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Hard Truths: The Navy and Marines Need Another #MeToo Moment: Part Two

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By Captain John P. Cordle, USN (Ret) and K. Denise Rucker Krepp

Part Two

In Part One we shared our experience and gave some interpretations of the data.* In this part we will finish that discussion and proceed to a set of recommendations. In the spirit of the discussion, it is important to understand that the trends are all heading in the wrong direction, indicating that policy and procedure changes are not enough. A culture change is required, starting at the unit level, if these trends are to be reversed. The following graph shows the magnitude of the problem, and the disturbing trend:

This chart of Sexual Assault events from the 2021 report shows quite clearly that the trend is in the wrong direction. (Source: FY21 DOD Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military).

5. Victims Bear a Heavy Burden
The IRC spoke with hundreds of survivors of sexual assault during the 90-Day review. One-on-one interviews and panel discussions brought to light the substantial burdens placed on victims as they navigated the military justice and health systems. Many survivors with whom the IRC spoke had dreamt their entire lives of a career in the military; in fact, they loved being in the military and did not want to leave, even after experiencing sexual assault or sexual harassment. But because their experience in the aftermath of the assault was handled so ineptly or met with hostility and retaliation, many felt they had no choice but to separate.

John: This echoes the case of my friend, who resigned from the Navy after nearly 10 years with the feeling – related to me directly – that she had no faith the system would change. The idea of psychological safety of the victim is huge and must be considered by leaders throughout the process. Again the DoD report is quite damning, showing that retribution and retaliation were found in 30 percent of cases – that means that someone who makes a report has a one-in-three chance of being retaliated against by the command or the alleged aggressor. I would never want my leadership to be characterized as “inept” – but the report found enough evidence to include this finding. Again, get out the mirror.

Denise: I have worked with both male and female sexual assault victims, including military and civilian. Service Academy students are nominated by Congressmembers to attend highly selective federal institutions. They have generally achieved high marks and excelled academically in high school to compete for the nomination. Most also excel in sports and extra-curricular activities to be competitive. They and their parents fill out mountains of paperwork and then they finally arrive at the school, full of dreams. Then reality sets in; I have seen their dreams of 20 years of service dashed by sexual assault. I have seen the tormented crying eyes of mothers and the rage-filled eyes of fathers, many of whom are alumni of the same institution.

When the military fails to help MST victims, the services also fail their parents. The failure is remembered and retold at family gatherings around the country. It is also told in videos, including the one that I watched at the new movie museum in Los Angeles. Every day, thousands of museum visitors learn about how the military failed to protect those who fought so hard to wear the uniform. If we want to look at why the military is having a recruiting problem, one place to start is the negative recruiting by those who recall a SASH event during their service – and tell their story. People do not want to join or stay in an organization where they are not respected.

6. Critical Deficiencies in the Workforce
The workforce dedicated to Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) is not adequately structured and resourced to do this important work. Many failures in prevention and response can be attributed to inexperienced lawyers and investigators, collateral-duty (part-time) SAPR victim advocates, and the near total lack of prevention specialists. These failures are not the fault of these personnel, but rather of a structure that de-emphasizes specialization and experience, which are necessary to address the complexities of sexual assault cases and the needs of victims.

John: You get what you pay for. Again there have been major steps taken in the past year to address these deficiencies, but if this is not the topic of a significant “Get Real Get Better” moment in the Pentagon then none such exists. One service member whom the author is mentoring received a letter at 180 days explaining that due to a backlog, her case – which was supposed to be adjudicated within 90 days – would take at least another 120 days – meanwhile she works at the same command with the alleged perpetrator, feeling that system has failed her – because it has. From collateral duty officers and chiefs with little training or motivation, to the oft-quoted dearth of mental health resources across the military, there is much to be done here. But what about the unit level? I submit that it is not OK to wait for the Navy to train thousands of counselors over the next few years. If you are in command today, take a personal interest in your staff and make sure that they have both the ability, the time, and the training to do the tough job of a sexual harassment (SH) or SAPR representative. Make sure that the available resources at the Fleet and Family Service Center are part of Command indoctrination, the command Facebook page, family support groups, and the sponsor program.

Denise: The critical deficiency I witnessed as a federal agency chief counsel and as a locally elected official was the lack of robust investigations and prosecutions. Prosecutors were not trained to prosecute the cases, were overworked and inexperienced, and found it easier to drop the case, claiming lack of evidence, than to do the work of studying the evidence and asking questions.

7. Outdated Gender and Social Norms Persist Across the Force
Although the military has become increasingly diverse, women make up less than 18 percent of the total force.4 With these dynamics, many women who serve report being treated differently than their male counterparts. In the IRC’s discussions with enlisted personnel, many Service women described feeling singled out or the subject of near daily sexist comments, as one of few women in their units.

John: Did you know that there are still several Navy ships with no female enlisted crew members? A recent photo of the senior Surface Warfare Flag Officers includes only two female Admirals. Diversity breeds inclusion – and a lack thereof does the opposite. The USMC lags the other services in female percentage by a significant margin, and yet are the apparent source of resistance to the Task Force One Navy recommendation to include RESPECT as a fourth core value. Unit leaders must look at their command through the eyes of the least represented and act accordingly. That said, it is also important to bear in mind that SH and SA are not restricted to a single gender and males can be targets as well, bringing a separate set of stigma and consequences for the victim, who may be labeled with a sexual orientation that is not their own due to the nature of the incident.

Denise: I served on active duty from 1992-2002. I left active duty because it was crystal clear at that time that I would not make Captain and Admiral. I was smart enough to become a senior leader but I was not going to be given the jobs that would make me eligible for them. I made this determination after talking with my father, a USMA grad who made 06 by the age of 40. He had seen combat in Vietnam and was a Ranger.

My generation of women were not eligible for career-enhancing combat jobs, so many of us left the service, which is why there are not that many female Admirals today – it literally takes a generation to change that. Women continued to leave in the 2000s because again, the jobs were not open to us and if they were, we were subjected to comments by senior leaders like “don’t go getting pregnant on me.” (that is sexual harassment, by the way.) There were also other obstacles like unwavering weight standards that had to be met after having children, hairstyles that caused our hair to fall out, and horrible uniform designs…Problems our male counterparts never had to overcome. But looming large was the ever-present threat of being sexually harassed – or worse – and having it be ignored.

8. Little is Known about Perpetration
The most effective way to stop sexual harassment and sexual assault is to prevent perpetration. However, the Department lacks sufficient data to make evidence-based decisions in this domain. As a result, the impact of prevention activities in military communities, particularly activities aimed at reducing perpetration, remains relatively unknown.

John: The most important role of the unit commander here is to properly investigate and report the data in a timely manner. One service member shared being told to “think twice” about making a report because “it would make the command look bad” – by the command equal opportunity counselor! This should never happen. Face the facts, do not shy away, and make the required reports, regardless of the consequences – it is the right thing to do. While training may inhibit sexual harassment through better education and intervention, sexual assault is a crime, and all the training in the world is not going to stop someone who is already so inclined. But proper training to recognize the signs of a bad trend can lead to more intervention and thus, hopefully, to prevention or at least prosecution. Sexual predators have no place in the military and should be excoriated as efficiently as possible.

