Drones/Unmanned

Naval Escalation in an Unmanned Context

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By Jonathan Panter

On March 14, two Russian fighter jets intercepted a U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper in international airspace, breaking one of the drone’s propellers and forcing it to crash into the Black Sea. The Russians probably understood that U.S. military retaliation – or, more importantly, escalation – was unlikely; wrecking a drone is not like killing people. Indeed, the incident contrasts sharply with the recent revelation of another aerial face-off. In late 2022, Russian aircraft nearly shot down a manned British RC-135 Rivet Joint surveillance aircraft. With respect to escalation, senior defense officials later indicated, the latter incident could have been severe.1

There is an emerging view among scholars and policymakers that unmanned aerial vehicles can reduce the risk of escalation, by providing an off-ramp during crisis incidents that, were human beings involved, might otherwise spark public calls for retaliation. Other recent events, such as the Iranian shoot-down of a U.S. RQ-4 Global Hawk in the Persian Gulf in 2019 – which likewise did not spur U.S. military kinetic retaliation – lend credence to this view. But in another theater, the Indo-Pacific, the outlook for unmanned escalation dynamics is uncertain, and potentially much worse. There, unmanned (and soon, autonomous) military competition will occur not just between aircraft, but between vessels on and below the ocean.

Over the past two decades, China has substantially enlarged its navy and irregular maritime forces. It has deployed these forces to patrol its excessive maritime claims and to threaten Taiwan, expanded its nuclear arsenal, and built a conventional anti-access, area-denial capacity whose overlap with its nuclear deterrence architecture remains unclear. Unmanned and autonomous maritime systems add a great unknown variable to this mix. Unmanned ships and submarines may strengthen capabilities in ways not currently anticipated; introduce unexpected vulnerabilities across entire warfare areas; lower the threshold for escalatory acts; or complicate each side’s ability to make credible threats and assurances.

Forecasting Escalation Dynamics

Escalation is a transition from peace to war, or an increase in the severity of an ongoing conflict. Many naval officers assume that unmanned ships are inherently de-escalatory assets due to their lack of personnel onboard. Recent high-profile incidents – such as the MQ-9 Reaper and RQ-4 Global Hawk incidents mentioned previously – seem, at first glance, to confirm this assumption. The logic is simple: if one side destroys the other’s unmanned asset, the victim will feel less compelled to respond, since no lives were lost.

While enticing, this assumption is also illusory. First, the example is of limited applicability: most unmanned ships and submarines under development will not be deployed independently. They will work in tandem with each other and with manned assets, such that the compromise of one vessel – potentially by cyber means – often affects others, changing a force’s overall readiness. The most serious escalation risk thus lies at a systemic, or fleetwide, level – not at the level of individual shoot-downs.

Second, lessons about escalation from two decades of operational employment of unmanned aircraft cannot be imported, wholesale, to the surface and subsurface domains – where there is little to no operational record of unmanned vessel employment. The technology, operating environments, expected threats, tactics, and other factors differ substantially.

Our understanding of one variant of escalation, that in the nuclear realm, is famously theoretical – the result of deductive logic, modeling, or gaming – rather than empirical, since nuclear weapons have only been used once in conflict, and never between two nuclear powers. Right now, the story is similar for unmanned surface and subsurface vessels. Neither side has deployed unmanned vessels at in sufficient numbers or duration, and across a great enough variety of contexts, for researchers to draw evidence-based conclusions. Everything remains a projection.

Fortunately, three existing areas of academic scholarship – crisis bargaining, inadvertent nuclear escalation, and escalation in cyberspace – provide some clues about what naval escalation in an unmanned context might look like.

Crisis Bargaining

During international crises, a state may try to convince its opponent that it is willing to fight over an issue – and that, if war were to break out, it would prevail. The goal is to get what you want without actually fighting. To intimidate an opponent, a state might inflate its capabilities or hide its weaknesses. To convince others of its willingness to fight, a state might take actions that create a risk of war, such as mobilizing troops (so-called “costly signals”). Ascertaining capability and intent in international crises is therefore quite difficult, and misjudging either may lead to war.2

Between nuclear-armed states, these phenomena are more severe. Neither side wants nuclear war, nor believes that the other is willing to risk it. To make threats credible, therefore, states may initiate an unstable situation (“rock the boat”) but then “tie their own hands” so that catastrophe can be averted only if the opponent backs down. States do this by, for example, automating decision-making, or stationing troops in harm’s way.3

The proliferation of unmanned and autonomous vessels promises to impact all of these crisis bargaining strategies. First – as noted previously – unmanned vessels may be perceived as “less escalatory,” since deploying them does not risk sailors’ lives. But this perception could have the opposite effect, if states – believing the escalation risk to be lower – deploy their unmanned vessels closer to an adversary’s territory or defensive systems. The adversary might, in turn, believe that his opponent is preparing the battlespace, or even that an attack is imminent. Economists call this paradox “moral hazard.” The classic example is an insured person’s willingness to take on more risk.

Second, a truly autonomous platform – one lacking a means of being recalled or otherwise controlled after its deployment – would be ideal for “tying hands” strategies. A state could send such vessels to run a blockade, for instance, daring the other side to fire first. Conversely, an unmanned (but not autonomous) vessel might have remote human operators, giving a state some leeway to back down after “rocking the boat.” In a crisis, it may be difficult for an adversary to distinguish between the two types of vessels.

A further complication arises if a state misrepresents a recallable vessel as non-recallable, perhaps to gain the negotiating leverage of “tying hands,” while maintaining a secret exit option. And even if an autonomous vessel is positively identified as such, attributing “intent” to it is a gray area. The more autonomously a vessel operates, the easier it is to attribute its behaviors to its programming, but the harder it is to determine whether its actions in a specific scenario are intended by humans (versus being default actions or error).

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles?

Scholars have begun to address such questions by studying unmanned aerial systems.4 To give two recent examples, one finding suggests that unmanned aircraft may be de-escalatory assets, since the absence of a pilot means domestic publics would be less likely to demand blood-for-blood if a drone gets shot down.5 Another scholar finds that because drones combine persistent surveillance with precision strike, they can “increase the certainty of punishment” – making threats more credible.6

Caution should be taken in applying such lessons to the maritime realm. First, unmanned ships and submarines are decades behind unmanned aerial vehicles in sophistication. Accordingly, current plans point to a (potentially decades-long) roll-out period during which unmanned vessels will be partially or optionally manned.7 Such vessels could appear unmanned to an adversary, when in fact crews are simply not visible. This complicates rules of engagement, and warps expectations for retaliation if a state targets an apparently-unmanned vessel that in fact has a skeleton crew.

