The US Navy and the National Security Establishment: A Critical Assessment 9781685856489

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
1 The US Naval Ecosystem
2 From the Nineteenth Century to World War II
3 Divisive Cold War Strategies
4 Sclerotic Equilibrium After the Cold War
5 Growing an Information Age Navy
6 Architecture for Antifragility
7 Adaptation in an Information Age of Great Power Competition
List of Acronyms
Bibliography
Index
About the Book

Citation preview

The US NAVY and the

National Security Establishment

The US NAVY and the

National Security

Establishment A Critical Assessment

John T. Hanley, Jr.

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2023 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Suite 314, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB www.eurospanbookstore.com/rienner © 2023 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hanley, John T., Jr., author. Title: The US Navy and the national security establishment : a critical assessment / John T. Hanley, Jr. Other titles: United States Navy and the national security establishment Description: Boulder, Colorado : Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “To explain why the US Navy seems ill-suited to face today’s global challenges, the author explores how the navy has negotiated its place in the broad national security establishment in the decades since World War II”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023007689 (print) | LCCN 2023007690 (ebook) | ISBN 9781685858520 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781685856489 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: United States. Navy—History. | Sea-power—United States—History. | National security—United States—History—21st century. | Naval strategy—History. Classification: LCC VA58.4 .H3624 2023 (print) | LCC VA58.4 (ebook) | DDC 359/.030973—dc23/eng/20230414 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007689 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007690 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated to Lieutenant Jack J. Hanley, US Navy Chief Engineer, USS Spruance (DDG 111)

Contents

List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments

ix xi

1

The US Naval Ecosystem

1

2

From the Nineteenth Century to World War II

17

3

Divisive Cold War Strategies

65

4

Sclerotic Equilibrium After the Cold War

123

5

Growing an Information Age Navy

189

6

Architecture for Antifragility

219

7

Adaptation in an Information Age of   Great Power Competition

265

List of Acronyms Bibliography Index About the Book

313 315 329 341

vii

Tables and Figures

Table 5.1

1990s Acquisition Reforms

209

Figures 1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1 4.2 4.3 6.1 6.2

Extended Schelling Influence Framework Prussian System of Military Instruction Navy Society for Naval Influence and Campaign of   Learning Before World War II Methods Involved in the Navy Campaign of   Learning Before World War II The Navy Ecosystem During the Cold War Society of Learning for Submarine Force Development Submarine Force Campaign of Learning Navy Society That Produced the 1980s Maritime Strategy 1980s Maritime Strategy Campaign of Learning Process for Naval Warfare Innovation Naval War College–SSG–Naval Warfare Development   Command Relationships Intended SSG–Naval Warfare Development   Command Interactions Features of Complex Adaptive, Nonlinear Dynamic   Security Ecosystem Robust Layered System

ix

9 34 56 57 96 106 107 109 116 138 158 161 221 224

x

6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 7.1

Tables and Figures

Conflicting Government-Contractor Incentives Conflicting MICE Incentives Conflicting Objectives Within the DoD Readiness, Regional Engagement, and   Retaining Advantage Architecture Adapting Paradigms

235 235 236 242 302

Acknowledgments

This book is the product of a career working for and with exceptional people. I would like to acknowledge Captain Robinson (Robby) R. Harris, USN (retired), and his leadership of the Navy Strategy Discussion Group for motivating this effort. Over the past years many speakers have addressed topics related to those contained herein. Finding several of the presentations provocative motivated me to write. Robby also has suggested readings each week, many of which have found their way into this manuscript. This effort relies heavily on the superb works of Professor John B. Hattendorf; Dr. Thomas C. Hone; the late Captain Wayne P. Hughes Jr., USN (retired); Captain Peter M. Swartz, USN (retired); and the officers who served on the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Groups over the period 1981 through 1998. I also am deeply indebted to those who offered comments and encouragement, including Admiral Dennis C. Blair, USN (retired); Dr. William F. Browning; Commander Andrea Cassidy, USN; Admiral Jonathan W. Greenert, USN (retired); Rear Admiral Francis W. Lacroix, USN (retired); Admiral Richard W. Mies, USN (retired); Admiral William F. Moran, USN (retired); Admiral William A. Owens, USN (retired); and Rear Admiral William L. Putnam, USN (retired). I am grateful to Tom Hone for his comments on learning and innovation in particular. Vice Admiral Ann E. Rondeau, USN (retired), was very helpful in providing historical information on the Naval Postgraduate School, as was Captain Jeffrey E. Kline, USN (retired), who provided detailed information on the Naval Postgraduate School’s navy force structure analyses.

xi

xii

Acknowledgments

I am also grateful to Garth A. Jensen of the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Carderock for assembling a community of federal government personnel and others interested in understanding how the navy and the nation can benefit from an improved understanding of complex adaptive systems research. We increasingly appreciate how wicked the challenges and opportunities are that we face, and which will benefit greatly by reframing our paradigms and analytical approaches as we employ recent research and applications. I have been exceedingly fortunate to have Marie-Claire Antoine as my editor. Her counsel has been wise and taught me much.

1 The US Naval Ecosystem

How should the US Navy adapt to an age of information and artificial intelligence? In particular, what actions will enhance resilience and diminish fragility in competition with China in both the near and the long term? To understand where one stands, one must appreciate how one arrived where they are. To understand what the navy should be and do, one must understand why the United States established and maintains a navy, and how the navy has evolved as an agent in a changing national security ecosystem. The substance of the navy emerges from interactions among a broad set of agents, including the president as commander in chief of the armed forces, Congress, industry, individuals and organizations in the national security establishment within the executive branch, and agents within the navy that affect the building blocks that form the navy. These building blocks consist of materiel platforms and systems that evolve with technology, organizations that direct the operations of those platforms and systems along with their personnel, and the organizations responsible for evolving the navy to remain fit for its roles and survive as the security environment changes. Combat provides the ultimate test. How well the navy and the national security establishment perform in combat depends not only on materiel force structures but also on the state of their environment and intellectual preparation. The major occupation of the US Navy over the centuries has been to influence events around the globe to mitigate others’ motives that lead to combat and to enhance the likelihood of success should combat ensue. Success in dealing with Chinese ambitions 1

2

The US Navy and the National Security Establishment

requires examining the paradigm of war and peace as a finite game, and influence as an infinite game. Over the five decades prior to World War II, the navy evolved into a learning organization, resulting in the construction of forces and operational schemes and the intellectual preparation of leaders that provided the foundations for winning the war. Changes in the national security establishment following the war led to fewer interactions among the agents within the navy that had constituted that learning society. Analytical paradigms that had emerged from operations research in World War II morphed into techniques for analyzing costs and benefits of alternative materiel systems. This intellectual foundation for equipping US military forces became embedded during the Cold War and has persisted, but it is ill suited for an age dominated by information and artificial intelligence and has led to fragilities that jeopardize the navy and the national security establishment. The imperative of adapting to rapidly emerging threats from China and others has resulted in recent initiatives to resurrect learning in the navy and the national security establishment. This book highlights practices that have led to successful learning societies and offers frameworks for evolving an antifragile national security environment where small investments provide high returns. The Enduring Roles and Posture of the US Navy Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution grants Congress the power to provide and maintain a navy. The United States maintains a navy because it learned early that it needs one to protect its interests, short of declaring war. Achieving peace with Britain following independence removed the threat of the Royal Navy, but it also left US merchant ships without its protection. When Algerian corsairs seized two US ships in 1785 and enslaved twenty-two crewmen, Thomas Jefferson, who was stationed in Paris as minister to France, proposed to John Adams that they build a fleet with 150 guns. Though he had not had the votes to defeat a $1.4 million navy budget in 1798, while campaigning for president at the head of a fiercely anti-navalist Republican Party in 1800 Jefferson declared himself in favor of “such a naval force only as may protect our coasts and harbor.”1 Then, in May 1801, shortly after becoming president, Jefferson decided to send a navy squadron to the Mediterranean to protect American merchant ships. Republicans abandoned their anti-navalism

The US Naval Ecosystem

3

after the small US fleet shocked and humbled the mightiest navy the world had ever known in the War of 1812.2 Madison continued operations against the Barbary pirates immediately after the war. Paraphrasing Jefferson, from its founding, the US Navy has existed to provide justice in international relations, defend American honor, and procure international respect to safeguard US interests.3 In 1787, Jefferson’s nemesis Alexander Hamilton had also argued for a navy. In Federalist No. 11, “The Utility of the Union in Respect to Commercial Relations and a Navy,” Hamilton highlighted the important relationship between a navy and the economic success of a nation, the need for a navy as a “resource for influencing the conduct of European nations toward us,” and the navy’s domestic relationship with the people of the United States. “Before anyone proposed a State Department to conduct foreign affairs or suggested other mechanisms of national security, Hamilton first believed that the United States needed a strong navy.”4 Over its entire history, the navy has deployed and maintained squadrons and, after World War II, fleets of ships around the world.5 It maintained a squadron in the Mediterranean, deployed ships to the eastern Atlantic and Caribbean, and had a frigate deployed to the Pacific through 1815. From 1841 through 1898, with the exception of the Civil War, it had squadrons in East India/Asiatic, the Pacific (South American coast), Brazil/South Atlantic, Africa (Gulf of Guinea), and the Mediterranean. It maintained the Asiatic squadron even during the Civil War. A buildup of foreign navies in the later nineteenth century presaged a renewal of great power competition. The prominent naval officer and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan promoted concentrating the fleet for a decisive battle. The navy reorganized into Asiatic and European squadrons, with a US Fleet and Special Service Squadron. This remained the basic structure until World War II, during which it organized into Atlantic and Pacific Fleet commands, with subordinate numbered fleets, under commander in chief and chief of naval operations Admiral Ernest King. Following World War II, fleets rather than squadrons deployed to geographic areas around Eurasia, with excursions to promote US influence around the globe. Balancing and Aligning Symbiotic Navy Strategies The navy and the national security establishment employ mutually dependent readiness, engagement, and equipping strategies for applying available resources to objectives. Readiness strategies involve mentally

4

The US Navy and the National Security Establishment

preparing personnel through education and training, and organizing and maintaining existing forces for combat. The navy employs engagement strategies to exert its influence. Clarifying the terms engagement, influence, and presence is also important. Forward stationed and deployed naval forces are commonly referred to as providing presence. Engagement connotes the interactions necessary to exert influence, whereas presence does not. Concepts for how to influence the prevention of war and to prevail in war provide the foundations for assessing readiness. Equipping strategies modernize materiel to sustain fitness as the security environment evolves. Where the readiness and engagement strategies address how to apply naval capabilities to advance national interests, the equipping strategy addresses how to apply fiscal and administrative resources to provide those naval capabilities that provide the means for executing the readiness and engagement strategies. The process for evolving the organizational relationships among the agents within the navy is under the purview of the chief of naval operations (CNO). Each CNO tinkers with the organization to align with his (or in the future, her) priorities. The secretary of the navy has greater influence over equipping than readiness and engagement strategies. Just as the strategies are mutually dependent, the secretary and the CNO are dependent upon each other for the success of the institution. Beginning in the 1970s, CNO Admiral Elmo Zumwalt began to question whether the navy could defeat the Soviet navy, as his budget required retiring large numbers of World War II–era ships without replacements. The result was an active fleet of fewer than 500 ships while the Soviets continued expanding their navy and merchant fleets.6 In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s administration with Secretary of the Navy John Lehman called for building the navy back up to 600 active ships.7 At the end of the Cold War in 1990, chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell proposed reducing the navy to 400 ships.8 Following the election of Bill Clinton to president, his secretary of defense Les Aspin conducted a Bottom-Up Review to examine defense strategy, force structure, and other aspects driving the defense budget. Aspin’s 1993 review included overseas presence as a sizing requirement for military forces. It recommended a fleet of 346 ships by 1999.9 CNO Admiral Frank Kelso tasked his staff to include presence as a mission area and to study the issue. He also had his 1993–1994 Strategic Studies Group study the value of forward presence and look for ways to sustain it in support of regional interests and policy goals.10 In September 2000, Washington Post journalist Dana Priest wrote a series of articles on how the regional combatant commanders (then called commanders in chief) had become proconsuls with

The US Naval Ecosystem

5

their own foreign policies, similar to the Roman empire.11 Concerns grew over how to sustain the general intent of Jefferson’s and Hamilton’s roles for the Navy with fewer ships in a post–Cold War environment, as well as the roles of the regional combatant commanders. Sensing a hiatus from expected major combat operations, Andrew Marshall (director of net assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense [OSD]) encouraged thinking about a revolution in military affairs, similar to the years between the world wars that produced navy underway refueling, and amphibious and carrier air warfare.12 In 1995, CNO Admiral Jeremy “Mike” Boorda changed the mission of the CNO Strategic Studies Group (SSG) to revolutionary naval warfare innovation.13 In 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reached out to president of the Naval War College Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski (father of netcentric warfare) to lead an Office of Force Transformation in OSD aimed at implementing the kinds of efforts that led to the innovations between the world wars.14 Commenting on these changes, Tom Hone noted, “The Navy does not have enough money to do everything it knows it should do: support the existing forward-deployed force, finance research into likely valuable future technologies, recruit and train personnel suited to a high technology military world, and modernize.”15 And yet the navy was being tasked to innovate the way that it had before and during World War II, to deal with potential future challenges that were developing more rapidly than the Japanese had between the US opening of Japan in 1853, when swords and sailing ships dominated Japan’s military, and when Japan defeated the Russian Fleet in 1904. Hone goes on to state two reasons that the navy was not conducting the kind of experimentation that it did between the world wars: One is that the regional combatant commanders must be able to deploy ready forces for a wide range of contingencies. The second is that they, with allies, need to demonstrate to potentially hostile leaders the implications of war. “The trade-off isn’t just between deploying (or readiness) and innovation (or experimentation). It also is between deterring a potential opponent and investing in the future.” Hone’s statement that “the enemy is not the other tribe in the Pentagon” does not fully capture the motivations of those sponsoring particular platforms and preparing budgets for their services. By 2010, the Center for Naval Analyses questioned whether the navy was at a tipping point as the number of ships had decreased 18 percent over a decade but the number of ships deployed had remained constant. Changing policy allowed “for longer, more frequent deployments and doubling the percentage of the fleet assigned to the Forward

6

The US Navy and the National Security Establishment

Deployed Naval Force (FDNF) since 1998.”16 Bryan Clark and Jesse Sloman at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments followed the tipping-point theme with a detailed assessment of alternative shipbuilding plans under different budget scenarios in 2015.17 Supporting the value of forward presence, Jerry Hendrix at the Center for a New American Security pointed out how much time CNO Admiral Jon Greenert (who had been a fellow on the SSG during their 1993–1994 study of naval crisis response and influence) had devoted to sustaining naval forces forward.18 Hendrix’s colleague Elbridge Colby, formerly at the Center for a New American Security, took a different view suggesting that the navy needs to reduce its presence operations and spend more time on fleet theater warfighting skills to counter China’s military buildup and Russia’s military modernization.19 Thomas Mahnken, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments president, followed with an analysis proposing an alternative fleet posture and architecture. He would employ the use of more survivable vessels, including uninhabited and those that would not severely jeopardize fleet battle readiness for naval influence, while carrier strike groups would focus more on the kinds of “fleet problems” the navy employed between the world wars.20 Navalists have proposed returning to more independent service structures to address the challenges presented by the operating tempo of current forces. Colonel Phillip Ridderhof, USMC, has proposed establishing a Maritime Functional Combatant Command to replace the current Joint Staff/Secretary of Defense global force management system for the positioning of naval forces.21 Steven Wills has gone a step further suggesting a reduction in the roles of regional combatant commanders as drivers of naval forward presence operations, and reinstating an Admiral King–like naval command.22 John T. Kuehn has argued for abolishing the secretary of defense and returning the service chiefs to the president’s cabinet.23 Returning to first principles and exploring new developments helps sort through this cacophony of what the navy should be and how it can accomplish everything it needs to do. The Yin and Yang of Naval Influence in Peace and War Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war, thereby distinguishing between a state of war and a state of peace. More broadly, Western tradition emphasizes the differences between preparation for war and war proper, as Clausewitz did in writ-

The US Naval Ecosystem

7

ing of the difficulties of war and of strategy in war.24 The Chinese tradition differs. Instead of dwelling on the difficulties, it seeks to avoid them by preparing the environment in advance. “Chinese strategy aimed to use every possible means to influence the potential inherent in the forces at play to its own advantage, even before the actual engagement, so that the engagement would never constitute the decisive moment, which always involves risk.”25 As some US strategists look for ways to reduce US naval influence operations to concentrate on war with China, the Chinese have rapidly accelerated the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) global presence and diplomacy. Like the Soviets, the Chinese are fully aware of the geostrategic advantage the United States enjoys from remaining forward stationed in facilities surrounding Eurasia that it occupied at the end of World War II, as they are aware of the far-reaching consequences that China’s maritime geostrategic relationships will have for the development of its naval strategy.26 In 2008, the PLAN conducted its first sustained out-of-area deployment to carry out antipiracy operations around the North Arabian Sea. Twelve years later, as one task group was relieved by another after four months of operations, it spent another two months conducting naval diplomacy and exercises with foreign navies. Multiple Chinese task groups have conducted operations in the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the west and east coasts of Africa, the Indian Ocean, Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania.27 They now have a base in Djibouti and are constructing others to support their global operations, adopting a practice for which they previously criticized the United States, as violating the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. They also invest in managing commercial ports capable of supporting their navy as they expand their maritime power around the world. The Chinese have become a major maritime power more quickly than did the Japanese in the nineteenth century. Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan’s book The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660–1783 remains a classic.28 His intellectual contributions saved the newly established Naval War College and motivated the rapid growth and organization of the US Navy in the early twentieth century. Chinese authors writing on naval matters frequently cite Mahan. As Mahan’s title suggests, the US military can only influence but not determine the outcome of war as the enemy decides when it is sufficiently compelled to accept terms. Similarly, the United States loses opportunities to promote justice in international relations, defend American honor, and safeguard American interests when it employs inappropriate instruments of national power to influence events in international affairs.

8

The US Navy and the National Security Establishment

Hamilton recognized the interdependent and complementary roles of the navy in war and in peace. Naval influence is part of a continuum—the yin and yang of interdependent and complementary positive and negative incentives that the navy provides across the spectrum from fighting wars to providing security assistance and conducting humanitarian operations. War is a subset of influence operations. In his book Arms and Influence Thomas Schelling outlined a model for interaction between the decisionmaking processes and actions of the United States and others.29 Written at a time when the United States was facing a growing arsenal of Soviet nuclear weapons, he focused on deterring others’ decisions to take actions inimical to US interests and compelling the reversal of such actions. However, even in Cold War rivalry, US and Soviet interests in controlling nuclear weapons and managing incidents that could lead to direct combat resulted in agreements. All states and nonstate actors, even rivals like the United States and China and allies like the United States and United Kingdom, have interests on which they agree (if not the approaches for addressing them) and on which they agree to disagree. Talks on some important subjects are difficult to arrange, such as talks with Chinese authorities on nuclear weapons and norms for cyber and space operations. Extending Schelling’s framework to include encouraging others’ decisions and rewarding actions favorable to US interests provides a means for mapping these to formulate comprehensive policies and strategies (see Figure 1.1). Naval influence actions range from encouraging and rewarding through naval diplomacy and port visits, military-to-military exchanges, arms sales, and training exercises to freedom of navigation operations and peacekeeping that encourages friends and deters potential enemies, to peace enforcement, sanction support (interdicting illegal arms and drug trafficking, etc.), surgical strikes, and surging for combat operations to compel changes in behavior. Comprehensive strategies align naval influence with economic, political, moral, informational, and cultural instruments of national power. Discordant objectives and actions among US government agencies create noise in the signals that naval forces send, thus requiring naval commanders to be as harmonious with other US government agencies as possible. The paradigm for war is winning and losing. The United States loses wars when it mistakes finite “games” that it can win with primarily military means, such as World War II, for what are infinite games where one victory merely leads to the next set of challenges and opportunities. The object in infinite games is to survive and grow stronger. Even in World War II, US terms for “unconditional surrender” were not

The US Naval Ecosystem

Figure 1.1

9

Extended Schelling Influence Framework

met as the Japanese retained enough influence to keep their emperor. Influence ultimately prevails. Political violence and international competition, such as exercised by China in controlling fishing and turning geographic features into fortifications in the South China Sea, have characteristics of wicked problems that are infinite games.30 The Navy as an Ecosystem The roles of the navy have remained as originally conceived by the nation’s founders, as has the navy’s engagement strategy favoring forward operations. However, as the navy grew and evolved from the age of sail to the age of steam and through the nuclear age, its readiness and equipping strategies adapted with the character of its adversaries and technology. Success in World War II and the Cold War froze the US approach for equipping its armed forces, leaving them fragile in an age of information and artificial intelligence. Rapid adaptation is imperative. Admiral Bradley Fiske, an influential leader and author, synthesized his wide-ranging ideas on naval warfare in his book The Navy as a

10

The US Navy and the National Security Establishment

Fighting Machine, published in 1916.31 As the world transitions from an industrial age to one dominated by information and artificial intelligence, we have yet to understand the implications of emerging societal systems and technology for the navy and the national security establishment as the United States seeks to enhance an international order that it created with like-minded nations in the aftermath of World War II. Employing industrial age paradigms and practices has led to sclerosis in the navy and the national security establishment. Changing the paradigms and practices that were suited for industrial age machines to information age ecosystems offers promise for accelerating the processes needed for survival and enduring strength. In 1935 Arthur George Tansley (1871–1955) coined the term ecosystem as a community of organisms in conjunction with their environment, interacting as a system.32 The constituent organizations of the US Navy form such a community, operating in the environment of the national security establishment and the nation’s politics, industry, economy, and international challenges and opportunities.33 The national security establishment forms a higher-level ecosystem. The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) used the term society rather than community as “an environment or structured field of activity for its constituent actual entities. . . . The society also changes in its basic structure or form in and through the interplay of its constituent actual entities.” 34 Whitehead notes that substance emerges from the interactions among the constituent entities of the society. Atoms emerge from the interactions among electrons, neutrons, and protons. Similarly, molecules emerge the interaction of atoms, cells emerge from molecules, organs from cells, and so on up to interactions among organisms, and organizations, to the cosmos. When the navy was established, the national security establishment consisted of the Departments of the Navy and War with their secretaries reporting directly to the president. As the navy grew, a panel of navy officers was formed to advise the secretary, which evolved into directors of bureaus to oversee various functions. The shift from the age of sail to the industrial age with ships powered by engines and advancements in armaments beginning with the US Civil War required additional organizations to oversee new technologies and processes. Following the Spanish-American War, the need to plan for war and oversee naval operations led to the establishment of a CNO as the senior officer in the navy reporting alongside the bureau chiefs directly to the secretary of the navy, with similar developments in the Department of War.

The US Naval Ecosystem

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As the nation and the navy grew, both the societies comprising the national security establishment and those within the navy evolved to meet the challenges and opportunities of the age. World War II led to a punctuated evolution of the national security establishment in its aftermath that directly affected secretary of the navy and CNO authorities, organization, and operations. In the case of the navy and the national security establishment, each society includes the interaction of personalities and organizations that employ a variety of methods to advance their interests in a changing environment. These entities are often referred to as actors when considering their roles, as actors in a play, or agents when considering the traditions, laws, and procedures that ascribe the decisionmaking authorities of each. These interactions create a complex adaptive ecosystem where organizations fit for environmental change flourish, and the unfit decline or perish just as organisms do. Expanding interactions among the agents within the navy and the national security establishment have made the hierarchical system more complex as more layers and organizations have been added. The range of disciplines employed to study and understand the behavior of organic complex adaptive ecosystems covers anthropology for language and culture, philosophy, history, political science, international relations, and hard sciences. Each discipline focuses on particular subject matter and has its standards for what questions are suitable and what constitutes evidence. Each deals with challenges of being (what is) and becoming (emergence) as it attempts to order knowledge. The ancient Greeks’ quest for order and stability raised the challenges of dealing with change, leading Heraclitus (ca. 540–480 BCE) to emphasize ceaseless change, famously stating that “you can never step in the same river twice.” Parmenides (ca. 515–450 BCE) challenged Heraclitus, claiming that change was the illusion rather than permanency. He argued that when living things die, they never become nothing. Though our imperfect eyes and ears observe change and transformation, our reason realizes that reality never changes since we live in a world where “No Thing” can never exist.35 The disciplines and analytic paradigms employed to drive interactions within societies have consequences. Inorganic societies, such as the fundamental particles that form an atom and the cosmos, admit Newtonian physics to provide many useful calculations. This led to beliefs in the Age of Reason that mathematics was superior to scripture as it demonstrated God’s order in the universe and was less subject to interpretation than scripture. This led to a “vogue of military mathematics” in the eighteenth century that attempted to treat war as an exact science.

12

The US Navy and the National Security Establishment

Prussians who fought Napoleon recognized such efforts as fraudulent and developed campaigns of learning to deal with the genius of Napoleon and the wicked problems that politics and war present. Following the successes of operations research during World War II, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara introduced systems analysis for acquiring military systems, quantifying costs and benefits as a basis for determining how much was enough. This led to a second vogue of military mathematics that has created “robust, yet fragile” navy and national security ecosystems. Recent research into multilayer complex adaptive systems has produced techniques better suited to a wicked world of becoming (emergence) and suggests approaches for making these ecosystems resilient. Resilient systems that learn and adapt become antifragile.36 Learning how to deal successfully with interacting demands for providing justice in international relations, defending American honor, and procuring international respect to safeguard American interests, while financing research into likely valuable future technologies, recruiting and training personnel suited to a high technology military world, and modernizing the force to deter, and if necessary defeat, increasingly capable foreign adversaries, requires strategic, operational, tactical, and organizational innovation through revisiting paradigms that are losing their validity. Doing so requires a deeper appreciation of the evolution of the navy, its development, and its influence in the context of a multilayered complex adaptive ecosystem. One approach to gain a deeper perspective on such a complex set of issues is to examine the evolution of the navy’s ecosystem that resulted in its emergence as the most capable navy in the world, and its subsequent evolution. Learning and innovation are constant themes. Campaigns of learning that the navy adopted and adapted beginning with the efforts of Stephen B. Luce play a major role in the navy’s emergence and how it has sustained the rationale for its existence as articulated by Jefferson and Hamilton. Outline of the Book The ability of the navy and other US armed services to influence events ultimately relies on their ability to prevail in combat. Chapter 2 addresses how, building upon the Prussian system, the US Navy led by the reformer Stephen B. Luce created a campaign of learning beginning in the nineteenth century that resulted in victory at sea in World War II.

The US Naval Ecosystem

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World War II punctuated the equilibrium in the world order and led to the punctuated evolution of the US national security establishment following the war. Organizational changes in the national security establishment combined with competition for resources among the services led to divisive equipping, readiness, and engagement strategies. Chapter 3 addresses the effects of this punctuated evolution on the Department of Defense and the navy during the Cold War, with special attention to learning societies within the navy. The end of the Cold War provided another opportunity for the national and international security establishment to adapt the security, trade, and financial organizations created after World War II to meet emerging challenges and opportunities of the globalizing world order. Though it was in the US interests to do so, as we would come to represent a smaller fraction of the world’s population and wealth over the coming decades, the hubris of Cold War “victory” led to inaction. Chapter 4 addresses missed opportunities and entrenchment of misguided paradigms that led to sclerosis in the navy and the national security establishment. Chapter 5 addresses challenges and opportunities for growing an information age navy. It introduces unsuccessful efforts to revise the navy’s equipping strategy, traces the evolution of capability-based planning, provides details on Rumsfeld’s failed systems analysis and subsequent acquisition reforms, and discusses how the navy staff organization responsible for systems analysis adopted its own interpretation to suit its purposes resulting in the current fragile navy force structure. Chapter 6 suggests what is required for the navy and the national security enterprise to evolve from its current “robust, yet fragile” state to become resilient and antifragile. The navy and the Department of Defense (DoD) began to move toward net-centric warfare beginning in the 1990s, in the context of networking sensors, commanders, and shooters. Now is the time to frame the navy more broadly as a component of a hierarchal networked complex adaptive ecosystem. This chapter explains fundamental concepts of undergirding “robust, yet fragile” and antifragile systems and suggests approaches for employing that paradigm for readiness, engagement, and equipping strategies for the navy, the DoD, and the military, industrial, congressional enterprise (MICE). It applies these concepts to Chinese strategy and the changing character of armed conflict as key to successful competition with the Chinese and other adversaries. Chapter 7 addresses adaptations needed to prevail in an information age of great power competition. As learning is fundamental to

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antifragility and readiness, it begins with the imperative for military education. It then goes on to suggest adapting intelligence, analysis, and operational and material readiness, engagement, and equipping strategies, focusing on schemes that the secretary of the navy and the CNO can either control or influence. Reinvigorating navy campaigns of learning and nurturing a learning culture are essential. Success requires adapting paradigms that no longer serve the navy well. The book concludes with a set of paradigms that hold, and new paradigms to replace misguided ones. Notes 1. Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 162. 2. The Navy has worked in an environment of partisan politics since its inception. 3. In writing to Adams, Jefferson stated his several reasons for a navy as: “1. Justice is in favor of this opinion. 2. Honor favors it. 3. It will procure us respect in Europe, and respect is a safeguard to interest.” Toll, Six Frigates, 162. 4. Benjamin Armstrong, “American Naval Dominance Is Not a Birthright,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 147, no. 9 (2021), www.usni.org/magazines /proceedings/2021/september/american-naval-dominance-not-birthright. 5. Peter M. Swartz and E. D. McGrady, U.S. Navy Forward Deployment 1801– 2001 (Alexandria, VA: CNA Center for Strategic Studies, 2001). 6. Elmo R. Zumwalt, On Watch (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Company, 1976). 7. John F. Lehman, Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018). 8. Lorna S. Jaffe, The Development of the Base Force 1989–1992 (Washington, DC: Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint History Office, 1993). 9. Eric V. Larson, David T. Orletsky, and Kristin J. Leuschner, Defense Planning in a Decade of Change: Lessons from the Base Force, Bottom-Up Review, and Quadrennial Defense Review MR-1387-AF (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2001). 10. Francis J. McNeil, “Letter to Admiral Frank B. Kelso II, USN,” September 17, 1993 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and History Command). 11. Jeffrey A. Bradford, Proconsuls and CINCs from the Roman Republic to the Republic of the United States of America: Lessons for the Pax Americana (Fort Leavenworth, KS: US Army Command and General Staff College, 2001). 12. Andrew F. Krepinevich and Barry D. Watts, The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy (New York: Basic Books, 2015). The Soviets had been writing about a military-technical revolution. Marshall changed the name to a revolution in military affairs to encourage thinking more about operational and organizational concepts rather than focusing on technology. 13. Hon. Robert J. Murray describes the original intent of the CNO SSG using Winston Churchill’s phrase “Captains of War” in Robert J. Murray, “A War-Fighting Perspective: An Interview with Robert Murray,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings

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109, no. 10 (1983), www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1983/october/war-fighting -perspective-interview-robert-murray. J. M. Boorda, “Naval Warfare Innovations Concept Generation Teams,” memorandum from Chief of Naval Operations, Ser 00/5U500133, July 10, 1995 (SSG collection sent to Naval Heritage and History Command Archives) began the change in the SSG’s mission completed by CNO Jay Johnson in 1997. 14. James Blaker, “Arthur K. Cebrowski: A Retrospective,” Naval War College Review 59, no. 2 (2006), https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi ?article=2110&context=nwc-review. CNO Tom Hayward selected Cebrowski as a commander to serve on the first SSG, where working with Commander William A. Owens they conceptualized what became net-centric warfare and system of systems, respectively; John T. Hanley Jr., “Creating the 1980s Maritime Strategy and Implications for Today,” Naval War College Review 67, no. 2 (2014): 11–29. 15. Tom Hone, “The Navy’s Dilemma,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 127, no. 4 (2001), www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2001/april/navys-dilemma. 16. Daniel Whiteneck, Michael Price, Neal Jenkins, and Peter Swartz, The Navy at a Tipping Point: Maritime Dominance at Stake? CAB D0022262.A3/1REV (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 2010). 17. Bryan Clark and Jesse Sloman, Deploying Beyond Their Means: America’s Navy and Marine Corps at a Tipping Point (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2015). 18. Jerry Hendrix and Benjamin Armstrong, “The Presence Problem” (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, January 2016). 19. Elbridge Colby and Jonathan F. Solomon, “Avoiding Becoming a Paper Tiger: Presence in a Warfighting Defense Strategy,” Joint Force Quarterly 82 (2016), ndupress.ndu.edu/JFQ/Joint-Force-Quarterly-82/Article/793233/avoiding -becoming-a-paper-tiger-presence-in-a-warfighting-defense-strategy. 20. Thomas G. Mahnken, “Forward Presence in the Modern Navy: From the Cold War to a Future Tailored Force” (Washington, DC: Naval History and Heritage Command, 2017), www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title -list-alphabetically/n/needs-opportunities-modern-history-us-navy/forward-presence -modern-navy-cold-war-future-tailored-force.html. 21. Colonel Phillip J. Ridderhof, USMC, Organizing to Control the Global Maritime Commons, program research project (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, 2011). 22. Steven Wills, “The Effect of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 on Maritime Strategy 1987–1994,” Naval War College Review 69, no. 2 (2016), https://digital -commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol69/iss2/5. 23. John T. Kuehn, “Abolish the Secretary of Defense?” Joint Force Quarterly 47 (2007): 114–116. 24. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 25. François Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 35. 26. Xu Qi, Andrew S. Erickson, and Lyle J. Goldstein, “Maritime Geostrategy and the Development of the Chinese Navy in the Early Twenty-First Century,” Naval War College Review 59, no. 4 (2006), https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi /viewcontent.cgi?article=2126&context=nwc-review. 27. Michael A. McDevitt, China as a Twenty-First-Century Naval Power: Theory, Practice, and Implications (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2020). 28. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1890).

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29. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 30. James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (New York: Free Press, 1986) addresses finite and infinite games. Aaron B. Frank and Elizabeth M. Bartels, eds., Adaptive Engagement for Ungoverned Spaces: Concepts, Challenges, and Prospects for New Approaches (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2022) discuss such games in the context of spaces that no one controls. Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 155–169 describe the characteristics of wicked problems. 31. Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske, The Navy as a Fighting Machine, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918). 32. Laura J. Cameron, “Sir Arthur Tansley,” Oxford Bibliographies, October 25, 2017, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199830060 /obo-9780199830060-0094.xml. 33. The US Marine Corps and the US Navy have had a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship since their founding. Though they have remained under one secretary, they have distinct cultures. Thus, this work treats them as distinct societies. The term naval will apply generally to both, but the emphasis here is on the navy. 34. Joseph A. Bracken, Does God Roll Dice? (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 23. 35. Arthur Herman, The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization (New York: Random House, 2013), 30. 36. Nassim Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2012) explains how tinkering with innovations (and learning what works) turns resilient systems into antifragile ones.

2 From the Nineteenth Century to World War II

The navy, pressed by reformers like Stephen B. Luce, followed the path that Prussian General Scharnhorst blazed at the Kriegsakademie in the early nineteenth century, when he created an officer corps capable of dealing with the genius of Napoleon. Scharnhorst and his followers Carl von Clausewitz and George Leopold von Reisswitz, influenced by the writings of Immanuel Kant, went on to develop a system of theoretical and practical activities that the US Navy eventually emulated and evolved into its campaign of learning. The substance of this campaign of learning emerged from close interactions among those in the navy providing the intellect, intelligence, technology, operations, and governance for its readiness, engagement, and equipping strategies. Foundations for the Navy’s Campaign of Learning Coming out of the Thirty Years’ War, Enlightenment scholars sought to curtail the political power of organized religion. Just as Napoleon revolutionized the character of warfare at the end of the eighteenth century, leading to a reexamination of military theories, Immanuel Kant (1724– 1804) expanded Enlightenment thinking. Kant’s teaching had profound effects on German thought broadly and thereby on the Prussian development of methods for military instruction. As we will see, his concepts have direct application to artificial intelligence today. While Enlightenment scholars recognized the transcendent aspects of art, spirit, and genius, their focus on deterministic causes and effects as the foundation for universal order contributed to the growing belief 17

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that God was unnecessary. Defending both science and religion, Kant examined “theoretical” understanding, embodied in mathematics and formal logic, which served as the basis for science, and “practical” reason, which dealt with concepts that transcended observable, material phenomena: “The function proscribing laws by means of concepts of nature is discharged by understanding and is theoretical. That of prescribing laws by means of the concept of freedom is discharged by reason and is merely practical.”1 To him, theoretical philosophy involved how the world is—the world of being. Practical philosophy dealt with how the world should be—the world of becoming. Kant wrote that each human constructs knowledge out of a sense of impressions and that experience requires both precepts (rules) and concepts to organize information. To do this requires the human faculty of synthesizing different representations through three complementary processes: first, raw perceptual input is filtered through human intuition for applying precepts; second, relationships between concepts and new perceptions are recognized; and third, reproduction in the imagination (forming images) allows the mind to go between intuition and concepts. Judgment stands between theoretical understanding and practical reason. Determinate judgment involves applying a concept held in advance to a particular instance (e.g., what constitutes greenness). Reflective judgment involves encountering a phenomenon and creating a concept to explain it—an invention of the thinker. The interplay of imagination and reflective judgment produces genius, which is bound by the order of nature but not by specific rules because no method is available to prove or disprove the work of genius.2 Beyond logical or mathematical deduction, Kant addressed the knowledge that is derived from synthesizing representations and concepts that touch upon a subject from many perspectives, which he called “logical tact.” Logical tact produces correct judgment by “touching” abstract objects from many perspectives through study and experience. “Directed immediately toward the object, tact, or logical tact, is an operative function that takes on multiple points of view on the sensory input, weighs them against each other, and offers a single result.”3 Similarities between observations improve determinative judgment regarding the nature of the object or phenomenon. But conceptualizing the object requires reflective judgment—hard thinking. Thus, Kant argues that although theoretical and practical philosophy proceed from separate and irreducible starting points—self-consciousness as the highest principle for our cognition of nature, and moral law as the

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basis for our knowledge of freedom—reflective judgment unifies them into a single worldview that assigns preeminent value to human autonomy. The interplay of imagination and understanding produces a special type of reflective judgment known as genius. The Prussians

Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst (1755–1813) was a Prussian general who developed the modern general staff system and reformed the Prussian military. Scharnhorst was convinced that the survival of the Prussian state confronted by Napoleonic France required a supreme commander with extraordinary ability, as well as that the pool of candidates from which such a leader would emerge could be significantly enhanced through military education, which in the absence of experience in war must be based on history.4 In 1773 Scharnhorst became a cadet in a military academy where he was taught pure and applied mathematics, civil architecture, physics, natural history, economics, geography, history and military history, and the military sciences of tactics, artillery, and fortifications. He went on to teach mathematics and military studies and develop his ideas on education.5 As with other endeavors, the Enlightenment provoked an upsurge in the volume of military literature in the middle of the eighteenth century, spreading from France to the rest of Europe.6 This literature developed an increasing emphasis on warfare as an exact science—as a branch of mathematics resembling geometry that gave rise to what was called the “vogue of military mathematics.” It was said, “A true strategist of that epoch did not know how to lead a corporal’s guard across a ditch without a table of logarithms. . . . Battles were no longer fought from motives of patriotism, but for art’s sake, and it was deemed preferable to forego victory rather than achieve it by unscientific methods.”7 By the end of the eighteenth century, authors like Adam Heinrich Dietrich von Bülow, who served in the Prussian Army, attempted to reduce warfare to geometry. Scharnhorst believed that war was not just a practical art but a science, subject to historical and analytical study. He “restated the classical conceptual framework of the Enlightenment: the art of war, like painting and the rest of the arts, has two parts: the one is mechanical and susceptible to theoretical study, the other circumstantial and dominated by creative genius and experience.”8 Consistent with Kant, Scharnhorst surmised that “through conceptualization, military theory makes possible

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the intellectual treatment of factors active in war.” Military theory provided “correct concepts” as long as they were grounded in “the nature of things or in experience.”9 He believed in the paramount importance of mathematics as used by Vauban in the design of fortifications, for artillery, and for training logical thinking, but rejected the geometrical formulations of authors like Bülow and Franz Miller as providing principles for battle formation, deployment, and maneuver.10 Rejecting universal principles, he believed “the application of concepts and principles to reality requires judgment, which is in turn sharpened only by experience and constant exercise, the major means of which is historical study. Thus, the proper method for educating young officers is, first, to provide them with ‘correct theory’ and encourage them to think independently and ‘clarify their concepts.’”11 Following Kant’s notion of logical tact, fearing that fragmentary news and reports of a battle could lead to false conclusions with respect to future battles, and that the narrative was no more than “a novel bordering on probabilities,” Scharnhorst encouraged the systematic collection of all records that emerge before, during, and after a campaign, however incomplete, to present a more coherent picture for general staff officers to study.12 Beginning in 1782, at the age of twenty-seven, Scharnhorst initiated and edited a series of military periodicals, which soon became widely read in Germany with hundreds of subscribers. He went on to write a Handbook for Officers on the Applied Parts of the Sciences of War and a more concise Military Pocket-Book for Use in the Field covering a wide variety of military tactics and operations.13 When he began writing, the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) had established the Prussian Army as the best in Europe. Frederick II ruled Prussia from 1740 until his death in 1786. Frederick “the Great” was universally admired for his generalship. He was a hero for Enlightenment authors who attributed his victories to perfecting the firing and maneuvering of the linear formation in close order, almost mechanically. His army was known for its discipline and order in battle. His military writings, regulations, and institutions for the instruction of officers reflected the ideas of the Enlightenment. Frederick believed “the art of war, like all arts, required professional education and considerable knowledge, and could be treated theoretically on the basis of rules and principles that relied on historical evidence, could be used as a partial substitute for direct experience, and should be applied to particular cases through critical judgment.”14 He was also known for treating people as but subjects to him, and his troops as “no more than soulless material for his war machine.”15

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Commissioned in the Hanoverian Army in 1778, Scharnhorst distinguished himself in Belgium and in campaigns against the French Revolutionary Forces in the 1790s. He applied for service in the Prussian Army in 1801 and requested that the king of Prussia permit him to reorganize the Prussian Army. He began his Prussian service at the war academy (Kriegsakademie) in Berlin and was ennobled in 1804. After the disastrous battle of Jena in 1806, Scharnhorst was taken prisoner, but he was soon released in a prisoner exchange. The Prussian defeat at Jena discredited the commanders of the old Frederician Army and demonstrated how the élan of the French troops overwhelmed rigid Prussian discipline. Prussia lost half its territory and population in the Peace of Tilsit (1807), and French troops occupied much of what remained, in addition to Napoleon limiting the size of the standing Prussian forces to 42,000. Appointed to head the Prussian Army Reform Commission that year, Scharnhorst initiated the modern general staff system and became one of the first to recognize the necessity for conscripted citizen armies rather than small, long-service, professional military forces. He also realized that national service required accompanying political reform. Although Napoleon prevented the Prussian King from implementing many of the proposed reforms, along with another reformer, August von Gneisenau, Scharnhorst devised a system in which army recruits were quickly trained and put into the reserves so that more men could be trained while keeping in Napoleon’s limits.16 Scharnhorst became chief of the general staff in 1809, directing the improvement of Prussia’s army organization, tactical doctrine, officer education, and troop training.17 Scharnhorst went on indefinite leave when Prussia was forced into an alliance with France against Russia (1811–1812). In 1813, he returned to service as chief of staff to Field Marshall Blücher and received a wound in the Battle of Lützen, from which he never recovered. The prestige of the reformed Kriegsakademie in 1815 grew with the emphasis on study and professionalism in the officer corps. The curriculum expanded to three years with “a heavy emphasis on free study and independent work by the students. . . . Under the influence of the Kriegsakademie tactical problem-solving became a minor hobby in Prussia.”18 Where Scharnhorst aimed to create a pool of officers for supreme command, Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) provided a theory of how to do so in his book On War. Clausewitz, the son of a retired lieutenant, first encountered war in 1793 as a twelve-year-old lance corporal. Two years of exertions and bloodshed led to an indecisive outcome, and

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reading military history influenced Clausewitz’s thinking on the lack of standards for excellence in war—that no one system was right to the exclusion of all others, that war could not be mastered by observing a particular set of rules or chance minimized by the employment of correct doctrine—and set him on the path of understanding wars fought for political purposes and with political consequences. After serving in a unit known for its innovative educational policies, he became a protégé of Scharnhorst after gaining admission to the Institute for Young Officers in 1801 in the war college that Scharnhorst had recently transferred from Hanoverian services and had organized in Berlin. He graduated at the head of his class in 1803 and was appointed adjutant to a young prince, which allowed him to remain in Berlin in close contact with Scharnhorst.19 Adopting Scharnhorst’s military outlook and theoretical conceptions, he began publishing critiques of contemporary military authors and accounts of history. However, coming at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Clausewitz did not have the same respect for the theories of the Enlightenment that had served to form Scharnhorst’s early thinking. Raymond Aron, in his book Clausewitz: Philosophers of War, wrote: At the age of 25, influenced by Scharnhorst and events, he [Clausewitz] already knew which types of theory to reject as contrary to the nature of things and as offering bad advice: namely those which failed to recognize the role of human emotion, of military virtues and of passions; in short, the human side of war and its conduct, those which put forward strict rules and claim to have discovered one rule amongst them all which is responsible for victory or defeat, those which failed to take to take heed of the singularity of each combination of events, and exclude the part played by accident and good or bad luck.20

Clausewitz fought alongside Scharnhorst at Jena, where Clausewitz was also captured. The spirit and resolve of the French troops impressed Clausewitz. Returning to Prussia in 1808, he acted as a confidential assistant to Scharnhorst, working on reforming and modernizing army equipment and doctrine, and serving as a military tutor to the crown prince while immersing himself in mathematics21 and history and publishing prolifically.22 When Prussian king Frederick William III chose to support Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, Clausewitz chose to leave the Prussian army and enter Russian military service, serving first on the Russian general staff and later with one of the Russian armies pursuing the French retreat. As the fighting moved west, in 1813, “still in Russian uniform, he acted as an advisor to Scharnhorst and Gneisenau until the former’s death, and then became chief of staff of a small inter-

From the Nineteenth Century to World War II

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national army.”23 In 1815, he regained admission to Prussian service and during the Waterloo campaign served as the chief of staff of one of the four corps making up the Prussian field army. In 1816, he became chief of staff to Gneisenau’s new command. In 1818 transferred to Berlin as the superintendent of the war academy, where he resumed his writing as various future duties allowed. Scharnhorst’s emphasis that theory could not be grounded only in experience but in the “nature of things” also affected Clausewitz. Echoing Scharnhorst, Clausewitz criticized the work of Bülow as a false conception of the nature of war. “Clausewitz placed the psychological at the center of his theoretical speculations.”24 Embracing the inability to quantify as part of scientific reality, he stressed that concentrating on the material elements, as Enlightenment authors did, while ignoring moral factors of danger and fatigue, boldness and determination ignored the real nature of war. He emphasized the importance of how elements of chance, guesswork, and luck come to play a great part in war, and that moral factors and the character of the enemy cannot be accurately quantified by any theory.25 The proliferation of military memoirs and histories during the Enlightenment generated controversies resulting in theorists attempting to “equip the conduct of war with principles, rules, or even systems.”26 However, the endless complexity of war led Clausewitz to criticize the “irreconcilable conflict” between theory and practice, as theorists restricted their “principles and system only to physical matters and unilateral activity” to “reach a set of sure and positive conclusions.”27 Clausewitz objected to those who based strategy on calculations of numerical superiority, supply, bases, and interior lines as aiming at “fixed values: but in war everything is uncertain and calculations have to be made with variable quantities. They direct the inquiry exclusively toward physical quantities whereas all military action is intertwined with psychological forces and effects. They consider only unilateral action whereas war consists of continuous interaction of opposites.”28 In essence, Clausewitz was emphasizing Kant’s need to synthesize theoretical understanding with practical reason. Clausewitz emphasized that the part of strategy that deals with the combination of battles must always remain in the sphere of free (nondeterministic) reasoning. While stating that “philosophy and experience must never despise nor exclude each other,”29 Clausewitz placed Kant’s philosophy within context of his experience.30 Direct evidence of Clausewitz’s familiarity with Kant’s works is scant other than the lectures of Kiesewetter, “one of Kant’s best-known popularizers and one of the pillars of the Institute

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for Young Officers.”31 Kant’s influence on Clausewitz is a matter of debate,32 To say that Clausewitz followed any particular philosopher is too strong. But Clausewitz’s conceptions for synthesizing the theoretical and practical in developing intuition, spirit, and genius follow directly from Kant. While others focused on the material factors, “Clausewitz is convinced, however, that the domain of genius covers the greater and much more important part of what constitutes the conduct of war, and that to ignore it while addressing lesser matters amounts to collecting the chaff and discarding the wheat.”33 But scientific investigation of genius involves moral factors, and as Clausewitz explains, “Theory becomes infinitely more difficult as soon as it touches the realm of moral values,” when architects and painters “aim at a particular effect on the mind or on the senses, the rules dissolve into nothing but vague ideas.”34 Clausewitz argues that “military activity is never directed against material force alone; it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life, and the two cannot be separated.”35 Clausewitz’s experience and study of history convinced him that “action can never be based on anything firmer than instinct, a sensing of the truth.”36 Sound decision involves “rapid, only partly conscious weighing of possibilities,” and “the man of action must at times trust in the sensitive instinct of judgment, derived from his native intelligence and developed through reflection, which almost unconsciously hits on the right course.”37 That “almost everything that happens in war . . . is through the hidden processes of intuitive judgment.”38 Clausewitz’s military term for intuition is coup d’oeil: “an intellect that, even in the darkest hour retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth,” that allows “a rapid and accurate decision . . . that the mind would ordinarily miss or would perceive only after long study and reflection,” “achieved by a mental gift that we call imagination.”39 He observes that “when all is said and done, it really is the commander’s coup d’oeil, his ability to see things simply, to identify the whole business of war completely within himself, that is the essence of good generalship.”40 Clausewitz’s observations are consistent with recent findings in cognitive science.41 Knowing the Prussian command’s debates and delays as they came to a decision at Jena, and having experienced the myriad factors that interfere with an army’s responsiveness to direction once decisions were made, Clausewitz formed his concept of friction, another factor beyond quantification, as it depends upon the particular circumstance and many details. He maintains that the ability to surmount friction requires the

From the Nineteenth Century to World War II

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development of “instinct and tact,” which constitute “a form of judgment capable with “an area littered with endless minor obstacles . . . instinct becomes almost a habit so that he always acts, speaks, and moves appropriately, so only the experienced officer will make the right decision in major and minor matters.”42 Commanders need the determination to work through friction and the presence of mind to deal with the unexpected. Courage and intellect need to work together to produce determination. Clausewitz viewed genius as requiring both intellect and personal temperament to come to rapid sound decision and deal with subordinates. Genius exploits the adversary’s friction. Clausewitz knew experience was essential to improving a commander’s intuition, the unconscious form of thought that synthesizes theoretical understanding with practical reason. According to Clausewitz, one creates genius through mental reenactment of past command decisions as palliative for lack of experience. The main sources of sound decision therefore come from the “insights, broad perceptions, and flashes of intuition”43 derived from reenactment of command decision. Following his lifetime practice, detailed study of command decisions in history was required to understand moral factors affecting the psychology of personalities and what the enemy would do rather than what the enemy could do. Clausewitz’s “paradoxical trinity” of emotion, courage and talent, and reason requires the commander to develop the necessary character to overcome the emotion engendered by physical danger, uncertainty (the fog of war), and chance using the synthetic experience of historical study.44 Clausewitz’s purpose for historical study was not to provide doctrines but to train judgment through indirect experience of a profession in which direct experience of sufficient scope is often unattainable.45 His theory provides an approach to acquire knowledge and capability, not the doctrine. Though large-scale events provide context and shape details, principles and doctrines always have exceptions contingent on unknowable variables that produced the outcome of a particular circumstance. Theory becomes capability through critical analysis, or “the application of theoretical truths to actual events.”46 Critical analysis surmises unknowable features surrounding verifiable historical facts to create a synthetic experience and reflects upon this synthetic experience to improve the capacity for judgment.47 The pedagogic function of theory is the process of refining the judgment and “instinctive tact” of the acting individual, not drawing up rules to be learned by rote.48 Practical rules and principles require reflective judgement in their application. As Jon Sumida notes:

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To surmount the limitations of language and ideas with respect to the accurate description of the moral dynamics of an individual, Clausewitz invented an indirect approach to understanding decisionmaking in war. It considers both the physical and moral factors that conditioned decisionmaking in particular historical cases—including those which must be surmised—in order to evoke a sense of command dilemma and the moral forces required to act decisively in spite of it. Because meaning cannot be explained directly, it has to be conjured through a form or psychological reenactment. Clausewitz calls such an exercise “critical analysis,” but the bare phrase does not do justice to its essential character. Exercises in critical analysis can generate different feelings and thus even different solutions in different individuals or even the same individual at different times. The critical variable, in other words, is the mental state of the person doing the reenactment, and the critical outcome is the development of the individual’s comprehension of the nature of high command in its moral as well as physical aspects. Reenactment, in other words, is a form of personal psychological experiment. The intended product of this process [critical analysis] is a sensibility—that is a mental character encompassing emotion as well as knowledge—that, in the absence of actual experience, can provide a measure of sound understanding and a platform for further learning. Clausewitz’s method of learning thus involved a process of inducing a form of selfknowledge, as opposed to the importation of technical knowledge. It was prompted not only by the recognition that a scientific approach might consist of something other than the formulation of laws of cause and effect, but also by the understanding that language [the manipulation of symbols] is incapable of accurately representing the phenomenon of high command, that language can nonetheless be used as a medium of productive intellectual work, and that the specific character of this work should take the form of psychological reenactment of past events.49

Conceding that “moral values can only be perceived by the inner eye, which differs in each person, and is often different in the same person at different times,” Clausewitz surmises that the science derives from shared experience—“there can be no doubt that experience will by itself provide a degree of objectivity to these impressions”50—noting such factors as the effects of ambush, the bravery of those who turn their backs on the enemy, the risks of pursuit, and the spirit of one’s own troops. He writes: All these and similar effects in the sphere of the mind and spirit have been proved by experience: they recur constantly and are therefore entitled to receive their due as objective factors. What indeed would come from a theory that ignored them? Of course these truths must be rooted in experience. No theorist, and no commander, should bother himself with psychological and philosophical sophistries.51

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He goes on to address moral conditions that make a theory of war difficult. First is the role of emotion, particularly as it affects courage as a response to fear, which differs widely from person to person and therefore is not subject to numerical measure. Second is the unpredictable actions and reactions of the adversaries. Third is that the information upon which both sides act is uncertain, which defies quantification. Doctrine based on mathematical models of conflict is wholly inadequate, particularly at the strategic level, where the issue is not the engagement itself but its effects, and where “almost all solutions must be left to the imaginative intellect . . . theory need not be a positive doctrine, a sort of manual for action, but rather a method of study.”52 Inquiry is the most essential part of any theory, and which may quite appropriately claim that title. It is an analytical investigation leading to close acquaintance with the subject; applied to experience—in our case to military history—it leads to familiarity with it. The closer it comes to that goal, the more it proceeds from the objective form of a science to the subjective form of a skill, the more effective it will prove in area where the nature of the case admits no arbiter but talent. It will, in fact, become an active ingredient of talent. Theory will have fulfilled its main task when it is used to analyze the constituent elements of war, to distinguish precisely what at first sight seems fused, to explain in full the properties of the means employed and to show their probable effects, to define clearly the nature of the ends in view, and to illuminate all phases of warfare through a critical inquiry. Theory then becomes a guide to anyone who wants to learn about war from books; it will light his way, ease his progress, train his judgment and help him to avoid pitfalls. . . . It is meant to educate the mind of the future commander, or more accurately, to guide him in his selfeducation, not to accompany him to the battlefield.53

The principles and rules resulting from this concept of theory provide a frame of reference rather than instructions for “precisely the path” to be taken. Clausewitz stipulates that this concept of theory as a method of studying history “only needs intelligent treatment to make it conform to action, and to end the absurd difference between theory and practice that unreasonable theories have so often evoked.”54 To Clausewitz, “intelligent treatment” of the application of theory to the study of history meant focusing on decisionmaking and the moral (unquantifiable) nature of the act of decision. But he also recognized the need for a considerable body of knowledge, going beyond history increasingly as one goes up the military ranks: The commander-in-chief need not be a learned historian nor a pundit, but he must be familiar with higher affairs of state and its innate

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policies; he must know the current issues, questions under consideration, the leading personalities, and be able to form sound judgments. He need not be an acute observer of mankind or a subtle analyst of human character; but the must know the character, the habits of thought and action, and the special virtues and defects the men whom he is to command. He need not know how to manage a wagon or a harness a battery horse, but he must be able to gauge how long a column will take to march a given distance under various conditions. This type of knowledge cannot be forcibly produced by an apparatus of scientific formulas and mechanics; it can only be gained through a talent for judgment, and by the application of accurate judgment to the observation of man and matter. The knowledge needed by a senior commander is distinguished by the fact that it can only be attained by a special talent, through the medium of reflection, self-study, and thought: the intellectual instinct which extracts the essence form the phenomena of life, as a bee sucks honey from a flower. In addition to study and reflection, life itself serves as a source. Experience, with its wealth of lessons, will never produce a Newton or an Euler, but it may well bring forth the higher calculations of a Condé55 or a Frederick.56

Emphasizing that knowledge must become capability, as with Kant’s subconscious intuition, Clausewitz writes that knowledge must be so absorbed into the mind that it almost ceases to exist in a separate objective way. In almost any other art or profession a man can work with truths he has learned from musty books, but which have no life or meaning for him. Even truths that are in constant use and are always to hand may still be externals. . . . Continual change and the need to respond to it compels the commander to carry the whole intellectual apparatus of his knowledge within him. He must always be ready to bring forth the appropriate decision. By total assimilation with his mind and life, the commander’s knowledge must be transformed into a genuine capability.57

Thus, Clausewitz again alludes to the power of practical reason attained through self-reflection to create the subconscious intuition required for talent and genius. Clausewitz intended the historical reenactment of military decisionmaking to be “an educational procedure that reproduced the emotional as well as the intellectual difficulties of supreme command, which would serve as a substitute for actual experience.”58 Clausewitz intended such a theory to supplement known historical data in six ways: 1. To direct attention to the factors that promote self-doubt in the commander, which include danger, complexity, contingency and

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unreliability of information and the emotional resources needed to overcome them. 2. To support conjecture about the factors that inform the commander’s judgment, which encompasses his knowledge of policy and politics, assessments of people and issues, and comprehension of the quality of the forces commanded. 3. To provide the basis for the consideration of the multitude of operational facts and motives for action of many individuals that are either never known, or if known, never recorded, or that may have been intentionally obscured. 4. To make certain that a proper account is taken of the nature of the relationship between cause and effect in war, which is affected by the play of unintended consequences and complexity. 5. To mandate the consideration of alternative courses of action as an essential part of the process of replicating command dilemma. 6. To allow knowledge of outcomes (success or failure of the operation) to influence assumptions about the roles of the unknowable variables just described and their complex interactions when evaluating the rightness or wrongness of decisionmaking.59 Clausewitz laid the foundations for the German military school of thought and practice.60 He was not a fan of board games in the form of Helwig’s and Venturini’s “war chess” with fixed rules. However, where Clausewitz focused on reenactment of the history of command decision and experience in actual war, the addition of games soon allowed officers to reenact the past and enact the future; they could put themselves into the psychological, emotional character of commanders and gain experience in war without war, in an environment more stimulating and compelling than books. To extend the evidence provided by history and theoretical study, the Prussian staffs and war college used staff rides and war gaming to enhance sound judgment and logical tact. The esoteric and rudimentary war chess games at the turn of the century employing fixed rules based upon Enlightenment thinking were too abstract to represent actual battles or synthetic history. They failed to attract the attention of professional officers.61 The Napoleonic Wars (1805–1815) had interrupted work on war games. In 1811, Baron George Leopold von Reisswitz, filling a position as a war councilor at the Court of Breslau in Prussia following the departure of Clausewitz, developed a game that would spare future officers the need to conduct tactical rides to the scenes of recent battles. The war game “could conjure” the battles “into his room,” along with,

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“the remaining, eternally memorable battle theaters of Silesia, in order to maneuver variously with . . . figures on them.”62 The baron exchanged the board of war chess for a sand table that could be adapted to represent different terrains. Symbols pasted on little porcelain cubes represented troops and weapons. The game provided a medium that made it possible to deal operationally with the incalculability of tactical developments. Prussia’s universities and military education founded on Immanuel Kant’s transcendentalist concepts of intuition and reflective judgment adopted “the enhanced order to think for oneself,” which the game promoted. Baron Reisswitz’s game immediately aroused the interest of Prince Wilhelm and Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke, who played war games. Prince Wilhelm persuaded his father, Prussia’s King Frederick William III, to grant him an audience to demonstrate the game. Reisswitz under no circumstances wanted to present the king with a sandbox and so developed a plaster model with pieces representing water courses, roads, villages, and woods that could be assembled to represent a particular terrain in relief. He called these terrain pieces “types,” analogous to principles used in the typecase for printing. The game was completed as the king received reports of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. The king with his sons, officers, and adjutants used Reisswitz’s game to reenact the war theater and campaigns leading up to the wars of liberation. In the process, “the usually scheduled hour of the separation of the royal family” was often “far exceeded.”63 “The game became something of a showpiece to senior officers and visiting foreign dignitaries. In 1816, when Russian Grand Duke Nicholas visited Potsdam, the king demonstrated the game to him. The duke (the future czar) was enthusiastic and introduced the game to the Russian court the following year. Interest in this gaming concept soon spread to other European countries.”64 Games modeled on chess that used deterministic rules to prescribe tactical principles and reproduce the rehearsal of specific formations were dismissed by the military as pure book learning. Reisswitz understood his game as a “mechanical device to present tactical maneuvers to the senses.”65 In 1812, Reisswitz published a sixty-page instruction manual. His rule system accounted for visibility, information flows, movements, strikes, and losses of troops during the battle, allowing the exploration of different contingencies and Napoleon’s new tactics. Game pieces only appeared on the table once enemy positions were discovered through reconnaissance. Communications and orders among teams were written to prevent the other team from hearing them, which taught officers how to write clear, concise orders and led to the adoption of writ-

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ten versus oral orders in actual battle. As loading cannon took about two minutes, moves in the game covered two-minute intervals. Other rules were similarly empirically based. Though the two parties took turns executing their moves, they simulated processes running in parallel, including time delays involved in transmitting orders. Two friends playing the game by post demonstrated the fissure of those sending and receiving orders. “A writing mistake, this correspondence of the two friends shows, once cost an infantryman his life, a case which might well have also occurred under other circumstances.”66 Time required for construction and destruction of buildings and bridges was also taken into account. The umpire kept detailed records of when units appeared and the accrual of losses, recognizing that firearms scatter more under battle conditions than when on a firing range or in maneuvers. The game “confronted its players with incalculabilities that can no longer be rehearsed, but can only be played through. The systematic use of dice [consistent with Clausewitz’s emphasis on the military’s need to deal with chance and luck] contributed to the unforeseeability and irreversibility of simulated courses of battle.”67 Beyond studying Clausewitz’s analogies, the game allowed players to experience the challenges and opportunities presented by particular contingencies and to generalize advantageous courses of action. By 1816 several matches had been played where Reisswitz demonstrated the suitability of the game for unit levels from the battalion to several army corps. The game met with considerable favor among officers in the Prussian (later German) Army. Reisswitz wanted to put his papers “without any scholarly ostentation” in the hands of those “who would use them purely for an actual military purpose.” Consistent with this goal, Reisswitz left everything else to his son (Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reisswitz), who was about to be promoted to a second lieutenant of the Prussian Guard artillery.”68 Encouraged by his father’s efforts, the younger Reisswitz enthusiastically applied himself to the development of the game. His purpose was to bring into the game the best military experience and thinking of the time. With the founding of the general staff and the war academies, his version of the game required attention to the “affairs of the General Staff officer.” As a member of the artillery testing commission, together with General Scharnhorst, he tested the range and scattering distance of all available firearms, including foreign ones, and incorporated the systematically collected data into the war game. As surveying and the technology for producing topological maps had improved, he employed maps prepared for the general staff rather than the typeset arrangements of his father’s game, allowing for games on representations of actual terrain:

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“It can be ascertained that, in General Staff education, techniques for the production of maps and their application in tactical war games were imparted with reference to each other.”69 General Karl von Müffling had begun his career surveying in the Rhineland before becoming chief of the general staff and had just completed mapping Prussia when the younger Reisswitz completed improvements to Kriegsspiel. In 1824, Prince Wilhelm, who for testing purposes had assumed command in the new game, sent Lieutenant Reisswitz to Müffling. A comrade described the meeting in Prussia’s official military journal, the Militär-Wochenblatt. Müffling’s mood on entering the game was cool. When he came to understand that one of the general’s war plans would be the subject of the game and he was asked to provide directions to subordinates for maneuvering the troops, he at first was astonished, but complied. Once the game began, he became warmer with each move, and at the conclusion cried out with enthusiasm, “This is no ordinary game, this is a war academy. I must and will recommend this to the army most warmly.” He kept his word. In early 1825, Militär-Wochenblatt published Müffling’s endorsement. He noted that the Reisswitzes over “a number of years with attention, insight and persistence” had created a game that provided entertainment as it provided instruction in dealing with the difficulties of serious war “in a simple and living manner. . . . The execution on good reproductions of real terrain and frequent variation so that the diversity is multiplied through many new arrangements make the game still more instructive.” He went on to note that “the prince of the royal house, the minister of war and the senior officers who have become acquainted with his war game” had acclaimed Lieutenant Reisswitz for his efforts and that “through the circulation and dissemination of the same he will not fail to gain the gratitude of the army.”70 In 1824 the younger Reisswitz published a manual containing a detailed set of rules for the game and updated it after a few years. His being called upon to conduct presentations for the crowned heads of Europe created jealousies. His immediate superior refused him a command and assigned him to an isolated border fortress where he became despondent and committed suicide on his first home leave in 1827.71 Kriegsspiel is considered the first true war game.72 Clausewitz had criticized Bülow, saying war was a map-game to him.73 What made this game so compelling where previous games had failed to capture the interest of a professional class? Its principal power came from the audience being drawn in as actors in the production, stimulating a play-mood. Several features of the game

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captured them into its flow. The game context presented a vivid professional scenario for which they knew they needed to plan, and which could be easily varied to accommodate other contingencies. The use of familiar bureaucratic rhythms and routines made the game simple to play, as the umpires dealt with the complications of the rules. The context included the mission of each team, the resources available to them and the other players, the use of terrain maps that they normally used providing the features that affected visibility, movement, and the effects of their weapons.74 Adjudication rules realistically accounted for the information that players would have when they made their decisions, the time required to implement those decisions, and the consequences of those decisions, based upon the empirical data needed for credibility. The game model provided what was needed to simulate professional challenges and opportunities, and the models used to adjudicate the game were based upon practices in use and the best facts available. The game aligned with Scharnhorst’s and Clausewitz’s insistence that theory had to be concrete and circumstantial, and encompass complexity and historical experience, bringing together the parts and the whole grounded in the nature of the particular conflict. The detailed scenario in the game approached the living reality of war, thus achieving some of the value of firsthand experience and conveying the complexity of factors and forces active in war, putting theory and practice in proper relationship. The game established a vivid competition where the players were intellectually stimulated and learned the logic inherent in the scenario and the consequences of their decisions. Being captured in the flow of the game and aha moments of learning created the play-mood that made play more instructive and entertaining. Baron Reisswitz created Kriegsspiel to develop a tactical feel for terrain and to adjust the spatiotemporal representation of warfare to develop logical tact in commanders, field officers, and the general staff. Kriegsspiel also comported with Kant’s notion of free will, as opposed to the causal determinism underlying previous forms of “war chess.” This led to a program of theoretical studies, practical exercises, and gaming for both staff and operational units (see Figure 2.1). The Prussian successes in the 1866 war against Austria and the war of 1870–1871 with France stimulated all of the major powers to emulate their system of preparation for war.75 In 1905, Colonel George Francis Robert Henderson, a widely read British author of his time, commented on the impact these events had on the role of education and teaching the science of war: “Other wars had shown the value of an educated general, these showed the value of an educated army.”

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The US Navy and the National Security Establishment

Figure 2.1 Prussian System of Military Instruction  "$&#% $!  &%&$#"! &$"! #   &%&$#"! $ %$" # &&  " & & #"  "&%% "#$& #" # $#"$ "#$&  &$ $" &% # "  ""#& 
"& '&%&$#"! &$"$&

 "#$&#%

  $ "  '&%&$#"! "#$& & &#&#"! #"

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Source: Ferrand Sayre, Map Maneuvers and Tactical Rides, 3rd ed. (Ft. Leavenworth: Army Service School Press, 1910).

The Prussian system included much more than gaming war. The cultures of different societies determined the systems for selection of officers and the prestige of the military. However, the adoption of war gaming and war college curricula was fully within the purview of the military. The increased importance attached to the game was, “in some measure, due to the feeling that the great tactical skill displayed by Prussian officers in the late war had been, at least partly, acquired by means of the instruction which the game affords.”76 McCarty Little, who established a program of war gaming at the Naval War College beginning in 1887, stated more strongly, “When in 1866 Prussia, out of half a century of peace, overthrew the power of Austria in a six weeks’ campaign, and, four years after in a struggle with France who had had the benefit of the experience of several wars, succeeded in rolling her antagonist in the dust, the world realized the value of systematic scientific training; and it was generally admitted that the war game was a notable factor in the result.”77 The Prussians offered their expertise as the militaries of England, Austria-Hungary, Italy, France, Russia, Turkey, Japan, and the United States introduced war gaming into systems of military education and strategy and tactics development.

