Riverine deployments from the Revolutionary War to the present have routinely included irregular-warfare (IW) missions, ranging from combat to stability operations. As the United States withdraws from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Defense has found itself transitioning not to the peacetime footing that typically follows conflict, but rather a new standing that straddles the divide between conventional notions of war and peace. It is in this divide where irregular warfare has the greatest potential impact. What principal IW asset does the riverine force provide, and why should the Navy maintain or expand this capability?
Irregular Warfare and the Maritime Domain
IW is a violent struggle among state and non-state entities for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population(s). It is a protean art favoring indirect or asymmetric approaches at times, and the full force of the military at others. Like all warfare, though, its ultimate goal is to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and will.1 With the conclusion of major combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are shifting our focus to tailored operations in the subsets of IW: counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense (FID), counterinsurgency, and stability operations.2 As the IW Joint Operating Concept states, “Once considered largely the province of special operations forces (SOF), irregular threats are now understood to fall within the purview of the entire joint force.”3 Missions to counter these threats can be coordinated at upper echelons of command while being conducted at the small-unit level and across wide areas of operation (AOs).
In addition, the past decade of warfare has shown us we are confronting an enemy who quietly exploits austere environments to weather our ability to mass forces. As President Barack Obama stated, they are an enemy who seeks “to gain a foothold in some of the most distant and unforgiving places on Earth. They take refuge in remote tribal regions. They hide in caves and walled compounds. They train in empty deserts and rugged mountains.”4 They are also resourceful, cunning, elusive, and dangerously patient. To combat them, the United States and its allies must be equally versatile and expeditionary in the realm of IW.
Irregular warfare is a land-centric affair; after all, man is a terrestrial species. Throughout history, however, we have made intensive use of waterways to facilitate our way of life. Our IW efforts must therefore address the maritime domain to be effective. To do otherwise would leave the waterways as uncontested maneuver spaces for the enemy and valuable conduits for their operations. The Navy’s Vision for Confronting Irregular Challenges has acknowledged precisely this:
The maritime domain similarly provides irregular actors with operating space and the ability to conduct the illicit flow of information, weapons, money, technicians, and cadres upon which much of their income and effectiveness relies. As such they are able to use the maritime environment to exploit, disrupt, or destabilize regions or governments, and to affect the will of civilian populations through insurgency, terrorism, crime, and the proliferation of radical ideologies.5
The maritime domain is the quintessential purview of the Navy, but it is no longer constrained to the Mahanian realm of large oceans and great power conflicts. It has expanded physically beyond the oceans through the littorals and into inland waterways; conceptually it has expanded beyond the physical environment into the factors affecting the use of these areas. The traditional surface Navy is vital and talented in countering major concerns of the global commons such as open-ocean piracy. Our riverine capability, however, brings a truly effective capability to a joint force focused on countering irregular threats.
The Riverine Mission
In the following scenario, the year is 2023. Violent extremism and regional instability have persisted in sub-Saharan Africa where the rule of law is limited outside of capital cities. Pressure on extremist organizations in the Middle East and drug-trafficking organizations in South America have driven the two toward a symbiotic relationship in Africa, plying drugs, ideology, terrorism, and corruption.6 The scarcity of passable roads has driven these organizations to rely on an extensive network of waterways for logistics and communication. As part of the Africa Command IW campaign, a Navy riverine platoon has deployed to a West African base where they live, train, and operate alongside host-nation forces.
During a six-month deployment they will spend most of their time providing training on subjects ranging from riverine tactics and small arms to maintenance programs and logistics. They will patrol the waterways for counterinsurgency operations to preempt extremists from taking root, enhancing host-nation governance, and demonstrating American commitment to our allies. From time to time, though, they may be called on to conduct swift and decisive counterterrorism actions alongside partner forces or in direct support of U.S. special operations. But throughout their tour, their guiding objective will be to strengthen our partner nations’ abilities, echoing the sentiments of President Obama when he addressed the Ghanaian Parliament in 2009: “The purpose of foreign assistance must be creating the conditions where it is no longer needed.”7 At the end of their deployment they will be relieved by another riverine platoon that will provide continuity to our partners and consistency to our strategy. Meanwhile, their host-nation counterparts will use the knowledge they gained to maintain the security of their country and carry it beyond their borders by contributing to African Union security operations.