Second, ships and submarines have much longer endurance times than aircraft. Hence, mechanical and software problems will receive less frequent local troubleshooting and digital forensic examination. An aerial drone that suffers an attempted hack will return to base within a few hours; not so with unmanned ships and submarines because their transit and on-station times are much longer, especially those dispersed across a wide geographic area for distributed maritime operations. This complicates efforts to attribute failures to “benign” causes or adversarial compromise. The question may not be whether an attempted attack merits a response due to loss of life, but rather whether it represents the opening salvo in a conflict.

Finally, with regard to the combination of persistent surveillance and precision strike, most unmanned maritime systems in advanced stages of development for the U.S. Navy do not combine sensing and shooting. Small- and medium-sized surface craft, for instance, are much closer to deployment than the U.S. Navy’s “Large Unmanned Surface Vessel,” which is envisioned as an adjunct missile magazine. The small- and medium-sized craft are expected to be scouts, minesweepers, and distributed sensors. Accordingly, they do little for communicating credible threats, but do present attractive targets for a first mover in a conflict, whose opening goal would be to blind the adversary.

Inadvertent Nuclear Escalation

During conventional war, even if adversaries carefully avoid targeting the other side’s nuclear weapons, other parts of a military’s nuclear deterrent may be dual-use systems. An attack on an enemy’s command-and-control, early warning systems, attack submarines, or the like – even one conducted purely for conventional objectives – could make the target state fear that its nuclear deterrent is in danger of being rendered vulnerable.8 This fear could encourage a state to launch its nuclear weapons before it is too late. Incremental improvements to targeting and sensing in the past two decades – especially in the underwater realm – have exacerbated the problem by making retaliatory assets easier to find and destroy.9

In the naval context, the risk is that one side may perceive a “use it or lose it” scenario if it feels that its ballistic missile submarines have all been (or are close to being) located. In particular, the ever-wider deployment of assets that render the underwater battlespace more transparent – such as small, long-duration underwater vehicles equipped with sonar – could undermine an adversary’s second-strike capability. Today, the US Navy’s primary anti-submarine platforms aggregate organic sensing and offensive capabilities (surface combatants, attack submarines, and maritime patrol aircraft). The shift to distributed maritime operations using unmanned platforms, however, portends a future of disaggregated capabilities. Small platforms without onboard weapons systems will still provide remote sensing capability to the joint force. If these sensing platforms are considered non-escalatory because they lack offensive capabilities and sailors onboard, the US Navy might deploy them more widely.10

Escalation in Cyberspace

The US government’s shift to persistent engagement in cyberspace, a strategy called “Defend Forward,”11 has underscored two debates on cyber escalation. The first concerns whether operations in the cyber domain expose previously secure adversarial capabilities to disruption, shifting incentives for preemption on either side.12 The second concerns whether effects generated by cyberattacks (i.e., cyber effects or physical effects) can trigger a “cross-domain” response.13

These debates remain unresolved. Narrowing the focus to cyberattacks on unmanned or autonomous vessels presents an additional challenge for analysis, because these technologies are nascent and efforts to ensure their cyber resilience remain classified. Platforms without crews may present an attractive cyber target, perhaps because interfering with the operation of an unmanned vessel is perceived as less escalatory since human life is not directly at risk.

But a distinction must be made between the compromise of a single vessel and its follow-on effects at a system, or fleetwide level. Based on current plans, unmanned vessels are most likely to be employed as part of an extended, networked hybrid fleet. If penetrating one unmanned vessel’s cyber defenses can allow an adversary to move laterally across a network, this “effect” may be severe, potentially affecting a whole mission or warfare area. The subsequent decline in offensive or defensive capacity at the operational level of war could shift incentives for preemption. Since unmanned vessels operating as part of a team (with other unmanned vessels or with manned ones) are dependent on beyond-line-of-sight communications, interruption of one of these pathways (e.g., disabling a geostationary satellite over the area of operations) could have a similar systemic effect.

The Role of Human Judgment

Modern naval operations already depend on automated combat systems, lists of “if-then” statements, and data links. For decades, people have increasingly assigned mundane and repetitive (or computationally laborious) shipboard tasks to computers, leaving officers and sailors in a supervisory role. This state of affairs is accelerating with the introduction of unmanned and autonomous vessels, especially when combined with artificial intelligence. These technologies are likely to make human judgment more, not less, important.14 Many future naval officers will be designers, regulators, or managers of automated systems. So too will civilian policymakers directing the use of unmanned and autonomous maritime systems to signal capability and intent in crisis. For both policymakers and officers, questions requiring substantial judgment will include:

The “moral hazard” problem. If unmanned vessels are perceived as less escalatory – because they lack crews, or because they carry only sensors and no offensive capabilities – are they more likely to be employed in ways that incur other risks (such as threatening adversary defensive or nuclear deterrent capabilities in peacetime)?

The autonomy/intent paradox. When will an autonomous vessel’s action be considered a signal of an adversary’s intent (since the adversary designed and coded the vessel to act a certain way), versus an action that the vessel “decided” to take on its own? If an adversary claims ignorance – that he did not intend an autonomous vessel to act a certain way – when will he be taken at his word?15

The attribution problem. Since unmanned vessels have no crews, local troubleshooting of equipment – along with digital forensics – will occur less frequently than it does on manned vessels. Remotely attributing a problem to routine component or software failure, versus to adversarial cyberattack, will often be harder than it would be with physical access. Will there have to be a higher “certainty threshold” for positive attribution of an attack on an unmanned vessel?

The “roll-out” uncertainty. How will the first few decades of hybrid fleet operations (utilizing partial and optional-manning constructs) complicate the decision to target or compromise unmanned vessels? If a vessel appears unmanned, but has an unseen skeleton crew – and then suffers an attack – how should the target state assess the attacker’s claim of ignorance about the presence of personnel onboard?

The cyber problem. Do unmanned systems’ attractiveness as a cyber target (due to their absence of personnel, often highly-networked employment) present a system-wide vulnerability to those warfare areas than lean more heavily on unmanned systems than others? Which warfare areas would have to be affected to change incentives for preemption?

