Read Part 1 on defining distributed maritime operations.
Read Part 2 on anti-ship firepower and U.S. shortfalls.

By Dmitry Filipoff

Massed Fires – A Core Tactic of Distributed Warfighting

A core tactic that operationalizes the concept of concentrating effects without concentrating platforms is combining the missile firepower of widely distributed forces. As various platforms launch weapons, their contributing fires combine to grow an overall aggregate salvo that is directed against a shared target. As commanders look to defeat and defend fleets, their decision-making will be strongly influenced by shaping the potential of these massed fires. These methods of massing missile firepower can form a centerpiece of fleet combat tactics in the modern era.

Because even one missile hit can be enough to put a ship out of action, modern high-end warships tend to emphasize powerful air defenses, which can include anti-air weapons, point defenses, electronic warfare, decoys, and other means. These many defenses significantly drive up the volume of fire needed to overwhelm warships and score hits. This makes the ability to mass anti-ship fires from distributed forces a valuable method for mustering enough volume of fire to threaten naval formations.

The adage of “firing effectively first” has sometimes been based in winning the scouting competition that precedes the launching of fires.¹ But one can certainly find the adversary first while not having enough available firepower to overwhelm their defenses. It is possible for opposing naval formations to effectively target one another, but are forced to hold fire until more additional launch platforms are made available to add enough contributing fires. A critical component of firing effectively first is being the first to launch enough volume of fire to overwhelm warship defenses.

The current inventory of only eight Harpoons or Naval Strike Missiles on many U.S. surface combatants is hardly enough to be a credible threat to many modern warships. However, if warships carrying only a few missiles apiece can be credibly augmented by more anti-ship fires delivered by bombers, submarines, and other platforms, then the individual warship presents a much larger and amorphous threat. The individual warship features as part of the greater whole that is the distributed force, because a small salvo launched by one platform could very well mean that more salvos from more platforms are on the way. Warships fielding small loads of missiles cannot be discounted or viewed in isolation from the larger force, which magnifies the threat posed by even lightly-armed combatants. Therefore the ability to mass fires considerably broadens the extent of force distribution in the eyes of the adversary.

Contributing Fires and Aggregation Potential

Massed fires can combine multiple different types of missiles, which can be done for the sake of presenting more distributed threats, preserving certain types of weapon inventory, or making due with whatever firepower is available. However, combining fires from a variety of platforms fielding a variety of weapons will pose challenges. Commanders must understand what characteristics dictate the options for how massed fires can take shape, and how these options affect the distribution and risk profile of their forces.

Each individual act of contributing fires to an aggregating salvo can have a narrow window of opportunity measured in only the tens of seconds.² Launching too late or too early will amount to launching an entirely separate salvo, and risk having missiles suffer defeat in detail while forsaking the advantages of combining fires. To effectively overwhelm multiple layers of air defenses, the missiles of an aggregated salvo have to tightly overlap the target within a similar timeframe, such as within the critical two-minute timeframe that subsonic sea-skimming missiles are visible to a target warship after they break over the horizon. Coordinated timing is central to concentrating firepower.

Regardless of the range or speed of the types of missiles, they will combine over a target if their time to reach the target is similar. One salvo does not need to physically merge with another salvo on the way to the target so long as their time to reach the target overlaps. However, the firing sequence will be affected by how different missiles have different ranges, and how quickly their speed allows them to travel those ranges. The desired timing of strikes affects the sequencing and availability of distributed launches.

Although contributing fires must overlap the target at a similar time, the fires may not all be launched at a similar time. If the U.S. Navy wanted to fire each type of its anti-ship weapons at the same time and have them strike at the same time, then all launch platforms would have to be roughly within the small 80-mile range of the Harpoon missile. The SM-6 launch platform would be a few dozen miles further out because of the weapon’s greater speed. More realistically, taking advantage of a variety of weapon ranges means distributed forces will be at different distances from the same target, and will have to sequence their launches to combine fires. A core task of assembling massed fires is organizing these firing sequences, and understanding the tactical implications of their design.

A critical factor is how long it takes a type of missile to fly to the limit of its range. Assuming the missile can be targeted out to this distance, the maximum flight time creates thresholds and ceilings for how much opportunity the missile has to combine with other fires. Missiles with longer flight times or longer ranges have more aggregation potential and offer more opportunity to combine with other fires. But if missiles have to be fired from a variety of ranges, then missiles with shorter times-to-target will have to wait on missiles with longer times to combine with them.

The maximum flight time of LRASM is estimated here at slightly less than 40 minutes. ³ If LRASM fires are to combine with a separate salvo, then that salvo must also be 40 minutes away or less from striking the target. Once these two factors come close to overlapping – the time-to-target of the waiting contributing fires and the time-to-target of the traveling aggregated salvo – those contributing fires will then have tens of seconds of opportunity to launch and effectively combine with the salvo. The figures below show roughly how long it takes U.S. anti-ship missiles to travel their maximum ranges at their maximum speeds, highlighting a critical factor of aggregation potential (Figures 1 and 2).

If missiles of similar speeds are to be combined to grow the volume of fire, then the weapon with the shorter range must wait for the longer-ranged weapon to close enough distance to make combination possible. When range overlaps, the time-to-target will also overlap for missiles of similar speed. Once the longer-ranged weapon aligns with the range of the shorter-ranged weapon, then the latter can be launched to combine fires. If a Harpoon salvo is to combine with a Tomahawk salvo, then the Harpoon launchers must wait for the Tomahawk salvo to be 80 miles or less away from the target to be able to combine with the salvo.

Assuming launch platforms will try to make the most of the range of their weapons, platforms firing Tomahawk will often fire first and platforms launching any other U.S. anti-ship missile will be firing much later in the firing sequence. By necessity those other platforms will have to be much closer to the target than those firing Tomahawk. They could have to wait as long as an hour or more for a Tomahawk salvo to get close enough for them to combine fires.

Combining weapons of widely differing speeds can require limiting tactical opportunities to create a viable firing sequence and achieve a larger volume of fire. The fastest weapons will often have to be fired last in sequence so they can catch up to slower weapons within the narrow timeframe of overlapping the target (Figure 3). The platforms with the fastest weapons will often have to wait the longest to fire, even though they may face the greatest pressures and opportunities to fire first. The potential of capitalizing on a faster weapon’s ability to strike a target earlier can be constrained by the need to combine with slower weapons to achieve enough volume of fire. This constraint stems from the relatively rare nature of the fastest weapons and how subsonic missiles are more common. Otherwise, firing salvos wholly composed of the most high-end and faster missiles can be especially expensive, depleting, and a less distributed form of massing firepower.

Consider how when firing an SM-6 missile in a standalone attack, a target can have as little as four or less minutes of potential warning against the incoming strike. But when SM-6 is a part of contributing fires, the missile’s launch platform will be forced to wait until the aggregated salvo is around four or less minutes away from striking before the SM-6 can be fired.

Figure 3. Click to expand. Three warships launch contributing fires of equal speed that surpass a fourth warship (USS Arleigh Burke). The fourth warship is still able to combine fires by using missiles of higher speed. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)

But faster weapons offer many advantages, such as how they can help an aggregating salvo recover from failing or failed strikes. They can be quick enough to be inserted into an active firing sequence, giving commanders flexible options to augment the salvo as it is unfolding. If contributing fires are destroyed on the way to the target, high-speed weapons can be fired to recover lost volume and bolster the salvo into overwhelming dimensions (Figure 4). If a salvo is defeated by defenses, but those defenses were heavily depleted of anti-air weapons in the process, then high-speed weapons can quickly seize the opportunity to finish the target. Faster weapons can also spare commanders from the lengthier process of organizing fires from slower weapons when needed. 

Figure 4. Click to expand. Faster missiles are used to recover lost volume of fire after a set of slower contributing fires suffer attrition. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)

Yet in the context of a massed firing sequence, even if a platform fields the fastest missile, it could be the last to fire. It may have to wait the longest even though it could hit the earliest. The longer a platform has to wait for its turn in the firing sequence, the more opportunity the adversary will have to preemptively attack the archer before it can contribute its fires. As commanders organize mass fires, they must be wary of the predictability of their firing sequences and the risk of suffering interruptive strikes. 

The Risks of Predictability and Interruptive Strikes

The way a distributed posture is presented to an adversary will flex and evolve during the course of a mass firing sequence. As an aggregating salvo closes in on a target, the options for growing the volume of fire will narrow, and the remaining distribution of potential launch platforms becomes increasingly concentrated. These dynamics simplify some of the adversary’s targeting challenges, where a force will strive for broad-area awareness partly to understand how an adversary’s massed fires are coming together and pinpoint opportunities to disrupt the firing sequence as it is unfolding.

