Sea Control - Sea Control 154: New Forms of Naval Operational Planning with CAPT Bill Shafley

Episode Date: January 26, 2020

1. CAPT Bill Shafley's article on new forms of Naval Operational Planning.http://cimsec.org/new-forms-of-naval-operational-planning-for-earning-command-of-the-seas/376412. Sir Julian Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategyhttps://www.gutenberg.org/files/15076/15076-h/15076-h.htm3. Wayne Hughes, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operationshttps://www.amazon.com/Fleet-Tactics-Naval-Operations-Professional/dp/16824733764. Milan Vego, Joint Operational Warfare, Theory and Practicehttps://www.amazon.com/Joint-Operational-Warfare-Theory-Practice/dp/B0057K4CVQ/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?keywords=vego+joint+operations&qid=1579581058&sr=8-1-fkmr05. While not dedicated specifically to the Composite Warfare Commander construct, Major Kevin M. Stepp's Master's Thesis, "Composite Warfare Doctrine – Providing the JFMCC with the Optimal Command and Control Method for Amphibious Operations," does an excellent job describing the concept, starting on electronic page 10:https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a621058.pdf

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome aboard Sea Control. Today we're discussing new forms of naval operational planning. My guest is Captain Bill Shafley. Captain Shafley is a career U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, the current commodore of Destroyer Squadron 26. He's a graduate of the Naval War College's Advanced Strategy Program and is a coded naval strategist. In September 2018, he authored an article for CIMSEC's Sea Control Topic Week entitled, New Forms of Naval Operational Planning for Earning Command of the Seas.

And that's what we'll be discussing today. As always, our views do not reflect the positions of the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government. Sir, how are we doing this morning? Great, Jared. Thanks for asking me to talk about this article that put together. And back in the fall, I'm really excited about the opportunity to talk about it today. So before we can dive in here, I think we need to explain some of the concepts that while you managed to get them onto the page, you probably weren't able to do justice to those concepts the way you want to just based on word count limitations. The first of those is really composite warfare commander concept. So for the layperson, the composite warfare commander concept is how we fight our carrier battle groups.

Can you explain that concept? Yeah, sure. As you think about the types of combat power that a carrier strike group can bring into the maritime environment, there has to be some sort of an organizing function to orchestrate all of those things and get them synchronized. I mean, the CWC structure, the composite warfare commander structure, has been around for, I mean, I can't even tell you how long. But essentially what it tries to do is it tries to take the complexity of combat at sea in various domains and give those domains or give command over those domains to a particular warfare commander.

So there's that warfare commander piece, and then there's a coordination piece that goes along with that as well. And these are supposed to be the common resources that all of those warfare commanders would share. So, for instance, like air resources, right? Those are the helicopters from the air wing, the helicopter element coordinator. Again, the rotary wing assets, things that all of these warfare commanders are going to want to try to consume resource-wise to protect the carrier strike group across all of those domains.

So it's really – we built an entire structure around this. Warfare commanders write operational tasking messages that describe how we're going to protect in those particular fields. We write daily intentions messages to explain how we're going to do that in the next, you know, 24 to 72 hours. So, and it seems, you know, the entire strike group is sort of organized around this particular structure, you know, whether it's in garrison and training up to go out and operate together all the way to the way that we plan and execute operations at sea. My understanding of composite warfare as a relatively junior officer was always that the guiding principle of the CWC concept was command by negation. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's part of, you know, the other the other bit that is kind of wrapped up in this this discussion on new forms of operational planning is this whole idea of mission command. Right. You know, as a as a commander, I give you mission orders. I give you commander's intent.

I give you a set of information requirements and an acceptable level of risk. I'll tell you what the end state is and you go out and you do it. This whole idea of command by negation. You know, I tell my guys all the time, you know, proceed until apprehended. Go and go and go until I tell you to stop. Right. You know, I don't ask for permission. I state my intentions. This is kind of ingrained in most naval officers, whether they be American or otherwise. Most of the naval officers that I've come into contact with over the course of my career from all over the world are pretty independently minded people. So putting the command by negation back into this is one of the overarching goals of this thinking.

