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)

These republished selections originally featured in the report, “Incubators of Sea Power: Vessel Training Centers and the Modernization of the PLAN Surface Fleet,” published by the China Maritime Studies Institute of the U.S. Naval War College. These selections are republished with permission.

By Ryan D. Martinson

Basic training conducted at Vessel Training Centers (VTCs) is essential to PLAN preparations for high-end conflict in maritime East Asia, which is the primary focus of China’s current military strategy. The surface force, working in conjunction with PLAN aviation, submarines, and coastal defense missile batteries, plus relevant units from the PLA Air Force and PLA Rocket Forces, would be expected to vie for “command of the sea” (制海权) in key operational areas within the first island chain and contest U.S. operations in waters beyond. Yet very little is known about the VTCs charged with helping them prepare to do that. This report seeks to fill this knowledge gap by providing an overview of VTCs— who they are, what they do, and how they do it—and examining some of the main factors affecting their effectiveness.

In particular, this report tracks recent efforts by the PLAN’s VTCs to evolve to meet the requirements of a rapidly expanding and modernizing surface fleet. This expansion/modernization began in the early 2000s, with the development of new classes of destroyers, frigates, and fast attack craft, but has accelerated since Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012. In the last decade, the PLAN has invested massive resources into new construction of advanced surface combatants, from stealthy corvettes intended for “near seas” operations to amphibious assault ships designed to project Chinese naval power throughout the Indo-Pacific and beyond. The PLAN’s embrace of surface warfare has placed huge stresses on the VTCs—to train more ship crews, to keep pace with new technologies and mission sets, and to ensure that training quality matches Beijing’s aspirations for a “world-class” navy. This report argues that despite some enduring challenges, the PLAN’s VTCs have generally succeeded in adapting to these new requirements.

VTCs serve two core missions. The first is to provide “basic training” to crews of newly commissioned surface vessels and older surface vessels that have completed major repairs, upgrades, or extended maintenance and need to be prepared to return to active status. Most classes of PLAN surface ships receive basic training at VTCs. This ranges from fast attack craft to hospital ships, corvettes to cruisers. VTCs are not responsible for training the crews of aircraft carriers. Ships enter VTCs as “Class 2” (二类) vessels (nondeployable) and, assuming they meet all requirements and pass all tests, depart for their operational units as deployable assets (“Class 1,” 一类). The VTCs second core mission is to conduct formal “evaluations” (考核) to ensure that the ship as a whole meets basic standards of readiness and that individual sailors meet the training requirements for their respective posts. These evaluations occur over the course of basic training. Basic training also culminates in a final “comprehensive training evaluation” (全训合格考核) that determines whether or not the ship can be certified for deployment.

The basic training conducted at VTCs is comparable to “Basic Phase” training done by the U.S. Navy’s surface force. VTCs themselves are analogues of the U.S. Navy’s Afloat Training Groups. Like with the U.S. Navy, basic training received at VTCs lays a tactical and technical foundation for the crews of individual ships to conduct more advanced training in conjunction with other ships (“surface action groups,” or ship “formations” in PLAN parlance), other arms of the navy (air, submarine, etc.), and the joint force…

…Ships are “stationed” (驻训) at VTCs for the duration of basic training. This allows the crew to focus entirely on the task at hand and use the dedicated training equipment and facilities available at the VTC. There is no explicit timeline within which basic training must be completed, but in practice it typically takes 6-12 months for a newly-commissioned ship to pass the comprehensive training evaluation. This differs from the U.S. Navy’s basic phase training, which is intended to last precisely 24 weeks (5.5 months).

While each VTC has some latitude to decide how it fulfills its training and evaluation missions, all must strictly adhere to a set of “Outlines on Military Training and Evaluation” (军事训练与考核大 纲, OMTE). The PLA issues a general, military-wide OMTE containing key principles that inform the development of a narrower set of OMTEs for each service.

To date, the PLA has issued three military-wide OMTEs. The first was issued in 2001, going into effect on January 1, 2002. Among other aims, the 2002 OMTE sought to ensure that training evaluations were true assessments of capabilities instead of “theatrical performance.” The 2009 update sought to increase the quantity of combined arms training, focus more on operations in complex electromagnetic environments, augment use of simulators, expand training for non-war military operations, increase “confrontation” (i.e., blue/red) training, and raise standards for basic training. These new requirements directly impacted the policies and approaches of the VTCs. Very little is known about the 2018 OMTE, as the PLA did not allow any media commentary about its contents. Four years later, key themes contained within it remain largely unknown. Each military-wide OMTE begets a separate set of service-specific OMTEs. These documents, in turn, inform the development of OMTEs for different service arms, and in the case of the PLAN surface force, OMTEs for each ship class. VTC instructors adhere to existing OMTEs for ships they are training, and they also help develop OMTEs for new classes of ships.

… Over time, the focus of at-sea training transitions from basic proficiency to handling complex scenarios under stressful situations. The experience of the Type 052D destroyer Qiqiha’er is a case in point. In October 2020, just two months after her commissioning, the Northern Theater Command Navy VTC took the Qiqiha’er out for seven days of training in the Yellow Sea. The training involved 20+ subjects, including firing the ship’s main gun against a surface target (an “enemy frigate”), missile defense (by simulating the firing of the ship’s surface to air missiles and actual firing of its close-in weapons systems—CIWS), man overboard recovery, and underway replenishment.

Basic training at VTCs involves use of live ordnance. Surface combatants fire their main guns against surface targets or targets ashore, CIWS against target drones, rocket-propelled depth charges, and surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles. Ships engaged in at-sea training also use onboard combat systems to simulate the firing of missiles and torpedoes.

Though the focus of basic training is on developing the technical and tactical capabilities of individual ships, VTCs will organize two or more ships to train together at sea, often for several days at a time. For example, in February 2021 the North Sea Fleet VTC took out eight ships for five days of at-sea training in the Yellow Sea. Participants included the Type 056A corvette Zhangjiakou; the Type 052D destroyers Huai’nan, Qiqiha’er, and Tangshan; and the auxiliary Beilan 770.

The composition of training groups changes over time, as some ships complete their training/evaluations and return to the fleet and new ships arrive. For example, in July 2021 the Type 052D destroyer Huai’nan that participated in the February 2021 training event (described in the previous paragraph), departed with another group of ships for six days of training in the Yellow Sea: the Dongpinghu (Type-903A), Kaifeng (052D), Xinji (056A), and Dongying (056A)…

… Despite going out as a group, the focus remains on individual ships. But in some cases, two or more ships in the group will operate together to fulfill training requirements. For example, the preferred PLAN approach to ASW requires multiple ships, aircraft, and other platforms working in close concert. Therefore, ASW training will sometimes involve two or more ships in the group, plus embarked helicopters… 

…In at least some, perhaps all, cases, ships engaged in basic training at VTCs conduct more advanced “formation training” (编队训练). This involves members of a task force operating together as a surface action group, synergizing their efforts to complete tasking. For example, in October 2021 the Northern Theater Command Navy VTC took out two Type 052D destroyers (the Huai’nan and the Kaifeng) and three Type 056A corvettes for five days of formation training in the Yellow Sea. While at sea, the five ships practiced joint air defense involving simulated attacks against enemy aircraft, joint fires strikes against enemy-held islands, mine countermeasures, and surveillance and countersurveillance. Video footage of the training shows the ships operating in conjunction with at least one China Coast Guard vessel, demonstrating the ability of VTCs to enlist forces from other services to support training goals. By contrast, the U.S. Navy defers task force and combined arms training until after Basic Phase training is complete.

At-sea training organized by VTCs is designed to be “realistic” (实战化), i.e., to approximate real combat situations. This involves bringing a ship (or small group of ships) to sea and forcing crews to demonstrate mastery of the training subject in unpredictable circumstances. Ships receive orders to leave port to respond to a particular crisis—e.g. the menacing presence of an enemy warship—and must be prepared to cope with threats almost immediately upon departure. Inevitably, the crisis will escalate and the Chinese ship will be ordered to simulate an attack on the enemy combatant. The ship’s crew might also be forced to fend off attack from an enemy aircraft or evade an enemy missile. The purpose of at-sea training is to place crew members under stress to improve their ability to apply skills developed ashore (in simulators) to real world circumstances. These combat scenarios are created by VTC staff members, who also observe and critique the crew’s responses to them.

