Sea Control - Sea Control 534 - NATO's Navies at 75 with Dr. Josh Tallis

Episode Date: July 6, 2024

Links1. "NATO’s Navies at 75: Operational Imperatives to Watch," by Joshua Tallis, Proceedings, April 2024.2. Sea Control 197 – Naval Great Power Competition with Dr. Joshua Tallis and Hunter Stires, CIMSEC, August 30, 2020.3. Sea Control 250 – Dr. Joshua Tallis on Arctic Strategy, CIMSEC, May 16, 2021.4. Sea Control 408 – NATO’s Maritime Future with Dr. Joshua Tallis, CIMSEC, January 29, 2023.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today marks the return of Dr. Josh Tallis, one of our most frequent guests on the pod over the last five years. Today we'll be talking about NATO's navies at 75. This episode was edited and produced by William McQuiston. 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, Kimber's men.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is a friend of the podcast, Dr. Joshua Tallis. We're going to discuss his April 2024 article for Proceedings Online, NATO's Navies at 75, Five Operational Imperatives to Watch. So, Josh, this is your fourth time appearing on Sea Control since I've hosted. You previously appeared on Sea Control 197, Naval Great Power Competition, alongside Hunter Stiers back in August of 2020. You were here for Sea Control 250 discussing Arctic strategy with Walker Mills in May of 2021.

We somehow missed you in 2022, and then you returned in January last year where we discussed NATO's maritime future. So thank you for your continued support and any professional updates since the last time you were here. Yeah, well, thanks for having me back. And since I was on with you last time, I have moved back from Naples to the D.C. area. I'm now a CNA detailee over in OpNav working as a special assistant there. So learning the ropes, moving from the fleet to corporate Navy. Well, thank you. And 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. So you chose five imperatives, and we'll walk through each of them. I'd kind of like to hear your reasoning for why you identified that topic as an imperative, followed by what the alliance members are doing to address the issue, as well as any additional analysis you might have on where you see plans falling short. But we can start with the surface recapitalization. Sure. Sure. So surface recapitalization, in terms of the what, that's pretty straightforward. That's

laid out in the article. The UK is expecting to launch something like eight ASW frigates and another five multipurpose frigates over the next 10 years or so. Royal Canadian Navy is adopting a modified British Type 26 in the early 2030s. Spain is expecting to build another five frigates with the U.S. Aegis Combat Suite, Italy, which is already one of the largest navies in Europe, and one that I think often flies a little bit beneath the radar, is coming up at the end of their current buy of the FREM, the European Multi-Mission Frigates. France is also at the end of its recent acquisition cycle for FREMs, but is in the early stages of a production run of smaller frigates. And for France, more significantly in the early design stages of

a follow on nuclear powered aircraft carrier to replace the Charles de Gaulle. So from a what's happening standpoint, that's pretty straightforward. And it tells a decently compelling story that the major navies in NATO are seizing the momentum and the political moment, not just from the most recent Russian invasion in Ukraine, but really sort of, you know, benchmark back more towards 2014, to build this momentum towards recap, recapitalizing the service fleet. The why or the implications of that, I think, is in some ways more interesting and tells some of the complex story that NATO navies have to cover. Usually, and you and I were talking, I think the last time I was on about an article I had written on standing NATO maritime groups. Part of the reason why I was

interested in that is because the fight in Europe is overwhelmingly a land and air fight. But it doesn't mean that the maritime domain isn't important. It does mean that it's under-discussed outside of NATO circles. In particular, the U.S. Navy doesn't really have much of an intellectual approach to how it would fight in Europe. It's at this point sort of a derivative or a lesser included case. So I wanted to build out that argument a little bit more. And in doing that thinking, I came across a couple of details that have me keyed on to the surface recapitalization issue. The first is that NATO's navies, and I'm excluding the US here, but including Canada, so this is not strictly European navies, on average, their major surface combatants,

just for comparison's sake, are about half the tonnage and half the missile capacity of a US flight to Arleigh Burke DDG, right? So they're smaller in general. On top of that, most listeners who are familiar with the U.S. cycle for maintenance, training, deployment, sustainment have the three to make one number in their head, right? Three ships to make one sort of permanent deployment. In European navies, it's more like four, five, six to one. So in addition to the fact that a number of these major surface combatants are, on average, much smaller than the workhorse of the U.S. fleet, which is the Flight 2 DDG, it also takes more of them to create the same level of persistent presence. And then the last bit on the why I think the surface

