Sea Control - Sea Control 408 - NATO's Maritime Future with Joshua Tallis

Episode Date: January 29, 2023

Links1. "NATO’s Maritime Vigilance: Optimizing the Standing Naval Force for the Future," by Dr. Joshua Tallis, War on the Rocks, December 15, 2022.

Hello, and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Dr. Joshua Tallis joins the program today to discuss the evolution of NATO's maritime command and control and the future of the standing naval force. I edited and produced today's podcast. CIMSEC is looking for a volunteer to join our technical team and support our web operations. We're 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. 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 and contact information on our website at simsec.org. So if you're interested, please reach out. Finally, I want to take this 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 with that, Kimber's Men. Hello, Hashimates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is friend of CIMSEC and Sea Control, Dr. Joshua Tallis.

We're going to discuss his War on the Rocks article entitled NATO's Maritime Vigilance, Optimizing the Standing Naval Force for the Future. So, Josh, welcome back. Could you refresh the audience on your background, please? Sure. Yeah, I'm a senior research scientist at the Center for Naval Analysis, a Ph.D. in political science. when I'm sort of back at CNA headquarters, I'm on our strategy and policy team. And then periodically, I participate in our field program. So previously, part of Carrier Strike Group 8, and now based here in Naples, Italy, working for US 6th Fleet. So as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions today are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. I'll also timestamp it for the

listeners. It's December 17th as we record this. So there's something that's come up relate to these groups or something that would be pertinent in the Russia-Ukraine conflict that you feel I should be asking about, it's because it hasn't happened yet. So Josh, back to you. Can you explain the origin of the standing NATO maritime groups? Yeah. So classically, success has many parents. So this is a bit of an abridged story, but most directly, the standing NATO maritime groups, which is what they're called now, and I can talk a little bit about sort of the name changes over time. Those are most directly the brainchild of a U.S. Admiral, Richard Colbert,

who at the time was the deputy chief of staff working for the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, so SACLAN, right? So I don't want to presume too much or too little knowledge on the part of listeners, right? So most of us are familiar with SACUR, Supreme Allied Commander Europe. For the entirety of the Cold War, there were actually three major commanders for NATO, the two largest were SACEUR and SACLANT. So Admiral Colbert was working for SACLANT at the time. John Hattendorf at the Naval War College actually has a really exceptional biographical article on Colbert, where I learned a lot of this information myself. It's linked in the

War on the Rocks piece. So for folks who are interested, I'd point them to that. But in brief, he seems to have had a really formative experience aboard a destroyer. He ultimately rises to become CEO of the Destroyer in the Pacific Theater during World War II, attached to that ill-fated ABDA command, the American, British, Dutch, Australian multilateral command. It's ultimately utterly obliterated by the Imperial Japanese Navy. He does not take a negative experience away from that command structure, though. And in fact, he takes away from it a pretty deeply rooted instinct for multilateralism that he carries through basically through the entirety of his career. It's something he comes back to time and time again over several, basically the

next two decades, trying to find environments and iterations and superstructures where that model might be applicable. And he finally succeeds in the late 1960s. So working through the NATO process in 1967. And then in 1968, he's successful in creating what I believe to be the first permanent peacetime naval coalitional force in modern history as an arm of SACLANT, and that's Standing Naval Force Atlantic, or STANAV-4, is how that's originally acronymized. And I would say, sort of in wrapping up sort of the early history here, that his vision is successful in this instance, where it hadn't been in several others prior, because about four years before then, And NATO had started experimenting with some fairly lengthy naval exercises under the moniker of matchmaker.

And these were running for like four to six months long. And this was early NATO's efforts to try and get a sense about how a multinational naval task force would operate. Right. How do you use basing from from multiple allies? Right. How do you how do you how do you do sustainment? How do you do some of the things that had become moderately routine from a coalitional sense in World War II from sort of a joint operations standpoint, but then that stuff starts to atrophy pretty quickly, especially as the U.S. Navy really contracts in size after the Cold War. And so when the Standing Naval Forces greenlit, they basically hijacked the 1968 iteration of Matchmaker and just repurposed that into the first official Standing Naval deployment. Sort of taking the planning, the staff, the ships that had already been earmarked for what would have been something like a six-month maritime exercise, and just basically turned that into what became the Standing Naval Force Atlantic. So how did the Standing Naval Forces and NATO Maritime Command and Control evolve through the Cold War?

