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Software-Defined Tactics and Great Power Competition

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By LT Sean Lavelle, USN

There are two components to military competency: understanding and proficiency. To execute a task, like driving a ship, one must first understand the fundamentals and theory—the rules of navigation, how the weather impacts performance, how a ship’s various controls impact its movement. Understanding is stable and military personnel forget the fundamentals slowly. Learning those fundamentals, though, does not eliminate the need to practice. Failing to practice tasks like maneuvering the ship in congested waters or evaluating potential contacts of interest will quickly degrade operational proficiency.

In the coming decades, human understanding of warfighting concepts will still be paramount to battlefield success. Realistic initial training and high-end force-on-force exercises will be critical to building that understanding. However, warfighters cross-trained as software developers will make it far easier to retain proficiency without as much rote, expensive practice. Their parent units will train them to make basic applications, and they will use these skills to translate their hard-won combat understanding into a permanent proficiency available to anyone with the most recent software update.

These applications, called software-defined tactics, will alert tacticians to risk and opportunity on the battlefield, ensuring they can consistently hit the enemy’s weak points while minimizing their own vulnerabilities. They will speed force-wide learning by orders of magnitude, create uniformly high-performing units, and increase scalability of conventional forces.

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Imagine an F-35 section leader commanding two F-35 fighters tasked to patrol near enemy airspace and kill any enemy aircraft who approach. As the F-35s establish a combat air patrol in the assigned area, the jet’s sensors indicate there are two flights of adversary aircraft approaching the formation, one from off the nose to the north and the other off the right wing, from the east. Each of these flights consists of four bandits that are individually overmatched by the advanced F-35s. Safety is to the south.

These F-35s have enough missiles within the section to reliably kill four enemies, but are facing eight. Since the northern group of bandits are a bit closer, the section leader decides to move north and kill them. The section’s volley of missiles all achieve solid hits, and there are now four fewer enemy aircraft to threaten the larger campaign.

Now out of missiles, the section turns south to head back home. That’s when the section leader realizes the mistake. As the F-35s flowed northward, they traveled farther away from safety while the eastern group of bandits continued to close on the F-35s, cutting off their path home. 

The only options at this point are to try to travel around the bandits or go through them. A path around them would run the fighters out of fuel, so the flight leader goes straight for the four enemy aircraft, hoping that the bandits will have seen their friends shot down and run away in fear.

The gambit fails, however, and the remaining enemy aircraft close with the F-35s and shoot them down. What should have been an easy victory ended in a tactical stalemate, and in a war where the enemy can build their simple aircraft faster than America can build complex F-35s, the 2:1 exchange ratio is in their favor strategically.

This could have gone differently.

Persistent and Available Tactical Lessons 

Somebody in the F-35 fleet had likely made a mistake similar to this example during a training evolution long before the fateful dogfight. They might have even taken a few days out of their schedule to write a thoughtful lessons-learned paper about it. This writing is critically important. It communicates to other pilots the fundamental knowledge required to succeed in combat. However, success in combat demands not just understanding, but proficiency as well. An infantryman who has not fired a rifle in a few years likely still understands how to shoot, but their lack of practice means they will struggle at first.

Under a software-defined tactics regime, in addition to writing a paper, the pilot could have written software that would have alerted future pilots about the impending danger. While those pilots would still need to understand the risk, ever-watching software would alert them to risks in real-time so that a lack of recent practice would not be fatal. A quick software update to the F-35 fleet would have dramatically and permanently reduced the odds of anyone ever making that mistake again.

The program would not have had to be complex. It could have run securely, receiving data from the underlying mission system without transmitting data back to the aircraft’s mission computers. This one-way data pipe would have eliminated the potential for ad-hoc software to accidentally hamper the safety of the aircraft.

The F-35’s mission computer in our example already had eight hostile tracks displayed. The F-35’s computer also knew how many missiles it had loaded in its weapons bay. If that data were pushed to a software-defined tactics application, the coder-pilot could have written a program that executed the following steps:

  1. Determine how many targets can be attacked, given the missiles onboard.
  2. If there are enough missiles to attack them all, recommend attacking them all. If there are more hostile tracks than missiles (or a predefined missile-to-target ratio), run the following logic to determine which targets to prioritize.
  3. Determine all the possible ordered combinations of targets. There are 1,680 combinations in the original example—a small number for a computer.
  4. For each combination, simulate the engagement and determine if an untargeted aircraft could cut off the escape towards home. Store the margin of safety distance.
  5. If a cutoff is effective in a given iteration, reject that combination of targets and test the next one.
  6. Recommend the combination of targets to the flight commander with the widest clear path home. Alert the flight commander if there is no course of action with a clear path home.

This small program would have instantly told the pilot to engage the eastern targets, and that engaging the targets to the north would have allowed the eastern targets to cut off the F-35s’ route to safety. Following this recommendation would have allowed the F-35s to maintain a 4:0 kill ratio and live to fight another day.

A simple version of this program could have been written by two people in a single day—16 man-hours—if they had the right tools. Completing tactical testing in a simulator and ensuring the software’s reliability would take another 40-80 man-hours. 

Alternatively, writing a compelling paper about the situation would take a bit less time: around 20-40 hours. However, a force of 1,000 pilots spending 30 minutes each to read the paper would require 500 man-hours. Totaling these numbers, results in 96 man-hours on the high-end for software-defined tactics versus 520 man-hours on the low-end for writing and reading. While both are necessary, writing software is much more efficient than writing papers.

To truly train the force not to make this mistake without software-defined tactics, every pilot would need to spend around five hours—a typical brief, simulator, and debrief length—in training events that stressed the scenario. That yields an additional 10,000 man-hours, given one student and one instructor for each training event. At that point, all of the training effort might reduce instances of the mistake by about 75%.

To maintain that level of performance, aircrew would need to practice this scenario once every six months in simulators. That is 10,000 hours every six months. Over five years, you’d need to spend more than 100,000 man-hours to maintain proficiency in this skill across the force.

Software-defined tactics applications do not need ongoing practice to maintain currency. They do need to be updated periodically to account for tactical changes and to improve them, though. Budgeting 100 man-hours per year is reasonable for an application of this size. That is 500 man-hours over five years.

Pen-and paper updates require 100,000 man-hours for a 75% reduction in a mistake. Software-driven updates require 596 man-hours for a nearly 100% reduction. It is not close. 

When a software developer accidentally creates a bug, they code a test that will alert them if anyone else ever makes that same mistake in the future. In this way, a whole development team learns and gets more reliable with every mistake they make. Software-defined tactics offer that same power to military units.

Software Defined Tactics in Action

While the F-35 example is hypothetical, software-defined tactics are not. The Navy’s P-8 community has been leveraging a software-defined tactics platform for the last four years to great effect. The P-8 is a naval aircraft primarily designed to hunt enemy submarines. Localization—the process by which a submarine-hunting asset goes from initial detection to accurate estimate of the target’s position, course, and speed—is among the most challenging parts of prosecuting adversary submarines.

