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Strategy

The U.S. Military In Competition: Supporting Effort One

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By Ryan Ratcliffe

“Ultimate excellence lies…in defeating the enemy without ever fighting.” —Sun Tzu

“America is back,” proclaimed President Joe Biden in his first address to the Department of State. “Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy,” he continued, declaring that the United States would repair its alliances and reengage the world to confront global challenges. Speaking to the department that had recently published its comprehensive assessment of relations with China and called for a revival of U.S. foreign policy, the President’s words were likely well received. 

Designed to serve as a modern-day “long telegram,” The Elements of the China Challenge reveals the Chinese Communist Party’s aim to revise world order, highlighting many of the Party’s malign and coercive activities designed to achieve its subversive ambitions. The authors of this seminal work, the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, conclude by calling for the United States to refashion its foreign policy around the principles of freedom and to reserve the use of military force for when all other measures have failed. 

Diplomacy will certainly be fundamental in addressing the China challenge, but returning it to the forefront of U.S. foreign policy will not occur overnight. Decades of systemic decline have reduced U.S. diplomatic capacity and left the military as the more prolific instrument of national power. Therefore, until the Department of State completes the transformation it requires and returns to primacy, the Department of Defense will need to shoulder some of the burden in answering the China challenge. One such element that the Department of Defense should assist with is countering actions in the gray zone. 

The gray zone is the “contested arena somewhere between routine statecraft and open warfare,” and it includes actions taken to achieve relative geopolitical gains without triggering escalation. So, despite the U.S. military’s preeminence as a joint fighting force (or, more likely, as a testament to it), state actors like the Chinese Communist Party are pursuing and achieving success in the gray zone. These revisionist actors purposefully avoid armed conflict in an effort to evade the lethal arm of U.S. foreign policy, challenging traditional assumptions of strategic deterrence. Left unchecked, these gray zone victories will gradually amass into a direct threat to U.S. national security; this makes it well within the military’s purview to orient on the gray zone. 

To help counter the gray zone strategy the Chinese Communist Party regularly uses, the U.S. military should consider non-traditional approaches to competition. Such creative military support would buy U.S. diplomacy time to rebuild its capacity for securing freedom, while still avoiding armed conflict. This article offers a framework for achieving this non-traditional support from the U.S. military: First, the United States should leverage its military manpower to legally support non-military competition activities. Second, the U.S. military should establish a forward-deployed headquarters to command and control the military’s involvement in competition. Finally, the senior military officer in this competition-focused headquarters should be charged with synchronizing operations in the information environment.

Providing Military Support to Competition

Although there are many definitions, competition is generally viewed as fundamental to international relations. To effectively compete, though, one must develop a thorough understanding of the competition. Therefore, it is important to recognize that the pinnacle of Sun Tzu’s “win without fighting” maxim is not determining the fate of a battle before it is fought; the true measure of excellence is to never even do battle because one’s aims were wholly achieved without conflict.

Recognizing that its competitors seek to achieve their revisionist aims below the threshold of armed conflict, the U.S. military must adapt its deterrence strategies to counter illegal gray zone operations. Deterrence by denial, defined as elevating the probability of operational failure, likely has a greater chance of succeeding in the gray zone than deterrence by punishment, such as taking retaliatory action. To effect deterrence by denial in the gray zone, the U.S. military should enable its interagency and international partners to counter the illicit activity that often underpins gray zone strategies.

Countering malign behavior has many faces: U.S. allies upholding their own sovereignty, partner nations protecting their economic livelihood, and the U.S. government imposing economic sanctions are all examples of ways to achieve competition’s strategic ends. In spite of their critical role in opposing illicit gray zone activities, though, the agencies that confront malign behavior often lack the manpower to reach the point of taking action. Manning shortfalls, exacerbated by the expansive size of the Indo-Pacific, leave the U.S. military’s interagency and international partners unable to muster adequate back-end support for their efforts, such as maintaining robust intelligence pictures or gathering actionable evidence of malign activity.

The U.S. Department of Defense, on the other hand, is more adequately manned for the task of competing in the Indo-Pacific. For example, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command alone has approximately 375,000 military and civilian personnel assigned to its area of responsibility. In contrast, the U.S. Department of State employs only 70,000 individuals throughout the world, and the New Zealand Defence Force is just over 15,000 strong. So, while the U.S. military’s interagency and international partners lack the manpower to identify and track gray zone activity, nearly two decades of asymmetric conflict has left the U.S. military manned, trained, and equipped to provide precisely the type of back-end intelligence and logistical support its partners require. Any manpower that the U.S. military contributes to these partners is likely to have outsized impacts on their ability to compete and counter gray zone actions.

It should be clarified that supporting competition cannot detract from the U.S. military’s lethality, a unique capability it alone provides. Therefore, like any effective strategy, efforts to counter gray zone operations should be focused on the most important and attainable objectives. Careful consideration should be given to preserving the “means” of the U.S. military to protect national security: its combat power. However, supporting competition and retaining combat power are not mutually exclusive. For example, many of the skills required to perform maritime governance, such as fusing multi-source intelligence data or finding and fixing maritime vessels, directly translate to combat operations. Activities supporting competition can and should be used to build operator proficiency, while simultaneously contributing to deterrence by demonstrating credible military power in the region.

A Competition-Focused Command

To synchronize the U.S. military’s support to competition and maintain awareness of the collective risk acceptance, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command should consider establishing a competition-focused headquarters west of the International Date Line. This headquarters would provide the unity of command required to develop the foreign, joint, and diplomatic partnerships needed to compete with a state actor seeking to undermine regional stability. 

