RIMPAC Builds Partnerships That Last
onal interests and common approaches to maritime security converge. In summer 2010, these mutual concerns spurred 14 nations to join for what has become the largest naval exercise in the world: Rim of the Pacific. RIMPAC builds the relationships and competencies necessary for collective security solutions. Participants benefit from the trust and confidence that come from lasting partnerships developed by operating together in a highly challenging, dynamic environment. This combination of developing skills and relationships makes RIMPAC special.Develop the Connection
The busier the maritime commons become, the more often responses to regional challenges must be met with multinational solutions. This trend is on the rise as information flow intensifies, populations grow, resources diminish, transnational threats build, and illicit high-seas activity such as piracy spreads.
Different languages and customs act as obstacles to multinational cooperation. This is further compounded by varying views, national constraints, and the lack of common tactics, techniques, and procedures. Consensus on the way ahead must be built, and interoperability developed despite the challenge of dissimilar equipment. In short, building lasting partnerships means building trust and confidence on many levels, and that requires an investment of time by all partners.
The payoff is increased capability and capacity, diversity in perspectives and wisdom, and greater endurance than any single entity could generate alone. Collaborations decrease regional conflicts, fill gaps in maritime-security needs, and provide a more common understanding of potential threats. The process of creating these partnerships builds long-lasting bridges between individuals and their organizations, often spanning entire careers of the individual participants.
Tend the Relationships
Common ground among participants must be identified and defined. While an operational architecture is being crafted, the fundamentals need to be worked and strengthened. It is essential that all players remain adaptable. This approach was used in RIMPAC 2010, and it charts the way ahead for RIMPAC 2012.
• Define the common ground: The RIMPAC series is a successful exercise design because it is anchored to relevant conditions. Shared physical realities draw Pacific nations together—geography, trade, and a common ocean. These conditions frame common interests in stability, security, and prosperity, the basic goals from which these exercises do not stray.
The pre-exercise commander’s intent reinforces that message. In RIMPAC 2010, guidance from Commander Combined Task Force reinforced the principal themes of combined agility, synergy, and support. From the tactical to the strategic, these points made clear that the purpose was to reinforce maritime relationships and improve interoperability in the force by building individual and combined warfighting competencies.
A key RIMPAC focus was to develop a greater understanding of partners’ culture, heritage, and traditions. Success was measured by each participant’s view of its own level of increased skills and its vision for future combined engagement and operations. Ultimately, everyone aimed to build increased trust and confidence.
• Develop a common operating architecture: RIMPAC is built on an exercise design and a command-and-control architecture to which all parties contribute. With proper planning, every asset can add value. Individual players, large or small, bring niche capabilities and expertise from which the entire force benefits.
To ensure everyone can contribute, the framework must be commonly accepted, fully functional, accessible, and understandable by all. RIMPAC 2010 employed combined staffs at multiple levels for command and control. The use of Cooperating Maritime Forces Pacific Internet Protocol enclave (CENTRIXS) answered the demand for a truly common medium to coordinate and execute objectives.
• Strengthen the fundamentals: Effective exercises are built on solid foundations. This means perfecting blocking and tackling skills: the essential tactical and operational competencies upon which multinational actions are based. Fundamentals include establishing reliable, redundant communication paths with the discipline to pass on meaningful information in a standardized manner; creating standardized operating procedures and testing them in tabletop or synthetic scenarios; and critiquing their application in symposiums and making adjustments as needed.
At sea, before RIMPAC 2010 began, a unique opportunity arose to reinforce these basics through a four-country, ten-ship group sail from Victoria, British Columbia, to Pearl Harbor. The ten-day passage gave participating units the opportunity to tactically maneuver, communicate, link, plan, coordinate, and command across a wide variety of multiship serials. An underway “icebreaker,” it fast-tracked the process of cementing operational relationships while laying important groundwork for RIMPAC execution.
• Build on the foundation: RIMPAC 2010 structured the exercise as a sequence: (1) coordination in the harbor; (2) discrete basic unit and multiship events in an underway schedule-of-events phase; (3) intermediate events during fleet-integration training; (4) an advanced tactical phase incorporating free-play events.
