Dr. Oscar Julian Palma Morales joins the program to discuss his research and work on maritime security and drug trafficking in Colombia. Dr. Morales is a Professor at the Department of International, Political and Urban Studies, and former Director of the Observatory on Illicit Drugs and Weapons, at Universidad del Rosario. He is a member of the Colombian Observatory on Organized Crime.
Vice Admiral Hank Mustin served in a variety of positions that focused on developing the capabilities and tactics of the U.S. Navy at the peak of the Cold War. Mustin helped pioneer the development and fielding of many assets that are now recognized today as mainstay capabilities of the modern surface fleet. But in Mustin’s time, the path to fielding these capabilities was unclear and influential opposition threatened to kill critical programs.
Below are select excerpts from Admiral Mustin’s oral history, conducted by Dave Winkler of the Naval Historical Foundation and republished with permission. In these excerpts, Mustin discusses navigating the opposition surface fleet programs faced from the highest levels of Navy leadership, methods for securing programs with funding and top cover within the OPNAV staff, and how certain projects were created or cancelled.
WINKLER: The threat at the time…was the Soviet Styx missile?
MUSTIN: That was just becoming a threat. And the feeling in the Navy leadership was, which was dominated by aviators, we’re not going to let anybody get close enough to shoot one of these missiles. The aviators said, if we see anybody out there that’s a threat, we’ll just go bag them at two to three hundred miles. Not to worry. And so we surface types all said, well okay, we’ll concentrate on shooting at air-launched missiles. “Well, we’ll take care of that too, if we ever get enough F-14s.” So we said, well maybe you can’t take care of them all; we’ll continue to pursue this.
Senior aviators at the time fought this rather bitterly. Success rates of these expensive missiles were not high. The performance of the systems was not good. And they viewed this as a drain, unnecessary, on funds that should be devoted to aviation capabilities. This is not a new kind of argument. So things like Aegis, and others, were bitterly opposed by the aviators. My own view is that we’d have never gotten Aegis if Bud Zumwalt had not been the CNO. Because a series of aviator CNOs before and after tried to kill it…
…The aviators—the notion had been since World War II that the main battery of every combatant should be resident on the flight deck of the carrier. So we’d try to put Harpoons on these ships and they’d say, “Hey, no, we’ll just take care of those guys with A-6s.” I developed a line of argument that said that JSOP, the force structure bible, says you need 26 carriers. We’ve only got 12. If we don’t have the number of carriers that we need, how are we going to fill in that firepower gap? This was the argument, it got at the issue without threatening aviation.
March 6, 1987 – An air-to-air overhead view of a fighter Squadron 1 (VF-1) F-14A Tomcat aircraft. (Photo via U.S. National Archives)
All of the issues of long-range targeting came up at that time. All of the issues of the inadequacies of the sonars. And as we built the Los Angeles class specifically to be escorts of the carrier task force—we didn’t call them battle groups—we found all the inadequacies in communications with the submarines while they are submerged. So the things that you see now—submarines with NTDS [Naval Tactical Data System], submarines with Tomahawk and Harpoon, submarines integrated into the striking forces of the Navy when required, the acknowledgement that you’ve got to disperse offensive power through platforms other than the carrier—all of those things were seen by Bud [Zumwalt] and Worth Bagley.
The problem was there wasn’t any technology available to implement them. To get the Aegis and to get the Tomahawk and to get these things, you had to spend the money. That money was going to come out of aviation, and everybody knew it. So the aviators just said there’s no reason for the Aegis ships; the F-14s will do the air defense job. Because it was apparent we were going to have fewer F-14s if we had Aegis ships.
