Sea Control - Sea Control 164 - Defender 2020 with Dr. Sal Mercogliano and Johannes Peters

Episode Date: March 18, 2020

Links:1. ISPK2. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Battle of the Atlantic 1939-19433. NCAGS4. What the Heck is NCAGS?5. Navy Drills Atlantic Convoy Ops for First Sime Since Cold War in Defender Europe 20206. Convoy Across the Atlantic Will Test Delivery of Equipment to Europe7. Admiral, I am Not Ready for War

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today we have Dr. Sal Mercogliano joining us. Sal is an Associate Professor of History at Campbell University. Additionally, dialing in from northern Germany is Johannes Peters from the Center for Maritime Strategy and Security at the Institute for Security Policy, Kiel University in Kiel, Germany. So as always, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which

we may be associated. Sal, you've been on with us a couple of times already. Welcome back. Thanks, Jared. I appreciate it. And Johannes, before we dive in, you are new to our listeners. So would you mind telling us a little bit about your background, please? Sure.

Johannes Peters, 39, political scientist by profession. I'm a researcher at the Institute for Security Policy, KIA University, and within the Institute at the Center for Maritime Strategy and Security. So we are focusing on the role of navies and sea power in international relations. And in doing so, we are continental Europe's only dedicated maritime security think tank. Thank you. And you had just mentioned to me pre-show that you also had some background in the maritime security industry. Could you tell us a bit about that? Because I think it's germane to the conversation we're about to have.

Yeah, sure, I will. So I finished my studies with a thesis on the Somalia-based piracy and the EU-led operation at Atlanta, the counter-piracy operation. And then I went to the German Ship Owners Association as a director of maritime security, which was basically dealing with piracy and how it affects the commercial shipping. A little bit of embargo stuff, but mainly piracy. And after that, I moved on to the ISBK. So I'm basically dealing with maritime security my whole professional life. Excellent. Today our topic is Defender 2020. But before we get into that, I think the topic on everyone's mind, and we're recording this on March 15th, is COVID-19 and what's going on in our respective countries in relation to it.

So, Sal, I'll start with you a little bit, how this is affecting you personally. I know you're an associate professor. I believe I've seen that Campbell has moved their courses online. Are you preparing for online courses now? We are. Matter of fact, we officially pulled the plug on courses on Friday, Friday the 13th, and we are temporarily moving everything onto an online platform until at least April 6th. Fortunately, I teach one course a semester online, and I've been kind of prepping and thinking in the back of my mind that this may be a potential possibility.

So I've been working to transition over to that delivery process. It's a good process to use every now and then. It really is. I'm not a firm advocate that all education needs to be online, but I think it does allow for the delivery of material in unique ways, ways that you can't always do it in a traditional sit-down class. So hopefully we take advantage of this opportunity. It's going to be a big learning curve for a lot of professors and a lot of students who aren't exposed to it. But I think overall it will be good. So I was going to ask, how are your colleagues responding?

Are you having to answer a lot of questions for folks who haven't done this before? There is a distinct divide, and it largely has to do with age, between who's able to adjust quickly to this and who's not. But, you know, those of us who do this a lot are fielding and supporting our colleagues quite a bit. Fortunately, our university's campus is not closed, so we can still be in our offices and we can still get together and kind of teamwork a lot of this process. It's obviously a big transitional shift, but, you know, explaining it to the students and making them understand why we have to do it, I think, was a good thing, too, that this happened. We're a little concerned by the fact that this coincided with students returning from spring break. So hopefully we don't see the virus spread too quickly. I think overall, I think we're as prepared as you could possibly ever be for a situation like this.

Thank you. And Johannes, how has this been for you personally? I know Germany has placed a few more measures in place than what we've seen here. It's beginning to affect us. I mean, we're only at the beginning. So, just earlier today, I read that Germany will close its borders to all its southern neighbors, to every other neighbor already in the east and in the north, close their borders to Germany. So, in fact, all borders are closed. So, I can't go anywhere right now. And schools and kindergartens are closed from Monday on, Thursday until midst of April. So, we'll see how the situation will develop to that point.

So that's basically it. So the state of federal state of Schleswig-Holstein, where I live in, just closed all bars, all sports clubs, stuff like that. So we are all told to reduce our social life to the absolute minimum. One of the things that struck me as I saw the reporting from Germany is the German tradition of handshaking the first time you all meet each other first thing in the morning. Yeah. Has that been, I assume, a little bit of a mental adjustment for everyone as you see friends? It was considered impolite not to shake hands when I was over there. But I would imagine this is going to require a change in the social construct a little bit. Yeah, it is deep within ourselves. So when you are a little kid, you always get told by your parents, and I tell this to my kids as well,

if you meet somebody shake his hands look into his eyes say hello and stuff like that and so it's basically we do this on a daily basis even with the colleagues we we see every day so um yeah that's something which is a little mind adjustment as you just put it correctly and not to reach for somebody's hand when you meet him but um they develop some some funny stuff like touching yourself the elbows or uh kicking with your feet and stuff like that so you can adjust to it and and have fun with it, actually. Yeah. All right.

