Sea Control - Sea Control 306 - Covert Logistics with Chris Booth

Episode Date: January 2, 2022

Links1. “The Modern Shetland Bus: The Lure of Covert Maritime Vessels for Great-Power Competition,” by Chris Booth, War on the Rocks, December 29, 2020.2. “Mules: Recommitting to Pack Animals Across the Spectrum of Armed Conflict,” by Chris Booth, Small Wars Journal, May 19, 2021.3. “Unfurl the Banners: Privateers and Commerce Raiding of China’s Merchant Fleet in Developing Markets,” by Chris Booth and Walker Mills, War on the Rocks, February 18, 2021.4. “Pierre Sprey, Pentagon Analyst Who Battled Brass to Produce A-10 Warplane, Dies at 83,” by Matt Schudel, The Washington Post, August 20, 2021.5. Sea Control 288: Chinese Civilian Shipping and the Threat to Taiwan with Tom Shugart, CIMSEC, October 28, 2021.6. “Pack Animals – The German Mountain Infantry Brigade,” NATO, February 18, 2019.7. “Overcome the Tyranny of Distance,” by Chris Booth, USNI Proceedings (December 2020).8. “Give Amphibians a Second Look,” by Walker Mills and Dylan Philips-Levine, USNI Proceedings, December 2020.9. “Bring Back the Seaplane,” by David Alman, War on the Rocks, July 1, 2020.10. “Cocaine Logistics for the Marine Corps,” by Walker Mills, Dylan Philips-Levine and Collin Fox, War on the Rocks, July 22, 2020.11. “Modern Sea Monsters: Revisiting Wing in Ground Effect Aircraft for the Next Fight,” by Walker Mills, Joshua Taylor and Dylan Philips-Levine, USNI Proceedings, September 2020.

Happy New Year, people. Jared here. We have Walker hosting guest Chris Booth today with an episode on covert logistics that was edited and produced by William McQuiston. Speaking of audio editors, we're looking to add to our 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. Write, fight, win. Beginning with Giving Tuesday, going through December, we are holding our annual Write, Fight, Win holiday donation campaign to support SimSec into the new year. SimSec's proud to say, since our founding, our content has been free and always will be. Especially as more websites build paywalls or pursue intrusive advertising, we hope those in the SimSec community who value our free, no-ad model will consider supporting us with monthly donations.

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. Welcome back aboard the Sea Control Podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. Today we're talking with Chris Booth, a career national security professional and former U.S. Army officer. We're going to be talking about two of his recent articles on logistics, the modern Shetland bus, the lure of covert maritime vessels for great power competition that was published in War on the Rocks, and Mules, the AK-47 of logistics, recommitting to pack animals across the spectrum of conflict that was published in Small Wars Journal. Chris, welcome aboard. Can you introduce yourself a bit more formally to our listeners?

Hey, Walker. Thanks for hosting me. Yeah, you kind of hit the high points on my background, but I'd say as a foreign service officer, I've served overseas in a variety of locations, particularly in the CENTCOM AOR and more recently some time in the INDOPACOM. And so I've had an opportunity to work closely with U.S. Mil on multiple war zones. As an interagency student, I recently was able to attend the Marine Corps Command and Staff College and was a distinguished graduate, which I like to pat myself on the back for that a little bit as a non-Marine civilian. But it was just a really phenomenal opportunity at school. I got to be a Gray Scholar and probably most relevant to this discussion was a Barrows Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center, where we focused for the year on great power competition. So overseas, I've spent a lot of time assisting foreign partners in capacity building.

And I think probably all those different experiences help focus my interest on the topics that we're going to discuss today, the Shetland bust, using mules or pack animals as logistic enablers in future conflict. I should note that Chris and I also know each other. So this isn't the first time that we're getting together and we've written a couple of articles together and hopefully we have some more coming. And I should also note that we like to consider ourselves at SimSec friends of the Krulak Center. And the last thing I'll note before we start is that I'd like to remind our listeners that the opinions presented here are solely our own and shouldn't be taken as representative of any institutions that we're associated with. I want to start with your essay on the Shetland bus. Tell us a little bit about that. What is the Shetland bus? What is the Shetland bus and why is it relevant today?

