Sea Control - Sea Control 497 - Citizen Sailors with Joshua Taylor & Scott Humphrey

Episode Date: February 24, 2024

Links1. “Citizen Sailors: The Missing link in Maritime Force Structure,” by Joshua Taylor and Scott Humphrey, War on the Rocks, November 15, 2023. 2. “The U.S. Navy Needs Its Own Bonds to Be Ready for China,” by Joshua Taylor, Foreign Policy, November 5, 2021. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. Walker Mills is back as your host this week. He has Joshua Taylor and Scott Humphrey on board to discuss citizen sailors and the history of maritime militias in the U.S. This episode was edited and produced by Jim Jarvie. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for CIMSEC tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And with that, Kimber's Men.

You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Welcome back aboard the Sea Control podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. I'm your host, Walker Mills, and my guests today are Joshua Taylor, a captain in the U.S. Navy and an Indo-Pacific Foreign Area Officer, currently serving as a Military Faculty Member at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. Quite a mouthful. Also joining us is Scott Humphrey, a Colonel in the Air National Guard and a Master Air Battle Manager, currently serving as Chief of International Affairs for the National Guard Bureau. We're going to discuss the essay they recently wrote for War on the Rocks titled,

Citizens-Sailors, the Missing Link in Maritime Force Structure, about why the United States needs a maritime guard and what that would look like. Gentlemen, welcome aboard. You start by telling the listeners a bit more about your background. Aloha. I'll kick things off. Josh Taylor here. As you noted, I'm an Indo-Pacific foreign area officer. Got my start flying EA-6B Prowlers, jumped over about mid-career point. I have seen, worked security cooperation for about the past dozen years, everything from spending four years at the embassy in Malaysia, where I worked the Maritime Security Initiative, where I met Colonel Humphreys, actually, to a fellowship at the Center for Strategic International Studies, looking at the strategic ramifications of

competition, particularly in the South China Sea, and then also the strategy and policy level, working at PAC Fleet as the head of international policy, and then Pacific Command as the South the Asia division chief. So bringing with me a breadth of experience and perspective from the tactical to the strategic and policy level. Over to Scott. Wonderful. Thanks, Josh. And so Scott Humphrey started out my career as a young airman doing survival instructor and spent a great time at the U.S. Air Force Sears School, which really probably brought out the more adventurous side in me. And so from there, I went into the air defense world for a little over 14 years. I worked in the Western air defense sector from both operational levels and into command. And with that, I was

given the opportunity to work also in the CBRN world, the chemical, biological, radiological response world. And that really ported over and started my time working in the state partnership program where we were at the time partnered with Thailand and the state of Washington. Soon after that, I was given the opportunity to become the first bilateral affairs officer to the nation of Malaysia, and that's where I met Josh. And we spent a lot of time together, which I will say was the A-team. I think when all the stars align

and you have a team that is firing on all cylinders, where it's also, it's an enjoyable place to work and a high-functioning team, that's a great place to be. So since that time, Josh and I have kept our relationship going. And recently I was assigned to not only work Malaysia, but now all 100 nations of the state partnership program as the chief who's responsible for all the funding and the management of the program

for the National Guard's SPP, as we call it. We're excited to have you all aboard, and thanks for joining us. As a reminder to the listeners, all the opinions presented here are solely our own and not representative of any of the institutions with which we are associated. Before we get into the what and how of the Maritime Guard, let's start with why. Why do you think that the United States needs a maritime guard? And what are the issues with the current force structure? Well, it comes down to two things, really, Walker, bodies and missions.

So put simply, I think most people in uniform would agree that we don't have enough bodies to fully man the ships that we already have. And we saw the tragic results of this in 2017 with the collisions of the Fitzgerald and McCain. I was in Malaysia, in fact, when McCain collided off the coast. And yes, there have been several studies that have come out since then. And we've made some bureaucratic changes, but we still haven't addressed the bottom line driving factor, which is not enough bodies. And I feel that this is because institutionally, the Navy tends to think about force structure in terms of hulls. And that's always the question from Congress is what is what is the hull count? You know, the Navy fleet ship building plan focuses on things and not people, unlike the other services, which are in which, you know, machines support people.

