A Review of the 2022 National Defense Strategy

In the very serious and expensive game of national defense, words matter. Even more than words, published documents with the President or Cabinet Secretaries' signatures are the source code of what our government will do as a matter of effort and expenditure. They are the "Ref. A." and regardless of their readability or subjective goodness, they require serious understanding and careful reading. 

Readers could not ask for a better mind to look at the most recent National Defense Strategy than our friend and occasional guest poster, Bryan McGrath. 

Refresh your drink of choice and dive in to his overview below. Bryan, over to you. 

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Following close on the heels of the Biden Administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), the Secretary of Defense released last week the 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) which is designed to explicate how the Department of Defense will prioritize and align to carry out the tasks assigned it (explicitly and implicitly) by the NSS. Released alongside the NDS were the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review and the 2022 Missile Defense Review, neither of which are addressed in this essay.

The lens through which this assessment is made is that of a navalist and unreconstructed Seapower advocate. Those biases acknowledged up front, the reader must decide whether the quality of analysis is impacted.

The document is well-written, and is a quick read, digestible by most readers who stay abreast of national security and international events. It is—like most of its predecessors—far more like the strategy it replaces than it is different. We tend not to lurch but to probe.

The format of this evaluation is to assess the goods and others of each section in turn. Verbatim quotes are in bolded italics.

 

LETTER OF PROMULGATION

The purpose of this section of the document is to give the reader insight as to what the Secretary of Defense considers the most important of the most important parts of the strategy. The letter is clear and well-written and avoids diving too deeply into any of the more controversial parts of the NDS.

Goods

The NDS directs the Department to act urgently to sustain and strengthen U.S. deterrence, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the pacing challenge for the Department.

This is superb. This sentence is the entire strategy boiled down to twenty-eight words. Would that it had remained so.

The PRC remains our most consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades. I have reached this conclusion based on the PRC’s increasingly coercive actions to reshape the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to fit its authoritarian preferences, alongside a keen awareness of the PRC’s clearly stated intentions and the rapid modernization and expansion of its military. As President Biden’s National Security Strategy notes, the PRC is “the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order, and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so.”

Again, this is superb. This is the problem statement, and as such, it cannot be improved.

Even as we take these steps, we will act with urgency to build enduring advantages for the future Joint Force, undertaking reforms to accelerate force development, getting the technology we need more quickly, and making investments in the extraordinary people of the Department, who remain our most valuable resource.

There is potential for greatness in these words, as what is implied here is the buildup of both offensive and defensive power. We will return to them.

 

Others

Our central charge is to develop, combine, and coordinate our strengths to maximum effect. This is the core of integrated deterrence, a centerpiece of the 2022 NDS. Integrated deterrence means using every tool at the Department’s disposal, in close collaboration with our counterparts across the U.S. Government and with Allies and partners, to ensure that potential foes understand the folly of aggression. The Department will align policies, investments, and activities to sustain and strengthen deterrence—tailored to specific competitors and challenges and coordinated and synchronized inside and outside the Department.

We will come back to this, the creation of the term “integrated deterrence” to somehow differentiate how the Biden team intends to conduct what previously was known as… “deterrence.” The suggestion that previous administrations—irrespective of party—did not do these things as the jot and tittle of their approach to deterrence is uninformed, ahistorical, and incorrect.

The Department will also campaign day-to-day to gain and sustain military advantages, counter acute forms of our competitors’ coercion, and complicate our competitors’ military preparations.

Again, we will return to this concept of “campaigning” later in the document. But when I read those words above, I find myself nodding and saying “Yep. Deterrence.” 

 

I.                INTRODUCTION

The introduction restates much of what was in the Secretary’s Letter of Promulgation.

Goods

The strategy identifies four top-level defense priorities that the Department must pursue to strengthen deterrence. First, we will defend the homeland. Second, we will deter strategic attacks against the United States, our Allies, and our partners. Third, we will deter aggression and be prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary. Fourth, to ensure our future military advantage, we will build a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem.

Clear, unobjectionable. My only quibble is the annoying adoption of the word “ecosystem”—first by the computer science world and now by all the other cool kids to describe a “system” or a “system of systems.” But that is just me.

We cannot meet these complex and interconnected challenges alone. Mutually-beneficial Alliances and partnerships are our greatest global strategic advantage – and they are a center of gravity for this strategy. We will strengthen major regional security architectures with our Allies and partners based on complementary contributions; combined, collaborative operations and force planning; increased intelligence and information sharing; new operational concepts; and our ability to draw on the Joint Force worldwide.

The strength of our economy (protected and sustained by our Navy) is the most important contributor to our military strength. The second most important contributor is our network of friends and allies (I do not capitalize “ally” or any of its variants—although I do capitalize “Seapower,” so sue me). This is clear and unambiguous here, and throughout this strategy. Time will tell whether posture decisions demonstrate our commitment to these friends and allies.

Others

The Department will advance our priorities through integrated deterrence, campaigning, and actions that build enduring advantages. Integrated deterrence entails working seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, all instruments of U.S. national power, and our network of Alliances and partnerships. Tailored to specific circumstances, it applies a coordinated, multifaceted approach to reducing competitors’ perceptions of the net benefits of aggression relative to restraint. Integrated deterrence is enabled by combat-credible forces prepared to fight and win, as needed, and backstopped by a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent.

Broken record alert—integrated deterrence is deterrence—it is not new; it is not novel. It is—as a term of art—cunningly constructed to indicate a preference for the increased importance of (and resource allocation from) OTHER “instruments of U.S. national power” so that defense resources can be either applied differently or harvested for other domestic policy preferences. The term is a creation of the DoD, and if the NSS or statements by other key figures in the national security apparatus (POTUS, SECSTATE, NSA) is any guide to the degree to which it has been adopted elsewhere in the “whole of government,” one can assume it is not widely respected.

Day after day, the Department will strengthen deterrence and gain advantage against competitors’ most consequential coercive measures by campaigning – the conduct and sequencing of logically linked military initiatives aimed at advancing well-defined, strategy-aligned priorities over time. The United States will operate forces, synchronize broader Departmental efforts, and align Departmental activities with other instruments of national power to counter forms of competitor coercion, complicate competitors’ military preparations, and develop our own warfighting capabilities together with those of our Allies and partners.

The inclusion of “campaigning” alongside “(integrated) deterrence” and “building enduring advantages” is a category error. The second sentence in this paragraph IS deterrence. As a navalist/conspiracy theorist, I have some anxiety about this concept. This is the camel’s nose in the tent for those with an adolescent understanding of naval presence (the “why do you need all those ships over there sailing around without a real mission?”) crowd, who wish to reduce the size of the Navy and have it operated more from a surge posture than from a forward posture.

 

II.               SECURITY ENVIRONMENT

Goods

This is a very well-written and conceived section that focuses on what the Administration considers important.

Others

Climate Change and other Transboundary Challenges. Beyond state and non-state actors, changes in global climate and other dangerous transboundary threats are already transforming the context in which the Department operates. Increasing temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, rising sea levels, and more frequent extreme weather conditions will affect basing and access while degrading readiness, installations, and capabilities. Climate change is creating new corridors of strategic interaction, particularly in the Arctic region. It will increase demands, including on the Joint Force, for disaster response and defense support of civil authorities, and affect security relationships with some Allies and partners. Insecurity and instability related to climate change may tax governance capacity in some countries while heightening tensions between others, risking new armed conflicts and increasing demands for stabilization activities.

I believe climate change is happening and that man is contributing to it. I believe we are an adaptable species and that we can and will adapt. I find myself often shaking my head when I read DoD officials talking about climate change and the degree to which they attempt to steal a rhetorical base by turning it into a national security threat. Climate change will cause DoD to make investments in bases over time—either creating new ones or buttressing old ones. Over a long time. If—as I am so often reminded—climate change will cause an acceleration and intensifying of all manner of “climate events” (a.k.a “natural disasters”), then there is a serious “say/do” mismatch between their rhetoric and their resourcing. To wit: the Navy’s large amphibious ships are not only important for the projection of land power ashore, but they are among the defense arsenal’s MOST useful platforms to mitigate human suffering in the event of natural disasters. The capacity for cargo carrying, power generation, water-making, and food distribution—not to mention the labor force contained therein, a labor force assembled for far more violent ends—makes these ships invaluable. Yet the Defense Department is trying to kill off the LPD 17 Flight II class at three ships (instead of 10), a resource driven requirement that is not only short-sighted, but unwise.

 

III.            DEFENSE PRIORITIES

Goods

• Defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC;
• Deterring strategic attacks against the United States, Allies, and partners;
• Deterring aggression, while being prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary –prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific region, then the Russia challenge in Europe; and,
• Building a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem

This short section is clear and straightforward, except for the previously stated objectionable use of the term “ecosystem.”

IV.            INTEGRATED DETERRENCE

I have already spilled enough electrons in my criticisms of “integrated deterrence,” and so I will not belabor them here. This is—to my knowledge—the first real attempt by OSD to create a “definition” of integrated deterrence. There is an interesting discussion in the section of “How We Will Deter” (not “How We Will Integratedly Deter”) that brings up the standard deterrence theory terms “denial” and “punishment”, and the degree to which THIS administration is unwilling to cast its lot with one over the other (the Trump team having explicitly come down on “denial”).

Others

Meeting the challenge requires a holistic response: integrated deterrence. In the past, the Department’s approach to deterrence has too often been hindered by competing priorities; lack of clarity regarding the specific competitor actions we seek to deter; an emphasis on deterring behaviors in instances where Department authorities and tools are ill-suited; and stovepiping. Integrated deterrence is how we will align the Department’s policies, investments, and activities to sustain and strengthen deterrence – tailored to specific competitors and coordinated to maximum effect inside and outside the Department.

This is a broad swipe at every single administration since the end of WWII, and I am not aware of scholarship that backs up this view of how deterrence has been achieved.

Deterrence by Resilience. Denying the benefits of aggression also requires resilience – the ability to withstand, fight through, and recover quickly from disruption. The Department will improve its ability to operate in the face of multi-domain attacks on a growing surface of vital networks and critical infrastructure, both in the homeland and in collaboration with Allies and partners at risk. Because the cyber and space domains empower the entire Joint Force, we will prioritize building resilience in these areas. Cyber resilience will be enhanced by, for example, modern encryption and a zero-trust architecture. In the space domain, the Department will reduce adversary incentives for early attack by fielding diverse, resilient, and redundant satellite constellations. We will bolster our ability to fight through disruption by improving defensive capabilities and increasing options for reconstitution. We will assist Allies and partners in doing the same.

So, let us review some of the terminological excesses of this strategy. First, it attempts to create a new kind of deterrence, called “integrated deterrence,” which is not in fact, new at all. Or even required. Next, it raises “campaigning” to the level of deterrence, when it is in fact, a means to achieve deterrence—deterrence by denial. The next crime is this new concept of “deterrence by resilience,” which up until a few days ago, I had never heard of. This is because virtually every word in how this term is defined applies to deterrence by denial. It is an unnecessary attempt to add a veneer of intellectual heft to an already well-understood topic.

Finally, a portion of this section is devoted to “Tailored Deterrence Approaches” (not “Tailored Integrated Deterrence Approaches” …I am so confused). It attempts to take highly classified approaches and plans and present them in an unclassified fashion. Doing so is unfortunate, as this section is not useful in an unclassified setting.

