Hard Truths: The Navy and Marines Need Another #MeToo Moment: Part Two

By Captain John P. Cordle, USN (Ret) and K. Denise Rucker Krepp

Part Two

In Part One we shared our experience and gave some interpretations of the data.* In this part we will finish that discussion and proceed to a set of recommendations. In the spirit of the discussion, it is important to understand that the trends are all heading in the wrong direction, indicating that policy and procedure changes are not enough. A culture change is required, starting at the unit level, if these trends are to be reversed. The following graph shows the magnitude of the problem, and the disturbing trend:

This chart of Sexual Assault events from the 2021 report shows quite clearly that the trend is in the wrong direction. (Source: FY21 DOD Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military).

5. Victims Bear a Heavy Burden
The IRC spoke with hundreds of survivors of sexual assault during the 90-Day review. One-on-one interviews and panel discussions brought to light the substantial burdens placed on victims as they navigated the military justice and health systems. Many survivors with whom the IRC spoke had dreamt their entire lives of a career in the military; in fact, they loved being in the military and did not want to leave, even after experiencing sexual assault or sexual harassment. But because their experience in the aftermath of the assault was handled so ineptly or met with hostility and retaliation, many felt they had no choice but to separate.

John: This echoes the case of my friend, who resigned from the Navy after nearly 10 years with the feeling – related to me directly – that she had no faith the system would change. The idea of psychological safety of the victim is huge and must be considered by leaders throughout the process. Again the DoD report is quite damning, showing that retribution and retaliation were found in 30 percent of cases – that means that someone who makes a report has a one-in-three chance of being retaliated against by the command or the alleged aggressor. I would never want my leadership to be characterized as “inept” – but the report found enough evidence to include this finding. Again, get out the mirror.

Denise: I have worked with both male and female sexual assault victims, including military and civilian. Service Academy students are nominated by Congressmembers to attend highly selective federal institutions. They have generally achieved high marks and excelled academically in high school to compete for the nomination. Most also excel in sports and extra-curricular activities to be competitive. They and their parents fill out mountains of paperwork and then they finally arrive at the school, full of dreams. Then reality sets in; I have seen their dreams of 20 years of service dashed by sexual assault. I have seen the tormented crying eyes of mothers and the rage-filled eyes of fathers, many of whom are alumni of the same institution.

When the military fails to help MST victims, the services also fail their parents. The failure is remembered and retold at family gatherings around the country. It is also told in videos, including the one that I watched at the new movie museum in Los Angeles. Every day, thousands of museum visitors learn about how the military failed to protect those who fought so hard to wear the uniform. If we want to look at why the military is having a recruiting problem, one place to start is the negative recruiting by those who recall a SASH event during their service – and tell their story. People do not want to join or stay in an organization where they are not respected.

6. Critical Deficiencies in the Workforce
The workforce dedicated to Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (SAPR) is not adequately structured and resourced to do this important work. Many failures in prevention and response can be attributed to inexperienced lawyers and investigators, collateral-duty (part-time) SAPR victim advocates, and the near total lack of prevention specialists. These failures are not the fault of these personnel, but rather of a structure that de-emphasizes specialization and experience, which are necessary to address the complexities of sexual assault cases and the needs of victims.

John: You get what you pay for. Again there have been major steps taken in the past year to address these deficiencies, but if this is not the topic of a significant “Get Real Get Better” moment in the Pentagon then none such exists. One service member whom the author is mentoring received a letter at 180 days explaining that due to a backlog, her case – which was supposed to be adjudicated within 90 days – would take at least another 120 days – meanwhile she works at the same command with the alleged perpetrator, feeling that system has failed her – because it has. From collateral duty officers and chiefs with little training or motivation, to the oft-quoted dearth of mental health resources across the military, there is much to be done here. But what about the unit level? I submit that it is not OK to wait for the Navy to train thousands of counselors over the next few years. If you are in command today, take a personal interest in your staff and make sure that they have both the ability, the time, and the training to do the tough job of a sexual harassment (SH) or SAPR representative. Make sure that the available resources at the Fleet and Family Service Center are part of Command indoctrination, the command Facebook page, family support groups, and the sponsor program.

Denise: The critical deficiency I witnessed as a federal agency chief counsel and as a locally elected official was the lack of robust investigations and prosecutions. Prosecutors were not trained to prosecute the cases, were overworked and inexperienced, and found it easier to drop the case, claiming lack of evidence, than to do the work of studying the evidence and asking questions.

7. Outdated Gender and Social Norms Persist Across the Force
Although the military has become increasingly diverse, women make up less than 18 percent of the total force.4 With these dynamics, many women who serve report being treated differently than their male counterparts. In the IRC’s discussions with enlisted personnel, many Service women described feeling singled out or the subject of near daily sexist comments, as one of few women in their units.

John: Did you know that there are still several Navy ships with no female enlisted crew members? A recent photo of the senior Surface Warfare Flag Officers includes only two female Admirals. Diversity breeds inclusion – and a lack thereof does the opposite. The USMC lags the other services in female percentage by a significant margin, and yet are the apparent source of resistance to the Task Force One Navy recommendation to include RESPECT as a fourth core value. Unit leaders must look at their command through the eyes of the least represented and act accordingly. That said, it is also important to bear in mind that SH and SA are not restricted to a single gender and males can be targets as well, bringing a separate set of stigma and consequences for the victim, who may be labeled with a sexual orientation that is not their own due to the nature of the incident.

Denise: I served on active duty from 1992-2002. I left active duty because it was crystal clear at that time that I would not make Captain and Admiral. I was smart enough to become a senior leader but I was not going to be given the jobs that would make me eligible for them. I made this determination after talking with my father, a USMA grad who made 06 by the age of 40. He had seen combat in Vietnam and was a Ranger.

My generation of women were not eligible for career-enhancing combat jobs, so many of us left the service, which is why there are not that many female Admirals today – it literally takes a generation to change that. Women continued to leave in the 2000s because again, the jobs were not open to us and if they were, we were subjected to comments by senior leaders like “don’t go getting pregnant on me.” (that is sexual harassment, by the way.) There were also other obstacles like unwavering weight standards that had to be met after having children, hairstyles that caused our hair to fall out, and horrible uniform designs…Problems our male counterparts never had to overcome. But looming large was the ever-present threat of being sexually harassed – or worse – and having it be ignored.

8. Little is Known about Perpetration
The most effective way to stop sexual harassment and sexual assault is to prevent perpetration. However, the Department lacks sufficient data to make evidence-based decisions in this domain. As a result, the impact of prevention activities in military communities, particularly activities aimed at reducing perpetration, remains relatively unknown.

John: The most important role of the unit commander here is to properly investigate and report the data in a timely manner. One service member shared being told to “think twice” about making a report because “it would make the command look bad” – by the command equal opportunity counselor! This should never happen. Face the facts, do not shy away, and make the required reports, regardless of the consequences – it is the right thing to do. While training may inhibit sexual harassment through better education and intervention, sexual assault is a crime, and all the training in the world is not going to stop someone who is already so inclined. But proper training to recognize the signs of a bad trend can lead to more intervention and thus, hopefully, to prevention or at least prosecution. Sexual predators have no place in the military and should be excoriated as efficiently as possible.

Denise: The best way to stop SASH is to prosecute existing cases and publicize the outcomes. Publicize how offenders are sent to prison. Publicize the loss of retirement benefits. Publicize all cases regardless of rank. Make it clear that everyone is held to the same standard.

Additionally, every year Department of Defense employees are required to take sexual assault and sexual harassment training. My recommendation is to include information in the training on the number of reports received each year, the number of individuals prosecuted each year for sexual assault and the number of individuals successfully court martialed for sexual assault.

We usually end an article with a list of recommendations, but since we both agree with all of the IRC findings, we will simply list them here (below) while encouraging the reader to find and read the original report. Many of them are at the Big Navy level – but we would encourage the reader to point out to their leadership where these actions are not having the desired effect or fast enough – and to be a demanding customer.

Key Recommendations:

    1. Ensure Service members who experience sexual harassment have access to support services and care.
    2. Professionalize, strengthen, and resource the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response workforce across the enterprise.
    3. Improve the military’s response to domestic violence—which is inherently tied to sexual assault.
    4. Improve data collection, research, and reporting on sexual harassment and sexual assault to better reflect the experiences of Service members from marginalized populations—including LGBTQ+ Service members, and racial and ethnic minorities.
    5. Establish the DoD roles of the Senior Policy Advisor for Special Victims, and the DoD Special Victim Advocate.

Accountability

    1. Create the Office of the Special Victim Prosecutor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and shift legal decisions about prosecution of special victim cases out of the chain of command.
    2. Provide independent trained investigators for sexual harassment and mandatory initiation of involuntary separation for all substantiated complaints.
    3. Offer judge ordered military protective orders for victims of sexual assault and related offenses, enabling enforcement by civilian authorities.

Prevention

    1. Equip all leaders with prevention competencies and evaluate their performance.
    2. Establish a dedicated primary prevention workforce.
    3. Create a state-of-the-art prevention research capability in DoD.

Climate and Culture

    1. Codify in DoD policy and direct the development of metrics related to sexual harassment and sexual assault as part of readiness tracking and reporting.
    2. Use qualitative data to select, develop, and evaluate the right leaders for Command positions.
    3. Apply an internal focus on sexual violence across the force in DoD implementation of the 2017 National Women, Peace, and Security Act.
    4. Fully execute on the principle that addressing sexual harassment and sexual assault in the 21st century requires engaging with the cyber domain.

Victim Care and Support

    1. Optimize victim care and support by establishing a full-time victim advocacy workforce outside of the command reporting structure.
    2. Expand victim service options for survivors by establishing and expanding existing partnerships with civilian community services and other Federal agencies.
    3. Center the survivor by maximizing their preferences in cases of expedited transfer, restricted reporting, and time off for recovery from sexual assault. 

That concludes the recommendations from the report. But it cannot end there. Only those in uniform can reverse this trend. That is our call to action.

Looking in the Mirror

One senior individual who read the draft of this article shared the idea that “nothing here is new,” citing Tailhook, Marines United, and other so-called “wake up calls” going back decades. Reports were filed, actions taken, briefs prepared – and yet here we are. Will it be different this time? Only we, the deck-plate leaders, can answer that question. In the end, we all want a workplace where we feel comfortable doing our jobs, and one where we would advise our children to join this organization. At a recent diversity symposium, a young Marine asked a retired General on the leadership panel “If I were your daughter – would you advise me to join the Military today?” There was a long and suspenseful pause before the answer came – which I will keep private – but the fact that the answer was not an immediate and resounding “yes!” speaks volumes. If we accept this condition then perhaps we are the problem. If we tolerate the occasional inappropriate comment, the sexist joke, the unwanted touch – we become complicit. Is it easier to just look away? Sure. But that is not what leaders do – good ones, anyway!

