School of War - Ep. 16: Gerry Roncolato on the U.S. Navy

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

Is the United States Navy prepared for war? Retired Navy Captain Gerry Roncolato joins the show to discuss the past, present, and future of American maritime power. Times 02:08 - Introduction  03:31 - Is the U.S. Navy prepared for a great-power war? 04:59 - The Navy during the Interwar Period and the Battle of Guadalcanal 09:41 - The experience of war at sea 16:30 - Historical examples—and lessons for the Navy today—in Roncolato’s article, A Warfighting Imperative: Back to Basics for the Navy 20:49 - Alarming incidents during operations at sea and underlying problems 27:23 - Are the troops adequately prepared for war at sea?  38:20 - Books aspiring officers should read 40:52 - Maneuver warfare at sea 48:20 - Managing troops in the barracks versus maneuvering men in battle  Link Roncolato’s article, A Warfighting Imperative: Back to Basics for the Navy

I'm going to open this week's episode, which uses history to speak directly to current events, and specifically to the health of our Navy in 2022, by reading from an outstanding recent article in the Naval Institute proceedings by Jerry Roncalado called A Warfighting Imperative, back to basics for the Navy. Quote, on the evening of 12 November, 1942, as the cruisers and destroyers of rear Admiral Dan Callahan's task force steamed toward battle against a powerful Japanese force that included two battleships, Callahan's flag captain, Captain Casson Young, opined, This is suicide.

Callahan replied, Yes, I know, but we have to do it. It was the first naval battle of Guadalcanal, and Callahan and Young would not survive the night. Ships were lost, and the survivors so battered that they were unable to fight the next night. The fearful cost in ships and men mounted. The ships in that task force lacking clear commander's intent,

but understanding the mission, largely acted independently to engage the enemy. Shortly after the battle began, effective overall command became impossible. Instead, individual ship commanding officers made decisions, regardless of cost, that would either win or lose the battle, allow them to survive or not, keep the Japanese from bombarding Henderson Field or not. None flinched. Relying on the proven bedrocks of interwar U.S. naval doctrine, aggressiveness, fast and effective gunfire, and individual initiative, they wreaked havoc on the Japanese. end quote. Is the U.S. Navy prepared to fight and win a war against the PLA Navy, or equivalent, today? I'm sorry to report that there are some red lights flashing on the instrument panel.

It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stay on it. 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. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thank you for joining the School of War.

Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Captain Jerry Roncolato, U.S. Navy, retired. Jerry, thanks for coming to the show. The last several episodes, we've had a series of really brilliant writers and scholars and experts in military history on the show. I'm very pleased to have somebody who is a brilliant writer and mostly what I want to talk to you about today is your recent piece in the Naval Institute proceedings, but who's a practitioner and who has served. And maybe we could just start there and give people a sense of who you are and where you've been. Like how did young Jerry decide to go to see what you do in the Navy? Like walk us, walk us through it. Yeah, I had a rather twisted childhood.

I decided I want to go to the Naval Academy. I was in fifth grade. I think it was based on Victory at C, which many in my generation used as a leverage to get in. So I went to Naval Academy. I was on mostly cruisers and destroyers throughout my career. I was on Merrill, Fletcher, Antietam, Mobile Bay, and then I had command of the Sullivan's, and then I had command of Destroyer Squad in 26. And after almost 30 years, plus some time.

as a senior civilian in Opnab, the Navy staff. I had to grow up and get a job. Fair enough. And you recently wrote, and folks can find this online, an article for the Naval Institute Proceedings, which is a fantastic publication, professional journal of sorts for the Navy. The article was entitled,

A War Fighting Imperative Back to Basics for the Navy. The subtitle is, The Service Must Think About What It Will Take to Fight and Win in a Future Great Power War. And I guess I want to just ask an obvious question before we get into the guts of the piece, which is, you know, why does somebody need to write a piece like this? Surely the Navy knows that a war is coming and it's focused on fighting a war. What's, what's wrong here?

Yeah, my sense in, you know, going to ships, talking to sailors on the deck plates and watching as an observer what was being said publicly by the Navy, I'm not convinced that the Navy understands the fundamental change that is being meted out to them. I think many Navy leaders think they know how to do Tomlach strikes, they know how to do air coordination, I know how to do maritime intercept, they train for anti-submarine, anti-surface warfare. So clearly we know what we're doing, and we can continue to do things as we have done them. and still meet this new challenge.

And I think that's fundamentally incorrect. We'll come back to that. We're going to come back to the present day. But you paint a picture in the piece of the U.S. Navy at the outset of World War II at a time when, you know, the defense establishment, it had come a long way from where it had been, you know, say in the mid-30s, but it still wasn't the, you know, the mighty warfighting machine that was going to exist by, say, 1944 into 1945. and a lot of U.S. efforts to include it C in the Pacific in 42 were kind of ad hoc desperate affairs.

