Innovation and Lessons Learned

March 23, 2013 Guest Author 5 Comments

There have been some interesting posts in the past week or so on spurring naval innovation that are worth the time to read. An article we cross-posted Wednesday, by LCDR Jason Schwarzkopf, dealt with fostering broad, collaborative discussion on tactical and practical naval matters and it received a well-reasoned response from CDR Salamander at his synonymous site.

Another post, by Robert Kozloski, “The Politics of Naval Innovation Revisited,” laid out some of the fascinating political aspects of working through the bureaucracy to champion the innovation that might develop out of such discussions advocated by Jason (especially innovation of a material/technological nature). One of the findings Robert highlights from a 1994 U.S. Naval War College paper is that:

“Programs that have the potential to be truly innovative will have a better chance of being fielded if promoted as evolutionary rather than revolutionary systems.”

Meanwhile at the Harvard Business Review, Maxwell Wessell discussed the (in his view false) business phenomenon of ‘high-end disruption’ in “Stop Reinventing Disruption,” and thereby laid out a good definition of classic disruptive innovation:

“Start with a barely-good-enough product that captures consumers too cheap to buy the existing, expensive product, then make it better and better until one day, it’s as good as, or better, than the incumbent product

These last two articles relate only tangentially to what I’d like to focus on for the rest of the post, but they make for good reads and help one understand how successful innovation typically works – through incremental and evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, approaches. This is not to say true revolutions in naval affairs don’t happen – but to be successfully embraced by the bureaucracy (and not just a senior-level champion) they need to not be oversold and show initial incremental advantages that are cost neutral, or provide a cost benefit.

Returning to Jason’s post, he touches on something that I’ve also pondered – namely why there is no well-run site for professional naval discussion that can take things beyond UNCLAS. There are plenty of UNCLAS models for how pieces of such a site could be structured, and most in enlisted/JO to mid-grade year groups have enough experience using such web-based tools that their absence from the professional sphere is all the more keenly felt.

Sailor Bob provides an example of the free-wheeling message board-format, but its unofficial nature means there is no formal on-ramp to capture and endorse the true kernels of wisdom and lessons learned that frequently appear. This is not to discount the importance of the informal route, but the lack does nothing to alleviate the “perception of ideas flowing into a doctrinal “black hole”” that Jason notes, and it is of course limited to UNCLAS.

Blogs such as ours and journals such as USNI’s Proceedings also aim to host professional discussions and can focus thought on a particular issue or innovation. Yet they are similarly UNCLASS and the time-delay to voice one’s thoughts, from hours to months, can markedly lag the near-real-time speed with which today’s generations expect to have conversations. Yes, journals provide a valuable service by developing and refining ideas through peer-review, establishing a threshold of maturity prior to providing their endorsement that something is fit to print, and subsequently exposing the idea to a broader base of critique and consideration.

However, the core ideas in an article could (potentially) be exposed to many more readers and thinkers, more quickly, and go through many more cycles of reaction and refinement in the time it takes for a print version to come out. Further, many with a great idea – or even just a nuanced piece of insight or feedback – may not, as Jason alluded, have the time to type out a great piece of literature. In a sense it’s a trade-off between quantity and quality, but if done well the diminished quality is only in the writing polish as opposed to the ideas themselves.

Another model, which does a good job of rapidly focusing many minds on a single idea or theme, is the series of online wargames run out of the U.S. Naval Post-graduate School (NPS) called MMOWGLI – Massively Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging Internet. These wargames have allowed anonymous-but-verified users to collaborate and contribute their two cents on topics from counter-piracy to electromagnetic maneuvers. With official backing, NPS has been able to run a counterpart on the classified side. The only distinct drawback that I’ve so far discerned (aside from the inability to participate of many on NMCI computers) is that determining the topic of MMOWGLI efforts is a top-down approach. So if someone has a great idea for a topic not in discussion they have to wait and hope it falls under the purview of the next game. In short, it can’t do everything, but is certainly worth sustaining.

