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Tomahawk Tactics—The Midway Connection

By Rear Admiral Walter M. Locke, USN (Ret.)
June 1992
Proceedings
Vol. 118/6/1,072
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By Rear Admiral Walter M. Locke, U.S. Navy (Retired)

It took manned aircraft to locate the Japanese fleet at Midway. They launched, headed over the horizon, and began their search. Thirty years later, planners who doubted the Tomahawk missile’s ability to find over-the-horizon targets finally realized that technology had given the missile the same search capability.

Colonel Alembic Feroc, the President-for-Life of Bel' licos, covets the deep-water harbor of Porto Riparo in neighboring Dormany—and his forces can eas­ily defeat the peaceful Dormans. The major obstacle to his aggression is a U.S. Navy surface action group—Aegis cruisers and destroyers—cruising off his coast. No U.S- aircraft carriers have cruised here since the U.S. armed forces were cut back in the early 1990s.

His staff estimates that at least 100 U.S. Tomahawk land-attack missiles (TLAMs) are aimed at Bellicos City- Another 100 TLAMs (including a few on the supporting submarines) are held in reserve. Recalling vividly the stun­ning television pictures of downtown Baghdad in January 1991, he decides that the Tomahawk ships must be elim­inated quickly if the invasion is to succeed.

What then? Bellicos will apologize for a regrettable accident—they thought their ships were being attacked by the Dorman Navy—pay reparations, and hope the world forgets.

The U.S. task groups’ air defenses are too tough for his air force, but his destroyers can launch a massive attack of Harpoon missiles from over the radar horizon. (Feroc bought Harpoons when tensions were low.) Furthermore, his navy has a Slava-class cruiser armed with 16 long- range SS-N-12 antiship missiles obtained following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

His four old destroyers carry 64 Harpoons each. Over­all, the fleet now has more than 300 cruise missiles. He has three diesel submarines, but their noisy approach will be picked up on sonar before reaching torpedo range. After the attack, most of his ships will probably be lost, but they will have destroyed the Tomahawk launchers—unless the U.S. ships strike first.

Is this likely? It depends on the rules of engagement and Feroc’s actions. First, the situation did not develop overnight; the U.S. Navy ships sailed to the area be­cause tensions had increased. Despite diplomatic assur­ances to the contrary, an invasion is expected. A state °f undeclared war has existed since the “accidental” strafing of a U.S. intelligence ship. Any use of Toma­hawk land-attack missiles will require a specific release from the national command authority. The task group commander, however, has the authority to defend his ships if threatened.

Bellicos Navy trawlers have been tracking the U.S. task group since it arrived on station, and Feroc’s Har- P°on shooters will not need to activate radars until after the missiles hit. Commercially available global position- lng system information can eliminate most location am­biguities between the trawlers and the warships, and the trawlers know when the attack will start. The Bellicos Navy plans to launch Harpoons from four directions, below the U.S. task group’s radar horizon, and away from its limited LAMPS-III searches. Counting on tactical surprise, Feroc expects to win by adhering to “the tactical maxim °f all naval battles . . . Attack effectively first.

The U.S. task group commander has spent much of his time watching the multisource ocean surveillance in­formation from satellites and picket submarines; the pic­ture over the last five days shows clearly that Feroc’s ships are moving circuitously toward the task group. Similar in­formation can be shown on the tactical displays of the Tomahawk weapons control systems in the task group. By collating all information, the U.S. forces can identify spe- Nfic Bellicos ships; the U.S. commander orders his Tom­ahawk antiship missiles (TASMs) programmed for mul- bple-pass, extended-range search because he needs to strike before the Bellicos ships close range and to compensate °r their uncertain movement.

^ This scenario is illustrative of the problem that threat- cned to derail the TASM program. Critics would ac­knowledge that a TASM could hit a target over-the-hori- ^°n (OTH)—but only if someone from the Navy could ®xPlain how the launch ship knew the target’s location, rom 1974 to 1977, this doubt could have killed the

Pr

TASM program before the first flight.

