All posts by Guest Author

Podcast

Bilge Pumps Episode 34: The Challenge of Replacement – Biden & Collins

Leave a comment

By Alex Clarke

Dear all, for this Bilge Pumps we apologize in advance for the amount of Australian in this podcast. We may mention the Collins-class replacement to Jamie, we may have had a bottle of irn bru riding on how long he could talk on it for and we may or may not have come up with a solution to several problems.

So with the warning out of the way, please sit back and enjoy some Bilge Pumps as your regular crew of Alex, Drach, and Jamie take a canter through the topics suggested, some of the topics that will feature this year, and some of the current events of the last couple of weeks.

#Bilgepumps is still a newish series and new avenue, which may no longer boast the new car smell, in fact decidedly more of pineapple/irn bru smell with a hint of jaffa cake and the faintest whiff of cork. But we’re getting the impression it’s liked, so we’d very much like any comments, topic suggestions or ideas for artwork to be tweeted to us, the #Bilgepump crew (with #Bilgepumps), at Alex (@AC_NavalHistory), Drach (@Drachinifel), and Jamie (@Armouredcarrier). Or you can comment on our Youtube channels (listed down below).

Bilge Pumps Episode 34: The Challenge of Replacement – Biden & Collins

Links

1. Dr. Alex Clarke’s Youtube Channel
2. Drachinifel’s Youtube Channel
3. Jamie Seidel’s Youtube Channel

Alex Clarke is the producer of The Bilge Pumps podcast.

Contact the CIMSEC podcast team at [email protected].

Commentary

NAVPLAN 2021: A Delayed Change of Command Speech

Leave a comment

By Robert C. Rubel

First, a little personal history. At the ceremony in which I took command of Strike Fighter Squadron 131 in June, 1990, after taking the command from my predecessor I went to the microphone for my remarks. Like most officers in that position I had thought hard about what I would say. I first issued a few thank you’s, to my wife, to the band, to my predecessor, and then I turned to the squadron, assembled in neat ranks, and said “In one year the Wildcats will own the night.” And then I walked off.

I used the remarks as a management tool. The word was that upon return from cruise we would exchange our F/A-18As for night strike F/A-18Cs. The problem was that there was an acute shortage of night vision goggles and navigation infrared pods (NAVFLIR), without which the plane would not actually have a night strike capability. My sister squadron’s CO said that they would just consider the Cs an updated version of the A. I thought about this and decided, no, I was going to go all in on getting to a night strike capability for the squadron. I didn’t know how, but there needed to be absolute clarity among the sailors and officers of the squadron about what I wanted. I decided to use my change of command remarks as a management tool.

By saying that one sentence and walking off, I created some shock value; the message was not buried among calls for excellence, the desire for winning awards, etc., that populated most change of command speeches. I wanted to increase the signal and reduce the noise. We ended up getting it done before I left the command, the JOs and troops doing things I would have never thought of.

NAVPLAN 2021 (NP21), despite being issued a year and a half after he took the reins of the Navy, is essentially Admiral Mike Gilday’s change of command speech. Capstone documents such as NP21 have been used routinely by CNOs as management tools. They are supposed to serve as a template for force development, which is the Navy’s primary mission as a service, while actual fighting is the province of the unified combatant commanders (COCOMs). Some, such as CNO Tom Hayward’s The Future of U.S. Seapower actually had some bite to them. Others, such as CNO Vern Clark’s Seapower 21, were of less influence. How NP21 will fare remains to be seen, but from this reviewer’s point of view, like a lengthy and rambling change of command speech, the key ideas and priorities are buried within a lot of pleading, utility arguments, and aspirational pep talk, which might dilute its effects. 

The key pleading element is the assertion that the Navy needs a bigger fleet. NP21 does not go into an extensive argument as to why, like, say the 2015 Cooperative Strategy (CS21R) document did, so apparently the CNO is relying on the actual implementation of some form of the SECDEF-issued Battle Force 2045 plan. But then he seems to hedge on the issue by saying that the most important things are fleet composition and capability. Does that mean that if Congress will not build more regular ships, the Navy will trade in some of its current ships (there is a short paragraph on divestments) for larger numbers of unmanned units? One either needs insider information or at least must read between the lines to discern the CNO’s true intent. 

The document calls for more fulsome cooperation with foreign navies. This is obviously a good and needed goal, but the document does not say much about how that will be achieved beyond coordinating capabilities and combined exercises. For the development of the 2007 Cooperative Strategy (CS21) we concocted a broader strategy for catalyzing greater international naval cooperation on maritime security that involved bringing international officers into the strategy development process, extensive international consultations, and including language in the document calculated to allay foreign fears of U.S. interventionism. There does not seem to be any such underlying strategy associated with NP21, just aspirational language. 

