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Capability Analysis

A New DESRON Staff – Beyond the Composite Warfare Commander Concept

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By Bill Shafley

A destroyer squadron (DESRON) staff’s employment as a Sea Combat Commander in the Composite Warfare Commander (CWC) construct is unnecessarily narrow and prevents a more lethal and agile strike group. Tomorrow’s fight requires multiple manned, trained, and certified command elements. These elements should be capable of maneuvering and employing combat power. This combat power is required to support area-denial operations, assure the defense of a high-value unit, or conduct domain-coordinated advance force operations to sanitize an operating area in advance of the main body. This ability to diffuse command and control, disperse combat power, and contribute to sea control operations is imperative to fully realize the Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) concept.

The Fight

The carrier battle groups (CVBGs) of the Cold War evolved into the carrier strike groups (CSG) of today. The components of the CWC organization did as well. The CWC organization evolved into managed defense of a high-value unit to preserve the capability of the carrier air wing (CVW). A destroyer squadron staff embarked on a Spruance-class destroyer managed multiple surface action groups (SAGs) and search and attack units (SAUs). They managed a kill chain designed to prevent submarines and surface ships equipped with anti-ship cruise missiles from ever entering their weapons release lines. As the anti-submarine warfare commander, they also managed the up-close defense of the carrier through assigning screening units and maneuvering the force as necessary to defend the ship and the air wing.

As the CVBG evolved into the CSG of today, the offensive and defensive missions were merged into one. The DESRON Staff was employed as the sea combat commander. The staff left the ships and embarked on the carrier. As maritime forces operated in support of land campaigns with precision fires far afield in mostly benign waters, defense of the CVN as a sortie generation machine became a primary mission. The carrier defense problem could be managed with one or two multi-mission cruisers or destroyers because the mission was generally limited to confined strait transits, managing a layered defense against fast attack craft, and establishing airspace control. The remainder of cruiser and destroyer offensive capability was chopped about between in-theater task force commanders to meet additional missions of interest, namely maritime interdiction and critical maritime infrastructure defense, and support to security cooperation plans. Near the conclusion of deployment, the strike group elements rejoined and went home together. This evolution has been fit for purpose over the last 25 years, but no longer.

The fight of tomorrow looks more like the fight planned for during the Cold War, with one major difference. China’s blue water fleet is quickly becoming more capable than the Soviet fleet ever was. Consequently, the wartime employment of tomorrow’s CSG must focus more on offensive employment in sea control operations while also facing greater threats. These operations are uniquely maritime as they are focused on the destruction of an enemy fleet and its components that may impact the United States Navy’s ability to operate with superiority. Commanders in this environment manage scarce resources (see fig 1) to establish and maintain a kill chain while assuring adequate defense. A CSG must fight into an environment, survive, exploit sea control, and be prepared to move and establish it again; perhaps multiple times. Each CSG, with the CVN, its air wing, the fires resident in the VLS tubes of the DDGs, needs to be preserved as a fighting unit in order to generate the combat power necessary to achieve sea control while assuring its survivability through subsequent engagements.

The defense of the carrier must now be balanced with the work necessary to survive as a complete task-organized force. The greater the demand for sea control in time and space, and the greater the enemy force contesting sea control, the more offensive firepower will be required to neutralize the enemy and establish sea control. At the same time, this enemy force may also out-range many of the CSG’s weapons, might shoot first, and will shoot back. This threat environment increases the requirement for defensive firepower. This is a conundrum for the traditional approach. As the DMO concept suggests, disaggregation of the CSG is driven now by lethality and survivability.

Fig. 1: Establishing and maintaining sea control is a balance between resources and time. Planning for and employing forces in this environment requires new thinking. See the author’s piece at: https://cimsec.org/new-forms-of-naval-operational-planning-for-earning-command-of-the-seas/

 As the above graphic notes, this tactical problem is far more complex than one of classic CVBG defense. Establishing sea control requires an optimized balance between offense and defense. This dilemma poses interesting questions. How much of the combat power of a CSG is left behind in defense? How much of it is committed to strike hard and win the war at sea? How is the offense commanded and controlled? Is there adequate command element (CE) depth to manage the CWC defense in one area and hunt/kill in another? What is the nature of the CE for these missions? Where should the CE be embarked for greatest effectiveness? How robust is it? What is the duration of the mission? The DMO concept requires command elements that, through the use of mission command can control all facets of sea control operations (to include logistics), in communications denied environments and at scale.

