Sea Control - Sea Control 197 - Naval Great Power Competition with Dr. Joshua Tallis & Hunter Stires

Episode Date: August 30, 2020

Links:To Compete with Russia and China, Think Small by Dr. Joshua Tallis, Defense One, May 12, 2020Win Without Fighting by Hunter Stires, Proceedings, June 2020How Good Order at Sea is Central to Winning Strategic Competition by Dr. Joshua Tallis, CIMSEC, August 12, 2020

Hey folks, Jared here. This week we welcome Dr. Josh Tallis and Hunter Stiers to the program to discuss their views on Naval Great Park competition and three of the recent pieces on the subject. We're also seeking volunteers to assist with the back-end production of Sea Control. Volunteers will be sitting in on interviews, assisting with sound editing and production, and helping transcribe episodes. Contact seacontrol at simsec.org if you're interested. it. Finally, as always, we want to advertise and strongly recommend our friends in the SimSec Podcast Network and our second podcast, Feed the Bilge Pumps. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and wherever else you download your podcasts. It's a more low-key, slightly less serious approach to current events in the maritime domain,

and able history by three historians. Check them out wherever you download your podcast. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. Hello, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today we're taking suggestions for naval great power competition, and our guests are Dr. Josh Talis and Hunter Stiers. Josh, Hunter, welcome, and thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. Great to be here.

So, Josh, let's start with you, because I believe you're new to our audience. I think, Hunter, you might have been on once before, but would you mind introducing yourself? Sure thing. So I've got a PhD in political science. I wrote my dissertation a few years back on maritime security strategy. That became a book that I published with Naval Institute last year, War for Muddy Waters. And I'm a research scientist in the strategy and policy shop at the Center for Naval Analyses. Thanks. And I should add that we are recording this August 12th, which today, Josh, you actually just published with us at CIMSEC, How Good Order at Sea is Central to Winning Strategic Competition. So hopefully that will come up in the course of our discussion. Thanks again. And Hunter, how about you? Well, first off, just wanted to say I read Dr. Talas's piece today. Highly recommend it. By way of introduction, I'm Hunter Stiers. I'm a fellow at the John B. Hattendorf Center for Maritime Historical Research at the Naval War College. My focus is, broadly speaking, maritime strategy and logistics in the Western Pacific.

Over the past three years or so, I originated a new strategic concept to reframe the Chinese challenge in the South China Sea and reorient U.S. and allied strategy to defeat it. The premise is that the Chinese are waging a maritime insurgency against the rule of international law and the freedom of the sea, and that this requires a U.S. and allied strategy of maritime counterinsurgency to defeat it. So that hit the pages of proceedings last year in a general prize piece called The South China Sea Needs a Coin Toss, had a companion piece called Why We Defend Free Seas, and then that was followed up this year with a general prize piece called Win Without Fighting. So thank you so much for having me on. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Awesome. So thank you both for coming on again. As a reminder, all views are our own and not representative of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated.

So we're going to use a pair of articles as a jumping-off point for today's discussion. The first, To Compete with Russia and China, Think Small, was written by Josh and published on Defense One. The second, Hunter just mentioned, Win Without Fighting, was written by Hunter for Proceedings and received the second prize for the 2019 essay contest. So both articles and some others are going to be able to be found in our show notes on the podcast, so feel free to look those up, check those out after you listen, before you listen, whenever. Hunter, I'm going to start with you. Both these articles are about competition at sea. How would you frame the current competition? Well, thanks so much. That's a really important question. It's essential to kind of define our terms. The way that I look at the current competition, focusing particularly on China,

I like to frame it as a battle of legal regimes. On the one hand, you have the legal and philosophical principle of the freedom of the sea, which is centuries old. It is codified in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and it's really backed by U.S. and allied maritime power. The other legal regime that is being put forward to challenge this free and open vision of maritime sovereignty is a closed, continental, and hierarchical, really Sinocentric version That's being put forward by the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing. And this essentially frames the world and frames the maritime commons, not as a commons, but as something that can be claimed like land. You can basically fence off a patch of ocean and stick a flag in. So that really runs fundamentally counter to this really essential legal principle that is at the foundation of the US-led rules-based liberal international order. And it is a paramount strategic importance to the United States. In this battle of legal regimes, there's sort of two approaches. If we're thinking about this, I like to refer to it as the prime factorization of a conflict. There's two approaches to wage a battle of legal regimes.

There's the conventional way where you have two sides. They get their forces out. They have a conventional force-on-force confrontation. One side wins. The other side loses. And then sequentially, whoever wins then proceeds to impose their laws and their legal regime on the civilian population that they seek to govern. The other way essentially recognizes that what's going on is it's not so much about who's got the more powerful conventional forces, but really at the core of what's going on is that we're fighting about who governs in a particular space or polity. When we think about governing, generally speaking, we are talking about the way that political will is translated into action is generally through law. So we're talking about whose laws are in force. And ultimately, for a law to be in force, this is about whose laws do the civilians follow. So someone who thinks that they would lose a conventional force-on-force confrontation or they deem it to be too costly, they can say, never mind actually the other guy's forces. I'm going to do what is actually strategically decisive in this battle of legal regimes. I'm just going to go and impose my laws on the civilian population right now. And I'm going to ignore the other dead conventional forces. And we call this approach an insurgency. So in environments like the South China Sea, that is more or less what China is doing, even though they're doing it without actually shooting anybody. I mean, in terms of a conventional force-enforced confrontation, they are essentially following the definition of an insurgency.