But you paint a picture of the service at that moment in time that I would say is generally positive. You talk about November 42, the first naval battle of Guadalcanal. Why do you look to that moment is something that Navy, I mean, implicitly ought to be looking at today? I think the first six months of the war and actual average. by November the first year of the war was a pre-war Navy running up against the reality of a peer competitor fight. And we went into the Navy, into the war of certain presumptions, and those are usually proven incorrect. You have to adapt because the enemy, unlike our recent enemies, the enemy definitely gets a vote. And so we were, we had never planned in the war period to fight in the South Pacific,

All the planning was for an access along the Central Pacific to Japan, whether it was originally, they called it the through the ticket where you went straight to the Philippines, fought the Japanese Navy, won the war in about three weeks and it was all over everybody along here. And then later on, they realized that that wasn't going to happen by a 1934 and they started planning at what became the island, Ionhabic campaign. but nothing nothing was there no thinking was there in the south pacific because that was british territory british had Singapore Hong Kong and in the australian subcontinent so what what happened in the reason i picked guadal canal and the solomons is because while midway was certainly an important battle and it did grievous damage to the japanese carrier air arm i think really the back of the Japanese Navy was broken on the spine of the Solomon Islands,

because that's where we fought pre-war Navy to pre-war Navy, and we beat them. And it took a while to get it right. And you don't really see a consistent, superior performance until 40, you know, 43, early 43, when guys like Mooseberger and Arley Burke came online. So the thing that I like about the first naval battle of Wall Canal is that it was not terribly well run, but in so it was against a huge odds. They were fighting against two Japanese battleships and they had nothing comparable. And it was a pickup team. They had no time for

sit down around a table, Nelsonian style and everybody understanding what the commanders can do. There was no plan. There was a pickup team Callahan rushed them into battle and did what he could. What I like about that example is it highlights the role of individual COs, ship captains, in coming to grips with a tactical reality that no one had thought about before and in doing what they knew got to do. And that was be aggressive, shoot first and use independent initiative to accomplish the mission in regards to what the boss says. And the boss stopped talking because he got killed.

And so did Admiral Scott who was there. So many senior officers in US Navy today will read about that battle or the battles. They'll read Trent Hones' learning war book. And they'll say, well, we did all that work in the inner war period. And we still screwed up in this time frame, the first six, 12 months of the war. And my answer is we did all this work in the inner war period. And that allowed us to adapt rapidly to unforeseen circumstances at an operational level, as well as tactical and prevail.

And that is a different perspective. It's 90 degrees off axis from the way most people look at this thing. And the common wisdom today is that we won the Pacific War because we outbuilt the Japanese. And my argument is we won the Pacific War because we outfought the Japanese. And we did that by 43. After that, it was a matter of grinding them down in an attrition war where the material advantages we enjoyed became more and more common. You know, you both have a long record of service and you're a student of history. You know, big chunks of the Department of Defense in the last 20 years have been engaged in

sustained combat operations, not necessarily. It would overstate it to say it's against peers, but certainly against forces that if you nap, they will kill you. You know, my own experience was in the Marine infantry, but there are big chunks of the Navy that have, you know, the special operations community, EOD, folks who have really seen a lot of violence in the last 20 years. And just by kind of accident of history, as you point out, that has not been true of the surface warfare community. Looking back to the 40s and to the war, what is war at sea like?

What is the experience of it to an officer or a sailor on that ship under fire? Well, okay, you know, I enjoyed the 29-year career without that. But absent the actual empirical evidence of your own career, then you have to turn to history. And I would say Winston Churchill once liken battleships slugging it out to eggshells with a hammer going ahead. And that's kind of, I mean, ships are, if you look at the Falcons War and how many British ships were disabled or sunk by Argentine. missiles and bombs at the very edge of their operational range, you get a sense of how violent and rapid and brutal war at sea can be. And I talked this up at the surface warfare officer school a couple of years ago. I was invited to be on a panel. And I talked to the prospective commanding

officers, exos, and department heads. And my stick was about three minutes long. I just said, You guys have to get your heads around the fact that we're coming to a period where ships are going to get sunk. And people are going to die in large numbers. And frankly, I think that's the same reality that even those who have been involved in combat in Southwest Asia, you're going to have to come to grips with. If you read, if you read, you know, science fiction books about, you know, war in the future or even literature about the war in Southwest Asia, of people get really excited when one person dies. And if you read instead, General Herman Bulk's memoirs of his time,

you know, when the Burmaq, the German army in World War II, and when he thought he had a good day, it was considerably worse than anything we've experienced in the last 30 years. So I think this is the change that's coming. And one of the things I try to impress on young officers is that if you look at the Solomon's battles, the night battles and the solomons, what you see is a ship CO had to make a decision to go act and to go fight. And that was, that was a decision that he knew was risking his life, the life of his crew, and the life of his ship. But that was what the mission

required. That, that is so at odds with the culture that's, that's prevalent today in our society, which is that, you know, safety is Uber-A-Lis is the most important thing of all, and we don't take losses the enemy does, and all that kind of baggage from our post-Cold War era, really post-World War II era in the Navy. And so I think that understanding of how brutal it can be, and I was thinking the other day, let's say we're proposing to fight this first.