Daily feedback occurred via commander-level video teleconferences, intentions messages, and exchanges on voice nets, Internet Protocol chat rooms, and site visits. Graduating levels of complexity, with response opportunities throughout the program, permitted adjustments to meet participants’ needs. Post-exercise hot-wash debriefs addressed larger adjustments for RIMPAC 2012 to continue improving the series.
With the fundamental tools in place, and planning complete, one truth was reinforced: there is no substitute for time spent together to practice the basics of multinational maritime operations.
• Demonstrate adaptability: To thrive, organizations must be formed with people ready to listen and willing to adapt. The distinguishing feature of multinational operations, whether maritime or not, is that they involve more than one nation’s forces. This means there will be differences. A collective, coordinated effort is a source of strength—if the overall organization can adapt constructively, methodically, and with discipline. RIMPAC 2010 was a prime example of this principle in action.
Monitor and Adjust Continually
Each participant has unique abilities and limitations. The combined force has an opportunity to decide how it can maximize capabilities across the range of potential missions, in both planning and execution. The various task groups can work together to strengthen force-wide coordination, competence, and teamwork by a thorough understanding of each country’s situation in terms of physical and policy considerations, as well as legal conventions.
In RIMPAC 2010, a new concept of noncombatant military operations (NCMO) was introduced. The aim was to define common ground for carrying out specific tasks that, directly or indirectly, supported broader missions. Some nations’ shared NCMO included surveillance, counterpiracy, search and rescue, and mine countermeasures. This approach brought efficiencies to the combined force by finding the “can” versus the “cannot” across many lines of operation.
Perhaps most important, the execution of NCMO-like tasks demonstrated a willingness to adjust a major international exercise to meet the requirements of participants who, because of their national limitations, would not otherwise have been involved. It broadened the overall aptitudes of the force and made fuller use and meaning of member-nation contributions.
Maritime-security needs will inevitably involve a mix of high and low capabilities, from nonkinetic to kinetic activities. Security in the maritime environment involves a blend of numerous lines of effort. Each participating nation sees that balance a little differently. Altering the RIMPAC context accordingly will keep it relevant; as a result, meaningful relationships will thrive.
The success of RIMPAC 2010 demonstrates that enduring maritime partnerships require careful cultivation and tending. This, in turn, builds the portfolio of skills among our partners that allow for adaptability to the dynamic environment of the Pacific theater. Our group action must be equally flexible. As we move forward to RIMPAC 2012, the same approach that delivered success in 2010 will help refine the exercise, keep it beneficial for all participating nations, and contribute to enduring partnerships that generate collective security in the Pacific.
Rear Admiral Girrier was the Commander of Carrier Strike Group Eleven and served as the Theater Surface Warfare Commander for RIMPAC 2010. He is now deployed as the Commander of Carrier Strike Group Seven on board the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76).
Disaster Relief Is Not Enough
The world is in a state of crisis. Countries are in shambles across North Africa and the Middle East; in the Far East, Japan reels from one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history. In each case, the American response has been to send the Navy. The amphibious ships USS Ponce (LPD-15) and Kearsarge (LDH-3) sit off Tunisia, while the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) and seven other warships provide support to Japan. As in Indonesia in 2004, Georgia in 2008, and Haiti in 2010, these big gray hulls serve as beacons of hope for people who have lost everything. The ships deliver fresh water, food, medical assistance, and search-and-rescue capabilities—but not the whole-of-government capability that would provide the needed level of aid.
For that the Navy must learn lessons that the Army and Marine Corps did while conducting counterinsurgency missions. The Navy needs to go interagency at the operational level. If the service can apply such an approach to humanitarian-assistance and disaster-relief operations, it could lead in the creation of a combined civilian/military expeditionary capability, an interagency mobile afloat response team that truly can be a global force for good.
