Read Part 1 on defining distributed maritime operations.
Read Part 2 on anti-ship firepower and U.S. shortfalls.
Read Part 3 on assembling massed fires and modern fleet tactics.

By Dmitry Filipoff

Introduction

Modern naval combat can consist of forces firing dozens if not hundreds of missiles at one another’s fleets and salvos. These volumes of fire can be unleashed within mere minutes as forces look to launch offensive and defensive salvos that are large and dense enough to kill and defend warships. Yet these sophisticated weapons are available in limited numbers and require long lead times to produce.¹ Only a fraction of these inventories are available for immediate use given how the magazines of the operating force’s platforms are distinct from the weapon stocks they draw from. Militaries can be limited to using the weapon stocks they had shortly before conflict broke out, and a short conflict may be decided by what was mainly fielded in platform magazines. Unless the conflict becomes especially prolonged and the industrial base grows significantly, the inventory of precision weapons will steadily diminish and pose critical constraints. A core operational challenge is how to carefully manage weapons depletion while still unleashing massed fires.

Weapons depletion is in its own right a powerful force for shaping warfighting behavior and securing major operational advantage. The larger consequences of depletion can include steep decreases in unit availability and overall operations tempo on a theater-wide scale. This challenge is especially severe for the U.S. Navy given how long it would take a depleted U.S. warship to travel out of a Pacific battlespace, rearm in safe havens, and return to the fight.² In a short, sharp conflict featuring intense salvo exchanges, a warship that depletes itself only once may very well miss the rest of the war.

The concentration and distribution of a force will flex and evolve as its platforms suffer depletion. As commanders look to employ mass fires, they must be mindful of how to spread depletion across the force, how to interpret the adversary’s expenditures, and how inventory pressures can be manipulated through the last-ditch salvo dynamic.

Distribution and Depletion

One of the critical advantages of massing fires from distributed forces is the ability to more effectively manage depletion. A distributed force fielding a vast array of overlapping firepower makes for an especially large and shared magazine. This offers a much greater chance of mustering enough firepower to overwhelm robust defenses while achieving a better spread of depletion. Depletion can be spread across a broader scope of platforms and occur more gradually across the force, rather than all at once for individual strike platforms and force packages. Spreading depletion prolongs distribution, because every depleted asset makes the remaining force less distributed and more concentrated.

Some platforms and force packages certainly have sufficiently deep magazines to launch large enough volumes of fire on their own, with less of a need for outside contributing salvos. But large standalone salvos diminish a core tenet of distribution – maintaining many spread out threats to complicate adversary targeting. Forces that fire large standalone salvos can quickly give away that they just depleted most of their offensive firepower, reducing their value as targets and diminishing the distribution of the broader force.

The more a platform has to discharge a large number of missiles to contribute fires, the more easily an adversary can ascertain the composition and depth of their remaining inventory. A U.S. destroyer that fires 30-40 Maritime Strike Tomahawks in a single large salvo can give away that it has little remaining long-range anti-ship weaponry. By comparison, massing fires from a broader array of distributed forces makes it harder for an adversary to ascertain when platforms and formations have depleted their individual magazines.

Aggregation allows firepower to be combined in smaller portions from individual launch platforms. Ideally each launch platform can afford to expend only a small fraction of its magazine at a time, if many other platforms are doing the same with proper timing and coordination. Individual platforms will be able to sustain distributed offensive threats for longer than if they had fired off large, independent salvos of their own.

However, as inventory begins to dwindle across a distributed force, mass fires can cause larger portions of the force to reach the end of their magazines around a similar timeframe. This could radically collapse the offensive posture and capability of the distributed fleet if not carefully managed. By delaying magazine depletion at the individual platform level, mass fires risk magazine depletion across a broader portion of the force at a later time.

Consider a fleet that has four distributed warships available for contributing fires. If one warship emptied its entire offensive inventory per strike, then the remaining force becomes increasingly concentrated and predictable as to where the next several strikes may come from. Instead, if those four warships combine fires to launch a quarter of their offensive inventory per strike, the distributed force posture endures for more time and across more attacks. But all of those warships would deplete at a similar time, triggering a larger drop in force distribution compared to depleting only one platform per strike through the first scheme. By spreading depletion to prolong distribution, mass fires trade smaller decreases in distribution earlier in the fight in exchange for larger decreases later on.

