Sea Control - Sea Control 345 - Reconsidering Maritime Warfare with Dr. Michael Petersen

Episode Date: May 15, 2022

Links: 1. Reconsidering Russian Maritime Warfare by Dr. Michael B. Peterson, CIMSEC, April 11, 2022.2. Russia Maritime Studies Institute

Hey folks, it's Jared. I'm joined today by Dr. Michael Peterson from the Naval War College's Russian Maritime Studies Institute. We'll be discussing a re-evaluation of Russian maritime warfare in light of events in Ukraine. We are still looking for additional audio editors, and we're happy to provide you with some very basic training materials and instruction in a low-stress environment. So if you're interested in finding a way to contribute to SIMSEC and add to your resume and personal skill set, please send us an email with your resume to seacontrol at 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. And 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, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Michael Peterson. We'll be discussing his article for SimSec on reconsidering Russian maritime warfare. So, Dr. Peterson, thank you for coming on. Could you introduce yourself a little bit more formally to the listeners, please? Well, sure. Thanks for having me.

It's really nice to be here. I am the director of the Russian Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College and the director of the Holloway Advanced Research Program, where we look at the nature of the maritime warfight between Russia and its potential adversaries. Thanks. And as a reminder, all opinions are our own, not reflective of any institution with which we may be otherwise associated. So what made you want to write this article? You know, there's been a lot of work these days in the last couple of years in particular on the growth of the Russian Navy and Russian military capacity in general. A lot of this analysis is focused on Russian naval technologies, which is a pretty important area of investigation, I think.

But it doesn't really give us any insight into Russian naval strategy or intent. And then there are these studies that examine intent, but then they have some pretty distinct echoes, I think, with Cold War arguments about whether or not the Russian Navy is intending a renewed kind of battle of the Atlantic or, you know, focusing instead on bastion defense. And I think we need more analytic clarity on that. I mean, we did an analysis of how Russian naval capabilities might fare against its potential global competitors, right? We need to understand how and how effectively the Navy might fight. And the question is always compared to what, right? You can't analyze these things in the absence of other factors. So, and I think that kind of clarity is necessary.

And asking those kinds of questions is pretty necessary. And we need to do that through a Russian lens, right? Not an American one. We need to think about this problem as the Russians think about it, or else we're just going to wind up mirroring our own thoughts. And this is the last point I'll make on that particular question. That is like a lot of Russian, a lot of examinations of Russian naval warfare have focused on the concept of A2AD. But that really only tells half the story, I think. It doesn't address Russia's ability to fight at the theater level or kind of across theaters of military operations, TVDs, they call them. And we need to start thinking about that a lot more deeply, I think, especially as we see suggestions that the Navy may try to close the GIUK gap or the English Channel or some such. I think we need to be thinking very deeply about whether or not that's a possibility and how that might happen if it were to happen at all. I'm skeptical of that, but I think we can talk about that as we go forward. You mentioned Russian periodization, and I hope I'm saying that word right.

But what does that mean and why are Russian definitions of the different periods important? Yeah, yeah, you got it exactly right. um so i think despite the evidence from ukraine the russian strategists have for decades thought very deeply about the nature of war uh two really critical concepts that they have are the threatening period and the initial period of war the threatening period is just what it sounds like right it's this period of heightened tension in which opposing military forces deploy in preparation for uh war now in the 21st century russian strategists generally believe that the threatening period will be pretty short or even non-existent. And that war may just begin from

a cold start, right, or a standing start. So high, maintaining high levels of readiness is really, really crucial from the Russian perspective. The initial period of war is the period in which belligerent states, according to Russia, will conduct military operations to achieve, call it immediate strategic objectives or favorable conditions for subsequent military action. It's actually a concept that goes back to the 1920s. But in the 21st century, Russian thinkers believe that this is likely to be a very short, very intense period of combat operations. They've looked at U.S. military operations since the early 1990s, starting at the first Gulf War, and have developed this idea that