To further bolster realism, VTCs will sometimes enlist the help of other PLAN units to serve as adversary (i.e., “blue”) forces. For example, while conducting basic training in 2013, the Type 056 corvette Bengbu trained with a PLAN submarine. In December 2015, the Type 052D destroyer Changsha conducted “confrontation” training with PLAN submarines, aircraft, and other ships. The PLAN’s emphasis on “realism” differs from the U.S. Navy’s Basic Phase training, the focus of which is to ensure that crew members develop the technical skills to perform their jobs. While creating “realistic” scenarios is cited as a U.S. Navy training aim, it clearly does not reach the same degree of priority as in the PLAN. In fact, unit-level combat scenarios designed to stress the whole crew only occur during the “Final Battle Problem”—a 2-3 day event at the end of the Basic Phase. Moreover, unlike the PLAN the U.S. Navy does not generally involve real aircraft or submarines to serve as adversary (“red”) forces in the Basic Phase…

Improving Training Quality

At the same time that VTCs have strived to expand capacity, they have also sought to improve the quality of the training they provide. This has not been easy. At the core of this effort has been the development and improvement of a system of “training supervision” (训练监察). Initially, in the early 2000s, this involved the creation of a Training Supervision Department in each VTC, which later evolved into a set of committees charged with the task of monitoring training quality, providing feedback, and (as discussed below) ensuring the integrity of evaluations. Training “supervisors” ( 监察员) point out problems/failings of individual crew members and weaknesses in the performance of the ship as a whole. They record these problems in dossiers, which can be reviewed by the training staff and officers aboard the ship undergoing training so that adjustments can be made. For example, Eastern Theater Command Navy VTC training supervisor Liu Zhiwan (刘志皖) noted eleven specific problems during a 2017 ASW training event. Among these, “the ship CO’s tactical awareness was not strong, the sonar operator lacked a clear mastery of the [tactical] situation, and the towed array was deployed at the wrong time.”

VTCs’ pedagogy has evolved over time to foster better training outcomes. For years, VTCs employed what was called a “nanny style” (保姆式) approach. That meant that VTC instructors did the bulk of actual teaching. This approach resulted in passivity among ship officers and “weakened the initiative” of ship COs. In 2010, the East Sea Fleet VTC, taking its cues from new OMTE requirements, revised its approach by empowering COs to take greater responsibility in organizing training for their ships. This reportedly increased the agency and creativity of the COs. Henceforth, they were responsible for organizing training for “ordinary” training subjects. The CO took the lead, with VTC staff providing assistance. They were also allowed a greater role in the organization of more important training subjects. The new approach, called a “guiding style” (指导式), “fully mobilized the initiative and creativity” of ship COs….

….VTCs have taken steps to ensure a highly-motivated training staff. By 2013, the leaders of the North Sea Fleet VTC, for example, had concluded that the attitudes of instructors assigned there were too lax. The problem was that the job was too “stable,” so that some of them “lacked enterprising spirit.” To stimulate greater zeal for their work, the North Sea Fleet VTC instituted an “incentive mechanism” and began providing extra compensation for high-performing training captains, trainers, and mission area experts.

VTCs have also instituted mechanisms that allow sailors receiving training to provide feedback on particular instructors or instructional practices. For example, the South Sea Fleet VTC invited sailors to complete appraisals of their instructors and mission area experts. Staff members with negative appraisals were reprimanded for their failings. Students dissatisfied with the quality of instruction can also provide feedback directly to training supervisors at the VTC.

Evaluation: Making Sure the Ship is Ready to Fight

Evaluations are the method by which the PLAN ensures that desired levels of technical and tactical training proficiency are reached for all training subjects. They are also seen as an instrument—in their words, a “command stick” (指挥棒)—to force units to train hard and well…

…After the ship passes all subject evaluations, it can proceed to the comprehensive training evaluation. Taking place at sea over the course of two or more days, the comprehensive training evaluation is both a judgment of the competence of the ship’s commanding officer (and other senior officers) and the competence of the ship as a whole. The core focus is on “integrated offense/defense” (综合攻防), i.e. engaging multiple threats from all three domains (air, surface, and subsurface). PLA media coverage of these events often shows footage of the CO and XO in the ship’s CIC, issuing orders to neutralize (or avoid) enemy threats. Behind them stand members of the “evaluation group” (考核组), who judge the correctness of their words and actions given the situations that they face. Other members of the evaluation group are likely dispersed around the ship, observing the performance of other crew members.

During comprehensive training evaluations, surface combatants will live-fire weapons systems including main guns, CIWS, and rocket-propelled depth charges. When engaging aerial threats, they will launch decoys. When engaging enemy submarines, they will simulate the firing of torpedoes.

To mimic real combat conditions, comprehensive training evaluations are unscripted. Ships put to sea without any knowledge of the challenges they will face. Therefore, these events are naturally very stressful for the CO and the crew. PLAN officers often describe the years of preparation and the culminating event as “more difficult than getting a PhD.”

To further increase realism, VTCs will involve outside units to serve as “blue” aggressor forces. For example, in December 2021 the Northern Theater Command Navy VTC organized three ships—the destroyer Harbin and corvettes Xinji and Songyuan—to participate in a 72-hour comprehensive training evaluation. VTC staff members responsible for organizing the evaluation enlisted the participation of other PLAN surface vessels, at least one PLAN submarine, PLAN early warning and strike aircraft, PLAN observation and communications stations, and electronic warfare forces.

Ensuring the Integrity of Evaluations

… The PLAN does not release its OMTEs, so little is known about its standards of proficiency. But it does openly discuss its struggle to ensure rigorous enforcement of its evaluation standards, which has been long and not completely successful.

The first challenge to the integrity of evaluations is institutional. Specifically, groups and individuals who have an interest in high success rates for evaluations have been allowed to play key roles in the evaluation process. Through the 1990s, the task of evaluating training proficiency was the job of VTC staff members in charge of training. In PLAN parlance, “whoever organized training did the evaluations” (谁组训谁考核). This practice was later recognized as hugely problematic, since trainers had a professional interest in seeing high pass rates because it reflected well on them. As a result, “training was not realistic and evaluations lacked rigor” (训练不实、考核不严), and ships judged certified sometimes fell short when conducting real-world operations.

The VTCs took steps to mitigate this problem in the early 2000s. Responsibility for evaluating crew performance was stripped from training staff and assigned to training supervisors (discussed above). Supervisory organizations evolved over time, but the principle remained the same: namely, to “separate training from evaluations” (训考分离). But assigning training and evaluation to different staff members within the same organization is also problematic, since the organization has a strong interest in passing ships that received training there. High success rates reflect well on the training organization. In theory, VTCs have rules preventing senior leaders from directly interfering in evaluation results. However, that has not always stopped them from trying to exert influence. Moreover, members of the evaluation group no doubt feel indirect pressure to act for the benefit of the organization to which they belong.

This conflict of interest was not just a problem in the PLAN. Early in Xi Jinping’s tenure, the PLA recognized that organizations responsible for conducting training should not also be responsible for evaluating training outcomes. Doing so resulted in a lack of focused training, obsession with safety, exercises that were highly scripted (演习念稿子), formalism (形式主义; i.e., focus on image, not substance), and a tendency to fake results (弄虚作假). To remedy this problem, in 2014 the PLA as a whole began embracing principles of training supervision that relied on evaluators external to the organization undertaking training.