In my last active duty assignment at N86/N96, one of my jobs was project manager for SWONET. This meant essentially acting as liaison between the Navy and the contractors who actually ran the site. One of my priorities was transforming SWONET into a more useful tool for surface warfare officers (SWOs), including swapping and sharing lessons learned – essentially a combination Sailor Bob/Google Docs for the professionally minded, leveraging the fact that it was access-controlled to navy.mil emails and that discussions could be held at the For Official Use Only (FOUO)-level. The contractors did a decent job of enhancing the site, and the message board was only one tool among many that were upgraded. Unfortunately, as we were rolling out the updated platform we ran into the Era of Austerity and the site was shut down as a cost-saving measure.

So what does this survey of web-based tools show? First, that there’s no go-to site for collaborating with one’s counterparts or for recording someone’s bits of wisdom (or just data points), even at the UNCLAS level. Second, that there are in fact demonstrated ways to do such a site.

In my mind a site can be developed at low cost in a way that accounts for the fears of stifled discussion if it focuses on these steps:

Host duplicate NIPR/SIPR sites at a command where the development of ideas is its core mission – whether an academic setting like NPS or the Naval War College, or tactically/operationally focused like NWDC.
Let users remain anonymous (once verified through NPC) with their own usernames. This does not mean a typical terms-of-use regulating conduct need not be enforced. Keep it professional, keep it respectful (regardless of rank – which would not be displayed), or lose your access.
In addition to the message board, provide an easy-to-use searchable repository of lessons learned to help provide quantifiable data. This could be done by integrating the existing Navy Lessons Learned site with the discussion forum and making it more flexible. While not every lesson learned will necessarily be reviewed by a flag, having one’s notes on a particular exercise or solution to a similar problem available for a counterpart in another command might be just as useful.
There’s further opportunity to leverage a single-stop “official” collaborative site, if it comes about – from letting users share copies of command instructions and useful forms, reducing time spent “reinventing the wheel”, to using the discussion forums to inform future MMOWGLIs.

One of the big lessons learned of the past decade of Navy experimentation with web-based tools is to focus on the tools that are lacking, rather than trying to duplicate what already exists (often for free) even if it is unofficial. Right now, however, it’s clear that there are things that can’t be done unofficially and that only an official site can accomplish.

h/t to BJ for the HBR link.

LT Scott Cheney-Peters is a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve and the former editor of Surface Warfare magazine. He is the founding director of the Center for International Maritime Security and holds a master’s degree in National Security and Strategic Studies from the U.S. Naval War College.

The opinions and views expressed in this post are his alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Department of Defense or the U.S. Navy.

Capability Analysis

The Carrier and National Security Variables

March 19, 2013 Guest Author 2 Comments

The report At What Cost a Carrier? published by CNAS and written by CAPT Henry J. Hendrix contains all the necessary ingredients for a simple model-structuring discussion about the validity and viability of the “Carrier Force” concept. With such a model, individual variables can be discussed or discarded without undermining the need to answer the leading cost question or the model itself. These are the basic variables we get with a carrier:

Influence: The amount of influence a navy can project on the world is indirectly measured by carrier military power – sets of “90,000 tons of diplomacy” – and not limited to it. In fact, the rest most of the world uses other means to influence events in order to achieve favorable outcomes. Other nations may want a carrier but, because they cannot afford one, have to look for alternatives.
Cost: The cost of achieving a carrier’s desired capabilities, whether measured by the price of procurement, life-cycle cost, or the cost to restore damaged capabilities during armed conflict. Inversely, not building carriers incurs the cost of losing industrial base and know-how.
Risk: This is commonly understood as vulnerability from a lack of assets (the risk of going without), but there are also consequences of losing a carrier. The magnitude of lost military power, cost, influence, and image in such a case would enormous.

Military effectiveness-related attributes, like striking power and affordability, are relatively easy to measure and remain at the center of discussions. On the other hand, political-value calculations are less structured (and harder to quantify) but probably represent the biggest threat to the carrier-centric concept, especially if linked with a shift in strategy. What is the acceptable Cost to have X amount of Influence? Or to reduce X amount of Risk? Is increasing Influence worth increasing Risk? What is our strategy to have Influence on opponent?

