Surface Combat and Air Support

Here’s a statement I came across that will have most of us shaking our heads in disbelief.

“The Navy will not be able to fight its way into denied environments and maintain open sea lines of communication without the Surface Force being able to take the fight to the enemy in environments where air assets are not available or are unable to effectively or persistently operate.” (1)

Think about that statement.  It’s saying that the Navy cannot do its job unless it can fight without the protection of air assets.  This runs counter to the entire basis of Navy operational and doctrinal thinking.  The assumption of air support and, indeed, air supremacy, is central to naval doctrine, tactics, planning, and procurement.  The Navy takes, as a given, uncontested control of the air and unlimited aviation support for its surface forces.  Yet, now, someone dares to come along and suggest otherwise?  What treasonous and militarily ignorant person said this and why?  Let’s form a lynch mob and put this idiot to death.  I’ve got pitchforks and torches for everyone.  C’mon!

We’ll blow this idiot out of the water with logic.  Let’s start by examining the relevant historical background.

Our carrier force is unsurpassed.  Yes, we’ve seen the number of carriers steadily decline from the 20’s to the current 10 (9 active) and there is no reason to believe that number will ever increase.  Sure, we’ve seen the size of carrier air wings drop from around 90 aircraft to the current 60’s.  Of course, even that is misleading in that several Hornets in each wing cannot be used as combat aircraft since they are needed to fill the tanker role.  True, the Navy has stated that when the F-35 enters service, squadrons will be reduced by a further 2-4 aircraft each.  Granted, the Air Force is undergoing similar reductions.  Admittedly, our basing options in the Pacific are limited and far from any relevant operational area and even our basing options in the MidEast are suspect.  Depending on the parameters of the conflict we may or may not be granted permission to use those bases in a combat role.  Combine that with potential overflight restrictions and MidEast basing is problematic, at best.

Ah, …  Maybe we better set those pitchforks and torches down for a moment.  We may have to dig a bit deeper than I thought to discredit this idiot.

OK, so we may not have as many air assets and aviation basing support as we once did but at least what we have will be uncontested and unbeatable, right?  I mean, it’s not like our enemies are developing their own stealth aircraft.  Well, I guess China and Russia are and they’ll undoubtedly be exporting their aircraft aggressively.  Still, their existing aircraft are, well …  actually they’re pretty good – at least on par with ours or maybe better in some cases.

Alright, so we may have a problem with the whole aviation presence and supremacy thing but, heck, our enemies will have the same basing issues we do.  I mean it’s not like China will have hundreds of airbases in range of the likely areas of conflict and …  we, ah …  we …  Oh, crap.  China, Iran, and N. Korea do have hundreds of bases within range of the likely areas of conflict!  They’ll be able to generate much higher sortie rates than us with much greater numbers of aircraft to call on.  Of course, the RAND report demonstrated that numbers alone don’t matter so, ah …  wait a minute, my bad.  I got that backwards.  The RAND report actually demonstrated that numbers do matter, even more than quality. 

I guess now that I think about it, trying to operate in, say, the Chinese A2/AD zone will severely limit our air support given our decreasing numbers of carriers, shrinking air wings, dwindling Air Force, limited bases, huge distances that must be traveled to reach the areas of interest, increasing enemy numbers, prevalent enemy surface to air missiles, and extensive enemy airborne and land based radar surveillance.

Clearly, the Navy will be fighting with less and less air support as time goes on.  Could this idiot’s statement be right?  I hate to say it but it would seem so. 

Who is this guy?  Let me check the source reference …  Ah, it’s VAdm. Thomas Copeman.  Well, that explains it.  You’ll recall that ComNavOps has praised Copeman several times in the past as one of the few (only?) clear thinkers in the ranks of Navy leadership.  It seems VAdm. Copeman has done it again.  He has identified the trends and pointed out the logical conclusion:  if the Navy wants to operate in enemy zones, it must be prepared to operate without the assurance of aerial supremacy or even support.  I guess instead of lynching him we should be gathering to praise him. 

So, if he’s right, what does this mean for naval ship design and construction?  It means that we need to be designing and building ships for independent operations (independent from carrier or Air Force aviation support).  Such a ship will need certain characteristics that differ from today’s designs.  For instance,

Stealth – This becomes mandatory.  If we don’t control the skies then we’d better be as hard to find and hard to lock on to as possible.  We covered this in a previous post.

Armor – If we don’t control the skies we will take hits.  Armor is mandatory to mitigate damage and allow us to continue to fight.  Cheap kills cannot be accepted.  We covered this in a previous post.

Soft Kill – As we’ve previously documented and discussed, the Navy needs to place much greater emphasis on soft kill AAW measures.  We need a soft kill CEC as we just recently posted.

