Podcast

Sea Control 405 – The Sea Corporation with Dr. Robert Anderson

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By Jared Samuelson

Dr. Robert Anderson joins the program to discuss his paper, “The Sea Corporation,” on maritime organizational law. Dr. Anderson is a Professor of Law at the Pepperdine University School of Law.

Download Sea Control 405 – The Sea Corporation with Dr. Robert Anderson

Links

1. “The Sea Corporation,” by Robert Anderson, SSRN, August 8, 2022.
2. Sea Control 380 – Underwriters of the United States with Dr. Hannah Farber, CIMSEC, September 15, 2022. 

Jared Samuelson is Co-Host and Executive Producer of the Sea Control podcast. Contact him at [email protected].

This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling.

Force Development

Bringing Back the Fleet? A Review of NWP-3 Fleet Warfare, Change 1

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By Barney Rubel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indo-Asia-Pacific

Using the Enemy to Train the Troops—Beijing’s New Approach to Prepare its Navy for War

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This article originally appeared on the Jamestown Foundation’s ChinaBrief and is republished with permission. Read it in its original form here.

By Ryan D. Martinson and Conor Kennedy

Introduction

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has quietly changed the way it interacts with U.S. military forces in the Western Pacific. Instead of just tracking and monitoring U.S. ships and aircraft, demanding they leave sensitive areas, the PLA has embraced an approach that favors hostile encounters as preparation for future conflict with the United States. In PLA parlance, it is “using the enemy to train the troops”—nadi lianbing (拿敌练兵).

This is not a new approach. The term nadi lianbing has appeared in PLA sources since 2014. However, recent statements by the Ministry of National Defense (MoD) indicate that it has become enshrined as doctrine. At the MoD’s press conference on January 22, Senior Colonel Wu Qian highlighted the key aims of PLA training. The first is to “vigorously promote the deep coupling of operations and training.” Specifically, forces operating on the “front line in the military struggle” should “use the enemy to train the troops” (PRC Ministry of Defense, January 27).

For the PLA, the front line in the peacetime “military struggle” is located along China’s maritime periphery: the Yellow Sea, East China Sea, South China Sea, and Philippine Sea. As a result, it is the air, surface, and undersea forces of the PLA Navy (PLAN) that are chiefly tasked with implementing this new approach. What does nadi lianbing mean for the PLAN, and what are the implications for PLAN-U.S. Navy interactions at sea?

From Concept to Doctrine

The notion of “using the enemy to train the troops” was first applied in undersea warfare. An August 2014 essay in People’s Navy, the PLAN’s official newspaper, highlighted the submarine force’s special function in “countering the powerful enemy” (应对强敌, yingdui qiang di), a common euphemism for the U.S. The author emphasized that the force should train like it will fight, which means it must “go to the battlefield of the future and boldly approach the opponent of the future…using the enemy to train the troops.” In his words, “training must be a rehearsal for war.”1 In a January 2015 article, the political commissar of a submarine unit urged PLAN submariners to “take aim at the operational opponent,” recognizing that peacetime “confrontation with the powerful enemy is the most realistic training form.” The force should embrace a culture that favors “competing with the enemy, and using the enemy to train the troops.”2

The PLAN expanded this approach to the rest of the service following a November 2020 Central Military Commission (CMC) meeting on military training. In his remarks, President Xi Jinping called for the PLA to realize a “transformation in military training.” This precipitated a greater emphasis on training in general, with a particular focus on “realistic” training that better approximates the conditions of actual combat with a likely adversary (Xinhua, November 25, 2020). Subsequently, the PLAN issued a document called “Decision on Accelerating the Promotion of Transformation of Navy Military Training and Constructing a New-Type Navy Military Training System.” The Decision took the concept of nadi lianbing from the shadowy world of undersea warfare and made it service doctrine. Henceforth, all components of the service would regard encounters with the “powerful enemy” as opportunities to bolster warfighting capabilities.3

Why Now?

