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Tactics and Warfighting

The Evolution of Soviet Views on Fleet Air Defense, Pt. 1

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The following originally appeared in the summer 1985 edition of the Naval War College Review and is republished with permission. Read it in its original form here.

By Floyd D. Kennedy Jr

“Air Defense of Naval Forces: a set of organizational measures and combat operations to repel the attack of an airborne enemy and protect groupings of naval forces at sea and in bases, and also to protect shore installations against air strikes. Naval air defense helps gain and keep air supremacy in certain regions of a theater of operations. Air defense is used in all types of combat and operations, during a sea crossing (of formations or independent ships), and in the daily combat activity of naval forces…” —Rear Admiral S.P. Teglev, Chief of Naval Air Defense, Soviet Military Encyclopedia, 1978.

The Soviet Navy is constantly changing, evolving from a coastal defense force to a blue water fleet able to show the red flag in the far reaches of the globe. This evolution is evident in Soviet shipbuilding programs and peacetime operations. But nowhere is it more evident than in Soviet naval literature. This literature, more than any other indicator, reflects the attitudes and concerns of high-ranking Soviet naval officers. In the 1980s one of the prime concerns of the Soviet Navy’s leadership appears to be the air defense (protivovozdushnaya oborona, or PVO) of naval forces. This phenomenon is a relatively recent one in the literature. The change portends a new Soviet intention to operate naval forces outside the protective umbrella of shore-based air defense forces and, perhaps, to use those forces more aggressively in areas distant from Russian shores outside the context of a NATO/Warsaw Pact war.

Air defense issues of particular importance to Soviet authors appear to center on the threat posed by antiship missiles (ASMs) and the best method of countering that threat. Among the leading ASM defensive measures discussed are electronic warfare (EW) systems, missiles, guns, directed energy weapons, and, the most controversial of all, carrier-based airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft and long-range interceptors. These Soviet views on fleet air defense require close examination if the West is to gain insight into the Soviet Navy of the late 1990s.

Early Views on Fleet PVO

One indicator of the attention a particular issue is receiving, or has recently received, at the higher levels of the Soviet naval command structure is the frequency with which it is discussed in the military literature. In the 1960s PVO at sea was a prime subject in only four articles from the available literature, and only two of those articles were devoted exclusively to fleet air defense.1 All four articles generally agreed that air defense could be broken down into two elements: combat against missiles and combat against missile launch platforms. Action against missiles was the responsibility of the antiaircraft guns, missiles, and electronic countermeasures on board surface ships. Action against launch platforms appeared to be the responsibility of the land-based interceptor aircraft of PVO Strany, the Soviets’ air defense force. The Soviet authors considered this division necessary because missiles could be fired from beyond the range of shipboard defenses. An unspoken but obvious corollary to this argument was that the Soviets did not then plan to employ their surface warships beyond the protective umbrella of land-based interceptors in wartime.

1990 – A port bow view of the Soviet Slava-class guided missile cruiser Chernova Ukraina underway en route to the Pacific Ocean from the Black Sea. (Photo via U.S. National Archives)

The literature of the early 1970s contained virtually no mention of fleet air defense. In an otherwise extremely comprehensive article entitled, “Some Trends in the Development of Naval Tactics,” Captain First Rank N. V’yunenko did not once mention PVO at sea, although he touched on almost every other naval subject imaginable.2 Because V’yunenko enjoyed then (1975) – as he does now – a close relationship with the Soviet Navy’s highest decision makers, his omission of PVO from his otherwise comprehensive article appears significant, reflecting either a lack of high-level concern about the subject or, more likely, a division of official opinion on the matter.

The ASM Threat

In the early 1970s the Soviet press began to discuss a significant new airborne threat, the ASM. The first article on this subject in their navy’s professional journal, Morskoy sbornik, was entitled “The First Combat Use of Ship-to-Ship Missiles and Their Development.” The author, a civilian named Shaskol’skiy, discussed the sinking of the Israeli destroyer Eilat in October 1967 and the Western reaction to that event in the form of ASM development and countermeasures. The magazine gave no prominence to the article – it was buried in the back pages, the author was a virtual unknown, and the events he was discussing were almost three years old.3 Yet the difficulties Shaskol’skiy described as bedeviling Western engineers in the development of ASM defense (ASMD) systems presaged similar Soviet problems.

In the mid-1970s Morskoy sbornik followed Western ASM developments fairly closely and reported their developmental milestones in the magazine’s section on “Foreign Navies: Reports and Facts,” a compilation of brief, newsworthy vignettes on foreign naval developments. The first complete article devoted exclusively to a single ASM appeared in the July 1977 Morskoy sbornik and inaugurated a spate of writing on the ASM and the problems of defending against it that has continued to the present day. This initial article was written by Captain First Rank B. Rodionov and Engineer N. Novichkov, who have become prolific writers on the problems of fleet air defense. Entitled simply, “The Tomahawk Cruise Missile,” it contained a basic description of the land attack and anti-ship variants of the missile, along with a mild polemic on their arms control implications.4

The following year Rodionov and Novichkov published a more analytical article entitled, “Is the Missile Defense Problem Solvable?” Crediting ”foreign military specialists” with most of the analysis, the two authors recommended recruiting helicopters into the ASMD role to improve a ship’s detection range against missiles and their launch platforms. In addition, the helicopters were to be equipped with electronic countermeasures (ECM) to foil the missiles’ seekers and air-to-air missiles to knock down the ASMs. The authors suggested other improvements, including the automation of information collection, processing, and weapons control on board ship to compensate for the short warning time afforded by sea-skimming anti-ship missiles. With regard to the question posed by the title of their article the authors concluded that there “is no unequivocal answer . . . at present,” adding “Many foreign specialists are far from optimistic when evaluating the capabilities of combating anti-ship cruise missiles.” The two Soviet writers reached this conclusion despite the fact that they had just finished describing the unqualified success of Israeli ASMD against Soviet-made anti-ship missiles in the 1973 Yom Kippur war.5 It would appear that their pessimism over ASMD capabilities was their own and not of Western origin.

Kuz’min also had described the 1973 Israeli successes in the previous edition of Morskoy sbornik, as out of 50 ASMs fired by the Egyptians not a single one hit an Israeli target. Kuz’min had a more important point to make, however,

“Reconnaissance support of the combat employment of anti-ship cruise missiles is linked directly with reconnaissance directed at combating cruise missiles. This fact has caused foreign military specialists to express grave concern about the difficulties of detecting missiles. . . . It might turn out that the warning about incoming missiles will be their detection on radar screens, which could already be too late for the employment of air defense missiles for their destruction.”

