Sea Control - Sea Control 272 - Changing the Navy's Force Generation Model with Bryan Clark & Bryan McGrath

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

Links1. "Disrupt the Navy’s Operational Model to Counter China," by Bryan Clark & Bryan McGrath, CDRSalamander, Aug 11, 2021.2. "Restoring American Seapower - A New Fleet Architecture for the United States Navy," by Bryan Clark, Bryan McGrath et al., Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2017.3. "American Seapower at a Crossroads: A Plan to Restore the US Navy’s Maritime Advantage," by Bryan Clark, Timothy Walton, and Seth Cropsey, Hudson Institute, Sep 29, 2020.

Hey folks, Jared here. Today I'm joined by Brian's Clark and McGrath to discuss their submission to Commander Salamander's blog on disrupting the Navy's operational model. This episode is the first edited by one of the new members of our editing team joining us all the way from France, Alexia Boulaghi. We just launched the call for submissions for the SimSec Forum for Authors and Readers over at the main website. If there's a particular piece that you enjoyed this year, go ahead and nominate it. If it gets enough votes, you can hear the author present his or her work. We've also officially put out our call for articles for the end-of-the-year fiction contests, so go over to SimSec.org for full details. 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 Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. I'm joined today by Brian Clark and Brian McGrath to discuss our joint submission to Commander Salamander, Disrupt the Navy's Operational Model to Counter China. So you both appeared on this program before. Brian Clark, I'm going to ask, would you mind introducing yourself to the listeners? Sure. I'm Brian Clark. I'm a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. I also direct Hudson Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, and I'm a retired submariner.

And after my Navy time, I worked over at CSBA, which is a tank here in D.C. for about six years, during which time I worked with Brian on the fleet architecture study that we'll discuss today. And then last year, I came over to Hudson just in time for the pandemic. And so I've been there since and done some work on fleet architecture in connection with the Future Naval Force Structure Study last year. Thanks. And Brian McGrath, could you please tell us about your background? Sure. I'm a retired surface warfare officer. I retired in 2008, and I've been consulting pretty much ever since.

I consult to both the surface force commander in San Diego and the director of surface warfare at the Pentagon. Although what you will hear from me today are my ideas and Brian's ideas and not something coming from them. That's important for me to get across because I have no idea whether they agree with what Brian and I have put forward. And quite frankly, I don't care. That shouldn't keep Brian and I from putting stuff out into the world. And that's what we do. I appreciate that. And as a reminder, all the opinions expressed are our own and not reflective of any institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Brian McGrath, I'll

start with you because you teased this article on Twitter by saying that your forthcoming piece would propose a radical change to the way the Navy generates forces. So, the optimized fleet response plan is how we do that now. Can you describe OFRP, what it's designed to do, and how? Yeah, I'm going to make a strained analogy. A pie factory makes food. And that pie factory has a recipe for producing peach pies, and it produces a number of peach pies based on the demand that they anticipate. and that factory is optimized to produce the right number of peach pies for the demand. Substitute certified ready strike groups for peach pie, and that's what OFRP is. It's a predictable, scheduled mechanism for the production of combat-ready strike groups, expeditionary and carrier, to be provided to the combatant commanders.

I think that's the easiest way to – now, there are other ways to provide food, right? you can go to a restaurant and get food and you can make a special order. You can make an order from a menu of auctions. And I think kind of what Brian and I are suggesting is more like the restaurant than the pie factory. And then a follow-up question, how has the Navy changed the way that it operates within the OFRP construct to increase availability in the last three to five years? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know that it has. It has made some rather public and well publicized sustainment employments, sustainment phase employments. It split one East Coast aircraft carrier's deployment into two parts, brought it home from Europe to Norfolk, sent it

back up to the North Sea. This is an attempt to ride that dynamic fleet employment wave. But in terms of additional operational availability, first of all, I can't claim that they have any. My guess would be that they are losing operational availability because of maintenance problems over that time, but I don't have the data to back that up. Brian Clark, did you have anything to add on that one? I see you nodding along in the other window. Yeah. So what Brian said is exactly the problem we're trying to address. The Navy's industrial model for deploying forces is good for what it does, but one thing we're finding is it doesn't deliver enough, you know, so the combat commanders, you know, want more or different. I mean, I think