So today we're going to discuss Defender 2020. The exercise, as far as I know, is still ongoing, though I believe parts of it have been canceled and affected. We'll discuss what we can. So, Sal, you and I discussed this a little bit, Sea Control 159, all things U.S. Merchant Marine. And since then, we've seen a lot more detailed reporting on Defender 2020. It provides us an opportunity to do a deep dive on some topics

that haven't really been addressed in a public forum since the Cold War. Let's start with the refresher. What is Defender 2020 and why are we doing it now? And I'll go to you on this first, Sal, and then Johannes, I'll come back to you for a European perspective on it. Sure. So let's go back in the history a little bit here. As a historian in the group, it tends to be where I like to be most comfortable. Right after World War II, we saw the U.S. withdraw almost all its forces from Europe. And then with the emergence of the Cold War, 1949 largely, we saw the deployment of about four divisions of U.S. forces into West Germany on a permanent basis. And one of the things that the U.S. initiated at that time was something called

Operation Gyroscope, which was the yearly rotation of divisions. It was actually, we would go in and lift a new division to Europe, take out the old division, and we would do that on a fairly consistent basis. The divisions would be there for about three years of the deployment. And about every year we were lifting a division out we did that through 1958 and that yearly deployment allowed us to keep up the proficiency so that if we need to move forces reinforce europe on a consistent basis we could do that curtailed in 1958 because of a massive downsizing in the military so it drawed down a lot during the end of years the eisenhower administration and the u.s then began to transition over to an idea of using some more pre-positioning equipment

and stockpiles. And you really don't see another exercise of moving troops over to Germany or to Europe, I should say, in large measure, to leave the Vietnam War. There was an exercise called Steel Pike, where they moved an entire division, this time over to Spain, actually, as part of an exercise. In Vietnam War, you're seeing basically the rotation of units, of just individual personnel, not units, in Germany. So the division flags are planted there, the forces are in place, And we're just doing individual replacements, much like we did during the Vietnam War. Post-Vietnam, we saw an opportunity to really re-look at our strategy, where we needed to focus. And obviously, the Cold War came up high in the late 1970s into the 80s.

And in 1976, you saw the first sea lift element of what was called re-forger exercises. These are the return of forces to Germany. That's where that acronym came from. And in 1976, Military Sealift Command undertook the first sealift element of Reforger, actually moved over the 101st Airborne Division elements of them over there. They fell in on preposition equipment, but also equipment that was brought over. Reforgers went on into the early 1990s, and then with the end of the Cold War, Reforgers kind of fell off. You actually saw what was kind of a reverse Reforger during Operation Desert Shield, Desert Storm in 1990. They nicknamed it Operation Deforger when they picked up the U.S. 7th Corps, two divisions and an armored cavalry regiment out of Germany and sent it over to the Persian Gulf.

Then the policy that really happened was a shift over to these kind of war sets, these army war sets that they did, army war reserve sets. And so the idea of lifting forces in a sea lift fashion, kind of like we would in the Cold War or World War II or even back to World War I, kind of went away. And one of the things that Defender 2020 is trying to do is demonstrate that ability to pick up and move an entire division over in case of a scenario. We've seen it done in 1990s over to Persian Gulf. We saw it again in 2003 with the lifting of the 3rd Infantry and 4th Infantry Divisions for Iraqi freedom. And now we're picking that up again. Again, this kind of coincides with our previous discussion you and I had, Jared, on an earlier SimSec podcast where we talked about the impact of the sealant readiness test that was done

last year, turbo activation, where they were trying to stress the sealant capacity. And this is really another way to kind of demonstrate why a valid sealant requirement is needed in the United States. Thanks, Jared. Johannes, I'll come to you to ask the question, why are we doing it now from the European perspective? The European perspective is a bit ambivalent actually, because especially in Germany, as you might know, we have a culture of having an ambivalent perspective to the military in whole. So, one say it's absolutely at the right time due to the Russian aggression in the Crimea and to the behavior of the Russians in the Baltic and the fear of the Baltic states actually to be more disposed to the Russian influence. Others say it's a huge aggression against another huge aggression against Russia and why are we doing such an exercise like Defender 2020?

Why can't we stop doing stuff like that? So there is no coherent European perspective, and there's absolutely no coherent German perspective on it. Thanks, Ed. Sal, I'll come back to you. How much equipment has the U.S. moved across, and with which assets have they done it? So obviously the large numbers put out by the U.S. Army forces in Europe and obviously European command is they're talking about moving over 20,000 troops and about 20,000 tons of equipment. So it's a massive movement that we're seeing. Military Seal of Command under the U.S. Transportation Command is coordinating that movement.