So it was a very, very turbulent time, internally as well as externally. I remember a very senior aviator, who I won’t name, said to me one day when I was a captain, and Bud was still the CNO, he said, “You’d better enjoy every day that he’s the CNO, because you’re not going to see another one during your lifetime who’s a black-shoe…”
…Aegis was just on the horizon, strongly opposed by the aviators, who felt that it was a big waste of money to try and fight air battles with the Aegis ship when you could do it all with F-14s, and they wanted Aegis dollars to buy aircraft. The inadequacies of the Charles Adams class against missiles, and in particular against long-range missiles, were becoming apparent. And the absolute inadequacies of the Talos missile became apparent. So it didn’t take long for Jim Doyle, Bob Morris, and I, who were the requirements guys, to figure out that we needed an Aegis fleet, which was programmed, very slowly. But at the same time we needed a new destroyer. So we undertook to develop the requirements for the DDGX, which became the Arleigh Burke.
VADM Mustin during a Second Fleet exercise, 1988. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)
So on Jim Doyle’s watch we brought in Aegis, brought in LAMPS, brought in the vertical launchers, brought in the SM-2 missile, brought in the Tomahawk, brought in the digital computer versions of NTDS. We brought in what is now called cooperative engagement—at the time it was called battle group AAW. We brought in the CIWS, the close-in weapons system. We brought in the SLQ-32, the modern anti-missile ECM suite. We brought in towed arrays. We brought in the new generation sonar. We significantly upgraded the capabilities of the design of the amphibs, the LHAs, the AOEs. It was an amazing time.
…Spruances were new. I was very unhappy with the Spruances. The Spruance had been a McNamara invention. It was to be the DX and the DXG. There were to be thirty DXs, which were ASW ships, and thirty DXGs, which were to be AAW ships, and they would operate in tandem all the time. Then the Typhon weapons system, which had been designed for the DXG, became too expensive, and so the DXG was cancelled. Now you had the DX, the Spruance, the single-purpose ASW ship, with no DXG. So the whole rationale fell apart. Here we had all these ships out there, which were the largest destroyers that we had ever built, and they had nothing on them. They had no weapons to speak of. We were furious at this.
On Jim’s watch we took the Spruance hull and turned it into the DXG with the Aegis fleet, it is the Ticonderoga-class cruiser. But it was ten years behind the Spruance in getting to sea. Then I think that it was [CNO] Jimmy Holloway—it was either Holloway or Tom Hayward—who changed the DDG to CG. I was in charge of the force structure as a captain, and I remember one day, with a stroke of the pen, we went from the Soviets having more cruisers than all of NATO combined to NATO outnumbering the Soviet cruiser force by almost two to one. DLGs became cruisers.
…I don’t know if I told you the story of the LAMPS [Light Airborne Multi-Purpose System] and how that worked. The deal when I got there was that, for the LAMPS helicopter, SH-60, Op 03 would pay for the R&D, which was the weapons suite and avionics. Op 05, the air warfare czar, would pay for the procurement of the fleet of the all-up airplane. Op 05 had rigged it for seven years so that the first procurement was always one year outside of the POM, because they wanted to spend their scarce aviation procurement dollars on tailhook aircraft, and not on helicopters to go on destroyers.
Doyle was furious about this, but they had two aviator CNOs. He said, “We’ve got to do something about this.” So I said, “You know what we’ve got to do? We’ve got to get our nose under the tent. What you ought to do in this POM cycle is, you ought to, number one, accelerate the R&D by putting in more money for two years, and then in that third year you give up FFG 7 and you take that money and buy the helicopter. Then, if you do that and you get that first buy in there, then Op 05 is going to be committed in the out-years to keep on. He isn’t going to like that, but how’s he going to argue with it? And how can he argue with it in OSD; how can he argue with it against the Hill?” In the meantime the people in OSD were saying, every banana republic navy in the world has got helicopters on the fantail; how come you guys don’t? We’d always mumble something. So anyway, that’s what we did. That’s how we got the SH-60 to sea. That was one of my programs in this period.
August 1, 1985- An SH-60B Sea Hawk helicopter participates in flight operations aboard the battleship USS IOWA (BB 61). (Photo by PH1 Jeff Hilton, via U.S. National Archives)
It became apparent that we had to stop building these FFG 7s in order to get the new destroyer, and the principal contribution of the new destroyer should be its land attack capability—with the Tomahawk missile, but there was no Tomahawk missile. Also we had to have some way to shoot it. The then-current version of the vertical launcher was two feet too short to accommodate the Tomahawk missile. So the first thing we had to do was lengthen the launcher, which was an enormously expensive proposition. It required ship re-design to do.