We encourage all leaders in the Navy and Marine Corps to read and truly digest both the 2021 DoD Sexual Harassment report and the IRC report. If you teach at a Navy schoolhouse, especially a leadership course, add these to the required reading list. You will be astounded and disappointed to learn that the trends are in the wrong direction almost across the board. These two documents are both authoritative and stunning – and yet many have not read them in the first place. Navy leaders at the upper levels are taking action, but as someone once posted on a USNI Blog feed a few years ago, “culture change does not happen by instruction or edict, but by the actions of each individual throughout the organization, on the deck plates, on a daily basis.” We firmly believe this to be true.

This is not just a CNO or SECNAV problem – they are taking action. It is your problem and our problem. And only we can solve it.

Have your own #MeToo moment.

John Cordle is a retired Navy Captain who commanded two warships, was awarded the Navy League John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational Leadership, and the 2019 US Naval Institute PROCEEDINGS Author of the Year.

K. Denise Rucker Krepp spent several years on active duty in the U. S. Coast Guard, graduated from the Naval War College, and served as Chief Counsel for the U.S Maritime Administration. Krepp also served as a locally elected Washington, DC official and Hill staffer. She is a longtime advocate for the rights of sexual assault and harassment victims.

*Correction: the Independent Review Committee was ordered by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, not SECNAV as we stated in Part 1.

Featured image: A Marine practices in front of the USS Green Bay (U.S. Navy photo by Markus Castaneda.)

The Politics of Developing the Aegis Combat System, Pt. 2

The following republication is adapted from a chapter from The Politics of Naval Innovation, a paper sponsored by the Office of Net Assessment and conducted by the Strategic Research Department of the U.S. Naval War College’s Center for Naval Warfare Studies. Read it in its original form here, read Part One of this republication here.

By Thomas C. Hone, Douglas V. Smith, and Roger C. Easton, Jr.

Rear Admiral Wayne Meyer: Manager And Entrepreneur

According to one of RADM Meyer’s former deputies, “Without Rickover, the Navy would have gotten nuclear power in submarines. There would have been no Aegis ship in the Fleet, however, without Meyer.” A former PMS-400 analyst, with over two decades experience in AAW development, noted that Meyer brought to the Navy its best example of integrated systems project management.

But it wasn’t easy for the Admiral. When he was appointed Manager of the Aegis Shipbuilding Project, he had to (1) organize his staff, (2) prepare designs for contractors, (3) develop a working relationship with his sponsor in OPNAV, (4) make sure Aegis ships met Fleet needs, and (5) keep Aegis afloat in Congress. The last task was threatened by the growing cost of ships and the Navy’s demand for large numbers of them. Converting Long Beach, for example, was estimated to cost nearly $800 million, more than the estimated price of a new conventionally-powered Aegis ship. But the Authorization Committees were dominated by advocates of nuclear power, so the pressure to convert Long Beach was strong….

…RADM Meyer was also able to get the Chief, NAVSEA, to support a charter for PMS-400-a charter which Meyer himself wrote. The charter (1) made Meyer responsible directly to the Chief, NAVSEA, (2) authorized Meyer “to act on his own initiative in [any] matter affecting the project,” (3) named Meyer the delegated authority of the Chief of Naval Material, (4) centralized control over Aegis ship procurement and Aegis system development in PMS-400, (5) made Meyer fully accountable for Aegis ship acquisition, (6) gave Meyer responsibility for preparing and signing the fitness reports and performance ratings of all military and civilian personnel assigned to PMS-400, (7) made Meyer responsible for “total ship system engineering integration,” and (8) gave PMS-400 the duty of integrating all the logistics requirements for Aegis ships. It was a major grant of authority. Developing force-level requirements, operational concepts, ship characteristics and doctrines was the duty of OP-03 (DCNO for Surface Warfare). There, Meyer had the support of VADM Doyle and his deputy, RADM Rowden (OP-35).30

After 1977, the Navy had problems with OSD and President Carter. In May 1977, for example, the President announced that his Administration would request Congress to authorize 160 new ships for the Navy over the next five years; one year later, Carter reduced that figure by half. Carter changed his mind about the Navy’s shipbuilding program because of studies in OSD which suggested that a major shipbuilding program would draw funds from the Army and Air Force, and that aircraft carrier survivability was much reduced in areas like the Mediterranean and Norwegian Seas. Defense Secretary Harold Brown was not convinced that the Navy needed 15 or even 12 Carrier Battle Groups, and his position carried the President.

The Navy, however, strongly disagreed. In 1977, the CNO authorized the Naval War College to begin a study of future force needs; parts of the study (Sea Plan 2000) made public in March 1978 directly contradicted the views of Defense Secretary Brown. The Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget accused the Navy of releasing parts of Sea Plan 2000 just to get Congressional attention and support. The Vice Chief of Naval Operations responded that, “We must avoid paralysis by analysis – a situation in which we talk about our Navy while our potential enemy is building his…”‘

…ADM Thomas Hayward, the new CNO, testified to Congress that, without Aegis, existing Carrier Battle Groups would be at great risk in the 1980s. ADM Hayward felt that the Carter Administration did not comprehend the strategic value of the Navy’s carrier forces and he initiated a series of studies to analyze the Navy’s contribution to a European war. He also supported Aegis. As a result of Hayward’s support, Congressional opposition to President Carter’s reductions in defense spending, and RADM Meyer’s ability to convince members of the House and Senate Defense Authorization Subcommittees that Aegis would work, FY 78 money was authorized for the lead Aegis destroyer (later to be classified as a cruiser).

Meyer’s Approach To The Navy And OSD 

To win support within the Navy, Meyer brought representatives from many Navy shore activities into PMS-400 by “double-hatting” them (that is, by giving them positions of responsibility within PMS-400 in addition to their regular jobs). The stratagem not only created teams of Aegis advocates in the Navy’s shore-based support organizations and within OPNAV, it also fed valuable experience into the Aegis technical group….

…One former aide said Meyer often used DSARC reviews to discipline his major contractors, RCA and Litton Industries (owner of Ingalls Shipbuilding). Another said Meyer felt that the DSARC process forced PMS-400 to be constantly alert, constantly tracking the progress of the Aegis system and its destroyer platform to head off any major delays or cost overruns. By meeting DSARC deadlines, PMS-400 could – and did – satisfy two important audiences: OSD and Congress.

…With money and Congressional support in hand, Meyer focused on satisfying OSD imposed deadlines and on supervising contracts. As the Admiral noted:

“At its peak, that project (PMS-400) never exceeded 120 people; most years, the project had only 70 people in it. I kept harping and harping on them about amplification. You can’t ever forget that you’re only one man-year, so if you’re going to get anything done, you have to find a way to amplify, and the only way you can amplify is through people. The Aegis effort in the end was an amplification into thousands of man-years.”

“Amplification” meant the following:

1. Making PMS-400 field representatives defacto Deputy Program Managers, so that contractors dealt regularly with an office possessing real authority.

2. Travel, with frequent on-site inspections and reviews. According to one witness, Meyer could be “ferocious” in these reviews, particularly at RCA and Ingalls. But his goal was to make adhering to production schedules a matter of pride. As one former staffer in PMS-400 said, “Meyer loved to kick the tires.” That meant lots of visits, even to subcontractors. RCA, for example, used PMS-400 to discipline Raytheon, one of its major subcontractors. And Meyer traveled regularly to smaller subcontractors, handing out efficiency awards and exhorting quality work.

3. Testing in parallel with production. PMS-400 “tested the hell out of the system,” according to a former Operations Division Director, because Meyer didn’t want any surprises. His goal, after all, was to produce a revolution in naval weaponry, and he was determined to turn his vision of warfare into a working reality.

4. Not allowing PMS-400 to become captive to routine. All the former staffers of PMS-400 interviewed for this study said RADM Meyer was a very demanding manager. Yet all respected him. They admired his fierce concern for excellence. As he himself admitted, “I harped on that and harped on that from day one.” They also admired his willingness to listen. One noted that Meyer was often not sure how to translate his “visions” into reality, so that senior contractor personnel wasted lots of time on ideas which didn’t pan out. But work was never dull. Meyer tapped key PMS-400 junior staff to answer Congressional questions and write speeches, and senior staff to hand out “Aegis Excellence Awards.” About every six weeks, the Admiral called a halt to travel, stuffed all of PMS-400 into a conference room, and reviewed the project’s status. He also gave out awards and “fired up the crowd.” Then it was back to travel and meetings.

5. Getting practical control of much of his contractors’ organizations. Meyer reached around RCA and Litton management to communicate with the people doing the work. Meyer also used the Applied Physics Laboratory and a number of independent consultants to review both technical and managerial practices employed by his major contractors. His goal was to create a community of Aegis supporters and experts. As one of Meyer’s former Deputies put it, “Meyer built a national organization through his prime contractors.”

6. Keeping fleet organizations informed with briefings, newsletters, films, and demonstrations. The Combat Systems Engineering Development Site (CSEDS) was used to show high-ranking Navy officers and influential members of Congress what Aegis could do, but it was also turned into a training station for AAW software development. To Meyer, Aegis was not a static system, and the heart of its “evolution” was its software. CSEDS both modified the software and showed it off. PMS-400 also planned programs to maintain and modernize Aegis ships.

7. Justifying Aegis to keep potential opponents quiet. Again, all responsible personnel in PMS-400 were tasked to defend Aegis against criticism. In the process, they often anticipated real problems and potential criticisms; the justification process was itself a planning tool…

….RADM Meyer’s real goal was not to field an improved AAW system; it was, instead, to revolutionize surface battle tactics of the Navy by the introduction of Aegis command and control systems. He had to play a game with the Navy and with Congress; pretend his system of battle management was conceptually developed when, in fact, it was still evolving. To keep it developing, Meyer needed to hoard money for contingencies; he also needed a sole-source relationship with RCA. Meyer also favored sole-source contracts in systems acquisitions and ship construction because PMS-400 would never have enough staff to manage second sources. As one former PMS-400 staffer said, “It was competition vs. control. We couldn’t have both.” Meyer wasn’t insensitive to cost; he was incensed when costs exceeded reasonable estimates. But he believed that PMS-400 would lose control of the situation if too many contractors were involved….

…Before John Lehman became Navy Secretary, the Navy rarely went to Congress with a clear, long-range strategy, and important Project Managers were given the freedom to develop their own relationships with members and staffers in Congress. Lehman changed all that. By 1982, the Secretary was acting on the basis of a planned, comprehensive legislative strategy, with clear goals and priorities set and enforced by his office. As one member of Lehman’s staff observed, “the mouthpiece has become the decision-maker.” An inevitable consequence of Lehman’s assertiveness was a clash of his perspective (with its emphasis upon building numbers of ships) with Meyer’s (with its bias toward changing the quality of battle management). Several serving Navy officers claimed in off-the-record talks that this conflict was behind Meyer’s failure to win a third star and advance to the position of Chief, NAVSEA…

…In 1983, the newspaper headline war heated up again. CG-47 was put through qualifications trials that April. That summer, Representative Denny Smith (R-Oregon), a frequent critic of high-cost military procurement programs, alleged that CG-47’s Aegis combat system had failed operational evaluation. His criticisms were echoed in the Senate by Gary Hart of Colorado, a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President. As Senator Hart told The Wall Street Journal, “Do we have a testing and reporting system that is fundamentally dishonest?” To head off speculation, the CNO acknowledged that there had indeed been software system failures in the April trials and he pledged further tests in September.