Since unmanned vessels have not yet been broadly integrated into fleet operations, these questions have no definitive, evidence-based answers. But they can help frame the problem. The maritime domain in East Asia is already particularly susceptible to escalation. Interactions between potential foes should, ideally, never escalate without the consent and direction of policymakers. But in practice, interactions-at-sea can escalate due to hyper-local misperceptions, influenced by factors like command, control, and communications, situational awareness, or relative capabilities. All of these factors are changing with the advent of unmanned and autonomous platforms. Escalation in this context cannot be an afterthought.

Jonathan Panter is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Columbia University. His research examines Congressional oversight over U.S. naval operations. Prior to attending Columbia, Mr. Panter served as a Surface Warfare Officer in the United States Navy. He holds an M.Phil. and M.A. in Political Science from Columbia, and a B.A. in Government from Cornell University.

The author thanks Johnathan Falcone, Anand Jantzen, Jenny Jun, Shuxian Luo, and Ian Sundstrom for comments on earlier drafts of this article.

References

1. Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt, “Miscommunication Nearly Led to Russian Jet Shooting Down British Spy Plane, U.S. Officials Say,” New York Times, April 12, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/world/europe/russian-jet-british-spy-plane.html.

2. James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 379-414.

3. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, [1966] 2008), 43-48, 99-107.

4. See, e.g., Michael C. Horowitz, Sarah E. Kreps, and Matthew Fuhrmann, “Separating Fact from Fiction in the Debate over Drone Proliferation,” International Security 41, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 7-42.

5. Erik Lin-Greenberg, “Wargame of Drones: Remotely Piloted Aircraft and Crisis Escalation,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (2022). See also Erik Lin-Greenberg, “Game of Drones: What Experimental Wargames Reveal About Drones and Escalation,” War on the Rocks, January 10, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/01/game-of-drones-what-experimental-wargames-reveal-about-drones-and-escalation/.

6. Amy Zegart, “Cheap flights, credible threats: The future of armed drones and coercion,” Journal of Strategic Studies 43, no. 1 (2020): 6-46.

7. Sam Lagrone, “Navy: Large USV Will Require Small Crews for the Next Several Years,” USNI News, August 3, 2021, https://news.usni.org/2021/08/03/navy-large-usv-will-require-small-crews-for-the-next-several-years.

8. Barry D. Posen, Inadvertent Escalation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); James Acton, “Escalation through Entanglement: How the Vulnerability of Command-and-Control Systems Raises the Risks of an Inadvertent Nuclear War,” International Security 43, no. 1 (Summer 2018): 56-99. For applications to contemporary Sino-US security competition, see: Caitlin Talmadge, “Would China Go Nuclear? Assessing the Risk of Chinese Nuclear Escalation in a Conventional War with the United States,” International Security 41, no. 4 (Spring 2017): 50-92; Fiona S. Cunningham and M. Taylor Fravel, “Dangerous Confidence? Chinese Views on Nuclear Escalation,” International Security 44, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 61-109; and Wu Riqiang, “Assessing China-U.S. Inadvertent Nuclear Escalation,” International Security 46, no. 3 (Winter 2021/2022): 128-162.

9. Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, “The New Era of Counterforce,” International Security 41, no. 4 (Spring 2017): 9-49; Rose Goettemoeller, “The Standstill Conundrum: The Advent of Second-Strike Vulnerability and Options to Address It,” Texas National Security Review 4, no. 4 (Fall 2021): 115-124.

10. Jonathan D. Caverley and Peter Dombrowski suggest that one component of crisis stability – the distinguishability of offensive and defensive weapons – is more difficult at sea because naval platforms are designed to perform multiple missions. From this perspective, disaggregating capabilities might improve offense-defense distinguishability and prove stabilizing, rather than escalatory. See: “Cruising for a Bruising: Maritime Competition in an Anti-Access Age.” Security Studies 29, no. 4 (2020): 680-681.

11. For an introduction to this strategy, see: Michael P. Fischerkeller and Robert J. Harknett, “Persistent Engagement, Agreed Competition, and Cyberspace Interaction Dynamics and Escalation,” Cyber Defense Review (2019), https://cyberdefensereview.army.mil/Portals/6/CDR-SE_S5-P3-Fischerkeller.pdf.

12. Erik Gartzke and John R. Lindsay, “Thermonuclear Cyberwar,” Journal of Cybersecurity 3, no. 1 (March 2017): 37-48; Erica D. Borghard and Shawn W. Lonergan, “Cyber Operations as Imperfect Tools of Escalation,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 13, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 122-145.

13. See, e.g., Sarah Kreps and Jacquelyn Schneider, “Escalation firebreaks in the cyber, conventional, and nuclear domains: moving beyond effects-based logics,” Journal of Cybersecurity 5, no. 1 (Fall 2019): 1-11; Jason Healey and Robert Jervis, “The Escalation Inversion and Other Oddities of Situational Cyber Stability,” Texas National Security Review 3, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 30-53.

14. Avi Goldfarb and John R. Lindsay, “Prediction and Judgment: Why Artificial Intelligence Increases the Importance of Humans in War,” International Security 46, no. 3 (Winter 2021/2022): 7-50.

15. The author thanks Tove Falk for this insight.

Featured Image: A medium displacement unmanned surface vessel and an MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter from Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron (HSM) 73 participate in U.S. Pacific Fleet’s Unmanned Systems Integrated Battle Problem (UxS IBP) April 21, 2021. (U.S. Navy photo by Chief Petty Officer Shannon Renf)

Human Capital

Gapped Billet Squall on the Horizon: The USCG Officer Corps Could be in Trouble

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By Joseph O’Connell

The Coast Guard is facing a looming afloat officer shortage with no good options on the table. With roughly 3.5%* of all CG officer billets currently gapped, and a particular shortfall impacting mid-grade (O3/O4) officers the Coast Guard needs to explore creative solutions to address the pending crisis. At the conclusion of assignment year 2021 (AY 21) the Coast Guard reported being 213 officers short, with a whopping 166 of those being O3 or O4’s, a growing shortfall of experience that cannot be easily resolved.1 While this might seem a rounding error to larger armed services, this represents a significant percentage of the Coast Guard officer corps. To put in context, if the U.S. Navy were facing a similar shortage, they would have gapped approximately 1,960 officer billets, a dearth that would undoubtedly impact operational readiness. This shortage grows more acute when considering the critical billets O3 and O4 officers fill aboard Coast Guard cutters: Operations Officers, Engineer Officers, Executive Officers, and Commanding Officers, depending on the cutter class.