Denise: The best way to stop SASH is to prosecute existing cases and publicize the outcomes. Publicize how offenders are sent to prison. Publicize the loss of retirement benefits. Publicize all cases regardless of rank. Make it clear that everyone is held to the same standard.

Additionally, every year Department of Defense employees are required to take sexual assault and sexual harassment training. My recommendation is to include information in the training on the number of reports received each year, the number of individuals prosecuted each year for sexual assault and the number of individuals successfully court martialed for sexual assault.

We usually end an article with a list of recommendations, but since we both agree with all of the IRC findings, we will simply list them here (below) while encouraging the reader to find and read the original report. Many of them are at the Big Navy level – but we would encourage the reader to point out to their leadership where these actions are not having the desired effect or fast enough – and to be a demanding customer.

Key Recommendations:

    1. Ensure Service members who experience sexual harassment have access to support services and care.
    2. Professionalize, strengthen, and resource the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response workforce across the enterprise.
    3. Improve the military’s response to domestic violence—which is inherently tied to sexual assault.
    4. Improve data collection, research, and reporting on sexual harassment and sexual assault to better reflect the experiences of Service members from marginalized populations—including LGBTQ+ Service members, and racial and ethnic minorities.
    5. Establish the DoD roles of the Senior Policy Advisor for Special Victims, and the DoD Special Victim Advocate.

Accountability

    1. Create the Office of the Special Victim Prosecutor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and shift legal decisions about prosecution of special victim cases out of the chain of command.
    2. Provide independent trained investigators for sexual harassment and mandatory initiation of involuntary separation for all substantiated complaints.
    3. Offer judge ordered military protective orders for victims of sexual assault and related offenses, enabling enforcement by civilian authorities.

Prevention

    1. Equip all leaders with prevention competencies and evaluate their performance.
    2. Establish a dedicated primary prevention workforce.
    3. Create a state-of-the-art prevention research capability in DoD.

Climate and Culture

    1. Codify in DoD policy and direct the development of metrics related to sexual harassment and sexual assault as part of readiness tracking and reporting.
    2. Use qualitative data to select, develop, and evaluate the right leaders for Command positions.
    3. Apply an internal focus on sexual violence across the force in DoD implementation of the 2017 National Women, Peace, and Security Act.
    4. Fully execute on the principle that addressing sexual harassment and sexual assault in the 21st century requires engaging with the cyber domain.

Victim Care and Support

    1. Optimize victim care and support by establishing a full-time victim advocacy workforce outside of the command reporting structure.
    2. Expand victim service options for survivors by establishing and expanding existing partnerships with civilian community services and other Federal agencies.
    3. Center the survivor by maximizing their preferences in cases of expedited transfer, restricted reporting, and time off for recovery from sexual assault. 

That concludes the recommendations from the report. But it cannot end there. Only those in uniform can reverse this trend. That is our call to action.

Looking in the Mirror

One senior individual who read the draft of this article shared the idea that “nothing here is new,” citing Tailhook, Marines United, and other so-called “wake up calls” going back decades. Reports were filed, actions taken, briefs prepared – and yet here we are. Will it be different this time? Only we, the deck-plate leaders, can answer that question. In the end, we all want a workplace where we feel comfortable doing our jobs, and one where we would advise our children to join this organization. At a recent diversity symposium, a young Marine asked a retired General on the leadership panel “If I were your daughter – would you advise me to join the Military today?” There was a long and suspenseful pause before the answer came – which I will keep private – but the fact that the answer was not an immediate and resounding “yes!” speaks volumes. If we accept this condition then perhaps we are the problem. If we tolerate the occasional inappropriate comment, the sexist joke, the unwanted touch – we become complicit. Is it easier to just look away? Sure. But that is not what leaders do – good ones, anyway!

We encourage all leaders in the Navy and Marine Corps to read and truly digest both the 2021 DoD Sexual Harassment report and the IRC report. If you teach at a Navy schoolhouse, especially a leadership course, add these to the required reading list. You will be astounded and disappointed to learn that the trends are in the wrong direction almost across the board. These two documents are both authoritative and stunning – and yet many have not read them in the first place. Navy leaders at the upper levels are taking action, but as someone once posted on a USNI Blog feed a few years ago, “culture change does not happen by instruction or edict, but by the actions of each individual throughout the organization, on the deck plates, on a daily basis.” We firmly believe this to be true.

This is not just a CNO or SECNAV problem – they are taking action. It is your problem and our problem. And only we can solve it.

Have your own #MeToo moment.

John Cordle is a retired Navy Captain who commanded two warships, was awarded the Navy League John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational Leadership, and the 2019 US Naval Institute PROCEEDINGS Author of the Year.

K. Denise Rucker Krepp spent several years on active duty in the U. S. Coast Guard, graduated from the Naval War College, and served as Chief Counsel for the U.S Maritime Administration. Krepp also served as a locally elected Washington, DC official and Hill staffer. She is a longtime advocate for the rights of sexual assault and harassment victims.

*Correction: the Independent Review Committee was ordered by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, not SECNAV as we stated in Part 1.

Featured image: A Marine practices in front of the USS Green Bay (U.S. Navy photo by Markus Castaneda.)

capability development

The Politics of Developing the Aegis Combat System, Pt. 2

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The following republication is adapted from a chapter from The Politics of Naval Innovation, a paper sponsored by the Office of Net Assessment and conducted by the Strategic Research Department of the U.S. Naval War College’s Center for Naval Warfare Studies. Read it in its original form here, read Part One of this republication here.

By Thomas C. Hone, Douglas V. Smith, and Roger C. Easton, Jr.

Rear Admiral Wayne Meyer: Manager And Entrepreneur

According to one of RADM Meyer’s former deputies, “Without Rickover, the Navy would have gotten nuclear power in submarines. There would have been no Aegis ship in the Fleet, however, without Meyer.” A former PMS-400 analyst, with over two decades experience in AAW development, noted that Meyer brought to the Navy its best example of integrated systems project management.

But it wasn’t easy for the Admiral. When he was appointed Manager of the Aegis Shipbuilding Project, he had to (1) organize his staff, (2) prepare designs for contractors, (3) develop a working relationship with his sponsor in OPNAV, (4) make sure Aegis ships met Fleet needs, and (5) keep Aegis afloat in Congress. The last task was threatened by the growing cost of ships and the Navy’s demand for large numbers of them. Converting Long Beach, for example, was estimated to cost nearly $800 million, more than the estimated price of a new conventionally-powered Aegis ship. But the Authorization Committees were dominated by advocates of nuclear power, so the pressure to convert Long Beach was strong….

