Dr. Rachel Lance joins the program to talk about her new book, Chamber Divers – The Untold Story of the D-Day Scientists Who Changed Special Operations Forever. Rachel is an author and Assistant Consulting Professor at Duke University, where she conducts research out of their Hyperbaric Medicine facility.
The following article originally featured in the September 2024 edition of Military Review under the title, “Seven Reflections of a ‘Red Commander’ What I’ve Learned from Playing the Adversary in Department of Defense Wargames,” and is republished with permission. Read it in its original form here.
By Ian M. Sullivan
It is the spring of 20XX, and the U.S. joint force is engaged in a major war against a peer competitor. Earlier in the conflict, the enemy seized a critical piece of terrain, and the U.S. National Command Authority (NCA) ordered the joint force to take it back. This required a massive joint force entry operation (JFEO), arguably the most difficult of joint operations to complete. But the joint force was game. It assembled the largest maritime assault force—both amphibious assault ships loaded with Marines and transports carrying Army formations—since the U.S. invasion of Okinawa in April 1945. It required deft planning to organize, mass, and eventually converge the force over the great expanse of the ocean. Yet the joint force, or “Blue Force,” did so and was ready to strike.
As the Blue plan unfolded, all seemed on track. Forces were moving, and joint and combined combat power was ready to support the JFEO. But it was at this time that an old, often ignored military maxim came into play—the enemy gets a vote. And their vote mattered.
Taking advantage of their own sophisticated capabilities and an approach to war that was designed with Blue in mind, the enemy “Red” Force quickly engaged elements of the invasion force at range, well before the joint force could bring its full combat power to bear. Focusing largely on the amphibious assault ships, which have a critical “over the beach” capability, the Red antiaccess/area denial forces came into play. Shore-based ballistic and cruise missiles—some hypersonic—air-launched systems, and maritime strike assets converged in a massive, multidomain blow, which caused critical damage to the amphibious fleet. The amphibious ships never made it to the invasion beaches. This left the transport ships carrying the Army formations to carry on to the target; however, lacking the over-the-beach capabilities of the amphibious ships, they needed to land in a functioning port to unload the Army forces.
Capt. William McCarty-Little was a U.S. Navy officer who introduced wargaming to the Naval War College in the 1880s. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Naval War College Museum)
Thankfully, this whole story is notional, and it played out not on the frontlines of a faraway war zone but in a simulations center on an Army base. This world of wargaming is becoming an increasingly essential tool for the Army and joint force as they grapple with what it means to conduct large-scale combat operations against peer competitors in areas far removed from the continental United States. In the words of Ed McGrady, one of the Nation’s leading experts in the field, wargaming is the “one tool that enables defense professionals to break out of the stories we have locked ourselves into.”1 He notes that “wargames are about understanding, not knowledge,” and about the stories we tell ourselves. In this case, Blue was forced to contend with an uncomfortable story; namely, a peer competitor can prevail if it plays its cards right. Blue then had to contend with an understanding of the implications of what transpired.
Additionally, it is important to note that none of this understanding or learning can occur if Blue does not have an effective opponent. And that is the role that I often get asked to play, that of “Red commander.” Over the past five years, I have played in twelve separate wargames for the Army, the Navy, combatant commands, and the joint staff; in nine of them, I was the Red commander. This means I led the enemy effort, supported by teams of experts from both military and civilian intelligence agencies. The “Red Team” truly is where “understanding” comes home to roost, as Red players must not only understand the intelligence record, but we must also understand how to mesh what we know into an operationalized campaign that effectively challenges Blue.
Red also must understand Blue, sometimes as well as Blue understands itself. Red provides Blue with a thinking enemy who understands Red’s real-world capabilities, warfighting doctrine, and national security imperatives (what we know). Red then operationalizes this understanding, along with an understanding of contemporary and near-future warfare, into a fight in the style the adversary would undertake (applying what we know). Dale Rielage, a brilliant Red Team expert, argues that the “value of wargaming hinges in large part of the quality of the opposition force—the ‘Red.’”2 To further his point, Rielage cites Capt. William McCarty-Little, the officer who first introduced wargaming to the Naval War College in the 1880s, who noted that the key to a successful wargame was “a live, vigorous enemy in the next room waiting feverishly to take advantage of any of our mistakes, ever ready to puncture any visionary scheme, to haul us down to earth.”3
Playing Red is a difficult task, and the Red commander treads a narrow path. On the one hand, the Red commander must have an excellent working understanding of how potential adversaries fight. It is both art and science. It is not just a technical exercise in understanding Red orders of battle or the capabilities of their systems but really is about being able to apply that knowledge in what amounts to planning and then executing a campaign plan and leading the adversary’s war fight. This means the Red commander needs to understand a potential enemy’s approach to warfare, their doctrine, and how they have employed their forces in regional contingencies and in training.
But at the same time, the Red commander plays a key role for Blue by helping them understand what Red is thinking. A good Red commander finds a way to keep Blue on its toes, all the while helping them comprehend the events of the game as they unfold and then working to explain the reasons and logic that underpin Red actions. A Red commander who cannot do this professionally, tactfully, and with good humor can completely scuttle the game. To truly help this understanding stick, a Red commander needs to convince Blue that the Red Team is more than a mere sparring partner but a broader partner in learning and thinking about what could happen in a potential conflict.
Wargames should be about Blue’s learning, not Red’s. However, one of the main benefits for Red in these events is that we learn too. In fact, our learning may actually be more acute because we often get many more “reps and sets” playing through countless permutations of possible regional conflicts when compared to our Blue counterparts. Red players become very knowledgeable and thoughtful on a range of issues, many of which relate to Blue as much as they do Red. We end up thinking a great deal about what warfare between peer competitors would look like. I like to tell my Red Team players that we should be able to close our eyes and visualize the conflict unfolding over time and space, which allows us to understand what key events will need to occur over what key pieces of terrain and in what time frames. Because we fight these wars time and again, we develop a unique understanding of both Red and Blue, their strengths and weaknesses, the vulnerabilities they present, and the opportunities they may be able to exploit.
U.S. Air Force Gen. John Hyten, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in describing how new joint warfighting concepts performed in a different wargame, noted that “without overstating the issue, it [the concept] failed miserably. An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us. They knew exactly what we’re going to do before we did it.”4 This is an advantage that a good Red commander will always have, which makes these games such important learning opportunities. But it also shows what it means to be a good Red commander—we must always try to further our own understanding of Red, Blue, and “Green” partner forces; the operational environment; and contemporary warfare so that we can give Blue the fight it needs at these wargames to advance its own understanding.
