Question of the Week February 27 - March 3, 2024

Each week Information Dissemination will present a Question of the Week for professional consideration and discussion. The question will remain at the top of the blog from Monday at 12:00am until Friday 5:00pm. Please scroll down for new contributions. This weeks question:

How should reduced manning concepts on ships and the move to unmanned aviation platforms impact graduating classes of USNA that currently graduate 1,200 students to fill pilot/NFO billets that will be directly impacted by reduced manning concepts being deployed to the fleet?

Potential Missions for Future PLA Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

I recently came across a 2013 Project 2049 Institute monograph detailing PLA efforts to research and develop UAV technologies. Ian Easton’s and Russell Hsiao’s report pieces together the PLA organizations, academic institutions, and industrial activities involved in Chinese UAV work; this is no small open source achievement. More importantly, though, it taps Chinese-language sources to outline concepts from each of the PLA’s services regarding potential future uses for UAVs. Many of these concepts unsurprisingly mirror a number of those under consideration by the U.S. armed services:

• Long-range autonomous strike
• “Wingman” duties for manned aircraft
• Localized communications relay
• Anti-ship scouting and targeting
• Ground combat scouting and targeting
• Wide-area surveillance

They make an additional key observation regarding the possibility that expanded PLA UAV capabilities might incentivize increased Chinese brinksmanship, and possibly the use of force, in a crisis:

“There could be a sense that because human pilot lives are not at stake, operators can push farther than they otherwise might. It is also not clear how nations would react to isolated UAV attacks in times of crisis, especially if these were blamed on mechanical or technical failure, or even on cyber hackers. In the future, PRC decision-makers might feel compelled to order “plausibly deniable” UAV attacks as a means of sending a political signal only to inadvertently wind up escalating tensions.” (Pg 13)

This dovetails closely to some of my own observations on unmanned systems and escalation management. The main difference is that whereas I proposed that an opponent’s unmanned scouts should be considered fair game for attacks during a crisis depending upon the circumstances at hand, it is entirely possible that an opponent might go further and use its unmanned vehicles to conduct limited attacks on traditional targets for coercive effect. The authors don’t argue that the PLA is considering use of UAVs for this kind of purpose, but they are correct that the PLA or any other UAV-operating military might.  The implications for crisis management deserve systematic examination through war-gaming.

Some of their most interesting but in no way surprising observations concern Chinese writings regarding the potential uses of UAVs to support anti-ship attacks. One such use proposed in the source writings is for UAVs to simulate inbound raiders, with the intent being to lure an opponent’s screening aircraft and surface combatants into wasting long-range anti-air missiles against these decoys. Other UAVs might perform electronic attacks against radars and communications systems. All this represents a longstanding and well-understood set of tactics. The requisite technical, tactical, and doctrinal countermeasures are similarly well-understood: multi-phenomenology outer-layer sensors that can classify contacts with high confidence, robust combat training to psychologically condition crews for the possibility of hostile deception, deep defensive ordnance inventories, and embracing tactical flexibility/seizing the tactical initiative. The only question is the defender’s will to invest in these kinds of countermeasures—both materially and culturally.

Easton and Hsiao also note that Chinese writers have proposed that some UAVs might perform direct ‘suicidal’ attacks against radars or warships (and in doing so fully blur the line between UAV and cruise missile). The Chinese sources additionally suggest that UAVs could replace manned aircraft as anti-ship missile-armed raiders, though I would argue this presumes the requisite artificial intelligence technologies for conducting attacks against ‘uncooperative’ targets in an ambiguous and dynamic tactical environment reach maturity.

Lastly, Easton and Hsiao’s sources suggest UAVs could serve as communications relay nodes that support anti-ship attacker—and perhaps in-flight missiles as well. For example, a scout UAV could conceivably provide targeting-quality cues to an over-the-horizon “shooter” via a relay UAV, and then provide periodic targeting data updates to the in-flight missiles thereafter. Or the relay UAV might enable direct communications between “shooters” within a given area. It might even enable direct coordination between in-flight missiles approaching on different axes. The use of highly-directional line-of-sight communications pathways or low probability of intercept transmission techniques would make this a particularly vexing threat. Clearly, naval battleforces will need means of detecting and classifying relay UAVs (not to mention scout UAVs) lurking in their vicinity.  