The staggered nature of building an aggregated salvo from sequenced fires increases the risk to friendly platforms whose contributing fires come later in the firing sequence. If an adversary discovers that standoff fires are being launched against them from distant forces, they may view closer forces as pressing targets demanding immediate strikes. Those closer forces are potential candidates for contributing to the volume of the incoming salvo. They could be archers waiting their turn. By targeting these forces before the salvo gets close enough to be combined with, a defender can preemptively destroy platforms to restrict the growth of the salvo and kill targets with fuller magazines (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Click to expand. Sensing a mass firing sequence, an adversary launches high-speed missiles at a pair of warships it believes will soon add contributing fires. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)

When a firing sequence is initiated and an aggregated salvo is born, the burden of destroying archers before they fire arrows considerably intensifies. But those distributed archers must realize that a friendly salvo fired by someone else can make them prime targets of opportunity. If a platform has to wait an hour or more to combine fires with a Tomahawk salvo, then that can offer plenty of time for them to be preemptively attacked by an adversary. The earlier a platform can launch in the firing sequence, the more it reduces its attractiveness for preemptive strikes during the course of assembling massed fires.

The process of assembling massed fires will take on a much more predictable pattern when most of a military’s anti-ship missiles have similar speeds, such as the U.S. military’s mostly subsonic arsenal. In this case an aggregated salvo can take the predictable pattern of gradually building in volume as it closes the range to the target. The outermost platforms initiate the strike by firing the longest-ranged weapons, then platforms closer to the target and with shorter-ranged missiles contribute their fires in turn. As the aggregated salvo closes the distance, each platform that becomes further away from the target than the salvo can be ruled out as a candidate for adding more contributing fires. The potential scope of remaining fires and launch platforms predictably shrinks as the aggregated salvo gets closer to the target. As the salvo closes the distance, the resulting distribution of potential contributors becomes tighter and more concentrated, making clearer to the adversary which archers may remain (Figure 6). 

Figure 6. Click to expand. A mass firing sequence takes on a predictable pattern of aggregation by using missiles of similar speed. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)

This predictability can be mitigated through several measures, including by combining fires with weapons featuring widely different speeds. Platforms with faster weapons can remain a candidate for contributing fires even if they are further away from the target than the aggregated salvo, which helps preserve force distribution as the salvo closes in (Figure 7). An adversary that sees an incoming salvo of Tomahawks 100 miles away can rule out that any platform well beyond that range cannot add further Tomahawks to that salvo. But warships 150 miles away can still pose a threat by launching SM-6s that are fast enough to catch up to the Tomahawks and combine over the target in the final minutes.

Figure 7. Click to expand. A mass firing sequence takes on a less predictable form of aggregation by combining missiles of mixed speeds. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)

In a similar vein, Chinese forces firing subsonic anti-ship weapons can still have ballistic and hypersonic missiles combine with their fires, despite those faster weapons being launched from positions that are potentially hundreds of miles behind the platforms firing the subsonic weapons. Weapons with a combination of extremely long range and high speed can be on call to rapidly combine with a large variety of other salvos on a theater-wide scale. Forces fielding weapons with a variety of speeds therefore present more complex forms of distribution that make it more difficult to predict how their contributing fires can come together. 

Waypointing is a critical tactic that can make aggregation less predictable and complicate an adversary’s options for preemptively striking waiting archers. Weapons with both long range and long flight times can allow commanders to program waypoints into flight paths to artificially increase the time-to-target and therefore lengthen the opportunity to combine fires. Waypointing can allow platforms closer to the target to launch their contributing fires earlier than if they had simply waited for their time-to-target to overlap with the traveling aggregated salvo.

Consider a warship that is waiting to contribute fires to a salvo that is 30 minutes further away from striking a target than the warship’s own fires. Waypointing can allow that warship to fire immediately and make up the time difference through nonlinear flight paths (Figure 8). This tactic of waypointing contributing fires can allow warships to deprive adversaries of the opportunity to destroy archers before they fire arrows, even if those archers can have a shorter time-to-target than the salvos they are aggregating with.

Figure 8. Click to expand. A pair of warships much closer to the target than distant platforms uses waypointing to launch early in the firing sequence while still aligning the time-to-target with the other contributing fires. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)

When contributing fires consist of weapons with similar speeds, the methods of waypointing and in-flight retargeting can allow those salvos to not only combine over the target, but to also merge together on the way to the target. By selectively merging contributing fires and creating more distinct masses earlier in the firing sequence, an attacker can manipulate an adversary’s perceptions and lure defensive airpower toward certain directions. Merging contributing fires can make an adversary falsely perceive that a given formation fired a larger salvo than is actually the case, which can create illusions of greater force concentration and magazine depletion (Figure 9). An adversary may believe a formation is more heavily armed and concentrated than previously believed and redirect more attention toward it. Or the adversary could believe the formation has diminished its value as a potential target by assuming it depleted much of its offensive firepower, and redirect attention away from it.

Figure 9. Click to expand. Two naval formations of several warships use waypointing to give the impression that a large standalone salvo was fired from the vicinity of a single warship (USS Mustin). (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)

By offering the ability to artificially increase the time-to-target, waypointing allows a force to make its firing sequences much more unpredictable in how they unfold. The path a waypointed salvo can take to the target is not linear, making it unclear to the adversary when exactly the salvo may arrive, what it is targeting, and what other contributing fires it may combine with. A sequence of waypointed fires may not predictably grow an aggregated salvo from the outside in. Rather, each platform uses waypointing to align its contributing fires with the time-to-target of other salvos that are being fired from a variety of ranges and are taking a variety of paths to the target. Through waypointing, the order of the firing sequence is no longer purely defined by who is farther or closer to a target, complicating the adversary’s ability to set priorities for interruptive strikes. This method is potentially one of waypointing’s most powerful force multipliers for enhancing distribution.

Figure 10. Click to expand. Distributed forces launch a mass firing sequence that consists entirely of waypointed salvos. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)

Creative methods of assembling massed fires are not only useful for producing overwhelming firepower, but for manipulating the adversary’s interpretations of massed fires for tactical effect. In line with the fundamental tenets of distributed warfighting, missile waypointing is a valuable means of challenging an adversary through complex threat presentations.

Distributing Volume of Fire Across Time

At what point in the firing sequence will the aggregated salvo take on enough volume to be overwhelming? As various contributing fires are launched during the course of massed fires, tactical advantage and disadvantage will come into play depending on when exactly the salvo reaches overwhelming volume on its way to the target. Preserving distribution is not only a matter of managing the physical locations of platforms and contributing fires, it is also a matter of distributing launches across points in time within a firing sequence. Well-distributed launch timing can allow a volume of fire to grow robustly yet unpredictably. Understanding the distribution of launches across time is central toward knowing how to disrupt a massed firing sequence through interruptive strikes and to secure tactical advantage.

A backloaded firing sequence depends on contributing fires to push the aggregate salvo into overwhelming dimensions near the end of the firing sequence. If an aggregated salvo does not reach overwhelming volume until the firing sequence is almost over, then the attack is more fragile and easily disrupted by attacking the contributing fires and waiting archers. A long-range Tomahawk salvo that heavily depends on combining with Harpoon salvos launched by an air wing would take the form of a backloaded firing sequence.

A frontloaded scheme achieves overwhelming volume of fire early in the firing sequence. A large amount of contributing fires are launched early on, but the salvo receives few if any contributing fires for the rest of the firing sequence. The adversary can focus more of their attention and command and control on managing defenses, because a frontloaded firing sequence can spare the adversary the pressure of having to rapidly initiate their own firing sequence in pursuit of interruptive strikes. Multiple warships firing large Tomahawk salvos in tandem and from distant standoff ranges would take the form of a frontloaded firing sequence.

These two schemes of firing sequences – frontloaded and backloaded – are disadvantaged forms of concentration with respect to timing. Various drawbacks are incurred by concentrating the growth of the volume of fire toward the frontend or backend of a firing sequence. If an adversary confronts a distributed force that repeatedly uses concentrated firing sequences, then distribution is diminished and massed fires become more predictable.

A well-distributed firing sequence makes the growth of the volume of fire less predictable and combines the advantages of frontloaded and backloaded schemes. By achieving high volume of fire early in the sequence like a frontloaded scheme, more contributing fires can be added later to increase the margin of overmatch and ensure the salvo can remain overwhelming. There will be more opportunity for new launches to join the active firing sequence, especially to recover volume of fire if it is lost to attrition or if friendly platforms are preemptively destroyed before they can contribute fires.