Yeah, so there are a couple of different threads that we can weave in response to that. So there are some early constructs that are kind of on the edge of the Standing Naval Forces, but not Standing Naval Forces themselves, but they do deserve some mention. So Allied Forces Southern Europe, which was a subordinate command to Supreme Allied Commander Europe, had designated a striking and support forces Southern Europe as the main combat arm in the Mediterranean that has as kind of its seed colonel, the U.S. 6th Fleet. And then Allied Command Atlantic had pushed the creation of a striking fleet Atlantic, which as its seed colonel was the second fleet, you know, principally its carrier battle groups and the nuclear capable strike aircraft that were flying off of those aircraft carriers. So those are some early sort of task oriented forces that NATO operated from maritime perspective, but they weren't standing groups and they weren't necessarily coalitional in design, right? They had the capacity through the NATO structure to bring in non-U.S. forces, but they had some critical elements that were built around U.S. forces. And maybe as we can talk about, we're actually designed to ensure that some high end U.S. capabilities, so carrier strike groups and more significantly, the nuclear weapons that they carry remained under U.S. control, despite the fact that they were technically under the NATO line of command. That command would always pass from one American to the other, straight up to SACEUR. And that, to some extent, remains true today.

There are also some early experimentation with multinational crews like the multilateral force that doesn't really get beyond the sort of initial experimentation phase. But that's a prominent example during the Kennedy years of how NATO in its early form is trying to think about what it means to execute command and control at sea in a truly multilateral, multinational context. The idea of formal standing forces directly under NATO commanded control, that's 1968, that's Sten F4, the creation of Admiral Colbert. It is pretty immediately popular after the Atlantic version. And I think that's an interesting takeaway that I got from my own research on this is how quickly the concept spreads. The mirror to that is how quickly the concept is adapted to meet the political realities and the operational capabilities and the operational strategic needs of the various commands where later versions take some instantiation. So the Mediterranean is an interesting example of sort of where you see the first copycat. Right. And in that context, you see Allied forces south developing an on-call force. So decidedly not standing in the sense that it's not out there steaming every day, but an on-call, but a standing construct to bring associated forces into a force when needed. And that happens almost immediately afterwards in 1969. That force stays in an on-call status all the way up through basically the end of the Cold War. It's not until something like 1992 that it turns into a standing naval force Mediterranean, which is now what we know as Standing NATO Maritime Group 2. 1973 is when you get the progenitor of what we now know as the standing natal mine countermeasure groups the first of which is an outgrowth of allied command channel so that's that third

major nato commander sack your sack land and then allied command channel which as you can tell by the name has a fairly narrow maritime remit in the english channel and the north sea that group is predominantly mine countermeasure and origin eventually becomes the northern standing nine standing mine countermeasure group. And that one doesn't see a Mediterranean counterpart. And again, mostly at this point, a Black Sea counterpart until again, 1992. Right. So you have some sort of the idea proliferates fairly quickly after the Atlantic version, but then you see them emerging in relatively tailored formats of politics and the operational needs of the specific commanders that are launching them. A little bit of homogenization after the Cold War,

both in terms of naming and also a little bit in terms of the missions that they pursue. And then all of that sort of built on top of the backdrop of some of these task-oriented but non-standing forces that are at the very origins of NATO's maritime operational C2 structure, right? Those, you know, the carrier battle groups being integrated, the multilateral crewing experimentations, things like that. So a really interesting, diverse history that sort of settles into its own by the mid-70s with some transition at the end of the Cold War.

