Advanced Russian Electronic Warfare Capabilities

LTG Ben Hodges, Commander of U.S. Army Forces Europe, has frequently commented over the past year on the high degree of offensive Electronic Warfare (EW) proficiency demonstrated by the Russian Army against Ukrainian forces in Donbas. While most of this Russian EW usage was likely intended to support combat operations, it is quite possible that some of it had a secondary objective of intimidating NATO audiences. Likewise, the Russians may have also directly demonstrated a new EW system against U.S. forces on at least one occasion following the seizure of Crimea, though Russian propaganda claims regarding the system’s effects upon the USS Donald Cook were laughable. All the same, the Russian military has long appreciated that “radio-electronic combat” is integral to modern warfare, and accordingly that it offers a set of relatively inexpensive weapons that can potentially cripple an opponent’s ability to sense, communicate, and exercise command and control within a battlespace.

With that in mind, it’s worth examining a Russian propaganda piece from earlier this spring regarding a new Russian EW system dubbed Richag-AV. The article describes how Richag-AV will be integrated with a Mi-8 helicopter variant, then goes on to assert that the system can also be integrated with warships, ground vehicles, and other aircraft. Richag-AV is developed by Russia’s Radio-Electronic Technology Concern (KRET), which also produces several other prominent EW systems. One such KRET product is the aircraft-carried Khibiny that was allegedly used against the USS Donald Cook. It is noteworthy that KRET has claimed elsewhere that at least one variant of its truck-mounted Krasukha series EW systems will be mounted on aircraft and ships as well. A cursory search for pictures of Krasukha series systems online indicates that their size, weight, power, and physical antenna design attributes are vastly larger than anything that a Mi-8 might carry. Krasukha series systems’ physical attributes certainly differ drastically from Khibiny’s as well. Taken together, it seems likely that the claims that all these KRET products are equally extensible to different platforms aren’t fully true. Rather, it is quite possible the Russian claims actually signify that these different products share some common internal design approaches or underlying technologies and techniques.

The Sputnik News piece on Richag-AV contains another detail I find interesting:

In a combat situation, the system would operate as part of an aviation shock attack group aimed at breaking through virtually any defense system, blinding everything up to and including the US MIM-104 'Patriot' anti-aircraft missile system.

This immediately made me think of the opening hours of the First Gulf War when U.S. Army Apache attack helicopters struck Iraqi radar sites near the border with Saudi Arabia in order to create air defense coverage gaps the first waves of F-117s “going downtown” could exploit. The Apaches’ attacks, combined with Project SCATHE MEAN’s use of decoys to lure Iraqi air defenses into lighting off radars and expending precious Surface to Air Missiles, landed debilitating blows against Iraq’s integrated air defense system.

Now, it’s far from clear that Russian doctrine actually envisions using armed Mi-8s equipped with Richag-AV to achieve similar war-opening effects in a notional conflict with NATO. The Apaches’ nighttime nap-of-the-earth approach to their targets in Desert Storm was difficult enough over the desert; an equivalent raid into Poland from Kaliningrad, for example, would have to deal with much more complex terrain and might also have to contend with the coverage provided by NATO Airborne Early Warning (AEW) aircraft. Nevertheless, U.S. and NATO planners ought to be thinking about how they might parry such a gambit.

It stands to reason, though, that Russian combined arms ground operations would likely feature use of aircraft-carried and vehicle-borne EW systems to blind, disrupt, deceive, or exploit U.S. and NATO sensor, communications, and command and control coverage within an objective area. Low-flying Russian helicopters would certainly be a plausible platform for suppression of the mobile air defense systems supporting NATO ground forces. Vehicle-borne Russian EW systems would likewise be plausible platforms for shielding Russian ground forces from NATO attacks.  

