The world will never see fully autonomous transoceanic commercial cargo ships. In fact, autonomous vessels are likely to operate in only very limited situations. In recent years, the prospect of fully autonomous vessels has become a hot topic for commercial shipping. The same fast-paced advances in technology that have led to projects to automate vehicles in every other sector of the transportation industry have also found their way to the shipping industry. Advances in camera technology, sensors, electromechanical actuators, and satellite technology appear to promise a world in which ships will soon traverse the oceans without a human on board. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the Comité Maritime International (CMI) are already exploring how autonomous vessels would fit into the existing framework of international maritime law.
Yet, while it is laudable to plan for the future, autonomous vessels operated by computers and remote operators quite simply pose too many vulnerabilities and they likely will prove too expensive to replace today’s manned vessels. The professional merchant mariners who operate ships today are the crucial on-scene decision makers, repairmen, and physical security providers who make commercial shipping secure, efficient, and inexpensive. Once we get past the promises and hyperbole, the risk of collisions, legal liabilities, and environmental calamity will ensure that some critical number of humans will persist onboard ships. Advances in technology will continue to make shipping safer and more efficient, but they will not eventually replace the human masters and crews that serve on today’s commercial vessels.
Despite all the excitement, the benefits of autonomous ships are still very much up for debate. For shipping companies, a switch to autonomous vessels promises cost savings from not having to pay for a master and crew, and perhaps from increased safety. But scores of new operators and technicians would be required to make a system of autonomous vessels work. The equipment to automate a ship will be extremely expensive and would introduce many new potential points of failure into commercial shipping. Autonomous vessels may reduce the number of accidents caused by human negligence, however, the relative safety of autonomous vessels versus manned vessels is pure speculation at this point. Autonomous ships could potentially be more efficient if the space for the crew could be dedicated to additional cargo. But ships will still likely need to have systems and controls in place to allow them to be operated with human master and crew when there are system failures. Autonomous vessels may result in better working conditions overall in the shipping industry as they would eliminate the need to find workers to fill the many difficult and hazardous jobs at sea. But the elimination of merchant mariner jobs would be a tremendous financial blow to those workers in those jobs today.
Recent articles have proclaimed that autonomous vessels are here or just on the horizon and seem to take the adoption of autonomous vessels as a certainty. At an initial glance, the future of autonomous vessels appears very promising. For small vessels the technology that is needed to automate a vessel is here today and is available enough that even a hobbyist can build an autonomous vessel. In 2017, SEA CHARGER, a small solar powered and unmanned home-built boat successfully completed a trip from California to Hawaii using GPS and a satellite modem for guidance and connectivity. And companies in the shipping industry are already using technologies that could eventually be used to automate larger vessels. The newest vessel of the the Red and White Fleet, a San Francisco charter boat company, is a hybrid diesel electric with a 160 kilowatt lithium ion battery pack that provides enough power for the ship to do a one-hour Golden Gate cruise on battery power alone.
One present obstacle for automating larger vessels is battery technology. At the outset, today’s batteries simply do not have the energy density necessary to power larger commercial vessels. Higher capacity and more powerful electric batteries that are powerful enough to move larger ships will likely be developed in the future. However, current battery technology has limitations. Lithium ion batteries, the type used for automated vehicles and aircraft, can explode if overcharged and further, large lithium ion batteries need to be temperature controlled to work properly.
Even more challenging obstacles to the success of autonomous vessels will be the expense and complexity of designing such systems. The technical challenge of operating a large cargo ship autonomously on the open oceans for days or weeks at a time will require a command and control system that does not exist today and may be impractical to build. Seamanship and navigating a ship safely is a challenge with a full complement of crew members on board. Automated ships will require command centers, computers, advanced satellite communications systems, other electronic devices, remote operators, and other technicians. Autonomous vessels would save money by not having a crew, but shipping companies will in many cases be simply replacing merchant mariners with other workers, most likely more expensive technical workers, who will work in offices on land or will be on call to assist autonomous ships across the oceans. Shipping companies will likely need multiple redundant command centers to provide the robust level of connectivity required for the safe and secure operation of these ships.
All of this advanced technology will be very expensive and much of the expense will be the cost of designing and operating a system capable of providing the propulsion, navigation controls, and stopping power necessary to operate a ship continuously in the harsh ocean environment. Weather, wind, waves, fog, obstructions, marine mammals, salt water, weather, birds, other ships, sounds, and almost anything else imaginable is encountered out on the open ocean. An autonomous ship will require incredibly complex technology to withstand the chaos of the ocean environment and enable a ship to respond remotely to any incident or emergency. It is still an open question whether today’s controls and communications technologies are sufficiently robust and capable so as to be relied on for commercial shipping in place of a human crew.