We've seen the movement of six ship loads over out of Savannah, Charleston, and out of Texas ports in Beaumont. And all told, we're expected to see 10 ship movements, about 1.3 million square feet of cargo. Put that into some context real quick. Overall, the max surge seal of capacity the U.S. identifies as necessary in time of war is about 19.2 million square feet. So we're testing about a tenth of our seal of capacity. One of the really interesting things about this right now is we've seen six ship movements so far. Five of the six ships were commercial vessels. Only one was actually a reserve vessel, the USMS Bendudez, which is an MSC LMSR.

The other five were commercial ships that are used by shipping companies, the American roll-on, roll-off carriers, Liberty Marine, and Secor Company. And that's a really interesting demonstration. We talked about the shortfall in the surge sealant fleet and the inability of them to meet the 85 percent readiness rating during that turbo activation in 2019. So it's really interesting they're using this. One of the big issues debating right now, as a matter of fact, this past week, Admiral Busby, the maritime administrator at General Lyons, the commander of U.S. Transportation Command, was up on the hill talking to the Armed Services Committee about the sealant shortfall. And one of the debates that's going on right now is how do they fix that seal of short wall? How do you replace the vessels that are aging out in the fleet? One of the talks is to buy used vessels and bring them in.

The problem is they've only allocated a set amount of money for them, and it's going to be hard-pressed to buy a vessel for the money they have and then convert it. Whereas I think one of the things they're trying to do here with this exercise is demonstrate the utility of using commercial vessels as sea lift platforms those vessels are active they have crews on board they're maintained by the shipping companies and when you can tap into them it's essential but at the same time you still need a vessel like ben viet does which is able to load a huge amount of cargo with 300 000 square feet of cargo and send it across so it's a it's an interesting demonstration that's going on i I should also mention, too, at the same time that this massive exercise, Defender 2020, is going on,

we just saw a ready reserve force ship, the Cape Edmont, go into Morocco for African Lion. It delivered about 7,000 tons of equipment. The motor vessel Cape Hudson right now is out in the Far East. It's just leaving Thailand right now after completing Operation Cobra Gold. And the Bob Hope, which is another one of these LMSRs, is moving equipment internally in the United States from the JRTC down in Fort Polk, Louisiana, up to Alaska and redeploying. So there's a lot of movements going on in terms of sea lift right now that we're seeing. And Defender 2020 is a great example of how we would go about moving forces over in case of a scenario of some kind. Thanks, Sal. For Johannes, I know northern Germany has some pretty significant port capacity based on my time living in Hamburg and in Wilhelmshaven.

Do you know where these vessels came into and how they were offloaded, distributed across the continent? Yeah, they were offloaded not only in Germany, but also in the Netherlands. And so I think the main port of disembarkation in Germany is Bremerhaven. So they don't disembark in Hamburg, only in Bremerhaven. And they brought in the troops with the plane to Hamburg and drove them over to Bremerhaven to receive the equipment. So the rest came in over the Netherlands and was distributed then by ship onto the inland waterways. oh that's excellent i didn't realize that the inland waterways were in use for this my assumption was that everybody was disembarking and then driving to you know to the front if you

will and now yeah we have um as you might know from your time in germany uh the port of duisburg which is located in the ruhr region from the former heavy industry uh center of western germany has the largest inland port i think in the world or europe it's a huge port and it's connected to the big ports in the netherlands so you can disembark in the netherland and then you can use the inland waterways up to the the heart of western former western germany and that's what they did that's excellent thank you so second fleet the u.s second fleet recently reconstituted took two actions to get the troops across. The first was using the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group

to sanitize the path for two MSC vessels. The second was practicing convoy operations with a U.S. Navy cruiser. Sal, can you tell us a little bit about the historical origins of convoy operations? Sure. This goes back to as early as the First World War. In World War I, when U.S. enters, remember U.S. enters late in World War I, it's April of 1917, the British and the French request the United States to send over a division as a kind of show of force and solidarity. It's going to be almost six months till the United States can recruit, train, and equip a field army. So they decide to send over that first

infantry division as a kind of a token to really demonstrate the fact that the U.S. is in the war. And they quickly organized a series of convoys, escorted across with cruisers and destroyers on the United States end. And then they met U.S. destroyers that were forward deployed over to Europe at Queenstown and escorted them in. That was in June and July of 1917. So it was about two, three months into the war before they were able to send that really that first contingent across. The next contingents are going to be a few months later in World War I. Fast forward to World War II, the U.S. has military forces better prepared for war, and as early as January of 1942, just less than a month into World War II for the United States, they're able to load up a convoy for the 34th Infantry Division and send it across to Northern Ireland and Europe. And much in the same way, much larger convoy, much better protection going across.

That convoy that goes across is escorted by an aircraft carrier, battleship, cruisers, and several destroyer squadrons. Just really a step up of what we saw. In World War III, had it happened, had we run the Red Storm Rising kind of scenarios, we would have seen, you know, repeats of the Battle of the Atlantic with massive convoys going across. And in this scenario, one of the things we saw was three of the ships that went across did so unescorted. So when Liberty Passion, Endurance, and Green Bay sailed, they sailed without escort. They just sailed commercially as they normally would. However, the ships coming out of Texas were organized into a convoy.

