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USMC Transformation Week

Stand-In Forces: Disrupting Anti-Access Systems

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Transforming the Marine Corps Topic Week

By Joseph Mozzi

The threat of anti-access capabilities is here to stay, and the Marine Corps’ stand-in force concept lends much-needed variety to the toolbox of approaches that will allow the joint force to “break the wall” if needed.1 Anti-access strategies are not new concepts, nor are they the oft-depicted ‘deus ex machina’ that will turn vast swaths of the globe into prohibited regions for American power projection.2 They do, however, present a threat that is only increasing in capability, bolstered by the increasing evolution of the mature precision-strike regime.3 By winning the maritime reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance fight, the stand-in force is uniquely capable of contributing to the systemic disruption of anti-access capabilities, generating advantages and opportunities for the naval services and joint force to exploit. It lends much-needed asymmetry to breaking the walls that many of America’s current adversaries will erect in their efforts to hold American power-projection capabilities at bay.4

There is broad congruence between the stand-in force’s role and the Marine Corps’ capstone doctrine of maneuver warfare. Penetrating an adversary’s system to eliminate its ability to function as a coordinated whole is central to the service’s warfighting philosophy,5 and systemic disruption is its defeat mechanism of choice.6 In viewing anti-access capabilities for what they are: complex systems reliant on technology, information, and human decision making; the stand-in force generates effects that both deter and provide advantages during conflict. It reinvents the traditional understanding of penetrating a denied space from the outside-in by persisting within an adversary’s weapons engagement zone beginning in periods of competition. It cooperates with allies and partners, assuming a deterrent posture as a form of temporal penetration. If competition escalates to conflict, the stand-in force already occupies a position of advantage. The stand-in force concept challenges the Marine Corps to create an adaptable system that can persist and sustain itself in a contested space, adapting its theory of warfighting to present challenges.

Anti-Access Systems

It is not the sources of power within anti-access systems that threaten external actors but the force of power that the system exerts. Anti-access approaches exhibit the emergent characteristics of complex systems: a whole greater than its parts. The sources of anti-access power: anti-ship missiles, surface combatants, and both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial reconnaissance systems, among others, are reliant on critical linkages to project force that can deny an area to an adversary.7 They are, in effect, an entirely interdependent network that must work together successfully.8

Anti-access warfare is fundamentally a struggle to gain and maintain awareness that can be synthesized within a system to result in targetable information.9 Actions cannot occur absent awareness of the environment. For example, China’s DF-21 anti-ship ballistic missiles rely on information to detect prospective targets throughout their range. They are dependent on other target acquisition systems within the larger system to achieve their intended effects. Information about the environment and the means to process it emerge as critical linkages within anti-access systems. A force that can affect those linkages – denying information and understanding to the adversary – has a high potential to contribute to the systemic disruption of the anti-access capability. In this lies the potential of the stand-in force, eschewing the direct approach of penetrating an anti-access system from the outside in favor of asymmetrically disrupting it from within.

Systemic Disruption and the Stand-In Force

Systemic disruption is the result of affecting a system’s coherence. It recognizes that an adversary is a system of interacting parts and attacks the relationships between critical components.10 By targeting the connections which bring coherence to an adversary’s system, systemic disruption achieves second-order effects on individual sources of strength by negating their collective functionality. Applying lethal or non-lethal means to disrupt an adversary’s ability to acquire targets within a contested space can have effects commensurate with destroying the systems themselves that would deliver effects. In this sense, it generates results disproportionately greater than the effort expended.11 The asymmetry inherent in stand-in force maritime reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance lends weight to its systemic disruption capabilities.

Narrowly dependent systems are less able to account for the full range of environmental pressures that may be brought to bear upon them.12 In the case of anti-access systems, this narrow dependency is the system’s reliance on information to the end of preventing the joint force from entering a contested area. By existing inside of a “denied” space during periods of competition, the stand-in force becomes part of multiple dilemmas facing an adversary. The anti-access system must detect forces both within its denied space and attempting to penetrate from the outside. The interdependence between the inside and outside forces strengthens the asymmetry. Unmanned target acquisition systems employed in-depth by the stand-in force are the forward edge of an integrated system encompassing not only stand-in force lethal capabilities but those residing in the fleet and joint force. The stand-in force can give and take, augmenting its actions by integrating external capabilities while generating opportunities for the fleet and joint force to exploit in its wake.

Successful reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance in periods of competition keep the stand-in force and fleet in a position of information advantage over the anti-access system through the transition to conflict. Stand-in forces create an area within which the anti-access system cannot aggregate the targetable information required to function. While the stand-in force denies the anti-access system information vital to its efforts to target the fleet, it remains a lethal and elusive obstacle that must be addressed. The anti-access system must expend increasing resources to “detect” and continuously “track” a force benefitting from high intra-theater mobility, low signature levels, decoys and deception, and lethal precision capabilities. Robust reconnaissance efforts support the counter-reconnaissance fight by identifying adversary collection patterns over time, ensuring both the fleet and stand-in force remain ahead of adversary decision cycles.

