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How Good Order at Sea is Central to Winning Strategic Competition

By Josh Tallis

Introduction

The United States sea services—the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard—are regularly underway and forward-deployed, carrying out routine activities and exercises daily. These activities are technically demanding, expensive, and occasionally dangerous. Consequently, the services face pressure to explain how their typical activities at sea support national strategy, which today means answering how the sea services compete, day-to-day, in an era of strategic competition with great powers. In other words, do the regular functions of the sea services figure in U.S. national strategy, and if not, what must they do to adapt to competition? In so answering that question, we can gain a deeper insight into what it means to compete more fundamentally in the modern era.

Policy implications for how the sea services must adapt to competition with great power rivals should begin with a concept of where day-to-day activities intersect with national strategy. The sea services require a defined strategic objective of day-to-day competition, which this article argues is U.S. leadership of the international order. This framing has operational and strategic ramifications. Operationally, it means that “smaller” maritime missions are now some of the sea services’ most important functions. Strategically, this is an important observation, as despite being a longstanding part of Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard history, maritime security infrequently drives or derives logically from overarching strategic concepts. The services must therefore adapt to meet the strategic challenges of competition. This means rethinking core aspects of Navy and Marine Corps policy and the Coast Guard’s operational priorities. It also augurs an even broader need for creative thinking about how the U.S. should incorporate lesser adversaries (e.g., Iran, North Korea, and non-state actors) into the context of competition with great power rivals, something that is particularly absent in contemporary strategy.

“Winning” the Competition

Defining the strategic objective of competition is foundational to our understanding of the day-to-day functions of U.S. sea services. If victory is the objective, what constitutes victory? And if the sea services seek to win, what are they trying to win? In exploring the definition of victory, we obtain a clearer understanding of the nature of the competition. Two different theories of victory are emerging. They rely on complimentary concepts but fundamentally represent different underlying visions of success.

One theory of victory is positional. Positional success is deterring conflict or, failing that, creating conditions for success in the event of a conflict. With victory understood in that largely operational context, competition would seem a matter of geographic positioning of U.S. assets, which would result in contests over access, basing, postures, and capable allies. U.S.-China contestation over key terrain such as Djibouti or the Philippines offer examples of this positional battle.

The other theory of victory is political. Political success is continued U.S. security and economic leadership of an international order that reflects U.S. values. With victory understood in that geostrategic context, competition becomes a matter of global agenda setting, which would result in competition over the international order, its character, its values, and its norms. U.S. contestation of Russian sovereignty claims in the Northern Sea Route, or Chinese claims over territoriality in the South China Sea, represent competition on this political plane.

Although both the positional and political theories of victory represent necessary activities on the part of the military, they offer competing visions of the role of U.S. sea services in day-to-day competition. Is it to deter conflict—imposing costs on adversaries—or to win without fighting—building a political order that offers sufficient benefits to make revisions difficult or undesirable? The positional vision is ultimately about deterring and preparing for conflict, not competition. As a result, the political theory of victory is more important when evaluating U.S. sea services and their role in day-to-day competition.

This conclusion is rooted in the very concept of strategic competition. If the present is an era defined by competition between great powers, what makes a power great? No theoretical architecture in U.S. strategy answers this question, but one particularly instructive definition offered scholars such as Nick Bisley and Bear Braumoeller is that great power status reflects a state’s outsized stake in, and effect on, the international order. If the order is central to what makes powers great, then great power competition is more than just a matter of conflict, it is political—it is a battle over the order.

“Winning” the Global Order

If we understand the nature of day-to-day competition with great powers to be a political, not positional, contest, how might the sea services identify barriers to victory? We can think about threats to the international order in two buckets—order defense and order maintenance.

First, the order could collapse abruptly, likely through a violent overthrow of the existing order. And if great powers are those with an outsized effect on the order, great powers are then the likeliest candidates to force a violent reversal of the prevailing order. In other words, the first type of threat to the international order is a great power war, a risk for which the sea services spend significant resources deterring and preparing to defeat.

The second threat relates to the order’s long-term health. An order can erode, through lack of proactive maintenance on the part of its steward, and it can corrode, through the persistent malign activities of both large and small actors. U.S. strategists are often concerned with avoiding a total collapse of the system (defending the order). Yet day-to-day competition is a function of understanding how to sustain the United States’ position in, and the character of, the existing system over a long time horizon and against subtle threats. It is about avoiding death by a thousand cuts, policing norms and ensuring the credibility of the institutions and rules that benefit the U.S. and its partners.

