The U.S. Navy is entering a new era of naval warfare hinging on tactics and technologies untested in combat. As we execute our mandate to “deter aggression and, if deterrence fails, win our Nation’s wars” in the Information Age, it is critical that we pause and think through what those tasks require and what parts of them may have changed since our last major naval conflict 70 years ago.1 To attain credible capability and readiness for 21st-century naval conflict, we must first determine in detail what naval warfare will entail for the units and personnel involved and look for insights and lessons we can apply to our preparations. The fog of war and the stress of mortal danger can never be entirely removed, but we can reduce their impact by maximizing our understanding of what to expect when the moment of conflict arrives and ensuring our training and preparation have been as realistic as possible.
In his seminal 1976 book The Face of Battle, military historian Sir John Keegan examines three historic infantry battles (Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme), describing how the actual tactical-level mechanics of each one played out. Rather than analyzing battles solely via subjective individual accounts of the action or a detached God’s-eye view of troop formations maneuvered simply by the will of their commanders, Keegan systematically pieces together how the fighting progressed as a series of interrelated events, perceptions, and actions by groups of individuals on the ground. This leads him to original conclusions about how preconceived tactics and plans combined with morale and human behavior to drive each battle’s ebb and flow, eventually leading to one side’s victory. Keegan applied this same methodology to naval warfare in his subsequent books The Price of Admiralty and Battle at Sea, this time achieving useful insights about the perennial aspects of naval warfare that merit study by its professional practitioners.2
While detailed historical analysis of this kind can help us understand the timeless characteristics of humans in conflict and battle at sea that have not changed, we must also find a way to understand what has changed in the past 70 years. How can we adapt Keegan’s concept of the “face of battle” to understand the likely realities of naval combat today and in the near future? What sorts of insights might this give us?
The Navy spends large sums of money on modeling and simulation in the development of warfighting requirements, in the analysis of alternative material solutions (usually new payloads or platforms) to fill capability gaps, and in the development and testing of systems that are selected for production. Likewise, the Navy expends a fair amount of resources on wargaming, fleet experimentation, and live end-to-end system-verification tests. These efforts generally serve their relatively narrow purposes of refining technical capabilities, validating specific tactics or procedures (often in fixed environments), or assessing the campaign- or theater-level dynamics of a given scenario. At the same time, predeployment fleet-training exercises test a deploying unit’s capability to execute a set curriculum of tasks, but they do not directly test the validity of those tasks themselves. Other fleet exercises rehearse parts or variations of operational plans or warfighting concepts, but usually with the likewise narrow focus of testing and troubleshooting an existing plan or concept. All of these time-tested methods are effective at addressing pieces of the problem, but none of them provide a comprehensive view of what warfighting in the Information Age will look like in practice.
How have the massive advances made in information transport, situational awareness, and automation altered the “face” of naval warfare in practice? What will tactical-level decision-makers experience, what will they be able to understand about the battlefield around them, and how will that lead them to employ the tactics and equipment they’ve been handed? The U.S. Navy lacks a comprehensive analytical approach to understanding the answers to these questions.
On a purely technical level, modeling and simulation can tell us the rough chances a sensor will have of detecting a certain target or that a weapon will have of reaching its target once launched. But many of those probabilities may not matter if we do not first understand how they will knit together on the tactical displays in front of the men and women who will have to observe, orient, decide, and act. Said another way, we expend significant resources to develop an effective toolbox of weapons and tactics, yet we do not attempt to understand in detail the proverbial “hours of boredom punctuated by sheer moments of terror” and the confusion and imperfect knowledge that will be the context for using those tools.
‘Technical and Tactical Race’
Extensive resources, experimentation, and a comprehensive knowledge base are required to analyze the realities of warfighting in the Information Age. However, certain “glimpses” can be easily had. While each of these merits a good deal of further analysis and testing, there are likely lessons—or at least worthwhile questions—that we believe will emerge from each one.