According to PLAN leaders, nadi lianbing is a direct response to an uptick in provocative U.S. behavior along China’s maritime periphery. The PLA has long complained about U.S. naval operations within the first island chain, but the Chinese military believes that U.S. activities have become more aggressive in recent years. According to the (unnamed) head of PLAN Training Bureau, “some countries have sharply increased their hostility towards China.” In the maritime realm, they have “continuously strengthened their targeted military deployments, frequently sent air and maritime forces to conduct close-in provocations, and have even organized air and maritime forces to ‘use China to train their troops,’ drilling warfighting methods and tactics.”4

Zhang Tianjing, a senior officer in the PLAN Operations Bureau, echoes these points in an August 2021 essay. Specifically, Zhang asserts that “ships and aircraft are frequently infringing the territorial waters and airspace of Chinese islands and reefs in the name of ‘freedom of navigation and overflight,’ warships have transited the Taiwan Strait multiple times, and military aircraft have conducted high-intensity flights adjacent to China’s near seas.” He describes these as “abnormal activities.”5

Approaches to Nadi Lianbing

Nadi lianbing is a “special training form” that exploits opportunities created by close encounters with the putative enemy. The head of the PLAN Training Bureau explains that this approach has two forms, one passive and one active (see note 4 for source information). With the passive approach, PLAN forces respond to provocative behavior by the enemy (因敌而动, yin di er dong), such as tactical exercises aimed at Chinese forces, taking steps short of kinetic force to defend against them. This approach likely involves all the skills required to thwart an attack, short of using force: e.g., intercepting inbound aircraft, maneuvering for tactical advantage, and perhaps jamming and other forms of electronic warfare.

The second form involves proactively seeking out (依我而动, yi wo er dong) nearby enemy forces during regular missions and using interactions to serve training purposes. That is, deployed PLAN forces would target enemy ships, aircraft, and submarines to complete required individual training, platform training, group (module) training, and combined group training. According to Zhang Tianjing, PLAN forces will “conduct real reconnaissance, real transmissions, real tracking, real aiming, and simulated attack, treating the enemy as a live target.”

Nadi lianbing is not limited to PLAN forces operating at sea in the Western Pacific. Escort task forces also now refer to the approach during training operations in the Indian Ocean. So too do coastal defense missile units, including those deployed to Chinese outposts in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.6

Benefits for the PLAN

PLAN leaders believe that nadi lianbing can help bolster PLAN capabilities in a number of ways.7 First and foremost, it ensures that training is realistic. In the words of one PLAN officer, the service gets to take on a “real blue team” (真实的蓝军, zhenshi de lanjun), instead of the poorly-simulated rendering of the enemy that is common in other forms of training. For example, nadi lianbing can bolster the PLAN’s ability to compete across the electromagnetic spectrum, that is, to ensure the performance of its reconnaissance and communications systems despite enemy efforts to degrade them, and to use electronic warfare to impair the enemy’s systems. According to one front page article in People’s Navy, the PLAN must “fully exploit scenarios in which the enemy engages in electromagnetic confrontation against China to conduct countermeasures, test the boundary capabilities of China’s various types of weapons and equipment, and let front-line sailors practice synergizing their efforts and practice their technical skills in a near realistic environment of counter-interference, counter-attack, and counter-reconnaissance.”

But nadi lianbing is about more than just training technical skills. The PLAN believes that hostile encounters with the enemy will help strengthen the “fighting spirit” of PLAN sailors. PLA commentators often highlight the existence of a “peace disease” (和平积弊, heping jibi or 和平病, heping bing) within the ranks, and they see close contact with the enemy as one way of treating this malady. CMC Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia amplified this point in a November 2021 essay, citing the value of using nadi lianbing as a means to instill the “martial courage” (血性, xue xing) needed to fight and win a great power conflict (People’s Daily, November 30, 2021).