Stand-in force actions force the anti-access system to adapt to an unexpected threat. Air Force Colonel John Boyd characterized a theory of systemic collapse where actions present as “simultaneously menacing…ambiguous, chaotic, or misleading.” These actions induce confusion and disorder into the system.13 To remain viable, the system must adapt by seeking new and perhaps riskier means to gain the information it requires to function. Without a complete understanding of its threat environment, it decompensates as challenges cascade faster than the system can adapt to them.14 Refocusing and repositioning target acquisition systems to locate the stand-in force will rob the anti-access system of vital capacity that could be dedicated to detecting the fleet while increasing its exposure to the lethal capabilities of the stand-in force.

The Stand-In Force and Maneuver Warfare

The realization of the stand-in force must be accompanied by a continued embrace of maneuver outside of the spatial domain. While spatial maneuver is fundamental to the success of the stand-in force in both competition and conflict, the Marine Corps’ capstone doctrine is careful to underscore that the service must “consider maneuver in other dimensions as well.”15 As a philosophy that aims to shatter an adversary’s cohesion through actions that generate a rapidly deteriorating situation, any action that generates and exploits advantage – executing maneuver in “all dimensions”16 – is well nested in the service’s capstone doctrine.

As information is a critical linkage within anti-access systems, the broader maritime reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance fight becomes a centerpiece to the stand-in force’s actions to achieve an advantage. These actions are fundamentally maneuverist in their effects, generating interconnected temporal, cognitive, and spatial advantages over an adversary. Temporal advantage begins in competition. The stand-in force in partnership with allies generates a persistent and baseline awareness of adversary systems and decision processes, a product of intelligence-led operations.17 This contributes to cognitive and temporal advantages in conflict, allowing the stand-in force in cooperation with the fleet to anticipate and remain ahead of adversary actions,18 dictating the terms of escalation or return to competition. Successful counter-reconnaissance also supports spatial advantage, as rapidly mobile and low signature forces use their understanding to achieve positions to hold adversary forces at credible risk. Spatial maneuver converges with temporal, cognitive, and informational maneuver to generate these advantages for the force.

For the Marine Corps, this forward-looking embrace of an expanded understanding of maneuver warfare must occur at all levels of leadership. The Marine Corps prides itself on teaching its leaders how to think, not what to think. Limiting one’s conception of maneuver warfare to the bounds of the land domain and spatial maneuver ignores the true potential of a timeless theory of achieving advantage and winning in both competition and conflict. The Marine Corps is currently training the non-commissioned and company-grade officers that will form the core of tactical-level leadership in the stand-in force of the future. They must retain a conception of maneuver warfare’s continued and timeless relevance.

Implications for the Stand-In Force

Depriving an anti-access system of information that forms the critical linkages between its sources of power is not the job of any single entity within the stand-in force. It is a task levied on the force as a whole. While the Marine Corps understands this fact,19 it presents potentially the greatest challenge to translating the concept of a stand-in force into a persistent and forward-deployed system that can provide these functions to the fleet and joint force. A holistic stand-in force that can win the maritime reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance fight will contribute to the systemic disruption of an anti-access system. If the stand-in force cannot, it will in turn be isolated and vulnerable.

There are elements of both art and science that will contribute to realizing the stand-in force. Sustainment and logistics methods that can support a stand-in force at scale and in conflict,20 advancing unmanned capabilities as a service in partnership with the Navy,21 and the rapid maturation of the information maneuver occupational field are a few examples of capabilities that will enable success.22 The stand-in force must be able to persist over time and throughout the depth of the environment.

To say that the concept of stand-in forces is high-risk and high-reward is perhaps an understatement. While current events in Ukraine can shed some light on the realities of future conflict as they apply to the Marine Corps,23 experimentation within the concept of stand-in forces is still largely anticipatory. Force Design 2030 is subject to an ongoing series of wargames to assess future force design and its associated concepts.24 Even the best-designed wargames are not completely predictive, at least not in the sense that they reduce the realities of conflict to a formulaic problem of right or wrong answers that can guarantee success.25 They can, however, provide a valuable means through which to reduce the complexity of problems to illuminate constraints, test theories, and challenge hypotheses.26 The end product of these efforts is a best assessment of what a future maritime fight may demand. 

