Keeping an Eye on the Long Game: Part XXX

Who is keeping an eye on the long game? James Kraska is.

Over at Orbis, he has an article that is worth reading, How the United States Lost the Naval War on 2015. Sure, the article has been out a few months --- but it lingers; it has a flavor.

Let's look at it.

First thing; I won't pick too much on his 2015 date. Who knows - I wouldn't call that time ripe (if I were Chinese I would push that to the right a decade and a half) - but hey - this is a just a vignette to spark a discussion, and no one called 1939 or 1914 either.

That isn't what is important. The vignette is just the wrapper - the concepts he brings out via the vignette is its meat.

He hits center mass however or some critical "shaping" issues. Starting in the first paragraph - you get a good idea where he is coming from and going to.

With a maritime strategy focused on lower order partnerships, and a national oceans policy that devalued strategic interests in freedom of navigation, the stage was set for defeat at sea.

Yes, a few Salamanderesque things to talk about.

He outlines well the second and third order effects of military exchanges and technology transfer. Short term thinking with long term consequences.

Globalization, developments in the international law of the sea, and the revolution in military affairs aided the emergence of China and other new naval powers. Globalization was a democratizing force among navies. The wealth effect of expanding trade and rising economies combined with the spread of doctrine, training and operational art, serving as a force multiplier. The result of globalization was a vastly improved Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in terms of its force structure and warfighting skills. The proliferation of advanced weapons technology helped nations that historically had never exercised naval power to make generational leaps in precision-guided munitions.

Just for starters, review Loral from the '90s. You know the background.

In addition to being very good at reverse engineering (though more work needed on the quality side) - the Chinese are also a good are understanding history, especially their history.

There are a few things that I would pop Kraska on the back of the head for though, as some good stuff got lost in poorly chosen buzz-words we could have done without. Here is one pop on 'da head.

A collection of unfriendly coastal states had invested heavily in asymmetric anti-access technologies and strategies to counter the power of U.S. naval forces. In 1991, Iraq used a mixture of crude pre-World War I contact navalmines and sophisticated magnetic and acoustic influence mines launched from small rubber boats. The country deployed over 1,100 mines in the first Gulf War, but most of them were either inoperable or improperly positioned. Yet Baghdad still reaped success in using mines to secure its seaside flank off Kuwait City. The USS Tripoli struck a moored contact mine, which ripped a 16 20 foot cavern below the waterline; hours later, and despite proceeding with deliberate caution to avoidmines, the USS Princeton struck a mine that cracked her superstructure and caused severe deck buckling.
...
Fueled by a dynamic economy and impressive ingenuity, Beijing developed and fielded a bevy of asymmetric weapons. One game-changing weapon, an anti-ship ballistic missile, could hit an underway aircraft carrier.

The good stuff is the note on "Sea Denial" weapons - or as I call it, the "Porcupine Strategy." You don't have to be the biggest, strongest, or most intelligent - you simply have to make it too painful and dangerous for anyone to get close to you.

The bad part - "asymmetric."

No, no, no. Sigh, sorry - I have to do this.

Adj. 1. asymmetric - characterized by asymmetry in the spatial arrangement or placement of parts or components

asymmetrical
irregular - contrary to rule or accepted order or general practice; "irregular hiring practices"

There is nothing asymmetrical about mine warfare - good googly moogly, there is a Union Ship a mortar shot away from me sunk by a "mine" in the Civil War. There is nothing "contrary" about it - it is about as much of the environment as typhoons - and like typhoons, they are only asymmetrical if you ignore them and/or don't prepare for them.

Same thing as ASBMs. Was the Dive Bomber asymmetrical? Was the Motor Torpedo Boat? Was the Submarine?

No. They were evolutionary developments in warfare - the eternal Darwinian battlefield. One technology begets a defensive response to them, that begets the need for another weapon, etc. Once again, they are only asymmetrical if you are so hide-bound and myopic as an institution that you refuse to improvise, adapt and overcome. Ahem.

I do not like the use of the "A-word" because it gives some mystic glint to what is a straight-forward professional challenge. A nit-pic? Sure. Detracts from the good stuff in his article? Not at all.

The core of his vignette,

Without warning, a Chinese anti-ship ballistic missile – a variant of the 1,500 km-plus range DF-21/CSS-5 solid propellant medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) specifically designed to decapitate U.S. carrier strike groups operating in East Asia – struck the USS George Washington causing the ship to erupt in a cataclysm.

There is some nice "PSYOPS-INFO OPS" vignette play that I will skip through because this part is what interests me - but if that is your thing, make sure and read it all. Back to my stuff though.