That's a good question. It was a program that was set up by the British because kind of organically these Norwegian fishermen started sailing to the Shetland Isles in the north coast of Great Britain. and originally they were just kind of bringing some refugees and things out of occupied Norway and the British decided to kind of capitalize on that and start using it as a logistics method to bring stuff back to Norway as well as exfil people and so between 1941 to 1945 these Norwegian fishermen sailing just basic fishing boats that were 50 to 70 feet in length and about 18 feet They brought out or they brought in 400 tons of arms and explosive equipment to establish 60 covert radio transmitters and smuggled assets and agents in and out of Norway. They sailed over 90,000 miles during that time, and the whole time, they never had more than 150 men involved in it, which were supported by two British military officers, three NCOs, three cooks, and a cipher. That's it.

So it's kind of amazing, really, how small and lean they kept it. They primarily sailed in the winter months and in darkness, which is also pretty amazing when you think about it. The British concluded that that was the best way to stay safe was to take advantage of the concealment that was provided by bad weather from German pickets and German aircraft, but it wound up being pretty powerful in terms of what they were able to do. I think a good example of just like an individual delivery was one in September 1941, where the fishing boat Siglaus delivered eight tons of cargo for sabotage, including high explosives with primers and detonators, various fuses, quantity of incendiary explosives and hand grenades. also brought weapons including automatic pistols, knuckle dusters, rubber truncheons, and fighting knives. So that kind of gives you an idea of sort of their initial capacity. They did do some other more specialized things. They had an opportunity where they changed a boat around to allow it to drop mines off. That was sort of a mixed success. They used it sort of not incidentally, but in a

supporting role for the attack on the heavy water plant in Norway, where they were able to exfil the leader of that operation when he was in need of medical attention. One of the other kind of more interesting operations they did was they tried to conduct an attack on the Tirpitz, which was the sister ship to the Bismarck, which was basically being held hiding in a Norwegian fjord. And the British had a whole lot of resources dedicated in case that thing tried to break out. So one of these fishing vessels towed two underwater delivery systems called chariots underneath the boat. And both those were supposed to carry two frogmen to basically put limpet mines against the battleship. And it was a really complex operation

that involves multiple fake documents and a three-month itinerary, and they got within five miles of the Tirpitz, and strong currents and bad weather broke the cables, and they lost the underwater submersibles they had, so that was unsuccessful, but that was kind of an example of some of the more unique or specs that they tried to undertake with it. You know, I was struck when I read your article the first time, you know, just kind of fascinating this idea of covert maritime logistics. And it actually reminded me of this book. I think it was called Snow Treasure that I read as a kid about smuggling out the Norwegian Royal Bullion through kids and then ultimately through this fishing network. So maybe that's connected,

maybe not. I want to kind of shift now to how does this tie to modern great power competition, like you've got that in the title. And some of our listeners will remember other podcasts we've done where we talk about maritime logistics. So why now? What connects the Shetland bus and that covert maritime logistics network to issues that we're facing today? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great question. And obviously, I don't know any more than anyone else does in what great power conflict might look like. But I think there's some basic things that we can kind of assume. If you look at Chinese doctrine, Russian as well, there's a huge information warfare component. And a lot of that is, I think they recognize that an advantage the

United States has is like our use of satellites for gaining intelligence, for communications, for precision guided weapons. And so both the Russians and the Chinese have invested heavily in a lot of counter space, weapon systems, GPS jamming, looks like the kill chain and others really are focused on the fact that anything that has a signature can be struck. And so anything that appears to be U.S. military equipment, military logistics, military vessels, you know, if it can be identified, it's going to be struck. And I think that we really need to find ways to make things more survivable. I think another thing that adversaries have learned, you know, since the Gulf War really is allowing the United States to build up logistics, to build up, you know,

the Iron Mountain is going to be to their detriment. So the goal really is to start and initiate any kind of war when they have an advantage and before we can really build up. And so I think something like a Shetland bus and later when we talk about mules, it's kind of low tech, but it's one of those things that might help hide in the noise and cause difficulty on the adversary's part in terms of being able to identify readily a signature. I think Pierre Spray, who recently died, was one of John Boyd's acolytes. He was a bureaucratic infighter in the Pentagon and is probably primarily known as one of the big proponents of the A-10. And he said, not all simple, low cost weapons work, but war winning weapons are

