Sea Control - Sea Control 426 - "Every Ship a SAG" with LT Kyle Cregge

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

Links1. “Every Ship a SAG and the LUSV Imperative,” Kyle Cregge, CIMSEC, March 2, 2023.2. Sea Control 215 – Bluetech: Gateway to the Undersea “Internet of Things," by Andrea Howard, CIMSEC, December 9, 2020.3. “20 Years of Naval Trends Guarantee a FY23 Shipbuilding Plan Failure,” Matthew Hipple, CIMSEC, May 9, 2022.4. “The Age of American Naval Dominance is Over,” Jerry Hendrix, The Atlantic, March 13, 2023.

Hello, and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Today, Andrea Howard talks with Lieutenant Kyle Craig about his recent CIMSEC article, Every Ship a Sag. They discuss his vision of incorporating large unmanned surface vehicles into the fleet. 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 are 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 are 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 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. Greetings Sea Warriors! Let's dive, dive back into sea control. I'm Andrea Howard and having

been on a break from hosting due to the start of my department head tour, I left at the opportunity to interview my dear friend and classmate from the Naval Academy, Lieutenant Kyle Craig. Today we're discussing his article titled Every Ship a Sag and the LUSB Imperative, which SimSec published online on March 2nd, 2023. Kyle is a surface warfare officer completing his department head training at SWAS in Newport, Rhode Island, before reporting to USS Pinckney DDG-91 as the operations officer. Kyle, it's so great to have you on and to see you and hear from you again. Absolutely, great to be connected again since we're working on NAVFAC like 2014. Oh, the time does fly. So yeah, let's focus on the good work you're doing now and start by talking

about the motivation behind this article. What is the projected outlook on the strike capability of the surface Navy over the next decade? So I opened piece talking about congressional budget office reporting and testimony that talks about the surface fleet losing 788 vertical launch system cells through the end of 2027. And that of the various plans that we've proposed, we're not going to really restore any of those BLS numbers in the late 2030s. There's been similar work on SimSec by Matt Hipple, who's also highlighted that, you know, of the shipbuilding plans we've produced over the past couple decades, we have not even met the numbers projected there. So it's similarly concerning to me to think that we'll be able to have the both strike and any surface

warfare capacity to be able to meet the challenge of the People's Liberation Army Navy, who has the world's largest Navy right now, and the industrial capacity to both meet and exceed that capacity. In light of that picture that you've painted, you offer the following as the main question for your article. What capabilities are most likely to enable a replaceable lethal force to deter or deny Chinese aggression from the Taiwan Strait to the Second Island Chain? So what is it that you propose? so ultimately the concept that i'm thinking about is you know every ship of sag where in the sense a sag is a surface action group of temporary organizational ships usually not involving a

carrier and ultimately they're assigned to a particular task in the past decade we've had hunter killer sags so called with multiple destroyers but in this case i'm trying to think about, hey, what are the different ships that I could put a large unmanned surface vehicle around to provide additional VLS capacity to be able to, you know, meet the need if required to deny a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or other aggression thereof. And, you know, I'll caveat as well that, you know, writing as a surface warfare officer, this is really tailored to my community. Vice, you know, I've seen similar arguments by David Allman talking about the use of air

power and bombers. I'm sure you could write your every boat a wolf pack sort of piece. But ultimately, there are different value choices that we can make between capabilities. But I was writing specifically to the community. And now I think that rather than extending cruisers or arming merchants, that pursuing an LUSV plan around any given ship is the best option that we have to increase strike capacity for our fleet. I like the sound of every submarine a wolf pack, and maybe I'll have to steal that for a future article. But with that, can you describe the capabilities of an LUSB? What is an LUSB, and how is the Navy planning to procure this platform? So an LUSB has been envisioned by Congressional Research Service reporting and also, you know,

discussed open source as a corvette sized vessel so 200 to 300 feet low cost high endurance reconfigurable and designed to fit up to 32 vls cells initial buys will be an fy25 and out to fy27 with 241 million per ship but ultimately that really means we're looking at about six ships through the end of the davidson window and there's been a lot of arguments about what these things can do, but I was trying to narrowly scope beyond just saying adjunct magazine, which I think is technically correct, but may struggle to easily explain that narrative of what an adjunct magazine is to, you know, the junior sailor, to the commanding officer, to our Congress people, both in understanding the need and the use case for them.

