Sea Control - Sea Control 374 - Enhancing Norwegian-USMC Cooperation with Dr. Ståle Ulriksen

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

Links:Building on Strength – Proposals for US-Norwegian Cooperation on the Operational and Tactical Level, by Ståle Ulriksen and Åse Gilje Østensens, Forsvarets høgskole, Concept paper series, February 2019.

Hey folks, it's Jared. My guest today is Stola Uriksson, and we're going to discuss a 2019 concept paper that he wrote on improving the cooperation between the Norwegian military and the U.S. Marines, specifically focused on creating a more survivable logistics operation using Norwegian civilian maritime infrastructure. This episode was edited and produced by Jim Jarvie and Nathan Miller. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters, whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, and 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. 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 pot of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hello, Hashemites, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Stola Ulriksen, and we'll be discussing his 2019 contribution to the concept paper series on reimagining U.S. Marine Corps and Marine Corps cooperation in the High North. So, Stola, welcome. Would you mind introducing yourself to our viewers?

Oh, yeah. I work at the Norwegian Naval College. We also do projects for the Norwegian Navy, but also for the Ministry of Defense. So I lead a team of researchers of about nine people. I have been previously working at the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs in Oslo, done some work for the government and so on. But now we're pretty much focused on Russia, of course. The main object of our research project is to support the Navy, Royal Norwegian Navy, in its choice for replacement of frigates, corvettes, and so on, to what kind of surface structure are we going to have in the future. So that choice is going to be made this year or next year. So that's the main focus, and difficult times to do that now. Absolutely. Thank you again for joining us. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institutions with which we may be otherwise associated.

So we're going to start out talking about Marine Corps prepositioning forces north or MCPPN. Where does that come from? What's in the 2006 agreement governing MCPPN between the U.S. and Norway? Well, the whole thing started up in the late 1970s when it was realized that it would be very difficult to get reinforcements to Norway in times of war if the Soviet Union already had established a forward defense for their bases on Murmansk, the so-called Bastion Defense. then it would be very difficult to get reinforcements across the sea because of all the submarines and that. At that time, the Jewish Marines were rebuilding of the Vietnam, kind of looking for a role, I think. So in the high north, they found one.

So Norway and the Jewish Marines developed a plan for the prepositioning of equipment. So in mid-Norway, there are several huge caves within the mountains where the Marines stock a lot of their material. And then can you comment on what's in the 2006 agreement specifically? The 2006 is a kind of renewal of the established program. One of the things that it says is that if the Marines are deploying from, And after meeting up with their equipment internally, if they're deploying it within Norway, then Norway is responsible for the transport, really, and also the securing of that deployment.

But that has never been exercised. And that was kind of one of the ideas behind the paper that we wrote in 2019. How would we do that if we had to? And what has been the deployment method for USMC units marrying up with their equipment to date? Normally, the troops have been flown in by air to Valnez Airport, to Erland Airport, and then they are marrying up with their equipment and, again, being brought to sea with one of the very large ships.

You see, not all this equipment is stored in Norway permanently. Some of them are stored on maritime prepositioning ships. so then they will deploy with very large ships 250 meters long ships northwards and go into the fjords the thing with Norway is that you can sail two ways

from the south to the north and one is to the inner leeds that would be the safe route in a sense especially when we're discussing submarine threats and so on and threats from aircraft craft. But it's difficult to sail in

with the very large ships, and especially if you're over 200 metres long, then it would be very difficult and very risky as well. So to mediate the threat from sailing on the open sea, then we suggested that, okay, we should perhaps use another way to deploy northwards. And that was how we started up with it. How would we do that if we are going to do it in an efficient way because neither Norway nor the US Marines

have access to a lot of organic smaller ships that could do that. But as you may know, Norway has huge maritime industries and a very large merchant fleet and also a very large offshore fleet that supports all the work, production, the construction of new platforms, other sites, pipelines, all that, from the North Sea and northwards.