The uncertainty that will always surround the future battlefield is perhaps the Marine Corps’ greatest advantage in preparing for the future. Recovering from battlefield surprise is the best test of a military’s adaptability. Even the best efforts to anticipate the character of future conflict will in some ways come up short, and how a service develops itself to respond contributes greatly to its success or failure. In his book On Flexibility, Meir Finkel might as well have been speaking of the Marine Corps when he outlined requirements for successful battlefield adaptation. Warfighting doctrine must be “open” and flexible enough to adapt to emerging battlefield realities, being of immediate utility while at the same time supporting change at the tactical level. Diverse force structures must provide complementary capabilities and solutions to meet emergent problems. Doctrine and force structure must be supported by a decentralized command and control model supported by cognitive flexibility. These attributes must be fostered through formal education and training, which arms leadership with the ability to meet new challenges effectively. Perhaps most importantly, improvement must be a central pillar within the organization.27

Stand-in forces will provide a valuable capability to the joint force to deter adversaries and, if necessary, disrupt anti-access systems in times of conflict. The success of stand-in forces is incumbent on the Marine Corps’ ability to realize an adaptable system that can persist and sustain itself in contested spaces. Its success will not be the result of any singular capability but of the competencies of the force as a whole. Warfighting remains a timely and relevant capstone doctrine to understand and realize this emerging concept, providing Marine leaders with the cognitive foundations to adapt to emerging demands. As the current and vibrant debate over the merits of Force Design 2030 indicates, the Marine Corps’ longstanding commitment to improvement lends confidence to the idea that the service will get it right.

Joseph Mozzi is a Marine Corps artillery officer. He is currently a student at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff Officers Course.

References

1. “Break the wall” from Sam Tangredi, Anti-Access Warfare, (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2013).

2. Luis Simon, “Demystifying the A2/AD Buzz,” War on the Rocks, (January 4, 2017).

3. Andrew Krepinevich, Maritime Competition in a Mature Precision-Strike Regime (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2014).

4. A more in-depth discussion on how America’s various adversaries could employ anti-access strategies can be found in Anti-Access Warfare.

5. Headquarters Marine Corps, MCDP 1, Warfighting, (Washington, DC: 2018).

6. For further discussion on systemic disruption, maneuver warfare, and the Marine Corps, see: Marinus, “Defeat Mechanisms,” Marine Corps Gazette, (July, 2021): 101-106.

7. The idea of sources, forces, and linkages of power is drawn from Pat Pentland, Center of Gravity Analysis and Chaos Theory (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air War College, 1993).

8. Anti-Access Warfare.

9. Ibid.

10. Marinus, “On Defeat Mechanisms”.

11. Ibid.

12. Murray Gell-Mann, “Complex Adaptive Systems,” in Complexity: Metaphors, Models, and Reality, ed. Cowan Pines et al (Addison-Wesley, 1994).

13. John Boyd, ‘Patterns of Conflict,’ in A Discourse on Winning and Losing, ed. Grant T. Hammond (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 2018).

14. The idea of decompensation in complex systems can be explored further in David D. Woods and Matthieu Branlat, “Basic Patterns in How Adaptive Systems Fail” in Resilience Engineering in Practice: A Guidebook, ed. Erik Hollnagel, and John Wreathall (Taylor & Francis Group, 2010).

15.Warfighting.

16. Ibid.

17. Headquarters Marine Corps, The Tentative Manual for Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, (Washington, DC: 2021).

18.A Concept for Stand-In Forces.

19. Headquarters Marine Corps, “Recon – Counter Recon,” Official Website of the United States Marine Corps, (August 2, 2021).

20. Daniel Katzman, “Sustaining Stand-in Forces,” Marine Corps Gazette, (March, 2022): 14-19.

21. Navy Press Office, “Navy and Marines Release Unmanned Campaign Plan,” Official Website of the United States Navy, (March 16, 2021).

22. Gregory Carroll, “Marine Corps Establishes 17XX Information Maneuver Occupational Field,” Official Website of the United States Marine Corps, (March 9, 2022).

23. Noel Williams, “Insights for Marine (and Beyond) Force Design from the Russo-Ukrainian War,” War on the Rocks, (March 31, 2022).

24. Tim Barrick, “On Future Wars and the Marine Corps: Asking the Right Questions,” War on the Rocks, (April 12, 2022).

25. For a further discussion on wargaming see Robert Rubel, “The Epistemology of War Gaming,” Naval War College Review, 59 (2): 1-21.  

26. Bob Work and Gen. Paul Selva, “Revitalizing Wargaming is Necessary to Be Prepared for Future Wars,” War on the Rocks, (December 8, 2015).

27. Meir Finkel, On Flexibility: Recovery from Technological and Doctrinal Surprise on the Battlefield, (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2011).

Featured Image: U.S. Marines with 3d Battalion, 12 Marines, 3d Marine Division, deploy High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems during Balikatan 22 in northern Luzon, Philippines, April 4, 2022. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Melanye Martinez)

Force Structure

Let the Navy Retire LCS and Build a U.S. Maritime Constabulary Instead

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By Bryan Clark and Craig Hooper

News recently leaked that the Navy’s Independence-class Littoral Combat Ships suffer from hull cracking, a long-rumored problem that constrains the ships to slow speeds and low sea states to prevent further damage. Along with the need for an expensive class-wide fix to Freedom-class LCS combining gears, these new disclosures suggest the Biden Administration’s proposal to send nine LCS to the scrapyard in FY2023 is likely only the first salvo in the Navy’s effort to eventually retire the entire 32-ship LCS fleet. The Congress should let the Navy do so and shift small-ship missions to services committed to doing them.