Easton and Hsiao observe that even though the sources they reviewed for their monograph wrote relatively little about using UAVs in the aforementioned ways for land-attack or ground warfare missions, there are no fundamental factors that prevent them from being extensible beyond the anti-ship mission. They’re absolutely correct on that point, and that’s something that all the U.S. armed services should be thinking about for the future.

--Updated 7/16/15 10:54PM EDT to fix first link in post--

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.

The Coming (Invisible) War of the UUVs?

In my post earlier this week, I talked about how the neutralization or destruction of unmanned scouts during crises might not be terribly escalatory.

Following that post, a colleague pointed out to me some important and subtle differences between how anti-scouting unfolds at and above the surface versus how it unfolds underwater. The beauty of undersea operations is, of course, that their effects are almost always plausibly deniable. This is the case today with submarines, and is sure to be the case with underwater unmanned vehicles.

Nevertheless, while a submarine that fails to come home cannot be covered up, the same will not be true with respect to their future unmanned brethren. Indeed, the fact that unmanned underwater operations will generally not be publicly disclosed means that even if a country employing these vehicles realizes that one or more were lost due to hostile action during a crisis, it is extremely unlikely that its leaders would be willing to escalate outside the unmanned underwater realm. Nor would it be easy for the victim to make a strong (and publicly-releasable) case attributing the loss of an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) to a hostile act by a specific actor.

Much like history’s many invisible peacetime ‘wars’ between countries’ intelligence agencies, it seems quite likely that there will be an continuous invisible peacetime conflict in which countries boldly employ UUVs within their opponents’ territorial seas. As detailed in works such as Blind Man’s Bluff, we saw a preview of this to some extent with respect to how special-purpose submarines were used during the Cold War. UUVs will only increase these kinds of operations’ breadth, audacity, and maybe even frequency. An even greater change will be the introduction of parallel efforts to neutralize, capture, or destroy opponents’ UUVs that enter one’s own seas. UUV proliferation might lead to the creation of ‘undersea defense identification zones’ and surveillance sensor networks that support them, with countries publicly asserting the right to interdict others’ UUVs that enter these zones. Ironically, the very creation of these networks will only encourage countries to use UUVs to map, probe, closely inspect, and even meddle with the networks’ sensor arrays and communications paths during peacetime.

All the same, countries could enforce—or trespass within—these zones with minimal escalatory risk. The greatest strategic risk would be the public and diplomatic embarrassment resulting from the capture and open display of a UUV whose nationality was clearly marked or otherwise unmistakable. Perhaps, then, the most critical defensive capability installed in a UUV will be its ability to recognize it has been discovered, break back out into international waters, and break contact with its hunters. It certainly won’t hurt to design unmarked UUVs with difficult-to-attribute technical origins for use in the most audacious of missions, either.

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.

An Observation on Unmanned Systems and Escalation Management

One of the issues I looked at in my Naval War College Review article on maritime deception and concealment concerned an opponent’s use of unmanned scout vehicles to search for and target a defender’s platforms during a crisis. Any scout that is able to locate and then support classification of one of the defender’s individual units such as a warship (or perhaps one of the defender’s larger formations such as a naval battleforce) can hypothetically provide the opponent’s long-range strike systems with targeting-quality track data. Depending on the circumstances and the opponent’s political objectives, this targeting data might create further incentives on the margins for the opponent to execute a first strike/salvo attack.

Unmanned scouts are ideal for performing the prewar ‘tattletale’ role that until now could only be accomplished by manned platforms. These vehicles might allow the opponent to persistently cover a wider area or track a particular contact longer than might be possible if only manned scouts were used. They would obviously also avoid exposing manned scouts to interception by the defender. 