…RADM Meyer was also able to get the Chief, NAVSEA, to support a charter for PMS-400-a charter which Meyer himself wrote. The charter (1) made Meyer responsible directly to the Chief, NAVSEA, (2) authorized Meyer “to act on his own initiative in [any] matter affecting the project,” (3) named Meyer the delegated authority of the Chief of Naval Material, (4) centralized control over Aegis ship procurement and Aegis system development in PMS-400, (5) made Meyer fully accountable for Aegis ship acquisition, (6) gave Meyer responsibility for preparing and signing the fitness reports and performance ratings of all military and civilian personnel assigned to PMS-400, (7) made Meyer responsible for “total ship system engineering integration,” and (8) gave PMS-400 the duty of integrating all the logistics requirements for Aegis ships. It was a major grant of authority. Developing force-level requirements, operational concepts, ship characteristics and doctrines was the duty of OP-03 (DCNO for Surface Warfare). There, Meyer had the support of VADM Doyle and his deputy, RADM Rowden (OP-35).30

After 1977, the Navy had problems with OSD and President Carter. In May 1977, for example, the President announced that his Administration would request Congress to authorize 160 new ships for the Navy over the next five years; one year later, Carter reduced that figure by half. Carter changed his mind about the Navy’s shipbuilding program because of studies in OSD which suggested that a major shipbuilding program would draw funds from the Army and Air Force, and that aircraft carrier survivability was much reduced in areas like the Mediterranean and Norwegian Seas. Defense Secretary Harold Brown was not convinced that the Navy needed 15 or even 12 Carrier Battle Groups, and his position carried the President.

The Navy, however, strongly disagreed. In 1977, the CNO authorized the Naval War College to begin a study of future force needs; parts of the study (Sea Plan 2000) made public in March 1978 directly contradicted the views of Defense Secretary Brown. The Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget accused the Navy of releasing parts of Sea Plan 2000 just to get Congressional attention and support. The Vice Chief of Naval Operations responded that, “We must avoid paralysis by analysis – a situation in which we talk about our Navy while our potential enemy is building his…”‘

…ADM Thomas Hayward, the new CNO, testified to Congress that, without Aegis, existing Carrier Battle Groups would be at great risk in the 1980s. ADM Hayward felt that the Carter Administration did not comprehend the strategic value of the Navy’s carrier forces and he initiated a series of studies to analyze the Navy’s contribution to a European war. He also supported Aegis. As a result of Hayward’s support, Congressional opposition to President Carter’s reductions in defense spending, and RADM Meyer’s ability to convince members of the House and Senate Defense Authorization Subcommittees that Aegis would work, FY 78 money was authorized for the lead Aegis destroyer (later to be classified as a cruiser).

Meyer’s Approach To The Navy And OSD 

To win support within the Navy, Meyer brought representatives from many Navy shore activities into PMS-400 by “double-hatting” them (that is, by giving them positions of responsibility within PMS-400 in addition to their regular jobs). The stratagem not only created teams of Aegis advocates in the Navy’s shore-based support organizations and within OPNAV, it also fed valuable experience into the Aegis technical group….

…One former aide said Meyer often used DSARC reviews to discipline his major contractors, RCA and Litton Industries (owner of Ingalls Shipbuilding). Another said Meyer felt that the DSARC process forced PMS-400 to be constantly alert, constantly tracking the progress of the Aegis system and its destroyer platform to head off any major delays or cost overruns. By meeting DSARC deadlines, PMS-400 could – and did – satisfy two important audiences: OSD and Congress.

…With money and Congressional support in hand, Meyer focused on satisfying OSD imposed deadlines and on supervising contracts. As the Admiral noted:

“At its peak, that project (PMS-400) never exceeded 120 people; most years, the project had only 70 people in it. I kept harping and harping on them about amplification. You can’t ever forget that you’re only one man-year, so if you’re going to get anything done, you have to find a way to amplify, and the only way you can amplify is through people. The Aegis effort in the end was an amplification into thousands of man-years.”

“Amplification” meant the following:

1. Making PMS-400 field representatives defacto Deputy Program Managers, so that contractors dealt regularly with an office possessing real authority.

2. Travel, with frequent on-site inspections and reviews. According to one witness, Meyer could be “ferocious” in these reviews, particularly at RCA and Ingalls. But his goal was to make adhering to production schedules a matter of pride. As one former staffer in PMS-400 said, “Meyer loved to kick the tires.” That meant lots of visits, even to subcontractors. RCA, for example, used PMS-400 to discipline Raytheon, one of its major subcontractors. And Meyer traveled regularly to smaller subcontractors, handing out efficiency awards and exhorting quality work.

3. Testing in parallel with production. PMS-400 “tested the hell out of the system,” according to a former Operations Division Director, because Meyer didn’t want any surprises. His goal, after all, was to produce a revolution in naval weaponry, and he was determined to turn his vision of warfare into a working reality.

4. Not allowing PMS-400 to become captive to routine. All the former staffers of PMS-400 interviewed for this study said RADM Meyer was a very demanding manager. Yet all respected him. They admired his fierce concern for excellence. As he himself admitted, “I harped on that and harped on that from day one.” They also admired his willingness to listen. One noted that Meyer was often not sure how to translate his “visions” into reality, so that senior contractor personnel wasted lots of time on ideas which didn’t pan out. But work was never dull. Meyer tapped key PMS-400 junior staff to answer Congressional questions and write speeches, and senior staff to hand out “Aegis Excellence Awards.” About every six weeks, the Admiral called a halt to travel, stuffed all of PMS-400 into a conference room, and reviewed the project’s status. He also gave out awards and “fired up the crowd.” Then it was back to travel and meetings.

5. Getting practical control of much of his contractors’ organizations. Meyer reached around RCA and Litton management to communicate with the people doing the work. Meyer also used the Applied Physics Laboratory and a number of independent consultants to review both technical and managerial practices employed by his major contractors. His goal was to create a community of Aegis supporters and experts. As one of Meyer’s former Deputies put it, “Meyer built a national organization through his prime contractors.”

6. Keeping fleet organizations informed with briefings, newsletters, films, and demonstrations. The Combat Systems Engineering Development Site (CSEDS) was used to show high-ranking Navy officers and influential members of Congress what Aegis could do, but it was also turned into a training station for AAW software development. To Meyer, Aegis was not a static system, and the heart of its “evolution” was its software. CSEDS both modified the software and showed it off. PMS-400 also planned programs to maintain and modernize Aegis ships.

7. Justifying Aegis to keep potential opponents quiet. Again, all responsible personnel in PMS-400 were tasked to defend Aegis against criticism. In the process, they often anticipated real problems and potential criticisms; the justification process was itself a planning tool…

….RADM Meyer’s real goal was not to field an improved AAW system; it was, instead, to revolutionize surface battle tactics of the Navy by the introduction of Aegis command and control systems. He had to play a game with the Navy and with Congress; pretend his system of battle management was conceptually developed when, in fact, it was still evolving. To keep it developing, Meyer needed to hoard money for contingencies; he also needed a sole-source relationship with RCA. Meyer also favored sole-source contracts in systems acquisitions and ship construction because PMS-400 would never have enough staff to manage second sources. As one former PMS-400 staffer said, “It was competition vs. control. We couldn’t have both.” Meyer wasn’t insensitive to cost; he was incensed when costs exceeded reasonable estimates. But he believed that PMS-400 would lose control of the situation if too many contractors were involved….

