The following article originally featured in the September 2024 edition of Military Review under the title, “Seven Reflections of a ‘Red Commander’ What I’ve Learned from Playing the Adversary in Department of Defense Wargames,” and is republished with permission. Read it in its original form here.

By Ian M. Sullivan

It is the spring of 20XX, and the U.S. joint force is engaged in a major war against a peer competitor. Earlier in the conflict, the enemy seized a critical piece of terrain, and the U.S. National Command Authority (NCA) ordered the joint force to take it back. This required a massive joint force entry operation (JFEO), arguably the most difficult of joint operations to complete. But the joint force was game. It assembled the largest maritime assault force—both amphibious assault ships loaded with Marines and transports carrying Army formations—since the U.S. invasion of Okinawa in April 1945. It required deft planning to organize, mass, and eventually converge the force over the great expanse of the ocean. Yet the joint force, or “Blue Force,” did so and was ready to strike.

As the Blue plan unfolded, all seemed on track. Forces were moving, and joint and combined combat power was ready to support the JFEO. But it was at this time that an old, often ignored military maxim came into play—the enemy gets a vote. And their vote mattered.

Taking advantage of their own sophisticated capabilities and an approach to war that was designed with Blue in mind, the enemy “Red” Force quickly engaged elements of the invasion force at range, well before the joint force could bring its full combat power to bear. Focusing largely on the amphibious assault ships, which have a critical “over the beach” capability, the Red antiaccess/area denial forces came into play. Shore-based ballistic and cruise missiles—some hypersonic—air-launched systems, and maritime strike assets converged in a massive, multidomain blow, which caused critical damage to the amphibious fleet. The amphibious ships never made it to the invasion beaches. This left the transport ships carrying the Army formations to carry on to the target; however, lacking the over-the-beach capabilities of the amphibious ships, they needed to land in a functioning port to unload the Army forces.

Thankfully, this whole story is notional, and it played out not on the frontlines of a faraway war zone but in a simulations center on an Army base. This world of wargaming is becoming an increasingly essential tool for the Army and joint force as they grapple with what it means to conduct large-scale combat operations against peer competitors in areas far removed from the continental United States. In the words of Ed McGrady, one of the Nation’s leading experts in the field, wargaming is the “one tool that enables defense professionals to break out of the stories we have locked ourselves into.”¹ He notes that “wargames are about understanding, not knowledge,” and about the stories we tell ourselves. In this case, Blue was forced to contend with an uncomfortable story; namely, a peer competitor can prevail if it plays its cards right. Blue then had to contend with an understanding of the implications of what transpired.

Additionally, it is important to note that none of this understanding or learning can occur if Blue does not have an effective opponent. And that is the role that I often get asked to play, that of “Red commander.” Over the past five years, I have played in twelve separate wargames for the Army, the Navy, combatant commands, and the joint staff; in nine of them, I was the Red commander. This means I led the enemy effort, supported by teams of experts from both military and civilian intelligence agencies. The “Red Team” truly is where “understanding” comes home to roost, as Red players must not only understand the intelligence record, but we must also understand how to mesh what we know into an operationalized campaign that effectively challenges Blue.

Red also must understand Blue, sometimes as well as Blue understands itself. Red provides Blue with a thinking enemy who understands Red’s real-world capabilities, warfighting doctrine, and national security imperatives (what we know). Red then operationalizes this understanding, along with an understanding of contemporary and near-future warfare, into a fight in the style the adversary would undertake (applying what we know). Dale Rielage, a brilliant Red Team expert, argues that the “value of wargaming hinges in large part of the quality of the opposition force—the ‘Red.’”² To further his point, Rielage cites Capt. William McCarty-Little, the officer who first introduced wargaming to the Naval War College in the 1880s, who noted that the key to a successful wargame was “a live, vigorous enemy in the next room waiting feverishly to take advantage of any of our mistakes, ever ready to puncture any visionary scheme, to haul us down to earth.”³

Playing Red is a difficult task, and the Red commander treads a narrow path. On the one hand, the Red commander must have an excellent working understanding of how potential adversaries fight. It is both art and science. It is not just a technical exercise in understanding Red orders of battle or the capabilities of their systems but really is about being able to apply that knowledge in what amounts to planning and then executing a campaign plan and leading the adversary’s war fight. This means the Red commander needs to understand a potential enemy’s approach to warfare, their doctrine, and how they have employed their forces in regional contingencies and in training.

But at the same time, the Red commander plays a key role for Blue by helping them understand what Red is thinking. A good Red commander finds a way to keep Blue on its toes, all the while helping them comprehend the events of the game as they unfold and then working to explain the reasons and logic that underpin Red actions. A Red commander who cannot do this professionally, tactfully, and with good humor can completely scuttle the game. To truly help this understanding stick, a Red commander needs to convince Blue that the Red Team is more than a mere sparring partner but a broader partner in learning and thinking about what could happen in a potential conflict.

Wargames should be about Blue’s learning, not Red’s. However, one of the main benefits for Red in these events is that we learn too. In fact, our learning may actually be more acute because we often get many more “reps and sets” playing through countless permutations of possible regional conflicts when compared to our Blue counterparts. Red players become very knowledgeable and thoughtful on a range of issues, many of which relate to Blue as much as they do Red. We end up thinking a great deal about what warfare between peer competitors would look like. I like to tell my Red Team players that we should be able to close our eyes and visualize the conflict unfolding over time and space, which allows us to understand what key events will need to occur over what key pieces of terrain and in what time frames. Because we fight these wars time and again, we develop a unique understanding of both Red and Blue, their strengths and weaknesses, the vulnerabilities they present, and the opportunities they may be able to exploit.

U.S. Air Force Gen. John Hyten, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in describing how new joint warfighting concepts performed in a different wargame, noted that “without overstating the issue, it [the concept] failed miserably. An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us. They knew exactly what we’re going to do before we did it.”⁴ This is an advantage that a good Red commander will always have, which makes these games such important learning opportunities. But it also shows what it means to be a good Red commander—we must always try to further our own understanding of Red, Blue, and “Green” partner forces; the operational environment; and contemporary warfare so that we can give Blue the fight it needs at these wargames to advance its own understanding.

So, what are the key things I have learned in playing the role of Red commander over the last few years? Well, there is a great deal more than I could possibly put into words here. But there are some important, big-picture ideas, thoughts, lessons, and observations that I have derived from my gameplay. Without further ado, these are my seven reflections of a Red commander.

Lesson 1: Everything Starts with Understanding the Enemy

Simple, right? But it’s not as simple as you would think. The Army and the joint force are massive machines, and sometimes the process of understanding the enemy becomes inexorable. This can mean that the mechanisms simply move without reflection or thought—never truly internalizing an understanding of the adversary, who, as noted in the starting vignette, always gets a vote. The threat must not be allowed to get lost in this machine. It must be front and center to everything the Army does. It must drive operations and the integration of doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy (DOTMLPF-P). Furthermore, the National Defense Strategy calls on the U.S. joint force to be “threat based,” and focuses on its pacing, acute, and persistent threats.⁵ 

If we do not base what we intend to do in a conflict against a peer competitor on an understanding of that peer competitor, then we will be at a massive disadvantage in a conflict. We need to avoid future “lobster traps,” and a working knowledge of the adversary is our best hedge against a failure of imagination. This notion is at the core of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s latest operational environment assessment, The Operational Environment 2024-2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations, which states plainly, “to achieve victory, the U.S. Army must know the enemy.”⁶ We need experts with a deep understanding of the adversary, but we also need those who will devise war plans and then execute them to maintain a strong working knowledge of Red. This was standard Army procedure during the Cold War, but it became a lost art in the years following. Wargaming can help restore that art. For example, in its after action report for the Unified Pacific 22 wargame, U.S. Army Pacific’s first highlighted insight was the requirement to address two key advantages held by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—mass and interior lines.⁷ This key conclusion from Unified Pacific 22 demonstrates how wargaming can specifically help war planners and operators learn about the adversary and then develop an understanding of the challenges it would need to overcome in an actual conflict.

Lesson 2: Warfare Remains a Human Endeavor

It is becoming rapidly apparent that competition, crisis, and conflict between great powers and peer competitors will be joint, combined, interagency, and whole-of-nation. The Department of Defense (DOD) wargaming community has started to understand this and does everything it can to invite experts from outside their typical echo chamber to participate in a game. This is important, as it shows the DOD that it is but part of a broader nation that would be engaged in a conflict. It shows that other entities, whether an intelligence agency, an ally, or perhaps even a private industry entity, might have an ability to help solve a military problem.

It also means that even though the DOD leads most wargames, military leaders must understand that they will not make many of the critical strategic calls during the run-up to a crisis or conflict. I recently played in a game where a senior political appointee from within the DOD played the NCA for a game in which the United States was engaged in a conflict with a nuclear-armed, peer competitor. The Blue Team, in responding to Red aggression, wished to quickly target and destroy a number of Red assets and installations. They were nonplussed to learn that the authorities for their desired strike were withheld as the NCA thought through his decision. During the hotwash, when Blue planners brought the delay up, the individual playing the NCA told them that he was being asked to make the most consequential decision any U.S. president would ever have to make—to initiate combat operations against a nuclear-armed enemy who had the capability to cause critical damage to the United States. He then, tongue-in-cheek, asked them to forgive him for taking some extra time to contemplate such a momentous call.

This is an extreme example, but wargaming needs to incorporate not only the capabilities but also the decision-making processes of a range of actors, both across the U.S. government and among our allies and partners. Getting experts from across this spectrum to participate in wargames will become increasingly essential.

