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Fight the Next Fleet Problem in the Solomons

January 28, 2019 Guest Author 3 Comments

By Ryan Hilger

“There’s a good chance…we’d lose the opening stages of this war,” remarked one high ranking official at a recent conference on Multi-Domain Operations.¹ Many senior officials are rightly worried that our potential adversaries have spent the last fifteen years developing capabilities tailored against us as while the U.S. military has been focused on Afghanistan, Iraq, a plethora of other low-intensity operations occurring all over Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, and perpetually overdrawn budget. Staffs in the Pentagon and at the systems commands fret over how we will maintain, much less expand, our competitive advantage as these countries undertake very public campaigns to develop capabilities such as hypersonic weapons and artificial intelligence.

Lost in the moment it is easy to forget that we have been in a similar situation before in the 1930s and 1940s. During the interwar period, the Fleet Problems were strategic proving grounds and tactical classrooms, incubating revolutionary tactics such as carrier warfare. The Navy refined those strategies in the crucible of World War II, and the lessons from those campaigns, not just the battles, are key to maintaining operational superiority in a new era of great power competition. Admiral Scott Swift, while the Commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, reinstituted Fleet Problems to prepare the Navy for the high-end fight using the tools on hand today.² Taking the Fleet Problems to the next level by including our joint forces will yield greater dividends and prepare the Navy for fighting campaigns, not just battles—something we haven’t done since World War II.³ Conducting the next one in the Solomons will reinforce the lessons of the campaign there in 1942 and stress the harsh, indiscriminate effects of geography on prolonged maritime campaigns.

Maritime Parallels and Analogues

China, like Japan in the 1930s, seeks to be a major regional, if not global, power. China continues to expand its presence and capabilities in the South China Sea, recently established a naval base in Djibouti, and begun making overtures to Vanuatu in the South Pacific.⁴ The Chinese, always with the long view, have embarked on a campaign to protect their global supply lines which are needed to fuel their industrializing economy. The Philippines, traditionally an American stalwart, openly denounced ties with us and moved directly toward Beijing.⁵ This sounds familiar. As early as 1931, the Japanese began pushing out into the same waters, seeking natural resources for their growing economy. By 1941, the Japanese had secured their western and northern fronts with campaigns in China and Manchuria, signed a pact with Russia, and established strong naval bases in the Marshall, Marianas, and Caroline Islands.⁶ Japanese naval power grew stronger by the day.

The conditions were becoming ripe for further expansion to secure their sea lines of communications and expel all western influence in Asia. After the war, the Japanese told an American survey team that their strategic plan for conducting the war against the Western powers was initially to be a “series of simultaneous and overwhelming surprise attacks on all of the Pacific bases of the western powers.”⁷ They succeeded brilliantly. The Japanese push to the their second island chain—both through the Marshalls and Gilberts toward Samoa, and through the Solomons with the capture of New Guinea as the final stroke—was predicated on the strategic desire to interdict supply lines between the United States and Australia, provide a defense-in-depth for maritime resource flows back to Japan, and to fight the remnants of the American Navy far from their shores. The same is true of Australia and its pivotal relationship to a Pacific campaign today.

The geographic conditions are eerily similar to China’s expansion today, and the “range, lethality, and sophistication of [their] new anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities constitute an unprecedented array of A2/AD capabilities that threaten the U.S. model of power projection and maneuver.”⁸ Additionally, today’s fiscal constraints, aging force structure, and readiness issues lends credence to the fear that the United States and its partners could be overrun in the opening phases of a conflict, just as it was almost eighty years ago with near-simultaneous defeats at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Wake Island, and the Java Sea. The subsequent campaign through the Solomons provides many lessons to inform maritime strategy today. Understanding these lessons requires a shift away from celebrating Mahanian naval battles, like Midway, to embracing the need to fight prolonged, joint campaigns to deter aggression or regain access.

Island Chains and the Maritime Siege

Nowhere is the tyranny of distance felt more than in the Pacific. This was true in 1942 and it is just as relevant today. Coming from Asia, both the Japanese in the 1940s and the Chinese today have a number of stepping stones to project power, are able to create overlapping barriers to deter and attrite forces moving west, whether as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in the 1930s or the Chinese Nine-Dash Line claims today. Captain (Ret.) Sam Tangredi identified these attritional operations as one of the central elements of an anti-access strategy.⁹ To this he adds four more: perception that the attacking force is superior; the maritime domain is the dominant conflict space; information, intelligence, and deception are critical and; unrelated events elsewhere have a decided impact.¹⁰ The Pacific theater, then and now, has many of these elements in abundance.

The Japanese followed up on their successes of December 1941 with a series of rapid offensives through the south-central Pacific, sweeping aside nearly all allied garrisons in the process. At the outset, Admiral Yamamoto believed the American Navy was superior and needed to be reduced before giving in to a decisive battle. Lawrence Freedman notes that the Americans knew that an early attack was probable, but only looked to “the Philippines as a target and had underestimated Japanese capabilities. They had assumed that the strength of the Pacific Fleet would serve as a deterrent.”¹¹

In late January 1942, the Japanese pushed through the Bismarck Archipelago in the southern Pacific and seized a major objective at Rabaul.¹² The development of Rabaul would be critical in flowing forces into the region to extend Japanese power into the Solomons and threaten allied supply lines to Australia.¹³ Subsequent Japanese Army operations in the region developed mutually supporting bases. Chinese movement toward Vanuatu today appears quite similar to the Japanese moves in 1942. Chinese port infrastructure projects in Vanuatu will be able to support warships once complete and the development of Chinese naval presence there would represent a major threat to both intercontinental supply lines and any naval forces moving through the region—the foundations of an anti-access strategy. However, in War Plan Orange, Miller notes that distance, so onerous for the United States to overcome, would prove a fickle mistress for the Japanese should Americans penetrate the barriers and establish advanced bases, giving it the ability to “sever Japan’s trade lifelines, neutralize its outlying stations, overwhelm its fleet in battle, and bombard its homeland. Defeat would follow inevitably.”¹⁴ The same could be said in a protracted conflict with China today.

Joint Maritime Campaigns

The Battle of Midway brought the American Navy its first true victory of the war, but it was not the decisive battle of the war. As both navies recovered from the losses sustained, Admiral Nimitz knew that the Japanese buildup in the Solomons had to be stopped and that the course of the next campaign would decide the war. The allied forces had to take the offensive to gain the initiative. In just over one month’s time, American forces planned, organized, and executed Operation WATCHTOWER, or as it was better known given the dearth of resources afforded it, Operation “Shoestring.”¹⁵ The next four months following the amphibious landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi on August 7, 1942 would prove pivotal and decisive.

American surface forces had yet to meet their Japanese counterparts in battle. The ferocious fighting in and around the Solomons, a true back and forth affair, shows the grind of the campaign and the absolute necessity for the campaign to be joint. The American Navy could not have won it alone then, nor, as Admiral Swift asserts, will we be able to do so in a future conflict.¹⁶ Taking a solely naval perspective of the Solomons campaign would fall into Rear Admiral Joseph Wylie’s strategic trap, in that “[t]oo often the first or blue-water phase of maritime strategy is regarded as the whole process rather than no more than the necessary first half.” The second phase, after adequate sea control is established, is “the exploitation of that control by projection of power into one or more selected critical areas of decision on the land.”¹⁷ Our fleet must necessarily remain aligned with our national objectives, supporting other operational campaigns by our joint partners, which force a decision of our adversary on land—neither the Japanese nor Chinese navies can capitulate on behalf of the national government should they choose to continue resisting. Thus, the success of the Marine and Army effort to secure Guadalcanal rested directly on the joint maritime campaign to keep them from being overwhelmed.

Solomon Islands map. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Japanese held a formidable position in the South Pacific. The Solomon Islands were within range of land-based aircraft and naval forces from Rabaul, Buka, and other bases, which could all be quickly reinforced from Truk. Combinations of these forces could deny the seas around Guadalcanal nearly around the clock. American land-based airpower—Army B-17s based at Espiritu Santo, Efate, and Port Moresby—could only provide marginal support, and the aircraft carriers had to steam within range of Japanese air power to effectively use their air wings. The amphibious forces of Task Force 62 under Admiral Kelly Turner, which needed several days of continuous unloading operations, would be exceptionally vulnerable until the airstrip on Guadalcanal could be made operational. Admiral Frank Fletcher, commanding Task Force 61, believed that he could only risk the carriers that close to Guadalcanal for three days at most before the likelihood of Japanese attack was too great to continue. Events forced them to withdraw after only two.¹⁸

The Japanese, though surprised, responded rapidly. American surface forces patrolled the waters to the north of Guadalcanal near Savo Island, protecting the landing forces. On the night of August 8^th, Samuel Eliot Morison writes:

“Sailors onboard the cruisers were still talking of their performance during the two days past. They had helped the Marines to land by chasing Japs into the hills with 8-inch shells; they had protected the transports with anti-aircraft fire. But they were dog-tired after two days of incessant action and excitement…It was a hot, overcast and oppressive night, ‘heavy with destiny and doom’ as a novelist would say, inviting weary sailors to slackness and to sleep.”¹⁹

The American technical edge, radar, was ill understood by the senior leadership and ineffectively employed. The Japanese forces, on pins and needles, passed by the radar-equipped Blue around 0143 and surprised the heavy cruisers in the Southern Force when the shutters of their searchlights flicked open. At that same moment, HMAS Canberra shuddered from two torpedoes and the first of 24 shell hits. Her war would be over in less than five minutes. U.S. ships “replied at ﬁrst only with their antiaircraft batteries and with machine guns. Subsequently a few main battery salvos were ﬁred.” The Japanese, well trained in night surface gunnery, poured a steady stream of shells into the surprised cruisers. The Southern Force was finished as an effective fighting force in less than six minutes as Admiral Mikawa’s forces sighted Vincennes and the Northern Force.²⁰ In less than an hour, Quincy and Vincennes were on the bottom. Astoria, gravely wounded, would succumb hours later. One can imagine a modern day onslaught with anti-ship cruise missiles in the opening engagement.