By also featuring a meaningful number of launches later in the firing sequence, distributed launch timing can make an adversary believe that both offensive and defensive actions are necessary to restrict the growth of the salvo. They may believe they must preemptively attack waiting archers to interrupt the firing sequence and inhibit the growing volume of fire. Adversaries would feel pressed to defend against missiles while also interrupting an active firing sequence through striking waiting platforms, stretching their decision-making across both offensive and defensive efforts.

A well-distributed firing sequence may be more logistically intensive, where a force would expend enough munitions to achieve overwhelming volume of fire early in the sequence, and still have plenty more launches occur later. This sort of firing pattern is more depleting, but it achieves the critical aim of reducing dependence on launches later in the firing sequence while still leveraging them to enhance distribution and further grow the volume of fire. Ideally an aggregated salvo has enough volume of fire to not only remain overwhelming against enemy defenses, but to also remain overwhelming when multiple friendly archers have been destroyed before they could contribute their planned fires. Launching enough volume of fire to withstand disrupted firing sequences will add to the extreme expense and potential for overkill that characterizes this form of warfare.

The pressure to interrupt an active firing sequence can force commanders to expend more of their fastest and most high-end weapons in interruptive strikes. These weapons can have low enough flight times that they can be fired after an adversary initiates massed fires and still reach targets in time to disrupt the firing sequence. Subsonic salvos by comparison will have far less potential for interruptive strikes. There may be significant opportunity to disrupt the massed fires of the U.S. Navy when its principal land-attack and anti-ship cruise missile will be a weapon that can take almost two hours to travel to the limits of its range, and when China fields anti-ship ballistic missiles of similar range that can reach targets within 15 minutes.⁵

The distribution of maximum flight times across U.S. anti-ship missiles will make for a more backloaded firing sequence when more weapons have to combine with Tomahawk fires (Figure 11). If Tomahawk is to be fired from near the limits of its range yet still combine with other types of anti-ship weapons, then the launch platforms firing those other weapons will have to wait around an hour before they reach their turn in the firing sequence. A shorter overall firing sequence can be achieved by foregoing Tomahawks and using the other U.S. anti-ship weapons, but those weapons require much denser platform concentration to mass enough fires, especially for air wings. The U.S. can accomplish a well-distributed firing sequence mainly by having enough Tomahawk shooters throughout the battlespace and at widely different ranges from targets, while also leveraging the missile’s potent waypointing and retargeting capabilities. The figures below illustrate different forms of distribution and concentration across firing sequence timelines (Figures 12-14).

These dynamics create a conundrum for using higher-end weapons. These weapons typically feature very low flight times by virtue of their especially high speed. Their speed will often place them later in the firing sequence where they can combine with more common weapons over the target. Using higher-end weapons is therefore more likely to backload the firing sequence of a mixed salvo. Since the weapons that could contribute the most to a salvo’s lethality would often be fired last, this creates more dependence on ensuring those forces and their kill chains survive until the final minutes of a firing sequence. If those platforms are destroyed or suppressed, or if the handful of high-end missiles are shot down by defenses, then the rest of the aggregated salvo may be at risk of failing and with virtually no time left to add more contributing fires. Counting on higher-end missiles to push a mixed salvo into overwhelming dimensions near the very end of a firing sequence leaves little room to recover lost volume during the course of the attack.

Commanders may not want to risk these dependencies. Therefore they may opt to shorten the overall length of the firing sequence, such as by firing salvos that mainly consist of higher-end weapons. Firing salvos primarily of the fastest weapons will shorten the decision cycle considerably compared to having to wait tens of minutes or longer for more common weapons to form massed fires. A greater number of firing sequences and mass firings could take place within the same span of time it takes to launch a single slower salvo. More than 20 consecutive SM-6 strikes or seven DF-21 anti-ship ballistic missile strikes could be conducted within the time it takes a single Tomahawk salvo to travel the limits of its range (Figure 15). This assumes of course that enough SM-6 and DF-21 inventory is available, targeted, and ready to fire.

Faster weapons can result in a faster kill chain and increase decision-making advantage. A faster kill chain creates more opportunity to launch more attacks, adjust volumes of fire as needed, improve understanding of adversary defenses, and move on to new targets. These advantages may come at a steeper logistical price by depleting high-end inventory at a faster rate. Yet distributed forces that heavily depend on more common weapons with long flight times, like the Tomahawk, may suffer considerable disadvantage in the speed of their decision cycle.

Massing Fires with Aviation

These frameworks for assembling massed fires presume a relatively static laydown of forces from the start to finish of a firing sequence. This is a fairly reasonable assumption when missiles can travel hundreds and even thousands of miles within timeframes that a ship or land vehicle can travel only tens of miles. Most launch platforms will have to rely on the speed and range of their missiles to compensate for their platform’s lack of near-term maneuver in a missile exchange.

Aviation is a critical exception to this. Aviation is the only launch asset whose speed can approach and even exceed that of cruise missiles. The scope of a weapon’s reach can be greatly enhanced by the speed and range of aerial launch platforms, where aviation can put fires in many more places than warships can with similar-ranged weapons in similar timeframes. Through speed and maneuver, aviation can be dynamically repositioned to bolster aggregated salvos in tactically meaningful timeframes. This ability to add flexible on-demand fires makes aviation an especially potent force multiplier for distribution and aggregation. But leveraging aviation poses challenges for assembling massed fires.

First, an important contrast has to be drawn between the availability of fires from carrier air wings, warships, and bombers. One critical advantage carrier aviation has over warships in launching anti-ship strikes is logistics. Carriers have especially deep magazines, and air wings can be rearmed in a matter of hours compared to the days or weeks it can take to rearm warships exiting the theater. But it is quite possible that air wings cannot be armed and sortied quickly enough to satisfy pressing operational demands in a shorter timeframe, such as fitting into a tight firing sequence. It can take a considerable amount of time to finalize mission planning for a large airborne strike, arm dozens of aircraft with specific weapon loadouts, launch those aircraft, assemble the air wing in flight, and then prosecute the strike.⁷ Aviation-based fires cannot be contributed until planes are loaded and made airborne.

While warships cannot rearm cruise missiles at sea like an air wing can, aviation cannot always match the promptness of warship-launched fires. By fielding weapons within launch cells, warships can fire salvos relatively soon after the decision is made to strike, essentially bypassing some of the steps it would take to deliver similar firepower through aviation.⁸ Commanders attempting to combine fires from carrier aviation and warships may find the near-term time demands of setting up aviation are constraining quicker options for massing fires. Commanders in need of rapidly deployed firepower may very well opt for warship-based fires over aviation-based ones, and be willing to pay the steeper logistical price of depleting warships in exchange for the earlier application of firepower.

It may be too logistically taxing to keep most of a carrier air wing airborne and on station for the sake of maintaining quicker options for fires. Instead, it is more likely that a carrier air wing would be armed and launched once targets have been definitively selected and the strikes ordered. If enough anti-ship firepower is widely fielded to the point that entire air wings are not necessary to achieve volume of fire, then smaller numbers of carrier aircraft can contribute a fraction of the contributing fires and reduce the time required to prepare aerial strikes. But compared to carrier aircraft, bombers offer a much more stable and enduring source of on-station aerial firepower by virtue of their longer endurance. This on-station endurance can allow bombers to provide options for fires that are more quickly deployed than air wings that need time to prepare and get airborne for massed strikes. The following schemes of assembling massed fires with aviation are more feasible with heavy bombers than full carrier air wings.

Combining fires between ships and aircraft will often depend on how much repositioning aviation needs to set up its contributing fires. But repositioning costs time, where taking advantage of aviation’s high speed to bolster salvos on demand will cost the time it takes to use that speed. That time is also needed to use speed to compensate for how U.S. aircraft are often limited to carrying smaller and shorter-ranged cruise missiles than the ship-launched weapons they can be combining fires with.

The time it costs to reposition aviation can delay massed fires, put aviation later in the firing sequence, and force other platforms to wait on aircraft to move. Flexible repositioning is one of aviation’s greatest potential contributions to massed fires, yet the time it costs to reposition can complicate aggregation and firing sequences. A critical question is how to position aviation in advance to create options for quick and flexible fires.

The extent to which warships are forced to wait on aviation depends on aviation’s position relative to the target and to the friendly warships they are combining fires with. The extent to which aviation will need to reposition after warships initiate the firing sequence mainly depends on aviation’s proximity to the target. Simply put, how do things change if aviation is kept on station in the space between opposing fleets, or when aviation is kept behind friendly fleets?