We have people support machines. Right. So part of it is we just don't have enough. We certainly don't have enough bodies to replace potential combat losses. If things go higher order in the Western Pacific, where are those people going to come from to replace combat losses and operationally relevant timelines? So along those lines, as a result, the active duty force focuses on the high end for obvious reasons, right? That is the most dangerous COA, and that's what the combatant commander is focused on. But because of that, the Navy tends to fulfill lower-end maritime security and engagement ops and activities when and if it can, right? And there is an absolute demand signal at the low end in competition for continuous maritime engagement.

And currently, we have to let quite a few of those opportunities pass by. big navy wants to do big navy stuff right but we need somebody to do the low-end navy stuff too and that's whether it's through the state partner program or something similar we need forces to engage we need competition engagement forces that look different than the forces that we need for for the high-end fight just look at the numbers right we we need to increase naval land strength and that's before before the shooting starts you know god forbid things go kinetic it's it's going to be a challenge because it takes a while to grow a you know a a trained experienced you know sailor same thing for a soldier right but you know it's very technical

what the what navies do what would this maritime guard look like i mean how how would it how would it work and fit into the current force structure that we have. Yeah, and that's where the definitions really start to matter, is understanding the difference between a guard and a reserve force and the titanals of law that they fall under, so that the guard, or excuse me, the reserve component is officially a federal entity who belongs directly to the president like an active duty force would, where the national guard is a component that belongs to the governor first and then the president second. And the only way that society will allow those forces to be used by the president is if one, the person volunteers to do a mission or two, that that organization is called up whole cloth by the country in order to go defend and be that that strategic reserve for the nation operating under two different titles.

Title 10 is your federal titles, and that's where your reservists and your active duty component work under. Yet Title 32, being a completely owned animal, is one of those types that allows the governor to use the guardsmen for even things like law enforcement within their communities where active duty component cannot because of posse comitatus. So there's some definite differences in the world that we live in, but the one for the Guard, I think, provides for a lot of flexibility and a lot of goodness for the structure. As an example, the 443,000 members of the Air and Army National Guard make up 20% of the Joint Force, give or take a few. So at 20% of the joint force, you have a lot of combat reserve, as we also call operational forces as well. And in the last 20 years of combat has really proven that out, that we have a guard force that is very operational in nature, but also provides that strategic depth, even though we're doing missions all the time. Of those 443,000 that I mentioned, there's about eight divisions worth of combat power when you look at those numbers. There's a whole ton of Army combat power there that are spread out around 3,100-ish armories around the nation and 90 wings. so when you think of that across americana you get the citizenry actually supporting the people that work in the guard and the people that work in the guard actually supporting the communities

that they live in so that creates a tie that probably doesn't exist in many other areas if you think of a reservist and many times i know gosh we talk about this but in many times a reservist will have to fly halfway across the country at their own expense to go to a drill and they have no connection to the unit, the mission or the community that they're working in. But in the National Guard, you actually live and work in the community that you serve. So that tie, I think, is a good model to be able to take folks that are ready to leave the Navy with a lot of experience and bring them into a model that lets them serve potentially in their own community with family and friends, bringing that service closer to where they want to be

and again, to society in general. if i'm not mistaken it's also true that folks in the national guard can stay in their billets longer than would be the case in active duty uh units is that right absolutely on on typically a person that joins the national guard unit may stay in that unit for their entire career and so they may spare of 20 years or more and in my case i'm 35 years in total service 31 of those years have been in the Washington Air National Guard, and this is my very first assignment to the national side of things now that I'm in the Arlington area. I've seen a couple of those engagements, and one of the things that struck me as particularly effective about them is that