So we're not near any other ships. And let's say a ship sinks. Well, we're going to know it sank probably. But what mechanisms do we have in place to recover the crew? Because the crew is priceless. We can't train them fast enough to replace them. So what are we going to do to do that? Are we going to have, or are we going to be able to do that?

Or are we going to all have a bunch of U.S. Indianapolis, the last heavy crews are lost by the U.S. in World War II, where most of the crew died because no one knew they were sunk. So there's what are the what are the processes in place to deal with that? So I think that's that's a kind of stuff that needs to be understood. And that's kind of what I was trying to get at in many ways in my article is, is we need to stop thinking about maintenance. And this is particularly the surface maybe, but we need to stop thinking about maintenance and administration and think about what is this war going to really look like.

We don't know for sure, but we've got to think about it. Yeah. I reflect on my own experiences in Afghanistan, and I compare them my father's experiences, who was a World War II veteran. And we had casualties, obviously, and they hit hard and they still hit hard. But, you know, I could count my battalion's casual deaths on my hands and feet, on my fingers and toes for one deployment. My father, as a young army infantryman in Italy in the winter of 43, 44, went on a company

patrol as a corporal and came back at the end of the day as the company first sergeant. Because everyone got shot. Everyone got shot. You know, I don't know the exact numbers. And he didn't, I don't think he never shared with me the exact numbers. But, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of casualties in one day in one company. And that, of course, happening all up and down the line. Right.

And that is, you know, you were right to point out that the ground community should also not be should not be arrogant as a function of their experience. I think the air community should also not be. And that's both Navy Air Force and Marines. You know, for most of the time in Afghanistan, Iraq, the aircraft had a floor. They couldn't go below. And my last deployment in 2002, a couple aircraft, there was a soft unit pinned down in Afghanistan. And these two guys, F-18 guys went in.

They got requests for close air support and strafing. They went and did it. but they went below the floor, and they got chewed out for it until, until everything came back from the special forces community saying, thank you, thank you, thank you. So, and as some marine communities in similar situation, because although it has always been operating under sea and doing really important stuff with Tom Oaks and intel gathering,

it's different than when you're going after enemies that can fight back. Yeah. And that's, maybe that's the overall. I mean, you look at the German army in May of 1945, it was still largely held together. The Japanese military, the Navy was always very competent. And we forget that fact. Let me ask you about another historical example. Just because you raise it in the piece. And I get, these are my words, not your words, Jerry, but I get the sense that you're using historical examples in the piece to make points without necessarily sticking it right. in the eye of some of the folks that you really want to make the points too. But you make reference to the Battle of Jutland in World War II, excuse me, World War I, and the performance of the British

Navy there. And you argue that that has some points the U.S. Navy today needs to take on board about the performance of a peace time service coming to terms with new realities. Can you, can you walk us through that? Certainly. One point first, I don't use the historical examples to keep from poking the Navy in the eye. I think the article does enough of that. I use the historical examples because we got nothing else. Yeah, fair point. As an aside to that, I will say that John Hadendorf, Professor Emeritus up at the Naval War College, published a book in 2001 or two in the first chapters about the Navy's use of history before World War I. And the naval officers in that era concluded that all this technological change had happened without us having any.

any fighting experience and therefore the only thing we could turn to to understand it was history. So that's that's what they did. Fast forward to today, we have remarkable technological change without any fighting experience and the answer from the corporation, the Navy corporation is history doesn't matter. And now you can say, okay, maybe it doesn't anymore, but the guys before 101 thought it did and that set up, set the stage for what happened in World War II. So what are we set in the stage for now? So that's that piece.

I use Jutland. It's not Jutland in particular. I actually use Andrew Gordon's book Rules of the Game because he does a masterful job of telling the story of Jotland, but then going into what many would call revisionist British history from World War I. Other authors are John Sumita and Nicholas Lambert, both superb officers that the British mainstream historians, naval historians don't like because they're telling a different story, which is one of, you know, bureaucratic, all the stuff we're familiar with today, bureaucratic politics, focus on, on sub-elements, not the main theme, and so on and so forth. And what Andrew Gordon does is he lays out these,

these kind of lessons that he takes from the time of the late 1800s up through Jutland in 1916 and says, he basically defines a peacetime need. And the definition, missions lay over completely, totally and accurately on the U.S. Navy today. So that's why I use it because if people read that book and it was republished by the Naval Institute a few years ago, if people read that book and read Trent Holmes book Learning War, with an eye toward understanding what we're going into, not just because it was history, they're going to learn some things about what the tendencies are to say. For example, I'll give you, two examples. One is he talks about the length of orders and doctrine or plans and things like that.

