The CSBA Monograph on U.S. Navy Surface Forces

Over the holiday I read Bryan Clark’s study on reinvigorating U.S. Navy’s surface forces’ abilities to perform sea control tasks. His commendable work casts a light on surface Navy issues that generally don’t receive much attention from the think tank community—and certainly not at such high levels of detail and fluency.

Bryan’s core argument is that the surface Navy is disproportionately organized and armed for reactive defense, and that this implicitly contradicts the maxim that the side that effectively employs its offensive weaponry first in naval battle is generally victorious. He also observes that the primary weapons the surface Navy uses for defense are often at a sizable cost-per-engagement disadvantage to the offensive weapons they counter. These considerations lead him to suggest the surface Navy should cede defensive depth against an adversary’s inbound weapons in exchange for a combination of increased offensive armaments capacity and increased inner-layer defensive density. By doing so, he argues, the surface Navy would be better able to disrupt or destroy adversary platforms before the latter could attack effectively, and any weapons the adversary did succeed in launching would have to contend with a deep (and cost-per-engagement advantageous) arsenal of multiple overlapping short/medium-range defensive systems. 

Bryan addresses quite a number of topics including fleet doctrine, top-level requirements for weapons, ideal characteristics for the LCS-derived Small Surface Combatant, and potential uses of U.S. Coast Guard and Military Sealift Command (MSC) ships to shoulder more of the overseas maritime security cooperation task load. Since several of his ideas relate closely to subjects I wrote about last fall, I will focus my commentary accordingly.

Sea Control, Campaign Design, and the Carrier-Surface Combatant Relationship

Bryan asserts that the Navy’s surface combatants must possess some capacity for attaining and then holding sea control (e.g., a temporary local margin of naval superiority) on their own in a notional major conflict because large-deck carriers’ air wings might not be available to contribute. I strongly agree, but my reasoning is different.

Bryan suggests the carriers’ unavailability might result from their being engaged in power projection operations elsewhere in theater. It seems unlikely, though, that conditions could be shaped to allow carrier battleforces to operate deep within a contested zone at a tolerable degree of risk relatively early in a conflict against a strong adversary. This would be especially true if the contested zone’s inner sections were adjacent to the adversary’s own borders. Furthermore, it normally takes a minimum of two carriers on scene to conduct sustained land-attack operations in even a lesser contingency, let alone to conduct operations of any kind inside a contested zone. Given that the presently-programmed 30-year carrier force structure means deployments of a single carrier within a given region will be the norm unless a crisis erupts, and given that the time lag for a second carrier to arrive on the periphery of a contested zone from elsewhere could be measured in weeks, there is a considerable chance that insufficient carriers would be on hand to perform early-phase land-attack strike tasks. For these reasons, the largest share of these early-phase tasks deep inside the contested zone would likely be allocated to missile-armed submarines and land-based long-range aircraft. Not only would these platforms be less vulnerable in such areas to the adversary’s attacks than carriers, but they would also be comparatively more available for this tasking.

Unlike the case with early-phase deep power projection, however, a battleforce containing a single carrier could contribute immensely to protecting situationally prioritized segments of the sea and air lines of communication that are necessary for U.S. military access to the combat theater as well as for embattled allies’ economic sustenance. A single-carrier battleforce operating from the contested zone’s periphery could similarly provide support to operations by Surface Action Groups (SAG) or other friendly forces further forward on a periodic basis. These would arguably be the most important—and in some cases, irreplaceable—roles for carriers during the early phases of a major maritime war.

This is where the doctrinal changes and capability enhancements Bryan recommends come into play. The in-theater carrier shortage means that mission-tailored U.S. Navy SAGs must be able to operate at some distance inside a contested zone for multi-day periods with limited to no external air support at a tolerable degree of risk. These operations might be offensive sweeps to draw out and then destroy adversary maritime forces. They might be reconnaissance missions or raids against adversary forward operating bases or expeditionary lodgments. They might be missions to provide friendly forces on the ‘frontline’ with supporting fires or defensive coverage. They might be convoy escort missions supporting the flow of supplies and reinforcements to these forces, or perhaps the flow of economic and basic humanitarian goods to embattled allied populations. They might even be operations to induce the adversary to react in ways that other friendly forces could then exploit.

The extent to which surface forces could perform any of these tasks at a particular distance inside a contested zone for a particular length of time would be determined by the margin of temporary local superiority they could sustain under such circumstances. It should be clear that the deeper an operating area might lie within the contested zone (and the closer that area was to the adversary’s homeland), the harder it would be for any SAG to persist in operating there. Bryan is thus absolutely correct in that the more offensive and defensive capacity that can be packed into existing surface combatants, the longer on the margins they would be able to operate more or less on their own at some distance inside a contested zone before their ordnance depletion reached the point that their margin of local superiority—and thus staying power—was all but gone. These considerations combined with the availability of carriers and other maritime forces to support SAG operations as deemed necessary would shape the sequence in which individual maritime operations were conducted a U.S. campaign. Precursor or parallel operations by other forces accordingly might be required to pave the way for a SAG’s operation.