Today’s CSG commander lacks command and control options to address these questions. A differently manned, trained, and employed DESRON staff could provide this flexibility. This staff is at its core a command element. It could be ashore working for the numbered fleet commander as a combined task force (CTF) commander one week, embarked on a command platform the next week, and on the carrier the week after that. It might even be dispersed to all of those at once and with multiple units under tactical control (TACON). This flexibility gives higher echelon commanders multiple employment options as they consider how to delegate their command and control to meet mission needs. However, the DESRON of today is not manned, trained, or certified to be employed in this manner.

Manning Concept

The proposed command element would require watch standers and planners, including enough subject matter experts to plug into multiple battle rhythm events. The command element would have cells for current operations (COPS), future operations and plans (FOPS), information warfare (IW), and readiness. It would be manned to provide a six-section watchbill, a distinct and separate planning team, an IW cell and readiness monitoring team that would coordinate with fleet logistics and maintenance support for assigned ships. The six-section watchbill requirement would afford the staff enough personnel to split and establish command and control in two different locations for missions as assigned. This staff size is roughly equivalent to current DESRON manpower levels (40-45 personnel). Its makeup in terms of subject matter expertise is more tailored to the Sea Control mission set.

This new DESRON staff would be manned as follows:

Fig. 2: Staff Manning Construct reflects subject matter expertise for planning and watchstanding functions

Training Concept

This command element should be educated and trained to apply joint warfighting functions with multi-domain maritime resources to establish, execute, and maintain a kill chain in an assigned geographic area. This is a robust capability that can be brought to bear in defense of high value units, in intelligence preparation of the battlefield, in surveillance and counter surveillance, or in direct action against enemy surface and subsurface units.

This organization is led by a major command selected captain (O6) surface warfare officer. This officer should have significant tactical experience in command as a commander (O5), have received a Warfare Tactics Instructor certification, and/or graduated from an advanced in-residence planner course (Maritime Advanced Warfighting School, School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, School of Advanced Warfighting, School of Advanced Military Studies). Experience on squadron, strike group, or fleet staffs would also be beneficial. The chief staff officer would be an O5, post-command officer of similar qualification. Service as the chief staff officer should be viewed as a career enhancing opportunity in the 5 years between O5 command and O6 major command. The leadership of this team would be rounded out by a billeted and selected command master chief.

Officers assigned to the staff should be proven shipboard operators in the all the major warfare areas. They should be qualified as ASW Evaluators and Shipboard Tactical Action Officers. Four post-department surface warfare officers would be assigned to the staff. They would serve as lead officers for current operation (COPs), future operations and plans (FOPs), training, and readiness, and serve staggered 24 month tours. Officers would follow an assignment track within these billets to afford experience in all four jobs, culminating as COPs or FOPs. These leaders should be post-department head officers eligible and competitive for command at sea.

There would be four post-division officer tour officers assigned to this staff structure. These would be qualified as surface warfare officers and served as an Anti-Submarine Warfare Officers/Evaluators, Tomahawk Engagement Control Officers, and/or hold Warfare Coordinator Qualification. These officers would be selected for department head and due course, that is, competitive for further advancement. All of these officers would attend the Staff Watch Officer, Joint Maritime Tactics Course, Maritime Staff Officer’s Course, and specialty schools as necessary. Officer who trained with foreign navies at their principal warfare officer courses and planning courses would also be sought after to bring Coalition Integration to bear.

There would be 3 senior chiefs and 8 chief petty officers permanently assigned to this staff. The senior chief petty officers (SCPOs) would be from the ratings of Sonar Technicians, Operations Specialists, and Information Systems Technicians each would have successfully completed shipboard leading chief petty officer (LCPO) tours. They should respectively hold advanced Navy Enlisted Classifications in the ASW field, achieved senior-level air controller qualifications, and hold Communication Watch Officer and associated computer network management credentials. Assigned LCPOs in rates depicted would provide technical and watchstanding expertise in their rate. All SCPO and CPOs would complete the STWO/JMTC course work and additional rate specific training. The remaining enlisted sailors would be first or second class petty officers (E6/E5), and trained as watchstanders to support the 6 section watchbill and planning cell.

This staff would include support from additional warfare communities. The IW cell would be comprised of a lieutenant commander (O4) maritime space officer and a lieutenant (O3) intelligence officer. The IW community would provide a lieutenant commander (O4) Information Professional officer to manage communications requirements for this rapidly-deployable team. The team would be rounded out with the addition of two aviators: an MH-60R pilot and a P-8A naval flight officer. Their experience would be crucial in planning and for watchstander assistance during training and operations.