 

V.               CAMPAIGNING

This section is unnecessary and should have been included in the “(Integrated) Deterrence” section.

 

VI.            ANCHORING OUR STRATEGY IN ALLIES AND PARTNERS AND ADVANCING REGIONAL GOALS

Goods

The clear message here to friends and allies is that “you matter.” Our network of friends and allies is important.

Others

The Department will seek to improve denial capability, including resilience, particularly for those most exposed to military coercion.

If one needed more proof for my contention that “deterrence by resilience” is just “deterrence by denial,” one only needs to consider this sentence.

 

VII.          FORCE PLANNING

Goods

Our approach to force planning aims to build strength and capability in key operational areas. To maintain information advantage, the Department will improve our ability to integrate, defend, and reconstitute our surveillance and decision systems to achieve warfighting objectives, particularly in the space domain, and despite adversaries’ means of interference or deception. To preserve command, control, and communications in a fast-paced battlefield, we will make our network architectures more resilient against system-level exploitation and disruption so as to ensure effective coordination of distributed forces. To enhance our ability to deny aggression, we will improve the speed and accuracy of detection and targeting. To mitigate adversary anti-access/area denial capability, the Department will develop concepts and capabilities that improve our ability to reliably hold at risk those military forces and assets that are essential to adversary operational success, while managing escalation. For logistics and sustainment, we will reinforce our adaptability to quickly mobilize and deploy forces and to sustain high-intensity joint denial operations despite kinetic and no-kinetic attack and disruption.

This is excellent stuff, and it represents effective thinking at DoD. Would that it were married to a sense of dread at the capacity problems all the services face.

Others

The Joint Force will remain prepared to employ combat-ready forces on short notice to address aggression or crisis, an ability critical to strengthening deterrence. At the same time, the Department will make sure that day-to-day requirements to deploy and operate forces do not erode readiness for future missions, or bias investments towards extant but increasingly less effective capabilities at the expense of building capability and proficiency for advanced threats.

Further to my earlier discussion of conspiracy, this is the Austin/Hicks DoD approach to knee-capping the Navy. One can sense the disdain associated with the words “day-to-day requirements to deploy and operate forces do not erode readiness for future missions, or bias investments towards extant but increasingly less effective capabilities at the expense of building capability and proficiency for advanced threats” as OSD continues to question the operational value of forward based naval forces as instruments of U.S. security and prosperity. This is the stuff of ridiculous “presence for presence’s sake” arguments, and flies in the face of the will of the House of Representatives (at least for now), which passed a 2023 NDAA changing the Title 10 mission of the Navy to include these vital peacetime activities. Predictably, OSD has objected to this change, and is hoping to derail it in upcoming House/Senate NDAA negotiations.

VIII.        BUILDING ENDURING ADVANTAGES

Goods

Transform the Foundation of the Future Force. Building the Joint Force called for by this strategy requires overhauling the Department’s force development, design, and business management practices. Our current system is too slow and too focused on acquiring systems not designed to address the most critical challenges we now face. This orientation leaves little incentive to design open systems that can rapidly incorporate cutting-edge technologies, creating longer-term challenges with obsolescence, interoperability, and cost effectiveness. The Department will instead reward rapid experimentation, acquisition, and fielding.

Any red-blooded American ought to be all for this. Any red-blooded American who understands the system (not “ecosystem”) knows how heavy a lift this will be.

Because Joint Force operations increasingly rely on data-driven technologies and integration of diverse data sources, the Department will implement institutional reforms that integrate our data, software, and artificial intelligence efforts and speed their delivery to the warfighter.

We have an immense amount to learn from how the commercial world handles data, software, and AI. Continuing to try and build these competencies within DoD—rather than aggressively partnering with industry to provide them—is a legacy (and weakness) of the system described above.

The Department will strengthen our defense industrial base to ensure that we produce and sustain the full range of capabilities needed to give U.S., allied, and partners forces a competitive advantage.

Hear, hear!

Others

The Department will act urgently to better support advanced manufacturing processes (e.g., aircraft and ship building, preferred munition production) to increase our ability to reconstitute the Joint Force in a major conflict.

This is the single most dangerous, simplistic, wrong-headed, and non-strategic statement in this entire strategy. The suggestion of “reconstitution “in a “major conflict” is a pipe dream. The complexity of what will need to be reconstituted, along with the lack of reconstitute-able industrial capacity, means we will fight with what we have. The time to build and stockpile is NOW, not when the shooting starts, especially given the prominence of the next decade in how this DoD sees the threat environment. How this sentence survived into the final cut is beyond me.

 

IX.            RISK MANAGEMENT

Inside baseball and not useful to readers.

 

X.               CONCLUSION

Nothing objectionable in the document’s conclusion.

 

My conclusion raises objections. There is a gigantic hole in this strategy, in that it does a wonderful, clear-eyed job of defining the threat and the challenges, but then offers up a flaccid and insubstantial justification of what it intends to do about them. The “divest to invest” mantra we have heard so much about is out of phase with an NDS that appears to cite a near-term threat. Pointing to “integrated deterrence” and “campaigning” as the two of the three primary ways to achieve its ends, it offers a reduced and destabilizing vision of what DoD does when it is not shooting at people to shift resources from critical peacetime security and prosperity activities to, both legitimate war-fighting needs and less legitimate domestic policy preferences. It accelerates and deepens the path we are on—one of being better able to fight a war that we are increasingly less able to deter. We must do both.

Bryan McGrath is the Managing Director of The FerryBridge Group LLC. These views are his own and do not represent those of any client.

War, Pestilence, and Famine - the World's Logistics Falters - with Ross Kennedy on Midrats

 

If it's April, it's time for a return visit by Ross Kennedy to Midrats!

A little under a year ago, we had Ross on to discuss the impact of COVID and related structural issues to the global supply chain. A year later, we find conditions have not just remained, but with war in Ukraine and a new COVID variant working its way through coastal China, in many ways the global trade in essential items has turned for the worst.

If you are worried about the cost and availability of fuel, food, and everyday items you've spent the last decade assuming were always going to be there at a price you're happy with, then you need to join us from 2-3pm Eastern this Sunday.

Ross is a U.S.-based logistics and supply chain expert with more than fifteen years in international transportation, procurement, and analysis. His unique blend of operations, sales, and strategic planning allows him to provide creative, agile solutions for his public- and private-sector clientele.

Join us live if you can, but it not, you can get the show later by subscribing to the podcast. If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here. You can find us on almost all your most popular podcast aggregators as well.

Culture, Competition, and Conflict: three rants on the state of Surface Warfare, by Bryan McGrath

The BONHOMME RICHARD fire report has the Surface Force in the news again, and one of our favorite ex-SWOs Bryan McGrath gave a speech to the Surface Navy Association's Washington DC chapter earlier today. He had a few things to get off his chest, and the things he said are worth a broader audience. 

Bryan has been kind enough to send along the text of his remarks for publication here - well worth your time.

Bryan, over to you!

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Speech to the DC Chapter of the Surface Navy Association

 21 October 2021

“Three Rants”

As Prepared for Delivery

Thank you for the introduction, Captain Bryans. It was an honor to be asked to be here, and I am grateful for the opportunity.

I hope the folks of this chapter know how lucky we are to have Bob Bryans leading us while he’s doing incredibly important and difficult work over at OPNAV. He’s the best of the best. 

When Bob asked me to do this talk, he requested a theme, and because this isn’t my first rodeo, I knew that the quicker I gave him one the quicker he’d get off my back about giving him one. So, I said, “Culture, Competition, and Conflict”, and we both went on with our lives. And while I have a feeling that I will hit each of those topics during my talk today, I ask that you give me some latitude to meander, and I’ll do so with the structure of three broad areas of concern that I call…the three rants. 

Also, I want to get something out of the way up front. I am a consultant. I happen to have business relationships with the Navy, specifically agreements with the Commander of Naval Surface Forces in San Diego and the Director of Surface Warfare Programs at OPNAV N96. In those jobs, the government pays me to tell Admirals Kitchener and Schlise exactly what I think. And that is what I do. Sometimes they agree with me. Sometimes they don’t. At no point has either one of them or their predecessors ever asked me to change or modify my opinion to suit the Navy line, nor have I ever taken a position publicly that isn’t my own. Nothing I say is carried water for anyone else. Period. Are we clear? 

Ok. Let’s get on with things.

Rant One: Good Competition

Let’s start with rant # 1, and that is, I want to talk about “Competition”. The previous administration centered its national security strategy and national defense strategy around the imperative of renewed great power competition. One doesn’t have to have a doctorate in international relations to see that we are elbow deep in great power competition again, and this was a rational response. Following this policy focus, the sea services promulgated a new maritime strategy, and the CNO updated his NAVPLAN, in BOTH CASES, raising the prominence of what has come to be known as the “competition phase” of the continuum of competition. The other phases of the continuum being “crisis” and “conflict”. 

I believe all four of these documents—NSS, NDS, maritime strategy, and NAVPLAN—were well-aligned to the security environment we face, and all pointed squarely at seapower as a primary tool of action and influence. The fact that all four placed considerable focus on the competition phase led me to several conclusions.

First, competition is different than crisis, or conflict. It is how the United States Navy spends the overwhelming balance of its time. It is where the United States Navy (and seapower more generally), has its greatest impact, acting as it does as the guarantor of America’s security and prosperity. 

The primary products of competition phase seapower are—as I said—security and prosperity, both of which owe their promotion primarily to one factor—the conventional deterrence of those who would disturb the peace.

Conventional deterrence is the ballgame, and as the Navy is the Service that promotes conventional deterrence where it matters and to a larger extent than any other element of American military power, one could and should have expected the Navy to receive more and more consistent resourcing. 

Additionally, and for the interests of this audience and the biases of this speaker, no part of America’s arsenal is as critical to providing conventional deterrence where it matters than the Surface Force. Forward, distributed, networked, lethal, visible, and sustained surface forces. 

Given the emphasis on competition, the focus on conventional deterrence, and the degree to which force structure discussions in 2020 seemed in no small part to be variations on the single theme of growing the Navy, it appeared as if an important point of consensus had been reached. The fact that it was reached after four years of TALKING ABOUT growing a Navy and with little or nothing DONE about it provided many of us with the nagging sense that the clock was running out on the consensus. 

It is now late 2021, and it appears that consensus is dead. The concept of military competition and its desired by-product conventional deterrence has been replaced by something called “integrated deterrence”, a term which strikes me as a means to de-emphasize the military contribution to deterrence while emphasizing other “whole-of-government” contributions, which invariably are less expensive than maintaining proper fleet.

We saw our first evidence of this in the 2022 budget and its approach to shipbuilding, and we continue to see more evidence of it as time goes on. No one at OSD is talking about competition anymore, as we’ve entered the stage of defense planning that goes something like “when there aren’t resources available for both the deterrence of war and the conduct of war, defer to the latter”. In the process, we—the Navy, DoD, the United States—will field a Navy that is marginally better at fighting war and LESS able to deter war. I think this is a troubling and dangerous path, and I urge the Secretary of the Navy and the CNO to take every opportunity they can to advise against it.