Photographed from a Japanese cruiser during the Battle of Savo Island, off Guadalcanal, 9 August 1942. USS Quincy (CA-39), seen here burning and illuminated by Japanese searchlights, was sunk in this action. (Wikimedia Commons)

By August 11^th, the American position was critical. The Marines had been able to offload less than half of their supplies. Already exhausted Marines were put on half rations. “The 1st Marine Division was virtually a besieged garrison.”²¹ Admiral Fletcher’s aircraft carriers had been withdrawn hours after the defeat at Savo Island, much to Marine General Vandegrift’s alarm. None of the Marine defense battalion’s 5-inch coastal defense guns, surface search radars, or fire control radars had made it ashore. Those radars and coastal defense guns, coupled with the Army B-17s in the region, may have helped tip the scales of sea control in the waters north of Guadalcanal at a crucial juncture. Just as Admiral Fletcher’s forces were ordered to protect the landing forces moving ashore, so too the Marines and Army could have assisted the Navy in setting the conditions necessary for their continued survival and success on land.

Geography dictates, according to Tangredi, the need to tailor forces and “that modern counter-anti-access operations need not be the sole province of naval and air forces.”²² Today, the Army, Marines, and Air Force are all investing in maritime warfare systems that can support the Navy. The Army is retooling its Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) for anti-ship missions out to 186-nautical miles.²³ The Marines are exploring similar capabilities from their High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS).²⁴ The Air Force recently completed several test firings of the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) from B-1B bombers, indicating that they want to play a part in sea control as well.²⁵ Sea control in and around expeditionary advanced bases, which the Marine Corps is reviving, needs to be a joint affair.

In a statement just as relevant today, especially when considering cruise missiles, Admiral Ghormley, commander of the South Pacific Area, foresaw the need for truly joint operations and communicated this to his task forces in the Solomons: “What we wish to achieve is the combination (no matter where the enemy may strike) of our shore-based aircraft and our carrier aircraft against the following targets in order of priority: Carriers, transports, battleships, cruisers, destroyers.”²⁶

The Navy should fully integrate the other services into its Fleet Problems and other exercises to develop the joint capabilities needed for maritime warfare. As Miller notes, despite the hasty tactical planning for Guadalcanal, the Allies “had a broad and well-established base in the doctrines governing landings on hostile shores which had been developed during the years preceding the outbreak of war.”²⁷ We should do the same again, starting by conducting the next Fleet Problem in the Solomons as a joint force on a campaign timescale.

Campaigns Require Sacrifices

By November 1942, three more major naval battles and countless skirmishes would rack up painful losses for both sides, from aircraft carriers down to destroyers. Each side knew that the final decision for the island, and potentially the war, was drawing near and continued to pour every available asset into the area to sway the outcome. The lessons from those previous battles had been learned, and the new, fiery leadership of Admiral Halsey reinvigorated American forces.

On November 12^th, reconnaissance indicated another Tokyo Express run headed to the Solomons to reinforce the Japanese garrison, shell Marine positions, and put Henderson Field out of action—this time with battleships. Admiral Halsey, desperately short on forces but having no other choice, ordered Rear Admiral Daniel Callaghan and Rear Admiral Normal Scott to the area in two groups consisting of a few cruisers with a handful of destroyers—a pickup force—against a Japanese force of two battleships, half a dozen cruisers, and a dozen destroyers. Morison remarks that the Japanese force was “obviously too large a bite for Callaghan’s two heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, and eight destroyers. Yet, with Kinkaid’s carrier-battleship force too far away to help, there was nothing else to be done but for Callaghan to block, and block hard.”²⁸ Captain Cassin Young of the San Francisco remarked to Admiral Callaghan, “[t]his is a suicide mission.” Callaghan replied, “Yes I know, but we have to do it.”²⁹ The Marine position on the shore, and the fate of the campaign, had to be protected at all costs.

Helena first detected the Japanese force at 27,000 yards and immediately sent warnings to Admiral Callaghan in San Francisco. That was the first and last thing to go completely right. San Francisco’s inferior radar left Admiral Callaghan with an incomplete tactical picture, and he was unable to discern whether the returns were his ships or the Japanese. In the ensuing melee, both Admirals Scott and Callaghan and twelve of the thirteen American ships were sunk or damaged. But the desperate action saved Henderson Field from bombardment by two Japanese battleships and kept the airfield in service. Admirals Callaghan and Scott and Lieutenant Commander Bruce McCandless, who assumed command after Admiral Callaghan was killed, would all receive the Medal of Honor for their actions that night.

Non-Linear Effects

The next day, Enterprise, the only remaining carrier in the theater and not fully capable of sustained air operations because of previous battle damage, flew off some of her air wing to operate from Guadalcanal under General Vandegrift.³⁰ Over the next few days, U.S. joint air forces in the region, including the B-17s, would ravage Japanese surface forces. The crew of the battleship Hiei, whose ship was hit more than 85 times the night before and marooned near Savo Island with a jammed rudder, would scuttle their ship on the 13^th after a prolonged day of repeated aerial assaults from Marine, Army, and Navy air forces.

B-17s of the 11th Bombardment Group based at Espiritu Santo bomb the damaged Japanese battleship Hiei north of Savo Island on November 13, 1942. Hiei, which was damaged in a naval battle off Guadalcanal hours earlier, appears to be trailing fuel. (Wikimedia Commons)

On November 14^th, Enterprise steamed within range and launched coordinated strikes against Admiral Tanaka’s transport force, which was still steaming south to land reinforcements at Guadalcanal. The Americans launched a combined twelve sorties from Enterprise, Henderson Field, and Espiritu Santo, sinking seven of the eleven transports, with Enterprise pilots flying sorties from both Henderson and the aircraft carrier in the same day—the joint force operated fluidly to achieve a higher sortie rate than Enterprise alone could have generated.³¹ The remaining transports, though heavily damaged, continued on to Guadalcanal attempting to unload while being constantly harassed and further damaged by Marine fighters and B-17s. Admiral Halsey knew that the carriers could not be readily replaced and thus shepherded the platforms carefully. Air power was the critical capability, but the aircraft and aircrews were expendable. In this three-day battle, Admiral Halsey showed the novel fighting concepts of disaggregating the air wing and how effectively using the joint force in the maritime domain could reduce the risk to irreplaceable forces that needed to defend the objectives on land.

After four months of vicious, close-in fighting on land and sea, the Battle of Tassafaronga on November 30^th brought the initial campaign to a close. The United States had penetrated the Japanese barrier and gained a foothold in the region—the anti-access strategy had been broken. A captured Japanese document, reflecting on the campaign, put the case plainly: “It must be said that the success or failure in recapturing Guadalcanal Island, and the vital naval battle related to it, is the fork in the road which leads to victory for them or for us.” President Roosevelt would note, “It would seem that the turning point his this war has at last been reached.”³² Admiral Nimitz and his forces had gained the initiative only through a joint campaign.

Conclusion

As the Navy returns to conducting Fleet Problems and increasing readiness, the lessons from the campaign in the Solomons should be imbued into them.³³

Geography reveals cold, hard truths about the ability to sustain a fleet beyond a single engagement. Campaigns at a distance require good stewardship of resources, national level commitment for support, and demands well-founded strategies at the strategic and operational levels to succeed. It drives how battles and wars are fought and won.

Resources will never be as plentiful as you would like. Learn to operate on a “shoestring” budget and still achieve your objectives. It requires tactical and operational level innovation and the freedom to experiment to prevail. Sometimes precious resources—ships and Sailors—must be sacrificed to protect the greater good. Do not forget the desired strategic outcome that put you there in the first place.

The pace of technological advancement and deployment is accelerating, but it cannot be allowed to drown our ability to fight. Officers and Sailors, on ships and shore alike, must embrace and thoroughly understand these technologies, and marry them with well-rehearsed, innovative doctrine to stay ahead of the enemy and prevail.

Maritime campaigns are fundamentally a joint effort at the strategic level. Failing to practice more creatively without joint (or even interagency) partners will harm combat effectiveness as a nation. Well-honed, integrated doctrine and tactics will deliver the non-linear effects in combat capabilities that we need to successfully deter aggression in the Pacific.

Our Navy plies the historic waters off the Solomons now; we need learn to fight there again. Send the joint force there now to figure it out.

Ryan Hilger is a Navy Engineering Duty Officer with the Strategic Systems Program in Washington, DC. His views are his own and do not reflect the opinion of the Department of Defense.

References

[1] Sydney Freedberg, “Generals Worry US May Lose in Start of Next War: Is Multi-Domain the Answer?” Breaking Defense, May 14, 2018, https://breakingdefense.com/2018/05/generals-worry-us-may-lose-in-start-of-next-war-is-multi-domain-the-answer/

[2] Scott Swift. “Fleet Problems Offer Opportunities.” United States Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 144, No. 3, March 2018, https://www.usni.org/print/92920

[3] Scott Swift. “A Fleet Must Be Able to Fight.” United States Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 144, No. 5, May 2018, https://www.usni.org/print/93518

[4] David Wroe, “China eyes Vanuatu military base in plan with global ramifications,” The Sydney Morning Herald, April 9, 2018, https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/china-eyes-vanuatu-military-base-in-plan-with-global-ramifications-20180409-p4z8j9.html

[5] “Duterte: Philippines is separating from US and realigning with China,” The Guardian, October 20, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/20/china-philippines-resume-dialogue-south-china-sea-dispute

[6] Naval Analysis Division, Marshalls-Gilberts-New Britain Party. The Allied Campaign Against Rabaul. United States Strategic Bombing Survey (Pacific), 1946, p. 5.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Michael Hutchens, William Dries, Jason Perdew, Vincent Bryant, and Kerry Moores. “Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons: A New Joint Operational Concept.” Joint Forces Quarterly, Volume 84, 1^st Quarter 2017, p. 135.