Nadi lianbing provides opportunities to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the adversary. As the head of the PLAN Training Bureau describes, hostile encounters allow the PLAN to “discover the ins and outs of the enemy’s combat capabilities.” By provoking a response, the service can gauge the enemy’s “principled red lines” (原则底线, yuanze dixian) and analyze the command styles and response speed of individual enemy commanders. The political commissar of the PLAN’s Type-055 cruiser Nanchang highlights the importance of collecting, analyzing, and using data collected during at-sea confrontations with U.S. forces, in order to develop a “brain trust” (智囊团, zhinang tuan) of PLAN experts specializing on the “powerful enemy” (强敌通, qiang di tong). According to Zhang Tianjing, effective use of nadi lianbing sheds light on current U.S. operational concepts, such as distributed lethality and mosaic warfare, which he describes as “posing a fairly large challenge” to the PLAN. With this knowledge, the Chinese military can develop plans to counter likely U.S. approaches in the event of a real conflict.

Nadi lianbing also helps the PLAN learn about its own shortcomings. Some of these “weak links”—as Zhang Tianjing describes them—are already apparent to the PLAN. In his words, the PLA’s reconnaissance and early warning capabilities remain “fairly weak,” its target identification capabilities are “inadequate,” the challenge of configuring kill chains for long-range precision strikes remains “fairly difficult,” PLAN tactics are “comparatively simplistic and meager,” and “precise coordination” between services is still a problem when conducting joint operations. Zhang writes that these problems must be remedied so that the PLAN can effectively support the types of integrated joint operations the PLA intends to conduct against the U.S.: multi-domain precision warfare (多域精确战, duo yu jingque zhan), cross-domain joint operations (跨域联合战, kua yu lianhe zhan), and area-denial warfare (区域拒止战, quyu ju zhi zhan).

No Risk, No Reward

PLAN leaders fully acknowledge that nadi lianbing carries risk. According to one surface warfare officer, when PLAN forces deploy to the front line, the “battlefield” and the “training field” overlap. As a result, although nadi lianbing provides a valuable learning opportunity, it also heightens the risk of an “inadvertent armed clash” (擦枪走火, ca qiang zouhuo).8 In a 2020 article, a senior PLAN submarine unit leader highlighted the need for balance in nadi lianbing: “if things are pushed too hard, there is a concern about exceeding the scope of ‘training’; but if things are pushed too soft, then the ‘training’ aims cannot be achieved.”

In his guidance, the head of the PLAN Training Bureau prescribes methods to “avoid friction and conflict” when applying the new approach. The PLAN should, for example, “strictly control the use of weapons” and take special care when organizing live fire exercises. However, he suggests ambiguity about using the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES), a 2014 agreement designed to reduce risky encounters between signatory countries (including the U.S. and China). In his June 7 guidance, he stated the service must “strictly obey” CUES and other such regulations. However, the following day he called for the “flexible application” of CUES, implying that PLAN forces would abide by the Code only when it suited their needs.

PLAN leaders perceive risk through the lens of the global balance of power, which is changing in a way “not seen in a hundred years.” That is, they see China as rising, while the U.S. is declining. In his August 2021 article, Zhang Tianjing cites the damaging impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. economy and concludes the U.S. is looking for a “strategic opening” to arrest its descent and maintain its status as a global hegemon. Thus, the PLAN “could not rule out” that the U.S. might manufacture an incident to cause a conflict or even a regional war. Despite these concerns, PLA leaders clearly believe that the potential rewards of hostile encounters with the U.S. military outweigh the risks.

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

Conor M. Kennedy is a Research Associate at the China Maritime Studies Institute of the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He holds a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies.

This article reflects the personal opinions of the authors and not the official assessments of the U.S. Navy or any other U.S. government entity.

Notes

1. 王红理 [Wang Hongli], 能打胜仗是最大的担当 [“Being Able to Win Battles is the Biggest Undertaking”], 人民海军 [People’s Navy], August 29, 2014, p. 4.

2. 李云平 [Li Yunping] 把握使命任务特点持续培育战斗精神 [Grasp the Characteristics of the Mission to Continue to Cultivate the Combat Spirit”] 政工学刊 [Zhenggong Xuekan], no. 1, 2015, p. 51.

3. 敢打善拼制强敌 [“Bold Enough to Take on the Powerful Enemy”], 人民海军 [People’s Navy], September 7, 2021, p. 1.