now the initial period of war is going to be very, very sharp, and it's going to be a contest over very specific things. And that will set the conditions for what happens next in the war, and may very well be determinative of whether or not the war is going to be successfully waged. So it's a really important concept. And if you read between the lines of the Russian military strategy, what you begin to understand is that Russian strategists don't think they can defeat the US or NATO in a straight up fight, right? That is pound for pound. The military doesn't compare favorably, especially to the US. So they've come up with these concepts to begin to address that asymmetry. And I think that that matters tremendously from the perspective of

how Russia thinks about its military, how Russia plans to operate with its military, and in particular, its Navy. So I'm going to ask you later about how Ukraine has changed any of your thinking on all this. But just to timestamp this for the listeners, we are recording this Saturday, May 7th. So if there's something that's going on in the war at sea that for whatever reason you think we're not addressing, that's the reason. If it occurred after Saturday, May 7th, it hasn't happened yet. But Mike, what is Russia's naval warfighting philosophy emphasized? Where is that captured in its doctrine or in public writings? And then how does that philosophy comport with Western views of sea control and sea denial? Yeah, that's a great question. A couple

of points. The first and most important job of the Russian Navy, as written in its own doctrine, is to maintain a credible second nuclear strike capability. Now, there is an argument over whether or not that's realistic or reasonable or whether Russia needs the Navy to do that. But be that as it may, that's what the Russians say, Russians themselves say about their Navy. And then other missions like Bastion Defense and the defense of the maritime approaches to Russia generally tend to flow from that mission. There are some exceptions here and there, but in general, they tend to flow from that mission. And that's kind of the traditional mission of the Russian Navy. But in recent decades, newer missions have been enshrined. And they're really, really

important, I think, and they have come along with this rise of new capabilities. The most important mission is the targeting of critical adversary infrastructure or critical adversary targets in general at sea and the shore. And this goes back to that warfighting philosophy that I was just talking about, right? Russian strategists believe that they can impose costs that restrain the adversary and outweigh the benefits of aggression. And so they undermine the adversary's political will and compel it to end the conflict on terms acceptable to Russia. And if they can do this in the initial period of war, all the better. They don't want a big, long, drawn-out conflict because Russia is not. The Russian military, as we've seen in Ukraine, is not structured for these kinds of

things. So that's a really critical point. And with some exceptions, the Navy's warfighting philosophy isn't really focused on sea control. And only in limited circumstances is it focused on sea denial. The Russians understand that a straight up fight, as I said, is not on the cards. It's a recipe for disaster. So they focus mostly on cost of position. And the ultimate goal of that cost of position is undermining the adversaries of will and ability to fight. And what's fascinating about this is that none of it is a secret, right? The Russians are very clear about all of this in their public writings. The Ministry of Defense website itself, if you navigate there, first of all, use a VPN. But second of all, the Ministry of Defense website

is very clear in its outlining of the missions for the Russian Navy. It says it right on the website. It gives you the peacetime missions. It gives you the wartime tasks. Moscow has published a maritime doctrine that very neatly outlines Russia's ambitions at sea. And the Navy has published its own doctrine that describes how it sees the world and how it organizes its priorities and its overall approach to warfighting. And so, and if I can offer a shameless plug for a second, our Institute at the Naval War College has actually published English language translations of these documents. So none of this is a secret. They are making this widely available for anybody there who's interested in reading these kinds of things. And that's what's so fascinating about

this. It's not, we have tended to ignore what the Russians themselves say about naval warfighting. And when I say we, I mean U.S. strategists, Russian military specialists have obviously been focusing very, very closely on this for a number of years. Yeah, I will link up with you afterwards to get the RMSI website and include that with the links in the in the show notes. So it's like no plug is too shameless for us here. But how does geography affect the Russian Navy? OK, so first to answer that question, first, a quick setup. Right. Russian naval thinkers divide the oceans up into various zones and there are no clear measurements to what these zones are. But in general, the two nearest Russia are known as the coastal zone and the near sea zone.