The most serious concern regarding autonomous vessels is the one that will very likely keep them from ever being employed: the risk of exploitation by adversaries, hackers, terrorists, criminals, and other malign actors. Autonomous vessels’ dependence on the electromagnetic spectrum and cyberspace infrastructure coupled with the lack of any human on-scene responders will provide an opportunity for others to interfere with these ships and potentially use them as weapons or for profit. The challenge for system designers is that the characteristics or features that make an automated system feasible for commercial application, such as standardization, continuous communications, and periodic updates, also provide exploitable opportunities for bad actors. Autonomous commercial cargo vessels would provide too easy a target of opportunity for theft, misuse, interference, or worse.
Conclusion
Some reality must be injected into the debate over autonomous ships. It is a truism that electronic and mechanical systems will eventually fail. For vital applications where human lives are at risk such as for aircraft, system engineers design in wide tolerances, safeguards, and multiple levels of redundancy to ensure an adequate margin of safety. The challenge in designing autonomous vessels is building both a safe and secure system that will function effectively in all ocean and maritime conditions without human beings on board and one that is not capable of being exploited by bad actors. Such a system, even if possible to build, would likely be too expensive for companies to build and operate compared to human crew. As a result, autonomous vessels are extremely unlikely to displace the human network of maritime professionals that have always made the maritime transportation system safe and secure.
Commander David Dubay is a Military Professor of International Law and Associate Director for the Law of Maritime Operations, Stockton Center for International Law, U.S. Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, or the U.S. Naval War College.
Suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD)1 is a mission based on recognizing that air defenses have become increasingly lethal, effective, and must be suppressed in order to allow air operations to be conducted with dramatically reduced loss rates. SEAD has evolved since WWII as a direct result of lessons learned in combat. It has established doctrine, established tactics, specialized force structure, specialized weapons, and trained and experienced personnel that plan and execute the mission. The U.S. Navy now faces a similar situation as the result of the dramatic increase in the numbers and sophistication of anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs). The situation is summarized in the 2017 Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) fleet architecture study as follows:
“To support deterrence by denial or punishment, American naval forces will need to operate and fight in proximity to the adversary. As described above, U.S. surface forces will face large numbers of enemy anti-ship missiles in these areas and thus require high-capacity air defenses to survive long enough to conduct their offensive missions. Active defenses may, however, be insufficient to win the ‘salvo competition’ between the enemy’s weapons systems and U.S. defenses. To reduce enemy salvos to more manageable levels, U.S. naval forces will also need to deny or degrade the enemy’s ability to find and target ships.”2
The nation that has the offensive capability to suppress an enemy’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) through physical destruction, deception, disruption, and corruption will have the critical edge – that of superior situational awareness, a significantly reduced threat of attack, and the all-important capability to target and attack enemy ships. While one ASCM hit will severely damage or disable most surface ships, anti-ship missiles are a threat only when an enemy ship has been detected, classified and identified, located and tracked, and targeted (e.g. allocated to a land site or an air, surface or subsurface launch platform). This extended kill chain is dominated by information from ISR systems which can be destroyed or disrupted.
To prevail in the salvo competition, the U.S. needs a robust offensive capability for Suppression of Enemy Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (SEISR). Like SEAD, this offensive capability has a preplanned and reactive component. The preplanned component achieves the greatest suppressive effect, but it has to be followed by a reactive component focused on suppression of any remaining or reconstituted ISR capacity. This component can be planned in great detail based on comprehensive intelligence analysis of the adversary’s land, air, space, undersea, and maritime surface ISR capabilities. This includes their associated communications, command and control, and intelligence analytical infrastructures. The reactive component requires current intelligence focused on enemy remaining or reconstituted ISR capabilities in order to plan and execute reactive SEISR operations. The complexity of a near-peer nation’s ISR capabilities suggest that SEISR will require a complex joint service response supported by multiple agencies to achieve the objective of reducing the ASCM threat to levels that are manageable for fleet defenses.
Building on the intelligence foundation, the mission will require an additional level of analysis to identify and assess the wide variety of possible kinetic and non-kinetic options for suppressing the wide range of enemy ISR capabilities. This analysis of suppressive options includes not only the effects of operational capabilities, but also, the identification of opportunities and the definition of requirements for new capabilities. The intelligence and effects analytical capabilities required to support the pre-planned and reactive SEISR missions will require the establishment of dedicated analytical cells that have the depth of knowledge of all aspects of enemy ISR systems and of available kinetic and non- kinetic alternatives for achieving the desired suppressive effects.
Suppression has to include a reactive component focused on suppression of enemy efforts to reconstitute or field new capabilities as the conflict evolves. Like SEAD, after the preplanned options are executed, SEISR will have a strong tactical component that drives a new near real-time intelligence and effects analytical focus, and SEISR capabilities that can be applied without delay when opportunities are presented by the enemy. SEISR will have to be animated by a forward-leaning, tactical mindset to keep up with or anticipate changing enemy ISR capabilities and methods throughout the conflict.
