The Next War

You all know the old adage that Generals are always preparing to fight the last war.  Like most adages, it’s largely true.

As a side note, possibly the best exception to the rule is the military’s preparation to fight Desert Storm.  We had pretty much the right equipment, tactics, and mindset for that conflict before the conflict started.  We were prepared.  Of course, one could make a legitimate argument that the preparations for Desert Storm were the result of having prepared for the old Soviet Union conflict rather than correctly anticipating the future Desert Storm and that the resulting match between forces and warfare needs was more fortuitous than predicted.  Moving on …

If the adage is generally correct, what is today’s military and Navy preparing to fight – the last “war” of neverending low end conflict or the next war, whatever that might be?

Let’s start with the easier question – what are we preparing for.  Our preparations are fairly clear and straightforward.  We’re downsizing our explosive power and armor in favor of lightness, mobility, and information (networks and data/sensor sharing).  The Marines are shedding tanks and artillery, ignoring amphibious assault, and focusing on expeditionary aviation and aviation based light infantry operations.  That’s clearly a terrorist, low end, third world focus which is exactly the “war” we’ve been fighting for the last two decades. 

On the Navy side, we’re focused on increasing the numbers of low end, light vessels like the LCS, JHSV, and LPD-17 while shedding Aegis cruisers, frigates, and large amphibious ships.  Air wings are shrinking, the fleet is steadily shrinking, and explosive combat power is vanishing.  The Navy is clearly moving from a combat force to a presence force which is what we’ve been doing for the last two decades.

On a more general level, we’re increasing the number of women in combat, increasing our diversity efforts, focusing on sexual assault prevention, changing titles to eliminate “man” from them, requiring sensitivity training, and debating women’s uniforms.  Honestly, I’m not sure what war this is preparing us for!

So, our actions make it clear that we’re preparing to fight the last war, meaning a continued focus on low end, anti-terrorist, anti-insurgency, peacekeeping, and democracy building with a dash of social engineering thrown in.  We are living proof of the “preparing to fight the last war” adage. 

Recognizing the trap we’ve fallen into, what war should we be preparing to fight?  Well, that’s the challenge, isn’t it?  It’s easy to see the last war but it’s harder to predict the next war, right?  Wrong!  It’s easy to see the next war(s) coming.  All we have to do is ask ourselves,

1. Who’s mad at us?
2. Of those that are mad at us, who has, or is building, a credible military force?
3. Of those that are mad at us and have a credible military force, who has a demonstrated set of actions and goals that conflict with our interests?

The countries remaining at the end of that simple set of questions will be the ones that constitute the next-war possibilities.

Who’s mad at us?  Perhaps an easier question is to ask who isn’t?  The list of countries and entities that are mad at us is long.  Aside from the obvious answers of Iran, NKorea, Russia, and China, we have to add several Central and South American countries, several African countries, every Middle East country to varying degrees, Pakistan, India (from time to time), Philippines, Japan (wherever our military comes in contact with their civilians), every terrorist organization (by definition!), the entire Islamic faith, and others.

Well that didn’t narrow things down much!

Of those countries and entities that are mad at us, which ones have, or are building, a credible military force?  This is where the list begins to narrow rapidly.  Only Iran, NKorea, Russia, Japan, China, and India have credible forces.

Finally, of those countries who are mad at us and have credible military forces, which ones have demonstrated actions and goals that conflict with our interests?  That leaves Iran, NKorea, Russia, and China.  This is our set of potential next-war possibilities.

Iran barely qualifies as having a credible military threat.  Further, they seem content with tweaking America when they can and funding terrorism.  They are probably the least likely to initiate an actual war.  Of course, when they obtain nuclear weapons this assessment will change given the fanatical and zealot nature of their leaders.  The most likely future with regards to Iran is an endless series of small scale confrontations though we could be dragged into a war on behalf of Israel.

NKorea has a credible, though low end, military and possesses nuclear weapons though without a reliable delivery system.  NKorea’s actions are generally contained and limited although that assessment has to be tempered by the realization that their leader is mentally unstable.  As with Iran, war is relatively unlikely although smaller scale confrontations will continue.

China has a peer level military that is on track to surpass us in the relatively near future.  Disturbingly, their near term goals of seizing the entire South and East China Seas and every disputed territory, combined with their longer term goals of recapturing Taiwan and their poorly concealed interest in the second island chain and, eventually the entire Pacific, put them on a collision course with the US.  Add to that their demonstrated willingness to physically confront the US and eventual war seems inevitable.

