Regardless of the era, naval units must be capable of operating in a contested environment. The U.S. Navy has always recognized the need to avoid adversary targeting. Continuing with Operations Haystack and UPTIDE in the Cold War, the Navy understood the need to limit electronic emissions to prevent adversary surveillance and reconnaissance. Now, in the face of adversary antiaccess/area-denial systems, naval units must be able to operate within the adversary’s weapons engagement zone while minimizing the risk of detection and targeting. Today, these efforts are referred to as counter–intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting (C-ISRT).
Platforms Must be Multimission Capable
One frequently overlooked nuance of today’s renewed C-ISRT focus is that these efforts are largely worthless if they cannot be coordinated with other warfare areas. No benefit is received from hiding in the vast ocean if forces do not simultaneously possess the ability to hold the adversary at risk. Too often, C-ISRT is seen as only the end goal. For strategic competition, C-ISRT is the enabling effort that supports all other missions. Success in any warfare area will require full integration with C-ISRT operations and maneuvers.
For the past 15 years, the U.S. Navy strove to build information warfare (IW) proficiency independent of the other warfare areas. As IW evolutions were seen as being “in conflict” or “mutually exclusive” with other warfare areas, IW leaders deconflicted by offsetting their schedules. As IW did not depend on weather or daylight, this led to IW evolutions being conducted in the middle of the night. Thus, IW’s C-ISRT evolutions rarely affected anyone beyond the overnight watchstanders—a small fraction of the strike group’s crew.
Once naval units reach the integrated training phase before deployment, commanders must be doing more than a superficial integration across platforms. It is important units work together, but naval forces also must strive to integrate across warfare areas. Ships and aircraft have long been advertised as multimission platforms, so they should be able to work for multiple warfare commanders simultaneously. It is no longer acceptable to operate in a single warfare area at a time. The requirement to conduct antisubmarine warfare while also launching a strike package has been well understood for decades. Now, forces need to get better at conducting information warfare C-ISRT in coordination with other warfare areas. Strike group units must fight in multiple domains simultaneously to survive.
To meet this goal, IW planners must use the training cycle to acclimate units to supporting multiple warfare commanders at the same time. Planners should seek friction between warfare commanders throughout the training cycle. C-ISRT evolutions must be scheduled at all hours of the day, ensuring IW requirements will overlap with those of other warfare areas. Commanders must understand the limitations of a given C-ISRT posture, practice prioritizing threats in a dynamic environment, and understand how to respond to a threat in one warfare area while minimizing the risk incurred in another. IW professionals need a proficient understanding of weapon systems, emitters, and the threat and must understand where these systems overlap and where they conflict with other warfare commander’s objectives. The IW team must be a presence among the other warfare commanders. Only then can IW leaders refine commander’s priorities and preplanned responses to ensure mutual understanding across warfare areas, enable mission command, and meet commander’s intent.
In addition, the information warfare commanders (IWCs) afloat must be more stubborn in standing by their IW requirements. In the past, IWCs (or their disparate strike group predecessors prior to the establishment of the IWC billets) have been encouraged to compromise their requirements in the face of opposition from other warfare commanders. Deployment certification requirements required only a basic IW proficiency, and further initiative was discouraged as too dangerous or too time consuming.
Conversations among warfare commanders today could be identical to feedback from the 1969–72 UPTIDE experiments:
The carrier community was not enthusiastic about the sometimes dangerous deceptive procedures used in UPTIDE. Those procedures included launching and recovering aircraft in low wind-over-deck conditions to keep the carrier below cavitation speed and flying at night under EmCon to a marshalling point in order to receive a vector to the carrier as much as one hundred miles away.1
Unilateral IW compromise in C-ISRT requirements is ill-advised. IWCs must be confident in understanding how an adversary’s sensors align with their platforms’ emissions. IWCs must state requirements plainly and rely on the composite warfare commander (CWC) to adjudicate competing requirements from other warfare commanders. It is not acceptable for IWCs to compromise to ensure harmony. Such compromises incur risk for surveillance, detection, and targeting and are therefore decisions for the CWC.
The IWC as the Supported Commander
During carrier strike group operations, the nature of the assigned operation determines who is the supported warfare commander. For example, the sea combat commander is supported for antisubmarine warfare and the air defense commander for air defense. As the IWC position has gained increased importance, there have been some opportunities for an IWC to be the supported warfare commander for limited evolutions. These generally consist of an intelligence-focused collection opportunity or an isolated, time-constrained training event.
When an adversary can consistently hold U.S. units at risk, all warfare commanders can no longer receive an equal share of the spotlight. Instead, one of two situations exists: The IWC is a supporting commander, ensuring force survivability regardless of mission; or the IWC is the supported commander, assuming the survivability of limited platforms is a higher priority than eliminating a small fraction of the adversary’s force.
Given the range of the adversary’s antiaccess surveillance systems, the Navy’s C-ISRT effort will encompass the preponderance of the mission, often requiring days of C-ISRT operations and maneuver for the strike group to arrive on station undetected and likely requiring additional day(s) of C-ISRT operations and maneuver from that point to reset the force after mission completion. In addition, there will be more frequent evolutions during which maneuvering the force undetected is a greater priority than successfully striking the target. Only in the direst situations will the acceptable level of risk to the force be high enough that fleet commanders are willing to risk the loss of the aircraft carrier and air wing. If these losses are unacceptable, then C-ISRT becomes the primary mission. Thus, the Navy must grow accustomed to the IWC serving as the supported commander.
The principles of C-ISRT tactics, operations, and maneuvers have been in development since the 1950s. Similarly, the conflict between the IWC’s C-ISRT responsibilities and other warfare commander’s responsibilities remains a point of contention at every commander’s decision brief. Yet, C-ISRT must take priority if naval forces are to survive. Improvements in C-ISRT operations will come through repetition and experience. The Navy must train like it will fight, and that includes not deliberately separating IW evolutions from other warfare commander evolutions. They must overlap to gain proficiency in meeting all commanders’ requirements. The IWC’s role will continue to grow in importance as the adversary’s capabilities improve. Today, the IWC must be prepared to be the focus of every evolution.
1. Robert G. Angevine, “Innovation and Experimentation in the U.S. Navy: The UPTIDE Antisubmarine Warfare Experiments, 1969–72,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 28, no.1 (February 2005): 77–105.
