Corbett’s Maritime Strategy
Bring Back The Merchant Marine And Shipyards
Both Dr. Romar and Captain Walker make good points. Romar states the purpose of a wartime navy is “commerce prevention.” Captain Walker then outlines how the United States had already lost the battle after the fleet’s first salvo and exhausted its magazines.
We have so few “bottoms” within our merchant marine, with a number sailing under a foreign flag to avoid strict crewing, licensing, equipment regulations, taxes, etc.
Has the United States already surrendered the battle of “commerce prevention” when hostilities commence? Will our vital imports and exports still be available, or will foreign-flag merchantmen remain in port rather than risk extinction?
—CAPT John J. Marks, USCGR (Ret.), Life Member
Review & Commentary—
The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War
Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War
Captain Byron states that the all-volunteer force lost two wars. The force wins battles, not wars. We fight where and when we are directed by higher authority, whether it be those with commissions or those with elected power. It is their job to win wars.
We volunteers are the best and brightest. We’re smarter and more motivated, and we fight harder and with purpose. We sacrificed university scholarships to join the force. We left our blood and body parts in foreign places so our neighbors would live in peace. We answered the call, and we won every battle the brass sent us into and came out with our honor intact. If we were misdirected, then what is to prevent the misdirection of a group of unwilling servants with unknown motives? Was the almost-all-draftee force of Vietnam somehow immune to mishandling and losing wars?
A poor workman blames his tools. Don’t blame the hammer. We struck hard, and we didn’t miss.
—Tim Duff
The Coast Guard Needs Stronger Policy To Prevent Maritime Cyber-Attacks
I applaud Lieutenant Ault for thoughtfully exploring one of the most pressing issues facing the service and our nation—the rising cybersecurity threat. The 2021 U.S. Coast Guard Cyber Strategic Outlook highlights the importance of the Marine Transportation System (MTS) to our national economy (25 percent of U.S. GDP) and national security (enables hard/soft power projection) and makes protection of this critical infrastructure the central pillar in the Coast Guard’s cybersecurity strategy.
As Lieutenant Ault notes, the key strength of the Coast Guard strategy is recognizing that cybersecurity is an operational risk best addressed by existing prevention and response capabilities. For too long, cyber has been thought of as an IT or administrative issue versus an operational imperative. Under the Commandant’s leadership, we are strengthening our operational approach but acknowledge we still have work to do.
For example, while we built specialized technical capabilities in our cyber protection teams and recently began staffing MTS cyber billets in the field, we must also provide frontline forces the ability to manage cyber risks. We must continue to develop our workforce and deliver policy and capability to take action at the lowest level.
We have taken key steps to build momentum. Lieutenant Ault calls for a cyber-focused industry working group. In December 2021, the Coast Guard hosted the first meeting of the new National Maritime Security Advisory Committee. Our cyber strategy calls for a risk-based regulatory, compliance, and assessment regime to address malicious activities highlighted in the article. In December 2021, an MTS Cyber Task Force was established to drive and integrate policy and standards development across organizational lines. That team is preparing a request for information to engage the public and industry on cyber standards. In addition, we looked beyond domestic industry and leveraged our international leadership role to implement cyber risk management requirements on all ships trading internationally through the International Maritime Organization.
Last, Lieutenant Ault thoughtfully links electronic spoofing and misinformation to cybersecurity. This is a reminder that information warfare, electronic warfare (e.g., counter–unmanned aerial systems), and cybersecurity are interlaced challenges in our information age operating environment. Like the parable on systems thinking, rather than continuing to think of these as unique issues—e.g., a spear, a rug, or a snake—we must see them as the whole elephant. Thankfully, our junior officers are as unconstrained by our organizational stovepipes as our adversaries.
Congratulations to Lieutenant Ault on her award-winning essay.
—RADM John W. Mauger, Assistant Commandant for Prevention Policy, USCG
Mahan And Corbett Will Not Inform A Modern Strategy For China
I am honored to have Dr. Benson reference my 2020 Proceedings article to springboard his own theories. However, after reading his article, I am left with lasting questions.