Close-In – We need many more close-in weapon systems per ship than we currently have.  Without control of the skies, the enemy can just continue to hammer our defenses and missiles and aircraft will get through at much greater rates than we imagine.

UAV – With limited aviation support, our ships will have to generate their own surveillance and targeting.  Extensive use of UAVs will be required to “replace” the Hawkeye/AWACS function.  A couple of UAVs per ship won’t cut it.  We need the ability to hangar and operate dozens at a time and continue doing so in the face of significant attrition.  Remember, we need local situational awareness, not oceanic awareness.  We need small UAVs as opposed to BAMS size.  The UAVs must be reasonably stealthy, as well.

AAW – If you want to operate inside someone’s A2/AD zone and don’t have air superiority, you’ll have to fight to stay there.  A robust AAW capability is mandatory.  In addition to Aegis/AMDR type systems, we’ll need more VLS cells for sustained engagements, more illuminators for redundancy, better separation of illuminators for survivability, a robust backup radar system that is physically separated and isolated from the primary to the maximum extent possible, effective EO backup systems, much greater close-in defenses, and greatly enhanced soft kill systems.

It’s clear from the preceding characteristics that such a ship will be quite large and quite expensive. 

Contemplation of the above leads to two supporting conclusions. 

If we’re going to operate without aerial support we ought to be giving serious thought to increasing our submarine forces.  A submarine bypasses many of the problems associated with the lack of aerial support. 

We need to re-evaluate our current trend of declining carriers and shrinking airwings.  In addition, we need to re-evaluate the type of aircraft we’re procuring.  In an A2/AD scenario, the carrier is going to be acting as the escort for the strike units (Tomahawk) rather than being the strike unit as has historically been the case.  Thus, there is a need for a much longer range air superiority fighter. 

The carrier has been both the Navy’s crutch and addiction for too long.  While incredibly powerful and useful, the carrier has limited Navy operational and doctrinal thinking.  We need to give serious thought to future operations in the absence of significant air support.  Simply saying we won’t operate without air support may be constraining ourselves to the point of defeat.

For those of you who think that ten carrier task forces are more than sufficient to deal with any enemy, even China, you might want to remember that Cold War carrier doctrine called for carriers to operate in pairs and that was when the airwings were much larger than now.  Single carriers were not considered survivable and effective.  Thus, we actually can only muster a maximum of five carrier task forces.  Indeed, the reality of combat may dictate that carriers with reduced airwings need to operate in groups of three or more against modern militaries.  Throw in the inevitable combat losses and we may find ourselves hard-pressed to assemble two or three carrier groups after only a brief period of combat.

The point is that unless we’re simply going to refuse to act without carriers we may find ourselves forced to fight without air support at some point.  Adm. Copeman clearly believes that to be the case.  If he’s correct, we need to develop doctrine and ship designs to support that doctrine.

(1) http://www.public.navy.mil/surfor/Documents/2026Vision.pdf, “Vision for the 2026 Surface Fleet, VAdm. Thomas Copeman III, Commander, Naval Surface Forces, Jan 2014, p.5

Top Gun For Ships

Well, we seem to be on a bit of an Admiral Thomas Copeman kick.  His latest effort is an article he authored in the current Proceedings (1) about the new surface warfare training program he’s established.  We’ve talked repeatedly in previous posts about the woefully deficient level of tactical training in the Navy and options for improving the situation.  Suggestions have included a standing OpFor (ala TopGun), the use of Meggit Hammerhead remote speedboats for live fire exercises, and generally more realistic training. 

Copeman acknowledges the very problems that we’ve pointed out with the statement,

“It may be hard to believe, but the U.S. Navy, widely recognized as the greatest Fleet the world has ever known, lacks an organization tasked with development, training, and assessment of the full scope of tactics for the warfare community on which it was founded 238 years ago – surface warfare.”

He also recognizes that the Navy’s focus has mistakenly been exclusively on ship readiness,

“The Surface Navy has long focused on ship readiness above all else …”

Even with that focus, ship readiness is at an all-time low with the situation having gotten so bad that INSURV inspections were classified so as to avoid the continual embarrassment of failures.  Regardless, readiness merely indicates that the ship is functional.  It says nothing about the tactical proficiency of the commanders and crew of the ships and groups.  Physical readiness without tactical readiness borders on pointless and, to his credit, Adm. Copeman sees this and has done something about it.

Some tactical training does, of course, exist in the Navy but it is isolated from any larger picture.  For example, tactical ASW prosecution of a submarine may be taught but the tactics are divorced from any larger consideration of how the ASW tactics fit into the ship or group’s overall tactical actions.  In other words, we may understand how to deal with a submarine in a one-on-one duel but we don’t have a validated set of tactics for executing an overall mission in the face of a submarine threat.