Russia has a near-peer military but is a bit of an unknown in that their long term goals are yet unclear.  Unfortunately, it looks as though Russia will not be content with the few territories already seized.  Russia appears to be preparing to seize the Black Sea and Baltic Sea, operating bases in Syria to support further Middle East expansion, and is solidifying their hold on the far eastern territories and the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea.  The unanswered question is whether Russia will continue to seize territories and expand west and south into Europe.  At the moment this appears somewhere between possible and likely.  Further, like China, Russia has clearly demonstrated a willingness, almost enthusiasm, to engage in confrontation with the US.  They clearly are not deterred by US military, political, or economic power.  While eventual war with Russia seems less inevitable than is the case with China, war is certainly possible.

We see, then, that there are two likely war scenarios.  War with China is almost  inevitable and war with Russia is possible.  These, then are the future wars we should be preparing for.  Other wars, such as with NKorea, Iran, South American or African countries, are subsets.  If we’re prepared to handle war with Russia and China then we can handle war with other, lesser militaries.

There, now that wasn’t so hard, was it?  We can see who we’ll have to fight.  The next question is how we’ll have to fight.  Will we have to invade mainland China?  Will we have to drive Russia back to previous boundaries?  Will we have to assault a seized Taiwan?  These are geopolitical strategic questions that must be answered in order for the military to come up with comprehensive operational plans.  Still, there are certain absolutes that transcend specific strategies.

For any kind of conflict with China we will need very long range aircraft and lots of them.  We will need a Navy that can support long range Air Force strikes and conduct their own strikes while suppressing China’s Navy and Air Force.  A war with China will be one fought over vast distances from the air and sea.  Ground combat will be quite limited.  Long range, high explosive missiles will be the predominant weapon.

A war with Russia will be a ground and air war with limited direct naval involvement.  Such a war will be up close and incredibly violent – European WWII combat on steroids.  Heavy armor and artillery will rule the battlefield.  Operational strategy will be subservient to attrition.  Last man standing will decide the victor. 

In both cases, electronic warfare will play a major role.

With all of the above in mind, and knowing, clearly, what the future war will be, why are we still preparing to fight the last war?  It’s clear that the future war requires a vastly different preparation path than we are currently on.  We need heavy tanks, more and heavier artillery, supersonic high explosive missiles (cruise and ballistic), long range air superiority fighters, high end naval forces, etc.  Instead, we’re building LCSs, JHSVs, Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, short range, small payload F-35s, and short range, subsonic anti-ship missiles.

There’s no excuse.  We know what war we should be preparing for.  Let’s start doing it.

I would be remiss to close out this discussion without briefly touching on the Third Offset Strategy.  Let’s be perfectly fair.  Very recently the military has taken the first steps towards planning for the next war.  Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work has imposed his personal vision of future warfare which he calls the Third Offset Strategy.  The cornerstone of this vision is networked sensors and weapons and a heavy focus on unmanned vehicles.  The premise is that superior information will compensate for the lack of numbers and explosiveness that we’ve created for ourselves. 

I give the military leadership some tiny bit of credit for beginning to plan ahead.  Unfortunately, the chosen path of the Third Offset Strategy completely misses the mark as to what wars we will fight and what we will need to fight them.  Work’s personal vision for the next war is as flawed as his championing of the LCS.  Continued pursuit of the Third Offset Strategy is going leave us woefully unprepared for the next war.

I’ve laid out the future for the military.  Now, they need to take heed and begin preparing for it.

Marine Electronic Warfare

ComNavOps has long discussed the need for the military to start training in an electromagnetically challenged environment since that is clearly what we’ll fight in.  Stubbornly, the military has refused to conduct serious electromagnetically disrupted training.  On the one hand, we have absolute faith in our ability to attack enemy communications, radars, sensors, data links, and networks while, on the other hand, crediting our enemies with no ability to do the same to us.  Evidence is mounting, however, that Russian and Chinese forces will routinely employ widespread and powerful electronic countermeasures (ECM).  Russian forces in Ukraine are reported to have electronic warfare (EW) units attached even to small units and have operated them quite effectively.