So the offshore fleet consisted in 2019 of about between 500 and 600 ships. that has been reused a bit since then but between 400 and 500 I would guess each one is about 90 meter long and each of them have

lots of tanks aboard so they can take several different fuels they can carry a lot on deck or these anchor handling ships may take up to 4000 tons metric tons on the decks would be no problem to

load and carry very heavy material. And since it's so many of them, we could use quite a large number of ships to transport a single brigade or battalion. But there would be enough. Moreover,

as we've seen from the Ukraine, that Ukrainian harbors are not safe. And when the Russians are trying to use Daryansk as a harbor, for instance, we saw that the Ukraine Ukrainians could easily hit them and sank an old alligator amphibious ship in the harbor. And that would, of course, be the same in the north. Even if we could erode the Russian targeting capability, they would still know where these harbor are located. So it would not be very

difficult to hit them. So we took a new look at this thing. How could we make a base or a logistic hub that that we could move around and then we looked at some of the material for the deep sea construction and they use very large flows they are 90 meters long 30 meters broad you can link several of them together and create a large floating base which then you could move every night or so with with by using these anchor handling ships and that would at least increase the level of safety a bit for targeting against the logistical hubs. That would be, I think, in a NATO operation in the north,

that would be one of the big problems, to protect those logistical hubs. I noticed that this was written before the war in Ukraine and before Sweden and Finland decided to apply for NATO membership. I'm going to ask you about that in just a minute. And you kind of touched on my next question, which was, you know, why was the current deployment method such a challenge in a combat environment? I think you've covered that. What is sort of your proposal for changing the existing concept of operations then?

Well, my proposal will be that we simply make a plan for how do we mobilize part of this offshore fleet. We distribute several offshore vessels to each of these units that we want to transport, and we use the inner leads to freight them. The thing with these vessels is that we could also install bridges on them, bridges that are normally stored in a container but could be mounted with a small crane, really, and those bridges could take up to 110 metric tons. So it would be no problem to land quite large vessels.

And so the thing is that we want to reduce the threat by using smaller ships and using lots of them. We also did some experimentation here. We gathered a lot of people from the shipwreck companies and from the wharfs, and we discussed how could we do this rather quickly. And then a lot of this material that we would need could be stored on bases, civilian bases,

where the Norwegian military already has contracts. So part of these bases are separated and are military areas. And then these offshore ships, they are spread all over the coast, so they could easily grab what they would need there and go to a mission quite quickly. What we would need to do, however, is that we would need to vet all the crews to make sure that we have crews that we can trust. One problem with the parts of the Norwegian fleet is that because of the rather high salaries and the cost of labor in Norway, they have recruited a lot of foreign sailors.

And some of them, some of these companies have almost exclusively recruited sailors from Russia. And that would, of course, be a problem. And that is one of the, I would say, one of the main security problems we know today, that in a crisis before a war, we would have to handle all that. And that is something that is being discussed in Norway right now. But most of the offshore companies,

they're not in that line. And so it will be easier to secure that all the crews are trustworthy. But that would mean that you would have to sign a contract with them. You use rapid mobilization and expect that to work. You need to plan it. You need to have contracts signed and all that in advance. And you would need to exercise. You wrote this paper back in 2019.

Have there been any changes since the outbreak of the Ukraine war as far as the government being re-energized to engage with industry to sign some of these agreements or to actually exercise some of these capabilities to be sure that they work? The Navy has exercised a bit of it, but not for this purpose. The army, the Norwegian army has also exercised a bit on similar concepts, but not on a very large scale. And there are ongoing negotiations, I think, between the U.S. and Norway on this, because when we launched this, it was grabbed quickly by both sides and they started negotiations. But then we have a change of governments in both Norway and the U.S. and there have been delays. But I believe that it's still on the table. What advantages and disadvantages do NATO forces deal with where Norwegian geography is concerned? well the disadvantage is of course that the climate might be quite unforgiving

so in in large parts of the year you would have very cold climate you would have almost no daylight uh storms very heavy seas uh and so on so that will be difficult in the summer it's the opposite problem. It's light all the time. So it's more difficult to hide, of course. But then you have the lack of roads.

