School of War - Ep 169: Dmitry Filipoff on Naval Warfare in 2025

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

Dmitry Filipoff, associate research analyst at the Center for Navy Analyses, joins the show to discuss the U.S. Navy surface component and the grave challenges it faces. ▪️ Times      • ��    01:19 Introduction     •      02:09 Lessons from the Red Sea      •      06:35 Friendly fire       •      10:55 Depletion        •      13:45 2027       •      18:07 How do fleets fight?      •      21:47 Scope and scale        •      24:57 “Catastrophic destruction”      •      29:00 The first few hours     •      34:30 Scripted exercises          •      37:15 Managing the chaos      •      41:34 Failing constructively   Follow along on Instagram or YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

How is the Navy going to fight in the Pacific if there's a war? What do we learn from fighting the Houthis in the Red Sea and how our munitions expenditures there affecting us in the Pacific? And what about the human element? Are our sailors and officers in the surface fleet ready to fight? We're going back into the weeds on naval war fighting today. Let's get into it. It is a perspective for war.

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And 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 back to the show today, Dmitri Philippoff, who is at the Center for International Maritime Security and also an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis. He's an expert in something called distributed maritime operations. Dmitri, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having it. We're going to talk about war fighting today, war fighting at sea.

This is your second time in the show. I went back and listened to your very interesting episode from about a year ago, where you were explaining sort of the basic operating concepts of the surface fleet. here in 2024 or what they what they what they what they seem to be becoming and we're a year on now where it's 2025 you said at the time that it was a little too soon to say what there is to be learned from the ongoing conflict in the red sea between the navy and other navies sailing alongside ours and the huthis backed by iran it's january 2025 i feel a little bit like i mean it's still going on but i feel a little bit like those characters at the end of that movie burn before reading where they say you know what What do we learn here? What do we learn from this unedifying and frustrating conflict in the Red Sea, Dmitri?

Yeah, I mean, I think you captured it by calling it a frustrating experience. I think to stop the topic that I have to caveat that I'm just speaking here in a personal capacity. Nothing I say here is based on anything I've done through my employer or anything like that. But I mean, the Red Sea, I think we've learned some interesting things about shipboard air defense, things in terms of, you know, how to handle ourselves in that kind of environment where we're seeing a variety of threats, salvos of missiles, salvos of drones, an issue ballistic missiles, pretty remarkable capabilities that are being fueled out there by the Houthis, and the U.S. Navy is definitely being pushed in some respects

to kind of that capability. In terms of what can be learned from that, I think we've learned a lot about, you know, how to handle weapons doctrine and weapons depletion. You know, what kind of capability is appropriate to the kind of threat? Are we going to use a multi-million dollar missile to shoot down a cheap drone? Probably not, if we can help it. But I also think it's important to understand that, you know, as we're talking about, you know, the cost exchange between offense and defense, we do have to be grounded in the tactics of the situation when it's going on. Because if the U.S. Navy wants to optimize for cost, that means it has to let the threats get closer to itself so it can use cheaper weapons.

If a U.S. Navy warship has to shoot down a threat that's more than 25 miles out, then we're going to be using missiles that probably cost millions of dollars. And it's also important to keep in mind what the mission is there, right? The mission is not just protecting U.S. Navy warships. It's about protect. protecting merchant traffic. And so it's an area defense mission, which means you're going to have to be using more longer range weapons. So, you know, it's not just the cost of the missile to protect the warship from the drone. You know, it's the cost of the commercial ship that could be carrying tens of millions of dollars with commerce that you managed to protect from a threat.

And so in terms of making sense of these engagements and the value of it, we have to be thinking a little bit more broadly than just, you know, what's the cost of the weapon and the thing it shot down? Another thing in terms of like, you know, the more operational strategic level, you know, it doesn't seem we've definitively put an end to the threat. So yes, the U.S. Navy has had a pretty decent success rate at protecting itself and shooting down a lot of threats. But the ultimate measure of success is, are the commercial companies feeling comfortable enough with the operational situation there that things will return back to normal in terms of their operations in the maritime traffic? And the answer is no, we're still seeing a depression there in terms of ships who are willing to go around the entire continent of Africa rather than have a more efficient. transit through the Red Sig. And so the question is, you know, how can we definitively put an end to the

Houthi capability? You know, by shooting down these missiles and so on, are we just treating the symptoms of the threat? You know, what is the root cause here? And also, you know, I think the Navy is taking a lot of pride in the first deployment that it had, or, you know, the Dwight Eisenhower strike group was on the scene dealing with these threats. But there's a long-term question of how much longer do we really want to be doing this. How much longer do we want to have carrier strike groups bottled up in the Red Sea, almost, you know, perhaps mowing the grass in the Houthi threat when those things, those assets may be put to better you use against China, for example. So there's a longer-term question of how sustainable is this. And also, the recent shoot-down incident with the friendly fire