Second, in order to get the Tomahawk in surface ships, we had to get a Tomahawk and we had to overcome the Mark 26 launching lobby, which was the lobby that was going into the first seven Aegis ships. They didn’t want the vertical launcher to come along because that jeopardized the Mark 26 launcher. So we had Tomahawk, which was opposed bitterly by the aviators, because they said we’ll do all that with A-6s; we had the launcher, which was opposed by the vertical launcher guys, because it meant changing their launcher and therefore delaying their program a year; and we had the Mark 26 guys, who did not want to have their launcher jeopardized just as it was entering the fleet. That wasn’t including all the people who didn’t want to do it on the outside.
April 12, 1983- RIM-66 Standard MR/SM-2 missiles on a Mark 26 launcher prior to being fired from the Aegis guided missile cruiser USS TICONDEROGA (CG 47) during tests near the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Facility, Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico. (Photo by Don Muhm, via U.S. National Archives)
We started off with a year’s study to determine the requirements for the new destroyer…The study showed that we knew how to do AAW and ASW modeling—a bunch of missiles come in, you shoot a bunch of missiles at them, and you’ve got them. We knew how to do ASW engagement. But we had no measures of effectiveness for the Tomahawk.
So I devised a series of analyses where we ran an air strike against Petropovlovsk with carrier air, and then we ran that same air strike with carrier air supported by the Tomahawks where the Tomahawks went in and beat down the air defenses before the A-6s went in. We drew a curve that showed the cost of the air strike in terms of aircraft attrition and the procurement of Tomahawks. The cost without Tomahawk was up, because there were so much aircraft attrition; we had all these Soviet capabilities approved by the Director of Naval Intelligence. The costs came way down as you brought the Tomahawks in, and then after a while it started to go back up again if you bought too many Tomahawks, because they’d already killed all the air defenses, so you didn’t gain any more cost reduction by reduced aircraft attrition.
A Tomahawk missile firing off a battleship, c. late 1980s. (Photo via NAVSEA)
We took that analysis to the CNO, Tom Hayward. He said, “I do not support this destroyer.” When the CNO tells you that it’s got a very chilling effect. In the meantime Op 05 was saying he didn’t support Tomahawk. He supported everything except the strike function, which he thought was unnecessary. And besides, Tomahawk had not been service-approved for procurement, which violated all of the “fly before buy” rules. And the Aegis guys were saying, you’re spending too much money on Tomahawks and not enough on Aegis.
…CNO had said he didn’t support it. It was very carefully handled. Anyway, Congress put enough heat on the OSD so that OSD said, all right, we think you ought to do this. We want you to cancel your Charles Adams improvements, a pretty expensive program, and get on with the finalizing of the design of the DDGX. The big issue was the vertical launcher for the Tomahawk. So we got the Congressional language to say that this ship should be capable of firing Tomahawks. Then we went back to the CNO, who was pretty unhappy about this turn of events. He knew who the culprits were, which I found out to my distress later. He gave the go-ahead, but conditionally. He said that he needed more F-14s and the F-18. And he could not undertake a shipbuilding program that requires a lot more helicopters.” So he told us to get out and figure out why we don’t need a helicopter in the Arleigh Burke. If we could, then he’d support it.
So we went out and I did a bunch of analyses which showed that if you made a lot of assumptions about other ships in company with the task force, you had enough LAMPS so all you really needed on the Arleigh Burke was a landing platform so they could hopscotch, and an in-flight refueling capability. So we designed the ship that way, and that’s why the first flight came out with no helos on them. Everybody has said ever since then: Hey, why didn’t you have a helo on them? The answer was because we couldn’t get it through OpNav. And the reason was, the aviation procurement budget was very tight, and the Navy’s priorities were for tailhook aircraft. Jim Doyle and I were really sensitive to this issue, having just gone through the LAMPS flail. And CNO was very sensitive to that, having seen the aircraft procurement money start to go to the LAMPS.
