Tactics and Warfighting

Fighting DMO, Pt. 4: Weapons Depletion and the Last-Ditch Salvo Dynamic

5 Comments

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.

By Dmitry Filipoff

Introduction

Modern naval combat can consist of forces firing dozens if not hundreds of missiles at one another’s fleets and salvos. These volumes of fire can be unleashed within mere minutes as forces look to launch offensive and defensive salvos that are large and dense enough to kill and defend warships. Yet these sophisticated weapons are available in limited numbers and require long lead times to produce.1 Only a fraction of these inventories are available for immediate use given how the magazines of the operating force’s platforms are distinct from the weapon stocks they draw from. Militaries can be limited to using the weapon stocks they had shortly before conflict broke out, and a short conflict may be decided by what was mainly fielded in platform magazines. Unless the conflict becomes especially prolonged and the industrial base grows significantly, the inventory of precision weapons will steadily diminish and pose critical constraints. A core operational challenge is how to carefully manage weapons depletion while still unleashing massed fires.

Weapons depletion is in its own right a powerful force for shaping warfighting behavior and securing major operational advantage. The larger consequences of depletion can include steep decreases in unit availability and overall operations tempo on a theater-wide scale. This challenge is especially severe for the U.S. Navy given how long it would take a depleted U.S. warship to travel out of a Pacific battlespace, rearm in safe havens, and return to the fight.2 In a short, sharp conflict featuring intense salvo exchanges, a warship that depletes itself only once may very well miss the rest of the war.

The concentration and distribution of a force will flex and evolve as its platforms suffer depletion. As commanders look to employ mass fires, they must be mindful of how to spread depletion across the force, how to interpret the adversary’s expenditures, and how inventory pressures can be manipulated through the last-ditch salvo dynamic.

Distribution and Depletion

One of the critical advantages of massing fires from distributed forces is the ability to more effectively manage depletion. A distributed force fielding a vast array of overlapping firepower makes for an especially large and shared magazine. This offers a much greater chance of mustering enough firepower to overwhelm robust defenses while achieving a better spread of depletion. Depletion can be spread across a broader scope of platforms and occur more gradually across the force, rather than all at once for individual strike platforms and force packages. Spreading depletion prolongs distribution, because every depleted asset makes the remaining force less distributed and more concentrated.

Some platforms and force packages certainly have sufficiently deep magazines to launch large enough volumes of fire on their own, with less of a need for outside contributing salvos. But large standalone salvos diminish a core tenet of distribution – maintaining many spread out threats to complicate adversary targeting. Forces that fire large standalone salvos can quickly give away that they just depleted most of their offensive firepower, reducing their value as targets and diminishing the distribution of the broader force.

The more a platform has to discharge a large number of missiles to contribute fires, the more easily an adversary can ascertain the composition and depth of their remaining inventory. A U.S. destroyer that fires 30-40 Maritime Strike Tomahawks in a single large salvo can give away that it has little remaining long-range anti-ship weaponry. By comparison, massing fires from a broader array of distributed forces makes it harder for an adversary to ascertain when platforms and formations have depleted their individual magazines.

Aggregation allows firepower to be combined in smaller portions from individual launch platforms. Ideally each launch platform can afford to expend only a small fraction of its magazine at a time, if many other platforms are doing the same with proper timing and coordination. Individual platforms will be able to sustain distributed offensive threats for longer than if they had fired off large, independent salvos of their own.

However, as inventory begins to dwindle across a distributed force, mass fires can cause larger portions of the force to reach the end of their magazines around a similar timeframe. This could radically collapse the offensive posture and capability of the distributed fleet if not carefully managed. By delaying magazine depletion at the individual platform level, mass fires risk magazine depletion across a broader portion of the force at a later time.

Consider a fleet that has four distributed warships available for contributing fires. If one warship emptied its entire offensive inventory per strike, then the remaining force becomes increasingly concentrated and predictable as to where the next several strikes may come from. Instead, if those four warships combine fires to launch a quarter of their offensive inventory per strike, the distributed force posture endures for more time and across more attacks. But all of those warships would deplete at a similar time, triggering a larger drop in force distribution compared to depleting only one platform per strike through the first scheme. By spreading depletion to prolong distribution, mass fires trade smaller decreases in distribution earlier in the fight in exchange for larger decreases later on.

Having deeper magazines or more strike platforms reduces the share of magazine depth each attacker must deplete to contribute to mass fires, and further delays the broader depletion of the force. A distributed force posture can be preserved by having a large number of assets with overlapping firepower, or rotating assets quickly enough to replace those that have depleted their magazines. The goal is to maintain enough available firepower over time so the distribution of the force can endure.

Asymmetric Weapons Depletion and Operational Risk

There are important asymmetries in how warships can deplete their offensive missile firepower versus their defensive firepower. One asymmetry is that commanders may be deeply uncomfortable keeping large surface warships in the battlespace when they are low on defensive firepower but fuller on offensive firepower compared to the reverse situation. Another key asymmetry is that defensive firepower is mostly drawn from the local magazines of the naval forces under attack, while offensive firepower can be drawn from the many magazines of a broader distributed force. Leveraging these key asymmetries can secure operational advantage.

Even if a ship survives an intense attack, being on the wrong side of firing effectively first can take the form of being low on defensive firepower while still full on unused offensive firepower. These units can still remain offensive threats, but the volume of fire required to overwhelm their defenses is substantially lowered. This can force commanders to pull these units out of the fight for the sake of survival and replenishing their defenses.

In this sense, firing effectively first is not only defined by scoring successful hits and kills, it can also mean depleting enough of the adversary’s defenses that commanders no longer feel confident in pressing their attack or maintaining warships in a contested battlespace. If those depleted warships are in escort roles and are responsible for defending other ships, then those ships could be forced to withdraw as well. By depleting defensive firepower to the point that warships must be withdrawn before they can attack, those warships’ offensive inventory can be removed from the fight before it can be used, thereby suffering depletion indirectly.

The battle of nerves in naval salvo warfare is partly a function of accepting risk for the sake of minimizing weapons depletion. A more efficient missile exchange tolerates more risk, demanding stronger nerves on the part of commanders. Otherwise, the desire to build more confidence into offensive or defensive engagements can make commanders waste their munitions. A defending warship that fires too many anti-air weapons per incoming missile wants to bolster its odds of near-term survival, but it can deplete itself earlier than warranted and increase risk in follow-on engagements. A warship that fires an excessive amount of anti-ship weapons can risk too much overkill and leave it with little offensive capability for later in the fight.

But commanders who attempt to precisely optimize their offensive salvos in a bid to just barely overwhelm targets with enough fire will risk much greater uncertainty than those willing to accept overkill by expending more volume. Indeed in a form of combat featuring salvos with dozens of missiles that only need to strike a single hit, overkill is more likely than not. Instead, it is the degree of overkill that separates what is sufficient from what is wasteful. Achieving a small degree of offensive overkill can be the more efficient outcome, since attacking with an insufficient volume of fire can lead to waste by making follow-on salvos once again pay the price of breaking through strong defenses to threaten a target. With too much overkill, a unit or commander witnessing a heavy volume of fire pouring into a dead or dying friendly warship may take some small satisfaction in knowing the enemy just suffered depletion far out of proportion to their target.