almost always simple. And I'm not saying that either of the things that I'm proposing are war winning, but I think that they're simple. And, you know, a tendency in the U.S. is to always look for a technological solution to everything. Even in World War II, we did that. Paul Fussell had a great book about World War Two, and he contrasted how the United States put its effort on like the Air Corps in our strategic bombing and contrasted it to like the German focus on putting your best troops in the infantry and basically allowing them to have mission command and how successful they really were to the end of the war, because they not only had good training an initiative, but they had put their biggest effort and their best forces there, which was

kind of the opposite of what we do. And we, we, you know, maybe it's just US culture, but we just tend to think we can come up with a technological solution to too many things. Similarly, in Vietnam, there was this idea that we could hang these things called people sniffers outside of a helicopter, and they're going to be able to find troop concentrations in the jungle. And that was quickly defeated by the NVA and the Viet Cong who would urinate in big cans and hang that stuff out there and that would throw off the sensors. So I think in competing against a sophisticated adversary like we are, we're going to have to get away from some of the typical trends that lead to stuff like, you know, what you're reading about of we're going to have just-in-time

delivery from drones. They're going to be able to GPS drop shipments to Marines in the second island chain. I mean, that would be great if it works, but given the fact that the enemy has basically told us that they're going to seek to knock out our satellites and damage our ability to use things like GPS, I think low-tech methods may work better. And that was sort of my premise of coming up with something like the Shetland bus. I'm really kind of struck by how well that fits with some of the things, some of the trends I think we're seeing in the Marine Corps as we shift to EABO, Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.

And I think the Commandant has certainly messaged that logistics and how we're going to support that, whether you call it inside force or stand in force, is one of the big, I think, still question marks all the way up to headquarters Marine Corps, right? So we're kind of thinking about how do you make a force? We know what we want it to do. We have a decent idea of how the force is going to look, but how do you sustain it? And it looks kind of like what we may see is this push for cheaper or more risk-worthy

platforms, which it sounds like the Shetland bus was an example of both. So how would a modern Shetland bus look like in the Western Pacific? The good thing is that we already have a lot of units that are engaged with foreign partners that could just kind of easily add this to their tasks. I'm thinking of like Marine Raider logisticians are already basically tasked with seeking non-traditional sources supply and 21st century foraging, and they're out there partnering a lot. Some of the naval special warfare is everywhere from East Africa to the Pacific, working with various maritime units, and not necessarily even the ones that you immediately think of. I mean, in one case, these special warfare combat craft

crewmen, the SWCC crews, were working not only with the Kenyan Navy, but also like the Wildlife Service, the Coast Guard, Maritime Police. All those are people that potentially could help identify vessels. And I think also, you know, just people that are actually in the industry, like fishing crews and some of the smaller maritime craft, what I would propose is really identify crews, identify vessels, track and know where they are, and have kind of coordinated in advance the plan to utilize some of these forces if the balloon went up. I think this is something that Indo-PACOM could kind of keep running track of or different units could keep track of. In many cases, I think some of the locals are already opposed to say the Chinese, you know, Vietnamese

fishing crews are already probably alienated by some of the ways the Chinese are squeezing them out in the South China Sea and just some of the high-handed behavior to Filipinos, etc. And besides patriotic motives, one of the reasons that the Norwegian fishermen and sailors contributed to the original Shetland buses they got paid really well and so talking to a crew and identifying their their willingness to cooperate in a conflict ahead of time with the idea that hey you know we'll pay whatever might be beneficial and it could really be a mixed crew I mean in the Shetland bus scenario it is actually always Norwegian they never had any British officers on board. The idea being that, you know, really there are only two British officers to begin with