From its start in 1971, the TASM kept getting smaller while its maximum effective range kept getting longer. In 1972, a strategic version became our primary interest and source of funds; Tomahawk left the antiship missile (Har­poon) program office, and I became the program manager. The TASM variant uses a modified version of the Har­poon’s all-weather guidance system but has about twice the Harpoon’s range.

The guidance system allowed us to fire a Tomahawk in the general direction of an enemy warship, fly at low altitude to avoid detection, and then—at a programmed distance—to climb to search altitude and seek the target ship with active radar. We also gave the missile a passive identification and direction-finding capability.

Submariners were satisfied with a TASM range of 140 nautical miles. Invulnerable to antiship missiles, they routinely cruised within range of Soviet antiship missiles while using sonar to detect and classify ships over the horizon. But these tactics would make a Tomahawk­launching surface ship quite vulnerable. The need to in­crease operational range introduced a problem: How could the target be detected, identified, and then located at ranges of up to 300 nautical miles?

A new seeker with extended detection range and a more accurate mid-course guidance system might have solved the problem, but it was too expensive. The Soviets had decided to solve the problem by using data-linked third- party targeting, but U.S. submarine leaders considered this approach unsatisfactory.

Radar ocean surveillance satellites could give accurate target locations, but the United States could not afford complete world coverage.

Yet another alternative was to replace the turbojet en­gine with the turbofan engine already planned for the land- attack version of the Tomahawk (TLAM), effectively more than doubling the TASM’s range. We planned for this ca­pability, but I did not make the change until the Williams turbofan engine was proved in its first Tomahawk test flight in June 1976.

An extended-range, terminal-area search pattern could give us the increased search capability we wanted. In the fall of 1974, I asked both The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and our guidance sys­tems contractor, McDonnell Douglas, to investigate the feasibility of using the extra propulsion range to conduct multipass, extended-search patterns.

I believed that ocean-surveillance products could be used for long-distance target location, and directed that tests based on historical battles, such as Midway, be simulated on computers.

Many people believed that no officer-in-tactical com­mand would shoot Tomahawks if the target could not be located with ship sensors or with task group resources. I found this remarkable for two reasons:

►First, the same critics who did not believe that the U.S. Navy could target OTH nevertheless accepted a 250- mile range Soviet antiship missile threat.

►Second, in World War II, we fought OTH battles—Coral Sea and Midway, for example—where neither side made

the strike. It was a tough decision: his torpedo planes had            1

a combat radius of only 175 miles, but the “commensu-                '

rate risk” seemed worth taking. (See Figure 1.) He made              (

his choice at just the right moment — about 20 minutes ; before Nagumo decided to rearm the attack group planes t for a second strike on Midway. Planes started taking off t from the Enterprise and the Hornet at 0702. s

Fletcher adopted the same course and speed as Spru- ;                    5

ance. He delayed launching, however, thinking that there             I

might be additional Japanese carriers—other than those               c

already reported—against which he could more properly [ direct his attack. At 0838, having received no additional c contact reports, he decided to launch half of his dive bombers and all of his torpedo planes, with a fighter es- t cort. They were using enemy location data four hours old. 1 By 0906, the Yorktown's strike group was in the air; an- t other deck load was ready to launch if needed.                                                                                                     t

At 1023, the Enterprise and Yorktown dive bombers £ successfully attacked the Japanese carriers.          t

It is not my purpose to retell the Battle of Midway ex- f cept to make the following points: In war, fleet com­manders will shoot over-the-horizon at target locations 1 based almost exclusively on ocean-surveillance informa- t tion. The Midway commanders achieved victory by at' c tacking effectively first—one of Captain Wayne Hughes’s s

surface contact and aircraft inflicted the major losses on both sides. Had the U.S. Navy become less capable since then? Critics granted that cruise missiles might be con­sidered aircraft, but argued that the absence of a human on board to find and positively identify an enemy ship fa­tally flawed OTH targeting.

Until 1977, most naval officers treated cruise missiles as long-range artillery—if they thought about them at all. Simplified war games employed cruise missiles as guided rocks rather than aircraft. I believed, however, that long-range cruise missiles could combine the scouting and attack functions into one vehicle. After all, carrier-based aircraft had performed both search and strike roles on the same mission at Midway, and Tomahawk antiship mis­siles could certainly fly toward an enemy’s uncertain po­sition without further instructions from the launching ship and search for the target. This suggested to me that we needed to reexamine our World War II experience, espe­cially the OTH attack decisions made then by fleet tacti­cal commanders.