This would not change dramatically as reinforcement carriers arrived in theater. Some would likely be tasked with extending greater protection over intra-theater maritime lines of communication. Others might be used to take on some share of Joint power projection tasks as submarines’ and long-range air forces’ standoff-range strike missile inventories became depleted. It should be noted, though, that these power projection operations could not be performed unless the carriers and their surface combatant escorts had already obtained the requisite sea control. As a matter of fact, a carrier battleforce’s tactical actions to seize and retain sea control could be just as consequential in a campaign context as the power projection tasks they might support. For instance, if a carrier battleforce could sustain a certain margin of temporary local superiority when clashing with the adversary’s maritime forces, its ability to inflict outsized damage or losses on the latter while absorbing tolerable damage or losses of its own would help erode the adversary’s probable advantages in the overall theater conventional military balance as well as arrest the adversary’s campaign progress. Likewise, the adversary’s allocation of maritime forces to fight a carrier battleforce (and any friendly forces supporting it) might result in fewer adversary forces available for operations elsewhere in theater during some period; this could be exploited by other friendly forces including independently-operating SAGs. The use of carriers in any of these ways should of course be governed by calculated risk, and precursor/parallel operations by other elements of the Joint force would very likely be necessary or desirable to create particularly advantageous margins of temporary local superiority.

The Airborne Early Warning Caveat

The greatest challenge facing SAGs operating without external air support would be their ability to detect and engage adversary platforms (or inbound threat weapons) at the most tactically advantageous distances. As I’ve previously noted, AEW is crucial to gaining and then holding sea control under intense opposition. Shipboard sensor ranges are limited by their height of eye relative to the earth’s curvature; an inbound air threat flying beneath or beyond this coverage will not be detected in the absence of offboard sensor support. It should also be pointed out that carrier-organic AEW is presently central to maximizing the effective range of the shipboard SM-6 interceptor missile via the Navy Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air (NIFC-CA) concept. While it would be possible for Air Force or allied AEW aircraft to support U.S. Navy SAGs, I am aware of no plans to develop capabilities for integrating either in NIFC-CA. Nor are there any plans I’m aware of to install the large aperture AEW radars necessary for long-range/wide-area surveillance on unmanned aircraft.[i] All of this drastically affects a surface combatant’s ability to engage an adversary aircraft before the latter can launch its own missiles.

SAGs can mitigate this somewhat by positioning their combatants so that the group’s fused sensor picture provides expanded coverage as well as engagement depth. Not all of these combatants need to employ their active sensors; it is perfectly valid for some to only search using passive sensors depending upon the tactical situation. Nevertheless, actively radiating SAG units expose themselves to counterdetection and targeting by adversary platforms operating outside the SAG’s sensor coverage. The same would also be true for the use of a SAG’s helicopters to perform AEW against inbound sea-skimming ASCMs, as the helicopters’ necessary proximity to SAG units to perform this task would cue the adversary’s reconnaissance and possibly targeting efforts. The risk that a SAG’s active sensor usage poses may remain entirely tolerable if the SAG possesses a sizable margin of temporary local superiority against the adversary’s forces. As this margin decreases, though, tactical (and operational) risk increases. Below some threshold margin, it very simply may not be possible for a SAG to operate at acceptable risk in some area for some span of time without carrier/land-based large AEW aircraft support. This further highlights the importance of a campaign’s operational sequence, particularly with respect to the role of precursor/parallel operations in helping a SAG gain and hold sea control.

Engagement Depth, Ordnance Inventories, and Targeting Confidence

Bryan correctly notes that shorter-range defensive weapons tend to be more affordable-per-engagement than longer-range defensive weapons, and that the latter tend to take up more shipboard space than the former. He consequently argues that by concentrating defensive firepower in a single inner layer with a roughly 30 miles radius, each surface combatant not only gains more favorable cost-per-salvo ratios relative to the adversary’s inbound weapons but also gains more opportunities to engage the adversary’s ‘archer’ aircraft with SM-6 before they can fire their ‘arrows.’

