In this conversation on U.S. Navy strategy, Steve Wills discusses themes and lessons from his new book, Strategy Shelved: The Collapse of Cold War Naval Strategic Planning. From the effects of the Goldwater-Nichols act, to tensions between analysis and strategy offices in OPNAV, Wills discusses how Navy strategy and strategy development has changed over recent decades.
You point to several critical events that combined to affect Navy strategy: The passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Gulf War. How did these events affect Navy strategy and strategy development?
The Goldwater-Nichols Act changed the Navy’s strategic outlook at the institutional and individual level of experience. The shift to a focus on the regional commanders vice the services tended to change the Navy’s outlook from a global force to one focused on providing forces to land-based regional commanders. It is difficult to think globally about the size and composition of naval forces when the focus is on satisfying regional demands.
At the individual level, the Goldwater-Nichols Act focus on filling joint positions tended to draw rising young officers away to joint positions as they offered more upward mobility than service staffs. I think the most significant of these changes however was empowering the regional commanders (COCOMs) at the expense of Washington-based service chiefs and their staffs. The legislation turned upside down the traditional U.S. system of centralized planning and decentralized execution of military operations.
In its place today we have regional commanders doing their own strategies separate of their fellow leaders while the JCS is trying to manage operational and even tactical levels of war through measures like the Joint Warfighting Concept (JWC). In World War II, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernie King set strategy, but he and Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall did not tell Admiral Chester Nimitz and General Douglas MacArthur how they should organize their forces or how they should fight in their theaters. Goldwater-Nichols is directly responsible for this unbalanced condition that is seriously damaging the ability of the U.S. to create global strategies for combating global rivals like China and Russia.
You reference the 1980s Maritime Strategy and the “…From the Sea” document as among the more influential Navy strategy products in recent decades. Among the many strategy documents referenced in the book, what made these stand out? How can we assess the influence and impact of a strategy document?
The 1980’s Maritime Strategy stood out for a number of reasons. It was directly tied to a specific Navy force structure (the 600-ship navy) unlike more recent strategies that do not have a specific ship requirement. The Maritime Strategy had broad, bipartisan support from Congress. It was also tied to the national strategy of containment and, if necessary, combat against the Soviet Union. Unlike most other strategic concepts, the Navy exercised Maritime Strategy concepts at sea in multiple regions as noted by former Navy Secretary John Lehman in his book Oceans Ventured.
Finally, the Maritime Strategy was easy to engage with whether the reader or recipient of the brief was a seasoned navy professional or a civilian with little naval knowledge. It included maps with specific forces and arrows depicting an outline of what the Navy planned to do, and when and most notably where it would act. Strategies since the 1980s Maritime Strategy have largely eschewed maps in favor of glossy images of ships and sailors doing their thing at sea. Nice, but not really helpful in explaining what the Navy is strategically trying to accomplish.
The 1992 “…From the Sea” white paper was not a strategy with maps and goals as was its 1980s predecessor, but was rather a white paper suggesting what concepts the Navy and the Marine Corps would employ in the post-Cold War era. Its central point that the Navy would be a supporting force for operations fought primarily on land around the Eurasian littoral became the central focus of the service for the next 25 years. In that regard, “…From the Sea” was more influential and long-lasting than the 1980s Maritime Strategy. The Navy’s primary focus since 1992 has been being a supporting force for conflicts with regional powers and non-state actors without significant naval forces of their own. Perhaps this is now why it has been challenging to get the service to return to a “war at sea” mentality where major combat operations would primarily be conducted against opponents with similar or even in some cases superior naval capabilities.
An important theme in the book is the evolving power differential between systems analysis and strategy. How did strategy development change when analysts were more influential than politico-military strategists, and vice versa? What should the analyst-strategist relationship look like?
I think the influence of different factions on the Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV) staff in terms of the creation of naval strategy matters a great deal. There was a relative balance between these two disciplines from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s until the advent of the Maritime Strategy and the 600-ship navy. The naval analyst discipline believed that the 600-ship navy was unsustainable in the long term and that the Maritime Strategy was too aggressive and dangerous in the face of the assumed Soviet threat. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James Watkins and Navy Secretary John Lehman did not agree and subsequently severely reduced the size and scope of naval analyses offices supporting the CNO’s staff.
When the Cold War ended and the Navy had no opponent around which to organize either by geography or threat, the naval analyses community returned in the guise of the OPNAV staff element producing the Navy’s annual budget input. In a world without notable opponents the only long-range strategy document turned out to be the budget and as a result the analyses community prospered while the strategy community declined to low levels of influence. As a result of this decline, and analyses’ domination of OPNAV for over three decades, it is challenging for the Navy to think in terms of threats and geographic requirements that current budget levels do not support. The analyses community in return has labeled any strategy document that strays beyond current funding as “unsustainable,” ignoring the fact that any one CNO or SECNAV might be able to secure that additional funding if the strategy is well-conceived and well-argued.
The right choice is often a balance between these two communities that allows for innovative strategy concepts to meet the threat, but balanced by budget limitations. It cannot be “all or nothing” as it has been since 1991.
As the Navy faced budget cuts after the end of the Cold War the preservation of diminishing force structure became an overriding priority. How did this focus on force structure assessment affect strategy development?
That is an excellent question. Being so focused on the preservation of the newest force structure, the capabilities it provided for present-day operations, and the math needed to sustain that effort caused the Navy to often ignore evolving threats. If your strategy is based only on your budget, then why think further afield? Force structure assessments used to be tied to the threat, but without a notable threat like a major competitor, the force then becomes a set of capabilities the navy has to argue for and defend against the needs of other services. The strategy starts to become about how to beat the other services for more of the budget and not about meeting an outside challenge.
The U.S. now faces two major outside challengers (China and Russia) so the force structure assessment needs to again be tied to combating a threat rather than just preserving a capability in the face of interservice rivalry. Goldwater-Nichols did not get rid of service “parochialism;” instead it created what some have called a “tyranny of jointness” where getting the joint balance right is seen as more important that getting the right services the right equipment for the task.
The book examines decades of critical reorganizations of the OPNAV staff. How did these reorganizations strengthen or weaken Navy strategy development over the years?
Reorganizations of the OPNAV staff are the prerogative of the CNO and done to support what that officer wants to accomplish. In the absence of an opponent since 1991, those reorganizations have placed more power and emphasis on the Navy’s budgetary and warfare roles rather than strategy. It is also difficult to return to a culture of strategy development after decades of what naval historian Peter Haynes calls a “strategy of means” where the budget became the de facto navy strategy.
How would you assess the quality of Navy strategy and strategy development today? Are there areas that have room for improvement?
The Navy has always had a dedicated core of strategy experts; both uniformed and civilian (government and think tank personnel). The events I describe in the book (the end of the Cold War, the Goldwater-Nichols provisions, and the outcomes of the First Gulf War) have tended to make it more difficult for strategists to gain the ear of senior leaders.
I think that situation is changing. The United States again faces peer rivals at sea in China and Russia. The Tri-Service Maritime Strategy signed by the Navy, the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard late last year was a good first step toward crafting an effective global strategy to address those adversaries in peace and war. The Naval War College and the Naval Postgraduate School are educating more naval strategy experts. There are many more sources on naval and maritime strategy than in the past, including books by John Lehman, John Hattendorf, Peter Haynes, Seth Cropsey, Jerry Hendrix, and of course my mentor Peter Swartz, whose many CNA works on naval strategy are now available on the CNA website. CNA itself has never stopped working on navy strategy products and continues to advise OPNAV on maritime strategy issues. Other voices including members of Congress such as Elaine Luria and Mike Gallagher who have called on the naval services to better explain the strategy behind their POM requests. These are all positive changes.
There are of course challenges and the provisions of the Goldwater-Nichols Act still create roadblocks to the traditional naval means of organizing strategy and operations. Traditionally, the Navy and Marine Corps have engaged in centralized strategic planning, but decentralized execution of those plans at the operational and tactical levels of war. This is how the Cold War unfolded with an overall strategy of containment of the Soviet Union as a baseline for both the strategies of regional commanders and those of the services to deal with naval-specific issues.
The provisions of Goldwater-Nichols have changed this over time. In the absence of a peer opponent around which to organize a global strategy, regional combatant commanders plan their own strategies and demand forces to execute them independent in most cases of the needs of their peers or service providers of forces. Instead of centralized planning, the Joint Staff now seeks to tell operational forces how to fight through documents like the Joint Warfighting Concept. While this problem was not as acute in the period after the Cold War when the U.S. did not have active peer rivals, the current situation of two peer rivals again demands a return to traditional practice. The Goldwater-Nichols Act stands in the way of such a return.
