Sea Control - Sea Control 363 - Maritime Sabotage in Great Power Competition with Alexander Powell

Episode Date: July 17, 2022

Links1. "A Blast from the Past? The Role of Maritime Sabotage in Strategic Competition," by Alexander Powell, Modern War Institute, February 3, 2022.2. "Frogmen Solve Hard Problems – From and on the Sea," by Rear Admiral H.W. Howard III, USNI Proceedings, April 2022.3. "Maritime Sabotage: Lessons Learned and Implications for Strategic Competition," by Alexander Powell, Elizabeth Yang, Annaleah Westerhaug and Kaia Haney, CNA, October 2021.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today I'm joined by Alexander Powell, and we're going to be discussing possible uses for maritime sabotage in great power competition to include some of the history of maritime sabotage. This episode was edited and produced by William McQuiston. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, Germany, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of our chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org so if you're interested please reach out and get involved finally i want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the simsec podcast network the village pumps

you can find alex jamie drack and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts with that kimber's men you're listening to sea control hosted by the center for international maritime sabotage. Hello, Hashimates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Alexander Powell. We'll be discussing his article for Modern War Institute, A Blast from the Past, The Role of Maritime Sabotage in Strategic Competition. So, Alex, welcome and thanks for coming on. Would you mind introducing yourself to our audience, please? Sure. Yeah, thank you. It's really great to be here. My name is Alex Powell. I'm a research scientist at CNA. I work on our countering threats and challenges team.

I've done a lot of work with special operations forces or SOF in the past, as well as work on terrorist group tactics and counterterrorism. I've done a lot of work on Afghanistan as well, which is sort of a nexus of those topic areas. I'm going to ask you to expand on one of those if you're willing to or able to. You said you've done a lot of work with SOF in the past. Can you go into any more detail about what sort of work you've done with SOF? Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Yeah, I've worked on a lot of issues, both directly for and as well as sort of tangentially

related to SOF, really ranging from the strategic down to the tactical. I did a deployment with the Special Operations Joint Task Force Afghanistan, so the SOJETF-A back in 2017. I was asked to come out and help that command stand up their command assessment cell. So really pretty familiar with SOF. Well, thanks. And as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. I'll take the opportunity to timestamp this too. We are recording this on Friday, May 27th. So the war in Ukraine is ongoing.

If there's something that doesn't come up, that turns out to be a maritime sabotage-like event that you, the listener, feel we should be discussing, The reason we're not is because it hasn't happened yet. So with that, Alex, how are you defining maritime sabotage here? And why did you decide to look into this topic? Sure. Yeah, well, first off, again, it's really great to be here. So I think sabotage is one of those concepts that a lot of people can probably describe. And they may do so in broadly similar terms, but they may have difficulty actually defining it. You know, I think people would probably say that they know it when they see it. Right. But I think definitions are helpful. So it's also worth noting here that at least as of now, the Department of Defense does not actually have a doctrinal definition of sabotage, or at least I was not able to find one. The term does not appear in the DOD's Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, right, which is sort of like the department's overarching glossary. And it's really an interesting omission, especially since this hasn't actually always been the case, right?

So more broadly, we find that sabotage as a defined concept has actually appeared sporadically in DOD publications, including a U.S. Army publication dating back to the 60s. But for whatever reason, there is not a current definition in the DOD. I would define sabotage in the military context as the following. A mission either conducted via an individual act or as part of a broader campaign to secretly disarm, obstruct, or destroy enemy war materiel or infrastructure for military advantage. So that's a bit of a mouthful, I know, but I think it captures the essential elements of sabotage that we're talking about, namely secrecy and target selection. So we identify sabotage as being a renewed topic of interest to the DoD, despite the lack of a definition that I mentioned earlier, to the DoD in general and to the special operations

community in particular. And this is really exemplified in a publication put out by the Joint Special Operations University in which sabotage is listed as what they refer to as a priority research topic. So we think that this is an area that is ripe for additional study and is really of particular interest to the department right now. And you included a wonderful table with your article that's going to get at the answer to this next question. So I encourage everybody to go back, read the article.

It's the top link in our show notes here. but can you explain some of the recent history with maritime sabotage? Yeah, sure. I'd be happy to. I think the first thing that I would offer, and thank you for referencing the table that we have, which is, I think, really great, and to my knowledge is the only sort of fairly comprehensive list of maritime sabotage instances. But the one thing that I would offer is that sabotage in general, and maritime sabotage in particular, are not new, right? So, So, for example, during the American Civil War, there was an instance of a Confederate operative who had invented this new explosive device that was designed to be indistinguishable from a lump of coal. And the idea being that Union steamships would be going, shoveling coal, and somebody would unknowingly shovel the explosive into the furnace and would thus create an explosion and disable the vessel.