Some will view a headquarters west of the International Date Line as incurring too much risk of escalation, but the opposite is more likely true. The U.S. military will be unable to deter illicit gray zone activities without accepting some risk, as a willingness to accept risk demonstrates commitment to one’s adversary. Accepting greater risk does not mean the United States should condone or take wanton action, though, as disparate or conflicting actions could elevate the risk of unintentional or inadvertent escalation. Instead, risk acceptance should be carefully considered for the confluence of the U.S. military’s efforts to support competition. Establishing a forward headquarters, then, directly addresses the issue of risk: it would demonstrate commitment to the United States’ competitors while maintaining a complete picture of the military’s support to competition, thereby decreasing the risk of escalation.

The ideal structure for this organization would be a Combined Joint Interagency Task Force (CJIATF) led by a senior civilian, with a 3-star general or flag officer serving as deputy, and possessing a cabinet of experienced foreign policy advisors and liaison officers. To ensure a “forward mindset”, the CJIATF should be positioned in Guam, Australia, or Palau, and staffed by a mix of deployed and permanent personnel. Such a construct will provide responsive command and control for regional competition, increasing the U.S. military’s ability to support competition while freeing other units to maintain their focus on conventional mission sets and traditional strategic deterrence.

There are many factors that make a CJIATF the ideal choice to serve as the nexus of military support to competition. First, joint task forces provide a “single mission focus” with the ability to “integrate forces…in a dynamic and challenging political environment.” They also foster “de facto interdependence” through an environment of mutual reliance on their members’ contributions. The “combined” and “interagency” modifiers emphasize the need to include a wide variety of partners within this joint task force—partners that should range from U.S. government agencies to a host of international liaison officers.

To effectively navigate the complex requirements of providing military support to external entities, the CJIATF should employ a blend of traditional and novel concepts. For example, the “by, with, and through” approach translates well to competition. Although more commonly associated with armed conflict, this approach offers an outline for orchestrating interagency and international cooperation: The CJIATF strives for actions performed by its partners, with the support of U.S. forces, and through a legal and diplomatic framework. Such an approach would allow the U.S. military to support a wide range of partner actions, while still abiding by international law and applicable U.S. Code. 

Competition demands exactly the kind of interagency and international cooperation that a joint task force promotes. As the stakes of competition continue to rise with tensions following suit, detailed integration between the military, government agencies, and partner nations remains the best hope for diminishing the risk of conflict. Avoiding conflict while preserving the rules-based international order should be considered success in today’s competition, and a CJIATF is uniquely capable of supporting this objective.

Information-Related Synchronization

In addition to enabling partner actions, the CJIATF will need to grapple with the fact that all competition efforts are inexorably tied to the information environment. Instant communication and weaponized social media offer ample opportunity for competitive exploitation, and they present considerable risk of inadvertent escalation. Additionally, misinformation and deep fakes now offer low-cost means to wreak societal havoc with ambiguous attribution. 

Despite some documented success, the United States has struggled to develop a unified understanding of information operations. Difficulty preventing exploitation, such as Russian interference in U.S. elections or Chinese industrial espionage, creates a perception of information vulnerability—a setback the United States must rectify. To fix this, consideration of information operations needs to move from garrison staff, academia, and think tanks to the operational realm. The role of every warfighter has changed: You are no longer simply “doing land operations, you’re doing an information operation in the land domain.” 

The connection between competition and information makes the CJIATF’s responsibilities inherently information-centric. Therefore, in addition to enabling its partners to compete, the CJIATF must also synchronize information operations in support of competition. This focus on gaining advantage in the battle for information dominance makes the CJIATF’s senior military officer a logical choice to serve as the first Joint Force Information Component Commander (JFICC).

The JFICC is a novel approach to the battle-tested functional component commander construct. Commanders designate a subordinate functional component commander to establish unity of command and unity of effort for operations in a specific domain (i.e., there are normally separate component commanders for operations on land, at sea, in the air, etc.). This type of domain-specific synchronization is precisely what the United States needs to overcome its previous setbacks in the information environment. Additionally, operations can have significant effects in the information environment regardless of the domain they are executed in, and the inverse is also true: Actions in the information environment can have real-world impacts in physical domains. 

To manage this cross-domain interaction, the JFICC needs to synchronize the projected effects of all efforts in the region. This robust requirement, combined with the move towards all-domain operations, means the JFICC must be able to deploy their information-related capabilities as a demonstrable force, in line with the forces operating in the other domains. They will then need the authority and capacity to mass this force in support of decisive action. Designating the CJIATF commander as the JFICC directly addresses this requirement by placing “the responsibility and authority for execution of the decisive [information] tasks under a commander vice under a staff officer.”

Although it is non-doctrinal for a joint force commander to serve as a functional component commander, there is some precedent for this: A Special Operations Joint Task Force commander may also serve as the Joint Force Special Operations Component Commander. Comparing special operations forces with information-related capabilities turns out to be rather effective, as neither “own” physical battlespace, neither historically have a dedicated service component, and both often operate below the level of armed conflict.

Any future JFICC will likely be faced with an extraordinarily complex all-domain problem, and will be able to directly impact national strategic objectives. Experience is the best teacher, and the U.S. military should capitalize on the opportunity to advance its ability to operate in the information environment by employing the first JFICC below the threshold of armed conflict. Doing so will provide valuable insight into the dyad of operating in the physical domain and information environment simultaneously—a fundamental challenge of all-domain operations. 

