Submissions Due: November 26, 2018
Week Dates: December 3–December 7, 2018 Article Length: 1000-4000 words Submit to: Nextwar@cimsec.org
Fiction offers a powerful means for exploring uncertainty and envisioning how scenarios could develop. CIMSEC invites authors to submit fictional short stories that stir the imagination and use fiction as a means to explore any variety of defense and foreign policy challenges. Submissions can take place in any time period and explore a range of themes. Send us your stories to shed light on issues, challenge the status quo, and fascinate readers with engrossing narratives.
“…changes in tactics have to overcome the inertia of a conservative class; but it is a great evil. It can be remedied only by a candid recognition of each change, by careful study of the powers and limitations of the new ship or weapon, and by a consequent adaptation of the method of using it to the qualities it possesses, which will constitute its tactics. History shows that it is vain to hope that military men generally will be at the pains to do this, but that the one who does will go into battle with a great advantage—a lesson in itself of no mean value.” –Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783
Tactics are fighting techniques, and how to effectively employ the tools of war to win battles. Arguably the Navy’s largest obstacles to tactical innovation come from its lack of essential tools such as anti-ship missiles as well as the nature of its recent operations and training.
It should be fair to say that training and tactics are not developed for tools that are not equipped, and a history of scripted exercising means refined training and tactics have yet to come for much of what the Navy already has. The character of a power projection focus has divided the warfare communities of the Navy and fostered operating norms that directly inhibit the development of a network-centric warfighting doctrine.
The only U.S. military warfare community that has any history of devoting serious thought to sinking warships at more than 100 miles away using missiles is the carrier aviation community. They were the only ones with the required tools and doctrinal mandate. For everyone else the Navy violated one of the most fundamental maxims of naval warfare – to fire effectively first – by not providing serious offensive firepower to so much force structure that could have readily fielded it.1
The surface fleet is a prime example of the tactical deprivation that can come through lack of anti-ship weapons and the offensive roles they enable. Even with Harpoon and the first introduction of the anti-ship Tomahawk in the 1980s the surface Navy’s defensive focus in fleet combat remained consistent since WWII. For decades throughout the Cold War the surface fleet’s high-end warfighting proficiencies focused on anti-submarine warfare and protecting capital ships from aerial threats such as missiles. The job of sinking surface ships then mostly fell to submarines and carrier aviation. The tactical execution of the surface fleet’s primary anti-air mission became increasingly automated, a trend best exemplified by Aegis. However, a defensive, reactive, and highly automated mission focus makes for a poor foundation for learning how to fire effectively first.
The Navy’s firepower is about to experience a serious transformation in only a few short years. Comparing firepower through a strike mile metric (warhead weight [pounds/1,000] × range in nautical miles × number of payloads equipped) reveals that putting LRASM into 15 percent of the surface fleet’s launch cells will increase its anti-ship firepower almost twentyfold over what it has today with Harpoon.2 New anti-ship missiles will cause the submarine community and heavy bomber force to also experience historic transformations in offensive firepower.
The widespread introduction of these new weapons will present the U.S. Navy with one of the most important force development missions in its history. This dramatic increase in offensive firepower across such a broad swath of untapped force structure will put the Navy on the cusp of a sweeping revolution in tactics unlike anything seen since the birth of the aircraft carrier a century ago. How the Navy configures itself to unlock this opportunity could decide its success in a future war at sea. The Navy needs tacticians now more than ever.
Doctrine in Networked Warfighting
“I am here to encourage and support a new type of officer, one who is naturally inclined to operational experimentation and innovation. I foresee officers who view doctrine as a dynamic adaptive process rather than a refuge for the uninformed.”–Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski
Doctrine is a common vision of warfighting, and an understanding of how to skillfully employ tactics and procedure. Naval Doctrine Publication 1, Naval Warfare, offers insight into the nature of doctrine, where “It is not a set of concrete rules, but a basis of common understanding throughout the chain of command…Doctrine is the underlying philosophy that guides our use of tactics and weapons systems to achieve a common objective….Our training and education are based on doctrine.”3 Doctrine does not culminate in a publication but in the refined intuition of the warfighter.
Doctrine aims to produce both a strong sense of independent decision-making at the unit level as well as the ability to connect as a member of a team. Net-centric warfighting is especially dependent on doctrine because of how networked capability has affected individual and group relationships. Net-centric operations are based on networked connections between many actors, yet units face the risk of losing those links. Units can be forcibly cut off from one another through electronic attack, and often need to impose silence on themselves for the sake of tactics and survivability. Connected units can call on all other sorts of actors to provide capability and information. Networked warfighting can leave one completely in the dark on the one hand and connected to a multitude on the other. Net-centric doctrine can then focus on developing common understanding for those two major types of relationships and situations.
Being effective while cut off requires an independent sense of what to do without outside help. Refined doctrine will allow a unit under emissions control to handle itself in the dark and remain faithful to commander’s intent while also knowing when it makes sense to break silence.
With doctrine a connected unit will have a common understanding with the many actors it can leverage through networked relationships. Being connected to a multitude of other actors requires having some sense of what their thought process is like, and what sorts of conditions affect their ability to contribute to the fight.
The many relationships of a networked force can easily result in congested information pathways and communications overload. This means more emissions, greater lag times, and more people requesting information or calling for help. An issue is the scale of naval warfare given how sensing and weapons can go for hundreds of miles. The area of interest for an individual warship can cover tens of thousands of square miles which promises a significant amount of overlap with many others.
Refined doctrine is absolutely necessary to streamline networked relationships and deconflict actors. Many units will be connected to the broader network, but they must resist the urge to leverage the network for every problem within their immediate area of responsibility. Command by negation and the initiative of the subordinate for a networked force could easily devolve into chaos if taken to its fullest extent. Doctrine will provide that key degree of discretion that helps a frontline unit know when its immediate situation is important enough to tap the network and call for attention from the greater force. Doctrine aims to distill what is of importance, and will help keep communications brief because networked units will have a good sense of one another’s thinking without having to ask for it.
Commander’s intent is supposed to be succinct, but the less doctrine there is the more the higher-echelon commanders can find themselves micromanaging their subordinates. The degree of refinement for doctrine can then be directly measured by how little a commander needs to convey to subordinates to successfully fulfill their intent. In his seminal “The Role of Doctrine in Naval Warfare,” published in 1915, Lieutenant Commander Dudley Knox used the example of how doctrinal development was able to shrink an operations order from 1200 words to 44 words for a 20-ship, six-hour night maneuver.4 How many words would it take that many warships to do the same thing today?
The present culture of a command and control system heavy on reporting requirements has given the Navy an unwieldy doctrine of information overload.5 This excessive reporting culture is built in part on a level of openness and ease of communication that comes with operating in the uncontested environments of the power projection era. Being micromanaged from higher headquarters feels like the norm in today’s U.S. Navy, and where a risk-averse culture is prone to micromanaging at the expense of trust-building. But doctrine can only work to condense complex operations into simple instructions if there is a high degree of trust.
Consider the challenge of command and control for a distributed force in both an offensive and defensive context, and how doctrine could shape the nature of trust. The speed of aircraft and incoming missiles compared to the range of defensive weapons means a distributed fleet will rarely be able to mass defensive firepower from across the force in a timely way. Commanders of dispersed units will likely need to have the authority to independently prosecute their local air defense missions with great initiative in order to avoid defeat in detail.
When it comes to anti-ship firepower the relatively slow speed of warships can provide much more opportunity to network effects. If a fleet commander discovers a concentration of hostile ships he or she can use networking to generate the firepower overmatch needed to overwhelm their defenses. A fleet commander could launch and collect anti-ship firepower from a variety of platforms across the distributed fleet using engage-on-remote networking. In-flight retargeting could then be used to better concentrate salvos, ensure their accuracy, and create multi-axial angles of attack. Doctrine that seeks to make this concentration of firepower possible for a distributed force would have to take some authority away from individual units when it comes to using their anti-ship missiles. The doctrine of a distributed fleet is therefore likely to keep the release authority for anti-ship weapons at a higher level of command than defensive anti-air weapons because of key differences in the feasibility of timing and concentration.
However, even with networking, tactics should be humble in their design. The expansive nature of networked capability can produce a strong urge to develop elaborate tactics that operate on more assumptions and dependencies, such as on close coordination and timing. But tactics and operations that are too complex could easily fall apart when put to the test. The nature of low-risk scripted exercising can cause tactics and concepts of operation to suffer from this runaway complexity. Capable opposition forces are absolutely indispensable for forcing humility on the developmental process and for identifying what is reasonably simple to execute. Resilience through simplicity is an ultimate goal of doctrine.
The Navy is itself a joint force involving aviation, surface fleet, and submarine communities. But power projection missions and training have divided the Navy’s communities from one another, and where these missions allowed units to act more independently. While effective independent execution is a primary goal of doctrine the nature of low-end missions meant that independent execution was not often directed toward a common operational goal. Carrier aviation could be focused on air-to-ground strikes, surface warships could be patrolling or conducting security cooperation, and submarines could be executing ISR missions. Low-end operations and training events often require little in the way of harmonized tactics or doctrine across communities, unlike net-centric concepts.
Slide from presentation by Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence (PEO C4I) and Program Executive Office Space Systems, NDIA San Diego Fall Industry Forum, October 24, 2017.
The Navy’s current system of training and operating can hardly allow the individual communities to say they are familiar with the full breadth of capability of even their own platforms, let alone those of other communities. Every community’s training has been heavily shaped by the power projection era at the expense of high-end skills and inter-community relations.6 U.S. naval officers Fred Pyle, Mark Cochran, and Rob McFall wrote of the poor connection between the surface fleet and aviation communities with respect to anti-surface warfare in “Lessons Learned from Maritime Combat”:
“Although Navy tactical literature frequently speaks to the use of air power in SUW, there doesn’t appear to be any formal training provided to the surface warfare community…Much like the SWO community, aviators are deploying without a basic understanding of surface-combatant capabilities or missions. Generally, aviators don’t know the differences in capability between cruisers and destroyers, or the variants of the standard missile used to augment the fleet air defense mission that they train for so often…The naval aviation community states that AOMSW (air operations in maritime surface warfare) is a primary mission set—yet only minimal training is conducted in flight school and in the fleet. The majority of squadron sorties are focused on air-to-air intercepts and air-to-ground weapons…The Navy as a whole has very limited access to sea-based opposition forces (emphasis added), and the tactical aviation community is afforded only limited integration opportunities with the surface Navy…With the number of other demands in the schedule and limited underway steaming days, DDGs cannot easily go to sea for daily integrated training missions with the air wing…AOMSW is by default a distant third priority behind air-to-air employment and strike warfare.”7
This points to a significant issue within the Navy’s workup cycle. The amount of time a strike group actually trains as a strike group before deploying is a very small minority compared to how much time individual ships and squadrons train at the unit level.8 If the Navy is to heal the divide between its communities and better prepare for the high-end fight then integrated training needs to take on a far greater share of time within the workup cycle’s training phase compared to individual training.