Historians agree that the forewarning obtained from cryptanalysis of Japanese radio messages was crucial to the U.S. Navy victory at Midway Atoll. By 1 March 1942, Commander Joseph Rochefort’s Combat Intelligence Of­fice in Hawaii knew within 300-400 nautical miles where most of the Japanese were located. During May, intelli­gence intercepted the Japanese plans, including their order of battle and schedule, before Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, issued his operation plan. (See sidebar, “Finding the Kido Butai.”)

Nimitz positioned his carrier Task Forces 16 and 17 northeast of Midway, correctly anticipating that patrol planes flying out to 700 nautical miles from Midway would find the Japanese carriers before their scouts could find the U.S. ships. At the final pre-battle meeting be­tween Nimitz and the task force commanders—Rear Ad­mirals Frank Jack Fletcher and Raymond Spmance—Lieu­tenant Commander Edwin Layton, the Fleet Intelligence Officer, presented what turned out to be an accurate esti­mated Japanese first-contact position.

This 1942 wide-area view from many sources is kin­dred to our improved ability to collect ocean surveil­lance information and, over time, integrate, correlate, and forecast ship locations—and then focus operations action on the area of interest. One instant source report might have large errors, but many bits of information, when put together and tracked for a while, determined enemy locations. Ocean surveillance continued as the U.S. car­rier task forces positioned for battle.

On the morning of 3 June, a PBY pilot sighted the Japanese transport group, which he reported as the main enemy fleet, and airplanes from Midway attacked the ships. The position report, however, did not correlate with the expected location of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s car­rier striking force, and Rear Admiral Fletcher, the officer- in-tactical command, correctly decided that the PBY pilot had seen only transports and escorts. He trusted the in­telligence-generated locus of the enemy force—northwest of Midway moving into position to launch an air attack on the atoll at dawn on 4 June—and placed his forces

about 200 miles north of Midway to strike Nagumo’s car­riers when the PBYs located them.

At 0553 on 4 June, radiomen on board Spruance’s flag ship, the USS Enterprise (CV-6), heard a PBY call “Many enemy planes heading Midway bearing 320°, dis­tance 150.” Spruance ordered: “Launch everything you have at the earliest possible moment and strike the enemy carriers.” He later said, “. . . I figured that if we were going to hit the Japanese, I should hit them with every­thing I had. . . ,”2

Fletcher had reached the same conclusion the previous night. “There was only one thing to do to the Japanese: attack and hit them as hard as we could. . . . We couldn’t afford to wait. We had to strike first, strike swiftly, and strike in great force.”3

At 0603, Fletcher and Spruance received a message that read, “Two carriers and battleships bearing 320°, distance 180 [nautical miles from Midway], course 135°, speed 25 [knots].” The position was about 200 miles west-south­west of Task Force 16. The position given was incorrect by about 40 miles and only two of the four flat tops had been sighted; but at least they now knew the approximate location of the striking force.

At 0607, only four minutes after receiving the first re­ported position of the Japanese carriers, albeit incomplete, Fletcher ordered Spruance with the Enterprise and the Hornet (CV-8) to “proceed southwesterly and attack enemy carriers when definitely located.” The Yorktown (CV-5) task force would follow as soon as her planes recovered.  i

Spruance was aware of the attack on Midway. He cal-                   <

culated that he would need to launch his airplanes early I in order to catch the Japanese with their planes on board ] after their return from the Midway strike.                                                                        j

Spruance decided to make an all-out attack; to launch : a “full load,” and it required more than an hour to launch

five cornerstones of mar­itime warfare. Fletcher and Spruance located the “enemy sufficiently [but not necessarily precisely] to deliver effective fire­power. . . ,”4

The target-location in­formation available to Fletcher and Spruance was ocean-surveillance quality, but they did not wait until they closed to task-force sensor range.

None of the admirals afloat in this great carrier battle was an aviator, yet, as Vice Admiral W. W.

