Sea Control - Sea Control 512 - Europe's Marines with Dr. Sidharth Kaushal

Episode Date: April 20, 2024

Links1. “Europe’s Marines in the Future European Littoral Operating Environment,” by Sidharth Kaushal, War on the Rocks, February 5, 2024. 2. “Amphibious Futures: The Royal Marines in Contested New Operating Environments,” by Sidharth Kaushal and Mark Totten, RUSI, January 9, 2024. 3. Sea Control 423: The First Unmanned Raid on Sevastopol with Dr. Sidharth Kaushal, CIMSEC, March 30, 2023. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. Walker Mills is back as host. He is Dr. Sid Kaushal discussing European Marines. This episode was edited and produced by Addison Pellerano. One note for the listeners, this episode was recorded prior to Sweden's official entry into NATO. 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 now, Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control,

hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Welcome aboard the Sea Control podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. I'm Walker Mills, and my guest today is Dr. Sid Kaushal, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute who focuses on maritime and naval issues. We're going to discuss the essay you recently wrote for War on the Rocks, Europe's Marines in the Future European Littoral Operating Environment. Sid, welcome aboard. Can you start by telling the listeners a bit more about your background? Of course, and thank you very much for having me. So, as you mentioned, my work at RUSI focuses primarily on dynamics related to naval power, but also amphibious power projection and forces in the littoral, and how those forces are adapting and evolving in the 21st century. And I suppose one of the reasons I chose this as an area of focus was that there's a perceived risk of a growing sort of spatial gap between navies and the wider joint force imposed by things like anti-access area denial capabilities. So I think at the heart of what I was looking at here was the question of how the littoral as a maneuver space can be reclaimed.

And we're ready to get into that. And before we do, I just got to remind all the listeners that all the opinions here are solely our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might otherwise be associated. To kind of start us out, can you tell us a little bit about the state of European Marines? And obviously, our listeners know that it's going to be different in different countries. But how have your Marine Corps and amphibious forces across Europe kind of changed and shifted since the end of the Cold War?

Sure. So I think there's a few dominant trends we've seen. So towards the end of the Cold War, you know, one of the major functions for a number of the key European marine forces, the Royal Marines, but also the Corps Mariner in the Netherlands, was reinforcement of the Alliance's northern flank, which is a core Cold War mission. So, you know, these two forces would form, roughly speaking, a full strength brigade, which would be the vanguard element, which would operate ahead of a heavier force like the U.S. Marine Corps in kind of delivering a full spectrum capability and on the relatively remote reaches of the alliance's periphery. Now, I think post the end of the Cold War, Marines have kind of retained their currency by being a multifunctional capability. You know, in many countries, including the UK, the Marines are a feeder organization for the special forces and indeed a tier two SF capability themselves. They can be used alongside ground forces as a kind of line infantry capability. And they retain that capacity for amphibious power projection. But there are two, I think, factors that are going to limit them, at least in terms of how they operate presently. The first relates to the way amphibious power projection is done.

You know, the anti-access area denial threat, even towards the end of the Cold War, was becoming ever more credible. But, you know, new capabilities, you know, supersonic and hypersonic missiles like the P-800 and the Zircon will mean that fleets will spend ever more time protecting themselves, which raises the question of how much protection they can afford to forces projected ashore. The second issue related to amphibious power projection is the security of lodgements and light infantry brigades ashore. So, you know, the security of an amphibious lodgement, the buildup of capabilities has always been an issue. And we saw this during, you know, for example, the Falklands War. But the diversity of threats, in particular air threat, ranging from increasingly precise tactical ballistic missiles used by countries like Russia, but also sub-peer competitors like Iran, through to cruise missiles, UAVs, and loitering munitions, to next-generation unmanned combat vehicles, combined with some relatively cheap air-based standoff capabilities, unguided bombs like the FAB-500 equipped with glide kits, for example, means that securing amphibious lodgements from air attack at shore will become increasingly difficult at precisely the point where fleets will be increasingly concerned with their own

self-protection. And the final question is going to be, what do light infantry brigades actually provide on concentrated, narrow, linear fronts against adversaries that can generate large volumes of fire, and often very responsibly, at least when their systems are working. You know, the Russians, for example, when their reconnaissance fire complexes are working, can generate fires on cycles as short as three minutes, which really poses a quite significant challenge to relatively light forces, especially when you consider that those forces will also be challenged by air threats without usually their own organic air defenses now so that i think is the key challenge that uh you know european marines are going to face in terms of their

