Brimleyism with a human face

Thu, 07/02/2009 - 12:00pm

Michele Flournoy, the no. 2 power at the Pentagon, lays down the law in the new issue of Proceedings, along with the shadowy but powerful Shawn Brimley. Wanna know where the QDR is going? Read this and learn, little grasshoppers. And listen up: China and India are where it's at.

Pretty near the top they quote Alfred T. Mahan, which seasoned Pentagoners know is a sign that the Navy is getting teed up to get hit long. (This is like when Gorby would quote Lenin, or Marc Antony would praise Julius Caesar.)

Yeah, they want the State Department to get its act together-but who doesn't?:

The task for the United States is to respond to these challenges with a whole-of-government approach that advances our interests while legitimizing our power in the eyes of others."     

They also want to the Pentagon to help allies keep the global commons free:

Helping to build the capacity of our partners and allies and working toward a common agenda on these increasingly complex issues should be a critical pillar of America's national security and defense strategy."

Okay, sounds good. But this is my question: If the global commons (sea, air, space, cyberspace) really is gonna be contested, why does anyone think conventional aircraft carriers and short-legged fighter aircraft are the answer? I think it is time to commission the UCAV carrier the USS Obama, whose hull and aircraft would both be stealthy. With perhaps a crew of fewer than 500 sailors. (Most controllers of aircraft could fly them from Virginia.)   

You listening, Navy? Your professional magazine has run an article by two of the Pentagon's top civilian thinkers telling you where they think you need to go. You might want to think on this. You too, Air Force.   

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The Three Great Apes

by Rubber Ducky on Thu, 07/02/2009 - 3:07pm

The US Navy has an insurmountable problem internally that keeps it from any innovative exploration of changes to the reigning paradigms: the power of its 3 dominant warfare communities.

Over the decades, naval air, submariners, and the surface navy have found an isostatic balance that let's them play (fairly) well together. But all 3 communities are absolutely wed to the existing force types, an arrangement tightly bound to the long-gone Cold War and more generally to bluewater offense on the high seas, never mind there's no one out there to contend with.

The loyalties demanded for promotion and success are such that any internal argument for fundamental change condemns the proponent to outer darkness. Your hint is right: the blue-suiters have quit thinking.

In the '70s, CNO Bud Zumwalt said that unionism was the biggest problem he faced. It's worse now. Navy officers are no longer naval officers but rather submariners, aviators, or skimmers. It is tribalism gone mad.

See Proceedings' lead article May 2005.

Trade-off's

by Andy on Sat, 07/04/2009 - 2:55pm

What will those controllers in Virginia do when China shoots down or otherwise disrupts out satellite-based C2 system? I realize that the thought of UCAVs and unmanned this and unmanned that is very appealing, but the reality is that by doing so you trade one set of vulnerabilities with another, greater, set of vulnerabilities. With unmanned systems "cyberspace" becomes much, much more important and cyberspace is the one area where the Chinese can seriously compete with us.

So it's not wise to insert a vulnerable critical node between your operator and equipment unless you can be certain that node can function 100% of the time in a high-intensity conflict. We're definitely not there yet and we won't be for quite a while, if ever.

Andy, where do you envision

by J Thomas on Sat, 07/04/2009 - 10:41pm

Andy, where do you envision the US military fighting china?

I just can't see us fighting china in china. They'd have interior supply lines while ours would be across the pacific. Ouch. And what would a victory look like? They have nukes, after all.

I don't see china projecting a lot of power very far outside china either. Say we wound up fighting china in korea or vietnam or siberia etc, we'd still have long supply lines to their short ones, and again what would a victory look like? Maybe we could win a quick decisive victory and say we'd won and go home, and china could then lay the groundwork for a slow total but local victory after we were gone? We could win a short high-intensity war against china somewhere other than china, but would we want to settle down to as decades-long low-intensity war after that?

And china won't go after say alaska any time soon.

Two nuclear powers. One that can project power anywhere in the world at great cost, at an unaffordable cost. Another that cannot project power far at any price. Why would they fight? Why would china disrupt our satellites?

They'd do better to find a polite way to hire us to attack their enemies. They have the money and we don't. We'd balk unless it was phrased right, but....

Agreed that our UAVs can be threatened by anybody who has the technology, so they're only useful against people who don't have that technology -- including US civilians. But our military aircraft have become pretty much unaffordable. Maybe we'd do better to find a weapon that can reliably shoot down anybody's manned aircraft. If no enemy can get air superiority then it won't be so important if we don't get it either.

Read the article

by Andy on Sun, 07/05/2009 - 5:54pm

...it has China written all over it. I don't think war with China is very likely either, but I'm aware enough of history to know that one's next adversary is often not projected years in advance (Japan in the 1930's, Iraq before Aug. 1991, etc. Besides, who do you think China's military buildup is designed to counter? It's not the Russians.

Regardless, a UCAV carrier "whose hull and aircraft would both be stealthy" isn't needed to police the global commons from the so-called hybrid/asymmetric/irregular threats - one doesn't need carriers for that at all in fact. Stealthy carriers along with stealthy strike aircraft are needed for war against an adversary with a decent military capability, not policing.

