Sea Control - Sea Control 423 - The First Unmanned Raid on Sevastopol with Dr. Sidharth Kaushal

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

Links1. "Ukraine’s Uncrewed Raid on Sevastopol and the Future of War at Sea," by Dr. Sidharth Kaushal, RUSI, February 2, 2023. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. As occasionally happens here, we are hostage to the rapid course of events. And in the case of this week's episode, we'd record with Rusey's Dr. Sid Kaushal not long after what turned out to be the first raid on Sevastopol by the Ukrainian Navy. So we've seen some reporting online that a second strike took place just last week. This episode doesn't take that into account. So if you're wondering why we're not talking about it, that's why. Still plenty of interesting conversation here related to the initial attack and what it might mean for the future of naval warfare.

This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling. 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 our chapters and contact information on the 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 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. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control.

My guest today is Dr. Siddharth Kaushal, and we're going to discuss his piece for RUCI entitled Ukraine's Uncrewed Raid on Sevastopol and the Future of War at Sea. Sid, welcome. As you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself. Of course, and thanks for the opportunity to be here. So I'm Sid Kaushal. I work at the Royal United Services Institute. So it's a defence and security think tank within the UK that aims to provide independent analysis to both the British government and the armed forces in particular. So I sit within the military sciences team at RUSI. We tend to focus quite a bit on the evolving character of warfare across the various domains. And my specialism is sea power, so all matters naval. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So what do we know about the Ukrainian attack on Sevastopol and what was the response? Right, so what we know about the attack is that it involved a combination of UAVs and uncrewed surface vessels Now the surface vessels the Ukrainians used were quite an interesting and in some ways quite an ingenious little piece of engineering

So they used a fair bit of commercial off-the-shelf technology including engines that were used in recreational devices they had a starlink antennae and possibly and electro-optical sensors and we know the last bit because we got a bit of footage of one of the vessels in its terminal sprint of attack towards the russian frigate admiral makarov uh now in terms of the damage uh the ukrainians did during this attack uh it would appear i mean there was claimed damage obviously to the admiral makarov as well as to other russian vessels uh that couldn't be conclusively verified but what we do know is that immediately after the attack, the Russians took a number of measures to buttress the defences around Sevastopol, for example, placing booms around the harbour entrances.

It probably contributed to making the Black Sea Fleet a bit more cautious about venturing past Sevastopol, although that claim is a bit difficult to falsify because after the sinking of the Moskva and, of course, the suppression of Snake Island, the Black Sea Fleet's been pretty cautious in any case. It's mostly sort of clung to Crimea and stuck to a sort of a cruise missile, effectively as a launch vector for cruise missiles against Ukraine's infrastructure. So that's kind of the broad strokes of the attack itself. In terms of the uncrewed vessels, it would seem that they were guided to their location by something like GNSS. And in their last phase, one would assume that there was a handover to some form of remote control, because obviously you're looking at

electro-optical sensors with fairly narrow fields of view, but also in terms of the processing power on the vessels, it's not clear that they were, you know, entirely autonomous in terms of their capacity to designate their targets. Although, of course, that, you know, remains a working hypothesis. Can you explain what a GNSS is for listeners as well? Sure. So effectively, satellite navigation that allows a vessel, well, you know, you would use it on an uncrewed vessel or indeed something like a cruise missile to guide it to the general location of its target, at which point in the sort of terminal sprint, once it's in the broad sort of vicinity of what it's looking for, you would have a handover to some sort of sensor. So on a cruise missile,

it would be an active seeking radar for example in this case it seems to have been an electro-optical camera that that did the final sort of identification so where else have we seen usvs used recently uh so we've seen usvs used in combat uh by the houthis in yemen to pretty good effect against the coalition vessels who have been operating to block it to block or not block but rather quarantined the flow of arms to Yemen. So, for example, you have a successful Houthi attack on the Saudi frigate Al-Medina some years ago. In this case, the boat appears to have been remote controlled. So there must have been something within relative line of sight that actually guided it to its target.