If effective, SEISR will reduce the ASCM threat to levels manageable by fleet non-kinetic and kinetic defenses. The non-kinetic component, often referred to as Counter ISR, will be focused on countering enemy ISR platforms and sensors, and countering launch vehicle and ASCM target acquisition systems. These non-kinetic methods range from tactics such as emissions control (EMCON) to deny detection, deception to confuse, and electronic attack against RF systems. Success is heavily dependent on having technical intelligence on enemy ASCM systems; and, the land, air, surface and subsurface ASCM launch complexes or platforms, and their surveillance, reconnaissance, and target acquisition systems, associated communications, and data links.
The key to tactical success in the defense against ASCM attack is directly dependent on the battlegroup tactical commander and his or her subordinate warfare commanders having the situational awareness that enables them to make better tactical decisions faster than the enemy. This situational awareness will be the result of the automated integration of information that is relevant to the specific commander with respect to geography, content, and timeliness.
SEAD has evolved over the past 70 years. The DoD and Navy do not have 70 years to organize and prepare for conflict against a nation with near-peer ISR and target acquisition capabilities. The SEISR mission will require an institutional focus, the rapid evolution of concepts and tactics, focused intelligence and target study support, and the development of personnel with a tailored commitment to the Counter-ISR missions.
Richard Mosier is a retired defense contractor systems engineer; Naval Flight Officer; OPNAV N2 civilian analyst; OSD SES 4 responsible for oversight of tactical intelligence systems and leadership of major defense analyses on UAVs, Signals Intelligence, and C4ISR.
References
[1] Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses — Activity that neutralizes, destroys, or temporarily degrades surface-based enemy air defenses by destructive and/or disruptive means. (JP 1-02)
[2] Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) study, titled Restoring American Seapower: A New Fleet Architecture for the United States Navy , Bryan Clark, Peter Haynes, Jesse Sloman, Timothy Walton, dated 9 February 2017.
Featured Image: PHILIPPINE SEA (June 9, 2019) Marines with Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 265 (Reinforced) aboard the USS Wasp (LHD 1) work on an F-35B Lightning II fighter aircraft during night time flight operations. (Official U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Kenny Nunez Bigay)
The U.S. Navy is faced with several big challenges in maintaining undersea warfare dominance – the domain of the fast attack nuclear submarine or “SSN.”
These challenges include the reemergence of a near peer naval threat that is a direct challenge to the entire U.S. Navy, including our SSN force. The current and growing undersea threat includes both advanced technology attack submarines (including nuclear, diesel-electric, and air independent propulsion variants) with advanced torpedoes and cruise missiles, and much increased numbers of adversary submarines, particularly in the Indo-Pacific theater. Another challenge comes from the rapidly escalating procurement and sustainment costs of ever-larger and more complex U.S. SSNs since the end of the Cold War.
These two challenges have resulted in a very large immediate deficit in U.S. SSN numbers,1 if not capabilities, that is expected to continue for decades. The Navy’s current planned way out seems to be to simply hope for the best, that the funding will materialize to build many more of today’s very large and expensive SSNs. That plan is increasingly seen as unlikely if not impossible given existing serious constraints on U.S. defense spending.
This situation is not unique to the submarine force. The Navy’s overall force structure assessment (FSA) is undergoing a significant revision due for release later this year.2 Navy leaders including outgoing CNO ADM John Richardson and VADM Bill Merz have stated on multiple occasions that the surface fleet is going to evolve with many more small surface combatants, with enhanced capabilities, and many fewer large surface combatants. Admiral Merz stated:
“You may see the evolution over time where frigates start replacing destroyers, the Large Surface Combatant starts replacing destroyers, and in the end, as the destroyers blend away, you’re going to get this healthier mix of small and large surface combatants.”
What is driving this mix to an overall surface fleet weighted toward smaller vessels? Cost. The cost to build, and then the cost to operate and maintain vessels is necessitating this shift from the current generation of surface warships dominated by large surface combatants. The same cost factors also inhibit submarine construction and operations, too. This is in fact a rebalancing in the age-old naval argument of capability versus capacity. The rebalancing is made possible by emerging technologies that allow the Navy to package enhanced capability into smaller hull forms, and to take advantage of new capabilities in cheap yet capable unmanned vessels. Yet today, the U.S. Navy still has no “small subsurface combatant” – just the very large Virginia-class SSNs that are evolving into even larger and more expensive hulls with the Block 5 and subsequent block versions.
The U.S. has relied on its total undersea dominance for nearly three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but that dominance is already fading, and is projected to flip upside down within the next decade. While perversely, due to the projected retirement of the rest of the aging Los Angeles-class SSNs, U.S. submarine forces will continue to fall over the same period, from 51 boats today to a projected 42 within a decade. The principle reason for the inability to build and operate the much larger SSN fleet of 66 subs that the Navy now says it needs is lack of funding. Some suggest that the answer is extending the service lives (SLEPing) of the Los Angeles-class boats, but that is not a practical solution, even in the short term, let alone the long term, since the maintenance burden for very old submarines is much higher than for new vessels. SLEPing old SSNs would only exacerbate the existing near-crisis of maintaining our these SSNs in operable condition.