…Before John Lehman became Navy Secretary, the Navy rarely went to Congress with a clear, long-range strategy, and important Project Managers were given the freedom to develop their own relationships with members and staffers in Congress. Lehman changed all that. By 1982, the Secretary was acting on the basis of a planned, comprehensive legislative strategy, with clear goals and priorities set and enforced by his office. As one member of Lehman’s staff observed, “the mouthpiece has become the decision-maker.” An inevitable consequence of Lehman’s assertiveness was a clash of his perspective (with its emphasis upon building numbers of ships) with Meyer’s (with its bias toward changing the quality of battle management). Several serving Navy officers claimed in off-the-record talks that this conflict was behind Meyer’s failure to win a third star and advance to the position of Chief, NAVSEA…

…In 1983, the newspaper headline war heated up again. CG-47 was put through qualifications trials that April. That summer, Representative Denny Smith (R-Oregon), a frequent critic of high-cost military procurement programs, alleged that CG-47’s Aegis combat system had failed operational evaluation. His criticisms were echoed in the Senate by Gary Hart of Colorado, a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President. As Senator Hart told The Wall Street Journal, “Do we have a testing and reporting system that is fundamentally dishonest?” To head off speculation, the CNO acknowledged that there had indeed been software system failures in the April trials and he pledged further tests in September.

After the September 1983 tests, both Watkins and Secretary Lehman wrote to Representative Smith, assuring him (as Lehman did on 11 October) that “Aegis is the most carefully tested combat system ever built.” But Smith did not stop his criticism of Aegis. That winter, he found an ally in Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In February 1984, Grassley grilled Secretary Lehman and CNO Watkins on CG-47’s performance. The Navy Secretary accused Grassley of “grandstanding” and said that CG-47 was performing splendidly off the Lebanese coast in her first tour overseas. One week later, unnamed Pentagon and Congressional sources told The Washington Post that the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering had informed the Secretary of Defense that Aegis had serious design problems, and the Secretary of the Navy admitted to reporters that “actual missile kills … have not been that impressive.” At the same time, Secretary Lehman officially (and privately) directed PMS-400 to supervise “a fully challenging test series,” which it did with CG-47, April 23-29, 1984, near Puerto Rico.

ADM Watkins praised the results of the trials at a public press conference, and the May 1985 Naval Institute Proceedings carried a glowing description of the Aegis system and also praised the performance of CG-47 during the ship’s tour of duty off of the Lebanese coast the previous fall. A later issue of the same journal, however, carried a long letter from an officer who claimed that the ability of CG-47’s radar to monitor contacts against the backdrop of the Lebanese coast had been exaggerated. The ship had been approached by a light plane while patrolling near Beirut’s harbor, and, by his account, CG-47 never detected it. The question of Aegis’ operational performance was therefore left somewhat unresolved.

RADM Meyer left PMS-400 in August 1983 and became NAVSEA Deputy Commander for Combat Systems (NAVSEA-06). He was replaced by his protege and former Deputy, RADM D.P. Roane…

Revisiting The Issues 

…To bring Aegis from its conceptual stages to fleet service, ADM Meyer had to overcome enormous problems. Foremost among them were:

  • Convincing Congress, OSD, and the CNO that Aegis was necessary, technologically feasible, and affordable and then maintaining program credibility to ensure system survival over the twenty-odd years from system definition to fleet entry.
  • Overcoming aviation community recalcitrance to support a new capability which they believed would downgrade or eliminate their traditional mission of Battle Group protection.
  • Weathering the heated debate between nuclear power advocates and supporters of a high-low ship mix centered on hull design and ship propulsion which threatened to terminate the Aegis program altogether.
  • Overcoming organizational problems over control of Aegis including shipboard weapons systems requirements and ship class and hull design that were initially under separate and competing offices.
  • Maintaining continuity in contractor technical, analytical, and production support in an environment increasingly calling for competitive contracting so that system requirements could remain based on operational performance goals and contractors could be disciplined with respect to attaining project milestones.
  • Selling Aegis as a counter for the intermediate-range AAW threat, particularly in terms of its cost, when RADM Meyer envisioned Aegis from the outset as primarily a battle force integration system.

While other obstacles also had to be overcome, these impediments were both formidable in nature and exacerbated by a strategic culture within the Navy that remains inimical to revolutionary change. Admiral Meyer recognized that the only way to achieve integrated Battle Group AAW defense was with a system which inherently possessed the reaction time to effectively deal with the saturation, high speed, low-flyer threat complemented by a battle management architecture which would permit the operator to exploit the system’s capabilities. Battle management automation was key because without it the Aegis systems engineering success could never be utilized to its potential. However, such a revolutionary change in the way the Navy fights could not be “sold” in the early days and Admiral Meyer brilliantly camouflaged his true objectives under the umbrella of an intermediate AAW defense system for which a clear requirement had been established.

While Admiral Meyer’s ability to promote Aegis as a counter to the Battle Group intermediate-range AAW threat (rather than as a battle force integration capability) helped decrease intraorganizational hostility from the TACAIR community, aviators eventually recognized that the surface community would inevitably impinge on their roles and missions through a combination of battlespace management capabilities and improved surface-to-air and new land-attack cruise missiles. Meyer’s ability ultimately to persuade that community that its role in battle force protection would actually be revitalized by Aegis technology proved critical to the program’s overall success.

Similarly, maintaining credibility in Congress for roughly 20 years was no small undertaking. Debates over whether Aegis should only be incorporated on nuclear-powered ships, and over a high-low ship mix destabilized the Aegis system program in that it focused on considerations not relating to its necessary function and technological feasibility. Thus the Program Manager raised the program above internal Navy politics in order to maintain a constituency in Congress independent of other major fiscal concerns relating to naval issues in Washington.

Featured Image: An aerial starboard bow view of the Aegis guided missile cruiser TICONDEROGA (CG-47) underway during sea trials. (Photo via U.S. National Archives)

Culture

Upgrading the Mindset: Modernizing Sea Service Culture for Trust in Artificial Intelligence

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By Scott A. Humr

Winning on the future battlefield will undoubtedly require an organizational culture that promotes human trust in artificial intelligent systems. Research within and outside of the US military has already shown that organizational culture has an impact on technology acceptance, let alone, trust. However, Dawn Meyerriecks, Deputy Director for CIA technology development, remarked in a November 2020 report by the Congressional Research Service that senior leaders may be unwilling, “to accept AI-generated analysis.” The Deputy Director goes on to state that, “the defense establishment’s risk-averse culture may pose greater challenges to future competitiveness than the pace of adversary technology development.” More emphatically, Dr. Adam Grant, a Wharton professor and well-known author, called the Department of Defense’s culture, “a threat to national security.” In light of those remarks, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David H. Berger, stated at a gathering of the National Defense Industrial Association that, “The same way a squad leader trusts his or her Marine, they have to trust his or her machine.” The points of view in the aforementioned quotes raise an important question: Do Service cultures influence how its military personnel trust AI systems?

While much has been written about the need for explainable AI (XAI) and need for increasing trust between the operator and AI tools, the research literature is sparse on how military organizational culture influences the trust personnel place in AI imbued technologies. If culture holds sway over how service personnel may employ AI within a military context, culture then becomes an antecedent for developing trust and subsequent use of AI technologies. As the Marine Corps’s latest publication on competing states, “culture will have an impact on many aspects of competition, including decision making and how information is perceived.” If true, military personnel will view information provided by AI agents through the lens of their Service cultures as well.

