We live in an age of acceleration, a time when the pace of innovation is increasing as the effects of Moore’s law produce unexpected combinations of social, technological and environmental change at a tempo that often exceeds our ability to adapt.1 This evolving situation is a primary concern shaping contemporary Naval strategy. According to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John M. Richardson, “The pace of competition has accelerated in many areas, achieving exponential and disruptive rates of change. As this pace drives yet more unpredictability, the future is becoming more uncertain. . . . We cannot become overwhelmed by the blistering pace.”
Under these circumstances, it is hard to chart a response to acceleration—it is impossible for the Navy to incorporate every innovation or new technology that comes along. Unanswered questions remain about what is constant and what is changing when it comes to the strategy, operations, and tactics of war at sea. What overriding goals drive the Navy’s response to this time of innovation? What should Navy officers keep in mind as change accelerates?
War at Sea: The Constants
A gunfight and a ship fight have one thing in common: The first side to put rounds on target usually wins. Everything about naval tactics, operations, and strategy has to begin with the fundamental goal of “attacking effectively first”; every innovation and technological opportunity has to be evaluated with this objective in mind.2 Artificial intelligence, robotics, nanoenergetics, additive manufacturing, and other new technologies become significant when they help the Navy do so. The guiding principle behind selecting and adapting innovations remains the same today as it was in the age of sail. What is different today is the speed of change.
Navy planners sometimes forget another constant as they deal with acceleration: Home-team innovations do not have to be perfect; they just have to be better than changes made by the other guy. Strategy, operations, and tactics are effective in a relative sense. Innovation can best be thought of as providing an edge in battle rather than as a surefire route to lopsided victory in every engagement. For this reason, innovations that misdirect an opponent’s fire or allow units to absorb some damage and continue to fight should not be dismissed out of hand. Small advances might produce big dividends and should not be ignored in favor of the “silver bullets” that always seem to lie just over the technological horizon.
Tactical and operational analysis, an unvarnished appreciation of technology and its limits, and a realistic strategy remain the sine qua non of war at sea. “Lanchester’s square law” of effectiveness cannot be neutralized on the fly once an engagement begins. It is important to figure things out in advance because tactics and operations that do not exploit Lanchester’s insights—or that fail to land that firepower pulse first—are virtually guaranteed to end in disaster, brave words and years spent at sea notwithstanding. Naval war is a “come as you are affair,” although acceleration guarantees that the accoutrements of naval combat change rapidly. Indeed, acceleration places a premium on analysis because of the myriad technologies emerging today, and their potential applications create pathways to victory for the side that exploits them to attack effectively first.
But current Navy culture does not accept the notion that prospects for victory are enhanced when Navy officers conduct research, spend more time in a classroom, explore analytical excursions and games, or undertake laboratory or field experimentation, despite the fact that acceleration demands analysis, evaluation of technology, and strategy.
Senior Navy officials understand this knowledge deficit exists. The “Education for Seapower” study led by Under Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly called for development of an officer corps capable of using the proliferation of technology that is occurring. This is not a static objective. Because the Navy is making inroads in developing in-house cyber expertise, for example, does not mean it can ignore the challenge of equipping the service to exploit robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, additive manufacturing, etc. The Navy’s evolving educational and research enterprise must equip future Navy officers with the knowledge and skill required to assess, adapt, and integrate new technologies into Navy operations before its opponents do.
War at Sea: The Changes
The competition inherent in the effort to attack effectively first has always occurred before the opening salvo of some engagement, but acceleration moves that competition to the left. Today’s Navy conducts only a minimal amount of basic research or concept development—the bulk of those activities long ago shifted to the private sector. Thus, Navy strategists now must monitor, assess, modify and exploit hundreds of commercially produced technologies, few of which were developed with naval applications in mind. Where once the Navy had significant control over which technologies were developed through research and development funding, now the Navy might be presented with a game-changing technology it never asked for or anticipated.
This is where the battle for the first shot begins. Everyone has ready access to new technology, concepts, and procedures, making intellectual laziness and a reluctance to incorporate change dangerous. It behooves the Navy to consider seriously how each item in the commercial innovation stream might be tapped to provide an advantage during war at sea.
