Category Archives: Strategic Outlook

Predictions and forecasting.

Strategic Outlook

Procuring Maritime Leverage

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A few weeks ago I was at a conference in Portsmouth, United Kingdom, assessing the historical, contemporary, and future relationship between the Royal Navy and the nation. Amongst the discussions that took place was one chaired by the former First Sea Lord concerning the issue of construction and procurement, in particular the ability of Britain’s shipbuilding industry to meet the requirements of the RN and at what cost. The UK still produces some of the most technologically sophisticated warships and weapons systems in the world, as the Type-45 destroyers are testament to. Yet, they increasingly come at a premium at odds with the current weak state of the country’s economy and an austere government that has instigated huge cuts to its armed forces, particularly its navy, following 2010’s Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR). The rationalisation of Britain’s defence industry from decades of mergers and takeovers and the rise of monopolistic monoliths like BAE Systems do not help, with a lack of domestic competition for national defence contracts that might otherwise lower prices. Still, a major issue lies in the decreasing numbers and frequency of warship orders, and the higher cost per unit this inevitably produces. We’ve already seen Britain outsourcing certain shipbuilding capabilities, with four new Royal Fleet Auxiliary tankers ordered from South Korea in February of this year, and it now seems unlikely that another tanker will be produced in the UK again for the RFA, at least in the short to medium-term future, as those skills are lost from its workforce. The question is where Britain draws the line. Does the UK and RN need to make a firm decision as to what industrial capacity it should safeguard in its national strategic interest, such as nuclear submarine construction, and what could be procured from overseas without loosing too much operational capability? Smaller patrol craft and minesweepers perhaps? To do so could produce a more affordable, sustainable navy, and abate the continuous reduction in numbers.

The UK’s next generation of fleet tankers will be built in South Korean not British shipyards

As a historian who studies the post-Second World War development of colonial naval forces into sovereign Commonwealth navies, this issue to me highlights a fascinating shift in strategic-economic relations that raises questions and concerns in areas of geopolitical uncertainty. For several decades, the vast majority of the world’s arms, particularly more technologically-sophisticated warships, came from the same small group of producers located in the traditional ‘First World’. The underdeveloped industries of post-colonial countries, a hangover from imperial policies to turn colonial economies into primarily suppliers of raw materials for the metropole’s industry, meant that they were often continuingly dependent on the former ‘imperial motherland’ to supply them with equipment for their nascent armed forces, subsidised by development aid packages. This was particularly the case in countries that didn’t wish to align themselves in the bi-polar international system of the Cold War, such as initially India. Countries like Britain derived not only economic benefits from such a relationship, including offloading its outdated and surplus warships, but political and strategic ones too from being able to shape the composition and capabilities of such beneficiaries to complement its own designs for ‘Commonwealth Defence’. India recognised the undesirableness of such a situation, and has made a concerted effort to overhaul its shipbuilding industry over the last fifty years, embarking upon ambitious indigenous construction programmes, including recently Shivalik-class stealth frigates and Vikrant-class aircraft carriers. Other formerly ‘developing’ countries, most notably China, also now have impressive manufacturing capabilities. With that comes opportunities for export, and as the industrial capacity of established producers in the West declines and is surpassed by the more-competitive emerging economies of the East, new defence agreements will be forged between untraditional partners. The link between economic and politico-strategic influence is intrinsic, and as countries such as Britain were once able to use naval procurement as leverage and a way of furthering their own interests, new producers such as China and India can be expected to do the same. This could lead to the creation of new strategic alliances and increased uncertainty in regions of escalating maritime tension and instability, with potentially frightening consequences for all.

Dr Daniel Owen Spence is Lecturer in Imperial and International History at Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom, and publishes research on nineteenth and twentieth century naval history.

Strategic Outlook

Thinking About Prevention, Pt. 1

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How to keep the missiles in their tubes?