A key asymmetry is how the risk of depletion through overkill is much more manageable for offensive fires because of the greater ability to mass those weapons from across many forces. Defensive inventory has far less margin to work with because of the isolating effect of the radar horizon on ship self-defense, where there is little ability for ships to leverage a broader shared magazine against sea-skimming threats. An attack on a naval formation can consist of fires pulled from a wide variety of forces, but the formation will often have only its own magazine to defend itself. And with that magazine, the formation may not only have to match the incoming volume of fire, but exceed it to ensure survival. Matching the attacking volume with only one interceptor fired per incoming missile may not be enough to confidently survive a dynamic where a warship cannot afford to take a single hit, yet the attacker can afford to have every attacking missile take a hit except one.

For defensive volume of fire, there can be a thin line between what is sufficiently dense and what is wastefully excessive. Firing just one more interceptor per incoming missile can dramatically increase expenditure in a single engagement and result in a warship facing follow-on threats with a far more depleted magazine. But as mentioned, defensive depletion not only increases risk to the individual platform, it threatens to take that platform’s offensive fires out of the fight prematurely. The broader offensive inventory that is available for massed fires can therefore be threatened by the localized manner of defensive engagements and their especially depleting nature.

Range advantages convert to depletion advantages, where forces with longer-ranged weapons can inflict asymmetric depletion against their shorter-ranged opponents. These threatening dynamics are more probable for navies that can be up against anti-ship weapons with much greater ranges than their own, such as the current range disparity the U.S. Navy is suffering against many Chinese anti-ship missiles.

If two opposing forces have a major disparity in the range of anti-ship weapons, then the forces with less range can be forced to travel hundreds of miles while under fire before they can finally be in a position to attack. These warships can be depleting their defensive firepower while still pressing forward in an increasingly risky bid to bring their offensive firepower to bear. By comparison, the longer-ranged side will deplete far fewer defenses to make their attacks, if they have to deplete those defenses at all. Warships with a significant offensive range advantage are not only in a much better position to fire first, they can fire their salvos and then simply reverse course to keep themselves out of reach while preserving their defensive firepower. The outranged fleet can be pressing forward without much of its defensive firepower left, while the other fleet can be in the much more comfortable position of pulling back with most of its defensive firepower remaining. It is unlikely that the fleet with shorter-ranged weapons would be in a position to catch up to the opposition in many circumstances. Because of the vast distances involved and the large speed differential between anti-ship missiles and warships, it seems improbable that surface warships will run each other down on the open ocean in the age of missile warfare. 

Increased payload range can also translate into increased reload speed, where shifting more of the burden of maneuver onto the payload shortens the logistical lifeline of the platform. The longer the range of the weapon, the less the platform has to travel between its launch areas and rearmament points, shortening the episodic drops in force distribution while offering higher rates of fire. This effect is especially potent for aviation, such as how aircraft firing JASSMs at 230 miles can have much lower reload rates and availability of fires compared to aircraft firing the 1,000-mile extreme range variant of JASSM (Figure 1).3 An asymmetry in weapon range between opposing forces can translate into asymmetry in reload speeds, and make the distribution of a force more resilient against depletion than its adversary’s.

Figure 1. Reverse range rings centered on Taiwan illustrate the area from which targets on the island can be fired upon by 1,000-mile and 230-mile variants of JASSM. Aircraft firing the longer-ranged variant can benefit from shorter journeys between launch points and airbases, such as those on Guam, allowing for quicker rearmament, more enduring force distribution, and higher rates of fire. (Author graphic)

Massed Fires and Uneven Depletion Across Platform Types

As waves of massed fires ensue, the distribution of depletion across the platforms of a force can become uneven. A distributed force may prefer to prioritize its longest-ranged fires, its most common weapons, or other payloads for other reasons, which depletes the specific platforms that launch them. This sets the stage for operational tradeoffs and an evolving risk profile, since one type of platform’s fires can preserve the inventory of another’s, and different platforms have different magazine depths and timeframes for reloading. Uneven depletion can gradually shift the burden of massing fires onto platforms that must assume more risk to continue the fight, encouraging a force to carefully consider how to distribute weapons depletion across platforms over time.

The anti-ship Tomahawk will offer long range and broad magazine depth across many platforms, making it an ideal weapon for massing fires. But heavily prioritizing the use of the anti-ship Tomahawk can make surface forces and submarines among the first to deplete their anti-ship missile inventories, and where these platforms can take many days to reload and return to the fight. The weapons that can contribute the most to mass fires can suffer the most depletion, putting the distribution of the force at risk down the line.

As the fight continues and warships become more depleted, more of the U.S. burden of assembling mass fires against warships can gradually accrue to aviation because aviation can reload much faster than warships. This is especially true for carrier air wings, and carriers have the deepest magazines of all afloat combatants, potentially making them the last warships standing when it comes to remaining inventory after intense exchanges.4 Yet this would pose an especially concentrated posture to an adversary and force air wings to take major risks in deploying the remaining firepower. Preserving the anti-ship inventory of warships is therefore critical in forestalling a need to rely more heavily on aviation-based strikes, which would tie down numerous aircraft to muster volume of fire, pull carriers deeper into the battlespace, and assume more risk.

Yet this relationship is paradoxical. Preserving warship-based inventory can also take the form of leaning more on aviation fires earlier in the fight. Therefore a balance can be defined between the proportion of fires to come from different platform types at different phases of the fight, in order to manage how the risk profile of depletion evolves. A commander that carefully balances a combination of air wing depletion and warship depletion earlier in the fight can better delay the prospect of air wings shouldering more of the burden. Or a commander could heavily favor bombers in the opening phases, which can preserve warship-based fires for later phases, which preserves carriers. Depletion does not necessarily mean firing options have to get far worse as time goes on, depending on how commanders balance risk with regard to what combinations of launch platforms they favor depleting at different periods of the fight.

Submarines offer one of the most critical advantages in managing depletion through the highly favorable tradeoffs that come with sinking ships with torpedoes instead of missiles. The undersea domain is far less saturated with warship defenses compared to above the waterline. The cost of a missile salvo large enough to credibly threaten a group of several warships could easily exceed $100 million and require expending dozens of missiles.5 Credibly threatening the same group would require only several torpedoes, which could cost ten percent or less of the missile salvo.6 A single lethal torpedo strike can substitute for the dozens of missiles that could be required to overwhelm the same warship from above water.

By sailing far into contested littorals and laying near ports, bases, and maritime chokepoints, submarines are much more likely to be in a position to sink ships with fuller magazines compared to other platforms and deprive the adversary of inventory. However, closing the distance for torpedo strikes increases risks to submarines. The operational implications include weighing tradeoffs in the amount of risk commanders are willing to accept for their valuable submarines, versus the risk that could be incurred by depleting the broader missile magazine of the distributed force. Risking submarines in torpedo attacks can spare broader missile inventory and vice versa.

Aircraft and ground-based launchers certainly carry far fewer missiles per loadout compared to a large surface warship. Their shallower magazine depth substantially shortens the interval between launching fires and reloading, even if each of their fires is limited to a few missiles. But these platforms can typically access weapons stocks to rearm at a fraction of the time it takes a warship to do the same. Their shallow magazine depth can make their availability for fires more episodic than warships, but their episodes of depletion are not nearly as steep or prolonged. Land-based forces in the form of Chinese launchers on the mainland would have particularly more endurance than expeditionary stand-in forces that heavily depend on lengthy logistical lifelines to sustain their fires in a long fight.

The nature of uneven depletion will make for especially challenging command decisions. Commanders may face pressure to maintain depleted assets in the fight for the sake of posing some semblance of a distributed posture to the adversary. Commanders weighing such decisions would have to consider whether the adversary’s tracking of expenditure may have been accurate enough to provide the critical insight that portions of the distributed force are depleted. Operational behavior may significantly change based on one’s estimate of an adversary’s depletion and if asymmetric depletion has emerged between opposing forces.