The aspect of modern naval warfare that is probably closest to home for most of us is the increasing lethality of offensive weapons. Antiship cruise missiles, torpedoes, surface-to-air missiles, mines, and now antiship ballistic missiles are all increasing in not only in their physical destructive power, but also in their sophistication and likelihood of penetrating our kinetic and non-kinetic defenses. In most cases, each of these has reached (or will shortly reach) a level where a single hit will result in a “mission kill” and, increasingly often, in a “unit kill.”
There are a number of improvements under way to our local defenses (i.e., those employed by the unit or formation under attack) against these threats. Systems such as electromagnetic railguns or lasers may even invert the cost-exchange ratio advantage that has been traditionally enjoyed by offensive weapons. There is also a growing impetus in Navy leadership and intellectual circles to renew our own offensive capabilities, and efforts are in progress to deliver some promising new weapons.3 However, potential adversaries will not cease to develop their own offensive and defensive capabilities as we field better weapons and countermeasures; they will continue to find weaknesses and workarounds to hold us at risk, extending the technical and tactical race in perpetuity.
Coupled with advancements and proliferation in wide-area surveillance and targeting systems, increasingly lethal naval weapons provide the teeth of what are commonly termed anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) systems. Because of the high cost of a single hit from these weapons, we are increasingly driven to seek to break A2/AD systems’ “kill chains” farther upstream by disrupting their command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems and therefore their ability to find, fix, or target us. For Navy units, perhaps the most significant day-to-day implication of this imperative is that we must carefully manage our electromagnetic (EM) signature as never before to avoid detection and attack. Or, as Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert terms it, we must look to our “electromagnetic hygiene.”4
In practice this means, among other things, controlling our EM signature while conducting any type of operations, with EM silence as our default posture. While we became fairly proficient at emissions control during the Cold War, the lack of a meaningful blue-water threat since the fall of the Soviet Union and our vast accumulation of new EM systems have allowed us to forget. Today, naval vessels and aircraft operate by default with multiple active radar, identification, datalink, and communication systems radiating. Rarely are we forced to operate in a silent (or reduced) mode for any sort of extended period or while conducting complex operations.
New Vulnerabilities
While changing patterns of day-to-day behavior and awareness is the essential first step, there is a deeper change of mentality that is also required. Aside from units steeped in a culture of stealth, such as submariners and some aircrews, most Navy warfighters have been trained to employ weapons against targets only once their position is precisely held with an active sensor and their identification positively known and correlated. We practice third-party targeting, but in limited and predictable scenarios. Most tactical decision-makers have never been subjected to extended, unstructured scenarios where their only means of targeting offensive weapons is with ambiguous data from passive sensors or third-party sources. Similarly, in air defense, we so infrequently practice single-ship or group-restricted radiation operations in tactical scenarios that it is questionable whether we are proficient enough to use them in wartime. And, as an increasing number of antiship weapons no longer rely on easily detectable active-radar seekers, would we be confident enough in our tactics and equipment to leave our radars off while under threat of attack from weapons that our passive sensors might not see? Only practice and familiarity can breed that kind of confidence.
There are related organizational problems, as well. While much of our tactical targeting capability today is vested in onboard active sensors that are vulnerable to detection, there are numerous highly effective national- and theater-level surveillance and targeting capabilities that are rarely glimpsed by the frontline watchstander. We have created an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) architecture that primarily serves the needs of the intelligence community, in turn informing high-level decision-makers, but is either too late-timed or too highly classified to be of value to tactical units. We must engineer systems that provide timely, relevant (and appropriately sanitized) outputs directly to the warfighter.
Returning to the larger aim of disrupting enemy C4ISR networks, there is another organizational problem: Much of the disruption effort will be executed by joint forces or at the operational level, so how will tactical-level Navy decision-makers know what is going on and how or when to exploit success? For example, if the Air Force disables a sector of the adversary’s passive electronic-surveillance network, how will the officer commanding a surface action group 1,000 miles away know he is now in an advantageous position where his ships’ radars can be energized to locate and destroy an enemy platform in his vicinity? What if this counter-ISR effect is only temporary? As we operate today, organizational linkages of this kind generally exist only at the naval component-commander level or above and require several relay steps (carried over communications links that are potentially vulnerable to denial by enemy action) to reach the tactical decision-maker who can exploit them. We pay a lot of lip service to seamless joint integration, but it is specious to believe communications between operational and tactical-level commanders in a joint environment are either as fast or as thorough as required.
