School of War - Ep 105: Dmitry Filipoff on Modern Naval Tactics

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

Dmitry Filipoff, head of online content at the Center for International Maritime Security, joins the show to talk about modern naval tactics and the readiness of the U.S. Navy for a surface engagement with the PLA Navy. ▪️ Times      •    01:26 Introduction      •    02:48 Evolution in naval warfare     •    05:46 Historical comps      •    08:01 Lessons from the Red Sea     •    09:37 Anti-ship missiles     •    12:16 DMO - Distributed Maritime Operations      •    15:00 What is the surface Navy’s purpose?     •    20:00 Massing fires     •    22:33 Defeating missile defenses     •    29:25 Scarcity and the network     •    34:12 Can the dynamic change?     •    37:13 Aircraft carriers     •    40:14 Is the U.S. Navy ready?      •    44:36 Exercises     •    47:51 Institutional knowledge     •    49:38 Is the PLAN ready? A FLEET ADRIFT: THE MOUNTING RISKS OF THE U.S. NAVY’S FORCE DEVELOPMENT Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

How is combat at sea actually going to work if there is a great power war, say, between the U.S. and China, within the next decade? What does the evolution of precision standoff weapons mean for naval tactics? How is the U.S. Navy doing in its preparations? How about the Chinese? It's back to war fighting on School of War today. As we get into what fleet tactics look like or could look like, they're sure to evolve in the crucible of battle in 2024. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today, Dmitri Philipoff.

He is the head of online content at the Center for International Maritime Security. He's written some really thought-provoking pieces about naval tactics, operations, strategy in SimSex publications. And Dimitri, I'm delighted to have you on the show today. Thank you for having me, Aaron. So let's start really big picture because you've written things that are big picture. So I think this is fair game. I'm going to make an assertion. You feel free to sort of challenge the premise here.

But my assertion is the United States surface fleet effectively last fought a war, as most people would understand the term war. In 1945, there's a general expectation that there's going to be another war here pretty soon, probably in the Pacific, where the United States surface fleet will play an important, if not the central role. There's obviously been plenty of fighting on the surface of the seas between 1945 and today to include a lot of fighting by the U.S. Navy.

And I feel like a lot of listening, I mean, I'm not a naval guy. So I feel like, you know, a lot of listeners, like I can picture surface naval warfare because I can picture, you know, World War II movies, essentially. And, you know, in the era where planes launched from carriers and submarines and ships for the most part were, you know, activating their weapon systems

with eyes on the adversary, right? and a series of tactics and operational concepts that flowed from that reality. The new reality in whatever year it's going to be, 2024, 5, 6, 7, 8 will look very different. My first question to you is, what are the big evolutions that have occurred over the course of America's holiday from major surface war? Thank you for that question. There's been an absolutely tremendous amount of change in terms of capability, in terms of tactics. And as you rightly point out, you know, the lack of experience and the lack of seeing a lot of the stuff actually playing out in the real world and real world operations.

There are so many capabilities. You know, you could pick out, you know, electronic warfare, cyber space. All of this has had a tremendous impact on how a major war at sea would be fought. But we don't actually know too well with how all of that's actually going to come together to produce specific tactical dynamics and combinations. What kinds of capabilities and methods are going to be superior in that? And so, you know, we don't really know with, I think, a lot of confidence of just how a lot of this warfighting is going to work out. You know, when you ask that question, a certain quote comes to mind that was made by Navy Captain Tom Schugart, where he made an interesting point saying, you know, if U.S. Navy jammers can be made to make China's anti-ship ballistic missiles consistently miss,

that's a completely different war than if that were not the case. And there are so many different variables like that, probably dozens of variables of capability of methods, where if you just take just one thing and it goes in a different direction, you have a completely different kind of conflict. And so there's just a lot of unknowns there. You know, I would say not just of the surface fleet, but with the Navy in general. I think naval aviation does have the benefit of the Vietnam experience was a very hard wake-up call for them in a lot of respects. And they learned a lot from that. But I think you are right to folks on the Surface Navy.

and their state of experience and understanding here. And it's important to think about then specifically because if you think about war of China, the surface Navy is going to bring most of the maritime air defense capability and most of the maritime long-range cruise missile launch capability as well. And so a lot of the firepower that the U.S. Navy can bring to that contingency is going to be based on the surface fleet.

And so you're right that there is a lot of writing on them. So let's, I want to get into the specifics of how you envision like the major conceptual scenario is working out in the present day in a minute. But before we get to that, I mean, you highlight how other services or even other components of the Navy have historical experiences they can latch on to. Obviously, in the ground context, you know, not only are there historical experiences that our services have directly participated in, but we can watch today. You know, you can watch the war in Ukraine and kind of see what drone integration and counter

UAS stuff looks like, right? There's a naval component in Ukraine as well in the Black Sea. There are other, you know, within the last generation, plenty of other naval engagements. I mean, if you go back to the 80s, obviously we have the tanker wars. You've got the Falklands. Like you've got, you've got, you know, stuff that is closer to the present day, such that technology is relevant. What historical examples do you think are most relevant when thinking about surface combat,

the kind of surface combat we're likely to see, like, where are you going, where should people be going to mine insights for the president? Yeah, it's hard to say. There's three examples that stand out. The first one, I think, is the Arab-Israeli War in 1973 was the first time you saw ships dueling with anti-ship missiles in a pretty kind of, you know, consistent way. Basically, Israeli missile boats fighting Arab missile boats. You saw uses of electronic warfare being used to spoof attacks and defeat attacks without

any sort of, you know, kinetic counters to incoming missiles. So that was a very interesting experience because it's the first real case we have of these missiles being used in a force-unforce kind of conflict. But that said, and this is true of almost every single case of anti-ship missile warfare that has happened, since the capability was invented, as that involved very low volumes of fire. We're talking a couple missiles fired per ship at most. When you look at how high-end naval conflict has been envisioned since the 60s and 70s, and you're talking about the Soviets in the U.S. Navy, you're talking much larger volumes of fire. and 100 plus missiles going up for a carrier battle group.