It is hard to imagine the Navy’s warfare communities would work well to network their capabilities together if they have a poor understanding of one another’s tactics and doctrine. Unprecedented cross-community understanding is necessary if a networked doctrine is to come alive. But the great divide between the Navy’s communities will stand as a tall obstacle to any net-centric vision.
Sea Control Tactics in the Age of Missile Warfare
“As a matter of tactics I think that going out after the Japanese and knocking their carriers out would have been much better and more satisfactory than waiting for them to attack us…” –Admiral Raymond Spruance9
Many of the possibilities of combat can be dictated by relationships between time, distance, and concentration. Fundamental characteristics such as weapons range, flight profiles, and magazine capacity outline tactical options for the application of force. War at sea is especially attrition based where tactical outcomes can quickly turn based on how firepower overmatch plays out between offense and defense. Knowing how certain platform attributes and tactics influence the nature of attrition is central to designing favorable tradeoffs. By focusing on how to best optimize critical factors such as endurance, survivability, and firepower overmatch one can begin to see a framework of tactics and operations.
While there is some merit to the current construct of focusing ships on air defense and using aircraft to sink ships at range the nature of modern war at sea may preference different roles. The Navy’s scripted style of training may also suggest that tactical risk is not well-understood despite the fact that naval combat in the missile age is a staggeringly vicious form of warfare.
Any warship must account for the immutable obstacle posed by the curvature of the Earth’s surface. Radar, being a line-of-sight system, can see things further away the higher they are. But the horizon as the limit of direct sight creates a large space beneath it that cannot be sensed by a ship’s radar (unless enhanced by certain environmental conditions). This effect is known as the radar horizon. The distance from the average warship’s radar and the horizon is barely under 20 miles.10
For decades anti-ship missiles have had the ability to execute low-altitude flight profiles, often described as sea-skimming flight, to take advantage of the radar horizon for the sake of greater effectiveness. By paying a price in fuel, range, and endurance, low-flying aircraft and missiles can exploit this space to lower detectability, increase survivability, and earn the element of surprise.
It is remarkable that the words “firing from a position of minimum uncertainty and maximum probability of success” could ever be used to describe training for modern naval warfare when just 20 miles away from a ship lies a long, near-invisible space missiles can exploit to achieve surprise.11 No matter how powerful a warship is it can be forced to wait until those final moments before it can bring most of its defensive firepower to bear. The curvature of the Earth itself is one of the deadliest things to a warship.
Once a sea-skimming missile salvo breaks over the horizon it will only be tens of seconds away from impact. Defensive firepower will be reactively fired soon after an attacking salvo crosses the horizon. But by the time that first wave of defensive firepower clashes with supersonic anti-ship missiles they can already be a third of the way to their target ship.12 And anti-ship missiles can still be lethal even when they are shot down within those final miles.
As defensive firepower is brought to bear powerful missiles will be detonating against each other at thousands of miles per hour not far from the ship. Exploding missile shrapnel will spray out, often in the direction of the ship, easily shredding radar arrays and degrading the ship’s ability to defend itself. Many sensors cannot be effectively armored without diminishing their performance. The close-in weapon systems and electronic warfare suites that are critical to a ship’s last line of defense could also be easily shredded by missile shrapnel. Weapons mounted on the deck such as Harpoon missiles and torpedoes may also pose risks. This shrapnel factor is already recognized in test and evaluation where supersonic test missiles are intercepted at a minimum offset of several miles away from test platforms to help avoid flying missile debris.13This may be one reason why it is unrealistic to think a warship can sustain high kill ratios against missiles in the close-in engagement zone. Because of this exploding shrapnel factor ships should be concerned about how many nearby missile shootdowns they can withstand.
SM-6 anti-air missile intercepts a relatively small, 600lb AQM-37C test missile. Note the shrapnel. (Source: U.S. Missile Defense Agency Multi-Mission Warfare Flight Test Events)
The range advantage anti-ship missiles often enjoy over defensive firepower gives the offense a better ability to fire effectively first in the age of missile warfare. This also makes it more difficult to deal with launch platforms before they fire their payloads, otherwise known as the more preferable tactic of dealing with archers before arrows. This offensive range advantage can also convert into greater lethality and survivability for the missile salvo by allowing for more sea-skimming flight. The more a launch platform can get inside the range of its anti-ship missile, the more a payload can maximize its time flying at sea-skimming altitude to stay below the radar horizon of defending warships. Some anti-ship missiles like Harpoon sustain a sea-skimming flight path throughout their flights, but many missiles in the hands of competitors have more flexible flight profile options.14 The range advantage anti-ship firepower often has over defensive firepower therefore increases the probability of ships being forced to face sea-skimming missiles in the lethal close-in engagement zone.
The deadliness of confronting sea-skimming salvos just after they break over the horizon adds urgency to early detection and to targeting platforms before they fire their missiles. It also makes it necessary to have the capability and tactics to defeat sea-skimming missile salvos long before they break over the radar horizon of defending warships.
This makes aviation indispensable to missile defense when many anti-ship weapons intentionally fly below the radar horizon of warships in spaces only aircraft can see from above. A certain amount of airpower would have to be kept on hand just to deal with sea-skimming missiles that have the potential to travel beneath the radar horizons of defending warships. For the sake of fleet defense air wings must be very proficient at shooting down sea-skimming missile salvos, including weapons capable of flying supersonic speeds. This will also require a refined doctrinal relationship between the aviation and surface fleet communities to coordinate the air defense mission, a relationship the abovementioned authors suggest barely exists.
Only now are warships able to shoot below the radar horizon limitation using revolutionary capabilities like NIFC-CA, but this requires networked dependencies on other platforms like aircraft. NIFC-CA could prove to be a very burdensome kill chain to manage with Captain Jim Kilby describing it as “operational rocket science” and that it requires “a level of coordination we’ve never had to execute before.”15 Using aircraft to shoot missiles below the radar horizon of ships may be a much simpler kill chain to manage compared to NIFC-CA. The Navy also has probably yet to develop refined tactics and training for NIFC-CA given how new and sophisticated it is. However, using aircraft to cue shipborne firepower in any case could help keep warships relevant to the fight even with shredded radar arrays.
Defensively using the air wing to focus on defeating missile salvos may prove extremely favorable, especially from an attrition standpoint. Aircraft should be able to conduct this mission with some altitude and thus retain greater endurance. They could also likely be more proximate to the carrier rather than be asked to strike ships far forward which also converts into extra endurance. They would be able to maximize their anti-air loadout which is thousands of pounds lighter than a full anti-ship loadout, earning still more endurance.16
A squadron of F-18s fully equipped with anti-air weapons can carry over 100 anti-air missiles which is comparable to the anti-air firepower of a large surface warship. Through speed and altitude aircraft will also have far more time and opportunity to shoot down sea-skimming missiles compared to warships. Perhaps best of all, anti-ship missiles, at least for now, can pose no threat to aircraft. The cost exchange should be distinctly one sided.
An underside view of an Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 4 (VX-4) F/A-18C Hornet aircraft in-flight. The Hornet is armed with eight AMRAAM air-to-air missiles on four wing pylons and two missiles on the fuselage. The Hornet also carries two AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, one on each wing tip. (Wikimedia Commons)
The tactical characteristics of the air wing’s anti-ship mission are quite the opposite in many respects, yet this is what the carrier-centric U.S. Navy has long committed itself to.
Besides endurance, one of the greatest limiting factors of airpower is its resilience. Losing only a few aircraft per sortie could leave a carrier with a fraction of its strength after a hard day of high-end combat. Losing only four percent of aircraft per mission will result in losing 70 aircraft out of 100 over the course of 30 missions.17
Just like missiles, anti-ship aircraft will likely have to fly at sea-skimming altitudes to earn surprise and preserve survivability, but pay a severe price in range, endurance, and fuel. However, unlike aircraft, missiles are only interested in making a one-way trip. Anti-ship aircraft may also have to strike far forward of the fleet which also incurs a greater price in fuel and endurance. Low-altitude flight and closing with enemy ships can also lead to more restricted emissions.
Aircraft have to be concentrated in order to deliver large enough salvos to overwhelm the powerful anti-air defenses of modern warships. A large surface warship can carry dozens of anti-air missiles and feature many layers of defensive capability in the form of electronic warfare, close-in weapon systems, and decoys. Attacking a surface action group of a few modern destroyers could take a squadron of aircraft to field enough firepower to overwhelm shipboard defenses. This anti-ship squadron may also have to be further augmented with more aircraft dedicated to jamming, refueling, and scouting roles. A single attack on a surface action group of several large surface warships could plausibly tie up a quarter of a carrier’s strike fighters, leaving gaps in coverage elsewhere.
Using carrier aircraft to prosecute the anti-surface mission with a short-ranged anti-ship weapon such as Harpoon makes it easier for modern warships to shoot down archers instead of arrows. The shorter the range of the air-launched anti-ship missile the less attacking aircraft can disperse from one another to mass firepower effectively. This in turn dictates the extent of possible concentration and bears an effect on survivability if more aircraft find themselves within the envelope of defensive fire.
For now, the Navy’s current carrier-based anti-ship tactic could easily turn into sending concentrated groups of aircraft into the teeth of modern shipborne air defense while bleeding fuel at low altitudes and across great distances. Survivability could be substantially improved with the air-launched version of LRASM that has better range than many anti-air weapons, but it will not do as much to ease concerns over endurance and fuel. The tactic of using carrier aircraft to sink modern warships with the short-ranged Harpoon is far less favorable with respect to survivability, endurance, and attrition compared to having the air wing focus on defeating anti-ship missiles in a defensive role.
Putting long-range anti-ship missiles on warships allows the logic of attacking archers in the form of ships to extend to most of the fleet beyond the carrier. Shifting more missile defense responsibility to the air wing frees up more shipboard launch cells for anti-ship fires and other payloads of interest. Ships can provide a solid and steady wall of firepower compared to the more transient presence of aviation. The transient presence of aviation for the anti-ship mission may at first suggest a more favorably discrete operating posture for the carrier. However, the need to maintain a screen of airpower to intercept scouts and bombers for the outer air battle would still bind the disposition of aircraft to a degree.
