Author Julia Jones joins us to discuss her book on British yachtsmen volunteers of World War II, Uncommon Courage – The Yachtsmen Volunteers of World War II. Julia is an English writer, editor, and classic yacht owner whose father served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Supplementary Reserve. She is a Literary Contributor for Yachting Monthly magazine.
Like all militaries, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) studies other nations’ wars to understand the changing character of warfare. The PLA has dissected the Falklands War, the First Gulf War, the air campaign over Kosovo, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and much else. It is no doubt scrutinizing the conflict in Ukraine. The PLA has drawn many lessons from these operations to improve its ability to fight and win future conflicts. Chinese writings about those lessons have, in turn, helped Western observers take better measure of the PLA’s priorities and preferences.
The PLA has even reached back more than eight decades to the Pacific War. Chinese military strategists have examined the origins, conduct, and termination of the ocean-spanning struggle between Imperial Japan and the United States. They have pored over the great battles at sea, rendering numerous judgments about what those engagements mean for the future of PLA warfighting. Chinese lessons from the Pacific War thus offer policymakers valuable insights about the PLA’s thinking and strategy.
The Pacific War’s Appeal to the PLA
In the past, the lopsided conflicts of the unipolar era in which American military might steamrolled third-rate opponents resonated with the PLA. Then, Chinese planners assumed that China would have to fight from a severely disadvantaged position against the United States. However, as the PLA continues its remarkable ascent, it expects to compete and fight with the U.S. armed forces on an equal footing. As such, the lessons from the Pacific War, which featured intense high-end combat between two peer militaries across an oceanic expanse, are increasingly salient to the PLA.
Moreover, the Pacific War stands out for its resemblance to a putative Sino-American conflict. Imperial Japan and the United States fought over an area where the PLA would likely collide with the U.S. military. Just as Japan sought to hold off its opponent in distant waters, the PLA would be attempting to keep its adversary at arm’s length from the mainland. In addition to its large fleet, Japan employed shore-based airpower to conduct maritime strikes. Now, China possesses an arsenal of land-based missiles and aircraft to hold surface combatants at risk, as well as modern fighting ships with increasing reach.
For U.S. policymakers, Chinese histories of the Pacific War—and the lessons they impart— reveal much about the PLA’s views of strategy and war. These retrospectives offer tantalizing hints of the PLA’s mindset, beliefs, assumptions, and proclivities. By assessing mainland writings about the war at sea and its implications, the policy community can catch glimpses of the Chinese military’s thinking about how it might fight a future great power war.
Drawing from extensive Chinese sources on the great battles at Midway, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa, this analysis reviews three recurring themes that emerge from the literature. Although Chinese analysts offer diverse findings from these campaigns, the following focuses on shore-based airpower, expeditionary logistics, and industrial strength and their corresponding parallels to Chinese strategy, Beijing’s ambitions, and the challenges ahead for the United States.
Lesson One: Shore-Based Airpower
Chinese analysts have paid special attention to the role of shore-based airpower at Midway, Guadalcanal, and Okinawa. They note that less capable and older aircraft on Midway performed critical duties that contributed to the American success. Long-range reconnaissance by flying boats and bombers provided an early warning screen and detected the incoming enemy fleet, buying precious time for the defenders to respond. Although the aircraft launched from Midway were tactically ineffective against the Japanese carriers, they knocked the attacking fleet sufficiently off balance to pry open the chance to deliver a decisive blow by carrier aviation.
Chinese commentators concur that the American seizure and successful defense of Henderson airfield were crucial to victory at Guadalcanal. The contest for control of the airfield became the focal point of the island campaign and the object over which the Japanese army suffered mounting and eventually unsustainable losses. American aircraft launched from the airfield provided close-air support to ground operations, blunted Japanese air offensives, interdicted enemy resupply, and kept Japan’s flattops at bay. By contrast, owing to the distance separating the airbase at Rabaul from the scene of action, Japanese aircraft were unable to stay aloft long enough to influence the course of the conflict.
Chinese analysts have documented the interactive impact of shore-based airpower during the struggle over Okinawa. Once the American fleet fell within range of Japanese aircraft, including the kamikazes, on Kyushu, the Ryukyus, and Taiwan, it came under unrelenting and deadly air assaults. Moreover, U.S. forces were unable to knock out the many airfields on Kyushu, exposing the fleet to a persistent air threat. Naval historian Zhao Zhenyu observes that Japan’s resilient land-based airpower fixed U.S. carriers in their places to defend the airspace around Okinawa.1 Conversely, the American capture of two airfields on Okinawa enabled U.S. airpower to provide close air support, fight off enemy air raids, and conduct deep sweeps against airbases on Kyushu, forcing the Japanese to relocate their aircraft beyond the range of American fighters.