This vignette illustrates just one possible future for a riverine platoon, but it embodies the IW spirit of the Defense Strategic Guidance directive to use “small-footprint approaches to achieve our security objectives, relying on exercises, rotational presence, and advisory capabilities.”8 These small-footprint approaches are already in practice with the riverine community today as we answer an ongoing demand for expertise in Africa as part of Africa Partnership Station and Marine Forces Europe’s Maritime Security Force Assistance program. In the Southern Command AO, we have routinely partnered small riverine teams with similarly sized Marine Corps elements to compose Joint Riverine Training Teams (JRTTs).9 As we rebalance toward the Pacific, JRTTs provide a clear focus point for regional partners like the Philippines (with 2,000 miles of waterway) and Thailand (2,500 miles of waterway)—both of which use riverine craft also found in the U.S. inventory, and places where riverines have already provided training through various exercises.10
Similar to Special Operation Command’s (SOCOM’s) Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program, JRTTs provide a tremendous opportunity for both the host nation’s forces and ours. Admiral William McRaven, commander of SOCOM, describes such teams as allowing us “to collaborate and provide training to host nation militaries tailored to the host nation’s requirements. Secondly, it delivers realistic training to U.S. SOF personnel in language, culture, and techniques implemented by other nations around the world.”11 His comments addressed the JCET program, but they translate directly to JRTTs conducted by conventional riverines. These endeavors are a key component of IW (as in foreign internal defense and stability operations) and part of the larger joint vision for shaping operations designed to train forces and establish operational area access.12
With few great-power conflicts on the horizon, they represent an expeditionary naval presence at the heart of the National Military Strategy’s dictum that “Preventing wars is as important as winning them, and far less costly.”13 The steady employment of these teams over the long term epitomizes the idea of working with partner nations to prevent conflict in the first place, and will minimize the scope of U.S. intervention when conflict does occur. While numerous forces can participate in the land component of these endeavors, Navy riverines are the only conventional force manned, trained, and equipped to conduct combat operations on inland waterways.14 It should be noted that SOCOM’s riverine specialists in Special Boat Team (SBT) 22 contribute to developing partner-nation riverine capability through the JCET program. However, SBT 22’s expertise lies in special-operations tactics (e.g., night-centric operations) which may not satisfy host-nation conventional requirements. Using riverines to teach conventional curricula frees SBT 22 capacity to focus on partner nations with advanced special-forces requirements (e.g., Nigerian special boat units) or to answer operational demands.
In countries such as Peru and Senegal, our proven ability to facilitate conventionally driven riverine combat training has provided an extraordinary capability within the U.S. military. From July through December 2012, Riverine Squadron 3 alone provided more than 1,200 man-days of conventional riverine training across six countries, including assisting in the revision of 500-plus doctrinal tactics for the world’s largest riverine force (the 14,000-man component of the Colombian Marine Corps). Continuing these endeavors reinvests the training funds expended on U.S. forces and returns impressive dividends to both the United States and host nations by increasing security and rule of law abroad.
Agile and Responsive
At their core, riverine units are organized for combat operations on inland waterways including the kinetic aspects of IW such as counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.15 While land warfare typically addresses rivers as boundaries or obstacles, riverines exploit the waterways to their fullest. In a seven-month Iraq deployment, Riverine Squadron 3 executed 275 combat missions (70 alongside Iraqi forces), 150 tactical convoy operations, 300 hours of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operations, seizure of numerous detainees, and discovery of 8 weapon caches yielding hundreds of pounds of ordnance—all within a 53-mile section of the Tigris River.16 As former commanding officer of Riverine Squadron (RIVRON) 2, Commander Gary Leigh, wrote about a similar AO:
In order to completely support the Joint Campaign Plan, we were asked to, not only conduct our own Irregular Warfare missions, but coordinate our own Security Assistance and Foreign Internal Defense, Civil Affairs, and Information Operations in a manner that was complementary to the battle-space owners.17
It would be folly to believe that extremist and criminal organizations would not take advantage of waterways left unchallenged, and that riverines would not be similarly effective in countering them.
Two kinetic applications are at play here. Just like village-stability operations in Afghanistan, riverines facilitating training with a host nation can easily transition from subject-matter experts to combatants (for the sake of discussion, the appropriate diplomatic and command-and-control measures have been taken). Their work alongside host-nation counterparts has taught them local terrain, rivers, and enemy tactics as well as language and cultural norms. Some sailors have sharpened this knowledge over several rotational deployments to this region, and their prepositioning makes them an asset for the entire range of military operations. Thus, they are ideally suited for tasking that extends their training focus to include potentially kinetic operations supporting SOFs or in cooperation with the host nation. Plus, their regional knowledge is invaluable in helping us win “the battle of the narrative” against enemies who wish to use their own knowledge of local culture to distort and negatively frame our actions. Finally, it provides a baseline of knowledge that can be promulgated through the force if conflict escalates.