incident in the Red Sea, that is, that is a remarkable development. You know, I think it's too soon to say definitively what happened. There's, of course, going to be investigations and so on. But it is the kind of issue that, of course, many things have to go wrong for that kind of thing to happen. And so when you're talking about, you know, area defense lessons, you know, and missile defense lessons from the Red Sea, you cannot exclude this, this extreme event of shooting down one of our own planes. Well, let's, can we linger on that for a second? I mean, there's a lot in what you just said, and there's a few different ways in which I want to follow up, but just, just lingering with this shoot down, because I want to, I want to get you to say, you know, why is it so remarkable? I mean, I can offer my non-naval. expert layman's instinct, which is that for as high-tech and sophisticated and data-driven, our processes are, and for as, I mean, they're dangerous. I mean, if their missile hits your ship, you're in real trouble. But for as low-tech, relatively speaking, as the Houthis are,

a mistake like this seems to me to have to be, you know, at some level human. Tell me, tell me what you think based on what you know. I mean, there's obviously an argument in Washington. or a line of thinking in Washington that's skeptical, skeptical of the surface Navy's war fighting ability, if only because it's been since 1945 that the Surface Navy has really faced a peer threat. What does this incident actually tell us? I mean, again, it's, there's a lot of room to speculate, and I want to be careful with what I say here, but it, but it is the kind of error that that requires many things to fail in order for this to happen.

It is remarkable because there is no, it doesn't seem like there's any threat that the Houthi have that could be, that could come. across as an F-18 fighter, right? They're not operating fighter jets, as far as I know. And also, I mean, it's just, you know, you're kind of in this confined area, you know, in the Red Sea. And having situational awareness over airspace and then this is, this is one of the top jobs of a cruiser of an air defense. One of the top jobs of a cruiser of a carrier strike group, right, is to lead that air defense mission and to have that, that situational awareness. And so, you know, I think it's really important to ask when we are seeing something like this.

And the Navy is saying we are learning a lot from these engagements and we're sharpening our edge. It's always important to ask the question of how much could we have learned, how much of this exact same lessons could we have learned without having our people get shot at in the first place, right? You know, could we have learned these exact same lessons and exercises and simulations and war games? Are there ways you could have learned these things without having to put our people into a combat situation? And so we always have to wonder like, you know, how much of these lessons are genuinely proactive. evolution versus how much of this is corrective action, right? How much of this is us fighting that things are not working out as well as we thought they would in this kind of situation? And obviously shooting down friendly aircraft is something that falls into the realm of corrective

action. And this specific type of friendly fire incident is interesting to me because I put out at work on DMO and talking about what this could look like. And, you know, I imagine that in the next high-end war at sea, having a close air defense relationship between aircraft and worship, is going to be extremely important for everyone's survivability, mainly because aircraft can see missiles and spaces that warships cannot. Because, you know, one of the deadliest things to a warship is the horizon limitation, and they can't detects east-coming missiles that are flying below that limitation most of the time. And so you need aircraft to have a close relationship with warships

that they can work together to deal with those threats. But, you know, if the aviators feel that there's a good chance that they may get shot down by a friendly warship and, of course, are trying to protect that worship from missiles, That, of course, is going to reduce operational effectiveness. And so, again, I think it's very, it'll be very interesting to see what comes to this investigation and what lessons we get out of it. You made the point or rather you raise the question of, you know, what is it we're actually doing here in the Red Sea? We don't seem to have solved the threat. How long do we want the Navy to be bottled up here?

I think those are all very reasonable questions. Again, I can kind of offer my own view, which I don't blame really the Navy for the deeper problems here. I think the mistakes in this conflict are really strategic. in nature. They're not failures of operating concepts. There's a decision made at the highest levels, I assume by the president himself, to essentially play defense, and the Navy is out there playing defense. And there are different ways in which you could think about going after the Houthis, whether it's going after regime targets, their command and control capabilities, whether there's countervalue strikes like the Israelis have been doing. I mean, there's a recipe,

a series of recipes that you could cook that would start to impose real costs on the Houthis. And then, you know, there's an Iran part to that conversation as well. And the decision's just been taken not to really do any of that at any kind of significant scale or with any kind of significant ferocity such that we are where we are. And so I am curious, you know, we, the Navy is then in this situation where it's kind of forced into these dilemmas. And I'm not trying to defend everything with the Navy. I agree with you completely. I think the F-18 thing is very concerning. But they are forced into these dilemmas, which, well, okay, what kind of weapon system do we want to use here? I mean, if you get it wrong in the end, you potentially have grievous damage.

to a to a capital ship. So like maybe we are going to fire a million dollar missile. I get it. I mean, I see the dilemmas and I don't, you know, I don't want to sit here necessarily in armchair quarterback. Every weapons release decision in these defense scenarios. That said, we are running through a lot of stuff, right, Dimitri. You know, best as you can tell, like, you know, how badly has this depleted our magazines?

How serious are we at refilling them? How serious is the Navy? How serious is industry? Like, speak to that part of the problem. Yeah, I mean, I think it's important. understand that weapons depletion is one of your biggest enemies in naval warfare. You can, you can tear through a magazine of a warship very quickly, even though, you know, your average U.S. Navy destroyer packs more than a hundred missiles. You can go through that remarkably fast.