Yeah, absolutely. And when you say ingrained, yeah, same experience with all my work with NATO navies, with the Japanese, with the South Koreans. And when you say ingrained too, you know, I just think back to the war of 1812 and commanders delivering notes to their commodores as they were taking in line saying, unless otherwise directed, I'm going to take my ship to sea and go seek the enemy. Yeah, that is an American tradition at this point. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, there's some significant ramifications to all of that. And, you know, maybe at some point here during the discussion we can get into that but um you know we've been experimenting quite a bit with getting back to this whole idea of command by negation and mission orders and you know i think

uh the potential for fights ahead you know suggests that we're gonna have to get comfortable in that environment again and certainly something that um that we've wrestled with uh as we've uh as we've started to kind of put that stuff back into or put those principles back into practice in our own environment. So you mentioned two distinct works in your article, Julian Corbett and Wayne Hughes. And I want to talk about Hughes a little bit later, because he just recently passed. And he's probably our most recent Titan, if you will, as far as like the work that he produced and the influence it's had on the Navy. But I'd like to start the strategic level with Corbett and talk about what we as a Navy are trying to achieve when confronted with another

Navy. How would you describe Corbett's varying degrees of sea control? It's funny, you know, I've read Corbett, I'm sure you have too, you know, half a dozen times in your career, right? I think the first time you get exposed to it is probably in the junior war college level. I think I really dug into him for the first time when I was a student at Leavenworth. I need to make sure I say student at Leavenworth. And then exposed at a higher level to what Corbett was saying and really getting after you as a as a senior commander junior captain and you know what what really strikes me about Corbett is is that you know he kind of takes this whole Mahanian idea of sea power right you know and he's at the grand strategic level starts really boiling it down to

yeah hey what does this all mean in terms of um you know what what is the navy really out here to do I think the the motivation for me to kind of go back to Corbett was you know I mean I I look at All of the things that, you know, we ask, we ask a carrier strike group to go out and do and, you know, and we'll just, you know, separate what may be coming down the road in terms of technology, etc. Right. And just kind of focus on the, you know, what is it that we're really trying to get after here? And how do you take, I know, a set of, you know, restrained resources and apply them in a way that that achieves, you know, some sort of operational effect or, you know, tactical, you know, end state. Right. And I kind of went back to Corbett. I'm like, you know, Corbett talks about this in terms of sea control. Right. And talks about it in terms of, you know, of space. You know, do we want local sea control? Right. And in a particular area to enable something else to occur. And I think we'll talk about that a little bit later in the discussion in terms of Hughes. But what is it that we're trying to do and where are we trying to do it? Is it the entire northern Atlantic or is it a portion of the northern Atlantic? And I think if you think about that, you know, rather briefly, I mean, you could tell that if I was trying to do sea control in the entire North Atlantic, it's going to take a lot of stuff to do it. Right. And then there's this whole idea of local. A good mentor of mine always used to tell me that, you know, the whole purpose of the carrier strike group was to put the air wing, you know, in a position to do things ashore and, you know, into or at sea. Right. So this whole idea of something local, you know, okay, I only have a little bit of space that I have to contend with that makes my resourcing problem a little bit better. So that's the whole idea between, you know, between general and local.

And then this whole idea of temporary or enduring. We talk about this idea of maritime supremacy versus maritime superiority. We take those terms from joint doctrine. And what does that actually mean? You know, I mean, can I really can I really hold this, you know, this this piece of the ocean, you know, in a manner that I'm allowed or that I can continue to do my bidding, you know, unencumbered by, you know, the effects of, you know, of an enemy's approach. And I started to really kind of beat that around. You know, I mean, when you think about it at the end of the day, I mean, all of our navies, all the navies that are out there are certainly resource constrained. And how do you put all that stuff together? And what can we realistically do? And if you take that, what can be realistically accomplished? And you balance that against what the bigger strategic, strategic objectives are, wherever that equation, however, that equation balanced is, is, you know, is akin to risk that you're accepting in terms of your ability to accomplish that task.