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US Navy Reforms

The navy established the Naval Academy in 1845. The military was among a broader movement of American professions that were embracing education and formal licensing boards. The American Medical Association was founded in 1847, the American Dental Association was founded in 1859, the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1852, and the American Bar Association in 1878. In 1881, Frederick W. Taylor initiated his time-motion studies leading to a theory of “scientific management,” which ultimately affected the military.78 Stephen B. Luce led a group advocating naval reform along the lines of the Prussian system. As a captain, he was instrumental in establishing the US Naval Institute and its Proceedings journal in 1873 as a primary vehicle for the advancement of professional and scientific knowledge among US naval officers.79 As commander of the US Navy Training Squadron from April 1881 to June 1884 he implemented the first formal training program for enlisted recruits, who previously had to learn on the job. Unlike most naval officers, Luce had written extensively on training, administration, organization, and education of the navy. Luce believed that education was a process through which each individual discovered for himself the nature of the world around him.80 He believed that as scientists had demonstrated basic physical laws of the universe, similar laws could be found in human affairs through two complementary methods of reasoning, the comparative and the inductive. Studying law, history, literature, science, technology, and education would provide analogies for comparison. This study must be combined with military science and art. The inductive approach would then allow generalizing from thinking about specific events. Luce’s notions of knowledge creation aligned well with Kant’s synthesis of theoretical understanding and practical reason. “Luce believed that first one must understand what a Navy does and why it exists, before one can effectively select the means, the tactics, and the weapons by which it is to be employed.”81 Luce worked both with Congress and through the secretary of the navy to establish a Naval War College. The bureaucratic process in that era was to establish a board of officers to study such issues. Luce was president of the board. Overcoming objections from the Naval Academy and training commands, the board declared that the navy should have “a place where our officers will not only be encouraged, but required, to study their profession proper—war—in a far more thorough manner than has ever heretofore been attempted, and to bring to the investigation of

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The US Navy and the National Security Establishment

the various problems of modern naval warfare the scientific methods adopted in other professions.”82 The program of study was to include modern political history and naval history, and international law was added as a subject “of the utmost importance” as naval officers’ behavior abroad affected national policies.83 Luce also believed that tactical exercises should be part of the curriculum. The decision to put the college at Newport, Rhode Island, resulted from Luce’s familiarity with the area and because he was still commander of the training squadron he had established there. On October 6, 1884, Secretary of the Navy W. E. Chandler formally established the Naval War College with Luce as its president. Having served more than forty years on active duty in 1886, he was appointed acting rear admiral and given command of the North Atlantic Squadron. While in command until mandatory retirement at age sixty-two in 1889, he continued to encourage war college students to employ the ships in his command to test their concepts. In 1901, Rear Admiral Luce was ordered back to active duty and remained at the college until his forced retirement in 1910 at the age of eighty-three. Echoing Kant’s philosophy on reflective judgment as implemented by Scharnhorst’s emphasis on free study, Luce explained his idea for the college, declaring that “there are no professors competent to teach” warfare, and stating, “All that a college can do . . . all that it professes to do, is to invite officers to come to it; and to offer them every facility for pursuing the study. . . . All here, faculty and class alike, occupy the same plane, without distinction of age, rank, or assumption of superior attainments. . . . In the beginning I, myself, . . . announced myself as one of the class in attendance.” The War College, Luce believed, “is a place for original research on all questions relating to war and to statesmanship connected with war, or the prevention of war.”84 When the United States established its Naval War College, the nation faced no imminent danger from the sea. The navy had 92 ships of which 32 were in commission with 8,000 officers and men. Britain had 359 ships with 63,589 officers and men, followed by France with 329 ships and 47,950 officers and men. The Russian, Italian, Spanish, and German navies came next in size. Some ranked the US Navy with this group, others with the Western Hemisphere navies of Brazil, Chile, and Argentina.85 Having had the most numerous and innovative fleet of ironclad ships in the world at the end of the Civil War, the navy had retained just enough ships for five squadrons geographically distributed for coastal defense and to protect overseas commerce. Eight powerful active-duty bureau chiefs administered the navy under its secretary.

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With the 1880s came a revival in shipbuilding in Europe. Americans paid attention with the establishment in 1882 of the Office of Naval Intelligence within the Bureau of Navigation, the primus inter pares among the navy bureaus that also oversaw officer assignments. The US Congress also paid attention, compelling the retirement of many outmoded ships in 1884, though not legislating new ships to replace them. Luce began with Army Lieutenant Tasker Bliss doing administration as the only permanently assigned person. The college was located in Newport’s former poorhouse and had no funds for books or furniture. Luce had established a strong relationship with the like-minded Brigadier General Emory Upton, who was promoting army education and commanded the artillery school. For his faculty, Luce arranged in September 1885 for Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, one of few authors on the relatively new subject of naval history, to be ordered to the college as a lecturer in naval strategy and tactics. Mahan adopted Antoine-Henri Jomini’s principles such as the concentration of force in his works (Clausewitz was not known in the United States at the time). Mahan took a year to prepare for his lectures, resulting five years later in his first famous book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660–1783. In January 1886, Luce was promoted to the permanent grade of rear admiral (the highest permanent rank in the navy at the time) and ordered to sea in command of the North Atlantic Squadron. Nineteen navy and two marine corps officers formed the class in 1886. Mahan lectured on history and strategy, Lieutenant William B. Hoff lectured on his recent book on tactics of naval gunnery, and Professor James Soley, Navy Department librarian, lectured on international law. Lieutenant Bliss lectured on military tactics, minor military operations, and the principles of modern strategy. Rear Admiral Luce was present with his flagship, which he allowed the college students to use for practical exercises.86 In later years he made efforts to use the squadron to both educate students and explore concepts developed at the college. Retired Lieutenant William McCarty Little was forced to leave active duty following an eye injury. An enthusiastic supporter of the college, he volunteered his services to Luce at its opening. When Luce departed, he continued to work with Mahan, who succeeded Luce as the college president. He began by drawing maps that Mahan used in his lectures and books. At the same time, they devised a system to examine and explain the tactics of historic battles using cardboard vessels of different colors for the contending navies moved over a sheet of drawing paper. Using

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The US Navy and the National Security Establishment

this method, they applied their technical knowledge of ships and began to work on principles of naval tactics. Little began to develop the idea further and suggested broader uses of war gaming in his 1886 lecture on “Colomb’s Naval Duel Game.” Little expanded his lectures on games in 1887. In 1889, Major William R. Livermore visited the college. Then stationed at Fort Adams in Newport, he was the foremost American on army war gaming and Kriegsspiel. Livermore’s ideas became important in the development of the war gaming system in Newport. When Mahan departed in 1889, the college had gone through years with little or no funding while countering efforts to change its mission and character. An insurgency led by Luce and his ally Admiral of the Navy David Dixon Porter, supported by Professor Soley as assistant secretary of the navy and Theodore Roosevelt who lectured at the college in 1888, saved the college. Though it held no classes in 1890– 1891, with the support of a new administration and navy secretary, Congress authorized funding for a proper building and put the college on a more solid footing. Mahan returned to the college as president in 1892, as the new building was completed. As with future buildings, it was designed to accommodate war gaming. However, the anti-expansionist President Grover Cleveland administration ordered Mahan to sea in 1894 and prepared to shut the college down. On his trip to Newport to do so, Secretary of the Navy Hilary Herbert, hostile to the college while on the Congressional Naval Committee, read Mahan’s latest book The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire 1793–1812 and decided, “This book alone is worth all the money that has been spent on the Naval War College. . . . When I embarked on this cruise, I had fully intended to abolish the college: I now intend to do all in my power to sustain it.”87 Herbert chose Captain Henry C. Taylor to be the new president of the war college. Keeping with Luce’s original intent, Taylor revised the 1894 course of instruction to include war gaming and established the practice of each class having a war problem to concentrate their studies. This curriculum remained unchanged for the next fifteen years. During the period from 1887 to 1893 war games had been used for occasional demonstrations and examination of particular problems.88 In 1894 games became an integral part of the instruction. Three different types of games were employed. Colomb’s duel game used two ships. A tactical game representing a fleet action was a modified version of Austrian and German games. The strategic game, based in part on the study of Kriegsspiel and other foreign games, represented an entire war and was played on charts with players in separate rooms. The duels, which

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included details such as ships’ turning radii, were found to be of limited value and terminated in 1905.89 Gaming was considered invaluable for teaching strategy and strategic geography. In the games that Little ran, “It is a matter of small moment who is adjudged the winner, while on the other hand it is of great importance to ascertain as nearly as possible what conditions make for success or failure.”90 Captain Taylor believed that “the war game has been useful to a degree far beyond my most sanguine anticipation.”91 Luce believed “the value of lectures on professional subjects must not be underrated. They are indispensable. But it is one of the principles of the Science of Education that throughout youth and in maturity the process in the acquisition of knowledge shall be one of self-instruction. . . . What the learner discovers by mental exertion is better known than what is told to him.”92 In other words, games provided effective mental exercises for experiential learning. The Naval War College began to create a body of doctrine that could be used in the absence of a central planning office in the Navy Department. While reformers following Luce continued to argue for a navy staff system for war planning and administration in peacetime, they “no longer recommended a slavish imitation of Prussian organizational methods, but broader applications of it.”93 In 1903, Little was promoted to the rank of captain by special act of Congress and recalled to active duty at the college in recognition of his nearly twenty years of voluntary work, principally in war gaming. He continued to work on gaming until his retirement in 1915. The Use of War Games in Navy Planning

War games directly affected the preparation of war plans. As early as 1895, the college staff had begun preparing war plans. The staff prepared a series of “war portfolios” in conjunction with the general board in Washington in 1907. Before the establishment of a CNO with a planning staff in 1915, the war college was the only agency in the navy capable of doing general staff work. In 1910–1911 the first Orange plan for war against Japan was formulated at the Naval War College, which contained the basic elements of the strategy used thirty years later.94 “By 1911 planning requirements had become so demanding that the President of the college, Rear Admiral Raymond Rogers, advised Washington that further production of war plans for the General Board could no longer be done without prejudice to the college’s role as an educational institution.”95 Once the CNO assumed the role of chief war planner, the college

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continued to affect plans as the college president was an ex officio member of the general board. Secretary of the Navy John D. Long created the general board in 1900 following the challenges he faced in the Spanish-American War. Concerns over how a general staff might erode civilian control of the military had resulted in Captain Henry C. Taylor (the Naval War College president 1893–1896), the Bureau of Intelligence, and Rear Admiral Francis M. Ramsay (chief of the Bureau of Navigation) preparing conflicting plans for war with the Spanish. As the secretary of the navy commanded the movement of naval forces, Long convened a board in June 1897 to make sense of the plans, and then a “strategy board” to advise him and President William McKinley on the conduct of naval operations during the war. After the war, a cadre of insurgents influenced by Luce—including Alfred Thayer Mahan, Henry Taylor, and Bradley Fiske, with Theodore Roosevelt as an ally—and like-minded individuals renewed their arguments for a general staff. Captain Taylor drew a parallel between the concept of a general staff and modern approaches to management. These insurgents made headway with Secretary of the Navy David Long, who created a general board with Admiral George Dewey, the victor of the battle at Manila Bay, as the board’s first chairman. Captain Taylor was named one of the inaugural members.96 Planning by the war college staff ended in 1912. The war college course became a full year of instruction, extended from the short summer and fall courses of a few months. Gaming remained central to learning. With the establishment of the CNO in 1915, his Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV) staff replaced the general board as the principal war-planning entity in the navy.97 The general board until 1932 consisted of the Naval War College president, the navy’s senior intelligence officer, the chief of the Bureau of Navigation, and the commandant of the marine corps as ex officio members with the addition of active-duty officers recognized for their stature. Noted for his inventions and writings on professional matters, Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske as a member of the Navy General Board strongly advocated gaming by the navy staff in Washington for determining policy and preparing plans.98 Fiske emphasized the use of gaming for looking beyond the first decision in a war: “Not only, however, must the strategist make plans in peace for preparations that culminate in mobilization, and simply ensure that the navy shall be ready in material and personnel when war breaks; he must also make plans for operating the navy strategically afterward, along each of the lines of direction that the war may take.”99

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In this Fiske held a game theoretic view of strategy as considering every course of action: “But no matter what plan is to be followed, a detailed plan for every contingency must be prepared; it must be elaborated in such detail that it can be put into operation instantly when the fateful instant comes; because the enemy will put his plans into operation at the same time we do, and the one whose plans are executed first will take a long step toward victory.”100 He advocated a scheme for executing his concept that was remarkably similar to what today might be called an expert system application of artificial intelligence. Officers at the Navy Department would “occupy their time wholly in studying war problems by devising and playing strategic and tactical games ashore and afloat.” After reaching a satisfactory solution, a moving picture would be made from a series of photographs depicting each distinctive situation, similar to depictions of chess in books. The film of photographs could be displayed on a screen, “as slowly and as quickly as desired,” and “the film records of a few hundred such games could be conveniently arranged,” to provide valuable precedents for action, whenever situations approximating them should come up in war.101 Gaming never received the serious attention in Washington that Fiske sought. However, during World War II the navy in the Pacific developed a similar grammar for a set of schemes based upon experience, much of it bitter, published in Current Tactical Orders and Doctrine, U.S. Pacific Fleet, or PAC-10, issued in June 1943. Previous doctrine anticipated that ships operating together for extended periods of time would allow the commanders to develop schemes for upcoming battles as Lord Nelson had among a “band of brothers.” The experience was that ships often needed to be reassigned, allowing no time to develop tailored plans. Instead, PAC-10 provided a new cognitive framework, a new grammar for formulating and communicating battle plans, that changed how the fleet went about developing tactics and doctrine. It was also a major new set of constraints. The new vocabulary allowed ships and squadrons to move around the fleet freely, while retaining coordination and cohesion. The predefined plans removed the need for individual ship commanders to compose their own; instead of communicating lengthy plans, they could simply transmit, for example, “1E3,” indicating a normal action at extreme range with van light forces operating offensively and rear light forces defensively.102

The success of Mahan prompted England, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan to establish naval war colleges using the US curriculum. They adopted both lectures on similar topics and the “laboratory method.”103

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Maturing the Navy’s Campaign of Learning Between the World Wars Between the world wars, the treatment of strategy remained as war upon the map. Military men studied strategy by employing the same “comparative” and “laboratory” techniques of history and gaming. Nonetheless, civilian lectures on international relations, area studies, economics, and policy appeared more frequently in the curriculum of the war colleges. Efforts to bring political and business leaders together with their military counterparts through war gaming increased during this period. War gaming assumed an even greater role in the US Navy and German Army (Wehrmacht) for similar reasons. Both operated on restricted budgets, had few personnel and platforms, and needed a means to test large plans. The US Navy and Wehrmacht evolved the Prussian system for military instruction into campaigns of learning. In both the Prussian/German and American systems, war gaming was part of a broader ecology of study, critical analysis, concept formulation and exploration, and experimentation both in gaming and in field/fleet exercises. The games and exercises provided experiential learning to experiment with and share solutions, a common appreciation of the way ahead, and data needed to improve models and rules in games. The Japanese continued to rely on gaming as a technique for developing theories and testing plans. The Soviets also got serious about military science; in collaborating with the Germans, they became familiar with techniques that emphasized gaming. Independently they developed their own methods consistent with Marxist-Leninist theory that relied on scientific determinism. Dispirited by the war, the prestige of the French military plummeted and intellectual attention to war atrophied. Strategy was dropped from the curricula of their war colleges. The professional British officer continued to treat war more as a sport, and the study of strategy was a study of the recent war.104 The formation of the Army General Staff in 1903 opened the way to create a joint board with army and navy representatives for war planning. In 1909, the Navy General Board had also taken over responsibility for defining ship characteristics. The close relationship between the Naval War College and general board during the period 1909–1912 threatened to overwhelm the teaching staff in Newport as they tried to respond to immediate problems of strategic planning and technical issues while the Naval War College lengthened the duration of its course. Following World War I, in the United States the army and navy staffs in Washington, in conjunction with the Navy General

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Board, became formally responsible for this planning. The joint board formed before World War I remained the principal war-planning agency throughout the interwar period. This tempered the philosophy for the role of the Naval War College in strategic planning in the interwar years.105 This distinction between study and the formulation of war plans was much stronger in the United States than in German and Japanese practice. Rather than using games to test specific plans, war colleges in the United States employed gaming more to extend the breadth of vision, improve the quality of analysis, and increase its officers’ depth of understanding. The prevailing attitude of pacifism and neutrality in the United States, coupled with budgetary neglect of the armed forces, did not encourage the same seriousness in gaming within the US Army as with the Germans. Like the Naval War College, the army colleges competed with technical training for prestige and resources. The US Army had opened separate schools for its combat arms: the artillery school opened in 1869 and the infantry and cavalry schools in 1881, all in different locations. The separation reflected the narrow technical philosophy of the training and the power of different army bureaus.106 Secretary of War Elihu Root established an Army War College in 1903 to learn from mistakes made in the Spanish-American War and to serve as the war-planning agency of the War Department General Staff. Following World War I, the college served as the capstone of a very formal officer educational system.107 While many senior army officers who served in World War II attended the college, improvements in land war gaming did not occur as they did in the navy.108 The navy had only surface ships and one war college, whereas the army had a senior college and a college for each of its branches. With only 50,000 troops stationed to defend US interests in theaters beyond the “zone of the interior,” the focus of army gaming was on tactical decisionmaking and doctrine development for each branch.109 Planning in the undermanned and underequipped army was far from realistic, being little more than staff studies. Comprehensive planning made far less headway in the army than in the navy.110 One bright spot was Captain George Kenney at the Army Air Corps Tactical School who in 1927 designed an air/sea/land war game that took maintenance, supply, and even airfield construction into account. Though the game may have benefited him as a general architecting Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s air, sea, and land campaign in the Southwest Pacific theater during World War II, the school stopped playing the game in 1931 on his departure.111

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Rear Admiral William S. Sims, president of the Naval War College following World War I, set the philosophy for the interwar years. Though he did not know of Clausewitz, Sims’s approach to officer education was similar while using games as the foundation for critical analysis. He emphasized the practical over the theoretical, and preparation of minds versus preparation of plans. The object of the college was to enable officers to make war plans, to elucidate general principles, and to develop habits of mind, not to answer specific questions. Therefore, the use of games to test new principles and plans for future operations was secondary to building the character of the leader and developing skills in the estimate of the situation.. The college emphasized grooming officers for command at sea, versus managing a bureaucracy or making policy. Sims reflected Kant’s balance of the theoretical and practical in his interpretation of the war college mission in a speech to the officers of the US Naval Academy on November 11, 1912. He stated that “the primary objective of the Naval War College is to study the principles of warfare . . . to develop the practical application of these principles to war on the sea under modern conditions, and then to train our minds to the highest degree of precision and rapidity in the correct application of these principles.” Later in the speech he echoed Clausewitz on logical tact and surprise: These qualities . . . comprise the ability to recognize . . . promptly, the military significance of each strategical and tactical situation; the ability to withstand surprise without impairment or suspension of judgment; rapidity of decision and promptness of action; and inflexible determination in carrying out the plan of operations. . . . Human action cannot be governed, nor can war successfully be waged, solely by precedent or by adherence to rule. The College offers no rules for the application of fundamentals and sedulously advises avoidance of such rules. Development of sound professional judgment, through unremitting individual study and observation, is the only path to the successful application of fundamentals. Assistance to the individual in this development is the offering of the College.112

A reorganization of the college following World War I increased the number of lectures to include national and foreign policies and conditions in other countries to reflect current states of mind and “economics, international trade, commerce, etc., arranged in such a way to bring home to the student some idea of how to use economic strangulation in the strategy of war. . . . Although economic pressure through control of the sea has always been a particular role of the Navy in war, very little

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has been done in our Navy in the past to perfect ourselves for carrying out that role.”113 The hierarchy of tactical and strategic games used to investigate questions from the details of technology to broad geopolitical and strategic issues remained. The Naval War College did not attempt to encourage original research during this period, as Luce and Mahan had done. Nonetheless, games produced new paradigms as they addressed operational challenges. They altered the basic vision of the conduct of naval warfare and accurately portrayed the major dimensions of the future Pacific war on a strategic and operational, if not tactical, level. The study of strategy focused on a central problem each year, using gaming. Though informal, and in a purely advisory spirit, a relationship between war planners and the college remained. The plans were named for colors assigned to each opponent: Orange-Japan, Red– Great Britain, Black-Germany, Silver-Italy.114 The campaign lectures from the college provided the conceptual text for the first war portfolios of the war plans division.115 As secretary of the navy in 1925, Curtis Wilbur wrote, “The Naval War College tests strategic policies of the Department by making them the basis for problems which are worked out and played on the gameboard.”116 Immediately following World War I, projecting an enemy was difficult, though the rise of Japan was a concern. Great Britain was initially a favorite under a fuzzy concept of Darwinian competition over trade, or Britain’s history of knocking off her maritime rivals. Furthermore, for tactical games the British fleet posed the greatest challenge. Of 106 purely tactical games fought during the period 1919–1941, 49 were against Orange, 5 against Black-Silver, and 52 against Red.117 The paradigm for the battle of the Atlantic was one of defending the Monroe Doctrine in a Jutland-like action that would have the effect of an American Trafalgar. Over the years between the wars, the US Navy lost its awe of the British legend, thanks to the aftermath of naval arms treaties equalizing the numbers between US and British fleets, improvements in American technology, the reluctance of Great Britain to consider war, and the war games. In 1925 the British held an advantage in dreadnoughts of twentytwo to eighteen following the Washington agreements of 1922. The prevailing US Navy opinion was “that the Blue [American] Fleet as it exists today can not engage the Red in gun action with any prospect of victory. The recent tactical exercise, or war game, at the War College has shown this in the most emphatic manner.”118 The solution to this problem was originally to extend the range of effective fire from 24,000

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to 30,000 yards. In London, in 1930, Britain accepted equality with the United States in numbers. The US admirals lost interest in trading fleets with the British. In the war games through the 1930s the British barely limped away from the engagement. By the mid-1930s, the US Navy had relegated the British to second place.119 In contrast to the tactical games, 127 of 136 strategic games during this period were against Orange. The concentration was almost solely against Orange through the period 1927–1939. In 1909 and through the interwar years, social Darwinism formed the basis for US views of Japan. The context was more racial than trade competition. The skill demonstrated by the Japanese fleet at the Battle of Tsushima in 1904 made the threat more vivid, though Japanese expansionism did not provide Americans a credible basis for conflict until the later 1920s. The strategic games grew in scope from the pre–World War I years, both covering more geography and including more types of forces. The games continually illustrated the infeasibility of a quick, decisive battle to end the war in the Pacific. As early as 1923, war college student Chester Nimitz wrote: To bring such a war to a successful conclusion Blue must either destroy Orange military and naval forces or effect a complete isolation of Orange country by cutting all communication with the outside world. It is quite possible that Orange resistance will ease when isolation is complete and before steps to reduce military strength on Orange soil are necessary. In either case the operations imposed on Blue will require the Blue Fleet to advance westward with an enormous train, in order to be prepared to seize and establish bases en route. . . . The possession by Orange of numerous bases in the Western Pacific will give her fleet a maximum of mobility while the lack of such bases imposes on Blue the necessity of refueling en route at sea, or of seizing a base from Orange for this purpose, in order to maintain a limited degree of mobility.120

Naval War College Operations Problem IV, played in 1933, formed the basis for college recommendations to the general board. Officers at the college studied and analyzed this problem more thoroughly than any such operation up to that time. 121 In the scenario, Orange had already seized the Philippines and the problem was to work out their recapture. Captain Ernest J. King, the senior officer student who was selected early for promotion to rear admiral, was the Blue fleet commander. The problem illustrated the effects of the lack of logistical support west of Hawaii, and the likelihood that the Japanese would try to wear down the US fleet before seeking a decisive

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engagement. King foresaw events coming years later when he wrote in his final college thesis, “Japan will assume the offensive initially to acquire advantage where she can assume the defensive and defy us to alter the situation, not that her defensive attitude will be in any degree passive—it will not.”122 Between 1923 and 1940 the US Navy conducted twenty-one “fleet problems” at sea, dividing the fleet into Blue and Orange or Black fleets to prepare for war.123 Though some of the problems focused upon defense against a European power, the problems typically involved the Combined Fleet fighting the Scouting Fleet, with surrogate vessels simulating greater capabilities and constructive (pretend) forces filling out the opposing fleets. One side conducting offense and the other defense contributed to both sets of skills needed in World War II. Recognizing the speed of the Japanese fleet, some fleet problems restricted the speed of one of the opposing fleets to mimic this advantage. These exercises occurred at the end of the fleet training cycle. The CNO and commander in chief of the US fleet would agree on the problem for the year based upon inputs from an ad hoc committee, commanders of the fleet components, the general board, the Naval War College, and others. The planning was then done by officers on the US fleet staff, often with assistance from the Naval War College. Systematic interaction between the fleet problems and the Naval War College and the navy war plans division was assisted by Captain Harris Laning’s decision to keep records of war games beginning in 1922 when he became head of the tactics department.124 Working out the details for the opposing commands involved bringing together commanders of the ships involved, as would occur in actual war. Fleet problems used umpires and free-form adjudication until 1930, when CNO William Pratt directed the Naval War College to develop more rigid rules, which were also used in games, as a result of a dispute over which force had an advantage. Umpiring put ships out of action for the duration of that segment of the problem and was often contentious. A lively critique followed each fleet problem and included written reports from the participants. These reports triggered examination of the issues in college war games and later fleet problems. In 1927 the Naval War College participated in the largest armynavy exercise staged up to that time. Taking place off the coast of southern New England, the exercise involved the Combined Fleet fighting the Scouting Fleet. It culminated in an amphibious assault in the Narragansett Bay area. The exercise was gamed at the college as it was conducted at sea. The results of the exercise led an admiral to

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The US Navy and the National Security Establishment

comment, “I have long felt that one of our weakest spots was in the Plans Division of Naval Operations because of its wholly inadequate personnel. I felt this so keenly when I was at the War College as to be apprehensive that in a large overseas operation of the amphibious nature, we would find Army plans thrust upon us because of the lack of adequate plans of our own.”125 The comment demonstrated the contribution of gaming at the Naval War College to the development of navy plans during the interwar years. The exercise also sparked increased attention to amphibious warfare at the college as the Fleet Marine Force evolved through the 1930s. Though in 1940 two trains of thought in the US Navy remained about how to recapture the Philippines—the decisive dash versus island hopping—the deliberate approach carried enough weight that the games and fleet problems from 1933 concentrated on a prolonged, intense effort. The number of units in the fleet problems increased and duration of the fleet problems grew from an average of seven to an average of thirty-six days.126 Evaluation of the fleet problems became less detailed as the size and time of the exercises grew after 1938. A long war carried the implications of too much expense and too many difficulties to be a national policy. Though US national sentiment veered toward isolationism, in the 1930s Captain Dudley Knox lectured the Naval War College on a national strategy that viewed the United States as a “world island” and the navy’s role as looking outward to defend America’s interests around the globe.127 The navy’s gaming and fleet problems anticipated, but did not reflect, national policy. By 1939 the game began in the third year of the war with the Blue fleet off of New Guinea and more than three million Americans under arms. The economic studies introduced during these years focused on the time required to mobilize the country and the effort needed to isolate the Japanese economically. In this context Admiral Nimitz could state, with some hyperbole, in a lecture to the war college on November 10, 1960, “The war with Japan had been re-enacted in the game room here by so many people and in so many different ways that nothing that happened during the war was a surprise—absolutely nothing except the Kamikaze tactics toward the end of the war; we had not visualized those.”128 Recognizing the distances the fleet would have to transit, the navy designed a fleet that was slower than the Japanese, but developed tactics to deal with the speed differences. “The circular dispositions used in World War II were devised on the game board, and the employment of carriers and aircraft in the games provided future fleet commanders

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with an insight into the capabilities of integrated sea and air power.”129 Some of the island-hopping campaigns in the games employed amphibious ships not yet in the fleet, another advantage of gaming possibilities. Where they had insufficient data on enemy capabilities, they varied them in the games. The games taught officers to learn how to learn.130 They misestimated some parameters, such as the range of Japanese torpedoes and the depth of water required for aerial torpedo attacks, and did not spend enough time exploring tactics needed for night surface engagements or the roles of aircraft carriers and submarines. Notwithstanding, there was no intellectual surprise. Using games and fleet exercises, the navy leadership had formed a complete intellectual framework in which they recognized events as they happened and the proper actions to take as the events obtained. Unlike the German games, the strategic games at the Naval War College included a staff solution that was presented after free discussion. Slides of the composite game moves were shown to critique the student solutions. In Operational Problem IV, 1933, King preferred a northern Pacific advance as opposed to the school solution that called for a more southerly route. The students frequently called to question the viability of the school solution. In the years between the world wars, the senior class at the Naval War College played twelve to thirteen games, beginning with demonstration games of World War I and previous naval battles, then moving on to contemporary contingencies, principally fighting Japan. Gaming in the mornings and having lectures in the afternoons, the elevenmonth curriculum incorporated about forty-five game days (eighteen weeks of gaming half days) to get fifteen war days. The strategic games “exercised student ability to move fleet units towards an objective, conduct scouting and screening operations, and maintain the necessary flow of supplies. . . . The students would be expected to develop an estimate of their respective situations and an appropriate solution either individually or later on in small ‘committees.’” Here they employed Immanuel Kant’s theoretic reason, slow thinking similar to that employed by scientists and mathematicians. They turned these solutions in to the staff, which selected one of them for the whole class to play. 131 Players from each team developed movement orders based on their understanding of their respective situations, and draftsmen translated the symbols of language into plots of symbols on large-scale nautical charts, allowing all of the participants with that view to share a common picture of the situation. Once the opposing fleets came into contact, the chart maneuver transitioned to a board

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maneuver or “tactical” game conducted with ship models on roomsized gaming boards in Luce Hall. Starting with the class of 1929, the Department of Operations initiated quick decision maneuvers to simulate situations where decisionmakers needed to develop estimates and orders in a compressed timeframe and usually under some duress. These games helped to develop fast-thinking logical tact, Kant’s subconscious “practical reason” that so influenced Clausewitz.132 Quick decision maneuvers were set up on the game board behind screens or curtains. On a signal, instructors removed the screens to reveal the situations to the students, then started the clock and timed the students while they developed their situation estimates, decisions, and orders. Once the students turned their orders in to the instructors, the maneuver proceeded in accordance with the student decisions.133 The games led to one “big” game to evaluate a campaign approach to the envisioned war. “The Big Game was generally a series of maneuvers played in stages set in the same scenario. These started with chart maneuvers for logistics planning, search and screening, and culminated in a large-scale tactical board maneuver.”134 As with the original Kriegsspiel, the game would begin with opposing commanders reviewing information on the disposition and readiness of their forces and intelligence reports. They then prepared their initial estimates of the situation and generated orders to their subordinate units. Students in staff roles translated these orders into messages, which they passed to other teams via the game director.135 Luce Hall, the first building designed for the Naval War College, was designed for gaming when it opened in 1892. The design included two separate rooms for “maneuver boards,” a plotting room for the umpires, and offices that their occupants vacated during games to provide spaces for separate staffs. The staffs were distributed. To replicate information that commanders would have, teams representing different fleet units were separated into different rooms if they were in each other’s visual range. Each team maintained their own plots. Marine messengers delivered communications between the teams. In a manner similar to the Germans’ Kriegsspiel, the director determined how much of the message would be passed to its recipient and how long it would take to be transmitted. In tactical games each move would last from three to five minutes during which the commanders had to write their orders. “Those playing the roles of aviators and submariners developed their estimates and orders in separate rooms and were not permitted to see the game board unless they were performing

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reconnaissance functions. On those occasions, the Game Director allowed them only a three to six second glimpse.”136 When a scouting unit (a plane, ship, or submarine) sighted the opposing force, they passed the appropriate information via messenger back to their commanders. Distributing the cells representing the different units and staffs helped simulate the fog of war regarding the enemy’s intent, and developed discipline in writing orders to have subordinates carry out the commander’s intent. When units engaged, the maneuver staff consulted fire effects and ship damage tables to determine the results. In 1934, the college added Pringle Hall with a sixty-eight by ninetytwo-foot maneuver room on the second floor surrounded by an observation mezzanine above, increasing the space available for a game by more than five times what they had in Luce Hall. The extra space better accommodated the expanding dimensions of naval battles involving aircraft carriers. Pneumatic tubes replaced Marines carrying messages between cells. The games did not try to disorient the players through fatigue and physical discomfort, but instead emphasized developing logical tact by simulating how a naval decisionmaker would receive and pass information. Though the games focused on command skills, the practical nature of the study of strategy for fighting Japan at the Naval War College could not help but frame ideas in the minds of those who would become leaders during World War II. “When the United States entered World War II, every flag officer qualified to command at sea, but one, was a graduate of the Naval War College, and had become accustomed to think in terms it had established.”137 The organizational relationships among OPNAV, the general board, the Naval War College, navy intelligence, the fleet, and technologists formed a society of learning that turned the Prussian system of military instruction into a campaign of learning. Games played an essential role in the navy’s campaign of learning but were incomplete without study, reflection, and critical analysis in addition to evaluating concepts at sea and organizing, training, and equipping to implement what was learned. Interactions with the general board and OPNAV affected both readiness and equipping strategies. This campaign of learning prepared the navy for victory in World War II. Admirals like King, Nimitz, Spruance, Turner, Lockwood, and other leaders like Arleigh Burke and J. C. Wylie focused on learning from every operation. They developed the Combat Information Center to allow rapid decision and PAC-10 fleet tactics that allowed units that had not had time to train together to employ set tactics for particular situations. The World War II navy was a learning organization.

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Naval Influence During the Campaign of Learning Before World War II The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a transformation in the size and character of the navy. US influence in the world was evolving rapidly: “For America and her armed forces, this was the period of enormous economic growth; the closing of the frontier; diplomatic rapprochement with Great Britain; joint wars against Spain and Philippine freedom fighters; coalition operations in China against the Boxers; and the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guantanamo Bay, the Philippines, Wake, Guam, Hawaii, Samoa, and the Panama Canal Zone.”138 As the navy prepared intellectually and materially for war, its engagement operations expanded. From 32 active ships when the Naval War College was established in 1884, the number of ships increased to 175 in 1903 (all steel), 245 in 1916, 365 in 1923, 478 in 1940, and 790 on December 7, 1941, even as the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922 and the London Naval Treaty in 1930 restricted numbers of various types of ships.139 Other nations had similar building programs. Though Mahan saw a deployment strategy of global dispersion as pernicious, exposing the fleet to piecemeal annihilation and dissipating the fleet’s offensive power against an enemy, the navy conducted numerous surges and forward deployed operations during the five decades preceding World War II. Early in its expansion, the navy demonstrated its ability to combine experimentation with engagement. In 1889, Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Tracy directed his Bureau of Navigation chief to form a “Squadron of Evolution.” The squadron brought together three modern unarmored steel cruisers and the new gunboat Yorktown. These ships had been designed to raid enemy commerce and protect American flag carriers. The mission of the new squadron was to experiment at sea with the strategic, operational and tactical principles being taught and studied at the Naval War College and debated on the pages of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, and to determine doctrine for employing the New American Steel Navy. During its first year, the Squadron deployed to Europe, where such “Squadrons of Evolution” had been a common naval concept for decades, and to South America.

In 1892, after deploying to South America as part of an operating force during a war scare with Chile, the squadron was merged with the North Atlantic Squadron. “It is an important early example of the usual fate of U.S. Navy units solely dedicated initially to experimentation.”140

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The theme of the navy reacting to war scares, showing the flag, and promoting US interests continued in parallel with the campaign of learning that informed readiness and equipping. Beyond the Spanish-American War in 1898, the navy remained busy. The forward squadrons were not idle. The Mediterranean Squadron operated against the Ottomans in the 1890s. They were, in fact, used often: at Samoa in 1889; in the Philippines jointly with the army; to help relieve the Boxer siege in Beijing; to patrol China’s rivers; and to land sailors and Marines in Argentina, Chile, Hawaii, Nicaragua, Korea, Trinidad, Colombia, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Turkey, and Panama (where they helped engineer the revolution that led to the digging of the canal). In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt abolished the Mediterranean and South Atlantic Squadrons, and in 1910, the Pacific Fleet’s third squadron, deployed in the Far East, became the Asiatic Fleet. Basing on the East and West Coasts did not mean staying home. In 1906, Roosevelt deployed a division of the Atlantic Fleet to Gibraltar during a Moroccan crisis, and he ordered his “Great White Fleet” to circumnavigate the globe from 1907 through 1909. Roosevelt’s successor William Howard Taft deployed cruisers that Roosevelt had sent to Samoa to the Philippines, China, and Japan in 1910. He then sent a battleship force larger than the Great White Fleet to visit British and French ports. He deployed a battleship division to Baltic Sea ports in 1911. President Woodrow Wilson surged nine battleships to the Mediterranean in 1913 during the Balkan Wars. He recalled them in 1914 to join units of the Atlantic Fleet in bombarding and occupying Vera Cruz, Mexico. Protecting US interests abroad resulted in deployments, landings of sailors and Marines, and peacekeeping operations in China, Cuba, Jamaica, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. “From 1905 through 1914, no other navy in the world implemented as extensive a forward deployment strategy.”141 As it conducted these operations, the navy was prepared to surge from its bases to fight the Germans in the Caribbean using War Plan Black. The navy reduced the scale of its deployments from 1914 to 1941 (excluding its participation in World War I) employing on-scene squadrons occasionally backed up by reinforcements from the United States, for small-scale contingencies in China and the Caribbean and to show the flag or indicate American concern. During this period, “the battle fleet trained while the gunboats fought.”142 During World War I, neither the German fleet nor its surface raiders arrived on the American continents. But the Germans did

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launch an offshore submarine offensive from Canada to the Carolinas in 1918. The navy ramped up its production of ships during the war, particularly destroyers along with a large number of antisubmarine patrol bombers, and operated forward out of Britain, France, Italy, and the Azores, with some forces under Royal Navy command. Congress also funded a huge expansion of the US Merchant Marine fleet. Reacting to the Russian revolution in 1918, the navy sent cruisers and other warships to Murmansk and Vladivostok alongside British and French warships in support of US Army troops and Marines deployed ashore, and it deployed ships to support US interests in the Antilles.143 Following the war, the navy balanced its fleet between the Atlantic and the Pacific in order to deter Japan and the naval powers of Europe, planning to use the Panama canal should consolidation be required. The squadrons at Murmansk and Vladivostok remained until 1919 and 1920 respectively. U.S. ships in the Adriatic protected Croatian Dalmatia from Italian encroachments from 1918 to 1921. From 1919 to 1924, a similar force was stationed at Constantinople to deal with the “chaos engendered by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Greco-Turkish War, the subsequent Greek evacuation of Asia Minor, and the Russian Civil War raging throughout the Black Sea littoral, especially the trans-Caucasus. All these operations involved significant cooperation with other navies, especially those of Britain, France, Italy and Greece.”144

In the Far East, the Asiatic Fleet continued its diplomatic and other operations, organizing a new command structure for the gunboats on the Yangtze River. Also, in 1920 a small Special Service Squadron of old cruisers and destroyers was forward based in Panama to support the State Department directly in its efforts to further US interests the Caribbean. Beginning in 1922, a shortage of funds, an isolationist tendency, and care not to provoke a Japanese reaction resulted in the navy focusing its efforts on the fleet problems described above. “While individual ships and squadrons often deployed overseas during this period, the . . . Battle Fleet took only one forward cruise—to Australia and the southwest Pacific in 1925.”145 Nevertheless, the national interests demanded a Special Service Squadron in the Caribbean and the Asiatic Fleet, with its Yangtze Patrol, in the Western Pacific. They were reinforced during 1927 crises in China and Nicaragua, and off Cuba in 1933–1934. Marine landings in the Caribbean and China occurred with great frequency during this period. “Other, more transient forces included U.S. Naval Forces in Europe—

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finally disestablished in 1929—and Squadron 40-T—a cruiser-destroyercutter force created in 1936 to look after American interests threatened by the Spanish Civil War, and which often operated as part of an ad hoc coalition of other interested powers.”146 Thus, even with an isolationist national policy and its concentration on experimenting with the fleet, the navy continued its engagement operations. The Japanese departed the naval treaty system in 1936 as they expanded their invasion of Manchuria into China. Germany and Italy formed an “axis.” President Franklin Roosevelt deployed the main battleship and carrier battle forces to Hawaii in 1939 and 1940, and the navy conducted its last fleet problem there in 1940. Following the Japanese attack on the Yangtze Patrol gunboat Panay in December 1937, the Asiatic Fleet redeployed from Shanghai to Manila. This and other regional developments reduced Asiatic Fleet operations to show the flag and protect US interests in China, and increased that fleet’s focus on assisting in the possible defense of the Philippines against Japanese attack. Major Features of the Navy Ecology, 1873–1941 The navy society for naval influence and its campaign of learning evolved over the period 1873–1941, stabilizing following 1915 with the establishment of the CNO and OPNAV. It involved the web of interactions among the secretary of the navy, the CNO, bureau chiefs, the general board, the Naval War College, fleet units stationed at home and abroad, and navy laboratories, embedded in a broader environment that included the president, Congress, and industry (see Figure 2.2). The interacting methods employed centered on creating theoretical understanding through study , and practical reason informed by gaming, critical analysis, fleet problems, and fleet operations. These were supported by institutes and journals for sharing views and developments, intelligence, reconstruction and analysis of games and operations, and prototyping, testing, and implementing doctrinal, operational, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, facility, and policy schemes (see Figure 2.3). Both ecologies evolved over these years with changes in the environment, but not as much as they were about to in the war and its aftermath. World War II The navy ecology changed rapidly as President Franklin Roosevelt pursued total war during World War II. The roles of the Naval War College

Navy Society for Naval Influence and Campaign of Learning Before World War II

Congress

President

General

oard

SECNAV

Bureau hiefs CNO  OPNAV

Industry

Naval War College

Navy  bs

CINCUS

Deployed  orward tationed
nits

Other leet ommands

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Figure 2.2

Figure 2.3

Methods Involved in the Navy Campaign of Learning Before World War II


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and the general board declined, and OPNAV grew. “Combat-credible” fleets deployed forward. Learning that had prepared the navy for World War II continued through analysis of operations at sea. But the interactions that created the substance of the big navy campaign of learning dissipated. Unsurprisingly, since the primary purpose of Naval War College games was to prepare officers for command at sea by addressing problems they may face while OPNAV prepared detailed war plans, the navy did not use gaming rigorously in preparing operational plans during the war, though the Marines did use games to prepare and rehearse their tactics. Innovations like the Combat Information Center and PAC-10 tactical doctrine reversed advantages that the Japanese Navy had early in the war. The continuity of command of King, Nimitz, Spruance, Turner, and others and their careful study of each operation led them to anticipate the increasing demands as the war enclosed the Japanese homeland. Tenth Fleet additions of escort carriers and more destroyers and its Operations Evaluation Group of civilian scientists turned around the antisubmarine warfare (ASW) campaign in the Atlantic. All US naval war planning and operations were conducted in a joint and combined context among the services and allies.147 Roosevelt took personal control of the munitions board and established an informal joint chiefs of staff with Admiral William Leahy as his personal chief of staff, Admiral Ernest King representing the navy, General George Marshall the army, and additionally General Hap Arnold for the army air force to match up with a British counterpart. He turned directly to his service chiefs for operational matters, sidelining his service secretaries.148 He made CNO King commander in chief of all navy forces, with the commanders of the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets reporting directly to him. Beginning with task forces and task groups, the ocean fleet commanders established subordinate numbered fleets for different regions and missions. The fleet exploded from 790 on Pearl Harbor Day to 6,768 on the day of Japan’s surrender, not including tens of thousands of landing craft. Where in 1942 the loss of an additional aircraft carrier may have significantly delayed the American campaign, by 1944 US carrier fleets were undefeatable.149 During World War II the role of the general board diminished as discredited admirals or those serving in their final assignments became members, and OPNAV took over ship designs in 1945.150 As the war in Europe began, the navy explored shutting down its war college and turning the facilities into training barracks. However, the president, Admiral E. C. Kalbfus, with the support of Admiral Chester

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Nimitz as chief of the Bureau of Navigation, succeeded in keeping the college running using shorter courses for the command and staff education of approximately 700 officers and for conducting correspondence courses for many hundreds more. Games were no longer a feature of the short courses, which relied principally upon lectures. A few months into the war, Admiral Nimitz as commander of navy forces in the Pacific sent two lieutenant commanders back to the Naval War College to see whether the college had ever used Japan’s actual strengths and weaknesses in its war games. “They found two years when the gamed Japanese characteristics had closely matched the evaluations of current intelligence. The officers returned with the Blue doctrine and plans from those years.”151 Also, the Marines refined their games during the war to account for differences between their games and assaults on places like Tarawa. Their refinements led to the point that their games matched the outcomes, until the Japanese changed their tactics.152 Where all but one of the admirals commanding at the beginning of World War II had attended the Naval War College, the 1942 Register of Naval Officers demonstrated that the rapid buildup of US naval forces that began in 1933 had resulted in only about 10 percent of the line commanders and lieutenant commanders in 1942 having attended the college. Recognizing the trend, Admiral Kalbfus argued that following the war delaying the education of officers in the fundamentals of war until they were commanders or captains would result in the senior course being devoted to fundamentals rather than advanced work.153 The early experience of World War II stressed the need for mutual understanding of the roles and functions of various armed services so that staff officers could “have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the technique of operations of all types of armed forces, ground, sea, and air, and the methods of coordination of such forces in joint operations.”154 To meet the demands for officers on joint staffs, the joint chiefs established the Army-Navy Staff College in Washington, DC, in 1943. The students rotated between the Army Air Force School of Applied Tactics in Orlando, Florida, the Naval War College, and the Army Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, and then back to Washington as their course progressed. In 1944, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox appointed Vice Admiral William S. Pye, who had become president of the Naval War College in 1942, the president of a board to study the methods of educating naval officers. Pye had participated on a similar board with Captain Ernest King (then head of the Navy Postgraduate School) and Commander Dudley W. Knox of the Naval War College in 1920. The second Pye

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board found that, among other things, “All naval officers must have a more thorough knowledge of the capabilities, limitations, and general principles of the employment of forces and their logistic support,” and that the findings of the 1920 board were fundamentally sound. They recommended that the Naval War College include three tiers: a command and staff course prior to command of a large ship, the war college course before commanding a division of ships, and an advanced course for flag officers. By the time the war had ended, Pye had begun to make preparations to reopen the college on its normal schedule, but the short courses continued into the summer of 1946.155 The Naval War College was never to achieve a scheme of education progressing with officers’ increased responsibilities over their careers, or the stature in the navy that it held before the war. Notes 1. Quoted in Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, The Age of AI and Our Human Future (New York: Little, Brown, 2022), 19. 2. Robert P. Pellegrini, The Links Between Science, Philosophy, and Military Theory (Maxwell, AL: Air University Press, 1997). 3. Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Empire of Chance: Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 70. 4. Jon Tetsuro Sumida, Decoding Clausewitz: A New Approach to On War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 94. 5. Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 157–158. 6. Ibid., 25. 7. Francis J. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, 3rd ed. (Newport, RI: Naval War College, 1966); J. P. Young, A Survey of Historical Developments in War Games, ORO-SP-98 (Bethesda, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), 8. 8. Gat, Origins of Military Thought, 165. 9. Ibid., 160. 10. Ibid., 164. 11. Ibid., 161. 12. Philipp von Hilgers, War Games: A History of War on Paper, trans. Ross Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2012), 35. 13. Gat, Origins of Military Thought, 157–159. 14. Ibid., 57. 15. Ibid., 154. 16. Germany employed a similar policy later in response to the military restrictions imposed after World War I. 17. Sumida, Decoding Clausewitz, 84. 18. Martin van Crevald, The Training of Officers (New York: Free Press, 1990). 19. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 5-8. 20. Quoted in Sumida, Decoding Clausewitz, 41. 21. Engberg-Pedersen, Empire of Chance, 59.

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22. Clausewitz, On War, 13–14. 23. Ibid., 18. 24. Ibid., 12. 25. Ibid., 85. 26. The discourse follows Sumida, Decoding Clausewitz, 138–139. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid 136. 29. Engberg-Pedersen, Empire of Chance, 50. 30. Clausewitz’s other military contemporaries, such Prussian major Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst, who received much attention, explicitly studied Kant to apply his philosophy to military affairs. Engberg-Pedersen, Empire of Chance, 51. 31. Gat, Origins of Military Thought, 176. 32. Raymond Aron believed “Clausewitz probably knew of Kantian thinking, at least indirectly,” but was neither a disciple of Kan nor applied Kant’s ideas (Decoding Clausewitz, 39). Walter Gallie believed that Clausewitz was strongly influenced by Kantian methodology (Decoding Clausewitz, 70). Howard and Paret’s introduction cites his study of Kantian philosophy and his use of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (On War, 14–15). 33. Sumida, Decoding Clausewitz, 139. 34. Clausewitz, On War, 126. 35. Ibid., 137. 36. Ibid., 108. 37. Ibid., 192 and 213. 38. Ibid., 389, emphasis in original. 39. Ibid., 102 and 109, emphasis in original. 40. Ibid., 578. 41. Ibid., 117 42. Clausewitz, On War, 120–121. 43. Ibid., 185. 44. Ibid., 44. 45. Gat, Origins of Military Thought, 188. 46. Clausewitz, On War, 156. 47. Sumida, Decoding Clausewitz, 195–196. 48. Clausewitz, On War, 157. 49. Sumida, Decoding Clausewitz, 100–101. 50. Clausewitz, On War, 137. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 140–141, emphasis in original. 53. Ibid., 141. 54. Ibid., 142. 55. Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Condé (1621–1686), like Frederick, was known as “the Great” for his military exploits. 56. Clausewitz, On War, 146, emphasis in original. 57. Ibid., 147. 58. Ibid., 177. 59. Ibid., 177–178 60. Gat, Origins of Military Thought, 140. 61. Alfred H. Hausrath, Venture Simulation in War, Business, and Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 5. 62. Hilgers, War Games, 40–43. 63. Ibid., 44. 64. Hausrath, Venture Simulation in War, 6.

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65. Hilgers, War Games, 47. 66. Ibid., 51. 67. Ibid., 47. 68. Ibid., 51. 69. Ibid., 53–54. 70. Ibid., 52. 71. Ibid., 56. 72. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, 2–6. 73. Gat, Origins of Military Thought, 90. 74. These features encompass the mnemonic METT-TC (Mission, Enemy, Terrain and Weather, Troops and Support Available, Time Available, Civil Considerations) used by the US Army to help commanders remember and prioritize what to analyze during the planning phase of any operation. 75. Ferrand Sayre, Map Maneuvers and Tactical Rides, 3rd ed. (Ft. Leavenworth: Army Service School Press, 1910), 20–25; Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske, The Navy as a Fighting Machine, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918), 105, 156– 157, 166–171. 76. Sayre, Map Maneuvers and Tactical Rides, 20–21, quoting the British. 77. W. McCarty Little, “The Strategic Naval War Game or Chart Maneuver,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 38, no. 4 (December 1912): 1216. 78. Trent Hone, Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898–1945 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018), 18. 79. John B. Hattendorf, B. Mitchell Simpson III, and John R. Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars: The Centennial History of the U.S. Naval War College (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1984), 4. 80. Ibid., 14. 81. Ibid., 15. 82. Ibid., 18, emphasis in original. 83. Ibid., 19. 84. Stephen B. Luce, “The U.S. Naval War College,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 36 (1910): 681–696. 85. Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 18. 86. Ibid., 24. 87. Ibid., 33–35. 88. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, 49. 89. Ibid., 50. 90. Little, “The Strategic Naval War Game or Chart Maneuver,” 2220. 91. Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 41. 92. Luce, “The U.S. Naval War College,” 695. 93. Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 43. 94. Ibid., 78; Michael Vlahos, The Blue Sword: The Naval War College and the American Mission, 1919–1941 (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1980), 116–118. 95. Charles W. Cullen, “From the Kriegsacademie to the Naval War College: The Military Planning Process,” Naval War College Review 23, no. 1 (1970), https:// digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol23/iss1/4. 96. Hone, Learning War, 27. 97. John T. Kuehn, “Revive the General Board,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 136, no. 10 (2010): 66–71. 98. Fiske, The Navy as a Fighting Machine, 185, 256–257. 99. Ibid., 164. 100. Ibid., 161.

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101. Ibid., 256–257. 102. Hone, Learning War, 257. 103. Luce, “The U.S. Naval War College,” 686–689. 104. Crevald, The Training of Officers. 105. Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 65. 106. Crevald, The Training of Officers, 57. 107. Harry P. Ball, “A History of the U.S. Army War College 1901–1940,” LibraETD: Online Archive of the University of Virginia Scholarship (March 1983), https://libraetd.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/1v53jx133. 108. Young, Survey of Historical Developments, 81. 109. Though there is evidence the army played large-scale games, their focus seems to have been on training in decisionmaking versus evaluating conceptual plans. Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 146; Ray S. Cline, Washington Command Post: The Operations Division (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1951), 3. 110. Mark S. Watson, Chief of Staff: PreWar Plans and Preparations (Washington, DC: Historical Division, Department of the Army, 1950), 87. 111. Matthew B. Caffrey Jr., On Wargaming: How Wargames Shaped History and How They Might Shape the Future, Newport Papers 43 (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2019), 51–52. 112. US Naval War College, The Mission and Organization of the Naval War College, 1936–1937, Folder 108, Box 7, Collection 619 Papers of Dewitt C. Ramsey 1914–1949, Operational Archives Branch, NHHC, 11 in John M. Lillard, “Playing War: Wargaming and U.S. Navy Preparations for WWII” (PhD diss., George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 2013), 36. 113. Quote from Harris Lanning in 1932 in Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 151. 114. See Vlahos, The Blue Sword, 163, for a complete listing. 115. Ibid., 105. 116. Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 127. 117. Vlahos, The Blue Sword, 149. 118. Ibid., 107. 119. Ibid., 109–112. 120. Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 127. 121. Ibid., 144. 122. Ibid., 145. 123. Albert A. Nofi, To Train the Fleet for War: The U.S. Navy Fleet Problems, 1923–1940 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2010), https:// bookstore.gpo.gov/products/train-fleet-war-us-navy-fleet-problems-1923-1940 provides a detailed account of the fleet problems. 124. Laning became a rear admiral and president of the Naval War College in 1933. 125. Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 132. 126. Nofi, To Train the Fleet for War, 509. 127. Vlahos, The Blue Sword, 47–53. 128. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, 2.54. 129. Francis J. McHugh, “Eighty Years of War Gaming,” Naval War Collge Review 21, no. 7 (1969): 89. 130. Caffrey, On Wargaming, 52–53. 131. Thomas B. Buell, “Admiral Raymond A. Spruance and the Naval War College: Part I—Preparing for World War II,” Naval War College Review 23, no. 7 (March 1971): 47–48.

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132. Engberg-Pedersen, Empire of Chance. 133. Lillard, “Playing War,” 65–66. 134. Ibid., 63. 135. Ibid., 83. 136. Ibid., 86. 137. Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 161. 138. This account of the use of the navy in overseas operations comes principally from Peter M. Swartz, Sea Changes: Transforming U.S. Navy Deployment Strategy: 1775–2002, DIM-2019-U-022208-1Rev (Arlington, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 2021), www.cna.org/CNA_files/PDF/Sea-Changes-Transforming-US-Navy -Deployment-Strategy-1775-2002.pdf. 139. “US Ship Force Levels: 1886 to Present,” Naval History and Heritage Command, November 17, 2017, www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories /us-ship-force-levels.html. 140. On the Squadron of Evolution, see Paolo E. Coletta, “A Survey of U.S. Naval Affairs, 1865–1917” (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 38–40; and S. S. Robison and Mary L. Robison, A History of Naval Tactics from 1530 to 1930: The Evolution of Tactical Maxims, (Annapolis, MD: US Naval Institute, 1942), 728. Swartz, Sea Changes: Transforming U.S. Navy Deployment Strategy, 28. 141. Swartz, Sea Changes: Transforming U.S. Navy Deployment Strategy, 31. 142. Ibid., 32. 143. Ibid., 35. 144. Ibid., 37. 145. Ibid., 79. 146. Ibid., 41. 147. The terms joint for the military services of one country and combined for military services from more than one country were adopted during US planning with the British early in World War II. Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War (New York: Harper and Row, 1987). 148. Ibid. 149. James D. Hornfischer, The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944–1945 (New York: Bantam Books, 2016); Ian W. Toll, Twilight of the Gods (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020). 150. Kuehn, “Revive the General Board.” 151. Caffrey, On Wargaming, 63. 152. Ibid. 153. Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 164–171. 154. Ibid., 174. 155. Ibid., 175–177.

3 Divisive Cold War Strategies

“The international system that arose in the aftermath of World War II created an imperative for new American policies at all levels of government.”1 The national security establishment experienced punctuated evolution. The need to adapt to the postwar environment changed both the agents and the relationships between those agents within the national security establishment and navy, which affected learning and decisionmaking. Aspects of the environment included: • The emergence of the Cold War, and its effect on navy operations. • The transition to collective and cooperative security and a web of alliances. • The National Security Act of 1947 that created the Department of Defense and the US Air Force, with subsequent revisions that reduced the authorities of the CNO. • The introduction of nuclear weapons and the newly emergent roles of civilian defense analysts and computers. This new environment changed how the navy operationally approached its enduring roles—how it invested, organized, trained, equipped, and innovated—and evolved a new ecosystem as it balanced naval influence and readiness with its responsibilities for organizing, training, and equipping. It exacerbated competition among the services, operational commanders, the new Joint Staff and Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the warfare branches within the services leading to divisive equipping, readiness, and engagement strategies. The norms for interactions in the ecosystem established during this period persist. 65

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The Emergence of the Cold War and Its Effect on Navy Operations Having no obvious opposing navy to defeat, the US Navy searched for a new paradigm as it demobilized from 6,768 active ships on Victory over Japan Day in August 1945 to 1,248 on June 30, 1946.2 Initial optimism over working with the Soviets faded as the Iron Curtain formed and Soviets were slow to withdraw from Iran. A State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee consisting of senior representatives from the three departments, supported by midgrade officers from the services, coordinated foreign and military policy. In practice, no coordination in the activities and thinking of these midgrade officers affected the operational fleet commanders. “King and the other admirals who had fought the war in Washington were accustomed to autonomy and were protected from interference, whether by the civilians, other services, or even the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff]. As a result, the Navy had been planning for the postwar world in a vacuum.”3 The Soviet Union was the most likely hypothetical threat, but not at sea. Though deployed globally, the navy was unable to project power far inland, whereas army air force B-29 bombers with bases around the world could reach far into the Soviet Union. As relations with the Soviets deteriorated, US foreign policy focused on Greece, Turkey, and Iran, but most naval forces and leading admirals outside of Washington were still in the Pacific. The pre–World War II conception that navies existed to fight other navies limited thinking about how to confront a land power. While Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had identified the Soviets as the main postwar threat as early as the fall of 1944, the uniformed navy was unwilling to accept that assumption. The Mediterranean was considered to be in the British sphere.4 However, following George F. Kennan’s “Long Telegram” of February 1946, in July 1946 the JCS formally recommended a policy of military deterrence to counter the Soviets and what amounted to worldwide containment. Not being able to count on allies that were recovering from the war for much support in the early phases of a conflict, the implication was that the United States should have forces and bases overseas to protect these nations until they could mobilize for war. This formed the basis for the Truman Doctrine presented to Congress on March 12, 1947. In September 1945, Forrestal had convinced President Truman to issue an executive order that again subordinated the CNO to the secretary of the navy, returned control of the bureaus to the secretary, and severed the CNO’s direct line to the president. With Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz becoming CNO at the end of 1945, by spring 1946

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Forrestal was making progress in clearing conceptual roadblocks by reorganizing the navy at the highest levels and bringing in new people from the combatant fleets. Dissatisfied with the navy’s postwar defense plan, Forrestal ordered a panel of three flag officers to evaluate it. Vice Admiral Harry W. Hill argued for a balanced force of air, surface, subsurface, amphibious, and support units “capable of effecting a landing and occupying territory against land-based air and ground opposition.”5 He also argued for equal forces in the Atlantic and Pacific, each with the ability to respond to any crisis. He clearly identified Soviet Russia as the major threat. Nimitz concurred with Hill. Soon thereafter, in March 1946 Hill became president of the Army-Navy Staff College at Fort McNair, Washington (soon to become the National War College), and Admiral Raymond A. Spruance became president of the Naval War College, charged by Nimitz to change the thinking of the navy and the nation. Nimitz also appointed new and often young flag officers from combat commands in the Pacific to OPNAV. In early 1946 British and US units had withdrawn from Iran, but Soviet General Secretary Stalin was refusing to do so. Spruance began gaming war against the Soviets. Hill had Bernard Brodie and George Kennan on his faculty. Brodie had established himself as an analyst of naval strategy and argued that the “ultimate naval goal was to control transportation over the seas during wartime” and “to project armies and air forces ashore across the seas.”6 This initially framed a new warfighting strategy for the navy. As the Cold War matured, the US Army would argue for Brodie’s formulation while the navy envisioned a greater role for itself in influencing the outcomes of battles where transportation occurred principally by sea and where naval forces could directly attack targets on land and, in conjunction with land-based air forces, exert air control over land battles.7 Kennan lectured at both the National and Naval War Colleges reiterating the theme of his “Long Telegram” that a stand against Soviet advances was mandatory. The navy viewpoint that had been six to nine months behind that of the administration caught up. The eastern Mediterranean became a focus as naval power could support Turkish and Greek forces in a fight against the Soviets. The interactions of games and lectures again served to create new concepts for naval employment. Navy deployments to the eastern Mediterranean began with the USS Missouri (BB 63) in April 1946, followed by the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CVB 42) carrier task force in August. In September, Forrestal confirmed that there would be a continuing navy presence in the eastern Mediterranean, and “[Admiral] Forrest Sherman’s Maritime Strategy

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statement of early 1947 presaged President Truman’s March declaration of the doctrine of containment.”8 By 1950 a permanent forward Sixth Fleet had been established in the Mediterranean. Though the Navy ended its permanent carrier presence in the western Pacific in 1947, it resumed in 1950 with the Seventh Fleet. A combination of forward deployed, surge deployed, or forces on extended cruises responded to crises in Greece, Turkey, Israel, the Persian Gulf, Norway, Berlin, and China. The employment strategy of the Korean War did not cause much deviation from the pattern of two fleets forward. In addition to readiness for nuclear strike, the fleets’ roles included naval diplomacy, crisis response, and various contingencies. Each fleet was designed to conduct the full range of missions, leading to the notion of “combat credible” presence. Smaller forces were deployed intermittently to other parts of the world. Attempts to base the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean met with partial success in the form of permanent headquarters, but the battle forces continued to rotate. In 1972–1973 the Seventh Fleet and Marines were hosted in Japanese bases. Other smaller units were also based overseas. The navy added a third hub in the Persian Gulf region in response to the Iranian revolution and seizure of the US Embassy in 1979. Forces deployed from the continental United States met this demand. Various changes in US interests, international developments, systems, and tactics resulted in adapting the organization of fleets over the years. However, the pattern of numbered fleets for various regions and mission areas remained. The demobilization of the wartime fleet and limited ship construction meant sustaining this policy with fewer ships beginning in the late 1940s and continuing until today. As Swartz and McGrady note: During the later part of the 1940s, the peacetime deployment strategy of the fleet was transformed, aligning now not only with the transoceanic employment strategy adopted toward the end of World War II, but also with the capabilities that resulted from the war’s procurement [equipping] strategy, and with the emerging planned wartime employment strategy against the Soviet Union. Combat-credible forward presence independent of advanced bases became the characteristic way the fleet would deploy for the next half-century and more.9

Evolution of Collective and Cooperative Security and of a Web of Alliances As US power grew and the security environment changed, the value to the United States of security arrangements with foreign governments

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increased. Having just achieved independence from Britain, the United States was very cautious about being exploited in some entangling alliance involving disputes between greater, European powers. As the United States created and sustained the post–World War II global order, alliances and security partners became an essential asymmetric advantage against its rivals. The League of Nations

After the United States had been pulled into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson fostered a League of Nations to resolve disputes diplomatically before they led to war. Isolationists in the United States succeeded in preventing Senate ratification of the treaty. The Germans explored using the league to defend against a Polish incursion into East Prussia or Upper Silesia in a political-military game in 1929. The play of the League of Nations anticipated future developments when it arrived at “no assertive measure that would have really deterred the aggressor.”10 The Germans concluded that the League of Nations would play no significant role. Essentially, the Germans turned the game on its head as it became the scenario for border actions that triggered the Polish army and the false flag attack by Polish insurgents used by the Wehrmacht in 1939 to justify the invasion of Poland.11 The league stopped its operations following Hitler’s invasion of most of its members, and Switzerland’s concern over hosting it while maintaining neutrality. The United Nations

President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the name “United Nations” in a Declaration by the United Nations on January 1, 1942, when representatives of twenty-six nations pledged their governments to continue fighting together against the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan). A United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference was held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944 with delegates from forty-four countries. These countries pegged their currencies to the US dollar, based upon gold, to create an efficient foreign exchange system, prevent competitive devaluations of currencies, and promote international economic growth. The Bretton Woods Agreement also created two important organizations—the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.12 Having addressed economic concerns, the next conference was at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, August to October 1944. Here allied delegates laid the groundwork for an international organization to

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maintain security and peaceful development in the postwar world. The organization was to possess considerably more authority over its members than the defunct League of Nations.13 A United Nations Conference on International Organization April–June 1945 in San Francisco drafted a charter for the United Nations that was ratified by the fifty-one member countries on October 24, 1945.14 The UN Charter established a Security Council with the power to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” and to take military and nonmilitary action to “restore international peace and security.” It also established a Military Staff Committee with the responsibility for the planning and strategic coordination of forces placed at the disposal of the UN Security Council. Chapter VII of the UN Charter addresses “Action with respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression.” Article 51 states, “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”15 Though not defining collective defense, the charter, largely drafted by the United States, established the principle of nations working under one command against an aggressor. The first big test of the United Nations came in 1950 when northern Korean forces invaded the south. The United States was able to obtain a resolution for the use of force because the Soviets, who had veto power as a permanent member of the Security Council, were boycotting the UN for recognizing Chiang Kai-shek as the legitimate leader of China.16 Though the United States provided about 90 percent of the forces, during the war and the reconstruction period following the signing of the Armistice Agreement, twenty-two countries contributed either combat forces or medical assistance to support South Korea under the UN flag.17 Many of those nations continue to provide representation to the Combined Forces Command in Korea. North Atlantic Treaty Organization

The foundations for NATO began with Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. There he stressed the necessity for the United States and Britain to act as the guardians of peace and stability against the menace of Soviet communism. In 1947, as Soviets undermined freely elected governments and prevented elections where they could, the United States adopted the Truman Doctrine for

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containing the Soviet Union and implemented the Marshall Plan for European recovery. The Soviets’ blockade of Berlin in 1948 cemented agreement on the need for an alliance to deter Soviet expansionism, forbid the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent, and encourage European political integration. These developments led to the creation of NATO in April 1949. General Dwight D. Eisenhower became its first supreme commander. In Article 5 of the NATO treaty, the new allies agreed “an armed attack against one or more of them . . . shall be considered an attack against them all” and that following such an attack, each ally would take “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force” in response. Other articles laid the foundation for cooperation in military preparedness between the allies.18 As with the UN, the treaty called for collective defense, but also went beyond to address nonmilitary measures to promote security and peaceful development. The Central Treaty Organization

A more improbable alliance that formed to prevent Soviet expansion to its south occurred with the Middle East Treaty Organization, which became the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO). Turkey and Iraq founded the Baghdad Pact for mutual defense and security on February 26, 1955. They invited Pakistan to join, but Pakistan was not willing to do so without the participation of the United States. Pressured by Britain and the United States, Pakistan signed the Baghdad Pact on September 23, 1955, along with Britain and Iran, forming the Middle East Treaty Organization. Due to concerns over war involving Israel and the Arab states, the United States functioned as an unofficial observer, but it signed individual agreements with each of the countries in this pact.19 Iraq’s 1958 revolution resulted in Iraq leaving the pact, and the name was changed to CENTO. Formed at the will of Britain and the United States, the participating countries had different objectives. The pact enhanced Iraq’s power and demonstrated loyalty to the West as it broke diplomatic relations with Moscow in January 1955. Pakistan expected the pact to balance relations with India and help it obtain economic benefits from West. Iran wished to align itself with the West; Iranian Prime Minister Mosaddeq saw an important opportunity in the alliance for the protection of his government, which did not work. Though not a signatory, the United States participated in the pact to contain the Soviets. The British also wanted to roll back the influence of the Soviet Union in the Middle East and to sustain their influence in the region.

