Moment of Movement Approaches

I have actually been writing content for the blog over the last week, but have decided not to publish any of it. Some of it is good; some not so much. There is no question I have missed a lot since February, and yet given the broadside across the bow of the maritime services shared in the recent speech by the SECDEF, maybe I simply picked the right moment not to be distracted by the daily noise.

May 2010 will be remembered as the month the Navy was given the first clear signal that change is coming since the cold war ended. It is important to note that the speech for the Navy League was only the first step though - with the second step coming on Saturday. If you thought the last Gates speech was interesting - wait until you hear the next one...

And that will be followed by the Air-Sea Battle rollout coming on the 18th. In other words, we live in interesting times. These two speeches and the battle doctrine rollout all signal one thing - there is a serious moment in the near future where the Navy is going to move from where they are today - into what they will be tomorrow. It may be a major shift, or more likely, only a small one - but with his speech the SECDEF clearly stated he is now the voice for changing the Navy and directing them towards the future. Gates had already done this with the Army and Air Force, and the Navy and Marines both knew this was coming. The Army lost Future Combat Systems and the Air Force lost the F-22 - so you have a track record to work with regarding what they Navy will lose.

But what has the Army and Air Force gained - or said another way - what are those services becoming as they shape for the future? How have those services improved with the changes previously made by Gates? How do we apply that logic to the meaning behind the SECDEFs words?

Everything the Secretary has said so far is subject to interpretation. When I broke down the SECDEFs speech, the only clear message I find being sent is the call for "change." Gates did not say "reduce aircraft carriers" or cancel the EFV. There was no specific instruction on equipment, rather what he did was call for fresh ideas. In many ways, I read the speech as a premature endorsement of the Air-Sea Battle - which still lacks a great deal of detail itself. In other words, the Navy is about to be handed a big idea, and will soon be told what the budget will be to 'make it work and get it done.'

There will be two kinds of reactions. It will be the ones with ideas towards a new direction, and those with complaints. Which group will get the most attention as they push their agenda to the masses? I think that will be a dynamic worth watching.

Maybe it is because I come from no school of internal DC influence, but my interpretation of the speech suggests that I see a bit of everyone in the direction the SECDEF is pointing - and the only thing we can say for certain is that Secretary Bob Gates reads Proceedings. I see a little Bob Work, a little Bryan McGrath, a little Peter Swartz, a little Andrew Krepinevich, a little Jerry Hendrix, a little Wayne Hughes, and even some CDR Salamander in the SECDEFs speech about the Navy. If I was completely delusional, I'd suggest the SECDEF reads the Navy blogosphere - but instead I'll simply say it looks to me like the people who are influencing the thinking of the SECDEF regarding the future Navy is reading at least as broadly as I am regarding alternative visions of the Navy.

Which leaves me thinking there is only one Admiral who must have the ear of the SECDEF regarding the future Navy - and his last name is neither Mullen nor Roughead. I think we all know of which man I speak...

It is very rare that SECDEF tea leaves are so easy to read, so perhaps I have completely misread them. Combining subtle and blunt in speeches takes skill - and Secretary Gates works his magic in his speeches like a grand master does the chess board. I have no inside information, but I'd bet the private channels among naval strategists are buzzing like bee hives since the SECDEFs speech, and the digging of trenches has already begun.

Who will make up the new generation of leaders is now the most important question to ask following the Gates speech - and on my calendar it looks like we have 16 months to ask and answer that question. The SECDEFs speech started by discussing people on purpose. Over the next 16 months the identification of those Navy and Marines 0-4 through 0-6 currently in the service with the vision and insight the SECDEF discusses will become the priority. Those papers written at the NPS or NWC matter more today than they did last month, indeed - you never know where the origins of ideas might come from.

There has never been a better time for a Navy or Marine officer to write for periodicals like National Defense Magazine, Joint Forces Quarterly, or Proceedings.