Some say our small SSN fleet size is also due to a lack of “industrial capacity,” but the ability of the United States of America to ramp up its industrial capacity in times of severe military need is clearly proven in actual U.S. history throughout both World War Two, and during the long Cold War. If the funds to build all the subs that we need are actually made available, American industry will almost certainly respond, and ramp up accordingly, as proven time and time again. Make the construction dollars available on a predictable, multi-year contracting basis, and existing yards will open new lines, and/or new yards will be built, workers trained, and supply chains expanded.
In the 1960s through the mid-1970s there were six U.S. shipyards building SSNs and SSBNs, and in just 13 years of production the yards produced 39 boats, an average of three per year while at the same time producing 31 boats in multiple classes of Polaris and Poseidon SSBNs over just a five-year period. That came to on average of more than nine nuke submarines delivered per year at its peak in the mid-1960s.
As to the dollars needed for an expanded SSN fleet, the current full construction cost of a Virginia-class Block 5 SSN with Virginia Payload Module (VPM) stands at $3.2 billion in 2018 dollars. For comparison, the Sturgeon class-SSNs were built in the late 1960s for approx. $130 million each – in 2019 dollars that would be approximately $726 million – about a fourth of the cost of a Block 5 Virginia boat.
These behemoth Block 5 Virginia SSNs, at approximately 10,000 tons submerged, are more than twice the displacement of Cold War SSNs in the Skipjack-class, Permit-class, and the numerically large Sturgeon-class boats (4,300 tons submerged displacement). And to make matters more challenging, current naval plans for the next generation SSN, now dubbed “New SSN”3 suggest an even larger attack submarine, perhaps 12,000 tons and likely to cost $4 billion to $6 billion or more in 2018 dollars (and not entering the fleet for a decade or more) to build, and similarly expensive to operate. The Seawolf-class of SSNs were of approximately the same displacement, and the very high cost associated with building and operating the Seawolf SSNs encouraged limiting the class of boats to three hulls after the end of the Cold War.
The attack submarine Seawolf (SSN-21) conducts her first at-sea trial operation, following her early morning departure 3 July 1996, from the Naval Submarine Base, Groton, Conn. (General Dynamics photo)
Note that not only does raw displacement drive up the construction cost of a SSN (the rule of thumb is you pay for ships by the ton), but it also drives up the lifetime operating costs of the SSN. Manning a Block 5 Virginia-class SSN with its 42 vertical launch cells requires a crew of approximately 140 officers and sailors, as compared to the 99 officers and sailors of a Sturgeon-class SSN.
So why are the current class American SSNs so large?
The answer includes land attack – the new mission assigned to SSNs by the Navy in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, with the virtually overnight disappearance of its main naval adversary, the Soviet Navy. By the early to mid 1990s the U.S. Navy was busy retiring aged-out Cold War boats by the dozens and was still building as replacements the last Los Angeles-class SSNs. These boats were larger than their predecessors, primarily to make them faster and capable of keeping up as escorts with CVN carrier battle groups and later on, carrier strike groups. Such high cruising speeds were not a requirement for anti-shipping warfare (both ASW and anti-surface ship) and ISR – the two primary missions of Cold War era SSNs.
Later on, the more advanced Virginia SSNs – as a smaller, cheaper, and slightly reduced capability version of the small class of Seawolf SSNs – came along by the mid-2000s, adding length, tonnage, and vertical launch tubes capable of putting up as many as 12 Tomahawk missiles (a similar vertical launch tube arrangement by then had also been added to some of the last Los Angeles-class boats). However, those post-Cold War Tomahawks on SSNs were not, like their Cold War predecessors, equipped to engage moving naval targets as long range anti-ship missiles, but instead were Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAM), capable only of engaging fixed land targets. The Navy was also busy deploying large numbers of TLAMs on large surface combatants, both Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, for the same deep strike land attack mission the Navy had taken on in the 1990s and beyond.
The latest Block 5 Virginias add a new “Virginia Payload Module” that adds yet another 84-foot section to the hull aft of the sail containing four more vertical launchers carrying as many as 28 additional TLAMs for land attack. The stated purpose of the VPM was to attempt to make up for the planned retirement of four SSGNs (converted Ohio-class SSBNs that were “denuclearized” per the START strategic nuclear arms reduction treaty). But of course that conversion of SSBN to SSGN was a “make work” solution for the resulting excess Ohio SSBNs above treaty limits, which has now begat a “make work” mission for SSNs. All of which bloats the boat itself and makes it much more expensive to build and operate.
Adopting the deep strike land attack mission was an understandable response to the drastic and virtually overnight elimination of a significant near peer naval threat in the 1990s. Thus the Navy and its supporters in Congress converted the navy virtually overnight to a deep strike land attack force in order to become more relevant to evolving national security interests, but at the expense of full-spectrum competence. Otherwise, naval leaders and proponents feared an even more drastic fleet reduction than the 50 percent cut that was actually made after the end of the Cold War.
