of participating Sailors after a live exercise versus a virtual wargame that is played in the company of only a handful of fellow officers. The highly concentrated nature of modern naval capability and authority has given the enlisted Sailor virtually no ability to shape his or her fate through tactics in high-end war at sea.36 It is on the ship’s officers to know how to fight well for the sake of everyone else aboard.

Scripted exercises inhibit the warfighter’s ability to develop the unique professional skills critical to success on the battlefield. These special skills can range from employing warfighting techniques and tactics, maintaining unit cohesion while taking heavy losses, and knowing how to gamble with equipment and lives. Skillfully managing the chaos of war favors certain personal qualities such as the utmost candor, open-minded thinking, and a willingness to push to failure. These traits hardly describe the character of heavily scripted training. Without hard combat trials one cannot prove skill and virtue in ways only a warfighter can.

What scripted exercising has done to the Navy is damage its ability to discover those within its ranks who best exemplify the profession of arms.

Rudderless

“After their examination, the recruits should then receive the military mark, and be taught the use of their arms by constant and daily exercise. But this essential custom has been abolished by the relaxation introduced by a long peace. We cannot now expect to find a man to teach what he never learned…” –Vegetius, De re militari

If the most important peacetime military mission is to realistically prepare for war then what happens if this primary mission does not act to unify effort across the enterprise? Compared to all other peacetime operations exercises are the activity that come closest to real war which makes them an indispensable foundation for force development.37 Realistic exercising is what best integrates and filters the vital functions that evolve training, tactics, and doctrine. Exercises are also some of the best means for investigating the changing character of future war as technology evolves. The lack of realistic exercising is much more than an issue of questionable operator skill. It is a broader developmental problem for how the Navy is deciding its future.

It should go without saying that trying things in the real world under challenging conditions is how to mold vision into reality. The choice to disregard realistic exercising for a generation overlapped with a time when evolutionary ideas and networking capabilities were hitting the fleet. As the Information Age excited the imagination the Navy hailed transformative warfighting concepts such as ForceNet and AirSea Battle, but to the average Sailor these concepts changed little. There never was any serious AirSea Battle training, network-centric warfighting doctrine, or exhaustive tactical development for new major capabilities like CEC.

The Navy certainly made an effort to transform, but progress and proficiency should never be measured by how many new capabilities come online, CONOPs or TACMEMOs that get published, or wargames that get played. If these things are to have life then they must be taught to and refined by those charged with their execution. Real progress and skill is best defined by what the Sailors and commanders on the deckplate know how to do well, and for that there is only training. Because warfighting concepts did not translate into new and realistic force-wide training many of the Navy’s most ambitious efforts to transform can safely be described as stillborn.

If the Navy’s standards of exercising have been so poor for so long then it is natural to be skeptical of other elements of force development that feed into one another such as wargaming and test and evaluation. The functional linkage between strategy, tactics, and technology demands that force development activities use a shared set of realistic standards that evolve together to pace threats. Excessively scripting the one activity that comes closest to real war means failure was not a meaningful force of change for much of the naval enterprise. Clearly many unhelpful things have made it into the fleet if realistic exercising was not there to set a standard, serve as a proving ground, and anchor the Navy’s focus on warfighting.

What makes the Fleet Problem exercises and SMWDC key drivers of change is not that they are some special evolution of ongoing activity. Instead, finally the Navy has a challenging high-end exercise, and finally the surface fleet has a command that integrates the surface warfare enterprise for the sake of tactical development. And when key things that should have existed are finally created and imposed upon a system they shed light on dysfunction that has long gone unnoticed. In the words of Admiral Wade, “We are just at the beginning here, but we have uncovered so many issues.”

Part 2 will focus on Firepower.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Nextwar@cimsec.org.

References

1. Forward…From the Sea, U.S. Department of the Navy, 1994. www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/navy/forward-from-the-sea.pdf

2. Naval Studies Board, “Responding to Capability Surprise: A Strategy for U.S. Forces,” 2013. www.nap.edu/catalog/14672/responding-to-capability-surprise-a-strategy-for-us-naval-forces

3. Captain Dale C. Rielage, USN, “An Open Letter to the U.S. Navy from Red,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, June 2017. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017-06/open-letter-us-navy-red

4. For more on the Millenium Challenge exercise see: Micah Zenko, “Millenium Challenge: The Real Story of a Corrupted Military Exercise and Its Legacy,” War on the Rocks, November 5, 2015. warontherocks.com/2015/11/millennium-challenge-the-real-story-of-a-corrupted-military-exercise-and-its-legacy/

Excerpt from official Millenium Challenge Report: “As the exercise progressed, the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted. This scripting ensured a Blue operational victory and established conditions in the exercise for transition operations.”

5. Admiral Scott Swift, “A Fleet Must Be Able to Fight,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-05/fleet-must-be-able-fight

6. For novelty of SMWDC reference: Vice Admiral Thomas H. Copeman III, “Tactical Paradigm Shift,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2014. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2014-01/tactical-paradigm-shift

Excerpt:

“It may be hard to believe, but the U.S. Navy, widely recognized as the greatest Fleet the world has ever known, lacks an organization tasked with development, training, and assessment of the full scope of tactics for the warfare community on which it was founded 238 years ago—surface warfare. This is going to change.”

Rear Admiral John Wade, “Red Sea Combat Generates High Velocity Learning,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, September 2017. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017-09/red-sea-combat-generates-high-velocity-learning

Excerpt:

“In the years preceding the establishment of the Warfighting Development Centers, the surface warfare community did not have a single organization that could cull lessons from combat and then coordinate the effort to achieve high-velocity learning not only in the fleet and school houses, but also across the engineering and acquisition communities. In June 2015, the establishment of the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC) closed this gap.”

For TOPGUN analogy see: “SMWDC Surface Warfare Officers’ Top Gun (Top SWO)” from Naval Surface Force U.S. Pacific Fleet

7. Sdyney Freedberg, “Top Gun for Warships: SWATT,” Breaking Defense, January 16, 2018. breakingdefense.com/2018/01/top-gun-for-warships-swatt/

8. Admiral Scott Swift, “Fleet Problems Offer Opportunities,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-03/fleet-problems-offer-opportunities

9. Admiral Scott Swift, “Fleet Problems Offer Opportunities,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-03/fleet-problems-offer-opportunities

Excerpt on timing: “After two years and more than six iterations, the reestablished Fleet Problem has never before been discussed in public. In that context, it is fair to ask why we decided to discuss the concept at this point.”

10. Admiral Scott Swift, “Fleet Problems Offer Opportunities,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-03/fleet-problems-offer-opportunities

11. Megan Eckstein, “Fight to Hawaii: How the U.S. Navy is Training Carrier Strike Groups for Future War,” U.S. Naval Institute News, March 22, 2018. news.usni.org/2018/03/22/fight-hawaii-u-s-navy-training-carrier-strike-groups-future-war

12. A caveat to this is that NTC training shifted to counterinsurgency operations and remained there for several years before shifting more toward high-end/hybrid warfare around 2012-2014.

For National Training Center reference:

Colonel John D. Rosenberger, “Reaching Our Army’s Full Combat Potential in the 21st Century: Insights from the National Training Center’s Opposing Force,” Institute of Land Warfare, February 1999, www.ausa.org/sites/default/files/LPE-99-2-Reaching-our-Armys-Full-Combat-Potential-in-the-21st-Century-Insights-from-the-National-Training-Centers-Opposing-Force.pdf.

Major John F. Antal, “OPFOR: Prerequisite to Victory,” Institute of Land Warfare, May 1993. www.ausa.org/sites/default/files/LPE-93-4-OPFOR-Prerequisite-for-Victory.pdf

Sydney Freedberg, “All Active Combat Brigades Trained vs. New Russian Tactics: FORSCOM,” Breaking Defense, October 17, 2017. breakingdefense.com/2017/10/all-active-combat-brigades-trained-vs-new-russian-tactics-forscom/

Interesting caveat from above: ““Before, in the ’80s and ’90s, it was very rote,” Abrams said. “You would get there on this day and on Friday, you would do a road march out, and you’d get an order for an attack, and you would go attack. And then, four hours after the attack was done, you’d do an After Action Review, you’d get another order, and you’d get ready do something else. It was all very lockstep.”

Dennis Steele, “Training for Decisive Action, “Old-School without Rotations Going Back in Time,'” Army Magazine, February 2013. ausar-web01.inetu.net/publications/armymagazine/archive/2013/02/Documents/Steele_0213.pdf

For Red Flag Reference:

Brian Daniel Laslie, “Red Flag: How the Rise of “Realistic Training” After Vietnam Changed the Air Force’s Way of War, 1975-1999,” krex.k-state.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2097/15506/BrianLaslie2013.pdf;sequence=1

414th Combat Squadron Training “Red Flag,” July 2012. www.nellis.af.mil/About/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/284176/414th-combat-training-squadron-red-flag/

13. Lt. Col. Bradford T. Duplessis, “Our Readiness Problem: Brigade Combat Team Lethality,” Armor, Fall 2017. www.benning.army.mil/armor/eARMOR/content/issues/2017/Fall/4Duplessis17.pdf

14. Megan Eckstein, “Warfighting Development Centers, Better Virtual Tools Give Fleet Training a Boost,” U.S. Naval Institute News, February 23, 2017, news.usni.org/2017/02/23/fleet-training-getting-a-boost-through-better-lvc-tools-warfighting-development-centers

15. William S. Bradley, “The Training Mandate,” Marine Corps Gazette, October 1990. search.proquest.com/marinecorps/docview/206324175/fulltext/C0F8174E7BD74AAEPQ/1?accountid=48498

16. For “Die in Place” references see:

Staff, Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, “Opposing Force TTP,” Marine Corps Gazette, August 2016. www.mca-marines.org/gazette/2018/02-27

Sgt. Luke G. Cardelli, “MAGTF Integrated Exercise (MIX-16),” Marine Corps Gazette, November 2017. www.mca-marines.org/gazette/2017/11/magtf-integrated-exercise-mix-16

17. Megan Eckstein, “Warfighting Development Centers, Better Virtual Tools Give Fleet Training a Boost,” U.S. Naval Institute News, February 23, 2017, news.usni.org/2017/02/23/fleet-training-getting-a-boost-through-better-lvc-tools-warfighting-development-centers

18. Megan Eckstein, “New Advanced Surface Navy Training Seeks to Fill Critical Gaps,” U.S. Naval Institute News, March 7, 2017. news.usni.org/2017/03/07/new-advanced-surface-navy-training-seeks-fill-critical-gaps

19. Megan Eckstein, “With Navy Struggling to Balance Training, Maintenance, Deployment Needs, Service Looking at Data Analysis to Warn of Readiness Problems,” U.S. Naval Institute News, November 13, 2017. news.usni.org/2017/11/13/navy-struggling-balance-training-maintenance-deployment-needs-service-looking-data-analysis-warn-readiness-problems

20. Government Accountability Office, “Military Readiness: Progress and Challenges in Implementing the Navy’s Optimized Fleet Response Plan,” May 2, 2016. news.usni.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/GAO-report-OFRP-2016.pdf#viewer.action=download

21. To get an idea of certification requirements see:

Roland J. Yardley, et. Al, “Use of Simulation in Training for U.S. Surface Force,” RAND, 2003. www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/2005/MR1770.pdf (See pg. 41)

COMNAVAIRFORINST 3500.20B, Aircraft Carrier Training and Readiness Manual, February 14, 2008, navybmr.com/study%20material/COMNAVAIRFORINST%203500.20B.pdf

COMNAVSURFPAC/COMNAVSURFLANT INSTRUCTION 3500.11 Surface Force Exercise Manual, www.dcfpnavymil.org/Library/tycom/3500.11%20SURFACE%20FORCE%20EXERCISE%20MANUAL.pdf

22. Lieutenant Jeff Vandenegel, “A Zero-Sum Game,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings Professional Notes, October 2015. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2015-10/professional-notes

23. Megan Eckstein, “Navy Wants More Complex Sub-on-Sub Warfare Training,” U.S. Naval Institute News, October 27, 2016. news.usni.org/2016/10/27/navy-wants-complex-sub-sub-warfare-training

24. Lieutenant Erik A.H. Sand, “Performance Over Process,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 2014. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2014-10/performance-over-process

25. Office of Naval Intelligence, “The PLA Navy: New Capabilities and Missions for the 21st Century, 2015. fas.org/irp/agency/oni/pla-navy-2015.pdf

26. Office of Naval Intelligence, “China’s Navy,” 2007. fas.org/irp/agency/oni/chinanavy2007.pdf

27. Admiral Scott Swift, “Fleet Problems Offer Opportunities,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-03/fleet-problems-offer-opportunities

28. On timing see: Admiral Scott Swift, “Fleet Problems Offer Opportunities,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-03/fleet-problems-offer-opportunities

Excerpt: “A year prior, Pacific Fleet had formed a Red team, the Pacific Naval Aggressor Team (PNAT), to support wargaming.”

For more see: Captain Dale Rielage, “Wargaming Must Get Red Right,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2017. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017-01/war-gaming-must-get-red-right

29. Admiral Scott Swift, “A Fleet Must Be Able to Fight,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-05/fleet-must-be-able-fight

30. Captain Dale Rielage, “Chinese Navy Trains and Takes Risks,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 2016. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2016-05/chinese-navy-trains-and-takes-risks

31. Admiral Scott Swift, “Fleet Problems Offer Opportunities,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-03/fleet-problems-offer-opportunities

32. Andrew Erickson and Ken Allen, “China’s Navy Gets a New Helmsman (Part 2) Remaining Uncertainties,” Jamestown Foundation, March 14, 2017. jamestown.org/program/chinas-navy-gets-new-helmsman-part-2-remaining-uncertainties/

33. For amount of ships devoted to interwar period Fleet Problems see: Albert Nofi, To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet Problems, 1923-1940.

Excerpt: “Virtually every one of the fleet problems involved a majority of the battleships, carriers, and destroyers in commission, and, as still considered “in commission.” Fleet Problem XI (1930) involved the fewest ships, only about 24 percent of the fleet, but came only a month after Fleet Problem X, which had involved nearly a third of the fleet; as some ships did not take part in both problems, the actual overall rate of participation was more than a third of vessels officially in commission. During the 1930s, Fleet Problems XIII (1932) through XX (1939) all involved about half or more of the fleet, peaking at 69 percent in Fleet Problem XVII (1936).”

34. Lieutenant Brendan Cordial, “Too Many SWOs Per Ship,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 2017. www.usni.org/node/90091

35. To get a sense of Cold War-era exercising standards and activity see the book Oceans Ventured (2018) by Reagan-era Navy Secretary John Lehman. The book is mainly about Navy exercises in the 1980s.

36. This is in reference to decision-making on employing the ship’s weapons and sensors, how to “fight the ship.” It is not in reference to things like damage control and medical assistance in which enlisted Sailors would play a prominent role.

37. On nature of exercising realism and artificialities see: Frederick Thompson, “Did We Learn Anything from that Exercise? Could We?” Naval War College Review, July-August 1982. digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=4876&context=nwc-review

Featured Image: Pacific Ocean, NNS (April 18, 2018) Lieutenant Craig Stocker, a Warfare Tactics Instructor assigned to Surface Warfare Officer School Newport, R.I., is temporarily attached to Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC) tracks and mentors crewmembers during an Anti-Submarine exercise onboard the USS Stockdale (DDG 106). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Amanda A. Hayes/released.)

HOW THE FLEET FORGOT TO FIGHT, PT. 3: TACTICS AND DOCTRINE
OCTOBER 1, 2018 DMITRY FILIPOF

By Dmitry Filipoff

Introduction

“…changes in tactics have to overcome the inertia of a conservative class; but it is a great evil. It can be remedied only by a candid recognition of each change, by careful study of the powers and limitations of the new ship or weapon, and by a consequent adaptation of the method of using it to the qualities it possesses, which will constitute its tactics. History shows that it is vain to hope that military men generally will be at the pains to do this, but that the one who does will go into battle with a great advantage—a lesson in itself of no mean value.” –Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783

Tactics are fighting techniques, and how to effectively employ the tools of war to win battles. Arguably the Navy’s largest obstacles to tactical innovation come from its lack of essential tools such as anti-ship missiles as well as the nature of its recent operations and training.

It should be fair to say that training and tactics are not developed for tools that are not equipped, and a history of scripted exercising means refined training and tactics have yet to come for much of what the Navy already has. The character of a power projection focus has divided the warfare communities of the Navy and fostered operating norms that directly inhibit the development of a network-centric warfighting doctrine.

The only U.S. military warfare community that has any history of devoting serious thought to sinking warships at more than 100 miles away using missiles is the carrier aviation community. They were the only ones with the required tools and doctrinal mandate. For everyone else the Navy violated one of the most fundamental maxims of naval warfare – to fire effectively first – by not providing serious offensive firepower to so much force structure that could have readily fielded it.1

The surface fleet is a prime example of the tactical deprivation that can come through lack of anti-ship weapons and the offensive roles they enable. Even with Harpoon and the first introduction of the anti-ship Tomahawk in the 1980s the surface Navy’s defensive focus in fleet combat remained consistent since WWII. For decades throughout the Cold War the surface fleet’s high-end warfighting proficiencies focused on anti-submarine warfare and protecting capital ships from aerial threats such as missiles. The job of sinking surface ships then mostly fell to submarines and carrier aviation. The tactical execution of the surface fleet’s primary anti-air mission became increasingly automated, a trend best exemplified by Aegis. However, a defensive, reactive, and highly automated mission focus makes for a poor foundation for learning how to fire effectively first.