I know it is hard to for the numbers people at OSD CAPE and N81 to quantify the benefits of conventional deterrence. I know it is far easier to do force on force analysis and come up with exchange ratios and campaign results. But that whole system ignores what we know to be true—that persistent, powerful naval force forward—specifically, surface forces—is the backbone of our conventional deterrence posture, and if we continue to de-emphasize powerful forward presence that creates doubt in the minds of potential opponents, we will be left with terrible decisions about whether and how to intervene when opportunistic opponents realize we’ve given up on the day-to-day competition. Critics of naval forward presence sometimes suggest that it destabilizes the security situation. Do you want to know what is even more destabilizing? The other guy having the perception that the competition is over. 

A prominent voice in the national security world recently opined that we need to abandon this “cop on the beat” mentality, because we don’t have the forces required to carry it out. So, he’s telling me that instead, we should diminish the fleet while implementing more of an over-the horizon strategy that is an even less powerful deterrent? 

How about we build the Navy we need?

There is talk of yet another force structure assessment in the wind, and my fever dream is that the Navy produces an assessment that is pretty consistent with the work it did in 2020, and then take a new position on that work. Well, not a new position, per se. But the position that the US Marine Corps has taken for much of my life. And that is, do the analysis and state the requirement. If the requirement is affordable within given resources, pursue it. If it is not, let political leadership know what the risks are and then do your best with the resources allocated. But never, NEVER, let available resources be the thing you start with when you seek to derive the requirement. And never, NEVER, change the requirement to fit the available resources. 

Rant Two: Bad Competition

Ok—let’s move on to rant #2. And it is another rant about competition. But a different kind of competition. 

I want to talk a little about the acquisition system by using a couple of examples of where I think the Navy has made grave errors, and then suggest that the time is ripe to make sure we don’t make that same error a third time.

About 11 years ago, the Navy moved forward with the Air and Missile Defense Radar, or AMDR program. A huge and critical effort, AMDR replaces the SPY 1 series of radars in surface combatants going forward, and it represented a franchise win for the company that competed and won the business. 

I don’t know much about this competition, but the urban legend is that Raytheon put a ton of internal investment money into winning this contract. I can imagine the conversation between the business unit lead and the CFO, where the business unit lays out the opportunity, the costs, and upside potential once serial production began. Considerable resources were applied, Raytheon won, and we expect to see the first ship with a SPY 6 AMDR radar commissioned in 2024 or so. Or put another way, we will not see an operational SPY 6 for a couple of years on a ship that won’t deploy until later in the decade.

But that did not stop the visionaries of the Navy Acquisition system from conducting a competition recently to bring on a second source to produce SPY 6 radars?

If I am that Raytheon CFO, I gotta be coming out of my skull. “We invested all that money and before the first one is even fielded the Navy is trying to find someone to undercut our price?”  

I think he or she has a good point. 

Now, I am a political conservative. I am a capitalist. I believe in free and competitive markets.

But defense production is not a free and competitive market. It is skewed by externalities unknown to most businesses in America. It is a monopsony, or at least a near monopsony, with considerable constraints placed on doing business internationally. 

For industry to make the kind of internal investment necessary to create the advanced capabilities that the Navy requires, they need to know that they will be able to get their money out of serial production. I’m all for competing but starting the competition before the first arrays are even placed just makes no sense.

But it isn’t just SPY 6. The same, or a similar move was made on the Navy’s SEWIP Block III program recently, and from what I can discover, similar conditions prevailed. In this case Northrop Grumman won the contract after considerable internal investment. No ship afloat has a fielded SEWIP Block III. Yet Navy acquisition recently sought to compete for serial production.

This is insane, and if this race to the bottom continues, it places the Navy’s Large Surface Combatant or DDG(X) program at serious risk. And here is why.

The Navy needs a sea-based, high-powered laser. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s call it the BAL—or Big-Ass Laser. Why does it need a Big-Ass Laser? Well, it needs a Big-Ass Laser because in a war with a big, aggressive country, after the carnage of an initial series of exchanges, our fleet will have to—as my friend Paul Giarra says—fight its way to the fight, and then fight through to the fight. It will be doing this against a country with a considerable ability to build missiles, and so we need a way to counter them that doesn’t bankrupt the United States.

To my mind, the logical place to put the Big-Ass Laser is on the BAS—or Big-Ass Ship. That is the DDG(X). The folks deriving requirements for this ship and doing trade studies and analyzing hull forms and all that stuff need to understand that the purpose of the Big-Ass Ship is to carry the Big-Ass Laser. 

The case for the Big-Ass Laser is that we will not be able to operate within the contested area NEARLY confidently enough unless we can project power from protected sea space. The Big-Ass Laser will give us that confidence.

Now…back to the whole question of competition. Capable tier-1 defense firms are busy with all manner of research and engineering designed to position themselves to compete for the Big-Ass Laser. It is difficult to conceive of being competitive without spending a considerable amount of internal investment money. So here I am, the VP of Big-Ass Navy Lasers at Acme Big-Ass Laser company, and I am going to talk to my CFO about getting the money necessary to upscale our current efforts to be able to compete for this contract. I deliver my perfectly crafted pitch, and then she looks at me and says, “why would I give you a dime after what the Navy has done with SPY 6 and SEWIP? How can we go to our shareholders and say that this investment is wise, given that EVEN IF WE WIN, the Navy is going to create a competitor before the first unit is fielded?”

How do you answer that? 

The bottom line folks is that if conventional deterrence fails and we get into a shooting war, we’re going to need to project power in order to fight our way back in. The high-power laser is the thing that we need to help us do that, and the real estate, cooling, and power for it will be provided by the DDG(X). Screw up the acquisition of the Big Ass Laser and the Big Ass Ship becomes an expensive luxury. 

We must get this right.

Rant Three: Culture and Systems

Ok—my final rant. I want to talk about culture, or more to the point, the perception that there is something wrong with our culture in Surface Warfare. I’ve been on this rant for four and a half years now since the collisions of 2017.

Those two collisions created and enabled a chorus of critics to charge that the there were “systemic” problems in Surface Warfare, particularly in the Surface Warfare culture. I asserted then, and I continue to believe now, that what others want to attribute to culture or leadership or some other ill-defined systemic failure, can more properly be attributed to a lack of resources. Simply put, the fleet was on the ragged edge because there weren’t enough ships to do what was being asked of them. To the extent that the system contributed to the collisions, it was this. 

But make no mistake about it. Those two ships had collisions because people who knew better, who knew what the rules were, and who knew what the right thing to do was—chose to do otherwise. 

If you want to make the charge of systemic failure, it seems to me you have a responsibility to account for why that failure was confined to one theater and a small number of ships. ADM Davidson, former INDOPACOM Commander, got into some hot water when he suggested as much before Congress. And while that was neither the time nor the place to try and make that case, it is a case that needs to be made. 

We have problems in Surface Warfare. What we do isn’t properly understood by policy-makers, we don’t do a good job in educating them, as a result, we get insufficient funding that results in too few ships, manning problems, deferred maintenance, and sub-optimized training opportunities.  

My inherently testable hypothesis is that if we properly resourced Surface Warfare, you’d hear a hell of a lot less about systemic and cultural problems. We are maintaining nearly a similar number of ships deployed every day with 295 ships that we did thirty plus years ago with twice that number. You want a systemic problem, there it is.

The culture I know is one of mission accomplishment, and I have no desire to see this diluted. 

Every generation has had ridiculous administrative burdens. That’s part of the job. What has changed is that the fleet we own and operate is insufficient to the operational tasks asked of it. Some say we ought to cut back on those tasks, that all this stuff we do around the world should be restrained, that we ought to bring the fleet home and operate it as a surge force with a bit of a cruising mindset, rather than a forward deployed force. 

I’d be happy to go along with this, but only after I was convinced that the American people were content with no longer being top-dog. Because if you’re going to be the world’s dominant political, economic, military, and diplomatic power, you aren’t going to do it from Norfolk and San Diego. The nation that believes itself to be those things is reflected in a powerful, forward deployed Navy protecting and sustaining its security and prosperity, along with that of like-minded nations. At the center of that fleet is the surface force and the professionals who operate it. They are the nation’s primary conventional deterrent, they are the nation’s primary military diplomats, and they are the nation’s primary crisis response force forward. 

It is time to resource them accordingly. 

I only hope that people are listening.

Thank you, and I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have.

---

Bryan McGrath is the Managing Director of The FerryBridge Group. These views are his and do not represent any client.

Army: Climate, Politics, and Pork

No, it is not.

Today, no nation can find lasting security without addressing the climate crisis. We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does…climate change is making the world more unsafe, and we need to act.

- Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, at the Leaders Summit on Climate, April 22, 2021

As a species, humans have thrived under drastically higher and lower sea levels; colder and warmer climates. The slow changes we are seeing now are not existential. Not even close. It is a challenge - maybe in some areas a mounting crisis, but not existential. It is something that, even if a mounting crisis, does not have a military solution.

From the top, all of this is simply because the military is following the orders of the CINC. That is how it works. As this is a fun topic this week; yes, this is political and the military is involved in it.

In line with the President and the Secretary of Defense’s direction, the Army is prioritizing climate change considerations in its threat picture, strategic plans, operations and installations. 

If your orders are legal, you carry them out. As such, 90% of this is about exactly what I would submit as a staff officer if so tasked by my boss. I don’t fault anyone involved with this per se … as there are a few subversive Easter Eggs here.

That won’t stop me … as … well … in the milbogg’n ecosystem, I have a job to do. Let’s get to it.

The whole issue around global cooling/warming/climate change and whatever new iteration will be used later when these become stale long ago left the realm of science for politics.

Long ago.

I’m just old enough to remember the 1970s global cooling scare. It made good copy to sell magazines and keep people panicked after “silent spring” petered out (after the Green Revolution took out the Malthusian panic). 

Everyone coasted along for about a decade when the usual suspects invested time in SANE/FREEZE or other large paper mâché doll consuming activities to buck up the tottering Soviet Union in its final days, but when the Cold War ended, it took awhile for them to find the latest hook. They knew they had the right topic when the patron saint Al Gore took up the global warming crisis and helped smooth a new path in a pursuit of power, government control, full-time paychecks, and most importantly for rent-seeking grifters – government contracts.

A crisis, real or created, is a great excuse to grab power by those who lust after it. If you can scare the masses and then tell them you are there to save them, the herd will give you that power. You can enjoy the power for power’s sake, and to gain allies to extend your high, use it to enable others that will back you to pursue other agendas you couldn’t pursue otherwise. To keep progress progressive, as it were, also reward your friends and punish your enemies.

“Climate” is the perfect kind of crisis. We have a lot of great scary movies about it, and is for many it is a secular religion. The zealots to use as enforces are legion.

“Climate change” is always happening. Mammoth bones in the North Sea, archaeologists exploring underwater caves off Central America and the Gulf of Mexico for evidence of Ice Age human settlements, and beach sand a few hours inland prove that. No one can deny climate change as it has been going on for billions of years before our ancestors decided to leave the trees for the plains.

The great unknown is how much of today’s change is related to human activity. Is it low single digit %, or in the middle double digits? If we knew that, then based on reason we could discuss cost/benefit analysis of what if anything we could do to address it and how to mitigate its effects. We’d have a better understanding of timelines we are facing in geologic times. Sadly, the rub is that last bit. 