Ben Viedes, Resolve, and Patriot, although Patriot didn't stay with them very long, were organized into a convoy with the concept of organizing them as a passage across, something we really haven't seen in a long time. You had to go back to 1980s, 1990s, when the U.S. practiced that in the North Atlantic passage. The maritime prepositioning squadrons, which are stationed around the world, would conduct quarterly what they called Rainbow Reef exercises, where they would bring on board Navy personnel and run convoy exercises, but not typically contested passage escorting.

It was more to get the convoys together, how to do maneuvers, communications versus the vessels. But this was a unique thing with the USS Vela Gulf, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser running a herd over at Bien Vienas and Resolve as they did a transatlantic passage. Thanks. And, you know, Johannes, I had promised earlier that your maritime security background was going to come into play here. And I think you have some notes on this, but is this something that NATO practices and trains? And by what mechanism would NATO facilitate the safe transit of merchant shipping? So NATO could do it with the, what's it called, the NATO, I just lost it. NCAGs? Yeah, NCAGs.

NCAGs are the, what's it called, Naval Corporation Guidance for Shipping, which is more a naval doctrine or concept. It's nothing NATO exclusive, but the NKEX element of NATO is the NATO shipping center at Marcom in northward London. And that is the NATO unit that could actually train and facilitate such convoy operations. My impression is actually that the NATO Shipping Center is a little more like a high-level committee for MarCom to meet with the industry representatives from the shipping industry to discuss ANCACs in theory or to keep in touch rather than setting up really live exercises. Like Lucky Mariner, for example, the U.S. do annually, which is an ANCACS exercise. So that's my impression. So NATO, in theory, NATO could do ANCACS exercises or should do it, actually, but it's not done on a regular basis.

from earlier life as a director maritime security at the german ship owners association i can tell you that there is a not much appetite within the shipping industry to take actual actions to enhance maritime security as long as nothing happens because it's costly it costs money to de-route ships to to pull them out of their schedules to participate in an exercise and stuff like that so my impression always was that shipping industry is quite reluctant when it comes to theoretical games okay like when you go to the ship ship owners or shipping companies and say okay let's uh let's do an exercise we have a frigate there and uh we do an escort uh for like two days with one of your vessels uh coming across it's often a lot of um

a lot of skepticism right there that's that's a huge problem and i mean you saw this shortfall in the gulf of aden at the peak of the somali piracy problem where these internationally recommended transit corridor was established and there were convoy operations created like on an ad hoc basis and that was quite a difficult thing because the shipping industry had had huge problems to to um yeah to stick to that convoy schedules and to faster vessels they want to go faster they don't want to then want to slow down uh to uh to help lower vessels to keep up so that is something which should be trained more regular there's still the capacity of of nato marcom could be a good facilitator but it's not used in a proper way from from my point of view

for the german navy the anchor component is located in hamburg still the epicenter of shipping in germany and this called marine uh you know one funny thing in german is that you can third like huge words by putting one noun after another and that is uh kind of quite an example for it so and uh it's manned with officers from commercial shipping who are also navy reservists And it's a good thing, I think, because they live in both worlds, and they know what's realistic to effect from the shipping companies, and they also know what the Navy needs from the shipping industry. So I think within the small world in Hamburg, that works quite good. On a NATO basis, it could be better. Jaes, could I ask you to tell us a little bit more about Lucky Mariner? Because I wasn't familiar with that exercise until you just brought it up

I am familiar with the Spanish exercise that incorporates submergent shipping But again, that's more of an ad hoc thing where ships play voluntarily I'm not familiar with Lucky Mariner It is an annual exercise led by the Naval Corporation Guidance for Shipping So the U.S. Detachment of ANCACs And it's done on an annual basis lucky mariner 19 i just looked at it one or two days ago was conducted with the fifth fleet and they set up like escort operations on an ad hoc versus at the gulf of aden as i told you

with the with the guided missile destroyer and then uh and commercial ships and this is done i think on the yearly base trading uh it was established probably even under the uh the impression of the of the piracy so i think it's a fifth fleet thing mainly because of the piracy problem in the gulf of aden but it's something that at least the the u.s trains on an annual basis even low scale but they do it thank you i'm going to go back to the historical origins because you both have used the word ad hoc on a number of occasions here i think one thing that's not necessarily understood is just how regulated the system of convoy operations was in World War II. Sal, do you have any background information from those? Because my primary source for that

is always the Samuel Elliott Morrison books, U.S. Naval Operations in World War II. I think the very first one is Battle in the North Atlantic, 1939 to 43, that goes in depth into exactly how the convoy operations came to be. Yeah, matter of fact, if you look, you know, one of the things that happened in, I'll take you back even just a little further, just the World War I. World War I, you see the initiation of convoy operations really in April of May of 1917. Admiral Sims comes over for the United States, meets with the Royal Navy, particularly Admiral Jellicoe, and they come up with this concept of convoy. And the British established a convoy office in the Admiralty. And matter of fact, one of the issues that happened was a kind of a divided command over