The Navy once produced detailed strategies such as War Plan Orange for Pacific operations before the Second World War and the Maritime Strategy for potential operations in the 1980s. CIMSEC recently covered the 1980s Maritime Strategy process in excellent detail. While many leaders today believe that the Navy and Marine Corps should not be producing strategies, where is the alternative, centralized global plan for operations against China and/or Russia? The JCS and Joint Staff don’t do strategy products. Who does, other than civilian authorities who potentially change every four years?
In conclusion, while the Navy has made great strides in understanding how it used to do strategy and how it might do so in the future, structural barriers such as the Goldwater-Nichols provisions that empowered regional commanders are impeding the naval services from again creating strategy.
Steven Wills is a Research Analyst at CNA, a research organization in Arlington, VA, and an expert in U.S. Navy strategy and policy. He is a Ph.D. military historian from Ohio University and a retired surface warfare officer. These views are presented in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the views of CNA or the U.S. Navy.
Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Content@cimsec.org.
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Navy Doctrine on Planning for Maritime Security Operations is Inadequate
“Military planning is essential to everything that naval forces do.”1 If the Navy intends to successfully conduct maritime security operations (MSOs), it needs to be able to effectively plan for them. That planning is particularly essential at the operational level—namely, the level of command linking tactical missions with national strategic guidance.2 Navy planning is conducted in accordance with doctrine, specifically the Navy Planning Process (NPP). This section, after discussing foundational issues such as the nature of operations in the maritime security realm, summarizes the NPP and identifies inadequacies in the particular component of the process most impacted by planning for maritime security missions: mission analysis, as informed by staff estimates.
1. The need for operational-level thinking and planning for MSOs
A tactical action or mission is one aimed at accomplishing a single major or minor tactical objective.3 An example of a tactical maritime security mission is carrying a law enforcement official from a partner nation aboard a U.S. warship on a single occasion to provide that official a means of enforcing his nation’s fisheries laws. Such a mission is individually useful to the United States in promoting a stable rules-based order at sea and in establishing itself as the “partner of choice” for that nation in an era of great power competition at sea. It is episodically useful to that partner nation as well in deterring or interdicting violators of its fisheries laws, therefore helping to preserve an important natural resource and source of national income, which enhances its stability.
The effect of such a mission is dramatically enhanced if it is conducted as part of a major operation or campaign as opposed to a one-off, “whack-a-mole” activity. Performing this activity as part of a campaign or major operation leads to concerted activities that are “proactive and anticipatory rather than simply reactive, and are issue-centered rather than incident-centered.”4 Both Till and Vego teach us that “operational warfare at sea is the only means of orchestrating and tying together naval tactical actions within a larger design that directly contributes to the objectives decided by strategy.”5 Vego brings this maxim into the maritime security realm, opining that operational-level thinking and concepts “are absolutely necessary for the most effective use of one’s combat forces not only in a high-intensity conventional war but also in operations short of war.”6 The need for operational-level thinking and planning holds true for lower-threshold MSOs as well.
2. How the U.S. Navy conducts operational-level planning
“The characteristics of today’s complex global environment have created the conditions where the U.S. Navy must be prepared for a wide range of dynamic situations;” furthermore, “the nature of modern naval operations—which must span from open ocean to deep inland—interlinks continuously with other services, countries, and means of national power, and it often places the lowest tactical commander in critical strategic roles, necessitating that a thorough planning process be used.”7 For these reasons and more, the Navy has created a formalized planning process, the NPP, that is optimized for planning at the operational level.8 The NPP is designed to ensure that the employment of forces is linked to objectives, and integrates naval operations with the actions of the joint force. Accordingly, the terminology, products, and concepts in the NPP are consistent with joint planning, joint doctrine, and are compatible with other services’ doctrine.9
To accomplish its purpose, the NPP establishes sequential, iterative procedures to, in turn, progressively analyze higher headquarters tasking(s); to craft a mission statement; to develop and analyze courses of action (COAs) against projected adversary COAs (in some cases adversaries could be forces of nature or other emerging non-military threats); to compare friendly COAs against the commander’s criteria and each other; to recommend a COA for decision; to refine the concept of operation; to prepare a plan or operation order (OPORD); and to transition the plan or order to subordinates tasked with its execution. The NPP organizes these procedures into six steps, shown in Figure 2 below, which provide commanders and their staffs a means to organize planning activities, transmit plans to subordinates, and share a critical common understanding of the mission. The result of the NPP is a military decision that can be translated into a directive such as an operation plan (OPLAN) or OPORD.10
Figure 2 – NPP depiction in NWP 5-01, 1-4
Military planning through utilization of the NPP is not a scientific or mechanistic process, but instead employs aspects of both science and art. The science involves such tangible aspects as disposition and number of ships, aircraft, weapons, supplies, and consumption rates, as well as the interplay of operational factors, such as time and space, that affect employment of the naval force. The art of military planning, on the other hand, is more conceptual. Operational art is defined as the cognitive approach by commanders and staffs—supported by their skill, knowledge, experience, creativity, and judgment—to develop strategies, campaigns, and operations to organize and employ military forces by integrating ends, ways, means, and risk.11 Through the application of operational art, the commander and staff identify the objectives and outline the broad concept of operations (CONOPS).
Dealing with the Unique Aspects of MSOs in the NPP
1. The unique aspects of MSOs
MSOs lie at the uncomfortable nexus between maritime law enforcement and naval warfare.12 According to Professor Till, operational art is not optimally employed to plan for the activities the world’s navies are actually having to conduct on a day-to-day basis, such as campaigns against piracy, narcotics or human smuggling and terrorism, patrols against human smuggling, or fishery protection.13 The reason for this, Professor Vego informs us, is that “[a]pplication of operational art in operations short of war is much more complicated than in high-intensity conventional war” due to a highly diverse and unpredictable operational environment, the dominant role of nonmilitary “force” factors in determining objectives, and human “space” predominating over geography.14 And, as we have seen, Professor Luke recognizes such a significant difference between MSOs and combat at sea that he felt the need to propose an entirely new theoretical paradigm, that of legitimacy, to reflect the unique “fundamentals and tenets that distinguish peacetime activities from warfare.”15 These unique fundamentals and tenets (which will be referred to as “factors” or “aspects”) include, as we have already seen, a “broad and growing array of legal regimes, treaties, and sources of authority that need to be fully appreciated, understood, and leveraged for success.”16
Figure 3 – Luke’s regime of authority for action perspective
This understanding of the fundamental uniqueness of MSOs is not solely the province of theorists; it is recognized in doctrine as well. Specifically, Appendix A of the NPP—the only section of the NPP that directly addresses maritime security operations—refers to the “many facets” of maritime security, and states that “each maritime security activity is unique.”17 As the following discussion will show, this doctrinal assertion is not complemented by guidance to planners on how to account for and accommodate the unique aspects of MSOs that are so critical for operational success.
2. Where those unique aspects are best dealt with in the NPP
The unique aspects of MSOs are best dealt with in the mission analysis phase of the planning process, as informed by relevant staff estimates. Mission analysis, as the first step of the NPP, is “the foundation for the entire planning process.”18 When performed correctly, it provides the who, what, when, where, and why for the planning staff, and makes the development of the how possible. A non-exclusive list of topics an effective mission analysis should address includes:
The tasks the command must complete for the mission to be accomplished;
The purpose of the mission and tasks assigned;
The limitations that have been placed on our own forces’ actions;
The forces/assets available to support the operation;
Additional assets required to support the operation;
Gaps of knowledge that inhibit planning; and
The various risks.19
Mission analysis leads to the delivery of a briefing to the commander and subsequent commander’s planning guidance. The briefing ensures the commander and staff have a common understanding of the overall situation, mission, intent, and planning guidance that facilitates COA development (the how).
