Tag Archives: featured

Indo-Asia-Pacific

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

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.

https://gfycat.com/NeatDesertedAntelopegroundsquirrel

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

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.

Book Review

The Secret Ingredients of “Collaborative Leadership”

1 Comment

Weisbrode, Kenneth. Eisenhower and the Art of Collaborative Leadership. New York City, St. Martin’s Press, 2018, 110 pp. $79.955.

Weisbrode – The Art of Collaborative Leadership

By Erik Sand

When Dwight Eisenhower assumed command of Allied forces in Europe in early 1943, he faced a daunting task. Not only did he need to prepare to assault the vaunted Germany army, but he faced a complicated set of command relationships. His three subordinates, Harold Alexander, Arthur Tedder, and Andrew Cunningham, were all British officers. Two of the three were from different services. Moreover, they all outranked him! Later in his life, Eisenhower would define leadership as “the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it, not because your position of power can compel him to do it, or your position of authority.” Eisenhower’s allied command would test, if not forge, this philosophy. In Eisenhower and the Art of Collaborative Leadership, author Kenneth Weisbrode describes Eisenhower’s leadership style both as an Army officer, and later as president.

Two traits stand out in supporting Ike’s “Collaborative Leadership” – his capacity for empathy and his self-discipline. As a middle child in a large family, Eisenhower grew up needing to recognize, adapt to, and shape the feelings of others. In command, he applied these skills. He sometimes reworded messages to subordinates to ensure they had generous interpretations. He spent time in informal conversations with his subordinates outside of meetings to better understand their perspective. As Weisbrode notes, empathy is “not easy in asymmetrical relationships: for the senior there is every incentive to dismiss the views of the less powerful and to get on with things; for the junior there is often thus every incentive to feel undervalued to begrudge this.” The difficulty of displaying empathy highlights the second theme: the importance of personal discipline to Eisenhower’s leadership.

Ike’s particular forte was leading, and keeping together, alliances. Yet, he often complained about exactly that process. In 1942 he wrote in his journal, “My God, how I hate to work by any method that forces me to depend on someone else.” Later he wrote, “What a headache this combined stuff is. We spend our time figuring out how to keep from getting in each other’s way rather than in how to fight the war.” Historians have called Ike’s leadership as president “the hidden hand.” He carefully chose his moments of intervention in discussions so as not to influence them too early, even though he had frequently already thought through the issue at hand. Even his apparently offhand remarks often were not. To so carefully control his own behavior, as well as to excel in work he found frustrating, required immense self-discipline. Perhaps this combination helps explain why, when it flared, his temper was so famous.

While Eisenhower’s understanding of leadership is simple to state, implementing it is less straightforward. The naval service could gain by discussing both of empathy and self-discipline more explicitly in discussions of leadership. We speak of “knowing our people,” but rarely of having empathy for them. The two are similar, but not the same. Empathy requires sensing and understanding the emotions of the other party. Perhaps our general discomfort with emotions explains why we avoid a term that highlights them.

Discipline forms the foundation of any naval organization, but we do not often explicitly acknowledge the challenge of self-discipline. Even Weisbrode does not explicitly speak to the issue despite its frequent appearance in his descriptions. Few people will point out their leader’s failings directly until it is too late. Often, the discipline required is not to restrain oneself from misconduct, but from excessive intervention in the affairs of subordinates. The challenge becomes greater as leaders rise in the ranks, the temptations of authority grow stronger, and they become more confident in their own opinions. A leader’s discipline must be self-discipline.

In summary, while occasionally difficult to follow as it shifts between Eisenhower’s experiences and actions and the philosophy of friendship and leadership, Weisbrode’s short 93-page text provides a leadership study that focuses on less-commonly discussed leadership traits as displayed by one of America’s greatest leaders.

Erik Sand is a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy Reserve and a PhD candidate in the MIT Security Studies Program. The views expressed here do not represent those of U.S. Government, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Navy.

Featured Image: 01/10/1944-Algiers: Prime Minister Winston Churchill,shown here w/ some of the ‘boys’, is smiling for the camera for the first time since his recent illness and donned his famous siren suit and a colorful dressing gown for the occasion. From left to right: General J.F.M. Whitely Air Marshal Sir Arthur W.Tedder, Deputy Commander of the Allied Forces in the European Theater; Admiral Cunningham; Gen.Dwight D.Eisenhower; Gen. Harold Alexander; Prime Minister Churchill; Lt.Gen.Sir Humprey Gale, Gen. Sir Henry Wilson and Gen. Smith.

Strategy

Then What? Wargaming the Interface Between Strategy and Operations, Pt. 3

Leave a comment

Read Part One. Read Part Two. 

By Robert C. Rubel

Filling the Gap

It might seem, from the discussion so far in Parts 1 and 2 of this series, that effective gaming of the operational/strategy interface is infeasible. It is certainly the case that if the matter was approached using regular gaming methods, it may very well be. However, the importance of the issue in the real world demands an attempt be made to incorporate it into the overall gaming posture of the military as a whole, not to mention games run by the State Department and other national security organizations. To understand the prospects for incorporating the interface of levels, we must examine how something, whether a phenomenon, factor, issue, etc., can be addressed in a game. There are three ways: simulation, representation, and discussion.