I'm going to try to think about how to rephrase this next question. So post-Cold War, are you able to speak to a little bit what happens to these groups post-Cold War up to present day? Because you talked a little bit about the way they've contracted down to their present size, where we've got quote unquote groups of two ships steaming around in some cases. Way right. And I'm a I'm a naval analyst. I'm a political scientist. So I tend to look at things from a contemporary lens, and I sort of raid the history toolbox as a non-historian. My observation, and I don't think this is particularly unique, is the decline in the

threat perspective, and then obviously the peace dividend that was paid afterwards, had a fairly dramatic effect on the standing naval forces, right? I mean, the standing naval forces are a great example of the issues that all navies experience, which is that they're fundamentally not garrison forces, right? You need to operate them in order to ensure that the crews retain the muscle memory to understand how to do things that you fundamentally are really only ever doing while at sea. And then in the NATO context, you have the added complication of needing to ensure that you understand and have the standardized capability to operate with, communicate with, you know, if you're in combat, fight with, right? Leveraging,

you know, the, you know, shared link architectures? Can you, can, you know, can an ally queue while another one shoots, right? Do you understand sort of the basics of your sort of combined battle doctrine? It's hard to do that without actually operating at sea. And yet, right, the decline in the threat emanating from the Soviet Union takes its toll on the operational purpose of the standing naval forces and their fill. There's some examples I saw where Standing NATO Maritime Group 1, which is the northern group generally, ends up partaking in, you know, counter-narcotics missions, HADR missions in the Caribbean, right, which is in some ways a fairly direct echo of what the U.S. Navy started doing as we turn, you know, the corner from 91 into that sort of

exceptional moment, right, where it wasn't obvious you had this enormous naval capability and not much by way of high-end threats to match with it. And then the second bit that I chronicle a little bit in the article is the decline in command structures that have explicitly maritime flavors to them, right? So SACLANT, who was operating Standing Naval Force Atlantic through the entirety of the Cold War, what becomes S&MG-1, Standing Naval Maritime Group 1, right, that's a battle-oriented commander who holds the primary responsibility for, one, the mid-Atlantic anti-submarine warfare fight, right, the resupply of Europe in the event of a conflict with the Soviet Union, and everything that comes with that, including delivering forces up to Norway, right, and the

northern part of that sort of extended northern NATO flank, right? So SACLAND ends up becoming terminated, right? At this moment in time, NATO only has one Supreme Allied Commander, and that's SACUR. There is another four-star based in Norfolk who took over sort of the physical terrain of, you know, the headquarters for SACLAND, but that's a training-oriented command now, Allied Command Transformation. And with the loss of SACLAND, you lost a number of some of those subordinate forces that were oriented towards operations in the Atlantic theater. And then similarly, in narrower format, right, the decline of Allied Command Channel, the decline of Iberian Atlantic Command, which watched the approaches to the Mediterranean, the loss of the command for

Baltic approaches, right? So the loss of these maritime-oriented, geographically-based commands, you start to see a loss of obvious mission and commanders who are perhaps attuned to the needs and requirements about how to best leverage those forces. And then kind of the end of that long arc is what we have now, which is a bit of an unusual, and I think many would argue still unresolved force structure in NATO, where you have domain commanders, so MARCOM being the most applicable one in the maritime context. NATO Maritime Command is the individual who controls the standing naval forces. And yet, the alliance also maintains three joint forces commands. So you have, you know, Joint Forces Command Naples, Joint Forces Command Brunson, and now Joint Forces Command Norfolk,

which is only about four years old, who own the responsibility for, say, requesting effects for their battle space. So there's a little bit of sort of a weirdness now in terms of, you know, we have the standing naval forces. They were a good enough idea that they survived the decline of mission and forces in the Cold War. And yet the loss of these narrower maritime-oriented commands, I think, has created a little bit of a challenge in terms of understanding who's the local champion for these forces and who helps really articulate what their various missions and requirements are in those spaces. Yeah, I think the other thing that we haven't really touched on too is concurrent with the