On a related note, the Marines are looking to expand the offensive use of EW by distributing jamming pods on all aircraft and even ground vehicles or, ultimately, individual soldiers (1).  The EW pod of choice is the Intrepid Tiger II which first appeared in 2012 and, in its airborne guise, is the size and shape of typical Hellfire missiles or simulator pods used in training.  Foxtrot Alpha website has a nice description of the pod and its origins (2).

Intrepid Tiger II Pod - Good Start But Only Half The Story

The desire by the Marines to include EW pods on many units and at many levels is commendable and, hopefully, signals a budding recognition that we may someday fight a peer opponent rather than the endless series of low end threats we’ve dealt with in recent decades – threats that have allowed us to become stagnant and complacent due to the lack of challenge.  Distributing EW widely and at low organizational levels will put a much needed capability at the front lines. 

We seem to be slowly recognizing that we need to expand our offensive EW capability.  That’s good but what about the flip side?  What about defensive EW capabilities?  What about our ability to operate in an electromagnetically challenged environment?  Can our troops communicate in the face of enemy jamming?  Can we navigate without GPS?  Will our data links function in the face of ECM?  Will our weapon guidance signals get through?

Hand in hand with distributing EW pods to all and sundry aircraft, vehicles, and troops, our forces need to learn how to operate when those EW capabilities are turned on them.  I have yet to see much indication that the Marines are making any effort to train in a realistic electromagnetically challenged arena.  The Army, at least, has begun to take steps in that direction and the Marines need to follow suit.

All of the above applies equally to the Navy. The Navy has only recently begun to upgrade its venerable (obsolete) SLQ-32 EW equipment and has made no effort to train in an electromagnetically challenged environment.  The complacent attitude is that our EW will baffle the enemy and theirs will have no effect on us.  Nothing could be further from the truth. 

We need to start training like we’ll fight which will be in an electromagnetically degraded condition.  A good starting point would be to turn our own EW/ECM capabilities on ourselves in exercises and to do so in an uninhibited manner.  Let the EW/ECM people inject themselves into exercises with no constraints and no limitations.  If they can totally disrupt a training exercise, so be it.  Better to find out now than in actual combat.  The argument in the past has been that if we disrupted our own training, we wouldn’t be able to accomplish the goals of the training exercise.  That is just complete and utter nonsense.  If we can’t accomplish our training goals in the face of EW/ECM then we aren’t prepared, equipped, and trained properly and the reduced training is worse than useless because it leads us to believe that we’re ready.  Every athletic coach will tell you that the only thing worse than not practicing is to practice incorrectly and develop bad habits.  That’s what we’re doing when we hold back in training.  Russia and China aren’t going to hold back on EW/ECM so that we can accomplish our goals.

_____________________

(1)Breaking Defense website, “Marines Aim For Jammers On ‘Every Airplane’”, Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., April 01, 2016,

http://breakingdefense.com/2016/04/marines-ramp-up-cyber-electronic-warfare-jammers-on-every-airplane/

(2)Foxtrot Alpha website, “How The Marines Cheaply And Quickly Built Precision Comm-Jamming Tech”, Tyler Rogoway, 18-May-2014,

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/how-the-marines-cheaply-and-quickly-built-precision-com-1577979656

Beach or Port?

ComNavOps has opined that high level amphibious assaults are very unlikely and, therefore, the amphibious fleet could be drastically reduced in size.  However, “very unlikely” does not mean impossible.  ComNavOps is nothing if not open minded (Hey!  I hear those snide chuckles in the back.  You people behave yourself.) and is always eager to consider alternate ideas.  With that in mind, a highly respected source has suggested to ComNavOps that the US military no longer has the capability to sustain a major assault and subsequent invasion force via movement of supplies over an unimproved beach.  The suggested premise is that such a large scale effort would require seizure and utilization of an existing port.  Let’s look at that premise a bit closer.

As we begin, let me state clearly that I don’t have anywhere near a sufficient understanding of the detailed capabilities the Navy could bring to bear on this.  I may be wrong about portions (or all !) of this.  That said …

I don’t think there is much question that we don’t have the resources to move sufficient amounts of fuel from ship to shore over a beach.  We’re talking about a major assault followed by major combat operations – division level efforts or more.  The amount of fuel division level ops consume is staggering.  Moving drums/bladders of fuel at a time just won’t suffice!

Similarly, history assures us that the amount of munitions a combat unit will go through will far exceed any pre-war planning allocations. 