Like Rodionov and Novichkov, Kuz’min recommended, through his “foreign military specialist” surrogates, the employment of helicopters for detecting incoming ASMs and the automation of intelligence processing and distribution.6

The sixth volume of the authoritative Soviet military encyclopedia Sovetskaya Voyennaya Entsiklopediya was published at approximately the same time as the above two articles. This volume contained an entry by Rear Admiral S. P. Teglev, Chief of Naval Air Defense, on “Air Defense of Naval Forces,” the first two sentences of which are quoted at the head of this article. Teglev continued his entry by describing the forces committed to naval air defense:

“This [defense] is accomplished with the antiaircraft weapons of ships and naval bases and naval fighter aviation in coordination with the National Air Defense Forces and the ground forces. Outside the reach of the weapons of the National Air Defense and the air defense forces of the ground forces, only a ship’s own antiaircraft missile complexes, small and medium-caliber antiaircraft guns, ship-based fighter aircraft, and equipment for naval reconnaissance and electronic warfare are used.”7

Later, Teglev specifically described how capitalist countries conducted naval air defense, implying that the above quotation described the Soviet method of PVO. This point is curious, because the entry was sent to press almost five years before the only Soviet ship-based fighter, the vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) Forger, demonstrated an antiair warfare capability. This encyclopedia entry probably reflected Soviet naval planning, or even desire, rather than capabilities.

1986 – A Yak-36 Forger aircraft parked aboard the flight deck of the Soviet aircraft carrier Kiev. (Photo via U.S. National Archives)

ASM Defense

The Soviets published no major Soviet articles in 1979 on either fleet air defense or ASMs, although the ”Foreign Navies: Reports and Facts” section of Morskoy sbomik continued reporting on Western programs in both these fields. But the following year more than compensated for the lapse in 1979 with five major articles, four in Morskoy sbornik and one in Voyenno-storicheskiy zhurnal.

In February 1980 Captain First Rank Vasil’yev examined PVO at sea from the historical perspective. Vasil’yev asserted that in World War II fighter aircraft were “the most effective force in repelling an air attack,” but by the 1960s surface-to-air missiles had assumed “the first place among other air defense weapons.” At present and in the near future “aircraft and. . . winged missiles, which fly at very low altitudes, will effectively overcome the air defenses of ship formations.” The way to counter these systems, according to Vasil’yev, was with a deeply echeloned defense in four zones: “self-defense (up to 20 km), close-in (20-70 km), medium-range (70-180 km), and distant (more than 180 km).8 Probably not coincidentally, new Soviet SAM systems neatly fall into three of these zones: the SAM carried by the DDG Udaloy for self-defense, the SA-N-7 for close-in, and the SA-N-6 for medium range.9 All that remains is the distant zone, for which Vasil’yev implied – but never directly stated – ship-based fighter aviation would be the most suitable.

1987 – A port beam view of a Soviet Udaloy-class guided missile destroyer underway. (Photo via U.S. National Archives)

In the April 1980 Morskoy sbomik Captain First Rank-Engineer V. Grisenko published a detailed description of the American AN/ALQ-32 ECM system that was designed, according to the author, after a careful analysis of more than 50 variants of naval combat. The system ”embodies completely the basic views of the US Navy’s leadership with respect to the role of ECM equipment in the defense of surface ships against missiles, especially anti-ship missiles with radar homing systems.”10

In a general discussion of air supremacy in the July 1980 issue of the journal of military history, Voyenno-istoricheskiy zhumal, Major General of Aviation I. Tomokhovich included two paragraphs on air supremacy in sea and ocean theaters of operations, He made two points, the first being that carrier-based aircraft had played the chief role in World War II naval battles. This first point was tempered by his second,

“The great importance of carriers as floating airfields and, on the other hand, their vulnerability from the air, forced the command elements of the warring sides continuously to reinforce the air defense of carrier forces with fighter aircraft and air defense weapons. This fact is why the operations of carrier forces usually were accompanied by fierce air battles and engagements.”11

Thus, according to Tomokhovich, although carrier aircraft were essential to victory at sea in World War II, the ships on which they were based were extremely vulnerable to enemy action and needed enormous resources devoted to their protection. By inference the same logic could be applied to proposed Soviet carriers.

1985 – An aerial starboard bow view of the Soviet Kiev-class aircraft carrier Novorossiysk. (Photo via U.S. National Archives)

Rodionov and Novichkov appeared again in the August 1980 issue of Morskoy sbornik with a treatise on the employment of airships (dirigibles) as airborne early warning (AEW) platforms for naval formations. Ascribing support for such a concept to “US Navy specialists,” the authors presented a convincing argument for developing airships to provide non-carrier naval groupings’ early detection of anti-ship missiles and their launch platforms. They cited the tremendous endurance of airships, their ability to handle all the functions of E-2C Hawkeye aircraft, including control of interceptors, and their ability to provide over-the-horizon targeting support to ship-based ASMs. Again paraphrasing their unspecified American source, the authors provided the following scenario. ”Dirigibles perform surveillance and issue target designations; surface combatants serve as platforms for helicopters and as means of support, including fuel for the dirigibles; and coastal patrol aircraft and ship-based helicopters deliver attacks against targets detected by the dirigibles and lay sonobuoy fields over a large area.”12 This scenario seems more attuned to Soviet naval equipment and operational concepts than to American ones.

The final 1980 article on the subject of anti-ship missiles and anti-ship missile defense seemed to be an attempt to put the ASM threat in perspective and allay what may have been growing fears about those missiles within the Soviet Navy. Subtitled “‘Anti-ship Missiles: Strengths and Weaknesses,” the article by Captain First Rank A. Strokin described the warheads, performance, flight profiles, and platforms of Western ASMs. It then outlined their weaknesses, concentrating on their subsonic speed, vulnerability to shipboard fire, inadequate target selectivity, and susceptibility to ECM. He concluded with steps suggested by “NATO naval specialists” for improving ASMD. “Increase the range of detection of the missiles; reduce time required to convert all means of fire to full combat readiness; improve the performance characteristics of means of observation and destruction to the point of complete automation of all processes from detection to opening fire.13 Automation seems to be a key concept espoused by many Soviet authors for solving the ASMD problem.

1983 – An underside view of a U.S. Navy A-6A Intruder aircraft armed with four AGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship missiles. (Photo via U.S. National Archives)

In 1981 Soviet authors produced one article in Zarubezhnoye voyennoye obozreniye (Poreign Military Review) on NATO ASMD capabilities,14 one in Morskoy sbornik on the operation of attack aircraft and fighters from carrier decks,15 and another in the same periodical on the general theory of the navy. This last is significant for the subject of this paper because of one comment by its author, Rear Admiral G. Kostev, “The winning of sea supremacy practically is not conceived without the winning of air superiority.”16 Although obvious to most Western naval analysts, this concept of sea supremacy and the attendant necessity for air superiority had not previously been mentioned in the available Soviet literature and its articulation by Kostev implied a Soviet recognition of the requirement for deck-based interceptors and fighter aviation.