Having deeper magazines or more strike platforms reduces the share of magazine depth each attacker must deplete to contribute to mass fires, and further delays the broader depletion of the force. A distributed force posture can be preserved by having a large number of assets with overlapping firepower, or rotating assets quickly enough to replace those that have depleted their magazines. The goal is to maintain enough available firepower over time so the distribution of the force can endure.

Asymmetric Weapons Depletion and Operational Risk

There are important asymmetries in how warships can deplete their offensive missile firepower versus their defensive firepower. One asymmetry is that commanders may be deeply uncomfortable keeping large surface warships in the battlespace when they are low on defensive firepower but fuller on offensive firepower compared to the reverse situation. Another key asymmetry is that defensive firepower is mostly drawn from the local magazines of the naval forces under attack, while offensive firepower can be drawn from the many magazines of a broader distributed force. Leveraging these key asymmetries can secure operational advantage.

Even if a ship survives an intense attack, being on the wrong side of firing effectively first can take the form of being low on defensive firepower while still full on unused offensive firepower. These units can still remain offensive threats, but the volume of fire required to overwhelm their defenses is substantially lowered. This can force commanders to pull these units out of the fight for the sake of survival and replenishing their defenses.

In this sense, firing effectively first is not only defined by scoring successful hits and kills, it can also mean depleting enough of the adversary’s defenses that commanders no longer feel confident in pressing their attack or maintaining warships in a contested battlespace. If those depleted warships are in escort roles and are responsible for defending other ships, then those ships could be forced to withdraw as well. By depleting defensive firepower to the point that warships must be withdrawn before they can attack, those warships’ offensive inventory can be removed from the fight before it can be used, thereby suffering depletion indirectly.

The battle of nerves in naval salvo warfare is partly a function of accepting risk for the sake of minimizing weapons depletion. A more efficient missile exchange tolerates more risk, demanding stronger nerves on the part of commanders. Otherwise, the desire to build more confidence into offensive or defensive engagements can make commanders waste their munitions. A defending warship that fires too many anti-air weapons per incoming missile wants to bolster its odds of near-term survival, but it can deplete itself earlier than warranted and increase risk in follow-on engagements. A warship that fires an excessive amount of anti-ship weapons can risk too much overkill and leave it with little offensive capability for later in the fight.

But commanders who attempt to precisely optimize their offensive salvos in a bid to just barely overwhelm targets with enough fire will risk much greater uncertainty than those willing to accept overkill by expending more volume. Indeed in a form of combat featuring salvos with dozens of missiles that only need to strike a single hit, overkill is more likely than not. Instead, it is the degree of overkill that separates what is sufficient from what is wasteful. Achieving a small degree of offensive overkill can be the more efficient outcome, since attacking with an insufficient volume of fire can lead to waste by making follow-on salvos once again pay the price of breaking through strong defenses to threaten a target. With too much overkill, a unit or commander witnessing a heavy volume of fire pouring into a dead or dying friendly warship may take some small satisfaction in knowing the enemy just suffered depletion far out of proportion to their target.

A key asymmetry is how the risk of depletion through overkill is much more manageable for offensive fires because of the greater ability to mass those weapons from across many forces. Defensive inventory has far less margin to work with because of the isolating effect of the radar horizon on ship self-defense, where there is little ability for ships to leverage a broader shared magazine against sea-skimming threats. An attack on a naval formation can consist of fires pulled from a wide variety of forces, but the formation will often have only its own magazine to defend itself. And with that magazine, the formation may not only have to match the incoming volume of fire, but exceed it to ensure survival. Matching the attacking volume with only one interceptor fired per incoming missile may not be enough to confidently survive a dynamic where a warship cannot afford to take a single hit, yet the attacker can afford to have every attacking missile take a hit except one.

