All posts by Guest Author

Notes to New CNO Week

Every Sailor a Cyber Warrior

1 Comment

Notes to the New CNO Topic Week

By LT Douglas Kettler, USN 

Every Marine a rifleman. This mantra resonates with the nation and highlights a fundamental fact about the USMC – no matter what a Marine’s primary job is, they are expected to be able to pick up a weapon and fight.

The CNO, having been a previous commander of U.S. Tenth Fleet/Fleet Cyber Command, should instill this same principle into his Sailors with a new creed, “Every Sailor a cyber warrior.” Given that the CNO is taking charge of numerous complex naval weapons systems that nearly all depend on the cyber domain to ensure their lethality, it is extremely vital that the CNO foster cyber literacy, programming skills, and robust cyber hygiene across the force. Similar to learning a new language, this process may appear difficult, but as a 2015 RAND study suggests, the impact could save the Navy billions of dollars and prevent critical network infiltrations.

This change will benefit the Navy in two primary ways, innovation and cyber defense.

First, naval innovation will be unleashed through advancing Sailor-driven programming skills and Sailor-driven coding solutions to improve computer-based weapons systems. The USAF has embraced airmen-driven innovation schemes with programs like the “Kessel Run,” while the Navy has continued to be beholden to expensive and slow contractor “solutions” to Sailor needs.

An emphasis on cyber will squeeze the most effectiveness and innovation out of fielded weapons systems by having the Sailors that run the systems manage an improvement cycle at little to no cost. A recent success story along these lines is seen in the Maritime Patrol community with a junior officer who drove innovation from the front while the contractors struggled to catch up. The CNO’s approval and fostering of similar types of programs across his weapons platforms at the Fleet level could unleash a wave of combat lethality and innovation unrealized since Eugene Fluckey created land-attack strike and special operations missions for the submarine force in World War II.

Second, cyber defense is critical to maintain if Sailors are trained and encouraged to make programming improvements for weapons platform software. This is where the CNO can generate outsized returns for his Navy. The current system of Cyber Awareness General Military Training alone does not cut it. The CNO must go further and inculcate more impactful and more frequent cyber training. This means cyber training that focuses on how the cyber domain specifically impacts the Sailor’s rating and the Sailor’s weapon system, not just their cellphone. While extremely important, social network operations security, personal electronics management, and other traditional “all-hands” cyber efforts are entry-level education that all Sailors are expected to understand. The next level of fleet-wide cyber education should show the Sailor how the domain impacts their lethality and arms them with the education to recognize, respond, and overcome adverse cyber effects.

Through the new creed of “every Sailor a cyber warrior,” the CNO will be able to leverage his experience at Tenth Fleet to arm the Navy with the foundational skills necessary to fight and prevail in twenty-first century network-centric warfare.

Lt. Douglas Kettler is a P-8A Naval Flight Officer and Weapons and Tactics Instructor in the U.S. Navy. He is an associate editor with CIMSEC. His views are his own and do not reflect the official position or policy of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. Navy.

Featured Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (July 25, 2019) Operations Specialist 2nd Class James Martin, from Pennridge, Pa., plots surface contacts in the combat information center (CIC) aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Paul Hamilton (DDG 60). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Julio Rivera/Released)

Notes to New CNO Week

Recapitalize Sealift or Forfeit the Next Great Power War

3 Comments

Notes to the New CNO Topic Week

By Stephen M. Carmel

The U.S. military has lost one of the unique differentiators that formally sets it apart from its potential adversaries – the ability to reliably sustain itself over long distances within relevant timeframes. There has been much said recently on the dismal state of the nation’s dry cargo sealift forces. And while it is rarely touched on in the conversation, the fact is that for all practical purposes there is no virtually tanker (fuel) capacity to speak of at all.

The question is not “would the U.S. Navy run out of fuel in a fight with China?”, but how quickly. We are talking weeks, if that. An aircraft carrier (even a nuclear one) at war without fuel is just an artificial reef in the making. The Chinese add the equivalent of an entire U.S. Maritime Security Program (MSP) fleet to their inventory every year while in the U.S. we debate about adding one or two ships over the course of decades but nothing concrete ever gets done. The Chinese have bold visions and execute on those visions effectively. In the U.S., at least in terms of sealift, incrementalism is our watchword and even then we don’t execute on that minimal vision. The focus is always on doubling down on failed programs and policies that brought about the current state of affairs when bold, innovative thinking that does not repeat the mistakes of the past is required.

