Sea Control - Sea Control 301 - Task Force 59 with John "Fozzie" Miller and Ari Cicurel

Episode Date: December 12, 2021

Links1. “Fifth Fleet’s Task Force 59 is a Good Start,” by John W. Miller and Ari Cicurel, RealClearDefense, October 6, 2021.

Hey folks, Jared here. Today I'm joined by Vice Admiral Retired John Fossey-Miller and Ari Shikaral, and we're going to dive into their piece for Real Clear Defense, Fifth Fleet's Task Force 59 is a good start. This episode was edited and produced by Joshua Gruver, and speaking of editors, we're looking for some additional editors to add to our audio team. If you're interested, please email us at ccontrol at simsec.org with your resume. At SimSec, we believe victory in the maritime domain starts with great ideas communicated compellingly. right fight win beginning with giving tuesday going through december we're holding our annual right fight win holiday donation campaign to support simsec into the new year simsec's proud

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My guests today are Bice Admiral Retired John Miller and Ari Shikaral, and we're going to discuss an article that they've co-authored for Real Clear Defense entitled, Fifth Fleet's Task Force 59 is a Good Start. The gentleman, welcome. Admiral, I'm going to start with you. Could you please start by introducing yourself to our audience? Yeah, thanks for having us today, Jared. I'm retired Vice Admiral John Fossey Miller. My last job in the Navy, I spent about 36 and a half years in the Navy, but my last job was as the commander of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. And since I retired from the Navy, I've run a national security consulting business. Well, thank you, sir. And Ari, if you don't mind introducing yourself to the audience as well,

please. Thank you for having us. I'm Ari Chikorow. I'm a senior policy analyst at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, or JINSA, which is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank focused on American defense and strategic interests, particularly in the Middle East. Well, gentlemen, thank you again for joining us. As a reminder, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Admiral, I'm going to come to you with the first question is, you know, we say Task Force 59, nobody really understands, but I understand it because I used to work for Task Force 55 and you when I was in command over there. How was Fifth Fleet organized when you were in

command and how is Task Force 59 a departure from that organization? Well, the organization of Fifth Fleet today is not terribly different than the way it was organized when I was the Fifth Fleet commander. And so there are two organizational concepts behind the way the fleet works. One is it is functionally organized. So you worked for Task Force 55. That gave you a certain mission set revolving around maritime security and sea control. But we have other task forces that are involved in issues such as mine countermeasure, intelligence surveillance, and reconnaissance missions so we're in that sense uh we were then and are still today task organized uh but we're also geographically organized and so uh there were there were three combined task forces which is

a little bit larger unit they're generally headed up by a a flag officer uh one was ctf 152 which is an overall in charge of maritime security uh inside the gulf one was ctf 150 which was all of the other water that is the responsibility of NAVCENT. And that's from the Suez Canal all the way to the border between India and Pakistan and the border between Somalia and Kenya. So about two and a half million square miles of water. And then we had CTF-151, which was our counter piracy task force. So what we've done by adding CTF-59 is just added another task force. This one focused on unmanned vehicles. Now, the two of you detailed a number of instances in your piece here of Iranian aggression over the last few years to include an unmanned systems attack against USS

Mason, harassment of U.S. naval vessels, illegal seizure of shipping vessels. And then he wrote, and I quote, Iran's maritime attacks indicate its leadership believes the maritime domain is an ideal location to retaliate for Israel's interdiction of weapons proliferation in Syria and Lebanon, end quote. Why do you think the maritime domain is the right place for that retaliation? Well, I'll go ahead and start, then I'll turn it over to Ari. So interesting to consider the way Iran does business. This is a nation that since the revolution in 1979 has been a nation that has been under heavy sanctions from the United States, from the European Union, from the United Nations. And so they find it very difficult to procure weapons

and weapons systems in a way that other nations might be free to do. And so a lot of what they are able to accomplish, they have to do in-house. It's all in-house kind of work. And so they steal some technology, they receive some technology on the black market from places like North Korea, or they capture things and then and then reverse engineer them so that they can use them or they use systems that they already had in place during the revolution if you remember back to the time right before the revolution we were selling improved hawk surfaced air missiles f-14s f-4s f-5s uh you know we were providing the iranian government with with a lot of uh military equipment. And they still operate that equipment. And this is equipment that hasn't been supported

