Sea Control - Sea Control 407 - Applying Lessons from Ukraine's Naval War with Brent Sadler

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

Links1. "Applying Lessons of the Naval War in Ukraine for a Potential War with China," by Brent Sadler, The Heritage Foundation, January 5, 2023. 

Hey, folks, it's Jared today. I'm joined by Brent Sadler to discuss his piece for Heritage entitled Applying Lessons of the Naval War in Ukraine for a Potential War with China. This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling. SimSec is looking for a volunteer to join our technical team and support our web operations. We are looking for someone with a background in WordPress implementation and support, as well as knowledge in web hosting and networking. Some knowledge of identity management and security operations is also helpful. so if you're interested please reach out to content at simsec.org to share your background and discuss 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 chances are there's a simsec local

chapter near you you can find a full listing of local chapters contact information on the website at simsec.org so reach out and get involved finally i want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the simsec podcast network the bilge pumps you can find alex jamie Drac, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International American Security. Aloha, shemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Brent Sadler, a naval analyst from the Heritage Foundation. We're going to discuss his paper entitled Applying Lessons of the Naval War in Ukraine for a Potential War with China. So Brent,

Welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about your professional background, please? No, thank you. 27 years in the Navy, started out as a nabster up in Newport, Rhode Island, Naval Academy. Lots of time in the Western Pacific and a nuke submariner for the majority of that time. The latter part, I became a foreign area officer with an Indo-Pacific focus. And I just retired at the height of COVID, unfortunately, in 2020. and been lucky enough to keep talking and advocating on issues really important to Navy

and maritime competition with China and Russia. So your article, again, is applying lessons of the naval war in Ukraine and then dot, dot, dot for potential war with China. What, if any, assumptions are you making about the nature of future U.S.-China war as you're drafting the report? So a few of the assumptions that I'm making is that, first and foremost, is that time is of the essence. uh you've heard admiral davidson and you've heard it doubled down by current and previous cia

directors uh that this is a very dangerous time the year 2027 is sometimes bandied about i am committed to that as there are several that this is in fact a dangerous time and there's a window a very small window where the risks are very high so that's one assumption the other assumption that I think is key is that the Navy will be a key player, perhaps the critical player in any conflict or say a crisis leading up to conflict over Taiwan in Asia. So those were my two big assumptions going into this. You identified a number of parallels between the ongoing war and then the potential war with China. So what were those parallels? Yeah, so I try to use a construct that, you know, often I'll write and I'll try and think like a staff officer in the Pentagon

because they have a busy job, a million things they got to cover. And so I use key operational problems as a construct to try to make the argument between what people are seeing and reading about in a lot of energy about the Black Sea and the war in Ukraine. I try to use three key operational problems that parallel to what you would see in in a taiwan crisis or contingency the first one is the ability to blunt and deny an aggressor's victory a quick fait accompli the other is the ability to sustain you know keep the arms flowing keep the keep your your ally your partner in the fight so to speak and then the last one is a maneuver advantage uh so those three key operational problems I saw both playing out in Ukraine, but in the Black Sea and along the

coastline. And I definitely have seen it as something that has to be considered if a crisis or a war were to erupt over Taiwan. So that's how I approach that. What were some of the key differences as you assess them there? Sustainment obviously jumps off the pages. I don't know if I want to say it's more challenging. I wrote more challenging as we're prepping this here but you know maneuver in that littoral environment if we're talking about sustainment by sea uh could i guess you could say it's more challenging in ukraine even but uh so sustainment jumps off the page but maneuver seems like a lot of opportunities when we talk about a naval war just because of the the distance that you can cover in the ship in the course of day

versus what you can do on the ground yeah so uh absolutely the sustainment one is probably the most obvious and the most uh explicit difference i mean ukraine's got it's a land-bound country you've got most you can just drive across the border bring in armaments you could also bring in people uh etc etc it's it's easier in that regard it's also targetable it's easier also to watch the russians kind of know where you're going to cross uh there's only so many places so there's cat and mouse game that has to be played there so easier in some respects dangerous and others Taiwan on the other hand island country and the Chinese have spent you know 20 years building a that could cut off Taiwan from resupply so it's easier from an operational perspective because

the only way you're going to get stuff into Taiwan is from the sea or from air and the air is really dangerous proposition which means the most likely way you're going to sustain Taiwan is going to be from sea and those are big big container ships big cargo ships big targets uh so the challenge is a lot higher um it becomes also deep deep navy one uh you also mentioned the maneuver advantage this one's actually i think more a lot alike than maybe it might seem the so the one that the place this really plays out is snake island in the black sea russians took it fairly early on They had a point off land that they could watch what the Ukrainians were doing with their Neptune. Anti-ship cruise missiles also gave the ability to monitor and also blockade any commercial shipping going in and out of Odessa to the north of Snake Island.