There’s obviously no way to be certain how Russian electronic attack capabilities actually stack up against U.S. and NATO radiofrequency systems. Such questions could only be answered in war, and that’s a ruinous proving ground one hopes the Putin regime and Western leaders equally want to avoid. It’s nevertheless worth pointing out that the Russian propaganda articles are incorrect in intimating that the edge in electronic attack is determined by an offensive EW system’s transmit power and raw coverage. Those are certainly important variables, but what matters even more is the adequacy of the targeted radiofrequency system’s electronic protection features and the comprehensiveness of the defending unit’s conditioning for operations under electromagnetic opposition. LTG Hodges has observed as much with respect to the U.S. Army. These observations urgently need to be translated into doctrine, operating concepts, tactics, force-wide training priorities, interim electronic protection upgrades to existing systems, and fielding of relevant ‘off-the-shelf’ EW technologies not only in the Army, but also across the U.S. armed services and their NATO counterparts as well.

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.

A Definitive Article about Information Age Naval Warfare

Earlier this week I discussed two superb articles in the July 2015 Naval Institute Proceedings that examined aspects of cyber and networking resiliency. Today I’m going to talk about the issue’s third article on cyber-electromagnetic warfare: LCDR DeVere Crooks’s and LCDR Mateo Robertaccio’s “The Face of Battle in the Information Age.”

Usually when I read a journal article I mark it up with a pen to highlight key passages or ideas so that I can revisit them later. My doing so to their article was pointless in retrospect, as I ended up highlighting just about every one of their paragraphs.

LCDRs Crooks and Robertaccio touch on virtually every major aspect of operating under cyber-electromagnetic opposition. They correctly argue that cyber-electromagnetic warfare is integral to 21^st Century naval warfare, and that we ignore that truism at our peril. They observe that while our pre-deployment training exercises are generally designed to test how well units perform particular tasks, or to test or troubleshoot plans and operating concepts, they don’t generally allow for freeplay experimentation that might uncover new insights about fighting at sea in the information age. “What will tactical-level decision-makers experience, what will they be able to understand about the battlefield around them, and how will that lead them to employ the tactics and equipment they’ve been handed?” ask the authors.

They also highlight the centrality of emissions control to combat survival, with the added observation that the Navy must learn to accept “electromagnetic silence” as its “default posture.” They decry the fact that the Navy rarely is “forced to operate in a silent (or reduced) mode for any sort of extended period or while conducting complex operations.” They allude to the fact that we were able to regularly perform at such a level as recently as a quarter century ago.

They then go into great detail asking questions about whether our training, preferred communications methods, doctrine, tactics, and tactical culture are fully aligned with the realities of fighting under cyber-electromagnetic opposition. When I was on active duty at sea in 2001-2004, I only recall one exercise in which a destroyer I served on practiced performing combat tasks while using only our passive sensor systems—and that was done at the initiative of my destroyer’s Commanding Officer. I don’t remember ever conducting a drill in any of my ships in which our connectivity with external intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets was deliberately manipulated, degraded, or severed by simulated electronic attacks. Evidently LCDRs Crooks and Robertaccio had similar experiences on their sea tours as well. The issues they raise along these lines in the middle sections of their article are worth the “price of admission” alone.

Their concluding recommendations are most commendable:

• Begin conducting a “series of extended free play Fleet Problems with minimal scripting and objectives beyond the generation of a large body of direct, honest lessons learned and questions for further investigation.” These Fleet Problems should “allow either side to win or lose without intervention to drive a planned outcome” and should “apply as many of the atmospherics and limitations of an Information Age A2/AD environment as possible, challenging participants to work within the constraints of a battlefield that is contested in all domains.”
• Use these experiments and other forms of analysis to generate “a set of assumptions about the conditions that are likely to apply in Information Age naval combat (in specified time frames) and mandate that they be applied to all tactics development, fleet training requirements and scenarios, manning plans, and training requirements for individual personnel” as well as “to the development of requirements for future payloads and platforms.”
• Acknowledge at every level that the cyber and electromagnetic domains will be hotly contested. This means no longer treating the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of information “as a given” or otherwise that it would be “lightly contested.” Tactical-level commanders should treat the need for temporary localized cyber-electromagnetic superiority as just as integral to sea control as is the case with the physical domains of war. As they observe, “this may often largely amount to the monitoring of operations coordinated at higher levels of command, but it is critically relevant even to individual watchstanders.” I would add that qualitative observations of the cyber-electromagnetic situation will likely be just as important as quantitative measurements of that situation.