After initial shock at the Navy’s plans to retire the nine LCS and 15 other ships during the coming year, some in Congress are coming around to the potential wisdom of the move. After all, each LCS costs more than $60 million a year to operate and support, compared to about $80 million for a much larger and more capable destroyer. And the design problems with both LCS classes will constrain their operations, making them undependable contributors in conflict. 

The Navy spent nearly $30 billion developing and building LCS, on top of more than $25 billion for the three Zumwalt-class destroyers that were envisioned as LCS’ high-end counterpart when the new family of surface ships was conceived during the late 1990s. For this investment, taxpayers have received about a dozen overseas LCS deployments.

But the LCS debacle reveals a deeper issue that should drive action by Congressional and Pentagon leadership the Navy, after operating more than 100 small combatants at the height of the Cold War, is clearly no longer committed to the role of small surface combatants like LCS. At the same time the service is seeking to begin cashiering LCS, it is also retiring the minesweepers and patrol boats LCS was intended to replace and is stopping construction of amphibious transport docks that support peacetime crisis response and humanitarian assistance. Meanwhile, the Constellation-class frigate that was originally envisioned as a small combatant counterpart to LCS has grown from the 4,000-ton Perry-class of the Cold War to be a nearly 8,000-ton warship only 20 percent smaller than the Navy’s Burke-class destroyers.

Historically, small surface combatants patrolled waterways for pirates and traffickers, trained smaller partner navies, or escorted commercial shipping. Today, missions like protecting merchant vessels from missile attack and searching for submarines are, in general, beyond the capability of small warships or are better done by unmanned systems. But maritime security, training, surveillance, and presence are increasingly important to build alliances and counter Beijing’s “gray-zone” aggression across the East and South China Seas.

The Congress and DoD leadership should embrace the Navy’s focus on high-end warfare by shifting security and training missions to ships operated by other services, specifically the Coast Guard and Military Sealift Command. Congressional leaders have expressed interest in adding defense-related spending to the White House FY2023 budget proposal, which could build more of the existing ships the Coast Guard and MSC would use. And to operate them, the up to $2 billion in annual LCS sustainment, basing costs, and manpower funding could be moved to these new mission owners. If the Navy sheds the small boat mission, the costs should be taken out of the Navy’s budget.

The Coast Guard has an improving track record of building and fielding a family of new cutters that are well-suited to the missions associated with protecting sea lanes from criminals or China’s maritime militia. The 4,500-ton National Security Cutter is reaching the end of its production run and can be extended by several ships to support an increased South China Sea presence and advance a rules-based order in the maritime domain instead of LCS. They could be joined by the handful of Independence-class LCS that are able to continue operating, albeit at slow speeds and in calm seas, with Coast Guard crews. Congress should also expand production of the Coast Guard’s new 4,000-ton Offshore Patrol Cutters, which could be forward-stationed in Japan and Guam or deploy from Hawaii to the Western Pacific.

The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Bertholf participates in Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC), July 29, 2018. (U.S. Coast Guard/Petty Officer 2nd Class David Weydert)

After taking over the Navy’s sealift and prepositioning fleets following the Cold War, MSC now operates with military detachments the Navy’s expeditionary staging bases and expeditionary support docks that host maritime security and counter-terrorism missions around the world. Civilian mariners also operate the more than a dozen expeditionary fast transports, or EPFs, that support Navy and joint assistance and training missions across Africa, Asia, and South America. Congress could continue construction of EPFs to enable MSC and its uniformed teammates to assume the Navy’s engagement mission. Since fewer civilian mariners are needed to crew a ship compared to Navy sailors, MSC vessels cost a fraction to operate compared to LCS. And the added demand for mariners would help bolster the ailing U.S. Merchant Marine.

The U.S. Navy’s twelfth Expeditionary Fast Transport (EPF) vessel, USNS Newport (EPF 12), successfully competed Integrated Sea Trials, July 30. (Austral USA photo)

Another benefit of using EPFs to take over the Navy’s small ship mission-set relates to the Navy’s conceptual challenges with the planned Large Unmanned Surface Vehicle program. Plagued by Congressional concerns about its ability to operate independently and carry a magazine of missiles, LUSV has a rocky path to fielding. As an interim step, the Navy could replace the LUSV with an EPF equipped with a vertical launch system magazine, as recently proposed by Representative Elaine Luria. With the crew aboard, the EPF could conduct maritime security and training missions. In high-risk situations, however, EPFs can offload their crews and revert to Navy control, operating autonomously for a day or more to launch missiles remotely.

The Navy and DoD leadership seem perfectly happy to abandon the constabulary missions that are a global fleet’s bread and butter. But as Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s adventures in the Pacific remind us, gray-zone operations can result in real gains on the ground or water and provide a jumping-off point for a larger conflict. Congress should step in to ensure the United States confronts low-level aggression at sea with an appropriate force that is committed to the mission.

Bryan Clark is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Dr. Craig Hooper, PhD is a defense analyst and Founder and CEO of the Themistocles Advisory Group.