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Subsequent developments in the Middle East weakened the pact. In 1956, Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser took control of the Suez Canal. Israel replied by invading the Sinai Peninsula. British and French forces interfered but were dissuaded by the United States. The British lost prestige in the region, which in turn diminished its leadership in the Baghdad Pact. The Egyptian-Syrian union, an Iraqi revolution, and civil unrest in Lebanon weakened regional stability. In response to these changes, the United States announced the 1957 “Eisenhower Doctrine” as an explanation for intervening in Lebanon. The members of the Baghdad Pact except Iraq endorsed the US intervention. The main purpose of CENTO was to limit the influence of the Soviet Union and communist movements, and to provide collective defense and security. However, CENTO never actually provided its members guaranteed collective defense or met the participants’ security goals. South Asia and the Middle East became unstable and weak regions during the 1960s with the ongoing Indo-Pakistani wars and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Pakistan tried fruitlessly to get support in its wars with India from CENTO, but this was rejected because CENTO was aimed at containing the Soviets instead of India. The Iranian revolution brought the end of the organization in 1979. Along with Iran, Pakistan also left CENTO. Every country had their respective national interests regarding CENTO, but the pact proved fragile as it did not achieve the participants’ goals and objectives collectively.20 Southeast Asia Treaty Organization

The United States, France, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September 1954 to prevent communism from gaining ground in the region.21 Other than the Philippines and Thailand, all other treaty partners were from outside the region. The Philippines enjoyed close ties with the United States and was fighting a nascent communist insurgency. Thailand also had concerns over communist subversion coming from southern China. Other countries in the region were less concerned over the potential for Chinese communist subversion. Burma (now Myanmar) and Indonesia preferred to maintain their neutrality. Others were unsympathetic or found it politically difficult to give formal support to the organization. “Agreements of 1954 signed after the fall of French Indochina prevented Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from joining any international

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military alliance, though these countries were ultimately included in the area protected under SEATO and granted “observers” status.”22 Australia and New Zealand were interested in maintaining security to their north and maintaining the relations that they had established with the United States during the recent war. The United Kingdom and France still had interests in their former colonies and continued to govern some territories adjacent to the region. Again, for Pakistan the appeal of the pact was the potential for receiving support in its struggles against India. The United States believed Southeast Asia to be a crucial frontier in the fight against communist expansion. It viewed SEATO as essential to its global Cold War policy of containment. SEATO headquarters were in Bangkok, Thailand. It maintained no military forces of its own and had only a few formal functions. The organization hosted joint military exercises for member states each year. “As the communist threat appeared to change from one of outright attack to one of internal subversion, SEATO worked to strengthen the economic foundations and living standards of the Southeast Asian States.”23 To address linguistic and cultural difficulties between the member states that presented problems, it sponsored a variety of cultural, religious, and historical meetings and exhibitions, and the non-Asian member states sponsored fellowships for Southeast Asian scholars. The SEATO charter undergirded the American rationale for the Vietnam War as the inclusion of Vietnam as a territory under SEATO protection gave the United States the legal framework for its continued involvement there. “The United States used the organization as its justification for refusing to go forward with the 1956 elections intended to reunify Vietnam, instead maintaining the divide between communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam at the 17th parallel.”24 The SEATO defense treaty was weak compared to NATO. It called only for consultation, leaving each individual nation to react individually to internal threats. It had no independent mechanism for obtaining intelligence or deploying military forces, so the potential for collective action was necessarily limited. “Moreover, because it incorporated only three Asian members, SEATO faced charges of being a new form of Western colonialism.”25 Its members had differing incentives for participation beyond the problems attached to the guerrilla movements and local insurrections that plagued the region in the postcolonial years. By the early 1970s, members began to withdraw from the organization. Neither Pakistan nor France supported the US intervention in Vietnam. Pakistan formally left SEATO in 1973. As with CENTO, the organization failed to provide it

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with assistance in its ongoing conflict against India. With the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the most prominent reason for SEATO’s existence disappeared, and SEATO formally disbanded in 1977. ANZUS Pact

Though SEATO disbanded, defense treaties with Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia and New Zealand remained. An ANZUS Pact between Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, for the purpose of providing mutual aid in the event of aggression and for settling disputes by peaceful means, had come into force in 1952. The United States offered the pact to Australia for compensation as it promoted Japanese rearmament. In the mid-1980s New Zealand banned nucleararmed vessels from its ports, including those of the US Navy. “In response, the United States formally suspended its treaty obligations to New Zealand in 1986 and reduced the two countries’ military ties. The three nations remained formal parties to the treaty, but in practical terms ANZUS was inoperative from then on.”26 The rise of China with its attendant expansion of its armed forces has resulted in US and New Zealand’s armed forces working together more closely again. A recent agreement between China and the Solomon Islands government has increased the incentives for cooperation. By the end of the Cold War, in the Asia Pacific region the United States had treaties for mutual defense with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Thailand, and the Philippines. World War II left the United States with bases and facilities encircling Eurasia. In addition to allies, the United States arranged Status of Forces Agreements and Visiting Force Agreements governing the activities of US forces with other security partners in Asia and the Middle East. Managing alliances and partnerships, particularly with respect to burden sharing, requires continuous attention to sustain support for the relationships. As the British prime minister (1855–1865) Lord Palmerston said, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”27 Working with allies always presents challenges. For example, France, Spain, and Italy denied overflight to US aircraft flying from Britain to attack Libya in 1986, adding 1,300 miles each way to the mission and requiring multiple refuelings.28 The Carabinieri surrounded Seal Team Six when they landed without permission in Sigonella, Italy, to apprehend the Palestine Liberation Organization hijackers of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985.29 These are but two examples of scores of

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incidents where interests of allies were not congruent with those of the United States. The alliances affected and supported navy readiness and engagement strategies as operations and training with allies/coalition partners at sea became routine and port calls provided both material and morale support for vessels, aircraft, and crews on deployments lasting six or more months. Visiting foreign ports and training with allies/coalition partners provided the traditional means for naval diplomacy. Forward basing allowed forces to remain on station longer, increasing the efficiency of forward naval influence. Toward the end of the Cold War, combatant commanders began to think in terms of interactions with allies and security partners that would make it more likely for them to provide combat support in various contingencies, rather than merely making assumptions in plans.30 Planning for these interactions began as cooperative engagement at Pacific Command and evolved into theater engagement plans when adopted broadly by the Joint Staff and combatant commands. The doctrine then changed from engagement to theater security cooperation plans. The term engagement is two-edged to include engagement with potential adversaries like China and Russia and provides a more complete framework than security cooperation. Over its history, US security arrangements with foreign governments have evolved into a complex web of interactions that provide options for advancing US interests. Positioning the navy and other US armed forces forward enhances their influence and, as the Soviets complained at the end of the Cold War and the Chinese have emphasized, provides the United States both military and diplomatic advantages over its rivals. The National Security Act of 1947 to Goldwater-Nichols in 1986 Resisted by the navy at every step, national reorganizations that would institutionalize relationships developed during World War II and establish new civil-military relations for future US security had major effects on the navy’s ecosystem. General George C. Marshall advocated postwar unification of the Departments of War and the Navy, leading to what became known as the “unification debates” and the eventual passage of the National Security Act of 1947. In 1943, the army under Marshall attempted to create a single military department with a single chief of staff and assistant secretaries for land, sea, and air. Marshall was convinced that the existing arrangement

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was too inefficient. Following the Spanish-American War, the army had pushed for centralized power and control. Harry S. Truman had been an army artillery captain during World War I and had stayed in the National Guard until 1940, rising to the rank of colonel. He was sympathetic to the army’s ideas on reforming the military organization. Congress tabled proposed legislation during the war. The navy saw unification as a threat to independent command at sea and to naval air. The marines saw unification as a threat to their existence. After World War II, “the Navy was not certain that it could compete in a unified department with the powerful Army Air Forces, with its atomic mission, and its large parent service, the Army.”31 Fearing that the executive branch might gain an advantage with a unified system, and representing constituents with differing interests in the services, Congress supported the US Navy and Marine Corps position, resulting in the National Security Act of 1947. The act sought to provide for the authoritative coordination and unified direction of the armed forces under civilian control, “but not to merge them.” It provided “for the effective strategic direction of the armed forces for their operation under unified control and for their integration into an efficient team of land, naval, and air forces.”32 The act provided for a National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, various boards that were established in the conduct of the war, and a National Military Establishment headed by a secretary of defense. The act renamed the Department of War as the Department of the Army. It protected the Marine Corps as an independent service under the Department of the Navy. It established the US Air Force as a separate department with a chief of staff. The act formalized the JCS consisting of the chiefs of each service to, among other things, “prepare strategic plans and provide for the strategic direction of the military forces, . . . establish unified commands in strategic areas when such unified commands are in the interest of national security,” to formulate policies for joint training of the military forces, and for coordinating the education of members of the military forces. A staff was created to support the functions of the Joint Chiefs. The Joint Chiefs were to act as the principal military advisors to the president and the secretary of defense. The service secretaries were members of the National Security Council (NSC). Truman made James Forrestal the first secretary of defense. Congress amended the act in 1949. The amendment emphasized that the military departments were to be separately administered and that there would not be “a single Chief of Staff over the armed forces nor an armed forces general staff (but this is not to be interpreted as

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applying to the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Joint Staff).”33 It downgraded the status of the military departments from being executive departments and removed the service secretaries from the National Security Council, making it more difficult for them to go around the secretary of defense directly to the president. It renamed the National Military Establishment as the Department of Defense and subordinated the service secretaries to the secretary of defense. However, the amendment stipulated that the secretary of defense was not to direct the use and expenditure of funds in such a manner as to affect the ability of the services to perform the functions assigned by Congress. The position of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was officially established as a nonvoting member of the JCS. The chairman was responsible for presiding over the JCS and was made a statutory advisor to the NSC. New provisions in the act were added to reorganize fiscal management to promote economy and efficiency by adding a comptroller and guidance on administering funds, and added reporting requirements to the secretary of defense and to Congress. The act subordinated various boards to the secretary of defense while eliminating some, and made provisions for enlarging the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff. Revolt of the Admirals

As assistant secretary of war (1937–1940), Louis A. Johnson advocated expansion of military aviation. Bypassed for secretary of war by President Franklin Roosevelt, he participated in mobilizing US industry during World War II. Fearing another depression as the economy wound down after the war, President Truman’s approach to funding the military was to provide what remained from federal revenues after allocating funds for other purposes.34 Louis Johnson contributed to Truman’s campaign for president and lobbied to become secretary of defense as a staunch supporter of further unification and holding the line on defense spending. After a series of conflicts over defense budgets, Truman asked for Forrestal’s resignation and replaced him with Johnson as secretary of defense in early 1949.35 Truman and Johnson believed that the US possession of the atomic bomb was adequate protection against external threats. This put the navy at a disadvantage to the air force with its bases around the globe and bombers with the range to reach far inside the Soviet Union and China. After he took office, Johnson promised a drastic cut in the number of National Military Establishment boards and rapid unification, and

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stated that the autonomous conduct of any single service was a waste of resources and a disaster for America.36 Johnson believed that the nation no longer needed the navy or marine corps and that the air force was sufficient. He made preparations for mothballing or scrapping much of the navy’s conventional surface fleet. Truman disliked Marines dating back to his army service in World War I. With the help of Truman, Johnson reduced the marines’ budget, attempted to eliminate marine corps aviation, and barred the commandant from attending meetings of the Joint Chiefs. He scrapped or sold what he could of the army. He welcomed the passage of the amendments to the National Security Act that increased his authority, believing that it would allow him to achieve greater budget cuts. As the ecology changed, how the system was supposed to work was unclear or unaccepted, particularly by the navy.37 To ensure support from Congress, Johnson’s Consolidated Directive no. 1 demanded public acquiescence from the chairman of the JCS and the service chiefs requiring all public statements by active and retired military personnel to go through the OSD for review. Faced with large-scale budget cuts, competition between the services for remaining funds grew increasingly acrimonious. Johnson’s termination of the supercarrier United States without consulting either the Department of the Navy or Congress prompted the resignation of Secretary of the Navy John L. Sullivan and a “Revolt of the Admirals” in congressional hearings. Admirals questioned the ability of the air force’s B-36 to penetrate Soviet airspace. The new secretary of the navy, Francis P. Matthews, dismissed CNO Admiral Louis E. Denfeld for his criticisms of defense planning and the administration of unification. On reviewing the issues, the House Armed Services Committee questioned the qualifications of the army and air force to determine vessels appropriate for the navy, and Johnson’s failure to consult congressional committees before acting, thus asserting their role in such decisions. The events weakened Johnson’s position with the services. The Soviets testing an atomic bomb in September 1949 and the subsequent National Security Council policy paper NSC 68 further limited his ability to make further cuts. The cuts Johnson had made to all of the services came to a head during the Korean War. Defense budgets increased to make up for the materiel that Johnson had scrapped. Having lost all airbases on the peninsula to the communist forces, the USS Valley Forge (CV 45), soon joined by two more carriers, demonstrated the value of naval air power. Though Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had attempted to reestablish the influence of the general board, in the wake of the Revolt

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of the Admirals the new general board had neither the constitution nor the clout it held before the war: The short-lived new General Board functioning just after World War II was composed of young officers thought to be destined for three-star and four-star jobs. Forward-looking instead of backwardlooking, this Board took long-range planning seriously because people on it had to think about what they might need or want when they actually would be in charge. The drawbacks were, however, many. The members were not sure of their prospects to be as independent as members of the old Board. More important, because of their talent and promise, members of the board were quickly pulled off to tasks that, while often less important, were more urgent.38

The board became a casualty of the new national security structures dominated by the secretary of defense and the power of the Department of the Air Force in 1951.39 The military, industry, and Congress all learned from the Revolt of the Admirals as the norms for new interactions in the post–World War II ecology emerged. Congress further amended the National Security Act of 1947 in 1953 and 1958 to strengthen the direction, authority, and control of the secretary of defense subject to congressional oversight. The 1958 law explicitly granted the ability of a service secretary or member of the JCS to make recommendations to Congress on their own initiative, after first informing the secretary of defense. The amendments also clarified the chain of command, removing the service chiefs from operational command so that command over assigned forces went directly from the president through the secretary of defense to the unified and specified commanders, and directed that the president, through the secretary of defense, would establish those commands.40 The legislation focused the role of the services on organizing, training, equipping, and administering their forces, thereby supporting forces assigned to the combatant commands by the secretary of defense with the approval of the president. It established the roles of the service vice chiefs while reducing the number of assistant secretaries of the secretary of defense and of the military departments. Following accelerating advancements in technology and the Soviet launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the law also established a director of defense research and engineering and authorized advanced projects, leading to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency being established. The CNO’s influence on navy operations eroded when he was taken out of the operational chain of command by the 1958 Defense

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Reorganization Act.41 By the 1970s, Admiral Zumwalt commented that planning in the Pentagon had become so centralized that any longrange planning in OPNAV was “useful only to the CNO in his personal capacity in dealing with a centralized Pentagon and with meetings with the JCS, the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of Defense, the President, and congressional committees.”42 The Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986

Prompted by the fog and friction of joint operations in attempts to rescue US hostages in Iran in April 1980, invade Grenada in 1983, and fix problems caused by interservice rivalry, Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. Even after the 1958 law, each of the services independently created their own war plans and business plans for equipping future forces. The JCS operated under the principle that service chiefs had the last word in their domain. Agreements required a formulation to which all could agree. Congress perceived that the services dominated the system and emasculated the unified commands to the point that they were unified in name only. Unification was achieved by cooperation and coordination with mutual consent. The military departments retained a de facto role in operational chain of command and resisted strengthening the roles of the unified and specified commanders.43 The effort to change the law began in February 1982 when chairman of the JCS General David Jones, US Air Force, testified to a House Armed Services Committee that the system was broken. His testimony triggered the traditional split between the army and air force chiefs voicing support for reorganization and the CNO and marine commandant vigorously opposed. However, the turnover of the service chiefs in the summer of 1982 resulted in the JCS recommending and the administration officially opposing JCS reform. This set the stage for a fight between Congress and the Pentagon. Personalities changed again in 1985. Senators Barry Goldwater and Sam Nunn working across the aisle on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Congressman Les Aspin chairing the House Armed Services Committee, and Admiral William Crowe becoming chairman of the JCS tipped the scales back toward reorganization. Also, the national security advisor Robert McFarlane convinced President Ronald Reagan to establish the Packard Commission to “examine the budget process, the procurement system, legislative oversight, and the organizational and operational arrangements,

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both formal and informal, among the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Unified and Specified Command system, the Military Departments, and the Congress.”44 These factors led the Senate and House to enact sweeping reforms despite continued opposition from the Pentagon. From the congressional perspective, the key problems were • an imbalance between service and joint interests, which they perceived as parochial service interests dominating, • military advice to the political leadership being watered down to the lowest common denominator, • inadequate education and experience of officers serving in jointduty assignments, and the services hindering the careers of officers so assigned, • unified commanders’ authority being incommensurate with their responsibilities, and confused and cumbersome operational chains of command, with the service components of unified commands more responsive to the service chiefs than the unified commander, • ineffective strategic planning, with the entire Pentagon devoting its attention to programming and budgeting, • ineffective mechanisms for supervising or controlling large-scale agencies such as the Defense Logistics Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency that had been created to provide common supply and service functions, • confusion over the roles of the service secretaries, • unnecessary duplication in secretary and service chiefs’ staffs, and • congressional micromanagement as Congress was too often in the weeds but not providing clear, but broad, strategic direction. The act freed the JCS chairman of the need to negotiate with the service chiefs. 45 His institutional perspective was to be that of the secretary. It clarified and strengthened the roles of the service secretaries in acquiring materiel. The act transferred all corporate functions of the JCS to the chairman (supported by a newly created vice chairman), made the chairman the principal military advisor with a mandate to provide that advice on the basis of the broadest military perspective, and made the Joint Staff responsible exclusively to the chairman. It also made provisions to improve the quality of officers assigned to the Joint Staff and the unified commands by adding joint duty as a requirement for promotion to flag officer (admiral and general) ranks. It also required assigning all

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military forces to the unified commanders and removed the JCS from the operational chain of command. No longer could services move forces in and out of regional commands without the approval or even the knowledge of the combatant commanders. To ensure sufficient authority, unified commanders were empowered to issue authoritative direction on all aspects of operations, joint training, and logistics, and to employ forces. A unified commander could now assign command functions to subordinate commanders and approve certain aspects of administration and support. In addition, they could select their headquarters staffs and subordinate commanders; they could suspend subordinates; and they could convene courts-martial. To address strategic planning, the act required an annual national security strategy, which was intended to provide the basis for fiscally constrained Pentagon budget plans and projections. The secretary of defense was to provide policy guidance to the chairman of the JCS and unified commanders for the preparation and review of contingency plans. Service components no longer prepared their own war plans. In the resource area, the act called on the defense secretary to address objectives and policies, mission priorities, and resource constraints. The intent was that the collective role of the military departments was to fulfill as far as practicable the current and future requirements of unified commanders. Congress also strengthened the supervision, budget review, and combat readiness of the growing defense agencies, and assigned new resource-related duties to the chairman of the JCS. The act also mandated reorganizing and reducing the military department staffs. In retrospect, the performance of the Joint Staff has generally been better than that of the OSD, leading to a perception of weakening civilian control. The advice provided by the chairman of the JCS is assessed as having significantly improved. The act did strengthen the authority of the unified commanders, but not to the extent envisioned for affecting service budgets and programs. The regional unified commanders have been thrust into broader roles as the Department of Defense is the only government agency that has officials stationed around the world with regionwide responsibilities. This has resulted in criticisms regarding their roles as “proconsuls” and the militarization of US government policies.46 The performance of forces in joint and combined operations has also improved significantly over the deficiencies exposed in the Iraq hostage rescue attempt and invasion of Grenada. In giving service secretaries more power, the act essentially reduced the role of service chiefs to administering their staffs and managing the competition for budget share. Within OPNAV, the CNO con-

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tinued to manage the competition for budgets between the major (air, surface, and submarine) platform barons, and those responsible for other functions. Alignment between the secretary and the service chief became even more important for success. Requirements for joint duty assignments reduced the talent assigned to OPNAV.47 However, strategy documents and the act in general have had few impacts on service programming and budgeting. Though the Packard Commission focused on business practices, defense management and administration were never a priority for the act’s drafters.48 Practices initiated by Secretary of Defense McNamara in the early 1960s continued to dominate intellectual effort in the Pentagon. Nuclear Weapons and the Roles of Civilian Defense Analysts and Computers The Manhattan Project assembled civilian scientists with the requisite skills to design and assemble the first atomic bombs. The existence of nuclear weapons mandated a change in the character of US strategy formulation. The role of armed conflict in international relations seemed to be significantly altered now that the initial blow could be terrible and presumably decisive. A queenpin of Clausewitz’s theory on what limited the totality of war had been removed: “If war consisted of one decisive act, or asset of simultaneous decisions, preparations would tend toward totality, for no omission could ever be rectified.”49 The need to maintain war as an instrument of policy remained. Clausewitz had considered the formulation of strategy as falling within the conduct, rather than the preparations, for war. This remained true in the sense of conducting a long-term military competition. However, the need to have forces and plans ready, in place for immediate use, increased the premium on the formulation of strategy well before contingencies arose. Nuclear weapons added urgency to the formulation of strategy at the national level. Seeing the consequences of war as so terrible, deterrence became the first priority, followed closely by the management of crises as the most plausible path to war.50 Nuclear deterrence strategy presented a contradiction. Once the Soviets had nuclear weapons and delivery systems, the strategy called for apparently irrational action of mutual destruction.51 The speed of nuclear attack and lack of information on the opponent’s action dictated rigid plans and timetables, similar to those that triggered World War I. Now political leaders had only minutes to consider appropriate action. Plans had to be

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based upon theoretical abstractions in relating targeting plans to strategic objectives as nuclear weapons and missile technology advanced.52 Foundations for critical analysis were weak as actual events comparable to nuclear war could only be imagined. Civilians constituted a much greater part of the national security and military “society” than they had before. Though civilians had always been involved in the development and production of military technology, advancements such as the airplane and electronics (e.g., radars and sonars) and particularly the atomic bomb, embedded civilians in military preparations. The achievements of operations research groups of civilian scientists and mathematicians that emerged to assist commanders with operational, tactical, technological, and organizational decisions using new mathematical techniques enhanced civilian influence and legitimized civilian roles in dealing with strategic and operational military issues. No military man could claim more expertise or experience in the logic of nuclear warfare than the civilian defense intellectual. The pace of technological change in general, and computers in particular, further advanced the roles of civilians in their relationships with the military. Civilians came to dominate the analytical techniques and processes used for making decisions on military matters. With McNamara’s reforms and his establishing a Systems Analysis Office in OSD, processes for assessing “cost-effective” systems reinforced attention to programs and budgets that dominated intellectual effort and staff time within the Pentagon. As the services competed for funding, this evolution further eroded the focus of analysis following World War II from, in Clausewitz’s terms, “war proper” to the preparations for war—from operations research to weapons systems analysis. The Rise of Operations Research and Management Science

Scientists played a much greater role in military operations in World War II than they had previously, creating a new field of operations research whose techniques applied to management science. Patrick M. S. Blackett, a British physicist with Royal Navy experience in World War I, pioneered efforts to integrate emerging technologies into combat operations at the beginning of World War II.53 Beginning with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in 1940, Americans followed suit employing scientists first to develop better naval weapons and countermeasures, then across the full scope of military operations to quantify effects of various alternatives as an aid to command decisions.54 These

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efforts led to the development of various techniques of mathematical programming for optimization under a set of constraints and to advancements in statistical analysis and analyzing stochastic processes to quantify chance. At the beginning of World War II, the military generally expected the scientist to produce improved technology, but not to tell them how to use the resulting systems. Therefore, it took the advent of complicated technologies such as radar and sonar, and successes in areas such as air defense, hunting enemy submarines, protecting convoys, bombing, and mining to persuade reluctant military professionals that the scientist could offer something of value to the conduct of military operations.55 By the end of the war the role of the civilian analyst was firmly ensconced in the military planning system. Building on the successes of operations research during the war, in 1946 each US military service established its own civilian-dominated research and analysis group.56 These took the form of federal contract research centers, which had special contractual relationships with the government.57 The navy set up the Office of Naval Research to work with the nation’s universities and transformed its Operations Research Group into the Operations Evaluation Group. This later became the core of the Center for Naval Analyses. Similarly, the air force established RAND (initially as a part of Douglas Aircraft, then as a separate institution in 1948). The army installed its Operations Research Office (ORO) at Johns Hopkins University. As the focus of effort shifted from researching operations to weapons evaluation, the Joint Chiefs of Staff founded a Weapons System Evaluation Group, which became the Institute for Defense Analyses in 1956. In August 1957 the Office of Naval Research sponsored a Military Operations Research Symposium. Continued events led to the incorporation of the Military Operations Research Society in April 1966. Universities adopted operations research curricula employing and further developing the mathematical programming and stochastic analysis techniques originated in World War II. Gaming expanded from the war colleges to military service staffs with contract support, as McHugh explained: The Air Force established a service-headquarters-level gaming activity, the Air Battle Analysis Center (ABAC) in mid 1957. The Navy set up Op-06C, the Office of the Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations for War Gaming Matters in early 1958. About two years later the Army established the Strategy and Tactics Analysis Group (STAG); The Marine Corps, the Landing Force War Game Group (LFWGG) at the Marine Corps Landing Force

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Development Center. In early 1961 the Joint War Games Control Group (JWCGC) was activated to plan, control, and supervise joint war games for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Two years later this group was expanded and redesignated the Joint War Games Agency (JWGA). Its mission remained unchanged.58

Except for political-military games, the JWGA used service gaming facilities and personnel, and contract support, but did not conduct their own war games. Before World War II, war gaming had been limited to war colleges and involved few professional civilian war gamers. The 1955 War Games Conference at the University of Michigan was attended by fortythree representatives of the armed services, civilian research agencies, and universities. “The Second Conference on War Games held at the University of Michigan in 1957 was attended by representatives of more than fifty military and civilian activities and groups. During the same year the American Management Association introduced its business game.”59 Martin Shubik and Garry Brewer pointed out that in 1974: The vast majority of the 400 to 500 MSGs [model, simulation, and game activities] found in the military survey were operational MSGs devoted to the investigation of doctrine, the composition of forces or to problems of allocation. This work was sponsored by all branches of the Department of Defense, including the Office of the Secretary. The Air Force was probably responsible for about 25 percent of the total activity; the Army, for about 40 percent; and the Navy and Marine Corps together for about 25 percent; the remaining 10 percent could be traced to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Secretary. About 60–70 percent of the MSGs were developed by contractors. . . . The major contractors included the Research Analysis Corporation, the Rand corporation, the Center for Naval Analyses, Stanford Research Institute, Battelle Memorial Institute, Tech Ops, Raytheon, General Electric and Booz-Allen Hamilton.60

Shubik and Brewer estimated several hundred professionals were involved in the construction of models, simulation, and games, and low thousands involved if one included part-time and specialist contributions. “A few behavioral scientists have participated in the development of human factors MSGs, such as those produced by the Army’s Behavioral Sciences Research Laboratories or the System Development Corporation in earlier years.”61 Through the 1970s and 1980s, for-profit contractors analyzing military problems using modeling and simulation for the various entities in the Department of Defense expanded to hundreds of corporations of var-

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ious sizes, many growing at 20 percent per year in this era.62 Part of Rear Admiral Stansfield Turner’s revolution in the curriculum at the Naval War College in 1972 emphasized the need of the college to reverse “our [the navy’s] increasing reliance on civilians and on ‘think tanks’ to do our thinking for us.”63 As contractors’ services came to represent about a quarter of the DoD’s budget, the market became saturated, though it remained dynamic through failures, mergers, and new starts. The Rise of Digital Computers

The navy had developed analog computers using mechanical gears for aiming weapons and other tasks before World War II. Pursuing his effort to determine whether a procedure existed to decide whether the truth or falsity of any given mathematical proposition could be proven (he proved that no such procedure existed), Alan M. Turing in 1936 published a paper describing automated machines that could perform mathematical calculations. In 1938, he informed the British Government Code and Cypher School run by the Foreign Office that he had begun thinking about encryption, and especially decryption, techniques. When the war broke out in September 1939, he reported to Bletchley Park and began work on breaking codes prepared by Germany’s Enigma machine. Turing’s work during the war led to a desire to “build a brain.” He devised ways to program an automatic electronic digital computer with internal program storage.64 In 1950, Turing wrote a paper questioning whether machines could think and provided his famous test on whether another human could determine if they were conversing with a human or a machine, and suggested how machines might learn.65 He anticipated thinking machines by the end of the century. Claude Shannon at Bell Laboratories, known for his contributions to information theory, wrote in 1950 about a chessplaying machine.66 John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern had noted the absence of a dynamic theory in their Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.67 In his 1951 paper “The General and Logical Theory of Automata,” von Neumann went on to propose thinking in terms of neural networks and what would be required for a computer to reproduce itself (which described the essence of DNA and RNA before James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA in 1953).68 Early digital computers used vacuum tubes and large computers like ENIAC at the Army Ordnance Department, Ballistics Research Laboratory, Aberdeen, Maryland, with 20,000 switching “organs” requiring large buildings. Soon researchers began to explore learning machines and neural networks. Using IBM prototype digital computers larger than

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refrigerators in 1952, John Holland began working on neural networks and Arthur Samuel began developing a program that could beat him at checkers. Samuel coined the term “machine learning.” By 1959, Samuel had a program that could beat him at checkers.69 Academics and researchers working on these subjects attended a conference at Dartmouth College in 1956, where they characterized the work as artificial intelligence (AI). Early work in AI produced results in “perception, natural language communication, formal (symbolic) reasoning, learning, and the strategic inference used in gaming.”70 However, futile efforts to scale up these advancements to solve general problems in the 1960s led to the termination of most US government funding for such research.71 But digital computers found more prosaic uses for speeding calculations. Their primary use involved extending the scale of tractable mathematical models applied to science and engineering and speeding calculations in human vs. electronic machine gaming, mostly tactical. In 1965, George Moore conjectured that the overall processing power of computers would double every year or two, leading some to think that all phenomena could be modeled usefully on computers. Efforts like TEMPER (Technological, Economic, Military, and Political Evaluation Routine)—created at the Raytheon Corporation in the 1960s for the Joint War Gaming Agency to determine causes and consequences of strategic warfare throughout the world—essentially attempted to model the world and failed. A review by Fred Iklé noted, “The prominence of the calculations continues because we know how to make them. Much as in a Freshman’s algebra test, we have tailored the problem to our capability to calculate.”72 The effort may have been useful had it been used as basic research into modeling social phenomena, but became dangerous when its results attempted to influence policy and strategy for Vietnam.73 McNamara’s Systems Analysis Office and Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System, and advances in computer processing power, laid the foundation for the return of a “vogue of mathematics” in military affairs that had been vanquished by Scharnhorst and Clausewitz 150 years earlier. The Postwar Naval War College and Naval Postgraduate School In 1946, Admiral Raymond Spruance became president of the college and restored an eleven-month curriculum. Nimitz’s brief instructions to Spruance were to revitalize the Naval War College, increase its pres-

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tige, and find a new direction for it. Spruance’s curriculum bore few points of resemblance to the prewar courses but expanded to include a broader set of subjects that officers like Spruance and Nimitz had to learn on the job as senior wartime commanders. The focus of the courses shifted from learning to teaching recent war experience. Clausewitz’s method of learning (which Sims had adopted), focusing on developing the character of future naval commanders and their ability to make sound decisions instinctually through self-knowledge, shifted to the import of technical knowledge. The mission of the college became “to further an understanding of the fundamentals of warfare with emphasis on future naval warfare, in order to prepare officers for higher command.”74 Fundamentals of warfare were deemed to include political, sociological, psychological, economic, and geographic factors, in addition to the strictly military subjects. The emphasis on teaching the estimate of the situation was deemed to have driven students from strategy to tactics, away from a synoptic view of naval warfare.75 Students now made estimates from perspectives of the US president, secretary of defense, or theater commanders. Less time was spent on the study of history than in the prewar curriculum and more on studying the world in which the commander must make his decisions. Recognizing the importance of logistics, Spruance brought in Captain Henry E. Eccles to emphasize that subject. The logistics course faded when Eccles moved on in 1951. Spruance also established a battle evaluation group that aimed to extract command decisions from major battles. The controversies created by that group resulted in its termination in 1958. War gaming no longer played the same role in the curriculum as it had before the war. A postwar faculty member writing on the college and its curriculum noted: World War II and subsequent developments have expanded manyfold the fields with which a high commander must be familiar. In the War College the problem of providing adequate time has been met in part by such steps as reduction of time-consuming game board problem plays and chart plot problem plays to one each, reduction of International Law from a leisurely three months to an intensive five days, and simplification of student research by providing compilations of useful information and by convenient layouts of currently applicable material.76

Naval War College games before World War II were analytical research games to develop strategy and tactics, consistent with Luce’s

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philosophy of not knowing answers. They developed the intuition of the participants and taught them habits of making sound military decisions and writing succinct orders. Like the college curriculum that sought to harvest the lessons of the recent war, where the staff prepared the materials for student discussion, games for the students following World War II were classified as educational, teaching lessons, rather than analytic, exploring and evaluating concepts.77 As with the lectures, the games contributed more to theoretical understanding rather than providing practical experience. The gaming did continue to provide some collateral benefits. Spruance appointed Commander Penn L. Carroll to develop strategic problems and war games, to include atomic weapons. The logistics group used games to develop the concept for a resupply ship that provided fuel, ammunition, and other supplies, which eventually reached the fleet in 1964.78 During World War II, the navy had a rough experience in learning how to present radar and sonar information to a ship’s captain and task force commanders. The distributed nature of the displays and inadequate communications procedures and tactics resulted in forfeiting the initiative to the Japanese in early battles around Guadalcanal and suffering heavy losses.79 Having developed combat information centers, flag plots, and tactics to speed decisionmaking, the Naval War College in 1945 initiated a request for an electronic display system that would eventually replace the game boards then in use.80 The Naval Electronic Wargaming Simulator, whose command centers appeared similar to a ship’s combat information center, began use at the Naval War College in 1958 following thirteen years of design and construction at a cost of $7.25 million. Initially, the system design called for simulating displays so that players could simulate shipboard procedures. Adding a battle damage computer to speed calculations used in adjudicating outcomes delayed development of the system and added to the costs of the system and of playing games. By the time the simulator was built, the games in the college curriculum no longer centered on ships’ combat information centers. The Naval Electronic Wargaming Simulator could simulate any section of the globe, varying from 40 to 4,000 miles on a side. Its 35,000 square feet of floor space included a flag plot, umpire plots, and twenty individual command centers, similar to combat information centers developed during World War II, with associated communications and computers accommodating a wide range of variables in weapon, ship, missile, and aircraft performance. Consistent with the postwar approach at the college, it was used principally for training and command exer-

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cises. In 1965, the college used it on thirty-six days principally for command and staff training, Atlantic Fleet staff exercises took fifteen days, and Destroyer School classes used twelve days. The system provided “the basic elements of mobility, firepower, vulnerability, and intelligence so that opposing commanders might exercise their professional judgment in the employment of assigned forces during a war game.”81 Though the college had invested in an updated gaming system with the prewar style of gaming in mind, the changes to the curriculum resulted in its occasional rather than routine use. One-quarter of the Atlantic Fleet was home ported in Newport following the war and officers assigned to ships could attend Naval War College lectures. However, the Naval War College’s interactions between the fleet and OPNAV never regained the prominence they had before the war. Efforts to require periodic war college education as officers progressed through their careers and to have the most promising officers attend failed. The Naval War College lacked a clear role: “Reforms to the War College were substantial and important ones, which reflected many of the insights gained in World War II; however, the college still lacked a clear Navy or Defense Department policy that firmly defined the college’s role and purpose.”82 Washington policymakers had little interest in having the college provide the kind of theoretical and practical work that required long years of intellectual development and exploration that it had before the war.83 The Naval War College evolved over time. In 1956, president Vice Admiral Lyle McCormick created a Naval Command Course for international navy officers. This effort was consistent with CNO Arleigh Burke’s efforts in the 1950s to “know your friends” through improving coalition fleet exercises and improving staff interactions.84 In 1960, the Naval War College initiated a series of military-media conferences.85 These efforts gave the Naval War College a direct role in broadening naval influence. By the mid-1960s, critics of the service war colleges found the colleges spending more time on national than on military problems, and the breadth of the curriculum was so extreme that it precluded “depth of view in any subject.”86 They claimed that colleges “had civilianized their curricula to the degree that they were not service-oriented; at the same time they did not reach the high quality of civilian universities.”87 Vice Admiral John T. Hayward, as new president of the Naval War College in 1966, established civilian chair-holders in different disciplines to stabilize the civilian faculty that had been on six-month to one-year contracts and refocused the junior command and staff course on planning for

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military operations where war gaming played a larger role. As McNamara’s “Whiz Kids” had come to dominate the Department of Defense, Hayward added military management, economics, and systems analysis to the curriculum, further embedding the systems analysis paradigm.88 In 1969, Naval War College president Richard G. Colbert created a foundation to provide “for activities and projects which the War College president wished to carry out but could not be funded officially.”89 The Naval War College Foundation would eventually provide resources for funding research institutes for subjects like China, Russia, and cyber operations that the college otherwise could not afford. Colbert also expanded the international program to include a Seapower Symposium attended by heads of free-world navies to discuss matters of mutual interest and created a five-day meeting of prominent civilians, numerous flag and general officers, and the staff, faculty, and students of the college to discuss global strategy to enhance community outreach and establish networks for supporting the navy.90 In 1972, the college added a Naval Staff Course “for junior officers of navies already represented in the naval command class and officers from smaller navies of the Third World countries friendly to the United States.”91 The Naval War College thus further increased its role as an instrument of naval influence. Armed with a mandate from CNO Elmo Zumwalt, Rear Admiral Stan Turner (a Rhodes Scholar) as Naval War College president brought in more of his Rhodes Scholar colleagues and overhauled the curriculum to focus on strategy and policy, systems analysis, and planning. He implemented a seminar and writing system that demanded more individual effort from the students. The strategy and policy course assigned about 1,000 pages of reading per week, preferring whole books to articles or excerpts. He reduced the number of outside speakers but emphasized a broad range of views and initiated advanced studies and more scholarly publications in the Naval War College Review.92 Turner was opposed to the way that war games used at the college had most students involved in writing complex orders rather than playing decisionmaking roles: “I wanted it so that they could actually see on a screen how their sonar beam went out. Then they would see the submarine closing and, as the beam would cross the submarine, the dice roll. On the screen you would see that you had a 50% probability and you did or didn’t make it that time.”93 The Naval Electronic Wargaming Simulator was not designed for this. This led to the use of tabletop games. Teaching players how to estimate the situation and communicate orders and learning the appropriate roles of each command echelon were secondary. Turner opted for a strong

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emphasis on what Luce had called “comparative” study, leaning on the theoretical learning rather than building logical tact in the officers using the “laboratory” of games, as had been the practice in the interwar years. Subsequent Naval War College presidents made minor changes following what became known as the Turner Revolution. However, the problem with preparing officers for higher command remained that the officers attending the college were not of that quality, even though subsequent CNOs set targets to improve the numbers and quality of the navy officers assigned. The Naval War College faced an ever-increasing problem beginning in the 1930s in having the most promising officers attend. The expansion of the fleet and emphasis on operational experience for command exacerbated the problem. However, the greater cause was “the lack of a systematic progressive system of professional education for middle grade and senior naval officers.”94 The college’s degraded reputation within the navy never appreciably changed. Gaming enjoyed a renaissance at the Naval War College in 1979 beginning with Rear Admiral Edward F. Welch becoming president and pushing the college toward operational matters and the fleet. The college started a series of Global War Games in 1979 to examine the ability of the United States and its allies to conduct an extended global war.95 Beginning as a Naval War College game with summer students and several notable outside experts, over a decade it grew into a game involving over 1,100 people including representatives from all combatant commands and services with broad participation from the Washington, DC, national security establishment and retired legislators for three weeks of the summer in Newport, Rhode Island. Extending naval influence to Washington was an unstated, but clear, objective of the games. The annual Global War Games series brought in all services’ campaign simulations to examine a protracted war with the Soviets and affected both naval and national strategic thought.96 Another contribution of the games was that from 1981 to 1987 the Global War Games brought into one setting the models of theater-level warfare most used by each of the services. The preparation and conduct of the games provided the opportunity for analysts from the various services to review and critique the data, logic, and approaches of each other’s models, and fostered the development of alternative models to improve the game from year to year. In 1981 the Naval War College began using its Enhanced Naval Warfare Gaming System. This system was designed as a computerbased simulation system to provide realistic wargaming in all areas of naval warfare, including tactical, strategic, and theater operations. The

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system provided tactical wargaming and decisionmaking training to battle group staffs. Its applications supported strategic mobility, logistics, and force-level planning for naval component commanders to the combatant commanders. It was also used to examine strategic and operational applications of naval forces within existing war plans, crisis action planning, and joint task force contingency operations. Naval warfare mission areas represented in the gaming system included air and antiair, antisubmarine, surface, mine, strike, amphibious, and electronic, and operational deception. Up to 2,000 agents could be represented at a variety of levels from individual units to multicarrier, theater-level battle forces up to global, multitheater war. Its various models considered how sea and atmospheric conditions affected each warfare area, such as air operations, and weapon and sensor performance. Virtually any geographic region in the world could be represented through adjustment of the parameters describing the sea and atmospheric conditions. The system had the capability to use fictitious maps should the scenario avoid actual geography for coalition game purposes. In 1987 it was installed at tactical training group commands in the Atlantic and Pacific. It provided combat scenario training support prior to and during Operation Desert Storm in 1990–1991.97 During the 1980s, a new Center for Naval Warfare Studies and SSG employed this system for games similar to those conducted between the wars. However, during the period 1985–1989 the number of games supporting the Naval War College using the system dropped from twentyseven to eight.98 The Naval Postgraduate School

Established in 1909 as a school of marine engineering at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, the Naval Postgraduate School’s curriculum rapidly expanded in 1912 to include courses of study in ordnance and gunnery, electrical engineering, radio telegraphy, naval construction, and civil engineering as well as continuing the original program in marine engineering as it kept pace with emerging technology.99 A study by Admiral Ernest King (formerly head of the school in the 1920s) during World War II established that the existing arrangement would not meet the navy’s needs. King’s study and accelerating technology led Congress to authorize a separate Navy Postgraduate School in 1945. During World War II the student population increased from its 1938–1939 level to meet increasing demands for technical expertise. In 1943 the navy requisitioned the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey, California, formerly a resort

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hotel, for emergency war needs and established a preflight school for aviation cadets that became a technical school on electronics and communications in 1944. In 1947, Congress established the position of the superintendent of the Naval Postgraduate School. The navy purchased the hotel in 1948. In 1951, the school moved its 500 students and 100 faculty and staff from Annapolis to its current site. The school received accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges in 1955. In 1959, the Office of Naval Research began funding research at the school. Though focused primarily on technologies and science, a Naval Finance and Supply School established in 1934 in Philadelphia evolved into resource analysis at the postgraduate school in the 1950s. Its operations research curriculum, established in 1951, was one of the first in the country and became recognized as one of the strongest.100 The school has continued to evolve with emerging technology and extended its reach into national security issues as it established a Department of National Security Affairs in 1972 leading to a two-year master’s degree program in 1982.101 During the Cold War, the Naval Postgraduate School grew to complement the Naval War College as one of the navy’s primary intellectual organs. Contrasting the Pre–World War II and Cold War Navy Ecologies Figure 3.1 illustrates major features of the navy’s ecosystem during the Cold War, with agents in the navy society shaded. The number of agents forming the environment in which the navy needed to fit increased significantly. Interactions between the intellectual institutions, the fleet, and OPNAV diminished as competition for budgets consumed OPNAV. This, along with the Naval War College’s shifting to teaching lessons from the war and theories, disrupted the navy’s campaign of learning. The creation of a Center for Naval Warfare Studies with a strategic studies group as its core in 1981 restored interactions and a campaign of learning that had withered with its punctuated evolution following World War II. During the Cold War, “National leaders sought to use the Navy to protect U.S. territory, defend allies, protect commerce, prevent the rise of a hegemon, and act for the common good. As such, the Navy would serve as an instrument of encouragement, deterrence, reassurance, and compellence—all aiming to shape Soviet behavior.”102 Demands for the navy to provide justice in international relations, defend American

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Figure 3.1

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honor, and procure international respect to safeguard American interests greatly expanded. US forces remained forward in most of the locations that they occupied at the end of World War II and the Korean War as the navy established bases and forward operating locations to support forward stationed and deployed fleet operations. By the 1950s the navy deployed “combat credible” carrier and amphibious groups as opposed to the task groups of smaller vessels that it had before the war.103 Though CENTO and SEATO dissolved, the United States maintained NATO and its treaties in Asia along with bases and installations surrounding the Eurasian continent, and continued to encourage the states within those regions to act upon mutual interests. The geographic position of the US military weighed heavily on the Soviets toward the end of the Cold War as they pressed for arms controls, including controls over the operations of naval forces. Beginning in 1986, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev sought treaties to control conventional (non-nuclear) forces in addition to nuclear arms control so that he could focus on reversing the Soviet Union’s economic decline. Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev used a map of the globe centered on the Soviet Union showing US forces, bases, and installations to all US delegations that he met, illustrating overwhelming US advantages to support the Soviets’ arguments for arms control.104 Naval forces operate forward for extended periods without having to secure diplomatic clearances. While using forward installations, they require less expensive fixed infrastructure than foreign army and air force bases, thereby creating a less disruptive footprint on foreign soil. “Further, their mobility enables them to shift from one theater to another and rapidly aggregate or disaggregate depending on the location, size, and type of operation intended.”105 From 1946 to 1990, the national command authority turned to US naval forces in 207 crises, exclusive of wars in Korea and Vietnam.106 Crises are defined here as activities not considered to be war, having fewer than 1,000 casualties—again illustrating the US partition of war and non-war. This list does not include naval participation in humanitarian operations, intelligence, and other special operations, operations that are undertaken to support US diplomacy, law enforcement operations, or incidents at sea such as collisions or harassment between US Navy and Soviet vessels. Aircraft carriers were involved in 68 percent of these actions and amphibious ships were involved in 54 percent. US Air Force fighters and/or bombers responded to 26 percent of the crises, and US Army forces were involved in 18 percent. The geography of the crisis response shifted with international political developments but

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occurred in all theaters. Operating through the chain of command at the time, forward stationed and deployed US naval forces played the major role in Cold War crisis response. The National Security Act of 1947 and subsequent legislation reduced the CNO’s control over naval operations and plans, though he retained considerable control over navy missions and manning of navy components to the combatant commanders, concepts for employment of the navy, and force design. However, the general board succumbed to the new ecosystem of an OSD that dominated service program planning, along with powers in OPNAV taking the lead on strategy and force design issues. In 1966, McNamara succeeded in abolishing the navy bureaus and establishing a Navy Material Command, causing another reexamination of OPNAV’s organization between functional and platform offices, but not reconciling challenges regarding the autonomy of program officers to meet the intent of the CNO. Program officers continued to hold power independently from their OPNAV sponsors through the end of the Cold War, and after, as responsibilities shifted between the secretary of the navy and the CNO with Goldwater-Nichols.107 By the 1970s the fleet operations office in OPNAV noted, “Practically the entire OPNAV organization is tuned, like a tuning fork, to the vibrations of the budgetary process. . . . There is a vast preoccupation with budgetary matters at the expense of considering planning, or readiness or requirements, or operational characteristics or any of the other elements contributing to the ability of the Fleets to fight.”108 The navy reacted rapidly to demands to remain relevant in an age of nuclear weapons, first by acquiring carrier-based aircraft capable of delivering nuclear weapons, and then with a very rapid and successful submarine-launched ballistic missile program overseen directly by CNO Arleigh Burke. Though the nuclear deterrence missions received the priority required, the creation of Strategic Command and having relatively few navy officers involved in nuclear strike planning and operations required much less attention from the navy than many other issues. A small community of specialists oversaw navy interests in nuclear doctrine, operations, and force development, as defense intellectuals determined major elements of the strategy and technology.109 While not conducting “fleet problems” on the scale or with the same level of planning as between the world wars, each fleet experimented with tactics and new technology in exercises to meet emerging challenges and explore new opportunities, while addressing demands for training to sustain readiness. To allow carrier strike groups in the Mediterranean to survive long enough to launch nuclear attacks from

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within the range of Soviet naval bombers, as the navy awaited new air defense technologies, it developed tactical deception methods in a series of Haystack Exercises beginning in 1957. The Soviet introduction of nuclear-powered attack submarines with antiship cruise missiles in the 1960s led the navy to conduct a Unified Pacific Fleet Project for Tactical Improvement and Data Extraction (UPTIDE) for antisubmarine warfare groups to defend against missile and torpedo attacks by preventing encounters.110 By the later 1970s, the navy had instituted a Tactical Development and Evaluation (TAC D&E) Program sponsored by the director for naval warfare in OPNAV (OP-095) and funded through the Office of Naval Research.111 As navy program offices produced new weapons, such as Harpoon and Tomahawk missiles, for which tactics for their employment had not been developed, the TAC D&E program served as a liaison with the fleets to develop, document, and share tactics, as well as to develop tactics to address the kinds of challenges that led to Haystack and UPTIDE exercises.112 However, other than sponsorship, OPNAV played a minor role in planning and learning from fleet exercises as the general board had between the world wars. The gulf between OPNAV’s focus on program planning and the fleet’s focus on readiness for crises and war; naval engagement with allies, partners, and adversaries; and innovating to address challenges and take advantage of opportunities widened well before the Goldwater-Nichols legislation and the increased authorities of combatant commanders. Following Goldwater-Nichols, the service secretaries gained greater authorities over acquisition, and the service chiefs were reduced principally to managing and administering their staffs and service personnel, establishing service “requirements” and their roles as members of the Joint Chiefs. They remained the chief uniformed spokesmen for their service. The status of the Naval War College had changed dramatically from when it had the most senior officer as part of the OPNAV organization in 1916.113 OPNAV no longer turned to the college for innovative ideas to integrate with Washington staffs into strategy or equipment; nor did the fleets in formulating their war plans. Following World War II, the college was intended to be a source of educated officers, but not the same source of strategic and tactical concepts that it had been before the war. As noted, it was a place that promising officers wished to avoid, not the source of future navy leadership that it had been. The curriculum emphasized “comparative studies” involving lectures, reading, and writing that provided what Kant had termed theoretical reasoning, but at the expense of involving the students in the “laboratory method” of war

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games focused on developing concepts and logical tact needed for rapid decisionmaking in battle. The curriculum sought more to teach the lessons learned during the war rather than to learn by exploring new concepts using games. Making estimates of the situation and writing orders did not receive the emphasis that it had before World War II as the curriculum for the senior class turned more to national policy and strategy, defense economics, and procedures for joint operations, rather than the prewar focus principally on military strategy and tactics. With its wartime expansion and the evolution of the security environment and national security enterprise, the organizational reforms that Luce had sought to create a navy staff accelerated. However, the navy’s intellectual foundations withered. As one teaches to replicate and educates to illuminate, the emphasis on the theoretical in the absence of learning practical logical tact diminished the education of the officers. The college went from a learning to a teaching organization. The Naval Postgraduate School contributed to technical developments and prototyping equipment, but suffered from officers’ concerns similar to the Naval War College that time devoted to education rather than serving another fleet tour would harm their careers. The numbered fleets organized for the purposes of the war became regional fleets driven by deployment schedules, disconnected from the navy’s intellectual organs. Service rivalry focused OPNAV on the society in Washington competing for budgets, further degrading the prewar interactions that had made the navy’s campaign of learning so successful. Big Navy was no longer a learning society. Successful Navy Learning Societies During the Cold War Interactions among the major intellectual, operational and training, and equipping organs within the navy deteriorated after World War II as the focus turned to interactions with an increasing number of agents in Washington, and the CNO’s agency was reduced. However, several subsocieties demonstrated successful campaigns of learning, developing concepts for future combat and operations that contributed to enhancing naval influence. The Submarine Force

From a force of 232 submarines on Victory over Japan Day, the United States had only 74 submarines three years later.114 Faced with extensive

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demobilization, the submarine force sought a new mission. The force knew almost nothing about antisubmarine warfare (ASW), having the capability to sink only submarines on the surface during the war. Though they did not have an adversary like the Japanese or German maritime forces, the Soviets were in the process of building a large submarine force. The submarine community received support from the navy to establish Submarine Development Group TWO (DEVGROUP) at the submarine base in Groton, Connecticut, in 1949 to develop ASW capability with a force of four diesel submarines. The group’s new commander reached out to the nearby Naval Underwater Sound Laboratory in New London. Working closely with scientists and technicians from the Sound Laboratory and Woods Hole in Massachusetts, the group worked on understanding acoustics, improving sonar arrays, and quieting the submarines by removing deck structures. The first decade was devoted to the basics such as understanding sound propagation paths; future president Jimmy Carter, Lt. J. J. Ekelund, and others developing techniques for ranging using only passive bearings; and quantifying each factor in the sonar equation through measurement and experimentation under different sea conditions.115 The passive acoustic horizon expanded from a few thousand yards to tens of thousands of yards against snorkeling submarines. In addition to experiments, learning from World War II, every exercise torpedo fired by a submarine was reconstructed with information from the firing submarine and the target. The commander of the Atlantic submarine force directed the group to liaise directly with the technical community and with other echelons of the force to continue generating force-wide interest and support for ASW. By the 1960s, employing an open-door policy, the DEVGROUP had established interactions with institutions whose roots were in the World War II National Defense Research Committee, Undersea Warfare Division. These included government labs (Navy Electronics Laboratory, Navy Undersea Systems Center, Naval Air Development Center Johnsville), university labs (University of Washington, Penn State, Texas, Harvard, UCLA, MIT), and oceanographic institutes (Woods Hole, Scripps, University of Rhode Island). They took promising ideas and devices to sea to test them.116 Early on, the group established a relationship with the Royal Navy to learn of their wartime experience with passive sonar. This relationship continued into the future with a Royal Navy exchange officer on the staff. The next step was to involve the Operations Evaluation Group (OEG) established during World War II to bring scientific rigor to the

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task, conducting unvarnished analysis and providing results, “warts and all.” The OEG laid out a phased program: • Learning how to operate the sonar equipment at peak efficiency, train enough sonar operators to man a section watch rotation, and learn how to reduce self-noise to a minimum. • Determine the capability of installed sonar equipment at various speeds and under various oceanographic conditions. • Develop techniques for passive and active ranging, particularly bearings-only solutions. • Develop tactics for detection, approach, and attack on submerged submarines. • Develop group doctrine and tactics and evaluate the capabilities of submarines vs. submarines in all possible tactical situations, including close-in patrol off enemy submarine bases, barrier patrol lines in open sea to destroy enemy subs in transit; barrier patrol lines along convoy routes; tactics for combined air-submarine killer teams; tactics for operation in close proximity to convoys for convoy defense. • Determine the operational requirements for new and improved equipment to adequately perform the submarine vs. submarine mission. In its second decade, the DEVGROUP had nuclear submarines assigned, and a tactical analysis group (TAG) of operations analysts within the command was created. The TAG was tasked to: • Develop optimum tactics for submarine weapons systems, focusing on new Soviet submarine classes. • Preform detailed analysis of all submarine exercises and establish common exercise reporting and analysis techniques throughout the force. • Provide continuity of analysis of lessons from year to year and exercise to exercise. • Establish acceptable and understandable methods for numerically defining the ASW performance of submarine weapons systems. • Assist in uniting the separately commanded Atlantic and Pacific submarine forces in efforts to develop submarine ASW tactics that meet the needs of the differing threats and sea environments in their areas of operation. • Establish a tactical development simulation program for the Atlantic submarine force to provide statistical answers to operational questions that could not be answered from at-sea exercises.

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Under contract to the Office of Naval Research, Electric Boat developed a submarine tactical game for the DEVGROUP to investigate submarine tactics involving diesel submarines focused on detecting transiting submarines and vectoring a nuclear submarine to attack the target. The game was also used as a training device for reserve officers and commanding officers to “prepare himself, at least on the theoretical level, for an operation before he embarks upon it.”117 Using the TAG, the DEVGROUP developed quantifiable performance data from structured and free-play exercises on the 594-class nuclear submarines against diesel and first- and second-generation Soviet nuclear submarines in deep and shallow water. In a form of gaming, the DEVGROUP used the submarine school’s computer-controlled tactical trainers for analysis of proposed tactics with one trainer crewed by Blue and the other simulating Red based upon information learned from at-sea surveillance. The quantitative data convinced Secretary McNamara to advance the MK 48 torpedo program by two years, as it demonstrated that the extant MK 37 torpedo could not deal with speedy nuclear submarines. The submarine force became an example for how the other communities should be operating to understand their own capabilities and develop effective tactics. After two decades, the US submarine force had gone from having no capability to attack submerged submarines to having the dominant ASW capability in the world. The third decade of the DEVGROUP in the 1970s encompassed the glory years of the submarine force, adding passive narrow band digital processing, towed array sonars, the MK 48 torpedo, Harpoon and Tomahawk missiles, and digital combat systems. The DEVGROUP typically designed, conducted, reconstructed, and analyzed four submarine ASW exercises a year and held one exercise on a specially instrumented acoustic range in the Bahamas to test the latest sonar and weapon technologies. Commanders learned more during the cleverly structured submarine ASW exercises than in any other events.118 The submarine force made a practice of employing prototypes in real-world operations to learn how they performed and affected tactics, which provided interim capabilities while larger systems were designed and budgets for them put in program projections. The DEVGROUP added a semiautomated reconstruction facility to reduce the time required for reconstructing encounters, and began reconstructing and analyzing real-world operations involving interactions with Soviets at sea and other missions. Semiautomated reconstruction reduced the time required to produce data from these analyses for both use in tactics development and to promote arguments for submarine programs in the Pentagon. The DEVGROUP became more

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involved in fleet exercises, employing submarine element coordinators on carrier battle group staffs to coordinate orders to assigned submarines. Working with the TAC D&E program, they also formalized the approach for documenting developing and approved tactics, which became the standard for the navy. Employing the discipline developed for reactor plant manuals, they developed procedures for updating documents to provide common tactics and procedures for submarines in both the Atlantic and Pacific forces. Also, in the 1970s, the DEVGROUP had an experience similar to the “Squadron of Evolution” from the 1890s. Demands for the DEVGROUP’s nuclear submarines to take their turns in the deployment cycle led to assigning more submarines to make a full submarine squadron and redesignating the DEVGROUP as Submarine Development Squadron TWELVE in 1977. No longer was a group of submarines dedicated solely to tactics and technology development. However, the new squadron sustained the pace of exercises, and real-world operations enhanced the professional experience of the ship’s crews and provided actual experience for critical analysis. The squadron had first call on the services of the submarines assigned, and had access to scheduling submarines from both the Atlantic and Pacific to participate in submarine and fleet ASW exercises. Exercises also began to address the security of ballistic missile nuclear submarines as Soviet submarine deployments near US coasts increased. The 1980s saw the continuation of practices developed in the previous decades, as the addition of missiles and support for carrier battle groups began to dilute the sole focus on ASW. Also, the Walker family and associates’ espionage providing data on US operations and system characteristics led the Soviets to emphasize quieting their submarines, reducing the acoustic advantage and long detection ranges that US submarines had enjoyed. The proliferation of digital combat systems required a greater focus on training the force, extending the close relationship between the submarine school and DEVGROUP. Admiral Hyman Rickover played the seminal role in the development of nuclear power for the navy and a key role in influencing the submarine society during the Cold War. As director of US Naval Reactors he held a position in the Department of Energy as well as in the navy. He used this position and his strong support in Congress to outflank the CNO, OPNAV, and the materiel commands as he sought to expand nuclear propulsion beyond submarines and aircraft carriers to include surface combatants and ice breakers. CNO Elmo Zumwalt, in particular, commented on his outsized influence.119 He caused the submarine force to

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conduct exercises aimed at justifying the expense of submarines like the Los Angeles (SSN 688) class that had twice the shaft horsepower of the previous Sturgeon (SSN 637) class and cost twice as much to gain a bit more speed. To save costs, it was not equipped to perform intelligence missions or operate under the ice as the 637-class did routinely. Though the campaign of learning did not address the expenses, it demonstrated that submarines could not perform as an outer screen to aircraft carriers in a manner similar to surface ships due to limited communications and frequent carrier maneuvers, a rationale that had been advanced to justify the greater cost of the 688-class of submarines. Eventually, the 688-class was modified to operate under the ice and conduct intelligence as previous submarine classes could. The society interacting with the DEVGROUP/Submarine Development Squadron was extensive (see Figure 3.2). As with the society involved in the campaign of learning, close relationships between those exploring and learning new concepts, operating forces, technology developers, intelligence, and those governing naval operations led to success. The techniques used for the submarine force campaign of learning during this era also mirrored those of the pre–World War II campaign of learning (see Figure 3.3). Rapid developments in understanding the science and technology of underwater sound played a greater role than comparative and inductive study, and gaming was used to explore concepts and educate commanders, but not to develop concepts the way that it had been used up to World War II. However, the linkage of OPNAV to the centers of intellectual development and the fleet, and the interactions between unvarnished analysis and force development, and the use of prototypes were common to both pre–World War II and submarine force campaigns of learning. By the end of the Cold War, US submarine operations to collect intelligence in Soviet navy training areas had become a central concern in Soviet efforts aimed at naval arms control. US forward submarine operations not only gained intelligence, but provided crews with firsthand experience in interacting with Soviet naval forces in areas where they would operate during war, combining naval influence and the campaign of learning in one operation. Extending the Submarine Force Approach

Rear Admiral Guy Shaffer, a DEVGROUP commander (1972–1974), employed the submarine force approach in his five-year assignment as the director, Navy Command, Control, and Communications Systems. Using

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Figure 3.2

Figure 3.3

Submarine Force Campaign of Learning

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the TAC D&E program, Shaffer supported Pacific Fleet’s efforts in developing the Composite Warfare Commander Concept of command by negation of subordinate antiair, antisurface, antisubmarine, and electronic warfare commanders in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He also led the coordination-in-direct-support program to integrate submarines into a carrier battlegroup and the over-the-horizon targeting program to develop targeting systems for Harpoon and Tomahawk missiles being introduced into the fleet. He sponsored the writing of exercise analysis guides for each project specifying the tactical concepts, measures of effectiveness, and data required for analysis. These guides were then used to coordinate exercise designs, observation/data collection, reconstruction, and analysis. Shaffer’s program office introduced laboratory prototypes in fleet exercises. the coordination-in-direct-support program explored the use of acoustic and electromagnetic communications systems from extremely low frequency to lasers in ten fleet exercises in all numbered fleets over a three-year period. The program demonstrated that the initial concept for employing submarines as an outer screen for a carrier battle group was ineffective. However, having collected the timelines for every ASW communication in ten exercises demonstrated the need to put a submarine element coordinator at sea with the battlegroup commander communicating through the submarine operating authority ashore, and provided detailed fleet data for laboratory simulations.120 Similarly, the over-the-horizon targeting program exercises, which incorporated new surveillance technologies such as prototype integrated synthetic aperture radar, demonstrated that technology was insufficient to employ antiship Tomahawk in complex littoral environments with large densities of vessels. This resulted in an emphasis on land-attack Tomahawk over its antiship variant. Shaffer’s programs demonstrated the broader applicability of the submarine force approach to the fleet. The 1980s Maritime Strategy

Another successful navy society and campaign of learning provided strategic, operational, and tactical foundations for the Maritime Strategy of the 1980s. The strategy provided a wartime employment strategy built upon extant navy deployment practices and provided effective bureaucratic arguments for enlarging the navy. Its effect on the navy equipping strategy is questionable, other than supporting larger budgets for each OPNAV warfare baron. The CNO SSG, national intelligence, and a Navy Advanced Technology Panel were critical agents in the society that created and implemented the strategy (Figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4

Navy Society That Produced the 1980s Maritime Strategy

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The interaction of many personalities, organizations, and processes created this strategy. The navy chafed under President Jimmy Carter’s focus on the Central Front in Germany and the perception of its role as delivering the army to Europe. As commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Thomas Hayward had developed a sea strike concept and plans for attacking the Soviets in the Far East should war occur. He argued that swinging the Pacific Fleet to the Atlantic would leave our Asian allies exposed and be futile due to the time involved. Also, Carter’s secretary of the navy, W. Graham Claytor Jr., worked with Undersecretary James Woolsey and CNO James Holloway to employ forward, offensive operations as the preferred way to defeat the Soviet navy.121 Claytor brought Bing West, director for advanced research at the Naval War College, to see Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, who agreed to a study of navy power. Using a handpicked group of navy officers, West produced Sea Plan 2000 that concluded (1) any war with the Soviets would be global, and (2) US nuclear attack submarines would sink the Soviet navy and place all nuclear ballistic missile submarines at risk. West then offered to do a game with all services, which Brown approved. This led to the Global War Game series at the Naval War College beginning in 1979.122 The alignment between President Ronald Reagan, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, and CNOs Thomas Hayward and James Watkins was key to the bureaucratic success of the strategy. The efforts of the Honorable Robert J. Murray and the SSG, using new intelligence on the Soviet navy, were essential to operationalizing the strategy in fleet exercises and war plans. Lehman had participated in the review of Sea Plan 2000 and settled on a target of increasing the navy from fewer than 500 ships to 600 to execute a forward, offensive strategy.123 He received strong support from Reagan. As undersecretary of the navy in the Carter administration following Woolsey, Robert J. Murray found that navy officers thought either tactically or in broad strategic terms, but “had little time to think large thoughts.” The concept of operational art (fighting theater-level campaigns that connected strategy and tactics) received little attention in the navy.124 He noted that the Naval War College had become a place for promising officers to avoid, and that few navy aviators and submariners had time in their careers to attend the college. Murray had previously worked arms control with Rear Admiral Ed F. Welch Jr., president of the college, who encouraged Murray to join him. Murray formed an idea for a center for naval warfare at the college “to serve as a focal point, stimulus, and major source of strategic

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thinking, drawing on the intellectual resources of the Navy, other U.S. government activities, the academic world, and foreign countries to promote an enduring renaissance in naval strategic thought.” The center would be staffed principally by a group of six or eight active-duty navy and marine corps officers in the grades of O-5 and O-6, normally serving a term of one year, with additional civilian and retired military support. It was “anticipated that the center will attract the best strategic minds in naval uniform, and that successful service on its staff will be viewed as an achievement of high distinction by election boards and assignment personnel.”125 The center would “maintain active contact with, and promote an exchange of views, with other portions of the office of the CNO concerned with strategy and the strategy-tactics interface . . . and will interact as well with Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, the fleet commanders in chief, numbered fleet commanders, and other U.S. government agencies concerned with strategic and politico-military affairs.” Borrowing an apt phrase from Winston Churchill, he asserted the necessity for turning “captains of ships into captains of war.”126 Murray took his idea to CNO Hayward cold. His deal breakers for the job were that the CNO and commandant of the marine corps had to select the officers assigned, that the group had to have access not only to high levels of US and foreign military, government agencies, and academia, but also to sensitive intelligence and navy special access programs, and that he had to have a robust travel budget to interact with the various organizations and individuals. Hayward responded enthusiastically. Only on taking command of Seventh Fleet had Hayward become aware that it was not until the three-star level that a senior officer was faced with having to make strategic decisions. The Navy had never implemented the recommendations for a Naval War College course tailored to prospective senior commanders. As a ship’s commanding officer, one did not have the necessary knowledge, and in most other positions, one did not have the time to prepare oneself. This insight gave Hayward the determination to do all that he could to encourage strategic thinking.127

Admiral Hayward viewed the center for naval warfare as an opportunity to provide personally selected officers that he believed likely to be future leaders of the navy “to get experience before they sat in the chair.”128 For a time, the Naval War College again became an important place where new ideas were generated and evaluated for incorporation into war plans.

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The Center for Naval Warfare Studies was established for the start of the academic year in 1981. Rear Admiral Welch assigned the Center for Advanced Research, the Center for War Gaming, the Naval War College Press, and the college’s naval intelligence detachment to Murray, who served as dean of the Center for Naval Warfare and director of the newly created SSG.129 In 1958, CNO Burke had formed a naval long-range studies project at the Naval War College to forecast requirements of the operating forces of the navy for equipment, personnel, and supporting services. The Naval War College was selected as it headquarters “for its academic atmosphere, library, educational responsibilities, and location away from Washington, yet near centers of learning and industry.”130 Yet, it was not an integral part of the college. And though the Center for Naval Warfare Studies was an integral part of the college, the SSG was not. The SSG reported directly to the CNO. Like the long-range studies, the SSG benefited from the college’s atmosphere and being away from Washington, where they could study and think without being drawn into the issues of the day. The Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group Role in the 1980s Maritime Strategy

CNO Hayward tasked the first SSG to spend an academic year at the Naval War College studying strategy and war fighting, with no set agenda. Originally, each of the eight officers in the group selected an individual topic as the focus of their study. However, in January 1982, they received a briefing on the latest all-source intelligence on the Soviet navy and were tasked to develop concepts for exploiting it.131 They quickly coalesced around a strategic concept, along with detailed supporting operational and tactical concepts.132 In April 1982 the SSG conducted its fourth war game to evaluate the concepts they had just developed. Following the game, Vice CNO (VCNO) William N. Small brought a select group of OPNAV leaders called the Advanced Technology Panel, who had access to the sensitive all-source intelligence, to Newport for two days to review the game. While advocating a contentious concept for naval operations was beyond the Advanced Technology Panel’s purview, their support for SSG wargaming results led to validating SSG concepts for the Maritime Strategy.133 Small had previously expressed his frustrations over the analysis employed to justify navy programs. He criticized the analysis for a “worst case” mentality, employing a strategy and tactics that put the

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force into situations that “no prudent planner or responsible commander would countenance.” OPNAV focused on defending the force rather than seeking out and destroying the enemy. The parochialism of the platform sponsors was leading the navy to “[price] ourselves out of business with exotic responses to extreme requirements, and the result is insufficient forces.”134 Following his review of SSG’s fourth game, in August, he called for an appraisal at the outset of the navy programming process with respect to how naval forces would be “employed in wartime and their disposition . . . to illuminate the issues imbedded in our maritime strategy, and also to serve as a backup and point of departure for the appraisals and CPAMs [CNO Program Appraisal Memorandums] to follow.”135 The SSG then shared all of the information that they had developed with OPNAV, who prepared a briefing on the Maritime Strategy.136 However, interactions between those preparing the navy program and those working on the strategy briefing were thin.137 Secretary Lehman reviewed the budget but never changed it.138 Though not able to make large changes in navy budgets to align it with the strategy, Small, as leader of the Advanced Technology Panel, was able to field counters to Soviet navy technical improvements in months and years, rather than decades, using special access programs developed by the Naval Research Laboratory and other navy laboratories.139 The SSG briefed their strategic, operational, and tactical concepts to CNO James D. Watkins’s first navy four-star conference held at the Naval War College in October 1982. Watkins held the meeting there to increase the stature of the college. This, and the SSG briefing their concepts to 162 navy and marine corps flag officers following the April 1982 war game, accelerated ongoing OPNAV efforts to promulgate the Maritime Strategy and resulted in rapidly changing war plans. Following the success of this first group, CNO Watkins formalized that only the CNO could task the SSG, and it reported only to him. He designated the SSG as “the Navy’s focal point on framing strategic issues and the conceptualization/development of concepts for naval strategy and tactics.”140 The SSG was to link US naval strategy to national, joint, and alliance concerns; provide a strategic context for shaping naval forces and framing decisions about technology, programming, and training; and foster thought and discussions about US naval strategy. He specified that the CNO would personally assign officers to the SSG and approve their follow-on assignments, which, as a general rule, would be to OPNAV offices responsible for policy and plans or for assessing naval war fighting. Admiral Watkins tasked his first group in 1982: “Tell me how to fight the Soviets, and don’t tell me to buy another thing.”141 The CNO SSG in the 1980s was

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• composed of navy captains and commanders representing a cross section of warfare specialties whom the CNO selected for their future promise, and joined by Marines of similar ranks; • focused on war fighting and engagement rather than programs; • given access to all levels of national intelligence and service special access programs; • given broad access to US and foreign government and military officials and top academics and think tanks; • supported in an intellectual environment at the Naval War College, having access to analysis and games; • given a rigorous program of study and time to think and learn about the navy, joint forces, and the US national security establishment; • accepting tasking only from the CNO; and • tasked with communicating concepts broadly across US and foreign security establishments. Many aspects of the SSG’s year would have been familiar to an officer at Germany’s Kriegsakademie or the Naval War College before World War II. It began with what the early Naval War College had called “comparative study” and critical analysis regarding the tasking provided by the CNO. This included an orientation comprised of study through lectures and reading, and visiting a wide range of US and foreign commands, government offices, think tanks, and universities to understand extant thinking and plans. In addition to this theoretical study, the group conducted games, typically beginning with current plans and then exploring and evaluating alternative strategic, operational, and tactical concepts. As concepts were refined, members of the group conducted additional visits to address specific issues. Having sought information from various commands and institutions at the beginning of their studies, the group typically visited these same places to present and vet the findings that they could share following a preview by the CNO. The SSG served as theater commanders in the Global War Games in 1982 and 1983, principally to communicate the details of the strategy to the game participants (which included the other armed services and senior US government officials) and give them insights into the factors that would be important in governing the outcome of a global war. SSG officer assignments to OPNAV following their year on the group reinforced interactions between those institutions. That a large percentage of the officers made flag resulted in their being able to continue to refine and implement the concepts that they had developed during their year of study. Those who retired from the navy typically went

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into positions in the larger national security and military-industrial enterprise where they could also advance their concepts. The SSG was at, but not of, the Naval War College. The topics they studied for the CNO, if not highly classified, were sensitive. During their year at the college, interactions between the officers on the SSG and the rest of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies and the college were not routine. On occasion the CNO admonished the group not to share their concepts lest some faculty member begin criticizing them before he had a chance to use them to affect navy, joint, and national policies. For the first two years, Robert Murray was both SSG director and the center’s dean. In 1985, the positions separated, which further contributed to the distance between the SSG, the center, and the rest of the college. Several officers assigned to the SSG later regretted that the relations were not closer.142 The features of the campaign of learning employed by the SSG and the navy in developing and implementing the 1980s Maritime Strategy bear a close resemblance to the navy’s campaign of learning before World War II (Figure 3.5). The SSG served a role in concept development that the Naval War College had served previously, employing study and games that involved the SSG, officers from the fleet, and US government officials to explore and evaluate, giving a wide audience experience in implementing concepts and in using fleet exercises and operations to establish the viability of concepts and prototypes in conjunction with allies. In addition to normal naval activities, navy and marine corps exercises with allies and OPNAV briefings to their leaders translated the strategy into naval influence as allies outside of central Europe came to understand the US commitment to mutual defense in the event of war. US Army General Bernard W. Rogers, NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe (1979–1987), was focused on the Central Front in Germany. He disagreed with the Maritime Strategy’s focus on changing the correlation of nuclear forces by sinking Soviet ballistic missile submarines (as he expected that he would need to use tactical nuclear weapons within days of a Warsaw Pact invasion of western Germany), and he questioned the effects of engaging Soviet forces in other theaters. He wanted the navy to focus solely on protecting the movement of soldiers and materiel to western European ports. The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union brought the demise of the 1980s Maritime Strategy as the navy found itself in a position similar to the end of World War II with no rival navy to fight. Absent the Soviets, the national security establishment had no obvious major rival, though the tip of the Chinese iceberg was becoming visible on the horizon.