LCDRs Crooks and Robertaccio have written a definitive thought-piece regarding modern naval warfare under cyber-electromagnetic opposition. I commend it to all naval professionals and enthusiasts alike. It should be considered a point-of-departure reference for the naval debates of our time. 

And my thanks to LCDR Crooks for sharing a follow-on surface force-centric piece here at ID last week. I truly hope his and LCDR Robertaccio’s messages percolate within the fleet. Much in the future depends upon it.

 

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.

Thinking About Cyber and Networking Resiliency

I’m well over a month late writing about the July 2015 issue of USNI Proceedings. Simply put, it contains three of the finest pieces about operating under cyber-electromagnetic opposition I’ve read in a long time. I’ll be talking about two of them today and the third one later this week.

First up is LCDR Brian Evans’s and Pratik Joshi’s outstanding article “From Readiness to Resiliency.” Evans and Joshi note that past Navy cyberdefense efforts primarily focused on unit-level compliance with information assurance measures such as firewall configurations, network configuration management and behavior monitoring, physical security protections, and regular ‘hygiene’ training for users. While these kinds of measures continue to be critically important in that they deny adversaries ‘cheap and easy’ attack vectors for exploiting Navy networks and systems, the authors observe that no cyberdefense can hope to keep an intelligent, determined, and adequately resourced adversary out forever. According to the authors, last fall the Navy’s nascent Task Force Cyber Awakening concluded (correctly I might add) that the Navy’s systems, networks, and personnel must able to continue operating effectively, albeit with graceful degradation, in the face of cyberattacks. In other words, they must become resilient.

Evans and Joshi essentially outline a concept for shipboard “cyber damage control.” They describe how the longstanding shipboard material readiness conditions X-RAY, YOKE, and ZEBRA can also be applied to shipboard networks: crews can proactively shut down selected internal and external network connections as tactical circumstances warrant, or they can do so reactively if cyber exploitation is suspected. The authors outline how crews will be able to segment networks and isolate mission-critical systems from less-critical systems, or isolate compromised systems from uncompromised systems, much like damaged compartments can be isolated to prevent the spread of fire, smoke, or flooding. The authors go on to discuss how damage isolation must be followed by repair efforts, and how knowledge of a system’s or network segment’s last known good state can be used to recognize what an attacker has exploited and how in order to aid restoration. It stands to reason that affected systems and network segments might additionally be restorable by crews to a known good state, or at least into a “safe state” that trades gracefully degraded non-critical functionality for sustainment of critical functions.

It’s important to keep in mind, though, that resilience requires more than just technological and procedural measures. When I was an Ensign on USS First Ship in 2001, many crewmembers would tell me of the “Refresher Training” at Guantanamo Bay that Atlantic Fleet ships went through up until budget cutbacks ended the program in the mid-1990s or so. At REFTRA, the assessors would put ships through exacting combat drills in which chaotic attacks, major damage, and grievous casualties were simulated in order to expose crews to the most stress possible short of actual battle. According to some of the senior enlisted I served with, it wasn’t unusual for the assessors to “cripple” a ship’s fighting capacity or “kill off” much of a watchteam or a damage control party to see how the “survivors” reacted. Some ships were supposedly tethered to Guantanamo for weeks on end until the assessors were convinced that the crews had demonstrated adequate combat conditioning—and thus a greater potential for combat resilience. This kind of training intensity must be restored, preferably by shipboard leaders themselves, with the 21^st Century addition of exposing their crews to the challenges of fighting through cyberattacks. Perhaps a scenario might involve intensive simulation of system malfunctions as a pierside ship rushes to prepare to sortie during an escalating crisis. Or perhaps it might involve simulated malfunctions at sea as “logic bombs” or an “insider attack” are unleashed. Evans and Joshi allude to the cyber-conditioning angle in the fictional future shipboard training drill they use to close their article. One hopes that Task Force Cyber Awakening is in fact exploring how to develop the psychological aspect of resilience within the fleet.