Featured Image: PHILIPPINE SEA (Oct. 18, 2021) The Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Jackson (LCS 6) and embarked MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter assigned to the Wildcards of Helicopter Sea Combat (HSC) Squadron 23, operate with the German navy frigate FGS Bayern (F 217) and embarked Super Lynx Mk88A helicopter in the Philippine Sea. (U.S. Navy photo courtesy of the German navy)

Theory

Can John Arquilla’s Rules of New Age Warfare Be Taken to Sea?

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By Robert C. Rubel

Thomas Friedman’s 13 April New York Times opinion piece recounts an interview with John Arquilla, a distinguished former grand strategy instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School.  In explaining Ukraine’s impressive military performance in the face of the Russian invasion, Arquilla cites three rules of new age warfare from his book Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare, and their application is quite fitting.  If these rules concocted for cyberwarfare apply to ground warfare, might they also apply to warfare at sea?  If so, what are the implications?

Arquilla’s three rules are as follows:

  1. Many and small beats large and heavy
  2. Finding always beats flanking
  3. Swarming always beats surging

These rules are few and simply stated – generally a good thing when it comes to parsing a complex phenomenon like war.  And they do have a true new age feel to them; terms like many, small, finding, and swarming convey the notion that information technology in the form of micro-miniaturization makes even small weapons more powerful.  That said, there are words in the rules that raise alarms; categorical words like always convey a superficiality that experienced warfighters and analysts immediately suspect. But nonetheless, it is worth exploring how these rules could impact future naval warfare and fleet design.

Rule 1: Many and Small Beats Large and Heavy

As missiles become faster, longer range, smarter, and even harder to defeat, they might very well challenge the traditional relationship between capability and tonnage. The introduction of potent hypersonic missiles adds saliency to the application of this rule to naval warfare, calling into question the vulnerability of large capital ships such as nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. The most powerful weapons of yore, namely major caliber guns and jet aircraft, required large hulls to support their operations and the remainder of fleet design followed from there. However, missiles tend to break the relationship between weapon power and ship displacement, just as they break the relationship between capability and cost; hundreds of thousands of Tomahawk missiles could have been bought for the same price as the F-35 program. 

A missile-centric fleet design that took advantage of the new opportunities might consist of numerous smaller units of various types. The nascent U.S. Marine Corps concept of small detachments operating anti-ship missile launchers from dispersed locations reflects that logic as does – albeit incompletely – the U.S. Navy’s concept of Distributed Maritime Operations. Operating a highly dispersed force would complicate enemy targeting.

Moving past the categorical nature of the rule, we must also acknowledge that operating dispersed forces in the maritime environment is not the same as small groups of soldiers toting Javelin anti-tank missiles. For starters, deploying and sustaining a dispersed force will be more difficult than current battle groups composed of large ships. Then there is the matter of command and control. Since the conceptual emergence of “network-centric warfare” in the late 1990s, the vision of a dispersed, heterogeneous force knitted together by a network has been at least the tacit basis for communications and data processing developments. The various challenges to realizing this vision have not yet been overcome, and so adopting highly dispersed operations before such a comprehensive and resilient battle force network is operational would require a new and more sophisticated approach to mission command. These are just a few concerns that make application of the rule at sea less than straightforward. Nonetheless, the inherent character of modern missiles does add credibility to the rule when it comes to naval warfare.

Rule 2: Finding Always Beats Flanking

Putting aside the word always, the rule would not at first glance seem to apply at sea, where ships can maneuver “fluidly” as it were. There is perhaps some whiff of flanking in the concept of threat sector. If battle group defenses, say the positioning of escorts or combat air patrol stations is oriented on an expected threat sector, then an enemy that can succeed in approaching outside of that sector might be regarded as flanking. But this is speculative. However, if we think of flanking at sea as achieving an operational level ambush, we can see it exhibited in historic naval campaigns and battles. At Midway, the US task force took a position to the northeast of Midway Island and succeeded in ambushing the Japanese carrier force. In March of 1805 Admiral Horatio Nelson took a “secret position” between Sardinia and Mallorca hoping to ambush Admiral Villenueve’s French fleet if it sailed toward Italy or Egypt. 

Now, in the Midway case, the Japanese forces did not find the American task force until too late and suffered the loss of three aircraft carriers (Hiryu was sunk later, after the US task force had been located). In Nelson’s case the ambush would have worked because Villenueve, even though his orders were to escape the Mediterranean via Gibraltar, had planned to sail east of Mallorca, which would have led him into Nelson’s trap. However, a merchant ship had seen Nelson’s force and reported it to Villenueve, who altered his route to west of Mallorca. If the Japanese had located the American task force earlier, the results of Midway would likely have been much different. Both examples reveal the critical importance of finding first.