Tracking adversary depletion is a critical operational imperative, but the desire to understand the specific composition and volume of missile salvos can place major demands on ISR and decision-making. Forces may struggle to distinguish between different types of anti-ship or anti-air missiles at long range and in the midst of battle. But knowing the type of launch platform narrows down the potential type of fires, where the tracking challenge is simplified by how certain weapons are exclusive to certain kinds of platforms. An F/A-18 firing on a warship is most likely firing Harpoons or LRASMs, and a Chinese warship firing on a ship is most likely firing YJ-83s or YJ-18s. Weapons that have longer range and are compatible with a broader variety of launch platforms will complicate the adversary’s ability to track expenditure and form estimates of depletion.

Defying Destruction and the Last-Ditch Salvo Dynamic

The adage of “firing effectively first” may be better described as striking effectively first, since two opposing naval formations can still destroy each other even if one fires after the other. In defining what it means to fire effectively first, an ideal kill of a warship or platform can include putting it out of action before it had a chance to use its offensive firepower. Similar to how it would be ideal to destroy a carrier while it is still embarking its air wing, it is ideal to destroy a warship before it has depleted its magazine of offensive missiles. This creates profound psychological and operational pressures that come into play when commanders of individual platforms and formations feel on the cusp of being destroyed. The critical phenomenon of last-ditch fires can threaten to destabilize distributed fleets and massed fires.

Commanders can be extraordinarily pressured to unleash most if not all of their offensive firepower if they believe there is a real risk of imminent destruction. Once a ship or fleet realizes that a potentially fatal salvo is incoming, enormous pressure can quickly force commanders to discharge their offensive firepower soon or else risk losing it permanently. Similar to how a carrier commander would be tempted to launch the air wing before the salvo hits the carrier, warships can make similar decisions with their missile magazines.

Last-ditch salvos are meant to deny the enemy one of the most critical benefits of firing effectively first. Launching a last-ditch salvo right before ships could be destroyed gives those offensive weapons a final chance of somehow contributing to the fight and deprives the adversary the benefit of sinking ships with fuller magazines. Last-ditch fires aim to ensure that archers are never destroyed before they can fire arrows. Concerns over losing limited weapons inventory are sharply intensified by lethal inbound salvos, making the last-ditch salvo a critical protocol for making the most of friendly losses moments before they are incurred.

A last-ditch anti-ship salvo cannot be an act of self-preservation. Commanders can be completely confident that an incoming salvo is dense enough and capable enough to overwhelm their defenses and destroy their warships. Launching their own anti-ship salvo in response is not going to change such an outcome. Anti-ship missiles cannot save warships from anti-ship missiles that are already incoming. These weapons can only save warships from anti-ship missiles that have yet to leave their magazines.

Many platforms that can threaten warships with anti-ship missiles cannot be threatened by those same missiles in return. This creates an asymmetric dynamic where some forces can enhance the effects of distribution by threatening to trigger last-ditch salvos that are futile. Since airborne aviation, submarines, and land-based forces cannot be directly attacked by anti-ship missiles, a warship launching a last-ditch salvo could very well be firing at perceived targets it can do nothing against. Even a single incoming torpedo from a submarine attack could trigger a last-ditch salvo fired in futility. Warships must strive to maintain awareness of candidate targets they can actually threaten with last-ditch salvos if a fatal attack comes from a domain they cannot effectively retaliate in.

A last-ditch salvo may be fired despite a lack of quality targeting information, since the method of simply firing down a line of bearing suggested by the incoming attack may be more than enough for a desperate warship. But warships ideally need broader situational awareness to launch effective last-ditch salvos, and especially to know whether they are under attack by a last ditch salvo themselves. If a warship does not recognize it is facing down a last-ditch salvo and simply reciprocates the attack, it could be firing on a warship with an empty magazine or even a warship that was already destroyed minutes earlier. This is even more wasteful than firing on a depleted warship, and a worthy result for warships whose final actions caused an adversary to waste precious firepower.

Last-ditch salvos are therefore a double-edged sword. This desperate act is meant to prevent precious weapons inventory from being permanently lost, yet this desire can be manipulated to prompt wasteful fires. An adversary can be made to take self-defeating actions in the crucial battle of nerves that infuses salvo warfare.

The simple appearance of an inbound volume of fire can be enough to trigger last-ditch firing protocols. Weapons with longer range and waypointing ability will have more opportunity to feint attacks on the way to their true target, multiplying the combat potential of salvos. If a weapon has enough range, attacking salvos may be waypointed to appear to threaten multiple targets in succession and provoke last-ditch fires from each (Figure 2).

Figure 2. A waypointed salvo triggers last-ditch fires from multiple formations by feinting attacks along the way to its true target. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command) 

The U.S. may eventually have a substantial advantage in this regard by fielding a cruise missile with especially long range. The Tomahawk has enough range to where a salvo can threaten multiple naval formations through waypointed feints, even if those formations are distributed across hundreds of miles. If several Chinese naval formations are concentrated within 300 miles so they can mass YJ-18 missiles, then it becomes even more feasible to waypoint Tomahawks to trigger last-ditch fires within this radius. If one side’s naval formations have to concentrate within shorter distances to mass their fires, they become more susceptible to this waypointing tactic than their opponents, and they may not even have the range to launch viable last-ditch salvos at all.

Salvos used to trigger last-ditch fires may have to risk a degree of attrition by allowing themselves to be seen by warships. Networked missiles could coordinate pop up maneuvers to rise above the horizon and make themselves known, but only briefly enough before they can be struck by defensive fires. Otherwise the salvo could suffer enough attrition that it loses both its psychological and kinetic potency. Decoy weapons that can project the signatures of multiple aerial contacts, such as the ADM-160 MALD, can be used to inflate the appearance of mass while reducing the ability of defensive fires to chip away at the salvo.7

Two Miniature Air Launch Decoys (ADM-160 MALD) sit side-by-side in the munitions storage area on Barksdale Air Force Base, La., March 21, 2012. (U.S. Air Force photo/Airman 1st Class Micaiah Anthony)

Posing the appearance of significant mass may not be a hard requirement for inducing last-ditch fires from a target. There may be a significant disparity in the volume of fire required to actually kill a platform, versus the volume of fire that is enough to manipulate it into firing prematurely. This disparity can stem from commanders being uncertain about the capability of enemy salvos or their ability to defeat them, or the strain of combat operations taking its toll on decision-making. The last-ditch dynamic can therefore magnify the tactical value of salvos that lack enough volume of fire to destroy targets. Commanders that are limited to local awareness may struggle to differentiate between a small salvo that was only launched as a standalone attack, versus a small salvo that is a harbinger of incoming mass fires. A small salvo can leverage these uncertainties to score outsized tactical benefit by triggering last-ditch fires despite not being able to actually threaten the target. 

Even if a salvo cannot strike a target due to limited range or other constraints, it may still provoke emissions, signatures, and other reactions that could be exploited. Commanders may struggle to distinguish between different types of incoming missiles in real time, where last-ditch salvos consisting of low-capability, short-range, or non-anti-ship weapons can still manipulate reactions. A warship launching a last-ditch salvo could certainly fire its land-attack cruise missiles toward an enemy warship, who either can’t tell the difference or won’t take the chance. The prospect of wresting any sort of non-kinetic benefit can encourage platforms under heavy attack to launch last-ditch salvos regardless of capability or volume of fire.

And non-kinetics can prompt last-ditch fires themselves. Actions such as heavy jamming, blinding attacks against networks, aggressive posturing, and other methods that could be interpreted as a prelude to an imminent attack could also provoke last-ditch salvos. Last-ditch fires can be triggered by much more than just other fires.