Figure 1: Total Gapped Billets by Assignment Year. (Author graphic)

Utilizing the last 18 years of officer assignment data, a picture of a rapidly declining officers corps forms, with current trends indicating that implemented officer retention tools are failing1. Figure 1 shows the rapid increase in missing officers over time, highlighting the unique nature and acuteness of this particular crisis.1,2 As shown in Figure 2, the officer shortage is extremely concerning for the afloat community and was correctly predicted in 2015’s The Demise of the Cutterman2. Of note, AY21 was the highest number of afloat billets gapped, verifying the more pessimistic predictions made by CDR Smicklas. As the Coast Guard continues to bring new hulls online while operating legacy assets the demand for afloat officers will far outstrip the limited and dwindling supply, with projections anticipating a 25% increase in cutter billets from current levels.3

Figure 2: Gapped Afloat Billets by Assignment Year. Author graphic.

Armed with this knowledge, there are several options left to decision-makers. The readily apparent options, from least to most intrusive are: letting the crisis play out, ameliorating critical shipboard habitability shortfalls, prioritizing afloat officers, and major force restructuring.

Wait and See

The least intrusive option the Coast Guard could pursue is a “wait and see” strategy, wherein program managers would assess the impacts of current retention policies impacts on officer retention and the afloat billet gap. In its current form, this exclusively entails the recent afloat bonus program.5 It is possible that the afloat billet gap will shrink as more officers elect to return afloat in pursuit of bonus money or career path incentives (arguably not the right reasons to go afloat).

There is a historical argument in favor of waiting as well, traditionally during economic boom cycles the service has difficulty retaining officers, while during economic downturns the officer corps is closer to full strength, this can be seen in the years following the great financial crisis when the officer billet gap was greatly reduced, only to steadily rise as the economy rebounded in the mid-2010s.9 Just as a prudent mariner would not hazard their vessel based on scanty radar information, Coast Guard programmers and planners cannot place bets on the future of the service based on unknowable economic outlooks. This strategy runs the risk of inaction and a deepening crisis while maintaining current priorities in hopes that new assets will alleviate habitability issues and that afloat bonuses will deepen the afloat talent pool. 8 If an economic crisis fails to materialize, or the officer corps reacts differently than during a financial crisis there is a chance that this strategy fails catastrophically and the afloat gap grows, adversely impacting operations.

Prioritize “Sea Service Attractiveness”

Habitability

The next actionable item the Coast Guard can pursue to mitigate the exodus of afloat officers is prioritizing sea service attractiveness. By and large, this falls into two buckets: 1) addressing egregious shipboard habitability issues and 2) “nice to have” incentives such as Wi-Fi, preserving port calls, and reduced work days. On the latter measure, the Coast Guard has made significant investments in UW connectivity and bandwidth.

These creature comforts do not, unfortunately, extend to legacy Coast Guard assets, namely the Famous and Reliance class, medium endurance cutters, which suffer from debilitating habitability issues. These issues range from the whimsical– water intrusion flooding staterooms every time it rains to such an extent that it was re-christened “the waterfall suite,”—to the downright dangerous 2 ft. diameter holes hidden by appliances such as laundry machines or controllable pitch propeller systems that rely on emergency relief valves to regulate system pressures. Furthermore, it is not uncommon in the medium endurance cutter fleet to hear sea stories of tools falling into the bilge and puncturing the hull.

Compounded, these unappetizing work environments significantly diminish the already austere nature of serving aboard ship. These unfortunate conditions are the result of years of policy decisions de-emphasizing legacy asset sustainment in favor of other priorities, with newer hulls promising to resolve habitability issues once online. Building new cutters has taken longer than anticipated and legacy medium endurance cutters, the bulk of the Coast Guard Atlantic Area’s forward operating assets, are now expected to operate for another 5-15 years4. Given this timeline, one “down payment” the Coast Guard can make for the health of its future afloat officer corps, is addressing the dire habitability issues aboard its medium endurance cutters. Paired with the “nice to have” initiatives, such as shipboard Wi-Fi, money spent on increasing the attractiveness of sea duty could pay significant dividends in the years to come. 

The Coast Guard should increase habitability and work-life balance, through major investments throughout the fleet, particularly in the Medium Endurance Cutter (MEC) fleet. Some easy actions to take would be increasing cutter maintenance budgets to repair long overdue crew comfort issues, earmarking funds to upgrade or install rec/morale equipment that can be used underway, increasing maintenance periods to promote work-life balance, and decreasing the amount of homeport maintenance work completed by the crew. While none of these are ‘free’ and come with associated costs (funds being taken from other priorities, reduced operational time, more workload for shoreside maintenance units, etc.), they are worthwhile to explore in order to avert a major afloat staffing issue.

Incentives

If sea duty attractiveness is increased, then an organic shift in officer billet preferences may occur and naturally fill the afloat gap. Increasing sea duty attractiveness is complex and difficult, and a myriad of solutions are currently being explored by the Coast Guard, namely afloat department head and XO bonuses5. Given that these bonuses may not prove to be effective the Coast Guard should be investigating additional incentives, starting with the least desirable afloat units. While monetary incentives through bonuses are very cogent, additional incentives could also be explored, such as offering geographically stable follow-on tours, weighing sea time when considering candidates for post-graduate studies, or more drastically increasing promotability for afloat officers. While none of these is a panacea for increasing sea duty desirability, these among other proposals should be explored.

Select and Direct

The proverbial easy button is to simply fill all afloat billets at the expense of the other communities, forcing sector officers, aviators, and support officers to be chronically understaffed while mandating that all afloat billets be filled. While this solution is theoretically easy to implement from a policy perspective, it may backfire as other operational and support communities suffer more acutely under staffing shortages, degrading joint mission capabilities and depleting the CG ‘brand’. More concerning is forcing officers into billets they have no interest (or expertise) in, leading to dissatisfaction at work, poor performance, and incompetence, all of which can congeal into toxic workplace environments aboard cutters, exacerbating the cutterman shortage through a vicious cycle. However, if afloat billets are prioritized while taking concrete steps to promote afloat habitability and work-life balance, there could be a natural shift in billet preference among the officer corps.

