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The Kriegsmarine and Compound War at Sea in WWII

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By Matthew Connors

The campaign against Nazi Germany is often characterized as a land battle, but Hitler also lost the war by losing the sea. The former army corporal never truly grasped the importance of sea power and did not appropriately invest in Germany’s navy. Despite this, the Kriegsmarine nearly broke Britain through its use of aggressive surface action groups (SAGs) and irregular commerce raiders. The Kriegsmarine entered a war it was ill-suited for, well before it was prepared to fight, but by employing a form of maritime compound warfare it nearly disrupted Allied sea control which would have starved Britain and the Soviet Union of seaborne supply. Germany’s near victory demonstrates the potential of compound war at sea.

Qualifying Germany’s Naval Campaign as Compound War

In compound war a commander makes use of irregular units operating out of secure bases and augments them with the threat of conventional forces that can also take on irregular operational patterns.1 These irregular operations can force an opponent to disperse forces across a broad space to protect vital points and supply lines from irregular raiders and guerillas. This works in tandem with the presence of a regular conventional force which requires an adversary to also maintain a sizeable concentration of units to potentially counter a large-scale offensive, similar to a fleet-in-being.

This dilemma is precisely what makes it difficult to counter a compound campaign. On land, successful compound campaigns have been waged by Washington, Wellington, and Ho Chi Minh. At sea, compound war is less common, where fleets usually contest control of the sea through fleet combat actions dominated by regular units, or raid with irregulars and dispersed units. Yet, by employing a mix of both regular combatants and irregular raiders, the Kriegsmarine essentially waged compound war from 1939 to 1942.

Broadly defined, German naval forces can be split into regular and irregular combatants.2 Regular surface combatants could engage the enemy battle line or decimate lightly defended convoys. Germany’s surface striking forces mainly consisted of cruisers and battleships. These warships sowed chaos among the British Admiralty and forced the Royal Navy to cover multiple convoys and large areas while hunting small groups of German combatants.3 The presence of one pocket battleship or heavy cruiser in the Atlantic generated the need for convoys to have major surface ship escorts lest they fall prey to the big guns of a German warship. The high speeds and potent offensive capabilities of the German surface fleet could induce the Allies to scatter lightly protected convoys, which limited the damage done by heavy German combatants, but exposed them to the predations of German irregulars, submarines, and aircraft. The best example of this dual threat at work was the case of Convoy PQ17, an Arctic convoy traveling to the Soviet Union in 1942. The threat of a task force led by the German battleship Tirpitz forced the dispersion of the convoy’s ships and caused their subsequent destruction in detail by submarines and the Luftwaffe.4

German battleship Tirpitz firing during practice in 1941. (Colorized by Irootoko, Jr.)

Compound war at sea enhanced the psychological threats posed by German heavy surface ships and the German irregulars. By acting aggressively, the Kriegsmarine forced the British to deploy every available ship in their fleet to hunt for a handful of German surface ships.5 The Germans also conducted an extensive mining campaign that sought to deprive the British of their own shipping through destruction and neutral shipping through deterrence.6 The strain of constant operations and a shrinking merchant fleet was designed to cripple the Royal Navy and the commerce it protected, leaving the British Isles exposed and cut off.

The Regular Naval Threat: Surface Forces

In 1939 and 1940, aggressive commerce raiding in the Atlantic and Indian oceans by German heavy ships caused panic in Britain. The deployment of the Scheer, a pocket battleship, caused the Royal Navy to dispatch an aircraft carrier and six cruisers.7 A subsequent cruise by the battleships Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau sank 115,000 tons of shipping in two months, forced the deployment of the British home fleet, and managed to delay convoy sailings until battleship escorts could be found.8 In late 1941, plans were drafted for the operation of a surface action group out of Norway coupled with a commerce raiding deployment launched out of France. The surface action group would have drawn the British home fleet away while the raiders sowed chaos on Allied shipping.9 These operational plans and deployments typified the German approach and were designed to spread confusion and disruption through aggressive action.

German heavy ship operations featured regular units acting in irregular ways. While any individual platform could engage a rival, they did not have enough to risk themselves in regular combat. Therefore, the Kriegsmarine sought to fight on favorable terms against lightly guarded convoys. When the German forces found themselves outmatched by convoy escorts, they would still engage, but they would often avoid wholly committing themselves to fighting a well-guarded convoy.

Despite their irregular behavior, the German surface fleet’s potential as a regular naval threat remained potent, demonstrating the power of a fleet-in-being. The retention of a German fleet also provided the British with a strategic situation in line with the compound war concept. The continued existence of German heavy units required the Royal Navy to retain a home fleet sufficient to crush a concentrated German excursion while forcing it to also protect distant supply lines against commerce raiders, even after SAG deployments effectively ended in 1942. Even as the German surface fleet was either bottled up or sunk, it remained a real threat and a constant source of British dread. While auxiliary cruisers and submarines could be dealt with by destroyers and aircraft, German battleships and cruisers demanded strong attention from the Royal Navy.

At one point early in the war the Commander-in- Chief of the Kriegsmarine, Admiral Erich Raeder, asserted that the loss of a major German capital ship was not of major significance, especially if lost as a result of “bold action.”10 Audacity, aggression, and frequent operation on the part of the capital ships was part of cultivating their threat potential and stressing the Royal Navy’s resources and leadership. Their mere existence as a fleet in being posed a threat and required the British to divert resources from anti-submarine warfare operations and convoy escort duties. German SAG deployment arguably stalled Allied convoy departures and reduced British imports far more effectively than the grinding destruction of U-boat warfare.11 But after the battleship Bismarck was lost on a raiding mission in the Atlantic the utility of these heavy units shrank as Hitler became concerned about their potential loss and was unwilling to further risk them in combat.