It is highly likely that U.S. rules of engagement during a crisis would preclude destroying an opponent’s manned scout in the absence of high confidence indications and warning that the opponent intended an imminent attack. U.S. use of non-kinetic means to ‘neutralize’ a manned scout would likely be limited as well. It is far less clear, though, that neutralizing or destroying an unmanned scout would carry similar escalation risks or otherwise set unacceptable escalatory precedents. Consider how Russia shot down several Georgian unmanned aerial scouts prior to the 2008 war, or how Iran shot at (and possibly also commandeered) U.S. unmanned aerial scouts over the past few years. Crisis circumstances matter, but it is worth noting that none of these cases resulted in anything more than diplomatic protests by the victims. These cases actually establish a decent international precedent regarding the legitimate bounds of a country’s response to the loss of its unmanned scouts. Granted, neither Russia nor Iran nor any other potential U.S. adversary would necessarily react along the lines of how Georgia or the U.S. did. Nevertheless, far less stigma (and international scorn) attaches to killing robots than manned platforms.  

Therefore, as I noted in my article:

A defender might declare exclusion areas during a crisis within which any detected unmanned system would be neutralized; enforcement of these areas might well not precipitate drastic escalation by the other side...A potential adversary could overcome this threat by placing unmanned systems under close manned escort, but that would undercut the rationale for using unmanned, vice manned, reconnaissance systems to increase search volume and on-station time per sortie. Also, it is not clear how a potential adversary could respond without disproportionate escalation if a defender neutralized the unmanned system by close-in jamming or other nonkinetic means. The point is worth study through war gaming. (Pg. 99, 115)

Depending upon how an unmanned scout was neutralized, the opponent might not even know within an actionable period of time whether an onboard malfunction or ‘external causes’ resulted in the loss of communications with the vehicle. This could support a U.S. ability to assert plausible deniability if need be. There would be a risk, however, that the opponent might conclude U.S. forces were operating in or near the area the scout was passing through when communications with it were lost. This might entice the opponent to focus its surveillance and reconnaissance resources on that area. All the same, if the U.S. had in fact declared a sufficiently broad exclusion area for the opponent’s unmanned vehicles, an overall U.S. deception and concealment plan might allow for disruption or even destruction of the opponent’s unmanned scouts near a specific location to create an impression that ‘something of value’ was nearby even when the actual U.S. or allied units being concealed were somewhere else entirely. Of course, nothing would prevent the opponent from pursuing similar ends via similar tactics.

I would submit that if war gaming and historical case study analysis find that the crisis stability risks of attacks against unmanned scouts would be tolerable, and if the resulting legitimization of equivalent attacks against U.S. unmanned systems would be acceptable, then it might be worthwhile for American diplomacy to advance unmanned scout neutralization (or destruction if the scout is outside the opponent’s internationally-recognized sovereign boundaries) as an international norm. This would not mean that the U.S. would automatically take such steps during a particular crisis—only that U.S. political and military leaders would reserve the option of taking them. If the opponent raised his forces’ combat readiness postures in response, that would be still be a preferable—and most likely more manageable—consequence than allowing the opponent to retain a high-confidence targeting picture that could decisively tilt him towards a decision to strike first.

The irony in all this is that it may incentivize potential adversaries to go 'back to the future.' If a potential adversary expects that U.S. forces will neutralize unmanned scouts without hesitation, then he may opt to return the brink-of-war tattletale role to manned scouts under the assumptions about U.S. rules of engagement during a crisis that I mentioned earlier. So the moral of the story may very well be: don't operate high campaign-value platforms in locations during crises where they would not be able to evade contact with the opponent's manned scouts for long. Instead, preserve those platforms in locations where the opponent cannot scout effectively, or contact with any manned scouts can be quickly and enduringly broken. And remember that whatever the opponent's prewar escalation dominance advantages of using manned scouts may be, those advantages evaporate once U.S. rules of engagement are relaxed upon the outbreak of open hostilities.

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.

The Future of Naval Warfare is Swarming, or… Distribute Everything

A few weeks ago, two esteemed navalists debated the future of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier at the U.S. Naval Academy. To provide an overly-simplistic summation of this debate, retired Navy Captain and think-tank fellow Jerry Hendrix believes that the days of super carriers should be numbered in favor of more (affordable) platforms, such as large-deck amphibious ships, missile carrying submarines, and future semi-submersibles embarking unmanned vehicles. But fellow ID poster Bryan McGrath argues that supercarriers - more (capable) platforms - will continue to provide value and versatility in future conflicts. They were both correct - to an extent.  CVNs have proven their value in war and peace since their inception and will continue to serve the fleet proudly for decades.  But they are expensive, and getting more unaffordable with every iteration.  Bryan notes that despite its extravagant cost, a carrier represents a mere rounding error in the overall federal budget.  Though true, this wishful thinking doesn't make a larger fleet any closer reality than it has been since the heady days of the (almost) 600 ship navy.  

