Captain Mark Vandroff and I have a piece over at USNI News on how to reform the acquisition system to enable a greater vision of American Seapower.
Have a look here.
Saturday, January 23, 2024
Monday, January 18, 2024
Surface Navy Association 2016 Wrap Up Panel
Ron O'Rourke, Chris Cavas, and Eric Labs consented to appear with me on a panel at the Surface Navy Association 2016 Symposium--with VADM Lee Gunn ably moderating.
Friday, January 15, 2024
Thoughts on the Farsi Island Incident January 12
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1) Even 48 hours after the initial incident it doesn't even appear CENTCOM or the Pentagon has a full accounting of the details of exactly what happened. People who have been telling the narrative since the incident first occurred are sure to be proven wrong, since they have almost certainly been guessing as to causes and motives. In the end, it is starting to look to be exactly what it looks like... a bunch of young sailors lost because of reliance on technology and/or machinery that failed. There is also, potentially, a training issue here related to navigation and leadership.
2) Those who are claiming the US Navy should have shot their way out of the standoff - when it appears the US Navy sailors actually involved appeared to have convinced themselves their ships were inside Iranian waters - make very interesting and yet terrible arguments for shooting at Iranians. Farsi Island may be a disputed Island in the Persian Gulf, but there is an IRGC naval base on that island and presence in the first rule of ownership. If the Iranian Navy, or Russian Navy, or any Navy drifted armed boats into US waters off Kings Bay, I suspect the US Coast Guard and/or US Navy would be very quick to point guns and be active in detaining the drifters.
3) I am unable to see any strategic advantage the US would have gained by fighting Iran inside the 3 mile zone of Iranian territory, and I am unable to see any strategic consequence to the US by not fighting Iran inside the 3 mile zone of Iranian territory. However, had the US Navy tried to shoot their way out of that situation, the strategic consequences would have been significant, and not just how it relates to Iran. Such a violent action would have given China a valid example to act the same way in disputed places in the South China Sea. If the US Navy is going to lead the global commons based on our interpretation of the rules at sea, the LT who apologized (and everyone on the political right is flogging) just forwarded America strategically. I note it is primarily the parochial arguments from people whose expertise lies in other military services like the Army who have completely ignored the details like global rule sets at sea who have been the loudest to shout at the Navy in this incident. With all due respect, this is an incredibly parochial and shortsided overreaction of the incident, because the National Review can and should do better than finding an Army guy - Bing West (whom I know and respect but wtf...) when it comes to a complex naval incident. This isn't the Pueblo, nor is it the Korean War. There will be no museum in Iran, and both the boats and the crews were returned.
4) This is one of those difficult issues that, in my mind, separates serious people who care about serious strategic issues the US faces in the 21st century and demagogues who see conspiracy and opportunity in every political crisis. If you are a partisan who sees a conspiracy, go away. For the rest of us, there are serious naval issues here that need serious answers. These are a few of the initial questions that should be considered.
- Is the maintenance of the riverine command boats contracted to the point the onboard crew was unable to repair the problem? The crew of only 5 sailors per boat suggests to me that something might be off with the manpower and maintenance procedures surrounding these very capable chess pieces of naval equipment. The RCB is made to fight in the Persian Gulf, but a broken RCB isn't going to win.
- This is a teaching moment if there ever was one, and as an incident this appears to represent a textbook case study on the reasons why the Navy needs more, not fewer, Commands for junior officers. It may be the opinion of some hard core political demagogues who have over a decade of tactical success combined with over a decade of strategic failure that this incident is somehow a defeat for America, but each new fact that emerges from this incident suggests to me this may be a case of procedural failure far beyond the scope of a LT... but when shit happened, strategic acumen by the officer in charge (LT) is potentially emerging as a feature in handling a bad situation and not making it worse. The facts are still unknown, and we may not know for sure for awhile, but regardless of what the facts are in the end I see this as a very teachable moment that favors the argument for early Command as often as possible for junior officers.