Lesson 4: Warfare Will Be Multidomain, and Wargames Allow Us to Master Multidomain Skillsets

What makes contemporary and near-future warfare so different when compared to what we have experienced since the end of the Cold War is that our key potential adversaries can match the U.S. joint force and its allies across all domains. They can converge capabilities, deny us the ability to operate in certain domains, and then achieve their campaign objectives if they play their cards right. In wargames, Red players generally have more experience and practice at employing multidomain capabilities than the typical Blue players, often providing a wake-up call to the Blue Team. Our pacing threat is designing a force capable of operating and converging across domains, with capabilities and an approach to war that denies Blue the ability to maneuver or operate jointly across warfare domains.¹⁰ If handled well in a wargame, Red can prevail. Conversely, Blue must use wargames as ability to test its own multidomain theories. Wargames offer a unique venue where the services can see how things come together in the joint fight. Italian airpower theorist Giulio Douhet noted, “There are experts of land, sea, and air warfare. Yet there are no experts of warfare. And warfare is a single entity, having a common purpose.”¹¹ Wargaming can help develop those experts and particularly develop the multidomain skills, knowledge, and understanding that the joint force will require to take on an adversary who also can operate across domains.¹²

Lesson 5: The Army Likes to Live in the Tactical World; Great Power Warfare Is Won and Lost at the Operational Level

The era of counterinsurgency shifted the Army’s focus to the tactical level. After the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Army changed its unit of action to the brigade level, and most of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan was done at the battalion and company levels. The whole Army structure of that era—how we trained, how we thought about warfare, and how we organized—focused on the tactical fight. Wargaming against peer competitors, however, demonstrates that such conflicts likely will be won or lost at the operational level, and that operational art is a skill set that must be understood throughout the joint force. If the tactical level focuses on battles, engagements, and small-unit actions, it is the operational level that will provide the critical linkages in terms of campaigns and major operations that ensure tactical success eventually translates to the strategic level, where theater strategy and national policy reside.¹³ It is the operational art that allows the commander to translate strategic-level goals into tasks that subordinates can accomplish.¹⁴ 

An example of this can be found in Unified Pacific 23, which focused on contested logistics. The game’s final report notes the criticality of improving joint combined command and control. For sustainment, the necessity to maximize operational-level, intratheater movement is then controlled by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s emerging Pacific Deployment and Distribution Operations Center, which takes in requirements from service components and then issues orders to subordinate commands to execute. The Army’s 8th Theater Sustainment Command then evaluated best practices and techniques to carry out sustainment down to the tactical formations in the fight.¹⁵ These types of issues routinely dominate wargaming and are clearly operational rather than tactical. This vignette demonstrates how practicing operational art is a crucial advantage of wargaming.

Lesson 6: Wargaming “Reps and Sets” Guard Against Strategic Surprise and Failure of Imagination

Red experts spend most of their time thinking about our adversaries and what conflict with them could entail, and most have played Red in many wargames. The next game is not summary learning for Red—it is just another permutation of a fight they’ve fought numerous other times. Blue generally does not get the luxury to do this in the daily press of normal operations, and when the Blue Team assembles for a wargame, it likely is the first time many of them have confronted the operationalizing of their war plans. Armies and soldiers often learn best through experience of battle, and wargaming is one of the best ways to at least approximate some of the challenges that could be faced when a conflict begins. In his excellent work on wargaming the unfought battles of the Cold War, Jim Storr notes, “Things that might be blindingly obvious to someone who gamed dozens of battles might well be nonsensical or, at best, counterintuitive to commanders who served for years but never fought [them].”¹⁶ Having the opportunity to fight the fights that could occur means that leaders will have the opportunity to confront the challenges they might encounter and not be faced with surprise or suffer a failure of imagination.

A pertinent historical example involves Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in 1941. Throughout the interwar years, U.S. defense planners struggled with the notion of how to defend the Philippines from a potential Japanese assault. The result was the well-known War Plan Orange (WPO), which understood, even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the difficulties that the United States would have in reinforcing the Philippines across the expanse of the Pacific and in the face of Japanese air and maritime power. WPO-3, the variant in effect in 1941, called for the U.S. forces in the Philippines to withdraw to the defensible Bataan Peninsula on Luzon, where, with pre-positioned sustainment stocks in place, they would hold as long as possible to give forces marshaling on the U.S. West Coast and Hawaii time to defeat the Japanese Navy and relieve the defenders. Despite the years of work in devising WPO—and countless wargames supporting it—MacArthur completely revised the plan on the eve of the actual Japanese attack. Instead of consolidating on the defense on favorable terrain, he would attempt to defeat the Japanese on the beaches of Luzon, wherever they landed. When the Japanese landed, MacArthur’s forces were completely out of position and out of time.¹⁷ In this case, MacArthur disregarded the “reps and sets” that went into devising WPO-3 and suffered due to his overconfidence. However, when leaders get the chance to learn from their participation in wargames, the experiential learning process generally becomes visceral and unforgettable, and hopefully will prevent future cases like the Philippines in 1941.

Lesson 7: Blue Buy-In Is What Makes Wargaming Useful

Red’s job in wargaming is difficult, as it often must relay uncomfortable truths to Blue. For wargaming to have value, Blue must understand and accept the notion that the scenario Red is presenting is valid. Red teaming expert Micah Zenko writes that there are three elements of buy-in that Blue must adopt. First, Blue must accept that there is a potential vulnerability within its sphere of interest/action that Red can help uncover and address. In military terms, this represents capabilities, approaches to war, and plans that can potentially defeat Blue. Second, Blue must be willing to assemble the best Red players it can possibly find. And third, Blue must allow Red to be absolutely truthful about its findings.¹⁸ This is not always easy, and wargames are replete with stories about Blue discounting Red actions based on the cliché that a Red action “would never happen” or, even worse, that Red “cheated.”

The story of Millenium Challenge 2002, a concept development wargame that was designed to validate a whole new joint approach to war, still resonates as a warning of what can happen when this buy-in does not exist. A strong Red Team led by retired U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper created controversy by demonstrating the flaws in Blue’s concept. Instead of accepting the flaws, joint forces command leadership instead fell line with the “this could never happen” school of thought and reset the game, adding massive constraints on Red. This led to a public relations disaster that remains a case study of how not to use wargaming.¹⁹

However, failing to get Blue buy-in to Zenko’s three elements have, in practice, had much more devastating effects than merely damaged reputations. On 27 August 1941, a group of graduate students from Japan’s Total War Research Institute, an institution that brought together the elite young leaders of the Japanese military and civilian government, presented a report to Japanese Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro on Japan’s prospects for winning a war against the United States and its allies. The report, which was backed by extensive research and wargaming, asserted that Japan might prevail in a few initial battles but concluded that it would be drawn into a protracted conflict where its resources would dwindle and eventually expire, leading to inevitable defeat. As a result, the Japanese played another wargame designed to test their conclusion, and most of the ministers who participated came to the same conclusion regarding a war with the United States.²⁰ Yet Japanese decision-makers—political and military—ignored the findings.

A healthier and more useful example of Blue buy-in can be found with Unified Pacific. The outcomes from Unified Pacific 23, for example, have been incorporated into U.S. Army Pacific’s operational campaign—Operation Pathways—and into real-world exercises, like the joint U.S.-Australian Talisman Sabre 23. Many of the outcomes also were included in the U.S. Navy’s Global game.²¹

Conclusion

There are many more things I have learned from playing Red in these wargames, and they range across a variety of issues. Simple things, like understanding the military implications of geography, to the very complex, such as what it means to engage in open conflict with a nuclear-armed peer adversary or understanding how we end wars. Playing in games certainly has made me a better intelligence analyst as the practical, experiential side of gaming has revealed implications and insights that intelligence reporting alone could never have given me. Most of all, it has driven home for me the necessity to develop a strong working relationship with Blue decision-makers, operators, and staff officers. These relationships are built on trust, which develops over time. When Red can demonstrate that it is indeed on the same team as Blue, a remarkable kind of learning occurs, and we are able to get to the type of competency required to prevail in global wars against peer competitors.

I have learned that we do not wargame enough, and that we should find ways to incorporate wargaming more deeply across all our various disciplines, and not just in large, command-sponsored, multiweek games. In addition to the time I have spent supporting these games, I am also an avid hobby wargamer, and I have learned a great deal from playing “for fun.” Namely, I sometimes get to play Blue, which is remarkably fun and interesting to me. When done right, a Red commander can provide a significant force multiplier to Blue. On his first day as the Pacific commander in chief, Adm. Chester Nimitz famously met with his staff intelligence chief, then Lt. Cmdr. Edwin Layton, and told him,

“I want you to be the Admiral Nagumo of my staff. I want your every thought, every instinct as you believe Admiral Nagumo might have them. You are to see the war, their operations, their aims, from the Japanese viewpoint and keep me advised what you are thinking about, what you are doing, and what purpose, what strategy motivates your operations. If you can do this, you will give me the kind of information needed to win the war.”²²

If Red is played well in a wargame, the Red commander can do what Nimitz charged of Layton but hopefully prior to a disaster of strategic surprise and failure of imagination of the magnitude of Pearl Harbor.

Interestingly, our pacing threat has adopted this very approach. The PLA has enthusiastically adopted wargaming as a means of testing its own ideas about warfare and to help overcome its lack of real-world combat experience. The PLA Navy has led the way in this regard, and it recognizes the need to effectively replicate its adversary—the United States—in these games. To do so, the PLA Navy created the Blue Team Center (in PLA parlance, the Blue Team are the adversaries) at the Naval Command College at Nanjing. The college’s one-time commander, then Rear Adm. Shen Jinlong, who was later promoted and served as the PLA Navy commander, noted that the PLA Navy’s wargaming faced a major problem—namely, that “Red (China) and Blue (the United States) were like twins. Not only were Blue’s organization, equipment, and combat style the same as Red—they even had the same operational thinking.”²³ The Blue Team is designed to rectify this mirror imaging so that PLA Navy wargames are more useful and effective. A profile of the Blue Team director, Gong Jia, indicates that his goal is to understand the minds of Blue at the campaign level (operational level in Chinese terminology) and above.²⁴

In one game where I played Red commander, the Office of the Secretary of Defense sent an observer team to assess if Red was being played effectively. As I was Red commander, the observers pulled me aside to interview me and ask me questions about how the game was going and how I was playing Red. One of the questions they asked me was among the best questions I’d ever heard because it gets to the gist of what it means to be an effective Red commander. They asked me, “How much better are you than Red would be in a real fight?” After thinking about it for a minute, I said our team probably was better because we understand Blue as much as we do Red. I told them if they asked me to, I could immediately take over as Blue commander and essentially run their fight because I had seen it and experienced it so much in so many other games. The observer team seemed happy with this answer and moved on.