So it served a purpose, much like the offshore islands in Taiwan. The pescadores come to mind halfway between mainland China and Taiwan. So there's a similar kind of maneuver advantage that you have if you control these offshore islands played out in both places. Ukraine had to retake it. And that was a precursor to them reopening up the shipping multinational deal. So that one, I think there's a lot more commonality between the geography and the importance of offshore islands, Taiwan, as well as Ukraine. And then how much value did you assign the sinking of the Moskva as you're writing this piece, given the ship's age? And then what we seem to be is publicly available about lack of training or proficiency on the systems that they have on board. Yeah, so I guess the disclaimer up front is we won't really know for years what really was going on on that ship, the Moskva.

There's certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence. There's stuff in Russian media, stuff that people have been able to get out from personal, like, telegram channels that, oops, a sailor kind of let out. It certainly paints a negative picture for their maintenance standards and damage control training. But I come back to that ship was a Cold War relic. It was designed to take out our carriers, and so it was shoot and die or shoot and run. So it was never meant for the fight it was in. And so it's hard to grade the Russians on the performance of that crew and that ship in this case. But it does tell us the importance of damage control to this day.

So watertight compartments, trained crews with good equipment can still save a ship. And that is very important for the Navy to kind of, and that's something I addressed. So I take that as the big lesson. The other one that's important, and again, the picture is a little murky because we don't have, And I would probably suspect even behind the curtain of classification, probably don't have as full a picture yet. And that is the combined use of drones and shore-based anti-ship cruise missiles to complicate or to overwhelm the crew on the Moskva to defend itself. So that tells me that combined, these coordinated attacks are very, very dangerous. And again, this is something that, you know, if you go back to Bob Work's time and you go back even to Marshall's time in Net Assessment,

this age of cruise missiles i mean this is this is another iteration of that same problem set yeah my kind of takeaway from the uh mosque was sinking and i had about three quarters of an article written that i was going to publish before uh life intervened on me was it it didn't really teach us a lot of new lessons but it reinforced a bunch of old ones so you're talking about the damage control and uh like i would assume that in the course of your naval career you set foot on a russian warship at one point or another even but you guys were sharing a port you walk over there and the vls launcher is all paint has been painted over six times uh rusty in different spots or you can obviously tell they've painted over rust and that's sort of a insidious problem but then the

other piece that i took away from it as i read as much as i could again we don't know what really happen was the criticality of like the diligent watch stander yes so whether that is the lookout observing something coming in or the the combat information center watch stander who's supposed to be wrapped attention in front of his or her screen for four to six hours at a time depending on what the watch schedule is like if you don't have that in a missile fight or if you even have a 20 second lapse at the wrong time in a missile fight that's kind of it for you so when i think about like the u.s navy and like the the focus that we placed on discipline uh in the watch standards like that is kind of like a major difference slash advantage but i don't know if

you had any thoughts on any of that yeah no this area is something even when i was still you know you go back 10 years ago or so in the pentagon you know we were trying to get people to look at the human element so this is not really we weren't really concerned about the russians at this time Though I think they merit, despite their size, they still can cause a lot of harm and death. But it's the Chinese Navy. You know, how are they manning and training their enlisted sailors? And again, they're a conscript Navy. Do they have the same kind of dynamics the Soviets did?