If aviation is kept behind friendly warships, then warships will often have to wait until enough aviation is assembled and then maneuvered across lines of departure before the warships can initiate the firing sequence with their longer-ranged weapons. Those aircraft may then have much of their ability to maneuver on the way to the target tightly constrained by the need to adhere to the timing of the firing sequence while still having to travel hundreds of miles forward to their launch points.

If aviation is maintained in the space between opposing fleets, then warships can initiate massed fires without having to wait as much for aviation to reposition. In this scheme, the need to reposition aviation can be deferred to the point of it not being a hard prerequisite for initiating the firing sequence. Aviation would have more flexibility to maneuver as needed while the firing sequence is in progress, rather than be locked into a more constrained flight path from the outset and across a longer distance.

Maintaining aviation in the space between opposing fleets will allow massed fires to be initiated earlier. But aviation positioned in this space may be deprived of the valuable air defense and sensing support that friendly warships can provide. It can also be more risky to maintain an aloft presence with aerial tanking in such a forward position, and protecting strike aircraft in a forward position could create substantial air defense requirements for carrier air wings and other aircraft. But unless aviation has missiles with similar ranges and flight times as the larger warship-based weapons, a force that wants quicker options for massing firepower will accept more risk to aviation by maintaining aerial presence in the space between opposing fleets.

Regardless of where they are maintained in the battlespace, once strikes are ordered, aviation will often need to go far beyond the protections of friendly warships that can fire from much longer standoff ranges. If a bomber with LRASM needs to combine fires with a nearby warship’s 800-mile-long Tomahawk strike, that bomber could have to travel 500 or more miles deeper into the contested battlespace before it can launch its own weapons. While other contributing salvos are in flight, aviation will have to be traveling deeper into the battlespace until the necessary time factors overlap so they can add their own fires. This challenge can be greatly mitigated by fielding larger or more capable cruise missiles that can shift more burden of maneuver from the platform to the payload, such as by equipping bombers with Tomahawks or extreme-range JASSMs. This would allow aviation to fire from more flexible standoffs ranges that are comparable to that of warships.

The disposition of aviation would be constrained by the relationship between the speed of the aircraft and the speed of the missiles they are combining fires with. In the U.S. military, many of the bombers and cruise missiles have similar subsonic speeds. Subsonic bombers like the B-52, B-2, and B-21 have fewer options for aggregating with subsonic salvos than faster aircraft. Aircraft that can outpace subsonic missiles, such as strike fighters and B-1 bombers, could be held further back and across wider distributions. If commanders are willing to pay the logistical price, they can use supersonic flight to surge these aircraft forward in time to combine fires with slower subsonic salvos.

Conclusion

Assembling massed fires from distributed forces will be a complicated challenge. It will involve mixing and harmonizing the kill chains of different payloads, platforms, communities, and services. Each of these factors comes with a variety of its own dependencies and pitfalls. As the services look to operationalize mass fires, they must be mindful of how too much complexity and too much sensitivity to tight coordination can threaten to yield brittle operational designs.

Part 4 will focus on weapons depletion and the last-ditch salvo dynamic.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content and Community Manager of its naval professional society, the Flotilla. He is the author of the “How the Fleet Forgot to Fight” series and coauthor of “Learning to Win: Using Operational Innovation to Regain the Advantage at Sea against China.” Contact him at Content@Cimsec.org.

References

1. The full quote is as follows: “At sea better scouting – more than maneuver, as much as weapon range, and oftentimes as much as anything else – has determined who would attack not merely effectively, but who would attack decisively first.” 

See: 

Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice, Naval Institute Press, pg. 173, 1986.

2. For an example on the need of very close timing for a mass firing sequence of anti-ship missiles, see:

Maksim Y. Tokarov, “Kamikazes: The Soviet Legacy,” U.S. Naval War College Review, Volume 1, 67, 2014, pg. 17, https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1247&context=nwc-review. 

3. This flight time is derived from an estimate of a maximum missile speed of 550mph, or about 9.16 miles per minute, and applying this speed to a maximum missile range of 350 miles.

4. For weapon range, see:

“Options for Fielding Ground-Launched Long-Range Missiles,” Congressional Budget Office, pg. 24, 2020, https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56143.

For 550mph subsonic speed of Tomahawk, see:

“Beyond the Speed of Sound,” pg. 158 (PDF page 166), Arnold Engineering Development Center’s contributions to America’s Air and Space Superiority, United States Air Force, https://www.arnold.af.mil/Portals/49/documents/AFD-100322-069.pdf. 

5. This estimate is based on the typical flight times of similar intermediate range ballistic missiles. See:

Bruce G. Blair, Harold A. Feiveson and Frank N. von Hippel, “Taking Nuclear Weapons off Hair-Trigger Alert,” Scientific American, November 1997, https://sgs.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/2019-10/blair-feiveson-vonhippel-1997.pdf. 

Dr. Jamie Shea, “1979: The Soviet Union deploys its SS20 missiles and NATO responds,” NATO, March 4, 2009, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_139274.htm. 

Charles Maynes, “Demise of US-Russian Nuclear Treaty Triggers Warnings,” Voice of America, July 31, 2019, https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_demise-us-russian-nuclear-treaty-triggers-warnings/6172981.html. 

6. This estimate is derived from the flight times listed in Figure 1, where SM-6 has four minutes of flight time, and a Tomahawk missile has a maximum flight time of 110 minutes.

7. For comparisons of times to plan and launch Tomahawk versus carrier air wing strikes, see:

General Accounting Office, “Cruise Missiles: Proven Capability Should Affect Aircraft and Force Structure Requirements,” GAO/NSIAD-95-116, April 1995, pg. 35-36, https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-95-116.pdf. 

8. General Accounting Office, “Cruise Missiles: Proven Capability Should Affect Aircraft and Force Structure Requirements,” GAO/NSIAD-95-116, April 1995, pg. 35-36, https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-95-116.pdf. 

Newer Tomahawk variants than those discussed above have considerably shorter launch preparation times. See:

“Tomahawk,” Missile Threat CSIS Missile Defense Project, last updated February 23, 2023, https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/tomahawk/ 

and 

Rear Admiral Edward Masso (ret.), “On The Tomahawk Missile, Congress Must Save The Day,” Forbes, June 10, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2015/06/10/on-the-tomahawk-missile-congress-must-save-the-day/?sh=7b86cc956bad. 

Featured Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (August 17, 2018) The guided missile destroyer USS Dewey (DDG 105) conducts a tomahawk missile flight test while underway in the western Pacific. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Devin M. Langer)

By Dmitry Filipoff

Series Introduction

“Why study tactics? It is the sum of the art and science of the actual application of combat power. It is the soul of our profession.” –Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski, foreword to the second edition of Fleet Tactics by Captain Wayne P. Hughes, Jr.

In the Western Pacific, the U.S. Navy is facing one of the most powerful arrays of anti-ship firepower ever assembled.¹ The Navy is attempting to evolve its capabilities and doctrine to meet this challenge and transform the future of naval warfare. In this pursuit, the U.S. Navy has made the Distributed Maritime Operations concept (DMO) central to its evolution and relevance, with DMO being described by the Chief of Naval Operations as “the Navy’s foundational operating concept.”² DMO can serve a defining role in guiding the development of the U.S. Navy and how it will fight for years to come.

But while DMO has lasted longer than other recent Navy warfighting concepts, it is still relatively new and much work remains to be done on its practical implementation.³ What exactly does DMO mean for the Navy, how is it different than current naval operations, and how could a distributed force fight a war at sea? This series focuses on these questions as it lays out an operational warfighting vision for how DMO can transform the U.S. Navy and be applied in modern naval warfare.

Part 1 will focus on defining the DMO concept and illustrating core frameworks of distributed warfighting.

Part 2 will focus on the U.S. Navy’s anti-ship missile shortfall and the implications for massing fires.

Part 3 will focus on assembling massed fires and modern fleet tactics.

Part 4 will focus on weapons depletion and the last-ditch salvo dynamic.

Part 5 will focus on missile salvo patterns and their tactical implications.

Part 6 will focus on the strengths and weaknesses of platform types in distributed warfighting.

Part 7 will focus on revamping the role of the aircraft carrier for distributed warfighting.

Part 8 will focus on China’s ability to mass fires against distributed naval forces.

Part 9 will focus on the force structure implications of DMO.

Part 10 will focus on force development focus areas for manifesting DMO.