And if you look at Spruent's plan for the Marianas, I think it's, you know, maybe 25 pages long. Okay. He's moving, you know, almost, you know, a thousand ships around and taking on the Japanese and one of their bastards. You look at any operational plan today, including for exercises, and it's orders of magnitude longer than that. And the plan is trying to account for every possible eventuality when what you need to do is put the commanders in the right position and let them fight it out. And we've lost that because that's what happens in peacetime. That's what Andrew Gordon demonstrates through his Jutland example.

And the other example, of course, is what was highlighted in several reports and has been long argued is kind of the micromanagement tendencies of Navy leadership or any military leadership, particularly when we have the kind of connectivity we have today. So just, so sticking with today then, you know, if you look at the record of the surface warfare community over the last few years, there are, you know, there seem to be lights on the instrument panel that are flashing in alarming ways. And, you know, what I'll list right now has probably the disadvantage of missing probably a lot of good, you know, dutiful stuff that's occurring that doesn't make news. But what did make news is the McCain, collision at sea,

Fitzgerald, collision at sea, bottom richard, apparent arson, you know, multi-billion dollar loss. It's one incident that, you know, in monetary and human terms, doesn't really rise to this, the level of the other examples, but it's one that's always really bothered me, which is back in, I believe it was January of 2015, right, at the, you know, sort of peak fervor of the Iran. deal in negotiations between the Obama administration and the Iranians. You had these two Navy small, I'm going to get the terminology wrong here, but small craft, small boats, you know, essentially, and just to call a spade, a spade here, surrender, surrender without a shot fired in the Persian Gulf.

They had made some navigational errors. They were where they weren't supposed to be, but they also were under no, you know, legal obligation. In fact, you could argue the opposite, that there was a legal obligation to not do what the young officer did in that circumstance. He was a recent graduate of the Naval Academy. You know, these are alarming, to me, data points. And I've asked folks, you know, in the service, do you think these things, very senior folks

without naming names, do you think these things are connected? Or do you think these are sort of unfortunate one-offs and of each with their own, you know, unfortunate causes, but not necessarily a sign of something, you know, cultural or connected? So which do you think it is? Do you think that, like, I'm right to look at this pattern and be alarmed, or is it more complicated than that? I think it's all connected completely. I don't know a whole lot about what happened with the PCs, and I can't remember what I do know, except that. So we don't know on the outside.

We don't know what their orders are, what their ROE was, any of that stuff. And what to what degree they were being, they were being, controlled from afar. We don't know. So I will say that the Naval Academy has ever since, you know, since my day has increasingly emphasized the academic environment and getting a degree and so on and so forth. There's very little about war in there. The only really war train you get a war fighting training you would get is on a shipment cruise and that's really focused on the rudiments of what you know what you're doing whether it's you know driving a ship or a submarine or flying a trainer it's it's really more exposure to what's out there rather than to training

we don't teach we don't teach at the naval kind we don't teach naval or military theory at all We do do a course on naval history, but it's, it's your first year. So I would not, I don't know what we would expect somebody like putting that position to have as a, as a foundation that they can reach back to you and say, what am I supposed to do in this environment? And so, so now the damage control, I know there are people who said after, and rightly so after Fitzgerald McCain, that the damage control was very well done on both ships and the sailors turned two and that's part of that is is the the unique nature of damage at sea you you can't run away you have to stay in fight there is no alternative and and the sailors on both ships did extraordinarily good good

work but to take that as and conclude from that that damage control training in u.s navy is okay was probably premature, and Bonhomme was short certainly shows that. Yes, it may have been an arson fire. We'll see how that plays out. But the fact is that they couldn't put the fire out, took them forever to respond. And I won't go into details on it. But we lost a major, a capital warship because of an import fire.

I mean, that's, and it's happened in the submarine community, too. Yeah, which submarine was that earned, and they just said, well, the heck, well, they will get rid of it. So with respect to ship handling and the collisions, yeah, there's a lot there that, that frankly people in my generation kind of shook their heads out of. How did we get to that point? Well, I'm not sure we were never at that point before. It just didn't happen to me.

And I did a lot of ship handling in my day and thankful for what I was able to do through command. But I think the response to the collisions in particular was focused on ship handling. And they changed the surface career path to adapt to to try and improve ship handling. And they did things with fail, pass, fail assessments on rules of the road when you go up to surface warfare officer school, et cetera, et cetera. And they spent a lot of money on trainers, almost all of which were shipments. based trainers, excuse me, shore base trainers. And okay, that's all good. That was all necessary, corrective to what had been going on since 2003 in the surface community. But that's, that wasn't the issue. The issue. I think the collisions, the fire on Bonham Richard,

what happened with the PDs and the Gulf, those are symptoms of a broader lack of focus on what we really are there for. Yeah. And I don't know, you know, I don't see the Navy really articulating why it exists in any effective way. And that's at a strategic level, but it gets all the way down to the deck plates. And the sailors on the deck plates are, you know, on, are really reeling under all the requirements that are placed on them. And in, in none of that, and this is not a, this is not a new phenomenon. It's a more pronounced phenomenon. But none of what we're doing is really focused on war fighting. and that's been the case even during the Cold War. Do you think that those young sailors on the deck plates are confronted when they join the service