This “keep the Navy relevant in the Post Cold War era” mindset was also aided and abetted by the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987 limits on “land based” intermediate range cruise missiles (IRCM) that strangely did not apply to “surface launched” (i.e., naval platforms). (Both the U.S. and Russia have now withdrawn from this treaty, effective later this year.) In any event, INF encouraged both the Russian and U.S. navies to deploy large numbers of land attack cruise missiles on surface warships.
Clearly a lot has changed since the Post Cold War-era began. The U.S. military today is no longer simply tasked with combating low-capability insurgent forces in various and sundry developing nations often situated well inland, nor does the INF treaty apply as of this year either.
With the well-documented fast growing maritime threat posed especially by China (whose fleet of attack submarines is currently estimated to number over 70 vessels, and is expected to continue to grow at a rapid rate thereafter), as well as a resurgent Russian Navy, the world of naval warfare has now transformed from a low threat environment into a serious challenge to U.S. naval dominance. The U.S. Navy now has a clear and overriding mission – to deter and if necessary fight and win a naval war against capable near peer forces. Projecting sea power ashore continues as a U.S. Navy mission, but that mission is best and most cost-effectively performed by naval aircraft (both carrier-based and land-based), not by submarines. Given all of the above factors, then, and the fact that naval shipbuilding budgets are constrained, including demands to simultaneously recapitalize aging CVNs and Ohio-class SSBNs, the Navy must go back to the drawing boards.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen visits the Chinese People’s Liberation Army-Navy submarine Yuan at the Zhoushan Naval Base in China on July 13, 2011. (DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley/Released)
The Navy should consider designing a new SSN that is smaller and cheaper, and focused entirely on the anti-shipping and ISR roles – the historic roles of the SSN throughout the Cold War – with particular attention paid to building and operating many more new boats at a far faster build rate.
Size as measured in tons displacement, however, is not the only requirement and means of controlling cost – there is also the matter of modernization and capability. Obviously the technologies available today are far more advanced compared to those available in the 1960s and 1970s when the bulk of our Cold War era SSN fleet was built. For example, the later generations of U.S. submarines incorporated new propulsors – pump jets, rather than the older and noisier seven-bladed open screws on the Cold War era boats. Better sensors are also going into today’s boats, both sonars and “above the water” sensors, with photonic masts rather than periscopes, which allows more efficient interior hull design and better distribution of sensor data to various locations within the crew area. Better electronic warfare capabilities are also part of today’s fleet, and cyber warfare is increasingly a key area of focus in the 21st century.
Better weapons are also available today, although advancements in deployed submarine-launched weaponry have clearly lagged behind both our adversaries and even of USN surface forces and naval air wings in recent years. Existing SSNs are still using the old Mk 48 ADCAP 21-inch torpedo first deployed in the mid-1970s, though significantly upgraded over the decades. But as of today the only submarine-launched anti-ship cruise missile available is still the old Harpoon Block 1C that was developed in the 1970s, and as of today only one of our existing SSNs has even re-integrated the Harpoon, as of last year. A new “Maritime Strike Tomahawk” refit kit is slated to become available in 2021 which will provide a new very long range ASCM capability to both submarines and surface warships with VLS. Perhaps other existing ASCMs such as the new Naval Strike Missile, now slated for deployment on LCS and FFGX, can and may also be integrated onto U.S. submarines, along with LRASM in the coming years.
Additionally, it should also be recognized that for purposes of anti-submarine warfare which was the primary role of the Cold War SSN, and which is now becoming a priority again, the Mk48 ADCAP torpedo is likely “overkill” for use against submerged submarines. The power of a 650 pound warhead on the Mk 48 certainly is helpful for attacking large surface ships, with the ability to literally break a ship in half when detonated under the keel. Submerged submarines, however, do not require such explosive power because of the effect of submergence sea pressure.
The lightweight ASW torpedoes such as the Mk 46 and Mk 54 (12.75 inches diameter by 8 feet 6 inches long, and weighing just 508 pounds vs. 21 inches, 19 feet, and 3,695 pounds respectively for a Mk 48) have for decades been in use by the US Navy and our NATO allies deployed on surface warships and ASW aircraft. The lightweight torpedoes have warheads with weights of slightly less than 100 pounds – demonstrably sufficient to sink a submerged submarine. Indeed, one of the most effective ASW weapons in WWII, the “hedgehog,” had a much smaller warhead of just 35 pounds of TORPEX. It was demonstrated that typically only one or two hedgehog detonations were needed to sink a submerged submarine.
An exercise Mark 54 Mod 0 torpedo is launched from the U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Roosevelt (DDG-80). (U.S. Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Justin Wolpert)
Therefore, the Navy needs to give strong consideration to adapting existing lightweight ASW torpedoes to our next generation of SSNs. Doing so would facilitate the ASW capability of our SSNs while significantly increasing the sub’s capacity to store and deploy much smaller torpedoes. Not as a total replacement for the Mk 48, but rather, as a supplement to the Mk 48 to enable much larger total magazine depth without increasing the displacement of the submarine, to accommodate the ability to attack both surface ships and submarines. Instead of just four 21-inch torpedo tubes on a Virginia-class boat, a combination of 21 inch and 13 inch horizontal tubes optimized for a typical mission profile could work very well.