1980s Maritime Strategy Campaign of Learning

   
  


  
      

  


 


  


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Notes 1. Robert E. Fisher, “The U.S. Navy’s Search for a Strategy, 1945–1947,” Naval War College Review 48, no. 3 (1995): 73. 2. “US Ship Force Levels: 1886 to Present,” Naval History and Heritage Command, November 17, 2017, www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories /us-ship-force-levels.html. 3. Fisher, “The U.S. Navy’s Search for a Strategy,” 78. 4. This account comes from ibid. 5. Ibid., 81. 6. Ibid., 84. 7. John T. Hanley Jr. and Robert S. Wood, “The Maritime Role in the North Atlantic,” Naval War College Review (November–December 1985): 5–18. 8. Ibid. 9. Peter M. Swartz and E. D. McGrady, U.S. Navy Forward Deployment 1801–2001 (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, Center for Strategic Studies, 2001), 48. 10. Manstein, quoted in Philipp von Hilgers, War Games: A History of War on Paper, trans. Ross Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2012), 16. 11. Sidney F. Giffin, The Crisis Game: Simulating International Conflict (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 59, provides another account of this game. 12. James Chen, “Bretton Woods Agreement and System,” Investopedia, April 30, 2020, www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brettonwoodsagreement.asp#:~:text=The %20Bretton%20Woods%20Agreement%20was%20negotiated%20in%20July,Thus %2C%20the%20name%20%E2%80%9CBretton%20Woods%20Agreement.%201 %20%EF%BB%BF. 13. “Dumbarton Oaks Conference,” Encyclopædia Britannica, August 14, 2020, www.britannica.com/event/Dumbarton-Oaks-Conference. 14. “The San Francisco Conference,” United Nations (accessed January 4, 2021), www.un.org/en/about-us/history-of-the-un/san-francisco-conference. 15. United Nations, “Charter of the United Nations,” Repertory of Practice of United Nations Organs, August 23, 2016, https://legal.un.org/repertory/art51.shtml. 16. C. N. Trueman, “The United Nations and the Korean War,” History Learning Site, May 26, 2015, www.historylearningsite.co.uk/modern-world-history-1918 -to-1980/the-united-nations/the-united-nations-and-the-korean-war. 17. “History of the Korean War,” United Nations Command (accessed January 5, 2021), www.unc.mil/History/1950-1953-Korean-War-Active-Conflict. 18. “A Short History of NATO,” North Atlantic Treaty Organization (accessed January 5, 2021), www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/declassified_139339.htm. 19. “CENTO (Baghdad Pact),” HistoryPak.com (accessed January 5, 2021), https://historypak.com/cento-baghdad-pact. 20. Ibid. 21. Adapted from “Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 1954,” Department of State, January 20, 2009, https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time /lw/88315.htm. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. “ANZUS Pact,” Encyclopædia Britannica, August 25, 2020, www.britannica .com/event/ANZUS-Pact.

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27. Michael Moncur, “Quotation Details,” The Quotations Page, 2018 (accessed January 6, 2021), www.quotationspage.com/quote/41290.html. 28. Andrew Glass, “U.S. Planes Bomb Libya, April 15, 1986,” Politico, April 15, 2019, www.politico.com/story/2019/04/15/reagan-bomb-libya-april-15-1986 -1272788. 29. Dario Leone, “OTD in 1985, the Achille Lauro Incident: When the U.S. Navy Forced an Egyptair Boeing 737 off Course,” Aviationist, October 10, 2012, https://theaviationist.com/2012/10/10/achille-lauro. 30. Vice Admiral Timothy W. Wright, USN (retired), interview by John T. Hanley Jr., CNO SSG briefing to CINCPAC—May 1988 (December 23, 2014) (author’s collection). 31. James R. Locher III, “Has It Worked? The Goldwater-Nichols Reorganization Act,” Naval War College Review 54, no. 4 (2001): 95–115. 32. US Senate and House of Representatives, “The National Security Act of 1947—July 26, 1947,” September 19, 2013, https://global.oup.com/us/companion .websites/9780195385168/resources/chapter10/nsa/nsa.pdf#:~:text=Text%20of%20the %20original%201947%20National%20Security%20Act.,Military%20Establishment %20with%20other%20departments%20and%20agencies%20. 33. “Public Law 216, 81st Congress—10 August 1949,” September 17, 2014, https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/dod_reforms/NSA1947amended1949 .pdf. 34. Ian W. Toll, Twilight of the Gods (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), 414. 35. Keith D. MacFarland and David L. Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America: The Roosevelt and Truman Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). 36. “Armed Forces: Master of the Pentagon,” Time, June 6, 1949, 22. 37. Andrew L. Lewis, The Revolt of the Admirals, AU/ACSC/166/1998-04 (Maxwell, AL: Air Command and Staff College, 1998), https://fas.org/man/dod-101 /sys/ship/docs/98-166.pdf. 38. Naval Research Advisory Committee, Historical Perspectives on LongRange Planning in the Navy (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 1980). 39. John T. Kuehn, “Revive the General Board,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 136, no. 10 (2010): 66–71. 40. Defined in Title 10 of the U.S. Code, section 161, unified commands are composed of forces from two or more military departments, whereas specified commands are normally composed of forces from a single military department. 41. US Senate and House of Representatives, “Public Law 85-599—Aug. 6, 1958,” August 17, 2020, www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-72/pdf/STATUTE -72-Pg514.pdf. 42. Naval Research Advisory Committee, Historical Perspectives, 61. 43. Locher, “Has It Worked?” Jim Locher directed the congressional staff effort that led to the Goldwater-Nichols Act. 44. “Executive Order 12526: President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management,” National Archives, July 15, 1985, www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives /speech/executive-order-12526-presidents-blue-ribbon-commission-defense -management. 45. “H.R.3622 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986,” 99th Congress, December 12, 1986, www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress /house-bill/3622. 46. Jeffrey A. Bradford, Proconsuls and CINCs from the Roman Republic to the Republic of the United States of America: Lessons for the Pax Americana (Fort Leavenworth, KS: US Army Command and General Staff College, 2001).

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47. Steven Wills, “The Effect of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 on Maritime Strategy 1987–1994,” Naval War College Review 69, no. 2 (2016), https:// digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol69/iss2/5. 48. Locher, “Has It Worked?” 49. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 155. 50. Though a large space existed for armed conflict below the level of general war, policymakers did not accept limited wars as the most likely form of future conflict until the late 1950s. Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), vi. 51. Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher devised and experimented with a “baffling” game as part of RAND’s efforts in exploring game theory. RAND consultant Albert W. Tucker provided a narrative and dubbed this game the prisoner’s dilemma. William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 106–121. Mutual assured destruction is a rational solution to this game, as it is to America’s dysfunctional national politics in the decades up to 2020. 52. David Rosenberg, “Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy 1945–1960,” International Security 7 (1983): 3–71. 53. “Patrick M. S. Blackett,” Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (accessed September 30, 2020), www.informs.org/Explore/History -of-O.R.-Excellence/Biographical-Profiles/Blackett-Patrick-M.-S. 54. The Naval Ordnance Laboratory and the Naval Research Laboratory were established during World War I at the urging of Thomas Edison. Alfred H. Hausrath, Venture Simulation in War, Business, and Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 39. 55. George E. Kimball and Philip M. Morse, Methods of Operations Research (Los Altos, CA: Peninsula Publishing, 1951); Hausrath, Venture Simulation in War. 56. For discussions of post–World War II defense analysis organizations see US Congress, House Committee on Armed Services, “The 600 Ship Navy and the Maritime Strategy,” Staff Report (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1985); J. A. Stockfish, Models, Data and War, R-1526-PR (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1975), 125–126; General Accounting Office, The Process for Identifying Needs and Establishing Requirements (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1974), chap. 12; Francis J. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, 3rd ed. (Newport, RI: Naval War College, 1966), 2.40–2.41. 57. These are now called federally funded research and development centers. 58. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, 2.40. 59. Ibid., 1.25–1.26. 60. Gary D. Brewer and Martin Shubik, The War Game: A Critique of Military Problem Solving (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 32–33. 61. Ibid., 33. 62. The author was a vice president in one of these corporations that grew from 12 professionals in 1977 to over 300 by 1985. Such growth was not unique to this corporation. 63. John B. Hattendorf, B. Mitchell Simpson III, and John R. Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars: The Centennial History of the U.S. Naval War College (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1984), 285. 64. Stephen Hawking, God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2005), 1121–1125. 65. A. M. Turing, “Can a Machine Think?” in James R. Newman, The World of Mathematics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 2099–2123.

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66. Claude Shannon, “A Chess-Playing Machine,” in Newman, The World of Mathematics, 2124–2137. 67. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior: Sixtieth Anniversary Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 44. 68. John von Neumann, “The General and Logical Theory of Automata,” in Newman, The World of Mathematics, 2070–2098. 69. John H. Holland, Emergence (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998), 16–27. 70. Robert F. Richbourg, Deep Learning: Measure Twice, Cut Once, IDA Document NS D-9138 (Alexandria: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2018). 71. Ibid. 72. Brewer and Shubik, The War Game, 132. 73. Ibid., 135; Hausrath, Venture Simulation in War, 266–269. 74. Frank Virden, “The Naval War College Today,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 79, no. 4 (April 1953), www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1953/april /naval-war-college-today. 75. Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 88. 76. Virden, “The Naval War College Today.” 77. See McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, 3.8, on games up to 1966 being principally educational. 78. Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 188. 79. James D. Hornfischer, Neptune’s Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal (New York: Bantam, 2011). 80. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, 2.56. 81. Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 238. 82. Ibid., 208. 83. Ibid., 235. 84. Ibid., 230. 85. Ibid., 239. 86. Ibid., 247. 87. Ibid., 246. 88. Ibid., 249. 89. Ibid., 269. 90. Ibid., 264–265. 91. Ibid., 271. 92. Ibid., 276–293. 93. Turner quoted in ibid., 287. 94. Ibid., 248. 95. John T. Hanley Jr., “On Wargaming: A Critique of Strategic Operational Gaming” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1991). 96. Ibid. 97. Robert A. Matern, Bob Cooper, and Jon Buser, “Site History: NWGS,” Multics, January 14, 1998, www.multicians.org/site-nwgs.html. 98. Hanley, “On Wargaming,” 418. 99. “Dudley Knox Library,” Naval Postgraduate School (accessed September 6, 2021), https://library.nps.edu/nps-history. 100. Alan Washburn and Stephen G. Powell, “The Teachers’ Forum: The Operations Analysis Curriculum at the Naval Postgraduate School,” Interfaces 26, no. 5 (1996): 71–80. 101. Steven T. Wills, Strategy Shelved: The Collapse of Cold War Strategic Planning (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2021), 98.

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102. Thomas G. Mahnken, “Forward Presence in the Modern Navy: From the Cold War to a Future Tailored Force,” Naval History and Heritage Command, August 16, 2017, 9, www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room /title-list-alphabetically/n/needs-opportunities-modern-history-us-navy/forward -presence-modern-navy-cold-war-future-tailored-force.html. 103. I am grateful to Captain Peter Swartz, USN (retired), for the definition of combat credible as carrier and amphibious task groups. 104. Dmitry Filipoff, “Spencer Johnson on Writing and Briefing the Maritime Strategy,” CIMSEC, April 28, 2021, https://cimsec.org/spencer-johnson-on-writing -and-briefing-the-maritime-strategy. 105. Bryan Clark and Jesse Sloman, Deploying Beyond Their Means: America’s Navy and Marine Corps at a Tipping Point (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2015). 106. The account for this period comes from Adam B. Siegel, The Use of Naval Forces in the Post-War Era: U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps Response Activity, 1946–1990, CRM 90-246 (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 1991), who discusses how definitions affected differing numbers in various studies. While specific numbers change, the trends between services are consistent across studies. 107. Thomas C. Hone and Curtis A. Utz, History of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (Washington, DC: Naval History and Heritage Command, 2020). 108. Quoted in ibid., 283. 109. Rosenberg, “Origins of Overkill.” 110. Robert G. Angevine, “Hiding in Plain Sight: The U.S. Navy and Dispersed Operations Under EMCON, 1956–1972,” Naval War College Review 64, no. 2 (2011): 79–95. 111. The same office was responsible for development of navy gaming systems. However, the office did not link gaming with TAC D&E efforts. 112. The author wrote the first TAC D&E master plan in 1980 and worked with the fleets to coordinate tactical development for emerging challenges and new weapons systems. 113. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 32. 114. This account comes primarily from Submarine Development Squadron TWELVE, “A Look—Past, Present and Future,” Proceedings of the Submarine Development Group TWO & Submarine Development Squadron TWELVE 50th Anniversary Symposium 1949–1999 (Groton, CT: Submarine Development Squadron TWELVE, 1999). 115. For a discussion of Jimmy Carter’s role, see ibid., 137. 116. Ibid., 140. 117. McHugh, Fundamentals of War Gaming, 4.24. 118. Submarine Development Squadron TWELVE, 39. 119. Elmo R. Zumwalt, On Watch (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Company, 1976). 120. The NAVELEXSYSCOM Warfare Environment Simulator designed to explore command and control morphed into the Naval Simulation System, losing its original purpose and much of its value. 121. John B. Hattendorf, The Evolution of the U.S. Navy’s Maritime Strategy, 1977–1986, Newport Papers 19 (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2004), https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/newport-papers/35. 122. Bing West, email to author, August 5, 2014. 123. John F. Lehman, Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018).

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124. Interviews by John T. Hanley Jr., Christopher Steinitz, Peter Oat-Judge, and Samuel Swartz, Center for Naval Analyses Corporation (August 5 and 29, 2014) (author’s files). 125. Robert J. Murray, “Center for Naval Warfare,” Memorandum for the Chief of Naval Personnel (Washington, DC: Undersecretary of the Navy, May 1, 1981) (author’s collection). 126. Robert J. Murray, “A War-Fighting Perspective: An Interview with Robert Murray,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 109, no. 10 (1983), www.usni.org/magazines /proceedings/1983/october/war-fighting-perspective-interview-robert-murray. 127. Hattendorf, The Evolution of the U.S. Navy’s Maritime Strategy. 128. Thomas Hayward and James Patton, interview by John T. Hanley Jr., CNO Strategic Studies Group, October 7–8, 2014. The quote comes from Captain James Patton (author’s collection). 129. Hattendorf, Simpson, and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, 312–315. 130. Ibid., 236. 131. Ken McGruther, email to author, March 31, 2021. 132. John T. Hanley Jr., “Creating the 1980s Maritime Strategy and Implications for Today,” Naval War College Review 67, no. 2 (2014): 11–29. 133. Christopher Ford and David Rosenberg, The Admiral’s Advantage (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 92. 134. William N. Small, “Program Appraisals and Analysis,” Memorandum for Director, Navy Program Planning (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, December 18, 1981) (author’s collection). 135 .William N. Small, “Naval Warfare,” Memorandum for OP-095, OP-O6 (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, March 1, 1982) (author’s collection). 136. Commander Ken McGruther, who served as a special assistant to Murray, delivered the SSG documents to OPNAV. Ken McGruther, email to author, March 31, 2021. 137. Filipoff, “Spencer Johnson on Writing and Briefing.” 138. Dmitry Filipoff, “Irv Blickstein on Programming the POM and Strategizing in the Budget,” CIMSEC: Center for International Maritime Security, March 26, 2021, https://cimsec.org/irv-blickstein-on-programming-the-pom-and-strategizing -the-budget. 139. Ford and Rosenberg provide a more detailed discussion of the ATP. 140. Chief of Naval Operations, “Strategic Studies Group (SSG) Objectives, Tasks, and Organizational Relationship” (Washington, DC, September 12, 1983) (author’s collection). 141. Colonel Ted Gatchel, USMC, interview by John T. Hanley Jr., SSG study interview (September 18, 2014) (author’s collection). 142. John T. Hanley, Peter M. Swartz, and Christopher Steinitz, Making Captains of War: The Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, 1981–1995 (Arlington, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 2016).

4 Sclerotic Equilibrium After the Cold War

As the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union dissolved, the question for US national security, the DoD, and the navy was, “What next?” As with the end of World War II, the navy no longer had a powerful navy competitor as a basis for assessing its force structure, and its strategies, which had affected Soviet behavior under Gorbachev, were no longer relevant. Given that large ships are designed for thirty to fifty years of service, decisions the CNO and navy agents make about ship construction affect the navy’s force structure for many decades into the future. The CNO needed an estimate of what characteristics of the future security environment would affect the navy’s readiness, engagement, and equipping strategies. What should the navy be ready to do and where should it exert its influence? Concepts for what would emerge in the future ranged from the “end of history” with widespread emergence of liberal democracies,1 to zones of peace in the “Western world” with 15 percent of the world’s population and zones of turmoil with 85 percent of the world’s population “where poverty, war, tyranny, and anarchy will continue to devastate lives,”2 to a clash of civilizations driven by cultural divisions.3 An even wider range of prescriptions for rethinking US security were proposed from focusing on domestic problems, to addressing differences between haves and have-nots between and within countries, to seizing the “unipolar moment” to create an new American century.4 Acknowledging that the future was not knowable, scenario planning employing a range of possible futures to assess the implications of following a particular course of action and “path games” employing five-year moves to explore 123

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developments over decades became valuable techniques.5 Calling the new era post–Cold War demonstrated the absence of appreciation for what the future would bring as no better name was accepted. Absent a clear destination, the navy and the nation steered by the wake. The Security Environment, US Policies, and the Fleet Though the prospect for war with Russia became moot in the 1990s as the readiness of Russian military forces collapsed, hotspots for potential conflict remained with Korea and the Mideast at the forefront. The Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, signaling the end of the Cold War. The next month the United States found itself conducting military operations in Panama. President George H. W. Bush gave a speech proposing a new world order on August 2, 1990, at a conference on “Shaping a New Global Community” in Aspen, Colorado. The same day Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. News of Saddam’s invasion overwhelmed the Aspen speech. Bush reiterated the theme in a joint session of Congress in September, making the case for reversing Saddam’s invasion and suggesting that “a new world order . . . can emerge: a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace.”6 However, compared to the changes made at the end of World War II, efforts to reexamine and reinvigorate international institutions to deal with new opportunities and challenges and to promote security and peaceful change in an ever more interconnected world were modest. In 1995 the World Trade Organization replaced the 1948 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Russia joined the G7 to make it the G8 in 1997. A G20 of finance ministers was established in 1999. The North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force in 1994 and was honored by the navy though not ratified by the US Congress. The European Union was established in 1993, and NATO established a Partnership for Peace with former Warsaw Pact adversaries to bring Eastern European countries into the European Union and NATO. As part of post–Cold War downsizing, Congress cut the State Department’s Agency for International Development (USAID) program and dismembered the US Information Agency, moving its functions into the State Department. In the 1990s, ethnic rivalries, nationalist aspirations, and territorial or political disputes that had been suppressed by the Cold War reemerged. As US armed forces began downsizing toward the end

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strengths established in Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell’s Base Force, the pace of humanitarian peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations accelerated. With the end of the Cold War, the context for UN peacekeeping operations changed dramatically. The UN Security Council authorized a total of twenty new operations between 1989 and 1994.7 Though steep force reductions were underway, the United States became involved in a growing number of peacekeeping and enforcement operations, such as Operation Provide Comfort in Iraq, protecting Kurds from Saddam Hussein following Desert Storm, and in Somalia, Liberia, and Kosovo. Shortly after Les Aspin became secretary of defense under President William J. “Bill” Clinton in January 1993, he directed a bottomup review of defense strategy and force structure. The study evaluated the forces required to handle two major regional contingencies, in addition to dealing with smaller conflicts or crises, maintaining overseas presence, and deterring the use of weapons of mass destruction. The report published in October 1993 resulted in a target for the navy of 346 ships with eleven carrier battle groups by 1999.8 Concerns over transnational piracy, drug and weapons trafficking, and nuclear proliferation with the demise of the Soviet Union came to the fore, though terrorist incidents diminished after peaking in the early 1990s.9 In his Agenda for Peace (1992), UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali identified threats posed by failed states as requiring future UN action. George H. W. Bush’s administration adopted a theory that democracies did not fight each other in its 1993 National Security Strategy, which the Clinton administration continued in the “National Security Strategy for Engagement and Enlargement” (1995) and “A National Security Strategy for a New Century” (1997). The European Union and NATO expansion into Eastern Europe was to enlarge the number of democratic states, with the intent of eventually including Russia. The three pillars of Clinton’s strategy—shape, prepare, and respond—required a military prepared for a range of interventionist scenarios. The navy’s traditional role as an instrument of national influence became the focus for naval strategy, as well as how to develop, organize, deploy, and employ all instruments of US national power in order to sustain a world order that provided security and peaceful development, even as the United States inevitably came to represent a smaller portion of the world’s population and wealth. Though the navy retained significant roles in the event of war in Korea, as it had in the 1950s, and with Iran, how to sustain naval influence became the overriding issue.

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However, much of the navy’s leadership was more comfortable thinking in terms of peace and war. Some had difficulty appreciating the navy’s role beyond war fighting. Admiral Mike Boorda considered the prospect of a long peace as devastating to navy institutional goals.10 The navy continued its efforts to sustain its Cold War engagement strategy with smaller forces. Facing challenges to sea control primarily in restricted waters, like the Baltic Sea and Persian Gulf and near littoral areas, the navy and marine corps under President George H. W. Bush with a white paper titled “. . . From the Sea” (1992) shifted readiness strategies from a focus on a global threat to regional adversaries, and the engagement strategy to helping shape the future in ways favorable to US interests. Underpinning alliances, precluding threats, and helping to preserve the strategic position at the end of the Cold War required greater emphasis on joint and combined operations. Secretary of Defense William Perry adopted the term “preventive defense.” As with the democratic theory of peace, the Clinton administration made few changes to the G. H. W. Bush administration’s articulation of naval strategy in “Forward . . . From the Sea.” “Forward” was added as the Bottom-Up Review made forward presence to shape events a criterion for force sizing. Priorities for the naval services moved away from operations on the sea toward power projection and the employment of naval forces from the sea to influence events in the littoral regions of the world—those areas adjacent to the oceans and seas that are within direct control of and vulnerable to the striking power of sea-based forces. The purpose of U.S. naval forces remains to project the power and influence of the nation across the seas to foreign waters and shores in both peace and war.

The navy provided humanitarian assistance during an increasing number of natural disasters. Though the navy increased the number of ship-days devoted to countering drugs, piracy, and other transnational challenges, it maintained its focus on combat credible presence, (i.e., carrier battle groups deployed forward for regional contingencies).11 Continuing operations in the Mideast led to the navy establishing the Fifth Fleet in 1995. In his 1997 U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings article, CNO Jay Johnson reiterated that “the purpose of the U.S. Navy is to influence, directly and decisively, events ashore from the sea—anytime, anywhere.”12 Strategic deterrence remained the top priority for readiness of navy forces, though nuclear force levels declined with implementation of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty. Seaborne trade in the 1990s increased from about four billion to six billion tons with the expansion of global trade, but faced little threat other

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than piracy in localized regions. Over the 1990s, the US share of commercial shipping dropped from 5 to 2 percent of world tonnage and carried only 4 percent of international trade. Though the larger share of both wealth, trade, and military expenditures was moving from Europe to Asia, 55 percent of the fleet remained home ported in the Atlantic in 2000.13

CNO Kelso Implements “Jointness” and Navigates in a Gale The end of the Cold War coincided with a particularly challenging time for the navy as it dealt with diminishing budgets, war with Iraq, and a series of incidents and social changes. Congressional and DoD efforts at acquisition reform created churn. More powerful computers further locked in belief in the use of computer simulations and the systems analysis paradigm. Admiral Frank Kelso II became CNO on June 29, 1990. As commander in chief, Atlantic Fleet, he had viewed his role under the Goldwater-Nichols legislation as providing trained forces to the unified commanders.14 While Admiral William Crowe had supported the legislation, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he had changed few practices as the services implemented the law. However, beginning in 1989 his successor General Colin Powell employed his authorities to the extent of not consulting CNO Carlisle A. H. Trost on his recommendation to the secretary of defense to reduce the navy’s target from 600 to 400 ships in his Base Force.15 Kelso as the leading uniformed spokesman for the navy published “The Way Ahead” with Secretary of the Navy H. Lawrence Garrett III and Marine Corps Commandant Alfred Gray in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings in April 1991. They cautioned about the need to preserve the industrial base, to operate naval forces safely given reduced funding, and to plan an affordable force.16 Publication of “The Way Ahead” took too long to coordinate to affect the ongoing force level debates. Realizing that the decisions he made would affect the force structure of the navy thirty to fifty years into the future, Kelso tasked his SSG with exploring what the nation would need the navy to do in the future and the implications for the navy.17 In June 1992 the group briefed him on their findings from that year. Dov Zakheim and Jeffrey Ranney at Systems Planning Analysis corporation had created a model of the cost growth in each of the major program categories that Secretary of Defense McNamara had created in 1962 and turned that into a simulation for projecting force structures under varying assumptions of DoD

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budget growth. They published the implications of their findings for the Clinton administration.18 The SSG employed their simulation to explore the implications for the navy of growth in platform, personnel, and operations and maintenance costs. In June 1992, the SSG briefed CNO Kelso on their findings that the navy would be able to afford between 250 and 300 ships by 2012 if the DoD and the navy continued doing business as they had for the previous three decades. Having just agreed to a navy of 451 ships, down from the Cold War target of 600, Kelso had difficulty in accepting their findings.19 Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq a month after Kelso began his tenure. Kelso saw his task as providing the theater commander General Norman Schwarzkopf with what he requested. Joint task forces involving navy assets proliferated with each new US military operation. Incidents creating negative press for the navy preceded Kelso’s tenure as CNO, and then sharply increased. Among challenges that faced Kelso when he began were Operation Ill Wind, the cancelation of the navy’s stealthy A-12 attack aircraft designed to replace the long-range A6, and a botched navy investigation into an explosion in the USS Iowa’s (BB-61) number two turret that had killed forty-seven people. Operation Ill Wind began as an FBI investigation into defense procurement fraud that led to the prosecution of over sixty personnel and conviction of nine government officials, including Melvyn Paisley, assistant secretary of the navy for research, engineering, and systems.20 The cancelation of the A12 disrupted the navy’s aviation plan, resulting in air wings on carriers with significantly less range than their predecessors. The navy investigation of the Iowa turret explosion initially placed the blame on sabotage by a sailor. However, objections to this finding led Kelso to order a subsequent investigation. Investigations by the Government Accounting Office and Sandia Laboratories found the evidence did not support the original navy findings, but they could not provide a definitive cause for the mishap, leaving the incident as an open controversy.21 However, the debauchery at a Tailhook convention in September 1991 consumed Kelso and Secretary of the Navy Garrett, who had attended the convention. The scandal ruined the careers of several admirals. Seventy navy officers incurred disciplinary action, and the careers of many more were limited. Garrett ended up resigning in June 1992. After serving as acting secretary of the navy for six months in 1993 at the beginning of the Clinton administration, Kelso retired several months before his normal tenure would have expired after Secretary of the Navy John Dalton had recommended that he resign.22 The Tailhook scandal led to greater attention to the role of women in the navy and opened new

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opportunities for them. The Clinton administration adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for homosexuality. Kelso had not anticipated dealing with these social issues as CNO. As force structure diminished, the US military no longer needed all of its bases. Congress created a Base Realignment and Closure Commission, a politically fraught process that became “very frustrating” for Kelso and the navy. Closing the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in 1991 had been difficult, but the round in 1993 was both harder and more necessary as it presented the likely last opportunity “to make difficult decisions required to reduce the [navy’s] overhead. Kelso received personal abuse for his decisions.”23 Kelso instituted “Total Quality Leadership,” based upon W. Edward Deming’s ideas that had worked well for Japan. It employed processes that focused on the customer as the organization’s primary mission and empowered the workforce to improve processes. Kelso aimed to produce quality outputs by empowering sailors. He established training across the navy to implement Total Quality Leadership techniques. The CNO’s Total Quality Leadership office attempted to institute Deming’s approach to strategy development within the navy. As with many CNO initiatives, Total Quality Leadership did not survive following Kelso’s tenure. President Bush in February 1989 had directed that the services implement recommendations made by the Packard Commission in 1986 to reduce costs. Defense and navy review commissions were established to verify the implementation. Kelso also wanted to change the navy’s programming process to increase consensus both within OPNAV and with the political leadership, as the concerns that Admiral Small had expressed a decade earlier, regarding platform barons preparing budgets with little time for coordination, continued. Kelso also wanted to better align OPNAV with the “joint” world. He had the support of his new VCNO Stanley Arthur. Kelso brought in Vice Admiral William “Bill” Owens from commanding Sixth Fleet to update OPNAV from its 1970s organization. He aligned OPNAV with Joint Staff and other service staff offices, reducing the role of the platform barons and putting requirements, assessments, and resource allocation under Owens as N8. Following Kelso’s lead, Owens established a collaborative process for developing a vision to balance “a general warfare overview against program and budgeting realities,”24 and used a joint mission area framework for assessing naval programs. He had formed this framework as a fellow in the CNO SSG in 1982.25 This joint mission assessment process replaced warfare appraisals by the director for naval warfare; the director for analysis (N81), employing mathematical techniques, took the lead for

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CNO program assessment memoranda. These techniques had been successful in developing tactics in World War II but were of limited use applied to campaign analyses for quantifying trade-offs among alternative platforms and capabilities. Power in OPNAV was concentrated in N8. The joint mission assessment process required program sponsors to justify to their navy competitors how their programs contributed to accomplishing joint missions such as joint littoral warfare and joint strike. To do this, Owens created a Resources and Requirements Review Board encouraging open discussion “to develop a collective flag officer sense of what the size, structure, and character of the Navy ought to be in the future, independent of the ideas of the lower-ranking staff.”26 Kelso and Owens intended to arrive at a consensus that the more junior flag officers would carry with them through their careers. Owens’s approach succeeded with the secretary of defense accepting almost all of the secretary of the navy recommendations for the fiscal year 1995 budget. OPNAV continued this approach following Owens’s departure through 1998 when it modified an integrated warfare assessment approach. Owens went on to become the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1994. In implementing Goldwater-Nichols, the Joint Staff had begun to publish joint doctrine to cover every aspect of military operations. Kelso stated, “I did not want to create a doctrine from the Navy. I wanted a joint doctrine for the Navy in a joint arena.”27 To accomplish this he established a Navy Doctrine Command modeled on the US Army Training and Doctrine Command and put it in Norfolk where it could be close to both Army and the Air Force doctrine development commands. Admiral Boorda relieved Admiral Kelso as CNO on April 23, 1994. Evolution of the Naval War College and the Naval Postgraduate School The Goldwater-Nichols legislation required the Naval War College to implement joint professional military education standards dictated by the Joint Staff using Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. The college adapted its curriculum to comply with the standards, teaching naval operations more in the context of joint operations than previously.28 The Global War Games in the 1980s had succeeded in drawing strong participation from all of the services. In the 1990s, the army and air force adopted their versions of the Global War Games that became Title 10 games, named for the title in the US Code of Federal Regula-

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tions legislating the DoD. The difference between these games and the 1980s Global War Games was their focus on service programs rather than on how to defeat the adversaries’ strategies. Each service selected scenarios for their games that provided a leading role for their preferred force structure. Like the 1980s Global War Games, the games served the function of communicating the service’s position to a large audience of participants and those receiving reports from the games. They also provided insights into challenges and opportunities presented by the proposed approach in the context of the game. The games were designed to highlight service programs, not to evaluate them rigorously.29 When the SSG received a director other than the dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies in 1985, the two institutions evolved on separate paths. The center continued as the principal research arm of the Naval War College but also diverged from academics. In addition to its war gaming and strategic research departments and advanced research program, the center has grown to include seven research centers covering irregular warfare, Chinese and Russian maritime studies, cyber, international law, future warfare, and maritime historical research. The Naval War College also expanded to include seven colleges, turning its distance learning program into a college and adding Maritime Operational Warfare and Leadership and Ethics to its national and international courses.30 The College for Maritime Operational Warfare was initiated in 2007 to prepare officers to serve in maritime operations centers, making up for the absence of a command and staff course that would teach naval officers how to plan theater-wide operations. Combatant commanders typically sought army and marine officers for their planning staffs as those best educated by their services’ command and staff courses. The composition of students attending the Naval War College has become more junior and weighted more toward specialties rather than unrestricted line officers; officers seeking to advance their careers continue to avoid the college. The Naval Postgraduate School added a joint professional military education course in 1999. By 2001 the Naval Postgraduate School consisted of a Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, a Graduate School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, a Graduate School of Operational and Informational Sciences, a School of International Graduate Studies, and fourteen academic departments, forty-two master’s and eighteen doctoral programs, four institutes, and twenty-three Centers of Excellence.31 The superintendent transitioned to a president in 2004. Though the school has contributed to many important technical developments and two of its alumni have been CNOs, attending the

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school has often been detrimental to a navy officer’s career, and the navy has a poor record for assigning officers to positions that take advantage of the subspecialties they earned through their education.32 Effects on the Navy’s Campaign of Learning While recognizing that military operations require contributions from the other services to win battles in major combat and have greater effectiveness in many smaller contingencies, the navy has always opposed adopting army staff procures. Army procedures provide the foundation for Joint Staff administration and carried over into OSD administration and joint doctrine (adapted from army doctrine). In this respect, the air force is a child of the army. Operation Desert Storm illustrated the challenges in the differences between the way the navy and air force planned and conducted air operations. The air force’s approach is to reduce strategy to a target list implemented through an air tasking order. As the navy implemented “jointness” it had to adapt to rigid staff procedures that limit options and initiative in ways that make many navy officers uncomfortable.33 The navy succeeded in creating two phases for joint professional military education, making training for the Joint Operation Planning and Execution System into a separate phase. However, the Naval War College’s box-checking to implement joint education amplified the theoretical nature of the curriculum that had been established by Turner, at the further expense of the practical exploration of contingencies required for commanders to make and communicate rapid decisions. Additionally, the termination of the Navy TAC D&E program at the end of the Cold War and formation of the Naval Doctrine Command further separated the fleet from OPNAV and the navy laboratories. Under the TAC D&E program, the navy type commands (air, surface, submarine) and the fleets created doctrine through a series of tactical memos, notes, and Naval Warfare Publications, increasing in authority. Exercises employing novel tactical and operational concepts and technologies provided the basis for these documents. The navy’s approach for developing doctrine through employing prototypes and new sensors and weapons in exercises and operations ran counter to the philosophy employed by the army’s doctrine command, which begins with a doctrinal concept as “the centerpiece of everything that we do.” This leads to a linear approach that uses concept and doctrine development as a basis for developing and procuring the army’s Tables of Organization and Equipment, employing separate units for experimentation to “test-

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out and evolve future force designs.” Whereas the navy is comfortable with experimentation being a component of exercises, the army emphasizes training to established doctrine in exercises.34 In the turbulence following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the navy lost sight of the interactions between the CNO, the SSG, the fleet, and the laboratories that had led to the campaign of learning that undergirded the Maritime Strategy. While implementing “jointness” created distractions, the navy cannot blame the Goldwater-Nichols legislation for further degrading its campaign of learning, which the secretary of the navy, the CNO, and the navy leadership have the power to sustain and strengthen. Naval Warfare Innovation Examining an unsuccessful 1990s attempt to recreate an ecology for naval warfare innovation similar to that which existed between the world wars is instructive. When Admiral Boorda became CNO in April 1994, the navy was “still on the hook” for social issues that began with the Tailhook debacle in 1991. Social issues had multiplied, “aggravated by relentless media coverage and intense political pressures.” Boorda believed that these were distracting the naval leadership away from “a nascent revival in naval war fighting—a period of enlightenment sparked by the Chief of Naval Operations and Commandant of the Marine Corps,” which could be “snuffed out” in “the ‘devastating peace’ that had ensued after [the] Soviet Union collapsed.”35 Boorda, along with the commandant of the marine corps and secretary of the navy, had updated and expanded “. . . From the Sea” to “Forward . . . From the Sea” in 1994 “to address specifically the unique contributions of naval expeditionary forces in peacetime operations, in responding to crises, and in regional conflicts.”36 However, new concepts for naval expeditionary forces sparked debate over the force of navy doctrine and competition between fleet commanders and Naval Doctrine Command’s authorities and roles.37 Some, like the SSGs in the early 1990s, saw a need following the Cold War for the United States to reevaluate and reenergize institutions such as the UN, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and NATO, along with relationships with Russia and China, to preserve an international order consistent with American values as the US population and economy declined as a portion of the world’s total. The SSG called for using naval forces to shape events and establish norms for behavior that would endure. Others who were focused on technology believed that it was time for a strategic pause during which the United States could skip

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a generation in the evolution of military capabilities to leap to a world in which information and other emerging technologies were affecting societies and global economics in profound ways. The OSD Office of Net Assessment had long sponsored the study of Soviet military literature and practices. Soviet Army Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov had been chief of the general staff of the Soviet Union from 1977 to 1984 and continued to lead Soviet military thought after leaving that position. Ogarkov viewed US efforts to develop “reconnaissance-strike complexes” and long-range precision to enable Follow-on Forces Attack and AirLand Battle as a military-technical revolution. The promise of precision strikes demonstrated during Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991 intensified US and international interest in the subject. The Chinese studied it carefully. Eschewing the systems analysis paradigm and emphasizing that operational concepts needed to change with the technology, Mr. Andrew W. Marshall, director of OSD Net Assessment, fostered broader approaches for including behavioral considerations when comparing forces. He coined the term “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) rather than the Soviet military-technical revolution to emphasize the importance of operational and organizational concepts. He promoted studies of the past RMAs and implications for future US forces. Absent a peer competitor, these studies motivated efforts across the DoD in the 1990s and early 2000s to explore what could be done with emerging technology to “transform” the US military for a more networked world. As vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff beginning in 1994, Admiral Bill Owens promoted his system-of-systems concept emphasizing the networking of all military services’ intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and communications systems to feed joint command and control systems, in the belief that interoperable technology could “lift the fog of war.”38 An accurate, shared picture of the battlespace was to allow smaller forces armed with precision weapons to have revolutionary effects. A Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy composed of well-respected national security professionals led by Fred Iklé and Albert Wohlstetter promoted “discriminate deterrence” employing the effects of precision weapons, which required such a system of systems.39 Owens, who spent his early career as a submarine officer, had overseen cutting the US submarine forces by half and promoted revolutionary thinking when he was OPNAV’s deputy chief of naval operations for resources, warfare requirements, and assessments (N8).40 As vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs he promoted concepts such as floating mobile operating bases and lighter-than-air ships, which the navy

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viewed as threats to aircraft carrier battle groups. As commander in chief of Allied Forces Southern Europe and commander in chief of US Naval Forces Europe, Admiral Boorda had admonished Owens as his Sixth Fleet commander for developing liaisons with his army and air force counterparts and conducting joint exercises without Boorda’s specific approval. Tensions between senior officers who embraced joint operations and those motivated primarily to enhance the navy’s position at the expense of the other services were apparent. Service doctrine centers, and a four-service Air Land Sea Application Center, were busy.41 The Naval Doctrine Command in Norfolk, Virginia, was writing versions of a navy operational concept and naval (navy and marine corps) manuals for operations, planning, logistics, and command and control along the lines of manuals that the marine corps had published. The Army Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, initiated projects on the “Army After Next” and “Force XXI,” a seamless digitized battlefield. The air force had published its concept “Global Reach, Global Power,” and Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, was developing doctrine to implement that concept. The Marine Corps Combat Development Command at Quantico, Virginia, was pursuing “Operational Maneuver from the Sea.” Following his appointment as commandant of the marine corps in July 1995, General Charles Krulak directed the activation of a war-fighting laboratory at Quantico. The Commandant’s Warfighting Laboratory was tasked with the experimentation of concepts developed under Sea Dragon, “a philosophy of advanced operational concepts and advanced technology seeking to garner the advantages of each and to combine them in order to enhance effectiveness in future operations.”42 The Joint Staff was working on “C4I (command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence) for the Warrior,” among other concepts. The Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel

Admiral Elmo Zumwalt established the CNO Executive Panel (CEP) in 1970. It served as a distinguished group representing scientific, engineering, political-military, and international relations communities to advise the CNO on questions related to national sea power. Until CNO Admiral John M. Richardson changed its charter in 2016, task forces of selected panel members conducted detailed examinations of specific matters of interest to the CNO. These examinations led to recommending various alternative naval policies and procedures. A chairperson, or cochairpersons, provided task force recommendations directly to the CNO

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in executive sessions, or through written reports. The panel was purely advisory in nature, not empowered to make policy or management decisions. The CEP was neither established nor intended to advise on individual procurements. It met approximately twice per year in plenary sessions at the convenience of the CNO. Individual task force meetings totaled approximately thirty one-day meetings per year.43 A navy captain served as executive director (OP00K and later N00K) with a small staff to coordinate activities of the CEP and conduct other tasks as directed by the CNO. In 1993 and 1994, Kelso tasked the CEP to create task forces on Emerging Technologies, The Navy After Next, Domestic Issues, and National Security. The work of these task forces caught the attention of Admiral Boorda. Boorda strongly desired ideas for the next generation of navy platforms.44 A CEP task force co-chaired by Mr. Walter Morrow (director of Lincoln Labs) and Mr. Benjamin Huberman (former deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and an engineer for Admiral Rickover) had been working on naval warfare innovation.45 Morrow had briefed CEP work on emerging technologies to Boorda in Naples, Italy, when he commanded naval forces in Europe. Boorda delayed a visit to European Command headquarters in Germany to spend more time discussing the brief.46 The CEP Emerging Technologies Task Force was the precursor to the Naval Warfare Innovations Task Force. In the naval warfare innovations effort, Boorda directed the task force to concentrate on the process aspect of the problem.47 The CEP Naval Warfare Innovation Task Force briefed CNO Boorda on January 30, 1995. The briefing laid out a process for naval warfare innovation and stated that “now” was the time to begin innovation since no major innovations had occurred since the 1980s and they would take ten to twenty years to reach the fleet. They recommended charging the Naval War College president with generating concepts for naval warfare innovation.48 Boorda asked how the SSG should be used in the proposed innovation process at the Naval War College. He also asked the CEP to focus on the innovation process, whether science and technology investments were properly focused, to consider the cycle time to meet threats, what analytic support would be needed for decisions, and what role Naval Doctrine Command should play.49 Boorda decided to make Admiral James Hogg, USN (retired), SSG director and have the SSG lead concept-generation teams rather than the Naval War College president. Hogg had deep experience in navy personnel matters, had commanded Seventh Fleet, and had been the OPNAV director for naval warfare, where he orchestrated the selection of SSG fellows for CNOs Watkins and Trost. He retired in 1991 after being the US military representative to NATO. In the spring of 1995,

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Boorda told Hogg that he wanted him to become SSG director. Hogg had misgivings based upon the SSG’s recent work. Boorda told Hogg that he was tasking the group with naval warfare innovation, and that Hogg could have any resources he needed. Hogg understood Boorda’s intent to establish an internal team focused exclusively on assessing technologies and concepts that could change naval warfare, and he accepted the position.50 On June 16, 1995, the CEP Innovation Task Force briefed their final report to Boorda. They recommended that the CNO institute a naval warfare innovation process (Figure 4.1). They envisioned the process beginning with concept-generation teams consisting of operators, technologists/designers, and personnel with manufacturing expertise, with thirty to forty individuals to provide analysis support to the teams. They recommended the Naval War College, Marine Corps Base Quantico, or Naval Postgraduate School as possible hosts for the teams, but that the teams be separate from faculty organizations. They noted that most people credited with historical innovation were technologists and mid-level officers and recommended the same for the teams. They envisioned the SSG as providing innovative operational expertise. The teams should have the ability to draw on resources of the tenant facility and leading universities. With the exception of the leader, the teams should have four- to six-month assignments with outputs briefed to the CNO. They emphasized the need for a filtering process to challenge and validate the concepts—an independent, resident capability. They noted that without constant management the experimental people and the concept people would not come together, and recommended that concept generators participate in demonstrations of the concepts. They envisioned four teams per year and recommended funding of $100 million per year per demonstration, pacing faster demonstrations than the norm. They called for the CNO to work closely with the assistant secretary of the navy for research, development, and acquisition to address the provisions of the Goldwater-Nichols Act that had limited the CNO’s role in acquisitions. They thought that Naval Doctrine Command should be tasked to support a Naval War College concept development team after the concepts had been generated.51 They envisioned ten- to twenty-year projections of warfare challenges and technology development as inputs to the process.52 The innovation process recommended by the CEP closely resembled interactions that had produced success in previous navy campaigns of learning. Their briefing emphasized the conceptualization phase of the process. They did not identify specific organizations for the functions in the process. However, they expected the Office of Naval Research to provide

Process for Naval Warfare Innovation

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basic research and to be a source for enabling technical advances, along navy, other government, and commercial laboratories. They were not specific about the sources for warfare challenges. Concept-generation teams would describe systems and architectures, and analysis would bridge conceptualization into operational experimentation and demonstrations to further develop the concepts. The Center for Naval Analyses would be a primary source for analysis. Naval Doctrine Command would work with fleet commands to experiment with operational concepts using new technology provided by the research and development community (the Office of Naval Research and laboratories).53 The navy and other services had programs for Advanced Technology Demonstrations, and OSD began a program for Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrations in 1994.54 The vision was that these experiments and demonstrations would lead to the promulgation of new doctrine and the production of new systems that would provide the navy with capabilities to retain its advantages well into the future. The SSG had briefed Boorda on its study of how to sustain naval influence with a smaller navy shortly after he became CNO in 1993.55 He preferred an OPNAV study that used forward presence to justify increasing the number of surface combatants by not relaxing any constraints on the way the navy was conducting deployments. Boorda believed that recent SSG work had been too policy oriented to the detriment of addressing military issues under its director Ambassador Frank McNeil.56 On July 10, referencing the CEP task force on Naval Warfare Innovation final briefing, Boorda directed that “while continuing to provide the SSG Fellows an understanding of strategic concepts, international security issues, and budgetary factors as they relate to military forces and naval operations,” the SSG serve as the nucleus for the generation of innovative concepts. He directed Hogg to implement the naval warfare innovation process recommended by the CEP, assuring him that he would be provided necessary resources and all navy commands would provide the fullest possible support. The CEP was to continue to advise the CNO on the innovation process and serve as a resource for the SSG director.57 The press quickly picked up on Boorda’s interests.58 A CEP member had suggested to Hogg that Nobel laureates mostly did their breakthrough work when they were young and suggested adding younger officers to the SSG. Hogg arranged for eight students each from the Naval War College and Naval Postgraduate School to join the more senior navy, marine, and coast guard officers to form conceptgeneration teams around a set of subjects determined by the group. The CEP had also recommended adding technologists and analysts to the

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group, and Hogg sought an acquisition professional. Even with the CNO’s support, resources for transforming the SSG were scarce. The SSG received temporary support from a few analysts and technologists, far short of the recommended personnel.59 Due to academic schedules and navy regulations for permanent moves, assignments for the Naval War College and Naval Postgraduate School students to the SSG needed to be less than six months. The more senior members continued their nominal one-year assignments. This allowed time for a broad-based orientation to begin critical analysis of national security and the navy to identify future warfare and operational challenges, as past SSGs had, and to organize concepts for study before the arrival of the more junior officers. Members of the CEP staff encouraged the SSG to think of future navy forces (such as a stealthy, passive sensor ship) to deal with anti-navy capabilities. With the policy of operating in the littoral and projecting power ashore, the CEP emphasized naval support to the land battle.60 The first SSG tasked with naval warfare innovation in 1995 established a pattern followed by future groups. The group organized into Knowledge, Protection, Sustainment, and Projection teams with a fifteen- to twentyfive-year horizon for full implementation of their concepts. They foresaw the transformation of warfare from its current basis of individual units and platforms to warfare based upon networks. The “cooperative engagement capability” for air defense created by networking data from Aegis radars best illustrated this view of the future. They expected the consequences of this change to be profound and to require a shift in understanding, culture, doctrine, and organization to fully exploit its potential. While they were developing their concepts, the group held “plenary” meetings at least once a month to share their concepts between teams, and invited Naval War College, Naval Doctrine Command, Office of Naval Research, CEP, and representatives from other institutions and organizations involved in their studies. The Knowledge team identified cognitive enhancement as a concept likely to improve the speed and effectiveness of decisionmaking. The Projection team identified electromagnetic rail guns on ships with integrated power systems for propulsion and weapons, uninhabited61 strike aircraft, advanced naval fire support systems, and cooperative engagement capability for land targets as concept areas with the potential to greatly enhance naval power projection capabilities.62 The Protection team identified experimental hull forms and distributed capabilities (including off-board sensors and undersea cooperative engagement) as innovative concepts with great potential for the future. Working with the

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Naval Surface Warfare Center at Carderock, Maryland, they envisioned ships of 350–400 tons with modular payloads, supported by tenders in a fashion similar to the way that an aircraft carrier supports its embarked air wing.63 The navy could use its Advanced Technology Demonstration program to explore different prototype hull forms and mission packages in a manner similar to the way Rickover quickly developed the nuclear submarine force, having the first nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus (SSN 571), underway within five years from congressional authorization and building fifty-eight nuclear submarines in eleven different classes in the first decade of navy nuclear power.64 Finally, the Sustainment team combined information technologies with other emerging production, shipping, and energy technologies to develop the in-stride sustainment concept in which every ship would be a combatant and every sailor a warrior.65 The concepts emphasized the application of emerging technology to defeat enemy forces and influence enemy perceptions.66 Public pressure on the navy over Tailhook and gender issues continued, as did ad hominem attacks on Admiral Boorda. He took his life on May 16, 1996, two weeks before the SSG was scheduled to brief their concepts to him. Admiral Jay Johnson, the vice CNO, became acting CNO. However, he could not perform as CNO until he was confirmed in August. Johnson had served as a fellow on the SSG in 1989– 1990 and had reservations over the change in the group’s size and direction.67 But, when the SSG was able to brief him in the fall, he decided to continue the program with naval warfare innovation. Though the SSG’s concepts received attention at high levels of the navy and OSD, the intent to select several concepts for substantial funding passed with Admiral Boorda as the navy was reaching a nadir in its annual funding following the Cold War. The second naval warfare innovation SSG followed their predecessor’s path. Their Projection/Protection, Command, Sustainment, and “Horizon” teams generated concepts for the CNO.68 The Projection/Protection team further developed concepts for navy rail guns, building upon research that the army was doing to develop rail guns for M-1 tanks. They also focused on the high-velocity projectiles that rail guns would use. They again explored uninhabited air vehicles, including those for combat missions, and the implications for carrier air wings, personnel, and reducing costs. Rather than designing new air frames, they recommended instrumenting existing air frames to begin inhabited/uninhabited experimentation. They investigated and recommended modular ship designs, similar to combat ships built in Europe and Australia, where one hull form could employ modular sensor and weapons payloads that

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could quickly be reconfigured. Blohm & Voss, a German shipbuilding firm, had been building modular frigates and corvettes to US Naval Sea System Command’s standards since 1981 that they had sold to seven foreign navies. Blohm & Voss data from 1981 to 1991 indicated more than 18 percent life cycle maintenance savings due to the benefits of modularity. The team also proposed a net-based undersea warfare concept to better coordinate dispersed searching using Bayesian techniques to develop probabilities of target locations and more rapid classification of contacts using artificial intelligence to enhance target recognition. The Command 21 team focused on ways to improve various aspects of combat decisionmaking and execution to allow commanders to perform quickly and confidently in complex, high-tempo future warfare. They built on the work of navy laboratories in San Diego (following the inadvertent shoot-down of an Iranian Airbus in 1988) and experimentation on the Third Fleet flag ship. They emphasized the needs for operational systems to include simulation capabilities that would allow interactive gaming and training underway, alongside the pier, or at training centers at any time. The two most innovative concepts involved sustainment and personnel management and training. They are worth noting as the technologies for developing them existed in the mid-1990s and they could have major impacts on the navy if pursued today. They were ripe for experimentation and development, needing only the level of investment that the CEP and Boorda envisioned to create prototypes and tinker with the details to establish their value. Therefore, they are presented in detail. Stay-in-the-Fray Sustainment

This team’s concepts encompassed supply, transportation, engineering, health services, and maintenance. They proposed a roadmap for evolving from the current planned maintenance system based upon time, to conducting maintenance based upon monitoring the condition of the equipment in real time using sensors, to information-based sustainment by transmitting the use of all categories of things required to sustain a ship to resupply locations in near real time, to a “cognitive” operational decision system employing artificial intelligence. The SSG believed that the navy needed to embrace emerging commercial technologies and policies in order to meet future national security demands with fewer ships and leaner budgets. The team studied the technologies and policies that industry had applied to provide a roadmap for changing the navy’s maintenance philosophy in the future. Technologies

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of netted small smart sensors, networks, and on-site fabrication would enable development of the cognitive maintenance process they espoused. The navy had several promising initiatives underway. Reduced Ship’s Crew by Virtual Presence was a Naval Surface Warfare Center Advanced Technology Demonstration to provide a fault-tolerant, intracompartment wireless system using small sensors. The reduced watch standing and damage control manning that this technology could provide were seen as vital to the smaller crew philosophies being studied for Surface Combatant-21, and the next-generation large amphibious ship and aircraft carrier. This research affected the computer simulations used to design the Littoral Combat Ship and Zumwalt-class destroyers. However, trust in computer simulations displaced investments in prototypes. The team believed that the navy should go beyond the Reduced Ship’s Crew by Virtual Presence Advanced Technology Demonstration with its small sensors to develop smarter sensors with the capability to understand machinery health. Installed smart sensors using neural network artificial intelligence would “learn” the operating characteristics of each piece of equipment. Dayton T. Brown Intrinsic Health Monitoring Systems had installed such a system on a shore-based electrical power plant. This system predicted failure of an electrical motor 150 hours before the motor seized. The Office of Naval Research was also working as part of the Advanced Technology Demonstration to develop diagnostic capabilities. The next step would be to develop netted, small, smart sensors, with the capability to do logic processing at the machinery level, while sharing command, control, and health information among elements of the system. This would be the key to developing automatic or autonomous operations. Florida Atlantic University had developed small, netted sensors that shared limited information wirelessly, and automatically took preventive or corrective action in an uninhabited research submarine. Taking the wealth of information from shipboard sensor networks and sharing it with the expert systems and technicians ashore would provide a big jump to information-based maintenance. Shipboard maintenance practiced then (and today) is a manpower intensive system consisting of the sailor on the deck plates manually recording machinery status information and the command passing it up chains of outside organizations. This results in a myriad of maintenance personnel attempting to find the fight “fix” for a given problem. An in-service engineering agent, responsible for the life cycle health of a particular type of equipment, was not directly in the flow of information. Provided with information on the performance of their systems, those agents

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would be in a position to contribute vital information or make the type of sweeping changes necessary to solve a problem with a class of equipment. A logistics network could solve this connectivity challenge and ensure that the right person or level received all of the relevant information. Under this concept, all machinery information aboard ship would be netted and passed in a web page format to the network off the ship. Information would be “pulled” from the net as desired by any authorized group or individual. Casualty reports would become automated; instant feedback on parts and tele-repair status would be immediate. Additionally, the ship would have the capability to pull the support they need from a variety of sources. Linking the logistics network with machinery health information would provide the potential for a sweeping change in the structure and functionality of fleet maintenance. Providing the continuous flow of information from the sensor, to an internal network, to the external network, the original equipment manufacturer would have access to all performance information and be able to make sweeping design corrections to the fleet material condition. In the best case, the original equipment manufacturer could be given the in-service engineering agent and repair responsibilities for shipboard equipment. This would significantly reduce the infrastructure and minimize response time for machinery repair. The logistics network investment payoff would be significant. The ratio of maintenance staff personnel ashore to support one ship at sea involved large costs. This concept could produce notable reductions in the size and number of assist teams and the staff required to monitor maintenance. Maintenance planning costs could be dramatically reduced, and the continual linking of material status would eliminate maintenance surprises and costly new work.69 From the shipboard perspective, there would be additional changes and benefits. Casualty reports and material updates would become paperless and instantaneous. Many inspections would become unnecessary. Downtime would be reduced with high-speed communication and tele-repair. Many new services could be provided to support the crew’s quality of life. The ship’s force would have more time to devote to war fighting rather than administration and maintenance. The best industrial example of a value-added network service at that time was the General Motors OnStar system. Developed initially to provide emergency support to Cadillac drivers, the hands-free connectivity from driver to OnStar control center had given unlimited access to emergency and concierge services, and had expanded to all

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GM drivers. The USS Princeton (CG-51) had the latest navy installation for connectivity and could link by fiber optics pier side, line of sight at sea, or satellite to shore base. In an SSG virtual teleconference with the commanding officer, he had expressed the value of this link to his material readiness and improved services to his crew. To go beyond information-based maintenance to cognitive maintenance, the navy would need to develop an automated response to maintenance needs. Specifically in the delivery of parts, the navy would develop solid free-form fabrication and move that technology to platforms and battle groups in the form of on-site fabrication. This would be the shipboard process to automatically manufacture parts from three-dimensional computer library templates using limited bulk material in a fraction of the time it took to order and receive parts using the current system. Solid free-form fabrication provided numerous underlying strengths. Because it is an additive process, products can be produced with essentially no waste. Taking the technology aboard ships would give the ships of the future unprecedented flexibility. Sensor data could predict machinery failure and plan a timely period of repair. Parts manufactured via onsite fabrication would be ready when needed and would reduce storage and delivery requirements. From a cost perspective, traditional prototyping and production methods were twice as expensive. Additionally, solid free-form fabrication permitted inexpensive design iterations until performance was maximized. The process would lead to the development of direct production of usable parts. Industry in 1996 was working with plastics and ceramics, but the use of high-melting-point metals was expected before long. The cognitive goal was to be able to make the metallic parts directly and use them immediately after fabrication. To support lengthier deployments and independent operations, the team investigated emerging engineering technologies that offered promise of minimized maintenance, manpower, and replenishment requirements for the fleet. They discovered three such enterprises. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was developing semiautonomous, task-oriented robots able to recognize when they have failed or succeeded at a job. This had a direct application to flexible manufacturing, as well as providing the opportunity to eliminate the human in the loop for a variety of navy tasks, such as damage control response or hazardous material management. The National Air and Space Administration was refining hydroponics, a soilless method of growing vegetables for use in space. A study conducted by their Ames laboratory for possible navy application showed that a twelve by twenty-foot container could be built to continuously provide daily fresh salads to a crew of

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about 100. This system would enable longer independent patrols and eliminate the vulnerability of food supplies. Corrosion and hull coating requirements drove ship docking schedules and were responsible for the largest expenditures in maintenance costs. Naval Research Laboratory’s work with lipid paint systems (phospholipids) offered the potential for creating biological hull and tank paints, which, compared to extant systems, would provide more efficient antifoulants and anticorrosives, and would be less detrimental to the environment. Horizon

Whereas concepts for uninhabited combat vehicles and modular ships were controversial, the Horizon concept presented the greatest challenge to navy culture. Where the army and marine corps have a culture of equipping the soldier and Marine, the air force and navy culture is to “man” the equipment. Four navy captains led the Horizon team, led by two aviators. The concept focused on improving the life of the individual sailor while taking advantage of emerging information and shipbuilding technologies to increase overall navy readiness and forward operations at lower cost. The most controversial feature of the concept was in assigning personnel to fleet readiness units rather than ships. The concept of assigning units to ships is routine for aviators operating from ships. Submariners have long used blue and gold crews to maintain strategic ballistic missile submarines at sea. Horizon took these concepts much further. The concept encompassed the following four key elements to describe a notional navy using Horizon: 1. Building on the innovative concept provided by the Sustainment team, platforms would be capable of remaining forward deployed for up to three years. This would provide continual maritime presence and, at the same time, more ready platforms for crisis response on demand. 2. Fully trained and ready sailors would rotate to the forward deployed platforms as individuals, watch teams, modular weapons systems teams, portions of crews, or even entire crews from an environment ashore or afloat where they were continuously training or working in their rating. The concept supported deploying detachments trained to use specific modular sensor or weapons systems, or uninhabited aircraft air squadrons or wings. “Direct support elements” for intelligence collection has long been a routine navy practice when ships deploy. Should the navy be required to deploy nuclear weapons on ships and sub-

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marines, the concept of deploying specialists trained to maintain and use the weapons whose personal reliability had been verified would significantly reduce additional administration demands on the ship’s force. The Horizon rotation cycle would provide sailors a much more predictable deployment schedule and improved stability in their home life. The concept of assigning sailors to teams that deployed to multiple ships rather than being assigned to one ship was counter to navy culture and the most controversial aspect of the concept, even though individual transfers to and from deployed ships is common. 3. Horizon sought to make 80 percent of navy personnel available for deployment, in contrast to the less than 50 percent of the navy’s personnel that were in deployable billets in 1996. Rather than distinguishing between “sea” and “shore” billets, the distinction would be between operational billets and billets required to support administrative functions ashore. The latter could be performed by other than sailors. Sailors would progress through an apprentice, journeyman, master career by remaining in their specialty and not having to assume other duties merely to give them more time at home. By assigning sailors to readiness units and tracking their individual deployments the scheme could double the time that sailors spent at their home base when assigned to operational units. 4. A new organizational structure centered in fleet concentration areas would train, maintain, and operate the force. Fleet Readiness Centers— like those in San Diego, California, and Norfolk, Virginia—would provide centralized support for Readiness Units organized by aircraft type and ship class. The majority of sailors would be assigned to the Fleet Readiness Centers or Units, either training or working in a fleet shore facility or serving in an operational platform. Horizon fellows teamed with Center for Naval Analyses analysts to develop a model to demonstrate platform and people rotation options. Having five crews for four ships became the focus. The concept was applied directly to the next-generation surface combatants then being designed by the navy. The planned three-year deployment capability and limited depot maintenance requirement (three to six months every five years) made this platform an excellent proof of concept platform. The planned initial operating capability in 2008 provided time to test and implement the organizational changes needed for the concept to succeed. Success with this platform would provide the experience needed to expand the concept to other platforms and warfare communities.70 There were several advantages to this operational approach: (1) the number of deployment transits would be substantially reduced by keeping one ship forward; (2) gaps in naval forward presence coverage in

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any of the three major theaters (East Asia, the Mideast and South Asia, and around Europe) would be eliminated; (3) two of the three ready platforms remaining in the continental US would be operationally “ready” platforms 100 percent of the time, and all three over 90 percent of the time. New nonintrusive ways of certifying the platforms and crews as “ready” for operations would free them from the yoke of the inspection-intensive interdeployment training cycle and joint task force workups. This would allow the navy to move away from cyclic readiness and toward sustained readiness. Their analysis revealed that extant efforts to keep units deployed in three regions required a greater number of ships to keep one forward than with the Horizon concept. For example, deployments to the Persian Gulf required approximately eight ships to maintain one forward. In contrast, Horizon only required four ships to keep one forward in the Persian Gulf. Horizon’s concept fully implemented on all navy surface combatants operating in the three regions would result in continuous maritime forward presence, plus 40 percent more ready platforms available for contingency, surge, and local operations. One example studied was five crews for four ships with a thirtymonth deployment cycle during which an individual would rotate in the following sequence: • Readiness Center facility for seven to nine months. The individual could be an instructor, receive advanced in-rate training, or work in a specialty-related billet. Online training would occur between sailors in the ashore facility, Readiness Units, and the forward deployed units. • Readiness Unit for twelve to fifteen months. The individual would train both in port and underway on one of the platforms within the Readiness Unit. High levels of individual readiness would continually be maintained using state-of-the-art, collaborative training technologies and techniques. The extant interdeployment training cycle with its cyclical readiness would be eliminated with the ability to maintain continuous readiness. • Online turnover for two weeks. The individual, watch team, or crew, fully qualified, would then perform a brief period of intense online turnover with counterparts in the forward unit. Large bandwidths would allow all individuals in the Readiness Units to view the identical tactical displays and work center environment as those forward. • Six-month deployment on forward deployed platform. • End of cycle. Return to Readiness Center/Unit.

