Tag Archives: Logistics

Beans Boots Bullets

Seafighters Will Never Operate In A Logistics-Free World

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Every QDR season, Wayne Hughes rousts himself from his Naval Postgraduate School hideout and mounts a push for his beloved teeny-tiny combatant–the “Seafighter”.  His latest, “Sustaining American Maritime Influence,” published in the September 2013 USNI Proceedings, is his usual salesman-like effort (in which he is joined by retired Admiral John Harvey, NPS Operations Research heavy-hitter, the retired Captain Jeffrey Kline, and LT Zachary Schwartz, USN) to get small craft onto the national security agenda.

Hughes’ small ship advocacy has worked–at least to a point. Small LCS-like ships are coming into vogue, yet it is fairly obvious–after perusing his repeated calls for ever-smaller ships–that Hughes thinks LCS, in its current guise, is too big, too pricey and too sophisticated. But his subsequent proposals for ever-smaller ships really risk falling flat because his “tiny ship” argument does not work without simultaneous reinvestment/recapitalization of a much-maligned and costly ship class–the surface-ship tender. (Our gallant cadre of accountant-minded warfighters killed those poor ships off by the early 2000s)

But Hughes, in his sales pitches, doesn’t have much time for tenders. He stays firmly with the sexy and superficial to make his pro-small-ship argument. After all, the Seafighter concept is a seductive “transformational” idea, tuned to catch notice of Congress and defense reformers–small ships are cheap. They can be built in numbers. And in numbers, they offer flexibility. They are wonderful engagement tools. They are now seen as an “alternative” to LCS. Fine. And he’s correct. But there’s just one big problem.

Logistics.

For a forward-deployed Navy, any small-ship scheme–well, any small ship scheme that has aspirations to be more than a coast-bound, Soviet-like homeland defense force–must be logistically supportable. That’s where Hughes and his fellow small-ship boosters run into heavy weather. Once sufficient logistical support is added to any small ship scheme, the economic savings vanish, and we end up generating a host of battlefield problems that Hughes and Kline simply refuse to analyze (in one larger study–recasting the entire Navy as an almost entirely small-craft affair–discussion of the logistical implications and subsequent cost–was just, well, not included).

There’s a big, fat, fiscal reason why tenders were some of the first to be ushered out of the arsenal. The ships were pricey, the crews large and costly, and you had to guarantee a sufficient level of forward operations to make the ships worth their while.

Now, the fact that the NPS Operations crowd comes back, year after year proposing the same concept is admirable, but their refusal–or, frankly, their inability–to address the gaping logistical holes their small-ship argument does the Navy academic community a disservice.  So here’s my message to that crowd: Reorient your small ship advocacy towards explaining logistical requirements needed for small-craft forward operations.

And, mind you, this is coming from somebody who likes Wayne and loves small ships.

First, Small ships don’t operate in a vacuum, and they certainly will not operate forward or be ready for action without refueling capability, ready resupply and maintenance. Think about it. Pick up any book about PT boat operations. Consider the ample shore establishment and fleet train those ships needed back in World War II.

The second reason why we need to have a discussion is this: Nobody knows what they want in a tender. It’s fairly obvious Hughes originally didn’t want just any old cobbled-together auxiliary. Here’s what he wanted back in 2000, in the USNI Proceedings article, “21 Questions for Seafighter”:

“The smaller model [streetfighter] should be sized so that a high-speed mother ship can carry six or eight.  The upper limit is therefore around 300 tons, and the craft must be configured to launch and recover in an open sea.  The crew should be small, so crew endurance is probably going to be the limiting factor on mission time.  Habitability, sustainment and replacement crews must reside in the mother ship.  Aircraft would have to be based within the mother ship, too, thus limiting the radius of action of the small streetfighter for some tasks.

Larger versions of, say, 1,200 tons would have to transit under their own power to their operating theaters and be followed closely by a tender for support….a potential convenience is that six spare destroyer tenders already exist for their support. On the other hand, aircraft carried by the 1,200 ton streetfighters would need support by the tender or an accompanying air-capable ship.”