The second application addresses conflict in a country where we do not have an existing presence. Riverines are a strong anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) solution by virtue of their expeditionary and shallow-water nature. For instance, riverine forces have demonstrated the ability to be transported, launched, and recovered from amphibious shipping. In 2012, RIVRON 3, Detachment 2 embarked on the USS Fort McHenry (LSD-43) alongside a Marine security cooperation task force bound for JRTTs as part of Africa Partnership Station.18 Had the ship not been redirected to Libya following the Benghazi attack, three riverine craft would have transported Marines 26 miles up the Delta du Saloum to rendezvous and conduct training with Senegalese forces. Similar engagements were planned for Cameroon and Liberia.
These form the same anatomy as a raid, with the exception that the element’s actions on objective were to train rather than assault. Such a model has numerous applications (e.g., counterterrorism raids, personnel recovery), particularly when addressing regions where waterways constitute an A2/AD advantage for the enemy or air-defense networks prohibit airborne entry avenues. Riverines partnered with at-sea platforms like this ensure an agile, responsive force with minimal geographic footprint.
Preservation Trumps Resurrection
In 2005 then–Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Mullen told the Naval War College, “I believe our Navy is missing a great opportunity to influence events by not having a riverine force. We’re going to have one.”19 The Navy’s riverine force was reincarnated, but in 2008 Lieutenant Daniel Hancock’s article in Proceedings accurately and presciently asserted that the Navy was not serious about riverine warfare.20 He was proved right in 2012 as budgets constricted and the Navy began merging its riverine elements into the Mobile Security Force because of perceived similarities of units operating small craft. This was done without due regard to the very different mission applications of those forces (i.e., riverines’ combat-arms core vs. Mobile Security’s force-protection focus). Post-merger capacity in the traditional riverine mission set is now approximately one-sixth what it was before, and in danger of becoming a collateral duty.
This approach has pros and cons, and it is not without precedent. After every major conflict where riverines are relevant, they are minimized and ultimately discarded only to be resurrected at the cost of extensive time and resources. We must stay ahead of the curve here and, as President Obama stated in his cover letter for the Defense Strategic Guidance, we must “remember the lessons of history and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past when our military was left ill-prepared for the future.”21 Minimizing the riverine mission now risks allowing the skills to diminish in such a way as to make its revitalization a time-consuming (two to three years historically) and resource-intensive process. Therefore, steps should be taken to mitigate the negative impacts of this reduction before long-term damage is done.
First, echelon IV and V commanders must avoid the temptation to employ existing riverine platoons as an additional mobile-security element. They must seek and advocate for deployments that apply our Navy’s investment in the traditional riverine skills. Such deployment opportunities exist today in numerous JRTT requests originating from within almost every geographic combatant command. Riverine participation in these FID engagements represents a valuable Navy contribution to the joint IW effort. It also represents a venue to demonstrate the contributions of riverine capabilities to a host of force requesters, developing relationships that can then be grown into further operational employment. Since these engagements are typically funded by the requesters’ lines of accounting, the cost to the Navy is usually very little. The riverine capacity should not be sacrificed to answer a surfeit of demand in the more widely staffed mobile-security mission. Simply put, conventional riverines are the only ones who can do conventional riverine things; their mission shouldn’t be marginalized to supplement something with roughly three times the force capacity.
Next, senior Navy leaders should allow riverines to align with land-force component commanders who can properly use these skills on the inland waters of their AOs. By partnering with our land-force brethren, the Navy can deploy riverines as a maritime force complementary to IW operations. The historic Navy–Marine Corps team provides a prime vehicle for developing and demonstrating innovative interservice approaches to IW. More than 20 years ago, Naval Special Warfare Command published a study urging the development of a Navy–Marine Corps riverine assault capability for a battalion-sized task force (an asset that became an ad hoc reality in Iraq).22 Today, as described by Admiral Jonathan Greenert and General James Amos in a June 2013 Proceedings article, the leaders of the Navy–Marine Corps team return to the use of Marine Corps forces alongside riverines: “We will also explore the integration of shore-based Marine detachments, small craft, and riverine operations into our delivery of naval forces.”23
To this end, staff members of the Marine Corps’ Basic School and Ellis Group have been working alongside the Navy Warfare Group to examine company-sized Marine air-ground task forces partnered with riverine platoons for long-range raids, small-scale contingency operations, and crisis response.24 The ideas are promising, but the feasibility of these applications in small-unit employment relies on a Navy partner with a competent and tactically relevant conventional capability just like that which the riverine forces provide.