This leads nicely into the July issue’s other excellent technical article on network resilience, CDR John Dahm’s “Next Exit: Joint Information Environment.” CDR Dahm argues that even if the Defense Department were to successfully consolidate and standardize the services’ information infrastructures within the most hardened of citadels, this Joint Information Environment (JIE) would still only be as combat-effective as the security of the communication pathways connecting that citadel to force in the field. He relates a fictional saga in which a near-peer adversary wins a limited war by severing the U.S. military’s satellite communications pathways as well as the oceanic fiber optic cables connecting Guam and Okinawa to the internet. He correctly notes that the “transmission layer” connecting deployed U.S. forces and theater/national intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets with the JIE presents the most vulnerable segment of the entire JIE concept. He alludes to the fact that a force that is dependent upon exterior lines of networking is essentially setting itself up for ruin if an adversary lands effective physical, electronic, or cyber attacks against any critical link in the communications chain. He closes by observing that “the communications necessary to support a cloud-based network architecture cannot simply be assumed,” with the implication being that the JIE concept must be expanded to encompass the transmission layer if it is to be successful in a major war.

We know that just as there can never be such a thing as an impregnable “information citadel,” there is no way to make any communications pathway completely secure from disruption, penetration, or exploitation. We can certainly use measures such as highly-directional line-of-sight communications systems and low probability of intercept communications techniques to make it exceedingly difficult for an adversary to detect and exploit our communications pathways. We can also use longstanding measures such as high frequency encoded broadcast as a one-way method of communicating operational orders and critical intelligence from higher-level command echelons to deployed forces. But both reduce the amount of information flowing to those forces to a trickle compared to what they are used to receiving when unopposed, and the latter cuts off the higher echelon commander from knowledge that the information he or she had transmitted has been received, correctly interpreted, and properly implemented. And neither method is unequivocally free from the risk of effective adversary attack. What’s needed, then, is a foundation of resilience built upon a force-wide culture of mission command. That may be outside the JIE concept’s scope, but it will be integral to its success.

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.

Victory Parade and Chinese Politics

Most recently, China had a Victory parade to celebrate the 70th anniversary of war against Japan. As part of this parade, China rolled out its latest ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, armored vehicles, UAVs, helicopters, fighter jets and special missions aircraft. All of the displayed weapon systems are believed to be in service. For the first time, China publicly displayed DF-21D and DF-26, which are the ballistic missiles designed for attacking moving targets like a carrier. Certainly, I have posted numerous blog entries in the past regarding China’s ASBM program and the challenges around it, so this has always been an area of interest for PLA followers. We have now seen these ASBM missiles on display and know that it is in active service. What we don’t know is how good China is at finding a fast moving carrier group in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, tracking it and then engaging it. Certainly for a missile DF-26 which will have longer range and higher re-entry speed than DF-21D, the engineering challenge of finding carrier upon re-entry and maneuvering to hit something that can move at greater than 30 knots is very daunting task. They also displayed DF-5B, which is China’s first public display of an ICBM with multiple nuclear warheads. The parade also displayed the DF-10A LACM (land based version of KD-20 LACM) and various other short and medium ranged ballistic missiles. The second artillery certainly had a field day at this military parade. Comparing this to the pictures from China’s military parade in 1984, it was quite interesting how backward they were back then. It still had the same nationalistic tone and show of strength from all the Chinese leaders.