over convoys. The Americans wanted to run convoys out of the United States. The British wanted to run them out of London. And what eventually happened was cargo convoys were run out of London. Everything coming across was directed by them. But the Americans still ran the troop convoys out of the United States. It was kind of a divided command, with Admiral Sims being in London and Admiral Gleaves, Albert Gleaves, in New York running those operations. World War II was much more systematic. The British had initiated a convoy system right from the very beginning of the war, and the Americans were the ones that were a little late in adapting to it. The Americans kind of rolled into the British convoy system. The British ran it very well out

of the Admiralty. In World War II, the Americans were slow to adapt it, for example, off the east coast of the United States and west coast of the United States. When Japanese submarines arrived off the West Coast in December of 1941 in German U-boats in January of 1942. It took the U.S. a little while to really get into it. And one of the things that you saw during the Cold War years was the U.S. and the NATO allies were absolutely rigid in the establishment of convoy operations. One of the things that was practiced quite consistently was how to do these types of convoy operations and i think that rigid nature takes place one of the things that happened with the fall of the soviet union in the 1990s is a lot of that ideas of how to run a convoy and how to

more importantly the practical nature of it went away one of the big issues i always refer you to an article that was written in g captain by john conrad where he talked about the the lack of knowledge that American merchant mariners, for example, have in how to do convoy operations. You know, in the United States Navy, for example, we had for a very long time the Merchant Marine Reserve Program. The Merchant Marine Reserve Program was intended to put merchant mariners with sailing backgrounds onto Navy ships as kind of convoy liaisons. Well, that has morphed now into the Strategic Sealift Officers Program, where it's taking merchant Mariners and keeping them active by giving them a Navy commission. And so we've really lost that

ability of how to do a convoy operation in both the military side. NCACS does a great job, but they are woefully underfunded, don't have the resources to train as much. And the Merchant Mariners don't have the background and training that they used to have. If you go back to that Morrison volume that you talked about earlier, one of the things that comes out very clear in Samuel Elliott Morrison's book is that divided nature between the commercial merchant marine and the U.S. Navy. They don't tend to get along very well. I think Morrison overplays that quite a bit. But I think that's an issue that did come up, and hopefully we'll see some results of that in the recent convoy operation with Bella Gulf and those two commercial vessels.

I think we need to be better prepared for how do you do a movement in a fairly contested sea. defender 2020 to europe is a 3 000 mile voyage if you do defender 2020 in asia that's a five to seven thousand mile voyage depending on where you're coming from and and that is a much more difficult prospect that looms on the horizon and i think it's a more difficult prospect not only from the distance involved but from the threat on that side the number of submarines and missile threat goes up significantly. Johannes, I think you made a really good point, though, that there is no forcing function for industry that would really drive them to participate in this the way that I think defense analysts would really like to see them participate, with the exception of

imminent conflict, or I think what we're seeing in Defender 2020, where the U.S. government has paid a significant amount of money to have these ships available to participate in this convoy operation is there an answer to why people were surprised to see a cruiser the uss velogolf doing this job i'll go to you first uh johannes no short answer is no not in uh i think within the the broader public they have no clue the difference of the of the tyco and ali berg so it's just in a u.s warship and within the the community of interest when i call it that way it Maybe it was a little surprising that they do Heiko the job and not an Ali Burke. I don't know the reason for it, so maybe Sal can refer to it.

Well, I think the choice of Vela Gulf was an interesting one. Obviously, we're akin to convoy operations being done by the likes of destroyers and frigates. So it appears that using a Ticonderoga-class GS cruiser may be a bit over the top. But if you think about it, one of the things you want to do is those ships, the merchant ships, have no defense at all. So you need to provide an area of defense for that. And obviously a Ticonderoga-class cruiser has the best anti-air weaponry involved. It has a deep missile magazine compared to a Burke, has at least one helicopter. If not, they were equipped with two helicopters on board.

And they're going to have to provide that type of coverage that you need along with sonar. Again, merchant ships are not equipped with point defense at all, and there's very little preparation for, as they did in World War I and World War II, to put armed guards on board merchant ships of any kind for either surface weaponry or anti-submarine weaponry at all. I think the choice of Belagal demonstrated the high value visibility of guarding those vessels. I think one of the other things that needs to really be talked about isn't just the choice of ships escorting them, but how you go about escorting them. One of the things about commercial vessels today that's sometimes very vastly overlooked is they have to be in nearly continuous communications with their home offices and, more importantly, their engineering plants. There's almost a continual uplink between commercial ships today and maintenance plants, machinery, you name it. And it is very hard, for example, for a merchant ship to go completely dark, MCON, and cut itself off from outside sources. One of the things that have happened over time is we've reduced crewing on merchant vessels.