On the P-8, the tactical coordinator decides on and implements the tactics the P-8 will use to localize a submarine. It takes about 18 months of time in their first squadron to qualify as a tactical coordinator and demonstrate reliable proficiency in this task. These months include thousands of hours of study, hundreds of hours in the aircraft and simulator, and dozens of hours defending their knowledge in front of more experienced tacticians.

When examining the data the P-8 community collects, there is a clear and massive disparity in performance between inexperienced and experienced personnel. There is another massive disparity between those experienced tacticians who have been selected to be instructors because of demonstrated talent and those who have not. In other words, there are both experience and innate talent factors with large impacts on performance in submarine localization.

The community’s software-defined tactics platform has made it so that a junior tactician (inexperienced and possibly untalented) with 6-months of time in platform performs exactly as well as an instructor (experienced and talented) with 18-months in platform. It does this largely by reducing tactician mistakes—alerting them to the opportunities the tactical situation presents and dissuading them from enacting poor tactical responses.

This makes the P-8 force extremely scalable in wartime. In World War II, America beat Japan because it was able to quickly and continually train high-quality personnel. It took nine months to train a basic fighter pilot in 1942. It takes two or three years to go from initial flight training until arriving at a fleet squadron in 2021. Reducing time to train with software-defined tactics will restore that rapid scalability to America’s modern forces.

The P-8 community has had similar results for many tactical scenarios. It does this, today, with very little integration into the P-8s mission system. Soon, its user-built applications will be integrated with a one-way data pipe from the aircraft’s mission system that will enable the full software-defined tactics paradigm. A team called the Software Support Activity at the Naval Air Systems Command will manage the security of this system and provide infrastructure support. Another team consisting of P-8 operators at the Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Weapons School will develop applications based on warfighter needs. 

Technical Implementation

Implementing this paradigm across the US military will yield a highly capable force that can learn at speeds orders of magnitude faster than its adversaries. Making the required technical changes will be inexpensive.

On the P-8, implementing a secure computing environment with one-way data flow was always part of the acquisition plan. That should be the case for all future platform acquisitions. All it requires is an open operating system and a small amount of computing resources reserved for software-defined tactics applications.

Converting legacy platforms will be slightly more difficult. If a platform has no containerized computing environment, it is possible to add one, though. The Air Force recently deployed Kubernetes—a framework that allows for securely containerized applications to be inserted in computing environments—on a U-2. Feeding mission-system data to this environment and allowing operators to build applications with it will enable software-defined tactics.

If it is possible to securely implement this on the U-2, which was built in 1955, any platform in the U.S. arsenal can be modified to accept software-defined tactics applications.

Human Implementation

From a technical standpoint, implementing this paradigm is trivial. From the human perspective, it is a bit harder. However, investing in operational forces’ technical capabilities without the corresponding human capabilities will result in a force that operates in the way industry believes it should, rather than the way warfighters know it should. A tight feedback loop between the battlefield reality and the algorithms that help dominate that battlefield is essential. Multi-year development cycles will not keep up.

As a first step, communities should work to identify the personnel they already have in their ranks with some ability to develop software. About a quarter of Naval Academy graduates enter the service each year with majors that require programming competency. These officers are a largely untapped resource.

The next step is to provide these individuals with training and tools to make software. An 80-hour, two-week course customized to the individual’s talent level is generally enough to get a new contributor to a productive level on the P-8’s team. A single application pays for this investment many times over. Tools available on the military’s unclassified and secret networks like DI2E and the Navy’s Black Pearl enable good practices for small-scale software development.

Finally, this cadre of tactician-programmers should be detailed to warfare development centers and weapons schools during their non-operational tours. Writing code and staying current with bleeding-edge tactical issues should be their primary job once there. Given the significant contribution this group will make to readiness, this duty should be rewarded at promotion boards to maintain technical competence in senior ranks.

A shortcut to doing this could be to rely on contractors to develop software-defined tactics. To maximize the odds of success, organizations should ensure that these contractors 1) are co-located with experienced operators, 2) are led by a tactician with software-development experience, 3) can deploy software quickly, 4) have at least a few tactically-current, uniformed team members, and 5) are funded operationally vice project-based so they can switch projects quickly as warfighters identify new problems. 

The Stakes

Great power competition is here. China’s economy is now larger than America’s on a purchasing parity basis. America no longer has the manufacturing capacity advantage that led to victory in World War II, nor the ability to train highly-specialized warfighters rapidly. To maintain America’s military dominance in the 21st century, it must leverage the incredible talent already resident in its armed forces.

When somebody in an autocratic society makes a mistake, they hide that mistake since punishment can be severe. The natural openness that comes from living in a democratic society means that American military personnel are able to talk about mistakes they have made, reason about how to stop them from happening again, and then implement solutions. The U.S. military must give its people the tools required to implement better, faster, and more permanent solutions. 

Software-defined tactics will yield a lasting advantage for American military forces by leveraging the comparative advantages of western societies: openness and a focus on investing in human capital. There is no time to waste.

LT Sean Lavelle is an active-duty naval flight officer who instructs tactics in the MQ-4C and P-8A. He leads the iLoc Software Development Team at the Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Weapons School and holds degrees from the U.S. Naval Academy and Johns Hopkins University. The views stated here are his own and are not reflective of the official position of the U.S. Navy or Department of Defense.

Featured image: A P-8A Poseidon conducts flyovers above the Enterprise Carrier Strike Group during exercise Bold Alligator 2012. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Daniel J. Meshel/Released)

Force Development

Learning for Warfighters: A Conversation with Major General William F. Mullen III (ret.)

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By Mie Augier, Major Sean F. X. Barrett, and Major Kevin Druffel-Rodriguez

Major General William F. Mullen III, USMC, retired as Commanding General (CG), Training and Education Command (TECOM) on October 1, 2020, completing a career that featured an unusually vast amount of experience across Marine Corps training and education commands. Major General Mullen commanded Marine Corps Tactics and Operations Group at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC) Twentynine Palms, CA, and he also served as President, Marine Corps University (MCU), concurrently serving as CG, Education Command, as well as CG, MCAGCC.

While CG, TECOM, Major General Mullen spearheaded the effort to publish Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication (MCDP) 7 Learning, the Marine Corps’ first new doctrinal publication issued since 2001, to explain why learning is critically important to the profession of arms. In the conversation that follows, we discussed some of the themes in MCDP 7, learning to become learners, and the importance of building learning cultures in warfighting organizations.

What inspired your own interest and curiosity in learning, and how did you first experience the benefits of being a lifelong learner?

I have always been interested in learning and reading and what it can do for you. But I had never heard it articulated how much it can actually do for you until I was a company commander at 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines. The battalion commander was LtCol John R. Allen (later General Allen), and he exemplified everything that was possible with reading, the 5,000-year-old mind, for example, and using that for knowledge and experience.

As an example, we had a short notice deployment to deal with Haitian and Cuban migrants. Before we deployed, he gave us a couple chapters of problems the U.S. Army had had with POWs (prisoners of war) in Korea as a read-ahead for the things we would likely face (e.g., dealing with large, angry crowds). Reinforcing this, LtCol Joseph F. Dunford (later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dunford) took over as battalion commander after Allen, and he also exemplified this ideal of being a lifelong learner. They showed us what was possible from learning. They were so far past their peers in their ability to think and execute, and it kept getting better as they became more senior.