Competition is Not a Nine-to-Five Job

To realize its strategic aims, the United States must make a concerted effort to align its means and ways to achieve its ends, building upon its strengths while improving its deficiencies. Supporting interagency and international partners where command and control resides with a new headquarters commanded by a novel functional component commander presents formidable challenges, but it is precisely the economy-of-force option the United States needs to better compete now. This structure aligns with strategic guidance from the highest levels of the U.S. Government, and it could eventually serve as an example for other theaters to emulate, such as U.S. Africa Command.

Finally, a subtle but crucial aspect of implementing this construct is that it acknowledges the gray zone operating environment for what it is: a contest of wills without violence. Left unchecked, these gray zone strategies could lead to a Tzu-esque defeat of the rules-based international order before Clausewitzian force is ever used. With this recognition, the U.S. military must shift its approach to competition from a “nine-to-five” business model and begin applying effort commensurate with traditional military operations.

Utilizing the U.S. military to support competition will likely be difficult and often uncomfortable. Additionally, establishing another forward-deployed headquarters will require both personal sacrifice and significant monetary commitment, and appointing a new functional component commander will challenge traditional military thought. There is, however, something much worse than these changes: failure to levy the existing force against today’s challenges with the hope that tomorrow’s force will be more capable of achieving success. Hope is not a viable course of action when national security is at stake.

As put forth in The Elements of the China Challenge, the United States needs to mobilize the global forces who ascribe to the existing world order and are willing to defend it, keeping one aim in mind: securing freedom. The forward-mindset and combined, interagency nature of this supporting approach will do exactly that: ensure the United States’ efforts align with and support the strategic interests of its partners in the Indo-Pacific. This paradigm shift could be the rallying cry that unites a constellation of allies and partners to form the whole-of-society approach this contest will require. The time for action is now; the world order we know depends on it.

 Major Ryan “Bevo” Ratcliffe is an EA-6B Electronic Countermeasures Officer and a Forward Air Controller in the United States Marine Corps, currently assigned to I MEF Information Group. He will begin pursuing a Master of International Public Policy from The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in August 2021.  

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Marine Corps, Department of the Navy, or Department of Defense.

Featured image: A JH-7 fighter bomber attached to a naval aviation brigade under the PLA Northern Theater Command taxies on the runway with drogue parachute during a flight training exercise in early January, 2021. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Duan Yanbing)

Strategy

A Tale of Two Seas: The Caribbean and South China Sea in Great Power Perspective

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By Akshat Patel

The South China Sea is to China as the Caribbean Sea is to the United States. Just as the United States repeatedly thwarted European powers from the Caribbean throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, China intends to thwart an American presence in the South China Sea in this century.1 In 1962, the ambitions of two superpowers reached a crescendo in the form of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Along the same lines, the ambitions of two of today’s great powers are resulting in skirmishes across the South China Sea. In the same way that the clash in the Caribbean was a deciding factor in who the victor of the Cold War would be, American maritime superiority will be decided in large part by who the reigning power in the South China Sea will be.

The parallels between Soviet-U.S. relations vis-à-vis the Caribbean and China-U.S. relations vis-à-vis the South China Sea are as striking as they are instructive. The Red Navy’s mistakes in its transatlantic ventures serve as salutary course corrections for the U.S. Navy’s transpacific undertakings today.

Then, as Now

By the twentieth century, the United States had established itself as the dominant power in the Americas. Politically stable and economically vibrant, the United States overshadowed the smaller republics of the Caribbean. Blessed with two adjacent oceans and two peaceful neighbors, the United States was virtually immune to a land-based invasion. The only way for a foreign power to establish a foothold in the American hemisphere was through the Caribbean. While “the Caribbean was the natural maritime extension of the continental United States, it was also the part of America’s security environment most vulnerable to European attack,” notes Robert Kaplan, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.2

In October of 1962, the Soviet Union attempted to exploit this potential American vulnerability through Cuba. The Soviets wanted to establish a naval base and station land-based nuclear missiles on the island nation. President Kennedy ordered an embargo around Cuba to expunge Soviet ambitions from the Caribbean and compelled Khrushchev to blink in the ultimate staring contest. In exchange for withdrawing nuclear missiles from Cuba, the Soviets extracted a public promise to not invade Cuba and a private promise to withdraw American nuclear missiles from Turkey.3 Both sides avoided direct conflict by reaching an agreement that neither desired. The Soviets surrendered their Caribbean aspirations and the United States surrendered its Cuban advances. 

China enjoys many of the same benefits of geography as the United States. Surrounded by natural barriers to aggression such as frigid Siberia, the Gobi Desert, the impenetrable Himalayas, and the lush forests of Vietnam and Laos, China is largely shielded from terrestrial attack. Just like the United States, China’s vulnerability is to the southeast. Not only do most Chinese live near the coast, but the South China Sea serves as their primary economic lifeline.4 The straits of Malacca, Makassar, Sunda, and Luzon all pour into the South China Basin and control both China’s energy supplies from the Middle East and its exports to the West.5 Just as the Caribbean is littered with small island nations eclipsed by a colossal United States, the South China Sea is peppered with littoral states over which China casts a large shadow.