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Horizon’s focus was operational primacy. “Ready” sailors would move through this cycle three times during an eight-year tour in operational duty. They would rotate seamlessly, not only through the Readiness Centers/Units, but also forward to deployed units. In developing a new operational approach, Horizon considered those options that not only met current operational policies and kept a sailor in operational duty longer, but also provided a better quality of life. The model’s defining criteria were a better turnaround ratio, increased time at home, deployments of no more than 180 days, and an acceptable operational tempo. In 1997, navy policy was a minimum turnaround ratio of two times as long at home as away, with a fleet average of about two and a half. However, the navy monitored only units, resulting in personnel transferred between units being exposed to longer times deployed. Horizon advocated monitoring individuals to measure the percentage of time an individual was at home base every day throughout the operational duty tour. Additionally, deployments would be restricted to no longer than six months. The same analysis that generated a four-platforms and fivecrews optimal rotation solution provided a significantly enhanced turnaround ratio of four times the length at home as deployed resulting in an individual spending 62 percent of their time during an operational tour at home base and a 25 percent savings in the costs associated with a unit’s operational tempo achieved through advanced, embedded training and certification techniques. Days spent underway solely for training would be reduced, allowing increased underway time in support of operational requirements. In this rotation schedule, a sailor would complete three, six-month deployments during eight years of operational duty. The employment rotation provided sailors predictability and stability in their lives—made home-basing work—and provided incentives for the professional career sailors. The operational changes forecast for the next-generation family of surface combatants, when combined with Horizon’s concept, would lead to sweeping organizational changes across the navy. Horizon kept approximately 80 percent of navy personnel in operational duty (billets involving advanced training, maintenance activities, etc.) and the remaining 20 percent in nonoperational duty (billets in recruiting, OPNAV, and other non-seagoing staffs). A comprehensive function and billet assessment of the infrastructure was needed to achieve the desired operational ratio. This included moving specific billets from shore to operational duty and placing all other billets that must be filled by sailors to nonoperational duty. All remaining general shore duty billets would be outsourced, privatized, or eliminated. Completing this process

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would reduce that part of the shore infrastructure needed to provide sailors tours ashore under the existing system. Notionally, a sailor would spend eight years in operational duty, then two years in nonoperational duty. This would provide the navy a sailor who spends sixteen years of a twenty-year career in a deployable status. However, not all of the sixteen years would be at sea. While in operational duty, sailors would be rotating within the Readiness Center and Readiness Unit in rating-related jobs and schools. They would be continuously teaching, training, and improving their professional knowledge while refining their skills, all enabled by advancements in technology that will lead to significant innovations in training techniques. Horizon envisioned Fleet Readiness Centers and Fleet Readiness Units as the principal organizational structures supporting readiness, training, and rotation of platforms and personnel. Fleet Readiness Centers would be geographic hubs providing major fleet support to navy units. Norfolk and San Diego were candidate sites for Fleet Readiness Centers. These centers could be further augmented by smaller Fleet Readiness Centers in areas like Pearl Harbor Hawaii, Everett Washington, and Mayport Florida. Readiness Centers were envisioned as regional manpower distribution authorities unlike the existing Bureau of Personnel assignment process. Readiness Centers would centralize and supervise redundant, stovepiped functions and services including training, logistics, administration, and intermediate maintenance activities. Within the Fleet Readiness Center would be Fleet Readiness Units. They would be organized by aircraft type or ship/submarine class. In a nominal career, sailors would remain within their community and be assigned by closed-looped detailing. In the Fleet Readiness Unit, sailors would continuously hone their knowledge and skills (both in their specialty and watch standing) and interact with other warfighters through online, collaborative training techniques. These Readiness Centers and Units would be the key to eliminating the cyclic readiness of people and platforms. Key to sustaining Horizon’s high levels of readiness was advanced modeling and simulation-based instructional technologies, such as fully immersive, interactive, virtual environment systems (similar to what the Meta corporation has made their core business) and networked interactive systems. Immersive virtual environment and networked interactive systems would facilitate revolutionary effectiveness, efficiency, and safety in fleet training. Virtual environments seemed to offer the most promise for affordable, deployable, and reconfigurable scenario-based training. Virtual environment technologies combined with other com-

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puter-based instructional breakthroughs would make a significant and dramatic improvement in the navy’s individual and unit-level operational training regimen. This training method would be applied across the full spectrum of seagoing and war-fighting knowledge and skills, not just knowledge and skills that involve use of combat information. The virtual environment training support was to be totally immersive (vision, space, and distance), geographically distributed, fully interactive (audio, visual, and haptic), and include performance measurement, diagnostic, and instructional capabilities. Other online, collaborative training systems such as synthetic environment training systems, interactive courseware, distance learning systems, and virtual environment techniques would provide the ability to see and train anywhere using the identical tactical picture and all readiness-related factors of the forward platforms, regardless of theater. Embedded systems and remote sensors in operational platforms would dramatically change the conduct of inspections and certifications. Efficiencies would result from the ability to continually monitor, test, certify, and measure equipment performance and man-machine interactions. Onboard computer-based monitoring would provide performance-based personnel readiness assessments and information required for individualized “just-in-time” refresher training. Training advancements based on modeling and simulation instructional technologies would not only enable sailors to learn better and faster, but also offer opportunities to recapture training lost by reduced underway days and flight hours and to change battle group workups. Ultimately, the navy would be able to reduce ship underway days and aircraft flight hours. In summary, the Horizon concept offered the navy a revolutionary operational approach to provide continual naval presence in all theaters, robust crisis response and surge capability, and a mechanism for reducing the shore infrastructure. OPNAV’s Response to SSG Concepts

The SSG briefed the CNO, VCNO, and senior OPNAV flag officers on June 3, 1997.71 The CNO directed that an OPNAV sponsor be designated for each concept and that those sponsors, in conjunction with SSG concept-generation teams, develop recommendations on implementation plans. On June 9, VCNO Harold Gehman sent a memorandum to OPNAV deputy CNOs and directors, the SSG director, Naval War College president, Naval Postgraduate School superintendent, Naval Doctrine Command, CEP, Center for Naval Analyses, and the Office of

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Naval Research, stating the CNO’s direction with an enclosure designating sponsors for each concept. He directed that OPNAV sponsors with assigned concept-generation teams brief the CNO by August 29, 1997.72 All of the SSG fellows moved on to their next assignments with the exception of Captain James Carman, who established an office in the Pentagon to work with OPNAV sponsors on recommendations for implementation plans. Carman arranged for members of the conceptgeneration teams to provide many follow-on briefings to the various staffs in OPNAV and other stakeholders. On June 24, 1997, Morrow and Huberman sent a memorandum to Gehman referencing his June 9 memo and stating, “Since no formal process or organization currently exists in the navy for concept development, experimentation, and testing, we agree that this was the only option available to you.” They noted that in learning how the commercial sector innovates they had found that separation of revolutionary innovation from mainstream business was “critical”: [People] involved in running the day-to-day running of a company (~OPNAV) often will not support new ideas as they perceive them to be a threat to resources and existing product lines. This drove our decision to recommend to the CNO in our 18 June 1997 Naval Warfare Innovation Task Force briefing that he establish a new command double-hatted with the Naval War College that would perform the functions of concept development [as opposed to generation], experimentation, testing, and doctrine development. . . . Our collective experience with the commercial sector practice of separating and protecting revolutionary innovation suggests that placing SSG concepts under an OPNAV sponsor at the early stages of development will probably not produce a revolutionary change in the way the Navy conducts warfare. When the OPNAV sponsors and SSG team brief you and the CNO later this summer, we believe it will fall to you and the CNO to protect truly innovative ideas.73

The CEP’s memorandum proved prophetic. To support the VCNO’s deadline for reports on SSG concept implementation by August 29, Carman arranged for the SSG concept-generation team leaders—along with the CEP staff (OPNAV N00K)—to meet with OPNAV sponsor representatives on August 15 in a series of sequential meetings.74 Following the meetings, Captain Ronald R. “Robby” Harris (N00K) sent a message to the new VCNO Donald Pilling stating that he had attended each of the meetings and the results were “spotty.” He recommended that the VCNO remind the sponsors that what was expected was a specific sponsor position on each SSG recommendation, clarifying their “intentions to fund,

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not to fund, study further, etc.”75 On August 28, 1997, Hogg used the occasion of sending SSG’s final report to give the CNO an update and express some concerns. He noted that most CNO fellows had duty in Washington and were heavily involved with OPNAV sponsors to develop near-term implementation plans for their concepts. He stated, “Key here is the alignment of sponsors, field activities and funds to permit the commencement of first order experiments and tests.” He noted that Harris was providing lots of help and appreciated the CNO’s “clear and written” direction for total focus on long-term, revolutionary, nonconsensual development of war-fighting/operational concepts.76 Hogg followed this with a fax to Harris discussing the need for experimentation, stating “that you don’t reduce risk by continued study of old data.”77 The August 29 deadline for a briefing to the CNO passed, and the briefing became a series of memos from the designated sponsors. The OPNAV sponsors largely concluded that the SSG’s concepts were premature, or that ongoing work addressed their concepts.78, Most recommended further study. OPNAV N4 endorsed condition-based maintenance (CBM) as a step to achieving cognitive maintenance and recommended transitioning the Smart Ship project to a “Smart Fleet” program office and experimenting with three Arleigh Burke class DDG-51s.79 None of this came to pass. Rather than a system of sensors to track the condition of equipment and predict when maintenance was required, N4 interpreted condition-based maintenance as a philosophy of performing maintenance when conditions demonstrated that maintenance was required. By treating CBM as a philosophy, for some maintenance the fleet went from planned cycles to conducting inspections during maintenance periods, which resulted in increased costs and maintenance delays. The CEP had anticipated OPNAV’s response. Carman continued to orchestrate efforts to implement these SSG concepts through April 1998. OPNAV deflected rather than rejected the SSG’s concepts. The responsible offices took no substantive action to implement them. Extant computer-based combat and campaign models were (and are) incapable of dealing with the complexity of distributed and dispersed operations or quantifying the value of alternative command and control capabilities and organizations. The tools employed in the systems analysis paradigm were inadequate for estimating costs and benefits without data from experiments with prototypes in the fleet. The CEP continued to work with Hogg and the CNO on ways to improve the naval warfare innovation process. They believed that the SSG needed to focus solely on naval warfare innovation, and that the orientation program to provide the SSG fellows an understanding of

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strategic concepts and international security issues that involved interactions with foreign military and government officials and intellectuals detracted from this focus, rather than providing a sound basis for anticipating future warfare challenges. This resulted in CNO Johnson revising the SSG’s charter in May 1997, making the sole mission “the development of revolutionary naval warfare innovations.”80 The orientation for the first two naval warfare innovation SSGs had been similar to their predecessors to provide a broad understanding of international security and naval strategy, and included interactions with Chinese and Russian counterparts. Interactions with foreign military, government, and intellectuals ended in 1997 as the SSG completed its transformation from preparing captains of ships to be captains of war to solely “revolutionary” naval warfare innovation. The interactions shifted to service doctrine commands and laboratories to explore emerging technology, further eroding logical tact for war fighting against emerging competitors as the emphasis on theoretical understanding increased.81 The Navy Warfare Development Command

The CEP’s process called for the SSG’s concept generation to be the first phase of a naval warfare innovation ecology interacting with a host of organizations. The CEP expected the Naval Doctrine Command and Naval War College to take SSG concepts for further analysis, war gaming, fleet experimentation, and doctrine development. By 1997 the CEP believed that ongoing navy efforts to move in the direction that the SSG had recommended were inadequate and that a Navy Warfare Development Command was required.82 By April 1997, the Naval Doctrine Command had created a Maritime Battle Center, whose director reported to the commander. The Maritime Battle Center was to interact directly with many organizations and commands to accomplish its mission, including • regional fleet commanders and various naval labs for experiment prioritization and coordination and for arranging warfighter experiments; • OPNAV for acquisitions, architecture, engineering, and testing recommendations; • the Operational Test and Evaluation Force commands for coordination and evaluation of systems and technologies; and • warfare development commands (i.e., Submarine Development Squadron TWELVE, Surface Warfare Development Group, Air Warfare Development Group, etc.).83

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Although the CNO had tasked the SSG to focus solely on naval warfare innovation in May, the role of Naval Doctrine Command was unsettled. VCNO Gehman directed a review of the current concept and doctrine development process to • identify, model, and experiment with new concepts and implement new capabilities; • enhance doctrinal awareness and provide timely delivery of naval doctrine to the fleet; and • recognize the many sources of innovation and good ideas by devoting navy resources and attention. Part of the motivation for this effort was the perception that joint doctrine and vision were setting the pace for military concept development, and the navy “must have its house in order.” Other perceived problems were that the navy concept development process was ill-defined, fleet battle experiments were ad hoc, and the Naval Doctrine Command was not empowered to drive doctrine development and innovative processes. The tasks this effort undertook were to define a process that facilitated innovation and concept development, and propose an organization empowered to manage, program, and commit resources to concept development, experimentation, and doctrine development processes. Neither the CEP nor the SSG was incorporated in this OPNAV effort. In June 1997, OPNAV proposed an organization with the Maritime Battle Center as the central integrator of the effort and a Navy Warfare Innovation Panel, chaired by the three-star with OPNAV principals responsible for policy and operations; command, control, and communications; and resources and requirements, along with commanders of US-based Second and Third Fleets who controlled forces and had the greatest training responsibilities as members. OPNAV would relegate the SSG to one among many suggesting concepts for further development. Independently, on June 18, 1997, the CEP Naval Warfare Innovation Task Force recommended to CNO Johnson that he establish a new command at the Naval War College “that would perform the functions of concept development, experimentation, testing, and doctrine development” to implement the second phase of their process.84 They had been aware of other working groups’ efforts to develop a process and had two primary concerns with those efforts. First, there was no distinction between the handling of revolutionary and evolutionary ideas. Second, they believed the inclusion of an oversight panel would weed out truly revolutionary ideas during the process

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of gaining consensus. Instead, revolutionary ideas would need a highlevel proponent “(normally the CEO or CNO) and protection from just a process” (italics in original). At a navy four-star conference on June 26–27, 1997, CNO Johnson approved recommendations to • create a new three-star command, the “Navy Warfare Concepts and Doctrine Development Command” at Newport, Rhode Island; • rename the Naval Doctrine Command the Navy Doctrine Command; • assign the Navy Doctrine Command responsibility for concept development and experimentation management within a Navy Warfare Concepts and Doctrine Development Command organization; • publish an OPNAV instruction to define command relationships and replace the existing Naval Doctrine Command charter; and • provide appropriate staffing and centralized funding for the Navy Warfare Concepts and Doctrine Development Command organization.85 OPNAV briefed the CNO again on August 21 on their proposed organization that would place OPNAV in the center of naval warfare innovation. This prompted the CEP to reiterate the need to separate revolutionary innovation from people involved in running the day-to-day business as they often would not support new ideas as they perceived them to be a threat to resources and existing product lines. They believed that concepts that had the potential to change the way the navy conducted warfare should be put into a special program office until they were able to withstand such competition. Although they did not mention it, they appreciated that OPNAV was impeding experimentation with SSG concepts at that time. CEP innovation task force leaders Morrow and Huberman recommended that the focus of the command be “well into the future” as opposed to focusing on near-term incremental changes in warfare concepts. They also objected that the relationship of the SSG with the new command structure was unclear, that the process did not depict a “division” responsible for ensuring that warfare requirements were incorporated into the process, that the process needed an organization to independently analyze and evaluate the experiments, and that a Red team was also very important. At the navy four-star conference on November 13, 1997, the CNO briefed his intention to streamline the naval warfare concepts innovation process by merging the navy’s concept development, fleet battle

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experimentation, and doctrine development efforts under a single command structure.86 He decided that a reorganization of the Naval War College, incorporating responsibilities formerly assigned to the Naval Doctrine Command, would provide appropriate leadership to develop strategy and guide the navy’s warfare innovation efforts. He would disestablish the Naval Doctrine Command and establish a Navy Warfare Development Command, commanded by a two-star, at the Naval War College to develop and validate navy warfare concepts through modeling and experimentation. This new command would be subordinate to a three-star Naval War College president (Figure 4.2). The provost of the Naval War College would become a one- or two-star officer, resulting in three flag officers in the Naval War College where there had been one. The relationships depicted under the Naval War College provost are notable. The warfare studies are given the central position, flanked by war gaming and academics, as they were before World War II. That was not to be. On December 10, 1997, the CNO apprised the secretary of the navy of his decision to expand the Naval War College’s mission to lead strategy development, serve as focal point for navy warfare innovation, and include the Naval Doctrine Command’s mission. The majority of billets were to be allocated from within the existing Naval War College and organizations.87 CNO Johnson assigned the Naval War College president to form an implementation group to draft, for his signature, an OPNAV notice directing all actions to support this memorandum, and provide the CNO with monthly progress reports on the first of every month until the reorganization was complete. His memo listed the subcommittees and participants required to support the effort.88 Neither the SSG nor the CEP was involved or mentioned in these communications. On December 22, 1997, the SSG discovered that CNO Johnson was expanding the mission of the Naval War College to streamline the navy’s warfare innovation process—linking innovation to strategic vision. CNO Johnson had announced that the next Naval War College president would be a three-star reporting directly to him along with the new command structure. Reorganization was to begin immediately and be completed by May 1999, to allow time to move personnel from Norfolk, Virginia, to Newport, Rhode Island. The intent was to capitalize on fleet battle experiments and talent at Naval War College, including the SSG, the faculty, war gaming and research capabilities, and the students.89 Interaction was to be with the CNO rather than OPNAV subordinates. The expectation was that the

Naval War College–SSG–Naval Warfare Development Command Relationships

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individual assigned as Naval War College president would be able to change the culture of the Naval War College faculty and practices to align these functions and organizations. Success of the effort rested upon the personalities and power of the CNO and Naval War College president. A Naval War College message announced the formation of an Implementation Working Group to convene at the college on January 5 for a week to plan for the Naval Doctrine Command’s move. It tasked the group with developing personnel, budgeting, facilities, and public affairs plans.90 The SSG was not invited to participate. The Naval Doctrine Command and the Naval Tactical Support Activity (which had administered the TAC D&E program in the 1980s) were to be disestablished on May 14, 1998, and the Navy Warfare Development Command established the next day to “provide unity of effort by realigning Navy warfare doctrine development, concept innovation, and fleet experimentation with strategy development and wargaming under the command of the President, Naval War College,” soon to be Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski. Cebrowski originally had conceived of concepts for networking forces as a fellow on the first SSG in 1981–1982 while working on the Maritime Strategy. He then served in several assignments as a flag officer that allowed him to further develop and begin implementing these concepts. His “network-centric warfare” became a centerpiece of “The Navy Operational Concept” that he drafted for CNO Johnson earlier in 1997. He argued that the navy could accomplish its missions with fewer, but networked, forces, aiming to drive rather than follow joint doctrine.91 Resolution of Naval War College/Naval Warfare Development Command/SSG Relationships

In June 1998, the CEP met with CNO Johnson on the subject of the Naval Warfare Development Command. “It was a really great meeting in a continuing series!”92 The CEP felt that the navy had the best opportunity to pursue innovation, compared to the army and the air force, but did not have as good public relations, citing “Army After Next.” They asked, “How can we use NWDC [Naval Warfare Development Command] to carry the Navy’s message?” They noted that OPNAV and the Bureau of Personnel would continue to test the seriousness of the CNO’s commitment to the command, and that people outside the command would measure its progress by looking at its people and funding, and who the commander was. They suggested that the CNO meet regularly with Cebrowski and travel to Newport to signal his support.

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They discussed the need for innovative officers. They thought that the Naval Warfare Development Command should lay out a marketing strategy for Congress to capture budget increases, and recommended linking with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to gain congressional support. They also recommended avoiding employing “life-time” analysts and technologists to prevent stifling innovation. The CNO wanted a clear written vision out of the Naval Warfare Development Command prior to the next Quadrennial Defense Review. He said it was important to focus on a few short-term projects and early successes. Cebrowski noted that connection to the fleet and tactical training groups must be robust and accepted by the fleet. Fleet battle experiments would be a point of connectivity to joint battle experiments. Morrow added that the SSG continued to be important and the navy needed to maintain strong support for it. The CNO noted that the next six months would be critical and asked the CEP task force to continue to monitor the establishment of the Naval Warfare Development Command and to advise him and Cebrowski on innovation.93 The CEP, however, never established the kind of relationship with Cebrowski and the Naval Warfare Development Command that it had with the SSG. The SSG leadership provided their depiction of desired interactions between the SSG and the Naval Warfare Development Command (Figure 4.3). To collaborate with the Naval Warfare Development Command, the SSG • began inviting their personnel to attend sessions with SSG speakers and providing copies of particularly good briefings to command; • created a common internet and collaborative planning net to share the database of SSG research; • began work on a common set of software games and analysis tools to clearly represent concepts and allow rapid adaptation and iteration; • participated in the planning of fleet battle experiment Echo (the fifth such experiment); • shared use of the SSG Innovation Center, a collaborative networked workspace, with the command; • established close liaison between SSG and the command’s science advisors; • involved participants from the command in SSG wargames; and • requested involvement in the command’s concept review board that determined which concepts they would pursue.94 Having failed to obtain any funding for experimentation from OPNAV, Hogg began emphasizing that the innovation the SSG was

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proposing would take decades (as depicted in Figure 4.3), thus not presenting a threat to funding for current OPNAV programs. In fact, only ecosystem sclerosis and not technology dictated that timeline. The organizational relationships did not mature as planned. The SSG briefed their concepts and recommendations to CNO Johnson, Vice Admiral Cebrowski (Naval War College president), and Rear Admiral Bernard J. Smith (commander of the Naval Warfare Development Command) on June 29, 1999. Johnson said that he had a gleam in his eye when he put out the tasking, but their brief went beyond his expectations.95 However, rather than directing Cebrowski and Smith to take action on the SSG’s recommendations as Hogg expected, the CNO adopted a passive approach assuming that the Naval War College and development command would follow up on the SSG concepts and move them forward. The Naval Warfare Development Command did assign a full-time liaison officer to the SSG, attended SSG plenary sessions and briefings, and selectively pursued SSG concepts. However, rather than taking SSG concepts for analysis, experimentation, and doctrine development as envisioned by the CEP and SSG, the command established a separate process for prioritizing concepts to develop.96 Absent a group like the general board to select fleet problems and orchestrate a campaign of learning, the development command decided unilaterally what to pursue. On September 17, 1999, CNO Johnson directed the Naval War College president to create a formal means for transitioning concepts from the SSG, to the development command, to OPNAV N8. The direction stated that occasionally revolutionary innovations would require establishing a special program office. Therefore, “it is critical to know when an innovation is truly revolutionary and requires a departure from the standard process.” The CNO directed the Naval War College and development command to “play a major role” in developing the criterion used and in vetting new concepts and technology and advising the CNO “when and if” something crossed that threshold. He tasked Cebrowski with developing a plan to transition concepts generated by the SSG to the development command and present it to him no later than October 1, 1999, and to brief him by October 29, 1999, on how they planned to conduct independent analysis of major new concepts, including “staffing, funding, and issues of structure and reporting relationships.”97 No substantive action was taken on this directive. As Naval War College president, Cebrowski made few substantive changes to implement the expanded mission. Working with his executive assistant, Captain Terry Pudas, Cebrowski personally refined his concepts for net-centric warfare and associated platforms and orches-

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trated some games at the new McCarty Little Hall, opened in 1999, an 11,000-square-foot gaming facility that had been designed to explore networking. The academic curriculum and Center for Naval Warfare Studies agenda changed little, and the relationship between the academic and research sides of the college remained distant. When Admiral Vernon E. Clark became CNO in July 2000, he was interested in near-term change and wanted ideas to come from the fleet. 98 In 2002 he reassigned the Naval Warfare Development Command from the Naval War College to Fleet Forces Command, and then moved it back to Norfolk, Virginia. The Naval War College reverted to a two-star command following the departure of Vice Admiral Cebrowski in 2001. The linkage between the SSG and the Naval Warfare Development Command weakened and then essentially broke as the development command focused on current rather than future fleet problems. 99 Clark also wanted the SSG to help him implement nearterm actions. However, the leadership kept the group focused on an “intellectual time horizon” decades out rather than an “action time horizon” that might reduce the group to the role of OPNAV action officers. 100 This focus reduced the group’s value to Clark and subsequent CNOs as they sought the SSG’s assistance on implementing some of the concepts that the SSG had previously developed, along with new CNO initiatives. At this point, the SSG was the only remaining agent in the revolutionary naval warfare innovation process proposed by the CEP and endorsed by CNO Boorda. Though CNO Johnson did attempt to implement CEP recommendations, elements of the OPNAV staff attempted to use the change to subordinate the SSG to them, as Cebrowski and Hogg cemented the SSG and Naval War College as separate organizations. These reorganizations did not have the effect intended by the CNO/CEP, dooming the CEP’s innovation process as distances between the agents of the navy campaign of learning grew and interactions had little effect. Even with this substantial effort, the navy in the 1990s was unable recreate the kinds of interactions that had led to the successful campaign of learning that existed in the years between the world wars. CNO Johnson’s priorities were funding the F/A-18E/F and avoiding the kind of bad press that had plagued his predecessors,101 and the CEP did not have the operational experience or clout of the old general board. It took almost a quarter of a century after the SSG first proposed distributed and dispersed operations employing families of uninhabited vehicles, new forms of energy weapons, and artificial intelligence for

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autonomous vehicles and decision support for the navy to prioritize funding for these concepts. Having not invested in prototyping and experimentation in a campaign of learning over this period, the navy does not yet understand well the niches needed for the various species of new platforms or the fitness of the resulting navy ecosystem. Though recent efforts are providing some evidence needed for critical analysis, concepts remain principally theoretical. Navy testimony has yet to convince Congress that sudden increases in investment to significantly alter its ecosystem to survive and prevail against threats, principally from China, are warranted. Any priority for using artificial intelligence for logistics, maintenance, and administration is not readily apparent. Twenty-four years after the SSG proposed moving from planned to cognitive maintenance CNO Gilday cited maintenance delays at shipyards as the navy’s “Achilles heel.”102 Over the period from its beginning in 1981 to its disestablishment in 2016, the SSG was very successful in creating innovative strategic, operational, tactical, and organizational concepts for tangible, near-term challenges and opportunities that affected navy readiness and engagement strategies. When it changed its focus from turning captains of ships into captains of war to naval warfare innovation spurred by emerging technology, the operational and organizational concepts to exploit that technology were theoretical, requiring a campaign of learning to provide the actual events needed for critical analysis. With the underlying paradigm that equipping changes would take decades, any theoretical concepts appearing to threaten the rationale for planned and programmed upgrades to existing species of platforms with strong military-industrial-congressional enterprise (MICE) sponsors was easy for OPNAV to dismiss, until the demands of the security environment and the potential of the technology became more concrete. Had CNO Boorda lived, in the 1990s OPNAV may have invested in the concepts promoted by the SSG with his friend and colleague Admiral Jim Hogg directing the effort, resulting in a navy much more ready to deal with the great power competition it faces today.103 From 9/11 to Great Power Competition The navy was swept up by the tsunami wave of US reactions to the alQaeda attacks on September 11, 2001, which resulted in approximately 900,000 deaths and $8 trillion of expenditures in wars over the next

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twenty years.104 The Overseas Contingency Operations funding intended to cover unanticipated costs of wartime operations received less oversight than the regular parts of the defense budget. As these funds could not be used to maintain forces operating at rates for which they were not designed, naval and other military force readiness declined, particularly the surface fleet. Continuing resolutions in congressional authorizations also created the need to prepare multiple budget submissions, which reinforced OPNAV’s tendency to focus on budgets to sustain their program of record each year, rather than the rate at which challenges from China were emerging. The attitude in the Pentagon was that the combatant commands were focused on the near term to the detriment of modernizing the force over the long term. The DoD’s processes for acquiring new capabilities that evolved to fit a Cold War long-term competition operated under a paradigm that the process would take two decades to complete for each new system. The effect was similar to the British rule between the world wars that no war would occur for ten years, which contributed to their military being unprepared for Hitler’s rapid breakout from World War I armistice agreements and the subsequent war. Pacific Command’s annual investment priorities did not impact service budgets and programs as China rapidly expanded its military. Emphasis on employing computerbased campaign models as opposed to experimenting with prototypes continued to stifle innovation in fleet designs and capabilities as the vogue of military mathematics became more entrenched. Though the Clinton administration had actively intervened in many disputes, with the notable exception of the Rwandan civil war and its accompanying genocide, the George W. Bush administration arrived with a more muscular view of the use of military force. In 1992, draft Defense Planning Guidance, under the supervision of Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, had created controversy.105 The draft guidance suggested that the United States must become the world’s single superpower and must take aggressive action to prevent competing nations— even allies such as Germany and Japan—from challenging US economic and military supremacy, even to the point of preemptive war. This became known informally as the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Wolfowitz and colleagues who believed that not invading Iraq in 1991 was a missed opportunity formed the Project for the New American Century during the Clinton administration. They called for “preemption” of any rivals and unilateral US military action. In 1998, the project called for the removal of Saddam Hussein.106 Ten of the staff, including Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, became senior officials in George W. Bush’s administration. In addition to an emphasis on President Reagan’s

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peace through military strength, the administration added an emphasis on transforming America’s national security institutions, principally the Department of Defense, to meet the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century. The 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred while preparation of an updated National Security Strategy was in progress. Even as China’s rise was becoming tangible, when published in 2002 the National Security Strategy stated: America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones. The U.S. national security strategy will be based on a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests. The aim of this strategy is to help make the world not just safer but better. Our goals on the path to progress are clear: political and economic freedom, peaceful relations with other states, and respect for human dignity. . . . It is time to reaffirm the essential role of American military strength. We must build and maintain our defenses beyond challenge.

It went on to reiterate the value of maintaining forces forward and its leadership with allies as it transformed the forces to meet emerging security challenges: The unparalleled strength of the United States armed forces, and their forward presence, have maintained the peace in some of the world’s most strategically vital regions. However, the threats and enemies we must confront have changed, and so must our forces. A military structured to deter massive Cold War–era armies must be transformed to focus more on how an adversary might fight rather than where and when a war might occur. . . . The presence of American forces overseas is one of the most profound symbols of the U.S. commitments to allies and friends. Through our willingness to use force in our own defense and in defense of others, the United States demonstrates its resolve to maintain a balance of power that favors freedom. To contend with uncertainty and to meet the many security challenges we face, the United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. forces.

While many of the tenets of this strategy extended past policies, the United States was to use armed force more freely. The new Bush administration came in supported by those looking for a new American century through the employment of military power. During his campaign, Bush had also stressed creating a smaller, more

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mobile, and less expensive military that would cost the nation less while being more effective as a tool of US policy.107 The new administration was committed both to fighting and to transforming.108 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld established an Office of Force Transformation within OSD with retired Vice Admiral Art Cebrowski as its director. This transformation effort was reaffirmed in the Quadrennial Defense Review Report published on September 30, 2001. In his foreword to the report, Rumsfeld informed his readers that “a central objective of the review was to shift the basis of defense planning from a ‘threat-based’ model that has dominated thinking in the past to a ‘capabilities-based’ model for the future.”109 This office published “Transformation Planning Guidance” and concepts for force transformation centered on net-centric warfare. It orchestrated the development of transformation plans by each of the services, oversaw the joint experimentation program at the new joint forces command, and funded a few modest prototypes to demonstrate Cebrowski’s concepts. When Cebrowski died in 2005, the office transitioned to working for the undersecretary of defense for policy rather than reporting directly to the secretary of defense. It was terminated in 2006 shortly before Rumsfeld departed. The office represented another effort to create a campaign of learning that was dependent on personalities and personal relationships that perished with the passing of the personalities on whom it depended. Immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom to defeat al-Qaeda elements wherever they were and remove its Taliban support in Afghanistan.110 Rumsfeld ordered planning for the invasion of Iraq in November 2001. Though plans for the invasion called for as many as 500,000 troops in total, to provide rear area security by occupying territory as coalition forces advanced toward Baghdad, Rumsfeld, looking to employ “shock and awe” to rapidly defeat Iraq’s forces, limited US forces to 140,000.111 Planning for the reconstruction and stability following the war did not start until January 2003, two months before the war. Retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner, who did the planning, was replaced at the last minute by Lewis Paul “Jerry” Bremer III. Bremmer ignored the planning that had been done, making several important mistakes that carried severe consequences.112 Key people in the administration, ignoring the lessons of the twentieth century on the difficulties and efficacy of using military aggression to establish a new regime, rather than in defense as a last resort, believed that the United States could rapidly defeat Saddam Hussein’s forces, install the Shia Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi as its

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new ruler, and depart. The administration was unprepared for the subsequent government transition and insurrection against occupation. Naval Influence and Campaigns of Learning Under CNOs Clark, Mullen, Roughead, and Greenert

Admiral Vernon Clark relieved Jay Johnson as CNO in July 2000. Clark would serve as CNO for five full years, being second only to Admiral Arleigh Burke in length of service as CNO. Clark, who had a master’s degree in business administration, arrived with an agenda to align OPNAV better with the fleet to make the fleet “the center of our thinking and action.”113 Clark’s vision was “to make sure that the Navy could stay forward deployed in adequate numbers by wringing the most efficiency out of its methods of training, acquisition, and maintenance.” He reorganized OPNAV, moving requirements from N8 to a new N7 in another attempt to shift OPNAV’s focus from submarines, ships, and planes to “capabilities.” The “bow wave” of projected program expenditures that called for an unrealistic increase in the navy’s budget required trying a different approach. Clark enlarged his inner staff to provide independent advice to him and the VCNO. The cell that had formed to conduct the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review became Deep Blue after 9/11. They were charged with coming up with innovative ways to wage war against terrorists. In 2002 he also created N00Z as a Strategic Actions Group performing analyses that N00K had performed in the past.114 Clark had five “ministaffs” within OPNAV—Deep Blue, N00Z, N00K, N81, N3/5’s strategy and concepts branch—and the SSG working on overlapping strategy projects beginning in 2002. Each competed to have their concepts and analysis drive CNO decisions and OPNAV actions. The fleet had “type commanders” for air, surface, and submarines in both the Atlantic and Pacific. Clark established Fleet Forces Command on October 1, 2001, to strengthen the fleet’s voice in setting navy requirements and logistics, and established one lead commander for each platform type under Fleet Forces Command as “the primary point of contact for all fleet and fleet type commander issues pertaining to policy and requirements related to manning, equipment and training.”115 To save money, Johnson had begun a program of “tiered readiness,” allowing the readiness of nondeployed forces to slip.116 Congress came to question the ability of the navy and other services to respond to multiple crises simultaneously. Following the 9/11 attacks, Clark established

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a Fleet Response Plan that changed the nominal cycle of a six-month deployment every two-years to a system that would allow six carrier strike groups to deploy within thirty days, with another two carrier strike groups ready within ninety days, almost doubling the numbers of carriers and escorts deployed or ready for deployment under the Cold War two-year cycle.117 “An assumption shared by both CNO Clark and senior officials in the systems command in 2000 was that the adoption of automated information systems and digital communications within the navy would facilitate fleet readiness while reducing its cost, thereby freeing up funds for other uses.”118 When briefed on SSG concepts in the fall of 2000, Clark found that the navy had taken no substantive actions on SSG recommendations. He directed the chief of naval research to incorporate SSG recommendations into the Office of Naval Research’s research and development and coordinate with the Naval Sea Systems Command and OPNAV.119 This direction produced the same results that had occurred under CNO Johnson: namely, no substantive action. Clark directed his first SSG to identify ways to rapidly introduce their “FORCEnet” concept for implementing Cebrowski’s network-centric warfare and to study the implications of digital technology on the education and training of sailors.120 Building upon the SSG’s 1999–2000 Sea Strike, Naval Power Forward, and FORCEnet concepts, N00Z under the leadership of Captain Frank Pandolf created Sea Power 21 to fulfill the CNO’s role in justifying the existence and form of the navy. Sea Power 21 consisted of three fundamental concepts—Sea Strike for “persistent offensive power,” Sea Shield for extending “defensive assurance throughout the world,” and Sea Basing to enhance “operational independence and support the joint force.”121 A ForceNet would “integrate warriors, sensors, networks, command and control, platforms, and weapons into a fully netted, distributed combat force,” making the network-centric warfare concepts promoted by Cebrowski an operational reality and bringing the navy into the information age. Sea Power 21 also contained three enabling concepts: Sea Trial, Sea Warrior, and Sea Enterprise. Where the previous concepts were intended to influence support for the navy publicly and internally, and articulate how the navy projected its influence, the enabling concepts articulated Clark’s vision for the navy’s campaign of innovation and learning. The fleet was to lead Sea Trial under the new Fleet Forces Command with its subordinate Naval Warfare Development Command. Working closely with the fleets, technology development centers, and academic resources,

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the development command was to integrate analysis and war gaming and orchestrate fleet experimentation with new concepts. The systems commands and program executive offices were envisioned as integral partners in bringing concepts to reality. The new concepts called for both more highly educated and trained sailors, and fewer of them as technology replaced manpower. Sea Warrior would provide the means for achieving these goals. Clark initiated “Task Force EXCEL (Excellence through our Commitment to Education and Learning) to begin a revolution in training that complements the revolution in technologies, systems, and platforms for tomorrow’s fleet,” along with other initiatives. He tasked the SSG to address Sea Warrior. The third enabling concept, Sea Enterprise, placed the VCNO in charge of aligning resourcing efforts that involved OPNAV, the systems commands, and the fleet as “it seeks to improve organizational alignment, refine requirements, and reinvest savings to buy the platforms and systems needed to transform our Navy. Sea Power 21 is our vision to align, organize, integrate, and transform our Navy to meet the challenges that lie ahead.” Sea Power 21 emphasized the navy’s role as part of a joint force and did not resonate well within the broader navy.122 In the last Sea Power 21 article published in the Proceedings in January 2004, VCNO Michael G. Mullen noted the operational and financial pressures on the navy: “Since 1990, the Navy has undergone a dramatic reduction in size—37% fewer ships, 26% decrease in number of aircraft, and 35% decrease in active-duty end strength. Despite this decline, our operational costs . . . continue to rise at about 7% per year . . . and consume critical recapitalization resources.”123 The proposed solution again was aligning the whole navy to support the fleet and achieve cost savings in its shore establishment. Mullen was looking for $10 billion in savings over the next five years. To sustain its forward deployed forces it had to be smarter and more creative, both on shore and at sea, and save money. It needed a campaign of learning for maintenance and equipping. Following Operation Desert Storm (the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait), the navy had maintained air combat patrols over northern and southern Iraq, and had conducted Operation Desert Fox, missile strikes against Iraqi facilities, in 1998 to reduce Iraq’s capability to produce “weapons of mass destruction.” “By the late spring of 2001, planes of a coalition of forces were flying about 10,000 sorties over Iraq per year.”124 To fill a gap in airborne surveillance over Afghanistan, navy maritime patrol aircraft began flying with Marines on board to coordinate with their units on the ground. The maritime patrol aircraft commu-

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nity practically abandoned the ASW mission to provide surveillance over land for many years. To extend its influence and relevance in Operations Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan beginning in 2001 and Iraqi Freedom beginning in 2003, the navy took several initiatives. Navy forces contributed aircraft and Tomahawk missile strikes from the sea with a much larger inventory of precision-guided munitions than they had a decade earlier for Operation Desert Storm. To increase its contribution to Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, the navy began sending personnel to command and participate in Provincial Reconstruction Teams in both Afghanistan and Iraq to help improve stability.125 Additional “individual augmentees numbered about ten thousand,”126 and 2,500 medical personnel were in direct support of ground combat missions. In FY 2004, “Navy sea-based tactical aircraft flew more than 3,000 sorties and dropped more than 100,000 pounds of ordnance in close support missions. Other Navy aircraft flew nearly 5,000 hours of reconnaissance missions, and Navy small craft protected Iraqi oil terminals after Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled.”127 The navy established the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command in 2006 to supplement the riverine capabilities of Navy SEALs and relieve Marines who had been conducting maritime security operations in ports and waterways in Iraq.128 Not all of this effort was covered by supplemental funding for the “Global War on Terror.” The navy absorbed $1.5 billion in corporate bills. As the navy continued to absorb additional costs over the years for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, many of the ships and aircraft that had entered the inventory in the 1970s and 1980s were being retired in advance because their maintenance was proving too expensive. This led to a reduction in the size of the fleet—from 318 ships when Clark became CNO to 282 when he retired in 2005, accelerating the projections that the SSG had made to CNO Kelso. Clark was willing to trade off ship and aircraft numbers because, as he put it, “I would rather muster two battle groups for three months and do something really significant internationally . . . than just go over and hang out for six months without purpose.”129 To justify the navy’s role and promote its relevance in the ongoing wars and global counterterrorist operations, Clark turned to Vice Admiral John G. Morgan Jr., his deputy CNO for operations and policy (N3/5). Morgan’s goal was to show the value of a forward deployed navy. The product in 2004 was centered on a slide dubbed “the bear paw,” showing stability operations, the global campaign against terrorists, and homeland defense/security in a Venn diagram as essential naval

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capabilities.130 The navy’s major combat capabilities were to feed into these missions. Clark adopted Morgan’s formulation and they began presenting it to audiences both within and outside the navy. Messages on the need to be forward deployed rather than near US shores defending against missile attacks and other threats to the continental United States were mixed. Not every senior officer responded positively to giving the US Navy, with the assistance of other maritime nations, a more constabulary role as enforcer of freedom of the seas that Britain’s Royal Navy had performed in the nineteenth century. Morgan and Admiral John Nathman commanding Fleet Forces Command differed over whether these missions were lesser included missions or required different systems and different training. Nathman believed that the policy would invite a challenge from China.131 Though China was expanding its maritime claims and its means to enforce them, Morgan mentioned China only in the context of its expanding trade in his 2005 article on a “1,000-ship navy.”132 As Clark had given Fleet Forces Command the lead on organizing, training, and equipping the fleet, he chose not to formally approve Morgan’s paper, but the briefing was circulated widely. Regrettably, the campaign of innovation and learning envisioned by Clark did not gel. A Naval Studies Board report on “The Role of Experimentation in Building Future Naval Forces” in 2004 found that the navy’s fleet battle experiments had achieved “modest successes,” but that the Naval Warfare Development Command had “insufficient influence over the Navy experimentation program.” Also, the “bridges between the experimentation organization and the acquisition and requirements organizations of the Navy are fragile; they depend unduly on the exercise of coordinating skills and personal interactions.”133 The development command was incapable of performing the role that the Naval War College had during the 1920s and 1930s, or that the SSG had performed under CNO Watkins. Notably, the Naval War College was not mentioned in articles on Sea Power 21. Clark’s reorganization initiatives to align navy activities to support the fleet and rejuvenate a campaign of learning were overshadowed by ongoing war. Sustaining US Naval Influence and the Navy in America’s Unending Wars

Throughout this period, hotspots of potential large-scale regional conflict remained between North and South Korea, with the ambitions of Iran in the Mideast, and between Pakistan and India.

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In 2005, Admiral Michael Mullen relieved Clark as CNO. Coming from command in Europe, Mullen’s ideas on naval strategy aligned with Morgan’s. He viewed the navy shaping activities using specialized capabilities as having disproportionate systemic effects.134 At the Naval War College Current Strategy Forum that year, Mullen unveiled his concept for a “1000-ship navy” comprised of ships from nations around the world in a global arrangement to further security in the maritime domain. A key aspect of this concept was to facilitate information and intelligence sharing with commercial maritime interests, other US government organizations involved in maritime security, and international counterparts. Where Clark had tasked his SSG to help him implement FORCEnet, Mullen tasked his SSG and the Naval Studies Board with implementing this 1000-ship navy.135 Mullen continued the practice of supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by rotating ten thousand individual augmentees from the navy.136 In his January 2006 Proceedings article, Mullen articulated among the eight tenets that guided his vision: “To be effective in this environment, combatant commanders require tools that are not only instruments of war, but implements for stability, security, and reconstruction in our global neighborhood.”137 He had in mind employing smaller navy ships like Joint High-Speed Vessels, Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), and patrol craft in places such as the Gulf of Guinea where the navy rarely went, to operate with foreign forces having smaller coast guards and navies. While agreeing with many of Mullen’s tenets, Nathman countered with an article emphasizing applying resources to navy war-fighting capabilities.138 Mullen did not budge, and the results of the Quadrennial Defense Review, published in February 2006, went Mullen’s way.139 This review effectively reestablished the agency between the CNO and Fleet Forces Command. Like Clark, Mullen focused his attention on the relationships between OPNAV, the systems commands, and the fleet via Fleet Forces Command. Fleet Forces Command, with its subordinate development command, was to identify future capabilities that the navy would need and concepts of operation. The Naval Warfare Development Command was again tasked to perform essentially the roles that the Naval War College performed during the years between the world wars. While its commanders did their best, it had neither the organizational agency nor the gaming facilities and talent needed to succeed. While expressing support for Seapower 21, Mullen did little to advance it. Admiral Gary Roughead had little notice for his selection as CNO when Mullen left to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs in September 2007. Coming from Fleet Forces Command, Roughead did not have the

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same depth of experience in OPNAV as Mullen had, and the timing of the turnover meant that Roughead could have little impact on that year’s financial programming. In 2007, the navy, marine corps, and coast guard came together for the first time to create a unified maritime strategy called “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower.” Roughead signed the document in October, though he had little participation in the effort. These service chiefs stressed an approach to integrate sea power with other elements of national power, as well as those of friends and allies. Its objectives were to apply sea power “around the world to protect our way of life, as we join with other like-minded nations to protect and sustain the global, inter-connected system through which we prosper. Our commitment to protecting the homeland and winning our Nation’s wars is matched by a corresponding commitment to preventing war.” This strategy was similar to the approach recommended by the SSG in 1993 as a broader set of defense and navy reforms, which Admiral Boorda had found too political, and on which the navy took no action. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Morgan’s treatment of China in his 2005 Proceedings article, China was not mentioned in the strategy. China’s antisatellite missile test in January 2007 and subsequent 2008 hack of White House emails quickly resulted in Washington, DC, paying as much attention to China as the Pacific Command had for a decade. China became the pacing threat in the 2008 National Defense Strategy and the subsequent Quadrennial Defense Review. Clark had initiated the navy’s move into information age warfare with FORCEnet. Where Mullen had focused on security cooperation, Roughead emphasized the role of information in warfare and wanted to shift the focus to the navy as a network, rather than a set of platforms.140 As part of Roughead’s emphasis on information, in June 2008 he began an intelligence transformation giving the Naval Network Warfare Command type commander responsibilities for fleet intelligence “in addition to its information operations (IO), networks and space missions.” The command “would continue to report to the commander, Fleet Forces Command, and it would not assume the duties of the Office of Naval Intelligence, but it would have direct access to N2 [navy intelligence] to ensure capabilities and processes are in place to deliver the best current/operational intelligence to the fleet.”141 Roughead also emphasized the role of regional maritime operations centers that had been resurrected out of the ashes of Fleet Operations Intelligence Centers. These centers had been folded into joint intelligence centers in the late 1980s and 1990s.142 The regional centers

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had been the key nodes for integrating all-source information to support navy operations and placed where they had direct access to the Sound Surveillance System designed to track the movements of Soviet submarines. Making the centers joint had diluted some of the edge that the navy operational intelligence practices provided compared to the other services. The maritime operations centers helped to regain this edge in providing a shared picture of the maritime environment. The Naval War College’s creation of a college for maritime operations in 2007 taught skills naval officers needed to run these centers and participate fully in joint planning. In February 2009, Roughead selected Vice Admiral David Dorsett to be the first three-star director of naval intelligence since the 1970s. Roughead was well aware of the intelligence infrastructure in Iraq and Afghanistan that was allowing the United States to target the tribal and Taliban leaders and wanted the navy to have similar capabilities for what he termed “information dominance.” Achieving information dominance required both improving the education of intelligence personnel and replicating similar intelligence processing capabilities to sea. The problem was that the bandwidth for communications between ships could not support the intelligence software. To make progress, Roughead directed the merger of the navy directors responsible for intelligence (N2) and communications (N6) in a June 26, 2009, memorandum. These two directors agreed that the merger was “an historic opportunity to reshape the Navy for war fighting dominance in the Information Age.” Roughead wanted the reorganization to begin on October 1 and finish no later than December 18, 2009. Roughead’s reorganization memo specified that the three-star N6 “billet will be used to establish a Fleet Cyber Commander . . . on 1 October 2009 to serve as the Navy Component Commander to U.S. Cyber Command.” This new navy cyber command was dubbed Tenth Fleet, the designation given to the ASW Operations Research Group when the navy was losing the battle of the Atlantic during World War II. At an OPNAV “all hands” meeting on July 17, 2009, Roughead explained why the staff was being restructured: “Biggest breakthrough of the current fight in OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan] and OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] is the successful integration of intelligence and operations, and using the network to get information to the right person, at the right time, in the right way. That is where the power is.”143 The organizational relationships for the new command were complex. A memo signed by Admiral Roughead on July 23, 2009, made Fleet Cyber Command/Tenth Fleet the naval component to the United

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States Cyber Command, which was in its turn under the command of the Strategic Command in Nebraska. However, Fleet Cyber Command/Tenth Fleet also had a formal administrative link to OPNAV to provide “the training, equipment, and funds for Fleet Cyber Command, and it was to OPNAV and the CNO that the commander of Fleet Cyber Command/Tenth Fleet turned to for the personnel, supplies, and facilities that the Command needed.” The commander of the new commands was also the “service cryptologic commander” for the National Security Agency. “This arrangement of divided authority untangled a potentially thorny relationship—the need for Fleet Cyber Command/Tenth Fleet to be operationally subordinate to USCYBERCOM while coordinating with the National Security Agency and being sustained by OPNAV.”144 Interactions are the substance of naval influence. Through his organizational initiatives, Roughead positioned the navy both for increasing its power, the speed at which it could apply its energy, and its influence on the development of organizations key to operations in the information age. Roughead became a victim of the 2008 financial crisis shortly after becoming CNO. The navy faced reductions in its budget that it had not seen since the winter of 1932–1933.145 Roughead believed that special forces operations countering insurgents and terrorists demonstrated the potential of the 2007 cooperative maritime strategy. Enhancing maritime domain awareness by sharing information with partners to take more effective action was feasible but it also was expensive, as the United States would have to provide equipment to many nations with smaller maritime forces to implement strategy. The strategy affected naval operations around Africa and South America as the United States expanded its partnerships with willing nations to counter terrorism, piracy, drugs, and other illegal trafficking. President Obama came into office in 2009 seeking ways to end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, determined to counter terrorism, but not to do “stupid things.” Caught unaware by the 2011 Arab Spring, he was reluctant to take strong actions as authoritarian rulers cracked down on their people and civil wars started in Libya and Syria, launching mass migrations affecting politics in Europe and creating openings for Russia, Turkey, and others with interests contrary to the United States to step in. An expansion of undergoverned spaces created agar for the growth of violent Islamist cells across the Middle East and Africa, resulting in a wide geographic expansion of the authority to use force provided originally for Afghanistan. Consistent policies were difficult to discern as

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events prevented the pursuit of desired ends with the strategies employed. The navy continued to respond to the Pentagon procedures for addressing combatant commander requests as Roughead, like his predecessors, worked to deploy as much of the fleet as possible. Roughead created a directorate for “international engagement,” charged with fostering and sustaining cooperative relationships with more international partners, in OPNAV on March 23, 2009.146 The Balisle Report

Reduced navy budgets while keeping a larger percentage of the fleet deployed led to serious maintenance problems among surface combat ships, especially within the DDG-51 class of destroyers. As the navy extended the service lives of its platforms to sustain the size of the fleet, studies of the maintenance needed to guarantee forty-year life spans for the DDG-51s had not been done. The number of surface combat ships ready for deployment declined. As Vice Admiral William Burke, then the deputy chief of naval operations for readiness and logistics (N4), told the members of the Subcommittee on Readiness of the House Armed Services Committee in July 2011, “an average of 50 ships a year since 2005” had “violated one or more of the . . . standards such as deployment length . . . compared with an average of 5 in years prior to 2005.”147 In September 2009, Roughead formed a panel, chaired by former Naval Sea Systems Command chief Philip Balisle to find the causes of the problem and recommend a solution to commander of Fleet Forces Command Admiral John Harvey and the commander of the Pacific Fleet. On February 26, 2010, the “Fleet Review Panel of Surface Forces Readiness” published its findings. The Panel’s findings were summarized in two sentences: “Surface Force readiness has degraded over the last ten years. This degradation has not been due to a single decision or policy change, but the result of many independent actions.”148 Rather than accepting responsibility for a series of internal navy decisions whose cumulative affect had led to the predicament, when confronted by Congress senior navy officers made the excuse that the combatant commanders drove the demand and were “relatively unconstrained,”149 despite the requirement for secretary of defense approval and Pentagon procedures for adjudicating the allocation of forces, and CNO efforts to deploy as many ships as possible. Admiral Harvey noted, “Many years of doing whatever was necessary to meet operational commitments artificially suppressed the Surface Force’s requirements for people,

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maintenance, training, equipment, and logistical support. Another unfortunate byproduct of this approach was the perception that broken and degraded equipment, inadequate proficiency, and poor risk management were tolerable.”150 Combatant commanders did not encourage this culture in the navy, nor were the secretary of the navy and the CNO able to control it. Deficiencies in the character of leadership at all levels of the navy led to this evolution to the point that CNO John Richardson opened a College of Leadership and Ethics at the Naval War College in 2018. Navy Wholeness

When Admiral Jon Greenert became CNO on September 23, 2011, clouds had already formed over congressional gridlock with the Budget Control Act passed that August. Greenert was a financial management specialist and had extensive experience in navy programming and the comptroller’s office, and as N8 and VCNO, in addition to commanding Seventh Fleet and Fleet Forces Command. As a captain, he also had served on the SSG during a year studying how to maintain the navy’s influence with a smaller fleet. His quantified analysis contributed many key concepts briefed to CNO Boorda. Arguably, no other navy officer was as well prepared to be CNO in such a demanding environment. Greenert’s priorities as CNO were “war fighting first,” operating forward despite not having the numbers of ships that he thought essential, and readiness. Before he became CNO, he had decided that the platform (ship, submarine, and aircraft) sponsors in N8 had not been programming adequately for total ownership costs that went beyond life-cycle costs to include training of personnel to man and support the system being developed and associated facilities. Greenert wanted to make sure that the process of developing requirements in OPNAV did not lead to systems that were too expensive to man and to operate in a constrained fiscal environment. Associated costs needed consideration when thinking through requirements for platforms. Though every CNO made changes to the OPNAV organization, accounting for these costs required a major reorganization.151 Forward operating forward bases such as those in Guam and Japan and the rights to use facilities in places such as Spain, Bahrain, and Singapore allowed one ship to perform what would otherwise require an average of 3.4 ships to do using rotations to those locations.152 Greenert pushed for stationing littoral combat ships in Singapore and deploying Aegis ballistic missile defense ships to Rota, Spain. He also sought

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resources to deploy an “afloat forward staging base” and provide amphibious lift for US Marines operating out of Australia.153 A concept of war fighting and readiness “wholeness” affected his approach. “War fighting wholeness is . . . about evaluating the capability and capacity of systems, units or forces required to achieve certain performance outcomes [emphasis in the original] in specific environments and scenarios.”154 Readiness wholeness included modernization and procurement. Since World War II, the DoD’s acquisition rules and service organizations of platform barons led each service to attempt to replace each of its major platforms with the next, more expensive generation of that platform while attempting to keep the same numbers of each platform. Beyond locking the services into the force structures of armor and artillery, fighters and bombers, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines that it had mobilized for World War II, it resulted in major acquisition programs focused on individual platforms rather than the capabilities and capacities that the interacting force structures provided. Systems analysis techniques could not provide performance outcomes resulting from nonlinear dynamic interactions. The systems analysis paradigm morphed to constrain the acquisition system’s focus to individual platform procurement costs rather than wholeness. Greenert was not looking for one-for-one replacements of systems like P-8 for P-3 patrol aircraft. He was looking for trades among systems used for performing various missions across the portfolio of the systems contributing to mission success, considering total ownership costs. Strapped with the same major acquisition programs as his predecessors based on programs initiated in the 1990s, he promoted analyzing payloads (sensors, information processing and presentation, weapons, etc.) to accomplish various missions rather than focusing on platforms. His experience as a submariner dealing with false contacts and his work on Air-Sea Battle led him to emphasize the need for more decoys, sonobuoys, and torpedoes and for training to regain the navy’s competence in ASW that it had allowed to erode with the end of the Cold War. He promoted “electronic maneuver warfare,” adding it to his 2015 update of the 2007 cooperative strategy for seapower. He also saw the need for the navy to implement new technologies such as integrated power systems with hybrid-electric drive that allows shifting power almost instantaneously from propulsion to directed energy weapons.155 Greenert and his realignment team prepared an OPNAV reorganization to avoid repeating the existing readiness problems of the surface fleet while providing forces to support military campaigns against terrorist movements and reassure other nations by providing what those

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nations needed, including more mobile ballistic missile defense. “But the reorganized and hopefully smooth-running OPNAV that Greenert wanted depended on a reasonably smooth-running Congress—one that could conduct the public’s business through routine negotiations with the White House.”156 In November 2011, CNO Greenert testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the continuing resolution and sequestration reductions in FY 2013 compelled [the navy] to reduce both afloat and ashore operations, which created ship and aircraft maintenance and training backlogs.” He told the senators that the actions taken by the navy to mitigate sequestration only served to transfer bills amounting to over $2 billion to future years for many procurement programs and that this fiscal strategy was not sustainable. Congress responded by changing the sequestration “caps” for fiscal years 2014 and 2015 in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 in December. This allowed Greenert to sustain the navy’s aircraft carrier and amphibious group deployments in fiscal year 2014. He said publicly, “Ten years ago we had 300 ships. We provided 100 forward. Today, we have about 285 ships. We provide 100 forward. It is this presence that is as important today as it was 20 years ago, and will be in the future.” However, sustaining forces forward meant that the maintenance and training backlogs continued, resulting in extending deployments and reducing the readiness of forces available for contingency response from a “requirement” of three additional carrier strike groups and amphibious ready groups to only one able to deploy within thirty days. Greenert was candid in testifying to Congress that “continuing along this budget trajectory means by 2020 (the [Defense Strategic Guidance] benchmark year), [the] Navy will have insufficient contingency response capacity to execute large-scale operations in one region, while simultaneously deterring another adversary’s aggression elsewhere.”157 The esteemed naval historian Dr. John Hattendorf is known for reminding people that historians (in this case analysts) who follow too close on the heels of history get kicked in the teeth. Needless to say, demands on the navy have only increased since 2015 while continued demands for countering terrorism, China, Russia, and Iran, and a host of other challenges have grown. Political gridlock in Washington, DC, along with increasing popular sentiments for a return to the American isolationism of the period between the world wars, has resulted in a less secure nation and world. However, bipartisan concerns over an increasingly assertive China and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have bolstered legislators willing to invest in sustaining a world order conducive to US interests.

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Notes 1. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 2. Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The Real World Order: Zones of Peace, Zones of Turmoil (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1993), 6. 3. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, June 1, 1993, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1993-06-01/clash-civilizations. 4. Graham T. Allison and Gregory F. Treverton, Rethinking America’s Security (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). 5. Peter Schwartz, Art of the Long View (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1991). 6. George H. W. Bush, “The Other 9/11: George H. W. Bush’s 1990 New World Order Speech,” Dallas Morning News, September 8, 2017, www.dallasnews.com /opinion/commentary/2017/09/08/the-other-9-11-george-h-w-bush-s-1990-new -world-order-speech. 7. United Nations, “Past Peace Operations,” United Nations Peacekeeping (accessed December 4, 2022), https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/past-peacekeeping -operations. 8. Les Aspin, Report on the Bottom-Up Review (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 1993). 9. Peter M. Swartz and Karin Duggan, The U.S. Navy in the World (1991–2000): Context for U.S. Navy Capstone Strategies and Concepts, MISC D0026420.A2 (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 2012), provides an extensive summary of events in the 1990s. 10. Terry Pierce, “We Gotta Have a War-Fightin’ Revival,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 123, no. 8 (1997): 31–35. 11. Under the leadership of director Hon. Robert B. Pirie, the SSG in 1991 added a US Coast Guard officer selected by their commandant to address the navy’s increasingly constabulary roles. 12. Admiral Jay Johnson, USN, “Anytime, Anywhere: A Navy for the 21st Century,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 123, no. 11 (November 1997), www.usni.org /magazines/proceedings/1997/november/anytime-anywhere-navy-21st-century. 13. Swartz and Duggan, The U.S. Navy in the World, 3, 6, 39, 68. 14. Unless otherwise noted, Thomas C. Hone and Curtis A. Utz, History of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (Washington, DC: Naval History and Heritage Command, 2020), chap. 14, provides the material for this section. 15. Admiral Carlisle A. H. Trost, USN (retired), interview by John T. Hanley Jr. and Peter Swartz, Interview of CNO Trost for SSG Study (February 19, 2015) (author’s collection). 16. H. Lawrence Garrett III, Frank B. Kelso II, and A. M. Gray, “The Way Ahead,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 117, no. 4 (April 1991), www.usni.org /magazines/proceedings/1991/april/way-ahead. 17. CNO Admiral Frank B. Kelso tasked his SSG in 1990 to study the future strategic environment, and the following year to focus on future contingencies and implications for the navy; Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, Future Security Environment (Newport, RI: Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, 1991); Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, Shaping the Future (Newport, RI: Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, 1992). 18. Dov S. Zakheim and Jeffrey M Ranney, “Matching Defense Strategies to Resources: Challenges for the Clinton Administration,” International Security 18, no. 1 (1993): 51–78.

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19. John T. Hanley, Peter M. Swartz, and Chris Steinitz, Making Captains of War: The Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, 1981–1995 (Arlington, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 2016). 20. Irwin Ross, “Inside the Biggest Pentagon Scam,” Fortune Magazine, January 11, 1993, https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1993 /01/11/77357/index.htm. 21. Samuel J. Cox, “H-029-4: The USS Iowa Tragedy,” Naval History and Heritage Command, May 3, 2019, www.history.navy.mil/about-us/leadership/director /directors-corner/h-grams/h-gram-029/h-029-4.html. 22. AP, “Navy Secretary Seeks Top Admiral’s Resignation in the Tailhook Scandal,” Argus-Press, October 2, 1993, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1988 &dat=19931002&id=ODoiAAAAIBAJ&sjid=wawFAAAAIBAJ&pg=2257,2776832. 23. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 395. 24. Ibid., 384. 25. Bill Owens, handwritten notes, 1982 (author’s collection). 26.. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 385. 27. Ibid., 396. 28. The author participated in these revisions, particularly as they applied to the CNO SSG, and successfully argued that the SSG’s education was on a higher level in Bloom’s taxonomy than the general Naval War College curriculum. 29. The author participated in many service Title 10 Games and other service games during the 1990s. 30. “About Wargaming,” US Naval War College (accessed June 19, 2021), https://usnwc.edu/Research-and-Wargaming/Wargaming/About-Wargaming. 31. Naval Postgraduate School, “Naval Postgraduate School: 1909–2009 Timeline,” briefing, Monterey, California, 2009 (author’s collection). 32. John Kroger, “Ten Take-Aways: The Education for Seapower Report,” America’s Navy, October 17, 2019, www.navy.mil/Resources/Blogs/Detail/Article /2268200/ten-takeaways-the-education-for-seapower-report. 33. Carl H. Builder, The Masks of War: Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 34. John L. Romjue, American Army Doctrine for the Post–Cold War, TRADOC Historical Monograph Series (Fort Monroe, VA: US Army and Doctrine Training Command, 1996). 35. Pierce, “We Gotta Have a War-Fightin’ Revival.” 36. Department of the US Navy, Forward . . . From the Sea (Washington, DC: Department of the US Navy, 1994). 37. CINCPACFLT message to COMNAVDOCCOM, Subj: Naval Expeditionary Force Concept, 14 October 1993 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). The debate over standing forces and staffs versus standing up a force as required and temporarily assigning officers carried over to joint forces command’s concepts of Standing joint task forces and headquarters eight years later. 38. Bill Owens and Ed Offley, Lifting the Fog of War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). 39. Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, Discriminate Deterrence (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, January 1988). 40. Blueprints for a Naval Revolution: Report of the Project Way Points (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 1993). 41. The Air, Land, Sea Bulletin, no. 93-3 (Fort Monroe, VA: US Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1993). Sponsored by the Army Training and Doctrine Command, army regulations governed this center located at Ft. Monroe, VA. US Joint Forces Command, replacing US Atlantic Command in 1999, assumed this role.

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42. R. Selleck, F. Padilla, M. Blaydes, and D. Davison, “Sea Dragon” (research paper, Montgomery, AL: Air Command and Staff College, 1997). 43. Mitchell S. Bryman, “Federal Advisory Committee; Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel; Charter Renewal,” Federal Register, April 26, 2010, www .federalregister.gov/documents/2010/04/29/2010-10002/federal-advisory-committee -chief-of-naval-operations-executive-panel-charter-renewal. 44. Vice Admiral Patricia A. Tracey, USN (retired), discussion with the author, November 28, 2014 (author’s collection). 45. Andrew W. Marshall was also a member of the CEP Naval Warfare Innovation Task Force. 46. Admiral James R. Hogg, USN (retired), phone discussion with the author, December 16, 2014 (author’s collection). 47. Memo describing CEP task forces 1993–1995 and the relationships between them in 1995/1996 Program file, August 2, 1995 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and History Command). 48. CNO Executive Panel Naval Warfare Innovations Task Force Mid-Term Briefing to Admiral Boorda, January 30, 1995 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and History Command). 49. Naval Warfare Innovations Task Force, Final Briefing Package 1994–1995. The package is a combination of the January 30, 1995, midterm and the June 16, 1995, briefing packages to provide a standalone brief. (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and History Command). 50. Robert Holzer, “U.S. Navy Team Begins Search for Innovative Warfare Capability,” Defense News, September 2, 1996, 50. 51. At this time, the Naval Doctrine Command was sorting out its role in navy concept development. Lester Gibson, Peter Dunne II, and Peter Swartz, What Can NDC Do to Improve Navy Concept Development? (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 1995). 52. Naval Warfare Innovations Task Force, Briefing to Admiral Boorda, June 16, 1995 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 53. This was similar to the Naval Electronic Systems Command–sponsored approaches for Coordination-in-Direct-Support and Over-the-Horizon Targeting in the late 1970s and early ’80s. 54. The objectives of ATDs were to demonstrate technical feasibility and maturity to reduce technical risks. The objectives of ACTDs were to gain understanding of the military utility before commencing acquisition, develop a concept of operations, and rapidly provide operational capability. Matthew T. South, “Transitioning Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrations to Acquisition Programs” (master’s thesis, Monterey, CA, Naval Postgraduate School, 2003). 55. Captain Jon Greenert as an SSG fellow was a major contributor to that study with his quantitative analysis. His work informed him when he became CNO in 2011. 56. Captain Robby Harris, USN (retired), from his position as N00K working the transformation of the SSG, interview with the author, August 8, 2014 (author’s collection). 57. Chief of Naval Operations letter to Director, Strategic Studies Group, Subj: Naval Warfare Innovations Concept Generation Teams, Ser: 00/5U500133, July 10, 1995 (author’s collection). 58. Robert Holzer, “Boorda Pleased with Naval Warfare Innovations Study, Wants More,” Inside the Navy, July 17, 1995, 3; Robert Holzer, “U.S. Navy Panel to Assess, Test Naval Warfare Concepts,” Defense News, July 31–August 6, 1995, 6; Robert Holzer, “Yearlong Study Has an Answer,” Navy Times, August 14, 1995.

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59. Vice Admiral T. J. Lopez, USN, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Resources, Warfare Requirements and Assessments) memorandum for Director Strategic Studies Group, Subj: Funding for Naval Warfare Innovation Concept Generation Teams, August 15, 1995 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 60. Tom Tesch, Captain Ed Smith, and Lieutenant Commander Tim Galpin letter to Dr. Hanley, Subj: Naval Warfare Innovation, August 16, 1995 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 61. Originally, these platforms were referred to as unmanned. Recognizing the increasing role of women in the armed forces, the terminology shifted to uninhabited. Now uncrewed is in vogue, which ignores the crews remotely controlling the vehicles and those that maintain them. Thus, the term uninhabited is used here. 62. As CNO, Admiral Trost had desired that what became the Arleigh Burke class of destroyers had integrated power systems. However, the Naval Sea Systems Command was not up to that task. Ronald O’Rourke, Electric-Drive Propulsion for U.S. Navy Ships: Background and Issues for Congress, CRS Report for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2000). 63. Captain Wayne Hughes, USN (retired), who worked with the SSG, referred to this as a two-stage system as a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. 64. Naval Submarine League, United States Submarines, ed. David R. Hinkle, Harry H. Caldwell, and Arne C. Johnson (Waterford, CT: Sonalysts, 2002). 65. Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, Naval Warfare Innovation Concept Team Reports (Newport, RI: Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group XV, 1996) (author’s collection). 66. Previous SSGs focused on strategies and operational concepts that influenced Soviet decisions before and during armed conflict, and naval roles in promoting US influence. These strategies required appreciating adversary aims, approaches, and perceptions. Looking decades into the future, with uncertain adversaries, the naval warfare innovation process focused more upon force-on-force engagements for defeating potential adversary capabilities, rather than affecting a particular adversary’s aims, approaches, or perceptions. See John T. Hanley, Peter M. Swartz, and Chris Steinitz, Making Captains of War: The Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, 1981–1995 (Arlington, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 2016). 67. Director, Strategic Studies Group memorandum to Chief of Naval Operations (Acting), Subj: Strategic Studies Group (SSG) XV Briefing Background, May 30, 1996 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 68. Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, Naval Warfare Innovation Concept Team Reports (Newport, RI: Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, 1997) (author’s collection). 69. US amphibious ships homeported in Sasebo, Japan, were having to repair their diesel propulsion frequently. The Sustainment team recommended using them to evaluate the LOGNET concept. 70. The SC-21 evolved into the DD-21 eventually, which became the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) and the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). Had the navy adopted the SSG’s concept, the LCS would have provided a class of ships for proving the concept. 71. Hogg letter for SSG-15 CNO Fellows and Associates, June 17, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 72. CNO Memorandum for Distribution, Subj: Implementation Plans for SSG XVI Operational Concepts, Ser N09/7U500768, June 9, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 73. Ben Huberman and Walt Morrow memorandum for Admiral Gehman, Subj: Process for Implementation of SSG Recommendations, N00K Ser 134, June 24, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command).

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74. Captain Jim Carman memorandum to Concept Generation Team Leaders, Subj: SSG Concept Transition Plan Updates, August 7, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 75. Captain Harris’s note to Vice Chief of Naval Operations, August 19, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 76. Hogg memo to CNO, August 28, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 77. ADM Hogg fax to Captain Robbie Harris (N00K), August 29, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 78. Rear Admiral J. M. Johnson, Head, Aviation Plans and Requirements Branch (N880) memorandum for Director, Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel (N00K), Subj: SSG XVI UCAV Assessment—Action Memorandum, faxed September 18, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command); Major General E. Hanlon Jr., USMC, Director, Expeditionary Warfare Division (N85) memorandum for Director Surface Warfare Division (N86), Subj: SSG XVI SUAV Evaluation and Assessment—Information Memorandum, faxed September 18, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command); Commander T. F. Hedervold, N512L memorandum for Deputy Chief of Naval Operation (Plans, Policy, and Operations) (N3/N5), Subj: Implementation Plan for SSG XVI Operational Concepts, Asymmetric Warfare—Missile Launcher Localization and Targeting Concept—Information Memorandum, faxed September 18, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 79. Vice Admiral William J. Hancock, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Logistics) memorandum for Chief of Naval Operations and Vice Chief of Naval Operations, Subj: Implementation Plans for SSG XVI Operational Concepts, Sustainment— Action Memorandum, faxed September 18, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 80. CNO memorandum for the record, Subj: CNO Strategic Studies Group (SSG), May 12, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 81. Beginning in 1993, the SSG had been meeting with the Chinese Naval Research Institute and other military institutes, organizations, and government think tanks in China. The SSG arranged similar visits in Russia in 1996 and 1997. These visits provided insights into the thinking and interests of the Chinese and Russians as they went through significant transitions and opened opportunities for other navy-to-navy and foreign government interactions. The CEP and others believed that such travel distracted the group from its focus on naval warfare innovation, resulting in the termination of SSG interactions with foreign military and government officials and intellectuals in 1997. OPNAV N-3/5 decided not to pursue the opportunities suggested by the SSG. John T. Hanley Jr. letter to Vice Admiral Ellis, February 6, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 82. CNO Executive Panel memorandum for Admiral Johnson, Subj: Proposed Implementation and Transition Plans for SSG XVI Recommendations, October 8, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 83. Excerpt from document describing the authority, responsibilities, and key relationships of the Maritime Battle Center, April 2, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 84. Ben Huberman and Walt Morrow memorandum for Admiral Gehman, Subj: Process for Implementation of SSG Recommendations, N00K Ser 134, June 24, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 85. Hal Hultgren email to John Hanley forwarding, Subj: Future of NDC, July 1, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command).

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86. CNO message, Personal for Rear Admiral Stark from Johnson, 110003Z, December 10, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 87. CNO memorandum for the Secretary of the Navy, Subj: Reorganization of the Naval War College and Naval Doctrine Command, December 10, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 88. CNO memorandum for distribution, Subj: Establishment of the Naval War College/Naval Doctrine Command Reorganization and Implementation Group, December 10, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 89. Lieutenant Commander Daniel Gallagher, memorandum to SSG, December 22, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 90. Naval War College message, 190801Z, December 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 91. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 419. 92. Captain R. Robinson Harris, fax to Mr. Walt Morrow, Mr. Ben Huberman, Vice Admiral Art Cebrowski, USN, June 4, 1998, forwards a memorandum on a CEP meeting with the CNO (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 93. Cebrowski was to serve as Naval War College president July 24, 1998– August 22, 2001, at which time he retired and became director of the OSD Office of Force Transformation under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. 94. William Glenney memorandum for Admiral Hogg, Subj: Notes for 11 December Meeting with Rear Admiral Smith, December 10, 1998 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 95. Lieutenant Commander James Lewis, Navy email to SSG, Subj: Notes from CNO Briefing, June 29, 1999 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 96. Glenney email to CNA study team, July 10, 2017 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 97. Jay L. Johnson letter to President, Naval War College, Director Strategic Studies Group, Subj: Transitioning Innovative Ideas from Conceptualization to Development, September 17, 1999 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 98. CNA study team phone conversation with Adm. Clark, October 22, 2018 (author’s collection). 99. Glenney email to author, August 24, 2017 (author’s collection). 100. William G. Glenney and John T. Hanley, Notes from the CNO Strategic Studies Group Archives: Vol. 2 (SSGs XX–XIV), DIM-2018-U-018738-Final LIMDIS (Arlington, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 2018), 12. 101. Ronald R. Harris, interview by the author, CNO Strategic Studies Group, March 31, 2021 (author’s collection). 102. Jordan Wolman, “Gilday: Navy Should Aim for 355-Ship Fleet, Says Maintenance Delays Are ‘Achilles Heel,’” Inside Defense, April 27, 2021, https:// insidedefense.com/daily-news/gilday-navy-should-aim-355-ship-fleet-says -maintenance-delays-are-achilles-heel. 103. John Hanley, “An Alternative History for U.S. Navy Force Structure Development,” Center for International Maritime Security, July 14, 2021, https:// cimsec.org/an-alternative-history-for-u-s-navy-force-structure-development. 104. “Costs of the 20-Year War on Terror: $8 Trillion and 900,000 Deaths,” Brown University, September 1, 2021, www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar. 105. Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop,” New York Times, March 8, 1992, 1, www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy -plan-calls-for-insuring-no-rivals-develop.html.

