Sea Control - Sea Control 157: Next Stand of the Tin Can Sailors with Roy Draa

Episode Date: February 10, 2020

1. "Next Stand of the Tin Can Sailors"http://cimsec.org/the-next-stand-of-the-tin-can-sailors-building-a-stand-in-naval-force/423502. Marine Corps Training and Education Command (TECOM) Warfighting Societyhttps://mca-marines.org/tecom-warfighting-society/

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome aboard Sea Control. Today we're talking with Roy Dre about his November 2019 piece for CINSEC, the next stand of the Tin Can Sailors, building a stand-in naval force. As always, our views are our own and not representative of the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. Roy, welcome. Could you tell us a little bit of your background before we go into the piece? Thank you. Happy to be here. So, Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps, 19 years of service.

I'm an infantry officer by trade, so not a naval officer. So, that's my first disclaimer about everything that I'm about to say right here. Well, I should say this. I'm not a Navy officer. Yeah, I was going to jump in and correct you. I was like, you are a naval officer. Yes. That's one thing that I think the Commandant's made pretty clear in his Commandant's planning guidance. So basically where this started off from was I'm currently at Training and Education Command, which is somewhat the equivalent of what the Navy is standing up with the N7 right now. But our commanding general stood up a warfighting society, getting together a bunch of officers and civilians to get together a sort of quasi-think tank and start to look at different questions, even prior to the commandant coming out with his planning guidance. Just looking at future warfare and looking at how we could use simulations to drive experimentation and things of that nature.

So that's really what got us looking initially at where the Marine Corps needed to go to be effective. And prior to the Commandant's planning guidance coming out, we were actually looking at a far north or Baltic situation and then decided to shift to the Pacific, as we were told to do several years ago, and finally Thummer. So that's really where we started looking at this. And, you know, as we started doing a look at the adversary capabilities there and looking at our own capabilities, not just the Marine Corps, but joint capabilities, it became patently obvious that, you know, what the commandant, what the chief of naval operations talk about with parity, that is definitely the case. And for us to continue to just try and compete and one-up our adversaries to regain our technological advantage, to regain the advantages that we've had over the past decades, probably is not the answer, just based off of the expense and just the proliferation of technology. So that's really where this came from. And, you know, while my name was on the article, there's certainly a series of articles that have been written by folks all over the Marine Corps. And we've begun to bring in Navy officers, some foreign officers as well, to look at the same problem and bring their expertise to this question as well. The article touches on, you're down at the tactical level, then you're talking about things at the strategic level, because you're talking a little bit about force design. What sort of planning assumptions did you have to make as you set out to develop your concept? Well, the thing I'd like to say straight off is, I mentioned EABO, I mentioned Loki in the article, and that's really what we're looking at. And with the article as it's written right now…

explain the acronyms real quick? Oh, sure. Expeditionary Advanced Basing Operations and then Latorre Operations in a Contested Environment. You know, these are both concepts that the Navy and the Marine Corps have been working on for several years now. There's been documents that have been signed by both the Commandant, the previous Commandant, and the current Chief of Naval Operations. So the Navy and the Marine Corps are now working in parallel on these uh these two concepts but my feeling is and the feeling of a lot of the people that have been talking with is is we're not there right now uh we don't have the capabilities to execute those uh so really the article looks at what do we have right now uh that we can use

as a bridging uh uh technologically and as force design uh as far as force design the bridge from time now to be able to compete in the littorals to the point where we will have the capabilities that the chief of naval operations, that the secretary of the Navy and the commandant are talking about in, you know, whether it's in the vectors that have been put out recently, or whether it's in force design documents that have put out as well. So when I went into writing this article, the assumption was we have what we have. And that's really where I looked at capabilities that we're talking about right now and capabilities that would be easily fielded in the near term. Got it. It's not a problem as soon as you start to try to

use hypothetical units. It's just, I don't know. I tend to agree with you. It's just an easier problem. It's like, okay, what do we have in our hand now? It goes back to the off-quoted rumsfeld quote of you go to war with the army that you have or in this case the navy that you have and the marine corps that you have absolutely so the first question i have for you then is one i saw on twitter and it seems like every marine understands the answer to this it's a little less clear to me is that what is a stand-in forces sure well we throw it around a couple different terms both in in the navy and the marine corps we talk about stand-in forces contact forces blunt forces inside forces and i think there's nuance in talking about each one of