The logic of shore-based airpower during the Pacific War is discernible today. In a major conventional war against the United States, the PLA would employ shore-based firepower—in the form of aircraft and precision-strike missiles launched from the mainland—to degrade or cripple American airpower at sea and ashore. It would hold at risk American carriers and their air wings operating within the range of its land-based firepower, just as Imperial Japanese air forces did to the U.S. Navy at Okinawa. Chinese missile attacks against Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, the hub of American airpower in Asia, could shut down the airfield for weeks or longer. Such an outcome would be analogous to Japan’s loss of shore-based airpower on Guadalcanal and its cascading consequences for Japanese air, naval, and land operations.
A H-6 strategic bomber attached to a bomber regiment of the naval aviation force under the PLA Southern Theater Command takes off for a flight training exercise. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Gao Hongwei)
Imagine a scenario in which China knocks out U.S. regional airbases while it keeps American carriers at arm’s length. Should it become too risky for land- and carrier-based airpower to launch sorties from offshore areas of the Chinese mainland, the United States would have to count on aircraft from more distant bases, including those in Guam and Hawaii. China’s deployment of the DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile suggests that even Guam may no longer enjoy its sanctuary status. If American airpower were pushed farther away from Chinese shores, the U.S. military’s predicament would echo the dilemma that plagued Japanese airpower on Rabaul during the Guadalcanal campaign.
Lesson Two: Logistics
Chinese writings express profound admiration for superior American logistics during the Pacific War. At Guadalcanal, U.S. forward basing, convoying, and sea lane defense allowed for the constant flow of materiel and troops to the island. The Japanese, by contrast, were ill-equipped to resupply their forces on Guadalcanal while American interdiction worsened Japan’s logistical predicament. Dwindling supplies and reinforcements sapped the Japanese army, leaving soldiers without food and ammunition in the campaign’s closing months. Chinese analysts also criticize the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) for failing to attack vulnerable American resupply efforts and exposed supply dumps on the island during the battle’s early stages. In reference to the U.S. logistics vessels that escaped destruction at Guadalcanal, naval analyst Liu Yi argues:
“Those unremarkable transports determined the war’s trajectory after the attritional campaign over Guadalcanal. The war was not to be dictated exclusively by the gains and losses of warships or islands. Rather, the war was about the ability to continue developing a nation’s industrial potential and to convert that potential into the energy that could sustain frontline combat power in a long-term struggle.”2
Chinese commentators extol America’s overwhelming logistical power during the conquest of Okinawa. They are uniformly impressed by the forward basing at the Kerama Islands, the entire logistical infrastructure across the Pacific, including the great anchorage at Ulithi, the at-sea replenishment fleet, the massive amphibious assault force, and the follow-on resupply efforts to keep the ground offensives going. The administrative and logistical systems needed to sustain the supply chain that stretched from the West Coast through various intermediary bases all the way to Okinawa are awe-inspiring to them.
Today, the PLA appreciates that logistical prowess—of the kind the United States demonstrated in the Pacific War—is essential to its global ambitions. The PLA will need to establish forward bases, field transport and logistical ships, and set up various support facilities at home and abroad. It must not only deploy forces that can credibly engage in sea lane defense and interdict enemy supply lines, but it must also demonstrate those skills through peacetime exercises and training. Chinese strategists concur that the infrastructure necessary to support distant missions must align with the sinews of China’s national power to avoid Imperial Japan’s fate at Guadalcanal.
Naval ships assigned to flotillas with the navy under the PLA Eastern Theater Command steam in formation to conduct alongside and astern replenishment-at-sea during a comprehensive replenishment training exercise on February 10, 2023. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Zhang Weile)
The PLA understands that logistical weaknesses, like Imperial Japan’s, can be fatal. It recognizes that modern wars consume huge quantities of materiel, placing enormous strains on logistical systems. Disruptions to resupply could lead to the loss of battlefield initiative or worse. The PLA’s doctrine thus calls for attacks against the enemy’s lines of communications to undermine its warfighting capabilities. The theory is that an effective strike against the opponent’s supply chain would cut off the essentials needed to keep its frontline combat units fighting, much as American airpower did to Japanese defenders on Guadalcanal.