The more unique, ill-defined, and unfamiliar the situation being analyzed, the greater the need to more closely examine the problem before or in conjunction with mission analysis.20 This close examination is accomplished by means of staff estimates. An estimate is a detailed evaluation of how factors in a staff section’s functional area or subordinate commander’s warfare area potentially impact the operation or mission.21 The estimate consists of significant facts, events, and conclusions based on analyzed data.22 Staff estimates provide a current status and an assessment of the ability of the command to meet the requirements of the assigned mission while identifying shortfalls and potential issues, as well as strengths and advantages. Every functional staff area has a responsibility to create and maintain a staff estimate.23 Types of estimates generated by maritime staffs include but are not limited to: (1) operations estimate; (2) personnel estimate; (3) intelligence estimate; (4) logistics estimate; (5) communications estimate; (6) civil-military operations estimate; (7) information operations estimate; and (8) special staff estimates (e.g., legal, public affairs, medical).24 The legal estimate is especially critical to MSOs.25
3. Existing doctrine related to conducting mission analysis and crafting staff estimates in MSOs is inadequate
Although existing planning doctrine correctly identifies operations short of war as challenging, different, and unique, it does not provide much in the way of guidance to planners on how to deal with these qualities. NPP Appendix A.2.3., while stating that the NPP is “well suited to support all aspects of sea control and power projection,” acknowledges that some “minor accommodations” may have to be made to the NPP when planning MSOs due to the fact that “[m]ost maritime security operations will entail a requirement for cooperation with or subordination to a multinational partner or civil law enforcement body to ensure the process is compatible with the expectations of the partners.” Though Appendix A.2.3. provides some guidance on mechanisms for effecting such cooperation—reciprocal exchange of liaison officers to participate in planning for multinational operations, for example—it is entirely silent on the issues raised by such cooperation, and regarding exactly what “minor accommodations” need to be made to the mission analysis to account for such cooperation. As for the legal estimate, which Appendix A.2.3. identifies as being “especially critical to a maritime security operation” which will “drive the concept development as well as rules of engagement or rules for use of force,” there is no further guidance on what, specifically, should be considered to take into account the unique aspects of MSOs.26
The Stability Operations Manual provides a bit more guidance, though nothing that can be considered holistic or detailed.27 Since MSOs are a subset of stability operations overall, and since both MSOs and stability operations are maritime operations short of war, the manual’s guidance may be of some utility in conducting the mission analysis for MSOs. The manual specifies that issues such as whether involved nations are UNCLOS signatories, the existence of maritime territorial disputes, the identification of “appropriate public and private international maritime laws,” and important cultural and other considerations should all be considered during the mission analysis phase of stability operations.28 Though somewhat of an improvement from the very sparse guidance in the NPP, this list still only exists in anecdotal, not systematic form, and is unclear about why the listed items are important, and what about them should be the subject of mission analysis.
The Constraint-Restraint-Enabler-Imperative (C-R-E-I) Model Introduced and Explained
According to Professor Till, “[d]efective doctrine is quite clearly the high road to defeat [while] effective doctrine is a very significant force multiplier.”29 As this article established earlier, the U.S. Navy will be expected to successfully engage in day-to-day MSOs along the full spectrum of violence including, increasingly, lower-threshold constabulary operations. Such operations are complicated and unique, and need to be effectively planned at the operational level through employment of the NPP and its embedded operational art principles. However, guidance is sparse on exactly how planning for such unique operations is supposed to occur. The C-R-E-I model for crafting appropriate staff estimates as part of the mission analysis is meant to fill this lacuna. While it is impossible to set out a cookie-cutter list of every item that should be considered in the staff estimate for the planning of a maritime security operation, consideration of applicable constraints, restraints, enablers, and imperatives applicable to a particular MSO spans the universe of authority-based considerations that ultimately determine the legitimacy of such operations. The model is discussed below:
Constraints are obligations that prohibit an operation from occurring at all, or prohibit certain activities or outcomes during the course of an operation. Constraints may derive from international obligations a state has chosen to accept, or from domestic sources such as a constitution or legislative enactments. In the United States, a constitutionally-derived constraint is the Fifth Amendment’s admonition that “[n]o person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” which serves as a direct prohibition against gathering evidence against a person through compulsive means such as torture. An example of a legislatively-derived constraint is the Posse Comitatus Act, which (along with derivative instructions and directives) prohibits the armed forces in the Department of Defense from directly engaging in law enforcement operations. As for constraints that derive from the international obligations to which a state chooses to subject itself, examples of relevance in the maritime security realm include the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits a nation from returning an individual to a nation where that individual would face a threat of loss of life or freedom, or of torture; the prohibition in UNCLOS Article 73(3) of criminal prosecution of individuals violating a fisheries law in a state’s EEZ; or the customary international law principle, embodied in UNCLOS Article 92(1), that flag states enjoy exclusive jurisdiction over their ships on the high seas—a principle that conversely constrains all other nations, absent unusual circumstances, from asserting any jurisdiction as a matter of right over a foreign vessel in that maritime zone.
Restraints are factors or conditions that limit the scope or range of permissible activities during a maritime security operation. They derive from the same sources as constraints. An example in the U.S. of a domestically-derived restraint is the reservation of authority within the Coast Guard chain of command, which manifests itself in the requirement that subordinate units must obtain a “statement of no objection” from higher authority before acting in certain circumstances. A restraint that derives both from domestic and international sources is the limitation on the use of force for constabulary purposes to the minimum force reasonable and necessary under the circumstances to accomplish a law enforcement mission. Restraints that derive from the international law of the sea include the limitation embodied in UNCLOS Article 27 on criminal prosecution of vessels and crew engaged in innocent passage, and restrictions on the right of hot pursuit such as the requirement that it be continuous and uninterrupted, and the extinguishment of that right once the pursued vessel enters a foreign territorial sea.
Enablers: Perhaps the most important (in terms of mission success) of the four-part analytical framework for preparing the staff estimate for MSOs are enablers. Enablers promote the successful conduct of a maritime security operation, notwithstanding the challenges imposed by constraints, restraints, and imperatives. Like constraints and restraints (and, as we shall see, imperatives), enablers can derive from international or domestic sources. Examples of enablers at the international level include flag state consent to foreign law enforcement activities aboard a flagged vessel on the high seas, which may be provided on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis, or through standing consent memorialized in an international agreement; the declaration by a state of an EEZ, which is a necessary precursor for it to exercise its sovereign rights as set out in UNCLOS Article 56 and to enforce those rights as provided in UNCLOS Article 73; regional agreements that promote cooperative security measures such as the sharing of monitoring, control, and surveillance data or the establishment of regional intelligence fusion centers to combat transnational organized crime; bilateral agreements that enable direct law enforcement support such as the carriage of shipriders from one nation aboard an enforcement vessel of another nation; and extradition treaties to allow interdicted suspects to be repatriated to another nation for prosecution. An example of an enabler with both international and domestic components is adoption by both a flag state and a port state of generally accepted international regulations, procedures and practices such as those established by the SOLAS Convention, which enables authorities of the port state to conduct an examination of a foreign vessel in its internal waters to ensure its compliance with these standards. Domestic enablers include the enactment of legislation and regulations that authorize desired maritime activities; the establishment of domestic architecture that permits a law enforcement matter to be taken all the way from detection through prosecution (i.e. to achieve a “legal finish”); and the establishment and utilization of mechanisms to coordinate the activities of various government agencies or ministries to achieve a common, agreed-upon outcome.
Imperatives are obligations that mandate certain activities in the maritime realm. Examples of imperatives with both an international and a domestic component in the maritime realm include the obligation embodied in UNCLOS Article 98 to go to the assistance of persons lost or distressed at sea; the affirmative obligations of the flag state to “effectively exercise its jurisdiction and control in administrative, technical and social matters” over ships flying its flag, as detailed in UNCLOS Article 94; the affirmative obligation in UNCLOS Article 61(2) on states to “ensure through proper conservation and management measures that the maintenance of the living resources in the exclusive economic zone is not endangered by over-exploitation;” the flag state’s obligation to ensure compliance by flagged vessels with conservation and management measures (CMMs) enacted by regional fisheries management organizations; the affirmative duty to cooperate in the suppression of illicit traffic by sea on signatories to the 1988 Vienna Drug Convention; and carrying out any affirmative obligations in UN Security Council resolutions.
Explanations and Caveats
Users of the C-R-E-I Model must avoid unnecessary quibbles about the appropriate characterization of a particular factor of importance to an MSO. For example, reasonable minds may differ as to whether the rule that, “[t]he right of hot pursuit may be exercised only by warships or military aircraft, or other ships or aircraft clearly marked and identifiable as being on government service and authorized to that effect”30 is a constraint or a restraint. The correct answer is that it does not matter. As long as utilization of the C-R-E-I model forces planners to identify, in a structured manner, the rule set regarding the type of vessels that may be used to engage in hot pursuit (assuming in this hypothetical that this is of significance to the intended MSO), then it has improved mission analysis and therefore the prospect for success of the intended MSO.
While the identification and analysis of applicable constraints, restraints, enablers, and imperatives relating to an intended MSO is a vitally important function, it is only the first step. Such identification and analysis can also be used to shape an MSO by converting undesired constraints, restraints, and imperatives into enablers. For example, a constraint such as prohibition against boarding a foreign vessel on the high seas can turn into an enabler through advance consent by a flag state to the conduct of desired high seas activities in advance of an MSO. The point is that authority-based factors are not static or immutable, and in fact can and should be actively shaped into enablers to promote operational success.