This issue touches on the fundamental dimension of naval warfare that has probably changed the most in the past 70 years: communications. The advent of satellite pathways, Internet Protocol–based networks, and tactical datalinks has revolutionized naval command-and-control at every level from tactical through strategic and in every dimension from warfighting to safety of navigation to administration and logistics.
However, as forcefully evoked by the CNO in his 2012 Proceedings article “Imminent Domain,” the vast potential of our global communications capabilities and automation have brought with them new dependencies and in turn, vulnerabilities. In the CNO’s words, “Future wars will not be won simply by effectively using the EM spectrum and cyberspace; they will be won within the EM-cyber domain.”5 So what are the practical implications and considerations that will apply to naval battle that extend into this new domain?
As in any battlefield domain, EM-cyber supremacy cannot be assumed; information assurance and assured command-and-control are warfighting objectives, not facts of life. Though we are developing extensive techniques and practices to counter their efforts, it is reasonable to assume that a capable adversary will find weaknesses and achieve at least some—probably unexpected—success in attacking our information infrastructure. Traditional EM spectrum-jamming, anti-satellite weapons, and cyber weapons will all complicate our ability to share information that is critical to every warfighting and support function.
For units operating in actively contested areas and subjected to direct EM jamming, denial of satellite pathways, and cyber effects, the basic reality will likely be that communications pathways come and go unpredictably. There are myriad implications to this, but first among them is the impact on command-and-control. In the Navy we are fortunate to be the heirs to a strong tradition of command-by-negation, distributed execution, and autonomous decision-making. However, with the increase in volume of communications our ability to fight complicated scenarios with minimal or intermittent communications has almost certainly weakened. We can regain it only with realistic and challenging training at all levels from fleet to unit and individual watchstander.
There are additional problems that must be considered in an intermittent communications environment as well. Are we ready to conduct all forms of communication via solely electronic textual means or solely analog voice means? This could at times mean issuing engagement orders or tactical maneuvering orders exclusively via chat or datalink. Or conversely, are we still capable of operating all of a carrier strike group’s warfare and administrative functions on short-range voice nets or severely reduced IP bandwidth? Should we consider a return to flashing light and flag hoist for silent close-order maneuvering? Would one-way, broad-area broadcast of certain orders or status updates be useful? The answers to each of these questions are complicated and will vary across unit types and formations. Only experimentation and practice will allow us to fully understand them.
Even outside directly contested areas, we must still consider the threat of cyber attack or other forms of information interdiction globally. Setting aside for the moment the risk of attacks on national command and decision-making structures, the Navy’s global support architecture could be a significant Achilles’ heel. For anything beyond a short, sharp conflict, the Navy’s logistics, personnel, technical support, ordnance, and repair infrastructures will need to mobilize and respond quickly to the needs of the engaged fleet. These large virtual organizations and their communications must be resilient in wartime. They must have established (and practiced) alternate methods available to them if their primary means of communications or movement of material and personnel are stymied.
Maintaining Awareness
A third “glimpse” that bears consideration is individual units’ ability to understand and assess their own status. The massively complex systems carried by our ships, aircraft, and submarines are automated to a high degree, and increasingly, deployed units are dependent on external communications for technical support. In an environment of restricted or limited communications, individual units will likely have to confront and diagnose technical problems (both innocent and malicious) quickly and with limited support from shore-based technical experts. Radar and other sensor operators will need to recognize jamming or other EM attacks, evaluate their effect, and quickly act to negate or work around them. This problem is further complicated by the need to distinguish EM attack from system malfunction or environmental phenomenon. Likewise, weapon-system operators and tactical decision-makers will need to accurately evaluate the battlefield situation and assess whether weapons can be effectively released, whether their unit is in danger, and make other critical but technically complex assessments.
