Barry Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Security Studies Program, and serves on the Executive Committee of Seminar XXI. Currently on leave, he is presently serving as the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center for the 2016-2017 term. In his most recent book, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (2015), Dr. Posen critiques Liberal Hegemony, the intellectual foundation of current U.S. grand strategy. He presents a bold new vision, a Grand Strategy of Restraint, as an alternative to Liberal Hegemony, and argues that the U.S. ought to focus on pursuing its security through an emphasis on command of the commons, a strategy with a considerable maritime component. CIMSEC spoke with Dr. Posen to get his take on how his arguments can be applied to the world’s emerging strategic defense dilemmas.
Q: Many have suggested that the U.S. is lacking a coherent strategy, including incoming Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who has testified that the U.S. is suffering from “strategic atrophy.” To what extent do you agree with such statements? Is it that the U.S. lacks strategic vision, or that the chaotic nature of the world makes the pursuit of any set strategic goals a fruitless exercise?
A: The United States has had the same strategy since the end of the Cold War. That strategy is Liberal Hegemony. It has two purposes: preserve to the extent possible the immediate post Cold War U.S. power and influence advantage relative to other nation states (dubbed the “unipolar moment”) and promote the spread of democratic forms of governance, market economies, and the rule of law—both within societies and at the level of the international system. This is a revolutionary strategy: it is meant to ensure U.S. security by transforming international politics.
These goals are very ambitious, and confront many moving targets. First, the economic and technological bases for power are diffusing to other countries and to groups, making it inherently difficult to preserve U.S. power and influence relative to them. Second, other peoples may not wish to emulate our forms of governance and economic organization. Nationalism is a strong force, making societies resistant to external tutelage. In some places, there simply is no obvious path to a liberal future. The Middle East is perhaps the most obvious example. There is a strong tension between the preservation of U.S. interests, power, and the spread of democracy. Indeed, there is not even sufficient cause-effect understandings about how to construct democracies.
Q: The U.S. identifies its adversaries in a 4+1 construct: revisionist regional powers such as China and Russia, rogue states that make wild threats and are pursuing or have pursued weapons of mass destruction such as Iran and North Korea, and the condition of widespread extremism and insurgent conflict. Under a Grand Strategy of Restraint, what would be the priorities among these threats?
A: The U.S. needs to think about what are the main threats to its safety, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and to its ability to generate sufficient power to defend these. If China or Russia were to establish hegemony in their regions, that would be a problem for the U.S. Russia is not powerful enough to do so in Europe. China may grow to be powerful enough to do so in Asia. So China is the main problem, though a full court press of containment seems premature.
“Rogue” states are not major problems for U.S. security; they may be problems for U.S. allies and if those allies lack the power to deal with them, then the U.S. can lend a hand. Extremism can be a problem, when it manifests itself in terrorist organizations with global ambitions. But this threat cannot be addressed as we have tried to address it, by reforming societies at the source. Instead the best the U.S. can do is keep pressure on such groups to divert their energies to their own defense, and to put defensive barriers between them and the U.S. This will not stop every problem, but efforts to go to the source, as attempted in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to create new terrorists as fast as the U.S. eliminates old ones.
Q: What is the force structure that a Strategy of Restraint recommends?
A: Restraint focuses U.S. security efforts on the most important threats to U.S. security. And it chooses military forces that are most appropriate to address those threats. Though ‘terrorists of global reach’ are a threat to U.S. safety, the chosen remedy of the last fifteen years—sending large numbers of ground forces to democratize and reform riven societies at gunpoint has proven wildly expensive and largely ineffective. Restraint cuts the ground forces that have been employed for this purpose. Restraint does oppose other great powers who might try to establish hegemony in Eurasia. To maintain the capability to act in Asia, the U.S. must retain command of the sea, and of course sufficient command of air and of space to be able to move forces across the ocean, should that become necessary.
At this time, the most survivable warship in the U.S. inventory is the nuclear attack submarine. When forward deployed, it makes a critical contribution to blocking other great powers access to the open oceans. The aircraft carrier provides a mobile, strategic reserve, to assist threatened allies, and to help sustain command of the air over the open oceans. That said, the carrier is increasingly vulnerable to a range of weapon systems deployed ashore. Thus, in wars with peer competitors, carrier forces must be used in strength and also with care. Except against much weaker states, they can no longer be viewed as airfields that can simply linger offshore for extended periods. U.S. strategic decision makers—civilian and military—must confront the strong possibility that in a serious conflict, some carriers will be lost. The U.S. began WW2 with six carriers; by the end of 1942 four were sunk; and two were badly damaged. Command of the sea does not come cheap.