And so it kind of plays into this theme of the deficit of experience that we really haven't seen large-scale missile warfare, even though we've seen a little bit of any ship missiles being used. The second good example is the Falklands. You know, you see a lot of interesting combined arms naval warfighting examples there. You know, lots of unexpected, you know, surprises and just in terms of how well the Argentines were able to, you know, damage the British and seeing British warships,

just how poorly British warships did in some respects when it comes to air defense. there were some interesting examples there that I think are definitely instructive. And the most interesting one to me is actually one that's taking place right now, which is the attacks in the Red Sea. Where you're seeing, you're seeing for the first time, I'm pretty sure ever, where you're seeing large-scale sort of salvo engagements between warships and missiles and drones, right? You're talking a dozen plus missiles and drones being launched, and you're seeing U.S. Navy warships having a shoot down,

a relatively large scale volume of fire compared to the historical experience. And so we're still, you know, in the middle of that, it's still a pretty new experience and there's still a lot of lessons learned, but I think we should be minding that very carefully for lessons about what this kind of conflict will look like. Well, let's linger there for a second.

What are we learning? What are you learning watching the day to day right now in the Red Sea? Yeah, it's hard to say exactly because a lot of the details are, you know, they're hard to perceive. You know, when you talk about naval war, It's not like, you know, in land warfare where you can have embedded journalists, you can have videos on telegram or something, right? Like, we're at sea is remote.

And so you have a harder time getting open-sourced out on what exactly is going on. So you have to rely on a lot on what the government's willing to say. And it's interesting to see basically these large-scale missile attacks being launched against commercial vessels, and the U.S. is putting itself in a position to intervene there. So maybe not so much in terms of combat lessons learned, but in terms of as an element of strategy, where we can use the U.S. Navy ships as a way to kind of launch limited intervention into the strike campaign of another country or another entity. That's kind of an interesting strategic innovation for the surface fleet. You know, where we're basically going to put ships in the position

of shooting down someone else's missiles and attacks, even though they're, even if they're not directed at those ships exactly. So I think that's a strategic innovation that I think is probably worth considering. I mean, I want to ask you like a really, it's a stupid question. But I feel like your answer to it is going to be interesting, which is given, given, you know, how we, we all expect that anti-ship missiles one way or another are going to be at the center. They are at the center of the story right now. They're going to be at the center of the story of any kind of major naval engagement in the Pacific. What does that mean? Like what does the rise to significance of anti-ship missiles mean for naval warfare?

Yeah. Yeah, it's a very important question. It's sort of a first order question to understand how this all works. What the Airship missile did that was really unique and powerful was that it marked a break in naval history sort of where up until the point of the anti-ship missile, the major ship killing weapons of the day, the dominant sort of capability was always concentrated in capital ships, right? The big gun battleship or the flat top aircraft carrier of World War II. now you have relatively small warships or planes or, you know, land-based launchers that can launch basically the premier weapon of the new age of warfare, and so you have a lot more distributed capability there. You have the ability to launch large volumes of fire from a lot of

spread out assets, whereas before naval warfare was very concentrated in a handful of capital ship platforms. The anti-ship missile, it's interesting because it basically, you know, if you're a warship, you know, carrying a couple dozen of these things in your vertical launch cells. You kind of have to almost think of in the vein of being a carrier commander, right, where you have, you're basically launching a one-way air strike of a very intelligent kamikaze type missiles. And so you kind of have to think in terms of, you know, missile firepower as another expression of air power. And when you think about any ship missiles, they're becoming very intelligent. They're becoming very automated. You know, it's not just something that shoots in one direction and it just

figures it out on its own. We're starting to see behaviors from any ship missiles where they can, you know, they can coordinate attacks, they can do jamming, they can fly in certain formations that, you know, make them more lethal. It's a very interesting space when you talk about, you know, AI or autonomy. Any ship missiles have been an area of autonomous capability that is extremely lethal in a place that's definitely a place of interest to look at. So I think this is a capability area that we need to play pretty close attention to. You are an advocate for, I take it and a kind of explicator of something called distributed maritime operations, which, you know, I personally, I see a term like that in my, you know, the hairs on the back of my neck

stand up because I just have kind of a horror of jargon. And yet you do need technical terms. And I take that this technical term is very important and not to be properly understood. So, and it points in the direction of what you were just pointing to, which just, you know, precision weapons in general, whatever domain we're talking. talking about have led to dispersion on the battlefield. That is a big and obviously longstanding historical pattern, which addressed here on the show in various ways over the course of our existence.

How is this playing out at sea and what does distributed maritime operations really mean? Yeah, so DMO is the Navy's kind of main warfighting concept right now. I'll admit that, you know, as a little bit of an outsider, I don't know exactly what it means to the Navy. But the reason I wrote a series on this concept called Fighting DMO, and the bigger reason I wrote it was that a lot of people in the Navy were telling me that there's a little bit room for more precise definition here. You know, we need more specifics. We need to be able to explain this thing in a concrete way. When you think about war fighting concepts like Airland Battle or Force Design 2030, those are things that have pretty, you know, there are specifics to it.