The panel debate last month at the Center for Naval Policy on U.S. strategy in the Asia Pacific helped start a discussion on potential strategies and the tools each would require. I served up my initial thoughts here.

As I noted, one of the difficulties in balancing the ends, ways, and means in any strategy designed to win an armed conflict is that the tools to win are not necessarily those that can help prevent the conflict from erupting in the first place, or to keep a conflict from escalating.

MAD or MEOW

As many have remarked, neither the U.S. nor China would benefit from a protracted conflict between the two powerhouses. The 50-year stand-off between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. that preceded it had its own cold logic of prevention derived from the balance of nuclear first- and second-strike capabilities. MAD, or Mutual Assured Destruction as the calculus was known, did two things. First, it helped prevent direct conflict between the two belligerents, knowing that unchecked escalation could lead to a war of unlimited aims and means, and ultimately mutual destruction. For this reason both sides took great pains to disguise active participation of their combatants in hostilities against the other, such as Russians in the Korean War. Second, if direct violence ever did flare between the two, MAD was there to act as a check to prevent it from becoming a war of unlimited means – to keep the conflict “conventional.”  

In many ways a similar check acts to keep sabre-rattling from becoming sabre-thrusting due to the intertwined interests of the U.S. and China. In this arrangement, the devastation swiftly wrought by a conflict would be economic, and the blast-radius global. So, in an effort to coin a term that I’m sure will become widely used, I give you Mutual Economic Obliteration – Worldwide, or MEOW.

Yet an oft-repeated fact is that the unprecedented levels of economic interdependence in Europe prior to World War I could not prevent that war’s outbreak. So it is today. Economics and rationality maximizing polices of nations can certainly help, but can not alone prevent a conflict in the event of a range of scenarios driven by nationalist passions, the self-interests of individuals, or just plain accident.  

An Ounce of Prevention

So how can the U.S. aid prevention in these cases? Nothing can completely eliminate the possibility of armed conflict, thus even the most pacifist of prudent nations retain militaries and self-defense forces, but there are steps available beyond economic co-dependence. These can be categorized as those steps taken to sow respect (often involving means useful in the event prevention fails) and those taken to enhance familiarity. I will explore some of the options available in the next post, but by no means have all of the answers. In an environment of fiscal restraint and a time of hard budgeting choices we can’t lose focus on the importance of trying to prevent conflicts as much as we prepare to win them. Financial resources, time, and creative energies are needed for both equally important endeavors.

Capability Analysis, Strategic Outlook

An Influence Squadron in the Making?

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Commander Henry Hendrix’s Proceedings article “Buy Fords, Not Ferraris” has entered the canon of innovative naval concepts and has received extensive attention at Information Dissemination and elsewhere. One idea from his article: influence squadrons, or a group of ships centered around an amphibious flagship and emphasizing smaller, networked platforms to conduct presence operations, theater security cooperation, and irregular warfare.

Over at ID, Commander Chris Rawley just wrote about testing distributed maritime operations using UAVs which will become unemployed as operations in Afghanistan wind down. Though he focuses on the aviation side of the house, he does mention surface vessels:

Some of the goals of these [distributed operations] battle exercises would be to…

 

  • Develop ways to employ smaller ships as forward arming, refueling, and communications relays for these aircraft.
  • Employ the above concepts with various deployed nodes of special operations forces, Marine, and NECC elements, in an effort to understand the capabilities and limitations each of these units brings to the distributed littoral fight.

Undersecretary Bob Work spoke at a CATO Institute event yesterday (h/t CDR Salamander) regarding the future of the Navy’s surface fleet. While LCS dominated the discourse as usual, I found two of his slides very interesting and no one seems to be talking about them:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To me, this looks like an “influence squadron” in the making. Take an LPD-17, a Burke-class DDG, two LCSs, and embark 4 Mk VI PBs in the well deck, combined with manned and unmanned aircraft from all ships and you’ll get a credible influence squadron. I could see a group of such ships and aircraft operating in the waters near Indonesia, other Pacific Islands, or the Straits of Malacca. This would be ideal for presence operations, HA/DR, capacity building for low-capability partners, theater security cooperation or – with the support of additional combatants – enforcing a blockade.  And to CDR Rawley’s point, can these vessels support a small UAV? Now seems the time to put such a group together and see what it can do – and it seems like the Navy’s senior leaders are thinking the same.