NP21 stresses readiness and all the good professional values the Navy has always held dear, and I suppose that such things need to be said in any such document, but they do add to the noise-to-signal ratio. To ferret out what key direction the CNO has in mind for the Navy, the document has to be read carefully. There are some hints.

First, the CNO is all-in on the Columbia-class SSBN program. NP21 makes this clear, and with no whining about where the funding is coming from. I cannot argue with this. But from there the message gets a bit harder to decipher. At one point NP21 says that the Navy’s highest priority is the development of a new C5ISRT system, the Naval Operational Architecture that kind of ties everything together. I do support this priority, but in other places the document calls for more missiles, more unmanned systems, and more small ships to populate a distributed operational concept. But then it also seems to support a continuation of current fleet architecture, such as the Ford-class aircraft carrier and future large combatants. Unless the Navy gets a large top line budget boost, this is just so much rhetoric. 

Along the same lines, NP21 calls for the Navy to “sensibly manage global force demands” in order to free up resources to focus on improving advantages over China. However, managing global force demands was the province of the joint chain of command, and that chain shows no sign of easing up its demands for Navy forces. So exactly how the Navy will do what NP21 calls for is unclear. Similarly, NP21, following the Tri-Service Maritime Strategy (TSMS), asserts the Navy will adopt a more “assertive posture” against excessive maritime claims. This again seems to cross the line of COCOM and indeed SECDEF and Presidential authorities. In any case, beyond just doing more freedom of navigation operations, which would seem to violate the idea of sensibly managing global force demands, it is not clear what Navy forces would do, such as whether it would intervene in a dispute between Filipino fishermen and Chinese naval militia.

NP21 addresses maintenance, which has been the source of severe readiness problems for the Navy. It says: “Better planning our maintenance availabilities, improving operational level maintenance practices, and providing stable, predictable requirements to industry will accelerate our improvements.” This sounds good, but remains aspirational and the document offers no guidance for how to achieve it. The Optimized Fleet Response Plan has been in force for a number of years and has not been able to dig the Navy out of the mission/resource mismatch. There is no more blood to squeeze out of the turnip, so “better planning” is not likely to be a source of relief. The CNO is right in that only a bigger fleet will ease the Navy’s maintenance and readiness hole within the context of the current U.S. grand strategy of comprehensive defense of the global system and current joint command procedures.

NP21 is supposed to be a companion document to the TSMS. The key feature of that document was the assertion that the three Sea Services would act in an integrated fashion to achieve synergies. NP21 offers only a head nod to that idea via a sentence here and there that basically just says it is a good idea. Otherwise, guidance on how the Navy is to approach it is missing. Such a revolutionary approach would seem to rate more guidance from the CNO so all the commands would understand how it would be achieved. This further reinforces the impression that NP21 is a kind of change of command speech.

There is some good content in NP21, like a call for developing the Naval Operational Architecture, buying more missiles, adopting distributed operations, and conducting fleet experiments to enhance the Navy’s ability to confront China. But the document is so comprehensive and so laden with utility arguments, aspirational statements, and equivocal prioritizing that its impact is diluted.

The overall impression is that the CNO will try to innovate around the margins while generally trying to maintain the status quo. I hope that is not the intent; the Navy needs a more fundamental shift in direction. NP21 does not provide either the stimulus or the roadmap for such a shift. As a normal change of command speech, NP21 is fine, but as a management tool it falls short.

Robert C. Rubel is a retired Navy captain and professor emeritus of the Naval War College. He served on active duty in the Navy as a light attack/strike fighter aviator. At the Naval War College he served in various positions, including planning and decision-making instructor, joint education adviser, chairman of the Wargaming Department, and dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. He retired in 2014, but on occasion continues to serve as a special adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations. He has published over thirty journal articles and several book chapters.

Featured Image: Adm. Michael Gilday, Chief of Naval Operations, speaks at the CNIC change of command ceremony onboard the Washington Navy Yard. (U.S. Navy photo by Chief Mass Communication Specialist Brian Morales)

Europe

Improve U.S. Maritime Posture in Europe Through Strategic Realignment

Leave a comment

By Colin Barnard 

In July 2020, senior U.S. military leaders announced a realignment of the U.S. strategic posture in Europe, projecting the movement of troops and materiel from various locations in Germany to elsewhere in Europe and back to the United States. General Tod Wolters, commander of U.S. European Command (EUCOM) and NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), argued the realignment enhances deterrence against Russia. Conversely, a former commander of EUCOM and SHAPE, retired Admiral Jim Stavridis, called the realignment a “victory for Putin.” 

With President Biden’s defense team set to review the realignment during the 120-day period granted under the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, it is worth evaluating, which, if either, of the above statements is correct. I argue that the planned realignment should go forward, but only if it includes improvements to the U.S. maritime posture, including: additional forward basing for U.S. warships, better collaboration with NATO on maritime domain awareness, and more U.S. foreign area officers embedded in the NATO command and force structures.