For defensive volume of fire, there can be a thin line between what is sufficiently dense and what is wastefully excessive. Firing just one more interceptor per incoming missile can dramatically increase expenditure in a single engagement and result in a warship facing follow-on threats with a far more depleted magazine. But as mentioned, defensive depletion not only increases risk to the individual platform, it threatens to take that platform’s offensive fires out of the fight prematurely. The broader offensive inventory that is available for massed fires can therefore be threatened by the localized manner of defensive engagements and their especially depleting nature.

Range advantages convert to depletion advantages, where forces with longer-ranged weapons can inflict asymmetric depletion against their shorter-ranged opponents. These threatening dynamics are more probable for navies that can be up against anti-ship weapons with much greater ranges than their own, such as the current range disparity the U.S. Navy is suffering against many Chinese anti-ship missiles.

If two opposing forces have a major disparity in the range of anti-ship weapons, then the forces with less range can be forced to travel hundreds of miles while under fire before they can finally be in a position to attack. These warships can be depleting their defensive firepower while still pressing forward in an increasingly risky bid to bring their offensive firepower to bear. By comparison, the longer-ranged side will deplete far fewer defenses to make their attacks, if they have to deplete those defenses at all. Warships with a significant offensive range advantage are not only in a much better position to fire first, they can fire their salvos and then simply reverse course to keep themselves out of reach while preserving their defensive firepower. The outranged fleet can be pressing forward without much of its defensive firepower left, while the other fleet can be in the much more comfortable position of pulling back with most of its defensive firepower remaining. It is unlikely that the fleet with shorter-ranged weapons would be in a position to catch up to the opposition in many circumstances. Because of the vast distances involved and the large speed differential between anti-ship missiles and warships, it seems improbable that surface warships will run each other down on the open ocean in the age of missile warfare. 

Increased payload range can also translate into increased reload speed, where shifting more of the burden of maneuver onto the payload shortens the logistical lifeline of the platform. The longer the range of the weapon, the less the platform has to travel between its launch areas and rearmament points, shortening the episodic drops in force distribution while offering higher rates of fire. This effect is especially potent for aviation, such as how aircraft firing JASSMs at 230 miles can have much lower reload rates and availability of fires compared to aircraft firing the 1,000-mile extreme range variant of JASSM (Figure 1).³ An asymmetry in weapon range between opposing forces can translate into asymmetry in reload speeds, and make the distribution of a force more resilient against depletion than its adversary’s.

Massed Fires and Uneven Depletion Across Platform Types

As waves of massed fires ensue, the distribution of depletion across the platforms of a force can become uneven. A distributed force may prefer to prioritize its longest-ranged fires, its most common weapons, or other payloads for other reasons, which depletes the specific platforms that launch them. This sets the stage for operational tradeoffs and an evolving risk profile, since one type of platform’s fires can preserve the inventory of another’s, and different platforms have different magazine depths and timeframes for reloading. Uneven depletion can gradually shift the burden of massing fires onto platforms that must assume more risk to continue the fight, encouraging a force to carefully consider how to distribute weapons depletion across platforms over time.

The anti-ship Tomahawk will offer long range and broad magazine depth across many platforms, making it an ideal weapon for massing fires. But heavily prioritizing the use of the anti-ship Tomahawk can make surface forces and submarines among the first to deplete their anti-ship missile inventories, and where these platforms can take many days to reload and return to the fight. The weapons that can contribute the most to mass fires can suffer the most depletion, putting the distribution of the force at risk down the line.

As the fight continues and warships become more depleted, more of the U.S. burden of assembling mass fires against warships can gradually accrue to aviation because aviation can reload much faster than warships. This is especially true for carrier air wings, and carriers have the deepest magazines of all afloat combatants, potentially making them the last warships standing when it comes to remaining inventory after intense exchanges.⁴ Yet this would pose an especially concentrated posture to an adversary and force air wings to take major risks in deploying the remaining firepower. Preserving the anti-ship inventory of warships is therefore critical in forestalling a need to rely more heavily on aviation-based strikes, which would tie down numerous aircraft to muster volume of fire, pull carriers deeper into the battlespace, and assume more risk.