The Irregular Subsurface Threat: Submarines

Admiral Karl Donitz, the head of the U-boat wing and eventual commander of the German Navy during WWII, conceived of a mathematical war against the British. The war of tonnage was designed to sink first British and French and later American merchant shipping quicker than it could be built. The resulting reduction in carrying capacity and goods would cripple Allied industry and force an armistice.12

The irregular component of the Kriegsmarine’s maritime compound warfare was executed by irregular surface and subsurface commerce raiders. These small, cheap platforms were designed to be stealthy enough to bypass the Allied naval blockade and cruise against allied shipping. Despite some false starts and early restrictions, unrestricted submarine warfare, once joined, proved theoretically possible. While British and American shipbuilding and convoy systems eventually overwhelmed the U-boat Arm’s destructive capacity, it wasn’t until 1943 that production outstripped destruction. 1943 also witnessed a sharp decrease in the U-boat’s efficacy as Allied convoy tactics, air-ASW, and the breaking of the Enigma codes proved increasingly effective at neutralizing U-boat attacks on convoys.13 The entry of the U.S. into the war and the increasing tactical effectiveness of ASW saved the Allies in the Atlantic.

However, had German force structure and strategy been built around commerce destruction by the time war broke out in 1939, it may have succeeded in breaking Britain.  German unrestricted submarine warfare proved ineffective, not because of tactical failings or strategic blunders by Admirals Raeder and Donitz, but because German industry, technology, and strategic cooperation proved inadequate. The incredibly small size of the U-boat Arm at the start of the war, only a sixth of the estimated force necessary to break the British, would grow as production gradually ramped up, but losses exceeded production until July of 1940. The force did not reach the necessary 300 boats until April of 1942, but only after the U.S. had entered the war and after tactical ASW was trending in favor of the allies.14

A rough estimate of the required tonnage destruction rate that could force British capitulation was 1,800,000 tons per quarter.15 Assuming a similar destruction rate, had the 82.5 deployed U-boats per quarter attained in 1944 been reflected in the average 1940 quarter, total tonnage destroyed could have amounted to 4,294,207 tons destroyed per quarter.16 Such a shock would have starved the British war machine and people. However, the German U-boat force of the first years of the war was, like the surface force, insufficient for the requirements of the German campaign.

U-boat strength vs. shipping strength during WWII. (Via HistoryNet)

The famed wolfpack was even temporarily abandoned after it became apparent that there were not enough U-boats to actively execute the tactic.17 As Allied ASW efforts improved, convoys became capable of inflicting heavy damage on their attackers and U-boats became increasingly subject to destruction en-route to the hunt. In 1943 the mid-Atlantic “air gap” was closed by escort carriers and Allied ASW units improved in both quantity and quality, reducing the U-boat’s destructive potential.18 The U-boat force peaked in early 1943, and production spiked to 79 new U-boats in 1944, but the window had passed.19

Organizationally, German U-boats were kept under relatively centralized control. Their limited ability to detect convoys and coordinate with other U-boats necessitated their direct operational command by Donitz and the U-boat branch in Wilhelmshaven.20 Wilhelmshaven would act as a central processing hub for data, either from submarines, aircraft, spies, or auxiliary cruisers and then concentrate a number of U-boats in the vicinity of a convoy. This concentration of boats would then attack at night on the surface where they had a speed advantage over allied merchantmen. However, the Naval Staff would also give orders directly to commanders, which complicated the command and control process.21 Tight control and cueing was necessary to ensure U-boats made contact with as many enemy ships as possible so as to maximize their statistical impact. This control, encrypted by the Enigma and Triton cyphers, was subject to Allied penetration. When this occurred, the Allies started avoiding submarines, reducing their efficacy.

One of the most crippling deficiencies of the German strategic approach resulted from the schizophrenic nature of Nazi high command. Historian Donald Steury assessed inter-service competition between the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine as a major hinderance to joint operations against Allied shipping.22 Donitz himself points to Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering’s staunch prohibition of an independent maritime airwing and bogarting of resources as having both limited the operational capabilities of the fleet in a broad sense and the size of the U-boat arm in particular.23 This resulted in minimal aerial scouting which frustrated Donitz’s early efforts to coordinate wolfpack operations and interdict Allied convoys.24

The Kriegsmarine had a sound strategic concept, but an inadequate force that lacked joint support. Despite their fearsome reputation, the U-boat was never properly employed to its full potential, and when coupled with Allied efforts this meant the effective defeat of Germany at sea.

U-boat efficacy by year.25

The Irregular Surface Threat: Auxiliary Cruisers

Auxiliary cruisers were launched to raid allied commerce but carried out a variety of support operations. These ships were converted merchantmen, altered to carry heavy armament and equipped with reconfigurable superstructures. Designed as stealth commerce raiders, there were only a few of these ships but they had an outsized impact. HSK-5, the Pinguin, sank or captured 154,619 tons of allied shipping, a total tonnage on par with some of the U-boat wing’s top performers. By comparison the U-boats sank approximately 11,023 tons per U-boat commissioned.26 Comparatively, the auxiliary cruisers did quite well, between the nine ships deployed from 1940-1943: 844,321 tons of allied shipping were destroyed, or 94,035 tons per auxiliary cruiser.27 Their effectiveness demonstrates the potential of such a vessel and role.

These irregular platforms had a mix of advantages and disadvantages. They were always exposed and subject to possible destruction by a curious surface combatant, the conversion process from merchant to warship was lengthy, and escaping into the Atlantic or Arctic oceans exposed them to detection and destruction by British forces. However, their high average destruction rate is reflective of their inherent capabilities. As surface vessels, they could make high speeds, could remain underway and operational for extremely long periods of time (622 days in the case of the Atlantis), and even could operate light aircraft.28 The ability to operate aircraft afforded them a degree of independence not found in the U-boats, and where the U-boat was heavily dependent on outside cueing for finding targets rather than its organic search capability. Because auxiliary cruisers could operate aircraft they could expand their personal search horizons, far superior to that of the relatively low conning tower of a submarine or its sonar.