The Benefits of Realignment

The potential benefits of the planned realignment should be easy for the Biden team to identify. Relocating EUCOM headquarters from Germany to near SHAPE’s headquarters in Belgium would, as General Wolters stated, “improve the speed and clarity of…decision making and promote greater operational alignment” of U.S. and NATO forces. Currently, General Wolters has to fly between these two headquarters just to address his staffs in person. While this is merely an inconvenience in peacetime, it is an unnecessary burden that could be dangerous during crisis or conflict.

Another benefit is the movement of air forces from Germany to Italy, closer to their parent headquarters and in a better position for operations across the Black Sea region and the Mediterranean. Russia’s continued presence in Ukraine, Georgia, and Syria, and its expanding footprint in Libya, warrant attention from both U.S. and NATO forces in Europe and highlight the need to think beyond the traditional notion of a front line with Russia that only faces eastward. 

Perhaps the greatest benefit of the realignment, however, is the movement of 1,000 troops to Poland, raising the total U.S. troop presence there to 5,500. Defense cooperation between the United States and Poland—a key NATO ally that borders the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and the infamous Suwalki Gap, and has an important coastline on the Baltic Sea—is crucial for deterring Russia. Additionally, the United States has recently improved on defense cooperation agreements with Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, and Georgia. 

Along with these bilateral agreements, Biden’s team should also consider NATO’s collective deterrence efforts—for example, two forward presence initiatives implemented by NATO in 2016, which placed four battalion-sized battlegroups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. 

What is still inadequate in U.S. bilateral and NATO deterrence efforts, however, is the maritime domain. Deterrence and defense against Russia require more than just ground troops. It is a multi-domain effort requiring significant maritime forces.

The Maritime Domain

Russia is first and foremost a land power, but it is increasingly focused on naval modernization and stand-off capabilities designed to challenge the international order at sea, and neither the United States nor NATO are keeping pace. Fortunately, the most recent U.S. maritime strategy acknowledges this reality and emphasizes the importance of U.S. maritime presence and power projection to compete with Russia. Surprisingly, however, the realignment does not call for a fixed number of U.S. maritime assets in Europe, nor for additional forward naval bases to support them.

The realignment does not entail any reduction in U.S. maritime presence either, which is actually anticipated to increase in the near future—most notably via two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers joining the four already stationed in Rota, Spain. These destroyers, along with NATO’s Standing Naval Forces, are at the forefront of daily competition with Russia in the Eastern Mediterranean, Black, Baltic, and Barents Seas. But the realignment does not address the remaining inadequacies of the U.S. maritime posture in Europe, something the Biden team now has time to correct. 

Before noting these inadequacies, it is worth mentioning that NATO members are making significant strides to improve their naval forces, and the United States has increased its naval deployments in support of NATO objectives, leading Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 for all of 2019, sailing its forward-deployed destroyers regularly into the Black Sea to reassure NATO allies and partners, and, most recently, sailing three destroyers into the Barents Sea for the first time since the end of the Cold War. 

Last year, retired Admiral James Foggo, former commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe, highlighted the challenge Russia poses in the maritime domain, indicating that more remains to be done. The European theater needs more U.S. naval forces, for which the realignment should account. While the Biden team should and will seek a broad range of input regarding the realignment, three recommendations for addressing the currently inadequate U.S. maritime posture in Europe are included below.

Recommendations

1. Forward Basing 

The Black, Baltic, and Barents Seas are areas of increasing naval competition with Russia, but U.S. naval forces can only access the first two via chokepoints, and all three lie far away from existing U.S. naval bases and logistical sites. While it is important for NATO member and partner states bordering these bodies of water to improve their own naval forces, the forward basing of U.S. naval forces nearby, specifically small surface combatants (such as the future Constellation-class frigate), would yield the United States and NATO important advantages over Russia.

First, forward-based U.S. surface forces would be able to develop sufficient interoperability with NATO allies and partner naval forces operating in the Black, Baltics, and Barents Seas, which is critical for integrating as one force during crisis or conflict. Outside of crisis or conflict, this interoperability is important for the United States and NATO to perform low-end maritime security tasks necessary for maintaining “good order at sea,” identified by Joshua Tallis at the Center for Naval Analyses and the new U.S. maritime strategy as a central part to winning strategic competition. 

Second, the logistical sites required to sustain forward-based forces would be critical during a crisis or conflict. Existing U.S. logistical sites, such as those in Spain, Italy, and Crete, lie too far from these bodies of water, and supplying forces within them would require transit via potentially contested chokepoints. Forward-based forces able to fight on day one, and sustain the fight with nearby logistical sites, would be a credible deterrent against Russia. These forces would be well poised to shape the maritime battlespace, protect sea lines of communication, and keep chokepoints open.