I think one of the major benefits that you highlight as well is the cost component of an LUSB versus an SSNX or a DDGX, and particularly in light of the strains that we already have on our defense industrial base and our domestic shipyards. Can you talk about that a little bit more? Okay. So I mentioned, you know, we're looking now when FY27, it's $241 million per ship. That's distinctly different than we're talking about in the billions for even our labor destroyers or Virginia-class submarines. Yes, we're talking about different capabilities, but ultimately, if I wanted to take and replace the nearly 800 VLS cells that we're going to lose through 2027, I could, by shipbuilding numbers only, replace that for under the cost of the potentially proposed SSNX at around $6 billion or just over two DDGXs at over $3 billion. now i'll caveat that those are just the shipbuilding costs everyone can make arguments about the c5i connectivity further research to be done on data and ai the hm and e support the manpower infrastructure the munitions required i'm not disagreeing on that but i think what we all can agree on and i think you know the cno mentioned in a recent 60 minutes piece that we don't have enough shipyards. The shipyards we have are building the big multi-mission and multi-billion

dollar combatants now. If I want to be able to find capacity in the industrial base, it's going to be in building smaller combatants like the LUSV, whether that's in American shipyards or with our August Japanese or Korean partners, because you can look open source, we're going to be sharing SM-6 with our Korean partners, Australians, and Japanese over the next few years, and as well, the Tomahawk land attack missile with the Australians and Japanese in the coming years as well. So those are the two missiles distinctly designed for the LUSV and its strike and surface warfare role.

So, you know, when Japan and Korea have the second and third largest field capacity in the world, I think, why not when we so desperately need additional ship capacity for our fleet as well? So let's say that the U.S. Navy is able to procure LUSVs at the scale that you propose in this article. Let's talk about who should be working with this platform and then how the employment of them will look in practice. So first, like I said, who do you envision as the leaders for these teams of LUSBs, and how do they fit into the existing chain of command? So I see that in two ways, one in the short or interim term, and then more in the longer term. And I've gotten some good feedback from those in the personnel realm trying to make arguments

towards it. In the interim, the surface fleet is already committing to early command opportunities for junior officers, both coming off their division officer tours and into their department head tours where they can go either with Task Force 59 out in Bahrain or with Fort Hueneme to work with LUSV and MUSV in that role, or correction, with USV Div 1, I should say. That's a good option in the short term, but ultimately I think there's value in being able to buy back other shore time for people similar to the way the SWO nuclear community has conventional

and then nuclear, division officer, department head, and then, you know, mid-grade tours. So something like a SWO hybrid pathway where you have folks that are talented in robotics, engineering, computer science, that can be a subset of a community where I can do a conventional SWO tour, and then I'm going to go explicitly work with unmanned, and then I can still get my shore duty to do all the things that we recognize are not going to go away, whether that's getting masters and joint doors and all these other things. But within the community, there's a desire and a higher level of expertise for individuals who can lead and execute with unmanned systems. Sounds like an awesome career opportunity to diversify the profile

and get involved with these unmanned or human in the loop technologies that are going to expand the reach of our existing platforms from the seabed up into space and you argue that lusvs are going to ultimately increase the survivability of the fleet by complicating an adversary's ability to target and attack surface forces so let's get to the meat of your article what does the employment of these platforms look like in practice realistically it just goes down to many of the tenets that Wayne Hughes and his adherents have followed and are built in into the distributed maritime operations concepts, where if I'm able to put more things to sea, separate them, then I'm complicating the adversary's targeting problem, whether I'm within their weapons

engagement zone or without, and they have to determine what is the greatest risk, and even as they work through that entire kill chain, doing a battle damage assessment to say, what did we actually successfully engage, what's left, and how do we do that? The more I can put out on the ocean, the more complicated that is for the adversary. And, I mean, realistically, I think about for myself, if every single Luyang-3 or Renhai came with an unmanned 32-cell VLS, that would be something that would greatly worry me. And so I would like to impose that same fear and consideration with them should the time come, because they're doing it with manned platforms right now, and we don't have the

capacity to do that. Yeah, it's hard to fathom trying to go up against Renhai's and Lu Yang's with additional unmanned systems augmenting their already top-notch capabilities. One of the scenarios that piqued my interest in your article is your identification of times that would warrant embarking on a USB. You know, a lot of folks will think that unmanned systems are going to just remain totally unmanned. So what situations would warrant that posturing? And how do you envision that transition between manned and unmanned operations?

It's definitely a lot of open source reporting. I think when the Department of Defense transitioned these unmanned systems to the Navy, we had, I think, the Sea Hunter be able to cross the Pacific about 94% of the time in May and things like that. But I do think there are times where, whether you're entering or leaving port or going through critical straits, where the ability to respond to casualties, both either on board or to the boater getting out on a Friday in San Diego, having someone on board who can take responsibility for and pilot the vessel accordingly is prudent.