And those stretch out to, say, around 300 or 400 nautical miles. Then you get the near sea zone and the far sea zone. And those are kind of roughly three or four hundred ish miles out to about a thousand miles. And then you get the far sea zone to the world ocean, which is basically everything else. So it's useful to think about that, those sort of zones when it comes to why why geography matters. And that basic geography is really, really critical. You know, we hear a lot about A2AD again, when it comes to Russian naval war fighting. And that always, of course, is a story of confined waters close to Russian shores, and the ability of Russia to project power from the land to the sea. And that's really critical, right? I'm not denying that that's absolutely important for understanding how Russia would consider warfighting. But we also almost never hear the opposite in discussions of Russian strategy, right? Geography can provide a modicum of sanctuary for Russia, but it also, I think, is a factor in warfighting, especially against distant targets, is a huge challenge for Russia.

There's a concept among geographers called a loss of strength gradient. And the loss of strength gradient is essentially the idea that you have a unit of competitive state power that is lost per some unit of distance from home shores. And so relative military strength can change with distance, right? In Russia's maritime domain, this is really, really relevant because at the operational level of war, capacity limitations in combat platforms, ISR platforms, logistics platforms, and Russia's failure to secure overseas basing and alliances have really had an impact on their ability to project force, especially into the Far Sea Zone and into the world ocean. So the farther you get away from Russian shorelines, the more difficult it gets for Russia to wage combat. And that's not to that's not an endorsement of saying that Russia will solely wage war based on principles of A2AD. It's a very Western concept. Russia will attempt to wage war in the in the far sea zone and in the world ocean. But the question is, how will they do it based on this massive geography that exists out there and all the capacity limitations that they have in things like combat platforms and ISR?

So we've seen Russian ground forces struggle with ISR in Ukraine. What sensors are available to the Russian Navy? Yeah, so there is it. I don't want to understate the number of sensors available and the capability of those sensors that they have. um the the closer you are to shore of course uh the the better uh russian sensing gets and the farther away from shore you get um the more challenging it gets but that's not to say that there aren't very capable things in place so um if we're talking about what we see on shore again let's go from the sort of littoral to the near sea and out from there if we're talking about sensors that we see on shore. Russia has a vast and dense network of early warning radars and combat management radars and target engagement radars, target acquisition radars, lots of SAM

systems, airborne radars. Those all exist in one capacity or another, and they all operate on various wavelengths and all the other beeps and squeaks that matter for combat operations exist in the far sea and i'm sorry in the uh littorals in the near sea zone but effective over the horizon isr is an essential element of long-range precision warfare and russia has been um moving toward the goal of being able to wage long-range precision warfare at sea now for quite a while we've seen evidence of that going all the way back to syria um but you can't kill what you can't find, and this is especially true in that sort of blue water open ocean environment where distance and volume, search volume, are orders of magnitude greater than what they are in the maritime

approaches. So these shore-based sensors tend to be limited in range or tend to be limited in accuracy. That's not entirely true, but for the most part, that's true. In the open ocean, navies have to rely on either space-based or air breathing platforms as as your listeners um i'm sure know very very well um or they have to rely on sensors that are organic to to combat platforms so russia has limitations on all of these um so what space-based capabilities are available and what air breathing capabilities are available well moscow has had really mixed results in the space uh department on this um it has a new family of electronic intelligence satellites uh it's called liana system um that's made up of uh two different kinds of satellites called peon nks and lotus s

these provide a space-based targeting capability um by collecting signals intelligence emanated emitted by adversary naval vessels and then and then transmitting that to combat platforms equipped with the right sensors but here's the problem um according to open sources, only one of these Pion-NK satellites exists, and only three Lotus satellites are currently operational. And again, according to open source estimates, these satellites are in a low Earth orbit, which without getting too technical on you, basically means that they have a revisit rate of about 90 minutes. So they only appear in a certain spot over the globe once every 90 minutes. And so there are these large gaps in coverage. So how do you cover those gaps? You

cover that with air breathing coverage. The problem, of course, is that Russia does have long range reconnaissance platforms like the TU-142. But the problem is that they have no bases forward and no fighters to escort those things. So the second those things reach out beyond SAM coverage and reach out beyond fighter coverage, they're vulnerable. So they're forced to operate closer and shore. So in essence, you get this massive search volume out in the open ocean that is really only covered by periodic satellite coverage. And that is a real problem from a targeting perspective for Russia. So I'm researching one thing here, because I want to ask you a follow up about this, or at least post something for you to comment on here is I have