Prioritizing afloat billets at the expense of other communities puts ‘butts in seats’, averting the critical crisis of a rapidly dwindling afloat officer corps, but is not a sustainable long-term solution. It is worth noting, a solution that quickly closes the afloat officer gap while incentivizing officers to return afloat still proves elusive, as the Coast Guard started utilizing monetary incentives over the past 2 assignment years without tangibly reducing either the pending staffing shortage or reducing the number of ‘afloat’ billets gapped.1

Major Overhaul

Finally, if the Coast Guard is unable or unwilling to fill billets and can still meet its statutory mission objectives, it could pursue more extreme options involving a major force restructure of officer billets. This restructuring could take multiple forms, including heavier reliance upon automation technology, reducing afloat officer billets, replacing officers with senior enlisted, reducing shoreside support billets, and mandating additional rotations into the cutter fleet. Each of these solutions harbors unique pitfalls.

A forward-looking solution is to reduce officer manning on future platforms such as the OPC, while simultaneously reducing officer billets on existing high-technology platforms, such as the WMSLs and HEALY. Given that industry vessels operate with manning in the teens for similarly sized vessels, it is entirely feasible to sail Coast Guard cutters with a fraction of the existing billet structure. These vessels rely heavily upon automation technology such as machinery control software (MCS) and utilize a different maintenance philosophy that emphasizes heavy depot periods and limited organization (crew) level maintenance6. However, by doing this the Coast Guard would accept significantly increased operating risks (by reducing organic crew casualty response capabilities), reduced operational effectiveness (fewer personnel to staff operational missions, such as law enforcement teams, migrant watchstanders, or defense missions) a reduced talent pool, among other serious consequences. Over-reliance on technology to reduce manning has proven troublesome in the recent past (see LCS and original WMSL manning concepts), and current automatic control systems do not replace a trained technician. 7

Another major restructuring action would be to fill O3 and O4 billets with more junior (to the billet) officers or senior enlisted personnel. While pursuing either action would serve as a temporary salve, both options harbor risk, officers junior to the traditional grade may lack the appropriate experience to serve as an Operations Officer or Executive Officer for example. Meanwhile, filling junior officer billets with qualified warrant officers or senior enlisted personnel stymies the training pipeline for future commanding officers.

A final drastic option would be to reduce current staff, support, and other non-afloat billets for critical pay grades and enforce an afloat tour requirement at those grades. While a guaranteed way to fill vital afloat jobs, this could have cascading effects on the afloat community, and the officer corps writ large. Reducing the number of support billets could degrade the quality of cutter support and sea duty attractiveness may suffer. This move could lead to an exodus of officers who joined the Coast Guard for different reasons than pursuing a career afloat.

Similar to ‘prioritizing the cutterman’, this would reduce the afloat officer gap, but may end up damaging the officer corps more than it helps. On the surface, alternative solutions are capable of solving the afloat officer gap, but a quick analysis reveals that they would have significant costs that may outweigh their benefits.

Shoal Water on Port and Starboard

On paper there are a variety of straightforward solutions to reduce the U.S. Coast Guard’s afloat and overall officer shortage, including leaning into automation/optimization technology, replacing current afloat officer billets with senior enlisted or more junior officers, restructuring the support officer billets and forcing pay grades to go afloat. Unfortunately, all of these solutions have deleterious consequences that increase the risks of operational units, (while decreasing effectiveness), and potentially damage the long-term health of the Coast Guard officer corps.

To avoid the worst of these consequences, the “least bad” option for the Coast Guard is to prioritize cuttermen and fill afloat billets at the expense of other officer specialties, while simultaneously increasing sea duty attractiveness to mitigate the consequences of selecting and directing. These measures are contingent upon increasing cutter habitability and sea duty attractiveness. Here, the Coast Guard must look to the least habitable cutters —the medium endurance cutter fleet— and work to make these units more desirable by increasing crew comfort underway and maximizing homeport downtime.

Lieutenant Joseph O’Connell is a port engineer for the medium-endurance cutter product line, tasked with planning and managing depot maintenance on five Famous-class cutters. He previously served in USCGC Healy (WAGB-20) as a student engineer and USCGC Kimball (WSML-756) as the assistant engineer officer. He graduated from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in 2015 with a degree in mechanical engineering and from MIT in 2021 with a double master’s of science in naval architecture and mechanical engineering.

These views are presented in a personal capacity and do not necessarily represent the official views of any U.S. government department or agency.

Note: due to the opaque nature of available billet vacancies, vacant afloat billets may not be true shipboard assignments, afloat training organization (ATO), select CG-7 jobs and others may be coded as “afloat,” obfuscating the true shortage.

*3.5% was calculated in the following manner: (Total # of officers-total gapped billets)/(total # of officers). This formula assumes there are no over-billeted positions, which is not entirely accurate, but serves as a decent proxy. 

 References

1. Assignment Year Data from Coast Guard Messages: ALCGOFF 142/04, 062/05, 048/06, 048/07, 082/08, 072/09, 064/10, 038/11, 030/12, 029/13, 025/14, 025/15, 043/16, 057/17, 032/18, 061/19, 068/20, 048/21, 023/22

2. Demise of the Cutterman, CDR Smicklas, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2015/august/demise-cutterman

3. State of the CG 2021, https://www.mycg.uscg.mil/News/Article/2533882/sotcg-get-all-the-details-on-the-commandants-announcements/

4. Report to Congress on CG Procurement, April 2022, https://news.usni.org/2022/04/05/report-to-congress-on-coast-guard-cutter-procurement-15

5. All Coast Notice: 105/20 Officer Afloat Intervention

6. CFR 46 Part 15: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2017-title46-vol1/xml/CFR-2017-title46-vol1-part15.xml

7. Unplanned costs of unmanned fleet, Jonathan Panter, Jonathan Falcone, https://warontherocks.com/2021/12/the-unplanned-costs-of-an-unmanned-fleet/

8. Federal Reserve, Financial and Macroeconomic Indicators of Recession Risk, June 2022;

9. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/financial-and-macroeconomic-indicators-of-recession-risk-20220621.htm

10. https://www.npr.org/2011/07/29/138594702/a-weak-economy-is-good-for-military-recruiting

Featured Image: A member of Maritime Security Response Team West watches as a Sector San Diego MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter approaches the flight deck of the Coast Guard Cutter Waesche (WMSL 751) cutter off the coast of San Diego, March 29, 2023. (U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Taylor Bacon)

capability development

The Politics of Developing the Aegis Combat System, Pt. 1

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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.