Certification Process

The proposed DESRON staff would be assigned to the Carrier Strike Group commander for administrative purposes. The DESRON staff would follow the Carrier Strike Group’s optimized fleet response plan (OFRP) progression (i.e., maintenance phase, basic phase, advanced phase, integrated phase, deployment, and sustainment phase). The staff would be deployable from deployment through the end of sustainment phase, and its qualifications would lapse as the CSG entered the maintenance phase.

Over the course of the OFRP maintenance phase, the staff would go through a personnel turnover period, to include key leadership. The primary purpose of this phase would be to establish the staff’s training plan. The WTIs would tailor the staff training plan based upon lessons learned from previous employment and potential future assignments. This training plan would incorporate the latest in tactical developments and experimentation. Furthermore, participation in table top exercises, Naval Warfare Development Command wargames, and Fleet 360 programs would be included. This training plan would be approved by the Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center (SMWDC) and enacted by the appropriate tactical training group (Atlantic or Pacific), the Naval War College, and various warfare development commands.

The staff’s basic phase would mirror a ship’s in length and complexity by field. Staff WTIs, along with the appropriate tactical training group, would craft scenarios that build in complexity and the amount of integration with the individual cells. The staff would benefit from staff rides to all of the warfare development centers, and significant time at the tactical training group to learn cutting edge tactics, techniques, and procedures and capabilities and limitations. Through the use of live, virtual, and constructive training tools, the staff would train to the Plan, Brief, Execute, De-brief (PBED) standard in stand-alone work before gradually integrating the staff. The DESRON commander would focus on crafting intent, planning guidance, and risk assessment. The IW Cell would conduct Intelligence Preparation of the Operating Environment, the planners learn the effective use of base plans, branches, and sequels, and the watch standers would execute these in scenario work. The basic phase would culminate with the entire staff certifying over a week long exercise where the team operates in a higher headquarters battle-rhythm driven environment and is certified to a basic standard by Tactical Training Group Atlantic or Pacific (TTGL/P).

The advanced phase would begin with the DESRON staff executing Surface Warfare Advanced Tactics and Training (SWATT) at-sea with SMWDC mentors with live ships, submarines, and aircraft. This exercise mimics the training conducted during the basic phase. In this program, the staff embarks a platform and integrates with the assigned ships and operates at-sea introducing frictions not seen in the live, virtual, or constructive environment. Watch sections and planning teams would be assessed again in-situ and performance assessed to assure continued development. The SMWDC senior mentor would then recommend advanced certification to the certifying authority. If practical, the staff should embark aboard the CVN with the CSG for Group Sail (GRUSL) for additional training opportunity prior to the pre-deployment Composite Training Unit Exercise (COMPTUEX, or C2X).

The COMPTUEX would remain the final hurdle in integrated training leading to deployment certification. Over the course of the 6 weeks at-sea, the staff would have to demonstrate its capability in integrating into the CSG battle rhythm and demonstrate watch stander acumen in increasingly complex live exercise (LIVEX) evolutions.

During the COMPTUEX, the DESRON Staff would have to demonstrate its capability to act as a CTF commander afloat, both on the CVN and embarked in a smaller unit with assigned units. It must demonstrate the capability to conduct “split-staff” operations at a remote site ashore. In each of these instances, the staff must demonstrate its capability to establish C2 of assigned units for mission effect, control operations effectively, and integrate into a higher headquarters battle-rhythm.

Satisfactorily assessed in these areas, the staff would be certified to deploy. During deployment, it would be employed flexibly and with optionality based upon the tactical situation and the desired effects from commanders at-echelon. As the CSG heads over the horizon, the DESRON staff could participate in fleet battle problems (FBP) and coalition-led exercises to test and validate a whole range of new tactics, techniques, procedures, doctrine, and interoperability. As FBPs continue to develop and live, virtual and constructive training tools come on line, the chance to “fail fast” in this space only increases.

Employment Concept

The proposed tactical DESRON could be employed across a wide range of operations supporting Carrier Strike Groups, Amphibious Ready Groups, and fleet commanders. Mission and associated tasks drive span of control in terms of assigned ships, aircraft, and additional resources. As a task organized, employed, and expeditionary staff, its main value prospect would be its flexibility.

Manned, trained, and certified during the intermediate and advance training phases, the command element’s normal mode of operation would be embarked aboard a command ship. Employed to protect a command ship, it would be capable of exercising warfare commander duties in a strike group/CWC environment with up to five assigned ships. While its primary missions would remain anti-surface and anti-submarine warfare, it could augment or establish additional warfare area support (Integrated Air and Missile Defense or Information Warfare) in any surface combatant. Employed as a scouting force further afield in the assigned operating areas, a portion of the staff may embark detached assets to afford command control and transition scouting missions into local maritime superiority missions. Employed as a task force commander, it may disperse further and move ashore with a local fleet commander to oversee operations over a broader area. Though this employment method would be more taxing on the staff, it might be required for short durations of high operational tempo. With basic manning and training levels achieved, the command element could be employed to C2 joint exercises or lead TSC missions ashore with partner nations as part of its further development.