August 11, 2013, at sea on USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6): Lance Cpl. Justin L. Morrow, a fire direction controlman with Echo Battery, Battalion Landing Team 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, and a native of St. Augustine, Fla., reads a book from the Commandant of the Marine Corps’ reading list. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Paul Robbins)

You argue the mind is a muscle and therefore atrophies when not exercised. This metaphor conveys not only the importance of learning, but also introduces an element of “pain.”1 What is the origin of your understanding of this metaphor?

We all know that Marines like to exercise, so when I was talking to them for my “PME on PME” lecture,2 one of the things I was trying to get across is that your brain needs to be exercised as well. I would ask them what happens if you don’t PT, you don’t exercise. Your muscles atrophy. Your physical abilities atrophy. The brain is the same way.3

In the past, I have read studies about Alzheimer’s patients and how to stave off the effects of memory loss. I noticed that people who stayed more mentally engaged, learned new languages, read a lot, and played challenging games were able to exercise their mental synapses, which allowed them to continue to think and be engaged instead of atrophying. Regarding the whole pain aspect, I would ask them, “How many times have you read a really hard book, and you are trying to work your way through it, and your brain is just tired?” This is just like a strenuous exercise, but for the mind. For me, philosophy is that way. I try and read it and work through it, but I have to take it in small doses because it is tough.

One way to train the mind-muscle is by reading. How did you become someone who reads broadly?4

Part of it is that I read fairly quickly, and that was developed when I finished being a company commander. I went to Inspector-Instructor (I&I) duty in Milwaukee and got back into my alma mater to get a Master’s in Political Science. So, I was working on my Master’s, working I&I duty, which if you do it right is more than a full-time job, and I was also doing my Command and Staff (non-resident course) box of books all at the same time. I had to figure out ways to read quickly. I wrote an article called “Advanced Reading Skills” that came out in the Gazette that talks about the process and how I did all that.5

I always knew I wanted to cast my net widely, but I couldn’t really articulate it until I saw LtGen Paul K. Van Riper articulate it. He said we are trying to understand human beings because we lead human beings. We try to get them to do things that they naturally would not do. How do you understand human beings? How do you understand all the things that impact our ability to get our job done if you aren’t reading widely? Some people say, “I never read fiction,” but some of the most creative things I have ever come across, with regards to ideas, are in fiction. Some of the things you read about, you ask, “Why can’t we do that?” It gives you ideas. When it comes to understanding the human condition and what makes people tick, human beings really haven’t changed that much. The character of war has changed, but the nature of war hasn’t. It is still human beings going against each other—opposing wills. So how do you understand people and what makes them tick?

What books have you found useful for inspiring others to pursue a lifetime of learning?

I wrote an article, “A Warriors Mind,”5 in which I talk about the different categories if you want to know more about this and all the books I listed. There are only five in each category. One of those categories is, “How do you hook their interest?” How do you get them reading more? That came from watching the phenomenon of the Harry Potter books. Kids who really wouldn’t read anything were reading books that are 700-800 pages long and just eating it up. That hooked their interest, and then they expanded onto other things because they realized that reading is not a chore. It is actually enjoyable.

So how do you get them interested? Where are they at intellectually? Where is their vocabulary? What is their comprehension level? Those are the important things because if you hand someone a dense book, and they haven’t been reading much, that’s a dead end. But if you hand them some other things that you can use to build up to something high-end, that’s a better approach. So, I would ask them, “Where are they at now, what have they read?” The biggest thing that has hooked people’s interest is historical fiction, especially well-written historical fiction. That really gets them enthusiastic and wanting to learn more, and they start expanding their interests from there.

MCDP 7 Learning has been out for a year now. How did it come together? And with the benefit of hindsight, is there anything you would have done differently? For example, are there any additional topics you would have included or ideas you would have framed differently?

To clarify, I didn’t write it. I had a writing team who did the writing, but it was my idea to initiate the writing of it, and I was heavily involved in the editorial process and reviewing it. I would go back to them and ask questions, ask them to factor in things, and try to get it “MCDP 1-like.”

The inspiration for doing it was frustration. MCDP 1 is our foundational document. It is our maneuver warfare philosophy. It is supposed to be the basis for everything we do, but a majority of the folks in the Marine Corps don’t understand it, mainly because they have not read it. For those who have read it, they have not read enough around it to understand what it means, how you operationalize it, because we aren’t studying our profession.

There are a lot of folks who just can’t be bothered. “Reading is a chore,” or “I joined the Marine Corps so I didn’t have to go to school anymore.” Officer, SNCO, enlisted, it doesn’t matter—everybody needs to understand it. So learning is about how you go about learning your profession. Continuous learning is a lifelong pursuit, and it is the only thing that enables you to understand what MCDP 1 says and how you then operationalize it and live by it in your units. Education prepares you for the unknown. What happens when plans have to change? And that always happens. Education is far more important than training.

What would I do differently? Right now, I can’t say that I would do anything that much differently because the main emphasis was to get it out in recognizable form. I sent it out to a couple of people, a number of people who I highly respect. Some of them came back and said, “We don’t need it,” and I was a little frustrated by that response, until I realized: Well, they lived it. Of course, they understand it, it is intuitive to them.

No, they didn’t need it, but it is not for them. It is for all of those folks who do not understand and don’t understand the why—why learning is so important. So I can’t say that I’d do it any differently. But I can say that it does need to be reviewed in about five or ten years or so. Take a look at it and see what needs to change to keep it current with education technology and the theories going on. But it was also to prod, to help change the Marine Corps from industrial age learning to information age learning, which is a very different approach, and we are not built that way. And we needed some serious dynamite under our foundation to break out of our bureaucratic processes.

You wrote the TECOM guidance that led to MCDP 7 and also had some interesting thoughts about how to take PME beyond the industrial age. What motivated you to issue that guidance?

The big piece was the why—why learning was so important. I have been talking about it for years, doing the “PME on PME” lecture as well, and advocating for it well before that—because of what I was seeing: the lack of people studying their profession and understanding the requirement to learn.

And then, thinking about what it would take to start to try and change the culture of the Marine Corps to become more of a learning culture. We were explaining the why and trying to get the culture to change through a doctrinal publication. I didn’t expect it to have the importance of MCDP 1, but I remember the Commandant, General Robert B. Neller, asking the question, “How do we re-invigorate maneuver warfare?” The reason he asked that question was that most people have not read it, they have not studied it, they haven’t studied the requirements.7 And all of this came together, and I talked with General David H. Berger when he was in his Deputy Commandant, Combat Development and Integration (DC CD&I) job, my immediate boss my first year at TECOM, and he thought the idea had merit. And then when he became Commandant, we sent it up to him after a brief review process, and he signed it.

So you had a little bit of inspiration from FMFM 1?

Yes, absolutely, because you have to understand how to take intelligent initiative. You have to understand what intent is and then be able to have the mental agility to adjust as things change around you. All of that requires continuous learning. If you decide that you don’t need to learn anymore and that you left all of that behind when you left school, you end up with people who might take the initiative—but there’s a good chance it is the wrong initiative.

