Sea Control - Sea Control 204 - American Sea Power at a Crossroads with Bryan Clark & Tim Walton

Episode Date: October 6, 2020

Links1. American Sea Power at a Crossroads: A Plan to Restore the US Navy’s Maritime Advantage,Bryan Clark, Timothy A. Walton, and Seth Cropsey, Hudson Institute, September 29, 2020.2. Sustaining the Undersea Advantage: Transforming Anti-Submarine Warfare Using Autonomous Systems, Bryan Clark, Seth Cropsey, and Timothy A. Walton, Hudson Institute, September 10, 2020. 3. Strengthening the U.S. Defense Maritime Industrial Base: A Plan to Improve Maritime Industry’s Contribution to National Security  Bryan Clark, Timothy A. Walton, and Adam Lemon, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, February 12, 2020.4. Taking Back the Seas: Transforming the U.S. Surface Fleet for Decision-Centric Warfare, Bryan Clark and Timothy A. Walton, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, December 13, 2019.5. Sustaining the Fight: Resilient Maritime Logistics for a New Era, Timothy A. Walton, Ryan Boone, and Harrison Schramm, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, April 23, 2019.6. Regaining the High Ground at Sea: Transforming the U.S. Navy’s Carrier Air Wing for Great Power Competition, Bryan Clark, Adam Lemon, Peter Haynes, Kyle Libby, and Gillian Evans, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, December 14, 2018.

Hey folks, Jared here. We have a packed week for you here at SimSec. We're going to start momentarily with Brian Clark and Tim Walton from the Hudson Institute. We're going to do a deep dive into their study for the Office of the Secretary of Defense on the Navy's fleet structure. We're talking a massively expanded surface fleet, smaller numbers of carriers, changes in who's responsible for the strike mission, and lots more. Tomorrow we've got Bilge Pumps 18 from Alex, Drack, and Jamie, and Thursday we're bringing back Roxandra Basilka to launch a miniseries on women in maritime security, so check it all out. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. Aloha, shimits, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, we're discussing the Navy's

new force structure assessment with two of its authors, Brian Clark and Tim Walton. Brian, I've been a fan of your work for quite some time now, and I'm sure you're well-known to a large part of our audience. Would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners and providing them with a bit of your background? Sure, Jared. Thanks a lot for having us on the podcast. I've been admiring the podcast a long time, so it's great to finally be on it. So I'm a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Prior to that, I was a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, where I did research on naval warfare along with other areas of emerging warfares like undersea, electronic warfare, and war gaming.

Prior to that, I was on the op-nav staff where I was the CNO's chief of a commander's action group, and prior to that, I was a submariner for 25 years. So I've had a longstanding relationship with the Navy, and this fleet architecture study comes out of a lot of the experiences and analyses that I've done over the last few decades. So hopefully we can have a good discussion about it and get some good feedback, because I think there's some good value criticism to address as well in here. So thank you very much for the opportunity. Thank you again for agreeing to come on. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

Tim, welcome. I am less familiar with you, but I get the impression that we're going to be hearing a lot from you over the course of the next couple of decades. So could you introduce yourself as well, please? Certainly. Thanks, Jared. I'm a fellow at the Hudson Institute in our newly created Center for Defense Concepts and Technology with Brian Clark. I have a background in Chinese operational guidance theory, U.S. concept development, and requirement studies, and then had the pleasure of working for a pair of defense and business strategy consultancies before working with Brian at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and now at Hudson. Looking forward to the discussion. Thanks, Tim.

So I'd like to start with the elevator pitch for the force structure assessment. So, Brian, if you don't mind summarizing the document a little bit for us, let's start there, and then we'll go into some more specific questions. Sure. So the study came out of a request that we had from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to participate in the Future Naval Force Study, which I think folks listening to the podcast have probably heard about. And what they asked for was an external view from outside the DOD that looked at the future fleet. And some of the things we tried to achieve with the fleet architecture were an affordable fleet that was going to be sustainable over the long term, both financially as well as logistically, that was going to be better able to address the emerging operational environment, dealing with a lot of the challenges that we're all familiar with, China, Russia, and regional competitors. We also wanted to make sure that that fleet was able to deliver on some of the new operational concepts that both the Navy and we ourselves at Hudson came up with to operationalize some of the theory that's going on right now,

future ideas on warfighting, like the joint warfighting concept and joint all-domain command and control. So that's the basic idea was to implement those operational concepts with a fleet that is sustainable over the long term. Okay, so in planners' parlance, I think you start these studies with constraints and restraints, things you must do, things you must not do. So what were the musts and must-nots for you as you kicked off here? Were you expected to stay budget neutral or personnel neutral? So the idea was to stay budget constrained in that we were going to stay below the PB21 plus inflation shift-building budget, the SDN budget. And then we also, within the Hudson team, tried to stay below the PB21 plus inflation operation and support costs, meaning operations and maintenance accounts, as well as personnel accounts. So we tried to keep under those constraints.

We were successful in keeping under the SDN constraints. We did go over the O1S constraints a little bit. The other constraint that we had was that we needed to be able to deliver a fleet that was within the shipbuilding industrial basis capacity. So we could not build a shipbuilding plan that was going to presume you would start and stop classes of ships in an unrealistic manner. You would build ships at a rate that would exceed what the industrial base could support, those kinds of limitations. So those are the two major hard constraints that we either put under ourselves or were given by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. And then in terms of things we were trying to pursue, we had to come up with a fleet that would deliver on a new set of metrics that were consistent with the new operational concepts that the department was considering and that we at Hudson have been proposing. So those are things like decision-centric warfare or moving towards a fleet that is more distributed and more complex.

So we created some metrics that represent those operational concepts and then built a fleet that was going to deliver on those metrics. So that was not a hard constraint, but that was the objective, if you will, of the fleet design. I'm going to come back to decision-centric warfare in a second, but were there any other assumptions that you started with? Well, the assumption, the starting assumption was you were given today's fleet. So you could not, we couldn't just presume that we were going to jump ahead and go into the next decade and say, well, here we're going to start with a different starting point. So we started with today's fleet as the starting point, the PB21 budget, and the associated shipbuilding investments, even though we don't have a shipbuilding plan. So we started with that PB21 fit-up, basically. We modified that fit-up, but the PB21 budget was not within our control.