The act of firing last-ditch salvos is extremely sensitive to timing given how warship launch cells are often carrying both offensive and defensive firepower, and how some cruise missiles require a minimum amount of lead time to be programmed for launch.8 A warship under attack from a subsonic anti-ship missile fired at a range of 250 miles has barely more than 20 minutes to react. And this assumes the target warship has knowledge of the launch. If the warship becomes aware of the incoming salvo only after it crosses the horizon, it can have roughly two minutes or less to prosecute an intense anti-air engagement while simultaneously discharging the whole of its offensive firepower in a last-ditch salvo. Those final moments would be characterized by an intense outpouring of the ship’s firepower in all-out offensive and defensive warfare. But these vast volumes of firepower would be bottlenecked by the rate of fire, of how many missiles can be fired by a warship’s launch systems in short periods of time. The volume of outgoing offensive and defensive firepower would be diminished as missiles of both types are primarily being fired from the same sets of launch cells, making them compete with each other for brief launch windows.

These challenges can be mitigated by having situational awareness over sea-skimming spaces that go beyond the radar horizon of a warship. Aircraft can provide early warning of incoming salvos and help warship commanders determine whether they must initiate a last-ditch salvo. Effective warning can allow commanders to discharge their last-ditch salvos early enough so that offensive missiles are not competing with defensive missiles for launch windows when it comes time for the warship to defend itself. In any case, warship commanders should strive to have a variety of pre-programmed responses at the ready so they can initiate last-ditch fires as fast as possible, and to have the subjective tactical judgement to know when it is time.

Warships under attack could be forced to fire their final salvos alone and in isolation from the broader distributed force. Yet last-ditch salvos may hardly be enough on their own to overwhelm concentrated defenses. This can put pressure on other combatants and commanders to add contributing fires in the hopes of growing enough volume to credibly threaten targets. A cascading domino effect could threaten to unravel a distributed force’s firepower as last-ditch salvos prompt hasty contributing fires from other platforms. The pressured nature of last-ditch salvos will exacerbate the timing challenges associated with combining fires and potentially rule out a variety of options for growing the volume of fire.

A commander of a distributed force must weigh the risks of attempting to combine fires with a last-ditch salvo. A last-ditch salvo may force a commander’s hand in adding contributing fires to a salvo that was fired on insufficient targeting data, lacks the volume to penetrate defended targets, or features other deficiencies. A commander could hold off on launching contributing fires, conserve the inventory of weapons, and allow the last-ditch salvo to play out on its own. But this may come at the risk of failing to support a salvo that could have effectively put opposing warships out of action if it had received just enough outside fires to tip the scales and cross the thresholds needed to overwhelm defenses. Commanders have to be ready to weigh these options as missile exchanges unfold in real time, and decide if a last-ditch salvo should remain a standalone attack, or leverage it through adding contributing fires.

Conclusion 

As distributed forces unleash massed fires against one another, their desire to decisively overwhelm the opposition will be tempered by the need to minimize depletion. Depletion can threaten to break naval operations and yield major advantage to an adversary. Effectively massing fires from distributed forces can help manage depletion, but the need to achieve overwhelming volume of fire will make this risk a pervasive consideration at all levels of warfare.

Part 5 will focus on missile salvo patterns and maximizing volume of fire.

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 weapon production lead times, see:

“Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 Budget Estimates,” Navy Justification Book Volume 1 of 1 Weapons Procurement, Navy, Page 2 P-1 Line #7, (PDF pg. 94), April 2022, https://www.secnav.navy.mil/fmc/fmb/Documents/23pres/WPN_Book.pdf.

Seth Jones, “Empty Bins in a Wartime Environment: The Challenge to the U.S. Defense Industrial Base,” Center for International and Strategic Studies, pg. 14, January 2023, https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2023-01/230119_Jones_Empty_Bins.pdf?VersionId=mW3OOngwul8V2nR2EHKBYxkpiOzMiS88. 

2. For one example, a warship on a one-way trip and traveling at 20 knots would take nearly two weeks to reach the Philippine Sea from U.S. naval infrastructure in San Diego. This assumes a straight line path, which may be less realistic under wartime conditions.

3. For JASSM range, see:

“AGM-158 Joint Air-to-surface Stand-off Missile (JASSM),” U.S. Air Force, https://www.af.mil/News/Art/igphoto/2000420243/.  

For extreme-range JASSM variant, see:

Brian A. Everstine, “USAF to Start Buying ‘Extreme Range’ JASSMs in 2021, Air & Space Forces Magazine, February 14, 2020, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/usaf-to-start-buying-extreme-range-jassms-in-2021/.

4. Hon. John F. Lehman with Steven Wills, “Where are the Carriers? U.S. National Strategy and the Choices Ahead,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, pg. 67, 73, September 9, 2021, https://www.fpri.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/fpri-where-are-the-carriers-.pdf. 

5. At an average unit cost of $3.5 million per missile, a combat credible salvo of about 30 LRASMs yields a volume of fire that costs in excess of $100 million.

For LRASM unit cost, see:

“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.

6. MK 48 MOD 7 torpedoes have an average unit cost of around $5 million, but have far less of a requirement to be salvoed in large numbers because of the less saturated nature of undersea warship defenses.

For MK 48 MOD 7 torpedo cost, see:

“Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 Budget Estimates,” Navy Justification Book Volume 1 of 1 Weapons Procurement, Navy, Page 1 of 16 P-1 Line #27, (PDF pg. 351), April 2022, https://www.secnav.navy.mil/fmc/fmb/Documents/23pres/WPN_Book.pdf.

7. “U.S. Airborne Electronic Attack Programs: Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, pg. 16-17, May 14, 2019, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44572. 

8. General Accounting Office, “Cruise Missiles: Proven Capability Should Affect Aircraft and Force Structure Requirements,” GAO/NSIAD-95-116, April 1995, pg. 35-36, https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-95-116.pdf. 

Newer Tomahawk variants than those discussed above have considerably shorter launch preparation times. See:

“Tomahawk,” Missile Threat CSIS Missile Defense Project, last updated February 23, 2023, https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/tomahawk/ 

and 

Rear Admiral Edward Masso (ret.), “On The Tomahawk Missile, Congress Must Save The Day,” Forbes, June 10, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2015/06/10/on-the-tomahawk-missile-congress-must-save-the-day/?sh=7b86cc956bad. 

Featured Image: September 3, 2005 – U.S. Navy Sailors aboard the USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) inspect the MK 41 Vertical Launching System (VLS). (Photo via U.S. National Archives)

Warfighting Flotilla

Flotilla SITREP: Systemic Naval Cyber Compromise and Contested-Network Warfighting

Leave a comment

By Dmitry Filipoff

This month the CIMSEC Warfighting Flotilla will be focusing on information and cyber warfare, and will hold discussions on systemic naval cyber compromise and contested-network warfighting. If you haven’t already, sign up through the form below to become a Flotilla member and receive the invites to our upcoming off-the-record February discussions. The full listings for these upcoming discussions are featured down below.

Last month the Flotilla discussed restoring the warfighting imperative for great power navies, and the role of Marine Corps forces in expeditionary anti-submarine warfare. These candid conversations illuminated useful methods for promoting a stronger warfighting focus while fostering connections between participants.

Feel free to visit the Flotilla homepage to learn more about this community, its activities, and what drives it.