[9] Samuel Tangredi. Anti-Access Warfare. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2013), p. 13.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Lawrence Freedman. The Future of War: A History. (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2017), p. 65.

[12] John Miller. Guadalcanal, The First Offensive. (Washington, DC: Department of the Army Historical Division, 1949), p. 4.

[13] The Allied Campaign Against Rabaul, p. 7.

[14] Edward Miller. War Plan Orange. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2007), p. 32-33.

[15] Elmer Potter. Nimitz. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1976), p. 177-179.

[16] Scott Swift, A Fleet Must Be Able to Fight.

[17] Joseph Wylie. “On Maritime Strategy.” United States Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 7, No. 5, May 1953, p. 468.

[18] John Miller, pp. 20-79.

[19] Samuel Eliot Morison. History of United States Naval Operations in World War II: The Struggle for Guadalcanal, August 1942-February 1943. Volume V. (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Co., 1949), p. 32.

[20] Ibid, p. 40.

[21] John Miller, p. 81.

[22] Tangredi, p. 16.

[23] Jeremy Hsu. “The Army Gets back in the Ship-Killing Business.” Wired, March 1, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/03/army-converting-missiles-ship-killers-china/

[24] Sydney Freedberg. “Marines Seek Anti-Ship HIMARS: High Cost, Hard Mission.” Breaking Defense, November 14, 2017, https://breakingdefense.com/2017/11/marines-seek-anti-ship-himars-high-cost-hard-mission/

[25] Ben Werner. “Pentagon Tests Next-Gen Anti-Ship Missile from Air Force B-1B Bomber.” USNI News, December 14, 2017, https://news.usni.org/2017/12/14/pentagon-tests-next-gen-anti-ship-missile-air-force-b-1b-bomber

[26] James Steele. “Running Estimate and Summary, 7 December 1941 – 31 August 1942.” War Plans and Files of the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet. American Naval Records Society, 2010. Vol. 1, p. 605.

[27] John Miller, p. 58.

[28] Morison, 235-6.

[29] James Hornfischer. Neptune’s Inferno. New York, NY: Bantam Books, 2012, p. 254.

[30] John Miller, p. 186.

[31] Morison, pp. 264-269.

Naval Analysis Division, Marshalls-Gilberts-New Britain Party. The Campaigns of the Pacific War. United States Strategic Bombing Survey (Pacific), 1946, p. 126.

[32] Morison, p. 287.

[33] Swift, Fleet Problems.

Featured Image: STRAIT OF HORMUZ (Dec. 21, 2018) An MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter assigned to Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron (HSM) 71 takes off from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74) during a transit through the Strait of Hormuz, Dec. 21, 2018. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Grant G. Grady/Released) 181221-N-OM854-0135

Capability Analysis, Future Tech

Developing New Tactics and Technologies in Naval Warfare: The MDUSV Example

January 24, 2019 Guest Author Leave a comment

By Jeffrey Kline, John Tanalega, Jeffrey Appleget, and Tom Lucas

Introduction

The paper is about synergy. It demonstrates the power of using analytical tools in a logical sequence to generate, develop, and assess new concepts and technologies in warfare. Individually there is nothing new here. Each of the analytical tools described in this paper is thoroughly discussed in academic literature. The use of intelligent experimental design and large scale simulation to advance knowledge in defense and homeland security issues is well describe in Design and Analysis of Experiments by leaders in the Naval Postgraduate School’s Simulation Experiments and Efficient Design (SEED) Center for Data Farming (Sanchez, 2012).¹ The power of campaign analysis to gain insight and quantify the value of new technologies and capabilities is covered in the campaign analysis chapter of Wiley’s Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science (Kline, 2010).² Wargaming’s use to develop concepts for employment of those new technologies and discover possible risks to them are discussed recently in both the Military Operations Research Society’s Phalanx (Appleget, 2015)³ and the journal for Cyber Security and Information Systems Information Analysis Center (Appleget, 2016).⁴

It is the synergy created by bringing these tools together—linked by officers with tactical experience and educated in the analytical techniques—which this paper addresses. We provide it as an example of military operations research in practice to advance naval force development and fleet combat tactics. We tell this story through the lens of our co-author, LT John Tanagela, USN, and one technology, the Medium Displacement Unmanned Surface Vessel (MDUSV), but provide multiple examples of past work similar in nature. LT Tanagela is a qualified Surface Warfare Officer who chose to attend the Naval Postgraduate School to obtain a master’s degree in Operations Research. We select John’s educational and research experience not for its uniqueness, but instead for its normalcy as a NPS OR student with unrestricted line qualifications. Our other co-authors were John’s combat models instructor, campaign analysis instructor, wargaming instructor, and thesis research advisors. We provide descriptions and results from the analytical courses John leveraged to advance his research in employing a MDUSV and highlights from his thesis. We conclude with brief summaries of other concepts and technologies advanced in this manner.

Triad of Military Applied Courses

The Naval Postgraduate School’s Operations Research students receive three foundational courses in warfare analysis: the introduction to joint combat modeling course, the joint campaign analysis course, and the wargaming course (See Figure 1). In these applied courses they learn to model combat effects in tactical and operational level conflict, integrate these quantitative techniques in campaign analysis and human decision making, and, as a result, develop and quantitatively assess new concepts, tactics, and technologies.

Figure 1: The three warfare analysis courses provided to NPS operations research students.

The joint combat models course introduces traditional force-on-force modeling, including homogeneous and heterogeneous Lanchester equations, Hughes’ salvo equations, and computer-based combat simulations. It provides our officers the experience to integrate uncertainty into these models to allow for sensitivity analysis and design of experiments in exploring new capabilities.

The joint campaign analysis class leverages these new skills and previous course work in simulation, optimization, decision analysis, search theory, and probability theory by challenging our officers to apply them in a campaign-level scenario. During the course they must develop a concept of operation to meet campaign objectives, model that concept to assess risk using appropriate measures for their objective, and assess “new” technical capabilities by comparing them to their baseline concept analytical results. The results are quantitative military assessments of new concepts and technologies, identification of force capability gaps, and risk assessments (See Figure 2).

Figure 2: The NPS Joint Campaign Analysis class process for applying officers’ new analytical skills to campaign and operational level issues.

The wargaming class provides an overview of the history, uses, and types of wargaming, but focuses its efforts on teaching officers how to design, develop, execute, analyze, and report on an analytical wargame. After learning the fundamentals, officer-teams are assigned real-world sponsors who provide the objective and the issues they desire to address during a wargame. The officer-teams work with the sponsor through execution of an actual wargame, completing their course work by reporting the wargame’s analysis and results to the sponsor. An example is supporting the Navy’s PEO C4I by assessing the Undersea Constellation concept and technology. (See Figure 3)

Figure 3: Sponsor, student wargaming team (in uniform) and players of the NPS wargaming course’s PEO C4I Undersea Constellation Game.

Passing Lessons and Students along

As the NPS operations research students proceed from one course to another in the triad above—where they are joined by Joint Operational Logistics students, Systems Engineering Analysis students, Defense Analysis students, and Undersea Warfare students—there is an opportunity to carry lessons from on course into another, and gain further insight into those concepts and technologies. The teaching faculty work closely to ensure that happens by design. NPS Warfare Analysis faculty and researchers use these courses synergistically to provide insights to real-world sponsors in advancing their concepts, assessing new technologies proposed by DoD labs and industry, and developing new tactics—all the while enhancing our officer-students’ educational experience and sharpening their combat skills. For example, after learning to model a war at sea strike using salvo equations in the joint combat modeling course, the officers are challenged to develop a maritime concept of employment using distributed forces in the joint campaign analysis class, and assess that concept using the salvo equations and simulation. That concept is passed to the wargaming class (usually the same students) to better understand Blue’s decisions in employing distributed forces and Red’s potential reactions. Common scenarios are used between classes with similar forces structures (See Figure 4).

Figure 4: The NPS Joint Campaign Analysis and Wargaming connection. Technologies and concepts analyzed in the Joint Campaign Analysis class are frequently introduced by real-world sponsors in the wargaming class to better understand Blue’s force employments and Red’s reactions to new Blue capabilities.

The results of these capstone classroom efforts are a series of analytical and wargaming briefings, reports, and papers frequently shared with DoD and service organizations. In addition, the work informs other NPS research occurring in unmanned systems, networks, and command and control. Most impactful, however, is when officers are inspired to take a much more detailed look at new capabilities as their thesis research, using the insights gathered from their capstone course work as a foundation to build upon.

Simulating a Half Million Tactical Engagements

Officers frequently select a new technology explored in their military operations research applied courses to further study in their thesis work. They will draw upon their own operational experience to develop tactics to employ these technologies; work with weapon tactics instructors to refine these tactical situations; identify important variables and parameters within that scenario to further identify needed performance capabilities (range, speed, etc.) and tactical employment (formations, distances, logistics, etc.); build or use an existing simulation to model those tactics; use intelligent experimental design to efficiently explore a range of values for each of identified parameter; execute the experiment—frequently running over a half million tactical engagements; then use advanced data analytics to identify the most important parameters’ values to be successful (See Figure 5.)

Figure 5: Using simulation, intelligent experimental design, and advance data analytics to identify the most import performance parameters of a technology or tactical employment.

These theses’ results are always of great value to warfare and tactics development commands, to resources sponsors, material commands, and defense laboratories developing new technologies. Their insights also inform future capstone course work and NPS technical research. We now turn to our specific example, LT John Tanalega and the Medium Displacement Unmanned Surface Vessel.