Our super-carrier fleet has shrunk from 14 to essentially 10 over the course of a quarter-century. Nuclear carriers, the centerpiece of today’s fleet, can only be in one place at one time.  Fewer carriers means less forward deployed presence.  Jerry has favored a fleet of more numerous and affordable "Fords" over pricier "Ferraris" for years now, and it is his vision that more closely matches the direction of future war at sea - distributed operations and swarming. 

I first wrote about swarms here about three years ago. My thinking on this concept has evolved as the U.S. Navy has now begun research and development on unmanned air and surface swarming technology in earnest.  Increasing portions of the research portfolios at DARPA, ONR, and the Naval Postgraduate school are focused on autonomy and swarming.

Defining the New Swarm
First, some history is order.  In some respects, the aircraft carrier was the platform that originally brought swarming to modern naval warfare - though one could look back somewhat further to the triremes of antiquity for tactics that somewhat resemble swarming. In World War II, dozens of U.S. and Japanese fleet carriers operated across the Western Pacific, carrying hundreds of aircraft that swarmed to attack and defend enemy surface ships and island bases. Future swarming will occur at both the tactical and operational levels. Though with projected force structure, surging three, maybe four carriers at any time to a given theater is going to be a challenge. Discounting casualties (a big assumption), maintaining them forward deployed over the course of a protracted naval campaign would be virtually impossible.  So how will tomorrow's smaller fleet be able to project power - both ashore and at sea across battle areas spanning millions of square miles in a major war?

Japan’s kamikaze attacks were another early form of naval swarming.   By some estimates, the Divine Wind suicide attacks accounted for up to 80 percent of U.S. Navy losses in the final phase of the Pacific war.  Although they were lethally effective, the lives of thousands of pilots sacrificed to execute these attacks accelerated the attrition of the Japanese war machine that ultimately led to its defeat.                                            

In the past decade, the Iranian fast attack craft swarming threat has driven significant discussion in U.S. Navy circles, ranging from grave concern to outright dismissal.  To address these sorts of threats, the Navy has acquired and deployed various countermeasures, such the LCS/FF surface package and USS Ponce’s laser system.  Developing hardware to counter swarming isn’t enough.  Iran’s multi-pronged sea denial threat illustrates some of the aspects of future naval swarms that will be emulated by other potential adversaries and friendly navies alike.  

Despite our best attempts, future enemies and conflict drivers are difficult to predict. But it is likely that increasingly affordable and numerous autonomous systems will make swarming a common tactic in the future, employed by both state and non-state maritime powers.  I strongly recommend Paul Scharre's work to understand the nature of military swarms and how they might be employed. What follows are some thoughts on how swarms might work in the naval milieu. 

Naval swarms require numbers.

A swarm is designed to overwhelm targeting systems and magazine capacity with its size.  Unlike the Japanese kamikazes, low cost, unmanned autonomous platforms will alleviate any qualms about mass human casualties on the side of the swarmers.  

By employing distributed maritime operations, a single surface platform with embarked unmanned vehicles can operate over a wider area than one without.  Using a multi-tiered hub-and-spoke concept, a large surface ship should be capable of simultaneously operating dozens of air, surface, and sub-surface vessels. So while a traditional surface ship might operate a boat or two and the same number of helicopters, using unmanned vehicles, that same platform can deploy numerous sensors and weapons at a considerable distance from the ship across all maritime domains.

Naval swarms will be multi-domain.  Manned and unmanned platforms will coordinate in the air, under, and on the sea.  The cyber and space domains are already integral to naval warfare and will remain so.  Investments in these areas will remain viable, but agility and upgradeability should be the hallmark attributes for future cyber and space programs.

Herd. Defend. Distract. Attack.