Finally, whatever combination of horizontal tubes and torpedoes is determined optimal, the weapons themselves need to continue to be updated to the latest technological capabilities as to sensors, self-contained computing (and artificial intelligence) as necessary to track and target submarines and defeat enemy countermeasures, and improved warheads. Hard kill anti-torpedo torpedoes as well as other torpedo countermeasures are also a prime area of development that needs to continue, despite a recent setback with the CAT weapon systems deployed on CVNs.
Nuclear propulsion technology is also advanced today over the old Cold War power plants. The latest generation of naval nuclear reactors as used on the new Ford class CVNs known as the A1B reactor are much more automated and simplified than the previous plants, allowing the highly trained and certified nuclear plant operator crew size to be cut in half as compared to the 1960s era reactors of the Nimitz class CVNs.4 Even more revolutionary nuclear power plant designs are going to be available to submarine designers in the next decade.
Similar technological opportunities abound to more heavily automate every work process throughout the next generation submarines, including artificial intelligence capabilities, and thus can significantly reduce overall crew manning requirements in a submarine. This has already been achieved on the latest surface combatants including the Ford CVNs and the Zumwalt DDGs, which respectively achieved overall manning reductions of 33 percent and 50 percent over their predecessor classes. A similar reduction in SSN crew size also ought to be achievable using the same design approaches and modern automation technology. Reductions in crew size also lead to reductions in hull volume.
Additional technology “insertions” are also available in other areas of submarine design that should be able to create significant impacts in both cost reduction as well as improving the capabilities of our next gen SSNs.
Conclusion
In consequence of all of the considerations described above, it is clear that NAVSEA needs to undertake a project to re-engineer the next generation of SSNs. Navy leadership has publicly stated its intent to reconfigure the surface fleet to significantly reduce the ratio of large surface combatants (LSCs) to small surface combatants (SSCs). The Navy now needs to similarly reconfigure the SSN fleet in favor of smaller boats optimized for sea control over long-range land attack. They must reject the bloated SSN(X) concept which is more of the same, but bigger and more expensive, and go for a new class of SSN that is far smaller and cheaper and thus affordable in much larger numbers than currently planned submarines.
Mr. Truitt is a veteran Cold War-era SSN sailor, qualified nuclear reactor operator, and civilian nuclear test engineer. He is also a degreed civil engineer, environmental scientist, and civil/environmental project manager with extensive experience at both naval and civilian nuclear facilities as well as military and civilian facilities development. His interest today as an author is in forward-looking military preparedness and improvements in both capacity and capability of U.S. naval forces.
Notes
1. USNI News, Ben Werner, March 27, 2019: “Indo-PACOM Commander Says Only Half of Sub Requests are Met”
2. USNI News, Megan Eckstein, April 8, 2019: “Navy Sees No Easy Answer to Balance Future Surface Fleet”.
3. USNI News, Megan Eckstein, May 13, 2019: “Virginia Block VI Subs Will Focus on Special Operations, Unmanned”
Featured Image: YOKOSUKA, Japan (Sept. 3, 2010) The Virginia-class attack submarine USS Hawaii (SSN 776) transits Tokyo Bay on the way to Fleet Activities Yokosuka, marking the first time in the history of the U.S. 7th Fleet that a Virginia-class submarine visited the region. This is Hawaii’s first scheduled deployment to the western Pacific Ocean. (U.S. Navy photo by Lt. Lara Bollinger/Released)
A recent independent reviewof the Navy’s cybersecurity posture, completed in March 2019, was predictably harsh on our Navy’s current culture, people, structure, processes, and resourcing to address cybersecurity.1 For many of us within the Information Warfare discipline, much of this report does not come as a shock, but it does lay bare our cultural, structural, and procedural problems that the Navy has been struggling with since the turn of the century.
The 76th Secretary of the Navy, Richard V. Spencer, should be applauded for enabling open and honest dialogue on the key issues of this report by releasing it for public comment and professional discourse. The review found that the Navy was not “optimally focused, organized, [nor] resourced” for cyberwar.2 Such transparency has been the hallmark of the naval service for centuries, and is largely the reason why such robust professional forums such as the United States Naval Institute (USNI) and the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC) continue to thrive.