Auxiliary German cruiser Kormoran (Wikimedia Commons)

Furthermore, the expanded crew size and cargo capacity allowed these stealth platforms to execute covert auxiliary tasks. Auxiliary cruisers mined Allied harbors all over the world, supported U-boats, and captured or destroyed Allied shipping. As surface ships, their interactions with enemy merchantmen allowed them to extend operations by refueling and resupplying from the prizes.29 These ships remained operational in the Atlantic slightly longer than the regular German fleet. However, like regular surface raiders, these platforms became increasingly difficult to deploy and the last attempt at a breakout failed in February of 1943.30 The auxiliary cruiser was an innovative and potent tool undercut by a lack of investment and the later conservativism of the German fleet. Much like the submarine, the auxiliary cruiser was doomed by a profound lack of investment in the German fleet and Hitler’s naval hesitance.

German Naval Force Structure: Idealism at the Cost of Realism

Admiral Raeder, who led the Kriegsmarine from 1928 to 1943, was mostly responsible for the reconstruction of the German fleet in the interwar period.31 After Hitler seized power naval building accelerated. Light cruisers, heavy cruisers, battlecruisers, and two battleships were constructed.32 However, Raeder’s Plan Z shipbuilding program was designed to build a fleet optimized for a compound campaign against the British. The Plan Z fleet centered on a robust home fleet, several striking forces, and commerce raiders. The home fleet would be strong enough to challenge the British home fleet, thus demanding the retention of the bulk of the Royal Navy’s capital ships in home waters, while the striking forces and commerce raiders starved the British by crushing convoys and sinking lone merchants. However, Plan Z required a longer lead time than a competing fleet design plan which would have consisted of a large submarine branch and multiple pocket battleships.

Operating under the assumption that hostilities would not commence until the mid-1940s, the Germans selected Plan Z. However, the decision to launch WWII by invading Poland in early 1939 took the naval staff almost entirely by surprise. The invasion launched the Kriegsmarine into war prematurely and well before the Plan Z buildup could be completed.33

Losses and an increasing hesitancy on the part of Hitler to risk capital ships eventually reduced the potency of the German surface force and increased the Kriegsmarine’s reliance on submarines.34 However, the German Navy started the war with an insufficient submarine fleet of only 57 boats, when an estimated 300 were required for war with Britain.35 Hitler’s hesitance and ignorance of the sea kept the Kriegsmarine weak, when he lost his nerve in 1942, he constrained his surface navy which then became mostly irrelevant, leaving his inadequate submarine force to carry on what was becoming a losing naval campaign.

Conclusion

Early British deficiencies gave the Kriegsmarine a chance at victory. British ASDIC (active sonar) often performed poorly; the convoy system was initially resisted, and British shipbuilding was not able to catch up to the rate of destruction until 1943.36 The cancellation of the regular surface campaign in the Atlantic in late 1941 was followed by an uptick in overall British imports, despite the increase in U-boat sinkings in 1942.37 Raeder and Donitz had a winning strategic concept but an inadequate force. While compound threats are typically potent, the Kriegsmarine was unable to execute a consistent, effective campaign. As ‘Fortress Europe’ began to crumble, the effectiveness of the German maritime campaign plummeted further still. Ultimately, Hitler’s strategic failings and the small size of the German fleet at the beginning of the war caused the Kriegsmarine’s failure.

The Kriegsmarine’s shortcomings were matched with Allied successes. Cracking Enigma, the reimplementation of the convoy system, the implementation of air-based ASW, and general improvements in ASW operations saved the British merchant from the U-boat, while brave men in steel ships defeated the big guns of Hitler’s surface fleet. A future war at sea against a compound threat will require much of the same: superb code breakers, clever screen commanders, effective tactics, and brave Sailors willing to grapple with any threat.

Lieutenant Matthew Conners is a 2012 graduate of the Naval Academy and a Surface Warfare Officer. He has served in USS Hopper (DDG 70) as Repair Officer and  USS Chung Hoon (DDG 93) as the Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer. He is also the recipient of the Naval Postgraduate School’s 2018 Liskin Award for excellence in National Security Studies. He graduated from the Naval Postgraduate school in 2018 with a Master of Arts in Security Studies. He is stationed in San Diego at the Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center.

References

[1] Thomas Huber, Compound Warfare; That Fatal Knot, (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Press, 2002) https://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/download/csipubs/compound_warfare.pdf vii.

[2] There were no German naval aviation assets. Gronning quickly appropriated all related maritime aircraft to the Luftwaffe and the two German aircraft carriers under construction were never completed.

Eric Raeder, My Life, trans. Henry Drexel, (Annapolis, Naval Institute Press, 1960), 154.

Robert Jackson, Kriegsmarine; The illustrated History of the German Navy in WWII, (London, Aber’s Books ltd 2001), 24.

[3] Jackson, Kriegsmarine, 23.

[4] Jackson, Kriegsmarine, 116.

[5] Terry Hughes and John Costello, The Battle of the Atlantic, (New York, The Dial Press 1977), 20.

[6] Hughes and Costello, The Battle of the Atlantic, 49.

[7] Hughes and Costello, The Battle of the Atlantic, 123.

[8] Ibid, 125.

[9] Steury, “The German Naval Offensive,” 81-83.

[10] Cajus Bekker, Hitler’s Naval War, (Garden City, Doubleday and Company 1974), 141.

[11] Sturey, “The German Naval Offensive,” 81-83. 

[12] Hughes and Costello, The Battle of the Atlantic, 38-52.

[13] Assmann, Kurt. “Why U-Boat Warfare Failed,” Foreign Affairs 28, no. 4 (1950): 659-70. doi:10.2307/20030803 665, 667.

Hughes and Costello, The Battle of the Atlantic, 304, 305.

[14] Hughes and Costello, Battle of the Atlantic, 304-305.

[15] A 1917 Imperial naval staff estimate. In Steury, The German Naval Offensive, 93.