and when they come through their initial training and then their initial, you know, indoctrination or familiarization on board ship that they may have to fight them, fight and fight and die, that this business is serious? Well, I'll tell you, it's been yet, I don't know because I think, I think when they come out boot camp there is there is tight and straight as any marine coming out of my son was was a marine was infantry was in afghanistan and i went to his boot camp his graduation and i went i was a speaker at the navy boot camp graduation and and there was you know there what you trained to do was different but they came out kind of the same then what we what we do

differently in the marine course we take them and we send them to a school three all this and they finally get to their ship. And it's really, it changes. But I don't, I don't think they're being confronted with it. When I had command, so this is probably 96, 97, so Cold War just ended. My command philosophy said, okay, we need to be prepared for a high-end fight, even though we're in a low-end era. And to be prepared for a high-end fight,

we need to push responsibility and accountability and authority down, far as possible so because i as the commanding loss will not be able to make every decision of combat that's the fundamental reality and it's going to happen fast and it's going to be ways we don't expect it so i need people to take ownership for their watch stations and and act within commanders intent to support the mission i had a young sail to come to me and and tell me they were they were very concerned about what i was talking about because you know they thought we were going to war. I said, well, we're not, I don't think we're going to war any time soon,

but we need to be ready if we do. And they were just, they were very concerned about that. That's not why they joined the Navy. So I think, and I think you could probably do the same thing with officers coming out of, whether it's Naval Academy or ROTC. We don't, we don't give them any kind of foundation in military theory, military history, or even. And I use those two as a way of saying, understanding what war is as a human endeavor as compared to the technological piece of smashing buttons on the console to launch weapons, that kind of stuff.

That's important, but you need to have a context that you're fighting against an actively opposed enemy will. And that takes something more than just smashing buttons. You mentioned the Naval Academy. So I was there. I taught there for three years, possibly as part of the problem because I was on the academic side of things. I was there as a Marine. So I was sensitive, I think, to some of the issues that you were highlighting here and confused

at times, honestly, about the environment that I was in. And I want to be careful what I say, but I'll just, I'll tell one anecdote. And, you know, the listeners can be the judge for themselves. But this would have been circa, you know, 2012, 2013. and active shooter guidance was promulgated for, you know, the base and for the brigade. And I read through it and he has posted on the walls. You know, what do you do if some crazy person comes around and starts shooting everyone up? And I'll tell you, Jerry, it's the same guidance that you would see in an elementary school.

You know, shelter in place, you know, lock the doors, you know, hide under, you know, hide in your desk. Bottom of the page, bottom of the page was, as a last resort, confront the shooter. And I was flabbergasted, you know, perhaps for the civilian employees, you know, in various aspects of the Academy's administration, this was appropriate. But are we really, I've sat there thinking, are we really telling young midshipman that if some crazy person is shooting up the classroom next door, they are to hide under their desks, like that that's what we're telling them. We shouldn't, you know, there's an opposite end of absurdity. where, you know, no one should be unarmed and, you know, charging an armed person down a long

hallway out of some, you know, misconceived sense of their own honor. But somewhere in between these two polls, there are, there are reasonable things to ask of young people who have been sworn into the United States military and who are being prepared to lead in combat. And that, and I, you know, raised this in my own modest way, the young officer and my chain of command was told them, in my opinions on the matter are not particularly welcome. So, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes, sir. But that was, you know, just, Just one example. Another, I'll say one thing, I'm curious to get your comment on this.

I was also kind of concerned with the way in which the surface warfare community was, you know, serviced by graduates or filled by graduates out of the academy. It struck me that the best students at the academy were phenomenal young Americans who had turned down admission to, you know, the best colleges in the land to go serve their country and they were going to flourish, you know, wherever, wherever they ended up. And then there were Mitchitman who I had concerns about. And the default, the default outcome at the academy, just to be blunt, was if you were at bottom of the class, you went to the surface warfare community. And this struck me as wholly perverse.

Holy perverse for an institution that, you know, the surface warfare community is it's not only its heritage, but also its future, that this is the war that's coming. the war at sea with China. And yet, here we were. So that was a lot. But I'm a Marine. I was a fish out of water. Maybe I'm exaggerating or overstating all this stuff. I don't know.

Yes. I, in my day, the, many of the, we had the same problem. And what, what we had the benefit of was the Spruins class, destroyers were coming in the line. That was really the first new class of surface warships since the Knox class frigates and the old World War II ships. And for most of my time at the Naval Academy, I was the nuclear power rep for my company. I was going to go submarines.