The Navy’s firepower is about to experience a serious transformation in only a few short years. Comparing firepower through a strike mile metric (warhead weight [pounds/1,000] × range in nautical miles × number of payloads equipped) reveals that putting LRASM into 15 percent of the surface fleet’s launch cells will increase its anti-ship firepower almost twentyfold over what it has today with Harpoon.2 New anti-ship missiles will cause the submarine community and heavy bomber force to also experience historic transformations in offensive firepower.

The widespread introduction of these new weapons will present the U.S. Navy with one of the most important force development missions in its history. This dramatic increase in offensive firepower across such a broad swath of untapped force structure will put the Navy on the cusp of a sweeping revolution in tactics unlike anything seen since the birth of the aircraft carrier a century ago. How the Navy configures itself to unlock this opportunity could decide its success in a future war at sea. The Navy needs tacticians now more than ever.

Doctrine in Networked Warfighting

“I am here to encourage and support a new type of officer, one who is naturally inclined to operational experimentation and innovation. I foresee officers who view doctrine as a dynamic adaptive process rather than a refuge for the uninformed.”–Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski

Doctrine is a common vision of warfighting, and an understanding of how to skillfully employ tactics and procedure. Naval Doctrine Publication 1, Naval Warfare, offers insight into the nature of doctrine, where “It is not a set of concrete rules, but a basis of common understanding throughout the chain of command…Doctrine is the underlying philosophy that guides our use of tactics and weapons systems to achieve a common objective….Our training and education are based on doctrine.”3 Doctrine does not culminate in a publication but in the refined intuition of the warfighter.

Doctrine aims to produce both a strong sense of independent decision-making at the unit level as well as the ability to connect as a member of a team. Net-centric warfighting is especially dependent on doctrine because of how networked capability has affected individual and group relationships. Net-centric operations are based on networked connections between many actors, yet units face the risk of losing those links. Units can be forcibly cut off from one another through electronic attack, and often need to impose silence on themselves for the sake of tactics and survivability. Connected units can call on all other sorts of actors to provide capability and information. Networked warfighting can leave one completely in the dark on the one hand and connected to a multitude on the other. Net-centric doctrine can then focus on developing common understanding for those two major types of relationships and situations.

Being effective while cut off requires an independent sense of what to do without outside help. Refined doctrine will allow a unit under emissions control to handle itself in the dark and remain faithful to commander’s intent while also knowing when it makes sense to break silence.

With doctrine a connected unit will have a common understanding with the many actors it can leverage through networked relationships. Being connected to a multitude of other actors requires having some sense of what their thought process is like, and what sorts of conditions affect their ability to contribute to the fight.

The many relationships of a networked force can easily result in congested information pathways and communications overload. This means more emissions, greater lag times, and more people requesting information or calling for help. An issue is the scale of naval warfare given how sensing and weapons can go for hundreds of miles. The area of interest for an individual warship can cover tens of thousands of square miles which promises a significant amount of overlap with many others.

Refined doctrine is absolutely necessary to streamline networked relationships and deconflict actors. Many units will be connected to the broader network, but they must resist the urge to leverage the network for every problem within their immediate area of responsibility. Command by negation and the initiative of the subordinate for a networked force could easily devolve into chaos if taken to its fullest extent. Doctrine will provide that key degree of discretion that helps a frontline unit know when its immediate situation is important enough to tap the network and call for attention from the greater force. Doctrine aims to distill what is of importance, and will help keep communications brief because networked units will have a good sense of one another’s thinking without having to ask for it.

Commander’s intent is supposed to be succinct, but the less doctrine there is the more the higher-echelon commanders can find themselves micromanaging their subordinates. The degree of refinement for doctrine can then be directly measured by how little a commander needs to convey to subordinates to successfully fulfill their intent. In his seminal “The Role of Doctrine in Naval Warfare,” published in 1915, Lieutenant Commander Dudley Knox used the example of how doctrinal development was able to shrink an operations order from 1200 words to 44 words for a 20-ship, six-hour night maneuver.4 How many words would it take that many warships to do the same thing today?

The present culture of a command and control system heavy on reporting requirements has given the Navy an unwieldy doctrine of information overload.5 This excessive reporting culture is built in part on a level of openness and ease of communication that comes with operating in the uncontested environments of the power projection era. Being micromanaged from higher headquarters feels like the norm in today’s U.S. Navy, and where a risk-averse culture is prone to micromanaging at the expense of trust-building. But doctrine can only work to condense complex operations into simple instructions if there is a high degree of trust.

Consider the challenge of command and control for a distributed force in both an offensive and defensive context, and how doctrine could shape the nature of trust. The speed of aircraft and incoming missiles compared to the range of defensive weapons means a distributed fleet will rarely be able to mass defensive firepower from across the force in a timely way. Commanders of dispersed units will likely need to have the authority to independently prosecute their local air defense missions with great initiative in order to avoid defeat in detail.

When it comes to anti-ship firepower the relatively slow speed of warships can provide much more opportunity to network effects. If a fleet commander discovers a concentration of hostile ships he or she can use networking to generate the firepower overmatch needed to overwhelm their defenses. A fleet commander could launch and collect anti-ship firepower from a variety of platforms across the distributed fleet using engage-on-remote networking. In-flight retargeting could then be used to better concentrate salvos, ensure their accuracy, and create multi-axial angles of attack. Doctrine that seeks to make this concentration of firepower possible for a distributed force would have to take some authority away from individual units when it comes to using their anti-ship missiles. The doctrine of a distributed fleet is therefore likely to keep the release authority for anti-ship weapons at a higher level of command than defensive anti-air weapons because of key differences in the feasibility of timing and concentration.

However, even with networking, tactics should be humble in their design. The expansive nature of networked capability can produce a strong urge to develop elaborate tactics that operate on more assumptions and dependencies, such as on close coordination and timing. But tactics and operations that are too complex could easily fall apart when put to the test. The nature of low-risk scripted exercising can cause tactics and concepts of operation to suffer from this runaway complexity. Capable opposition forces are absolutely indispensable for forcing humility on the developmental process and for identifying what is reasonably simple to execute. Resilience through simplicity is an ultimate goal of doctrine.

The Navy is itself a joint force involving aviation, surface fleet, and submarine communities. But power projection missions and training have divided the Navy’s communities from one another, and where these missions allowed units to act more independently. While effective independent execution is a primary goal of doctrine the nature of low-end missions meant that independent execution was not often directed toward a common operational goal. Carrier aviation could be focused on air-to-ground strikes, surface warships could be patrolling or conducting security cooperation, and submarines could be executing ISR missions. Low-end operations and training events often require little in the way of harmonized tactics or doctrine across communities, unlike net-centric concepts.

The Navy’s current system of training and operating can hardly allow the individual communities to say they are familiar with the full breadth of capability of even their own platforms, let alone those of other communities. Every community’s training has been heavily shaped by the power projection era at the expense of high-end skills and inter-community relations.6 U.S. naval officers Fred Pyle, Mark Cochran, and Rob McFall wrote of the poor connection between the surface fleet and aviation communities with respect to anti-surface warfare in “Lessons Learned from Maritime Combat”:

“Although Navy tactical literature frequently speaks to the use of air power in SUW, there doesn’t appear to be any formal training provided to the surface warfare community…Much like the SWO community, aviators are deploying without a basic understanding of surface-combatant capabilities or missions. Generally, aviators don’t know the differences in capability between cruisers and destroyers, or the variants of the standard missile used to augment the fleet air defense mission that they train for so often…The naval aviation community states that AOMSW (air operations in maritime surface warfare) is a primary mission set—yet only minimal training is conducted in flight school and in the fleet. The majority of squadron sorties are focused on air-to-air intercepts and air-to-ground weapons…The Navy as a whole has very limited access to sea-based opposition forces (emphasis added), and the tactical aviation community is afforded only limited integration opportunities with the surface Navy…With the number of other demands in the schedule and limited underway steaming days, DDGs cannot easily go to sea for daily integrated training missions with the air wing…AOMSW is by default a distant third priority behind air-to-air employment and strike warfare.”7

This points to a significant issue within the Navy’s workup cycle. The amount of time a strike group actually trains as a strike group before deploying is a very small minority compared to how much time individual ships and squadrons train at the unit level.8 If the Navy is to heal the divide between its communities and better prepare for the high-end fight then integrated training needs to take on a far greater share of time within the workup cycle’s training phase compared to individual training.

It is hard to imagine the Navy’s warfare communities would work well to network their capabilities together if they have a poor understanding of one another’s tactics and doctrine. Unprecedented cross-community understanding is necessary if a networked doctrine is to come alive. But the great divide between the Navy’s communities will stand as a tall obstacle to any net-centric vision.

Sea Control Tactics in the Age of Missile Warfare

“As a matter of tactics I think that going out after the Japanese and knocking their carriers out would have been much better and more satisfactory than waiting for them to attack us…” –Admiral Raymond Spruance9

Many of the possibilities of combat can be dictated by relationships between time, distance, and concentration. Fundamental characteristics such as weapons range, flight profiles, and magazine capacity outline tactical options for the application of force. War at sea is especially attrition based where tactical outcomes can quickly turn based on how firepower overmatch plays out between offense and defense. Knowing how certain platform attributes and tactics influence the nature of attrition is central to designing favorable tradeoffs. By focusing on how to best optimize critical factors such as endurance, survivability, and firepower overmatch one can begin to see a framework of tactics and operations.

While there is some merit to the current construct of focusing ships on air defense and using aircraft to sink ships at range the nature of modern war at sea may preference different roles. The Navy’s scripted style of training may also suggest that tactical risk is not well-understood despite the fact that naval combat in the missile age is a staggeringly vicious form of warfare.

Any warship must account for the immutable obstacle posed by the curvature of the Earth’s surface. Radar, being a line-of-sight system, can see things further away the higher they are. But the horizon as the limit of direct sight creates a large space beneath it that cannot be sensed by a ship’s radar (unless enhanced by certain environmental conditions). This effect is known as the radar horizon. The distance from the average warship’s radar and the horizon is barely under 20 miles.10

For decades anti-ship missiles have had the ability to execute low-altitude flight profiles, often described as sea-skimming flight, to take advantage of the radar horizon for the sake of greater effectiveness. By paying a price in fuel, range, and endurance, low-flying aircraft and missiles can exploit this space to lower detectability, increase survivability, and earn the element of surprise.

It is remarkable that the words “firing from a position of minimum uncertainty and maximum probability of success” could ever be used to describe training for modern naval warfare when just 20 miles away from a ship lies a long, near-invisible space missiles can exploit to achieve surprise.11 No matter how powerful a warship is it can be forced to wait until those final moments before it can bring most of its defensive firepower to bear. The curvature of the Earth itself is one of the deadliest things to a warship.


Visualization of the radar horizon limitation. (Source: Aircraft 101 Radar Fundamentals Part 1)
Once a sea-skimming missile salvo breaks over the horizon it will only be tens of seconds away from impact. Defensive firepower will be reactively fired soon after an attacking salvo crosses the horizon. But by the time that first wave of defensive firepower clashes with supersonic anti-ship missiles they can already be a third of the way to their target ship.12 And anti-ship missiles can still be lethal even when they are shot down within those final miles.

As defensive firepower is brought to bear powerful missiles will be detonating against each other at thousands of miles per hour not far from the ship. Exploding missile shrapnel will spray out, often in the direction of the ship, easily shredding radar arrays and degrading the ship’s ability to defend itself. Many sensors cannot be effectively armored without diminishing their performance. The close-in weapon systems and electronic warfare suites that are critical to a ship’s last line of defense could also be easily shredded by missile shrapnel. Weapons mounted on the deck such as Harpoon missiles and torpedoes may also pose risks. This shrapnel factor is already recognized in test and evaluation where supersonic test missiles are intercepted at a minimum offset of several miles away from test platforms to help avoid flying missile debris.13 This may be one reason why it is unrealistic to think a warship can sustain high kill ratios against missiles in the close-in engagement zone. Because of this exploding shrapnel factor ships should be concerned about how many nearby missile shootdowns they can withstand.


SM-6 anti-air missile intercepts a relatively small, 600lb AQM-37C test missile. Note the shrapnel. (Source: U.S. Missile Defense Agency Multi-Mission Warfare Flight Test Events)

The range advantage anti-ship missiles often enjoy over defensive firepower gives the offense a better ability to fire effectively first in the age of missile warfare. This also makes it more difficult to deal with launch platforms before they fire their payloads, otherwise known as the more preferable tactic of dealing with archers before arrows. This offensive range advantage can also convert into greater lethality and survivability for the missile salvo by allowing for more sea-skimming flight. The more a launch platform can get inside the range of its anti-ship missile, the more a payload can maximize its time flying at sea-skimming altitude to stay below the radar horizon of defending warships. Some anti-ship missiles like Harpoon sustain a sea-skimming flight path throughout their flights, but many missiles in the hands of competitors have more flexible flight profile options.14 The range advantage anti-ship firepower often has over defensive firepower therefore increases the probability of ships being forced to face sea-skimming missiles in the lethal close-in engagement zone.

The deadliness of confronting sea-skimming salvos just after they break over the horizon adds urgency to early detection and to targeting platforms before they fire their missiles. It also makes it necessary to have the capability and tactics to defeat sea-skimming missile salvos long before they break over the radar horizon of defending warships.

This makes aviation indispensable to missile defense when many anti-ship weapons intentionally fly below the radar horizon of warships in spaces only aircraft can see from above. A certain amount of airpower would have to be kept on hand just to deal with sea-skimming missiles that have the potential to travel beneath the radar horizons of defending warships. For the sake of fleet defense air wings must be very proficient at shooting down sea-skimming missile salvos, including weapons capable of flying supersonic speeds. This will also require a refined doctrinal relationship between the aviation and surface fleet communities to coordinate the air defense mission, a relationship the abovementioned authors suggest barely exists.

Only now are warships able to shoot below the radar horizon limitation using revolutionary capabilities like NIFC-CA, but this requires networked dependencies on other platforms like aircraft. NIFC-CA could prove to be a very burdensome kill chain to manage with Captain Jim Kilby describing it as “operational rocket science” and that it requires “a level of coordination we’ve never had to execute before.”15 Using aircraft to shoot missiles below the radar horizon of ships may be a much simpler kill chain to manage compared to NIFC-CA. The Navy also has probably yet to develop refined tactics and training for NIFC-CA given how new and sophisticated it is. However, using aircraft to cue shipborne firepower in any case could help keep warships relevant to the fight even with shredded radar arrays.

Defensively using the air wing to focus on defeating missile salvos may prove extremely favorable, especially from an attrition standpoint. Aircraft should be able to conduct this mission with some altitude and thus retain greater endurance. They could also likely be more proximate to the carrier rather than be asked to strike ships far forward which also converts into extra endurance. They would be able to maximize their anti-air loadout which is thousands of pounds lighter than a full anti-ship loadout, earning still more endurance.16

A squadron of F-18s fully equipped with anti-air weapons can carry over 100 anti-air missiles which is comparable to the anti-air firepower of a large surface warship. Through speed and altitude aircraft will also have far more time and opportunity to shoot down sea-skimming missiles compared to warships. Perhaps best of all, anti-ship missiles, at least for now, can pose no threat to aircraft. The cost exchange should be distinctly one sided.

Video
An underside view of an Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 4 (VX-4) F/A-18C Hornet aircraft in-flight. The Hornet is armed with eight AMRAAM air-to-air missiles on four wing pylons and two missiles on the fuselage. The Hornet also carries two AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, one on each wing tip. (Wikimedia Commons)
The tactical characteristics of the air wing’s anti-ship mission are quite the opposite in many respects, yet this is what the carrier-centric U.S. Navy has long committed itself to.

Besides endurance, one of the greatest limiting factors of airpower is its resilience. Losing only a few aircraft per sortie could leave a carrier with a fraction of its strength after a hard day of high-end combat. Losing only four percent of aircraft per mission will result in losing 70 aircraft out of 100 over the course of 30 missions.17

Just like missiles, anti-ship aircraft will likely have to fly at sea-skimming altitudes to earn surprise and preserve survivability, but pay a severe price in range, endurance, and fuel. However, unlike aircraft, missiles are only interested in making a one-way trip. Anti-ship aircraft may also have to strike far forward of the fleet which also incurs a greater price in fuel and endurance. Low-altitude flight and closing with enemy ships can also lead to more restricted emissions.

Aircraft have to be concentrated in order to deliver large enough salvos to overwhelm the powerful anti-air defenses of modern warships. A large surface warship can carry dozens of anti-air missiles and feature many layers of defensive capability in the form of electronic warfare, close-in weapon systems, and decoys. Attacking a surface action group of a few modern destroyers could take a squadron of aircraft to field enough firepower to overwhelm shipboard defenses. This anti-ship squadron may also have to be further augmented with more aircraft dedicated to jamming, refueling, and scouting roles. A single attack on a surface action group of several large surface warships could plausibly tie up a quarter of a carrier’s strike fighters, leaving gaps in coverage elsewhere.

Using carrier aircraft to prosecute the anti-surface mission with a short-ranged anti-ship weapon such as Harpoon makes it easier for modern warships to shoot down archers instead of arrows. The shorter the range of the air-launched anti-ship missile the less attacking aircraft can disperse from one another to mass firepower effectively. This in turn dictates the extent of possible concentration and bears an effect on survivability if more aircraft find themselves within the envelope of defensive fire.

For now, the Navy’s current carrier-based anti-ship tactic could easily turn into sending concentrated groups of aircraft into the teeth of modern shipborne air defense while bleeding fuel at low altitudes and across great distances. Survivability could be substantially improved with the air-launched version of LRASM that has better range than many anti-air weapons, but it will not do as much to ease concerns over endurance and fuel. The tactic of using carrier aircraft to sink modern warships with the short-ranged Harpoon is far less favorable with respect to survivability, endurance, and attrition compared to having the air wing focus on defeating anti-ship missiles in a defensive role.