Anyone familiar with the writing of legendary Naval Postgraduate School Professor Wayne Hughes’ and his principle of “strike effectively first,” will immediately see the connection with this rule. Getting in an effective first strike requires finding effectively first, and no naval ambush can occur if this does not happen. This in turn requires enemy scouting efforts are ineffective and the enemy commander remains ignorant of the ambushing force. The act of finding and striking effectively first should not be viewed in momentary isolation or as singularly decisive, because command decision-making at all levels will be critical in maneuvering these finding and striking forces prior to successful engagements. So, while the term flanking does not translate well into naval warfare, its implied dependency on maneuver does carry over.

Rule 3: Swarming Always Beats Surging

The third rule is a bit trickier to relate to naval warfare. Arquilla states in the interview that “You don’t need big numbers to swarm the opponent with a lot of small smart weapons.” The implication is that instead of achieving mass or concentration of force using symmetrical weapons, tanks versus tanks, for instance, forces can make asymmetric attacks by using smart weapons not tied to big platforms, i.e., many teams of Javelin shooters versus columns of Russian tanks. In that sense the third rule seems to be merely a restatement of the first. That said, swarming is a term that has taken on new meaning in an age of smart drones. The notion of a large number of small things “besetting” a target conveys Arquilla’s implicit meaning. 

Picking this apart a bit more, let’s regard surging as the assembling of a force or capability that is greater than that of the enemy it is confronting – the traditional concentration of force, either at the operational or tactical level. Swarming, on the other hand, implies coming at a particular enemy target from everywhere, whether the besetting attack is centrally planned or whether it is based on the self-synchronization of the individual swarming entities. Surging implies a numerical relationship between the opposing forces, one presumably outnumbering the other. Swarming involves no such relationship – it is about having enough individual units to beset a target from all sides either simultaneously or in rapid sequence. Swarming seems generally to apply to the tactical, unit or even weapons level.

An instantiation of swarming in naval warfare would involve the use of deception drones or missiles meant to saturate an enemy ship’s defenses. The US Navy devised an elemental form of swarming tactics in its attempt, after the showdown with the Soviet Fleet in the Mediterranean in 1973, to generate some kind of anti-ship capability, which it had let lapse after World War II. The tactic involved a formation of five aircraft approaching the enemy ship at low level. Flying in close formation it would look like one blip on enemy radars. At a certain point the aircraft would starburst, fanning out in different directions and then turning back in based on careful timing such that they would arrive at their bomb release points in rapid succession. The maneuver was meant to confuse the target ship’s fire control systems and at the end saturate defenses such that at least one aircraft would be able to reach its release point. 

Surging implies Lanchestrian calculations that reveal the superiority of numbers; swarming is about creating confusion, using relatively large numbers for sure, but not in the strict relative sense addressed by Lanchester’s equations.1 This point is widely appreciated: China is thought to have developed large numbers of deceptive drones and missile warheads that can deploy decoys to achieve confusion and saturation of US Navy ship defenses.

At the present state of the art, achieving swarming would still require either a large number of launching platforms or engagement from relatively close range.  If the Navy did adopt the concept of a flotilla of smaller missile combatants there would have to be significant covering and deception efforts to get them into position to use their missiles and decoys. On the other hand, cover for a salvo of long range missiles might be provided by long range bombers that could launch decoys in addition to anti-ship missiles. However, the central point is that swarming – no matter how it is achieved – offers potential relief from the brute force logic of Lanchester’s equations.

Taking the Rules to Sea

If we combine Arquilla’s three rules, what do we get in terms of a picture of future naval warfare? First, it would seem that we could articulate a rather more nuanced rule: the force that can find, evaluate and target first will have a significant advantage. However, if both sides forces are composed of smaller, dispersed missile-shooting units, be they surface, air or subsurface, both fleets would likely be more resilient if they had to absorb a first strike. A naval battle would then become a geographically dispersed, cat-and-mouse game of progressive attrition. The game board would include not only the ocean, including the air above, adjacent land features and the depths below, but space, cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum. If swarming attacks were fully developed and employed, the only defense would be to avoid detection through stand-off, stealth, or deception.  The set piece naval battle would be replaced by an extended campaign of raids and quick strikes, followed by rapid retreat into sanctuaries or out of range. Knowledge of the tactical and operational situation would be intermittent and mostly fragmentary. The chances of putting together a large and coordinated missile salvo from dispersed units would be small, assuming the enemy is able to disrupt friendly networks in some way, so each unit must be armed with missiles that have the ability to create their own terminal swarms. This would allow for a form of swarming on a larger scale; dispersed units would operate on the basis of mission orders, and a swarming rule set, including a precise definition of calculated risk appropriate to the situation. The operation of German U-boat wolf packs in World War II constituted a nascent form of such a battle.