The sustainment phase would be the most important of all for this staff because it would be key to force-wide improvement. Over the course of a deployment, the DESRON staff would have participated in various operations and exercises. Based on these experiences, the staff training officer would lead a robust program of lessons learned. The assigned WTIs would also compile and prepare various tactical notes and after action reports to share amongst other DESRON staffs and units alike. As the staff transitioned into its maintenance phase, it would go “on the road” to debrief its lessons learned, new tactical and doctrinal proposals with the goal of driving organizational learning for future operations. The habitual relationships with War College and its various research groups, the warfare development commands, and SMWDC WTI community makes for an amazing opportunity to share experiences, connect subject matter experts and further development efforts across the fleet.

Conclusion

This concept is aspirational and developed without respect to resources. There are numerous additional details necessary to bring a capability like this to fruition, but none of these details require new thinking to manage. Commitment, purposeful planning, and some smart staff work would be adequate to address each on in turn. A capability like this could be developed within the 5-year Future Year Defense Program/Program Objective Memorandum cycle. The staff’s full capability will be realized over time as new business rules for assignment are enacted. The certification criteria would be amended and in some cases completely developed. But much of this infrastructure, the school houses, the courseware, and training systems already exists.

This model makes no mention of permanently assigned surface ships to the DESRON. This work presupposes that ships assigned to the squadron arrive manned, trained, equipped and certified at the basic level. Ships change operational control to the DESRON for employment via formal tasking order. Readiness oversight functions of this staff are limited across the board. This staff retains a strong working relationship with the various type commands and local maintenance centers to assure in-situ readiness issues can be resolved.

The deployment and sustainment phases of the OFRP are vital to successful maintenance and basic phases for the next set of employment. The DESRON staff responsibility in this work is to assure that the events prescribed by the Surface Force Readiness Manual are scheduled, are thoroughly completed by assigned units, and that long-term readiness risks are endorsed. Once sustainment phase is complete, the assigned ships are returned via “chop” in the same official manner. Readiness oversight success in this environment means that ships have true and complete self-assessments with ample transparency of emergent and voyage work necessary to maintain assigned readiness conditions.

The proposal for a tactical DESRON represents an opportunity to leap ahead of the competition and bring the elements of speed, synchronization, and surprise to the employment of naval forces. The CSG and ARG as units of employment have been disaggregated for most of the last 20 years in an effort to get the most out of assigned theater maritime resources. Forces have been chopped up and moved about amongst standing fleet task forces, leaving the strike group staff in most instances over-billeted in terms of staff capability. This has left DESRON staffs as the under-employed adjuncts of CSG staffs and merely augmenting the battle-rhythm. This proposal to invest in the DESRON staff and reorient it towards looming challenges would correct these trends and yield a more lethal force for employment within the Distributed Maritime Operations concept.

Captain Bill Shafley is a career Surface Warfare Officer who has written extensively on strike group operations, mission command, and sea control in this forum and others. He has served on both coasts and overseas in Asia and Europe. He is a graduate of the Naval War College’s Advanced Strategy Program and a designated Naval Strategist. These views are presented in a personal capacity.

Featured Image: PHILIPPINE SEA (June 18, 2022) Sailors aboard Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Spruance (DDG 111) handle lines during a replenishment-at-sea with Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72). Abraham Lincoln Strike Group is on a scheduled deployment in U.S. 7th Fleet to enhance interoperability through alliances and partnerships while serving as a ready-response force in support of a free and open Indo-Pacific region. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Taylor Crenshaw)

Podcast

Sea Control 372 – The Problem with Autonomous Ships

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By Jared Samuelson

In the wake of the U.S. Navy testing uncrewed vessels as part of the Rim of the Pacific exercise, Johnathan Falcone and Jonathan Panter join the podcast to discuss possible drawbacks of autonomous vessels.

Jonathan Panter is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. His research examines naval organizational practices and crisis management. Prior to attending Columbia, he served as a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy.

Johnathan Falcone is an active-duty surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy, serving as chief engineer aboard a littoral combat ship. He is a graduate of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and Yale University.