So you have today's fleet, the PB21 budget, the industrial base that exists today. So those were the basic assumptions that went into it. The other assumptions had to do with the external operating environment, so they had to do it. Well, what are the missions that you're expected to do? We've assumed that the missions we do today, like anti-submarine warfare, air and missile defense, strike warfare, anti-ship warfare, mine warfare, those would persist. And we presume that you'd be doing those missions in an operating environment that's represented more or less by a projection forward from today's operating environment

with regard to China, with regard to Russia, and with regard to regional competitors like Iran or North Korea. So we took today's operational environment and just projected that forward to the best degree, the best we could using DOD's own assessment. You know, those unclassified assessments, we're familiar, we're all familiar with. DIA has done some great work with regard to North Korea and Iran and Russia. And then the intelligence community as a whole has done some great work on China. So we're able to leverage that at an unclassified level to inform how the operational concepts would have to be executed in the future. So those were the assumptions that we used going in to try to avoid having a solution that was different than what the Navy or OSD would have come up with in their fleet architectures. And I promise I come back to it. You started using the phrase decision-centric warfare. What does that mean?

So the idea behind that is consistent with what you've heard discussed in some of the talk about the new joint warfighting concept. Some of the discussion about JADC2 has focused on this idea that we need to get beyond just attrition as a basis for military competition. So success in a future warfight is going to depend less on being able to kill as many of the enemy as quickly as possible to degrade his warfighting strength and his ability to carry on the campaign. That approach to warfare is going to be less valuable in the future because adversaries are not going to give us that opportunity. So China and Russia, based on their writings and based on their behavior, are not intending to give us a World War III fight to the death attrition battle. They're going to give us what we've been seeing, which is much more of this gray zone warfare, much more creative uses of combination and national power to achieve their objectives, even though those objectives may take longer to achieve than they would if they used traditional military means. So given that change in the character of war over the last decade, we have to think about a new warfighting approach that instead of using attrition as a basis for success, uses gaining a decision advantage. So essentially, it's a return to maneuver warfare where the objective of your military force is to create enough dilemmas for an adversary that he's not going to be able to pursue his objectives or achieve them in a time period that's realistic for him.

Or you're able to degrade his centers of gravity such that he's not going to be able to sustain a warfighting effort over the long term. That approach is more consistent with that of a status quo power of the United States. We're not looking to take over another country. We're looking to prevent another country from having a successful act of aggression. Therefore, a warfighting approach that's focused on getting a decision advantage, putting barriers in the way of an enemy, creating dilemmas that he's not able to overcome in a reasonable period of time. is a way to prevent him from being successful. So we think that approach to warfighting is much more relevant in the future

than the attrition-centric approach that we've been using since the Cold War ended. Basically, the way we fought in Iraq both times and Afghanistan, and even, you could argue, Kosovo, Libya, those were all essentially attrition fights. It was just about all servicing dempies to eventually cause the enemy to no longer be able to carry on the fight.

We're arguing that going forward, that approach is not going to be successful against a country like China or Russia that aren't going to give you those targets and aren't going to give you the RRE that allows you to strike them. And they instead are going to be much more creative about how they use force. So we're going to have to think about how to create dilemmas rather than how they will strike their forces. Thanks, Brian. I think I have one more question for you, and then we'll switch over to interrogating Tim. You went into the concept of mission command early, arguing that junior commanders should be able to take the initiative to continue pursuing senior commanders' intent, even when communications is lost. But naval force will likely be unable to execute due to distributed operations. So what constitutes a junior commander in this context? Yeah, so we're all familiar with – we're talking about essentially a shift commander.

So my argument or our argument is as we move to more distributed warfighting concepts like the Navy's concept for DMO or even JADC2 and certainly the Marine Corps' idea behind expeditionary advanced base operations, all those concepts presume a more distributed force that is going to be operating dispersed over a wider area, that's going to be having to reach back to commanders that are probably distant. And the expectation is that the commanders on the scene, you know, these O-3s through O-6s that are in charge of their distributed units, are going to take charge when they lose communications with the senior command and the senior commander's staff. The challenge with that is we're at the same time equipping our forces with more and more interesting, useful equipment that could provide for a lot more complex warfighting concepts. So if you've got a Marine squad, for example, that now has UAV, unmanned ground vehicles, electronic warfare systems, Sagan systems, they've got all this new equipment that's being provided through the Marine Corps's great efforts when it comes to MAGDAP-EW. But they don't have the planning tools to be able to use it. That junior commander now has been given mission command, but no tools to be able to maximize the effectiveness of that force. So they're going to fall back on tactics that they learned in school, or they're going to fall back on doctrine.

That the enemy can predict. So they're going to put themselves in a position of not giving the enemy the kind of complexity they would need to present to be able to win the decision battle. Because if you're China and you kind of know the playbook, once you've isolated these units by cutting off their comms, you can know then what they're going to do, what their tactics are likely to fall into, and you can start to anticipate that and take them out in detail. So instead, we think we need to give those junior commanders the kind of planning tools that allow them to execute mission command in the way that our doctrine says they should. That allows them to take advantage of the new capabilities being afforded to them through all these new investments in unmanned systems, electronic warfare, and cyber. So that's a key element of this idea behind decision-centric warfare has to be empowered by the junior commanders being able to take charge when they're no longer able to communicate with their senior leaders. And then also this idea of distributed operation that gives you a more resilient force that spreads out the enemy's attacks is also dependent upon the idea that junior commanders and a distributed force are able to execute mission command at some level of complexity. So that's kind of a central element that really applies no matter if you use our fleet or somebody else's fleet. We need to empower these junior commanders in a way that is not being done with the state's investment.

That's a big change, I think, that just now DoD is realizing, and DARPA is doing some great work in this area, and JASD2 has done some demonstrations in this area. But until we come up with ways to empower those junior commanders, we're going to continue to think that we can have this ability to control forces from a senior level, and it's going to fail once we get into the fight. Yeah, I'm going to ask a follow-up here that's not on the menu. This represents kind of a massive mindset shift for the way we control our forces right now because we're used to having persistent, reliable communications for the most part with naval forces forward. Did you war game this at all? Yeah, we did. So we war game this as part of the Mosaic Warfare Project we did last year for DARPA. So one of the big findings out of that study was that we need to flip the script on our C3 approach.