There's only one main road connecting Southern Norway to Northern Norway. Only one. Of course, that would be easy to create delays there by doing sabotage and all that.

That would be unwise to trust that these roads will be open or you will keep them open all the time so you need to use the sea advantages of reaching coastline

in a sense is that you have a littoral that is if you know how to operate it, it is easy to hide there, so that's the way we use our corvettes for instance if you can hide in the littorals then no our very few

anti-ship missiles will be able to hit you because most of them would not be able to separate the ship from the islets or the rock and we know that the Russians also are

trying to get their sailors to obtain knowledge of these coastlines so they can operate as well and we see that or we suspect that the Russian Navy in the north soon will get the same kind of corvettes that they have in the Black Sea

in the Baltic Sea and also in the Pacific they have been tested and testing them out so if you can use this terrain both over and underwater on the Norwegian coastline it will function as a

multiplicator of capabilities simply but of course it's difficult if you don't know how to use it, then it's difficult to navigate, and then you will get accidents, as we had

when we lost one of our frigates some years ago, and it has been quite normal for the Norwegian Navy to crash on in the littoral, so we're there, they're small, fast attack craft, and so all the time, but you need to exercise to get that expertise.

If you know how to use it, then there's a lot of protection in the by sailing the inner leads. And of course, the main problem there would be mining. And we have mine hunters and so on, but there's only 40% or so of the coastline that could be a way we could use ROVs for mine hunting. The rest there, we need to sweep it

because of the rocks and the terrain, the underwater terrain and so on. So that would be the main threat in inner leads. Outside in the open sea, You know, the Russian Navy is struggling to maintain the number of nuclear-powered submarines, but what we expect in this decade, really, is that they will renew their whole fleet of diesel-electric submarines. The same kind that we're seeing in the Black Sea right now, launching missiles against the Ukraine, but also the Lada-class, that is.

They have been experimenting for a while, and they have ordered at least five or six of them now. So we would also expect the Norwegian Sea to be quite full of conventional diesel-electric submarines on such an occasion, and we would expect them to deploy the nuclear-propelled submarines for further out. What changes would you make to your proposal based on what you've observed in Ukraine?

The most obvious one is that the fear of the missiles should be reinforced. I mean, they would learn how to use more missiles early in a conflict. They would probably attack all the air bases in Northern Europe and in the world with NATO. That means that we would struggle to obtain dominance of the air. It's not only the Norwegian bases in Norway, but also the bases in the UK. There's not a single Separatist air missile battery

in the whole of the UK. So none of the bases there are protected. And that includes Fairbanks, where the US used the bombers from. It includes Mildenhall, where all the US tankers are stationed and so forth and so on. So in an early phase, we might expect perhaps to lose air control for a while, and the Russians would then be able to operate forward if they wanted to for a brief period.

The only thing that could mitigate that, I think, is the deployment of bombers directly from the continental U.S. And we have, I mean, the U.S. Air Force have been exercising a lot since. Also, the Russians are doing very old-fashioned war. Lots of artillery. what I would like to know is how they think about the failed missions

the initial attack on the Hostomal Air Airpost where they used their airborne troops, their VDV and they got massacred more or less would they still try to use that kind of concept

for instance in Norway if they could gain air dominance would they use the VDB to deploy forward. That is one of the things that we have planned for, not planned for, but at least one of the things we discuss when we

are trying to work out how their course of action would look. Similarly with the Marines, the Russian Marines, they have not used them in landings yet, and they have

not really tried, or it's not really been doctrine to land on a defended beach yet, but in Kerch close to the Ukraine, in Crimea there's a shipyard and there's two rather large amphibious carriers that are being built. And what we see when we look at the models that the Russians present of these ships, they are not filled up with anti-submarine

helicopters and so on but KA-52 attack helicopters and when they exercise these they use these helicopters or they simulate that they have the helicopter carriers and then they attack from the beaches with them first and then the