You've also seen the IRGC experiment with uncrewed surface and subsurface vessels. and subsurface vessels. Beyond the sort of more crude side of things, we've also seen sort of experimental work in places like the PRC with more sophisticated uncrued surface assets. So companies in China, for example, experimenting with uncrued boat swarms that communicate laterally to effectively allow sort of on-the-fly adjustments of courses of action and tactics, which obviously is a step change in sophistication relative to what we've seen in, say, Ukraine or, for that matter, in the Babel Mandate. Why are you advising some caution for the analysts who are a bit overenthusiastic about what this might pretend for naval warfare? Yeah, so I think there's an undeniable, the impact of unmanned capabilities in the maritime domain is undeniable.

But I think there's a few reasons we might want to caveat our assessments of what that impact might be. So the first of them, I would say, is that, you know, single vector solutions to challenges that depend on a particular kind of technology are inherently fragile to that technology being offset. So, you know, one thinks of the Jeune École, for example, the turn of the 20th century French school of thought, whose progenitors believed that a combination that the torpedo, you know, launched by a combination of things of fast attack torpedo boats and light cruisers and later submarines, although that developed down the road, would effectively make close in areas very difficult to approach for major surface combatants and could also potentially allow for them to be overwhelmed. and enable other forms of commerce raiding. The problem wasn't that the basic proposition that the torpedo would be central wasn't right. It's that the action-reaction dynamic was overlooked. So once you have, particularly when it comes to torpedo boats,

solutions like smokeless firing guns, which prevent them from using the smoke of gunfire as cover for their approach, or torpedo nests, A lot of the value of the sort of the Jean-Nicole approach starts to disappear because it's essentially bet the house on a single kind of technology. So I think the first is, you know, the fragility of a single tech centric approach or an approach that begins with a single bit of technology and then, you know, moves on and kind of builds its concepts on top of that. I think the second issue we might consider is embracing technology before its maturity. And obviously, you know, examples that come to mind are things like the German Wunderwaffe of the end of the Second World War, where, you know, you do have a series of genuinely pretty revolutionary capabilities,

but they're embraced before they've really reached maturity. And therefore, before they really have the opportunity to have a transformative impact. And arguably, they represent, you know, an opportunity cost relative to more traditional capabilities. The third, I would say, is the tendency to exacerbate say-do gaps within sort of military force structures. So there's been some very interesting work on, you know, we tend to look at innovation through the lens of opportunity. And in particular, the risks that excessive conservatism can impose on a force structure. But there's also a risk that organizations can interpret innovations in ways that enable them to believe that gaps between their resource commitments and their actual, I'm sorry, their resources and their commitments can be elided over with the right technological sort of innovation, the right technological change. And that's obviously a way in which actually organizations can embrace innovation in a way that reinforces sort of existing organizational pathologies rather than sort of solving them.

The final two points I'd make is that even sensible ideas can sometimes be exaggerated. So, you know, think of someone like Harold Brown and the second offset strategy in the US. Many of his ideas about, you know, precision strike are absolutely vindicated. But there were areas in which he took the logic of his argument a bit too far. So, you know, for example, his idea that the emergence of the cruise missile had rendered the aircraft carrier obsolete comes to mind as one example. And the final sort of issue I sort of talk about is what one historian called, you know, the shock of the old, that actually a lot of times when new technology is embraced, it fits into a package with existing capabilities in a way that enhances it rather than actually fundamentally changing the character of war. So, you know, if you take an example of unmanned capabilities in the land domain in Ukraine, one of their primary roles has been to act as spotters for artillery. So, you know, it's absolutely true that they've changed the battlefield in Ukraine, but it's been by actually turning some pretty dumb artillery into very precise capabilities. similarly when you look at things like anti-ship missiles at sea um you know they certainly did or indeed torpedoes they certainly did change the character of war at sea but it was by fixed

fitting into a combined arms mix with existing capabilities and there's a risk that when you focus on the technology first that sort of that factor tends to be elided over so i'd say those are the major risks and areas where you might want to not necessarily ignore the impact of unmanned capabilities, but introduce a cautionary note about how we think about them. What are the risks of fleets that move too quickly to embrace new technology? Yeah, so I think there's a couple of risks that fleets that move a bit too quick on the technological front face. So the first of them, The first risk is that you are left like the journey call with what one commentator called a fleet of experiments. So you invest quite a lot of institutional capacity into technology that's maturing, but in the process, actually under-resourced more traditional capabilities that are both more and more immediately relevant, but and which perhaps, you know, are already under-resourced.