- I have no problem with high profile diplomatic incidents like this between the US Navy and Iran, as long as for each incident the actions of the US Navy is aligned with the strategic aims of the United States. If the US Navy had attacked the IRGC inside the territorial waters of Farsi Island to defend their boats, this would be a major strategic setback for the US. Had the incident occurred outside the territorial waters of Iran and the US Navy not fought back; that would also be a strategic setback for the US. Right now it appears the US Navy sailors on the scene did everything right.
- The only way to produce a genuine strategic failure from this incident is to unfairly punish those involved, in other words... if the Navy wants better commanders, handle early career mistakes the right way. Tell me how any of those 10 sailors are somehow worse off for this incident. If legitimate mistakes were made, deal with it appropriately, but pinning blame for things out of their control would be a failure of leadership, and in my mind an unforgivable sin.
- At the end of the day, this was a real diplomatic test of the US and Iran who under the recent agreement are partners in Iran's nuclear energy ambitions. The outcome is very positive for the United States. I don't trust the government of Iran, but I am yet to see anything from this incident that suggests to me Iran has has been inappropriate. If you're the American Idiot who doesn't think it was appropriate for the US Navy sailors to have their hands on their heads at any point in the engagement near the IRGC base on Farsi Island, try drifting your private armed boat into the US Navy area of Kings Bay or Norfolk or New London and pretend like there is a snowballs chance in hell you will get out of there without your hands on your head. You will have your hands on your head, or if you point a gun back at the US Navy or US Coast Guard, you will be shot dead by very serious people who protect that location and will be pointing guns at you. You don't even have to be an Iranian for that outcome to occur, nor will you need an Iranian flag on your boat, a US flag will result in the same action. Wake up people, don't let the silly season control your ability to think with objectivity.
I look forward to learning what really happened, because at the end of the day we have a well armed naval craft in the middle of the Persian Gulf with a serious mechanical problem that couldn't be quickly resolved apparently combined with some incredibly bad navigation from two crews who somehow found their way to the only piece of land between their departure location and destination that could create a diplomatic problem. When you swim past all the political bullshit, the serious naval specific issues on the table leave a lot of serious questions that deserve serious answers.
Monday, January 11, 2024
GAO Wrong on LCS Survivability
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| USS Fort Worth Arrives in Singapore, December 2014, Military.com |
GAO has secured much of its evidence for
LCS’s lack of survivability from a Total Ship Survivability Trial (TSST)
conducted on USS Fort Worth (LCS 3)
in October 2014.[1] TSST focuses on the crew
training necessary to conduct the damage control to restore the ship’s
operational capability while it remains in a combat environment. LCS would
obviously not fare well in such testing for two reasons. First, a substantial
portion of the equipment that could be damaged in an attack and the additional
personnel that operate that equipment are not physically present on the current
sea frames. They are resident in the yet to be fully developed mission modules.
Any present TSST of LCS would be partially incomplete. Second, LCS is not
designed to restore battle damage and immediately return to the fight, as are higher
capability warships. It was conceived to survive damage and withdraw as
necessary.[2]
GAO acknowledges the limits of the LCS
Concept of Operations (CONOPS) and notes the Navy’s 2012 change in the
foundation of survivability from ship “characteristics” to “capabilities.”[3]
The agency persists, however, in aiming its report on the sea frame’s physical
damage control aspects; its characteristics, rather than its capabilities to
avoid or prevent attack, such as its installed active and passive defense
systems.[4] It
continues to reference a 2004 Navy measurement of survivability in describing
LCS that is no longer used by the Navy. GAO notes the deletion of three design
features of survivability from previous LCS designs due to weight/cost
considerations. Given that the sea frame’s armament is unchanged, it seems that
these missing elements were characteristics and not capabilities. Finally, GAO
seems to suggest that the Navy deliberately changed the LCS CONOPS in order to,
“To compensate for any gaps in the
ship’s survivability and lethality capabilities.”[5]
The
Navy altered its survivability
description for good reason. The principal threats faced by surface
warships have significantly changed in the last two decades. The proliferation
of capable cruise missiles, submarine torpedoes, and naval mines represents a
significant threat to any ship less than 600 feet in length and 10,000 tons
displacement. These limits encompass the entire U.S. Navy surface combatant
force (excepting the Zumwalt class
destroyer.) Damage to U.S. Navy surface ships in the last several decades has
been limited to small cruise missiles such as the Exocets that damaged the USS Stark in 1987 and the relatively small influence and contact mines
that crippled the USS Princeton in
1991 and nearly sank the USS Samuel B.
