Sea Control - Sea Control 532 - Coalition Naval Operations during the Korean War with Dr. Ian Bowers and Dr. Deborah Sanders

Episode Date: June 29, 2024

LinksCoalition Navies During the Korean War: Understanding Combined Operations, edited by Ian Bowers, Routledge, 2024.Sea Control 231 – Not So Disruptive After All with Dr. Ian Bowers and Dr. Sarah Kirchberger,  CIMSEC, March 11, 2021.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today I'm joined by Drs. Ian Bowers and Deborah Sanders to discuss their contributions to a volume edited by Ian entitled, Coalition Navies During the Korean War, Understanding Combined Naval Operations. This episode was edited and produced by Marie Williams. Here at CIMSEC, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas in the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out CIMSEC.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for CEMSEC tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kim Ruzman.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guests today are Dr. Ian Bowers and Dr. Deborah Sanders. We're going to discuss a compilation edited by Ian entitled Coalition Navies During the Korean War, Understanding Combined Operations. Deborah contributed a chapter entitled Small Navies and Coalition Operations. So Ian, you were rejoining us, having appeared previously on Sea Control 231 alongside Dr. Sarah Kirshberger, discussing the Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies. Could you tell the listeners a little bit more about your background. Sure. It's great to be here and back on the podcast again. Right now, I'm a senior

researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Defense Studies, where I'll be mainly working on Asian security issues and sea power issues. And then prior to that, I was an associate professor at the Institute for Military Operations at the Royal Danish Defense College, where I primarily spent my time teaching military operational planning or operational level planning and also leading their research project on multi-domain operations. But my entire background is more heavily focused on sea power research and my PhD. First book was on the South Korean Navy. So it's kind of a thread throughout what I've been doing for the last 10 years. Welcome back. Deborah, could you introduce yourself to listeners, please? Of course. Thank you so much for inviting me to this podcast.

I'm a professor of contemporary conflict and strategy in the Defence Studies Department of King's College London and which is based at the Joint Services Command Staff College just very long title in the UK Defence Academy. I've been delivering professional military education for the last 27 years and I'm an expert in the Black Sea and Black Sea security and what I found is that teaching naval officers in particular piqued my interest in navies and in small navies nothing to do with Royal Navy, which I have been focusing on increasingly for the last decade or so in terms of my research. Thank you. Well, thank you and welcome. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions expressed today are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might

be otherwise associated. Ian, I think I have an idea based on your description of your biography, but why did you choose to focus on this conflict? Yeah, as I said, I kind of have a background in korean security and over the years i i had the privilege of working uh quite closely with a naval kind of sea power think tank in korea called the korean institute for maritime strategy and and they approached me and asked me if i could think of uh any topics related to the korean war kind of contemporary korean history that would be relevant uh for them and uh kind of maybe it would help me in putting together an edited volume uh and this is kind of what i chose and i think on a kind of wider level the Korean War is kind of is is in my view quite bizarrely almost written

out of a lot of naval history it's not really talked about very much as kind of the first major conflict after World War II it kind of set the stage for a lot of you know contemporary naval doctrine contemporary naval sea power thinking particularly in the U.S. really hasn't changed since then so I think from lots of reasons it just for me struck me as very very important that you know people begin to think more about what happened during the Korean War at sea in particular why specifically did you focus on the coalition at sea aspect well i think from my perspective that was kind of one of the really interesting parts of it was that what you what you essentially saw during the korean war was under under a un flag this relatively ad hoc

coalition of nations i think 12 different countries working together kind of at the first time since when since world war ii and some from very very different backgrounds different languages So it presented a load of challenges that like this book could really delve into from a national perspective. And then, you know, the way I viewed it was that, and I wrote this, I think, in the introduction is that, you know, coalition naval operations at sea or combined operations at sea are just going to get more important. And, you know, as I say, the Western order or however you want to frame it is under more pressure. I think nearly every Navy out there is in relative terms getting smaller in terms of ship numbers and things like that. And I can only see it going in one way where, you know, we will have to work together more closely. And the reality is we don't have a large number of examples where you see Navies working together in terms of war fighting at sea. so navies do a lot of operations together kind of in peacetime or in times of competition and crisis

but in terms of war fighting we just don't get a lot of examples to work with and the korean war was you know it was sustained operations at sea doing lots of different things and i think it just brought lots of interesting examples that we can actually transfer now to the contemporary security environment that's really why i chose to focus on it so we'll time stamp this for listeners, we're recording this on Sunday, April 28th. And there's going to be a question or two related to the Red Sea and modern coalition operations later on in the podcast. But if there's anything that's, you know, occurring in the Red Sea after this date, that's the reason we're not talking about it. Deborah, what constituted a small navy for this conflict and