Another point about the model is that it is authority-, not capability-based. Such matters as vessel and crew endurance, vessel speed and other capabilities, transit times, etc., are not unique to MSOs and are not directly addressed by this model. However, proper utilization of the model significantly impacts capabilities-based planning considerations. For example, limitations (constraints or restraints) inherent in the use of force regime applicable to an intended MSO that are exposed during mission analysis should drive commanders to ensure, not only that the crews of vessels that will participate in the MSO are properly and adequately trained, but also that the vessels and crews are properly equipped with the means to lawfully employ force if required. As another example, if mission analysis reveals that a partner nation has a domestic legal requirement (an imperative) that suspects must be brought before a magistrate within 24 hours of interdiction, the operational commander must ensure that assets employed in an intended MSO have the capacity to comply with that requirement, or else the “legal finish” to the operation may be jeopardized.
Finally, as a follow-up to proper training, while this model is conceived for operational-level commanders and planners, mission commanders must also be facile in their ability to identify, understand, and react to relevant constraints, restraints, enablers, and imperatives. This indicates the need for robust professional military education and continued pipeline training for mission commanders and their support personnel. That training and facility should include clear lines of communication from tactical commanders to operational commanders and their staffs. As Advantage at Sea reminds us, “[a]ctivities short of war can achieve strategic-level effects.”31 The consequences of tactical commanders failing to understand constraints, restraints, or imperatives they encounter, or failing to properly exploit enablers, are too dire not to demand facility with the C-R-E-I model at the tactical level as well.
Conclusion
The C-R-E-I model builds upon and endorses Professor Luke’s legitimacy theory for thinking about maritime operations short of war as being the only theoretical model that recognizes the essence of their uniqueness and singularity. It follows his linkage of legitimacy to authority (see Figure 3), but provides granularity to authority-based considerations by parsing them into constraints, restraints, enablers, and imperatives. It also “operationalizes” his theory by providing a concrete model for planners to employ during the stage of the planning process most suited to consideration of the unique features of MSOs: the mission analysis phase of the NPP. Without such a disciplined and systematic approach by planners more accustomed to planning for combat operations at sea, there is the ever-present “danger of warfighters falling back into doctrine designed for combat—‘heavy metal thinking’—in such things as peace operations where such thinking is not appropriate.”32
This failure of planning has numerous potential negative operational consequences, including, but not limited to, legal challenges against aspects of the underlying operation that could impact the “legal finish.” Though admittedly not in the lower-threshold constabulary realm, federal lawsuits brought by aggrieved parties in United Nations Security Council (UNSC)-authorized interdiction actions are indicative of the nature of potential legal challenges across the spectrum of operations short of war. These include Tarros v. United States, in which the plaintiff sought damages related to the “blockage and diversion” of his vessel that occurred pursuant to UNSC. Resolutions 1970 (2011) and 1973 (2011), and Wu Tien Li-Shou v. United States, in which the plaintiff sought damages due to the wrongful death of his fishing vessel’s master and the negligent destruction of his vessel resulting from the rescue of a fishing vessel by U.S.-NATO forces enforcing UNSC Resolutions.33 Though these suits were unsuccessful, other challenges in European and international courts arising from lower-threshold constabulary operations have been successful, and serve as a harbinger of legal consequences that could result in improperly planned MSOs conducted with or on behalf of allies and partners.34
Beyond legal challenges, other potential consequences of improper planning for MSOs include career ramifications throughout the chain of command and ill will or even a diplomatic incident with an ally or partner. All of these potential consequences run counter to Advantage at Sea’s admonition to the Naval Service to “partner, persist, and prevail across the competition continuum,” and could lead to failure to achieve the strategic objective of prevailing in day-to-day competition. Adoption and application of the C-R-E-I model should ensure that thinking and analysis are properly focused on the “fundamentals and tenets that distinguish peacetime activities from warfare,” which will greatly enhance the prospects of success of the MSO being contemplated and, ultimately, of the strategy enunciated in Advantage at Sea.
Capt. (ret.) Andrew Norris works as a maritime legal and regulatory consultant, and has been retained to create and teach a new five-month maritime security and governance course for international officers at the U.S. Naval War College. He retired from the U.S. Coast Guard in 2016 after 22 years of service. Prior to attending law school and joining the Coast Guard, Capt. (ret.) Norris served in the U.S. Navy as a division officer aboard the USS KIDD (DDG-993) from 1985-1989. He can be reached at +1 (401) 871-7482 or anorris@tradewindmaritimeservices.com.References
[1] Navy Warfare Publication (NWP) 5-01, Navy Planning (Ed. December 2013), 1-1.
[2] Geoffrey Till, Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century: Fourth Edition (New York: Routledge, 2018), 159-160.
[3] Milan Vego, “Operations Short of War and Operational Art,” Joint Forces Quarterly 98 (3rd Quarter 2020): 38-49, 43.
[4] Till, Seapower, 458.
[5] Till, Seapower, 162.
[6] Vego, “Operations Short of War,” 38.
[7] NWP 5-01, 1-2.
[8] “Optimized” does not mean “exclusively” – “Through the NPP, a commander can plan for, prepare, and execute operations from the operational through the tactical levels of war.” NWP 5-01, 1-4.
[9] NWP 5-01, 1-5 – 1-6.
[10] NWP 5-01, 1-4.
[11] NWP 5-01, 1-2.
[12] Kraska and Pedrozo, International Maritime Security Law, 2.
[13] Till, Seapower, 165.
[14] Vego, “Operations Short of War,” 44. Professor Vego also correctly advises that the process of determining the Desired End State in operations short of war is “far more complex and elusive” than in a high-intensity conventional war. Ibid.
[15] Ivan Luke, “Naval Operations in Peacetime: Not Just “Warfare Lite,” Naval War College Review 66, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 10-26, 15.
[16] Luke, “Naval Operations in Peacetime,” 11.
[17] NWP 5-01, Appendix A.2.3.
[18] NWP 5-01, 2-1.
[19] NWP 5-01, 2-2.
[20] Ibid.
[21] NWP 5-01, Appendix K-1.
[22] NWP 5-01, App. K.3.1
[23] NWP 5-01, 2.3.3.
[24] NWP 5-01, Appendix K.2.1.
[25] NWP 5-01, Appendix A.2.3.
[26] In fairness, Appendix N of NWP 5-01 does provide some further guidance for the legal estimate generally, but this guidance is generic to all operations and is not focused on the unique aspects of MSOs.
[30] The Convention on the Law of the Sea, Dec. 10, 1982, 1833 U.N.T.S. 397 (UNCLOS), Article 111( 5.).
[31] Tri-Service Maritime Strategy “Advantage at Sea,” 17 December 2020, 6.
[32] Till, Seapower, 165.
[33] Tarros v. United States, 982 F. Supp. 2d 325, 327 (S.D.N.Y. 2013); Wu Tien Li-Shou v. United States, 997 F. Supp. 2d 307, 308–09 (D. Md. 2014), aff’d, 777 F.3d 175, 179 (4th Cir. 2015). These and more are discussed in Brian Wilson, “The Turtle Bay Pivot: : How the United Nations Security Council Is Reshaping Naval Pursuit of Nuclear Proliferators, Rogue States, and Pirates,” Emory International Law Review 33, issue 1 (2018): 1-90.
[34] See Brian Wilson, “Human Rights and Maritime Law Enforcement,” Stanford Journal of International Law 52, no. 2 (July 2016): 243-319.
Featured Image: Maritime Operational Planners Course at the U.S. Naval War College (Credit: www.usnwc.edu)
The new U.S. tri-service maritime strategy, Advantage at Sea, which refers to the three maritime services (Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard) collectively as the single Naval Service, largely focuses on great power competition at sea against peer or near-peer competitors.1 However, although the Naval Service has to be configured and trained to prevail in high-intensity armed conflict, unless and until such conflict occurs, this competition at sea will play itself out through interactions short of war across what the strategy refers to as the “competition continuum.” By increasingly and successfully engaging in activities short of war against maritime competitors and other malign actors, the Naval Service will accomplish a central pillar of Advantage at Sea, which is to “prevail in day-to-day competition.”
In addition to being built, equipped, manned, and trained to compete in operations short of war, the Naval Service also has to be able to plan for campaigns and major operations in this space to ensure the most effective and efficient employment of scarce resources—not only to achieve the United States’ strategic goals, but also to assist allies and partners in achieving their own goals and objectives. This ability to plan at the operational level will increasingly include operations at the lower, “constabulary” end of the competition continuum (see Figure 1), an area of far less familiarity to the U.S. Navy than to the U.S. Coast Guard. Operations at this level, which promote a rules-based international order at sea, are “increasingly being seen as a crucial enabler for global peace and security, and therefore something that should command the attention of naval planners everywhere.”2
This article asserts that the U.S. Navy will increasingly be called upon to operate in the constabulary end of activities short of war and proposes a 4-part constraints, restraints, enablers, and imperatives (C-R-E-I) analytical model for preparing the staff estimate to inform the mission analysis phase of the Navy Planning Process (NPP),3 when utilized to plan for such activities. In doing so, it builds upon the scholarship of Professors Milan Vego and Ivan Luke of the U.S. Naval War College.