Putting long-range anti-ship missiles on warships allows the logic of attacking archers in the form of ships to extend to most of the fleet beyond the carrier. Shifting more missile defense responsibility to the air wing frees up more shipboard launch cells for anti-ship fires and other payloads of interest. Ships can provide a solid and steady wall of firepower compared to the more transient presence of aviation. The transient presence of aviation for the anti-ship mission may at first suggest a more favorably discrete operating posture for the carrier. However, the need to maintain a screen of airpower to intercept scouts and bombers for the outer air battle would still bind the disposition of aircraft to a degree.

With respect to attrition anti-ship firepower can see a far greater proportion of its missiles wasted away against defenses compared to anti-air firepower focused on shooting down missiles. This can necessitate follow-on attacks on ships. Even though ships may discharge a large portion of their anti-ship firepower in a salvo they could readily leverage their deep magazines to launch another attack rather than be forced to wait for another anti-ship squadron to make a fresh attempt. This key distinction is where the staying power of warships can prove superior to the transience of airpower with respect to sustaining attacks on well-defended ships.

A closer team between warships and aviation along the lines of these roles can be more favorable with respect to information management. Aircraft can better manage the risks of emitting through speed and maneuver, and air defense is an especially emissions-intensive fight. A ship can preserve emissions if it has aircraft to support local awareness. By conducting air defense for forward units aircraft would also be well-poised to cue offensive fires from ships, conduct in-flight retargeting as needed, and perform battle damage assessment.

Anti-ship missile fire from submarines can be an especially powerful tactic, though it may be more dependent on outside cueing. Unlike most other platforms undersea forces can easily bypass defensive screens of ships and aircraft to get in close. Putting anti-ship missiles on submarines would also significantly enhance platform survivability. Submarines would be able to fire from a distance that far outstrips torpedo range which would make their attacks much more difficult to attribute. If a ship comes under sea-skimming missile fire it may not know which sort of platform launched the attack, but if a ship finds itself under torpedo fire then it could easily reckon a submarine is close by. From a defensive perspective the threat of missile submarines unleashing sea-skimming salvos from unexpected directions and at close range could tie down more airpower for missile defense across a broad space.

A considerable amount of the fleet’s ability to manage the fight would be centered around the E-2 aircraft whose powerful radars and communications make it the Navy’s “carrier-based tactical battle management, airborne early warning, command and control aircraft.”18 A carrier fields very few of these critical command and control aircraft, usually close to half a dozen.19 Despite the fact endurance is one of the most important attributes that governs the operations of airpower the crucial E-2 command and control aircraft will finally be getting an aerial refueling capability in 2020.20 This upgrade comes over 50 years after the aircraft was introduced and despite the fact in-flight refueling was already commonplace in the aviation-centric U.S. Navy since the Vietnam War. Israel purchased the E-2 aircraft from the U.S. during the Cold War and installed an in-flight refueling capability at some point in their service lives. Now after decommissioning these aircraft an E-2 Hawkeye capable of in-flight refueling rests at the Israeli Air Force Museum.


Israeli E-2C Hawkeye with refueling probe. (Wikimedia Commons)
Distributed Lethality

“Sound strategy depends on a knowledge of all forces and their tactics sufficient to estimate the probabilities of winning. Thus…it will not do to study strategy and offer strategic plans without first studying in detail the forces and tactics on which those plans depend. Strategy and tactics are related like the huntsman and his dog. The hunter is master, but he won’t catch foxes if he has bought and trained a birddog.” –Capt. Wayne P. Hughes Jr., (ret.), Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat

The Navy is looking to move to a more distributed warfighting construct, otherwise known as distributed lethality or distributed maritime operations.21 A major tactical and operational advantage distributed warfighting hopes to achieve is diluting the firepower and sensing of the adversary across a larger space. With respect to great power adversaries that enjoy steep land-based advantages for sea control these constructs are based in part on the hope that distribution will hurt opposing anti-access/area-denial forces more than they will hurt expeditionary forces. Like so much else in the U.S. Navy these distributed warfighting constructs hope to achieve greater effectiveness in part through affecting efficiency. The tactics suggested above are certainly guilty of this to an extent. While affecting the timely concentration of effects is a fundamental principle of warfighting, especially in attrition-centered naval combat, these distributed warfighting constructs are fundamentally incomplete without more specific techniques at the tactical level.

The tactics suggested above envision a closer relationship between carrier aviation and warships where they leverage one another’s platform advantages. It argues that the deep capacity of surface warships is better put to use for the offensive anti-ship mission, and that aviation’s speed and maneuverability is better focused on defending against missiles. This is the opposite logic of what the Navy has long subscribed to.

But the tactical analysis above is still very rudimentary. It does not attempt to account for things like electronic warfare, cyber effects, and space-based capabilities where each can be very critical in its own right. So much decisive space in a future war at sea could lie within circuits, algorithms, and computer code. These tactical ideas may be nothing more than mere speculation, and perhaps some variable that was left unaccounted for could make it all fall apart. But one couldn’t know until they tried.

The question remains as to what are the tactical deficiencies of a carrier-centric Navy that chose to starve the vast majority of its force structure of the ability to sink ships at range, and instead chose to focus perishable aviation on one of its most difficult missions. Aircraft would already be split between conducting major scouting functions, maintaining an outer screen to intercept enemy scouts and bombers, and guarding against sea-skimming threats. Concentrating airpower to sink ships at range would add enormous strain to the air wing.

The force structure of competitors is far more wholesomely armed with anti-ship weapons, but the carrier-centric U.S. Navy chose to confront these threats with offensive missile firepower coming from a sole, central source. This echoes a now familiar theme. By forcing the air wing to take on so many kinds of missions – scouting, counterscouting, outer air battle, defeating sea-skimming threats, and attacking ships – the U.S. Navy inflicted distributed lethality against itself.

Part Four will focus on Technical Standards.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Nextwar@cimsec.org.

References

1. The maxim comes from Fleet Tactics, Theory and Practice, U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1986, first edition, by Capt. Wayne P. Hughes, Jr. (ret.)

2. Total Harpoon strike mile lethality for surface fleet comes is about 13,708. Total strike mile lethality for LRASM using 15 percent of the surface fleet’s launch cells is about 267,000.

For more on strike mile metric: Alan Cummings, “A Thousand Splendid Guns: Chinese ASCMs in Competitive Control,” U.S. Naval War College Review, Autumn 2016. digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://cimsec.org/?p=37357&preview_id=37357&preview_nonce=33a19394d2&post_format=standard&_thumbnail_id=37675&preview=true&httpsredir=1&article=1143&context=nwc-review

3. Naval Doctrine Publication 1, Naval Warfare. U.S. Department of the Navy, March 1994. www.iwar.org.uk/military/resources/aspc/pubs/ndp1.pdf

4. Lieutenant Commander Dudley Knox, USN, “The Role of Doctrine in Naval Warfare,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March-April 1915. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1915-03/role-doctrine-naval-warfare

5. For more on the Navy’s current command and control culture with respect to micromanagement and risk aversion see:

Lieutenant Commander Colin Roberts, USN, “In the Long Calm Lee of Midway,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-01/long-calm-lee-midway

Admiral Scott Swift, USN, “Master the Art of Command and Control,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, February 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-02/master-art-command-and-control

Lieutenant Commanders Kit de Angelis and Jason Garfield, USN, “Give Commanders the Authority,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 2016. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2016-10/give-commanders-authority

6. For power projection training focus for submarine force see: Megan Eckstein, “Navy Wants More Complex Sub-on-Sub Warfare Training,” U.S. Naval Institute News, October 27, 2016. news.usni.org/2016/10/27/navy-wants-complex-sub-sub-warfare-training

For aviation see: Captain Fred Pyle, Lieutenant Commander Mark Cochran, and Lieutenant Commander Rob McFall, USN, “Lessons Learned for Maritime Combat,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2016. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2016-01/lessons-learned-maritime-combat

For helicopter community see: Commander Ben Reynolds, USN, “Time to Think Tactically,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, September 2013. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2013-09/time-think-tactically

For surface fleet see: Vice Admiral Thomas Rowden, Rear Admiral Peter Gumataotao, and Rear Admiral Peter Fanta, USN, “Distributed Lethality,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2015. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2015-01/distributed-lethality

For a more general description of changed training see: Captain Pete Pagano, USN (ret.), “Have We Forgotten How to Fight?,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, February 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-02/have-we-forgotten-how-fight

7. Captain Fred Pyle, Lieutenant Commander Mark Cochran, and Lieutenant Commander Rob McFall, USN, “Lessons Learned for Maritime Combat,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2016. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2016-01/lessons-learned-maritime-combat

8. COMNAVAIRFORINST 3500.20D CH4, Chapter 3: Training Cycle. elearning.sabrewebhosting.com/CVnTraining/tramanfiles/chapter3.pdf

For balance of time between integrated and other forms of training see pg. 11 of: Bryan Clark and Jesse Sloman, “Deploying Beyond Their Means: America’s Navy and Marine Corps at a Tipping Point,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, November 2015. csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/CSBA6174_(Deploying_Beyond_Their_Means)Final2-web.pdf

9. This quote from Spruance is followed by the qualifier: “but we were at the start of a very important and large amphibious operation and we could not afford to gamble and place it in jeopardy” and was made in reference to the Battle of the Philippine Sea and defending the Saipan invasion force. However, even in its unqualified form, the quote still suffices to make a key point “as a matter of tactics.”

10. For 18nm radar horizon see: Lee O. Upton and Lewis A. Thurman, “Radars for the Detection and Tracking of Cruise Missiles,” Lincoln Laboratory Journal, Volume 12, Number 2, 2000. pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e603/f87c32337e5feb7a0b9995356d5bbe8748c1.pdf

Caveat: Over the Horizon-Backscatter radars are not limited by the horizon by reflecting radar energy off of the ionosphere. These radars are land-based, and while they can detect contacts of interest at a great distance the fidelity is much more poor compared to line-of-sight radar systems. To see operating principles of various radars and sensors see: Jonathan F. Solomon, “Defending the Fleet from China’s Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile: Naval Deception’s Roles in Sea-Based Missile Defense,” Thesis Defense submitted to Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University, April 15, 2011. citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.454.8264&rep=rep1&type=pdf

11. Admiral Scott Swift, USN, “A Fleet Must Be Able to Fight,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-05/fleet-must-be-able-fight

12. This figure is based rough calculations using supersonic missile speed, defensive missiles featuring a speed of around Mach 3 such as Standard Missile, and to discern the point they would first meet once the former crosses over the horizon. A key advantage attacking missiles will likely have is coming over the horizon at maximum speed and where defensive missiles would have to accelerate to full speed once they are reactively launched.

13. Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, “DDG 51 Flight III Destroyer/Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR)/Aegis Combat System,” FY17 Navy Programs. www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2017/pdf/navy/2017ddg51.pdf

Excerpt: “Use of manned ships for operational testing with threat representative ASCM surrogates in the close-in, self‑defense battlespace is not possible due to Navy safety restrictions because targets and debris from intercepts pose an unacceptable risk to personnel at ranges where some engagements will take place.”

Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, “DDG 51 Flight III Destroyer/Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR)/Aegis Combat System,” FY15 Navy Programs. www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2015/pdf/navy/2015ddg51.pdf

Excerpt: “In addition to stand-off ranges (on the order of 1.5 to 5 nautical miles for subsonic and supersonic surrogates, respectively), safety restrictions require that ASCM targets not be flown directly at a manned ship, but at some cross-range offset, which unacceptably degrades the operational realism of the test.”

14. For variable flight profiles of anti-ship missiles see:

Dr. Carlo Kopp, “Killing the Vampire,” Defence Today, 2008. www.ausairpower.net/SP/DT-Vampires-2008.pdf

Dr. Carlo Kopp, “Evolving Naval Anti-Ship Weapons Threat,” Defence Today, 2010. www.ausairpower.net/SP/DT-ASBM-Dec-2009.pdf

15. For quotes see:

Sam LaGrone, “The Next Act for Aegis”, U.S. Naval Institute News, May 7, 2014. news.usni.org/2014/05/07/next-act-aegis

Captain Jim Kilby, USN, “Surface Warfare: Lynchpin of Naval Integrated Air/Missile Defense,” Center for International Maritime Security, April 4, 2014. cimsec.org/surface-warfare-lynchpin-naval-integrated-airmissile-defense/10748

16. AMRAAM missile weighs 356 lbs, Sidewinder missile weighs 188 lbs (See U.S. Navy AMRAAM fact file, Sidewinder fact file), max load of ten AMRAAM plus two sidewinder: 3936 lbs.

Harpoon weighs 1,523 pounds (See U.S. Navy Harpoon fact file), full load of four Harpoons: 6092 lbs.

For max F-18 Harpoon load see: “F/A-18F Super Hornet take on a full load of Harpoons Anti-ship missiles for the first time,” www.navyrecognition.com/index.php/focus-analysis/naval-technology/1346-video-fa-18f-super-hornet-take-on-a-full-load-of-harpoons-anti-ship-missiles-for-the-first-time.html.

17. John Stillion and Bryan Clark, “What it Takes to Win: Succeeding in 21st Century Battle Network Competitions,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2015. csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/What-it-Takes-to-Win.pdf

18. “E-2 Hawkeye Early Warning and Control Aircraft,” U.S. Navy Fact File. www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_display.asp?cid=1100&tid=700&ct=1

19. Seth Cropsey, Bryan G. McGrath, and Timothy Walton, “Sharpening the Spear: The Carrier, the Joint Force, and High-End Conflict,” Hudson Institute, October 2015. s3.amazonaws.com/media.hudson.org/files/publications/201510SharpeningtheSpearTheCarriertheJointForceandHighEndConflict.pdf

20. Valerie Insinna, “Northrop to Begin Cutting in Aerial Refueling Capability in E-2D Advanced Hawkeye Production this year,” Defense News, April 11, 2018. www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/navy-league/2018/04/11/northrop-to-begin-cutting-in-aerial-refueling-capability-in-e-2d-advanced-hawkeye-production-this-year/

“E-2D Conducts Successful Aerial Refueling Tests,” Naval Aviation News, March 21, 2018. navalaviationnews.navylive.dodlive.mil/2018/03/21/fuel-factor/

21. Vice Admiral Thomas Rowden, Rear Admiral Peter Gumataotao, and Rear Admiral Peter Fanta, USN, “Distributed Lethality,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2015. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2015-01/distributed-lethality

Navy Warfare Development Command, “CNO Visits Navy Warfare Development Command,” April 2013, 2017. www.nwdc.navy.mil/PressRelease/9.aspx

Excerpt:

“Specifically, the CNO was updated on NWDC’s development of the Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) Concept, a central, overarching operational concept, that will weave together the principles of integration, distribution and maneuver to maximize the effectiveness of the fleet Maritime Operations Centers to synchronize all-domain effects.

“DMO will describe the fleet-centric warfighting capabilities necessary to gain and maintain sea-control through the employment of combat power that may be distributed over vast distances, multiple domains, and a wide array of platforms,” explained Mark Coffman, DMO concept writing team lead, “The concept’s action plan will drive the development of these new capabilities so that fleet commanders will be able to distribute but still maneuver the fleet across an entire theater of operations as an integrated weapon system.”

Featured Image: ARABIAN GULF (Dec. 6, 2017) – The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) transits the Arabian Gulf. Theodore Roosevelt and its carrier strike group are deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations in support of maritime security operations to reassure allies and partners and preserve the freedom of navigation and the free flow of commerce in the region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Anthony J. Rivera/Released)

“As a matter of tactics I think that going out after the Japanese and knocking their carriers out would have been much better and more satisfactory than waiting for them to attack us…” –Admiral Raymond Spruance9

Logistics and maintenance is the stuff that puts taxpayers to sleep, when you discuss it, until they need it as a matter of life and death. Then they want you to provide it to them like magic beans and explain how it works.

-That would be ME. Miletus12.

In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the intellectual world.
Martin Heidegger

HOW THE FLEET FORGOT TO FIGHT, PT. 5: MATERIAL CONDITION AND AVAILABILITY

By Dmitry Filipoff

Material Condition and Availability

“The very gallantry and determination of our young commanding officers need to be taken into account here as a danger factor, since their urge to keep on, to keep up, to keep station, and to carry out their mission in the face of any difficulty, may deter them from doing what is actually wisest and most profitable in the long run…” –Admiral Chester Nimitz

The post-Cold War Navy made major reforms to a fundamental operating construct of the fleet, its readiness cycle. The readiness cycle of the Navy is a standardized period of maintenance, training, deployment, and sustainment phases that produce ready naval power within a specified timeframe. The deployment schedule the Navy operates on is tied to how its forces are moving along at various phases in the cycle and when they become available for use after having met their needs.

A readiness cycle should be predictable in that it regularly produces naval power of consistent quality in the absence of major contingencies. From the perspective of a competitor it should be unpredictable in that it has enough margin where it can effectively surge and sustain a large number of forces on short notice to surprise and overwhelm foes if need be. It should then be able to recover from a surge in a reasonable timeframe and reset itself in stride. It should also maintain some consistency while allowing ships to undergo extensive maintenance and upgrade periods as needed.1

A readiness cycle’s viability is based on the deployment rate it serves, where a higher rate of deployment can come at the cost of more unmet needs. A cycle cannot resemble a taut rope, but rather one that keeps enough slack to maintain the necessary resilience and flexibility. These qualities are predicated on respecting the material limits of naval power. National security strategy is bounded by these limits.