Upcoming March Sessions
______________________________________

The Threat of Systemic Naval Cyber Compromise

 

Cyber threats are pervasive yet underappreciated. As great powers compete, they can leverage their cyber capabilities to undermine opposing militaries in peacetime, and set the stage for wartime compromise. How can navies grow their awareness of how deeply competitors have penetrated into their systems? What may be the ramifications of pre-positioned cyber capabilities being activated in wartime? Join us to discuss these questions and more as we consider the potential for systemic naval cyber compromise.

Read Ahead: “Paralyzed at the Pier: Schrödinger’s Fleet and Systemic Naval Cyber Compromise,” by Tyson Meadors
______________________________________

Network-Contested Warfighting

 

Modern military forces rely heavily on networks to function. But are these forces doing enough to prepare for when the network is a contested battlespace? Are militaries challenging their own network in simulated crucibles, wargaming, and other venues to ensure warfighters can operate in spite of contested networks? Join us to discuss network-contested warfighting and its implications for force employment and force development. 

Read Ahead: “Fighting When the Network Dies,” by Capt. Sam Tangredi (ret.)

Completed February Sessions
______________________________________

Restoring the Warfighting Imperative

The warfighting focus of great power navies can atrophy when faced with little high-end competition for decades. Without the press of a true competitor to center the organization, unhelpful habits and mindsets can proliferate, and the skills needed to win a hard fight are eclipsed by less consequential matters. In light of renewed great power competition, how can modern navies restore the primacy of the warfighting imperative? How can navies reorient themselves to truly be about winning wars, first and foremost? Join us to discuss these questions and more as we can consider the state of the warfighting imperative and how to elevate it.

Read Ahead: “A Warfighting Imperative: Getting Back to Basics for the Navy,” by Capt. Gerard Roncolato (ret.)
______________________________________

Expeditionary Anti-Submarine Warfare

The need for more ASW capability is rising with the size of competitor ASW fleets. Existing ASW assets may be stretched thin, and could struggle to threaten adversary submarines in decisive littorals. How can the Marine Corps enhance ASW capability in contested environments? How can expeditionary advanced bases and stand-in forces contribute to the ASW mission? Join us to consider the possibilities as we discuss expeditionary ASW.

Read Ahead: “Implementing Expeditionary ASW,” by Captain Walker D. Mills, U.S. Marine Corps, Lieutenant Commanders Collin Fox, Dylan “Joose” Phillips-Levine, and Trevor Phillips-Levine, U.S. Navy
______________________________________

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content and Community Manager of the Warfighting Flotilla. Contact him at Content@cimsec.org.

Podcast

Sea Control 419 – Commanding a Piece of American History with CDR Billie Farrell

Leave a comment

By Anna McNiel

In Sea Control’s first in-person interview, the commanding officer and first woman to command USS Constitution, CDR Billie Farrell, joins us to discuss what it is like to command a piece of American history.

Download Sea Control 419 – Commanding a Piece of American History with CDR Billie Farrell


Links

1. USS Constitution Museum.
2. USS Constitution U.S. Navy Website.
3. “Conning the Constitution,” Chris Peters, CIMSEC, September 3, 2012.
4. “Sea Control 153: USS Constitution with Angry Staff Officer and Dr. Claude Berube,” Jared Samuelson, CIMSEC, January 20, 2020.
5. A Call to the Sea: Captain Charles Stewart of the USS Constitution, Claude Berube and John Rodgaard, Potomac Books, 2006.

Anna McNiel is Co-Host of the Sea Control podcast. Contact the podcast team at Seacontrol@cimsec.org.

This episode was edited and produced by Marie Williams.

Information Warfare

Bigger than a Balloon: The Chinese C4ISRT Complex as Hyperobject

Leave a comment

By Shane Halton and Ryan Hilger

“From a proud tower in the town, Death looks gigantically down.” —Edgar Allan Poe

In late January 2023, the American public came into close, almost personal contact with a portion of China’s globe-spanning surveillance complex as a high-altitude balloon drifted across the United States. The balloon maneuvered and loitered over American intercontinental ballistic missile installations and other sensitive national security sites before the President ordered the balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina. Imagery and the recovered debris cut against the Chinese narrative of a simple weather balloon – it was designed to gather intelligence and communicate it back. Congress and the American people demanded answers as to how a balloon could get into the United States almost untracked. A joint statement from Representatives Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) stated that “The Chinese Communist Party should not have on-demand access to American airspace” and that the threat from China “is here at home, and we must act to counter this threat.”1

The revelation that Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloons may have crossed the United States before unsettled national security leaders and the American public. Suddenly, a threat normally contained to the Western Pacific was made tangibly real to the average American. In Helena, Montana, a retired state judge told The New York Times: “I can’t believe they are spying on Billings, [Montana]… There’s not much there.”2 American security officials reported to the press that the Chinese balloon surveillance program had conducted operations in 40 countries across five continents.3 At least one theory rapidly emerged that the operation was a practice run for a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse attack or delivery of other effects.4 While Americans understood on some level that China had satellites and other systems capable of monitoring them, the drifting balloon became urgently personal and real, with several news outlets reporting this as a “Sputnik moment” for the country.5 In the 1950s, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite’s constant beeping across the night sky profoundly and fundamentally altered how Americans perceived the Soviet Union and behaved in response.

We have been here before. The concept of a “hyperobject” can help provide national security leaders with a new framework to grasp, understand, and engage with China’s C4ISRT complex. 

What is China’s C4ISRT Complex?

C4ISRT is a long-range network of active and passive sensors designed to identify, track, target and engage hostile forces across warfare domains (air, subsurface, surface, etc.). In addition to sensors and datalinks, the concept also encompasses the thousands of human analysts and IT professionals working to process and make sense of all the data. Each node —human, sensor, or otherwise—is linked via a complex web of network connections.

What separates a C4ISR network from a C4ISRT network is Targeting (the ‘T’)—the ability to use sensor data from a variety of systems to accurately direct long-range fires. If the data collected by the sensors lack sufficient detail or is “old” (as in out of date) it cannot be used for targeting precision weapon systems. As Beijing’s 2019 defense white paper, China’s National Defense in the New Era, states, the operational requirement for greater data fidelity, speed, and accuracy has compelled the Chinese military to continue investing heavily in both “informatization,” the development and deployment of ever more sensors to fill gaps and provide overlapping coverage, and “intelligencization,” the use of machine learning programs to assist in processing all the data collected.6 Both terms have grown in prominence through China’s last two defense white papers in 2011 and 2015. The combination of this evolving C4ISRT complex with modern precision weaponry creates non-linear battlespace effects greater than the simple sum of their constituent parts.7

China’s homegrown third-generation space-craft tracking ship Yuanwang-5 sets sail for the Pacific Ocean on March 22, 2022. (Chinamil.com photo by Wang Luyao)

Hyperobject as Conceptual Framework

Taken as a whole, China’s C4ISRT complex is best described as a “hyperobject,” a term first pioneered by philosopher Timothy Morton in his 2013 book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. As defined by Morton, hyperobjects are very large objects distributed unevenly across time and space that operate at non-human timescales.8 Hyperobjects are not an abstraction or an intellectual parlor game. In fact, Morton’s goal is to refocus modern philosophy toward engaging with real objects in the real world and away from what he believes is a dead-end of recursive abstract analysis. Morton writes “Hyperobjects are real whether or not someone is thinking of them. Indeed, for reasons given in this study, hyperobjects end the possibility of transcendental leaps ‘outside’ physical reality.”9

In Hyperobjects, Morton draws the majority of his examples from ecology and the physical sciences, citing the sum total of all plutonium created since 1942 as a hyperobject par excellence.10 A primarily man-made chemical element that occurs very rarely in nature, plutonium is currently spread unevenly across the Earth’s biosphere, densely gathered in nuclear weapons caches, power plants, and storage facilities.