Naval officers must be alert to another potential change produced by acceleration: Asymmetries in capabilities are more likely to emerge abruptly vis-à-vis opposing naval forces. This might not appear to be a new phenomenon. The broad sweep of naval history seems to be marked by long periods of equilibrium punctuated by significant changes: consider the transition from sail to steam; the development of breech-loading cannon with exploding shells; or the emergence of naval aviation.
Nevertheless, these seemingly “abrupt” changes actually unfolded over decades. For example, in 1910, the first U.S. Navy officer flew an airplane, but the Navy did not establish a Bureau of Aeronautics until 1921. A long-decade later (1934), it possessed four aircraft carriers, including the first purpose-built aircraft carrier, to use for technical, tactical, operational, and doctrinal development. Carrier innovation evolved at a leisurely pace.3 Despite the staggering challenges that had to be overcome to exploit naval aviation, the U.S. and Japanese navies fought the Battle of Midway with broadly similar tactics, ships, and aircraft. Innovation no longer unfolds so leisurely.
The moment may be approaching when conflicting sides might employ fundamentally different forces. Today, the Russian and Chinese militaries are deploying hypersonic missiles that can penetrate U.S. Navy missile defenses, asymmetric weapons that conceivably could neutralize what are, on balance, superior U.S. capabilities. In a broader asymmetric departure, China is developing underwater acoustic systems that might be used to coordinate attacks by swarms of cheap autonomous vehicles. The pathways to asymmetric forces are proliferating, and the pace of change is accelerating, which makes it increasingly likely that future engagements will not necessarily occur between relatively symmetrical forces.
All this makes it imperative that the Navy get out in front of the innovation curve. Put somewhat differently, the principle of “attacking effectively first,” does not mandate the use of similar platforms or weapons, despite our tendency to envision combat as something that occurs between similarly equipped opponents. Acceleration can produce important political and social changes that Navy strategists should consider; legacy systems, standard operating procedures, and organizational cultures might reflect settings that are rapidly fading into the past.
A critical geopolitical change of immediate concern is that today’s opponents are preparing to fight at sea, and few if any currently serving Navy officers have encountered this situation during their careers. As Wayne Hughes and Robert Girrier note, for decades “U.S. maritime supremacy was so certain that with the rarest of exceptions no enemy had dared to target American ships at sea. The result has permitted one-sided operations in which the U.S. Fleet delivered its combat power without any enemy response. . . .”4
That situation is rapidly coming to an end. Naval officers have to come to terms with how strategic and operational perspectives—along with organizational culture and preferences—must change to accommodate the new operating environment. Organizations everywhere are finding it difficult to keep up with the pace of change. Bureaucracy qua bureaucracy is deteriorating, as demands for agility and innovation are increasing, but as anyone who currently serves in the government knows, agencies are becoming increasingly sclerotic as training, compliance, and audit requirements proliferate, pushing mission into the background.
Professor James Russell notes that, in the Navy, the effects of this deterioration are evident in “an ever-widening chasm between a ponderous ship-development and acquisition cycle and the pace of change in technologies.”5 Acceleration itself might not be diminishing organizational capacity, although “innovative” ways to monitor the workforce or to memorialize routine matters in digital media are drowning out valuable work. Nevertheless, the demand for rapid innovation highlights how financial, acquisition, and personnel systems, which each embrace an endless series of training and auditability requirements, are out of step with the pace of change today.
Opportunities: Low-Hanging Fruit
The term “innovation” often conjures up utopian visions of a better future that preserves the best things about today while improving the rest. In this imagery, strategic insight is combined with operational and tactical analysis to select promising technology and innovative applications that are then adopted seamlessly into existing customs and procedures. The missing ingredient from this utopian vision is time—it takes time for humans to adapt to change. The changes produced by accelerating innovation will be disruptive if for no other reason than they emerge at a pace that severely tests the human and organizational capacity to change. The Navy must develop a culture of innovation to respond to the need for rapid innovation. The best way to do that might be to apply existing technologies and systems innovatively, to respond to emerging threats.