Datalink and computer-network supervisors will perhaps be the most challenged of all afloat personnel. They will need not only to recognize and react to instances of intrusion or interruption, but must also be ready to rapidly reconfigure communications paths across an array of systems and network arrangements quickly and perhaps repeatedly. As more and more systems and communications paths have become dependent on various kinds of IP-based networks, the skills of our afloat information-technology personnel have generally struggled to keep up. The added potential for hostile cyber effects only increases the severity of this problem. The diagnostic capability and resilience of individual units’ networks should be more thoroughly tested in a realistic warfighting environment, but it appears at first blush that serious consideration should be given to enhancing the diagnostic, configuration, and recovery capability of every tactical unit. This would probably require both improvements to system design and a significant increase in the technical expertise present in each unit.
Changing the Rules
In his 1996 book The Rules of the Game, British naval historian Andrew Gordon adopts a similar approach to Keegan’s “face of battle” in a detailed reconstruction of the Battle of Jutland that is compiled and reconciled from several sources. Utilizing his synthesized battle narrative as a stepping-off point, Gordon goes on to illustrate how the organizational culture of the late-Victorian and Edwardian Royal Navy led directly to some of the confusion and disappointments that service faced at Jutland.
In a narrative that in some ways sounds familiar, he shows how in the “long, calm lee of Trafalgar,” a century without serious challenge by a peer rival or experience of major fleet combat, the Royal Navy’s warfighting and intellectual culture lost its edge. The service lapsed into a focus on inspection readiness, ego-driven internal politics, and a parade-field or “checking-the-box” approach to training for combat. While the British successfully conceived and fielded new technology and warfighting concepts like the all-big-gun Dreadnought-class battleship, they failed to fully explore the dynamics of combat between such ships and how best to organize, command, and control a fleet in that new environment. As a result, confused communication and rigid decision-making at Jutland led to multiple dangerous missteps in the deployment and engagement of the British fleet, and probably ultimately to the escape of the German High Seas Fleet.6
Though no historic precedent is a perfect fit, particularly in warfare, it is not too large a hypothetical step to ask whether the U.S. Navy is cruising in the “long, calm lee of Leyte Gulf” or at least that of the end of the Cold War. In response to this uncomfortable thought we suggest that, in order to maximize the credibility of our combat capability in peacetime and—to the maximum extent possible—avoid learning painful and perhaps unaffordable lessons in a future conflict, the U.S. Navy must adopt a cultural emphasis on understanding what modern naval combat would be like and adapting ourselves to its realities in every way possible. Our professional deliberation, analysis, and experimentation must not solely focus on tackling the next dazzling threat system or solving the time and space problems of a particular campaign. In every venue, be it requirements development, acquisition, tactics development, operational planning, or fleet training, we need to think holistically about how the tools we are shaping with these processes will be used by our people in an Information Age contest of wills against a determined and capable adversary.
As former Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV) action officers, we recognize the danger of simply stating and admiring a problem and that the limiting factor in correcting problems is often resources. We have three specific and cost-effective recommendations on how to stimulate the cultural emphasis we call for above:
• OPNAV N9 and Fleet Forces Command (as the respective sponsors and authors of warfighting requirements) should sponsor a series of extended free play Fleet Problems—similar in some ways to those undertaken before World War II—with minimal scripting and objectives beyond the generation of a large body of direct, honest lessons learned and questions for further investigation. These experiments should be based on simple scenarios (e.g. establishing sea control, island seizure, or location and destruction of enemy forces) that allow either side to win or lose without intervention to drive a planned outcome. They should apply as many of the atmospherics and limitations of an Information Age A2/AD environment as possible, challenging participants to work within the constraints of a battlefield that is contested in all domains. While specific concepts and techniques could (and should) be tested in this environment, those trials should not be allowed to drive the event, as they may mask other unexpected lessons.