Q: How important is it for the U.S. to assert itself in the South China Sea? What strategic interests and precedents are at stake? What is the value of freedom of navigation operations there and what other means can the U.S. employ to shape the environment?
A: The U.S. relies on the sea to access the rest of the world, not just for trade, but more importantly to ensure against the rise of a continental hegemon. Thus the U.S. should protect freedom of the seas. States are tempted to bootstrap historical claims and the fine print of the Convention on the Law of the Sea to assert control over quite a lot of sea space. The U.S. should ratify the Convention and continue to assert its right to sail in those waters where others’ claims seem beyond what the Convention allows.
Q: You severely criticize “buck-passing diplomacy” by U.S. allies in your book. Yet there are partners who have been working well with the U.S. (e.g. Singapore) or that the U.S. could be doing more with (e.g. Australia). How can the U.S. better leverage security relationships with such prospective partners? Are there any lessons the U.S. can learn from these relationships that can be applied to the U.S.’s relationships with less forthcoming partners?
A: Most U.S. allies invest much smaller shares of GDP in defense than does the U.S. This arises from their confidence that the U.S. will defend them, and perhaps also their true doubts about the imminence of security threats. They may complain about those threats, but they may not be as concerned as they pretend to be. Australia is one of the allies that under-invests. To the extent that some allies do more than others, this arises from either their proximity to threats, or their history of having been abandoned, or nearly abandoned by past protectors.
There are three lessons for the U.S. First, when your allies tell you they are frightened, ask them what they intend to do about it before offering to solve the problem for them. If the answer is not much, then do not rush to address the problem. Second, make burden sharing a central issue of alliance diplomacy. Third, remind allies that the U.S. is inherently a very secure country. And the U.S. retains command of the sea. We have more options than they do. They need to earn our support.
Q: Donald Trump, on the campaign trail, suggested that the U.S. provide less security to allies unless they paid more, and hinted that Japan, South Korea, and other countries, should acquire nuclear weapons. If Donald Trump sustains pressure on U.S. allies to increase burden sharing, how may these alliances evolve?
A: Eliciting a more equitable sharing of defense burdens requires a strategy. If the President simply sends an irate tweet every now and then, he will accomplish very little.
There are two ways this can go. First, the President can complain and at the same time unilaterally reduce U.S. military contributions to the alliance. If the U.S. simply disengages, my prediction is that U.S. allies, who are quite rich, will learn to defend themselves. But the process could be rocky. This could include getting nuclear weapons. We may wish for prudential reasons to attempt serious reform first. Or, the U.S. can make burden sharing a central issue in the alliances, hinting that our contributions depend on theirs.
The President and U.S. cabinet officials and diplomats must communicate regularly and publicly with allies on this issue. The alliances must set actual concrete military goals. Many of these should be public. The performance of allies must be assessed in public. The Congress must hold hearings on the matter. The press needs to be induced to cover the issue. The allies need to be made to believe that this is very, very serious. If they value U.S. help, they must show that they care about their own defense. They must be made to believe that without evidence to this effect, the alliances will fray, and they will find themselves on their own. Few people remember that this is what the U.S. did with NATO in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It did not work perfectly, but it worked better than anything attempted in recent years.
Q: In the conclusion of your book, you remark that change can happen through one of three ways. The Strategy of Restraint could be adopted through astute politicians listening to proponents of the Strategy of Restraint and having a “eureka” moment; through crisis; or through incremental changes. Is Trump’s election more like a “eureka” moment, or just the first step in a longer process of redirecting U.S. security policy?
A: It is very difficult to read the actual foreign policy orientation of the Trump administration. It does not look to me as if this is a ‘eureka’ moment for the “Restraint” strategy. Instead, this looks a bit like hegemony without liberalism. President-elect Trump has promised to increase U.S. military spending. This is not consistent with Restraint. His appointees seem to be people who wish to militarily confront those states and groups who challenge the U.S. in any way. China and Iran seem to be at the head of the list. Some of his appointees seem hostile to Russia as well. The President-elect seems to wish to do something more aggressive vis-a-vis Al Qaeda and ISIL than the outgoing administration. It is hard to see how this many military confrontations would be consistent with Restraint. With this many under-thought confrontations underway, it is likely that one or more will go awry. The costs will mount, and future administrations will find they have even less public support for a forward grand strategy. This is how I imagine the U.S. could ultimately shift to a more restrained grand strategy.
Barry Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Security Studies Program, and serves on the Executive Committee of Seminar XXI. He is presently serving as the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center.
Mina Pollmann is CIMSEC’s Director of External Relations.