loss of all that command and control and advocacy piece was all these fleets contracting. You know, they're shadows of their Cold War selves. And we can talk about the U.S. fleet, but I mean, I'm most familiar with the German one, what the Germans used to have versus what they have today to float around is not even comparable. But how has NATO started to change its maritime command and control relationships and response to, like, I trace it back to sort of the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. But I think some of those conversations started back in 2008, when I was an SNG one, and what we're the

first unit to go into the Black Sea, literally, the day after the Georgia war. Yeah, so there are a lot of muscle movements here, not all of them, at least to the best of my knowledge, are public yet. So I'll be a little bit sort of circumspect about some things and speak a little bit more more to others. Not because I think there's anything, you know, particularly secret going on, more just because, right, when you've got deliberations with 30 nations, nothing's done until it's done. So it doesn't advantage anybody to get sort of ahead of our skis on that. So I'll say something that's not reflected in the article just because it didn't fit with sort of the scope of the argument, but probably one of the biggest muscle movements from a NATO

maritime command and control standpoint these days has less to do with the standing NATO maritime groups and more to do with naval striking and support forces NATO, right? So strike for NATO or SFN. That's the modern incarnation of what was the Southern striking force way back in the Cold War. It went through sort of a number of iterations that ultimately resulted in it being the only striking force to survive. There were two, right? There was one for SACEUR and one for SACLAND. It's headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, which also has sort of some older heritage to it related to the Iberian Atlantic Command. And the purpose of Strike Force NATO is ultimately for the United States to fold a carrier strike group into the Atlantic

Alliance without the concern of a non-U.S. commander exercising direct tactical or operational control over that force. So it's a little bit weird in that the commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet is an Echelon 3 commander. He reports to the commander of Naval Forces Europe, who reports to commander of UConn, right? The Sixth League commander is dual habit as the commander of Strike Force NATO.

Strike Force NATO is an Ech2 command in that it goes direct to SACEUR, right? You don't pass go. That is a force that is directly allocated to the commander of SACEUR, who's also UConn, right? To do with what he pleases and exercise that major combat power at any point in the AOR, according to how he sees fit.

So that's the sort of best case version of what Strike Force NATO is supposed to do. The truth is, for the last like 15 years, it's been a bit sleepy, right? They run bolt ops, you know, to sort of help flex that command and control muscle there. But the United States hasn't been particularly keen on transferring authority of an aircraft carrier strike group to NATO in a long time. That changed with the prior commander here with Vice Admiral Black, which has been carried forward with Vice Admiral Ishii. And this was kicked into high gear after Russia's reinvasion of Ukraine. And so if folks are interested and they sort of Google Neptune, you know, Neptune Strike, Neptune Challenge, Neptune Shield, these are a series of activities in which Strike Force NATO has been supercharged and has at this point fairly routinely exercised direct tactical control within the NATO command and control construct of a U.S. carrier strike group. And that's, I can imagine for some listeners, it sounds like an incredibly arcane and narrow thing to be proud of. But this is a big first, right? And this is a totally different staff in a completely different country, taking on the responsibility for the day-to-day command and control management of a carrier strike group, which is an enormous force, right? There's simply nothing comparable in the NATO alliance with all respect to, you know, our allies with, you know, with large carriers. There's still nothing like taking responsibility for a U.S. carrier strike group. And they're now doing this with some regularity and integrating that carrier's ability to generate effects across the entirety of the alliance, right?

any joint force command can request effects during these windows. And that's all being integrated at one command now. So that's a big deal. It's not the standing NATO maritime groups, but it is important. I'll run through maybe a few others, some of which are a little bit on the US end, but they're relevant, right? So the recreation or the resuscitation maybe is a better word of second fleet. That's relevant. Second fleet being the East Coast US-based surge capability for forces that would need to come over to the European theater, right? So that has some direct echoes of the Cold War structures. Bringing that back is relevant to NATO, not in least because the commander of Second Fleet is dual-hatted as the commander of Joint Forces Command Norfolk,

right? And Joint Forces Command Norfolk is basically sack land in miniature, right? Based in Norfolk, responsibility for that Atlantic maritime battle space. So that's an incredibly significant change in the overall maritime command and control construct, rebuilding a joint forces command that has explicit responsibility for almost an exclusively maritime theater. Folks may be familiar with Task Force 61-2. This is a Marine Corps task force linked back to a second Marine Expeditionary Force in North Carolina that was newly created this past year as well to integrate marine and amphibious capabilities into the Sixth Fleet staff.