Likewise, the amount food, spare parts, water, and all the other things that a combat unit needs to sustain itself will dwarf our nice, neat pre-war planning.  Factor in inevitable combat losses of supplies as they cross the beach and move inland and it becomes obvious that we just don’t have the number of transport vessels to move the supplies across the beach or the number of transport vehicles to move the supplies from the beach to the inland combat element.  Helos will help to a minor extent but are severely limited in individual capacity and will certainly be employed moving troops and providing direct fire support.

The Navy’s solution to amphibious sustainment support is the seabasing concept.  Unfortunately, this concept is based largely on wishful thinking. 

• Wishfully thinking that the weather will cooperate since the seabase components are mostly limited to lesser sea states.
• Wishfully thinking that the enemy will not attack the seabase since we only have or are planning to have two MLPs (and three AFSBs that may or may not be able to function as MLPs), the major component of the seabase concept and a limiting factor in supply throughput.
• Wishfully thinking that an enemy SSK won’t make the seabase a top priority target.
• Wishfully thinking that we can move the requisite tonnage of supplies across the seabase.
• Wishfully thinking that the fixed nature of the seabase won’t make it a very attractive target for ballistic and cruise missiles.

Of course, we have yet to address the delivery of the supplies to the operating units once the supplies make it to the beach.  Again, we do not have the trucks or helos necessary to move the requisite tonnage of supplies  after they make it ashore.

That said, a pretty good argument can be made that the only viable option to conduct and sustain a major amphibious assault is to seize an existing port.

Unfortunately, port seizure brings its own set of problems.

• How do we repair damaged ports while under fire?  We lack the heavy equipment to do the job while under fire.
• How do we protect ports from cruise and ballistic missiles?  The Navy wants to stand its Aegis ships 25-50 miles offshore so they won’t be able to do it effectively. 
• How do we provide rocket, mortar, and artillery defense?  Note: operating C-RAMs (land based Phalanx) in a built up, urban port city will cause massive collateral damage or have so many holes in its coverage as to prove useless, assuming we could even get C-RAMs ashore and set up under fire.
• How do we move supplies from the port, out of the city given that the few major roads will undoubtedly be mined, mortared, and “snipered”?
• How do we provide ongoing minesweeping in the harbor given the ease with which mines can be laid?
• How do we unload cargo ships in the port assuming that the enemy destroys the port’s cranes and other cargo handling equipment?  To the best of my knowledge we lack mobile, heavy duty cranes and heavy lift equipment.

Seizing a port can probably be done but repairing the port and cargo handling equipment while under fire will be a challenge.  Equally challenging will be defending the port from the multitude of missiles, rockets, mortars and artillery that a known, fixed location will invite.  We have neither the equipment nor doctrine to defend a port. 

Given our fixation with minimizing collateral damage, port defense will be very difficult.  Consider the simple case of snipers in adjoining multi-story buildings.  If we’re not willing to inflict significant collateral damage (destroy an entire floor or building to kill one sniper, for example) how will we neutralize snipers?  Room by room through a skyscraper?  We don’t have remotely enough troops to do that.

Consider the related challenge of mortars firing through holes in rooftops or, simply, from narrow, crowded streets.  They would be essentially invisible and invulnerable unless we were willing to apply counterfire and accept destruction of entire buildings and the countless civilian deaths that would result to get a single mortar.

Beach or port?  This is one of those questions that has no easy answer.  Nonetheless, the military needs to pick an option and begin equipping and training for the desired option.  For instance, can anyone even remember the military ever conducting a full scale port seizure exercise?

From Bad To Worse

How do programs go from recognizably bad to worse?  It happens when bad decisions are compounded by more bad decisions in the face of all evidence, common sense, and logic.  This is what’s happening right now with the Ford carrier program.

As reported by USNI News website, the man who ran the LCS program is now taking over the Navy’s troubled carrier program.  RAdm. Brian Antonio who has served as PEO for the LCS program since 2013 is taking over as PEO for carriers.

According to the Navy, Antonio,

“… previously served as program manager for Future Aircraft Carriers from 2007 to 2011.  Antonio also held various ship maintenance, modernization and acquisition roles throughout the Navy in his 33 years in the service. 

After having overseen the start of production of the future carrier Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) as program manager, Antonio will now guide the ship through delivery, commissioning and fleet introduction as PEO. “

Is that an impressive resume of poor performance, or what?!