While forward basing would be possible in or close to the Baltic and Barents Seas, the Montreux Convention prevents the United States and any other non-littoral state from permanently stationing naval forces in the Black Sea. Nevertheless, much could be done to improve the maritime posture in the Black Sea short of forward basing U.S. naval forces there. One particularly creative idea proposed by Luke Coffey of The Heritage Foundation is for Danubian states such as Germany to sail warships for longer durations in the Black Sea using the Danube River to reset the time limits of Montreux, and potentially for non-Danubian states to do the same using the Danube-Black Sea Canal.

2. Maritime Domain Awareness

U.S. maritime domain awareness (MDA) in Europe also requires improvement. Defined as “the effective understanding of anything associated with the global maritime domain that could impact the security, safety, economy, or environment of the United States,” global MDA requires significant collaboration among allies and partners, but currently even regional collaboration on MDA within NATO is inadequate. An exhaustive list of recommendations designed to improve U.S. collaboration with NATO is beyond the scope of this article, but two specific suggestions are worth noting.

First, the United States and NATO need to identify and acquire the capabilities required for effective MDA of the European theater as an alliance. Collaboration is only possible if those collaborating have the capabilities to do so. These capabilities need not only be military, though military platforms are certainly a crucial part of MDA. Commercial services and open-source methods for tracking vessels of interest at sea—ideally that avoid national classification issues, which often prevent effective intelligence sharing—are also needed. 

Second, the United States and NATO need to establish a more direct link to events at sea instead of relying on maritime fusion centers (MFCs), which are agencies and processes designed to connect commercial and governmental maritime actors. While crucial for collating and disseminating information related to safety and security incidents, such as search and rescue or piracy, MFCs are only as good as the information they receive. One way to establish a more direct link to the biggest maritime actor of all—merchant vessels—is through the states and organizations that flag and insure them, such as Norway and the Norwegian Shipowners’ Mutual War Risks Insurance Association. 

Among the many services the association offers its 453 members, encompassing 3,391 merchant vessels and offshore rigs, are intelligence reports generated by its Intelligence and Operations Center (IOC) after a security incident occurs. Some of the first and most accurate intelligence available after the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps attacked merchant vessels in 2019 came from the IOC, as Norwegian-flagged vessels were damaged in two of the attacks. Though the Norwegian example is perhaps unique, identifying and developing voluntary linkages with similar organizations across Europe would go a long way to improve U.S. and NATO MDA.

3. Foreign Area Officers

Finally, U.S. Navy foreign area officers (FAOs) should be better utilized to synergize U.S. bilateral and NATO capacity building and deterrence efforts in the maritime domain. FAOs are the U.S. military’s international engagement professionals, working across the globe in U.S. embassies, military headquarters, and on battlefields to develop and maintain critical relationships with allies and partners, to include facilitating defense and security cooperation agreements. While every branch of the U.S. military has FAOs assigned to the NATO alliance, the U.S. Navy should dedicate more. 

NATO as an organization relies on bilateral agreements between individual NATO members and key partners such as Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, and Georgia to build capacity and improve its deterrence posture in the maritime domain. However, a gap in information sharing exists between the predominantly non-American officers at NATO and their American counterparts, even though they are all working on engagements with the same partners. While the details of finalized U.S. bilateral agreements eventually make their way to NATO, the lack of real-time synchronization severely impedes NATO efforts to plan and exercise based on these agreements. 

The simplest solution to bridge this gap is to embed more U.S. Navy FAOs within the NATO command and force structures. In the command structure, U.S. Navy FAOs are already present at two of NATO’s joint force commands, but NATO’s theater maritime command does not have a single U.S. Navy FAO on staff. In the force structure, Navy FAOs could be attached to European maritime headquarters that are capable of providing the maritime component command for the NATO Response Forces in the event of crisis or conflict. Adding more FAOs to the line officers (e.g., surface, aviation, submarine, etc.) already at these headquarters would provide more regional focus and expertise than line officers alone.

These NATO-focused FAOs would not work alongside a country team in a U.S. embassy or contributing to strategic and operational planning at a U.S. military headquarters, but they would gain valuable experience in support of European national and NATO exercises, operations, and planning groups, which would pay dividends when serving in traditional FAO billets. Though spread across the European theater, these FAOs would interact with each other regularly during exercises and at workshops and meetings. They would be a vast network into which American Embassies and the U.S. EUCOM, 2nd Fleet, and 6th Fleet headquarters could tap at any time. 

Conclusion

U.S. military presence in Europe continues to be necessary, but what that presence looks like, and where it is, should always be subject to reassessment. Security environments are not static, nor are the threats within them. During its review of the realignment, Biden’s team should keep a multi-domain focus when determining the right mix of forces forward deployed in Europe while taking into account existing NATO deterrence initiatives and the challenges posed by Russia at sea. 