Lesson Three: Industrial Power
Chinese analysts acknowledge the importance of economic power and industrial strength in carrying out a protracted war at sea. To them, the mismatch between Imperial Japan’s economy and its ambitions led to severe overextension at Guadalcanal. The destruction of transports and ground forces there accelerated the consumption of scarce resources and compounded Japan’s overreach. The cumulative effects of attrition spilled over into Japanese campaign plans on the Asian continent, compelling Tokyo to call off offensives against Nationalist positions in southcentral China. Losses that Japan could ill afford thus sharpened its dilemma of fighting a two-front war on the mainland and in the Pacific.
Chinese observers have analyzed the interplay between industrial capacity and attrition of forces on the battlefield. They find that Japan’s lack of industrial depth and personnel to recover from combat losses was a critical factor in the conduct and the outcome of the war. Imperial Japan’s inability to rapidly reconstitute its forces had a particularly baneful impact on Japanese warfighting. The loss of irreplaceable pilots at Midway and Guadalcanal was a major contributing factor to Japan’s declining fortunes. To mainland analysts, Japan’s struggle with material and manpower shortfalls illustrates the importance of harnessing all elements of national strength in fighting protracted great power wars.
Marines assigned to a brigade of the Marine Corps under the PLA Navy check and prepare ammunition before loading prior to a recent live-fire training exercise. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Shang Wenbin)
Today, there are concerns about the U.S. Navy’s capacity to sustain and make up for its losses in a prolonged war. Armed with a large arsenal of missiles, the PLA would seek to land decisive blows against the approaching U.S. surface fleet, just as the IJN and the U.S. Navy inflicted heavy losses on each other in single encounters. The PLA’s ability to drive up attrition means that mass will be at a premium for the United States. Yet, decades of decline, neglect, and mismanagement have led to an atrophied defense-industrial base and an undersized, aging fleet. This resource quandary raises unsettling questions about whether the United States, in a naval war against China, might encounter material constraints like that of Imperial Japan.
Aiming High
History lessons and historical analogies are not predictions. They hint at the shape of things to come. If the PLA’s interpretations of the Pacific War are any indication of its ambitions, then U.S. policymakers should take notice. Tellingly, Chinese strategists see the United States in the Pacific War as their surrogate for China in a future war. They depict the Imperial Japanese Navy’s failings as a cautionary tale while they show the U.S. Navy’s successes as a model for emulation. Their fascination, if not obsession, with America’s logistical prowess is just one sign of China’s aspirations. The literature conforms to Beijing’s expectation that the PLA must strive to become an equal to the U.S. military. Policymakers should thus treat Chinese lessons from the Pacific War as early warning signals of the PLA’s aims and plans.
Toshi Yoshihara is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA). His latest book is Mao’s Army Goes to Sea: Island Campaigns and the Founding of China’s Navy (Georgetown University Press, 2022).
References
1. Zhao Zhenyu, History of Sea Battles in the Pacific (Beijing: Haichao Press, 1997), pp. 643-644.
2. Liu Yi, The Combined Fleet (Wuhan: Wuhan University Press, 2010), p. 206.
Featured Image: Amphibious armored vehicles attached to a brigade of the PLA Navy Marine Corps head to shore in formation during a beach raid training exercise in the west of south China’s Guangdong Province on August 17, 2019. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Yan Jialuo and Yao Guanchen)
Submissions Due: April 5, 2023 Topic Week Dates: April 17-21, 2023 Article Length: 1,000-3,000 words Submit to: [email protected]
By Nicholas Romanow
The Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) ended the debate (for now) on whether the U.S. Navy needs a cadre of cyber officers. Section 1503 of the Act mandates that the Navy “establish and use” a cyber operations designator for officers and a cyber operations rating for enlisted personnel. It also prohibits members of existing information warfare designators from filling cyber-related billets and requires the Navy to submit a report to Congress in one year on the administration, training, and utilization of the Navy’s cyber personnel.
But the answer to this question opens up a range of new questions on cyber operations in the maritime domain. How should the Navy recruit, train, and retain cyber talent? What do cyber operations in a maritime environment look like? How will this investment in a Navy cyber community affect the Navy’s aviation, surface, subsurface, and special warfare communities? As the Navy develops this new cadre of talent, it needs to more deeply examine how it can leverage cyber in warfighting and peacetime operations.
Cyberspace is quite similar to the maritime environment. It is a domain wherein trillions of dollars of international commerce transits. It is not exclusively controlled by any single nation-state in particular. It is simultaneously a conduit for wealth and exchange yet also rife with peril and exploitation.
In theory, naval leaders should be in a prime position to understand the complex logic of cyberspace and tackle its dilemmas. Yet numerous other actors influence the maritime domain through cyber and depend on cyber for maritime access. What could be the risks of suffering malicious cyber effects on critical maritime infrastructure and platforms? How do maritime security and cybersecurity interact and depend on one another?