Nations that had little respect for offshore or littoral freedom of navigation were courted, and regional commanders favored the benefits of partnership over the value of preserving navigational rights. Winning ‘‘hearts and minds’’ trumped age-old principles. The U.S. Navy struggled with how to conduct combined, lower-order maritime security operations. China was concentrating on how to win a naval war.
...
Furthermore, most of the other nations with large navies were allies. While technically true when measured in fleet tonnage and missile tubes, his testimony obscured the fact that while the U.S. Navy perhaps could outmatch any other navy in a fair fight, her rivals were not looking for a fair fight. Allies would prove unreliable partners, more intent on avoiding war than deterring it. U.S. adversaries were thinking asymmetrically.

Those are two paragraphs that are very difficult to talk about in "polite company" but represent two significant strategic risks that we have adopted. Oh, and I will ignore the A-word. Read Sun Tzu (the Chinese do) - its all there.

He reminds us of another challenge of the American Fleet - we have more than one ocean to worry about,

The fourteen-to-one advantage in naval power also assumed that the United States had time to collect and concentrate its far-flung ships against a single foe. The ephemeral 313-ship force structure was never achieved, but it called for eleven carriers, eighty-eight cruisers and destroyers, forty-eight submarines, fifty-five littoral combat ships and thirty-one amphibious warfare ships. But these forces were spread thinly throughout the world maintaining a bewildering and multi-tasked agenda. Given that a 1.0 force presence—maintaining one ship on station—typically requires three ships—one in work-ups and evaluation, getting ready to deploy, one on deployment, and one in the yard being refurbished after deployment—the 313 ships never really promised more than about 100 ships at sea at any given time, and these would be spread over the entire globe.
...
No sooner had warships from the U.S. Second Fleet in Norfolk gotten underway, however, than did Cosco, the Chinese company operating the Panama Canal, declare the passageway closed for four weeks for urgent repairs to the Atlantic and Pacific locks. Closure of the 40-mile long canal added 3,000 miles to transits from the East coast of the United States to the Far East.6 The alternative was to take the laborious route through the Strait of Magellan in southern Chile. Considerably safer than Drake Passage, Magellan was still difficult to navigate. The narrow passage was dogged by fierce winds and the inhospitable climate. Half the U.S. fleet anchored in Norfolk was temporarily cut off from the Pacific. At the same time, street protests to stop the impending transit of U.S. warships through the Suez Canal stung the government in Cairo. The Suez Canal shaves 40 percent of the distance off a trip from the Sixth Fleet operating area in the Mediterranean Sea to the Far East.

Actually, the Straight of Magellan is a challenge, but isn't that difficult, but inside the vignette, both canal challenges are well described.

... and here is the Porcupine in action,

In 2015, China’s navy was somewhat smaller, numbering only a handful of aircraft carriers, sixty submarines and seventy major surface combatants. Beijing also operated hundreds of fast offshore patrol vessels, many that packed a punch with anti-ship cruise missiles. Whereas an adversary like China could marshal its entire national fleet for a crisis immediately off its shore, as well as land-based missiles and aircraft, to face down the United States, the U.S. Navy would have to fight with the forces that happened to be in the region.

Back to the critique - there is another problem from a historical perspective, though I don't blame the author. It came from the 2009 DOD Capstone Concept for Joint Operations,

Foreign sensitivities to U.S. military presence have steadily been increasing. . . .

Balderdash. I remember the Sane-Freeze gaggle anti-GLCM/Pershing II et al from the Cold War. This is nothing new - we have it easy.

Speaking of balderdash,

The Army could fail, as it did in Vietnam;

No, no, and no. The military part of the Vietnam War was won. The defeat of the '72 invasion proved that. Vietnam was lost in '75 when Congress cut off all support for South Vietnam, inviting the North to invade. Political, not military defeat. Rinse, repeat.

He makes up for these historical oversights with a more critical historical reference that is a foundation stone to understanding th Chinese mind.

When China was weak, it suffered the indignity of routine U.S. and foreign naval operations off its shores. But as the U.S. Navy declined and the Chinese Navy became more powerful, China became less willing to tolerate the ‘‘foreign invasions.’’

All you need to do is pull the string from The Sand Pebbles and you will know what he is talking about. Still a huge issue for the Chinese. Their cultural historical memory is a order of magnitude greater than ours - and they hold grudges.

Towards the end, Kraska plays gadfly rather well.

When China acted, it was the culmination of a patient and focused national plan to couple naval technology and resources to a corresponding political, legal and diplomatic strategy in the oceans. The U.S. Naval force plans had been in disarray for decades. The nation was implementing a ‘‘cooperative’’ naval strategy designed for peace—preventing brushfire wars rather than deterring great power conflict. Meanwhile, the White House, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, placed environmentalists in charge of strategic U.S. oceans policy. These environmentalists championed coastal state control over the offshore areas – both in the United States and in multilateral diplomacy – and this focus played into China’s hands by de-legitimizing freedom of the seas in the littorals.