So that, again, a little bit U.S. flavor, but obviously if we expect the Marines to play a role in NATO, they've got to integrate through some formal and established staffs. And so this strikes me as a pretty good pathway for doing that. And then, you know,

there are some more explicit NATO changes that are afoot. So the NATO Response Force, which is kind of the always ready portion of NATO's forces, right? The Standing NATO Maritime Groups are the naval arm of those forces. The Allies have agreed to some changes there, moving to an Allied reaction force, which will be a little bit supercharged. The Madrid summit this past

year talking about a new force model. That's only ever been talked about in the context of what it means for land forces and tiered phases of readiness about how the Alliance understands who's ready when. But one could imagine that that has some applicability in a maritime context as well. They just haven't mentioned anything on that front yet. But there are big muscle movements at play, both from a maritime standpoint and also just from a general way about how the alliance is talking about understanding its readiness to execute missions at tiered phases into the future. And I think that'll have some salience in the maritime space. Yeah, you mentioned Second Fleet. I mean, I can remember when it was disestablished, but

prior to that, it was pretty much just training and administration on the east coast of the United States. And not only was it brought back, but then they started to be given operational tasking. I know they came forward and ran ball tops while I was over in Germany the last time. And that was a big deal. I mean, I remember seeing Admiral Lewis show up and the Europeans being very excited to see Second Fleet and not Sixth Fleet up there doing stuff. How much is each nation expected to contribute to these forces and what are they doing today? Yeah, so from the expectation standpoint, I couldn't get into specific group size numbers, but in general, the large navies are expected to pony up, right? I mean, these groups have roughly optimal sizes,

and it is the responsibility of the larger navies to sustain those sizes. You'll also see occasionally that the groups are listed with oilers or sustainers affiliated with them, right? And so that's a form of contribution that nations can make as well. I'll say in general, we see the groups as low as, you know, two. It's hard to get much lower than that, the nations that are the commanders for each group. And I'm talking at this point mostly about the two larger groups, the Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 and 2, right? Those are predominantly supposed to be large surface combatants, frigates, destroyers, things of that nature. If you're the flag or the commander of that group, then you have a responsibility to provide a flagship, right? So basically the smallest you can get is one. You know, if I'm trying to think back, maybe we've seen numbers as high as four or five over the last couple of years.

So that's kind of your your upper and lower bounds just from, you know, what I've seen out there in public, what they do. It kind of goes back to my earlier point about navies aren't garrison forces. Right. So a lot of what they do is what the U.S. does when it's out there on its own routine deployments. They train. They do a lot of exercise participation. There are tons of exercise ongoing across the alliance at all times, NATO and national. Right. So these are these offer great ways for for national exercises like Mario Perto, which is a big Italian one to incorporate NATO flavor into them. And it gives the standing groups an opportunity to to integrate with, you know, with with exercises other than simply the ones that perhaps Marcom might be running. And, you know, to be honest, port visits, that's a big deal in this alliance.

Right. Port visits. They're political symbols. They're also cash infusions. Right. So it's not an insignificant part of what they do is to steam around and show the flag in largely NATO, but not exclusively NATO ports. But then lately, you know, there are some more operational missions. So, you know, one that I've definitely seen out there in the public domain is when the secretary general recently embarked the George H.W. Bush strike group when it was afloat in the Mediterranean. Indian Native Maritime Group 2 folded into the screen, right, which is a demonstration that a force of predominantly frigates and when the U.S. joins and sometimes the French destroyers, and again, these are largely air defense ships and occasionally, you know, ASW friends, they have the capability to fold into a CSG pretty effectively. And it's basically the same ships when, for example, the Danes or the Germans or the Norwegians participate in a cooperative deployment with a U.S. carrier strike group. Those are the same ships that they're sending on alternative deployments to standing NATO maritime groups. So one thing that I'm certainly curious about as a growing mission is HVU defense, high value unit defense, as one potential mission or tasking for these standing NATO maritime groups.