The Technology: The Medium Displacement Unmanned Surface Vessel

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) Medium Displacement Unmanned Surface Vessel (MDUSV) program is a self-deployed surface unmanned system capable of on station times of 60-90 days with ranges of 900-10000 nautical miles depending on speed (3-24 knots) and payload (5-20 tones).⁵ For the NPS warfare analysis group, we provide it the following future mission capabilities. In an antisubmarine warfare (ASW) role, it receives an off-board cue and hand off, then conducts overt trail with active sonar. It can act as an ASW scout in coordination with area ASW assets like the P-8 maritime patrol aircraft or benthic laid sensors in an Undersea Constellation, conducting large acoustic surveillance using passive and/or active bi-static sonar. It can deploy three Mk 54 or six smaller CRAW torpedoes. In its Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) role, it can work with surface ships as an advanced scout employing passive sensors, and in an offensive role, can carry eight RBS-15 surface-to-surface missiles. In its mine warfare role, it can conduct mine sweeping with a MK-104 acoustic sweep body or can deploy a clandestine delivered mine in an offensive mining role. It may also act as a forward environmental survey ship, a platform for operational military deception, a tow for a logistics barge, and special operations equipment delivery.

All MDUSVs in these analyses are augmented by TALON (Towed Airborne lift of naval systems)⁶, which can carry up to 150 pounds of payload up to 1,500 feet. This payload can be communication relays, radar, electronic jammers (or emitters for decoy operations), or optical sensors.

https://gfycat.com/AlivePitifulIberiannase

ACTUV conducting testing with TALONS (DARPA Video)

The MDUSV equipped with TALON has been introduced in several Joint Campaign Analysis classes and Wargaming classes as technical injects to be assessed. LT Tanalega was given the MDUSV as a technical inject for both these classes.

The Student: LT John Tanalega

Academically talented, John has a typical operational background for a Naval Postgraduate School Operations Research student. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science degree in English. His initial sea tour was as Auxiliaries and Electrical Officer, and later First Lieutenant, in USS DEWEY (DDG 105). While assigned to DEWEY, he deployed to the Western Pacific, Arabian Gulf, Red Sea, and Eastern Mediterranean. His second division officer tour was as the Fire Control Officer in USS JOHN PAUL JONES (DDG 53), the U.S. Navy’s ballistic missile defense test ship. He attended the Naval Postgraduate School in from 2016 to 2018, where he earned a Master of Science degree in Operations Research and conducted his thesis research in tactical employment of the MDUSV.

Insights from the Joint Campaign Analysis classes, the Wargaming Classes, and other NPS research

As mentioned, the MDUSV with TALON was introduced to a series of Joint Campaign Analysis classes and several NPS wargames. Officer-students have employed it in a variety of missions, from active operational deception to logistics delivery to riverine patrol. Its strongest characteristics are on-station time over unmanned aerial systems, sensor payload capacity over all other unmanned systems, and speed over unmanned underwater systems. Its limitations include vulnerability to attack (it has no active defense), which is mitigated by a low radar cross section making it difficult to target and/or acquire. Our analytical and wargaming teams have found their value forward in offensive naval formations and in defense screening formations (Figure 5). Employing a single or pair of MDUSV with a P-8 maritime patrol aircraft in an area ASW environment is also valuable. (Figure 6).Figure 5: The graph shows the probability of successfully finding and engaging an adversary’s amphibious task force in a South China Sea scenario with a traditional U.S. Surface Action Group (SAG) with and without allied ship support. As MDUSVs are added to the SAG, the probability of mission success is increased. The MDUSV are contributing to the ISR and targeting capabilities of the SAG. This analysis was produced using combat modeling by a Joint Campaign Analysis class team.

Figure 6: This plot shows the simulation results of an Area ASW engagement between a PLA Navy SSK submarine and the MDUSV alone (labeled ACTUV or Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, the original DAPRA program name); the MDUSV with a P-8 (labeled both), and the P-8 alone. The Tukey-Kramer test displays significant improvement with the MDUSV and P-8 work as an unmanned-manned pair.

Unique employment concepts are also developed, such as employing paired MDUSVs working as an active-passive team for both active radar and acoustic search. This information is passed to both sponsors and the NPS combat systems research faculty for engineering analysis.

LT John Tanalega’s Joint Campaign Analysis efforts included analyzing the MDUSV’s contribution to a scouting advantage for Blue forces in a surface-to-surface engagement (see figure 5). While a student in the NPS Wargaming Class, John’s team designed, developed, and executed a classified South China Sea game for United States Fleet Forces Command exploring distributed maritime operations and a force structure that included the MDUSV. Lessons from both classes were then applied to his further research in the MDUSV’s best tactical employment in a surface to surface engagement.

Furthering the study by use of simulation (Problem, Tactical Engagement, and Design of Experiments)

In transitioning MDUSV from technical concept to operational reality, several questions are prominent. First, MDUSV is just what its name implies—a vessel. The specific technologies which will make it effective in the maritime domain are all in various stages of development, and they are too numerous for MDUSV to carry all of them. Therefore, an exploration of which capabilities improve operational effectiveness the most is essential. Second, while superior technology is necessary, alone it is not sufficient. USVs must also be used with effective tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to make them effective SUW platforms. USVs are entirely new to the U.S. Navy, and no historical data exists for their use in combat. Modeling, simulation, and data farming⁷ provide an opportunity to explore concepts and systems that, today, are only theories and prototypes.

Computer-based modeling and simulation are an effective means of exploring MDUSV capabilities and tactics. Live experiments at-sea are always important to gather real-world data and provide proofs of concepts. However, they require a mature design. They are prohibitively expensive, and the low number of trials that can be conducted reduces the confidence levels of their conclusions. Computer-based modeling and simulation allows us to run tens of thousands of experiments over a wide range of factors. It is, therefore, better suited for design exploration. Using high-performance computing and special techniques in design of experiments (DoE), such as nearly orthogonal and balanced (NOB) designs, simulation experiments that would have taken months or years with legacy factorial designs can be can be performed in a matter of days. This highly efficient technique provides greater insights that inform and direct live experimentation and requirements development.

To explore the effects of MDUSV on surface warfare, LT Tanalega used the Lightweight Interstitials Toolkit for Mission Engineering using Simulation (LITMUS), developed by the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division (NSWC DD). LITMUS is an agent-based modeling and simulation tool suited specifically to naval combat. Ships, aircraft, and submarines are built by users and customized with weapons, sensors, and behaviors to mirror the capabilities and actions of real-world combat systems. Using an efficient design of experiments and LITMUS scenario, over 29,000 surface battles were simulated with varied active and passive sensor ranges, MDUSV formations and armament, and emissions control EMCON policies.

To compare battle results, LT Tanalega used the probability of a surface force being first to fire a salvo of missiles against an adversary as a measure of effectiveness. This choice is motivated by the maxim of naval combat in the missile era to “fire effectively first,” and indicates a clear advantage in offensive tactics.⁸

Simulation Results (Unclassified)

Analysis of the simulation output shows that a traditional Blue force combating a very capable Red force in its home waters has 19 percent probability of meeting first-to-fire criteria (See Table 1). Blue surface forces equipped with MDUSV are nearly three times as likely to be first-to-fire. Analysis also found the increase in performance is due primarily to the extended sensor range afforded by the TALONS platform on scouting MDUSV. Based on the presence of MDUSV alone, Blue improves its probability of being first-to-fire by a factor of nearly three (from 19 percent to 56 percent), as shown in Table 1. Though a SAG will likely have helicopters embarked, it is important to note that helicopters are more limited in endurance. Further, the use of a helicopter in Phase II of a conflict poses exceptional risk to human pilots, especially if the enemy is equipped with capable air defense systems. We therefore modeled “worst case” without an airborne helo during the engagements. Given the long endurance of MDUSV and its autonomous nature, MDUSV represents a worthwhile investment for the surface force. When numerically disadvantaged and fighting in dangerous waters, MDUSV levels the odds for Blue.

Table 1. MDUSV Effect on First-to-Fire Probability

Advanced partition tree analysis of the data noted a breakpoint at an MDUSV passive sensor range of 36nm. With this range or greater, Blue was first-to-fire in 81% of the design replications (Table 2). Using the mathematical horizontal slant range formula to approximate visual horizon, this equates to a tether height of approximately 1020 feet. Given the current 150-pound weight limit for a TALONS payload, a passive electro-optical sensor may be more feasible than an active radar. Placing a high power radar, with power amplification, transmission, and signals processing in a TALONS mission package may not be feasible in the near term. Further study, from an electrical engineering and systems engineering perspective, is required.

Table 2. MDUSV Passive Sensor Range Effect on First-to-Fire Probability

While arming MDUSV provides a marginal increase in first-to-fire performance with EMCON policies 1 and 2, it has a small negative effect with EMCON policy 3. Ultimately, first-to-fire in each replication is driven by scouting—who saw whom and fired first. Since detecting the enemy is a necessary condition to shooting him, providing MDUSV with over the horizon sensor capabilities should be the first concern. This will allow the missile shooters of the surface and air forces to employ their weapons without emitting with their own sensors.

Furthering the Study by Use of Wargaming

The Fleet Design Wargame consisted of three separate gameplay sessions. During each session, the BLUE Team received a different order of battle. During gameplay, the study team observed the players’ decisions to organize and maneuver their forces, as well as the rationale behind those decisions. After two to three turns of gameplay, a member of the study team facilitated a seminar in which all players discussed the game results. Each team, BLUE and RED, had a leader playing as the “Task Force Commander,” and a supporting staff. The Blue Team consisted of three SWOs, a Navy pilot, an Air Force pilot, a Navy cryptologic warfare officer, two human resources officers, and a supply officer. The RED team consisted of three SWOs, one Marine NFO, one Navy cryptologic warfare officer, two Naval intelligence officers, and two supply officers. Search was adjudicated using probability tables and dice. Combat actions are being analyzed using combat models, such as a stochastic implementation of the salvo model.