them so a gentleman by the name of art corbett who's over at the war fighting lab in the united states marine corps wrote an article in the marine corps gazette back in i think it was february of 2019 that he really lays out what stand-in uh forces deal with so we're talking about you know when he describes stand-in forces, he's talking about a force that is in theater, that's able to affect day-to-day competition with an adversary force. So you're talking about the units that are currently deployed there, whether those Marine forces, whether that's the particular fleet that's in that area. If we're talking about the Pacific, it's the Army units that are engaged and Pacific Pathways. So they are the units that prior to conflict are in place, that are

partnering theater security operations or cooperation, things of that nature. And Tom Mankin from the Center for Strategic Budget Analysis also talks about this as an inside force where he looks at a task organized Marine Corps unit that would be almost like the feed bump, if you will, to allow for a larger maritime force to come in. And really, when I wrote this article, I'm looking at this as, you know, when I look at these stand-in forces, I look at my own experiences being in the Pacific, deployed there as a lieutenant, again, as a major, and looking at the opportunities that we had there and doing a lot of the joint and combined exercises throughout the Philippines, throughout Southeast Asia. These are all opportunities to

contest that area. And I really think that is what we are looking at as far as the stand-in forces. We have forces that are there on the ground. They're partnering with allies, with treaty partners and with strategic partners that are in the area. And we need to look at that as an opportunity for competition with adversaries that are in the region. Thank you. That was the most comprehensive answer I've received to that question thus far. And for the listeners, we'll go pull those articles and make those available on the show notes. Right up top in the article, you address Navy's understandable reticence to risk capital ships, sitting on the scene of kind of setting definitions or commonly understood definitions, how are you defining capital ships in this instance?

Sure. Well, you know, I think it's broader than just a reticence to risk capital ships. I think if you look at, traditionally, we view a capital ship historically as a battleship or a carrier, a ship that is a center of gravity for the fleet, that if it survives, the fleet survives to fight another day. If it does not survive, then generally speaking is a catastrophic failure on the part of the ship. So I would add SSBNs in that just from a cost standpoint and just from the fact that we probably really don't want nuclear reactors to be on the sea floor. But I think it extends beyond just capital ships, as I wrote in the article. Really, it's any ship. When We look at the cost of the new DDGs are at like $1.8 billion.

Yes. That's a huge price tag right there. And it's a huge capability that if you lose that capability of Aegis, that is a major capability that you take away from the fleet. So I think as we look at competition, and if you look at what has been written by the commandant, what has been written by the chief enable operations within the last year, we need to look at competing in a way that we do not risk those platforms, but we use those platforms to augment risk-worthy platforms, I think is the term that the commandant's been using recently.

Yeah, risk is one of the trickier topics. As a force, you know, the Navy has not been really engaged by a peer since 1945. So risk is always an interesting discussion to me. And you mentioned the cost of a new destroyer. And it's not just the cost of replacing the destroyer, it's the time. So there is no bench for those destroyers. And the time it would take to replace one or repair one, and we're seeing right now what it's taken to repair the two vessels damaged in the collisions in the summer of 2017.

team. They're just now getting ready to really come back online full capability again. So it's a question of, it costs us time as much as it does money. Do you have in mind what you would consider a risk-worthy platform in this case? I know we're going to get into the different littoral combat groupings that you've laid out here, but what would you consider a risk-worthy platform? What do you think the Commandant thinks is a risk-worthy platform? Well, I won't speak but when i look at yeah sorry i when i uh when i look at this and i know that you know as i drew out that diagram there i have several lcs's i have several smaller vessels l-class ships esbs really even those i think for where we are as a uh a nation are not necessarily risk-worthy

platforms. But we look at those as platforms to launch from. So I think the risk-worthy platforms, we need to think about unmanned surface vessels, unmanned subsurface vessels, UAS, things of that nature. Those are the risk-worthy platforms. Or if we're talking about manned platforms maybe we're looking at a uh like a mark 6 or an lcu or something of that nature a barge that we can leave on the beach you know if we have a barge that has some type of vertical launch system on it that is a risk worthy vessel that if it were targeted uh and we lost that particular craft, that's not necessarily something that we're going to salvage or recover. So I think when we talk about risk-worthy vessels, we're probably talking about something