After the September 1983 tests, both Watkins and Secretary Lehman wrote to Representative Smith, assuring him (as Lehman did on 11 October) that “Aegis is the most carefully tested combat system ever built.” But Smith did not stop his criticism of Aegis. That winter, he found an ally in Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In February 1984, Grassley grilled Secretary Lehman and CNO Watkins on CG-47’s performance. The Navy Secretary accused Grassley of “grandstanding” and said that CG-47 was performing splendidly off the Lebanese coast in her first tour overseas. One week later, unnamed Pentagon and Congressional sources told The Washington Post that the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering had informed the Secretary of Defense that Aegis had serious design problems, and the Secretary of the Navy admitted to reporters that “actual missile kills … have not been that impressive.” At the same time, Secretary Lehman officially (and privately) directed PMS-400 to supervise “a fully challenging test series,” which it did with CG-47, April 23-29, 1984, near Puerto Rico.

ADM Watkins praised the results of the trials at a public press conference, and the May 1985 Naval Institute Proceedings carried a glowing description of the Aegis system and also praised the performance of CG-47 during the ship’s tour of duty off of the Lebanese coast the previous fall. A later issue of the same journal, however, carried a long letter from an officer who claimed that the ability of CG-47’s radar to monitor contacts against the backdrop of the Lebanese coast had been exaggerated. The ship had been approached by a light plane while patrolling near Beirut’s harbor, and, by his account, CG-47 never detected it. The question of Aegis’ operational performance was therefore left somewhat unresolved.

RADM Meyer left PMS-400 in August 1983 and became NAVSEA Deputy Commander for Combat Systems (NAVSEA-06). He was replaced by his protege and former Deputy, RADM D.P. Roane…

Revisiting The Issues 

…To bring Aegis from its conceptual stages to fleet service, ADM Meyer had to overcome enormous problems. Foremost among them were:

  • Convincing Congress, OSD, and the CNO that Aegis was necessary, technologically feasible, and affordable and then maintaining program credibility to ensure system survival over the twenty-odd years from system definition to fleet entry.
  • Overcoming aviation community recalcitrance to support a new capability which they believed would downgrade or eliminate their traditional mission of Battle Group protection.
  • Weathering the heated debate between nuclear power advocates and supporters of a high-low ship mix centered on hull design and ship propulsion which threatened to terminate the Aegis program altogether.
  • Overcoming organizational problems over control of Aegis including shipboard weapons systems requirements and ship class and hull design that were initially under separate and competing offices.
  • Maintaining continuity in contractor technical, analytical, and production support in an environment increasingly calling for competitive contracting so that system requirements could remain based on operational performance goals and contractors could be disciplined with respect to attaining project milestones.
  • Selling Aegis as a counter for the intermediate-range AAW threat, particularly in terms of its cost, when RADM Meyer envisioned Aegis from the outset as primarily a battle force integration system.

While other obstacles also had to be overcome, these impediments were both formidable in nature and exacerbated by a strategic culture within the Navy that remains inimical to revolutionary change. Admiral Meyer recognized that the only way to achieve integrated Battle Group AAW defense was with a system which inherently possessed the reaction time to effectively deal with the saturation, high speed, low-flyer threat complemented by a battle management architecture which would permit the operator to exploit the system’s capabilities. Battle management automation was key because without it the Aegis systems engineering success could never be utilized to its potential. However, such a revolutionary change in the way the Navy fights could not be “sold” in the early days and Admiral Meyer brilliantly camouflaged his true objectives under the umbrella of an intermediate AAW defense system for which a clear requirement had been established.

While Admiral Meyer’s ability to promote Aegis as a counter to the Battle Group intermediate-range AAW threat (rather than as a battle force integration capability) helped decrease intraorganizational hostility from the TACAIR community, aviators eventually recognized that the surface community would inevitably impinge on their roles and missions through a combination of battlespace management capabilities and improved surface-to-air and new land-attack cruise missiles. Meyer’s ability ultimately to persuade that community that its role in battle force protection would actually be revitalized by Aegis technology proved critical to the program’s overall success.

Similarly, maintaining credibility in Congress for roughly 20 years was no small undertaking. Debates over whether Aegis should only be incorporated on nuclear-powered ships, and over a high-low ship mix destabilized the Aegis system program in that it focused on considerations not relating to its necessary function and technological feasibility. Thus the Program Manager raised the program above internal Navy politics in order to maintain a constituency in Congress independent of other major fiscal concerns relating to naval issues in Washington.

Featured Image: An aerial starboard bow view of the Aegis guided missile cruiser TICONDEROGA (CG-47) underway during sea trials. (Photo via U.S. National Archives)

Fighting DMO, Pt. 8: China’s Anti-Ship Firepower and Mass Firing Schemes

Read Part 1 on defining distributed maritime operations.
Read Part 2 on anti-ship firepower and U.S. shortfalls.
Read Part 3 on assembling massed fires and modern fleet tactics.
Read Part 4 on weapons depletion and last-ditch salvo dynamics.
Read Part 5 on salvo patterns and maximizing volume of fire.
Read Part 6 on platform advantages and combined arms roles.
Read Part 7 on aircraft carrier roles in distributed warfighting.

By Dmitry Filipoff

Introduction

China’s arsenal of anti-ship weapons is truly a force to be reckoned with, and is superior to that of the United States in many respects. These weapons and the tactics that make use of them can be at the forefront of China’s ability to deny U.S. forces access to the Western Pacific. As both great powers build up and evolve their anti-ship firepower, it is critical to assess their respective schemes of massing fires, and how these schemes may compete and interact in a specific operational context, such as a war sparked by a Taiwan contingency. Whichever side wields the superior combination of tools and methods for massing fires may earn a major advantage in deterrence and in conflict. 

China’s Anti-Ship Missile Firepower

China has assembled a wide array of anti-ship missiles and naval force structure for generating massed fires. These weapons and the way they have been distributed across platform types come together to form an outline for how China can mass fires against warships. These weapons should be assessed through a framework of the specific traits that highlight their mass firing potential, including launch cell compatibility, platform compatibility, range, maximum flight time, numbers of weapons procured, and numbers of weapons fielded per platform.

China’s main anti-ship missiles are the YJ-12, YJ-18, YJ-83, DF-21, and DF-26. The YJ-12 serves as a primary weapon for bombers and coastal launchers; the YJ-18 is a primary weapon for submarines and large surface warships; the YJ-83 is fielded by multirole aircraft and surface warships smaller than destroyers; and the DF-21 and DF-26 ballistic missiles are China’s most long-ranged land-based anti-ship weapons.1 While there are other anti-ship missiles in China’s inventory, those appear relatively uncommon compared to these five weapons.

Click to expand. Key traits of mainstay PLA anti-ship missiles. (Author graphic)

Each of these weapons, save for perhaps the YJ-83, is relatively modern and introduced into China’s anti-ship arsenal within the past 10-15 years.2 While the recency of introduction suggests the inventory may not be deep enough for a major conflict, China’s precise weapon procurement rates are not as publicly discernible compared to U.S. forces. However, the U.S. Department of Defense has stated that China conducted more than 135 ballistic missile live firings for testing and training in 2021, which “was more than the rest of the world combined,” excluding conflict zones. The DoD made the same remark about 2020, with China firing 250 ballistic missiles that year, and earlier again for 2019, but with no accompanying figure.3 These firing rates suggest that China has invested in a robust missile production industrial base and recognizes the value of building out deep inventories of precision weapons.

The YJ-83 is a relatively common Chinese anti-ship missile that is widely fielded across its surface and air forces. It is similar to the Harpoon in being a smaller, shorter-ranged weapon that is not compatible with vertical launch cells. For warships, it is primarily fielded in box launchers aboard Chinese frigates, corvettes, and small missile boats. Multirole aircraft can field this weapon as well, making it the primary anti-ship missile for non-bomber PLA aircraft, such as land- and carrier-based aviation.4

The lack of launch cell compatibility makes it fielded in relatively low numbers aboard the compatible platforms. The short range and low magazine depth forces the extensive concentration of platforms to mass large enough volumes of fire. The range of the weapon is short enough that aviation can be forced to concentrate in large numbers within or near the limits of modern shipboard air defenses, although attacking aircraft may still have enough space to fire and then dive to spoil semi-active illumination. Like Harpoon, the greater the proportion of YJ-83s in a mass firing sequence, the greater the risk the force will incur.

YJ-83 box launchers mounted aboard a Chinese frigate. (Photo via Wikimedia commons)

The YJ-18 strongly stands out in the PLA arsenal for being its only widely fielded anti-ship missile that is compatible with vertical launch cells.5 It is fielded aboard China’s large surface combatants, the Type 52D destroyer and Type 55 cruiser, and a torpedo tube-compatible version of the weapon is fielded aboard PLA submarines.6 By combining a long range of more than 300 miles with launch-cell compatibility, the YJ-18 offers a strong capability for the Chinese surface fleet to distribute across wider areas and still combine large volumes of fire. Primarily because of the YJ-18, it is starkly clear that large U.S. surface warships are heavily outgunned by their Chinese equivalents, and must compensate for the disparity in offensive firepower with superior tactics, defenses, and combined arms methods.

The YJ-12 has similar range to the YJ-18 and is compatible with a larger variety of launch platforms, including coastal launchers and bombers, but crucially it lacks launch cell compatibility.7 The range of China’s bombers and the roughly 300-mile range of the weapon could allow bombers to reach out at long distances, concentrate aircraft well beyond the range of warship air defenses, and fire effectively first. By being compatible with bombers, this weapon can be at the forefront of China’s ability to fire on warships at extreme ranges from the mainland.

The YJ-12 and YJ-18 feature terminal sprint capability, a major force multiplier that is absent from U.S. anti-ship missiles. By accelerating to around Mach 2.5-3.0 after breaking over the horizon view of a warship, these missiles can offer less than half the reaction time for the target warship to react compared to subsonic weapons.8 This allows the missile to cross much more distance from the horizon before the warship can make its first intercept, and reduces the time it takes the missile to get inside the minimum engagement range of major warship defenses. By substantially reducing reaction time, terminal sprint allows lethal effect to be achieved with less volume of fire compared to a slower weapon. These weapons still fly at subsonic speed for most of their flight to maximize range, especially when traveling at sea-skimming altitude. This strengthens the imperative to intercept sea-skimming missiles with aviation well before they can activate their deadly terminal sprint capability against warships.