You know, I don't know the exact numbers. I've seen numbers out there of the number of engagements we think we are aware of. And, I mean, it could be potentially hundreds of targets have been shot down with a variety of weapons systems. And that's going to, it's going to take years to be here to probably build back that inventory, right? And, you know, we don't really have that many of these weapons to go around. I mean, it's a chronic problem that we have especially understood in the wake of the Ukraine war that we have. We have chronically shortchanged weapons accounts and the magazines that we have. And now that we're seeing what the expenditure looks like, you know, we realize that we just cannot,

we just cannot be shortchanging our weapons magazines anymore. And so, you know, that is a, that is a strategic limiting factor. It's not just something, it's not just something that concerns the person on the scene. or the fleet commander, it's something we have to ask for ourselves strategically. You know, am I comfortable spending air defense missiles shooting down Houthi drones at the expense of potentially losing the potential expense of not using those weapons to shoot down Chinese anti-ship missiles in the Taiwan scenario? Right.

That's a very real tradeoff. And people keep talking about, you know, we have to get ready for war in 2027 with China. And, you know, the weapons inventories are not going to change that much in the next two years. And so if we shoot a missile today, there's a good chance it's not going to be replaced in two years. And so we need to be thinking more strategically about the implications of weapons to pollution. You know, I take that to be just a blunt statement of reality, and I have nothing really to push back on it. It is coherent with the views of every other smart person I talk to on this question. That said, we do have a change in administration, new president, new secretary of the Navy, John Phelan,

you know, put yourself in this new secretary's shoes. I mean, we're all sitting here saying these outrageous things. Like, if we shoot a missile today, we won't have it back by 2027. That's insane. I mean, it's just insane. And by the way, all the military indicators suggest to me that the sort of late 20s clock for an invasion scenario is pretty much, seems pretty plausible. Seems pretty spot on.

I mean, it might be deterred. You're sort of shaking your head here. I'm curious to know if you disagree, but maybe things can be. deterred. Maybe there are diplomatic solutions. Maybe President Trump has a kind of deterrent force all his own. I think those are all plausible. But just purely from a point of view of military preparation, you see these half dozen, you know, mulberry harbors being built by the Chinese, just break into the news in the last week. You know, things seem pretty concerning. So if you're the new SECNAV, what do you, you know, you're being told, sorry, sir, we fire these missiles. We're not getting

them back. What do you do? What can you do? Yeah. So, I mean, in terms of the 2027 date, you know, I'm just, I guess I'm just cautious or skeptical of thinking like, you know, there's, there's a, there's like, you know, a 2027 clock and on Huchingping's wall or something like that. I think it's more of a general guideline in North Star for both the PLA for the U.S. military. So like the pirate code, more a set of guidelines than a trick rules. But I mean, it is useful as something to kind of drive a sense of urgency into people and think like, you know, yes, you may actually have to fight a high end war and you should all be asking yourselves very carefully. what does a war we're trying to mean for me in my day-to-day job and whatever I'm doing for the Navy, whatever I'm doing for the Defense Department, you know, it should serve as a wake-up call.

You know, in terms of what they should focus on, I mean, the weapon stocks is probably not going to change. You're not going to change the force structure in the fleet in a couple of years. I think one of my bigger gripes with sort of the, the D.C. crowd on naval affairs is that there's definitely a strong focus on technology and shipbuilding and forest structure. I think one of the most important things that gets ignored is the war-fighting development of the Navy. You know, this is a system that is responsible for investigating the future of war and developing the force and adapting to it. This is a system that does your tactical development,

your doctrine development, your combat training. This is the force that's, this is the system that's responsible for teaching people how to fight and how to get better at fighting. And I think that is an area where leaders have far more decision space to consider than changes in hardware. I think, I think you can probably update the combat training curriculum of a force a whole lot faster than it takes to build a new warship or design a new missile or anything like that. And so if we are able to change the curriculum of these things, change the design of the exercises, change the combat training curriculum, change the war gaming programs at the Naval War College, there's a chance that we could rotate tens of thousands of people through these

programs within the next two years, right? And so I think focusing on war-finding development is probably a more effective focus area for really trying to make a major change for the Navy in time for 2027. And also we need to be mindful that, you know, when we talk about capability, when you talk about new ships and weapons, you do not close a gap and risk when you feel a new weapon or when you build a new ship. Every single new capability you introduce into the force creates a new set of downstream demands of war fighting development. So the people who actually are in charge of using those things in war know what they're doing with them. And there's, you know, as we've seen in the Red Sea and with the shootdown and with, you know, other other issues,

we can't be totally sure that the Navy completely understands how to use the things it has today in a high-end war, let alone brand new capabilities that could be coming down the pike, right? And so I think, I think doubling down on the focus on war-fighting development is a much more productive use of our time than, then perhaps worrying about, you know, hardware-type questions. Well, let's talk about this then, and this is really your bread and butter, and it's a, It's a reasonable point that the human software is probably more flexible than the hardware. As part of this distributed maritime operations concepts, which we went into some length on the last time we spoke, and I encourage listeners to look up that episode because it's a really good introduction to the idea.