This haphazard approach results in gaps in tactics – sometimes significant and, frankly, astounding.  As Copeman says,

“… no command is currently focused on surface warfare, a core competency since 1775.”

That’s quite an indictment of Naval tactical training!

Using his position as Commander, Naval Surface Forces, Adm. Copeman has instituted the Naval Surface and Expeditionary Warfare Command which is responsible for creating, validating, and teaching tactics throughout the surface fleet.  He likens the group to the Navy’s Naval Strike and Warfare Center (NSAWC). 

He states that the development and training of tactics will be conducted by full time professionals dedicated to that purpose.  Unfortunately, he also strongly implies that the majority of the positions will be filled by naval personnel as a duty assignment.  That’s not the way to build concentrated knowledge.  By the time personnel come up to speed it will be time to move on.  I’ll withhold my judgment on this aspect.

Training will build from the individual to the ship to the group in much the same way an airwing trains independently prior to integrating with the carrier and then the carrier group.

The one aspect that is not mentioned in the article is how the individuals/ships/groups will be challenged during training.  I’ve opined that a dedicated OpFor is required.  Copeman offers no explanation about this aspect.  Again, I’ll have to wait and see how it develops.  The potential problem with the lack of an OpFor is that the training risks becoming a paper exercise with no opportunity to prove out the tactics being taught.  The benefit of Top Gun was that the student aviators could put the tactics that they were being taught into practice during training, learn lessons, grasp finer points of the tactics, and get immediate and expert feedback.  Lacking an OpFor, there is no chance to attempt the tactics against a thinking enemy and no chance to learn through experience.  A trainee may be able to regurgitate the tactical maxims but will have no gut level experience to fall back on when things inevitably go wrong.

We’ve discussed the use of simulators as an OpFor and noted that they just don’t provide the level of stress and confusion that real combat will.  While we can’t engage in real combat, we can actually “fight” our ships for minutes, hours, or days on end and feel some of the stress and fatigue of combat through the use of actual drone targets, maneuvering real ships, having to be aware of actual terrain effects, and so forth.  For those of you typing out comments to the effect that combat occurs in CIC so computer simulations are the same thing, I refer you to the Vincennes incident where a highly trained CIC crew made every mistake possible and few that were thought not possible when faced with a real situation.  I would remind you that as Air Force simulator use increased, so, too, did real world mishaps because the simulators just couldn’t replicate the stress of g-forces and cockpit confusion.  There’s a reason why naval aviators qualify on the carrier rather than on simulators.  Britain sends their prospective submarine commanding officers to sea for evaluation rather than simulators.  And so on …  Simulators have a useful role but can’t be the entire training process.

It sounds like the key to the program will be the Weapons and Tactics Instructors (WTI) who will be the core, highly trained experts who will be placed throughout the fleet to provide expertise and training.  Here, the program seems to differ from Top Gun in that the WTIs will go to the fleet as opposed to having the fleet come to the instructors.  Again, the merits of this approach remain to be seen.

In summary, Adm. Copeman has recognized the Navy’s failure to focus on tactics and has created a training program to address the issue.  Several aspects of the program remain open questions as far as their effectiveness with the biggest unknown being the apparent lack of an OpFor to exercise against.  Still, this program is the best training effort to come along in quite some time and I’ll give it every chance to succeed before passing judgment.  Admiral Copeman has, once again, stepped up and demonstrated vision far beyond the rest of his peers.

(1) US Naval Institute Proceedings, “Tactical Paradigm Shift”, VAdm. Thomas Copeman, USN, Jan 2014

Surface Force Commander's Vision - Part 2

Admiral Tom Copeman has done it again.  He previously authored an internal Navy memo which we discussed ("Surface Force Commander's Vision") and in which he described his view of the current surface fleet and some of the actions he believed warranted consideration.  There was a lot to like in the memo and ComNavOps was impressed – no easy feat from today’s Navy leadership.  Copeman has now issued a follow-up memo (1) giving a bit of a State of the Navy assessment and a description of the ongoing, and still needed, actions required to get the surface fleet where it needs to be.  Here are some excerpts from the document.

Copeman points out that various measures of success can cause unintended conflicts.  He offers an example,

“Success in spiral development of C4I systems means inefficiencies in training, main­tenance and logistics on the deck plates as 62 DDGs have 42 different configurations when measuring just eight major Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence (C4I) systems.”

He’s pointing out that the Navy’s obsession with spiral development (essentially the model being used to develop and deliver LCS modules) means that not only is there never a “final” version but that continuous development litters the fleet with many versions of the product which hinders training, maintenance, and operation due to the many fielded versions.  This is an absolutely insightful observation that has, potentially, profound implications for the Navy’s acquisition and development programs.  Outstanding!