Behind all of this, it’s a time of uncertainty and worry for the current Chinese leadership. China’s major leaders of past and present were all there (even ones I didn’t realize was still alive) to present a united front. By this point, most people have seen the crash of Chinese stock market. The Chinese economy has also slowed down a lot by this point. Nobody can predicate what will happen there or anywhere else, but these parades are used to show the power and accomplishments of the communist party and distract people from the worries of economic and other problems. I’ve read numerous articles on the politics of recent events. While I’m not sure about their accuracy, it does paint a picture where the younger generation of leaders is still battling the older generation in their efforts to carry out reforms. China’s previous paramount leader Hu Jintao was quite limited in his power due to the continued influence of his predecessor Jiang Zemin. It seemed like the leadership of Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang would get more freedom in their efforts to bring a more market based economy to China since taking control 2 years ago. Reading about their pilot free trade zone in Shanghai, the attempted deleveraging of the credit bubble and wider trading band of RMB, I have gotten the feeling that Li Keqiang has some pretty good ideas about resolving some of the problems in the Chinese economy. In the past couple of month with the worsening stock market and rapidly slowing economy, you can really see a lot of his moves getting reversed. (If you listened to any of Donald Trump’s speech recently, you would hear about the greatest one-day devaluation of RMB of 2%.) To clear up certain misconceptions before we continue: China does have its own foreign exchange market similar to EBS, which allows RMB to be freely traded within the 2% daily band for entities inside China. It just has capital control preventing money from easily flowing outside the country (like Brazil, Korea, India and numerous other nations), so does not appear free-floating to outsiders.

Throughout PRC’s history, elderly members of the politburo have been more reluctant toward reform efforts. Even when the all-powerful Deng Xiaoping was pushing his reforms in the 80s, other party elders like Chen Yun and Li Xiannian limited Deng’s efforts as soon as troubles started. The most reform minded Chinese leaders of their day Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang were pushed out and humiliated after the student protests of 1987 and then the infamous 1989 TianAnMen Square protests. In a functional economy, we have the boom and bust cycle where credit expand during the boom and contract during bust causing problems in the economy. The bust part of cycle allows the inefficiencies and ailments of the economy to be removed. It is natural for any reform and deleveraging economic efforts to cause a period of economic and social problems. The last time China really allowed the bust to happen is during the Asian economic crisis of 1997 and 1998 when the inefficient state owned enterprises were allowed to fail. At the time, unemployment rate, early retirement and crime rate skyrocketed in the country. The FaLanGong movement arose during this period. Since then, China enjoyed 10 years of good economic growth, a slowdown in 2008 and another 6 years of economic growth. While this was happening, it has been accumulating unsustainable amount of debt and credit creation.

In May of 1989, Zhao Ziyang, who was nominally China’s president at the time, told the visiting Soviet leader Gorbachev that he was not really in charge of China in real decision-making. After taking over in 1987 from Hu, Zhao needed to survive 10 years against the pressures of the conservatives inside the politburo, but lasted less than 2 years after refusing to participate in crushing the student movement. Since then, most of the reform efforts have been economically related and is badly needed in China right now. If reform minded leaders inside the day-to-day leadership get pushed every time there is a setback and become blamed by the elders for economic problems, it’s hard for me to see how this new generation of leaders can get anything done while Jiang Zemin and Li Peng are alive and functioning. Looking beyond China’s display of military power in this parade, China’s biggest threat to the world is an economic crash that slows down its major trade partners and vacation destinations.

For the Want of an RMMV, Should Modular Mine Warfare be Lost?

RMMV aboard USS Independence (LCS 2)

     There have been a number of recent complaints from Congress and the Director, Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) regarding the poor performance of the Remote Mine hunting System’s (RMS) Remote Multimission Vehicle (RMMV). Some LCS critics have seized on this poor performance as another reason to cancel the LCS program, or to at least divorce mine warfare from the LCS program. These critics are ignoring the lessons of post World War 2 attempts by the United States Navy to field dedicated mine warfare platforms. They also forget that the LCS mission modules were always meant to be adjustable based on the given threat and host seaframe weight restrictions. As the saying goes, “there are many ways to skin a cat,” and there are equally many ways to go about conducting mine warfare. The Navy is pursuing the right course in making mine warfare a modular capability that can be deployed from LCS and other platforms. The problems with the RMMV suggest that Congress should better fund the Navy’s overall mine warfare capability.