And I should say, they should look at the things you've written on this. So you recently wrote a report at the Atlantic Council on this subject called distributed maritime operations, solving what problems and seizing which opportunities. People can look that up. But there's a related concept to this new way of thinking about fighting at sea, which is the maritime operations center and the notion that one is going to fight from the maritime operations center or the mock. This is getting a little in the weeds. This is getting kind of technical, but this is how the Navy is thinking about fighting. And just to put it in context, I mean, that the layman listener might understand, because this is the context I had to put it into for me to understand, we're talking

about fleets at war again, you know, as opposed to the way the Navy has fought and projected power for generations now. We're talking about admirals fighting fleets and a bunch of other stuff, too, as fleets. So where are those admirals? How are they making decisions? How are they tactically prepared? How are their staffs tactically prepared? How is this all going to work? that's what's tied up in this somewhat jargony maritime operations center debate. Dmitri, how are Admiral is going to fight? How are fleet's going to fight in the late 2020s? Well, I'm trying to figure that out myself, but here's a rough sketch of what I've been able

to figure out so far, is that the maritime operations center, it's not just, it's basically a command center at the major fleet commands, right? So the Pacific Fleet has a mock, the Seventh Fleet has a mock. All the major fleet commands have had this thing called a mock. And it's not just like a physical command center. It's a philosophy that the next high-end war at sea will be won from the mock. And that's a departure from traditional naval thinking, which is, of course, you know, you will have your flagship at sea, and you will command the fleet from sea. And that'll be the way we do things.

And so the mock is an interesting departure. And it's important to understand this in the context of the Navy's high-end war fighting in DMO in the sense that, you know, this is where the high-level kind of decision-making is primarily. probably going to happen in terms of, you know, deciding the engagements and so on. And so when we're asking about, you know, DMO or how the Navy is going to fight, we have to ask, you know, how are they preparing the people who man the mock to do this kind of fighting? What is the mock warfighting curriculum? What's the war game that goes into this? And my sense is that the mocks have perhaps been chronically under resource, perhaps understab. They are extremely dependent on reservists to augment the mocks in the time of, in a time of need. So if there's a major exercise, that's really going to be,

you know, put a lot of burden on the mock. They need to bring in a lot of reservists to make sure they can keep up with the tempo. And that's, that's no knock on the reservists, but it's a question of, you know, if this is going to be your premier center of war-fighting decision-making in a major high-end war, you know, how sustainable is it? And so that's the curious question. And also, you know, as you might be able to tell, the mock is a very concentrated kind of construct, right?

So we may have a bit of a contradiction here where we're talking about fleets. We're talking about having, we're talking about having spread out, you know, warships and fleets across the theater, but the command structure is very concentrated by comparison. And that can be a liability, right? So, you know, if the ability of a distributed fleet to be able to continue the fight is, it hinges on the ability of a mock to stay in the fight, you know, is that a single point of failure? You know, what is the backup plan? And that's something I try to talk about a lot in the report. You know, how can we have more command nodes in the battle space that can kind of step in and continue the fight if the networks go down, if the mock is out of the fight, or the flagships go out of

fight. This kind of thinking is something that I think it's far more well developed in the U.S. Army because they have seen what has happened in Ukraine, where Ukraine has ruthlessly targeted the command posts of Russian forces. And the U.S. Army has taken that lesson and made an emphasis of distributing command posts at the National Training Center when people go in for their exercises. Because if you show up to this exercise and you have a concentrated command post, there's a chance you're going to be losing pretty quickly. But I think there's kind of disparity there because I'm not sure the Navy has really caught onto the idea of distributing command notes and command posts in the way that the Army has. And so, you know, this is something we need to be thinking about,

you know, very seriously. What is the case then, given that very reasonable concern for having this capability immobile and ashore? And I'm picturing, you know, tell me if I should picture something different, but I'm kind of picturing from that 80s movie War Games with Matthew Broderick, like the NORAD command centers, or you've got the maybe Dr. Strange Love, you've got the big board, you know, you've got a bunch of sailors and officers sitting at terminals, you know, monitoring their job responsible for their information stream and their decisions, all being coordinated sort of by the admiral there, you know, when the balloon goes up, standing in the middle barking orders. Why would we want that ashore as opposed to mobile and at sea, or maybe

to your point, to your, your, the way you put it, maybe that's a false choice. Why would we want it all concentrated as opposed to distribute it? Yeah. So there's, there's a couple of reasons that, couple things incentivizing this kind of set up. One of them is that the scope and scale of a modern naval campaign and a battle is going to take place across a theater-wide level, right? It's going to take place across the entirety of a region. It's not going to be something that is confined within the situational awareness of a single naval task group, right? And so the need for a broader sense of situational awareness across the entire region is a major driver of why they want maritime operations centers. And a maritime operation center is a pretty, it's a pretty robust

command center. It's more robust than what you could find even on an aircraft carrier to give you a sense of comparison. There's also, and this is based off of conversations I had with people when writing the Atlantic Council report, there's a strong sense that, you know, we're going to rely pretty heavily on highly classified capabilities in war with China. But in order to use that capability, we need to have the right, we need to have the right infrastructure, the right communication channels, you know, the right people who are cleared

