Proactively “From the Sea”; an agent of change leveraging the littoral best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma best business case to synergize a consistent design in the global commons, rightsizing the core values supporting our mission statement via the 5-vector model through cultural diversity.
The fleet a nation builds is not predestined; it develops over time based on the perceived security needs of a nation, its economic carrying capacity, combined with the will and vision of its leaders. After those basic ingredients are set, then you have to have the right people with the right ideas to implement it. The fleet that results is not the result of a simple 1+1+1=3. Like three different chefs can come up with three very different dishes from the same basic ingredients, so too can different leaders build very different fleets to meet what they perceived best meets a nation’s requirements. If you had different leaders at a point in time, you would have a very different fleet. We have the fleet we have because of those in positions of power, uniformed and civilian, at important decision points. There were alternatives to today’s present. There are alternative futures. The “what if” matrix is as complex as the personalities and philosophies that chose one path over another; one platform over another. Navalists know most of the more recent decision points that led to the fleet we have today. We know those who led one school of thought or another – who won the argument, and who did not. Who got 80% of what they saw the future needed, who got 20%. When you look at people with alternative designs from what we have today, one of the first people who comes to mind is Wayne Hughes, CAPT USN (Ret.). In June’s issue of Proceedings, he has an article, “Build a Green Water Fleet” that again raises the issue of what fleet we need as an alternative to the one we continue to build. The article builds off the concepts I wrote about in JAN 2010 embedded in the decade old “New Navy Fighting Machine". It may be a decade old, but it is still fresh. In my 2010 post, Reforming the Confederate Navy, I outlined the issue as I saw it,
The Confederate Navy … she threw her lot in with transformationalism. VIRGINIA and HUNLEY were wonderful ground breaking designs and concepts - built against tremendous odds - but in the end they were like the nation they served - beautiful losers destroyed by their own fatal conceits.
What was their conceit? They thought that a few high technological breakthroughs thrown into a few hulls and applied with a bit of tactical verve could triumph over the many primarily pushing sound fundamentals.
Yep, the South did win - it won the post Goldwater-Nichols Navy. Let’s get back to Hughes’s latest;
The New Navy Fighting Machine Study described an affordable yet more numerous and complete U. S. fleet for the 21st century. By distinguishing smaller, single-purpose, green-water (coastal and littoral) combatants from the large, multipurpose, expensive, heavily manned blue-water (open-ocean) fleet, the study was able to restore a Navy of more than 600 vessels that could be sustained with an annual Ship Construction New (SCN) budget of $15 billion. [3] The fleet’s composition was tested by war games and studies conducted by faculty and students. Their efforts explored the value and limitations of the NNFM force against two first-class enemies, irregular warfare opponents, and for peacetime engagement with friendly states.
What kind of fleet for Green Water ops would he like?
The Navy needs small, lethal, fast, green-water ships and submarines to take the fight to the enemy in the littorals. The Mark VI patrol boat (top) and this HOSS X-1 concept submarine (designed by and copyright J. Scott Shipman of B.B. Hoss, Inc.) are examples of vessels recommended by the New Navy Fighting Machine Study.
…“Minuteman” class of missile combatants to comply with surface navy specifications that included eight antiship cruise missiles, a gun, a combat crew of 12, bunks for 30, and a cruising radius of 3,000 nm.
To get it, he is willing to trade some Blue Water capital;
… the existing 280-ship fleet its 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers (CVNs) took 46 percent of sea-going billets. By reducing the number of CVNs to six or seven and distributing the sea-based air capability more widely, the NNFM freed enough people to operate the new fighting fleet.
There are some who are questioning the math here, but even if you adjust 25%, the argument should not be dismissed out of hand.
…a light aircraft carrier (CVL), displacing 28,000 tons, that could carry 20 F-35B aircraft plus assorted helicopters and unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) for scouting and auxiliary functions. Weisser showed that in most scenarios two or three CVLs working together, or one operating in concert with a CVN, would be more adaptable and could deliver firepower more efficiently than sea-based air power operating from CVNs alone.
…16 non-nuclear submarines because littoral waters are where they will be most effective.