recapitalization element is such an important story to watch is because there are a variety of missions that all rely on frigates and destroyers, what I would sort of term medium density, but high demand assets. And some of these missions require the fleets to be in physically different places to do these missions, right? So there's escort requirements for high value units. NATO has a number of aircraft carriers, not just the United States, but you've got the UK with two carriers, the French with a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Italians with a large aircraft carrier. You've got the Spanish with a big deck. You have the Turks with a big deck, right? Then throw in the amphibs, throw in the LCC, the US command ship in Europe

that has virtually no inherent self-defense capabilities, plus Oilers, right, which are another category of high-value unit. And that is a lot of stuff that the alliance would have to defend in a fight. And virtually none of these nations other than the United States have the organic capacity to defend these assets by themselves. So NATO as an alliance is going to have to develop some sort of HVU defense theory, and that will require a more capitalized surface force. The other thing, and we're seeing this right now, is missile defense, particularly ballistic missile defense. Most of the navies that I listed in NATO don't have a robust BMD capability, but some do, and some more are developing it. But as the BMD sailors out there

know, in order to make that shot, you've got to be in whatever your specific and designated hotbox is, right? And so that will tie certain shooters to certain places. Land attack strike, again, a capability that many of these NATO navies don't have, but some do, would require you potentially to be poised somewhere else to range whatever your land attack crew's missile is. And then there's anti-submarine warfare, which might put you in an entirely different geography. So doing all of those missions, even sequentially, let alone simultaneously, requires, to use Admiral Franchetti's phrase, more players on the field. And so that's why I started off with the surface recapitalization. The individual acquisitions are interesting, but in the context of all of

these various missions, plus the challenge with density, plus the fact that many of these are on average much smaller than what the U.S. audience might be familiar with, all of that factors into a NATO that really needs these added surface combatants. So I'm going to go a little bit out of sequence, if that's okay, because you started with ASW and then you brought it back to ASW at the end. And in that realm, we're seeing multiple countries develop ASW-focused frigates. So you mentioned, the Brits, the Germans are also planning to build ASW frigates that are somehow larger than a cruiser. The PA seems to pick up a new contract every week. Do you think that ASW frigates are the correct decision based on most likely threat? So it's an interesting question.

My answer is, you know, ASW is a team sport, right? And so, you know, your best asset for a wide area search for an unlocated sub is going to be aviation, right? And so P-8 is the right answer for that. And for some of our allies who, you know, live in, let's say, parts of the neighborhood where we may be most concerned

about an out-of-area deployer emanating from the North Fleet, for example, we'd want that kind of help from them for that wide area search. You know, fast attack submarine, great for holding track and in trail once you

know where the submarine is, but pretty abysmal at the search function. The frigates, I think, are valuable because, you know, despite being optimized for ASW, they are in general still multi-mission. So you could use them for other things. The Russian submarine threat is the most substantial maritime threat that the Russians pose in the European area of operations. And so I think focusing on ASW as the primary mission area for NATO's naval forces makes sense. And FFGs are useful at holding track once you've located something, right? And they have some search capacity themselves. And so this is where the geography starts to make a bit of a difference, right?

I mean, ASW in the East Med, for example, against a different kind of target that the Russians have based out of the Syrian Basin Tardis, that looks different than ASW in, let's say, the high north or then south of the GI-UK gap into the mid-Atlantic. But my short answer is that I think the FFGs are important and they play a valuable role, and there's a certain amount of economizing that comes with them because, one, many of these nations either can't afford to buy fast attack submarines either at all or very many of them, and the ones that they do have don't have the range often that a U.S. SSN would have. So there are some advantages there from the FFGs, plus that sort of inherent multi-mission aspect creates a level of flexibility. And then the added bit, and it relates to that multi-mission element, is that the FFGs can be really helpful with HVU defense, right? Even if they're just operating in their anti-submarine warfare capacity, the ability to tack on, let's say, a Royal Navy ASW frigate onto a U.S. or Strike Force NATO-operated or French-operated carrier strike group to provide that extra layer of security for a big-deck, high-value unit that's operating in a high-threat area. adds a lot of additional value even if they're not being actively used for let's say you know

sort of you know search and destroy missions yeah i'm gonna challenge that just a little bit and i guess i i'm always baffled when i see the asw frigate being built especially a modern asw frigate being built with extremely minimal air defense capabilities um because you met you have talked about uh magazine depth both in this podcast and when you and i have spoken previously and uh those for those who are not familiar i mean you're just as likely to be shot at by a missile from a russian submarine as you are a torpedo i mean the torpedo centric approach i believe is mostly like a western thing as far as like the way submarines are going to kill targets at this point it's like the uh russian russian submarines are just they they like missiles so