Vessels, including Chinese maritime militia vessels, at Thitu Island in the South China Sea, December 18, 2019. [Click to Expand] (CSIS/AMTI/MAXAR Technologies)
The Rule of Law and Day-to-Day Competition

Credibility is an operative word when describing competition over the international order. The current, U.S.-led order is successful in part because association with it is somewhat voluntary—states aspire to join its commercial and political structures because an American security umbrella and predictable economic rules create a largely safe, stable, and prosperous dynamic. The desirability of participating in that structure is partially contingent on U.S. credibility sustaining certain core commitments, many of them stemming from the sea. These obligations—ensuring freedom of navigation, enforcing international norms, enforcing multilateral sanctions, containing terrorism and piracy—represent fundamental maritime security tasks that promote the maintenance and success of the order. The low-end maritime security missions that bolster U.S. credibility as capable of enforcing core security and economic norms are central to day-to-day competition.

Rescue swimmers and aircrewmen from Coast Guard Air Station Cape Cod, Mass., conduct hoist training evolutions June 23, 2015. (U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Ross Ruddell)

The objective of maritime security (or, good order at sea) is to sustain and enforce the rule of law, to promote the mutual gains that encourage nations to trust in and rely on the United States, and to protect the legitimate uses of global commons that keep the world prosperous and safe from major conflict. To maintain the U.S. position at the helm of the international order is to pursue maritime security. To fail to pursue maritime security is to concede rulemaking and rule breaking to competitors, creating a less desirable and beneficial order and thus facilitating its erosion or corrosion. Countries that fall further from the U.S.-led order will have China (and to a lesser extent, Russia) to turn to as partners in facilitating the construction of robust alternatives.

The Sea Services as Unique Instruments of Competition

The Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard are not just a part of maintaining the international order, they are critical to it. The ability to deliver dynamic, calibrated coercion or reassurance without a large footprint is a longstanding benefit of seapower. Each force (and the Navy in particular) has historically served as primary levers in the pursuit of good order at and from the sea because they provide policymakers with unique coercive and diplomatic tools. As one CNA report remarks of the Navy, the force has “almost always been involved in smaller-scale contingencies (SSC) and operations other than war (OOTW). For long stretches, these operations were all that the Navy did.” Even as strategic competition has reinvigorated attention to great power wars, the missions that U.S. leaders pursue in practice reflect a reality that is equally if not more concerned with the maintenance of the U.S.-led order (e.g., freedom of navigation operations, presence operations, sanctions enforcement, counterterrorism, and capacity building).

There is little evidence that great power competition will disrupt policymakers’ use of the sea services in pursuit of order maintenance. Such are core functions for the Coast Guard. And for the Navy and Marine Corps, the forces historically balanced small-scale missions with preparations for conflict. That these operations did not produce a substantial effect on strategy is what should concern us today. Despite being a dominant part of naval history, maritime security is often pursued as an annex to strategy, not logically derived from it. Policymakers can help avoid that mistake in this era, which begins by understanding good order at sea as central to, not an appendage of, great power competition.

Implications for the Sea Services and Strategy

This assessment yields implications for Navy and Marine Corps policy, Coast Guard priorities, and U.S. strategy. First, the Navy and Marine Corps must reflect the rising strategic prominence of day-to-day competitive tasks in their policies. Decisions over where the sister services station forces, what the Navy buys to deploy those forces, and what both services do with the platforms they send forward should all include some assessment of their impact on day-to-day competition. In practice that should mean a more dispersed fleet to compete effectively in more places at once. It should also mean an increase in the number of smaller platforms the Navy fields (including with embarked Marines), designed to support maritime security missions in African, Latin American, and Indian Ocean waters. The forces should also operationally prioritize, to a much greater extent than they do currently, low-end missions, affording them a place of prominence in internal decisions regarding force allocation, readiness, and external communications about what they are doing and why.