During the power projection era the Navy’s readiness cycle lost its discipline. In less than 20 years the Navy has deployed under four separate cycles, and where the two most recent constructs are attempting to restore order and arrest systemic shocks that spiraled out of control. These shocks unbalanced the Navy, sapped its ability to surge the fleet, and incurred significant strategic risk with respect to great power war.

The Power Projection Era and Readiness Cycle Reform

“We kind of lost our way a few years back when we were all doing everything we could to get airplanes and ships forward into the fight…it went on and on and on, and I think that’s where the stress of not only the people and the equipment but also the processes started to break down.” –Vice Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Bill Moran

In the new national security environment of the power projection era the Navy felt it needed to increase its ability to surge the fleet on short notice as well as increase its continuous presence in forward areas. The Navy sought to accomplish this in part by making major changes to its readiness cycle through a major reform known as the Fleet Response Plan. The Navy was especially focused on increasing surge capacity, where according to the Naval Transformation Roadmap (2003):

“The recently created Fleet Response Plan (FRP) will significantly increase the rate at which we can augment deployed forces as contingencies require. Under the regular rotation approach…the majority of ships and associated units were not deployed and thus at a point in their Inter-Deployment Readiness Cycle (IDRC) that made it difficult and expensive to swiftly ‘surge’ to a crisis, conflict or for Homeland Defense. The FRP features a change in readiness posture that institutionalizes an enhanced surge capability for the Navy…a revised IDRC is being developed that meets the demand for a more responsive force. With refined maintenance, modernization, manning and training processes, as well as fully-funded readiness accounts, the Fleet can consistently sustain a level of at least 6 surge-capable carrier strike groups, with two additional strike groups able to deploy within approximately 90 days of an emergency order.”2

This surge policy was implemented and approved of just after the Iraq War began. Seven carrier battle groups conducted forward operations in support of the invasion of Iraq, with an eighth deployed in the Pacific. Five of those eight battle groups and air wings had already participated in Operation Enduring Freedom just a year before. A year later seven carrier groups simultaneously deployed in 2004 for the Summer Pulse exercise that intended to demonstrate the FRP’s surge capability.3 In relatively quick succession the Navy surged the fleet multiple times at levels not seen since the Vietnam War.4

One of the most far-reaching changes of habit was an increasing willingness to extend deployment lengths beyond what was previously the norm. Since 1986 the Navy had rigorously adhered to a maximum deployment length of six months, a policy the Global Navy Presence policy described as “inviolate.”5

New strategies concerned with adding forward presence and surge capability often encouraged the Navy to lengthen deployments. From Operation Desert Storm to 9/11 the Navy only granted a few dozen exceptions to the six-month deployment policy. It then granted almost 40 exceptions for Operation Enduring Freedom in 2002, and a year later it granted almost 150 more in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.6 What was once the exception became the norm as ships continued to deploy in excess of six months many years after the large surges that accompanied the starts of those campaigns. From 2008-2011, carrier strike group deployments averaged 6.4 months, which then climbed to 8.2 months in the next three years.7


Table depicting the increase in percentage of deployments whose length exceeded six months. (Source: Center for Naval Analyses report, “The Navy at a Tipping Point: Maritime Dominance at Stake?”)
This operating tempo and the Fleet Response Plan proved to be fundamentally unstable and unsustainable. The effects forced the Navy to repeatedly compromise and improvise its schedules to make ends meet and maintain its deployment rate.

Some ships already on deployment had their tours extended on short notice. Longer deployments then created greater maintenance demands, where ships often saw their expected maintenance phase grow by many months. Some even tripled in length.8 Maintenance overruns started happening more often than not, forcing other ships to deploy sooner to cover the planned operations of ships that found themselves stuck in prolonged maintenance. Meanwhile backlogs and equipment casualty reports were mounting as the fleet was pushed harder and harder and maintenance troubles grew more severe. In spite of all of this the demand for naval power only kept growing.9


Depictions of the preponderance of maintenance overruns from FY 2011-2014 for aircraft carriers and surface combatants. (Source: GAO information provided to Congressional committees on the Navy’s Optimized Fleet Response Plan.)
Navy leadership eventually admitted the system was falling apart:

“Unfortunately, the Navy was rarely able to execute the FRP as designed…schedules were adjusted to meet changing combatant-commander demands, maintenance delays, and crisis response. This has caused significant unpredictability for our sailors and maintenance teams, while revealing a host of inefficiencies…Inefficient readiness production and unpredictable schedules are never good, but they have become unsustainable.”10

As negative effects spiraled out of control and cascaded across the Navy’s timetables it had little choice but to take corrective action. A new readiness cycle known as the Optimized Fleet Response Plan (OFRP) was implemented in 2014 in an attempt to bring “predictability” to the cycle.

Among many changes OFRP slightly reduced the amount of time ships would be deployed from 25 percent to 22 percent of the cycle, slowing material degradation and allowing more time for maintenance. A significant amount of time was added to the sustainment phase that follows deployments and comes before the maintenance phase. The surface fleet in particular benefited from a significant extension of the sustainment phase. Warships in this phase are supposed to be surge capable and available for hard training. However, the ships and crews are usually quite spent after six to eight months of forward operations, and more importantly the Navy has typically allocated little funding for significant amounts of training or operating in the sustainment phase.11 Perhaps the most value that comes from the sustainment phase is that ships can use it to get caught up on what maintenance they can.12


The phases of the Navy’s workup cycle under the Fleet Response Plan and its successor, the Optimized Fleet Response Plan. There is some slight variation (by a month or so) in these figures across sources. (Source: GAO information provided to Congressional committees on the Navy’s Optimized Fleet Response Plan.)
Navy leadership described a key reform that OFRP attempted, in that it “transitions fleet production of operational availability from a demand based to a supply based model.”13 This new model will hopefully be “disciplined” and “predictable” in nature.14 However, a supply-based model is the only sort of readiness scheme a Navy can realistically run on.

No fleet that wishes to maintain its consistency can operate under a demand-based model for long because it will eventually spend itself. Naval power is extremely flexible and mobile, where ships can independently conduct many sorts of missions and travel hundreds of miles a day. Operating remotely in international waters can temper foreign political sensitivities such as those that are often associated with hosting foreign troops on land. Naval power can often streamline operations by not having to rely as much on the bureaucracies of foreign countries. All of these qualities can make naval power very attractive to theater commanders and the interagency.

However, a Navy must guard its long-term condition by successfully saying no to excessive demand signals more often than not, which is how a supply-based model is preserved over time. To subscribe to a demand-based model is to put the fleet’s material condition in the hands of combatant commanders whose official responsibilities are to use forces for near-term operations, not maintain them for long-term well-being.


Number of lost operational days due to maintenance overruns for aircraft carriers, surface combatants, and submarines from FY 2011-2016. According to the GAO these approximately 14,000 days of lost operating time translated into losing the use of 0.5 carriers per year, three surface combatants per year, and 2.8 submarines per year across this period. (Source: GAO Report,”Navy Readiness: Actions Needed to Address Persistent Maintenance, Training, and Other Challenges Facing the Fleet.”)
Even if it operates under something more sustainable the consequences of recent deployment rates can come back to haunt the Navy and force it to pay another price later.

Hard deployment rates accelerate material degradation and can shorten the service lives of ships.15 This creates long-term risk because shortened service life can prompt early retirements. Concerns about gaps in presence and fleet numbers can be exacerbated in the future by ships being forced into early retirement as they become increasingly expensive and time-consuming maintenance burdens.


Average maintenance backlogs by ship class, FY 2000-2015. It highlights the Optimal Manning Period, a reform the Navy attempted in order to save costs by reducing crew sizes on ships. Optimal Manning was subsequently reversed. (Source: GAO Report, “Navy Force Structure: Actions Needed to Ensure Proper Size and Composition of Ship Crews.”)
Now in order to grow and preserve fleet size the Navy is heavily counting on its ability to modify and extend the lives of many ships past the original estimates.16 But the significant maintenance debts incurred under recent deployment rates will no doubt complicate this endeavor, and add to the Navy’s fears of seeing the fleet shrink even further.

Fleet Availability and National Security Strategy

“I didn’t have a full appreciation for the size of the readiness hole, how deep it was, and how wide it was. It’s pretty amazing…You have a thoroughbred horse in the stable that you’re running in a race every single day. You cannot do that. Something’s going to happen eventually.” –Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer

Gaps in forward naval presence could become the new normal and not just as a result of lacking readiness discipline. Rather, it may be the product of the Navy and the Department of Defense finally coming to terms with the limits of what can be done with a much smaller fleet. Reconciling with this truth could mark a major strategic shift in how the U.S. envisions using its Navy for war and deterrence.

In spite of increasing demand signals and widespread fluctuations across the Navy’s workup cycles one key thing remained consistent. For at least the past 25 years the Navy steadily deployed around 100 ships per year for about six months at a time. The Navy tried to maintain this deployment rate despite the fact the fleet shrunk by over 40 percent in the same timeframe.


Graphic depicting relationship between fleet size, deployment length, and deployment rate. (Source: Department of the Navy FY 2018 President’s Budget Press Brief)
Fleet size helps dictate what deployment levels can be sustained. In order to maintain round-the-clock presence in a distant part of the world around four ships are needed for every one kept forward.17 This comes from how the deployment phase is about a quarter of the time within the workup cycle under the FRP or the OFRP. Forward-deployed naval forces such as those homeported in Japan are far more efficient by being based in theater, but forward-based units are a small minority of the force. Rotational crewing can also increase availability, but this also applies to a minority of the force and no large surface combatants or flattop capital ships operate under this scheme. Four ships for every one forward translates into something quite larger than the 280-ship fleet that exists today if the Navy wishes to keep deploying 100 ships per year for six months at a time.

The Navy was able to maintain constant presence in certain parts of the world through this deployment rate. The strategic argument for presence had long been a driving force behind the power projection focus, and where it was widely reported in 2015 that a carrier presence gap emerged in the Middle East for the first time in eight years.18 Guaranteeing constant presence was used to justify crushing deployment rates for years. Perhaps this is why it was so difficult to break away from deploying 100 ships per year on six-month deployments. Dropping below this rate could normalize presence gaps in certain areas, thereby triggering a major strategic revision of how the fleet could be used in key parts of the world.

Gaps in presence are poised to become more frequent in any case. It is not that the Fleet Response Plan itself was a failure, but that the strategy it tried to serve became highly unrealistic for a shrinking Navy. Recent experience proves the Navy will wreck itself if it tries to continue deploying around 100 ships per year for over six months at a time. Therefore this deployment rate may actually represent a supply-based ceiling that was set many years ago by a much larger fleet, instead of a true demand-based model. Despite the fact that demand for naval power substantially increased throughout the power projection era the number of ships being deployed held steady.

However, what was once a supply-based limit may have morphed into demand-based pressure as the shrinking fleet became more stretched and strained. Maintenance troubles became severe enough to induce presence gaps in this deployment rate despite the Navy’s vigorous efforts to improvise timelines to prevent those gaps from happening. Somewhere along the way the fleet shrunk so much that eventually predictable presence could not come without predictable maintenance, putting the Navy at a tipping point.


A map providing an idea of the forward presence maintained by U.S. Navy forces. (Source: Department of the Navy FY 2018 President’s Budget Press Brief. Click to expand.)
The Navy’s latest deploying construct, known as Dynamic Force Employment, was implemented this year. One of its main features appears to include regular three-month deployments, which are half as short as the deployments of the past 30 years. By bringing units home much earlier the Navy won’t spend most of a ship’s readiness in a single stretch and in a forward area. This will conserve enough readiness to allow ships to more confidently deploy again if need be instead of possibly reusing tired ships and crews coming off long deployments. This will then create greater overlap in the employability of the Navy’s ships, allowing the fleet to better surge in larger formations. Ships can also use that extra time to get caught up on maintenance, conduct force development operations near home, or be better primed to surge. Perhaps Dynamic Force Employment is the break the Navy finally needed.

This operating concept could also represent a major shift in how the nation envisions using the Navy for winning and preventing wars. A major strategic justification for emphasizing continuous forward presence was the concept of deterrence by denial. By steadily maintaining naval forces in forward areas the Navy would shut down threatening ambitions by ruling out an adversary’s options for sudden strikes and quick, fait accompli victories. Forward presence also allows ships to frequently engage in foreign partnership operations and security cooperation. These operations can build constructive relationships, enhance partners’ skills in providing for their own security, and shape regions toward a more positive outlook of the U.S.19

Gaps in presence can change the strategic calculus of military options and deterrence. With gaps the Navy would not be as able to prevent sudden hostile actions or victories, but instead it could be reactively deployed to punish adversaries, roll back their gains, and prevent consolidation. This concept is strongly reinforced by shifting to an operating posture that emphasizes surging forces from home instead of continuously maintaining them abroad for presence. Defense Secretary James Mattis suggested this significant shift behind Dynamic Force Employment:

“They’ll be home at the end of a 90-day deployment. They will not have spent eight months at sea, and we are going to have a force more ready to surge and deal with the high-end warfare as a result…You can bank readiness by decreasing forward presence – that is, if you have fewer forces forward deployed…you have more to push forward when you want them. In other words, it’s punishment rather than deterrence — you surge after the enemy has made its move.”20

This suggests deterrence by denial through steady presence has been deemphasized in favor of responding to hostile action through reactively surged force.

Deploying ships for only three months at a time under this latest construct will dramatically lower presence even further. Dynamic Force Employment may therefore signal the removal of forward naval presence from an overriding position in national security strategy. This year the Navy has gone about six months without operating a carrier group deep in Middle Eastern waters, and with little fanfare compared to the previously mentioned two-month presence gap in 2015.21 Under this new construct presence gaps could have been made much more acceptable, and especially for the sake of improving surge capacity.

video at link.
A tracker displaying Navy deployments over a six-month period. Note the absence of a carrier strike group operating deep in Middle Eastern waters for almost all of the time period. (Types of major ship formations: ARG = Amphibious Ready Group, ESG = Expeditionary Strike Group, CSG= Carrier Strike Group. ARGs and ESGs are centered on an amphibious assault ship as the primary capital ship of the formation. Formations here are named after their main capital ship. Tracker source: U.S. Naval Institute News Fleet Tracker, sponsored by the Center for Naval Analyses)

This could be a major pivot in the Navy’s posture toward great power competition and away from power projection. It could also be the long overdue acceptance of the strategic downgrade in presence that occurs when the Navy of a geographically isolated superpower shrinks to half its size in a span of 15 years.22 For American naval supremacy it could mark the end of an era, or a new beginning.

Surge Capacity and Strategic Credibility

“I had always supposed that the subdivision in time of peace of a nation’s fighting units into numerous independent squadrons was due more to personal reasons than to a consideration of the principles of naval training and strategy—which latter seems to be more correctly illustrated by the rapid concentration that takes place when war is imminent…where the command of the sea is involved, a nation is not deterred from going to war by the state of dispersion of a rival nation’s battleships, but by the knowledge that he has a certain number…and that they have been continuously trained to a high degree of individual and fleet efficiency by concentration in one or more large fleets.” – Lieutenant Commander William Sims, 1906.

The damage done by years of excessive deployment rates has already degraded the Navy’s credibility. Regardless of any demand for presence maintaining latent surge capacity has always been one of the most vital national security requirements for a superpower. It gives the nation the flexibility it needs to effectively respond to major contingencies. War plans must be underpinned by realistic understandings of surge capacity to know how much force can be brought to bear in those crucial first weeks and months of a major war.

Significant declines in surge capacity can force revisions to war plans, and where a diminished ability to surge the fleet can increase strategic risk if the Navy cannot respond as well to major events. This makes the state of the fleet’s maintenance and material condition a major limiting factor of strategic consequence because these variables largely determine the Navy’s ability to surge its forces on short notice.

If the Navy has to suddenly surge in large numbers it will have to make difficult decisions on which ships it will bring forward and which ships it will leave behind. Major contingencies could easily force the Navy to pull forces from beyond those that are in the “employable” windows of the workup cycle. At any given moment many ships are undergoing deep maintenance and complex upgrades which makes it more difficult to deploy them on short notice. The deeper and more troubled the maintenance work of a ship the harder it will be to surge it with confidence. In the aftermath of last year’s fatal collisions the Navy’s “can-do” culture was cited as a major factor in normalizing excessive risk by deploying ships in worsening condition for years. But how “can-do” will the Navy be when it really has to surge for a major crisis?23

The viability of a readiness cycle can be measured by its ability to preserve a given amount of surge capacity against the wear-and-tear of regular operations. This is how a supply-based model can drive its discipline. Maintaining ships and aircraft in a good state and knowing how to firmly control their maintenance needs is central toward preserving surge capacity and understanding material limits. But a demand-based model and its inherently unstable nature will eat away at that supply and make maintenance less predictable. Navy leadership testified before Congress on the nature of the demand-based model and the mounting strategic liabilities it was incurring:

“…we continue to consume our contingency surge capacity for routine operations. It will be more challenging to meet Defense Strategic Guidance objectives of the future. Ultimately, this is a ‘pay me now or pay me later’ discussion.”24

Exactly how much surge capacity has the Navy sacrificed? Navy leaders testified that a major goal of OFRP was to “restore” the Navy to a three-carrier level of surge capacity.25 This is half the six-plus-two construct that was the goal of the Fleet Response Plan, suggesting a staggering loss of over half the Navy’s surge capacity within about ten years. But perhaps the Navy just overestimated itself. When the GAO suggested in 1993 that a 12-carrier force could surge seven battle groups within 30 days the Navy wrote the idea off as an “overly optimistic picture of carrier battle group surge capability.”26 Yet the goal of the Fleet Response Plan was not much different.