4. 王世建 [Wang Shijian], 进一步提高部队训练质效和打赢能力 [“Do More to Improve the Quality and Effectiveness of the Force’s Training and Ability to Fight and Win”], 人民海军 [People’s Navy], June 7, 2021, p. 1.

5. 张天敬 [Zhang Tianjing] 拿敌练兵主要“练什么” [“The Gist of ‘What We Train’ When We Use the Enemy to Train the Troops”], 人民海军 [People’s Navy], August 10, 2021, p. 3.

6. Information on escort task forces and Nadi lianbing is derived from 刘冬冬, 石小强, 王宗洋 [Liu Dongdong, Shi Xiaoqiang, Wang Zongyang], 第38批护航编队开展实际使用武器训练 [“38th Escort Task Force Conducts Weapons Training”], 人民海军 [People’s Navy], August 11, 2021, p. 1; 孙飞, 方智坤 [Sun Fei, Fang Zhikun], 薪火传承 激发打赢热情 – 南部战区海军某岸导团利用红色资源提升教育质效 [“Continuing to Fuel the Fire to Inspire Enthusiasm for Winning – A Shore-to-Ship Missile Regiment of the Southern Theater Navy Uses Red Resources to Improve the Effectiveness of Education”], 人民海军 [People’s Navy], July 21, 2021, p. 2.

7. Information in this section on how nadi lianbing may bolster the PLA’s capabilities is derived from the following sources: 本报评论员 [Anonymous Columnist] 坚持战训一致助力训练转型 [“Persist with the Unity of Operations and Training to Support a Transformation in Training”], 人民海军 [People’s Navy], June 4, 2021; 刘志刚 [Liu Zhigang], 立足实战实案，紧盯新质新域求突破 [“Ground Ourselves in Real Combat and Real Cases, Focus on New Qualities and New Domains to Seek Breakthroughs”], 人民海军 [People’s Navy], June 22, 2021, p. 1; 张校邦 [Zhang Xiaobang] 破“心中之敌”，深入纠治和平积弊 [“Destroy the ‘Enemy in the Heart,’ Rectify Peace Disease”], 人民海军 [People’s Navy], June 5, 2021, 1; 赵宝石 [Zhao Baoshi], 把握关键环节 提升打赢能力 [“Grasp the Key Links and Improve Our Ability to Win in War”], 人民海军 [People’s Navy], June 8, 2021, p. 1; 陈维工 [Chen Weigong], 深化强敌研究, 培养知彼胜彼的 “智囊团” [“Deepen Research on the Strong Enemy and Cultivate ‘Think Tanks’ that Can Understand the Enemy to Defeat The Enemy人民海军 [People’s Navy], July 16, 2021, p. 1; Zhang, “The Gist of ‘What We Train’ When We Use the Enemy to Train the Troops.”

8. Information on the PLA’s risk versus reward calculus on nadi lianbing is derived from the following sources: 杨黎明 [Yang Liming], 以战载训砥砺胜战刀锋 [“Use Operations to Advance Training and Sharpen the Blade of Victory”], 人民海军 [People’s Navy], April 29, 2020, p. 3; 徐杰 [Xu Jie], “以敌为师”漫谈 [“Ramblings on ‘Using the Enemy as a Teacher’”], 政工学刊 [Zhenggong Xuekan], no. 5, 2020, p. 75; Wang, “Do More to Improve the Quality and Effectiveness of the Force’s Training and Ability to Fight and Win;” Zhao, “Grasp the Key Links and Improve Our Ability to Win in War;” Zhang, “The Gist of ‘What We Train’ When We Use the Enemy to Train the Troops.”

Featured Image: A frigate attached to a naval flotilla under the PLA Southern Theater Command steams ahead towards the designated waters in a maritime combat training exercise in late June, 2022. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Zhang Bin)

Book Review

Andrew Marshall’s Reflections on Net Assessment

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Andrew W. Marshall, edited by Jeffrey McKitrick and Robert Angevine, Reflections on Net Assessment. Andrew W. Marshall Foundation and Institute for Defense Analyses, 2022, 331 pp, US $10.00., ISBN 978-0578384238.