Our naval culture must appropriately adapt to the changing realities of the new Cognitive Age. The Sea Services must therefore evolve their Service cultures to promote the types of behaviors and attitudes that fully leverage the benefits of these advanced applications. To compete effectively with AI technologies over the next decade, the Sea Services must first understand their organizational cultures, implement necessary cultural changes, and promote double-loop learning to support beneficial cultural adaptations.

Technology and Culture Nexus

Understanding the latest AI applications and naval culture requires an environment where experienced personnel and technologies are brought together through experimentation to better understand trust in AI systems. Fortunately, the Sea Service’s preeminent education and research institution, the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), provides the perfect link between experienced educators and students who come together to advance future naval concepts. The large population of experienced mid-grade naval service officers at NPS provides an ideal place to help understand Sea Service culture while exploring the benefits and limitations of AI systems.

Not surprisingly, NPS student research has investigated trust in AI, technology acceptance, and culture. Previous NPS research has explored trust through interactive Machine Learning (iML) in virtual environments for understanding Navy cultural and individual barriers to technology adoption. These and other studies have brought important insights on the intersection of people and technologies.

One important aspect of this intersection is culture and how it is measured. For instance, the Competing Values Framework (CVF) has helped researchers understand organizational culture. Paired with additional survey instruments such as E-Trust or the Technology Acceptance Models (TAM), researchers can better understand if particular cultures trust technologies more than other types. CVF is measured across six different organizational dimensions that are summarized by structure and focus. The structure axis ranges from control to flexibility, while focus axis ranges from people to organization, see figure 1.

Figure 1 – The Competing Values Framework – culture, leadership, value from Cameron, Kim S., Robert E. Quinn, Jeff DeGraff, and Anjan V. Thakor. Competing Values Leadership, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014.

Most organizational cultures contain some measure of each of the four characteristics of the CVF. The adhocracy quadrant of the CVF, for instance, is characterized by innovation, flexibility, and increased speed of solutions. To this point, an NPS student researcher found that Marine Corps organizational culture was characterized as mostly hierarchical. The same researcher found that this particular group of Marine officers also preferred the Marine Corps move from a hierarchical culture towards an adhocracy culture. While the population in the study was by no means representative of the entire Marine Corps, it does generate useful insights for forming initial hypotheses and the need for additional research which explores whether hierarchical cultures impede trust in AI technologies. While closing this gap is important for assessing how a culture may need to adapt, actually changing deeply rooted cultures requires significant introspection and the willingness to change.

The ABCs: Adaptations for a Beneficial Culture

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” quipped the revered management guru, Peter Drucker—and for good reason. Strategies that seek to adopt new technologies which may replace or augment human capabilities, must also address culture. Cultural adaptations that require significant changes to behaviors and other deeply entrenched processes will not come easy. Modifications to culture require significant leadership and participation at all levels. Fortunately, organizational theorists have provided ways for understanding culture. One well-known organizational theorist, Edgar Schein, provides a framework for assessing organizational culture. Specifically, culture can be viewed at three different levels which consist of artifacts, espoused values, and underlying assumptions.

The Schein Model provides another important level of analysis for investigating the military organizational culture. In the Schein model, artifacts within militaries would include elements such as dress, formations, doctrine, and other visible attributes. Espoused values are the vision statements, slogans, and codified core values of an organization. Underlying assumptions are the unconscious and unspoken beliefs and thoughts that undergird the culture. Implementing cultural change without addressing underlying assumptions is the equivalent to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Therefore, what underlying cultural assumptions could prevent the Sea Services from effectively trusting AI applications?

One of the oldest and most ubiquitous underlying assumptions of how militaries function is the hierarchy. While hierarchy does have beneficial functions for militaries, it may overly inhibit how personnel embrace new technologies and decisions recommended by AI systems. Information, intelligence, and orders within the militaries largely flow along well-defined lines of communication and nodes through the hierarchy. In one meta-analytic review on culture and innovation, researchers found that hierarchical cultures, as defined by CVF, tightly control information distribution. Organizational researchers Christopher McDermott and Gregory Stock stated, “An organization whose culture is characterized by flexibility and spontaneity will most likely be able to deal with uncertainty better than one characterized by control and stability.” While hierarchical structures can help reduce ambiguity and promote stability, they can also be detrimental to innovation. NPS student researchers in 2018, not surprisingly, found that the hierarchical culture in one Navy command had a restraining effect on innovation and technology adoption.

CVF defined adhocracy cultures on the other hand are characterized by innovation and higher tolerances for risk taking. For instance, AI applications could also upend well-defined Military Decision Making Processes (MDMP). MDMP is a classical manifestation of codified processes that supports underlying cultural assumptions on how major decisions are planned and executed. The Sea Services should therefore reevaluate and update its underlying assumptions on decision making processes to better incorporate insights from AI.

In fact, exploring and promoting other forms of organizational design could help empower its personnel to innovate and leverage AI systems more effectively. The late, famous systems thinking researcher, Donella Meadows, aptly stated, “The original purpose of a hierarchy is always to help its originating subsystems do their jobs better.” Therefore, recognizing the benefits, and more importantly the limits of hierarchy, will help leaders properly shape Sea Service culture to appropriately develop trustworthy AI systems. Ensuring change goes beyond a temporary fix, however, requires continually updating the organization’s underlying assumptions. This takes double-loop learning.

Double-loop Learning

Double-loop learning is by no means a new concept. First conceptualized by Chris Argyris and Donald Schön in 1974, double-loop learning is the process of updating one’s underlying assumptions. While many organizations can often survive through regular use of single-loop learning, they will not thrive. Unquestioned organizational wisdom can perpetuate poor solutions. Such cookie-cutter solutions often fail to adequately address new problems and are discovered to no longer work. Rather than question the supporting underlying assumptions, organizations will instead double-down on tried-and-true methods only to fail again, thus neglecting deeper introspection.

Such failures should instead provide pause to allow uninhibited, candid feedback to surface from the deck-plate all the way up the chain of command. This feedback, however, is often rare and typically muted, thus becoming ineffectual to the people who need to hear it the most. Such problems are further exacerbated by endemic personnel rotation policies combined with feedback delays that rarely hold the original decision makers accountable for their actions (or inactions).

Implementation and trust of AI systems will take double-loop learning to change the underlying cultural assumptions which inhibit progress. Yet, this can be accomplished in several ways which go against the normative behaviors of entrenched cultures. Generals, Admirals, and Senior Executive Service (SES) leaders should create their own focus groups of diverse junior officers, enlisted personnel, and civilians to solicit unfiltered feedback on programs, technologies, and most importantly, organizational culture inhibitors which hold back AI adoption and trust. Membership and units could be anonymized in order to shield junior personnel from reprisals while promoting the unfiltered candor senior leadership needs to hear in order to change the underlying cultural assumptions. Moreover, direct feedback from the operators using AI technologies would also avoid the layers of bureaucracy which can slow the speed of criticisms back to leadership.

Why is this time different?