According to all the earlier warnings, we should all be dead right now, NYC would be flooded, and we would be a decade past the 10-yr-until-it-is-too-late point. I’m still here. Water levels are the same at my house and the Obama’s. 

A few decades after we all should have drowned or starved to death, we still suffer from powerful people ruled by emotion being pushed by people motivated by more base drivers; lust for power and greed.

That is how you should read the latest from the US Army.  Make no mistake, this is all politics and money driving well meaning people’s emotionally based fear.

Read it all, but here we go.

First, remember how we are all told by reliable sources that climate is not weather, and likewise?

Well, fail out of the gate (or Easter Egg?)

The Army has a lot to be proud of, yet there is a lot of work to continue to operate efficiently across extreme weather and climate conditions.

Next, tell me how any of this helps the Army win the upcoming fight west of Wake?

• Strategizing and planning to mitigate climate threats, with emphasis on Soldier resilience, energy reform, and capability enhancement and procurement.
• Advancing development and use of renewable energy, energy and water efficiency and consumption, and other environmental initiatives that steward the land, air and water to enable Army operations and maximize readiness.
• Poised to lead the way in technology development for tactical vehicles that balances increased capability with decreased climate impacts.

In the above, all the bolded items are simply taking the Army budget to Solyndraize a few companies. 

What would I 100% support the Army doing because it is a real, actionable series of activities that would address real issues, has reliable metrics to track progress and creates sustainable stewardship examples future generations can enjoy? I’ve underlined them.

Not all of this is bad … but the politics and grift is transparent.

This sad little document ends with one of the secular religion’s chant. It really should be in Latin, or perhaps Esperanto. 

Climate change leads to competition for scarce resources and can increase the spread of infectious diseases. To secure the American people and their interests in the homeland and abroad, the Army must continue to address the challenges a changing climate poses to the people, territories, capabilities, and other resources upon which U.S. security depends.

You know what right now and for the next 5, 10, and 15 years we know is and will be driving, 

“…humanitarian disasters, undermine weak governments and contribute to long-term social and economic disruptions.”?

Mass migration, high birth rates, environmental pollution. That's what.

We have real metrics that that are statistically sound and objectively observable. If we must expend Army funds in this area … then do it here. This will see results … but to be quite honest, they are more the responsibility of USAID and other governmental organizations. The Army can support them … but it really isn’t their job – and it shouldn’t be.

Feeding the Vaal that is the “climate emergency?” All that does is line pockets, fill campaign coffers, and tickle fetishes … which is mostly the point.

The Once and Future Arab Spring

One of the most under-reported stories of 2017 - to our great collective shame - was the almost complete destruction of the Islamic State's caliphate (minus a few holdouts). This was done mostly through local forces enabled by newly invigorated USA-led Western capabilities in support. Russia deserves a best supporting actor mention as well - but that is a different topic for a different day.

There are many more chapters in the Long War to come, but as this one comes to and end, we need to remember how we got here.

Over at The Intercept, Murtaza Hussain has an interesting take that deserves your consideration. Some of his writing comes from an angle you may not read all that often.

Among the revolutionaries there was a democratic trend that included liberal activists, nationalists, and Islamist groups willing to engage in the electoral process. Alongside the democrats was a violent, wildly utopian religious movement launched by groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda that tried to destroy Muslim societies and recreate them as a “caliphate” — an imaginary community where all the world’s Muslims would ostensibly live happily-ever-after under the rule of jihadis.

The democratic movements were largely crushed by the brutal response of local dictators. The jihadis, meanwhile, briefly managed to achieve a version of their caliphate, only to see it destroyed in a final cataclysm. But while the core idea that animated the Arab democrats continues to be attractive despite its repression, the utopian project of the jihadis has been undermined in critical ways by its failure.

IS should never have existed - but there was an opening when the chaos of the Syrian civil war coincided with the disastrous early withdrawal of USA forces from Iraq. It took the opportunity and created a nightmare.

Its strategic Center of Gravity was always the religious justification for its existence. It had to be destroyed by Muslim forces, on local terms, in order to make sure that CoG was thoroughly undermined. The Trump administration annihilation policy in support of local forces made this more effective.

The defeat of the Islamic State might ironically be a letdown for some in the West. Western politicians, military officials, and their assorted hangers-on in the media and think tank world have already begun planning for a long war against “global jihadism,” an analogue to the Cold War that would justify their inflated budgets and provide a continued sense of purpose. Unlike communism or nationalism, however, there’s little indication that apocalyptic jihadism as an ideology is attractive or sustainable enough to meaningfully compete with Western democracies in the way that those ideologies did. Diehard Islamic State sympathizers may continue committing individual acts of terrorism for the foreseeable future and mini proto-states pledging allegiance to the group will still proliferate, but the rapid rise and fall of the caliphate demonstrates an important lesson about the fundamentally self-destructive nature of millenarian movements.

Exactly. Recognize what they are, ID their weakness, destroy it. Notsomuch a national or ethnic movement - but a movement based on a cult-like belief system - but here is a critical point that the author mentions but underplays; there is not an insignificant religious basis for their actions. Destroying such systems are not easy, but once defeated, the intrinsic fragility of its foundation can make its immediate defeat effective. We did it with Nazism, and mostly to State Communism. Both of those movements have something in common with Islamic terrorist movements;

Instead of a return to traditional values, Saleh describes Salafi jihadism as the latest iteration of a quintessentially modern phenomenon: nihilism. A philosophy with its roots in 19th century Europe, nihilism denies that the material world and life itself hold any intrinsic value or meaning. While nihilism does not inevitably lead to violence, its world-denying tenets helped inspire numerous campaigns of terrorism by its adherents. In Europe, where atheism had already become normative, local expressions of nihilism were atheistic. But in Muslim-majority societies like Syria, nihilism “looks for its pillars of support in the religion of Islam,” Saleh says.

The nihilism analogy goes deeper into the practices of groups like the Islamic State. Suicide and murder are normally considered to be grave sins by Muslims. But during periods of widespread crisis and trauma, radical groups like the Islamic State exploit a cognitive opening to try to portray these acts as acceptable, even positive. The religious concept of an afterlife is also twisted to support a nihilistic worldview, by devaluing acts committed in the material world in favor of a promised hereafter.

Yet this radical inversion of traditional values is not one that has shown itself to be appealing to large groups of people in Muslim countries. Rather than a mass movement with deep social and cultural roots, Saleh says that jihadism relies mainly on exploiting conditions of crisis to coerce the support of people who would normally find its tenets repellent.

Though I'm not in full alignment with Saleh quoted here, he is not wrong on all counts. Percentage matter - especially when the majority is powerless and supine - but this is a global war in the small details vice broad fronts;

“There is a lot of attention to jihadism because it feeds into the narrative of the U.S. global war against terrorism and because Western media and politicians are generally obsessed with Islam. But I don’t think we should be deceived by this — we are not talking about a civilizational conflict here,” says Saleh. “These are armed groups that combine religion with military training and fascist educational indoctrination. But they are mainly concerned with violence. They do not have any meaningful social, political, or cultural base, nor do they offer any real emancipatory potential for Muslim societies.”

There is one big difference between the IS's philosophical underpinnings and those of the Nazis and Communists the author references for comparison; they were secular philosophies - this is religious.

For all its faults, there are hooks in Islamic teachings to justify what the IS did. The IS is almost gone, but the hooks remain - just waiting for someone else using a different name and justification to hang their bag on.

While the movements were not morally equivalent, sometimes the intensity of the conversion experience for jihadi recruits and former communist revolutionaries were not dissimilar. Arthur Koestler described his initial belief that Soviet communism would liberate the oppressed masses of Europe as a feeling of “mental rapture,” in which “the new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull [and] the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw.” The euphoria of that conversion was equaled only by the pain of his eventual disillusionment.

“Though we wore blinkers, we were not blind,” Koestler reflected. “Even the most fanatical among us could not help noticing that all was not well in our movement.”

Surveying the destruction of ancient cities like Raqqa and Mosul, and the millions of shattered lives left in the wake of the Islamic State’s failed revolution, it’s hard not see the group, now stripped of its power, as anything other than the latest, most fanatic attempt to remedy the ills of long-tyrannized societies. Although jihadis may be killed and their ideology may even fall out of favor, until the people of the region experience genuine emancipation, there is unlikely to be an end to terrorist violence, nor to radical armed groups promising to bring heaven down to earth by any means necessary.

There is much unfinished business in the Arab world and the non-Arab Muslim outer belts.

History is not done here - and for the West, the Long War is not going away.

The Navy's Strategic Readiness Review

Thanks for everyone's patience since Monday's post - but this took some time. Go get a cup of coffee and let's get down to it.

It is time to digest the Navy's Strategic Readiness Review that came out late last week.

BLUF ... and I will repeat myself a few times from here ... this is an exceptional document. Well written, substantive, educational, blunt, and something we can build a great future on - if we have the institutional courage to do so.

Once you get past the Executive Summary, you get to a rather informative but peculiar body of work. It is structured in a way to inform people who may not really know what goes on in the Navy but have the ear of decision makers. I think this is smart. The people who control real power in DC do not wear a uniform.

One downside of the review is that it wanders in to excuse making now and then, and gives the impression that things were done to the Navy, vice Navy leadership making decision to respond one way or another to challenges. Yes, the Navy as an institution - though bound by duty as it is - has agency.

Now that I've softened everyone up, I want to make this point about the Navy’s Strategic Readiness Review (SRR) - your timing blows.

Why release this the Friday before Christmas? Why release this one work-day before the President delivers his National Security Strategy?

Timing matters and this document deserves the intellectual space and oxygen it need to have effect. Whoever signed off on the delivery time should be sent out to 10-DME in holding to think about what they have done.

Anyway, as everyone else seems focused on the National Security Strategy, I want to put out my thoughts on the SRR for now.

We lost 17 Sailors, and two front line warships are out of the game so we could get this review. I hope everyone will get their copy and digest it. It is almost everything we wanted.

I am not exaggerating. This document is exactly what I hoped for.

I’m going to try to keep this as simple and straight forward as possible; this document represents and institutional repudiation of the last 30-years of Navy leadership. Full stop.

You can get the link here, or just read the embedded document at the bottom of the post, your call.

Off the bat, the Executive Summary. This is almost perfect, and I feel the need to put out a disclaimer; I did not write this, not to my knowledge did any longstanding members of the Front Porch (though I know a few lurkers did, … I see you … ). In any event, we should no longer have to buy any beers from here on out. If that is too much, then we should have least received a footnote.

It is that good.

Here we go - and something we’ve been hinting at and we saw today with the National Security Strategy; the era of peer to peer is back;

Another era of sustained peer-on-peer competition has arrived
…
Even in a non-peer-on-peer environment, the Navy and the nation can ill afford the readiness deficiencies revealed in the recent ship-handling incidents in the Pacific. These deficiencies are of profound consequence. While the shipboard causes that led to those tragic events have been identified, this Strategic Review finds there are institutional deficiencies that have developed over decades that must now be addressed.

Yes Shipmates, as an institution, the Navy has gone Salamander. Yes, I'm being self-focused and a bit narcissistic, but I don't care. Its true. Vindication is a hell of a drug, and I won't deny it to the Front Porch. It came at a huge price, so I wish it never happened - but there it is.

Remember over the last decade+ where I said how much I wish I/we were wrong, but I didn't think we were. Well, we're here.