By BJ Armstrong

Known throughout parts of the American national security establishment as “Yoda,” referred to by The Atlantic as the “Brain of the Pentagon,” and respected worldwide for his decades of strategic work at RAND, the National Security Council, and finally in founding and running the Office of Net Assessment, Andrew Marshall was a critical figure in the Cold War and post-Cold War history of American security and strategy. He was also an intellectual figure who left a limited imprint on the literature of American national security, having written the vast majority of his work for classified audiences and publishing very little in the open.

The two generations of “Jedi” who were trained by him during their time working in the Office of Net Assessment are strategists, scholars, and consultants who prefer their own moniker as “graduates of St. Andrew’s Prep,” and who have published widely and influentially in a myriad of topics. For those who never attended the “prep school” before it closed with his death in 2019, Marshall’s own words and thoughts are much harder to come by. Today’s scholars and practitioners of national and defense strategy are reliant on these acolytes for much of our insight into the running and thinking of ONA. Reflections on Net Assessment, edited by Jeffrey McKitrick and Robert Angevine for the Andrew W. Marshall Foundation, offers a rare glimpse into Marshall’s own thoughts and approaches to strategy and security, and is an insightful contribution to the wider national security community.

Across seven chapters, Reflections offers transcripts of a series of oral history interviews primarily conducted and transcribed by Kurt Guthe during the 1990s. The interviews included Guthe and Marshall, as well as a number of unnamed colleagues who likely were contemporary or former members of the ONA staff, in dialogue about a wide range of topics. It appears, from several comments made during the interviews, that Marshall was considering writing a book or memoir reflecting on his then nearly five decades of service. He ultimately never wrote the book. However, the content of the interviews overlaps so clearly with the content and details included in former ONA staff members Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts’ book, The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy, that it seems likely they carried forward on Mr. Marshall’s intent by writing the book themselves based largely on these oral histories. For Reflections, McKitrick and Angevine took the transcripts made by Guthe and formatted and edited them, created short contextual essays to remind readers of the milestones in American history which the interviews often mentioned, and overall did an excellent job of organizing the book for publication.

As is the case when reading raw or lightly edited oral histories, anyone looking for insights will be taken on a circular trip. In the case of the interviews with Marshall this often includes fascinating minor details of his background and education, insights into the inner workings of multiple Presidential administrations and their Departments of Defense, and occasionally sharp personal opinions and foibles. In the case of these transcripts, the interviewers themselves often head off on tangents sharing their own memories and interests. While this sometimes derails Marshall’s intended subject, and sometimes moves the conversation away from Marshall’s personal insights (even occasionally trying to answer questions for him rather than letting us read what he really thought), it is also likely the price of admission for such candid discussions with interlocuters who themselves are likely highly accomplished and intelligent strategists and researchers.

In addition to the fascinating look inside the mechanisms and intellectual infrastructure of American national security and strategy making, three key insights from Marshall repeatedly rise to the surface of the conversations included in this book. First, the importance and role of asking good questions. Second, the nature of influence within the American national security establishment. And finally, the ability, or lack of ability, of security organizations to do intellectual work together or share insights, and the training or lack of training of the members of these organizations in deeply intellectual work.

Marshall repeatedly shares that his primary goal throughout his career was not to find solutions to American defense and security problems, but instead to find ways of asking the right questions. By finding and researching the right questions, his view of net assessment was that it could present the military with the real parameters of the problems that needed to be solved. He quite clearly believed that the military services themselves were the real experts at determining the tactical, operational, and strategic solutions to the challenges of the Cold War (and eventually post-Cold War world). But he seemed to believe that they often struggled to do the deep work and research needed to ask the right questions and determine what the root challenges actually were.

In this respect, Marshall was a deeply inductive thinker. His instructions to members of his staff to “go read everything” on a topic in order to get started, presupposed his intense dislike of strategic work that tried to shoehorn threats or challenges into an already existing framework or the use of a deductive model that insisted on following a theory. He described two types of defense analysts, “theory oriented” versus “reality oriented” people, and lamented that there were far too few focused on reality. In this approach, inductive instead of deductive, Marshall might be seen more as a historical thinker than the social scientist he was by training, and his ideas followed in the wake of strategists of prior generations like Corbett and Clausewitz.