For its part, the PLAN took steps to create “third parties” responsible for supervising comprehensive training evaluations. By 2016, the East Sea Fleet, for example, was organizing third party “joint evaluation groups” (联合考核组) to evaluate officers for ship command. This resulted in more objective evaluations and much higher failure rates. By 2018, the Eastern Theater Command Navy Staff Department had begun sending teams to supervise evaluations of ships that had received training at the VTC. As a result, according to the VTC Deputy Director, Wu Guoyu (吴国瑜), “judgments had become more objective and accurate, and some problems with training had been exposed more prominently.” These accounts suggest that the involvement of the Fleet (now Theater Command Navy) Staff Department has strengthened the integrity of comprehensive training evaluations and improved overall training quality….

….What is clear is that institutional and cultural problems have undermined the PLAN’s efforts to ensure that ship crews actually meet all the training standards outlined in the OMTEs. This is done through formal evaluations over the course of basic training and a final, multi-day comprehensive training evaluation held after basic training is complete. VTCs have strong incentives to give passing marks to all ships/crews that they train, because doing so reflects well on them. However, in recent years the PLAN—following guidance from above—has implemented a system that involves “third party” entities in the evaluation process. These teams of experts from the Theater Command Navy Staff Department are more insulated from institutional pressures to achieve high success rates. By some accounts, this new system is yielding more objective assessments….

…Despite similar timelines, PLAN basic training appears to cover more content than U.S. Navy Basic Phase training. After completing basic training and passing all evaluations, PLAN vessels are expected to be ready for almost immediate deployment, as single ships or as members of “ship formations” (i.e., surface action groups). Therefore, basic training includes subjects such as joint ASW, joint air defense, and joint search and rescue, which the U.S. Navy leaves for later phases in the training process. Moreover, PLAN basic training concludes with a multi-day comprehensive training evaluation that certifies that a ship and its CO are ready for action. The U.S. Navy’s Basic Phase does not.

Lastly, PLAN basic training places much heavier emphasis on training ship crews under “realistic” combat conditions. The aim is to force sailors to demonstrate competence in unpredictable circumstances, under stress, and against “blue” aggressor forces enlisted for the purpose. Except for a 2-3 day capstone Final Battle Problem, reserved until the end of Basic Phase training, the U.S. Navy does not prioritize training under realistic conditions until months later, during follow-on training phases.

Ryan D. Martinson is a researcher in the China Maritime Studies Institute at the Naval War College. He holds a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a bachelor’s of science from Union College. Martinson has also studied at Fudan University, the Beijing Language and Culture University, and the Hopkins-Nanjing Center.

Featured Image: The guided-missile frigate Xuchang (Hull 536) attached to a destroyer flotilla with the navy under the PLA Southern Theater Command fires its close-in weapon system at mock sea targets during a maritime training exercise in waters of the South China Sea in late March, 2020. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Li Hongming and Li Wei)

The following is based on a presentation delivered to multiple think tanks and U.S. Navy staffs. 

By Dmitry Filipoff

“How the Fleet Forgot to Fight” was an article series I published some time ago on CIMSEC. The series covers many topics so I’ll narrow it down and focus on what I believe are the more important things.

When those two major reviews tried to explain why those collisions happened out in the Pacific, one term that got used was the “normalization of deviation.”¹ This term is the main theme behind this series, that the Navy is suffering from very serious self-inflicted problems and is deviating in many of its most important efforts in how it prepares for war.

What specifically inspired the series was writing in Proceedings, mainly writing on the new Fleet Problem exercises by Admiral Scott Swift, who was the Pacific Fleet commander, and also writing by Captain Dale Rielage, who was the Pacific Fleet intelligence director.² Especially an article of his called, “An Open Letter to the U.S. Navy from Red.”³ These articles helped spark the series because of how they describe the character of the Navy’s combat exercises. And given how important these exercises are, this issue really sheds light on systemic problems throughout the Navy.

When looking into the Navy’s exercises, the key themes that kept coming up were things like high kill ratios, training one skillset at a time, ad-hoc debriefing, and shallow opposition. I’m going to briefly go over some of these things.

The structure of combat exercises in the Navy usually took the form of focusing on individual skillsets and warfare areas—anti-surface warfare and anti-air warfare, and so on. But these things were not often combined in a true, multi-domain way. Instead, exercise and training certification regimes often took the form of a linear progression of individual areas.

The opposition forces were made to behave in such a way as to facilitate these events. However, a more realistic and thinking adversary would probably employ the multi-domain tactics and operations that are the mainstay of war at sea. But instead, the opposition often acted more as facilitators for simpler target practice it seems, which is why very high kill ratios were the norm. But more importantly, a steady theme that kept reappearing was that the opposition pretty much never won.

There are so many of these events, so many training certifications that had to be earned in order to be considered deployable that Sailors feel extremely rushed to get through them. And these severe time pressures help encourage this kind of training, especially at the expense of having a solid after-action review process.

By comparison, if you are losing and taking heavy losses then you should be taking that extra time to do after-action reviews and debriefing to figure out what went wrong and how to do better. The after-action review of a combat exercise can be a really humbling experience for the warfighting professional, where leaders are forced to take responsibility for mistakes that, in real combat, would have gotten their people killed. How a leader accounts for such consequential errors can reveal something about their command philosophy and leadership style. And so the way this kind of after-action conversation plays out is absolutely fundamental to the professional development of the warfighter, and it is an important expression of the culture of the organization.

Now when it comes to debriefing culture across the Navy’s communities you can see a difference in the strike fighter community, where candid debriefing and opposition force training is more embedded into how they do business.⁴ But I’d say the opposite was very much true of the Surface Navy’s system. And what is being described here also applies more broadly to how things were done for larger groups of ships, such as at the strike group level.

But overall, the Navy’s major exercises often took a scripted character, where the outcomes were generally known beforehand and the opposition was usually made to lose. Training only one thing at a time against opposition that never wins barely scratches the surface of war, but for the most part this was the best the Navy could do to train its strike groups for years.

So is this common? It looks like all the services have some history of doing heavily scripted combat exercises, but there is a major difference between what the Navy was doing, and what the Air Force and the Army have been doing for a long time.

The Army and Air Force do have high-end combat exercise events they rotate their people through. For the Air Force this is a major exercise called Red Flag and for the Army this happens at the National Training Center.

There they compete against opposition that often inflicts heavy losses and employs a variety of multi-domain assets at the same time. Those forces are composed of units that are dedicated toward acting as full-time opposition for these events, such as the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, where units across the Army rotate through the NTC to face off against them specifically. The job of these standing opposition forces is to learn and practice the doctrine of foreign adversaries and then put that into practice to make for a much more realistic fight. But by comparison it seems the Navy doesn’t have a major, multi-domain standing formation to act as full-time opposition for the high-end fight.

When it comes to the Marines, a valuable question was posed by Captain William Bradley. In an article he asked, “Who among us can say he has been a part of major exercises where ‘success’ was not artificially preordained?”⁵ That article published more than 30 years ago. In the early 2000s, in an article entitled “What Are We Afraid Of?” Colonel Mark Cancian wrote that “We Marines believe we are master tacticians, ready to take on any adversary. In reality we are like a football team that scrimmages against easy opponents, and because it always wins, thinks it’s ready for the Super Bowl.”⁶ Much more recent writing on how opposition forces were used in the Marine Corps kept referencing something called the “die-in-place” method.⁷

Now when it comes to the Chinese Navy, those public reports the Office of Naval Intelligence puts out paint a very different picture from what the U.S. Navy was doing.⁸ The Chinese Navy often trains multiple skillsets at a time, they do not always know the composition and the disposition of the forces they are facing off against, and they do not always know exactly what will happen when the event is about to go down. And not only did Chinese Navy combat exercises become increasingly intense, they were willing to impose on themselves certain warfighting fundamentals of friction that the U.S. Navy was unwilling to do.

They have been training like this for some time now, and with a specific institutional focus on high-end warfighting at the very same time the U.S. Navy was focusing on the low-end spectrum of operations.⁹ And this is a disparity worth highlighting because it can have strategic consequences. For years the U.S. Navy did not try to practice destroying modern fleets, while the Chinese Navy was.