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106. Maria Ryan, Neoconservatism and the New American Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 107. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 441. 108. Ibid., 446. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid., 445. 111. Clayton Dennison, “Operation Iraqi Freedom: What Went Wrong? A Clausewitzian Analysis,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring 2006/07), https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=b9b8fbbfd17a1b3dJmltdHM9MTY3O TQ0MzIwMCZpZ3VpZD0yOTJjODkyNS0wN2ZhLTYzYWEtM2M4Zi05YmY5 MDY3MDYyZTkmaW5zaWQ9NTE3NA&ptn=3&hsh=3&fclid=292c8925-07f a-63aa-3c8f-9bf9067062e9&psq=clayton+dennison+a+clausewtizian+analysis&u =a1aHR0cHM6Ly9qbXNzLm9yZy9hcnRpY2xlL2Rvd25sb2FkLzU3Njk wLzQzMzYwLw&ntb=1. 112. Defense Science Board, Transition to and from Hostilities (Washington, DC: Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, 2004), https://dsb.cto.mil/reports/2000s/ADA430116.pdf. 113. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 438. 114. Ibid., 453. 115. Quoted in ibid., 449. 116. Ibid., 422. 117. Ibid., 451. 118. Ibid., 441. 119. Office of the Chief of Naval Operations CNO ACTION ITEM Subj: SSG Roadmaps, 00 Control # 2000U111001869, November 7, 2000 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 120. V. E. Clark, “SSG XX Theme,” Memorandum for the Director, Strategic Studies Group (SSG) (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, September 20, 2000) (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and Historical Command). 121. The following description and quotes regarding Sea Power 21 come from Vern Clark, “Sea Power 21: Projecting Decisive Joint Capabilities,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 128, no. 10 (October 2002), www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2002/october/sea-power-21-projecting-decisive-joint-capabilities. 122. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 454. 123. Quoted in ibid., 454. 124. Ibid., 448. 125. Kate Wiltrout, “Navy’s Role in Afghanistan Grows,” Virginian-Pilot, May 21, 2006, www.pilotonline.com/military/article_3381e022-ba72-506b-96d2-b64cbc37529d .html. 126. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 473. 127. Ibid., 456. 128. Ronald O’Rourke, Navy Irregular Warfare and Counterterrorism Operations: Background and Issues for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2010), https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc29743/m1 /1/high_res_d/RS22373_2010Sep28.pdf. 129. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 456. 130. Ibid., 457. 131. Ibid., 459. 132. John G. Morgan Jr. and Charles W. Martoglio, “The 1,000 Ship Navy: Global Maritime Network,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 131, no. 11 (2005), www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2005/november/1000-ship-navy-global -maritime-network.

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133. Naval Studies Board, The Role of Experimentation in Building Future Naval Forces (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 2004). 134. Peter D. Haynes, Toward a New Maritime Strategy: American Naval Thinking in the Post–Cold War Era (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015). 135. Naval Studies Board, Maritime Security Partnerships (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 2008). 136. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 473. 137. Mike Mullen, “What I Believe: Eight Tenets That Guide My Vision for the 21st Century Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 132, no. 1 (2006), www.usni .org/magazines/proceedings/2006/january/what-i-believe-eight-tenets-guide-my -vision-21st-century-navy. 138. John B. Nathman and Clay Harris, “Shaping the Future,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 132, no. 1 (2006), www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2006 /january/shaping-future. 139. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 475. 140. Ibid., 500. 141. Ibid., 516. 142. Christopher Ford and David Rosenberg, The Admirals’ Advantage: U.S. Navy Operational Intelligence in World War II and the Cold War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 114–115. 143. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 516–517. 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid., 507. 146. Ibid., 523. 147. Ibid., 514. 148. Ibid. 149. Ibid., 515. 150. Ibid. 151. Ibid., 533. 152. Greenert did not want to station too much of the navy overseas, recognizing both potential vulnerabilities and constraints, and the need to eventually rotate them back to the United States for deep maintenance. Jonathan W. Greenert, phone conversation with the author, September 10, 2021. 153. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 537. 154. Quoted in ibid., 536. 155. Recognizing that electric drive offered significant anticipated benefits for US Navy ships in terms of reducing ship life-cycle cost (including 18 to 25 percent less fuel consumption); increasing ship stealthiness, payload, survivability, and power available for nonpropulsion uses; and taking advantage of a strong electrical power technological and industrial base, in September 1988, then US CNO Admiral Carlisle Trost endorsed the development of integrated power systems (IPS) for electric drive and other ships’ power for use in the DDGX, which became the Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) class destroyer. This decision, however, was subsequently reversed due to concerns over cost and schedule risk with DD-21 (Zumwalt class) being the first large surface combatant with IPS. Though the navy established an IPS office in 1995, it has yet to mature the technology. O’Rourke, Electric-Drive Propulsion for U.S. Navy Ships. 156. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 538. 157. Ibid., 540–541.

5 Growing an Information Age Navy

CNOs in the twenty-first century have been bound by decisions on next-generation platforms made in the 1990s, a belief in the need to contribute navy resources to the “global war on terrorism” to remain relevant, and the sclerosis of the military-industrial-congressional enterprise—the MICE. Gray rhinos are obvious challenges that only grow larger the longer they are ignored.1 Constrained by personal incentives and institutional cultures, the MICE have ignored the gray rhinos that have been apparent since the end of the Cold War. A system organized around the primacy of the species of industrial age equipment that emerged from World War II, and merely upgrading those species with each new generation of technology, is unsustainable and unfit for an age of information and artificial intelligence where the value of machines increasingly is in their embedded computers. Exploring how the equipping ecosystem has evolved is essential for formulating new paradigms and policies to improve its fitness. Navy Equipping Strategy An effective navy equipping strategy provides the materiel, personnel, and facilities that are the nutrients required to sustain its readiness and engagement metabolism. Constrained by congressional authorizations and appropriations, it specifies what forces to build and when. The SSG in 1992 presented a gray rhino to CNO Kelso when they stated that if the navy continued to acquire forces as it had in the past, replacing each vessel and aircraft with the next generation as technology 189

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advanced and incurring increasing personnel costs, the navy was on track for 250 to 300 ships in twenty years. They based this estimate on trends in federal spending on “entitlement” programs (principally the gray rhinos of Social Security and health care), interest payments on national debt, “discretionary” programs (principally defense budgets), and projections of future growth in the gross national product providing the basis for taxation. Costs to sustain the navy ecosystem were on track to increase by about 3 percent more than budgets. Using the financial rule of seventytwo, the anticipated deficit in investment meant that navy force structure would be reduced by half about every quarter century. The fleet was down to 282 ships when Clark retired in 2005. Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments claimed in a 2011 analysis, “The base budget now supports a force with essentially the same size, force structure, and capabilities as in FY 2001 but at a 35 percent higher cost. The [Defense] Department is spending more but not getting more.”2 Where Kelso had tasked his SSGs in 1990 and 1991 to look out decades as the decisions he was making would affect the navy over that period, future CNOs found that they were hamstrung by those major program decisions that were made in the fervor of the 1990s focus on littoral bombardment and the George W. Bush administration’s “force transformation.” With no formidable adversary in sight, the expectation was that time was available to sort through difficulties in employing leap-ahead technologies. Rather than using the kind of broad net assessment process promoted by Andrew Marshall and a campaign of learning involving the navy’s intellectual, fleet, and equipping organs to work through future navy fleet employment and design as was done in the years between the world wars, OPNAV N81 relied upon systems analysis employing computer modeling and simulation (that ignored mathematical chaos, emergence, and nonlinear systems dynamics) rather than learning from prototyping concepts and technology in the fleet. The Joint Strike Fighter, which became the F-35, is the most expensive of programs. Initially conceived to fight over short ranges principally in Europe, it was to replace air force, marine, and navy fighter inventories. Given the unique needs of each service, it evolved into three variants and has taken decades to field. Maintenance costs far exceed previous aircraft. With the navy A-12 program for a long-range, stealthy carrier attack aircraft to replace the A-6 canceled in 1991 due to cost overruns, the navy has no long-range carrier-based aircraft. The surface combatant 21 program investigated a family of follow-on ships focused largely on fire support for Marines and ground troops under the vision of “Forward . . . From the Sea.” This led to the DDG-21, which

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became the DDG(X)/DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class. The DD(X) design called for stealth, a new dual-band radar that had not yet been developed, a new long-range gun (the Vertical Gun for Advanced Ships) in order to provide fire support for US forces ashore, with the Extended Range Guided Munition, and was supposed to be powered by a permanent magnet motor.3 The 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, in a similar vein to the SSG reports in 1991 and 1992, pointed to increasing challenges from “antiaccess and area denial” systems, similar to those that the Soviets had presented, that would complicate operations envisioned in “Forward . . . From the Sea.” It called for small high-speed, shallow draft combatants with modules that could perform mine-clearing, ASW, and other missions employing networks to enhance their survivability and effectiveness to augment the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke–class and the proposed DDG-21.4 This led to the Joint High-Speed Vessel and the poorly conceived and implemented Littoral Combat Ship program. All of these designs called for networked forces and digital combat systems. Software costs spiraled along with delays in introducing new propulsion and weapons technologies into these ships. In addition, requirements and initial designs were established for what became the new Ford-class aircraft carrier embodying a host of untested technologies. The Marines Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, a high-speed armored vehicle that could be launched from over the horizon, added to the mix, in addition to the continual marine sparring with the navy over the number and kinds of amphibious ships required. The Zumwalt-class, called a destroyer, is the size of a World War II cruiser. The Littoral Combatant Ship designs displaced as much as World War II destroyers. The Ford-class carrier was the upgrade to the World War II carrier eight decades later. The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle was to be the latest generation platform for transporting Marines from ship to shore. The species of platforms that led to victory in World War II evolved only slowly as the character of competition and armed conflict accelerated. Admiral Mullen inherited the next-generation destroyer, Littoral Combat Ship, the Virginia-class attack submarine, the Advanced SEAL Delivery System, the LPD-17 amphibious ship, and the Joint Strike Fighter. The Marines inherited the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, the H-1 helicopter program, and the vertical take-off and landing version of the Joint Strike Fighter. All had cost and schedule overruns. Mullen assigned his vice chief Admiral Robert F. Willard to address the rising costs of ships.5 “After being sworn in, Mullen immediately directed VCNO Willard to chair a study group to see if there were ways to improve Navy shipbuilding.”6 CNO Mullen directed Willard to stabilize

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the navy’s relations with its shipbuilding industrial base, develop a future naval force structure, discipline the requirements process for ships, eliminate or highlight statutory or regulatory barriers that hampered efficient shipbuilding, and move the navy toward “more modular and multipurpose ship designs.”7 That no feasible solutions were found is not surprising given that acquisition authority rested under the secretary of the navy in the person of the service acquisition executive, who oversees the program executive offices and systems commands. The CNO proposes, but the secretary of the navy disposes materiel construction and repair. Supporting the “global war on terrorism” continued to draw on budgets intended for navy programs. When CNO Roughead took the helm, “The two littoral combat ships then building were not going to meet their Navy cost goals or the cost ceilings imposed by Congress in the FY 2006 Defense Authorization Act, and the Navy had already terminated the contract with Lockheed Martin for the third ship of the class because of a disagreement over the vessel’s cost.”8 The decisions made by CNO Clark at the beginning of the program to select one of two prototypes no longer obtained as the decision was made to keep two variants to support the thinning industrial base. The decision to design new mission modules rather than employing existing ASW, counter-mine, and surface combat systems resulted in the modules not being ready when the ships were built. FORCEnet, of which the Littoral Combat Ship was intended as a component, was nowhere in sight. The planned buy for the DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer began at thirty-two ships. “That number was steadily reduced—to 24, to 12, and then to seven. By the time Admiral Roughead became the CNO, the number of Zumwalts that the Congress was willing to support was three, and even that number was not firm.”9 The demand from combatant commanders had evolved to missile defense and ASW, not fire support for forces ashore. The platform sponsors largely continued to control navy programming and the annual budget through N8 as they had before the creation of N8. Force Analyses at the Naval Postgraduate School Captain Wayne P. Hughes Jr. graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1952, became a surface warfare officer, commanded a minesweeper and a destroyer, and served as the deputy director of the Systems Analysis Division in the office of the CNO in the 1970s. He joined the operations

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research faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in 1979. A scholar who studied the evolution of the navy and the nature of armed conflict, and a prolific author, Hughes encouraged following the guidance of the World War II fathers of operations research; namely, “one must ruthlessly strip away details (which can be taken into account later), and arrive at a few broad, very approximate ‘constants of the operation.’ By studying the variations of these constants, one can then perhaps begin to see how to improve the operation.”10 Hughes employed this advice in creating his “salvo equations.”11 Hughes’s study of history led to his first principles of naval battles: “Fire effectively first,” and he echoed, “a fleet’s a fool to fight a fort.” He often articulated his concerns that in an age of unproven missile defense, where the effectiveness of antiship missiles had been demonstrated by the Argentine and Israeli navies, the navy was putting too much emphasis on fewer numbers of large multimission surface ships whose damage or loss would disproportionately degrade fleet effectiveness. Indeed, these platforms were more cost-effective if they never engaged in combat, but simple equations and available data highlighted the fragility of this approach. He encouraged “a more distributed fleet that is offensively disposed yet can suffer losses and fight on, for no defense at sea can be perfect against a skilled opponent.”12 Independently, the first SSG generating innovative naval warfare concepts in 1996 proposed a netted system of numerous functionally distributed and physically dispersed sensors and weapons to provide a spectrum of capabilities and effects, scaled to the operational situation.13 Platform considerations were secondary to the effects achieved by sensors and weapons as the primary function of the platform was to position the payloads to apply the desired effects. Hughes came to instruct a subsequent SSG in September 1997 in naval campaigns, and promoted two-stage systems, similar to an aircraft carrier and its air wing, keeping the first stage out of harm while exploiting its operational mobility to deliver combat units. These two-stage systems would include submarines, surface combatants, logistics ships, and amphibious ships, in addition to aircraft carriers.14 Working with Jeffrey Kline and other Naval Postgraduate School faculty, Hughes fostered • a Naval Postgraduate School technical study “New Navy Fighting Machine” in 2009, • a study for the Office of Net Assessment, “A Flotilla Study to Support a Strategy of Off-shore Control” in 2012,

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• “Between Peace and the Air-Sea Battle: A War at Sea Strategy” in 2012,15 • “Single Purpose Warships for the Littorals” in 2014,16 • “A Tactical Doctrine for Distributed Lethality” in 2016,17 • “Impact of the Robotics Age on Naval Force Design, Effectiveness, and Acquisition,” in 2017,18 and • “Build a Green-Water Fleet” in 2018.19 Wayne Hughes passed away in 2019. However, James Wirtz went on to address the effects of Hughes and Kline’s naval force designs on deterrence in 2021,20 and the Naval Postgraduate School conducted a campuswide study on what it called a hybrid fleet for 2045 that addressed aspects of cost, sustainability, and issues beyond attrition in combat.21 The Naval Postgraduate School’s role in fleet design is similar to that performed by the Naval War College between the world wars. Then, the navy’s general board acted upon the findings of the Naval War College, whereas today OPNAV and the secretary of the navy place little weight into the Naval Postgraduate School’s analysis and recommendations. Congress has questioned whether the navy has conducted sufficient analysis to invest in uninhabited systems. Whether the navy can now implement a campaign of learning to realize such concepts as were developed by the SSG and Naval Postgraduate School beginning in the 1990s to regain momentum over the Chinese requires dedicated efforts beyond extant practices. Capability-Based Planning Capability-based planning begins with a strategy, a scheme for accomplishing one’s goals with available and projected means. It then focuses on enhancing the means to implement the missions required to execute that strategy. Effective strategy begins with understanding the competition: their aims, their theory for accomplishing those aims, what capabilities they have for accomplishing their aims. It then goes on to address what the competition cares about most (their sensitivities), how they are organized, and how to leverage vulnerabilities in their capabilities, organization, and geographic position while remaining aware of their strengths. Even the most aggressive adversaries worry about their core values and territory. Their military culture, which evolved with their political order, frames their approach to warfare. All have vulnerabilities in their capabilities as their various organizational elements

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competing for limited resources have differing objectives and incentives. This formulation of capability-based planning provides the foundation for readiness, engagement, and equipping strategies, even strategies for dealing with the MICE. The organization and administration of the equipping strategy affects the viability of readiness and engagement strategies. Congress first organized the navy around bureaus in 1842, which it reorganized in 1862 for the Civil War. The bureaus adapted as technologies such as naval aviation became more important. With systems engineering becoming more important and integrated systems crossing the bureau line of authority, the bureaus came to an end in the mid-1960s and were replaced with systems commands. Though the bureau and systems command chiefs were always admirals, and the CNO influenced their selection, after the Goldwater-Nichols legislation the systems commands support program executive offices report to the navy secretariate. Once a CNO was established in 1915, every CNO made adjustments to his staff within the constraints allowed by Congress.22 The early OPNAV organization included offices for communications (radio stations), intelligence, inspection and survey, target practice and engineering, the Naval War College, and aeronautics. During the period between the world wars, the organization grew to include ship movements, planning, materiel, and naval districts in 1920, adding a submarine division, budget and policy and liaison sections in 1923, fleet training in 1931, and fleet maintenance in 1939, as some divisions were subsumed into the newer ones. OPNAV grew as new divisions were added to meet the demands of World War II and was pared back to an inspector general, a general planning group, and deputy CNOs for personnel, administration, operations, logistics, and air, with a VCNO, in 1947. By 1958, it had again added offices for a chief of information, a long-range objectives group working for the CNO, a Progress Analysis Group working for the VCNO, and the deputy CNO offices now added one for Policy and Plans, an assistant CNO for research and development, and an ASW executive. CNO Zumwalt in 1971 shifted OPNAV from functional toward platform communities in creating the system of deputy CNOs for air, submarine, and surface forces. He intended that the director for navy program planning (OP-090) would force the warfare community leaders to align ongoing programs to larger goals through control over the navy’s program plans. This system did not work as intended. As the navy began to create the Maritime Strategy in the early 1980s, VCNO William Small found OPNAV appraisals wanting. Major deficiencies that he noted included:

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• A worst-case mentality “assigning the best capabilities to the enemy and the worst situations to our own force.” • Putting the force, “for the purposes of engagement analysis, into tactical situations which no prudent planner or responsible commander would countenance.” • An emphasis on defense rather than seeking out and destroying the enemy. “If we look at the problem offensively, with an overall tactical concept or strategy in mind, it results in significantly different employment of both ships and aircraft, and with consequent different perspectives on the weapons they employ.” • Parochialism of the platform sponsors and the failure of OPNAV to “integrate analysis, appraisals, requirements and programs in designing a cost-effective naval force.” The failure of the platform sponsors to address intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, tactics, command and control communications and countermeasures against adversary systems, and electronic warfare, as seriously as they addressed weapons. • Bottom-up programming and analysis that avoids knowing the price of the total to the last minute, and the price always being unaffordable. At that point the choices are “either/or, or less of everything” with “no chance to decrease the cost of individual programs through less stringent requirements.” Injecting affordability early into analysis based upon realistic threats would result in fewer and better supported combat systems.23 He followed this December 1981 memo with a memo in March 1982 stating, “In my eight months back in OPNAV, I’ve not found an explanation of how convoys are going to be employed, or how carrier battle groups are going to be employed, or how amphibious task forces are going to be employed in a war with the Warsaw Pact.” Neither the navy’s net assessment of hardware nor its appraisal of programs “took any account of how our forces or Soviet forces are likely to be employed. What can we do to fix this? Who’s in charge?”24 His two days in Newport in April 1982 with senior OPNAV leaders discussing the SSG’s war game answered his questions about how US and allied forces could be employed and how Soviet/Warsaw Pact forces were likely to be employed based upon deep intelligence penetration of the Soviet military. Noting that the previous year’s Summary Warfare Appraisal had recommended adding $1 billion at the same time that fiscal guidance dictated decrements of $2 billion, Small directed an appraisal at the outset of the programming process “with respect to how naval forces would be employed in wartime . . . to illuminate the issues imbedded in our maritime strategy [emphasis added], and also to serve as a backup

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and point of departure for the appraisals and CPAMs [CNO Program Appraisal Memorandum] to follow.” He had the strategy developed by the SSG in mind as “our maritime strategy.” He put the deputy CNO, Plans, Policy, and Operations in charge.25 This led to OPNAV preparing an evolving set of briefings and a document that became known as the Maritime Strategy. Small’s attempt to make navy programs responsive to strategy could not overcome the parochialism of the various appraisals and differences in approaches between the navy “high-priests” of strategy and the “gladiators” who had to fit a set of programs within congressional mandates for programs and budgets.26 Greater emphasis on capabilities-based planning emerged from decreasing post–Cold War budgets and an increasing sense of the power of forces acting in concert rather than independently. Vice Admiral Bill Owens, as director of the newly restructured N8, created a system known as the galactic radiator. It had columns depicting joint missions crossed with rows depicting force capabilities. He required program sponsors to use this framework in discussing and justifying their expenditures. As with previous attempts to focus on capabilities, this effort was unable to overcome organizational incentives and institutional momentum. The strategy framework was also less well defined in the absence of a preeminent Soviet/Warsaw Pact threat. The Bottom-Up Review posited the need for forces with the capacity and capabilities to engage in major contingencies in two regions simultaneously. The Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea (DPRK—North Korea) and Iran were intended to be illustrative cases.27 However, the Pentagon planning process soon used them as the cases, determining that the wars needed to be near-simultaneous because the services did not want to trade combatant platforms for enough sea- and air-lift to transport forces to both simultaneously. Also, US military leaders knew less about details of the doctrines and organizational responsibilities of the DPRK and Iranian militaries than the Soviets and Warsaw Pact. That DPRK doctrine was derived from Soviet doctrine provided clues, as did close observation of their exercises and their continuing efforts to send special forces into the Republic of Korea. Though the US military had worked closely with the Iranians and provided most military systems before the 1979 revolution, taking full advantage of the divisions between regular Iranian military organizations and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was challenging. Therefore, the Pentagon focused on technical intelligence on the capabilities of DPRK and Iranian weapons systems rather than on a net assessment of their ecology and the larger systems within. Systems

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analysis techniques did not go beyond evaluating the physics associated with adversary weapons systems (while ignoring nonlinear systems dynamics and deterministic chaos). Pressures for service unification during the Truman administration and efforts to place all aircraft under the control of the newly created US Air Force resulted in Secretary of Defense James Forrestal gathering the service chiefs in Key West in 1948 to review each service’s roles and missions. This led to an agreement that specified the functions that each service was responsible for and empowered the services to establish “requirements” to fulfill those functions.28 Concerned that the services were not taking into account each other’s capabilities when establishing their requirements, the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 required the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to review service roles and missions every three years and submit recommendations to the secretary of defense. After two such reports fell short of expectations, Congress established a Committee on Roles and Missions in 1994 to “review the efficacy and appropriateness for the post–Cold War of the current allocations among the Armed Forces of roles, missions, and functions . . . and make recommendations for changes.”29 The Committee on Roles and Missions stated that their most important finding was that the traditional approach to roles and missions was no longer appropriate as the context had significantly changed since the 1948 Key West agreement: “The question is no longer ‘who does what,’ but how do we ensure that the right set of capabilities is identified, developed, and fielded to meet the needs of unified commanders. The Services, the defense agencies, OSD, and the Joint Staff—who make these decisions and develop these capabilities—are at the forefront of this effort.”30 The committee recommended that capabilities and requirements be reviewed in the aggregate, arguing that “only by approaching capabilities in the aggregate, from the combatant commanders’ perspective rather than the Services’, can the ‘who needs what’ question be answered.”31 Under the leadership of vice chairman Admiral Bill Owens, the joint staff prepared Joint Vision 2010 in 1995 as “the conceptual template to provide a common direction for use by the Services in developing their unique capabilities within a joint framework of doctrine and programs as they prepare to meet an uncertain and challenging future.”32 The first Quadrennial Defense Review in 1997 continued this theme. However, the effort to formally implement a capabilities-based planning approach began with the 2001 review: A central objective of the review was to shift the basis of defense planning from a “threat-based” model that dominated the thinking of

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the past to a “capabilities-based” model for the future. This capability-based model focuses more on how an adversary might fight than specifically whom the adversary might be or where a war might occur. It recognizes that it is not enough to plan for large conventional wars in distant theaters. Instead, the United States must identify the capabilities required to deter and defeat adversaries who will rely upon surprise, deception, and asymmetric warfare to achieve their objectives.33

Responding to this guidance for dealing with abstract adversaries, various parts of the Pentagon began to revamp their individual processes to reflect a capability-based approach. The abstraction exacerbated the Pentagon’s tendency to focus on its shortfalls in dealing with every conceivable possibility, rather than on ways to attack adversary sensitivities and weaknesses, resulting in unaffordable lists of “requirements.” Absent an overall framework, the processes initiated to constitute capabilitybased planning were interpreted independently by each service and were not reconciled with one another or the recurring rhythms of the congressional budget cycle. The processes included the following: • Changing the annual Planning, Program, and Budgeting System that McNamara had instituted to a two-year planning cycle, and intending to include an “execution and monitoring stage,” thus changing the acronym from PPBS to PPBE. • Replacing the Defense Planning Guidance with two documents. Strategic Planning Guidance was described as a single, fiscally informed document to replace the policy and strategy sections of the Defense Planning Guidance. Joint Planning Guidance replaced the programmatic elements of the Defense Planning Guidance and recorded decisions reached during the planning stage. • An Analytic Agenda to produce a set of scenarios and intended to produce common sets of data for use in analysis, along with managing some major joint studies to improve the quality and commensurability of analyses supporting planning and programming throughout the department. • Creating a Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System to balance the requirements of current operations against the need to invest in capabilities to support future concepts. This was to have two parts: a requirements system to permit investments in transformational capabilities based upon joint operating concepts, and strategic analysis to compare risks across time and between multiple theater-level operations. These demands for strategic analysis went far beyond what the systems analysis techniques in use could produce.

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• Directing the establishment of a Joint Concept Development and Experimentation process to provide concepts for eight to twenty years into the future as a basis for assessing the risks of future joint concepts. • Revising directives to reflect the linkage between acquisition and capabilities development planning through the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System. The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review established a pilot initiative to have the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics (who controlled major acquisition decisions) together with the director of program analysis and evaluation (who analyzed the cost-effectiveness of proposed systems) and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who led the Joint Requirements Oversight Council) approve the solution concept before committing major expenditures to a new program. As the services were organized around their equipment, major acquisition decisions most commonly arose when a generation of vehicles, vessels, or aircraft approached the end of its life and was to be replaced with a more expensive, more technologically advanced generation. By the mid-2000s, directives had been prepared for all of these new processes and the various Pentagon organizations were expending great efforts to comply with them. As each developed independently, the joint staff commissioned a study to propose ways to better synchronize the efforts.34 The study exposed challenges in each of the efforts: • Processes for effective evaluation and monitoring of programs had yet to be established.35 • The timing of the guidance documents did not align with the need to provide program plans and budgets for annual congressional legislation. • The Analytic Agenda provided a patina of jointness for the services’ individual capability development processes but had little effect. For example, logrolling ensured that each service had scenarios emphasizing their individual core competencies. The paradigm employed for computer-based campaign analysis was also inadequate.36 • The Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System directives were revised annually, adding further confusion. Also, at the same time that the joint staff was implementing the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, Secretary Rumsfeld chartered the Joint Defense Capabilities Study, chaired by former under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics Pete Aldridge. This study was referred to as the Aldridge Study and the processes it recom-

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mended as the Aldridge Process. Aldridge found that the lack of strong combatant commander influence resulted in capabilities being “pushed” to the warfighters rather than their identifying and “pulling” needed capabilities from the force providers. Aldridge proposed giving combatant commanders a larger role in shaping defense strategy and using operating concepts and the unique demands of the various theaters to drive assessment of joint needs. Based upon the Aldridge Study, Rumsfeld initiated an “Enhanced Planning Process” that used the same analytical resources as the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System process. The competing processes exacerbated complaints in the Pentagon over combatant commanders’ insatiable demands and nearterm focus. The idea of amalgamating the Joint Requirements Oversight Council–controlled Functional Capability Boards with OSD program review issue teams never made it into the implementing guidance, resulting in one requirements system informing the JCS chairman and another the secretary of defense. • The Joint Concept Development and Experimentation program resulted in the formulation of several joint concepts, such as Rapid Decisive Operations, that had few noticeable effects on service programs. Joint Forces Command ran a joint experimentation program funded at about $100 million a year. The program was sui generis to the command, rejecting requests to support broader experimentation by the other combatant commands and services, ultimately contributing to Joint Forces Command’s disestablishment in 2011. OSD established pilot programs to employ the new concept decision approach identified in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review and conduct Evaluations of Alternatives on six programs. The Evaluation of Alternatives differed from the extant Analysis of Alternatives in that the latter evaluated alternatives for replacing a vehicle, vessel (e.g., destroyer), or aircraft with the next generation of the same platform. The former endeavored to explore alternatives for conducting missions that could involve alternative platforms. Despite some promising success in the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and Integrated Air and Missile Defense programs, John Young terminated the reform efforts when he became under secretary for acquisition, technology, and logistics in 2007, not wanting his acquisition authorities diluted by working with the director of program analysis and evaluation and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Even as the tempo of military operations picked up, the military operations research community remained focused on modeling and computer simulation of theoretical combat, rather than returning to the

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field to collect data on actual operations, where the discipline had begun. An effort led by retired Admiral Dennis Blair, then president of the Institute for Defense Analyses, to form analytical teams from his institute, the Center for Naval Analyses, and RAND to analyze operations on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan received tepid support from the Pentagon. Commanders in the field did not want analysts incorporated into their units who reported to higher authorities. Each commander determined the data he wanted for his operations, resulting in incomplete and inconsistent data and analysis. The analytic chiefs in each of the services, who were the sponsors for the Military Operations Research Society, focused upon analyzing future forces, which had little if anything to do with the ongoing combat. Defense analysts, in general, were much more comfortable behind their computers using theoretical data for calculations on theoretical combat, rather than the core of their profession—in the field and at sea. Rumsfeld aimed to change the defense planning process, “which he deemed was too slow to deal with rapid changes in the world.”37 Ironically, the sum of Rumsfeld’s efforts to provide business reform to the DoD’s requirements and acquisition processes employing capabilitybased planning resulted in extensive churn as the various organizations worked to develop and comply with new guidance. The result was extending the time to initiate new programs and field capabilities, while having no appreciable effect on the services’ decisions. Given the absence of a sharp definition of capabilities, the services employed the ambiguity to pursue their individual force capability development processes.38 “The deputy chief of N81, retired Captain Arthur H. Barber III, believed that the concept of ‘capability’ was inadequate as the basis for programming, and he set out to see to it that ‘capability assessments’ did not influence the work of N81.”39 The focus on N81’s analysis was its work on the four “capability scenarios” developed by OSD and the services’ chief analysts. When Elmo Zumwalt served as the head of OPNAV’s systems analysis division, he “didn’t think you got answers from analysis,” but that analyses were an important way of both bringing people from different parts of the navy together and developing evidence to support the navy’s overall program.40 However, as with the scientists in the age of reason, Barber, trained as an engineer, sought to mathematize nature. N81 returned to the “vogue of military mathematics” that Clausewitz had argued vehemently against as excluding essential features of chance, fog, friction, and morale. In writing about senior decisionmakers, Barber argued, “Their problem is often complex, with many vari-

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ables and constraints, and some aspects of the problem may not be tractable to quantitative techniques.” Barber sought computer-based combat and campaign models for computational reproducibility, asking, “Were the model run inputs and calculations done correctly?”41 Making the problem tractable for quantitative techniques meant constraining the analysis to those portions of the problem for which the analyst has tools that he, she, or they know how to use. Barber stated, “The issues worth studying are the ones that will potentially have a significant impact on war fighting outcomes or on the cost of buying, operating, or maintaining the force; and that are susceptible to [quantitative] analysis [emphasis added]. Many issues are interesting, some are important, and some of the important ones are not really amenable to analytic techniques.”42 Those issues not amenable to quantitative analysis apparently were not worth studying. However, neither N81 nor the DoD analytical community calculated or even estimated the uncertainties inherent in their computational results. During World War II, operations analysts had discovered that a useful estimate of the uncertainty in their models was an estimate of the error in their variables times the square root of the number of variables.43 Adding detail to models leads to more variables thus adding uncertainty to the results, to the point that valid comparisons of alternatives are impossible. Nor did these analyses consider replicability.44 Would a different team studying the same scientific problem employing alternative models and data sources arrive at the same result? Time pressures, security classification, and proprietary contractor procedures prevented any peer review of models, data, and how they affected analytical results, making the process susceptible to providing consistent, inaccurate results. As Barber said, “Time, tides, and POMs [Program Objective Memoranda] wait for no man.”45 Time pressures required to address Overseas Contingency Operations as well as the baseline navy budget exacerbated those pressures, producing more calculations but little critical analysis. Those who employed these techniques ignored the subjectivity that went into all of the decisions regarding the details of the analysis. N81 generally rejected war games as not being computationally reproducible, not recognizing that they more accurately represented the nature of conflict. Aspects of games that are not reproducible reflect life where free will results in many possible, unquantifiable paths from any starting point. Barber misconstrued reproducible computation and rigor in stating: Wargames are human-in-the-loop activities whose outcomes change with each set of humans that do them, they are not rigorous repeatable

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analysis. Their best role is to shape the assumptions that are used by quantitative analysis before that analysis is applied against new operational problems. This analysis should then ideally be tested through operational experimentation that puts hardware (real or virtual) in the loop to see if things work out the way as predicted. . . . Uniquely within the Navy the N81 staff knows how to structure an issue into an analytic problem, how to select the appropriate techniques to apply to it, and how to either do the work themselves or find the right outside provider to apply those techniques.46

Barber was not well schooled in the context of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics admonition that “a well-schooled man is one who searches for that degree of precision in each kind of study which the nature of the subject at hand admits.” Warfare is a human-in-the-loop activity that does not admit the precision that Barber sought from repeatability. Suggesting precision where it does not exist demonstrates the absence of rigor. Barber should be applauded for recognizing the value of a campaign of learning, though N81 had no role in operational experimentation, instead focusing on its internal analyses. Seeking point estimates, N81 did not know how to structure and apply appropriate analytic techniques to strategic or wicked problems. The Naval War College began a series of “Halsey” games beginning in 2003. Over the years, these games suggested relatively inexpensive measures that could have significant effects in countering particularly troublesome adversary systems, such as using the US Army’s Coyote obscurant system costing $600 a box and requiring about forty-eight boxes to cover several ships or an airfield. N81 summarily rejected these results stating that all discretionary navy funds had been expended and preferring more expensive active to passive defenses. Subsequently, Halsey’s results have been used by OSD to suggest systems for partners and allies.47 Barber noted that the navy has not made the progress on the FORCEnet concept from the 1990s that now is required to support concepts for distributed operations.48 N81’s campaign models were incapable of addressing information effects, thus incapable of highlighting the need for and value of networking. Eschewing nonlinear dynamics, the models disguised fundamental uncertainties in their reproducible outcomes. The Naval Electronic Systems Command developed a warfare environment simulator employing communications data from years of coordination-in-direct-support at-sea exercises in the 1980s explicitly to address the effects of time delays in communicating information and effects on command and control. The simulation required personnel at each command node and was data intensive. To save time it evolved into the Naval Simulation System, dropping the features that “bottled”

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information for each command node. Similarly, though mines, decoys, electronic, and other countermeasures have driven combat outcomes, such systems received little attention in navy analyses focused on the next generation of vessel or aircraft. Though the navy was entrenched in the global war on terrorism in the 2000s, the defense of Taiwan was the principal defense planning scenario used for navy programming. Barber commented that he was tired of studying that scenario and sought to move on to others.49 The analysis demonstrated the increasing risks to the navy as the People’s Liberation Army fielded more capable weapons. N81’s task was to defend navy programs, not to win wars. If the war appeared intractable, assume that it would not happen and move on to another rather than find what kind of navy it would take to win. As the navy began to move from the industrial to the information age, Barber treated the environment in the 2000s and early 2010s as sufficiently stable that the suite of computer-based combat and campaign models could be usefully employed to make major decisions regarding next-generation major acquisitions and operations. He now appreciates “unbounded” security challenges and the difficulty of establishing merely quantitative requirements: “When major changes in unit characteristics and force employment concepts are underway but have not yet stabilized and the threat is evolving rapidly, the task of doing a force structure assessment that produces specific provable numbers as the ‘requirement’ for each type of unit becomes an unbounded problem. That is the situation the Navy is in today.”50 The churn of DoD capability-based planning increased the focus of OPNAV on internal Pentagon processes, as opposed to a campaign of learning consisting of enhanced interactions to seek concepts and analysis from the Naval War College and Naval Postgraduate School and to explore concepts in war games and fleet exercises. While stating support for a campaign of learning, and noting that different organizations in the navy owned the different pieces and had no coherent approach, the focus on quantitative analysis limited the value and virtue of N81’s analyses. Nor did N81 appreciate the profound uncertainties in their analyses. More broadly, while recognizing that replacing one class of platform with the next generation would inevitably lead to smaller numbers of more expensive platforms, Pentagon and navy practices frustrated multiple CNOs’ attempts to organize OPNAV to provide affordable capabilities to conduct naval missions. Naval forces predictably continued to shrink as the “platform barons” continued to dominate programming and budgeting.

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Having made a hash out of capability-based planning, revising practices to focus on payloads rather than platforms will be more difficult than if the approach had been employed as intended beginning at the end of the Cold War. Admiral Greenert argued for revising practices as CNO but had little success in changing the analytical paradigms and techniques, thus limiting the ability to adapt navy programs.51 N-81’s analysis techniques would be better devoted to analyzing navy wholeness rather than campaign outcomes. Though difficult, capability-based planning through a campaign of learning is even more essential today to create adaptive capacity and reverse the growing Chinese momentum.52

The Military-Industrial-Congressional Enterprise and Navy Force Development In his 1961 farewell speech, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the potential threats posed by the military-industrial complex and “the prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.”53 He chose to emphasize his cooperative relations with Congress rather than highlight their role in the influence of the military-industrial-congressional enterprise (MICE). He anticipated the rapid growth of defense intellectuals and civilian services in the form of various think tanks and contractors beyond those industries that produced military materiel. While international security challenges and opportunities changed significantly, the Cold War MICE procurement practices became even more entrenched as acquisition reforms added processes and complexity. Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in 1986 to promote joint operations and provide more civilian control by creating an under secretary of defense for acquisition and reducing the role of the service chiefs in acquisition decisions. This legislation added joint duty requirements to the already packed career paths for line officers, even as it added new educational and experience requirements for acquisition professionals.54 The Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act in 1990 further created mandatory requirements for a more professional acquisition force. Line and acquisition professionals “had completely different chains of command and, consequently, were situated in different performance evaluation and promotion structures.”55 Having little appreciation for increasingly complex acquisition processes, line officers had trouble articulating their needs to an acquisition workforce that was itself increasingly isolated from the operational environment.

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The Packard Commission that informed the Goldwater-Nichols legislation called for more prototyping to gain experience with new platforms and systems before making major investments. However, the DoD and the navy increasingly turned to computer-based combat and campaign simulations, believing them to be a cheaper and more flexible way to inform acquisition decisions.56 This had the effects of further separating the intellectual contributions of the Naval War College and Naval Postgraduate School and the experience of fleet operators from navy acquisition, and removed an important source of data for ensuring computer-based simulations were accurate.57 Following the conclusion of the Cold War, the US military—in line with a government-wide trend—embraced outsourcing, increasing reliance on contractors instead of using military service members or government civilians to perform various tasks.58 Outsourcing all but inherently governmental functions was believed to provide both cost savings and greater productivity from access to more skilled workers. Facing the dilemma of reduced infrastructure and high demands for support from the fleet, CNO Kelso made a distinction between “core” support and readiness capabilities and those that were not core. As Tom Hone and Curtis Utz explained the concept: The latter could be contracted out, supposedly allowing the Navy to enlarge or shrink shore-based infrastructure relatively quickly in response to changes in national strategy or defense spending. The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) accepted this policy when the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Logistics said in November 1993 that the Defense Department’s policy stressed retaining “core” capabilities under government control. A “core” capability was then defined as one needed to “meet readiness and sustainability requirements of the weapons systems” that supported the “contingency scenarios” of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Core” capabilities in the Navy’s shore installations were those that minimized operational risks and guaranteed “required readiness.” However, “core” depot capabilities were the minimum necessary; they were not those held in reserve in case of an extended national emergency.59

The navy also began to rely more heavily on industry for ship designs, and the program executive officers and supporting laboratories turned to contractors for many engineering projects that had previously been done in-house. Contractors working as government staff increased their roles in articulating military requirements. In a speech to the National Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1974, Admiral Hyman Rickover had

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cautioned the navy over losing its technical competence and condemned McNamara’s and subsequent emphasis on management schemes: To meet the demands of the technological revolution we had witnessed since World War II, the Navy had two choices. It could make the strenuous effort needed to keep abreast of technology. Or it could let technical competence fall from its grasp; placing its dependence on industry, tinkering with its organization and, through various makeshift arrangements, attempt to keep track of the technical developments upon which its future depended. The decision was to rely on reorganization and management techniques. The result was a flood of studies and an endless series of reorganizations, all of which increased emphasis on “management” and decreased the reliance on technical competence.60

In the early 1990s, the navy turned to industry rather than its engineers for its reliance on technical competence as that became other than a core capability. As the navy was moving many activities to contractors, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry presided over 1993’s infamous “Last Supper,” where he hosted the CEOs of the top defense firms and issued the ultimatum that shrinking defense budgets would require consolidation among them. His remarks served “as the starting point for a wave of mergers and acquisitions that dramatically changed the industry landscape—in a 2005 paper, Pierre Chao, then of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that ‘By the end of the 1990s, 107 firms had become five’—creating the current, top-heavy defense industrial base.”61 Perry then presented a special paper to the House Armed Services Committee entitled “Acquisition Reform: A Mandate for Change.” This accelerated a series of frequent reforms to the acquisition process (Table 5.1). Though the table ends in 1996, the reforms continued at a rapid pace. Many acronyms in the table are not spelled out to demonstrate how arcane the system became, resulting in acquisition handbooks and checklists rather than technical competence to deal with a complicated ecosystem—the antithesis of reflective judgment and logical tact needed for an equipping strategy. As the defense industry downsized, corporations focused more on their industry competitors than on the threats to the nation.62 By 2013, “DOD obligated $310 billion on federal contracts—more than half (51%) of total DOD direct obligations and more than the contract obligations of all other federal government agencies combined. DOD contract obligations were equivalent to approximately 9% of the

209 Table 5.1

1990s Acquisition Reforms

Date

Event

February 1991

DoDD 5000.1 DoDI 5000.2 changed and reissued and   5000.2M promulgated. The Acquisition Law Advisory Panel (Section 800   Panel) findings reported to Congress.a Colleen Preston assumes the position as Deputy Under   Secretary of Defense for Acquisition Reform.a Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act (FASA) of 1994   enacted. The Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration   program initiated.b Secretary William J. Perry replaces Les Aspin as   Secretary of Defense.a Secretary Perry issues “Acquisition Reform, A   Mandate for Change.”a Secretary Perry attaches “Mandate for Change” to a   letter to the leadership of the Department of Defense.a Secretary Perry issues memo: “Specifications and   Standards—A New Way of Doing Business.”a Paul Kaminski sworn in as Under Secretary of Defense   for Acquisition and Technology USD(A&T).a DUSD(AR) position to report to USD(A&T) The Oversight and Review of the System Acquisition   Process PAT report published.b The Defense Acquisition Pilot Program launched as   allowed by FASA. USD(A&T) establishes an IPT for the purpose of rewriting   the February 23, 1991, 5000 Series documents.b Kaminski issues a memorandum, “Reengineering the   Acquisition Oversight and Review Process.” First   recommendations of the PAT team approved.b Secretary Perry implements the IPT concept for the DoD   via a memorandum.a Kaminski holds a DoD offsite entitled “Institutionalizing   IPTs—DoD’s Commitment to Change.”b Rules of the Road: A Guide for Leading Successful   Integrated Product Teams is published.b (continued) CAIV was initiated.a USD(A&T) issues guidance for making “class action”   contract changes to existing contracts on a facility-wide   basis. AKA Single Process Initiative.b DoD Guide to Integrated Product and Process Development,   (Version 1.0) issued by the USD(A&T) office.a Director, Test, Systems Engineering, and Evaluation,   publishes DoD Guide to IPPD, Version 1.0.b

January 1993 June 1993 October 1993 1st Quarter 1994 February 1994 February 1994 March 1994 June 1994 October 1994 c. 1994 December 1994 December 1994 March 1995 April 1995 May 1995 July 1995 November 1995 December 1995 December 1995 February 1996 February 1996

continues

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Table 5.1

Continued

Date

Event

March 1996

Update of the DoD 5000 Documents approved by the   USD(A&T), DOT&E, and ASD (C3I).a The ODUSD(AR) produces the video “The Overarching   and Working Level Integrated Product Teams,” and the   OIPT-WIPT Information Guide.b DoD and Texas Instruments sign first SPI agreement for   manufacturing standards for all its products.b DoD Acquisition Reform Day is held.b The Defense Acquisition Deskbook, first piece, released.b Kaminski’s memorandum provides guidance for dealing   with specification or process changes on subcontracts   (SPI).b Publishing of DoD 5000.2R, Mandatory Procedures for   Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAPs) and   Major Automated Information Systems (MAIS)   Acquisition Programs (Includes change 1).b

March 1996 April 1996 May 1996 July 1996 September 1996 December 1996

Source: Reprinted courtesy of the DAU Press, originally published in Acquisition Review Quarterly 7, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 35–36. Notes: a. All data and information obtained from Defense Systems Management College. (December 1997). A Model for Leading Change: Making Acquisition Reform Work (report of the 1996–1997 DSMC Military Research Fellows). Fort Belvoir, VA: Author. b. All data and information obtained from Defense Systems Management College. (January–February 1997). Acquisition reform—the end of the beginning. Program Manager 26, no. 1 (special issue).

entire US budget. . . . From FY1999 [FY is fiscal year, starting the previous October 1] through FY2013, adjusted for inflation (FY2013 dollars), DOD contract obligations increased from $175 billion to $308 billion,” having reached a peak of $435 billion in FY2008 as the fiscal crisis occurred. Of this the acquisition of services represented 52 percent of the total, compared to 48 percent for goods, as funding for research and development dropped from around 18 percent of obligations to 10 percent.63 Contracts providing logistics support to contingency operations increased from less than 0.2 contractors per US uniformed military personnel in the American revolution to 0.4 in Korea, under 0.2 again in Vietnam, and then to greater than 1.0 in the Balkans, and increasing to about 1.1 in Iraq and 1.2 in Afghanistan.64 Cost, schedule, and performance problems persisted: • Since 1993, development contracts have experienced a median of 32 percent cost growth (not adjusted for inflation).

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• Since 1997, 31 percent of all major defense acquisition programs (MDAPs) have had cost growth of at least 15 percent. • During the period 1990–2010, the army terminated twenty-two major defense acquisition programs; every year between 1996 and 2010, the army spent more than $1 billion on programs that were ultimately canceled. • Procurement costs for the aircraft carrier CVN-78 [USS Gerald R. Ford] have grown more than 20 percent since the submission of the FY2008 budget, and 4 percent since the submission of the FY2013 budget, prompting the navy to program more than $1.3 billion in additional procurement funding for the ship in FY2014 and FY2015.65 The Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009 included: • appointment of a director of cost assessment and program evaluation (CAPE); • appointment of a director of developmental test and evaluation; • appointment of a director of systems engineering; • a requirement that the director of defense research and engineering periodically assess technological maturity of MDAPs and annually report findings to Congress; and • a requirement that combatant commanders have more influence in the requirements generation process.66 The combatant commanders submit “integrated priority lists” for defense procurement every year. Typically, these lists emphasize capabilities such as long-haul communications, logistics, and electronic warfare, but not the platforms that are the foundation of the services’ programming. Systems analysis has difficulty in quantifying the value of such capabilities, and the combatant commanders are accused of being near-sighted at the expense of future defense. Therefore, their priorities have little influence on service budgets. Ignoring Pacific and IndoPacific Command’s priorities for decades has left the United States ill prepared for the rise of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. As defense reform has continued, the time required to field systems has increased. The years from the start of a program to initial operational capability for military aircraft stayed constant at about five years from 1945 through 1975 when defense reforms began to gain momentum in Congress. Since then that time has increased at approximately 0.6 years per year. Since 1960, the similar time for civilian aircraft has been an order of magnitude less, and the time for automobiles has

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decreased by half.67 As the intellectual design and engineering components represent a significantly greater cost than the materials used to build such systems, time delays add to cost. “The Administration’s proposed FY2021 defense budget requested about $11.4 billion in procurement funding for the F-35 program. This would fund the procurement of 48 F-35As for the Air Force, 10 F-35Bs for the Marine Corps, 20 F-35Cs for the Navy and Marines, advance procurement for future aircraft, and continuing modifications. The proposed budget also requested about $1.7 billion for F-35 research and development.”68 Using these numbers, the DoD is paying about $140 million per aircraft, not including the continuing research and development or the estimated trillion-dollar cost of maintaining the aircraft over their lifespan that will go principally to Lockheed Martin. A former official in the Clinton administration noted that, despite being designed to defeat the Soviets, the administration’s intent was “to dissuade the Chinese from competing with us” by getting “so far ahead of them, particularly on some critical technologies, that we can dissuade them from even bothering to compete with us militarily.”69 Unfortunately, early in development the Chinese gained access to detailed F-35 designs. The DoD continued to buy weapons designed for war in Europe even as it spent two decades enmeshed in the global war on terrorism and China became the driving military threat. The Chinese have emphasized process innovation to overcome US advantages in technical innovation. They now can steal designs and produce and field them more quickly than the US MICE can move through the processes of authorizing and appropriating the funds to acquiring the system and providing it to US forces. The complexity of new weapons systems, particularly their software, has presented additional challenges. Dr. Delores M. Etter, who served as deputy under secretary of defense for science and technology from 1998 to 2001 and who was appointed assistant secretary of the navy (Research, Development, and Acquisition) in November 2005 attempted to institute “software acquisition discipline.” However, neither the naval systems commands nor program managers in the DoD have developed the competencies to deal with software acquisition. As noted above, the ships that the navy is now building largely derive from decisions made in the 1990s, and face similar delays in fielding as aircraft, though not at the same rate. As long as the navy and the DoD remain in an industrial age paradigm of counting major platforms rather than measuring capabilities of payloads needed to accomplish missions in the information age, maintaining an edge will remain dubious. What will it take for the US military to keep its edge? Perhaps swarming an enemy with armed commercial systems will be required in the future.

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Prototypes

Emergent technology derives primarily from risk takers employing the practical reason of trial and error rather than theoretical designs.70 Prototypes were a prominent element in the navy’s campaign of learning before World War II and into the 1980s. As the navy divested of “noncore” functions, it turned to industries that have little incentive to create a protype unless guaranteed follow-on production. For the development of the nuclear submarine force, Hyman Rickover employed prototypes to explore the design space. As a captain, Rickover received authorization to build nuclear-powered submarines in 1951, integrating existing submarine technology with a nuclear reactor and components from surface ship steam plants. The USS Nautilus (SSN 571) was commissioned in 1954 and at sea in 1955 with a pressurized water reactor. Rickover achieved the rapid construction by permitting no changes to the design other than required to accommodate the reactor.71 The navy then commissioned the following: • The USS Seawolf (SSN 575) with a liquid metal cooled reactor in 1957. This design presented too many risks and was quickly replaced. • The USS Triton (SSRN 586) in 1959, a large radar picket submarine with two reactors. • The USS Tullibee (SSN 597) in 1960, a very small, quiet submarine with a small reactor. • The USS Jack (SSN 605) in 1967 with direct drive and counterrotating shafts and propellers. These submarines, augmented with the small classes of SSNs built between the prototypes to expand the force, explored the design space, adapted design features, and informed the building the following classes of nuclear submarines.72 The large capacity of the USS Halibut (SSGN 587), designed to shoot Regulus nuclear cruise missiles, allowed it to adapt to different missions over its service life.73 In 1978 the Defense Science Board noted that over the past fifteen to twenty years the period from initial program conception to approval of full-scale development of the system had increased from less than two to an average of nearly five years, and expected it to continue to increase. They found that operational test and evaluation, reduced concurrency, and limited funding contributed to delays. They noted that approving more program starts than the budget could bear led to “cost overruns, program stretchouts [sic], over management by OSD and the

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Congress, introduction of new (and retention of the old) management techniques, institutionalizing of procurement practices, and the delivery of obsolescent systems and equipment in insufficient quantities or with inadequate performance and reliability in too many instances.” The task force recommended carefully reviewing the utilization of prototypes. The major concern regarding prototypes was, “Who pays?” They stated, “Small investments of a contractor’s own funds for simple prototypes are one thing, but for DoD to request or expect contractors to make very large (i.e. multi-million dollar) investments of their own resources for all-up, complex system prototypes is short sighted and poor practice indeed. Such practices force ‘teaming of teams’ and ultimately result in the elimination of competition all together.” They cited examples of aircraft programs that received no benefit from prototyping (e.g., A-10/A-9, F16/F/17). However, they went on to state that competitive prototyping “at the less than platform level, using breadboard, brassboard and simulation techniques,” could reduce the time to reach a full-scale procurement decision by up to two years and at “only 20–25% of the cost of full system prototype competition.”74 They noted that another advantage of such prototyping was increasing the mutual understanding of the contractor and the government of the true nature of the development job, as well as realistic costs and risks. They also noted that “the success of any venture will, in any case, depend largely on the establishment of full and open communication between the customer and supplier, in a competitive but non-adversary environment.” The increasing speed of computer computations was leading to the development of a paradigm that prototypes were unnecessary at all levels from individual payload components to large platforms. The task force was critical of operational testing and evaluation that came after systems were mature, which delayed delivering equipment into the field. It was convinced of a great need “for many more development experiments and tests in realistic field environments, with participation by both users and developers.” As was the experience of the submarine force, “Such tests can surface the user’s real needs and identify the real inadequacies of existing equipment, and suggest the ways in which these needs can be met and these inadequacies overcome.” Indeed, the history of allowing operators to tinker with prototypes demonstrates that the ability of users to discover uses of the prototype that the developers had not considered, and to quickly identify features that limit the utility of the system in operations before committing to major procurement actions, saves time and expense as both the users and developers learn.75 Similarly, relying upon computer modeling of

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systems, combat, and campaigns has stifled innovation and delayed the navy from achieving capabilities that it now desires.76 Pushing enhanced technology into the fleet without interactions between concept developers, users, and engineers has been costly and much less successful than the appropriate use of prototypes. An approach that emphasizes payloads for specific applications over hereditary platforms is conducive to prototyping and rapidly adapting systems. Notes 1. Michele Wucker, The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016). 2. Thomas C. Hone and Curtis A. Utz, History of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (Washington, DC: Naval History and Heritage Command, 2020), 548. 3. Ibid., 485. 4. Ibid., 488. 5. Ibid., 472. 6. Ibid., 484. 7. Ibid., 473. 8. Ibid., 507. 9. Ibid., 509. 10. George E. Kimball and Philip M. Morse, Methods of Operations Research (Los Altos, CA: Peninsula Publishing, 1951), 38. 11. Wayne P. Hughes Jr., Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1986). 12. Wayne P. Hughes Jr., “A Bimodal Force for the National Maritime Strategy,” Naval War College Review 60, no. 2 (2007), https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu /cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2003&context=nwc-review. 13. Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, Naval Warfare Innovation Concept Team Reports (Newport, RI: Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group XV, 1996). 14. Wayne P. Hughes Jr., “Parting Shots,” letter, Newport, Rhode Island, September 29, 1997. 15. Jeffrey E. Kline and Wayne P. Hughes Jr., “Between Peace and the Air-Sea Battle: A War at Sea Strategy,” Naval War College Review 65, no. 4 (2012), https:// digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol65/iss4/6. 16. Wayne P. Hughes Jr., “Single-Purpose Warships for the Littorals,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 140, no. 6 (2014), www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2014 /june/single-purpose-warships-littorals. 17. Jeffrey E. Kline, “A Tactical Doctrine for Distributed Lethality,” Center for International Maritime Security, February 22, 2016, https://cimsec.org/tactical -doctrine-distributed-lethality/#:~:text=This%20distributed%20lethality%20tactical %20doctrine%20implies%20each%20ship%E2%80%99s,under%20a%20full %20range%20of%20emission%20control%20conditions. 18. Jeffrey E. Kline, “Impacts of the Robotics Age on Naval Force Design, Effectiveness, and Acquisition,” Naval War College Review 70, no. 3 (2017), https:// digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol70/iss3/5.

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19. Wayne P. Hughes Jr., “Build a Green-Water Fleet,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 144, no. 6 (2018), www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018/june/build -green-water-fleet. 20. James Wirtz, “Unmanned Ships and the Future of Deterrence,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 147, no. 7 (2021), www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2021 /july/unmanned-ships-and-future-deterrence. 21. Jeff Kline, “Evolution of the Bimodal Fleet” (presentation to the Navy Strategy Discussion Group, Zoom session, August 11, 2021). 22. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, provide a detailed history. 23. W. N. Small, “Program Appraisals and Analysis,” Memorandum for Director, Navy Program Planning, Washington, DC, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, December 18, 1981 (author’s collection). 24. William N. Small, “Naval Warfare,” Memorandum for OP-095, OP-O6, Washington, DC, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, March 1, 1982 (author’s collection). 25. William N. Small, “POM-85 CPAM/Warfare Appraisals,” Memorandum for Director, Navy Program Planning (OP-090); Director, Office of Naval Warfare (OP095); DCNO (Manpower, Personnel and Training) Chief of Naval Personnel (OP01); DCNO (Plans Policy and Operations) (OP-06), Washington, DC, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, August 2, 1982 (author’s collection). 26. Dmitri Filipoff, “Irv Blickstein on Programming the POM and Strategizing in the Budget,” CIMSEC: Center for International Maritime Security, March 26, 2021, https://cimsec.org/irv-blickstein-on-programming-the-pom-and-strategizing -the-budget. 27. Rear Admiral Dennis C. Blair directing force structure assessments in J-8 on the Joint Staff formulated this approach. 28. This account of capabilities-based planning processes comes from John T. Hanley Jr., Michael F. Fitzsimmons, James H. Kurtz, Lance M. Roark, Vincent M. Roske Jr., and Daniel L. Cuda, Improving Integration of Department of Defense Processes for Capabilities Development Planning, P-4154 (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2006). 29. US Congress, Public Law 103-160, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1994, Subtitle E, Washington, DC, 1994. 30. Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces, Directions for Defense (Washington, DC: US Congress, 1995), vii. 31. Ibid., 2-2, 2-27. 32. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2010 (Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1995), 1. 33. Department of Defense, Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2001), iv. 34. Hanley et al., Improving Integration. 35. In 1968, Thomas Schelling had testified to Congress that if the DoD Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System worked, it was because of the people involved, not the process. Thomas C. Schelling, “Planning-Programming-Budgeting: PPBS and Foreign Affairs,” memorandum prepared at the request of the Subcommittee on National Security and International Operations . . . of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, Washington DC, US Government Printing Office, 1968. 36. For a discussion of DoD analysis paradigms see John T. Hanley Jr., “Changing DoD’s Analysis Paradigm: The Science of War Gaming and Combat/Campaign Simulation,” Naval War College Review 70, no. 1 (2017): 64–103.

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37. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 461. 38. David R. Graham, Jerome Bracken, Patrick Coffey, Richard P. Diehl, John Hanley, Johnson Hansford, et al., United States Marine Corps Headquarters Realignment, P-3983 (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2005), provide a comparison of the marine corps force capability development process to the other services as the Marines considered realigning their headquarters. 39. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 479. 40. Ibid., 289–290. 41. Arthur H. (Trip) Barber III, “The Art of Successful Analysis,” Phalanx 54, no. 2 (2021): 60–65. 42. Dmitry Filipoff, “A Conversation with Trip Barber on Fleet Design, Budget Analysis, and Future Warfighting,” Center for International Maritime Security, February 18, 2020, https://cimsec.org/a-conversation-with-trip-barber-on-fleet-design -budget-analysis-and-future-warfighting. 43. Bernard O. Koopman, “A Study of the Logical Basis of Combat Simulation,” Journal of Operations Research 18, no. 5 (1970): 855–882. 44. For scientific standards see Committee on Science, Engineering, Medicine, and Public Policy and Global Affairs, Reproducibility and Replicability in Science (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2019). 45. Barber, “The Art of Successful Analysis.” 46. Filipoff, “A Conversation with Trip Barber.” 47. James Fitzsimmonds, “Interactions with N-81,” email to author, July 23, 2021 (author’s collection). 48. Filipoff, “A Conversation with Trip Barber.” 49. Comment Barber made to the author in 2009 during a DoD study on China, to which the author replied that as planning military action against Taiwan was a central planning case for the PLA, so should it be ours. 50. Ibid. 51. Jonathan W. Greenert, “Payloads over Platforms: Charting a New Course,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 138, no. 7 (2012): 16–23. 52. See both ibid. and Kline, “Evolution of the Bimodal Fleet,” for the importance of this approach for engendering more rapid change. 53. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961,” Yale Law School Avalon Project (accessed July 22, 2021), https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp. 54. US Code Title 10, Chapter 87, www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/subtitle -A/part-II/chapter-87 (accessed December 5, 2002). 55. Charles Nemfakos, Irv Blickstein, Aine Seitz McCarthy, and Jerry M. Sollinger, The Perfect Storm: The Goldwater-Nichols Act and Its Effect on Navy Acquisition (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010). 56. David Packard, A Quest for Excellence: Final Report to the President (Washington, DC: President’s Blue Ribbon Commission Defense Management, June 30, 1986). 57. Hanley, “Changing DoD’s Analysis Paradigm.” 58. Congressional Research Service, Defense Primer: Department of Defense Contractors (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2021), https:// crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10600. 59. Hone and Utz, History of the Office, 440. 60. Hyman G. Rickover, “The Role of Engineering in the Navy,” speech to the National Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Seattle, WA, August 1974 (author’s collection).

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61. Aaron Mehta, “30 Years: William Perry—Reshaping Defense Industry,” Defense News, October 25, 2016, www.defensenews.com/30th-annivesary/2016/10 /25/30-years-william-perry-reshaping-the-industry/#:~:text=In%20the%20contractor %20world%2C%20Perry%20is%20perhaps%20best,shrinking%20defense %20budgets%20would%20require%20consolidation%20among%20them. 62. Marcus Weisgerber, “Five Ways 9/11 Changed the Defense Industry,” Government Executive, September 14, 2021, www.govexec.com/defense/2021/09/five -ways-911-changed-defense-industry/185363. 63. Moshe Schwartz, Defense Acquisition Reform: Background, Analysis, and Issues for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, May 23, 2014), 1–3. 64. Defense Science Board, Task Force on Contractor Logistics in Support of Contingency Operations (Washington, DC: Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, 2014). 65. Schwartz, Defense Acquisition Reform, 5. 66. Ibid., 6. 67. Missy Ryan, “The U.S. System Created the World’s Most Advanced Military, Can It Maintain an Edge?” Washington Post, April 1, 2021, www.washingtonpost .com/national-security/china-us-military-technology/2021/03/31/acc2d9f4-866c -11eb-8a67-f314e5fcf88d_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium =email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2 .washingtonp. 68. Congressional Research Service, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Program (Washington, DC: US Congress, May 27, 2020), https://crsreports.congress.gov /product/pdf/RL/RL30563. 69. Weisgerber, “Five Ways.” 70. Nassim Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2012), 8. 71. Dave Oliver and Anand Toprani, “Why Is Technological Change in the Military So Messy?” RUSI 41, no. 4 (2021), https;//www.rusi.org/explore-our-research /publications/rusi-newsbrief/why-technological-change-military-so-messy 72. The principal argument against such prototypes is the cost of maintaining one-off designs. However, each prototype served operationally for decades, and current technology using 3D printing makes economic quantities of one or a few more feasible. 73. Naval Submarine League, United States Submarines, ed. David R. Hinkle, Harry H. Caldwell, and Arne C. Johnson (Waterford, CT: Sonalysts, 2002). 74. Defense Science Board, Report of the Acquisition Cycle Task Force (Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, 1978), https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a058443.pdf. 75. John Hanley, “Back to the Future: Routine Experimentation with Prototypes,” Center for International Maritime Security, July 26, 2021, https://cimsec.org /back-to-the-future-routine-experimentation-with-prototypes. 76. John Hanley, “An Alternative History for U.S. Navy Force Structure Development,” Center for International Maritime Security, July 14, 2021, https://cimsec .org/an-alternative-history-for-u-s-navy-force-structure-development.