Roberts in 1988. Current versions of these weapons are larger, faster and
much more capable. The recent Russian cruise missile salvo (at least 26
missiles) fired against land targets in Syria from a
flotilla of small warships suggests the level of threat faced by U.S.
warships.[6]
Surface combatants no longer carry armor and are fully dependent on their
installed active and passive defense systems to avoid, decoy or shoot down such
weapons. While damage control remains important, survivability must not be
fully predicated on a ship’s physical characteristics. The Navy’s measurement
of survivability properly changed in response to the change in the threat to
surface ships from a new generation of larger and more capable cruise missiles,
and improved torpedoes and mines.
GAO’s assessment of the lethality of LCS suffers from the same problems
associated with its survivability measurements. The agency agrees that LCS
completed interim testing of its surface warfare (SUW) package in April 2014,
but then said that testing was incomplete due to the lack of both sea frames
being tested (a valid point), but also because not all SUW requirements could
be met. That should not be a surprise considering the evaluated SUW package was
an interim fitting and not the ship’s final operational capability module.
Testing cited by GAO, and done by the Director of Operational Test and
Evaluation (DOT&E) further states that the testing of the SUW package was,
“insufficient to provide statistical confidence that LCS can consistently
demonstrate this level of performance.”[7]
How much testing of an interim package is required to attain statistical
confidence and how much would this testing cost or limit the ship’s operational
employment? DOT&E in fact requires the LCS program to re-test an entire
mission package if even one component (however small) is changed. LCS is
dependent on the ability to rapidly field new mission packages in response to
different tactical and operational circumstances. The testing regime of the
analysis community would seem to limit this important LCS capability.
The threat environment facing the LCS has changed significantly since
the program was announced in November 2001. The Navy has attempted to respond
to this change by modifying the sea frame, mission modules and ship’s CONOPS to
meet the changing threat environment. The analysis community, as represented by
GAO and DOT&E seems trapped in the relatively stable Cold War and post-Cold
War era where slow, predictable, incremental change was managed through an
ever-expanding test and evaluation regime. LCS, with many of its most lethal
capabilities in separate mission modules, and/or still under development will
not likely meet the requirements of the 1960’s-era analysis community until its
mission modules are fully developed. The ability of LCS to rapidly adjust its capabilities
in response to new threats will remain limited with such stringent testing
requirements accompanying each mission package change.
GAO’s unhappiness with LCS should come as no surprise. A short review of
the last 40 years of surface warship construction suggests that the agency has
little love for any particular platform. It has severely criticized the Perry class frigate for survivability
issues[8];
the Spruance class destroyer for a
lack of lethality[9]; and the
Ticonderoga class cruiser for lack of
AEGIS testing and room for growth.[10]
GAO has a point in suggesting that capability-based survival of warships
needs evaluation beyond modeling and simulation. Live fire tests on naval
platforms were the normative method of predicting survivability from the 1920’s
through the end of the Cold War.[11]
The number of hits a vessel could sustain was an adequate predictor of its
survival as an operational contributor in combat. The development of more powerful weapons, the evolution of very
effective active and passive defense systems and the accelerated fragility of
surface combatants in supporting them have changed these time-honored
evaluation criteria. Those active and passive systems are now the equivalent of
what armor was to combatants of the early 20th century. While these
systems have been tested through modeling and simulation, the only real way to
examine their effectiveness is through expensive live fire exercises against a
target ship with active systems including surface to air missiles, guns and
electronic countermeasures. This last recommendation is a useful contribution
from the GAO report, but the office must recommend such testing for all surface
combatants and not just LCS.