I wanted to try to start a dialogue. I mean, you know, naval officers, I think, in general, are quick to point, are quick to throw terms around supremacy or superiority or establish local sea control or establish, you know, general sea control. and we really don't understand that those words have some meaning right uh and it's our job at this level to take that you know from higher headquarters and translate it into something that's actionable um and then be able to you know can i really resource that and that's kind of what i was trying to get at i ran out of space clearly but you know you can't really get much further until you start batting around and understanding what exactly those things meant and you know And Corbett, I think, provides the right lens to look at that through. Yeah, I don't think it was until I was in a position as an instructor

where I was expected to explain sea control, sea denial, and different concepts. I had always thought of those as relatively binary concepts, not really wrestled with the degrees of that. It was like, do you think sea control is defined as even achievable against a peer with modern weapons here? I think it was Frank Jack Fletcher who was giving a speech at Iowa State University after the war. I probably need to do a little bit more research. And he kind of went through what the U.S. Navy had done to the Japanese Navy over the course of the war.

And it was as thorough a job as destruction was humanly possible. And at the end of the day, the USS Indianapolis was still torpedoed and went down with, you know, all but a few hundred survivors in the closing days of the war. Do you think that sea control as defined is achievable? Or is it going to be like, are we now into the terms of degree and more, okay, this is going to be a local event and it's going to be temporary and that's the best we can hope for. Well, here's the other thing I think you need to recall about Corbett and, you know,

Corbett, Corbett came out very quickly and, you know, very early on in that whole, you know, on some principles of maritime strategy, it was very clear to point out that sea control only exists in times of dispute, right? So to say you have it before somebody challenges you in it is, you know, is falsehood number one. So, you know, that's something to consider. And then to your specific question, you know, I mean, is it possible, you know, in its purest sense? And unless you start narrowing it down and start thinking about it in Corbett's terms, I don't think you can answer that question fairly. This whole idea of do I have to have command of the seas the way the United States Navy tried to get command of the seas in World War II in the Pacific and try to extrapolate that to times to come.

And I think any professional naval officer would be wise to be skeptical in terms of what is actually achievable and be able to influence dialogues with other military professionals that aren't quite as up to speed or familiar with just how challenging that environment is. I think you'd be wise to question that. Yeah, the challenge of the environment I don't think can be overstated. One of the sentences that you had in here that really jumped off the page at me was, this condition may be achieved only by the annihilation of enemy's capabilities. A lot of those capabilities, the Navy alone isn't going to have the ability to reach out and touch. Absolutely. I think that's going to become even more prevalent, right? We keep saying that we're never going to go into these fights without our joint and combined partners. We're going to have to figure out a way to really start peeling that stuff back as a team to be allowed to let naval forces bring what they can into the environment. So I'd like to transition here a little bit away from Corbin and talk about Wayne Hughes because the second work you mentioned was Wayne Hughes' Fleet Tactics in Coastal Combat.

since publication of your article he had released his third edition now titled Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations and then I believe it was just last month he passed away you just talk about the impact of Wayne Hughes in light of his passing yeah sure I mean I tell you there are a few super intimidating works out there right Clausewitz's On War is a ridiculously intimidating you know tome my hands uh influence of sea power and and then i think you gotta you gotta throw wayne hughes in there right and i remember being a jo i used to you know i'd see that that book sitting on the uh the bookshelf when i'd open it up i think i'd get to within you know the first 10 pages and there's just this ridiculous amount of math equations and um yes clearly uh clearly more

math than shafley ever mastered in his time uh in uh in college and in master's programs so I mean, you immediately get turned off to it. And I still think it takes a special soul to be able to understand all of the math that Professor Hughes put behind that. But I think that I didn't really fully appreciate what Hughes was doing until I got back up with an old friend of mine, Captain Krishnanko, the director of the Maritime Advanced Warfare School at the Naval War College. And they were doing a lot of work with Hughes' six principles in terms of trying to provide some sort of a rubric to planners to think about this whole idea of fighting at sea. I mean, when I was a lieutenant commander at Leavenworth, going through the analysis of relative combat power, I mean, the Army guys are always really good at talking about how that's going to work, right? And they have this framework to kind of go through it. You know, and Hughes has got all these little quips and, you know, like to see the purposes of land and, you know, attack effectively first. But when you look at the way that he organized those six principles, right, you know, it's like this is the rubric that I've been looking for, right?