So it essentially exacerbates some of the existing resource tradeoffs that fleets face. The second issue I think that fleets do face if they embrace new technology more quickly is that they don't set the technology in its operational context. So if you think of, for example, the uncrewed surface vessel threat, What it essentially is, is in many ways a new feature of an existing operational reality, namely the threats that naval forces face in littoral spaces, and in particular the threat to fixed infrastructure upon which they depend. And that's not primarily or even exclusively about uncrewed assets. You know, it could be large numbers of manned sort of expendable assets like the IRGC small boats or indeed the suicide boats that the LTT used, which, you know, come to mind as previous examples of this of this threat. It could be the threat from cruise missiles or UAVs, which of course are on man, or it could be just the fact that fixed infrastructure is relatively easy to saturate with, you know, cruise and ballistic missiles, something that, you know, the US Navy in particular will have to contend with in the event of a conflict in the first island chain.

So actually looking at this question from the bottom up, looking at the technology and how it affects the sort of the operating environment, it lies over the broader problems within which, and indeed opportunities within which technology, a given piece of technology sits. So it's often more useful, arguably, to start from the top down with the sort of the operational concepts that a fleet or indeed a force of any kind wishes to enact and move down to the technology rather than the other way around. Because then you can answer certain questions about, you know, what are the opportunity costs of adopting a given technology? Could this be achieved by more traditional means or does it provide a truly non-substitutable sort of capability, for example? Those sorts of questions are much easier when you have a concept of operations against which new technology can be measured rather than building from the technology towards new concepts, which, you know, raises certain risks. Where do you anticipate USVs having the greatest impact in the near future? so i'd say because so if we look at this sort of relatively cheap rough and ready usvs used by for example the ukrainians or indeed the hutis i would say they are limited by a couple of things

as impressive as they are field of view being an obvious example but endurance as well is is a factor. So I'd say in the blue water, it's hard to see them being as impactful. Where I think they would pose a significant challenge to sort of traditional naval force structures is in two places. The first is congested littorals, you know, in particular maritime choke points, where by the nature of geography means that vessels have surrendered or forced to surrender a certain amount of tactical mobility the second place i think is when vest is vessels in harbor and indeed the supporting infrastructure that enables them so actually uh it's worth noting that the ukrainians also conducted a smaller raid on an oil terminal near sevastopol harbor a little bit

after the first uncrewed vessel on on attack on the the ships and you know fixed infrastructure or vessels that are tethered to fixed infrastructure effectively represent situations where the problem of field of view, the problem of tracking a dynamic mobile target is to a large extent solved. And then I'd say the third area where I think they could add a new threat vector is situations where vessels have, by virtue of the mission allotted to them, surrendered a certain amount of tactical unpredictability because they are following predictable patterns of behavior. And here I would think of, you know, the enforcement of

quarantines being one example where actually you are not completely predictable, but certainly following certain predictable course, relatively predictable courses of action in a given geographical part of the theater at any given time. So I'd say those are the areas in which uncrewed assets with limited fields of view probably do represent the most challenging threat vector. But again, you know, if you think of those three areas I listed, those are also the areas in which anti-ship cruise missiles probably represent a pretty substantial threat vector. They're also the areas in which things like ballistic missiles, you know, represent a threat vector. It's far easier to destroy, you know, supporting infrastructure with ballistic missiles

than to say Q in a DF-21D against a carrier at sea. So really, I'd say that the real challenge is that you're looking at an emerging state of affairs where the force protection requirements for vessels, large vessels in littoral spaces, and in particular, the fixed infrastructure on which the ability to project them in many cases depends, are growing.