Of course, this does not fully address the Blue Water changes, but as the author mentioned, that can be addressed SEPCOR. One final note from me, for any meaningful change to take place, we need to pull up Goldwater-Nichols root and branch and replace with a new construct. We need a wholesale, highly disruptive change in the bureaucratic structure and the accretions build up around it in the last 3+ decades. Better now in peace by choice, than at war when the decks are slick with blood and we are grasping for something more effective. It is not a coincidence that we have not been able to field a successful surface combatant since Goldwater-Nichols. Remember, the money to cut steel on DDG-51 Hull-1 was in 1985, a year prior to Goldwater-Nichols. Since then, we have put forward LCS & DDG-1000, aborted CG(X), cannot stop picking our belly button with DDG(X), and have a fairly good chance of having FFG(X) just be a reconfigured (spit) LCS. When will the last Arleigh Burke DDG be commissioned, 2030? 2035? Heck, 2040? There is a pretty good chance that a DDG envisioned and first built at the height of the Cold War will almost see service in to the 22nd Century. 2085 at a minimum. 100 years. Almost like we were about to decommission the last of our TENNESSEE Class BB, designed and built after and during WWI.
In the last few months a lot has been written about learning how to fight a conventional land battle again after years of a focus on counterinsurgency. Fighting against an enemy who is holding territory, has a capital, armor, artillery and a proven record in the battlefield. While some are writing it, others have been living it, fighting side by side with traditional allies and new ones in a complicated joint and combined environment that is the latest chapter in the Long War; the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Our guest this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern is returning to Midrats after just returning from leading Marines in the fight, Colonel Seth Folsom, USMC. Colonel Folsom is a Marine Corps infantry officer with 24 years of commissioned service. He currently works on the staff of I Marine Expeditionary Force, and he has commanded Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan at the company, battalion, and task force level. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Marine Corps War College, and he is the author of three books about his Marines fighting The Long War. He and his family live in Oceanside, California.
Some days, you miss the passing of a giant. Not in size, but in deed. These men make you stop and wonder, are you ready to endure what they endured?
Navy Cmdr. Robert J. Flynn, who spent five and a half years in a Communist Chinese prison during the Vietnam War...
Read that again. Chinese.
Then-Lieutenant Flynn, a bombardier-navigator, was taking part in a raid on Aug. 21, 1967, targeting rail yards near Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital, about 75 miles from the Chinese border, when his two-man A-6 Intruder came under attack. The Pentagon later said his plane and another Intruder on that raid had been downed after straying over southern China while seeking to escape North Vietnamese jets.
Lieutenant Flynn and his pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Jimmy Lee Buckley, ejected from their craft. Lieutenant Flynn, suffering severe spinal injuries, found the pilot’s body near the spot where he had come down, and he was soon captured. The Chinese news agency Xinhua reported six days later that one of four American airmen whom China had just downed had been paraded before peasants and Red Guards at an anti-America rally. It did not identify that airman, but Lieutenant Flynn was the only survivor from the two Intruders.
Mrs. Flynn said in an interview on Wednesday: “I saw on TV he was being beaten, and the streets were lined with people. That’s how I knew he was alive.”
His experience, almost unknown to his countrymen, is hard to grasp.
For the remainder of the Vietnam War, he spent virtually all his prison time in a small cell in Beijing
...
“The most terrible part was the solitude, the solitude, the solitude,” Commander Flynn told The Pensacola News Journal in 2008. “What do you do with all that time? All those hours? All those days and years?”
To be so alone for so long, but not alone.
Freedom finally came on March 15, 1973, when he was taken across a covered bridge into Hong Kong, wearing a blue Chinese cap. He was released to the American authorities there together with Maj. Philip E. Smith of the Air Force, who had been imprisoned by the Chinese since his plane was downed over their airspace in September 1965.
Two C.I.A. agents, John Downey and Richard Fecteau, who had been captured in China in 1952 during the Korean War, were also at the prison where Lieutenant Flynn and Major Smith were held. Mr. Fecteau was freed in December 1971, and Mr. Downey in March 1973.
He served until 1985, retiring as a Commander.
“I wouldn’t want to do it again,” he told The News Journal in recalling his captivity. “But it was part of the experience of my life. Life is sort of an adventure. Sometimes, the adventure gets out of hand.”
Indeed.
Cmdr. Robert J. Flynn ... died on May 15 in Pensacola, Fla. Commander Flynn ... was 76.
The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Kathy.
It seems like it was only yesterday when throughout DOD, warfighting was out, Lean-In Circles were all the rage, and every single month it seemed that we were more concerned with the self-identified color of one's skin than the content of one's character. The later problem is still with us - hiding in the shadows but still exuding its bile about - but perhaps there is still hope.
For so long, our leaders dared not speak in open about "administrative burden" or the amount of manhours and TAD funds were expended supporting the grievance of the month club or the Society of Emoting Navelgazers ... oh no.