The fallout over control of an American sea of 1.5 million square miles foreshadowed the rest of that great-power competition – the Cold War. Similarly, the contest for an Asian sea of comparable proportions will act as a bellwether for the great-power competition taking place today. Five claimants occupy almost 70 different atolls and have built more than 90 different outposts in the South China Sea.6 With 20 outposts in the Paracel Islands, 7 in the Spratly Islands, and 3,200 acres of newly constructed land, China is by far the most aggressive player in the area.7 Malaysian, Philippine, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese maritime claims have been brushed to the wayside while China charges forward to secure its “blue national soil.”8 China is aware of its vulnerability to the southeast and stands to gain immensely by shielding against it. By turning the South China Sea into a Chinese enclave, Beijing would not only safeguard the lives and livelihood of its citizens, but would also create a strategic disadvantage for the United States. The South China Sea is a conduit linking the Western Pacific to the Indian Ocean and Chinese control of that critical juncture would jeopardize American maritime dominance. Lucrative global trade routes would cease to be international common grounds and the redoubts of allied nations would fall under a Chinese penumbra. American merchants would be subject to harassment by the Chinese coast guard and the U.S. Navy would no longer be able to crisscross the Indo-Pacific theater with impunity.

To circumvent China’s efforts to dominate the South China Sea, American naval policy is rightly learning from Soviet efforts. By maintaining naval bases in South Korea, Japan, and Guam while simultaneously encouraging a naval buildup in Singapore, Taiwan, and the Philippines, the United States is building a multilateral coalition to check Chinese forays into the Pacific.9 As the Soviet Union attempted to tamp down American influence in the Americas through Cuba, the United States is curbing Chinese influence in Asia through Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) nations.

Empowering the Right Platform

When Che Guevara expressed concern at the Soviet gambit in the Caribbean, Soviet Minister of Defense Rodion Malinovsky replied, “There will be no big reaction from the U.S. side.”10 The Soviet defense minister expected little retaliation from the United States because, as he viewed it, he was exercising soft power by bringing Cuba into the fold. As the term “Cold War” reminds us, neither side was ever interested in a full-fledged, direct, violent conflict; instead, the Cold War was a great-power competition in which both sides tried to undermine the other through maximum power projection while suffering minimal losses. To project this power, the Soviets wanted to permanently station an entire fleet in the Caribbean: two cruisers, four destroyers, eleven diesel electric submarines, and two submarine tenders.11 But, at the last minute, the Soviets changed their plans. Instead, they sent forth four covert Foxtrot-class diesel submarines as the vanguard of the Red Fleet.12

The reigning Soviet naval doctrine prioritized submarines over surface ships. In 1956, Khrushchev stated that “submarines were the most suitable naval weapon and they would receive emphasis in the future development of the Soviet Navy.”13 As a result, new construction of major surface vessels was virtually terminated under his premiership.14 According to a 2017 CIA analysis of the Soviet Navy, “Khrushchev declared surface naval forces…no longer useful and predicted they would soon become obsolete.”15 Motivated by advances in technology, the Soviets wanted to reduce overall military manpower and costs by replacing a large surface fleet with a more effective, smaller submarine fleet.16 In other words, they prioritized a denser more capable force over a more numerous, less capable one.

By attempting a transatlantic overture to the Caribbean, the Soviets made the right geopolitical decision. By sending submarines, they made the wrong tactical decision. Submarines are mobile, undersea intelligence gatherers packed with brutish lethality. They are about “sheer aggression,” not power projection.17 They are best suited to spy and wreak havoc, not as conspicuous icons of power. By deploying covert submarines to the Caribbean, the Soviets were guaranteed to alarm Americans and provoke a strong response. President Kennedy ordered a maximum Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) effort to track and surface the submarines.18 The Soviets were not harmlessly posturing by deploying submarines within sailing distance of Florida while simultaneously stationing land based nuclear missiles at America’s doorstep. They were committing an act of belligerence that the Unites States met with force. The Atlantic Fleet mobilized to detect and ferret out the furtive aggressors. As Defense Minister Malinovsky’s comment suggests, the bold step to Cuba was never supposed to culminate into the hair-raising crisis that it did. His intention was to assert Soviet dominance without causing an international scene. This is exactly the United States’ objective in the South China Sea today.

To maintain American primacy in the South China Sea, Chinese maritime ambitions must be curtailed without devolving into the grand standoff that occurred in the Caribbean. Submarines should not be the U.S. Navy’s primary tools in this great-power competition. Because of the raw aggression that submarines communicate, they are ill-suited for missions that display military power and best suited for missions that exercise military power. The surface fleet’s strengths are altogether opposite.

Aircraft carriers, simultaneously symbols of national power and of national prestige, are excellent tools for communicating power, but a ruinously costly platform to lose.19 Losing a symbol of national pride would deal irreparable damage to the national psyche. The U.S. Navy must look to its destroyers and cruisers as the primary combatants of this great-power competition. While not as awe-inspiring as an aircraft carrier, they are still an excellent form of communication. The U.S. Navy has rightly increased destroyer and cruiser freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) in the South China Sea, and it must continue this upward trajectory.20 By regularly challenging expansive Chinese claims, Washington must continue to signal Beijing that the South China Sea is not a Chinese lake. Frequent FONOPs through contested sea lanes go much farther in projecting maritime strength, communicating intentions, and deterring aggression than stealthy submarine deployments. To do this effectively, and not repeat Soviet mistakes, the United States needs a larger surface fleet.