The Navy will finally have a specialist cyber cadre, but more remains to be done. As maritime and cyber connections grow and proliferate, these two domains will interact in complex ways to present advantage and threats across the spectrum of conflict. We invite authors to discuss these questions and more as we consider the future of Navy and maritime cyber. Send all submissions to [email protected].
Ensign Nicholas Romanow, U.S. Navy, is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently assigned to Fort Meade, Maryland, and working toward his qualification as a cryptologic warfare officer. He was previously an undergraduate fellow at the Clements Center for National Security. He is CIMSEC’s Social Media Coordinator.
The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other military or government agency.
Featured Image: Artwork created with Midjourney AI.
Read Part 1 on defining distributed maritime operations. Read Part 2 on anti-ship firepower and U.S. shortfalls. Read Part 3 on assembling massed fires and modern fleet tactics. Read Part 4 on weapons depletion and last-ditch salvo dynamics.
By Dmitry Filipoff
Introduction
There is more to the lethality of a volume of fire than sheer numbers. Missile salvos can take on different patterns, both in how the missiles are arranged within a single salvo, and how multiple salvos can be arranged together into a combined volume of fire. These patterns reflect how the aspects of concentration and distribution apply to the weapons themselves, and how these configurations apply within salvos and between salvos. Different patterns will affect how a volume of fire takes shape and can multiply the threat it poses. Commanders and autonomous missiles can leverage these patterns to increase tactical advantage by changing how salvos are maneuvered throughout key elements of the fight. These patterns have considerable tactical implications for defending against missiles and maximizing offensive volume of fire.
Stream versus Saturation
It is infeasible for a warship to instantly fire a large volume of missiles all at once. While warships can certainly fire missiles rapidly, their rate of fire is typically limited to only a few missiles at a time from the whole of their launch cells.1 Because the entirety of a salvo cannot be fired at once, salvos often default to a stream pattern, where a long, vertical column of missiles travels toward a target (Figure 1). Each missile in the column is slightly further away from the target than the missile ahead of it, because each missile was fired slightly later than the missile before it.
Figure 1. Click to expand. A warship launches a salvo in a stream pattern. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)
This typical salvo pattern has several disadvantages, such as how an attacking stream salvo can allow the defender to more easily defeat the missiles in detail. If the streaming missiles are flying closely enough along the same flight path, destroying missiles at the head of the stream can disrupt missiles further behind as they may have to fly through exploding shrapnel and debris. A stream salvo can also minimize the maneuvering and targeting readjustments needed to apply warship defenses that are more directionally limited, including mounted defenses such as laser dazzlers, rolling airframe missile launchers, and close-in weapon systems (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Click to expand. A close-in weapon system engages multiple missiles of a stream salvo approaching on a single axis. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)
Alternatively, a saturation pattern has greater tactical advantages. Instead of flying in a staggered sequence or vertical column, the missiles are traveling abreast of one another in a wide horizontal row. This salvo pattern poses a broad front of concentrated firepower compared to the long and narrow front of a stream salvo, where a saturation salvo takes the form of a multi-axial attack instead of the stream’s single axis. Once a saturation salvo crosses over the horizon, all of the missiles aim to be at a similar distance from the target warship, intensifying the challenges of defense. Directional defenses will need to traverse more angles to acquire new targets, and the attacking missiles run a lesser risk of having to fly through the exploding debris fields of their destroyed colleagues (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Click to expand. A close-in weapon system engages a saturation salvo’s missiles across multiple axes. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)
Platforms that feature small magazines and larger numbers, such as aircraft, truck launchers, and small missile ships can more readily assemble into firing formations that generate saturation patterns from the onset. But the feasibility factors that bottleneck a warship’s rate of fire make a saturation pattern more unnatural for a warship to launch than a stream pattern, where warships can only launch large salvos in streams. The missiles will have to be maneuvered into a saturation pattern after the salvo is fired. Ideally this will be facilitated by networking and autonomy on the part of the missiles, rather than a complex firing scheme on the part of the launch platform. Modern anti-ship missiles will be able to be programmed to self-organize into a saturation pattern after they are launched from a warship, or outside retargeting and in-flight updates could provide similar instructions.2 By maneuvering weapons after they are launched, these capabilities serve the critical function of helping a salvo’s missiles maximize the overlap of impact timing regardless of the launch platform’s rate of fire.