Second, the Coast Guard does (and should continue to) play an integral role in reinforcing good order at sea and compliance with international norms. It is uniquely situated to do so regarding key issues in day-to-day-day competition such as maintaining rule of law, including through fisheries enforcement and promoting U.S. sovereignty in the Arctic. The Coast Guard will also continue to serve as an agent of U.S. law enforcement, and thus cannot always act strictly with an eye toward maintenance of the international order in a time of strategic competition. Yet the Coast Guard must make hard choices where those obligations conflict (i.e., system maintenance versus other constabulary duties), and policymakers must evaluate whether certain tasks optimally utilize a limited national resource to maximal effect in defense of core security and economic norms. Counter-drug missions in the Caribbean offer one such example. They consume high levels of Coast Guard resources, are doubtless important to its law enforcement functions, but represent a Sisyphean effort that may not optimally use finite assets in defense of the most important norms in the international order. That is the type of policy prioritization balance facing the Coast Guard in day-to-day competition.

Finally, despite emphases on China and Russia, the National Defense Strategy maintains the need for continued attention to Iran, North Korea, and terrorists, but at levels that do not hold U.S. forces hostage. U.S. strategy must therefore reflect how actors that are not great powers can undermine its ability to compete successfully with primary rivals. Even if only major powers can overthrow a global order, actors up and down the power spectrum can corrode an order so that it becomes less desirable. The result of such corrosion may not be a wholesale replacement of the order, but its weakening or fracturing. And since great powers are those with the most to benefit—and the greatest ability to capture incremental improvements—from such degradation, China and Russia stand to gain even when North Korea, Iran, pirates, or terrorists strain the order’s credibility. Thus, more than just great powers can influence the outcome of day-to-day competition. The sea services should deliberately incorporate lesser powers into their policies of great power competition to ensure that risks emanating from lesser powers neither overtake the focus on great powers nor disappear entirely in their wake.

Conclusion

Great power competition is not only about preparing for conflict, but also includes sustained, day-to-day competition regarding who most shapes the structure of the international order. The U.S. sea services—the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard—are uniquely positioned to wage this competition. They have historically served as tools for preserving rule of law at and from the sea in the past.

What is required now is for the sea services to articulate a clear theory of victory in the era of strategic competition, to recognize the relationship between competition and the small tasks that uphold the international order, and to prioritize policies and operations that reinforce the order upon which U.S. security and prosperity rests. In the process, a focus on the international order underscores the role of lesser adversaries as spoilers in strategic competition, whose malign actions can corrode the credibility of U.S. leadership to the benefit of China and Russia.

Whether combatting corrosion of the order by great powers or lesser adversaries, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard policy must adapt in order to prioritize, resource, and meet the demands of low-end missions in an era of great powers. Only then, as a function of preserving good order at sea, might the sea services achieve their measure of victory in this global competition.

Dr. Joshua Tallis is a research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses and an adjunct professor at the George Washington University specializing in maritime security, polar affairs, and naval strategy. He is the author of the 2019 book, The War for Muddy Waters: Pirates, Terrorists, Traffickers, and Maritime Insecurity and the recent CNA report, Maritime Security and Great Power Competition: Maintaining the U.S.-led International Order, from which this article is partially derived. The opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of CNA or the U.S. Navy.

Featured Image: SAN DIEGO (March 3, 2017) USS Jackson (LCS 6) is pierside during sunset. (U.S. Navy photo by Lt. Miranda V. Williams/Released)

Bilge Pumps 10 – Small Navies

By Alex Clarke

It’s yet another historically informed maritime current events podcast inbound! Or Bilge Pumps as we three naval geeks of Youtube and Twitter call it. As an explanation, well pretty much imagine three naval historians having a chat while sitting in a Discworld dwarfish pub, but without the rat, possibly some ketchup, plus it’s done by Skype and recorded…

So what is episode 10 about? Well, the #Bilgepumps team are responding to the listeners. You wanted to hear about small navies, we did small navies, you wanted to hear about what that thoroughly Modern Nation Elbonia should be equipped with by her traitorous leadership, so you will hear it here first.

#Bilgepumps is still a new series and new avenue, and although possibly no longer having the new car smell, we are getting the impression that it’s liked. But now we need you. Do you have suggestions for topics? Comments on how we could improve? Or most importantly, ideas for artwork, then please either tweet them to us the Bilgepump crew (with #Bilgepump) at Alex (@AC_NavalHistory), Drach (@Drachinifel), and Jamie (@Armouredcarrier). Or you can comment on our Youtube channels (listed down below). 

Download Bilge Pumps 10 – Small Navies

Links

Alex Clarke is the producer of The Bilge Pumps podcast.