The level of in-depth understanding that there is about DMO is not the level of those concepts, for example. So there's an opportunity here to kind of figure out what does this mean? How do we define this? And what does it mean for how we should be changing the Navy on how to fight? And I think the reason anti-ship missile goes so well with the MO, or at least the idea of it, is that up until very recently, the U.S. Navy's, the U.S. military's anti-ship missile firepower was completely concentrated in aircraft carriers. It was the only platform that had the weapons to, had the weapons and the doctrine to basically

launch these things at standoff range and with enough volume of fire. The U.S. military for no, pretty much for, you know, the entire Cold War up until the modern day has had virtually no anti-ship missiles and its surface warships and its bombers and its submarines and its land-based forces. By comparison, the Soviet Union, Russia, and China have had all of that for decades. And so only with the advent of things like L. Razum and the Maritime Strike Tom Hock recently, are we starting to see U.S. military anti-ship firepower. power finally go beyond just the flight deck of the aircraft carrier. And so there's a lot of room to be done in terms of thinking about, you know, what does this mean? Because this is a major

evolution that's happening. There's a lot of options that are you opening up here. And it's really important to figure out how do we put all this firepower together now that we have all these communities that are going to be getting these new tools. And it's important to figure that out because it'll give you some insight into maybe how the Chinese and the Russians have been thinking about this for some time and what their options are for fighting the U.S. West Navy. Yeah. Well, we'll get, we'll get to them in a minute. I'm very curious to your thoughts on how our adversaries are doing, but sticking with us for now. Another, another first order question for you. I want to step back for a second from operational concepts, and then we'll return to it.

Let's think about the Western Pacific for a second. We have this Navy. What are we going to use it for? Like, what's its purpose? What is the Navy doing in the Western Pacific we're going to conduct these distributed operations in order in order to achieve? As opposed to, like, why don't we just have an air force, right, or just have land-based facilities? Like, what is the Navy, the surface Navy specifically actually going to do that it's going to then require it to fight with this distributed approach? Yeah, so the value proposition of the fleet and the service fleet in this kind of concept is basically it gives the U.S. some ability to contest something like a Taiwan contingency or some sort of, you know, China contingency. Because there's a concern that, you know, the U.S. has a lot of allies,

it has a lot of forward bases in the area, but China has a tremendous capability to arrange those bases with their own missile firepower, which is very considerable. And it's also a question of, you know, maybe some allies may not want to let the U.S. use these bases in a time of war because of how politically sensitive it is

or how, you know, foreign policy calculations or so on. And so this is basically a hallmark of the Navy's value proposition to the Navy, to the nation and its options is that, you know, it can use the open oceans to provide some options to decision makers. And in the case of something like this, the Navy can provide a tremendous option for long-range cruise missile fires, for example, around Taiwan or the Chinese mainland, if the nation, if the national leadership wants those kinds of options.

And so that's kind of the main scenario that I think about when I'm framing these things. There are many other ways it can play out. But basically, I'm trying to figure out, you know, how does DMO work in a Taiwan contingency? And you can see that there's a lot of benefits there. So in order to achieve these things, we're going to do these distributed maritime operations. Let's go back to that and let's say more about that. Presumably, you know, as you suggest, it means at the most basic level, spreading things out.

It means more than that. Like put some color on it for us, would you? Like, what will it actually look like in practice? What is required to do, to spread things out and then make them fight effectively? Can you spread them out too far? Like just explain to us what you, what we're really talking about. Yeah. When you're talking about distributed, it is kind of an amorphous definition.

I think it helps to think about it that there is such a thing as being too distributed, which means that you're stretched then and you can't combine effects. It's more of a liability than an asset at that point. So you have to be able to understand that there is such a thing as too much distribution. And when you take it in the other direction, you're too concentrated. And of course, that creates its own set of liabilities. You have to think about distribution as sort of a happy medium between the to. When I think about it in terms of massing fires and anti-ship fires, basically what you're

trying to do is taking a variety of platforms, you know, service warships, aircraft carriers, submarines, and so on. And you're trying to create some sort of combined arms firing scheme that gives you a lot of options to put firepower on an opposing plate. And so, you know, in the specific operational context, I was thinking about, you know, there's an operational imperative for China to keep the U.S. Navy at least a thousand miles away out from the mainland. or else they can put, or else they're going to have to be dealing with maybe hundreds of Tomahaw cruise missiles, for example. So there's an operational imperative for China to be able to contest the U.S. Navy out to that ring. And so when you think about that as sort of a point of

departure, you know, how do you layer different kinds of capabilities from different kinds of platforms on top of one or another to have options for China, for example, being able to mass fires at a thousand miles away? And so one way you think you can think about it is that the surface fleet in particular is sort of a really key part of that combined arms team because they can maintain basically a pretty deep base of fire that undergirds the rest of the mass firing scheme. When you look at things like submarines or, you know, submarines are valuable. You don't want to betray their location. You know, when you look at airplanes, there's logistical requirements for maintaining a lot of airplanes over the ocean for a long period of time to have on-call fires.

And so, you know, that surface fleet is really important in kind of helping get around the the weaknesses and the disadvantages of the other platform. Now, the challenge is that when you have two combined arms teams of fleets, engaging with each other, and one of the fleet substantially outranges the other, which means that they are, you know, one surface fleet is outranged by the capabilities of the other. This scheme, it sort of fall apart or it twists into something that's very disadvantageous.