You know, after I've determined, you know, this whole idea about sea control and how we're going to get it, you know, this is how we're going to break this down. These are the elements of the fight. It's unfortunate that it took me all that time to really kind of see the beauty in Hughes. I guess my recommendation to any of the more junior folks out there, don't get bogged down in his equations. Read the middle chapters, right? There's a lot of pure gold in there, and he writes with a playfulness that if you can get out of the equations, you'll see that quite quickly. I mean, he's truly a tactician at heart, just a tactician that could do the math, you know, and show his work in a way that was important to people that that mattered to. But there's a lot of goodness in that book.

Don't let the equations bog you down. This whole idea of force and counterforce and scouting and anti-scouting, I mean, it's just pure gold. It will help you out immensely. I think I had a similar experience. The first time I read Hughes, I'm not going to lie, I was turned off by all the math. and again it was not until i was in a position to teach other naval officers that i got back into the book okay i'm gonna set the math aside here i'm gonna go into the cornerstones and i'm working with uh folks whose first language is not english but we could pick out that those

pieces of the cornerstones and use that and then at the end of our theoretical instruction we would move over to a practical piece where we're war gaming for two weeks yeah and the war game would bear out the math yeah that's where we would come to realize like oh if i start with this number of force and i know the enemy or i think the enemy has this amount of force these two forces collide i have a rough estimate of what's going to happen when we bring those two forces together and that point we would bring in the math and be like okay this is what hughes was actually talking about when he's talking about the strength of your initial salvo versus the enemy that's right and Unfortunately, we don't have the, at least at the tactical level, the ability to really war game that kind of stuff out and take the two weeks to do it.

You're exactly right, Jared. I'm glad we share similar backgrounds on Hughes now that we're older and wiser. My favorite Hughes cornerstone is the one that you actually mentioned, the subordinates in Navy, the seat of purposes on land. I would say it was like the apex of my career over in Germany was getting all these German officers to say the seat of purpose is on land as we got to the end of our war game and realized that we had accomplished or not accomplished our mission. We've had plenty of practice the last few decades steaming in circles or more accurately boxes, launching aircraft and missiles into foreign countries largely unopposed. We've had little to no practice operating in a true contested environment where we now have to not only accomplish an objective for a land commander,

But have our own fight to win as well. So I think your article is arguing it's time to address the question of how we prioritize those missions before the shooting starts. How do you propose we do it? Well, I think it all starts with, you know, first of all, I was like, you know, I think you're exactly right. You know, right now, I think, you know, again, this is Shafley's opinion, right? You know, I mean, this whole idea that, you know, we can just operate with impunity and do whatever we got to do to, you know, to bring the air wing or, you know, a marine expeditionary unit into the fight without having to earn that first, I think is a, you know, is a second falsehood. How do I propose that we do it? Right. Well, I think that was kind of the that's kind of the genesis or the purpose behind the article. Right. I mean, I don't think you can really you can't really have an intelligent conversation at the higher echelons of command about what it's going to cost to do those things. Right. before I can even start making impact for you. Here's what that cost is going to be. And we can certainly get it done, but there's a bill associated with that, and that's going to impact what is remaining

to be able to achieve larger theater and national objectives. And I think it's just a much more nuanced conversation than what we're exposed to in some of the training environments here at the tactical level, or even at the operational level and war college environment etc you know so i think it's um it's having the uh having the ability to do the analysis uh and then being able to break that analysis down into cogent things

that are described to you know to senior commanders in a way that make that helps them understand you know the the cost in terms of time the cost in terms of space the cost the cost in terms of force that i'm gonna have to pay up front in terms of an investment in time and whatever to be able to provide, you know, whatever that residual is, you know, I mean, I think when I first came into the Navy, I was always exposed to this whole idea of sorties in excess, right? There for a while as a department head of an XO, I never had to worry about sorties in excess, right? I mean, everything belonged to somebody else. But, you know, now it's this very basic question, you know, I mean, to defend the carrier, I need X, right? You get X minus whatever that is,