that is disposable or has a significantly smaller price tag to it than $1.8 billion and a crew of several hundred sailors on it. I did a podcast with Ian Brown a couple weeks ago talking about Fiction Week, and one of The underlying assumptions from all the authors as we pondered war in the future was we're not going to have the networks, but we don't believe that we're going to have all the communications networks that we think we're going to have. So how are all these unmanned craft going to function? It's always interesting because eventually those are probably going to be manned craft going in harm's way at some point, as much as we want to fight with our unmanned craft. The flip side of that question is autonomy and looking at, you know, certainly policy isn't there right now. And I think there's some reticence in the use of autonomous craft and the use of artificial intelligence. but that may be an answer itself. If you program a system to be able to make decisions within a

right and left lateral limit, is that something that our civilian leadership in this country would be willing to accept? Certainly something that we've been looking at within TECOM Warfighting Society is looking at how we can use AI in conjunction with unmanned systems. But that's something that there would need to be a significant policy change. There's probably a lot of ethical and legal questions that go along with that as well. Yeah, and I would be surprised if you ever see that policy change come about outside of an actual wartime scenario where you really start to feel threatened. I would be surprised as well. I think, unfortunately, Hollywood's put a lot of movies out there about AI that don't necessarily represent the science that's behind it.

So I want to go back to some of the specifics of the article here. You went into detail about different task organizations that you envision the Marines and Navy creating. I'd like to start with the Littoral Combat Team and go through each of these, talk about your nominal construct and sort of what underpins those constructs. Sure. So I look at the Littoral Combat Team as, you know, what really is that organization that would be embarked aboard shipping that could be, you know, put aboard or put on to on the shore. So I look at that littoral combat team as a mix. It really needs to be a joint force because some of the capabilities that I believe we need as far as fires and anti-aircraft capabilities don't exist currently within the Marine Corps, but they do exist within the joint force. And then there's other capabilities as far as surface lift that don't exist within the Marine Corps, but do exist within Naval Expeditionary Combatant Command. So I look at it really being scalable, but based around a marine infantry company, merely because that gets our foot in the door very often with a lot of our host nations in the Asia-Pacific region to be able to conduct exercises. And I look at those exercises as being a part of contesting the littoral. But again, you know, a littoral combat team needs to be multi-domain. It needs to be able to be able to control aircraft. It needs to be able to sustain itself. So as you start to look at all those different warfighting functions and all the domains that it needs to be able to operate in, I think you very quickly realize, or at least I did, that this is becoming a much larger signature, whether it's a physical signature or electromagnetic.

And, you know, after having written the article, came to the conclusion that really we need to be looking at the joint force and the joint capabilities and can't look at one littoral combat team being able to solve all of its problems. It has to be able to reach back to the joint force to reach back to the JIFNIC for support. So let me divert then from sort of what we discussed a little bit here, because you brought up a really interesting point. It's like the joint force and the capabilities you're going to reach back for. What are you talking about reaching back for? You said you learned this post-article. Sure. So I was invited to actually go down to Fort Eustis, where the Army has its future force command, and to talk about these same concepts.

They're looking at a lot of the same problems that the Navy and the Marine Corps has. and as they were talking about it i came to the realization that they're looking at the problem the same way we are as if goldwater nickels never happened uh so they're looking at trying to solve this thing as if it's just the army out there and i and you know it made me laugh because the marine corps is trying to solve this as if the marine corps is the only one dealing with this problem uh and we're talking about proliferation of uh satellites and synthetic aperture radar with our adversary forces and i begin to think well you know the air force has capabilities to deal with things of that nature and we have uh you know cyber command that can

deal with these issues and so i i think you know if we look at look at this problem in that sense that it is a joint problem and that a littoral combat group does not need to have every single capability to be able to engage the adversary in every single domain. It really needs to be able to provide specific functions to allow the fleet to maneuver within the littorals. And if we look at those specific functions that the Joint Force Maritime Component Commander or the Naval Task force commander requires, I think we can come up with a more reasonable-sized organization from a physical and electromagnetic standpoint. So back to the different force groupings that you've laid out here, the littoral combat

group, how does that differ from the littoral combat? So I look at the team being that ground force or being, you know, we looked at it as primarily a Marine Corps force with some Army capabilities and Navy capabilities that were bolted onto it. The Littoral Combat Group, I look at that as encompassing naval surface vessels. In the diagram in the article, I laid out a couple of different hull forms that we can look at using there. And I looked at the Littoral Combat Group having similar capabilities that you would see with an amphibious ready group and an expeditionary strike group but being able to do it with fewer ships just because we're looking at a much smaller force being embarked on that shipping