Smith later said, “all Were air conscious.” All the more remarkable when, in their U.S. Naval Academy days, one of their textbooks on ord­nance and gunnery listed the ram as the most im­portant naval weapon.”5

Faced with the reali­ties of battle, fleet lead­ers will act decisively in the future; there is no Problem there. The prob- 'em has been the failure to consider history in weapons acquisition decisions.

By early 1975, Dr. David Kalbaugh and his APL team had proved with computer simulations that ocean-sur­Veillance information, even when late and inaccurate, could heiine targets well enough for a scouting Tomahawk to acquire. Initially, the results were only mediocre, but two later computer-modeled patterns showed promise, and these were continually improved. Tomahawk antiship mis- sfles became capable of OTH scouting and strike mis­sions—just like the carrier-based aircraft at Midway. (See figure 2.) Nonetheless, how would a modern-day Fletcher 0r Spruance get the information? This problem was es­pecially difficult for a submarine operating covertly or a destroyer on independent patrol.

About the same time, the opposition in the Office of |he Secretary of Defense attempted to make the Toma­hawk antiship missile an issue for a special Defense Sys­tems Acquisition Review Council (DSARC); we stopped (he opposition for a while.6 On the other hand, we did not authority or resources to pursue OTH target defini- h°n, and had to solve the problem ourselves without a funded project.

On 1 December 1975, Jere Patterson, then with Lock­heed Missiles and Space Company, dropped off a rather enuous proposal called Outlaw Shark—a computer-to- c°mputer tactical information system tailored for attack Submarines. He had an idea for a data-processing and dis­play system consisting of a computer data base that would support fa­cilities on land and on board the Tomahawk submarines, linked by a dedicated, encrypted communication network. Data received directly by the submarines or re­layed by shore centers would be correlated in a submarine terminal command-and-control system. Outlaw Shark evolved from a program called Outlaw Hawk, which had processed and passed ocean-sur­veillance information to the USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63) and her battle group during 1975 Pa­cific fleet exercises. Out­law Shark improved communications and processed the data faster.

The next day, I visited Lockheed’s Sunnyvale facility where Patterson showed me results from Outlaw Hawk that con­vinced me, if no one else, that surface-contact locations were accurate enough to apply the computer-generated search patterns and plan a successful antiship mission. The data had been gathered and correlated at Fleet Ocean Sur­veillance Information Facilities and Centers, but the in­telligence experts said it was not good enough for target definition.

A week later, I asked Commander Albert Best, from the Naval Electronics Systems Command (NavElex), if Outlaw Shark would work. “Yes—technically,” he said, but he anticipated trouble with the intelligence commu­nity. (Special classifications of many intelligence prod­ucts created a problem for tactical use.) Best understood what I was trying to do, and he agreed to run the project for me from NavElex with Tomahawk funding.

On the following Monday, I asked Vice Admiral Joe Williams, Jr., Commander, Submarine Force, U.S. Atlantic Fleet, to assign a submarine for Outlaw Shark. He was quite familiar with Pentagon opposition to the Tomahawk because of the OTH issue. He was intrigued, however, by computer-to-computer communications that would permit submarines to support a battle group directly, and he gave us the newly commissioned USS Richard B. Russell (SSN- 687). He also helped arrange for an Outlaw Shark instal­lation at the Submarine Operational Command Center (SOCC), Naples, Italy.

In March 1976, Commander Harry Yockey reported to the Cruise Missiles Project Office from a Pacific car-

rier division staff. Outlaw Hawk had performed poorly in a fleet exercise, he said—thus, Outlaw Shark looked like a big risk to him; after he inspected the Lockheed and APL work, however, he became an enthusiast. Besides the authors at APL, Yockey played a big part in putting to­gether the first TASM employment manual, which was later used in the Outlaw Shark exercises.

The Lockheed team installed the Outlaw Shark equip­ment and software in the Richard B. Russell and started

tests in November. The Best-Patterson Outlaw Shark team accomplished the impossible in less than ten months.

