Sea Control - Sea Control 510 - The Fortress Fleet with Lt Col Nathan Jennings, Ph D

Episode Date: April 13, 2024

Links1. "The Army and the Fortress Fleet: Reimagining Landpower in Maritime Warfare," by Nathan Jennings, Modern War Institute, March 5, 2024.2. "To Upgun Seapower in the Indo-Pacific, You Need an Army," by General Charles Flynn and Lieutenant Colonel Tim Devine, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, February 2024.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today we're welcoming Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Jennings, PhD, to the program. He's written an article for Modern War Institute on the Army's Fortress Fleet concept. 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 SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimbersman. 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 Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Jennings, Ph.D. We're going to discuss his article for the Modern War Institute, The Army and the Fortress Fleet, Reimagining Land Power in Maritime Warfare. So, Nate, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, please? Yeah. Hello, Jared. Thanks for having me. So, I'm an Army strategist and associate professor, serving officer at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. I have a background in armored warfare and counterinsurgency, and I'm very happy to be with you. Thanks. And as reminder listeners, all opinions expressed today are our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might be associated.

I think we're probably going to talk a little bit about Ukraine and some of the stuff going on in the South China Sea today as well. So I will timestamp this for you. We're recording this on Sunday, St. Patrick's Day. So if anything has happened in either of those theaters and you're wondering why we're not discussing it, that's the reason. It just hasn't happened yet. But Nate, you started with the assertion, for the U.S. Army in particular, it means

that modernization of an older idea called the Fortress Fleet concept could allow novel contributions to join the coalition's sea power. So what is the Fortress Fleet concept and where did it come from? All right. So the Fortress Fleet is a 19th century concept where the idea was that a Navy would operate in conjunction with coastal batteries, coastal artillery, and you would have basically a joint approach. And you combine the maneuver capability of the Navy with the deeper magazine and protection of the Army batteries. And just to lay down for our viewers, this is something the U.S. Army was preoccupied with in a big way for the first really half of our history in the 19th century, especially the idea of building out these big forts along the eastern seaboard in particular, and then having big guns for coastal defense. So what would that concept allow the Army to do using modern weapons? Well, now in modern weapons, we could, you know, you add longer range fires, both artillery, missiles, potentially drones. And I see the Army, EW, Special Operations Forces raids. I think there's a larger role for the Army to get involved with assisting with American joint sea power.

And I would offer, for the Army's perspective, I don't believe we can offer sea control, but we can offer protection, logistics, sea denial capability. I really think that sea control, you need the Navy element to fully, you know, square that circle. So I'm going to go a little bit off script here. I ask you this anyway, because you and I talked about it a little bit offline. To what extent has the war in the Black Sea sort of informed your thinking on this concept? Yeah, so I've been fascinated by, frankly, the Ukrainian military's ability to not neutralize, but limit the Russian Black Sea Fleet's ability to influence the war. So the maritime theater, you know, the sinking of the Moscow was a decisive point. I think it was a maybe not a paradigm shift, but definitely saw the Russian Navy have to operate longer distances, sometimes to be stay in port, perhaps longer than they wanted, and take a less decisive role in the war. And this is fascinating because the Ukrainian military does not have a fleet to speak of.

And so they're doing this with land-based missiles, drones, some commando raids, things like that. And I think they've definitely affected Russian calculus here. How did Mahan assess the concept of the fortress fleet? So Mahan, 19th century naval warfare thinker, strategist, theorist, probably the most influential single person leading up to World War I, World War II on how nation states, especially with large coastlines, viewed sea power. he would have disdained this and we don't we don't have to wonder he told us he does not like the fortress fleet concept because in his day he favored general fleet actions in the blue as the decisive event and we shouldn't misconstrue even though he was about the fleet action really that was a stepping stone to get to maritime blockade so the ultimate purpose of bahanian

warfare is to strangle the opposing nation state by eliminating its commerce, its access to foreign markets. And so that's a way to avoid a large, costly land invasion, by the way. So he thought that a fortress fleet concept would really limit the creativity, the aggression of a fleet commander, his officers, the fleet itself. And so he wouldn't have wanted to be limited to the really you know, operating the littorals where naval battery, where the land batteries, the coastal Chile of his days could reach out to. How is the Fortress Fleet concept different from what the Marines are proposing with expeditionary advanced base operations? Then how do you envision those two concepts

meshing together based on what you know about them? What the Army can bring is resources, depth to complement the Marines' agility that they're really moving towards. They're, from what I've read, looking to have a lighter posture, less logistically constrained. And so the Army, though, as a larger institution with more resources can help create both, I guess, a logistics base, but also potential windows of opportunity. That's kind of a word from our doctrine for naval maneuver. I know there's a lot of discussion over, you know, how vulnerable are amphibious landings now to long-range precision strike. And so perhaps that's something we could help enable and make possible.

You listed three examples where the concept might be applicable, the South China Sea, the Baltic, the Arabian Gulf. Two of those examples represent relatively confined waters, minimal opportunities for this type of campaign. But what I will say though, it's like both of those bodies of water, the Baltic Sea and the Arabian Gulf, they're similar to the Black Sea as far as the confined geography, but the South China Sea and Pacific are very different. What is the Army doing to address the logistical challenge that that strategy represents? Well, we can offer protected forward basing, and especially in the realm of air defense capabilities that may assist with allowing naval maneuver through these confined

spaces. We've just seen in the Red Sea how quickly situations can change. And I think a lot of this is based off differences in how the army and perhaps the navy view risk the army's forces are just by definition disaggregated you know hundreds or thousands of platforms such as tanks you know artillery batteries things like that ew platforms while the navy tends to be more aggregated or concentrated in large ships that are costly and so i think we can help buy down some of that risk with an expanded posture in these areas i did i hadn't thought to ask you about the red sea as well as the red sea other than what you just mentioned changed any of your thinking as opposed to what you observed in the black sea not really i think it reinforces just

that ships can be vulnerable and as far as an army role there obviously applying land power could just, I think, amplify the maritime capabilities. Even though in my article, I focused mostly on the potential expansion of the Army inventory with anti-ship missiles, various types of drones, I see no reason the Army can't get into the surface, subsurface, and we're already in the aerial drone business. Those are all going to be launched from land. And so that could be added to the land battery concept but also there's just ground counter-attack you know one of the things army guys like to brag about is in world war ii the majority of the amphibious assaults are by army forces so that's a game we've been in before and we can get back into so i'm not sure when it

will air but i did speak with lieutenant colonel tim devine about a week ago about his article on a similar topic he brought the exact same thing about the amphibious the quantity of the amphibious assaults. But unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Jennings, PhD. Nate, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? You can just find me, I guess, on LinkedIn. I write for various publications. Nothing under contract, but I look for a military review, Modern War Institute. Right now, I've been doing a study on going back to the 19th century, the American joint assault on the city of Veracruz during the Mexican-American War, it required what at that time was a novel joint approach

between the Army and the Navy, and they had no precedent to operate from and no joint doctrine. So I've been fascinated with looking at how those commanders and those forces created a partnership to accomplish that operation. Thank you again for joining us. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. There I met with Greasy Annie

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We'll be right back.