Suck it up and embrace the vibrancy; ships drive themselves anyway - but you won't fix your latent homophobia, CIS-gendered bigotry, and implicit bias laden hatred on your own, you privileged oppressor. Hate yourself as much as I do.
In a series of servicewide memorandums approved by Army Secretary Mark Esper and Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and obtained by The Washington Times, service leaders are making optional previously mandatory training on issues such as transgender transition and drug abuse. The move, Army leaders argue, is designed to relieve stress on the overburdened troop training regimen and refocus on soldiers’ ability to fight in combat.
...
Those mandated training requirements “served as barriers to maximizing time … to build readiness and lethality” within combat units, he said in an interview. Aside from ending mandatory training programs on transgender troops and drug abuse, courses on media awareness and human trafficking have been eliminated from the mandatory curriculum, the service memorandums state.
Army officials are codifying the new marching orders into servicewide training guidelines and doctrine, which will bring the Army more in line with the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy, Col. O’Grady said.
All hail SECDEF Mattis! Now, about our fetid little nest of Diversity Bullies ...
I am sympathetic to the theory that the worry that China will become the next global hegemon is overblown. Different schools of this belief have different totems; some demographics of a rapidly aging nation, others the exceptional economic fragility that makes China ripe for a sharp recession leading to internal conflict - but while I can see these are factors, I am starting to subscribe to another confession; China is her own worst enemy. As a dime-store therapist might say, China has "a lot of baggage." She holds other ethnicities and nations in contempt. She does not have an open culture or one that is flexible enough to be nuanced. She also has a stubborn record of corruption, pride, and cold-hearted mercantilism that would put the East India Company to shame. She also has a huge chip on her shoulder. She remembers the Opium Wars. She knows how the British and the Portuguese got Hong Kong and Macau. They know how Russia got their far east. They remember as if it were yesterday. In their 3-4,000 cultural history, it is. Don't discount payback and catch-up going on.
In her desire to secure her economic GLOC and SLOC (Belt & Road), she is using any tool she can to get what she wants. As word gets out as to what happened to others, eventually other nations will demur ... if those nations can find a way to place uncorruptible and competent people in decision making positions. NYT has a perfect example this week in a story about how China managed to get their foothold right off India in Sri Lanka. Reading this, it became clear that Goodfellas and The Godfather movies are not all that popular in Sri Lanka. If so, they might have avoided their fate;
Every time Sri Lanka’s president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, turned to his Chinese allies for loans and assistance with an ambitious port project, the answer was yes.
...
Mr. Rajapaksa was voted out of office in 2015, but Sri Lanka’s new government struggled to make payments on the debt he had taken on. Under heavy pressure and after months of negotiations with the Chinese, the government handed over the port and 15,000 acres of land around it for 99 years in December.
Few things are more dual use than a good port. This is how, if you're playing a long game, you get a naval base.
The case is one of the most vivid examples of China’s ambitious use of loans and aid to gain influence around the world — and of its willingness to play hardball to collect.
From a mercantilism POV, will this be a net economic gain for China? That is a tough sell. From an imperialist POV though, who cares? What a great base if you need one. Got to get trinkets to the right natives though.
• During the 2015 Sri Lankan elections, large payments from the Chinese port construction fund flowed directly to campaign aides and activities for Mr. Rajapaksa, who had agreed to Chinese terms at every turn and was seen as an important ally in China’s efforts to tilt influence away from India in South Asia. The payments were confirmed by documents and cash checks detailed in a government investigation seen by The New York Times.
• Though Chinese officials and analysts have insisted that China’s interest in the Hambantota port is purely commercial, Sri Lankan officials said that from the start, the intelligence and strategic possibilities of the port’s location were part of the negotiations.
...
• Though the deal erased roughly $1 billion in debt for the port project, Sri Lanka is now in more debt to China than ever, as other loans have continued and rates remain much higher than from other international lenders.
Is debt really that much of a weapon? It has been used as such for thousands of years, no reason to see that change now.
“John Adams said infamously that a way to subjugate a country is through either the sword or debt. China has chosen the latter,” said Brahma Chellaney, an analyst who often advises the Indian government and is affiliated with the Center for Policy Research, a think tank in New Delhi.
“The only way to justify the investment in Hambantota is from a national security standpoint — that they will bring the People’s Liberation Army in,” said Shivshankar Menon, who served as India’s foreign secretary and then its national security adviser as the Hambantota port was being built.