The battle of ‘capability vs. numbers’ is a perennial struggle that has haunted the minds of American naval policy wonks for decades. Examined holistically, there is a clear winner. “The trend towards fewer, more capable ships is both unarguable and . . . inexorable,” notes Admiral John Ellis, former Commander of United States Strategic Command.21 Over the past twenty-five years, the number of ships in the U.S. Navy has decreased by nearly half while the demands placed on the American fleet remain the same.22 “Today, that means twice the percentage of the fleet is deployed than was at the height of the Cold War,” notes ex-Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead.23 At the same time, the Congressional Budget Office recently determined that the Navy is only able to fulfill 60 percent of deployments requested by combatant commanders.24 In short, at some point, numbers do matter. Simple math dictates that if the U.S. Navy has fewer ships, either they need to be deployed more often or they must be asked to execute fewer missions. The Navy must stem its unrelenting pursuit of a leaner, cutting-edge fleet. Naval budgeteers must be willing to substitute a pricey aircraft carrier for a dozen more destroyers or cruisers. Vulnerable aircraft-carriers and stealthy submarines will not be the heroes that secure American maritime superiority, it will be destroyers and cruisers.

Together, not Alone

The Cuban missile crisis of 58 years ago stands as the most studied event of the nuclear era—so much so that there are essays about why we should stop writing essays about it.25 Yet, until fall 2002, American national security experts were not aware that the four Foxtrot-class diesel submarines deployed to Cuba had been armed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes.26 The CIA’s four intelligence reports on Soviet arms buildup leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis categorically ruled out the presence of nuclear weapons in the Caribbean.27 Instead of preparing Americans for the possibility of nuclear catastrophe, intelligence reports based on complacent assumptions made the discovery of this fact all the more shocking. In short, the Soviet Union caught the United States flat-footed.

Handicapped by the technology of the time and oblivious to the presence of tactical nuclear weapons, the U.S. Navy decided to release a Notice to Mariners (NTM) detailing how depth charges would be used to peacefully signal the submarines to surface. Moscow never sent an acknowledgement of receiving the NTM.29 Upon detecting the nuclear torpedo laden B-59, American naval forces started dropping depth charges in accordance with the NTM. Unaware of American intentions, suffering from inhospitable conditions and agitated by the subsurface explosions, Captain Savitsky gave the order to ready the nuclear torpedo: “We’re gonna blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not become the shame of the fleet.”30 It is because cooler heads prevailed on the B-59 that day that the Caribbean was not subject to a nuclear explosion. Second Captain Vasily Arkhipov overruled Captain Savitsky and prevented the opening shot of a nuclear war.

Now as then, complacency continues to surprise and compel the United States into ad hoc, reactive measures. In 2012, both China and the Philippines swarmed a collection of rocks and reefs known as Scarborough Shoal. Up until then, both countries claimed the Shoal as theirs, but it was under de facto Philippine control. 550 nautical miles from the closest Chinese land mass and 124 nautical miles from the main Philippine island of Luzon, the Scarborough Shoal episode exemplifies China’s ambitions in the South China Sea.31 To mediate their dispute, the United States hastily brokered a bilateral agreement for both sides to retreat and, in effect, return control to the Philippines. Only one side held to its word. China used the agreement to deceive the Philippines into retreating while maintaining its presence. Without American reprisal or condemnation, China has since then controlled Scarborough Shoal.

The United States must not let the People’s Liberation Army (Navy) bully China’s neighbors. Unlike Khrushchev’s about-face with Castro, the United States must stand steadfast beside its allies. Despite increased FONOPs in the South China Sea, a recent public opinion poll of ASEAN citizens indicated that almost two-thirds of respondents believed U.S. engagement with ASEAN nations had declined. Another one-third said they had little to no confidence in the U.S. as a strategic partner and provider of regional security.32 The United States must reaffirm its commitment to the South China region through military sales, combined exercises, and economic empowerment. It is much harder to reverse a change in the status quo than to maintain it through deterrence. By turning the cause of American maritime dominance into a multilateral quest, China’s unilateral offensives will be rendered moot. 

One More Time

The Soviet Union was not defeated through armed conflict; it was defeated through persistent coercion. As the United States negotiates its presence in the South China Sea, and by extension its maritime dominance, it must rely on the same strategy that overwhelmed the Soviet Union while not resurrecting Soviet mistakes. The Soviet decision to forsake their surface fleet and their allies precipitated their withdrawal from the Caribbean, which in turn forecasted their global retreat and eventual downfall. The United States must simultaneously lean on its surface fleet and its ASEAN allies to maintain its position as the bailiff of the world’s saltwater commons.

Sun Tzu pithily remarked that the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. We have done it once before, now we must do it again.

LT Akshat Patel is a Submarine Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy. The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not represent those of the Department of Defense. 

Endnotes

1. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, (W. W. Norton, New York, 2001), 401.

2. Robert D. Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron: the South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (New York: Random House, 2015), 278.

3. Noam Chomsky, “Cuban Missile Crisis: How the US Played Russian Roulette with Nuclear War,” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, October 15, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/15/cuban-missile-crisis-russian-roulette.

4. George Friedman, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (New York: Random House, 2009), 153.

5. Ibid.

6. “Occupation and Island Building,” Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (Center for Strategic and International Studies), accessed April 25, 2020, https://amti.csis.org/island-tracker/

7. “China Island Tracker,” Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (Center for Strategic and International Studies), accessed April 25, 2020, https://amti.csis.org/island-tracker/china/

8. Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron, 60.

9. Ibid., 75.

10. Svetlana V Savranskaya, “New Sources on the Role of Soviet Submarines in the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Journal of Strategic Studies 28:2 (April 2005): 236, doi: 10.1080/01402390500088312.

11. Raymond Garthoff, “New Evidence on the Cuban Missile Crisis: Khrushchev, Nuclear Weapons, and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Cold War International History Bulletin 11 (Winter 1998): 253.

