Queen Elizabeth Class - All In Or Half-Hearted?

Beaking Defense website has an article about the UK committing to operating two carriers with F-35B air wings (1).  That’s good news for the Royal Navy and yet I see limitations and weaknesses being baked into the concept as well some disturbing trends being played out just as they have in the US Navy.

Ministry of Defense officials are saying that the UK is committed to operating two carriers regardless of the results of an ongoing defense review.  That strikes me as a bit optimistic but, not knowing the UK political situation, I’ll accept the statement at face value.

One of the trends in the US Navy is minimal manning.  The concept is that automation will allow reduced crews thereby saving on personnel costs.  The flip side of that is that significant maintenance must be performed by shore side personnel.  Thus, the manning isn’t really decreased but rather a portion of it is transferred from sea to shore.  Again, the concept is that the shore contingent will be able to service multiple ships at an overall decrease in manning.  That sounds good on paper but, thus far, the US Navy has not been able to make it work.  LCS shore side personnel have had to be far more numerous than planned and there has been no significant reduction in manning and, quite probably, an increase depending on how one counts the personnel.

Worse than simple overall personnel numbers is the issue of actual maintenance.  The US Navy has been dabbling in minimal manning for at least a couple of decades now and has amassed considerable practical experience with the concept.  The clear finding has been that minimal manning has proven very detrimental to the material condition of the ships involved.  Minor problems have been allowed to grow into major ones and ships have been early retired due to their poor condition – much of that condition directly attributable to the lack of manpower.

It now appears that the UK is going down the same path.

“To save costs, the Queen Elizabeth class has a fewer sailors for its size than older ships, she [Penny Mordaunt, Minister of State for Armed Forces] said, but it requires ‘additional shore support’ to compensate.”

I hope that the UK looks seriously at the USN experience before fully committing to minimal manning. 

Moving on, the Queen Elizabeth class will carry F-35B air wings.

“Each QE-class ship can accommodate 40 aircraft of various types, but not all of those are going to be fighters. … The maximum capacity for F-35s is reportedly 36 aircraft but during routine operations, each carrier might have only a dozen F-35Bs on board.”

The key part of the statement above is the suggestion that the carriers would operate with only a dozen F-35s during routine operations.  If true, this would be a major mistake.

How can a navy learn to operate an air wing under maximum combat conditions if all their operational and training time is spent operating an air wing that is a third the size?  There are just too many differences between a 30-40 aircraft wing operating at maximum capacity versus a 12 aircraft wing operating under leisurely peacetime conditions.

How will the carrier learn the deck “dance” of handling and placement of 30-40 aircraft under constantly changing conditions from only operating 12?

How will the carrier learn the art of juggling launches and recoveries under maximum sortie rates with only 12?

How will the carrier learn the task of munitions handling, refueling, and maintenance of 30-40 aircraft with only 12?

In short, a carrier does not seamlessly transition from 12 aircraft operated at a leisurely pace to 30-40 aircraft operating a maximum sortie rate without constant practice.  The USN devotes months of training workups to its carriers and air wings prior to each deployment and that’s with operating a full air wing routinely.  The art of maximum carrier operations is not something that can be picked up on the fly in a week.

This brings us back around to manning levels.  The reduced manning of the QE class presumably is what’s required to operate the dozen F-35s.  When the carrier surges to a maximum 30-40 aircraft it will need many additional personnel.  Where will these extra personnel come from?  How will they be trained if they aren’t routinely operating with the carriers?  Learning on the fly on a carrier is a recipe for disaster.

Reduced operations is a bad idea all around.  Remember the adage, fight like you train, train like you fight?  Routinely operating 12 aircraft when you intend to fight with 30-40 violates a very wise adage.

Royal Navy, are you operating two carriers because you just like the idea of being able to say you have the carriers or are you operating two carriers because you want to be able to place two fully loaded carriers into high end combat at a moment’s notice?

Lastly, here’s an interesting comment about philosophy.

“What’s more, Britain has prioritized warfighting over low-intensity operations, accepting a smaller fleet as the price of more capable vessels …”

If true, that’s a very wise philosophy and one which, sadly, the USN is abandoning with its emphasis on the toothless LCS, JHSV, smaller air wings, submarine and fighter shortfalls, etc.  Note, though, RN, the contradiction between the stated philosophy of emphasis on warfighting with the reduction in operations of the carriers from max size air wings (30-40 aircraft) to a dozen aircraft for routine operations.  Are you really committed to warfighting or not?  Will you be fully trained and ready, or not?  You certainly won’t have a full air wing at a moment’s notice.