[16] Based on a rate of 52,051 tons per quarter per U-boat deployed at a rate of 82.5 U-boats deployed in 1944. Hughes and Costello, The Battle of the Atlantic, 304-305.

[17] Ibid, 49.

Hessler, Gunter, The U-boat War in the Atlantic, 1939-1945: German Naval History, (Great Britain, Ministry of Defense 1989), 12.

[18] Jackson, Kriegsmarine, 48-55.

[19] Hughes and Costello, The Battle of the Atlantic, 304-305.

[20] Ibid, 2.

[21] Hessler, The U-Boat war in the Atlantic, 9.

[22] Ibid, 91.

[23] Karl Doenitz, Memoirs: Ten years and Twenty days, (Cleveland, World Publishing Company 1959) 132-133.

[24] Doenitz, 133-134.

[25]Ibid.

[26] Hughes and Costello, The Battle of the Atlantic, 304-305.

This includes U-boats launched after the bulk of Allied ASW efforts began to take effect.

[27] Bekker, Hitler’s Naval War, 381.

[28] Jackson, Kriegsmarine, 69.

[29] Jackson, Kriegsmarine, 69-77.

[30] Ibid, 77.

[31] Raeder, My Life, 138-139.

[32] Jackson, Kriegsmarine, 21-23.

[33] Jurgen Rohwer, “Codes and Ciphers: Radio Communication and Intelligence,” in To Die Gallantly; The Battle of the Atlantic ed. Timothy J Rynyan and Jan M. Copes, (Boulder, Westview press 1994), 38-38.

[34] Donald Steury, “The Character of the German Naval Offensive: October 1940-June 1941,” in To Die Gallantly; The Battle of the Atlantic ed. Timothy J Rynyan and Jan M. Copes, (Boulder, Westview press 1994), 81.

[35] Assmann, Kurt. “Why U-Boat Warfare Failed.” Foreign Affairs 28, no. 4 (1950): 659-70. doi:10.2307/20030803 www.jstor.org/stable/20030803 665, 667.

[36] Kurt. “Why U-Boat Warfare Failed,” 665-667.

[37] Steury, “The German Naval Offensive,” 84-87.

Featured Image: German battleship Bismarck in the Baltic Sea in May 1941. (Colorized by Irootoko, Jr.)

Capability Analysis

The Bad Day Scenario, Part 2: Dynamic Force Employment and Distributed Operations

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Read Part One here.

By Jimmy Drennan

The first article of this series introduced the “Bad Day Scenario,” reminiscent of a similar scenario the Navy considered in 2003. The Navy went on to test its global responsiveness in the surge exercise Summer Pulse 2004. The scenario posited in Part One involves simultaneous reports of a mine strike in the Strait of Bab el Mandeb, a paramilitary invasion of a Turkish town, and a Chinese attack on a U.S. military aircraft.

The Bad Day Scenario pushes the U.S. Navy, even with its global reach, to the brink of mission failure. Even if none of the three flashpoints boiled over into armed conflict, it is questionable whether today’s Navy could posture to deliver desired effects in a timely manner. There is also no true safe haven to be found in the other military branches or U.S. allies. The preferred military response would probably be a joint operation, but the Navy would likely be called upon to act first, if only to begin moving forces into position. Mobilizing naval forces could provide national leadership with decision space before crossing a strategic “point of no return” while achieving a rapid, politically acceptable result. If the Navy, however, could not position capable forces to respond in a given timeframe, such a response would be decidedly less feasible to political leadership.

Nor could the Navy rely on U.S. allies to save the day. First, prudent planning dictates that in a worst case scenario analysis, one should not assume the benefit of allies coming to their aid. Second, although unlikely, unilateral U.S. operations are entirely feasible. American presidents have routinely reserved the right to act unilaterally to preserve vital interests. Meanwhile, NATO is a shell of the military force that once served as a counterbalance to Russian aggression, and much of Europe is preoccupied with economic and domestic issues. Even if European allies could muster the political will to assist in Turkey, it is unreasonable to assume they would have the capacity to support in the Bab el Mandeb simultaneously. In the Pacific, it is possible U.S.  allies would view the downed aircraft as strictly a U.S.-China issue. There could also be murky questions as to the flight profile of the aircraft relative to China’s contentious claims of territorial airspace. However, U.S. allies in the region are far more likely to come to the aid of the U.S. over issues that impact their sovereignty or economy, such as China’s excessive claims in the South China Sea.

Faced with the specter of having to go it alone, the Navy could capitalize on two emerging concepts to tackle the Bad Day Scenario: Dynamic Force Employment (DFE) and Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO). Both concepts have the potential to improve the Navy’s global responsiveness. Integrating DFE and DMO into actual operations and doctrine creates both intriguing challenges and opportunities for the Navy of the future.

Dynamic Force Employment

Introduced in the 2018 National Defense Strategy, DFE is a concept for employing forces on a global scale in an agile and unpredictable manner. DFE has a significant impact on the Navy by shifting carrier strike group (CSG) deployments away from the routine, almost clockwork, schedules that supported  the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two decades, and toward a demand-based methodology that could involve shorter or more irregularly spaced deployments to any number of locations based on current events. Among the many changes that DFE will bring, it will immediately impact the advanced training portion of the readiness cycle – ships and strike groups will no longer be able to focus on a predetermined set of threats based on geographic area.

DFE essentially addresses the timeliness aspect of the Bad Day Scenario. It is designed to maximize the probability that forces will be available to respond to global crises and contingencies. It sacrifices presence for responsiveness and agility.

Forward staging forces around the world on rotational deployments provide presence, but this approach has gradually degraded force readiness over the past two decades. In addition, there’s no guarantee forces are deployed where the next crisis will ignite, and it may take just as long for them to reposition as it would for them to deploy from CONUS. Instead, DFE uses responsive deployments. Forces deploy when and where they are needed, and when deployed, they can extend their presence on demand and far more easily than a unit coming off a long deployment.