Featured Image: CAMP FUJI, Japan (Nov. 4, 2016) MV-22B Osprey tiltrotor aircraft return after a long-range raid from Combined Arms Training Center, Camp Fuji, Japan to Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, Okinawa as part of Blue Chromite 2017, Nov. 4, 2016. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sergeant Major Michael Cato/released)
It’s the end of the year, so the CIMSEC team gets together to talk about the events of 2016 and does its best to look into the crystal ball to see what is on the horizon in 2017.
Happy New Year from the entire CIMSEC team!
Matthew Merighi is the Senior Producer for Sea Control and the Host of Sea Control: North America. He works as Assistant Director of Maritime Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
Some international observers minimize the importance of military facilities and operational capabilities on the People’s Republic of China’s various claimed features, rocks, and islands in the South China Sea. They should reconsider.
Each location in isolation is not that potent. However, in the aggregate, this island base network poses a more resilient capability (geographically dispersed cluster bases) which, at the very least, would require a significant effort to neutralize, detracting significantly from other priority missions.
PRC military aircraft and missile batteries spreading throughout the South China Sea serve a number of important functions, all to the disadvantage of the United States and its allies and those who have a stake in freedom of the seas, the rule of law, and their own territorial claims.
First, they fortify the PRC’s maritime approaches.
Second, they militarize the PRC’s political claims, making it much more difficult to challenge them legally.
Third, they make it operationally much more difficult and risky to dislodge the PRC from these positions.
Fourth, these individual military capabilities are part of a larger fixed and mobile PRC military network, not only throughout the South China Sea, but on the Chinese mainland.
Fifth, the PRC now has four large People’s Liberation Army (PLA) airfields in the South China Sea, and these extend dramatically the operational range of PLA land-based aircraft, which can recover on these fields, refuel, and swap crews in shuttle missions which change the military equation considerably.
Sixth, these maritime facilities push out the limits of the PLA’s maritime footprint. This helps the PRC achieve a goal of establishing maritime control throughout the first island chain by magnifying the PLA’s anti-access (A2) and area-denial (AD) capabilities and bringing a considerably larger portion of the PRC’s maritime approaches under PLA firing arcs. Planners will have to take into account future deployments of DF-21D and DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missiles, for instance, and the likelihood of an extension of PRC seabed acoustic sensors like the U.S. SOSUS system, tracing the contours of China’s Nine Dash Line territorial claims.
What happens when advanced systems are deployed to these island outposts?
As one example, it was only a matter of time before Russia announced the transfer of the S-400 Triumf (NATO reporting name: SA-21 Growler) advanced air defense system to the PRC, following on the earlier transfer of the less-capable but still potent S-300. Given its extremely long range and effective electronic warfare capabilities, the S-400 is a game-changing system which challenges current military capabilities at the operational level of war.
Depending upon where in the PRC it is deployed, and which variant is transferred, its very long range would extend over Taiwan and the Senkaku (Daioyutai/Daioyu) islands. If Russia provides the S-400 with the longest range — 250 miles — in essence this would have the effect of turning a defensive system into an offensive system, and extend the PRC’s A2/AD umbrella over the territory of other regional states and the high seas.
Effective air defense systems like the S-400 are consequential because of the cost equation involved. Surface-to-air missile systems are much less expensive than the manned (and unmanned) aircraft they are designed to target or deter. The very long range of the S-400 multiplies the advantage. Without effective countermeasures, aircraft would be held away from China’s coasts, giving teeth, for instance, to the PRC’s assertion that surveillance missions in the PRC’s EEZ are not allowed.
Modern air forces expect to have to fool, suppress, pick their way through, or go around good integrated air defense systems, and countermeasures and tactics for doing so are well developed. In a move-countermove air warfare competition, the Russian transfer of the S-400 to the PRC would make doing so much more difficult (although not impossible).
Of course, one must wonder what the Russians are thinking in their defense technology relationship with PRC as all of this unfolds. Moscow is clearly aware that, while the PRC is expanding to seaward to challenge East Asia’s maritime and littoral states, Beijing’s list of revanchist claims must have motivated PLA leaders to consider plans for northward expansion as well.
Seventh, as Beijing consolidates political, economic, and military control over the South China Sea, one obvious purpose in mind will be to establish secure bastions there for the new Chinese SSBN force. Doing so would be consistent with what we saw the Soviets do when pressed by U.S. and allied ASW forces as envisioned by U.S. Chief of Naval Operations (1978-82) Adm. Thomas Hayward’s Maritime Strategy, subsequently made famous by U.S. Secretary of the Navy (1981-87) John Lehman.