Low Cost, High Impact
The final two recommendations represent a significant shift from the current Coastal Riverine Force construct: consolidate riverine capabilities in Naval Weapons Station Yorktown, Virginia, by re-establishing Riverine Squadron 1, and establish a Small Craft (SC) Operator rating. Riverine capability is currently dispersed across three squadrons. Consolidating under one Echelon V command will streamline training, logistics, and operational requirements while retaining the savings gained from an overall reduced riverine capacity. Doing so at NWS Yorktown takes advantage of more than $3 million invested in pre-merger RIVRON 3 facilities and provides ideal training environments on the James and York rivers, as well as proximity to numerous weaponry ranges and other training facilities.25 Second, the once-proposed Riverine Warfare rate never came to fruition for various reasons, one of which was the narrow scope of billet opportunities. By creating an appropriately broad rate specializing in conventional small craft (thereby maintaining a distinction from current Special Warfare Boat Operators), we open an avenue for cross-pollinating experience across riverine and coastal commands, as well as throughout the Fleet by creating SC billets in assault-craft units, beach-master units, and the deck departments of ships with organic small craft.
In his Chairman’s Assessment of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, Admiral Mullen stated, “The focus is on building joint-force capability and capacity for irregular warfare without compromising our conventional and nuclear superiority.”26 The Defense Strategic Guidance continues this by directing us to “continue to build and sustain tailored capabilities appropriate for counterterrorism and irregular warfare.”27 The Navy’s riverines are just that—a low-cost, high-impact conventional force skilled in IW.
The 2014 QDR will undoubtedly maintain the affirmation of IW in the light of even tighter budgets. The Navy will have to balance its budget and its relevance to the IW fight alongside competing demands for its traditional role. With 60 non-integrated Gap countries containing 1.8 billion people, 125,000 miles of waterways, and 21 river deltas, U.S. strategy cannot afford to disregard the relevance of the riparian environment to IW, and the Navy cannot let this opportunity to influence the maritime domain go unanswered.28 An efficient and effective employment of the post-merger riverine capacity answers this paradigm of IW and tight budgets perfectly. The opportunity is primed and ready; we need only seize it.
1. Department of Defense, JP 1-02, Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 2011, 189.
2. Department of Defense, Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept, 2010, 5.
3. Ibid., 8.
4. President Barack Obama, Remarks at the National Defense University, 23 May 2013, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23/remarks-president-national-defense-university.
5. Department of the Navy, The U.S. Navy’s Vision for Confronting Irregular Challenges, 2010, 4.
6. Ashley Neese Bybee, “The Twenty-First Century Expansion of the Transnational Drug Trade in Africa,” Journal of International Affairs, Fall/Winter 2012, 70.
7. President Barack Obama, Remarks to the Ghanaian Parliament, 11 July 2009, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-ghanaian-parliament.
8. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Defense Strategic Guidance, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense, 2012, 3.
9. Author’s experience at RIVRON 3.
10. Center for Naval Analyses, Renewal of Navy’s Riverine Capability: A Preliminary Examination of Past, Current, and Future Capabilities, 2006, 149, Table 9.
11. ADM William McRaven, “Preparing Special Operations Forces for the Future,” The Journal of International Security Affairs, Fall/Winter 2012, 11.
12. Department of Defense, JP 3-0 Joint Operations, 2011, V-37.
13. Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, The National Military Strategy of the United States of America, 2011, 7.
14. OPNAVINST F3501.363B, Required Operational Capabilities and Projected Operational Environment for Navy Coastal Riverine Forces, 2012.
15. Ibid.
16. CDR Gregory Sandway, personal experiences while commanding RIVRON 3 as cited in his strategy research project for the U.S. Army War College, War on the River: Development of Joint Expeditionary Riverine Officers, 10.
17. Ibid., 4.
18. Author’s experience at RIVRON 3.
19. ADM Michael Mullen, Remarks to the Naval War College, 31 August 2005, www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=19924.
20. LT Daniel Hancock, “The Navy’s Not Serious About Riverine Warfare,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, vol. 134, no. 1 (January 2008), 14–19.
21. Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership, 7.
22. Naval Special Warfare Command, Riverine Warfare Study (aka Worthington Study), 10 December 1990, as cited in Center for Naval Analyses, Renewal of Navy’s Riverine Capability: A Preliminary Examine of Past, Current, and Future Capabilities, 2006, 18.
23. ADM Jonathan Greenert (USN) and GEN James Amos (USMC), “A New Naval Era,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, vol. 139, no. 6 (June 2013), 16–20.
24. Author’s correspondence with CAPT Jonathan Cohen (USMC).
25. Author’s white paper to CORIVGRU ONE, 2013, coauthored with LT Carl Misitano (USN).
26. ADM Michael Mullen (USN), letter accompanying the Department of Defense’s Quadrennial Defense Review, 2010.
27. Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership, 4.
28. Renewal of Navy’s Riverine Capability, 2.