and then the last grouping was the littoral strike squadron you know we were looking at peeling away those uh lcs ships uh away from there looking at the the different um uh, mission modules that you can put in those, uh, LCS, uh, ships. So normally when you look at an expeditionary strike group, you're talking about, you know, a crew desk capability being associated with that or a subsurface capability being, uh, associated with that. But are we necessarily willing to peel those away from a carrier strike group for this, uh, this type of mission. So we look at the LCSs and the potential that is there with some of the modules as being the nucleus for that littoral strike group. You've already mentioned the Pacific, so I think

we have a fairly good idea of where these groups would be operating, but how do you envision sustaining them in a contested environment? I think one of the capabilities that, or one of the things that we're going to need to work on, and this is, you know, comes down to this problem being a whole of government issue is we'll need to work through defense attaches to set up contracting, to set up logistics facilities, things of that nature. The problem with that is logistics facilities, whether it's fuel sites or whether it's ports, those are all targets and they're all things that are going to be targeted in, you know, in a conflict. So if we're looking at organizations being smaller signature. You know, my personal view is we need to look at

alternative fuels, alternative forms of energy. We need to be looking at the ability of a combat service support element to be able to generate its own repair parts. They're looking at the advances in pre-printing. And while we do have an ESB that's associated with the littoral combat groups as i i kind of drew them out there we're looking at okay the connectors what do we need there because the lcus even the lcu 2000 really doesn't need the speed or the signature or the survivability that i think we would need in this type of environment so i think you're looking at some sort of autonomous logistics variant of a uh a surface craft that's an unmanned vehicle Something that is inexpensive, that can push from the offshore, from the littoral combat group towards wherever the team is currently deployed to.

If it is recovered, great. If it's not recovered, then we're still able to continue with operations. But I think that's really the long pole in the tent here, as you call out right there, is number one, the sustainability and the fact that we as a military just burn through petroleum and burn through electricity at the cyclic rate. And it's a huge problem. I want to talk a little bit about your choice on the title here, too. Next time, the Tin Can Sailors. Obviously, you're playing off last stand of the Tin Can Sailors. it's an extremely evocative word choice why did you go that route i think it's a great book and i think it i talked about at the beginning of the article our reticence to risk shift and i think if

we we need to be serious about what the next fight could possibly entail that it's going to involve sacrifice and i think we need to be prepared for that because technologically we're not where we need to be you know there's certainly been improvements on the size of the force with regard to the the number of ships that we have but we don't have that great of an advantage over a lot of the adversary forces that we do now the areas that we do have advantages in are training and in our ability to command and control our ability to partner with other nations and to bring them on board as a part of a maritime force. But I looked at that, number one, because it's a great book,

and number two, because it shows what can be done with a well-trained and well-led force against a superior force. And when you look at that book and you look at the pocket destroyers and the escort carriers that were involved in that fight, significantly smaller capability, but based off of the training of those crews, the leadership of those combat groups, and deception was a huge part of it, they were able to defeat a significantly more capable naval force there in those very same waters. So really, what I'm looking at is not to say that I look at these littoral combat groups as being sacrificed or

anything of that nature, I look at them more as being a covering force. In the Marine Corps, we talk about a screen force, a guard force, a covering force, and the different capabilities that those units need to be able to have to accomplish those missions. So I look at this being a maritime covering force that's able to contest the tutorials prior to conflict. they're able to partner in our allies and our partner nations uh exclusive economic zones and they're able to change the calculus uh right now adversary forces whether it's the arctic or whether it's the south china sea pretty much have the at least as you would read it in the uh in the media have the run of the block in those areas. And if we were to, I think, look at

alternate ways to compete in that area with our partners side by side, I think that's what we're looking at. And this covering force being in place and being able to set conditions for a larger naval task force to move into that area. Well, thank you, Roy. The article again was Next Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, Building a Stand-in Naval Force. That and Roy's other work can be found on the SimSec website. We'll link to it in our show notes. Roy, where else can we find you online? Well, you can also find us if you go to the Marine Corps University Foundation website.

If you maneuver through there, you can look for the TECOM Warfighting Society. That's where we do a lot of our simulations. There's a lot of other articles that have been written by both Marine personnel and Naval personnel, building on the work that I've done here and building on a lot of the work of Marine Corps University as well. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Roy. And for our listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Help me, Bob, I'm pulling in the alley. Why are they pulling in the alley?

Help me, Bob, I'm pulling in the alley. Pull it out of your mouth.