So, what are the key things I have learned in playing the role of Red commander over the last few years? Well, there is a great deal more than I could possibly put into words here. But there are some important, big-picture ideas, thoughts, lessons, and observations that I have derived from my gameplay. Without further ado, these are my seven reflections of a Red commander.
Lesson 1: Everything Starts with Understanding the Enemy
Simple, right? But it’s not as simple as you would think. The Army and the joint force are massive machines, and sometimes the process of understanding the enemy becomes inexorable. This can mean that the mechanisms simply move without reflection or thought—never truly internalizing an understanding of the adversary, who, as noted in the starting vignette, always gets a vote. The threat must not be allowed to get lost in this machine. It must be front and center to everything the Army does. It must drive operations and the integration of doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy (DOTMLPF-P). Furthermore, the National Defense Strategy calls on the U.S. joint force to be “threat based,” and focuses on its pacing, acute, and persistent threats.5
If we do not base what we intend to do in a conflict against a peer competitor on an understanding of that peer competitor, then we will be at a massive disadvantage in a conflict. We need to avoid future “lobster traps,” and a working knowledge of the adversary is our best hedge against a failure of imagination. This notion is at the core of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s latest operational environment assessment, The Operational Environment 2024-2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations, which states plainly, “to achieve victory, the U.S. Army must know the enemy.”6 We need experts with a deep understanding of the adversary, but we also need those who will devise war plans and then execute them to maintain a strong working knowledge of Red. This was standard Army procedure during the Cold War, but it became a lost art in the years following. Wargaming can help restore that art. For example, in its after action report for the Unified Pacific 22 wargame, U.S. Army Pacific’s first highlighted insight was the requirement to address two key advantages held by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—mass and interior lines.7 This key conclusion from Unified Pacific 22 demonstrates how wargaming can specifically help war planners and operators learn about the adversary and then develop an understanding of the challenges it would need to overcome in an actual conflict.
Lesson 2: Warfare Remains a Human Endeavor
Wargames spend a great deal of time, effort, and focus on capabilities, both Red and Blue. Wargaming provides a unique laboratory to see how critical capabilities—such as hypersonic missiles; unmanned systems; counterspace weapons; new and visionary intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities; or counter-unmanned aircraft systems—fit into a conflict.
But it is not the performance of these systems that are central to these games. It is the human factor, namely how these pieces are put together and employed by people, the strategies they adopt, and how they react to the unexpected, that truly makes wargaming unique. The Center for Army Analysis, the Army’s leading provider of wargames, notes that wargaming highlights the “complex, subjective, and sometimes illogical and irrational decision of humans.”8 One of the most telling examples of this comes from the Cold War, Exercise Ivy League ’82. The game simulated a rapid Soviet nuclear attack on the United States and gave the U.S. NCA mere minutes to react. The game was played twice; once with a stand-in president, and once with President Ronald Reagan playing his role as commander in chief. The game essentially demonstrated the human nature of existential conflict. It demonstrated that panic or emotion could very well be real and palpable, and that the best-laid plans are hostage to human actions. One issue that came up in Ivy League ’82, for example, was that President Reagan refused to board the National Emergency Airborne Command Post when a notional Soviet nuclear strike was inbound. He wanted to manage the crisis from the White House and not in the skies aboard the “Kneecap,” thereby placing himself at grave risk and overturning the best-laid continuity of government plans.
It is becoming rapidly apparent that competition, crisis, and conflict between great powers and peer competitors will be joint, combined, interagency, and whole-of-nation. The Department of Defense (DOD) wargaming community has started to understand this and does everything it can to invite experts from outside their typical echo chamber to participate in a game. This is important, as it shows the DOD that it is but part of a broader nation that would be engaged in a conflict. It shows that other entities, whether an intelligence agency, an ally, or perhaps even a private industry entity, might have an ability to help solve a military problem.
It also means that even though the DOD leads most wargames, military leaders must understand that they will not make many of the critical strategic calls during the run-up to a crisis or conflict. I recently played in a game where a senior political appointee from within the DOD played the NCA for a game in which the United States was engaged in a conflict with a nuclear-armed, peer competitor. The Blue Team, in responding to Red aggression, wished to quickly target and destroy a number of Red assets and installations. They were nonplussed to learn that the authorities for their desired strike were withheld as the NCA thought through his decision. During the hotwash, when Blue planners brought the delay up, the individual playing the NCA told them that he was being asked to make the most consequential decision any U.S. president would ever have to make—to initiate combat operations against a nuclear-armed enemy who had the capability to cause critical damage to the United States. He then, tongue-in-cheek, asked them to forgive him for taking some extra time to contemplate such a momentous call.
This is an extreme example, but wargaming needs to incorporate not only the capabilities but also the decision-making processes of a range of actors, both across the U.S. government and among our allies and partners. Getting experts from across this spectrum to participate in wargames will become increasingly essential.
Brig. Gen. Rose King (center), New Zealand Army deputy chief of staff, and Australian Army Maj. Gen. Chris Smith (right), U.S. Army Pacific deputy commanding general–strategy and plans, listen to a brief during Unified Pacific’s intelligence-focused “Pacific Winds” on 26 January 2023 at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. (Photo by Sgt. Jennifer Delaney U.S. Army)
Lesson 4: Warfare Will Be Multidomain, and Wargames Allow Us to Master Multidomain Skillsets
What makes contemporary and near-future warfare so different when compared to what we have experienced since the end of the Cold War is that our key potential adversaries can match the U.S. joint force and its allies across all domains. They can converge capabilities, deny us the ability to operate in certain domains, and then achieve their campaign objectives if they play their cards right. In wargames, Red players generally have more experience and practice at employing multidomain capabilities than the typical Blue players, often providing a wake-up call to the Blue Team. Our pacing threat is designing a force capable of operating and converging across domains, with capabilities and an approach to war that denies Blue the ability to maneuver or operate jointly across warfare domains.10 If handled well in a wargame, Red can prevail. Conversely, Blue must use wargames as ability to test its own multidomain theories. Wargames offer a unique venue where the services can see how things come together in the joint fight. Italian airpower theorist Giulio Douhet noted, “There are experts of land, sea, and air warfare. Yet there are no experts of warfare. And warfare is a single entity, having a common purpose.”11 Wargaming can help develop those experts and particularly develop the multidomain skills, knowledge, and understanding that the joint force will require to take on an adversary who also can operate across domains.12
Lesson 5: The Army Likes to Live in the Tactical World; Great Power Warfare Is Won and Lost at the Operational Level
The era of counterinsurgency shifted the Army’s focus to the tactical level. After the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Army changed its unit of action to the brigade level, and most of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan was done at the battalion and company levels. The whole Army structure of that era—how we trained, how we thought about warfare, and how we organized—focused on the tactical fight. Wargaming against peer competitors, however, demonstrates that such conflicts likely will be won or lost at the operational level, and that operational art is a skill set that must be understood throughout the joint force. If the tactical level focuses on battles, engagements, and small-unit actions, it is the operational level that will provide the critical linkages in terms of campaigns and major operations that ensure tactical success eventually translates to the strategic level, where theater strategy and national policy reside.13 It is the operational art that allows the commander to translate strategic-level goals into tasks that subordinates can accomplish.14
An example of this can be found in Unified Pacific 23, which focused on contested logistics. The game’s final report notes the criticality of improving joint combined command and control. For sustainment, the necessity to maximize operational-level, intratheater movement is then controlled by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s emerging Pacific Deployment and Distribution Operations Center, which takes in requirements from service components and then issues orders to subordinate commands to execute. The Army’s 8th Theater Sustainment Command then evaluated best practices and techniques to carry out sustainment down to the tactical formations in the fight.15 These types of issues routinely dominate wargaming and are clearly operational rather than tactical. This vignette demonstrates how practicing operational art is a crucial advantage of wargaming.