6 Architecture for Antifragility

Though advances in computer simulation closed a window on the use of prototyping in equipping strategies with the “peace dividend” in the 1990s, it opened new vistas in artificial intelligence and understandings of chaos and complex adaptive systems. The underlying mathematics for chaos and complex adaptive systems emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century with mathematicians like Georg Cantor, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Henri Poincaré demonstrating discontinuity and deterministic chaos. Alan Turing advanced the mathematics for computers in the 1930s that had been initiated at least as far back as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the later 1600s.1 The work of Turing and John von Neumann led to advances in machine learning and neural networks with primitive computers beginning in the 1950s. This led to new understandings of how complex adaptive systems emerge.2 Combined with Edward Lorenz’s demonstration of chaos in a simple nonlinear system dynamic model for weather (the “butterfly effect”) and Benoit Mandelbrot’s self-similar fractals at all scales, these developments led to a new field of chaos and complexity sciences.3 The Santa Fe Institute formed in the mid-1980s, bringing together Nobel laureates from many disciplines to study complexity.4 The scientists that formed the operations research groups during World War II were unaware of these new sciences. As the DoD entrenched systems analysis, employing operations research techniques over the past seven decades, they solidified the Age of Reason and Enlightenment practice of reducing their studies to effects that they could attribute to a simple cause, never venturing into the complexity sciences in the combat simulations used to support decisionmaking. 219

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As Pentagon programming turned to defense intellectuals within the Washington, DC, beltway and away from its operating forces, understanding became theoretical, separated from practical reason. Complex adaptive systems consist of a large number of mutually interacting components, or agents, each with a purpose. They learn and adapt as they respond to one another in performing their purpose. Because they operate in environments that consist of other adapting systems, they form a higher-level coevolving system. Complexity derives from nonlinear interactions where causes have multiple effects, which in turn become causes having effects that loop back to the cause-effect singled out for study. The agents in complex systems are alive, becoming, not merely being. Reducing analysis of the system to a series of individual causes and effects reveals little about the behavior of the system as a whole. The core operations research techniques of optimization and stochastic analysis are inadequate to predict complex systems’ dynamics. As the number of agents and organizations has increased, technology has increased the number and speed of interactions, presenting opportunities and challenges to security and peaceful development at accelerating rates. The number of sovereign countries has grown from 74 in 1945 to 195 in 2022, many with internal ethnic and religious disputes, disputes with their neighbors, and corrupt governments, all contributing to political violence. The population of the world grew from about 2.5 billion to 8 billion over the same period, and is projected to grow by another 2 billion by 2050, increasingly concentrated in urban centers. Projections indicate that the population of India will surpass the declining population of China in 2024, and the population of Nigeria will surpass that of the United States shortly before 2050. The world’s population growth will be concentrated in nine countries: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, the United States, Uganda, and Indonesia—in order of their contribution to population growth.5 Educating girls and women dampens population growth. People provided with education and opportunities to thrive contribute to economic growth. People without opportunities present great challenges, particularly young men. Global communications make even the poorest aware of opportunities others have, and global transportation allows them to move. Climate stress limits economic opportunity, and limited economic opportunity drives migration, furthering political divides and violence in affected countries. These are just some of the interacting factors driving challenges and opportunities in our complex adaptive, nonlinear dynamic security ecosystem (Figure 6.1). The behavior of an individual phenomenon adapts depending upon what happens in

Figure 6.1

Features of Complex Adaptive, Nonlinear Dynamic Security Ecosystem

     

    

    




 

  




 

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the other phenomena, and the behavior of the system cannot be predicted by studying the individual phenomena separately. The evolution of banking and investment practices has contributed to widening economic gaps within developed countries and led to the 2007–2009 financial crisis.6 As the value of information has outstripped all other commodities and industry, a handful of multibillion-dollar information technology firms have created success by hijacking individuals’ data, affecting livelihoods, the social fabric, and our minds as they have dominated the stock market.7 As the sustainability of economic and political practices has assumed greater salience, what previously could usefully be thought of and modeled as bounded, independent systems have become networked ecologies of systems-of-systems, increasing the complexity of the whole. The emergence of this pattern of complexity applies to essentially all sectors of life, from the globalization of finance, travel, trade, and information to the navy and its ecology. The navy came to view net-centric warfare in terms of passing information between networks of sensors and shooters/weapons. Concepts of net-centricity go well beyond sensors to shooters. They encompass the interactions among all of the agents within the navy, and the navy within the national and international security ecosystems. Adopting the paradigm of the navy society as a node in a complex adaptive, nonlinear dynamic network in an age of information and artificial intelligence— advancing from an industrial age paradigm of the navy as a fighting machine—bears promise as the sciences of complexity and networked architectures advance. Efforts to design the components of each system to control intended behavior and run more efficiently—as we have seen recently with supply chains and over decades of acquisition reform—create complexity and fragility. Continually adding features further increases the complexity and fragility. “Add enough of them, and soon these otherwise beneficial features become potential sources of risk in themselves, as the possible number of interactions—both anticipated and unanticipated—between various components becomes impossibly large.”8 The result is that the navy, the DoD, the MICE, and the broader national security establishment have evolved into a “robust, yet fragile” system. Robustness

Analysis over the past couple of decades on why the internet is robust against failure (contrary to earlier theoretical studies employing network analyses that did not appreciate the value of the underlying architecture)

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has revealed common ways that advanced technical and biological systems evolve to be robust, yet fragile. The analogies to biology, financial, and political systems are striking. The recent Covid-19 pandemic is a vivid example in the way that the human immune system evolved to provide robustness against disease but instead makes the body fragile to the Covid “parasite” that hijacks the system. The 2007–2009 financial crisis and parasitic cyberattacks are other recent examples. As studies at the Santa Fe Institute have revealed, much can be learned by comparing and contrasting the organizational principles of interacting agents within hierarchical societies, in Alfred North Whitehead’s terms. The rules of nature that exist independent of human minds tend to be fixed and lend themselves to physics, chemistry, biochemistry, and other hard sciences. The rules in “unnatural” societies invented by sentient beings, whether it be technological or political, financial, economic, or other ecosystems, lead to behavior that is more difficult to predict.9 However, connections between the complex network architectures of both the natural and the unnatural sciences are neither superficial nor accidental. The mathematics of complexity sciences is exposing “universal system requirements to be efficient, adaptive, evolvable, and robust to perturbations in their environment and component parts.”10 A system is robust if it can deal with the following set of perturbations: Reliability involves robustness to component failures. Efficiency is robustness to resource scarcity. Scalability is robustness to changes to the size and complexity of the system as a whole. Modularity is robustness to structured component rearrangements. Evolvability is robustness to lineages to changes on long time scales. A system can have a property that is robust to one set of perturbations and yet fragile for a different property and/or perturbation. Highly evolved systems, ranging from advanced technologies to biology, exhibit RYF [robust, yet fragile] features, and understanding RYF tradeoffs lies at the heart of the design challenges for network-centric infrastructures. An example of a possible RYF tradeoff is a system with a high efficiency (i.e., using minimal system resources) might be unreliable (i.e., fragile to component failure) or hard to evolve.11

Fragility is the opposite of robustness. Examples of fragile national security enterprise components include those that are hard to evolve and those that have long lives, including infrastructure, careers, service cultures and tribal cultures within services, and the incentives of the agents in the MICE, among many others. The internet is a robust layered system (Figure 6.2). The bottom layer consists of swappable hardware in the form of computers, smart

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Figure 6.2

Robust Layered System 
  

  


 




    

 




 

 

   

   






 








 

 

    

Source: Compiled by the author based on John C. Doyle, 2021, https://doyle .caltech.edu/Main_Page.

phones, or chips embedded in the internet of things interacting with server farms (or clouds). Each hardware component employs one of a fewer number of operating systems, which are not swappable, to interact with an even larger number of swappable applications. The architecture of this system provides a “diversity-enabled sweet spot” that allows the system to be robust with respect to the categories listed above as it evolves. Biological systems have a similar structure. Animals are able to consume a variety of swappable foods, which are processed by an operating system that evolves over generations and allows the animals to perform a large variety of tasks. Manufacturing clothing has a similar layered structure in the use of swappable materials (cotton, wool, polyester, etc.) going through a structured operating process (loom) to create a large variety of products. Navy society represents multiple layers in a larger layered system. Warfare specialties are embedded in the navy, which in turn is embedded in the DoD’s layered architecture, which is embedded in national and international security architectures. Operationally, the navy is organized into fleets, task forces, and sub elements and units, as a component of a combatant commander’s forces. Analogous to applications are the missions and tasks that the services, Joint Staff, and the DoD

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perform across the spectrum of military preparations and operations. The analogy to hardware is the materiel, personnel, and facilities that the services use in their preparations and operations. The analogy to the operating system is the doctrine, organization, training, leadership, and policies, all of which evolve slowly with service and warfare specialty cultures within the services. Similarly, at the level of the MICE, the functions that the president, Congress, and industry perform are the applications; the analogy to the hardware are the materiel, personnel, and facilities; and the operating systems are the organization, customs, rules, and laws of the Congress and industry that govern how they operate. Training and leadership preparation for the president, Congress, and industry are less structured than the military, as it is with political appointees within the DoD. Just as generals unfamiliar with the navy as an organism make decisions that affect the size of the navy and its operations, so do the president, Congress, and political appointees by creating laws and industry by lobbying Congress. This evolving operating system is, and always has been, the architecture in which the navy must fit. The system creates a set of principalagent problems in which the principal delegates authority to an agent, who provides selective information back to the principal, creating moral hazards, and where conflicts of interest occur when interests are not aligned. Paradigms affect the operating systems of each level of hierarchy. Resilience

Building on studies of complexity has led to four categories of resilient systems.12 First is the notion of resilience as the system rebounding to its previous performance. A second is characterizing resilience as robustness. Robust systems, as suggested above, are robust in situations for which they were designed, but become brittle and fail when facing unanticipated situations. The military requirements system is designed for this form of resilience. Neither of these approaches has been particularly effective. The third category incorporates the notion of graceful extensibility, the opposite of brittleness, captured in the kinds of layered architectures described above. Graceful extensibility requires a system with the potential for adaptive action in the future when information varies, conditions change, or when new kinds of events occur, any of which challenge the viability of previous adaptations models, plans, or assumptions. However, the data to measure

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resilience as this potential comes from observing/analyzing how the system has adapted to disrupting events and changes in the past.13

The internet has proven to be very adaptive as competition for its uses has accelerated. Roles of people in the organization are critical as “organizations can undermine, inadvertently, their own sources of resilience as they miss how people step into the breach to make up for adaptive shortfalls.”14 The value of the case studies of successes and failures of previous navy campaigns of learning is in observing and analyzing adaptations from adaptations in the past. The value of the Prussian system of learning adopted by the navy was in refining the judgment and logical tact of officers to intuitively take initiative to make up for adaptive shortfalls in the system. Recent studies have identified biological systems that have architectures for sustained adaptability. This level of resilience “refers to the ability to manage/regulate adaptive capacities of systems that are layered networks, and are also a part of larger layered networks, so as to produce sustained adaptability over longer scales.”15 Some layered networks or complex adaptive systems demonstrate sustained adaptability, but most layered networks do not (i.e., they get stuck in adaptive shortfalls, unravel, and collapse when confronting new periods of change, regardless of their past record of successes).16 As Woods explains: In socio-technical systems, sustained adaptability addresses a system’s dynamics of the life cycle or multiple cycles. The architecture of the system needs to be equipped at earlier stages with the wherewithal to adapt or be adaptable when it will face predictable changes and challenges across its life cycle. Predictable dynamics of challenge include, over the lifecycle, assumptions and boundary conditions will be challenged—surprises will continue to re-cur. conditions and contexts of use will change—therefore the boundaries will change, especially if the system provides valuable capability to stakeholders. adaptive shortfalls will occur and some responsible people will have to step in to fill the breach. the need for graceful extensibility and the factors that produce or erode graceful extensibility will change, more than once. classes of change will occur, and the system in question will have to adapt to seize opportunities and respond to challenges by readjusting itself and its relationships in the layered network.17

The punctuated evolution of the national security establishment’s layered network occurred when it implemented the lessons of World

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War II for joint operations and adapted to nuclear weapons, opened a greater role for civilians in military affairs, and adopted systems analysis and computers. One achieves resilience by adopting a resilient architecture and incorporating swappable hardware with even more swappable applications controlled by a few operating systems. This applies to the navy but, as the United States and Allies learned in World War II, extends to joint and coalition forces. Legislation promoting jointness and coalition readiness has made the national security system more robust and resilient by providing commanders with more options for meeting the challenges and opportunities presented by an expanding set of missions. MICE incentives for sustaining force structures and the authorities of each agent have limited adaptability as the security environment evolved and acquisition reforms added complexity, making the US national security system more fragile. Attacks on layered network systems come in the form of parasites such as viruses that attack the operating system and applications, and predators that attack the hardware. These are analogous to espionage and cyberattacks to disrupt the system versus what militaries commonly call kinetic attacks on opposing forces. What have been called “gray zone” and “hybrid” operations, such as those Russia employed in 2014 against Ukraine and that China has employed to exert sovereignty over the South China Sea and its other near seas, have largely been parasitic attacks. Antifragility Antifragility, in which the system grows stronger as a result of adapting to challenges, is essentially the same as sustained adaptability. Keys to achieving antifragility are learning, improvement, and evolution of the system.18 In his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduced the notion of antifragility as what occurs when systems improve from stressors.19 Antifragility involves increasing marginal returns for each investment of resources, including time. Taleb realized that when the nonlinear returns are convex, looking like a smile, the system is antifragile. When they are concave, appearing as a frown, the system is fragile. Taleb is known for his study of probability distributions that do not follow the law of large numbers like the Gaussian bell curve or that converge only slowly. His making a large return on his investments during the 2007–2009 financial crisis and publishing his book Black Swans: The Impact of the Highly Improbable criticizing Wall Street’s financial and economic predictions earned him notoriety.20 Black Swans

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are rare (statistical outliers); they are disproportionately impactful; and, because of that outsized impact, they compel human beings to explain why they happened—to show, after the fact, that they were indeed predictable. The 2007–2009 financial crisis was more of a Gray Rhino than a Black Swan, as similar crashes had occurred in the past demonstrating the fragility of the financial ecosystem. However, the models used on Wall Street to optimize returns, derived from World War II operations research, exacerbated the debacle. Taleb strongly recommends employing a “barbell strategy.”21 This barbell, or bimodal, strategy has two distinct modes rather than a single central one. It employs extreme risk aversion on one side to lower exposure to Black Swans and Gray Rhino foreseen risks of ruin. The other extreme involves taking a lot of small risks where possibilities for large gains exist. A financial investment example would be putting 90 percent of one’s investments in cash equivalents and 10 percent in maximally risky securities providing exposure to massive upside gains. The inability to predict risk means that seeking to moderate “expected” risk leaves one open to ruin. Features of fragile systems are that they are large, complex, and centrally controlled; employ predictive computer optimization techniques uncritically to inform decisionmaking; and create a checklist culture to deal with their many rules—the antithesis of innovation. Systems designed to optimize efficiency are fragile. Features of antifragile systems are that they are simpler and have functional redundancy created by swappable options, encouraging mistakes that are “small and benign, even reversible and quickly overcome” and are “rich in information.”22 They rely upon practical reason rather than theoretical understanding. The war in the Pacific during World War II began with a devastating attack on the fleet at Pearl Harbor. Admiral James Richardson, commander of the Battle Force, disagreed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s steps to increase the US presence in Hawaii beginning in 1939, believing that moving the fleet to Pearl Harbor created large risks. When Richardson became commander in chief of the US Fleet, he was ordered to send more of the fleet to Pearl Harbor. He objected to Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark and was told that the president wanted it there as a deterrent. In January 1941, Roosevelt prematurely relieved Richardson and replaced him with Admiral Husband Kimmel.23 The navy turned to a barbell strategy following the Japanese attack. War games had demonstrated that a rapid thrust to relieve the Philippines was risky. After Pearl Harbor that no longer was an option. Taking command following the attack, Admiral Chester Nimitz had to restore the

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confidence in the fleet by taking “calculated” risks. His special Letter of Instruction to his commanders at the battle of Midway stated, “In carrying out the task assigned . . . you will be governed by the principle of calculated risk. . . . The avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting . . . greater damage on the enemy.”24 Nimitz relied on the logical tact of Admiral Raymond Spruance for the interpretation of “calculated” and “good.” Japanese advances resulted in the navy commander in chief Admiral Ernest King accepting greater risks in defending Guadalcanal. Information gained from those operations led those navy officers who had been educated to learn at the Naval War College to quickly overcome and reverse initial Japanese advantages. As part of a barbell strategy, one can think of many national security examples where relatively small investments of diplomatic and military resources provide potentially high payoffs. First are alliances and coalitions based upon realist principles of nations acting when their interests are engaged. The investments in alliances surrounding Eurasia to implement the containment strategy around the Soviet Union continue to provide options for bases and places to station US forces forward and sustain deployed forces. Without these facilities the US global operations would be greatly diminished, as would security partners’ confidence that the United States could support their interests. The Chinese are acutely aware of their need for similar facilities. Military exercises that include allied and coalition forces both increase the readiness of forces to operate together and enhance trust and confidence among the commanders and their national leaders. When their interests are engaged, as European interests have been engaged in thwarting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and in addressing China’s efforts to change rules undergirding world order, allies and coalition partners have amplified what the United States has the ability to do. One never knows when exercising alliance options will come in handy. Large, centrally controlled organizations are more fragile than decentralized ones. In this regard, NATO with its requirement that all nations formally agree to all of its strategies and procedures is more fragile than the looser coalitions in the Indo-Pacific and other regions. Following the formation of a coalition staff to oversee operations in East Timor in 1999, Pacific Command (now Indo-Pacific Command) initiated an effort to train officers from nations in its geographic area of responsibility to serve on such staffs. This was part of a set of initiatives to enhance military interactions aiming to promote security and

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peaceful development in the region. Military exercises with allies in the Philippines and Thailand were restructured to provide a venue for exercising these staffs and coalition forces, alongside table-top games to develop common options for doctrine that the designated coalition commander could select. The doctrine was then posted on an Asia-Pacific Area Network that allowed access to the doctrine and provided a means for those developing it to interact. Beginning with the five US treaty allies (Japan, South Korea, Australia, Philippines, and Thailand) and Singapore, the participants expanded to twenty-eight nations within two years, thus demonstrating opportunities for large upsides in the approach. Military-to-military dialogue among all military leaders is also a way to gain positive and negative information on where there is agreement, where the policies are to agree to disagree, and subjects about which the parties will not engage in sharing their views. Providing more active roles for chiefs of defense from the nations in the IndoPacific region and meeting with national and military leaders who were proscribed from attending conferences was another aspect of these initiatives. Though coalition commitments in the Indo-Pacific region are not as strong as in NATO, nations come together when all can act in a manner consistent with their varying interests. Initiatives such as these provide the foundations for partners to act effectively while building dependable expectations of peaceful change.25 Arms control, which must be verified to provide convex returns, and confidence-building agreements also contribute to a barbell strategy. Dangerous activities, such as US and Soviet forces illuminating each other’s ships and aircraft with radars used to guide missiles in the eastern Mediterranean during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, led to agreements on preventing incidents at sea during a crisis that could lead to inadvertent escalation. Similarly, the US-China agreement on a Code for Preventing Unplanned Encounters at sea provides both a basis for preventing inadvertent escalation and information on Chinese intentions when they breach the agreement. Such confidence-building measures provide more information when breached than would be available should there be no agreement. The potential upsides for large returns from relatively small investments in cyberspace is apparent. Parasitic cyberattacks ranging from fraud, to denying service, to inserting a variety of malignant software for different purposes take little investment and are highly profitable. Inserting features into computer chips that allow similar control is more complex and requires greater investment but has the potential for even higher payoffs as the costs of rectifying the attack are much higher and take

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longer. Similarly, the payoffs of false information for deception are huge. One cannot optimize a search in the presence of a large number of false contacts.26 The use of decoys and deception to penetrate enemy defenses precedes even the Trojan Horse. As weapons have grown more expensive, the potential payoff for employing inexpensive decoys to cause an enemy to waste expensive munitions is large, particularly at the beginning of a conflict when the learning curve is steep. As militaries employ more artificial intelligence, opportunities for deception by inserting biases and changing peacetime and wartime behaviors increase. AI learns by observing patterns and assessing rules. It becomes overwhelmed when provided uncertain data. For an ecosystem to be antifragile it must constantly tinker with low-cost options to learn what works and then adapt to what it has learned. Air Force Colonel John Boyd, a fighter pilot, created an observe, orient, decide, act loop for decisionmaking that works well in uncluttered environments. Unable to determine whether Taliban fighters were inhabiting towns in Afghanistan, the Australians developed an Act-Sense-Decide-Adapt (ASDA) cycle to deal with complex environments.27 Sending a small patrol into a town to draw fire limited the prospect of ruin of the larger unit and was reversible while gaining essential information. This approach has applications to readiness, engagement, and equipping strategies. The Australian example demonstrates a war-fighting approach. Risking small elements for large information gains forms Taleb’s extreme risk end of the barbell. Gaining such information with uninhabited units greatly reduces the costs. The use of drones versus scout patrols on foot for reconnaissance and surveillance and to draw fire in Ukraine is a modern example. The example applies to engagement and readiness operations. Conducting operations that draw an adversary’s reaction while collecting intelligence on that reaction provides information on adversary capabilities, command and control arrangements, and so forth. As mentioned, when an adversary using AI triggers friendly forces, they should respond with patterns that they want the adversary to observe rather than merely react. In 2000, Pacific Command conducted a rare two-carrier battle group and air force air wing exercise in the South China Sea. The readiness and engagement objectives of the exercise were to experiment with new tactics for fighting in the area and to cause the Chinese to surveil our forces as we collected on their collection. We learned much about their capabilities to track our aircraft carrier battle groups. The Quadrennial

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Defense Review the following year called for an increase in the number of days that carriers operated in the region. This would allow Pacific Command to conduct dual-carrier exercises more frequently, stimulate Chinese reaction for analysis, begin to provide patterns for operational deception, and rub shoulders to develop patterns of behavior for limiting chances of unintended escalation in an actual crisis. All of these are consistent with a barbell strategy. Unfortunately, the terrorist attacks in September 2001 resulted in aircraft carrier operations being increased in the Middle East rather than the western Pacific. Back to prototyping. The primary aim of prototyping is, as Admiral Wayne Meyer put it, to build a little, test a little, and learn a lot.28 Using this approach Meyer in the 1980s provided a prompt jump in the capability of navy surface ships to detect, track, and engage aircraft and missiles. This Aegis system remains at the core of navy air and missile defenses today. Applying prototyping techniques employed by Rickover and thereafter routinely by the submarine force, and by Meyer in developing Aegis, is essential for antifragile equipping strategies. A Fragile Equipping Architecture

An antifragile architecture for equipping the navy and the other armed services begins with the applications—the missions and tasks within those missions that the forces are organized, trained, and equipped to do. As information has become more important, the means for acquiring and sharing information, particularly cyber and space systems, have resulted in new commands. The premium on decoys and deception to provide false information and covering sensitive information has also increased. Protecting systems that process information from parasitic attacks is essential. Intelligence on adversary physical, logical, and personnel networks and algorithms provides the potential for dominating competition. As with the internet, applications based upon information are potentially swappable among the services. The ability to adapt depends principally upon the operating system—joint and service doctrine, organization, training, leadership, laws, and policies. As suggested, having hardware systems at hand that are designed to create options for commanders to accomplish required tasks that are swappable and redundant within and across the services contributes to antifragility. As with aircraft that need to fly from different land and sea bases, each service requires tailored capabilities unique to its circumstances. As in nature, such niche capabilities operating interdependently contribute to the health of the ecosystem. The hardware must fit its

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niche. To be swappable, it must also be compatible with the operating system, and thus interoperable within the larger system. Tradeoffs between such niche capabilities defy optimization due to nonlinear systems dynamics, the number of combinations created by the details of any particular contingency, and adaptation of the agents involved. The details of the evolving environment determine the appropriate mix of species. Adaptability to the environment through tinkering with prototypes to create options is key. The DoD’s operating system, constrained by organizational and analytic paradigms and culture and the competing interests among the agents within the MICE, is the greatest obstacle to adaptability. Whereas US operating forces pride themselves on mission orders that specify what is to be done but not the details of how to do it, promoting initiative, DoD acquisition is built around centralized planning and five-year plans for control, similar to the Soviet system that failed and that is now employed by the Chinese. The Chinese system is now more adaptable than the US system as it is able to implement leadership decisions faster because the various agents in the Chinese system have less power to protect their divergent interests than the MICE and DoD components. Paradigms that ossified equipping strategies over the Cold War included replacing the species of forces that prevailed in World War II with the next generation of the same species, and taking decades rather than years to field such forces. Immediately following World War II, Rickover demonstrated that forces with significant enhancements could be fielded quickly. However, as the DoD’s acquisition system added rules and procedures to control outcomes, the system arrested initiative and rapid adaptability. To promote “jointness,” the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in 1986 gave the JCS chairman greater authority over service equipping programs and established a vice chairman to oversee what became a Joint Requirements Oversight Council composed of the service vice chiefs. The Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System was added to planning, programming, and budgeting and acquisition processes to validate joint war-fighting “requirements.” It added a “capability-based assessment” as a basis for the oversight council followed by an “initial capabilities document” to begin the acquisition process. This extended the initiation of any new programs by an additional two years. The following “analysis of alternatives” process was restricted to looking at alternatives for applying emerging technology to the species of platform or system reaching its end of life (i.e., aircraft for aircraft, vessel for vessel, vehicle for vehicle). Rather than beginning work when an

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opportunity or challenge was identified, the system grew to require approximately seven years before serious development could begin. The MICE ecosystem focuses on the hardware rather than the applications— capabilities. No effort was made to investigate how the applications provided by that species could be accomplished by using alternative species. Applications that were difficult to model on computers using existing systems analysis techniques were ignored. The military operations research community remains unable to analyze the effects of information in complex adaptive systems in an age of information and artificial intelligence. Recommendations to employ rapid, spiral acquisition as an alternative to this programming and acquisition system built upon sequential analyses did not align with the interests of agents in the MICE.29 Agency theory views organizations as a set of interactions among self-interested individuals. An agency relationship is created when a person (the principal) authorizes another person (the agent) to act on his or her behalf. Issues arise in this relationship based on the risk that the agent will act in accordance with their interests rather than in the best interests of the principal. Studies of defense contract management have employed agency theory to appreciate how such conflicts of interest affect the behavior of the system (Figure 6.3). As depicted, the interests of the government and contractors conflict. The ostensible objectives of the government are procuring a product or service at the right quantity, quality, price, and time, and from the right source to support public policy. The objectives of the contractor are to be awarded a contract to provide the product or service in a manner that earns profit, growth, market share, and cash flow. The marketplace, requirement, government’s mission, and contractor’s capability inform both the way that the government plans, structures, awards, and administers the contract and the way that the contractor bids on it and completes it. Figure 6.4 expands this framework to highlight incommensurate interests among each agent of the MICE. The interactions of these interests drive the behavior of the larger system. Though the figure depicts industry and Congress as one actor, members of Congress compete for funds for their districts, just as each contractor is competing with others seeking the contract. Reelection is the domineering interest of members of Congress that affects their support for various industrial and military initiatives. Having lost the Soviets as a focal point after the Cold War, defense industries increasingly focused on competing with their peers as defense expenditures decreased. Mergers around common weapons platforms into a small number of large companies created monopoly/monopsony relationships between the prime contractor for a particular platform and

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Figure 6.3

235

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Figure 6.4

Conflicting MICE Incentives  

 

  

  




  

   

     
 

     

   


    

  

    

the DoD. The need to maintain congressional support by having suppliers from many districts resulted in 60 to 70 cents of every dollar contracted to the prime passing through to their suppliers, adding costs for administration.30 Having fewer prime contractors makes the system more fragile, as the demise of one of them due to unforeseen events could result in a large frown in defense manufacturing. Boeing’s recent

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predicaments come to mind. Are the remaining prime defense contractors “too big to fail”? If so, what moral hazards does that create? Just as individual corporations compete to accomplish their objectives, the agents within the DoD have their conflicting objectives (Figure 6.5). Each secretary of defense, service secretary, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and service chiefs, and the combatant commanders arrive with their own priorities, as do individuals on their staffs. Service members assigned to the Joint Staff support the chairman, subject to their need to return to their services to advance their careers. The senior leaders of the warfare specialties in each service have priorities that align with loyalties to their tribe, as well as to the service. Program managers in the systems commands have a different set of incentives. Increasing the dollars under their control is a common incentive. Combatant commanders’ priorities are readiness to implement their contingency plans, regional engagement to promote security and peaceful development while forming coalitions capable and willing to contribute to the full range of military operations, adopting innovations in concepts and technology to retain advantages over increasingly capable adversaries, and having the resources to do these things. Though the other agents share these objectives to some extent, only the combatant commands are dominated by these interests as they are responsible for the military outcomes of any contingencies that should arise.31 Of all of the agents in the MICE, only the combatant commanders dealing directly with adversaries and partners have a bias toward adap-

Figure 6.5

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tation. Members of Congress structure authorization and appropriations for defense programs around specific constituents. Once a constituent is profiting from a defense appropriation, the member promotes larger budgets for that program and strongly resists adaptation that would make that program redundant. Congress provides funds for specific military systems rather than capabilities to direct funds to constituent vendors. In fiscal year 1956, before McNamara introduced his program structure, the army was able to use $5 billion in unspent funds from the Korean War for all of its equipping needs. Since the 1960s, the number of individual line items in the DoD’s budget has grown tenfold to allow Congress to target constituents, hamstringing military adaptation.32 Continuing resolutions further restrict the allocation of funds to previous authorizations, preventing adaptation to new security developments and learning. Any funding provided for rapid adaptation is referred to pejoratively as “slush” funds. Congress specifying what it wants the DoD to do by funding mission applications rather than specifying how to perform missions by funding hardware programs provides less control over who receives the contracts. However, focusing on the what would raise the importance of strategy, and data on the details of contracts the Pentagon has requested and funded allow Congress to exercise oversight. The DoD and the services are increasingly looking to digitize and apply artificial intelligence to many of their processes. As they do, they will make many of their civilian jobs redundant. Congress will resist this loss of jobs and slow the evolution unless the DoD and the services’ equipping strategies address the implications of such initiatives.33 Whereas resilient and antifragile systems require modular, swappable components, Congress and the defense industry have the opposite motivations. Proprietary intellectual property designed to require the DoD to use only a particular vendor’s product is the major obstacle to interoperability among systems, particularly information processing systems. Proprietary models and computer programs also degrade the scientific rigor of DoD analyses as peer review is impossible. As computers are increasingly used for design, using that code for operation and maintenance of the system and to employ three-dimensional freeform printing of repair parts would provide significant savings. But contracts are not structured to do so. Modularity means that another vendor could easily replace some system component. This motivates the major defense contractors, with their congressional backers, to design integrated systems whose components only they can supply. When the navy turned ship design over to industry in the early 1990s rather than enforcing modularity, it exacerbated its fragility while adding costs.

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Similarly, program managers seek stability. They eschew competing innovations that could either reduce the cost or increase the capability provided by their program of record as they seek to control as many dollars as they can. Over two years around 2000, Pacific Command oversaw development of a system that would network US Navy, Air Force, and Army information on air contacts together and with their Korean counterparts to prevent attacks on friendly forces returning to their bases through a myriad of air defenses controlled by different organizations. About $20 million was required to create a working prototype. The Single Integrated Air Picture program in the Pentagon scuttled this effort. Its program manager claimed that his system, to be fielded in a decade for hundreds of millions of dollars, would do much more. He also argued that the systems developed by combatant commanders should not be allowed as they may be unique to the region or function of the command that developed them. An alternative approach could have been for the Pentagon to encourage combatant commanders to tinker with systems required to meet immediate demands, and then proliferate the successes, adding capabilities through spiral development. Similarly, the Navy Research Laboratory created a software system for linking radio signals that was used in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah to allow local law enforcement to communicate with military systems. The small cost and capability of this system presented a threat to the Joint Tactical Radio System program manager. He succeeded in having the navy terminate the initiative. The Single Integrated Air Picture was terminated before it delivered and the Joint Tactical Radio System had significant cost overruns and never delivered promised capabilities. Finding diversity-enabled sweet spots in such a complex system is difficult. As Taleb points out, fewer, larger organizations and systems are more fragile.34 Top-down efforts to eliminate diversity and optimize efficiency create brittle systems that shatter when struck in ways for which they were not designed. Top-down efforts to eliminate diversity through the use of joint concepts and experimentation through the creation of a Joint Forces Command failed as the command attempted to exert centralized control rather than promote tinkering and learning across the combatant commands. Had these top-down efforts to centralize succeeded, they would have accelerated the fragility of US military forces. Top-down programs for a Joint Tactical Radio System and a Single Integrated Air Picture failed as they eschewed innovations created at other laboratories and commands to protect their program of record. The top-down Joint All Domain Command and Control initiative is exhibiting similar pathologies.

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The effort to produce the Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35, has taken over two decades to produce a system that consumes an inordinate portion of the defense budget, and costs continue to snowball. “If DOD moves forward as planned, it will have bought a third of all F-35s before determining that the aircraft is ready to move into the full-rate production phase. . . . The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter program remains DOD’s most expensive weapon system program. It is estimated to cost over $1.7 trillion to buy, operate, and sustain.”35 The program only progressed when it recognized the need for multiple versions of the aircraft to meet the diverse, legitimate service requirements. Similarly, OPNAV and navy systems commands efforts emphasizing large-scale efficiency in the production of multimission naval platforms while eschewing recommended innovations for smaller and uninhabited vessels and aircraft have led to a fragile navy. Loss of any hardware degrades mission applications. However, the loss of smaller and uninhabited vessels provides information to a system prepared to learn and is reversible. The loss of a single large, multimission combatant is irreversible and has a concave frown effect on the ability of the force to provide multiple mission applications. Efforts to ameliorate conflicting interests have led to a long series of acquisition reforms that added to complexity without improving performance and created additional risks from time delays as the system ossified. The system that required decades to produce new capabilities worked reasonably well during the stability of the Cold War competition. Both the US and Soviet defense industries were centered on platforms. Each carefully projected the other’s next generation based upon upgrades in technology and structured programs to gain advantages. Contingencies involved only relatively minor crises. However, this system was unable to meet urgent US demands of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and has not evolved to meet the demands of an information age environment or the speed of Chinese industry. The conflicting MICE incentives in the absence of strong military competitors produced a fragile national security establishment and equipping architecture. The Gray Rhino of costs exceeding budgets and fixed paradigms preventing system adaptation has resulted in the current dilemma between sustaining naval influence through engagement and readiness for theater war fighting as the tempo of naval operations became unsustainable. Readiness and Engagement Architectures

The navy’s and the national security establishment’s readiness and engagement architectures are much less fragile than the equipping

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architecture. Lower echelons have much more control over the system as Congress and industry are concerned primarily with money for equipping rather than military applications. Fragility in readiness results from the fragility of the equipping architecture in not providing needed capabilities to services and combatant commands in a timely fashion. It also results from failures to adapt the operating system of doctrine, organizations, training, leadership, policies, and service cultures to the emerging security environment. The navy simultaneously touts the flexibility of naval forces, the power of naval influence, and the frequency with which naval forces have contributed to crisis management, while complaining that political leaders and combatant commanders too often call for aircraft carriers. The carriers come with their escorts, resulting in unsustainable ship and aircraft operation tempos. Too frequent and extended deployments have deleterious effects on morale, driving the loss of highly talented personnel, thereby increasing recruitment, training, and education costs and diminishing the competence of the force. The SSG’s Horizon concept provides an approach for relaxing some of these constraints. To organize, train, and equip each service secretary and chief requires a strategic concept of how the service provides the most value to national security. The strategic concept provides a description of how, when, and where the service expects to advance the nation’s interests. “If a service does not possess a well-defined strategic concept, the public and political leaders will be confused as to the role of the service, uncertain as to the necessity of its existence, and apathetic or hostile to the claims made by the service upon the resources of the society.”36 Each chief is responsible for assessing its service’s readiness to provide the applications required to accomplish its assigned missions and tasks. This requires each service to study and share its appreciation of how best to employ the service as new priorities emerge. Each service requires a vision of its war-fighting strategy to inform its readiness strategy. Having more responsibilities than resources places a premium on setting priorities; the complexity of a rapidly changing security environment puts a premium on adapting priorities. Service cultures, particularly the hierarchy of warfare specialties within services, put a brake on adaptation. The temptation is to make everything a priority. Leadership initiative at lower echelons is then required to determine what will be done when not all can be accomplished. Too often, the absence of leadership initiative leads to checklist mentalities that satisfy higher echelon demands while compromising readiness. Only by encouraging initiative

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at lower echelons that results in reversible mistakes and learning from them can readiness become antifragile under these circumstances. The US president approves a Unified Command Plan that assigns responsibilities to the combatant commanders. This plan specifies each command’s geographical or functional area of responsibility and contingencies for which each command must be prepared. The combatant commanders then create a strategic concept for each contingency that provides the foundation for assessing readiness. Formal “deliberate” war plans are prepared in detail for most consequential contingencies and reviewed by the Joint Staff and OSD. The combatant commands employ component forces organized, trained, and equipped by the services. Differences between the service and combatant commander strategic concepts create agar to grow both options for the combatant commanders and potentially pathologies in readiness if the service concepts are misaligned with combatant commanders’ strategic concepts. In creating their strategic concepts, each service secretary and chief must be cognizant of the degree to which their war-fighting visions for measuring readiness align with combatant commanders’ strategic concepts. The operating system for biannual review of major plans and continuing measurement of readiness provides for adaptation promoting antifragility. Techniques for measuring readiness can contribute to adaptiveness needed for antifragility. Combatant commander staffs can compare the readiness of assigned and planned forces to what the plans call for. US Pacific Command employed such an approach in 1999 when the carrier battle group based in Japan was deployed to the Mediterranean. This resulted in a request to forward deploy more air force squadrons to provide the sorties that the carrier was no longer there to provide. This approach could be provided to all combatant commander plans. More recent adjustments of US forces in Europe demonstrate the agility of the system. As previously mentioned, the geographic positioning and swappable hardware that allies and coalition partners provide create options that contribute to antifragile readiness. Antifragile architectures and strategies for readiness, engagement, and retaining advantages against dynamic adversaries through adapting concepts in the operating system and swapping hardware create a Venn diagram (Figure 6.6). One activity can serve more than one purpose. This larger architecture forms a whole, requiring balance among its various parts. Exercising with allies and coalition partners that have little interest or ability to conduct high-intensity combat between major powers diminishes opportunities to focus on applications required for such a contingency. However, focusing only on high-intensity combat diminishes

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The US Navy and the National Security Establishment

Figure 6.6

Readiness, Regional Engagement, and Retaining Advantage Architecture

 

  

  

   




       
 

         

opportunities to release large navy multimission platforms from conducting constabulary duties that other less powerful naval forces can perform to advance US interests. Including less-capable navies in fleet battle exercises increases both their competence and stature, strengthening ties. The combatant commanders identify forces required along timelines for conducting contingency and theater security cooperation plans. Changing the name to security cooperation from engagement in the early 2000s has been unfortunate as engagement more accurately captured the notion of applying both positive and negative incentives to influence desired outcomes. Influence operations to deter and compel are no longer captured in theater security cooperation plans. Activities to influence potential adversaries through military-to-military contacts, conducting exercises such as search and rescue to promote common interests, and freedom of navigation operations to protect freedom of the seas are all applications in the engagement architecture. Long-term regional engagement simultaneously encourages various countries to support US interests while deterring them from aligning with adversaries. Recent developments in the Solomon Islands demonstrate the perils of ignoring governments of even small countries in

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important locations as the Chinese create the conditions to operate from Guadalcanal without occupying it. The Chinese have carefully studied US operations in the Pacific during World War II. To the extent possible, engagement strategies should employ activities that directly contribute to readiness. Retaining advantages is the third set of applications in the Venn diagram. The Office of Net Assessment’s promotion of the Revolution in Military Affairs and long-term competitive strategies were aimed at retaining US military advantages over potential adversaries.37 Prototyping concepts and technology is where the equipping architecture interacts with readiness and engagement. Exploring the use of such prototypes in exercises as part of a campaign of learning allows establishing the operational value of a system before committing millions or billions of dollars to procurement, as was done with the Coordination-in-DirectSupport and Over-the-Horizon targeting programs. Culturally, the navy and marine corps have been more comfortable with exploring and experimenting with prototypes than the army. The army’s approach has been a linear, sequential concept formulation, doctrine development, followed by equipment development and training forces to employ new doctrine and equipment rather than treating these as interacting lines of effort in a campaign of learning.38 This sequential, top-down approach led to failures of overreach in the 1990s Force XXI and early 2000s Future Combat System concepts, resulting in billions spent on programs that were ultimately canceled. As noted, the top-down army staff culture provides the foundation for Joint Staff and OSD processes and procedures. Responding to operations in Iraq involving no front lines and improvised explosive devices led to army units innovating more with their equipment in the field beginning in 2003. A sweet spot occurs when allies and coalition partners are brought into this readiness and engagement architecture. Exercises and operations with allies and coalition partners that explore innovative concept and technology prototypes simultaneously increase readiness and US influence while retaining advantages over potential foes who are also increasing their military capabilities. With allies capable of combating major rivals, such as many in NATO and Australia, Japan, South Korea, and India, exercising sophisticated war-fighting applications employing prototype concepts and technology is possible. Working on command and control arrangements with improving information technology provides value even for partners with limited capabilities. The navy, the DoD, and the larger national security enterprise have been slow in responding to the rise of Chinese ambitions and military

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capabilities. In the 1980s, the United States was sharing various military equipment with the Chinese, such as lightweight antisubmarine torpedoes, to increase the Soviet perception of a Chinese threat. The Chinese Communist Party massacre of students protesting for democracy in the symbolic Tiananmen Square in June 1989, shortly before the Berlin Wall came down, led to a hiatus in US-Chinese military relations. In 1989, few projected the rapid rise of China. However, Andrew Marshall as director of net assessment in OSD did. In 1988, using economic projections done by his former colleague Albert Wohlstetter at RAND, Marshall began running games exploring the rise of China over the coming decades.39 China responded with missile barrages and military exercises to the first free and direct elections in the history of Taiwan in 1996 and accelerated a relentless campaign to modernize the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Beginning in 1999, Pacific Command began serious planning for war with China. However, the terrorist attacks in September 2001 and sclerotic, fragile equipping architecture directed attention away from China and limited adaptation to rapidly increasing PLA capabilities that have been projected over the past two decades. Now that many fear the prospect of war with China in the near term, priorities that Pacific Command submitted annually beginning in 1999 and that Indo-Pacific Command is submitting today are finally gaining traction with the Pentagon and the MICE. The Alpha Parasite Unlike most militaries, Chinese People’s Liberation Army personnel from the various army, air force, navy, rocket forces, and other branches take oaths not to protect their country but to protect the Chinese Communist Party. The PLA employs military commissars alongside commanders at the regimental echelon and above to ensure that commanders act in accordance with party directives. Mao Tse-Tung employed communism the way that former president Donald Trump used democracy.40 Communism provided Mao a platform to exert ruthless power as he orchestrated the penetration of communist sympathizers into the organs of Chinese government. When possible, he stood aside while the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek (Kuomintang) spent its power fighting the Japanese invasion beginning in 1937. Predators attack the hardware in layered networked systems. Parasites attack the operating systems and applications. Though also a predator, Mao achieved victory through parasitic attacks.41

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Mao’s successors bid their time until Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. Deng Xiaoping, who followed Mao as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, established four modernizations to strengthen the fields of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and the military, with the military ostensibly being the fourth. Theft of Western intellectual property and US defense system blueprints accelerated the modernizations. As the People’s Republic of China’s economy developed, it expanded its influence in international government organizations and with foreign governments. Following decades of double-digit economic growth, the military modernization came to the fore. Under Xi Jinping, parasitic attacks have accelerated with prevarications over not militarizing geographic features in the South China Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative, and “wolf-warrior” diplomacy. Xi has turned to his maritime forces as major organs of international influence with the aim of dominating East Asia and the western Pacific as China expands its global power. The Chinese Communist Party currently is the alpha parasite. General Liu Huaqing, though a ground officer, is often referred to as the “father of the modern Chinese Navy” and “China’s Mahan.” Liu served as commander of China’s navy, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA Navy) from 1982 to 1987. He changed China’s naval strategy from coastal to “active” defense in its near seas. He argued for the PLA to acquire aircraft carriers and, as a member of the Central Military Commission, oversaw the Chinese occupation of the Spratly Islands, including a shootout with Vietnamese forces in 1988. He also argued for establishing air bases on islands in the South China Sea to provide air cover for naval ships.42 The PLA Navy in the 1990s sought to extend beyond coastal defense and develop military capabilities to reintegrate Taiwan and exert sovereignty over the South China Seas within their nine-dashed line.43 Following the massacre at Tiananmen in June 1989, the Chinese economy recovered and grew at double-digit rates. The PLA budget, nominally the fourth of the four modernizations, received budget increases several percentage points higher than the economic growth, growing at 15 percent annually by 1996.44 Naval and air forces and the Second Artillery (now the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force) received greater shares of these funds as army ground forces contracted. The 2002 Department of Defense report on Chinese military power noted that, though the full extent of Chinese military expenditures were unknown, they had announced an increase of 17.6 percent in their military budget for that year. They divested of “self-sufficient” commercial activities that had been used by the various services in their military

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regions as they professionalized the force.45 The 2002 report correctly projected continuing double-digit increases in the PLA’s budget, and that the United States should expect an increase in hacking by Chinese for commercial and defense intelligence.46 The performance of US forces in Operation Desert Storm and Taiwan’s political trends in the mid-1990s provided impetus for the PLA to accelerate their military modernization. The PLA studied the US use of long-range, precision strikes to defeat Soviet-equipped Iraqi forces. Cornell University invited Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan’s president, to attend an alumni reunion in June 1995. Lee had received his PhD from Cornell. Though chairman of the Kuomintang, who ruled Taiwan after Chiang Kai-shek occupied the island in 1949, Lee supported Taiwan’s indigenous people over those who came from the mainland. He leaned toward Japan, and had little interest in maintaining the traditional line maintaining that there was “one China” incorporating both the mainland and Taiwan. Following Lee’s visit, “the PLA suddenly bracketed Taiwan with missiles in July and August; conducted naval exercises in December; built up troops across the strait in February; and conducted further missile tests in March 1996, with some missiles landing within sixty kilometers of the Japanese-inhabited island of Yonakuni.”47 These actions demonstrated that the assumptions that had driven US policy toward China since 1972, about China not using force to retake Taiwan, had been wrong. Though the United States had not planned for such a contingency, the Yokosuka-based carrier USS Independence (CV 62) battle group was nearby in the Philippines and was deployed near Taiwan and the USS Nimitz (CVN 68) battle group was moved from the Persian Gulf to the western Pacific.48 When Admiral Dennis Blair became commander in chief of US Forces Pacific in 1999, serious planning for contingencies involving China’s use of force against Taiwan began. In 2003 the Naval War College began a series of Halsey games rigorously focused on China and other likely adversaries. These games continue today employing the best available intelligence on adversary technology, organization, and doctrine. US officers with recent operational experience command both Blue (US) and Red (adversary) forces in the games.49 Though the navy’s 2007 Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower avoided mentioning China and the PLA Navy (PLAN), the 2008 National Defense Strategy under Secretary of Defense Robert Gates began to add “challenges by more powerful states” to dealing with “violent extremist movements.” The PLA became the pacing challenge for the studies conducted for the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review. China’s military

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modernization, including the PLAN, has become the top focus in US defense planning and budgeting.50 Following over twenty-five years of modernization, the PLAN has surpassed US Navy numbers of battle-force ships, making it numerically the largest in the world, and is projected to grow from 360 battleforce ships in 2020 to 400 by 2025, and 425 by 2030.51 These ships are now comparable in many respects to those of Western navies, including the US, with some being the top of their class. In addition to its navy, China has a coast guard and, building on its traditions of people’s war, established the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia that employs its fishing fleet to strong-arm competition and assert territorial claims. Each of China’s three maritime armed forces has been the world’s largest of its type at least since 2017.52 These “irregular” maritime forces are used to intimidate regional claimants attempting to fish in the South China Sea and across the Pacific Ocean, and to harass US surveillance operations such as when fishing vessels surrounded the USNS Impeccable (T-AGOS 23) in 2009.53 These maritime forces routinely attempt to limit freedom of navigation in seas claimed by China. Chinese sources refer to such actions as “war without gun smoke.”54 Though the United States was the dominant global naval power at the end of World War II, maritime power moved to the Far East as China, the Republic of Korea, and Japan built over 80 percent of merchant ship tonnage, and the US share fell under 1 percent.55 As the top ship-producing nation in the world by tonnage, China has a decisive advantage over the United States in repairing and replacing ships damaged during and after a conflict.56 The PLAN is behaving as a traditional navy. In addition to preparing for battles involving Taiwan and China’s near-seas region, it is developing capabilities to protect China’s broader interests, including defending commercial sea lines of communication, protecting Chinese citizens abroad, and conducting operations with other navies and naval diplomacy to extend China’s influence in general.57 Between 1985 and 1999, the PLAN conducted eight voyages abroad with the farthest being to Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh in 1985; Hawaii, San Diego, Mexico, Peru, and Chile in 1997; and New Zealand, Australia, and the Philippines in 1998. Each of these involved one or two destroyers/frigates, often with a replenishment ship. Between 2000 and 2008 the number of voyages doubled employing similar task forces, with one-quarter of them being in 2007. The deployments extended to Europe. In 2008, the PLAN began participating in UN-sanctioned

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antipiracy operations in the vicinity of the Gulf of Aden and northern Arabian Sea. These operations became routine with thirty-three rotations of PLAN task forces by 2020. The routine had become for the task forces to continue on to the Mediterranean Sea. In 2011, they evacuated Chinese citizens from Libya and in 2015 from Yemen.58 By 2017, the Chinese strategists were writing about an Atlantic strategy and the PLAN simultaneously deployed six task forces covering areas from the Pacific and Indian Oceans to the Baltic Sea and West Africa.59 To support such wide-flung operations, China has overcome its traditional opposition to overseas bases. It established a base in Djibouti and is seeking other bases and to operate from ports with Chinese commercial operations around the world. As with its other dual-use approaches between commercial and military activities, its commercial facilities in Europe, East and West Africa, Central and South America, as well as in Asia, provide support for PLAN ships. China’s Belt and Road Initiative also targets ports useful for PLAN operations.60 As Alfred T. Mahan wrote in The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783: It is not the taking of individual ships or convoys, be they few or many, that strikes down the money power of a nation; it is the possession of that overbearing power on the sea which drives the enemy’s flag from it, or allows it to appear only as a fugitive; and which, by controlling the great common, closes the highways by which commerce moves to and from the enemy’s shores. This overbearing power can only be exercised by great navies, and by them (on the broad sea) less efficiently now than in the days when the neutral flag had not its present immunity.61

Chinese scholars and strategists have paid close attention to Mahan in arguing for greater attention to the sea as they constructed facilities on geographic features in the South China Sea as bases for further coercing fishermen and any others who challenged their sovereignty over their nine-dashed line. They originally touted these as peaceful facilities that would be made available for common response to humanitarian emergencies. Though leaders such as Hu Jintao had hinted at greater naval ambitions, it was not until May 2015, at the International Institute for Security Studies conference in Singapore, where they made their intentions abundantly clear: “The traditional mentality that land outweighs the sea must be abandoned, and great importance has to be attached to managing the seas and oceans and protecting maritime rights and interests.” China would “seize the strategic initiative in military struggle, proactively plan for military struggle in all directions and

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all domains, concentrate superior forces, and make integrated use of all operational means and methods.”62 The concept of “shi,” or momentum, plays a large role in Chinese strategic thinking. As Sun Tzu suggested, “Victory is then a simple necessary consequence—and the predictable outcome—of the imbalance that operates in his favor and that he has been able to influence. . . . The process that leads to victory is determined so far in advance (and its development is so systematic and gradual) that it appears to be automatic rather than determined by calculation and manipulation.”63 Supreme Excellence: Achieving Without Fighting

According to Sun Tzu, supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. Indeed, though the Chinese are willing to fight, they would much prefer achieving their aims without fighting, the acme of skill. They believe in calculations and manipulation. Their institutes calculate comprehensive national power incorporating many measures of economic, social, technological, diplomatic, and military power. They have been tracking what they believe to be the decline of the United States, particularly following the 2007–2009 financial crisis.64 Believing that they now have “shi,” the Chinese Communist Party leadership has altered its strategy from Deng Xiaoping’s “hiding China’s power and biding its time” to the recent “wolf-warrior” diplomacy and bald coercion. These leaders delight in America’s political disfunction and contribute to it. The Chinese have been adept at attacking the networked US economy and its national security establishment for decades. Their parasitic attacks on the US operating system and applications, including espionage and the use of disinformation on social media along with Russia, Iran, and others to discredit American democracy, have been relentless. Their preparations to conduct predatory attacks have concentrated on the navy and regional air bases. Their approach has been to partner, purchase, or purloin intellectual property, justifying theft as meeting the needs of a developing power. The annual losses to the US economy are comparable to the current annual level of US exports to Asia—over $300 billion. 65 The extent of this theft undermines both the means and the incentive for entrepreneurs to innovate. The slow pace of legal remedies for intellectual property theft in China particularly affects companies whose products have rapid product life and profit cycles. Cybertheft has grown over the past decades at the pace of internet expansion.

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In addition to stealing trade secrets, patents, copyrights, and trademarks, the Chinese focus on penetration of the US defense industry through a broad range of means. They have succeeded in accessing plans for major military systems under development. Should prime contractors have implemented effective security, they succeed by worming their way into the system through the diverse range of suppliers. They stole plans for the F-35 early in its development. They lack some key technologies to copy or reverse-engineer some systems—such as jet engine components until recently—and have lagged in inventions. However, their process innovation has allowed them to become a very fast follower, particularly if they have access to the components that they need.66 Where they have not acquired the component specified in the design, they rapidly try alternatives until they achieve the performance they seek. With plans for US systems in hand, they can field some more rapidly than the sclerotic US MICE. Where they have identified potential advantages, such as in hypersonic missiles, their investments in development have exceeded the MICE. Where the United States emphasizes divisions between its industries and government, the Chinese Communist Party is firmly embedded in Chinese industry and all developments are subject to dual civilian and military use. Chinese treatment of intellectual property will mature as Chinese corporations need to protect their inventions and innovations. Measures of Chinese innovation such as patents are increasing. However, they will continue to vigorously pursue parasitic attacks on the US multilayered networks to sustain the “shi” that they now have. The greatest advantages that the United States has over the Chinese are its Cold War containment legacy network of alliances and partnerships around the world and accompanying global positioning. Sustaining US naval influence is essential for maintaining this advantage. Though the maritime industries in the United States have shriveled, the US and its closest allies in Asia far outweigh the maritime might of China. Chinese diplomacy works diligently on bilateral relationships. Chinese bilateral influence around the world exceeds that of the United States. However, US influence combined with but one of its major allies exceeds that of China.67 Even when not fully coherent, the United States working with its allies and partners far makes up for shortfalls of the United States acting independently. In dealing with the Chinese, sole concentration on compellence and deterrence, even “integrated deterrence,” is inadequate. Chinese cooperation will be limited as civilian and military leadership view the competition as zero-sum and they fundamentally oppose the United States

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and its alliances. However, they must be encouraged and reassured when acting in concert on shared interests on a wide range of issues that create challenges to security and peaceful development. Working with Xi’s regime will be taxing and produce limited results. Exerting influence requires a steady strain as in a tug of war. Results are not proportional to effort but occur suddenly when conditions change. Once the conditions obtain, attempting to initiate a strain to move events in the desired direction it fruitless, as the opportunity will have passed. Extending Thomas Schelling’s influence framework from deterrence and compellence to include encouragement and reassurance applies to China, as well as to all who affect security and peaceful development. Blessing the Chinese Navy

Every time the CNO meets with the chief of the PLAN, she should thank him for providing time for the US Navy to recover from decades of misdirected momentum. As Sun Tzu noted, the first factor in studying war is moral influence: “that which causes the people to be in harmony with their leaders.”68 Chinese efforts to mirror and outclass the US Navy, combined with the aggression of the Xi regime, have united a majority of the US Congress that cannot seem to agree on any other issues than Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and North Korean threats to international security. The United States struggles to remain the most powerful navy as China’s maritime power increases. In his work The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, Alfred Thayer Mahan expanded upon Alexander Hamilton’s appreciation of sea power and suggested six main factors that influence the naval power of the state. Of the factors, though China has powerful states on its land borders and the proportion of size of the country to its coastline is less than the United States’, it has a long coastline and harbors suitable for building reliable ports. Intercontinental bombers and missiles with weapons of mass destruction, cyber, and the ability of small groups to wield greater destruction (as in the 9/11 attacks) have eroded the safety that oceans provided to the United States in Mahan’s time. China has natural and human resources and has established extensive international links and maritime commercial activity as it opened to global trade and expanded its commercial and fishing fleets. An increasing proportion of China’s population is involved in maritime activities, in strong contrast to the proportion of the US population. US maritime industries have been unable to compete, in part due to the protectionist 1920 Jones Act that limits

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incentives for innovation and evolution of increasingly fragile US shipbuilding.69 Mahan’s arguments regarding the stability of the transfer of governments in democracies versus “despotic powers” may obtain should Xi’s despotism undermine the popularity of the Chinese Communist Party. However, US political gridlock, challenges to US election results, and the instability of democracies in the United States and around the world bear watching. The PLAN is building a navy of large, multimission ships, including aircraft carriers and large destroyers, that look good in Jane’s Fighting Ships. In doing so, the Chinese are growing similar fragilities facing the US Navy, though their inventory includes many smaller vessels. The PLAN commissioned fifty-one corvettes of about 1,500 tons since 2015, fourteen of which they commissioned in 2018. They also have eighty-six mostly older, smaller missile boats that operate principally in coastal waters.70 Beginning with his book on fleet tactics in 1986, Captain Wayne P. Hughes Jr., USN (retired), calculated the fragility of large US ships faced with small missile-armed ships and land-based missiles. The successes of Egyptian missile boat attacks against the Israeli destroyer Eilat followed by the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, and the Argentine Exocet missile attack on the British Royal Navy in 1982 suggested that closer examination of navy vulnerability to missiles was warranted. The Iraqi-mistaken Exocet attack on the USS Stark in 1987 added to the evidence. Kamikaze suicide attacks proved the most effective weapons system against the US fleet during World War II. Missiles with increasingly sophisticated guidance systems have replaced humans. Continuing investment in aircraft carriers has been controversial in the United States for many decades. Since the Soviets worked to extend the zone of defense against US aircraft carriers from 1,500 to 2,500 kilometers in the 1970s, the challenges for aircraft carriers conducting sustained strikes against great power rivals has grown. With it, legitimate questions regarding the fragility of the navy force structure centered on aircraft carriers that led to US victory in the Pacific in World War II have emerged. From Operation Haystack onward, the navy has sought ways to extend the survival of aircraft carriers in a war with a major Eurasian rival. The key challenge of the Maritime Strategy of the 1980s was positioning carrier air wings where they could make a difference through selective attacks in the maritime theaters flanking the Soviet Union on “targets that count” that would affect the outcomes of the war on land. The primary threat at that time came from submarines and massed Soviet naval air cruise missile strikes, perhaps combined with submarine cruise

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missile strikes against US Navy formations. Top Gun “Chainsaw” tactics, silent surface-to-air missile shooters, and land-masking carriers in “havens” offered prospects for providing temporary protection to the carriers. But sustaining carrier strikes forward presented great risks. Extending the range of the carriers through the use of forward airfields on allied territory offered prospects of trading efficiency for range to keep the carriers beyond the effective range of Soviet naval air strikes. Another barbell strategy. Aegis air defense is helpful against large-scale attacks if the system is working as designed and the crew is alert. However, limited magazine capacity and the inability to rearm at sea makes the efficacy of the system questionable in sustained combat. Current efforts to provide the ability to rearm Aegis-equipped ships at sea are encouraging, should missile inventories be available. The Iranian Airbus shootdown in 1988 raised further concerns over the operation of the Aegis system in a stressful combat situation. Hughes began pressing for the use of smaller US missile-armed vessels for combat in contained seas, such as the Baltic, Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, and China seas to provide offense for sea control and denial, as opposed to navy surface forces designed principally to protect aircraft carriers. However, absent conflict involving carrier strikes against China and Russia, US aircraft carriers have remained a mainstay of US influence.71 Carriers were originally envisioned as scouting platforms. Given the flexibility of their air wings, they will continue to contribute as their roles evolve, and will remain central to naval influence and in combat against any nations that cannot target them at long ranges. The PLAN will face similar challenges and opportunities with their aircraft carriers. Using their carriers to provide “combat stability” for strategic ballistic missile submarines, as the Soviets did, is likely a major priority. While being extremely useful for naval influence, their carriers are fragile against opponents with land-based missiles in narrow seas and are incapable of winning a major battle against US carrier battle groups beyond the range of the PLA’s land-based missiles. But the PLAN does not intend to fight where the US Navy has decisive advantages. Its fleet is increasingly capable of intimidating smaller navies and nations. As the US Navy found after the Cold War, recapitalizing a fleet built when budgets were increasing in large increments will be exceedingly difficult when having to operate and maintain that navy as budgets decrease. As the rate of growth of the Chinese economy has significantly declined, the PLA will face severe pressures even should it receive

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budget increases greater than the country’s economic growth. The CNO should bless the PLAN chief for repeating the mistakes that the US Navy made during its 1980s buildup, and for unifying the US Congress. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated the power of people with smart phones and an internet connection, civilian and military drones, and small, stealthy units armed with missiles that can destroy armored platforms. US ships are no longer armored but have distinct profiles as warships and are easy to identify. Using small vessels to scout for approaching naval formations is not new. A fishing sampan, the Nitta Maru, radioed sighting the USS Enterprise (CV 6), causing Admiral Halsey to launch the Doolittle raid 150 miles farther out than intended.72 The Nitta Maru had been taken into the Japanese Navy. However, in general, people not in uniform providing targeting information are functioning as combatants, complicating rules of engagement and laws of war. As the Chinese tradition of the people’s army has been extended to the sea, the legitimacy of sinking fishing and other small vessels who report on US/allied movements will be increasingly problematic. Arming merchant ships is one way to impede the ability to easily classify a ship as a naval combatant. Though providing some options, such schemes further blur distinctions between combatants and noncombatants—a growing information age trend. Rapid growth in the use of of sophisticated commercial drones with military capabilities further complicates this issue. The market for commercial drones began twelve years ago and is growing at 20 percent per year. A Chinese company, DJI, now has 80 percent of the market. One can purchase a DJI drone on the web that possesses a high-definition camera, infrared sensors, a laser, and artificial intelligence for collision avoidance, as well as the ability to follow the controller through the woods and return to its launch site using a combination of GPS, site recognition, and other features.73 The Ukrainians have effectively used such drones to track and target Russian forces, even employing Molotov cocktails as payloads. Civilian owners of such drones are teaming with Ukrainian military service personnel in tactical operations centers. Changes in the Character of Armed Conflict and Long-Term Competition The character of great power competition is demanding an even broader set of conditions for which the navy must be prepared. Warfare is moving from the industrial to the information age. The US Navy will not

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compete successfully with China using industrial age paradigms and thinking in terms of ship counts as Chinese non-PLAN maritime assets serve as naval auxiliaries, space-based sensors and land-based missiles cover wide ocean areas, uninhabited drones with artificial intelligence play a greater role, cyber reaches into navy systems and society, and prospects for biological instruments of compellence increase. Continuing the use of the ship-count metric plays into the Chinese narrative on their rise and the US decline. The navy needs to change its paradigm to center on resilient and antifragile architectures, and those of the national security establishment, MICE, and allies/partners. The structure of the MICE ensures that platform costs will rise faster than budgets resulting in smaller numbers of vessels and tonnage. We said in the 1990s that we know we have reached the information age when Jane’s publishes volumes comparing military networks. We remain far from that point as MICE and systems analysis paradigms for thinking of and analyzing conflict and competition remain centered on platforms vice applications (capabilities).74 CNOs have attempted to move the navy toward the information age with CNO Clark’s efforts to realize FORCEnet; CNO Mullen’s use of systems theory and 1,000-ship navy for maritime domain awareness and sea control; CNO Roughead organizing an information dominance corps, the Naval Network Warfare Command, and Fleet Cyber Command/Tenth Fleet; CNO Greenert’s emphasis on electromagnetic maneuver warfare and focus on enemy kill chains to make attacking missiles ineffective. However, the larger navy let the CNOs down as OSD and navy systems analysis and acquisition focused on replacing each platform with a more expensive one employing the latest technologies. Tribes remained consumed with programming their platforms, and the systems commands were unable to discipline their contractors to provide modular and interoperable hardware and applications. Though the US Navy bears primary responsibility for dealing with the PLAN, fixating on ship counts and PLA anti-access systems distracts from broader changes occurring in armed conflict and competition. Two PLA Air Force senior colonels’ writings in 1999 on unrestricted warfare in a globalized age motivated broader thinking on how the character of conflict might change. This writing, which might be called “indiscriminate compulsion,” came on the heels of the US publication of “Discriminate Deterrence,” which argued that precision weapons could be used to deny objectives and punish an aggressor to an extent that only nuclear weapons could in the past.75 Building on an air power tradition beginning with Giulio Douhet that argued bombarding

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populations could cause them to make their political leaders cease hostilities, trends of attacking the psyche of populations to compel an enemy to do one’s will have increased, despite efforts to establish norms and international law to the contrary. Social media and other cyber disinformation have increased the tools and the effectiveness of affecting national psyches. The use of artificial intelligence to mimic human behavior and create deep-fakes is increasing the effects those tools can provide. Early battles in the Russian invasion of Ukraine are demonstrating the punctuated evolution between the character of World War II land battles and battles in the information age. Russia has been able to exert its mass, but Ukraine’s use of information age advantages for deep attacks on Russian command and supply depots stymied and reversed Russian gains. Every person with a smart phone is potentially a node in an ISR network. Civilians operating personal drones embedded in tactical operations centers are targeting Russian forces. Missiles and drones are decimating armor and logistics support, as well as artillery and troops. Belorussian resistance employing physical and cyber sabotage against railroads significantly affected Russian resupply, halting the northern thrust toward Kiev. Though Ukraine and its supporting cyber defenses have been more effective than anticipated, the contest of using cyber to attack and defend infrastructure has been fierce. The use of social media in the information war has resulted in strong international support for Ukrainians as the Russian government has done its best to cut the Russian people off from knowledge of events affecting them. Ukrainians have encouraged Russian prisoners to call their families. Pictures with identities of dead Russian soldiers have been posted, in violation of the laws of war. Ukrainian civilians performing military functions in response to the initial invasion was consistent with international law regarding levée en masse. However, absent Ukrainian efforts to incorporate these civilians into the military, Ukraine is in violation of international law in having civilians, including some children with drones, contributing to combat. Information age sea control will involve much more than the ship and weapons counts employed in campaign analysis models. The sinking of the cruiser Moskva is the latest demonstration of the fragility of large naval vessels when attacked by smart, shore-based missiles. Landand sea-based US forces operating forward with allies create more options for conducting drone and cyberattacks. In his book Bursts, Albert-László Barabási defines human information entropy as the ability to know where a person is and what they are

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doing based upon their routines, or lack thereof.76 Most people get up about the same time in the morning, have their morning routine, go to work, and so on. They have low information entropy. Some with frequent trips, like my globe-trotting niece, provide no pattern and create a higher personal information entropy. You know that she travels frequently, but establishing a pattern of her whims involves many uncertainties. Naval intelligence could track the personal information entropy of PLAN commanders and others of interest to monitor for any unusual patterns of individuals and groups that would indicate enhanced preparations. Beyond that, intelligence could get to the level of where the children go to school, whether a person’s expenditures exceed their service pay and returns on investments, or whether they are having an extramarital affair—to provide another dimension of naval influence. Meetings with Russian admirals in the mid-1990s confirmed that occasional encounters with forward operating US and allied submarines let them know we were around, but the Soviets could do little about it.77 These operations enhanced US deterrence. Just as submarine operations then, giving the Chinese Communist Party, PLA, and PLAN occasional direct evidence that the United States is in their systems contributes to deterrence. Declaratory policies of what could happen in the event of unpleasantries would reinforce deterrence today. Deterrence by detection could well extend into the realm of individuals rather than tracking platforms.78 Sea control in the information age could take on different forms. Given evidence of PLAN mobilization, taking such actions as turning on water sprinklers in command and telecommunication centers to make them inoperable and shutting down cell towers to cripple communications for a time when the PLAN was trying to communicate with their crews and leaders are the kinds of things that the United States should be prepared to do to disrupt a large deployment. Such techniques obviously extend to fuel pipelines, as the United States has experienced, ships’ shore power and power plants, and transportation needed to move people and weapons to the ships. Conceiving of examples for each element of the PLAN administration and shore infrastructure should not take too much effort. The effect is similar to mining the fleets into their harbors: and the addition of mines would greatly complicate any surge deployment when command systems were already degraded. The navy should prepare for similar attacks, in addition to cyberattacks on power, fuel, and other infrastructure in homeports and logistics nodes. Among other disinformation attacks, the navy should expect the spouses and children of sailors and officers to receive personal messages

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containing threats should the sailor or officer deploy, or deep-fakes showing that their loved ones have perished.79 The skills that the Chinese have developed in their efforts to create a social reliability index for each of their 1.4 billion citizens, and the skills that the United States has developed in identifying and tracking the activities of persons of interest in countering terrorists provide the foundation for extending warfare into this realm. Additional artificial intelligence on individuals’ patterns of behavior not only provides the information needed to target threats and create disinformation, it complicates operational security for all military activities. As with so many of today’s wicked problems, the navy will be subject to such an environment but will not be able to control it. It will require a broader supporting ecology of partnerships with other services and government and civilian agencies to defend against such attacks. Similarly, the DoD requires such partnerships and the United States requires coalitions that can both deny and punish information age attacks by individuals, small groups, and states—classic deterrence. Groups like the early SSGs representing all naval warfare areas, supported by access to the best thinkers, the best intelligence, and all special access programs could develop strategies that go well beyond the scenarios that drive Pentagon programming today. Deterrence can be successful, particularly in raising the prospect of nuclear warfare. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russians made clear that they would resort to nuclear weapons if needed as their military establishment faced turmoil. The Chinese are now building hundreds of missile silos in the desert as part of their campaign to appear overwhelming in all domains. If the United States felt its interests threatened enough, it too could raise the prospect of nuclear escalation, to the point of suggesting that its nuclear umbrella extends over Taiwan. The prospect of a return to the MADness (mutually assured destruction) that ended with the Cold War is highly undesirable. Alternatively, the United States can shape the narrative, backed by credible action. The Chinese Communist Party faces growing domestic challenges on fronts from climate change and attendant disasters, pollution, an aging population, increasing government control over their most innovative industries, and a population that only puts up with draconian controls as long as the party provides adequate economic gains. They must import food. The annual number of asylum-seekers from China rose from 15,362 to over 107,000 under Xi Jinping’s rule, with more leaving from Hong Kong.80 That they have managed these problems well with technocrats educated in top Western universities, particularly in the United States, bodes well for them continuing to manage this set of problems. However, Chairman

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Xi’s emphasis on personal loyalty is making it more difficult for a bureaucracy of competent technocrats to work. The rate of Chinese economic growth is declining as their economy has developed, cheap sources of unskilled labor have diminished, and Xi had enforced a zero-Covid policy and exerted more state control over some of the most successful Chinese enterprises, though he now appears to be changing course. Automation will offset declines in the working population, but also demand increases in advanced skills, creating winners and losers. Large portions of a smaller pool of young people in China do not have the requisite education. A US Information Agency similar to the Cold War could be very useful in this competition. The buildup of the PLAN has largely taken place under doubledigit annual budget growth. Just as the US Navy faced the defense “train wreck” of the later 1990s as all services faced the need to recapitalize forces created during the Reagan buildup of the early 1980s, the PLAN will similarly face challenges in maintaining and operating an aging force while maintaining the size of its force structure with smaller annual budget increases. More study of when this structural phenomenon is likely to occur should be part of a long-term strategy for competing with China. Just as the existence of a separate Soviet strategic air defense service provided strong indicators of Soviet sensitivities and their theory of what would be required for victory, the separate PLA Rocket Force provides a strong indicator of Chinese proclivities. All PLA services are highly dependent upon missiles, as increasingly are Russian forces. Making sea- and land-based antiship ballistic missiles, surface-to-air missiles, sea and antiship cruise missile attacks ineffective would cripple the PLA. Hitting “bullets” with “bullets” quickly depletes defenses and provides a cost advantage to the offense. However, defeating the information that missiles use to find, fix, and finish their targets from prelaunch through the end game provides both sustainability and a cost advantage to the defender. The Missile Defense Agency has focused on expensive, unsustainable, active defense measures. The paradigm of defeating missiles with missiles should change. A shift to directed energy weapons for air and missile defense will help. Measures to make the Chines leadership and military doubt the effectiveness of their missiles in the information age should receive priority attention. Notably, increasingly sophisticated defenses designed to counter faster, guided cruise and ballistic missiles will make aircraft less survivable. As the costliest platforms in the force, the fragility of inhabited aircraft demands careful review.

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The navy needs a fleet including many smaller and uninhabited platforms to deal with the growing effectiveness of hybrid/gray-zone competition and conflict. The current DDG(X) concept of a larger destroyer employing new technologies like lasers and hypersonic missiles follows the classical MICE paradigm of replacing a ship class with a larger, more expensive ship class leading to an ever smaller, increasingly fragile navy where the loss of one ship eliminates a significant portion of fleet power. As the United States adopts a less fragile information age fleet architecture, variously called hybrid and bimodal, to deal with challenges that China presents, it will be better postured to sustain its naval influence against all rivals in conjunction with its partners. Notes 1. James R. Newman, The World of Mathematics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956). 2. John H. Holland, Emergence (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998). 3. Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002). 4. M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). 5. United Nations, “World Population Projected to Reach 9.8 Billion by 2050, and 11.2 Billion in 2100,” June 21, 2017, www.un.org/development/desa/en/news /population/world-population-prospects-2017.html#:~:text=The%20current %20world%20population%20of%207.6%20billion%20is,a%20new%20United %20Nations%20report%20being%20launched%20today. 6. Rana Foroohar, Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street (New York: Crown Business, 2017). 7. Rana Foroohar, Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech (New York: Random House, 2021). 8. Andrew Zolli, “Want to Build Resilience? Kill the Complexity,” Harvard Business Review, September 26, 2012, https://hbr.org/2012/09/want-to-build -resilience-kill-the-complexity. 9. For a discussion of natural and unnatural kinds see A. B. Frank, E. M. Bartels, et al., Adaptive Engagement for Undergoverned Spaces: Concepts, Challenges, and Prospects for New Approaches (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2022), 43. 10. D. L. Aldreson and J. C. Doyle, “Contrasting Views of Complexity and Their Implications for Network-Centric Infrastructures,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 40, no. 4 (July 4, 2010): 839–852. 11. Ibid. 12. D. D. Woods, “Four Concepts for Resilience and the Implications for the Future of Resilience Engineering,” Reliability Engineering and System Safety 141 (2015): 5–9, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ress.2015.03.018. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Aldreson and Doyle, “Contrasting Views of Complexity.” 16. Woods, “Four Concepts.” 17. Ibid.