But the question has stuck with me ever since. If Red does its job well, it provides Blue with the chance to try new things, to fail, to learn, and to hopefully redefine the stories that we tell ourselves, and to devise new thoughts and ideas that will lead to victory in a future conflict. In referring to the work done by the joint board in the 1930s and early 1940s at developing the “Rainbow” war plans (such as the aforementioned WPO), which included a great deal of research and wargaming, Blaine Pardoe writes, “Without the skills earned working in the darkness … the United States would have struggled to attempt to develop this competency in its general staff.”²⁵ This “work in the darkness” requires a capable, knowledgeable, flexible, and adaptive Red that will enable Blue learning.

A wargame will not predict the future for Blue, but if Red does its job correctly, it will allow Blue to experience what a potential fight could look like. It becomes the work in the darkness that allows Blue to learn, and hopefully leads to the light of victory in the next war. So perhaps the most important lesson of all gets back to the beginning—we have to get Red right so that Blue gets the opportunity to learn and to get it right on a future battlefield.

Ian M. Sullivan is the deputy chief of staff, G-2, for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). He holds a BA from Canisius University in Buffalo, New York, and an MA from Georgetown University’s BMW Center for German and European Studies in Washington, D.C., and he was a Fulbright Fellow at the Universität Potsdam in Potsdam, Germany. A career civilian intelligence officer, Sullivan has served with the Office of Naval Intelligence; Headquarters, U.S. Army Europe and Seventh Army; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) at the National Counterterrorism Center; the Central Intelligence Agency; and TRADOC. He is a member of the Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service and was first promoted to the senior civilian ranks in 2013 as a member of the ODNI’s Senior National Intelligence Service.

The author would like to thank Maj. Gen. Jay Bartholomees, U.S. Army, and Charlie Raymond (TRADOC G-2) for their thoughtful reviews and edits of this article.

Notes

1. Ed McGrady, “Getting the Story Right About Wargaming,” War on the Rocks, 8 November 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/11/getting-the-story-right-about-wargaming/.

2. Dale C. Rielage, “War Gaming Must Get Red Right: An Expert In-House Adversary is a Powerful Tool for the Fleet,” Proceedings 143, no. 1 (January 2017), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017/january/war-gaming-must-get-red-right/.

3. Ibid.

4. Tara Copp, “‘It Failed Miserably’: After Wargaming Loss, Joint Chiefs Are Overhauling How the US Military Will Fight,” Defense One, 26 July 2021, https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/07/it-failed-miserably-after-wargaming-loss-joint-chiefs-are-overhauling-how-us-military-will-fight/184050/.

5. U.S. Department of Defense, 2022 National Defense Strategy (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 2022). https://www.defense.gov/National-Defense-Strategy/.

6. U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), The Operational Environment 2024–2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations (Fort Eustis, VA: TRADOC, 1 August 2024), 31, https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/2024/07/31/the-operational-environment-2024-2034-large-scale-combat-operations/.

7. U.S. Army Pacific (USARPAC), Unified Pacific Wargame Series 2022: Unclassified Overview (Fort Shafter, HI: USARPAC, September 2022), 4, https://www.usarpac.army.mil/Portals/113/PDF%20Files/Unclassified%20UPWS%20Report%20Final.pdf.

8. Government Accounting Office (GAO), Defense Analysis: Additional Actions Could Enhance DOD’s Wargaming Efforts, GAO-23-105351 (Washington, DC: GAO, April 2023), https://www.gao.gov/assets/d23105351.pdf.

9. Marc Ambinder, The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1982 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 82–89.

10. Ian M. Sullivan, “Three Dates, Three Windows, and All of DOTMLPF-P: How the People’s Liberation Army Poses an All-of-Army Challenge,” Military Review 104, no. 1 (January-February 2024): 14–25, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/January-February-2024/Sullivan/.

11. Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Sheila Fischer (1921; Rome: Rivista Aeronautica, 1958).

12. Robert P. Haffa Jr. and James H. Patton Jr., “Wargames, Winning and Losing,” Parameters 31, no. 1 (Spring 2001): Article 9, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol31/iss1/9/.

13. Chad Buckel, “A New Look at Operational Art: How We View War Dictates How We Fight It,” Joint Force Quarterly 100 (1st Quarter, January 2021): 94–100, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/2498208/.

14. Wilson Blythe, “A History of Operational Art,” Military Review 98, no. 6 (November-December 2018): 37–49, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/November-December-2018/Blythe-Operational-Art/.

15. USARPAC, Unified Pacific Wargame Series 2023: Unclassified Overview (Fort Shafter, HI: USARPAC, September 2023), 8.

16. Jim Storr, Battlegroup! The Lessons of the Unfought Battles of the Cold War (Warwick, UK: Helion, 2021), 74–75.

17. John C. McManus, Fire and Fortitude: The U.S. Army in the Pacific War, 1941–1943 (New York: Caliber, 2019), 63–64.

18. Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 2–5.

19. Ibid., 52–61; Micah Zenko, “Millenium Challenge: The Real Story of a Corrupted Military Exercise and Its Legacy,” War on the Rocks, 5 November 2015, https://warontherocks.com/2015/11/millenium-challenge-the-real-story-of-a-corrupted-military-exercise-and-its-legacy/.

20. Eri Hotta, Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy (New York: Vintage Books, 2014), 164–65.

21. USARPAC, Unified Pacific Wargame Series 2023, 11.

22. Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 307; Rielage, “War Gaming Must Get Red Right.”

23. Ryan D. Martinson, “The PLA Navy’s Blue Team Center Games for War,” Proceedings 150, no. 5 (May 2024), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2024/may/pla-navys-blue-team-center-games-war.

24. Ibid.

25. Blaine L. Pardoe, Never Wars: The US War Plans to Invade the World (London: Fonthill, 2014), 28.

Featured Image: Students move pieces around the board on 21 December 2023 during a wargame based on Pacific conflict while attending the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. (Photo by Billy Blankenship, U.S. Air Force)

By Jason Lancaster

Introduction

The modern destroyer squadron (DESRON) is unable to attack effectively first. It is primarily a defensive organization designed to protect the carrier from surface threats and submarines. There are many trite maxims like a good defense is a strong offense, but without a greater number of improved offensive weapons, there will not be an ability to improve the offensive capability of the DESRON or deploy offensive SAGs.

There has been some movement to create offensive SAGs to reach out and attack the enemy first, but these concepts have several issues. The Carrier Strike Group does not have the number of assets needed to protect the carrier in wartime, where providing for the defense of capital ships may prove too powerful of a demand signal to allow a meaningful number of surface ships to go on the offensive. Not only are there too few ships, but those ships need better offensive weapons to successfully conduct offensive missions. It is easier to kill the archer than the arrow, but the enemy archer in the form of Russian and Chinese assets heavily outranges the U.S. surface fleet. Addressing these shortfalls requires longer-range anti-ship weapons, a medium-range ASW aircraft, and better manning for DESRONs.

The State of Anti-Surface Warfare

The Soviet Union lacked significant carrier-based aviation and had to compensate by heavily investing in the development of powerful and long-range anti-ship missiles that were compatible with a wide variety of naval force structure. The theory was to use heavy bombers, submarines, and surface forces to launch large salvos of these long-range missiles to overwhelm U.S. carrier battle groups. The substantial lead the Soviet Union gained in anti-ship missile technology persists to this day.

Russia still has multiple surface-launched anti-ship missiles, many of which are supersonic and long-range. The most modern is the Zircon hypersonic missile deployed aboard Grigorovich-class corvettes. Newer Russian ships boasting the Kalibr system can also deploy the SS-N-26 Strobile or SS-N-27 Sizzler supersonic anti-ship missiles, while the older Soviet-era ships deploy the SS-N-22 Sunburn, SS-N-12 Sandbox, SS-N-19 Shipwreck, SS-N-26 Yakhont anti-ship missiles. The Russian Navy also has subsonic missiles like the SS-N-25 Switchblade and the older SS-N-2 Styx, as well as an anti-submarine rocket, the SS-N-14 SILEX, that also has an anti-surface mode. Russia sold many of these missile types to China, who also fields a wide variety of anti-ship missiles, including land-based ballistic missiles such as the DF-21 and DF-26.

The variety of Russia’s and China’s different missiles complicates U.S. Navy options for hardkill and softkill countermeasures. Different missiles have different terminal maneuvers and signatures designed to confuse and challenge terminal air defenses. Softkill options rely on decoys and electronic warfare to distract, jam, or seduce enemy missiles away from the targeted ship, but increasingly capable multimodal seekers are diminishing the utility of softkill countermeasures. This wide array of advanced anti-ship missile capability means that U.S. ships must devote more magazine space to defensive countermeasures, reducing the amount of space available for offensive weapons. In order to change the dynamic, the U.S. needs to rapidly develop and field a greater multitude of offensive surface and air-launched anti-ship missiles to better threaten rival naval forces and force them onto the defensive.

As an ensign, I noticed the discrepancy between our Harpoons and the plethora of missiles Russia and China had developed. I asked my executive officer about this state of affairs, and he said the U.S. Navy relied on carrier-based naval aviation to strike enemy ships, and our ships protected the carrier and did not need large numbers of surface-to-surface missiles to attack the enemy. This doctrine may have been slightly more appropriate for a time when Cold War-era carrier aviation had much longer reach than it has today and when opposing surface warships had far less capable air defenses. But the balance of advantage has become much different.