Contact the CIMSEC podcast team at [email protected]

Join Us August 27 for the 2020 CIMSEC Forum for Authors and Readers!

By Jimmy Drennan

Please join us this Thursday evening, August 27th, for the 2020 CIMSEC Forum for Author and Readers (CFAR), presented via Zoom by the Center for Naval Analyses. This annual event brings you together with your favorite CIMSEC authors over the past year. Authors will discuss the articles you voted for, and you will be able to ask them questions directly. Plus, the esteemed Alex, Drach, and Jamie from our new Bilge Pumps podcast will kick off the event! Don’t miss it!

For the first time ever, CFAR will be held online, which should give many more of you the opportunity to participate!

Click Here to Join via Zoom! 

Agenda (all times ET):
6:00 – Welcome
6:05 – Introduction by The Bilge Pumps
6:20 – “Star Gazing: Why Do We Have So Many Flag Officers?” by James L. McClane and Kevin Eyer
6:40 – “Reflecting the Law of the Sea: In Defense of the Bay of Bengal’s Grey Area”  by Cornell Overfield
7:00 – “Clausewitz, Corbett and Corvettes,” by Sascha Rackwitz
7:20 – “How China has Overtaken Japan in Naval Power and Why it Matters,” by Toshi Yoshihara
7:40 – “The Future of Aircraft Carriers: Consider the Air Wing, Not the Platform,” by Robert Rubel
8:00 – Closing Remarks


We hope to see you all online!

Jimmy Drennan is the President of CIMSEC. Contact him at [email protected].

Winning The Spectrum: Securing Command and Control for Marine Stand-In Forces

By Brian Kerg

Signatures, Success, and Failure: Two Vignettes

January, 20XX: With the likely election of an aggressively pro-independence candidate as the new president of Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China initiates a plan to reunify this ‘rebel’ province with its homeland. Chinese anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) assets are activated across the theater. Peoples’ Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) fleets steam to key chokepoints, deterring foreign intervention, while conducting live-fire missile exercises around the Taiwan Strait to intimidate Taiwan and potential interlopers. With the Chinese Weapons Engagement Zone (WEZ) ensconcing the area of operations, Beijing is confident that no foreign force can interfere with their plans without drastic escalation that no country will accept.

But across the area of operations, small U.S. Marine and Navy detachments operating out of Expeditionary Advanced Bases (EAB) within the first and second island chains rapidly deploy several long-range precision fires systems. Launching swarms of unmanned aerial, surface, and underwater reconnaissance systems, they acquire the locations of the most critical ships of the Chinese fleet, communicating this data to American maritime and joint operations centers.

With targets acquired, Washington informs Beijing that the PLAN fleet will be sunk unless the threat of military action against Taiwan is withdrawn. In the diplomatic dust-up that ensues, America and its partners close the trap with Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO), sending disaggregated fleets into the area of operations, further pressuring China with the threat of massed effects from maritime forces.

China sees the off-ramp and takes it. Ships return to port, Taiwan breathes a sigh of relief, and normal maritime commerce resumes. Deterrence by denial avoids a shooting war between great powers.1

The preceding vignette illustrates how Expeditionary Advanced Based Operations (EABO) and DMO, aided by emerging fires and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) technologies, can prevent America’s adversaries from applying fait accompli strategies. But consider, instead, another way the story might have played out:

Unbeknownst to U.S. planners, China detected the American EABs long ago. The naval forces communicated using predictable techniques, on easily detectable spectrum, while exercising poor transmissions discipline and signature management. The PLAN had a reliable laydown of American EABs in their theater long before Beijing executed its reunification plan.

As China closed the noose around Taiwan, PLAN forces simultaneously isolated the EABs in the electromagnetic spectrum, cutting off their primary communications pathways. Targeting information was spoofed, rendering the long-range precision fires systems at the EABs useless. Isolated and blind, the EABs were caught unawares as Chinese amphibious forces landed in Taiwan, forcing the sorely outgunned U.S. forces to surrender.

With the U.S. unable to check Chinese aggression without escalation that would lead to large-scale combat, the rest of the international community looked the other way as China forced Taiwan back under its control.

EABO and DMO are the Navy’s and Marine Corps’ bid for success in disrupting the fait accompli strategies of great power competitors, providing the deterrence by denial called for in the 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) and 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS). In order to succeed in the A2/AD environment cultivated by America’s adversaries, EABO and DMO will necessarily be facilitated by emerging fires, ISR, and communications technologies. But the critical vulnerability to EABO, DMO, and consequently to deterrence by denial, is signature management.