A U.S. strategic posture realignment in Europe should go forward as long as the U.S. maritime posture in Europe improves as a result. Increasing forward basing for U.S. warships, collaborating better with NATO on MDA, and embedding more U.S. FAOs in the NATO command and force structures will enhance deterrence against Russia even more than General Wolters stated. Contrary to Admiral Stavridis’ statement, it would be a nightmare for Putin rather than a victory.

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 publishing 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: NATO Standing Maritime Groups operating in the Mediterranean (NATO)

Strategy

Peter Swartz on Creating Maritime Strategy, Pt. 2: Secretaries and Exercises

Leave a comment

In Part Two, Swartz discusses the role of Navy Secretary John Lehman in conceptualizing the 1986 Maritime Strategy, major exercises that manifested the strategy at sea, and how Navy strategists “broke the code” of how to present the Navy’s warfighting contributions to the Pentagon bureaucracy.

Read Part One here.
___________________________________________

Peeks: …We were wondering if you could discuss the role Secretary [of the Navy John] Lehman played in developing the Maritime Strategy, and was there a connection between it and his 600-ship target for Navy force structure?

Swartz: …When he became the Secretary of the Navy…having thought a great deal about strategy, written about it, and being by now pretty proficient in what he thought was Navy strategy and should be Navy strategy, he declared that the Navy needed a strategy and, fortuitously, it had one: It was what he said it was, as Secretary.

And he did that in a series of [speeches], press conferences, articles and testimony, and so on all through 1981 and 1982, his first year in office. His message was not really codified for a couple of years, but when it was codified, when you look back at it, you could see he developed a very, very clear—and I was a codifier by then—clear, three-part message. The message was: “First, you need a strategy. President Reagan has a strategy—an overall National Strategy—and I as Secretary of the Navy and the Navy as an institution have a Maritime Strategy.”…it was a strategy that was global, but mostly he talked about the Norwegian Sea. It was a strategy that was forward, it was against the Soviets, it was aggressive, and the centerpiece of it were carrier battle groups.

Second, the way he discussed it: “In order to carry out that strategy, I need 600 ships. That’s the bare minimum, but we might be able to pull this off if you guys give me 600 ships.” This was the theme of the testimony. “You shouldn’t give it to anybody who doesn’t have a strategy. You should give the money to somebody that has a strategy, and we in the Navy have a strategy. It’s sound, it’s valid, it’s been validated by war games and exercises and so on, and that’s what you should do.”

Third: “Moreover, 600 ships cost a lot of money. I get it—I’m going to save you money. This strategy and this 600-ship Navy is affordable: through two-carrier buys, getting rid of layers of bureaucracy, competition wherever it could possibly be, no gold plating, no bells and whistles.” …Tell me a program that was innovative and revolutionary that was instituted by John Lehman? Nothing comes immediately to mind. That’s because he wasn’t chasing rainbows. He wasn’t there in order to come up with the next wiz-bang thing 20 years from now. He was about systems there on the ground right now, in the water: “This is what we’re going to do against the Soviets and I need more ships now and I need more money now, and I’m going to save you money by the way in which I’m going to procure those ships and aircraft.” That was his three-part message: strategy, 600 ships, affordability.

So, to that extent, he was definitely involved in shaping the strategy, his own declaratory message, and his view—which he still feels—that if you haven’t got a strategy, you’re out of Schlitz. “You need a strategy and, by God, we’ve got one.” Now, the connection between the 600-ship Navy and the Maritime Strategy was contentious. First of all, the slogan “600 ships” predated much—but not all—of the writing and speaking about the strategy and, in fact, given our system, when you go up to the Hill to get the money to get the ships to implement the strategy, you have to tie the strategy to the ships and the money, whereas there were other people back in the Pentagon that said you don’t need more than 600 ships to do it. My colleague Commander Harlan Ullman in OP-965 said that then and got chastised for his trouble: “You’re never going to get the 600 ships, it’s not going to happen, the country can’t afford it, I don’t care about all of your affordability measures, you’re not going to be able to do it.” He and the Secretary certainly parted ways on that. So did the CNO, Admiral Watkins. They shut down Harlan’s shop, which was 965…

Larry Seaquist, who followed me and Roger Barnett on the strategy desk in OP-60, maintained that there was no linkage whatsoever between the 600-ship Navy and the Maritime Strategy: Strategy was strategy and wasn’t linked to the number of ships you had, and [he] decried anybody who sought to justify 600 ships by using the strategy.

So, different people had different views on all of this. Lehman’s view was pretty clear, and I got to be the guy who spelled it out and fed it back to him: “This is what you believe?” He said, “Yeah, let’s do this: the strategy. Need 600 ships for the strategy. Need affordability measures in order to be able to get the 600 ships.” That was his message as I understood it.