We've reduced them down to a level where we can get by with very minimal manning. But that also means there's more of a reliance on automated vessels where we're not at the point of going autonomous. But a lot of systems rely on these uplink systems, and to cut a ship completely off is something that most merchant mariners are not used to doing. And so it's going to be very hard to do it. You can do it. I mean, you can obviously turn it off and do it. But, again, that's going to create some issues and some problems. And one of the issues we're going to see is our traditional method of defending a convoy may not be against an armed merchant cruiser, it may not be a surface warfare threat, it may not be an air threat, it may not be an ASW threat, it may be a cyber threat where they can upload viruses and disable machinery on board vessels.

And now all of a sudden you start knocking off ships in the convoy, not by torpedo hits or backfire bombers launching air-to-surface missiles, but by knocking off the engine plant because you got it to cut off the lube oil going to the diesel and the engine fries itself. I think we have to start thinking in more asymmetric ways of how we go about defending vessels. One of the upshots of the American sealer fleet is it's so old that it's not as reliant as many modern vessels. But that's not a method of defense I really advocate. Yeah, so, I mean, to the topic of cruiser versus destroyer, I don't think the public really realizes the differences between those two platforms. And the cruiser does have some more redundancy built into it. It does have more communications.

You mentioned the size of the VLS cells that it has on board, so it has 122 versus 96 on Destroyer. Again, the communications. I think the major difference there might be, though, the commanding officer. So a cruiser captain is a captain for the second time, where most Destroyer captains are a captain for the first time. If you're dealing with some salty merchant mariners, having that cruiser captain available, that may be value added versus the newer destroyer captain who's you know wrestling with command for the first time in his or her career so i want to turn from that jared if i if i can add one more thing to that because that's a great point that you had absolutely seen the recent

we've seen the recent spat of collisions in 2017 with burks we've had some prior to that too the other issue that you have to add in there is range of the vessel i think it's a very important one. One of the reasons you don't see an LCS besides the reduced weapons capacity of an LCS is LCSs don't have the ranges to do this. They just don't. You would need to attach an oiler to that convoy to get an LCS to basically sprint and forward and be able to move along. And same thing, you know, the Tycos have a much longer range than other vessels to do that. And I think that's an issue. But I do agree that the commanding officer, the experience of being a ship handler is a fairly important thing. So Johannes, I'll ask you, is there a European component to this

convoy portion as well? I think I saw some reporting on the German Navy escorting near the end there. Yeah, first of all, thank you to Sal for raising a very, very important issue, the link of the commercial vessels with the shipping company, actually. That's something which is which is quite important because it has a direct impact on the quality of the cruise the machine compartment of a commercial vessel is not as good as it used to be and that's due to the fact that the vessel is 24 7 connected to the company and there's an old-fashioned experienced technical officer sitting there checking the data of the chip and just calling the ship or emailing the ship and saying hey your consumption is too high your temperatures are too

adjust this adjust that and that is something which is not a big big thing when if nothing happens but as soon as you go off offline then you might be problem so that was a pretty good point with the cell there is a you mentioned the the German Navy component and without being too impolite I think that was more of a photo X so they wanted it they wanted it actually the one of the picture of a german navy ship in front of one of these ships of defender 2020 there was no significant component of the german navy within defender 2020 so i think uh your characterization of the phoenix might not be completely inaccurate but i do believe they're actually supposed to be

conducting lead through operations can you tell us what a lead through operation is or explain that at all yeah they detached uh uh mine counter vessel to um to to the north sea and they uh just took over when they when they came into german territory to waters to to um do the clearance of the of the path of the of the ship uh to bremerhaven that was they so they combined actually their their normal uh exercises a little stake into defender 2020 exercise i think the main reason why there is no german navy stronger german navy participation is that there was no naval part in the baltic so if there had been the decision to do the reinforcement over over the sea not to bremerhaven or to to to amsterdam but reinforce over the sea up to gedansk or

Gdynia, so to Poland, as soon as the convoy would have entered the Baltic, that would have been a much more stronger role for the German Navy. Okay, so you think it was mostly eliminated by geography and the fact that most of the German mine countermeasures forces are actually there in, I think they're in Kiel, yes? Yeah, they are in Kiel. And you see, the German Navy has the smallest order of battle of all times and they're quite overstretched right now so one of the the key requirements by the by the navy command is to have the standing nato maritime groups and countermeasure groups equipped with at least one one german platform then we have a uni field then we have atalanta then we have normal training then we have maintenance so there's not many

platforms left to deploy for more commitments and that's why I think they pulled out of a stronger role there to have a stronger role there because they didn't have to actually as I said it would have been a different deal if they had gone into the Baltic. Yeah and I would have liked to see them go into the Baltic if for the only reason American forces we don't get to work with mine countermeasures vessels a lot and do practice things like lead through operations where your folks are very practiced at executing those. We don't see that very often. So it would have been interesting to see some of our combatants work more closely with the mine countermeasures countermeasures vessels. Sorry. So can I add just one thing? The Northern Coast 19 exercise,

so the NATO exercise in the Baltic, the annual exercise in the Baltic took place in September last year i was embarked on a on a german german navy support ship for the whole exercise and one of the key and the focus elements of northern coast 19 were escort operations from german harbors eastbound to the danish island of bornholm which is located close to poland so it's the eastmost island which is not part of the baltic states of poland and there was lead operations from German ports eastbound to Bornholm were one of the absolutely focus elements of Northern Coast 19. So that might be a strong indication how the German Navy would have participated if Defender 2020 would have had an abortive component.