     In the 70 years since the end of the Second World War the United States has twice attempted to create a dedicated force of mine warfare ships to support global naval operations. Neither effort has been fully successful. The first such endeavor was the construction of the 53 Aggressive minesweeper, ocean class (MSO’s) in the wake of the October 1950 amphibious assault at Wonson during the Korean War. By the late 1970’s however, this first postwar mine warfare force was poor condition. A planned modernization program on the fleet of 65 ships was curtailed to 13 units.[1] There was little specific training and enlisted men assigned aboard the MSO’s usually provided training on mine warfare to incoming officers.[2] The Commander of Naval Mine Warfare Command in 1985, Commodore Duke Cockfield, was quoted in the Navy’s All Hands magazine as saying, “If you go back to the 1970’s, mine warfare was in serious trouble.”[3] Finally, significant minesweeping operations such as the post-Vietnam War clearance of naval mines from Haiphong Harbor as part of the agreement ending the war were conducted by mine sweeping CH-53 helicopters rather than surface ships. Despite this success, overall U.S. mine warfare capabilities were at a low eb.

     The Reagan administration began a U.S. Navy surface ship mine warfare renaissance with the authorization for construction of 31 new mine warfare ships of the Avenger class mine countermeasures ships (MCM) and the Cardinal (later Osprey) class coastal mine hunter ships (MHC).[4] Construction was slow due to a general loss of mine warfare ship construction expertise in U.S. shipyards, and the Avenger class average cost grew to $260 million dollars a unit (in 2009 dollars) by the time they were complete and in active service.[5] Initial units of the MCM class were in service in time to participate in mine hunting and clearance actions during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. While mines claimed no Allied ship losses, significant damage was incurred by the cruiser USS Princeton (CG 59) and USS Tripoli (LPH 10) due to hitting World War 1 design contact mines.

     The continued construction of both the MCM and MHC classes through the 1990’s appeared to have renewed the U.S. surface mine warfare capability, but this force is now aging as the MSO’s were in the 1970’s. In fact, the whole of the U.S. mine warfare capability, including surface ships, helicopters and explosive ordnance detachment (EOD) capabilities are, in the words of mine warfare expert Dr. Scott Truver, “brittle” and have historically accounted for less than 1% of the Navy’s program for funding and operations.[6] The Osprey class MHC’s have already been retired in the decade of the 2000’s. The last MCM is scheduled to leave service in 2024, and the MH-53E Sea Dragon minesweeping helicopters will depart active duty in 2025.[7]

USS Coronado (LCS 4) and JHSV 3 USNS Millinocket

     The Navy has obviously learned an important lesson in that dedicated mine warfare ships is not the best way to preserve a mine warfare capability. The service has committed to making the surface component of its mine warfare a modular vice platform specific capability. Multiple surface platforms may eventually deploy variants of the LCS mine warfare module. The Joint High Speed Vessel (JHSV) is one such ship, and recent exercises have explored the idea of outfitting the ship with an expeditionary mine warfare capability. Other ships with the space for the autonomous air, surface and subsurface platforms associated with the mine warfare modular might also deploy all or parts of this capability.