And this is taking place in the 1850s. But you could probably go all the way back into antiquity and find other examples of sabotage. Certainly, we see that military deception was a tactic that was well known in the ancient world, as evidenced by the supposed Greek employment of the wooden horse at Troy. So these tactics have been used throughout history. That's the first thing I'll say. That said, I will point to a couple of more recent examples of maritime sabotage in particular that I think are interesting. So first off, during World War II, there was a really interesting plot by Nazi Germany to sabotage the U.S. homeland, right? And the idea was that they would land, Germany would land saboteurs via submarine all along the eastern coast of the United States, right? And those saboteurs would then go off and sabotage various U.S. industry targets.

This is a highly ambitious plot and relied on a lot of things falling into place, and it ultimately failed when the saboteurs were discovered, and one of them then confessed to the plot and essentially gave up the others. You know, sort of fast-forwarding a little bit, during the Vietnam War, we had an instance of a group that was known as the Stop Our Ship movement, which undertook a sabotage campaign, really targeting U.S. Navy vessels. So members of this organization, right, these were anti-war people, some of whom were actually U.S. military personnel, conducted what we would typically refer to as simple sabotage by doing things like throwing wrenches into engines and those sorts of basic sabotage tactics in an attempt to disable the ships. The campaign achieved some success, I would say, in causing financial damage, right? There were some ships that ended up having millions of dollars worth of damage done to them, but no ship was prevented from returning to service. And so I think if we were to look at that from a more strategic perspective, we would say that that was not a particularly successful campaign, even if it did achieve some moderate

tactical success. And then later in the 1980s, there was an incident when French special operations forces conducted a sabotage operation targeting a Greenpeace vessel. It's called the Rainbow Warrior, which was docked in New Zealand at that time. French SOF employed combat divers and limpet mines to essentially, you know, secretly approach the vessel, place the limpet mines and sort of swim away. This was successful, and they successfully sunk the vessel. However, during the explosion, at least one, and potentially two, civilians were killed, and this actually ended up landing the French in substantial political trouble. So that, right, that was an example of an operation that was successful, but had really significant negative

ramifications for the perpetrators. So those are just a couple. And as you mentioned, the table has a lot more, somewhere in the area of 20. But those are a few, I think, kind of diverse examples that I wanted to point to. There was one that I wanted to ask you about specifically that jumped out at me I wasn't aware of. It was an attempted Argentine attack on British shipping in Gibraltar during the Falklands War. Did you have any more information about that? Yeah, so you forgive me, I'll need to go back and really double check. But my recollection is that that operation was essentially an attempted feint, right, to essentially draw the attention of the British away from the Falkland Islands, you know, by making them focus on losing one of their ships

closer to home. And it was not successful, but that was the idea. And while we're on the topic of the Falkland Islands, the British SAS also conducted some sabotage operations during that war as well. So interestingly enough, the Falklands can sometimes be, I think, forgotten as a conflict, but there were several instances of maritime sabotage used during that war. you also did a study on this topic with cna the study should be the third link posted in our show notes it's entitled maritime sabotage lessons learned implications for strategic competition so what trends were you able to identify as part of that study yeah sure so as you again allude to we the the approach that we took was to to take a database a data set approach so rather than

take a historical case study approach in which we would have kind of identified a few select instances of maritime sabotage and really dug deep into them, we found that the data didn't really lend themselves to that approach because we were able to find a lot of different kind of mentions of maritime sabotage instances, but we weren't necessarily able to find enough information on each instance to enable us to write a full case study. And so we said, okay, well, maybe we approach this as a data set instead. And we create a list of variables against which to examine all of these instances. And so that's the approach that we took. And we identified, I think, really three main trends from this analysis. So first, we found there to be unintended negative political

consequences for perpetrators of maritime sabotage, specifically when third-party collateral damage was involved or if conducted outside of what we would consider to be large-scale combat operations. So think of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior as an example that sort of exemplifies this trend. Second, we noted that there was a potential disconnect between maintaining the element of surprise and attaining a successful outcome in a sabotage operation. This was something that was actually quite surprising to us. One might expect that sabotage operations in which the element of surprise is maintained, achieve a higher rate of success, but we didn't necessarily find that. And then three, we found there'd be a positive correlation between the

complexity of the operation and the propensity for failure. So if I could dig a little bit into each one of those. So on the first trend, we found there to be a connection between maritime sabotage operations incurring collateral damage and negative consequences, right? So there are really two instances that kind of highlighted this. The Rainbow Warriors, I said, and then the example of the CIA mining campaign that took place in Nicaragua, in which the CIA essentially mines a bunch of harbors in Nicaragua to prevent shipping. In both of these cases, the perpetrators of the maritime sabotage faced really withering political backlash as a result of the actions. And, you know, incidentally, both of those sabotage operations also occurred outside of

large-scale combat operations, which you may suggest a broader point about the political dangers associated with conducting sabotage outside of declared hostilities. All right, so if we go back and look at our data set, we find that a ton of the instances took place during World War II, that was really as close as you can get to total war. And it was sort of like anything goes. But outside of that kind of total war construct, sabotage may be viewed differently, I think, is one of the things that we would take away. Second, and again, perhaps kind of intuitively, we found that losing the element of surprise may not make a sabotage operation more likely to fail. So of the individual sabotage operations we examined and with the

element of surprise was lost, only approximately half failed, right? Approximately half of them still succeeded in achieving their desired tactical objective. And more broadly, our research suggests that maritime sabotage operations in general are just kind of difficult to conceal, exemplified by the high rate of force exposure. So just a lot of the instances that we identified the sabotage force was actually exposed during the conduct of the operation. And so if this is true, right, this dynamic may actually, may want to give pause to policymakers wishing to employ maritime sabotage operations, especially in sensitive environments, if that force is likely or, you know, could perhaps become exposed.