Download Sea Control 372 – The Problem with Autonomous Ships

Links

1.  “Feedback Loops and Fundamental Flaws in Autonomous Warships,” by Jonathan Panter and Johnathan Falcone, War on the Rocks, June 24, 2022.
2. “The Unplanned Costs of an Unmanned Fleet,” by Jonathan Panter and Johnathan Falcone, War on the Rocks, December 28, 2021.
3. “RIMPAC Testing Will Inform the Fate of Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel,” by Mallory Shelbourne, USNI News, August 1, 2022.
4. “Sea Control 301 – Task Force 59 with John “Fozzie” Miller & Ari Cicurel,” by Jared Samuelson, CIMSEC, December 12, 2021. 

Jared Samuelson is Co-Host and Executive Producer of the Sea Control podcast. Contact him at [email protected].

This episode was edited and produced by Nathan Miller.

Podcast

Sea Control 371 – Maritime Security and Colombia with Dr. Oscar Palma Morales

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By Walker Mills

Dr. Oscar Julian Palma Morales joins the program to discuss his research and work on maritime security and drug trafficking in Colombia. Dr. Morales is a Professor at the Department of International, Political and Urban Studies, and former Director of the Observatory on Illicit Drugs and Weapons, at Universidad del Rosario. He is a member of the Colombian Observatory on Organized Crime.

Sea Control 371 – Maritime Security and Colombia with Dr. Oscar Palma Morales

Links

1. Sea Control 219: USCG Commandant Admiral Karl Schultz, Walker Mills, CIMSEC, December 27, 2020.
2.“La Sorprendente Adaptabilidad De Los Narcotraficantes En El Mar,” Oscar Palma, La Silla Vacia, November 11, 2021.
3. Irregular Warfare Podcast 54: Plan Colombia: Anatomy of a Successful Counterinsurgency Campaign, by Kyle Atwell and Benjamin Jebb, Modern War Institute, June 3, 2022. 

Walker Mills is Co-Host of the Sea Control podcast. Contact the podcast team at [email protected].

This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling.

Force Development

Vice Admiral Hank Mustin on the Politics of Naval Capability Development

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Vice Admiral Hank Mustin served in a variety of positions that focused on developing the capabilities and tactics of the U.S. Navy at the peak of the Cold War. Mustin helped pioneer the development and fielding of many assets that are now recognized today as mainstay capabilities of the modern surface fleet. But in Mustin’s time, the path to fielding these capabilities was unclear and influential opposition threatened to kill critical programs. 

Below are select excerpts from Admiral Mustin’s oral history, conducted by Dave Winkler of the Naval Historical Foundation and republished with permission. In these excerpts, Mustin discusses navigating the opposition surface fleet programs faced from the highest levels of Navy leadership, methods for securing programs with funding and top cover within the OPNAV staff, and how certain projects were created or cancelled.

Be sure to explore more CIMSEC republications of Admiral Mustin’s insights in “Vice Admiral Hank Mustin on Naval Force Development” and “Vice Admiral Hank Mustin on New Warfighting Tactics and Taking the Maritime Strategy to Sea.”
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WINKLER: The threat at the time…was the Soviet Styx missile?

MUSTIN: That was just becoming a threat. And the feeling in the Navy leadership was, which was dominated by aviators, we’re not going to let anybody get close enough to shoot one of these missiles. The aviators said, if we see anybody out there that’s a threat, we’ll just go bag them at two to three hundred miles. Not to worry. And so we surface types all said, well okay, we’ll concentrate on shooting at air-launched missiles. “Well, we’ll take care of that too, if we ever get enough F-14s.” So we said, well maybe you can’t take care of them all; we’ll continue to pursue this.

Senior aviators at the time fought this rather bitterly. Success rates of these expensive missiles were not high. The performance of the systems was not good. And they viewed this as a drain, unnecessary, on funds that should be devoted to aviation capabilities. This is not a new kind of argument. So things like Aegis, and others, were bitterly opposed by the aviators. My own view is that we’d have never gotten Aegis if Bud Zumwalt had not been the CNO. Because a series of aviator CNOs before and after tried to kill it…

…The aviators—the notion had been since World War II that the main battery of every combatant should be resident on the flight deck of the carrier. So we’d try to put Harpoons on these ships and they’d say, “Hey, no, we’ll just take care of those guys with A-6s.” I developed a line of argument that said that JSOP, the force structure bible, says you need 26 carriers. We’ve only got 12. If we don’t have the number of carriers that we need, how are we going to fill in that firepower gap? This was the argument, it got at the issue without threatening aviation.