part of what we're trying to do is address the fact that the command commanders need something different than what the Navy provides. But, you know, if you're a pie factory and you're used to making peach pies and someone wants mincemeat, that's a big lift. I got to figure out how to do that. So that's one of the problems we had today is people complain that COCOMs need to go on a diet. But in fact, what it is, is what we're feeding them is not what they want. You know, so that's not the same thing. So one thing we're trying to address is the fact that we're not able to deliver enough or the right mix. And then the other thing, like Brian said, is you've got this huge readiness deficit that we're creating because we have been double pumping carrier

strike groups in an effort to try to satisfy the combatant commander's needs, which are partly because we just don't have the right mix of forces for them. So we just give them more in hopes that they can do something better with it. So it's a little bit about the industrial model, and it's a little bit about the kind of forces we're actually delivering to the combat commander. So we'll try to address both of those things with this shift. All right. One, I'm going to posit that the mincemeat pie in this analogy is probably the Royal Navy carrier strike group that's out right now, just for heritage and mincemeat sake.

Two, Brian Clark, I'm going to come back to you for the next question. You called for bringing back, and you mentioned this study earlier, the 2017 Fleet Architecture Study. You both contributed to it alongside several others. That'll be linked in our show notes. The main takeaway from that study that you're proposing again here is the creation of two forces, the deterrence force and the maneuver force. So before I ask about the deterrence force, how are you defining deterrence in this case? Yeah, great question. Because there's a lot of

talk right now about deterrence by denial, the alternative being deterrence by punishment. I think what we're arguing here is that we need a force that's able to deter via denial. But when we say denial, what we really mean is prevent an aggressor like China from getting what they want in the timeframe they want and on the terms that they want. So I think people throw around denial pretty loosely when, you know, it's going to be hard to deny China anything at once if it really wants to go after it. But we can maybe affect the timeline. We can affect the cost that it's going to incur. We can affect the repercussions down the road. And so we need naval force that's out there able to provide that level of uncertainty to the Chinese, for example, as to whether they're

going to be successful on the terms that they find to be acceptable. And that means you need a force that's out there that's robust enough to do it and is persistent enough to be able to be there to create that credibility to deter the aggressor and reassure the ally. So what comprises the deterrence force? And then how are you proposing that that force be generated? Yes, the deterrence force, we argue, is going to be the bulk of, we're arguing in the Pacific Fleet context, the Pacific Fleet surface combatants and amphibious fleet together would be mostly your deterrence force. So the amphibious assault ships of your amphibious fleet would constitute the air power element of the deterrence force. And then your surface combatants, both

large and small, would form into surface action groups or other, you kind of bespoke force packages that the combatant commander could create. The deterrence force would essentially be assigned to the combatant commander permanently, and it would operate, we would call today the FDNF cycle or the forward deployed naval force cycle. So they're operating on a four-month maintenance and training, eight-month operational cycle each year, which is a higher op tempo than you get out of your OFRP forces, which operate on one deployment every three years, which averages out to about 20% operational availability. So you get about 60% or 70% in this deterrence force model versus 20%, which is what you

get out of OFRP. This higher op tempo keeps them more proficient, allows them to be more familiar with the operating area, keeps them more engaged with allies and with adversaries. So folks that are in crews on ships that are in the deterrence force ostensibly would be better suited to do the deterrence kinds of missions, to do the security cooperation and to do the reassurance of allies. The cost that you incur is that you're going to maintain this higher operational tempo. So as we've seen with our FD&F forces, there's a premium of 20 to 30 percent more in terms of operations and maintenance to keep those ships and other forces at the appropriate

level of readiness. But that's that deterrence force model. Then the other parts of the Navy would be in the maneuver force. And Brian could talk to that. Brian McGrath, over to you. What is the maneuver force composed of and how is that generated? I'd like to make a distinction between the maneuver force that's put forward in the 2017 CSBA study, which came with a matching force structure. Like as Brian said, there was a strategic question that the approach answered, and there was within that approach a force structure, and that force structure was considerably larger than what we have today. What we believe that our article did was to, first thinking about, hey, this bifurcated fleet, the maneuver force, the returns force, what do you say we look at taking the fleet we have

and giving it a go? And so the maneuver force of the CSBA study had two aircraft carriers. I think it had close to 10 Aegis platforms. It had large USVs. It had, I forget what we call those things that the Marine Corps has, that at-sea stuff where their rolling stock is. What is that, Brian? The Maritime Pre-Positioning Force. Maritime Pre-Positioning Force, right. Yeah, Maritime Pre-Positioning Force. It was a great big giant war machine formation.