With respect to attrition anti-ship firepower can see a far greater proportion of its missiles wasted away against defenses compared to anti-air firepower focused on shooting down missiles. This can necessitate follow-on attacks on ships. Even though ships may discharge a large portion of their anti-ship firepower in a salvo they could readily leverage their deep magazines to launch another attack rather than be forced to wait for another anti-ship squadron to make a fresh attempt. This key distinction is where the staying power of warships can prove superior to the transience of airpower with respect to sustaining attacks on well-defended ships.
A closer team between warships and aviation along the lines of these roles can be more favorable with respect to information management. Aircraft can better manage the risks of emitting through speed and maneuver, and air defense is an especially emissions-intensive fight. A ship can preserve emissions if it has aircraft to support local awareness. By conducting air defense for forward units aircraft would also be well-poised to cue offensive fires from ships, conduct in-flight retargeting as needed, and perform battle damage assessment.
Anti-ship missile fire from submarines can be an especially powerful tactic, though it may be more dependent on outside cueing. Unlike most other platforms undersea forces can easily bypass defensive screens of ships and aircraft to get in close. Putting anti-ship missiles on submarines would also significantly enhance platform survivability. Submarines would be able to fire from a distance that far outstrips torpedo range which would make their attacks much more difficult to attribute. If a ship comes under sea-skimming missile fire it may not know which sort of platform launched the attack, but if a ship finds itself under torpedo fire then it could easily reckon a submarine is close by. From a defensive perspective the threat of missile submarines unleashing sea-skimming salvos from unexpected directions and at close range could tie down more airpower for missile defense across a broad space.
A considerable amount of the fleet’s ability to manage the fight would be centered around the E-2 aircraft whose powerful radars and communications make it the Navy’s “carrier-based tactical battle management, airborne early warning, command and control aircraft.”18 A carrier fields very few of these critical command and control aircraft, usually close to half a dozen.19 Despite the fact endurance is one of the most important attributes that governs the operations of airpower the crucial E-2 command and control aircraft will finally be getting an aerial refueling capability in 2020.20 This upgrade comes over 50 years after the aircraft was introduced and despite the fact in-flight refueling was already commonplace in the aviation-centric U.S. Navy since the Vietnam War. Israel purchased the E-2 aircraft from the U.S. during the Cold War and installed an in-flight refueling capability at some point in their service lives. Now after decommissioning these aircraft an E-2 Hawkeye capable of in-flight refueling rests at the Israeli Air Force Museum.
Israeli E-2C Hawkeye with refueling probe. (Wikimedia Commons)
Distributed Lethality
“Sound strategy depends on a knowledge of all forces and their tactics sufficient to estimate the probabilities of winning. Thus…it will not do to study strategy and offer strategic plans without first studying in detail the forces and tactics on which those plans depend. Strategy and tactics are related like the huntsman and his dog. The hunter is master, but he won’t catch foxes if he has bought and trained a birddog.” –Capt. Wayne P. Hughes Jr., (ret.), Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat
The Navy is looking to move to a more distributed warfighting construct, otherwise known as distributed lethality or distributed maritime operations.21 A major tactical and operational advantage distributed warfighting hopes to achieve is diluting the firepower and sensing of the adversary across a larger space. With respect to great power adversaries that enjoy steep land-based advantages for sea control these constructs are based in part on the hope that distribution will hurt opposing anti-access/area-denial forces more than they will hurt expeditionary forces. Like so much else in the U.S. Navy these distributed warfighting constructs hope to achieve greater effectiveness in part through affecting efficiency. The tactics suggested above are certainly guilty of this to an extent. While affecting the timely concentration of effects is a fundamental principle of warfighting, especially in attrition-centered naval combat, these distributed warfighting constructs are fundamentally incomplete without more specific techniques at the tactical level.
The tactics suggested above envision a closer relationship between carrier aviation and warships where they leverage one another’s platform advantages. It argues that the deep capacity of surface warships is better put to use for the offensive anti-ship mission, and that aviation’s speed and maneuverability is better focused on defending against missiles. This is the opposite logic of what the Navy has long subscribed to.
But the tactical analysis above is still very rudimentary. It does not attempt to account for things like electronic warfare, cyber effects, and space-based capabilities where each can be very critical in its own right. So much decisive space in a future war at sea could lie within circuits, algorithms, and computer code. These tactical ideas may be nothing more than mere speculation, and perhaps some variable that was left unaccounted for could make it all fall apart. But one couldn’t know until they tried.
The question remains as to what are the tactical deficiencies of a carrier-centric Navy that chose to starve the vast majority of its force structure of the ability to sink ships at range, and instead chose to focus perishable aviation on one of its most difficult missions. Aircraft would already be split between conducting major scouting functions, maintaining an outer screen to intercept enemy scouts and bombers, and guarding against sea-skimming threats. Concentrating airpower to sink ships at range would add enormous strain to the air wing.
The force structure of competitors is far more wholesomely armed with anti-ship weapons, but the carrier-centric U.S. Navy chose to confront these threats with offensive missile firepower coming from a sole, central source. This echoes a now familiar theme. By forcing the air wing to take on so many kinds of missions – scouting, counterscouting, outer air battle, defeating sea-skimming threats, and attacking ships – the U.S. Navy inflicted distributed lethality against itself.
Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Nextwar@cimsec.org.
References
1. The maxim comes from Fleet Tactics, Theory and Practice, U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1986, first edition, by Capt. Wayne P. Hughes, Jr. (ret.)
2. Total Harpoon strike mile lethality for surface fleet comes is about 13,708. Total strike mile lethality for LRASM using 15 percent of the surface fleet’s launch cells is about 267,000.
9. This quote from Spruance is followed by the qualifier: “but we were at the start of a very important and large amphibious operation and we could not afford to gamble and place it in jeopardy” and was made in reference to the Battle of the Philippine Sea and defending the Saipan invasion force. However, even in its unqualified form, the quote still suffices to make a key point “as a matter of tactics.”
Caveat: Over the Horizon-Backscatter radars are not limited by the horizon by reflecting radar energy off of the ionosphere. These radars are land-based, and while they can detect contacts of interest at a great distance the fidelity is much more poor compared to line-of-sight radar systems. To see operating principles of various radars and sensors see: Jonathan F. Solomon, “Defending the Fleet from China’s Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile: Naval Deception’s Roles in Sea-Based Missile Defense,” Thesis Defense submitted to Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University, April 15, 2011. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.454.8264&rep=rep1&type=pdf
12. This figure is based rough calculations using supersonic missile speed, defensive missiles featuring a speed of around Mach 3 such as Standard Missile, and to discern the point they would first meet once the former crosses over the horizon. A key advantage attacking missiles will likely have is coming over the horizon at maximum speed and where defensive missiles would have to accelerate to full speed once they are reactively launched.
Excerpt: “Use of manned ships for operational testing with threat representative ASCM surrogates in the close-in, self‑defense battlespace is not possible due to Navy safety restrictions because targets and debris from intercepts pose an unacceptable risk to personnel at ranges where some engagements will take place.”
Excerpt: “In addition to stand-off ranges (on the order of 1.5 to 5 nautical miles for subsonic and supersonic surrogates, respectively), safety restrictions require that ASCM targets not be flown directly at a manned ship, but at some cross-range offset, which unacceptably degrades the operational realism of the test.”
14. For variable flight profiles of anti-ship missiles see:
16. AMRAAM missile weighs 356 lbs, Sidewinder missile weighs 188 lbs (See U.S. Navy AMRAAM fact file, Sidewinder fact file), max load of ten AMRAAM plus two sidewinder: 3936 lbs.
Harpoon weighs 1,523 pounds (See U.S. Navy Harpoon fact file), full load of four Harpoons: 6092 lbs.
“Specifically, the CNO was updated on NWDC’s development of the Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) Concept, a central, overarching operational concept, that will weave together the principles of integration, distribution and maneuver to maximize the effectiveness of the fleet Maritime Operations Centers to synchronize all-domain effects.
“DMO will describe the fleet-centric warfighting capabilities necessary to gain and maintain sea-control through the employment of combat power that may be distributed over vast distances, multiple domains, and a wide array of platforms,” explained Mark Coffman, DMO concept writing team lead, “The concept’s action plan will drive the development of these new capabilities so that fleet commanders will be able to distribute but still maneuver the fleet across an entire theater of operations as an integrated weapon system.”
Featured Image: ARABIAN GULF (Dec. 6, 2017) – The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) transits the Arabian Gulf. Theodore Roosevelt and its carrier strike group are deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations in support of maritime security operations to reassure allies and partners and preserve the freedom of navigation and the free flow of commerce in the region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Anthony J. Rivera/Released)
The Navy’s tactical ignorance is built into its arsenal. Currently some of the Navy’s most important weapons development programs are not just evolutionary, but revolutionary in the possibilities they open up. This is not due to innovation, but instead many of these noteworthy and foundational capabilities are finally arriving decades after the technologies were first proven, many close to half a century ago. Many of these most crucial weapons are already in the hands of great power competitors such as Russia and China who have had decades of opportunity to train and refine tactics with them.
Offensive Firepower
“…no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.” –Horatio Nelson
One of U.S. Navy’s gravest errors in handicapping its own development was neglecting the development of long-range offensive firepower in the age of missile warfare. What made the anti-ship missile a revolution in naval warfare was its ability to deliver a powerful pulse of firepower comparable to that of an attacking wave of carrier aircraft through a combination of high speed, large warhead size, and salvo fires.
In spite of this by 1971 the Soviet Union managed to field 11 different types of anti-ship missiles before the U.S. had yet to field one.1 Today numerous surface ships, submarines, and heavy bombers in the Russian and Chinese navies carry long-range anti-ship missiles, many with supersonic speed and ranges as great as over 200 miles. It was not until 1977 that the U.S. Navy would field its first anti-ship missile, the Harpoon, which remains its primary anti-surface weapon to this day. Weapons with triple the range and speed of the Harpoon missile already existed in numbers 50 years ago.2
Select Soviet anti-ship missiles and their date of introduction, all preceding Harpoon. (Source: Declassified CIA Soviet Naval Cruise Missile Force: Development and Operational Employment, 1971)
The Harpoon is a slow, subsonic missile and extremely short-ranged at around 70 nautical miles.3 The Harpoon also isn’t equipped by most of the U.S. Navy’s destroyers. It is only found on less than half of the Navy’s destroyers despite there being little difference in the design of the ships that carry them and those that do not.4*
The submarine force took Harpoon out of its inventory entirely in 1997 which shaved tens of miles off its surface strike range and limited itself to only close-range torpedo engagements. Now the submarine force is thinking about bringing Harpoon back some 20 years later.5
Harpoon failed to take advantage of arguably the most important attributes large naval platforms bring to the fight – capacity and staying power. The surface fleet ships that do carry Harpoon only carry eight, a small sum. This is in spite of the fact that all U.S. Navy large surface warships have around 100 vertical launch cells for missiles and where Harpoon is much smaller than launch cell-compatible missiles like Tomahawk.