The value of DFE’s agility is highlighted in the Bad Day Scenario. Under the traditional force employment paradigm, an east coast-based CSG would typically deploy to the Arabian Gulf. From there, it would take nearly as long to respond to the Turkey incident as a CSG in homeport, plus the time, risk, and resources incurred by transiting a potentially mined chokepoint in the Bab el Mandeb Strait or even the Suez Canal. DFE eliminates the “default” deployment to the Arabian Gulf, and increases the likelihood of east coast-based forces being allocated to the European region (6th Fleet), poised to respond to the Russian aggression in Turkey. Forces in the Middle East (5th Fleet) would be preferable to CONUS-based forces to respond to the mine strike in the Bab el Mandeb Strait. However, the unique defensive and force protection challenges of the region (e.g. anti-ship cruise missiles, explosive boats, lethal unmanned aerial vehicles) require capabilities that 5th Fleet’s assigned mine countermeasure forces do not possess. As the Navy’s Director of Expeditionary Warfare points out, having the wrong capabilities available is the same as having zero availability. Critical enablers such as Aegis cruisers and destroyers may need to deploy from CONUS after all. DFE forces the Navy to prepare for the possibility of having to rapidly deploy such a package for unique missions like mine clearance, potentially resulting in improved global responsiveness.

Lastly, DFE is ideally suited for the return to an era of great power competition by presenting unpredictability to potential adversaries, such as Russia and China. To be clear, DFE is in some respects a necessary outcome of budget restrictions and the end of nonstop naval air support to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, it is heartening to see DoD make a strategic transition so deftly. Instead of shifting default rotational CSG deployments from one area of responsibility (AOR) to another, DoD rewrote the game plan, simultaneously forcing potential adversaries to wonder where U.S. forces will show up next, while also creating operational tempo “breathing room” to help reset the force.

As Tyson Wetzel points out on the Strategy Bridge, there are some potential challenges to DFE becoming an effective force management system. Some Combatant Commanders (COCOMs) could view DFE as a threat to force allocations in their AOR since they have long been accustomed to continuous naval presence. Allies may view irregular deployments as a sign of waning U.S. commitment to their strategic partnerships. Above all else, DFE will remain constrained by overall end strength. No matter how dynamic the Navy is, it is ultimately only as responsive as the number of ships it has operationally available.

Distributed Maritime Operations

One way to overcome the limitations of end strength is to rethink how U.S. naval forces operate once deployed. This is, in part, the logic behind distributed maritime operations (DMO), the successor to Commander, Naval Surface Force’s distributed lethality concept. While a universally accepted definition of DMO does not exist, DMO emphasizes multi-domain maneuver and kill chain agility through incorporating lethality into more platforms, offboard sensors, network-optional C2 (i.e. a blend of mission command and networked operations), and unmanned systems, to name a few. It is an operational concept that guides the Navy toward fielding a force capable of applying efficient, tailored force packages to a wide range of potential missions and threats. To some, it represents a significant departure from the near-myopic focus on power projection ashore via high-end capabilities, such as CSG sorties and ship-launched cruise missile strikes to support land-based operations.

If DFE addresses the temporal aspect of the Bad Day Scenario, DMO addresses the spatial and doctrinal aspects. DMO, in concept, would allow the Navy to respond to multiple contingencies in different regions by operating in a distributed manner. Although the Navy has been slow to adopt DMO (due in part to “organizational inertia” associated with the preeminence of CSG operations), deployed CSGs, amphibious readiness groups (ARGs), and destroyer squadrons (DESRONs) are already accustomed to operating disaggregated units, sometimes even across COCOM AOR boundaries. DMO will theoretically take disaggregated operations to the next level. DMO will allow units to disaggregate and then effectively integrate with other distributed units to produce tailored force packages on demand as the situation dictates.

Specific to the Bad Day Scenario, DMO could improve the Navy’s responsiveness in multiple ways. A group or squadron operating in the Mediterranean or Red Sea could rapidly disaggregate to respond to both the Turkey and the Bab el Mandeb crises. And by building lethality into all platforms, there is a greater likelihood the Navy could respond to any of the incidents with the nearest available assets. With the current force, some otherwise capable platforms, such as the San Antonio-class LPDs, could not respond to the South China Sea incident due to a lack of integrated air and missile defense capability. Offboard sensors and unmanned systems are particularly useful in mine threat areas, which create greater standoff ranges in relatively small littoral areas such as the Bab el Mandeb Strait. DMO can integrate lower-end surface platforms with these capabilities, allowing them to conduct missions such as mine warfare without incurring undue risk or having to wait for the minesweepers to arrive.

While DFE has been rapidly implemented, DMO (and distributed lethality before it) has lingered on the Navy’s operational “whiteboard,” with many supportive ideas and unique definitions coming from across the Navy enterprise. The implementation of DFE benefited from top-down Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) guidance, whereas DMO, on the other hand, began with the Surface Force and had to gain acceptance from the broader Navy and Joint Force from the “bottom up” (or at least from a few steps down). DFE was received as a mandate from SECDEF, whereas DMO has to be sold as a valuable concept, which necessarily takes longer. The lack of a unifying guidance document may have contributed to the delay in widespread acceptance. In order to facilitate implementation, the Navy should prioritize publishing a Naval Warfare or Doctrine Publication (NWP/NDP) on DMO as soon as possible.

The Convergence of DMO and DFE

The advent of DFE, coming from the Joint Force, and DMO, being developed from within, create unique challenges and opportunities for the Navy’s global responsiveness going forward. Ignoring the necessary integration of the two concepts and addressing them in a vacuum could lead to sub-optimal implementation of both concepts, or an unnecessary rejection of one concept in favor of the other. (Likely DMO would be the one to suffer, given SECDEF’s endorsement and rapid implementation of DFE.) Instead, the Navy needs to analyze how DFE and DMO will coexist to maximize maritime warfighting effectiveness. With that comes several key implications which will be addressed in detail in Part 3 of this series.