Yeah, and to make clear for the listeners what lead-through operations are, that's just a mine countermeasures vessel guiding you through a known minefield. So you and the combatant or the cargo ship are following closely behind, getting signals from the mine countermeasures vessel to show you that you are, in fact, in safe water. Exactly. So simultaneously, the U.S. and NATO are or were, I guess in some cases, I think, cold response has been dialed down quite significantly due to impacts of COVID-19. But simultaneously, U.S. and NATO are executing dynamic Manta in the Mediterranean, cold response in northern Norway. that seems like a lot are we back at a cold war standard now or is this still below the threshold of what we were seeing regularly during the cold war and i'll go to sal for this one first and then

come back to you johannes well i think one of the things you're seeing especially with dynamic manta in the mediterranean and more importantly cold response in the northern norway is you're seeing the ability to you know move forces over in large measure in defender 20 but then move in intra is a big aspect you know we have a large marine corps pre-positioning element in northern norway and the ability to move those resources to where they're needed it's important to exercise that so not only are we practicing you know moving with these large vessels commercial and lmsrs but we're also using smaller vessels like the expeditionary fast transports the spearhead class TPFs to move equipment over. It's sometimes forgotten during the Iraqi freedom, the first

brigade for the 3rd Infantry Division came on board pre-positioning vessels. The second brigade came out of a store of equipment that was in Qatar that was moved into Kuwait by those same vessels. After they offloaded, they picked it up and they moved it. And then the 3rd Brigade was brought over from the United States. So there's a sequential element for moving equipment so having these other exercises i think it's really important add to it african lion going on in morocco uh cobra gold going on in thailand you know one of the things that that has always been a focus is not one contingency happens at one time there's usually multiple issues going on so so i think exercising knees are are fairly important elements to be done

uh if you look at the med training one you're looking at countries like georgia for example being involved? How do we do that Black Sea, you know, going through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles? What role is Turkey going to take in that? Going into the Baltic, how do we get through the Kattegat, the Skattegat, being able to get through those narrow waters? I mean, we could talk about contested. We just talk about the geography of moving vessels through very tight waterways. You have the issue with Kaliningrad, obviously, in moving into the Baltic. All these need to be addressed it's not just getting tonnage and vehicles and manpower across the atlantic once you get into europe there's a geography there in the mediterranean there's

a geography you have to deal with and overcome one of the things we're doing a little bit better with at least on the u.s side by putting the teps for example in europe you can now pick up a you know a load of equipment and move it intra-theater very quickly that's what those vessels are designed to do. Same thing with moving them internally in the former Warsaw Pact nations, which are now NATO nations. How is that seamless flowing going on? I'm sure Johannes could talk about that a little better. How's that internal movement going on within Europe? We've seen images, I've seen lots of images coming across of movements internally in Europe. But along the coast-wise, it's an important element. I think that's one of the things you're seeing tested in

these portions of defender 2020 johannes any final thoughts from you on the uh the exercise schedule or intra-european movement yeah sure it is always interesting to hear like the the huge amount of exercises and deployment the u.s is in compared to to the european europeans are in especially germany so um we have um right now with defender 2020 code response dynamic mentor dynamic mentor is something which is not very much on the radar on the public radar here so Germany is involved up with one MPA and cold response we have two significant detachment there we have the good SIGA the mountain troops there and we have a detachment from the from the sea battalion the German Marine Corps

if you want to call it that way they are both partitioned in and cold response and that is something which really comes to to or which is more and more into the media actually like it's since the last two years probably there's much more media coverage of the exercises the um the bundeswehrs of the german armed forces are involved into and the response is is by full if you want to call it that way so um part of the people uh they say okay that's that's the way we we have to do it we have to practice more we have to enhance the readiness we have to equip our troops better and the other half is very reluctant and saying why do we germans we started two terrible wars and why are we playing war again so that's always it's a very

very sensitive political issue in germany and i think it's going into the right direction the armed forces by themselves they communicate in much more offensive via social media and that's the right thing to do in my uh from my point of view um so for um for for german the germans they have to relearn actually that um something like defender 2020 um is good for the german public because they have to relearn that the the troops the military is visible again in germany yeah so one of the uh the things that was a concern a major concern here was um will the people with the car drivers uh be able to deal with a convoy on the autobahn because most of the people have never seen a real convoy on the autobahn and they don't know how to uh yeah how

to deal with it um so the german law says a convoy is to be treated has to be treated like one car So you can pass it, but you are not allowed to pull into the convoy and stuff like that. That's something most people don't know because they haven't ever seen a convoy. So that's the very, very low level we are coming from. And I think it's very important for the German public to get used to a kind of military presence again in their daily life. So, I think that's one side effect, these exercises, positive side effect, these exercises have for the German public. The other question was about contested geography, or just help me quick. I'm going to defer to Sal, because it's really like he had thrown a question in there.