engaged. So if they had gotten captured, that could be detrimental. But I don't think that that would have to be the model used here. I think you could certainly have Marines, you could have SEALs, you could have really anybody that was engaged in it. And I think just looking at it, the scale of how many vessels out there is really kind of remarkable. I mean, the Japanese fishing vessels registered in 2017, there were 224,575 vessels, 95% of which were less than 10 tons. Similarly, in 2017, the Philippines self-reported to the Regional Fisheries Policy Network that they had 157,494 motorized vessels of three gross tons or less and 3,473 licensed vessels of greater than three tons. So there's a lot out there. I mean, if you're looking to

hide in the noise, it's there. And a counter might be, well, how much can you trust some of these crews? The fact that we're looking out there is going to come to the adversary's attention. You know, that's not necessarily a bad thing, because if Chinese intelligence wants to spend all its time trying to track down which fishing boats we may use to deliver supplies at some point that means they're not focused on something probably more significant I mean if they're chasing ghosts that also solves some purpose so I don't think there's a disadvantage in having it known that this is something we're pursuing and I also think it's interesting I mean the Chinese themselves are looking for some non-traditional platforms in the last year we've seen them do

stuff like test firing rockets from a freighter's deck. So they too are looking at what's going to provide a different signature, what's not going to register to ISR that we typically are going to be looking for. So I think there's a benefit of doing it. And I think even if it never gets used, the influence, the positive influence of having U.S. forces operating in the Pacific, Working with locals, having a positive engagement with everybody from coast guards to shipping port operators really only benefits us, particularly in, you know, sort of that narrative conflict that we're having. And I think that there's a lot of people already primed to dislike the Chinese and what the Chinese are doing with Belt and Road and just kind of this arrogance that they often present in a lot of these countries. And so this engagement, which is low cost, may pay dividends for developing allies that we might need if we do have any kind of conflict in the area. I think that's particularly important that it's a by, with, and through kind of proposal, right?

You know, and it brings me back to this, this kind of myth of the empty battlefield, I guess you could say, you know, this idea that we're going to be potentially we would be in conflict with somebody or fighting somebody, and there's not going to be anybody else there. But the reality is that the Western Pacific is absolutely full of all different types of vessels and people doing all different kinds of things. you know and how could we maybe leverage that and you know you mentioned that the PLAN is also working on this we just did a podcast with Thomas Shugart talking about how they're potentially using ferries for for amphibious operations which was which is really interesting so I want to kind of pivot and ask you about mules now which seems like a really different kind of kind of thing but you made the argument that it's a related idea and a related concept so can you tell us a little bit more about that and and what you wrote about yeah let me make one last point because i i think what you said was interesting just thinking about how everything's

going to be operating in the pacific it's not an empty battlefield i think that's absolutely true and i think we should look at things too like look at the taliban did those guys most of them fight all the time no i mean there were plenty that did it as a part-time you know side hustle Right. And so some of those fishermen and people operating in the South China Sea, they may not be able to do their regular job transporting cargo or operating ferries because there's a conflict. So they may be open to the idea of helping us out. So I think you raise a really interesting point on that. So talking about mules, I kind of want to say mules, but also a little bit broader pack animals. and how is that connected? I think it kind of fits in with what we're talking about of low signature and being able to be a logistics connector or enabler in a high-intensity

conflict. Something like the EABO model, you're going to often have these units basically isolated and potentially cut off behind the A2D2 curtain. And so they may not be able to be easily resupplied or able to rely on things like mechanized transportation, particularly in some of the places that they're going to operate because there just isn't that infrastructure or road network. And they also don't really want to sit there and raise their profile by operating on roads and highways where they can be struck. So in that case, you need something that can operate,

that doesn't require fuel or spare parts, that can operate all weather and mules and pack animals really do a good job on that kind of thing and historically they were excellent in some of these places like New Guinea and Burma and the Philippines and so they've already operated in some of the places that we're talking about but provided that we have built mule or pack animal network into the structure of our units it'll be there, which is kind of the point with the Shetland bus too. This isn't something that you can kind of just impromptu do once war starts. You really kind of have to invest ahead of time and have given it some thought. If you thought about what would be kind of the ideal way to