Arguably, the naval services have past records of adapting to shifts in technology and pursuing innovations needed to help win future wars. Innovators of their day such as Admiral William Sims developing advanced naval gunnery techniques and the Marine Corps developing and improving amphibious landing capabilities in the long shadow of the Gallipoli campaign reinforce current Service cultural histories. However, many technologies of the last century were evolutionary improvements to what was already accepted technologies and tactics. AI is fundamentally different and is akin to how electricity changed many aspects of society and could fundamentally disrupt how we approach war.

In the early 20th century, the change from steam to electricity did not immediately change manufacturing processes, nor significantly improve productivity. Inefficient processes and machines driven by steam or systems of belts were never reconfigured once they were individually equipped with electric motors. Thus, many benefits of electricity were not realized for some time. Similarly, Sea Service culture will need to make a step change to fully take advantage of AI technologies. If not, the Services will likely experience a “productivity paradox” where large investments in AI do not fully deliver the efficiencies promised. 

Today’s militaries are sociotechnical systems and underlying assumptions are its cultural operating system. Attempting to plug AI application into a culture that is not adapted to use it, nor trusts it, is the equivalent of trying to install an Android application on a Windows operating system. In other words, it will not work, or at best, not work as intended. We must, therefore, investigate how naval service cultures may need to appropriately adapt if we want to fully embrace the many advantages these technologies may provide.

Conclusion

In a 2017 report from Chatham House titled, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Warfare,” Professor Missy Cummings stated, “There are many reasons for the lack of success in bringing these technologies to maturity, including cost and unforeseen technical issues, but equally problematic are organizational and cultural barriers.” Echoing this point, the former Director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Marine Lieutenant General Michael Groen, stated “culture” is the obstacle, not the technology, for developing the Joint All-Domain, Command and Control (JADC2) system, which is supported by AI. Yet, AI/ML technologies have the potential to provide a cognitive-edge that can potentially increase the speed, quality, and effectiveness of decision-making. Trusting the outputs of AI will undoubtedly require significant changes to certain aspects of our collective naval cultures. The Sea Services must take stock of their organizational cultures and apply the necessary cultural adaptations, while fostering double-loop learning in order to promote trust in AI systems.

Today, the Naval Services have a rare opportunity to reap the benefits of a double-loop learning. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sea Services have shown that they can adapt responsively and effectively to dynamic circumstances while fulfilling their assigned missions. The Services have developed more efficient means to leverage technology to allow greater flexibility across the force through remote work and education. If, however, the Services return to the status quo after the pandemic, they will have failed to update many of its outdated underlying assumptions by changing the Service culture.

If we cannot change the culture in light of the last three years, it portends poor prospects for promoting trust in AI for the future. Therefore, we cannot squander these moments. Let it not be said of this generation of Sailors and Marines that we misused this valuable opportunity to make a step-change in our culture for a better approach to future warfighting.

Scott Humr is an active-duty Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Marine Corps. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Naval Postgraduate School as part of the Commandant’s PhD-Technical Program. His research interests include trust in AI, sociotechnical systems, and decision-making in human-machine teams. 

Featured Image: An F-35C Lightning aircraft, assigned to Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 125, prepares to launch from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George H. W. Bush (CVN 77) during flight operations. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Brandon Roberson)

Drones/Unmanned

Naval Escalation in an Unmanned Context

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By Jonathan Panter

On March 14, two Russian fighter jets intercepted a U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper in international airspace, breaking one of the drone’s propellers and forcing it to crash into the Black Sea. The Russians probably understood that U.S. military retaliation – or, more importantly, escalation – was unlikely; wrecking a drone is not like killing people. Indeed, the incident contrasts sharply with the recent revelation of another aerial face-off. In late 2022, Russian aircraft nearly shot down a manned British RC-135 Rivet Joint surveillance aircraft. With respect to escalation, senior defense officials later indicated, the latter incident could have been severe.1

There is an emerging view among scholars and policymakers that unmanned aerial vehicles can reduce the risk of escalation, by providing an off-ramp during crisis incidents that, were human beings involved, might otherwise spark public calls for retaliation. Other recent events, such as the Iranian shoot-down of a U.S. RQ-4 Global Hawk in the Persian Gulf in 2019 – which likewise did not spur U.S. military kinetic retaliation – lend credence to this view. But in another theater, the Indo-Pacific, the outlook for unmanned escalation dynamics is uncertain, and potentially much worse. There, unmanned (and soon, autonomous) military competition will occur not just between aircraft, but between vessels on and below the ocean.

Over the past two decades, China has substantially enlarged its navy and irregular maritime forces. It has deployed these forces to patrol its excessive maritime claims and to threaten Taiwan, expanded its nuclear arsenal, and built a conventional anti-access, area-denial capacity whose overlap with its nuclear deterrence architecture remains unclear. Unmanned and autonomous maritime systems add a great unknown variable to this mix. Unmanned ships and submarines may strengthen capabilities in ways not currently anticipated; introduce unexpected vulnerabilities across entire warfare areas; lower the threshold for escalatory acts; or complicate each side’s ability to make credible threats and assurances.

Forecasting Escalation Dynamics

Escalation is a transition from peace to war, or an increase in the severity of an ongoing conflict. Many naval officers assume that unmanned ships are inherently de-escalatory assets due to their lack of personnel onboard. Recent high-profile incidents – such as the MQ-9 Reaper and RQ-4 Global Hawk incidents mentioned previously – seem, at first glance, to confirm this assumption. The logic is simple: if one side destroys the other’s unmanned asset, the victim will feel less compelled to respond, since no lives were lost.

While enticing, this assumption is also illusory. First, the example is of limited applicability: most unmanned ships and submarines under development will not be deployed independently. They will work in tandem with each other and with manned assets, such that the compromise of one vessel – potentially by cyber means – often affects others, changing a force’s overall readiness. The most serious escalation risk thus lies at a systemic, or fleetwide, level – not at the level of individual shoot-downs.

Second, lessons about escalation from two decades of operational employment of unmanned aircraft cannot be imported, wholesale, to the surface and subsurface domains – where there is little to no operational record of unmanned vessel employment. The technology, operating environments, expected threats, tactics, and other factors differ substantially.

Our understanding of one variant of escalation, that in the nuclear realm, is famously theoretical – the result of deductive logic, modeling, or gaming – rather than empirical, since nuclear weapons have only been used once in conflict, and never between two nuclear powers. Right now, the story is similar for unmanned surface and subsurface vessels. Neither side has deployed unmanned vessels at in sufficient numbers or duration, and across a great enough variety of contexts, for researchers to draw evidence-based conclusions. Everything remains a projection.

Fortunately, three existing areas of academic scholarship – crisis bargaining, inadvertent nuclear escalation, and escalation in cyberspace – provide some clues about what naval escalation in an unmanned context might look like.