March 6, 1987 – An air-to-air overhead view of a fighter Squadron 1 (VF-1) F-14A Tomcat aircraft. (Photo via U.S. National Archives)

All of the issues of long-range targeting came up at that time. All of the issues of the inadequacies of the sonars. And as we built the Los Angeles class specifically to be escorts of the carrier task force—we didn’t call them battle groups—we found all the inadequacies in communications with the submarines while they are submerged. So the things that you see now—submarines with NTDS [Naval Tactical Data System], submarines with Tomahawk and Harpoon, submarines integrated into the striking forces of the Navy when required, the acknowledgement that you’ve got to disperse offensive power through platforms other than the carrier—all of those things were seen by Bud [Zumwalt] and Worth Bagley.

The problem was there wasn’t any technology available to implement them. To get the Aegis and to get the Tomahawk and to get these things, you had to spend the money. That money was going to come out of aviation, and everybody knew it. So the aviators just said there’s no reason for the Aegis ships; the F-14s will do the air defense job. Because it was apparent we were going to have fewer F-14s if we had Aegis ships.

So it was a very, very turbulent time, internally as well as externally. I remember a very senior aviator, who I won’t name, said to me one day when I was a captain, and Bud was still the CNO, he said, “You’d better enjoy every day that he’s the CNO, because you’re not going to see another one during your lifetime who’s a black-shoe…”

…Aegis was just on the horizon, strongly opposed by the aviators, who felt that it was a big waste of money to try and fight air battles with the Aegis ship when you could do it all with F-14s, and they wanted Aegis dollars to buy aircraft. The inadequacies of the Charles Adams class against missiles, and in particular against long-range missiles, were becoming apparent. And the absolute inadequacies of the Talos missile became apparent. So it didn’t take long for Jim Doyle, Bob Morris, and I, who were the requirements guys, to figure out that we needed an Aegis fleet, which was programmed, very slowly. But at the same time we needed a new destroyer. So we undertook to develop the requirements for the DDGX, which became the Arleigh Burke.

VADM Mustin during a Second Fleet exercise, 1988. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

So on Jim Doyle’s watch we brought in Aegis, brought in LAMPS, brought in the vertical launchers, brought in the SM-2 missile, brought in the Tomahawk, brought in the digital computer versions of NTDS. We brought in what is now called cooperative engagement—at the time it was called battle group AAW. We brought in the CIWS, the close-in weapons system. We brought in the SLQ-32, the modern anti-missile ECM suite. We brought in towed arrays. We brought in the new generation sonar. We significantly upgraded the capabilities of the design of the amphibs, the LHAs, the AOEs. It was an amazing time.

…Spruances were new. I was very unhappy with the Spruances. The Spruance had been a McNamara invention. It was to be the DX and the DXG. There were to be thirty DXs, which were ASW ships, and thirty DXGs, which were to be AAW ships, and they would operate in tandem all the time. Then the Typhon weapons system, which had been designed for the DXG, became too expensive, and so the DXG was cancelled. Now you had the DX, the Spruance, the single-purpose ASW ship, with no DXG. So the whole rationale fell apart. Here we had all these ships out there, which were the largest destroyers that we had ever built, and they had nothing on them. They had no weapons to speak of. We were furious at this.

On Jim’s watch we took the Spruance hull and turned it into the DXG with the Aegis fleet, it is the Ticonderoga-class cruiser. But it was ten years behind the Spruance in getting to sea. Then I think that it was [CNO] Jimmy Holloway—it was either Holloway or Tom Hayward—who changed the DDG to CG. I was in charge of the force structure as a captain, and I remember one day, with a stroke of the pen, we went from the Soviets having more cruisers than all of NATO combined to NATO outnumbering the Soviet cruiser force by almost two to one. DLGs became cruisers.

…I don’t know if I told you the story of the LAMPS [Light Airborne Multi-Purpose System] and how that worked. The deal when I got there was that, for the LAMPS helicopter, SH-60, Op 03 would pay for the R&D, which was the weapons suite and avionics. Op 05, the air warfare czar, would pay for the procurement of the fleet of the all-up airplane. Op 05 had rigged it for seven years so that the first procurement was always one year outside of the POM, because they wanted to spend their scarce aviation procurement dollars on tailhook aircraft, and not on helicopters to go on destroyers.

Doyle was furious about this, but they had two aviator CNOs. He said, “We’ve got to do something about this.” So I said, “You know what we’ve got to do? We’ve got to get our nose under the tent. What you ought to do in this POM cycle is, you ought to, number one, accelerate the R&D by putting in more money for two years, and then in that third year you give up FFG 7 and you take that money and buy the helicopter. Then, if you do that and you get that first buy in there, then Op 05 is going to be committed in the out-years to keep on. He isn’t going to like that, but how’s he going to argue with it? And how can he argue with it in OSD; how can he argue with it against the Hill?” In the meantime the people in OSD were saying, every banana republic navy in the world has got helicopters on the fantail; how come you guys don’t? We’d always mumble something. So anyway, that’s what we did. That’s how we got the SH-60 to sea. That was one of my programs in this period.