Neither the formalized collision of lines of dreadnoughts nor the long range groping of carrier battles are likely to characterize future naval warfare. Arquilla’s three rules imply intermittent and dispersed missile-based campaigns of attrition that will extend over days, weeks or even months; the quick and decisive clash at sea could very well be a thing of the past. If this is so, fleet design must be rethought. Missiles, not tactical aircraft dropping bombs, will be the decisive weapons. The Fleet’s offensive power must be distributed among a larger number of platforms, and its doctrine must include ground and long-range air elements. Logistics for such a force that would allow it to remain in contested areas for extended periods must be worked out. Sensing and processing as well as resilient communications will, in effect, become the new “capital ship” of the Navy, as these will allow the offensive missiles to be most effective in accordance with Arquilla’s rules. There will be a continuing need for some residual legacy forces, as the Navy has a multi-faceted and global mission, but for high-end naval combat in littoral waters, a force designed around Arquilla’s rules will be needed in order to fight at acceptable levels of strategic risk.

Does all this have implications for traditional naval concepts like command of the sea and sea control? Almost certainly. Command of the sea has heretofore meant that the weaker navy either could not or would not directly confront the stronger. This allowed the stronger navy to use the seas for its own purposes and deny such use to the weaker. But if sea power becomes atomized, composed of many missile shooting units, then the deterrent basis for command of the sea evaporates. We see a nascent form of this already with the Chinese land-based DF-21 and 26 anti-ship ballistic missiles. While this condition may initially be limited to specific littoral regions, the continued development of naval forces shaped by Arquilla’s rules would imply that command of the sea could be contested by weaker navies farther and farther out at sea, to the point that the concept loses meaning. Sea control, the function of protecting things like merchant traffic or geographic points, would become the paramount concept and demand the utmost in dispersion of forces – strategic, operational and tactical. Thus navies desiring to produce for their nations the traditional benefits of command of the sea would have to be composed of numerous and therefore cheaper units so that naval power would be available at any and all points needed, whenever that need arose.

Chaos theory shows how complex phenomena can emerge from simple rule sets. If we tease out their threads, Arquilla’s three simple rules for new age warfare seem to be able to perform that trick with regards to naval warfare and the design of navies. We might look askance at the categorical tone he uses in those rules, but that should not cause us to dismiss them as new age fluff. Some basis for fleet design is needed beyond the narrow incorporation of the next better radar or aircraft, and these three rules seem to be worth considering in that endeavor.

Robert C. Rubel is a retired Navy captain and professor emeritus of the Naval War College. He served on active duty in the Navy as a light attack/strike fighter aviator. At the Naval War College he served in various positions, including planning and decision-making instructor, joint education adviser, chairman of the Wargaming Department, and dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. He retired in 2014, but on occasion continues to serve as a special adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations. He has published over thirty journal articles and several book chapters.

Endnotes

1. In its simplest form it is Aa2 = Bb2 where A and B equal the quality of the respective forces; a and b represent the number of forces. This reflects the dominance of numbers in calculating the outcome of engagements.

Featured Image: KEKAHA, Hawaii – Artillery Marines from 1st Battalion, 12th Marines escort a Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System launcher vehicle ashore aboard Pacific Missile Range Facility Barking Sands, Hawaii, Aug. 16, 2021. (U.S. Marine Corps photo)

Tactical Concepts

Distributed Maritime Operations – Becoming Hard-to-Find

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By Richard Mosier

The concept for Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) is based on three bedrock tenets: the distributed force must be hard-to-find, hard-to-kill, and lethal. For decades, the Navy has been focused on and has continuously improved its fleet defense capabilities – the hard-to-kill tenet. And, with the recent increased emphasis on the offense, the Navy is making significant progress in becoming more lethal. In contrast, there is limited evidence of progress with respect to the hard-to-find tenet: the very lynchpin of the DMO concept, and the subject of this article.

The hard-to-find tenet and the DMO concept itself are in response to Russia and China as recognized peer threats, including their advanced ISR capabilities to detect, locate, classify, and track (all elements of “find”) and target US maritime forces. When decomposed, the hard-to-find tenet requires consideration of a range of complex activities to disrupt, deny, deceive, corrupt, or destroy the adversary’s ISR ability to find the US force as outlined below.

Deny ISR

This is perhaps the most complex but most effective way to be hard-to-find, track and target.

It involves five steps:

Step 1: Analyze the technical performance of enemy information systems. This level of technical analysis applies to each type of active and passive enemy ISR system that could be employed against distributed forces.

Step 2: Analyze and quantify the technical characteristics of US Navy force observables to include radars, line-of-sight communications, satellite uplinks, data links, navigation aids, and acoustic observables.

Step 3: Assess enemy ISR systems probability of detection of specific fleet systems’ observables at various ranges and altitudes, under various atmospheric, acoustic, and diurnal conditions.

The Navy Joint Precision Approach and Landing System (JPALS) offers an example of such an assessment. JPALS is a GPS- and radio-based system to guide tactical aircraft to the carrier and through approach and landing on CVN/LHA/LHD ships in all weather and sea conditions.

Pilots returning to a carrier first engage with JPALS at about 200 nautical miles (nm), where they start receiving an encrypted, low probability of detection UHF broadcast that contains the ship’s position, allowing the aircraft to determine range and relative bearing to the ship. At 60 nm the aircraft automatically logs into JPALS via a two-way data link. At 10 nmthe aircraft start receiving precision data and the pilot follows visual cues to land.