The moment of movement - the first time the Navy has made significant changes since the cold war - approaches. It is noteworthy because for 99% of the people in today's Navy, it will be the first time in their career they have worked during a time of internal movement. For the Marines - well, the shake up will be even more profound. Up until now, all both services have had to do is adapt to technology. What is coming is much more difficult.

Any change is always hard, but for the maritime services - it could end up looking and feeling like a System Perturbation for those in the maritime service community. Accordingly, it is also possible that is how they read it - even if the final impact of coming changes is disproportionate to the amount of actual change that takes place.

Publish Post

Enjoy your Friday, because after the SECDEF speech on Saturday - everything changes yet again.

Edit: Link fixed above. I can't believe i messed up the one link in the post I think matters most....

Russia Frees Hijacked Oil Tanker

A month after the Netherlands launched an assault againt a hijacked ship, now Russia has freed a hijacked ship from Somali pirates. The Liberian flagged MV Moscow University was on its way to China with 86,000t oil, when it was hijacked yesterday.

It was reported that the crew had retreated to a safe place on the ship, which was confirmed by a maritime patrol aircraft sent to the ship, while the RFS Marshal Shaposhidov was already on its way. The Russian naval vessel arrived at the hijacked vessel early this morning.

The helicopters and small boats the Russians sent to investigate the ship were fired upon and returned the fire. During this firefight 1 of the pirates died. After the remaining 10 pirates surrendered, the 23 Russian crewmembers were found to be alive and well.

The Gates Bit...

Bryan has already done a fine job with SecDef Gates' speech, and I'm only going to contribute on part of his analysis. I want to focus in particular on the question of how other state's naval capabilities should matter for right-sizing the USN. I think that this was the most controversial part of the speech, and I disagree with Bryan on several key points. Here is the key graf:

Like the annual media story trumpeting a “Drop In Crime Even As Prison Population Surges”, the cause and effect nature of Gates statistics seem simply to evade him. The plain truth of the matter is that we have a world full of free riders, content to spend meager portions of their defense budgets on navies BECAUSE we have such a dominant one. That Navy—our Navy—performs a critical function in the global system, one performed at different times by the leading maritime nation of the world. The English, the Portuguese and the Dutch all provided a “global good” by being as powerful as they were and ensuring that others could safely and reliably conduct commerce across wide expanses. What is most dangerous of all about Gates riff here is where it could lead—and that is to a naval arms race. Our spending on a dominant Navy discourages virtually every nation on earth from building bigger more powerful navies (more on that in a bit). Should we begin to show signs of walking away from that dominance—other nations will see themselves has having no other option than to build more ships. While we may short-sightedly think that is just fine, in the long run, such a naval arms race would be destabilizing.

Bryan argues that Gates fundamentally misses the point by asking why the United States has eleven carrier battle groups while no other country has more than one. While I appreciate Bryan's argument (the United States has special responsibilities, including global maritime maintenance and the prevention of regional arms races), I can't accept that US force structure should have no relation to international procurement. The argument fails on a simple thought experiment; if the Chinese in the next twenty years build six carrier battle groups, would anyone still think that eleven USN carriers are sufficient for US needs? They certainly would NOT be sufficient for the mission that Bryan suggests (maintaining a hegemonic position in order to deter arms races), yet at the same time I doubt that anyone would advocate for the deployment of sixty-six carrier groups in order to maintain our current level of dominance. Accordingly, it's simply not true that foreign naval procurement and force structure should have no effect on discussions about how many carriers the United States ought to deploy. At best, we can say that there's a floor below which the United States cannot accomplish the tasks associated with benign maritime hegemony, and that this floor is affected by the force size of major potential competitors. Recognition of this hardly makes Gates' comparison of the USN with its foreign competitors irrelevant, however.