August 1, 1985- An SH-60B Sea Hawk helicopter participates in flight operations aboard the battleship USS IOWA (BB 61). (Photo by PH1 Jeff Hilton, via U.S. National Archives)

It became apparent that we had to stop building these FFG 7s in order to get the new destroyer, and the principal contribution of the new destroyer should be its land attack capability—with the Tomahawk missile, but there was no Tomahawk missile. Also we had to have some way to shoot it. The then-current version of the vertical launcher was two feet too short to accommodate the Tomahawk missile. So the first thing we had to do was lengthen the launcher, which was an enormously expensive proposition. It required ship re-design to do.

Second, in order to get the Tomahawk in surface ships, we had to get a Tomahawk and we had to overcome the Mark 26 launching lobby, which was the lobby that was going into the first seven Aegis ships. They didn’t want the vertical launcher to come along because that jeopardized the Mark 26 launcher. So we had Tomahawk, which was opposed bitterly by the aviators, because they said we’ll do all that with A-6s; we had the launcher, which was opposed by the vertical launcher guys, because it meant changing their launcher and therefore delaying their program a year; and we had the Mark 26 guys, who did not want to have their launcher jeopardized just as it was entering the fleet. That wasn’t including all the people who didn’t want to do it on the outside.

April 12, 1983- RIM-66 Standard MR/SM-2 missiles on a Mark 26 launcher prior to being fired from the Aegis guided missile cruiser USS TICONDEROGA (CG 47) during tests near the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Facility, Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico. (Photo by Don Muhm, via U.S. National Archives)

We started off with a year’s study to determine the requirements for the new destroyer…The study showed that we knew how to do AAW and ASW modeling—a bunch of missiles come in, you shoot a bunch of missiles at them, and you’ve got them. We knew how to do ASW engagement. But we had no measures of effectiveness for the Tomahawk.

So I devised a series of analyses where we ran an air strike against Petropovlovsk with carrier air, and then we ran that same air strike with carrier air supported by the Tomahawks where the Tomahawks went in and beat down the air defenses before the A-6s went in. We drew a curve that showed the cost of the air strike in terms of aircraft attrition and the procurement of Tomahawks. The cost without Tomahawk was up, because there were so much aircraft attrition; we had all these Soviet capabilities approved by the Director of Naval Intelligence. The costs came way down as you brought the Tomahawks in, and then after a while it started to go back up again if you bought too many Tomahawks, because they’d already killed all the air defenses, so you didn’t gain any more cost reduction by reduced aircraft attrition.

A Tomahawk missile firing off a battleship, c. late 1980s. (Photo via NAVSEA)

We took that analysis to the CNO, Tom Hayward. He said, “I do not support this destroyer.” When the CNO tells you that it’s got a very chilling effect. In the meantime Op 05 was saying he didn’t support Tomahawk. He supported everything except the strike function, which he thought was unnecessary. And besides, Tomahawk had not been service-approved for procurement, which violated all of the “fly before buy” rules. And the Aegis guys were saying, you’re spending too much money on Tomahawks and not enough on Aegis.

…CNO had said he didn’t support it. It was very carefully handled. Anyway, Congress put enough heat on the OSD so that OSD said, all right, we think you ought to do this. We want you to cancel your Charles Adams improvements, a pretty expensive program, and get on with the finalizing of the design of the DDGX. The big issue was the vertical launcher for the Tomahawk. So we got the Congressional language to say that this ship should be capable of firing Tomahawks. Then we went back to the CNO, who was pretty unhappy about this turn of events. He knew who the culprits were, which I found out to my distress later. He gave the go-ahead, but conditionally. He said that he needed more F-14s and the F-18. And he could not undertake a shipbuilding program that requires a lot more helicopters.” So he told us to get out and figure out why we don’t need a helicopter in the Arleigh Burke. If we could, then he’d support it.

So we went out and I did a bunch of analyses which showed that if you made a lot of assumptions about other ships in company with the task force, you had enough LAMPS so all you really needed on the Arleigh Burke was a landing platform so they could hopscotch, and an in-flight refueling capability. So we designed the ship that way, and that’s why the first flight came out with no helos on them. Everybody has said ever since then: Hey, why didn’t you have a helo on them? The answer was because we couldn’t get it through OpNav. And the reason was, the aviation procurement budget was very tight, and the Navy’s priorities were for tailhook aircraft. Jim Doyle and I were really sensitive to this issue, having just gone through the LAMPS flail. And CNO was very sensitive to that, having seen the aircraft procurement money start to go to the LAMPS.