Yet this relationship is paradoxical. Preserving warship-based inventory can also take the form of leaning more on aviation fires earlier in the fight. Therefore a balance can be defined between the proportion of fires to come from different platform types at different phases of the fight, in order to manage how the risk profile of depletion evolves. A commander that carefully balances a combination of air wing depletion and warship depletion earlier in the fight can better delay the prospect of air wings shouldering more of the burden. Or a commander could heavily favor bombers in the opening phases, which can preserve warship-based fires for later phases, which preserves carriers. Depletion does not necessarily mean firing options have to get far worse as time goes on, depending on how commanders balance risk with regard to what combinations of launch platforms they favor depleting at different periods of the fight.

Submarines offer one of the most critical advantages in managing depletion through the highly favorable tradeoffs that come with sinking ships with torpedoes instead of missiles. The undersea domain is far less saturated with warship defenses compared to above the waterline. The cost of a missile salvo large enough to credibly threaten a group of several warships could easily exceed $100 million and require expending dozens of missiles.⁵ Credibly threatening the same group would require only several torpedoes, which could cost ten percent or less of the missile salvo.⁶ A single lethal torpedo strike can substitute for the dozens of missiles that could be required to overwhelm the same warship from above water.

By sailing far into contested littorals and laying near ports, bases, and maritime chokepoints, submarines are much more likely to be in a position to sink ships with fuller magazines compared to other platforms and deprive the adversary of inventory. However, closing the distance for torpedo strikes increases risks to submarines. The operational implications include weighing tradeoffs in the amount of risk commanders are willing to accept for their valuable submarines, versus the risk that could be incurred by depleting the broader missile magazine of the distributed force. Risking submarines in torpedo attacks can spare broader missile inventory and vice versa.

Aircraft and ground-based launchers certainly carry far fewer missiles per loadout compared to a large surface warship. Their shallower magazine depth substantially shortens the interval between launching fires and reloading, even if each of their fires is limited to a few missiles. But these platforms can typically access weapons stocks to rearm at a fraction of the time it takes a warship to do the same. Their shallow magazine depth can make their availability for fires more episodic than warships, but their episodes of depletion are not nearly as steep or prolonged. Land-based forces in the form of Chinese launchers on the mainland would have particularly more endurance than expeditionary stand-in forces that heavily depend on lengthy logistical lifelines to sustain their fires in a long fight.

The nature of uneven depletion will make for especially challenging command decisions. Commanders may face pressure to maintain depleted assets in the fight for the sake of posing some semblance of a distributed posture to the adversary. Commanders weighing such decisions would have to consider whether the adversary’s tracking of expenditure may have been accurate enough to provide the critical insight that portions of the distributed force are depleted. Operational behavior may significantly change based on one’s estimate of an adversary’s depletion and if asymmetric depletion has emerged between opposing forces.

Tracking adversary depletion is a critical operational imperative, but the desire to understand the specific composition and volume of missile salvos can place major demands on ISR and decision-making. Forces may struggle to distinguish between different types of anti-ship or anti-air missiles at long range and in the midst of battle. But knowing the type of launch platform narrows down the potential type of fires, where the tracking challenge is simplified by how certain weapons are exclusive to certain kinds of platforms. An F/A-18 firing on a warship is most likely firing Harpoons or LRASMs, and a Chinese warship firing on a ship is most likely firing YJ-83s or YJ-18s. Weapons that have longer range and are compatible with a broader variety of launch platforms will complicate the adversary’s ability to track expenditure and form estimates of depletion.

Defying Destruction and the Last-Ditch Salvo Dynamic

The adage of “firing effectively first” may be better described as striking effectively first, since two opposing naval formations can still destroy each other even if one fires after the other. In defining what it means to fire effectively first, an ideal kill of a warship or platform can include putting it out of action before it had a chance to use its offensive firepower. Similar to how it would be ideal to destroy a carrier while it is still embarking its air wing, it is ideal to destroy a warship before it has depleted its magazine of offensive missiles. This creates profound psychological and operational pressures that come into play when commanders of individual platforms and formations feel on the cusp of being destroyed. The critical phenomenon of last-ditch fires can threaten to destabilize distributed fleets and massed fires.