Because Harpoon is incompatible with its launch cells the Navy bolts the missiles on top of the deck in a most uneconomic fashion. This limits the maximum anti-ship salvo U.S. Navy surface warships can deliver to only an eight-missile salvo with extremely short range and subsonic speed. The Navy certainly expects its own ships to be able to easily swat down such a salvo. Harpoon must be fired via torpedo tubes for submarines, but shooting missiles through torpedo tubes can also only produce small salvos compared to a submarine’s launch cells.6
PACIFIC OCEAN (Feb. 18, 2008) Note the four Harpoon missile launchers in the background and the 64 vertical launch cells in the foreground. Original caption: Seaman Robert Paterson, of Norgo, Cal., stands watch next to the aft vertical launch missile platform on the fantail while underway on the guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Erie (CG 70). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Michael Hight)
The Navy did come close to effectively fielding a long-range anti-ship weapon. However, the Navy never truly integrated it by only procuring a small quantity and eventually taking it out of the inventory entirely.
At first the Tomahawk missile program pursued a weapon with two different capabilities. An anti-ship Tomahawk missile was first tested six months after the land attack version in 1976.7 The anti-ship Tomahawk incorporated the same active radar seeker and guidance technology from the Harpoon missile, but offered far better range and a larger payload.8 However, by 1995 it appears only about 600 anti-ship Tomahawks were produced, roughly a tenth of the size of the Harpoon inventory.9The only surface ships that could have carried more than a handful of deck-mounted anti-ship Tomahawks during the Cold War were cruisers that were exclusively focused on protecting capital ships via the defensive anti-air mission. Once the Cold War ended the U.S. Navy got rid of its only long-range anti-surface weapon by remaking the anti-ship Tomahawk missile inventory into the land-attack version.10
Ill-conceived arguments were put forward to justify taking these weapons out, such as how the Navy could not likely target the missile to the maximum extent of its range and the Navy’s current anti-ship missile seekers would be ill-suited to congested waters featuring a mixture of hostiles and non-combatants.11 However far the Navy could target Tomahawk was going to be far better than what it was getting with Harpoon. The Navy certainly accepted a 200-mile anti-ship missile threat from Soviet forces. And if NATO had gone to war against the Soviet Navy it still could have fought in congested waters such as the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas.
A comparison of U.S. and Chinese Navy (PLAN) warships and the range of their respective anti-ship firepower. (Via China’s Near Seas Combat Capabilities, China Maritime Studies Institute, Naval War College)
Still, the Tomahawk makes for a relatively poor anti-ship missile. It is subsonic and lacks aerodynamic features that allow for dynamic terminal maneuvering and where both drawbacks will lower its survivability. More missiles would have to be fired per salvo to achieve a similar effect offered by the more modern missiles coming to the fleet like the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) and Standard Missile (SM)-6.
Tomahawk’s best feature is its long range of hundreds of miles which would allow a dispersed force to aggregate their fires into concentrated salvos via networking.12 However, both slow speed and long range increase the dependence of the missile on in-flight retargeting updates and creates a more burdensome kill chain. It is also questionable to use such a large warhead when modern missile seekers using passive sensors can attempt to pinpoint their strikes on ships. If a missile can confidently choose to hit a ship in the magazine or in other spaces that guarantee a mission kill then missile design can more readily trade warhead size for extra range and speed.
The Navy is once again pursuing this capability. An anti-ship Tomahawk missile will be coming back to the fleet in 2022, 40 years after a Tomahawk first sunk a ship in testing.13
Defensive Firepower
“Anything can be saturated. Aegis can be saturated.”–Rear Admiral Wayne E. Meyer (ret.)
One of the most fundamental trends of military capability is that of reinforcing the kill chain, or the process by which targets are found by sensors and then fired upon with weapons. This process requires certain levels of information from simple detection to targeting-quality data. A key challenge is in keeping the kill chain resilient and freshly updated once the weapon is fired and travels a distance to its target. In response to being detected or coming under fire a target can change its behavior and launch decoys which can require new targeting inputs. Arguably one of the most information intensive fights among the warfare areas is the anti-air mission where sustained radar energy must steadily illuminate speedy aerial targets over great distances in order to guide a missile toward a hit.
The difficulty of steadily illuminating a dynamic aerial target can be somewhat mitigated by putting a radar seeker into the missile itself, a capability known as active radar seeking. This adds resilience to the kill chain and gives the missile some degree of independence from external illumination sources such as the radar of a ship or aircraft. Usually active radar seeking is engaged in the terminal phase of the engagement given the relatively small size of the onboard seeker.
Missiles that are totally dependent on outside sources for illumination operate under semi-active homing. The Navy realized the potential of combining both semi-active and active radar homing when it fielded the Phoenix missile through the F-14 Tomcat that was the mainstay of the fleet’s air-to-air capability during its service life. The Phoenix missile could travel 100 miles and engage active radar seeking in the final moments to see the engagement through. The fundamental principle of building resilience into the kill chain by adding an active seeker into the payload itself is also reflected in the many torpedoes that have an active homing capability and in the Aster anti-air missile that is widely used by European navies today.
A Fighter Squadron 211 (VF-211) F-14B Tomcat aircraft banks into a turn during a flight out of Naval Air Station, Miramar, Calif. The aircraft is carrying six AIM-54 Phoenix missiles. (Wikimedia Commons)
Aircraft, through adjusting altitude and maneuver, are clearly not as inhibited as warships in illuminating their targets for anti-air engagements. If it made sense to put active radar seekers in anti-air missiles used by aircraft then it should make even more sense for a ship which must contend with the horizon and cannot maneuver in three dimensions like aviation. If an aerial target dives in reaction to being sensed and engaged then an attacking missile could use its active radar seeker to chase the target below the horizon limitation of its illuminating ship in a bid to independently finish the engagement. Such a capability adds extra depth to a ship’s ability to defend itself below the radar horizon and at altitude.
The Navy fielded active radar seekers over 40 years ago in the Phoenix air-to-air missile it procured by the thousands.14 The story is different for the surface fleet. In spite of this simple but important enhancement almost all of the Navy’s surface-to-air missiles do not have active radar seeking technology.
The missiles that are the mainstay of the fleet’s defensive arsenal such as Standard Missile (SM) and the Evolved SeaSparrow Missile (ESSM) are only equipped with semi-active radar homing, and where this form of homing has tactical handicaps. Semi-active homing works by having an external source illuminate a target with its radar. The radar reflections are picked up by the missile, which then finds its way to the target with the assistance of mid-course guidance from the external radar. Because a ship is limited by the horizon, if a target dives deep enough, the ship will no longer be able to illuminate it with its radar to see the engagement through.
Land-based surface-to-air missiles are not as inhibited by semi-active homing in spite of the same horizon limitation because they work in tandem with other anti-air systems. An aircraft diving low to avoid illumination over land places itself at risk of being engaged by shorter range anti-air weapons that do not reveal themselves through radar emissions. This tactic worked to great effect over Vietnam as radar-guided surface-to-air missile batteries forced American warplanes to drop altitude and fly within range of gun-based anti-air systems which ended up shooting down more aircraft than missiles.15 There is no similar effect at sea because capability is concentrated on warships.
To an extent Sailors already know the Standard Missile is handicapped by its guidance capability. The Standard Missile has an anti-surface mode, but of dubious effectiveness. Its range is less than 20 miles in this mode because that is only as far as the ship’s radar can target it close to the surface and to the limit of the horizon.16
An annual Defense Department report from 1975 highlighted this issue when it sought to develop an anti-ship version of the Standard Missile:
“The STANDARD SSM program was initiated in 1971 to provide an interim anti-ship missile capability until the HARPOON could be developed and deployed. The STANDARD SSM is operational in two versions, with a third now in development…The third version, Active STANDARD with a radar seeker…will have a range capability beyond the ship radar horizon. The range of the STANDARD semi-active missile is limited to the range of the ship’s radar, since the missile’s target must be illuminated by a ship radar. The STANDARD ARM and Active STANDARD, equipped with an anti-radiation homing capability and an active terminal seeker, respectively, eliminate the need for illumination of the target by a ship radar and thus permit engagement of targets beyond the ship radar horizon.”17
In the end the original Active Standard SSM never made it into the fleet though the same basic idea and capability would be replicated decades later. Despite many variants produced across nearly 50 years of service active radar seeking did not come to the Standard Missile family of weapons until SM-6 arrived in 2013. Even so, SM-6 does not have a unique seeker but takes its active radar seeker from the widely equipped AMRAAM air-to-air missile that entered service in 1991.18 SM-6 introduced an anti-ship capability in 2016, similar in concept to what was already deemed desirable many years ago in the form of the Active Standard SSM.19 SM-6 now bears the odd distinction of being both the Navy’s first long-range active radar seeking surface-to-air missile, and its first supersonic anti-ship missile.
In explaining the benefit of SM-6 the Navy once again described the value of similar technology 40 years later:
“The introduction (emphasis added) of active-seeker technology to air defense in the Surface Force reduces the Aegis Weapon System’s reliance on illuminators. It also provides improved performance against stream raids and targets employing advanced characteristics such as enhanced maneuverability, low-radar cross-section, improved kinematics, and advanced electronic countermeasures.”20
However, SM-6 will be fielded in relatively small numbers because it is extremely expensive and is not meant to replace the more widely equipped SM-2.21Active radar homing will also not come to the Evolved SeaSparrow Missile, the Navy’s main short-ranged defensive anti-air missile, until the Block 2 upgrade hits the fleet in 2020.22 The Navy is already pursuing a more common Standard Missile variant equipped with an active radar seeker, the SM-2 Block IIIC.23The missile is being pushed through the Navy’s Maritime Accelerated Capability Office in a bid to shorten the acquisition timeline and hopefully get it into the fleet within three years.24
However, according to the Navy’s 2017 program guide the Standard Missile variants that do not have active radar seekers “will be the heart of the SM-2 inventory for the next 20 years.”25
The Heavy Bomber
“We think we can destroy it; it is our business to attack it, and it is up to you to judge whether we can do it or not. Give the air a chance to develop and demonstrate what it can do!”–Billy Mitchell in 1921 urging Congress to support bombing warships with planes in testing.