Okay.  Aside from the fact that Hughes probably knew that four of the six available destroyer tenders had been struck the year before (the Shenandoah, Cape Cod, Yellowstone and Samuel Gompers), it’s pretty clear Hughes was interested in a gold-plated auxiliary.  Look at the language–”fast” ,”air-capable”, “launch and recover in an open sea”.  Even then, Hughes knew that this LHA/T-AOE/AD/MLP hybrid was going to be far more expensive than the $500 million he suggests as a tender price-point.

But Hughes is not alone. We do not have a good model for tenders.  Frankly, I’m really vexed that we are poised to decommission some of our fast T-AOEs (yes, I know there is a sound engineering reason for that move), and I think the MLP offers all kinds of interesting options that we have yet to fully explore. Logistical ships have been overlooked for far too long, and we must do more to discuss and study them.

My third reason I wish to have wider consideration of auxiliaries is that auxiliaries are entering the fleet! We are ushering MLPs and JHSVs into service and about to design a T-AO(X) for mass production. If small ships can leverage these platforms, or if small ships demand a larger T-AO(X) block buy for support, then the National Security community needs to know now.

Unfortunately, small ship advocates are soft-pedaling their support requirements. Rather than engage in a frank discussion of floating logistical support, small-ship proponents use a fall-back strategy–an impressively simple solution called (you guessed it!) shore-basing.

In Hughes’ 2000 article, that strategy was detailed in one sentence:

“Whenever operations are near a friendly state, a small, prepackaged, transportable shore facility is an alternative.”

In Hughes’ latest act of small ship advocacy, he acknowledges the price of logistical support, but, in the end, he takes pretty much the same tack:

“When they [Seafighters] operated independently in coastal waters, then tender support was conjectured. Exploratory tender support for a large flotilla of 100 missile ships located in many places was disturbingly expensive in manpower and construction costs.

However, we believe our previously outlined worldwide survey—as well as the clearly attractive current Navy plans to base the LCS overseas in Singapore—demonstrates that in real-world circumstances we will usually be collaborating with a state where the ships can be supported ashore. Tender services might be desirable for out-of-the-way places, and so the personnel costs of two or three interim alternatives—to include auxiliary ships or amphibious-assault ships such as the USS Ponce (LPD-15)—should be included in the cost of deploying flotilla squadrons.”

The LCS deployment to Singapore was a bit of a wakeup call. We’ve forgotten that any forward-basing scheme that relies upon host-nation resources is a tough task rife with lots of opportunities for error. With Glen Defense Marine Asia, we learned that lesson–in spades. Aside from the fact that the LCS’s husbanding agent is under investigation for corruption, we are still struggling mightily with the logistical challenge of getting spares, techs and other items into another country in a timely fashion. The cost and delay stemming from customs, export control, security requirements and other issues make forward-deployment a personnel-heavy challenge. For persnickety combatants, it’s a lot easier to have a ship at the pier full of spares, techs and back-up crews dedicated to the task at hand.  (My offhand thought is to take most of the LCSron folks in San Diego and put ‘em all on a tender.)

(A tender also helps grant small ships an added measure of flexibility–I won’t even get into how geopolitics could, at a time of tension, break war plans that depend upon forward-basing schemes to work.)

Yes, other ships do manage to operate forward. There are plenty of success stories out there. But maintaining a solid old T-AO forward is one thing, while maintaining a bunch of new “yet-to-work-out-the-kinks” combatants is something else entirely.

At a minimum, a tender would have made the LCS introduction to forward-basing go far more smoothly. I mean, why have our current shore-basing options in the Gulf–the some ones we cite today as a rationale for “more” forward basing–worked so well?

Those arrangements go smoothly because, twenty years ago, the U.S. Navy brought in tenders, and used those as bases to help develop trusted relationships, a means for engaging local shore support establishment, support protocols and so forth.

With new auxiliaries coming on-line and the current “small ship” showpiece struggling to “win” a forward deployment, it would be far more useful for small ship advocates to take a new tack, and start exploring how to best enable forward operation of small craft. Stop indulging in another set of long, well-trodden discussions of small-ship capabilities, costs and other minutiae. Let’s figure out what we need to do logistically to enable small ships.

I’ll be blunt: if those small ships cannot reliably operate forward, then all the effort Hughes and his friends put into promoting small-ship Seafighter design, armament schemes and operational doctrine means nothing.