Another aspect of this was that my zeal for making this the Navy officer corps’ strategy ran right into the theology of “this strategy is John Lehman’s ‘Sermon on the Mount’ tablets that he’s brought down from the mountain. This is given to you by John Lehman,” which he did very little to diffuse with remarks that he would make like, “You guys are lucky I didn’t become Secretary of the Air Force,” and so on. Yes, he still does have a pretty healthy ego, and he has a lot to have a healthy ego about. He’s pretty good. But, before I went to work for him, I was no fan of his overwhelming presence in the discussion of Maritime Strategy because it ran counter to what I was trying to do re: the Navy officer corps. I thought that to the extent that it was his and Republican and Reaganite, then it was partisan and therefore not something that I could get involved in, working in OPNAV—and not something that the Navy should advocate.

So, for example, for an effect of my handiwork, when it came time to publish the special issue of Proceedings in 1986, you’ll notice that the first entry in my “Contemporary U.S. Naval Strategy: A Bibliography” is a Hayward article, not a Lehman speech; and, if you take a look at the pictures that adorn it, you’ll notice that the first big pictures are of Admiral Watkins and Admiral Hayward, and then there’s a smaller picture of John Lehman, even though he wrote one of the lead articles. That’s because Fred Rainbow and I arranged things that way. Fred Rainbow was the editor-in-chief of Proceedings, and he and I were in each other’s pockets at that time. The overwhelming association of the strategy with Lehman by some ran headlong into my desire to make sure that I was using the TACAIR guys, the submarine guys, all of the uniformed communities, roping everybody in, showing how they fit and all of that.

And, another aspect of Lehman that I only learned about relatively recently, but which is highly topical…he decided to write a book a few years ago on exercises at sea and the Maritime Strategy, and he called me up and asked me for some help. I said “yes” and that’s all in the book. The book came out [about two years ago] and it’s called Oceans Ventured.

What I had not realized until I got involved in it was how deeply he felt about the importance of the exercises. To me, what had been important was the declaratory policy and the speeches and so on, the Global War Game up at Newport, the activities in the SSG, et cetera. Well, of course! I was a staff puke. I didn’t go to sea. But, that was not Lehman’s view. Lehman’s view was that the very centerpiece of the strategy had been the exercises, and the book title Oceans Ventured is a takeoff, of course, on the title of the first exercise, Ocean Venture, in 1981, in which he and Admiral Lyons were involved—Lyons as the fleet commander —to go to sea and demonstrate to the Soviets at sea, not by some speech that his speechwriter wrote (or some speech that he wrote, because he wrote a lot of his own speeches), or by some staff work that I did buried down in some trench in OP-06. His main method of communicating with the Soviets was by U.S. Navy warships at sea doing things.

I had never really realized and certainly never internalized it, until I got involved with the book and I discovered how deeply he was involved in that. He was involved in the choosing of aggressive admirals to go to sea and do things, hence the salience of Lyons, Mustin, [Vice Admiral Jerry O.] Tuttle, and others—Kelso, who he regarded as a very aggressive submarine commander, et cetera. And, that was another aspect of the strategy that goes hand and hand with that: He was still also a commander in the Naval Reserve. And, as such, he participated in these same exercises: He flew in them. When they were making simulated strikes on the Kola [Peninsula], which he was speaking about before the Congress, he was actually in the cockpit next to Joe Prueher simulating bombing the Kola off some fjord in Norway. He was personally flying there.

And, then the last point I’ll make on Lehman and the Maritime Strategy was, when the Soviets started to crumble, he fell off the Maritime Strategy, way before the CNO, who was a man who didn’t like him and who he didn’t like either, Admiral Trost. [Lehman] said, as a private citizen again just reading the newspapers in early 1990, “Okay, they’re finished. They’re toast and we ought to be using the reserves more”—remember, he’s a reservist—“and we ought to be doing this and we ought to be doing that, we have to put more work in the reserves, and we should be less aggressive.” I don’t remember the exact words, but he said this in at least a couple of venues.

The CNO went nuts. Admiral Trost said—and he said this publicly—“Hasn’t he been watching what they’re doing? Hasn’t he—how can he possibly say things like that?” Admiral Trost went to the very end of his tour, which was the middle of 1990, believing in his heart of hearts—and he still believes it for all I know—that nothing had changed fundamentally on the Soviet side. They were throwing new construction ships in the water. They had seven carriers built or under construction, and he was going, “What do I do with that? Perestroika and Glasnost and peace and freedom and all of that, I’m not seeing it. I’m seeing seven carriers built or under construction.” Kelso fell off immediately when he first became CNO, so the break point was very clear then, but for several months, Lehman and Trost had been sparring, and Lehman had already fallen off the strategy…

Peeks: So, following up on what you said—and this is kind of a delicate question—but you mentioned Admiral Hayward, you mentioned Admiral Trost, and they had well-publicized issues with Secretary Lehman and they certainly weren’t the only senior admirals who did as well—from where you sat in OPNAV and the Secretariat, what, if any, friction between Lehman and the senior leadership of the Navy, what did that look like? Did that affect Navy staff ’s ability to do its job?