MCDP 7 refers to learning organizations and learning cultures. How do these organizational elements interact with individual-level learning, and how can we cultivate them more effectively?

We have to set the foundation for the expectation that when you join the profession, continuous learning and continuing professional development during the career—ideally, through life—is absolutely required. And if that is too much work for you, then you need to find employment elsewhere. Because the way I look at it is, if we are not studying our profession, if we don’t keep up with it, it is like a doctor or a lawyer who stops studying. Who wants to go to them?

We are in the most intellectually and physically demanding profession on the face of the earth, and the price of getting it wrong is that the people we are in command of end up dying.

We shouldn’t have to figure it out by filling body bags. But we do, too often. I saw it in Iraq, I saw it in Afghanistan. And that is not right.

There should be the understanding that learning is something you need to get after as a professional. But if you don’t because you are young, and you just haven’t figured that part out yet—whoever is in charge of you should tell you, “You better get after it! Here are some ways to do it, and let me help you with it. Here are some things to read, we are going to talk about them. I will help coach you and move you along.” That is the kind of thing that has to happen in a good profession and in a good unit.

How do active learning approaches benefit leadership development?

Part of it is taking responsibility instead of needing others to push you through things. One of the active learning experiments we did was out at the Marine Corps Communications-Electronics School (MCCES) out at Twentynine Palms. One of the questions I asked when I first took over was, instead of Marines having to wait around to join a course, can’t we hand them a syllabus as soon as they show up, preferably on some electronic device? They start to read through the syllabus at their own pace. If there is a lab requirement, it is hands on, it is available to them 24/7. The instructors are there to coach, teach, mentor, and help them through the process, and they work through it with their peers—but they work at their own pace. And when they have demonstrated the necessary level of competence, they move on, cutting down on time waiting around.

In the experiments we did, the Marines loved it. We experimented at Marine Corps Intelligence Schools, and the Marines loved it. There were a couple of other places where we experimented. We need to be able to take advantage of the fact that the young Marines are smart, great with technology, and can learn at their own pace. It also is then about building trust by giving Marines control over their learning. Let them show initiative as well.

In both MCDP 7 and your “PME on PME” lecture, you talk about the importance of critical thinking, judgment, and decision-making. What other important post-industrial age skills and attitudes do you find important, and how can we improve at cultivating them in our PME institutions?

The understanding that comes from continuous learning—being better educated, being more openminded, being more mentally agile—makes Marines more capable. Some people have advocated that the kinds of skills that special operations forces (SOF) have are needed—the maturity, the knowledge, the skills. I’m not advocating that we need to be SOF, but we certainly need to be more SOF-like. We have to get our Marines more mature, better focused. In today’s operating environment, people have to be able to think, take the initiative, have good judgment, and understand what is going on around them.

Thinking about the differences between rote memorization and critical thinking, what shifts have to occur to transition from teaching warfighters what to do and what to think to how to think critically and independently?8

Part of it is getting out of the bureaucratic process we have established and that has been ground into everybody, probably since the mid-1960s. TECOM is part of the problem because we inspect that process, the industrial age process, which tells people what to think, which encourages them to sit down and wait to be told what to do.

So, shifting out of that—one part of that was sending a letter to the commanders of all the schools in TECOM saying, “Now you have the authority to experiment. Tell me what you want to do. And that is what we will hold you to, and no longer the part of the inspection process that does not apply.” But we need to figure out how to do that in the most effective manner—not necessarily in the most efficient manner. Efficiency is good, but it is less important than effectiveness in my mind.

Maj. Gen. William F. Mullen III, off-going commanding general, Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, gives a speech during the installation’s change of command ceremony, Twentynine Palms, Calif., June 8, 2018. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Rachel K. Porter)

How do you shift, and how will it look after? I don’t have the answer right now, but we need to at least start moving, and that is what we are doing. We have started, but we need to expand. Every Marine knows he or she may get called to go into combat or to support it. They need to be able to show initiative and figure out what to do, not wait around to be told.

You mention the importance of experimentation, active learning, and critical thinking. What are some of the critical barriers to cultivating and implementing them in our organizations?

For sure, bureaucracy and the inspection process—the formal school’s inspection process, which holds people in a straitjacket. And what I experienced was, some colonels, as soon as you gave them an inch, and the ability to experiment, they took it and ran like you would expect a good colonel to do. Others were very hesitant, didn’t know what to do, and said, “No, we are just going to continue doing what we are doing.” And that was tremendously frustrating. You have been given guidance. Here is the intent. You have top cover—get after it. You have the ability to take some risk, especially in a training environment where the risk you are taking is being more effective and making sure Marines understand.

One of the buzzwords I had was we have to get away from focusing on process, and we have to focus on product. What do the Marines understand and retain once they move out to the operating forces? That is what is most important. Everything we do should focus more on that: helping them understand more, retain better, think better—not the process of just moving things through and making sure you have all the “i’s” dotted and all the “t’s” crossed. That, to me, is our biggest obstacle: our own processes and bureaucracies and being so focused on process.

Major General Mullen was commissioned in 1986 and served 34 years as an infantry officer, serving in the operating forces with 1/3, 2/6, and RCT 8. He participated in Operation SEA SIGNAL dealing with Haitian and Cuban migrants, Contingency Operations in the former Yugoslavia, several counter-narcotics operations, as well as three combat tours in Iraq. Supporting establishment tours included the FAST Company, Pacific; Inspector-Instructor, F Company 2/24; Marine Aide to the President; the Joint Staff; and, CO, MCTOG. As a general officer he served as President, Marine Corps University; Director, Capability Development Directorate; Target Engagement Authority for Operation INHERENT RESOLVE; CG, MCAGCC; and ended his service as CG, Marine Corps Training and Education Command (TECOM). Major General Mullen retired on Oct 1, 2020 and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado. He also recently started as Professor of Practice at the Naval Postgraduate School (Graduate School of Defense Management). He co-authored the book Fallujah Redux which was published in 2014.

Dr. Mie Augier is Professor in the Graduate School of Defense Management, and Defense Analysis Department, at NPS. She is a founding member of NWSI and is interested in strategy, organizations, leadership, innovation, and how to educate strategic thinkers and learning leaders.

Major Sean F. X. Barrett, PhD is an intelligence officer currently serving at Headquarters Marine Corps Intelligence Division. He has previously deployed in support of Operations IRAQI FREEDOM, ENDURING FREEDOM, ENDURING FREEDOM-PHILIPPINES, and INHERENT RESOLVE.

Major Kevin C. Druffel-Rodriguez is an active duty Marine Corps combat engineer officer. He is currently the operations officer for the Headquarters Marine Corps Directorate of Analytics & Performance Optimization.

References

[1] Mortimer J. Adler, “Invitation to the Pain of Learning,” Journal of Educational Sociology 14, no. 6 (Feb. 1941): 358-363.

[2] “MajGen Mullen’s PME on PME,” October 17, 2019, Marine Corps Association, video, 1:41:49, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcPSB5Edbx4.