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

By 1975, the extremely capable TU- 22M Backfire bomber, which could carry the AS-4 as well as more capable AS-6 and AS-9 missiles, had entered service with Soviet Naval Aviation…the impact of the rapidly evolving Soviet aviation threat to naval units was assessed during the 1960s and firmly established in the Center for Naval Analyses “Countering the Anti-Ship Missile” (or CAMS) Study. Much of the analytical work had already been done as early as 1958 by Richard Hunt of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) who used a series of carefully defined threat models to determine the possible future threat environment that would have to be countered by U.S. naval forces. In this case, the United States found itself responding to offensive, although expected, innovation on the part of its major adversary that had profound implications for the survivability of naval forces at sea.

The Politics Of Aegis Development

Having established the threat-based context within which the Aegis development team was required to operate, let us now turn to the relevant political circumstances which helped or hindered their attempts to adapt technology to meet emerging threats.

In January 1983, the Navy commissioned USS Ticonderoga (CG-47), the first of a new and expensive generation of missile cruisers. The heart of Ticonderoga was its Aegis weapon system, consisting of a phased array radar (SPY-1), a tactical weapon system (to monitor the radar and direct the ship’s antiaircraft missiles) and a battery of surface-to-air missiles. Aegis anti-air warfare (AAW) systems were designed to track, target and engage high numbers of incoming aircraft and cruise missiles. The purpose of the system was to protect Carrier Battle Groups from saturation missile attacks staged by Soviet aircraft and submarines.

However, CG-47 carried more than just an AAW system. Linked to computers which monitored and directed AAW missiles were anti-submarine and surface target sensors and weapons, such as the LAMPS antisubmarine helicopter and the Harpoon cruise missile. With this variety of sensors, weapons and sophisticated tactical displays, CG-47 class ships formed the core of the Navy’s Carrier Battle Group surface defense screen…The essence of the system is its ability to screen and monitor, then track and attack, large numbers of radar contacts simultaneously….

May 2, 1982 – An aerial port bow view of the Aegis guided missile cruiser USS TICONDEROGA (CG-47) underway during sea trials. (Photo via U.S. National Archives)

…The Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance had already developed several varieties of ship-launched air defense missiles, but no one had yet created the kind of radar and missile system that could deal with the threats forecasted by the Applied Physics Laboratory. Work on such a system began in the Bureau of Ordnance in 1959. Dubbed TYPHON…the new system was designed to track as many as 20 radar contacts simultaneously. But the new system’s radars were heavy, bulky, unreliable, and used enormous amounts of electrical power. As a result, the Secretary of Defense cancelled the project in 1963. The Navy was already having trouble successfully operating its deployed anti-aircraft missile and radar systems, and in September 1962 the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) declared a moratorium on further development in order to “establish an orderly Long Term Plan which takes into account the logistic, maintenance, and training problems of the Fleet as well as the technical opportunities presented by scientific progress.”

Priority was given to a program to make existing anti-aircraft missile systems meet their design goals in operations at sea. The Surface Missile Systems (SMS) Project in the recently created Bureau of Naval Weapons (following the merger of the bureaus of Aeronautics and Ordnance) was assigned this task. After TYPHON was cancelled, the CNO ordered SMS to create a new development office, later given the title Advanced Surface Missile System Project or ASMS. The task of ASMS was to find technological solutions to the problems which had made TYPHON so unwieldy and unreliable.

The basic engineering problem was to develop a radar which did not need a mechanically-aimed antenna. The standard tactic in 1963 was to assign one fire control radar antenna (or “illuminator”) to each target, having already used a separate air search radar to identify contacts. The fire control radars were used to guide anti-aircraft missiles to targets within range. When numerous, high-speed simultaneous targets were approaching, mechanically-aimed radars were easily overwhelmed.

The solution, then being developed, was an electronically-aimed, or “phased array” radar, which could move from one target to another almost instantaneously so as to properly distribute radar beams and defensive missiles among a host of targets. As the orders to ASMS from the CNO put it, the Navy needed “more flexible and standardized fire control systems for SAM ships” built around three-dimensional radars and “multipurpose digital computers and digital data transmission.” The mission of the ASMS office was to work with the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Surface Warfare to prepare general and specific “operational requirements” to guide civilian contractors in their efforts to design and build the new equipment…

…In 1969, the Office of the Secretary of Defense made the second change: establishing the Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council (DSARC). DSARC was created to review major development and procurement efforts at three critical stages (project start, engineering development, and production) in their progression from exploratory development to full-scale production. The goal of this administrative innovation was to decentralize authority and responsibility for major acquisition programs to specially chosen project managers while keeping essential control over procurement in the hands of the Secretary of Defense. Both changes worked to the advantage of ASMS. The first gave the project more resources; the second gave the project the periodic opportunity to demonstrate its progress and thus ensure even more resources in the future…

…In 1970, Navy Captain Wayne Meyer, former head of engineering at the Naval Ship Weapon Systems Engineering Station (Port Hueneme, California), was transferred to the Naval Ordnance Systems Command (NAVORD). Appointed manager of the Aegis project, he almost immediately faced problems from outside his office.

The Deputy Chief of Naval Material for Development recommended against further development of RCA’s Aegis radar on the grounds that the cost would not be justified by the potential anti-air warfare benefits. Chief, NAVMAT, did not agree, however, so his Deputy for Development appealed to the OPNAV staff. That there was a need for a new generation of AAW surface escort ships was generally agreed. What was not clear was whether RCA’s solution to radar tracking and targeting problems was cost effective.

The “showdown” in OPNAV set the Deputy Chief for Development (NAVMAT) and his ally, the CNO’s Director of Research, Development, Testing, and Engineering, against the Navy’s Director of Tactical Electromagnetic Programs, the Director of Navy Program Planning, and the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (DCNO) for Surface Warfare, whose offices sponsored the Aegis project and the offices which would procure the Aegis ships. The DCNO for Surface Warfare argued that the Aegis project office had drastically reduced the phased array radar’s weight, power requirements and cost, and that even greater reductions were likely in the near future as the radar system matured. The Director of Navy Program Planning defended the project office’s management of Aegis development and stressed the need to move the new system into the fleet.