Rapushas would use their multiple rocket launchers and then they would land so will they keep up this or will they think that those kinds of amphibious landings are too risky to carry out in the future this is a problem because

since we have all these islands in the Norwegian coastline if the Russians should wish to establish a forward defense using their S-400 missiles, their coastal batteries with missiles and these

things then it would be possible for them to find a Norwegian island with a good airport and it would be very difficult for us to to defend since our army is rather small and the country is so big and it's so easy you can choose many different locations where to land and install these batteries so if you do that on the north norwegian coast on the bear island between norway and svalbard and on svalbard

well, then you would be able to set up a kind of A2AD zone where you could perhaps block U.S. bombers and also surface ships. And they would do a lot of mining, of course, against submarines. And an early phase up there would be critical in a sense. But things have also changed after Finland and Sweden applied for membership in NATO. We do a lot of wargaming, and it's always...

It gives me most insight to play the Russians. if you're the boss in Murmansk how would you defend and what is the threat and how do you stop it until now that the threat has come from the west

where especially American hunter killers and bombers could attack their bases and also possibly track their boomers and attack them at sea but

with Sweden and Finland coming in then NATO suddenly becomes very big in the north and we don't only threaten the bases on Kola but also the three other places and the first of them of course

St. Petersburg will be very vulnerable to NATO attacks from Estonia and Finland as seen from a Russian perspective that was why Stalin back in the days, in the 1939 war against Finland, because he feared that the border was too close

to St. Petersburg. And then there's the link between St. Petersburg and Murmansk, and the base on Kola, and that's a railway. Russian military is extremely dependent on the railway. We see that also in the Ukraine. So if

that could be cut, then the base on Murmansk would be isolated. And the fourth one is Severodvinsk. It's close to Arkhangelsk. It's a small town, but it has some very big shipyards. And that's the only place where the Russians build their nuclear-powered submarines. And also another wharf up there where they do the most important maintenance of the nuclear-powered submarines. And that would be, I think the Russians would feel that that one would also be threatened.

Because right now there's very few and very small military units in this area. So they would need to reinforce it. So I expect a lot more tension, a large Russian buildup in this area. And that would also mean that for NATO, this would not be a flank anymore. It would be one of the main fronts and perhaps the most important one. And that would also mean that we, NATO, would need to reinforce, especially Finland, but also Sweden. And again, that would mean that it would be more important for the Russians to stop this reinforcement from the sea in the Norwegian Sea and in the North Sea. So I would expect them to increase the numbers of especially conventional submarines up there to make it that more difficult for us.

and it will also of course mean that more of the harbors and the large ports where we would take in this reinforcement would be more threatened from missiles and sabotage I think Russia will

likely be able to deploy a lot of irregular forces special forces in both Norway, Sweden and Finland because of the open economies so we would have that kind of threat well unfortunately that's all that we have time for

I'd like to thank my guest Dr. Stola Uriksson, Stola where can we find you online and what are you working on next online I'm if you go to the Norwegian Defense Academy

the Naval College is a part of that and FHS pages in Norway would show way to me Also, I have a smaller position on the NUPI, the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, NUPI.no. What I'm working mostly on now is to try to envision how will the maritime time domain look in 2040? Who will be the strong actors?

Where will the hotspots be? What kind of technology do we need? will we need when we get there it's rather pessimistic I think looking at China especially and how that will undoubtedly

tip the balance even more as I don't see how the West can catch up with the present Chinese build up if we're not very smart or take very dramatic actions and that is also one of the things that I think is important for the US is to

take a look at allies like Norway and others and see how can we use their strengths in this big struggle to come Well thank you again for joining us to the listeners, thanks for tuning in, we'll see you next time So help me, Boban, pull in the alley.

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