Swartz: Probably, but it didn’t affect me very much, and the reason is because there was very little daylight between Lehman and the flags when it came to the Maritime Strategy. The daylight between them was in programs and budgets like the F/A-18 and how much it should cost and who should build it and how fast should the rate be and how it should be configured. The issues had to do with tradeoffs between this and that, the platform shops wanting to put bells and whistles on a new construction and Lehman saying, “No, I want to get it in the water.” There were huge programmatic issues between Lehman and many of the senior flags on programs, F/A-18 being a major one.

But not in the area that I toiled in. This came out when he and I were talking about the book and he would say something about some admiral and I’d say, “But not the Maritime Strategy, sir. He did X or Y or Z or he wrote this.” And Lehman would say, “He did?” And I said, “Yeah, you were fighting with him over programmatics. That’s what Secretaries of the Navy and the Navy staff do. I get it. You did it a lot more than other people because you were you. But on the strategy, I didn’t see very much difference among you all.”

Peeks: So, sticking with the Maritime Strategy and even before Goldwater-Nichols, strategy and operational plans: I mean, they’re the province of the combatant commanders, the Joint Staff, OSD—how did the Navy Department attempt to get other stakeholders to buy in to its new strategy and how successful were those efforts?

Swartz: Well…much of what I’m talking about is before Goldwater-Nichols and even after Goldwater-Nichols. Goldwater-Nichols really didn’t kick in until [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin] Powell, which is what, ’89? So, this is all before all of that and before Desert Storm.

So, the Navy said, we thought, and I still believe, that the Maritime Strategy was really the maritime component to the National Military Strategy. That’s how we always presented it. Now, there might have been some people who presented it differently, but certainly myself and Roger Barnett, Admiral Moreau—I can’t remember: I’d say that Admiral Lyons did that, I’m not sure that Secretary Lehman did it, but we certainly always presented it as the maritime component to the National Military Strategy. And, in the strategy briefings and documents we cited—and we went through all the national documents, the NSDDs [National Security Decision Directives] and the Defense Guidance and the JSCP [Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan], so on and so forth, and pulled stuff out. In OP-06, that’s what you did, you contributed to joint documents, and so we knew what was in them and we knew what we liked in them and we knew what we didn’t like in them, and so we knew how to hitch ourselves to them and embed ourselves in them.

The strategy itself, as I mentioned earlier, included discussion of how TACAIR played, how AWACS played, how the Air Force tankers played, how the Army played, what the Army was doing, Hawk [anti-air missile] batteries in Iceland, things that were helpful on the flanks that we could use them for, Air Force space systems, Air Force strategic lift that we needed (and we needed a lot of it), Air Force tactical fighters in Iceland were all part of the Maritime Strategy, they’re all in there. As a matter of fact, by contrast, you won’t see any Navy in the Army’s AirLand Battle and you won’t see any Navy—except decried and, “Gee, we’re not sure what they were actually doing”—in Air Force aerospace doctrine from that period, but you see a lot of positive Air Force and Army references in the Maritime Strategy. That was by design. That was Peter Swartz and Ace Lyons and Roger Barnett.

And, I can remember briefing the strategy internal to Navy with the big three sitting in front of me—OP095, 090, 06, Baggett, Trost, Lyons—and me putting up the slide on Air Force TACAIR and explaining the Air Force laydown and what we expected them to do. Admiral Baggett erupted out of his chair and asked me why was I shilling for the Air Force? “What are we doing?” And, I remember Lyons getting up and cleaning his clock and defending me and protecting me as I was taking all these arrows from this three-star.

Yeah, the strategy was allied, it was Army, it was Air Force, and nobody noticed. Now, why was that? Well in part because at the very same time that we were doing this, and we had this strategy and it was avowedly joint and allied in our view and we built that into the briefing, we were also simultaneously fighting like hell against Goldwater-Nichols. And, so what everybody “knew” was that “the Navy’s against jointness, so how could the Maritime Stra …”—if you didn’t actually read it, which nobody in the other services actually did, right?—“so how could the Maritime Strategy—be joint?” asked the chatterers.