Crisis Bargaining

During international crises, a state may try to convince its opponent that it is willing to fight over an issue – and that, if war were to break out, it would prevail. The goal is to get what you want without actually fighting. To intimidate an opponent, a state might inflate its capabilities or hide its weaknesses. To convince others of its willingness to fight, a state might take actions that create a risk of war, such as mobilizing troops (so-called “costly signals”). Ascertaining capability and intent in international crises is therefore quite difficult, and misjudging either may lead to war.2

Between nuclear-armed states, these phenomena are more severe. Neither side wants nuclear war, nor believes that the other is willing to risk it. To make threats credible, therefore, states may initiate an unstable situation (“rock the boat”) but then “tie their own hands” so that catastrophe can be averted only if the opponent backs down. States do this by, for example, automating decision-making, or stationing troops in harm’s way.3

The proliferation of unmanned and autonomous vessels promises to impact all of these crisis bargaining strategies. First – as noted previously – unmanned vessels may be perceived as “less escalatory,” since deploying them does not risk sailors’ lives. But this perception could have the opposite effect, if states – believing the escalation risk to be lower – deploy their unmanned vessels closer to an adversary’s territory or defensive systems. The adversary might, in turn, believe that his opponent is preparing the battlespace, or even that an attack is imminent. Economists call this paradox “moral hazard.” The classic example is an insured person’s willingness to take on more risk.

Second, a truly autonomous platform – one lacking a means of being recalled or otherwise controlled after its deployment – would be ideal for “tying hands” strategies. A state could send such vessels to run a blockade, for instance, daring the other side to fire first. Conversely, an unmanned (but not autonomous) vessel might have remote human operators, giving a state some leeway to back down after “rocking the boat.” In a crisis, it may be difficult for an adversary to distinguish between the two types of vessels.

A further complication arises if a state misrepresents a recallable vessel as non-recallable, perhaps to gain the negotiating leverage of “tying hands,” while maintaining a secret exit option. And even if an autonomous vessel is positively identified as such, attributing “intent” to it is a gray area. The more autonomously a vessel operates, the easier it is to attribute its behaviors to its programming, but the harder it is to determine whether its actions in a specific scenario are intended by humans (versus being default actions or error).

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles?

Scholars have begun to address such questions by studying unmanned aerial systems.4 To give two recent examples, one finding suggests that unmanned aircraft may be de-escalatory assets, since the absence of a pilot means domestic publics would be less likely to demand blood-for-blood if a drone gets shot down.5 Another scholar finds that because drones combine persistent surveillance with precision strike, they can “increase the certainty of punishment” – making threats more credible.6

Caution should be taken in applying such lessons to the maritime realm. First, unmanned ships and submarines are decades behind unmanned aerial vehicles in sophistication. Accordingly, current plans point to a (potentially decades-long) roll-out period during which unmanned vessels will be partially or optionally manned.7 Such vessels could appear unmanned to an adversary, when in fact crews are simply not visible. This complicates rules of engagement, and warps expectations for retaliation if a state targets an apparently-unmanned vessel that in fact has a skeleton crew.

Second, ships and submarines have much longer endurance times than aircraft. Hence, mechanical and software problems will receive less frequent local troubleshooting and digital forensic examination. An aerial drone that suffers an attempted hack will return to base within a few hours; not so with unmanned ships and submarines because their transit and on-station times are much longer, especially those dispersed across a wide geographic area for distributed maritime operations. This complicates efforts to attribute failures to “benign” causes or adversarial compromise. The question may not be whether an attempted attack merits a response due to loss of life, but rather whether it represents the opening salvo in a conflict.

Finally, with regard to the combination of persistent surveillance and precision strike, most unmanned maritime systems in advanced stages of development for the U.S. Navy do not combine sensing and shooting. Small- and medium-sized surface craft, for instance, are much closer to deployment than the U.S. Navy’s “Large Unmanned Surface Vessel,” which is envisioned as an adjunct missile magazine. The small- and medium-sized craft are expected to be scouts, minesweepers, and distributed sensors. Accordingly, they do little for communicating credible threats, but do present attractive targets for a first mover in a conflict, whose opening goal would be to blind the adversary.

Inadvertent Nuclear Escalation

During conventional war, even if adversaries carefully avoid targeting the other side’s nuclear weapons, other parts of a military’s nuclear deterrent may be dual-use systems. An attack on an enemy’s command-and-control, early warning systems, attack submarines, or the like – even one conducted purely for conventional objectives – could make the target state fear that its nuclear deterrent is in danger of being rendered vulnerable.8 This fear could encourage a state to launch its nuclear weapons before it is too late. Incremental improvements to targeting and sensing in the past two decades – especially in the underwater realm – have exacerbated the problem by making retaliatory assets easier to find and destroy.9

In the naval context, the risk is that one side may perceive a “use it or lose it” scenario if it feels that its ballistic missile submarines have all been (or are close to being) located. In particular, the ever-wider deployment of assets that render the underwater battlespace more transparent – such as small, long-duration underwater vehicles equipped with sonar – could undermine an adversary’s second-strike capability. Today, the US Navy’s primary anti-submarine platforms aggregate organic sensing and offensive capabilities (surface combatants, attack submarines, and maritime patrol aircraft). The shift to distributed maritime operations using unmanned platforms, however, portends a future of disaggregated capabilities. Small platforms without onboard weapons systems will still provide remote sensing capability to the joint force. If these sensing platforms are considered non-escalatory because they lack offensive capabilities and sailors onboard, the US Navy might deploy them more widely.10

Escalation in Cyberspace

The US government’s shift to persistent engagement in cyberspace, a strategy called “Defend Forward,”11 has underscored two debates on cyber escalation. The first concerns whether operations in the cyber domain expose previously secure adversarial capabilities to disruption, shifting incentives for preemption on either side.12 The second concerns whether effects generated by cyberattacks (i.e., cyber effects or physical effects) can trigger a “cross-domain” response.13

These debates remain unresolved. Narrowing the focus to cyberattacks on unmanned or autonomous vessels presents an additional challenge for analysis, because these technologies are nascent and efforts to ensure their cyber resilience remain classified. Platforms without crews may present an attractive cyber target, perhaps because interfering with the operation of an unmanned vessel is perceived as less escalatory since human life is not directly at risk.

But a distinction must be made between the compromise of a single vessel and its follow-on effects at a system, or fleetwide level. Based on current plans, unmanned vessels are most likely to be employed as part of an extended, networked hybrid fleet. If penetrating one unmanned vessel’s cyber defenses can allow an adversary to move laterally across a network, this “effect” may be severe, potentially affecting a whole mission or warfare area. The subsequent decline in offensive or defensive capacity at the operational level of war could shift incentives for preemption. Since unmanned vessels operating as part of a team (with other unmanned vessels or with manned ones) are dependent on beyond-line-of-sight communications, interruption of one of these pathways (e.g., disabling a geostationary satellite over the area of operations) could have a similar systemic effect.

The Role of Human Judgment

Modern naval operations already depend on automated combat systems, lists of “if-then” statements, and data links. For decades, people have increasingly assigned mundane and repetitive (or computationally laborious) shipboard tasks to computers, leaving officers and sailors in a supervisory role. This state of affairs is accelerating with the introduction of unmanned and autonomous vessels, especially when combined with artificial intelligence. These technologies are likely to make human judgment more, not less, important.14 Many future naval officers will be designers, regulators, or managers of automated systems. So too will civilian policymakers directing the use of unmanned and autonomous maritime systems to signal capability and intent in crisis. For both policymakers and officers, questions requiring substantial judgment will include:

The “moral hazard” problem. If unmanned vessels are perceived as less escalatory – because they lack crews, or because they carry only sensors and no offensive capabilities – are they more likely to be employed in ways that incur other risks (such as threatening adversary defensive or nuclear deterrent capabilities in peacetime)?