Going Interagency
In the May 2010 National Security Strategy, the administration made it very clear that all national-level organizations must work together to achieve our common international goals. The NSS stated:
To succeed, we must balance and integrate all elements of American power and update our national security capacity for the 21st century. We must maintain our military’s conventional superiority, while enhancing its capacity to defeat asymmetric threats. Our diplomacy and development capabilities must be modernized, and our civilian expeditionary capacity strengthened to support the full breadth of our priorities.1
Through leadership in a systems-thinking construct—meaning it addresses financial, natural, material, social, organizational, and intellectual issues through mental, emotional, and physical means—the Navy can find solutions to worldwide challenges by pairing problems with assets of national power, both inside and outside the service. The wicked problems that ships face today while responding to a crisis require a nuanced approach that spans the capabilities of smart power. The people involved must be far more educated than in the past on all aspects of engagement. This means tapping into knowledge from other parts of the government.2
Highly versatile naval ships can be the backbone for a systems-based interagency capability. Recently, in discussions about the future of the naval force, language such as seabasing, adaptive force packaging, and offshore balancing has resurfaced to designate possible models for the future. New concepts such as “influence squadrons” even acknowledge that the structure of deploying units should shift from the carrier strike group to one that can handle a postwar maritime environment.
Such ideas are the building blocks. Already the Navy can tailor its forces to meet the demands of combatant commanders by using the flexibility inherent in ships. Once again the service has been demonstrating its ability to have an impact by conducting humanitarian-assistance and disaster-relief missions unilaterally in a crisis. Now, to be a true force multiplier the Navy must include the interagency framework.
Learn from COIN
In the past four years, the Army has worked closely with the Marine Corps to develop interagency counterinsurgency. In 2007, Generals David H. Petraeus and James F. Amos led a team that wrote the Counterinsurgency Manual. This produced a critical mindset shift for all irregular challenges. Among other things, it was recognized that a systemic approach was required, meaning interagency cooperation.
From experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, the counterinsurgency team developed the concept of provincial reconstruction teams. These followed a three-dimensional systemic approach: implementation of security, institution building, and facilitating reconstruction.3 The teams brought together civilian and military assets to maximize communication and effectiveness. Generally, at a minimum they included representatives from the State Department, United States Agency for International Development, Department of Justice, and Department of Agriculture.
These people helped the military coordinate efforts with the embassy and dozens of governmental, nongovernmental, intergovernmental, and private organizations, most of which do not have their own organic expeditionary capability. By establishing units similar to provincial reconstruction teams that could deploy on ships for humanitarian-assistance and disaster-relief missions, the Navy would be using its organic assets to create interagency groups with the skills needed for specific situations.
Not So Sci-Fi Anymore
Another innovative idea from the counterinsurgency team that was inspired by time in Afghanistan was a civil-military operations center to coordinate U.S. and multinational military forces with civilian agencies. Such a 24/7 center could easily be duplicated on board a naval ship, which has the facilities, capabilities for communications and intelligence collection, and understanding of complex operations to coordinate efforts in the region.
The idea of an at-sea hub of operations is a variation on Admiral Vern Clark’s Seapower 21 seabasing, the ultimate joint platform. Providing joint command and control and its own line of communication, it also moves on order to the location of a new hot spot. Joint seabasing was once considered a futuristic concept, but if the Navy is going to show it can be a leader in the postwar period, then it is going to have to be the standard concept of operations.
The Naval Operations Concept 2010 recognizes that seabasing supports the interagency process and identifies its capability, while acknowledging that the Navy has yet to realize its full potential. Integrating the provincial-reconstruction-team and civil-military-operations-center concepts with shipboard operations would result in an interagency mobile afloat response team that could project stability from the sea and coordinate military support while providing the full range of hard and soft power.
As stated in A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, the future will require “an unprecedented level of integration among our maritime forces and enhanced cooperation with other instruments of national power, as well as the capabilities of our international partners. Seapower will be a unifying force for building a better tomorrow.” Sailors deployed around the globe are doing everything they can to better the lives of suffering people.