In the May 1982 issue of Voyenno-istoricheskiy zhurnal Chief of Naval Air Defense Rear Admiral S. Teglev traced the history of fleet PVO in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945). While Teglev did not attempt to relate the specific PVO lessons of that war directly to the present day, he did keep returning to the theme that fighter aviation was an invaluable component of fleet air defense. He concluded the article by saying, “The experience of the Great Patriotic War showed that fleet air defense is an important factor that exerts considerable influence on the success of combat operations of warships and units.”17

Colonel I. Inozemtsev expanded on Teglev’s theme in the August issue of the same journal. In his article, subtitled “Airborne Defense for the Northern Naval Lines of Communication,” Inozemtsev was less reticent than Teglev about advocating the use of naval fighter aviation for future conflicts. His basic point was that air defense of the SLOCs would be a naval responsibility in any future war just as it had been in World War II, and that naval fighter aviation, with assistance from other services, was necessary to fulfill that responsibility.18 Because Soviet Naval Aviation (SNA) in 1982 had in its inventory only a few obsolescent Su-17 Fitter attack aircraft and the Forger, considerable additions of fighter aircraft to the SNA would be necessary to implement Inozemtsev’s recommendations. Inozemtsev carried the argument still further by repeating Fleet Admiral Gorshkov’s claim that all other services operating in maritime theaters should be subordinated to naval control for better coordination.19

Rear Admiral N. V’yunenko, supposedly one of Fleet Admiral Gorshkov’s  ghost writers, turned to an entirely new topic in the August 1982 Morskoy sbornik and examined American development of directed energy weapons. After describing the technical characteristics of such weaponry, V’yunenko discussed its possible application to naval warfare, especially against anti-ship missiles. Key to the potential of directed energy weapons against ASMs was the speed at which they could strike the target: ‘”While a conventional missile closes with the target at a speed commensurate with a Mach number, the destructive energy of a particle beam moves at the speed oflight.” V’yunenko stopped short of recommending – or having foreign military surrogates recommend – general adoption of directed energy weapons for anti-ship missile defense, but his generally positive treatment of the subject suggested that such a course was being taken by the Soviet Navy.20

Read Part Two.

Commander Kennedy is a professional staff member of the Center for Naval Analyses and maritime editor for National Defense. He publishes widely on US and Soviet naval and aeronautical affairs.

Notes

1. V.S. Sysoyev and V.D. Smirnov, “Antiaircraft Defense for a Force of Surface Combatant Ships,” Morskoy sbornik, March 1966, pp. 32-38; I, Lyubimov, “Coordination of National Air Defense Troops with the Navy,” Voyennaya myst, March 1969.

2. N. V’yunenko, “Some Trends in the Development ofNaval Tactics,”‘ Morskoy sbomik, October 1975, pp. 21-26.

3. N.V. Shaskol’skiy, “The First Combat Use of Ship-co-Ship Missiles and Their Development,” Morskoy sbornik, May 1970, pp. 94-99.

4. B. Rodionov and N. Novichkov, “The rTomahawk Cruise Missile,” Morskoy sbornik, July 1977, pp. 86-91.

5. B. Rodionov and N. Novichkov, “Is the Missile Defense Problem Solvable?” Morskoy sbornik, May 1978, pp. 96-103.

6. I. Kuz’min, “Reconnaissance in Support of Cruise Missile Firings,” Morskoy sbornik, April 1978, pp. 96-101.

7. S.P. Teglev, “Air Defense of Naval Forces” Sovetskaya Voyennaya Entsiklopedia (Moscow: Voyenizdat, 1978}, vol. 6, pp. 587-588.

8. V. Vasil’yev, “Developing the Antiaircraft Defense of Large Formations of Surface Ships,” Morskoy sbornik, February 1980, pp. 26-31.

9. See Jean Labayle-Couhat, ed., Combat Fleets of the World, 1984/85 (Aunapolis, Md.: Naval Insticute Press, 1984), p. 675 for unclassified descriptions of these systems.

10. V. Grisenko, “Shipboard ECM Equipment in the U.S. Navy,” Morskoy sbornik, April 1980, pp. 78-82.

11. [. Tomokhovich, “World War IT and the Postwar Period: The Character and Methods of the Struggle for Air Supremacy,”‘ Voyenno-istoricheskiy zhurnal, July 1980, pp. 26-34, trans. inJoint Publications Research Service (JPRS) 76824 (Washington: 14 November 1980).

12. B. Rodionov and N. Novichkov, “Dirigibles in the Defensive System of Task Forces,” Morskoy sbornik, August 1980, pp. 82-87.

13. A. Strokin, “Antiship Missiles: Strengths and Weaknesses, Morskoy ssbornik, November 1980, pp. 84-87,

14. V. Vostrov, “NATO Capabilities Against Antiship Missiles,”‘ Zarubezhnoye voyernoye obozreniye, January 1981, pp. 72-74, trans. in JPRS 78054 (Washington: 12 May 1981).

15. I. Beriyev and N. Naskanov, “Operating Tactics of Deck-Based Attack Aircraft and Fighters,” Morskoy sbornik, August 1981, pp. 80-89.

16. G. Kostev, “On Fundamentals of the Theory of the Navy,” Morskey sborrik, November 1981, p. 25.

17. S. Teglev, “Soviet Art of Warfare in the Great Patriotic War: Operational Art: Covering Fleets from Air Attacks,” Vopenno-istoricheskiy zhurnal, May 1982, pp. 27-33, trans. inJPRS 82628 (Washington: 12 January 1983}.

18. I. Inozentsev, “Soviet Art of Warfare in the Great Patriotic War: Airborne Defense for the Northern Naval Lines of Communication,” Voyentto-istoricheskiy zhurnal, August 1982, pp. 13-19, trans. In JPRS 82549 (Washington: 28 December 1982).

19. See Floyd D. Kennedy, Jr., “Soviet Doctrine for Mutual Cooperation: The Naval/Air Force Context,” Naval Intelligence Quarterly, December 1981.

20. N. Y’yunenko, “‘The U.S. Beam Weapon,” Morskoy sbornik, August 1982, pp. 81-85.

Featured Image: 1988 – An aerial port quarter view of the Soviet Kiev class VSTOL aircraft carrier BAKU (CVHG 103) underway. (Photo by LT P.J. Azzolina, via U.S. National Archives)

Interviews

Rear Admiral Dave Oliver and Anand Toprani on American Defense Reform

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By Christopher Nelson

Can we reform the Department of Defense and the Navy? In their new book, American Defense Reform: Lessons from Failure and Success, Admiral Dave Oliver (ret.) and Dr. Anand Toprani make a spirited argument that, yes, we can.

But it won’t be easy. Oliver and Toprani outline four key disruptive historical events in the Navy—the 1940s Revolt of the Admirals, the McNamara Revolution in systems analysis, the fallout from the Vietnam War, and the end of the Cold War. From these events, the authors note that reform in the Navy and the Defense Department will require collaboration among Congressional members, the White House, the Department’s senior uniformed and civilian leaders, and collaboration with industry and the private sector. In this conversation, the authors discuss their new book along with a wide range of topics, including the future of the Navy, its good and bad leaders, thoughts on Admiral Hyman Rickover, and useful reading recommendations.