[3] One of the more interesting receptions of MCDP 7 is Jocko Willink, Echo Charles, and Dave Berke’s detailed reading of it on Jocko Podcast. They discuss important themes in MCDP 7, such as continuous learning and needing to exercise your mind. Jocko Willink, Echo Charles, and Dave Berke, “227: Learning for Ultimate Winning. With Dave Berke. New Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication. MCDP 7 Learning,” April 29, 2020, Jocko Podcast, podcast, 2:21:27, https://jockopodcast.com/2020/04/29/227-learning-for-ultimate-winning-with-dave-berke-new-marine-corps-doctrinal-publication-mcdp-7-learning/ and Jocko Willink, Echo Charles, and Dave Berke, “228: Put Pressure on Your Mind, Be Your Own General and Be Your Own Soldiers. MCDP 7, Pt. 2 With Dave Berke,” May 6, 2020, Jocko Podcast, podcast, 3:08:13, https://jockopodcast.com/2020/05/06/228-put-pressure-on-your-mind-be-your-own-general-and-be-your-own-soldiers-mcdp-7-pt-2-with-dave-berke/.

[4] Epstein notes the importance of intellectual range and agility in David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019).

[5] William F. Mullen, III, “Advanced Reading Skills: Techniques to Getting Started,” Marine Corps Gazette Blog (Apr. 2019): B1-B5.

[6] William F. Mullen III, “A Warrior’s Mind: How to Better Understand the ‘Art’ of War,” Marine Corps Gazette 103, no. 6 (June 2019): 6-7.

[7] For a more detailed discussion, see William F. Mullen, III, “Reinvigorating Maneuver Warfare: Our Priorities for Manning, Training, Equipping, and Educating Should Be on Our Close Combat Units,” Marine Corps Gazette 104, no. 7 (July 2020): 62-66.

[8] For an overview of some changes already underway in the Marine Corps, see Gidget Fuentes, “Marine Infantry Training Shifts From ‘Automaton’ to Thinkers, As School Adds Chess to the Curriculum,” USNI News, December 15, 2020, https://news.usni.org/2020/12/15/marine-infantry-training-shifts-from-automaton-to-thinkers-as-school-adds-chess-to-the-curriculum.

Featured Image: PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (Jan. 10, 2020) – Marines and Sailors with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit’s Maritime Raid Force secure a simulated casualty during Visit, Board, Search and Seizure training. (Official U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Isaac Cantrell)

Indo-Asia-Pacific

No Ordinary Boats: Cracking the Code on China’s Spratly Maritime Militias

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By Ryan Martinson

A Chinese fishing vessel appears in a sensitive location—near the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, a South China Sea reef, or just offshore from a U.S. military base. Is it an “ordinary” fishing boat, or is it maritime militia?

This straightforward question seldom yields straightforward answers. China does not publish a roster of maritime militia boats. That would undermine the militia’s key advantages—secrecy and deniability. Nor is it common for Chinese sources to recognize the militia affiliations of individual boats. Analysts can gather clues and make a case that a vessel is likely maritime militia, or not. That process requires painstaking effort, and the results are rarely definitive.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) may have made that process much easier, at least in the most contested parts of the South China Sea—the Spratly Islands. Since 2014, the PRC has built hundreds of large Spratly fishing vessels, collectively called the “Spratly backbone fleet” (南沙骨干船队). As I recently suggested at War on the Rocks, most if not all of these vessels are maritime militia affiliated. This insight can help overcome the perennial challenge of differentiating wayward Chinese fishermen from covert elements of China’s armed forces.

Backbone Boats are Militia Boats

In late 2012, PRC leaders decided to invest heavily in the modernization of China’s marine fishing fleet. Prompted by a proposal made by 27 scholars at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, they implemented a series of policies to help fishing boat owners replace their small, old wooden vessels with larger, steel-hulled craft. These programs provided subsidies to large segments of the Chinese fishing industry. But the most generous support was reserved for a specific class of fisherman: i.e., those licensed to operate in the “Spratly waters,” the 820,000 square kilometers of Chinese-claimed land and sea south of 12 degrees latitude.

The Chinese government, both at the central and local levels, allocated large sums of money to reimburse fishing boat owners willing to build new Spratly boats. Hundreds of Chinese fishing boat owners took them up on this offer. The new boats constituted the “Spratly backbone fleet.”

The PRC was very particular about what kinds of boats it wanted in the new fleet. In a January 2018 interview, the Party Secretary of a Guangxi-based firm named Qiaogang Jianhua Fisheries Company (桥港镇建华渔业公司) acknowledged that while the subsidies were quite large, the new boats had to meet very exacting standards. According to the Secretary, surnamed Zhong, the vessels must be quite large, have powerful engines, and be equipped with advanced refrigeration units, among “many, many” other stipulations. Zhong declared, “The document listing these requirements (批文) is very thick. If you don’t adhere to these stipulations, then there’s no subsidy.”

Aside from controlling what types of boats got built, Beijing likely desired some control over how the new boats got used. If deployed effectively, their actions could, like at Scarborough Shoal in 2012, enable new territorial acquisitions. Conversely, if misused, they could damage China’s reputation and even precipitate a violent clash. When the program began, China already had in place a system for controlling the activities of its fishing boats in contested waters: the maritime militia.

April 27, 2021 – Philippine Coast Guard personnel survey several ships believed to be Chinese militia vessels in Sabina Shoal in the South China Sea. (Philippine Coast Guard photo)

The “maritime militia” (海上民兵) is the saltwater element of China’s national militia. Like the People’s Armed Police and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), it is a component of the country’s armed forces. Most members of the maritime militia have day jobs, often as fishermen. However, their affiliation with the militia means that their vessels can be “requisitioned” (征用) to participate in training activities and conduct missions (service for which they are compensated). Militia members are trained and managed by PLA officers assigned to People’s Armed Forces Departments (PAFDs) in the city, county, or town in which the militiamen reside.

Subsidies for construction of the Spratly backbone fleet have been channeled both to existing members of the maritime militia and unaffiliated fishing boat owners that were willing to take the oath as a condition for the money. Among the first to receive the new boats, members of the Tanmen maritime militia benefited from the first approach. Spratly backbone boats registered to Hainan’s Yangpu Economic Development Zone offer an example of the second.

The Spratly backbone fleet appears to be managed by the coordinated efforts of provincial fisheries authorities and the provincial military system (of which PAFDs are a part). The most compelling support for this thesis comes from a 2017 report by the Guangzhou-based MP Consulting Group, which was hired to audit Guangdong’s Marine and Fisheries Bureau. The resulting 96-page document was subsequently posted on the website of the Guangdong Department of Finance.