why? Oh, thank you. Yes, I found that providing a clear definition of what constitutes a small Navy for this conflict was actually quite challenging. And there were a number of reasons for this. I think first and most importantly, most of the literature on maritime strategy is traditionally, as we know, focused on larger navies. And that's because the impetus behind creating theory on the maritime aspects of war has been more related to hegemonic struggles for sea control. So what I found was the traditional works of maritime strategy have tended to focus on war and the preparations for war as conducted by major naval powers. And they've often had very little to say then about smaller or small navies generally, or more specifically

their role in coalition operations, which is what we focus on in the book. This means there isn't an agreed upon definition of small navy that I could use or there wasn't a huge body of literature as well that I could turn to the traditional definitions of what constitutes a small navy and there really isn't much written on there so being quite quite narrow and I think unhelpful in many ways so I needed to come up with a new idea that would work for Ian's book and i think a second problem i faced with coming up with a definition for the book was that navies themselves understandably are often uh resistant to being labeled as small for reasons like organizational pride inter-service politics and of course budgetary issues as well and i think all

of these create risks in being called small i put little little quotes around that um not least the tendency to equate small with an important of course um and therefore you've got a much smaller share of the defense budget because you're small um and what we also find as you know as maritime experts is that navies also tend to be aspirational organizations and even very small navies will reference what is very traditional maritime theory as part of their raison d'etre again making it at best impolite and at worst possibly quite damaging to label a navy as small so those were some of the problems and then I think on a very practical level for me as well there was a huge variety in the size and power of the participating allied navies

in Korea, in the role they play, the challenges they faced in operating in terms of this allied force. And this meant that for me, finding an all-encompassing definition was always going to be slightly tricky and a bit sticky. So basically, the range of navies discussed in our book includes, of course, the more powerful Royal Navy, as well as the much smaller Royal New Zealand navy and as we discuss um all of these navies have very different roles some more war fighting some more humanitarian based so given all of these challenges and it felt like quite a big challenge in putting this this chapter together I decided to adopt a more inclusive broader and I think um I think in many ways more simple definition of what a small navy might be

So for the purpose of the book, all of the Allied navies, apart from the US Navy, of course, are described as smaller, doing the air quotes thing again, as described as smaller navies. And while this, I think, might feel a bit harsh for some of the participants, you know, like the Royal Navy or even the Canadian Navy as well, the bottom line is that as against all, as against the US Navy, all navies operating this maritime coalition were in Korea smaller navies so in the end this quite simple definition I think of smaller navies I think it allowed for a more comprehensive examination in the book of the many challenges of naval coalition operations and I think it

allowed for the development of some broader lessons from the specific case study and just one last point if i may i think um i would add that in addition the label of smaller navies in the book is also a useful term as it does help articulate the idea of relative maritime power during the korean war so in essence um control of our operations is ceded to the larger navy in this case U.S. Navy and the term smaller navy therefore denotes a more junior partnership and as we discuss in the book that in itself also carries with it a range of difficulties which I think is one of the unique and interesting selling points from the book. Thank you. So if you'll permit me a follow-up one of the more interesting things there was a character

position of the Royal Navy in the early 1950s as like a small slash smaller Navy, air quotes from my size as well, though, where if you were to compare it to the Royal Navy today, it was absolutely massive. Is part of your framing driven by their specific contribution to this conflict, which because of location was actually just a very tiny fraction of the royal navy's fleet at that point yeah that's a good point and i'm always very nervous of course working at the uk staff college of calling the royal navy a small smaller navy they do now they have to accept it now they have to accept it it's like i'm sorry and that is not uh in any way a critique of like any of my colleagues i am a false survivor like i have a lower back tattoo that says

that but uh it's like royal navy trained but uh now now they would have to accept that designation Yeah. And I think I got the idea of smaller navies from the work of John Rob Webb, one of my, Dr. John Rob Webb, one of my colleagues at Staff College, who wrote on the Pacific Fleet. And again, in one of my books, my first book on small navies, and he referred to the Pacific Fleet, which, as we know, was, you know, the UK contribution was enormous as against what the Royal Navy operates and maintains today. And I think that for me, that really spoke to this idea about being a smaller navy in terms of working alongside much larger navies. And I think that it gave all of our contributors that ability not to get too tied up around the axle, around definitions, and then lose sight of some of the interesting and unique aspects of the challenges of smaller navies in coalition operations. Thank you. So Debra, I'll start with you. But Ian, if you want to contribute to this question, feel free. What challenges do small slash smaller navies face when they're conducting coalition operations? And then how did the various navies involved address those challenges during the Korean conflict?