to use that kind of stuff. And it's much easier to wield highly classified capabilities at a sort of a shore establishment like this than a carrier flagship, for example, which may have more limited facilities and staffing and so on for this kind of fight. And so that's another major driver of what I can understand. But it is a major paradigm change for the Navy,

and it's still very much work in progress. How do we think about surprise in the Pacific and being ready for surprise? I'm still caught up on this concern you have about concentration. I was just in Israel a couple months ago and embedded with the IDF there and sort of studied what they were doing up in the north and Lebanon. And I was struck by just how successful their deception and decapitation campaign in September and October were. And I did this long episode and wrote this piece to the effect of a memory that in the Pacific that we're Hezbollah and the Chinese are. the Israelis and we shouldn't be quite so confident that in 2025 you know the defense is sort of the stronger form of warfare anymore there seem to be opportunities for the offense to put

real points on the board really quickly if you can generate an atmosphere of ambiguity and leverage intelligence overmatch and precision i mean if you can do those things you can win pretty quickly as the israeli showed or at the very least make a lot of progress really quickly before you culminate you know if i'm the chinese and there's this mock in Hawaii or whatever or a series of mocks in different places. But I mean, how can you hide these things? Like, you're going to know where they are. It's obviously at the top of my list for problems to deal with. Now, okay, so maybe that's beyond my A2AD bubble in the area where I'm most comfortable, but these are priority targets. Pearl Harbor was beyond the normal operating

areas of the Imperial Japanese fleet in 1941, but they made it work. How do you think about surprise? How do you think about the first hours or day? of a war scenario in the Pacific and how do these concepts intersect with like the very violent, very iterative reality that those hours will present? Yeah, I mean, that's a really important question to be asking because naval warfare is a form of warfare where it's extremely catastrophic destruction very quickly and a type of warfare where the offense has the advantage. Right.

If a carrier strike group falls parade to a Chinese missile salvo, that's about, you know, 7,000 lives and $20 billion worth of capability that's lost in just a couple of minutes, right? You know, those equivalent numbers will get you about, you know, a couple thousand tanks, but there is no plausible combat scenario where you lose a couple thousand tanks in a couple minutes, right? So naval warfare is an absolutely brutal form of conflict, and you cannot afford to skimp out on your, on your defenses and your situational awareness. And so the way this plays out, you know, especially with China, I mean, China has perhaps the most fierce. arsenal of anti-ship weaponry than compared to any country in the world. And so the question for the U.S.

Navy is, how do I, how do I penetrate and survive within that AT, A-2-A-D envelope? And that's why the Navy's thinking about distribution, that's a key driver of distribution in a sense that China's naval firepower is so overwhelming or so potent that, you know, we don't want to, we don't want to test that capability against concentrated naval formations, right? You know, the point of distributing is that it helps set up the fleet for better deception, better survivability. And so the source of survivability in a distributed fleet is not the raw concentrated firepower of the ships. It's counter-targeting.

We're trying to interfere with the targeting and the decision-making and the sensing that sets up the strikes rather than waiting until the end of the kilching and hoping the naval defenses of a concentrated formation can hold around against those strikes. And so that's why, you know, in the Atlanta Council report, you know, I chose to focus that piece on decision advantage. And how can we deceive and have deception to frustrate their decision-making? And how can we reinforce our own decision-making through better commanding control? And having those relationships and being able to, you know, affect the fog of war and situational awareness of the adversary through deception in those opening hours, it's going to be absolutely fundamental to survivability.

Yeah, I guess my concern is, I mean, that all makes a lot of sense. And I get the appeal of the concept and as a sort of paradigm. Everything you said just now makes sense. I'm just thinking about the human realities of the first few hours and the possibility that there will be genuine surprise. Maybe not like cold start genuine surprise because it would be pretty hard to pull that off if you're the Chinese. But at least enough ambiguity in Chinese behavior that we won't actually know when H-hour is. And we won't be fully deployed in our capabilities. And add to that, by the way, which if you want to go back and look at World War II, this is a huge factor, December 41, really through a lot of 1942. It's just the peacetime fat of the United States Navy. Now accumulated effectively, you know, in the surface community, you could argue, for 80 years. You know, it just takes time sometimes for a fighting force to become really a fighting force and to do away with what's not essential. And if I understand I'm not an expert in Chinese doctrine,

But if I understand the experts in Chinese doctrine, the Chinese prioritize surprise, what I think I've learned in the last couple years at looking at these questions is that the defensive form of war in 2025 does have a lot of advantages. So if you're going to move, if you're going to be on offense, it means surprise really is essential. Striking the first blow is essential. If you give a lot of warning and attack into the teeth of your DMO concept, fully deployed, already, all sensors up, everyone's kind of hovering. at the edge of the Chinese weapons envelope, you know, well, that's, that's tough. That's tough for the PLA Navy. But if you can get a few hours ahead of that or a few days ahead of that, that's, that's very, very dangerous. That's what I mean, everything, all of which is say, your answer makes great sense. Yes, if DMO is up and running and it works, makes sense. But what about those

first few hours? How, how are we thinking about that? How is the, how should the Navy think about that. Yeah, it's, it's a tough question. I definitely agree that the Chinese seem to have a doctrinal emphasis on surprise. I don't know if the U.S. Navy has a, has a similar emphasis on deception to, to, you know, mitigate that. You know, is deception sort of a household tactical doctrine throughout the fleet? I'm not so sure about that. And I also think you're, you're, when you address surprise in a larger sense, I think it's definitely going to happen, you know, in the sense that we haven't fought another fleet in a great power war since World War II. Capability has changed so much since then and our ability to truly know how all of that's going to actually come together.