In their report, MP consultants assessed the Bureau’s success at achieving the seven goals established for 2016. Most were domestic regulatory functions, irrelevant to this story. However, the Bureau’s seventh goal set out the organization’s mission to help protect China’s “rights” in disputed maritime space in the South China Sea. MP consultants generally gave favorable marks on this account, listing eight noteworthy achievements. These included the Bureau’s role in “promoting the construction of maritime militia forces.” Specifically, the Bureau spent 2016 clarifying the division of responsibilities between it and the provincial military district with respect to the “construction, daily operation, combat readiness training, and other relevant tasks” of the Spratly backbone fleet. This statement indicates that the Guangdong elements of the Spratly backbone fleet—and, by extension, those backbone vessels based in Guangxi and Hainan provinces—are organized into militia units jointly managed by the provincial military district and the provincial Marine and Fisheries Bureau.

Other evidence supports the hypothesis that “backbone” boats are militia boats. In August 2020, for instance, the Jiangmen City branch of the Bank of Guangzhou released a summary of its contributions to the local economy. Among these, the branch cited a 97 million RMB loan it provided to an unnamed “top tier fishing company” to build 11 Spratly backbone boats. The bank unwittingly revealed that these new fishing vessels also had “militia functions” (民兵用船功能).

A generic employment contract for crew members embarking on Spratly backbone boats offers additional evidence. The contract—which was uploaded to a Baidu document sharing platform in February 2019—outlines terms for employment at the Shanwei City Cheng District Haibao Fisheries Professional Cooperative (汕尾市城区海宝渔业专业合作社). While little is known about this cooperative, its members are clearly active in the Spratlys. Indeed, its operations manager, Mr. Zhang Jiancheng (张建成), serves as the General Secretary of the Shanwei Spratly Fishing Association (汕尾市南沙捕捞协会).

The Haibao Fisheries contract makes clear that its backbone boats are militia boats, without actually using the words “maritime militia.” It contains a section on “rights protection requisitioning” (维权征用), i.e., removing the boat from production so that it can serve state functions in disputed maritime space. According to Article 2 in that section, if required for “national defense,” the fishing vessel and its crew must “participate in training activities and rights protection tasks, and support military operations.” Article 2 also indicates that crew members must comply with arrangements made by the fishing cooperative and “obey the command of the military” and other government authorities. Article 4 states that if and when the fishing vessel is requisitioned, the boat and its crew must “obey the command of the state,” operating in the manner required, mooring in the determined location, and “completing the operational tasks according to the specific requirements.”

March 23, 2021 – This satellite image by Maxar Technologies shows Chinese vessels in the Whitsun Reef located in the disputed South China Sea. (Maxar Technologies)

Section 6 outlines the rules governing crew behavior, both ashore and at sea. For example, crew members must not gamble, solicit prostitutes, or visit strip clubs while in port (Article 6). The rules also include content specific to the vessel’s militia functions. Article 7 proscribes taking photos and “divulging the secrets of the boat.” Without the permission of the captain, crew members cannot bring outsiders aboard the boat to view its “design structure and internal setup” (设计构造和内部设置).

Implications

In this article, I have argued that most if not all Spratly backbone boats are militia boats. They may actually catch fish, but their militia affiliation makes them available for state and military tasking. If this conclusion is correct, it offers useful new ways to identify Chinese maritime militia forces operating in the Spratly waters. While the PRC does not publish lists of active maritime militia boats, it does share information about which boats belong to the Spratly backbone fishing fleet. This can serve as an indicator of militia status.

How might this work in practice? At the time of this writing, a team of four Chinese fishing boats is operating illegally within 200 nautical miles of Vietnam’s coast, i.e., within the country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The four vessels are named Qionglinyu 60017, 60018, 60019, and 60020, respectively, indicating they are registered to Hainan’s Lingao county (临高县). Vietnamese maritime law enforcement authorities could evict them, but before doing so they might ask, are they maritime militia?

My answer: “very likely.” A quick sifting of open-source materials reveals they are all backbone boats. This information appears in a March 2020 open letter posted on the website “Message Board for Leaders” (领导留言板). In it, the boat owners entreat PRC officials to restore fuel subsidies and other rewards for operating in “specially-designated waters” in 2018. Likely amounting to hundreds of thousands of RMB, the subsidies were withheld as punishment for operating in the Spratlys without the required licenses. To elicit special consideration, they emphasized that their four vessels were Spratly backbone boats. (Their ploy ultimately failed, as the Lingao County Bureau of Agriculture responded to their letter with a firm but polite refusal to change their decision.)

Qionglinyu 60017, 60018, 60019, and 60020, May 2021. (Via www.marinetraffic.com)

Southeast Asian countries can and should compile lists of known Spratly backbone boats. They can start with local newspapers, which are a great source for such information. In December 2016, for example, Zhanjiang Daily published an article about the launching of the city’s first Spratly backbone trawlers: the 48-meter (577 ton) Yuemayu 60222 and 60333. Registered to the city’s Mazhang District, the craft are owned by Zhanjiang Xixiang Fisheries (湛江喜翔渔业有限公司). With these clues in hand, one can then try to learn the identities of the company’s two other Spratly backbone boats, then still under construction.

Yuemayu 60333 (Via NHJD.net)

The websites of Chinese shipbuilding companies are another useful source of information. Those with contracts to build backbone boats often issue news releases when these vessels are launched or delivered. In October 2017, for instance, the Fujian-based Lixin Ship Engineering Company launched five very large Spratly backbone trawlers built for a Guangdong fishing company, Maoming City Desheng Fisheries Limited. The five boats were delivered two months later. They included Yuedianyu 42881, 42882, 42883, 42885, and 42886. The boats were 63.6 meters in length and had the large (1244kW) engines typical of the backbone fleet. Of note, Desheng Fisheries is the same company that owns Yuemaobinyu 42881, 42882, 42883, 42885, and 42886, all spotted moored at Whitsun Reef in March. Indeed, they may be the very same boats (their names having been slightly altered in the years since they were built).

Yuedianyu 42882, December 2017 (Photo via Fujian Lixin Ship Engineering)

Provincial and municipal governments may be the most valuable sources of all. In November 2020, the Guangdong Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs released information about the province’s Spratly (“NS,” for nansha) fishing license quota for 2021. The document indicated that 255 Guangdong boats would receive Spratly fishing licenses this year, among which 185 would go to backbone boats and 70 would go to “ordinary boats” (普通渔船). The Bureau attached an Excel spreadsheet listing the chosen vessels. The document omitted Table 1, containing the list of backbone boats. But it did include Table 2, listing the 70 “ordinary” fishing boats. Since only two types of Guangdong boats operate in the Spratlys—i.e., ordinary and backbone—any Guangdong boat there and not found in Table 2 must be a backbone bone, and therefore presumed militia.

These data help shed light on recent events. In March and April 2021, the Philippine Coast Guard released photos of Chinese fishing boats loitering at Whitsun Reef. Thanks to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI), we know the identities of 23 of them.

Both AMTI and the Philippines Coast Guard classified them as “militia.” They are right. All are from Guangdong. All are absent from Table 2. And that makes them no “ordinary” boats.

Ryan D. Martinson is a researcher in the China Maritime Studies Institute at the Naval War College. He holds a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a bachelor’s of science from Union College. Martinson has also studied at Fudan University, the Beijing Language and Culture University, and the Hopkins-Nanjing Center.