The man was responsible, in large measure, for getting the Ford off to a disastrous start.

He held various maintenance, modernization, and acquisition roles.  How’s the Navy’s maintenance?  How’s the Navy’s modernization programs?  How’s the Navy’s acquisition programs?  Could one man have a poorer resume?

The LCS is, arguably, the biggest shipbuilding disaster in Navy history and the man responsible for a large chunk of that is now going to be put in charge of carriers – for which he is already partially responsible for the Fords problems.

I’m not going to bother reciting a litany of the LCS’ problems.  They’re well documented.  Likewise, the Ford’s problems are also well documented.  This man had a major hand in both.     

  … And now he’s in charge of the Navy’s carriers.

This is how a program goes from bad to worse.

____________________________

(1)USNI News website, “Rear Adm. Brian Antonio, Former PEO LCS, Takes Over As PEO Aircraft Carriers”, Megan Eckstein, June 1, 2016,

https://news.usni.org/2016/06/01/antonio_peo_aircraft_carriers

I Want More Money

As reported by USNI News website, a group called the Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition is asking Congress to authorize a two-ship block buy contract for Ford class aircraft carriers (CVN-80, CVN-81) (1).  In addition, they are asking for money to research ways of saving money on carrier construction.  Let’s look at bit closer at this.

Block Buy Contracts are similar to Multi-Year Procurement contracts and are supposed to be limited to purchases of well established, mature designs.  Such contracts can only be authorized by Congress.  There is also a formal difference between “block buys” and “block buy contracts” and it’s not clear from the article which terminology is being referenced.  Regardless, given that the first Ford class carrier is not yet complete and that several major pieces of equipment are still highly suspect regarding their long term viability, it’s hard to see how a block buy contract makes sense or would even be permissible.  This is clearly an attempt by a defense industry “lobby” to lock in construction business and profits.

Such an acquisition move is not necessarily a bad thing.  Theoretically, there are savings to be had from such a contract structure although, as CRS points out, such savings are small and often difficult to demonstrate in the face of the many other sources of cost increases which can obscure any savings (2).

Curiously, the article references the desire of the Coalition to initiate block buys of common equipment at a very early point in construction.  However, as the CRS report points out, this may not be legal.

“Economic order quantity (EOQ) authority—the authority to bring forward selected key components of the items to be procured under the contract and purchase the components in batch form during the first year or two of the contract—does not come automatically as part of BBC authority because there is no permanent statute governing the use of BBC that includes EOQ authority as an automatic feature.” (2)

This appears, then, to be a questionable contracting procedure intended to solidify the defense industry’s work load more so than to produce savings for the Navy.  Again, it’s not necessarily bad as long as the Navy enters into the agreement carefully and with a well thought out contract – something the Navy has not been noted for in the past!

Moving on to the more interesting point, the Coalition is asking for money to research ways to save money building carriers.  Well, here’s one way to save money:  don’t spend money to research ways to save money! 

The group is requesting $20M for research.  Hey, here’s an interesting procurement tidbit - figuring out how to make construction less expensive is supposed to be what the shipbuilder does all the time.  In fact, under a fixed price contract, there is enormous incentive for the shipbuilder to find ways to reduce construction costs because the savings go completely to the shipbuilder.  If savings can be demonstrated, the next ship can be built to a cheaper contract price and the cycle continues.  This is what economy of scale is.  The Navy doesn’t need to finance the shipbuilder’s cost savings efforts;  the fixed price contract already does that!

This effort is just industry trying to get the Navy to pay for what industry should be doing, and has every incentive to do.  I hope the Navy isn’t dumb enough to do this.  It all goes back to our discussions about running procurement contracts like a business instead of like an industry welfare program.

That industry would even ask for (demand) these financial concessions illustrates how ingrained poor contracting practices have become and how desensitized the Navy has become to being financially abused (willingly) on a regular basis.  This must end.

__________________________

(1)USNI News, “Industry Pushing Congress for CVN-80 and 81 Block Buy, Research for Shipbuilding Efficiency”, Megan Eckstein, March 18, 2016,

http://news.usni.org/2016/03/18/industry-pushing-congress-for-cvn-80-and-81-block-buy-research-for-shipbuilding-efficiency

(2)Congressional Research Service, “Multiyear Procurement (MYP) and Block Buy Contracting in Defense Acquisition: Background and Issues for Congress”, Ronald O'Rourke & Moshe Schwartz, November 6, 2015

Distributed Targeting

A reader, Benjamin Oliver, recently made a very succinct comment regarding the use of the LCS and every other Navy ship as shooters.  To paraphrase slightly, he said that distributed lethality won’t work without distributed targeting.   This is a brilliant summation of the issue.