It's not that you can't meet each part of the threat vector. It's that the cost of doing so increases and therefore the difficulty of scaling operations also increases accordingly. So I think the real operational challenge from which we want to build is how do you project power from the outside in, sort of recognizing that vessels, large ones at least, will have to operate at ever greater distances and reduce their reliance on fixed infrastructure. How do you project power into the littoral and landwards? And, you know, there have been some, there's been a fair bit of work done on this already. You know, the U.S. Navy looking at options for VLS replenishment at sea comes to mind as one sort of facet. But really, it's that bigger picture, I think, within which the uncrewed vessel challenge probably sits. Which leads directly to the last question I think we're getting into. How else are navies preparing to generate mass in the future aside from traditional shipbuilding? Right. So I think the other traditional way you delivered mass, whether in a naval context or otherwise, was a reliance on irregulars, right?

You know, you think of privateers back in the sort of the history of naval warfare. people it effectively boils down to can you co-op people and assets that you are willing to lose and certainly you do see a variety of approaches to this being taken uh to give you uh to use an example uh both uh china and russia have containerized uh the variants of anti-ship cruise missiles they use, the YJ-18 and the Club, which is an export variant of the Caliber, respectively, which could in principle allow them to be utilized from ISO containers on, you know, repurposed civilian vessels, for example. China has put a fair bit of work into integrating bodies such as its maritime militia, an

organization in which various civilian sort of fishermen amongst others operate on a on a sort of part-time basis into its existing force structure so for example we've seen them operating uh we've seen uh regional military commands uh training maritime militia and individuals within the maritime militia to spot vessels essentially enhancing the PLA's situational awareness and providing them with the communications sort of infrastructure, sort of equipment to interact with the PLA. We've seen the Tiananmen militia, a regional

maritime militia, actually taking part in exercises with PLAN vessels. And, you know, this could be a way of enhancing, you know, the sensor net, potentially. But you can, you know, think without stretching one's imagination too much of other ways in which these assets could be used. For example, you know, think of the way in which oilers were used during Operation Haystack to provide sort of effectively decoys for aircraft carriers along with, you know, other vessels that present multiple sort of vessels presenting a radar return that was comparable to a carrier. You could certainly see, you know, militia vessels being used in a similar way. You could also see, you know, larger commercial vessels being weaponized using things like containerized missiles. So, you know, the PRC, for example, has passed national shipbuilding laws which compel civilian, which so mandate that new civilian vessels be built to specific military specifications.

Thus far, a lot of the emphasis in studying this has been on the potential use of civilian ferries to increase amphibious lift, which is, of course, a very important issue, especially in a Taiwan Straits context. But you could also consider, for example, turning merchant marine assets into sort of rough and ready missile launch platforms, for example, with containerized cruise missiles, which, yes, would need off-board queuing and would probably be far more easy to sink than a dedicated warship, but are also fundamentally expendable. So I think the big question there is, as we've seen in Ukraine, you know, no plan survives contact with the enemy. And a lot of the exquisite capabilities that militaries have built, not just Western militaries, even if you look at, you know, the Russian military that went into Ukraine, may actually rapidly degrade in the first phases of a conflict. So how do you regenerate capability at pace when, you know, a warship takes, you know, X number, a pretty substantial amount of time to sort of turn out? That's, I think, the broad operational ask. And I think, you know, uncrewed assets could be part of the solution, but I think it'll probably be part of a more federated solution, including, you know, perhaps things like the creative use of auxiliaries to generate mass. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. I forgot to timestamp this for the listeners earlier, but we record this Sunday, February 19th.

So if there's been any sort of dramatic developments in the naval war in the weeks in between when we've recorded this and when this actually goes to air, that's why we're not talking about it. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Siddharth Kaushal. Sid, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? So you can find my work at the RUCI's website, which and specifically sitting within the military sciences team. And what I'll be working on next in the immediate future is work on the evolving naval balance in the High North. Well, I look forward to reading that when it comes out and hopefully we can bring you back on to discuss. But thank you again for joining us today. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thank you for having me.

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