Offensive ASuW and The Rules of the Game

The Surface Navy Association held its annual gathering last week, and some of the biggest news to come out of it thus far has been a focus on offensive ASuW, aided in no small part by the speeches of ADM Samuel Locklear (PACOM), VADM Tom Copeman (SURFOR) and RADM Tom Rowden (N96).  PACOM's quote "I’ve never wanted to enter any tactical scenario where all I had is a defensive capability. It’s a losing proposition...you will defend yourself until you’re dead" certainly put a smile on my face.  The surface navy appears to be all over this one, with a number of important options to explore from lasers to railguns to missiles.  I like where this is headed.

But there is more to this than hardware, and I have been thinking about it quite a bit after finishing Andrew Gordon's magisterial "The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command" over the holidays.  The book is actually two books--the first, in which Gordon traces the development of the Royal Navy from Trafalgar to the start of WWI, and the second, which is an exhaustive overview of the Battle of Jutland.  My interest is in the first part.

In it, Gordon traces the evolution of the Royal Navy from its zenith at Trafalgar, to a more hidebound, administrative, and ineffective Navy at the start of the First World War.  The key variable of individual initiative within the ranks of commanding officers is studied closely, with Gordon finding that over time, it came to be somewhat less valued.  It is cruel of me to reduce this masterpiece to this paragraph, but this is a blog and I want to be concise. 

Gordon's thesis is that the poor performance of the RN at Jutland can be directly traced to this century-long evolution (or devolution, if you will).  The "peacetime" RN lost some of its edge, and it showed when it had the chance to crush the High Seas Fleet, and couldn't. 

I've begun to wonder whether or not our own Navy has similarly evolved (devolved) over time, perhaps since WWII but certainly since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I don't want to go too far with the historical comparison, but I will use Offensive ASuW as an explanatory point.  During the 21 years I served on active duty, I often underwent numerous "Harpoon Tactical Qualifications" or some other similar assessment of my ship's ability to proficiently wield the Harpoon Weapon System.  As an Operations/Combat Systems type, this was one of our big inspections, one of the things you practiced over and over and over again for.  Yet no matter how many times I submitted to and passed these inspections, one thought was never far from my mind--and that was "God I hope my Captain doesn't employ this weapon the way they are training us to do it." 

You see, the heavy influence of the PEACETIME NAVY was at work.  We overanalyzed, over-plotted, over-targeted and over-thought every single engagement, driven in no small measure by the fear of hitting "white shipping", or the clueless merchant who meanders into a hot war zone during the scenario.  Never mind that the flight path of the missile avoided the merchant by hundreds of yards.  Never mind that its seeker head wasn't active when it CPA'd the merchant.  Never mind that the height of the missile at that part of its flight path would have flown over most of the merchants in the world at that time.  Never mind that merchants don't have AAW radars and missiles.

No, invariably we would hold off on the shot to allow for "adequate" separation, or as some unfortunate watch teams found, take the shot and then suffer the ignominy of some OS Chief who couldn't sit watch supervisor on your watch team tell you that you had failed to account for white shipping. 

I came to despise the Harpoon weapon system, not for any reason except the ridiculous pain it caused me as a leader in preparing for the elaborate kabuki that was a Harpoon Cert.  Some of us would whisper..."if we were really at war....then...." and discuss how we might ACTUALLY want to employ the weapon.

By the time I had the ability to make a real difference--command--the Navy had ceased to put Harpoon on its new construction ships and I commanded one of those Harpoonless ships.  We haven't built a warship with the organic ability to disable another surface vessel over the horizon since the year 2000.

So now the community is getting justifiably concerned, and the wheels are turning to return a surface to surface over the horizon weapon to the surface fleet.  I am pleased.  I am also pleased at the words used by both VADM Copeman and RADM Rowden at SNA pointing to the requirement to embrace warfighting--basic blocking and tackling again. 

It sounds as if we may not need our "Jutland" to shake us out of the peacetime Navy mindset, or at least a mindset in which we concentrated on other aspects of the warfight and allowed our Sea Control skills to dull a bit.

Whatever direction the Navy ultimately takes in re-equipping its surface combatants for the war at sea, one thing is clear to me.  We must from the get-go, plan and train to employ the weapon the way we would in war, a war in which we might once again be challenged at sea.   We must not train out the aggressiveness that we seem to want now to reinsert.  The temptation to "overthink" these new capabilities will be HUGE, as they will likely fly far greater ranges than the Harpoon did.  So be it.  We should not waste weapons indiscriminately, but we must ensure that the technologies we acquire promote the greatest forward lean possible in taking the offensive.

These are the rules of the game. 

Bryan McGrath