We agree that “the trap strategists must avoid is importing time-specific strategic prescriptions when looking at the general logic:” also, that we must be cautious when reading “historically important strategists as educational tools [because they] can also inadvertently encourage students to treat
their texts authoritatively.” There is indeed danger in drawing false and anachronous parallels between past
and future.
Yet, Dr. Benson goes too far in his sweeping dismissal of naval theorists. As I wrote: “Mahan cannot solve the problems of today, but his work perhaps serves as a better guide for asking the right questions.” That is why we read history: to help us think about complexity and ask the right questions for today.
Dr. Benson argues that U.S. naval action to undermine the Chinese economy would so pressure the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party that it would provoke a nuclear response. Instead, the United States and China should duke it out mainly in the cyber domain. He writes: “The United States and China have important interests in cyberspace, but none are so important (at least for now) that they are likely to provoke nuclear war.” Really? Why the presumption that action in cyberspace will not provoke “kinetic” war? To me, it seems that systematic cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and government institutions walk the same tightrope between competition and war and target exactly the same economic foundations as a naval blockade.
Dr. Benson further suggests that any form of kinetic action could “create a nuclear crisis.” Economic coercion by the Navy against China’s national prosperity “might seem like a military victory, but once China’s national life is under threat, so is the well-being of the people who control China’s nuclear weapons.” Again, what is the difference between maritime victory and cyber victory? Why might U.S. victory in one domain trigger a nuclear response but not in the other?
Following Dr. Benson’s logic, what is the purpose of the U.S. Air Force in a conflict with China? Has he not provided a good argument for dissolving the Air Force, and especially its strategic bomber force? One of the beauties of a maritime assault against an enemy’s economic foundations is that it may be ramped up or down according to political need; i.e., the Navy can adjust how many commercial vessels it intends to capture. Compared with Air Force B-1 and B-52 bombers, the Marine Corps (and the Navy) are the epitome of subtlety and measured response.
—1stLt Matthew Suarez, USMC
How To Absorb The Marine Corps Into The Army And Navy
Commander Denny springboards his argument on a singular statement by Lieutenant General Victor Krulak taken out of context. To suggest the Marine Corps is irrelevant simply because Krulak said the nation “wants” a Marine Corps, but does not necessarily need one, is ridiculous. General Krulak, of all people, would have vigorously defended the Marine Corps’ combat worthiness—which is highlighted by its powerful air-ground team. Indeed, Krulak, an infantry officer, was influential in developing vertical assault tactics.
Commander Denny is correct in saying that the other services are “fully capable of close-air support.” The big question is, do the other services, institutionally, want to do close-air support considering their present force structures? The Air Force’s priority and ethos is the strategic application of aviation, and the Navy’s aviation prioritizes supporting and defending the fleet. The idea of the Army taking up the rotary-wing/tiltrotor Marine Corps mission is quite a remarkable proposition. Since when does the Army operate from ships?
As for public opinion, which Commander Denny thinks is vitally important, both the Air Force and naval aviation—deservedly—have great public reputations. Marine aviation, he says, is practically invisible to the public. And he is correct. But why does that matter? Marine aviators historically, and today, have been content to be Marines and support ground operations. Because of the close integration with Marine infantry, Marine air does not draw attention to itself as an independent service or element. The “every Marine a rifleman” ethos makes Marine aviators the acknowledged specialists in close-air support and other tactics that support ground combat. As Marine Corps General Roy Geiger said in 1949 while testifying before Congress in defense of Marine Corps aviation: “We have never acquired the view that to support another arm in performance of a service to the country was to suffer either indignity or loss of prestige.”
—Maj Fred H. Allison, USMC (Ret.)
Toward A Unified Maritime Warfare Strategy
Another “school” of Naval Strategy was promulgated by the late Samuel P. Huntington in his article “National Policy and the Transoceanic Navy,” published in the May 1954 Proceedings. In this article, Huntington asserted that Mahan was no longer relevant since the U.S. Navy had achieved command of the sea following the end of World War II.