And that's in a peacetime and sort of regular operations environment. Similarly, I could also see arguments for, depending on the C5 ISRT architecture we have set up and continue to develop with the Navy operational grid and project overmatch and things like that. You know, if I'm in a degraded environment, is there value in potentially a small crew embarking on an LUSB that it will proceed over the horizon for its own strike mission twice the entire destroyer or LCS or ESB that it is working with? That's potentially an option that's worth considering. And so, you know, it's more like maybe the PT boats and John F. Kennedy of yore that it's not great to live on, but you can get the job done if you need to. That's a great conceptualization. And for people that may still not fully be able to grasp this, you give a metaphor of sorts in saying that there is a parallel between the Romeo community and its deployment of expeditionary detachments of pilots. How does this model differ for LUSBs,

but what are the similarities as well? Sure. So this is not meant to an insult to our Seahawk community brethren, but ultimately, as a SWO, when I'm bringing on a Hilo, I'm bringing on a semi-autonomous weapons and sensor platform that can go out and do jobs on its own, or it's going to be under the control of a particular operator on board the ship. And, you know, when we go to our crew desk platforms with Romeos and Sierras and things like that, they are bringing on board a detachment of operators, maintainers, and those able to operate the system as required. The only difference that I would offer is, you know, the Romeo or those aircraft are dependent specifically on the vessels which can embark them, land them, fuel them, communicate with them accordingly. I definitely think there's cases, without knowing the details as I drew from open source,

that an LUSV can interoperate, whether it's I'm going to be with the carrier one day, and as we break off a SAG to go operate with this destroyer, I can easily be chopped over just like I would any other destroyer into a surface action group, and that can be more seamless. At least it is with the C2, but everyone can make the appropriate arguments about whether the network connectivity and things like that will be backed up. That's an appropriate critique

and I think something we need to manage. I certainly have bought into this concept that you've proposed and I can say at a very low level that I've gotten to experience some of the concepts that you're talking about within the subsurface community on the SSGN platform.

For the naysayers though, how does your article address concerns about reliability and maintenance, as well as ethical use of weapons in conjunction with these LUSBs? Those are good questions, and I think the Navy is trying to answer them both themselves and for congressional representatives, both with land and sea-based testing that we're going back to and making significant investments in to show that these things can operate on their own for multiple days. But with respect to ethical use of weapons, it's sort of an easy, hard answer by which i mean opnev n96 the you know the leadership within our community that

buys the ships has said that these systems will rely on human in the loop uh for decision making um whether that's someone on board or embedded within a network to make a decision um so that is in a sense the easy part we know how to do that the hard part is that four-time targeting uh not having done it but just based on my assumptions from exercises and gaming it out the wartime targeting and ethical use is going to be hard regardless and it's a great responsibility for anyone firing a weapon and their role within that kill chain to meet the ethical standards and the ROE accordingly but that's the same methodologies that we've had since we employed the fire and forget harpoon since the middle of the cold war that we're

applying here so ultimately this is not robo killer death robots trying to sink all the ships This is deliberate human action in coordination and teamed with our unmanned partners. You do such a great job of laying out the hurdles that still need to be surmounted in order to make this idea come to fruition. But I'm going to keep digging in onto some of these other major barriers to every ship of SAG as a concept. And some of those involves fleet data collection, demand for talent, and munitions. So I'll have you cover some of those topics as well. Sure. So I think there's been a lot of good work by folks like John Falcone and Jonathan Panter

pointing out cyber as a critical risk for unmanned systems and force protection as well. They wrote a great piece on the unplanned costs of an unmanned fleet. So I would offer those in two cases. One, there's the whole mechanical electrical maintenance infrastructure where we've all dealt with ships that are in maintenance and trying to deal with that. Just throwing additional ships into the fleet without the maintenance facilities to support them, both people, process, procedures, tools, et cetera, ultimately will not make us a successful program. Similarly, on the software side, if we don't have cybersecurity, the ability to integrate data,

execute that in the same ways that the Navy and Department of Defense are making efforts towards artificial intelligence and digital transformation, those things are critical as well. But the two I really want to highlight specifically are the talent and the munitions. And first, the talent. I do recognize at present, whether it's Air Force drones or Navy uncrewed systems, the data has not yet shown that when I go unmanned, I'm saving manpower dollars automatic. And I think there's been some concern with our current congressional representatives that this is a sneaky way to shrink the Navy and save money with more lethal systems. And I would, one, disagree and really ultimately say we need these systems because we need the additional capacity in the fleet, which will come initially with a manpower bill. However, I would offer until we get to the place where these systems are reliably used, that's not until the place where we'll be able to pull back on the manpower in the first place.