How did you two meet and develop the idea for this book? 

We met during a series of Naval War College discussions regarding the future of the U.S. Navy. We quickly found we had a compatible background. Dave had served six tours in the Pentagon and been a political appointee and corporate leader. Anand was an historian with special interest in naval history after World War II. Both of us wanted to understand why imposing change on the military had not worked in the past. Since the naval services – the Navy and the Marines – operate in all of the major domains of war (air, land, and sea), we wondered if it might not well serve as a microcosm of understanding the challenge of managing the defense establishment.

We postulated that a review of what the Navy did well or poorly during three major fiscal challenges since 1945 – the end of World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War – might disclose best practices and point to a way ahead for leaders who wanted to embark upon major changes of the Department of Defense. At the same time, we recognized we could not limit our analysis to the past – we needed to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the various contemporary actors who might push change, such as political appointees, Congress, and the private sector. 

Historians regularly rank U.S. Presidents. So, if you were to argue for your top two or three men who were the Secretary of Defense and the top two CNOs, who are they and why?

This query gets at why we were able to produce such a strong book. Because we had strong and sometimes divergent viewpoints that we only reconciled after additional research and discussion, our book ends up reflecting the best attributes of our varied experiences as a practitioner, on the one hand, and a scholar, on the other.

To address your specific question, Anand believes that Forrest Sherman was probably the most skilled CNO of the post-WWII era. He was a bona fide strategic thinker and a skilled bureaucratic operator. He repaired the damage of the “Revolt of the Admirals” with Defense Secretary Louis Johnson and saved naval aviation even before the Korean War began. Finally, he secured the construction of the Forrestal class of supercarriers but had the presence of mind not to feud with the Air Force by constructing the carriers in such a way as to launch long-range nuclear strikes.

Dave interviewed or worked with Arleigh Burke, George Anderson, Dave McDonald, Elmo Zumwalt, Jim Watkins, Carlisle Trost, Frank Kelso, Mike Boorda, Jay Johnson, and Vern Clark. Of these extraordinary men, he has long placed Zumwalt and Kelso in the front rank, for reasons that we make clear in our book.

Just as with CNOs, Dave and Anand have different views about what makes an effective SECDEF. Anand is convinced that the smartest SECDEF hands down is Harold Brown. He didn’t revolutionize how the Pentagon operated, but he did make many of the technological investments that the Reagan Administration exploited a decade later. Moreover, despite his brilliance, he was open minded about alternative viewpoints, provided his critics made a strong argument. For example, when the Navy pushed back against the idea that it should play only a supporting role in the defense of Europe, Brown gave his SECNAV, Graham Claytor, the authority to commission a study questioning OSD’s assumptions. He also came around to the need for a more proactive naval policy by the end of the Carter Administration. Finally, Brown recognized the essential fact that you cannot run defense like a business, and that a certain inefficiency is the price we pay for living in a democratic society.

Dave worked for and knew Mel Laird, Dick Cheney, Les Aspin, Bill Perry, Bill Cohen, and Donald Rumsfeld. He has long been impressed with the many accomplishments of Bill Perry and hope that future scholars will explore discontinuity between Dick Cheney’s performance as Secretary of Defense and his service as Vice President. 

And the two or three worst?

People do their best, and few people leave the Pentagon with their reputations enhanced. That said, Anand thinks that Caspar Weinberger misunderstood his role. Weinberger appeared to see his job as being an advocate for higher defense budgets and was desperate to avoid the taint of being “another McNamara.” Consequently, Weinberger failed to exercise leadership by asking why the services were making their specific budget choices, and whether each service’s decisions complemented those of the other services. Consequently, one can make a good case that the country did not get the return on investment it deserved during the 1980s.

Dave believes that an extraordinary book is still waiting to be written that explains why a man with all of Donald Rumsfeld’s experience, charisma, intellect, and charm was unable to lead the Department of Defense. 

Who was William Edwards Demming? How did he influence Admiral Kelso’s leadership style? 

Demming was the statistician and engineer who went to Japan and provided the Japanese with guidance (Total Quality Management) that was vital to the reconstruction of their shattered industrial sector. He then returned to the United States to espouse the same principles to U.S. industry, but found few takers at a time when U.S. firms were globally dominant and saw little need to innovate. Nevertheless, Demming’s principles were consistent with the precise demands of nuclear power that Hyman Rickover was espousing. When Total Quality Management was combined with the concept of Six Sigma originated by Bill Smith (most famously of Motorola), certain sectors of American industry took an enormous surge forward. (This is discussed at some length in Dave Oliver’s Bronze Rules, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2021, pgs. 145-152.)

The impact of these three men – Demming, Rickover, and Smith – on American industry during the last century cannot be overstated. That said, Demming and Smith’s concepts were intended to guide aid in the production of manufactured items and have only a peripheral application to defense matters. Admiral Kelso may have overhyped the potential impact of Total Quality Management, but it is impossible to make an accurate judgment since this imitative was overtaken by the Tailhook scandal, which consumed the Navy after 1991. 

I really enjoyed the second part of the book titled “What is to be done and by whom?” You synthesized and compiled a lot of information about what doesn’t work well in the DoD across the private sector, Congress, and appointed officials. As for the length of, say, a flag officer’s time in a particular billet, do you think we should keep them in a job for longer than two years? Did we rotate as often and as quickly in the WWII era and Korea through Vietnam as we do today? Or less? 

We don’t know the answer. Whether senior naval leaders should spend more time in specific billets is a matter for debate, but there is no doubt that the sum of their experience as operators, bureaucrats, and leaders far exceeds that of people from outside of the defense enterprise. 

The MRAP is a fascinating case study on getting something done and done quite quickly. Personality (SECDEF Gates) and process seemed to meld. Gates demanded bi-weekly meetings I believe. He made it his highest priority. Absent a war or something else that drives national attention, for a bureaucracy the size of ours, is this the best we can hope for among the thousands of decisions, distractions, and other priorities? That is, prioritization matters. And some things – or  many things – are not going to get solved. 

The MRAP story is not black and white. While many believe it took senior direction to get the MRAPs because of problems in the acquisition system, the real problem was one of requirements – that is, the senior Army and Marine officers did not want to buy the MRAPs. Their experience and analysis told them that, as soon as the United States was out of Iraq, their investment in the MRAP would be wasted, and the military would suffer long-term damage because of the misallocation of resources to a program that, while saving lives, yielded no strategic benefit. These officers were out of synch with the Bush II Administration. The President wanted regime change in Iraq, and he did not want to acknowledge that the war was a political and military mistake, which made him deaf to recommendations to change course.