• Based on lessons learned from experiments of this type and other forms of analysis, Fleet Forces Command should promulgate a set of assumptions about the conditions that are likely to apply in Information Age naval combat (in specified time frames) and mandate that they be applied to all tactics development, fleet training requirements and scenarios, manning plans, and training requirements for individual personnel. OPNAV should in turn apply these assumptions where appropriate to the development of requirements for future payloads and platforms. The types of assumptions we think could apply here are along the lines of the “glimpses” we describe above: the contested nature of the EM-cyber domain, instability of communications, the need for tight control of EM emissions, the inherent complexity of individual units’ communications and sensor configuration and status, the opacity of operational-level information-dominance measures to tactical units, etc. Places where implementation of these assumptions would be cost-prohibitive should be clearly documented to at least provide a new awareness of a likely weakness or shortfall that should be addressed in the future when feasible.
• Following from the CNO’s mandate to treat EM-cyber as a warfighting domain we must acknowledge at every level that, like other domains, it will be contested. While in the bastions of the Information Dominance Corps this is a clearly understood reality, in most fleet warfighting scenarios, information dominance is still treated as a given or is lightly contested. Commanders at all levels, but particularly at the tactical level, should require briefing of plans to fight for information dominance and continual reporting of those plans’ progress in every warfighting scenario, much as they would for air supremacy or sea control. This may often largely amount to the monitoring of operations coordinated at higher levels of command, but it is critically relevant even to individual watchstanders. As in other domains, commanders must also prepare for an extended effort that may not achieve full success. The recently growing responsibility and influence of carrier strike group information-warfare commanders is a positive development, but progress appears to be uneven and must be further strengthened and accelerated.
It is a well-known lesson of military history that the performance in combat of a particular fleet, tactic, technology, or person can never be fully predicted and that the outcomes of battles and wars depend on so many variables that they are even more difficult to foresee. This reality at times makes attempts to holistically imagine the realities of battle seem futile and instead breeds a focus on simpler yardsticks like comparing technical capabilities of weapons. More dangerously, it can lead us unconsciously to bad habits like mirror-imaging our adversaries or assuming broadly that our previous success and longevity equal continued superiority. Really, though, the difficulty of predicting the realities of war should be the very thing that drives us to constantly seek a better understanding of the “face of battle” in the Information Age.
Fielding credible warfighting capability and readiness in an age when rapidly evolving technology is aggressively leveraged by our adversaries is an incredibly challenging task. In undertaking it, we can neither afford to rest on our laurels and assume that we know fully what to expect in combat nor to give up on trying to understand more because it is too hard or too expensive. Rather, we must constantly question our capabilities and readiness and strive to answer those questions with the best information available to us, even if it is imperfect. We must be honest with ourselves and admit whether we are really preparing our forces to succeed in combat despite inevitable uncertainty and friction. And of course, “the enemy gets a vote.”
1. ADM Jonathan W. Greenert, USN, “CNO’s Sailing Directions,” www.navy.mil/cno/cno_sailing_direction_final-lowres.pdf.
2. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1976).
3. For conceptual discussions, see VADM Thomas Rowden, RADM Peter Gumataotao, and RADM Peter Fanta, USN, “Distributed Lethality,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, vol. 141, no. 1 (January 2015), 18–23; and Bryan Clark, “Commanding the Seas: A Plan to Reinvigorate US Navy Surface Warfare,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, November 2014, http://csbaonline.org/publications/2014/11/commanding-the-seas-a-plan-to-reinvigorate-u-s-navy-surface-warfare/.
4. ADM Jonathan W. Greenert, USN, “National Press Club Remarks,” 16 November 2012, www.navy.mil/navydata/people/cno/Greenert/Speech/Chief%20of%20Naval%20Operations%20%28CNO%29%20Adm%20Jonathan%20Greenert%20delivers%20remarks%20at%20the%20National%20Press%20Club%2016NOV2012.pdf.
5. ADM Jonathan W. Greenert, USN, “Imminent Domain,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, vol. 138, no. 12 (December 2012), 16–21.
6. Andrew Gordon, The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command (London: John Murray, 1996).