When combat is joined between missile-armed fleets the maneuver of individual warships will matter little in the near term because of the large disparity between ship speed and missile speed. Upon engaging in fleet combat a commander’s most flexible means to respond to risk and opportunity in timely fashion will be through speedy aviation. Despite its single-minded focus on using aviation to sink ships at range the Navy never effectively incorporated the use of heavy bombers.
Heavy bombers can feature very long endurance and range, far superior to that of carrier aircraft. Bombers also have large carrying capacity that allows them to mount a level of offensive firepower comparable to that of a warship. Because long-range anti-ship firepower usually outranges anti-air firepower by a steep margin heavy bombers can have a powerful ability to fire effectively first against warships.
Both Russia and China field heavy bombers with long-range anti-ship firepower, and where heavy bombers were at the leading edge of Soviet anti-ship capabilities throughout most of the Cold War. Soviet-era Backfire bombers can travel over 1500 miles, are capable of supersonic speed, and can fire multiple Mach 3 missiles that have hundreds of miles of range. Large Backfire bomber raids have been expected to be a principle tactic for countering American carrier groups far from Russia for decades.26
Similar platforms exist within the U.S. military, but heavy bombers belong to the Air Force. It appears the Air Force bought very few Harpoon missiles with less than 100 in its inventory by the mid-90s.27 The full adoption of an anti-ship role for heavy bombers may have also been hindered by a combination of inter-service rivalry between the Navy and the Air Force as well as differing priorities in their contingency planning.
Soon one of the most powerful anti-ship platforms in the American arsenal will not even belong to the U.S. Navy. The platform that will first receive the first truly modern and widespread anti-ship missile of the U.S., LRASM, will not be a Navy asset but the Air Force’s B-1 bomber. These bombers will be able to carry 24 of these powerful weapons, packing over 15 times the anti-ship firepower of a Harpoon-equipped U.S. surface warship.28 These planes will make for an extremely powerful asset when combined with their thousands of miles of range.29 This year the U.S. will finally have a heavy bomber with credible long-range anti-ship firepower, but after the Soviets pioneered the same capability half a century ago.30
An Air Force B-1B Lancer drops a Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) during a 2013 flight test from Dyess Air Force Base in Texas to Point Mugu Sea Test Range off the coast of southern California. (DARPA photo)
Shortchanged
Of the Navy’s errors in arming the fleet none can compare to failing to effectively bring its offensive firepower into the age of missile warfare. Only now is it on the verge of doing so with launch cell-compatible missiles like LRASM and the Maritime Strike Tomahawk that are just a couple years away from hitting the fleet. Finally the Navy will have widespread anti-ship firepower that can hit at over 100 miles. This wholesome introduction of long-range anti-ship missiles comes over half a century after the Soviets proved it was possible.31
But this recent introduction of long-range anti-ship firepower will not be the Navy’s first attempt. Up until now much of the Navy’s story of fielding anti-ship missiles consists of developing weapons long after they were first possible, then not fielding them in effective numbers, subsequently removing them from the inventory, only to then try and reintroduce them decades later. The Navy lagged long enough to where today there are 400-ton Chinese missile boats that carry more long-range anti-ship firepower than 9,500-ton, billion-dollar American cruisers and destroyers that have around 100 launch cells.32
Chinese Navy Type 022 (Houbei Class) Fast Attack Missile Craft (China Military Review)
Why was the Navy stuck with only the short-ranged Harpoon for so long, and why were competitors able to design so many more anti-ship missiles with greater lethality in the meantime?
The answer may lie with doctrine. The aircraft carrier has remained the centerpiece of U.S. Navy anti-ship doctrine since WWII. Harpoon probably became the Navy’s first anti-ship missile and remained its primary anti-ship tool for over 40 years because it appears Harpoon was one of the first anti-ship missiles small enough to fit onto multirole aircraft, such as those flown from aircraft carriers.33 By comparison, airborne anti-ship firepower for the Soviets mostly took the form of enormous missiles that could only be carried by large bombers. The very short range of Harpoon was made up for by the long reach of aviation that could travel hundreds of miles and strike targets well before they could get within range to unleash their own anti-ship firepower.
The small size necessary to equip carrier aircraft with Harpoon was a major limiting factor for missile capability with respect to range, speed, and size. Ship-launched missiles can take on far greater proportions such as Tomahawk or the early-Cold War era Talos anti-air missile that weighed over four times as much as Harpoon.34 But by not bothering to effectively field an anti-ship missile that was compatible with the thousands of launch cells across the fleet the Navy was unable to capitalize on core advantages warships bring to the fight – staying power and deep capacity.
It is questionable to subscribe to a doctrine that deprives the surface fleet, the submarine force, and the heavy bomber arm of long-range anti-ship firepower. Russia and China have not made this mistake. With respect to anti-ship firepower in the age of missile warfare not only did the Navy bet the aircraft carrier would reign supreme, but that it could stand alone. While the reach and size of the carrier air wing could compensate for Harpoon’s shortcomings the rest of the fleet was stuck with a small, slow, short-ranged missile kept aboard in very low quantities. The U.S. Navy, so completely blinded by absolute faith in the supremacy of a single platform, failed to effectively field the premier offensive weapon of a new age of warfare.
Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Nextwar@cimsec.org.
*Correction: Harpoon is equipped by a majority of the U.S. Navy large surface combatants unlike as was originally worded. Harpoon is found on a minority of U.S. Navy destroyers.
Excerpt: “That shot marked the first time a Harpoon had been fired from a U.S. submarine in more than 20 years, and Commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet’s Submarine Force Rear Adm. Daryl Caudle said he expects that the cruise missile will be added back into the SSN’s regular armament.”
7. Captain Philip Signor, USNR, “Cruise Missiles for the U.S. Navy: An Exemplar of Innovation in a Military Organization,” Naval War College, June 1994. http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a283784.pdf
8. Joseph C. Schissler and John P. Gibson, “The Origin and History of the Global Engagement Department,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest, Volume 29, Number 2 (2010) http://www.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/TD/td2902/Schissler.pdf
10. For anti-ship Tomahawk remove of service: Joseph C. Schissler and John P. Gibson, “The Origin and History of the Global Engagement Department,” Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest, Volume 29, Number 2 (2010) http://www.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/TD/td2902/Schissler.pdf
Note: Vertical launch cells that could fire Tomahawk missiles were fairly rare in the U.S. Navy until only after the Cold War, and where Tomahawk was also kept in deck-mounted launchers for many ships. Vertical launch cells became more common when Spruance-class destroyers were modified to accomodate launch cells in the 90s, and the concurrent introduction of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
13. For 1982 test date: E. H. Corirow, G. K. Smith, A. A. Barboux, “The Joint Cruise Missiles Project: An Acquisition History, Appendixes,” RAND, August 1982. http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a141082.pdf
Statement Of The Honorable James F. Geurts Assistant Secretary Of The Navy Research, Development And Acquisition Before The T Senate Armed Services Committee On Department Of Defense Acquisition Enterprise And Associated Reforms, December 7, 2017. https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Geurts_12-07-17.pdf
33. Navy has an multi-role fighter-mounted weapon known as SLAM-ER that has superior range to Harpoon and is capable of engaging ships. However, it is much more rare than Harpoon. See inventory: Forecast International, AGM-84E SLAM, March 2011. https://www.forecastinternational.com/archive/disp_pdf.cfm?DACH_RECNO=850
Despite their enormous size the Navy had cruisers that could carry over 100 Talos missiles through highly advanced missile launch systems and magazines. These shields also carried dozens of shorter-ranged anti-air missiles. See: Elmer D. Robinson, “The Talos Ship System,” JHU APL Technical Digest, Volume 3, Number 2, 1982. http://www.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/views/pdfs/V03_N2_1982/V3_N2_1982_Robinson.pdf
Featured Image: The battleship USS IOWA (BB-61) launches a Harpoon anti-ship cruise missile during Fleet Exercise 2-86 (National Archives Catalog)
“Fleet level processes and procedures designed for safe and effective operations were increasingly relaxed due to time and fiscal constraints, and the ‘normalization-of-deviation’ began to take root in the culture of the fleet. Leaders and organizations began to lose sight of what ‘right’ looked like, and to accept these altered conditions and reduced readiness standards as the new normal.” –2017 Strategic Readiness Review commissioned in the aftermath of the collisions involving USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and USS John S. McCain (DDG-56)
The U.S. Navy is suffering from self-inflicted strategic dysfunction across the breadth of its enterprise. This series seeks to explore the theme of the normalization of deviation in some of the most critical operations, activities, and attributes that prepare the U.S. Navy for war. Because the U.S. Navy is the senior partner in its alliance activities many of these problems probably hold true for allied navies as well.
Part One below looks at U.S. Navy combat training and draws a comparison with Chinese Navy training.
Part Two will examine firepower relating to offense, defense, and across force structure.
Part Three will look at tactics and doctrine with an emphasis on network- and carrier-centric fleet combat.
Part Five will look at the relationship between the Navy’s availability and material condition.
Part Six will examine the application of strategy to operations.
Part Seven will look at strategy and force development, including force structure assessment.
Part Eight will conclude with recommendations for a force development strategy to refocus the U.S. Navy on the high-end fight and sea control.
Combat Training
“This ship is built to fight; you’d better know how.” –Former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke (ret.) at the commissioning ceremony of the destroyer USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51)
The training strategy of a military service is one of its most fundamental responsibilities. Training is central to piercing the fog of war as much as possible before combat exacts its price. Training is what forges people into warfighters.
Soon after the Cold War ended the Navy announceda “change in focus and, therefore, in priorities for the Naval Service away from operations on the sea toward power projection.”1 A new operating focus on low-end missions such as partner development missions, striking land targets, and deterring rogue regimes came to dominate its focus. Different training followed. This training and operating paradigm replaced the high-end threat focus the Navy was originally made for in an era of great power competition against the Soviet Union. But the shift was wholesale, and did not attempt to preserve a responsible minimum of important skills that still held relevance. Perhaps worst of all, somehow this shift allowed U.S. Navy training to fall to incredible lows and remain there for most of a generation.
So much valuable corporate memory has evaporated. Extremely unrealistic training exercises starved Sailors of opportunities to learn important skills and prove themselves. And while the U.S. Navy slipped for years its latest rival, the Chinese Navy, made strong gains in the very same skills the U.S. Navy was losing.