Jimmy Drennan is the Vice President of CIMSEC. These views are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of any government agency.

Featured Image: PHILIPPINE SEA (Nov. 16, 2018) Ships with the Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group and John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group transit the Philippine Sea during dual carrier operations. Ronald Reagan and John C. Stennis are underway and conducting operations in international waters as part of a dual carrier strike force exercise. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kaila V. Peters)

Strategy

Then What? Wargaming the Interface Between Strategy and Operations, Pt. 1

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By Robert C. Rubel

The Problem

Wargaming is ubiquitous throughout the U.S. Armed Forces as a tool for research, education, training, and influence. It is a flexible tool, adaptable to different scenarios, purposes, and levels of war. It is in this last arena, levels of war, that gaming organizations and their sponsors can bump up against the limits of wargaming.

The inherent nature of wargaming requires delineation and focus in game objectives and design. A game to address all three levels of war, strategic, operational, and tactical, is simply not feasible, requiring too many players, too much money, and too much time. The normal approach is to pick a level of war to play, with the other levels being either scripted, managed by the control cell, or ignored altogether. Even when a game is designed to incorporate free play at two levels, some kind of pruning of factors – frequently time – must occur to make the game feasible within budget and schedule constraints. The net result is that a robust exploration of the relationships among the levels of war becomes a casualty, missing in action.

Among the consequences of this gap in gaming could be a failure of communication and coordination among policy, strategy, and operational decision-makers, such as occurred in Vietnam and Iraq. This series will discuss the nature of this gaming gap and will offer some suggestions for closing it.

The Real World Gap

The doctrinal partitioning of war into three levels in the U.S. is a relatively recent occurrence. The Army’s 1982 Field Manual 100-5 Operations introduced the notion of an operational level in between strategy and tactics.1 The operational level, according to doctrine – and subsequent practice – is the level of command at which campaigns and major operations are planned and directed. This doctrinal development simply provided a theoretical basis for a command structure that had existed since World War II. Between fighting units and their direct commanders in the field and at sea, there were established theater headquarters that not only oversaw, coordinated, and supported large and widely dispersed forces, but also coordinated theater strategy – the campaigns – with the national command authorities in Washington. In WWII the emergent arrangement in which theater commanders such as Eisenhower, Nimitz, and MacArthur worked with an ad hoc joint staff that consulted routinely with President Roosevelt worked well enough in the context of a total war against the Axis. Deft political management during the war and especially in the end game produced, if not a perfect post-war world, at least good outcomes in West Germany, Italy, and Japan. Operations were governed by strategy, set in Washington, which was where political and military feasibility met.

After the war, the U.S. established a permanent globe-girdling theater command structure to coordinate a potential global war versus the Soviet Union, manage the geopolitical strategy of containment, and execute the oversight and support of limited wars that broke out, such as in Korea and Vietnam. The problem, as compared to World War II, was that those wars were conducted in the shadow of the U.S./USSR nuclear standoff, thus taking certain military options off the table. Moreover, those two wars and all subsequent ones were fought for limited objectives. These factors called for a more detailed interaction among policy, military strategy, and operations than was required in World War II. Sometimes this resulted in micromanagement, as in Lyndon Johnson’s approach to bombing in Vietnam. After that war, the services, especially the Army, embarked upon an effort to revamp their doctrine and cultures, including the notion that Washington should delegate more authority for running operations to theater commanders. The development of the operational level of war aided in this change.

However, the development of operational art as a key pivot of U.S. military doctrine had the effect of turning theater commanders into regional military “proconsuls.”2 This served, in the view of two Army War College writers, to drive a wedge of sorts between strategy (to include the policy side) and operations (the conception and design of campaigns) to the point where it “… reduced political leadership to the role of ‘strategic sponsors,’ quite specifically widening the gap between politics and warfare.”3 Others have attributed the inability of the United States to achieve definitive victories since 1945 to defective strategic leadership in Washington.4 Both problems have infected U.S. strategy since at least Vietnam, being perpetuated by a gap in understanding of the connections between operations and strategy. One manifestation of this gap is in the vulnerability of administrations to the lure of what might be termed “sure fire” victory concepts.

Since at least the dawn of the air age there have been warfare prophets that assert in an a priori manner that particular technology-based concepts, like strategic bombardment or network-centric warfare, will confer an unassailable advantage to their users and produce rapid victory. Such concepts are alluring to political decision-makers that find themselves under pressure to resolve a vexing international dispute on favorable terms. Skeptics have a difficult time countering the claims of adherents, since there usually exists no historical counter-evidence as the concept and its supporting technology are new.

The most notorious recent example is the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The policy/strategy framework for Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) was founded upon Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s notion that new technology would produce “shock and awe” and allow the invasion to be carried out with far fewer forces than had participated in 1991’s Desert Storm. “Faster, lighter,” were his buzzwords, and he believed intelligence and hi-tech gadgetry would play a more important role in future conflicts than boots on the ground.5 Blatantly missing from the strategy was any plan for establishing order after Baghdad was captured, which resulted in chaos and an eight-year counterinsurgency operation. There were indeed people in the national security community that advised caution based on the politics of using military force, such as former Central Command commander Marine General Anthony Zinni and Congressman Ike Skelton, who advised the administration that they should not take the first step without considering the last.6 However, their concerns fell on ears deafened in part by the administration’s idea that the war would be quick and easy.