it hasn't made a lot of sense to me as I've seen these ASW frigates rolled out with, you know, eight VLS cells. Even if you quad pack that with ESSM, that is not a lot of defense capability for you or for anyone else in your vicinity. I don't know if you want to take that and tie it directly into the next topic of air defense here, but I think it fits there. And we'd ask also, what lessons do you see NATO learning from the conflict in the Black Sea and the Red Sea, where you've got multiple NATO countries actively participating. Yeah. I mean, you make a very important point. It's one, when I was doing some research back in my time at Sixth Fleet that I spent a lot of time dwelling on, which is just sort of the overall shallowness of the magazines on really across

the European navies. And, you know, I would include the Royal Canadian Navy in that function as well. This is one of the challenges, the smaller your platform gets, the more challenged the multi-mission aspect. There are some advantages, right? So some of the ASW frigates have anti-submarine missiles on them. And so it extends the range. Now, I think there's some credible arguments about like whether or not the range extensions that come from, I'm thinking of like the Italian Frems, for example, the range extensions that you get from those as compared to what the, let's say a flight one USDTG that doesn't have a helicopter embarked, right? So just has to use whatever's organic, might have even less range. There's also the peacetime or

crisis versus conflict element of this, which is, you know, we can expend a lot of assets and a lot of time just generally keeping tabs on on deployers or attempting to. Right. And so I think there's utility for all the time we were not at war, you know, having a platform that can that can do that job. But yeah, ultimately, you have to buy these things in order to, you know, finish the kill chain. And I agree that the lack of air defenses or the and that's, you know, we can tie this into your next question, is historically problematic among NATO navies. And not much of what we're seeing in the surface recapitalization fundamentally addresses that. There are some areas where we're still seeing very little movement. Land attack cruise missiles, right?

I mean, a lot of that is a U.S. game. And so that would tie up, for example, the U.S. Arleigh to be doing to range strategic targets in Russia that may mean that they can't be used to do other things because that's a capability that, at least from a naval standpoint, is relatively scarce among many NATO navies. And the air defense is really problematic. So let's look at a notional Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 configuration and a notional Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 configuration, and I'll stipulate that these are almost never as big as I would use for illustrative purposes here, but I'm picking what, to my assessment, are the most common participants in either of these groups, just to give you a sense of range.

And if every country offered their most capable air defense platform in those units, in S&M S&MG1, you'd likely end up with the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany, each of which can field a medium-range SM-2. So that's 150 kilometers. That's not terrible. That's a wide-area air defense capability. But that's the best that your average S&MG1 participant can provide, and not every combatant that those countries could provide is equipped with that maximal capability. And then a lot of countries that you'd think of as pretty heavy hitters, you know, the Norwegians, the Canadians, the Portuguese, I mean, they're really packing just point defense, right? I mean, it involves a C-SPARO missile with an air defense range of 50 kilometers.

And then if you want to provide a comparison statistic, a U.S. DDG armed with an SM-6 or an extended range SM-2 has a reach of more like 350 kilometers, right? And so that's a significant capability distinction. And an SM-2, a medium range SM-2 is nothing to sneeze at. It's a high quality missile. But, you know, many NATO navies that we would regard of as, you know, as tier one players can't field those. And even the one that can field them can't necessarily do so on all of their platforms. And then in standing NATO Maritime Group 2, you'd be left with Spain and again, Germany, because they contribute to both with that SM-2. Italy is kind of in the middle tier with the Aster 30, which is 100 kilometers, so about 50 kilometers less. And then Greece and

the Canadians, again, and Turkey, all of that evolves Sea Sparrow missiles, which, you know, 50 kilometers. So that's kind of a long walk to a short answer, which is yes. The air defense problem is one that is slowly being addressed. There are some navies, if I'm remembering correctly, I think the Netherlands might be among them, that are upgrading either to the SM-2 or to at least the Naval Strike Missile for anti-ship capabilities where the reach is a little bit more favorable as compared to a US DDG. But it's really problematic. You had mentioned lessons from the Black Sea and the Red Sea. And I think the easy button answer is to talk about swarms and drones, and I'm happy to do that. But my underlying theory is more really that the EVs still need