you can have the same officers or NCOs coming back for many years, whereas for normal active duty or even reserve engagements, you have a kind of more limited timeline to develop the relationships with the partners. Josh, I think you had a follow-up. Yeah, I just wanted to make a couple points just on sheer numbers you know scott mentioned you know eight combat divisions worth of power combat power 90 wings just to put in 433 000 just in the army reserve garden reserve just to put things in context total we're talking about 55 000 personnel in the navy reserve total. That is 20 hardware squadrons, right? But most of the Navy Reserve is comprised of 111 Naval Operational Support Centers. And that's just a manpower pool that largely is dedicated

towards pulsing up headquarters in times of crisis or conflict, not operational combat power, Right. So, you know, there's very little tooth there resident in the Navy Reserve. And to think about it another way, right, the Army and Air Force have essentially three tiers of force structure, active duty, traditional reserve, and then guard. The Navy and Marine Corps, by the way, only have two. They only have the active duty forces and the reserve. And the strategic depth that the Guard provides for the Army and Air Force just is not there for the Navy. reading the initial article that y'all wrote i mean it certainly struck me that this is a huge well of manpower that the sea services don't have i mean the coast guard too for that matter doesn't have a i believe they have a reserve not um a guard and i mean 443 000 that's more than double the size significantly more than double the size of the entire marine corps so what i would like to say is that there is is a mechanism for doing this under current statute okay it's a little bit

different. So as Scott mentioned, Army and Air Guard are, you know, are governed by largely by Title 32. There is a provision under Title 10 for a naval militia. And in fact, three states currently have naval militias. But here's the difference, right? Under the National Guard model, the forces are funded by the federal government, but owned by the governor, right? And they generate force, right, as whole units and can be federalized. Under the Title X Naval Militia Statute, it is a way for state governors to access existing reserve component forces. So it goes the other way if you're following, right? So National Guard, you generate forces and readiness that can be accessed at the federal level. For naval militias, right, the reserve component generates whatever force it can, and then state governors can tap into it, right? As you can see, though, there's no real benefit there for big Navy to advocate for this program, because if and when units are mobilized, right, individual reservists revert back to their parent unit.

You cannot mobilize naval militia units as entire units. They essentially go away. So how would this proposal kind of change that paradigm and make and fit somewhere in between the current National Guard model and this historical legacy that we have of naval militia? So essentially, it would create a maritime component of the National Guard akin to the Army National Guard or the Air Guard. And now the reason that we went with the term Maritime Guard is because it would incorporate both Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, but also people tend to forget the Forgotten Sea Service, the Merchant Marine capabilities in a unit that would be responsive to governors performing homeland defense, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief missions. In focusing on maritime domain awareness, all those mission areas that are critically important to our competition partners, right, that big Navy doesn't have the bandwidth and therefore the interest in really fulfilling. I really appreciate the idea of having, again, as I said before, sailors that can return home from their active duty service with a skill set, with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of training, and we can keep them employed and attached to the mothership, as it were, to stay current and become a strategic reserve for the Navy in that need, in that time of need. but along with that probably the one of the things that excites me the most is what could be the tie

into the state partnership program and how that works right now to a country that has coastal waters either the the embassy country team or the national guard when they're engaging in their state part the state partnership program is specifically asked hey can you help us with illegal unregulated fishing can you help us understand more things about maritime domain awareness and we have to look at and put kind of put our hands up and say well we'll work with the navy we'll work with other organizations the coast guard and see if they can bring that to bear on your coast and inside of your economic exclusion zone and make that work for you and where we struggle is is it's not inherent to the guard and truly because the navy is as busy as they are it's

really not inherent to the Navy, that they have the capacity to assist in that area. And I'm sure Josh has some more thoughts on that. But the idea that the state partnership program, using those forces that are a strategic reserve for the Navy, could then go out on their annual training and increase retention, create a great opportunity to work with allies and partners for access, overflight, basing, domain awareness, and be a wall and help to compete in very difficult times. You know, that's one of the most kind of exciting things about the proposal is where I think it could fit into the kind of allies and partners, right? And I know that both of y'all are working in places where you do, you know, security cooperation and things like that. And