Professor Vego, in his recent article “Operations Short of War and Operational Art,” discusses the precepts of operational art (which are embedded into the NPP) as they apply to operations short of war.4 While a masterful Vego product as always, the article’s focus on operations at the higher end of the spectrum of violence involving the kinetic application of military force to achieve higher end political objectives—such as Operation Allied Force in Kosovo (1999), Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan (2001-2002), and Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya (2011)—leaves unaddressed the question of how operational art, as embedded in the NPP, needs to be adapted to account for the unique aspects of maritime operations with a constabulary derivation. This article attempts to fill that void.
The other theoretical inspiration for this article is Professor Luke’s approach to understanding operations short of combat at sea, as set out in his article “Naval Operations in Peacetime: Not Just ‘Warfare Lite’.”5 His underlying thesis is that:
[t]he things the U.S. Navy and other navies of the world are doing in peacetime today are fundamentally distinct from naval warfare, and they are important enough to demand an expanded naval theory that incorporates their unique aspects. Continued reliance on naval warfare theory alone puts the [U.S.] Navy at risk of not doing its best to meet the challenges of, or not capitalizing on the opportunities present in, the maritime domain today.
In recognition of the “broad and growing array of legal regimes, treaties, and sources of authority that need to be fully appreciated, understood, and leveraged” to achieve success in operations short of armed conflict, Professor Luke proposes a theory of legitimacy as being more appropriate than the theory of naval warfare to such operations.6 This article endorses the centrality of legitimacy, grounded on underlying authority, as a unifying theoretical construct of the authority mechanism for success of operations short of armed conflict, and “operationalizes” it by providing a mechanism—constraints, restraints, enablers, and imperatives—for thoroughly accounting for the factors that collectively constitute the authority and legitimacy of an intended operation.
Before arriving at the proposed analytical model, this article will first discuss operations short of war on the competition continuum and distinguish between those with an armed force derivation and those with a constabulary derivation. It will then demonstrate how the Naval Service, and most importantly, the Navy, will increasingly be called upon to perform lower threshold constabulary missions as part of the day-to-day competition in the maritime domain. It will then examine the need to perform those missions as part of a campaign or major operation, instead of haphazardly and situationally in response to malign activities at sea.
It will conclude by reviewing the Navy Planning Process overall, by identifying mission analysis (as informed by staff estimates) as the proper place to account for the “unique aspects” of operations short of war, and by demonstrating the inadequacy of existing doctrine to guide proper mission analysis for such operations. It is in the context of this discussion that the 4-part analytical tool will be presented and discussed.
Operations Short of War Defined and Discussed
1. Maritime security operations versus operations short of war
Professor Luke uses the term “operations short of armed conflict” to denote “naval operations in peacetime;” other commentators such as Professor Vego use the term “operations short of war.” As we have seen, Advantage at Sea, by defining the competition continuum to include day-to-day competition, competition in crisis, and competition in conflict, and by using terms such as “war” and “destroying enemy forces” to illustrate what competition in conflict means, implies that operations not rising to the level of conflict are operations short of “war.” The NPP and a host of official U.S. government products use the term “maritime security” synonymously with “operations short of war.”7 While Professor Till also employs the term “maritime security,” which he equates to the term “good order at sea,” to describe such operations, he acknowledges their ambiguity, and states that such terms must be used with caution.8
The bottom line is that a hodgepodge of terms are in common use to describe maritime operations short of war. While some may dispute the equivalency, for purposes of consistency, this article will use the terms “maritime security operations (MSOs)” and “operations short of war” interchangeably to refer to all operations short of “combat operations”—which is another term used in Advantage at Sea to denote operations during conflict.
Figure 1 – Till’s Depiction of MSOs Arrayed Along a Spectrum of Violence (Click to expand)
2. Maritime security operations with a law enforcement versus an armed force derivation
In addition to settling on consistent terminology amongst a welter of options, this article also distinguishes between higher-threshold maritime security operations that have an armed force derivation and a political-military purpose, and lower-threshold9 maritime security operations that have a law enforcement derivation and typically a constabulary purpose. The former must be conducted by members of the armed forces of a state operating from a warship10 and are governed by the law of armed conflict. In the latter, the use of force is governed by rules for the use of force deriving from human rights law, and operations may be undertaken not only by “warships or military aircraft,” but also by “other ships or aircraft clearly marked and identifiable as being on government service and authorized to that effect.”11
The U.S. Navy will increasingly be expected to perform lower-threshold MSOs
According to Advantage at Sea, the Naval Service will partner, persist, and prevail across the competition continuum, employing Integrated All-Domain Naval Power through five lines of effort:
Advance global maritime security and governance, which means operating with allies, partners, other U.S. agencies, and multinational groups12 to maintain a free and open maritime environment, and to uphold the norms underpinning our shared security and prosperity.
Strengthen alliances and partnerships, with the ultimate aim of modifying bad behavior in the maritime domain.
Confront and expose malign behavior by rivals, with the ultimate aim of holding them accountable to the same standards by which others abide.
Expand information and decision advantage, which provides superiority in coordinating, distributing, and maneuvering our forces while simultaneously removing adversary leaders’ sense of control, inducing doubt and increased caution in crisis and conflict.
Deploy and sustain combat-credible forces, which enables all lines of effort, deters potential adversaries from escalating into conflict, and ensures that naval and joint forces will defeat adversary forces should they choose the path of war.
As can be seen, though prevailing in the event of war is and always will be a core objective of the Naval Service, the lines of effort largely and properly focus on activities at the lower end of the competition continuum as the best means for prevailing in day-to-day competition. Effective competition at this level upholds the rules-based order, denies our rivals’ use of incremental coercion, and creates the space for American diplomatic, political, economic, and technological advantages to prevail over the long term.13 In short, it helps achieve the aim of line of effort 1, which is the promotion of maritime security and good maritime governance.
Examples provided in Advantage at Sea of “activities short of war” conducted by Navy and Coast Guard ships as part of day-to-day competition include:
freedom of navigation operations globally to challenge excessive and illegal maritime claims;
Coast Guard cutters and law enforcement detachments aboard Navy and allied ships exercising unique authorities to counter terrorism, weapons proliferation, transnational crime, and piracy;
enforcing sanctions through maritime interdiction operations, often as part of international task forces;14
crucial peacetime missions, including responding to disasters, preserving maritime security, safeguarding global commerce, protecting human life, and extending American influence; and
underwriting the use of global waterways to achieve national security objectives through diplomacy, law enforcement, economic statecraft, and, when required, force.
Such activities support day-to-day competition in a diverse threat environment that includes potential adversaries such as Russia and China, but also additional state competitors, violent extremists, and criminal organizations, all of which exploit weak governance at sea, corruption ashore, and gaps in maritime domain awareness. Furthermore, “[p]iracy, drug smuggling, human trafficking, and other illicit acts leave governments vulnerable to coercion. Climate change threatens coastal nations with rising sea levels, depleted fish stocks, and more severe weather. Competition over offshore resources, including protein, energy, and minerals, is leading to tension and conflict. Receding Arctic sea ice is opening the region to growing maritime activity and increased competition.”15 These forces and trends create vulnerabilities for adversaries to exploit, corrode the rule of law, and generate instability that can erupt into crisis in any theater.16
If, as Advantage at Sea posits, the Naval Service will be called upon on a day-to-day basis to conduct operations short of war, the traditional functions assigned to the Coast Guard and Navy, respectively, as depicted in Figure 1, will become more integrated and homogenized.17 The Coast Guard will increasingly be called upon to conduct MSOs in the political-military realm, such as freedom of navigation operations, sanctions enforcement through maritime interdiction operations (often as part of international task forces), and providing specialized capabilities, to include Port Security Units or Advanced Interdiction Teams to augment operations in theater.18 The Navy, by contrast, will increasingly be called upon to conduct operations in the lower-threshold, “softer” constabulary realm. We know this to be so because: (1) Advantage at Sea and other strategic documents tell us so, and (2) as by far the largest seagoing service in an era of ever-shrinking platforms available to “employ All-Domain Naval Power to prevail across the competition continuum,” no other realistic alternative exists.19
For a variety of structural and other reasons, adaptation by the Navy to operate in the constabulary realm is much more challenging than the adaptation necessary by the Coast Guard to conduct higher-threshold political-military operations.20 Principal among the many challenges is the fact, as Professor Luke identifies, that legitimacy of operations short of war is the ultimate “measure” of their lawfulness. Legitimacy brings into play the vista of “legal regimes, treaties, and sources of authority that need to be fully appreciated, understood, and leveraged,” both individually and interrelatedly, to ensure the success of a contemplated lower-threshold operation. The unique nature of operations at this level, and the Navy’s capacity to adequately plan for them, is the subject of the next section in part 2 of this article.