Commanders can be extraordinarily pressured to unleash most if not all of their offensive firepower if they believe there is a real risk of imminent destruction. Once a ship or fleet realizes that a potentially fatal salvo is incoming, enormous pressure can quickly force commanders to discharge their offensive firepower soon or else risk losing it permanently. Similar to how a carrier commander would be tempted to launch the air wing before the salvo hits the carrier, warships can make similar decisions with their missile magazines.

Last-ditch salvos are meant to deny the enemy one of the most critical benefits of firing effectively first. Launching a last-ditch salvo right before ships could be destroyed gives those offensive weapons a final chance of somehow contributing to the fight and deprives the adversary the benefit of sinking ships with fuller magazines. Last-ditch fires aim to ensure that archers are never destroyed before they can fire arrows. Concerns over losing limited weapons inventory are sharply intensified by lethal inbound salvos, making the last-ditch salvo a critical protocol for making the most of friendly losses moments before they are incurred.

A last-ditch anti-ship salvo cannot be an act of self-preservation. Commanders can be completely confident that an incoming salvo is dense enough and capable enough to overwhelm their defenses and destroy their warships. Launching their own anti-ship salvo in response is not going to change such an outcome. Anti-ship missiles cannot save warships from anti-ship missiles that are already incoming. These weapons can only save warships from anti-ship missiles that have yet to leave their magazines.

Many platforms that can threaten warships with anti-ship missiles cannot be threatened by those same missiles in return. This creates an asymmetric dynamic where some forces can enhance the effects of distribution by threatening to trigger last-ditch salvos that are futile. Since airborne aviation, submarines, and land-based forces cannot be directly attacked by anti-ship missiles, a warship launching a last-ditch salvo could very well be firing at perceived targets it can do nothing against. Even a single incoming torpedo from a submarine attack could trigger a last-ditch salvo fired in futility. Warships must strive to maintain awareness of candidate targets they can actually threaten with last-ditch salvos if a fatal attack comes from a domain they cannot effectively retaliate in.

A last-ditch salvo may be fired despite a lack of quality targeting information, since the method of simply firing down a line of bearing suggested by the incoming attack may be more than enough for a desperate warship. But warships ideally need broader situational awareness to launch effective last-ditch salvos, and especially to know whether they are under attack by a last ditch salvo themselves. If a warship does not recognize it is facing down a last-ditch salvo and simply reciprocates the attack, it could be firing on a warship with an empty magazine or even a warship that was already destroyed minutes earlier. This is even more wasteful than firing on a depleted warship, and a worthy result for warships whose final actions caused an adversary to waste precious firepower.

Last-ditch salvos are therefore a double-edged sword. This desperate act is meant to prevent precious weapons inventory from being permanently lost, yet this desire can be manipulated to prompt wasteful fires. An adversary can be made to take self-defeating actions in the crucial battle of nerves that infuses salvo warfare.

The simple appearance of an inbound volume of fire can be enough to trigger last-ditch firing protocols. Weapons with longer range and waypointing ability will have more opportunity to feint attacks on the way to their true target, multiplying the combat potential of salvos. If a weapon has enough range, attacking salvos may be waypointed to appear to threaten multiple targets in succession and provoke last-ditch fires from each (Figure 2).

Figure 2. A waypointed salvo triggers last-ditch fires from multiple formations by feinting attacks along the way to its true target. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command) 

The U.S. may eventually have a substantial advantage in this regard by fielding a cruise missile with especially long range. The Tomahawk has enough range to where a salvo can threaten multiple naval formations through waypointed feints, even if those formations are distributed across hundreds of miles. If several Chinese naval formations are concentrated within 300 miles so they can mass YJ-18 missiles, then it becomes even more feasible to waypoint Tomahawks to trigger last-ditch fires within this radius. If one side’s naval formations have to concentrate within shorter distances to mass their fires, they become more susceptible to this waypointing tactic than their opponents, and they may not even have the range to launch viable last-ditch salvos at all.