The implication here is that surface combatants are most likely to detect inbound Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles (ASCM) at the shipboard radar horizon. This is certainly true for sea-skimming ASCMs to a considerable degree, but not all ASCMs are pure sea-skimmers. For example, some spend a good portion of their flyout at high altitudes, and a few older types perform terminal dives on their targets. Shorter-ranged defensive interceptors can certainly be used against these threats, but it might be desirable to retain the option of situationally employing longer-ranged interceptor missiles (though not necessarily SM-6) against them as well. It should also be noted that an interceptor missile’s ability to intercept any particular inbound threat is often a factor of the ‘engagement geometry.’ Assuming sufficiently timely sensor detection and tracking of a given air threat, an interceptor missile’s effective range against that threat will be closer to its ‘advertised’ maximum range when the threat is headed more-or-less directly towards the interceptor’s firing unit than when the threat is crossing at a tangential distance to the firing unit. If SAG units are intended to mutually support each other within an inner zone defense, this means that the practical separation distance between those units will be less than the ‘advertised’ maximum reach of their shorter-range interceptor missiles; Bryan notes as much in his Footnote #51 (Pg 20). Many perfectly valid SAG tactics allow for minimal to no mutual kinetic defensive support. Greater separation between a SAG’s combatants might be desirable at other times, though, in order to expand the volume covered by the SAG’s sensors or to support concealment tactics. If either of these are the case, and if some degree of mutual kinetic defensive support is desired, then use of a somewhat longer-ranged interceptor becomes necessary. Lastly, it should be noted that if ‘archer’ aircraft could fire their ‘arrows’ from outside SM-6 range (which is well within the realm of the possible), SAG defenses would have to cope with a much larger inbound salvo. The preceding considerations lead me to conclude that Bryan’s call to rely predominantly on a dense inner zone defense is correct, but that some number of relatively affordable medium-range interceptors that can reach beyond 30 miles will still need to be carried in combatants’ vertical launchers for the reasons I’ve outlined.

Not all inner zone defenses need to be kinetic, however. Bryan correctly observes that Electronic Warfare (EW) systems can contribute greatly to defensive effectiveness. He also correctly observes that the short distances and timeframes involved during inner zone defense mean that even the most effective of shipboard EW systems will not allow a surface combatant to refrain from firing interceptor missiles against a given inbound threat. There are also physics-based limitations on the jamming techniques a shipboard EW system can employ. The same physics suggests the value of offboard EW systems, especially in circumstances where their placement can result in inbound threats never detecting or otherwise locking on to defended combatants.[ii]  With adequate separation between offboard EW systems and defended combatants, it becomes theoretically possible to cause a threat ASCM to commit itself early enough towards a harmless direction such that shipboard interceptor missiles can actually be withheld. Perhaps more significantly, the intelligent use of offboard EW systems can contribute enormously to an overall deception and concealment plan that prevents a SAG from being detected or correctly classified by the adversary in the first place. Consequently, I would add ship-launched offboard EW systems to Bryan’s list of future ‘ordnance’ that would be useful for expanding the surface Navy’s sea control capabilities.

All the same, nothing prevents the adversary from employing similar EW methods to defeat the surface Navy’s own offensive weapons. An adversary’s effective use of EW in tandem with other forms of deception could entice surface combatants into wasting their limited longer-range missile inventories against decoys. As I wrote last fall, the Navy faced this exact problem during the Cold War. Thus, from a purely technological perspective (i.e., excluding the non-material solutions I mentioned in a follow-on piece), the use of multi-phenomenology sensors (and often visual-range examination of contacts) is necessary to have high confidence in a long-range targeting picture. While SAG-organic scouts such as manned helicopters or unmanned aircraft can perform this role against distant surface contacts, it is less clear what organic tools a SAG could to perform it against distant air contacts. Shipboard radars could use non-cooperative target recognition techniques to perform some air contact classification, but their doing so could be subject to EW countermeasures by the adversary. Bryan’s call for improved inner layer defensive density resultantly gains additional importance, as it would provide a SAG’s only other recourse in the event an adversary’s deceptions defeat a SAG’s offensive use of ASCMs or SM-6.

In turn, this reemphasizes my earlier point that the location and length of a SAG operation within a contested zone must be predicated on its ability to sustain its margin of local temporary superiority above some threshold. If it cannot do so on its own, and if the operation in question cannot be delayed until circumstances are more favorable, then it will either need external air support at some stage (such as for detection and outer-layer visual-range identification of air contacts) or the theater commander will have to accept the elevated risks.