The second issue is that Gates really understates US supremacy. It's not simply that the United States has eleven carrier battle groups and the Russians have only one; the US is close allies with most of the other major naval powers in the world. The British, French, Japanese, Italian, South Korean, Spanish, Canadian, and Australian navies are all quite large by worlds standards, and are all tied to the United States by formal treaty arrangements. It's fair to ask whether all of these treaty arrangements would withstand a serious maritime crisis, but it's absurd to assume that none of them will. Moreover, one of the insights of the Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower is that naval power is not entirely zero sum. Even Chinese and Russian naval capabilities contribute to some of the missions that are associated with the maintenance of the maritime domain. US, allied, and competitor forces can't simply be added together, but they do complement one another. Thus, allied capabilities in particularly serve to lower the floor of minimum USN capacity. They also affect US force structure; allies are probably less likely to become involved in intense, peer competitor type conflicts than the US, and less likely to have capabilities that can contribute to such fights. Nevertheless, the naval capabilities of both allies and competitors matter for discussions of the optimal size of the USN.

Now, all of this is different than the question of where the USN currently sits in regard to the floor under which benign maritime hegemony is no longer necessary. It's possible that this floor is eleven carrier battle groups, ten amphibious assault ships, etc. It's also possible that the floor is above this, and that the US and its allies are already incapable of accomplishing the tasks associated with benign maritime hegemony, although if this were the case it would be worth investigating whether force structure rather than size was the real culprit. Anyway, if we're under the floor then Gates' questions about carrier battle groups aren't quite irrelevant, but do miss the point. I don't believe we're under that floor; in short, I think that the ability of the USN to bust down doors and beat down competitors is considerably greater now than it was in 1988, largely because the only viable competitor disappeared in 1992. I also think that the Cooperative Strategy provides a framework through which we and our allies can accomplish the other tasks of benign maritime hegemony with a minimum of friction.

I think that there's also a point of comparison problem. The United States Navy has enjoyed two moments in the last sixty five years of utter, uncontestable maritime hegemony. The first followed the wake of World War II, and the second the collapse of the Soviet Union. At both points, the USN enjoyed not simply dominance, but complete maritime command. Both points, as it turned out, were unsustainable. Even a modest Soviet post-war construction program would have made maintaining the level of dominance enjoyed by the US in 1945 economically impossible. Similarly, the effective and sudden disappearance of the Soviet Navy in 1992 again rendered the USN utterly dominant in every corner of the globe. Again, even modest naval construction programs on the part of China or Russia would make that level of dominance economically infeasible for the United States. As it turns out, Russian naval reconstruction has yet to achieve the level "modest", while Chinese construction has substantially exceeded modest, but the point remains. This is why I find efforts like Robert Kaplan's "Elegant Decline" hypothesis nearly worthless; the idea of relative decline is tied to a particular point of reference, and that point of reference may not be sensibly chosen. As I suggested above, the USN is relatively less dominant now than in 1992, but is considerably more dominant than it was in 1988. Why the former is considered a more relevant comparison that the latter eludes me. In this context, wondering about the relationship between the USN and other major competitors is, again, on point.

The question of how foreign naval construction ought to affect US naval procurement echoes a larger debate about the relationship between the US defense budget and world defense spending. We know, of course, that the US accounts for roughly half (possibly more) of aggregate world defense spending; the only question is what this fact means. I tend to believe it means that the US is overspending, especially given the fact that five of the top seven and ten of the top thirteen spenders are US allies, but this belief is not a necessary implication of the facts on the ground. It might be best for the US to account for 3/4 of aggregate world defense spending; I would still doubt, however, that foreign capabilities (high or low) should play no role in determining the level of US financial commitments.

What I appreciated most about Gates speech was open the recognition of US world military supremacy. This supremacy doesn't allow the United States to do anything it wants (as Kenneth Waltz has argued, "To say that militarily strong states are feeble because they cannot easily bring order to minor states is like saying that a pneumatic hammer is weak because it is not suitable for drilling decayed teeth"). Nevertheless, conversations inside the defense community often seem to have an almost scholastic character, in which the assumption of utter US hegemonic dominance is almost unspoken. Gates, at the very least, recognizes that we're simply talking about modifying the degree of US dominance, and trying to find the floor under which benign maritime hegemony can no longer hold.