This series will mainly focus on how the U.S. Navy can apply DMO and mass fires, but important fundamentals of the concept apply to other services and militaries as well. In crucial respects, China’s military is far closer to realizing the potential of DMO and mass fires than the U.S. Navy. What will be analyzed does not only apply to how the U.S. Navy can use DMO to fight adversaries, but how adversaries can use DMO to defeat the U.S. Navy.

Why Define a Warfighting Concept?

Warfighting concepts can mean many things. They can espouse lofty operational goals, cutting edge capabilities, and extraordinarily complex tactics. Public definitions can feature broad principles and vague points but little substance. Meaningful specifics can be relegated to the labyrinth of the classified world, which is hardly a guarantee of actual utility or force-wide understanding. An official concept can suggest more organizational and intellectual coherence on future warfighting than what may actually be the case.

Warfighting concepts can be abused, acting as little more than bumper stickers attached to initiatives in service of preconceived interests.⁴ Some concepts can be more politics and marketing than real change agents, such as by serving as budget battle weapons rather than drivers of genuine reform or operational innovation. The rapid rise and fall of various naval net-centric warfighting concepts in recent decades suggests a lack of clarity on what is desired or sustainable. This regular procession of short-lived concepts has taken a genre of thinking that once seemingly sparkled with transformational promise and often relegated it into stale generics.

Yet warfighting concepts are absolutely necessary. Militaries must have a vision for the overarching frameworks of how they intend to fight and compete. Concepts are needed to combine various capabilities and tactics into a conscious integrated whole, rather than letting individual elements yield disjointed operational designs. Concepts offer holistic frameworks for valuing the combat power of force structure, and evolve analysis beyond more superficial measures of capability such as hull counts, launch cell quantity, or reputation. Concepts serve critical functions in guiding force development toward earning distinct advantages, and providing a common point of departure for how operational commanders can tailor the employment of forces.

To provide clarity and to prevent misuse, warfighting concepts require careful definitions and measured expectations. Actionable coherence requires specificity. Concepts require that key effects and capabilities be defined as priorities to organize focus. They must have specifically defined features that distinguish them as unique and evolutionary. Warfighting concepts demand discipline of vision, pinning success more on plausible attainability rather than breathtaking transformation. A critical part of examining the promise of DMO is considering whether it may be too good to be true.

The way the Navy has defined DMO deserves careful assessment. Core tenets of DMO and distributed warfighting need to be described and evaluated through the fundamentals of modern naval warfare. How exactly do these concepts expect to create advantage? Central terms need to be established to create consistent understanding of how to define warfighting success and how it can be achieved. All beliefs about future conflict reflect implicit assumptions on the theory and practice of war, and what theory of victory is superior. These underlying assumptions need to be made explicit to acknowledge limits and respect much of warfighting’s fundamental unpredictability.

Ultimately, achieving sharper clarity will give more shape and form to this warfighting concept that could define the future of naval warfare for years to come.

Defining DMO and Core Warfighting Lexicon

DMO is happening for several reasons, where the drive toward distributed warfighting is part defensive reaction and part offensive evolution. The considerable missile firepower fielded by China especially has encouraged distribution for the sake of survivability. But offensive developments on the part of U.S. services are also driving distribution. DMO is poised to harness a major transformation in the anti-ship firepower of the services, with each service now beginning to procure weapons that will bring substantial anti-ship missile firepower to U.S. communities that have never fielded it before, including surface warships, submarines, and land-based aviation and launchers.⁵ Fielding this major expansion of anti-ship firepower across the fleet and the other services will significantly elevate the maritime threat posed by a broad swath of force structure, and allow far more forces to disperse across greater distances and still combine fires. In this sense, DMO and the overarching Joint Warfighting Concept are an attempt to manage a defensive problem while seizing an offensive opportunity.⁶ The problem is the considerable missile firepower of competitors, and the opportunity is the major expansion of anti-ship missile firepower across U.S. force structure.

In this context, Navy leadership has communicated central tenets of the DMO concept with some consistency. These definitions provide a helpful point of departure in understanding the concept and going from theoretical understanding to practical implication. These definitions also suggest how Navy leadership believes that realizing the DMO concept is critical to securing the Navy’s future. CNO Admiral Gilday captured defining features of DMO in testimony before Congress:

“Using concepts such as the Joint Warfighting Concept and Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO), we will mass sea- and shore-based fires from distributed forces. By maneuvering distributed forces across all domains, we will complicate adversary targeting, exploit uncertainty, and achieve surprise…Navy submarines, aircraft, and surface ships will launch massed volleys of networked weapons to overwhelm adversary defenses…Delivering an all-domain fleet that is capable of effectively executing these concepts is vital to maintaining a credible conventional deterrent with respect to the PRC and Russia.”⁷

In the tri-service maritime strategy Advantage at Sea, DMO is defined as:

“[a concept] that combine[s] the effects of sea-based and land-based fires…[and] leverages the principles of distribution, integration, and maneuver to mass overwhelming combat power and effects at the time and place of our choosing.”⁸

The concept has featured some consistency across Navy leadership turnover. CNO Gilday’s predecessor Adm. Richardson stated in A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority (2019):

“We will fully realize the inherent flexibility of DMO when we provide the capability to mass fires and effects from distributed and networked assets.”⁹

These explanations of DMO contain several defining traits that have consistently featured in the Navy’s public definitions of the concept. They include the massing and convergence of fires from distributed forces, complicating adversary targeting and decision-making, and networking effects across platforms and domains.

These elements of DMO encompass a broad multitude of naval tactics and capabilities. This series will anchor its focus on one of the defining features of DMO – massing anti-ship missile firepower from across distributed forces. It will concentrate on this core tactic of massing fires as an organizing framework for analyzing DMO. Developing the ability to execute this tactic has profound implications for the transformation of the U.S. Navy and the U.S. military writ large. It is one of the most critical features that distinguishes the evolutionary character of DMO from what the U.S. military is capable of today. By focusing on this central tactic, this series hopes to give more concrete precision and practical clarity for how this concept can work in practice.

Concepts of massing fires strongly apply to how forces can threaten well-defended land targets as well. Whether the targets or the attacking forces are on land or sea, a central operational challenge of high-end warfare is how to mass enough missile firepower to break through strong air defenses and achieve effects. Using distributed forces to launch massed fires against land targets is also a far more developed capability for the U.S. military and U.S. Navy than anti-ship fires.

The terms used to describe these fires can include massed, combined, or aggregated. Distributed forces are looking to combine their missile salvos to build massed fires. These salvos are combining and aggregating with one another into a larger salvo, where the term aggregating means “to collect or gather into a mass or whole.”¹⁰ Contributing fires are individual missiles and salvos that aim to increase the overall volume of the primary aggregated salvo. Aggregation is the main term used here to frame how fires can be combined, and aggregation potential is the ability of different types of platforms and payloads to offer contributing fires.

As opposed to massed fires, standalone fires describe independent salvos that are launched from an individual unit, force package, or force concentration. Standalone fires can still feature considerable mass and volume of fire. But standalone fires have no expectation or intention of combining with the fires of outside, non-organic forces.

Overwhelming fire is the goal of aggregation, and it achieves this through mustering enough volume. Contributing fires come together through aggregation to increase the volume of fire until it is enough to be overwhelming. Forces are attempting to mass enough missile firepower to break through strong missile defenses, and once broken through, score enough hits to achieve the desired effect.

The term “overwhelming” can still describe volumes of fire that go far beyond what is necessary. Therefore the specific goal of overwhelming a target is understood as massing the minimum amount of firepower required to confidently surpass a defensive threshold and then score enough hits. Overwhelming fires that go well beyond these thresholds are termed overkill, which can be difficult to predict and is highly likely given the natural combat dynamics involved, such as how only one missile hit can easily be enough to put a warship out of action.¹¹

The ability to overwhelm a target with missiles will be described as mainly a function of achieving enough volume of fire. This is a central assumption because defenses can be overwhelmed not so much by pure volume, but by advanced capability. Specific capabilities can improve the ability of a missile to find and discriminate targets while enhancing the ability to penetrate defenses. Hypersonic weapons are more difficult to defend against by virtue of their speed and flight profiles. Outside capabilities and tactics such as jamming and deception can also serve as force multipliers to a missile salvo. But even though high-end weapons and force multiplying tactics can lower defensive effectiveness, these weapons may be fired in salvos because some level of payload attrition is still expected. Modern warship defenses are relatively dense and consist of multiple layers and varieties of capability, suggesting there is still a role for volume of fire even for higher-end weapons and tactics.

