Why the Navy Needs Disruption Now
steveblank.com
steveblank.com
For the Navy, a Horizon 3 conversation would not be about better carriers and aircraft. Instead it would focus on the core reasons the Navy deploys a carrier strike group: to show the flag for deterrence, or to control part of the sea to protect shipping, or to protect a Marine amphibious force, or to project offensive power against any adversary in well-defended areas.
Carriers are vulnerable and probably cannot be protected enough to survive an all out war. Too often the conversation gets side-tracked by this debate. However, carriers are very useful outside of war for projecting power and influence around the globe, so they are still very useful.
It seems like the modern militaries are probably already well aware of these two separate things, to the point where there are probably two different conversations about Horizon 1/2/3, one for projecting the appearance of power for diplomatic leverage, and the other for wartime efficacy.
I guess that's probably true if your objective is to wage war and kill.
If your objective is to prevent or minimize those things than it's probably not your biggest problem at all and is actually your biggest accomplishment.
I'm saying that if you're going to fight a war in Vietnam, you should land the Marines at Haiphong and capture Hanoi, rather than idle away ten years and tens of thousands of American lives on a failed adventure, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians that died along the way.
If you're going to topple the government of a middle eastern country, you need to actually stick out the occupation and build a structure that will stand on it's own, rather than descending into anarchy when you pull out. If you're not willing to invest in that, then perhaps you shouldn't invest in the initial "Shock and Awe" portion of the campaign.
Moreover, 3000 years of history should be enough to convince anyone that invading Afghanistan is a terrible idea, maybe one step down from "launch an invasion of Russia in late summer."
Even though the Chinese troops were poorly armed and poorly trained relative to US troops they had undergone some degree of moderization since the Korean War where they had fought the UN to a standstill. Given the logistical advantages of the Chinese to mass men and material (it was on their border vs half the world away) it isn't obvious the US would have prevailed in a escalated conflict. China was also a nuclear power by 1965 which was not true during the Korean War.
But I don't think any of this disagrees with the main point of your comment which is don't intervene where the rules of engagement prevent you from winning.
Both Gulf wars saw thorough and decisive military victories by US and Coalition forces. That wasn't the problem.
Are you referring to something like WW2, where the entire population is mobilized in the production of material for the war? Do you mean "total war"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_projection
You just have your terminology wrong.
Carriers have already proven themselves as valuable assets over half a century of relative peace. This is what they are to me: peace time projection platforms.
There's this idea where there are two sides in war scenarios, offense and defense, attackers and defenders, like sports or whatever. It seems to me more like modern war wouldn't be two sides playing offense and defense, it would be two parties dishing out incomprehensible destruction and one-upping each other hoping that the other gives up first.
Carriers don't travel by themselves, and are heavily defended by anti-missile/plane/sub/etc installations and supporting vessels.
They may not last an entire war, but they will probably last as long as needed to tip the scale. It's more likely the carrier's aircraft will be lost before the carrier.
https://warisboring.com/the-u-s-navy-s-big-mistake-building-...
A modern war with another major nation likely won't last months or years like traditional wars. There's too much destructive firepower available to major nations for that to be realistic.
It's more likely that it will be destructive, brutal, and very swift.
Not to mention Rickover said that nearly 40 years ago - our modern carrier groups have a lot more firepower and technology at their disposal - including new generation stealthy ships.
Aren't we past the point where giant war machines have much effectiveness when it comes to actual global war between 1st world nation-states?
Build drone carriers. Who needs brave pilots in fighter seats when you can get the same results with slightly less brave drone operators? You can pack a lot more than 44 drones in each carrier.
Repurpose container ships. If Russians can launch cruise missiles directly from shipping containers (4 missiles per standard 40-feet container), the same can be done with drones. Imagine how much of them can be packed in 1000-container container ship, which looks like any other civilian cargo ship until the need arises.
Drone operators can control entire formations of combat drones (no need to actually fly these things — point and click interface should be enough with modern tech). Autonomous refueling, sensor fusion, battlespace mapping — the only need for humans in the loop is giving "go / no go" for kill requests.