Meanwhile, in April 1976, a Tomahawk cruise missile study group, chaired by Rear Admiral William Rowden, submitted its re­port to the Chief of Naval Operations. Rowden be­lieved that the greatest ad­vantage of Tomahawk lay in its long-range capability. The report pointed out that, while the airframe-engine combination gave the mis­sile great theoretical range, in practice it was limited to about 140 nautical miles because of both localiza­tion and seeker sweep- width limitations. Thus challenged, I scheduled a proof-of-concept, live fir­ing of the TASM using a multi-leg search plan gen­erated by Outlaw Shark. As we approached a Jan­uary 1977 DSARC, three OSD groups recommended that the antiship version of Tomahawk remain in advanced de­velopment with deployment decisions based on and paced by the development of the supporting OTH systems. We needed a successful long-range TASM test for the DSARC—and we got it.

On 7 December 1976, the test missile was launched at a target reported at a range of 240 (actually 224) nauti­cal miles. The missile flew approximately 175 nautical miles and commenced the programmed search of the tar­get area. It flew another 173 miles during its search—a total of 348 nautical miles since launch—before the seeker locked onto a destroyer target hulk. It then flew a low- altitude attack profile, intentionally flew over the target, and was successfully recovered. The flight lasted ap­proximately 55 minutes. It was the first long-range, anti­ship missile flight without a data link (the Soviets had long-range missiles, but relied on a data link).

Tests at Naples, Italy, started on 15 December and ran for about five days. The command center processed and removed sensitive-origin intelligence from 824 reports and collated the results. At the end of this first test period, they were following 117 active targets, and the command center sent 78 combined reports to submarines. The Richard B. Russell's, crew tracked targets at ranges of more than 900 nautical miles, simulated shooting Tomahawks at real targets in the Mediterranean not held by the sub­marine’s sensors—and got simulated hits.

At the DSARC II on 6 January 1977, I presented the results of the antiship missile flight and a summary of Outlaw Shark data, and the program was granted approval to continue.

Tests and exercises continued the next year with other submarines, patrol planes, and surface ships. Initially, the delays from first contact to simulated Tomahawk firing were lengthy, but within a few months, the average lo­cation error and data delay improved dramatically as the fleet gained experience and improvements were incor­porated.

An understanding of the Battle of Midway’s technical issues helped us see possibilities for cruise missiles.Un­fortunately, the commanders who made the battle deci­sions at sea years ago are not at the table when new weapons are discussed. One of the lessons of Tomahawk systems development has been that neither systems analy­sis nor generalized doctrine are sufficient guides. His­tory should be a major indicator for defense acquisition. Battles must be analyzed with the insight of technical op­portunity.

Second, ocean battles that resemble Midway can occur in regional wars, e.g., the Falklands Conflict. But we must not neglect low-intensity conflict experiences against pa­trol boats near land, and among friendly and neutral shipping when we consider weapons development. Flex­ibility and ship-magazine limits indicate a requirement to develop multimission guidance.

The third lesson from the Tomahawk antiship system and Outlaw Shark development was best summarized by former Assistant Secretary of Defense David Packard when he wrote, “Excellence requires . . . responsibility and au­thority placed firmly in the hands of those at the work­ing level, who have knowledge and enthusiasm for the tasks at hand.”7

Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., Captain, USN, (Ret.) Fleet Tactics, (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1986), p. 25.

Gordon W. Prange, Donald M. Goldstein, and Katherine V. Dillon. Miracle at Midway (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1982), p. 238.

'Ibid., p. 239.

"Hughes, op. cit., pp. 25 and 145.

William Ward Smith, Midway, Turning Point of the Pacific (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1966), p. 61.

"This and subsequent references to documents and historical events not otherwise cited are based on U.S. Navy Cruise Missiles Project document and briefing fries; interviews conducted by Dr. Kenneth Werrell, Professor of History, Radford University; and from the author’s diaries.

The President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management, A Quest fot Excellence (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, June 1986), p. xii.

Admiral Locke is writing a history and analysis of modem U.S. sea-, air-, and ground-launched cruise missiles that will be published by the Naval Institute Press in 1994. He worked on early Harpoon develop' ment, led the Tomahawk program for a decade, and directed the Joint Cruise Missiles Project before retiring from active duty in 1982.

Digital Proceedings content made possible by a gift from CAPT Roger Ekman, USN (Ret.)

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