At the end of the Iraq War, the military leaders who slow-rolled the MRAP proved correct as nearly all of the MRAPs, purchased at great cost, were abandoned in place in Iraq, and the United States failed to achieve its political objectives. At the same time, far too many service personnel suffered grievous injuries or worse from improvised explosive devices. There are no heroes or villains, but perhaps a more honest discussion of the war between civilian and military leaders would have allowed the United States to mitigate the long-term damage of the Iraq War. 

Are we done with the age of an Admiral Rickover? A singular juggernaut by sheer force of will that can create an entire military culture that lives on for decades? 

In our book we use the example of nuclear-powered submarines to show how difficult it is for each of the services to recognize technological innovation that threatens their existing culture and hierarchy.

When we think about Admiral Rickover’s legacy, we focus on nuclear-powered carriers and submarines that have set an unparalleled standard of safety by never having a reactor accident, and we recognize the importance nuclear-powered vessels play today to performing vital naval and national security missions. What we forget is that Rickover needed incredible support from political and military leaders, starting with President Truman, whose initials were welded on the hull of USS Nautilus, President Eisenhower, whose wife launched Nautilus, and Admiral Burke, who supported both Rickover and the Office of Special Projects that developed the Polaris missile within the Navy.

Admiral Rickover was innovative, brilliant, and hardworking – a true American original. That said, he would never have been able to make the progress he did if it were not for 40 years of unwavering support from the support from the Oval Office, Congress, and the naval leadership.

You each get to change the current DoD Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process. What would you do? 

We believe PPBE gets a bad rap, largely because of the association with McNamara and because, as we discuss in our book, the average observer does not realize that each service does the process differently. We probably should make modifications to speed up the process, which generally takes two years to just plan and program each budget before the White House submits its budget to Congress. That said, at its essence, PPBE is a process that tries links budgetary choices to national objectives. The alternative appears to be allowing the services to create their own wish lists without reference to what the Administration and Congress believes is necessary or what the other services are doing.

We think if you want to make meaningful changes, you have start with the requirements and acquisition processes – i.e. deciding what you need and what you will buy. If you get those two questions wrong, no amount of budget wizardry during PPBE is going to save you from the consequences of poor choices made at the start of the process. 

Today, how would you characterize the morale of the DoD civilians and military members you regularly come in contact with? Are they frustrated with some of the issues you’ve raised in your book?

The United States is fortunate to have so many gifted entrepreneurs interested in contributing to national defense. A great number of them, particularly from startups and tech, are justifiably frustrated with how slow the process is to adopt new weapons. The problem is that they have very little understanding that the obstacles against which they struggle are the result of Congressional limitations. Fundamentally, too few people from the private sector share Harold Brown’s realization that the military is answerable to the American people rather than stockholders and cannot simply operate like a private firm.

How would you propose we build or mentor a politically astute officer?

An investment in education would probably help. There simply isn’t time to create such officers in PME, and the quality control is also lacking. Anand is struck by the contrast and influence of the well-educated officers the Navy had in the 1970s and 80s. The Navy made a conscious decision to educate a “Fletcher mafia” among gifted line officers and then send them to specific offices in OPNAV – the same goes with the Strategic Studies Group (SSG) alumni. These same officers then went on to major command and many become flag officers. Ultimately, cultivating defense intellectuals among the officer corps requires considerable expenditure of time and money. Hoping they will find time to develop intellectually in their spare time only make sense if you have made the initial investment to develop the appropriate aptitude and skills.

For each of you, what are three books you recommend to readers after they have picked up your book? Or any books you think anyone working in the DoD should read today in light of our current challenges?

There are two classics we would recommend. The first is Alain Enthoven’s classic, How Much is Enough, to figure out how to reconcile quantitative and qualitative methods of making defense choices. As we discuss in our book, Enthoven and his fellow “Whiz Kids” always claimed analysis was only a tool for aiding judgment, but they failed miserably to create a productive discourse with their military counterparts.

The second book everyone should read is Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision. Although the subtitle of the book is Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, it has limited utility for illuminating that particular historical event now that most of the relevant U.S. documents, and even some of the Soviet and Cuban records, are declassified. Rather, the greatest strength of Essence of Decision remains Allison’s analysis of how important decisions are made in our national security establishment, particularly his model of “bureaucratic politics.” 

Are you optimistic or skeptical that we see any consequential defense reforms for the better in the next 5-10 years?

Andy Marshall created the discipline of Net Assessment because he wanted the United States to make different choices without the external stimulus of a military disaster or defeat, which is the usual way militaries embrace innovation. Marshall wanted Americans to rethink what they needed and why rather than simply wasting money replicating existing forces whose utility might have declined. Marshall first made his case back in the 1970s, and by the 1990s, he realized few people in positions of responsibility were listening, which contributed to the gradual irrelevance of the office he established in the Pentagon.

The premise of our book is that at some point in time the nation will decide it needs to rebalance or even reshape the defense establishment. This may be because we reach some limit on resources (fiscal, technological, human, etc.), or it may be because of a reconsideration of the threat. Whatever the reason, inspiring lasting change within a complex social organization – whether a bureaucracy, a private firm, or even a military service – is anything but easy, particularly when the entity has been spared the worst consequences of poor decisions for too long. That is precisely the time, we argue, to remember that it is less costly to learn from other people’s mistakes than to make your own. We still believe the country can learn from its history, and our leaders should know the relevant information when making their decisions.

Dave Oliver is a retired admiral who also served in the Pentagon for Presidents Clinton and Bush, and spent more than a decade in the defense industry. He was one of the founding members of the American College of National Security Leaders.

Anand Toprani is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College.

CDR Christopher Nelson is a career intelligence officer, graduate of the U.S. Naval War College, and regular contributor to CIMSEC.

All views are presented in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the U.S. Navy or Department of Defense.

Featured Image: The Pentagon, headquarters of the Department of Defense. (Department of Defense photo by Master Sgt. Ken Hammond, U.S. Air Force)

Indo-Asia-Pacific

Quality from Quantity: The PLAN’s Road to Achieve American Skill via Size

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By Matthew Hipple

The United States Navy holds up quality as the firebreak against the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) dominant fleet size and overwhelming industrial capacity. But the development and maintenance of professional skills to fight wars, build ships, and maintain fleets requires material, time, and people – in a word, quantity, for which the PLAN holds the undeniable advantage. The cliché that “quantity has a quality all its own” improperly frames the advantages conferred upon America’s PLAN adversary by the size of its navy and its various supporting enterprises. Quantity is not merely an attribute with which to bury one’s opponent; quantity pragmatically applied provides individuals and entire professional classes the opportunity to cultivate and cement quality. Without the opportunity afforded by scale, the U.S. Navy will fall behind an adversary with a world of opportunity to explore new skills, new systems, and grow its force-wide professionalism. The potential qualitative impact of quantity shows at every level – from the shipyards to fleet training for individual sailors.