The report was particularly critical of the Navy’s culture, stating that the Navy is “preparing to win some future kinetic battle, while it is losing the current global, counter-force, counter-value, cyberwar.”3 The report goes on to recommend that the highest levels of Navy leadership adjust the service’s cultural landscape to become more information-centric, rather than platform-centric. This excerpt is particularly vexing:
“Navies must become information enterprises who happen to operate on, over, under, and from the sea; a vast difference from a 355 ship mindset.”4
In truth, the Navy that acts as an information enterprise and the Navy that pursues the tenants of traditional naval warfare as laid out by naval doctrine are not mutually exclusive. Our drive toward a bigger, better, and more ready Navy, aligned to the National Defense Strategy, requires a naval culture ready for high-end conflict but active and engaged in all levels of conflict below lethal combat. The adoption of information enterprise core principles certainly has a place in our doctrine; in fact, it’s already there but lacks proper execution and widespread cultural adoption as a core competency across all warfare communities. Navy culture can be adapted to better fit the information age, but it will take the entire Navy to do it and not just a single community of effort.
Information is Already in our Doctrine, but Prioritization Must Improve
The 31st Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), Admiral John Richardson, released a Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority shortly after assuming his role, and recently released an update (Design 2.0) to compliment the 2018 National Defense Strategy. The CNO put information warfare at the center of his strategic thinking, and challenged the Navy’s operational and resourcing arms to “adapt to this reality and respond with urgency.”5 But this change in the security environment wasn’t new to this CNO, in fact, it was foreseen decades ago by thinkers like CAPT (ret.) Wayne P. Hughes, a venerated naval tactician and professor emeritus at the Graduate School of Operations and Information Sciences of the Naval Postgraduate School. Early versions of Hughes’ Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat, required reading in graduate-level naval officer training, placed information, rapid adoption of technology, and intelligence at the forefront of effective maritime operations in the modern age.6
If we’ve valued information in warfighting all along, then why are we failing to adapt our naval culture to the Information Age? The Cybersecurity Readiness Review cuts straight to the point: “… cybersecurity continues to be seen largely as an ‘IT issue’ or ‘someone else’s problem.’”7 In our haste to stand up a community of practice to do all the cyber things we, as a Navy, failed to make the necessary cultural changes that should have accompanied it.
Why hasn’t the growth of the Information Warfare Community focused the Navy’s culture appropriately? After all, creating such specialized warfare communities has always worked well in the past, as any aviator can attest to. Truthfully, the problem is bigger than just one community; the subsequent decades saw the rise of global information technology as central to nearly everything we do, and every Sailor now uses the network as a primary on-the-job resource. The loss of email, web browsing, and support systems that handle tasks from personnel to logistics can and does result in work stoppage; any assertions to the contrary, that workarounds or manual methods still exist, do not accept the reality of the situation.
Cultural change is long overdue, and just like a Marine or Soldier learns how to handle their weapon safely and effectively from day one, we must now train and mentor our Sailors to use the network in the same vein. No more can we flippantly say “we have people for that” when faced with information management and cybersecurity problems, putting effort into modernizing complex systems and enhancing Information Warfare’s lethality, while ignoring the power a single negligent user could wield to bring it all down. It’s all hands on deck now, or the Navy faces the very real possibility of fumbling the opening stages of the next kinetic fight.
Security is Already an Inherent Part of Navy Culture
The good news is that information security is already an intrinsic part of being a member of the armed forces, uniformed or civil service. Security clearances, safe handling procedures for classified information, and cryptography practices like two-person integrity have been trained into the workforce for decades. Protecting information is as much a part of our culture as operating weapons systems or driving warships.
The Navy’s training machine should find ways to leverage this existing culture of compliance to incorporate dynamic and repetitive ways to reach all Sailors at all stages of development – from boot camp to C school, from initial officer training to graduate school, focused on making each Sailor a harder target for information exploitation. Each engagement should be tailored to fit the environment and to complement subject matter: initial user training should teach how to report spear-phishing, practice OPSEC on social media (and how to spot adversarial attempts to collect against them), and recognizing unusual activity on a network workstation. A more senior Sailor in C-school might learn how to look at cybersecurity from a supervisory perspective, managing a work center and a group of network assets, and how to spot and report insider threats both malicious and negligent. An officer in a naval graduate program, such as at NPS or the Naval War College, would take advanced threat briefings on adversarial activity targeting rank-and-file users on the network, and how to incorporate such threat information into wargaming to inform the strategic and operational levels of war.
Some of these actions are already in the works, but the emphasis should be on how to engage Sailors in multi-faceted, multi-media ways, and repetition is critical. Seeing the same concept in different ways, in different case studies, reinforces better behavior. The Navy is no stranger to this training method: we are masters at repetitive drills to train crews to accomplish complex actions in combat. Reinforcement of this behavior cannot come fast enough. Incidents attributed to negligent network users are on the rise, and cost organizations millions of dollars a year.8 The Navy is no exception: category-4 incidents (improper usage) are too common.
Ultimately, the objective should be a Sailor who understands cyber hygiene and proper use of the network as a primary on-the-job tool, just as well as any Soldier or Marine knows his or her rifle. Sailors go to sea aboard complex warships with integrated networked systems that run everything from Hull, Mechanical, and Electrical (HM&E) systems to combat systems and weapons employment. The computer is our rifle, why shouldn’t we learn how to use it more safely and effectively?