Featured Image: In this photo provided by the National Task Force-West Philippine Sea, Chinese vessels are moored at Whitsun Reef, South China Sea on March 27, 2021. (Philippine government photo)

Europe

Improve NATO’s Black Sea Maritime Posture Through Operation Sea Guardian

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By Colin Barnard 

In a recent article for CIMSEC, I proposed three ways to improve U.S. maritime posture in Europe, including the forward basing of small surface combatants in the Baltic and Barents Seas. Due to the Montreux Convention, however, only littoral states are able to base warships in the Black Sea, which excludes the United States and all but three NATO members: Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Recognizing this limitation and others on overall NATO maritime posture in the region, Russia has invested heavily in expanding and modernizing its Black Sea Fleet to maintain a position of relative strength and ensure its unfettered access to sea lanes, which it has used in recent years to continue its destabilization of Ukraine and Georgia and resupply its forces in Syria and Libya (the latter in violation of UN sanction regimes). 

In order to protect its members and their interests against the possibility of further Russian aggression in the region, as well as to safeguard maritime security in the Black Sea, NATO needs to enhance its maritime presence and improve its balance of forces with Russia. To this end, NATO must find a solution to address the current limitations of its Black Sea maritime posture, in particular the Montreux Convention, but also the low capacity of Black Sea NATO navies and the lack of sufficient NATO maritime command and control in the region. This article explains the extent of these limitations and proposes a solution: expanding NATO’s maritime security operation, Operation Sea Guardian, to the Black Sea. 

Limitations on NATO Black Sea Maritime Posture

The most significant limitation on NATO’s Black Sea maritime posture is the Montreux Convention. Some of the many stipulations of the convention are positive for NATO, e.g. giving Turkey control of the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits. However, the agreement forbids non-littoral navies from forward basing warships in the Black Sea and restricts them to sailing there for a period of no more than 21 days. After the 21 days have passed, non-littoral navies must transit back through the Straits to the Aegean Sea in order to reset the clock. These restrictions are problems for NATO because only three of its members—Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey—are allowed to operate navies in the Black Sea on a permanent basis. This is one of the reasons why neither the United States nor NATO had adequate presence and situational awareness at the start of the Russo-Georgia War in 2008 and the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, both of which involved significant Russian naval operations in the Black Sea.

The United States and NATO have since improved their ability to respond to a crisis in the region through NATO Assurance Measures, which include more frequent patrols by U.S. warships and NATO’s Standing Naval Forces (SNF) in the Black Sea, the latter of which is the maritime arm of NATO’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (established in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea). Unfortunately, the reality is that neither of these crises lasted long enough for such a response to matter.

More frequent patrols by U.S. and NATO warships in the Black Sea within Montreux’s 21-day limit are critical for conventional deterrence and reassurance to NATO allies and partners, but they are not enough on their own to achieve an adequate NATO maritime posture. Posture implies readiness to respond to the full range of threats, military and non-military, that Russia poses to the region. Effectively identifying and disrupting Russia’s use of criminal networks to destabilize NATO allies and partners alike, for example, requires permanent, sustained presence and situational awareness.

A second limitation on NATO’s Black Sea maritime presence is the low capacity of Black Sea NATO navies. The largest and most capable of the three is the Turkish Navy, which includes submarine forces, but even it cannot provide the presence and situational awareness across the Black Sea that NATO requires. This is due, at least in part, to the fact that Turkish naval forces must split their attention between the Black, Aegean, and Mediterranean Seas, where Turkey has numerous interests. Romania and Bulgaria, in contrast, operate only a small number of frigates, corvettes, and mine countermeasures ships between them. Romania has announced plans for four new multirole frigates, which will be useful once delivered, but Bulgaria appears only to be purchasing two, less capable offshore patrol two vessels. 

While these naval forces are a critical part of NATO’s order of battle (and indeed they routinely support NATO maritime activities), they lack the capacity to deter Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and enforce maritime security in the region when not supplemented by other NATO forces. Furthermore, as Russia has increased its air, submarine, and amphibious forces in the Black Sea, large multirole combatants, such as Romania’s two Type 22 frigates, are required in far greater numbers than Black Sea navies can currently field, especially when maintenance and training cycles are factored in. 

In addition to large combatants, more capable small combatants are required to bolster overall presence and perform maritime security tasks such as interdiction operations, which Romania’s new frigates and perhaps Bulgaria’s new patrol vessels, depending on their capability, will help address. Close NATO partners Ukraine and Georgia have the potential to add to the number provided by NATO navies, especially after the U.S. transfer of Island-class cutters to both states, and the planned transfer of Mk VI patrol boats to Ukraine. These platforms will expand Ukraine’s and Georgia’s range of patrolling their own maritime borders with Russia (for Ukraine, this includes inside the Sea of Azov), which benefits NATO as well.

Finally, NATO lacks sufficient maritime command and control (C2) in the Black Sea to conduct operations. Currently, NATO maintains what is called “Tailored Forward Presence” in the region. This presence is centered around a multinational division headquarters in Bucharest, which commands land forces also based in Romania, as well as two NATO Force Integration Units (NFIU), one in Romania and one in Bulgaria. None of these headquarters are maritime. The NFIUs, tasked with integrating NATO forces in the event of crisis and conflict, rely on the SNF to be the maritime arm of the VTJF under control of NATO’s Allied Maritime Command (MARCOM) in the United Kingdom. In peacetime and the outset of a crisis, NATO relies entirely on MARCOM to conduct maritime operations in the Black Sea. When the SNF is not in the Black Sea, however, MARCOM is not guaranteed to have control of naval forces in the region. This creates a lag, if not a gap entirely, in NATO’s situational awareness and ability to respond to maritime security incidents and crises in the Black Sea. 

Outside observers may argue unwittingly that warships operating under national authority of a NATO member can suffice for overall NATO presence and thus deterrence, but the NATO command structure is distinct from national command structures, with its own C2, classification categories, and so on. The public may not be able to see a difference between a U.S. maritime patrol in the Black Sea and a patrol by a NATO standing maritime group, but the difference matters. This is one reason I argued for NATO navies above the Arctic Circle to form a standing maritime group to provide steady presence and maritime security in the European Arctic. As in the Barents Sea, NATO via MARCOM requires a standing maritime group of some sort in the Black Sea, providing direct input to its operational picture (not via its national command first) and able to react immediately to security incidents and crises at or from the sea. 

Solutions to Improve NATO’s Black Sea Maritime Posture

Recommendations to mitigate the limitations above are aplenty, but common to all are proposals to increase and formalize the rotation of non-littoral NATO navies to the Black Sea, especially from European NATO members. What these proposals lack, however, is a pragmatic way to make such a rotation more appealing to the political leadership that must approve it. Enter Operation Sea Guardian (OSG). Rebranding the rotation in the name of maritime security rather than only a NATO deterrence initiative would likely appeal to politicians across NATO. The easiest way to accomplish this would be to increase the area of operations (AO) for OSG to include the Black Sea. OSG succeeded Operation Active Endeavour (OAE) in November 2016. Unlike OAE, which was focused on counter-terrorism, OSG was expanded to include additional maritime security tasks, three of which are permanently authorized: maritime situational awareness, counter-terrorism, and capacity building. If authorized, forces in support of OSG may also uphold freedom of navigation, conduct maritime interdiction, counter weapons of mass destruction, and protect critical infrastructure.