…OSD was of the view that the Navy was sort of irrelevant to the NATO strategy, for the reasons that we’ve discussed. So while we were looking into making these new capabilities, we were developing arguments for why the Navy was relevant. The Tomahawk was the key that unlocked that, because that gave the surface Navy for the first time the ability to influence events ashore, beyond the range of the 5- inch gun. That meant that in the battle for Europe you could now hold at risk the Kola Peninsula with other carrier air. From the eastern Med you could hold at risk targets in Russia, that you could not do before unless you put the carriers way, way up in the Adriatic. So all of a sudden the Tomahawk unlocked a lot of doors in OSD.

…I went to see Admiral Doyle, and I said, “Walt Locke isn’t going to do it.” He said, “Tell him to come over here; I want to see him.” Walt and I walked in to see Jim Doyle. Jim Doyle said, “Walt, maybe once if you’re lucky, in your naval career, you come across a capability that’s going to be a change in naval warfare on the order of sail to steam.” He said, “In my view, Tomahawk is that change during our lifetimes. What we have to do is stop this complaining and get on with it. We’ve got to have the launcher to support it, we’ve got to have the targeting, and we’ve got to have the seeker and warheads to do the job. Because,” he said, “we now have about half of the number of aircraft carriers that we all say we need to perform the Navy’s function in a NATO war, and we’re not going to get any more. So if the Navy is going to stay relevant it has to have a capability like the Tomahawk, and fortuitously the technology is such that that capability is now at hand. So you are the naval officer who will be able to bring that to bear.”

Walt Locke almost stood up and cheered. He walked out of there and he was a convert. It was one of the most compelling senior officer man-to-man discussions that I’ve ever been in. Walt was turned around like that. We gave him the money, and he marched off.

Henry C. Mustin was born in Bremerton, Washington on 31 August 1933, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of distinguished naval officers. Vice Admiral Mustin, a destroyerman, served at sea in the Pacific and Atlantic Fleets in USS Duncan (DDR 874); as Commanding Officer USS Bunting (MHC 45); as a plankowner in both USS Lawrence (DDG 4) and USS Conyngham (DDG 17); as Commanding Officer USS Henry B. Wilson (DDG 7); as Commander, Destroyer Squadron 12, homeported in Athens, Greece; as Commander, Cruiser Destroyer Group 2; and as Commander, U.S. Second Fleet and NATO Striking Fleet Atlantic. He served ashore in Vietnam with the Delta River Patrol Group; as Flag Lieutenant to the Commander-in-Chief Pacific; as Executive Assistant to the Commander-in-Chief U.S. Naval Forces Europe; as Director, Surface Combat Systems Division in the Office of Chief of Naval Operations; as Deputy Commander Naval Surface Force, Atlantic Fleet; as Naval Inspector General; and as Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Plans, Policy, and Operations). He retired January 1, 1989. He passed away on April 11, 2016.

David F. Winkler earned his Ph.D. in 1998. from American University in Washington, DC. He has been a historian with the non-profit Naval Historical Foundation for over two decades. His dissertation Cold War at Sea: High Seas Confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet Union was published by the Naval Institute Press in 2000, was republished under the title Incidents at Sea: American Confrontation and Cooperation with Russia and China, 1945 – 2016 in December 2017. He was selected in early 2019 to be the Class of 1957 Chair of Naval Heritage at the U.S. Naval Academy for the 2019-2020 academic year and the Charles Lindbergh Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum for the following year. Winkler received his commission as a Navy ensign in 1980 through the NROTC unit at the Pennsylvania State University. In addition to a B.A. in Political Science, he has an M.A. in International Affairs from Washington University. He is a retired Navy Reserve commander. 

Featured Image: September 7, 1985 – Aerial starboard quarter view of Battle Group Alfa underway. The ships are: (clockwise, center front) USS REEVES (CG-24) , USS SAN JOSE (AFS-7), USNS MISPILLION (T-AO-105), USS OLDENDORF (DD-972), USS KANSAS CITY (AOR-3), USNS KILAUEA (T-AE-26), USS ENGLAND (CG-22), USS TOWERS (DDG-9), USS KIRK (FF-1087), USS KNOX (FF-1052), USS COCHRANE (DDG-21), and USS MIDWAY (CV-41) (center). (Photo via U.S. National Archives)