There are many examples of proposals aimed at undermining the delicate balance between the above attributes.

During the 1980s, Surface Action Groups (SAGs) built around battleships (then still in service) were considered partial substitutes for Carrier Battle Groups (CBGs). It was a compromise, which in effect supplemented carriers but did not replace them.

In the same category we can place contemporary “Influence Squadrons.”

“If the Navy rethinks the role of Carrier Strike Groups (Ferrari) and deploys new, scaled-down Influence Squadrons (Ford), the result will be 320 hulls in water for three-quarters the price,” said Capt. Hendrix. This fits well with the trends of other nations, purchasing LPH-class helicopter carriers as affordable naval air power, and spurs grim predictions for carriers from bloggers:

Were Humphrey a betting man, then he’d be willing to place a small wager that within 20 years, there will be six nations operating aircraft carriers (down from nine today), and only two of them will be in the West…

Sir Humphrey depicts the world (almost) without carriers and shows how easily – through the cascading effects of delayed deployments, reduced training, and backlogs in nuclear refueling – sequestration could drastically reduce U.S. naval air power (or its useful part). In this context, if the variables above are the right ones, than DF-21 is the modern equivalent of the Star Wars project and cruise missiles from Cold War-era. Development of these weapon systems created such strong financial pressures on their opponent that they ultimately put the enemy’s whole system on the edge of collapse. DF-21 is presented as a weapon targeting carriers’ vulnerabilities, but in a way it becomes strategic weapon with political calculations behind it.

Ballistic missiles represent yet another area of exploration, which potentially could result in changing the prime positions of carriers in a national defense portfolio. We’ve lately seen the latest attempts to reinvent conventionally armed Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs). These concepts are not new and in this case risk-calculation will probably prevail, as launching ballistic missiles from submerged submarines creates a danger of triggering nuclear conflict as the adversary may have a hard time differentiating the conventional launch from the nuclear variety.

The impression is that there is no threat today to aircraft carriers’ primacy because they still represent such a large capability to influence events. Experimenting with other alternatives shouldn’t be viewed as a budgetary threat to carriers but rather as a way to limit the risk if an opponent changes the balance between Influence, Cost, and Risk in favor of other means or weapon systems. The time elapsed between construction of HMS Dreadnought and the Jutland Battle was only 10 years. In the battle, the British Grand Fleet validated the concept of the distant blockade of Germany, but at the same time forced Hochseeflotte to switch resources toward U-Boats, which in turn made the Grand Fleet obsolete in maintaining a distant blockade. Preparing defensive measures against the new threat was costly during the war and forgotten in peacetime.

Przemek Krajewski alias Viribus Unitis is a blogger In Poland. His area of interest is broad context of purpose and structure of Navy and promoting discussions on these subjects In his country

The Lighter Side

Global Warming Warms U.S. and DPRK Relations

March 16, 2013 Guest Author Leave a comment

Maritime Satire Warning: The following is a work of satire in the spirit of our International Maritime Satire Week. It is a piece of fiction intended to elicit insight through the use of satire and written by those who do not make a living being funny – so it’s not serious and very well might not be funny.

U.S. and DPRK relations improve after North Korea unexpectedly attacks rising sea levels in the Sea of Japan with short-range missiles.

Kimg Jong-Un plots his move as the sweltering environment mocks his national sovereignty.

In a surprise development, North Korea has made the first move towards peace amid deteriorating relations. Over the past month, as the U.S. and China appear to have come to a consensus over North Korean sanctions, the regime’s vitriol has convinced some North Korea’s intentions for its nuclear program have turned ominous. Early on Friday the 15th, Kim Jung-un was seen to have extended an olive branch to American policymakers through unilateral military action against the rising sea levels in the Sea of Japan.