And the way they're going about this, they are waging a concerted campaign of intimidation and harassment against local civilian maritime populations. So with fishermen, they steal people's catch. They confiscate radios and navigational equipment. for a long time, for at least 10 years, they had a regularized system of kidnapping Vietnamese fishermen for ransom. And as we've seen on multiple occasions, we have seen Chinese maritime law enforcement and government ships ram and sink local civilian vessels. We saw this this past spring with a Vietnamese vessel. We saw it last June with a Filipino vessel. This is something they do on a regular basis. We've seen them harass and intimidate regional hydrocarbon

operations, like with the West Papala standoff in the Malaysian EEZ. So they're essentially going about this without a conventional, okay, we're going to blow up the forces that are defending the legal regime that's currently in force. They're waging a maritime insurgency against the freedom of the sea and the rule of international law. So that's how I would frame the competition, at least in the South China Sea and the Western Pacific. Thanks. Josh, Hunter focused very specifically on China, but you included Russia in your piece. Why did you opt to include Russia? It's a great question, Jared. And I guess I should start with a little bit of backing up, which is to say both the Defense One piece as well as the SimSec article that you mentioned are each components of a larger project that I had undertaken, which was to think about the little guy and the little things in the context of strategic competition. And so there's been a lot of focus since the release of the National Defense Strategy Summary in 2018 on this pivot towards great power competition and thinking about China first and foremost and then Russia in that upper echelon of great power competitors.

But something that can often be missed, unless you're doing a close read of the NDS summary, is that DOD is still interested in the little things. They're interested in smaller power competitors, countries like Iran, North Korea. They're interested in smaller non-state issues as well, terrorism, piracy, things of that nature. So I entered a project I was working on with the question about what's the role of maritime security in great power competition? And what they got me to was a larger consideration about what does great power competition mean? We need an organizing framework for the concept of great power competition. And then within that, we need to nest maritime security operations in order to make sure that they're connected to and driving larger strategic objectives. And so as a result of that, I really backed into this conversation thinking about what does it mean for great powers to compete with one another in the international order?

And so you can't have that conversation without each of the great powers represented. There's a whole separate poli-sci conversation we can and should have at some point about what does it even mean to be a great power and who's getting included on that list and who isn't. But at least from the perspective of DOD, it's fairly obvious they've downselected to the U.S., Russia and China. And so I was looking to create a conversation that talked about great power competition across the great powers, which is why I've included Russia and China collectively. We can talk, I think maybe we will a little bit later, about some of the implications for thinking about great power competition in that way and of thinking about each of the major powers and the major stakeholders from that standpoint. But fundamentally, and this is an area where I think Hunter and I have some overlap, it comes down to this idea of the rules-based order and thinking about the relationship between great powers and the concept of the international system. But to me, if you're going to have that bigger conversation about the rules-based order, you need to have each of the major claimants or competitors in that order represented at a strategic level so that you can then move from there to operational considerations about how do you compete effectively. Thanks, Josh. Josh, I actually want to come back to you for the next question. It's what assumptions, if any, did you make as you started this project and how did those hold up? So that's a really fun question. As an analyst, you always want to go into these projects with an understanding of what either what biases are you bringing to them or what what baseline assumptions are you stipulating in order to move forward with the next stage of your analysis?

And as I mentioned, I was sort of backing into this larger strategic concept. I came in really wanting to understand what's the role of maritime security and small scale missions in an era of strategic competition. And to be quite frank, my assumption was that the answer to that question would be that maritime security and low end missions were going to be marginal considerations in an era of great power competition. I didn't think that the answer would be that they're in any way substantive, let alone central or core to the idea of what it means to compete among great power competitors. My motivation behind approaching that discussion was really to help the Navy avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In the last 20 years, the Navy has cultivated a large set of capabilities related to competing with non-state actors. My assumption was, to your question, Jared, that the Navy would want to get rid of as many of those responsibilities and capabilities as possible to plow as much cash, training, time, and attention to the big fight. And my concern was that the Navy would lose too many of the core competencies and capabilities that it would still at some point require in the event of a small-scale contingency or the spike-up of an issue like piracy or terrorism in some part of the world.

And then again, as I argue in particular in the SIMSEC piece that's out today on August 12th, the conclusion that I came to was not that these issues are incidental or that the Navy should hold on to a handful of small-scale mission sets, but truly, and to some extent surprising myself, coming to the idea based off of this strategic concept of what it means to compete in great power competition and centering the rules-based order at the epicenter of that competition, that really what we're talking about are the day-to-day activities. on the part of the Navy, and to a lesser extent, the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard. Thinking about the sea services and their day-to-day functions is actually a critical component of what it means to compete with other great powers. Thanks. I'm going to ask you one more follow-up, and then, Hunter, I'm going to come to you about your assumptions. But, Josh, you mentioned the role of maritime security. I've heard that I think maritime security can sometimes become a loaded phrase. How would you define maritime security? Yeah, certainly can be. a loaded phrase for sure. The definition that I found really helpful is to break it into two

parts. One is to think about the objective behind what you're searching for, so not to do something for the sake of doing it, and then to think about the mission as a function of that. So the objective of maritime security is to create an environment that supports the free and legitimate use of the maritime domain. And I borrow that from a CNA report that we had done a number of years ago, thinking about maritime security as a mission area. The reason why I like that definition is Because it actively uses the language that we are seeing invoked in a strategic context everywhere, which is this idea of free and fair use, legitimate use, freedom of navigation, freedom of overflight. But in order to make those coherent strategic concepts, we need to situate them into a specific strategic and operational capability set. And so if the objective behind maritime security is to create an environment that supports the free and legitimate use of the maritime domain, then the mission set behind maritime security is the prevention, deterrence, or the mitigation of activities that threaten the free and legitimate use of the seas.