But theoretically, they're optimized for air defense. They're optimized for any submarine warfare, some of them. And they certainly would exercise that in the training and the exercises that they participate in. I pulled some numbers before this conversation from the Marcom website, just to maybe give a little bit of context about what these groups are up to. So this is propaganda from Marcom, but, you know, they're good people and I think it's probably true. These are numbers for 2021 that the groups, and they're including all four groups now, so this includes the mine countermeasure groups, 76 different ships over the course of the year participating in 25 major exercises. They visited 131 port calls, 480 operating days in the Aegean, 286 operating days in the Baltic, 99 operating days in the Black Sea. You know, the standing NATO mine countermeasure groups do a lot of historic ordnance disposal, right? So these are mines and other sorts of pieces of ordnance that are left over from predominantly the two world wars. They go out and they do an important service of rendering those inert or just blowing them up. So they're busy, right? They're active, despite the fact that the numbers are small, which is something I lamented in the piece I was writing. What I don't want people to take away is that I think these groups are ineffective or not important. Quite the opposite, right? I mean, I truly believe, despite the fact that NATO is predominantly a land and air theater, the forces that will be your contact and blunt layer, the ones that are most politically maneuverable, particularly before the alliance declares Article 5, right?

your ability to operate in sort of loose coalitions of the willing, your ability to apply pressure to demonstrate the ability to deny by punishment, that's a, in my opinion, predominantly maritime game. And I think the standing naval maritime groups play a big role in that and can play a bigger role in that if they were resourced at the scale that they should be. So it's interesting you brought the HVU defense because my impression of that, and again, like my NATO deployments back in 2008 was, it's actually a relatively recent development that a lot of the European countries can contribute to that because they've all started to develop sort of major air defense units that look a lot like, they may not have the same magazine depth, but they look and behave a lot

like United States Aegis units. So that's the Saxon class frigates in Germany. That's the Darien class in the Royal Navy. They have these high-end air defense capabilities, and they also have the communications hardware to basically sync up with all these units where Link 16 is just built in. It's not an add-on later. I mean, again, when I did that deployment on the German frigate Lubeck, which was decommissioned two years ago, and she was originally commissioned in 1990, not a high-end air defense unit. Okay, we can contribute to the ASW fight and we can do some extremely limited air defense for ourselves and maybe drive ourselves in the way of an inbound missile, but we're not going to be joining the carrier strike group

to sit at the outer picket and engage in bound missiles. I've also noticed, and maybe you can comment on this, the participation levels in the maritime countermeasure groups does not seem to have dropped in the same way that the standing NATO maritime groups has dropped. And my impression of that is it's related to that mission. You said that there is always old ordinance for those groups to go around and dispose all over Europe,

still left over from World War II. so they like their mission has never ever gone away it is a very operational one where they're pulling into a port and pulling up stuff off the seabed that uh you don't nobody wants there um has go ahead no sorry i think there's a uh there are a couple of really interesting sort of points to pull out and the the you know i'm a good u.s naval analyst so i only look at big ships so i didn't look at the the mine countermeasure groups that much in in some of the research I've done recently, but I think they offer some good examples, right? One, they require smaller ships, right?