This new Huntington transoceanic strategy gained prominence during the Eisenhower administration and its so-called “New Look” defense policy, based on massive retaliation that gave nuclear weapons and their delivery systems (bombers, carriers, ICBMs, SLBMs) primacy over more conventional weapons systems. The Huntington school even continued to offer utility to the Kennedy-Johnson administrations and their flexible response defense policy, as the strategic gap between the United States and Soviet Union began to narrow during the 1960s.
Only when the Soviet Union began deploying its navy in more blue-water operations and began to threaten U.S. command of the sea did Mahan and Corbett suddenly return to relevance. The result was the 1986 Maritime Strategy that challenged the Soviets’ strategic bastions and deterred their navy from initiating a Third Battle of the Atlantic.
Following the end of the Cold War, without a near-peer blue-water competitor, the U.S. Navy found itself entwined in a neo-Huntington strategy of littoral warfare and joint operations. With the rise of the People’s Liberation Army Navy and the resurgence of the Russian Navy, a return to Mahan and Corbett may be long overdue from a naval strategic point of view.
—Marc C. DeLamater
Forward Battle Damage Repair Keeps Ships In The Fight
I enjoyed Commander Prouty’s article but wonder about a few of the ship’s repair aspects that he did not mention—specifically the mission of naval submarine and destroyer tenders (and even battleship repair shops). In conjunction with mobile drydocks, these repair ships could allow a severely damaged ship to regain mobility to achieve more significant repairs. I also realize that the Navy decommissioned most—if not all—of the repair ships in service during the 1980s.
—CWO3 William G. Nesbitt, USN (Ret.), 7131 designator
Drinking From The Fetid Well: Data Poisoning And Machine Learning
Contrary to Lieutenant Galle’s characterization, data poisoning is no new technical challenge. What is new, however, is the urgency of securing against attacks and the challenges of incentivizing good security across public and private partners.
Data poisoning was the earliest adversarial machine learning (ML) attack to be theoretically explored. In 1993, researchers explored how an adversary might embed “malicious errors in the examples given to a learning algorithm.” In the 2000s, the email spam and cybersecurity arms races drove data poisoning research, spurring work on defending internet worm classifiers, network security models, spam filters, and countermeasures.
While the examples listed by Lieutenant Galle are in fact evasion attacks, there are some publicly documented real data-poisoning attacks. Examples include the VirusTotal malware detector attack and the 2016 attack on Microsoft’s chatbot Tay. Coordinated public documentation efforts by the Partnership on AI and independent researchers indicate a rapid increase in AI failures. A 2019 Gartner report estimated that 30 percent of cyberattacks would involve data poisoning, model theft, or adversarial examples by 2022.
Increased data sharing and model reuse, as well as the incorporation of open-source code and models, heighten the risk of spreading the damage from a data poisoning attack. Supporting aims “to harness the power of data” and leverage data and models as “strategic assets” through increased data and model sharing exacerbates this danger (e.g., “The National AI R&D Strategic Plan: 2019 Update,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Academic Institution Module Initiative).
Technical challenges are being addressed through efforts such as NIST’s Taxonomy and Terminology of Adversarial ML. But the effectiveness of technical defenses hinges on incentivizing implementation and good security practices.
Questions for policymakers will be: How to balance the risk of cascading impacts from data poisoning against the value of data sharing? How to incentivize good security measures from private sector partners (e.g., adaptation of existing cybersecurity frameworks, vulnerability reporting, and procurement processes)? And how to increase information sharing and awareness of the threat?
—Morgan Livingston
Can-Do Is Not Working
Combined with the earlier article about fatigue by watch standers, Lieutenant Zeberlein’s piece really struck home why we call it “standing watch.” If you fall asleep while standing up on watch, you will wake up when you strike the deck on the bridge. I know this to be true because it happened to me twice.
—CAPT Ralph A. Hotton, USN (Ret.)