And so I'll wrap up with maybe a few examples because, Jared, as you mentioned, this can be contentious. It can also balloon to be a somewhat uncontrollably large concept. And depending on which hemisphere you're sitting in, maritime security is a bigger concept or a more niche concept, depending on which academic traditions you're from or where you're sitting in the Pentagon or in DHS. what's critical for me when talking about maritime security is that because you are driving towards an objective, it does not necessarily mean that maritime security is or is not kinetic. It is in service of creating and fostering free and legitimate use of the maritime space. And so things like, for example, limited strikes in the case of the strikes that the Trump administration has done in Syria in furtherance of the norm against the use of chemical weapons in war, and especially chemical weapons against the civilian internal population. That is leveraging the maritime space for free and legitimate use and upholding core norms in the international system.

Sanctions enforcement, like what the international community conducts by way of the United Nations Security Council resolutions against North Korea, would be another example. And then the more fundamental activities we're probably familiar with, things like defense of commerce, humanitarian assistance, gunboat diplomacy. All of those are other instances and examples of the way in which you might leverage the maritime space, again, in the furtherance of that core objective, the free and legitimate use of the maritime space. Thank you. That was tremendous. Hunter, over to you now. What assumptions did you come in with and how did those hold up as you did your research? So the project really started essentially looking at a couple of key historical case studies and how these could be applied. So I guess the assumption would be that potentially they could be applied to contemporary strategic challenges. So the first one was that of the U.S. Asiatic fleet in the months and years leading up to the Pacific War. And I started looking at essentially the warfighting experience, and that ended up preceding the article in August of 2016 called 1941 Asiatic Fleet Offers Strategic Lessons.

Because essentially it was, well, the Asiatic fleet has similarly composed forces. They're in the same area. They're dealing with a rising peer competitor that is localized in Asia and use land-based air. They have a heavy reliance on submarines. They have a disproportionately torpedo-based armament, which we use the same salvo equations as we use for missile combat that Wayne Hughes developed. How did it work out for them? Not so well in the warfighting event. I ended up looking more deeply at the period leading up to the war, which is particularly interesting because this was a case study between 1937 and 1940, where as Imperial Japan was launching an invasion of China,

they were also executing what we would now call a gray zone campaign to force U.S. and Western interests out of China, but without having to resort to open-arm conflict. And here, the U.S. Asiatic fleet with 39 old, obsolescent, outclassed ships is actually able to wage a a highly successful counter-graze zone campaign to prevent the Japanese from achieving their aim of forcing the U.S. and the West out of China. I initially turned this into an article in the Naval War College Review, which was published in last year's summer issue, and that's they were playing chicken, the U.S. Asiatic Fleet's Graze Zone Deterrence Campaign against Japan. So looking there, how can we, as the United States, achieve our strategic objectives

without fighting, and it had disproportionate outcomes relative to the amount of force input that we're actually using here. So this was a really interesting example of a very small forward-deployed force having outside strategic impact. And then the other case study that I kind of synthesized with the Asiatic Fleet's example is that of the Combined Action Program in the Vietnam War. So the U.S. Marine Corps, they're deployed to the I-Corps area of responsibility in the northern part of South Vietnam, and a couple of senior Marine Corps commanders quickly recognized that the Army's predominant notion of how to fight the war, of these large scale battalion size sweeping operations, really are not very effective.

And they are neglecting this underutilized local force of this home defense militia that is in a lot of the the different localities and villages and hamlets of relatively small scale i mean but at its greatest extent it involves about 2200 marines and they're like well let's what if we were to pair with a platoon of these local home defense militia and what they found was they were able to achieve a lot of again outsized strategic impacts where essentially the marines are able to make this home defense militia much more effective because we're bringing all the cool toys. We're bringing the combat enablers of medevacs, quick reaction forces. We're bringing better equipment. We are bringing the connections to all of our logistical supply lines. And at the

same time, they're improving our ability to achieve our objectives where they're bringing the local knowledge, they're bringing the commitment to defend home. And what these guys are doing is they persist in and among these local civilian populations to try to create a sense of credible permanence in the eyes of the civilian population. If you have essentially a situation where you've got maybe 12 bad guys with guns who are persisting in a village and they're living there and will assassinate local officials, will assassinate local police, and they're like, listen, we're in charge here and you have to pay rice taxes to us, not to the government. You have to have your people be conscripted into our forces, not the

government. The insurgents there are directly contesting this battle of legal regimes that is ultimately at stake. So what the Marines essentially try to do is they start fighting a counterinsurgency more or less like the insurgents. They are highly successful in this. With their 2,200 Marine input, they net out a force of 20,000. So you put in a battalion, you get something the size of a division. And in terms of combat outcomes, you see proportionally fewer U.S. casualties, proportionally greater casualties inflicted on the enemy, and you see measurably higher degrees of civilian population security. Now, the Army fought this at every turn, so this was not implemented more widely. I would argue this was a major contributing factor as to why this

particular counterinsurgency did not go our way is because we did not adopt this approach more widely. Nevertheless, these two case studies of the Asiatic Fleet and the Combined Action Program offer really interesting insights as to even when you're in someone else's backyard, even when you're in the case of the Asiatic Fleet, how can you achieve economy of force and still achieve your strategic objective without breaking the bank and by enlisting your local partners and allies and essentially counter a, you know, and certainly in the case of traditional counterinsurgency environment of the Combined Action Program, how can you defeat an insurgency or an insurgent-like threat using this kind of persistent presence? So essentially, the maritime counterinsurgency

concept seeks to synthesize the learning from these two case studies and try to apply it to our contemporary environment. Thanks. So you both also chose to focus on competition below the level of shooting war and highlight that the fleet built for fighting major conflict has some drawbacks in peacetime. Josh, you specifically advocated for developing smaller combatants. Why was that? Yeah, so I approached the question of what we should buy and what the force structure should look like, at least notionally from the perspective of what should our strategy require the fleet to look like? Partially, I'm, you know, I know strategy is always written with a pen on the paper, but to the extent we can take a step back and think critically about whether or not our

force posture can or should adapt over time to meet evolving strategic considerations. I really started with my analysis at the strategic level. I've already mentioned that my larger project was this question about the role of maritime security in these lower-end issues in great power competition, which led me to a much larger conversation, as explored in today's SimSec article, as well as the CNA paper that it's based on about the overall context of great power competition as it relates to the maritime domain. And my argument, which I've teased already, is this idea that central to great power competition is this idea about control over what is now at least the U.S.-led international order.