Wargaming Results (unclassified)

The game demonstrated the combat potential that networked platforms, sensors, and weapons provide. Long endurance systems, such as the MQ-4C Triton and the Medium Displacement Unmanned Surface Vehicle (MDUSV) can be the eyes and ears of missile platforms like destroyers. The game also showed that with its range alone, an ASuW-capable Maritime Strike Tomahawk provides BLUE forces with greater flexibility when stationing units. On the other hand, unmanned systems also provide RED with a wider range of options to escalate and test U.S. resolve during phase 1. The study team also found that expeditionary warfare can have a double effect on the sea control fight. The presence of an LHA is a “double threat” to the enemy, acting as both an F-35B platform, and as a means of landing Marines.

Further Research Work on the MDUSV

Future research is required to optimize MDUSV design and to better characterize the human element of MDUSV employment and coordination. While TALONS provides a unique elevated sensor platform, a 150-pound maximum payload will be a considerable constraint. Passive sensors, such as EO/IR, may be mounted on the TALONS platform, but the weight required to house a high-performance radar will be a higher hurdle to overcome. Though this can be mitigated by changing the parasail design to increase lift, this will require more in-depth study of the engineering trade-offs. Also, the process will have to be automated. TALONS testing to-date has involved members of the test team deploying and recovering it.

Though this study was performed with software-driven automata, the tactical decisions leading-up to the placement of MDUSV will be made by humans. The long endurance of MDUSV makes it an ideal platform for deception. Tactical and operational level wargaming may yield insight into the affect that adding MDUSV will have on human decision-making.

As this study was the first SUW simulation of a man-machine teamed force, the scope of the agents explored was purposefully limited. To add to the realism of the experiment, and to explore future tactics, the addition of helicopters and other scout aircraft to the scenario may yield further insight into the design requirements and tactical employment of MDUSV.

MDUSVs in this study were homogenously equipped and shared the same EMCON policy. However, if each MDUSV is given only one capability, such as a particular sensor type or a weapon, their strengths may offset their weaknesses. Grouping several MDUSVs with different mission load-outs may be an alternative to sending a manned multi-mission ship like a DDG. It may also prove to be more resilient to battle damage, as the loss of a single MDUSV would mean the loss of an individual mission, while the mission-kill of a DDG would result in a loss of all combat capability. Further simulation and analysis with LITMUS may yield insights into this trade-off.

Other Examples

Although we have highlighted LT Tanalega’s recent research to demonstrate how the NPS Warfare Analysis group integrates officer’s tactical experience, classroom work, and more detailed research to provide insights in new technologies, tactics, and operational concepts, many other examples can be mentioned. These include tactics to defeat swarms of unmanned combat aerial vehicles, best use of lasers aboard ships, developing tactics to counter maritime special operations insertion, employing expeditionary basing in contested environments, exploration in distributed logistics, best convoy screening tactics against missile-capable submarines, and use of sea bed sensors and systems. Analytical red teaming is also used for sponsors wishing to better understand the resilience and vulnerability of their new systems—employed in the same classes mentioned in this paper. These results are shared with DoD and Navy sponsors interested in getting robust and quantitative assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of their systems.

Although the NPS Warfare Analysis group is pleased to make real-world contributions as part of our students’ education experience, our greatest satisfaction comes from observing the junior officer’s military professional growth that accompanies the application of their newly learned analytical skills. To model and analyze an engagement, a thorough understanding of the tactical factors and performance parameters is necessary. By the end of our students’ experience, they have gained expertise in that mission and in operations analysis—a perfect blend to contribute to our nation’s future force architecture and design.

CAPT Jeff Kline, USN (ret.) is a Professor of Practice in Military Operations Research at the Naval Postgraduate School. He holds the OPNAV N9I Chair of Systems Engineering Analysis and teaches Joint Campaign Analysis, Systems Analysis, and Risk Assessment. jekline@nps.edu

Dr. Jeff Appleget is a retired Army Colonel who served as an Artilleryman and Operations Research analyst in his 30-year Army career. He teaches the Wargaming Analysis, Combat Modeling, and Advanced Wargaming Applications courses. Jeff directs the activities of the NPS Wargaming Activity Hub. He is the Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC) Chair of Applied Operations Research at NPS. jaappleg@nps.edu

Dr. Tom Lucas is a Professor in the Operations Research Department at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), joining the Department in 1998. Previously, he worked as a statistician and project leader for six years at RAND and as a systems engineer for 11 years at Hughes Aircraft Company. Dr. Lucas is the Co-Director of the NPS Simulation, Experiments, and Efficient Design (SEED) Center and has advised over 100 graduate theses using simulation and efficient experimental design to explore a variety of tactical and technical topcs. twlucas@nps.edu

LT John F. Tanalega is a Navy Surface Warfare Officer from North Las Vegas, Nevada and is a 2011 graduate of the United States Naval Academy His first operational tour was as Auxiliaries and Electrical Officer, and later as First Lieutenant, in USS DEWEY (DDG 105). He next served as Fire Control Officer in USS JOHN PAUL JONES (DDG 53). As an operations analysis student at the Naval Postgraduate School, his research focused on combat modeling, campaign analysis, and analytic wargaming. After graduating from NPS, he reported to the Surface Warfare Officer School (SWOS) in Newport, Rhode Island, in preparation for his next at-sea assignment.

References

1. Sanchez, S.M., T.W. Lucas, P.J. Sanchez, C.J. Nannini, and H. Wong, “Designs for Large-Scale Simulation Experiments with Applications to Defense and Homeland Security,” Design and Analysis of Experiments, volume III, by Hinckleman (ed.), Wiley, 2012, pp. 413-441

2. Kline, J., Hughes, W., and Otte, D., 2010, “Campaign Analysis: An Introductory Review,” Wiley Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science, ed Cochran, J. John Wiley & Sons, Inc

3. Appleget, J., Cameron, F., “Analytical Wargaming on the Rise,” Phalanx, Military Operations Research Society, March 2015, pp 28-32

4. Appleget, J., Cameron, F., Burks, R., and Kline, J., “Wargaming at the Naval Postgraduate School,” CSIAC Journal, Vol 4, No 3, November 2016 pp 18- 23

5. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has demonstrated a prototype “Sea Hunter”. Information may be found at https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2018-01-30a

6. For more information on the TALON visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWEoV88PtTY

7. See Sanchez, ibid.

8. Hughes, W.P., Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat, 2^nd ed, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, 2000.

9. Wagner D.H., Mylander, W.C., Sanders, T.J., Naval Operations Analysis, 3^rd ed, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, 1999, pp 109-110.

Featured Image: The Medium Displacement Unmanned Surface Vehicle (MDUSV) (DARPA photo)

Indo-Asia-Pacific

Ships of State: Chinese Civil-Military Fusion and the HYSY 981 Standoff

January 23, 2019 Guest Author Leave a comment

By Devin Thorne and Ben Spevack

Introduction

On a late June morning in 2014, Vietnamese fisheries inspection vessel KN 951 approached HYSY 981 (海洋石油981), a Chinese-owned mobile oil platform operating within Vietnam’s claimed exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Three Chinese state-owned commercial vessels retaliated by spraying, ramming, and chasing KN 951 for approximately 11.5 nautical miles, ultimately doing substantial damage to the Vietnamese vessel’s hull. During the pursuit, these three Chinese tugboats displayed a considerable degree of tactical coordination: there is video footage showing that two boats worked in tandem to “T-bone” KN 951 while a third tug positioned itself in front of the Vietnamese vessel to prevent it from escaping. With the fifth anniversary of the HYSY 981 standoff on the horizon, reexamining it in the context of China’s civil-military fusion concept reveals Beijing’s strategic thinking on the role China’s merchant marine could play in future conflict.

Civil-military fusion (CMF) is a defining strategic concept in China’s quest to modernize its armed forces. A core component of the concept is improving national defense mobilization for both peaceful and wartime operations by integrating civilian personnel, equipment, and capabilities with military logistics systems. Burgeoning links between civilian actors and military bodies has led to, among other developments, agreements between the Joint Logistics Support Force and civilian-owned companies, as well as agreements between such firms and specific branches of China’s armed forces. In the maritime domain, agents of China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) have supplied People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) escort ships in the Gulf of Aden. Military exercises also use commercial semi-submersible transport ships as mobile docks, with the goal of moving materiel and repairing combat-damaged warships.

Civilian-military logistical cooperation in wartime is not uncommon. Yet the HYSY 981 standoff of 2014 is a striking display of how Chinese civilian infrastructure, nominally peaceful in purpose, might be summoned to assist in achieving national security objectives outside of war and how civilian equipment could be used in conflict. It also provides further evidence for an oft-heard but difficult-to-prove claim: Beijing sees state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and their assets (as well as those of private companies) as dual-use and may consider using them aggressively to achieve China’s goals internationally.

Joint Operation

The HYSY 981 standoff began in May 2014, as a China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) mobile drilling platform moved into disputed waters south of the Paracel Islands on behalf of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). It was the opening of a bold play to enforce Beijing’s jurisdiction over the surrounding area. The U.S. Department of Defense described the standoff as “Using [a] Hydrocarbon Rig as a Sovereignty Marker.” This apt description was presaged two years earlier at HYSY 981’s unveiling when CNOOC’s Chairman and Party Secretary lauded the platform as “mobile national territory” in 2012 and, later, described HYSY 981 as a “strategic weapon.” Vietnam protested HYSY 981’s deployment through diplomatic representations and its coast guard, law enforcement, and fishing vessels harassed HYSY 981’s mission. The standoff lasted approximately two and a half months, with clashes between Chinese and Vietnamese non-military assets a common occurrence.

The HYSY 981 standoff has been judged to be the largest joint operation between China’s three main sea forces: the PLAN, the Coast Guard (CCG), and the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia (PAFMM). Deployed to Vietnamese-claimed waters until July 15, 2014, the HYSY 981 platform was defended from Vietnamese challengers by three concentric security rings (i.e., cordons) primarily comprising CCG and PAFMM assets. PLAN vessels, as well as PLA aircraft, provided overwatch support. Yet a fourth fleet participated as well: China’s merchant marine. Over the summer, roughly 30 commercial transport ships and tugboats also defended the oil platform.