to beware the missile. And I'll offer a couple of examples here. So in the Black Sea, there was a Foreign Affairs article from February. So, you know, it's the end of April as we're recording this, so these statistics are a little bit dated. But that author noted that modified LACMs shot at Russian vessels that had been relocated to port were responsible for five of the nine mission kills on major vessels since the start of the war. And then I did some analysis based on some open source data from Lloyd's List. And I did this about a month ago. So again, a little bit less dated, but not the most up-to-date numbers. But I think it's illustrative. And what I found is that of the 20 known Houthi strikes on merchant vessels since the attack

started, four came from unidentified projectiles. Two were attributed to drones. These are strikes, not just in general attacks. And 14 were attributed to missiles. And then I think the most critical part there is that the most damaging attacks and the only attack to result in loss of life so far all appear to be a result of missile strikes. And those can be cruise missiles or ballistic missiles. So my kind of long-winded answer there, trying to rely on some data, is that there's a lot of energy and interest behind swarms. I'm doing some work on this myself, but ultimately, NATO navies need to be prepared to operate against high-end, air-breathing, fast-moving cruise and ballistic missile anti-ship threats. That is, at the end

of the day, what is going to punch the biggest hole in the side of your ship and cause a mission kill. And NATO navies have proven to some extent that they can operate in that kind of environment, particularly in the Red Sea, but it hasn't been perfect. And as I think, you know, something we're going to talk about, that's really where that magazine shallowness really starts to hit, because their ability to stay on station is incredibly constrained. And that maybe is workable if you're operating very close to your own, you know, ports or friendly ports. But navies, to some extent, are designed to be expeditionary. And if you can't do this for more than one or two engagements, then, you know, I think we're sort of underscoring some real strategic dilemmas that

these navies need to address. Now, in the article, you brought up uncrewed platforms and mine warfare, and there's been a lot of focus on Ukrainian uncrewed platforms decimating the Russian Black Sea Fleet, which you mentioned. Should NATO be looking at these from a defense perspective? For example, how do we protect ourselves from this in the future? Are they viewing these as primarily offensive platforms? So right now, my read is that the most maturity in NATO on these systems is defensive and largely related to mine countermeasure. That seems to be sort of an area where there's the greatest amount of progress in terms of actually feeling something. In general, my argument would be that the sort of the primary

issue to address here is defensive. Not inherently because these systems individually would cause an inordinate amount of damage to a ship, although these are not sort of heavily armored in terms of the actual hulls, right? So it doesn't take much to do a certain amount of damage to frigates and destroyers. But again, it goes back to the missile argument, which is to say the offensive power that a frigate or a destroyer or a cruiser, in the case of the United States, brings to the fight is its suite of offensive missiles. And if those missiles are depleted through a number of defensive actions because it's easy and cheap for an adversary to throw uncrewed systems at them, then one, either you've depleted the offensive capability because it has no more missiles,

or it has to leave in order to restock and rearm on defensive interceptors, which is functionally the same thing because the threat has left the area for whatever that period of time. So my argument is that the ship defense needs to take precedent here because, you know, a ship that is either struck or has to withdraw in order to rearm is neutered, right? It's a functionally non-existent, very virtual presence is actual absence. And that's a pretty easy way to create virtual absence, even if the systems that are being thrown at these ships are themselves not very robust, right? I again point back to the example from the Red Sea. These things are proving relatively straightforward to intercept. That does not seem to be the technological issue right now. it's the fact that we don't really have much other than sm2s and sm6s to do that with and

and that's i think reasonable right ship defense will always be more expensive than ship offense until such a time as we have things like sophisticated non-kinetics or directed energy things of that nature because it's it's it's an inherently more technologically sophisticated and demanding requirement. And you want to be armed with the most sophisticated and capable interceptor because you don't know if you're going to get shot at by a Shahed loitering missile or, you know, a sophisticated anti-ship cruise missile or, you know, an anti-ship ballistic missile. So you want something that can defend you from everything. So a little bit of a tangent. I think that's sort of some of the cost and price arguments we're seeing lately on the cost of interceptors versus the cost

of uncrit systems, is a little bit of a red herring. But the magazine challenge is one that I do think needs to be resolved. And then we can talk about offense. I have my own sort of initial skepticisms. You know, at sea, the combat power has to commute to the battlefield in a way that it doesn't in Ukraine, in a way that it doesn't even in the Red Sea, because commercial shipping is being shot at by, you know, militia operating from land with either land-based or covert lines of communication. So what swarm-based ship-deployed drones look like 10 or 15 years from now is intriguing to me, but I don't think the imperative for NATO to solve right now. But NATO deserves a shout out. There's been a lot of experimentation on this front. The Portuguese