Salvos used to trigger last-ditch fires may have to risk a degree of attrition by allowing themselves to be seen by warships. Networked missiles could coordinate pop up maneuvers to rise above the horizon and make themselves known, but only briefly enough before they can be struck by defensive fires. Otherwise the salvo could suffer enough attrition that it loses both its psychological and kinetic potency. Decoy weapons that can project the signatures of multiple aerial contacts, such as the ADM-160 MALD, can be used to inflate the appearance of mass while reducing the ability of defensive fires to chip away at the salvo.⁷

Posing the appearance of significant mass may not be a hard requirement for inducing last-ditch fires from a target. There may be a significant disparity in the volume of fire required to actually kill a platform, versus the volume of fire that is enough to manipulate it into firing prematurely. This disparity can stem from commanders being uncertain about the capability of enemy salvos or their ability to defeat them, or the strain of combat operations taking its toll on decision-making. The last-ditch dynamic can therefore magnify the tactical value of salvos that lack enough volume of fire to destroy targets. Commanders that are limited to local awareness may struggle to differentiate between a small salvo that was only launched as a standalone attack, versus a small salvo that is a harbinger of incoming mass fires. A small salvo can leverage these uncertainties to score outsized tactical benefit by triggering last-ditch fires despite not being able to actually threaten the target. 

Even if a salvo cannot strike a target due to limited range or other constraints, it may still provoke emissions, signatures, and other reactions that could be exploited. Commanders may struggle to distinguish between different types of incoming missiles in real time, where last-ditch salvos consisting of low-capability, short-range, or non-anti-ship weapons can still manipulate reactions. A warship launching a last-ditch salvo could certainly fire its land-attack cruise missiles toward an enemy warship, who either can’t tell the difference or won’t take the chance. The prospect of wresting any sort of non-kinetic benefit can encourage platforms under heavy attack to launch last-ditch salvos regardless of capability or volume of fire.

And non-kinetics can prompt last-ditch fires themselves. Actions such as heavy jamming, blinding attacks against networks, aggressive posturing, and other methods that could be interpreted as a prelude to an imminent attack could also provoke last-ditch salvos. Last-ditch fires can be triggered by much more than just other fires.

The act of firing last-ditch salvos is extremely sensitive to timing given how warship launch cells are often carrying both offensive and defensive firepower, and how some cruise missiles require a minimum amount of lead time to be programmed for launch.⁸ A warship under attack from a subsonic anti-ship missile fired at a range of 250 miles has barely more than 20 minutes to react. And this assumes the target warship has knowledge of the launch. If the warship becomes aware of the incoming salvo only after it crosses the horizon, it can have roughly two minutes or less to prosecute an intense anti-air engagement while simultaneously discharging the whole of its offensive firepower in a last-ditch salvo. Those final moments would be characterized by an intense outpouring of the ship’s firepower in all-out offensive and defensive warfare. But these vast volumes of firepower would be bottlenecked by the rate of fire, of how many missiles can be fired by a warship’s launch systems in short periods of time. The volume of outgoing offensive and defensive firepower would be diminished as missiles of both types are primarily being fired from the same sets of launch cells, making them compete with each other for brief launch windows.

These challenges can be mitigated by having situational awareness over sea-skimming spaces that go beyond the radar horizon of a warship. Aircraft can provide early warning of incoming salvos and help warship commanders determine whether they must initiate a last-ditch salvo. Effective warning can allow commanders to discharge their last-ditch salvos early enough so that offensive missiles are not competing with defensive missiles for launch windows when it comes time for the warship to defend itself. In any case, warship commanders should strive to have a variety of pre-programmed responses at the ready so they can initiate last-ditch fires as fast as possible, and to have the subjective tactical judgement to know when it is time.

Warships under attack could be forced to fire their final salvos alone and in isolation from the broader distributed force. Yet last-ditch salvos may hardly be enough on their own to overwhelm concentrated defenses. This can put pressure on other combatants and commanders to add contributing fires in the hopes of growing enough volume to credibly threaten targets. A cascading domino effect could threaten to unravel a distributed force’s firepower as last-ditch salvos prompt hasty contributing fires from other platforms. The pressured nature of last-ditch salvos will exacerbate the timing challenges associated with combining fires and potentially rule out a variety of options for growing the volume of fire.