And that's somewhere where I think, at least from my perspective, maybe sometimes the big Navy struggles, both because it doesn't have the force structure that it needs, but also because it can be kind of difficult to match carrier strike group with doing security cooperation with a country that really has a naval constabulary force. So kind of aligning the size and having a little bit more symmetrical of an approach, which I think might be a lot easier if you had this maritime guard that fits it a little better like that. Yeah, it's also a lot more cost effective than taking it, you know, even even parts of a carrier or even a DDG and having it engaged with a low end partner. So I get it. You know, I hate to say it, but, you know, theater security cooperation has kind of a bad rap because for too many of the warfighters,

I think, okay, I'm going to take a DDG and I'm going to go teach, you know, small boat maintenance and BBSS again. And, you know, I need to be, you know, focusing on going kinetic in the high end fight. And I would completely agree with that statement. I would also point out though, that in the long war, you know, the, the articulated threat was, you know, countering, you know, violent extremism. So you use the assets that you have, you know, to go after the mission set, you know, our Current, you know, the articulated threat now is to, you know, deter posture to fight and win, you know, against China and the Western Pacific.

But that doesn't mean that the competition activities go away. In fact, they're more important than ever, as Scott pointed out, for facilitating access basing and overflight. If we can't get, you know, sovereign partner nations to say, yes, please come in, use our airspace, use our sea space, use our, you know, our A pods and S pods, you can't close the fight, you're not in the fight, or you're fighting outside of 12 nautical miles, which is really difficult to do. So it's really how it's a critical piece of preparing the battle space. I mean, the Tri-Service Maritime Strategy talks about how, you know, activities in competition facilitate the rapid transition of crisis or conflict. You know, it'd be great if we could rely on our Coast Guard brothers and sisters, because for largely political reasons, they are the preferred partner in much of Southeast and South Asia. It's diplomatically speaking, it's a lot safer for them to engage with the Coast Guard because they're, you know, law enforcement authorities. The problem is, is that the Coast Guard isn't nearly big enough and they're fighting their, you know, they're facing their own manning and funding issues and they're just not structured or funded for the away game.

They are doing an amazing job in the Pacific right now. I don't want to take anything away from them. They have, you know, they're putting their cutters out here. They have a campaign plan that's fantastic. but they're it's just not their primary mission set right the navy is the force that we have that's supposed to go and do the away game stuff and if you had a force with smaller assets that look more like a partner nations that again you know as as guardsmen as a naval militia where have we heard the naval militia term before right with unique legal authorities

I think it would be, I think partner nations would be a lot more comfortable engaging with them than potentially, you know, higher end assets. So it's about creating the right tool for the job. And oh, by the way, there are all sorts of combat enablers that we just don't have enough of that you could also stick in there. Like the Marines, like EABO concept relies on, you know, I think they're, I forget what they're calling laws now, but it requires lift, right? But where do you stick those? So offshore support vessels are kind of the near-term solution for that. But where do you stick those? I mean,

do you put them in the Gator Navy? Kind of, maybe. So they don't have a good fit other places. So combat salvage is, you know, expeditionary, you know, recovery and repair is going to be huge if things go down at the high end that we just don't have enough of. And oh, by the way, a lot of these are missions that inherently align with either maritime trades in the States or could support, you know, domestic infrastructure and domestic missions. Keeping in mind that one of the reasons as we were talking through this that we're excited about this idea is certain writers talk about how they feel that the United States has become sea blind, right? And that we've kind of turned her back on the ocean. And I somewhat agree with that. And I think 50 years ago, we kind of turned her