amphibious competency competencies the second aspect of the challenge is these are increasingly small forces that are having to perform multiple functions which means certifying for multiple competencies uh which which in turn means stressing an ever smaller force with this was sort of objective of being a switchblade capability and so i think what is going to have to happen both in order for marines to retain their utility for to the joint force in the context of high intensity war fighting and in order for them to retain at least some competencies that are useful across the spectrum of conflict is for them to focus on a narrower range

of niche capabilities that can be both enablers for tier two entry in the high intensity part of the conflict spectrum, but which can also draw on some of those tier two special forces competencies, which can be relevant short of conflict. I think that's a great summary of some of the challenges. I think in your War on the Rocks piece,

you did a good job of explaining the kind of, I guess you could say, the strategic geography in why amphibious forces and marine forces have kind of enduring relevance in places like the Baltic and Scandinavia, and also what you might call Europe's southern flank. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. Of course. So essentially what I'd argued in the War on the Rocks piece, as well as the wider report from which it's drawn, is that actually amphibious forces can remain highly relevant to conventional deterrence within Europe if they subsume their concepts of operations within the traditional maritime functions of strike. And this creates the potential for complementarities between concepts of operations

being developed on both sides of the Atlantic, but also between the amphibious forces of NATO's members, older members, and some of the navies of its newer sort of the members that either have joined or will be joining NATO, you know, Finland and Sweden, for example, which traditionally built littoral oriented fleets for the purpose of sea denial. But to begin with the rationale, you know, one of the challenges that's going to face the alliance, if it should find itself in high-intensity conflict with Russia is that many of the fronts in which it might engage Russia, places like the Baltics, potentially the high north, are areas that are actually quite congested, in which the Russians can concentrate a great deal of force on quite a narrow linear front,

where they can generate both fires and ISR saturation, and can layer EW capabilities. And we saw, you know, in last year's fighting in the Donbass, for example, that when the Russians are able to fight in this way, the way they would prefer, they can actually inflict pretty significant attrition on a ground force. You know, the Ukrainians were losing upwards of 200 many a day for some phases of last year's fighting in the Donbass. Now, one part of the solution is to expand the geometry of the battle space. So when you consider Europe's littoral, Actually, the geometry of quite congested France in places like the Baltics and the High North expands considerably. You know, Estonia, for example, has 2,000 or so islands.

Norway, by some counts, has over 200,000. And when one has the capacity to maneuver strike-centric forces across both the land and the littoral in order to exploit this geography in a way that the U.S. Marine Corps envisions doing under Force Design 2030, one can considerably complicate Russian targeting cycles by expanding the areas that they must survey and presenting them with a more dynamic battle space. So that's one part of it. The second element is that if you look at the navies of some of NATO's new members, you know, countries like Finland or Sweden, they were built around things like fast attack craft, like the Hamina class, corvettes, like the Swedish VSB class, which are these missile equipped vessels that were built for sea denial against what was presumed to be a stronger Russian navy. Now, in the context of an alliance fight with Russia, sea denial is no longer the challenge for these countries. What is relevant is how you exploit the reality of sea control, which the alliance will probably have vis-a-vis Russia, you know, shore-based sea denial capabilities that Russia possesses notwithstanding. And actually, a lot of these same capabilities can be useful, not just in a defensive role, but in a more forward leaning role on, for example, the flanks of a Russian ground assault into Europe. You know, missile-equipped fast attack craft can be postured forward in a way that allows them to disrupt the lines of supply and the critical nodes upon which that fire-centric Russian way of war depends. not unlike the way HIMARS did sort of earlier on in the middle of last year. They can be positioned in a way that makes them more usable,

or rather they're more usable in this role than larger vessels, you know, frigates and destroyers, both because they are less appealing targets for ground-based anti-ship capabilities and because they are required for fewer missions, unlike these larger multipurpose vessels, which will be tied up with other functions, you know, ASW and the protection of a task group, for example. And so arguably, between the concepts of operations that the US Marine Corps is developing, primarily with an eye on the Indo-Pacific, but we argue, you know, with relevance to Europe's strike-centric concepts of operations within the littoral, which can actually generate effects inland, not just, you know, sea denial in places