And a guy, a lieutenant, we were on a YP Cruz, and the lieutenant said to me, what are you going to do? And he was a surface guy. I told him, he said, oh, you're afraid to lead men. And I went, what do you mean? So submarines get all the pick of the litter, which may or may not be true. And in those days, in the late 70s, the surface community was really not doing well with that. And so I thought about it, and I said,

yeah, I don't want to go to school after I go to school anyway to learn new power. So I'll go surface. I got so much grief for that from the new power community because they were trying to make numbers. Anyway, first of all, I would say this, that in my experience, I would rather have an officer who can deal with reality and practically and effectively and effectively deal with other people

than the number one guy in the class necessarily. So in my company from Naval Academy, we graduated 26. And I mean, everyone who graduated was, had a good career. Many of us retired as captains, one is a three-star. and one of the guys who did very, very well was the anchor man in the class. His first tour of duty was on a World War II oiler. Not career, not exciting career. But anyway, my point is that I don't know how you would fix the surface community's representation

because people want to fly jets. I mean, that's kind of what everybody wants to do. Or many want to go, this I don't agree with. Many want to go be doctors and dentists and things like that. Well, then don't go to the Naval Academy, with some place sometimes, in my opinion. I think the Naval Academy should be preparing naval officers for combat arms, whether it's Marine or Navy.

And in a submarine community is the same way. I mean, the submariners are really the tip of the spear in many ways. So I think what my argument would be is, Now, we cannot address the service culture issue other than the way we did in the early 80s where we brought really good ships online and attracted people. So the Spruance class and Aegis class, Ticonderota class, those are remarkable ships. And we can make surface community more attractive to aspiring officers by showing them that when they get to a ship and get a division, that's their division. It's not the admiral's division and get, you know, get people off their back and focus on, yeah, manage the division, make the chief run it.

And you, Ensign Fonongolese, learn how to fight, learn what this whole naval warfare thing is about. That's part one. The other part is, I think at the Naval Academy, particularly, we need to do a lot more with military history, naval history, and naval theory. Theory has been really discounted in the Navy. And it's what fills the gaps from our experience and hones our judgments of we go into battle. We have something more than ROE pre-planned checklist and Docker. We have a sense of what this battle thing is going to be.

It doesn't, you don't want to take that into battle with you, but you want to have it there to hone your judgments. When you go into battle for the first time, you have a fighting chance of figuring it out. So that's where I think we're falling down. And the Naval War College, all the War College is probably, but the Naval War College is exactly the same. They're really pushing the academic credentials to get a master's degree,

and that's not what a war college is supposed to be for. The War College reports that I've heard from talking to people up there, they institute a few years ago, firing, not firing, not failing to graduate people who didn't make a certain grade point average. And almost all those that they let go were naval officers. Because the Navy undervalues the war college. Well, it undervalues the war college because, you know, if you want, if it all is getting an advanced degree, you can do that in any university in the country.

But if you want to understand naval warfare, not just in your community, but the broader naval warfare, and you want to understand where that fits into joint warfare, then that's what a war college should be doing, and we're not doing it. So let's imagine a young, it could be either a young midshipman or a, you don't call them field grade officers, but a student at the Naval War College who perhaps shares your sense that there's something out there that they're not getting that they should be. What should they be reading?

Like I said, I think they should read first and foremost Trent Holmes book, Learning War, which talks about the Navy from the early 1900s up through 1945. It's a remarkably fresh insight into what was going on and what it takes to be able to win against a capable point. The other book is Andrew Gordon's rules the game because it talks about the transition from peacetime culture to wartime culture. and when it fails and when it succeeds.

I think the Naval Institute is doing this American Sea Power project. They did a year, and they're getting really good authors to do it. So it's kind of new for the Naval Institute to have a consistent theme that they're hitting over time. Usually they take whatever comes over to Transom and publish it. If it's good, this is a themed thing. And last year was kind of the strategic level. This year's the operational level.

and next year it's going to be the tactical and below level. And so I think that the corpus of those articles, if people read those, will give them a very good sense of what a Navy is for, how it's going to be used, what are some of the alternatives to, you know, presence or not presence, that argument. And then you can put into context things like,

you know, do we want to make all these unmanned or optionally manned ships and how we're going to control them? Do we want to keep building missiles? when we can't we can't rearm it. See what's the, you know, those things get put into context by reading the strategy and operational level stuff. And frankly, I would, I would tell them to read FMFM1, the original version.

Because that, that, which you know is, it's called war fighting. Oh, yeah. To me, was, I read that when it first came out, and I'd already been talking maneuver warfare in the Navy, which doesn't go well, by the way. And I think that that, the value of that very thing, then won't hurt you if you read it a night and it falls on your face book is it talks about what war is like and that's what we need to be teaching people just to pull the thread because

I'm you know I'm I'm a Marine and so was indoctrinated in a cult of maneuver warfare it's almost a religious commitment what do you mean by it doesn't it doesn't go well at sea well you get several So I tried to insinuate that into the command culture on my ship to Sullivan's. And it went pretty well. People really like the idea. But I somehow got into an email exchange when we were in post-shakedown availability. So this is 97. And I ended up exchanging those with General Kruak, who said, what you're doing is great, but you don't, you don't understand manure warfare.

and that's what you need to do. And I said, General, I disagree. I've been studying the newer warfare since before you guys were. And I've been trying to implement it, but I can't call it that because the Navy doesn't want to do what the Marines are doing. And so, and that's one answer. The Navy doesn't want to do what the Marines are doing. The other answer is. So I said, if you don't believe me, come see me, come to my ship.