For the purposes of this discussion, the maneuver force is two aircraft carriers, probably five to seven Aegis platforms, and not much else. But it is a very high-power strike group that is optimized to do high-end exercises, high-end operations, specifically multi-carrier integrated operations. We do a really good job of you fly day, you fly night. We don't do as good a job of getting air wings to operate as a system, and that's what we need to begin to do. So this would provide a great deal of opportunity for the air wings to do multi-carrier operations. The maneuver force that has returned from a previous deployment in its quote-unquote sustainment phase, we would advocate that one of those two carriers would do an echo

deployment back out with the two that are underway for some portion of that time to do three-carrier integrated air wing. So you think about the number of fourth and fifth generation fighters that Chinese can put out several hundred miles. We're going to have to be able to fight multiple airwings as a system. We need a land-based way to prove that out, a virtualized way of doing that. But then we need to go to sea and be able to do that. The only way we're going to have the capacity to do that kind of practice is if we take those aircraft carriers out of the businesses of everyday forward presence and optimize them for this high-end practice and exercise. So how would you then change the training that our ships currently do to prepare for CSG operations?

I don't see that different for the maneuver force. The maneuver force stays in pretty much an OFRP-like readiness cycle and training cycle. And so I don't see the maneuver force changing that much. The big changes are in the deterrence force. So, Jared, one thing on that is that we would say that the Japan carrier would actually shift to maybe adopting an OFRP cycle, given this modification. Because in the Pacific, we'd say the carriers that are being combined to form this two-carrier group are going to be the Japan carrier. and then a carrier from the West Coast. So there may be an opportunity to shift the operating cycle of that Japan carrier to work

into this cycle. But if you do, if you add up the carriers on the West Coast plus Japan, that's six carriers, you should be able to have a two-carrier presence depending on how you manage the deployment cycles. Thanks. And then Brian Clark, how would the training and preparation for non-CSG units change? the training cycle is really basic phase where ships are kind of operating on their own and then integration starts to happen in the intermediate and advanced phases. So would you advocate for

cutting that at a certain point, or would you do the integration a different way where maybe some of those units start to integrate around one of the large deck amphibious ships? Right, right. So that's exactly what we're thinking. So in the deterrence force, you're going to adopt this FDNF operating model. So all of your non-CSG units, even those based on the U.S. West Coast, are going to move to this higher up-tempo model. So they would have this four-month training and maintenance phase before they move into their operational phase, during which they would train to operate in different force packages. So kind of like the FDNF units of today, you would have your basic phase and intermediate phase somewhat truncated from what

we see in the OFRP cycle. And then you've got your graduation exercise will be with whatever force package we want to have you be part of most of the time. So it may not be the large deck amphib, but that may be what some of the surface combatants combine around. Some of the surface combatants may do their graduation exercise as a SAG. Others may do it as a kind of a distributed force that's going to be operating independently. So there's going to be different Comp 2Xs, if you will, associated with different parts of the deterrence force based on kind of what we think they're going to do predominantly during their operational phase. Brian McGrath, you kind of answered my next question, why a two-carrier task force? You talked about what those carriers

run into when they start seeing just swarms of fourth and fifth generation fighters coming at them. So I'll alter my question a little bit, since we seem to have a common understanding of the why. What sort of infrastructural changes do you think need to be made to support the training for two carrier task forces operating at sea? Because obviously getting them underway all the time, it sounds great, but it also costs a lot of money. You think there's some fleet or some shoreside infrastructure that needs to be made to support that as well? The very first investment needs to be either out at Fallon or somewhere else. But if your listeners haven't seen the movie Ender's Game, not the book, the book's great, but seeing the movie. Get them to watch the movie and

