A testament to adaptability, the Navy-Marine Corps team led the joint campaign in landlocked Afghanistan—here, a Navy F-14 and F/A-18s en route to al Qaeda targets refuel with an Air Force KC-10 and Marines from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) patrol the Afghan desert. Naval forces are poised to dissuade, deter, and defeat the nation's adversaries.
If last year I had encouraged you to envision a future in which the Navy-Marine Corps team would be the leading element in a joint campaign against a dispersed and entrenched network with multinational support systems in an impoverished, landlocked nation more than 600 miles from the nearest blue-water port, I would have been met with a lot of laughter. And yet, in a mark of these transformational times, that is just what we have done.
Let me share some Afghan campaign nuggets:
- On 11 September, based on Cable News Network reports, and acting on their own initiative, the Enterprise (CVN-65) Battle Group reversed the course they had set to return home from a six-month deployment and were on station the next morning, ready to answer the nation's call.
- Within hours, Navy assets were in place to conduct strikes against targets in Afghanistan, well ahead of all other elements of the joint team.
- Under verbal orders, while mission planning was in progress, and with a small air wing detachment, the Kitty Hawk (CV-63) steamed 6,000 miles at flank speed to establish an innovative special operations platform for our joint special operating forces. She provided the best support these teams had ever experienced. They literally did not want to leave and are now looking to the Navy to capture this sea-based capability for the future.
- Operating against a landlocked nation, more than 70% of the strike sorties were flown by naval aviation; 80% of our sorties hit targets; 93% of the ordnance dropped was precision guided. And the Navy was over the target 24 hours a day/7 days a week—and still is.
- The only significant conventional land force presence in country for the opening phases of the campaign was provided by the Marine Corps 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit from the Peleliu (LHA-5) Amphibious Ready Group.
- Allied on-station attack submarines launched one-third of all the Tomahawk strikes.
- Within days, our naval forces were critical to establishing complete maritime situational awareness, on which we have built the most extensive maritime interdiction operations ever—a model for future operations in the global war on terrorism.
Even more important, the Navy and Marine Corps are fighting as integral members of a joint team. For thousands of years, the conventional wisdom has said a five-to-one advantage of offense to defense is required to predominate in an assault. We rewrote the rule book in Afghanistan. Using joint special operating forces; persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR); strategic airlift and in-flight tanking from the Air Force; and sea-based precision strike, our Afghan allies, outnumbered two to one by a dedicated and well-resourced foe, overran Afghanistan in a campaign so short we did not even have time to negotiate basing rights in neighboring allied countries.
Here is another way to look at this: We won Desert Storm with Cold War tactics. We won Kosovo with post-Cold War tactics. We are winning in Afghanistan with Cold War carriers and 16th-century ground warfare. When you see Green Berets on horses, it completely opens the aperture of warfare.
With that thought in mind, and the vivid images it conjures up of a Navy in transformation, I would like to address how we are resourcing the Navy's transformation vision. First, let me place that vision in context.
- The Navy has been transforming itself for the past 100 years; it only has accelerated in the past decade.
- The Navy is at the heart of transformation in the Department of Defense.
- Because of long-term investments we have made in personnel and technology, the Navy is poised for a great leap in delivering combat capability to our nation's leaders.
- The Navy's heritage of transformation is easy to understand when you consider who we are, what we do, and how we do it.
- Our Navy is focused operationally, forward deployed, operating in areas of possible and actual conflict, day in and day out.
- Our Navy is a high-technology organization, focused on engineering details, driven by data, and open to new ways of doing business as technologies mature.
- Our Navy is blessed with smart, dedicated people solving hard problems every day, unencumbered by a rigid doctrine and empowered by a tradition of initiative, responsibility, and accountability that is as old as command at sea.
Within living memory, we have shifted drastically how we employ naval forces. In the 1950s, faced with a Soviet sea denial threat, the Navy operated in tailor-made task groups. In the 1970s, countering a broad Soviet open-ocean fleet, our platform-centric Navy perfected multimission carrier battle group operations and the composite warfare commander concept. Today, building on breakthroughs in communications and information technology, a networked Navy strives to ensure access to the joint task force commander wherever and whenever directed by our Commander-in-Chief.