Discussing manpower shortages, Copeman notes,

“Manning actions are required for many ships to deploy with the minimum critical skills onboard, and these “rip to fill” actions not only erode ship readiness for those ships at home preparing to deploy, but also erode the morale of the force.  The timing of these actions-just before deployment-also means that these Sailors don’t train with the rest of the ship or the strike group.”

Despite the convoluted Pentagon-speak, he’s talking about cross-decking of personnel to fill gapped billets in deploying ships and he notes the negative impact that has.  As he points out, cross-decked personnel haven’t been part of the ship/group’s workup and are not fully integrated the way they should be.

Copeman then links new ship construction quality issues to training and maintenance,

“New ship construction deficiencies (LPD 17, LHD 8, and LCS in particular) must be corrected after ships have entered the deployment rotation, resulting in bills that must be funded through fleet maintenance accounts and major schedule changes and interrup­tions that directly impact the crews’ ability to train.”

His comment recognizes the failure of NavSea to ensure the quality of the ships the Navy is accepting.  NavSea is being forced to sign off on incomplete and substandard ships as a political and PR measure.  This is pure and simple ethical cowardice being displayed by Navy leadership.

He further addresses training as we have so often in this blog,

“Arguably the most important finding in our Readiness Kill Chain effort was that we documented how far we have fallen behind in individuals training.”

Spare parts availability is addressed,

“…gross effectiveness numbers have increased, though they are still in the 50 percent range (five times out of 10, a Sailor can get the part they need from the storeroom to correct a casualty).”

CNO Greenert can talk all he wants about warfighting and readiness but it’s clear from this kind of evidence that it’s just talk.  Our leadership is failing the Navy.

Copeman looks at warfighting readiness, which is something I’ve long criticized the Navy about.

“As we look critically at how we do business, we cannot escape the fact that deploying ships that can successfully execute Phase 0/1 operations and those fully prepared for combat operations are two different things. In recent decades, warfighting has not always had the focus it requires for us to meet our obligation to be prepared for prompt and sustained combat operations. It has my complete attention.”

He states that warfighting readiness has his complete attention.  Well, that’s just great.  I have only two questions:  what has had his attention for the last several years and why aren’t the other Navy leaders focused on warfighting given that it’s the Navy’s reason for being?

Listen to this one,

“Warfighting excellence starts with training.”

My goodness!  Doesn’t that sound like half the posts I’ve written?  (Try "Realistic Training" as one example)  This guy could write this blog.  The disturbing part is that I’ve been on this bandwagon for some time and he’s only just now getting on board.  Still, far better late than never.

He offers a statement about effective training that has implications that even he does not grasp,

“Our officers and enlisted personnel will be developed using a holistic approach with a deep, solid foundation in the basics of naval warfare and will be trained so as to have the cognitive agility to land on their feet inside a chaotic situation, pivot to the task at hand and carry the day.”

This is exactly what I’ve called for – realistic training that intentionally incorporates chaos and confusion.  That’s how you avoid the Vincennes CIC debacle.  Unfortunately, while Copeman recognizes that chaos is an integral part of combat, I don’t think he grasps that the chaos must be trained for and incorporated into the training exercises.

Copeman indirectly addresses one of our recent points (see, "Industry In Charge") about the Navy abdicating its responsibility to define requirements for weapons and systems in favor of allowing industry to deliver whatever they want rather than what the Navy needs.

“…it is incumbent upon us to ensure that research organizations supporting us understand what we need … “

He’s speaking specifically about research organizations but the thought applies equally to industry.

Looking at soft-kill (ECM) defensive measures,

“Culturally, the Surface Force is hard-kill oriented, but the quantity and quality of threat weapons that our forces will face in any future conflict necessitate better soft kill capability …”

C’mon, now.  This guy is just copying my posts! (see, "AAW - Hard or Soft Kill?")

Copeman acknowledges the death of optimal manning programs,

“We will no longer reduce manpower first, hoping that innovation will follow. To this end, I have formally rescinded the rule sets that led to the shipboard manning reductions of the last decade.”

Maintenance “savings” are addressed,

“As we have learned, “saving” money by not doing maintenance in the short term does not save money. It defers payment and increases costs over time.”

Seriously?!  This is intuitively obvious to all the rest of us.  Again, better that the problem is recognized now, however late and however obvious.

There were many other observations contained in the memo and I urge you to read it in its entirety.  As I have stated previously, Adm. Copeman is, so far, the only Navy leader I’ve identified that seems to have a common sense and logical understanding of the various issues facing the Navy.  He is a rare treat among an otherwise putrid rank.

(1) http://www.public.navy.mil/surfor/Documents/2026Vision.pdf