back on on on the sea and we're in the weird position of trying to be a naval power well we're no longer a maritime power and if you remember your basic bahan right that that kind of inverts things right he said that the country's naval power is an expression of their overall maritime power right so how do we how do we recapture you know the the imagination of the citizenry with the sea services and this is one way to do it keeping in mind that 23 states are on the seaboard and only 10 states don't have navigable commercially navigable waterways to the ocean right so our nation does have this inherent link to the sea that for any various reasons you know top gun 2 you know not included right we've forgotten about right so because

maritime issues are not at the forefront of the citizenry and electorate, guess what? It's not at the forefront of Congress either, right? And if you look at what happened with the long war, you know, it was really when, I hate to say it, but our guardsmen started to get beat up in Iraq, that you had all of a sudden a lot of money and a lot of attention went towards force protection. And a lot of programs got fast-tracked. A lot of capability went forward quickly, right? Because as it stands now, unless you have one of the major shipyards or a base in your district or your state, as a congressperson or senator, it's probably not at the top of your list. A lot of good points there. Scott, did you have a follow-up? Yeah. And that's, again,

where it goes back to one of my favorite points of as as he was discussing as the communities started sensing the pain of their young airmen and soldiers getting injured in combat resources started to flow so again it's that community tie and that community tie is is paramount to to making making the system that we're talking about work but even more important with that is is my first love. And that's how the state partnership program actually will create opportunities to go from episodic touch points that the active service currently has with a nation. So no relationship survives a single permanent change of station cycle. So as the PCS cycle comes around, you immediately will lose that connectivity that you may have had for two or

three years. And what you get is a lack of trust. But through a program like in the National Guard or in some sort of a Maritime Guard, you're going to have the opportunity for those individuals to spend a long time working with those nations to create enduring relationships. And I think that's where nationally, as far as our strategy goes, that's where we're going to be in a much better place is if we can build trust with our partners because they know us, they've broken bread with us. In many cases, we've had nations that have gone and deployed with us and shed blood with us together. And when that happens, you can't you can't replace the trust that exists with there. So that flagship program that the National Guard has through the state partnership program

is a neat part of how this would develop and create some great opportunities and also help the nations that we ally and partner with to avoid having China on their back doorstep, you know, doing all the fishing, putting pressure on them, not letting them resupply things in places that they have. So given, given the challenges that we're having recruiting into the all volunteer force, we need to make it easier for people to serve. Okay. And, you know, this just seems to be a glaring hole in the force structure. It's like, it's one of those things where once you see it, you can't unsee it. At least it's been that way for me, right?

It's like, you know, I think, you know, the call just went out, like every commander, every unit is supposed to like recruit like one person or something, right? Well, okay, great. We should do that. But we should also make it easier for the average person to drive, you know,

somewhere within half an hour and be able to drill in a mission that supports the Navy's overall mission, be it on an LCS repurposed as a homeland defense training ship or as a float expeditionary staging base in the ESB that is being used for coastal C2 here that can push forward as needed to, like I said, those other missions such as salvage, such as repair. there's just such a breadth of mission areas that you know maritime guardsmen could could support

when you're looking at the number of weeks months and years and the investment it takes to get someone's actually fully operational in their career field that can be you know multiple years on end and if you just let that experience walk out the door and no way to keep your hooks in them with something that's credible and society values. They're just going to walk away and they're just going to tell stories about the time they were in the Navy. In reality, you want them to be excited about it. You want them to stay connected and you want them to come back and use that experience to the benefit of our nation, even if it is part-time. Absolutely. I think that's a good point about the active duty force. It seems like it's really

simultaneously trying to be more innovative and how it allows folks to be flexible in the service and hurting for people to come in and this is you know good work to to kind of solve that problem wholesale you know i mentioned it before seeing these guys come back to i was working at columbia and and you can tell when they showed up at the airport that the columbians had worked with the same i think they were south carolina air national guardsmen and they had worked with these guys year after year after year and it was different than you know the marines loved coming down and the Colombian Marines loved working with us, but, you know, every, every year it was a different set of guys. And, and I think, you know, we're talking about force structure and some kind of policy