The PLA also explicitly and candidly states that this habit of guaranteeing victory in heavily scripted exercises is counterproductive and something to be overcome.¹⁰ We rarely if ever hear similar things from U.S. Navy leaders.

Recently there have been some positive changes for the U.S. Navy. There are the Fleet Battle Problem exercises Admiral Swift started which seem to be the first truly contested, large-scale, high-end exercise events the Navy has had in a long time. Unit-level exercises and larger-scale events are becoming more difficult through LVC, or Live Virtual and Constructive training, especially the COMPTUEX exercise ships do before deploying.¹¹ The Surface Navy is going through these new SWATT exercises which are now some of the most advanced events surface ships experience.¹² The submarine force has stood up a new aggressor squadron.¹³ And there have been some similar changes for the Marines.¹⁴

But what all of these changes have in common is that they only started within the past several years. The extent to which the Navy will really make the most of them is unclear, and this progress is still reversible. It is also unclear if these improvements have been matched by a willingness to be defeated by the opposition. But what is clear is that the corporate memory of the fleet, the institution of the modern U.S. Navy, has been heavily shaped by decades of these heavily scripted exercises.

And exercises go far beyond training. At the tactical level, they are the one activity that comes closest to real war. So exercises are supposed to play a vital function in setting a standard and serving as proving grounds for all kinds of concepts, ideas, and capabilities. This goes to the very heart of one of the most important missions of a peacetime military, which is to develop the force for future conflict. So the Navy’s decades-long exercise shortfall is far more than an issue of operator skill, it is a sweeping developmental problem.

Consider how you could go about exploring a new tactic, a wargame, or a warfighting concept. You come up with an idea and refine it as much as possible through simulations or other methods. And then you finally try it out in the real world through an exercise. You make sure to use serious opposition to see where things may go wrong or backfire. You then repeat trial and error until you have a sturdy, resilient concept. And once you have that, you convert lessons learned in experimentation into new training, you update the training events, and then rotate your people through those events so they have a chance to learn and apply the new thing.

But this is not how force development worked in the U.S. Navy.

When it comes to at-sea experimentation, relatively few warfighting ideas were ever tried out in the real world to begin with. But if an idea managed to get tested in some sort of combat exercise, it often went up against heavily scripted opposition. As a result it had few, if any, rounds of trial and error. Instead, it often was a one-and-done “validation” event that was deliberately crafted to prove the idea right. But if they moved on in spite of that, the idea was perhaps turned into some publication that was then tucked away in a lessons learned library somewhere. And there it will sit among many other publications that hardly anyone is really familiar with.

Now if they do happen to be familiar with it, they will not often have the chance to actually apply it and practice it in a live combat exercise. But if they do have the chance to actually practice it, it most likely turned into just another check-in-the-box scripted certification event, lost among the dozens if not hundreds of other certifications that are all competing with each other for the time of the extremely busy Sailor. And the Sailors often have no real choice but to rush through them and frequently cut corners just to make due and get out on time for deployment.

It is important to recognize that these scripted exercises and this bloated training certification system overlayed an era of supposed transformation for the Navy, because the littoral power projection era was happening at the very same time as the network-centric era. The Navy promoted supposedly transformative warfighting concepts like ForceNet and AirSea Battle, but to the average deckplate Sailor these concepts didn’t change much. There just never was much AirSea Battle training, network-centric warfighting doctrine, or extensive tactical development for many new major capabilities.

Now, the Navy certainly made an effort to transform, but progress cannot be measured by how many new capabilities come online, how many CONOPs or doctrine documents get published, or how many wargames or simulations get run. If these things are going to truly come alive they have to be taught to and refined by the people that will be charged with their execution. In my mind at least when it comes to force development and warfighting, real progress and skill is best defined by what the Sailors and commanders on the deckplate know how to do well, and for that there is only training.

So looking back on the Navy’s recent history of force development, so much of what the Navy did just didn’t go that far. This habit of unrealistic exercising and this overflowing training certification system came together to render so many warfighting methods untested, unrefined, and untaught.

For an important example on why other parts of force development have to be grounded in combat training and translated into combat training, you can look to the Navy’s wargaming enterprise. These wargames are really important to how the Navy thinks about the future, and among many things these wargames can inform war planning. But if you read more into it, these wargames aren’t always as scripted or as straightforward as the live training and exercise events, and the fleet often takes very serious losses in these wargames. Especially against China.¹⁵

So what could be the implications of having a large disparity between the realism of training and the realism in wargaming? For one, it means the war plans the United States has drawn up for great power conflict are filled with tactics and operations for which the U.S. Navy has made barely any effort to actually teach to its people. To paraphrase a certain Defense Secretary, you go to war with the fleet you trained, not the one you wargamed.¹⁶

Strategy and Operations 

Another major implication of the exercise shortfall was in how the Navy applied strategy to operations, or what the fleet was spending its time doing on deployment in recent decades. Because the Navy not only has the chance to work on force development through exercises within the workup cycle, but also once ships are certified and out on deployment. But once ships deployed in the power projection era, their operations mostly focused on missions that didn’t contribute all that much to high-end force development.

It should be remembered that many of the low-end power projection missions that dominated Navy deployments during these past few decades, things like security cooperation, forward presence, maritime security, these things were at first not seen as overriding demand signals for the Navy’s time. The strategy and policy documents the Navy was putting out just after the Cold War ended essentially characterized the opportunity to do many of these missions as a luxury, something that was afforded to the Navy only through the demise of a great power rival.¹⁷

When it comes to the major campaigns the U.S. was involved in these past few decades, mainly Iraq and Afghanistan, what needs to be understood is that blue water naval power really struggles to find relevance in these kinds of wars. A destroyer or a submarine just cannot do much to fight insurgents or nation-build. So for the vast majority of the fleet’s ships, they usually did other things with their time, including many of these missions that were certainly helpful but often optional. Plenty of these operations are better described as the many opportunities that come with the especially diverse set of missions you see at the low-end spectrum of operations, rather than really pressing requirements driven by wartime demand or acute geopolitical risk. For just one example, while tens of thousands of Soldiers and Marines were solely focused on advising heavily embattled Iraqi and Afghan troops, the Navy enjoyed the luxury of partnering with dozens of other nations, almost all of whom were not engaged in any major hostilities.

Now in spite of their own crushing operational tempos, the Army and the Air Force have guaranteed significant amounts of forces for their high-end exercises. Hundreds of aircraft participate in the Air Force’s Red Flag exercises each year, and about a third of the Army’s active-duty brigades rotate through the National Training Center annually.¹⁸

The force generation models of these services, and the associated combatant commander demand signals, have preserved significant amounts of forces and readiness for these services to consistently conduct major high-end force development exercises at home. The ready forces of these services are not all exclusively allocated toward feeding COCOM demand.

Compared to this the Navy operates under a different model. The Navy is a continuously deploying expeditionary force, compared to the more garrison-oriented postures of the Army and Air Force. Once U.S. Navy ships complete maintenance and certification and are deemed ready for high-end operations, they are then turned over to the operational chain of command. The Navy is essentially the only service that is afforded little to no ready forces for its own use and force development agenda. So it looks like for the past few decades almost all of the ready naval power of the fleet was being spent on combatant commander demand. And those demand signals were so overpowering that they made it incredibly difficult for the Navy to pull together enough ready ships to do truly large-scale and high-end exercises on a regular basis.

Now, some might say the Navy actually did do a lot for force development on deployment when it was exercising with partners and allies abroad. But there are some issues with this. The U.S. Navy does not like sharing various types of classified information with many partner fleets, and this really limits the willingness of the Navy to fully flex its capability abroad. Another major reason is that there is a severe amount of concern on the Navy’s part, perhaps overconcern, on being surveilled by competitors when exercising in forward areas, or anywhere actually. So aside from what looks like a handful of exceptions, most of the exercises the Navy does abroad with partners are maybe even more straightforward than what it does close to home.