That’s an interesting question, too.  How long will it take to get all those extra F-35s out to the ship?  Are they all going to be parked on a tarmac ready to launch?  Not likely.  Will the extra pilots be sitting around fully trained (and carrier qualified!!) just waiting to launch?  Will the extra maintenance crews be sitting around, ready?  Will the extra spares and maintenance/testing equipment already be on the carrier or will they also have to be assembled and transported to the carrier? 

Those who might suggest that the a dozen aircraft are just fine for routine operations and that the rest of the aircraft can be instantly surged are just not seeing reality.  The F-35 is not a WWI powered kite that can be piloted by someone with a few hours training and maintained by any mechanic with a pipe wrench.  Surging F-35s may take weeks or months and a carrier caught in a moment’s notice conflict will be severely limited in its capabilities.

It pains me to see the Royal Navy preparing to go down some of the same paths that the USN has already shown to be mistakes.  I hope the RN very carefully thinks through their carrier operating plans.

(1)Breaking Defense, “UK Commits To 2 Carriers, Fully Crewed; F-35B Numbers TBD”, Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. September 04, 2015,

http://breakingdefense.com/2015/09/uk-commits-to-2-carriers-fully-crewed-f-35b-numbers-tbd/

Appeasement - Follow Up

By now, I'm sure you've read about the Chinese task force passing through United States territorial waters (inside the 12 mile limit) near Alaska in an exercise referred to as "innocent passage".  This procedure allows ships to pass through another country's territorial waters under certain conditions.  ComNavOps has no problem, per se, with the Chinese exercising their rights.  There are, however, a few noteworthy aspects to this incident.

First, the timing was such that the incident occurred as President Obama was conducting a trip to Alaska.  The timing and the implicit message could not be more obvious.  However, we'll leave the political aspects and move on.

The maneuver cannot be interpreted as anything but provocative.  The Chinese ships were not in a position where they had no choice but to take that particular path.  The choice was deliberate.  This should speak volumes to us about our current policy of appeasement.  The more we back off, accommodate, and make peaceful gestures and concessions, the more aggressive the Chinese behave.  That's not surprising, really.  History tells us with 100% certainty that appeasement only encourages further aggression.

Remember the incident in Dec 2013 when the Aegis cruiser Cowpens was harassed and chased off from observing a Chinese carrier in international waters in the South China Sea?  We meekly left the area after being harassed and warned off.  We left international waters!  Despite this appeasement, China engages in deliberately provocative maneuvers in US territorial waters.  Do you see the blatant failure of appeasement?  And this is just one example.

So, the Chinese pattern of response to our appeasement is further provocation and aggression.  So much for appeasement.

What we should have done is observe the Chinese innocent passage by having our ships literally bump the Chinese the entire passage and having a non-stop succession of aircraft conduct low level supersonic observation passes over the Chinese ships throughout the entire passage.  If they wanted to send messages, we should have answered with our own.

I can already hear the sniveling and whining.  "We can't risk escalation".  Well, I've got news for you if you can stop wetting yourself long enough to hear it - the Chinese are escalating the situation on a daily basis.  We need to either get in the fight or back completely out of the Pacific and learn to speak Mandarin while we wait for the Chinese to reach San Francisco.

Combat In The Information Age

Proceedings has an interesting article about combat in the “Information Age”, as the authors put it (1).  The article is an odd combination of the authors “getting it” and “missing it”.  Let’s take a closer look and see what they have to say that we might learn from.

First, it should be noted that the authors are two active duty Lieutenant Commanders, one a Surface Warfare Officer selected for command and the other an Intelligence officer.  As such, they ought to represent a doorway into current naval thought and for this reason, if no other, their writing is worthy of consideration.

The authors discuss the recognition that weapons are becoming more lethal and that, as a result, there is a need to try to cut the kill chain further upstream.  They state that the implication of this is the need to manage our electromagnetic (EM) signatures “as never before”.  Of course, EM silence (EMCON) was the default state of naval units during the Cold War so the “as never before” statement rings a bit hollow and, to be fair, the authors point that out.  As they put it,

“In practice this means, among other things, controlling our EM signature while conducting any type of operations, with EM silence as our default posture.”

Again, this warrants a huge, “Duh!”, but at least they’re saying it.  They go on to say,

“While we became fairly proficient at emissions control during the Cold War, the lack of a meaningful blue-water threat since the fall of the Soviet Union and our vast accumulation of new EM systems have allowed us to forget.  Today, naval vessels and aircraft operate by default with multiple active radar, identification, datalink, and communication systems radiating.  Rarely are we forced to operate in a silent (or reduced) mode for any sort of extended period or while conducting complex operations.”

And there it is.  The authors summed up the entire EM issue.  We knew it.  We forgot it.  We don’t practice it.  You’ve heard me say this on a regular basis and now you’re hearing active duty, ranking officers saying it.

Could we even operate in an EMCON mode if we had to?  The authors, and ComNavOps, do not believe so.