The June 23 incident was not an anomaly. Within just five days of the platform’s entrance into Vietnam’s claimed EEZ, Chinese and Vietnamese vessels clashed nearly 200 times. Videos of the standoff show how commercial vessels repeatedly worked in tandem with CCG assets to spray, ram, and otherwise harass Vietnamese vessels that approached HYSY 981. Thus, China’s merchant marine not only served as passive deterrents in the security rings around the rig, but became active combatants in the conflict.

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Chinese ship rams a Vietnamese vessel in the HYSY 981 standoff in 2014. (Thanh Nien News NewsVietnam.org)

Open source ship tracking data (i.e., AIS data) show that Chinese commercial vessels assumed distinct patrol patterns around HYSY 981. For example, two ships—Hai Shan (海山) and Zhong You Hai 226 (中油海226)—appear to have been assigned guard duty south and southeast of the platform, respectively. They maintained these relative positions throughout the summer. When HYSY 981 repositioned halfway through its deployment (on May 27), these vessels moved with the platform and maintained their patrols. Further, AIS data suggests these, and other, vessels may have used Triton Island as a staging area. Confirmation of this interpretation—that these vessels were not merely working in the vicinity of the rig—is found in the open source: Hai Shan’s manager praises the vessel’s role in providing security for HYSY 981 on the company website.

Combatant IDs

Chinese companies risked losing hundreds of millions of dollars in commercial assets by allowing their vessels to engage in the standoff. Moreover, HYSY 981 and the vessels involved sparked mass protests in Vietnam, which imperiled the overseas investments of Chinese businesses and ultimately led to the evacuation of thousands and deaths of more than 20 Chinese nationals in the protests. Many questions naturally follow. Among them, who are the owners of these brazen vessels, and why would they risk valuable assets in such an audacious manner?

Accounts of the standoff estimated that approximately 30 commercial vessels, not including fishing vessels, participated in the security cordons around HYSY 981. Ten of these are identifiable, along with their owners, in the open source and through AIS tracking. All ten are owned, respectively, by just three SOE subsidiaries:

CNPC Offshore Engineering Co. Ltd. (CPOE) owns five of the ten vessels. CPOE is a wholly-owned subsidiary whose sole investor is China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), a national-level SOE that is directly owned by the State Council. CNPC had leased HYSY 981 to drill in the disputed waters.
China Oilfield Services Limited (COSL) owns two of the ten vessels—Binhai 284 and Binhai 285—both of which participated in the June 23, 2014 attack on KN 951. COSL also manages HYSY 981. Corporate records show that COSL is majority owned by CNOOC. COSL’s remaining shares (49.47 percent) are currently held by government controlled funds in China and Hong Kong. In turn, CNOOC is a SOE wholly-owned by China’s Ministry of Finance and owns HYSY 981.
Yiu Lian Dockyards Limited owned the remaining three vessels, including Hia Shan, You Lian Tuo 10, and You Lian Tuo 9—the third tug boat that joined the June 23, 2014 maneuver. Corporate records reveal that Yiu Lian Dockyards is a wholly-owned subsidiary of China Merchants Group (CMG), one of China’s oldest and largest SOEs.

The appearance of SOE assets in a quasi-military operation raises the question of government involvement. Although Chinese oil SOEs, particularly CNOOC, have actively lobbied Beijing for permission to drill in the South China Sea since 2008 with some success, they have also been denied over concerns about conflict with Vietnam. Further, certain CNOOC projects are allegedly protected by CCG vessels at the company’s request, indicating that the company likely does not routinely provide physical security using its commercial ships or those of its subsidiaries. Moreover, SOEs alone would not have had the authority or capacity to unilaterally coordinate the PLAN, CCG, and PAFMM in defense of HYSY 981.

Chain of Command

China’s National Defense Mobilization Law of 2010 gives the State Council and Central Military Commission authority, typically through the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and the Chairman of the State, to mobilize civilian assets for national defense when “the sovereignty, unity, territorial integrity or security of the state is threatened.” Although there is no direct evidence that the state relied on these structures, explicit government involvement came on May 8, 2014—a week after HYSY 981 moved into position. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and CNOOC’s subsidiary COSL held a press conference responding to Vietnamese retaliation. Yi Xianliang of the Department of Boundary and Ocean Affairs and Li Yong, COSL’s President and CEO at the time, threatened to increase security in the area. This threat was swiftly carried out; within days of the conference, AIS data show that Bin Hai 284 and 285—the two COSL vessels that attacked KN 951 in June—began moving south from Beijing toward HYSY 981. To the end of the standoff, China’s ministry of foreign affairs spokespeople emphasized that HYSY 981’s mission was entirely within China’s sovereign rights. Chinese officials further argued that it was Vietnam who militarized the incident by sending armed ships, whereas China, officials asserted, only dispatched civilian vessels, thereby “preserving utmost restraint.”

In this file image from June 23, 2014, released by Vietnam’s Coast Guard, Chinese vessels purportedly ram a Vietnamese fishery control vessel, while another Chinese ship fires a water cannon, in a disputed area of the South China Sea. (Vietnam Coast Guard)

Further evidence of direct state support is found in how the Chinese government incentivized participation in the operation. During the standoff, a small private firm named Qingdao Kilter Ship Management Co. Ltd. managed three vessels on behalf of Yiu Lian Dockyards Limited. Defending HYSY 981 became a point of pride for Qingdao Kilter. The company’s website states that, “the oil industry has given [the company] high praise. Especially, between April 27 and July 22, Hai Shan, You Lian Tuo 9, and 10 defended HYSY 981 in the Paracel Islands, … for which [the company] received positive evaluations and commendations from high-level leadership in all areas.”

One of the commendations bestowed on Qingdao Kilter Ship Management Co. Ltd. was a second-class merit award (二等功) that went directly to a tug boat captain named Li for their part in the operation. Further tying this award to the Beijing, chapter 1 article 7 of the National Defense Mobilization Law states that honors will be given to civilians and organizations that make significant contributions to national defense mobilization. Notably, a second-class merit was conferred on all commanders, combatants, and logistics personnel 40 years earlier, when China originally wrested control of the Paracel Islands from Vietnam.

Lessons Learned

The HYSY 981 incident demonstrates for foreign powers how China’s merchant marine may interface with military and paramilitary forces in maritime conflict, furthering state aspirations, and hints at how Beijing elicits and rewards participation. But questions remain: why did Beijing mobilize the merchant marine for this operation and in what circumstances might it consider doing so again?

To the former, it is possible that Beijing required SOEs to contribute to the rig’s defense in exchange for approving the project in the first place. This may explain why the majority of identified commercial vessels belonged to COSL and CNPC and their subsidiaries. Another possibility is that these ships were mobilized to augment the capacity of the maritime militia. The maritime militia is primarily comprised of civilian fishermen who are compensated to participate in paramilitary operations. There is some evidence that militia members may have initially resisted participation in the HYSY 981 mission due to limited incentives, and thus the merchant marine may have been called upon to offset a force deficit.

To the latter, it is possible that Beijing was testing the use of its merchant marine in conflict both as a test of efficiency and how foreign actors might respond. Just as the PAFMM is employed to assert China’s interests in its near-seas below the threshold of war, the merchant marine could be used to do the same farther abroad. Already, the Chinese merchant marine and civilian transport companies are expected to facilitate long-range naval missions globally. Even outside of the Gulf of Aden, Chinese companies operating in foreign countries resupply warships. In the years following the standoff, China has formalized aspects of the dynamics on display in 2014 by promulgating new legislation. In 2015 and 2016, new laws further required all “container, roll-on/roll-off, multipurpose, bulk carrier and break bulk” vessels be built to military standards and that “all SOEs conducting international transport services and their overseas institutions must provide re-supply and rest and re-organization assistance for all ships, planes, vehicles, and personnel involved in military operations for international rescue, maritime escort, and the defense of national interests overseas.”

Strategic Challenge

In building itself into a “great maritime power” capable of projecting power and influence far afield, China is employing both military and economic means. Chinese SOEs now dominate international shipping lanes and ports, enjoying control of or influence in over half of the world’s top 50 container ports—investments that have the potential to reshape operating environments in critical waterways. At the same time, China controls the world’s largest merchant marine (counting by vessels owned and registered in the country) of 2,008 ships (not including tugboats or fishing vessels), which the Chinese military thinks of as a “strategic delivery support force” to enhance Beijing’s maritime projection.

Many countries rely on their merchant marine fleets to provide logistical support to the military during war and peaceful long-range patrols, but the HYSY 981 standoff suggests that Beijing believes commercial assets are legitimate instruments of aggression in peacetime. Similar logic is seen frequently in the activities of China’s PAFMM fishing vessels, which is one of only two militias in the world that has a mandate to defend internationally disputed territorial claims, even in peacetime. China’s apparent willingness to leverage commercial assets—particularly SOE assets—as critical tools of foreign policy coercion has global security implications.

In 2015, the HYSY 981 platform was prominently featured at an Achievements of Civil-Military Fusion Development in the National Defense Technology Industry Exhibition alongside other dual-use systems and technologies, such as remote sensing and surveillance planes, satellites, and water-pressurized nuclear reactors. Yet the standoff shows that CMF is more than civil-military cooperation on science and technology or research and development (on which most CMF research in the West has focused). It is also more than the adaptation of civilian infrastructure for military logistics and defensive mobilization. CMF opens the door for direct civilian participation in conflict. The HYSY 981 standoff shows this to be the case in the maritime arena, and in other domains (specifically network warfare) Chinese strategists explicitly call for civilian participation in combat.