Unfortunately, naval aviation’s primary anti-surface weapons are the Harpoon and the JDAM. U.S. naval aviation has predominantly relied on JDAMs for their strike missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the small 15NM range easily allows modern warship air defenses to threaten archers before they can fire arrows. Naval aviation is replacing the Harpoon with the Joint Stand Off Weapon (JSOW) glide bomb with an advertised 62NM range and the Long-Range Anti-Surface missile (LRASM) which has an estimated range of 300NM, but neither is in the fleet in large numbers, and it will take years to build enough inventory.^1,2 Naval aviation cannot be reasonably expected to shoulder all of the burden of employing the U.S. Navy’s anti-ship missile firepower, and surface warships will be needed to alleviate this burden and open new options for maritime strike.

The U.S. is only recently starting to field replacements for the ship-launched Harpoon missile. The Naval Strike Missile is a modern sea skimmer and its 100NM range is slightly better than Harpoon, but still far less than many adversary weapons and it is not compatible with vertical launch cells.³ The Navy is also fielding the SM-6 and Maritime Strike Tomahawk for anti-surface work, but the Navy possesses a limited inventory. Both missiles have alternative missions in air defense and land-attack strike respectively that might take priority over anti-surface missions. But with the end of the War on Terror’s major campaigns, the U.S. Navy should be able to reduce the number of Tomahawk missiles carried for land-attack missions and increase the amount of magazine depth devoted to maritime strike.

Anti-Submarine Warfare

U.S. forces are heavily challenged by enemy submarines. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have 208 submarines combined of various age and capability.⁴ Chinese and Russian submarines field advanced anti-ship missiles with ranges in excess of 200NM. The modern carrier strike group will struggle to defend itself against this threat, especially when submarines can slip past screening warships and aircraft. The U.S. Navy needs a new medium-range aircraft organic to the strike group to assist in ASW defense. Surface ships also need a longer-range anti-ship rocket (ASROC) to engage detected submarines much farther from the strike group or SAG. This combination of capability will extend the scope of ASW defense and better allow surface warships to go on the offensive in other missions.

During the Cold War, the S-3 Viking was tailor-made to support ASW and ASuW missions. These aircraft had the endurance to travel several hundred miles from the strike group and remain on station while hunting submarines for hours. But the S-3 Viking was retired without a similar platform to replace it, and now the only ASW aircraft organic in the carrier strike group is the much shorter-ranged MH-60R helicopter. They are designed for terminal classification and engagement, not for wide-area searches that are critical to early warning in ASW.

The Navy needs to develop aircraft to fill the roles once provided by the S-3 Viking, but it does not need to develop a new airframe and new sensors. The Navy already has highly capable sensors in the P-8 and MH-60R. Fielding those sensors in an airframe like the MV-22 Osprey, or using an unmanned aircraft like the MQ-9B Sea Guardian, would greatly extend the classification, identification, and engagement area (CIEA) for ASW. An MV-22 variant could utilize sensors from the P-8A and the MH-60R, provided it can handle the added electrical load. A vertically-launched medium range ASW aircraft could also be sold to the wide variety of allies and partners that operate flattops. Other countries such as the Philippines might be able to use a medium-range ASW aircraft and launch it from austere airfields to control ASW chokepoints.

The MQ-9B Sea Guardian is an unmanned aircraft that has operated during exercises. It is capable of conducting ASW within a 1,200-mile mission radius with significant on-station time. It is capable of carrying 120 sonobuoys in two sizes.⁵ Recent tests have proven that the MQ-9 is capable of short takeoffs and landings, which would enable the ARG-MEU to deploy with significant anti-submarine capacity.

With the growing numbers and capabilities of rival submarines, it is time to invest in improving ASW capabilities, and specifically with an eye toward extending the possible ranges of detection and engagement. Longer-range ASW weapons for surface ships and new ASW aircraft will drastically improve the Navy’s defensive capability against hostile submarines.

DESRON Manning

The modern destroyer squadron is configured to operate as an administrative and tactical command and is supposed to be manned as such. Yet when one looks at DESRON manning and who is standing watch, there are significant shortfalls. I once trained a Boatswains Mate Chief Petty Officer to stand watch, and we deployed at only 50 percent manning, which subsequently increased to 85 percent with plus-ups from various Third Class Petty Officer Operations Specialists to fill the voids of First Class Petty Officer Operations Specialists. This lack of experience reduced the ability of the staff to properly execute mission command-type orders, among other challenges.

A deploying DESRON staff needs to be allowed to focus on naval warfare. The staff needs to turn all of its maintenance duties over to Surface Forces or a Maintenance Surface Squadron that then allows deploying DESRONs to focus on preparing for naval warfare. The announcement of new Surface Group (SURFGRU) readiness squadrons is a step in the right direction, but it will take time for the DESRONs to offload habitual responsibilities to focus more on warfighting. Typically during the maintenance and basic phases, the DESRON staff focuses on the ships and not enough on themselves. There are few opportunities for the DESRON can conduct tactical training, let alone conduct enough of it. When I was stationed in Norfolk, we went to Tactical Training Group Atlantic only several times, and only managed to train on our CVN once prior to SWATT. This greatly impaired the development of the DESRON’s tactical readiness and our understanding of the DESRON’s warfighting functions.

The DESRON needs a dedicated basic phase to develop its abilities to wage offensive and defensive war at sea, and to build its tactical warfighting skill and know-how. A deploying DESRON could be called a Tactical Squadron to differentiate itself from other DESRONs. The proposed TACRON manning chart below is designed to build a naval staff capable of sustained planning and operations, with a focus on putting warfighting first and foremost.

Conclusion

For generations, the primarily defensive roles of the surface fleet and the lack of long-range anti-ship weapons have sapped the offensive spirit of the Surface Warfare Officer community. As ships begin to utilize the SM-6 in anti-surface mode, an offensive spirit is beginning to build. The surface warfare enterprise needs to continue to invest in longer-range weapons to put the enemy on the defensive and to put our own ships on offense. SM-6, LRASM, and the Maritime Tomahawk, combined with new over-the-horizon targeting techniques, have placed the Navy on the right track for ASuW. However, the lack of a medium-range ASW aircraft still limits the ability of flattops to defend themselves, and threatens to pull surface warships away from their growing offensive potential and into the resource-intensive ASW fight. Yet new capability will not be enough to fill these gaps. Surface warfare officers – from watchstanders to operational commanders and especially DESRON staffers – will all need to rediscover the offensive spirit that is fundamental to striking effectively first.

LCDR Jason Lancaster has served as Operations Officer at DESRON 26 during their 2020 deployment workups and a portion of deployment. He has also served aboard all manner of surface ships including USS STOUT (DDG 55), USS NEW YORK (LPD 21), USS TORTUGA (LSD 46), and USS AMERICA (LHA 6). Ashore he has served in the N5 at Commander, Naval Forces Korea and OPNAV N5. These views are presented in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the official views of any U.S. government department or agency.

References

1. “AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW),” U.S. Navy Fact File, September 27, 2021, https://www.navy.mil/Resources/Fact-Files/Display-FactFiles/Article/2166748/agm-154-joint-standoff-weapon-jsow/. 

2. David B. Larter, “Pentagon’s weapons tester gives update on Navy’s new long-range anti-ship missile,” Defense News, January 21, 2021, https://www.navytimes.com/naval/2021/01/14/the-pentagons-weapons-tester-has-an-update-on-the-navys-new-long-range-anti-ship-missile/.

3. “Naval Strike Missile,” Kongsberg, https://www.kongsberg.com/kda/what-we-do/defence-and-security/missile-systems/nsm-naval-strike-missile-nsm.

4. “Submarines by Country,” World Population Review, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/submarines-by-country.

5. “MQ-9B SeaGuardian,” General Atomics, https://www.ga-asi.com/remotely-piloted-aircraft/mq-9b-seaguardian.

Featured Image: June 2016 – Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyer USS Spruance (DDG 111) (front) steams in formation with USS Decatur (DDG 73) and USS Momsen (DDG 92). (U.S. Navy photo by MC2(SW) Will Gaskill)

Read Part 1 on defining distributed maritime operations.
Read Part 2 on anti-ship firepower and U.S. shortfalls.
Read Part 3 on assembling massed fires and modern fleet tactics.
Read Part 4 on weapons depletion and last-ditch salvo dynamics.
Read Part 5 on missile salvo patterns and maximizing volume of fire.
Read Part 6 on platform advantages and combined arms roles.
Read Part 7 on aircraft carrier roles in distributed warfighting.
Read Part 8 on China’s anti-ship firepower and mass firing schemes.
Read Part 9 on the force structure implications of DMO.

By Dmitry Filipoff

Introduction

Force development is the process of investigating the future of warfighting and aligning the preparations of a military along the lines of that investigation’s findings. If knowing how to fight could be described as knowing how to execute tactics, then force development is about how to get better at fighting.¹ Yet force development is not just about creating viable tactics or proper crucibles for forging warfighting skill. It is about ensuring there is a high level of force-wide fluency on warfighting and a broad understanding of how to get better at fighting.

Force development serves a vital role in safeguarding a military from its own atrophy. A major symptom of institutional decay in militaries is when warfighters, especially those in the combat arms and unrestricted line communities, struggle to realize that their fundamental job is to be tacticians. If not consciously kept in check, creeping bureaucratic forces will gradually turn warfighters into administrators, maintainers, engineers, and other things that eventually eclipse their fundamental role of being tacticians, of being professionals that learn how to fight.