Unfortunately, these aggressive PRC developments illustrate the old maxim that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. While the PRC’s construction on its collection of artificial islands must consist of dual-use infrastructure at this point, the military purpose behind the PRC’s new South China Sea bases is transparent. It would have been much easier to prevent the building of these facilities than it will be to dislodge them. The U.S. and the Allies learned this lesson, to Japan’s disadvantage, at Guadalcanal during World War II, where Japan and the United States fought desperately for six months to prevent Japan from building an airfield and dominating the lines of communication from the United States to Australia and New Zealand.
The PRC’s island building also reminds how unforeseen developments can have dramatic cascading consequences. At Guadalcanal, before the almost casual Japanese decision to build an airstrip at the location of what became immortalized as Henderson Field, the two sides had no specific intention to fight in the region, or to lose almost 50 ships in the ensuing naval battles. Japan’s Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto focused the Imperial Japanese Navy on Guadalcanal (previously an Imperial Army operation), because that was where the U.S. fleet and Marines were. Building airstrips and importing missile batteries has that sort of galvanizing effect, and in the case of Guadalcanal it preserved the Coral Sea strategy — keeping open the sea lanes between Australia and the United States — which remains a key pillar of U.S. and Australian national security strategy to this day.
What the PRC has been doing on Mischief Reef, Subi Reef, and Fiery Cross Reef, it can do on various other claimed features and rocks in the South China Sea. In fact, Beijing is doing what the United States and its allies — in a strategically logical world — should also be doing: expanding operational perimeters; distributing significant firepower along operational peripheries; and combining the psychological and legal elements of modern warfare in an integrated campaign.
Paul Giarra, a former U.S. naval aviator and strategic planner, is the President of Global Strategies & Transformation, a Washington, DC, area strategic planning consultancy. He has an extensive background as a national security analyst on Japan, China, East Asia, and NATO futures.
The ushering in of a new administration on January 20th has many wondering what campaign promises will materialize and meaningfully affect the U.S. Navy. Is it reasonable to expect movement toward a “350-ship Navy” and, if so, what might such a Navy look like? Where can increased military spending be focused to have the most immediate impact on the United States’ readiness to address near peer competitors?
To answer these questions, we invited one of the United States’ foremost experts on American Seapower, the Hudson Institute’s Bryan McGrath, on this episode of Sea Control. Hosts Sally DeBoer and Mike also talk with Mr. McGrath about measures to increase force lethality, the newly established N50Z office and efforts to let strategy inform the budget, and burgeoning threats in the 21st Century.
Listeners interested in attending Mr. McGrath’s American Seapower Speaking Tour can find more information here.
Read on, or listen to the audio below. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
SD: The first topic we’d like to discuss with you is fleet design. The forthcoming Trump Administration has, as part of its campaign promise, vowed to increase military spending and indeed establish a 350-ship Navy (as discussed by Steve Wills in his fantastic recent CIMSEC Article: A New Administration, A New Maritime Strategy). Due to sequestration and decreased funding for platforms in general over the past decade or so, as well as the Reagan-era platforms reaching the end of their service life, we are coming from behind. Where should money be spent to have the most immediate impact?
BM: With respect to the 350-ship Navy, I think the thing to keep in mind is that they have wisely not established a timeline for when they want to reach 350 ships. I’ve done a lot of work over the last few years looking at how the industrial base could flex to meet a larger navy and it seems to me that getting to 350 would be beyond anything but an emergency shipbuilding plan during two terms. What they ought to do is concentrate on getting us on a path to 350, articulate what 350 ships looks like, and create a sense of trust in the congress that the Navy can build ships cheaply and efficiently.
One way to get started on this, and obviously Steve Wills is one of the most articulate defenders of the LCS, is to build more LCSs relatively quickly. I have written an article on this for the Hudson Institute Center for American Seapower where I recommend building two ships per yard in ‘17 and ‘18, and then moving to the frigate design and conducting a competition where the winning yard would build the frigate starting in ‘19 and the losing yard would continue to build LCS through 25. These would be the LCS-plus that the Navy is going to bid on in ‘17 that will have surface-to-surface missiles and air search radar, from what I can tell. This would be one way to produce 12-15 small surface combatants between now and ‘25. That keeps those two shipyards in business.
I think industrial base concerns are important and I recently listened to a hearing on LCS where people were making fun of or dismissing industrial base concerns. I think that’s strategically inept. If we are going to build and maintain the world’s finest navy we have to have a strong maritime industrial base. Plus, the fact is that Wisconsin, where one of the ships is built, was part of breaking down that blue wall and helped elect Mr. Trump. Alabama, where the other ships are built, is the home state of his attorney general. There are political realities here.