like the Indo-Pacific, and some of these European naval capabilities, one can see the beginnings of a quite integrated capability to exploit the littoral as a maneuver space and expand the geometry of a battlefield in ways that are unfavorable to a Russian force that depends on being able to layer effects in quite a narrow space in quite a linear way. But there's a challenge here, which is if one is to oversimplify things, at the risk of slightly oversimplifying things, it's easier to see out to sea from the land than vice versa. So any sort of strike centric littoral force will need eyes inland so to speak the ability to actually identify targets of interest but it will also need the ability to shape the battle space in ways that force an

adversary to concentrate in ways that make him vulnerable to strike centric capabilities and it's here that what we argue that some of the european marine forces you know the royal marines but also potentially the the dutch for example can add greatest value as a distributed forward contact layer that shapes the battle space and generates ISR for strike-centric capabilities maneuvering in the littoral. So I should note there for the listeners that the larger paper that Sid is referencing is called Amphibious Futures, the Royal Marines in Contested New Operating Environments that was co-authored between Sid and Mark Totten, also by the Royal United Services Institute. And we'll make sure to put a link to that in the show notes so you can

read the full version, which is definitely worth your time. Sid, so I also want to ask, I think, you know, with a lot of the more, it seems like kind of naval news, there's things going on in the Red Sea, there's conversations about the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. It seems like, well, I don't think it just seems like, but European naval fleets have shrunk considerably in size and debatably capability since the end of the Cold War. Is that a risk to the relevance of european marines and amphibious forces or is should we rather view that as an opportunity for european marines and amphibious forces to kind of look beyond a traditional uh you know amphibious assault type things and more towards a contested littoral like you've been talking about

uh yeah and i think that's that's a really good question and to be honest uh it can be interpreted both ways. On the one hand, I think the pressures on, you know, force structures pose a considerable risk to amphibious power projection as traditionally conceived. But on the other hand, they do create opportunities for role specialization in ways that may be actually more congruent with the nature of the future littoral battle space. And, you know, that's true in Europe, as we've discussed, but that can also be true in contexts beyond Europe. For example, you know, if the focus of European amphibious forces is creating distributed small force packages ashore that enable maritime strike, that could potentially be relevant to enabling

theater entry near a contested maritime choke point, for example, or indeed to generating value in certain contexts, for example, the increasingly urbanized maritime littoral, where, you know, European militaries probably won't generate the combat mass to actually, you know, fight in urban battle spaces. But they can potentially provide niche capabilities, offshore maritime strike, for example, which will nonetheless require situational awareness ashore in order to be useful and again here you know marines can be part of an important part of the solution so i think you're right that there's a there's a challenge uh that's being that's being imposed on european militaries more broadly and marines specifically by by resource constraints but in

some ways that may force uh organizations to think more creatively and come to solutions that that may be quite well suited to the the present and future operating environment that makes a lot of sense. I mean, myself coming from the U.S. Marine Corps, even though I'm sure that these European amphibious organizations would look at the Marine Corps and not consider us budget constrained, you know, we have a habit of considering ourselves budget constrained and using that as a justification to look for more innovative or perhaps creative solutions and operating concepts. Something that you kind of touched on is global use. Obviously, we've talked a lot about Russia, and Russia would certainly be, I think, kind of the primary preoccupation

with European security establishments and security forces. But do European amphibious forces, are they globally deployable? Or would that really be only under kind of a NATO construct? And I guess another way to ask that is, you know, are these countries capable of independent action with their increasingly small amphibious forces? Or do they only have the potential to be used kind of within a multinational force construct or a NATO construct? Yeah, that's a good question.

And to some extent, I think it does differ based on the organization one is looking at and the organizational aspiration. So for example, if you look at the Swedish Marines, they've, you know, amphibious forces, I should say, they've optimized quite explicitly for the Baltic theater in ways that would make them quite useful to some of the concepts of operations we discussed you know they focused on things like placing the Nemo mortar on fast

attack craft but you know which could be quite useful for providing fires inland on the flank of a Russian ground so but but that's really a very much an a Baltic optimized capability I think organizations like the Royal Marines would probably still see themselves as playing both a European and a global function here. This is the way the Royal Navy's littoral response groups, for example, are being task organized with one being southeast of the Suez and then littoral response group north

remaining within Europe with the potential for both to aggregate. But even here, I think it will almost by, it will be absolutely necessary for these forces to operate in a multinational construct, if not necessarily a NATO one. And so the question again becomes, where can niche value be added? So if you look beyond Europe, some of the trends that we've discussed are relevant beyond Europe as well. So if you look at the A2AD threat, for example, it's much more dense in the European theater and of course, the Indo-Pacific than it is elsewhere. But as we've seen in the Red Sea, actors that we would have considered sub-peer can actually generate reasonably capable anti-access capabilities themselves, things like anti-ship cruise missiles, for example, especially with the patronage of a major power patron.