Right. And, you know, CFACs used to get whatever they want and as much as they want. Yeah, I think it's this whole idea that all of these things that we learned when we were J.O.s going through junior colleges and things like that. I mean, we're just we're going to have to bring them back into the fore and it's going to be on junior planners and, you know, and folks that can cogently describe these types of these types of paradoxes, you know, in a way that senior leaders can understand them. But it's all got to start with this rigorous analysis that, you know, I'm hopeful that, you know, we're starting to sketch out here in this article can provide some of that back and forth. So one of the major SMEs that you did address was Milan Vigo. And I feel like Professor Vigo has been around so long that he predates Naval War College, but he's been around for a while. Well, do you think that we, the Navy, are failing to introduce these references early enough,

or is it too much for our junior officers who are involved in these day-to-day tactical problems? Like, it really is at the appropriate level when we're handing it to the lieutenant commander for the first time. Yeah, I mean, I wanted to, you know, Vago is actually probably one of the people that you probably ought to put into your reading list. you know again he writes with that same level of uh you know ferocity that i mean he's you know it's just really hard to get into him he was actually teaching at the war college when i was there in the senior course and you know uh it's kind of like i think somebody said they actually had him for the jpme2 course and um it was almost like a unicorn sighting if you saw professor vago walking around uh the halls of newport like oh there's there's a vago right like oh that's

I never would have thought. But he writes in such prolific detail, and his level of knowledge on historical occurrences just baffles many of us. And it's hard to put into context what he's telling you if you don't have an idea of what he's describing to you from a historical standpoint. You know, this whole idea of time, space and force and balancing these things in a way that can achieve operational effects and how we get all that stuff kind of synchronized to the point of contact. I mean, this is what V.O.V.E. is getting after. And I think we have to start exposing our officers to this type of thinking sooner and sooner. I mean, I think the WTI program that the Surface Navy has worked on here that is in full swing. I think is a great first start, you know, from a tactical standpoint. I think, you know, teaching advanced planner courses like Moz, I think is another great step. And then rounding out that education with this idea of, you know, this purely strategic, you know, this strategic outlook that I was exposed to in the Advanced Strategist Program, I think is, you know, is a good kind of vector, right? Yeah, I mean, I think the sooner we can expose officers to this stuff and explain it to them in a way that makes sense to them, I think that, you know, that that cadre of leaders that we're going to have here in 10 or 15 years is going to be in a much better shape than you and I are. But at this point, but, you know, podcasts like this, I mean, I think it helps that dialogue and hopefully there's some young folks out there, younger officers or professionals in the organization that will be inspired by our conversation and go out and jump into these things and see what they can learn.

Yeah, you mentioned MAWS. And I think from a naval operational planning process perspective, I mean, we're in more of a transitional phase. And I think we're really aware of organizationally. We didn't really have a planning process until a few years ago when we realized all the other services were doing this. And we kind of just adopted the Marine Corps model and then put some Navy terms on it. so absolutely you know my experience with the marines i went i did their pme at marine corps university in the command and staff course and they started going into the planning process like i've never heard of what you're talking about absolutely i'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to sit here like a moron in the corner and i'll be the quote-unquote fleet liaison guy but i'm gonna have to learn all this on the fly i hope we're seeing that the transition to a navy where the operational planning process is gets inculcated in our junior officers more than it's been to this point. I don't know if that's happening. You may be able to tell me if that's happening from your

experience out there right now with your staff. Well, first, I would I would offer to you that there are senior leaders in the American Navy, I think, that are highly committed to this whole idea of, you know, exposing officers to this whole idea of planning. And, you know, Jared, your experience in Quantico is my exact same experience in Leavenworth. I don't know if your conclusion was the same as mine, but I remember sitting in that, you know, after being exposed to mdmp for the first time thinking where the heck was this um when i was getting my butt kicked as an operations officer on a harley burke class destroyer because i didn't think through you know the problem set and excruciatingly fine enough detail and i was thinking to myself you

know if i had had a process like mdmp and i really understood it i probably could have saved myself a lot of you know personal pain but we could have been much more effective as uh you know as a worship at sea so yeah i think um yeah are we getting better at it i think we are i think we're at least exposing people to it but like i tell my guys all the time i mean i can teach you mdmt right i can i can sit down and explain to you the steps i can run them you know we could you could go to um you go to the mopsy course at um at the war college and route to um into your pto planning and training officer billet or to my staff we can run you through a whole bunch of operational planning team exercises and expose you to it. I think what that does is it trains you how to be