I had never heard of the Mark VI program until watching Secretary Work’s presentation, but I am very interested to know more. I’ve seen amphibs embark Riverine Command Boats and am curious how this program is related, if at all. Google results were nil after a few searches – can anyone with the gouge on this craft post to comments?

Finally, what is remarkable about this is that in only three years after CDR Hedrix’s article went to press, the Navy seems like it is seriously considering the implications of this radically different kind of deployment scheme. Though it may not seem fast to some, I think that compared to other historical shifts, the exploration of influence squadrons has occurred rather quickly.

The opinions and views expressed in this post are those of the author alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy, or any other agency.

Strategic Outlook

Law of the S.E.A.

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With the recent statements from U.S. Secretary of Defense Panetta and the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) advocating the ratification of the three decade-old UN Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS), it is clear that U.S. policy will continue to support a cooperative approach to maritime security.  Besides Secretary Panetta’s detailed justification for UNCLOS in providing “economic jurisdiction” and a seat at the table (sans hypocrisy) for future international maritime dispute resolutions, UNCLOS supports freedom of navigation and access to the global commons (unless restricted by historical treaties such as the Montreux Convention).

Nations' Outer Continental Shelf boundaries and unilateral mining may not extend beyond "constraint lines" defined by UNCLOS.

UNCLOS ratification enshrines the principles of freedom of navigation and access, thereby strengthening the U.S. position in the pacific region and the U.S. pivot to South East Asia (S.E.A.). Ratification supports future S.E.A. diplomatic developments through its focus on the region’s most prominent domain.  Maritime territorial claims continue to inflict tension in S.E.A. and with UNCLOS as the primary legal guidance, the U.S. would be forced to stay on the diplomatic sidelines for a multilateral discussion without ratification.  Yet, U.S. accession and ratification would result in isolation and a decline in future cooperation with those remaining maritime countries that have maintained disputes over UNCLOS and chose not to accept or ratify it, namely:

Cambodia, Colombia, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Ecuador, El Salvador, Eritrea, Iran, Israel, Libya,  Peru, Syria, Timor-Leste, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela [1] 

Despite the advantages Secretary Panetta and other U.S. advocates cite for the international maritime legal framework and global commons access rights (including the Arctic), the U.S. and other non-ratifying countries have long since acknowledged various negative aspects of the convention: increased non-local environmental policies, International Seabed Authority fees and taxes, international eminent domain grabs of intellectual property (to share new technology used in exploiting the economic opportunities of the expanded maritime domain), and the perception of a requirement to suspend all military-related actions while conducting innocent passage.

Claims submitted by the origina 2009 deadline.

In order to fully address the impact of UNCLOS ratification to S.E.A. regional stability, countries such as the U.S. must weigh the finer points of the treaty and second-order effects its ratification might bring.  As a new signatory, would U.S. diplomatic relations with Turkey and Israel now hinge on ignorance of Greece and Cyprus maritime boundary and Exclusive Economic Zone claims?  As U.S. businesses continue to explore deep sea beds, would the U.S. concede to limited exploitation and research of (traditionally unquestioned) U.S. bodies of water by an international consensus?  How would the U.S. discuss future fish stock trade with South American countries concerned with migratory fish locations beyond 200nm?  Perhaps the U.S. pursuance of UNCLOS to support the pivot to the Pacific truly outweighs these other non-vital diplomatic considerations, but I can’t stop wondering if by doing so, the U.S. may cause yet another pivot among its allies.