So enabling and given that these are fleeting, elusive targets, you know, enabling maritime strike against them may require activities such as forcing them to displace, forcing things like SAM tells to emit, for example, in ways that enable maritime strike from further out. So, again, you know, an enabling function that relies on using light forces to, well, enable the joint force rather than being enabled by it in the model of traditional amphibious power projection could be relevant, you know, to enter entry in areas like contested sea lines or choke points near contested sea lines of communication. The other major trend, of course, we see beyond Europe is the increasing urbanization of the littoral. And if you look at the urban battle space, you know, it's obviously a very complex environment, but it's also inherently manpower intensive to operate in, in a way that means that it's more likely than not that partner forces will typically be the leading edge in any urban assault, you know, much as was the case in, let's say, the counter-ISIS campaign. So again,

the question for European forces at reach and maritime forces operating in an expeditionary context is, what's the niche value that can be offered to partners that, you know, will probably generate a lot of the combat power themselves? And one of the things, of course, is the capacity to locate and strike elusive targets. That's partially an air power competency. But, you know, as we saw during, for example, the fighting in Yemen, air power is not a persistently present capability and adversaries can typically adjust around it. Maritime power can actually operate in a much more persistently present way. And we saw this, for example, you know, in the way the UAE's the Navy provided things like gunfire support in the fighting around Aden in Yemen.

But in order to be useful, that maritime power, again, requires a force element ashore that can identify elusive targets that is linked by a chain of command to offshore maritime strike capabilities, and can sometimes aggregate to generate credible assault capabilities in a limited way against specific targets so you know some of those concepts that those very strike-centric concepts that are relevant to the european littoral arguably have a certain transferability and i think one of the lessons we might draw is because of forces specialized doesn't necessarily mean it's tethered to a certain theater of operations a similar concept of a given concept of operations even if it focuses on niche competencies can actually be

quite fungible across multiple contexts. I think those are really interesting points, and certainly what you're describing makes me think of the kind of force design 2030 and the expeditionary advanced base operations that the U.S. Marine Corps is interested in pursuing. This flip of the joint force going from enabling joint forcible entry to lightly equipped Marines enabling joint force maritime in-air strike. And we usually think about it in the Indo-Pacific. I don't know that there's a consensus yet in the U.S. Marine Corps about whether or not or how relevant or how transferable

those concepts are to the European theater, which also makes me want to ask, do you see an opportunity for the U.S. Marine Corps' role kind of in Scandinavia and in the Baltic to shift significantly? Or do you have any suggestions for how that may shift? Yeah, so I think the accession of Finland and the likely accession of Sweden does create a few opportunities for the role of the U.S. Marine Corps. The first is, you know, what we mentioned, that both nations, I think, are going to have to re-envision the roles of fleets that they've already built for a different context. And actually one of the viable functions that those sea denial fleets might play, you know, actually as a forward operating maritime element, would make them inherently complementary with the ways the U.S. Marine Corps intends to operate.

You know, strike-centric capabilities distributed in places like offshore islands can quite easily be complemented by light littoral-oriented craft that can also pack quite a punch in terms of, you know, some of the missiles they carry on board. So I think there are some complementarities there which can quite readily be exploited. The second question, of course, in terms of opportunities for the US Marine Corps might be, and I think it's true for allied amphibious forces more generally, is how they might be used for the function of operational dislocation. So if we look at the force design that Russia envisions having post-Ukraine, it's clear that they intend to have a larger force than they went into the war with. They plan on adding 10 new divisions, for example. It's almost certain that the force will be of variable quality. And if we look at the Russian force structure in