And so from that as a starting point, I asked myself, well, what are the threats to a U.S.-led international order. And I've come up with two buckets of examples. The first is an effort on the part of a rival power to stage an acute overthrow of the US-led international order and replace that order either with one of their leadership or just generally to fracture that order entirely. And based on, and folks can read this in a little bit more detail if they're interested in it, but based on pre-existing work in fields like international relations, The general understanding is that only a rival great power can truly threaten at an acute level by way of great power war the abrupt overthrow of an existing international order. So that's bread and butter Navy, Marine Corps, Joint Force stuff.

That is preparing for a no-kidding shooting war with the effort on the part of a great power adversary to abruptly overthrow the U.S. position in the international system. I stopped thinking about that once I got to that point because the Navy and many of the experts at CNA and many of the experts at the Naval War College spent a lot of time thinking about the high-end fight and what does the Navy need to buy and how does it need to train and how does it need to staff in order to win that fight. The second bucket that I became really focused and interested in was this other consideration of, other than an acute threat and an immediate overhaul of an international system, international systems can degrade. They can corrode and erode over time. And that became something I was really interested in, that longitudinal, long-term threat to the survival of the U.S.-led international order. Within that, there are two ways we can think about threats over the long haul to the U.S.-led international system. One is on the part of great power rivals who try to salami slice make changes first in their orbit and then potentially further afield to the norms in that arena that don't work to their advantage. which Hunter knows a lot more about this than I do in the China context. But most folks who are listening to this podcast have probably heard of Chinese salami slicing tactics in the South China Sea as one example. This is occasionally something that we hear about with Russia as well, which believes that as a great power, it has certain prerogatives that other sovereign nations do not have in terms of its ability to violate local territorial and sovereignty.

We see this in Georgia. We see this in Ukraine and Crimea. On the other end of this spectrum, when we think about potential corrosion or erosion of the U.S.-led international system over time, one of the things that I liked most about this framework is that it also gave us a way to think about the smaller actors in the context of great power competition. And it's possible that the U.S., as the leader of the international order, if the U.S. does not safeguard, for example, the transit of goods through key sea lines of communication against acts of piracy and depredation, or if the U.S. does not affirm the value of sovereignty and sovereign nations, even in parts of the world where the U.S. doesn't have obvious, specific, near-term strategic objectives – think about, for example, parts of the Gulf of Guinea – that over time, the norms corrode to the point that it's no longer obvious why nations would want to voluntarily participate in the U.S.-led international order. And participation is, to a large extent, non-obligatory. States opt into participation in the U.S.-led international order. They opt into an American security umbrella, either actively or passively, by not building up forces to counteract it. And this is critical as well. They agree to liberal

economic rules that fundamentally value the American consumer and American producers. So all of that is some necessary background to answer the more immediate question you put forward, which is to say, well, why smaller combatants, which was the centerpiece of my argument from the Defense One piece a few months ago? And the answer is because the larger surface combatants And the Navy as a whole is right now almost exclusively postured from a material standpoint to address the risk of an acute and immediate overhaul of the U.S.-led international order. But as I've just discussed, that's one bucket of the many ways that the U.S.-led international order can be threatened. And as a consequence, only one, albeit a particularly violent way, in which the United States could, quote unquote, lose the great power competition over the long haul. I'm interested in a more balanced high-low mix for the Navy as well as a more substantive role for the Coast Guard in order to make sure that all of those little day-to-day order maintenance tasks get completed.

And maybe this is something we can go a little bit back and forth on, but the reality is the Navy is not going over the long haul to dedicate Arleigh Burke-class destroyers to the sufficient level that is necessary to engage in that day-to-day maintenance function. And occasionally, like today, for example, we'll hear a fun little good news story about a DDG participating in a cocaine bust where they took in a $4.5 million haul. It's chump change. You could fill up an Arleigh Burke destroyer for more than $4.5 million. The cost-benefit doesn't make any sense. And when push comes to shove, combatant commanders and the Navy and policymakers aren't going to allocate those large surface combatants at the scale that is necessary in order to engage in the day-to-day system maintenance functions that I think are critical for avoiding the loss of great power competition in this more nebulous longitudinal competition over norms and control of the international order over the long haul. Hunter, I had a question queued up for you here, but I think his suggestion of the back and forth here. I see you leaning forward in your seat ready to pounce, so just go ahead and initiate the back and forth, please.

Fundamentally, right now, as part of the current shift to this notion of great power competition, the U.S. and the Department of Defense in particular are spending a lot of time and energy thinking and worrying about and preparing for the prospect of a great power war to come probably about 10 to 15 years down the road. And you look at in terms of, again, as Dr. Talos was saying about how we are materially postured, and you look at in terms of the procurement processes and the force development and force design initiatives that the Navy and Marine Corps are pursuing, they're all designed to mature in about 10 to 15 years, which is more or less when we are worried that the Chinese are going to try to make their move. The problem is that if we don't deal with the other subtler forms

of attack, like what I characterize as China's maritime insurgency, if we don't deal with this now, then we actually don't need to worry about a great power war in 10 to 15 years, because they will have won and we will have lost with nary a shot being fired. And this is a difficult and uncomfortable thing to think about. The idea that we will have investing $700 million a year in our top line defense budget into getting ready for this precise scenario. There's a terrific article in Proceedings that just came out, which looks at the possibility of Chinese beta complete in Taiwan, they envision a contested election that puts our political order up in the air. As a result of that uncertainty and that top-level political turbulence, that creates a window for