Because if you're fighting a Navy that outranges your airship missile firepower, that means that you have to rely on platforms that have a better ability, to strike ships first by circumventing the anti-ship firepower. So, for example, that means more dependence on airplanes, more dependence on submarines. And that kind of forces you to depend more heavily on and deal with those disadvantages I mentioned earlier. And so you really want to have a range advantage so you can have a superior sort of combined armed scheme of massing anti-ship fires against another plate.

So that's kind of like one point of departure how to think about this. And well, say more if you would about massing fires then, because that's obviously integral to this concept. I mean, at some basic level, it just makes sense, right? You've got a target. You don't want to just shoot one. There's an infantry way of understanding this. Anything that's worth shooting once is worth shooting 20 or 30 times.

I take it that at some base level, that's what you're talking about. But say more and put it for us. Yeah, it's important to know that this is one of the biggest things you have to understand about modern naval warfare and how it's different than modern land warfare in some respects is that it's not enough to be accurate. It's not enough to have good targeting information. Because the warships that you're shooting at have dozens of missile launch cells. They have many layers of defenses,

you know, soft kill, non-kinetic defenses as well. If you're going to kill a modern warship today, you're going to have to launch a missile firepower, a lot of missiles at it to be able to break through a lot of defenses and the hopes that maybe a couple missiles can actually score the killing blows. And so, you know, when I talk about massing fires, it's a principal operational challenge. right? How do we get enough missile firepower together that we can overwhelm the defenses of these

very powerful surface warships? And that's a major challenge. And that's kind of a key point of logic and trying to figure out how our Navy is going to fight each other today is, you know, how are they going to break through these extremely robust missile defenses? And I would also suggest that it's not something that's that sustainable. You know, there's a lot of talk about industrial base and, you know, can we really build enough things for a contingency? And there's a pretty good chance that we could blow through a lot of the missile ammo in a couple weeks of trying to mass fires against navies. It's such an extremely expensive and attrition-centric form of warfare that we have to be mindful of that. And so, you know, we have to think about, you know, do we really want to, do we really want to fight this way?

Or are there ways to kind of offset naval savor warfare or circumvent it? So, for example, you know, if you're using a submarine to sink a warship, using a torpedo launch from a submarine, it's probably, you know, maybe 5% of the cost of launching a massive salvo to kill the warship from above the waterline because there's a lot fewer defenses below the water line than above the water line when you're trying to overwhelm with missiles. And so you're trying to think in terms of efficiency, submarines are actually a really good way to just get out of this dynamic and have a much more cost-effective way of not having a deal with mass fires.

That's really interesting. Well, let's come back to this issue of scarcity in a minute because it's obviously it's on everyone's minds and it's critical. So we'll add that to our list along with China of things we're going to come back to. But before we get to that, I think what might be helpful, it'll be helpful for me. Can you kind of walk us through like a scenario and like describe, pick a target. It can be a Chinese target from your imagination or a generic target with a standard set of missile defenses for 2024 and describe how realistically you would go about trying to defeat

it in a little bit of detail. Sure, no, that's a good question. So let's say we have a trio of Chinese type 52D destroyers. Baseline capability of that unit, you're looking at about 180 launch cells, many layers of missile defenses, and you have to figure out how are you going to break through those defenses to defeat it. You can't use the U.S. Navy surface fleet because they don't have, they're outranged by those Chinese destroyers.

Those Chinese destroyers have YJATING missiles, which are far longer range. and they have much more of them than what the U.S. Navy destroyers have. And so you have to figure out how am I going to sink this most likely using carriers? And so basically what that involves is that you have to figure out, you know,

in order to overwhelm just a single surface action group, you're getting most of the strike fighters on deck for that. You're talking about three to four squadrons of F-18s and F-35s that have to come together, loaded out with any ship missiles, and basically trying to concentrate them so they line up the timing of their launches. so all those missiles basically break over the horizon of the warship

are at around the same time and can overwhelm the defenses because if you do a little missile, if you do some missiles here, some missiles here, you're not going to overwhelm those defenses. They'll be able to defeat those missiles in detail. You know, you really have to line up the timing of these launches so they can, you know, be able to mass effectively. Now, what's really interesting about this is that, you know,

from the perspective of the defending surface warships, they have a very lethal problem to deal with, even if it looks like on paper, they have a lot of defensive capability. So what happens is that basically, you know, because radar for the most part is a line-up site system and that these missiles are sea skimming, they don't see those missiles until they're about 20 miles out, which is a kind of remarkable thing, that the curvature of the earth and the horizon is literally one of the deadliest things to a warship. And so basically, you know, if you have subsonic missiles crossing that 20-mile horizon limit,

those ships have about two minutes to shoot down all the salvo, to shoot down the entire salvo, or they're going to be taking hits. And so as those missiles are closing the distance, the ships are engaging their defensive systems, and the missiles could be jamming. You know, the missiles could be conducting maneuvers, making it a much more complicated problem. The surface warships have to figure out on the spot

a precise distribution of fire so they don't deplete their magazines all in one go. And so it's a very complicated and highly automated process of trying to do that missile engagement in those final few miles. It's something that Aegis does for the service fleet, China has something similar. And basically, as the missiles get closer and closer,

it becomes a much harder challenge. The missiles have the ability to basically pick out a specific part on the warship to hit it and conduct the most damage. Basically, you know, it's a one-shot kill type of thing with naval warfare. People don't realize that the emphasis in naval warfare is not about taking hits and keeping fighting. It's about not getting hit at all because there's almost no chance of surviving a single hit from an anti-ship missile, especially one that is smart enough to strike you in your magazines.