Sal, can you reframe that question about the geography again? Sure. So, I mean, obviously one of the things you see with dynamic manna is an ASW exercise, so an anti-submarine exercise. But, again, one of the things that you have to be able to do internally is move goods around and equipment around in the Mediterranean Basin, for example. If we have to go into a Black Sea environment, how do you move that? We've seen exercises being done by the United States over the large exercises seem to be these destroyer operations that go in.

But one of the things that MSC has been doing is sending in these smaller fast transports, the EPFs. And that's a good movement. It's a quick way to move things to reinforce countries like Romania, Bulgaria, but also over to Georgia, Azerbaijan, any place that would need that kind of support. And, you know, one of the things that we've been seeing, especially in the Asian environment, too, is the recent budget request by the Marine Corps for land-based Tomahawk missiles for grabbing these. You know, we're almost getting back to the point that we saw in the interwar years of grabbing key geographic points to secure them, to allow sea movement or sea denial take place. And it's going to be very interesting to see how this progresses over time, what type of exercises we do, how do we go about movement. You know, getting into Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, for example, you've got to go through some very contested waters. You've got to go through some tight waters that can be easily shut down.

The Katagats, Skatagat are notoriously shallow, easy for closing with mines. You've got to get past Kaliningrad, which is basically a huge potential roadblock for any passage. So I think this intra-theater transport, looking at what we're looking at with Defender being an intercontinental movement, but intra-theater is going to be a very important aspect going forward, whether it's in Europe or it's in Asia dealing with the first island chain, South China Sea. I think we're seeing this really develop and being a big contention of General Berger, the Marine Corps, with his new guidance and going forward for what the Marine Corps is going to do in the future. And even the Army looking for a role to play in this with almost a return to coastal artillery, coastal defense batteries being established. So, Johannes, I'm not sure there was a question in there for you to answer. And if there was, I think you actually already answered it earlier when you talked about the intra-theater aspect. One, on the convoy side, as far as how German drivers deal with the convoy side.

And two, when you mentioned the inland waterway transportation. So I think that's addressed, and we're kind of out of time here anyway, unless you had something else. Yeah, just one quick comment. I think that is something where the U.S. Navy probably could even learn from the German Navy, from the European navies, because the German Navy is, they've always operated, and they do still, in contested geography. So operating in the Baltic is probably one of the most contested areas. Navy ships can operate Navy vessels.

So we do this on a daily basis. And this is something which I think could be of much value to have a joint exercise, sea lift exercise in the Baltic, getting personnel and getting kit going to the Baltic and further east. That would be something where the German Navy could be of high value, I guess. Absolutely. Absolutely. And no problem accidentally saying we when you refer to the German Navy as someone who's spent almost five years on exchange with the German Navy. I occasionally do that myself as an American. So understandable.

That is all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Sal Mercogliano. You can find him online at Mercogliano S on Twitter. Sal, any projects you're working on now? I got a piece that's going to the U.S. Naval Institute Press, proceeding, excuse me, talking about expeditionary warfare, the transition between forward-deployed and expeditionary warfare. And I should have a piece coming out fairly shortly on GCAP and talking about the COVID-19, the impact it's having on the cruise industry and comparing it to the movement of passenger aligners at the beginning of World War I, World War II as a parallel. That's excellent. We'll look forward to both of those and maybe discussing them on here. Johannes, where can we find you online and what's next for you? personal twitter account is at you boat hunters which is a german handle so i would recommend if you don't already do it's highly recommended follow the my my my center the center for

maritime security and security on twitter it's at sea power series which is much easier for international guests and via that account this account will pretty easy find myself So I'm currently working on a paper on possible future procurement concepts for the German Navy and along a piece on the strategic value of the German submarine force for NATO. Besides that, as a project manager, I'm responsible for the annual Kiel International Sea Power Symposium, KISS in short, Europe's dedicated maritime security conference held in June in Kiel, hopefully. Yeah, that was going to be my next question is if you're still on track to hold that. I guess we're all in a little bit of a holding pattern here

as hopefully COVID-19 will start to recede a little bit. Yeah, so we're currently planning to conduct KISS as usual, but we're monitoring developments closely and then we will decide early enough in advance, but not before Easter. So I think we will decide in the midst of April, end of April, if we will conduct KISS or not. But keep our fingers crossed that the situation will ease a little

so we can proceed as planned. Absolutely. Thank you, gentlemen, again very much. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thank you. Come on, put it out, put it out, it's your moral.