Establishing the Narrative For the Coming Paradigm Shift

Over the past year, this blog has evolved with a narrative for thinking about the Navy's new maritime strategy. We discuss maritime strategy using the analogy of a Yin Yang, representing warfighting and peacemaking as two opposing and, at the same time, complementary (completing) applications of military power.

We believe military power must take a balanced approach addressing the requirements for winning war and managing peace. If the military is to balance itself, this means there must be a commitment to counterinsurgency capabilities for Army peacemaking operations, and in the case of the Navy it means building flexible forces for leveraging the sea as base to connect the non-integrated gaps. Using the Ying Yang analogy, if black is war and white is peace, this analogy is used to recognize the white dot as peacemaking forces as a requirement for winning war, just as the black dot represents warfighter capabilities as a requirement for managing peace.

We believe our narrative is in line with the Navy's new maritime strategy, highlighting the phrase "preventing war is as important as winning war" in Seapower 21, we note that balance is critical for military power to adequately address the 21st century threat conditions. We have also utilized other narratives to promote the utility of naval forces. We describe ships using a modern rating system, utilize the term cruiser as a role instead of a class of ship, and perhaps most importantly, when looking to the future we discuss the specific metrics, leaving specific capabilities to the experts, that we believe will be necessary for advancing US Naval power. Perhaps one of the most discussed examples of describing metrics rather than capabilities is how we describe unmanned platforms and manned platforms as networks to be leveraged for warfighting and peacemaking respectively.

In examining the metrics of the peacemaker, we believe manpower is an absolute requirement. Virtual presence through unmanned systems is in effect the absolute absence of humans, and the presence of human beings is the one irreplaceable factor in fostering peaceful relations, particularly for forward deployed seapower. In examining the metrics of the warfighter, we believe unmanned systems hold a significant advantage over several manned systems utilized today. Human beings suffer from limitations like persistence that unmanned systems do not suffer from, giving the unmanned systems warfighting advantages in the metrics that matter in waging and winning war.

That is why we believe the requirement for many distributed, small manned and unmanned systems at sea will eventually become central to Naval operations in the 21st Century. We often say we believe the Mothership for many manned and unmanned deployable subsurface, surface, and aviation systems will ultimately be to the 21st Century Navy what the manned aircraft carrier was to the 20th Century Navy.

We reestablish this narrative today as we strive for better balance. As a blog that discusses daily events, content can get skewed as it rides the wave of daily events that unfold in unequal order. We have spent a lot of time lately discussing peacemaking capabilities in the maritime domain, but we do think about warfighting capabilities here as well. Specifically we highlight this excellent piece by Thomas P. Ehrhard, PhD and Robert O. Work (PDF) that we believe is very much in line with the strategic vision for future naval forces we promote on the blog. While we believe an evolution is necessary for addressing the metrics for peacemaking, we highlight this piece as a reminder how the metrics for warfighting must also evolve. Both evolutions need to be a priority from Naval leadership.