And you said, okay, well, I'm like, I better tell my Commodore that. I just invite the common out of not just some, but all Marines to come to my ship. Anyway, you know, so anyway, they, the other, the other reaction you get is, well, the Navy always maneuver, so what's the big deal? And it's hard, it's hard to get across what it, what it is. But, you know, people will say, hey, the composite warfare commander concept or composite warfare concept is maneuver warfare. That's what we do. And well, it is if we do it that way. But, you know, when you've got, when you've got ships shooting down missiles in the Red Sea off of Yemen,

and the White House situation was calling the CEO on the phone saying, what are you doing? Okay. You know, how is that working? How is that maneuver warfare ethos working? And so I've used in, so the maneuver warfare, that the Marines based it on is based on a German off-tracks tactic, which was a name that was applied after World War II to describe what the Germans had done up in World War I and World War II,

mostly in World War II. And the problem you have is that it took, the reason they did that is because Napoleon kicked their butts in Yenna in 1806. Okay. So it took them that long to get this all in place so that they had the right culture. The NCOs had the responsibility. junior officers understood, you know, you could like General General Bulk in trying to soar up the front west of Stalingrad in 1942, he would meet with his division commanders.

I think he was a Corps commander at the time. His division commanders, he'd go drive around and meet with him. And all his orders were verbal, very short verbal. And he knew which division commanders, he just had. to kind of look at and they knew what to do and which ones he had to really stick with and explain things to and we all experienced that as leaders there's people get it and there's people you need to help through and then there's people you need to fire but so that that kind of cultural thing is something that we haven't had impressed on us maneuver warfare came out of the out of the

vietnam war when we clearly had lost our understanding of how to command and control in war in combat, even at the infant in the infantry level. And it's evolved. I don't know how effectively the Marine Corps has actually implemented it. You know, my son was a corporal. He was a convoy commander and Marja. And he's told me all sorts of stories about he did two deployants. He's told me all sorts of stories.

What battalion? Third, sixth. Yeah, I was with one six. Yeah. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah, so his company was, I think, yeah, his company was heloed into Marsh and whatever that when we. February of 2010.

Yeah. And he said, he said, dad, these, these Taliban guys can't hit anything to save the day. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, they're shooting at us and bullets spraying everywhere and no one's getting hit. I said, don't tell your mother that one. Do not tell your mother that one. But, you know, they, and they did a great job. But, but the second deployment, you know,

the what was conspicuously absent were senior enlisted in junior officers from outside the wire. You know, he was a, he was a, he was a four convoy commander and was out, they were out on their own. And so that's a different. And I, you know, that's obviously different in how the Navy would fight because we take everything with us. But I just wonder how much, and maybe that's the ultimate expression of maneuver warfare. know. I think not. I think

the maneuver warfare concept is practiced by Germans and the Israelis and what we're trying to do has much more had much heavier involvement at the J.O. Senior Liff level than what he described. Yeah. That's right. I mean, and all of us, every service is operating under this whole joint world that we're in, which my cynical opinion probably people wouldn't agree with me is that army dominated set of doctrine because that's what the army does they do doctrine really well

the Marines and the Navy in particular are operating we don't do a whole lot of that doctrine stuff compared to what the army does so you could argue that in World War II the Pacific campaign was a joint campaign and the difference between then and now is that each then each service kept its unique culture based on its domain, air, surf, sea, land, and work together. Now we're trying to make everything the same regardless of domain. And I don't think that's right. Yeah. There's a whole separate conversation that maybe we should have. It would be a whole other episode on a shortcomings in Afghanistan, very much including the Marines.

And it's a good question, how much of that is it, because there were shortcomings and how much of that is attributable to, you know, failure to be true maneuverists or is attributable to other causes? I'm not sure. It's actually a good question worth kind of exploring. Yeah, I'm not, I mean, I'm a Navy guy. I'm a pump kicker ship driver guy. I don't know much about what goes on on the land at a professional level.

But I do know when I read, when I listen to what my son talks about in his, as he regales me with, you know, two combat tours there. And then I read what the Germans were doing or what the Israelis do. I see a totally different world. Yeah. I probably knew, I probably know some of your sons, lieutenants. Yeah, we won't go there. Not on the air, at least. So just to step back for a second because we've we've waded into, I think, a debate that's going to be familiar to, you know, professional officers, but may not be to every listener.