China’s DF-21D and DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missiles offer critical asymmetric advantages by offering a combination of especially high speed and long range, allowing them to be at the forefront of China’s ability to mass fires against warships. This combination of traits also allows these weapons to combine fires with a large variety of other platforms and payloads on a theater-wide scale. If a Chinese platform is firing anti-ship missiles at a naval formation within the second island chain, the defenders cannot discount the possibility that the salvo could be bolstered by high-end ballistic fires launched from the Chinese mainland. However, if the concentrations of these land-based launch platforms are maintained at their widely separated bases across the mainland, then this will lessen the overlap between their fields of fire and dilute their delivery density. 9

Ballistic missile bases and brigades of the PLA Rocket Force. (Photo via CSIS China Power Project)

With the anti-ship Tomahawk, the U.S. may soon finally have anti-ship firepower that is more widespread and long-range than what resides within China’s arsenal. But it is a major assumption to think China’s anti-ship capability will remain static in the next 10-15 years as the U.S. builds up its anti-ship Tomahawk inventory. The state of advantage could change if China fields anti-ship weapons similar in design to the Tomahawk, or fields more of its novel missile types, such as the YJ-21 anti-ship missile that was reportedly test fired from a Type 55 cruiser in 2022.10 The YJ-21 could stand to be the first hypersonic, launch-cell compatible, anti-ship missile for Chinese surface forces. While forthcoming variants of the SM-6 could stand to offer similar capability to U.S. forces, it will likely be subject to multiple factors that dilute its anti-ship potential as described in Part 2.11 China has clearly demonstrated a strong interest in developing advanced anti-ship missile capability, and will be motivated to maintain its edge.

Key Elements of China’s Naval Force Structure

China’s force structure features much more variety than the U.S. military in terms of the platform types that can field long-range anti-ship firepower. Select elements and traits of this growing force structure deserve to be highlighted in light of their ability to contribute to mass fires.

Within the past decade China’s surface fleet has emerged as a major force in its own right. After producing multiple short-run variants, several modern warship designs entered serial production, dramatically increasing numbers and capability. Today China’s surface fleet is mainly composed of about eight cruisers, 30 destroyers, 30 frigates, 50 corvettes, and 60 fast-attack missile boats.12 Most of the PLA surface fleet’s capability to fire large volumes of long-range anti-ship missile firepower is concentrated in its large surface combatants, a force of nearly 40 warships that was built within the past ten years. If current production trends hold, this force of large surface combatants could double to around 80 warships within the next decade.13

The Type 55 guided-missile destroyer Nanchang (Hull 101) attached to a naval vessel training center under the PLA Northern Theater Command steams in tactical formation to occupy attack positions in an undisclosed sea area during a 10-day maritime training exercise. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Zou Xiangmin)

The asymmetry of certain scenarios and force structure can allow PLA surface warships to take on more favorable missile loadouts compared to the U.S. Navy. Given its expeditionary nature, the U.S. surface fleet faces greater pressures to split its magazine depth across multiple missions, including anti-ship, anti-air, anti-submarine, and land-attack missions. If the Chinese surface fleet is operating within the second island chain, much of the demand for land-attack capability could be offloaded to forces on the Chinese mainland, such as by having bombers, multirole aircraft, and ballistic missiles filling the demand for land-attack strikes. While Chinese frigates and corvettes have virtually no long-range anti-ship or land-attack capability, their anti-submarine capability could alleviate further demand on the larger surface combatants. The U.S. Navy by comparison does not feature frigates or corvettes, which concentrates its surface fleet’s division of labor in its large surface combatants.

By being spared of the need to devote considerable magazine space to land-attack and anti-submarine weapons, China’s large surface combatants could allocate a larger proportion of their magazines to anti-air and anti-ship weapons than equivalent U.S. warships. This advantage could give China’s surface fleet more capability and staying power on a ship-for-ship basis when it comes to fleet-on-fleet salvo combat.

China’s surface forces can be significantly bolstered by non-military elements. China’s coast guard and maritime militia feature numerous vessels, and its commercial shipping fleet is massive. While these ships feature little in the way of firepower, they can considerably enhance the distribution of Chinese forces and complicate targeting by allowing the Chinese surface fleet to mask its presence among these more numerous vessels. China could also reap considerable gains in the ability to mass fires and pose a far more distributed threat if it opts to extensively field containerized launchers that could fire weapons and decoys from commercial ships.14 Missile seekers that are programmed to avoid striking contacts that look like civilian vessels may struggle to differentiate these threats. The threat of hidden arsenal ships residing within China’s massive shipping fleet could pose an especially distributed challenge. 

China’s naval service fields bombers within its force structure, unlike the U.S. military. The H-6J variant is optimized for maritime strike and can carry up to six YJ-12 missiles, an increase from the four missiles the H-6G can carry.15 This increased carrying capacity translates into fewer platforms needing to concentrate around a target to mass enough fires.

These bombers are relatively limited compared to their American counterparts with regard to magazine depth. An American B-1B bomber can launch 24 LRASM missiles, a volume of fire that is four times greater than what an H-6J can muster, and with similar weapons range.16 The U.S. can launch a greater volume of fire from its bombers by fielding cruise missiles that are small enough to be compatible with internal rotary launchers, substantially increasing the magazine depth per bomber. By comparison, YJ-12s are large enough weapons that they can only be carried via external hardpoints, limiting the magazine depth of the platform.

Sept. 19, 2014 An internal rotary launcher is seen outside a B-52 bomber. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Jannelle Dickey)
A PLA H-6 bomber equipped with two YJ-12 anti-ship missiles mounted on external hardpoints. (Photo by Japanese Ministry of Defense)

However, as mentioned in Part 2, the U.S. Air Force is procuring so few LRASM weapons that long-range anti-ship capability is almost non-existent for the air service.17 The fact that China has dedicated maritime strike bombers within its naval service suggests it is less likely to grossly under-resource their inventory of anti-ship weapons.

The PLAN operates about 50 attack submarines, where all but a few are diesel-electric, which limits their range and endurance compared to nuclear-powered submarines.18 A critical shortfall is the lack of vertical launch cells in all PLAN diesel-electric submarines. They are confined to firing anti-ship missiles from their handful of torpedo tubes, which severely restricts their volume of fire.19 But the ability of these submarines to field anti-ship missiles with terminal sprint capability may allow them to compensate for low volume of fire by launching close-range, high-speed missile attacks against warships.

A PLA submarine attached to a submarine flotilla under the PLA Northern Theater Command steams during a maritime combat training exercise in early August 2022. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Shi Jialong)

China fields hundreds of land-based multirole aircraft that could be critical in a naval conflict, including for growing or attriting volumes of fire and securing information advantage.20 Land-based aircraft tend to have longer range than carrier-based aircraft, but most of China’s land-based aircraft are fielded by the PLA Air Force, which will naturally have less familiarity and practice operating over maritime spaces than PLA naval aviation.21 But these aircraft will still likely operate over or near maritime spaces in a Taiwan contingency, making them a considerable factor in naval operations.

Among the many trends of China’s evolving naval force structure, its growing inventory of aircraft carriers stands to substantially tilt the naval balance in critical ways. The U.S. ability to overwhelm China’s naval forces will be enhanced by its expanding arsenal of new anti-ship weapons, but maybe not as much as hoped for because of China’s carriers. A world in which the U.S. military has finally built up enough anti-ship Tomahawks and LRASMs to mass fires against warships is also likely to be a world where China has built around six aircraft carriers, if current production trends hold.22 China is poised to substantially change the balance of naval aviation in the Pacific during the same timeframe it will take the U.S. Navy to field enough weapons to mass anti-ship fires. China’s newfound carrier capability will then be poised to heavily attrit America’s newfound anti-ship capability, which will further drive up the volume of fire the U.S. will have to muster.

China’s Type 003 carrier, Fujian. (Photo via South China Morning Post)

But while China may be on track to field more carriers in the Pacific than the U.S. Navy, the U.S. may maintain a critical edge by fielding increasing numbers of the F-35 aboard carriers. It is unclear if China’s carriers will field as many 5th generation aircraft, potentially giving the U.S. major advantages in sensing, networking, and battle management functions that are powerful force multipliers for massing fires.

Nonetheless, the following dueling concepts of operation for mass fires take place in a hypothetical future 10-15 years from now, with both sides fielding considerable carrier aviation capability, and with China able to project a substantial amount of multirole naval aviation over the Philippine Sea.

China versus the U.S. and Competing Schemes of Mass Fires

The U.S. and China have developed forces that assemble massed fires in different ways. In looking at how a potential conflict may play out, it is critical to conceptualize how these different schemes would interact and oppose one another. A comparison of mass firing schemes highlights each nation’s advantages and disadvantages in the context of the other’s capabilities, and forms an outline for how kinetic exchanges could transpire.

What all of China’s mainstay anti-ship weapons have in common is that they can travel to the limits of their range in roughly 30 minutes. The firing sequences of Chinese massed fires will typically be much shorter and concentrated than that of U.S. forces, such as those that rely heavily on Tomahawks (Figure 1). There will be comparatively less opportunity to counter PLA massed fires after they begin, where a shorter mass firing sequence reduces the defender’s opportunity to reposition defensive airpower to attrit inbound salvos, launch interruptive strikes against waiting archers, and organize last-ditch salvos and their contributing fires. The PLA will benefit from a faster decision cycle compared to forces using much longer firing sequences, where multiple rounds of PLA massed fires could fit into the time it takes to mount a single firing sequence using Tomahawks that are launched near the limits of their range. The emphasis will instead be more about complicating the PLA decision to fire through distribution and other means, carefully pre-positioning airpower to attrit salvos soon after they are launched, and striking PLA archers early enough that they cannot initiate massed fires.

Figure 1. Click to expand. A timeline chart of the max flight times of U.S. and PLA anti-ship missiles, highlighting how PLA firing mass firing sequences can be more concentrated than those of U.S. forces. (Author graphic)

U.S. forces may typically have longer firing sequences by virtue of the Tomahawk’s long range and subsonic speed. However, the longer flight time of the mainstay U.S. anti-ship weapon will give it more opportunity to grow the volume of fire and more ability to leverage waypointing tactics, especially to increase the complexity of threat presentation and to feint attacks in a bid to trigger last-ditch fires. This long range and flight time also translates into more opportunity to maneuver across different salvo patterns, and more ability to recover from deception in pursuit of new contacts. China will be hard pressed to match these advantages, especially when its anti-ship weapons that rival the range of Tomahawk are ballistic missiles that are much more constrained in their ability to maneuver and reorient along their fixed ballistic trajectories.

However, the long range and flight time of Tomahawk gives the defender more opportunity to bring airpower to bear against salvos, and where the range of Tomahawk could outstrip the range of friendly escorting aircraft. Mass firing sequences that heavily depend on Tomahawk will have to strongly emphasize salvo patterns and waypointing tactics to compensate for the weapon’s survivability challenges and to preserve as much volume of fire as possible. These specific challenges and tactics also make Tomahawk especially dependent on naval aviation to provide critical information and air defense support to Tomahawk salvos. If PLA warships manage to get within range of Tomahawk-equipped warships, then many of the advantages that come with Tomahawk’s longer range and flight time will be minimized.