Capt. (ret.) Andrew Norris works as a maritime legal and regulatory consultant, and has been retained to create and teach a new five-month maritime security and governance course for international officers at the U.S. Naval War College. He retired from the U.S. Coast Guard in 2016 after 22 years of service. Prior to attending law school and joining the Coast Guard, Capt. (ret.) Norris served in the U.S. Navy as a division officer aboard the USS KIDD (DDG-993) from 1985-1989. He can be reached at +1 (401) 871-7482 or anorris@tradewindmaritimeservices.com.
References
[1] Tri-Service Maritime Strategy “Advantage at Sea,” 17 December 2020.
[2] Geoffrey Till, Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century: Fourth Edition (New York: Routledge, 2018), 97.
[3] Navy Warfare Publication 5-01, Navy Planning (Ed. December 2013).
[4] Milan Vego, “Operations Short of War and Operational Art,” Joint Forces Quarterly 98 (3rd Quarter 2020): 38-49.
[5] Ivan Luke, “Naval Operations in Peacetime: Not Just “Warfare Lite,” Naval War College Review 66, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 10-26.
[6] See Figure 3, Appendix, in part 2 of this article.
[8] Professor Christian Bueger at the University of Copenhagen eponymously devotes an entire article to the issue of “What is Marine Security,” Marine Policy 53 (2015) 159–164.
[9] References to “threshold” and “spectrum” refer to the spectrum of violence as depicted in Figure 1, which also equates to the spectrum of activities across the competition continuum in Advantage at Sea.
[10] Article 29 of The Convention on the Law of the Sea, Dec. 10, 1982, 1833 U.N.T.S. 397 (UNCLOS) defines a “warship” as “a ship belonging to the armed forces of a State bearing the external marks distinguishing such ships of its nationality, under the command of an officer duly commissioned by the government of the State and whose name appears in the appropriate service list or its equivalent, and manned by a crew which is under regular armed forces discipline.”
[11] UNCLOS, Article 111.
[12] In general, “naval, coast guard, marine police, coastal and maritime forces are joined by ground and air elements of the joint armed forces, other departments and agencies, including oceanographic and fisheries services, the intelligence community, and international partners” to conduct maritime security operations.” James Kraska and Raul Pedrozo, International Maritime Security Law (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2013), 3.
[13] Advantage at Sea, 10.
[14] While forward-looking overall, in this respect, Advantage At Sea reflects existing realities: “Over the past decade, the Security Council has authorized the naval pursuit of rogue states, nuclear proliferators, pirates, and migrant smugglers with unparalleled frequency. From 1946 to 2007, the Security Council adopted approximately thirty-six resolutions with a direct or indirect impact in the maritime environment. In the following decade, from 2008 to 2017, the Security Council approved more than fifty such resolutions. What previously occurred about once every 1.7 years at [the United Nations] for six decades—the adoption of a resolution with a direct or indirect maritime impact—now is routine, transpiring every 2.5 months.” Brian Wilson, “The Turtle Bay Pivot: How the United Nations Security Council Is Reshaping Naval Pursuit of Nuclear Proliferators, Rogue States, and Pirates,” Emory International Law Review 33, issue 1 (2018): 1-90.
[15] Advantage at Sea, 5.
[16] Advantage at Sea, 5.
[17] For an excellent analysis of U.S. Navy versus U.S. Coast Guard functions, see Odom J.G. (2019) The United States. In: Bowers I., Koh S. (eds) Grey and White Hulls. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9242-9_11.
[18] Advantage at Sea, 13-14.
[19] Advantage at Sea implicitly recognizes this by its reference to the Coast Guard integrating its unique authorities—law enforcement, fisheries protection, marine safety, and maritime security—with Navy and Marine Corps capabilities (including the availability of assets) as a means of providing options to joint force commanders for cooperation and competition. Advantage at Sea, 7.
[20] The Coast Guard always has a focus toward higher threshold operations since, by law, it can be and has been (most recently, during World War Two) subsumed by the Navy in times of war. Thus, for example, the Coast Guard Atlantic and Pacific Area commanders continuously exist within DOD as Commander, Coast Guard Defense Force (CGDEFOR) East and West, respectively; federal law requires the Coast Guard to engage in training and planning of reserve strength and facilities as is necessary to insure an organized, manned, and equipped Coast Guard when it is required for wartime operation in the Navy; and Coast Guard doctrine recognizes the need to employ its authorities to support National Defense Strategy (NDS) objectives. See Coast Guard Strategic Plan 2018-2022.
Featured Image: May 2, 2021 – USCGC Hamilton (WMSL 753) and Georgian coast guard vessels Ochamchire (P 23) and Dioskuria (P 25) conduct underway maneuvers in the Black Sea. Hamilton is on a routine deployment in the U.S. Sixth Fleet area of operations in support of U.S. national interests and security in Europe and Africa. (Credit: U.S. Coast Guard)
This article outlines the path that led to the U.S. Navy’s current strategic deficit and proposes a framework for a new maritime strategy, one that I believe should be immediately developed along with the corresponding force structure assessment. With a modest 5% additional investment in the Navy over the next five years, 90% of the changes required by this strategy can be achieved.
The Death of Naval Strategy
The Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 effectively ended U.S. naval strategy. Through this legislation, Congress affirmed its authority to step in and “right the ship” after a series of well-publicized military failures, which at the time seemed to lay squarely on the shoulders of the services’ inability to work together without service-specific parochial interests getting in the way.
The Goldwater-Nichols Act affirmed and strengthened the role of Secretary of Defense and greatly expanded the power of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, effectively removing the Service Chiefs and Secretaries from any role in the operational chain of command and from any advisory role to the President. They were relegated to budget warriors – and the Navy was a ship not under command.
The Act also sought to increase the caliber of officers in joint positions and required that all officers serve in a joint tour as a prerequisite for promotion to flag or general rank. As a result, the services realigned officer career paths to meet these new joint timelines. Each service had to align to statutory promotion boards, which ultimately drove the career path of each officer, resulting in officers moving as quickly as possible from one milestone tour to another. No longer could an officer afford to spend multiple tours on Navy staffs learning the craft of strategy. Strategy was only for the Joint Staff—only for the Chairman.
The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO)—the only service chief with “Operations” in his title— had a unique role since the position’s establishment in 1915. The official role of the CNO was codified in 1947 under General Order 5 as “(a) command[er] of the Operating Forces, (b) principal naval advisor to the President and the Secretary [of the Navy].” The ink had barely dried on the General Order, when forces in Congress and the White House set about to further the trends in unification of the armed forces. Over the next 20 years in a series of laws, the role of the CNO in operational matters was fully removed and by the 1970s, then-CNO, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, was convinced that the Navy “was confused about its justification for existence.”
Thomas Hone noted in his book, Power and Change, that “OPNAV [the CNO’s staff] is a loose confederation, not an operational organization.” It was, however, not until 1978, when CNO Admiral Thomas Hayward, fresh off a tour as Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, translated Zumwalt’s criticisms into real change. Hayward was convinced the Navy needed to be revitalized, strategically and tactically – simply put, the Navy needed a strategy around which to plan and program. As professor John Hattendorf of the Naval War College observed, “Hayward sought to change…from a budget battle to an analysis of the strategic issues of a global maritime power.” In 1981, Navy Secretary John Lehman built on Hayward’s Sea Strike concept to establish the goal of a 600-ship Navy, which he very nearly reached before leaving office.
Then came Goldwater-Nichols. One cannot deny that the Act has been successful in more fully integrating the services into a Joint Force, however, one cannot overlook the deleterious effects on strategy and procurement in the individual services that have resulted. As I wrote in Look to the 1980s to Inform the Fleet of Today, the Navy does not have, and has not had, a maritime strategy for the past 30 years. Moreover, the past 30 years have seen failures in ship class after ship class, resulting in a lost generation of shipbuilding.
As “budget warriors,” many CNOs since the late 1980s have attempted to leave their mark on the service, and some have—for better or worse. However, it is precisely because the Navy has lacked a strategy that the success or failure of the Navy has relied solely on the strength of the CNO or Navy Secretary’s personality. As I noted in my article, Secretary Lehman’s bullish approach: “first strategy, then requirements, then the POM, then budget,” stands in stark contrast to the budget-driven Navy leadership of subsequent decades.