In salvo combat, if a missile is not able to hit the target because it was shot down by defenses, the next best thing is that its destruction can buy a sliver of time for another missile in the salvo to have a slightly better chance of striking. This dynamic can continue throughout an engagement, where through their destruction, missiles are buying small consecutive improvements in striking opportunity for other missiles. The way impact timing is distributed across a salvo’s missiles will affect how much opportunity the destroyed weapons purchase for the survivors. A majority of a salvo’s missiles will likely be destroyed in the process of ensuring that only a handful have a real chance of striking the killing blows.
Stream patterns stretch the volume of fire thin with respect to the timing of impact. Each missile in the salvo would impact the target at a slightly later time than the missile ahead of it, where the distribution of impact times across a stream salvo is mainly limited to being a function of the launching warship’s rate of fire. If defenses are robust enough, a defender can even keep a stream salvo at a fixed distance away from the target until the salvo is fully destroyed. The ability for stream salvo missiles to buy time for one another is diminished by how destroying the missile at the head of the pack slightly rolls back the clock.
What a saturation pattern offers is a salvo that is always closing the distance regardless of the extent of attrition. Even if missiles are being destroyed, the minimum time to impact is steadily winding down. The volume of simultaneous defensive effects required to keep the whole of a saturation salvo at a fixed distance away from a target warship is far higher than that of a stream salvo, because it would require destroying the entirety of the saturation salvo simultaneously.
A saturation salvo epitomizes the principle of concentrating effects, where all missiles in the salvo are angling to strike the target at the same time, and bring the full weight of the entire volume of fire to bear at once. Saturation salvos improve efficiency by maximizing concentration, and can reduce the number of offensive weapons required to overwhelm warship defenses.
Because defensive missiles typically have much less range and flight times than long-range anti-ship missiles, they have far less opportunity to be maneuvered into saturation patterns, especially when they must strike incoming missiles that are only miles or seconds away from impact. Saturation patterns can chiefly be a feature of attacking salvos, while a warship’s defending salvos are more likely to be relegated to stream patterns. This forms a critical asymmetry in the offensive-defensive balance and confers significant advantage to the attacker in naval salvo warfare.
Salvo Patterns and Tactical Information
One of the most critical considerations for preserving missile inventory and preventing wasteful fires is guarding against deception and maintaining quality targeting information while salvos are traveling toward distant targets. Salvo patterns heavily influence the tactics of missile search and deception, especially given how capable modern seekers have become.
Anti-ship missiles are difficult to evade and deceive when their onboard seekers feature a robust combination of sensor modes including infrared, electro-optical, active, passive, and others. These combined sensors are meant to work together to maximize their strengths while covering each other’s blindspots. They aim to simplify the challenge of terminal search while negating softkill capability. A passive radar receiver can often detect a target or radiating decoy at longer range than an electro-optical sensor, but the latter is much harder to deceive when the contact enters within visual range.3At that range missiles will be especially challenging to deceive, where they are close enough to visually verify a target’s authenticity. And once they make their final approach, the missiles’ targeting logic can employ aimpoint selection capability, where they select the most lucrative impact points on a ship to maximize destructive potential, such as hitting a ship directly in its missile magazines.4 Aimpoint selection capability makes effective damage control a dubious proposition and helps ensure that only a single well-placed hit is enough to destroy a target, reducing the volume of fire necessary to inflict sufficient striking power.
These electro-optical and infrared sensors are major force multipliers by making it much easier for missiles to ignore the short-ranged warship-launched decoys that form a major portion of a warship’s softkill defenses. Even if these decoys pull a missile away from a ship at the last moment, an intelligent missile would know to circle back for another pass, where the decoy only buys the warship more time to shoot down the threat. Effective softkill deception against intelligent missiles therefore needs to occur at a distance that goes well beyond the horizon. Otherwise deception measures that occur within the horizon view of a warship will struggle to have an effect against missiles that can literally see the warship.
The seeker head of an IRIS-T air-to-air missile. (Photo via Airforce-technology.com)PACIFIC OCEAN (July 11, 2018) – The guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey (DDG 105) launches an electronic decoy cartridge from an MK-234 Nulka Decoy Launching System while underway. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Devin M. Langer/Released)
Successfully deceiving these anti-ship missiles may be less likely to take the form of getting them to strike false targets. It may instead become more a matter of keeping them at arm’s length and pulling them in directions away from friendly forces until they waste enough time and fuel that they fall from the sky. But most of a typical warship’s decoy capability is very short-ranged, and warships are extremely limited in their ability to deploy decoys tens of miles away from the ship. They may have to rely on other platforms such as aviation to deploy decoys at a tactically meaningful distance away from the warship.