So instead of trying to build a communications network that supports our desired command and control structure, we need to instead have a command and control structure that can adapt to whatever the communications availability is. And that's where we get to this idea of empowering junior commanders, having the planning tools, and what we call in the study context-centric C3, meaning your C3 setup is going to depend on the availability of comms and your particular situation. And so we're going to need C2 relationships that are much more fluid. And the only way you can get fluid D2 relationships is if junior commanders are equipped with the kind of capabilities that would normally be only resident in a planning staff. And thanks to some of the work that DARPA, the Air Force, and ONR are doing, those tools are now becoming available. Thanks. Tim, I'm going to shift gears a little bit here and come to you. So I think the thing that I had written is it's going to get everyone's attention, but it has got everyone's attention immediately is the top line number of ships. So you're well over 500 here, but then coming down to nine carriers.

So let's start with the overall ship numbers first. How did you arrive at the number that you arrived at? And then what assumptions did you have to make to get there? Thanks, Jared. To generate a fleet requirement, we first started with the National Defense Strategy and its demands for capable naval forces in the contact, blunt, and surge layers. We then analyzed some relevant planning scenarios, focusing on ones involving China and Russia to determine the kinds of capabilities that would allow U.S. forces to prevail in potential

conflicts. As we conducted this analysis, we recognized that in addition to more traditional metrics related to the attrition of enemy forces in specific scenarios, we wanted to analyze the force in terms of its ability to deliver improved performance in terms of other metrics that are directly related to the decision-centric approach to warfare and would ensure that the force could perform effectively not just in very specific scenarios with discrete assumptions, but could also perform effectively across a range of scenarios. These four metrics were complexity of U.S. force presentation, so how complex is that force to an adversary, defensive capacity, offensive capacity, and lastly amphibious and strategic sea lift capacity. So we analyzed the

force using those different metrics, and we considered what are the force packages of units necessary in different regions to conduct operations using new operational concepts for ISR and counter-ISR, air missile defense, ASW, strike warfare and anti-surface warfare, mine warfare, amphibious operations, and some other missions. And after taking into account these new operational concepts and how they would support the requirements of the National Defense Strategy, we determined how many force packages we needed to have in different locations throughout the world, and then finally accounted for readiness cycles, times ships are in transit, and long-term maintenance in order to generate sort of the final required number.

As you pointed out, the final number is above 500. It's 581 ships in our proposed requirement. 442 of those were manned or optionally unmanned, and 139 of them were unmanned surface and subsurface vessels. Thanks. I want to come back to the carriers real quick because this is another question off menu but driven by current events. We're seeing aircraft carriers doing double pump deployments now, so a very short break between deployments and then going right back out again for a long period underway. Is the nine carriers based on an assumption that we're going to see the demand for aircraft carriers in peacetime go down in the future? I wouldn't quite say that. So as part of our sort of approach to the fleet design, we envisioned a fleet of nine carriers,

which is enough to support the presence of about two carriers, depending on how they're employed. But we found that carrier strike groups, ideally operating together as part of a carrier strike force of two carrier strike groups together, were really important in order to complement some of the other force packages in order to be able to generate sort of a combat-credible force to the adversary in which you would have some force packages that are more optimized for delivering responsive missile-based fires at the outset of a conflict, and then also other capabilities that would come from the carrier air wing that would be delivered by those carrier strike forces.

So we found that carrier strike forces and carrier strike groups will continue to be critical in future warfare, although sort of the role of the air wing will start to change. What will probably need to evolve over time to enable that type of nine-carrier fleet to be sustainable in the future is just national leadership selection of how to employ carriers and the readiness cycle in which they're sustained and maintained. As you know, sort of these double pump deployments really do take a major tax on our future carrier presence. And so apparently in the moment, national leadership has made a conscious decision that that's in the interest of the nation. But it's critical to recognize that that's going to have

an enormous consequence on future availability of carrier presence and also the readiness of carriers if some of the time that they would have taken as part of their OFRP cycle to do more training or maintenance is curtailed. Jared, one thing I'll add on that is part of this is just changing the, I guess, habituating our allies and our combatant commanders to what the units of issue are for naval force. I mean, right now, a carrier is the standard unit of issue. And so when a combatant commander wants to do something, they ask for a carrier, even though I would argue in CENTCOM, carriers aren't really a very good piece of force structure use because they create a target for the Iranians.

We've done studies and talked with Iranian expats who made it clear that the Iranian government did not find the carrier to be a really effective deterrent because they felt it actually gives them a target that they could easily score a hit on that would give them a great public relations victory. So it's habituating the user, the customer of the COCOM as to what the units of issue are for naval force and what might be more appropriate for their purposes. And if you create this fleet that's got more of a diversity of selections for naval forces, then there's the opportunity to get them to ask for different things through the request for forces or on the gift map. Okay, I think I'm understanding this, that the Navy really has kind of an advertising job ahead of itself here to, one, explain to itself what it's doing here, but also then to explain to the other services commanders up to the COCOM level what exactly the unit of issue is and what they can use aside from just what they're used to, which is the carrier strike group.

So, Tim, how then is the fleet organized in your study? We're used to seeing the carrier strike group, but you have a number of other force packages. That's right. We recognize that although the Navy is pursuing a path toward distributed maritime operations, the current organization of the fleet really is centered around small numbers of force packages, be they carrier strike groups, expeditionary strike groups that are, in fact, frequently disaggregated throughout a theater, and then some independent deployers. This current approach makes it challenging for the fleet to distribute. It's also challenging for the fleet to employ assets in sort of a scalable and tailored manner, which builds off of Brian's remarks a second ago. And then also it's challenging for the fleet to actually implement new operational concepts within specific force packages that can build the proficiency in how to employ new operational concepts and implement new TTP. So in response, what we did was we organized the fleet into 10 types of force packages that support the NDS during peacetime competition. And those force packages have units that are specialized in terms of the vessels within the force packages and then the capabilities on those vessels to perform specific primary missions.