“Similarly, in air defense, we so infrequently practice single-ship or group-restricted radiation operations in tactical scenarios that it is questionable whether we are proficient enough to use them in wartime.”

The lack of realistic training – another pet peeve of ComNavOps. 

The authors bring up another great point concerning the global, universally networked, all-seeing, infinitely datalinked, battle management system that the Navy is so enamored with and that is the awareness of what’s happening at the tactical level.  Allowing, for the moment, that this kind of mythical network can even work (it can’t), the authors point out a tactical level awareness problem.

“Much of the disruption effort will be executed by joint forces or at the operational level, so how will tactical-level Navy decision-makers know what is going on and how or when to exploit success?  For example, if the Air Force disables a sector of the adversary’s passive electronic-surveillance network, how will the officer commanding a surface action group 1,000 miles away know he is now in an advantageous position where his ship’s radars can be energized to locate and destroy an enemy platform in his vicinity?”

An excellent question and it again points to the need for realistic training so that these types of unforeseen problems can be identified and worked out.  Some might casually employ the hand wave and confidently assert that all levels of operation will seamlessly and flawlessly communicate to each other.  They might, or they might not, as suggested by the authors.

“We pay a lot of lip service to seamless joint integration, but it is specious to believe communications between operational and tactical-level commanders in a joint environment are either as fast or as thorough as required.”

Again, these are active duty, ranking officers saying this!

The flip side of the EM coin is also noted.  The enemy will be doing their best to control the EM spectrum and we must anticipate the loss or, at best, intermittent use of our comms, networks, and datalinks.  The implication is that we will be faced with fighting with a lack of higher level command and control – the opposite of what we have now where the movements and actions of individual soldiers can be monitored and ordered from the White House.  As the authors point out,

“In the Navy we are fortunate to be the heirs to a strong tradition of command-by-negation, distributed execution, and autonomous decision-making.  However, with the increase in volume of communications our ability to fight complicated scenarios with minimal or intermittent communications has almost certainly weakened.  We can regain it only with realistic and challenging training at all levels from fleet to unit and individual watchstander.”

Again, straight from the annals of this blog!

Well, so much for the “get it” portion.  Unfortunately, the authors still generally believe that the modern battlefield will be electronic, networked, datalinked, and comm’ed though, to their credit, not to the degree or with the effortlessness that the Navy thinks.  They fail to grasp the reality that modern combat against a peer will see all the magic devices on both sides come up well short due to a combination of countermeasures and the 100% certainty of weapons and systems being vastly overrated.  As a result, the combatants will quickly fall back on simpler, brute force weapons and systems with the resulting combat being closer to WWII than Star Wars.  Complexity is great for wargaming and public relations but when combat starts, simplicity will quickly become king.

We need to begin developing weapons and systems that can function without external inputs and we need to begin training for a state of degraded and lost external inputs.

(1) USNI Proceedings, “The Face of Battle in the Information Age”, Crooks & Robertaccio, July 2015

E for Expeditionary

With all the challenges the Navy faces, what do you think Navy Secretary Mabus and CNO Greenert are spending their time on?  Ballistic missile defense?  Chronic maintenance and readiness problems?  The coming submarine and fighter shortfalls? 

Those are all good guesses but not even remotely close.

Mabus and Greenert have just created a new ship designation.  The new designation is “E” for Expeditionary.  It will be used to redesignate these ships:

JHSV, Joint High Speed Vessels will become EPF, for Expeditionary Fast Transport

MLP, Mobile Landing Platforms will become ESD, for Expeditionary Transfer Docks

AFSB, Afloat Forward Staging Bases will become ESB, for Expeditionary Base Mobile

I don’t really care what the ships are designated but is this really the best use of the SecNav and CNO’s time?  Is this really the issue that moves them?

Further, I doubt that this is just an innocuous redesignation.  I assume this will be used as justification to count these ships as part of the fleet rather than as the auxiliaries that they are.

Navy leadership is truly an embarrassment to the fleet and the nation.

Appeasement

I’ve suggested in comments and posts that the US geopolitical “strategy” regarding China is one of appeasement.  Well, here’s the latest piece of evidence via Breaking Defense website (1).

“…we understand from two well-informed sources that the US is effectively observing a 12-nautical mile limit around the piles of coral, rock, and sand the Chinese have erected  to bolster their claim to the waters inside their Nine Dash Line.”

There you have it.  It’s illegal to build man-made “islands” and claim territorial sovereignty rights but that’s what China is doing and the US is honoring those claims.  The Chinese takeover of the South and East China Seas is all but complete. 

Appeasement. 