The Maritime Industry and a Nation’s Maritime Character

The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) recently assessed that the China’s shipbuilding industry fields 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States, representing almost 50% of total global shipbuilding capacity. To stark quantitative differences like these, the U.S. Navy responds, “in many ways our shipbuilders are better shipbuilders, that’s why we have a more modern, more capable, more lethal Navy.”

An unclassified slide from the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) highlighting differences between U.S. Navy and PLA Navy shipbuilding capacity, ship count, and overall tonnage. (U.S. Navy graphic)

Unfortunately, these snapshots of quantitative position fail to account for the rate of qualitative improvement required for China to achieve this feat of material and professional development – from backwater to backbone. China’s modern shipbuilding behemoth is only 20 years old, the result of a deliberate Chinese Communist Party (CCP) campaign of maritime expansion begun in response to the US Navy’s Summer Pulse 2004 exercise when China represented only around 10% of global ship production. In the time between LCS program initiation in 2004 and the final mission package reaching initial operating capability in 2023, the CCP revolutionized an entire industry and supporting professional class. Meanwhile, 20 years of mismanaged shipbuilding plans – have left American shipbuilders without the demand needed to sustain itself, its professional community, or meet naval demand. John Konrad of GCaptain estimates that making “an American shipyard professional takes about 3-5 years.” Although the communal professional improvement of China’s shipyard workers will take longer due to their extreme individual specialization compared to more broadly skilled Western shipyard workers – the China’s shipbuilding cadre have that opportunity to improve with the scale of their enterprise. And ultimately, specialized workers who exist are superior to theoretically higher quality generalists who do not.

But shipbuilding is just a piece of that qualitative puzzle solved by the scale of China’s maritime industry. There is a maritime quality to China’s population that America has left behind. As Mahan notes, “in point of population, it is not only the grand total, but the number following the sea, or at least readily available for employment on ship-board and for the creation of naval material, that must be counted.” Mahan goes on to say that this is a quality of,

“staying power… which is even greater than appears on the surface; for a great shipping afloat necessarily employs, besides the crews, a large number of people engaged in the various handicrafts which facilitate the making and repairing of naval material, or following other callings more or less closely connected with the water and with craft of all kinds.”

But even in front-facing maritime industries, America falls behind, as evidenced by the Maritime Administration (MARAD) finally sounding the alarm on mariners available for the ready reserve fleet in a war against a thoroughly maritime nation with a maritime militia and weaponized commercial fleet.

These maritime qualities expand beyond mariners and their supporting maritime industry. From commercial electronics to drone manufacturing, China fields vast and ever-improving professional communities in pursuits related to the development, sustainment, and operation of a modern Navy. Mahan recognized that “such kindred callings give an undoubted aptitude for the sea from the outset.” Even industries unassociated with naval warfare provide those with the character and skill needed to support the fleet. Mahan notes a particularly canny English mariner, Sir Edward Pellew, who, “when the war broke out in 1793… Eager to get to sea and unable to fill his complement otherwise than with landsmen, he instructed his officers to seek for Cornish miners; reasoning from the conditions and dangers of their calling… would quickly fit into the demands of sea life. The result showed his sagacity… he was fortunate enough to capture the first frigate taken in the war in single combat.” China’s multitude industries provides such individuals experienced in the conditions and wielding the skills sufficient to make useful mariners.

The U.S. Navy highlighting contemporary quality recalls Mahan’s unnamed French officer, who after “extolling the high state of efficiency of the French fleet… goes on to say: ‘Behind the squadron of 21 ships-of-the-line which we could then assemble, there was no reserve.’” China certainly displays Mahan’s qualities for a maritime nation’s industrial character and its relation to the sea. The CCP’s groundwork of capacity is now well laid to improve the qualitative muscles at sea, opportunities well in excess of the U.S. Navy’s.

Practice Makes Perfect – But How, When, and With What?

When faced with the ever-growing size of the PLAN, a common U.S. Navy response is that, “they script their people to fight, we actually train our people to think.” While valid, the United States Navy has had its own past struggles with training quality  and scripting. Meanwhile, the PLAN pursues improvements in the quality and accurate assessment of its combat exercises.

Only nine years ago the surface fleet founded the Surface and Mine Warfare Development Center (SMWDC) to repair decades of atrophy in tactical and operational training and expertise. Still, scripts and constraints continued to erode junior officers’ desire to command while early command opportunities decrease. From my own experience, experienced, post-command mentors wondered aloud if seeking command at sea was and is worth the ever-shrinking margin of actual command exercised against a sea of requirements.

Ship for ship, the U.S. Navy is still better than America’s PLAN adversaries. U.S. Navy waterfront leadership’s resentment of administrative leashes indicates they still strive for independence and know what right looks like. However, institutionally the U.S. Navy fails to detect the diminishing opportunities for excellence that its size and those leashes provide, and how the opposite opportunity is now offered to America’s principal adversary. The diminished size of the U.S. fleet against growing operational requirements requires leadership to impose ever greater oversight and ever smaller margins of independence, while the PLAN’s mere size allows broad new opportunities for autonomy and professional growth if they want to pursue it.

To demonstrate these narrow margins, during the roll-out of the 36-month Optimized Fleet Response Plan, my officemates and I at the Surface Forces Atlantic Commander’s Action Group did a loose internal analysis projecting the cycle over time. We determined that scenarios existed in which the margins imposed by the historically low fleet size in 2014-2015 were such that major exercises would suffer. Our limited quantity imposed clear potential limitations on our ability to generate quality – highlighting how a lack of capacity can force greater invasive or disruptive acts to ensure the fleet-level schedule meets basic requirements.

Those invasive acts further limit a commanding officer’s ability to exercise their own judgment and build trust with their crew, as exercised during “CO’s time” – the time underway free of outside direction where a ship’s captain independently sets the agenda and priorities for training or testing. There is no data I know of tracking the availability and use of “CO’s time,” but over the past decade I have heard its absence lamented in greater volume every year. As an operations officer (OPS), my CO tasked me with clawing back what little time I could for us to set our own destiny. Even after triple-stacking requirements just to meet our timetable, I cannot recall ever having succeeded. I have yet to meet a CO or a fellow OPS with a success story on this front. The fleet’s limited numbers often force condensation and scripting of training by necessity, precluding greater independent opportunities for teams to develop and exercise their tactical creativity.

Additionally, the U.S. Navy’s often minimalist approach to procurement shows how limited quantity limits development of quality in arenas like tactical and technical development. As an example, the 10-years-behind-schedule LCS Mine Counter-Measures (MCM) Mission Package (MP) has still yet to certify Full Operating Capability. When I was OPS with LCS Crew 206 in 2020, when the package was only seven years behind schedule, we could only field a single unmanned surface vessel (USV) for limited periods to conduct basic testing – let alone tactical development. This was after the disastrous attempt to base the MCM mission package off the Remote Multi Mission Vehicle (RMMV) – a corner-cutting approach that tried to repurpose a program from 1999 for DDGs into an LCS minehunting system into the 2020’s.