China to make a move. There's sufficient delay in the U.S. response that in their scenario, Taiwan capitulates. And then we're like, what just happened here? And this is something that I'm very worried about not just that particular scenario in an election year, but over the long haul. Fundamentally, the freedom of the sea is a foundational U.S. national interest. Our interest in the freedom of the sea is older than the republic, which Greg Pauling at CSIS really admirably put included in his testimony before Congress. It is older than the republic. And I like to point out that the United States as an independent country has fought no less than six wars in which the freedom of the sea was a declared US aim. And if you count the American

Revolution, it's actually seven wars. Elements of the freedom of the sea are discussed in the Declaration of Independence. So this is something that we really care about as a country, and rightly so, because we depend on free and open access to the maritime commons in order to have enjoy commercial, military, and political access to the overwhelming majority of the world's population that lives outside North America. So these subtler forms of attack, it is imperative that we figure out how do we deal with things like China's maritime insurgency in the South China Sea. Because if we were to allow it to succeed, if we were to allow the freedom of the sea to go away, and for this essentially a balkanization of the oceans to be allowed

to enter into force in conjunction with China's move to create new overland trade corridors through the Belt and Road Initiative deep in the continental interior of Eurasia. In a way, this is of such a magnitude that we almost miss it. This is of world historical scale and importance. What China would achieve if we were to allow them to succeed in these two parallel initiatives is essentially the creation of what Napoleon tried to build and failed against Britain in terms of the creation of a true continental system. Napoleon was unsuccessful because Britain was able to enjoy overseas trade with imperial

possessions in India and elsewhere, areas that were beyond Napoleon's own direct control. In the case of China, since we are talking about Eurasia and Africa here, the world island, we are 4% of the world's population. If China is able to essentially cut off free seas and our ability to enjoy that kind of access to the Eurasian rimland and essentially be able to set the terms under which we can engage with the overwhelming majority of the world's population, we're left with three choices. We can go to war, we can submit to Chinese dictates, or we can be left to wither on the world's geopolitical and economic periphery. So this is existential, and the first step of this project is underway in the South China Sea. So it is imperative that we figure out how to defeat this initiative. That is why I'm saying if this isn't an insurgency, we need to figure out how do we implement a strategy of maritime counterinsurgency. And I've been really gratified to be joined in this thinking by some really smart minds in the naval community and to see now a prototype implementation of this concept underway with Task Force 76 under Rear Admiral Fred Kacher over the past couple of months.

And they've enjoyed a number of important successes as in episodes like the West Capella standoff and in deterring illegal Chinese survey operations inside the Vietnamese Exclusive Economic Zone in the beginning of July. Thanks. I'm going to ask a follow-up. Does your work focus a lot on the unsuitability of the current combatants for, I think you described these as constabulary missions, but if you want to re-characterize them from how I just described, please go ahead and do so. Do you think, Josh, that smaller combatants would be suitable there, or were you thinking of something more purpose-built? yeah so i think i think dr talos and i are very much on the same page i think smaller combatants are definitely the way to go i mean it frankly gets back to to julian corbett who distilled navies down to basically three essential functions of ship you have capital ships which contend for command of the sea in that initial series of decisive engagements with an opposing battle fleet. You have cruisers that go out and manage the international environment in certain respects where they're protecting and attacking trade, protecting your own trade, attacking the

adversary's trade, and performing important functions, operating largely independently. And then you have the flotilla, which is often specialized craft for projection of power into litoral region after command of the sea has been won. And right now we have, we in the U.S. Navy have fundamentally a capital ship-centric force, not just capital ship-centric, but almost capital ship-exclusive force. We really, as Dr. Talos is saying, we really need to be looking to figure out how we can build out this broader capability. We have some capabilities in the cruiser space, but in particular, this notion of the flotilla. So the critical component is that what we look to buy here to execute these missions, since we are dealing with very dangerous

great power adversaries that are dangerous in the kinetic sense, what you want is to make sure that what you choose to buy for the constabulary mission still is a net contributor to rather than a net consumer of the fleet's resources. So you really want something that is preferably offensive oriented, something that from this potentially vulnerable position out forward, you can immediately assume an offensive or counter offensive to any kind of large scale adventurism along the first island chain. You want something that could rapidly attract enemy forces before making its exit and help prepare the way for the battle fleet to come in and assist in that kind of decisive battle. So it's not necessarily that you want something completely

purpose-built. You have to be able to do both. The problem with a lot of the capital ships is that they're not just, frankly, they're not very cost-effective in a lot of these kinds of missions. Dr. Talas gave a great example. Over the past couple of months, we have deployed multiple guided missile destroyers to the South Com area of responsibility to conduct drug interdiction. For a ship that costs north of $220,000 a day to operate, that's just not cost-effective, especially when the level of increase in your actual interdiction is relatively modest. As Admiral Gilday pointed out, when you're wrapping $2 billion around 96 missile tubes, proceeding to send it out to go and chase down a drug smuggler, it's just, A, that's a very pricey thing to ask an exquisite asset to do. The second thing is it's also not necessarily the best at that kind of job. Those destroyers are wonderful ships.

They are, generally speaking, more efficient, just speaking in terms of fuel efficiency. They are more efficient at a high speed. A lot of these kinds of constabulary missions are more efficient at low speed. I co-authored an article, hopefully going to be coming out soon, with a former littoral combat ship skipper, wonderful guy Dan Stroud, who was the commissioning commanding officer of the USS Montgomery. And one of the things that we're looking at is here's a ship that is not ideal, definitely not exactly a model in terms of the acquisition process of how we went about buying that particular platform. However, this kind of ship has a lot of capabilities and just intrinsic qualities that make it really well suited for a lot of these kinds of constabulary missions. And once you start adding things like the naval strike missile, as we're starting to, they can contribute in some interesting ways to the fleet in more or less this kind of, you can stabilize your functions with the possibility transitioning to a more kinetic role. And in particular, just talking about this fuel efficiency, having that kind of combined diesel and gas power plant, we think about the LCS as a high-speed combatant being capable of speeds in excess of 40 knots.