had a sort of a problem with Russian A2AD as a concept, because it sort of rests on this assumption of, one, continuous presence, two, that shooter, ISR platform, weapon can all be knit together with a series of data links and communications technology and trained personnel, all of which have to function basically flawlessly to get a weapon on its target. I don't think from what we've observed in Ukraine, I don't think Russia is capable of that. So, you know, what assumptions did you have to make about a future conflict to imagine how the Russian Navy might fight, and then how do you think they would fight? Yeah, oh boy, those are great points. And I got to tell you, I'm not convinced of any Navy in the world, including the U.S. Navy's ability to do those

things consistently, right? We all have problems. But I like to say that if you think being in the U.S. Navy is bad trying being in the Russian Navy. So to get back to your question, though, you know, I think the nature of Russian warfighting depends on the intersection of three concepts. One is geography. I mentioned that, right? The second is ISR. I mentioned that. And the third is order of battle. And when you combine all those things together, you begin to see a picture of sort of a Russian Navy that wants to impose cost at sea, but is limited in doing so against maritime targets. That is, when I say maritime targets, I mean specifically naval targets at sea.

I think Russia will have a tremendously difficult time finding adversary platforms that don't want to be found, right? So if you have a carrier strike group that is operating at some level of MCON, a restrictive level of MCON, Russia's gonna have a hard time dealing with that problem because they lack the ISR to go out and find it. And even if they were able to find these platforms,

they lack the number of combat platforms, shooting platforms that would allow them to be in the right position at the right time, right? Your listeners know that naval warfighting is really, really difficult over such massive spaces and lots of things have to go right, as you pointed out. So that's a problem. So what does that mean for the Russian Navy? Right. What are they trying to do? Well, you know, we can we can go back to a their doctrine and be what we've discovered that they're already actually pretty good at. And that is striking critical targets ashore. The Russian Navy will be in the you can imagine a scenario here where the Russian Navy goes forward in the in the threatening period that I was talking about earlier.

And then for whatever reason, deterrence fails and a war breaks out. But those Russian naval forces that have been deployed in the threatening period now are probably in a really good position. I'm thinking here specifically of nuclear powered cruise missile shooting submarines like Severin, Vinsk and others would be in a very good position to target critical targets ashore in the initial period of war as a way to either impose cost and confuse and disorganize adversary attempts to defeat them or as a way to control escalation, right? To manage escalation as the conflict goes on. So they can deploy covertly and carry out a pretty successfully, I think, a mission of land attack against critical targets ashore. And one might imagine that that might look something like attacking C2 nodes or important radar stations, for example, in coastal Europe. One might imagine attacking early warning radars along the coast of Norway or in the U.K. or other critical targets, even on the east coast of the U.S., if that becomes necessary. And that is because, as I mentioned, Russia is much, much more likely to be able to strike those targets more easily and more efficiently than they could if they were trying to hit targets that were moving targets that were at sea.

And that's not to say that they wouldn't do that. The Navy obviously is attempting to have a Navy on Navy fight, but we should be really careful about focusing solely on Navy on Navy fights, right? or even sort of joint U.S. force on Russian Navy fights, because that's not the fight the Russian Navy wants. The Russian Navy wants to have a fight that targets the things they can hit easily ashore, that confuses the U.S., that would slow down their ability to put forces forward, and that would create tremendous political cost at home that would undermine their ability to, the U.S.'s ability to carry out this kind of conflict. So I think we need to be really careful not focusing solely on Navy on Navy fights. The Russian Navy is going to conduct a variety of different kinds of operations that are designed to impose cost.

