The Last Revolt Was Today's Solution

Eagle1 responds to an excellent post by CDR Salamander who calls for a revolt by those who care about the Navy's Maritime Strategy and call's upon the Navy to match ends and ways with means. I intend to discuss CDR Salamander's contribution, but first I want to focus in on something Eagle1 highlights in his excellent response.

Citing one of my favorite books, by one of my favorite authors, then discussing two of my favorite subjects (Streetfighter and NCW) Eagle1 channels Captain Wayne P. Hughes book Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat with some excellent points, but he struck up the conversation on our end with this observation.

In my view, during my last days being involved with such matters, we were not training senior officers in how to fight and how hard that fighting is against a determined enemy who has had time to build forces designed to exploit your well-known weaknesses.

So when CDR S calls for a "commander's revolt" I understand his frustration. And note that John Boyd paid for his revolution heavily while lesser men gained from his insight. The would-be revolutionaries need to understand the risks.

These commanders need some political help from someone who understands that we shouldn't have billion dollar ships doing missions poorly that could be done better by having many more mission-designed ships. To use a famous Navy phrase, "any ship can be a mine sweeper once." Real minesweepers can be reused after they have swept a channel- multi-billion dollar "capital ships" cannot.

Given the promise of "network centric warfare," merely connecting a few huge platforms under-utilizes the potential for linking many small ships for greater tactical flexibility.

Eagle1 nails this in so many ways. We note Captain Hughes was part of the group that led the last revolt in favor of smart strategy which was championed by Admiral Cebrowski. It is also noteworthy Eagle1 notes the promise of "network centric warfare", because while NCW has been integrated into Navy doctrine, the discussions of network centric warfare and the promises of tactical flexibility hasn't evolved much beyond where the revolting admirals left the discussion.

If a force's combat power grows out of proportion to its survivability, however, it becomes tactically unstable. And a tactically unstable force has diminished utility to the nation because it becomes risk averse. This already is happening in some areas. In Kosovo, for example, the most needed use of air power was proscribed in both time and space. As a result, allied aircraft remained at high altitudes. In short, commanders will be unwilling to risk forces because of the human dimension, because of the disproportionately large percentage of the force's combat power represented by a single platform, and because of the high cost in time and treasure when even one such platform is lost in battle. The Navy after Next could become tactically unstable in the face of sophisticated area denial strategies—great eggs, but too few baskets.

History and analysis have demonstrated that to achieve a given level of combat power, numerical advantage is the single most important force attribute. This is why Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jay Johnson repeatedly has stated that in today's environment there is an unacceptable level of risk associated with a force of fewer than 300 ships. Of course, these 300 ships are of different types for different tasks, but numbers contribute to robustness and combat power, strength and combat power are the components of tactical stability, tactical stability underpins access, and access plus power projection equate to a relevant U.S. Navy. Determining the right balance between numbers of ships and the shape of the force is key to leveraging the power of numbers while maintaining affordability.

I think that there is true irony that the Navy began the century by shooting down Streetfighter, because as we review the reasons why Streetfighter was unpopular, we note some glaring similarities by critics of another recent adaptation of strategy.

If you recall, Streetfighters were "expendable", they couldn't be protected, they would be vulnerable, they would be too close to the enemy to survive, etc... Those arguments should sound very familiar to those who observe Iraq, because in effect the same arguments we saw thrown against Streetfighter were the primary arguments by critics who claimed the COIN doctrine adopted by the US Army and Marine Corps wouldn't work. As we have observed in the past, Streetfighter is the Naval version of the Army COIN strategy.

At sea, Network Centric Warfare takes a collection of ships and organizes them into a unified fleet distributed over large areas enabled by shared information. Furthermore, western fleets, and specifically US Navy vessels are neither designed or equipped to distribute manned forces over large enough areas at sea to utilize COIN peacemaking doctrine when facing irregular challenges, thus must rely on the NCW warfighter doctrine Admiral Cebrowski discusses.

...Admiral Cebrowski advocated large numbers of small manned systems at sea for the US Navy, which by design has the effect of being a force designed to offer both a Network Centric Warfare warfighter doctrine and a distributed human interaction COIN doctrine in peacemaking.

As we have noted many times, the requirement for many distributed, small manned systems at sea is something this blog believes will eventually become part of Naval operations in the 21st Century, and why we often say we believe the Mothership for many manned deployable sea systems will ultimately be to the 21st Century Navy what the aircraft carrier was to the 20th Century Navy.

It should also be noted that when Admiral Mullen produced the 313-ship plan, Congress required an alternative fleet design by the Office for Transformation. While we wouldn't advocate the Navy adopt the fleet design produced by Cebrowski and Johnson at OFT, we think it requires a substantial amount of hubris to flat out ignore what they proposed within the context of the 313-ship plan.

After all, those same concepts Johnson and Cebrowski advocated have clearly been finding their way into fleet operations of the Navy today. We have noted the development of motherships and Afloat Forward Staging Bases, and we note where the Navy has incorporated the OFT concepts similar to how Johnson, Cebrowski, and even Captain Hughes described them the Navy has been largely successful, while spin off projects that are not similar to their recommendations like the LCS and DDG-1000 highlight a lack of application of the new maritime strategy.

The Navy has adopted a strategy for peacemaking. While the desire to focus on the principles of war as outlined by Clausewitz, Mahan, or Corbett can be distracting, we find ourselves observing that Streetfighter, with its multiple small platforms dispersed over a region interconnecting the gaps with NCW in the littorals, up close and personal with the regional shipping, best represents the COIN model of the forces on the ground in Iraq, an example of a peacemaking strategy at sea. In other words, the fleet design originally promoted to the Navy as a wartime solution, which the Navy rejected with the same arguments later used by COIN critics, has become exactly the kind of peacemaker force that is most desired for today's modern Naval peacemaker strategy.