on purpose, for example. And so it's a very lethal engagement. Now, in terms of who has the advantage between three surface, three destroyers of the Chinese Navy and the entire airwing of a carrier, it's kind of hard to say without more specifics. But it gets to the problem that I think is at the, it's kind of at the heart of the issue that you cannot spend the entire airwing of a single carrier sinking just three destroyers, but that is kind of what it's going to take right now without the capabilities organized. Yeah, I'm struck. I'm struck in, I mean, feel free to keep going if you've got more, I want to say there, but let me throw in, and you can respond to this as well, that in the two, in the first, in the, an answer ago when you were talking about, you know,

cost effectiveness, you, you immediately went to submarines and said, basically, it's more efficient to use submarines to kill Chinese ships. And now when I asked you, you know, how you're going to just pick a generic example, how do you kill a bunch of Chinese ships, you went to the, to the air wing, you know, it's striking to me that in either scenario, you're sort of not advocating for the use of surface ships to Colchina. What are the other Navy surface ships are out there defending the carriers? What is their purpose? It's interesting because the high end missions of the surface fleet since the end of World War II, all the way through the Cold War, until today, has been almost exclusively anti-air warfare and anti-submarine warfare.

With how U.S. doctrine has been designed for the Navy and the U.S. military in general, carriers are what sink ships with missiles at long rain. The surface fleet is almost exclusively a defensive player in how in U.S. Navy high in warfighting doctrine since the Cold War. And that's why having things like Maritime Strike Tomahawk is such a big deal. In other navies, that's not necessarily the case. I would say a lot of allied navies have a similar approach, but when you look at Russia, when you look at China, they have some very serious anti-ship firepower on their surface warships. And I think they want them to be more offensive in design than what the U.S. Navy has in line for its own service warships. But now with these recent capabilities, you can see the U.S. Navy trying to do something similar to what the Chinese and the Russians have been doing for a long time.

So there's two sort of obvious, probably more, but two that occurred to me that are obvious problems with the sort of operational concepts that we're talking about here. The first you've already alluded to, in a way, you've already alluded to both. But the first is the scarcity issue that in a conflict that lasts more than a couple days, you know, pretty shockingly soon, I think, from the perspectives of most Americans who are only sort of just starting to wake up to this reality, we start to run out of stuff. And that's not even counting losing stuff in combat. That's just kind of using munitions. So that's issue one, which we should address.

And I am curious to know how you think that. And then issue two, which I want to get into is, and presumably we are thinking about this offensively as well. You know, this distribution and the clever way in which, you know, mass fire solutions are going to be found and coordinated and everything, well, that all depends on the existence of the network and the communications and, you know, the whole cycle of sensors and analysis and communication, et cetera, that the network provides.

So obviously having your network attacked is something that you're going to anticipate. And then we're also going to be going out and looking to attack somebody else's network. moment somebody succeeds in really significantly jamming up someone's network, either in the literal sense of jamming it in the electromagnetic spectrum or in some other sense, you know, cyber or whatever, like you're all of a sudden your fancy distributed fleet is just a bunch of ships out sailing alone in the water. So two kind of obvious challenges. I'm sure we are not breaking any news here on either front. How do you how do you think about these things? How do you think the Navy is thinking about these challenges.

Or I guess you could see, certainly the latter one is also an opportunity. It's as much an opportunity as a challenge. The former one, I worry, is more just a challenge. Yeah, yeah. I'm not totally sure how the Navy is thinking about this stuff, but I think they're definitely thinking about it in some way. To the scarcity question, I mean, when we're talking about naval salvage warfare, when we're talking about massing fires, we're talking about a type of combat where you

can blow through 10 years worth of weapons procurement in about a couple of minutes, right? And so it's, it's, it's, it's, a extremely depleting form of warfare. It's extremely expensive. And, you know, and, and, and, and something you kind of hear in the discourse of defense analysis kind of issues is that, you know, there's a, there's a bias toward short term thinking. You know, we're only going to think about this war, maybe like a month or two out, you know, the high end conflict because we're just going to run out of stuff. Well, what if they, what if they choose to keep on fighting, right? Are we going to be going back to the days of, of guns and torpedoes for surface warships because they run out of missiles, right? Like, we need to think about how does the lack of munitions force us to adapt in some really hard ways?

And I don't know if enough thinking has been done on that. And I think it's a really important question to ask because I think it's really underappreciated how China probably has a better industrial base in the United States when it comes to maritime power and navies in particular. To give you some quick statistics, I think in the past 10 to 15 years, the Chinese Navy has built 40 large surface warships of destroys and cruisers, about 30 frigates. about 70 corvettes, and that's, you know, that's 100 plus warships they've built in about 10 years. You know, I don't know what the exact figure is for the U.S. Navy, but it's, but it's

nothing. And so when you think about sustainability, when you think about scarcity, they can crank out warships. They've got the facilities. They've got, you know, they, I think China has almost half of the world's market share in commercial shipbuilding industry, right? Like, they have a massive industrial base for this kind of thing if they really need to dive into it. In terms of missiles, that's harder to gauge, of course, with China. But an interesting fact to it on this is that, you know, when you look at the annual China Military Power Report, there's always a line there that says how many ballistic missile tests

that China has done. And it's a number that's in the hundreds. And there's always a line that says, oh, by the way, and this is more ballistic missile tests than anyone than everyone else in the world put together. And you see that, you know, if you go back a couple years, the line appears again and again and again. So China has a really massive industrial base.

and there is a real problem, probably a real threat that they can outlast us in this kind of warfare. Going to the question about the network, that is something that's a huge, that's a huge part of it, of course.