a team member in that environment, right? To contribute to the running estimate. But the problem is, is what I don't need guys that can participate in an MTMP OPT, right? I need guys that can lead an operational planning team, right? And to lead a planning team in my perspective requires a lot more familiarity and level of comfort, you know, and a much more rich understanding of where the process gets bogged down and they can add some pragmatism to it because you know probably saw this at bonico i mean mdmp planning will expand to the time you allow right yes if i give you a week to plan you're going to take a week to plan and it's just a lot of it just becomes mental gymnastics for the sake of mental gymnastics and it takes a it takes a wise soul to understand

that and you know preferably i'd love to have these third tour you know departmental advisors that are showing up to my staff, you know, have that same, that same level of expertise, you know, that, that wisdom, you know, wise grizzled, you know, approach to that process. But I think we'll get there. It's just going to take some time. You're right. I mean, up until what, 10 years ago, we didn't even have a, we relied on the commander's estimate of the situation and still a pretty good way of approaching it. But we're going to have to, we're going to have to continue this commitment to uh to teach him or folks how to how to think like this yeah and i said all those things that were critical before but then you know i look at the continuum of training and

assignments through your career and okay well now you have to squeeze that in somewhere and i'm not exactly sure where i would fit it so it's yeah absolutely for me to suggest these things but then uh you know actual implementation that becomes a little bit tougher we're all trying it I think we're all trying to figure this out. All of the organizations that we live and operate in, whether it's the American Navy or anybody else's Navy or academia or whatever, there's always this bureaucratic kind of rules of the organization that become inculcated over time. And, you know, breaking these types of paradigms take time. And, you know, I'm fairly certain that leadership, at least in our Navy, is committed to making that, to making this something more enduring. Yeah. And that's my impression as well. But I'll say you're now out in the fight.

You're trying to implement what you advocated for last year. You are one of the warfare commanders that you mentioned in the carrier strike group. So for the uninitiated, you would be Zulu and responsible for the naval surface and subsurface fight. How is that implementation going for you? Are you seeing progress, and what obstacles are you encountering? So what do I think we've been able to accomplish? I think we've done a pretty good job of this, you know, kind of getting back to this whole idea of mission orders. um and i'll tell you one of the most challenging things that i've uh that i've dealt with in this

tour um and it's all on me right is uh you know hey bill sit down and write a commander's intent statement right and uh try to make that uh try to make that cogent and try to get it out of platitudes uh and try to get it down to you know hey bill what's your vision of the what's your theory of the fight and how do you put this thing together uh i'll tell you right now jared if you haven't done it uh if you haven't really sat down and tried to do it as a commander uh because i think it's commander's business is something that you should do um it's hard um and you read it after you get done just like anything you actually write professionally and you're just like this is crap um am i am my people really i mean i'm really saying what i want to say here and that's been

really challenging but i think we're getting better at it and um you know i think the staff is getting more used to this idea of working in terms of commander's planning guidance and driving towards these five-paragraph op orders that set ourselves up for tasking. And I think that subordinate units are super excited about the fact that, hey, I get to sit down here and come up with a plan and use my own tactical prowess by just being given something to execute. So I think that that's positive. We have been working really hard trying to inculcate some of the stuff that I wrote in this article.

And I think, you know, there's friction any time you start to kind of think through the problem set in a different manner. It's hard to level everybody. You know, we just talked about people's understanding of the Navy planning process and trying to find the folks that are interested and comfortable in that type of a process. And I think we've made strides. I think we're in a really good spot to go out here and give it another go. I think I'd like to be much further along in using more fighting functions as an organizing principle in terms of planning. But we exposed ourselves to that, to those functions here in the last six, eight, nine weeks. And I think we got some take up.

But it's going to take a lot of leadership. It's going to take a lot of patience. But I think we're moving in the right direction. I think that there's a level of interest there that is starting to catch on. And I think what we'll find as we continue to progress, we'll see more and more of a need for this type of thinking to be able to kind of inform the way that we move forward when we think about planning operations and executing them as a team. It is heartening to hear that, you know, this is gaining some traction. One last question for you is, in your conclusion, you said the carrier strike group will be the primary maneuver element in the maritime-based engagements of the future. Yeah. Do you still think that's true? Well, I mean, Admiral Brown just released that in his most recent proceedings article, you know, and spoke quite frequently about this whole idea.