And so they're friendlier for a wider variety of smaller partners to participate in. And that's not insignificant in thinking about how we encourage allies, in addition to the United States, to resource the groups at the scale that they need to be, right? So I think, you know, your observation about the fact that despite the fact that the quality level of European navies has been on a pretty significant increase over the last two decades. The quantity level is not growing at a significant pace, right? So there's still relatively few ships to go around. And the mine countermeasure groups offer opportunities for smaller navies to still play a role. They're not at sea for as long periods of time, right? Because

It's just not the capability of that type of platform. And so it's a different type of argument than you'd have to make for the longer, larger, more extended standing deployments that come with some more political risk, right? Because in theory, those task groups could get directed almost anywhere in a way that a mine countermeasure group wouldn't. But your point most critically on the fact that they have an ongoing mission, I think is important, right? Because NATO allies, right, the joint and civilian superiors to NATO navies, it's not that they don't want to use their navies. It's that these are expensive to operate, and not everybody's got limitless cash to spend on what their armed forces are up to at any given moment. And so if you can provide a compelling rationale and a tangible mission that results in demonstrable benefits to the alliance, it's easier for navies to make the arguments to their superiors that they need to be resourced. And so the mine countermeasure groups are a great example, but so also are the other named operations that NATO has participated in, right? The, you know, the named operations in the Mediterranean in terms of, you know, maritime security, and then the counter piracy ops, Ocean Shield, you know, from 2009 to 2018 off the Horn of Africa, those got NATO navies to participate because they could demonstrate

to, you know, to their joint and civilian masters, that they were contributing to an explicit and specific required operational need, right? So there's some real benefits that come from that, that I think the larger combatant standing NATO maritime groups struggle to demonstrate. So what are your recommendations for the future of this force then? So ultimately, I want to see the forces grow. I want to see the two larger combatant groups get bigger. And I mentioned this already, right, but to use the DOD terminology, these are some of NATO's most reactive contact and blunt layer forces, right? And to be effective, they need to be large enough in order to either deter a punch or take a punch and then dish one out. And I am concerned that at the scale that they're manned right now, they're not large enough to create that credible deterrent, either by denial or by punishment. I'm arguing in the piece that the best way to do that is, as I just mentioned, to enable allied navies to see the benefits to them, right, either in readiness to their forces, through exercise participation, through political signaling, through contribution to more explicit mission tasking, and enable those navies to sell that vision up the food chain. I think that there is potential growth in pursuing some of that more explicit mission

tasking that we haven't really seen over the last 20 years. I'd like to see more conversations about how the Northern and Southern groups might differ from one another, certainly in terms of mission and also just in terms of their operating environment, right? Part of the reason I dug into the history here is because it demonstrated that these groups were born for different purposes under different commanders with different geographic maritime terrain. That conversation has really died down since the end of the Cold War. We're slowly gaining it back. But I don't think that the navies of NATO are leading strategically in

the way that they have led operationally. I think that mismatch needs resolution. And having that discussion as it did during the Cold War would help clarify the purpose and then ideally lead to larger crewing for the missions themselves. I think that's especially important now with the sort of impending accession of Sweden and Finland, right? The style of operations, the requirement of the missions in the northern group and the southern group, they both operate on Europe's flanks, right? On the northern and southern flank of a central front. But what role they should play in that flanking force is probably not the same. And having that conversation out loud, I think, should have some implications for the nature, the crewing, the nature of the

ordnance and training for those larger groups. And then, as I mentioned in the piece, I'm interested in the smaller mission-tailored forces as well, right? We've got these mine countermeasure groups. They do good work. We've certainly seen in the context of the Black Sea, although not in a NATO context, the need for mine countermeasure is real and not going away, right? That's an incredibly important mission set that we want allies to maintain. That being said, the maritime world looks a little different now than it did 40 or 50 years ago. And we've certainly seen since the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines that maritime critical infrastructure is a big conversation. And that's pipelines, but it's also data cables, right? And I think that,

again, having a conversation about how these groups are geographically distinct from one another and may lead to different specific mission tasking, maybe that leads us to a conversation where, in addition to a northern mine countermeasure group, we think a little bit more about, again, incorporating some of the smaller capabilities from Sweden and Finland matched with the UK, Germany, Poland, Norway. Maybe there's a need for a maritime critical infrastructure defense force that looks a lot different and doesn't need to be manned with frigates and has much more reliance on smaller combatants and special operations forces and smaller research submersibles and survey vessels,