A prime imperative of force development is to preserve the fundamental principle that tactics are at the core of what any navy is and does, that tactics are the “soul of our profession,” as once described by Vice Admiral Art Cebrowski.² Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Tom Hayward argued the same point in the introduction to the first edition of the seminal work Fleet Tactics by Captain Wayne Hughes, where he argued, “What is the naval profession about if not tactics, tactics, and more tactics?” A military service that loses sight of this fundamental principle of existence will have dysfunction radiate throughout its institutions. This is because tactics are not just mere details or minor actions, they are the ultimate logic that governs how fleets are destroyed in combat. Regardless of whether warfighters are aware of it, tactics are a central animating force behind much of what a navy does, whether it be strategy, force design, human resources, and many other efforts. So much of military policymaking is critically degraded when the warfighters do not have a good idea of what the fighting is going to look like, or of how to get better at fighting.

The force employment of a military will largely be a function of how good its force development can make it. A military’s ability to fully manifest a new warfighting concept will depend on how well its force development can take the abstract notions of the concept and convert them into genuine force-wide improvement in warfighting skill. As the U.S. Navy explores the future of distributed warfighting and naval salvo combat, it must be prepared to make major changes to how its force development institutions cultivate warfighting skill so the fleet can effectively evolve alongside the intensifying threat environment.

Force Development and the Major Engines of Change

Overarching warfighting concepts are often developed by specific groups such as fleet staffs, warfighting development centers, wargamers, and others. Compared to the broader fleet and the multitudes of deckplate warfighters, these groups are extremely niche staffs. Just because a warfighting concept has been developed by specialized groups and approved of by senior authorities is no guarantee that it will actually result in force-wide change. Major efforts have to be made to deliberately introduce the warfighting concept into the service’s primary engines of force development, and bridge the wide gap between the niche insight of the concept developer and the force-wide reality of the deckplate sailor.

The major engines of force development in a service are the primary mechanisms through which warfighting skill is developed on a force-wide level. These engines mainly include the exercise and certification regimes, training and readiness matrices and syllabi, schoolhouses, graduate education programs, and the tactical instructor programs of warfighting development centers. Tens of thousands of servicemembers are rotating through these mechanisms to learn about warfighting. If a warfighting concept generated by a niche staff is to stimulate genuine force-wide improvement, then the concept must be broken down into specific operational skills and challenges that are then administered through these major engines of force development. Syllabi must be revised, new certifications must replace older ones, and new scenarios should keep warfighting crucibles fresh and challenging.

The content of the warfighting concept must inform and align with the content of force development. Otherwise, the force will incur major risks in conflict when the content of its warfighting concepts and war plans are vastly different than what the force as a whole has actually been prepared to do.

This process of change has to be deliberate and measured. The aftereffects of introducing more tactics, doctrine, and capabilities into the major engines of force development are often not well appreciated, but these effects threaten to strangle progress. The downstream effects of introducing new things to force development are often more requirements, more administration, more maintenance, and myriad other burdens added to already stretched warfighters. The imperative to effectively master something new can be suffocated by the overflowing system of requirements and certifications, and where many of these requirements are a product of undisciplined bureaucratic accumulation.³ Failing to make deliberate tradeoffs will risk losing critical new warfighting imperatives amidst the crammed labyrinth that characterizes much of the U.S. Navy’s requirements and certification system. This overflowing system has forced combat training schedules to take the form of serialized one-off events, rather than focused series of multiple rounds that allow warfighters to flesh out specific skills and conduct extensive trial and error. The Navy needs to consolidate its overstretched focus so it can afford to go deeper in priority areas.

If the Navy is to seriously introduce the new force development efforts that are vital to making DMO and massed fires a reality, it will need to vigorously protect and guarantee time and focus for these efforts amidst the ocean of other demands that threaten to stifle these initiatives. Careful and deliberate tradeoffs must be made in defining what tactical skills and scenarios sailors should be prioritizing their time on, rather than simply adding to the system’s congestion. 

One specific example of how force development tradeoffs can be made is in adjusting the amount of focus spent on building damage control skillsets versus air defense. Since it only takes one hit to kill a warship, if the offensive-defensive balance tilts even slightly in the attacker’s favor, then the result will be extreme overkill. This happens because naval salvo combat can consist of forces launching dozens of missiles at warships, so if a warship is going to take a hit, it is very unlikely to take only one. Damage control at that point will often be an exercise in futility. While sailors can certainly learn much about their systems through damage control practice, the force development implication of this brutal tactical reality is that much more preparation should be spent on preventing the ship from getting hit than learning how to save it.

That is one aspect of naval salvo combat that readily translates into deckplate-level force development implications. But the act of massing fires from across a distributed force is something that can happen on a theater-wide scale, which is a larger-scale scenario that can strain unit-level training methods, resources, and perspectives. While new studies and curricula are useful for teaching the broader picture, tactics are actions. The cultivation of tactical skill demands extensive hands-on application and learning-by-doing.

If mass fires are to become a mainstay tactic and skillset, then wargaming and Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) events need to become a much more mainstream and higher fidelity experience for unit-level warfighters. Wargaming and LVC are key simulation tools that can help deckplate servicemembers experience warfighting on a much larger scale and understand how their piece of the fight contributes to broader success. Unit-level sailors can strive to understand how their long-range salvos will combine into a larger volume of fire against a distant target, and how the broader distribution or concentration of the force can be affected by their unit-level actions. They can learn to craft custom firing sequences and assemble massed fires against serious opposition in a variety of contexts. They can become more proficient in interpreting the situation presented in the broader common operating picture that goes beyond the scope of their organic sensors, which can also help them contemplate effective targets for last-ditch or standalone fires. They can develop a deeper understanding of how higher-echelon commanders think about naval salvo combat and assembling massed fires, which helps build a common doctrinal framework across the chain of command. By leveraging these tools, unit-level servicemembers can improve their fluency with these inherently large-scale warfighting methods.

Despite the fierce character of naval salvo combat and the high stakes involved, a warfighting imperative is often not strong enough on its own to compel change when the imperative must be operationalized by a bureaucracy. The major engines of force development need to be infused with clear professional incentives for warfighters to develop specific tactical skills and distinguish themselves as above average tacticians. The incentives for competitive promotion and assessment are arguably some of the strongest levers for fomenting change in any organization, and this holds true for militaries as well.

The introduction of new tactics and methods requires commensurate new criteria for assessing proficiency and rewarding tactical skill. But the specific nature of launching anti-ship fires challenges the ability to craft stirring professional incentives for the tactical actions that are at the heart of massing fires.

There may be relatively few distinguishing factors when a unit is simply one platform out of many that is launching anti-ship missiles at distant targets. The act of launching fires at forces that are far beyond the limits of one’s organic sensors can substantially reduce the scope of decision-making and tactical skill to be exhibited and assessed at the unit level. Launching anti-ship fires may be far less tactically distinguishing or exciting than the scope of tactical skill a lone fighter pilot can display in a dogfight, or a submarine officer can exhibit in setting up a torpedo strike. Serving as a missile magazine to be cued by someone else’s firing decisions may hardly make for provocative debriefs or in-depth assessments of tactical skill at the unit level. These types of challenges can cause warfighting establishments to undervalue critical tactical tasks because they offer little opportunity for warfighters to distinguish themselves from their peers and challenge professional assessment mechanisms. As a result, military bureaucracy can limit the amount of time training and exercising these skills.⁴

Here is where wargaming and simulation can come together with assessment criteria and professional incentives. Because wargaming and LVC can allow deckplate-level warfighters to practice the large-scale tactics of massing fires, it can also provide a venue where warfighters can distinguish themselves professionally, and be assessed on more complex matters of tactical skill compared to simply launching contributing fires. Wargaming and LVC can also offer settings where Sailors can operate their individual platforms in simulated network-contested environments, where they can demonstrate how they would take the initiative, such as by assembling massed fires on a local basis or launching standalone attacks as an isolated unit. 

The U.S. Navy will have to make major changes to its force development to promote more opportunity for warfighters to tactically distinguish themselves from their peers and spark their competitive spirit. But a system of certification that aims to train warfighters to the same baseline standard will struggle to provide this opportunity. The U.S. Navy’s ability to offer meaningful crucibles for warfighters to distinguish themselves is also severely challenged by its deeply ingrained habit of artificially guaranteeing victory in combat exercises and deliberately handicapping opposition forces.⁵ These fundamental and far-reaching flaws will strongly constrain the Navy’s ability to discover and cultivate its best tacticians, as well as impair its ability to have a rigorous process of investigation undergirding its force development. These self-inflicted flaws have already rendered many prior Navy warfighting concepts into unrealized and underdeveloped aspirations. These flaws will continue to challenge the Navy’s ability to manifest any warfighting concept that can be durable enough to withstand the chaos of war.

Ultimately DMO should provide the impetus to reform not just the content of the Navy’s force development, but also its character. 

New Force Packages for DMO

The U.S. Navy is attempting to manifest DMO with a relatively concentrated force structure of high-tonnage warships. It will need to revise its current force employment and force packaging to be more distributed in the near term. As the Navy transitions toward DMO, it needs to consider how it may reorganize its existing force structure to better manifest the concept.

The relationship between force structure and force employment is closely related to the standard force packages of a service and the warfighting concepts that animate them. In the case of the U.S. Navy, the Composite Warfare Commander (CWC) concept has animated its carrier strike groups and naval formations for years.⁶ Regardless of the many concepts that have been developed over time, the CWC concept is what the Navy has actually been putting into practice on a force-wide level, and it forms a major point of departure for naval force employment. Countless strike group staffs and wardrooms have had their visions of warfighting heavily shaped by this concept. Consistent application of CWC over the years has molded a critical form of operational muscle memory that pervades the U.S. Navy as an institution.

The introduction of DMO should warrant a deep examination of new formations, force packages, and tables of organization that will embody the new concept. Historically, militaries will modify these aspects of their organization in relation to changing perceptions of the future of warfare and force employment. When reforming for great power war, these changes have heavily focused on defining the proper echelon for integrating combined arms capability.⁷ This has often resulted in pushing the integration of multi-mission, combined arms capability down to lower-level units, while also being mindful of not overwhelming lower-level commanders with too much span of control. As they push combined arms integration downward, militaries have also gone upward in designating a larger-scale formation as the primary standard unit of control when emphasizing focus on great power war. For example, where artillery and anti-air fires may have been held at the brigade commander level, now the company commander can direct these fires; where the brigade was once the primary operational unit, now the division is the primary unit.