They don't have good chiefs and good, you know, first class petty officer equivalent. Not really a strong suit for Chinese Navy nor the Russian Navy. And so as you talk about that diligent watchstander, that's where that happens. ships sink or stay in the fight based on uh your junior enlisted um and so i'm not sure sure the quality is there but we just don't know rich area for for uh further research and certainly kind of kind of explore some more uh it will matter at a tactical level absolutely yeah also an opportunity to make some dangerous assumptions about the future if we're uh if we're wrong about it. What other lessons did you derive from the naval conflict to date? Well, mines, simple like

old World War I kind of mines can actually bring about international action. So this is the grain embargoes or the blockade the Russians were doing and the fact that the world was seeing these mines complicating the shipment of grain out of Ukraine and Russia. And it was to Russia's benefit to open not the grain shipments do they they made a lot of money on that but the world um overwhelmed an operational military operational effort and they changed the dynamics in the black sea so and that's just a world war one type mine military and naval predominance in the area which the russians still have so they could turn that off again in a flick of a switch um so that's another one that i think is worth bringing up and you're going to see this play out in shipping

lanes from the Straits of Malacca, the South China Sea and the East China Sea. I mean, the United States is much more connected economically and its engine of industry, even in wartime, is connected to those sea lanes. So if you've got mines and you've got a hostile navy tooling around in there, it's going to have a significant impact. How that changes the political diplomatic choices the United States as president has at the time will be shaped by that, much like the United Nations took action to try to get both sides, Ukraine and Russia, to relent and to allow grain shipments. We could be forced in a similar kind of world pressure to relent. And that could be very detrimental to Taiwan and to U.S. interests coming out of whatever conflict. So we got to be

ready for that. Now, you had recommendations for SECDEF Congress, INDOPACOM, and SECNAF. So can you talk us through some of those recommendations? Yeah, I think, one, when you watch what's happening in the Black Sea, I make a similar recommendation for NATO nations to cobble together their mine clearance capability and just to patrol NATO waters in the Black Sea. A similar kind of thing, I think, is that could be worthwhile in the Philippine Sea, the East and South China Seas. You know, if a North Korea-South Korea conflict, you're going to see mines there, too. So this task force, a multinational task force that's standing, that's patrolling and keeping a lookout for dangers to shipping, I think has merit in not only just a China-Taiwan crisis, but even a North Korea one. And so that's one of the recommendations.

That's really the end of PACOM, but it's going to be Navy PAC fleet that probably executes it, and 7th Fleet in particular. That's one. We don't have a whole lot to bring to the table on that. We do have some minesweepers, but not a whole lot. And it needs to have an operational framework existing. As we saw with Pelosi's visit, you're going to see similar kind of play if we have another crisis. So better to have a task force in place before that. Another one is, you know, the security cooperation, the provision of munitions and equipment to Ukraine.

Man, that, I mean, the folks at UCOM and the folks at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency just across the street where I live, these folks have taken what normally takes, you know, 10 months to a year and turn it around in the measurement of days and hours. Now, that's got to be replicated left of bang in a conflict with over Taiwan. So that's another urgent recommendation is, hey, you need to go ahead and stand up the similar kind of thing, a Kolaroy, that in Indo-Pakom and start exercising it. The sales of weapons that Taiwan makes, Congress is debating establishing a foreign military financing account, pretty big one. You've got to have that in place because when urgency comes or the bullets are flying, that's not the time to sort this out. we got lucky because ukraine is a land country we could drive things across you don't have that benefit so act now on that one another another interesting one it has to do more with strategic

capabilities office uh and bring them in to try to slow or to blunt and deny that that key operational problem and that is using like quick strike mines which everyone's talking about extended range on bombers when the fighting starts you're going to want to lay mines from taiwan you can't do it from a ship or an aircraft because it'll be easy targets the other thing is you won't know that it's for real invasion or an assault until they're crossing the 12 mile line so you need something more responsive SCO strategic capabilities should be looking at taking those quick strike mines or an equivalent putting it on a rocket that you could launch six to ten miles offshore just in front of a Chinese armada not place it there before absolutely well unfortunately

that's all the time that we have for today i'd like to thank my guest brent sadler brent where can we find you online what are you working on next well the best way to follow me i'd say is on linkedin uh of course you can always go to heritage.org and then just in the search look type in my name brent sadler and you'll find me uh those are probably the easiest ways to find find me and uh if you have questions you i will engage i do respond so i try to be very responsive to any and everything thank you for the chance to talk today well thank you again for joining us. To the listeners,

thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. We'll be right back.