So the counterpart, the other view that opposes maneuver warfare is to summarize attrition-based warfare. You grind it out with the other guy and the guy typically with the most stuff brought to apply most efficiently wins. maneuver warfare holds that that's not necessarily true that one should avoid the enemy's strengths and strike it as weaknesses and one should devolve this is kind of at the heart of your piece and now that you pointed out i see exactly how you've put it in the headline and i missed it a war fighting imperative how your piece is in a way about maneuver warfare and a naval context you push authority down to the lowest level you can really get away with on the theory that it's the folks at that level who will see the opportunities, who will see the gaps amidst the surfaces and

be able to cause the enemy harm and you empower them with knowledge of a commander's intent that they can operate within so that they can achieve the mission. So just to just to kind of clarify for people who may be getting their bearings and what we're what we're talking about. And, you know, a constant tension here. And you see this in the, in the Marines. In the Marines, we typically often confront it in the sort of barracks, non-deployed environment versus the deployed environment. you know if you i'm with you jerry i i'm i was i was raised a maneuverist and i remain a maneuverist and i think if you want to win fights that's how you can do it that there's something about human competition that maneuver warfare gets correctly but if you want to avoid getting in trouble

as a senior officer or or a junior officer for that matter you don't devolve authority down you control it um if you live in a world i'm going to make these examples up if you live in a world where you're a battalion commander and you're going to get let up because you have a certain number of DUIs. Well, you know, the command environment you're going to create to prevent that kind of thing from happening is going to be one that's hyper-controlled. And it's hard to alternate between the sort of administrative mindset where, you know, people are micromanaged because the boss doesn't want to get in trouble. And then somehow shed that in a tactical environment where you're meant to be this much, you know, much more trusting organization where we're senior officers. or trusting junior officers and NCOs to not only do the right thing, but to win, to win without minute-to-minute guidance.

And the trust goes three ways, actually, right? So it goes down. So the seniors trust the subordinates. The subordinates trust the seniors that the seniors, one, are competent, and two, are not going to ask them to do something for frivolous reasons. Do something that might get them killed. And then you need to, actually, there's four ways. You need to trust each other at the same level.

So you as the platoon leader, a company commander, need to trust the other platoon leader. And you need to know them. You need to understand what they're thinking. And then finally, you need to trust yourself. And that goes to your level of training and confidence and how you've been prepared. So that's, but I think I don't like the separation of maneuver versus the attrition.

I don't like that because I think that leads one to the, conclusion that maneuver warfare isn't about killing the enemy. It's what it, what maneuver warfare is about killing the enemy much more efficient and much more effectively and doing it faster than the enemy is ready to handle it, whereas attrition is the broad front, slow advance. We just, we're going to out-metal you. What I think the opposite of maneuver warfare is what the French called methodical battle. And for various reasons, many of which were justified, the French army going into World War II was going to rely on what they call methodical battle. The artillery would pulverize the enemy.

The infantry would move in, largely unopposed, dig in. The artillery would move up and repeat the washrooms. And what that whole process failed to account for was that the enemy got a vote. And so you have the model in French literature was the general had his hand on a fan. He could direct it where he wanted to. If that doesn't sound familiar to our way of fighting today, then we're not paying attention. That's exactly how things are in.

And modern command and control capabilities, the ability to reach down in, you know, from the White House to a ship CEO, it accentuates that problem. And what the French found, of course, is the generals trying to do the fan thing while German soldiers are running by him outside, outside his chateau

headquarters and he's being told you know by his intel guys the Germans are 25 miles in front of you you're doing it right and the guys the drivers are like hey those are Germans going by here

and so it was that disconnect and so I think you don't you don't what what the maneuver warfare concepts allow you to do is to kill the enemy better and fast

without having to have necessarily a material overmatch because you're reacting so fast because the guys at the tip of the spear, the company commanders, the shift COs, the TAOs, whatever, they have the ability, the latitude to take action. And then everybody flows in behind success in, you know, kind of a linear sense. And that's what, and that's the whole John Boyd-Udle loop thing, you know, where you're, you're creating an increasingly bad situation for the enemy. And then, and there was a lot of argument back in the days when we're doing, uh, uh, airland battle after Vietnam. And they actually, the army actually interviewed, uh, General Balk and General Bond Melentai is, his chief staff, chief of staff, uh, general staff officer. And they talked about, you know, this whole maneuver warfare thing.

And we can, we can, you know, Liddell Hart's approach, which was we can, we can out maneuver and therefore we can beat the enemy without hardly fight. It kind of assumes a approach. And Balkan, Van der Leonellentine said, we don't know what you're talking about. You know, and these are the ultimate practitioners. They said, no, no, we maneuvered to kill the enemy. Yeah. There was, with the Russians, you had to kill them. You couldn't get away from that.

And so, so that's kind of, that's where, so I, I don't particularly like the attrition versus maneuver. I like the methodical battle versus maneuver, because that, that to me captures the essence of both predilections. It's a great point and well argued. And I have a, I have a three-year-old at home who seems to have been born preternaturally gifted at being inside of my Oudal Loop. So I predict he's going to be a great field commander one day. It doesn't get any better. Jerry Roncalado. author most recently of a fantastic piece called A War Fighting Imperative, Back to Basics for the Navy.

Thank you so much for joining us today. It was fascinating conversation. My pleasure. I enjoyed it. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.