USPACOM, Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, made statements 13 March 13 indicating global warming and rising sea levels as the U.S.’s greatest security concerns in the region. Not two days later, Kim Jong-un ordered a massive strike against the Sea of Japan with KN-02 short-range missiles. This is a particularly intriguing new development, since the DPRK has used her strike capabilities to both whip up domestic fervor and intimidate her increasing number of detractors. The use of the DPRK missile program as a tool of peace is a shock to veteran policy analysts.

Due to moves by the DPRK, plans accelerate to use the US "missile umbrella" to counter inclement weather. — Due to moves by the DPRK, plans accelerate to use the U.S. “missile umbrella” to counter inclement weather.

In an apparent sign of approval the U.S. has moved new interceptor missile batteries to Alaska, increasing the firepower aimed at the Gaian enemy. Admiral Locklear states, “Certainly weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past. We are on super typhoon 27 or 28 this year in the Western Pacific. The average is about 17.” As American, South Korean, and North Korean officials meet in private about the potential for coordinating military actions against threatening environmental change, word has already spread of the resumption of six-party talks next week. The U.S. and PRC have already announced that they plan to drop all talk of the new sanctions at the U.N.

Strategic Outlook

Maritime Security and National Identity

March 15, 2013 Guest Author Leave a comment

A recent sign posted on the window of a Beijing restaurant refuses to serve certain nationalities due to current international maritime disputes between state actors. Sarah Danruo Wang analyzes how historic disputes on sea (and on land) shape national identity

As I near graduation at the University of Toronto, I keep thinking about vignettes of my incredibly awkward, enlightening, and unforgettable first year that really shaped some of my research interests today. In one such episode, as I was researching a paper on the Franco-Prussian War I encountered an odd little anecdote about how, decades back, a group of people watched an opera so cathartic that when it concluded, Belgium was born. Since then I have researched what it means to be “German” through the ambitions of Bismarck; “Soviet Russian” during Lenin’s implementation of national language policies; “Greek” during the fall of Constantinople; “Czechoslovakian” amidst such an unstable geography; and “Azerbaijani” in a seemingly ethnically homogenous, enigmatic Iran. Personally, I was born in Beijing and I have lived for four to five years each in Ottawa, the San Francisco Bay Area, Vancouver, and now Toronto – a mobile life that renders me identity-less. If our characters are formed through our reactions to our struggles, is a national identity similarly (re)created through the interpretation of conflict?

A restaurant in Beijing has a faded sign on its window: “This shop does not receive the Japanese, the Philippines (sic), the Vietnamese, and dog.” I admit that I am not shocked by this almost boastful racism from my hometown. Chinese signs were once the tangible symbols of losing something in translation, yet this one is succinctly clear. Why specifically these three countries? It turns out that each has a maritime dispute with China. China is obviously at odds with Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands; and with Vietnam and the Philippines over islands in the South China Sea. Although the sign is an isolated incident, provoking nasty reactions from the nationalities in question, the state has not asked the owner to remove the sign as the owner indicates that “this is my own conduct.” What many news outlets did not mention is that this sign is eerily reminiscent of a well-told Chinese story of a sign reading, “Chinese and Dogs Not Admitted”, in Shanghai’s Huangpu Park in the 1920s. Although Chinese people were barred from entering local parks, the exact wording of any signs is disputed. Nevertheless, the restaurateur’s homage, grafted from previous experiences to today’s prejudices, exhibits the tension between perceived relative statuses.

When I was living in the United States, I recited the pledge of allegiance every day. When I returned to Canada, I did not remember the words to the national anthem, let alone the Royal Anthem that we had to sing on the way out of every assembly. I watched my social studies teacher be the only one in the auditorium refusing to stand for “God Save the Queen” because of an alternate stanza belittling the Scots. The nationalism in my Chinese peers and their parents was diluted at best – cultural detachment and youthful apathy. I want to blame the decreased interest in politics on the events and aftermath of 1989, but I now know better, that it was the decision to prioritize economic opportunity, and the spread of a material culture in my generation.