     This modular package of systems was always intended to be flexible and able to add or remove equipment based on the current threat. If the RMS and associated RMMV are not capable of meeting critical performance parameters, then other systems such as unmanned surface (the Minehunting Unmanned SurfaceVehicle (MHU) and Common Unmanned Surface Vessel (C-USV) or subsurface (MK 18Mod 1 Swordfish and Mod 2 Kingfish Unmanned Underwater Vehicles) systems may fill its position in the LCS mine warfare module (weight restrictions permitting). It is also worth noting that nothing in Dr. Gilmore's 03 August 2024 letter to OUSD, AT&L condemns the LCS program, or the concept of modularity for mine warfare. Specifically:

 “The reliability of existing systems is so poor that it poses a significant risk to both the up coming operational test of the LCS Independence-variant equipped with the first increment of the Mine Countermeasures (MCM) mission package, and to the Navy's plan to field and sustain a viable LCS-based mine hunting and mine clearance capability prior to fiscal year (FY)20.”[8]

     Mine warfare must continue to move past manpower intensive, ship specific capabilities to modular, automated systems. Surface ship mine sweeping is an intensive, very physical process that quickly saps a crew's endurance. There is good reason behind the aphorism of “hunt when you can and sweep when you must”. Mine sweeping operations on U.S. MCM ships involve the whole crew; often in “port and starboard” (six hours on and six hours off) watches that could last for up to a week. This operation also places highly trained sailors in the midst of an active mine field in order to accomplish their mission. Mine hunting in order to clear a swept channel through a mine field can be accomplished entirely through unmanned units like the RMMV, and other automated surface and subsurface platforms. Sweeping is best left for post-conflict clearance operations like that to clear Haiphong harbor in 1973, the Suez Canal in 1974 and the Persian Gulf in 1991 and 2003.

     The LCS remains the right platform to host the bulk of the surface ship mine warfare capability. An LCS-based capability frees the mine warfare capability from over a century of confinement aboard small, slow, short-legged ships often incapable of operations outside the shallow littoral zones of the world’s oceans. Furthermore, it ends the period of mine warfare as an arcane; little understood concept of naval warfare beyond those few sailors assigned to dedicated mine warfare platforms. The planned large force of LCS and FF variants has the potential to introduce the mine warfare module to a larger joint and multinational audience. A modular mine warfare capability can become just as common as helicopter-based antisubmarine warfare.

AN/SLQ-48 MNV

     Finally, it should be remembered that the RMS and its associtated RMMV have been in development since the 1990’s. Many RMMV’s are over 10 years old and their advanced age may play a role in their less than satisfactory performance. Poor RMMV performance may also be indicative of the poor funding state of Navy mine countermeasures in general since the mid 1990’s when the MHC class entered active service. Current fleet mine hunting capabilities remain resident in the aging AN/SLQ-48 Mine Neutralization Vehicle (MNV) whose tether to its host ship platform is 3500 feet in length.[9] The RMMV has no tether as does the older MNV and may still offer a significant improvement in fleet mine countermeasures capability beyond current legacy systems.[10]

     Mine Warfare in the U.S. Navy has been a neglected discipline for nearly two decades. The change to a modular capability from its previous platform-centric model can liberate the mine warfare discipline from its century-long confinement aboard small, slow ships with little survivability. Problems with one system of the modular capability should not distract Congress or the Navy from making the important change to surface naval mine warfare.

    

                

---

[1] Tamera Moser Melia, Damn the Torpedoes, A Short History of U.S. Naval Mine Countermeasures,Washington D.C., The United States Navy Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1991 p. 97.

[2] Ibid, p. 98

[3] http://www.navy.mil/ah_online/archpdf/ah198502.pdf, p. 26.

[4] Melia, pp. 117, 118.

[5] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/111th-congress-2009-2010/reports/07-17-smallcombatants.pdf, p. 6 (author: Dr. Eric J. Labs, supervised by Dr. J. Michael Gilmore and Matthew Goldberg)

[6] Truver, p. 47.

[7] Ibid, p. 48.

 [8] J. Michael Gilmore, Letter to Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and      Logistics (OUSD, AT&L) Frank Kendall, subject: Remote Multi-Mission Vehicle (RMMV) and Remote Minehunting System (RMS) Reliability, 03 August 2015.

[9] Norman Friedman, The Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapon Systems, 5^th Edition, Annapolis, Md, U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2006, p. 821

[10] http://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed/data/ms2/documents/RMS-brochure.pdf