But the main point here is that the Navy hardly recognizes force development as a major driver of fleet operations. Things like working out wargames, warfighting methods, and new tactics in the real world must be recognized as some of the strongest possible demand signals for ready naval power. So as the Navy reconfigures itself for great power competition it has to think about how it will strike a new balance between spending time on forward operations versus spending time on working on itself.

The fleet can start with the strategic guidance the Navy has to align itself with. There is a national defense strategy that makes great power competition the main priority.¹⁹ So what does the Navy need to learn about for great power competition? There is certainly a broad spectrum of capability that is relevant to that competition, but high-end warfighting especially deserves greater emphasis compared to where it has been these past few decades.

So the Navy needs to identify what specific operations have the most learning value when it comes to getting better at great power competition skillsets. Look at the learning value of a Fleet Battle Problem or a SWATT exercise and compare it to maritime security missions or doing security cooperation with a third world partner. It should become pretty clear that these exercise events can teach the Navy far more about high-end warfighting than most forward operations.

And these events need to be deliberately resourced in global force management rather than be something that is squeezed in between events within the workup cycle, or squeezed into the window of time where a deploying unit has just completed certification but hasn’t yet reached the forward operating environment. And you have to view these exercise events as something directly connected to making Distributed Maritime Operations, or any of the Navy’s warfighting methods, a more tangible reality. Because the more reps and sets you do of these things the faster you will climb that learning curve and the quicker you will mitigate the outstanding force development risk residing within the Navy. Imagine how much progress could be made if a strike group spent a full two or three months on deployment working on Navy force development through focused reps and sets of contested opposition force exercises and at-sea trials. We could get to a place where these high-end exercises are often the point of some deployments and not just an accessory. The Navy can consider how steep it wants its slope of improvement to be.

Now I want to paraphrase something I read from an admiral who was the submarine force commander a couple years back. In a news article he said something along the lines of, “We’re taking a really hard look and in-depth scrub of our certification process….to insert ten days’ worth of force-on-force training for the high-end fight.”²⁰ Only ten days’ worth within a months-long process. This points to something important about the Navy when it comes to trying to do more unscripted, contested exercises.

Why was it so difficult for the Navy to make so little time for one of the most important things it has to be doing? Whether it’s cutting certifications to make time for more thorough events within the workup cycle, or retasking ships on deployment, it has often been a tough bureaucratic fight to make space for these things. This problem suggests that the Navy has gone for so long without unscripted, contested force development exercises that the need for them may have turned into a blind spot, and it didn’t realize why it is so critical that it is missing out on these things, and why it is so fundamental to the well-being of the force. If there is not that much experience in doing this kind of thing then there will not be that many advocates. And so what the Navy has been doing with its time and its budgets and its forces for so many years was stretched to its limits in the absence of a major demand signal.

The Force Development Demand Signal

And that demand signal is something I really want to hone in on.

I want to try and describe a framework for why force development is a major demand signal for ready naval power. And I also want to try to describe the nature of failing to account for force development risk.

There are at least two elements that can drive this demand signal and increase force development risk. One is the force development of competitors and the other is the nature of disruptive capability surprise.

Looking at China, it is critical to understand that the Chinese military is primarily focused on its force development. They also have no significant overseas operations that split their resources elsewhere. And because of that, the operating posture of their fleet has far more in common with the interwar period U.S. Navy than the modern U.S. Navy does. This can make them especially dangerous, because like the interwar period U.S. Navy (that would of course go on to help win WWII) their operating posture allows them to spend most of their time on working on themselves for the high-end fight.

Going to a second major demand signal of force development, that is guarding against disruptive capability surprise.

Look at WWI, the machine gun, chemical gas, and rapid-fire artillery. When they finally put all these new things together, it created a type of warfare that nobody had really seen before. New technology had changed the nature of tactical success so much, but their peacetime force development failed to detect that. The disruption that came from those new weapons and the tactics they produced was so powerful it helped rip apart the operational and strategic plans of nations caught in great power war. And of course there was a tremendous human cost in failing to detect these new tactical trends.

So how do you get a sense of that burden today, of how much real-world combat experimentation needs to go into modern high-end force development? And how much latent force development risk could be residing within modern forces?

Look to how networked combat between great powers has never happened before, or how fleet combat between great powers hasn’t happened since WWII. Look at everything that has evolved since then. Electronic warfare, cyber, missiles, satellites, so much has changed, and our ability to truly know how all of that will actually come together to produce specific tactical dynamics and winning combinations is very hard to know for sure.

A lot of these questions are already being looked at by organizations within the Navy, but the furthest the analysis is able to go is often limited by the imperfections of simulations. Some time ago we published an excellent piece on CIMSEC where people from the Naval Postgraduate School, mainly wargamers and operations researchers, talked about doing tens of thousands of simulations and models to look at tactics for a new unmanned warship.²¹ Those kinds of people certainly learn plenty about new tactics, but I imagine they will tell you that they could benefit from a lot more real-world experimentation. That is because real-world experimentation can discover the decisive tactical truths that are hiding within the seams of simulation. And I also imagine that wargamers and operations researchers would want some of their insights to eventually be passed on to the deckplate Sailor through updated training.

Now when it comes to force development, clearly you want to enter a conflict with the most tried-and-true warfighting methods and capabilities. But it’s almost inevitable that when you finally get into a real high-end fight, something is going to break. So I want to use another example to show how force development risk reveals itself in wartime.

The U.S. submarine force entered WWII with ill-conceived concepts of operation, a highly risk-averse culture, faulty weapons, and underdeveloped tactics. Submariners at first expected to mostly use sonar to attack their targets (which didn’t make much sense at the time), the torpedoes didn’t work well, and they didn’t have much doctrine for unrestricted submarine warfare.²²

This force development failure happened in spite of interwar period wargaming, Fleet Problem exercises, and Admirals Nimitz and King both having a decent amount of submarine experience in their careers. U.S. naval commanders even had the benefit of watching German U-Boats earn combat experience as they sunk plenty of shipping in the Atlantic before the U.S. formally entered the war. But in spite of all of that, the U.S. submarine force punched far below its weight for many months while the rest of the force depended very heavily on them to take the fight to enemy home waters at the start of the conflict.

The submarine force would go on to fix these problems, but they were forced to experiment with their force development in the middle of the war.²³ And this points to something important as to why you should really try to get your force development right in peacetime. The better you do in peacetime, the more you will be able to focus your wartime force development on proactive evolution, instead of retroactive corrective action. You would rather be taking those hard-earned combat lessons and using them to make the next best torpedo, rather than trying to figure out what’s going wrong with the ones you already have. And so if these force development shortfalls are worth taking the time to fix in the middle of a war, then surely they are worth fixing today in a time of relative peace.

But coming back to the present, it is hard to say just how many unhelpful and fragile things have made it into the modern U.S. Navy simply because hotly contested, unscripted, high-end exercises were not there to serve as proving grounds or set a standard. While the Navy was working to mitigate geopolitical risk through forward operations, the force development risk that resides within the Navy has been building, and building. The Navy’s system of trying things out in the real world has almost certainly primed the fleet for a lot of hard corrective action in the event of great power conflict.

And so imagine how this could play out. Imagine there was a new major concept of operations or set of TTPs in the works, and it was lucky enough to get the Navy to devote a single large-scale exercise to trying it out. And after that one exercise it got the stamp of approval and then was filed away in a lessons learned system somewhere. Now imagine a conflict breaks out and a fleet commander needs that concept. And when he sees it, it’s the first time he’s ever really looked at it, he’s never tried it out, he’s pretty sure nobody under his command has been trained to do it, and he can’t even be sure that the concept itself was the product of a rigorous series of at-sea combat trials.

Now how much risk do you think that has? The Navy has plenty of things like this residing within itself. And this points to why heavily scripted combat exercises and training events can be so self-defeating, because when you script the challenge out of an exercise, you mask the shortfalls you could be revealing, and you defer the critical warfighting lessons you could be learning. So it’s important to view the habit of heavily scripted exercises as a significant source of self-inflicted risk. And it’s important to contemplate just how much of this risk has been injected into the Navy after doing mainly these kinds of exercises for decades.