Use large coordinated battlegroups with numerous uniform modular cheaper vessels instead of a few big expensive carriers surrounded by combat support. Every ship can (and should) be fitted with ECC and offensive electronic warfare options, which prevents attacking electronic support first. Try to jam 200 small ships simultaneously while they are constantly on the move in the large area — nearly impossible. No designated C&C ships — all battlegroup members can take multiple roles as needed, including command and control.
Fail-deadly "nuclear options" — if battlegroup communications are jammed beyond repair, drones can be programmed to proceed with their missions fully autonomously, until kill switch signal arrives. Looks harsh, but better than actual nuclear option.
Etc etc.
> Build drone carriers.
You mean like regular carriers will be with N-UCLASS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_X-47B) or the optionally-manned F/A-XX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F/A-XX_Program)?
> looks like any other civilian cargo ship until the need arises.
This is called Perfidy. It's a war crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy
> Drone operators can control entire formations of combat drones
They have a hard enough time controlling one -- bandwidth requirements and ensuring reliable communication are hard.
> point and click interface should be enough with modern tech
Right up until your adversary degrades your access to all that modern tech. Military tech needs to be literally bullet-proof.
> programmed to proceed with their missions fully autonomously
The UN disagrees. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/09/un-urged-to-...
Maybe, but it looks like a bit of a grey area. The WP article you link states that "Ruses of war are not prohibited", and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruse_de_guerre includes this:
disguising a warship to appear to be a neutral merchant vessel, or a merchant vessel on your opponent's side, has traditionally been considered a legitimate ruse de guerre, provided the belligerent raises their own flag to break the deception, prior to firing their guns. This was called sailing under false colors. Both sides during the world wars used this tactic, most famously the Royal Navy's Q ships.
and also this:
German commando Otto Skorzeny led his troops wearing American uniforms to infiltrate American lines in Operation Greif during the Battle of the Bulge. Skorzeny later reported that he was told by experts in military law that wearing American uniforms was a defensible ruse de guerre, provided his troops took off their American uniforms, and put on German uniforms, prior to firing their weapons. Skorzeny was acquitted by a United States military court in Dachau in 1947, after his defense counsel argued that the "wearing of American uniforms was a legitimate ruse of war for espionage and sabotage" as described by The New York Times.
> This is called Perfidy. It's a war crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy
I agree with all of your points except this one. Traditionally, disguising a warship as a neutral or enemy merchant is a legitimate ruse de guerre provided the deception is broken before the vessel attacks. There has never been a prohibition against arming merchants or concealing armaments on a vessel flying its proper colors.
Primarily because we can't get the same results with slightly less brave drone operators. High-performance UAS are significantly more expensive and still far less capable than their manned counterparts in contested airspace; their primary advantage is in loiter time because they don't require a pilot and can be optimized for efficient flight in low-airspeed regimes (at the cost of their medium and high airspeed performance). "Like a manned aircraft, but with more latency (or autonomous controls and planning techniques we don't yet know how to implement well against an opponent actively attempting to make your life difficult), a bigger price tag, and a kill chain enormously vulnerable to electronic warfare" is not a good selling point.
Your arsenal ship idea isn't a bad one (except for the bit where it renders all civilian shipping a valid target in times of war and is also a war crime, though without knowing that I can see why it would be appealing :), but those ships already exist. Those shipping containers are called VLS cells, and the autonomous expendable relatively inexpensive point-and-click drones that accept sensor and targeting input from external platforms are the missiles that go in them. E-2D and F-35 CEC already exists and has been demonstrated with midflight SM-6 guidance handover to strike OTH targets; man-out-of-the-loop sensor fusion has been a part of the USN's ABM program for a while now, and they've been launching SM-3s with cueing from external platforms for years and years. The USN quad-packs ESSMs, too, though ESSM is purpose-built point defense against super and hypersonic maneuvering targets, not an AAW tool.
>Drone operators can control entire formations of combat drones (no need to actually fly these things — point and click interface should be enough with modern tech). Autonomous refueling, sensor fusion, battlespace mapping — the only need for humans in the loop is giving "go / no go" for kill requests.
This largely ties into the USN's view of the future (cf. various whitepapers), except that the USN views it as a sensor/shooter divide where the drones are extremely LO sensor platforms datalinking target information to arsenal platforms capable of engaging at extreme range with huge numbers of weapons.