by the U.S. or other countries since 1979. So it's a difficult task that they face in order to provide for their defense and in order to conduct the sort of malign activities that they've become quite infamous for. The maritime environment is a great environment for them in that regard. They have thousands of small craft, fast inshore attack craft. So think of these as sports boats that you drive around San Francisco Bay or the Chesapeake Bay, but they're fast and they put RPGs on them. They put machine guns on them. They potentially are able to rig them up to operate autonomously as suicide boats. So they pack them up with explosives and it's relatively inexpensive. And these are things that are available on the commercial market to Iran and

to anyone else. And so they have had a history since the revolution of being very active in the maritime environment. In some ways, it gives them an opportunity to be less visible. And so they can conduct these sort of asymmetric attacks by placing limpet mines that magnetically attach to the side of a ship and then remotely detonate them. And it's hard to pinpoint the fact that that's Iranian malign activity. And so that's why that's important to them. Plus, of course, the Gulf itself is the transit point for a good portion of the oil in the world and gas that is transported via maritime means. And so they can have an impact on the global economy and therefore have an impact on how the globe thinks about them and considers what their activities are all about.

Now, having said all that, I'll turn it over to Ari. I know he's got some interesting views on this. Thank you, Admiral. Yeah, I think that covered a lot of the issues. If you're looking at Iran's perspective, and I think it's important to point out that when we talk about right place or wrong place for attacks, we're really talking about what Tehran and the IRGC considers to be the best place for them to exert pressure on the United States, its partners, and target U.S. interests in the region. Obviously, none of it's acceptable, and the U.S. needs to take actions to deter Iranian aggression, which I'm sure we'll discuss in the conversation. But one of the reasons that Iran is targeting in the maritime domain is because Israel has conducted hundreds

of airstrikes on Iran's efforts to proliferate weaponry to its partners in Syria and Lebanon, which Israel has called its campaign between the wars. Israel has been successful in interdicting many of those weapons. But skirmishes between Israel and Iran escalated in April with alleged Iranian attacks on Israeli-owned and operated cargo ships. Israel retaliated against Iranian military vessels. Israel primarily targeted ships that were illicitly transporting oil, But there were also Israeli attacks on Iranian ships carrying weapons as well. But just for one example, Iran's attack on the Mercer Street this past summer shows that it feels less constrained or deterred to attack Israeli operated vessels and vessels operated by American partners than it does to attack Israel directly after Israel conducts airstrikes in Syria and Lebanon

on Iranian weapons proliferation. One of the reasons that they may feel this is because besides deploying submarines, Israel has limited ability to unilaterally project power into the waterways that Iran conducts these attacks near itself in the Arabian Peninsula. This fact underscores the importance of developing maritime coalitions with U.S. partners, like Bahrain, who has recently agreed to partner with Task Force 59, but also with Israel. So what is Task Force 59? Task Force 59 is a great idea, and as we titled the article, it's a good start. So this is a task force that is designed to attract unmanned vehicles to the region. And those are air vehicles, surface vehicles, subsurface vehicles. So the whole spectrum across all the domains

having unmanned vehicles concentrated in a particular task force. I think it's important to point out that the Fifth Fleet area of responsibility has for a very long time been a place that is very receptive to experimentation. And so when I go back to the time that I was there, and that was six years ago when I left, during the time I was there, we accepted mine hunting units, which are unmanned surface vessels that tow a fish, if you will, that's designed to find mines in the water. And it does that unmanned. And the idea behind that was to take the sailors out of the minefield and keep the equipment in there so that it was safer for us to search for mines. In addition to that, we took on the Mark 18, which is another

torpedo-like looking device that's unmanned that goes out and looks for mines and does surface or bottom searches so that we understand what's on the bottom, in particular lanes in the Gulf, so that we know it's safe to sail there. Both of those were experimental programs, and they've been in the Fifth Fleet in both cases now for almost a decade. Another example is the BAMS, the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance Demonstrator. So this was a Global Hawk unmanned airplane that was modified for the maritime environment. They came out to do about a five or six week experiment about a dozen years ago.

They're still there. And if you remember last spring, the Iranians shot down one of our unmanned airplanes. That's it was one of the BAMS aircraft that got shot down. So it's a great place for experimentation. So standing up a task force that is designed to attract unmanned vehicles, whether they're airborne, operate on the surface or operate under sea, is a good way to further that spirit of experimentation that Fifth Fleet is known for. And it's an opportunity to sort of jumpstart into the fleet at an operational level in a place that's very busy, various different vehicles that might prove out to be successful. I think most people are aware we're in the middle of an explosion of unmanned, or I like to think of them as optionally manned vehicles. So you can put people actually on board the craft or you can operate them as unmanned. Doesn't mean there's not a person in the loop.