The Navy can consider similar changes to its organization. New force packages can encourage an accompanying revision of the command relationships and operating concepts that animate the formations. New force packages provide a valuable impetus and point of departure for initiating fresh force development efforts. 

At first sight, DMO may encourage an amorphous vision of force packages, where units can flexibly plug-and-play at will across a dynamic battlespace. A distributed force will gain a significant amount of resilience if its lone units can seek one another out and dynamically come together to apply effects on a local basis, rather than be wholly dependent on higher-echelon commanders to organize them. But while this hypothetical flexibility is desirable, in reality it can lead to an undisciplined and unstructured vision for how a distributed force may actually be wielded. It may leave far too much to chance and assume too much about the ability of individual units to meaningfully integrate on the fly. Instead of a flexible and resilient force, the risk is the spontaneous creation of disorganized pickup teams that will have little time to build common understanding in the midst of a fight. That common understanding may prove crucial to success, especially for methods that require careful harmonization, including emissions control, air defense doctrines, and last-ditch firing protocols. One of the hard WWII lessons the U.S. Navy paid abundantly for in blood is that combined units need time to develop into genuinely integrated force packages before being sent into battle.⁸

As a potential new DMO force package, consider a force of two destroyers supported by a squadron of carrier aircraft. Half of the squadron remains in the local vicinity of the destroyers to defeat sea-skimming threats well before they break over the warships’ horizon, and to provide early warning such as for air defense and last-ditch fires. The other half of the squadron is far forward of the two destroyers, and conducts scouting, counter-scouting, and bomber interdiction. The forward element also helps cue warship salvos toward targets, inputs retargeting support to the salvos, defends the salvos from aviation threats, and assesses salvo effectiveness against the target. This forward aviation element is the primary actor in contesting aerial and information superiority in the critical space between opposing fleets. If those forward aviation units are under heavy threat by opposing aircraft, they can pull behind the surface warships and leverage their air defense capability. The roles conducted by the aircraft kept closer to the destroyers can be assigned to F/A-18s and an E-2D. The forward roles are ideally conducted by F-35s, with their longer range and robust sensor fusion capabilities.

This force package of two destroyers and a squadron could be termed a surface strike group (SSG) and be a standard unit of a distributed naval force (Figure 1). It represents the lowest level at which carrier aviation and surface warships could be fully integrated for combined arms naval warfighting. Through its warships, this force could conceivably field up to 80 anti-ship missiles in its launch cells. This makes for a considerable amount of magazine depth that could allow the force to steadily persist and preserve force distribution as it fires small but meaningful increments of contributing fires. If network links degrade or some other circumstance isolates the surface strike group from the broader force, it will have a decent amount of organic capability to fall back upon, it will have preserved vital combined arms relations, and it will retain significant magazine depth as a standalone unit.

Multiple CNOs have now called for a renewed emphasis on fleet-level warfare.⁹ A renewed emphasis on fleet-level warfare requires a fleet-level force package. The parent force package of the Surface Strike Group could be the principal fleet-scale maneuver element, a hypothetical Fleet Strike Group (FSG) that would be larger than a carrier strike group. It could consist of the combined forces of about two carrier strike groups, divided into four surface strike groups with two destroyers each, and four destroyers assigned to escort the two carriers (Figure 2). The carriers are protected by roughly four squadrons of aircraft, with the other four squadrons assigned to the surface strike groups, which are the primary striking arms of the Fleet Strike Group for generating massed fires.

The surface strike groups may be oriented in various dispositions relative to the carriers, but must not exceed the ranges required to have confident aviation support, and not exceed ranges that would stretch them too thin to combine their fires against a shared target. A force package does not always imply a specific disposition, but it provides a clear point of departure for multiple arrangements of forces while maintaining a coherent command structure and concept of operations.

These force package concepts illustrate the critical constraints of organizing a distributed fleet. Warships can only disperse so far from one another before they are spread too thin to effectively combine fires. Surface warships will substantially increase their risk if they venture beyond the range of aviation support, and they would have more flexibility of maritime maneuver if that aviation support came from carriers instead of airfields. But carrier aviation can only travel so far and remain on station for so long. Carrier aviation must also maintain enough reach and capacity to strongly contest the aerial battlespace between opposing fleets, and secure the critical scouting and informational advantages that come with earning air superiority in this area. Yet carriers cannot be pulled too deep into the battlespace themselves, or else suffer increased risk.

These critical factors of mutual support bind the extent of distribution and help define the divide between what is usefully distributable versus what is unfavorably stretched thin. Standardized force packages capture these critical relationships and constraints, and provide a framework to work within them.

These force packages formalize other essentials of DMO. They formalize a closer tactical relationship between aviation and surface platforms, who will need a tight-knit doctrinal relationship at a level below the traditional strike group. It establishes a new fleet-scale unit that is larger than a carrier strike group, both in terms of the number of platforms and in the scope of its applications. It also establishes a subordinate lower-echelon unit that is credible enough to pose a threat on its own even if the force fractures or disaggregates. These fundamentals can provide an enduring basis for designing force packages regardless of their specific composition.

Standard force packages provide a valuable frame of reference for what forces can coalesce or disaggregate into, which is a vital part of DMO. If a distributed force fractures into individual units and force concentrations, many units may naturally seek each other out to pool their capability and broaden their awareness in a bid for local overmatch. But as standalone units gather themselves, they may unwittingly create a force that is overly concentrated. Standard force packages can provide a valuable frame of reference by defining a ceiling of tolerable concentration or dispersal. Forces may use this frame of reference to independently distribute or converge if they believe they have overly concentrated or stretched themselves. It is critical that effective concentration and distribution is not just something imposed on a force by higher-echelon command, but something that lower-echelon units can effectively self-organize into through shared doctrinal understanding.

The frame of reference offered by a force package can also encourage isolated units to prioritize the regeneration of combined arms capability. In the case of distributed warfighting, isolated aircraft would know to seek out warships to leverage their magazine depth, and warships would seek out aircraft to leverage their greater situational awareness. As isolated forces seek out one another and combine into force packages, they can not only have a sense for judging appropriate concentration, but also a sense of judging proportion between the combined arms.

This frame of reference also makes hard tradeoffs more doctrinally acceptable. A core defensive goal of distribution is to minimize losses when they are taken. A core offensive goal is to manipulate this concern to compel opposing forces to stretch themselves thin. The threat of accurate firepower can force units to sacrifice their ability to provide mutual support as they widen their distribution to try to minimize potential losses. If a force package is judged too concentrated and must distribute, the diminishing availability of combined support will be better understood as a deliberate tradeoff rather than a reckless omission.

As much as an assortment of smaller units attempting to integrate across a battlespace can confuse an adversary, it can also confuse a force’s own commanders. The desire for open-ended flexibility must be balanced against the need for coherence, and standardized force packages are a critical mechanism for creating coherence of forces. But the organizational coherence that force packages offer can certainly be a liability. The predictability of organization for oneself also makes it more predictable to the adversary. This predictability can lend itself toward the speedier massing of fires, both from a force and against it. There can be a direct connection between using organization to reduce the command-and-control challenge of wielding a distributed force, and reducing the challenge to the enemy’s decision-making. Commanders must weigh the benefit of coherence along these lines.

New force packages can serve a critical organizational function in moving force development forward and strongly emphasize a service’s commitment to transformation. In the case of the U.S. Marine Corps, the new Marine Littoral Regiments are a major embodiment of that service’s concrete commitment to new operating concepts.¹⁰ By creating this new force package, certain combinations of capability and cross-community relations were formalized and obligated. These relationships were then cultivated through shared force development and put into practice in exercises and elsewhere.¹¹

If the U.S. Navy wants to make DMO a reality, one of the most powerful steps it can take is to commit to new force packages. This can send an especially strong signal to its competitors and its own organization that real transformation is coming.

Developing Doctrine for DMO and Massed Fires

At first glance, the tactics of massing fires could easily lend themselves to heavily scripted methods, preset responses, and automated decision aids. Algorithms and playbooks will surely serve an important role in speeding the coordination of available firepower into salvos against shared targets. But the fundamental importance of subjective human judgement cannot be eclipsed by these factors. Naval force development on DMO must focus heavily on cultivating the human skills and decision-making that undergird mass fires. Developing a common doctrinal understanding will be vital toward employing this form of warfighting that depends so much upon shared awareness and coordination.

Doctrine does not only consist of official publications or standard responses. Doctrine is best understood as the implicit and subjective visions of how to fight that warfighters subscribe to.¹² Doctrinal development should principally focus on creating shared expectations in the minds of warfighters of how massed fires function and why.

The doctrine of massed fires will need to carefully govern how release authorities control the employment of various weapons. These mainly concern the circumstances under which offensive and defensive weapons are to be retained, delegated, or seized by various authorities. For massed fires to work, the release authority for anti-ship weapons cannot often be in the hands of the unit-level commanders of individual platforms except in highly specific and threatening situations. A higher-echelon commander or a commander with a higher degree of situational awareness will need to have the authority to reach into the magazines of various assets to assemble a volume of fire from the available options.

Because of this, there are few concepts that have as much potential to undermine massed fires than that of mission command and the initiative of the subordinate. Mission command has been defined as “the conduct of military operations through decentralized execution based upon mission-type orders…Successful mission command demands that subordinate leaders at all echelons exercise disciplined initiative and act aggressively and independently…”¹³ If each individual platform decides to launch its fires independently, then the force will often fail to muster enough volume of fire to overwhelm targets and it will suffer disproportionate weapons depletion across its units. The evolving distribution and concentration of the broader force will pitch and roll without much consideration for larger consequences, and many higher-order designs and intentions will be at the mercy of spontaneous, local-level developments. It is unclear if a distributed force that grants wide-ranging independence to its many individual units can be meaningfully wielded as a coherent “fleet.”