Other Thoughts

• One of Bryan’s most important observations was in his Footnote #39 (pg 14). In describing an adversary’s reliance on wide-area surveillance and data relay systems to cue attacks by Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles (ASBM), he suggests that “surface combatants would be more effective in targeting these enablers, rather than planning to attack mobile ASBM launchers themselves from 800 - 1,000 nm away.” This is absolutely correct. What’s more, these surveillance/reconnaissance 'systems of systems' are likely to be used to cue anti-ship attacks by other platforms such as submarines and land-based aircraft. Degrading or neutralizing these constituent sensor and communication systems—however locally or temporarily—using deception, concealment, or (as feasible) physical attack will be a critical prerequisite for sea control within a contested zone. Doing so essentially represents a 'mission-kill' against the adversary's ability to perform over-the-horizon targeting. At the campaign-level, these anti-scouting efforts will be central to rolling back the adversary’s offensive progress and eroding his military potential in theater. Surface forces will have major roles to play in this fight, but it will often require contributions from other Joint combined arms to be successful. 
• I agree with Bryan’s three desired design attributes for future shipboard missile development: offensive capability, multi-mission usability, and smaller physical size. I would also add wartime producibility to Bryan’s list. 
• I strongly support the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) concept for all the reasons Bryan articulates. Nevertheless, I believe more analytical attention needs to be paid to how it will be provided with high-confidence targeting cues at distances beyond the range of SAG-embarked aircraft or in hotly opposed areas where the MQ-4C Triton or P-8 Orion might not be risked. The Navy’s Outlaw Shark over-the-horizon targeting experiments of the late 1970s highlighted the extreme difficulties this situation presents, especially if missile cueing depends upon the adversary’s Emissions Control indiscipline.[iii] Visual-range confirmation of a target’s classification may be necessary for employing LRASM with high confidence. This may be a potential major role for the proposed Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) system. 
• Aircraft embarked in combatants will remain the most lethal means for time-sensitive attacks against a nearby adversary submarine in the absence of land-based anti-submarine aircraft support, but as Bryan observes there is a need to buy some time for the embarked aircraft to fly out to the threat. The existing Vertically-Launched Anti-Submarine Rocket (VLA) does not have sufficient range to disrupt attacks by adversary submarines that are solely using their organic sensors to target the protagonist’s battleforce. I therefore strongly agree with Bryan’s recommendation for a new, longer-ranged quick-reaction anti-submarine weapon.
• Bryan is entirely correct that the Navy’s programmed shortfall of Small Surface Combatants (SSC) capable of performing wartime convoy and combat logistics ship escort duties means these tasks would fall on the AEGIS cruiser and destroyer force, which itself would be heavily in demand during a conflict. He is also correct that the SSC shortfall in general is pulling cruisers and destroyers into performing peacetime security cooperation tasks that detract from their combat readiness. I agree with his recommendation that the sea services should find ways to use U.S. Coast Guard and MSC ships to take on some share of peacetime as well as wartime SSC missions. In particular, I think it would be worth examining whether the Coast Guard’s High Endurance Cutters could be outfitted and their crews regularly trained to take on some share of wartime escort duties in low to moderate threat environments (e.g. outside or on the periphery of a contested zone). With respect to MSC ships, though, I would note that their hypothetical combat activities may be constrained by international legal considerations. These need to be fully investigated when developing concepts for how they might be used to take on SSC-type tasks.
• The Navy’s proposed SSC solution is to modify the two existing LCS variants’ designs so that the FY19 and follow ships receive permanently-installed anti-submarine and long-range anti-ship capabilities as well as improved EW capabilities. Bryan reasonably recommended that they should also receive a medium-range air defense interceptor such as the Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM) that would allow them to protect escorted units, but this is not part of the proposed program of record. As a result, wartime convoys approaching a combat zone in which there is a considerable air (or submarine-launched ASCM) threat will likely need to be augmented by AEGIS combatants or external tactical air support. This will absolutely be the case if a convoy must traverse part of a contested zone. Convoy demands are likely to be high in a war against a great power adversary, and as such the availability of AEGIS combatants for offensive SAG operations may be limited by the demands on them for convoy protection.

Tomorrow, I will examine the surface Navy’s leadership’s article on SAG concepts in the January Proceedings.

--Updated 8:43PM 1/14/15 to clarify why longer-ranged interceptors might be needed by a SAG if the separation between its units is increased, and to delete a typo in the beginning of the 'Other Thoughts' subsection--

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the official positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, and to the author’s knowledge do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency.

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[i] The X-band AN/ZPY-3 radar on the MQ-4C Triton is a surface surveillance and ship classification sensor. It is not suited for long-range AEW.

[ii] See 1. Dave Adamy. “EW Against Modern Radars-Part 2: Radar Jamming Techniques.” Journal of

Electronic Defense 33, No. 1 (January 2010): 44-46; 2. Thomas W. Kimbrell. “Electronic Warfare in Ship Defense.” Technical Digest, Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, (September 2004): 85-86; 3. Craig Payne. Principles of Naval Weapon Systems. (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2006), 91-92.

[iii] See Norman Friedman. Network-Centric Warfare: How Navies Learned to Fight Smarter Through Three World Wars. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009), 206-210.

When matching the strategic objective of preventing war to resources, can the US Navy prevent war in the 21st century, and if so, how?

Today's guest is Jan Van Tol, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower states the Navy believes that preventing wars is as important as winning wars. When matching the strategic objective of preventing war to resources, can the US Navy prevent war in the 21st century, and if so, how?

America’s Navy: A Global Force for Good
                        Contemporary Navy recruiting slogan   

“Sic vis pacem, para bellum.”
                  Publius Flavius Vegetius

In thinking about the Cooperative Strategy’s premise that “preventing wars is as important as winning wars,” one is reminded of a certain classic movie set at a fictional college whose proud motto was “Knowledge is Good.” That is, it is a fine sentiment, but what practical guidance does it provide the Navy?

Accepting the premise en arguendo for the moment, the meanings of two key words must be unpacked. For the purposes of the Cooperative Strategy (CS21), what does “war” mean? What does “preventing” entail? Only with some reasonable working definition of those terms in the CS21 context is it possible even to consider whether the US Navy could accomplish the stated objective of “preventing war,” and what resources it might require to do so. 