The U.S. is heavily disadvantaged by geography when it comes to military responses in that it must cross large oceans to surge to the front. Great power competitors such as Russia and China can easily enjoy steep advantages in time, space, and numbers because major contingencies are more likely to break out in their front yard. By operating so much closer to home great power competitors will have a vastly superior ability to surge at the start of sudden war. By comparison the U.S. will have relatively few forward forces, will have to surge across great distances, and may have to heavily rely on regional allies where many are easily overmatched by Russia or China. The deterrent value of forward forces and certain allies could make them more of a tripwire instead of a roadblock.

Surging is vital to winning the high-end fight because of its especially intense character. War at sea in particular has always been fairly deterministic when it comes to firepower overmatch because of the concentrated nature of naval capability. This trend is greatly magnified in the missile age where now only one hit can easily be enough to put a ship out of action, meaning a very small advantage in firepower can quickly snowball into decisive effects. This is especially true when modern war at sea can consist of forces unleashing dozens if not hundreds of missiles at one another’s ships within minutes. High-end naval combat could easily witness extreme amounts of rapid overkill if warship defenses fail to keep up even slightly. As Wayne Hughes the renowned thinker on naval tactics describes it, “It is demonstrable both by history and theory that not only has a small net advantage in force…often been decisive in naval battles, but the slightly inferior force tends to lose with very little to show…when committed in battle, the heart of a fleet can be cut out in an afternoon.”27

A fleet that is even slightly outgunned can easily lose. This makes the ability to powerfully surge foundational to success. By swallowing surge capacity to feed forward presence the Navy’s ability to win great power war has been degraded in a most critical way. A Navy that is serious about its credibility for the high-end fight will vigorously defend its material readiness for the sake of surge capacity.

Instead, the power projection Navy compromised its discipline. It lowered key readiness standards, set extreme surge requirements, and made lengthy deployments that were once considered rare the new normal.28 Pursuing more presence in forward areas and having more surge capacity from home are two opposite ambitions for orienting readiness. The Navy tried to do both, and with a shrinking fleet.

The Navy is now less sure of its own limits after having long exceeded them. If a pressing contingency breaks out tomorrow could the Navy effectively surge and then quickly rebound? Could the Navy surge enough ships to arrest a short sharp war by China, such as in a Taiwan scenario? After pushing too hard for too long the U.S. Navy finds itself tired, unbalanced, and less sure if it has either the forward presence or the surge capacity to stop great power war in its tracks.

Part 6 will focus on Strategy and Operations.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Nextwar@cimsec.org.

References

1. Megan Eckstein, “U.S. Fleet Forces: New Deployment Plan Designed to Create Sustainable Naval Force,” U.S. Naval Institute News, January 20, 2016. news.usni.org/2016/01/19/u-s-fleet-forces-new-deployment-plan-designed-to-create-sustainable-naval-force

Excerpt: “We’re trying to get four things out of OFRP: we’ve got to have a schedule that’s capable of rotating the force, meaning sending it on deployment; surging that force in case we have to go to war; maintain and modernize that force so that we can get it to the end of its service life; and then if you had to go to war or if you had some other catastrophe, be able to reset the whole thing in stride, which the previous iteration didn’t have that capability…”

2. Naval Transformation Roadmap 2003, Assured Access & Power Projection From the Sea… www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/navy/naval_trans_roadmap2003.pdf

3. For scale of recent surge deployments see:

Roland J. Yardley et. al, “Impacts of the Fleet
Response Plan on Surface Combatant Maintenance,” RAND, 2006. www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/technical_reports/2006/RAND_TR358.pdf

Excerpt: “Operation Iraqi Freedom featured the largest naval deployment in recent history, with more than 70 percent of U.S. surface ships and 50 percent of U.S. submarines underway, including seven CSGs, three amphibious readiness groups, two amphibious task forces, and more than 77,000 sailors participating…”

Benjamin S. Lambeth, “American Carrier Air Power at the Dawn of a
New Century,” RAND, 2005. www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2005/RAND_MG404.pdf

Excerpt:

“As the Iraqi Freedom air war neared, the Navy had eight carrier battle groups and air wings deployed worldwide, including USS Carl Vinson and her embarked CVW-9 in the Western Pacific covering North Korea and China during the final countdown. Five of those eight battle groups and air wings had participated in Operation Enduring Freedom just a year before. With five carrier battle groups on station and committed to the impending war, a sixth en route to CENTCOM’s AOR as a timely replacement for one of those five, a seventh also forward deployed and holding in ready reserve, and yet an eighth carrier at sea and ready to go, 80 percent of the Navy’s carrier-based striking power was poised and available for immediate tasking. During the cold war years, having eight out of 12 carriers and ten air wings deployed at sea and combat-ready at the same time would have been all but out of the question.”

For Summer Pulse see:

“Summer Pulse 2004,” All Hands Magazine, September 2004. www.navy.mil/ah_online/archpdf/ah200409.pdf

Caveat offered by GAO: “Summer Pulse 2004 was not a realistic test because all participating units had several months’ warning of the event. As a result, five carriers were already scheduled to be at sea and only two had to surge. Because six ships are expected to be ready to deploy with as little as 30 days’ notice under the plan and two additional carriers within 90 days, a more realistic test of the Fleet Response Plan would include no-notice or short-notice exercises.”

4. General Accounting Office, “Cost-Effectiveness of Conventionally and Nuclear-Powered Aircraft Carriers,” August 1998. www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GAOREPORTS-NSIAD-98-1/pdf/GAOREPORTS-NSIAD-98-1.pdf

5. Heidi L.W. Golding, Henry S. Griffis, “How Has PERSTEMPO’s Effect on Reenlistments Changed Since the 1986 Navy Policy?” Center for Naval Analyses, July 2004. www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/1014531.pdf

For “inviolate” reference: Raymond F. Keledei, “Naval Forward Presence,” Naval War College student thesis, October 23, 2006. www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a463587.pdf

6. Raymond F. Keledei, “Naval Forward Presence,” Naval War College student thesis, October 23, 2006. www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a463587.pdf

7. Admiral Bill Gortney and Admiral Harry Harris, USN, “Applied Readiness,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 2014. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2014-10/applied-readiness

8. Megan Eckstein, “USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Repair Period Triples in Legnth; Carrier Will be in Yard Until 2019,” U.S. Naval Institute News, September 24, 2018. news.usni.org/2018/09/24/eisenhower-carrier-maintenance-will-last-2019-tripling-length-expected-6-month-availability

9. For increase in Combatant Commander demand see:

Naval Operations Concept 2010. fas.org/irp/doddir/navy/noc2010.pdf

Excerpt: “Since 2007 the combatant commanders’
cumulative requests for naval forces have grown 29 percent for
CSGs, 76 percent for surface combatants, 86 percent for ARG/MEUs, and
53 percent for individually deployed amphibious ships.”

Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin, USN (ret.), “It’s Not Just the Forward Deployed,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-04/its-not-just-forward-deployed

Excerpt:

“Between 2015 and 2017, naval operations in the Indo-Asia Pacific expanded dramatically both in direct response to national priorities and to ComPacFlt and Commander, U.S. Pacific Command (USPaCom). As a consequence of the increasing demand for and decreasing availability of C7F assets, readiness declined in CruDes forces. This was known both to commanders in FDNF and across the Navy. The GAO had reported to the Navy in 2015 that resources were not keeping pace with demand. Through 2016 and culminating in early 2017, my staff produced detailed data quantifying the increase in CruDes operational tasking and demonstrating the consequent decline in executed maintenance and training, which I sent directly to ComPacFlt. ComPacFlt agreed operational tasking threatened FDNF surface maintenance and training. Yet C7F received no substantive relief from tasking or additional resources.”

For increase in equipment casualty reports see: Government Accountability Office, “Navy Force Structure: Sustainable Plan and Comprehensive Assessment Needed to Mitigate Long-Term Risks to Ships Assigned to Overseas Homeports,” May 2015. www.gao.gov/assets/680/670534.pdf#page=2

10. Admiral Bill Gortney and Admiral Harry Harris, USN, “Applied Readiness,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 2014. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2014-10/applied-readiness

11. Captain Dale Rielage, USN, “How We Lost the Great Pacific War,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-05/how-we-lost-great-pacific-war

Excerpt: “…we created a sustainment phase in the OFRP. This phase was designed to ensure that readiness did not “bathtub.” Each deployment cycle was envisioned to build on the previous iteration, ultimately creating the varsity-level performance the challenge demanded. The sustainment phase was also where we planned to keep surge forces, but it was never resourced. Ten years ago, the director of fleet maintenance for U.S. Fleet Forces referred to it publicly as a “sustainment opportunity” because there was no funding associated with it. The years of continuing resolutions, Budget Control Act restrictions, and maintenance deficits left the sustainment phase a shell of a concept.”

MEGAN ECKSTEIN, “NAVY PROVES HIGH READINESS LEVELS DURING CARRIER’S SUSTAINMENT PHASE LEADS TO MAINTENANCE SAVINGS LATER,” U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE NEWS, AUGUST 3, 2017. HTTPS://NEWS.USNI.ORG/2017/08/03/NAVY-PROVES-HIGH-READINESS-LEVELS-CARRIERS-SUSTAINMENT-PHASE-LEADS-MAINTENANCE-SAVINGS-LATER

Excerpt: Of course this high level of readiness had an upfront cost. [Admiral] Lindsey praised U.S. Fleet Forces Command commander Adm. Phil Davidson and his staff for the “maneuvers” it took to keep Eisenhower funded during the sustainment phase, saying “I never wanted for money that I needed to keep them at that high level. … That’s a testament to Adm. Davidson and his staff, his comptroller and everything.”

12. Megan Eckstein, “Navy Proves High Readiness Levels During Carrier’s Sustainment Phase Leads to Maintenance Savings Later,” U.S. Naval Institute News, August 3, 2017. news.usni.org/2017/08/03/navy-proves-high-readiness-levels-carriers-sustainment-phase-leads-maintenance-savings-later

13. Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet and Commander, U.S. Fleet Forces Command, “COMUSFLTFORCOM/COMPACFLT INSTRUCTION 3000.15A, Subject: Optimized Fleet Response Plan,” December 8, 2014. www.sabrewebhosting.com/elearning/supportfiles/pdfs/USFFC_CPF%20INST%203000_15A%20OFRP.pdf

14. “Optimized Fleet Response Plan,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Readiness of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, 114th Congress, September 10, 2015. www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-114hhrg96239/pdf/CHRG-114hhrg96239.pdf

15. “Optimized Fleet Response Plan,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Readiness of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, 114th Congress, September 10, 2015. www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-114hhrg96239/pdf/CHRG-114hhrg96239.pdf

Rear Admiral Bruce Lindsey and Lieutenant Commander Heather Quilenderino, “Operationalizing Optimized Fleet Response Plan – SITREP #1,” March 5, 2016. blog.usni.org/posts/2016/03/05/operationalizing-optimized-fleet-response-plan-sitrep-1

David Larter, “New Deployment Plan Faces Hurdles, Official Warns,” Navy Times, September 11, 2015. www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2015/09/11/new-deployment-plan-faces-hurdles-official-warns/

16. Megan Eckstein, “Navy Will Extend All DDGs to a 45-Year Service Life; ‘No Destroyer Left Behind’ Officials Say,” U.S. Naval Institute News, April 12, 2018. news.usni.org/2018/04/12/navy-will-extend-ddgs-45-year-service-life-no-destroyer-left-behind-officials-say

17. Bryan Clark and Jesse Sloman, Deploying Beyond Their Means: America’s Navy and Marine Corps at a Tipping Point, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, November 2015. csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/CSBA6174_(Deploying_Beyond_Their_Means)Final2-web.pdf

18. The story of the late 2015 carrier gap was picked up by outlets including Business Insider, U.S. Naval Institute News, CNN, Navy Times, Fox News, and Stars and Stripes.

19. For nature and benefits of forward presence operations see Navy strategy document: A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, 2015. www.navy.mil/local/maritime/150227-CS21R-Final.pdf

For nature of deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment see: Michael Gerson and Daniel Whiteneck, Deterrence and Influence: The Navy’s Role in Preventing War, Center for Naval Analyses, March 2009. www.cna.org/CNA_files/PDF/D0019315.A4.pdf

20. David Larter, “Is Secretary of Defense Mattis planning radical changes to how the Navy deploys?” Navy Times, May 2, 2018. www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/05/02/is-secretary-of-defense-mattis-planning-radical-changes-to-how-the-navy-deploys/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ebb%2003.05.18&utm_term=Editorial%20-%20Early%20Bird%20Brief

21. Sam LaGrone, “U.S. Aircraft Carrier Deployments at 25 Year Low as Navy Struggles to Reset Force,” U.S. Naval Institute News, September 26, 2018. news.usni.org/2018/09/26/aircraft-carrier-deployments-25-year-low

Caveat: In the time period covered the Harry Truman strike group conducted operations in the Middle East but from the Eastern Mediterranean and not for the full duration of its deployment. Hence the distinction of describing naval presence as “deep” in Middle Eastern Waters, where typically carrier groups were deployed and maintained in the immediate vicinity of the Persian Gulf.

22. For U.S. Navy fleet size and ship counts see: US Ship Force Levels, 1886-Present, U.S. Navy History and Heritage Command. www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/us-ship-force-levels.html#1986

To explain the difference between this point with the earlier comment on 40 percent shrinkage across 25 years, the Navy shrunk by half from 1990 to 2005, and where fleet size stabilized in the range of 270-280 ships around 2005. Open source data on deployment rates (as a defined by number of ships deployed per year) in the early 1990s was not immediately findable. However, in the early 1990s such as from 1990-1993 the fleet would drop in size by over 100 ships.

23. Comprehensive Review of Recent Surface Force Incidents, October 2017. s3.amazonaws.com/CHINFO/Comprehensive+Review_Final.pdf

24. “Optimized Fleet Response Plan,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Readiness of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, 114th Congress, September 10, 2015. www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-114hhrg96239/pdf/CHRG-114hhrg96239.pdf

25. “Optimized Fleet Response Plan,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Readiness of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, 114th Congress, September 10, 2015. www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-114hhrg96239/pdf/CHRG-114hhrg96239.pdf

See Also: “Aircraft Carrier – Presence and Surge Limitations and Expanding Power Projection Options,” Joint Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces Meeting Jointly With Subcommittee on Readiness of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, 114th Congress, November 3, 2015. www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-114hhrg97498/pdf/CHRG-114hhrg97498.pdf

26. General Accounting Office, “Navy Carrier Battle Groups: The Structure and
Affordability of the Future Force,” February 1993.

27. Captain Wayne P. Hughes Jr., USN, “Naval Tactics and Their Influence on Strategy,” U.S. Naval War College Review, Volume 39, Number 1, Winter, 1986. digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://cimsec.org/?p=37359&preview=true&httpsredir=1&article=4426&context=nwc-review

28. For reduced readiness standards see review conducted in aftermath of fatal 2017 collisions: Strategic Readiness Review 2017, s3.amazonaws.com/CHINFO/SRR+Final+12112017.pdf

Featured Image: Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Wash. (Aug. 14, 2003) USS Ohio (SSGN 726) is in dry dock undergoing a conversion from a Ballistic Missile Submarine (SSBN) to a Guided Missile Submarine (SSGN). (U.S. Navy file photo)

HOW THE FLEET FORGOT TO FIGHT, PT. 7: STRATEGY AND FORCE DEVELOPMENT

By Dmitry Filipoff

Force Development

Exploring the future of conflict while preparing to wage it is a daunting task. Military forces are constantly attempting to perceive how war is evolving, and subsequently orienting their institutions along that vision in order to be ready. However, what makes a military unique from most other organizations is that it does not execute its primary function (aside from deterrence) until war breaks out. This makes it especially difficult to prepare for major war since it is a rare experience that usually cannot be fully understood until it finally occurs. When war arrives, years of preparation are immediately put to the test, and deficiencies are violently revealed. How well a military has prepared for conflict in peace helps determine how much it will have to adjust in war. In this sense, force development is the peacetime equivalent of wartime adaptation.

The term force development has been used here in place of a term that is often used to describe military evolution, “modernization,” which tends to have an inherent bias toward high-end capability and not full-spectrum competence. The idea of “modernizing” implies a focus on pushing for better technology, yet “modernization” 20 years ago could have meant preparing for low-end conflicts where technological superiority conferred little advantage. The term “modernization” can also encourage a habit of using the procurement of newer systems as a major milestone for progress, and promote the fallacy that once new technology is bought and fielded a shortfall has been filled or an advantage has been gained. What has to be recognized is that once the taxpayer has purchased new military tools the warfighter has an obligation to execute follow-through in the form of developing new tactics and training around those tools. Otherwise, the benefits or pitfalls of new technology will not be fully realized.

Force development as it has been described here intends to convey that the institutions that focus on tactics and doctrine, not procurement, are what primarily drive competitive military advantage. It intends to convey that operator understanding of how to execute and evolve tactics and doctrine is how to best define warfighter competence. Tactics and doctrine must not only be well-understood by the warfighter, they must be thoroughly validated so that they actually make sense in application. The professionalism of the force will punch far below its weight if warfighters are well-versed in warfighting concepts that turn out to be brittle.

Force development still occurs even in the middle of war, but it takes on a far more urgent character. Militaries are often forced to innovate and experiment in the middle of conflict, and spend precious time and resources on force development when those resources could be applied to the battlefield. However, even in the middle of a war (or especially so) militaries often choose to make those considerable investments because wartime adaptation can be decisive. Wartime force development can seek to correct deficiencies revealed by combat experience, rapidly field new capabilities built on fresh tactical insight, or remain ahead of the curve in a general sense as all sides continually pursue better tactics. If a force can enter a conflict with sturdier warfighting concepts then it can focus more of its wartime force development on proactive evolution instead of painful corrective action.