But with a foreign conflict, specifically one that makes the average Chinese feel cheated over our poignant, invaded past, the Chinese public do not disappoint. A traditional Chinese hero is Zheng He, whom we proudly claimed to have travelled the seas centuries before the Europeans. Yet we rarely note that Zheng is not ethnically Han but of Muslim Hui descent. More recent victories and defeats at sea during the Sino-Japanese conflicts of the late 19th century were captured primarily in the Japanese visual style (see image below).

Since the 1990s, when the nation was once again challenged by non-governmental oversight and the retreat of ideology, China has faced and reacted mostly to land-based or conceptual conflicts. China Can Say No, published in 1996, rejected Americanization of culture. The bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 by NATO produced protests that were verbally supported by Vice-president Hu Jintao. The 2008 Summer Olympics was a triumphant display of cohesion and unity. And now, the historical antagonism with Japan is suddenly reignited over rocks. Is this solidarity perhaps just a defense mechanism to perceived (cultural or national) insecurity, rooted in a historical perspective of either relative inferiority or regional supremacy? Or perhaps, it is just a bit more comforting to confront the other in the company of one’s peers?

As for Canada, the Rush-Bagot Treaty of 1818 demilitarized the Great Lakes region by permitting only one naval vessel each for Britain and the United States on Lake Ontario. This demilitarization was seen as a first step testing the precarious trust after the War of 1812. Furthermore, the Naval Service Act of 1910 created the Canadian Navy with second-hand British vessels, the HMCS Niobe and HMCS Rainbow, and established the Naval College in Halifax. Opponents derided the effort, calling the formation the “tin-pot Navy”. Yet this was a clear assertion of Canada’s self-protection autonomy – separate from, but loyal to the Commonwealth.

Canada’s maritime security hasn’t always been life-or-death serious. In 2002, Denmark erected a flag and left some Danish vodka on Hans Island in a bizarre attempt to provoke a reaction over a rock that burdens Canadian-Danish relations. Five years later, Russia similarly planted a flag in the seabed of the Arctic to prove “the Arctic is Russian,” illustrating that Russian cooperation and aggression will perpetually be a mercurial cycle. Current maritime concerns in the Arctic revolve around Canada’s ability to react to potential oil spills and pollution through drilling and shipping, and Ottawa’s assistance to indigenous maritime development.

I do not want to poeticize maritime divides, but any fifth grade geography class reveals that the continents were once fitted together like a finished puzzle known as Pangaea. It is appropriate that with continental drift, distance produced distinct people. Only with the advances of maritime technology, ambition, and the lust for adventure led to the discovery of the New World. Shipping and maritime security determined wealth and relative power, which enabled the early flourishing of The Netherlands and divorced England from the European continent.

Before man conquered the skies, maritime passages were the medium for the arrival of the other. It is ironic that for all the efforts China used to build a wall to keep barbarians on horses out, it was defeated by other barbarians on ships at its ports.

The dividing seas also facilitated asymmetric development, ideological escape, and the spread of commerce. The Austro-Hungarian Empire’s lack of a navy exacerbated its economic stagnation as it steadily lost its maritime-efficient proxies through successions or independence. A century later, a Russian ambassador asked why the Czechs needed a navy when the country was obviously landlocked (the Czech representative replied that he did not understand why Russians needed a ministry of cultural affairs). Lastly, incidents like the Komagata Maru and Pearl Harbor shape our collective sense of how national and human security is simultaneously enhanced and endangered by the oceans, as trouble can be carried on the tides.

The racist sign in the Chinese restaurant, among the vast stimuli of a city like Beijing, indicates how disputes trickle down to even the obscurest of places. Conflict on the seas – both today’s and from times past – shapes who we are, what we fear, and how we react.

Sarah Danruo Wang is currently a third year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto studying international relations, philosophy, and fine art history. Her research interests from first year has steadily moved east from Germany to the former Czechoslovakia to Russia and include broader issues in identity politics, EU and NATO eastward enlargement, and education policy. She has previously researched for the Advocacy Project, the Department of History at the University of Toronto, and the G8 Research Group.

This article was re-published by permission and appeared in original form at The Atlantic Council of Canada.

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.