The other political reality is Sen. McCain and his desire to move away from the LCS ASAP. I think the Navy could go a long way toward meeting Sen. McCain’s concerns if they articulate within the next year or so what the follow-on frigate is going to be and that it will acquire it at the latest by FY26. There’s a hole in the small surface combatant biplane right now during 4 years in the late 20s that we need to fill and keep building ships.
You asked how to get started – hot production lines can build LCS, and build more oilers. We need oilers and need to rebuild the logistics fleet which is far smaller than it should be. We should also consider ship-to-shore connectors, ocean-going tugs, and understand there are a bunch of ships that can be built quickly, on budget, and show that we’re going forward.
Importantly, in ’17 and ’18, and even more important than building ships, is plugging the holes in the maintenance and modernization of the entire fleet, and not just ships but depot level maintenance on aircraft as well. We are at the ragged edge of hollowness right now and if we decide to start building ships willy-nilly on a base of shifting sands when we haven’t addressed modernization issues then we are making a mistake. I think we can build ships and accomplish this, and plus-up personnel accounts so that we can move and train people. If we’re going to build the Navy 30% bigger then costs are going to be incurred that aren’t bound up in shipbuilding.
SD: To expand on this, what are the major obstacles you see to the 350-ship Navy and to building toward a bigger navy or putting a nation on that road?
BM: I think the biggest issue is that the president-elect made a 350-ship Navy an article of his campaign, he won the election, and navies never grow unless the president is behind them. The first thing is the president has to stay behind that goal. If indeed he does, it is likely to happen. It’s not guaranteed because his bankers on Capitol Hill have to write the checks. The one thing that I haven’t heard yet, but I imagine they’re hard at work on a story to articulate why we need 350 ships, where, why, how will they operate, to what extent, against whom and what threats? The thing that many people don’t realize about the 600-ship Navy in the Reagan era is that that number was rattling around for a while in the late 70s and it was an article of the election in 1980, but it wasn’t until Reagan came into office and John Lehman was able to tie the emerging thinking of some really visionary admirals in the pacific fleet to that number. You need to have a story. Congress won’t appropriate money until they know what the plan is and why. That’s the biggest problem.
SD: Speaking of a narrative, it seems to me as a non-expert, that the Republican party has moved toward the idea of non-intervention and Mr. Trump said yesterday (and I know there’s a difference between things said in promotion and things that actually happen) that there would be focus on non-intervention and just defeating ISIS as far as U.S. military policy goes. Does that indicate to you anything about his commitment to the Navy?
BM: I’m not sure I would say the Republican party has gone in that direction, but the president-elect of the U.S. and his support base have moved in that direction. I think there is a serious tension within the GOP. I am one of the other guys, I think about American exceptionalism and think the world is better with more America in it. The road to perdition is paved by trade wars and moving away from a global trade posture. So, the problem or the difficulty that I see in making the case for a 350-ship Navy is in the “to do what?” question. If you are going to lean on allies to pick up more slack and if Russia is not seen as a major threat, then a 308-ship Navy is probably sufficient, the one that is there now. In order to justify 350 ships you have to have a more global internationalist outlook, so there is some tension there. I think they can thread the needle, but it is going to be hard.
MK: I would like to bring up the decline in attack submarine numbers throughout the early 2020s. There are ways to figure that out, like building 2 Virginia-class SSNs and one Columbia-class SSBN-X a year, but that is going to have to get done and paid for or we won’t have that capability. The attack submarine force will sharply decline right about the time the Chinese undersea threat becomes more pronounced. Right now, having dry-dock space to maintain the fleet that exists is at a sheer premium if we’re going to talk about plussing up the fleet and there will need to be an increase in shipyard capacity for maintaining that fleet.
BM: This is a national strategic issue. The Navy and the U.S. military should defend free markets but we don’t have to practice them. There are sound military reasons for excess capacity – excess capacity that you would never maintain if you were running a business – you don’t want excess stock on the shelves. That’s not the way the military works, we need excess capacity so that we can ramp up and have a workforce that can do what you need it to do.
MK: The other thing I would add to that is we sort of, based on some dubious lessons from WWII, think that we can build ourselves out of any deficit at the beginning of a major war. That isn’t the history of WW2, most of the naval conflict was fought with platforms that existed at or programs that were underway in December of 1941. Second, the shipbuilding excess capacity that existed in the country at the time does not exist today. I am not saying that we’re headed for world war, but it’s a worthy intellectual exercise to think about how you would plus that up and recognize the time that it would take to make a massive change in fleet size inside of a strategic challenge would be prohibitive at this point with the complexity of ships that are being built.