China may hold a critical advantage with respect to interruptive strikes, which are used to disrupt an active firing sequence as it is unfolding. China’s anti-ship ballistic missiles can offer plenty of options for interruptive strikes by virtue of their high speed and long range. Warships that are suspected of being waiting archers in a lengthy firing sequence can be attractive targets for ballistic missile strikes, encouraging those warships to launch earlier and leverage waypointing to artificially increase their time to target. But this comes at the expense of frontloading the firing sequence and reducing the distribution of fires across time. China’s potentially superior ability to launch interruptive strikes could then shift the overall interaction between competing schemes of mass fires. China’s superior interruptive ability can lead to the opponent frontloading their firing sequences, which subsequently affords China more time and opportunity to bring defensive airpower to bear against the incoming salvos, while also giving China more time to organize last-ditch salvos and their contributing fires.

Anti-ship ballistic missiles can cast a shadow over the air defense doctrines of numerous forces operating within the weapons engagement zone, where warships may be forced to split their attention between sea-skimming and ballistic threats simultaneously. Warships deeper in the battlespace may be forced to radiate active sensors for the sake of defending more distant friendly forces from incoming ballistic threats, since being deeper in the battlespace can translate into more opportunity to make midcourse intercepts of those ballistic threats. By being forced to radiate and launch against ballistic threats, these warships could be highlighting their positions to the adversary. But the ability to shoot down ballistic threats will be a critical form of insurance against China’s ability to leverage its potential superiority in interruptive strikes. In this sense, effective ballistic missile defense can interrupt China’s interruptive strikes, and shift the balance of advantage in the ensuing interactions between competing schemes of massed fires.

China’s Multiple Layers of Massed Fires

China’s ability to mass anti-ship fires can be understood in terms of multiple layers. These layers are a function of the range of the weapons and the platforms that field them. Each layer of land-based anti-ship capability adds a new combination of platform types for growing the volume of fire and increasing the complexity of threat presentation. Within these more fixed layers of land-based capability, naval forces can be maneuvered to augment the density of the overlapping fields of fire. While weapons range and platform range are not enough on their own to extrapolate precise concepts of operation, they are an important point of departure for outlining options and limits.

The longest-ranged layer of how China can start to combine anti-ship fires from across land-based platform types is a mix of DF-26 ballistic missiles and bombers. These two delivery systems are China’s most far-reaching options for delivering anti-ship missile firepower, and could come together to threaten naval targets starting at around 1,800 miles from the mainland.23

Massing fires from this limited combination of platforms poses its own set of challenges, especially by having only two main sources of firepower to draw upon. If bombers are destroyed before they can fire, PLA commanders would be forced to compensate by increasing the expenditure of their most high-end anti-ship weapons. Alternatively, if the kill chains enabling the ballistic missiles are undermined or uncertain, the transiting bombers would have virtually no options to increase their volume of fire while in flight, and may be forced to close with targets to secure targeting information for platforms other than themselves.

Bomber sorties could feature large numbers of aircraft to build a greater margin of overmatch to ensure the volume of fire can remain overwhelming in the face of unforeseen challenges and attrition. This was essentially Soviet naval aviation’s doctrine for distant anti-carrier group strikes, where upwards of 70-100 bombers would fly more than a thousand miles from their bases and then heavily concentrate within 250 miles of a carrier battle group to mass fires.24 The need to mass fires at extremely long range confined the Soviet Navy’s options to gambling a major amount of its bomber force structure in each individual carrier attack, while being limited to homogenous force packages to produce mass fires instead of leveraging combined arms tactics. PLA naval aviation is perhaps in the more favorable position of being able to combine bomber fires with ballistic fires at extreme ranges, allowing fewer bombers to be risked per strike, and being able to compensate for bomber attrition in a timely manner with high-speed ballistic weapons.

Even so, China may not want to risk sending unescorted bombers into distant oceans and risk losing these valuable platforms to opposing carrier air wings, where air wings can better optimize themselves for early warning and air defense when reacting to especially long-range attacks.25 Even with the possibility of combining fires with ballistic missiles, the bombers still have to concentrate their platforms inside a 300-mile radius of the target to launch fires. This could present a lucrative and concentrated target for U.S. carrier aircraft, where only a handful of fighters would be enough to credibly threaten a concentration of unescorted bombers. And the fighters can preserve the anti-air threat to bombers even if the bombers drop below the radar horizons of their target warships. Extensive aerial refueling would be required to ensure the bombers have enough aerial escorts that can accompany them on long-range strikes and contend against carrier air. The limitations imposed by refueling copious amounts of smaller escorting aircraft to extreme range could constrain the range of the larger bomber platforms, despite the extensive reach of those aircraft.

While China certainly has some ability to combine fires at the initial 1,800-mile layer, it remains a highly unfavorable scheme for massing fires, especially due to the challenge of providing extreme range aerial escort to bomber forces and a potentially heavy reliance on its most high-end anti-ship weapons.

With the twin overlapping threats of bombers and DF-26s starting at around 1,800 miles from the Chinese mainland, U.S. naval forces can travel another thousand miles closer to China before encountering the next major layer that adds another combination of land-based air and missile forces. These forces include a mix of hundreds of multirole aircraft such as the JH-7, J-10, and J-16 platforms that can field the YJ-83 anti-ship missile.26 The DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile also comes into range at around 900 miles from the Chinese mainland, assuming the launchers are near the coastline.27

This distance is still beyond the range of unrefueled U.S. carrier air strikes, allowing air wings to focus mainly on defense. But this distance is also roughly where U.S. warships and bombers would first be able to fire on Taiwan and the Chinese mainland with land-attack cruise missiles, creating a strong incentive for the PLA to mount a strong naval and air defense at this distance.

Attacking Chinese multirole aircraft would need to heavily concentrate in large numbers within 100 miles of their targets to mass overwhelming fires with the short-ranged YJ-83. But these aircraft are much better able to defend themselves against carrier aircraft compared to bombers and can diversify their loadouts to include a mix of anti-air and anti-ship weapons. If U.S. aircraft are unable to prevent these PLA aircraft from firing their anti-ship weapons, then the number of aerial targets will drastically multiply after they launch their volume of fire. U.S. aircraft will be forced to divide their attention and anti-air weapons between firing on enemy aircraft and firing on enemy missiles that are roughly ten minutes away from impacting friendly warships. And once PLA aircraft fire their anti-ship missiles, they could be well-positioned to attack the U.S. aircraft attempting to attrit the salvos.

Fighter jets attached to a naval aviation brigade under the PLA Eastern Theater Command sit in their aircraft shelters prior to a night flight training exercise on April 17, 2020. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Zhao Ningning and Tian Jianmin)

U.S. carrier aircraft can certainly be in a position to inflict similar dilemmas on an adversary with their own anti-ship strikes. But a critical difference is that the aforementioned PLA land-based multirole aircraft have longer range than the U.S. Navy’s F/A-18 aircraft, and airfields can have a higher sortie generation rate than carriers.28 These advantages can give them more opportunity to inflict these dilemmas and with potentially greater numbers on their side. 

However, projecting substantial airpower to nearly 800 miles beyond China’s mainland will still create major demands for aerial tanking capability. To make the most of tankers to extend range, this in-flight refueling would have to take place near potentially contested areas, such as the airspace near Taiwan, the Ryukus, and the Batanes island chain. If the airspace around these locales can be effectively contested, China may be severely limited in its ability to project land-based aircraft in large numbers over the Philippine Sea, forcing China’s carriers to be alone in providing multirole airpower beyond the first island chain.

The next major layer of PLA anti-ship firepower begins roughly 300 miles from the mainland. In this layer, coastal YJ-12 batteries and YJ-83s fired from short-range Type 22 missile boats pose an especially distributed form of massing anti-ship fires. These assets can help the PLA project sea denial over much of the East China Sea, the northern areas of the South China Sea, and over the maritime approaches to Taiwan. The fleet of 60 missile boats in particular could be valuable in contesting sections of the Batanes and Ryukyu island chains and the maritime approaches leading toward expeditionary advance bases posted on those islands.29

Type 22 fast attack missile boats under the PLA Eastern Theater Command steam in formation during a maritime attack and defense training exercise in waters of the East China Sea in late March 2018. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Chen Jian)

These three main layers of combined anti-ship capability have more limited dispositions due to being fielded by land-based forces and small surface warships. On top of these more static land-based layers, China’s surface and submarine forces are able to dynamically extend the scope and concentration of China’s ability to mass fires against warships, and provide a maneuvering base of offensive fire. But these forces have their own limits to survivability and their ability to generate large volumes of fire.

Chinese submarines could arguably pose some of the earliest missile threats U.S. forces face by deploying far and away from the Chinese mainland, but their volume of fire is especially constrained due to the lack of vertical launch cells. Chinese submarines could still stalk certain areas such as Yokosuka, where they could fire on depleted warships returning from the fight, divert frontline assets to local submarine hunting patrols, and generate uncertainty around the maritime approaches to critical naval bases. Chinese submarines could also make major contributions to preserving the broader PLA anti-ship missile inventory by making a priority of torpedoing U.S. large surface combatants, which boast large missile magazines and considerable air defense capability.

China’s fleet of large surface combatants, primarily the Type 52D destroyers and Type 55 cruisers, could add significant volume to a mass firing scheme. However, it is debatable how far forward China is willing to employ these ships from the mainland in a high-end conflict. The need for airpower to be on hand to improve survivability for these ships and their salvos, and to provide critical airborne information functions, limits how far these ships can be confidently deployed. If China extends a surface force from beyond the umbrella of airpower’s critical enablers, those surface forces may be alone in contending with hostile salvos and airpower, especially from U.S. carrier air wings. Sending surface warships beyond the range of supporting aviation and into the weapons range of opposing aviation is a recipe for defeat in detail.

The struggle to maintain a substantial amount of multirole aviation out to a thousand miles from the mainland imposes significant liabilities on any mass firing scheme China can assemble at this distance. But until China can confidently field a significant number of its own carrier air wings, the bulk of naval-enabling airpower will have to come from land-based aviation that may be hard-pressed to fight in distant waters. For now, the U.S. may be heavily advantaged in being able to maintain robust combined arms relationships between its surface and carrier air forces regardless of the distance between those forces and land-based airfields. In the near-term, China’s ability to make the most of its surface fleet’s contributions to massed fires will be heavily constrained by the range and sustainability of land-based airpower, and its limited ability to overlay airpower’s critical enablers over distant maritime spaces.

In designing the overall scheme of massed fires with these limitations in mind, China’s surface fleet fits well within the second main layer of China’s anti-ship firepower. By leveraging a combination of YJ-18s launched by ships and YJ-83s launched by multirole aircraft, China can substantially lessen the burden on its bombers and land-based ballistic missiles to mass fires. Instead, it can focus on using much more common platforms and missiles to generate massed fires while posing a more distributed threat.