Ukraine, it's kind of divided into three elements, right? Very disposable infantry, slightly better line infantry, and assault infantry like the VDV who are conserved and are generally regarded as critical for the most important bits of the fight. Now, that's interesting because some of those assault infantry, in particular the VDV, but also the 200th Arctic Brigade, are amongst the only cold weather trained troops in the Russian force structure. Now, I think that intersects with the changing geography of the alliance in interesting ways. And by that, I mean, if one considers the way in which the alliance's frontier has moved towards areas like Murmansk in the north, the emplacement of strike-centric allied capabilities,

for example, some of those that the U.S. Marine Corps are developing in areas in the littoral battle space of the high north, would pose a pretty unacceptable risk to the Russians in the context of, for example, an escalating crisis, given the proximity to critical facilities. And that would leave the Russians with some pretty considerable dilemmas at the theater level. Either they would have to strip away some of their limited cold weather trained troops from another part of the theater, for example, the Baltics, and in so doing, actually weaken their prospects for tactical success in those areas. And if they chose to use those forces offensively in the north they might well find themselves doing so under in pretty difficult

terrain under pretty contested conditions if they couldn't find fix and destroy an adversary capability easily if for example it had the opportunity to exploit littoral mobility so actually the ability to spread russian capabilities across multiple fronts could be an important part of deterrence much in the way you know allied maritime strategy in the 1980s the forward maritime strategy was, but with a greater emphasis on using the littoral rather than the blue water as the basis for operational dislocation in the maritime space. So I think there are opportunities both at the tactical level in individual theaters like the Baltic and at the more theater level for the U.S. Marine Corps' concept of operations to intersect

quite neatly with the changing geography of the alliance. The last question I'll ask, so it is is a bit beyond uh what was in the scope of what was in the um the report but do we or rather do you have any uh lessons that we can take away or or salient observations from the performance or non-performance of russian amphibious operations during the the current conflict um and is there anything you know worth noting or or learning from in their use uh in ukraine sure so i think there's a couple of things we we might learn from the the russians uh in in ukraine so early on the russians did contemplate an amphibious assault near odessa using the 810 naval infantry brigade uh the assault was eventually abandoned partially of course because

the land component from that that was advancing through uh up to michael live with which it was was meant to link up never really got there but partially because it's early it's reconnaissance elements that were meant to be inserted both by helicopter and by waterborne craft took pretty heavy losses which actually convinced Russian commanders that the losses they would face would be quite prohibited and I think the lesson there is that a combination of things like increasingly dense sort of air defense complexes complies to both surface-to-air missiles and MANPADS will make traditional vertical insertion by helicopter increasingly difficult. And maritime insertion itself, although it's still very much possible, will occur under

increasingly contested conditions, which will make it important to rely on ever more distributed and light force packages. The question then, of course, becomes how does one actually use light and distributed forces to good effect? Because, you know, by definition, distribution results in a dispersion of effort. And I think part of the answer is contained in Force Design 2030, the idea that dispersed forces can still generate convergent effects if they have the reach to do so. But I think there's another lesson we saw in the way the Ukrainians have used, you know, raiding forces to do things like dislocate surface to air missile sites, which is that small light distributed forces can set the conditions for heavier strike centric forces to be used to quite good effect. And that, I think, is the way in which the more strike-centric concepts of operations that the U.S. Marine Corps has in mind might intersect with the need for lighter European amphibious forces to rely on ever smaller force packages of around 12 men or so in order to achieve theater insertion under those very contested conditions, which, you know, the Russian naval infantry found it so hard to operate within. this has been a fascinating conversation probably going to have to uh listen to this

recording a second or third time to make sure that i've gotten everything out of it but i think that's about all we have time for today uh so i'd like to thank my guest dr sid koshel for joining us today and talk about his recent essay europe's marines in the future electoral operating environment and his russi paper amphibious futures the royal marines and contested new operating environments uh and we'll make sure to put links to both of those uh in the notes below the show sid where if anywhere can our listeners find you online and what are you uh working on next uh well uh your listeners can find my work online via the russi web page if they're interested and in terms of next projects uh where i'm focusing quite heavily on how uh well continuing

the theme really how europe's naval forces can be applied as an asymmetric offset in the context of conventional deterrence vis-a-vis russia fantastic we may have to have you back on the podcast to talk about that thank you again for joining us and to the listeners thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time thank you for having me appreciate There I met with Greasy Annie Put it on the shimbo now So help me, Bob-I, put it in the alley Way, hey, put it in the alley

Help me, Bob-I, put it in the alley Put it on the shimbo now A porter of a porter gin, oh Way, hey, put it in the alley A porter of wine, of white and red, oh We'll see you next time.