It's very hard to know for sure. So there's going to be a lot of surprises in that realm as well. In terms of the first few hours, you know, it's interesting the way you put it in that, like, you know, we're going to have a bunch of, we're going to try to have a bunch of ships ready to go on the outside of the perimeter and then ready to go in. I think China has a very strong interest in preventing it from ever getting to that point. Right. Right. And I get this. sense that in Chinese doctrine, they have a, they put priority on targeting your critical enablers, right, your logistics, your networks, those kinds of things. Those also happen to be the kind of things that the U.S. Navy has a chronic issue of not wanting to impose friction on in their

exercises. You know, like it's really a massive muscle movement to say, well, we're going to, we're going to cut off GPS and make a carry strike group fight without GPS. Or we're going to really, you know, hamper your logistics in a variety of ways. Like, you know, that's just some something that a lot of people unfortunately just don't want to think about, you know, how do I force myself to fight without these critical enablers? And well, that's the very first thing that the Chinese are going to target. And so we have to force ourselves and think about that. We have to put people through the exercises and find the answers for that. And it's going to be a very, it's going to be a very frustrating process to see, you know, how can we make do without

that? And so when I think about the first few hours and I think about surprise, we're talking about, you know, not necessarily the warships being the first targets, but the commanding control centers like the mocks, your your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, ammo dumps, that kind of thing, right? That's, that's the kind of thing that's going to be really surprising to people if they don't practice that a lot in peacetime. And, you know, if I were the one designing these training plans, whether for, for ships or mock staffs or whoever we're talking about, and ideally you want exercises where they're all training together, right? You know, taking away these capabilities selectively is ought to be, that ought to be what you're training for.

otherwise it's just a parade you know that is to say yeah you should just build into every exercise okay and now you operate without GPS you know you should do some exercise but guess what guys now you operate without a mock and we gotta go find a new admiral because the admiral's dead because this war like that's what's gonna happen

that's what's gonna happen and I I'm a little bit this conversation is not making me less worried I'll put it that way yeah I mean the Navy unfortunately and I mean I've read about this public and other series and stuff. But there is a chronic problem of heavily scripting exercises in the U.S. Navy to guarantee that the Blue Team wins. And people go into the events knowing what's going to

happen. The Red Forces, the opposition forces are deliberately handicapped. And so, you know, you calling it a parade, that's one way to call it. I mean, I've had people call it a play. You know, there's a lot of writing out there in the Navy where people have, you know, described these combat training, these combat exercise practices of a lot of frustration saying this is not realistic. You know, this only serves, you know, this serves a lot of beer purposes or political or cultural purposes, you know, why are we not willing to lose from opposition force? And if we're not willing to do it to ourselves, then we're just asking for the Chinese to do it to us in the real world someday, right? And so, you know, this chronic habit of scripting the

exercises and not being willing to really go into the deep end of difficulty, it masks a lot of problems and it defers a lot of critical warfighting lessons that you should be learning. And so this is the kind of thing that you need to be thinking about going back to what, you know, you asked me earlier about what should we be focusing on if we really think there's going to be a war this decade, we need to be having better warfighting development in the vein of these types of things, right? We need to be finding, you know, all the hidden problems inside the Navy that could blow up in our face in the war with China. That could lead us to shoot down, you know, friendly forces like we just did in the Red Sea. There's a lot of problems

that are, you know, embedded within the Navy that we have not fully addressed or have not found yet because this habit of scripting exercises and combat training programs, it's been a habit for decades for the Navy. And so this is a major source of self-inflicted risk. And this is a, this is a practice that causes a lot of faulty tactics and doctrine to proliferate throughout the force unknowingly. And yet it's massed by, you know, oh, we won the exercises. We got green across the board and we're doing great. And so it's sort of the strange dichotomy where people think they are more ready than they actually are. But we need to, we need to be going a lot harder in this throughout for sure.