Lesson 6: Wargaming “Reps and Sets” Guard Against Strategic Surprise and Failure of Imagination
Red experts spend most of their time thinking about our adversaries and what conflict with them could entail, and most have played Red in many wargames. The next game is not summary learning for Red—it is just another permutation of a fight they’ve fought numerous other times. Blue generally does not get the luxury to do this in the daily press of normal operations, and when the Blue Team assembles for a wargame, it likely is the first time many of them have confronted the operationalizing of their war plans. Armies and soldiers often learn best through experience of battle, and wargaming is one of the best ways to at least approximate some of the challenges that could be faced when a conflict begins. In his excellent work on wargaming the unfought battles of the Cold War, Jim Storr notes, “Things that might be blindingly obvious to someone who gamed dozens of battles might well be nonsensical or, at best, counterintuitive to commanders who served for years but never fought [them].”16 Having the opportunity to fight the fights that could occur means that leaders will have the opportunity to confront the challenges they might encounter and not be faced with surprise or suffer a failure of imagination.
A pertinent historical example involves Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in 1941. Throughout the interwar years, U.S. defense planners struggled with the notion of how to defend the Philippines from a potential Japanese assault. The result was the well-known War Plan Orange (WPO), which understood, even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the difficulties that the United States would have in reinforcing the Philippines across the expanse of the Pacific and in the face of Japanese air and maritime power. WPO-3, the variant in effect in 1941, called for the U.S. forces in the Philippines to withdraw to the defensible Bataan Peninsula on Luzon, where, with pre-positioned sustainment stocks in place, they would hold as long as possible to give forces marshaling on the U.S. West Coast and Hawaii time to defeat the Japanese Navy and relieve the defenders. Despite the years of work in devising WPO—and countless wargames supporting it—MacArthur completely revised the plan on the eve of the actual Japanese attack. Instead of consolidating on the defense on favorable terrain, he would attempt to defeat the Japanese on the beaches of Luzon, wherever they landed. When the Japanese landed, MacArthur’s forces were completely out of position and out of time.17 In this case, MacArthur disregarded the “reps and sets” that went into devising WPO-3 and suffered due to his overconfidence. However, when leaders get the chance to learn from their participation in wargames, the experiential learning process generally becomes visceral and unforgettable, and hopefully will prevent future cases like the Philippines in 1941.
Lesson 7: Blue Buy-In Is What Makes Wargaming Useful
Red’s job in wargaming is difficult, as it often must relay uncomfortable truths to Blue. For wargaming to have value, Blue must understand and accept the notion that the scenario Red is presenting is valid. Red teaming expert Micah Zenko writes that there are three elements of buy-in that Blue must adopt. First, Blue must accept that there is a potential vulnerability within its sphere of interest/action that Red can help uncover and address. In military terms, this represents capabilities, approaches to war, and plans that can potentially defeat Blue. Second, Blue must be willing to assemble the best Red players it can possibly find. And third, Blue must allow Red to be absolutely truthful about its findings.18 This is not always easy, and wargames are replete with stories about Blue discounting Red actions based on the cliché that a Red action “would never happen” or, even worse, that Red “cheated.”
The story of Millenium Challenge 2002, a concept development wargame that was designed to validate a whole new joint approach to war, still resonates as a warning of what can happen when this buy-in does not exist. A strong Red Team led by retired U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper created controversy by demonstrating the flaws in Blue’s concept. Instead of accepting the flaws, joint forces command leadership instead fell line with the “this could never happen” school of thought and reset the game, adding massive constraints on Red. This led to a public relations disaster that remains a case study of how not to use wargaming.19
However, failing to get Blue buy-in to Zenko’s three elements have, in practice, had much more devastating effects than merely damaged reputations. On 27 August 1941, a group of graduate students from Japan’s Total War Research Institute, an institution that brought together the elite young leaders of the Japanese military and civilian government, presented a report to Japanese Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro on Japan’s prospects for winning a war against the United States and its allies. The report, which was backed by extensive research and wargaming, asserted that Japan might prevail in a few initial battles but concluded that it would be drawn into a protracted conflict where its resources would dwindle and eventually expire, leading to inevitable defeat. As a result, the Japanese played another wargame designed to test their conclusion, and most of the ministers who participated came to the same conclusion regarding a war with the United States.20 Yet Japanese decision-makers—political and military—ignored the findings.
A healthier and more useful example of Blue buy-in can be found with Unified Pacific. The outcomes from Unified Pacific 23, for example, have been incorporated into U.S. Army Pacific’s operational campaign—Operation Pathways—and into real-world exercises, like the joint U.S.-Australian Talisman Sabre 23. Many of the outcomes also were included in the U.S. Navy’s Global game.21
Conclusion
There are many more things I have learned from playing Red in these wargames, and they range across a variety of issues. Simple things, like understanding the military implications of geography, to the very complex, such as what it means to engage in open conflict with a nuclear-armed peer adversary or understanding how we end wars. Playing in games certainly has made me a better intelligence analyst as the practical, experiential side of gaming has revealed implications and insights that intelligence reporting alone could never have given me. Most of all, it has driven home for me the necessity to develop a strong working relationship with Blue decision-makers, operators, and staff officers. These relationships are built on trust, which develops over time. When Red can demonstrate that it is indeed on the same team as Blue, a remarkable kind of learning occurs, and we are able to get to the type of competency required to prevail in global wars against peer competitors.