Conclusion

As CMF drives state-owned and private firms closer to the Chinese military, countries and corporations should appropriately evaluate the risks and rewards of certain Chinese investment. Chinese SOEs may pose the greatest risk, as they are directly controlled by the State. Moreover, they have deep capital reserves, enabling them to operate broadly across regions and industries, as well as potentially absorb substantial losses that market-driven businesses may not survive. Finally, many SOE subsidiaries are publicly traded on international markets, creating the impression that these companies are purely motivated by profits. Indeed, a CNOOC subsidiary is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Such impressions can be accurate, but the dual-use nature of SOEs and the inherent risks of civilian mobilization potentially stemming from CMF agreements demand heightened scrutiny of Chinese investments abroad.

Devin Thorne (@D_Thorne) is a Senior Analyst and Ben Spevack (@BenSpevack) is an Analyst at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, DC

Featured Image: A Chinese Coast Guard vessel passes near the Chinese oil rig Haiyang Shiyou 981 in the South China Sea, about 210 km (130 miles) from the coast of Vietnam on June 13, 2014. (Reuters)

Tactics

Vice Admiral Hank Mustin on Naval Force Development

January 21, 2019 Guest Author 1 Comment

Vice Admiral Hank Mustin earned a reputation as a hard-charging commander and a cunning tactical innovator. At the apex of his career in the 1980s Cold War U.S. Navy, Admiral Mustin played a critical role in the Navy’s force development. From developing new tactics to organizing large-scale fleet exercises, to introducing new weapons and drafting requirements for future warship types, Mustin was at the very forefront of naval force development in an era of great power competition.

Vice Admiral “Hammerin Hank” Mustin (right), shown here discussing the details of a Second Fleet exercise with Captain Frank Lugo (left). (USNI Proceedings)

His legacy still lives on, and his work helped inspire the current Pacific Fleet’s “Fighting Instructions.” 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 shares his experiences and insights on leading naval force development, experimenting with new weapons, and how generating fresh tactical insight can make friends and foes in some of the most powerful places.

The great majority of the time was put into the development of this whole new bag of anti-air warfare tactics. There was not a lot of attention paid to anti-surface tactics or naval gunfire support because the feeling was that they would be handled by carrier aircraft…

…the fleet commander’s role in this stuff was essentially limited, because he was concerned with the operation of the force that he had, not the generation of a bunch of new tactics for new ships. So the majority of the tactical development at the time was done by the type commanders. That changed later on to be the fleet commanders bag, for the good reason that as we got into this stuff we found that, in particular, AAW was not the private purview of the surface Navy. You had to be able to integrate. As our own and the Soviet missile ranges got longer and longer your chances of shooting down your own airplanes, blue on blue, correspondingly increased. So the interplay between the surface ships and the carrier air wings got to be a very significant and difficult part of that equation. That was beyond the scope of the surface type commander’s authority. Because now you had two type commanders: the aviation type commander and the surface guys. So the fleet commander had to referee all those issues…

…Then the Arab-Israeli crisis of ’73 erupted. And to our amazement the Soviets put ninety-nine ships in the Mediterranean. There was no NATO involved in this so it was a U.S.-only operation. The first phase of the operation that involved the U.S. was the resupply of fighter aircraft to the Israelis. No cooperation from Spain, no cooperation from NATO. The replacement aircraft would TransLant and then go to ports in Italy. The function of the Sixth Fleet was to make sure that they could do that without the Soviet Navy interfering.

The Soviet Navy was an amazingly powerful unit—submarines, cruisers, all of whom were equipped with varying degrees of anti-surface missiles. It became apparent very quickly as we surge deployed our own forces that we had no tactics to deal with the defense of the fleet against these modern anti-surface missiles, because we’d been spending the last decade doing nothing but shooting at the Vietnamese ashore, and flying air strikes at Haiphong and Hanoi with no opposing fleet to stimulate fleet-on-fleet tactics. The whole body of tactics and weaponry and the modus operandi of the fleet was really in its formative stages. It caught both the aviation and the surface communities very, very much short…

…Luckily for the U.S. and for NATO, that [Arab-Israeli ’73] crisis tamped itself down without any shots being fired. What we got out of that was a huge bag of lessons, most of which showed how prescient Bud Zumwalt and Worth Bagley’s views about the rise of the Soviet Navy had been. Nobody believed them before all of this, in particular how important the rules of engagement were, the fact that we were not oriented or trained or properly indoctrinated to deal with fleet-on-fleet engagements, and how we had been way, way behind in the game of how to deal with these anti-surface missiles, largely because the aviators had just said: ‘Hey, we’ll sink everything before they have a chance to shoot at us,’ which of course ignored the rules of engagement…

…So really, after we got them up to those stages we started to work seriously on this bag of tactics that was so inadequate. The operations officer of the Sampson was a lieutenant named Neil Byrne. He had invented a dice game that you played on the wardroom table with ship models. He outlined all the capabilities, as we knew them, of the Soviet ships and ours, and you played tactical games. It’s called NavTag. Later on, when I was Op 35, we brought Neil back to OpNav, automated his game, and installed one of them at the Naval Academy and one at the War College. So that people started playing it. But at this time it was played on the wardroom table with dice. We started first as a competition between the ships. The wardrooms ate it up; they loved it.

Then we started a project where we played all the Type Commander’s TacNotes, and eighty percent of them were no good at all. We very carefully documented why we said this, and sent all this stuff to the Type Commander’s staff, who did not really welcome them in the spirit intended. Then we played ComSixthFlt’s anti-tattletale tactics, which is where we reached the fundamental but previously overlooked conclusion that you couldn’t get there from here if you tried to deal with the tattletales solely with carrier air…

…I learned in that tour in OpNav, particularly as Op 35, the tremendous potential of the whole new family of weapons systems that were on the verge of entering the surface Navy. They included the Tomahawk missile and the Harpoon, guided projectiles, electronic warfare systems such as the SLQ-32, and towed arrays for ASW. All these things were poised to enter the fleet.

But the fleet is not an experimental unit. Because the fleet has to maintain proficiency with the weapons that it has, and not play imaginary games with death rays from outer space and things like that. So while we were on the verge of providing this hardware, which in my view would change the nature of surface warfare forever, we were not doing anything in the fleet to develop the new tactics to use these weapons. So I determined when I got my orders, thanks to Jim Doyle, to be a CruDes Group commander, that I would focus very heavily on the tactical development, and the things that you could do as these new weapons were introduced.

At the same time, I could see that there was an enormous infrastructure built up to deal with the engineering status of the fleet. The PEB, that I think I told you I had been responsible for initially, had grown into an enormous bureaucracy, but there was no counterpart in the area of weapons or weapons development. So there was no clearinghouse for any of these tactics, the maintenance procedures were not established, and so we were really starting off from ground zero. The organization of the type commanders’ staffs, the capabilities and the imagination and the knowledge of the people in the staff structure had to be developed from the bottom up, because all these weapons were being introduced from the top down…

…I was able to focus more and more on the tactics, because the innovations of the PEB had now brought the engineering readiness of these ships up to a status where we didn’t have to worry so much about whether they could get underway, but rather what they would do after they got underway. So I started to work on the Tomahawk tactics and the AAW tactics as my highest priority.

I was more and more aware about how much resistance there was to the Tomahawk in surface ships. The CNO was resistant. He thought it was an unnecessary drain on naval aviation. Admiral Holloway, whom I dearly love, had referred to the Tomahawk as a silver bullet that we just didn’t need, in Congressional testimony. This is not conducive to high morale if you are a Tomahawk advocate. Anyway, I went out to work on Tomahawk tactics, which involved a lot of pretending. The trick was to work on maintaining proficiency with the things that we had, but at the same time incorporating into each exercise some of this “Let’s pretend we have Tomahawk” stuff, so we can see what we’re doing.

The first time we did this, I had a carrier down in the Caribbean working, and we were going to go down and join them for a FleetEx. I arranged with the CarGroup commander that on the way down we would conduct a force opposition drill. The carrier would come out and try to sink my flagship, and we would try to locate and sink the carrier. Everybody said: Great; great exercise. So we went out in Bill Peerenboom’s ship, and took five ships to go down for this. We went down in electronic silence and along the coast. The carrier couldn’t find us. In the meantime we had sent a couple of submarines down, and they located the carrier. So they were keeping us informed of the carrier’s position and we were still in silence. The carrier air wing was searching all over the Atlantic Ocean and couldn’t find us, because we had very carefully gone in one of these merchant routes.

When we reached Tomahawk range we fired not only on the submarine-reported position, but on electronic signals that we received from the carrier at long range. We fired what we called six Tomahawks; then we rolled the dice and said: Okay, two of them hit. Then we found out what the carrier had been doing at that time, and it turned out that they’d had a bunch of airplanes on deck, and things like that.

When we got down there I went over and saw the admiral on the carrier, and I said, “Hey, here’s the way the exercise worked out, as I see it. We fired these simulated missiles, and rolled the dice. Here’s what we had for your position.” He checked it, and said, “Hey, you had us.”

So I wrote up a personal message to ComSecondFlt, Tom Bigley, and told him all this. I said, “I think that we’re on the verge of something here that’s really going to change naval warfare. It shows that surface combatants now will have the capability to engage at long range a vastly superior force.” At the time we were worried about the Kiev, the Soviet nuclear-powered cruisers, and the Soviet carriers, which were coming into their inventory. I worded this very carefully. I put in the message that the CarGroup commander concurred with this message, after he’d said that he did, and sent it off to ComSecondFlt. Tom Bigley thought it was great. He was a surface warfare guy. A few weeks later a couple of officers came down from OpNav. They had heard about this. One of them was in OLA, the Office of Legislative Affairs, liaison with Congress. I told them about the exercise, and they asked me for a copy of this message. I made a mistake and gave it to them.