Thank you. In my chapter, I looked at a number of generic challenges, such as achieving operational and tactical interoperability, the classic ones. the difficulties of sharing intelligence I mean even amongst allies which hasn't gone away asymmetries in technology and lastly how differing rules of engagement can also pose challenges and we see all of these challenges in Korea and I think for at least some of them there were workarounds found and I'm sure Ian can speak to some of these more authoritatively than me So taking the challenge of operational level interoperability in Korea, we see that the UK, for instance, had given this a lot of thought and come up with a long term solution of embedding liaison officers with the US Navy. And the exchange of liaison officers between the two fleets was seen by the British as a vital mechanism, not only, I think, to facilitate sharing information and intelligence, but also as a means of encouraging the wider interoperability of the two navies. So that was that was very important. And two additional factors that I looked at as well, which I think come up in terms of how well small navies adapted to working alongside the US Navy is technological mismatch and the challenges of sharing intelligence in particular.

And as we know, technological interoperability, where it works, is an important force multiplier, as it does enhance the fungibility and flexibility of naval forces available to the lead nation in a coalition operation. and as mentioned I think depending on the nature of the naval coalition the degree of technological interoperability will vary tremendously on the spectrum I guess between the smaller navies involved and this means that in in an allied operation and this was the case in Korea coming back to Korea there'll be a degree of technological asymmetry between allies and this could include different degrees of reliance on technology by smaller navies, the utilization of different forms of technology, and the use of technology by different navies for different purposes, just to make it even more complicated, I guess. And during the Korean War, differences in

communication equipment between Allied navies forced the US Navy to find ad hoc solutions and workarounds to allow operations to run smoothly and as most of the UN warships operating in Korean waters weren't fitted with UHF radios they were increasingly adopted which were you know as you know increasingly adopted by the US Navy for more of their regional communications at this period multinational naval corporations instead had to rely heavily on VHF radios and visual signals to communicate instead making interoperability you know difficult devils in the detail quite often and another challenge I found to achieving effective interoperability is the willingness and ability of allies in both large and smaller navies to share intelligence

so the collection pooling and sharing of intelligence between states involved in multinational military operations is seen as obviously an indispensable feature of coalition warfare but sharing intelligence even now is always a very sensitive issue even with allies so during the Korean war the US as we know had very strict regulations on what intelligence could be shared and with whom and as a result the US only provided information to the Commonwealth navies on a sort of need to know basis and the timelines for disseminating were also slightly problematic so finding workarounds proved not impossible but certainly difficult and i would say um in korea as well that this problem of sharing intelligence with allies had

an interesting almost additional dimension which was how to effectively share the sheer amount you know this is often a problem in the contemporary battle space but was equally true in Korea is how you share the sheer amount of intelligence and communication that is generated in an allied and what we see in the Korean war was that communication problems arose between allies due to the need for more frequent and longer radio messages which of course crowded out existing radio networks that were structured for peacetime rather than combat operations and the US Navy of course had more radio operators people had more available circuits on board as compared to the British and Commonwealth ships this meant that the smaller navies tended to

struggle pretty much to keep up with the volume of radio traffic generated by the US Navy so there was a there was a number of attempts to try and find ad hoc and work around um solutions and i'll hand over to ian because i appreciate i've spoken far too much over to you ian no i think that's a that's a really good summary and i really like that last point you made because i think it speaks to this issue of mass and size and how you know smaller navies actually work together and as deborah said just the sheer volume of communications would overwhelm radio rooms and c2 nodes that were like for the british one even the british or the australians they just couldn't cope with the amount of traffic the u.s ships were generating and they had to figure out workarounds

and i think that question of mass you also saw it with the canadian navy and i think with the new zealand navy to a degree where where they struggle to to bring in supplies and rotate personnel and not just but also communications from home and all these various issues that a larger navy can do relatively straightforward particularly if the entire force is concentrated in that area but for the canadians or the australians there's only one or two ships operating there at any one time and they then needed to dedicate capabilities in order to supply those ships with what's with the things their crews needed and it did cause them some problems but again workarounds were found and usually that involved working more closely with