So it is safe to say that if a major conflict breaks out tomorrow, from the very start a lot of people in the Navy will be forced to improvise. And by its very nature, the skill of improvisation is just about the furthest thing heavily scripted training is able to teach.

Why Is This Happening?

Why is this happening, why does the Navy keep doing this? There are several reasons, and they include expedience, politics, and culture.

Heavily scripted exercises are expedient. They cost a lot less time than more contested events. It allows you to put many more exercises into the schedule, get more certifications done, and to get through the schedule with fewer interruptions.

A common thing you hear from naval officers who work on these things, is for example, when they tried to insert electronic warfare, or cyber, or some sort of degraded critical enabler into an exercise, it often gets white-carded out of the event. The umpires jump in, restart the event, and “white-card” those effects out of the experience. And the common justification is that they have a schedule to get through, they have to preserve that schedule. Which implies that the schedules are not designed with these things in mind, and that simply getting through the schedule or the checklist might be more important to some than the quality of the actual learning experience. This is a common theme of this problem. Scripting exercises saves time, which nobody has enough of.

When it comes to politics, hard-fought and contested exercises can have programmatic implications. And after something becomes programmatic, it can become political. There is a story that shows this. In the 1980s there was a naval officer, Vice Admiral Hank Mustin, who was a very hard-charging personality who focused much of his career on force development and operational innovation. In an exercise he organized, he scored simulated hits on a carrier with a notional anti-ship missile capability. He figured he had something worthwhile and filed it away in his exercise report. But as he tracked the progress of the report as it made its way through the chain of command, he noticed that the part about him getting hits on the carrier kept getting deleted. And he eventually found out that his superiors at the four-star level were doing this because carrier funding was a difficult topic with Congress at the time.²⁴

If something keeps failing in contested exercises, it is perfectly natural to question if the service should continue to invest in it. The proper response is to innovate. You don’t suppress challenging feedback, you don’t script the risk out of the exercise, or force people to stick with disproven warfighting methods. Rather, you go back to the drawing board, you do trial and error, and you innovate with your tactics, operations, and training. Because that’s exactly what you would be doing in wartime. And so it’s not enough to have well-designed or realistic exercises, there needs to be the will to act on their results, a healthy tolerance for the inherent uncertainty of force development, and the patience for rigorous trial and error.

That brings me to the final point on why this is happening, and that is culture.

Some parts of the military services are afflicted by zero-defect culture. Zero-defect culture is a collection of inherently corrosive dynamics that undermine the health of institutions. What it boils down to is that it is often professionally unsafe to report problems or shortfalls, or even areas that simply have room for improvement. It can be professionally unsafe to make simple mistakes, even honest mistakes. But this culture can force people to engage in dishonest behavior as they try to navigate the irreconcilable contradictions of an overbearing system and a climate of fear in some parts of the fleet.

And this often affects combat training. Because the training requirements system is overflowing, it roughly takes the form of something like this: You have 200 days’ worth of training requirements to complete, but only 150 days to do it. And you’re immersed in a zero-defect culture. So what do you do, when what you have been asked to do is literally impossible? In the Navy it’s called gundecking, in the Army it’s called pencil-whipping. But basically, you report that things are green across the board, and that you completed every one of those 200 days’ worth of requirements.

So how do you define good leadership in this dynamic? What do you make of the commander that gundecks the paperwork for his motorcycle safety certification, in order to buy a sliver of time to do more complex air defense training with his Sailors? Does that make him a slightly better leader than the commander who doesn’t do that? Possibly. But what happens when you have so many commanders across the Navy making that subjective judgment on their own, deciding which of these combat training requirements is worth actually doing, and which are worth only reporting as being done? And when you send that reporting up the chain, to the higher echelon commanders who have come up through this system, how do they decide what to believe? So when out-of-control training requirements come together with zero-defect culture, the natural result can be what the Lying to Ourselves Army War College report described as, a “state of mutually agreed deception.”²⁵

So how does heavily scripted exercising complement zero defect culture? It spares the Navy from having the hard conversations its culture is not always the best at having. It allows people to be professionally safe, to keep their heads down, and stay in their lanes. Or would you rather be the person whose professional competence is immediately under suspicion because the opposition force pushed a little too hard in that last exercise? Or come across as the rogue maverick who tried out a new set of tactics in an event, rather than using an officially sanctioned checklist that might have been written 15 years ago? Or the Navy finding out that a certain capability or platform that it bought with a lot of taxpayer money is maybe not all it has been made out to be? The main thing is that in zero-defect culture, heavily scripted exercises can make things professionally and politically safe.

And so we can say a lot about how to make combat exercises more realistic. But the cultural and political factors are maybe the most decisive obstacles. When it comes to combat exercises, these factors have made it extremely difficult for the Navy to go harder on itself, to be more honest with itself, and to have a constructive approach toward pushing its people to their limits and beyond.

There is also a broader theme here. I’ve talked a lot about exercises, training, and force development so far, but these issues go much further than this. The main fundamental problem of concern is the state of tactical focus in the fleet. There is a resounding concern across many in the Navy that serious tactical learning and effectiveness has really fallen by the wayside. Whether it’s how the Navy does manning, personnel evaluations, PME, admin, inspections, for so many things in a very comprehensive way, it looks like serious tactical learning is struggling to make the list of top priorities. Instead, a large variety of other things have been allowed to overwhelm the time and focus of Sailors, and this is coming at the direct expense of their tactical warfighting skill. There are many ways to tell this story, and the story behind the Navy’s exercise shortfall is just one of them.

Now taking a longer strategic view, after the Soviet Union fell, the Navy could have taken a different path rather than pivoting all the way to power projection. This sort of awkward mismatch between blue water naval power for counterinsurgency could have actually been a blessing in disguise for the Navy while the other services were heavily tied down by operations in the Middle East. The Navy could have instead focused on settling complex developmental questions posed by emerging net-centric concepts. But the Navy effectively missed a historic opportunity to make major progress on force development, where the fleet could have focused on securing its future edge.

Instead, it let a rising rival close the gap. For a generation now the Chinese and U.S. Navies have focused their skills, training, and warfighting culture on opposite ends of the warfighting spectrum. This disparity can be far more fatal to the American fleet. A superpower navy does not threaten its existence by lacking low-end skills, but it can certainly risk destruction by not being ready for the high-end fight. This is why full-spectrum competence across the range of operations is so indispensable and can’t be ignored for a superpower fleet. Now a possible historical legacy of the likes of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and the Ayatollah could include helping the U.S. Navy lose enough high-end skill that it was taken advantage of by China.

Conclusion

To wrap it up, I would say much of the modern U.S. Navy’s story is that of an organization that was divorced from what had long been its defining mission, which was high-end sea control. And when that separation occurred at the end of the Cold War and the start of the littoral power projection era, problems radiated throughout the Navy’s institutions, and especially across its system of force development.

Now the Navy is embarking on a tough transition back toward great power competition, which has been made all the more urgent by the rise of a rival maritime superpower.

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. “Strategic Readiness Review 2017,” U.S. Secretary of the Navy, pg. 3 2017, https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/4328654/U-S-Navy-Strategic-Readiness-Review-Dec-11-2017.pdf. 

2. 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.

3. 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. 

4. “Ninety Days to Combat: Required Training Capabilities for the Fallon Range Training Complex 2015-2035,” Naval Air Warfighting Development Center, June 2015 ,https://frtcmodernization.com/portals/FRTCModernization/files/FRTCM_EIS_-_90-Days_to_Combat-Jun2015.pdf. 