What's actually really interesting about them is the diesels allow them to be more efficient actually in the low-speed role. We've been thinking about them as this kind of speedboat with a 57-millimeter and a couple of missiles on them. But actually, they are a lot more fuel efficient than destroyers at low speeds. So that would allow them to persist on station for considerably longer periods of time. And that will be really helpful, especially in that kind of maritime counterinsurgency function, which is going to be really predicated around getting back to this battle of legal regimes concept. If the decisive question at the end of the day is whose laws do the civilians follow, the mission of a maritime counterinsurgency operation is how do we make sure that we can adequately protect, with reasonable economy of force, local civilian mariners? Certainly, you want the speed in order to be able to rapidly reposition if you have to, but a lot of that is probably going to entail a lot of low-speed operations, low-speed steaming, loitering in certain areas that are potentially under threat. That's where some of these kinds of capabilities with LCS can be really helpful.

And then I think if you were to start looking at new acquisitions, I think the vision that corvettes or missile boats that Dr. Tallis outlined, it's one that I find very appealing. There's a couple of Korean and Japanese designs that I think are worth taking a look at. And maybe we can get into this a little bit later about some of the specific qualities that you would want in some of these kinds of combatants. But I think Dr. Tallis is really hitting the nail precisely on the head, getting more smaller ships to help support the battle fleet with these constabulary functions and liberate the battle fleet and allow the battle fleet to really focus on that high-end warfighting that it does best. So, Josh, let me ask you first before we move any further down the question. Do you have any rebuttal response to either of those answers from Hunter?

uh honestly more more of an echo especially of the point that that hunter uh rounded out on with the end which is this idea of part of thinking about a more dispersed high and low mix as well as a more dispersed fleet geographically which is a big part of the argument that i've put forward over the last few months is part of that is is enabling the battle fleet to do its primary function to train effectively to deploy uh credibly from a deterrence fashion where it needs to operate. And so I would hope that those involved in strategy as well as acquisitions would not strictly think of smaller vessels and smaller craft in opportunity costs to the other higher end multi-mission combatants that they could have purchased for the price of two FFGs. You could

have had another early bird class destroyer, but to think of the fact that as a result of having acquired some of those smaller craft, if applied in the right fashion, you are enabling those larger multi-mission destroyers and higher level assets to prepare for the type of conflict and engagement and use functions that they were designed, built, and trained to be used for. And so to think about that cost benefit as a much larger consideration and not a narrow opportunity cost between how much money you spent for one platform versus how much of another platform you may have gotten for it. So let me follow up with that. What is the importance of ship size to the maritime diplomacy and maritime security cooperation?

So there are two ways to answer that. One is there's a basic reality from a ship size standpoint in terms of if your primary obligation, so I mentioned earlier this idea about the U.S.-led international order can face corrosion and erosion from a variety of sources. Some of that is malign activity that is taking place on the part of Russia and China, great power rivals, But a lot of that is either by the function of smaller state rivals like Iran and North Korea, as well as non-state actors, terrorists operating in the maritime domain, pirates, things of that nature. And a lot of that ultimately comes down to the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard engaging in building partner capacity with host nations around the world. So partly the question of vessel size and platform capability and platform size relates to what is the most optimal vessel with which to engage in partner capacity building. And when you are participating with, for example, the Nigerian Navy, whose flagship is a retired U.S. Navy Coast Guard cutter, showing up with a DDG is not necessarily the most comparable or the most functionally useful asset for that type of cooperative endeavor.

And for a lot of these reasons, the U.S. Coast Guard is often the partner of choice, either for smaller nations or for nations with smaller navies or for whom their navies are actually functionally Coast Guards. And even still, the Coast Guard often outclasses from a vessel standpoint the size and the capability set of these nations. So from a baseline perspective, if you are thinking about capacity building and engagement with less capable allies and partners as a core function of competition in the age of strategic competition, then you should think about the quality and the scale of the vessel with which you are arriving in port, because you have the capacity to totally outclass some of the partners with whom the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard are participating. The other element to that question, I think, relates to what we just talked about, which is this question of the opportunity costs. And so to some extent, the size and the capability set of the platform is relevant in order to disincentivize policymakers, combatant commanders, the U.S. Navy from using the smaller assets for these higher-end multi-mission roles. And to the extent that the new frigate, to the extent that the FFGX is a response to policymakers' perspectives that the LCS failed as a platform for operating in those more kinetic environments and in more contested spaces and with an eye towards the higher end fight, that to me signals that we're actually learning the wrong lesson from that context. The concern I have with the use of something like the FFGX is it's robust. It's incredibly expensive at about $800 million per pop, so double at least the intended cost of the LCS equipped with Aegis Air Defense. It's a capable platform, but it is effectively built as a pocket Arleigh Burke destroyer with the same overall responsibility set for falling in screen in defense of a high-value unit or engaging in other forms of air defense and surface warfare. So when you think about, well, a vessel that has those types of capabilities sounds a lot like some other vessels in the U.S. Navy fleet that have those capabilities. The Navy is, as a general rule, unwilling to utilize those assets over the long haul for the types of missions that I've outlined or the types of missions that Hunter has outlined from the standpoint of this long-term insurgency concept in the South China Sea.