BM: It isn’t going to happen. In those days American shipyards were building merchant ships, you could take that commercial capacity and turn it into cannibalized excess shipbuilding, tank, plane capacity, etc. It just doesn’t exist now.
MK: But it certainly does exist in China though!
SD:That’s a great point, and we talked about in an interview with Dr. Andrew Erickson of the Naval War College, who is the editor of the new book Chinese Naval Shipbuilding. Could you speak to the CNO’s recent OPNAV staff reform co-locating the assessment division with the strategy folks in the new N50 office. Reactions have been positive – people like the idea of strategy informing budget. What kinds of substantive changes do you think we can expect from this arrangement and are you generally in favor of it?
BM: Who could not be in favor of it? It’s like ice cream or air. It’s what we have all always wanted in theory, right? Every strategist or would-be strategist wants resources to follow strategy. I think the CNO is making all the right moves and saying all the right things but resources following strategy is hard, really hard. It’s challenging enough to have resources follow strategy when you are utterly in charge of all of the variables – like if you’re running a company and can put internal investments where you want them to go and enter new markets as you want to. The CNO and SECNAV don’t have those luxuries. They have to respond to national tasking and to national strategy, so I think there is great value in the exercise and in the attempt. I look forward to its success – I might not bet on it. I’m going to meet with the N50 people to talk about some of these things and maybe my opinion will change. I am looking forward to it. I do like that some of the folks from N81 are being dragged over there and that there will be a way to assign them or have some folks who are in charge of thinking about how the fight will happen and what will be the desired strategic outcomes pushing them rather than N81 making it up itself, which kind of appears the way it has been done for a long time.
MK: I am also in the wait and see category. I think no matter how good your intentions may be there’s a tendency in large organizations to sort of know the answer going in. I think there’s the potential there that we assign the answer before the answer is given. If we’re told to program to 350 ships we will find something to do with them, rather than try to take a top down approach, which may take longer, given our needs.
BM: I think the CNO is doing something even more intelligent and even more potentially beneficial to the navy than this N81/N50 alignment thing. And that is taking a more architectural look at fleet design and dividing up or thinking about that architecture through domains rather than platforms, and assigning a honcho to each domain who then works with the resource sponsors within that domain to create a program that serves the domain’s ends – threats, networking, weapons, sensors, platforms – in a more holistic and integral way so that you’re able to allocate functionality more efficiently in a domain without thinking about air, surface, and subsurface and other things separately. Think about fighting in that domain in the most efficient way and allocate functionality that makes the most sense. That could be truly revolutionary if it works.
SD: Let’s switch gears. Characterize the fleet’s current effort to increase lethality in terms of conflict with proto-peer competitors. Specifically, we talk about distributed lethality – which we know you’re an expert on – and would like you to speak to the command and control construct that would accompany DL and the kinds of training and experimentation the fleet will undergo to implement it.
BM: So I just gave a talk at the OPNAV staff/CNA Future Strategy Forum at the Navy Memorial. I was on a panel that was called “beyond distributed lethality” and one of the things I said was that it was gratifying to think that DL had become so integrated into thinking that we could now move beyond it. Some of that was tongue in cheek but not all of it.
The subject of my talk was split into two halves. The first was command and control and the second was combat systems. With respect to distributing lethality in the fleet, this includes things like maritime-strike tomahawk missiles, SM-6’s surface mode, OTH missile for LCS and SSC, and also SEWIP bloc 2 and 3. The Virginia Payload Module (VPM) in the submarine force is the granddaddy of DL in my view. Those guys were on that a long time ago and it really affected my thinking. The Navy’s doing a good job of spreading its weapons and that is important because it makes you harder to find, harder to attack, you get to attack the other guy from multiple angles, and you get to hold more of what he values at risk and through more ways.
SINGAPORE (November 30, 2016) USS Coronado (LCS 4) departs Changi Naval Base to conduct sea trials after a maintenance period. Currently on a rotational deployment in support of the Asia-Pacific Rebalance. (U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Michaela Garrison/Released)
The command and control of a distributed force is something that bears a lot of thought. The way I look at this is that there is a slider, a continuum, that describes an exquisite peacetime network and comms environment that I refer to as the pre-first shot state of the war environment. This involves very centralized control, very strict ROE – the kind of thing we exist in so we don’t get some guy popping off a shot at the ragged edge of the network starting a war. That requires a very sophisticated network with high confidence in communications. For peacetime operations that’s probably the appropriate manner of Command and Control whether concentrated or distributed. You’re still going to want to have centralized control over weapons employment in that environment.