Once a salvo is fired against a warship, an area of uncertainty grows around the target, where the warship may have moved from its original position at the time of launch, and where decoys may be deployed within this area of uncertainty. This area of uncertainty remains relatively small for the speediest weapons and missiles with short times-to-target. But for long-range and subsonic weapons, this area can grow to include thousands of square miles.5 If the area of a missile seeker’s coverage can overlap most of the area of uncertainty, then the problem of terminal homing is somewhat simplified. But if the area of uncertainty exceeds seeker coverage, then missiles may need to rely more on their own search capabilities to find and discriminate contacts for attack in the final phases.
Saturation patterns maximize the ability of a salvo to search and find a target. A saturation pattern spreads missile seekers across a wide front, allowing each seeker to search a given axis (Figure 5). If a seeker acquires a target, in-flight networking and autonomy between missiles can allow them to converge on a specific contact. A stream salvo by comparison makes for a highly redundant search pattern by concentrating seekers along a single axis, which is hardly ideal for searching across an area of uncertainty (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Click to expand. The seekers of a stream salvo pattern search along a narrow axis. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)
Figure 5. Click to expand. The seekers of a saturation salvo search across multiple axes. (Author graphic via Nebulous Fleet Command)
Missiles can be drawn to contacts that turn out to be decoys, which may need to be discriminated by much shorter-ranged seeker modes than radar, such as electro-optical or infrared sensors. The need for missiles to close the distance to more rigorously investigate and verify contacts can threaten the cohesion and range of the salvo. Relying on only a few missiles at the head of a stream to do most of the searching on behalf of the salvo runs a greater risk of having the whole salvo being led astray by false contacts, which will come at a significant cost to fuel, range, and time. Advanced networking and autonomy may do little to alleviate the inherent tunnel vision of a stream salvo, where the whole of the salvo can be made to suffer penalties if only the leading missiles are deceived. If the missiles lack the programming and networking to work together, a stream salvo encountering a decoy could fragment and lose its cohesion as some missiles take the bait and others do not.
In a primitive stream salvo, the pattern of searching for a target and attacking a target remains virtually the same, compared to the more dynamic expansion and contraction of a saturation salvo that widens while searching for a target and then converging on it. A saturation salvo is much better able to withstand the disruption decoys can inflict against the coherence of the volume of fire. When the salvo is searching across a wide front, a single weapon could investigate a contact and make sure to only cue the rest of the salvo to converge on the contact after it has been verified. This helps a saturation salvo reduce the cost of deception to a single weapon or a handful of weapons being led astray at a time, rather than larger segments of the salvo like a stream pattern. However, if the deception is effective enough to get networked missiles to cue convergence, then a saturation salvo that is made to repeatedly expand and contract as it converges on false contacts and then renews its search is a salvo that will be quickly running down its mileage.
Stream salvos may offer some informational advantages when it comes to battle damage assessment and assessing the effectiveness of an attack. Missiles later in the stream could use their sensors to perceive that the target ahead has been destroyed and communicate fresh battle damage assessment information to the network. Or they could communicate that the vast majority of the missiles ahead them have been destroyed by defenses and strongly suggest that a salvo is on the verge of being defeated. In either case, missiles could deliver especially critical and time-sensitive intelligence on the effectiveness of attacks and defenses, assuming they are able to deliver such information through a network in those contexts. A saturation salvo that simply maintains several weapons to the rear of the main wave of attacking missiles could deliver similar information.
If the targeting and search capabilities of salvos are capable enough, they can lower the threshold of information required to precipitate a strike and speed the decision cycle. If the missiles are capable enough to sort out contacts and even decide their own distribution of fire across a target naval formation, then commanders can launch on less information knowing the missiles themselves can reliably sort out critical details. If an adversary is presenting a mass of cluttered signatures that makes target discrimination difficult from afar, saturation salvos could be fired into the mass in a bid to earn positive identification themselves and function as one-way scouts. Modern seekers that can visually identify a target based on robust onboard databases of warship designs should be capable enough to differentiate most warships from civilian vessels and minimize the ability of navies to use commercial traffic as human shields.
With respect to the vulnerability of the launch platform, a stream salvo can more easily betray the position of its launching warship by providing a clearly defined line of bearing back toward the vicinity of the platform. A warship under attack from a stream salvo could fire its offensive weaponry down this line of bearing in a last-ditch salvo and have a greater chance of striking back. Nonlinear flight paths and saturation patterns can help mitigate this risk through multi-axis attacks that can manipulate perceptions of where an attack originated.
