Warfighting, Peacemaking, and Hybrid Warfare at Sea

The Small Wars Journal is highlighting an Inside the Navy article (subscription only) by Zachary M. Peterson called Marines Make Case for Return to "From the Sea" Ops, Hybrid Warfare. It is an interesting article, and outlines the USMC vision for how the Corps is looking to return to action after Iraq.

In my opinion, this debate is so much bigger than the USMC, and I get the impression that with a targeted information dump like what this article appears to be from Col. Steven Zotti, the Navy is being sent a broadside over the bow. Make no mistake, this will be the discussion of 2009 in the Navy, and it is going to be an interesting discussion. This debate is centric to how maritime forces will operate for the next decade, and how maritime forces will be shaped for much longer. The budget crunch coming to the Navy is too big for the Navy to simply build ships to sail the ocean blue, ships will either have a specific purpose that Congress can justify with spending, or the ship won't get built. Easy as that.

The article goes on to lay out three major focuses of the USMC "Vision and Strategy 2025" (PDF): soft power, hard power, and hybrid warfare. Essentially, the Marines see themselves engaged in security engagement operations to build up security through regional partnerships. The Marines also see themselves built for amphibious warfare to insure access against competitors. Finally, the Marines see themselves as the nations future hybrid warfare force dealing with competitors who attempt to fight us outside the conventional space of warfare. By doing this, the Marine Corps can add balance to the force structure of the United States by directly taking on the challenges of irregular warfare while also maintaining core competencies in combat operations against competitors, something of a 'return to its roots' approach in being the small wars force but with maritime delivery capability of hard power. I note the SWJ also covered another article that goes to the heart of a balanced defense strategy in the same post.

The Navy will soon release NOC 09 to be the Navy's narrative for their stated direction. It will be interesting to see what it says, and if all it does is nod in the direction of the Marines while blazing a different vision of what the Navy considers a "balanced" approach to 21st century warfare.

The Marines approach very much aligns with the maritime strategy philosophies often discussed on the blog. I believe US 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 nGW capabilities including counterinsurgency for peacemaking operations, and in the case of the Navy it means building flexible forces for leveraging the sea as base in shipborne operations for supporting close to shore and land operations around the globe. 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.

I believe this narrative is in line with the phrase "preventing war is as important as winning war" stated in the maritime strategy of the maritime services, and I believe that a balanced approach is critical for military power (including naval power) to adequately address the 21st century threat conditions. I also don't believe a balanced approach requires equal budget share to be achieved, we can afford to spend less on lower end threats just like we must be prepared to spend a lot of money countering the highest threat challenges, ballistic missile submarines as a nuclear deterrent being a good example.

Lets assume for a moment dealing with Hybrid Warfare becomes the desirable direction of the USMC from the nations perspective. How might that change the way we develop Naval forces? In my opinion, we must first recognize there is an absence of important lessons learned debates from the current wars inside the Navy itself that relates to this issue. For example, consider this quote in the article as it relates to Navy force structure development.

Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway has called for Marines to return to their expeditionary roots, which means shipborne operations in close-to-shore areas around the globe.

This Zachary M. Peterson finishes this brilliant article by including this statement:

These efforts will require the realization of the “strategic corporal,” a concept first described by former Commandant Ret. Gen. Charles Krulak. The concept involves creating young enlisted leaders able to handle complex situations traditionally conducted by officers and senior enlisted leaders well above their rank.

“We don’t think that technology is necessarily the first priority,” Zotti said. “Technology is always an enabler and the Marine Corps’ strength has always been and we think will continue to be preparing young Marine leaders for the battlefield.”

Zachery, I could buy you beer. Lets start the irregular warfare discussion in the Navy shall we, and let us link the peacemaker (strategic corporal) with technology and see where it takes us in a Navy discussion.

Why do we build MRAPs? Why are tanks tactically critical in COIN? There is an important lesson from the 21st century wars that is not being applied to the 21st century fleet. Have you noticed that the closer we get to the enemy in the irregular warfare space on land, the heavier and more survivable we require the technology? In other words, the most important lesson of irregular warfare on land has been to build survivability into our presence, and insure our presence is as close as possible to the enemy. We intentionally sacrifice mobility and stealth for armor in our peacemaking tactics as a core requirement.

So how has the Navy approached irregular warfare at sea? In combat, mobility and stealth play an important role in force protection. People have emailed me asking if I believe nuclear power is appropriate for the CG(X). My response is: absolutely. Why? Because we are adding power that can be turned into speed, and speed in blue water is a serious capability in the maneuver warfare tactics that have proven very successful in warfighting. But in irregular warfare, also known as peacemaking on this blog, speed has limited usefulness.

We don't rely on concealment when approaching a ship for VBSS. We don't have the luxury of concrete barriers and giant blast walls in protecting our ships when operating close to an enemy coast. If the Navy intends to support the shipborne operations of Marines in close-to-shore areas around the globe in the hybrid warfare space, then consider for a moment how conceptually backward the Navy's approach is.

As we get closer to the enemy (shore), the Navy has intentionally reduced the armor requirement both wars have proven absolutely vital to sustainability and presence, and has indeed traded armor for mobility (LCS) and stealth (DDG-1000) instead, both of which mean little in peacemaking operations where we basically expose ourselves in plain sight of the enemy. We have also reduced the most important component to a successful peacemaking operation, specifically the future Navy will have fewer "strategic corporals" in the peacemaking spaces because we are intentionally reducing our manpower on ships; another case where we are clearly ignoring the lessons learned in both wars where it takes sustained presence of distributed, survivable manpower to insure the peace. Piracy is as old as the sea, but Somali piracy with the use of common fishing boats as pirate vessels does represent a irregular challenge in the maritime domain. What has been the solution? Massive numbers of manned ships at the point of engagement, because unmanned systems have proven only useful in a supporting role, also described as the tactical role of scouting.

Body armor and unarmored Humvee's were not a problem for the wartime period in Iraq during the warfighting (mobility) phase of the conflict, but our strategic corporal's would be dead without the additional armor that has made sustained presence possible at the point of engagement in peacemaking. If the Marine Corps is serious about "shipborne operations in close-to-shore areas around the globe" then the Navy may want to take a serious look at how they intend to support this. The Navy is going to need more armor to support any approach by the Marine Corps to get closer to the enemy dealing with an irregular warfare challenge, and the 21st centry frigate approach using a barely armored, barely manned vessel as suggested by industry, and even the commercial, unarmored approach by usually insightful COIN experts (PDF, Chapter 6) offer little protection for the Navy's peacemakers. Both of those opinions highlight the lack of serious intellectual rigor committed to this discussion from a Naval centric perspective.

Want to see ideas where people are really thinking about these types of challenges, check out Dakota Woods paper (PDF) and Frank Hoffman's paper on joint maritime force structures towards hybrid threat challenges in the future at sea. We are going to discuss aspects of both papers a lot over the coming weeks.

This week Mobility vs Armor in the context of force structure strategy, irregular warfare, and the budget challenges that drive options will be my theme on the blog.