In every case, there is a person in the loop. It just means that the vehicle itself might or might not happen to have people on it. But this is a very good way to sort of jumpstart that effort to find companies that have ideas that want to prove out the viability of their product or platform by sending it to Fifth Fleet and putting it into CTF-59. Well, that leads directly to my next question. What platforms do you expect to be associated with Task Force 59? What additional capabilities do you expect the task force to gain? Harry, I defer to you. This is somewhat an area, I think, of your expertise. Thank you. So we've already seen the task force has had its first training exercise on October 20th, in which it operated alongside Bahrain. And during the exercise, it was deploying new man-portable tactical autonomous systems, the Mantis T-12 variant. It's an unmanned surface

vessel that operated alongside U.S. patrol craft and Bahrain vessels as well. According to NAVCENT, The exercise was conducting maritime patrol, search and rescue, mine warfare, naval fleet security, surveillance. So these are all the capabilities that unmanned systems can bring without having crew on board or, as Admiral Miller pointed out, optionally having crew on board. And I think it's important to note that deploying the unmanned systems or optimally manned systems aren't an end state of itself. The objective is to expand the capabilities for the Fifth Fleet. So in our article, we also pointed out some other systems, specifically the unmanned surface vehicles, Sea Hunter and Seahawk, which can patrol without human guidance to avoid hitting obstacles. The MQ-9B Sea Guardian, which is the maritime domain variant of the Reaper drone. The MQ-8B Fire Scout Autonomous Helicopter as well, which would provide reconnaissance, situational awareness, aerial fire support in the maritime domain.

Unmanned craft work alongside manned counterparts to perform missions. And it's important that the task force expand the capabilities of the Fifth Fleet by being able to operate in environments that would put crewed craft potentially in danger from Iranian or other adversary watercraft, such as fast attack watercraft or drones. Do you think creating a new 06 command was strictly necessary? Couldn't these platforms have been folded into, say, CTF-55s commanded by the destroyer squadron commander in the Gulf? Well, what I think we're going to find over time, Jared, is that once these vessels have an opportunity, these various vehicles, an opportunity to prove themselves, they're going to move into other purpose-driven task forces. So a good example might be the Triton, which is an unmanned aircraft. It's the Navy's own designed from the beginning as a Navy surveillance craft and designed to be unmanned and to augment the P-8 surveillance craft that we use today. Those vehicles are coming into service in the fleet now, and they won't be part of Task Force 59. They'll be part of the surveillance task force that already operates the PH and the BAMS demonstrator that I mentioned earlier.

And I think what we will find over time is that we won't have an unmanned task force. So we won't have a CTF-59. We'll have stood it up. It will have served its purpose to attract capability into the region. And then that capability will go into mine countermeasures, sea control, maritime surveillance, all of the various traditional missions that Fifth Fleet is performing today and has performed since its inception. So what this really serves to do is to create the excitement and the draw and to open up the market of good ideas to various companies. And there are lots of different companies that are that are busy building unmanned vehicles of every kind. And so if you can surveil something with a Triton and do that for an extended period of time without having people on board the aircraft, it has a smaller footprint.

It's stealthier. It has greater persistence and it operates at a lower cost. And so bringing those systems into an operational theater, finding out what works well, what needs to be modified, what's not going to work at all, is a good idea. But at the end of the day, if I look forward, say, a decade from now, I don't think we have a Task Force 59 that's focused on unmanned. We have all of our unmanned surface, subsurface, and airborne vehicles in the appropriate functionally driven task forces that exist today. And Ari, I'll come to you to start with the next question, Admiral, if you want to add on to it. Obviously, that's your priority. How do you see CTF-59 developing and evolving, Ari?