So in addition to the carrier strike groups and expeditionary strike groups, we have different flavors of surface action groups for anti-surface warfare, strike warfare, ASW, escort, and air missile defensive locations ashore. We also have force packages for mine warfare, both mine laying and mine countermeasures, and maritime security operations, and then undersea groups. And we found that these tailored force packages can support the implementation of new operational concepts and allow units to build the proficiency that they need in specific warfare areas. Got it. So as part of this, you had to come up with a number of new ships to include DDCs, which are a type of corvette, future small surface combatants, light amphibious warships, and the medium unmanned surface vessel. Now, law has been pretty widely discussed. I think I've heard of medium unmanned surface vessel, but I hadn't seen anything about these other vessels. What can you tell us about those? Are those on drawing boards somewhere?

Do they need to be developed from scratch at this point? Thanks for pointing those classes out. The DDCs, the corvettes, and the medium unmanned surface vessels really are vital sort of in our fleet design to the fleet's ability to distribute its effects and then impose complexity on adversaries. Both of them build off of sort of existing concepts and in some cases designs. And I'll sort of detail both in a moment. So DDCs are optionally unmanned corvettes. These DDCs would operate within force packages to carry offensive missiles and would be protected by destroyers or other manned warships within the force packages. The corvettes would also have their own terminal self-defense systems like CRAM or CWIP light.

and uh corvettes would also be similar in design perhaps to the navy's envisioned large unmanned surface vessel but instead of being unmanned all of the time or most of the time they'd be crewed most of the time with small crews of around 24 personnel so the the presence of these crews would help secure the ship during the competition phase and conflict and could enable some the ships to perform some other missions in peacetime related to building partner capacity or engagement if desired. The corvettes would also have a high degree of autonomy and automation similar to that envisioned for the large unmanned surface vessel which could reduce the demands on the crew which is how we can get to a small crew of around 24 personnel but that autonomy and automation

would also enable concepts in which the crew could be taken off board if in some wartime missions there was a desire for the corvettes to be sent into highly contested areas in a fully unmanned mode. In our shipbuilding plan, we build off of the Navy's work on LUSV to procure five prototype DDCs, and then we take a three-year procurement pause to mature some of the concepts and technologies needed for this new class of corvettes, and then we enter into serial production in fiscal year 27. So we take a methodical approach that builds off of the current work the Navy has been doing on LUSV. In terms of the medium unmanned surface vessels, these are unmanned vessels that are employed in force packages for ISR using passive and active RF

and EOIR sensors, counter ISR using jammers and spoofers, ASW using active and passive towed arrays and short-range anti-submarine warfare weapons, and then mine warfare primarily to lay mines defensively or offensively. And the concept for MUSV is influenced by the DARPA developed Sea Hunter program, and it's envisioned to be a low-cost, risk-worthy vessel. The Navy recently awarded L3Harris a contract for MUSV, and in our shipbuilding plan, we have the Navy award six prototypes before, again, taking this three-year pause to mature concepts and technologies, and then entering into serial production in fiscal year 27. As you pointed out, these are new vessel types, but we think that if the Navy takes a methodical approach

that provides sufficient time for the maturation of technology ashore and afloat and then does detailed design work ahead of time it can probably responsibly enter into serial production of these classes of vessels before the end of the decade which will allow us to rapidly build the necessary capacity we need in the 2030s and 2040s so let's talk about that technology ashore piece um as far as i know that i think there are really two places that produce our major surface combatants here that's pascagoula mississippi and bath main uh if we're talking about destroyers uh was the move to these smaller platforms part of a plan to diversify the industrial base a little bit because as i said there's really only two shipyards that build

destroyers but i can think of a lot of smaller shops that could build some of these ships that you described at least from the outsider's perspective they look like they could build these ships? That's a great question. The shift to smaller platforms really was driven more by operational considerations. We had done analysis that basically concluded as part of this project and an earlier one that force packages of multiple types of large and small platforms, when they work together, tended to outperform uniform force packages of all large ships like destroyers. So it had a primarily operational benefit, and that's why we pursued that approach. But at the same time, it has a number of sort of other benefits. One is in terms of operations and support costs, where the conscious choice to restrain the size of some ships can generate ONS savings over time. And then another advantage, as you pointed out, relates to the industrial base.

Earlier this year, Brian and I did a study with Adam Lemon on the Defense Maritime Industrial Base, and we found that there are sort of numerous smaller shipyards that mostly focus on commercial work, but either episodically do government work or could do so. And vessels like LAW, the Corvettes, the medium unmanned surface vessels, and then different auxiliaries that we propose in our fleet plan could be built at some of these smaller yards at sustainable rates that would complement their commercial work. This would result in sort of a more operationally effective fleet that would also be fiscally sustainable. But it also has the benefit that if done properly, and if we actually coordinate some of the government and commercial shipbuilding, it could improve the health of the broader maritime industrial base, including at some of these smaller yards. Thanks, Brian. I'm going to shift to you then for the next one. What do you envision flying from the decks of those nine carriers? And is your plan calling for a larger carrier air wing or something that looks a little bit more from a range perspective, like what we're used to seeing during the Cold War? Yeah. So we did a study last year looking at the future of the carrier air wing that was separate from this effort.

But what we tried to do with these two studies is allow for that different air wing to emerge because what we did with this study is we did not require the fleet ships part of the budget to consume more of the resources. So we didn't assume that more of the Navy's budget was going to go into SCN or go into ONS associated with the ships in the fleet, so that we would allow ourselves to essentially cordon off the airwings, so that an airwing could be pursued within that TOA, within that Total Obligation Authority. And in that study last year, what we found is the Navy could evolve its current air wing into an air wing with longer range and greater persistence, even within its TOA, its existing aviation portfolio, by making some smart trades with regard to the next generation of aircraft. So what we envision happening with this fleet is that we study that the Navy would slowly evolve the air wing to incorporate more unmanned aircraft. And what we envision that as being was the current effort to develop an F-AXX, which is the follow-on to the F-A-18EF, would be instead an evolutionary approach. So the F-AXX, or the next generation of dominance for the Navy, would be a variation on the F-35 or the F-A-18. So it would be an evolution of that airframe rather than a completely new aircraft. That would save a lot of R&D money that could be reapplied to an unmanned aircraft that would complement those.

So we saw the air wing of the future being essentially F-35s, the F-AXX, which is a variation on the F-35 or the F-18, the M225 tankers. And we saw that number having to go up to about 12 from what the Navy is currently talking about, which is five or six per air wing. And then E-2 Delta continued use of the growler with six growlers per air wing. And then the MV-22 is the COD. And then the helicopter complement to allow for ASW and logistics. But we know that the M-225 would also be developed and it would have a strike and ISR capability, or the Navy could pursue it independently, a separate unmanned vehicle. But in the interest of cost, we thought that it was more like some kind of variation on the MQ-25 that would give them strike and ISR capabilities to complement what's being done with the manned strike fighters.

But all of that we saw as being something that was achievable within the Navy's current aviation budget. But it all depends on the F-AXX being an evolution of today's aircraft rather than a new start that consumes a lot of the resources that could have otherwise gone to creating this new variant of the MQ-25 that allows for the longer range and persistence for the ISR and strike mission. So then how does your, I'm going to shift gears again here and talk about different domain, is how does your study address the undersea domain? Are we sticking with SSNs and their traditional roles? And then what about SSGNs? Yeah. So, in the undersea domain, we pursued a couple of different things. So, one is on ASW, we took an entirely new approach to ASW that shifts most of that mission to unmanned systems with the idea that defeating an enemy submarine may require just suppression of that submarine's operations rather than killing the submarine. One of the challenges that the Navy or any Navy faces is keeping a submarine is really difficult because you need a heavy weapon that's placed just so in order to allow you to sink the submarine. Generally, that's going to require another submarine to achieve that level of proximity and the size of weapon. But suppressing the submarine is relatively easy, as we saw from Battle of the Atlantic, as we saw from samples during the Cold War. So given that suppressing the submarine is much easier and can be done with small weapons that can be launched with some frequency by unmanned systems, we saw shifting that mission a lot to unmanned systems.

So we saw submarines only doing ASW in those situations where we absolutely, positively had to sink the enemy submarine, had to destroy the enemy submarine. So things like protecting our own SSBNs, going after enemy SSBNs, those missions would require a U.S. submarine to be devoted to it. But otherwise, our SSNs were not going to be doing the ASW mission. That frees them to do much more of the strike, anti-surface warfare that consume a lot of their time today. So we saw the Undersea Warfare mission set for the future as being submarines doing those missions. So strike and ASUW mission in the most contested areas during some period in the war fight when nobody else could get inside. And then doing ISR and targeting or warning most of the other time during the war fight. And then they would be complemented with extra large UUVs.

But the XLRGEVs would be devoted mostly to supporting the ASW mission by acting as sensor platforms, potentially to engage enemy submarines as part of the suppression campaign, and then also as a mining platform. So the XLUEV would have a relatively constrained fleet that we define. And that was in large part just because we didn't think it was realistic to expect it to perform missions that require a lot more autonomy or a lot more endurance than is currently achievable. So the Navy has goals for the XLUV of getting to several months of underway deploy time, but really just getting to 30 days is going to be a hard challenge. So we thought if we kept the mission set of the XLUV focused on mine warfare, acting as a sensor platform for ASW, then that would probably be consistent with the level of endurance you're going to be able to achieve within the next 10 or 15 years. And then we saw the other part of the undersea mission set being essentially ASW, and then the missions that the submarines would do with ASUW and strike. Thanks. That was really comprehensive.

I did have one follow-up, though. The Columbia, did you plan for the Columbia to, like the Navy would continue to fund that from its own shipbuilding budget as part of your study? Yeah, we did. That was one of the, that was not an explicit constraint, I guess, All the fleet architectures that were developed as part of the FNFS study that OSD led, all the fleet architectures assumed that the Columbia was paid for out of the SCN budget and that it wasn't paid for with some separate account. So we had to address the Columbia's cost as part of our shipbuilding. And we assumed that we would continue to build the 12 out that is currently planned by the Navy.

So we didn't try to presume a change in STRATCOM's requirements or a change in the readiness model for the SSBNs that would allow you to get by with a smaller fleet because, one, those are kind of outside the bounds of the study. But, two, we didn't think we'd be able to justify either one of those changes without getting into a classified discussion that would be inappropriate, really, for the study we were doing. Got it. And how did you plan to replace the loss of strike capacity that's going to result from the retirement of the SSGNs? Yeah, so for the SSN fleet, it's going to be doing the strike mission in these most contested areas. I think two things are going to happen. One is the ability and reliance of Marines for strike capacity is going to go down over time because enemies are going to improve their ASW capability. The Chinese and Russians, the Chinese in particular, are investing in the kind of SOSIS-like array that would allow them to monitor their near-seas. They're investing in maritime patrol aircraft and low-frequency active acoustic ASW sensors.

So they've been improving their ASW capabilities. So the idea of a submarine going in multiple strike operations is unrealistic. Pretty much after that first shot, you're going to be suppressed or you're going to be under attack or being pursued. So the submarine's ability to conduct large volumes of strike warfare is just not likely to be the case in the future. So I don't know if we need to replace all that capacity. Then the other thing is, that's one thing that's happening. The other thing that's happening is we're going to disperse that strike capacity onto the Virginia payload module equipped SSMs. And we assumed in our fleet that you would have Block 5, 6, and 7 of the Virginia class include that Virginia payload module.

So they'd have those extra 28 missiles, and so 40 missiles total on each ship. So that's quite a few submarines. You're talking about 30, I guess, 38 submarines probably with 40 missiles each. So that would make up for the capacity that was lost with the SSGMs throughout the fleet, which is probably a better idea because, again, if a submarine is going to get rapidly engaged every time it launches weapons, having it carry 140 weapons means that after you launch the first few, The rest of those 140 weapons are unavailable until the submarine can once again get into a position to strike. But if it's running around from trying to evade ASW forces, those missiles are unavailable to a commander.

Whereas if you've got only 40 missiles per ship, well, if he launches five or six weapons and then the rest of his missiles are out of the fight for a while, that's less of a problem because your strike capacity. But we saw that as a valuable asset. The other thing we did, though, was that the SSM-X, which is a follow-on to the Block 7 Virginia class, we made that into a submarine that was more designed for the ASUW mission. So we shifted back and said, well, we won't need another submarine that's focused on strike capacity because we believe ASUW capabilities are going to progress to the point where submarines aren't going to be the ace in the hole for strike that they are today. So we're going to need to have a submarine that may be more focused on being stealthy, operating deep inside an enemy's contested area, and maybe going after the enemy's SSBNs and SSGMs. So we need something that's able to go after those hard targets, which is what we devoted the SSMX's capability to. Okay, so our conversation thus far has been very warfighting-centric, I think. What does all this mean for the peacetime Navy and the presence or constabulary mission set?

So we thought, we recognized that we didn't want to get two warfighting scenarios. The overall FNFS study was very warfighting focused, but we wanted to make sure our fleet had the ability to offer escalation options to commanders at a lower level than what you would normally get. So today's fleet does not have those kinds of escalation options. I mean, you basically, if you're in the Pacific, you can send out a SAG of DDGs or you can send out a carrier strike group. You know, that's kind of your choices. So we, with this new fleet design, with a greater diversity of platforms, and as Tim mentioned, a greater diversity of force packages, there's a lot of ways to manage that force in a way that gives you options for lower escalation situation. I think a great example is what was done by Indopaycom a couple months ago into Tuna by sending the Gabriel Giffords down to intervene in the dispute between China and Malaysia over gas fields down there. So that platform, the Gabrielle Giffords, wasn't going to be able to stand toe-to-toe and fight off a Chinese SAG, but it was a way to demonstrate the resolve of the U.S. and not escalate the situation or provoke a response.

So we need more options like that in the theater. So one way to do that is distributed. So what we do is have a distributed fleet that can aggregate to provide the mass necessary for warfighting, but then can disaggregate to allow it to participate in these competition phase, if you use the NDS term, interactions with adversaries and allies. So I think we took that deliberately into account, and we built force packages in the study that addressed the maritime security operation mission set. Thanks. Tim, my next question is for you. And I know we addressed this a little bit earlier, but I'm hoping we can go into a little bit more detail now. Is your plan neutral from personnel perspective? Personnel was an area that we carefully analyzed, and we were determined to try to ensure that we avoided the past mistakes of optimum manning or minimal manning without automation that ultimately ended in lowering fleet readiness. So, thankfully, what we found was that even when we robustly crewed each vessel, it would require about 18,000 less personnel to man the fleet than today and 27% fewer personnel than the Navy's FY 2020 30-year shipbuilding plan.

So, this was mostly the result of shifting to smaller designs and adopting greater automation. So overall, even though we are sort of manning the ships in the proposed fleet at the required number of personnel and ensuring that they're robustly manned, by shifting to smaller vessels over time and ensuring that we have greater automation on not only the unmanned vessels, but also on some of the manned vessels, we can certainly stop the projected growth in manpower, as called for by the Navy's 30-year shipbuilding plan. and then likely reduce the number of personnel needed in the fleet as well. Thanks. Brian, was there any discussion about what your plan is going to mean for command in the surface Navy? Does this force structure would actually open up a lot of command opportunities at more junior pay grades than I think surface warfare officers are accustomed to seeing? And they're going to be driving around platforms with long-range strike weapons, which is also not something that we've been accustomed to.

Yeah, we deliberately took that into account. That was one of the things we were hoping to provide is more command opportunities at junior levels. And one thing to think about is when you go back to the deep, dark past, you know, so the post-World War II or even World War II Navy, there were opportunities for command of surface vessels that were afforded to officers that then went back to the submarine force or even went into aviation. So the idea of 40 more command opportunities to naval officers that may be outside their normal specialty, you know, could be something to consider as well. So, yeah, that was something we deliberately tried to take into account because I think one of the weaknesses of today's fleet design is it does not provide those opportunities. And so we've seen challenges with, you know, like the fleet up model for XOCO transitions and surface fleet in the aviation world. And I think this would provide you a way to give you some more steps up the ladder to get your command shops down before you arrive at that, you know, O5 command where you do have a lot of responsibility and a lot of authority and some autonomy to go use it, especially if we're going to look at mission command as being a necessary element of future fleet operations. Thanks. So what would your plan mean for the fleet's deployment cycle then? Would we see an OFRTP that would look the same as it does today, or have you imagined something else? So we assumed that the OFRP would be used for the parts of the fleet that were deploying,

I guess, deploying from CONUS and the ones that were the larger pieces of core structure. So one of the elements of the fleet posture is the fact that you've got essentially a large maneuver force of two carrier strike groups. The two carrier strike groups that are allowed or enabled by the nine carriers would be deployed more or less as a unit. So they'd be deployed both in the Indo-Asia Pacific region, and so they would be operating on the OFRP along with their surface combatants. So that whole group of ships would be operating in that slower operational cycle, Whereas the forces that are based overseas, which are a lot of the small combatants, plus your normal FDNF forces in Japan, they'd be operating on that FDNF cycle, where essentially they have about 50% operational availability. Then there's the one difference that we called out is that some forces in CONUS that would be involved in operations that are mostly on our side of the Pacific or the Atlantic, they'd be operating on the FDNF cycle as well. So I think one thing the Navy needs to consider is higher operational tempo deployment cycles for CONUS-based ships that are likely to be operating either in Europe or in East Pack or in the Atlantic.

So there's the maritime security operation, there's ASW operation, there's some fleet engagement type operations that would be in those areas that could be serviced by a force that's doing the FD&F cycle, rather than having them in the OFRP, much longer timelines. So we have used OFRP and we used FD&F cycle, but we use them in places that were not necessarily the same as those in today's fleet. Thanks. I'm actually going to jump ahead of question here, because we just talked about it a little bit here, is that the four deployed naval forces locations didn't change. You've got Yokosuka, Sasebo, Bahrain, and Rota. Was that given to you as a limiting factor, or did you propose any different locations? it wasn't a limiting factor we did though try to ensure that we postured force packages and locations where their capabilities would most be needed so we use current home ports in order to ensure that the proposed fleet wouldn't require additional changes in areas outside of the scope of the study given that we really were focused on on future fleet architecture that said the location of home porting in the u.s and abroad certainly is an area that requires more analysis

moving in the future. And as we sort of adopt new operational concepts and as U.S. warfighting approaches change, I do think it's going to be necessary for DOD to evolve its approach to posture. Another related topic is that of maintenance and repair of vessels forward. So in our study, we contended that it's going to be essential for the department to improve public shipyard infrastructure through the shipyard infrastructure optimization plan and make some similar investments in private yards to enhance ship maintenance and repair capacity within the U.S. because we found that unless we can tackle that maintenance problem within the fleet, we won't be able to maximize the potential of the current fleet, much less a larger one.

However, even though that the focus of those maintenance improvements will be in U.S. yards, we found that given the current maintenance backlog and the fact that we're introducing some new vessel types that are likely going to remain for a larger portion of their lives. There are going to be opportunities to use some of the spare capacity in allied shipyards, such as those in Japan, to conduct some types of maintenance forward. This was actually a topic Congressman Whitman, the ranking member on the House Subcommittee on Seapower and Power Projection Forces, raised last week in a heritage panel that Brent Sadler and Maya Clark hosted.

And I think the fact that Congress is starting to take a look at it suggests that I think the Navy will need to examine it as well in order to maximize the potential opportunities there are in some of these allied shipyards to ensure that our forward presence can be maximized at a high state of readiness. And I do think that there are ways to be able to collaboratively work with some of these allied shipyards in a way that's not going to take away investments or workload levels from the U.S. shipyards. Then as part of this study, did you look at the footprint overseas in those parts if we were talking about pushing more vessels into those ports? We did. It was done at a relatively high level, but part of the examination was, well, what's the current posture? What are the current pier spaces? And would the vessels that we're proposing to operate from these locations reasonably be supported at those locations? And in the past, as part of some previous studies, we had gone to some of these forward operating locations and so had a sense of what are the mix of either current use of existing infrastructure and maybe some additional spare capacity infrastructure that could be used that would support this larger posture forward. Thanks, Brian. I'll come back to you then.

You propose a number of doctrinal changes as well to accommodate slash use this fleet. Can you explain why you're calling for a change to the Navy's air and missile defense doctrine? Yeah, Jared. So one of the challenges with doing a study like this is that the Navy does not have a publicly described overarching operational concept. The Navy's way of warfighting is essentially an accumulation of tactics that then are used in various ways, depending on what the commander wants to do in situ. So that's changing now with distributed maritime operations a little bit. That's changing with the joint warfighting concept. What we had to do was come up with a set of doctrine for the operation of the fleet that was consistent with what the Navy is doing internally,

but also is taking advantage of some of the new technology and taking advantage of a new operational approach that's more decision-centric than attrition-centric. So what we came up with was a series of operational concepts that we described in the study, one of which is this one for air and missile defense. And we think it's really important that the Navy rethink how it does air and missile defense as it moves to a more distributed architecture. If we're going to have distributed maritime operations, if we're going to have small force packages operating independently, then we want to think about how to increase their defensive capacity so that they're able to be harder targets individually, because we're not going to have everything drive around in a large concentrated carrier strike group where you have mutual supporting air defense. So if you've got a SAG of like two or three shifts,

to get sufficient air defense to make that a hard target, you've got to think about bringing in the range at which you do air defense. So instead of trying to shoot every incoming missile at the farthest possible range using an SM-2 or an SM-6, then bring that range in to shoot a target that you can at 10 to 30 nautical miles. so that you're able to use things like the ESSM that can be loaded forward to a BLS magazine cell or electronic warfare or direct-to-energy weapons because those are line-of-sight weapons. They can't be used over the horizon. And then also systems like RAM, which is a very good but short-range air defense system.

If we don't bring in the range in which we do air defense, then we're going to use our best and largest and most expensive air defense weapons right away in the fight, so the SM-6s and SM-2s. And then we're going to be left with these shorter-range weapons as the last resort, as opposed to using them when they're most appropriate earlier in the fight to maximize the capacity. The other thing to consider is if you move to a more distributed architecture, you don't need to shoot incoming weapons necessarily as far away because you're not defending some other asset like a carrier. You know, if you're a surface combatant defending a carrier, you might be far enough away from the carrier that you have to use an SM-6 to be able to shoot, you know, across the carrier to hit an incoming net weapon. But if you're just defending yourself, you can collapse that air defense umbrella down into this 10 to 30 nautical mile range where you can rely on weapons that have a much deeper magazine than what you get with your SM-2s and SM-6s. So I think that this change in the doctrine is essential, or else our surface combatants are not going to be able to generate the defensive capacity that allows them to compete with the kinds of salvos that the Chinese, for example, could use against them at the kind of ranges they would need to operate at.

Okay, thanks, Tim. I'm going to come back to you for the next question. What do you envision for combat logistics and support in the future? Are you talking about new platforms, or are we finally going to reintroduce a way to reload munitions at sea? In the study, we adopted a balanced approach to fleet design where we wanted to make appropriate investments in logistics in order to enhance the lethality and overall performance of the rest of the fleet. So we ended up fielding a more resilient logistics force suitable for contested operations that expanded the number of logistics forces with new classes of vessels to enable these more distributed sustainment concepts and increase the resilience of the deployed combat naval formations. So in terms of the ship choices, in addition to the cargo ships and oilers of today's combat logistics force, the proposed logistics fleet includes some small oilers, large tankers, both government-owned or long-term chartered, and then under some new initiatives we can discuss. It also included some dedicated weapon reload ships that we called TAKM or missile reload ships. We had some additional medical vessels and towing and salvage vessels and also more tenders. to support not only submarines, but also the larger surface fleet and increasing numbers of

deployed unmanned vessels. We found that by making these investments into logistics, the number of combatants that could be sustained forward was significantly increased. Additionally, force packages could distribute more across and within theaters, and then the firing rates of force packages could be maintained at a much higher level than in the current program fleet. So these key investments in logistics and support vessels, even if they came at the cost of some combatants, were well worth it because they really significantly improved the fleet's overall performance. Thanks. How did your study address strategic sea lift? It's a great question. So today's strategic sea lift force is aging, it's in need of rapid

recapitalization, and then it falls short of the tanker capacity necessary to support military operations. The other set of challenges facing the current fleet are that the government-owned portion of the fleet is in a poor state of readiness, as we can see by the slate of activations that have been done by Transcom. And then there's also a shortage of around at least 1,900 mariners necessary to crew the fleet in a protracted conflict. So for the strategic sealift requirements for dry cargo, such as container requirements or the requirements to move cargo on roll-on, roll-off vessels. The current Navy approach plans on buying a mix of old and new ships, but not seriously addressing the mariner's shortfall. So what we did in our

proposed fleet was adopt this new flexible approach to strategic sea lift, in which we bought 24 newly built government-owned and operated ships, and we paired that with chartered U.S. ships and an expanded maritime security program of commercial ships. So the proposed plan by relying more heavily on the commercial merchant marine would outperform the Navy's plan in terms of meeting those cargo requirements established by Transcom. And also by having a larger portion of the fleet in active commercial service, it would increase the number of active merchant mariners and solve the mariner gap in addition to creating a healthier merchant marine. The other main element of our strategic sea lift plan involved fuel, and we took a similar approach that maximized the potential of the merchant marine.

So in our proposed fleet, we do secure continuous access under long-term charter to some consolidated logistics or console tankers that can support some of those requirements during the competition phase or conflict. But we also lean heavily on two other reforms. The first is Congress's proposed tanker security fleet, in which tankers would receive stipends like in the Maritime Security Program to operate in commercial service during peacetime and contribute to the economy, but then be ready to be called upon by DOD in a conflict. The other initiative was we proposed some reforms to DLA Energy's sourcing of fuel to buy more of its fuel at U.S. rather than foreign refineries, and in turn provide more preference cargo to U.S. flag tankers. And these three initiatives in combination would generate a fleet that could meet DOD's tanker requirements for ships and crews. And overall, this proposed approach to strategic sea lift could meet DOD's operational requirements, but could also be done in a fiscally sound manner and in a manner in which DOD and Congress could start to make some of these decisions in the near term. Can you tell me a little bit more about the fuel initiative? Maybe this got by me when I did my initial read, but what it sounds like you're calling for is that we're going to purchase fuel here in the United States and then use tankers to shuttle it forward to our forces as necessary. Exactly. So DLA Energy currently buys fuel, bulk fuel solicitations from a number of locations around the world. Many of them take place here in the United States, continental U.S. and elsewhere, and they're bought from U.S. refineries.

A significant portion, though, of DOD's fuel purchases come from overseas refineries, and this has been done mostly to save costs because you want to buy fuel as close to the point of need in order to minimize transportation costs. It also helps cultivate a relationship with local partners where U.S. forces are based. That approach, though, has the downside of not providing that preference cargo or that U.S. government impelled cargo for U.S. flag tankers. And so in our proposed approach, we would recommend changing a portion of DOD's overseas fuel purchases from foreign refineries to U.S. refineries. This could tackle areas such as the Westpac solicitation that DLA Energy does annually. And by shifting about half of those overseas fuel purchases from foreign to U.S. refineries, it would provide enough preference cargo, that government cargo to U.S. flag tankers, to generate anywhere from four to seven U.S. flag tankers.

It would give enough cargo to U.S. flag tankers to support the business operations of four to seven more U.S. flag tankers. So it's not an enormous difference, but the advantage of this is that the cost is relatively minimal. We're talking about an annual total transportation cost of around $25 million. So it's less than a quarter of a cent per gallon of what the services pay on their annual working capital funds. So it's sort of, I think, a low-cost, high-impact decision that the department can make in the near term. Thanks. Brian, I do have one more question. I understand that you had to be budget neutral. That was one of the constraints that you entered with. What would you have done with 20% more resources? Did you consider a higher end fleet if you received a budget increase? we didn't build out a larger fleet that was one of the considerations that went into the early discussions about the study though as we did talk about what are we going to use for our our fiscal top line um so we we settled on the pb21 plus inflation just because it represented probably the most optimistic scenario and it was likely under the you know whatever the future

administration and congress are willing to do uh so 20 seems like an unlikely target but But if we did get 20% more, I think somewhat counterintuitively, the best use of those dollars is going to be to go towards some of the larger, more traditional platforms. So one thing we found in the study is that you can buy a relatively large number of these smaller ships and even sustain them over time because individually they don't cost very much. And then their operational support cost is that high because they're small and they just don't have a big crew, not because they're highly automated, but because they're just not very big. So you can add those relatively easily or subtract them, and they're somewhat fungible. But if you've got an infusion of funding, I think the best place to put it would be to go back to the carrier construction program, shift that back to five-year centers, because that's a relatively low-cost way to grow the carrier fleet or keep the carrier fleet at a little bit higher number over time. because by taking the carrier construction timeline for five to six years, you pay about a 10% to 15% premium because now it's less efficient to build the carrier.

But then you're saving money because you're spreading out the installment payments over six years instead of five years. So when you do the math, going to six years is cheaper, but not a huge amount cheaper. So if you went in with that extra money and put it back in, you can shift to five years. And then we could go and also increase the submarine fleet size by a little bit because there were a few years in the plan that we built where we had to go down to one per year because there just wasn't enough money given the need for the Columbia class to be built. And the fact that we needed to sustain the industrial base for the amphibious fleet and for the surface fleet, by the end of the day, we couldn't build two SSNs every year during the Columbia class. So that was a fiscal constraint rather than an industrial-based constraint that we would want to address if we got 20% more money. So unfortunately, that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guests, Brian Clark and Tim Walton.

Brian, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? You can find me at Hudson because I don't have social media presence other than that. But if someone wants to email me, then they can email me at bclark at hudson.org. and Tim and I are currently working on an electronic warfare technology development strategy for the Navy so we're going to be finishing that up and hopefully getting that out to the

public in the next month or so and then we're also working on a study looking at air and missile defense concepts for the military and so Tim's working on a separate project which I think would be very interesting so you can address that I mean normally I would lament

the lack of a social media presence, but given all the studies that you've identified and how extremely productive you've been, maybe it's something the rest of us should look at. Tim, same question to you. Where can we find you and what's your next project? I know Brian mentioned a couple already. Exactly. I'm on the Hudson website as well.

My email is twalton at hudson.org. And I do have a Twitter account. It's Timothy A. Walton. And we'll be working on some of those same projects together. And then an interesting, I think, shorter piece we're looking to release is on some of the key defense choices and opportunities facing the nation moving forward. I'd like to thank you, Jared, for this interview. Absolutely. Gentlemen, thank you again for joining us. To our listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Sea Control is produced and edited by Keegan Ingersoll, Ed Salo, and William McQuiston.

We'll be right back. So help me, Bob, I'm pulling in the alley. Why are you pulling in the alley? Help me, Bob, I'm pulling in the alley. Pulling out the shimbo now.