Naval swarms will be multi-dimensional.  Swarms will not simply attack, they will deceive, distract, and defend.  Multi-dimensional platforms - dissimilar and similar, will collaborate autonomously to disable command networks, insert malicious code into control systems, and yes, destroy enemy vessels.  As Scharre notes, swarming is not the same as network-centric warfare. Controlling data-links will be not necessary when autonomy, local visual or acoustic sensors, and insect (or fish-like) intelligence enable tiny platforms to collaborate.

So what sort of platforms will compose future naval swarms? Increasingly, miniaturization and unmanned systems will allow smaller platforms to enjoy the the plug-and-play payload versatility that Bryan rightly argues make the super-carrier so valuable. Somewhere between today's high end fleet and tomorrow's nano-swarms are distributed naval operations.   

Existing and planned surface combatants
Though high in quality, today's fleet is smaller in quantity than needed for future distributed operations. Although a "thousand ship" multi-national navy has possible utility in peacetime, what happens in time of war, when partners go wobbly? I have advocated for distributed operations at sea to include distributed firepower for about five years now.  So it warmed my heart to see surface warfare leadership take an interest in distributed lethality in a recent Proceedings article and in subsequent public comments. 

Future warfare will require more than just a new generation of weapons onboard planned combatants. The LCS/FF and SSC, warts and all, will be critically important, given their numbers and versatility at carrying various payloads. By adapting smaller unmanned payloads, each ship will be able to launch a mini-swarm.  These platforms will aggregate and disperse as the tactical situation dictates.  Of course, carriers and large deck amphibious ships will remain valuable for the foreseeable future, simply because of their massive capacity to carry smaller vehicles.  Additionally, the vision of long range, persistent, even armed UAVs embarked on every surface combatant is slowly edging closer to reality with research programs such as DARPA’s TERN. Realizing the full potential of distributed warfare at sea will require will a variety of vessels to augment the conventional fleet, which is unlikely to grow much at all. 

Non-traditional naval platforms

Military Sealift Command Ships embarking adaptive force packages, such as the JHSV and MLP, will by virtue of their payload capacity, speed, and numbers, become a component of the distributed swarm. Does it make more sense for a $3 billion destroyer or a naval auxiliary costing a tenth that amount to sit in mod-loc for weeks at a time as a host platform for an ISR UAV? If the LCS/FF can host offboard mine-countermeasures systems, then why can't the JHSV? Should amphibious ships continue to perform nine and ten month deployments when we have equally spacious USNS ships with flight decks sitting in reduced operating status? The legal issues raised with employing USNS ships in combat situations can, and should be overcome with some creative lawyering.  

Expeditionary Swarming

Swarming gets even more chaotic where the sea meets the land and increasingly dense urban populations reside. David Kilcullen has laid out a future of swarming maneuver doctrine already embraced by many urban guerrillas.                            

Ever since J.F.C. Fuller, in 1918, the foundational concept of maneuver doctrine for the 20th century is not to fight the enemy bit by bit, but to find his headquarters and put a pistol shot into the brain. Fuller talks about finding and killing the enemy headquarters, putting a deep penetration armored unit behind the frontline looking for the enemy headquarters to kill it. That is on what blitzkrieg is based on, it’s what Russian maneuver warfare is based on, it is a fundamental guiding idea for Liddell Hart or Guderian. The scary thing that Black Hawk down tells you is that because of how these guys operate-- with tactics completely emergent within a self synchronizing swarm-- there is actually no headquarters in the Western sense. The guy I sat with, a Somali brigade commander, didn’t have a bunch of guys with radios in a command and control center. What he had, it was walkie talkie and a larger truck than everybody else, carrying a reserve of fighters and ammo. He just listened on the radio and drove around the battlefield to where the fighting was heaviest. He didn’t need to give an order for the attack because the self-synchronizing tactical system didn’t require that. The scary thing that Black Hawk Down tells you is that if the Rangers were able to capture Aidid, it might not have any effect at all. They were going after a headquarters that didn’t exist.

American special operations forces are already doing distributed warfare.  Several SOC-Forward headquarters are deployed across the globe, each one composed of very small teams of multidisciplinary operators and enablers conducting training, information operations, civil affairs, and direct action.   The Marine Corps is also experimenting with distributing smaller units of action, both ashore and afloat.                  