I have learned that we do not wargame enough, and that we should find ways to incorporate wargaming more deeply across all our various disciplines, and not just in large, command-sponsored, multiweek games. In addition to the time I have spent supporting these games, I am also an avid hobby wargamer, and I have learned a great deal from playing “for fun.” Namely, I sometimes get to play Blue, which is remarkably fun and interesting to me. When done right, a Red commander can provide a significant force multiplier to Blue. On his first day as the Pacific commander in chief, Adm. Chester Nimitz famously met with his staff intelligence chief, then Lt. Cmdr. Edwin Layton, and told him,
“I want you to be the Admiral Nagumo of my staff. I want your every thought, every instinct as you believe Admiral Nagumo might have them. You are to see the war, their operations, their aims, from the Japanese viewpoint and keep me advised what you are thinking about, what you are doing, and what purpose, what strategy motivates your operations. If you can do this, you will give me the kind of information needed to win the war.”22
If Red is played well in a wargame, the Red commander can do what Nimitz charged of Layton but hopefully prior to a disaster of strategic surprise and failure of imagination of the magnitude of Pearl Harbor.
Interestingly, our pacing threat has adopted this very approach. The PLA has enthusiastically adopted wargaming as a means of testing its own ideas about warfare and to help overcome its lack of real-world combat experience. The PLA Navy has led the way in this regard, and it recognizes the need to effectively replicate its adversary—the United States—in these games. To do so, the PLA Navy created the Blue Team Center (in PLA parlance, the Blue Team are the adversaries) at the Naval Command College at Nanjing. The college’s one-time commander, then Rear Adm. Shen Jinlong, who was later promoted and served as the PLA Navy commander, noted that the PLA Navy’s wargaming faced a major problem—namely, that “Red (China) and Blue (the United States) were like twins. Not only were Blue’s organization, equipment, and combat style the same as Red—they even had the same operational thinking.”23 The Blue Team is designed to rectify this mirror imaging so that PLA Navy wargames are more useful and effective. A profile of the Blue Team director, Gong Jia, indicates that his goal is to understand the minds of Blue at the campaign level (operational level in Chinese terminology) and above.24
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson visits the People’s Liberation Army (Navy) Command College on 15 January 2019 for a roundtable discussion where he underscored the importance of lawful and safe operations around the globe. The PLA has adopted wargaming to test its own ideas about warfare and overcome its lack of real-world combat experience. The PLA Navy created the Blue Team Center at the its command college in Nanjing to effectively replicate its adversary—the United States. (Photo by Chief Mass Communication Spc. Elliott Fabrizio, U.S. Navy)
In one game where I played Red commander, the Office of the Secretary of Defense sent an observer team to assess if Red was being played effectively. As I was Red commander, the observers pulled me aside to interview me and ask me questions about how the game was going and how I was playing Red. One of the questions they asked me was among the best questions I’d ever heard because it gets to the gist of what it means to be an effective Red commander. They asked me, “How much better are you than Red would be in a real fight?” After thinking about it for a minute, I said our team probably was better because we understand Blue as much as we do Red. I told them if they asked me to, I could immediately take over as Blue commander and essentially run their fight because I had seen it and experienced it so much in so many other games. The observer team seemed happy with this answer and moved on.
But the question has stuck with me ever since. If Red does its job well, it provides Blue with the chance to try new things, to fail, to learn, and to hopefully redefine the stories that we tell ourselves, and to devise new thoughts and ideas that will lead to victory in a future conflict. In referring to the work done by the joint board in the 1930s and early 1940s at developing the “Rainbow” war plans (such as the aforementioned WPO), which included a great deal of research and wargaming, Blaine Pardoe writes, “Without the skills earned working in the darkness … the United States would have struggled to attempt to develop this competency in its general staff.”25 This “work in the darkness” requires a capable, knowledgeable, flexible, and adaptive Red that will enable Blue learning.
A wargame will not predict the future for Blue, but if Red does its job correctly, it will allow Blue to experience what a potential fight could look like. It becomes the work in the darkness that allows Blue to learn, and hopefully leads to the light of victory in the next war. So perhaps the most important lesson of all gets back to the beginning—we have to get Red right so that Blue gets the opportunity to learn and to get it right on a future battlefield.
Ian M. Sullivan is the deputy chief of staff, G-2, for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). He holds a BA from Canisius University in Buffalo, New York, and an MA from Georgetown University’s BMW Center for German and European Studies in Washington, D.C., and he was a Fulbright Fellow at the Universität Potsdam in Potsdam, Germany. A career civilian intelligence officer, Sullivan has served with the Office of Naval Intelligence; Headquarters, U.S. Army Europe and Seventh Army; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) at the National Counterterrorism Center; the Central Intelligence Agency; and TRADOC. He is a member of the Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service and was first promoted to the senior civilian ranks in 2013 as a member of the ODNI’s Senior National Intelligence Service.
The author would like to thank Maj. Gen. Jay Bartholomees, U.S. Army, and Charlie Raymond (TRADOC G-2) for their thoughtful reviews and edits of this article.
Notes
1. Ed McGrady, “Getting the Story Right About Wargaming,” War on the Rocks, 8 November 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/11/getting-the-story-right-about-wargaming/.
2. Dale C. Rielage, “War Gaming Must Get Red Right: An Expert In-House Adversary is a Powerful Tool for the Fleet,” Proceedings 143, no. 1 (January 2017), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017/january/war-gaming-must-get-red-right/.
3. Ibid.
4. Tara Copp, “‘It Failed Miserably’: After Wargaming Loss, Joint Chiefs Are Overhauling How the US Military Will Fight,” Defense One, 26 July 2021, https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/07/it-failed-miserably-after-wargaming-loss-joint-chiefs-are-overhauling-how-us-military-will-fight/184050/.
5. U.S. Department of Defense, 2022 National Defense Strategy (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 2022). https://www.defense.gov/National-Defense-Strategy/.
6. U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), The Operational Environment 2024–2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations (Fort Eustis, VA: TRADOC, 1 August 2024), 31, https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/2024/07/31/the-operational-environment-2024-2034-large-scale-combat-operations/.