Protecting the Global System versus Winning in Wartime

CS21 describes a litany of “Challenges of a New Era.” It suggests the diverse consequences of globalization, increased demand and competition for resources, widespread access to information, and growing proliferation of technologies with military applications to an ever broader range of state and non-state actors are all potential sources of future conflict. Further, “weak or corrupt governments, growing dissatisfaction among the disenfranchised, religious extremism, ethnic nationalism, and changing demographics exacerbate tensions and are contributors to conflict,” and heighten the appeal of extremist ideologies. Climate change may further amplify human misery and lead to greater social instability, large-scale involuntary migrations, and regional crises. These and other threats such as piracy, terrorism, trafficking in people, drugs and weapons, and other forms of criminality all pose threats to the “peaceful global system comprised of networks of trade, finance, information, law, people and governance.”

The maritime domain is particularly important “because [it] … supports 90% of the world’s trade, it carries the lifeblood of a global system that links every country on earth.” Thus “where conflict threatens the global system and our national interest, maritime forces must be ready to respond along with other elements of national and multi-national power,” as well as the capabilities of international powers. Since no single nation has the resources needed to provide safety and security throughout the entire maritime domain, a cooperative approach to maritime security is required. This is turn puts a premium on ongoing peacetime engagement with various partners, e.g., via Global Maritime Partnerships, to promote the rule of law, and prevent or contain local disruptions (including conflicts) before they impact the global system. This is reflected in CS21’s elevation of two new “core capabilities,” maritime security and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR), to the same level as the traditional naval missions.

CS21 acknowledges the continuing important roles of maritime forces in defending the homeland, deterring major power war, and defeating enemies in war (as part of the joint force). However, it explicitly states there is tension between the requirements for “continued peacetime engagement” (or global system maintenance, if you will) on the one hand and maintaining the capabilities and proficiency in critical skills needed to fight and win in combat on the other. Thus by implication, these are distinctly different, hence the proposition that preventing wars is as important as winning wars [emphasis in the CS21 document].  By logical extension, this implies that meeting the requirements for the former is as important as meeting those for the latter.

CS21 offers an extraordinarily expansive view of the sources of violence and conflict that can threaten the global system, and which thus must be dealt with before they can result in destabilization of that system. It is especially concerned about regional conflict since that “has ramifications far beyond the area of conflict,” including humanitarian crises, violence spreading across borders, pandemics, and the interruption of trade in vital resources. Though CS21 acknowledges “we cannot be everywhere, and we cannot act to mitigate all regional conflict,” it nonetheless offers an essentially unbounded vision of what factors and circumstances may or should draw US military involvement and/or intervention, with multi-national assistance where possible, without it if necessary. In essence, because the security, prosperity, and vital interests of the United States are now inextricably coupled to those of other nations and the global system, it asserts that the United States has a general duty to intervene to prevent or contain wars, principally by a priori addressing the diverse underlying factors that may lead to conflict, because any significant disruption to the global system might ultimately pose a threat to US security.

Which of these prevents war?

It’s Magnificent but It isn’t (really about) War

The CS21 vision is thus based on maximalist notions of what may lead to war and accordingly what its prevention will entail in the future. It is a formula for creating virtually unlimited demand for actions and activities to ameliorate the large set of disparate factors that ostensibly have the potential to lead to conflicts around the globe. Moreover, left unconstrained, the set of possible actions likely will also grow. Consider the recent efforts to invoke a new “responsibility to protect” in the case of regimes savagely mistreating their populations (e.g., Libya, Syria); recurrent calls for humanitarian intervention in the cause du jour; proactive humanitarian assistance such as provision of medical services overseas by amphibious forces; the employment of a CVN in fisheries patrol in Oceania. Worthy as such efforts may be, the causality with regard to wars “prevented” (as opposed to alleviating human suffering) seems highly tenuous at best. Negative proofs are always difficult.

Further, such activities conducted on the scale that CS21 implies will be necessary in the future security environment must bring very substantial resource demands with them. Those might be sustainable in times of budgetary plenty, but in an austere budgetary environment represent an increasingly zero-sum game vis-à-vis the resources required for maintaining the warfighting superiority if not dominance required against adversaries with genuine ability to harm the United States and its national interests.  

Problems with the CS21 Construct

The central tension within CS21 thus lies with its imperative to use seapower in conjunction with the joint force and perhaps other agencies of government to prevent any significant disruptions of the global system (of which those caused by wars may be the worst) versus the traditional requirements to deter and if necessary win wars directly involving the United States and its allies should they occur. That tension is unnecessarily and unreasonably intensified by CS21’s exhaustive list of factors that the United States and the Navy should act to ameliorate in order to prevent conflicts from breaking out.