A commander of a distributed force must weigh the risks of attempting to combine fires with a last-ditch salvo. A last-ditch salvo may force a commander’s hand in adding contributing fires to a salvo that was fired on insufficient targeting data, lacks the volume to penetrate defended targets, or features other deficiencies. A commander could hold off on launching contributing fires, conserve the inventory of weapons, and allow the last-ditch salvo to play out on its own. But this may come at the risk of failing to support a salvo that could have effectively put opposing warships out of action if it had received just enough outside fires to tip the scales and cross the thresholds needed to overwhelm defenses. Commanders have to be ready to weigh these options as missile exchanges unfold in real time, and decide if a last-ditch salvo should remain a standalone attack, or leverage it through adding contributing fires.

Conclusion 

As distributed forces unleash massed fires against one another, their desire to decisively overwhelm the opposition will be tempered by the need to minimize depletion. Depletion can threaten to break naval operations and yield major advantage to an adversary. Effectively massing fires from distributed forces can help manage depletion, but the need to achieve overwhelming volume of fire will make this risk a pervasive consideration at all levels of warfare.

Part 5 will focus on missile salvo patterns and maximizing volume of fire.

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 [email protected].

References

1. For weapon production lead times, see:

“Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 Budget Estimates,” Navy Justification Book Volume 1 of 1 Weapons Procurement, Navy, Page 2 P-1 Line #7, (PDF pg. 94), April 2022, https://www.secnav.navy.mil/fmc/fmb/Documents/23pres/WPN_Book.pdf.

Seth Jones, “Empty Bins in a Wartime Environment: The Challenge to the U.S. Defense Industrial Base,” Center for International and Strategic Studies, pg. 14, January 2023, https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2023-01/230119_Jones_Empty_Bins.pdf?VersionId=mW3OOngwul8V2nR2EHKBYxkpiOzMiS88. 

2. For one example, a warship on a one-way trip and traveling at 20 knots would take nearly two weeks to reach the Philippine Sea from U.S. naval infrastructure in San Diego. This assumes a straight line path, which may be less realistic under wartime conditions.

3. For JASSM range, see:

“AGM-158 Joint Air-to-surface Stand-off Missile (JASSM),” U.S. Air Force, https://www.af.mil/News/Art/igphoto/2000420243/.  

For extreme-range JASSM variant, see:

Brian A. Everstine, “USAF to Start Buying ‘Extreme Range’ JASSMs in 2021, Air & Space Forces Magazine, February 14, 2020, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/usaf-to-start-buying-extreme-range-jassms-in-2021/.

4. Hon. John F. Lehman with Steven Wills, “Where are the Carriers? U.S. National Strategy and the Choices Ahead,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, pg. 67, 73, September 9, 2021, https://www.fpri.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/fpri-where-are-the-carriers-.pdf. 

5. At an average unit cost of $3.5 million per missile, a combat credible salvo of about 30 LRASMs yields a volume of fire that costs in excess of $100 million.

For LRASM unit cost, see:

“Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 Budget Estimates,” Navy Justification Book Volume 1 of 1 Weapons Procurement, Navy, Page 1 of 10 P-1 Line #16, (PDF pg. 261), April 2022, https://www.secnav.navy.mil/fmc/fmb/Documents/23pres/WPN_Book.pdf.

6. MK 48 MOD 7 torpedoes have an average unit cost of around $5 million, but have far less of a requirement to be salvoed in large numbers because of the less saturated nature of undersea warship defenses.

For MK 48 MOD 7 torpedo cost, see:

“Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 Budget Estimates,” Navy Justification Book Volume 1 of 1 Weapons Procurement, Navy, Page 1 of 16 P-1 Line #27, (PDF pg. 351), April 2022, https://www.secnav.navy.mil/fmc/fmb/Documents/23pres/WPN_Book.pdf.

7. “U.S. Airborne Electronic Attack Programs: Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, pg. 16-17, May 14, 2019, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44572. 

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: September 3, 2005 – U.S. Navy Sailors aboard the USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) inspect the MK 41 Vertical Launching System (VLS). (Photo via U.S. National Archives)

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 [email protected].

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)