The risk assumed in EABO and DMO puts signature management at a premium. Detection or denial of Command and Control (C2) systems will hamstring the promise of both operational concepts. Emerging C2 techniques and technologies provide viable solutions to signature management, validating EABO and DMO, and ensuring the sea services will maintain a critical edge in competition and in war.

DMO, EABO, and Deterrence by Denial

The 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) and 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) describe strategic competition with revisionist powers, namely China and Russia, as the central challenge facing the United States now and in the future.2 In pursuing advantages, such competitors flout the rules-based international order to further their own interests at the expense of those of the United States and its allies. To prevent the United States and others from rolling back their gains, competitors secure their advantages through pursuit and application of fait accompli strategies that quickly seize objectives and create A2/AD zones, preventing opponents from having the time or political will to strike back, as prolonged escalation may be deemed too costly.3 An example of a successful fait accompli was the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine. Even though the annexation was internationally condemned, wresting control of Crimea back from Russia would almost certainly require large-scale combat operations that would be considered unacceptable.

Historically, the U.S. deterred adversaries through a strategy of punishment. However, the growing military and economic strength of potential adversaries, combined with fait accompli strategies, makes deterrence through punishment nonviable. Instead, deterrence by denial is emphasized by both the NSS and NDS as the preferred means of countering adversary fait accompli strategies. It is the responsibility of the joint force to develop viable deterrence by denial options. While all of the services are working on this problem, the Navy and Marine Corps are supporting deterrence through their respective sea denial and sea control concepts, specifically EABO and DMO. These concepts look to overcome the challenges of the current and future security environment by transforming the application of traditional military principles through disruptive technologies and concepts of operation.

The Navy and Marine Corps are refining the mutually supporting concepts of DMO and EABO to provide joint force commanders with feasible options for deterrence by denial. DMO is premised on the disaggregation of naval forces at sea, distributing their offensive capability geographically.4 Forces are distributed, increasing their survivability, while offensive effects are capable of massing through synchronization and aggregation of sensors and shooters across a theater. This distribution accounts for the ever-increasing threat range of adversary WEZ, reducing the risk to U.S. warships.

DMO is complemented by EABO, in which Marine Corps forces enable sea control and sea denial by establishing and operating from EABs at sea and ashore, using a variety of platforms deployed in littoral regions. Once established in their EABs, naval forces deploy and operate sensor, shooter, C2 systems, and other capabilities required to persist forward as stand-in forces.5

Operating inside the WEZ, EABO enables the stand-in naval forces that provide sea control and denial,  and changes adversary decision-making to favor U.S. interests, deters aggression, and prevents conflict. During full-spectrum combat operations, EABO-enabled stand-in naval forces allow joint and naval commanders to exploit opportunities to leverage stand-off forces and win battles at sea and ashore.6

The EABO concept is highly promising and could resolve the wicked problem presented by adversary A2/AD capabilities combined with fait accompli strategies. But EABO is characterized by an extremely high level of risk for EAB-hosted inside forces. The most immediate problem is enabling C2 while reducing detection to ensure EAB survivability, and reducing jamming to ensure lethality and utility at the decisive moment.

Once deployed within an adversary’s WEZ, inside forces are at constant risk of detection; they must put a premium on concealment. The increasingly contested electromagnetic spectrum, and accelerating capabilities to detect and intercept signals of any kind, mean inside forces will be challenged to communicate with a higher headquarters. This is an imperative because it is required for the command to fire on targets that will incur operational and strategic effects.

As stand-in forces aim to be deployed to key maritime terrain allowing them to employ fires against adversary ashore and afloat targets, they will often be within detectable range of shore-based and afloat direction finding (DF) systems. Communications using higher-power settings needed to successfully connect to higher headquarters will be highly susceptible to detection. Space-based ISR will also be regularly conducting surveillance on this key maritime terrain. Any misstep in the use of current C2 systems will reveal the locations of EABs, allowing adversaries to take steps that will mitigate their utility to any plan for deterrence.

Signature Solutions

Emerging tactics and technologies can be employed to overcome these signature challenges, mitigating the greatest risks to the inside forces that will be conducting EABO.