This article is cross posted with permission from Craig Hooper‘s blog, http://nextnavy.com/

Capability Analysis

The Falklands: The Carrier

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Skis Up!
                                     Skis Up!

By Ben Brockschmidt

It has been over a month since Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner called for the U.K. to give up the Falkland Islands to Argentina. While this could have been nothing more than an attempted distraction by President Kirchner from a multitude of domestic issues, the dispute over the islands is constant background noise for both countries. In the meantime a referendum on the future sovereignty of the islands is scheduled for March. What this latest uptick allows is an opportunity to look at the logistics of fighting on the other side of the world and the role of aircraft carriers in modern conflict.

During the Falkland Islands conflict in 1982, the UK deployed two aircraft carriers and a sizable fleet to the South Atlantic. Since then, the end of the Cold War and shifting priorities have changed the composition of military forces for both Argentina and the UK. There is ample research comparing the naval forces of 1982 with those of today, but the lack of a British aircraft carrier remains of particular concern. This disadvantage was evident during the intervention in Libya. The absence of a mobile platform to launch aircraft contributed to a more expensive conflict as RAF sorties were flown out of airfields in Southern Europe. The result was longer flight times, fewer missions, and higher rates of fatigue.

With the exception of the facilities maintained in the Falklands themselves, the region is as far away as the U.K. can get from its bases, and it won’t have the benefit of friendly airfields and support sites nearby. While the U.K. has significantly increased the units deployed in defense of the islands, its airfields are known targets.

During the gap between carriers (The first of the two new Queen Elizabeth-class carriers isn’t expected to undergo sea trials for at least a year), questions remain about the functionality of the future ships. The carriers in development lack capabilities that existed during the first Falklands conflict, such as aerial refueling, that are essential for lengthy engagements.

What turns aircraft carriers into a truly formidable force are the carrier strike groups and support craft. By themselves, carriers are offensive weapons and have limited operations. Strike groups combine a carrier with a mix of frigates, destroyers, supply ships, and other vessels. These ships ensure non-stop air operations while protecting the carriers from land-, air-, and sea-based threats. Under its current makeup the Royal Navy, while smaller than it used to be, still maintains a modern and efficient force with all the pieces of a carrier strike group in place, minus the carrier.

The next round of predictions on the Falklands Islands won’t start until after the referendum in March. Until then, the UK needs to identify how it plans to projects its power and defends its interests abroad – both while short a carrier, and in view of the carriers’ limitations.

A 2006 graduate of Illinois State University, Ben Brockschmidt moved to Washington, D.C., on a whim in 2007. Concurrent internships in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, Ben worked for Congressman Tim Johnson of Illinois (retired) who was a senior member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (T&I). He is a 2012 CDE graduate of the U.S. Naval War College and today is the Executive Director of the Infrastructure Council and Director of Federal Affairs for the Illinois Chamber of Commerce.

This article appeared in its original form at TheRiskyShift.com

 

Read more with LT Kurt Albaugh’s examination of the effects the Falklands’ “Tyranny of Distance” had on the outcome of the war.

Beans Boots Bullets

Supply: Now Lactose Free

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This article was first posted to the USNI blog.

The demands of the warfighter are like cheese processed through the lactose intolerant digestive tract that is military supply; though digestion is a vital process, it can be unspeakably painful and smell of rotten eggs. End-users already plagued by rapidly decreasing manning and time are now interrupted by long backorder lead times, artificial constraints on off-the-shelf solutions, and funding. Personnel are known to skip the supply system altogether, purchasing parts or equipment out of pocket when an inspection is on the line. This both hides the problem and takes from the pockets our sailors. The military has forgotten that supply exists for the utility the operator, not the ease of the audited. For the military supply system to regain the trust and capabilities necessary to serve the end-user, reforms to the way supplies are selected, commercial purchases are managed, and funding requested are necessary.