5. William S. Bradley, “The Training Mandate,” Marine Corps Gazette, October 1990.

6. Col. Mark Cancian, USMCR, “What Are We Afraid of?” Marine Corps Gazette, April 2002.

7. See:

Staff, Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, “Opposing Force TTP,” Marine Corps Gazette, August 2016. https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/2018/02-27 

Sgt. Luke G. Cardelli, “MAGTF Integrated Exercise (MIX-16),” Marine Corps Gazette, November 2017. https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/2017/11/magtf-integrated-exercise-mix-16

8. See:

Office of Naval Intelligence, “The PLA Navy: New Capabilities and Missions for the 21^st Century, 2015. https://fas.org/irp/agency/oni/pla-navy-2015.pdf

Office of Naval Intelligence, “China’s Navy,” 2007. https://fas.org/irp/agency/oni/chinanavy2007.pdf

Also see: Ryan D. Martinson, “China Maritime Report No. 24: Incubators of Sea Power: Vessel Training Centers and the Modernization of the PLAN Surface Fleet,” U.S. Naval War College China Maritime Studies Institute, November 2022, https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1023&context=cmsi-maritime-reports. 

9. Captain Dale Rielage, “Chinese Navy Trains and Takes Risks,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 2016. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2016-05/chinese-navy-trains-and-takes-risks

10. See:

Elsa B. Kania and Ian Burns McCaslin, “Learning Warfare from the Laboratory, China’s Progression in Wargaming and Opposition Force Training,” Institute for the Study of War, September 2021, https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Learning%20Warfare%20from%20the%20Laboratory%20ISW%20September%202021%20Report.pdf.

David C. Logan, “The Evolution of the PLA’s Red-Blue Exercises,” China Brief Volume 17 Issue 4, Jamestown Foundation, March 14, 2017, https://jamestown.org/program/evolution-plas-red-blue-exercises/. 

11. See:

Megan Eckstein, “Warfighting Development Centers, Better Virtual Tools Give Fleet Training a Boost,” USNI News, February 23, 2017, https://news.usni.org/2017/02/23/fleet-training-getting-a-boost-through-better-lvc-tools-warfighting-development-centers.

Megan Eckstein, “IKE Carrier Strike Group Commands SEALs, Marine Missile Teams in First-of-a-Kind, Large-Scale Drill,” USNI News, February 17, 2021, https://news.usni.org/2021/02/17/ike-carrier-strike-group-commands-seals-marine-missile-teams-in-first-of-a-kind-large-scale-drill. 

12. See:

Dmitry Filipoff, “RDML Christopher Alexander On Accelerating Surface Navy Tactical Excellence, CIMSEC, January 11, 2022, https://cimsec.org/rdml-christopher-alexander-on-accelerating-surface-navy-tactical-excellence/.

Dmitry Filipoff, “On the Cutting Edge of U.S. Navy Exercising: Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training,” CIMSEC, November 30, 2018, https://cimsec.org/on-the-cutting-edge-of-u-s-navy-exercising-surface-warfare-advanced-tactical-training/. 

13. Dmitry Filipoff, “Undersea Red: Captain Eric Sager on the Submarine Force’s New Aggressor Squadron,” CIMSEC, July 13, 2021, https://cimsec.org/undersea-red-captain-eric-sager-on-the-submarine-forces-new-aggressor-squadron/. 

14. Gidget Fuentes, “Marine Infantry Training Shifts From ‘Automaton’ to Thinkers, as School Adds Chess to the Curriculum,” USNI News, December 15, 2020, https://news.usni.org/2020/12/15/marine-infantry-training-shifts-from-automaton-to-thinkers-as-school-adds-chess-to-the-curriculum. 

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

16. Eric Schmitt, “Iraq-Bound Troops Confront Rumsfeld Over Lack of Armor,” The New York Times, December 8, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/08/international/middleeast/iraqbound-troops-confront-rumsfeld-over-lack-of.html. 

17. John B. Hattendorf, D.Phil., “U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1990s Selected Documents,” U.S. Naval War College Press, pg. 89, 2006, https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1026&context=newport-papers&#page=95.

Quoted as: “With the demise of the Soviet Union, the free nations of the world claim preeminent control of the seas and ensure freedom of commercial maritime passage. As a result, our national maritime policies can afford to de-emphasize efforts in some naval warfare areas.”

18. For National Training Center reference:

Colonel John D. Rosenberger, “Reaching Our Army’s Full Combat Potential in the 21st Century: Insights from the National Training Center’s Opposing Force,” Institute of Land Warfare, February 1999, https://www.ausa.org/sites/default/files/LPE-99-2-Reaching-our-Armys-Full-Combat-Potential-in-the-21st-Century-Insights-from-the-National-Training-Centers-Opposing-Force.pdf.

Major John F. Antal, “OPFOR: Prerequisite to Victory,” Institute of Land Warfare, May 1993. https://www.ausa.org/sites/default/files/LPE-93-4-OPFOR-Prerequisite-for-Victory.pdf

For Red Flag reference:

414th Combat Squadron Training “Red Flag,” July 2012. https://www.nellis.af.mil/About/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/284176/414th-combat-training-squadron-red-flag/

19. U.S. Department of Defense 2022 National Defense Strategy, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-NPR-MDR.PDF.

The latest NDS describes competition between great powers as “strategic competition,” rather than “great power competition” as its predecessor NDS. In practice the intent is much the same.

20. Megan Eckstein, “Navy Wants More Complex Sub-on-Sub Warfare Training,” U.S. Naval Institute News, October 27, 2016. https://news.usni.org/2016/10/27/navy-wants-complex-sub-sub-warfare-training.

21. By Jeffrey Kline, John Tanalega, Jeffrey Appleget, and Tom Lucas, “Developing New Tactics and Technologies in Naval Warfare: The MDUSV Example,” CIMSEC, January 24, 2019, https://cimsec.org/developing-new-tactics-and-technologies-in-naval-warfare-the-mdusv-example/. 

22. Frank Hoffman, “Wartime Innovation and Learning,” Joint Forces Quarterly, 4th Quarter, 2021, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/jfq/jfq-103/jfq-103_100-109_Hoffman.pdf?ver=YxmLg-7ITNr4chMEkKZDJw%3D%3D. 

23. Ibid.

24. David Winkler, “Oral History of Vice Admiral Henry C. Mustin,” Naval Historical Foundation, pg. 146, July 2001, https://www.navyhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Mustin-Oral-History.pdf.

25. Dr. Leonard Wong and Dr. Stephen J. Gerras, “Lying to Ourselv o Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Pr es: Dishonesty in the Army Profession,” U.S. Army War College, pg. 12, 2015, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1465&context=monographs. 

Featured Image: Indian Ocean (January 6th, 2021) The aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68) steams in the Indian Ocean. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Drace Wilson)

By Barney Rubel

The Navy recently issued Change 1 to one of its key new doctrine books, Navy Warfare Publication 3, Fleet Warfare. The change was issued to update the definitions of a number of key terms to keep them in accordance with joint doctrine. The issuing command, the Navy Warfare Development Center, says “Ultimately, Change 1 to NWP-3 enhances fleet-centric warfighting effectiveness through establishing a framework for the execution of fleet warfare at the operational level of warfare.” Certainly there is an advantage to maintaining consistency across the services in the definition of terms, but NWP-3’s contribution to warfighting effectiveness is less than it could be due to its generic approach to the subject. Granted, it is an unclassified publication, but nonetheless, it could have offered more practical detail on the evolving nature of the Navy’s approach to warfighting. An unclassified practical framework would be vital to operationalizing the Navy’s renewed emphasis on fleet-level warfare.

Beyond including the definition of various terms like strategy, operations, tactics, and mission command, NWP-3 describes the three levels of war and the command and control arrangements the U.S. has established to direct forces within that framework. Focusing on the Navy piece of the action, NWP-3 defines numbered fleets as the Navy’s highest tactical-level commands, although in certain cases like Fifth Fleet (specific fleets are not mentioned in the text) the fleet staff might also function as a Joint Force Maritime Component Commander (JFMCC) in which case it would constitute an operational-level command. The Navy components – Pacific Fleet, U.S. Naval Forces Europe, and U.S. Naval Forces Northern Command – are the Navy’s highest operational level of war commanders. This is depicted conceptually by the graphic below.