An example of failed peacetime force development and a subsequent effort to urgently correct deficiencies in the middle of war can be found in the U.S. submarine force. The submarine force entered WWII with ill-conceived concepts of operation, a highly risk-averse culture, faulty weapons, and underdeveloped tactics. Submariners at first expected to mostly use sonar to attack their targets (a dubious tactic at the time), were equipped with torpedoes that often failed to detonate upon impact, and had little doctrine for unrestricted anti-submarine warfare. These deficiencies forced American submariners to experiment with new tactics and doctrine in the midst of conflict.1 This force development failure happened in spite of the interwar period wargames, Fleet Problem exercises, and Admirals King and Nimitz both having a decent amount of submarine experience. U.S. naval commanders even had the especially useful experience of watching German U-Boats earn combat experience as they sunk hundreds of merchant ships in the Atlantic before America entered the war. However, as a result of poor force development, U.S. submarines punched far below their weight for many months while the rest of the force still relied heavily on them to take the fight to enemy home waters.

The U.S. military suffered a historically painful force development experience in recent years. Despite after crushing the initial opposition in the opening phases, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began to falter hard as insurgents made impressive gains in territory and manpower. The counterinsurgent fight proved to be extremely difficult in these countries due to the complexity of interagency operations, unfamiliar frontline roles, war-torn societies, and a host of many other significant challenges. But as the Department of Defense sought to adapt itself to a difficult fight it at least had the benefit of history. Insurgency is perhaps the most common form of warfare, with around 100 such conflicts in the past century.2 There was no shortage of case studies to learn from.

The Navy’s current situation couldn’t be more opposite. High-end fleet combat between great powers using precision weapons has never happened before. This is why realistic exercising for the sake of experimentation and investigation is so important. Because there are zero historical examples to draw on, the Navy must dedicate an especially large effort toward building its own case studies of networked fleet combat actions in the form of unconstrained, large-scale exercises. However, the Navy’s long tradition of highly unrealistic exercising translates into very poor institutional understanding on many specifics of future combat.

The Navy’s chronic lack of realistic exercising and its bloated certification system reveal a force development enterprise in disarray. The Navy has many institutions that produce tactical memoranda, concepts of operation, and doctrine, all of which seek to evolve the force. Yet many of these ideas have not been effectively validated because exercises were not used to meaningfully test ideas in realistic environments. The few tactical and doctrinal ideas that did have the opportunity of being tested in large-scale exercises were likely pitted against handicapped opposition forces. This undercuts the process tremendously. Scripted exercises that guarantee easy victory are far more likely to produce brittle tactics and doctrine. These concepts will rarely experience multiple rounds of revision and refinement born from a series of iterative exercises. Clearly there will be many rounds of trial and error if one is testing warfighting ideas against capable opposition. As a result of using weak opposition to validate warfighting concepts many of the Navy’s most important wargames, tactical memoranda, concepts of operation, and doctrine never left the level of a rough draft.

Even if it was effectively validating concepts through realistic exercises, the Navy’s ability to teach the average Sailor new tactical lessons is severely handicapped. Warfighting certifications are supposed to institutionalize the Navy’s force development, but the bloated character of the certification system is strangling the Navy’s ability to become a learning organization. Tactical and doctrinal products cannot turn into meaningful learning if they take the form of just another certification event or inspection Sailors have to check off among the dozens if not hundreds of other events. Many Sailors already feel it is virtually impossible for them to get good at the numerous certifications that have been forced upon them. Because of this, institutions that work on producing tactics and doctrine are having many of their efforts effectively wasted because their products simply cannot compete for time within the certification system. And even if the Navy somehow made enough time for Sailors to effectively study tactical and doctrinal publications, they are being given little opportunity to use meaningful exercises to distill those lengthy publications into actionable and digestible insights. The scarcity of meaningful exercising and the bloated certification system have combined to produce numerous warfighting ideas that are untested, unrefined, and untaught.

Under these conditions, the U.S. Navy is hard-pressed to define requirements that can remain durable in great power war. There should be absolutely no doubt that an incredible number of latent problems have been accumulated over the years as a result of lax force development and using weak opposition to validate concepts. If the Navy decides to embark on a serious path of transformation for the high-end fight then it must steel itself for difficult corrective actions, stubborn bureaucratic pushback, and the possibility that it may be stuck with tactically disadvantageous investments that could prove fatal in war.

Wargaming

Soon after leaving his term as the first president of the Naval War College he founded, Stephen B. Luce grew frustrated. Just before opening the War College, Luce commanded the North Atlantic Squadron, a unit he used to test warfighting concepts through at-sea experimentation and exercises. After finishing his term at the War College, Luce came back to the Squadron, hoping to conduct more exercising in pursuit of new tactics. Others had something else in mind.

After rejoining the Squadron, Luce’s attention was almost immediately diverted by higher ups. He was ordered to handle brewing fishing disputes that consumed much of his attention for the first year of his command. Unrest in Haiti prompted the Navy to detach one of his ships to the Caribbean. A request from the State Department took another ship. Not long after Luce’s flagship was also stripped from his command to serve elsewhere, the Navy Department inquired about his summer training plans.

Luce had finally had enough. With only two ships remaining under his command Luce fired off a stern letter to Secretary of the Navy William Whitney, and described how a fundamental mission of the Naval War College was being undermined:

“The fundamental idea (emphasis added) is to make theoretical instruction and practical exercise go hand in hand; or, in other words, to correlate the work of the Squadron and that of the College. In the lecture room certain tactical propositions are laid down, or war problems given out, to the officers under instruction. Their merit is then tested in the School of Application, the Squadron, and the result afterwards discussed in the lecture room. This system raises our Squadron exercises to a higher plane than those of any other known to me, and places our Navy, comparatively insignificant in all else, in advance of the Navies of the world in respect to professional education.”3

Today, the Naval War College stands as one of the most important institutions to the Navy’s force development. Aside from educating cohorts, the College performs critical force development functions for the Navy by playing a leading role in its wargaming enterprise. These wargames seek to answer some of the most critical questions of strategy and future development. They can inform war plans, test contingencies, and support major programmatic decisions such as future warship procurement. They can explore new tactics, doctrine, and warfighting concepts. However, the problem that afflicted Luce’s squadron also holds true today. The Navy has allowed operational demand to strip units away from its wargaming enterprise, and no serious effort has been made for decades to “correlate the work of the Squadron and that of the College.”

The Navy continues to use wargaming to make major decisions and provide important insights. However, the validity of wargaming is being diminished by both the rising complexity of networked warfighting and a lack of real-world testing. The Navy is heavily leaning on a tool that is growing ever more dependent on real-world testing for the sake of accuracy, yet the Navy’s exercise agenda appears to rarely reflect major wargaming initiatives.

Wargames, because they are virtual simulations of conflict, operate on a far wider spectrum of tactical assumptions than real-world exercises. Attempting to recreate tactical accuracy in wargames stretches them to their limits and takes considerable effort. High-fidelity wargames can be extremely intricate programs, requiring meticulous inputs, powerful processing capabilities, and are governed by many rules. Elements of chance can be introduced through randomized results, similar to a dice roll.

Exercises and wargames must work together when exploring tactics and doctrine. Wargames can play out many scenarios in a preliminary manner to narrow down options and ideas. What remains can then be played out in the real world using exercises. In addition to testing out the ideas themselves, exercises can uncover assumptions and collect important technical data that can update the models the wargames operate on. This point was elaborated on by renowned wargamer Peter Perla:

“Careful observation, reconstruction, analysis, and interpretation of exercise events and system and unit performance can provide the insights and data to improve the form of mathematical models and the quality of parameter estimates. In addition, the physical execution of maneuvers and procedures required to carry out the operation can help to identify important operational opportunities or potential problems that the analysis and wargaming may have downplayed or failed to consider at all.”4

As powerful and complex wargames are, they are still only simulations, and cannot come close to the realism of exercises. Exercises have to be used to refine wargames in a continual feedback loop for the sake of refinement, and to keep wargames grounded in reality. Many types of wargames are not supposed to be static, but fluid simulations that are continuously updated through exercises to improve their realism and ensure their accuracy. Significant tactical discoveries should also be enough to prompt the replaying of certain wargames. Exercises can help wargamers more precisely understand the very things that make a wargame artificial, such as factors that must be reduced to dice rolls, inputs, and rules. In short, exercises help wargamers understand their assumptions.

The complexity of Information Age warfighting is one of the most powerful forces diminishing the value of tactical- and operational-level wargaming. As warfare becomes more complex, it becomes more difficult to simulate. This holds true for both exercises and wargames, but it is especially more true for the latter given they are simulations and not real maneuvers. The world of inputs required to accurately simulate warfare has grown to unprecedented heights, especially because so much decisive tactical space now exists within electronic means that are especially difficult to replicate in a simulation.

Networked warfare involves many complex and nuanced electronic interactions between opposing forces. The nature of sensing, deciding, and engaging has become an ambiguous electronic battlefield. Opposing sides will seek to jam, intercept, and deceive communications and sensors across the spectrum. Cyber attacks will seek to cripple systems, collect sensitive information, and proliferate throughout infrastructure. As an anti-ship missile closes in, its seeker can use a variety of sensors to pinpoint its target, and a variety of countermeasures such as electronic warfare will respond in an attempt to confuse the seeker. Bandwidth limitations will shape decision-making, and data will be processed and refined by both man and machine. Operators and autonomous actors will attempt a variety of real-time workarounds in response to electronic attack, and these attacks can cause them to lose confidence in their equipment and each other.

It is already extremely difficult to replicate many of these network combat dynamics in exercises, and for wargames many elements are outright impossible. While a wargamer can make due by using dice rolls to distill combat ambiguity into specific outcomes, this will not often satisfy the tactician or the trainer. Even the supposed strengths of wargaming are challenged by networked warfare. According to Perla, wargaming “is a tool for exploring the effects of human interpretation of information. Wargames focus on the decisions players make, how and why they are made, and the effects that they have…The true value of wargaming lies in its unique ability to illuminate the effect of the human factor in warfare.”5 Yet so much decision-making in modern war is completely beholden to electronic nuances that wargames struggle to replicate, and decision-making is often the direct objective of electronic attack.

Because networked warfare poses immense realism challenges to wargaming, a force development strategy in the modern era demands an especially exercise-heavy process of tactical investigation. Wargames have become more dependent than ever on exercises because exercises can probe whether decisive tactical truth lies undiscovered within the seams of simulation.

Exercises are indispensable to wargames because they can provide the important baseline input of the competence of the force. Even though it can be difficult to program human performance factors into a simulation, these are some of the most important variables to know for the sake of realism. By benchmarking human performance through exercises, wargames can have a realistic baseline of how well the force can perform and then build ideas within the limits of that potential. Otherwise, wargames will be misaligned with the training of the force, and can run the grave risk of producing tactics, doctrine, and war plans that are beyond the ability of the force to execute. To paraphrase a certain quote, you go to war with the fleet you trained, not the one you wargamed.

Force Structure

Soon after guiding at-sea experiments to test future warship concepts, Wayne Hughes became frustrated. The USS ­Guam had been modified to test concepts for the Sea Control Ship (SCS), a warship concept touted by then-Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Zumwalt who desired a large platform dedicated to anti-submarine warfare. However, according to Hughes, the tests were hamstrung by a lack of imagination and poor understanding of how to use exercises to make a warship concept come alive:

“It was my task to design an experiment from which as much information as possible could be gleaned during ten days of intensive interactions between submarines, their target (played by the Guam), and the assorted screening units…SCS success depended on new tactics (emphasis added), which we didn’t have, and the tactical commander’s staff lacked enthusiasm to develop. I had frustrating conversations with the admiral, who thought his responsibility began and ended by rigidly following the test plan…An exercise at sea is as much for tactical development and training as it is for statistical testing. Most new weapons, sensors, and command-and-control systems entail new tactics to reach their full potential.”6

This experience points to a fundamental principle of designing military forces: force structure is founded on tactics.

How a fleet will be used in war is fundamental to its design, and the shape of force structure is guided by a perception of what capabilities and tactics will dominate. When it appeared advantageous to use aircraft to attack ships, nations built aircraft carriers. When a torpedo fired from an undersea platform could produce a powerful combination of surprise and lethality, nations built more submarines. When aerial threats took the form of missile salvos the U.S. Navy led the way in building warships focused on long-range air defense. When platforms were deemed to have lost their tactical relevance, whether ships of sail, ironclads, or big-gun battleships, nations stopped making them.

Three congressionally mandated force structure studies set out to understand what the future fleet could look like, and examined various considerations such as cost, forward presence models, and national strategies. However, while a force structure assessment can be shaped by many factors, the assessment is inherently incomplete if it does not attempt to understand how future tactics and doctrine will define the composition of forces. While the studies took various analytical approaches, the assessment conducted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Studies stands out in this regard. 7 It devoted extensive attention to trying to understand the character of future conflict, how capability development is trending across numerous warfare areas, and what new operating concepts may require. All of the studies acknowledged to some extent that visions of tactics and operating concepts are fundamental to designing force structure.

The existence of a platform or payload is solely justified by the tactical options and advantages it offers. The structure of a fleet is therefore the embodiment of concepts of operations that are built on tactics that are meant to work well together. However, the extent to which those warfighting concepts are proven or not is another question. Aligning force structure planning with an ever-evolving vision of future war is a major strategic challenge, and goes to the very core of force development. This point was made clear by maritime strategist Julian Corbett:

“The truth is, that the classes of ships which constitute a fleet are, or ought to be, the expression in material of the strategical and tactical ideas that prevail at any given time…It may also be said more broadly that they have varied with the theory of war…It is true that few ages have formulated a theory of war, or even been clearly aware of its influence; but nevertheless such theories have always existed, and even in their most nebulous and intangible shapes seem to have exerted an ascertainable influence on the constitution of fleets.”8

Those who favored battleships in the interwar period did not accurately predict their fate because their “theory of war” had failed to keep pace with change. They had a flawed understanding of how future war at sea would develop at the tactical level, especially with respect to how the air domain could dominate the surface domain. The American capital ships that were long expected to be the dominant offensive platform for anti-surface warfare instead spent most of their fleet combat actions serving as ships focused on the defensive anti-air mission. New tactical truth led to battleships being modified in the middle of the war to carry additional anti-air weapons and bolster their defensive firepower. However, their enormous guns, the core weapons that originally justified their construction, were totally irrelevant in this new role. If the interwar Navy had accurately predicted the tactical fate of the battleship would it have built them differently? Would it have built them at all?

For all the good the interwar period wargames and Fleet Problem exercises did for the Navy’s force development they often made one major mistake – scripting battles to guarantee a clash between the battleline.9 The potential of the aircraft carrier was rapidly growing, but in the minds of many interwar leaders the fleet combat actions of the era would still frequently feature fights between battleships. Interwar period exercises and wargames were artificially fulfilling this warfighting theory, thereby lending weight to programmatic decisions to procure battleships. It is quite possible that if not for the revealing combat experiences of WWII then navies would have continued building big-gun warships.

Modular force structure can act as an insurance policy against the sort of tactical irrelevance that befell the battleship. Modularity helps ease both peacetime force development and wartime adaptation. A “payloads not platforms” approach can help a force compensate for poorly-adjusted warship designs once conflict reveals hard lessons. Deep magazines and the large variety of missile payloads could allow a modern ship to change its mix of capabilities in far less time than it took a battleship to undergo a refit.

However, net-centric warfare has made adapting modern warships more difficult in certain respects, even with modularity. A key challenge will be in trying to ascertain how tactical outcomes heavily influenced by ambiguous electronic effects will translate into an ideal mix of capabilities. If defensive electronic warfare or jamming proves to be especially capable at defeating missile seekers then an adaptation could take the form of equipping a different missile loadout. Missile loadouts could also be affected by how well datalinks and network nodes can concentrate fires while being degraded by electronic attack. If the network is less resilient than anticipated, then a new missile loadout could focus on making a warship more independent from forces it would have originally relied on for networked fires.

An enduring principle of successful warfighting is optimizing the concentration of firepower. This principle has especially dominated naval force structure, and can be seen in how successive capital ship designs often grew larger and larger to concentrate more firepower. Preferable ways to concentrate firepower through force-wide tactics can also translate into how a fleet is built. Ships of various sizes offer different levels and types of firepower, and the way tactics affect concentration can translate into an ideal mix of platforms. Interwar period navies did not build fleets of only the most powerful platforms in the form of battleships or carriers even though large-scale fleet combat featured prominently in their minds. Rather, their fleets struck a balance between large capital ships and many smaller combatants such as cruisers and destroyers. They felt that their visions of fleet combat created relationships between tactics and concentration that encouraged a degree of platform variety.

Optimizing platform variety has become far more difficult in the age of networked warfare because assumptions about network performance can have a powerful effect on designing force structure. Network resilience will strongly dictate the extent to which capabilities can be effectively distributed and concentrated in combat, but the distribution and concentration of capability is also exactly what force structure seeks to optimize. A fleet that is built on a vision of a well-functioning network could very well have a vastly different composition compared to a fleet that anticipates fighting mostly in the dark.

To use a modern example, a U.S. Navy cruiser has 122 launch cells and a possible version of the Navy’s future FFG(X) frigate could have 16 launch cells. Would the Navy be better served by buying 20 frigates or 10 cruisers, where the cruiser could cost twice as much as the frigate but has seven times the missile capacity? A well-grounded understanding of how retargeting and engage-on-remote tactics shape a distributed force’s ability to mass firepower should inform such a debate.