What is, and is not, a Maritime Strategy?
A strategy is the military means to accomplish political ends – or as often quoted from Clausewitz, “a continuation of politics with other means.”
This year, like many others, military leaders reiterated in repeated testimony before the House Armed Services Committee that they are “prepared to compete globally and fight and win the nation’s wars…” However, when asked what “win” means, the same leaders seem befuddled. The Chief of Staff of the Army recently testified that “winning with China means not fighting China.” I happen to agree with him, except, that was not the question—which is precisely the problem. We cannot define what “winning” means. When one cannot define winning, one cannot write a strategy.
What does winning with China look like? Numerous naval strategists including Sir Julian Corbett have argued that war cannot be won by naval (or air) action alone. Similarly, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, recently testified that “decisive outcomes in war are ultimately achieved on land…” Does this mean that we cannot have a decisive outcome with China without a ground invasion of the mainland?
Today, the military rise of China threatens the balance of power globally and as Thucydides noted – the rise in power of one actor threatens all others. This is not to say that China—or any other country—does not have the right to defend itself, but that a country that does not share the ideals of a free, democratic world is disrupting international norms. As with the destabilizing actions of Russia, if not properly managed, China’s actions could be misinterpreted and lead to unintended conflict.
It is precisely this ambiguity that drives the Navy’s need for a new global maritime strategy – and a complementary national maritime strategy that includes the full range of commercial maritime activities, domestic shipbuilding and repair, and Maritime law enforcement activities. The need is especially critical when defense resources are strained amid competing priorities from non-defense spending and among the services themselves. This naval strategy should be developed by naval leaders, not by the Joint Staff nor the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Since the end of World War II, the U.S. defense planning strategy has been a variation of a two-front war policy. Today’s National Defense Strategy (NDS) calls for the Armed Forces to be capable of “defeating aggression by a major power; deterring opportunistic aggression elsewhere.” By placing offense (defeating aggression) as the primary capability of our forces, it constrains thinking in the offense-defense balance of military strategy and has resulted in maintaining a large standing army and Cold War-era battle tactics as the preferred methods of training and equipping our forces.
Today’s “Maritime Strategy”
In the 1984 Maritime Strategy, “winning” meant keeping the conflict to a conventional war and supporting ground forces in driving the Soviets back to their own borders. This is the “deny and punish” approach still employed today. The Navy developed the strategy on the assumption, backed by intelligence, that any conflict with the Soviets would quickly engulf much of the globe. This required the Navy to be present and ready in three key regions simultaneously, instead of the “swing strategy” preferred by the Joint Staff.
The Navy developed a maritime strategy based on a three-front conflict and centered it around the carrier battle group. The strategy did not consider limitations in maintenance, training, or employment. It was assumed every ship would be available in conflict and that the number needed was 600.
If the same construct were applied to our force today using the current NDS, the Navy could simply use the Indo-Pacific Command Commander’s most demanding contingency to determine the number and type of ships required for the whole Navy. This resultant force structure would be well below the 355-ship requirement, even when accounting for “opportunistic aggression elsewhere,” and would likely fall below 250 total ships.
So, how did the Navy develop its current Battle Force 2045 plan that calls for somewhere between 382 to 446 manned ships and 143 to 242 large, unmanned vessels?
Instead of starting with a single contingency, or multiple contingencies, the Navy made assumptions about force development, force generation, and force employment to drive their final assessment. The range of ships presented in Battle Force 2045 came about not from a global maritime strategy, but instead, three different studies were simply coalesced into a single force structure assessment, and the resulting force requirements present a range based on the final product of each study.
As a 2019 RAND Corporation study on defense planning noted, “different assumptions and types of guidance can produce very different results in the process.” In other words, our assumptions greatly drive outcomes. Combatant Commanders (CCDR) develop contingency plans to combat specific scenarios in their theater while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, through the Joint Staff, is tasked with global strategic planning. The study concluded that “a common assumption is that the plans and programs of the defense planning process should be strategy-driven, but the final size and shape of the force are highly budget-influenced. When operating in that realm, defense planners do not have a reliable way of estimating—or quantifying—risk” (emphasis added).
Former Undersecretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2015, that the Joint Staff force planning process, the process that translates strategy into the forces we need, is deeply flawed and guided much more by parochial interests vice national interest. She goes on to say “the current process is antithetical to the kind of competing of ideas and innovation that the Department [of Defense] really needs…”
When a force structure assessment begins by using inputs like force generation and employment to counter specific scenarios, the output will always be dependent on current force employment constructs. The Optimized Fleet Response Plan uses a 5:1 model, where five ships result in one deployed. For example, if one wanted 100 ships deployed around the globe annually (the Navy’s traditional deployment rate), the force structure required would be 500 ships. However, if the force generation model is changed to 4:1, the total force would require only 400 ships. Further, if the force generation model was a forward deployed naval force (FDNF) model where ships are available two-thirds of the time (3:2), the force structure assessment addressing the same threat would only require 150 total ships. These force generation models are critical assumptions that drive the force structures used in defense planning.
In a seminal article, “Cruising for a Bruising: Maritime Competition in an Anti-Access Age,” Naval War College Professors Jonathan D. Caverley and Peter Dombrowski, note “the most likely location for great-power friction is at sea.” Many scholars have written about the balance of power that affects competition on land, especially over the last 20 years, but much less has been written about maritime competition and the offense-defense balance on the oceans. However, a truth remains, “when offense has the advantage, the security dilemma grows more acute, arms races grow more intense, and war grows more likely.”
Naval platforms are ideally suited to provide a flexible deterrent option, however, Barry R. Posen and Jack Snyder postulate that the U.S. military is offensively minded, and one can see this through public testimony and statements of our military leaders. The defense side of “offense-defense” is often thought of as a natural output of a strong offense. This was true in the 1980s Maritime Strategy that envisioned an exclusively offensive plan and is what Caverley and Dombrowski refer to as the “Cult of the Offensive…” They argue that even if the Navy could instantly develop the fleet of the future, the doctrine of power projection would still dominate the thinking.
In the 1984 Maritime Strategy, the deterrent role was ancillary from the demand-based wartime strategy that resulted in the 600-ship requirement. In that strategy, deterrence was an output of force structure, and it articulated the requirement for a peacetime presence to fill deterrent roles, reduce response times, and provide policymakers with naval crisis-response options. One-third of the ships needed for wartime missions in each theater would always notionally be forward deployed under the strategy. However, by 1987, the 600-ship requirement was exclusively tied to a deterrent presence model. Vice Admiral Hank Mustin testified that dropping below the 15-carrier requirement would necessitate a discussion of “what [region] do you want to give up?”
Deterrence as a Strategy
I agree with many of today’s military leaders that war is not inevitable, but to conclude that the only way to win in the face of malign or belligerent nations is not to go to war is naïve at best, and is not grounded in a strategy that uses deterrence as its first principle.
It would be better to acknowledge that we are not going to conduct a land campaign against China, so in conventional thinking, the U.S. cannot “win” a war, however, much as with nuclear war, deterrence should be considered “winning.” When military leaders use language like “fight and win,” it downplays the primary objective of deterrence and ultimately may shape force structure and force employment in the wrong direction.
A deterrence strategy should not be a byproduct of an offensive strategy. According to a 2017 Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) study, in the decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, “the U.S. Navy pursued a deterrence posture that relied on modest levels of forward deployed forces that were smaller representations of the larger force. To avoid instability caused by regional powers, deterrence was premised on the promise of punishment that would arrive with follow-on forces.” Bryan Clark, testifying about the study in 2017, affirmed “the emergence of great power competition is going to put the onus on us to deter conflict with those great powers.”
Each contingency plan has a phase of deterrence, or what the Navy terms “presence,” day-to-day requirements for ships at sea. In the past 20 years, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dominated the Navy’s power projection requirements and structural cracks in our force generation and employment models have been revealed. Many ships have deployed back-to-back with maintenance truncated, only to have future maintenance availabilities extended to double or more of their original length, requiring another ship to deploy in their place. The Navy has tried to “reset” this cycle on several occasions, only to be told that they must surge again to meet emergent requirements.
Today, the combined CCDR day-to-day requirements for all theaters would require 150 more ships than are presently in the fleet. Moreover, although the Navy can provide flexible strike options without the need for overflight consideration, the last two decades of war have shown that our Navy is not adequately sized using current force employment models to provide this enduring capability.
The inherent mobility of a navy provides a deterrent when present, but when removed it reminds enemies—and allies alike—of the unfixed nature of a mobile force, and could create the incorrect perception that an opening exists for aggression. Case in point is the recent deployment of the forward-based carrier Ronald Reagan from Japan to the Middle East. A ship can only be in one place at one time, therefore, political decisions or CCDR requests can also take away the deterrent that was present yesterday.