It is true that large anti-ship missile salvos have never featured in the modern history of naval warfare, despite the capability existing for more than half a century and numerous sunk warships.¹² The history of warships being struck by anti-ship missiles, whether they be the Moskva, the Sheffield, or the Stark, is mainly a history of poor situational awareness and woefully unprepared crews.¹³ The naval missile duels of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war featured decently ready warships, but were primarily small salvos exchanged between small combatants.¹⁴ Salvos fired at warships that resulted in no hits, such as in Operation Desert Storm or in the Red Sea in 2016, also consisted of very few missiles.¹⁵

All of the historical experience to date of warships being attacked by missiles, successfully or not, consists of extraordinarily small volumes of fire. Despite this being the case, for decades the design of high-end naval capability has long been predicated on launching and defeating volumes of missile firepower that are far larger than the historical experience so far. This is not to suggest that naval capability design could be deeply misguided. Rather, the historical circumstances that yield large naval missile exchanges have yet to manifest. But the contours of those capabilities and circumstances are plainly visible today. Therefore this series assumes that much of the combat effectiveness of modern naval forces in high-end warfighting will continue to be predicated on their ability to launch and defeat large volumes of missile firepower. It also assumes that crews, platforms, and capabilities will mostly function as intended, a core assumption that cannot be made lightly.

In terms of force packages and geographic dispositions, the term distributed forces is not used here to describe the disaggregated U.S. naval formations of the past few decades. A distributed naval force is not envisioned here as a force where each element is almost completely independent, and operational effectiveness is mainly a function of accumulating individual, unit-level victories. Rather, a distributed force is a collection of forces that are widely separated yet generally still acting in concert in key respects. Unity of action is still a fundamental requirement for critical warfighting functions, especially for massing fires. As Vice Admiral Jim Kilby described it:

“Distributed Maritime Operations is fleet commanders controlling ESGs, CSGs, SAGs, individual units, that’s a little different for us…At a very simple level [DMO] is many units in a distributed fashion, concentrating their fires and their effects.”¹⁶

This complements guidance published by the previous Chief of Naval Operations on the need to “master fleet-level warfare” and that “Our fleet design and operating concepts demand that fleets be the operational center of warfare.”¹⁷ The current CNO has continued to emphasize the fleet-level imperative, stating that “If we’re going to fight as a fleet – and we moved away from fighting just as singular ARGs, as singular strike groups, to fighting as a fleet under a fleet commander as the lead – we have to be able to train that way.”¹⁸

DMO is a form of fleet-level warfare, and it is closely connected to the U.S. Navy’s push toward wielding larger-scale naval formations. A distributed naval force is a coordinated fleet, and a fleet is something larger in scale than the typical naval formations of the past few decades, such as carrier strike groups.

A carrier strike group can still be an appropriate formation to use in a distributed force if it is a component of a larger fleet. Distribution can be achieved not only by spreading formations, but also by increasing the overall number of forces within a theater of operations. This series envisions a distributed force as mostly consisting of large numbers of surface action groups, naval aviation, bombers, and land-based forces acting together to mass fires, with other formations and platforms featuring as well. Many of this series’ concepts are also ungirded by the critical assumption that the U.S. can surge enough forces to field enough platforms and firepower to pose a distributed threat and mass fires. 

Central Frameworks of Distributed Naval Warfighting

DMO marks a departure in being a network-centric warfighting concept instead of a platform-centric concept. The latter requires that platforms be closely co-located in order to mass their firepower, which is concentrated, not distributed, warfighting. In network-centric warfare, firepower can be massed without co-locating the launch platforms themselves. This capability is a product of increased weapons range and the networks that allow widely separated forces to coordinate their fires across great distances. Massing firepower in this way can be described as an attempt to earn the benefits of concentration without incurring its liabilities. Distributed warfare is therefore distinct from what could be termed as concentrated warfare. Distributed warfare is now being regarded as the superior method by the U.S. Navy, which is a marked departure from millennia of high-end naval battles often characterized by decisive clashes between heavily concentrated main battle fleets. A framework is needed to differentiate what is distributed from what is concentrated, and how these different configurations affect advantage.

The question of what is distributed or concentrated is often centered on how to arrange the density of capability. This can include the density of capability in individual payloads, platforms and force packages, and how the density of capability is spread across an entire force structure or theater. At first, the definition of distribution may be interpreted as lessening density, where distribution is seen as the act of spreading capability outward and more broadly. But distribution does not inherently imply a stretching or dispersal of capability. Rather, this perception is often based on the traditional force employment and force design of a service, and what direction it must take to achieve better distribution. A force that is stretched thin could certainly achieve a better state of distribution by slightly concentrating itself.

Distribution is better defined as an ideal balance in the spread of capability. In this sense, distribution is at the center of a spectrum (Figure 1). On one end of the spectrum is the concentrated force, in the center is the distributed force, and at the other end is the force that is stretched thin. Being stretched thin can be defined as the spread of capability being too wide to be mutually combined and reinforcing, when those capabilities were meant to be combinable. Being concentrated can be defined as the spread of capability being so dense that it incurs more liability than benefit. Distribution implies an ideal balance in the spread of capability, a happy medium between the two extremes of overconcentration and being stretched thin.

As will be demonstrated throughout, the core aspect of being distributed, concentrated, or stretched thin applies to many realms of naval capability besides spatial and material factors. These aspects can apply to firepower, timing, and other elements. Each can describe a separate manner of configuring missile loadouts, of sequencing fires in time, or of spreading weapons depletion across a force during mass fires. These recurring themes will provide a common frame of reference for describing the configuration of various operational elements and their state of advantage.

Spatial factors can help with distinguishing these configurations. In spatial terms, concentration means the area of overlapping capability and influence between assets is nearly one and the same. Distribution means there is still a substantial area of capability overlap between assets, but also a substantial separate area of influence (Figure 2). These two areas can complicate an adversary’s decision-making because these distributed assets maintain options for combining their fires, but also options for exercising initiative independently of one another in distinct areas. The geographic space between distributed units can blur the perception of which forces constitute distinct force packages. This makes it less clear to the adversary how distributed forces will behave and support one another operationally, and can obscure which assets are the leading elements or the supporting elements. This overlap of distributed capability creates more vectors of attack, and the more viable options that are available to a commander, the less clear the next moves will be to the adversary.

Distribution is distinct from being stretched thin, which is a vulnerability that is incurred when the spreading of capability is taken to an extreme. Being stretched thin suggests that weakness can be exploited at the capability gaps between forces. Stretched forces struggle to support one another and combine their effects. Commanders must use discretion to limit distribution so that widely spaced forces are still able to support one another or combine effects to support an overall operational design.

Offensively, the amount of maneuver that is required for distributed forces to initiate massed fires against a shared target can represent how stretched these forces are. A force with long-range weapons would require less preparatory maneuver than a force with short-ranged weapons. It takes far less space to stretch thin a force trying to combine Harpoon missiles compared to longer-ranged Tomahawks. With respect to offense, forces are more stretched the more they must maneuver to create overlapping fires, with weapons range being a key limiting factor in identifying the gaps.

This spectrum highlights a central paradox of distributed warfighting and the arguments that are often made in favor of it.¹⁹ Why is it favorable for a force to proactively distribute its own assets and platforms, but unfavorable to cause an adversary to do the same? The answer may lie in the distinctions that occur on the ends of this spectrum, that one force’s distribution can cause its adversary’s to become stretched thin. This paradox also applies to the decision-making advantage that is central to success in distributed warfighting. Concentration simplifies command and control, but distribution complicates it. Some of distribution’s effectiveness is therefore predicated on the belief that the command-and-control burden of wielding a distributed force can be more manageable than the C2 burden of targeting that force.

The nature of being concentrated, distributed, or stretched thin does not hold evenly across functions, especially offensive and defensive warfare. A configuration that appears distributed for one way of combining capability can be stretched thin for another. When forces are to mutually support one another, it is far easier in naval warfare to be distributed and combine offensive missile firepower than it is to combine defensive firepower. In the case of defense, even naval formations that seem heavily concentrated can have their defenses stretched thin by the fundamental dynamics of naval warfare.

Since many radar systems cannot see through the curvature of the Earth, the radar horizon limit has an intensely isolating effect on naval defense. The low-altitude, sea-skimming flight profiles of many anti-ship missiles take advantage of these radar horizon limits to tightly compress the amount of time and space warships have to defend themselves. Much of the advantage offered by long-range sensing and defensive weaponry is negated by sea-skimming flight profiles that force defensive engagements to begin mere miles away from warships (Figure 3).

