National Interest

by James Holmes

    If haste has come to be the lodestone of force design, then the Navy’s leadership is probably best off pouring its resources into the clutch of smaller naval drones optimal for sea denial.

    Over at the Naval Institute Proceedings this month, retired naval engineer and surface-warfare officer (go, team!) Jack Rowley holds forth regarding the U.S. Navy’s fitful effort to put a “hybrid” fleet to sea. Once fielded, a hybrid fleet design augments traditional crewed ships of war with a sizable contingent of uncrewed surface and subsurface vehicles—bulking up the fleet with new hulls, at low cost and in relatively short order compared to the agonizingly prolonged process of constructing major combatants. In particular, Rowley frets that the Navy appears irresolute about fielding a coterie of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs).

    And Commander Rowley is right. He delivers meaty, actionable insights and guidance that Navy leaders must heed. Read the whole thing.

• The Pentagon Needs to Set Drone Priorities

    The author voices dismay at what he regards as the myopia—my epithet, not his—underlying Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent directive to the US armed services to achieve “UAS [unmanned aerial systems] domain dominance” by 2027, ostensibly the year of maximum danger in the Western Pacific. Secretary Hegseth wants to ramp up the US drone manufacturing base, field thousands of unmanned warplanes and train soldiers, sailors, marines and aviators to use them for tactical and operational gain—all in the next eighteen months or so. Haste is the secretary’s message to the armed forces. The post-Cold War age of leisurely force design, manufacturing and deployment is over if Hegseth gets his way.

    Rowley does not object to unmanned aircraft per se. How could he  In recent years, drones have proved their mettle in conflicts ranging from Nagorno-Karabakh to the Black Sea region to Syria to the Persian Gulf. Their worth is incontestable. At the same time, though, he maintains that unmanned aerial vehicles such as first-person-view drones are necessary but not sufficient for US martial success.

    That is a sensible point of view. After all, sea power is an intensely joint endeavor nowadays. Few force architects would countenance making the traditional crewed air component—F-35s, F/A-18s and so on—the sole focus of naval warfare. Doing so would sideline the surface and undersea components, to the detriment of the fleet’s aggregate combat power. Accordingly, Rowley maintains that “the services must accelerate the procurement of unmanned systems in all domains,” including drones that ply the surface of the world’s oceans and seas. Deployed in large numbers, such systems would scatter sensors around the maritime realm while furnishing fleet commanders with extra firepower—and give new life to the US Navy’s governing concept of distributed maritime operations.

    The idea underwriting distributed maritime operations is that dispersing weapons and sensor capability among many platforms bolsters resiliency. The less capability concentrated in any individual platform, crewed or uncrewed, the more of that platform a fighting force can stand to lose. As platforms are used, they will succumb to hostile action, subtracting a minor fraction from the fleet’s combat power. But the fleet as a whole will fight on. Determining which losses are acceptable and minimizing the risk of losses that are not acceptable, is the point of naval strategy.

    Rowley closes by issuing a list of specific recommendations for how to bring about a genuinely hybrid fleet. Two stand out. One, service magnates should “articulate the range of missions” they want unmanned surface craft of various sizes and shapes to execute. And two, they should “define how USVs can perform both defensive and offensive missions.” To identify the larger operational and strategic purposes for the uncrewed contingent and impart direction and momentum to the USV effort, the navy leadership could do worse than crack open that musty old copy of Julian S. Corbett’s masterwork, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (1911). Written at the onset of the age of steam, drawing on the history of the age of sail, it is a fount of insight into fleet design in the age of drones.

    Corbett conceives of naval warfare as unspooling through three broad phases. In the first phase, if a navy—in particular the Royal Navy, for which Corbett wrote more than a century ago—finds itself too feeble at the outset of strife to hazard a decisive high-seas battle at a particular place and time, wise commanders will undertake an interim strategy of “sea denial.” In other words, a beleaguered navy plays defense until ready to go on offense. Sea denial aims to balk a brawnier red team’s strategy, defeating its aims until the weaker blue team amasses sufficient relative combat power to fight a decisive engagement that yields “command of the sea.” Vying for command is phase two. Seldom does a fighting force win complete command of the sea, namely more or less absolute and permanent control of expanses vital to the war effort. But complete control is the goal. Victory at sea delivers a multitude of blessings to the victor in phase three, including the option to cut off a seagoing antagonist from overseas trade, crimping its economy; open new combat theaters; or land troops on foreign shores to radiate military power inland. Exploiting command of critical waterways constitutes the goal of naval strategy. How precisely USVs should fit into this Corbettian sequence is for today’s naval leaders to decide.