Unconventional players

A small sample of the largest surrogate fleet in the world...

Naval swarms will not consist solely of naval combatants. What I call naval unconventional warfare - essentially the use of maritime surrogates to achieve naval objectives - will feature prominently in future swarm warfare at sea.  China’s massive fishing fleets are already demonstrating a form of surrogate swarming in the South China Sea.  

These non-state maritime actors - some working at the behest of nation states and others on their own accord - will complicate rules of engagement, entice overreaction, disrupt surface movement, and in some some cases, attack as swarms.

On the air side, commercial drones, of which 32,000 are estimated to be flying in the next decade (most not in the U.S.), along with of hundreds thousands of personal drones, will be pulled into this unconventional swarming threat. Currently light-weight and short-ranged, civilian UAVs will expand in capability more rapidly than their military counter-parts.

Physics Gets a Vote

A solid argument against this vision is that smaller platforms, be they a combatant ship, unmanned underwater vehicle, or unmanned air vehicle, are limited in range and payload capacity.  Notionally, shorter-legged vehicles dispersed over hundreds or thousands of miles require more frequent resupply and refueling (or recharging).  However, innovative ways of resupply will mitigate some of these concerns. Along these lines, the Navy’s recent choice of the V-22 as a carrier onboard delivery (COD) aircraft will greatly enhance the fleet’s distributed logistics capabilities.  The COD will move parts and people not only for the single deployed carrier and its air-wing, but for amphibious ships and smaller combatants (via vertrep) within hundreds of miles of the carrier.  Commonality with Marine Corps and Air Force Special Operations Command Ospreys will bring operational, maintenance, and training efficiencies.  

Unmanned vehicles operating at the edge of the battlespace will require new concepts in afloat logistics.  Moored undersea docking stations to recharge the batteries of long range UUVs should be designed for air or surface deployment.  Unmanned air vehicles flying from surface ships will also support vertical resupply of distributed sea and ground elements operating hundreds of miles from their motherships.  This concept has been demonstrated successfully ashore with the K-MAX rotary wing vehicle which flew more than 17,000 sorties in Afghanistan, delivering over four million pounds of supplies to Marines in remote forward operating bases. Even small patrol vessels operating alone and unafraid could be partially refueled by air, using blivets (from drones, of course) or conceivably, a reverse helicopter in-flight refueling (HIFR) system from the V-22.  Moreover, surface ships with shallower drafts, such as the FF and JHSV can pull into more austere and remote ports for upkeep than their deep draft counter-parts. 

The Future is Clear as Mud

It’s possible that this future is unrealistic, and large combatants - including the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier - will reign the seas for decades, if not centuries to come.  But given the changing rate of technology, an entirely different scenario is not implausible.  In Peter Diamandis' new book BOLD, futurist Ray Kurzweil portrays a future dominated by nanosystems, artificial intelligence, and yes, singularity.  Diamandis discusses some of these astounding (and somewhat scary) predictions for the not too far out future:

By the 2020s, most diseases will go away as nanobots become smarter than current medical technology. Normal human eating can be replaced by nanosystems. The Turing test begins to be passable. Self-driving cars begin to take over the roads, and people won’t be allowed to drive on highways.

By the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real. We will be able to upload our mind/consciousness by the end of the decade.

By the 2040s, non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than biological intelligence (a.k.a. us). Nanotech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air and create any object in physical world at a whim.

By 2045, we will multiply our intelligence a billionfold by linking wirelessly from our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud.

Extrapolating just a few of these trends into naval warfare, one begins to see a very different future emerge than one dominated by a handful of $15 billion capital ships.  Thousands of autonomously navigating civilian and military unmanned surface vessels, such as the “Sea Hunter” prototype currently undergoing testing, will share the seas with manned vessels.  These vessels will be large, small, and very small, and much cheaper to operate than their manned equivalents.  

If Kurzweil is even partially accurate, nanobots will eventually become naval weapons in their own right.  Dispersed from the air prior to hostilities, they will float dormant like plankton in shipping lanes until they recognize an enemy ship. They will then swarm the vessel’s seawater intakes, disable engines, sensors, and perhaps even crew.  Airborne nano-bots floating in the trade winds will be attracted to electromagnetic emissions and disable radar array faces. 