The principles of mission command and the initiative of the subordinate are often couched in terms of seizing fleeting targets of opportunity.¹⁴ But the ability to fire quickly on independent initiative should be tempered by the challenging requirement of assembling enough volume of fire. Totally delegated release authority can lead to premature and ineffective attacks, where it may be of little use to have an individual unit fire on a target of opportunity if it ends up wasting missiles because it cannot muster enough volume of fire. The requirement to achieve enough volume of fire to hit a densely defended naval formation changes the definition of what actually makes for a viable target of opportunity.

Relying on individual initiative and mission command can certainly result in a higher tempo of decisions and unit-level actions, but this is not an inherent advantage if those decisions and actions are not operationally effective. Having a higher tempo of decision-making does not always guarantee a higher quality of decision-making. A force that patiently musters its missile firepower for a single strong blow against a naval formation may often prove to be much more effective than a force launching numerous individual blows that are too weak on their own to overwhelm the adversary. Initiative of the subordinate can enable self-defeating impulses in a form of warfare that demands a significant measure of coordination to muster a minimally viable amount of striking power. Given the requirement to build enough volume of fire, many unit-level leaders will have to exercise tense patience rather than sharp initiative, even if they have all the targeting information they need to take their personal shot at the target.

The concept of delegating authority for the sake of taking advantage of fleeting opportunity in the battlespace cannot be blindly advocated as an enduring theoretical good. The successful application of this principle depends on specific tactical context, and it can clearly be self-defeating in many situations. Having a wide variety of distributed units prosecuting their local engagements with great independence assumes a theory of success where broader victory is the product of accumulating many smaller wins. But it is unclear how well this construct applies to the unique nature of high-end naval warfare, which has historically tended toward highly centralized tactical decision-making, large-scale pulses of fleet-destroying firepower, and extremely dense concentrations of capability. To unconsciously apply these principles without operational context is to strip away many of the potential benefits of massed fires.

Therefore higher-echelon commanders will naturally need to maintain some sort of doctrinal grip on the offensive anti-ship loadouts of many units if they are to harness their potential for massed fires. The same can hardly be true for defensive doctrine. The sudden nature of defending against anti-ship salvos or submarine attacks involves highly time-sensitive decisions. Doctrine statements that are pre-programmed into combat systems need to be able to automatically engage defenses to give warships a fighting chance of survival against incoming salvos. Therefore the release authority for defensive capability will have to naturally reside at a much lower level of command.

But unit-level commanders will still need some authority to independently launch their offensive missiles in certain situations. The potential of last-ditch fires means commanders need to exercise subjective judgement about their tactical situation and know when it warrants them firing off their weapons without higher-level approval. Commanders who perceive they are on the verge of detection or destruction will need to be afforded the discretion to do what they can under extreme circumstances. A similar logic applies to operating within degraded network environments. If adversaries have effectively damaged trust in networks and communications, then commanders may hesitate to believe what the networks are telling them. If commanders are unsure if their higher-echelon leadership can reach them to issue firing orders, they may feel compelled to take the initiative in launching fires themselves.

The doctrinal implications of who exactly organizes massed fires in what operational context deserve serious emphasis in force development. Joint commands, fleet staffs, and warfighting development centers need to design doctrinal schemes of release authorities for massed fires on both force-wide and unit-level scales. Commanders at all levels need to understand the distribution of these release authorities for various weapons and how the scope of these authorities can change with specific circumstances, such as heavily degraded networks or low-emission postures. Certain circumstances that make it challenging to mass fires from widely distributed assets can trigger fallback schemes that delegate release authorities to individual units and force concentrations.

But massed fires may be unworkable if the joint fires targeting process is too bureaucratic and rigid to be applied in a chaotic warfighting environment.¹⁵ While there are certainly many considerations that deserve to be factored into mass fires, the joint fires process should be prepared to expedite procedure for the sake of speeding decision. In a combat environment that is being heavily shaped by naval salvo warfare, custom firing sequences will need to be quickly designed to meet emerging needs. This is especially critical for the time-sensitive methods that help a force preserve its capability while under heavy fire, methods such as interruptive strikes against the adversary’s active firing sequences, or adding fires to the last-ditch salvos of dying units. Speed of decision is vital to winning in naval salvo combat, but an overly bureaucratic joint fires targeting process could easily confer major decision-making advantage to the adversary.

Lone units may not care much for official procedure when they are facing imminent destruction at the hands of incoming salvos. Unit-level commanders need to know how to craft an effective last-ditch firing protocol and have the subjective judgement to know when to trigger it. Commanders need to know how to assess the signature of an inbound volume of fire, judge the offensive-defensive balance, and decide if they are unlikely to survive. They must also have the skill and nerve to know when not to launch last-ditch salvos, or otherwise risk being provoked into wasteful fires.

Effectively practicing last-ditch fires will be less a matter of preventing unit destruction and more about having commanders smartly deploy a custom last-ditch firing protocol in the context of what information they had at the time. Scripted solutions and automated decision aids will not be enough to forge the prudence needed in this crucial battle of nerves. The U.S. Surface Warfare community in particular must cultivate this judgement in its warfighters through exercises and simulations that impose the last-ditch firing dilemma, but where warfighters do not know in advance whether they are expected to survive.

Developing doctrine for last-ditch fires is critical for ensuring archers are not destroyed before they can discharge their offensive firepower, and ensuring that valuable weapons inventory is not lost before it can make some contribution to the fight. Otherwise a force under fire will lose its weapons as it loses its platforms, and crews will be deprived of their chance to offer a final parting shot to the adversary. The extreme circumstances that surround last-ditch choices create a demand for extensive doctrinal development so that warfighters can be ready to make the most of what may be their final moments.

The Joint Element and the Role of Fleet Commanders

The act of massing fires is an inherently large-scale, combined arms, cross-service function. The joint contours of this capability are already becoming apparent, with all of the services now procuring anti-ship missiles and getting into the mission of sinking warships.¹⁶ While it will take at least another decade for them to procure enough weapons to be able to truly mass fires, all of the services must focus more force development on the anti-ship mission. The extent to which service kill chains can be effectively linked in a contested battlespace can determine the true extent to which massed fires can be brought together from across the joint force. Otherwise operational methods may default to standalone fires from service-specific forces. The force development of massed fires must occur through critical joint and service command structures, and the nature of these structures puts fleet commanders in a prime position to refine these concepts.

While war plans are meant to be executable today with current capability, service warfighting concepts tend to have a longer time horizon to guide the development of capability in a purposeful direction. But ideally at some point the timeframes overlap, and the content of the warfighting concept should begin to inform the content of war plans. The DMO concept as it stands today is more of a service-specific concept for the Navy rather than an overarching concept for the joint force, although DMO could serve as the Navy’s pillar to the Joint Warfighting Concept (JWC).¹⁷ But it remains unclear if there is a deliberately structured relationship for how the warfighting concept of a service informs the war plan (OPLAN) of a combatant command. A warfighting concept can represent how a service would like to fight and how it believes it could make its best contribution to the broader joint force. But ultimately the employment of forces falls under the authority of the combatant commands, who may have different force employment concepts than a service.

Therefore a critical role of service-specific force development is not only generating improved operational methods, but also socializing these methods with the combatant commands and joint organizations that would ultimately be charged with employing these methods. The more the content of a service’s warfighting concept is reflected in the content of the war plans, the more successful the concept may have been in earning joint buy-in. Given how all the services are now procuring anti-ship weapons and the sea control mission is growing in importance, the Navy can take a leading role in shaping how the joint force envisions massing fires against warships.

The act of massing fires is not only a joint endeavor, it is an expression of combined arms warfighting. The Navy itself is a joint force with its separate communities. But most of the Navy’s force development is heavily siloed within the type commands who manage the force development for their respective communities. This siloed character is reinforced by how most of the Navy’s workup cycle focuses on unit- and squadron-specific force development, with only a few weeks of truly integrated, cross-community exercising toward the end.¹⁸ This relative lack of deep cross-community integration has also been reinforced by the disaggregated operations of recent decades.¹⁹ The Navy does not appear to have a singular overarching mechanism or higher-echelon command that purposefully integrates the force development agendas of the type commands around a common framework, whether it be a war plan, DMO, or other concepts. The heavily siloed nature of the Navy’s force development strongly impairs its ability to deepen vital combined arms relations and manifest new warfighting concepts, especially ones as cross-cutting as DMO and massed fires.

Fleet commanders are needed to fill these gaps and serve these two vital functions – deepening the force development integration between the navy’s communities, and socializing service-specific warfighting concepts with joint commands.

The purview of fleet commanders sits a step higher than that of the type commands and allows them to integrate the multiple communities in operational context. As Vice Admiral Hank Mustin once noted, the type commanders “stayed within their own little pookas until somebody mixed them all. That’s the role of the fleet commander.”²⁰ Fleet commanders could ensure that each community-specific force development agenda is organized around common frameworks. This could take the form of ensuring the content of the war plans is reflected in the training certifications and syllabi of the various communities, or that warfighting development centers are collaborating on combined arms doctrine. The fleet commander’s position as the lead naval component commander within a combatant command also allows them to more readily access their fellow component commanders from the other services. They are in a prime position to socialize DMO and naval massed fires into joint partners and command structures.

Aside from influencing the force development of lower echelons and joint partners, fleet commands will need to be heavily subjected to force development themselves. A renewed emphasis on fleet-level operations demands more warfighting practice for fleet-level staffs. As CNO Gilday has emphasized, “If we’re going to fight as a fleet – and we moved away from fighting just as singular ARGs, as singular strike groups, to fighting as a fleet under a fleet commander as the lead – we have to be able to train that way”²¹ [Emphasis added]. Fleet-level staffs should engage in frequent wargaming to exercise the command of naval massed fires and fleet-scale force packages.