So my concern is not so much that the frigate is incapable of doing the types of things that I've outlined, but that it's clearly built with an eye towards falling in the screen with this perspective towards higher-end conflict. So does the Navy need a smaller platform in order to do the things I've outlined? Not necessarily, but so long as it builds platforms whose primary function is engaging in a high-end conflict, the Navy will be unwilling to do the type of high-loaf mix that I've described or the type of allocation of the battle fleet, as Hunter has described it, versus the fleet that's fundamentally not the battle fleet. You need to be able to draw distinctions between those assets so that the Navy, policymakers, combatant commanders see where that line is and utilize those resources separately. Almost think of it, to some extent, as two fleets, the battle fleet, and from my standpoint, at least, the maritime security fleet. Thanks. Before we go back to Hunter, I'll just add a couple of points here on this. From my experience is that we often conflate size with seniority in the U.S. Navy when we talk about ships. So I was the captain of a PC as a lieutenant.

I went up to do a security cooperation exercise with the Iraqis and Kuwaiti navies. and they sent patrol craft out and I thought okay well these are about the same size as my ship and probably also a lieutenant over there and before I knew it I had two captains standing in front of me. I don't mean ship captains, I mean O6s, like captains

colonel equivalents standing on the bridge of my ship. It was an uncomfortable situation for me realizing all of a sudden that I had had these two extremely senior foreign Navy officers come over to my ship when protocol would dictate that I should be on their ship and

taking guidance from them, if you will. My last question for you was actually going to be, where's the new class of crickets fit in your proposal, too much, not enough, or TBD? I think what you're saying, what I'm hearing you say is that too much, these are still too large for what you've envisioned there. So what do you think we should be getting? Then I'll ask you first, and then Hunter, we'll come over to you. We can have the conversation that you had at before about what we think should be buying. I'm going to leave the Cod Wars piece out because I'm planning a separate cod wars podcast with somebody else so we'll have this conversation and then wrap it up but josh go ahead yeah so in terms of alternative options i think in general

smaller vessels particularly focusing not so much again on size because there's a quality of endurance open ocean capability and those and some of the challenges that i think and i'm generally not a critic of the lcs but some of the the endurance issues that we've seen in terms of the LCS. I think those are fair critiques, especially if you are envisioning. So for example, I put forward in some of my writing advocating for stationships in a much more sort of an old school conception of a vessel or two, somewhat alone and unafraid operating for long periods of time in parts of the world where the threat environment is generally more diminished, but where we still benefit from a long term presence on the part of the US Navy. So that's

not necessarily thinking about scale from a dimensional standpoint, but thinking that scale from a kinetic capability standpoint. I'd throw that out there as one major consideration. The other part, and Hunter has heard this before, that I'd throw out that I think is worth considering is actually the question of unmanned vessels. And again, thinking about this consideration of opportunity costs, not with respect to I buy this or I buy this, but rather I buy this unmanned platform. What types of missions is it optimized to do? And how can I then reallocate the requirements and the resources that I would have used for that mission for application in another space. So generally speaking, I am lukewarm on the idea that unmanned platforms are the right tools for

engaging in a type of system maintenance functions that I think are critical to great power competition. You can do a FONOP with a robot, but a robot flying the flag doesn't send a credible signal to, for example, the Chinese or to the Russians. That being said, and separately, Perhaps in other spaces, you could talk about the ways in which unmanned systems could be force multipliers occasionally from things like surveillance standpoint. But my general argument from what we buy in the unmanned space would be to say, think about unmanned systems as an opportunity to plus up shooters, VLS tubes, targeting systems with respect to the high-end fight. And then think about ways where you could reallocate personnel because people are fundamental to the smaller scale day-to-day maintenance functions. If you are trying to conduct freedom of navigation operations, if you are trying to engage in some sort of maritime law enforcement program, a training initiative with partner nations, all of those require people. counter piracy. It's hard for robots to arrest pirates, right? All of those fundamentally require people. And so perhaps a way to answer your question, again, not just related to the scale

of the systems we buy, but when thinking about where a lot of the excitement is in the acquisitions and in the technology space right now on unmanned systems, to think about unmanned systems somewhat counterintuitively as opportunities to free up, if not money, certainly manpower to address a lot of these smaller scale threats. And then we can talk about, do we want to put them on PT boats? Do we want to put them on missile boats? Is it worth buying auxiliary vessels? Is it worth pursuing a bit of a SOCOM model and modifying commercial vessel? I think there are all sorts of options to think about stationships and things like that. But where there's a lot of energy right now on manned space, I think there's also an opportunity for us to think a lot more creatively

about the downstream effects. What do you do with some of the people that those applications may free up in a kinetic space? And can we bring them into the maritime security environment? But in order to have that conversation, it has to start with the baselining of an understanding about these smaller scale issues are fundamental to success in great power competition. And to Hunter's point earlier, you could lose without firing a shot if you understand great power competition in this way. And that should energize the Navy and it should energize policymakers to think about ways it can rebalance the force to address those lower scale issues. thanks hunter over to you and i think this will be the last question that we're going to have time

for so what what do you think we should be buying to keep this up well i think dr talent really puts something on the head especially with this idea of station ships there's a notion in the united states that as a country and as a navy that has to cross oceans to get most of where we're trying to go that all the ships have to be able to cross the ocean themselves and i think this is not necessarily true we talk about something you have speed it can have range it can have endurance it can have everything starts getting bigger in a lot of respects when frankly if you're like okay if i have to give up one thing or another frankly range is something that you can give up and you put it on a tender and that's where looking back at the

Asiatic Fleet as an example of a forward deployed force, in particular, this idea of a regionally aligned force. The Asiatic Fleet, a large component of it was composed of four stacker destroyers and small submarines that are really not designed to travel trans-oceanic distances. They have tenders to help them do that if they need to. The tender will move to a port or to a harbor that will allow them to operate as a mobile base, everyone's going to stay relatively close to the tender. And then the tender, if you can make it agile enough and you can make it relatively light and the tender can go other places to go get supplies while the rest of the force persists in the zone, that could be a more viable model, especially in an environment where size is

a liability from the standpoint of being targeted, in particular being targeted by a lot of these very long-range weapons like anti-ship ballistic missiles. In terms of some thoughts about what we should be buying for this kind of maritime counterinsurgency mission, I think there's a number of different options. We've seen in the recent prototype implementation by Task Force 76 where they've combined an up-gun ESG centered on USS America as the higher-end covering force supporting the low-end force of the littoral combat ships based in Singapore. LCS has a lot to offer. If you were to continue in this direction, I'd say platforms like the Mark VI patrol boat could have a useful role.