things, but it seems like both of, both of y'all have talked about like relationships, like it's about, uh, having a maritime guard allows you to have relationships, you know, with partners and allies across the Pacific and around the world, but also forging key relationships, uh, between those guard members in their own communities in the United States. And that's just a really cool thing to hear. So I think probably the, you know, the last question that I'll hit you guys with is, so what are some of the obstacles, right? So if it's such a good, good idea, what are some of the things standing in the way or the obstacles that would have to be overcome to kind of put this in practice? Well, just like anything else, the obstacle number one is money, money, money, money.

Right. So obviously, it would require a significant shift in statute. So you're looking at somebody who's going to have to float a legislative proposal essentially to change the Title 10 Naval Militia Authority to something analogous to the Title 32 National Guard Authority. So in order to do that, you're going to need champions in SECNAV's office, both houses of Congress. Where's the funding going to come from to create the force structure at the low end? Some of the funds in the Navy's top line could be reallocated. But, you know, again, we really need that for the high end. That said, if Congress is going to make a significant new authorization for outlays and increase in strength, and that's what we're talking about, we're talking about

increasing the in-strength of the Navy, I think, having done two tours in legislative affairs, that politically speaking, it's more realistic to do it at the local level because significant amount of that money will go be recaptured by the local community. And that, quite honestly, that's voters, right? So the money is staying home, vice when, you know, an investment in active, you know, active duty naval strength, while equally, if not more so needed, you know, that money goes away. It doesn't, it's not as available to the voter of seeing it, you know, stay home and work for them. So champions in SECNAV's office, champions throughout DOD and in Congress to get the money flowing. There are potentially some creative ways to fund naval recapitalization. Shameless Plug wrote an article on floating naval bonds to fund naval recapitalization.

So I think we're going to have to start thinking outside the box because I don't think that the traditional authorization appropriations process is going to get us as far as we need to go as fast as we need to get there. Well, we'll make sure to put a link to your, I think it was in foreign policy, if I'm not mistaken. We'll put a link to that below the show. And I think that's a really key point in a question that I was going to ask, but didn't ask, is making sure that this is not a request to cut, you know, naval funding somewhere else. It's not an either or. It's in addition to the maritime force structure that we've already got. Scott, did you have any follow-up? Well, and as Josh alluded to in the states, there's a lot of there's a lot of desire to bring industry markets and things trade to the individual states. And with the congressional delegations as they exist, the adjutant general of a state has actual authority to be able to go as a title 32 guardsman can go to their Congress member and actually ask for things. so if we decide that there's some sort of a nexus or a desire for something like this at the state level people that are currently serving in the service in the guard can go and

talk to their congressional delegations without fear that a title 10 active duty member would have and so that opens up some some opportunities for discussions to occur if we think that needs to happen and that because again it's back at the community level and and that's where it's going to grow. That's where it's going to get the interest. And that's where the money will come from is when those representatives decide that it's important to have that capability in their district. Well, I'm sorry, it's just about all the time we have for today. But I'd like to thank my guests, Captain Joshua Taylor from the United States Navy and Colonel Scott Humphrey from the Air National Guard for joining us today to talk about their recent essay, Citizen Sailors, The

missing link in maritime force structure. Josh, where, if anywhere, can we find you online and what are you working on next? Let's see. Best place to find me online is LinkedIn. So please, I think I'm definitely one of the top three Joshua Taylors and only one in naval uniform that'll pop up. LinkedIn. The next article that I'm working on is about how security cooperation has a command and control problem and potential ways to fix that. well we're looking forward to that scott same question to you and i can also be found under scott humphrey on linkedin and with that what we're working on and i'm working on currently is how do we take the bilateral affairs officers that exist in all 54 states and territories

working in 100 nations across the world and incorporate them and roll them in to the security cooperation force as a viable member thanks again for joining us and to the listeners. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021