Because fleet commanders reside within the operational chain of command, their primary focus is operations, not force development. Historical experience has often shown that when significant force development and operational responsibilities are combined under one administrative structure, the latter tends to eclipse the former.²² Guarding against this tendency is the Department of Defense’s bifurcation into the distinct spheres of operations, and train/man/equip. But unlike the Navy, the other services have vital mechanisms that ensure service-retained control of large ready units for the purposes of force development, where combined arms relations can be consistently exercised and evolved without being constrained by an imminent need to deploy. But to its severe detriment, the structure of the Navy has caused most of its opportunity for live cross-community force development to fall under the operational command structure.

The Navy’s integration between its own communities is not nearly as well developed as it needs to be to make DMO and massed fires a reality. The fleet commands must take an active role in deepening cross-community integration and force development, as well as refining joint methods for massing fires against warships. But their operational responsibilities will hardly abate, and decades of habit will make it challenging to introduce major new force development imperatives to what are fundamentally operational commands. Even if they can take on these efforts, the variety of multiple fleet commands may not translate into a coherent set of enduring requirements for integrating the force development agendas of the type commands around a common framework like DMO.

If the fleet commands cannot take sufficient ownership of coordinating these force development functions, then these functions may have to be centralized on the OPNAV staff. This responsibility would fit best within the OPNAV N7 Warfighting Development Directorate, but N7 seems to lack the critical authorities that would allow it to issue firm directives to the type commands and integrate their force development agendas in any major way.²³ OPNAV also has very little in the way of service-retained ready forces under its control, challenging its ability to manage much of the vital force development that would need to happen through the active operating forces.

The Navy’s organizational structures and operating patterns already heavily impair its ability to implement major force development reform. The needs of DMO and massed fires demand more than just changing the content of existing practices or agendas, these warfighting methods demand significant changes to how the Navy organizes its force development in general. Hopefully DMO can provide the impetus for much-needed reform.

Series Conclusion

“Peacetime commanders are the professional anscestors of men who fight…Peacetime leaders forget that their first responsibility is to keep doctrine current and train to it. Working machinery, full supply bins, and reenlistments matter, too, but since they are more tangible than combat readiness they tend to divert attention from it….peace should be a time for renewing tactics and doctrine.” –Captain Wayne P. Hughes, Jr.²⁴

The Navy must not become so invested in the concepts of DMO or massed fires that it artificially guarantees their success, whether that be in its warfighting crucibles and experiments, or in its internal politics and programming. These are not concepts to be haphazardly “validated,” they are concepts to be ruthlessly interrogated.

The first and foremost principle is preserving a rigorous standard of warfighting resilience. Whatever the methods, they must be able to withstand the chaos of war. It is the duty of force development to uphold this standard, and to ensure that visions are grounded in practical reality, rather than be entranced by grandiose concepts. While something may seem conceptually elegant on paper or in models, this may obscure the fact that the deckplate-level warfighter will have to do the painstaking work of ironing out myriad critical details of implementation to manifest these things in a meaningful way. And during that process, the deckplate warfighter may unearth flaws and liabilities that could render a warfighting concept unworkable. No service should ignore the possibility that it can be better served by ruling out a warfighting concept than by moving forward with it. If the Navy must reject the idea of massed fires or DMO after rigorous trial and error suggests these elaborate methods cannot withstand the chaos of war, then the Navy will have been all the better for it.

Ultimately this series has been an exercise in exploring what DMO can be, not what it actually is in the eyes of the U.S. Navy. By investigating the critical leverage points of naval salvo warfare, it hoped to carve more definition into this concept, and illuminate what modern naval warfare may encompass. Whether this adequately aligns with the U.S. Navy’s own vision of DMO is an open question. But concepts and visions aside, many of the discussed fundamentals of naval salvo warfare will remain enduring regardless of whatever vision of future war is under consideration. And despite the heavily kinetic focus on massed fires and salvo combat, there are many non-kinetic factors and theories of victory that deserve deeper investigation.

The future of naval warfare has never been more uncertain. The destructive potential of high-end battle fleets is growing ever more ghastly and awe-inspiring. While the precise nature of modern naval warfare and all its many interactions remains deeply uncertain, its potential to change the course of history in an afternoon is not. As the world’s oceans become a major arena for great power competition, navies have little choice but to set course for the hazy horizon.

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

References 

1. This is the author’s own definition of force development, not drawn from an official source.

2. This quote appears in the foreword to the second edition of Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat by Captain Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., Naval Institute Press, 1999.

3. Lieutenant Brendan Cordial, “The Surface Navy’s Training Program Remains an Administrative Nightmare,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 2018, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018/october/surface-navys-training-program-remains-administrative-nightmare.

4. According to the author’s conversations with naval aviators in the strike fighter community, the relative lack of tactical skill in massed ASUW fires may be a major reason why this community has limited its ASUW training curricula and assessment criteria. 

See: Stephen Walsh, “The Strike Fighter Time Management Problem,” War on the Rocks, June 22, 2022, https://warontherocks.com/2022/06/the-strike-fighter-time-management-problem/. 

5. For writings on the U.S. Navy’s practice of heavily scripted exercises, see:

Admiral Scott Swift, “Fleet Problems Offer Opportunities,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 2018. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-03/fleet-problems-offer-opportunities.

Admiral Scott Swift, “A Fleet Must Be Able to Fight,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 2018. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-05/fleet-must-be-able-fight.

Captain Dale C. Rielage, USN, “An Open Letter to the U.S. Navy from Red,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, June 2017. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017-06/open-letter-us-navy-red. 

Senior Chief Gunner’s Mate Norman Mingo, “The U.S. Navy is Prepared for Inspections, Not War,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 2021, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2021/march/navy-prepared-inspections-not-war.

Lieutenant Jonathan Gosselin, “Make Composite Training Less Scripted,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, June 2021, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2021/june/make-composite-training-less-scripted .

Lieutenant Erik A.H. Sand, “Performance Over Process,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 2014. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2014-10/performance-over-process.

Sdyney Freedberg, “Top Gun for Warships: SWATT,” Breaking Defense, January 16, 2018. https://breakingdefense.com/2018/01/top-gun-for-warships-swatt/.

6. The author thanks Anthony LaVopa for contributing to this insight.

7. Jonathan M. House, Combined Arms Warfare in the Twentieth Century, University Press of Kansas, 2001.

8. Trent Hone, Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898–1945, pg. 180-182, Naval Institute Press, 2019. 

9. For renewed fleet-level emphasis by current and previous CNO, see:

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

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

10. For significance of the new MLRs and their role in USMC force development, see:

“Force Design 2030: Annual Update,” U.S. Marine Corps, May 2022, https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Docs/Force_Design_2030_Annual_Update_May_2022.pdf. 

11. Irene Loewenson, “Marine littoral regiment fends off traditional regiment in exercise,” Marine Corps Times, March 16, 2023, https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2023/03/16/marine-littoral-regiment-fends-off-traditional-regiment-in-exercise/. 

12. Captain Wayne P. Hughs Jr. and RADM Robert P. Girrier, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations, Third Edition, U.S. Naval Institute Press, pg. 20-24, 2019.

13. “Mission Command,” Insights and Best Practices Focus Paper, 2nd. Edition, Deployable Training Division Joint Staff J7, January 2020, https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/fp/missioncommand_fp_2nd_ed.pdf. 

14. See:

Captains Rob Peters and Benjamin Miller, U.S. Navy, and Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hanrahan, U.S. Army, “The Atrophy of Mission Command,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, August 2022, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/august/atrophy-mission-command?check_logged_in=1. 

Lieutenant Matthew Conners, “Mission Command Is Essential to Mission Success,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 2020, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2020/april/mission-command-essential-mission-success.

15. For more on the process and procedure for joint fires, see:

“Joint Publication 3-09: Joint Fire Support,” Joint Staff, April 10, 2019, https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/jp3_09.pdf. 

“Joint Targeting School Student Guide,” Joint Targeting School Dam Nek, March 1, 2017, https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/training/jts/jts_studentguide.pdf?ver=2017-12-29-171316-067. 

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

17. For JWC, see:

Laura Heckman, “SEA-AIR-SPACE NEWS: Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0 ‘Definitely Coming,’ Official Says,” National Defense Magazine, April 5, 2023, https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/4/5/joint-warfighting-concept-30-definitely-coming-official-says. 

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

18. COMNAVAIRFORINST 3500.20D CH4, Chapter 3: Training Cycle. http://elearning.sabrewebhosting.com/CVnTraining/tramanfiles/chapter3.pdf

For balance of time between integrated and other forms of training see pg. 11 of: Bryan Clark and Jesse Sloman, “Deploying Beyond Their Means: America’s Navy and Marine Corps at a Tipping Point,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, November 2015. https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/CSBA6174_(Deploying_Beyond_Their_Means)Final2-web.pdf

19. For disaggregation norms see: 

Naval Operations Concept 2010. https://fas.org/irp/doddir/navy/noc2010.pdf 

Carrier Strike Group 11 Fact Sheet. https://www.public.navy.mil/surfor/ccsg11/Documents/FactSheet.pdf 

20. David F. Winkler, “Oral History of Vice Admiral Henry C. Mustin, USN, (Ret.), Naval Historical Foundation, pdf pg. 180, July 2001, https://www.navyhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Mustin-Oral-History.pdf.

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

22. Michael Hunzeker, Dying to Learn: Wartime Lessons from the Western Front, Cornell University Press, July 2021. 

23. This assertion is based on multiple conversations the author has had with personnel who have served on the staff of OPNAV N7. 

24. Captain Wayne P. Hughs Jr. and RADM Robert P. Girrier, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations, Third Edition, U.S. Naval Institute Press, pg. 229, 2019.

Featured Image: MEDITERRANEAN SEA (June 28, 2016) Sailors prepare to load ordnance onto an F/A-18E Super Hornet assigned to the Sidewinders of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 86 on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Anderson W. Branch/Released)