The similar range of the YJ-12 and the YJ-18 means China’s surface and bomber forces need to concentrate within a similar ring around a target to combine fires. Through combined arms methods, warships could provide critical air defense and sensing support to friendly aircraft and provide a protective screen from which their airpower can leverage. Carrier air wings that pursue bombers and multirole aircraft could be led into Chinese warship air defenses.

The range differential between the the YJ-12, YJ-18, and YJ-83 is small enough to create a disposition where PLA aircraft and warships can readily provide critical enablers to one another, rather than the more divided nature of having U.S. airpower travel far forward to support Tomahawk salvos fired from upwards of a thousand miles away. While the similar ranges of China’s primary anti-ship cruise missiles can certainly increase force concentration, their similar ranges also create a foundation for force-multiplying combined arms relationships and closely integrated force packages.

The second main layer of anti-ship firepower at around 800-1,000 miles from the mainland appears the most preferable to China. But maintaining a robust scheme for massing fires at this distance will not just be a function of the available combinations of capability. For China, it is a critical operational imperative.

Buffering the Pacific: Competing Mass Fires in Operational Context

China’s potential schemes of massed fires have to be assessed in a specific operational context. While there are many dimensions to future contingencies, a core operational challenge for China in a Taiwan contingency is to maintain a maritime buffer zone out to around a thousand miles from the mainland. If U.S. and allied forces can get within this range, they can launch large volumes of land-attack cruise missile fires against China and Taiwan that can considerably complicate PLA operations. If China cannot effectively contest a maritime buffer out to this distance, it would have to devote considerable airpower toward cruise missile defense over oceanic spaces, when that airpower may be sorely needed for operations elsewhere. Preempting the looming threat of hundreds of land-attack cruise missiles launching from U.S. warships and bombers is therefore a critical operational imperative for China. As opposing forces contest sea control, the success of the anti-ship effort will unlock or deny options for follow-on power projection that could have decisive effects on a campaign.

A key question then is what sorts of combined arms relationships can China maintain out to this critical distance from the mainland, what schemes of massed fires those relationships would yield, and how those schemes of massed fires would interact with those of opposing expeditionary forces. The previous section highlighted how at about 800-1,000 miles from the mainland, China’s combined arms relationships for massed fires can consist of bombers, anti-ship ballistic missiles, and land-based aviation. China’s surface and submarine forces can be maneuvered to add to this mix, which considerably increases the potential volume of fire and complexity of threat presentation.

China would be in the challenging position of having to maintain a maritime defense that is forward enough to hold U.S. surface forces at risk before they can launch land-attack fires, but not so far forward that it outstrips the PLA’s ability to add more platform types to its combined arms scheme of massing fires. It also cannot be so far forward that surface forces outstrip their ability to be well-supported by aviation in the critical air defense mission, or else those surface forces could be alone in facing withering anti-ship fires. The need to maintain substantial PLA surface warships near the outer edge of a buffer zone would also limit their maneuver space compared to the opposing expeditionary forces that can leverage the broader expanse of the Philippine Sea and adjacent waters. This asymmetry in maneuver space would simplify the scouting and targeting challenges for expeditionary forces facing warships that are tasked with reinforcing a buffer zone. But these surface warships are critical for providing a major base of fire that can persist at the outer edge of the buffer zone, or otherwise a disproportionately large volume of the available firepower would have to come from more transient platforms such as aircraft.

U.S. forces can impose some of these buffering dilemmas today because the land-attack Tomahawk missile is widely fielded across its surface warships. Those warships would still have to lean very heavily on U.S. submarines and carrier aviation to destroy opposing surface and air forces in advance, where those forces could prevent U.S. warships from reaching firing areas that are within Tomahawk range of Taiwan or China.

The dynamic significantly changes if China’s anti-ship capability remains constant enough that the U.S. can secure a major range advantage with the anti-ship Tomahawk. This range advantage would threaten to split apart the combined arms relationships the PLA is able to maintain in a distant maritime buffer. The anti-ship Tomahawk would force the PLA to depend more on the platforms that are better able to reach out and threaten U.S. warships while circumventing Tomahawk firepower by attacking from different domains. These platforms include aviation, submarines, and ballistic missiles, but each of these has significant disadvantages, such with respect to sustainability, volume of fire, and survivability. This scheme may be the only combined arms mix that could have a chance of attacking distant surface forces before they could fire first against an outranged surface fleet.

A key challenge then is how to maintain a robust mass firing scheme within a forward maritime defense when the defender’s anti-ship capability is heavily outranged. If the defender’s surface force can be more easily fired upon first, then it can threaten to remove a major base of fire that is undergirding the combined arms scheme for much of the maritime buffer.

A surface force that is outranged or at risk of aerial attack must rely on more creative and combined arms tactics to compensate for the inferior ability to fire effectively first. This disadvantage especially requires a force to place heavier emphasis on scouting, counter-scouting, deception, and stealth. By securing distinct advantage in these specific areas, a force can earn vital proximity to an adversary with longer-ranged weapons, or induce them to launch wasteful fires, or complicate their decision to fire at all. Airpower is valuable for executing these specific tactics that help warships compensate for a disadvantage in the ability to fire first, but a distant buffer zone increases these challenges by diluting aviation’s availability while limiting the surface maneuver space.

A force that is more likely to be fired on first may be forced to focus much of its initial strategy on optimizing for defense, so it can absorb enough volume of fire in the hopes of then transitioning to a more offensive posture that has better options against a depleted adversary. But if the adversary is firing with weapons of much longer range, then they can more effectively withdraw from the battlespace without coming under fire themselves. The buffering defenders may have to content themselves with inflicting weapons depletion more so than platform attrition, and maintaining sea denial rather than seizing sea control.

China has unique options for reinforcing a maritime buffer even if its surface forces could one day face major disadvantages in their ability to fire first. By filling the forward edge of the buffer zone with copious amounts of state-owned commercial shipping, China could vastly complicate the sensory picture of the battlespace. China’s surface warships could then lurk among these large commercial vessels, and work with aviation to challenge scouts that attempt to probe and make sense of the morass of maritime contacts. Submarines may struggle to use sonar to isolate warship contacts amidst the heavy churning of many commercial ships. Anti-ship missiles may need to rise above sea-skimming altitudes to dodge commercial ships and discover warship contacts, potentially exposing themselves to more defensive fires and offering more early warning to an adversary. China’s uniquely asymmetric ability to leverage large fleets of state-owned commercial shipping in naval warfare deserves careful consideration, especially within the context of maritime active defense.

While China’s commercial fleets can vastly increase the complexity of its naval threat presentation, the U.S. has its own unique advantages that can provide similar effects. The long reach of the Tomahawk broadens the geography of firing areas enough to where the U.S. can capitalize on alliance advantages. The Tomahawk has long enough range to where it can be fired from within the complex littoral geography of the Japanese and Philippine home islands and into a variety of Indo-Pacific maritime spaces. This could allow U.S. forces to circumvent maritime buffers or fire upon them from their littoral margins, which are mostly allied territories. This concept is somewhat similar to the Cold War-era concept of hiding carriers within Norwegian Fjords to launch strikes against the Soviets.30 Warships traditionally rely on broad oceanic maneuver to be a major enabler, but operating from labyrinthine littoral terrain can also complicate detectability and enhance the complexity of threat presentation even if it comes at the expense of maneuver space.

The littoral geography of the Japanese home island of Kyushu. (Photo via Google Earth Pro)
The littoral geography of the central Philippines. (Photo via Google Earth Pro)

While operating within fixed geography can certainly help adversaries localize naval forces, it may be more difficult to mass fires against warships residing within these littorals. Operating from these areas substantially increases the opportunity for warships to leverage friendly land-based air defense and aviation for support, increasing the volume of fire required to overwhelm warships. The challenges of navigating over littoral terrain can also force missile salvos to engage in tactically unfavorable behavior. Anti-ship missiles may have to depart from sea-skimming altitudes when flying over land, or burn more range to maintain themselves over water at low altitudes while taking more circuitous routes toward littoral contacts. Although it may increase warship findability in some respects, littoral firing areas could improve defensibility enough to compensate. The U.S. can carefully consider how the Maritime Strike Tomahawk opens up vast opportunity for launching massed fires against opposing fleets from friendly littorals.

Figure 2 highlights how these competing fields of fire overlap, and how firing areas located within these island littorals offer key advantages. These littorals can help U.S. forces circumvent a PLA buffer zone and bring those forces within Tomahawk range of Taiwan and the mainland coast. These separate areas also offer a substantial degree of overlap for combining fires over key geography. Tomahawk-equipped forces lurking within the complex littorals of Kyushu and the central Philippines will be able to combine and mass fires with one another over Taiwan and a substantial area of the Philippine Sea. 

Figure 2. Click to expand. The yellow reverse range ring, centered on a location 100 miles inland on the Chinese mainland, shows the area from where U.S. forces enter Tomahawk range of Taiwan and much of the mainland coastline. All other markers are conventional range rings, depicting the range of capabilities placed at the center of their respective rings. (Author graphic)

These dueling schemes of massed fires therefore look to increase their complexity of threat presentation with unconventional means. China’s navy could aim to preserve its maritime buffer by lurking within a vast array of commercial vessels, and the U.S. Navy may seek to circumvent or damage the buffer from within a web of allied island geography. While this hardly makes for a traditional view of maneuvering battle fleets exchanging heavy fire, modern navies may be driven toward such methods by the unforgiving ferocity of naval salvo combat and its overriding insistence on firing effectively first.

Conclusion 

China’s ability to mass fires against warships is a product of a truly historic evolution. China was a third-rate maritime power only two decades ago, but it has transformed into a force that heavily outguns the U.S. Navy in major respects. China has clearly stolen a march on the U.S. when it comes to developing advanced anti-ship firepower, and now the U.S. is racing to close the gap. But it will still be many years before the U.S. has the tools in place to have decent options for massing fires. By then, the Chinese naval arsenal may have become something even more fearsome.

Part 9 will focus on the force structure implications of DMO and massed fires.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content and Community Manager of its naval professional society, the Flotilla. He is the author of the How the Fleet Forgot to Fight” series and coauthor of “Learning to Win: Using Operational Innovation to Regain the Advantage at Sea against China.” Contact him at Content@Cimsec.org.

References

1. For PLA anti-ship cruise missile capabilities and platform compatibility, see:

Dr. Sam Goldsmith, “VAMPIRE VAMPIRE VAMPIRE The PLA’s anti-ship cruise missile threat to Australian and allied naval operations,” Australian Strategic Policy Institute, pg. 10, April 2022, https://ad-aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/2022-04/Vampire%20Vampire%20Vampire_0.pdf?VersionId=tHAbNzJSXJHskd9VppGNRcTFC4hW7UqD.

For ballistic missile capabilities, see:

“Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” U.S. Department of Defense, pg. 64-67, 2022, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/29/2003122279/-1/-1/1/2022-MILITARY-AND-SECURITY-DEVELOPMENTS-INVOLVING-THE-PEOPLES-REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA.PDF/.