Evaluation of LCS using Cold War-era methodology is
not an accurate measurement of the class’ survivability or lethality. GAO has a
long history of criticizing surface combatant programs, and the office’s present
dislike of LCS should be no surprise. GAO should recommend that all
surface combatants be tested according to their capabilities and not just their
characteristics. Finally, GAO should re-evaluate the survivability of LCS to take into account its modular design.
Friday, January 1, 2025
Some New Year's Thoughts On Aircraft Carriers
The year past was an important one for the Navy and its power projection centerpiece, the large, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Dr. Jerry Hendrix and I got things off to a rollicking start in January with an old-school debate about carriers at the Naval Academy, my think-tank released a study that makes the case for the necessity of the carrier in the high end fight--a view 180 degrees out of the prevailing narrative of China's A2AD arsenal rendering the carrier obsolete, and Hendrix rounded out the year with a superb study of how the carrier's "retreat from range" had indeed fed the narrative just referenced.Along the way, the Senate Armed Services Committee led by its Chairman Senator John McCain (R-AZ) performed a necessary and critical oversight role in relentlessly urging the Navy to reduce the cost of the carrier and improve its acquisition performance. Additionally, Senator McCain sent the Navy and other organizations off to evaluate alternative carrier designs, because he asserts, "we simply cannot afford to pay $12.9B for a single ship." Those evaluations will hit the street in 2016, which is incidentally the year the nation's newest carrier USS GERALD R FORD (CVN 78) is due to be commissioned.
Having so publicly defended the aircraft carrier in 2015, I begin 2016 by asserting that I am not an aircraft carrier advocate, just as I am not a destroyer advocate, or a maritime patrol aircraft advocate (both of which I will defend with the same tenacity as I do the CVN). No, I am a Seapower advocate, and because I continue to cling to the increasingly outdated notion that our Navy and Marine Corps perform the equally strategically important functions of preventing AND conducting war, I will continue to defend the aircraft carrier's centrality in a balanced fleet capable of performing both of these functions.
So to get the year off on the right foot, a few thoughts to baseline what is likely to be another year of churn on this topic.
- It's the Air Wing, Stupid. While I disagree with Senator McCain's pronouncement that we "...cannot afford to pay $12.9B for a single ship" (see below), the plain, ugly truth is that if the FORD Class cost $9B, its utility in deterring the wars we must not fight (and the wars that we therefore cannot lose) would not be any more apparent. To put it another way, whether we spend $12.9B or $9B or $5B--the money will be ill-allocated unless the main battery of the carrier evolves to meet the threat. By that, I mean that the air wing must evolve (as it has consistently for seven decades) to provide long range stealthy strike, sea control, ISR, and organic refueling, if even the first dollar allocated in carrier construction is to be worthwhile. Jerry Hendrix report above, and the one we did at Hudson (also cited) make this point forcefully. Without this evolution (and a timely evolution at that), the carrier will indeed become what its critics have predicted for decades, an expensive anachronism. And as the Hudson study asserted, the carrier--with an upgraded air wing--is likely to provide essential and unique combat capability in high end scenarios under consideration. But only if the air wing evolves.
- What Should a Carrier Cost? Many critics of the FORD Class take aim squarely at its cost, most recently estimated by the Navy at $12.9B. My response to them is, what should it cost? What should a floating, nuclear-powered air base, that moves...at 40 plus knots....for fifty years...cost? Against what are you comparing it? No other bit of military kit is as complex or as useful as the aircraft carrier, and very few examples of military hardware last as long. Are we so unduly influenced by its acquisition cost that we lose the ability to adequately assess the long term return on investment? Also, since we buy a carrier once every five years, about a third of one percent of every dollar spent on defense in those five years are spent on CVN's. Are the above benefits not worth a third of a percent? We are entering a new era of great power contention, and the post-Cold War model of defense spending is insufficient. We need to begin building up to meet the challenges of this new competition, and while we must continue to do everything we can to drive excess cost out of acquisition programs, perspective and understanding of what is required to meet this challenge is necessary. Viewing an asset with the capability and flexibility of the CVN--even at its current cost--as "unaffordable" is simply inconsistent with the demands of the future.