But it's going to be much easier for them to do that against targets that are fixed, that don't move, and that in many cases are going to be difficult to defend. so given everything you've described is the way the u.s and its allies have spoken about threats to sea lines of communications for example the giuk gap is that realistic you know that's that's a really critical question in the debate i'm thank you for asking that i you know it's a great question um i honestly am skeptical of the threats to sea lines of communication now that's not to say that the threat does not exist. Russia has other means of understanding how U.S. logistics and combat forces will flow, say, across the Atlantic and into Europe. They can use cyber means, for example, right? Most of the logistics networks ashore are, as I understand them,

pretty vulnerable. So that's a problem. But on the other hand, if we're talking about actual combat at sea, so out in the deep mid-Atlantic, for example, I'm really skeptical of that. And I'm really skeptical that Russia would ever have the ability to close the GI-UK gap. I just don't think that's possible. Same thing with the English Channel. We've seen this, we've seen these assessments over and over and over again, especially, you know, when we see assessments of, say, Russian Arctic basing. The Russians, so the argument goes, are going to use these Arctic bases to project force out into the Norwegian Sea, down into the GI-UK gap, and into the English Channel. I just don't see how that's possible, given the geographic, the ISR, and the order of battle

limitations that I've tried to describe here. I just don't see how that's possible. So, you know, that means we need a little bit more analytic clarity. So what is at risk here when we're talking about SLOCs? I would argue that the ends of the SLOCs are really, really at risk, right? s pods a pods c points of debarkation uh air points of debarkation and embarkation for that matter are really really um critical targets for russia to defend you can imagine that it's a lot easier to um hit say a ro-ro ship that's tied up to the pier than it is to hit a convoy that's trying not to be found at sea right it's much more difficult so why not wait until those convoys pull into port and then try to attack those convoys or even the port infrastructure. That's

a more difficult prospect. But, you know, I just sort of mentioned it for the sake of making the argument. So I'm really skeptical about threats to the GIUK gap and threats to logistics flows in the open ocean. I am concerned about threats to the ends of those slocks, though. And I think that's where we need to start thinking carefully about how we're going to, how we're going to deal with that problem. Yeah, and a good example there, the Russians just experienced in Berdyansk when they lost their alligator LST alongside of the pier. What a fantastic example. Yeah, geez. I mean, that is, that's what's so interesting, right? Like, Ukraine is not exactly a low-end military, But they're not exactly functioning on the same level as you might expect the U.S. or the Chinese probably, or even, you know, I guess this is heresy these days, or even the Russians.

Clearly, they're outperforming the Russians now. But on the other hand, boy, that's a great example of the dangers to SLOCs, right? Wait for those ships to tie up at the pier and then get after them. What capabilities do you recommend the U.S. and its allies explore as a result of your analysis? So I think, you know, this this this kind of analysis leads us to a couple of conclusions. And I promise I'll get to the answer to your question in a second. What this kind of augurs is that the Russians, particularly if we're talking about combat in Europe, will reserve most of their forces, I think, to operate, say, in the vicinity of their primary naval bases, say, on the Kola Peninsula,

particularly if you're talking about long-range strike or in the Black Sea or on Sevastopol. And they'll utilize those long-range precision strike capabilities that are resident, say, in the caliber missile, caliber land attack cruise missile, the land attack variant of the caliber, to sort of conduct what I would call theater-level strikes, right, against critical targets. The same thing is true, by the way, of the Russian Air Force. Their long-range aviation forces are not that likely to fly very far out of these protected bastions. They may do that. And same with the Navy. They may come out of those protected bastions just a little, but they're likely to try to conduct theater strikes from inside those bastions.

And what that means is that U.S. joint forces have to go forward, particularly the Navy has to go forward, right? This has implications for tanking. If the Air Force doesn't have enough tanker availability in particular, then you've got to send the U.S. Navy forward to deal with this problem. And the Navy's got to go forward anyway because the Air Force, despite some newer capabilities developments, lacks an extensive ability to defeat Russian Navy vessels. So you've got to send the U.S. Navy forward. And so now to get to the answer to your question, I think the critical sort of element of modern warfare is the ISR versus counter ISR contest. And I'm a little bit more skeptical of the argument that says, you know, we need to build, you know, 300, 400, 3 million ship Navy, right? With the same capabilities that it has right now. You know, having more ships is always great, but it's the capabilities on those ships that matter.