I think we should maybe lean into it a little bit more and recognize that it's probably a question of when, not if. And, you know, we should have doctrine for it. You know, if the fleet gets split apart and everyone has to do their own mass fires,

if these standalone forces have to figure out, how do I put this together on the spot without having to be able to call fires from people who are far away, they need to be able to be prepared to do that. You know, we don't want to have single points of failure here. We want to have redundancy. And so we need to be able to train people and exercise people in such a way that they know

how to handle themselves when the network goes down. And that's going to be a challenge in a form of warfare that's dependent so much upon being able to bring a lot of capabilities together. So back to the scarcity issue first. In a way, the good news scenario is everyone runs out of stuff and we're there slugging it out with guns and in torpedoes and what to the extent we have torpedoes left but lower end systems at closer ranges that's like good news scenario which is a crazy thing to say because that's you know that's it's a it's a long war where everyone's kind of run out of stuff except for their most

significant scenarios the things they prioritize the most everything else has to use what it's got and we just had a really interesting conversation on the show with a guy named escander raymond who wrote a really interesting book about how we should all just be expecting long wars of attrition that that's the pattern in great power complex, historically speaking, and it's crazy that everyone, to include apparently the Chinese, seems to expect a short, sharp war. That's just not what you would predict, looking at the historical record. But, I mean, what you're saying presents, actually,

there's actually a much more alarming scenario. The more alarming scenario is we run out first. We run out well ahead of when they're going to run out. So let's, I'm going to make these numbers up. Let's say we've got four weeks of stuff at high intensity, and they've got five months, six months. Well, that gap is long enough that you could just imagine being defeated. You're just simply defeated.

The ranges are too long. The dominance and overmatch is too great for too long. And, you know, whatever, Taiwan Falls or, you know, the Philippines, you know, like you can come up with the strategic outcomes, the consequence of that many months of being outfought. But what's the good news here? Is there good news? Do you have any ideas to mitigate this besides build more?

Steph more quickly? I mean, I think we should be trying to figure out in terms of offset strategies, counters, go asymmetric somehow, try to go non-conetic, you know, maybe think in terms of cyber or something like that. I personally don't have many answers in that what that actually looks like, but I think that's how we need to be thinking about this. You know, what can we do to kind of get out of this dynamic where we are so dependent on material superiority to win kinetically, right? you know, it's a very difficult problem to think about as you're pointing out. And it's going to demand a lot of creativity. And that creativity needs to happen now, not when we're running out of stuff in the middle

of the war. Well, of course, for long periods of the Cold War, there was a, there was a, we were outmatched in conventional forces on the European landmass. And there was an answer to this. And it was extended deterrence with nuclear weapons. And we still have, you know, we have these commitments, for example, with Japan. We have treaty allies where, you know, extended deterrence is contemplated as a part of the strategy. It is nuts, though, that, you know, we seem to have nacked our way into a situation where that may be the only good solution because we simply didn't build enough stuff.

You know, that's pretty shocking. Yeah, it's people don't usually think about munitions inventories as like a hard limit on strategy until it imposes on itself. in a really tough situation. I mean, there's always some stories, you know, with Cold War history or recent history where some senior level official gets the briefing on how much stuff we have. And they're like, wait, we only have enough

for like a week's worth of war. And it's because there is a habitual tendency that when bureaucracies need money, they'd like to pull it from weapon stocks because it's not today's problem. It's tomorrow's issued down the line. So they're kicking the can down the road. And so, you know, we need more discipline in terms of foresight, but also just the mechanisms of budgeting and making priorities and understanding these stockpiles as a strategic asset or a strategic liability.

We need to give that credit words, too. Yeah. Let me ask you about aircraft carriers, because in a way, you've kind of already pointed to the answer because you gave them a role in the fight when we were speaking earlier. But, you know, in this general process of dispersion and the way in which the battlefield is more scarcely populated for all sorts of obvious reasons, the aircraft carrier does kind of stand out as a kind of exception to the rule. It is an extraordinary concentration of really expensive stuff and lots and lots of sailors on one platform, which suggests that in the new scheme of things, it would be an extraordinarily

valuable target and quite vulnerable. make you suggest that it has a role to play a few minutes ago make make make the case make or don't I mean what would you take what is your your input to this sort of obvious discussion yeah no I I love this question because what I just what I said in my my example there with the operational narrative is exactly how I want the Navy to stop using aircraft carriers which is how it's always been using them since the World War II you don't want to be in a position or you have to launch the entire air wing just to kill a couple ships, right? You know, in my vision of the aircraft carrier of what it can be doing for distributed operations is that when you finally have anti-ship missile

firepower across surface warships, bombers and submarines and land-based forces, you can use the aircraft carrier to quarterback that force because you're talking about the network, you're talking about the sensor demands. You know, when you're trying to hit targets hundreds of miles away with missiles, that's a very information-intensive process. And so basically, you know, the aircraft carrier can play a really critical role in this in terms of scouting, in terms of queuing fires, you know, in terms of using, you know, uplinks and data links to basically maneuver these missile salvos against targets, right? Envision, you know, a combat scenario where you have a bunch of surface warships launching Tomahawk missiles at a range of 500-plus miles or even close to a thousand

miles, you know, and the target is, of course, moving, the situation is changing, but you have maybe a couple F-35s that are closer to the targets who can use the robust sensor fusion capabilities to make sure those missiles are on target, you know, talk to the missiles, maneuver them into certain formations, make sure they're getting fresh targeting information so they arrive on target. And once they prosecute, you know, the target and the engagement, but you have, you can get immediate feedback. You know, aviation can be in a place to get feedback on the engagement and speed or decision

cycle because, you know, it's going to be frustrating if you go through all the trouble of launching these missiles, and at the end of it, you don't even know if you hit the target, right? And so there's critical information demands that go into this kind of warfare for Sava warfare for massing fires. And naval aviation, and specifically naval aviation from carriers is uniquely situated to work those kill chains. And this is something that I think is really underappreciated about the carrier and about Savel warfare in general, is that, you know, I don't think the carrier is dead.