The same is not true for forward based ground troops. During the past twenty years, the Army did not lower the troop levels in Korea or Germany to deploy them to Iraq and Afghanistan—but that is precisely what the Navy did with its own force posture commitments. Naval forces that otherwise would have been present in the Mediterranean, Western Pacific, and North Atlantic have instead persistently been deployed to the Middle East, leaving a massive presence gap that China has exploited.
A New Maritime Strategy
The same 2017 CSBA study cited earlier provides a compelling model for developing a new maritime strategy. This study proposes a revolution in naval strategy and presence. This new “deterrent strategy” would organize forces into distinct Deterrence Forces and Maneuver Forces, with each having separate force structures and missions. The study suggested that the Navy should “focus on sustaining an effective posture for conventional deterrence rather than an efficient presence to meet near-term operational needs.”
The Deterrence Forces
Much has been written over the past 70 years about the actual success of deterrent strategies, but many believe it is a strategy worth pursuing. Deterrence cannot be measured in real time and although it is the cornerstone of our National Defense from nuclear to conventional conflict, there is no way to accurately measure its success or failure. Only in retrospect can we know that our strategy of deterrence has worked – and it has clearly worked in nuclear conflict, but not always in conventional conflict.
In a deterrent strategy, the commitment of the defender, in this case the U.S., must be resolute and unwavering. As Robert Jervis noted, “perceptions are the dominant variable in deterrence success or failure.” Bruce Russett concluded that deterrence fails “when the attacker decides that the defender’s threat is not likely to be fulfilled.” This does not mean that the U.S. must respond to every provocation, as it often did during the Cold War, but as Michael J. Mazarr noted, “successful deterrence typically involves…taking steps to demonstrate both the capability and determination to fulfill a threat.” It is this capability and determination that may have led Michèle Flournoy to state that if the U.S. had the capability to “credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours, Chinese leaders might think twice before, say, launching a blockade or invasion of Taiwan…”
The Navy and Marine Corps by their inherent construct are uniquely positioned to provide both general (ongoing, persistent) and immediate (short-term, urgent) deterrent forces. In a 2020 article, Erik Gartzke and Jon R. Lindsay stated that “One of the defining characteristics of a naval force is its special role in projecting power. Navies enable countries to influence politics in more places, more decisively, farther from home.” The article provides an in-depth discussion of the role of naval power and identifies actions that demonstrate resolve and capability, and that make room for adversaries to reach bargains, rather than conflict. This is precisely the reason the U.S. Navy should be persistently present on the high seas around the globe. This deterrent presence cannot simply be the byproduct of the current Navy global presence construct. It must be intentional, persistent, and tailored to the individual theater.
The CSBA study provides a detailed proposal of the composition and deployment locations of the deterrence force, and although I do not agree with the entirety of the force structure or locations outlined in the study, the overarching concept it defines is valid and should be considered as a foundation of a new maritime strategy.
In this construct, the Deterrence Force consists primarily of forward deployed naval forces, with a force generation model that produces a full year of deployed ship presence for every two ships, which is 2.5 times what we achieve today through purely rotational forces. The study’s force construct provides for a mix of low- and high-end forces, including unmanned surface and sub-surface vehicles. Carrier strike groups would not be part of Deterrence Forces.
The Maneuver Forces
While the Deterrence Force is the first line of defense preventing near-peer competitors from achieving a fait accompli, the Maneuver Force arrives to conduct sustained warfare, and will be augmented by the remainder of CONUS-based rotational forces when they arrive later.
In the CSBA study the Maneuver Forces are deployed on a more traditional, rotational model such as the Optimized Fleet Response Plan (OFRP) and are centered exclusively on carrier strike groups. The study provides for two carrier strike groups deployed continuously, but independent from current global force management plans. Instead, these forces “will need to be prepared for a wider range of possible operational environments, more potential adversaries, a larger number of alliance relationships, and a higher likelihood of being faced with high-intensity sustained combat.” In the study, the Maneuver Forces consist of multi-carrier task groups not assigned to a particular region, but free to move between theaters conducting major exercises, experimenting with tactics, and operating with allies.
Next Steps
The Navy should develop a maritime strategy and corresponding force structure based on the Deterrence and Maneuver Force construct outlined in the CSBA study, make changes to operating models as rapidly as possible, and make their intentions widely known.
The 2017 CSBA study makes a strong case for adoption of this new operating model and for making significant changes to future naval forces. We simply cannot continue to use the same outdated approach to conventional deterrence and expect to successfully deter peer competitors. The study concludes that:
“This [current] approach to conventional deterrence will likely not work against the potential great power aggressors of the 2030s, who are likely to seek the ability to achieve a quick, decisive victory over adversaries. Efforts to reverse the results of aggression would require a much larger conflict and would likely have global consequences that would create international pressure to reach a quick settlement. To be deterred in the 2030s, aggressors must be presented with the possibility that their goals will be denied or that the immediate costs to pursue them will be prohibitively high.”
The conundrum we face today is that there is no time to waste in developing this new strategy and method of operations. The CSBA study calls for significant investment in new platforms and overseas basing that are both costly and time consuming.
Many of the force changes proposed in the study would take decades to achieve and proposals such as basing forces in Vietnam and the Philippines are unlikely to materialize. However, force employment and generation can be changed quickly, and existing infrastructure and basing agreements can be rapidly leveraged to achieve the goals of this strategy.
In order to quickly establish the Deterrence Force, I differ somewhat from the CSBA study in the proposed locations for these units and believe that we must take advantage of locations where we currently conduct routine operations and have existing infrastructure. These forces could be postured in a sweeping arc encircling China, from Djibouti to Diego Garcia to Singapore to Guam to Japan, very similar to the Akhromeyev Map.This would include standing up the First Fleet in Singapore, as proposed by the former Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite. We should work with allies in the region on increasingly-coordinated operations and extend and strengthen our compacts with island nations, such the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau, who have expressed a willingness to work closely with the U.S. to reject Chinese influence.
In the Mediterranean and European theater, deterrent forces should be based in Souda Bay, Spain, and Norway to counter Russian malign efforts in the region, with additional forces stationed in Alaska. This would also be a deterrent force poised to respond in the Arctic.
For the Maneuver Force, a slightly different approach than that discussed in the CSBA study is achievable today. Operating these maneuver forces using a FDNF CONUS-based model would position one carrier strike group on each coast, with the remainder of the carriers operating in a rotational model (such as OFRP) until it is their turn to rotate into the FDNF model. Additionally, the Japan-based FDNF carrier would remain on its current cycle. The two FDNF CONUS carriers would then split the globe and operate as maneuver forces in a regional model vice specific allocation to a combatant commander.
Finally, I propose that by using existing platforms we can achieve most of the deterrent effect of this strategy in the next five years. We should increase DDG procurement to four per year (two per yard per year), rapidly ramp-up and expand the FFG program to a second production yard, modify current platforms such as the MK VI patrol boat with missile launchers, field the Naval Strike Missile on LCS, and convert commercial vessels to large VLS magazines. Additionally, while the Marine Corps fully develops its Expeditionary Advance Base Operations concept, they could begin testing the concept using the LCS and EPF platforms. I postulate that this deterrence effect can be gained for as little as a 5% increase in the current Navy budget ($10B) per year. Much as John Lehman wrote in discussing the development of the 1984 Maritime Strategy, 90 percent of the deterrent power of this buildup could be achieved in the first year. This was done by publicly declaring and explaining the strategy, especially its naval component, and taking actions that left no doubt among friend and foe that it would be achieved.
Conclusion
The United States has a unique role in history. Seth Cropsey and Bryan McGrath wrote in 2017, “the paradox of the American experience is that the U.S. is not simply a great power – it is an exceptional power, for which ideals count as much as strength.” It is this exceptional power – and responsibility – that requires exceptional thinking by the political and military leaders of our nation. This global maritime strategy can work, but the Navy will have to overcome substantial barriers to change in the Joint Staff, Combatant Commands, amongst the Services, and within the National Security Council and Congress. However, one cannot argue with a good plan. All we need is the plan and a few champions on Capitol Hill.
Representative Elaine Luria is a 20-year Navy veteran who represents Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District and serves as the Vice-Chair of the House Armed Services Committee.
Featured image: PERSIAN GULF (April 7, 2007) – Guided-missile cruiser USS Anzio (CG 68) conducts normal underway operations as part of Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) Carrier Strike Group. Anzio is on a scheduled deployment in support of Maritime Security Operations (MSO). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Angel Contreras)
critical events that combined to affect Navy strategy: The passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Gulf War. How did these events affect Navy strategy and strategy development?