integrate mules back into the force, right? Because they were, and pack animals generally, because they were leveraged in the past. I mean, have you thought about that? What's the kind of capacity we have to bring them back? Yeah, so that's a good question. I mean, I don't think that every unit is going to have mules. It's just not realistic. And it doesn't really make any sense. But I do think that like right now, this test bed that the Marines have this littoral regiment that they're testing out could be a good, you know, situation where they can see, hey, does this work? Does it actually make any difference? There are two schools right now that do teach animal packing run by the Marines and by Army Special Forces. But the

problem is that they just really don't have a whole lot of throughput. You know, they're not producing that many graduates. And, you know, I make the point in my article, if you sent an army soldier through like air assault school, are you going to trust that person five years later to sling, you know, a load for a helicopter if they haven't been practicing or they're not in a unit where they're using it? I mean, you're not. And so you really, I think, could benefit right now from setting up some of these units and see how they operate. There's a video I recommend people checking out called Pack Animals, the German Mountain Infantry Brigade. It's a NATO video that you can find on YouTube. And it shows the last mule unit that the Germans are operating.

And I mean, when you think German military, if nothing else, you got to think that they tend to be pretty technologically advanced, and yet they still maintain a mule unit. And I think it's a good introduction to how they're using them. There's a guy in there who probably has spent too much time around the mules, but it's also a good example. I mean, really, historically, the mules that have been most effective are the ones that people work with. I think setting up sort of some dedicated logistics units that have not only handlers trained in how to how to pack out mules properly as well as some farriers or blacksmiths you know that can keep them in good stead they basically can really go continuously i think an interesting

historical analogy or not analogy but anecdote was in one of the last army campaigns against the indians when they were chasing geronimo a cavalry unit chased him and his band for 2 000 miles and most of the troops had to be replaced over that time but the mules averaged at least 30 miles a day under heavy pack foraging just off of local grasses so that's pretty amazing and on average I think you know obviously the high point was the uh the American Indian Wars but they averaged 320 pound load for 30 miles and sometimes you know 60 to 80 miles a day and so So that's a that's a pretty significant benefit, I think, or force multiplier in what you're able to haul. I really appreciated your point about the German military, and we'll try to post a link to that video.

You know, in some of my reading, I've found that the German military through the entire Second World War, you know, normally you think about the Blitzkrieg and the panzers and the tanks ran to a really high degree on pack animals. mostly horses instead of mules. And it was much less mechanized overall than the British army or the US army. When the Wehrmacht invaded Russia, they brought with them over 600,000 horses. So basically, the Panzer divisions were motorized and mechanized, but infantry divisions relied on horses through the end of the war, which kind of blows my mind because you associate it with this fast-moving, mechanized style of warfare. You know, even more recently, our covert support to the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s, almost all that was born by mules. And it's pretty fascinating. I mean, obviously, some of the money was being spent by the Saudis, and you get into whatever,

you know, it was Pakistani or Chinese weapons or whatever, but the logistics of the United States, And it's pretty crazy. Most of these mules were bred in Tennessee and shipped really halfway around the world to basically take all these supplies from Karachi into Afghanistan. And they needed a steady supply because, among other things, some of the Mujahideen in the dish eating the mules may have mistreated them and had abnormal relations with the mules so that they didn't want to work after a while. But the Soviet Hind helicopters had a bounty on going after these mule trains because the Soviets saw it as like that impactful, really, in terms of the support that the Mujahideen were getting that they set out deliberately to try and find and kill these mule trains. So that's still a fairly recent historical example. And in the 1980s, even the Army set up a mule committee to study whether or not we should bring back mules. And in particular, we're looking at them for use in some of the secret wars in Latin America. It is a capability that is often underappreciated, but I'll go back to guerrilla warfare theorist and noted T-shirt icon Che Guevara, who said that mules in covert transport, that well-trained guerrilla muleteers and their mule teams could create regular four-footed armies of unbelievable effectiveness. So even he recognized kind of the power of mules. Kind of as a conclusion, I want to ask, what other unconventional or innovative logistics do you think are out there? And I'm also kind of baiting you because I know you've written about seaplanes. And actually, for the audience, Chris and I, myself writing with some friends, both had articles about seaplanes or amphibious planes published in USNI Proceedings in the same month. So this is your bait to talk about seaplanes.