For the purposes of communicating while avoiding detection and allowing inside forces to reduce signature and remain concealed in the electromagnetic spectrum, the High Frequency (HF) band is the premier option. In the EAB environment, communications systems using frequency bands higher than HF remain easily detectable; in concert with their low footprint, rapid set-up, and network flexibility, HF radios are the most viable candidate for successful signature management.7 But even HF in normal operating modes is likely to be detected if the location and direction of propagation are being scanned by current DF systems at the time of transmission.8

HF Low Probability of Intercept (LPI) is a tactic that rapidly varies the power output and frequency of HF channels used to transmit, greatly reducing the likelihood of detection.9 With appropriately trained personnel, certain maritime communications systems are currently capable of employing HF LPI.

The challenge is that no training standard currently exists by which to prepare naval communicators to use this technique. Whether HF-LPI is employed or not, and how well it might be executed, is completely at the discretion of individual ship and unit commanders. Though the principles behind HF-LPI are decades old, disruption must first occur in existing standard operating procedures and communications practices across the fleet to ensure HF-LPI is a technique in which personnel are reliably proficient. Such an initiative would be remarkably simple and affordable to implement today, providing an asymmetric advantage over enemy DF capabilities, if the will to employ HF-LPI is exercised.

Institutionalize over Time by Automating Spectrum Modulation

While training in HF-LPI techniques provides a short-term solution, automating this and similar means by which to conceal presence in the electromagnetic spectrum is the long-term answer by which to revolutionize signature management. Emerging spectrum modulation techniques, embedded in systems being researched and developed, will provide this capability.

While Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) is a tried-and-true method to rapidly move across frequencies, new variations provide greater protection. Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH) currently avoids crowded frequencies to support Bluetooth, but can be similarly used to avoid frequencies that adversaries are scanning or monitoring. Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) randomizes bit transmission, and is currently in use supporting Wi-Fi networks. While most applications seek dispreads to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, anti-intercept methods would be complemented by reversing this process, hiding the signal in the noise. Fielding systems that automate these spectrum modulation techniques will minimize signal detection, interception, and exploitation.10

Guarantee Signal Integrity – Systems-Based Interceptor and Jammer Rejection

Eventually, inside forces will have to increase their signature when they employ their fires systems for the purposes of achieving deterrence, and when this time comes, signal integrity will trump the need for signature concealment. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently developing communications technologies with the potential to achieve this end. The Hyper-wideband Enabled Radio-Frequency Messaging (HERMES) system works with extremely wide radio frequency bands, while deploying several interceptor and jammer rejection techniques, such as processing gain, integrated filters, and active cancellation.11 The broad spectral spreading further challenges detection systems and increases interference resistance.12 Similarly, the Protected Forward Communications (PFC) program allows military forces to persist and operate in a contested electromagnetic environment using a structured system engineering method.13 The PFC program would protect not only external communications from an EAB to higher headquarters – for example, the order to fire from an EAB at an enemy ship – but also internal communications and signals, such as the signal for a system to fire from an operator within the EAB, and signals from a sensor that would guide ordnance onto target.

Hide in Plain Sight – Nuke the Spectrum

It is not hard to hear a single voice, even in a large room. However, it is very difficult to hear that voice in a crowd. We need to build the haystack in which to hide the needle. At present, EABs and ships operating in the first and second island chains present isolated voices that are susceptible to detection and targeting at even a single breach of signature management discipline. Artificially raising the signature baseline will provide a robust electromagnetic canopy under which inside forces can conceal themselves. Rather than operating under an overarching philosophy of carefully maintained silence and signature control, saturating the spectrum with numerous false emissions can overwhelm an adversary’s ability to make sense of the environment and provide openings for one’s own forces to emit and communicate.

Currently, swarming technologies are being developed and fielded to provide combat power via small, cheap, attritable unmanned systems. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) and Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) are presently testing a ‘ghost fleet’ of small, interconnected attack boats.14 Similarly, DARPA is also experimenting with its Gremlins program, providing low cost swarms of interconnected, unmanned aerial systems launched from a larger aircraft.15 While these systems aim to provide sensor and shooter functions, the concepts can be easily modified to serve a signature deception function. Outfitting swarms of unmanned vehicles instead with transmissions systems that communicate on the same frequencies, power levels, and data rates as those C2 systems employed by inside naval forces, they would provide a swarming mask of signature in any operating environment.