The CNO, ADM Elmo Zumwalt, Jr., was left with the decision. His dilemma was that technical specialists in the Aegis project office (supported by their NAVORD and NAVMAT chiefs) and their warfare sponsors in OPNAV (OP-03, the DCNO for Surface Warfare) believed that Aegis was too important to abandon whereas critics noted the cost of fielding Aegis was consuming much of the Navy’s budget for engineering development. At the same time, ADM Zumwalt was committed to replacing the Navy’s World War II-era surface escorts which were still in service. To make this escort replacement program affordable, ADM Zumwalt planned to asked Congress to fund a “high-low” mix of ships, which featured low capability, less expensive escorts for convoy protection and high capability, higher speed escorts for work with carriers. The projected high cost of Aegis made ADM Zumwalt’s task of obtaining funds for large numbers of both “high” and “low” capability ships just that much more difficult.

His first inclination, therefore, was to try to reduce the cost of Aegis. In December 1971, ADM Zumwalt asked the DCNO for Surface Warfare if the Aegis system could be scaled down and procured at a lower cost. The request was passed to CAPT Meyer, who noted that his office had already considered that option in September and rejected it. The position of the Aegis project office was that the original system had to be developed. The Chief, NAVMAT, also believed a scaled-down Aegis was a waste of money.

At that stage ADM Zumwalt considered cancelling the whole project. He was angry because there was no AAW development plan to integrate the various ongoing AAW projects, and he correctly anticipated that Congress would resist funding sufficient numbers of an expensive, nuclear-powered Aegis ship. But cancelling Aegis would leave the Navy without any medium-range air defense and might threaten the future “high” capability surface escort program, which was then in the concept formulation and design stage.

Moreover, the Aegis project could not be faulted on grounds of inefficiency. At the CNO’s direction, the Naval Audit Service had investigated the management of Aegis development. In its March 1972 report, the Audit Service commended the Project Office’s management methodology. Eventually, powered flights of the Navy’s own anti-ship missile (Harpoon) were conducted in July 1972, demonstrating the growing sophistication and potential of anti-ship cruise missiles. This threat could not be ignored and it pressured the CNO into making a decision in favor of Aegis, the only medium-range system which could knock cruise missiles down.

Thus in November 1972, the CNO finally approved a production schedule for the Aegis radar and control system, giving Meyer’s office secure funding, providing the Navy and Congress could agree on a platform to carry the new system.

Over the next four years, however, debates over the proper ship platform for Aegis almost killed the system altogether. Aegis engineers faced a difficult problem: design a system which would fit a range of platforms (large or small, nuclear- or conventionally-powered, destroyers and cruisers), field test it with the Standard Missile (SM-2), and then have RCA produce it in time to match whatever platform the Navy and Congress finally agreed upon.

The challenge for CAPT Meyer was that the platform issue was to a large degree out of his hands. The Navy had begun work on a new surface escort design in 1966. The approaching block obsolescence of the hundreds of destroyers built during World War II required large numbers of replacement ships; advances in threat technology and tactics required increasingly sophisticated (and hence more expensive) ships. The potential conflict between numbers and individual ship capability was laid out in the Major Fleet Escort Study of 1967, written in OPNAV’s Division of Systems Analysis while (then) RADM Zumwalt was its director. As CNO, Zumwalt attempted to act on the conclusions of the study even though he well understood how hard it would be to persuade Congress to fund the construction of large numbers of expensive (and more capable) fleet escorts.

Zumwalt also lacked complete control of shipbuilding. The real boss of ship construction in 1972 was ADM Isaac Kidd, the Chief of NAVMAT, and Kidd had immediate authority over the surface escort program. After a long exchange of memos in 1973, Zumwalt persuaded Kidd not to accelerate the design and production of the anticipated conventionally-powered missile-firing escort so that ship and Aegis development could progress together. Zumwalt hoped to mount Aegis on a conventionally-powered escort; nuclear surface ships were too costly to get in satisfactory numbers, and Zumwalt wanted to guarantee sufficient production to maintain Aegis development and manufacture. The first engineering development model of the Aegis radar had already been tested ashore, and Zumwalt wanted to pace Aegis development to match that of a conventionally-powered platform.

In 1972, CAPT Meyer was assigned to Chief of the Surface Missile Systems Office in NAVORD. He also retained his position as head of the Aegis Project and this expanded assignment signified the degree to which Aegis development dominated surface-based AAW systems.

In 1974, the Naval Ship Systems Command merged with NAVORD to become the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA). The Aegis Project Office became the Aegis Weapon System Office (PMS-403), and CAPT Meyer was promoted to Rear Admiral and made head of PMS-403 as well as Director of NAVSEA’s Surface Combat Systems Division.

May 1983 – Rear Admiral Wayne E. Meyer, USN.

This organizational change was important to Meyer. For the first time, he had access to and control over ship design offices and direct, authorized contact with the sponsors in OPNAV. Before the reorganization, Meyer had headed a weapons system office. After 1974, he directed that office plus two others, including one responsible for the design of a destroyer-size Aegis ship, the other for an Aegis cruiser. After the creation of NAVSEA, Meyer had three sponsoring offices instead of one, and the opportunities for him to act as an organizational entrepreneur increased.

Unfortunately, the struggle over the “proper” Aegis platform was just heating up about the same time the Aegis system itself was changing from just an AAW sensor/weapon system to one which could direct all AAW weapons and sensors for an entire Carrier Battle Group. This modification of Aegis system goals was made, not to build a PMS-403 empire, but because it became technically feasible. The Navy had originally developed digital communication links for carriers and their escorts in order to allow one ship to coordinate and control the massed AAW firepower of a whole group believing that capability eventually would be developed.

RADM Meyer believed that Aegis computers and software could revolutionize the conduct of Carrier Battle Group defensive operations. He saw the Aegis ship as mainly a command center, and only secondarily as an AAW escort. Through 1974, he made his point to his superiors in NAVSEA and NAVMAT and to a variety of offices in OPNAV. By December 1974, Meyer had persuaded the Chief of NAVMAT to consider a redefinition of the Aegis combat system, and it seemed that the Aegis program had entered a new (but logical) stage of development.