You have the carrier strike group being that primary maneuver on for the fleet commander and doing the things that the fleet commander deems necessary to learn that in that joint operating area. So, yeah, I do think we're going to have to we're going to have to figure out how to do that. Yeah, I've been doing some additional thinking, you know, with some of the, you know, with some like-minded folks, you know, here in the waterfront, you know, about, you know, is the carrier strike group staff organized and robust enough to really be able, you know, are we, do we, do we have the team in place to be able to do the same things that, you know, that that statement of the carrier strike group being the maneuver element, you know, I mean, is our money where our mouth is, right? I mean, and certainly not a resource-based comment there, but, you know, do we, is that team robust enough? Is it man-trained and equipped in a way that would allow it to really be that staff that can move that thing around in a way that, you know, is decisive, you know, for the theater commanders? So, yeah, I think that's true. I mean, Admiral Brown wouldn't have said it if he didn't think it was the right way to go or the right statement. We'll just kind of have to see how this plays out.

You mentioned the carrier strike group staff, and I've been thinking about it. It's probably a gross conceptual error on my part. I've been thinking about our numbered fleet staffs and whether or not they're postured for combat operations. I think I've been approaching it incorrectly. The firepower that a modern carrier strike group has, that carrier strike group commander is more akin to Spruance or Halsey in the Second World War than, say, one of their subordinate task force commanders. So do we need to think maybe a little bit differently historically about numbered fleets? and instead of trying to equate Spruance's 5th Fleet or Halsey's 3rd Fleet to the modern 5th Fleet, 3rd Fleet, 7th Fleet, 6th Fleet, maybe you start thinking about those carrier strike group commanders as more analogous to that role?

I don't know yet, Jared. I think the, again, you know, Shafley's opinion here, I mean, to me it becomes a span of control issue, right? Right. I think that the current process of certifying fleet commanders and their staffs for MCO type or major combat operations type stuff, having them go through maritime operations center certifications to prove that they can do that, I think that's time and money well spent. You know, I think that there still needs to be that layer, that echelon of command that sits there with other component commands and that can interact with the feeder commander and, you know, or with the various JFCs if you're in a European construct, right? So, yeah, I mean, carrier strike group can do a lot, but that staff, I think, would get overwhelmed quite quickly. I guess what I should say is, from that perspective, I'm definitely not calling for a disestablishment of numbered fleets. They definitely have their space, and it's the question of span of control and the level of autonomy that they're giving to the carrier strike group commanders. That strike group commander probably has more autonomy than the folks who work for Spruance.

Okay. Yeah, hey, that's a fair point. You're doing some bagel on me here, man. And your level of understanding of that is certainly higher than mine at this point. But I'm not too proud to say it. But, yeah, I mean, you're exactly right. And I just think I think what the command that you just came from that was doing these war games and I think, you know, the stuff that that that folks that are interested in this kind of this kind of analysis. I think, you know, the more time we spend, you know, testing hypotheses, right, thinking through how all of these things could possibly impact, you know, future operations.

I mean, I think it's, again, time well spent, right? You know, we've got to challenge our assumptions and ask ourselves whether or not all of the things that we're doing at sea are, you know, are going to achieve the effect that we really want them to achieve. All right. Well, thank you very much, sir. Again, the article we've been discussing is available on the CIMSEC website. It's entitled New Forms of Naval Operational Planning for Earning Command of the Seas. You can find online using Google, using CIMSEC's own search function. We'll also post it as part of our show notes. Ken Billshaffley, thank you for coming on.

Where else could we find you online, sir, and what's next for you? I'm on LinkedIn if you want to try to connect there. What's next for me? I guess continuing to get my team ready to go out and do what we get paid for. Hey, man, I really appreciate the fact that you've stepped up here and reinvigorated the Sea Control podcast. You've been working really hard on it. I appreciate you taking the time to ask me to come discuss this article with you

and your listeners. Thank you very much for those kind words, sir. And for the listeners, we'll see you next week. © BF-WATCH TV 2021