We could do a much more cost effective job to build an effective Navy if we are focusing on things like soft kill technologies, deception technologies, technologies that are designed to keep the adversary sensors from operating in ways that can provide effective targeting to effective and rapid targeting to the shooter. And then soft kill of those missiles that happen to be inbound. Right. So I don't think that it's a matter of building more ships, which we obviously need. We need to the fleet needs to be updated and upgraded. But those upgrades need to, I think, focus primarily on ISR and counter ISR technologies and soft kill technologies, Just because as the U.S. Navy has to go forward to deal with this problem that Russia presents to us, it's going to be a matter of avoiding those Russian, that limited Russian sensing that allows them to strike, say, a carrier strike group at sea. And then one final question is, what has the Ukraine war changed about your thinking or has it? Yeah, I mean, I think everyone would be a lunatic to say that the Ukraine war has not changed

thinking on how the Russian military operates. First part of my answer to that question is that I think we need to be careful to learn the wrong lessons from this war. Russia is not going to fight the same kind of conflict in Ukraine that it would fight against the United States and NATO. they just would not do it they've made a series of assumptions based on a variety of calculations that they've made sort of in the in-house on correlation of forces and means and other things that have restricted their ability to fight the war effectively in Ukraine and then there are all the political goals that are out of alignment with the military goals I don't think that's probably going to be true in a war with NATO. Not only will the stakes be clearer, but the

strategy would be clearer. That's one thing. I think we ought to be careful not to learn the wrong lessons. I will say this. The Russian military has really underperformed. The Russian Navy has not exactly covered itself with glory either. We know, for example, that the Russian Navy has conducted long-range precision strikes into Ukraine against what targets, I'm not sure. But we know that those strikes have been conducted and that they've been successful. Bully for them, I guess. But on the other hand, the Russian Navy has been in some ways outclassed by the Ukrainians who don't have a Navy at all, right? We are learning that Russian sailors aboard the Moskva, for example, were not all professional sailors, right? Many of them were conscripts

and were poorly trained. We're learning just yesterday, this yesterday, Friday, Friday the 6th, there was news that came out that the Moskva was having all kinds of technical issues regarding satellite communications operating at the same time as radars. And that was that, That information was subsequently pulled down off of social media, but not before it sort of hit the broader sort of world of Russia military analysis. We're learning that Russia is having a very hard time projecting force from land to the sea. and that Ukraine is capable of contesting Russian naval deployments just with relatively inexpensive drones, right? This is a cost exchange that definitely does not favor Russia.

I don't know how they targeted Moskva. I don't. There are some reports that they were using a drone to do that. But now we're seeing reports that Russia or Ukraine is able to use TB2s, the Bayraktar drones, to do things like contest the reinforcement of Snake Island, for example. And that's really interesting. That's a cost exchange that will never work out in Russia's favor. It just won't. So the whole situation is in flux right now.

It's too early to say that we have firm conclusions. But it's not too early to say that we are all undergoing a very serious revision of what we think about how the Russian military might fight in general and the Russian naval capabilities in the Pacific. But again, I think we should still be careful not to learn the wrong lessons from Ukraine. And it's going to be a while for us to digest all these lessons. Well, fortunately, that's all that we have time for. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Michael Peterson. Mike, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Well, all you got to do is do a quick Google search for the Russia Maritime Studies Institute. And that will draw you right into the Naval War College website where you can

find a bunch of translations of Russian naval documents, including the Arctic strategy, naval strategy, maritime doctrine, naval fundamentals, all that kind of fun and important stuff and uh right now we are uh working on a couple of different projects that include a broader look at the influence of russian naval thought um uh the influence i should say of of uh admiral gorshkov on russian naval thought and how his thinking has carried forward into the 21st century and uh more projects on um russian infrastructure right naval infrastructure and the ability of the infrastructure to support the Navy that Russia wants, particularly in light of all of the really, really difficult problems it's going to have

coming out of the Ukraine war with regard to sanctions and everything else. Well, thanks again for joining us. To listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thanks very much. Thank you. I'm so happy for my millennial days. Why are they millennial days?

Help me, oh, my millennial days. For they are the same for now.