To note a few problems with this expansive view:

• Many of the threats that may cause disruptions of some kind to the global system do not involve war or plausibly lead to war at all. For example, most maritime security tasks deal with criminality, e.g., piracy, smuggling or trafficking, terrorism at or from the sea, thus are more the province of coast guards in nature. However, the US Coast Guard is comparatively small, so overseas tasking of this kind has primarily fallen to the Navy, with the (in some eyes) perverse result that expensive, sophisticated warships are all too often employed on such low-end tasks at the cost of wear and tear and their availability for other tasking.
• Non-emergency humanitarian assistance efforts, while useful for the sake of public diplomacy, are necessarily far too small in scale to ameliorate internal sources of turmoil such as corruption, mass poverty and underdevelopment serious enough to threaten governments.
• Humanitarian interventions, particularly those under the amorphous “responsibility to protect” rubric, more often than not have costly unintended consequences. Similarly, “peace enforcement” actions have a notable lack of success historically. Recent experience suggests the continuing wisdom of John Quincy Adams’ assertion that “America is not in search of monsters to destroy.”   
• Outside involvement in various kinds of intractable conflicts, such as insurgencies or civil wars, generally has been costly and not accompanied by success.
• From a purely Navy perspective, many of the CS21-cited factors contributing to potential systemic disruption or conflict are beyond Navy’s ability to affect materially in any case, simply because they occur on land beyond the reach of maritime forces. While some of these could eventually lead to conflicts that entail employment of naval forces in support of other elements of the joint force or combined forces, the role of seapower in preventing them per se is nugatory.

The danger with falling into the mindset of putting prevention of these kinds of conflicts or potential disruptions to the global system on a par with maintaining the unambiguous ability to deter or prevail in war against genuinely dangerous enemies is not merely the diversion of the substantial scarce resources that may be entailed, but the fact that it “absorbs strategic bandwidth”, i.e., distracts the attention of an organization and its top leadership from genuine potential or actual national security threats, which will come primarily from high-end adversaries. Some might argue that exactly this has occurred over the last decade with respect to the interminable deep US involvement in the CENTCOM AOR. Importantly, it also tends to permeate (and potentially undermine) the ethos of a warfighting organization.

Which of these prevents war?

“Salvation Navy” or “Warfighting First”?

Being a “Global Force for Good” is no doubt a positive and useful thing. The US Navy has long done much “good” on a large scale in the CS-21 “prevent war” sense, but it has done so en passant, and will continue to do so on that basis. However, pace the sainted Samuel Huntington, “a military service does not exist to perform these functions; rather it performs these functions because it has already been called into existence to meet some threat.”

And, indeed, the Navy and its sister services have done by far their greatest good for America (and the global system) by helping to destroy a succession of “evil empires” and regimes. Sometimes this had to be accomplished through major protracted wars, sometimes happily without requiring direct warfare against a major antagonist. But in each case the paramount factor in achieving the end result was the demonstrable US ability to prevail in war if it came to that. 

Preventing wars is of course to be preferred to actually waging wars, but nothing is more important than the winning of wars, and being suitably prepared to do so. In the realm of peace or war, few axioms or adages have stood the test of time as well as the Vegetius’ ancient formulation, “if you want peace, prepare for war.” This is nothing other than classic deterrence of significant competitors and adversaries. The paradox of deterrence remains as ever that as long as any serious potential or actual enemy has deep reason to doubt it will profit by initiating a conflict with the United States and its allies, that war de facto will have been “prevented.”

The US Navy cannot affect or attenuate most sources of strife and conflict around the globe, and it would be hubristic to believe that it can. It can, however, play a major role in helping to prevent (deter) the outbreak of the most dangerous kind of wars, those involving aggression by major adversaries, whether directly against the United States or its forces or against genuine US allies and selected other security partners, by strongly reinforcing perceptions on their part that the Navy and the rest of the joint force exist first and foremost to fight and win in war. This is the critical element in preventing war. Navy resources not dedicated to that purpose are resources misallocated.

That CNO Greenert has made “Warfighting First” a central tenet for the fleet is refreshing and salutary - and long overdue for a Navy that still remains largely a peacetime organization in its collective mentality.

AirSea Battle - A Strategy of Tactics?

AirSea Battle is gaining public notoriety, even as an official description is yet to exist. AirSea Battle is now part of general answers and specific questions in Congressional hearings suggesting there is some anticipation on Capitol Hill what exactly this widely touted but never officially discussed series of ideas might be.

The focus of AirSea Battle appears to be to counter the growing challenges to US military power projection in the western Pacific and Persian Gulf, although in public use AirSea Battle is now used almost exclusively in the context of China.

CSBA described AirSea Battle as A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept. The use of the term "operational" implied AirSea Battle is intended to be developed as a battle doctrine for air and sea forces. Milan Vego recently took this one step further in Proceedings and recommended AirSea Battle be developed as one of several operational concepts for littoral warfare, although I think there is room to develop AirSea Battle doctrine for joint operations in several different geographic conditions.

All we really know about AirSea Battle is that we don't know a lot more about it than we do know, so every time someone writes about AirSea Battle from a position of some authority as to what AirSea Battle actually is - it's worth noting. In the latest example, we learn a lot.

A new Armed Forces Journal article by J. Noel Williams titled Air-Sea Battle is perhaps the most important contribution to the AirSea Battle discussion to date, because it starts a valid public discussion with criticisms of AirSea Battle - criticisms that cannot be ignored or dismissed. The article should be read in total - it's worth it. Because the article is very long difficult to cover in a single blogpost, I'm going to focus on only a few specific aspects of the article that stick out to me; a few of the criticisms and the implied competing doctrines.

