Despite advanced technologies and highly trained operators, the Navy’s reliance on instant and ubiquitous communications is a potential liability. Simply put, the service has become addicted to bandwidth and the enormous amount of information that flows through it. It has built an expectation of continuous and near-perfect information exchanges that depend on complex communications architectures with enormous pipes and global reach. So what happens to command and control (C2) when those pipes get clogged or cut? Mission command is the reflexive response, but in truth, the Navy does not know because of the very real challenges in doing what it would take to find out.
One of the Navy’s most significant C2 challenges is exchanging critical information between operational-level headquarters ashore and tactical headquarters afloat. The days of sending captains over the horizon with broad mission orders and the authorities to execute them are gone. Modern high-end warfare requires coordinated action across vast distances and disparate domains. The “control” part of C2 requires that subordinates know what is expected of them, but also that they provide sufficient information to support higher headquarters decision-making and coordination.1
Mission command certainly has a place in the Navy’s toolkit, but it will remain more an article of faith than a demonstrated concept until the Navy understands the implications of and acknowledges in training and doctrine the limits to real-time information flow in a modern fight. It is a worthy vision, but not a tested practice.
C2 and Mission Command
To be effective, the operational-level commander must have greater insight than subordinate commanders into what is required to win the day.2 This more holistic picture allows the operational commander to make four basic contributions to the tactical fight:
• Intent. The operational-level commander must ensure subordinate commanders understand the desired end state and their roles in achieving it. This will reduce the effects of fog and friction and ensure tactical actions are directed toward operational objectives. Intent is the linchpin of mission command.
• Battlespace awareness. Information on force dispositions, capabilities, and intentions flows from above and below into the maritime operations center, where it is fused, analyzed, and pushed back out in tactically relevant formats and on tactically relevant time lines.
• Logistics and sustainment. The operational commander’s primary role here is to prioritize and allocate war-fighting material and personnel over broad expanses so tactical commanders have what they need when they need it. This is especially challenging when logistics forces operate in different communications environments and use different communication means than do tactical forces.
• Coordination and advocacy on behalf of tactical forces. Tactical outcomes increasingly are dependent on services and effects controlled and/or provided at the combatant and national command levels. Tactical commanders depend on communications services and require cyber and space effects (offensive and defensive) over which they have little control and no authority. The operational commander must ensure tactical forces receive required services and that offensive or defensive effects are coordinated to achieve maximum impact.
These contributions are the building blocks subordinate commanders require to achieve mission objectives and operational-level commanders have the responsibility to provide. So it follows that successful modern naval warfare requires a C2 system, including technologies and procedures, that supports the information flow required to make these contributions in any communications environment.
The Message vs. the Medium
Admiral Robert “Rat” Willard’s assertion that the Navy made a mistake in combining command and control with communications and computers (and now cyber) was prescient.3 C2 products, including requirements, orders, operational pictures, intelligence, and much more, travel up and down the chain of command in various data formats using communications systems, but those systems are merely enablers. Command and control is the goal, and it is judged by different metrics than the speed and quantity of bits and bytes.
That is a key point. The Navy communicates to exchange information; some of it vital, some of it trivial, and most of it perishable in a modern maritime fight. This information can be passed in a variety of ways, but the common thread is that the significance is in the message, not the medium. This is important because focusing on the medium will drive technical solutions, while focusing on the message points to procedural and doctrinal solutions. Both are necessary. Neither is sufficient in itself.
The Navy needs enhanced technologies, but they are part of the familiar threat/counterthreat dialectic that applies to all warfare capabilities wherein the Navy gains an advantage that the adversary eventually overcomes, which the Navy then counters, and so on. Technical solutions, as necessary as they are, require constant investment, typically involve long lead times, and have limited shelf lives; and the enemy gets a vote on their effectiveness. There also are challenges in implementing technical solutions, not the least of which is that the operational-level commander does not “own” and cannot independently maneuver his or her operational C2 system. Supporting/supported relationships can get dicey when one commander sees the system as a tool to achieve an immediate local objective and the “enterprise” owner sees it as an enduring strategic requirement that must be preserved at all costs.
Procedural or doctrinal solutions last longer, and the enemy gets less of a vote in their implementation and outcomes. In fact, the point is to put in place procedures that endure despite enemy actions and that can get inside the adversary’s decision cycle. In the context of C2, that en-tails focusing on the information being communicated rather than the medium used to communicate it—in other words, focusing on what information has to be exchanged and how to keep it to the absolute minimum while ensuring the operational-level commander can contribute to the fight and that the fight can go on even when the operational commander is cut out of the loop.
The need to exchange information is not new. What is new is the ability to do it across the globe and at the speed of light. This capability and the resultant surge in the quantity of information available undoubtedly has resulted in enormous efficiencies and more precise outcomes. But instant and detailed communication does not prepare naval leaders to make hard decisions with imperfect information or train forces for the conditions they are likely to encounter in a high-end fight.