But nonlinear attacks and saturation patterns incur penalties in range and fuel economy. Stream salvos will suffer less penalties than saturation salvos in this regard because it is more fuel efficient to maneuver a salvo across waypoints when maintaining a stream pattern. By comparison, saturation salvos will suffer a greater cost in fuel given how some missiles will have to cover more distance than others to preserve the abreast formation while traveling across waypoints. It may be more preferable to confine a saturation pattern to the terminal phase of attack rather than the cruise phase of missile flight, where a stream salvo only expands into a saturation profile just before breaking over the target’s horizon.
Salvo patterns can therefore be flexed during flight to emphasize search, fuel economy, or lethality depending on what is more applicable at various points in the engagement. The need for maximizing range and fuel may compete with the need to search and withstand deception, where these latter factors encourage a saturation pattern. If enough outside retargeting support can confidently convey information to a salvo during flight, then it can minimize the amount of fuel the salvo would have to expend in a broader search pattern. This can also improve the survivability of the salvo and improve its element of surprise, where a saturation pattern engaged in search could provide more early warning to an adversary by posing a radiating wall of missile seekers. Even emphasizing passive detection can reduce the element of surprise, since missiles may have to leave sea-skimming altitudes to broaden the reach of their sensors. Outside retargeting support is helpful toward improving the range and survivability for missile salvos on their way to the target by allowing them to maintain low-altitude stream patterns, and reduces the need for saturation patterns to only the final moments of attack.
A salvo of Soviet P-500 Bazalt anti-ship missiles (NATO reporting name: SS-N-12 Sandbox) is fired by a Slava-class cruiser against a U.S. Cold War-era surface action group. Demonstrated intelligent missile swarming behaviors include self-organization from stream pattern into saturation pattern, single high-altitude missile searching on behalf of larger sea-skimming salvo, target prioritization for distribution of fire, and weaving flight profiles in terminal attack phase. Blue trails mark offensive missiles, pink trails mark defensive missiles. (Work-in-progress developer video of forthcoming naval wargame, Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age.)
Patterns of Combining Fires
Saturation and stream patterns go beyond describing individual salvos, where they can also describe the broader aggregated salvo as a whole. Depending on how contributing fires are being amassed from distributed forces, the aggregated salvo itself may take on an overall stream or saturation profile, or some mixture of the two. The overall profile of an aggregated salvo may feature an amalgamation of waypointing and salvo patterns that generate especially complex threat presentation as a shapeshifting volume of fire closes in on a target (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Click to expand. A reverse range ring is centered on a REDFOR surface action group under attack by massed fires featuring a combination of stream and saturation patterns. (Author graphic)
It is easier to combine with stream salvos than saturation salvos. Because not all missiles in a stream salvo will hit the target at the same time, there is slightly more opportunity to overlap with the salvo, which can measure in the tens of seconds. A saturation salvo will pose greater challenges for effective aggregation because the salvo is already attempting to position all its missiles to strike the target at the same time. Outside salvos attempting to combine with saturation salvos will have to be very closely aligned in timing because of the minimum of opportunity for overlap.
In-flight retargeting and programming can play a critical role in ensuring aggregation can maximize opportunity for saturation. Multiple contributing salvos can approach a target as streams and then travel waypoints in a holding pattern beyond the target’s horizon until more contributing fires arrive. Once the final attack is initiated, the contributing fires switch to saturation patterns and converge on the target. The efficiency of the stream pattern buys more time to grow the volume of fire, and the lethality of the saturation pattern is reserved for the final approach.
As various contributing fires approach a target, the defenders may prioritize the destruction of specific salvos based on their patterns. Defenders may prioritize saturation patterns especially, believing them to be the greater threat. The more complex the flight profile and missile behavior, the more an adversary may assume that a set of contributing fires consists of more capable missiles, and prioritize those salvos for interception by its defensive airpower and other means.
Salvo patterns can be flexed to manipulate adversary threat perceptions and potentially open gaps in defenses. By flexing a combination of salvo patterns and waypoints, a set of contributing fires could expand into a saturation profile to draw adversary airpower away from a target and open opportunities for other salvos to make the strike. And as a salvo comes under attack from airpower, it can shift its flight profile as it senses radar illumination and notices that friendly missiles are disappearing from the local network. By shifting flight profiles while under aerial attack, a missile salvo can make defense more challenging and buy time for the overall strike. Primitive anti-ship missiles by comparison may hardly change their flight behavior when under attack or radar illumination, simplifying the defender’s challenge.
Salvo Patterns: A Forthcoming U.S. Advantage?