the americans and leaning in on american networks to do that right so i think that's a really important element that kind of comes out in in lots of the different examples that the different office brings up is that all these smaller navies struggle or not i think the royal navy to a lesser degree struggle with that question of mass and how do we kind of operate so far forward and and those kind of networks that that we would kind of take for granted now didn't really exist then and they had to be solutions had to be found and i think that's an interesting point that came out from the Korean Navy, or from the Korean War at the time. I think some of the other issues that come out as a smaller Navy, but also kind of within the wider framework of coalition operations

is, you know, how many ships do you contribute to this? Why are we doing this? Big, big strategic and operational level questions for smaller navies. And, you know, what effective capabilities are we going to bring to the party? And how does this affect things like force structure and force development so tim choi when he writes about the canadian navy uh was talking a lot about how they were actually building their entire navy for an atlantic conflict and then all of a sudden that was about asw essentially and then all of a sudden they were dragged into some weird literal conflict on the other side of the world and and this kind of disrupted certain force development plans so again i think it kind of brings up this idea of for smaller navies they kind of have to be able

react faster and be a little bit more multifunctional than they expected in the 1950s and that's an interesting point that probably has some relevance for today i think another thing that comes up is this idea of maybe it's more relevant for the south korean navy but this was really a navy that was in its very nascent stages it was it was literally just born a few years earlier and they very much struggled with um with getting qualified personnel on board they'd sent all their good personnel away to learn to be naval officers prior to the start of the Korean War and most of them would not have been educated until it was after it was finished so they had problems with language and things like that so it was very difficult for them to work alongside the US Navy

and they again needed to find to find workarounds in terms of solving very specific low-level tactical challenges for example that they needed to work with but they hadn't faced before and I think in general and Deborah alludes to this what we do see with the smaller navies and kind of in a kind of coalition framework is this kind of remarkable capacity of military officers to solve problems on the fly right I've had the privilege of working with military officers for a long time and like I'm always impressed by their ability to troubleshoot a problem needs to be fixed right now and I think we see that in this conflict a lot that you know they manage to find workarounds and that's important and then the other important point where it comes from

you know larger navies working with smaller navies or just navies working together is this issue of trust and a lot of the authors come back to this point that the better working relationships were the ones that had kind of developed in world war ii actually that you know the americans kind of to the to the extent to which they trust anybody trusted the royal navy and the australian navy to do the jobs they thought they could do and the personal relationships that were built up in world war ii then kind of extended to the korean war and this does not mean that the relations particularly between the the royal navy and the u.s navy were perfect and i think a number of chapters allude to personal interrelationship problems between admirals

but in general i think this question of trust and experience is really important when it comes to coalition operations and particularly a larger navy like the united states or the largest navy like the United States working with smaller navies and doing that so the book and I think the conflict itself brings out all of these issues really really really really well I love the point about the radio operators as an enduring problem that you can read about going all the way back to World War II and I can remember reading about British captains would have their radio operators decrypting every single message that was being sent whether the ship was an addressee or not just because culturally that captain wanted to know everything that was happening. So he would

have a larger understanding of what the big picture was of the war. And it was just burning out radio operators because they're, you know, 80 plus percent of these messages are not addressed to them yet. They're still having to spend all the time to decrypt every single one of these. And even taking like the German frigate Lubeck, I was an exchange officer on her from 2007 to 2010. And when we went across to FOSS, we had just operated by ourselves after having come out of the shipyards and initially getting over to FOSS, which is the Royal Navy's training establishment there off of Plymouth. You start getting bombarded with all this radio traffic and you, the officers, are having to process all this radio traffic, like which of these are important to me for the next three days and which of these are important to me for the next seven weeks. of like, okay, I'm going to prioritize this to survive the next three days. And like, how can I get to a space where I'm now working ahead where, okay, I'm seven days ahead and I'm 10 days

ahead as the person who is largely preparing the bridge for all these operations as an enduring challenge that is just a constant when operating in a coalition environment. So Debra, final question to you. And again, Ian, if you have any thoughts on this, please chime in here. has the conflict in the Red Sea and the contributions of smaller navies to that conflict made you reflect on anything that you had contributed in your chapter? I think it's a really interesting question. I think the conflict in the Red Sea in many ways reinforces many of the challenges identified in Ian's book. And I think for me, in the Red Sea, smaller navies, I mean, we've seen some of the challenges again, smaller navies like the Royal

Navy, working alongside the US, have been forced to adopt ad hoc solutions again to address their lack of technology or least specific capabilities in the Red Sea. So for example, the UK has underinvested a naval land attack capabilities, which means that we don't have a full suite of of capabilities available on our naval platforms and so it's type 45 destroyer assigned to the Red Sea such as HMS Diamond for example is very well equipped for air defence but plans for the class to have a land attack capability were abandoned and this has meant that the Royal Navy has had to find these ad hoc solutions in meeting the US requirement to attack land targets So this has included calling on the RAF Typhoon combat aircraft based in Cyprus to carry out attacks on Houthi rebels in Yemen, for example.