Criticisms of AirSea Battle

This paragraph contains a lot of room for more discussion. The author's argument is that AirSea Battle doctrine appears to be a symmetrical approach to Chinese military capabilities. It should be noted that AirSea Battle doctrine is specifically being developed as an asymmetrical approach to Chinese area and access denial capabilities.

AirLand Battle posited an asymmetric approach in relation to the Soviet Union. AirLand would attack all echelons of the Soviet force with aviation and long-range fires because NATO was badly outnumbered on the ground. In contrast, ASB is symmetrical, pitting U.S. precision strike against Chinese precision strike. Since ASB is by definition an away game, how can we build sufficient expeditionary naval and air forces to counter Chinese forces that possess a home-court advantage? Is it prudent to expect the weapon magazines of an entire industrial nation to be smaller than those of our Navy and Air Force deployed more than 3,000 miles from home? What happens when the vertical launch systems of our ships and the bomb bays of our aircraft are empty?

Logistics is going to be a challenge in any military campaign where an enemy has the capacity to strike at our lines-of-communication, so in that sense the logistics points are not really a compelling argument for me against AirSea Battle. Logistics is a challenge in any military endeavor that can be applied to any doctrine. It is fair to note logistics is a huge challenge for the US today in Afghanistan, and hardly a major challenge specific to any single theater of war. I do like the last question though, because it is a question Congress needs to be asking all the time as budget pressures force difficult choices on Navy force structure.

The bigger question here is whether AirSea Battle doctrine represents a symmetrical apprach of "pitting U.S. precision strike against Chinese precision strike." I think the authors statement represents a fair question, but I am hesitant to agree with the author that this conclusion is accurate. Any battle doctrine between the US Air Force and US Navy should build towards a precision fires regime, so I am unclear as to why that is implied a problem with AirSea Battle. Furthermore, because AirSea Battle is supposed to be a battle doctrine - a joint US Navy and USAF operational concept - the authors strategic level argument fails because it compares tactical methods as symmetrical comparisons. Just because Taliban forces and US Army forces in Afghanistan might both employ accurate, precision fires, that doesn't mean both sides are engaged in symmetrical warfare on the battlefield. How forces are used on a battlefield is often much more important to measuring the symmetrical or asymmetrical nature of combat than the weapons forces utilize on a battlefield, and I have yet to see much discussed on that aspect of AirSea Battle doctrine development.

A military confrontation with China would be the biggest national security challenge since World War II, yet ASB advocates suggest it can be handled by just two of the four services. To the outside observer, this is astonishing; to the insider skeptic, it is absurd. Many ASB advocates I have talked with or have heard speak on the subject follow the logic that we will never conduct a land war in China, therefore long-range precision strike is the only practical alternative. What is missed in this line of thinking is that there are other, more fundamental choices that also don’t require a land war in China. It would appear there is an unstated assumption by many that conflict with China must include a race across the Pacific to defend Taiwan; many war games over the past decades have solidified this point of view. Unfortunately, this assumption is outdated. Chinese capabilities now, but especially 10 years from now, simply preclude a rush to Taiwan and would require a very deliberate campaign similar to that described in the aforementioned CSBA report to gain access. Without ground forces and with limited magazine capacities, what happens once we get there? What now, lieutenant?

I have heard everything mentioned in that paragraph discussed myself in person by those who are developing AirSea Battle doctrine, and I myself found what was said by AirSea advocates both "astonishing" and "absurd." The parochial, shortsighted nature of AirSea Battle that fails to include ground forces as a capability in major war is so thoroughly shortsighted that even as a hard Navy partisan I have a hard time believing AirSea Battle doctrine development has as much support as it does. The parochial nature of the AirSea Battle discussion informs me, an observer, that AirSea Battle is nothing more than an idea to advance a political agenda for the Navy and Air Force, and by political I am speaking specifically about justification of budgetary investments.

Competing Doctrines

Army Col. Gian Gentile, writing in Infinity Journal, expresses similar concerns about the impact of optimizing the Defense Department for counterinsurgency operations — in other words, optimizing for the opposite end of the spectrum recommended by ASB. The logic of the criticism is the same, nonetheless, since optimizing forces for an uncertain future is a prescription for getting it badly wrong. Gentile argues that counterinsurgency has become a “strategy of tactics.” He explains that when nations “allow the actual doing of war — its tactics — to bury strategy or blinker strategic thinking,” it leads to disaster, such as in Nazi Germany, where the German Army’s tactical excellence in Blitzkrieg could not rescue the regime from its fundamentally flawed strategy.

It is possible that, like Blitzkrieg, the U.S. could prevail in the tactics and operational art of ASB and still suffer strategic defeat.