…OSD was of the view that the Navy was sort of irrelevant to the NATO strategy, for the reasons that we’ve discussed. So while we were looking into making these new capabilities, we were developing arguments for why the Navy was relevant. The Tomahawk was the key that unlocked that, because that gave the surface Navy for the first time the ability to influence events ashore, beyond the range of the 5- inch gun. That meant that in the battle for Europe you could now hold at risk the Kola Peninsula with other carrier air. From the eastern Med you could hold at risk targets in Russia, that you could not do before unless you put the carriers way, way up in the Adriatic. So all of a sudden the Tomahawk unlocked a lot of doors in OSD.
…I went to see Admiral Doyle, and I said, “Walt Locke isn’t going to do it.” He said, “Tell him to come over here; I want to see him.” Walt and I walked in to see Jim Doyle. Jim Doyle said, “Walt, maybe once if you’re lucky, in your naval career, you come across a capability that’s going to be a change in naval warfare on the order of sail to steam.” He said, “In my view, Tomahawk is that change during our lifetimes. What we have to do is stop this complaining and get on with it. We’ve got to have the launcher to support it, we’ve got to have the targeting, and we’ve got to have the seeker and warheads to do the job. Because,” he said, “we now have about half of the number of aircraft carriers that we all say we need to perform the Navy’s function in a NATO war, and we’re not going to get any more. So if the Navy is going to stay relevant it has to have a capability like the Tomahawk, and fortuitously the technology is such that that capability is now at hand. So you are the naval officer who will be able to bring that to bear.”
Walt Locke almost stood up and cheered. He walked out of there and he was a convert. It was one of the most compelling senior officer man-to-man discussions that I’ve ever been in. Walt was turned around like that. We gave him the money, and he marched off.
Henry C. Mustin was born in Bremerton, Washington on 31 August 1933, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of distinguished naval officers. Vice Admiral Mustin, a destroyerman, served at sea in the Pacific and Atlantic Fleets in USS Duncan (DDR 874); as Commanding Officer USS Bunting (MHC 45); as a plankowner in both USS Lawrence (DDG 4) and USS Conyngham (DDG 17); as Commanding Officer USS Henry B. Wilson (DDG 7); as Commander, Destroyer Squadron 12, homeported in Athens, Greece; as Commander, Cruiser Destroyer Group 2; and as Commander, U.S. Second Fleet and NATO Striking Fleet Atlantic. He served ashore in Vietnam with the Delta River Patrol Group; as Flag Lieutenant to the Commander-in-Chief Pacific; as Executive Assistant to the Commander-in-Chief U.S. Naval Forces Europe; as Director, Surface Combat Systems Division in the Office of Chief of Naval Operations; as Deputy Commander Naval Surface Force, Atlantic Fleet; as Naval Inspector General; and as Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Plans, Policy, and Operations). He retired January 1, 1989. He passed away on April 11, 2016.
David F. Winkler earned his Ph.D. in 1998. from American University in Washington, DC. He has been a historian with the non-profit Naval Historical Foundation for over two decades. His dissertation Cold War at Sea: High Seas Confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet Union was published by the Naval Institute Press in 2000, was republished under the title Incidents at Sea: American Confrontation and Cooperation with Russia and China, 1945 – 2016 in December 2017. He was selected in early 2019 to be the Class of 1957 Chair of Naval Heritage at the U.S. Naval Academy for the 2019-2020 academic year and the Charles Lindbergh Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum for the following year. Winkler received his commission as a Navy ensign in 1980 through the NROTC unit at the Pennsylvania State University. In addition to a B.A. in Political Science, he has an M.A. in International Affairs from Washington University. He is a retired Navy Reserve commander.