12. Ryurik A Ketov, Captain 1st Rank, Russian Navy (retired), “The Cuban Missile Crisis as Seen Through a Periscope,” Journal of Strategic Studies 28:2 (April 2005): 218, doi: 10.1080/01402390500088304.

13. Soviet Navy: Intelligence and Analysis During the Cold War (Central Intelligence Agency, 2017), 12.

14. Ibid., 7.

15. Ibid., 12.

16. Ibid., 8.

17. Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron, 71.

18. Svetlana V Savranskaya, “New Sources on the Role of Soviet Submarines in the Cuban Missile Crisis,” 249.

19. “Aircraft-carriers are big, expensive, vulnerable – and popular,” The Economist, November 2019; Jeff Vandenengel, “Too Big to Sink,” Proceedings, May 2017.

20. Zack Cooper et al. “America’s Freedom of Navigation Operations Are Lost at Sea,” Foreign Policy, January 2019.

21. James O. Ellis, Admiral, U.S. Navy (retired), “Rightsize the Navy,” Hoover Digest (Summer 2018): 49.

22. Gary Roughead, Admiral, U.S. Navy (retired), “A Stretched Navy and A Fiscal Disconnect” Strategika 47 (January 2018).

23. Ibid.

24. Ellis, “Rightsize the Navy,” 51.

25. Eliot A. Cohen, “Why We Should Stop Studying the Cuban Missile Crisis,” National Interest, Winter 1985/86.

26. Svetlana V Savranskaya, “New Sources on the Role of Soviet Submarines in the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

27. Amy B. Zegart, “October Surprises,” Hoover Digest (Fall 2013): 50.

28. Svetlana V Savranskaya, “New Sources on the Role of Soviet Submarines in the Cuban Missile Crisis,” 249.

29. Ibid., 250.

30. Ibid., 246.

31. Gordon G. Chang, “A China Policy That Works – For America” Strategika 41 (May 2017).

32. Jack Kim et al. “Southeast Asia wary of China’s Belt and Road project, skeptical of U.S.: survey,” last modified January 6, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-asean-singapore-idUSKCN1P00GP.

Featured Image: A P2V Neptune U.S. patrol plane flies over a Soviet freighter during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Strategy

Implementing National Maritime Strategy With a Shrunken Fleet

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By Robert C. Rubel

Soon the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower will depart from Norfolk, Va., on a “double pump” deployment; going back out for another six or seven month cruise just six months after returning from a deployment that set records for the amount of time at sea.  This departure will occur shortly after Ike’s sister ship USS Theodore Roosevelt did the same thing from the West Coast. This will take a toll on both the ships of the two battle groups and the sailors that man them, not to mention their families. The reasons behind the decision to double pump Ike boil down to too much demand from the regional combatant commanders and too few ships available to fill those demands at an operating tempo that allows for adequate ship maintenance and stateside time for sailors.

Although former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper issued a plan for expanding the fleet, its prospects for implementation are unclear at best due to massive government expenditures for COVID-19 relief and vaccines. For its part, the Navy is looking for ways to meet demands within expected budgets, such as fielding unmanned vessels and building smaller ships. But these measures miss seeing the strategic forest for the operational trees. The current U.S. military command and control system of regional combatant commands is tacitly based on having a much larger military force than is available today. In lieu of building the U.S. military, especially the Navy, back up to Cold War levels, a new approach to managing the use of naval forces on a global level is needed.

U.S. maritime strategy, which consists of the way the nation uses the seas to support its overall grand strategy, has been consistent since shortly after the end of World War II. The national grand strategy, adopted by President Roosevelt and his Secretary of State Cordell Hull, was to broker a system of international institutions and rules that would level the international economic playing field and at least work toward a rules-based international order. That grand strategy has been consistent to the current day despite changes in administrations, their differing policies, and massive geopolitical shifts; the U.S. seeks to comprehensively defend the global system of commerce and security. 

The maritime component, as described by the political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1954, is to ring Eurasia with naval power to deter, suppress or defeat instability and aggression that might threaten the system. This maritime strategy is mechanized by the Navy, which is tasked with raising, training and maintaining forces for use by the regional unified combatant commanders. The combatant commanders, for their part, develop both war plans for use in case of military aggression and theater strategies for day-to-day security operations. Both include estimates of forces needed, which can be broken down into surge forces that might be needed for contingencies and steady state forces for day-to-day use, including deterrence, engagement and general constabulary functions. Thus, in the Navy’s case, it not only needs forces to meet the demands of day-to-day operations, but to have in reserve forces to surge in case war breaks out. During the Cold War, especially in the 1980s, the Navy had sufficient forces to support both aspects of force demand. Now it does not.

The strategic paradigm taught in the nation’s war colleges is ends-ways-means. These three elements must be harmonized if strategy is to be successful. Ends and the ways to achieve them must not be based on inadequate means. This implies, in the current instance, that either U.S. ends – a liberal global trading order – must be modified to be less expansive, or the ways, a grand strategy of comprehensive defense and support of that system, must be adjusted. Despite the Trump Administration’s adoption of an “America First” policy, it does not appear that it made any significant move to alter the supporting maritime strategy aspect of the traditional grand strategy, and the Biden Administration is likely to reaffirm U.S. adherence to it.

Given that the means the Navy has at its disposal to support the national maritime strategy are more or less fixed, something has to give. At various points suggestions have been made to shift the Navy to a surge posture, significantly reducing its forward deployments, but this would be out of step with the character of the national grand strategy. Altering fleet design to an architecture of a larger number of smaller and cheaper ships is a possibility, but this will take a decade or more to achieve, even if sufficient institutional and political support for it can be mustered. A way must be found to stretch the available means to accommodate the national maritime strategy in the short term.