Currently, OSG’s AO only includes the Mediterranean Sea, but justification for expanding it is easy to find. OSG’s primary line of effort is maritime situational awareness, which entails a broad range of information and intelligence gathering activities, supported by submarines, surface ships, and aircraft. These activities naturally interact with both military and commercial vessels of interest, which do not always stay in the Mediterranean. The Black Sea in particular hosts a number of smuggling operations, most of which have been consolidated and expanded through Russia’s occupation of Ukraine and Georgia. These operations include the overt and covert transport of arms and fuel to Russian-associated forces in Syria and Libya. In the case of Syria, Ben Hodges, a former commander of Allied Land Command and current Pershing Chair at the Center for European Policy Analysis, tweeted that Germany, France, Turkey, and the United States should work together to prevent Russia’s use of its bases and ports in the Black Sea to support the Assad regime. 

Recognition of Russia’s use of ports and sea lanes in the Black Sea to support its forces and proxies not only in the Black Sea, but elsewhere, is important, but preventing it remains a challenge. One way could be to sanction and interdict non-Russian-flagged vessels supporting Russian resupply efforts. In truth, these vessels are already violating EU sanctions on Syria, yet the EU has done nothing to enforce them. OSG would be the ideal operation to support an embargo of non-Russian-flagged shipping supporting Russian resupply efforts. This would likely result in Russia reflagging much of this shipping, as Iran has done to prevent interdiction of its own shipping in European waters; but this would be a good result. Russia should be required to flag all shipping supporting its military and proxy engagements. This would make it easier for the UN, NATO, and the rest of the world to understand where and how Russia engages in the world, which could result in stronger international support against Russia when it undermines international law and norms.

If NATO pursues such an embargo operation, it would serve a more important recognition that maritime security and sanctions enforcement are important in competition with Russia. In his article with CIMSEC critiquing NATO’s 2011 Alliance Maritime Strategy, Ian Sundstrom advocated for a NATO maritime operation focused on Russian deterrence, which OSG currently is not. In fact, at present, NATO’s SNF are not the primary forces deployed in support of OSG, though they often augment OSG task groups, which usually means patrolling part of the area designated for an OSG focused operation (FOCOP). The forces which make up OSG task groups are instead volunteered from NATO navies on a rotational basis. MARCOM, which commands OSG, has operational control of these forces for specific periods of time. The reason the SNF are not the primary forces deployed for OSG is because of the prevailing notion in NATO that the task of maritime security is wholly separate from deterrence against Russia. 

This notion has been challenged time and again by crises in NATO’s backyard, yet it remains. For example, OSG has conducted FOCOPs in the Eastern and Central Mediterranean on numerous occasions during the ongoing civil wars in Syria and Libya, and the task of detecting vessels smuggling arms, fuel, or people in violation of international law has directly overlapped with the task of tracking Russian military activity. The concept of a competition continuum, recently adopted by the U.S. sea services in their latest maritime strategy, recognizes the role of low-end maritime security tasks in military competition. Competing daily against Russia and other malign actors requires not only conventional deterrence demonstrated through the deployment of high-end forces, but also constabulary presence to detect and disrupt “gray zone” activities. Rotational forces supporting OSG centered around the navies of Black Sea NATO members would be able to work together to this end, a framework that can and should be duplicated throughout the rest of Europe. 

An ancillary benefit of expanding OSG’s AO to include the Black Sea would be reassurance to Ukraine and Georgia. Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and, more recently, its de facto embargo of Ukrainian ports in the Sea of Azov highlighted by its temporary closure of the Kerch Strait in 2018, the United States and other NATO members have been supporting Ukraine and Georgia in their respective pursuance of NATO membership and deterrence posture against Russia. An OSG task group operating in the Black Sea would be able to sustain presence near the maritime boundaries Ukraine and Georgia share with Russia through exercising, information sharing, and patrolling with Ukrainian and Georgian naval and coast guard forces. Importantly, Georgia has maintained a liaison officer in MARCOM for years, whose role includes support to OSG. Both Georgia and Ukraine were active members of OAE, and the relationships that existed before Russia’s invasions of both countries could be quickly repaired under the umbrella of OSG. 

Caveats and Conclusion

An important caveat to the expansion of OSG to the Black Sea is the need for all NATO members to support it, especially Turkey, which is the prime mover for NATO in the region. OSG has already suffered a black eye in the Mediterranean because of disagreements between NATO members, specifically Turkey and France, over the course of the Libyan civil war. The disagreements culminated last year in an unsafe interaction off the coast of Libya involving the French frigate Courbet, flagship for an OSG task group, and three Turkish frigates operating under Turkish national control (though also, ironically, in associated support to OSG). When Courbet intercepted the Tanzanian-flagged (at the time) vehicle carrier, CIRKIN, identified as potentially carrying military cargo from Istanbul to Libya in violation of UN sanctions, a Turkish frigate used its fire control radar to track the French frigate, or so the French claim. The fallout of this interaction was France’s withdrawal from supporting OSG. 

This interaction should not have surprised anyone. NATO knew its members were increasingly at odds over the clash of interests in Libya, and that Turkey was actively shipping military equipment to its forces and proxies in Western Libya; yet NATO still allowed for an OSG patrol to take place off the coast of Libya. NATO usually suffers paralysis when its members do not agree, though in this case, it was not so much paralysis as it was a failure to address the elephant in the room. Whether one agrees with France or Turkey on its approach to Libyan civil war, the problem for OSG is that it is a maritime security operation, which implies it recognizes and upholds international law, including UN sanctions. Successful expansion of OSG to the Black Seaㅡi.e., providing NATO with rotational forces to enforce maritime security and erode Russia’s ability to destabilize the regionㅡwill require NATO consensus. If NATO cannot find consensus, then the advantage goes to Russia and other malign actors. 

NATO needs to enhance its maritime presence in the Black Sea and improve its balance of forces with Russia, despite the current limitations of the Montreux Convention, the low capacity of Black Sea NATO navies, and the lack of sufficient NATO maritime command and control in the region. These limitations can be mitigated by expanding OSG’s AO to include the Black Sea. An OSG task group supported by the rotation of non-littoral NATO navies, operating alongside Black Sea NATO and partner navies, would improve NATO’s maritime posture in the region to deter Russia and safeguard maritime security—two tasks which are often inseparable. 

Colin Barnard is a U.S. Navy foreign area officer currently in training for an exchange with the German Navy. He was formerly a staff operations and plans officer at NATO Maritime Command in the U.K. In addition to writing for the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings and the Center for International Maritime Security, he is a PhD student at King’s College London with a focus on European maritime security. The views expressed in this publication are the author’s and do not imply endorsement by the U.S. Defense Department or U.S. Navy.

Featured Image: DARDANELLES STRAIT (Jan. 19, 2019) The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Donald Cook (DDG 75) transits the Dardanelles Strait, en route to the Black Sea, Jan. 19, 2019. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ford Williams/Released)