But, if you go in to the documents you’ll see —because I drew the maps, wrote the pictures, wrote the copy—that the Air Force and the Army were given their due. When Admiral Watkins decided to go public with the strategy in January of ’86 in Proceedings, I was talking to Fred Rainbow about pictures. So we, Fred and I, were looking at pictures and I said that we’ve got to get some Air Force and Army pictures. He said fine, so he went to wherever he goes for Air Force pictures and he got AWACS aircraft and tankers refueling Navy F-14s and all kinds of appropriate stuff. So, then he went to the Army. They slammed the door. “No. The Maritime Strategy is a Navy budgetary ploy, why would we support that?” So, there are no pictures in the special issue of the U.S. Army, even though I wanted to show Army Hawk batteries in Iceland. He was told not to do it, got his hands slapped for it, and didn’t do it. The Army was [against] it even though we talked positively about the Army in the Maritime Strategy.

Admiral Bill Pendley, Admiral T. J. Johnson, and other admirals really felt strongly about this. They understood that what had happened was that we in the Navy had now broken the code on how to present how you fight the war. The joint system had reduced everything to pablum. (Well, partly that was because the Navy wanted it to be pablum, because we didn’t want to be told what to do by the joint system, same with the other services, except the Army. The Army wanted to control the joint system. The Navy just wanted to be out of it.)

…First of all, it was my firm belief, Roger’s firm belief, and I believe Admiral Moreau’s firm belief, that the lingua franca, the way to get anybody’s attention in the building, the way to do anything, was through a SECRET brief. That’s how people talk to each other in the Pentagon. Unclass? “Real men don’t do unclass, you know.” TS? Too hard, got to sign for it, go in a special room. Codeword? Even worse. The SECRET briefing is the central vehicle for how the Pentagon communicates with itself and therefore the basic Maritime Strategy had to be a SECRET briefing. (We later will talk about “Well, what happened in the ’90s, when we had an incessant stream of unclassified documents?” Beats the heck out of me why, right? This year the Strategy is finally SECRET again.) But we in the 1980s were clear that the Strategy had to be a Secret briefing.

TS was the war plans and so you were suddenly criticized: “Well, you guys are describing war plans.” “No, no, we’ve dumbed down the war plans. We’ve gone to the war plans and we’ve gone to the SECRET annex or the concept of ops, which is SECRET, and we’ve used that, we haven’t used TS.” We didn’t care whether a plan called for, say, three carriers at such and such a point on D+9. That was TS. What we cared about was the general thrust and intent of the commander and what he was trying to do. That was usually unclass, CONFIDENTIAL, or SECRET.

…Another part of it was, as I just said, I honestly believe that “we broke the code.” We knew how to present Navy strategy in a way that was compelling and truthful, and guys that came afterwards said, “We can’t do it like they did it in the days of the Maritime Strategy because first of all, that doesn’t showcase ‘me’.” Again, I was not big on that. If I had done that to Stan Weeks or he had done that to me, the thing would have collapsed. The point was not to do that. And Larry Seaquist and me and all of that, yes, there was rivalry, but there wasn’t out-and-out warfare and there wasn’t ignoring—“Well, if it was in their strategy, then we’re not going to put it in our strategy.”

We didn’t have that. They have that all the time nowadays: “Well, CNO X put out this, so now new CNO Y is in here.” “I’m [Secretary of the Navy] John Dalton, a Democrat, and every day I come out of my office and I see this picture of [Secretary of the Navy] Sean O’Keefe, a Republican, with . . . From the Sea in his pocket, I need one too.” That was one impetus for Forward…From the Sea.

There are several examples of all of that, many of which I can’t relate. We weren’t in that mode and that was a reason why we were successful.

Read Part Three.

Peter Swartz is a retired U.S. Navy captain, a former CNA Research Program Director, and currently an adjunct Principal Research Scientist at CNA. Most of his Navy assignments related to strategy, policy and allied engagement, including two tours as an advisor with the South Vietnamese Navy; helping set up the Navy’s Zumwalt-era intercultural relations program; coordinating Navy staff talks with key European allied navies; helping conceptualize, draft and disseminate the Maritime Strategy of the 1980s; directing the US Mission to NATO’s operations division as the Berlin Wall was coming down; and serving as Special Assistant to CJCS General Colin Powell during the First Gulf War.  At CNA he primarily focused on analyzing U.S. Navy and Marine Corps strategy and policy, including their historical roots. In 2020 a Festschrift was published  in his honor (Conceptualizing Naval and Maritime Strategy) by several of his colleagues, and the Naval Historical Foundation awarded him its Commodore Dudley Knox Lifetime Achievement medal.

Ryan Peeks is a historian at the Naval History and Heritage Command, and the author of Aircraft Carrier Requirements and Strategy, 1977-2001.

Justin Blanton is a historian at the Naval History and Heritage Command.

Featured Image: June 16, 1983. A starboard bow view of the nuclear-powered strategic missile submarine USS MICHIGAN (SSBN-727) underway. (Photo via the U.S. National Archives)