One way of viewing the U.S. joint command and control structure is that it is based on strategic sufficiency of means. Whether the overall U.S. military strategy was based on two simultaneous major contingencies or down to one in one theater and a holding strategy in another, the demands for day-to-day forces emanated from all six geographic commands all the time, and a grand strategy of comprehensive system defense required that all of them be honored, even in light of the Navy’s severe difficulty in satisfying those demands. Former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work attempted to shift the formula from a demand-based model to one based on supply; the combatant commanders would be placed on a diet of forces that could be sustained by the Navy. He was not able to institute such an approach because starving the combatant commanders of forces across the board was neither consistent with the U.S. grand strategy nor was it politically acceptable to the combatant commanders. Another way of dealing with scarcity must be found.

An answer can be found in U.S. Air Force air power theory. That theory asserts that air power is a scarce but mobile resource. These two characteristics imply that it must be subject to centralized management such that can be applied strategically across the theater. This logic can be scaled up and applied to sea power on a global basis. In other words, the nation’s sea power, at least the allocation of it, should be managed by a staff in Washington that has a global perspective. Sea power, given the reduced size of the fleet, is a scarce asset whose application must be managed strategically.

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis devised the idea of randomizing naval deployments or at least keeping intended movements of forces under wraps such that potential adversaries would not know when a U.S. task force would show up. In theory this would maintain deterrence with a force too small to conduct a station keeping strategy. While it made for good deterrence theory, it did nothing to address day-to-day combatant commander requirements and, from a global perspective, reduced the availability of U.S. Navy forces for response purposes. In any case, the strategy was never fully implemented; the combatant commander demands for forces just overrode it.

The failure of both the Work and Mattis schemes, even though emanating from the top two Defense Department officials, indicates that a more institutionalized fix is needed. That fix would consist of a new staff within the Pentagon with global command authority, at least for maritime operations. Its authority to allocate maritime resources would echo that of Admiral Ernest King in World War II in his role as Commander-in-Chief U.S. Fleet. He was the only officer that had the “latitude to change the longitude” of Navy ships. However, simply establishing the authority to manage the global distribution of naval forces is not enough, that distribution must be based on a new approach to the nation’s maritime strategy.

The U.S. Navy simply does not have enough ships to provide “full service” of robust deterrence, contingency response capability and engagement capacity in all areas, at least at an acceptable cost in terms of maintenance and personnel tempo. Prioritization on a global basis will be needed, and that is where a global maritime staff with global allocation authority is needed. Such prioritization must be strategic; that is, on the basis of some idea for how forces can be allocated to achieve desired effects or to manage the risk associated with executing the current maritime strategy with fewer forces. The current organizational structure is only able to allocate on the basis of satisficing. Such a staff might also be able to conceive of and implement a new version of the national maritime strategy.

Heretofore the U.S. Navy has, from time to time, issued what have been called maritime strategies, but as a military service constrained by statute to raising, training and equipping forces, it has no formal authority to do so. On the other hand, the Navy does have a global and maritime perspective, which at times has impelled it, notably in the cases of the 1980s Maritime Strategy and the 2007 Cooperative Strategy, to deal with an operational/strategic problem in the maritime domain that needed to be solved but which the joint chain of command either could not or would not address. A maritime staff within the joint chain of command would have such authority. This would require close coordination with most other cabinet departments and the National Security Council, which suggests that it be located in Washington. 

A kind of template for such a staff already exists; each combatant command has a Joint Force Maritime Component Commander (JFMCC) embedded within its C2 structure. The JFMCC possesses the requisite authorities for moving, tasking and supporting naval forces, including not only the needed administrative mechanisms but a maritime operations center (MOC) that provides real-time situational awareness and communications.

A national level version of a JFMCC would be feasible from a mechanical point of view; the challenges to its instantiation would be political. First, it would essentially constitute a new unified command that combined the characteristics of current geographic and functional ones. However, unlike the geographic commands, the new global JFMCC would not directly command naval forces within a theater, it would simply allocate forces. Nonetheless, new legislation would be needed to create it and imbue it with the requisite authorities. Opposition from the Air Force and Army could be expected, as it might be viewed as giving the Navy too much power. However, the command would not have any Title X authority over budgets, although as a joint command, it would have a draw on forces from those Services if it thought necessary; the maritime domain involves the functioning of all types of forces. Moreover, as a joint command, it would be staffed by personnel from all the Services and its commander could wear any uniform. It is the perspective of the command – global – and its function – strategic allocation of forces – that governs the approach of whoever commands it, not the color of their uniform.

The current structure of the Unified Command Plan bakes in an inefficient approach to the execution of the national grand strategy and its maritime component. When the United States enjoyed a robust force structure this inefficiency could be tolerated; in the current environment of resource scarcity it creates more strategic risk than is necessary by limiting the global mobility of naval forces, and to some extent other forces. Strategic allocation vice satisficing must be achieved, and current structures such as the Joint Staff and Office of the Secretary of Defense are not able to accommodate the function. The creation of a new unified command with a global, maritime perspective is a viable and frankly necessary solution.

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

Featured Image: U.S. Navy ships from the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group and the America Expeditionary Strike Group transit the South China Sea March 15, 2020. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Nicholas V. Huynh)

Strategy

The Pentagon Needs To Rethink Its Worst-Case Scenarios Against China And Russia

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The following article originally published on Forbes and is republished with permission.