7. U.S. Army Pacific (USARPAC), Unified Pacific Wargame Series 2022: Unclassified Overview (Fort Shafter, HI: USARPAC, September 2022), 4, https://www.usarpac.army.mil/Portals/113/PDF%20Files/Unclassified%20UPWS%20Report%20Final.pdf.
8. Government Accounting Office (GAO), Defense Analysis: Additional Actions Could Enhance DOD’s Wargaming Efforts, GAO-23-105351 (Washington, DC: GAO, April 2023), https://www.gao.gov/assets/d23105351.pdf.
9. Marc Ambinder, The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1982 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 82–89.
10. Ian M. Sullivan, “Three Dates, Three Windows, and All of DOTMLPF-P: How the People’s Liberation Army Poses an All-of-Army Challenge,” Military Review 104, no. 1 (January-February 2024): 14–25, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/January-February-2024/Sullivan/.
11. Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Sheila Fischer (1921; Rome: Rivista Aeronautica, 1958).
12. Robert P. Haffa Jr. and James H. Patton Jr., “Wargames, Winning and Losing,” Parameters 31, no. 1 (Spring 2001): Article 9, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol31/iss1/9/.
13. Chad Buckel, “A New Look at Operational Art: How We View War Dictates How We Fight It,” Joint Force Quarterly 100 (1st Quarter, January 2021): 94–100, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/2498208/.
14. Wilson Blythe, “A History of Operational Art,” Military Review 98, no. 6 (November-December 2018): 37–49, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/November-December-2018/Blythe-Operational-Art/.
15. USARPAC, Unified Pacific Wargame Series 2023: Unclassified Overview (Fort Shafter, HI: USARPAC, September 2023), 8.
16. Jim Storr, Battlegroup! The Lessons of the Unfought Battles of the Cold War (Warwick, UK: Helion, 2021), 74–75.
17. John C. McManus, Fire and Fortitude: The U.S. Army in the Pacific War, 1941–1943 (New York: Caliber, 2019), 63–64.
18. Micah Zenko, Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 2–5.
19. Ibid., 52–61; Micah Zenko, “Millenium Challenge: The Real Story of a Corrupted Military Exercise and Its Legacy,” War on the Rocks, 5 November 2015, https://warontherocks.com/2015/11/millenium-challenge-the-real-story-of-a-corrupted-military-exercise-and-its-legacy/.
20. Eri Hotta, Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy (New York: Vintage Books, 2014), 164–65.
21. USARPAC, Unified Pacific Wargame Series 2023, 11.
22. Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 307; Rielage, “War Gaming Must Get Red Right.”
23. Ryan D. Martinson, “The PLA Navy’s Blue Team Center Games for War,” Proceedings 150, no. 5 (May 2024), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2024/may/pla-navys-blue-team-center-games-war.
24. Ibid.
25. Blaine L. Pardoe, Never Wars: The US War Plans to Invade the World (London: Fonthill, 2014), 28.
Featured Image: Students move pieces around the board on 21 December 2023 during a wargame based on Pacific conflict while attending the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. (Photo by Billy Blankenship, U.S. Air Force)
The 1778 French entry into the American War for Independence imposed several strategic conundrums for the British that fatally impaired chances of victory. First, French entry initiated a pattern of European opportunism to challenge British global hegemony, specifically with the cooperative involvement of France and Spain. Second, peripheral theaters in the West Indies, India, and Europe diffused British naval forces and strained limited manpower, devastating the British capability to conduct land warfare successfully. Finally, French entry bolstered American international legitimacy and domestic determination, which prevented Britain from regaining the strategic initiative. Ultimately, these combined challenges had adverse effects that made any remaining chance of British victory impossible.
European Opportunism
In the years leading up to its entry into the war, France aligned strategic resources to capitalize on opportunities that challenged British hegemony, particularly in the maritime domain. The French Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Vergennes, spearheaded ambitions to restore France to its perceived rightful dominant place in Europe by attacking British influence abroad instead of the historical strategy of targeting Britain itself.1 Additionally, both the French Director-General of Finance and Secretary of State for the Navy, Jacques Necker and Gabriel de Sartine, respectively, established policy decisions from 1774-1780 that supported France’s ability to pay for domestic war support, including the robust reformation of its naval forces.2 This preparation allowed France to be generally well suited to confront British naval forces, a physical representation of British hegemony, and directly contributed to British defeats in the maritime domain.
Following the commencement of the war, France identified the unique opportunity this far-off conflict presented for restoring order and balance to European power dynamics, which would also weaken British military successes. Specifically, the strained state that British forces were in following the Saratoga and Philadelphia campaigns provided the ideal timing for the French to enter the war. While Britain was considering negotiations to cease hostilities after these two campaign failures, France sought to prolong the war for its own benefit.3 France had long desired a revengeful opportunity to damage Britain in a manner that would increase maritime and political superiority in France’s favor.4 The tyranny of distance associated with European conflict in North America was capitalized on by France and continued to be a monumental struggle for Britain.
France’s entry into the war placed it in the unique position of being able to leverage American Revolutionary aims for independence as the catalyst for its grand strategy to challenge British hegemony and defeat it when opportunities presented themselves. Although France had expressed genuine interest in the American colonies seeking independence, this disturbance ultimately served France as a lever to restore global colonial balance and French influence.5 France embodied its role as a catalyst for challenging British hegemony and, in doing so, spurred Spain and Holland into later cooperation to ensure British victory in the American War for Independence would be impossible.
