The Year of 'Payload Centric Warfare' Force Structures

A decade ago when the Streetfighter debate broke out, there was a smaller debate discussing 21st century ship design that got lost somewhere along the way. The focus of that debate was on the littorals and the Streetfighters, but one of the important ideas that carried over was the concept of focusing on payloads when developing 21st century waships.

That eventually led to technology development of modularity, and with that the concept of payload quietly became a comfortable, familiar idea but absent the Naval Postgraduate School SEA LANCE study (26MB PDF here), the conversation regarding payloads never really materialized into serious intellectual analysis. While SEA LANCE concentrated on towed payloads, conceptually the idea focused on increasing payload flexibility options for new ships. It really was a novel way of thinking, very much ahead of its time.

As I finally emerge from too many weeks of obligations, I have had time to think about what I see as an emerging Payload Centric Warfare capability developing momentum inside the US Navy today. This isn't a new capability, the US Navy has always enjoyed the large payload capacities of Aircraft Carriers and Amphibious Ships, and this decade the Navy has exploited the utility of high speed vessel transport capacity allowing the Navy to move relatively large payloads with smaller vessels at high speed. The definition of "Payload" I am using here doesn't directly apply to the MSC, as I refer to payload as a warfighting and peacemaking capability, not as a term substituting for cargo.

When naval officers discussing LCS say "everything you know about how to operate, maintain, fight, and survive has to be rethought," they are right. It is actually much bigger than LCS. Traditional line of thinking in the military has long paired form and function as a symbiotic relationship, but in this era of warfare, we have learned they are not. US convoys in Afghanistan aren't getting hammered by mobile vehicles or heavily fortified platforms, rather the most dangerous weapon system leveraged by the enemy to great effect is manpower without body armor or backpack. The reason that man is lethal against our platforms is because the enemy is able to leverage the environment to exploit the emerging 21st century principles of war on the battlefield better than we currently are.

Attack, Speed, Maneuver, Control, Flexibility, Precision, Surprise, and Communications are the principles of war that are achieving the most successful results on the 21st century battlefield, and I note they are the principles of war being integrated into the emerging AirSea Battle doctrine the Air Force and Navy are working on. Read that Air Force Times article, read this paper (PDF), and observe the concepts advocated while noting who the authors are and where they are serving in the DoD today.

The Littoral Combat Ship news this week being discussed here and elsewhere glanced over a key point. In the 21st century, emerging weapon systems and technologies are not the only payloads for naval ships; manpower has become a critical payload to peacemaking the maritime domain in the 21st century. What was lost in the analysis, including my own, is that the Navy didn't add manpower to the LCS, manpower became the module of the LCS. The distinction is key. Ships that are not flexible enough to separate form and function are becoming relics of the last era of naval warfare, and that idea has not set in among many who are observing the direction of the Navy today - and I think the LCS discussion this week can be examined as evidence of that point.

This year has been remarkably quiet, and as a Naval blogger, somewhat boring to discuss actually. For all the promises by the new administration for an open dialog, the Navy has become a closed book when it comes to public discussion of the ideas being developed. There have been multiple force structures debated, discussed, and wargamed this year as part and separated from the QDR development process, and yet only one force structure and doctrine concept from the Naval community was ever discussed publicly. Influence Squadrons, at its fundamental core, was conceptually the idea of regionally distributing platforms capable of Payload Centric Warfare for cooperative engagement and capacity building purposes during peacetime, and going under and over the sea to penetrate A2AD networks in war.

Another idea that emerged this year that no one has publicly discussed yet, but I believe will get some attention in public when discussed in detail, is the force structure produced this year by the Naval Postgraduate School often called the New Navy Fighting Machine (NNFM). What I like to call Streetfighter Part Deux, Captain Hughes and others at the Naval Post Graduate School have produced an evolution of the Streetfighter concepts first promoted a decade ago. At its core is a Payload Centric Warfare concept that distributes warfighting and peacemaking capabilities into networks of smaller systems to swarm and overwhelm A2AD networks.

The force structure concept that is emerging as one most likely to make it into the QDR is the "boxes" force structure concept. The "boxes" concept emphasizes open architecture combat systems on warfighter centric platforms like CruDes and Subs, flexible payload space on everything else, and emphasizes a distributed, joint operations doctrine. Note again the emphasis of Payload Centric Warfare where "boxes" are filled with common combat systems and open space is utilized for flexibility.

The common theme among these naval force structures discussed during this QDR year is the flexibility towards platform payloads. It is also noteworthy that none of the force structure debates this year ever discussed frigates, primarily because cold war era frigates do not have the flexibility to separate form and function. The view of naval warfare inside the strategic planning and policy bubbles are rapidly evolving, but the LCS announcement this week highlights how the Navy has a long way to go towards building public support to conceptually embrace a broader vision of flexible payloads that, as of today anyway, appears to be viewed with skepticism when packaged in the form of the LCS.