2. For Y-18 and DF-26 introduction timeframes, see:

Michael Pilger, “China’s New YJ-18 Antiship Cruise Missile: Capabilities and Implications for U.S. Forces in the Western Pacific,” U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, October 28, 2015, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/China%E2%80%99s%20New%20YJ-18%20Antiship%20Cruise%20Missile.pdf.

For YJ-83, YJ-12, and YJ-18 introduction timeframes, see:

Dennis M. Gormley, Andrew S. Erickson, and Jingdong Yuan, “A Potent Vector: Assessing Chinese Cruise Missile Developments,” Joint Force Quarterly 75, September 30, 2014, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/577568/a-potent-vector-assessing-chinese-cruise-missile-developments/.

For DF-21D introduction timeframe, see:

Andrew S. Erickson, “Chinese Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile Development and Counter-intervention Efforts,” Testimony before Hearing on China’s Advanced Weapons Panel I: China’s Hypersonic and Maneuverable Re-Entry Vehicle Programs U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, February 23, 2017, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Erickson_Testimony.pdf

3. For assessments of PLA ballistic missile firing rates across China Military Power Report editions, see:

“Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” U.S. Department of Defense, pg. 64, 2022, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/29/2003122279/-1/-1/1/2022-MILITARY-AND-SECURITY-DEVELOPMENTS-INVOLVING-THE-PEOPLES-REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA.PDF.

“Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” U.S. Department of Defense, pg. 60, 2021, https://media.defense.gov/2021/Nov/03/2002885874/-1/-1/0/2021-CMPR-FINAL.PDF.

“Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” U.S. Department of Defense, pg. 55, 2020, https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/2020-DOD-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT-FINAL.PDF.

4. For YJ-83 capabilities, see:

Dr. Sam Goldsmith, “VAMPIRE VAMPIRE VAMPIRE The PLA’s anti-ship cruise missile threat to Australian and allied naval operations,” Australian Strategic Policy Institute, pg. 10, 13, 16, 20, April 2022, https://ad-aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/2022-04/Vampire%20Vampire%20Vampire_0.pdf?VersionId=tHAbNzJSXJHskd9VppGNRcTFC4hW7UqD.

5. Michael Pilger, “China’s New YJ-18 Antiship Cruise Missile: Capabilities and Implications for U.S. Forces in the Western Pacific,” U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, October 28, 2015, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/China%E2%80%99s%20New%20YJ-18%20Antiship%20Cruise%20Missile.pdf.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. For terminal sprint capability, see:

Michael Pilger, “China’s New YJ-18 Antiship Cruise Missile: Capabilities and Implications for U.S. Forces in the Western Pacific,” U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, pg. 2, October 28, 2015, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/China%E2%80%99s%20New%20YJ-18%20Antiship%20Cruise%20Missile.pdf.

9. Gerry Doyle and Blake Herzinger, Carrier Killer: China’s Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles and Theater of Operations in the early 21st Century, Helion & Company, pg. 49, 2022.

10. Amber Wang, “Chinese military announces YJ-21 missile abilities in social media post read as warning to US amid tension in Taiwan Strait,” South China Morning Post, February 2, 2023, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3208763/chinese-military-announces-yj-21-missile-performance-social-media-post-read-warning-us-amid-tension.

11. “U.S. Hypersonic Weapons and Alternatives,” Congressional Budget Office, pg. 45, January 2023, https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2023-01/58255-hypersonic.pdf.

12. For Chinese surface fleet ship types and numbers, see:

“Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” U.S. Department of Defense, pg. 53-54, 2022, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/29/2003122279/-1/-1/1/2022-MILITARY-AND-SECURITY-DEVELOPMENTS-INVOLVING-THE-PEOPLES-REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA.PDF.

Ronald O’Rourke, “China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities—Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, pg. 8, 27-33, December 1, 2022, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL33153/265.

Tayfun Ozberk, “China Launches Two More Type 052DL Destroyers In Dalian,” Naval News, March 12, 2023, https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2023/03/china-launches-two-more-type-052dl-destroyers-in-dalian/.

13. Based on the aforementioned sources listed in reference #12, China built roughly 30 destroyers and eight cruisers in a ten-year period from 2012-2022.

14. Ronald O’Rourke, “China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities—Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, pg. 13-14, December 1, 2022, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL33153/265.

15. “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” U.S. Department of Defense, pg. 60, 2022, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/29/2003122279/-1/-1/1/2022-MILITARY-AND-SECURITY-DEVELOPMENTS-INVOLVING-THE-PEOPLES-REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA.PDF.

16. Oriana Pawlyk, “B-1 Crews Prep for Anti-Surface Warfare in Latest LRASM Tests,” Military Times, January 3, 2018, https://www.military.com/dodbuzz/2018/01/03/b-1-crews-prep-anti-surface-warfare-latest-lrasm-tests.html.

17. “Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 Budget Estimates,” Navy Justification Book Volume 1 of 1 Weapons Procurement, Navy, Page 1 of 10 P-1 Line #16, (PDF pg. 261), April 2022, https://www.secnav.navy.mil/fmc/fmb/Documents/23pres/WPN_Book.pdf.

18. Ronald O’Rourke, “China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities—Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, pg. 8, December 1, 2022, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL33153/265.

19. Captain Christopher P. Carlson, “Essay: Inside the Design of China’s Yuan-class Submarine,” USNI News, August 31, 2015, https://news.usni.org/2015/08/31/essay-inside-the-design-of-chinas-yuan-class-submarine.

20. The Military Balance 2022: The Annual Assessment of Global Military Capabilities and Defense Economics, The International Institute of Strategic Studies, Routledge, pg. 259-261, February 2022, https://www.iwp.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/The-Military-Balance-2022.pdf.

21. Ian Burns McCaslin and Andrew S. Erickson, “Selling a Maritime Air Force The PLAAF’s Campaign for a Bigger Maritime Role,” China Aerospace Studies Institute, pg. 15-16, April 2019, https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/CASI/documents/Research/PLAAF/2019-04-01%20Selling%20a%20Maritime%20Air%20Force.pdf.

22. For PLA carrier production rates, see: “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” U.S. Department of Defense, pg. 55, 2022, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/29/2003122279/-1/-1/1/2022-MILITARY-AND-SECURITY-DEVELOPMENTS-INVOLVING-THE-PEOPLES-REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA.PDF.

23. For DF-26 range, see:

“Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” U.S. Department of Defense, pg. 64, 2022, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/29/2003122279/-1/-1/1/2022-MILITARY-AND-SECURITY-DEVELOPMENTS-INVOLVING-THE-PEOPLES-REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA.PDF.

For H-6J bomber range, see:

“Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” U.S. Department of Defense, pg. 60, 2022, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/29/2003122279/-1/-1/1/2022-MILITARY-AND-SECURITY-DEVELOPMENTS-INVOLVING-THE-PEOPLES-REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA.PDF.

24. Maksim Y. Tokarov, “Kamikazes: The Soviet Legacy,” U.S. Naval War College Review, Volume 1, 67, 2014, pg. 13, https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1247&context=nwc-review. 

25. Lieutenant Commander James A. Winnefeld, Jr., “Winning the Outer Air Battle,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, August 1989, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1989/august/winning-outer-air-battle

26. For JH-7 YJ-83 compatibility, see:

Dr. Sam Goldsmith, “VAMPIRE VAMPIRE VAMPIRE The PLA’s anti-ship cruise missile threat to Australian and allied naval operations,” Australian Strategic Policy Institute, pg. 13, April 2022, https://ad-aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/2022-04/Vampire%20Vampire%20Vampire_0.pdf?VersionId=tHAbNzJSXJHskd9VppGNRcTFC4hW7UqD.

For J-16 compatibility, see:

Andreas Rupprecht, “Images show PLAAF J-16 armed with YJ-83K anti-ship missile,” Janes, February 18, 2020, https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/images-show-plaaf-j-16-armed-with-yj-83k-anti-ship-missile.

For J-10 compatibly, see: “New Cruise Missile Confirmed For China’s J-10C Fighter: An Anti-Ship Weapon to Boost Export Prospects?” Military Watch Magazine, March 4, 2022, https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/new-cruise-missile-confirmed-for-china-s-j-10c-fighter-an-anti-ship-weapon-to-boost-export-prospects.

27. For DF-21 range, see:

“Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” U.S. Department of Defense, pg. 64, 2022, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Nov/29/2003122279/-1/-1/1/2022-MILITARY-AND-SECURITY-DEVELOPMENTS-INVOLVING-THE-PEOPLES-REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA.PDF.

28. Air bases can employ “elephant walks” where large numbers of aircraft are surged from an airfield in a back-to-back manner that is not feasible for carriers. Damaged airbase runways are also generally easier to repair than damaged carrier flight decks, such as by using fast-drying concrete that can be ready in several days.

For considerations for air base sortie generation, see:

Christopher J. Bowie, “The Anti-Access Threat and Theater Air Bases,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2002, https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/2002.09.24-Anti-Access-Threat-Theater-Air-Bases.pdf.

For carrier sortie generation rates, see:

“CVN 78 Gerald R. Ford Class Nuclear Aircraft Carrier (CVN 78),” December 2021 Selected Acquisition Report (SAR), pg. 4, April 28, 2022, https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20Room/Selected_Acquisition_Reports/FY_2021_SARS/22-F-0762_CVN_78_SAR_2021.pdf.

“Appendix D: Aircraft Sortie Count,” (for Operational Desert Storm), https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/u/us-navy-in-desert-shield-desert-storm/appendix-d-aircraft-sortie-count.html.

29. Ronald O’Rourke, “China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities—Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, pg. 40, August 1, 2018, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL33153/222.

30. “Vice Admiral Hank Mustin on New Warfighting Tactics and Taking the Maritime Strategy to Sea,” Center for International Maritime Security, April 29, 2021, https://cimsec.org/vice-admiral-hank-mustin-on-new-warfighting-tactics-and-taking-the-maritime-strategy-to-sea/.

Featured Image: The Type 55 guided-missile destroyer Nanchang (Hull 101) attached to a naval vessel training center under the PLA Northern Theater Command steams in tactical formation to occupy attack positions in an undisclosed sea area during a recent 10-day maritime training exercise. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Zou Xiangmin)

Upgrading the Mindset: Modernizing Sea Service Culture for Trust in Artificial Intelligence

By Scott A. Humr

Winning on the future battlefield will undoubtedly require an organizational culture that promotes human trust in artificial intelligent systems. Research within and outside of the US military has already shown that organizational culture has an impact on technology acceptance, let alone, trust. However, Dawn Meyerriecks, Deputy Director for CIA technology development, remarked in a November 2020 report by the Congressional Research Service that senior leaders may be unwilling, “to accept AI-generated analysis.” The Deputy Director goes on to state that, “the defense establishment’s risk-averse culture may pose greater challenges to future competitiveness than the pace of adversary technology development.” More emphatically, Dr. Adam Grant, a Wharton professor and well-known author, called the Department of Defense’s culture, “a threat to national security.” In light of those remarks, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David H. Berger, stated at a gathering of the National Defense Industrial Association that, “The same way a squad leader trusts his or her Marine, they have to trust his or her machine.” The points of view in the aforementioned quotes raise an important question: Do Service cultures influence how its military personnel trust AI systems?