The susceptibility of both civilian and military strategists to the siren song of new, unproven concepts occurs in part because of a widespread ignorance of the interactions between policy, strategy, and operations. Apart from Congressman Skelton’s injunction not to start a war without considering how it might be brought to an end – and the aftermath – there is little in the way of guidance in the literature on the matter of how, exactly, the strategic and operational levels interact before, during, and after a war. In fact, there are reasons to think that it may not be possible to develop a set of principles or rules of thumb on the matter. As Carnes Lord pointed out:

“The fundamental problem facing American proconsuls is that political and military decision-making are institutionally split. This remains the case in spite of the significant reforms put in place after World War II, especially the creation of the National Security Council. Today, after ten years of war and continuing pressures to improve the integration of the political and military dimensions of American counterinsurgency operations in the Greater Middle East, there remain significant disconnects and tensions between a civilian leadership that is increasingly without military experience and a military establishment (embracing civilian professionals as well as the uniformed military) that is increasingly competent to deal with security-related matters beyond the narrowly military sphere.”7

In other words, it may fall increasingly on the military to reconcile the gap between strategy and operations, a solution far from optimum but likely better than ignorance of the strategy/operations relationship in both Washington and the field. Wargaming is deeply institutionalized within the military, so it is within the military gaming process that education and analysis of the relationship must at least start to occur.

To close the existing gap, national security practitioners, uniformed and civilian, should develop a feel for the dynamics of these interactions such that they can approach decisions to go to war, war strategy, campaign design, and post-war arrangements much more sagaciously. Widespread inclusion of such an interface in wargaming would help close the gap.

Professor Emeritus Rubel is retired but serves as an advisor to the CNO on fleet design and architecture. He spent thirty years on active duty as a light attack and strike fighter aviator. After leaving active duty he joined the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College, serving as Chairman of the Wargaming Department and later Dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. In 2006 he designed and led the War College project to develop the concepts that resulted in the 2007 Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower. He has published over thirty articles and book chapters dealing with maritime strategy, operational art and naval aviation.

References

[1] U.S. Army, Field Manual 100-5, 1982, p. 2-3, https://archive.org/details/FM100-5Operations1982

[2] Carnes Lord, Proconsuls, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), see Chapter 1, “On Proconsul Leadership,” pp. 1-22 for a discussion of delegated political-military leadership in the American system.

[3] Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan, Alien: How the Operational Art Devoured Strategy, (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, September 2009), p. viii.

[4] Harlan Ullman, “Harlan Ullman: U.S. decision-making lacks strategic thinking,” UPI June 13, 2016, http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Opinion/2016/06/13/Harlan-Ullman-US-decision-making-lacks-strategic-thinking/3231465586081/ 

[5] Richard Saunders, “The myth of ‘shock and awe’: why the Iraqi invasion was a disaster,” The Telegraph, 19 March 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/9933587/The-myth-of-shock-and-awe-why-the-Iraqi-invasion-was-a-disaster.html

[6] David C. Gompert, Hans Binnendijk, Bonnie Lin, Blinders, Blunders and Wars, (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2014). p. 167.

[7] Lord, p. 231.

Featured Image: NEWPORT, R.I. (May 5, 2017) U.S. Naval War College (NWC) Naval Staff College students participate in a capstone wargame. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jess Lewis/released)

Fiction

A Conversation with Naval Fiction Writer David Poyer, Author of Deep War

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By Michael DeBoer

I had the pleasure of speaking with author David Poyer, former naval officer and author of the Tales of the Modern Navy and War with China series of novels, and other exciting naval fiction titles. We discussed his newly released book in the War with China series, Deep War, how the trends of war are reflected in his writing, and how the main characters of a long series are taking on new roles.

(Read our previous interview with Poyer on his book Onslaught here.)

MD: A major feature of your work is the escalatory nature of war. You seem to be making the point that, given the escalatory nature of a war between nuclear powers, the use of nuclear weapons is likely or inevitable. Do you think the taboos regarding nuclear use are enough to maintain a conventional war between nuclear powers?

DP: Well, as one of my characters says, there is no historical precedent for war between two nuclear-armed powers. My own analogy is a knife fight in an alley, where both antagonists, in addition to knives, are carrying concealed firearms. Is the combatant who’s about to lose his life going to forego pulling his gun? I doubt it.

Limits have a way of getting transgressed in war. Unrestricted submarine warfare, use of gas, shelling and bombing cities . . . none of these red lines held when a regime felt its existence was at stake, and most were not merely “taboos,” but had been duly codified in international law signed by the warring parties.

So to answer your question, yes. As I have assumed in these novels, the danger of escalation is extreme.

MD: Tales of the Modern Navy was, until these chapters, slightly retrospective. They normally looked backward 5-10 years. However, starting with Tipping Point, we’ve moved into the future. What did you have to change about your writing process and style when you moved into the future?  How did you prepare?

DP: That’s a perceptive question that goes back to the roots of my writing career. My very first published stories were science fiction, and so were several of my early novels: Stepfather Bank, White Continent, The Siloh Project, and others. So incorporating and extending technology into story hasn’t been a stretch for me.

The shift from mildly retrospective to near-future was crucial because although Dan’s several missions for the Tactical Analysis Group, for example, (Korea Strait, The Weapon, The Crisis, The Towers) were classified, and thus could be accepted by an informed audience as having happened even though they hadn’t heard about them on the evening news, we couldn’t slide a whole world war past them that they knew had NOT happened! The shift to a near future was the answer. And no special preparation was necessary; simply extending current political and technological trends a few years adds, I hope, enough credibility to make the story work. We’ll see in ten years how close I came – and of course, I’m hoping the dire events described in these volumes never happen!

MD: Technological development in Deep War is picking up speed. Lenson’s reality is now populated with Zumwalt-class follow-ons, directed energy weapons, increasingly sophisticated UAVs, successive blocks of F-35, integrated digital optics, and AI. Similar to Ghost Fleet, this cocktail produces a brutal combat environment in which few humans can survive. Do you have any thoughts on the future of warfare with all of these digitally enabled and augmented technologies?  Are we coming around a corner similar to the First World War, when the technical capacity for killing exceeds our ability to innovate in a way that prevents attrition from becoming the decisive force in war?