Among numerous other programmatic issues, the paucity of resources always limited the speed of development. The U.S. Navy is making strides learning from that failure on the unmanned front with CTF 59 in Bahrain, USV DIV One in San Diego, and a new approach for 4th Fleet. Nonetheless, the US Navy remains well short of needed manned surface vessels. As the qualitative lag in the MCM MP caused by a paucity of USV assets demonstrates, the same applies to manned surface vessels. But unlike the U.S. Navy, the PLAN has nothing if not extra ships, ordnance, and unmanned systems to train and experiment with.

July 24, 2020 – The crew of USS MANCHESTER (LCS 14) conducts USV training. (Author photo)

Our Advantage Is Our People – If We Can Get Them To School

Finally, the ultimate advantage of the U.S. Navy against the PLAN is that its sailors are better on their feet. But to be better improvisers, they need training they can stand by – a lesson learned during the lost decade replacing in-person schools with CD-based SWOS-in-a-box and online GMTs. While the U.S. Navy has greatly improve the availability and quality of training today, getting to this training demands adequate capacity: enough ships to fulfill fleet requirements while giving COs and crews the space to learn and enough sailors to cover the watch while shipmates are at school. The lack of the former is discussed above, and the 22,000 gapped at-sea billets underscore the continuing lack the latter.

With overtasked, undermanned ships – a force cut to the bone against ever-increasing global demand for conventional maritime forces – ships are caught in a Catch-22: they need to send their sailors to school, but the persistent demands of security, engineering, maintenance, administration, domestic fleet tasking, and the like means there are very few sailors to spare. Here, LCS shows a world that could have been, had the fleet not hamstrung its future manning with the ill-conceived Perform-to-Serve cuts. For a time, the Blue-Gold model showed what a properly manned command could do- with time for sailors to attend school, watchteams available for a month to fight entire virtual wars in the simulator, opportunity to focus on personal and family health, and opportunities to assist other crews as necessary while training along the way. In our case, LCS Crew 206 sent 12 sailors to train on and test the USV with the prime contractor and Naval Sea Systems Command’s LCS Mission Modules program office (PMS-420) in Panama City. Properly resourced, these well-trained and well-practiced sailors achieve feats like USS Charleston’s 26-month deployment.

SAN DIEGO (March 5, 2020) – Sailors stand a simulated watch on the bridge of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Integrated Tactical Trainer (ITT)-2B at the Littoral Training Facility on Naval Base San Diego, March 5, 2020. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Kevin C. Leitner)

Unfortunately, contemporary manning gaps have made proper resourcing of any manning model a challenge. Geography also exacts an asymmetric toll: While a San Diego-based warship takes a month to cross to the Western Pacific and another month to return, a PLAN vessel can steam around Taiwan to conduct a Restriction of Navigation Operation (RONOP) on a whim. Across the roughly 425 combatants of the PLAN, that home field advantage grants years of extra operating time, which then provides the PLAN greater opportunity for professional development at every level. Whether that opportunity is properly utilized is another question – but its potential must be recognized.

Quality is Molded From Quantity

Quantity may be a quality all its own but quantity is, in jargon terms, a “force multiplier.” Quantity is opportunity – exposure to new skills, repetition and practice of old skills, and chance to develop both. Quantity is bandwidth – the capacity to cover requirements while still supporting schools, training, technical and tactical development, and innovation. The U.S. Navy may field a relative advantage in quality today but the main adversary fields capacity that enables an opportunity to overtake.

The U.S. Navy’s historically diminished size combined with the constraints necessary to maximize that diminished force’s availability paves a path to relative diminished quality against a PLAN which is growing and improving every day. If the U.S. Navy is truly serious about honing a cognitive combat edge against its numerically superior opponent, then it must recognize, advocate for, and invest in the quantity necessary to cultivate quality. There are no silver bullets for the Navy’s most likely adversary; they are communists, not werewolves. The U.S. Navy is going to need, in laymen’s terms, “more” – not merely to fight the next war, but enough to keep cultivating in ourselves the skills and mindset to win it.

Matthew Hipple is an active duty naval officer and former President of the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC). These views are presented in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the views of any U.S. government department or agency.

Featured Image: October 2023 – Chinese Navy warships attached to a destroyer flotilla under the PLA Eastern Theater Command sail in formation en route to a multi-subject training exercise in East China Sea. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Wei Chenping)

Force Development

Other People’s Wars: The U.S. Military and the Challenge of Learning from Foreign Conflicts

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Sterling, Brent L. Other People’s Wars: The US Military and the Challenge of Learning from Foreign Conflicts. Washington DC, Georgetown University Press, 2021. 336 pp. $39.95 (soft cover). ISBN: 1647120594.

By LtCol Adam Yang, USMC

The conflict between Ukraine and Russia has already raged on for nearly two years and continues to provide the US Department of Defense an incredible opportunity to derive insights on the changing character of war. Similarly, Israel’s offensive against Hamas terrorists in Gaza today may likely reveal new insights on urban and tunnel warfare in densely populated areas. 

Though it can be quite hazardous to draw definitive lessons for an ongoing conflict, there is a remarkable appetite across the defense community to extract preliminary lessons and implications from their unique vantages. For observer nations, the spectacle of a foreign conflict might reveal critical battlefield information on new capabilities and concepts and provide the critical information-edge needed to overcome an opponent in future battle. Why learn the hard way when you can learn from the wartime successes and challenges of others?

Though there is plenty of literature on learning and training processes, Brent L. Sterling’s book, Other People’s Wars, provides a structured academic view into the lesser-examined topic on how, specifically, the US military has served as third-party but direct observers to learn from foreign conflicts in the field. Sterling delves into four historical examples when the United States deployed some of its best military minds to learn up close battlefield lessons in a bygone era that lacked the information systems we enjoy today. The four cases are the Crimean War (1854-56), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), and the Yom Kippur War (October 1973). 

In each case, Sterling provides a snapshot of each respective conflict and answers four basic questions: 1) How did the US military attempt to identify lessons, 2) What lessons did the services identify, 3) How did the services apply those lessons, and 4) What were some of the implications of those applied lessons? As an overarching theme, Other People’s Wars is less about the specific lessons derived from each conflict and more about the leadership, bureaucratic, parochial, and cultural challenges military organizations face when they attempt to “learn” lessons and enact resource decisions based on foreign battlefield information.1

The academic foundation of Other People’s Wars blends literature from military innovation, information diffusion, and organizational learning and Sterling, thankfully, keeps much of his analysis away from academic jargon. Sterling rightly distinguishes the act of “drawing a lesson” and “learning a lesson.” The former implies the process of collecting, observing and deriving a valid insight from a foreign conflict. The latter idea of learning itself relates to how organizations actually apply observed lessons to improve their combat effectiveness.2 In other words, Sterling suggests that organizational learning does not truly occur unless there is actually change in organizational behavior based on related combat findings.