Barriers to C2 Resiliency
Reducing the Navy’s reliance on the ever-increasing volume and fidelity of information will be hard for a variety of reasons, which can be broadly categorized as technical, training, and cultural factors.
• Technical: The Navy always will (and should) be in search of technical advantage, but that advantage always will be temporary and may even be obsolete before it is fielded. Counting on a deus ex machina solution when normal communications go dark is a losing proposition. A technical obsession also may divert the Navy’s attention from “the very thing that has made us the most powerful fighting force in the world—our collective initiative stemming from a commander’s fundamental duty to maintain effective C2 over forces in war.”4
• Training: Training plans and events are full of compromises. Cost, schedules, safety, competing training objectives, and other factors dilute some areas and elevate others in an effort to get the greatest bang for the buck. In the end, though, if exercises do not reflect what the Navy can expect to see in the real world, they are sprinkling fairy dust on the conditions or threats likely to be encountered.
Training in a denied or degraded C2 environment makes achieving all other training objectives more difficult. For that reason, degraded C2 training objectives always will compete with whatever other areas a training event or exercise is designed to address. The question is whether the Navy really wants to explore whether its subordinates and superiors can last an hour, a day, a week, or more without a steady stream of PowerPoint briefs, video teleconferences, and other products; whether the operational commander has set the conditions for mission command to succeed in the absence of that steady stream of information.
The only way to assess this is to exercise in an actual communications-denied environment. An exercise degraded C2 environment should be the backdrop against which all other training objectives must be achieved, rather than just one more training objective that competes with all the others for time and attention.
• Culture: Operating effectively in a degraded C2 environment is a long-term challenge that will require changes from how the Navy has done business in the relatively threat-benign era since the end of the Cold War. The systems and processes the peacetime Navy has developed for C2 are trending toward increased consolidation and specialization to achieve lower costs and greater efficiencies. Unfortunately, efficient does not equate to effective when the shooting starts. An effective C2 architecture devolves as much authority to defend the system as possible to local commanders, segregates networks to protect critical enclaves and prevent lateral movement of threats, and provides redundancy across the board to prevent single-point failures.
The Navy is good at executing the current mission and gaining efficiencies from existing capabilities. It also is pretty good at identifying mission gaps and creating iteratively better capabilities to fill them. But recent initiatives notwithstanding, the Navy rarely rewards and is not structured to develop the ideas or tolerate the disruptions and inevitable failures that radical innovation produces, at least not at the deckplates. Many factors conspire to inhibit the ideas and experimentation the service will need to break out of the current threat/counterthreat dialectic and reduce its long-term vulnerability to denied or degraded command and control, including:
• A perceived need for high-fidelity bandwidth-hogging information products
• Increasingly centralized C2 systems and authorities
• A zero-defect evaluation and promotion system
• Risk-averse cyber training scenarios
• Uneven progress in resilient C2 planning and training
• Joint procedures based on relatively static battlefields where the United States controls the operational tempo
The Navy needs to mitigate some training, procedural, and technological shortfalls in the short run, but to be successful in the long run, it must challenge some assumptions and reexamine a culture that has developed over two decades of unchallenged maritime and electromagnetic spectrum superiority. In particular, it must reassess its attitude toward risk tolerance and shift its focus from what may be lost to what may be gained.5 Initiative and learning are both stifled in a milieu that does not tolerate failure, and so “failing up” should not just be tolerated, it should be rewarded.
The double-edged sword
Today’s society is information-driven, with a constant flow of data pouring from screens of every size, shape, and color. But instant information is a two-edged sword. When it is available and reliable, it can facilitate precision and timeliness. But it also can be a crutch and an addiction that, if denied or even degraded, can result in paralysis or errors that put mission objectives at risk. Right now, the Navy is able to choose which edge of that sword to use, but it may not always have that luxury. A future fight may require it to be equally proficient with either the sharp or the blunt edge.
Admiral Willard, in his article on C2, said, “One day, the U.S. military is going to encounter an enemy who is multidimensional, well equipped, well trained, willing to fight, and intending to win. When that day comes, the commanders who are best trained to exert exacting control over their forces to relentlessly advance their plans will win the day—every time.”6 Many would argue that day has arrived, but the Navy’s vision for “control” is not yet clear.
1. This article shares Admiral Robert Willard’s definitions of “command” as a doctrinal authority and “control” as guiding the operation. ADM Robert F. Willard, USN, “Rediscover the Art of Command and Control,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 128, no. 10 (October 2002), 53.
2. Ibid. See also ADM Scott Swift, USN, “Master the Art of Command and Control,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 144, no. 2 (February 2018), 31.
3. Willard, “Rediscover the Art of Command and Control,” 52.
4. Swift, “Master the Art of Command and Control,” 30.
5. Milan Vego, “Mission Command and Zero Tolerance,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 144, no. 7 (July 2018), 61.
6. Willard, “Rediscover the Art of Command and Control,” 54.
Commander Graham is a retired A-6 bombardier/navigator and F-14 radar intercept officer.