Many of these deficiencies have been observed and authoritatively documented for years, however the naval capacity that had been built up for the Cold War masked their impact. That past margin in ships, aircraft, and sailors enabled the Navy to make mitigating adjustments in fleet operations, training, maintenance, and funding to accomplish assigned missions.

…and where was that nadir, and who was in charge?

No, they don’t go full Salamander and call people out by name, which is fine and proper for such a document. That is our part of the ecosystem - but really isn’t all that interesting here. We all know who they are, and those who don’t can simply search the archive here going back to 2004 and it’s all there.

This Strategic Review examines the long degradation of readiness and recognizes that improvements in readiness will not happen overnight – they will require sustained focus, commitment, and funding. This Strategic Review also recognizes that necessary improvements can only occur with the concerted leadership of the Secretary of the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations and the support of the Secretary of Defense, Congress, and the American public.

…and this “long degradation” came from where? When? How?

This document actually goes there to an extent, and does a good job doing it.

I’m not kidding, this is exactly what we asked for, and our Navy desperately needs.

Those factors that drive readiness are all interrelated in a complex system-of-systems governed by regulations, policies, and processes that play out and act upon each other over time.

This Strategic Review examined the systemic conditions of the last 30 years. … However, the cumulative effects of well-meaning decisions designed to achieve short-term operational effectiveness and efficiencies have often produced unintended negative consequences … Simultaneously, Navy leaders accumulated greater and greater risk in order to accomplish the missions at hand, which unintentionally altered the Navy’s culture and, at levels above the Navy, distorted perceptions of the readiness of the fleet.

There is one understandable weakness here, and that is now and then the tone of excuse making creeps in. Part of the reason is that this document was created by many of the people responsible for the decisions of the last 30-yrs. They are putting themselves on report, and it is understandable that they would try to, if not apologize, at least try to explain why well meaning people trying to do the right thing would make the decisions they did - however wrongheaded they look in 2017.

The above quote just soaks in “not until after my PCS cycle” decision making that got us here. Time and time again, our leaders failed to stand up to what many knew was a long term error in thought and policy that would come back to bite us.

Where was our General Shinseki?

Here is the PCS cycle paradox in a nice, small package.

The growing mismatch between the supply and demand of ships taxed fleet personnel and consumed material readiness at unsustainable rates.
…
Within the fleet, often the only option to meet those demands were short-term tradeoffs to training, manning, and maintenance. Accepting those trades and increasing risk across the force was seen as necessary to get the job done. Over time, the Navy’s “must do” wartime culture was adopted for peacetime as long-term readiness and capability were sacrificed for immediate mission accomplishment.

This is all on the leadership in place at the time. Their jobs as stewards of our naval power was to ensure that this did not happen. It did.

With fewer resources available, ship crew workloads grew significantly, expanding their work days and weeks to unsustainable levels.

Good lord how many times did we rail against this through the years? “Bags of cash and Sailor sweat will be the band-aid and cure-all for Flag Officers’ sweet little lies.”

Wait … calm yourself Salamander … and you too Front Porch. Remember, Big Navy is writing this. They are coming in to alignment. A decade and a half or so late, but they are here.

We should welcome them here as the British and French welcomed America in 1917. Or maybe how we welcomed the French in 1942 or the Italians in 1943, I’m not sure quite yet.

Anyway, back to the ES … and an early mic drop and your power words of the week;

…the “normalization-of-deviation” began to take root in the culture of the fleet.
…
The departure from a questioning culture prevented operators, leaders, and resource managers from stepping back and assessing accumulated risk and reinforced a mistaken confidence that operations remained within risk boundaries.

Yes, they have gone here. Isn’t it glorious?

There is also the appearance of a topic we have covered a lot over on Midrats through the years, and a bit here; the ossified guiding hand of Goldwater-Nichols;

This was exacerbated by the rapid increase in new overhead governance structures created in response to the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act.

Goldwater-Nichols was mentioned 34 times. Yes, it is that big of a problem.

You recall our ongoing issues with Staff bloat?

With the growth of headquarters, and staff centric promotion parameters, staff service began displacing service at sea as a significant driver of officer career paths, assignments, and promotions.

Time to change the Board Precepts, don’t ‘cha think?

When do the authors want action though?

The time to chart a new course is now. Failure to address the compounding factors identified in this Strategic Review will have serious implications on the effectiveness of the Navy in the peer-on-peer operational era it is entering.

How about accountability - properly focused?

Accountability must always fall primarily on commanders, but accountability must also be sought and assessed in a systemic way, at institutional levels, in the policy decisions and processes that can set the conditions for aberrant behavior and negative outcomes.

You can start to see here and other places the influence of the nuclear/submarine and aviation side of the Navy. Good on the surface force. I don’t think they had a choice, but it is welcomed throughout this document. If it soaks in, the surface force and our Navy will be better for it.

At the end of the ES, there are four broad strategic recommendations. All are spot on and should be fully hoisted aboard.

- Re-establish Readiness as a Priority: The creation of combat ready forces must take equal footing with meeting the immediate demands of Combatant Commanders. Sufficient time for training crews and maintaining ships is critical for restoring and monitoring readiness.

- Match Supply and Demand: There must be a greater appreciation for the reality that only so many ships and sailors can be made available in a given operational cycle. The Navy must establish realistic limits regarding the number of ready ships and sailors and, short of combat, not acquiesce to emergent requirements with assets that are not fully ready.

- Establish clear Command and Control Relationships: The Navy must realign and streamline its command and control structures to tightly align responsibility, authority, and accountability.

- Become a True Learning Organization: Navy history is replete with reports and investigations that contain like findings regarding past collisions, groundings, and other operational incidents. The repeated recommendations and calls for change belie the belief that the Navy always learns from its mistakes. Navy leadership at all levels must foster a culture of learning and create the structures and processes that fully embrace this commitment.

Before they dive in to the specifics, they define the scope. Again, this is exceptionally correct.

…the Strategic Review examines the evolution of the Navy over the period since the service last faced a peer competitor – the Soviet Union.
…
To that end, this Strategic Review specifically examines stress on the force, operational culture, budgetary tradeoffs, accountability structures, and risk management. Additionally, the Strategic Review analyzed career patterns, manning trends, training architectures, operational tempo, and the infusion of new technologies into the fleet. Finally, these elements are evaluated and accessed for their cumulative effect on the Navy’s operational readiness against shifts in U.S. strategy and evolving peer-on-peer threats.

In case it hasn’t sunk in, we’re back to peer-to-peer. That has a lot of implications that I will write about in future posts - but not now.

In case the reader didn’t get the hint, they roll this right in front of you again in, The Long Road to Degraded Readiness (1985-2017) and clearly points to the latent causes previous iterations of leadership sold as the best thing since CNTs;

…the Goldwater-Nichols Act, the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA),3 and the manner in which they were implemented, changed the governance of the Navy’s career officer corps by adding joint duty requirements and establishing common career paths, promotion, separation, and retirement rules for all the services.
…
That 1991 Base Force reduced the Navy to a target fleet size of 451 ships.
…
The 1993 Bottom-Up Review confirmed the Navy’s new focus on presence, projection, and crisis response, while further reducing the target fleet size to 346 ships.
…
the 1990s’ Navy operated more globally than during the prior decade. … the 1990s’ Navy conducted 85 named operations, up from 49 in the 1980s.5 These demands forced the Navy to lengthen deployments to provide forces in more geographic areas. The increased operational tempo stretched a fleet that shrank from 529 ships in 1991 to 318 in 2000, which in turn more rapidly consumed those ships’ service life.
…
Increasingly, maintenance costs required the Navy to look for cost savings measures to offsets its funding shortfalls. Most significantly, the trades made to reduce manpower costs and the retention challenges imposed by the robust U.S. economy ultimately contributed to a shortage of manpower for at-sea billets by mid-1998. Additionally, the Navy’s operational tempo created significant challenges for the 24-month training, maintenance, and deployment cycle for ships and aircraft squadrons.

Again … where was our Shinseki? Where was our VADM Connolly?

…On the eve of 9/11, the U.S. Navy had shrunk to 316 ships
….
Following 9/11 and Operation Enduring Freedom, the Navy found that precision strike was a critical enabler for future conflicts and shifted its focus accordingly.

No. Wait. We knew that right after Desert Storm almost a decade earlier than 9/11. I know, I served in it and I was there at the debrief. This is one of the few errors I can find in the document. I’ll let it pass, but noted.

Here is a heartbreak, but it is good that even in passing it is noted.

A 2010 review of the surface fleet (Balisle Report) warned that increased operational tempo and lower manning were threatening the long-term readiness of the surface Navy. Ships were being run harder with less maintenance which required the Navy to retire them after just 25, or even 20, years rather than the expected 35-year life for which they had been procured.

…and it was ignored. It was hoped that it would go away. We lost 17 lives indirectly because our uniformed and civilian leadership ignored the Balisle Report. Disagree if you want, but in your heart you know its true.

The authors continue to drop dimes next to their bread crumbs. Where was Admiral No?

While Russia is not as consequential a peer competitor as China, Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, recent activity in the Baltic and Eastern Mediterranean, and resurgent submarine activity have also added to operational demands for the Navy. As all these global demands have increased, ships, personnel, and funding available for operations have not – all were being stretched. In 2014-2015, the Navy embarked on yet another effort to address the growing imbalance - the Optimized Fleet Response Plan. This plan was implemented to better respond to operational demand while endeavoring to provide greater predictability to the fleet.

NB: you know that chaffs the hide of the Russians that we dismiss them as a secondary player at sea to the Chinese.

I will allow and encourage it.

I know there is a little bit of salesmanship directed at The Hill in this ending, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t correct.

the Navy must recover its readiness and reestablish the standards that have historically ensured its preeminence. This is imperative for the Navy to adapt and prevail in peer-on-peer competition. This adaptation will require a fundamental understanding and appreciation of how much the Navy has changed over the last 30 years and how much those changes have impacted its ability to defeat peer threats and meet future challenges.

Next we head to readiness;

The four recent accidents involving U.S. Navy warships are direct consequences of eroded readiness and are a leading indicator of unsustainable operations.

Here, have a diagram. Yes, it is that a simplified diagram.

In spite of knowing the “unsustainable” nature of our operations, this fall we patched together a three CVN photo op to WESTPAC. We know what had to be done to make that happen, yet in spite of all we knew already about the latent causes of the collisions in WESTPAC in 2017, we did it anyway.

Miles to go before we sleep, Shipmates. Miles to go.

Let’s just go Chapter by Chapter at this point, shall we? Not a full fisking – as I do have a paying gig and this is no small report, but I’ll do my best to pull out what I think the Front Porch would find of greatest interest.

CHAPTER 1: Operations

Despite this deterioration of readiness, the Navy accepted the missions and, at times, deviated from established standards and absorbed increased risk. Over time, this deviation from accepted standards increased, became normalized, and subsequently institutionalized.

The operative part of that quote is “became normalized, and subsequently institutionalized." I’m repeating that for emphasis. This was done by specific people responding to rewards and punishments foisted on them by other people. This is not something that happened to our Navy. This was an active decision.

This entire document does a fine job outlining what happened, and most of why – but it side-steps around much of the human dimension of why the “institution” of our Navy did what it did. This danger was known and yet accepted. Centuries of experience building, maintaining, and operating a navy would tell any informed leader that time would exact a cost, and yet the “institution” persisted.