Given how the limits of the radar horizon can typically be as little as 20 miles away, warships will have their mutual defenses stretched thin by the radar horizon dynamic unless proximity and concentration is taken to extreme lengths.²⁰ Ships that are close enough to help defend one another against sea-skimming threats are likely to be concentrated enough that they can be threatened by the same individual salvo, removing distribution’s key advantage of diluting fires. Networking capabilities like the Navy’s Cooperative Engagement Capability will only marginally increase the potential for defensive concentration, given how incoming missiles can still be tens of seconds away from impacting the warship illuminating the missiles for outside defensive fires.²¹ While some environmental conditions can allow radar to bend around the horizon, this adds more complexity to the engagement and is not a panacea for mitigating sea-skimming threats.²² When sea-skimming salvos break over the horizon and are only tens of seconds away from impact, warships are more likely to fight alone. 

Even if missiles attack from higher altitudes that give warships more scope for mutual defense, the act of combining defensive fires from multiple warships can incur major inefficiencies in weapons depletion. If incoming missiles penetrate into the overlapping air defense zones of a fleet, the pre-programmed doctrines of heavily automated combat systems could easily generate defensive overkill. If multiple Aegis warships reflexively execute the standard “shoot-shoot-look-shoot” doctrine against the same missile, far more anti-air weapons than necessary could be wasted against individual targets.²⁴ The fleet’s magazines would be depleting at a disproportionate rate relative to the number of missiles being shot down, and the attackers would be operating at a more favorable exchange ratio. Simply depleting magazines of anti-air weapons can be more than enough to put commanders in untenable positions and force ships out of the fight as they retreat on a long journey home to rearm. Tightly coordinated networking and automation would be required to efficiently expend defensive fires across multiple platforms, especially for a concentrated fleet. Yet there would also be an especially strong incentive to do everything possible to preserve a concentrated fleet, since it likely represents a major center of gravity whose loss cannot be afforded.

Click to expand. Three warships, each using a firing doctrine of two interceptors per incoming missile, defeat a small salvo with highly inefficient expenditure. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)

Concentration does offer several advantages in naval warfare compared to distribution. One of the hallmark advantages of concentration is simpler command and control, which could prove invaluable in a heavily contested electromagnetic environment. Concentration allows for offensive fires to be launched with less networking and communication demands compared to distribution. The contributing fires of a concentrated force can also become aggregated and massed shortly after launch, where the salvo takes on overwhelming volume early in its creation. Because there is less need for follow-on salvos to grow the volume of fire, the adversary’s options for preemptively destroying follow-on shooters is diminished. However, a salvo that combines into an overwhelming mass early in its creation can also present a distinct center of gravity. This creates clearer and more timely opportunities for an adversary to apply defensive countermeasures against the salvo, such as airpower.

By comparison, a distributed force is more challenged to ensure its various contributing fires combine over the target. This can require sequencing launches, which creates opportunities for adversary preemption during the course of building an aggregated salvo from contributing fires. But by combining fires from distributed forces, the aggregated salvo does not necessarily combine into a distinct mass until it is near the target, which complicates the defender’s options. The visuals below show the difference in how the salvos of concentrated and distributed fleets can develop overwhelming mass.

Click to expand. A concentrated fleet launches a large salvo, which develops into a distinct mass shortly after being fired. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)

Click to expand. A distributed fleet launches an aggregated salvo through a firing sequence, where the contributing fires coalesce into an overwhelming mass shortly before reaching the target. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)

Distribution and Decision-Making Advantage

When it comes to massing fires, distribution offers many more options for combining offensive capability than defensive capability. Distribution reaps defensive benefits not by facilitating mutual kinetic support between warships, but by complicating the adversary’s decision to strike.

As a force surveils a large ocean space, it must find opposing naval forces and then develop targeting information that enables effective fires. The force must also decide whether the target is worth striking and worth the weapons depletion. A large concentration of naval forces that takes the form of a single force package, such as a main battle fleet, reduces uncertainty by clearly presenting a distinct center of gravity. An adversary would then feel much more comfortable investing a large number of limited munitions in attacking such a distinct center of gravity.

A distributed force complicates this calculus by presenting multiple groupings of contacts across the battlespace rather than a distinct main body. An adversary scouting an ocean could discover some individual elements of a distributed fleet much sooner than a concentrated fleet. But finding those elements may not create enough clarity to warrant a prompt attack because they represent only a portion of the force, and other unseen forces are at large. A distributed force poses a larger number of force packages than a concentrated force, and having more force packages imposes more kill chains for the adversary to manage. Adversaries would have their scouting assets stretched and tied down by these distributed force packages, since discovered forces can require regular tracking and updating of targeting information to ensure offensive options remain timely and viable. While developing a growing menu of targeting options, the adversary may feel tempted to prolong the search for information to build enough confidence to set priorities for expending limited numbers of munitions. But there is an inherent tension between taking the time to gain more information and ceding the initiative to the opponent, allowing a distributed force to pressurize the adversary’s tempo of decision-making.

While stealth enhances distribution, distribution can still act as a force multiplier even when the distributed force is in plain sight of the adversary. If an adversary has complete awareness of every distributed asset’s location, that can still not be enough to clarify intent and clearly define priorities for action. As Vice Admiral Phil Sawyer stated, DMO “will generate opportunities for naval forces to achieve surprise…it will impose operational dilemmas on the adversary.”²⁵ What a distinct main body of forces can disclose to an adversary is the crucial insight that this main body is likely the primary element through which commanders will exercise their intent. This creates more opportunity and temptation for firing first and preempting the actions of the main body.

What a distributed force poses is a vast array of interlocking firepower, making it less clear to an adversary which elements of the distributed force could be the first to initiate massed fires, or which forces pose the most pressing threat. Distribution also makes it more difficult to ascertain which forces are peripheral to main lines of effort, since forces in peripheral positions or secondary theaters can still bolster main efforts through contributing long-range fires. When deciding what distributed targets are to be fired upon first, it can be hard to know where to begin.

Distribution allows a force to better compete for the initiative and for options to fire effectively first, which is especially crucial to succeeding in naval combat. The 2016 Surface Force strategy expressed similar advantages of distribution, in that it can “influence an adversary’s decision-making calculus” and “spreads the playing field for our surface forces at sea [and] provides a more complex targeting problem.”²⁶

A major driver of distribution is the growing capability of powerful land-based anti-ship forces designed to counter expeditionary fleets. These forces can include anti-ship ballistic missiles, coastal defense cruise missiles, and land-based bombers and air forces, which can produce especially large volumes of standoff fires. By virtue of operating from their homeland, these forces can enjoy far quicker logistical rearming compared to expeditionary naval forces. Land-based missile forces are especially threatening by fielding some of the most powerful and long-range missiles, requiring virtually no maneuver to keep their weapons within range of targets on a theater-wide scale, and employing highly survivable launch platforms. The experience of scud-hunting in Desert Storm was instructive in showing how extremely difficult it is to target land-based missile launchers, even with exhaustive effort, highly favorable terrain, and total air supremacy.²⁷ This makes it much more difficult to execute the favorable tactic of destroying the archer before the arrow is fired. When a fleet cannot meaningfully threaten a large scope of land-based firepower with attrition, distribution offers a way to circumvent this firepower by complicating the adversary’s decision to strike.

A Vision of Future War at Sea

Distributed Maritime Operations can provide a framework for understanding modern naval warfare and illuminate its future. While plenty of unknowns remain, the DMO concept offers an important opportunity to foster debate on how to adapt naval warfighting and translate theory into practice. Great power navies will be able to secure their relevance in a time of rapid change by establishing a clearer vision of war at sea. Those who better articulate and manifest their vision can earn the decisive edge. The U.S. Navy has no time to waste, for its competitors are already ahead of the curve.

Part 2 will focus on the U.S. Navy’s anti-ship missile shortfall and the implications for massing fires.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content and Community Manager of its naval professional society, the Flotilla. He is the author of the “How the Fleet Forgot to Fight” series and coauthor of “Learning to Win: Using Operational Innovation to Regain the Advantage at Sea against China.” Contact him at Content@Cimsec.org.

References 

1. For Chinese Navy vertical launch cell count and anti-ship missile capabilities, see:

Toshi Yoshihara, “Dragon Against the Sun: Chinese Views of Japanese Seapower,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, pg. 15-19, 2020, https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/CSBA8211_(Dragon_against_the_Sun_Report)_FINAL.pdf.

For a broad overview of Chinese naval capability and its trajectory, see:

“Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2022,” U.S. Department of Defense, pg. 50-65, 2022, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/29/2003122279/-1/-1/1/2022-MILITARY-AND-SECURITY-DEVELOPMENTS-INVOLVING-THE-PEOPLES-REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA.PDF.