Motivated by decades of simmering retaliation and individual self-identification as the rightful European hegemon, France’s entry into the war forced Britain into a defensive maritime fight that prevented victory after 1778. Since 1763, the French-led House of Bourbon had been conducting robust shipbuilding efforts with the anticipation of likely conflict with Britain’s notoriously strong naval fleet. Unburdened by any land warfare entanglements in Europe, the House of Bourbon majorly oriented its resources towards increasing its combined maritime power.6 By 1775, France and Spain’s relative combined naval power exceeded Britain by approximately 25 percent and continued to grow throughout the remainder of the war.7 This prioritization of the maritime domain forced Britain into a strategic defensive posture, with alternating concerns between the North American land campaigns and countering Bourbon maritime threats across the globe.8
Peripheral Theaters
French entry into the American War for Independence created pervasive and politically deadly dilemmas for British control of its far-flung naval bases and ports across the globe.9 Except for the Spanish-controlled naval shipbuilding port of Havana, overseas locations for European countries were typically resource deficient and required significant garrison forces to maintain order.10 The vast distances and garrison requirements complicated British efforts to counter French attempts at harassment, isolation, or invasion. Due to French threats to British colonial garrison forces and the maritime sea lines of communication between them, Britain reoriented its forces and resources towards France and decreased allocations to combating the American colonialists.11 Britain eventually further ensured its strategic defeat with its declaration of hostilities on Holland. France capitalized on the resulting Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and gained a critical extension of control into the Indian Ocean and West Indies.12 This unification of European powers, led by France, signaled a shift in global British control and turned the weight of Britain’s colonial possessions won during the Seven Year’s War in 1763 into an overwhelmingly taxing drain that prevented the British from bringing its full combat potential to bear at the locations of its choosing.13
France’s entry also led to the defense of Britain becoming the primary strategic objective when threats of attack from the House of Bourbon culminated between 1778-1780.14 In particular, the British Admiralty tended to be riveted by fears of potential invasion and over-insured home waters with British naval forces that could have proved decisive elsewhere.15 This fear was further flamed as Britain entered hostilities without any continental allies.16 Despite focusing maritime forces in its home waters, the British navy would have had no legitimate chance against a combined Franco-Spanish naval fleet if they had pursued a determined invasion of Britain. Britain’s shift from offensive operations in the American colonies, King George’s original strategic objective, to defensive operations displayed the genuinely destructive nature of French entry into the war.
Due to this refocusing towards Europe, Britain overly fixated on French naval dockyards in their misguided pursuit of a decisive naval engagement.17 The First Lord of the Admiralty, John Montagu, preferred concentration of the British naval fleet in Europe to force the House of Bourbon alliance to reallocate their respective naval forces from North America and the West Indies. However, the British navy lacked proper military intelligence on the intentions of enemy fleet movements.18 This intelligence gap resulted in the British fleet predominately failing to locate and engage the House of Bourbon naval forces. Additionally, France exploited its geographical position to facilitate an increasing operation focusing on guerre de course to harass British shipping.19 This missed opportunity of British naval forces countering France at sea allowed the French to operate with general freedom of action and inflict terminally damaging economic and military costs on Britain.
Bolstered Americanism
American Revolution leaders had framed their political narrative as a legitimate protest movement with traditional values grounded in English law and classical political philosophy to protect against British accusations and attract powerful European political and intellectual elites’ support.20 This political narrative would result in an increasing European acknowledgment of American Revolution legitimacy in the international system, albeit initially limited. Additionally, the radical changes in principles, opinion, sentiments, and affections of people from the republican ideals in the Declaration of Independence improved American legitimacy and furthered domestic determination. The American Revolution leadership hoped that a potential French recognition of an established United States of America would pave the way for other European nations to join the war and understand the long-term economic benefits of a British defeat.21 By incorporating principles of English society into their cause, the American revolutionaries had created a brilliant situation where British resentment fueled a growing fire of emboldened Americanism. Having been satisfactorily impressed by the intricate efforts of the American Revolution leadership like Benjamin Franklin, France became the spark that lit the eternal fire of American determination to defeat Britain.22
American leadership had long depended on France’s entry into the war and recognized the significance it would have on inhibiting Britain’s chance of victory. Even in the darkest moments after conflict initiation, George Washington remained faithfully committed that a French entry would inevitably occur. Specifically, Washington understood that the strategic complication of Britain fighting a land battle in the American colonies and contending with French naval forces across the globe would ensure a British defeat.23 American leadership hoped that the British failure during the Saratoga Campaign would be a turning point for French war support, which proved valid with France’s entry shortly afterward.24 Further hopes of a more meaningful alliance and a long-awaited desire to decisively defeat the British would come to fruition in August 1781 at the Battle of Yorktown with a sixteen thousand man-strong combined force of French and American troops.25
France’s entry also brought tangible aid to the American colonists that ensured war efforts could continue and drain Britain’s overseas land combat potential. French military leaders identified that the American colonists organically possessed relatively proficient skills with handling weapons and that they maintained the ability to fight in the near-limitless space across the American colonies. Additionally, France perceived the American colonists as being fearless of losing cities as they had no legitimate political, moral, or industrial foundation for military efforts, unlike the cities of Europe.26 This unique degree of American colonial resolve to reach war termination in their favor spurred on French, Spanish, and Dutch military aid in the forms of gunpowder, loans, and various equipment.27 Specific to the French, the first shipment crossed the Atlantic Ocean just after conflict initiation in 1776 clandestinely through a fabricated commercial entity and continued until war termination.28 The tangible aid that came with French entry, combined with the character of American warfighting, sapped British land forces of necessary combat potential.
In addition to tangible military aid, France provided a maritime-based capability to project power shore and inflict military costs on the British. While the American colonists focused almost exclusively on land warfare to drain British military resources, France focused its military efforts at sea.29 This French naval strategy ideally supported land operations and had been doctrinally implemented with the anticipation of a potential war with Britain in the American colonies.30 The September 1779 French fleet bombardment of Savannah displayed this ability against British land targets, and although limited in tactical success, contributed to furthering American determination against Britain.31 Following French entry, British naval and land combat potential in North America would never recover to 1776 levels.32
Although traditional American naval action was limited during the American War for Independence, French entry bolstered American privateering against British shipping and the land pressuring of naval bases, providing morale boosts that kept American colonial determination strong. Before there was a French naval presence on the Atlantic Coast, British sea control was locally uncontested and prevented consistent privateering near the coastal waters.33 American privateering increased and challenged British maritime security efforts once French naval forces provided limited sea control.34 The presence of Comte d’Estaing’s ships forced Britain to abandon blockade efforts, which dramatically increased opportunities for privateering and the flow of European goods shipments.35 This privateering went practically uncontested by the British for the remainder of the war and highlighted the general decrease in British maritime superiority upon French war entry.36 Additionally, French entry spurred American determination to put pressure on and control the naval hubs of Boston, Narraganset Bay, and New York.37 The threat of privateering and loss of strategically important naval bases in North America, enabled by the French, directly contributed to overall British defeat in the American War for Independence.