Unfortunately, the seamen do not have the knowledge or experience to provide the level of help that is required. When the next disaster occurs, the Navy should provide the combatant commander with an interagency mobile afloat response team. This force can provide smart power on the operational level. The Navy has the capability to coordinate the U.S. national assets in sea-based humanitarian-assistance and disaster-relief operations. If it applies the Army’s and Marine Corps’ lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Navy will revolutionize its seabasing capability.
Through the creation and systematic execution of interagency mobile afloat response teams, the service can take the lead in responding to future disasters and provide a new capability that will make a profound difference in the lives of people around the world.
1. National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: GPO, May 2010), p. 5.
2. Barbara McFall, Personal Resource Systems Management: A Proposal for Interactive Practice (Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech, 1998).
3. Markus Gauster, “Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan,” George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies Occasional Paper Series, no. 16 (January 2008): p. 8.
Know Your People to Prevent Disasters
You don’t discover every day that one of your medical-school classmates is accused of mass murder. I was acquainted with alleged 2009 Fort Hood shooter Army Major Nidal Hasan, with whom I attended medical school in a class of 165 students. As details emerge about the shootings, one aspect is disturbingly obvious: A fellow physician and brother in uniform stands accused of heinous acts that violate the most sacred trusts of our profession and country.
At the Uniformed Services University, our education involved more than mastering medical knowledge. It also included training in becoming a medical officer: a leader committed to providing compassionate care to our service members and their families. If Hasan is indeed guilty, something went terribly wrong.
Ongoing Background Checks
Reports indicate that months and even years before 5 November 2009, some knew of Major Hasan’s proclivities. More than one source reported significant concerns about his fitness to serve in uniform. With professional and academic deficiencies documented, the presence of multiple red flags regarding Major Hasan’s performance was clear.
But all finger-pointing aside, what lessons can we apply from this atrocity? To prevent the next Fort Hood incident, we must consider tools and processes that can empower our military leadership to deal with high-risk personnel. We urgently need to seek areas in which we can improve our human-resources management.
As a flight surgeon, I have repeatedly observed that anticipatory thinking can shape an organization’s culture to prevent mishaps. The maxim Know Your People has found practical application in the aviation community, and it points to a possible solution.
More Intrusive Leadership
In naval aviation, it is recognized that personnel issues are among the leading causes of aircraft accidents. The Navy/Marine Corps class-A mishap rate hovers between 1 and 2 per 100,000 flight hours, at a cost of approximately $400 million dollars (Fiscal Year 2010) per year. This staggering financial impact, not to mention the loss of highly trained personnel, has the field of naval aviation actively striving to change the way it works with its people.
Both formal and informal mechanisms of evaluating aviators have been instituted throughout the Fleet. The familial culture of the ready room imparts corporate knowledge to junior officers about how to function and be successful in the unit, emphasizing certain norms that underscore acceptable behaviors and pathways to inclusiveness. In the formal Human Factors Council system, unit leadership is briefed on all aspects of aviators’ lives and their potential impacts on flight safety and mission accomplishment.
During my tour with the air wing, we took that concept one step further. A newly reporting sailor had been killed in an alcohol-related incident just before deployment. Unbeknownst to his gaining squadron, he had an extensive record of substance-abuse-related events leading to his transfer, and continuing until his death. If his new command had known this history, there might have been an opportunity to prevent the tragic outcome.
As a result, the carrier air wing commander immediately instituted a top-to-bottom review and interview process for all air-wing personnel. The program used the squadron’s CO, XO, command master chief, chief medical officer, and department heads to implement this recurring assessment, which also included the chaplain and flight surgeons as consultants. The squadron CO was ultimately responsible for adjudication of any information obtained from the interview process.
Controls were put in place so medical privacy was not violated, nor were the bounds of religious confession. Ultimately, this formalized an intrusive leadership principle down to the deck plates. Squadron commanders were now accountable to the carrier air wing commander to know all their people. By using Human Factors Council principles during the time of the program’s full activation and during my three-year tour, we had no more class-A personnel mishaps.