My point was, however, to question the basis for the adoration among some for unmanned systems - particularly UAV's. I say this as someone who works within the UAV community, specifically Predator. The utility of unmanned systems is fantastic for our current conflicts. Our adversaries have zero capability to impact UAV ops. For other conflicts they will be much less effective unless and until the technology becomes much more robust and reliable at a minimum.

Ever notice that we always go from issue to technology solution.

by Bill Keller on Mon, 07/06/2009 - 5:18am

Suggest this frames the Navy's fundamental mission identification challenge. It starts as a technology then runs for a mission upon which to use it. Until the last 50 years, a Navy was about trade, commerce. Power projection was a element of maintaining the movement of trade.

It has fallen out of that business to concentrate upon the profligate world of armada fleets and many admirals. It is the military equivalent of investment banking - one gets to live very, very well on the side of commerce while taking a very large piece of the action and no one asking for much of a return.

Serve coffee now and then, dress well for conferences, fly high altitude missions, operate a gulag at an old country club, name the biggest ships after the largest benefactor, fly a jack to look a victim....and cash continue to flow.

My point was, however, to

by J Thomas on Mon, 07/06/2009 - 5:33am

My point was, however, to question the basis for the adoration among some for unmanned systems - particularly UAV's.

I have to agree. The current versions are useful against low-tech targets -- third-world armies and US civilians and such. I don't know where they're heading. Particularly for situations where the meaningful detail is limited -- like oceans -- it might eventually work to release them unguided and have an AI that looks for a target and attacks it.

I can imagine a relatively slow small UAV that can go a long time on a small tank of gas, that has a variable-cost under $1000. Make millions of them. Send thousands of them against an aircraft carrier and it costs more to shoot them down than they cost. The ones that get close turn into PGMs, they each target some specific spot -- a flight elevator, a catapult, an antenna, the cockpit of a plane on deck, one engine of a plane on deck, A fire control station, etc. A few dozen successful small attacks might leave a carrier temporarily nonfunctional.

In the short run UAVs have the problem that the AI is so inadequate we need human eyes and brains to manage them. There are advantages and disadvantages to having those human brains in the vehicle, where the communication is harder to jam but the vehicle must cater to fragile organic brains that are not considered expendable. Improve the AI and the tradeoff shifts. I'd expect maybe the simplest task will be air-to-air, where anything flying can be considered friend or foe and the goal is to destroy foes. Air to sea would be second-simplest. But if you can get air superiority with UAVs then after that you can send out the pilots.

On the other hand, if the technology works out that in a contested area no flying vehicle can stay in the air more than a few minutes, then air forces turn as obsolete as horse cavalry. You can use them to quickly get supplies to safe rear areas.

When I try to look ahead more than three years to where the technology may be heading, this looks like an exciting time to be alive.

Rubber Ducky said, In the '70s, CNO Bud Zumwalt said that unionism was the biggest problem he faced. It's worse now. Navy officers are no longer naval officers but rather submariners, aviators, or skimmers. It is tribalism gone mad.

This sort of thing might make it harder for us to fully exploit new technology, or at least it's certain to distort its development. Our air force may try to discourage technology that makes air forces temporarily obsolete. Parts of our navy would try to discourage technology that makes surface navies obsolete. Etc.

I find it hard to tell how the various planning is actually going, from the outside. Like, does it make sense to have a stealthy carrier when your opponent has satellite observation? Is this development intended to be valuable after both sides' satellites are gone? Or is it for relatively low-tech opponents who can still hit ships they can find? Or are they finally responding to the submariners who've been telling them for 50 years that there's nothing but submarines and targets?

To change what the Navy does

by Rubber Ducky on Mon, 07/06/2009 - 9:18am

To change what the Navy does and where it points itself, you have to change the wetware.

Zumwalt understood this and through his Z-grams and other personnel initiatives shook up the old order, drove the racists out, and heightened the status of the common sailor to make embrace of technology at the man-machine interface possible. The techie sailor of today is a far cry from the knuckle-draggers I joined with many years ago. Credit Zumwalt.

Likewise, Frank Kelso took on the internal power structure in his downgrade of the three platform fiefdoms from three to two stars in OPNAV. Right move, but he didn't follow through with changes in the personnel system itself and so the platform leaders in Navy's Bureau of Personnel were (and are) able to thwart any moves to downplay existing platforms in favor of innovation and the repackaging of force.

Today we see no change in the power of the platforms. Gary Roughhead, otherwise a fine CNO, seems content to screw around with sailors' uniforms rather than challenge the 3-great-apes paradigm. In the realm of recasting the Navy for a future world, we bow to the power of the Navy's own Iron Triangle and play trivial pursuit.

It took WW-II to kill the Gun Club and bring aircraft carriers to the fore. It took the Vietnam War to bring about the shift from grease pencils to computers in managing shipboard conbat operations. It took the Cold War to bring modern submarines to a paramount role. Maybe the next war will force the Navy to internal reorientation for greater relevance. In the meantime, one cannot find great harm in the Navy's current irrelevance. But it's still irrelevant, this said by someone with 37 years' active-duty time in the Navy..