• How to Adapt Drones to a Naval Fleet

    Now one must turn to fleet design more specifically. Corbett divides a navy into three contingents: the battle fleet, a complement of “cruisers,” and a swarm of small craft known as the “flotilla.” “Capital ships,” the fleet’s heavy hitters, make up the battle fleet. They fight a toe-to-toe engagement against a peer fleet, then act as guardians of the cruisers and flotilla against whatever remnants of the hostile navy survive. Phase two of Corbett’s sequence—the fight for nautical command—is mainly the province of the battle fleet. Aircraft carriers, cruisers and destroyers comprise today’s battle fleet.

    The cruiser contingent and flotilla are more intriguing. Cruisers—in today’s parlance, frigates, corvettes and other small surface combatants—are lighter, less complex and cheaper than capital ships. They are affordable in bulk yet adequate to their missions. They can fan out in large numbers to police seaways the battle fleet has scoured clean of hostile capital ships. Cruisers outmuscle merchantmen and light combatants they may encounter across the main. Flotilla craft take this logic even further. These are even more winsome, simpler, less expensive and thus more numerous ships that mostly hug the coast. Despite their short range, flotilla vessels superempowered with guided missiles, torpedoes, or sea mines can punish even a daunting foe that ventures within reach. Even a century ago, Corbett seemed to despair at how novel weapons technology had come to imperil capital ships during his lifetime. A technological revolution had upended traditional fleet design.

    The revolution went into overdrive after the days of Corbett, with the debut of precision weaponry. This, then, is an approach from the classics for gauging the functions of unmanned surface craft. Given the state of drone technology at present, USVs seem best classified as an unconventional neo-flotilla, a contingent optimal for executing sea-denial missions when the parent navy is outmatched and forced to play strategic defense. If the US Navy were to find itself weaker than an opponent—presumably the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN)—on a particular oceanic battleground at a particular time, commanders might unleash the USV contingent in concert with joint and allied sea-denial assets to deny the PLA Navy access to waters it must control to achieve Beijing’s aims. Flooding the Taiwan Strait or China seas with sea-denial armaments could confound the PLA Navy’s strategy while forces gather in the theater in strength sufficient to bid for maritime mastery.

    More ambitious, more capacious, more complex USV designs able to tote larger weapons or sensor payloads across greater distances could even qualify as cruisers in a latter-day Corbettian scheme of things. Larger USVs could contribute in all three phases of sea war, helping deny the adversary’s navy command, wrest command from it and exploit command. As technology matures, the functions of larger surface drones would blur into the functions played by traditional manned ships of war, while smaller USVs would have more in common with munitions. Larger drones would be platforms; smaller ones would be payloads. Both contingents are devoutly to be desired.

• Sea Denial Is Paramount—for Now

    But the drift of Rowley’s article tends to favor larger unmanned surface craft, so he might not concur with my own view, which is as follows. If haste has come to be the lodestone of force design—if indeed the US Navy confronts an eighteen-month deadline to get ready for action in the Western Pacific—then the Navy’s leadership is probably better off pouring its resources into the neo-flotilla, the clutch of smaller USVs optimal for sea denial. Such craft could have disproportionate impact during the crucial early phase of the war. After all, if joint and allied sea denial can keep Chinese maritime forces from crossing the Taiwan Strait, the PLA can’t land troops on Taiwan. And if the PLA can’t deposit troops on the beaches, they can’t conquer the island. Taiwan lives. China loses.

    Contra Corbett, sea denial—a temporary defensive strategy of the weak—could thus prove decisive in a Pacific conflagration. That is the mission for which the US Navy most needs new implements of war. Meanwhile, the Navy should expedite fleet experimentation with larger USVs, which would presumably play a greater part in the latter phases of a naval war—once joint and allied forces thwart Chinese aims and assemble in the region for a major fleet counteroffensive.

    First things first.