The ability to leverage the tactical advantages of salvo patterns may be one of the key advantages the U.S. will have over China by fielding the anti-ship capable variants of the Tomahawk missile, assuming China does not develop similar weapons. The Tomahawk missile’s especially long range gives it great flexibility for maneuvering through various patterns and along many waypoints. Greater range also improves the missile’s ability to recover from deception by false contacts and extend its search for real targets. These capabilities are magnified by another dimension of salvo patterns, that of sea-skimming versus high-diving attacks.
Anti-ship ballistic missiles can take on saturation patterns by virtue of being launched by multiple platforms with shallow magazines, such as truck launchers. But despite having similar range as Tomahawk, anti-ship ballistic missiles are heavily disadvantaged when it comes to reconfiguring their salvo patterns in real time. The fixed nature of a ballistic trajectory strongly constrains the ability of these weapons to alter the disposition of their salvos while in flight, and the steep high-diving nature of their final approach constrains the scope of ocean their onboard seekers can search across.6 A ballistic missile on its terminal descent cannot decline a false contact and then default back to a wider search pattern as easily as a cruise missile. A ballistic missile locked into its terminal descent is only moments away from hitting the ocean regardless of whether its targeting information is viable or not, whereas a cruise missile has more margin for error. By their nature, ballistic missile attacks attempt to minimize the area of uncertainty around a target not so much by coordinating search across a salvo’s seekers, but more by having tremendously high speed that helps preserve the viability of the original targeting information given at launch.
The differences in terminal search and attack patterns between ballistic missiles and cruise missiles is somewhat similar to that of the attack profiles of WWII dive bombers and torpedo bombers, respectively. The dive bomber, like a ballistic missile, makes its final approach from a steep angle at higher altitude, exposing itself to a broader array of sensors and defensive firepower, while having relatively little leeway to shift to new targets midway through its high-speed dive. The torpedo bomber by comparison is usually traveling more slowly, but its flight profile is at a flatter angle that affords it much more maneuverability, even in the terminal attack phase. This flatter flight profile offers a broader scope of opportunity to investigate contacts, recover from deception, and shift targets, while giving the platform more options in when it begins its terminal approach.
A sea-skimming cruise missile is therefore better able to employ a wider search pattern across the area of uncertainty around a target than a weapon locked into a high-diving flight profile. While the visibility of sea-skimmers is more deeply affected by horizon limits than high-divers, a high-diving platform or missile may struggle to radically reorient itself toward a new contact during its dive, and the smaller size of the seekers used by missiles can limit how much those weapons can leverage the broader visibility for search. However, sea-skimming attackers may have to break through successive layers of defending warships and aircraft before they can threaten a priority target in the interior of a formation. In exchange for some disadvantages, high-diving attackers can threaten those priority targets directly.
Conclusion
Sharpening the intelligent swarming behaviors of anti-ship missiles will be a key area of naval competition, one with significant potential for building offensive advantage. These capabilities should be expected to proliferate and magnify missile threats. Navies should take care to assess the programming and autonomous targeting logic of their salvos to consider how this may make their striking power concentrated or stretched thin during an attack. When warship salvos have little in the way of effective networking or autonomy, they default to more primitive stream salvo patterns and suffer major disadvantages. They become more susceptible to deception, struggle with long-range search, and raise the cost of attack.
As a distributed force masses its fires, it will attempt to maximize the saturation effect. In those final phases of attack, the greatest offensive advantage will be gained when saturation patterns characterize how salvos are arranged as they converge on a target. What these salvo patterns make clear is that in the missile age, the weapons themselves have become a chief maneuver element.
Part 6 will focus on the strengths and weaknesses of platform types in distributed warfighting.
1. Factors that bottleneck a warship’s rate of fire from vertical launch systems include exhaust gas limits and safety risks of launching numerous missiles in very close proximity to one another. The minimal unit of a MK41 vertical launch system takes the form of eight-cell module, with each module sharing a common exhaust gas system.
For module and exhaust gas design of MK 41 VLS, see:
5. Jeffrey R. Cares and Anthony Cowden, “Fighting the Fleet: Operational Art and Modern Fleet Combat,” U.S. Naval Institute Press, pg. 30-42, 2021.
6. Gerry Doyle and Blake Herzinger, Carrier Killer: China’s Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles and Theater of Operations in the early 21st Century, Helion & Company, pg. 42, 2022.
Featured Image: US joint forces conducted a sinking exercise on the decommissioned guided missile frigate ex-USS Ingraham in the Hawaiian Islands Operating Area, 15 August 2021. (US Navy photo MCS David Mora Jr)