Featured Image: September 7, 1985 – Aerial starboard quarter view of Battle Group Alfa underway. The ships are: (clockwise, center front) USS REEVES (CG-24) , USS SAN JOSE (AFS-7), USNS MISPILLION (T-AO-105), USS OLDENDORF (DD-972), USS KANSAS CITY (AOR-3), USNS KILAUEA (T-AE-26), USS ENGLAND (CG-22), USS TOWERS (DDG-9), USS KIRK (FF-1087), USS KNOX (FF-1052), USS COCHRANE (DDG-21), and USS MIDWAY (CV-41) (center). (Photo via U.S. National Archives)
New co-host Zsofia Wolford is joined by Nicolò Fasola, former Junior Eisenhower Fellow at NATO’s Defense College and Doctoral Researcher at the University of Birmingham, to discuss the new Strategic Concept, the future of arms control, and NATO’s new defense and deterrence posture. They will also explore the limitations of the new concept and the challenges member states will face in its implementation in the years ahead.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the security environment of NATO and Europe has changed significantly, prompting the Alliance to propose significant changes to its force posture, increasing its troops from 40,000 to 300,000 on its Eastern Flank. During the latest NATO Summit at the end of June, NATO also adopted a new Strategic Concept after 12 years in which it becomes clear that we will see changes not only to the Alliance’s defense and deterrence posture but to its approach to strategic stability and arms control.
It’s no secret that a fight in the Pacific is atop the Pentagon’s list of concerns. The 2022 National Defense Strategy fact sheet explicitly states that China is “our most consequential strategic competitor and the pacing challenge for the Department.” A large part of the Pentagon’s effort to deter—and if necessary confront—China is investing in new technology to connect platforms and sensors. One of the most important initiatives is to improve joint fires as part of the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept, often summarized as “any sensor, any shooter” and more recently as enabling “the Joint Force to ‘sense,’ ‘make sense,’ and ‘act’ on information across the battle-space. Speaking at the Hudson Institute in 2020, then-Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General John Hyten credited JADC2 as the key to giving any element of the joint force “the ability to defend itself or the ability to strike deep into an adversary area of operations.”
While JADC2 is focused on technology, war is inherently human. This article will discuss the role of the Naval Gunfire Liaison Officer (NGLO) as one human in a JADC2-enabled theater. Any conversation about fires, lethality, and the Pacific leads either implicitly or explicitly to considerations of how naval vessels can support maneuver forces ashore. However, this legacy — maritime fires directed against terrestrial objectives — is now only one part of the equation. As concepts evolve for potential wars in the Pacific, the NGLO can provide maritime expertise that improves the integration of joint, multi-domain fires at the tactical and operational levels of war.
The NGLO Origins, Briefly
The Pacific is the birthplace of naval gunfire as a coordinated contribution to combined arms. The Marine Corps’ forward observer handbook credits Lieutenant General Holland Smith with establishing a formal naval gunfire section at V Amphibious Corps in 1943 and a companion unit for close air support training in 1944. Citing work by the historian Allan Millet, it notes that codifying the training and employment of amphibious fire support “reflected the lessons from three years of intense combat across the Pacific and formed the basis for the Marine Corps’ current procedures for controlling supporting arms.”
This NGF Section gave rise to the Shore Fire Control Party (SFCP), a small team of four or five enlisted Marines led by the NGLO (a naval officer) who can be employed as naval gunfire spotters in the field, controllers in a fire support coordination center, or planners in a headquarters element (and often all three).
The specific size, task organization, and mission of a NGLO’s SFCP has varied based on the availability of personnel and the actual tasking of the unit they’re assigned to. However, the gist has remained the same over time: a small cadre of individuals who are particularly well-versed in sea-based fire support and deployed with Marine Corps maneuver elements. In this regard, the SFCP is distinct from Air and Naval Gunfire Liaison Companies (ANGLICOs) who have a greater emphasis on close air support and are doctrinally tasked to “conduct terminal control of fires in support of joint, allied, and multinational forces,” i.e., to work for non-Marine Corps units. This distinction — NGLOs and SFCPs for Marine units and ANGLICO elements for all others — may no longer be the most efficient or effective way to coordinate joint fires in a maritime-centric environment like the Pacific. New weapon capabilities and the JADC2 concept are driving deeper integration that requires more “connective tissue” across maneuver and fires elements. While communication and data transmission are a vital part of this, it will always be necessary to have the right people in the right places at the right time. That is where the NGLO comes into play.