Simulation and Representation

Simulation involves an attempt to recreate some aspect of reality as an aspect of the game. Certain things are understood well enough to be accurately modeled mathematically and simulated in computer programs. But the simulation approach can also be used when computer modeling is not possible or appropriate. A frequent instance in gaming is command and control. Where multiple command echelons are involved, human players act as commanders and staffs. The game designer attempts to create the essential elements of a C2 environment, including organization of player cells and communications equipment, such that in the course of a game the process of C2 unfolds in a manner sufficiently like it would in the real world to allow lessons to be learned that are applicable outside of the game. Such simulations can be very instructive, especially when new communications concepts or technologies are involved.

The problem that commonly arises in games of this design is that such simulation occurs only on the Blue side. Red consists of a relatively small team of players that sit in a single seminar style cell, so C2 issues are obviated – not simulated. This introduces a profound asymmetry to the game irrespective of whether Red gets to engage in free play. Red can easily amalgamate strategy and operations in a way that is impossible for Blue. Creating a symmetrical C2 structure runs up against a number of feasibility issues. First is finding a sufficient number of Red players with the requisite knowledge of Red capabilities and doctrine. Second, simulating the cultural dynamics involved in foreign, multi-echelon interactions is normally beyond our intelligence capabilities. The third problem involves the inherent imponderables of free play at the strategic level. Even the real Red likely does not know what it would do in a crisis situation, and gaming experience has shown a reluctance of strategic level players to initiate hostilities on their own in a rational actor environment – with Red being played by U.S. personnel. All of this leads to the conclusion that the interface between the operational and strategic levels of war cannot be gamed via the simulation approach.

Those things that are well understood or whose effects are relatively simple and straightforward are susceptible to being represented by a rule. An easy example from board gaming is a rule that reduces a unit’s (say an Army armored regiment) movement factor if it enters hexes (six-sided cells that overlay the game board’s map) that depict forests. This represents the difficulties that real world units experience moving through such terrain. Some phenomena are more difficult to represent by rules. An example is command and control (C2). For a board game the author had used to support his wargaming theory and practice class, C2 was represented by a budget metaphor. Players had fixed numbers of C2 points that had to be spent in order for their pieces to move or fight.1 Players did not have unlimited numbers so they had to make decisions on where to spend them. This simulated the pressures on a commander’s ability to focus. In other cases, again commonly in board games, a unit’s combat strength factor might be reduced to reflect deficient training or morale. In some cases, such representations can be useful, but the problem is that they are at best impressionistic – like the simple brush strokes an artist might use to represent foliage – and unable to capture what might be qualitatively different effects in different situations.

A notable example of a game using a set of rules to represent political dynamics is Persian Incursion, a commercial board game that explores the consequences of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. In it a series of cards and look up tables produce a way to integrate operational actions and political effects. Its goal is not to determine whether Israel should attack Iran, it “… is an exploration of the consequences. What are the odds of it working? And what are the costs – to the attackers, the defenders, and everyone on the sidelines?”2 The game’s focus is limited, but the notion of superimposing a set of rules that provide a defined set of political inputs or outputs (rigidly assessed, in Francis McHugh’s terminology3) on an otherwise free-assessed operational game merits some consideration.

If such an approach is to have either analytic or educational value, it seems to require iterative gaming. The outcomes of a single game cannot be used as reliable indicators of future reactions. However, multiple games employing the same rules might produce insights into how various factors relate to one another. The challenge lies in mounting multiple games, especially large, detailed operational games that often characterize service gaming. On the other hand, some useful insights might be gained if the same rule set were to be used by all the services and its effects on each game were well documented.4

Discussion

The final approach to incorporating something into a game is simply talking about it. While this may not appear at first to be a gaming technique at all, there is ample precedent for doing so. A good example involves cyber warfare. There are any number of obstacles to subjecting it to either of the first two approaches, including it being highly complex, new, and not well-understood. However, in a series of deterrence games, the Naval War College brought in cyber experts to advise umpires on how cyber might be manifested in the assessment of player moves. Nuanced, qualitative judgments replaced rules and simulation as the mechanism by which the effects of cyber were inserted into the game. This seems to be a useful way that the complex, cybernetic interactions that characterize the interface of the strategic and operational levels of war can be incorporated into games.

To understand and appreciate the utility of “talking about” the strategy/operations interface we can use a concentric ring framework similar to that adopted by Clausewitz for the purposes of what he called kritik, the historical analysis of battles and campaigns to arrive at a judgment of the relative merit of command decisions.5 We will proceed from an inside-out orientation.

The beginning and most narrow focus is that of the individual game. We have already established the difficulty of trying to address, via representation or simulation, the interplay of the strategic and operational levels. To assess the worth of talking about the interface, we must first break down the potential purposes of games. Broadly speaking, they can be categorized as research, education, training, and influence, admitting nonetheless that any game can have multiple purposes and effects. Research games are conducted to learn something about a potential military situation that cannot be learned any other way.6 Educational games support teaching of some sort, most often the curricula of the military war and staff colleges. In the training realm, games tend to be substrates for the principal teaching objectives including weapons systems operations, staff procedures, tactics, etc. Influence games are conducted to create consensus on an issue, build teamwork, or convince external parties of the position the game sponsor holds on a matter.