You move that slider to wartime, “the knife fight in a dark closet,” where you’ve lost a good bit of your SATCOM, probably on HL, LPI/LPD kinds of comms, radio silence. Commanding and controlling those forces is a real challenge but it is something we have to think about in the bright light of peace while we aren’t fighting someone in that kind of environment. We have to be able to maintain as much war fighting capability as we possibly can as you move down the sliding scale toward dark and quiet from light and loud. We have to back up aerial layer networks, tactical receiving of satellites, and aerostats potentially. There’s all kinds of ways to set up networks and temporary networks. But we have to be investing money and thinking about it and imbue our commanders with a very honed sense of mission command and that is – go execute your last orders and oh, by the way, if we lose comms, use your initiative. Go kill people and wreck things.
MK: There’s sort of two ways to solve that. The first is by increasing your sensor payload on whatever you think your smallest unit of action is going to be. There’s a lot of inventive ways to look a little further over the horizon, and in the “knife fight in the dark closet,” the potential of mistakes is going to go up. In my view, I don’t think enough effort is being applied to trying to figure out how we’re going to integrate air assets into DL. I have a couple concerns with that, particularly because in a similar place the reason that Vincennes shot down that Iranian airliner in 1988, a part of it was because she was in the dark and couldn’t get her aviation support fast enough. The alert package launched off of the Forrestal and they burned to get there but they couldn’t get there in time. I think there could be a similar mistake, and in a modern 24-hour news cycle, this would look even more poorly. Look at what the Russians are going through having shot down an airliner. There is a lot of blowback from mistakes like that and so I am a little concerned. I would like to see an increase in sensor payload of those sorts of ships to give them a better look without national-level assets.
BM: There’s an interesting DARPA/Office of Naval Research joint program called TERN. It’s a medium-altitude long endurance UAV that would take off and land on LCS, future FF, DDG, and cruisers. I think that it’s a couple hundred pound payload, 14 hours in the air. It’s just a truck and then you decide what package goes on (comms, IR/ER, radar), so that’s one way to get around that problem. The other thing to think about though is – if we’re in the real knife fight, I should hope that mistakes will be tolerated. If we are in an environment where we’ve lost SATCOM and we’re fighting a first world power –mistakes are going to happen and you have to minimize them but I would hope that there would be some understanding.
MK: The Lusitania sinking by a German U-boat in a war zone, potentially carrying war material, had huge strategic impact. So no I don’t think so and the idea that the entire rest of the world while we and China go at it is probably not reality. So you know, to say nothing of some potential attempt to egg us on to do something. I don’t think that’s the case at all.
BM: Don’t get me wrong, you bring up good points, and your point about the rest of the world is well taken. If the U.S. and the PRC get into a scrap the pressure to end it quickly is going to be immense which has in my view, huge fleet architecture implications. You damn sure better have what’s out there in the fleet be a force that can deny or deter their aggression. If you can’t, their aggression becomes more likely because the probability of success becomes higher. I’m not trying to say we would willy-nilly shoot down airliners, what I am trying to say is that there will be mistakes, incredible mistakes when command and control is taken away, but I don’t know that we necessarily want to use the fear of such a thing to help design our force.
MK: I would generally agree. I am just arguing that the likelihood of mistakes will be lessened and the lethality of your basic unit of combat will be higher with some set of fast moving fixed wing aircraft that can look at OTH targets.
BM: Keep in mind one of the reasons DL is attractive is because you don’t need CAW, or you would need one less, because they’re finite and there’s a finite supply. They can’t be everywhere at once. This is the thing that I tell my aviator friends: in a first-world scrape, that air wing is going to be very busy not just doing strike but doing ASUW, hopefully someday ASW again, certainly doing ISR. I think the CAW is going to be incredibly busy, maybe too busy to provide air cover for a SAG out there alone and unafraid.
MK: I think that’s probably true and possible.
SD: With respect to increasing lethality, are there any initiatives you feel that don’t get enough attention from fleet leadership that could lead to increased lethality?
BM: Everyone gets all excited about lasers. Lasers have been just around the corner for 30 years and I think there are applications, they are coming, they are out there, but it’s not like I think, ‘If we just paid attention we could move it along.’ The technology is moving along at the rate that it can. Railgun? I like the railgun as a concept; I like it quite a bit. I think I like it more than anything in its ASMD role, if you could throw a high energy projectile that blows up and creates a lot of FOD in front of a missile that is a wonderful way to take it out and it’s cheaper than trying to do so with a missile. Again, railgun is moving along, someday we will solve the energy storage problem. Storing the power is the issue, not generating it. I would like to see a supersonic long-range ASM that could be fired from a surface ship or sub, I would like to see that in the inventory, and I am talking 500 miles or so. I’m relatively satisfied with the weapons, weapons programs, and sensors. What I am not satisfied with is the networking, the ISR, and the connective tissue among all the elements. What we don’t have is all the interstitial stuff that helps tie it all together.