Senior Airman Cody Jenkins, right, and Tech. Sgt. Ryan Asaria, left, 96th Aircraft Maintenance Unit weapons loaders, prepare to transport a Miniature Air Launched Decoy (MALD) to a B-52H Stratofortress at Barksdale Air Force Base, La., May 14, 2012. (U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Jonathan Snyder)

A functional example is the Miniature Air-Launched Decoy (MALD), jointly developed by DARPA and Raytheon. The MALD is a low-cost, expendable air-launched system that simulates flight profiles and signatures of aircraft.16 Combining this system with similar decoys deployed across the maritime domain will further confound adversaries.17 By providing a litany of other targets to detect and target, naval planners will have ‘nuked the spectrum,’ creating an exasperating targeting dilemma for adversaries who will have to dedicate an untenable amount of resources to separate the signal from the noise. Naval inside forces, whether operating on EABs or aboard ships supporting DMO, will have the concealment they need to mass effects inside the WEZ and provide sea denial and sea control.  

Managing Signature for Deterrence and Denial

The sea services aim to provide deterrence by denial through the related concepts of DMO and EABO. Stand-in forces operating from EABs inside an adversary’s WEZ can overcome enemy A2/AD, prevent competitors from employing fait accompli strategies, and secure U.S. interests across the globe.

However, the high risk assumed by inside forces makes signature management a paramount requirement for success. Conventional means and methods of communications and combat systems operation mean inside forces run a high risk for detection and jamming. By applying emerging tactics, such as HF LPI, along with emerging technologies, including HERMES, PFC, modulation techniques, and spectrum deception, stand-in forces can manage their signature and maintain signal integrity. In acquiring, fielding, and employing these tactics and technologies, EABO and DMO will be viable concepts by which deterrence by denial can be realized. Signature management secured in these ways will ensure the sea services maintain our nation’s advantage to prevent, and if necessary, win the next war.

Brian Kerg is a Marine Corps officer and writer currently serving as the Fleet Amphibious Communications Officer, U.S. Fleet Forces Command. He is a Non-Resident Fellow at Marine Corps University’s Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity. His professional writing has appeared in War on the RocksProceedingsThe Marine Corps Gazette, and The Strategy Bridge. His fiction has appeared in The Deadly Writer’s PatrolLine of Advance, and The Report. Follow or contact him @BrianKerg

References

1. Brian Kerg, et al., “How Marine Security Cooperation Can Translate Into Sea Control,” War on the Rocks (accessed 27 Jan 2020: https://warontherocks.com/2019/09/how-marine-security-cooperation-can-translate-into-sea-control/). Modified vignette used with author’s permission.

2. National Security Strategy of the United States of America, (accessed 28 Jan 2020: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf.

3.  Mike Gallagher, “State of (Deterrence by) Denial,” The Washington Quarterly 42 no. 2, (Accessed 27 Jan 2020: https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.gwu.edu/dist/1/2181/files/2019/06/Gallagher.pdf)

4.  Kevin Eyer and Steve McJessy, “Operationalizing Distributed Maritime Operations,” Center for International Maritime Security (accessed 28 Jan 2020: https://cimsec.org/operationalizing-distributed-maritime-operations/39831).

5. Headquarters, Marine Corps, “Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations,” U. S. Marine Corps Concepts and Programs, (accessed 28 Jan 2020: https://www.candp.marines.mil/Concepts/Subordinate-Operating-Concepts/Expeditionary-Advanced-Base-Operations/) 

6. Jim Lacey, “The ‘Dumbest Concept Ever’ Might Just Win Wars,” War on the Rocks, (accessed 28 Jan 2020: https://warontherocks.com/2019/07/the-dumbest-concept-ever-just-might-win-wars/).

7. National Telecommunications and Information Administration, “Department of Defense Strategic Spectrum Plan,” NTIA, (accessed 01 Feb 2020: https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/dod_strategic_spectrum_plan_nov2007.pdf).

8. National Urban Security Technology Laboratory, Radio Frequency Detection, Spectrum Analysis, and Direction Finding Equipment, (New York: Department of Homeland Defense, 2019), 12.

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10. Syed Shah, “Assured Communications,” Milcom 2015 Presentation, (October 2015).

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Featured Image: U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Dylan Griffen (Left), a field radio operator, and Lance Corporal Brent Millard (Right), an anti-tank missileman assigned to 1st Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company, I Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group, conduct pre-flight maintenance at San Clemente Island, California, May 1, 2020. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Manuel A. Serrano)