Contrarian Viewpoint
Some might argue that the House of Bourbon alliance was fragmented between drastically different political objectives, leading to opportunities for Britain’s exploitation and regaining the initiative towards achieving favorable war termination. This fragmentation is supported by French awareness of the necessity for Spain to provide resources for a combined naval force to place the British naval fleet at risk. Likewise, Spain was exceptionally aware that France depended on their involvement and actively leveraged this to steer the House of Bourbon alliance to achieve its land seizure objectives. Spain had specific war objectives of seizing Minorca, Gibraltar, and Jamaica from British control but was generally less committed to holistically orienting strategic resources towards successful operational execution.38 Additionally, Spain contrasted France in that it had no intentions of supporting the Americans or recognizing their moves towards independence.39 Finally, Spanish political resolve for conflict was limited and nearly led to withdrawal from the war following Spanish failure at Gibraltar.40 This vulnerable situation required France to direct resources to maintain a particular strategic objective of preventing Spanish capitulation from hindering French benefit or enabling a British victory.41
Despite these contrary views, these opposing objectives were overcome by an overall common unity to challenge British hegemony and cause culminating burdens. Neither France nor Spain were aggressively opposed to each other’s objectives and successfully found compromise to leverage each other’s military advantages. In particular, Spanish renewed efforts to pressure Britain in the West Indies allowed France to increase maritime and power projection operations in North America.42 France and Spain were deeply bound by desires for reprisal against British actions several decades prior and held sentiments of European rightfulness to supersede British hegemony.43
Additionally, others might argue that British naval forces were doctrinally and capability superior to their French equivalents, which could have led to a British victory. In general, British naval forces were able to maintain a degree of local sea control around their sea lines of communication, thus ensuring the strategic sustainment of its North American land forces. Likewise, the British were confident in their naval superiority and assessed that one or two decisive maritime engagements would have terminally altered the threat of the Franco-Spanish naval fleet and regained the complete strategic initiative in British favor.44
While this perspective holds some merit, British strategic decisions like those made by George Germaine, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, had severely limited British maritime strategy.45 British fears of upsetting France and British taxpayers that response to the American rebellion was a prelude to invading the French West Indies led to limited naval mobilization in 1775. These limitations were also coupled with broad navy funding cuts and rules of engagement additions that dictated there be no interception of French ships carrying munitions and supplies to the American colonies. These measures ultimately negated any possibility of a successful blockade on the Atlantic Coast being effectively implemented.46
Additionally, the French recognized the immense risks of becoming involved in a decisive naval battle with the British and instead focused efforts on attacking seaborne trade, launching land assaults against colonial possessions, enhancing French overseas control, and escorting French trade.47 Compounding the problem of France not being a cooperative target set, the British failed to internally coordinate intelligence of French and Spanish naval dockyards, which led to the House of Bourbon operating with near impunity across the Atlantic Ocean.48 With French entry pressing Britain into an overly defensive posture, British naval forces became too burdened by global mission tasking to guarantee local sea control of its Atlantic Ocean sea lines of communications.49
Finally, the British would have ultimately had to prioritize the North American theater over its other colonies to mitigate the risk posed by the combined French-Spanish naval forces. This prioritization would have suicidally sacrificed British economic priorities in other colonies, such as the West Indies, which had become a focal point of French maritime operations.50 Likewise, British naval focus on protecting the homeland was predicated on poor strategic assumptions that France intended to conduct an amphibious landing. Although there were discussions within the House of Bourbon to conduct such an invasion, this strategy was smartly abandoned for a more appropriate increase in maritime trade interdiction that would place Britain at greater strategic risk. Additionally, the British land forces in North America contended with unparalleled exterior lines of communication that measured more than three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean.51 This vast distance required overseas locations, with corresponding garrison forces, that Britain could not maintain after French entry.52 Ultimately, French entry into the American War for Independence in 1778 negated any possibility of Britain achieving victory.
Lieutenant Commander Alex Crosby, an active duty naval intelligence officer, began his career as a surface warfare officer. His assignments have included the USS Lassen (DDG-82), USS Iwo Jima (LHD-7), U.S. Seventh Fleet, and the Office of Naval Intelligence, with multiple deployments supporting naval expeditionary and special warfare commands. He is a Maritime Advanced Warfighting School–qualified maritime operational planner and an intelligence operations warfare tactics instructor. He holds master’s degrees from the American Military University and the Naval War College.
Endnotes
[1] Pritchard, James. “French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal.” Naval War College Review, vol. 47, no. 4 (Autumn 1994): 86-87.
[2] Ibid., 85.
[3] Ferling, John. Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015: 207.
[4] Mahan, Alfred Thayer. The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1890: 510-513
[5] “French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal.” 88.
[6] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 505.
[7] O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson. The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013: 343.
[8] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 508.
[9] Ibid., 511.
[10] Ibid., 520.
[11] Ibid., 520.
[12] Ibid., 521.
[13] Jasanoff, Maya. Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Knopf, 2011: 24.
[14] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 14.
[15] Mackesy, Piers. “British Strategy in the War of American Independence.” Yale Review, vol. 52 (1963): 555.
[16] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 334.
[17] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 526.
[18] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 333-334.
[19] Mahan, Alfred Thayer. “Introductory” and “Discussion of the Elements of Sea Power.” In Mahan on Naval Strategy. John B. Hattendorf, ed. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2015: 33
[20] Genest, Marc. “The Message Heard ‘Round the World.” In Quills to Tweets: How America Communicates about War and Revolution. Andrea J. Dew, Marc A. Genest, S.C.M. Paine, eds. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2019: 10.
[21] Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. 205-206.
[22] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 114.
[23] Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. 205-206.
[24] Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. 40.
[25] Ibid., 52.
[26] British Strategy in the War of American Independence. 541.
[27] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 14.
[28] Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. 205-206.
[29] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 508.
[30] French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal. 91.
[31] Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. 44.
[32] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 14.
[33] Ibid., 333-334.
[34] Ibid., 343.
[35] French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal. 93.
[36] Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. 209.
[37] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 520.
[38] Ibid., 510.
[39] French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal. 87.
[40] Ibid., 94.
[41] Ibid., 96-97.
[42] Ibid., 99.
[43] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 509.
[44] British Strategy in the War of American Independence. 554.
[45] Ibid., 548.
[46] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 13-14.
[47] French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal. 92.
[48] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 346-347.
[49] British Strategy in the War of American Independence. 541.
[50] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 513.
[51] British Strategy in the War of American Independence. 543.
[52] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 515.