(1)Breaking Defense, “Carter To China: US ‘Will Fly, Sail, Operate Wherever Law Allows’”, Colin Clark September 01, 2015,

http://breakingdefense.com/2015/09/carter-to-china-us-will-fly-sail-operate-wherever-law-allows/

Missile Pylon Costs

You all know what the LAU-115/6 is, right?  You don’t?!  OK, I didn’t exactly recognize the item right off the bat either.  LAU-115 and -116 are the launch pylons used on the Navy’s Hornets to carry and launch AIM-120 and AIM-9X air to air missiles.

Typical Launch Pylon

What do you think they cost?  Maybe $1000 each?  Naw, probably more than that.  The military doesn’t buy anything cheap.  Maybe $5000 each?  They couldn’t be more than $10,000 each, could they?  They’re just relatively simple racks that carry and eject the missiles. 

Well, Raytheon Technical Services was given a $38M contract to supply 228 LAU-115 launchers and 30 LAU-115 launchers for the Navy.  Some quick math gives us a price of $144,000 each.  Wow!  I’m in the wrong line of work.

Center of Gravity

Although ComNavOps abhors the use of buzzwords and phrases such as synergy or center of gravity (CoG), some of them nevertheless convey an accurate image.  A center of gravity is just what it implies:  a major concentration of capability.  In the case of the military arena, a CoG is a concentration of a critical warfighting capability.  We attempt to identify the enemy’s CoGs and attack them but do we examine our own CoGs?  What are our CoGs and how might an enemy attack them?  China is undoubtedly devoting a great deal of time and effort to exactly this task and we would do well to anticipate their actions and have ready responses.

So, what Navy CoG do we want to examine today?  Well, I’m willing to bet that the Navy’s most important, least recognized, and, potentially, most vulnerable CoG is its vast system of networks.  By “network”, I mean all the weapons and systems that generate, collect, transmit, use, and manipulate data.  This would include GPS signals, Link XX, SATCOM, UAV comm links, weapon guidance signals, straightforward communication channels, and every other data transmitting or receiving device the Navy has. 

Consider that the Navy uses data transmissions of one sort or another to guide nearly every weapon it has.  How many weapons are GPS dependent, for example?  How many weapons use mid-course guidance signals?  We’re actively pursuing in-flight reprogramming of cruise missiles (though the benefit of that is highly debatable).

Consider the wondrous F-35 which will be a combination of E-2 Hawkeye, P-8, F/A-18G ECM, J-STARS, and fire control for every aircraft and weapon within a million mile radius.  Setting aside my mockery of it, its performance is predicated on seamless and flawless data flow (the Navy having all but admitted that it won’t be used as a frontline combat aircraft but, rather, as an enabler of other aircraft).

Consider the Navy’s next generation Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC), the Navy Integrated Fire Control – Counter Air (NIFC-CA) which will tie every sensor and shooter system together in an impenetrable defensive network, according to the brochures.  This is nothing but data flow and data sharing on an immense scale.

I submit that data flow is the heart of the Navy.  It is the Navy’s CoG. 

And it’s vulnerable.

China knows this.  Do you think they aren’t working on disrupting our data flow?  Jamming?  False signals?  Data overwrites via signal injection?  Physical destruction of nodes?  Dozens of other electronic and cyber disruptive possibilities I haven’t even begun to think of?  We’ve seen them conduct their own anti-satellite missile tests so there go our GPS signals.  They’re continually practicing cyber warfare (hacking) on a daily and massive scale – and quite successfully, too, from what information is released publicly.

We need to look closely at our own COGs and their vulnerabilities and begin strengthening them. 

We need to develop better methods of data transmission, improve the security our data and comm lines, develop better methods of authenticating our data, and develop better means of handshaking our data to ensure that complete packets are received.  This is way outside my area of expertise.  I can see the problem and I know the general direction we need to go but the specifics are way beyond me.  The Navy, however, needs to work on this.

In addition to strengthening our networks, we need to train to operate in electronically degraded environments.  Conducting set-piece training exercises that utilize the full range of networking and data flow is worthless because none of that will happen in a real conflict.  Instead, we need to conduct every training exercise in the face of the best ECM and counter-data effort we can generate.  This will accomplish two things:  it will show us how to operate in a real world scenario and it will vigorously exercise our ECM and counter-data capabilities.  We’ll get two levels of training for the price of one, so to speak.

Finally, and related to the training issue, we need to think the unthinkable.  We need to consider designing less brilliant weapons.  Conceptually, which is more useful:  a gravity bomb that is unaffected by any jamming or cyber disruption or a GPS guided weapon that won’t do anything if it has no GPS signal?  We are so enamored of our technology and networking that we’ve forgotten that simplicity reigns once combat begins.

Both sides have CoGs and we need to recognize our own and anticipate their weaknesses so that when the enemy attacks we’ll be prepared.