right? There's room for everybody here. We just have to have a more explicit conversation in order to really pull out what these groups should look like, which I do believe would ultimately lead to a much easier time for the member navies to argue for their manning to to their superiors. Yeah, as you discussed the addition of Sweden and Finland, I couldn't help but think like this might be an opportunity for some of these countries to reinvest in those smaller forces that they divested from since the end of the Cold War. So you saw almost all of the fast patrol boats go away from the major NATO navies because those weren't showpiece type platforms that they could send to integrate with the U.S. carrier strike group or operate with one

of these standing NATO maritime groups. But if you look at the geography, either of the Norwegian littoral or in the Baltic, those forces are ideal to pop in and out of fjords, loose their missiles, and then go right back to where they're protected. So it'll be interesting to see any changes in fleet architecture that come out of this. I don't really have any other questions. I don't know if you had any other thoughts. You know, my only parting thought is I think that that last comment is one that, again, brings up the benefits of having commands that are organized around the maritime geography. I'm, in general, my bias is to be skeptical of the argument that what we need is just one more flag or general officer with one more task force, you know, with one more

headquarters. I understand why that argument is often unappealing. And yet, it would create a champion for having that conversation about what should the combined strength and force structure of Baltic navies look like? And what mission would they pursue in the event of an Article 5 scenario with Russia? And why does that look different than the type of force structure one would be compelled to create in the Black Sea versus the Eastern and Central Mediterranean versus the Western Mediterranean and Eastern Atlantic versus the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea versus the North Atlantic. I mean, these are different operating environments. And we're used to the fact that we want navies to be forces that are able to deploy large multi-mission forces,

that it makes sense why you'd want that. And yet, to your point, many, many of the navies in the alliance cannot or do not want to create a force structure of that size and scale, nor does the alliance necessarily need that. And the lack of an explicit champion to help organize that debate across these various sub-theaters in the alliance, I think really hurts the maturity of the strategic conversation, which has real implications all the way down to mission, tasking, and force structure. Well, it's interesting that you bring up a reluctance to build out any of that force structure, because just again, my impression as an outsider is the one thing that a lot of these countries have is staff officers that are available to build out these kind of

staff. So, you know, I'm 42 right now. I'm going to be retirement eligible from the United States Navy here within the next five months. If I were in one of these European navies, I would be serving another 20 years before I reached my retirement age because they're just organized differently. Again, like as my time working with foreign navies, I would encounter on these staffs, Like all these guys in their mid 40s to early 60s who have been commanders for 20 plus years that are ideal for those kind of positions and sort of building out that staff.

They have long experience. They've been through extensive like staff officer courses through their own countries or other NATO countries. They understand how to work with these and produce staff officers as a product in a way that the United States has really only recently started to do with the establishment of like the Maritime Advanced Warfighter Force in Newport. It's like, I feel like all that infrastructure exists. So it's very interesting for me to hear you say that there's kind of this reluctance to reestablish that command. And I did bet my German students when Doi Mar 4 was established, the German maritime forces up on the Baltic there. I was like, I bet in 10 years this is a NATO command. It's like you it's that was a 2019. So we'll see. I got seven more years on it.

But my money is still on that becoming a NATO maritime command to command the Baltic because the Germans love nothing more than commanding task forces. That's one of their favorite things to do. Someone's got to do the hard work. yeah absolutely this is a tough life up there on the beautiful baltic uh gorgeous summers and everything but uh unfortunately that's all the time that we have for today i'd like to thank my guest dr joshua talish josh where can we find you online what are you working on next uh so i'm on twitter for as long as twitter survives at doc talis i'm trying out post news at josh talis we'll see if we can make that work i'll be uh here in naples for another

probably, I think, nine months or so. So I'm going to keep digging into this. I'm interested in advancing the sort of the U.S. Navy-NATO integration. I've got a great partner in the U.S. commander of Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 and working hard to really try and capture as many lessons as possible from U.S. command of a Standing NATO Maritime Group because it just doesn't happen that frequently. And now is a critical time to really soak up that learning and see if we can push it back into the fleet. Well, thanks again for joining us. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thank you.

Oh, I'm putting it out. It's putting out the show now.