So long as the strategic issue is confined to a particular theater, this graphic – and the U.S. military command structure (Unified Command Plan or UCP) – is an accurate depiction of how things would work. But for the Navy, there is a problem associated with the fact that the oceans of the world are all connected, essentially forming one single world ocean that cuts across combatant command jurisdictions. While NWP-3 mostly confines its discussion to the framework of the UCP, it makes one excursion that acknowledges the disconnect. It quotes a Chinese white paper that declares the PLAN will focus on the far seas, which sets up a global challenge, and then says on page 10:

“Warfare against an enemy of such resource and reach will require the Navy to operate as a globally unified force, orchestrating naval power in a manner that overcomes geographic, organizational, and administrative boundaries. It will require that commanders align, share, and synchronize assets, capabilities, operations, and understanding across the globe while balancing challenges unique to their regional theaters. Fleet warfare will require the holistic, integrated application of distributed naval power across an entire fleet, working in concert with other fleets in other operational areas to confound, dislocate, and defeat our enemies. Campaigns must account for fleet warfare on a global scale, and form an integrated, coherent unity of purpose, effort, and effect across the naval, joint, and likely coalition force. Fleet warfare in an era of GPC requires integrated and distributed multifleet operations on a global level.”

It then promptly reverts back to the theater-by-theater model for the following 35 pages, until it offers an impromptu solution on page 45:

“Fleet warfare in this GPC era will require global coordination that crosses traditional CCDR boundaries. The supported CCDR’s JFMCC will integrate naval activity across CCDR lines under the authorities of a support command relationship. The SECDEF establishes and prioritizes support between and among CCDRs via the support command relationship. When a supporting commander cannot fulfill the needs of the supported commander, the SECDEF will be notified by either commander and will rely on the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Services to determine solutions.”

While this may reflect what is permissible in the context of the UCP, it is an awkward and probably slow arrangement that does not seem consistent with the description of global naval coordination requirements on page 10. If NWP-3 is trying to advocate for something different in the way of global naval C2, this is a pretty subtle and frankly weak approach to doing so. The discrepancy between the two paragraphs could be confusing, especially as a doctrinal publication trying to navigate the seams of the issue.

This harkens back to the early 2000s when the Navy was attempting to achieve some degree of global coordination due to shrinking force structure. It established Tenth Fleet to globalize cyber operations, the Global Engagement Strategy Division N52, and according to then-Fleet Forces Commander Admiral John Nathman, a global network of naval component commander operations centers that would coordinate with each other. It is still not clear how much global coordination the Navy is able to accomplish on its own recognizance. This has relevance due to calls by certain members of Congress for the Navy to develop a new global maritime strategy, something which in theory the Navy has no authority to do under the joint structure.

NWP-3 unfortunately does not spend a lot of time discussing naval operations in a joint context. When it does, it says:

“Future fleet warfare will increasingly rely on capabilities not necessarily under direct fleet command. For example, special operations forces, embarked on fleet vessels, could be used to enhance targeting, communications, and other capabilities. Capabilities can also include those inherent within other fleets, or resident within naval forces already in theater. Joint forces, now including space and cyberspace, all have capabilities that can support fleet warfare. Additionally, national capabilities are increasingly responsive and pervasive as technological advances expand across the maritime domain. Furthermore, integrated campaigning below the level of armed conflict provides opportunities in peace to find and refine efficiencies that are practical in war.”

The significant omission in this paragraph has to do with the Air Force and airpower. A large portion of a fleet warfighting manual ought to outline how Navy forces would work with the Air Force in defense (integrated air and missile defense), offense, and scouting. Air Force bombers have considerable maritime strike and mining capabilities that could be magnified via Navy cooperation. Large swaths of ocean create significant demand for domain awareness and tactical-level intelligence that aircraft can provide. Land-based aviation typically outranges carrier aviation and could offer major augmentations to carrier concepts of operation. The other services also deserve more explicit mention. The Marine Corps is getting into the anti-shipping business and the Army is talking about it with its Multi-Domain Operations concept. Why would the Navy’s capstone document on fleet warfighting not discuss all this? Mentions of potential joint collaboration should not be limited to brief hypotheticals, but rather expanded into detailed frameworks for how the joint force can bolster the capability of the fleet and vice versa. Despite being major service-level warfighting concepts, neither DMO nor EABO are mentioned in the document.

As a nit, NWP-3 asserts that British Admiral Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar saved Britain from the threat of a French invasion. In fact, Napoleon had already abandoned such plans before the battle took place. The reality is more nuanced; the collective “mission command” decision-making of a number of Royal Navy admirals, along with inspired strategic directives by the First Sea Lord Barham, confounded Napoleon’s attempted combinations in the months preceding Trafalgar to lure Royal Navy forces away from the English Channel so he could mount an invasion. Trafalgar was a kind of coup de grace that freed Britain up to take the strategic offensive. A Navy doctrinal publication should exhibit more careful historical appreciation.

The publication seeks too much erudition in the theoretical realm, leading to a rather confusing conclusion: “Recent history suggests that fleet warfare will be a protracted affair of episodic decisive engagement as each side seeks degrees of sea control suitable for supporting operational objectives.” This illustrates the overall problem with the publication – it resembles more theoretical Naval War College reading than it does substantive and practical guidance for the fleets to operationalize.

The establishment of the Joint Force Maritime Component Commander headquarters and its embedded Maritime Operations Center (MOC) spelled a new approach to fleet-level command and control. This should be the focus of NWP-3. How do all the elements of a fleet, including surface, air, subsurface, logistics, and others work together? How do they all work in conjunction with joint and perhaps international forces? The theory of operational art is a good thing for officers to learn, but there is currently a gap between that and the teaching of unit and community tactics that needs to be filled. There must be some unclassified way of discussing fleet-level operations that bridges the operational and tactical levels that is specific enough to provide practical clarity for MOC watchstanders, JFMCC planners, and individual unit commanders. NWP-3 should ideally constitute a bridge between the strategic and tactical levels, yet it makes no mention of Admiral Bradley Fiske’s injunction that no strategy is valid unless it takes account of the tactics required to make it work. The idea at the fleet level is to set units up for tactical success rather than counting on them to exhibit tactical genius to make up for deficiencies in broader operational design.

Despite the theorizing about DMO and fleet-level concepts, right now the fleet would fight a conventional war at sea by mainly using carrier strike groups and submarines to some extent. P-8s would conduct anti-submarine warfare and such MQ-4s as are available would provide reconnaissance and surveillance, and perhaps targeting. How exactly the various elements would do this is naturally classified, but the fact that the main source of anti-ship capability still resides in the carrier air wings is something that should be explicitly talked about, and then how the other elements of the Navy support it. At a minimum, such a description would provide a baseline for thinking through other ways of doing business at the fleet level. The Navy needs clearer guidance to bridge its current formations and force packages into the larger-scale combat entity that fleet-level warfare is intended to wield.

NWP-3 is an indicator that the Navy is having trouble shifting gears from a service that has engaged almost exclusively in projecting power over the shore from unchallenged sanctuaries at sea to a force that will have to fight for command of the sea and conduct sea control operations in hostile environments. Moreover, it also indicates the Navy has not gotten joint in its heart despite the years of bureaucratic requirements set up by the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. The latest capstone document Advantage at Sea, along with its wingman, the CNO’s NAVPLAN, together offer a somewhat better vision of fleet warfighting than NWP-3, although those visions are also hardly satisfactory. As the Navy considers how to transform itself for fleet-level warfare, it will need stronger and clearer frameworks for what exactly that may look like in practice.

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

Featured Image: PHILIPPINE SEA (Nov. 20, 2022) The U.S. Navy’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier, USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76), steams in formation with the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, USS Milius (DDG 69), Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ship, JS Setogiri (DD 156), Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser, USS Chancellorsville (CG 62) and the Royal Australian Navy supply ship, HMAS Stalwart (A304), in the Philippine Sea. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Heather McGee)