So we'll never be able to get over the hump until we have deployed these in the first place. And so divest to invest is a dirty word, and I recognize manpower is an important piece here. Munitions, too, though. I mean, the Fleet Forces Commander, Admiral Cottle, highlighted in Surface Navy Association this year that if he had 75 mission-ready ships, he wouldn't have their magazines all full right now. So SM-6, Tomahawk, these are critical munitions programs that I know in at least the most recent budget proposal are being maxed out. It's great, and you love to see it. It's something that's a hard rock, but something we'll have to get to to make this effective. the same conversation exists around torpedoes for subsurface platforms as well it's not enough to

just feel the platforms themselves without the capabilities to then make them lethal you have to inject the lethality into them right you did highlight some of the great efforts by the department of defense and i had the pleasure of interviewing captain michael brasser who is the Commodore Task Force 59 and Julie Angus in the 215th episode of Sea Control, which was only my second, but they are doing great work on creating a digital ocean. How does every ship of SAG integrate into and bolster their framework, as well as the work by PEO IWS and the Naval Postgraduate at school. So Captain Brosser just turned over with Captain Corden with Task Force 59.

So I'd wish them both luck, Captain Brosser and his retirement, and Captain Corden in continuing the work that Task Force 59 and Admiral Cooper are doing out there in Fifth Fleet. There's really a lot of valuable stuff, testing and experimentation that they're doing. And the DigitalOcean that Captain Brosser talked about, specifically in how they're deploying commercially available systems is really valuable, I think, in all of the missions of the Navy that we can often take for granted, both as a country and within the Navy itself. It's some of the stuff, whether that's supporting migrants or monitoring data, environmental

pieces, pieces that were highlighted, you can find online if you Google DigitalOcean. I would offer that as in vain with the missions recently updated by Congressman Gallagher in the last NDAA, which acknowledged the peacetime missions of the Navy in a presence role around the world and supporting the global order instituted in the post-World War II timeframe. But there's also the warfighting mission that we don't want to get lost, and I wouldn't say it is, but I don't think we have told a compelling and convincing story about the role of USVs in a warfighting context and specifically framed it in a specific enough way to where that is abundantly clear to anyone who understands the basics of systems and operating concepts within the Navy. And so every ship of SAG for me is when we go to war, this is what we might need and in many ways what it might look like, whether we have unmanned systems or not, whether it's SAGs or strike groups operating in a distributed manner, able to strike or deny an adversary's capabilities. In a digital ocean context, when the phase zero, phase one, where we want to have better data to understand anything that's happening from the seabed to space, absolutely want that and supports the peace sign missions of the Navy. You mentioned PEOIWS. They're doing a lot of great work with ship modernizations and specifically the integrated combat system. Things like this obviously will help mesh together the man-to-man teaming that, whether it's DigitalOcean or every type of SAG, I think is required.

Similarly, the Naval Postgraduate School and the TICOM AI Task Forces, work that needs to happen in innovation and research that we're investing in and trying to show that these things matter. i'll give you one last shot across the bow and it's because of a linkedin post that you just shared with us on jerry hendrix's article in the atlantic this month it's titled age of american naval dominance is over how does every ship of sag contest this notion well i'll start to say that emerald gilday has called us to get real and get better and uh you know i opened my piece with uh hard math hard math that i don't want to believe is true but i think it's hard to argue with numbers and it's hard to argue with congress's numbers and ultimately we have less ships in the navy in the coast guard in the merchant marine

less industrial capacity than the Chinese. Jerry Hendricks, who's been an advocate for increasing the maritime power of the United States and getting back to our roots, going back to the revolution, these are things that we need to consider. So how would I say every ship of SAG fits in? I would say it is a recognition that current industrial-based capacity does not support additional fleet growth with the same multi-billion dollar multi-mission combatants and building the combatants that are smaller scope to particular use cases and can be fielded with scale in time

of relevance with sufficient capacity those are the things we need and that is one small scope of the piece that jerry hendrix was speaking to and i would encourage everyone to go read it because That's the sort of advocacy we need, whether he's talking at home in Indiana or on the Hill, because one small component of the Surface Navy fits in with a wider, wider network from the Merchant Marine to the Coast Guard, our Marine Corps, and across the fleet as a whole. Kyle, you mentioned that Jerry is an advocate, but since our days on, you know, running around the Naval Academy together and me watching you tear it up on the football field to now where you have not only become an emerging voice for junior officers, but an established one

with a pretty big accolade coming down the line here from proceedings. It has just been a pleasure to chat with you today. And while the time has run out, I just continue to feel good that the surface warfare community has a department head like you getting ready to forge out back into the fleet to lead to think to write and to make us a better collective force so thank you again for your time today so much and i would say to anyone who's interested in writing to do it uh you will start poorly much like i did and you will only get better by continuing to do it just like we do anything so i look forward to getting back out to san diego whether it's for warm summers and California burritos and margaritas and just hanging out with my family and

young kids out there. It'll be a great time. So thanks so much. It doesn't get much better than that. We'll catch you next time on Sea Control. © transcript Emily Beynon We'll be right back.