get them to watch where the kids are, how they fight that fleet. Obviously, that's futuristic science fiction stuff. What I would like, though, is a virtualized training facility where multiple airwings and staffs could go and actually fight an integrated airwing digitally to figure out what are the first 50 muscle movements we need to do and do right and do right every time before we ever go out to sea and try to do those things so the very first infrastructure thing is is the training facility as for the whether they're going to i don't know i honestly don't know and i and i this is where we turn over to math people like brian to go figure out i don't know that over the course of five years, those aircraft carriers would be more underway under this approach than

they would have been under OFRP. I just don't know. I suspect maybe, but it wouldn't be a lot. And the other thing would be, I don't know that you would have 2.0 presence 100% of the time in the Indo-Asia Pacific. There may, in fact, be some gaps. That has to be worked out. The problem Brian and I tried to solve was there's not enough peanut butter for the bread, and it doesn't look like anybody's giving us any more peanut butter. So we have to figure out how to get more operational availability out of the forces we have and to better utilize them. So, I mean, I think about the deterrence force being out there, a deterrence force in the numbers and the numbers of missiles that they carry with the air and the strike and power projection of LHD, LHA. I think that what we have suggested is a more powerful day-to-day presence in the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean than we have today.

Period. End of story. I need somebody. I'd like to see somebody at N81 or whatever analytic organization prove me wrong. I'm like that guy sitting at the table in the corner, right? Prove me wrong. And I'd like to see that. Brian Clark, anything to add on that one? You look like you're about to chime in a couple of times.

So go ahead. Yes. I mean, I think the idea of live virtual constructive training as a mechanism to help prepare for these multi-carrier operations, that's a great idea. And we just saw an example with the large scale exercise where we just did this. So there shouldn't be any roadblocks that would prevent the Navy from being able to be able to train at this multi-carrier level virtually or constructively, and then go out to sea to be able to practice it. And this model would give you the ability to be able to practice it at sea more frequently than we do now, where we're going to do an LSE every three years, and we're going to do RIMPAC every couple of years. So this would give you a way so that every deployment you could do multi-carrier operations.

And in terms of the operational availability, if we have six carriers in the Pacific and we're looking to have a two-carrier presence, that means you need about 33% availability out of each one. Well, OFRP gives us 20, FD&F gives us 66, 67. So we should be able to work out a system where you can have the six carriers on the West Coast give you at least nearly 2.0 presence in the Indo-Pacific. And that means you'll have this training platform essentially available to you almost continuously, but you could augment it by having the live virtual constructive that are preparing folks to do these kinds of operations when they get to sea. And we'll let the carriers focus on these missions as opposed to what they do today, which is having to be a jack of all trades, doing FON ops and doing strike missions and doing withdrawals from Afghanistan all in the same deployment, which is great for the carrier. It just means that that's a lot more things they have to prepare for and limits their ability to prepare for the major power war that we might need them to really be able to deter. And Brian Clark, final question to you, what's the impact to shipyards and fleet maintenance from your proposal? There's going to be a need for more frequent and shorter maintenance periods.

So when you think about the FD&F operating model, it's about 67% operational and then 33% non-operational, which means those four-month periods when you're doing maintenance and training, that's when you got to get your work done on the ship. And those FD&F ships go and get maintenance every year during that period. It's less efficient, means you're opening up the ship to do maintenance on it every year, as opposed to doing it overly over two or three years, like we do today, depending on whether you're doing a C&O availability or some shorter availability, but we don't go into the ship at that level every year. So this would be expanding that to the rest of the surface combat fleet. So we've got to have enough throughput at the ship repair yards so that you can have a third of the, or I guess, you know, at this case, you know, a third of your

surface combatant fleet going through maintenance at any given time. And then the next third and the next third, you know, it's going to be kind of how it goes. So it'll be a lot more maintenance periods being done, but they're going to be shorter. So you can transition to that. I mean, there's no reason why we couldn't use the infrastructure of today to do it, but the transition period will be difficult because you're going to have this. Today, we've got these very long, infrequent maintenance periods, we're going to move to a system where we have shorter, more frequent maintenance periods. So we'll need to probably put some money into shipyard infrastructure, ship repair yard infrastructure to expand it, to accommodate this shift.