So, again, this is having to think outside the box, be a little bit more innovative. And I think a second challenge we see in the Red Sea is how difficult it is to put together and hold together a coalition, something which I think we see in Korea and in other theatres as well. So while the US has assembled quite a strong coalition of countries to carry out patrols in the Red Sea to safeguard commercial vessels, this doesn't include key regional allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for instance. And these operations, as we know, have raised concerns amongst many European states that it could trigger a broader regional war. And I think in response to these concerns, what we've seen is the EU setting up its own maritime security operation made up of French, German and Greek frigates and an Italian destroyer as well. so it seems to me when you look at the red sea it's almost a microcosm of many of the problems of coalition operations naval operations how you put together and then hold together a coalition sometimes the wibbly wobbly um is always a very tricky business i think for the lead states such

as the u.s navy and we're seeing this replicated again um in the red sea anything to add here yeah yeah when you sent this question i was i thought about this quite a lot because one of the things that struck me uh in the korean example was the fact that a lot of nations were asked by the u.s to contribute military forces to korea which is a land conflict and a lot of them wanted to send naval vessels because they didn't want to send land forces right and and it struck me that you know for them it was kind of a naval diplomacy thing was signaling to your ally like we're doing something here you know and the australian case is a really good case where you know australians really wanted to send more naval ships and

the u.s government was was pressuring them heavily to send more land forces because that was actually what was needed uh and i i that struck me that then as you have this contrast with the red sea where there's no real land component but the u.s is really struggling to get people to come in and help them here and and it does strike me about this this question of naval diplomacy and And how navies are used as signaling tools within alliances and particularly smaller states using their naval forces to show interest or lack of interest in specific conflicts and in helping their ally. And it is instructive to see in the Red Sea what countries have actually donated vessels to the U.S., let's say, in inverted commas, led coalition of forces versus the other ones. And it just strikes me that we probably need to think a little bit more deeply about, you know, how countries, smaller countries or countries with smaller navies actually use them for this kind of naval diplomacy, not for an external target, but really for this primary ally or their patron and how it works there. And it's just something that's been struck me recently that we should think about more.

Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Deborah Sanders, Dr. Ian Bowers. deborah where can we find you online and what are you working on next oh thank you um i don't have a twitter or x or instagram or tiktok account as i'm i'm over 20th and 21st century um woman and but i can be contacted in the sort of traditional way via email um my next project is is working with professor ian speller at manouf university um on our third book in our series on small navies and our first book looked to fill some of the glaring gaps in the literature on small navies and the second book looked at small European navies and their ability to address

maritime security issues. The plan for the third book is to revisit I think the issue of small navies and look at how and in what ways smaller navies have adapted to the changing character of war we're seeing in the 21st century I think this is particularly important in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the changed geostrategic environment in which all of our navies operate and where we've seen the emergence of new threats and of course the use of innovative technology which I think is a really exciting bit for me and I think all of these challenges all of these affect the ability of navies to effectively use the maritime domain so i think that that's our next project and that's something i'm very excited about going forward thank you we look forward to

seeing that come out uh we we have had dr speller on back for sea control 233 talking about the evolution of british amphibious capability so whenever you two wrap that up we'd love to we'd love to bring you back as part of our ongoing series of ians that we bring on to talk about naval matters i'm an insane question to you uh where can we find you and what's your next project probably easiest to find me on on linkedin these days it's the one i'm focusing on more uh more and more and then uh my next project uh i'm going to start probably just after the summer a new book on on joint operations and see or particularly you know how navies work in joint contexts is the plan whether we'll come work right or not but that's the idea

No, that sounds excellent. We'd love to talk to you about that as well. But thank you both again for joining us. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you. Help me for wine, put it in the alley, put it on the shimbo now. A porter of a porter, dear old, way, hey, put it in the alley. A porter of wine, both white and red, old, put it on the shimbo now. So help me for wine, put it in the alley, way, hey, put it in the alley. Help me, Paul, I'm put in the alley

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