So, it is the end of 2017, and…

Changing this culture by restoring and sustaining readiness is vital. In turn, given the current congressional resourcing of the fleet, military and civilian leaders must accept less Navy presence worldwide.

OK, then let’s do it. Do it now. We have known this for months, yet to repeat, just this fall we did a 3 CVN PHOTOEX in WESTPAC – draining and bleeding the Fleet to do so. If it is so serious, then why?

Where is Admiral No when you need him?


This the excuse-making foreplay that weakens the document, is unfortunate and unnecessary. Yes, I understand the need to educate, but …

The global environment that affects U.S. interests has changed dramatically in the last three decades. Despite the peace dividend after the Cold War, technological advances accelerated global access to, and increased sea and air activity in, the global commons. Globalization of markets and ideas increased the competition for resources. Violent ideologies emerged, weapon and information technologies advanced and proliferated, and partner and adversary nations realigned.

First, “violent ideologies” – we still can’t name it, can we – but strip that out; all the rest of the paragraph is simply ahistorical. These environmental factors to one degree or another have been present is almost every 30-yr period since Ragnar Lodbrok first left Uppsala. There is nothing that has “changed dramatically” – this is well within the normal course of human events.

Yes, this overreach is a hobby horse of mine and I will bring it up every chance I get.

Everyone.
Read.
History.
From.
Before.
Your.
Lifetime.

Nothing we are experiencing is new.

OK, off the hobbyhorse and back to this otherwise superb document. As opposed to a big quote, I’ll put out what may be the most important graph related to the Navy in the last decade.

One picture, the saying goes, …

We see again more evidence of the “not in my PCS cycle” problem.

Even with the advantage of forward deployed naval forces, the operational tempo in the current environment that insufficiently resources training and maintenance is unsustainable. This has created an “operations-first” mentality that was reinforced by the overall “must do” culture of the Navy. This, in turn, obscured current fleet readiness and incurred long-term risk in order to accomplish near-term missions. While an advantage in combat, this “must-do” attitude can have far-reaching and deleterious effects on overall long-term readiness. The Navy must restore readiness standards and the culture that enforces them, while informing civilian and military leadership of the consequential impact of less continuous Navy presence around the world.

This behavior exists because it is rewarded. What happens to people who demand standards or rock the boat a bit? They get their FITREPs spiked, or a spiteful person calls the IG in and they get fired for something the IG stumbles on unrelated to the complaint - and they get spiked that way.

We have to change the career calculus. Rational men and women respond to systems that have clear rewards and punishments. The culture we are putting on report exists and will continue to exist until those signals changes.

When unchecked, the excessive use of waivers and an unbridled “must do” attitude compromise established Navy readiness standards, and cause senior commanders to inadequately appreciate the risks they are accepting. This defined a new normal, especially in the 7th Fleet.

Yes, and who failed to do the checking? Why was there no one to do the checking? 

The cause was there was no desire to check. Senior leaders found that it was in their best interest to not check, and to reward those who did not check.

No one said a word?

...the number of expired certifications in Japan skyrocketed from 6% in 2015 to nearly 40% in 2017. Additionally, in 2016, a ballistic missile defense ship in Japan was underway for 235 of 366 days, and has been underway for 231 days of 2017. Finally, and contrary to established standards, Forward Deployed Naval Forces in Japan are manned at levels well below the established fleet average.

This is 100% the fault of senior leadership; not just the senior leadership that was sacrificed recently … but all those who had those positions dating back years.

It goes up from 7th Fleet too. What were the priorities from those on high? Who was giving them the demand signal? 7th Fleet leadership did not create those pressures out of whole cloth.

In an environment where this “normalization-of-deviation” has taken hold, ships and their crews perceive the certification process as merely a burden to their success, rather than the key to achieving individual, ship, and fleet readiness. This culture ultimately bleeds over into every facet of ship training, operations, and maintenance.

Read that again, it is one of the most best descriptions of why standards are important beyond the immediate readiness event.

Go ahead, read it again, especially the last sentence - I'll wait for you here.



This report, to its great credit, goes in to a lengthy discussion about having a questioning culture – but that is not something we have to wait for. We know who the PITAs are in their respective communities. We know who the nudges are. We know who the iconoclastic, non-careerist, curmudgeons are; those who are in the fight, throwing elbows in the marketplace of ideas. Those who have all the right enemies for all the right reasons. Some of them are up for Flag Officer on the next board. Some recently retired and could be brought back. We know who they are. Heck, send me an email if you wear 4-stars, I’ll give you one name for free that needs to come out of that board wearing a star.

We can start changing the culture now. We can start sending a signal that if you want to be a Flag Officer you need a different pedigree than before. We don’t have to wait decades. We have the power to do it now. All it takes is institutional courage – and putting your actions where your mouth is.

The recommendations in this section are mostly solid. I do have one cautionary note on 2.a;

Set a “Readiness Standard” for operating forces that is achievable and strictly enforce it.

Be careful who and what defines “achievable.” Defining deviancy down is not just a socio-cultural concept.

About Admiral No, if we find him he needs a tool;

Establish the Global Force Management availability as the maximum supportable peacetime force and limit additional demands for forces to the redeployment of existing Navy assets among theaters rather than using non-deployed, unready forces.

If done correctly, this can be that tool. If we can really only do so many things in “peace” then define that and stick to it.

In war, as FDR showed in the months leading to TORCH, the military may slow roll you about when they are ready (boy, what a different time we are in), but that was war. From a fleet perspective – regardless of what people may hyperventilate about – we are not at war. We are at a busy imperial policing tempo. There is a difference – and a lot more choice of action or inaction in the later than the former.

CHAPTER 2: Command and Control

Much of this chapter can be summarized as – again a regular topic for the Front Porch – staff bloat.

In 1986, the Navy supported the five then extant Geographic Combatant Commanders with three regional Navy Component Commanders, under which four numbered fleet commanders operated a fleet of 556 ships.

In Fiscal Year 2018, the Navy is comprised of 279 ships,24 about 55% of the 1987 Navy. Despite a reduction in operating units, there are now ten combatant commanders (six geographic and four functional commands) and six Navy Component Commanders under which five numbered fleet commands operate naval forces.

The worst kept secret around; we have a much larger staff “serving” a much smaller fleet;

Over the last 30 years the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations has expanded its staff positions and their seniority. The staff in 1986 was organized around the platforms the Navy operates: ships, aircraft, submarines, with each senior platform sponsor being a Vice Admiral who reported directly to the Chief of Naval Operations for management of the current and future readiness of the platforms for which he was responsible. In the early 1990s, the Chief of Naval Operations’ staff was expanded and reorganized along functional lines that paralleled the organizational structures of the Army, Air Force, and Joint Staffs. As a result, the principal advisors to the Chief of Naval Operations, the Deputy Chiefs of Naval Operations, were assigned exclusively to functional responsibilities (Manpower, Policy and Plans, Resource Integration, Logistics, etc.) rather than platforms. This structure provided greater clarity and commonality between the Navy and Joint/Unified Commanders facilitating increased interoperability and delineation of authorities. However, it also reduced the visibility, at the most senior Navy staff, into the readiness conditions of the platforms the Navy operates.

…and in spite of the fact we have more Flag Officers than warships…

To manage the expansion of headquarters and staff organizations, many senior Flag Officers have been tasked with multi-hatted authorities, including multi-service, multi-national, and service-specific roles to meet both operational and administrative control responsibilities and manage both current and future readiness. As pointed out in the Comprehensive Review, these many “hats” compete for the commanders’ time and divert attention away from ensuring a ready and sustainable force is available to meet the needs of Combatant Commanders. … This high-level focus on the current demand obscures long-term fleet sustainability.

Money quote, and explains why those who have multiple combat or combat support tours do not select, but those who stay in CONUS “must fill” busy-work staff jobs do.

The growth of the entire staff enterprise has caused a shift from a command-centric to a staff-centric culture in the Navy and, more broadly, the military officer corps. This is exacerbated by the joint duty imperative that draws many experienced officers away from Navy critical operational, maintenance, and training assignments necessary to enhance mastery of the naval profession and readiness of the fleet.

We can change that focus for every board that meets from here on out. Just change the precepts.

You want to change a culture? Change what motivates it. Will good people get lost in the shuffle? Sure they will, but they do anyway. The breaking point in the crunch is so thin and insignificant, it really is a wash anyway.

Someone will win, someone will lose. Pick your rate, pick your fate - we all know the drill.

Speaking of culture, give a nod to this – admitting that the submarine/nuke and aviation community culture is doing a better job and is worth the surface force making the effort to emulate the best parts of both.

With the surface fleet as small as it is today, replicating the process the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program employs for direct and regular communication from Commanding Officers of nuclear ships to the Director, Naval Reactors, is worth considering. In the Naval Reactors model, Commanding Officers communicate via letter with the Director on a quarterly basis (monthly while in an extended maintenance period), discussing manning issues, training requirements/ assessments, overall readiness status, and any major deficiencies in equipment or performance. This model has proven valuable in providing the Director with clarity concerning the readiness and training status of nuclear powered ships. An analogous model could be employed in the surface force to transparently communicate manning, training, and readiness conditions to the respective type commander beyond what is currently provided in the Defense Readiness Reporting System, Navy (DRRSN).

The rest of the chapter is devoted to the Type Commander Organizational Structures. My weakness here, I really cannot discuss it without having a 6’x4’ white-board and six different colored pens. I’ll just say that I concur with all recommendations.

CHAPTER 3: Manning and Training

This whole chapter is one big, “I told you so.” I know it drives some people nuts when we say that, but it’s true and if you don’t like it you can pack sand. I’ll touch on that more at the end, but let’s get to the “nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.”

…fewer, more complex ships spending a greater portion of their time at sea with smaller crews.

You think? Just classic. “Optimal Manning” and all that crap does not look so “Optimal” now, does it? Infuriating that it took until 2017 for Big Navy to admit how wrong it was, but I’ll take it.

In response to decreasing budgets, the Navy made a series of decisions that increased operating tempo, reduced manning levels, and changed career progression patterns resulting in significantly diminished opportunities for Navy officers and enlisted sailors to master operational and maintenance skills.

…and to make it worse, it begat LCS and DDG-1000 with this foolish concept baked it. To a lesser extent to LPD-17 and the FORD CVN are feeling the pain, but they are more fixable.

We have now reached the point that no one can argue that the critics of “Optimal Manning” were not right from the beginning. That along with “Just in Time Manning” and modified/diluted readiness requirements are finally all just discredited frauds.

There is a lot of ruin in a Navy just as there is a nation. We can claw our way back, and we will if we build off this review.

Smaller crew sizes increase the need for officers who are incentivized to invest in careers at sea.

…and yet our acts of commission and omission were in the opposite manner.

In a deep-dive in to latent causes, a lot of time is spent dragging Goldwater-Nichols in to the light to be gibbeted for all to see.

Good.

The intent of these Goldwater Nichols provisions was to ensure that Flag Officers had joint experience and that lower ranking officers with joint experience remained competitive for promotions. However, the implementation of the Act resulted in each of the services making an unnecessarily large number of their officers joint qualified.
…
As early as 1989, a Naval Postgraduate School study warned the Navy that joint duty and education requirements could lead to significant deterioration of Navy warfighting skills or personnel shortages in operational fields,

…and yet they were ignored.