Building on what Admiral Miller was just saying, I think the ultimate objective is to not have a Task Force 59 in the long term, to integrate the systems within the rest of the Fifth Fleet. But I also think, as Admiral Miller pointed out earlier, that the Fifth Fleet has been a point of experimentation, and that Task Force 59 could be an excellent model for other regions to develop similar task forces that fit their theater of operations and their threats, particularly the Sixth Fleet, where obviously Turkey is an ally, but they have a widespread drone program that is also being proliferated. Also in the Indo-Pacific, China has a widespread drone program and developing a similar task force in the Indo-Pacific theater could help develop

capabilities to deal with Chinese threats as well. If I can just add on to that two points. One, I want to really highlight what Aries just said about the fact that the effort in unmanned or optionally manned vehicles is important in Fifth Fleet, but it's also important all around the world. And if you think about just having, let's say, an unmanned subsurface vehicle that can deliver supplies throughout the Pacific region, the Indo-Pacific region, and use that for a logistics effort, that's obviously a wonderful thing because the Indo-Pacom region is huge. And so the more you can put into unmanned that you don't have to crew, you don't have to feed itself, you just let it travel from port to port, picking up and delivering supplies, that's a force multiplier in and of itself. And so there's a great market across the globe and many, many nations, including the United States, China, Russia, and Iran, as this is the last point I want to make, are involved in building autonomous vehicles.

When I just look at the period of 2012 to 2015, when Jared, you and I were out there in the Gulf, essentially the Iranians had no capability in 2012 with respect to unmanned airborne vehicles. And by the time I left in 2015, they were flying surveillance drones, unmanned aircraft over the Gulf on a daily basis. And so they, even though they are a country that's heavily sanctioned and find it very difficult to develop new capability because of those sanctions, they've made leaps and bounds progress in unmanned aerial vehicles and in unmanned surface vehicles. And we saw some of those unmanned surface vehicles being used by their proxies in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. We saw unmanned airborne vehicles in the attack on the Aramco facilities. So they are not only developing them, they're using them, they're lending them to their proxies and putting them to work in nefarious ways. And that's going to continue. And so part of what Task Force 59 does is it helps us counter and thwart the unmanned efforts that are ongoing by the Iranians.

Thanks, sir. I want to ask one follow up that we hadn't discussed previously, but Ari's point sort of highlighted this. And then you emphasize it again is experimenting with this in Fifth Fleet, but then exporting it to the other combatant commanders. The Pacific initially doesn't seem to be analogous to the Fifth Fleet. But if you break it down from this gigantic theater into sort of micro theaters and spaces, smaller spaces, I think a lot of it fits in. In particular, a lot of this unmanned technology and capability you talked about would seem to fit with the Marine Corps sort of expeditionary advanced space operations that they're experimenting with here. Do you see Task Force 59 as a testbed for some of those concepts going forward? I think Task Force 59 will be a testbed for some of these concepts. But those concepts are also being developed and experimented in other theaters and in other venues, including the large scale exercise that the Navy and the Marine Corps most recently conducted.

So as people may be aware, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, right from his initial Commandant's planning guidance a couple of years ago to the force guidance that he most recently published, is very interested in integrating the naval force, the Navy and the Marine Corps. And, of course, the Coast Guard, which is already out in Bahrain with a force of six patrol craft, and they're replacing their older patrol craft with newer national security patrol craft. So there's an effort to reintegrate the Marine Corps after a long period of time where it operated more like a second army than the Marine Corps because it was busy doing operations in Afghanistan and in Iraq. but to reintegrate them back into the to the fleet and so if you look at a place like the Indo-PACOM region the opportunity to operate the naval force the navy and the marine corps together in the littorals in the first or second island chains and to have advanced expeditionary bases or expeditionary advanced bases I'm sorry to have them and utilize them for sea control missions is certainly viable. And so supporting those and providing them with

the firepower they need will most certainly include unmanned or optionally manned vehicles. And so there's an opportunity to experiment with it in the Fifth Fleet, which is, as people are aware, a very active part of the world because it's the Middle East and it just seems to have to be that way. But experiment with it there and then from that determine, okay, where do we utilize this? How do we utilize it in other theaters? Thank you, gentlemen. Unfortunately, that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guests, Vice Admiral Retired John Miller and Ari Chickerell. Ari, we'll start with you. Where can we find you online and what's your next project? Thank you for having us. You can find all of my work at JINSA's website at

jinsa.org, or I also tweet from my Twitter handle at A-R-I-C-I-C-U-R-E-L, and I'm continuing to research and work on Iranian drones and their proliferation of weaponry. Thanks. And Admiral, where can we find you and what are you working on next? You can find me at fazi, F-O-Z-I-E, at fazimiller.com. And, you know, we're going to continue to work on national security issues, in particular maritime security issues, but especially in the Arabian Gulf region. Well, thank you again for joining us, gentlemen. To listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. I walked up to the far-oom counter.

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