One key feature of hyperobjects is their ability to impact human social behaviors. Morton describes this feature as a hyperobject’s viscosity – its ability to enter our mental frameworks and get stuck there. In the case of plutonium, the combination of its radioactivity, its historic use in extremely destructive weapons, and its 21,400-year half-life means that even when plutonium is stored out of sight in nuclear weapons bunkers or at the plutonium waste store site at Savannah River, South Carolina, it is never out of mind. The existence of plutonium has compelled humans to alter laws, customs, and individual behaviors to account for the plutonium hyperobject they now share the planet with. During the Cold War, plutonium preoccupied national leaders in the United States and Soviet Union for decades and shaped how they engaged with each other.

In addition to their large, unevenly distributed mass, or their scale and viscosity, Morton notes two other distinctive features of hyperobjects – non-locality and the way in which they operate at non-human timescales. Non-locality means that a human being will only ever experience a part or portion of a hyperobject, never the whole hyperobject. We see one balloon over Montana but a dozen Chinese spy satellites whiz overhead each day, barely registering in Americans’ consciousness. Hyperobjects’ ability to operate at non-human timescales follows a similar logic. You might occupy the planet at the same time as a chunk of plutonium but, owing to its very slow rate of decay, it will outlast you, your family, and possibly your civilization. It is important to note that “non-human timescales” can refer to hyperobject behaviors that occur very quickly over a short period, such as a machine speed kill web, and not just slowly over a relatively long period as is the case in plutonium decay. The point is that a hyperobject’s timescale is out of sync with human biological, social, and organizational speeds.

Does China’s C4ISRT complex, taken as a whole, qualify as a hyperobject? An analysis of each of the four characteristics of hyperobjects indicates that it does.

Scale. China’s efforts to construct a C4ISRT complex began with the deployment of air surveillance radars along China’s coastline during the Cold War and greatly accelerated in the early 2000s with the deployment of modern active and passive surveillance systems along the Taiwan Strait. Over the last decade, China has supplemented its air and maritime surveillance capability with new, indigenously produced sensors designed to search the undersea domain as well as dozens of new spy satellites. Collectively, this sensor network is assessed by Western analysts to cover at least the Western Pacific, out to Guam, if not further.11

Soldiers assigned to a radar station with the air force under the PLA Southern Theater Command checks a radar system after a heavy snow on December 20, 2018. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Xu Hangchuan)

In addition to these investments in sensor capabilities, China’s military underwent significant organizational reforms in 2017-2018. The People’s Liberation Army is now organized into five Joint Theater Commands, each responsible for a different geographic area: Eastern Command is responsible for Taiwan; the Southern Command for the South China Sea; Northern Command for Russia and the Korean peninsula; Western Command for India and Tibet; and Central Command for Beijing and central China.12 This division of labor along geographic lines has simplified the human and organizational dimensions of the C4ISRT complex, making it more focused and efficient by aligning the sociotechnical aspects of the C4ISRT complex to optimize information flows, use of national resources and technical means, and joint planning for theater operations and achieving desired national outcomes.13

As Western observers have watched the Chinese C4ISRT network expand in scale, the influence of that growth, the near global reach of the system, and the continual expansion and alignment of resources and capabilities has altered the way in which Western policymakers perceive the system and the threat it poses. Two decades ago, the Chinese C4ISRT complex was an afterthought, easily accounted for and countered with existing tactical means. Today, however, China’s C4ISRT complex has become their schwerpunkt – their center of gravity – that enables them to conduct a range of kinetic and non-kinetic actions throughout the Western Pacific and even globally. 

Non-Locality. Hyperobjects are unevenly distributed in time and space and China’s C4ISRT complex is no exception. China’s side of the Taiwan Strait and its outposts in the South China Sea are assessed to have relatively dense concentrations of active and passive sensors, with varying capabilities and quantities of weapons to match. Historically, it has been assumed that as one moves further away from the mainland the fidelity and accuracy of China’s targeting capability drops off.14 However, the last decade of satellite launches have complicated this assessment, as it is no longer clear that a unit’s physical proximity to Chinese-controlled territory corresponds to how accurately that unit can be tracked.15 Still, satellites must either orbit around the Earth or hold a geosynchronous position above it, and as such China’s spy satellites and balloons cannot be everywhere, seeing everything at once—at least not yet.

Non-locality therefore takes on a double meaning. Any interaction an individual unit (such as a U.S. Navy destroyer) has with China’s C4ISRT complex is “local” and this local instance of the C4ISRT complex represents only a fraction of the total system (i.e., you are never interacting with the whole C4ISRT complex at once). Additionally, it is difficult to reliably ascertain the density of sensors at any given point on the map and, therefore it is difficult to be sure one is not being tracked at any given time. China’s increasing deployment of passive, dual-use space-based sensors makes this aspect of non-locality even more pernicious.

A KJ-500 airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft attached to a naval aviation division under the PLA Eastern Theater Command gets ready for a flight training exercise on February 20, 2021. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Li Hengjiang)

Non-human Timescale. China’s C4ISRT complex operates at a non-human timescale in much the same way all modern digital communication systems do. A sensor at the edge of the network can detect a target and report its location, speed and direction back to a fusion center or watchfloor thousands of miles away in tens of seconds. We have become somewhat inured to the speed of digital communications in an age where anyone can place a Zoom call to a family member living on another continent, but this near instantaneous detection speed has real ramifications in a battlespace where the fastest warship can only make 35 knots and an F-35 can only fly at Mach 1.6, still well short of the speed of digital sensor transmission – the speed of light.

Latencies and entropy creep back into C4ISRT systems wherever humans are involved. Double checking or cross checking a “contact” using another sensor can add minutes or more to a targeting process. One goal of China’s “intelligencization” campaign has been to use machine learning tools to speed up sensor data processing, relegating human beings to a secondary, supervisory role in many cases. 

Viscosity. The existence of China’s C4ISRT complex certainly seems to have the ability to shape behaviors, particularly among the West’s military and political elites, paralleling the historical debates around nuclear weapons (also a hyperobject) doctrine during the Cold War. At the time of this writing, a debate is raging among American navalists as to whether China’s C4ISRT capabilities, paired with long range precision anti-ship missiles, has rendered U.S. aircraft carriers obsolete. That discussion has even spilled out of professional military circles and into the mainstream, with outlets like Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal, and Investor’s Business Daily running articles summarizing the debates.16 In a similar vein, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) leadership has approached Congress about increasing air and missile defenses at Guam.17 Places that once seemed remote from China’s sensors, such as northern Australia’s Air Force bases, are being compelled to reassess their position relative to the C4ISRT hyperobject.18 As the C4ISRT complex grows and evolves, we become more aware of it and it roots itself more firmly in our minds. 

China’s Type 815 Dongdiao-class auxiliary general intelligence vessel ship operates in the vicinity of Exercise Talisman Sabre in international waters. (Photo by Commonwealth of Australia)

An Uneasy Coexistence?

So what should Allied militaries do about the Chinese C4ISRT hyperobject? Here we must diverge significantly from Morton’s ecology-centric understanding of hyperobjects. It is decidedly a philosophical theory, and Morton asserts that the only viable way forward for human philosophy, art, and culture is to attempt to attune ourselves to the hyperobjects now impinging on our world and through this attunement, achieve a form of coexistence. Morton seeks a new type of ecology that is not premised on a “return to nature” rejection of the modern industrial civilization, but a more mature, thoughtful approach that incorporates the reality of hyperobjects into our understanding of the “natural” world.19 This approach leaves the tangible applications wanting.