Realism and the Nature of U.S. Navy Exercising
“The mission of the fleet in time of peace is preparation for war, and in this preparation tactical training heads the list of requirements…No matter how perfect we are in every other respect, if we cannot make good here we might as well not exist.” –Captain William S. Sims, “Naval War College Methods and Principles Applied Afloat,” 1915.
For years the Navy’s training exercises took on a scripted character where the outcomes were generally known beforehand and where opposing forces were usually made to lose. Scripted training is not inherently wrong if it is used as a stepping stone to more open-ended and complex exercises. However, such events were very few and far between. As a result most U.S. Navy high-end combat training remained stuck at an extremely basic level that barely scratched the surface of war. As a report from the Naval Studies Board described Navy training, “There is little free play, and exercises are typically scripted with little deviation allowed.”2
One of the most important methods of making exercises realistic is facing off against opponents that can win. Going up against a thinking and capable adversary creates a level of challenge that simple target practice cannot approach. Red teams and opposing forces can be highly specialized units that incorporate key intelligence insights to make their behavior more like that of a foreign competitor. Opposing forces can also be more simple when using scratch teams where training units can be divided into opposing sides and told to challenge each other. Scratch opposition forces are not as realistic as using teams informed by intelligence on competitors, but scratch teams can pose a real challenge because it is still troops competing against troops.
It appears Navy exercising was devoid of opposition forces that stood a chance. In “An Open Letter to the U.S. Navy from Red,” Captain Dale Rielage, the intelligence director of U.S. Pacific Fleet, writes from the perspective of an opposing force commander to the U.S. Navy and offers insight into how the Navy minimized challenge in its training by handicapping its Red teams:
“Your opposing forces often are very good, but you have trained them to know their place…our experience is that they have learned to self-regulate their aggressiveness, knowing what senior Blue and White cell members will accept. As one opposing force member recently told us during a ‘high-end’ training event, their implied tasking included not annoying the senior flag officer participating in the event. They knew from experience that aggressive Red action and candid debriefs were historically a source of annoyance. They played accordingly.”3
Rielage invoked the infamous Millennium Challenge exercise. This exercise was a massive warfighting experiment that became a controversy after the opposing force commander Lt. Gen Paul van Riper quit in protest. Riper at first inflicted devastating losses on the Blue team through unconventional means, but subsequent rounds cemented parameters that forced Red to lose.4 According to Rielage, “The entire event generally is remembered as an example of what not to do…The reality is that we repeat this experience on a smaller scale multiple times each year.”
Rielage then goes on to suggest the problem is extremely pervasive and longstanding:
“You talk about accepting failure as a way to learn, but refuse to fail. It is instructive to ask a room of senior officers the last time they played in—or even heard of—a game or exercise where Red won.”
If the Red teams of Navy exercising are so constrained they rarely ever win then what are they being used for? Admiral Scott Swift, recent commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, gives a clue in “A Fleet Must be Able to Fight.” Swift points out that “Our warfighting culture focuses on kill ratio—the number of enemy losses we can inflict for every loss we take.”5 However, Navy exercising usually results in extremely favorable tradeoffs. Swift argued that the Navy’s “reliance on high kill ratios” causes it to focus on “exquisite engagements,” or “firing from a position of minimum uncertainty and maximum probability of success (emphasis added).” Swift concludes that in high-end operations “it is not possible to generate the number of exquisite engagements necessary to achieve victory.”
Warfighting culture is a product of training. If the Navy’s warfighting culture was focused on easy (“exquisite”) engagements that always earn high kill ratios then perhaps the reason opposing forces almost never won is because they were relegated to the role of cannon fodder.
One example of Red teams being used for simplistic target practice is seen in how submarines were often pitted against warships. Only three years ago did the surface fleet finally open a fully integrated tactical center of excellence for itself, the Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC, or the TOPGUN of the surface fleet as they often say), whose responsibilities include improving training and tactics.6 One SMWDC commander spoke of how the Navy was using the surface fleet as an opposing force to train submarines in certain exercises, where according to Admiral John Wade, “Up until two years ago, surface ships were kind of just targets…They told you to go drive from Point A and Point B…The submarines were just crushing us.”7
How else can one reduce an opponent to easy prey? The Navy accomplished this in part through a linear style of training. Navy training took the form of a series of events that focused on individual warfare areas. These include mission areas such as anti-air warfare, anti-surface warfare, and anti-submarine warfare. Exercise and certification events mainly focused on working only just one skillset at a time. Admiral Swift suggested Navy training amounted to “ticking off a discrete schedule of individual training objectives” and argued that this is why the Navy could not execute critical warfighting tasks with confidence. While the Navy did manage to train individual skills, “…we as a force never practiced them together, in combination with multiple tasks…”8
This limits the freedom to play an accurate opposition force. Capt. Rielage remarked that Red teams are most often constrained and used to only “perform a specific function to facilitate an event” (such as an individual training certification event) rather than behave like a thinking adversary.
Many naval platforms are multi-domain in nature, with the ability to attack targets in the air, on the ocean, and beneath the surface. Cross-domain fires are the norm in war at sea, such as how a submarine can fire missiles at a ship from underwater. Sinking a modern warship is at least a matter of knowing how to fight targets on the surface and in the air at the same time, simply because ships can fire missiles at each other. Naval warfare involves sensors and weapons that can reach out to hundreds of miles from a single ship. The scale of this multi-domain battlespace can be enormous while containing numerous types of threats. Through this complexity war at sea can be filled with an incredible scope of possibilities and combinations. Even in an era absent great power competition rogue regimes like Iran still field multi-domain capabilities such as submarines and anti-ship missiles. Practicing only one skillset at a time using cannon fodder opposition forces that almost never win barely scratches the surface of war, yet this is exactly how the U.S. Navy has been training its strike groups for years.
In recent decades it appears the Navy did not have a true high-end threat exercise until Admiral Swift instituted the Fleet Problem exercises two years ago.9 It must be recognized that because the Fleet Problems are so new they still may not accurately represent real war. Instead, they simply set and combine the basic conditions to present a meaningful challenge to train for the high-end fight.
The Fleet Problems are large-scale, long-duration, and open-ended events. Large-scale, in that the unit being tested can be a strike group or larger; long duration, in that the exercise is at least several days long instead of less than 24 hours; open-ended, in that they give wide latitude to the troops involved rather than narrowly constraining them to execute proscribed methods.10 Perhaps most critically, the Fleet Problems include an opposition force that is capable of inflicting painful losses. They also force the Navy to exercise multiple warfighting areas in combination rather than one at a time, which was the standard design for the Composite Unit Training Exercise (COMPTUEX) that was considered the peak of high-end sea control training in every deploying strike group’s workup cycle.11 The novelty of the Fleet Problems suggests the Navy’s overseas exercises on deployment were not much better. While these individual training conditions are not totally unprecedented in the Navy the Fleet Problems appear to be the first events in many years to effectively combine them on a large scale.
Before the Fleet Problems the Navy’s training system stood in stark contrast to the exercise programs of other branches. Both the Army and the Air Force are keenly aware of the need to use dedicated and capable opposition forces to hammer warfighting competence into their units through high-end threat training.12 Hundreds of aircraft participate annually in the Air Force’s Red Flag exercise where opposing aggressor squadrons often impose high cost. Nearly a third of the Army’s brigades rotate every year through the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin where Army units are regularly challenged by dedicated opposition forces. The table below shows how Army Brigade Combat Teams do not always score high kill ratios at the NTC.13
Original caption from source: This table captures the lethality of four armored BCTs (ABCTs) that trained under live-fire conditions at NTC by outlining the total number of threats presented to the ABCTs and the effects of the BCTs’ weapon systems. Of note is that greater than 94 percent of the “enemy” destroyed during these live-fires were destroyed with direct-fire systems (including attack aviation), meaning that our formations fought a “fair” fight.
The National Training Center and Red Flag exercises have existed for decades and are among the highest priorities for their respective military branches. Evolving real-world threats frequently combine with new technology to introduce fresh challenges into these capstone training events. Yet in spite of everything that was changing about the Navy’s technology and advances being made by foreign competitors the Navy’s premier pre-deployment exercise stagnated. Admiral Phil Davidson suggested, “we’ve made more changes during the last 18 months to COMPTUEX than in the last 18 years.”14
The problem of military training becoming so scripted that victory is assured is not unprecedented. The Marines also have some history with this issue. In 1990, Marine William Bradley blasted the Corps for unrealistic training, questioning exercises that “smack of ‘zero defect’ artificiality,” and charging “who among us can say he has participated in major exercises where ‘success’ was not artificially preordained?”15 More recent writing suggests that opposing forces in the Marine Corps have been often made to simply “die in place.”16
Scripted training might come from some organizational pathology born from a zero-defect culture, a failure to evolve target practice into something that resembles dynamic battle, or some other combination of complacence and lack of imagination. What is certain is that it bears little resemblance to the sort of wars the military of a superpower can be asked to fight.
The Navy has made moves in the right direction only recently though much of Navy training probably remains a heavily scripted affair. Truly difficult exercising for the high-end fight at the strike group level has begun with the advent of the Fleet Problems. COMPTUEX is becoming more challenging, although through more virtual means.17 Two years ago SMWDC instituted a new training event called Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training (SWATT) that finally gives the surface fleet its own integrated training phase prior to joining capital ships for larger events in the workup cycle.18
Given how new they are however the extent to which the Navy will sustain and make the most of these activities remains unclear. What is certain is that they are taking place within a context and a culture shaped by a generation of neglect. As Admiral Swift succinctly put it, “There is no classroom instruction and little doctrine or guidance for fighting a fleet.”
The Structure of U.S. Navy Training
“Peacetime maneuvers are a feeble substitute for the real thing; but even they can give an army an advantage over others whose training is confined to routine, mechanical drill.” –Carl von Clausewitz, On War.
After deploying beyond its means for years the Navy was facing unsustainable growth in maintenance backlogs, yet rising demand for naval power meant the Navy would hardly budge on delaying deployments. As ships went through their usual phases within the workup cycle to prepare for deployment something had to give as pressure built from both sides. Navy leadership characterized the situation as a “rise in operational demand, maintenance availabilities going long, and training getting squeezed in the middle.”19According to Navy officials cutting weeks of training became the preferred remedy to get ships out on time.20
Cutting training time is not necessarily wrong however because training could go on forever. Even with cuts ships still have months of time devoted to training within the workup cycle and more opportunities when deployed. The Navy cannot blame operational demand or maintenance backlogs alone for compressed training. Instead, it is the fault of poor decision-making on how to structure the training process and assume risk.