>numerous uniform modular cheaper vessels instead of a few big expensive carriers surrounded by combat support
Small ships are awful. No, really: they're horribly inefficient, because as soon as you run up against their tiny volume, weight, or power generation limits, you need to build another copy of them with all of the same supporting crew and systems to get more capability. That means a ton of inefficient small turbines generating power for duplicated systems, significantly more crew (who are actually far and away the most expensive part of operating a ship across its lifetime), and significantly less capable individual combatants. Compare the Sachsen-class (5800t displacement) with 32 VLS cells (each cell representing one missile to use for offense and defense) to the Arleigh Burke-class (up to 9800t displacement), which has 96 VLS cells, each storing one missile for offensive purposes (SM-6 in anti-air or anti-surface mode) or four for defensive purposes (quad-packed ESSM).
The three Sachsen-class ships you need to purchase to have the same offensive and defensive capabilities of the Burke (minus ABM capability, which the Sachsen lacks) cost $3.18 billion to acquire, vs. the $1.8 billion for a Burke. You're also paying, training, and feeding 729 crew members for the Sachsens, but only 329 in a Burke. Additionally, groups of smaller ships are much more vulnerable to attrition in saturation attacks unless they're sitting right on top of one another, as you can defeat any given one of them by engaging it with slightly more missiles than it's capable of taking out (i.e. 1 to 3 + 32 anti-ship weapons, assuming your Sachsen has a perfect defense), whereas to sink one Burke you need to strike it with 1 to 3 + up to a hypothetical maximum of 384 missiles, if you've quad-packed every VLS cell and have a perfect defense.
Smaller ships are just not worth it. If you're willing to spend the money it takes to have a world-class navy, you're better off taking the far more efficient route by building arsenal ships with hundreds of extremely long range weapons and networking them with sensor platforms.
>Every ship can (and should) be fitted with ECC and offensive electronic warfare options, which prevents attacking electronic support first
This is already the case.
>Try to jam 200 small ships simultaneously while they are constantly on the move in the large area — nearly impossible
That's simply not really how electronic warfare works. 200 small ships facing a one-axis attack are no less vulnerable to noise jamming than one ship. If you want to force your enemy to expend a lot of emitters on various more advanced techniques, the most efficient way to do that is by simply having more of your own emitters to jam, and the most efficient way to do THAT is not to build a bunch of ships with them, but by putting them on aircraft or in large quantities on larger ships.
>No designated C&C ships — all battlegroup members can take multiple roles as needed, including command and control.
This is desired irl, but the training overhead is difficult (not everyone is good at C3) and it tends to rely on the assumption that your opponent is not capable of messing with your datalinks (which is not a safe assumption to make).
Regarding datalinks — AFAIK, modern platforms streaming realtime and sensor feeds for humans in the loop, and bandwidth requirements for these are huge. If most non-combat decisions are taken autonomously, you can downstream only basic telemetry and go / no go requests. In serious jamming conditions, getting even 1 bit of information through can be beneficial ("proceed with mission plan A" / "proceed with mission plan B").
Even with that bias though things like rail guns and theater defense with lasers is continuing. If I were in a H-3 think tank I would be seriously thinking about what it means to have computers and sensors to be "free". Consider what it would mean if in addition to a tracer round in CIWS you fired a sensor round. A bullet with a cpu, a network, an a 9dof inertia sensor and one bit optical sensor. All sensor bullets in flight sending back telemetry about position and optical transits on their sensors above the horizon. Now your anti-ship missile has to be stealthy and invisible.
That is just off the cuff but such sets of sensors are cheaper to deploy than some of these bullets.
[1] https://www.usnwc.edu/getattachment/87bcd2ff-c7b6-4715-b2ed-...
But I was hopelessly lost when it tried to draw an analogue between the 'need for disruption' and the larger, big-picture view of why we have aircraft carriers in the first place.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the point, but I certainly don't want any sort of disruptive, mavericky thinking applied to how, why, when a Navy (any Navy, not just "ours") deploys force projection. This does not sound like an appealing recipe for responsible use of force and for limiting provocation of other parties to just below the level that they're willing to retaliate, and the like. So, in short, I don't understand the point the author's trying to make.