This, frankly, is not an option for Allied militaries dealing with an adversary C4ISRT hyperobject which is designed to identify, track, and kill them. The Chinese C4ISRT complex is a key enabler for Chinese kinetic and non-kinetic actions. Thus, the ultimate goal of military planning must be to destroy or at least significantly degrade China’s C4ISRT immediately in the event of a conflict and operate effectively in the liminal space before then. Until then, however, a very uneasy coexistence with the hyperobject seems to be our only option. Life did go on after humanity entered the Atomic Age after all. To that end, here are three rules of thumb for practitioners to guide day-to-day interaction with the Chinese C4ISRT hyperobject.

1. There can be no complete picture of the C4ISRT hyperobject. Even if one mapped out all the Chinese land-based sensors, there would still not be a complete picture of the hyperobject. If one added all the orbits and capabilities of the Chinese spy satellites and balloons, one would still not have a complete picture. If one held their breath, dived deep, and sketched the location of all the underwater sensors, one still would not have a complete picture. Even if one added all of the Chinese intelligence and surveillance activities in cyberspace, one still would not have a full picture. Hyperobjects are, by definition, far more than the sum of their parts.

At a minimum, the picture would fail to capture the network connections and the organizational dimension of the data processing, such as the humans working to turn raw data into a holistic understanding of what is happening. Even if one were to somehow add in those dimensions, there would still only be a static snapshot of a complex, dynamic, and constantly evolving system of systems with emergent and potentially chaotic behaviors. The map is not the whole territory, and the inclusion of humans at multiple levels makes the picture even more messy and unpredictable. The emergent behaviors that hyperobjects bring forth cannot be accurately predicted. Despite knowing all the technical capabilities and locations, leaders, engineers, and policymakers simply cannot know or accurately predict how different commanders in China will use them, or how many Chinese actions will drive behaviors in U.S. or allied national security leaders.

Chinese “floating integrated information platforms” (IIFP) (浮台信息系统) that have been deployed to the South China Sea. (CSIS/AMTI graphic)

We must accept that fact and reorient information and decision-making processes to operate under greater uncertainty, seeking opportunities to experiment and reduce uncertainty. In many respects, the Chinese C4ISRT hyperobject conducted another experiment on the United States with the high-altitude balloon flights, looking for how the U.S. would respond to help them shape their future actions and anticipated responses.

The reality of this systemic dynamism means that discrete, timebound snapshots have to give way to something like simulation or understanding degrees of uncertainty to ever hope to understand how the hyperobject is actually operating at any given time. Today, there are two ways that humans can simulate complex, dynamic behaviors of systems in the world – either by using their own minds or by using a sufficiently powerful computer. Neither of these is perfect, and the flows of data and information to feed that simulation are subject to the same laws of entropy, chaos, and uncertainty as what is trying to be simulated.

Unfortunately, both approaches have limits when it comes to modeling hyperobject behavior. The human mind struggles to grasp something as large, multi-dimensional, and extra-temporal as a hyperobject. Modern computer systems fare better—we are able to model climate change using supercomputers after all—but computer simulations require detailed, up to date, probabilistic data to simulate complex behaviors. The challenge here is that almost every part of the Chinese C4ISRT hyperobject is a tightly-guarded Chinese state secret, including the capabilities of the individual sensor systems, and much of the needed data about individual Chinese behaviors is essentially unknowable. Thus, it is near impossible to feed a computer enough ‘good’ data regularly enough to ensure the computer simulation will be accurate, which itself is a probabilistic concept. And there may be cognitive biases that will hold onto the model even after key Chinese leadership or technical capabilities change.

2. You’ll never be 100% certain if you are being detected (or not). The difficulty of simulating hyperobject behavior with either one’s mind or a computer means that it is very hard to know whether it is collecting information on you, your unit, or your platform at any given time. The C4ISRT hyperobject is perhaps the most elaborate incarnation of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon—a theoretical prison structured in such a way that the inmates must assume a warden is watching them, but they can never be sure.20 This superimposition places the target unit in an uncertain state where they must at least double their contingency planning for scenarios in which they are and are not being detected. An avenue for future research would examine the applicability of quantum principles to see if they may provide any assistance in grappling with the duality of Bentham’s Panopticon and its analog with a hyperobject.

The launch of the final satellite of the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in June 2020. (CCTV photo)

This duality may drive commanders and leaders at all levels mad contemplating whether a servicemember’s seemingly random tweet has been observed, collected, and analyzed by the Chinese C4ISRT complex, and what that tweet might compromise about the unit’s readiness, capabilities, or operational security. Even if that does not directly reveal anything, could that tweet provide another one of the thousand grains of sand China needs to effectively target and counter American or allied power?21 Will that new grain of information be used tomorrow, a year from now, a decade from now, or never?

In that light, the daily contact with the hyperobject demands we acknowledge we might be getting collected on at any given time. Thus, we should simply act prudently and strive to minimize the amount of information we leave exposed for the Chinese to find. Practice good operational security. Foster good relationships with domestic intelligence and law enforcement services to understand the area threat. Strive to become a harder and more unpredictable target, whether one is a deckplate sailor on a destroyer, a defense contractor, Congressional staffer, or the Secretary of Defense.

3. Finally, a hyperobject is not easily reducible to its constituent parts. Our inability to reliably map out the hyperobject’s shape or model its behavior also impacts our ability to identify key points of strength or weakness within the system and to understand how disabling or destroying one part will affect the performance of the whole. Practitioners must resist the temptation to assume that knowledge of constituent parts yields knowledge of the whole. Understanding the technical specifics of a Chinese ISR satellite or balloon does not mean that you understand the overall behavior of how Southern Command will utilize them, which may be different from Eastern Command’s approach, which may be different from the global or meta-level behavior of the hyperobject—the effect of non-human time scales, viscosity, scale, and non-locality.

Military leaders in particular are best equipped to grapple with this rule of thumb. Military leaders train against adversary orders of battle and seek to create overmatch conditions for tactical victories. But at the strategic level, the familiar treatises of Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz provide surprisingly sage advice for dealing with the irreducibility of the Chinese C4ISRT hyperobject. Sun Tzu detailed the challenges; ephemerality, and general uncertainty of warfare, and how actions by one side’s leadership might create unpredictable behaviors from the enemy. Clausewitz spoke of the centers of gravity, the paradoxical trinity of emotion, chance, and reason, and principles—not laws—of war. These theorists understood that all the knowledge could not dictate the outcomes and that the friction or fog of war meant warfighters had to operate to clear the fog and reduce the uncertainty to be prepared for the unexpected.

Today, we must reacquaint ourselves with these concepts with a view toward how we might understand the uncertainty of the Chinese C4ISRT hyperobject. It will always be in some corner of our minds. We must accept that we will never fully know and be able to predict its actions. Seek opportunities to test their system to see how they respond—does Southern Command respond the same as Eastern Command to the same event? How does China respond to a notable cyber breach of a state-owned enterprise compared to economic sanctions against the same enterprise? These types of tests help leaders at all levels better understand the hyperobject and modifies their behaviors from determinism to probabilities. 

The End of the World?

Perceptive readers may have noted the subtitle of Morton’s book “Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World.” The end of the world alluded to here is more prosaic than it first appears. Morton is not talking about the apocalyptic climax of all human events. Instead, he highlights the ability of hyperobjects to destroy—or at least severely alter—the small, local, and temporal mental ‘worlds’ that humans inhabit on a day-to-day basis. Once one is made aware of a hyperobject, its viscosity ensures it will stick in your mind, altering the way you think about the world, or at least requiring a Herculean mental effort to deny its existence.22

Morton points out how discussing the weather with a stranger has historically been considered a safe, albeit boring, way to pass the time.23 Our contemporary understanding of climate change has altered the experience of ‘talking about the weather.’ Weather is revealed to just be a localized experience of the climate overall, which means talking about the weather risks you bringing up the topic of climate change with a stranger. The hyperobject of climate change has intruded into the normal conversation about the weather, turning the whole experience into a fraught social tightrope.24 The little world of the boring weather conversation has been forever changed.