And then we'll have to pay the premium that's probably 15 to 20%, given that it's in CONUS, that's going to be more expensive to do maintenance because it's less efficient, because you're breaking open the ship more frequently instead of doing it once and then getting all your work done at one time. So there'll be some costs day to day. There'll be some costs up front. But the benefit is you get this huge increase in operational availability. And from a COCOM perspective, the more important, I think, from the COCOM perspective is not just they get more forces. It's that they're getting this more diversity of forces. So from the COCOM's perspective, I'm not just getting a CSG presence that I have to work with the Navy component

commander to figure out how to use. I'm getting this collection of surface combatants and amphibious ships that I can package in different ways as the combatant commander. And then you've got this maneuverable force that you can tap into if you need it to come do the high-end operations. So from the COCOM's perspective, it gives them a lot more options, which is really important if you're trying to deter a country like China, which has sort of trained itself to focus on the CSG model as its main opponent in a Taiwan-type scenario. I'll ask a follow-up that wasn't on here, but then would your plan, because we have talked about all of this through an Indo-Pacific lens, But would your plan be to transition this, the entire Navy over to this model here and do the same thing with the East Coast?

Or are we talking about basically splitting the models that we have? Yeah, so in the fleet architecture study from 2017, we did the entire, we did deterrence forces throughout the world. So we had deterrence forces in each theater using this FDNF operational model. I don't know that we found on the East Coast the benefit was significant in that if you do the FDNF operational model, the East Coast ships are close enough to Europe that they can go operate in Europe with only a week or so transit time, and it's very easy for them to be engaged there. So there's a lot of benefits to using this model on the East Coast because of the short transit time. You can really exploit what it provides you in terms of operational availability. So I would say if we can eventually get the maintenance infrastructure to support it, then definitely this would be a model worth pursuing fleet-wide. I don't know what Brian thinks, though. The maneuver force would remain in the Indo-Pacific, though. There wouldn't be an Atlantic maneuver force. I think that we've got to remember that what Brian and I have done was take an idea that we crafted along with some other really smart people. You should read their names on the report when you check the link that Jared puts in there.

But there was a considerably larger fleet that was suggested that could accommodate a global bifurcated force. I would like to move in that direction. I think that is a model that the Navy ought to be trying to do for the longer term. I think trying to do that for both fleets immediately or in the very near term, probably too big a lift. And also the utility may not be there just because in Europe, we have a lot of allies, right? So we've got European allies, we've got navies who are very focused on their near-term or their security concerns with regard to Russia. In a lot of ways, their capabilities are actually better for the Russian threat than ours are. So I think that it's less urgency to have an increased naval presence in Europe than there is in the Indo-Pacific. And I think we even said in the article that to support this idea of the maneuver and deterrence forces in the Pacific, we may even want to shift some ships from the East Coast to the West Coast to better accommodate the model

and then rely more on some allies in the East Coast or rather in the Atlantic and the European theater. Well, thank you very much for coming on today, gentlemen. Brian Clark, I'll start with you as we close it out here. Where can we find you and what are you working on next? We can find me at the Hudson Institute since I don't do social media. That's the only place you're going to find me. I'm working on right now a maritime air power study. So looking holistically at the Navy and Marine Corps aircraft portfolio, which I mean, when you think you step back and think about it is sort of it's sort of surprising that we still have this situation where you've got rotary wing that are very Navy focused, marine focused.

you've got land-based aircraft carrier-based aircraft and they all operate in their own tribes and own ecosystems and we don't bother to try to figure out how they work together so that's what that study is doing so that's the thing i'm writing right now and brian mcgrath where can we find you and what's your next project brian doesn't do social media but he's very active in anti-social media so you can find him there yes you can find me mostly popping off on twitter at cons wahoo i don't have anything any big projects uh right now i i it's hard enough to keep my clients happy uh and that's uh essentially what i'm doing i am going to germany in a week or two weeks gonna see power uh forum in keel i'm uh doing a couple panels there and that's something

i'm really looking forward to well thank you both for joining me to the listeners thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. We'll be right back.