have leaned in with RepMUSE, which has become the proving ground in NATO for uncrewed system experimentation in the maritime domain. NATO stood up Diana, which is its sort of capabilities accelerator, not exclusively focused on naval issues. But there's a lot of energy in NATO moving towards uncrewed, and a lot of that deserves credit. But operationally, MCM seems closest. And then I would say, let's focus on ship defense so that you can keep your missiles on station until such a time as you actually need to use them. So finally, what are the NATO navies doing to address logistics and what types of logistics capabilities are they prioritizing? Because we have seen multiple ships having to go pier side to replenish

ammunitions expended in the Red Sea. Yeah, so there's a lot of, I would say, positive but relatively traditional activity in the the area of resupply and logistics so doing some of the research the canadian navy looking for two new joint support ships on order those will mostly be focused on providing resupply at sea plus some c2 float capability it's not unusual for particularly smaller navies to try and bundle the utility of the logistics ships so the Norwegian logistics ship Maud is internally reconfigurable to serve as a floating field hospital, as one example. Now, similar to our conversation on ASW frigates, anything that's optimized more for one thing than for something else struggles to be fully multi-mission. And so

there are some challenges that can come with that. But in general, it can be a cost-effective solution. Logistics is an unpopular thing for parliaments and governments to pay for, which is one of the reasons why the United States likewise has particular poverty when it comes to a sufficient number of fleet oilers. The Italians are buying their second volcano-class logistics support ship. That's, you know, fleet oiler and dry stores. The Dutch Navy, very similar. Theirs was already launched, I think, but not yet ready for service. That's, you know, an oiler and stores. The Royal Navy, three larger ones on order, you know, same story. So which is all to say, the oilers, that That is important and valuable, particularly for some of these navies that we do expect

to either potentially be alongside the United States in a Pacific fight or who at least do these longer deployments. You know, the Royal Navy is an example. We've seen the Germans out there. We've seen the French out there, obviously, with some territorial holdings. So the ability for them to support themselves is critical. There are two issues that I would highlight here that these sort of fundamentally don't resolve.

One is that logistics in NATO is not a collective burden. Logistics is the responsibility of the individual nation for its units. Now, that doesn't mean that either in peacetime or in conflict, you couldn't snuggle up against an oiler from another country. And, you know, that happens and, you know, they work out the finances and 30 years later, some treasury wires some money to somebody. But it creates a significant amount of inefficiency when it comes to how NATO thinks about oilers and logistics and particularly sort of, you know, resupply at sea. I don't know if we were really viewing all of NATO's navies as a collective naval force, that this is the sort of federated approach that we would have come up with. The other thing which points to what you had mentioned, Jared, which is problematic, including for the United States, is that none of this addresses the challenge of VLS reload at sea, right? And there are all sorts of demonstrators that are in the works to try and work through that issue. But, you know, at the end of the day, I think we will find in the early stages of conflict, it's much more likely that NATO ships will go Winchester before they run out of hamburgers and potato chips, right? And so the logistics is critical. I think we're all familiar with the, you know, the amateurs talk strategy, experts talk logistics. It does matter. It is complicated. And more logistics ships, more oilers and ships capable of delivering dry stores out there in European waters is a boon, particularly for the U.S., ideally, so that we can start rebalancing our own fleet. but it doesn't necessarily solve some of the most critical operational challenges. We see that in the Red Sea. We're going to continue to see that until there's some sort

of meaningful breakthrough on that front. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Joshua Tallis. Josh, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Online? Lately, I've been rediscovering LinkedIn, so folks can look for me there at Joshua Tallis. And as of next, I think as you could tell, I've been digging into unmanned systems, trying to get a little bit better of a sense of all the activity that we're seeing in Ukraine and even the Red Sea. What's the applicability there to long-range missile-based anti-ship and anti-air warfare at sea? I've been trying not to take some of what I think are the fairly unique land-based circumstances and just transpose them at sea. It's a project I've been really interested in.

we look forward to seeing what comes out of that and perhaps we'll be able to bring you back and talk about it um but thank you again for joining us to listeners thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time Help me for wine, put it in the alley, put it on the shimbo now. A porter of, and a porter gin of, way, hey, put it in the alley. A porter of wine, both white and red of, 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, help me, help me, put it in the alley, put it out in Chippewa now.