Across four cases, Other People’s Wars offers the gritty details how the US Army, Navy, and Air Force leaders strived to glean insights from foreign conflicts based on their unique political climates, budgetary constraints, and cultural lenses. The cases then show how military organizations enacted or failed to enact change after returning home with their troves of newly acquired tactical knowledge. The decision and authority to initiate such studies were almost exclusively top-down given the political sensitivities of their work and invasiveness with scrutinizing foreign armies in active combat zones. The ideal method to learn from foreign conflicts is to embed neutral observers with all belligerents to capture reciprocal perspectives of their engagements. However, at least in the Sterling’s cases, this standard was rarely met save for a few limited instances.

For example, during the Crimean War in June of 1855, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis dispatched three trusted Army officers to Crimea via Russia. However, though acting as neutral observers, these officers were blocked by both sides (France and Britain on one side and Russia on the other) and lost valuable observation time waiting in neutral areas because local commanders did not want any distractions amidst active battle. Later, during the Russo-Japanese War, the US War Department’s General Staff dispatched eight observers to observe both Japanese and Russian forces with greater success. Those observers gained enough access to observe the aftermath of the Japanese siege of Port Arthur in December 1904, and directly monitor the Battle of Mukden on the front lines in February 1905 – two of the most decisive battles of the entire conflict.

When the United States could not gain direct access to a foreign battle, it leveraged third-party observers for direct reporting of critical capabilities and systems. Sterling shows how the US military frequently leaned on its network of defense attaches. During the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, US defense attaches in Spain, Germany, Italy, and Russia, developed a dense network of local contacts and foreign officials to help collect.3

The Pitfalls and Perils of Learning from Others

For US military personnel attempting to learn from foreign conflicts, Sterling draws a clear line between their observations, drawn lessons, and reports back to senior military and political leaders. However, it is the process of stateside reception and critique and of those lessons that complicates the learning process in each historical case. In some instances, the US Army or Navy enthusiastically adopted lessons from the front lines that would trigger systematic doctrinal and capability changes across their Services.

To illustrate this point, Sterling describes how the Army dispatched Major General Donn A. Starry – a future Commanding General for the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (1977-81) – to capture lessons from the Israelis shortly after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. In turn, the Army would transform Starry’s findings, particularly those related to combined arms and the need for greater air-ground coordination, to guide the development of its famed Air-Land Battle doctrine over the next ten years. Yet, this example tends to the be exception rather than the norm in terms of bureaucratic change. Sterling identifies at least five recurring challenges the US military faced when learning from others:

Preexisting Preferences. A recurring culprit in this book, prior organizational preferences shape every aspect of a learning process, including what data to pursue, how to interpret such data, and whether any “lessons” are relevant to the service. The Navy believed that the Russo-Japanese War validated Alfred Thayer Mahan’s core idea that “concentrating capital warships was the key to winning fleet engagements” and that defense-oriented alternatives were a losing proposition for any great navy.4 Though this lesson may be have been “correct,” the Japanese never allowed US Navy personnel directly near the waters of Port Arthur and forced the Navy personnel to interpret battle information from Japanese liaisons and foreign attaches that had first-hand accounts of the battle.5

Failure to Identify What Happened. The inability to access relevant battlefield information undermines the entire learning process. Surprisingly, the act of sending multiple observers to document different battlefield phases and stages tended to generate contradictory and conflicting reports, which buried important lessons under the noise and weight of lesser observations.

Application of Disputed Lessons. Senior leaders with bureaucratic power can build “artificial consensus” and use ambiguous lessons to muscle through preferred programs. Sterling cites how Secretary Davis and some Army leaders used the Crimean War to justify the development of more masonry fortifications after claiming this is what allowed Russia to repel the assaults by the Allies, rather than focusing on the failure of Allied coordination during the assault.

Rejection or Ignoring of Lessons. This pitfall occurs when military forces ignore or write off important observations because they do not directly apply to their current activities. Sterling shows that in the 1930s the Army Air Corps failed to take notice of German close air support tactics because they were primarily focused on the effects of strategic bombing.

Identifying Contradictory Guidance. Another common challenge includes the identification of two or more relevant lessons that signal contradictory behaviors and investments. After the Yom Kippur War, the Army observers separately noted that it was more beneficial to boost the “tooth” (i.e. combat power) versus “tail” (sustainment) ratio – and vice versa – to generate the greatest utility from its armor formations. Consequently, the Army diluted its limited resources for several years as it experimented with both courses of action.

A Modern Context

As the conflict in Ukraine nears the end of its second year, the Department of Defense and other foreign militaries will continue to capture what they believe to be relevant information on the conflict inform resource decisions. Modern information technologies provide military experts and researchers incredible access to information and individuals at incredible rates, however, an on-the-ground investigatory approach even today would yield incredible insight and knowledge that one does not get from distant observation. Even Carl von Clausewitz recommended that military leaders “should be sent to observe operations and learn what war is like.”6

Sterling’s book offers a historical gateway into this phenomenon and provides remarkable insight into the benefits and challenges of learning from foreign conflicts from an American point of view. Other People’s Wars mostly focuses on the challenges with institutional learning and, admittedly, does not attempt to detail how to overcome such issues. Sterling writes that there are “no easy remedies;” but stresses the need for organizations to build complete and objective histories of events, and to disseminate findings widely to solicit a broad assessment of findings. For a different view on this subject, readers can also explore John Nagl’s dissertation turned book, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, as he elucidates how organizational culture skews organizational learning by comparing the US Army and British Army experience with counterinsurgency.

Overall, Brent Sterling does a remarkable job illuminating the benefits and challenges of organizational learning in the US military. Though this subject has been written on in other forms, Other People’s Wars captures the US military’s historical experience methodically and with great clarity, purpose, and evidence. While these cases are historical, the stories related to leadership, hubris, and bureaucratic slow-walking are timeless and seemingly reminiscent to the strategic churn that occurs today. This book is a must-read for military professionals, educators, and those interested in organizational change.

Lieutenant Colonel Adam Yang, PhD is a Marine Corps strategist assigned to the Strategy Branch in the Plans, Policies, and Operations directorate of Headquarters Marine Corps.

References

1. Brent L. Sterling, Other People’s Wars: The US Military and the Challenge of Learning from Foreign Conflicts (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2021).

2. Sterling, 6.

3. Sterling, 138–39.

4. Sterling, 74.

5. Sterling, 62.

6. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton University Press, 1989), 122.

Featured Image: Ukrainian troops participate in a military exercise. The main task of this brigade is to shoot down Shahed-136/131 drones used by Russia to attack Ukraine. (Photo via the “Rubizh” Rapid Response Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine)