Sea Control - Sea Control 253 - The Future of European Seapower with Dr. Jeremy Stöhs and Dr. Henrik Breitenbauch

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

Links:1. How High? The Future of European Naval Power and the High-End Challenge, by Dr. Jeremy Stöhs, February 12, 2021.2. Centre for Military Studies - University of Copenhagen

Hey folks, Jared here. I've talked about our feed. I'm going to keep talking about it. There are two existing Sea Control feeds out there. The one that you want to be listening to is labeled simply Sea Control and includes the phrase Simsex Flagship Podcast in its description. That's Sea Control, Simsex Flagship Podcast. That's where you want to be. Please subscribe, rate, and review. We're checking in with our old friend, Dr. Jeremy Stoes, in this episode. He's joined by Dr. Henrik Breitenbauch, and we're going to be discussing the future of European sea power.

This episode was edited and produced by Taylor Fairless. Please check out everything going on over at the main website, simsec.org. We've partnered with Transcom for a call for articles related to strategic sea lift. If you want to get your idea in front of some flag officers, this is your chance. For more information, check out our website, simsec.org. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download

your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security Aloha Shoemates and welcome back aboard Sea Control Today I'm joined by Dr. Jeremy Stowes and Dr. Henrik Breitenbauch and we're going to be discussing Jeremy's most recent report How High? Future of European Naval Power and the High-End Challenge This report was produced in cooperation with the Center for Military Studies, a research center at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen.

Jeremy, thank you for coming back. Could you refresh the listeners on your background, please? Sure. Thank you very much for having me. I have a background in public security, worked in law enforcement for several years and studied English and history. I also did my PhD in Kiel, political science PhD, and currently I'm deputy director of the Austrian Center for Intelligence, Propaganda, and Security Studies, a non-resident fellow at the Institute for Security Policy in Kiel and its adjunct Center for Maritime Strategy and Security, operated and collaborated with the Center for Military Studies in Copenhagen. Thanks so much. And thank you for coming back. Henrik, would you mind introducing yourself to the listeners? My name is Henrik Brandau. I'm the director of the Center for Military Studies at the University of Copenhagen. And we're an independent research unit that's part of the Department of Political Science at the university. But we're a little bit unusual in the sense that we don't do a lot of teaching. Instead, we do applied analysis after agreement with the Danish Ministry of Defense and the parties to the defense agreement in Danish parliament.

parliament. And so in that way, we are very concerned with topics of current importance that have to do with all kinds of aspects of defense and security policy, including Jeremy's great report. Well, thank you both again for joining us. Henrik, your center commissioned this study. Why did your center commission this study? Well, I think we commissioned this study with Jeremy because we wanted an in-depth understanding of what the challenges and opportunities are from a European naval perspective, following the major changes in international security landscape that we've seen the last five to 10 years. What we felt was the beginning of the study was really the fact that European navies, small navies, mid-sized

navies, have for the 25 years of world history that we kind of now know as the epoch of globalization. So from the end of the Cold War until around like 2014, plus minus, all of the European navies had been in a downsizing environment, peace dividend logic with regard to their political masters following the end of the Cold War, and then discovering or rediscovering softer and low-end maritime security operations, stuff related to the global south, then counter-piracy, things that were also very far away from their home ports. And then very sudden, that area had a completely different logic with the sort of the renaissance of a troublesome Russian neighbor and then also the emergence of China. And that's the starting point for the

report. What do specifically European navies do? What kinds of conditions are they sitting in with regard to the high-end challenge, having again to orientate themselves towards the high end of the conflict spectrum, again considering very long-term decisions in terms of what kinds of things to buy and develop and build and man and equip for, that is a very complex new environment where having to deal with actual warfare has not been very much on the radar for a long time, in spite, of course, of NATO defence planning and so on. So it hasn't gone completely away. But in practical everyday terms, it hasn't been very much at the forefront of European

naval defence planners' agenda, nor on the political masters, I might say. And that is as much as a concern for us. We don't write reports only for military decision makers, but also for the civilian modis, as well as for the parliamentarians and the ministers who sit on top of the decision making pyramid. Thanks, Jeremy. Henrik has covered a kind of a geostrategic situation facing European navies and some of that background. Your report dives deeply into the dilemma facing European navies. Can you describe that dilemma? What we really discuss is what particular challenges do European navies face. And when we say European navies, we have to always consider that those individual states with individual policy making processes, forms of naval forces or even maritime forces. And one of our goals was also that the listeners, in particular outside of Europe, the US, also

the Middle East and in Asia, maybe that they have a better understanding of the different forms of navies and the different challenges they face. And we came up with both demand-side challenges and supply-side challenges. And the demand-side challenges would be such that the environment, the strategic environment in which naval forces operate, require that. They demand that. And that would be in one aspect, one demand-side challenge would be the proliferation of advanced missiles and sensors. That is really one of the worrying challenges in the maritime domain and actually across many domains another would be another demand side challenge the second that we had was autonomy artificial intelligence and other forms of the term we often use is

disruptive technology and the third demand side challenge would then be what what develops out of those technological developments or the the consequences if you will is multi-domain operations. So military operations across all domains in the high-intensity area. And then those are three demand-side challenges that European navies face and that make it very difficult for planning procurement processes and so forth. Henrik, Jeremy has talked about the demand-side challenges. Can you speak to what some of the supply-side challenges are? The supply-side challenges are then logically things that come from the inside and having really to do with the combination of existing problems in developing new capabilities and

then combining them with the external given problems. So in a sense, they cover all of the aspects of running a navy from material to manpower in a sense. Yeah, I mean, that's something that is different to many navies, but still the same to many navies. And if you talk to any military development in general, it is several factors that we think about in particular is manpower, the personnel problem, the cost of personnel, the cost of technology. And we might touch on that because that is something that is really

one of the most prominent issues that navies and armed forces have. Another one that is maybe more specific to naval forces is the home game and the away game, as I would call it, is having to have a presence close to home and strategic lines of communication close to shore exclusive economic zones having a presence they are credible presence also presence to be able to conduct operations at the higher end across many domains but then at the same time to be able to project power and this is now one of the big conundrums is how to square their circle how to balance the home game and their way game knowing that in both cases you might be doing low intensity operations but you also be might might be deployed abroad and have be have to be able to conduct high intensity

operations in the Strait of Hormuz or in the South China Sea or somewhere else so this is a conundrum and the third maybe aspect that we identified is as I already mentioned the high end and the low end so how do you find a good balance between those capabilities when you focus on one you might lose capability in the other as we saw in the last I would say 25 years where as Hendrik has mentioned, especially for European navies, the focus was in civilian operations, policing, anti-terrorism operations, and so on and so forth. And all of a sudden, you have to learn very complex tasks, such as anti-submarine warfare and so on, which takes time and takes a lot of money as well. How is this problem addressed in the Cold War? Well, maybe Henry can add something to this.

I'm not a child of the Cold War, although I was born during the Cold War, but I've conducted, that my PhD was actually also touches on and touched on this as well, that, of course, during the Cold War, the threat was very clear. There was a, within NATO and on the other side of the Warsaw Pact, there was a clear division of labor, a very, or relatively clear division of labor, even though states could still have some independence in what they could do. But just remember back, for example, the Royal Navy was more or less relegated to anti-submarine warfare during large parts of the Cold War, rather than doing expeditionary operations. Belgium and the Netherlands were very much focused on mine warfare within their NATO

concept, and the same went for Western Germany, the Danish Navy, and so on and so forth. So it was quite clear cut. And I would say because of the threat perception at that time, it was easier to focus your Navy on specific taskings within the greater context. Exactly. As Jeremy says, during the Cold War, it was probably a characteristic of any case, for example, the Danish Navy, that the number of vessels was probably a little bit higher than it is today, also for legacy reasons. But it was also a more specialized set of vessels because it was a threat-based construction of the Navy. We kind of knew what the threat was and the different capabilities were designed to meet those threats. But what happened after the Cold War ended was really that everyone moved into a more uncertainty-based defense planning where capabilities had to be flexible.

And in the Danish case, the Danish Navy developed the StandFlex model where containerized modules can be fitted onto vessels and then give them different kinds of roles relatively easily. So that's, I think, is an expression of how we move from a threat-based defense planning to more uncertainty-based defense planning. And the same kinds of questions then arise again. Are we moving back to specific threats or do we want to retain flexibility? And as Jeremy rightly points out, I mean, you cannot have all of the low-end capabilities necessarily also in terms of numbers of vessels, for example, If you go very directly for the high end and have a lot of very expensive material, especially smaller navies will relatively quickly be hit by techflation in that they can not have a large number of vessels. So those kinds of balances that we saw during the Cold War and the evolution ever since, all of those questions become relevant again for defense planners in the naval arena. Jeremy, can you describe what techflation is and why it's such a problem?

Definitely. So techflation is a combination of rising costs for military equipment procurement that exceeds inflation. And so you see an increase in per unit costs, creating this economies of scale. What that means is that it's getting more and more expensive to build naval vessels. And naval vessels are the most complex and the most expensive military equipment you can procure. And Jerry Hendricks in a recent series of SimSec also touched upon this, that also that is the case for the U.S. Navy, just the same, where an Arleigh Burke frigate costs twice as much as it would have been the case at the end of the Cold War. The same applies to European navies. Just for small states, the problem is you can maybe procure four, five, six frigates and unit costs rise and rise and rise.

And then it's not twice as much, but three times as much as maybe three decades ago. And so many states are at the end of the line regarding procurement of large vessels, submarines as well, you know, maritime patrol aircraft, all those very complex assets that also need personnel, you need an infrastructure, that industrial base that are also lacking in Europe, being able to maintain those navies, maintain readiness because of the lack of, you know, birthing space and stuff like that. Something you just said struck me there. Is it a hidden cost as the technical complexity of the system rises that you then require more training for your force so more highly trained personnel

by assessing that correctly i would say yes it's something that henry also pointed at and mentioned before you see during the 1990s the armed forces many european armed forces switched from compulsory military service from standing forces to professional service professional forces and what you saw as professionalism more flexibility better train personnel also because technology became more complex and you can only but you still need a critical mass not only of capabilities of ships but you also need a critical mass of personnel manning or crewing those those vessels those platforms as much as automation can already do you still need those in terms of damage control and so on and we see throughout europe that those

lean what's called lean manning concepts so having very few personnel on ships does not really work to the extent that they thought it would. So yes, they are more expensive. And of course, personnel costs are also rising because to compete with the private sector, you have to pay your service members a decent wage. You divide up Europe's navies into four types. How did you break those down?

And then can you give us a couple examples of each of them? I understand these are like broad categories and not hard and fast rules. Exactly. And I think that's something we discussed Just anyway, typologies of navies were, I think, easier in the 1980s during the Cold War. And there are, of course, great typologies by Eric Grove, for example, and others. But the criteria of how to rank a navy is very difficult.

So that's always a difficult pin down. But I would say, from what we understood, we have large navies in Europe. That would be, for example, the Royal Navy or the Marine Nationale, the French Navy, which have capabilities across the board. Also, in this case, nuclear forces also have a strategic deterrent, which costs a lot of money, but still is a naval element, if you will. And below that, you actually have several navies, mid-sized navies, as we call them, that have capabilities and have still a significant number of ships. Germany would be an example, or a relatively well-balanced, like the Dutch Navy, although they have fewer ships, but they still have submarines, amphibious assault ships, they have frigates, and so on. And below these mid-sized, Turkish Navy would also be an example, below these mid-sized navies, you have the category that we sometimes, or I believe we could call small navies, but high-performing small navies. So technologically advanced navies that have relatively few platforms and have to strike difficult balances between the different warfare areas.

So they might not have submarines, but they then might have capable frigates. They might have maritime patrol aircraft, but therefore non-fibious assault ships and things like that. So capable, technologically advanced, well-trained, very often professional forces. and below that and this is something that we shouldn't look down upon navies or maritime forces that are very small because of course if a state is small just don't have the means to build a large navy and one aspect that I think holds true nowadays is that even small very small maritime forces can have more to say can influence and can act more in international relations and in foreign policy. Then they were able, let's say during the Cold War, where they were called

token navies. I would say that that is not the case anymore. However, these very small navies with limited budgets, limited means have the problem in light of the changing geostrategic environment, the trend towards high intensity capabilities that they will not be able to keep up they will not be able to jump over the bar that other navies and especially the u.s navy sets for everybody else and that's why also the title of our study is how high how high is this bar that the u.s navy and the other big actors russia china maybe india and so on how high is this bar that other navies are setting and other military forces are setting for european navies which opportunities do they still have and they're of course the most challenged to be able to

contribute at least to multi-domain operations should push come to shove and should deterrence fail and they would be and they be involved if they would be involved in high intensity conflict somewhere can you describe the missile gap european navies are contending with and i'm thinking the defensive missiles naval strike and land attack important issue i think this is being talked about it and Henrik and the team and I talked about this at length as well and we have also I think a very good graph in our in our study an illustration it shows this or really illustrates this missile gap navies in Europe face vis-a-vis great powers the US, Russia and or China that being that they have relatively few vertical launch system cells on their vessels

with which they can deploy advanced missiles and this is an important metric it's just one metric we we agree on that it's not you know we don't but we have to count missiles as we count ships as we count tonnage as we count readiness and so on and that gives us a complete picture of capabilities. And vis-a-vis great powers, Europe lags behind, and it suffers from a missile gap, both in a defensive sense. So being able to defend critical assets of the NATO alliance, of in Europe, command and control facilities, large units, ships, air bases, amphibious assault aircraft carriers, and other task forces against the advanced anti-ship or land attack missiles, Because those are really proliferating if you're looking at Russia or China.

Those are the capabilities you have to defend against. But I would argue there are too few vertical launch systems spread across European navies. Naval strike and land attack. So those would be the offensive capabilities. Offensive capabilities, that's something we discussed at length as well. They often are the same missiles. So you can conduct land attack as well as launch anti-ship missiles, but also against land targets. European navies have significant capabilities in this area.

However, many are not distributed in vertical launch systems. So you only have your missile tubes on your ships and your launchers. And the land attack capability in particular is limited in terms of long-range strike because only France and the UK have long-range cruise missiles. This has, of course, a political dimension because long-range strike is a political issue. and at the same time it is very expensive and that's also something people often forget how expensive actually advanced missiles are even if they're air defense missiles that's really difficult for states to procure larger amounts of business what difficulties do the european navies face developing their own missiles because i know like the united states supplies an awful

lot of missiles to european navies yes of course a standard missile is deployed on several european ships as well as land installations. At the same time, technologically, European systems are highly advanced, be it the Asta system and others as well. Brits with a cam, Turkish air defense systems are coming into their own. So from a technological standpoint, European missile technology is very advanced. At the same time, of course, missile procurement capability, and maybe Hendrik wants to touch on this. Procuring systems for smaller states also has a political dimension, and especially in the naval arena, where most European states with larger navies are NATO allies, are closely aligned to the U.S. It has this dimension of the U.S., of course, providing some of the

best system, which is Aegis, with their standard missile. Spanish have it, Norwegians have it, and so on and so forth. The Aegis system, whereas the missiles, many others. Money is an issue. Technology is an issue. And of course, the political relationship with the U.S. has a great impact on that as well. Henrik, Jeremy mentioned comparative lack of VLSLs on European ships. Then we have the Navy's opting to purchase high-end options like SM-2 Block III Alpha for DMR-3 Iver Huitfeld class frigates. Does it make more sense to purchase more missiles that could be quad-packed in the way that the evolved Sea Sparrow missile can be, for example, to maximize the utility of an individual VLS seller? What sort of drives that decision-making process?

I should probably preface this answer with the caveat that I'm not a missile expert, but I think what's really important for the smaller U.N. navies is that all armaments purchases, all acquisitions decisions are never just a matter of efficiency and effectiveness. They are always also, from the beginning, matters of alliance politics. And so the moment you start to choose and look at different kinds of systems, then you're also locking yourself into longstanding relationships with certain producers and certain navies. And I think it's from that that you have to see the kinds of patterns evolving and where it's also obvious that in spite of all of the attempts to sort of speak up a European defense identity, that in spite of that, there's still a very clear, very strong connection across the Atlantic between many of the smaller European navies and the United States. And that will continue to go on also by virtue of these acquisition decisions. So that is why from a political science perspective, even if you know nothing about the technology, it's still super, super important to look at patterns of acquisitions because they are examples of larger alliance politics decisions that help further the lives of the alliance.

If I may, I just want to touch on something that might add to this really important point that Hendrik made before and that might be interesting to the listener is the political aspect of it. At the same time, the Danish Navy, unlike during the Cold War, is now focused very much on cooperating with the U.S. Well, it was focused on cooperating with the NATO and within the NATO context, but now really as to a certain degree as an escort force. Really, the transatlantic lines of communication integrating with American carrier battle groups. And for that aspect, of course, a standard missile is a different animal than an involved sea sparrow, which they already have procured and they have in their arsenal. So from this standpoint, and with the focus of the Danish Navy being not so much towards the Baltic Sea, but really out into the Atlantic and those sea lines of communication, that also makes sense from a tactical point of view, if you will. This phrase came up a little bit earlier in our discussion, but where do European navies stand with regard to disruptive technologies? Regarding disruptive technology, I mean, this is an umbrella term for a lot of things.

But we discuss that and invite the listeners to look at our chapters that we wrote on disruptive technology and what ramifications it could have and how European navies develop. So in general, disruptive technology should be understood as something revolutionary rather than evolutionary and to take a capability that renders obsolete the policies, the doctrines, the capabilities of potential adversaries. And the European nations, of course, are highly advanced technologically. They have developed groundbreaking technologies and also disruptive technologies, be it in artificial intelligence, being in autonomous systems, and that were beyond the time that we have here to discuss all of them in detail. And Frank Hoffman from the National Defense University raised that in the podcast several months ago, is that if you look, for example, at European initiatives on the EU basis, military initiatives in PESCO, is that they're very much defensive-oriented applications of disruptive technologies, being at harbor protection, autonomous systems, underwater systems, very much defensively oriented. Whereas the U.S. has very much this application, as it was called back in the day, third offset strategy within an offensive mindset. And that speaks, of course, to how Europeans think about defense and how Americans think about defense. Henrik, let me ask you the next one. And I realize that if we go country by country on this, it could be like a seven part podcast series just discussing all the political sensitivities. Can you broadly describe some of the political sensitivities in Europe regarding the use of armed drones or use and procurement of armed drones?

I think the political sensitivities in Europe with regard to the use of armed drones are much the same probably as those that exist in the wider American public. It's probably just that they're closer to the political systems in terms of parliaments. And for that reason, I think the military establishments also have to factor them further into account. And that in combination, of course, with less actual combat experience in many European countries have also resulted in kind of a more sort of automatic pacifism, which makes political systems more reluctant to embrace new lethal technologies. And for that reason, there's generally a lot of reluctance and resistance attached to the topic of armed drones. And whenever we publish something on them, there's invariably some journalists calling about the publication we did on killer robots, but they're never called armed drones. And and so just to just to say that that's that I think is the general public perception of this. And and I think that is probably in many ways natural, given the different historical context.

But I think you can also see variation in Europe, depending on whether the countries have concrete current operational experience or not. Even if, for example, the UK public sphere have lots of very animated discussions and so on, the UK government is relatively modern in its approach to new acquisitions and weapons developments. Jeremy, any closing thoughts before we end the podcast? Well, in general, the future will not be easy for European naval leaders and their political masters. They will be challenged in many ways. We lay out in the study several recommendations for the different navies, be they large, mid-sized, small, and opportunities that present themselves to those navies. So I invite the listener to have a look at the study and the many recommendations we offer in the study. Do you want to touch on one or two of those recommendations?

Well, in general, we believe that it will be important to focus on high-end capabilities. So policymakers have to be aware of the focus area. At the same time, navies should try to leverage the technological advancements that present themselves, particularly disruptive technology, AI, unmanned system, and sensor technology, especially for small navies to have a recognized maritime picture to see what's going on close to their shores. And also to rethink if the current force structures that they have actually best suit them, or if it doesn't make sense within a multi-domain context to look at how other domains, the land domain and the air domain, can actually result in better maritime domain awareness, but also in better maritime security. And at the end of the day, what we all want is deterrence to prevent conflict. How closely are some of these navies watching the development of laser systems as a way to possibly get them off of the missile dependency? Yeah, of course, very much everything is classified. So something that Brian McGrath has touched upon several times in regard to the U.S. Navy, that is definitely one of the big, big issues to solve this missile gap that European navies are facing.

I should have touched upon it when we discussed the missile gap. Definitely high-power laser will be the future to protect oneself against saturation missile attacks, given that you only have so many silos, so many tubes on your ship, and can't, at least currently, can't resupply your vessels, rearm your vessels, but have to go back to port to do so. So definitely, laser technology is something that many states are looking into. However, if we look at something Henrik talked about, the drone development across Europe, the reluctance and how slow things are moving for several navies, which are just only now introducing drone technology on their small helicopters, on their vessels, on the water systems. It is a very slow process and definitely this target investment that, for example, the U.S. can do through its large budget and also DARPA. That is, of course, on a much smaller scale in Europe and not the same on the European Union as the U.S. can do. And that's actually what is needed in those technological areas is really target investment to move forward quickly. Thank you for that. That was a really comprehensive answer to a subject that we didn't really prep beforehand. And I appreciate that, Jeremy. I'd like to thank my guests, Dr. Jeremy Stoes, Dr. Henrik Breitenbauch. Jeremy, where can we find you online and what's your next project?

Well, you can find me under Jeremy Stoes on Twitter. And my next project is the publication of my second book, The Development of European Naval Power Since the End of the Cold War. So I'm hoping that that will be published sometime 2022. And yeah, I will look forward to that and hopefully be able to talk with you about when it comes out. Henrik, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? I'm online with the Center for Military Studies at University of Copenhagen. So you can look us up there and see all of our publications there in the in these months. In these months, I'm busy helping out the Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs with a high-level foreign policy review that leads up to the next multi-year Danish defense agreement.

And hopefully interesting stuff will come out of that by early next year. I'll look forward to reading that as well. Thank you both again for joining us. To the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © transcript Emily Beynon So help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alleys. Why are they pulling the alleys?

Help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alleys. Pulling out the shimbo now.