Today the Navy finds itself at a critical inflection point in building the future fleet. It is currently finalizing designs and requirements for the next generation of surface warships in the form of a future frigate FFG(X), and a family of future surface combatants (FSC). The FFG(X) frigate and FSC warships are expected to serve well into the latter half of the 21st century. The request for proposals for the FFG(X) frigate offers interesting concepts of operation for how the Navy intends to use the platform:

“This platform will employ unmanned systems to penetrate and dwell in contested environments, operating at greater risk to gain sensor and weapons advantages over the adversary. The FFG(X) will be capable of establishing a local sensor network using passive onboard sensors, embarked aircraft and elevated/tethered systems and unmanned vehicles to gather information and then act as a gateway to the fleet tactical grid using resilient communications systems and networks…In terms of the Navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) Concept, this FFG(X) small surface combatant will expand blue force sensor and weapon influence to provide increased information to the overall fleet tactical picture while challenging adversary ISR&T efforts.”10

This is a preview of future tactics and missions, but it hints at a major force development challenge. Requirements for these ships have to try to align with major transformations the Navy has planned. The Distributed Maritime Operations Concept is still in its early stages. The Distributed Lethality concept envisions numerous surface action groups that combine various types of ships into tailored force packages. Networked warfighting can feature various multi-domain tactics and distributed fleet formations, each with a different ability to concentrate firepower and facilitate command and control. Tactics for key capabilities like NIFC-CA, CEC, retargeting, and engage-on-remote will be the bread and butter of networked warfighting. An unprecedented increase in long-range anti-ship firepower is about to hit the Navy as a new generation of anti-ship missiles is fielded.

In short, these future ships must somehow reflect the implications of many net-centric tactics and roles the Navy has yet to develop or discover.

The Navy is heavily relying on simulations such as wargames and tabletop exercises to test concepts of operations for these future ships. According to Navy officials, the FSC program was “preparing for a big wargame…to test out ideas for the FSC family of systems” and that “Based on the outcome of the June wargame, officials should have a ‘surface force initial capabilities document’ written by July to get FSC into the acquisition pipeline.” One Navy official emphasized, “We’ve got to get these wargames right…”11

The Navy’s void of high-end experience is now a critical foundation upon which it is deciding its future. The Navy is led by officers who spent most of their careers in a fleet that failed to train them in sea control, abstained from equipping them with essential weapons like anti-ship missiles, and neglected to give them enough opportunity to test their tactical imagination in exercises. Many of the Navy’s most important wargames and simulations have not been properly tested or refined by real-world experimentation. The Navy has virtually no concrete doctrine for a very complex form of warfare that’s never happened before. This is a recipe for producing flimsy requirements for future capability.

The experience of testing the Sea Control Ship concept suggests there may be merit to the idea of using real ships to test ideas for future ships. The Navy’s surface warfare directorate has already teased the idea of standing up an “experimental squadron” within the next year, and include a Zumwalt-class destroyer, a Littoral Combat Ship, an Arleigh-Burke-class destroyer, and an unmanned surface ship.12

However, compared to most other force development missions, the enormous investment that comes with a new generation of force structure should already pose one of the strongest possible demand signals for rigorous at-sea experimentation. The modern fleet should already be acting as an experimental squadron for the future fleet. But it appears the Navy is making some of the most important naval force structure decisions of the 21st century without using a series of major exercises to inform requirements. Now the Navy is poised to set sail into the future with a new generation of ships inspired by doctrine born in a simulation, and not in the fleet.

The eighth and final part will offer a Force Development Strategy.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Nextwar@cimsec.org.

References

1. F.G. Hoffman, “The American Wolfpacks: A Case Study in Wartime Adaptation,” Joint Forces Quarterly, January 2016. ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/Article/643229/the-american-wolf-packs-a-case-study-in-wartime-adaptation/

2. Christopher Paul et. al, Victory has a Thousand Fathers: Detailed Counterinsurgency Case Studies, RAND, 2010. www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2010/RAND_MG964.1.pdf

3. James C. Rentfrow, “The Squadron Under Your Command: Change and the Construction of Identity in the U.S. Navy’s North Atlantic Squadron,1874-1897,” 2012. drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/12855/Rentfrow_umd_0117E_13092.pdf;jsessionid=A0AEFD1C57596CDFFEAF23292597ECA4?sequence=1

4. Peter Perla, The Art of Wargaming, U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1990.

5. Ibid.

6. Captain Wayne P. Hughes Jr., USN, “Navy Operations Research,” Operations Research, 2002. pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/opre.50.1.103.17786

7. Bryan Clark et. al, Restoring American Seapower: A New Fleet Architecture of the U.S. Navy, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2017. csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/CSBA6292-Fleet_Architecture_Study_REPRINT_web.pdf

8. Julian Stafford Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, 1911. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15076?msg=welcome_stranger

9. Albert Nofi, To Train the Fleet For War, Department of the Navy, 2010.

Excerpts:

“While no fleet problem was scripted from start to finish, some portions of each were usually set-up in order to play out certain ideas or test particular tactics. After all, the actual playing out of a scenario might not have resulted in a particular type of action developing, such as a battleline clash. So the stage was often set for these, in order to test ideas, new or old. Unfortunately, pre-planned portions of the fleet problems seem to have led to many officers to draw the wrong conclusions about the future of naval warfare. As Mark Allen Campbell observed, ‘The dramatic images of battle lines engaged in long-range gunnery duels with one another may very well have persisted longer in the memories of the officers present than the remembrance of the artificial conditions necessary to get the dreadnoughts into firing range of each other.'”

“For example, as late as 1940 Admiral Richardson concluded that the fleet problems demonstrated carriers needed to stay close to the battleline, in order to be protected by its heavier firepower. Concern about the potential value of the autonomous carrier task force was not necessarily the result of blind unwillingness to see the obvious. Carriers had been “sunk”or “damaged” by surface ships during Fleet Problems IX (1929), X (1930), XII (1931), XIV (1933), XV (1934), and XVIII (1937), and had come under “gunfire” on numerous other occasions. It was not until almost literally the end of 1941 that the Navy had dive bombers and torpedo bombers capable of harming heavy ships in long range operations or fighters with the “legs” to escort and protect them. Until then carriers had to take great risks in order to be effective. The possibility that a carrier might be caught by surface forces was very much on the minds of senior naval officers during the 1920s and 1930s, as can be seen by the 8-inch guns carried by Lexington and Saratoga.”

For Wargaming see: John M. Lillard, Playing War, Potomac Books, 2016.

10. RFI: FFG(X) – US Navy Guided Missile Frigate Replacement Program, Department of the Navy, July 10, 2017. www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=cdf24447b8015337e910d330a87518c6&tab=core&_cview=0

11. Megan Eckstein, “Wargames This Year to Inform Future Surface Combatant Requirements,” U.S. Naval Institute News, February 21, 2017. news.usni.org/2017/02/21/wargames-future-surface-combatant-requirements

12. Ibid.

Featured Image: The USS Zumwalt makes it way down the Kennebec River as it heads out to sea. (The Associated Press/Robert F. Bukaty)

HOW THE FLEET FORGOT TO FIGHT PT. 8: A FORCE DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY

By Dmitry Filipoff

Introduction

“You sort of take on the role of one of the leaders in those battles and you get to rethink it through and you lead the team through that talk and you’re there on station. It’s a very educational experience, and I’ve always envied the opportunity to do that…I always envied these land battles, and the Army or the Marine Corps that fought them because in our business we have nothing like [staff rides]…We can study our battles but we have nothing like that. At the end of our conflict, at the end of our battles, the winners sail away victorious and the losers sink to the bottom, and the sea washes over them and soon after, there’s almost no trace of what happened. Maybe, if you want to reach, you can think about walking the Constitution, and you get a chance to see what war at sea in the age of sail might have been like. Maybe you can walk the USS Missouri and you get a chance to see what fighting that battleship in World War II might have been like…Pearl Harbor, a naval battle of sorts…you can see where the terrain might have played a role. But in general, we don’t get a chance to do anything close to a staff ride, and it’s a stark testament to the unforgiving nature of our environment, and it imposes a level of accountability far greater than any administrative measures that any Navy could ever take.” –Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson1

Major conditions are coming to fruition that will allow the Navy to transform itself for the high-end fight. A new national security strategy has officially refocused the Department of Defense on great power competition after decades of focusing on lower-end threats. A new deploying construct based on unpredictability will help the Navy reset its operating patterns and find more time to work on itself. New weapons and networks that will give the Navy greater firepower than ever before are about to hit the fleet. The time is ripe for revolution. What force development strategy will guide the Navy into the future?

Setting Priorities

“NIFC-CA employs ships and aircraft to consummate missile engagements beyond the radar horizon. This execution is operational rocket science. Those who master it will be identified as the best and brightest.” –Captain Jim Kilby, “Surface Warfare: Lynchpin of Naval Integrated Air/Missile Defense,” 20162

Force development is a process of evolution, where the education and equipment of the force is being continually updated to align with visions of how future conflict may transpire. A force development strategy must guide this evolution by aligning the components of military evolution, mainly capabilities, tactics, doctrine, and training. These components can be aligned toward producing specific warfighting concepts, and also toward generating individual tactics that are a key element of succeeding in future combat regardless of the higher-order concepts they serve.

But the major warfighting experiments and training events that make force development flourish are undoubtedly large expenditures of time and effort. Their scarcity can act as a constraint that forces prioritization. Numerous stakeholders will be competing for time in order to fully experiment with tactics, capabilities, concepts of operation, and other ideas. The products of force development will then compete for the time of the Sailor, and force the Navy to prioritize what it wants Sailors to be proficient at. As it considers a wide variety of demand signals, the Navy must deliberate on what specific force development questions are important enough to warrant sustained series of experiments and new training curriculum. If Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) is an operational warfighting concept in need of a force development strategy, then the interconnected nature of force development can be revealed in a specific line of effort that develops a hallmark tactic of DMO.

Distributed naval forces will be able to use networking to aggregate anti-ship firepower from across the force and collect missiles into overwhelming salvos on demand. But it is still practically impossible for the U.S. Navy to execute missile aggregation tactics because almost all of its anti-ship missiles have a meager range of less than 80 miles. That hard limit means U.S. ships can barely spread out and distribute themselves if they want to keep their anti-ship firepower concentrated. A lack of long-range anti-ship firepower will stand in the way of the Navy’s ability to full realize its next major warfighting concept until new capabilities are introduced.

Capability introduction must be matched by tactical development. This will require a heavy experimentation component to identify the best means. What is the ideal method to collect firepower from across a distributed force? What are the best methods to program missiles in such a way as to overwhelm and confuse an adversary? Aggregating missile fires can be a hallmark tactic of distributed naval forces, but will depend on the ability of units to execute other tactics as a prerequisite. Units must be able to use engage-on-remote tactics to cue networked fires from widely dispersed forces, and to use retargeting tactics to keep the kill chains of those missiles fresh. DMO requires new interlocking sets of networking tactics if it is to be fleshed out as a concept.

Training must prioritize proficiency for executing those specific tactics, and should seek to cultivate an overall tactical sense. Units will need good tactical sense to assess the risks of emissions control while facilitating networking. Units must also be trained in executing tactics for managing datalinks, including through jamming and deception. If Sailors are not well-trained in managing datalinks under contested conditions, then a training shortfall can also be enough to inhibit the Navy from making the most of DMO.

DMO can also take a note from how the interwar period Navy prioritized its own force development. Some of the interwar period Navy’s most important subjects of tactical and doctrinal investigation were fleet formations. The advent of airpower and the diverse types of units that could engage one another in naval combat added a significant degree of complexity in designing fleet formations. These formations attempted to promote maneuverability, facilitate the concentration of firepower, and give room for a variety of command and control options from the fleet commander down to the initiative of the unit leader.


Interwar period fleet formation for cruising. (Source: Trent Hone, “Building a Doctrine: U. S. Naval Tactics and Battle Plans in the Interwar Period“)

The advent of distributed operations and the enormous range of modern weapon systems presents the Navy with a similar challenge, but of greater magnitude. The Navy must focus a significant amount of effort into crafting a variety of distributed fleet formations – fighting stances for how a distributed fleet could steam into a contested zone or meet a hostile force of a certain kind.

Because the speed of a ship is miniscule compared to the speed of missiles, a formation of ships could hardly change during fleet combat. A modern fleet action could be over within minutes, causing fleets to rely heavily on speedy aviation for flexibility and responsiveness. Therefore a distributed fleet formation should also pay great care to a distributed airpower formation, and the nature of that fleet-wide ship-to-aircraft interface can help determine tactics for emissions control, retargeting, and engage-on-remote. Understanding how various distributed airpower schemes can overlay distributed fleet formations is a prime area of interest, as well as how critical networking capabilities like NIFC-CA and CEC can be flexed with different formations.


An animation of a hypothetical scenario demonstrating the Cooperative Engagement Capability and an associated fleet formation. (JHU APL)

Distributed fleet formations are a higher-order force development question for the Distributed Maritime Operations concept. A major fleet action is a complex mosaic of many warfighting dynamics, but the Navy needs to prioritizes specialized series of events that flesh out individual areas to gradually fill in this mosaic and refine the larger exercises and simulations.

However, experimenting with force development usually suffers from handicaps posed by the numerous artificialities and practical restrictions that come with warfighting simulations. Safety regulations can sometimes be so restrictive that they harm the realism of exercises to an unreasonable degree. The use of special “war modes” for certain sensors and electronic capabilities can also be restricted. Firings are often simulated since it can be highly impractical and dangerous to use real weapons. But these restrictions and artificialities run the risk of hiding valuable insight and hindering force development. Force development must find ways to selectively push these limits for the sake of realism and to ensure that tactical investigations are thorough. A force development strategy should define targeted tactical investigations that are being held back by restrictions or obscured by artificialities, and execute specialized series of events in controlled environments. This will help ensure that the details of certain tactics or capabilities are not overlooked, and that surprise is not incurred.

A strong candidate for frequent live-fire testing and experimentation is the incoming generation of anti-ship missiles that are about to hit the fleet. A significant amount of tactical decision-making could still transpire after an anti-ship missile salvo is fired, and much of that decision-making could be in the hands of autonomous actors. Missiles can use a variety of sensors and networking to close in on their targets, refine their attack profiles, and evade defenses. Other platforms can use networking and retargeting to keep the salvo’s kill chain fresh, and ensure missiles are not deceived by decoys or jamming. Actors could in turn seek to interfere with the datalinks that connect the missiles within a salvo and with the broader force. Evolving the tactics, behavior, and decision-making of autonomous missile salvos and those defending against them is a paramount area of interest for focused tactical investigation.

Arguably one of the most interesting recent developments in naval arms is the advent of the anti-torpedo torpedo, a novel system the U.S. Navy is currently installing on its capital ships. What makes this system noteworthy is that it introduces a hardkill dynamic into modern torpedo defense for what appears to be the first time. Prior to the advent of this system, it appears torpedo defense was confined to only softkill countermeasures – decoys and other distractions that could lure a torpedo away but not outright destroy it. Introducing a hardkill dynamic into torpedo defense could drastically change the tactics of undersea warfare, and create new offensive/defensive dynamics. If the anti-torpedo torpedo proves to be effective enough and widely proliferates, then it could negate much of the American military’s offensive advantage in the undersea domain until its submarines finally get anti-ship missiles. The tactical effects of this seemingly innocuous system could have serious strategic consequences.


Experimental Countermeasure Anti-Torpedo (CAT) launches from the fantail of USS George HW Bush (CVN-77) in May, 2013. (U.S. Navy Photo)
Power projection operations presume a degree of sea control in order to be executed, and in a similar sense, naval power presumes a degree of cyber control in order to function at all. Warships are highly complex machines made up of advanced electronics, and fleets form sophisticated networks from among their many elements. The cyber terrain of an individual warship is enormous (let alone that of a fleet), and offers numerous points of failure.

It is not too far-fetched to suggest that a cyberattack on a ship could spark grievous mechanical failures, hijack equipment from operators, or scramble the code of combat systems like Aegis. In a time of war, ships could be stuck pierside or dead in the water if they are being wracked by cyberattacks. No Navy can afford to lose in cyberspace, making cyberwarfare one of the most important areas for force development. In spite of this, those who led the cyberforensics investigation into the USS John S. McCain collision suggested that the Navy is extremely far behind on establishing even a basic cyber defense capability:

“To generate network situational awareness sophisticated enough to do cyber forensics, the team will need to search for electronic anomalies across a wide range of interconnected systems. A key component of anomaly detection is the availability of normal baseline operating data, or trusted images, that can be used for comparison. These critical datasets of trusted images do not currently exist.”3

Cyberwarfare is a prime area for the Navy to loosen the restraints and create a specialized series of tactical investigations and training events. However, it will be challenging to effectively resource and constrain this sort of exploration because of the expansiveness of the cyber domain. In order to resource realistic cyber warfighting practice and experimentation, the Navy should consider taking ships from each class and turning them into full-time cyber battlegrounds. Crews will be able to practice damage control on realistic terrain, and operators will be able to understand how gracefully (or ungracefully) their capabilities degrade. For certain experiments, cyber Red teams must be empowered to break things and attack systems with the relentlessness of a great power adversary. Over time this will help build a base of knowledge on cyber hygiene, and eventually aim to give the Navy the confidence that adversaries have not been able to pre-position cyber weapons into ships and systems during peacetime.