EFV: A squad of Marines will change the world

Yesterday at the National Museum of the Marine Corps, the latest Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle was presented to reporters and dignitaries. Mostly it was a bunch of Marines and contractors slapping each other on the back, but underneath was the promise of a Marine Corps with EFV's and how some squad of Marines in the future will change the world.

I know our Defense Secretary questioned the value of the EFV in an emerging world of hybrid threats and non-government actors. Those are valid concerns, the AAV has been around 40 years, and the EFV will be around at least that long. But I would also bet that he sees a need for Marines to be able to move from ships to be able to seize key objectives ashore on the large level....but much more likely, on the level of a Marine Corps Company.

It has happened in the past. Small groups of a few dozen to a few hundred Marines have stemmed an enemy advance, quelled a riot, provided security, turned the tide of a battle, and thereby a war and the world. It will happen again.

Despite the 20,000 or so Marines deployed to Afghanistan, we've added value to the nation by having a few hundred Marines at the right place at the right time. That is what we are already thinking about in a post Enduring Freedom world.

Our MEU's will be asked to do something, squash anti-government forces in a friendly nation perhaps. On my MEU in 1992, we could send the Amtraks 2 miles up the beach, the boats 2 miles down the beach and the H-46's about 20 miles inland, and that was the range of our maneuver. An EFV increases that range by an order of magnitude, and increases the lethality by another order of magnitude above that.

I can see the arguments against it though: amphibious ship and EFV vulnerability to cheap missiles, EFV vulnerability to IED's, cost, complexity, etc.

If you use these reasons for nay-saying the EFV, then we wouldn't get our Marines involved in any dangerous situation, because those risks apply equally to all weapons systems.

The "beauty" of this amphibious monster lies at the Marine Corps Company. Some time, be it in 2020, 2030 or beyond, we will ask a Marine Corps Company to go into a foreign land. They will be out manned by a 10 to 1 ratio, they may be outgunned to some extent, but those are situations Marines have handled before. An emphasis on maneuver and dominance in the fight you are currently in will whittle down the on-paper advantage of hostile forces.

So what if we are outmanned by 10:1, let's move around 70% of their formations.

So what if we are outgunned, if in every confrontation our Marines still emerge victorious due to coordinated and accurate fire.

So yes, I am an amphibious Kool-Aid drinker. I think we need this vehicle to assure dominance in every engagement. To be able to engage and not back away from conflicts near the coast, where 70% of the world's population will live.

So what will we send that world-changing squad of Marines into future small wars and battles with? If you're going to change the world, then bring the right tool to do it.

Final Exam Time

My Defense Statecraft Final Exam:

DIP 750 Defense Statecraft
Spring 2010
Please answer one of the following three questions by 5:45pm today.

1. Critics of the 2010 QDR have argued that it fails in its mandate to set forth a strategic plan for the next twenty years. Evaluate this argument. Is it wise to spend time thinking about the medium term while in the midst of two wars? Is it possible to conduct strategic planning with a twenty year time frame?
2. On March 26, 2010, the South Korean patrol ship Cheonan exploded and sank in disputed waters. Discuss, from a South Korean point of view, the difficulties associated with determining responsibility for the sinking, and with developing an appropriate response.
3. The “COIN vs. Conventional” debate is currently roiling the US defense establishment. Characterize each position in the debate, and discuss what is at stake. Which side has the more compelling argument? What events might “prove” the case of one faction or the other?

Next year, I plan a substantial set of revisions to this course and to DIP 600 National Security Policy. The aim will be to make the transition between the courses more seamless, so that the course takes on the feel of a 28 week, full year class rather than two distinct classes. The trick, of course, is that there actually is a seam; some students take the Spring (Defense Statecraft) course without having taken the fall (National Security Policy). Also, with luck I'll manage to podcast the entire sequence.