yeah yeah i mean it wound up being kind of interesting because it was like a bookend and somebody else had one in in war on the rocks that preceded us i guess by publication but it's interesting that we all sort of had the same train of thought you know i don't know that it fits in in this situation but i i've seen that socom is uh considering making amphibious versions of the c-130 which would be good but i do think that something needs to be developed that might have less of a signature again, right? I mean, a C-130 is pretty obvious, but I think if you built a seaplane on the basis of being able to carry a load, but also have a low radar signature, you could build stuff out of some of these polymers, similar to some of the UAVs and

things that are being built. There's some work being done on solar-powered aircraft, and I think it could be a method really to help resupply some of the forces eabo again because i'd like to study history in the 1950s the navy had studied the concept of kind of these seaplane dispersed seaplane units that stayed out at sea and then periodically were resupplied and carried on you know they were going to carry nuclear weapons so it ultimately was scrapped but this is something that we could consider. I mean, having seaplanes that are dispersed, that have various tender ships, maybe like a Shetland bus or something, or, you know, submarines, or you could set up FARPs underwater that they can have cached ahead of time so that they're staying dispersed,

hard to find, low signature, but are available as a logistics enabler is something kind of how I envisioned it and then again as a historical lesson it was interesting most people don't know and I didn't know until I read about it that there was a second Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor where they they had done something like this they had kept some sea planes off at an atoll and they had had them resupplied by submarine and they launched two of these to bomb Pearl Harbor interestingly the submarine that was like an advanced picket that was supposed to provide them some weather data had been sunk prior to them taking off so they didn't have a good picture of of what the conditions were like in hawaii so when they got there it was clouded in and so the bombs

were harmlessly you know they missed the targets uh so that was a downside but in terms of a capacity or a capability you know i think it kind of validates under wartime that you could do something like that so i agree it's an interesting uh an interesting situation there's probably a lot of different logistics uh methods we haven't thought about you and some others have written about like the cocaine logistics with your semi-submersible vessels i think that's something that might have some promise and it's certainly interesting yeah i think the the point on sea planes or amphibious aircraft is really well taken you mean you mentioned the the essay that came out on board on the rocks by david allman and i think he actually just published a second one so we're

going to try to get him on the him on the podcast as well to give us his uh his take on amphibious aircraft i've advocated also for wing and ground effect aircraft you know that have to stay a little bit lower but then they can carry a higher payload and maybe stay below radar horizons or something like that we're just about out of time for today but before we go i just want to ask you if you're if you're working on any writing now and where if anywhere our our listeners can find you online? Great question. I have two book reviews coming up. I've also, uh, submitted to a few essay, uh, contests. So hopefully one of those will get picked and then maybe we can discuss that in the future. And I also have written a chapter in a book that professor, uh,

Chris Harmon wrote, who is, uh, the Donald Bren chair of great power competition from the Brulak Center again. I wrote a chapter for him in his book on proxies and proxy forces on the United Wa State Army, which I'll admit I didn't really know much about until I served in South Asia, but they are one of the world's largest drug producers. They used to be in heroin, now they're in synthetics, and they also have about 35,000 troops and operate two statelets in Myanmar, kind of similar in size and power or scope to Hezbollah. And they are a proxy force of the Chinese and engaged in some interesting things with some of the other ethnic armed groups. And it's kind of this, whatever, 3D chess between the Chinese, the Burmese, Junta, and also even

the Indians because of some of the stuff going on in the Indian Seven Sisters. So it's an area that people should definitely check out. And I'll let you know when my article gets, or my, the book gets published, I guess it's going to be published by MCU Press. So race out and pick that up. I've got a LinkedIn page. So I usually highlight if something comes out on that. And then Muckrack is also a good source. If you want to look up, I try and make sure that I keep it accurate as to anything i've i've published and they're not attributing stuff that i didn't publish on there as much i'd like to take credit in some cases but you can look up my full name christopher d booth on muckrack and it has a good list of everything that i published

awesome we look forward to seeing that stuff coming out and hopefully we can have you back on the podcast i'd like to thank chris booth again for joining us on the podcast to talk about innovative and non-traditional logistics take care See you next time. We'll be right back.