A New Landscape for Maritime Fires
The traditional employment of an NGLO and the SFCP is coordinating gunfire from a ship at sea in support of an amphibious operation. The principal constraint on this since World War II has been the range of a ship’s gun, such as the Mark 45 workhorse aboard U.S. cruisers and destroyers which is rated to 13 nautical miles. This is no longer the case as weapon system capabilities improve and joint warfighting doctrine evolves. A 21st Century war in the Pacific now offers three distinct categories where NGLOs have a role to play.
Maritime Fires Against Terrestrial Targets:Naval fire support against targets ashore is no longer limited to guns aboard main combatants. For instance, ANGLICO Marines in the Pacific recently executed a Tomahawk call-for-fire as part of exercise Valiant Shield 2020 and options for firing HIMARS rockets from the decks of amphibious ships were demonstrated in 2017. Future integration of conventional prompt strike capabilities from Zumwalt-class destroyers presents further opportunities to rapidly apply maritime fire power against objectives ashore. Moreover, integration of missiles into naval fire support means submarines may now be viable shooters for near-real time fire missions. Of course, this is not wholly new for the Navy-Marine Corps team. This is the traditional integration of naval fires in support of amphibious maneuver as originally envisioned. It is, however, new — or at least a reinvigoration — of capabilities for the Army. The Marine Corps is a formidable force, but any large-scale conflict in the Pacific cannot be fought by them alone. This is why, as in World War II, the Army is getting back into the island-seizing business.
Terrestrial Fires Against Maritime Targets:Until recently, this category was largely concerned with coastal defense thanks to the range and targeting limitations of shore-based fires. This is also no longer the case. The confluence of the U.S. withdrawal from the INF Treaty with the possibility of conflict in the Pacific has led the Marine Corps and the Army to express their strong interests in operating land-based, anti-ship weapons. From their perspective, this capability gives them the means to counter adversary naval forces which may threaten their operations ashore without needing to have ships on station. From the Navy’s perspective, it means Army and Marine Corps firing batteries can be called upon as part of the maritime fight in a way that they have never been before. This versatility is a mutually reinforcing and beneficial development that exemplifies the joint warfighting concepts taking shape today, enabling elements of the joint force to use cross-domain capabilities to defend themselves or strike deep as circumstances require.
Maritime or Terrestrial Fires Against Littoral Targets: This hybrid category is a distinct situation where observers on shore or near shore are directing fire from any firing unit against targets in the littorals. These engagements can be prosecuted to support maritime objectives like chokepoint control, or terrestrial objectives like countering adversary amphibious assaults. This is especially relevant as tactical drone aircraft proliferate across the battlefield, greatly expanding the sensor envelope of forward observers and turning small islands and coastal enclaves into viable observation posts.
Okay, But Why The NGLO?
As it stands now, most NGLOs are drawn from the surface warfare community. Their greatest strength is their familiarity with the shipboard operations and the maritime environment. Just as artillery forward observers learn how the gunline works as part of their professional development, NGLOs come to the table as warfare-qualified naval officers who have already gained significant understanding of how a ship operates when providing fire support. This gives them a clear advantage in planning, supervising, and conducting fires that originate from naval platforms. Similarly, their broader experience at sea is valuable insight about how ships operate in the maritime environment and is uniquely relevant when terrestrial fires are being directed against naval and littoral targets.
One thing NGLOs are not: a substitute for ANGLICO Marines or other personnel with advanced fire support certifications like Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs) or Joint Fires Observers (JFOs). While these personnel can and should be versed in naval fires, and may also count NGLOs in their ranks, their mandate is often broader. This requires a greater investment in training and results in them becoming notoriously high-demand, low-density assets. A “grunt” NGLO specifically, and SFCPs more broadly, are a supplement that eases the burden on these high-demand personnel. This has typically been a consideration within the Navy-Marine Corps team, but it is shaping up to take on new urgency as Army units increase the demand signal for both receiving and providing naval fires.