Sailors feel constantly rushed while training, especially within the workup cycle, because they are being forced to do hundreds of training events in order to satisfy an impossible number of requirements that only seems to grow.21 As training and certification events grew more numerous they were forced to become more shallow because they were stuffed into fixed or even shrinking timeframes. As the Naval Studies Board lamented, “There are no empty blocks on the exercise and training schedules.”
Time pressures encouraged scripted events because training can be passed more quickly. Hard training involves repeat attempts after failure, a larger selection of open-ended scenarios, and a thorough after-action review process. All of these things cost time. Scripting can help make time for more events and cut corners when needed. Scripted training became an important means to help Sailors stay on schedule in a system that was overburdened with too many requirements.
These excessive requirements come from a desire to cover too many bases. A warship, being an advanced machine, can experience technical failure and take damage in numerous ways. Ships can also be employed in a wide range of missions. Training to manage the degradation of a ship and the complexity of naval warfighting is an incredibly difficult task. However, it is impossible to train to every kind of scenario or prevent every kind of failure. A training system represents calculated risk where strong proficiency in some areas must come at the expense of skill in many others.
An example of poor risk calculation with respect to tactical training can be seen in the submarine force where according to LT Jeff Vandenengel:
“…virtually every officer on board can explain complex engineering principles, draw diagrams of entire reactor systems, and have conducted countless complex engineering-casualty drills, but few to no simulated attacks on an enemy warship. So much time, energy, and effort is spent on engineering issues that the study, development, and practice with tactical systems and techniques are often treated like afterthoughts.”22
The Navy has allowed the technical complexity of its ships and the flexibility of naval power to overwhelm the ability of Sailors to effectively train for war. Miscellaneous administrative burdens have also ballooned. Risk aversion has been mistaken for due diligence where a risk averse culture prone to adding training and inspections sought to mitigate risk that should have been accepted. Now it has become impossible to expect Sailors to become skilled at core warfighting tasks when there are too many boxes to check.
The training certification system has become so backward it is inhibiting the very sort of skill it should be promoting. According to Vice Admiral Joseph Tofalo, recent commander of the U.S. submarine force, they were “…really working hard by taking a hard scrub of our assessment and certification process” just to make only 10-15 days’ worth of time to insert high-end threat training into the months-long workup cycles of submarines.23 The bloated certification system is suffocating the ability of senior leaders to implement meaningful training reform.
But even with a bloated system why is it such a struggle for the Navy to make so little time for one of the most important types of training there is?
Training and Evaluation
“You cannot allow any of your people to avoid the brutal facts. If they start living in a dream world, it’s going to be bad.”–James Mattis
Most of the Navy’s training is not actually training in the fullest sense of the term. Rather, most events appear to be readiness evaluations. The intent of a readiness evaluation is not necessarily to create an in-depth learning experience, but to pass an event and earn a certification that indicates a unit is competent at a certain task. The term “certification” is almost always used in relation to the intent and end result of Navy training. Sailors in the fleet are often worrying about maintaining their numerous certifications because they require periodic refreshing.
Good training is about pushing to failure, testing limits, and taking risk head on. This makes it necessary to have training events that do not culminate in a pass/fail evaluation that can reflect poorly on a participant. When under evaluation one will likely fall back on previously known methods instead of using the opportunity to try something new. By frequently conflating readiness evaluations with training the Navy has failed to create enough space where Sailors can safely experiment and learn from their mistakes.
A singular focus on certification can encourage scripting because the goal simply becomes passing the next event rather than genuine improvement over time. Scripting away risk makes the chances of passing certification events much better. Yet much of the point of military skill is in knowing how to manage violent risk.
The Navy’s scripted style of training calls the trustworthiness of the certification system into question. In reference to unit-level training LT Erik Sand described a training and reporting system that allowed for “easy gaming and cheating” and that “because ships design their own drills, they can hide their weaknesses.” Ships were able to write the training packages they would be evaluated on and rehearse them enough to minimize surprise in advance of their inspections. LT Sand felt compelled to argue for the obvious: “In combat, a ship cannot pick where she takes a hit. The crew should not be able to do so in an inspection…the ship’s crew should not have specific foreknowledge of drill scenarios.” The end result was not an inspection process that seriously tests warfighting skill, but instead “evaluates the crew’s ability to stage-manage a show.”24
The quality of any certification is based on the standard of training it was earned through. How credible is a warfighting certification earned through scripted training?
Comparing Chinese Navy Training
“He who can modify his tactics in relation to his opponent and thereby succeed in winning, may be called a heaven-born captain.” –Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Winning is not about being the best, but simply being better than the opposition. In this vein, how does the U.S. Navy stack up against its chief rival, the Chinese Navy?
The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) regularly releases unclassified reports on foreign navies. Its reports on the Chinese Navy (People’s Liberation Army Navy – PLAN) criticize training shortcomings that the U.S. Navy is itself committing. However, these reports also paint a picture of a force that is serious about training harder and working to overcome past disregard for realism.
In its 2015 report ONI stated the PLAN is “rectifying training methods by avoiding formalism and scripting in exercises.”25 As it looks to improve, less scripted training events that aim to “stress tactical flexibility, are occurring on a regular basis…” ONI’s 2007 report indicates the PLAN was making similar reforms earlier. The report said a limitation of the PLAN was its “reliance on scripted training events” and that new training guidance emphasized opposition force training and injecting surprise. In what the PLAN calls Naval Combat Readiness Exercises the exercise plan is “kept from the unit being exercised until just before orders are issued, or until the warning or signal is given.”26 The 2015 report said that a key goal of opposing force training exercises happening “on a regular basis” is “to evaluate a leader’s ability to develop and execute operational plans according to loosely defined objectives.”
Compare this to how Admiral Swift described the reaction of U.S. Sailors being presented with a Fleet Problem exercise: “Some teams clearly were uncomfortable, looking for the gouge on how the problem would go down. Many seemed astonished that the part of the order tasking them (‘Here is my intent. Your charge is to develop the required tasks to achieve it.’) often was less than a page long.” Swift said the fleet staff had to urge these leaders several times to “Stop asking for the plan; plan your solution.”27
The 2007 ONI report noted that “Typically, PLAN units previously conducted only one training subject per sortie in a building block approach” and that under new training standards units “now conduct more than one training subject per sortie.”
Compare this to how Admiral Swift described Navy training in his recent writing, in that “Much of the process of unit training certification consists of performing individual techniques, often in a set sequence and a reduced tempo. In a fight, these techniques need to be combined and executed with speed.”
In addition to being chief of intelligence for U.S. Pacific Fleet Captain Rielage also serves as the senior member of the Pacific Naval Aggressor Team (PNAT) that was created a few years ago.28 PNAT seeks to incorporate intelligence insights on adversaries to create accurate representations of their thinking and behavior. PNAT then puts these insights into practice by leading opposing forces in certain events such as the Fleet Problems where Admiral Swift says PNAT “frequently surprises” leaders all the way up to the four-star level “unlike current strike group training.”29 Capt. Rielage also has interesting insights into how Chinese Navy training is evolving.
In “Chinese Navy Trains and Takes Risks” Rielage writes that PLAN units often engage in force-on-force exercises that incorporate key elements of surprise such as where live opposing forces do not know the “exact composition or disposition of the adversary.”30 Units that exercise initiative to increase the difficulty of their training events are regularly praised in official PLAN media. According to Rielage, “The clear impression is that the PLAN is more willing to accept risk in its training evolutions than its U.S. counterparts.”
There is also a stark difference in the sort of missions the U.S. Navy and the Chinese Navy are focused on training for. Rielage claims the PLAN is “underpinned by an institutional emphasis on training for high-end naval warfare” and that “there is a strong argument that success in this mission is the PLAN’s primary and defining priority.” Compare this to how Admiral Swift characterized U.S. Navy training in the power projection era:
“A quick glance at a Composite Training Unit or Joint Task Force exercise schedule showed maritime interdiction operations, strait transits, and air wings focused on power projection from sanctuary. But despite the best efforts of our training teams, our deploying forces were not preparing for the high-end maritime fight and, ultimately, the U.S. Navy’s core mission of sea control.”31
For years the U.S. Navy has not tried to practice destroying modern fleets, but the Chinese Navy has.
The importance the PLAN places on training is also reflected in its leadership. While serving as Commandant of the Naval Command College and prior to becoming the current chief of the PLAN Admiral Shen Jinlong helped create a “Blue Force Center” that seeks to improve the realism of opposition force training. Earlier in his career he served as director of a naval vessels training center and was credited for establishing a training system for new-type ships.32 The current leader of the Chinese Navy is no stranger to training innovation.
Vice Adm. Shen Jinlong tours USS Blue Ridge (Original U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Samuel Weldin)
The rate of tactical learning in the PLAN compared to most other navies is especially high, and not just because of its training values. With a hint of condescension the 2015 ONI report said that before the PLAN expanded its distant operations in 2009 it was “largely a training fleet, with very little operational experience.” But a force focused on hard and realistic training can certainly be effective when it will count most in war. The PLAN still has very few steady overseas commitments, and can afford to spend the bulk of its readiness on force development just like the interwar period U.S. Navy.33 On the other hand the modern U.S. Navy is stretched thin across the globe, and chooses to spend most of its readiness on overseas operations which are not the same as focused force development conducted close to home. The American and Chinese Navies have been spending their time on very different priorities.
Regardless of where they stand in relation to one another on the continuum of military excellence it appears the Chinese Sailor is learning and becoming a more lethal professional at a rate that far outstrips his American rival.
Training and Satisfaction in the Profession of Arms
“If we fight our fleets in mimic fights against each other, every officer and seaman, and fireman, and ward-room boy will understand enough to become interested. What we need more than anything else is to make our people interested…certainly no profession gives the opportunities for continued interest that ours does…yet is there anything more heartbreaking in its dullness than a man-of-war is often made to be!” –Commander Bradley A. Fiske, “American Naval Policy,” 1905.
A key distinction between institutions that provide security and most other organizations is that they rarely get to apply the full scope of their potential until an immediate threat demands a response. Most other organizations operate under a steady grind where they regularly apply foundational skills and often in direct competition against many others who are doing the same. Until an imminent threat appears an organization focused on security must remain in a self-imposed state of vigilance. This comes with unique challenges of promoting professional satisfaction and morale.