By Bryan Clark

Pentagon force planning is a dense and complicated blend of assumptions and projections, but operational scenarios are its most impactful ingredient. Their importance varies as administrations change and threats come and go, but depictions of the situations U.S. military forces and systems need to address are essential to setting investment priorities. Unfortunately, organizational inertia and a desire to compete for dollars lead U.S. military services to plan for scenarios that privilege their largest existing programs–even as America’s adversaries are moving on to an entirely different type of warfare.

During the past decade, DoD naturally focused its planning on peer competitors China and Russia or nuclear-armed rogue states like North Korea. The most stressing campaigns U.S. forces could face against these adversaries dominate DoD analysis, under the assumption that worst-case scenarios like an invasion of Taiwan also capture the needs for “lesser-included” cases like a lengthy blockade of Japan’s southwest islands or a sustained submarine threat off the U.S. coast. 

Recognizing DoD’s focus on high-intensity warfighting, its potential adversaries are methodically developing strategies and systems that circumvent the U.S. military’s advantages and exploit its vulnerabilities by avoiding the types of situations for which U.S. forces have prepared. DoD may be falling into a trap by continuing to use a narrow set of high-intensity conflicts as its pacing threats. 

The New Battleground

As part of their efforts to bypass U.S. military strengths, the Chinese and Russian militaries seek to make information and decision-making the main battlegrounds for future conflict. Concepts such as the People’s Liberation Army’s System Destruction Warfare or the Russian military’s New Generation Warfare direct forces to electronically or physically degrade an opponent’s information sources and communications while introducing false data that erodes the defender’s orientation and understanding. 

In their hybrid or gray-zone campaigns, Chinese and Russian military and paramilitary forces complement information operations by isolating or attacking opponents without significantly escalating the confrontation. Avoiding actions that provide a rationale for U.S. retaliation narrows the options available to U.S. commanders and provides Chinese and Russian forces a decision-making advantage. 

Decision-centric operations like those pursued by the PRC and Russian governments will likely be a significant form of future conflict, especially as more confrontations occur outside the context of large-scale existential combat where attrition could be more decisive.  

During the late Cold War, the U.S. military’s revolutionary approach to precision-strike warfare leveraged the then-new technologies of communication datalinks, stealth, and guided weapons. Similarly, decision-centric warfare may be the most effective way to militarily exploit artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, which are arguably today’s most prominent technologies. 

The characteristics that win decision-centric operations will not be the ones prioritized by attrition-centric scenarios driving Pentagon planning today. Instead of lethality and survivability being all that matter, adaptability and sustainability will provide an advantage in conflicts where information and decision-making form the main lines of effort. The commander that is able to retain more options over a longer time during an informationized confrontation is more likely to make better or faster decisions than the leader of a less adaptable force. Moreover, the more adaptable force will be able to impose greater complexity and degrade the decision-making of opposing commanders. 

A Different Set of Worst Cases

Situations DoD plans for today like short, intense invasions of Taiwan, Baltic NATO allies, or South Korea do not prioritize the adaptability and sustainability needed for decision-centric conflicts. These scenarios favor heavily-armed and well-defended ships, aircraft, and troop formations that are expensive to buy and sustain. Because of their cost, these forces are not available in large numbers; because they are self-contained multi-mission units, they cannot easily be reconfigured or recomposed. And because they are built to fight major theater war, today’s U.S. forces are disproportionate for the sub-conventional confrontations often presented by China and Russia.

The divergence between U.S. defense planning and the changing character of war suggests DoD needs a new set of worst-case scenarios. Like a football team relying on the “prevent defense” to protect against long passes, DoD is leaving itself open to the ground game being pursued by its competitors.

DoD should increase the priority of scenarios that center on information and decision-making, such as protracted blockades or quarantines of allied territory or islands; sustained gray-zone campaigns against allied or partner governments; or air and sea denial operations in international waters or airspace. Instead of quickly turning into canonical invasions, these scenarios could episodically intensify and deescalate over an extended period as the combatants attempt to resolve the confrontation. For example, the ongoing conflict in Eastern Ukraine may be more relevant than Russian tanks rolling across Latvia in 2 days. 

The attributes needed for decision-centric conflict are not widely represented in today’s U.S. military, which truly makes these situations worst case for DoD. A set of decision-centric planning scenarios would likely prompt U.S. military services to rebalance away from large, monolithic platforms and formations toward smaller, disaggregated units that include more autonomous systems. In addition to being less expensive to buy and sustain, more disaggregated forces would be more easily recomposed in theater to improve adaptability and give commanders more options.

Unless DoD begins to rethink its scenarios and rebalancing its forces, recent Chinese and Russian gray-zone successes in the East and South China Seas or Crimea could become the norm and the U.S. military could find itself losing a battle of inches against patient competitors who are willing to play the long game.

Bryan is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, where he leads the Center for Defense Concepts and Technologies. He has led studies during the last decade for DARPA, OSD, the Navy, and the defense industry exploring ways new technologies can be applied to military challenges and operations. Prior to becoming a think tanker, he was a career enlisted and officer nuclear submariner.

Featured Image: Amphibious dock landing ship Changbaishan (Hull 989) and Jing’gangshan (Hull 999), along with 3 Landing Craft Air Cushions (LCAC), attached to a landing ship flotilla with the South China Sea Fleet under the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy, steam in waters off the Xisha Islands during the maritime coordinative training from March 6 to 11, 2019. (Photo via eng.chinamil.com.cn/Liu Jian)