Today, the way we do this carrier strike groups. The author is arguing that the carrier strike model for achieving these goals is now ~50 years old. If you were to start today from a blank slate to achieve those goals, you'd construct something very different from a strike force. This is where he's suggesting mavericky thinking ought to be applied - in coming up with those blank slate solutions.
* Contracting takes forever -- actual times measured in months to years. We haven't had proper planning and budgeting from congress for almost a decade, so funds that expire are released late, forcing the services to take a bad deal signed quickly over a good deal that would come too late.
* No flexibility. Projects are funded as "Programs of Record" (or not at all) and funded for their life-cycle in the budget. Services fight endlessly to keep PoRs no matter how they turn out because it is so damn hard to start new programs.
* The system is designed to allow bad deals. It's legal (and not uncommon) for a prime contractor to subcontract work through a middle-man corporation that contracts back to a subsidiary of the prime to perform the work. DoD acquisition contracts include a negotiated profit fee with the prime, but often have no insight into the structure of their lower-level deals, allowing the primes to take a profit straight off the top, then an additional cut at the working level.
* All new acquisitions are driven "top-down" by resource sponsors distilling warfighter needs into "requirements" that are then solved with a materiel solution.
* We spend a lot of money on this stuff, and we can't make new programs, so we end up supporting things long after their planned EOL. Check out B-52s, A-10s, F/A-18s, weapons, etc. It costs a lot of money to keep supporting this stuff.
* PoRs usually require a competitive tech development phase where you pay two prime contractors to build solutions before doing a competitive down-select.
So... Make it easier to contract. Easier to spend small amounts of money to test solutions. PoRs should grow out of successful products, not the BS we do now. Be a bully in contract negotiations, and put some teeth in the regulations on contractors playing shell games. We don't see much innovation because the services can't move quickly, and they can't adapt to changing requirements.
How bout we disrupt that?
With that in mind we ought to quit pouring all of our money on weapons designed for enemies that we can never realistically fight. It would make far more sense to retool for conflicts against insurgencies and developing nations.
What seems to occur instead is that major powers fight via proxy wars, where they provide arms, training, covert assistance, and sometimes even open troop commitments on the soil of vassal states. This provides plausible deniability to the superpowers (neither of which actually want to see the world end in nuclear annihilation); offloads the human cost of the war onto foreign, less-developed countries; offloads the political cost onto puppet governments that can be disposed of when no longer needed; and prevents widespread public discontent from threatening the ruling government.
Just because the war is likely to happen in the Persian Gulf or Sea of Japan doesn't mean that the weapons & tactics involved won't be developed by first-world nations.
So why do we need lasers, railguns, and stealth fighter jets to fight bands of rice farmers and goat herders?
Second, we are much more squeamish about losing American lives than we ever have been before. Any administration that chooses to throw bodies at the problem like we did in both World Wars will be quickly replaced. I can't defend every project (especially not the F-35), but by and large this tech is designed to maximize effect with minimal risk to American lives.
steve19 also makes the very good point that these weapons did fall into the hands of the enemy: most of the Taliban were trained by the CIA, and the weapons our forces faced in Afghanistan were largely ones we had sold to the mujahideen in the 80s. Now the weapons left behind in Iraq are largely in the hands of ISIS.
The point of this article is that the U.S. is likely to face similar asymmetric threats in any future war, where the opposition doesn't have the same weapons as us but they do have weapons that are very effective at countering us.
What I'm saying ultimately is that developing these capabilities is necessary and sufficient to enable these countries to engage in diplomatic relations with other countries in the current geopolitical climate. It's not enough to hold our thumb over the world-ending button and say "We'll kill everyone if you don't do what we say!" (which is North Korea's strategy, and even they need China's backing to make their threats credible)
The goal is to achieve escalation dominance, in which your military forces are strongest at all levels of conflict intensity. Think of conflict escalation as a ladder, where the lower rungs are covert or plausibly deniable operations, middle rungs involve conventional war, and the highest rungs involve nuclear war.
All wars involve the escalation of conflict. As a war fighting power, you want to seek dominance not only on the thermonuclear rung, but also on all the rungs below it so that you are not forced into an escalate-or-lose situation. If you achieve escalation dominance on every level, you have achieved hegemony which is a term of art meaning you can compel other powers to act without having to act yourself.
(I leave the proof as an excercise for the reader)