DP: “Picking up speed” – sure, and I note in these novels that war is always a forced draft for technology. Still, though, that technology often fails you, especially in combat conditions, and I highlight that possibility in Hector Ramos’s experiences on Itbayat and Taiwan, as well as occasionally with the other characters. As for the technical capacity for killing exceeding the capacity to innovate in a way that bypasses attrition . . . I must disagree. Attrition was the decisive force in World War One. It was decisive in WWII as well. But innovation on one side, along with good strategy, can drive attrition rates on the other side. That is how they are related, I believe.

As to the future of warfare with these augmented technologies, these six books . . . The Cruiser, Tipping Point, Onslaught, Hunter Killer, Deep War, and next year’s Overthrow . . . address and describe the way I think warfare may evolve.

MD: I think I caught a little bit of Fahrenbach’s This Kind of War in Hector’s experience on Taiwan. Is that accurate, and are there any other books that inspired you in this work?

DP: Haven’t read Fahrenbach but thanks for the suggestion! Several pages of research articles, monographs, and a few books are listed in my acknowledgements at the back of each novel, along with shout-outs to those folks who advised me and read portions of the text to make sure I didn’t go completely off the rails. Many, many active duty and recently retired subject matter experts backstopped me and provided useful suggestions. I owe them a lot. Still, any errors and omissions are my responsibility.

MD: Deep War largely surpassed Daniel Lenson, who winds up being mostly an observer compared with Oberg, Staurulakis, and Hector. Have you considered writing works with any of them as the central figure?

DP: These novels are braided narratives, with different characters providing different views of the action. I call the story arcs of each protagonist a “strake,” in an analogy to ship design, with Dan serving as the keel. If you welded together the strakes for each character from succeeding books, you would have more or less the work you describe.

I employed different points of view for the same reason Tolstoy did it in War and Peace: a war is too geographically and emotionally sprawling an event to recount from one point of view.

A final reason for multiple characters was that Dan is getting pretty damn senior by now. We began the series with him as an ensign in The Circle. Now he’s a one-star, at least for the duration. But what that means is that as he ascends the ladder, it becomes more and more difficult to believably involve him in close-up dramatic situations. Most admirals I know would agree that their official duties are pretty unexciting from an action-adventure standpoint.

Thus, artistically, we had to transition Dan from an action hero to something more like a big-picture boss who functions less to take on bad guys hand-to-hand, as he did in earlier books, and more like the wartime leader who has to inspire, manage, and adapt fleet tactics to new threats and ways of fighting. That doesn’t mean the decisions he will make won’t be hugely significant and maximally stressful! He also shares with Blair Titus the coverage of overall strategy, although as a (increasingly reluctant) member of the administration she operates at an even higher level than he does.

MD: The title Deep War seems to be a homage to the Russo-Soviet pre-World War II concept of Deep Battle, a concept of operational warfare emphasizing penetration of enemy strategic depth. Was this intentional, and if so, who is waging the Deep War?

DP: Not really! Actually it’s a homage to Ilya Ehrenburg’s poem “The War,” where he wrote: “We speak of deep night, deep autumn; when I think back to the year 1943 I feel like saying “deep war.””  So it’s a literary reference that can be taken other ways as well. That I think is the best way to craft a title, with resonance that beckons the reader in, then reveals multiple meanings and associations as the book progresses.

MD: One theme that seemed to run through Deep War was the juxtaposition between Thucydides Whale and Elephant. By the time of your story, the United States has effectively denuded Chinese naval power, but can’t reach the land power’s center of gravity. Likewise, China, despite efforts through cyberspace, can’t reach the distant American center of gravity by conventional means. China has spent a lot of money and time trying to turn itself into a maritime power. Has it succeeded? Or will a Thucydides-type dynamic continue to hold true into the future?

DP: There are more elements to sustaining naval power than ships, or even a balanced fleet. Allies, technological depth, economic staying power, training, tactics, national determination, leadership, and geography are others. Right now we’re neglecting and even estranging our allies, but that can’t continue with any good end result for us. So, I assume in my writing that any fissures have largely been healed (though some allies are more allied than others). China’s increasing overreach and bullying of smaller nations will also contribute to a rebalancing of alliances.

But to return to your first question: the dire and unprecedented problem of how a war between two nuclear powers can be terminated resonates through the book. This is the crux of the dilemmas faced by Blair Titus, Dr. Szerenci, and Jay Yangerhans, and even certain elements within the Chinese leadership. They are searching more and more desperately as the conflict deepens and casualties mount for a way not necessarily to “win,” but to reach at least an armistice before escalation leads to mutual destruction. This is the real tension of the last two volumes of the War with China series, as I believe it’s the most likely way things would play out in the real world.

MD: Any final thoughts to share?

DP: In closing, I want to thank the many fans who’ve stuck with me through this series. I know it’s been frustrating at times to have to wait for the next volume in order to find out what happens to Teddy, Dan, Blair, Hector, Cheryl, and our other friends. Dark fates await some of them. Brighter days beckon for others. I too am just as impatient to find out how it all ends. Stay with me, as you so resolutely have so far, and we’ll all discover what lies at the end of their turbulent voyages!

David Poyer is the most popular living author of American naval fiction. His military career included service in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Arctic, Caribbean, the Middle East, the Pacific, and the Pentagon. His epic novel-cycle of the modern military includes The Med, The Gulf, The Circle, The Passage, Tomahawk, China Sea, Black Storm, The Command, The Threat, Korea Strait, The Weapon, The Crisis, The Towers, The Cruiser, Tipping Point, Onslaught , and Hunter Killer (all available from St. Martin’s Press in hardcover, paper and ebook formats). Deep War, the latest in his War with China series, recently published on December 8. Visit him at www.poyer.com or on Facebook.

Michael DeBoer is a U.S. naval officer. The views herein are his alone and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense, the Department of the Navy, or any other organization.

Featured Image: Littoral Combat Ship by Matt Bell.