The effect is more officers being diverted from assignments of fleet mastery to joint training and joint duty assignments necessary for flag careers.

That same problem; we have in forcing people to do things so they are “competitive for command.”

Not everyone wants to have command. Not everyone wants to be a Flag Officer. I know you went through three wives, all your friendships, and half your liver to get there, but not everyone else wants to - and that should be OK.

A relaxation of Goldwater-Nichols Act provisions, combined with a reduction in joint headquarters’ billets, would enable the Navy and the other services to be more selective in grooming officers for leadership of both service and joint forces.

Relaxation? How about elimination? You can start with something the Front Porch is familiar with; PLAN SALAMANDER for Officer Progression. No War College or Joint Requirements until after CDR Command.

I have to non-concur with the desire to be “more selective in grooming” too. Done too early, and that will eliminate too many good officers, is ripe for abuse and favoritism, and will result in perfumed princes that are disconnected from the fleet. 

Through CDR Command only one thing should matter; performance in your warfare area. That will be the best culling function you can have on who should progress up the Chain of Command. All else is vanity.

Going back to comparing the surface, aviation, and submarine communities – a very telling description of how the career paths were adjusted in response to Goldwater-Nichols,

Was the surface force looking for a competitive advantage over the other communities? Sure seems like it, and is well in line with the decision to make the ~+/-100 Sailor LCS a CDR Command, vice LCDR Command.

All about promotion boards – not about building proficient surface warfare leaders. All about cultural priorities.

The next note on education I can argue both sides of. I responded to this demand signal as a senior LT. I have a Master’s Degree from a State university in a residency program while holding down a full-time shore duty job. Pretty much worked two full time jobs to do it.

I got the check in the block – all the Navy wanted – and got the sub-specialty code for it, yet the Navy never once used it. All they wanted was the pain points for their metrics.

An increased focus on graduate education further decreases opportunity for officers to gain proficiency working with the fleet.
…
Often, however, these graduate degrees do not directly contribute to a deepening naval or tactical mastery and for many officers a master’s degree requires an additional tour away from operational assignments.
…
In 2015, 85% of the commanding officers in the unrestricted line communities had at least one master’s degree. Of those who had master’s degrees, approximately half received their degrees while attending an in-residence program during a shore tour.

Here’s an unpopular request. I want to see the numbers when you take out Master’s Degrees earned while that shore duty was at War College - related to that War College tour. IMAO that simply does not count. No offense, but it doesn’t.

In 1996, the Surface Warfare Community discontinued the Senior Officer Material Readiness Course, which provided prospective Commanding Officers with the skills needed to understand and effectively manage their material and equipment. The loss of the Readiness Squadron billets combined with the loss of the Senior Officer Material Readiness Course led to fewer officers with a thorough understanding of how to maintain increasingly complex warships. 

The surface fleet aggravated experience loss by eliminating the sixteen-week Surface Warfare Officer School basic course in 2003.

If you were looking for a mark to put on your calendar, you can call this period the “Era of De-professionalization of the Surface Force.” What a lamentable period of time. A great shame to us all.

The next is a chicken or egg issue;

A second issue contributing to declining surface warfare officer naval operational expertise is the long-term Navy practice of over accessing junior officers. For more than 20 years the number of junior officers commissioned into the surface warfare community has exceeded the number of ensigns required in afloat billets.39 This helps ensure an adequate number of surface warfare officers are available later for department head tours at sea. The Comprehensive Review recommended aligning “the number of SWO [surface warfare officer] candidates assigned to ships with the billet requirements.” While the Strategic Review concurs with the intent of that recommendation, it would have to be implemented in a way that ensures it would result in a sufficient number of officers progressing to department head.

I stand by the argument that you would retain more people if they were not in a shark tank like that. Just horrible.

Train them well. Let them do their job well. Make them know their job is valued and they will stay. You will need to assess fewer. Q.E.D.

I take zero pleasure the next “I told you so,” as this was the exact point that those who lost the argument made a couple of decades ago. A hollow victory I wish we never would have to claim.

Over time, officers with less experience were promoted into leadership positions where they were training the Navy’s newest junior officers. The result was a decline in surface warfare officer skills. The pendulum has swung too far and a lower level of training and experience was normalized. A rebalancing is needed to ensure the Navy has an officer cadre comprised of officers with deep naval expertise and a more appropriate number of joint-qualified officers with the breadth of experience needed to succeed in joint operations.

Yes, I will continue to beat this dead horse. Big Navy has joined in the beating, and I will not deny myself another run at it.

The Age of Transformationalism rears its ugly head again and again in this report. All the below was force-moded by senior leadership. Don’t bother with excuses. This was a deliberate decision with intent.

These cumulative reductions in sailors available for fleet duty were accommodated by the adoption of the 2002 Optimum Manning initiative, which reduced destroyer and cruiser manning by 18% and 12% respectively.
…
In its May 2017 Navy Readiness assessment, the Government Accountability Office found that reductions to crew sizes made in the early 2000s were not analytically supported and in congressional testimony stated the reductions “may now be creating safety risks.” The Government Accountability Office went on to say, “With fewer sailors operating and maintaining surface ships, the material condition of the ships declines, and we found that this decline ultimately contributed to an increase in operating and support costs that outweighed any savings on personnel.” The Strategic Review agrees.

This was all known, but welcome to the party nonetheless.

The combined effects of Optimum Manning and the Navy’s implementation of the 2001 Revolution in Training significantly degraded enlisted expertise. Revolution in Training was intended to overhaul the Navy’s schoolhouse-centric individual training system by transitioning to a lifelong-learning continuum reliant on computer-based and on-the-job training.

All the “Old Think” shaming done by the “smartest men in the room” of this period will remain a black mark on our Navy. The lost lives and destroyed careers cannot be recovered, but we can affect the future.

This is what this report is trying to do – but it needs follow-through.

The annual cost per sailor has increased by more than 25% since 1998,

I would like to see this broken down by cost source to ID main drivers, and to the degree we can do a little regression analysis as well. As I know part of the answer, I’m not sure Big Navy is ready to go there – but it would be a nice exercise to go through.

History shows the potential for technology-enabled manpower savings were routinely overestimated. Three of the last four ship classes required increases to crew size after fleet delivery.

I’m sorry, I can’t stop laughing. What has it been denizens of the Front Porch?  Well over a decade we’ve been beating that drum?

Both versions of the Littoral Combat Ship required significant increases in personnel beyond original estimates, and the Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyer already experienced a crew size increase of 11% with the full extent of needed manpower increases unknown until its systems are fully tested and operational.
…
Overly optimistic workload assessments create a cycle of unbalanced manpower allocations, unachievable individual ship workloads, and eventual increases in ships’ crew size. Sailors being overworked, or perceiving themselves to be overworked, also effects retention…

This is where we deserve at least one footnote, but that’s OK.

The rest of this chapter is mostly a validation of the critics of the Transformatinalists and their ilk.

Due to the complex mix of pressures and constraints on the personnel system over the last few decades there is no single area of personnel development, manning, or training where isolated action is likely to create lasting improvements or compensate for previous shortfalls. 

…overly optimistic assumptions about the ability to reduce crew sizes and lack of institutional commitment to long-term training reform, appear likely to be repeated if systemic change is not undertaken.

That’s strong, and welcome. Breaking it down to parade rest, indeed.

The recommendations are so good I just want to get nakid and roll around in them. As this is a family blog, instead I will just quote them in full.

All are enthusiastically endorsed. All should be implemented as soon as possible. Not practical; possible.

1. Restructure officer career paths, particularly for surface warfare officers, to refocus on mastering skills crucial to the Navy.
     a. Seek legislation to relax Goldwater-Nichols Act promotion requirements by lowering the required percentage of joint qualified officers. In the absence of relaxed legislation, take maximum advantage of the waiver provisions in the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Simultaneously, work with the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff to reduce the number of staff tour billets, particularly officer billets, outside the Department of the Navy.
     b. Amend Defense Officer Personnel Management Act related statutes and policies to allow the Secretary of the Navy to retain a modest number of qualified Lieutenants and Lieutenant Commanders to serve extended careers without convening boards for their selection and annual retention.
     c. Amend Defense Officer Personnel Management Act related statutes and policies to remove Limited Duty Officers from control grade table strengths (O4 to O6) and allow the Navy to build more deep naval expertise.
     d. Discontinue the fleet-up model for surface ships and place a shore tour between Executive Officer and Commanding Officer tours, except in exceptional cases mandated by unusual career paths or needs of the Navy. The Strategic Review recognizes that there are likely costs associated with such a change, including the potential for lower retention, greater permanent change of station costs, and the need for longer or additional screening boards each year.
     e. Restrict the practice of surface warfare officers serving their second division officer tours on embarked staffs to those who were preselected to convert to a restricted line community.
     f. Review the number/length of department head tours and the number of department heads required per ship.

2. Establish a process to measure the true workload of ships’ crews, both periodically and after upgrades and modernizations, to determine if manpower models adequately predict personnel requirements at sea and in port. This should include identification and quantification of added demands and additional work that affect readiness and technical qualifications.
     a. Adjust ship manning levels to allow for adequate crew rest, performance of extraneous and collateral duties, training (routine, on-the-job, and new hardware/software) that occurs while aboard ship, and should include some excess capacity.

3. Require officers to maintain a career record of watch-standing hours and specific operational evolutions for surface ship watch standers, similar to naval aviator flight hour logs and separate from current deck logs.

4. Establish minimum hour and evolution requirements to become/remain a qualified Officer of the Deck, Combat Information Center Watch Officer and Tactical Action Officer.

5. Require successful completion of relevant simulator training scenarios to maintain watch-standing qualifications.

CHAPTER 4: Fiscal Disconnect

This chapter is aimed at the DC Wonkosphere. Important, but you need to just read it yourself. I’m bored just writing this sentence about it. The recommendations are solid.

I’ll give you a taste though;

....there is a correlation between resourcing levels and the priority the Navy places on various operating, manpower, and recapitalization accounts that make up the Navy’s Budget.

In other news, I tend to be opinionated.

There are some things in the body that are worth noting;

The Navy has been able to meet the requirement for “forces forward,” but it has come at a significant cost. There have been reductions in, or suspension of, operations not considered necessary to fulfill on-going missions assigned to deployed forces supporting Combatant Commanders. If a unit is not on deployment or in a “next-to-deploy” status, its stock orders have been put on hold, some training opportunities deferred, and its maintenance delayed until the Navy was certain funding would be made available. Most significantly, the Navy’s Facilities Sustainment, Restoration, and Modernization accounts were used as the perennial “bill payers” to meet the needs of forces forward. The net result is that these accounts are at the lowest level they have been in many years.65 At some point, the decline in readiness of facilities will manifest itself as another example of “normalization-of-deviation.”

This is when I remind you that at present we are unchallended on the high seas, and yet?

…we continue to shoot up the horse.

While the standard for facilities sustainment should be in the range of 85% of the sustainment model funding levels, the Navy is only reaching the 70% level.
…
Since ship maintenance availabilities (as described in section 4.1 above) are now intentionally shorter, the capacity of facilities and personnel are limited by the system’s ability to accept and adjust for these emergent issues. The emergent problems have not had planning and design work done to fix them; the parts have not been ordered; the job has not been efficiently sequenced into the scope of work nor has it been included in the overall production plan. Overcoming all of this ultimately makes the total bill higher than planned.