The autonomy/intent paradox. When will an autonomous vessel’s action be considered a signal of an adversary’s intent (since the adversary designed and coded the vessel to act a certain way), versus an action that the vessel “decided” to take on its own? If an adversary claims ignorance – that he did not intend an autonomous vessel to act a certain way – when will he be taken at his word?15

The attribution problem. Since unmanned vessels have no crews, local troubleshooting of equipment – along with digital forensics – will occur less frequently than it does on manned vessels. Remotely attributing a problem to routine component or software failure, versus to adversarial cyberattack, will often be harder than it would be with physical access. Will there have to be a higher “certainty threshold” for positive attribution of an attack on an unmanned vessel?

The “roll-out” uncertainty. How will the first few decades of hybrid fleet operations (utilizing partial and optional-manning constructs) complicate the decision to target or compromise unmanned vessels? If a vessel appears unmanned, but has an unseen skeleton crew – and then suffers an attack – how should the target state assess the attacker’s claim of ignorance about the presence of personnel onboard?

The cyber problem. Do unmanned systems’ attractiveness as a cyber target (due to their absence of personnel, often highly-networked employment) present a system-wide vulnerability to those warfare areas than lean more heavily on unmanned systems than others? Which warfare areas would have to be affected to change incentives for preemption?

Since unmanned vessels have not yet been broadly integrated into fleet operations, these questions have no definitive, evidence-based answers. But they can help frame the problem. The maritime domain in East Asia is already particularly susceptible to escalation. Interactions between potential foes should, ideally, never escalate without the consent and direction of policymakers. But in practice, interactions-at-sea can escalate due to hyper-local misperceptions, influenced by factors like command, control, and communications, situational awareness, or relative capabilities. All of these factors are changing with the advent of unmanned and autonomous platforms. Escalation in this context cannot be an afterthought.

Jonathan Panter is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Columbia University. His research examines Congressional oversight over U.S. naval operations. Prior to attending Columbia, Mr. Panter served as a Surface Warfare Officer in the United States Navy. He holds an M.Phil. and M.A. in Political Science from Columbia, and a B.A. in Government from Cornell University.

The author thanks Johnathan Falcone, Anand Jantzen, Jenny Jun, Shuxian Luo, and Ian Sundstrom for comments on earlier drafts of this article.

References

1. Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt, “Miscommunication Nearly Led to Russian Jet Shooting Down British Spy Plane, U.S. Officials Say,” New York Times, April 12, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/world/europe/russian-jet-british-spy-plane.html.

2. James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 379-414.

3. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, [1966] 2008), 43-48, 99-107.

4. See, e.g., Michael C. Horowitz, Sarah E. Kreps, and Matthew Fuhrmann, “Separating Fact from Fiction in the Debate over Drone Proliferation,” International Security 41, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 7-42.

5. Erik Lin-Greenberg, “Wargame of Drones: Remotely Piloted Aircraft and Crisis Escalation,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (2022). See also Erik Lin-Greenberg, “Game of Drones: What Experimental Wargames Reveal About Drones and Escalation,” War on the Rocks, January 10, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/01/game-of-drones-what-experimental-wargames-reveal-about-drones-and-escalation/.

6. Amy Zegart, “Cheap flights, credible threats: The future of armed drones and coercion,” Journal of Strategic Studies 43, no. 1 (2020): 6-46.

7. Sam Lagrone, “Navy: Large USV Will Require Small Crews for the Next Several Years,” USNI News, August 3, 2021, https://news.usni.org/2021/08/03/navy-large-usv-will-require-small-crews-for-the-next-several-years.

8. Barry D. Posen, Inadvertent Escalation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); James Acton, “Escalation through Entanglement: How the Vulnerability of Command-and-Control Systems Raises the Risks of an Inadvertent Nuclear War,” International Security 43, no. 1 (Summer 2018): 56-99. For applications to contemporary Sino-US security competition, see: Caitlin Talmadge, “Would China Go Nuclear? Assessing the Risk of Chinese Nuclear Escalation in a Conventional War with the United States,” International Security 41, no. 4 (Spring 2017): 50-92; Fiona S. Cunningham and M. Taylor Fravel, “Dangerous Confidence? Chinese Views on Nuclear Escalation,” International Security 44, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 61-109; and Wu Riqiang, “Assessing China-U.S. Inadvertent Nuclear Escalation,” International Security 46, no. 3 (Winter 2021/2022): 128-162.

9. Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, “The New Era of Counterforce,” International Security 41, no. 4 (Spring 2017): 9-49; Rose Goettemoeller, “The Standstill Conundrum: The Advent of Second-Strike Vulnerability and Options to Address It,” Texas National Security Review 4, no. 4 (Fall 2021): 115-124.

10. Jonathan D. Caverley and Peter Dombrowski suggest that one component of crisis stability – the distinguishability of offensive and defensive weapons – is more difficult at sea because naval platforms are designed to perform multiple missions. From this perspective, disaggregating capabilities might improve offense-defense distinguishability and prove stabilizing, rather than escalatory. See: “Cruising for a Bruising: Maritime Competition in an Anti-Access Age.” Security Studies 29, no. 4 (2020): 680-681.

11. For an introduction to this strategy, see: Michael P. Fischerkeller and Robert J. Harknett, “Persistent Engagement, Agreed Competition, and Cyberspace Interaction Dynamics and Escalation,” Cyber Defense Review (2019), https://cyberdefensereview.army.mil/Portals/6/CDR-SE_S5-P3-Fischerkeller.pdf.

12. Erik Gartzke and John R. Lindsay, “Thermonuclear Cyberwar,” Journal of Cybersecurity 3, no. 1 (March 2017): 37-48; Erica D. Borghard and Shawn W. Lonergan, “Cyber Operations as Imperfect Tools of Escalation,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 13, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 122-145.

13. See, e.g., Sarah Kreps and Jacquelyn Schneider, “Escalation firebreaks in the cyber, conventional, and nuclear domains: moving beyond effects-based logics,” Journal of Cybersecurity 5, no. 1 (Fall 2019): 1-11; Jason Healey and Robert Jervis, “The Escalation Inversion and Other Oddities of Situational Cyber Stability,” Texas National Security Review 3, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 30-53.

14. Avi Goldfarb and John R. Lindsay, “Prediction and Judgment: Why Artificial Intelligence Increases the Importance of Humans in War,” International Security 46, no. 3 (Winter 2021/2022): 7-50.

15. The author thanks Tove Falk for this insight.

Featured Image: A medium displacement unmanned surface vessel and an MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter from Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron (HSM) 73 participate in U.S. Pacific Fleet’s Unmanned Systems Integrated Battle Problem (UxS IBP) April 21, 2021. (U.S. Navy photo by Chief Petty Officer Shannon Renf)