2. “Chief of Naval Operations’ Navigation Plan 2022,” Department of the Navy, pg. 8, 2022, https://www.dvidshub.net/publication/issues/64582.

3. AirSea Battle was publicly promulgated in 2013 and was later incorporated into the Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons (JAM-GC) in 2015. JAM-GC featured in the discourse for several years afterward but appears to have been subsumed under other efforts. The ForceNet concept was promulgated in the early 2000s but appeared to lose steam or was subsumed under efforts. Warfighting concepts often seem to lack definitive or declared ends.

4. The earlier era of Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) and Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) featured robust discourse on the future of warfare but also tautological discourse that affixed itself to these concepts while lacking in substance. The Distributed Lethality concept was adopted by industry to describe various efforts broadly relating to surface warfare. For a recent example on the potential abuse and buzzwording of concept language, see:

Colin Demarest, “What JADC2 is, and what it is not, according to a US Navy admiral,” C4ISRNet, February 16, 2023, https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/c2-comms/2023/02/16/what-jadc2-is-and-what-it-is-not-according-to-a-us-navy-admiral/.

5. Relatively new anti-ship missiles include: Maritime Strike Tomahawk (MST), Long-range Anti-Surface Missile (LRASM), Naval Strike Missile (NSM), and Standard Missile 6 (SM-6). The Army, Air Force, and Marines are procuring some of these weapon types.

6. David Vergun, “DOD Focuses on Aspirational Challenges in Future Warfighting,” DoD News, July 26, 2021, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2707633/dod-focuses-on-aspirational-challenges-in-future-warfighting/.

7. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday, “Statement Of Admiral Michael M. Gilday, Chief Of Naval Operations On The Posture Of The United States Navy Before The House Armed Services Committee,” U.S. House Armed Services Committee, pg. 7, June 15, 2021, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AS/AS00/20210615/112796/HHRG-117-AS00-Wstate-GildayM-20210615.pdf.

8. Advantage at Sea: Prevailing with Integrated All-Domain Naval Power, U.S. Department of Defense, pg. 7 and 25, December 2020, https://media.defense.gov/2020/Dec/16/2002553074/-1/-1/0/TRISERVICESTRATEGY.PDF.

9. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson, “FRAGO 01/2019: A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority,” U.S. Department of the Navy, pg. 7, December 2019, https://media.defense.gov/2020/Jul/23/2002463491/-1/-1/1/CNO%20FRAGO%2001_2019.PDF.

10. Merriam Webster definition of “aggregate”: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aggregate.

11. Captain Wayne P. Hughs Jr. and RADM Robert P. Girrier, “Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations, Third Edition,” U.S. Naval Institute Press, pg. 157-159, 2019.

12. John C. Schulte, “An Analysis of the Historical Effectiveness of Antiship Cruise missiles in Littoral Warfare,” Naval Postgraduate School, September 1994, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADB192139.pdf.

13. Steve Wills, “40 Years of Missile Warfare: What the losses of HMS Sheffield and RFS Moskva Tell Us about War at Sea,” Center for International Maritime Security, June 29, 2022, https://cimsec.org/40-years-of-missile-warfare-what-the-losses-of-hms-sheffield-and-rfs-moskva-tell-us-about-war-at-sea/.

14. Abraham Rabinovic, The Boats of Cherbourg: The Navy That Stole Its Own Boats and Revolutionized Naval Warfare, revised edition, independently published, 2019.

15. For Desert Storm attack, see:

Captain Wayne P. Hughs Jr. and RADM Robert P. Girrier, “Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations, Third Edition,” U.S. Naval Institute Press, pg. 147-148, 2019.

For 2016 attack, see:

Sam LaGrone, “USS Mason Fired 3 Missiles to Defend From Yemen Cruise Missiles Attack,” USNI News, October 11, 2016, https://news.usni.org/2016/10/11/uss-mason-fired-3-missiles-to-defend-from-yemen-cruise-missiles-attack.

16. Sam LaGrone, “Large Scale Exercise 2021 Tests How Navy, Marines Could Fight a Future Global Battle,” August 9, 2021, https://news.usni.org/2021/08/09/large-scale-exercise-2021-tests-how-navy-marines-could-fight-a-future-global-battle.

17. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson, “FRAGO 01/2019: A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority,” U.S. Department of the Navy, pg. 3, December 2019, https://media.defense.gov/2020/Jul/23/2002463491/-1/-1/1/CNO%20FRAGO%2001_2019.PDF.

18. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday, “CNO Speaks to Students at the Naval War College,” August 31, 2022, https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/Speeches/display-speeches/Article/3161620/cno-speaks-to-students-at-the-naval-war-college/.

19. On arguments that argue in favor of spreading the adversary’s sensing more broadly, see:

Vice Admiral Thomas Rowden, Rear Admiral Peter Gumataotao, and Rear Admiral Peter Fanta, “Distributed Lethality,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2015, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2015/january/distributed-lethality.

20. For radar horizon distance, see: Lee O. Upton and Lewis A. Thurman, “Radars for the Detection and Tracking of Cruise Missiles,” Lincoln Laboratory Journal, Volume 12, Number 2, pg. 365, 2000, https://archive.ll.mit.edu/publications/journal/pdf/vol12_no2/12_2detectcruisemissile.pdf.

For radar horizon combat dynamics, see: Conrad J. Crane, “CEC: Sensor Netting with Integrated Fire Control,” Johns Hopkins Apl Technical Digest, Volume 23, Numbers 2 And 3 (2002), pg. 152, https://www.jhuapl.edu/Content/techdigest/pdf/V23-N2-3/23-02-Grant.pdf.

21. For CEC capabilities as they relate to radar horizon combat dynamics, see: Conrad J. Crane, “CEC: Sensor Netting with Integrated Fire Control,” Johns Hopkins Apl Technical Digest, Volume 23, Numbers 2 And 3 (2002), pg. 152-153, https://www.jhuapl.edu/Content/techdigest/pdf/V23-N2-3/23-02-Grant.pdf.

22. Donna W. Blake et. al, “Uncertainty Results for the Probability of Raid Annihilation Measure,” 2006, https://fdocuments.in/document/02s-siw-092-uncertainty-results-for-the-probability-of-raid-annihilation-measure.html?page=1.

See also: Dmitry Filipoff, “How the Fleet Forgot to Fight, Pt. 4: Technical Standards,” Center for International Maritime Security, October 8, 2018, https://cimsec.org/how-the-fleet-forgot-to-fight-pt-technical-standards/.

23. For SPY radar range estimate, see: “AN/SPY-1 Radar,” MissileThreat Center for International and Strategic Studies Missile Defense Project, last updated June 23, 2021, https://missilethreat.csis.org/defsys/an-spy-1-radar/.

For radar horizon range limit, see: Lee O. Upton and Lewis A. Thurman, “Radars for the Detection and Tracking of Cruise Missiles,” Lincoln Laboratory Journal, Volume 12, Number 2, pg. 365, 2000, https://archive.ll.mit.edu/publications/journal/pdf/vol12_no2/12_2detectcruisemissile.pdf.

For SM-2 range, see:

“SM-2 Missile,” Raytheon Missiles and Defense, https://www.raytheonmissilesanddefense.com/what-we-do/naval-warfare/ship-self-defense-weapons/sm-2-missile.

and

“SM-2 Standard Missile,” Royal Australian Navy, https://www.navy.gov.au/weapon/sm-2-standard-missile.

24. Bryan Clark, “Commanding The Seas The U.S. Navy And The Future Of Surface Warfare,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, pg. 17, 2017, https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/CSBA6292-Surface_Warfare_REPRINT_WEB.pdf.

25. Edward Lundquist, “DMO is Navy’s Operational Approach to Winning the High-End Fight at Sea,” Seapower, February 2, 2021, https://seapowermagazine.org/dmo-is-navys-operational-approach-to-winning-the-high-end-fight-at-sea/.

26. “Surface Force Strategy Return to Sea Control,” U.S. Department of the Navy, pg. 19, 2016, https://media.defense.gov/2020/May/18/2002302052/-1/-1/1/SURFACEFORCESTRATEGY-RETURNTOSEACONTROL.PDF.

27. Colonel Mark E. Kipphutt, “Crossbow and Gulf War Counter-Scud Efforts: Lessons from History,” The Counterproliferation Papers Future Warfare Series No. 15 USAF Counterproliferation Center Air University, pg. 18-20, February 2003, https://media.defense.gov/2019/Apr/11/2002115481/-1/-1/0/15CROSSBOW.PDF.

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