PMS-403 ran into two problems however. The first was a debate between the Navy and OSD about the proper design of the Aegis platform. The new CNO, ADM James Holloway, favored a nuclear-powered ship. OSD was opposed to the nuclear-powered alternative on the grounds of cost and numbers: too few ships at too high ($600 million, projected) a cost. OSD also criticized the nuclear-powered escorts (California-class) then being completed as “loaded from stem to stern with technically achievable, but not very practical, systems and subsystems.” As Vice Admiral E.T. Reich, then working in the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense, noted in February 1975, “the Navy had done an inadequate job of specifying overall ship system integration design…systems engineering and total ship design integration have been seriously lacking in post-World War II surface ship acquisitions.” This concern was shared by Meyer, and he argued that the rational solution was to give the combat systems office (PMS-403) authority over the design of the ship – control, not merely the right to negotiate or coordinate. Meyer’s proposed solution was novel but it was not unreasonable.

Unfortunately, Congress intervened and the issue over the proper Aegis platform rapidly became politically controversial, placing several key decisions beyond Meyer’s effective influence. The conference committee report on the FY 1975 Defense Authorization Bill stated that future authorizations for Aegis would be withheld unless the Aegis AAW system was tested successfully under operational conditions and then maintained at sea by “shipboard personnel only.”

The report also demanded that the Navy and OSD agree on the design of the Aegis platform and that the Navy produce a “cohesive integration plan specifying the interface of Aegis with the platform(s) and other weapon and command/control systems.” In July 1974, Congress approved Section 804 of Title VIII of Public Law 93-365 (“The Nuclear Powered Navy”), which stated:

“All requests for authorization or appropriations from Congress for major combatant vessels for the strike forces of the United States Navy shall be for construction of nuclear powered…vessels…”

…To satisfy Congressional demands that Aegis be tested and maintained at sea, RADM Meyer had the land-based prototype systems (radars and computers) moved from the RCA plant in New Jersey to the test ship USS Norton Sound. In just over three months in the summer of 1974, Norton Sound was converted into an AAW ship complete with radars and missiles. By December, Norton Sound’s AAW tracking and fire control capability had been proven superior to that of any other Navy AAW ship, and actual test firings against a variety of targets in January 1975 were a success.

USS Norton Sound (AVM-1) at sea, circa 1980. Ship shown after the SPY-1A Aegis combat system was installed. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

The results were impressive enough to convince the Secretary of the Navy to release money that had been withheld pending the outcome of the sea trials. Even so, Meyer could not resolve the dispute between the Navy and OSD about the Aegis ship design. He favored a mix of both nuclear and conventionally-powered ships, but the procurement costs associated with nuclear propulsion (estimated at 4 to 1 over a conventionally- powered ship) were more than OSD could accept. In January 1975, OSD decided not to ask Congress for any FY 76 funds for Aegis ship construction or conversion. RADM Meyer termed the decision “unacceptable for a stable program in Congress…”‘

…In May 1975, the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee fired another salvo against OSD: “the committee tied the use of RDT&E funds for Aegis to your provision of a plan for a nuclear platform for Aegis… As a start we expect to have Aegis installed promptly on the USS Long Beach” (the first nuclear-powered cruiser, launched in 1961). That same month, the CNO told the Secretary of Defense that Congress would eliminate all Aegis funding if OSD did not stand firmly behind some Aegis platform. The Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee also wrote to President Gerald Ford arguing that major surface combatants should be nuclear-powered and denouncing the influence of “systems analysts” in OSD….

…Behind the scenes, however, the Navy and OSD had been considering an Aegis destroyer powered by gas turbines as a companion to the nuclear-powered Aegis cruiser.

Aegis was finally saved in a House-Senate Conference Committee meeting in September 1975. President Ford greatly influenced this decision by promising to justify in writing the need for a gas turbine Aegis ship. OPNAV also strongly supported Aegis. VADM James Doyle, the Deputy CNO for Surface Warfare (OP-03), was a strong Aegis supporter and he persuaded ADM Holloway to support the proposal to place Aegis in an existing gas turbine-powered destroyer design (the Spruance-class)…

…Meyer was another reason Aegis survived. Trained as a engineer (at University of Kansas, MIT, and at the Naval Postgraduate School), Meyer gradually and deliberately gained the respect of Congressional staff aides and members of Congress. According to one of his civilian assistants, Meyer established his legitimacy as a systems engineer both in the Navy and in Congress in 1975. His argument that Aegis should not fall victim to a dispute over its platform apparently had some effect.

The most important event in 1976, however, was the establishment of the Aegis Shipbuilding Project (PMS-400) that October, with Meyer as Project Manager. PMS-400 was created by combining PMS-403, PMS-389 and PMS-378 into one NAVSEA office. OPNAV sponsors were also combined into one unit, OP-355. PMS-400 was given responsibility for developing and producing the Aegis combat system. It was the first “hardware” organization given authority over shipbuilding, but that was just what RADM Meyer wanted.

He had criticized recent nuclear cruisers on the grounds that their sensor and weapons systems were poorly integrated, and that they lacked the capability to manage Battle Group anti-air and anti-submarine information and weapons in major engagements. His criticisms were supported by officials in OSD and accepted by Congress. The order creating PMS-400 was the Navy’s solution to the systems integration obstacle.

Read Part Two.

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

Podcast

Sea Control 427 – The Impact of Conflict on Trade with Dr. Nizan Feldman

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By Jared Samuelson

Dr. Nizan Feldman discusses his article published in Security Studies and co-authored with Mark Shipton, entitled “Naval Power, Merchant Fleets, and the Impact of Conflict on Trade.” Dr. Nizan Feldman is an assistant professor at the Division of International Relations, School of Political Science, University of Haifa. He is also a senior research fellow at the Maritime Policy & Strategy Research Center, University of Haifa.

Download Sea Control 427 – The Impact of Conflict on Trade with Dr. Nizan Feldman

Links

1. “Naval Power, Merchant Fleets, and the Impact of Conflict on Trade,” Nizan Feldman and Mark Shipton, Security Studies, December 8, 2022.
2. Nizan Feldman’s Twitter Feed.

Jared Samuelson is Co-Host and Executive Producer of the Sea Control podcast. Contact the podcast team at Seacontrol@cimsec.org.

Brendan Costello edited and produced this episode.

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.