So what’s the rub specifically? ASB initially was conceived as a way to increase interoperability between the Air Force and Navy through increased training and improved technical interoperability. Given the overlaps in their strike capabilities, especially in aircraft, it makes perfect sense for the two most technical services to work closely to ensure interoperability. But like its progenitor, AirLand Battle, ASB has progressed to an operational concept to address a specific military problem. While AirLand Battle was conceived to counter the Soviet Union, Air-Sea Battle is billed as the answer to growing anti-access/area-denial capabilities generically, but as everyone knows, specifically China.

CSBA described AirSea Battle as "A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept," so I am unclear how ASB progressed into an operational concept when ASB was actually introduced as an operational concept. Operational concepts are what drive doctrinal development, so if a service was going to develop battle doctrine the logical starting place would be to develop an operational concept. Am I missing something here?

I agree with Col. Gian Gentile that counterinsurgency has become a "strategy of tactics," kind of. It is more accurate to say that the US military developed a population centric operational concept intended to address a specific battlefield problem in Iraq, and the operational concept drove development of counterinsurgency doctrine. That operational concept and subsequent doctrine became tactics employed by troops on the battlefield that through trial and error, led to a wealth of lessons learned on the battlefield and ultimately, a political victory by means of military power that our national leaders could live with.

What followed the successful execution of a population centric operational concept, often generically described as "COIN" although it is much more than just counterinsurgency, was an intellectual Enterprise consisting of a politically diverse group military and policy intellectuals, and it was that intellectual Enterprise (or industry) - through open source intellectual rigor and debate - that began a process of broadly articulating strategic and policy ideas and recommendations based on the experiences and lessons learned from the successfully employed battlefield tactics.

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the author frames AirSea Battle as akin to being a competing doctrine to COIN, pitting a high end warfare AirSea Battle doctrine represented by the US Air Force/US Navy against a small wars COIN doctrine represented by the US Army/US Marine Corps. This competition is political, which is another way of saying it is almost entirely intended to influence budget decisions. I tend to think that would explain why US Army leaders see a future where intervention is required in small states that are more likely to be unstable as a result of the rise of regional powers; and why US Navy leaders see a future where rising regional powers leads to instability throughout the world suggesting the focus should be on deterring hostilities and maintaining escalation control between major powers.

There is not a national security policy that settles this debate, or said another way, the National Security Strategy of the United States (PDF) is so broad, generic, and ultimately useless that almost any version of the future use of military forces is accurate, and the the DoD can do just about everything and anything and meet the strategic guidance.

Which leads me back to reminding folks that since we enacted Goldwater-Nichols, the military services don't actually do strategy. The military services are responsible for the development of tactics and doctrines for forces that get pushed up to the strategic level - which is the COCOMs, who develop and execute strategies from the political policies of US civilian leaders. Because the military services are not effectively engaged in strategic development as a result of Goldwater-Nichols, and all they really develop themselves anymore is doctrine and tactics, the services attempt to leverage the doctrines they develop to influence politically up to strategy and policy. The services manage budget and tactics/doctrine, so for them it is only logical to match budget to doctrine/tactics, not budget to strategy/policy.

COIN and now AirSea Battle are representative of how doctrine becomes advocated in political form for purposes of justifying the budgets of the services. Goldwater-Nichols has built a wall that separates strategy (COCOMs) and budget (Services), and the results are that 25 years later the nation has yet to develop a coherent national security policy or strategy that meets the challenges of the 21st century.

Budgets controlled by the services get aligned with doctrine/tactics resulting in the US military being remarkably brilliant tactically but unquestionably adrift strategically. My concern is, and I think the article by J. Noel Williams suggests, that while AirSea Battle may be a smart development for the US Air Force and US Navy towards a joint battle doctrine; AirSea Battle will also be the next military operational concept forwarded as a political idea that acts as a substitute for the absence of a coherent 21st century national security policy.

You know that strategic process Secretary Panetta discusses that will guide budget decisions? We are going to look globally incompetent if that "strategy" reads like it was informed by a doctrine rather than a policy.

Can We Retire A2AD?

Since Dr. Krepinevich and Bob Work coined the phrase back in 2003 or thereabouts, a term of art largely describing an adversary's ability to contest our freedom of maneuver has gained relevance. "Anti-Access/Area Denial" (or A2AD) has become one of those phrases that those in the know love to use, but which upon closer inspection, seem less meaningful.

Here's one way Dr.K and Mr. Work distinguish A2 from AD "If anti-access (A2) strategies aim to prevent US forces entry into a theater of operations, then area-denial (AD) operations aim to prevent their freedom of action in the more narrow confines of the area under an enemy’s direct control." For seven years now I have struggled to understand why the distinction is important, and I continue to come up empty on this one. If the primary distinction is one of where (geographically) the adversary's actions are directed, it seems to me to be insufficient rationale to make the distinction. As an example--an aircraft carrier targeted by an anti-ship ballistic missile is subject to an "anti-access" challenge. An LHD offloading LCAC's on the horizon attacked with G-RAMM is subject to an "area denial"challenge. Do we need two terms for this?

I'd advocate that we settle on one term or the other.

Bryan McGrath