COSAL:

The first major problem is the Coordinated Shipboard Allowance List (COSAL). COSAL is a process by which the navy’s supply system determines what supplies it should stock on the shelves; items are ordered through the in-house supply system and the hits in the system raise the priority to stock. Unfortunately, COSAL is reactive rather than predictive and cannot meet the needs of either the new aches of an aging fleet or the growing pains of new ships. As ships grow long-in-the-tooth, parts and equipment once reliable require replacement or repair. New ships find casualties in systems meant to last several years. Equipment lists also change, leading to fleet-wide demands for devices only in limited, if any, supply. The non-COSAL items are suddenly in great demand but nowhere to be found. Critical casualties have month+ long wait-times for repairs as parts are back-ordered from little COSAL support. Commands attempt to fill their time-sensitive need by open purchasing these items from the external market, which are not COSAL tracked. This leads to either supply forcing the workcenter to order through supply and end-users waiting potentially months for critical backordered items, or the open purchase being accomplished and COSAL staying unchanged. Although difficult, the supply system should be more flexible to open-purchasing stock item equivalents due to time constraints while integrating open purchase equivalence tracking into the COSAL process. This bypasses the faults of COSAL’s reactionary nature while still updating the supply system with the changing demands.

Split Purchasing:

The limitations on open purchasing (buying commercial off-the-shelf) create artificial shortages of material easily available on the street. Namely, when items are not under General Services Administration (GSA) contract, single vendor purchases or purchases for a single purpose cannot exceed $3,000, no matter how the critical need or short the deadline. This further exacerbates the problems from an unsupportive COSAL; if requirements exceed purchase limitations, requests are sent through a lengthy contracting process which wastes more time than money saved. The contracting requirement ignores the fact that from the work-center supervisor to the supply officer, everyone now has the ability to search the internet for companies and can compare quotes. Purchasers need not be encouraged to spend less money, since they have the natural deisre to stretch their budget as far as possible. Contracting opportunities also become more scarce as the end of the fiscal year approaches, since money “dedicated” to a contracting purchase is lost if the clock turns over and no resolution is found. This means money lost to the command and vital equipment left unpurchased. For deployed/deployable units, this can be unacceptable. The supply system exists to fulfill the operational needs of the training/deployed demand-side, not to streamline the risk-averse audit demands of the supply side. If not raising the price-ceilings of non-GSA purchases for operational commands, the rule against split purchasing by spreading single-type purchases across multiple vendors should be removed. Breaking out a single purchase amongst several vendors alleviates the risk that large purchases are being made to single vendors due to kick-backs. This would call for more diligence on the part of Supply Officers, but that is why they exist.

Funding:

Finally, the recent Presidential Debates have shown the military’s poor ability to communicate the message that funding is becoming an increasingly critical issue force-wide. To many, the defense budget is so large that cuts are academic, savings no doubt hiding throughout the labyrinthine bureaucracy. However, for those of us who had no money to buy everything from tools to toilet paper for a month, it’s a more practical problem. Long before sequestration, Secretary Gates started the DoD on the path of making pre-emptive cuts before outside entities made those choices for the DoD. However, the military has made a poor show of communicating that these cuts have become excessive and are now cutting into the muscle of the force. Obeying the directive to cut funding does not require quietly accepting these cuts; now the Commander and Chief believes the military not even in need of a cut freeze, let alone a funding increase. With Hydra of manning, material, and training issues constantly growing new heads, the strategic communicators must come out in force to correct this misconception. While administrative savings can be found, our capabilities are paying the price for the budgetary experiment. Military leadership should, in part, involve advocacy; obedience requires the resources to execute the mission.

The supply system is a painful process, but with rather humble reforms, that pain can be both lessened and taken off the shoulders of whom the system exists to serve. With a reformed COSAL tracking open purchases, a loosened open-purchase limit that puts the stress on the supplier rather than operator, and better strategic communications about funding, we can apply a bit of lactaid to an otherwise painful process.

Matt Hipple is a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy. The opinions and views expressed in this post are his alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Department of Defense or the U.S. Navy. 

Capability Analysis

The Sinews of War

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Fleet Admiral King – probably thinking about the challenge of getting from A to B.

I don’t know what the hell this “logistics” is that Marshall is always talking about, but I want some of it.

– Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King to a Staff Officer, 1942

Carting around beans and bullets has never much interested me until recently. Of course, the Military Sealift Command has been on my mind due to the recent engagement of a suspicious vessel by the USNS Rappahannock. I’ve also been reading more about the Falklands War after my conversation with Scott Cheney-Peters on TheRiskyShift.com‘s “Debrief” and recently found an out-of-print book from the 1960s titled Conflict and Defense: A General Theory with a lot of smart things to say about military might. Finally, Undersecretary of the Navy The Honorable Bob Work has been weighing in on forward basing of ships over at Information Dissemination. Though they seem unconnected, all of this has led me to the following conclusions:

  1. You can’t claim to be a Navalist without having an interest in logistics. When we talk about future fleet composition, we’re not spending enough time talking about how we will support our combat ships and how many/what types of replenishment and pre-positioning ships we need.
  2. If you’re looking for a single measure of national power, the size of a country’s merchant marine is a good place to start, but:
  3. The globalization of the shipping industry both affects this last measure and may make large conventional wars less likely.

The Falklands War is a clear example of what Scott calls “The Tyranny of Distance.” The further a state has to go to get to the fight, the less combat power they will be able to apply in that fight. Part of the reason Argentina decided to invade the Falklands in the first place was that they believed that they were so far away from Britain, whose military power (and some would argue, national power) was on the decline. Few believed the British could sustain military operations so far from home – and with good reason. The Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) could only muster 22 ships with around 120,000 tons combined displacement to sustain a naval task force, a brigade of Royal Marines, an army brigade, and other ground, air, and special operations forces.

The famous RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 converted for wartime service under “Operation Corporate.” Photo: Andy Shaw.

One of the reasons for Britain’s success was the rapid signing of the Requisition of Ships Order of 1982 and the launch of “Operation Corporate” – the rapid conversion of civilian ships to aid the RFA. Virtually overnight, Britain quintupled its replenishment and sealift tonnage. These ships were indispensable to the war effort, allowing the British to concentrate far more military strength in the Falklands theater than many outside observers anticipated. This is why I think a country’s merchant marine is a critical measure of national power – military forces rarely invest enough in logistics capabilities during peacetime. Once a crisis erupts, countries with robust merchant fleets can quickly convert them for wartime use. Great powers need to respond globally, and sometimes that will require surging logistics forces during a crisis.

The United States operates under the tyranny of distance every day. Perhaps that’s why we’ve become insensitive to our logistics forces – we rely on them so often. And we have such a professional and robust force in the Military Sealift Command that the merchant marine becomes an afterthought. But our merchant marine has shrunk drastically since the 1940s. It’s telling that the United States lost 733 merchant ships greater than 1,000 tons displacement in World War II – our current merchant marine stands at only 393 ships according to the CIA World Factbook. I’m not advocating for a return to a 6,000 ship merchant marine, but this historical perspective should spur us to ask the question: do we need more sealift capability in reserve? What kinds of policies might increase our merchant fleet? And comparatively, when we talk about China, we rarely note that it has the largest merchant marine of any great power at 2030 ships.

Going down the rabbit hole further, I find it interesting that our National Defense Reserve Fleet – the ships in “mothballs” – is shrinking significantly. According to a report published in May, the US Maritime Administration is planning to dispose of 34 of 142 ships, with the potential for more down the road. Most of the vessels being disposed of are some kind of bulk carrier or tanker.

Forward basing definitely mitigates some logistics challenges. According to Conflict and Defense by Kenneth Boulding, a Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan in the 1960s, forward bases can actually reverse the tyranny of distance – so powerful is their influence. Students of Mahan know this argument well. Forward basing is also the sensible posture to assume in times of austerity, allowing more operational use to be had from a smaller number of ships without completely burning out equipment or people. But we must consider the future of our logistics capability, particularly the reserves from which we might surge during a crisis.

Finally, a thought on globalization: with the rise of multinational shipping companies and the prevalence of flags of convenience, I think that conventional wars between great powers – particularly invasions across the seas – might be far less likely. In this sense, the decline of national merchant marines might offer some security advantages. Famed international relations theorist John Mearsheimer coined the term “the stopping power of water.” With countries less able to mobilize the logistics capability to transport large numbers of ground troops, great powers (like, perhaps, the United States and China) will be less able to invade one another.

What do you think: does the United States need more logistics forces? Should the United States seek to grow its merchant marine? How? What does China’s large merchant marine say about its national ambitions? This is a conversation worth having…

LT Kurt Albaugh, USN is President of the Center for International Maritime Security, a Surface Warfare Officer and Instructor in the U.S. Naval Academy’s English Department. The opinions and views expressed in this post are his alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of U.S. Department of Defense or the U.S. Navy.