Embedding NGLOs with ground units has obvious value for the Army and Marine Corps who benefit from improved planning and execution of naval fire support; but, sending NGLOs to these ground units also benefits the Navy. This is most apparent when terrestrial fires are directed against maritime and littoral targets: naval officers at the firing unit or higher headquarters can provide real-time context and nuance to commanders in a way that fire support requests, the joint target list, and operation orders cannot. In more deliberate scenarios, these NGLOs have professional networks and reach-back capabilities that are reciprocated as touch points for the fleet with ground force staff— all of which facilitates and improves the planning process. At a more fundamental level, officers returning from NGLO tours bring unique perspective to the fleet that, especially in wartime, can prove invaluable to every echelon from the individual warship to fleet staffs.
There are numerous opportunities to integrate NGLOs and NGLO-qualified officers with Army and Marine Corps units. The most straightforward billets are the traditional ones currently embedded with Marine Corps infantry and artillery units. Depending on task organization, this can be an NGLO and SFCP assigned to the Weapons Company in general support of a battalion or a distribution of naval gunfire observers across three to four company-level fire support teams. In time of war, this can and should be replicated with their Army counterparts at least at the battalion and brigade level if not lower. Short of war, the Navy and Army should cooperate to establish joint duty assignments for NGLO-qualified officers at the infantry division level, with the Army’s fire support training enterprise, and with the Navy’s Expeditionary Warfare Training Groups in order to begin building procedural and doctrinal familiarity.
Separately, if replacements for PCs and Mark VI patrol craft are fielded, those officers and Sailors should be given formal training on naval gunfire procedures. Ideally, the officers would be fully-qualified NGLOs; however, this may not be feasible under current peacetime requirements. Similar consideration should be given to training the crews of allied patrol craft as well as U.S. small and medium-sized Coast Guard cutters that may be deployed to the theater in time of war. As land-based anti-ship capabilities evolve in the Army and Marine Corps, patrol crews operating in the littorals may become some of those best positioned to call for and deliver indirect fires against maritime and littoral targets.
To do this well, the Navy’s surface officer community will have to put greater value on joint combat experience (as opposed to high-echelon staff tours) as part of its personnel management. The community’s number one goal is to prepare and select the best officers for command afloat while filling key operational billets. This is the driving force behind the ideal career path that is heavily centered on grey-hull, blue-water tours. This is a reasonable approach that has been largely sustainable (though arguably sub-optimal) in the post-Cold War era. In a wartime Pacific, the surface Navy will face a hostile environment that it has not truly wrestled with for nearly 80 years and, furthermore, will be depended upon for an unprecedented level of wide-spread fires integration. This is to say that the surface Navy will not be able to fight alone, a statement that is neither new nor surprising. But, in execution, the community will have to improve the way it values joint warfighting tours like NGLOs—similar to aviators in JTAC tours— because, even if they are not blue-water themselves, they provide a key linkage that enables the surface fight.
Conclusion
NGLOs are not a panacea to the enduring complexities of integrating multi-domain fires. They are, however, a uniquely valuable member of the fire support community. As the overarching JADC2 concept emphasizes, joint integration and cooperation is the name of the game. If war comes in the Pacific, NGLOs are a human advantage and an economy of force that the Navy can contribute to the joint fight. By leveraging a relatively small number of personnel placed in key positions, the Navy would improve the effective integration and delivery of naval fire support and increase the benefits it derives from new shore-based maritime fires.
Alan Cummings was an active duty Naval officer for ten years, including as an NGLO with 10th Marine Regiment and Battalion Landing Team 3/8. He continues to serve in the Navy Reserve. He is indebted to the Marines of his SFCP—Nick Ingmire, Mark Olsen, R.T. Fullam, and Richard Barcena—for all they taught him. The views expressed here are solely his and do not reflect the official positions of any organization with which he is affiliated.