The Sea Hunter, the Navy’s medium-displacement unmanned surface vehicle (MDUSV) that has recently completed testing, might make a good counter to the hypersonic missile threat emerging on the horizon, for example. In a defense role, the Sea Hunter could simulate various electronic signatures, misdirecting an opponent’s pulse of firepower toward low-value targets (i.e., itself). In an offensive role, the Sea Hunter could be armed, which would give the opponent a pressing reason to target the autonomous ships.
To succeed at either task, the legal, administrative, command, logistical, and tactical details of Sea Hunter operations need to be worked out. This makes it absolutely imperative that the Navy promptly purchase and deliver to several destroyer squadrons (DesRons) enough Sea Hunters to begin working out those details. The idea that a DesRon might actually include more than a few functional combatants, or units that could be employed in deliberately risky escapades, would create operational and tactical opportunities that have not existed for decades. Real innovation has always occurred in this manner. The Army Air Corps turned over the task of figuring out how to deliver an atomic bomb to a colonel; the Navy really should turn over the task of figuring out how to fight the Sea Hunter to a few captains. There are many strategists, analysts, and technicians across the Navy who would be eager to help.
Overcome the Reluctance
The constants, changes, opportunities, challenges, and emerging requirements produced by the age of acceleration have been articulated time and again by senior Navy officers. And the Navy actually has a good track record when it comes to working with the latest technology. In fact, if you were to devise a “do’s-and-don’ts” checklist from this essay, the Sea Hunter would be identified as an innovation with significant potential, one recognized by the Navy. Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work spoke at the 2016 christening of the Sea Hunter about how the autonomous vessel might be used in an innovative way by the Navy. Work noted that “we might be able to put a six pack or a four pack of missiles on them. Now imagine 50 of these distributed and operating together under the hands of a flotilla commander. This is going to be a Navy unlike any navy in history, a human-machine collaborative battle fleet that will confound our enemies.” Sea Hunter, in Work’s vision, is indeed an exquisite weapon because it creates a discernible way for the Navy to attack effectively first.
Sea Hunter holds out the possibility of providing the Navy with a low-cost way to move some firepower out of the 11 baskets of carrier aviation where it now resides. The distributed lethality the Sea Hunter represents is difficult for the opponent to target, while the fact that any one platform is expendable opens up new opportunities for surveillance and deception. The tactical and operational opportunities created by this new platform could bring about a new type of surface warfare. Ironically, the need to distribute lethality to bolster carrier aviation has long been recognized in Navy circles, although the geopolitical setting of the immediate post–Cold War period reduced the urgency behind the effort.6 The Sea Hunter looks as if it could be the first Navy innovation success story in today’s age of acceleration.
There is only one glitch. After the prototype checked out in testing, the Navy placed an order for just the second Sea Hunter—in 2017.7 Despite clear direction from the CNO and compelling evidence that it is necessary, there still seems to be a reluctance in the Navy to innovate.
1. Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
2. CAPT Wayne P. Hughes Jr., USN (Ret.) and RADM Robert P. Girrier, USN (Ret.), Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations, Third Edition (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2018), 3.
3. George W. Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy 1890–1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 135–145.
4. Hughes and Girrier, Fleet Tactics, 144.
5. James A. Russell, “Bureaucracy, Innovation, and Maritime Strategy: The Problem of 21st Century Fleet Design,” in James A. Russell and Alessio Patalano (eds.), Maritime Strategy and Naval Innovation: Technology, Bureaucracy and the Problem of Change in an Age of Competition (Forthcoming).
6. Since the mid-1980s, Wayne Hughes has been calling for the Navy to develop low-cost pulse missile firepower delivered by surface combatants to diversify the Navy’s offensive capabilities. With Sea Hunter, the technology to accomplish this mission has arrived.
7. The fact that the second autonomous vessel has actually been designated “Sea Hunter II,” suggests that the scope and nature of the program is not entirely appreciated by those surrounding it.