While much has been written about the need for explainable AI (XAI) and need for increasing trust between the operator and AI tools, the research literature is sparse on how military organizational culture influences the trust personnel place in AI imbued technologies. If culture holds sway over how service personnel may employ AI within a military context, culture then becomes an antecedent for developing trust and subsequent use of AI technologies. As the Marine Corps’s latest publication on competing states, “culture will have an impact on many aspects of competition, including decision making and how information is perceived.” If true, military personnel will view information provided by AI agents through the lens of their Service cultures as well.

Our naval culture must appropriately adapt to the changing realities of the new Cognitive Age. The Sea Services must therefore evolve their Service cultures to promote the types of behaviors and attitudes that fully leverage the benefits of these advanced applications. To compete effectively with AI technologies over the next decade, the Sea Services must first understand their organizational cultures, implement necessary cultural changes, and promote double-loop learning to support beneficial cultural adaptations.

Technology and Culture Nexus

Understanding the latest AI applications and naval culture requires an environment where experienced personnel and technologies are brought together through experimentation to better understand trust in AI systems. Fortunately, the Sea Service’s preeminent education and research institution, the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), provides the perfect link between experienced educators and students who come together to advance future naval concepts. The large population of experienced mid-grade naval service officers at NPS provides an ideal place to help understand Sea Service culture while exploring the benefits and limitations of AI systems.

Not surprisingly, NPS student research has investigated trust in AI, technology acceptance, and culture. Previous NPS research has explored trust through interactive Machine Learning (iML) in virtual environments for understanding Navy cultural and individual barriers to technology adoption. These and other studies have brought important insights on the intersection of people and technologies.

One important aspect of this intersection is culture and how it is measured. For instance, the Competing Values Framework (CVF) has helped researchers understand organizational culture. Paired with additional survey instruments such as E-Trust or the Technology Acceptance Models (TAM), researchers can better understand if particular cultures trust technologies more than other types. CVF is measured across six different organizational dimensions that are summarized by structure and focus. The structure axis ranges from control to flexibility, while focus axis ranges from people to organization, see figure 1.

Figure 1 – The Competing Values Framework – culture, leadership, value from Cameron, Kim S., Robert E. Quinn, Jeff DeGraff, and Anjan V. Thakor. Competing Values Leadership, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014.

Most organizational cultures contain some measure of each of the four characteristics of the CVF. The adhocracy quadrant of the CVF, for instance, is characterized by innovation, flexibility, and increased speed of solutions. To this point, an NPS student researcher found that Marine Corps organizational culture was characterized as mostly hierarchical. The same researcher found that this particular group of Marine officers also preferred the Marine Corps move from a hierarchical culture towards an adhocracy culture. While the population in the study was by no means representative of the entire Marine Corps, it does generate useful insights for forming initial hypotheses and the need for additional research which explores whether hierarchical cultures impede trust in AI technologies. While closing this gap is important for assessing how a culture may need to adapt, actually changing deeply rooted cultures requires significant introspection and the willingness to change.

The ABCs: Adaptations for a Beneficial Culture

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” quipped the revered management guru, Peter Drucker—and for good reason. Strategies that seek to adopt new technologies which may replace or augment human capabilities, must also address culture. Cultural adaptations that require significant changes to behaviors and other deeply entrenched processes will not come easy. Modifications to culture require significant leadership and participation at all levels. Fortunately, organizational theorists have provided ways for understanding culture. One well-known organizational theorist, Edgar Schein, provides a framework for assessing organizational culture. Specifically, culture can be viewed at three different levels which consist of artifacts, espoused values, and underlying assumptions.

The Schein Model provides another important level of analysis for investigating the military organizational culture. In the Schein model, artifacts within militaries would include elements such as dress, formations, doctrine, and other visible attributes. Espoused values are the vision statements, slogans, and codified core values of an organization. Underlying assumptions are the unconscious and unspoken beliefs and thoughts that undergird the culture. Implementing cultural change without addressing underlying assumptions is the equivalent to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Therefore, what underlying cultural assumptions could prevent the Sea Services from effectively trusting AI applications?

One of the oldest and most ubiquitous underlying assumptions of how militaries function is the hierarchy. While hierarchy does have beneficial functions for militaries, it may overly inhibit how personnel embrace new technologies and decisions recommended by AI systems. Information, intelligence, and orders within the militaries largely flow along well-defined lines of communication and nodes through the hierarchy. In one meta-analytic review on culture and innovation, researchers found that hierarchical cultures, as defined by CVF, tightly control information distribution. Organizational researchers Christopher McDermott and Gregory Stock stated, “An organization whose culture is characterized by flexibility and spontaneity will most likely be able to deal with uncertainty better than one characterized by control and stability.” While hierarchical structures can help reduce ambiguity and promote stability, they can also be detrimental to innovation. NPS student researchers in 2018, not surprisingly, found that the hierarchical culture in one Navy command had a restraining effect on innovation and technology adoption.

CVF defined adhocracy cultures on the other hand are characterized by innovation and higher tolerances for risk taking. For instance, AI applications could also upend well-defined Military Decision Making Processes (MDMP). MDMP is a classical manifestation of codified processes that supports underlying cultural assumptions on how major decisions are planned and executed. The Sea Services should therefore reevaluate and update its underlying assumptions on decision making processes to better incorporate insights from AI.

In fact, exploring and promoting other forms of organizational design could help empower its personnel to innovate and leverage AI systems more effectively. The late, famous systems thinking researcher, Donella Meadows, aptly stated, “The original purpose of a hierarchy is always to help its originating subsystems do their jobs better.” Therefore, recognizing the benefits, and more importantly the limits of hierarchy, will help leaders properly shape Sea Service culture to appropriately develop trustworthy AI systems. Ensuring change goes beyond a temporary fix, however, requires continually updating the organization’s underlying assumptions. This takes double-loop learning.

Double-loop Learning

Double-loop learning is by no means a new concept. First conceptualized by Chris Argyris and Donald Schön in 1974, double-loop learning is the process of updating one’s underlying assumptions. While many organizations can often survive through regular use of single-loop learning, they will not thrive. Unquestioned organizational wisdom can perpetuate poor solutions. Such cookie-cutter solutions often fail to adequately address new problems and are discovered to no longer work. Rather than question the supporting underlying assumptions, organizations will instead double-down on tried-and-true methods only to fail again, thus neglecting deeper introspection.

Such failures should instead provide pause to allow uninhibited, candid feedback to surface from the deck-plate all the way up the chain of command. This feedback, however, is often rare and typically muted, thus becoming ineffectual to the people who need to hear it the most. Such problems are further exacerbated by endemic personnel rotation policies combined with feedback delays that rarely hold the original decision makers accountable for their actions (or inactions).

Implementation and trust of AI systems will take double-loop learning to change the underlying cultural assumptions which inhibit progress. Yet, this can be accomplished in several ways which go against the normative behaviors of entrenched cultures. Generals, Admirals, and Senior Executive Service (SES) leaders should create their own focus groups of diverse junior officers, enlisted personnel, and civilians to solicit unfiltered feedback on programs, technologies, and most importantly, organizational culture inhibitors which hold back AI adoption and trust. Membership and units could be anonymized in order to shield junior personnel from reprisals while promoting the unfiltered candor senior leadership needs to hear in order to change the underlying cultural assumptions. Moreover, direct feedback from the operators using AI technologies would also avoid the layers of bureaucracy which can slow the speed of criticisms back to leadership.

Why is this time different?

Arguably, the naval services have past records of adapting to shifts in technology and pursuing innovations needed to help win future wars. Innovators of their day such as Admiral William Sims developing advanced naval gunnery techniques and the Marine Corps developing and improving amphibious landing capabilities in the long shadow of the Gallipoli campaign reinforce current Service cultural histories. However, many technologies of the last century were evolutionary improvements to what was already accepted technologies and tactics. AI is fundamentally different and is akin to how electricity changed many aspects of society and could fundamentally disrupt how we approach war.

In the early 20th century, the change from steam to electricity did not immediately change manufacturing processes, nor significantly improve productivity. Inefficient processes and machines driven by steam or systems of belts were never reconfigured once they were individually equipped with electric motors. Thus, many benefits of electricity were not realized for some time. Similarly, Sea Service culture will need to make a step change to fully take advantage of AI technologies. If not, the Services will likely experience a “productivity paradox” where large investments in AI do not fully deliver the efficiencies promised. 

Today’s militaries are sociotechnical systems and underlying assumptions are its cultural operating system. Attempting to plug AI application into a culture that is not adapted to use it, nor trusts it, is the equivalent of trying to install an Android application on a Windows operating system. In other words, it will not work, or at best, not work as intended. We must, therefore, investigate how naval service cultures may need to appropriately adapt if we want to fully embrace the many advantages these technologies may provide.

Conclusion

In a 2017 report from Chatham House titled, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Warfare,” Professor Missy Cummings stated, “There are many reasons for the lack of success in bringing these technologies to maturity, including cost and unforeseen technical issues, but equally problematic are organizational and cultural barriers.” Echoing this point, the former Director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Marine Lieutenant General Michael Groen, stated “culture” is the obstacle, not the technology, for developing the Joint All-Domain, Command and Control (JADC2) system, which is supported by AI. Yet, AI/ML technologies have the potential to provide a cognitive-edge that can potentially increase the speed, quality, and effectiveness of decision-making. Trusting the outputs of AI will undoubtedly require significant changes to certain aspects of our collective naval cultures. The Sea Services must take stock of their organizational cultures and apply the necessary cultural adaptations, while fostering double-loop learning in order to promote trust in AI systems.

Today, the Naval Services have a rare opportunity to reap the benefits of a double-loop learning. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sea Services have shown that they can adapt responsively and effectively to dynamic circumstances while fulfilling their assigned missions. The Services have developed more efficient means to leverage technology to allow greater flexibility across the force through remote work and education. If, however, the Services return to the status quo after the pandemic, they will have failed to update many of its outdated underlying assumptions by changing the Service culture.

If we cannot change the culture in light of the last three years, it portends poor prospects for promoting trust in AI for the future. Therefore, we cannot squander these moments. Let it not be said of this generation of Sailors and Marines that we misused this valuable opportunity to make a step-change in our culture for a better approach to future warfighting.

Scott Humr is an active-duty Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Marine Corps. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Naval Postgraduate School as part of the Commandant’s PhD-Technical Program. His research interests include trust in AI, sociotechnical systems, and decision-making in human-machine teams. 

Featured Image: An F-35C Lightning aircraft, assigned to Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 125, prepares to launch from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George H. W. Bush (CVN 77) during flight operations. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Brandon Roberson)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.