I mean, just to sum up, sort of what you're telling me is, you know, sorry, Aaron, you're not going to have enough missiles by 20, 27. So basically all you can control is your, you know, your doctrine, your training, your, your sort of human war fighting elements. Those things you can make rapid change in. You can, you can. I mean, anyone who has any experience in a military organization knows once you make a decision to do it, and unfortunately, sometimes it takes shots being fired to make that decision,

you can whip things into shape really quickly, you know, some people get relieved, some people get promoted, some things get serious. And before you know it, you know, it doesn't, it does not take a year. It does not take six months. It might only take a couple weeks. And the thing that frustrates me is that like, you know, oh, we're being shot at in the Red Sea and now we have a sense of urgency about maybe learning and tweaking some things. It's just like, well, our, you know, if we did combat exercises that were more unscripted and had more credible opposition forces, you know, we could have experiences in the Navy where we said, you know, we just had a carrier go down in this exercise off the West Coast, and 5,000 sailors just died

a simulated death. That deserves to be a massive wake-up call in its own right, right? You know, we don't need to send people in the harm's way to have that, but the system is not set up in such a way to generate these self-imposed wake-up calls through these heavily, you know, these scripted events. And it's a symptom of what you're talking about in terms of like, you know, we haven't had to fight a pure adversary in 80 years. We haven't really thought about it, I mean, especially since the end of the Cold War, we optimized so heavily for fighting insurgents in the Middle East, right? And so we have this confluence of factors coming together that's sort of its impacting the Navy's ability to really get ready for a high-end conflict. And they contrasts sharply with the Chinese.

I mean, I've tried to read everything I could find in the open source about Chinese combat training. And they're extremely hard on themselves. They're not afraid of losing to their opposition forces. They have third-party assessment mechanisms. They have very robust scenarios that they put their people through. And when you see what a Chinese servicely combat exercise looks like, it's truly something incredible. And so, you know, it's strange that we have this Navy that serves an authoritarian government that is not as afraid to fail publicly in these combat exercises.

And yet we have the U.S. Navy of a Democratic country where for some reason, the cultural incentives have a hard time accepting failure as a proper source of learning. And so, you know, it's honestly worth looking at what the Chinese Navy is doing because I frankly think the U.S. Navy could be learning a lot from them how to do this better. If I were the new Secretary of the Navy or the CNO or, you know, someone in a position of authority here, you know, what I would demand are large-scale exercises, fleet-level exercises, you know, theater-level exercises, however you want to define it, where the red team is going to be commanded by my most promising up-and-coming admiral, junior admiral, you know, the guy who we all think is going to be CNO in a few years.

and I would tell them I'm going to wait the exercise slightly in Red Team's favor. I'm going to thumb the scales for Red Team. And if you lose, you're relieved. Go have fun. Go win. Because I agree with you completely.

I agree with you completely. You have to have these experiences of facing an enemy that has advantages, that has a step on you and learn what it's going to take to actually survive and win in those circumstances

in a realistic fashion, realistic training. I mean, this is not complicated. I mean, in principle. In execution, it's devilishly complicated. But in principle, it's very simple. It's, I think it is, it is in principle very simple, right? It's like if you're a war fighting organization, if you're a military and your sole purpose

is to be able to manage the chaos of war, then this is the kind of stuff that you have to be doing, right? And it's almost, you know, completely the opposite of that to do that type be scripted exercises where there is no element of surprise, right? How much are we talked about surprise today? There's no surprise in the scripted event necessarily. And so it kind of goes against a lot of what you think these organizations would be doing. In terms of your concept of having those larger fleet exercises, I definitely agree. I don't know if we should necessarily fire people if they lose, although that is something the U.S. Navy did in the lead up to World War II,

where people got fired. But people should feel like their career, that the career incentives are tightly connected to their tactical warfighting skill, right? When people are up for promotion, how does the tactical warfighting skill of some, come up in that, right? And the problem, though, is that when you have the system that everyone is going through in a scripted system or everyone is supposed to follow the same scripts, where they're supposed to kind of like show that they know what the textbook says, there's no room to really distinguish yourself, right? If you give everyone the same set of

instructions. And so having these more open-ended kind of exercise is you give people an arena where they can distinguish themselves and show how do they independently think this stuff through. And also, it's really important to see how they handle themselves as leaders, right? because the way a leader takes responsibility for combat mistakes that would have gotten their people killed in a real situation, that says a lot about who they are as a person, right, and who they are as a combat leader, right? You know, how do they handle that? Do they do they accept responsibility?

Do they blame someone else? Do they have a meltdown? Are they, you know, are they level-headed? You know, there's a human dimension to this that we are not adequately testing because we are not putting people in situations where I have to take responsibility for getting thousands of sailors killed and losing warships. And the problem, though, with what you mentioned is that, unfortunately, the Navy has over-extended itself, and that overextension has been made permanent. The way the combatant and commander demand signals are set up, and the way the force generation

of the Navy is set up, there is almost no spare forces around to do these kinds of major exercises, at least at a level of frequency that would really increase the slope of improvement in time by the end of the decade. And that's a problem, right? And so we have to figure out, you know, how can we get more ships available to do this? And if we can't get more ships available to do this, what are the alternatives? Right. And I talked about this in the Atlantic Council report. We need to do more war gaming. We need to do more simulations. You know, make sure we have war gaming be something that is a, it is a widespread mainstream experience across the fleet rather than something that just happens in a couple centers of excellence with small staffs. You know, and there's great writing out there on how the Chinese

military does war gaming. And it is a very, it is a very, it is a very main. extreme thing, not only in the Chinese military, but in Chinese society where they have these giant war gaming competitions and stuff, right? And so, you know, if we truly cannot get enough ships together to do large scale exercise at a meaningful frequency, you know, if we can't get real opposition forces together, then the next best thing is to go really hard in the war gaming emphasis and make that a very common experience to throughout the fleet and make sure you tie it into some serious assessment mechanisms. So when people go into these war games, they feel like, yes, their career is on the line and they actually have to try.