The LCS will have 100+ nm anti-ship missiles coupled with 20 nm sensors.  Yes, the ship will have a helo and a UAV but the helo will be reserved for ASW and near-ship ASuW.  The UAV will have a very limited sensor field of view and a single UAV will be woefully inadequate for broad area target searches.  Thus, the ship will have to depend on off-board sensing and targeting.  We’ve discussed this many times.

The Navy’s plan to use P-8s and Triton UAVs is unworkable.  Both are large, slow, non-stealthy aircraft that will serve only as target drones for enemy aircraft and missiles.

Submarines simply don’t have the sensor range or speed to cover the large swaths of ocean needed to find enemy ships.  Plus, our submarines will have more important tasks than acting as search platforms for the LCS.

Satellites are not capable of real time targeting, contrary to what many people believe, and they won’t last long in a peer war.

So, where will the distributed lethality get its distributed targeting?  The short, simple, and painful answer is that there is no viable distributed targeting system.  The kill chain is missing a key link and the Navy’s distributed lethality is just another unworkable Navy fantasy without it.

The concept of distributed targeting is, however, viable with the right sensors.  Unfortunately, the Navy does not have the right sensors and, worse, seems to have no grasp of the problem and no intention of getting the right sensors.  The task falls, then, to us to define the right sensors.

The requirement is simple.  The sensor needs to be able to penetrate many hundreds of miles of enemy territory undetected, find targets, and transmit the data back to the shooters.  For the sake of this discussion, we’ll assume the shooters are ships, the LCS specifically, although the shooters could also be aircraft or land bases.

So, the sensor needs great range, long endurance, stealth of some form, a decent size/power radar and/or good optical sensor, and secure communications.  There are also a couple of implied characteristics.

Unless the sensor is a very large AWACS / E-2 Hawkeye / P-8 Orion size platform, the radar it carries (assuming it uses radar) will, of necessity, be small and low powered which means the field of scan will be limited.  This suggests that large numbers of sensors will be needed to make up for the limited individual coverage.

This, in turn, implies the characteristic of affordability.  Large numbers of sensors can only be produced if the individual sensor is cheap. 

By definition, many of these sensors won’t make it back.  This, again, argues for extreme affordability to be able to absorb the losses and costs.

So, having defined the requirements, what form of platform can meet the requirements?

Unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) are stealthy but too close to the surface to have much sensing range and are too slow to cover much territory.  UUVs, then, would not make good general purpose distributed sensors.  They could, however, be useful for monitoring limited, fixed areas like navigational chokepoints or harbors. 

Unmanned surface vessels (USV), like UUVs, lack the sensor range and speed to cover sufficient territory.  In addition, they lack the inherent stealth of a UUV.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) potentially offer the range, endurance, and speed to cover larger areas.  Combined with the high altitude they operate at, the sensing area is correspondingly greater.  UAVs also offer the potential to be stealthy through a combination of small size (compared to an AWACS or P-8) and airframe shaping.

Blackjack UAV

UAV’s, then, seem to be the best choice for distributed sensors.  The concept of operation would be to flood a region with many dozens of UAVs at any given moment.  Although an individual UAV would provide limited coverage, the large numbers would ensure adequate area coverage and compensate for the inevitable high attrition rate.

The key question is whether the desired characteristics can be made to fit in an affordable package.  Can we build a UAV with great range, small size, stealth, and decent radar/optics for a low enough price to allow us to build thousands of them?  That’s a difficult challenge but that’s the part of the kill chain the Navy needs to be working on.  An LCS with a hundred or thousand mile anti-ship missile is useless if we can’t provide targeting.

__________________________________

Side note:  An upsized Blackjack UAV might make a good design starting point for a distributed targeting sensor.  The Blackjack has an operational radius of 480 miles and is small enough to be operated from any ship.  It has a degree of stealth by virtue of its size and the airframe could probably be shaped to provide a greater degree of stealth.

Alternatively, a downsized MQ-1 Predator might also make a good starting point.  It has an operational radius of around 1000 miles.