When considering the nature of influence within the American national security establishment, Marshall was far more sanguine that someone of his reputation might be expected to be. Despite being held up as something like the godfather of American success in the Cold War, Marshall instead saw influence as a far more nuanced and limited thing. He did not seem to believe that very many of the reports and studies conducted by ONA or for ONA really affected the military services or overall national strategy very much. As he repeatedly points out, his audience was actually the Secretary of Defense individually in an effort to (once again) get the Secretary thinking about how to ask the right questions.

In Marshall’s opinion, new ideas often simply resulted in the services rebranding things they were already doing. In the case of both “competitive strategies” and the “revolution in military affairs,” which described the development of the reconnaissance and precision strike complex of the future, Marshall and his staff described how the services merely attached those labels to programs or new weapons that were already in development or in service. Marshall claimed that real influence only came when you changed the vocabulary of strategic discussions, and moved beyond the initial re-labelling phase to get service staffs to rethink their approaches by forcing them to consider the ideas behind the new labels. This kind of influence, interestingly, was not something Marshall believed he genuinely could control once released into the wild.

Finally, Marshall returns in his discussions to the relationships between the organizations inside the intellectual infrastructure of American national security and strategy making. The National Security Act of 1947 fundamentally reformed the American government’s security elements just as Marshall’s career was beginning. Across almost six decades he observed how new organizations, like the CIA and the National Security Council, changed over time. One of his strongest observations was how over time, convinced of their own expertise, these organizations became less collaborative and less open to outside ideas, either from government or civilian sectors. As organizations built their own internal cultures they entrenched and became less and less likely to share ideas or information. These organizations and their enclosed cultures, Marshall observed, also became less and less capable of producing the kind of inductive and deep-thinking analysts in their newer generations of employees. By the Reagan Administration, not only were the military services treating each other as bureaucratic adversaries, but so was much of the intelligence community and other elements of the intellectual infrastructure of American security and strategy.

As the U.S. Navy continues deeper into the twenty-first century, talk of a “new” Cold War is common and there has been a strong tendency to reach back on the successful methods of the “old” Cold War. The history of ONA and Mr. Marshall’s methods seem ripe for replication in our contemporary world as we face the challenge of China, the resurgent but chaotic Russia, and regional challengers in a multipolar world. There will be a temptation to ask about the “competitive strategies” necessary to overcome our adversaries, or to determine the next “offset” in a new “revolution” in military affairs that will lead to success. But, following Marshall and his interlocutors through their circling discussions of his experiences and approaches, this starts to appear exactly like the kind of “theory-oriented” thinking that he lamented from defense analysts. In order to be “reality-oriented,” perhaps we need to return to the roots of Marshall’s insights.

Today, who is making sure that the U.S. Navy is asking the right questions? Who is defining the vocabulary and the intellectual infrastructure of how we think about our contemporary challengers? And are we learning from each other, and developing the next generation of analysts who will be creative and intelligent enough to do the deep work, “read everything,” and come up with creative new ideas rather than rehashing old models? Andy Marshall believed in focusing on finding the right questions and defining their parameters. In Reflections on Net Assessment, naval and national security practitioners and analysts can still learn a great deal from Yoda in his own words, if we do the reading and remain reality-based in our search for wisdom in confronting the challenges of the 21st century.

BJ Armstrong is a historian and Principal Associate of the Forum on Integrated Naval History and Seapower Studies. He is the co-author of Developing the Naval Mind and author/editor of the forthcoming revised and expanded second edition of 21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era. Opinions expressed here are offered in his personal and academic capacity and do not reflect the policies or views of the U.S. Navy or any government organization.

Featured Image: Andy Marshall attends his retirement farewell ceremony at the Pentagon on Jan. 5, 2015. (Photo by Master Sgt. Adrian Cadiz/U.S. Air Force)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.