That is exactly how you should look at it. You need to read the full article so you can see the template they will use where there are democratic systems in place. The 2015 election will do. It appears that inside China there is not full alignment with how best to gather the access they want. Do they keep the established template, or something less likely to scare away other nations?
Some Chinese officials have become concerned that the nearly institutional graft surrounding such projects represents a liability for China, and raises the bar needed for profitability. President Xi acknowledged the worry in a speech last year, saying, “We will also strengthen international cooperation on anticorruption in order to build the Belt and Road Initiative with integrity.”
Time will tell, but man ... you almost need a 2-meter whiteboard to track this;
The deal left some appearance of Sri Lankan ownership: Among other things, it created a joint company to manage the port’s operations and collect revenue, with 85 percent owned by China Merchants Port and the remaining 15 percent controlled by Sri Lanka’s government.
But lawyers specializing in port acquisitions said Sri Lanka’s small stake meant little, given the leverage that China Merchants Port retained over board personnel and operating decisions. And the government holds no sovereignty over the port’s land.
When the agreement was initially negotiated, it left open whether the port and surrounding land could be used by the Chinese military, which Indian officials asked the Sri Lankan government to explicitly forbid. The final agreement bars foreign countries from using the port for military purposes unless granted permission by the government in Colombo.
That clause is there because Chinese Navy submarines had already come calling to Sri Lanka.
Strategic Concerns
China had a stake in Sri Lanka’s main port as well: China Harbor was building a new terminal there, known at the time as Colombo Port City. Along with that deal came roughly 50 acres of land, solely held by the Chinese company, that Sri Lanka had no sovereignty on.
This story will not be going anywhere;
Now, the handover of Hambantota to the Chinese has kept alive concerns about possible military use — particularly as China has continued to militarize island holdings around the South China Sea despite earlier pledges not to.
Sri Lankan officials are quick to point out that the agreement explicitly rules out China’s military use of the site. But others also note that Sri Lanka’s government, still heavily indebted to China, could be pressured to allow it.
And, as Mr. de Silva, the state minister for national policies and economic affairs, put it, “Governments can change.”
Remember, there are so many lessons from The Lost Boys. The most important one - a vampire can only hurt you if you invite them in to your house.
Technology is reaching the point of affordability and capability that even medium powers are on the cusp of having a conventional, precision global strike capability. If you're willing to scope that down, we are already at the point of regional long range strike for anyone who wants it. Right now, a rag-tag group of rebels from Yemen is launching ballistic missiles at the capital of Saudi Arabia on a regular basis. Sure, they are not having much success, but that is because they are using half-century+ old weapons technology in limited numbers against a well integrated 21st Century ABM system. Just wargame out a bit more capability with a bit more targeting and then a diversity of better weapons with similar range and you have ... a tough nut. The vulnerability of large airfields has been a "known-known" for over 75 years and from Pearl Harbor to Egypt to Iraq, what happens when your enemy is many and your airfields are few is clear. Because since about 1943 we have been on the giving side of this fact vice the receiving, we've forgotten this more than we should. We need to continue to think hard about those things that are efficient in peace that may be be the most effective at war. Airbases are one of them. In an interesting article, Robbin Laird brings up a case in point;
“From a USAF standpoint, we are organized for efficiency, and in the high intensity conflict that we might find ourselves in, in the Pacific, that efficiency might be actually our Achilles heel, because it requires us to put massive amounts of equipment on a few bases. Those bases, as we most know, are within the weapons engagement zone of potential adversaries,” Wilsbach said.
...
“We’re at the very preliminary stages of being able to do this but the organization is part of the problem for us, because we are very used to, over the last several decades, of being in very large bases, very large organizations, and we stovepipe the various career fields, and one commander is not in charge of the force that you need to disperse. We’re taking a look at this, of how we might reorganize, to be able to employ this concept in the Pacific, and other places.”
In February, I talked with his predecessor, Lt. Gen. Kim Jäämeri, who is now deputy Chief of Staff for strategy for the Finnish Defence Forces. He highlighted the distributed operations aspect of the Finnish approach.
“It is becoming clear to our partners that you cannot run air operations in a legacy manner under the threat of missile barrages of long range weapons. The legacy approach to operating from air bases just won’t work in these conditions. For many of our partners, this is a revelation; for us it has been a fact of life for a long time, and we have operated with this threat in the forefront of operations for a long time,” Jäämeri said.
One could also bring this line of discussion in to the carrier debates.