As a start we urgently need a true Maritime Strategy (CS21R and its successor, the Design, are naval, not maritime strategies). The Maritime Strategy must lay out how the nation’s sealift assets and merchant marine fit into broader national security objectives and wartime contingencies. Then that strategy must be executed rapidly and effectively.

A program for defense sealift must ensure the proper mix of both wet and dry cargo ships is available and truly deployable when needed. The architecture of the defense sealift fleet must be adaptable and able to adjust easily to changes in the threat we face. However, current policy remains a static architecture and what is being discussed in the Ready Reserve Force recapitalization conversation is just another old, obsolete, and static fleet architecture, but which somehow intends to be used in a modern and dynamic threat environment. This is a recipe for failure. 

This is an issue of readiness posture. It is time to recognize that if this problem is not solved and solved urgently, a peer competitor will be able to outlast us in conflict and eventually dictate the outcome. Sealift cannot continued to be viewed as a burden and one to be cut when dollars are short. It is a crucial logistical enabler of naval warfighting.  

Sealift – the ability to sustain our forces over long distances at the speed of war – must be viewed as an indispensable element of a forward leaning, lethal, combat force. Without this investment everything else may be rendered moot. 

Steve Carmel is Senior VP at Maersk Line Limited. Among other activities he is a current member of the Naval Studies Board, and past member of the CNO Executive Panel and Marine Board. 

Featured Image: Ready Reserve Force Vessel Cape Ray. (Transportation.gov)

Notes to New CNO Week

Reestablish the Strategic Studies Group

4 Comments

Notes to the New CNO Topic Week

By Commander Chris O’Connor, USN, and Lieutenant Commander Ryan Hilger, USN

In April 2016, Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral John Richardson directed the Strategic Studies Group (SSG) to disband. The SSG had become irrelevant, despite, as the CNO states, “[producing] some ground-breaking ideas that have moved our Navy forward.” Some commentators agreed, accusing the SSG of becoming too technology focused and a waste of resources. But the history of the SSG and the lessons that it might provide for the Navy in a new era of great power competition are compelling. The SSG’s original mandate, to develop and propose innovative warfighting concepts against peer competitors (initially the Soviet Union), is quite relevant today. The new CNO should reestablish the SSG along these lines to develop a new generation of strategists and operational concepts for Navy and Marine Corps warfighting. 

In 1981, after several years of debate amongst Navy and Marine Corps flag officers over his strategic concepts, CNO Admiral Thomas Hayward chartered Robert Murray, the outgoing Undersecretary of the Navy, to establish the Strategic Studies Group. Murray, after wrestling with many issues, finally settled on the SSG model: a small cohort of officers (augmented with civilian specialists in later years) reporting directly to the CNO, with unprecedented access to senior leaders that would produce a tightly-focused study on some aspect of maritime strategy. Various aspects of strategy could be tackled over successive cohorts to allow for a single cohort to conduct a deep analysis of the problem. 

After overcoming the initial defensiveness of senior leaders, the SSG found a pragmatic audience, accruing many champions. Most senior leaders came around to see the benefit for developing a “strategy in a vacuum” as a way of diversifying strategic thought and refining the conventional maritime strategy, something the Navy lacked. Over the next several years, the SSG would develop the core of the operational strategy to defeat the Soviets in conventional war. Their influence would reach Secretary of the Navy John Lehman and would be a major shaping force of the Maritime Strategy he released. 

This version of the SSG is desperately needed today. Not the last iteration, rechartered under CNO Admiral Boorda in 1995, which for two decades focused on the nexus of emerging technology and new operating concepts (railgun, electromagnetic maneuver warfare, net-centric warfare) against an undefined adversary. The Naval War College (NWC), Naval Warfare Development Command, or Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) did not fit well with this assignment, despite their assertions. Their overall focus is on academic research or tactical doctrine, not maritime strategy at the operational level of war. Individuals at NWC or NPS often lack the high-level access and diversity of thought from well-crafted teams to produce revolutionary strategies. Given the strategic challenges that we face, the operating costs of a reestablished SSG would pale in comparison to the benefits of developing revolutionary warfighting concepts and re-training leaders to think unconventionally in order to execute those strategies with naval forces across the warfighting domains. The CNO should follow the example of Admiral Hayward by bringing back the SSG and staffing it with our best and brightest people. 