I don't think the carrier is necessarily obsolete. There is still a very important role for this platform to play in this form of warfare, but it's going to be more of a quarterbacking information-centric kind of role rather than making them shoulder the burden of launching all the strikes. So about a year ago, you wrote a piece called A Fleet Adrift about the current state of preparation for war in the Navy. The title suggests that you have some reservations. how is assuming that everything we've discussed should be gospel, which I think all of my opinion

should be gospel. So you have every right to think that of yourself and that the Navy should be preparing to fight in the sort of ways you're suggesting. How are they doing? How is the Navy doing in your best estimate in getting ready for what's to come? Yeah, I'm actually worried that I'm wrong about everything and it keeps me up there sometime. So yeah, I don't know of any of the stuff I'm talking about is the right answer, but I think it's worth it's worth thinking about.

But yeah, I think when I, what I talked about in that piece, it was about how the Navy prepares for war, you know, what is the state of force development, what is the state of operational learning? And basically, is the Navy in a place where it can learn how to do these things? Is the Navy actually in a position to change itself as an organization and meet the challenge of getting good at high in warfare? And it's something that, you know, I think there are reasons for some reservations about that and there's a lot of room for improvement.

you know, what I'm talking about, you know, with salvo warfare and the ways you've described this, right, this is a very vicious form of warfare. This is a combined arms form of warfare involving a lot of teams playing together at the same time. But the thing that I focus on in the fleet of drift piece is the state of Navy combat exercising, which tends to be scripted, tends to focus on one thing at a time, and it tends to be against opposition forces that are deliberately designed to lose. and this has been the norm of Navy large-scale exercises for many years, decades. And this is not at all realistic compared to the demands of high-end warfare at sea and what we've been talking about. And so, you know, when you have these kinds of crucibles take on this format, it becomes problematic because, you know, you need these exercises to train people,

to vet your concepts, to vet your capabilities, and you need them to set a standard, right? Rather than, you know, scripting the risk out of the exercise or water, bring things down so someone's idea works, you're supposed to be maintaining a standard. And if someone's idea doesn't meet that standard, you go back to the drawing board, right? You don't script the exercise. You don't use exercises to validate something in some one-and-done event. You use them as a way to kind of rigorously test things. And so that's just one symptom, one important symptom of something that I'm concerned about in the Navy, which is the state of

tactical focus. You know, I talk to a lot of people in the fleet, and there's a lot of concerns over, you know, I spend my whole job worrying about maintenance and about administration, but I don't get enough time in the fleet thinking about tactics, thinking about war fighting. The incentives aren't set up to reward people or give people a place where they can distinguish themselves as above average tacticians. I would say naval aviation is better about this. I would say the surface fleet has more room for improvement by comparison. But this is a really important conversation to have because, you know, we can talk about warfighting

concepts, you know, all day and what the fight's going to look like. But can the Navy actually teach its people how to do these? things. And it's a problem when you look at very flashy and high-end war fighting concepts like Air Sea Battle, for example, which envisioned very complicated joint operations. But then you look at the Navy's combat exercises and they're training only one thing at a time against opposition it always loses. And you see a major disconnect there where you see that, you know, how does this concept make sense when they're not teaching it to people on the deck plate level? And, you know, and the problem, the real problem, I think, is that these kinds of concepts, these kinds of war games,

they influence the war plans, the O plans, the actual, if the U.S. goes to war against China tomorrow, they have playbooks and they have ideas from what they're going to do. And because of the nature of how force development and operational learning has been functioning, it's almost clear that there are tactics and operations in those war plans that have not been practiced, that have not been tested in real world exercises, they haven't been taught to the force and the fleetwide level. And so we're running the risk of sending people into a fight that they don't really know what they're going to be in for. And that can be a strategic problem down the line. Yeah. And you're just thinking about how you would design realistic exercises based on everything

we've discussed so far this hour, you know, that itself is actually kind of a challenge because you're talking about a day one scenario that looks very different from a day 30 scenario, right? Of course, everything may be great on day 30 and you haven't run out of stuff and the other guy's network is screwed and your network is robust and you're just winning. There's just so much winning. You don't know what to do with yourself. But it seems more realistic that even if things, even if you haven't lost, even maybe even some things are going pretty well, but you're still in the fight, like you should be practicing for scenarios where you, where you have run out of stuff and you can't talk to the other, you know, like you need to have

exercises that iterate in this way so that the crews can practice and the fleets can, the, various structures can practice at the various levels of resource access and communications access. And that would be, it seems both hard to design, just sitting here as a layman and also critical of the essence. Yeah, it's, it's fundamental. It's, it's fundamental. It's, it is difficult. It is hard to do. You know, it's, it's a lot easier to keep the schedule and keep things on track when you don't take away any critical enablers and stuff like that, but you have to train for that. And that's, that's sometimes a theme that I've heard from folks in the fleet is that some of these exercises, you know, they don't, they don't, they make, they make major assumptions about

critical enables, right? Like, let's go into us with all our logistics intact, all our communications intact. Those are the explicitly, those are going to be the main targets of an adversary that knows what they're doing. And so we need to be able to tolerate that discomfort, and we need to deliberately design the system that we are going to go into these things knowing there's going to be some friction, right? Because the thing that always comes up with Navy exercise is that there's so many events stuffed into a tight schedule that, you know, if there's some friction in there, derails the schedule, and that causes problems down the line and so on. And so that means that the schedules aren't designed for these things. And that's a frequent

critique that you'll see from people inside the Navy is that a lot of the combat exercising and training has been almost relegated into a box checking exercise. Like, it feels more of like a bureaucratic thing they just have to get over with rather than like a really invigorating professional development experience for the warfighter. And so that's kind of a major issue with this. Well, and this is, I mean, it's come up here on the show before. And it worries me deeply. I spent a few years at a Navy installation at the Naval Academy on the faculty there. And I, you know, then there's no, there's no like particularly diplomatic way to say this.