Keys to Success
Cultural change is hard, but lessons learned from our past, best practices from the private sector, and good old fashioned invasive leadership (the kind the Navy does very well) can adjust the ship’s rudder and speed before we find ourselves much further in shoal water.
Top level leadership must set the conditions for success, but they have to believe in it themselves. Our Sailors can easily tell when a leader doesn’t fully commit to action, paying lip service but nothing beyond it. They are also hungry to follow a leader who has a passion for what they do. To effect change, passionate leaders need to take center stage with the authority and resources necessary to translate change into action at the deckplate level. When a Sailor sees a top-level message about a desired change, then sees that change actually happening in their workspace, it becomes real for them. Let’s also trust them to understand the threats, rather than keeping the “scary” threat briefs at the senior levels.
Successes must be celebrated, but failures must have real consequences. It’s time to get serious about stopping insider threats, specifically negligent insiders. Too often the conversation about insider threats goes to the criminal and malicious insiders, ignoring the most common root of user-based attack vectors. Our Sailors must be better informed through regular threat briefings, training on how to spot abnormal activity on the network, and clear, standardized reporting procedures when faced with phishing and other types of user-targeted attacks. Those who report suspicious activity resulting in corrective action should be rewarded. Likewise, those who blatantly ignore established cyber hygiene practices and procedures must face real consequences on a scale similar to cryptographic incidents or unattended secure spaces. This will be painful, but necessary to set our user culture right.
Effective training begets cultural change. We must take advantage of new and innovative training methods to enrich our schoolhouses with multimedia experiences that will reshape the force and resonate with our new generation of Sailors. The annual Cybersecurity Challenge should be retired, its effectiveness has been questionable at best, and replaced with the same level of rigor that we used to attack no-fail topics like sexual assault prevention. With the stand-up of a Director of Warfighting Development (N7), and the lines of effort within the CNO’s Design 2.0 rife with high-velocity learning concepts, the near-future landscape to make this sea change looks promising.9
Conclusion
The Navy has spent the better part of 30 years struggling to adopt an information-centric mindset, and the good news is that operational forces have come a long way in embracing the importance of information in warfare, and how it permeates all other warfare areas. Yet our culture still has a long way to go to break the now dangerously misguided notion that information management and cybersecurity are something that “we have people for” and doesn’t concern every non-IW Sailor. The IW Community has come a long way and can do a lot to further the Navy’s lethality in space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum, but it can’t fix an entire Navy’s cultural resistance to change without strong assistance.
Secretary Spencer, in his letter introducing the public release of the 2019 Cybersecurity Readiness Review, noted that “the report highlights the value of data and the need to modify our business and data hygiene processes in order to protect data as a resource.”10 He highlighted that cross-functional groups were already underway to address the findings in the report, and surely the machinations of the Navy Headquarters are more than capable of making the necessary changes to the Navy’s “policy, processes, and resources needed to enhance cyber defense and increase resiliency.”11 But culture, that’s all of us, and we must be biased toward change and improvement. We are the generation of naval professionals who must adapt to this reality and respond with urgency.
Lieutenant Commander Howard is an Information Warfare Officer, information professional, assigned to the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington DC. A prior enlisted IT and Surface Warfare Officer, his last operational assignment was as the Combat Systems Information Officer aboard USS ESSEX (LHD 2) in San Diego, CA.
References
[1] The Hon. Michael J. Bayer, Mr. John M. B. O’Connor, Mr. Ronald S. Moultrie, Mr. William H. Swanson. Secretary of the Navy Cybersecurity Readiness Review (CSRR), March 2019. https://www.navy.mil/strategic/CyberSecurityReview.pdf
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Chief of Naval Operations, December 2018. Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority, Version 2.0. https://www.navy.mil/navydata/people/cno/Richardson/Resource/Design_2.0.pdf. p. 3
[6] Wayne P. Hughes, 2000. Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press.
[7] Bayer, et al., CSRR 2019, p. 12
[8] Security Magazine, Apr 24, 2019. “What’s the Average Cost of an Insider Threat?” https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180424005342/en/Research-Ponemon-Institute-ObserveITReveals-Insider-Threat
[9] CNO, Design 2.0, p. 13
[10] Secretary of the Navy, 12 Mar 2019. Letter accompanying public release of the CSRR 2019. https://www.navy.mil/strategic/SECNAVCybersecurityLetter.pdf.
[11] Ibid.
Featured Image: U.S. 7TH FLEET AREA OF OPERATIONS (Oct. 16, 2015) Operations Specialist 1st Class Keith Tatum, from Americus, Georgia, stands watch in the Combat Information Center (CIC) aboard the guided-missile cruiser USS Normandy (CG 60) during an air-defense exercise as a part of the joint exercise Malabar 2015. Malabar is a continuing series of complex, high-end warfighting exercises conducted to advance multi-national maritime relationships and mutual security. Normandy is deployed to the U.S. 7th Fleet area of operations as part of a worldwide deployment. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Justin R. DiNiro/Released)