Commander Chris O’Connor and Lieutenant Commander Ryan Hilger both served on CNO Strategic Studies Group XXXIII. Their opinions are their own and do not necessarily represent the Department of the Navy. 

Featured Image: 190822-N-WI365-1014 TAIWAN STRAIT (August 23, 2019) – Ensign Juan Curbelo, from Isabela, Puerto Rico, looks through a bearing circle while standing watch as the conning officer on the bridge of amphibious transport dock ship USS Green Bay (LPD 20). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Markus Castaneda)

Notes to New CNO Week

Make Crew Endurance an Operational Warfighting Imperative

2 Comments

Notes to the New CNO Topic Week

By Captain John Cordle, USN (ret.)

Admiral Gilday, we are classmates from the Naval Academy, SWOSDOC, and the PCO course. I have watched and admired your career for nearly four decades. You are the right person at the right time to make crew endurance a priority. After the tragic deaths of 17 Sailors in 2017, the Navy made progress in this direction, but there is still much left to do. Now is the time to accelerate the learning process and leverage the benefits of circadian watches and crew endurance policies into a Navy-wide mindset that values and prioritizes personal readiness.

Like you, I have studied — and lived with — sleep deprivation, fatigue, and their pernicious effects for decades. While in command of San Jacinto (CG-56), I used a circadian watch bill at sea, and the performance and morale of my crew made me a believer. While not a perfect cure for everything, it works. 

Navy researchers like Dr. Nita Shattuck and Dr. Kimberly Culley have amassed a mountain of research to support the safety, operational, and long-term health impacts of circadian-based schedules, and many current commanding officers have seen the benefits. Although the human body needs at least seven hours of good quality sleep, a commanding officer studied by Dr. Shattuck slept on average only 5.2 hours per 24-hour period, including naps, which resulted in a state of chronic fatigue while deployed. Additionally, he spent approximately 15 percent of the deployment at a fatigue level equivalent to a person with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08 percent, i.e., “legally drunk.” (See Figure 1.) Many studies show that the averages are not much different for the Sailors as well.

Major sleep episodes of a U.S. Navy commanding officer during a deployment (Shattuck and Matsangas, 2015)

I challenge my two friends and shipmates, you and Chief of Naval Personnel Admiral John Nowell, to prioritize crew rest and endurance as a warfighting imperative. This can be done through several initiatives.

Launching a Crew Endurance Panel to chart the progress on combating fatigue across the Navy. Bring in experts and operational commanders to create momentum in training the force on human requirements for sleep, the operational benefits of it, and the best practices for ensuring rest on shore and at sea. There are too many independent efforts that are not coordinated. Your leadership can change this.

Promulgating a Crew Endurance Policy by the end of 2019 to convert the guiding principles of circadian watch rotations, daily routines built around the watchstanders, and best practices to mitigate fatigue into operational priorities for the entire Navy. SUBFOR and SURFOR have paved the way; their instructions and NATOPS (the aviators have always gotten it!) can be used as models.

Establishing a Center of Excellence to craft educational products, track implementation, and train the force in the science of sleep, always striving to keep the minds and bodies of Sailors sharp. The Naval Postgraduate School would be the perfect place. Establish the SWOS and Senior Enlisted training that was recommended by the CR, but is still not yet in place two years hence.

The Navy owes Sailors a culture that maintains its people with the same rigorous mindset and planning as the maintenance of its ships and aircraft. Proper crew rest and sleep hygiene not only improve the daily performance and long-term endurance of our personnel in stressful environments, but best practices will lead to better long-term health outcomes when our Sailors leave the service. This aligns perfectly with (and in reality, is a necessary prerequisite for) other recent initiatives, such as “mindfulness” and “toughness.” You can recapture the sense of urgency that we all felt in the summer of 2017 but has since waned. Standing by to help!

Captain Cordle retired from the Navy in 2013 after 30 years of service. He commanded the USS Oscar Austin (DDG-79) and USS San Jacinto (CG-56), and received the U.S. Navy League’s Captain John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational Leadership in 2010.

Featured Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (Sept. 11, 2019) Sailors transit through Pearl Harbor aboard Independence-class Littoral Combat Ship USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS 10) during sea and anchor detail. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kenneth Rodriguez Santiago/Released)