But the fact that there hasn't been a major surface war since 1945 does worry me in this regard. It worries me is sort of at almost like a, talking about fundamentals, but like at a human level even beneath. There's a way in which, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan were not, you know, Normandy in Okinawa. But, you know, they were, they had their serious moments for sure, and a lot of, a lot of Marines and soldiers died. And, you know, it just introduces a kind of seriousness to the enterprise that you can't get away from and that is obviously salutary to training and realistic exercises and the things that we're talking about here. You have a whole community through no fault of its own, just sort of as a function of American dominance that has not had in any kind of extended or at scale kind of way. I guess as you point out, what we're seeing in the Red Sea right now is maybe the closest, certainly since the 80s.

You're the expert, not me on this dimension of history. So correct me if I go wrong here. But, you know, and even there, I mean, the Houthis ain't the PLA Navy. So, you know, I'm worried. I've been listeners to the show will know I'm worried about the Navy and worried about, you know, like at the sailor level, you know, like do these young people know, like what they've signed up for? What's it going to look like when some of these missiles hit?

And what are the requirements for you on a human level going to be? I'm pretty confident than other components of the American defense establishment because of these relatively recent experiences of combat. I'm confident that to the answer to this question is, yes, those young people are being prepared, but people who've lived it. And I don't know. I don't know. It's a major challenge, and I think it's a problem.

you know, it's 30 plus years of worrying about low-intensity conflict on top of not having any major war since since 1945, and that leaves a deep impression on an institution. And I understand if some things are going to atrophy, but, you know, when we think about militaries, we're thinking about organizations that, you know, they don't sometimes do as good of a job of remembering the lessons of their own history as you would expect them to. There's a lot of forgetting, which is unfortunate because, you know, sometimes you'll hear something like, you know, this doctrine is written in the blood of people who died to help us learn it, right? Well, the Navy compared to the Army, for example, is a very flimsy relationship with doctrine. It has a very, you know, it doesn't have as good a relationship

with lessons of its own history, you know, and it's not just the lessons of fighting wars and specific combat lessons, but there's a very interesting story behind how the Navy got ready for World War II in the interwar period, which is the closest parallel, arguably to where we are today. And when you compare the Navy of the interwar period and the preparations that were being done then and the level of tactical and operational literacy of the flag officers and the admirals of that generation, you know, and what was being done, it's very different than what we see today. And we need to be, we need to be mindful of that disparity and we need to be making more of an effort to remember institutional lessons learned. And that Navy, the Navy that you were pointing

to as a model is still a Navy that lost its crown jewel fleet. I'm not sure if my term is correct here. But a major collection of its most important assets on the first day of the fighting. Well, last question for you here. How's China doing? How's the PLA Navy doing in getting ready? I think they have a tremendous amount of momentum, and I think they are, they deserve to be taken very seriously.

You know, I've already talked about the shipbuilding, which is tremendous and substantial. The anti-ship missile arsenal is superior to the U.S. navies in a lot of ways. And also in terms of the training and the mindset and the exercising, it's important to understand that the Chinese Navy is a Navy that has no real, large-scale overseas commitments. They spend all of their time concentrated and they're kind of near abroad. they are configured in such a way that they can spend most of their time on working on themselves and the way that we've been talking about. Whereas the U.S. Navy is spread thin and it's conducting operations, which is not the same

thing as working on yourself through focused reps and sets of difficult exercises. And so the disposition of the modern Chinese Navy has a lot more in common with the interwar period U.S. Navy than the modern U.S. Navy does. And that's very critical for understanding that, you know, how they are set up to learn. And I also, you know, I've spent a lot of time researching how they do their common exercises and how they do things. And they are extremely hard on themselves. You know, they will openly say that the habit of scripting victory into exercises on purpose is a counterproductive habit and we've got to work on stopping this. You know, when you look at the specific scenarios, you know, the capstone scenario of a Chinese surface navy warship after their six-month sort of basic phase thing, that capstone event they do at the end of that is extremely.

intense. It's multi-domain. They go into it not knowing what to expect. You have lots of live opposition forces going after the ship. And they have an assessment mechanism where the Chinese Navy found that making the training organization in charge of the assessment creates kind of productive incentives like we've been talking about. If you're the training organization, you have an incentive to pass the people you are training to show that you're doing your job. What the Chinese Navy, the service suite does in this event is that they have a third party sort of assessment mechanism where they have senior level people come in and literally stand behind the decision makers in the CIC and grade them. And they provide candid critiques and stuff. And so by and large, I would say that the way they do

their exercises, the way that they are configured to learn in terms of their overall force posture, they're very formidable. And I would not count them out. Demetri Filipov of the Center for International Maritime Security. You can see things that he's written at simsec.org. This has been a really interesting conversation. Maybe you'd be willing to come back some time. We can do a whole episode on just the PLA Navy. I think that'd be really interesting. Sure. Yeah. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you joining. Thank you, Aaron. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.