Our transformation in operational paradigms has driven, and has been driven by, the possibilities of precision engagement, the universal application of vertical launch technology, the maturing of the Tomahawk weapon system, and the phenomenal capabilities of the Aegis weapon system, with its potential in theater ballistic missile defense and cooperative engagement. Thus, since 1989, even though the Navy's battle force has been reduced by 43%, strike missile magazine space actually has increased and the accuracy, flexibility, responsiveness, and lethality of each weapon in the magazine has improved—in some cases by an order of magnitude.
As an example, in Desert Storm in 1991, the Tomahawk targeting cycle was three days. During Allied Force in 1999, it was reduced to 101 minutes. In Operation Enduring Freedom it was down to 19 minutes in some cases. We are now planning systems that allow near-real-time targeting and retargeting in flight by 2004.
The Navy of 2002 stands at a unique crossroads of opportunity and challenge. The transition to a new administration, actively seeking change throughout the Department of Defense, set the stage. The ongoing debate on transformation, buoyed by the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the Defense Policy Guidance, and the evolving Transformation Roadmaps, provides an intellectual and strategic framework in which to work. Maturing technologies, reflecting both defense investments of the past and burgeoning commercial investments we can leverage, present tremendous opportunities for scale changes in how we operate, both tactically and as a "corporation."
Rationalized, standardized, networked, focused on projecting power from the sea, and manned by the most highly educated, motivated corps of professionals in its history, the Navy is positioned to tackle the challenges and the opportunities before us. Yet, there remain hard choices to make. We must carry the Navy transformation into the future.
The Pillars of Transformation
The QDR identified six operational goals on which DoD investment resources will be focused to improve the linkage between strategy (assuring allies, dissuading adversaries, deterring aggression, and decisively defeating any adversary should deterrence fail) and investments:
- Protect bases of operation at home and abroad and defeat the threat of chemical, biological, and radiological weapons. Navy contributions to sea-based missile defense will be key.
- Ensure information systems in the face of attack and conduct effective information operations. The Navy's focus on network-centric operations over the past few years puts us in a leading position. The Navy-Marine Corps Intranet will be predicated on secure information backplane architecture.
- Project and sustain U. S. forces in distant antiaccess and area-denial environments. Our attack submarines prepare the battle space, exploiting their inherent stealth and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. The cruise-missile submarine will deliver stealthy strike and insert special operations forces deep within any antiaccess weapons arc. The DD-X family of ships, building on DD-21 technology, will allow our surface forces to penetrate antiaccess and area-denial screens.
- Deny enemies sanctuary by providing persistent surveillance, tracking, and rapid engagement. New families of planes, including the Joint Strike Fighter and the new Multimission Aircraft; powerful new radar systems, including an upgrade to the E-2 and an advanced electronically controlled radar for our strike aircraft; the recently operationally validated cooperative engagement capability, which will expand from the surface fleet to include joint air assets; and new programs to field unmanned aerial vehicles will enable us to develop the persistent and intensive situational awareness we desire.
- Enhance the capability and survivability of space systems. This is crucial for us. The Air Force is the executive agent for space, but the Navy is the primary customer of our space architecture. We must do a better job of defining, articulating, and advocating our space requirements. We must build a cadre of military and civilian space-qualified professionals, including flag officers and senior civilians. We must build a partnership for space with the Air Force. We need to get into space with ideas, people, and resources and ensure that the space-enabled transformation of the Navy can continue.
- Leverage information technology and innovative concepts to develop interoperable joint command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR). We need to ensure our needs as a warfighting customer are met, but we also have a lot to contribute.
Transformation Pathways
The pathways for achieving this transformation are:
- Science and Technology. The United States' technological prowess is the ultimate asymmetry against which any adversary must contend. We have a tremendous Navy investment in technology enterprises, from research labs to warfare development centers to shipyards. We also can call on a rich, vibrant, and varied national network of academic and commercial researchers and technologists, especially in the areas of information technology, knowledge management, signal processing, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. The Navy is banking on this infrastructure to deliver the electric ship, integrated power systems, knowledge superiority, littoral antisubmarine warfare, and full spectrum force protection, to name just a few key capabilities. The key questions are when? And at what cost?
- Experimentation. New capabilities must be simulated in advance of the development of operational concepts. Practical problems of implementation must be solved. Many ideas must be tried to arrive at the true gems that transform operations. Dedicated tactical and technical experimentation, with brisk interchange between tacticians and engineers, operators and designers, has to be integral to our Navy culture.
- Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR). In a networked, precision munitions Navy, some of the greatest return on capability investment will be in ISR. We have weapons we can place exactly where we want, with a very high probability of kill. If we can maximize our ability to identify targets, our overall combat capability will increase tremendously. Populating all of the networked Navy's elements—ships, submarines, aircraft, unmanned vehicles, Marines ashore—with more and better sensors, as well as with greater organic ability to process the data gathered and convert it into knowledge, must be a key element of our transformation strategy. This is particularly true in antisubmarine and mine warfare. There are glaring holes in our situational awareness in these areas that technology must address.
- Communications and Network Centricity. Clearly, adding more and more robust network links will be key to achieving the changes in scale effects we desire in the Navy of the future. This applies not only for the deployed nodes of the Navy but also to reach-back links to the support infrastructure ashore. These links will magnify combat capability, reduce maintenance down time, improve situational awareness, allow us to rationalize manpower expenditure, and improve morale for the deployed sailor.
- Platforms and Weapon Systems. We cannot forget the ships, aircraft, and submarines that populate the net. Their long service lives—in some cases, 50 years—as well as their stability in outward form appear to testify against fundamental Navy transformation. But as anyone familiar with the Navy knows, what is important, what has changed beyond recognition, is how these platforms are outfitted, manned, and employed. What this means is we must be rigorous in getting the platform requirements right, because we will live with these assets for decades. We must build flexible platforms, with open architecture and commercial-off-the-shelf standards when appropriate. We must leverage the best available propulsion, power distribution, and stealth technologies. This will allow for future transformations in outfitting, manning, and employment.
The Navy Battle Network
What is the naval service's vision of a transformed Navy-Marine Corps team of the future? Or, rather, what should it be? First, the vision: "The United States Navy-Marine Corps Team will dissuade, deter, and defeat our adversaries in any environment by employing ever increasing decisiveness, responsiveness, sustainability, and agility. Our Sailors, Marines, and civilian shipmates—the finest in the world—will leverage innovative organizations, concepts, and technologies to achieve order of magnitude increases in warfighting effectiveness."
Second, some attributes. At this stage, these are just bumper stickers, but they provide a way to think about the future we want so we then can do the hard work of creating it.
- The networked Navy will organize, train, operate, and fight as cohesive global and theater naval battle networks, the maritime components of the joint U.S. battle network.
- ForceNet, the information backplane of the networked Navy and maritime component of the global grid, will connect every network component, officer, sailor, and civilian to enable collaborative battle network situational awareness and integrated knowledge operations anywhere, anytime.
- Scalable global and theater battle networks, composed of tailorable combinations of invulnerable and high-risk crewed components, and survivable and expendable uncrewed components, can defeat any type of attack with minimal loss of life and continue to operate with no loss of mission capability.
- The networked Navy's elements can shift instantly from presence and show of force to offensive operations, and can project sustained, persistent precision effects.
- The networked Navy is largely self-sufficient in terms of repair parts, food, and energy, and is capable of replenishing itself without withdrawing from network combat operations. Backed by the best global logistics and support system in the world, it can be sustained anywhere on the planet, indefinitely.
- The networked Navy is designed for joint, interagency, nongovernmental, and allied multilevel security, plug-and-play operations anywhere, anytime. The sailors, officers, and civilian shipmates of the networked Navy have the talent, operational mind-set, training, and equipment to forge agile coalitions anywhere in the world in support of U.S. diplomatic and foreign policy objectives.
- The networked Navy is one of the top ten employers in the world, by virtue of its flexible active, reserve, and civilian entry and service options; innovative, world-class life-long training and education programs; and emphasis on sailor connectedness with families and loved ones while home and on deployment.
- The networked Navy is recognized as a visionary service, combining a well-developed process for examining the future with a vibrant experimentation program and robust science and technology investments.
These are ambitious goals. All of them will require much intellectual capital and funding to bring to fruition. But they tell the story of a future Navy that is worth working for and investing in.
With our nation's leaders, the power of ideas is paramount. They believe strategy should drive programming, and they put their money where their mouth is. From missile defense to the Tomahawk-armed Trident submarine to investing in science and technology: in all of these, the power of a story, of a strategy of ideas, is converted into cold, hard cash. So, to fund the transformed Navy of the future, we need to win the battle of ideas. We need to promote a compelling story of what that Navy can do and how it will do it. And we need to start now. The future belongs to those who capture the vision.
Admiral Mullen is Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Resources, Requirements, and Assessments. This article is adapted from his address at the U.S. Naval Institute–AFCEA West Exposition and Conference in January 2002.