- You Can't Go Backward, You Won't Do Better, and Steel and Space are Cheap. Chairman McCain's direction to the Navy to go back to the drawing board and to study alternative carrier designs is a useful and necessary task, one that forces what is a characteristically hidebound organization to examine its presumptions and prove its assertions. Similar inquiries have been forced upon the Navy in the past, as the Hudson study above recounts. Each time, however, two consistent themes arise in the analysis. Bigger is better, and nuclear power is preferable to fossil fuels. Size and propulsion are directly related to the performance of the ship/air wing system, as measured by a diverse series of metrics including sortie generation, aircraft size accommodation, range, and mission diversity. Because steel and space are relatively cheap, the additional size gained in a larger carrier creates disproportionately large increases in performance. Put another way, if the Navy is presented with a design for an aircraft carrier that costs 2/3 of what the FORD costs AND can deliver 2/3 of its performance (or better)--it should consider buying it. You can substitute any ratio into the previous sentence, and my view would be the same. The trouble is, such a carrier does not appear to exist. If this nation simply wants to spend less on its aircraft carriers because it believes them to be too expensive, than our leaders need to step forward and declare that they are content with buying proportionally less capability. Some have suggested simply dropping back, retooling, and building NIMITZ class carriers again beginning in the 2020's. Such a path should be considered among the various options. My gut tells me that the cost of such a move, coupled with a decrease in ship/air wing performance that would occur, would be nonsensical in comparison to continuing to build FORD Class carriers and benefiting from the historic constant dollar decline in cost of ships in serial production.
- Competition For Hulls Would Be Nice, But It Is Not Going To Happen With Our Current Industrial Base. Building large, complex surface ships is done at frightfully few places in the United States. Building large complex surface ships from which fixed wing aircraft can be launched and recovered is done at two places in the United States. Building large, complex nuclear-powered surface ships from which fixed wing aircraft can be launched and recovered is done at one place in the United States. While I take a backseat to no one in my support for the benefits of competition in free markets, I am unconvinced that any attempt to inject hull-based competition into the carrier program will have any impact on cost--except to increase it. If the United States decided that it needed additional shipbuilding capacity in order to produce a competed, conventionally powered aircraft carrier, it would almost certainly have to invest billions of dollars into capital improvements at an existing yard that isn't owned by the one company that owns both yards currently capable of doing so (Huntington Ingalls Industries at its Newport News, VA and Pascagoula, MS yards). The cost of capitalizing a second nuclear powered aircraft carrier building yard would be enormous. Putting aside the prohibitive costs of competing hulls, were we to push for a conventionally powered variant simply to reduce total costs, we run into the problems cited above in #3. To the extent that competition CAN be pushed back into the CVN program, it is going to largely reside in the Government Furnished Equipment (GFE) that the shipbuilder is provided with, and competition for these items demands that the horrible mistakes in early CVN 78 program management and oversight not be repeated. The 2002 decision to inject over a dozen unproven technology upgrades into the first hull (CVN 78) rather than across the first three, dealt this program early blows from which it is only now recovering. Congress must continue to hammer the Navy on the twin/related problems of immature designs and concurrency, while ensuring that as much competition is injected into the furnishing of mature capability.
- The Burden is On the Critics to Show The Extensibility of Their Views. If someone were to come forward with a fleet architecture that either diminished or eliminated the importance of the CVN while maintaining the balance of conventional deterrence and warfighting that exists in the current fleet, I would walk away from the CVN in a heartbeat. But like the proportionally capable/cheaper aircraft carrier, such a fleet architecture does not currently exist. The perturbations from the current fleet architecture either diminish warfighting in order to plus up deterrence, or (as we see from the letter above from SECDEF to SECNAV) they diminish deterrence in order to plus up wafighting. I do not believe that the current fleet architecture is the ONLY one that could accomplish the required balance between conventional warfighting and deterrence. But in my view, any competing approach MUST demonstrate in some reasonable manner that it maintains such a balance, or that such a balance is no longer required or desired.
Ok, release the hounds. There are a few things to chew on as we all consider how to best contribute to the robust debate underway in our area of collective interest. Happy New Year.
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