Designing the Field of Application

“Two interdependent activities, exercises and experimentation, help to bring joint concepts to life. Throughout history, military exercises have served to reduce uncertainty, increase readiness, and refine and test new concepts. Recognizing the complexity of today’s strategic landscape, we are reenergizing and reorienting the joint exercise program…” –Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Dunford4

Military tools are more advanced and interconnected than ever, driving warfighting concepts toward more complex tactics and doctrine. Yet it is infeasible to realistically test the complex tangle of a great power battle when it can involve things as expensive as warships, as numerous as missile salvos, or as expansive as cyber warfare. These trends are pushing military experimentation and training further and further into the virtual realm, and making force development more vulnerable to the caveats of simulation. The difference between what can be reasonably tested and the nature of actual combat has grown to unprecedented heights, and surprises may lie within that gulf of the unknown. Because of this, force development must include a robust system of real-world experimentation and training that pushes these limits frequently and with rigor.

Exercises can serve as the bedrock of force development because only they can serve as the real-world field of application short of war itself. How these events and their participants evolve over time can reflect the pace of learning. The concepts and scenarios that are deemed worthy of sustained real-world testing and training will reflect the highest priorities. The standards that undergird the field of application can reflect the seriousness of force development, and the level of understanding on warfighting. The learning architecture that is built around exercises helps determine how stakeholders can make the most of the field of application. Ultimately, how the military makes use of exercises as the field of application can reveal much about the state of a force development strategy as a whole.

Exercise events can be widely dissimilar, depending if they are focused on training, experimentation, or partnership engagement. The Navy must define standards and create formats for its major warfighting experiments and training events. It can also learn from earlier difficulties in designing major experimentation exercises. The Fleet Battle Experiments intended to be exercises that could test out important ideas for the Navy’s development. However, they became overcomplicated. They often combined elements of virtual forces, live forces, readiness evolutions, and wargaming. On top of this hodgepodge they stacked numerous test goals driven by many stakeholders. All of this complexity made it difficult for the Navy to extract value from the events.

Adding virtual forces to live exercises can be driven by the need to create appropriately large scenarios. However, because they are simulations, virtual forces introduce simulation caveats which can complicate analysis. Compared to live opposing forces, virtual units can certainly be more accurate representations of adversaries in a technical sense, but their behavior may be more simplistic. Virtual forces can hold great value for training events, but they must be more carefully used when mixed with experimentation.

Wargaming is a virtual field of application, and there is already a significant learning architecture built around certain wargaming programs. Wargames focused on tactics and doctrine should work together with the real-world field of application in a process of cooperative refinement, where wargames can refine concepts for eventual field application. But some balance must be struck between the two, lest wargames get too ahead of themselves or too much is spent on real-world trials.

Adding too many goals to the Fleet Battle Experiments made it difficult to organize follow-on events that could build on insights. Because warfighting is highly complex, multiple rounds of trial and error must characterize force development trials. However, if the Navy is to facilitate this sort of trial and error on the field of application, then events must be tightly constrained to focus on narrowly defined objectives. Otherwise, it is extraordinarily difficult to design the appropriate follow-through for a large-scale event that attempts to answer too many questions for too many stakeholders.

Multiple rounds of trial and error must also require that events take the form of a series, and where a single series can be focused on exhaustively probing only a handful of questions, warfare areas, or scenarios. One can look to the Air Force, with Red Flag as the premier combat training event, Green Flag as the main close air support exercise, and Space Flag which focuses on space-based effects. Those who program the schedule of events for the field of application should often think in terms of series, and not just one-off events.

Oversight

In a responsible system of force development, warfighting concepts and programs should live or die by their ability to prove their tactical worth. Arguments on the lasting usefulness of a system are not settled by simply identifying the capability it brings or the mission areas it contributes to. Capabilities have to be tested with an eye toward the specific tactics they produce, and in fleshed out environments. Regardless if the systems are functioning in a technical sense, capabilities can be proven useless or even counterproductive in the context of their application. Poor tactical performance in simulations or exercises should be enough to force changes or cancellations as force development weeds out brittle ideas. If a service or a warfighting community is concerned about the viability of a particular concept or a system, then they should be made to compete through superior tactical innovation. But having realistic proving grounds, a robust learning architecture, and a healthy learning culture is not enough to have the utmost confidence in the military’s ability to change. Despite all the good they can do for military evolution, exercises and wargames have often been deliberately shaped to defend preconceived notions.

Objective tactical investigation and competition requires that trials be realistic, unbiased, and transparent to crucial stakeholders. However, defense programs and warfighting concepts do not exist in an objective vacuum, and involve bureaucratic and political equity. Various communities within each of the services compete with one another for resources for their respective programs, and each has their sacred cows. Multiple tools can exist for the same mission, such as for anti-submarine warfare, but reside among the different tribes and communities. Institutional divisions can emerge along varying interpretations on what will dominate in future war. The services can also compete with each other, such as in the infamous Revolt of the Admirals that was driven by arguments that pitted the Air Force’s strategic bombers against the Navy’s carrier aviation. Questions of tactical effectiveness are but one element of these debates, and sometimes parochial interests can become overriding. These dynamics can also go far beyond the Pentagon and also reach into the halls of Congress. Members of Congress can strongly depend on certain defense programs for jobs and political capital, and can hold other attachments to certain systems of interest. In the past, Congress has forced the military to retain platforms that the services deemed to have outlived their tactical usefulness, including battleships and the A-10.

In How Much Is Enough, Alain Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith pointed to how military culture and bureaucracy can be susceptible to unobjective influences, and how independent analysts in the once-controversial Systems Analysis office were able to compensate:

“Military officers as a group (and some civilians as well) are in a position to have very limited intellectual and career independence. While many individuals succeed in standing up to the system, there are numerous institutional factors working to limit the officer’s intellectual independence…The military man lives in an atmosphere in which many assumptions, attitudes, and beliefs – generally unspoken – are shared…Officers who do not share these beliefs are liable to reprisal on their annual fitness reports…This lack of career independence further helps to ensure conformity to the Service point of view…[independent civilian] analysts could more easily ask the hard questions and pose genuine alternatives, arriving at a recommendation via a more rational and objective process. They were not constrained to defer to rank, age, experience, or chain of command. They had the time to think about important long-range policy problems and [had] the room for imagination, initiative, and fresh thinking. They were comparatively free to gore sacred cows. Such liberties are institutionally very difficult to exercise in a military organization, joint or single Service. There have been loud complaints about civilians ‘muzzling the military’; but anyone who is familiar with the system knows that most of the muzzling is done by the military themselves.”5

For these reasons and others, the Department of Defense and the Congress should establish an independent body that seeks to provide an unbiased set of eyes on major exercising and wargaming programs. Important independent bodies already exist in the Department of Defense, such as the Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE, which is descended from the Systems Analysis office) and Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOTE). These organizations aid in assessing major programmatic decisions and provide oversight and evaluation of weapons testing, respectively. These organizations play important roles in providing independent assessments, maintaining standards, and help act as a check on the military’s parochial interests. An organization that seeks to provide similar functions for major exercises and wargames could focus on accounting for:

Nature and extent of exercise/wargame artificialities and assumptions
Fidelity and behavior of opposing forces
Fairness of adjudication
Effective inclusion and communication of results in follow-on reporting
Exercises and wargames can have enormous programmatic implications like the programs CAPE and DOTE assess. However, they are venues that can still be corrupted by institutional bias. One such example includes the Congressionally mandated “flyoff” between the F-35 and A-10, which was supposed to be an exercise designed to assess the tactical merits of the platforms in the close air support mission. However, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), an independent watchdog, released a scathing report on the flyoff that argued the exercise design was deliberately distorted to favor the F-35. While pointing to a variety of flaws, POGO claimed:

“Air Force leaders…are staging an unpublicized, quickie test on existing training ranges, creating unrealistic scenarios that presuppose an ignorant and inert enemy force, writing ground rules for the tests that make the F-35 look good—and they got the new testing director, the retired Air Force general Robert Behler, to approve all of it. According to sources closely involved with the A-10 versus F-35 fly-off, who wished to remain anonymous out of concerns about retaliation, this testing program was designed without ever consulting the Air Force’s resident experts on close air support, A-10 pilots and joint terminal attack ground controllers…”6

The frequency with which it appears the military distorts the field of application to protect assumptions, to include scripting behaviors and other measures, points to an uncomfortable truth of force development. The military cannot be expected to always accept or disclose the most disruptive implications that can come from investigating the future of war. Despite their hefty mandate, the armed forces, like any other organization, can still stifle progress through bias, bureaucratic inertia, and an unreceptive culture. An independent body that assesses major exercises and wargames can add needed discipline to force development, safeguard the field of application, and promote military evolution that is appropriately receptive to change.

Resourcing and Reorganization

“Sailors are the most modular, lethal, and adaptable asset the Navy has. No weapon system, no matter how technologically advanced, is more instrumental to warfighting effectiveness than the person directing it. But competency and confidence are not naturally ingrained in a sailor. Warfighting effectiveness only can develop in a sailor who is properly educated, rigorously trained, and meaningfully assessed—and all these factors require resourcing.” –Lt. Brendan Cordial, “People Over Payloads,” 20187

If strategy is to inform budget in an age of great power competition, then the Navy must decide how it can invest more into learning tactics and doctrine. Resourcing priorities can focus on providing more operational units in order to increase the frequency of major training events and warfighting experiments, as well as investing in the unique personnel assignments that are specifically tailored toward force development. However, the current political environment and other constraints are not going to allow for a sudden major increase in force development funding. When it comes to resourcing, how the Navy makes the most of its force development will greatly depend on how it reinvests its time.

The Navy’s force development agenda and the overseas operational agenda will compete for the fleet’s time and units. The Navy’s current ability to resource its own force development with enough field trials and opposing forces will be heavily tied to its ability to wind down its overseas operations. With respect to becoming a learning organization that intends to learn more about high-end warfighting specifically, the Navy must weigh the learning value of major force development events versus overseas operations. In this vein, it should be plainly clear that advanced training and experimentation events help the Navy learn more about high-end warfighting than virtually any presence patrol or maritime security mission.

If the Navy wants to maximize the “reps and sets” of its force development, then it can invert what it has long been its operating paradigm. Advanced events like SWATT and the Fleet Problems shouldn’t just be the prelude to a long deployment, they can become the point of a deployment. Allowing units to do these events several times in the course of a single stretch will accelerate the Navy’s learning to incredible heights, and give the training audience multiple attempts to better themselves in large-scale venues. More importantly, this will add greater speed to the Navy’s ongoing transition away from the low-end focus and gradually reduce the strategic liability it incurred. How frequently the fleet chooses to conduct high-end training events at the onset of this transition will determine how quickly the Navy can close the door on any adversary that seeks to capitalize on the Navy’s lingering neglect of full-spectrum skills.

A baseline resourcing requirement can include defining a dedicated opposing force, because major real-world trials will often need meaningful opposition as a basic realism requirement, and dedicated opposing forces require adequate time to train to foreign doctrine. By designating a combination of units to act as a dedicated opposing force, the fleet will also have a major unit that can be mostly focused on solving Navy problems and not just combatant commander problems. Such a force can maximize its size and availability by including virtual units and operating on a workup cycle similar to that of forward deployed naval forces.

Another resourcing requirement will come from how the field of application is organized, and the various series of events that are defined. Some events could focus exclusively on training while others focus only on experimentation, since the two can be distinct types of events. Many tactical investigations will require a series of experiments, and many units will need to pass through training crucibles each year. How the Navy organizes the field of application and then allocates units and spends readiness across the various events can drive resourcing requirements.

The Navy has a tremendous advantage over its great power rivals when it comes to resourcing force development. The numerous allies the U.S. has around the world can also put their navies to use in answering critical force development questions. Allies can be asked to investigate specific tactical problems, and can offer more units to serve as opposition forces. Every allied navy adds size to the field of application, and can allow for a more expansive force development agenda that is shared among partners.

Aside from investing more energy toward live exercises and away from forward operations, the Navy must learn to better resource learning at the individual level. The Navy must give Sailors the time to focus on what makes them better warfighters, and also improve access to the career opportunities that hold the greatest value for their development as warfighters.

Debriefs and replays can and should be reviewed by many more than those who actually participated. No Sailor needs to wait to participate in order to learn from a Fleet Problem, a SWATT evolution, or a wargame. The Navy can widen the reach of its learning architecture by creating deliverable lesson plans and replays for each of these events. Easily digestible and widely disseminated deliverables will multiply the size of the training audience, and make the most of expensive exercises. However, this sort of learning experience should not be left to the initiative of Sailors, since the Navy’s lessons learned systems are infamously difficult and underutilized. Instead, Sailors should be mandated to review these sorts of replays and debriefs as a part of their training curriculum, which will ensure the Navy multiplies the value of these events. Also, for certain trials, opposition forces need to be capable and unpredictable enough so this sort of reviewing doesn’t amount to finding an answer key.

Sailors still need to be given enough time if they are to have better learning experiences. The Navy already makes plenty of time for Sailors to learn things, but among numerous workshops, inspections, and trainings, not enough are truly focused on making Sailors better warfighters. Leaders have long sought to cut these burdens and have made some progress, but Sailors are still overburdened and their focus spread thin. The Navy must recognize that many of these burdens are the accumulated baggage of a risk-averse culture and a low-end operating focus that was not well-constrained. Similar to how a SWATT exercise teaches more than virtually any presence patrol, spending a few hours watching a Fleet Problem replay teaches more about warfighting than virtually any admin paperwork. The Navy should redefine individual training requirements for the high-end fight, and then force most other burdens to conform to those requirements and not the other way around.

By the time the Imperial Japanese Navy struck Pearl Harbor, 99 percent of the U.S. Navy’s admirals were graduates of the Naval War College.8 All the admirals who graduated from the interwar period Naval War College learned from a curriculum that included a heavy wargaming component. Through multiple wargames that could last weeks at a time, naval officers acted out major fleet actions against great power rivals and became engrossed in warfighting specifics. This shared wargaming experience was invaluable in giving the Navy’s admirals a common baseline of expertise on tactics, doctrine, and operational thinking.


The first move of Tactical Maneuver IV for the Naval War College class of 1923. This chart shows the Red fleet at the upper right and the Blue fleet in the lower left. (“Battle of Emerald Bank, Tactical Problem IV, TAC 94, 1923. Naval Historical Collection) [Click to Expand]

While many of the modern Navy’s flag officers are also graduates of the College, the current curriculum is more diverse and does not come close to producing the base of warfighting expertise the interwar Navy earned through the same institution. Wargaming programs at the College such as the Gravely and Halsey programs have become very exclusive, yet do not often feature in the experience of flag officers. Wargaming experience should become more mainstream throughout the Navy’s officer ranks because it is a valuable training and research experience, and it is far more affordable training than live exercising.

Distinction in wargaming should also be rewarded with better career prospects. This should hold especially true for earning flag rank because wargaming can help compensate for the natural disadvantages of how command experience evolves. Naval officers usually do not have the opportunity to lead multi-ship operations until they have served for decades and are already fairly senior. A more mainstream wargaming curriculum will help the Navy identify leaders with a knack for commanding large-scale combat operations far earlier in their careers, and ensure that the senior ranks are populated with leaders that have experience thinking through high-end conflict scenarios.

Conclusion

Whether artillery begins to rain on the Korean peninsula, or Iranian mines litter the Strait of Hormuz, or a major terrorist attack unfolds, the Navy must never again allow itself to totally do away with preparing for the high-end fight. The story of the modern American Navy is unfortunately that of an organization that was divorced from the main purpose that had long animated its spirit, and dysfunction radiated throughout its institutions as a result. A difficult transition looms ahead, its urgency underscored by the sudden naval ascendance of a great power rival.

The U.S. Navy still retains its global preeminence, and has the greatest potential of any other navy today. Its history is replete with historic victories, its resources are unmatched, and the world still regards it as a powerful expression of American global leadership. The mettle of the fleet will be forged anew as an emerging era of great power competition infuses it with urgent spirit.

Now the U.S. Navy is embarking on a bold transformation, and soon it will rediscover the power of its essence–to command the seas.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Nextwar@cimsec.org.

References

1. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson, USN, Keynote Speech before the Surface Navy Association, January 9, 2018. www.navy.mil/navydata/people/cno/Richardson/Speech/180109_CNORichardson_Keynote_SurfaceNavyAssociation.pdf

2. Captain Jim Kilby, “Surface Warfare: Lynchpin of Integrated Naval/Air Missile Defense,” CIMSEC, April 4, 2014. cimsec.org/surface-warfare-lynchpin-naval-integrated-airmissile-defense/10748

3. Zachary Staples and Maura Sullivan, “Cyberphysical Forensics: Lessons from the USS John S. McCain Collision,” CIMSEC, January 22, 2018. cimsec.org/cyberphysical-forensics-lessons-from-the-uss-john-s-mccain-collision/35254

4. General Joseph Dunford, USMC, “From the Chairman: Maintaining a Boxer’s Stance,” Joint Force Quarterly, June 19, 2017. ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/1218381/from-the-chairman-maintaining-a-boxers-stance/

5. Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much is Enough?, RAND , 1971. www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/commercial_books/2010/RAND_CB403.pdf

6. Dan Grazier, “Close Air Support Fly-Off Farce,” POGO, July 10, 2018. www.pogo.org/investigation/2018/07/close-air-support-fly-off-farce/

7. Lieutenant Brendan Cordial, “People Over Payloads,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceeings, May 2018. www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-05/people-over-payloads

8. John Lillard, Playing War: Wargaming and U.S. Navy Preparations for World War II, Potomac Books, 2016.

Featured Image: NORWEGIAN SEA (Oct. 26, 2018) Aviation Machinist’s Mate Airman Jadah Martinez inspects an after burner for fuel leaks during an active test on the fantail aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Victoria Granado/Released)