Decades of Chinese investment in sensors, networks and data management means that Allied operations in the Western Pacific are now occurring within a dynamic, complex, shifting, and expanding Chinese C4ISRT ecosystem. The national security community should heed Morton’s hyperobjects and how they provide a better framework for understanding the reality-altering nature of the Chinese C4ISRT complex as a hyperobject. The exact extent and scale of the hyperobject is difficult to ascertain, thereby making it hard to say definitively whether one is being tracked by it at any given time, particularly during this uneasy period of great power competition. Through decades of hard work and investment, China created this hyperobject, and by doing so, it has changed the long-range surveillance and targeting game.

Has knowledge of the Chinese C4ISRT hyperobject altered the worlds of the U.S. destroyer captain, the Australian F/A-18 pilot, or the INDOPACOM command team? Arguably yes, but probably not as explicitly as it should have. The carrier debate in the U.S. indicates we are likely in the early phase of understanding the impact of the C4ISRT hyperobject crashing into the rigidly structured world of the U.S. Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan and the DoD’s anachronistic acquisition system. These disruptions to our preferred way of doing things are likely to increase in frequency and intensity over the coming decade, putting a premium on our ability to understand and adapt to a hyperobject dominated battlespace. Practitioners would do well to reflect on what they actually know about the Chinese C4ISRT hyperobject—and more broadly, what can be known—to better understand how it influences their daily actions. From there, leaders can begin to respond in kind. Until then though, the Western response will be suboptimal at best, or catastrophically misinformed at worst.

Lieutenant Commander Shane Halton is an intelligence officer currently serving in California. He has previously served on exchange with the Royal Australian Navy and as a requirements officer at the Navy’s Digital Warfare Office.

Lieutenant Commander Ryan Hilger is a Navy Engineering Duty Officer stationed in Florida. He has served onboard USS Maine (SSBN 741), as Chief Engineer of USS Springfield (SSN 761), and ashore at the CNO Strategic Studies Group XXXIII and OPNAV N97. He holds a Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School and is a doctoral student in systems engineering at Colorado State University.

These views are presented in a personal capacity and do not necessarily represent the official views or policies of the Department of Defense or the Department of the Navy.

References

1. Helene Cooper, “Pentagon Says it Detected a Chinese Spy Balloon Hovering Over Montana,” The New York Times, February 2, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/us/politics/china-spy-balloon-pentagon.html

2. Ibid.

3. Katie Bo Lillis, Jeremy Herb, Josh Campbell, Zachery Cohen, Kylie Atwood, and Natasha Bertrand, “Spy balloon part of broader Chinese military surveillance operation, US intel sources say,” CNN, February 8, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/07/politics/spy-balloon/index.html

4. Bob Hall, “Chinese spy balloon exposes US vulnerability to EMP attacks,” Washington Examiner, February 13, 2023, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/courage-strength-optimism/chinese-spy-balloon-exposes-us-vulnerability-to-emp-attacks

5. Michael Mazza, “The Chiense spy balloon is a tangible Sputnik moment for Biden and Americans,” New York Post, February 6, 2023, https://nypost.com/2023/02/06/the-chinese-spy-balloon-is-a-tangible-sputnik-moment-for-biden-and-americans/

6. “In Their Own Words: China’s National Defense in the New Era,” Chinese Aerospace Studies Institute, Air University, July 2019, https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/CASI/documents/Translations/2019-07%20PRC%20White%20Paper%20on%20National%20Defense%20in%20the%20New%20Era.pdf?ver=akpbGkO5ogbDPPbflQkb5A%3d%3d

7. James S. Johnson, “China’s vision of the future network-centric battlefield: Cyber, space and electromagnetic asymmetric challenges to the United States,” Comparative Strategy, Volume 37, Issue 5 (March 2019): 373-390, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01495933.2018.1526563

8. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

9. Morton, “Hyperobjects,” 2.

10. Morton, “Hyperobjects,” 1.

11. Johnson, “China’s Vision of the Future Network-Centric Battlefield,” 373-390; Thomas R. McCabe, “Chinese Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Systems,” Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs (Spring 2021): 1-6, https://media.defense.gov/2021/Mar/07/2002595026/-1/-1/1/25%20MCCABE.PDF.

12. Ziyu Zhang, “China’s military structure: what are the theatre commands and service branches?,” South China Morning Post, August 15, 2021,   https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3144921/chinas-military-structure-what-are-theatre-commands-and-service

13. Michael S. Chase and Jeffrey Engstrom, “China’s Military Reforms: An Optimistic Take,” Joint Forces Quarterly 83, Fourth Quarter (2016): 49-52, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1020041.pdf.

14. “The odds on a conflict between the great powers,” The Economist, January 25, 2018, https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/01/25/the-odds-on-a-conflict-between-the-great-powers.

15. McCabe, “Chinese Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Systems,” 1-6.

16. Marc Wortman, ““Floating Pointlessness”: Is This the End of the Age of the Aircraft Carrier?,” Vanity Fair, May 5, 2022, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/05/is-this-the-end-of-the-age-of-the-aircraft-carrier;

“The Navy’s Big Carrier Groups Are Sitting Ducks,” Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/navy-aircraft-carrier-fleet-battle-group-target-warfare-china-missile-asbm-11649885333;

Gillian Rich, “This Icon Of U.S. Power Is More Sinkable Than Ever But Hard To Kill Off,” Investor’s Business Daily, January 31, 2020, https://www.investors.com/news/aircraft-carriers-more-sinkable-but-hard-to-kill-off/.

17. C. Todd Lopez, “Time for Guam Missile Defense Build-Up Is Now,” U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, December 9, 2021,  https://www.pacom.mil/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/2867950/time-for-guam-missile-defense-build-up-is-now/

18. Malcolm Davis, “Australia must prepare as China’s coercive capabilities draw closer,” Australia Strategic Policy Institute, September 15, 2021,  https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/australia-must-prepare-as-chinas-coercive-capabilities-draw-closer/

19. Morton, “Hyperobjects,” 201.

20. University College London, “The Panopticon,” accessed July 9, 2022,  https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/who-was-jeremy-bentham/panopticon

21. Vernon Loeb and Walter Pincus, “China Prefers the Sand to the Moles,” Washington Post, December 12, 1999, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-12/12/097r-121299-idx.html

22. Morton, “Hyperobjects,” 35.

23. Morton, “Hyperobjects,” 100-104.

24. Elizabeth Boulton, “Climate change as a ‘hyperobject’:a critical review of Timothy Morton’s reframing narrative,” WIRE Climate Change (2016), https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elizabeth-Boulton-3/publication/303801414_Climate_change_as_a_’hyperobject’_a_critical_review_of_Timothy_Morton’s_reframing_narrative_Climate_change_as_a_hyperobject/links/5dd5110f458515cd48ac6dfe/Climate-change-as-a-hyperobject-a-critical-review-of-Timothy-Mortons-reframing-narrative-Climate-change-as-a-hyperobject.pdf

Featured Image: A U.S. Air Force U-2 pilot looks down at the Chinese surveillance balloon as it hovers over the U.S. on Feb. 3. (Department of Defense photo)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.