__________________________________

S-3 Viking Gunship

We’ve seen that the Marines are trying to create a poor man’s gunship out of their KC-130J Super Hercules tankers using the Harvest Hawk add-on kit.  The Marines are also toying around with turning the MV-22 into a mini-gunship.  So, can the Navy get in on this?  Maybe an E-2C/D Hawkeye gunship?  That probably wouldn’t be any sillier than what the Marines are doing but, just for fun, let’s take a look at a study that was done many years ago about turning an S-3 Viking into a gunship.  Taylor Emanuel did the study for his Naval Posgraduate School thesis (1).

To begin with, the author notes that organic fire support capability was being steadily reduced. 

“This study provides analysis that shows a huge reduction in expeditionary fire support capability. The Marine Corps has experienced a 45 percent reduction in cannon artillery, the loss of self-propelled artillery capability, and reductions in tactical aircraft. The Navy has decommissioned all battleship NSFS 16-inch gun platforms and mine threats coupled with limited littoral water depths will probably make NSFS 5-inch guns a non-factor.”

So, even back in the early 1990’s the trend of steadily shrinking fire support was obvious and this trend provides the foundation and justification for his examination of gunship options.  Interesting, isn’t it, that the author saw the inadequacy of the 5” gun for fire support long before the Navy opted to retreat to 25-50 miles offshore?  Those artillery reductions have only gotten worse and have been joined, now, by tank reductions.  The organic fire support situation has only gotten worse - far worse.

The author’s solution is to increase Close Air Support (CAS).

“To offset reductions in organic fire support, more frequent and sustained application of CAS and CAS/TIC [TIC = Troops in Contact]  will be required by joint expeditionary forces.”

He uses four measures of CAS to determine merit:

• target detection/recognition
• lethality
• survivability;
• combat persistence.

That’s not a bad group of measures for CAS.  Of course, just as important, or more so, is the direction of the battle – the ability of the pilot (or observer) to see, assess, and direct the battle.  However, that’s a function of training and doctrine and the author is focused on the platform so he can be forgiven this omission. 

Here is the author’s summary of desired characteristics.

“The sensor suite consists of a turret mounted forward looking infrared and low-light-level television to provide 360 degree battlefield coverage and to cover the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The weapons suite consists of one 25-MM Bushmaster chain gun for area suppression of personnel and use against light armor, one 30-MM Bushmaster II gun for destruction of vehicles and armored vehicles, and eight Hellfire missiles for hard-target kill and forward-firing, non-orbit firing capability. In addition, the platform will be survivable. It will have state-of-the-art self-defense capability coupled with armor plating and redundant systems. Finally, combat persistence will be good. The CBG [carrier based gunship] will be carrier-capable and have at least a 1,500 nautical mile range.”

The platforms that the author examines for CAS suitability are the E-2C, S-3, and V-22.  The specific relevant characteristics of the S-3 Viking in the gunship role are:

• High wing – minimize interference with weaponry
• Good range/endurance
• High speed
• Cabin height over 7 ft – allows full installation and operation of weapons
• Crew of 4 – would result in task saturation according to the author;  four is the minimum viable CAS crew size, according to the author
• Comprehensive sensor suite – FLIR and ISAR already part of the airframe
• High IR signature – means the aircraft would be susceptible to heat seeking weapons
• Low Radar signature – low on a relative basis, not compared to full stealth aircraft
• Good munitions load capacity
• Full weapons load
• 1x 25mm
• 2x 30mm
• 8x Hellfire

Gunship?

As the author points out, the Navy, and carrier groups, lack any real close air support.  As ComNavOps has pointed out, in a peer level assault the carrier's aircraft will be fully occupied trying to establish and maintain air control and protecting the carrier/amphib groups.  They will only sporadically be available for CAS, at best.  

The author’s thesis demonstrated that the S-3 offers the possibility of a dedicated CAS platform though it would not, of course, be as effective as a purpose designed, new aircraft.  Still it’s an interesting concept to think about and once again emphasizes the versatility of the S-3 which has operated in the ASW, ISR, maritime strike, ESM, tanker, and COD roles.  That’s a pretty impressive and versatile aircraft!

______________________

(1)Taylor C. Emanuel, “Gunship Diplomacy: Carrier-Based Close Air Support For Joint Expeditionary Forces”, Naval Postgraduate School Thesis, Dec 1994