The assessment would determine the probability of detection and location of the CVN/LHA/LHD transmitting the JPALS UHF broadcast by Chinese or Russian ISR aircraft and electronic surveillance satellites.

Step 4: Based on the results of step (3), develop and integrate into the combat system the aids to help the tactical commander manage force observables commensurate with the ISR threat to remain hard-to-find; and, to decide if and when it is tactically advantageous to transition from hard-to-find to hard-to-kill.

Step 5: Develop and continuously update a single, all source threat tactical ISR threat picture with the fidelity and timeliness to support the commanders’ ability to make better tactical decisions faster than the adversary.

DMO Force Combat Team 

In addition to denying ISR, there are other methods for countering enemy ISR and keeping the force hard-to-find.

If, under the DMO concept, the force has to be ready to operate under mission orders, the combat team will have to be trained and ready to manage the all of the methods that can be used to remain hard-to-find. This will include the identification of the responsible positions on the team, their training, and the planning tools and decision aids they need for the planning and management of these methods for countering enemy ISR.

U.S. Navy Cmdr. Tadd Gorman, center, the commanding officer of the guided missile destroyer USS Ross (DDG 71), explains the ship’s combat information center to Ukrainian navy Vice Adm. Serhiy Hayduk, the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Naval Forces, aboard the Ross in the Black Sea Sept. 8, 2014, during exercise Sea Breeze 2014. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class John Herman/Released)

 As with the well-established surface warfare mission areas of ASW, ASUW, and AAW, the tactical commander will require familiarity with and high confidence in the person managing the deny, disrupt, destroy, deceive, and corrupt ISR functions. This position will require an in-depth knowledge of collateral and SCI information sources and methods as well as offboard sensor coverage, tasking, and feedback mechanisms. The position will require in-depth knowledge of enemy ISR systems, their coverage, and, their performance attributes. It will require knowledge of ship/force sensing systems, their performance against various ISR threats, and the atmospheric and acoustic factors that affect their performance.

DMO Battlespace Awareness

Battlespace awareness1 is achieved by the continuous and rapid integration and presentation of relevant information, keeping the commander continuously updated so that he or she can make better and faster tactical decisions. The key factors in this process are relevance and timeliness. The current shipboard system architectures will require modifications to optimize the process for automated integration and presentation of relevant collateral and SCI information. Time is the key factor. An end-to- end analysis of the flow of information from receipt on ship to presentation to the commander would serve to identify and eliminate delays.

DMO force commanders should not only be cleared for access to compartmented information, as they are now, but they should also be educated on and comfortable with these off-board systems, their sources and methods, their strengths and weaknesses, and their tasking and mission plans. They also have to understand how own-ship and off board collateral and SCI information are integrated on the ship, in what space; managed by whom, and, in what form.

In summary, the hard-to-find tenet presents significant challenges that will have to be addressed, both in fleet operations and in Navy-wide efforts to man, train and equip the fleet with the capabilities for its’ successful execution. Two challenges stand out. The first is the determination of the OPNAV resources and requirement sponsor for the manning, training, and equipping the fleet for countering enemy ISR and managing the hard-to-find functions. The second will be adjustments in onboard architectures to assure each commander has the relevant information, in a consumable form and in time to make better decisions faster than the adversary. (A history of the Deny ISR task can be found in the detailed description of the US Navy’s Cold War efforts to be Hard-to-Find provided in Robert Angevine’s paper subject: “Hiding in Plain Sight—The U.S. Navy and Dispersed Operations under EMCON, 1956–1972.“)

The success of the Navy concept of Distributed Maritime Operations depends on being hard to find. This runs counter the JADC2 concept in which all DoD platforms, sensors, and weapons are networked, e.g. continuously transmitting and receiving information via line-of-sight, HF and satellite RF communications that unfortunately present the enemy with electronic surveillance observables that can be exploited to find and attack the transmitting ships. The Distributed forces can receive information via broadcast without compromising their presence. However, the decision regarding if and when to engage in RF communications for active participation in networks will depend on the commander’s assessment of the risk of enemy exploitation of those emissions to locate the force.

Richard Mosier is a retired defense contractor systems engineer; Naval Flight Officer; OPNAV N2 civilian analyst; OSD SES 4 responsible for oversight of tactical intelligence systems and leadership of major defense analyses on UAVs, Signals Intelligence, and C4ISR.

1. Battlespace awareness is: “Knowledge and understanding of the operational area’s environment, factors, and conditions, to include the status of friendly and adversary forces, neutrals and noncombatants, weather and terrain, that enables timely, relevant, comprehensive, and accurate assessments, in order to successfully apply combat power, protect the force, and/ or complete the mission.” (JP 2-01)

Featured Image: JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM (Feb. 21, 2022) Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyer USS Michael Monsoor (DDG 1001) gets underway in Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Feb. 21, 2022. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Isaak Martinez)