Ask the Ethical Questions
This plan was not without critics, nor was it easy to implement. Tempting though it may be to resist intrusive investigations, understanding what makes people function also leads to discovery of their barriers to optimal performance. Retrospective analysis of the air wing’s efforts to identify at-risk sailors shows that the program was ultimately successful, and for this reason it is useful to scrutinize closely how it got started.
Foremost, unity of effort had to be put forth at all levels in conveying the command’s new cultural norm. The carrier air wing commander’s intent was clear: The expectation was that leadership would consider all aspects of a sailor’s life.
Inherent in this push are some very real ethical and legal questions that needed to be constantly examined. Do you really want to know about your sailors’ problems with their marriage, religion, finances, children, medical ailments, substance use, or high-risk activities? In truth, if you are a commanding officer and your mission accomplishment depends on the success or failure of the people under your command, then the answer is an emphatic yes, you need to know.
Statute grants commanding officers the authority to know all pertinent information on their personnel. The law also allows flight surgeons, chaplains, legal officers, and others to keep private any unnecessary or salacious details that are not pertinent to helping commanding officers lead their units. The key word here is “pertinent.” All participants in the process who serve as guardians, caretakers, or supervisors must share a strong sense of duty and propriety so that unit cohesion is not endangered.
Those of us who have served in an operational capacity have observed instances when an active-duty member who should have been remediated or terminated was instead transferred to the next duty station—often to the detriment of the gaining command. The Navy has tools in place to document personnel performance. We do a disservice to the unit and ultimately the service member if we ignore ongoing problems, or, worse, fail to document the existence of a problem.
Be Worthy of the Public Trust
In the military we are blessed and challenged with special circumstances regarding human resources. The country trusts service members to protect its national interests through the force of arms. Peacemaking tools can take the form of the infantry rifle or the multimillion dollar fighter jet, and the state has authorized military personnel to use weapon systems to kill people and destroy property. It is up to the command leadership to ensure that operators of such equipment are qualified and responsible.
The duty to lead people is a heavy moral and societal burden, not easily carried out and often underappreciated. On 5 November 2009 the unthinkable happened: 13 service members died, possibly because one person with a pattern of sociopathic behavior had access to guns and an Army base.
The Navy must be prepared to consider the consequences of an airborne F/A-18 laden with live ordnance and a pilot who has an act of terrorism festering in his soul. Thinking about the unthinkable should become more commonplace in this age of terrorism. Preemptive action requires intrusive leadership and moral courage. A new standard of scrutiny in the military, one that may be unacceptable to private citizens, should become the new cultural norm for active-duty personnel.
Apply the Lessons
We may never fully understand why Major Hasan allegedly committed these murders. But all uniformed leaders should believe there are loose cannons in our ranks. The processes and tools that we have in place are inadequate to help leadership mitigate at-risk service members. Had there been a relaxed type of ready-room culture within Major Hasan’s professional community, or had they had the same intimacy as Navy and Marine Corps aviators during Human Factors Councils, the alleged events of that fateful Thursday morning might never have occurred.
It is likely impossible to ever know enough about people to prevent all mishaps, but that should not even be the goal. Frankly, it is not possible, nor is it wise, to have a standard of accountability for leadership that embraces a zero-defect mentality. But in this age of self-radicalization, we can maintain a balance between national security and the legal rights enshrined by our Constitution.
This is one of the biggest conundrums that Major Hasan represents. There should be a well-defined limit of potential mishaps and threats that we should aim to mitigate. The potential for mischief or harm where privacy and personal liberties are concerned would be too great under a boundless, draconian rule that infiltrated the everyday lives of service members in the pursuit of poorly defined outcomes. The goals need to be clear, as do the processes and their limitations.
A classmate, colleague, and officer is accused of choosing a path that completely diverged from the mission of the Uniformed Services University and military medicine. To prevent this from happening again, military leaders must be willing to ask some uncomfortable questions. We may be able to face the shock and horror of combat, but we must have the courage to take the necessary steps to know our people. We must start thinking the unimaginable.