Featured Image: Battle of the Virginia Capes, 5 September 1781. Oil on canvas by v. Zveg, 1962, depicting the French fleet (at left), commanded by Vice Admiral the Comte de Grasse, engaging the British fleet (at right) under Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Graves off the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. (Courtesy of the U.S. Navy Art Collection, U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph)
“Legal Finish” is a term that has become commonplace in maritime security circles around the world. It refers to the process of putting a maritime law enforcement action through a legal mechanism – whether a prosecution, administrative proceeding or other adjudication – that formally assesses offenses under national law and where appropriate, penalizes perpetrators. Legal finish has rightly been identified as crucial because merely disrupting illicit activities does little to deter future criminal conduct; only enforcing legal consequences changes the risk-reward calculus for nefarious actors. The problem, however, is that with all the focus on the legal finish, many states, international organizations, and “capacity building” partners have forgotten the legal start.
Maritime law enforcement is not a linear process, it is a cycle that starts and ends with the law. Recognizing its recursive nature is essential to establishing clear, consistent, and effective law enforcement and security operations.
Figure 1. The Maritime Security Cycle.
To begin with, the law is the framework by which the maritime domain is assessed. Armed with the legal framework, maritime watchstanders can monitor and surveil the maritime domain, looking for any anomalies. Once they find those anomalies, however, a rigorous analytical process is needed to ensure that information is turned into understanding –about both what is happening on the water and what can be done about it. That analytical process, therefore, relies heavily on understanding the law. The key questions are:
Is the anomaly desirable or undesirable? (Not all anomalies are undesirable).
If it is undesirable, is it legal or illegal? (Not all undesirable matters have been addressed by the law).
If it is illegal, is it actionable or not? (Does the state have the authority and jurisdiction to do something about it?)
If it is actionable, is it achievable or not? (Does the state have the right physical capacity and capability to interdict the matter?)
Even if it is undesirable, illegal, actionable, and achievable, would interdicting the matter be wise? (Is it worth the fuel, is it worth the risk, could there be geopolitical blowback, etc.?)
If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” then there should still be consideration of one additional question: “Is there anything else that could be done?” Watching the situation further, notifying other agencies, issuing a notice to mariners, or contacting neighboring states are all on the long list of other things that might be worth doing, short of pursuing an interdiction.
If the analysis suggests that an on-the-water operation might be warranted, then the analysts must have access to some sort of mechanism for sharing information with the proper decision-makers. Whether it is operative within an agency or across agencies, that cooperative mechanism must be repeatable (so there is consistency in how things happen), documentable (so there is a chance to learn from both successes and mistakes), and structured in such a manner that adequate information gets to the appropriate decision makers efficiently.
Once decision-makers have information about an anomaly that is undesirable, illegal, actionable, achievable, and worth pursuing, it is up to them to decide whether to conduct an operation. If they choose to do so, the operation must be planned and executed in a manner consistent with the law. That requires not only a clear understanding of the authorities that the respective agencies have for law enforcement, and the limitation of enforcement jurisdiction in the maritime domain, but also a sufficient grasp of all the elements of an offense to be able to identify and document those elements at sea. The collection and preservation of evidence in the maritime space is crucial, especially since revisiting a “crime scene” at sea is rarely, if ever possible. Thus, understanding the law at the operational stage – both in the sense of what the law enforcement officers do and concerning what they notice and record – is vital to legal finish. But that understanding is usually in the hands of completely different people than those responsible for the legal finish.
Importantly, arrests of people do not happen at sea. While it is possible to arrest a vessel, the suspects themselves are detained at sea and brought back to shore. Only once on shore are they handed over to land-based authorities who, on reviewing whatever evidence has been collected, then conduct an arrest or initiate an administrative proceeding. An arrest would then trigger the start of a prosecution, adjudication, and, if successful, penalization of the case. An administrative proceeding would similarly assess some sort of penalty. In either case – both considered to be “legal finish” – the personnel responsible are almost always different than the ones involved in every prior step of the process. All too often, however, most of the support, training, capacity building, attention, and funding has gone to this final stage, while the role of the law and legal advisors has been ignored in all the others.
Legal advisors are rarely, if ever, part of the process of monitoring and surveilling the maritime domain, analyzing anomalies, sharing information, planning operations, or even executing operations. They are sometimes – but rarely – consulted regarding evidence collection and preservation. Usually, the first time lawyers are brought into the maritime security cycle is for the legal finish, and it is left to them to kick-save any legal mistake or oversight that has been made at any previous point in the cycle. There is only so much, however, that can be fixed at the end of the process. Additionally, there may have been operational options that would have been more impactful if legal consultations had occurred earlier. Maritime law is strange and it affords some rights and opportunities that are sometimes hard to believe. Operators may miss out on more effective operations due to a lack of legal input at that stage.
Because maritime law enforcement is a cycle rather than a linear process, it does not end if one of the steps breaks down or even if all of them are successful through to prosecution. The final step is to revisit the starting point – the law – to ensure that it is fit for purpose. Law has two main functions: to constrain bad action and to enable good. If the law does not address an undesirable activity occurring in the maritime domain, it should be expanded or amended. If that law is not creating space for “good,” economically productive, and desirable activities, it should also be amended. While maritime law enforcement focuses on “the bad,” governing the maritime domain requires recognizing a balance between the two. Only stamping out the bad is not possible; there must be ample opportunities for good, lawful activities as well – especially when they are vital to a state’s economic security.
To be most effective, therefore, in both promoting good activities and stopping bad ones, the law must be seen as a tool or an asset for law enforcement – much the way a ship, radar system, or even a weapon would be seen. To be as impactful as possible, the law must be calibrated for the security operating environment. But even perfect law will be virtually worthless unless those who understand it and know how to use it are involved from the start of the maritime security cycle. Relegating the law to the legal finish phase betrays a lack of appreciation for the centrality of the law to the entire cycle, and sets up the state for failure.
Legal finish is incredibly important. But so is the legal start. If operational lawyers are not recognized as playing a vital role in all the phases leading up to the handover to land-based authorities, the prospects of both effective operations and successful legal finish are being undermined. So, for all the good attention that has been paid to prosecutors and judges, as well as to the work of coast guard and navy lawyers in support of those prosecutions or administrative proceedings, much more must be done to back up and start integrating sound legal advice throughout the maritime security cycle. While this can be a challenge, as operational cultures tend to not be welcoming to legal advisors, it is not about disrupting missions and operations with annoying legal points. It is about enhancing missions and operations by safeguarding the likelihood of their success. As simple as it sounds, we must not lose sight of the reality that legal finish needs a legal start.
Dr. Ian Ralby is a recognized expert in maritime and resource security. He has worked in more than 95 countries around the world, often assisting them with developing their maritime domain awareness capacity. He holds a JD from William & Mary and a PhD from the University of Cambridge.
Featured Image: A commercial ship passes by San Francisco. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)