Far-fetched? Perhaps, but then again, twenty five years ago, how many of us expected to always carry a pocket-sized device that responds to voice commands enabling us access to most of the world’s information wirelessly? Kurzweil did.

Because the only certainty is that disruptive technological change will continue to accelerate apace, investments in extremely expensive singular-unit force structure (both air and naval) must be viewed with circumspect.  Simply put - if we don't figure out naval swarming, the democratization of technology today means somebody else will. America's traditional battle force fleet can - and should - be expanded as the fiscal and political environment dictates. But careful investments in an alternative portfolio emphasizing distributed naval operations and swarming will hedge future uncertainty that is sure to result from coming technological disruption.

 The opinions and views expressed in this post are those of the author alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Defense or any of its agencies.

The Large-Deck Carrier: The Finale

For previous installments, see Parts I, II, III, and IV

Carriers in the 2020s and Beyond

It is clear that while the large-deck carrier rightly no longer serves as the fleet’s single concentration of conventional striking power, its air wing can still provide power projection and sea denial capabilities of great value—most notably in the event of a protracted major maritime campaign. Moreover, it remains the only battleforce platform that will be capable of hosting the AEW, aerial refueling, and outer screening layer aircraft necessary for sustaining localized sea control throughout opposed maritime operations. When supported by Joint combined arms suppression and rollback of adversary surveillance/reconnaissance capabilities, carriers can exercise these capabilities at a tolerable level of risk from a contested zone’s outer reaches.

All this hinges on the future carrier air wing possessing the requisite capabilities. It is unclear, for example, what aircraft and weapons combinations will be best suited for restoring if not extending the battleforce’s outer screening layer’s range as potential adversaries’ maritime strike aircraft capabilities continually improve. Nor is it clear what aircraft are best suited for resuming the carrier-organic aerial refueling and wide-area anti-submarine roles.[i] Most significantly, it is unclear what balances between stealth (including its electronic warfare support), range, and payload will be sufficiently affordable to expand the space in which carriers can perform power projection tasks at an acceptable risk when needed.

Unmanned systems offer some solution options for each of these categories, with possible concomitant efficiencies in training and other manpower-related expenses. It may nevertheless take the better part of two decades, if not longer, to develop and gain testing-based confidence that autonomous unmanned systems can reliably execute high-end combat tasks in intensely-contested cyber-electromagnetic warfare environments. The nearer-term solution may very well be to develop semi-autonomous unmanned aerial systems that can coordinate their actions with or be commanded by humans via line-of-sight, low probability of intercept communications pathways—which in turn validates the continued relevancy of manned naval tactical aircraft.[ii]

Regardless, a compelling case can be made that the large-deck aircraft carrier will necessarily remain critical to the future Joint force’s ability to wage major maritime campaigns. The carrier’s ability to fulfill the likely doctrinal roles I have outlined in this week's posts will correspondingly depend on resolution of the above questions concerning the future air wing. 

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[i] On the aerial refueling question, see Dave Majumdar. “UCLASS Could Be Used As Tanker For Carrier Air Wing.” USNI News, 01 April 2014, accessed 4/2/14; http://news.usni.org/2014/04/01/uclass-used-tanker-carrier-air-wing

[ii] See 1. Daniel Goure. “A New Kind of Carrier Air Wing.” Naval Institute Proceedings 138, No. 9 (September 2012): 27-28; 2. Dave Majumdar and Sam LaGrone . “Navy: UCLASS Will be Stealthy and ‘Tomcat Size’.” USNI News, 23 December 2013, accessed 1/3/14, http://news.usni.org/2013/12/23/navy-uclass-will-stealthy-tomcat-size; 3. Robert Farley. “UAVs and the F-35: Partners in Air Power?” The Diplomat, 03 January 2014, accessed 1/3/14, http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/uavs-and-the-f-35-partners-in-air-power/ ; 4. Dave Majumdar and Sam LaGrone. “Inside the Navy’s Next Air War.” USNI News, 23 January 2014, accessed 1/24/14; http://news.usni.org/2014/01/23/navys-next-air-war