From the Battle of Lepanto to the Battle of Okinawa, major fleet action was the decisive event in many modern wars. Over the past five hundred years all of the world’s foremost powers achieved their position of leadership through reliance on unsurpassed naval capabilities.16 Even a traditional continental power such as Russia reached the apex of its standing on the global stage through naval power.17 The West had forgotten that the history of international security and freedom of the seas was a story intimately woven into the material of world politics, forming the basis for an Anglo-American world order.

True, we lost focus on Neo-Mahanian ideal - but a good Navy can do both. "Distributed and Networked" warfare with many small units has a long history in the USN. From the Union blockade of the South to the Battle of the Atlantic and the unrestricted submarine warfare against Imperial Japan - we did that while being able to pivot to major fleet actions as well.

Yes, we do need to focus on what I call the Long Game - but we can and must do both. I am not too pessimistic on the technology side. Sure, they (might) have a MRBM - but we will have SM-3. They may sink one carrier - but with the political will, we can handle that. History also proves that fixed shore sites are no match for mobile strike from the sea.

What we do need to do is to shorten our lab-to-Fleet technology cycle. Get technology demonstrators to sea. We don't do that like we used to.

Why did I call Kraska a gadfly? Well - he got a reaction - reaction in the right places.

Let's start with the Financial Times. In their article you find a common problem - the "official" thinkers in both locations seem to have the same mission; tell everyone to ignore the poor innocent military expansion by the world's most populous nation - who BTW is run by an authoritarian government.

Some analysts express caution against overstating China’s naval prowess. Even sending a small group of ships to take part in anti-piracy operations off the east coast of Africa this year proved to be a large logistical challenge for the Chinese navy.

“China lacks many of the capabilities to project power abroad,” says David Shambaugh, a China specialist at George Washington University in the US.
...
“The focus of our foreign policy will be in assisting development, not in signing up to expensive new commitments,” says Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at People’s University in Beijing.

Or as another Chinese academic, who asked not to be named, says of protecting seaborne trade: “Why should we spend billions of dollars paying for something that is already being paid for?” Largely paid for, he did not need to mention, by the US.

Can anyone say, "Don't plan based upon stated intentions, but by capability." Wait, I did.

Thomas E. Ricks isn't all that happy, here is the part he didn't like.

The U.S. Navy also suffered problems in readiness and proficiency. Diversion of thousands of officers and enlisted sailors to fill Army shortfalls in Iraq and Afghanistan deprived the service of years of training and operational experience at sea. Promotions were tied to disassociated augmentation tours for stability operations and reconstruction rather than excellence afloat. An entire generation of mid-career commissioned and noncommissioned officers tried to learn counterinsurgency land warfare in the desert and mountains of of central Asia while their counterparts in China conducted fleet exercises to learn how to destroy them."

Ricks snarkily replies,

Really? Has the Navy sent "an entire generation" to Iraq and Afghanistan?

Well, yes; or at least a large part of it. I spent the last part of my career largely doing nothing but that - Navy CDR doing a LTC's job. I didn't mind though - I picked that set of orders around what "my community" wanted me to do. The taxpayer got much more out of me than the "busy make-work" the folks in Millington would have had me do. So yes, Ricks has a point - but so does Kraska.

Ricks then shifts fire here.

Also, does national security rest ultimately only on the Navy, as this hydrocentric article tendentiously asserts?:

Only more slowly did people begin to realize that the maintenance of the world order had rested on U.S. military power, and that the foundation of that power was U.S. command of the global commons. The Army could fail, as it did in Vietnam; the Air Force was ancillary to the Army. To secure the U.S. position and the nation's security-and indeed for world order-the Navy could never fail."

Well, when you are fighting China - the Navy and the USAF better be at the front. Land war in Asia? No thank you.

In his final broadside, I think Ricks tells us more about himself than Kraska,

But what stuck in my craw most of all was Kraska's casual poke at "the apologizing Obama administration," which he asserts that, combined with the "unpopularity" of the predecessor administration, is undermining national security. I think it is acceptable for active duty officers to critique strategy, but I think here Kraska is sailing a little too close to politically attacking his commander in chief, especially since he offers no evidence, and footnotes this sentence to an article by Henry Kissinger that appeared months before Obama became president.

That is a funny snit. James - you made Tom look cross-eyed! Bravo Zulu!!! Oh, and for the record; Ricks is totally off base on this argument - Kraska is well clear. No one is perfect though, we'll give Ricks a pass.

Intellectual churn - it keeps you healthy. There has been a push, General Mattis and Admiral Stavridis have pushed the most I think, for officers to read, think, and write. James Kraska has answered that call.

One note of warning though - Mattis and Stavridis are rare. Many of their peers - and many more between O6-O9, do not share their enthusiasm for discussion. Cultivate those who support your efforts - but watch your back. Sad, but even this month I have received emails from people on active duty who have had the person who ownes paper on them threaten them professionally for "reading, thinking, writing." But hey - Sims, Mitchell, Connolly - you're in good company.