And just, you know, I would say on the firing piece, you know, this is a separate conversation about personnel policy. But I also think that in general and for the most part, being fired should not be the end of your career. I think that this is not your area of focus, Dimitri, but I do think that that's the road that our military has gone down in the last, I don't know, since I've been affiliated and been paying attention to our military. It's terrible. It's terrible. And it's usually people who were fired over some, you know, relatively minor nonsense. A mistake, a personal mistake they made. You know, they had three beers instead of two before. driving through the gate, things like that. Things you shouldn't do, things that maybe you should be relieved of command for, depending on the details, but it's automatic and it's career ending.

Yes. And what kind of talent have we thrown away through that over the last 20 or 30 years? And what I'm suggesting is you're going to hold somebody accountable for a failure, but that should be an obstacle and an unfortunate thing for your career, but not the end of your career. There should be second chances. No, that's a really profound point to make, because the Navy has been, been accused of having a zero defect culture where, like you said, a simple mistake or an honest

mistake can be career ending. And that creates toxic environments. That creates perverse incentives. You know, it makes people say everything is okay when things are not. And they tell their boss a story that's different than reality. And, you know, it's because we just can't, because the culture is just not good at having those hard conversations about how do we get better, right? And so, you know, of course, if you're a war fighting organization, you absolutely have to be. be good at that kind of conversation, right? This is a profession that is filled with hard conversations, but if we're firing people over very simple mistakes and honest mistakes, well, you know, how do you have an honest conversation, a constructive conversation if you have to explain to someone,

you know, that mistake you made, that could have gotten a lot of people killed in the combat situation, right? You know, I'm not going to fire you, but I'm going to give you more chances to learn how to get better at that, right? And so, you know, all of this that we're talking about in terms of war fighting development and making deeper war fighters, there has to be a, cultural foundation that allows people to fail constructively and feel like there's there's learning happening and there can be you know it can be difficult to to walk that lying in terms of you know how do it make someone think their career is on the lying in a true in a sense of an exercise but also make them you know not not too afraid of what could happen if something goes wrong right and so you

know maybe we have different events for one thing versus another and so on and so forth but it's a question of how can we have these kinds of experiences of people hearing for their careers. Dimitri Philippoff, author most recently of a report called Distributed Maritime Operations for the Atlantic Council, the Skowcroft Center there. This has been a really, really interesting conversation. I hope you'll come back again sometime soon and continue this conversation. You know, I just, I think my, at the deepest level, and I've been thinking about this for some time, you know, when I was in the Senate, I worked on a report on the surface Navy after the Bonham-Mashard, Bernard Pierside, and that we, you know, there had been the McCain and the Fitzgerald

and all these incidents. And I think my deepest fear is that, you know, I think there are a lot of institutions in American society that when you peer under the hood, you realize that there's a kind of soft corruption that's been at work for a long time. And things sort of superficially look good, but actually they don't really function like they're supposed to function. And it's largely because, to your last point, Dimitri, because there's a lot of sort of dishonesty and self-deception, most of all. And it would be a national catastrophe, potentially an unrecoverable national catastrophe, if that were true of the Navy surface fleet, and if we had to learn it on day one of a war. So with that sobering thought, I'll leave the last word to

you. No, that's, that's completely true. And you know, I think, you know, just to reiterate, you know, what I said earlier, like, this is an absolutely catastrophic form of combat, naval combat. This is the kind of combat where you can lose, you know, a dozen warships in the span of the day, right? How long does that take to build that back and take years and years and years, right? This means you have to get a lot right in peacetime. And so, you know, when we encounter misplaced priorities or excuses, you know, saying, oh, you know, we, I don't have time for this exercise because I have to do some administrative stuff or I have to do this, you know, try to bring it back home to the tactical war funding implication. Because at the end of the day,

that's kind of the core thing that you have to orient yourself on, right? What does this mean for my ability to win war against China in the next few years? And, and yeah, I think, I just think we need better perspective, you know, in terms of what you mentioned about self-disception, that it's definitely a piece of this. Another problem is that when it comes to the state of decay and the atrophy, it's existed for so long that there are people who genuinely don't know what right looks like. This was a theme of the 2017 reports that came out after those fatal collisions. Normalization of deviation was the term that was used. And they applied that theme of deviation across so many other functions of the Navy when it came to ship handling and maintenance and all

other kinds of things. That theme also applies to the war fighting development of the Navy and knowing how to fight. And so, you know, we should be clear-eyed about the challenge here. And we should be prepared to face some pretty uncomfortable truths as we get ready for the next high-end war at sea. Thanks, Demetri. This has been great. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.