And then third, you know, on the issue of complexity of sabotage operations, We examined complexity through a sort of a holistic examination of the sabotage force, right, whether the operation was joint or combined, what type of equipment was employed, and just in general, the relative ease or difficulty of the mission. And we did find that sabotage operations that we considered to be the most complex tended to be associated with a greater rate of failure. So I mentioned the German sabotage campaign earlier. That one obviously failed, as I mentioned, also an extremely complicated mission, right? So landing multiple teams of saboteurs by submarine at various points along the eastern coast, and then, you know, essentially trusting them to go off and conduct these operations on their own. So it's, that was a very complex mission. So, and then in addition to these three trends, the analysis that we did enabled us to make several other observations, which I just, I briefly know, first off, World War II, obviously, or perhaps obviously representing a high watermark for maritime sabotage, right, with almost half of the identified instances that we were able to find occurring during that conflict. Relatedly, most of the instances of maritime sabotage that we identified took place during large-scale combat operations. And while this partly may be a function of our reliance on open source information, we find that this introduces the possibility that outside of large-scale combat operations, active maritime sabotage may be considered overly provocative. And I've sort of alluded to this already. And so that's that's sort of the findings of the study in a nutshell, although there are some there are some other things that I encourage anyone who's interested to to go through the report itself and read it.

What forces are typically used for maritime sabotage and were you able to draw any conclusions about the whys behind the choice for force employment? Yeah, yeah, sure. So when you look at the types of forces that have been used to conduct maritime sabotage, we find that they're typically what we would today consider to be special operations forces, SOF, or intelligence forces. So, for example, during World War II, this really manifested in a lot of activities being conducted by the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. The OSS even had a maritime unit that was focused on maritime sabotage as one of the key things that it did. The OSS was, of course, the direct predecessor to the CIA. However, U.S. SOF also traced their lineage back to the OSS. So sort of highlighting that the SOF and intelligence forces nature of that. So, you know, why is it that sabotage is often conducted by SOF?

Well, you know, I think it comes down to the tactics employed, really. You know, sabotage is often conducted by a small group of personnel with highly specialized training and expertise. This tends to be how SOF operates. You know, furthermore, the actual act of sabotage itself often involves surreptitiously placing an explosive somewhere, you know, either via combat diving or, you know, infiltrating enemy held territory on land. And we find that this is actually in line with one of the soft core activities, right? So soft have 10 core activities that they typically, well, that they must be able to do. One of them is called direct action. And these types of operations generally fall right into the description of that. And in fact, the definition of direct action, as put forth in Joint Publication 3, TAC 05, which is the joint publication specific to special operations forces,

specifically mentions conducting independent sabotage, as well as in placing mines and other munitions as part of direct action. So I think that's why SOF have been the primary force looked to when conducting sabotage over the years, both because of the nature of how they're employed, as well as the specific tactics of how they conduct operations. Then a final question. You kind of hinted at this before with your comments about sort of the open source nature of some of the research documents, but how confident are you in your conclusions, given that so much of this material is classified? Yeah, that's a good question. It's one that's obviously hard to answer. You start to get into the space of you don't know what you don't know. So, for example, one of the hypotheses that we sought to explore as part of this analysis centered on the notion that sabotage operations in which the element of surprise is lost are more likely to fail. I sort of introduced this earlier. However, it's possible that our open source data set was skewed towards instances in which the sabotage force was exposed, right? Because those are the operations that are probably more likely to become public knowledge. Whereas operations in which secrecy was retained may remain classified. That's not, you know, I don't know that for certain. That's just a, right?

It's just a it's just me thinking. But we we did we tried our best to manage these types of issues the only way that we really could, which was by by clearly caveating the results of the analysis. Right. Well, unfortunately, that's all we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Alexander Powell. Alex, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Sure. Yeah. So the best place to find me online is probably on our company website, CNA.org. um we you know i have an experts uh profile on our experts page which lists off in addition to my bio some some of the the work that i i've been working on i'm also on linkedin i would encourage again encourage any readers who are interested to go back and read through the report itself i i think it's a it's a good read and yeah hopefully look forward to working on on more

soft related projects in the in the future thank you again for joining us to listeners Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Yeah. Thank you so much. A porter of a porter jillow Where I had a bully in the alley A porter of white, both white and red A bully and a shimbo now So help me, Bob, I'm bullying the alley Where I had a bully in the alley

Help me, Bob, I'm bullying the alley A bully and a shimbo now