It's a little bit short-legged with about a 600 nautical mile range. Some kind of a tender or a mission support vessel could probably help ameliorate that, both in terms of fuel as well as crew endurance. I think if you were to continue along this line with small combatant, offensive-oriented, maybe with a little bit longer legs, maybe more offensive weaponry, I think we have a lot that we can potentially learn from the experience of the Korean Navy. From a kinetic standpoint, the Korean Navy is one of the few navies in the U.S. alliance system that has had experience in recent naval combat. They've had several gun skirmishes with patrol vessels along the northern limit line. And they had particularly instructive experience was in 2002, where Korean Navy lost one of its patrol killer boats, something that was armed with a 40 millimeter and a pair of 20 millimeters. And essentially, the lesson they learned is that missiles are politically escalatory, and they're also very expensive.

So they're going to take the biggest gun that will fit and put it onto the smallest hull that will take it. These days, for the United States Navy, we used to see the 5-inch on a 2,000-ton ship like the Fletcher-class destroyer in World War II. Now we see them on something closer to 10,000 tons. And we'll see, for the smaller combatants, we'll see things like the 3-inch and the 57-millimeter. The Korean Navy has been, we're going to put a 5-inch gun on a 2,000-ton frigate. We are going to put a 3-inch gun on a 500-ton missile boat. A move in that direction could be favorable thinking about if things should come to blows and if both sides are trying to manage escalation, are you really going to use missiles? Is using missiles actually necessarily a good idea from a political diplomatic point of view?

And in that case, what kinds of equipment and weaponry do we need? One of the things that the forthcoming article with Captain Straub looks at is things within the realm of intermediate force capabilities. This offers the promise of an action that you can take against an adversary without necessarily killing anybody. Essentially with a reversible effect, something where I can potentially directly compel my opponent. So whether that's long-range acoustic device, you have things like active microwave systems to potentially turn off an outboard motor. These are sorts of capabilities that would be interesting to start thinking about how we can seek to integrate into the vessels that we're going to try to allocate to this more constabulary function.

It's one of the reasons why things like the early bird class destroyer are not the best platforms to host these kinds of capabilities, because they're largely maxed out in terms of excess space, weight, power, and cooling. Things like the littoral combat ship, they've got a lot of excess space, weight, power, and cooling. So they might be a really good host for those kinds of capabilities for now as we're looking to build some of these smaller, whether a missile boat or corvette, etc. That's something we can think about. And then the other piece is that the advent of unmanned systems really is a great enabler in terms of the potential for economies of force when it comes to embarked off-board capabilities.

All of a sudden, a smaller vessel using something like a ScanEagle that you might have had embarked on the Cyclone class that you commanded, that kind of thing is going to enable a ship that cannot carry a conventional manned aircraft to have greater influence and greater ISR capability across a much wider area. That's something that we should seek to leverage. One of the key drivers that led the littoral combat ship concept to go from the 500-ton street fighter concept up to something with one of the largest flight decks in the fleet, short of a big-deck amphib or an aircraft carrier, was the thinking that you're going to need a helicopter. Now it's possible to embark aircraft that do not require such a large cost in terms of size and deck space. That's something else that we should be looking to enable. yeah that was uh that was very comprehensive uh josh any final thoughts from you before i close it out i think we covered everything oh great but unfortunately that's all the time we have for today i would like to thank my guests dr josh talus and hunter stires josh where can we find you

online and what are you working on next sure uh so online uh folks can find me at doc talus on twitter people are interested in the oceans the poles and space or strong opinions on star trek I'm your guy there. In terms of what I'm up to next, I'm the portfolio manager, among other things, for Arctic strategy and policy at the Center for Naval Analyses. And so I'm up to my elbows on that topic lately. But it actually ties in a lot with what we've been talking about. You recently hosted, I think, Elizabeth Buchanan and Katie Burkhart on an Arctic episode of this podcast. And one undercurrent from that conversation was the role of the rules-based order in the Arctic for the U.S., as well as other Arctic nations, including Russia,

which leaves us, I think, on the tantalizing note of thinking about not only great power competition, but space for great power cooperation. And I think maybe a topic for a future conversation to dive into. Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for, you both have done a tremendous job of like pumping previous podcasts. You mentioned Golf of Guinea, which just went up last Sunday. Now the Arctic won. And you mentioned Greg Poling, who we've had on as well. So thank you both for that. Hunter, same question to you. Where can we find you online and what are you working on next? So online, you can find me at Hunter Stiers on Twitter. You can find me on LinkedIn.

In terms of forthcoming work, this article with Captain Straub on the utility of the littoral combat ship in the Maritime Counterinsurgency mission will be out soon. And then keep an eye out for further work on Maritime Counterinsurgency, looking at what kind of resources are going to be required, what we can do with our current resources, where the gaps are, what we're going to need to buy in the future. So excited to be moving out on that front as well. Well, thanks to you both again for coming on today. And to our listeners, thanks for listening.

We'll see you next time. Sea Control is edited by Keegan Ingersoll. Thank you. Oh, no.