This is all a conscious choice; a deliberate choice. No one forced us to do this. This was all priories. It isn’t that we don’t have the time or money for it – it just wasn’t a priority.

In the recommendations we see the other warfare specialties being recognized;

Adopt a Training & Readiness matrix (similar to the aviation Training and Readiness matrix) to define what each ship must accomplish in each phase of training, the number of times it has to be demonstrated, how many times it can be simulated, and what the external grading criteria are for meeting the requirements for each level of certification.
     a. Develop effective measures of overall ship readiness that accurately describe what is necessary to achieve and maintain certification in each warfare area.

CHAPTER 5: Governance

Mostly a red-tape and bureaucracy complaint list and an opportunity to beat up on Goldwater-Nichols again. Tough to keep using that as a shield for too many things. It is the law of the land. Not policy or procedure, but law. If it needs to be changed, it needs to be done in Congress.

…and those who will make that happen are …

The two areas that the Goldwater-Nichols Act profoundly impacted were officer career paths77 and chains of command and associated authority. With respect to lines of authority, although military advice often comes through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the operational chain of command runs from the President to the Secretary of Defense to the regional Combatant Commanders. Service Chiefs, who best understand the capabilities and readiness of their forces and who are supported by the significant doctrine development and tactical expertise of their school houses, and the strategic insights from their staff and war colleges, are not part of that process.
…
…in the area of readiness, under the Goldwater-Nichols Act, there are confusing lines of authority and separation of, and competition between, readiness and operational responsibilities.

Again and again in this report, I keep coming up with the desire to know who has the power to say, “no.” People do, but they don’t.

Unless the authority over these decisions can be restored, ships will continue to be operated when they are no longer fully certified in all their respective primary missions or have inadequately trained crews to meet the full range of operational assignments.

The reason they don’t? Simple. The system of reward and punishment.

While the Goldwater-Nichols Act has been effective in enhancing current joint force operations, after more than 30 years of existence it and its implementing details have not been substantially reviewed for its overall effectiveness for a return to peer-on-peer competition.

A polite way of saying to G-N, “Thank you for our service. Here’s your gold watch.”

I wish it were that easy.

Hey Shipmate, have you complained about the admin overhead your UIC suffers under?

With respect to congressional oversight and direction, the Navy is a compliance-based organization and dedicates whatever resources, including staffing, necessary to respond to oversight and direction. Such compliance is resource intensive and frequently distracts leadership’s attention from its primary responsibilities. Responding to ever-increasing National Defense Authorization Act direction, environmental, safety, and acquisition requirements, as well as other legal obligations, requires significantly increasing involvement by the Secretary and the Chief of Naval Operations.

One would hope that the Secretary and CNO, seeing the challenge they face with admin overhead, will take that onboard and act on the admin overhead they have put on our Navy in turn. Take action on this and you’ll get even more focus on the things you want people to act on in the recommendations in this report. We all only have a 24-hr day.

In their recommendations, they propose to,

Seek relief, in coordination with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, from excessively detailed external oversight and reporting requirements.

Lead from the front.

Lead. From. The. Front.

CHAPTER 6: Industry Best Practices and Learning Cultures

I’ll take this as more apology than excuse. Accepted.

Well-intentioned, dedicated Navy leaders, faced with complex, near-term problems, have made difficult decisions over many years using the best available information.

…but …

To better understand the dynamics of how large complex organizations, like the Navy, learned and adapted following a tragic event or series of safety mishaps, this Strategic Review included discussions with key leaders of leading global companies in the aerospace, maritime, and medical industries.91 They were selected because they are recognized global leaders in their respective fields and because of their records of learning and changing after tragic events. Each company official articulated that, in retrospect, their tolerance for, and accumulation of, multiple, seemingly minor, decisions made to “get the job done”92 degraded recognition of unsafe daily operations.

This goes on for another page and a half. 

What do I not see? I don’t see recognition that other smaller, but very similar, navies do not have the same fundamental failure of seamanship that we have.

Have we talked to not just “industry,” but to the Royal Navy? How about the Royal Netherlands Navy? Heck, how about the French even?

If we are too proud to reach out, that is very petty of us. We ask a lot from our allies, we should acknowledge that there are some things we can learn from them in the balance – and we should be out and proud about it.

The Navy has a culture that currently prioritizes immediate mission accomplishment over long-term sustainable readiness.

…because? …driven by whom?

While the Navy espouses a learning culture — and there are pockets of excellence — a myriad of previous readiness reviews, when viewed holistically, indicate there is much work to be done. There have been similar, repeated, conclusions and recommendations made over the years for improving Navy's overall readiness.94 A more structured, data-driven system for ensuring attention to, and learning from, the lessons of the past can only increase institutional attention to the core fundamentals of safety, seamanship, and training. The Comprehensive Review echoes previous report findings and correctly identifies the Navy, in the aggregate, has not truly embraced a culture of learning.

…
Such a culture depends upon data and critical analyses to facilitate rapid, informed decisions.

On the following point, I think this review does a solid job in setting the table. At the present we aren't there, but we can get there with the proper signals and actions from leadership.

Successfully achieving a culture of learning requires implementation of a comprehensive system with clear lines of authority, accountability, and responsibility.

Like the company leaders the Strategic Review Team spoke with, Navy leadership must now take ownership of the issues and lead the corrective action not only in the specific shortfalls identified in the various investigations, but by addressing the decisions, programs, policies, and systemic gaps that would have avoided and/or arrested them.

The report really hits its stride here;

As indicated in the Comprehensive Review, flaws have been identified in the underlying systems, organization, processes, regulations, and culture that diminish Navy readiness.

…but…

As this Strategic Review gleaned from industry,…

If you are wondering what “industry” are we benchmarking, it is in Appendix A. Appendix B lists the individuals consulted. I have nothing but good things to say about these people. I might have ventured a bit outside the traditional lines here, but that would just be changing happy to glad. Good balance.

I’m not going to quote any of this section's Recommendations here as it will harsh my positive vibe about the report. I mean, really people; aren’t we already supposed to be doing these things?

OK, you think I’m being a fussbucket? Fine, this is what I’m talking about.

The Secretary of the Navy and Chief of Naval Operations, with the support of the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy, must personally lead the Navy … built upon systemic data analyses focused on leading indicators … Employ system dynamics modeling and simulation … better identify leading indicators for use in predictive analysis.

I’m pretty sure this is in place, if not – then things are a lot worse than I thought. Everything behind the curtain must have really gone TANGO-UNIFORM since I hung up the uniform in ’09.

Then we come to “Righting the Ship.” A nice summary you can read yourself. I can’t add to it, and anyway my snark bucket is down to its strategic reserve – not that it needs any snark. I like it.

As I wrap things up, I feel a need to point out something significant, at least to me and the people who are regular readers and commenters at “CDR Salamander,” those I refer to as the “Front Porch.” 

I am always humbled and honored by this bunch taking the time to visit and contribute, many of which have been commenting, emailing, or lurking since we started here in 2004.

The Front Porch is well aware that almost from the start of his tenure, I was highly critical of former CNO Admiral Gary Roughead, USN (Ret.). All my critiques stand, but if here and there I threw an unnecessary elbow or had an edge where perhaps it shouldn’t have been, I will drop an apology to him – so … if needed Admiral Roughead, my apologies for any unnecessary rough-and-tumble over the years. You’re a SWO, so it goes without saying that you should have been able to handle it, and I am sure you have been called worse by better.

Why am I doing that here? Simple, Roughead was a Co-lead on the team that produced this report. This report is highly critical of the years he was senior leadership. That is something. It takes a certain type of professional to be able to be in that position and to husband a review like this to publication.

Perhaps someday we’ll know on a personal level why when a senior officer he took the point on some issues that he did, and supported programs the way he did, but now is not the time for that. As we say here often, good people can find themselves in difficult jobs and do the best they can.

He needs no redemption and owes nothing to anyone, but at least for this little blogger, I am reassessing my holistic opinion of him.



There is something even more personal that came out of my reading this report, something I let leak our early in the post; vindication.

Not just vindication for the Front Porch and "CDR Salamander," but for the “Old School” naval blogosphere who during the ‘00s fought a losing battle, a holding action, as the problems this report outlines were set in as policy and began to manifest themselves in the Navy we all loved.

I’m still here, as is EagleOne. I wish Lex were still with us for many reasons, but mostly because I wish we could have had one of our entertaining email exchanges offline for those things we couldn’t really put on a blog, but were comfortable sharing among each other.

I also think of my fellow paleobloggers who fought the good fight, but went on to other hobbies. Chapomatic, Joel from TheStupidMustBePunished, and even SkippySan (NB: I know I’m leaving some important people off, no offense). 

There were many more who did not blog, but worked in the bureaucracy to move the needle and stop the train wreck they saw coming, but failed – often having their careers damaged by petty men in the process. There were those who didn’t even comment, but did email, call or even have hand written notes sent through intermediaries - helping provide context and information so Lex, Chap, Joel, Skippy and I could form better critiques.

And of course, there was the Front Porch. Byron, MTH, LT B, and so many more who were there from the start and came in with their extensive experience to help others to know that they were not alone in seeing the madness around them. Even when there was disagreement in details, at least you knew we were always trying to stop things before it was too late.

They were right. We were right, but I’m comfortable saying this – to a man I know we wish we were wrong.

We would wish that as 2017 was ending that all the fruit promised by the Age of Transformationalism had come to pass. That the leaders and visionaries we had then really were so much better than the generations before them such that they could ignore the hard lessons of centuries - and we were blogging our apologies to them.

Finally, because this is CDR Salamander, we do have to point out something now instead of saving it for a Thursday.

You want to know how serious a document this is? Do a word search for “diversity.” Look for any mention of, “women” or “female” issues.

You won’t find them. Why? Simple, they have zero to do with a well-functioning Navy. They are what they have always been, a distraction. A socio-political distraction. That distraction was part of our lack of focus on the problems that brought this report in to being.

When a CNO says diversity is his #1 priority, something else moves off his scan or gets less time. If X% of his travel and staff time is distracted on socio-political issues, that is time, effort, and TDY funding that is not being used to ensure that the fleet is properly trained, manned, and equipped.

When the SECNAV and SECDEF are out promoting “Lean-In Circles” and allocating BA/NMP simply to feed one side of the socio-political divide, what BA/NMP is not being funded? What meetings with fleet Sailors are not taking place?

I’ve often said that the Navy is not being a serious institution when it allows itself to be a photo-op puppet of socio-political hobby-horses. It isn't. In this line of work, if you are not focused and serious, people die.

We don’t discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin. We enforce that policy. We don’t need an entire infrastructure bought and paid for based around a policy that is already being enforced. We don't need to fund other people's political programs - or their projected insecurities.

The law says we have to do X. We do it, we enforce it. We don’t have to play cheerleader for one side or another. That isn’t out job.

Our job is to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic. Our job is to ensure that we have the best trained, manned, and equipped Navy and Marine Corps we can given the resources provided.

Anything that does not add to the above is not our job.

It takes leaders to enforce that. It takes focus to see that through. It takes a culture to live that.

Let’s reset and get to work.