The message ended up on the Hill, in the hands of Tony Battista, who was running the R&D for, I think the House Armed Services Committee, or Senate Armed Services Committee—one of the authorization committees. He was on the civilian staff. That message came back to really bite me later on, because it really irritated the CNO, who wanted to spend more money on aviation programs than on cruise missiles, and who also was very sensitive to issues of carrier vulnerability…

About this time Ace Lyons was Commander Second Fleet. He said that he wanted to run a little exercise, carrier versus carrier, when the Forrestal out-chops from the Med. He would run this exercise so that the Eisenhower, the newest of our carriers, and the Forrestal will have a carrier-versus-carrier exercise when the Eisenhower’s on her way to northern Europe. And he would like me to take my staff and fly back over to Rota, get on board the Forrestal as she left the Med, and run the Forrestal air wing. So I said: Great. I flew back over in a C-5 with the staff and we picked up the Forrestal when she left the Med, now out of Sixth Fleet’s bailiwick and under CinCLantFlt’s bailiwick, and Com Second Fleet, Ace.

I gave my staff the following guidance: “What we’re going to do is, operate in total electronic silence.” This exercise had to be weapons that you had—you couldn’t pretend you had any new stuff. “We’re going to take our Harpoon escorts and we’re going to peel them off, three of them; send them way up north to the GIUK gap; and then, in electronic silence, just have them drift down with the merchant traffic as it comes down out of the gap into the central Atlantic; and we will see if, through electronic deception: number one, we can remain hidden in the Forrestal from the Ike’s aircraft, and number two, if you shooters, by mingling in with the fairly heavy merchant traffic and remaining silent, can get close enough to the Ike to shoot Harpoons at them.” Well, it worked like a champ. The carrier-versus-carrier exercises in the past had just been a bunch of guys revealing their positions, launching strikes at each other, and then saying, “Hah, hah. I bagged you…’”

The Ike’s aircraft couldn’t find us in the Forrestal. We weren’t flying. We were just drifting along near the coast. They were looking for us coming out of the Med, and not for this group coming down from the GIUK gap. And they were looking for a battle group, and not a bunch of scattered single contacts that were camouflaged in the pretty heavy traffic. So before they found us, two of our Harpoon shooters got in and launched simulated Harpoons at the carrier, from point-blank range in the middle of the night…

…And rolled the dice and said, “Okay, here’s how many times we bagged you,” and your airplanes were on deck. Well, wrote that report up and sent it off to ComSecondFlt, Ace.

That became a very contentious exercise, because the Ike was brand new and the funding for the new carriers was at issue. This was deemed by senior aviators to be a very inflammatory exercise, because it highlighted the vulnerability of the carrier to a determined enemy who was going to employ electronic deception and use anti-ship missiles. So Ace delayed and delayed and delayed the exercise report. The drafts would come back and I would keep changing them to say we hit and severely damaged the carrier, and it would have been out of action for x hours. Those remarks kept getting deleted from the final report of the exercise.

And I kept hearing these rumors that were getting stronger by the minute that I was going to retire. It turned out, and I didn’t know this, that Dave Johnson, who was SurfLant, and Harry Train, who was CinCLantFlt, were told by the CNO that he didn’t have a job for me. When he says that, you’re finished…

…But that’s the fine line that you walk. Really, people around very senior people— and you see this not just in the Navy or other Services but in the White House—the rumor mills poison the well for you. You walk a very difficult line, particularly when you’re at the front edge of innovation. You find a lot of guys who get ahead to very senior positions by never making any waves and by perpetuating the status quo. That’s the easy way, because while you don’t make powerful advocates, you don’t make powerful enemies either. All it takes is a couple of those powerful enemies when you’re in the rarified atmosphere of the flag business, and you’re out of there…

…One of the things I found, for example, was that no one in the Second Fleet, and by extension in the Navy, was really working on how to do war-at-sea strikes against modern Soviet forces. The aviation type commanders essentially were concerned, properly, with aviation safety. So that when you were a carrier skipper, AirLant’s principal concern was that you got everybody into the air and then you got them back on board safely. Once they were airborne and they went off to drop their bombs and do their things, that was not really the type commander’s concern. So each of the carrier air group commanders had his own set of tactics.

All of the tactics, for example, in the war-at-sea strikes started off with the assumption that they knew where the enemy was. Well, I was mindful that in the Battle of Midway, and in the tactical preparations before that battle, in the late thirties, the aviators developed a bunch of tactics which essentially said that the torpedo planes went in low and the dive bombers came in high at the same time, and the enemy was forced to split his battery and couldn’t figure out where to put his combat aircraft patrol. So he was either going to be dive-bombed or torpedoed, and everybody got his Legion of Merit and they loved these tours.

Well then at the Battle of Midway they didn’t really know where the enemy carriers were. As a result, the torpedo planes got there first. So I used to say that if you want to talk about the efficacy of that particular assumption, that you know where he is, let’s get hold of Ensign George Gay and discuss it with him. Because he’s the only guy left out of Torpedo Squadron 8. So we’re going to change all these tactics. You’re going to start off with the assumption that you don’t know where he is, and you’re going to combine search and attack tactics.

Well that changed everything. Then we took all of their tactics—by this time I had gotten Neil Byrne, the inventor of NavTag on my staff and he had automated it, put it in the computer—and we played all of the aviators’ war-at-sea strike tactics in the computer, to figure out which one of these eight carrier air group commanders had a set of tactics that made any sense against Soviet modern SAM defenses. We picked the best tactic, which not surprisingly was the one developed by Commander Art Cebrowski. That became the Second Fleet war-at-sea tactic. So we did all that kind of stuff, an awful lot of it. The aviators loved this. It was an interesting viewpoint from which to be able to watch how the surface type commander and the aviation type commander and the submarine type commander stayed within their own little pookas until somebody mixed them all. That’s the role of the fleet commander…

…We had the first two-Aegis ship exercise. There was a big debate about how you use Aegis—whether you used it away from the carrier to manage what was then called the outer air battle, or you used it in close to the carrier just to shoot at incoming missiles. My view was that if you used it in close to the carrier you weren’t using an Aegis ship, you were using an SM-1 ship. So it ought to be used to manage the air battle, because we had determined that, to handle massed Backfire raids, you had to engage these guys essentially before they fired. That meant that you had to engage them at a couple of hundred miles.

I went back to my Vietnam experience. The big concern about the Seawolf helicopters had been that their legs were too short. But what happened on every occasion was they went out and they expended all their ammunition long before they ran out of fuel. So there are all these tactics that had these carrier air patrol stations out at hundreds of miles, and the aviators were looking at these as a problem of keeping them re-tanked and refueled. But in these NavTag war games we showed that that wasn’t the problem at all. The problem was they shot up their load of Sparrows and Sidewinders instantly, and then they had to come back a couple of hundred miles, and you had to have more airplanes with weapons on the way, and there was no way to tank weapons. So a whole set of tactics flowed from that that were very different from the existing long-range engagement tactics. In order to do what I just said, you needed the capabilities of something like Aegis to manage the problem, with the Spy system. So we worked on that. We then, at the same time, were working on these long-range air strikes.

I set up a four-carrier exercise off the east coast and one down in the Caribbean. This was to show what carrier air power could do, and it was a very high visibility exercise in the political arena. We had a map of the east coast and we would hit targets up and down the east coast, widely separated, so that it would be impossible for an enemy to target them all, let alone find them with enough accuracy to launch missiles. The idea was that all four carrier air wings’ strikes would occur within a five-minute window. One of them was a thousand miles long. Dick Dunleavy was the CarGru commander who was in overall charge of this.

Anyway, we ran this wonderful exercise. We took it over to Congress and showed how we could have gone into St. Louis, Missouri, and made a couple of statements which really caught their eye. Four carrier air wings now possess the ordnance strike capability of 800 B-17s. I’d go over to Congress and say: You guys all remember these newsreel photos of World War II where the skies are full of B-17s going over Germany. Well, we can do that with four carriers. And nobody can target multiple carrier locations, so the carrier vulnerability issue is way over-exaggerated. So don’t cut the carrier forces. Interestingly, as a surface warfare officer, I was becoming the Navy’s principal spokesman in support of aircraft carriers.

But anyway, management of the outer air battle with the Spy-1 and the Aegis was magnificent. It changed everything. It impressed Jim Watkins so much, because he was having a big flailex with Aegis funding at the time, that he asked me to write him a personal letter. So I wrote him a letter and said, “This is so spectacular that I’m taking the unusual step of writing you personally. The detailed reports of these exercises will follow.” Then I wrote about a two-page letter that was deliberately designed to be Unclass and understandable, in language that a layman could understand. He entered that in the Congressional Record, and Aegis sailed through, for that and other reasons.

Henry C. Mustin was born in Bremerton, Washington on 31 August 1933, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of distinguished naval officers. (The Guided Missile Destroyer DDG 89 has been named for the Mustin family.) He graduated from Coronado High School, Coronado, California, in 1950 and attended the University of Virginia for one year prior to entering the U.S. Naval Academy. He was graduated and commissioned an Ensign 3 June 1955. He retired 1 January 1989.

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 (225 ships and 2100 aircraft over 45 million square miles from the Arctic Ocean to the Equator.)

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 was responsible for the development of requirements and fleet introduction of the Tomahawk missile, the Standard missile (SM 2), LAMPS helicopters, and the Ticonderoga-class AEGIS cruisers. He was instrumental in defining the initial requirements for the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.

Vice Admiral Mustin directed all U.S. Navy arms control planning, including the START negotiations with the Soviet Union. He led high level U.S. interagency delegations to Moscow, London, Paris, Lisbon, Oslo, and Seoul. He also served as the Senior U.S. Military Representative to the United Nations.

He was married to the former Lucy Holcomb of Alexandria, Virginia. They have three sons, a daughter, and nine grandchildren. He passed away on 11 April 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: The U.S. Navy aircraft carriers USS Enterprise (CVN-65) and USS Midway (CV-41) underway in the Pacific Ocean with their task groups in 1982.

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