MK: I think we’ve made some really good progress toward EW but I am not quite sure we’re there yet or have thought about what it’s going to take to fight in a heavy EW environment, both in EA or some sort of electronic defense and providing the frequency agility that we might need in a very complex EW environment. I agree and I think that the increase in lethality of surface ship ASW systems has really changed a lot of things with the way that you can do ASW. AN/SQQ-89(V)15 is really a change in model for the surface navy and it is a very impressive system.
BM: Great point, the surface fleet needs a weapon that can exploit the detection range of the V15. We need to get something headed out quickly toward that submarine in the 4th or 5th CZ to put it on the defense. Killing subs is hard, scaring them is easy. Bryan Clark has done great work at CSBA that showed we were much more effective in WWII at scaring subs away than killing them.
Speaking of EW, the second half of my discussion at the Future Strategy Forum was about combat systems and I made the case – I didn’t command a ship that long ago (2006), that ship is still in the fleet (USS Bulkley) – the combat system is essentially the same, but the kinetic combat system and the EW combat system were not the same system. They were integrated to some degree, but not fully.
PACIFIC OCEAN (Jan. 26, 2008) Sonar Technician (Surface) 1st Class Mark Osborne supervises Sonar Technician (Surface) 2nd Class Randy Loewen, left, and Sonar Technician (Surface) 3rd Class Roland Stout, right, as they monitor contacts on an AN/SQQ-89V15 Surface Anti Submarine Combat System, aboard the guided missile destroyer USS Momsen (DDG 92). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class James R. Evans)
We need, at the unit level, to have a single combat system that provides decision makers with automated battle management aids, provide strategies that help you conserve weapons, that tell you the better thing to do here is to jam this missile with this technique rather than shoot it with this missile or this gun – that kind of full integration of hard and soft kill EW with kinetics at the unit level is required. But then we have to take it to the next level and have networked combat systems in a SAG so the SAG can husband its efforts in the most efficient way, which leads you up to the strike group. You can get to a point where you have almost a web-based combat system that degrades gracefully down to the combat system that is in the ship providing end-to-end functionality within the ship – hard kill and soft kill – that can be networked among other units in order to conserve assets. We have to find a way where we are not going Winchester on the first salvo.
BM: First, I have always considered A2/AD to be redundant. A2 and AD are the same thing. It is sea denial – its keeping someone from doing something they wish to do in a chunk of the ocean. So the term itself is redundant. I don’t have any problem with what the CNO did. I think it is reasonable from the standpoint of trying to get people off their fainting couches. People overestimate the “kill zone” that is the Pacific Ocean. It is just not the case, it is looney to think that, but what I think he’s trying to do by eliminating that term is to make sure people understand that we have some tricks up our sleeves and can absorb some of this risk and fight our way in, fight our way out.
MK: I totally agree. He is saying that A2/AD presents it as a fait accompli rather than an aspirational goal is very well taken.
BM: Let’s face it; dealing with OTH radar – OTH radar has different characteristics at night and day. Sun spots, weather comes into play. What’s really needed is the ability in real time to heat map adversary ISR. We have to be able to see where the weaknesses and seams are and that’s where you go project power and do strike, then get the hell out and go do the next one. We can do that, we just have to think our way though it.
SD: I wanted to mention your American Seapower speaking tour. Can you tell our audience what that means, what you’re doing, and how they can attend?
BM: I think we haven’t been doing a good job of telling the American people the value of investing in their Navy and what the payoff is. My speaking tour is targeted to 23 different Rotary Clubs around Maryland. I have done 12 so far and I talk for 20 minutes and answer questions with a bunch of people who don’t ‘get’ the Navy. I am going to the far western edge of Maryland next week, a town called Oakland, and I’m going to talk to people about seapower. It’s a result of my frustration and my effort to try to do some good.
SD: I want to thank you for your time today, it was a true honor to have you on the show. Any last comments before we sign off?
BM: I love what you guys do, keep it up!
SD: Thank you very much, sir. Thank you also to our listeners and have a great holiday season.
Sally DeBoer is the President of CIMSEC for 2016-2017. The views of the guests are theirs alone and do not represent the stance of any U.S. government department or agency.