Being a sentry, as important as that may be, is hardly gratifying. The logic of promoting deterrence is often not tangible enough to be professionally fulfilling on its own to most who wear the uniform. After spending an ungodly amount of time filing paperwork, attending sessions, and conducting so many other preparations warfighters crave the opportunity to do their job and put their skills to the test. An organization focused on security should conduct hard training not only for the sake of preparedness but to give its people opportunities to push their limits and enjoy the fulfillment of becoming a better professional. In the absence of a pressing mission that demands the immediate use of specialized skills a focus on growing those skills is the next best thing.
While the Navy featured prominently at the opening of many campaigns and saved lives in humanitarian disaster the emphasis on low-end missions and training hardly helped Sailors experience the full potential of the powerful Navy they joined. The power projection era precluded Sailors from practicing many of the core high-end missions and skills a superpower Navy is usually built for, yet Sailors were still responsible for the extensive maintenance that high-end capability required. Scripted training under the bloated certification system has turned most tactical training into just another chore on a checklist rather than a stimulating exercise that focuses on quality learning and professional development.
The professional development opportunities that come with joining the most powerful Navy should be especially unique. In how many places can someone practice warfighting skills and operations using some of the most advanced warships ever made? How many jobs allow someone to become the best in the world at taking command of the seas through skill of arms? Surely there is some connection between the level of opportunity to grow as a better warfighter through hard trials and the unique job satisfaction that comes with being a military professional. Has the Navy harmed retention and morale by letting too many requirements, inspections, and low-end missions crowd out time for hard training? Clearly people joining the Navy would much rather be “forged by the sea” instead of forged by their inbox.
Training and Human Capital in the Profession of Arms
“…I would argue that nothing takes precedence over the peacetime commander’s job of finding combat leaders.” –Captain Wayne P. Hughes, Jr. (ret.), Fleet Tactics, Theory and Practice
The training certification system is unable to maintain a consistent standard across the force because luck plays an important role in how well the American Sailor gets trained. The fixed nature of the workup cycle and the variety of deployment experience create a roulette wheel of training opportunity. A Sailor can report to a ship only to spend the entirety of their assignment stuck in drydock with limited operating time. A Sailor that happens to report aboard closer to a deployment will have far more opportunity to conduct at sea operations, especially integrated training within a larger group of ships.34 One Sailor can deploy to mainly exercise with numerous third world navies while another’s deployment can feature exercises with more capable allies. The nature of the workup cycle and the variety of overseas experience sends a hodgepodge of training experience throughout the Navy’s ranks. This creates the need for major training events that are disconnected from the deployment cycle to better standardize proficiency. By the time a combat arms leader becomes a general officer in the Army or Air Force they have usually paid multiple visits to Red Flag and the National Training Center across their career.
While machines reflect learning as they grow in capability corporate memory is mainly carried forward by people. In this respect the Navy’s wholesale shift toward power projection not only inhibited its ability to practice war well, but failed to preserve a responsible minimum of institutional memory for full-spectrum competence. As Cold War-era personnel retired and separated from the service the Navy hemorrhaged skills and experience born from a time of better warfighting standards.35 Those with Cold-War era experience who still serve today saw their tactical skills atrophy under a new strategic focus. The result is that on average American Sailors know far less about high-end combat and sea control than they did 30 years ago. An organization that often describes its training in terms of “reps and sets” should have also understood the concept of use it or lose it.
American Sailors can put their training into a different “reps and sets” context. How many times have they run the exact same scenarios? How many times have they seen a live opposing force defeat a strike group? Are scripted exercises the defining training experience of a generation of American Sailors? In a system where everyone gets a trophy it is hard to know who is any good.
But training should not always be about winning or passing a test. Training is supposed to be a learning experience where failure is welcomed as an opportunity to learn and further prove oneself. Scripted training inhibits arguably the most important part of the training process – the after-action review. In the after-action review troops are expected to confront their mistakes, reflect upon alternatives, and contemplate their thought process. Without failure or the fear of future failure there will be less to question and reflect on. A solid after-action review process is necessary to give people a space where they can distinguish themselves as learners.
The after-action review of a training exercise can be a most humbling experience for the military professional where leaders are forced to take responsibility for mistakes that would have gotten their people killed in war. How a leader accounts for such consequential errors can reveal something about their command philosophy and leadership style. There is also a large difference in taking responsibility for failure within view of hundreds if not thousands of participating Sailors after a live exercise versus a virtual wargame that is played in the company of only a handful of fellow officers. The highly concentrated nature of modern naval capability and authority has given the enlisted Sailor virtually no ability to shape his or her fate through tactics in high-end war at sea.36 It is on the ship’s officers to know how to fight well for the sake of everyone else aboard.
Scripted exercises inhibit the warfighter’s ability to develop the unique professional skills critical to success on the battlefield. These special skills can range from employing warfighting techniques and tactics, maintaining unit cohesion while taking heavy losses, and knowing how to gamble with equipment and lives. Skillfully managing the chaos of war favors certain personal qualities such as the utmost candor, open-minded thinking, and a willingness to push to failure. These traits hardly describe the character of heavily scripted training. Without hard combat trials one cannot prove skill and virtue in ways only a warfighter can.
What scripted exercising has done to the Navy is damage its ability to discover those within its ranks who best exemplify the profession of arms.
Rudderless
“After their examination, the recruits should then receive the military mark, and be taught the use of their arms by constant and daily exercise. But this essential custom has been abolished by the relaxation introduced by a long peace. We cannot now expect to find a man to teach what he never learned…” –Vegetius, De re militari
If the most important peacetime military mission is to realistically prepare for war then what happens if this primary mission does not act to unify effort across the enterprise? Compared to all other peacetime operations exercises are the activity that come closest to real war which makes them an indispensable foundation for force development.37 Realistic exercising is what best integrates and filters the vital functions that evolve training, tactics, and doctrine. Exercises are also some of the best means for investigating the changing character of future war as technology evolves. The lack of realistic exercising is much more than an issue of questionable operator skill. It is a broader developmental problem for how the Navy is deciding its future.
It should go without saying that trying things in the real world under challenging conditions is how to mold vision into reality. The choice to disregard realistic exercising for a generation overlapped with a time when evolutionary ideas and networking capabilities were hitting the fleet. As the Information Age excited the imagination the Navy hailed transformative warfighting concepts such as ForceNet and AirSea Battle, but to the average Sailor these concepts changed little. There never was any serious AirSea Battle training, network-centric warfighting doctrine, or exhaustive tactical development for new major capabilities like CEC.
The Navy certainly made an effort to transform, but progress and proficiency should never be measured by how many new capabilities come online, CONOPs or TACMEMOs that get published, or wargames that get played. If these things are to have life then they must be taught to and refined by those charged with their execution. Real progress and skill is best defined by what the Sailors and commanders on the deckplate know how to do well, and for that there is only training. Because warfighting concepts did not translate into new and realistic force-wide training many of the Navy’s most ambitious efforts to transform can safely be described as stillborn.
If the Navy’s standards of exercising have been so poor for so long then it is natural to be skeptical of other elements of force development that feed into one another such as wargaming and test and evaluation. The functional linkage between strategy, tactics, and technology demands that force development activities use a shared set of realistic standards that evolve together to pace threats. Excessively scripting the one activity that comes closest to real war means failure was not a meaningful force of change for much of the naval enterprise. Clearly many unhelpful things have made it into the fleet if realistic exercising was not there to set a standard, serve as a proving ground, and anchor the Navy’s focus on warfighting.
What makes the Fleet Problem exercises and SMWDC key drivers of change is not that they are some special evolution of ongoing activity. Instead, finally the Navy has a challenging high-end exercise, and finally the surface fleet has a command that integrates the surface warfare enterprise for the sake of tactical development. And when key things that should have existed are finally created and imposed upon a system, they shed light on dysfunction that has long gone unnoticed. In the words of Admiral Wade, “We are just at the beginning here, but we have uncovered so many issues.”
Excerpt from official Millenium Challenge Report: “As the exercise progressed, the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted. This scripting ensured a Blue operational victory and established conditions in the exercise for transition operations.”
“It may be hard to believe, but the U.S. Navy, widely recognized as the greatest Fleet the world has ever known, lacks an organization tasked with development, training, and assessment of the full scope of tactics for the warfare community on which it was founded 238 years ago—surface warfare. This is going to change.”
“In the years preceding the establishment of the Warfighting Development Centers, the surface warfare community did not have a single organization that could cull lessons from combat and then coordinate the effort to achieve high-velocity learning not only in the fleet and school houses, but also across the engineering and acquisition communities. In June 2015, the establishment of the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC) closed this gap.”
Excerpt on timing: “After two years and more than six iterations, the reestablished Fleet Problem has never before been discussed in public. In that context, it is fair to ask why we decided to discuss the concept at this point.”
12. A caveat to this is that NTC training shifted to counterinsurgency operations and remained there for several years before shifting more toward high-end/hybrid warfare around 2012-2014.
Interesting caveat from above: ““Before, in the ’80s and ’90s, it was very rote,” Abrams said. “You would get there on this day and on Friday, you would do a road march out, and you’d get an order for an attack, and you would go attack. And then, four hours after the attack was done, you’d do an After Action Review, you’d get another order, and you’d get ready do something else. It was all very lockstep.”
33. For amount of ships devoted to interwar period Fleet Problems see: Albert Nofi, To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet Problems, 1923-1940.
Excerpt: “Virtually every one of the fleet problems involved a majority of the battleships, carriers, and destroyers in commission, and, as still considered “in commission.” Fleet Problem XI (1930) involved the fewest ships, only about 24 percent of the fleet, but came only a month after Fleet Problem X, which had involved nearly a third of the fleet; as some ships did not take part in both problems, the actual overall rate of participation was more than a third of vessels officially in commission. During the 1930s, Fleet Problems XIII (1932) through XX (1939) all involved about half or more of the fleet, peaking at 69 percent in Fleet Problem XVII (1936).”
34. Lieutenant Brendan Cordial, “Too Many SWOs Per Ship,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 2017. https://www.usni.org/node/90091
35. To get a sense of Cold War-era exercising standards and activity see the book Oceans Ventured (2018) by Reagan-era Navy Secretary John Lehman. The book is mainly about Navy exercises in the 1980s.
36. This is in reference to decision-making on employing the ship’s weapons and sensors, how to “fight the ship.” It is not in reference to things like damage control and medical assistance in which enlisted Sailors would play a prominent role.
Featured Image: Pacific Ocean, NNS (April 18, 2018) Lieutenant Craig Stocker, a Warfare Tactics Instructor assigned to Surface Warfare Officer School Newport, R.I., is temporarily attached to Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC) tracks and mentors crewmembers during an Anti-Submarine exercise onboard the USS Stockdale (DDG 106). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Amanda A. Hayes/released)