In training and influence games, any inclusion of the strategy/operations interface would likely constitute a distraction and serve to undermine game objectives. The role of the game as a substrate in training makes any auxiliary discussion of the interface irrelevant and superfluous. In influence games, unless the interface is central to game objectives, it would constitute a distraction and possibly interfere with the achievement of game objectives.

The situation is fundamentally different for research and educational games. Research games, especially those that focus on the operational level of war, require a degree of plausibility to stimulate player buy-in and realism sufficient to establish an intellectual link with the real world. This is sometimes termed validity. Both of these attributes could be enhanced by the inclusion of the strategy/operations interface via discussion in all phases of game design, execution, and analysis. The interface should permeate the game as both enhanced context and direct influence on player decision-making. Sufficient attention to developing a “road-to-war” scenario, including discussions between scenario writers and political scientists, would tee up more nuanced play, including move assessments. A dedicated “interface” control cell could inject political considerations into the game as both guidance to umpires and injects to players, keeping the “whys” of the conflict as visible as the “hows” as the game unfolds. This cell would be well-placed to conduct an end-of-game session on the direction of the conflict beyond where the game ended, otherwise described as the “then what?” question. The research insights and lessons learned would be colored and enhanced by doing this, and its demands on time and manpower would be manageable. The main ingredient would be an organizational commitment to the idea that the interface matters. The inclusion of the interface in educational gaming would use a similar approach, to include a more completely thought-out road-to-war scenario, an interface-oriented control cell, and a “then what” session included in the hot wash.

The discussion approach might also benefit from iterative gaming. Using the methods just discussed, a series of games featuring the same general scenario but with different “strategies” adopted by control would allow analysts to see how different sets of presumed political conditions and dynamics could affect approaches to military operations. However, due caution must be exercised if different players and methods are used in each game. Nonetheless, patterns may emerge that could provide valuable insight into the potential dynamics of the strategy/operations interface.

Conclusion

There are a number of reasons that the exploration, via gaming, of the strategy/operations interface may not yield directly actionable insights. Any game conducted in peacetime can only speculate on why a war would start, thus making gaming of the interface across the span of that conflict equally speculative. Moreover, the intellectual complications Clausewitz discussed are always present, further clouding any predictive value the game might have. However, well-run games can have indicative value; that is, they can reveal possibilities. But even in this realm, the narratives that emerge from gaming the interface cannot be directly distilled for principles. If this is the case, what value is obtained from the cost and effort of including the strategy/operations interface in gaming?

The value of gaming the interface is admittedly indirect, but nonetheless real. It would be manifested in the minds of game participants and eventually in the corporate reflexes of the national security enterprise. If the interface was routinely incorporated into the appropriate games, over time, individuals would start to reflexively consider it in their real-world tasks, whether developing plans, policy, or making real-time decisions. In the best case, experience in such gaming would inoculate practitioners and policymakers against mystical, “sure fire” concepts of wa and perhaps keep them from yielding to emotion in the heat of conflict. In this sense, it is like superimposing an influence game on a research or educational game.

Military officers and civilian national security professionals who experience the competitive narrative of a wargame are likely to be more aware of the strategy/operations interface, and adopt more nuanced approaches to their various national security tasks. In other words, just talking about something in the context of a wargame can have widespread and important effects, not the least of which is developing a reflex of asking the important question, “then what?”

Professor Emeritus Rubel is retired but serves as an advisor to the CNO on fleet design and architecture. He spent thirty years on active duty as a light attack and strike fighter aviator. After leaving active duty he joined the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College, serving as Chairman of the Wargaming Department and later Dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. In 2006 he designed and led the War College project to develop the concepts that resulted in the 2007 Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower. He has published over thirty articles and book chapters dealing with maritime strategy, operational art and naval aviation.

References

[1] Peter Perla and Michael Markowitz, Wargame Construction Kit, a one-off game produced at the author’s request.

[2] Larry Bond, Chris Carlson, Larry Dougherty, Persian Incursion, Rule Book, (Sassamansville, PA: Clash of Arms Games, 2010) p. 4.

[3] Francis J. McHugh, The Fundamentals of War Gaming, Third Edition, originally published 1966,(Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office), p.14.

[4] Robert Rubel, “Connecting the Dots: Learning from Multiple Wargames,” Phalanx, December 2016, (Arlington, VA: Military Operations Research Society).

[5] Clausewitz, Book Two, Chapter Five, p. 156 for a general explanation and pp. 159-161 for an example of his widening circle analysis concerning his moves in the 1797 campaign leading to the peace of Campo Formio.

[6] Robert C. Rubel, “The Epistemology of Wargaming,” Naval War College Review, Spring 2006, (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press), p. 111.

Featured Image: NEWPORT, R.I. (May 5, 2017) U.S. Naval War College (NWC) Naval Staff College students participate in a capstone wargame. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jess Lewis/released)