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18. Alberto Martinetti, Maria Mikela Chatzimichailidou, Luisa Maida, and Leo van Dongen, “Safety I-II, Resilience and Antifragility Engineering: A Debate Explained Through an Accident Occurring on a Mobile Elevating Work Platform,” International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics 25, no. 1 (2019): 66–75. 19. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2012). 20. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2010). 21. Taleb, Antifragile, 159–167. 22. Ibid., 21. 23. “Solely a Bluff: Relocating the US Fleet to Pearl Harbor,” National World War II Museum, October 20, 2021, www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/fdr -bluff-relocating-us-fleet-to-pearl-harbor. 24. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963). 25. Dennis C. Blair and John T. Hanley Jr., “From Wheels to Webs: Reconstructing Asia-Pacific Security Arrangements,” Washington Quarterly 24, no. 1 (2001): 7–17. 26. Lawrence D. Stone, Theory of Optimal Search (New York: Academic Press, 1975). 27. Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan, “OODA Versus ASDA: Metaphors at War,” Australian Army Journal 6, no. 3 (2009): 39–50. 28. US Naval Institute, “Meyer, Wayne E., Rear Adm., USN (Ret.) (1926–2009) Oral History,” 2008. 29. John T. Hanley Jr., “Bridge to the Future,” Armed Forces Journal International 140, no. 5 (2003): 36–41. 30. Marcus Weisgerber, “Five Ways 9/11 Changed the Defense Industry,” Government Executive, September 14, 2021, www.govexec.com/defense/2021/09/five -ways-911-changed-defense-industry/185363. 31. Anand Toprani and Dave Oliver, American Defense Reform (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2022), provides extensive examples of conflicting interests in the defense ecosystem and suggests what defense reform needs and why. 32. Jared Serbu, “How DoD’s Own Budget Process Keeps the Military on the Wrong Side of the ‘Valley of Death,’” Federal News Network, December 21, 2022, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/contracting/2022/12/how-dods-own-budget-process -keeps-the-military-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-valley-of-death. 33. The author has personal experience in meeting such resistance in efforts to digitize Navy Reserve readiness administration. Also, the SSG recognized that the navy implementing their sustainment concepts would make organizations such as the Naval Support Activity in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, largely redundant. 34. Taleb, Antifragile. 35. US Government Accountability Office, “F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: Cost Growth and Schedule Delays Continue,” April 25, 2022, www.gao.gov/products /gao-22-105128. 36. Samuel P. Huntington, “National Policy and the Transoceanic Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 80, no. 5 (1954), www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings /1954/may. 37. Andrew F. Krepinevich and Barry D. Watts, The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 38. In 2003, the army rejected OSD Office of Force Transformation efforts to have them incorporate prototype concepts and technology in training exercises as a

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matter of routine rather than attempting to use separate exercises and dedicated experimental units. 39. The author participated in these games. 40. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, The Unknown Story of Mao (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). 41. Note that Mao did not fundamentally change the Chinese political order established by the emperor that relied upon rule by law rather than rule of law and government accountable only to their central control in Beijing; Frank Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order from Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). 42. Michael A. McDevitt, China as a Twenty-First-Century Naval Power: Theory, Practice, and Implications (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2020), 55, 129–131, 172. 43. The CNO SSG held talks with the PLA Naval Research Institute, and other PLA institutes and think tanks, annually from 1993 to 1996 when their mission changed. OPNAV decided not to continue the talks. 44. Michael J. Green, By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 469. 45. The PLA had been organized by military regions responsible for recruiting and training units in each of the services. This practice led to corruption and differences in doctrine and readiness across the military regions, resulting in reforms beginning in the 1990s and into the 2000s. 46. Department of Defense, Annual Report on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, Report to Congress Pursuant to the FY2000 National Defense Authorization Act (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2002), https://archive.defense.gov/news/Jul2002/d20020712china.pdf. 47. Green, By More Than Providence, 470. 48. During a meeting with the SSG in Newport in the fall of 1995, then senior captain naval attaché to the United States, Yang Yi told the group that China would use nuclear weapons to prevent Taiwan’s independence from the mainland. Yang Yi had served as the SSG’s senior Foreign Security Bureau escort in China the three previous years and later as rear admiral in 2000 directed research at the National Defense University in Beijing and became a frequent commentator of Chinese defense policies. 49. John T. Hanley, The Halsey Games: An Assessment of Continuous Gaming (U), P-4594 (Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses, April 1, 2010). Though the author offered the defense of Taiwan as the subject for the 1990 Global War Game at the Naval War College, it was rejected because the scenario did not have an obvious major role for US Army forces. Rather than a game using the Enhanced Naval Wargaming System, a Balkans scenario was selected for a “seminar” game. This began the transition to more subjective free-form adjudication of most games at the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. While not employing mathematical models coded into the Enhanced Naval Wargaming System, the Halsey games returned to rigorous adjudication employing quantification where appropriate and possible. 50. Ronald O’Rourke, China Naval Modernization: Implications for US Navy Capabilities—Background and Issues for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2021), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33153.pdf#:~:text =Congressional%20Research%20Service%202%20China%E2%80%99s%20military %20is%20formally,called%20the%20PLA%20Naval%20Air%20Force%2C%20or %20PLANAF.

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51. Ibid. 52. Andrew S. Ericson, “Understanding China’s Third Sea Force: The Maritime Militia,” September 8, 2017, www.andrewerickson.com/2017/09/understanding -chinas-third-sea-force-the-maritime-militia. 53. McDevitt, China as a Twenty-First-Century Naval Power, 142. 54. Andrew S. Erickson, “The South China Sea’s Third Force: Understanding and Countering China’s Maritime Militia,” House Armed Services Committee Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee Hearing, September 12, 2016, 1. 55. Peter M. Swartz and Karin Duggan, The U.S. Navy in the World (1991– 2000): Context for U.S. Navy Capstone Strategies and Concepts, MISC D0026420 .A2 (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 2012), 7. 56. Ryan Pickrell, “China Is the World’s Biggest Shipbuilder, and Its Ability to Rapidly Produce New Warships Would Be a ‘Huge Advantage’ in a Long Fight with the US, Experts Say,” Insider, September 8, 2020, www.businessinsider.com/china -has-advantage-over-the-us-in-shipbuilding-2020-9. 57. McDevitt, China as a Twenty-First-Century Naval Power. 58. Ibid., 16. 59. Lyle J. Goldstein, “Why China Wants Its Navy to Patrol the Atlantic Ocean,” National Interest, December 15, 2019, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why -china-wants-its-navy-patrol-atlantic-ocean-105187. 60. Geoffrey F. Gresh, To Rule Eurasia’s Waves: The New Great Power Competition at Sea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). 61. Quoted in ibid., 272. 62. Green, By More Than Providence, 424. 63. Francois Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 26. 64. Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (New York: Henry Holt, 2015). 65. The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, The IP Commission Report: The Report of the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property (Washington, DC: Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, 2013), www.nbr.org/program/commission-on-the-theft-of -intellectual-property. 66. Jonathan Woetzel, Yougang Chen, James Manyika, Eric Roth, Jeongmin Seong, and Jason Lee, The China Effect on Global Innovation (London: McKinsey Global Institute, 2015), www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Featured%20Insights /Innovation/Gauging%20the%20strength%20of%20Chinese%20innovation/MGI %20China%20Effect_Executive%20summary_October_2015.pdf#:~:text=In%20the %20next%20ten%20years%20the%20”China%20effect”,could%20benefit%20from %20better%20goods%20at%20lower%20prices. 67. Jonathan D. Moyer, Collin J. Meisel, Austin S. Matthews, David K. Bohl, and Mathew J. Burrows, China-U.S. Competition: Measuring Global Influence (Washington, DC: Atlantic Council, 2021), www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content /uploads/2021/06/China-US-Competition-Report-2021.pdf. 68. Samuel B. Griffith, Sun Tzu: The Art of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 64. 69. Richard A. Smith, The Jones Act: An Economic and Political Evaluation (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003), https://dspace.mit .edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/33431/62868407-MIT.pdf?sequence=2. 70. O’Rourke, China Naval Modernization. 71. Moyer et al., China-U.S. Competition.

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72. Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 288. 73. Bill Edwards, “Killer Drones: Disruption Today, Destruction Tomorrow . . . the Future Is Now,” NSI, April 7, 2022, https://nsiteam.com/disruption-today -destruction-tomorrow-the-future-is-now. 74. Bryan Clark, Dan Patt, and Harrison Schramm, Mosaic Warfare: Exploiting Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems to Implement Decision-Centric Operations (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2020), https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/Mosaic_Warfare.pdf, is an attempt to move in the direction of applications (capabilities) vice platforms. Developing the ability to employ such a complex scheme will require a dedicated campaign of learning. 75. Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, Discriminate Deterrence (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, January 1988). 76. Albert-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Patterns Behind Everything We Do, from Your E-mail to Bloody Crusades (New York: Dutton, 2010). 77. SSG meetings with Russian counterparts in January 1997 (author’s collection). 78. Thomas G. Mahnken, Travis Sharp, and Grace B. Kim, Deterrence by Detection: A Key Role for Unmanned Aircraft Systems in Great Power Competition (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2020), https:// csbaonline.org/research/publications/deterrence-by-detection-a-key-role-for-unmanned -aircraft-systems-in-great-power-competition. 79. Justin Sherman, “Data Brokers Are Advertising Data on U.S. Military Personnel,” Lawfare, August 23, 2021, www.lawfareblog.com/data-brokers-are -advertising-data-on-us-military-personnel. 80. “Under Xi Jinping, the Number of Chinese Asylum-Seekers Has Shot Up,” Economist, July 28, 2021, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/28 /under-xi-jinping-the-number-of-chinese-asylum-seekers-has-shot-up.

7 Adaptation in an Information Age of Great Power Competition

Secretaries of the navy and CNOs since the end of the Cold War have been caught in a gale. Sailing “in irons” into the headwinds of systems analysis, failing to institute capability-based planning, and implementing MICE acquisition reforms have limited the navy’s headway to the point that some believe that it cannot avoid the rocks. The Congress, president, secretary of defense, Joint Staff, other services, combatant commanders, industry, think tanks that influence national security policies, allies, partners, and adversaries all form the environment that frames and constrains choices. The secretary of the navy and CNOs not only have limited control over navy operations, but they have also limited control over the larger institution. The interactions among those who constitute the navy as a complex, adaptive society are responsible for its current state. As CNO Michael G. Mullen noted, “The [Marine] commandant makes a decision, boom, everybody’s singing from those first edition copies of the music. The Navy has a debate. It’s a vigorous debate. The CNO makes a decision, and everybody goes, ‘Holy Cow, he’s serious, we’d better have a debate.’”1 Using the environment as an excuse for the current state of the navy is disingenuous. Agents in the navy as a society made decisions to protect their individual domains and avoid innovations that could threaten programs of record, more comfortable with compliance rather than learning to come to grips with the challenges and opportunities of the emerging environment. The navy cannot direct the wind, but it can adjust its sails. As this book was being written, encouraging signs of adaptation were emerging like shoots from acorns in the spring.2 265

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CNO Michael M. Gilday’s Navigation Plan 2022 calls for a “rigorous campaign of learning” as part of a “continuous, iterative Force Design process to focus our modernization efforts and accelerate capabilities we need to maintain our edge.” He identifies a “learning culture” as essential. The “Get Real, Get Better” initiative is a “call to action” aimed at fostering a “healthy ecosystem . . . that assesses, corrects, and innovates better than the opposition.” Get real is a call to eliminate the checklist compliance culture identified in the Balisle report that hides rather than highlights mental and materiel deficiencies. Getting better involves adapting the information architecture along the lines of the SSG’s 1997 Horizon and sustainment proposals to correct those deficiencies. The plan highlights the need for strategic competition to sustain “the free and open [international] order.” Gilday states, “The world is entering a new age of warfare, one in which the integration of technology, concepts, partners, and systems—more than fleet size alone—will determine victory in conflict.” He identifies three significant trends that affect the growing lethality and complexity of the battlespace—emphasizing the expanding impact of the information environment in addition to China’s rapidly increasing military capabilities and “Chinese and Russian behavior that undermines the international rules-based order.” The plan advances the paradigm shift from industrial to information age metrics. Employing the framework of the 2022 National Defense Strategy, the navigation plan addresses how the navy contributes to integrated deterrence, campaigning forward (recognizing the importance of alliances), and building an enduring advantage. As we have seen, deterrence is insufficient. The navy and the national security establishment need to extend concepts and practices for integrated deterrence into integrated influence. Where the paradigm of war is a finite game with a winner and a loser, strategic competition is an infinite game. By emphasizing competition and naval influence, the plan is a step in evolving the war-peace paradigm into the more useful influence paradigm. The force design emphasizes deception; geographic distribution using smaller, lethal, and less costly inhabited, uninhabited, and optionally inhabited platforms; and decision advantage among its imperatives. On September 8, 2021, the US Navy commissioned Task Force 59 headquartered in Bahrain “to use uninhabited air, sea, and underwater systems in an operational maritime environment to test, integrate, learn lessons from, and practice deployment and tactics.”3 This task force is learning rapidly how to employ and protect uninhabited systems as Iranian forces have attempted to capture several platforms. The success of this effort is resulting in similar task forces emerging in other fleets.

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Chief of Naval Research Rear Admiral Lorin C. Selby has made providing large numbers of small, inexpensive uninhabited vehicles a priority to give the navy a “strategic hedge” to its shipbuilding plans. Like Task Force 59, he is employing prototypes in the fleet to learn. The imperatives in Navigation Plan 2022 are remarkably similar to those proposed by the SSG in the 1990s that made no headway against the headwinds of OPNAV. We could have had an alternative, much less fragile navy today had exploration of SSG concepts begun in the 1990s.4 The Naval War College is again leading efforts to affect maritime strategy. As examples, Hunter Stires, a fellow of the John B. Hattendorf Center for Maritime Historical Research, also serves as project director, US Naval Institute Maritime Counterinsurgency Project spearheading an effort to bring together the world’s leading maritime strategists to examine the concept of maritime insurgency and maritime counterinsurgency in the South China Sea. He also is a program analyst supporting OPNAV’s naval expeditionary forces branch and recently served as a strategy and policy analyst for OPNAV leading to his current counterinsurgency project. He is allied with Professor James R. Holmes, who publishes regularly in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings on concepts for dealing with the Chinese. Both of these authors advance the paradigm of war as a subset of broader naval influence. As research director of the Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute and visiting scholar at Harvard and other universities, Dr. Andrew S. Erickson is an acknowledged leader in the use of original Chinese sources to inform navy planning. Though outstanding individuals influencing Big Navy thinking are a good thing, the navy’s architecture remains dependent upon personalities in the absence of institutional interactions similar to the general board. The emerging shoots can grow into a mighty oak only by sustaining adaptation. CNO initiatives have a history of meeting resistance, particularly when they promote cultural change. Also, each CNO seeks to establish a legacy, altering or ignoring the initiatives of their predecessors. Navigation Plan 2022 moves the navy toward greater resilience, but “Get Real, Get Better” will require sustained support from Gilday’s successors. As the chief spokesperson for the navy, the CNO is compelled to argue for the numbers and types of forces that support navy readiness and engagement strategies. This results in Gray Rhino shipbuilding plans that inevitably underestimate required investments and call for larger budgets than the navy has historically received. The navy took a new approach for

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2023 in providing the Congress three alternatives rather than one shipbuilding plan out to 2045. The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of these alternatives found that the navy did not account for historical cost growth in design of future ships and in costs of labor and materials that grow faster in the shipbuilding industry than in the economy as a whole.5 The cost of the three alternatives would require average annual shipbuilding appropriations that are 23 to 35 percent more than the average over the past five years, which is 14 to 18 percent more than the navy estimates. Congress already had added funds to navy shipbuilding beyond the president’s request in each of the past ten years, but not at the levels required to realize the proposed shipbuilding plan. The fleet size and firepower would initially decrease as the navy decommissions old cruisers and relatively new Littoral Combat Ships to reduce operating costs. The navy’s cost estimates are similar to the Congressional Budget Office’s over the next ten years, differing by 5 to 8 percent, but widen with the purchase of the next generation of ships. The new attack submarine and the next-generation destroyer account for more than half the difference between the navy’s and Congressional Budget Office estimates. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost of the new submarine design would almost double over the current Virginia-class submarines from an average of $3.7 billion to $7.2 billion per submarine. The cost of the fragile next-generation destroyer is estimated to cost half again as much, increasing from $2.1 billion per ship to over $3 billion. Fully purchasing and operating the larger fleet under all three alternatives would require increasing the navy’s budget by about 30 percent, though costs would temporarily decrease as the number of ships in the fleet initially declined. Investments in aging shipyards to perform maintenance on schedule and increase capacity are not included in the shipbuilding plan. The navy budget would need to exceed that which it had at the height of the Cold War, adjusted into current dollars. Reducing then expanding the fleet implies rapid adaptation of personnel and infrastructure policies and plans. The plan is indeed a Gray Rhino in its call for annual increases of 3 to 5 percent over inflation out to 2040. While calling for larger budgets, the secretary of the navy and CNO are responsible for readiness, engagement, and equipping strategies consistent with the budgets that they have. The secretary of the navy and the CNO cannot change the MICE paradigms and practices that require two decades rather than five years to field new major platforms, as was the case with Admiral Rickover following World War II. However, Task Force 59 and Rear Admiral Selby’s hedge force demonstrate what can be done.

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The story is similar in the other services. The MICE practice of replacing one species of major platform with the next generation incorporating emerging technology is not sustainable. The fragile equipping architecture must adapt. The purposes of the US Navy to provide justice in international relations, defend American honor, and procure international respect to safeguard American interests endure. The question is, following decades focused on the global war on terrorism and the sclerosis of Pentagon programming, how can the navy employ campaigns of learning to adapt its readiness, engagement, and equipping architectures and strategies to regain headway quickly? Recognizing that the winds will remain strong and variable, the navy’s capacity to adapt will become increasingly important. Many important adaptations are within the agency of the secretary of the navy and the CNO to control, employing a barbell strategy of tinkering with small investments in ventures with potentially large upside returns to learn what works well, then adapting to reinforce success. They also are in positions to influence adaptations in the broader national security establishment and MICE. Adapting Readiness Adapting for the infinite game with China and other competitors must address mental, materiel, and the makeup of navy force structure aspects of readiness. Mental adaptation is the most important for recreating learning societies. It begins with education. Nurturing Navy Education

While all post–World War II CNOs have supported forward naval influence to the extent possible, they have paid less attention to the navy’s campaign of learning. Focusing on harvesting the lessons of World War II and national vice naval decisionmaking, the Naval War College curriculum following the war emphasized, in Kant’s terms, theoretical over practical reason. The college no longer was the navy’s font of conceptual development driving navy strategy and fleet operations and tactics. CNO Hayward initiated a success with the establishment of the CNO SSG in 1981. However, over the years, interactions between the SSG and OPNAV policies and fleet strategies waned, particularly when CNO Kelso was consumed with Iraq, post–Cold War force reductions, and scandals. Based upon CNO Executive Panel recommendations, CNO

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Boorda attempted to recreate a campaign of learning similar to that which existed during the interwar period. Following his untimely death, the effort failed. CNO Clark attempted to recreate a campaign of learning centered on the fleet as part of Seapower 21. However, moving the Naval Warfare Development Command to Norfolk separated it from the intellectual and gaming facilities at the Naval War College, limiting its concept exploration and development. Though CNOs through Greenert employed the SSG to study issues of importance to them, the effect that they had on the navy was only what the CNO could do with their concepts, which was inversely proportional to the bureaucratic dominance of the agents in OPNAV and in the broader the ecosystem. Though CNO Johnson changed the mission of the SSG from turning captains of ships into captains of war solely to revolutionary naval warfare innovation, all CNOs up to Admiral John M. Richardson valued the SSG for the experience that it provided to promising officers. OPNAV and the fleet have looked at the Naval War College and the maturing Naval Postgraduate School principally as providing education to officers for future assignments rather than as the navy’s leading intellectual institutions for informing policy, strategy, operations, tactics, and administration. Navy culture continues to value operational assignments at sea over education, resulting in many of the most promising officers finding ways to avoid all but minimal professional military education requirements required to advance. The practical experience from the fleet provides no time for reflection. Naval education’s focus is on porting technical knowledge as opposed to developing the character of future naval commanders and their ability to make sound decisions instinctually. Those officers who take time to receive graduate education often fail to advance to senior ranks. The navy also has a well-deserved reputation for not assigning officers to positions for which they have specialized education. Building upon guidance in the 2018 National Defense Strategy and believing officers and enlisted were inadequately educated for the complexities of the emerging security environment, in April 2018, Under Secretary of the Navy Thomas B. Modly directed a Department of the Navy Education for Seapower study.6 The study team produced a report that found the following: • “The education of our naval leaders is the single most important way to prepare the Naval Services, and the Nation, for a dangerous and uncertain future.” As retired Admiral James Stavridis observed in the report, “In the end, 21st century warfare is brain-on-brain conflict, and

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we must build our human capital and intellectual capacity as surely as we produce the best pure war fighting technology if we are going to win the nation’s wars and advance its security.”7 • Intellectual capital through education is at least as important as building platforms and weapons systems, but the current education system is insufficient. • Because developing intellectual capital requires years of study and reflection, the effort must begin immediately. • The Naval War College, Naval Postgraduate School, Naval Academy, and Marine Corps University were “underfunded, under-prioritized, under-utilized, and disconnected from one another, without any unifying strategic vision or purpose.” In particular, “Faculty are not receiving enough funding to teach effectively, develop professionally, and conduct research.” The report called for a unified Naval University System with higher priority funding. • There is a need for a Naval Community College offering “rigorous associate of science degree programs for naval sciences, with concentration areas such as data analytics, organizational behavior, and information systems.” • The navy often sends poorly qualified officers to fill quotas. This practice includes “sending non-due course officers, junior officers to senior programs, and restricted line officers, such as dental officers and chaplains, to fill quotas meant for unrestricted line officers.” As a result, navy officers “consistently underperform the officers of other services.” It calls for “competitive in-residence selection boards” similar to those already adopted by the marine corps. • Education is currently viewed as an obstruction in navy career paths by the majority and significant changes are recommended in how the navy evaluates and promotes officers to promote educational and intellectual development. • Leaders need to “assume responsibility for the education of their charges” as well as their own at both commissioned and noncommissioned levels. • “Individual Sailors and Marines must pursue more education and take their academic performance just as seriously as they do the performance of their operational duties. Our leaders must obtain world-class educations while taking responsibility for the educational advancement of the men and women they lead. Our educational institutions need to reinvent their curriculums and delivery systems so that greater educational impact can be achieved for sea services that are by definition continually deployed. And the Department of the navy as a whole must invest in our

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schools and make badly needed reforms to our personnel systems so that education becomes a top priority. These reforms are not optional. This is a fight we must win if we are to do our duty to protect national security.”8 Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer endorsed the study team’s report and stated his intention to create a Naval University System for the navy and marine corps, beginning with the establishment of a Naval Community College for enlisted sailors and Marines.9 Funding was to be specified in programming guidance to ensure educational enterprise wholeness. OPNAV N7 became the sole sponsor for navy education and, with a marine counterpart, to create a “feedback loop including wargaming, analytical capability, active relationships with the Fleets/Marine Operating Forces, and a lifetime continuum of learning for each Sailor and Marine . . . to serve as a strategic accelerator for designing and delivering the naval forces of the future.” The directive also established a chief learning officer in the Navy secretariat, stated an intent to build a united naval university system composed of all departments of the navy educational activities, and addressed acquisition of digital delivery systems for online courses, games, virtual reality, e-learning, reporting and governance, and specific initiatives, including promulgating a strategy and educational requirements for officer advancement. The Education for Seapower Strategy 2020 stipulates that “for the first time in decades, we are competing on a more level playing field and our advantage is declining. In this new era, the intellectual capability of our Navy and Marine Corps team will be the primary military differentiator between our nation and its adversaries and the true foundation of any credible deterrent to war.”10 Despite the momentum created by this report and strategy document, the navy’s fiscal year 2022 budget request cut funding for higher education by over 20 percent from $615 million to $498 million.11 Officers assigned to OPNAV N7 leading this effort were transferred to the Joint Staff. The campaign of learning initiatives in Navigation Plan 2022 are aimed at the enlisted ranks. The Imperative of Military Education in an Age of Artificial Intelligence

As funding for higher education was cut, funding for artificial intelligence (AI) increased. The use of AI in the operating system architecture for readiness, engagement, and equipping strategies is accelerating. AI can solve specific problems for which it has been trained as long as the

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system remains stable. It can explore alternatives within the rules encoded in its algorithms. However, it cannot imagine. It has no subconscious intuition. It cannot conduct critical inquiry and encompass intangible aspects of a situation and reframe an approach to a wicked problem. In short, it has no coup d’œil, no real talent, no genius. Investing in AI and machine learning should not be at the expense of a campaign of learning that provides individuals and organizations with the talent and adaptive capacity they need to meet complex challenges and conceive of opportunities in those challenges. Reducing budgets for navy education while increasing investment in artificial intelligence is dangerous. The age of artificial intelligence. Ages have not been named since the

Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. In a recent book, Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google), and Daniel Huttenlocher (the inaugural dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Schwarzman College of Computing) coin the term “Age of Artificial Intelligence.”12 Many have characterized AI variously as “machines that can perform tasks that are characteristic of human intelligence,”13 and more ambitiously as “the study and construction of rational agents,”14 to provide rational decision for rational action. The emphasis is on performing intelligent-seeming behavior rather than deeper philosophical, cognitive, or neuroscientific dimensions.15 Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher state that “AI is both shaping and learning from our actions,” and that “AI will suggest new solutions or directions that will bear the stamp of another, nonhuman, form of learning and logical evaluation.”16 They cite Kant’s philosophy on the limitations of human senses to understand the true nature of things to suggest that AI is altering the human relationship with reason and reality.17 They make a strong case that as AI becomes more useful in performing tasks better than humans, it will proliferate. They stipulate that just as the Luddites were unable to ban new technology to preserve their old way of life, AI will overwhelm those who do not embrace it. 18 Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher posit that we are now entering an Age of AI as AI is overcoming human limitations by outperforming human cognition and productivity in an increasing set of tasks, including aircraft dogfights. Observations such as these have resulted in the Department of Defense uncritically increasing investment in AI, perceiving it as a new cure-all. AI, games, and language. Inspired by Alan Turing’s writings on “think-

ing machines”19 (1950) and John von Neumann’s work on game theory

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and automata akin to neural nets (1951),20 working on the Defense Calculator (a computer using vacuum tubes the size of a refrigerator) in 1952, John Holland and his colleague Arthur Samuel found that the computer opened possibilities for exploring models far beyond what could be done with pencil, paper, and an adding machine.21 They aimed to create programs that could learn as their calculations explored alternatives, that would allow them to tell the computer what to do without telling it how to do it. Holland attacked the problem through the metaphor of neural nets while Samuel developed a technique, which he named machine learning. Beginning with Samuel’s checkers player, games became a principal metric for advances in AI as computers were programmed to beat chess grandmasters like Garry Kasparov and Jeopardy champions. AI has progressed from dominating humans in two-person, zero-sum games to beating some humans in multiperson games like poker involving bluffing and recently in Diplomacy using verbal negotiations among chatbots to negotiate.22 Recent advances in generative AI include language programs (like ChatGPT) and programs that generate art that can appear to have been made by humans. “In the DARPA program AlphaDogfight, AI fighter pilots have outperformed humans in simulated combat by executing maneuvers beyond the capabilities of human pilots.”23 Current AI employs supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. In supervised learning the AI developers use a data set containing example inputs that are individually labeled according to the desired output. For recognizing images, AIs train on a set of prelabeled images learning to associate an image with its appropriate label by adjusting relational values in a set of neural nets. Supervised learning has proven an effective way to create a model that can predict outputs in response to novel input but is sensitive to details in the data. “In situations where developers have only troves of data, however, they can employ unsupervised learning to extract potentially useful insights. . . . Unsupervised learning allows AI to identify patterns or anomalies without having any information regarding outcomes. . . . Programmers task the learning algorithm with producing groupings based upon some specified weight of measuring the degree of similarity.”24 Without specification of “proper” outcomes, they can produce both novel insights and eccentric, nonsensical results. “In both unsupervised and supervised learning, AIs chiefly use data to perform tasks such as discovering trends, identifying images, and making predictions.”25 In reinforcement learning, AI is an agent (as a player in a game) “in a controlled environment, observing and recording responses to its

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actions. Generally these are simulated, simplified versions of reality lacking real-world complexities.”26 A reward function running on digital processors provides feedback letting the AI know how successful it was. Having games play against themselves is a frequent use of reinforcement learning. Generative Adversarial Networks are algorithmic architectures that pit one network against another to generate new, synthetic instances of data that can pass for real data. They are used widely in image, video, and voice generation, and to detect “deep-fakes” that otherwise could appear real. AI is constrained by its code in three ways. “First, the code sets the parameters of the AI’s possible actions. . . . Second, AI is constrained by its objective function [what the programmer established as its values], . . . AI can only process inputs that it is designated to recognize and analyze.”27 Computers can search spaces of inputs and outputs at many orders of magnitude more quickly than humans. The more stable and better understood the processes are—the rules of the game—the more successful AI has been and will be. Changing rules for possible actions, objectives, and designated forms (e.g., the objective) “mid-game” flummoxes all AI programs.28 Going back to Aaron Frank’s discussion, natural kinds “exist independently of human minds and are discovered in nature, such as electrons, planets, and trees.”29 Because hard sciences like biochemistry operate according to stable sets of rules, that AlphaFold, using supervised learning, was able to uncover a previously undeveloped protein by searching possible inputs for a given output much faster than human laboratory research is unsurprising.30 Similarly, AI will be very helpful with unnatural kinds invented by humans where rules are fixed, as in games and administrative processes. However, for supervised and unsupervised learning, changes in underlying behavior invalidate historical data. Reinforcement learning generates synthetic written, verbal, and visual data that may be taken for real. Today, both video gaming and AI development are contributing to each other as the video gaming market is booming.31 As synthetic written, verbal, and visual data and massivemultiplayer online role-playing video games become a prolific source for “big data” used to train AI, these programs become a snake eating its tail, divorcing results from reality. The inability to generalize on specific applications led to an AI “winter” of diminishing investment following the 1960s and another AI winter following advances in “expert systems” in the 1990s.32 Recent advances in language, voice, and image processing have accelerated the ability to make deep-fakes. Thus, biases created by the data used to

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train algorithms, use of synthetic data to train AI, and concerns over the decisions that should be allocated to autonomous weapons have raised many concerns regarding ethical uses of AI. Uncertainty in the data limits the value of all computation. A common misconception is that adding more detail to models makes them more accurate. For data that obey the Law of Large Numbers, an estimate of the range of uncertainty in the output is the error range of a typical variable multiplied by the square root of the number of variables. Thus, the uncertainty increases by the square root of the number of variables. The uncertainty of any results derived from detailed computer-based campaign is models large.33 Uncertainty in the data overwhelms the ability of AI to compute results as more data are added. Adding more sensors to a grid reaches a point where calculations are not possible. Deception will be the “killer ap” in AI employed for battlespace management.34 As AI improves deep-fakes, deception will become much easier. As the most recent National Defense Strategy and Joint Publication 3-0 Joint Campaigns and Operations demonstrate in their discussion of continual campaigning, the DoD is coming to appreciate the limitations of attempting to draw clear distinctions between war and peace and thinking in terms of phases of warfare and end states. Open-ended engagement to influence the course of international events is an infinite rather than a finite game.35 “The current human-machine partnership requires both a definable problem and a measurable goal.”36 In a finite game the goal is to win. In an infinite game, the goal is to survive and keep playing while increasing one’s strength. Whereas rules are fixed in finite games, they evolve in infinite games.37 AI is better suited for well-structured finite rather than wicked infinite games. The inability to generalize AI applications to address sets of problems led to previous AI winters. Recent work “shows that it is theoretically impossible to design a rational learning algorithm that has the ability to successfully learn across heterogeneous environments.”38 This finding is consistent with the challenges of finding unique game theoretic solutions in what John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern call “essential games.” Two-person, zero-sum games are inessential games that have a simple maximize the minimum payoff as a unique solution. Essential games involve coalitions, communications, and mixed motives. Automated driving and fighting involve mixed motives when deciding whether to save the driver/automated vehicle or other persons. Such mixed motives have considerable implications for individual and group choice in combat whether to save or sacrifice the individual. Going beyond one-on-one engagements introduces many complexities.

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In general, essential games have sets of feasible solutions that can be reduced only by adding specific conditions. The challenge is that the solution no longer obtains when those conditions are not met.39 Schemes for dealing with mixed motives in AI involve fixing the logic and the value proposition when coding the program.40 Reinforcement learning can learn from failure. But the failure depends upon complex details and AI does not have the ability to contextualize or deal with outcomes the program has not previously encountered.41 Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher invoked Immanuel Kant in marking the end of the Age of Reason and the beginning of the Age of AI. They argue that AI is “altering the human relationship with reason and reality,”42 and “an accumulation of matches with the patterns of reality could approximate and sometimes exceed the performance of human perception and reason.”43 While they are correct that under certain conditions computers exceed human productivity, they are wrong to suggest that computers somehow can “transcend every capacity of human reason.” AI can search spaces bounded by their logic much more quickly than humans, but cannot pass beyond those bounds. AI embodies precepts but cannot create new concepts beyond the logic used in its code. In this sense, Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher conflate reason with logic by not highlighting the distinction between Kant’s theoretical understanding and practical reason. Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher provide valuable perspectives and warnings regarding negligence or incompetence in adopting AI and adapting it to increase one’s productivity and accomplish tasks beyond human capacities. However, though AI employs determinate judgment, it lacks reflective judgment. As Clausewitz noted, “The knowledge needed by a senior commander is distinguished by the fact that it can only be attained by a special talent, through the medium of reflection, study, and thought.” They understate the limitations of AI’s inability to imagine and its lack of talent, much less genius. Adversaries may indeed automate decisions involving moral and other features that transcend theoretical understanding. As Clausewitz suggests, they would do so at their peril against talented commanders: “When ever [the commander] has to fall back on his innate talent, he will find himself outside the model and in conflict with it; no matter how versatile the code, the situation will always lead to consequences we have already alluded to: talent and genius operate outside the rules, and theory conflicts with practice.”44 Though AI must be carefully managed to succeed in complex realworld environments such as military operations,45 it should play a major

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role in creating talented commanders. AI is most productive and reliable when used to perform routine tasks that have stable rules. Most administrative and maintenance tasks are of this class. Focusing AI on processes under our control and learning from those uses should take priority rather than overreaching for AI in situations where the enemy affects the outcome, recognizing cyber and information operations as an exception. Employing AI to give operators time to concentrate on gaming, operations, and war-fighting skills rather than spending the vast majority of their time on mindless administration would contribute directly to increasing their reflective judgment and logical tact. The Naval War College. To turn captains of ships (and ground, air, space,

information forces) into captains of war, first, future captains of war need to attend the Naval War College. The top performers from all warfare specialties should get to know their peers. The curriculum needs to balance theoretical understanding with practical reason, as it did during the interwar years. Gaming against anticipated adversaries should again become an integral part of the instruction preparing commanders with the character and decisionmaking skills they would employ in future combat. Such a curriculum would change the image of the college in the minds of those who otherwise would prefer not to attend. In creating the Center for Naval Warfare Studies, the Naval War College created a research arm balancing theoretical understanding and practical reason. However, with important exceptions, this arm is separated from the “educational” arm of the college that emphasizes theoretical understanding at the expense of the practical. One important exception is the Halsey game elective. The elective should move to the core. Other, larger games should involve routine participation from OPNAV, fleet staffs, and laboratories employing the latest intelligence while exploring the use of new technologies. Promising concepts and technologies from games should migrate directly into fleet exercises; and reconstruction and analysis of those exercises should feed directly back into the college and OPNAV. Recent developments in staging “fleet problems” in a joint/all domain context are a promising venue for this work. When the Naval War College adopted its eleven-month course in 1911, the faculty no longer had the time to contribute to planning the way that it had when the students were there for shorter times. With the establishment of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies, the Strategic Studies Group contributed directly to CNO direction of OPNAV and to fleet planning. The Halsey games are now making similar contributions. The Center for Naval Warfare Studies can again serve in this role.

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Doing so would require the Naval War College president to have a stature and relationships with OPNAV and fleet commands similar to when the general board was at its prime. As AI advances, its developers should become agents within the learning society. Just as techniques for the production of maps and their application in war games were imparted with reference to each other with the adoption of Kriegsspiel, AI prototypes should be employed in games, exercises, and operations. As with Fiske’s scheme for using officers playing games to create an expert system, involving current and future commanders in the development of AI algorithms will improve their own judgment while better appreciating the value and limits of the AI. Operators should participate early in the development and not have to determine how to use the AI when “final” products are deployed. As the chess master Garry Kasparov has found, humans informed by AI outperform AI alone.46 Given the vested interests among the various agents within the Naval War College and the navy, recommended changes will be difficult. However, to make the college a valued member in a new navy campaign of learning, changes such as these are essential. In an age where AI could overtake the judgment of those responsible for using it, balancing theoretical understanding with practical reason for sound judgment is imperative. Doing so is fully within the control of the secretary of the navy and the CNO. Adapting Intelligence

In developing an ability to track terrorists, the United States implemented capabilities to track any number of “persons of interest.” Naval intelligence could be using these capabilities to provide information age operational intelligence based upon the movements, activities, and relationships of individuals, rather than focus on ships.47 Just as navy intelligence provided knowledge of Soviet navy administration and readiness that was key to creating the 1980s Maritime Strategy, knowledge of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) administration and readiness should be a high navy priority. The information age provides many more opportunities to control the sea through taking advantage of PLAN unit and personnel rhythms and routines and supporting infrastructure. Much of this intelligence is available through open sources rather than stealing secrets.48 The war in Ukraine has amply demonstrated the ubiquity of open sources of information. Navy intelligence, and the US intelligence community, should fully exploit open

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sources, while screening it for deception. Recent work on monitoring the entropy of satellite maneuvers, including Chinese satellites, suggests an approach for detecting changes in system behavior that can provide early indications and warning.49 Detecting an upcoming PLAN mobilization and surge should be easy. Tracking transactions made by PLAN units and training/deployment schedules should allow AI to establish normal behavior. Any variation from those routines provides early warning. Technology for rapidly creating deep-fake text, voice, and visualizations presents opportunities to deceive adversary AI and to target adversary leadership. Navy intelligence should incorporate these skills. Adapting Operational and Materiel Readiness

Adapting education makes the navy’s architecture and strategies more resilient. Employing a barbell strategy for its war-fighting construct makes the navy antifragile. As in World War II, preventing irreversible losses early in combat is essential, as is learning from individual engagements. While emphasizing forward readiness and forward combat operations, navy component commanders should work closely with their combatant commanders on plans employing Nimitz’s principles of calculated risk. Adapting intelligence to provide warning of when to move select forces forward and others from harm’s way should provide a basis for planning in the information age. The Chinese are targeting missile strikes on fixed facilities. Moving forces prior to a strike exacerbates the entropy of their information and degrades the effectiveness of their strikes. Even better is deception to make them believe that they know where the forces are. Expanding their sets of targets and causing them to employ limited inventories of smart missiles against decoys and facilities of limited value turns fragility into antifragility. All services and allies should have plans to exploit warning. Many of the challenges in principal-agent relationships derive from asymmetric information. The services weigh different risks over different time frames than the combatant commanders. One approach for producing a less fragile system would be for the combatant commanders and the services to share their appreciation of risks in a structured way, and have the secretary of defense explicitly acknowledge the risks identified in deciding on the global force management plan. 50 As a risk assessment tool, Admiral Dennis Blair when commander in chief of US Forces in the Pacific had his staff employ a stoplight chart of green, yellow, red, and black (for no force available) to the time-phased deployment plans for key contingency plans based on the

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readiness and availability of forces employed. The intent was to have the Pentagon accountably acknowledge risks to the approved major contingency plans as forces were moved in accordance with global force management procedures or otherwise became unavailable.51 Similarly, the services can identify the risks entailed in deploying more forces than called for in the global force management plan. CNO Greenert’s concept of wholeness captured this concept as he tasked OPNAV to develop the capability to analyze the tradeoffs between sustaining readiness and maintaining forces forward.52 This contributed to his emphasis on forward stationing navy units and could lead to adaptations along the lines of the Strategic Studies Group’s Horizon concepts. The challenge is that the services budget for a projected two-year global force management plan aligned with their maintenance and training plans. As circumstances arise, the political leadership directs additional forces for specific missions beyond what was projected. Political authorities directing the USS Eisenhower and USS Reagan carrier strike groups to cover the withdrawal from Afghanistan and similar alterations of amphibious readiness group schedules to cover the sudden withdrawal of forces from Syria in 2020 are recent examples of unanticipated changes to global force management schedules. The combatant commanders become scapegoats. Putting combatant commanders on a demand signal diet has become a fad in DC think tanks.53 Though the agency of combatant commanders increased with the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols legislation, the challenge is not new. Demands for naval forces have always exceeded their availability. In 1985–1986, CNO James Watkins had his SSG study methods for anticipating, preempting, and responding to acts that would result in the allocation of forces and identify alternative naval and joint force packages and complementary diplomatic and economic actions, to replace kneejerk demands for aircraft carriers. He had them brief their work to the Joint Chiefs to adopt as a method but was unable to follow through as his term as CNO ended. This study provided many alternatives to the employment of carrier strike groups to respond to crises, and suggested ways to prevent anticipated small contingencies. For example, the study anticipated what became a missile attack on the USS Stark (FFG 31) when Iraqi forces mistook it for being an Iranian vessel. But measures recommended to prevent the attack were never implemented. Political authorities, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, or combatant commanders typically call for carriers that come with their screening forces for contingencies where naval forces face little or no land- or sea-based threats. In a recent example, vertical take-off F-35Bs flown

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from other than large aircraft carriers could have provided the needed capability without burdening a full carrier strike group. As the SSG demonstrated, providing more options to political leaders for responding to contingencies can reduce the fragility created by demands on forces operating forward. The global force management system requires the secretary of defense to approve the allocation and movement of forces. A common observation is that the secretary of defense is busy, and a common complaint is that the Joint Staff defers to combatant commanders’ unsatiable demands over the objections of the service chiefs. The responsibility lies with the secretary of defense. Presenting the secretary of defense with both the risks to combatant commanders’ major contingency plans alongside risks to future force maintenance and training readiness is one way to provide the secretary information on current and future risks and have the secretary specifically acknowledge and accept the risks inherent in the decision, learn what could be done to reduce the risks, and institute changes to force readiness, engagement, and equipping strategies. Sustained adaptability for an antifragile system requires responsible people to step in as shortfalls occur. Providing higher authorities with the impacts on navy wholeness together with impacts on combatant commander readiness and regional engagement plans could eliminate important information asymmetries affecting principal/agent behavior in the larger enterprise. Adopting such feasible staff practices within OPNAV and across the combatant commands would contribute significantly to reducing navy fragility and provide a template for evolving into a practice across the DoD. Having meaningful work and not wasting their time with rote routines is particularly important to millennials (born 1981–1996) and generation Z (born 1997–2012). They sign up for family separations, but not for drudgery. Working extra hours to manually insert the same data multiple times for different users on old, difficult to access computers, having to print and collate data in three-ring binders for inspectors, needing to manually find differences between ship and shipyard parts lists, and being assigned maintenance tasks for which they have neither the training nor the tools in ill-advised efforts to save money lead to low retention rates. Low retention rates increase recruitment and training costs. These investments could be put into SSG-like sustainment concepts that would allow ships’ forces to concentrate on operations and war-fighting skills that provide meaning to their service. Rather than investing in unobtainable battle management schemes, computers and artificial intelligence should perform rote routine tasks, freeing the intellect and motivating younger

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generations who will not put up with drudgery. Such investments will increase retention and enhance mental and material readiness. Adapting Engagement Unfortunately, forward naval presence is often conflated with naval influence. The substance in naval influence is in interactions with both security partners and rivals. The term presence is ill suited as influence involves much more than merely being there. The influence is in the becoming, vice the being. It is presence with a purpose. In thinking through naval influence, one should begin by recognizing the use of compellence short of war, as the Chinese and Russians have done successfully over at least the past decade. No US strategy since World War II has considered unconditional surrender by the enemy as a feasible goal. Though nuclear weapons have played a major role with nuclear-armed states and their clients, knowledge that surrender means occupation and ownership of the outcome until a viable government can be formed has placed limits on war aims. The challenges of creating a viable government in South Vietnam should have created more caution in US ambitions in Afghanistan, and reversed the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Recognizing that outcomes as decisive as unconditional surrenders are infeasible, the objective of strategy in war is then to achieve a negotiated outcome advancing an acceptable state of security and peaceful development. As Thomas Schelling pointed out in The Strategy of Conflict, conducting operations in both “peace” and “war” involves tacit, if not explicit, negotiation as each side acts considering the other’s likely and possible responses.54 The objective of changing the nuclear correlation of forces by sinking Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines in the 1980s Maritime Strategy was to motivate negotiations on terms acceptable to the United States and its allies, with no expectation of leading to occupation of the Soviet Union.55 Similarly, the idea of occupying China is beyond the pale. Regime change depends upon the power of individuals within those countries, over which our military operations have little control, particularly when considering possibilities of escalation to the use of nuclear weapons. Naval influence applies to both setting the conditions for security and peaceful development and accomplishing acceptable outcomes of war—an infinite game. In their study of naval influence in 1993–1994, the SSG created a dynamic planning model employing an extension of Thomas Schelling’s

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definitions in his Arms and Influence of deterring potential unfavorable actions and compelling reversal of ongoing unfavorable actions.56 It included encouragement to initiate favorable actions and reward, including reassurance, for continuing to support actions favorable to US interests and aims. They included economic, political, moral, informational, and cultural actions in addition to military instruments. Incoherent objectives and actions among US government agencies create noise in the signals that naval forces intend to send. Naval commanders must be as harmonious with other US government agencies as possible. Naval influence actions ranged from encouraging and reassuring through naval diplomacy and port visits, military-to-military exchanges, arms sales, and training exercises; to freedom of navigation exercises and peacekeeping that encourages friends and deters potential enemies; to peace enforcement, sanction support (interdicting illegal arms, drug, etc. trafficking), surgical strikes, and surging for combat operations to compel. The extended Schelling model applies equally to allies and security partners as it does to rivals. The aims of each are never fully congruent, nor exactly opposite. The game is not zero-sum. Responses to US efforts to influence are highly nonlinear. Successful strategies require sensitivity to the motivations and constraints on the targets of influence, their willingness and capacity to comply with US aims, and maintaining a constant strain that allows them to move as conditions change. The intent of the broader strategy is to change those conditions, establishing norms of behavior consistent with security and peaceful development. Each combatant commander prepares theater security cooperation plans, formerly called theater engagement plans, to achieve specific goals with specific countries and to create advantages should combat occur. The term engagement is preferable in that it has two edges, one for cooperation and the other for deterrence and compellence. Well-formulated plans consider what forces assigned to the command can contribute and the willingness and capability of the nations in the region to support various US objectives. Activities of each force are then tailored for each country to provide as much influence as possible. Nations led by army officers or with strong army influences are often more receptive to army than navy interactions. Every CNO before and after World War II has faced a dilemma in sustaining the tempo of naval influence operations to the extent possible with the available fleet to accomplish the fundamental purposes of the navy as articulated by Jefferson and Hamilton, while working to limit the length of deployments and keep the fleet whole.57 Family separation has always been a foremost reason talent leaves the navy.58

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Since naval forces are mobile, require less onshore footprint, and have fewer restrictions on their movements, and navies have a culture of assisting each other at sea, combatant commanders naturally turn to naval forces as their most flexible and often most appropriate instrument. The Goldwater-Nichols legislation had little effect on demands for the fleet exceeding availability. However, limits have been reached that require raising the threshold for the employment of naval influence short of combat. Though the CNO lost operational control over the fleet in 1958, she still can influence the fleet’s tempo of operations. The navy can advance its case by using CNO Greenert’s concept of wholeness to demonstrate the implications of employing a particular unit on its readiness for future influence operations, including the effects on the combatant commander’s readiness and engagement plans. Deployments should be timed so that forces needed for a contingency are in the vicinity when incidents are more likely to occur. In 1999, Pacific Command developed a scheme of forecasting potential incidents in the theater eighteen months into the future and adjusting the maneuvers of assigned carrier strike groups and amphibious ready groups to be in the vicinity of possible turmoil, as with elections, particularly in Taiwan. This contributed to planning and successful operations in turmoil surrounding the East Timor referendum as it gained independence from Indonesia. Extending this practice to twenty-four months would provide the bases for budgeting global force management plans. Several have suggested altering the organization and the activities of naval forces to allow them to spend more time on training for fleet battles against the Chinese. While highlighting the power of the combatant commander, articles promoting alterations make no mention of the role of the Joint Staff in global force management, that the secretary of defense makes the decision regarding the assignment of forces of these commands, or to the dilemma that CNOs face in keeping the navy relevant while trying to keep the fleet whole. Arguments for limiting the role of combatant commanders ignore the fact that they are much more sensitive to developments in their areas of responsibility than the Pentagon. The Pentagon lost two decades of responding to the rise of the PLA by discounting Pacific Command’s priorities. Naval component commanders should not repeat previously scheduled operations and exercises without careful review of their effects on naval influence and learning. Every operation and exercise should be viewed through the lens of learning opportunities. For example, freedom of navigation operations provide an opportunity for the wardroom

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to think through how the target country may react, what forces they could commit, how to respond to those reactions, and what pattern of operations they want the adversary to observe. Ideally, the wardroom would game the operation using a red team to play the adversary. Such gaming is a powerful means for learning adversary capabilities and military geography, and it should occur at higher echelons for larger exercises and operations, teaching commanders and staffs the kinds of skills they would need to prepare for combat. These exercises and operations should be designed, data collected, and reconstructed to compare expectations of what would happen to what did. Reporting should contribute to learning across the navy, not just the commands involved in the exercises and operations, in a manner similar to submarine special operations data collection and reporting. Such learning should be routine practice. Readiness and regional engagement are mutually reinforcing. Training forward in areas where one expects to fight reaps significant rewards. It familiarizes crews with the military geography, adversary forces, and coalition partners. It stimulates adversaries to respond, providing data on their doctrines, organization, and capabilities. It provides opportunities to collect upon their means of reconnaissance and surveillance. It provides opportunities to employ deceptive patterns on which we want them to collect, train their artificial intelligence, and formulate their plans. It also results in rubbing shoulders with competing fleets to establish norms of behavior and avoid undesired incidents in times of crisis. Forward operations also provide venues for testing prototype concepts and tactics in the real-world environment. Ideally, the prototype advocate would be on the deployment along with operations analysts to provide an independent assessment. Each of these objectives should be considered when conducting major exercises. Steve Wills and John Kuehn, among others, have made arguments for reversing the movement toward joint military structures. In World War II, the armed services learned that theater campaigns would require contributions from all services and coalition partners to prevail. That condition of the navy’s ecology has expanded with the growing importance of space and cyber operations. The Maritime Strategy of the 1980s was not a “typical” maritime strategy of national maritime power built around naval, merchant marine, fishing fleets, and other sea-based activities representing national maritime power. It was a strategy for the maritime theaters around the Soviet Union where the US Navy, as part of a joint and coalition force, could make the difference in the outcome of the combat in the theater. The navy cannot be prepared for theater

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campaigns and battles by diminishing its involvement in joint operations. OPNAV tuning its efforts to programming and budgets and distancing interactions with educational institutions and the fleet occurred well before the Goldwater-Nichols legislation. While the navy needs to improve its skills and capabilities for the possibility of war with China and Russia, the implication that this necessarily conflicts with naval influence operations is incorrect. They each are part of a whole, each complementing and reinforcing the other. Those who would have the United States pull back from forward operations, or restrict them to one region, to prepare for combat as the PLAN is extending the frequency and areas of its operation around the globe would play into the Chinese strategy of “shi,” forfeiting naval influence to them and making their naval dominance inexorable. Any viable strategy for managing China’s ambitions will require both a regional strategy to attract China’s leadership to nearby challenges, and increasingly a global strategy. Therefore, global US naval influence is essential. Integrated influence requires orchestrating all US government instruments. Having regional assistant secretaries of state and other executive branch departments located in nearby headquarters and forming regional interagency task forces would facilitate such orchestration. Though beyond the span of control or influence of the secretary of the navy and CNO, they should support such an initiative. Adapting Equipping Equipping provides the means for readiness and regional engagement to retain advantage. Equipping an antifragile navy requires adapting both force structure and the operating system. The secretary of the navy and the CNO can promote changes, but have limited influence in overhauling the MICE architecture. However, just as CNO Kelso turned to industry for ship design, they can affect important adaptations. The secretary giving the CNO greater influence over acquisition would contribute to rebalancing the practical with the theoretical. Under the guidance of Wayne Hughes and his colleagues, the Naval Postgraduate School advocated larger numbers of smaller platforms to increase navy resilience. Independently, the SSGs in the 1990s promoted mixes of smaller inhabited, optionally inhabited, and uninhabited air, surface, and undersea platforms employing modular systems that could be swapped for different missions as the foundation

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for functionally distributed and geographically dispersed formations. Such formations increase options available to a commander and reduce the fragility posed by large, multimission platforms, thereby reducing the fragility of the force. Since the end of the Cold War, the Chinese and, to some extent, the Russian militaries have adopted stealth, long-range precision targeting, and other capabilities that gave the United States an advantage. They have tailored their systems to counter the basic navy carrier strike group, marine expeditionary unit, army brigade combat team, and air force wing and squadron force packages around which US forces are organized. Surviving forward combat in the face of these approaches to accomplish mission objectives requires US hardware to become more swappable, along with adapting the operation system. The force must become less fragile. Observations like these led Bryan Clark and his colleagues to conduct a study for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on retaining advantage through an architecture that presents adversaries with decision dilemmas while enhancing US commanders’ speed of decision. As they explain: Decision-centric warfare improves the adaptability and survivability of U.S. forces by leveraging distributed formations, dynamic composition and recomposition, reductions in electronic emissions, and counter-C2ISR [command and control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] actions to increase the complexity and uncertainty an adversary would perceive regarding U.S. military operations and degrade the decision-making of opposing commanders.59

Whereas 1990s net-centric warfare was based upon reliable communications to create shared awareness for synchronizing commanders’ actions, this concept assumes much greater entropy in the information environment. Clark’s “mosaic warfare” would have command structures reconfiguring based upon whom commanders can communicate with among units assigned to accomplish specific missions. The force structure that goes with this approach is similar to that proposed by Hughes and the SSG. The design decomposes multimission units designed for efficiency into a larger number of smaller elements with fewer functions that would be more composable. Composable modules provide options to commanders that make the force much less fragile. Autonomous uninhabited platforms and communications management systems employing artificial intelligence would provide the emerg-

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ing technologies needed for this approach. AI will not perform well in such an uncertain information environment. The greatest challenge in implementing such a concept is in allowing operators to explore what they can do with prototypes and develop the necessary command skills in games and exercises. Current campaign analysis techniques focused on optimization are incapable of dealing with either the combinatorics of composable forces or information effects. Resolving the inherent uncertainties in the employment of such force structure requires an emphasis on practical experience over theoretical calculations. The envisioned force structure is consistent with others promoting less fragile forces. Former US congressional representative Elaine Luria from the Tidewater area in Virginia, retired navy surface warfare officer, adapted concepts described in a 2017 Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments report on restoring US sea power60 to propose a maritime strategy with distinct naval forces for deterrence (influence) and maneuver forces for high-end war fighting.61 This formulation harkens to the era when “the battle fleet trained while the gunboats fought.” As then, these deterrence forces would undertake constabulary, intelligence-gathering, and other influence missions. Not all forward deployed navy forces were operating as elements of “combat credible” battle groups in days of early flotillas, or in the 1,000ship navy concept, but they were tailored for the missions they were to conduct. The deterrence forces would be similarly tailored. These deterrence forces could also form components of an international standing naval task force in Asia as like-minded navies operate together in the region. Attack submarines and uninhabited/optionally inhabited vessels would be part of the deterrence force, exploiting their firepower while reducing the fragility of the force operating in dangerous waters. The larger number of smaller, including optionally inhabited, vessels would provide hybrid capabilities for working with smaller navies and conducting constabulary missions to maintain order on the high seas. Maneuver forces organized around carrier strike groups would represent combat capable forces for higher-end war fighting, to join the influence forces as needed. Positioned to respond to regional contingencies, these groups would be involved in fleet battle training and postured for incident response with other services and coalition forces with similar capabilities. The use of this force for engagement is similar to that proposed by Vice Admiral Morgan in the 1,000-ship navy, except that all forces would be designed for roles in fleet battles and theater campaigns, not designed principally for engagement.

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While control of the DoD’s acquisition operating system is beyond the secretary of the navy and the CNO’s control, they can fully exploit the authorities that they do have. US Code Title 10 is the law that governs the armed forces. Section 2430 specifies dollar amounts for major defense acquisitions. Whether service or OSD acquisition executives oversee a particular program depends on projected levels of expenditure. Programs requiring an eventual total expenditure for research, development, and test and evaluation estimated at more than $525 million, or for procurement, more than $3.065 billion (in fiscal year 2020 constant dollars), are in acquisition category 1, requiring OSD oversight.62 By structuring programs that remain below these thresholds, the secretary of the navy and CNO can explore the design space in a manner similar to which Admiral Rickover explored nuclear powered submarine designs. The question is what applications can the navy prototype within the research and design threshold, and how much capacity can be procured below the acquisition category 1 threshold? Employing the prototype systems in operations and exercises provides evidence and knowledge that no amount of computer simulation can generate. Advances in free-form fabrication technology and processes have significantly reduced profitable economic order quantities, making the sustainment of prototypes less expensive. Congress created an eleventh major force program along with creating the US Special Forces Command in 1987 that allowed the command to equip its assigned forces beyond what the services provided. Only this combatant commander has such authority. The army and marines adopted many of the items prototyped by special forces for the global war on terrorism. Though the Special Forces Command has encountered similar difficulties as the services as special forces have grown in size, the command pioneered processes that the navy could use effectively within its acquisition authorities. Adapting Analysis Adapting analysis is fundamental to moving from an industrial age to an age of information and artificial intelligence. Immanuel Kant made the case that if the world was determined only by cause and effect, humans would have no free will. Many human experiences transcend simple cause-effect relationships. Computers allowed an appreciation of the sensitivity of chaotic systems to initial conditions, making point predictions increasingly inaccurate over time. Machine learning and neural

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network models led to an appreciation of emergent system behaviors that defy prediction. Studying emergence and calculating the behavior of nonlinear, dynamic systems provided greater appreciation of the scale in predicting system behavior.63 With these developments came a greater appreciation of the wicked world of becoming where the solution to a problem depends upon how one frames it, and any solution is temporary, only establishing the conditions for the next round of the infinite game. This world is alive. The secretary of the navy and the CNO do not have the agency to change the DoD’s analysis paradigm of predictions based upon computer-based campaign, combat, and system cost-benefit modeling and simulation to which the Pentagon and Congress have become accustomed. However, by employing analytical techniques that more accurately represent the phenomena under study, the secretary of the navy and CNO can influence OSD, Joint Staff and other service and agency practices. Beyond phenomena usefully modeled as deterministic—as in applying Newton’s laws to bodies in motion and employing statistics and probability theory to determine probability distributions where chance is involved—are strategic indeterminacy, created by interactions of various agents having differing motivations, and structural indeterminacy, created by the wickedness of problems where people disagree on how to frame them. The current DoD analysis paradigm deals only with nonchaotic determinism and statistical/stochastic indeterminacy where probabilities and rates for transitions between various states of the system are known and fixed—dead modeling. While appropriate for some phenomena, it has limited value for informing antifragile readiness, engagement, or equipping strategies. Agent-based and nonlinear dynamic systems models, games, and scenario planning techniques that demonstrate the limits of prediction are far better suited for creating antifragility in a world of becoming. Agent-based models employ the local information that each agent has and provides rules for how the agent behaves with that information to study the behavior of the larger system. The accuracy of the model depends upon the accuracy of the rules for agent behavior. This technique provides one way to explore “great man theories” of the effects of a notable individual on system behavior. Big data is providing rich sources of information for modeling agent behavior. Agent-based modeling employing empirical data is advancing rapidly in the social sciences.64 Retired Navy Captain Wayne Porter, formerly a special assistant to Admiral Mullen in his service as CNO and chairman of the JCS, teaches the use of nonlinear dynamical systems models at the Naval

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Postgraduate School. He and his students have employed this approach for a broad range of studies, from identification and tracking of subgroups of vessels of interest; owners, operators, ports, cargoes, and specific activities associated with artificial reef enhancement and construction in the South China Sea; to methods for handling Covid outbreaks on aircraft carriers.65 Porter promoted the value of systems dynamics modeling in policy analytics and planning while serving with Mullen, shaping such initiatives as the 1,000-ship navy. Games similarly deal with strategic indeterminacy. They are “a powerful method for simultaneously mastering complexity, enhancing communication, stimulating creativity, and contributing to consensus and a commitment to action.”66 Though postulating the structure of the problem is an essential part of game design, games employ abductive reasoning to draw insights into the fundamental factors that govern the situation. Players are rarely shy about pointing out important features omitted from the game design. Competition stimulates creativity, particularly when a scheme fails to accomplish the desired outcome. Arthur Samuel used his understanding of fundamental factors as the building blocks for machine learning in his checkers player, and bootstrapping to improve the algorithm. The gameboard or map provides a common picture representing the complex structure of the subject under study. The common picture is much more vivid than verbal descriptions, thereby enhancing communication among the players. When players seek to find solutions to their common problem, rather than merely obstruct solutions or attempt to verify a predetermined solution, games have a history of leading to consensus on the character of the problem and leading to a commitment to implement solutions embraced by the game participants. Recognizing the importance of framing in dealing with structural indeterminacy, Royal Dutch Shell’s use of common scenarios as a basis for its distributed business units’ planning led to anticipating global developments and increasing its market share in the oil crises of the 1970s.67 Many other business, OSD’s Office of Net Assessment, and the SSG adopted scenario planning for creating strategies to deal with bounded yet unpredictable changes in the environment over decades, employing techniques described by Peter Schwartz.68 Similarly, recognizing how one framed the wicked problems posed to military forces, the Joint Staff adopted operational design as the leading step in its process for developing contingency plans.69 This approach also recognized the importance of the planning process itself providing the logical tact needed for rapid, effective decisionmaking.70

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In their book American Defense Reform, Anand Toprani and Dave Oliver provide detailed insights into what needs to be done and why. Employing the above analytical techniques provides an approach for how to achieve the reforms they advocate. Navy analysis of wholeness would provide a much stronger foundation for readiness, engagement, and equipping strategies than the current investment in computer-based campaign models and simulations. Though some claim that these models deal with uncertainty, rarely do they employ probability distributions. Instead, they employ expected values based upon statistical analysis or conjectures on the performance of proposed systems. Financial models and simulations employed on Wall Street are similarly flawed. As Taleb stresses, strategies based upon the expected rather than the unexpected and seeking to optimize efficiency rather than provide options, lead to ruin. Employing techniques that demonstrate the limits of prediction as a basis for strategy formulation are essential for antifragility. Belief in AI machine learning and neural networks is logically inconsistent with the orderly world of systems analysis. Computers became the foundation for AI techniques and better understanding the emergence of unpredictable system behavior. Systems analysis is from the orderly world of being whereas AI was motivated to expose a world of becoming. To the extent that the data these techniques use for training are stable and their rules are fixed—dead—they can provide consistent outputs useful for making decisions. Where the underlying phenomena are alive, learning, and adapting their multilayered hardware and operating systems, AI techniques provide insight similar to games that require a campaign of learning to provide logical tact and sound decision. Like all mathematical models, once the AI algorithm is coded, it dies. Models of live and emerging systems die once they are coded into zeros and ones. Even the codes that change codes are dead once objective functions and transition rules are fixed. They have no reflection, no free will, no ability to transcend what the human has made them to be. Just as this book lives after publication through stimulating thought and action, AI lives only through interaction with humans. It can increase human productivity, but not make complex decisions for them. The navy needs unvarnished analysis of shortfalls within its control and span of influence. It needs to appreciate its position in the multilayered, networked, complex adaptive US security system rather than seek independence and hope that the right personalities will come along in the broader ecosystem to improve its position. The security environment demands greater interaction among all who contribute to national

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security. Legislation does not prevent the navy from creating a renaissance in its readiness, engagement, and equipping strategies. Measures to become antifragile are within its control. Reinvigorating Navy Campaigns of Learning and Nurturing a Learning Culture How to become antifragile is straightforward. The navy has excellent examples of campaigns of learning that have led to success, and more recently, lessons from an example of how the navy society failed to adopt a campaign of learning that could have positioned it much better for today’s environment. Since World War II, interactions with the MICE have dominated OPNAV and those commands reporting to the secretary of the navy as they have come to rely too heavily upon misguided systems analysis techniques. The nerves connecting the Pentagon to the fleet dampen the pain of daily administration and maintenance. Layers of agents, each organized to prevent changes deemed as threats, and many mechanically using checklists, create a drug-like stupor limiting the rapid adoption of novel concepts and technologies. Enhancing mental and material readiness requires restoring the generation and flows of prototype concepts and technologies to reinvigorate the navy’s metabolism. The Education for Seapower strategy provides a template for getting started. The Naval War College and Naval Postgraduate School hold prominent places in a navy campaign of learning. Requiring the most promising officers to attend the college is fully within the control of the CNO and secretary of the navy, as is instituting a tiered system of education, beyond the current training regime for junior officers in their warfare specialties and enlisted in their ratings, to prepare officers and enlisted personnel to succeed in positions of greater responsibility and authority. Rear Admiral Stansfield Turner wanted naval officers to drive the concepts by which they will thrive, or perhaps die, not defense intellectuals. Treating intellectual effort as a core navy capability will reduce the need for expenditures on think tanks and consultants, freeing funds for exploration of concepts and technology. To fulfill this role, the Naval War College will need to rebalance practical and theoretical education to emphasize the development of character and self-education by employing Clausewitz’s notion of critical analysis, using studies and games that psychologically prepare officers for command. The ability to regurgitate policy, doctrine, and other theoretical constructs that have no

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emotional content is inadequate. Just as in the interwar years, opportunities to conduct large-scale fleet maneuvers will be few and far between, annual at best. But repeatable war games provide inexpensive and accessible opportunities for officers in school and at sea to learn through trial and error that which they could not hope to experience at sea. Making efforts such as the Halsey games core in the Naval War College pre-command curriculum should be a priority, with an emphasis on commanders’ estimates and writing combat orders. More senior officers should combine critical analysis with games to address even more wicked problems. With OPNAV sponsorship, concepts developed at the Naval War College and Naval Postgraduate School should be explored and evaluated in platform and fleet exercises, both navy and with other services and partners. Current concerns mirror those over the rise of the Soviet Navy and maritime prowess when Admiral Hayward and Hon. Bob Murray formed the SSG to turn captains of ships into captains of war. That the combatant commands do the actual contingency (including war) planning does not relieve the navy from determining how best to conduct naval operations. The voice of combatant commanders in Pentagon programming and budgets is weak and ineffective. The CNO via OPNAV and secretary of the navy control navy hardware, operating systems, and applications available to the combatant commanders. The relationship between the navy and combatant commanders should be analogous to the learning done at the Naval War College in support of the planning done in OPNAV following 1912. Then, the War College provided the intellect, the reason, underpinning OPNAV plans. Now the navy campaigns of learning need to provide the reason underpinning combatant commander plans. A small group of select officers could make an immediate and sustained impact on navy readiness, engagement, and equipping strategies for influencing China across the spectrum of conflict and cooperation. CNOs have been very successful in selecting officers who would become future senior navy leaders. Over the period that the SSG’s mission focused solely on preparing captains of war (1981–1995), the navy selected fortythree of the eighty-eight navy officers who served as SSG fellows for flag rank. Eight of these eighty-eight went on to serve as four-star officers: • Two as vice chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff • Two as CNOs • Four as combatant commanders (one with two combatant command assignments, and the other subsequently as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff)

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• One as director of Navy Nuclear Propulsion Programs. Ten fellows served as three-star officers. Three of the four women assigned during this period served as flags. Two became three-stars and one became a two-star. The Marines promoted two of their thirty-six SSG fellows to flag. One served as a four-star combatant commander. One coast guard officer joined each SSG beginning in 1991, as the recognition of naval forces roles in constabulary missions increased. The coast guard promoted one of these four officers to flag. By 1995, with typically six navy officers assigned to each group, former SSG fellows constituted about 12 percent of the navy unrestricted line officers, 22 percent of the 3-star admirals, and 25 percent of the 4-star navy admirals. In 2000, they peaked at 30 percent of the 4-star navy admirals. Their focus on creation and application of novel concepts far exceeded the typical war college education that teaches familiarity with accepted theory. Long service following the SSG allowed them to employ their learning and to implement concepts that they had developed over extended careers. Their interactions within the navy and with national leadership quickly raised the overall strategic competence of navy admirals and contributed to success of the 1980s Maritime Strategy.71 Absent formal education for flag officers beyond the current capstone familiarization course at the National Defense University, a similarly constituted group could have similar effects four decades later. The intellectual effort must tie into the other agents in the navy society, particularly the fleet, and strongly affect OPNAV and other key constituents in the environment. In addressing the symposium for the fiftieth anniversary of the submarine DEVGROUP, retired Admiral Richard Mies detailed the interactions and features that led to success for the submarine force: • An open door. Establishing a culture open to all members of the scientific community and industry with a willingness to test out any new technology or tactic at sea. • An absolute commitment to truth. Analytically and painstakingly examining exercises operations for every wart to provide an unvarnished perspective, to see things as they are and not how we would like them to be, or how we would like our bosses to think that they were. • A unity of command. An organization recognized as being a focal point. The principal authority and the editor, if not the primary author for the coordination and promulgation of guidance. The

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starting point for a unity of thought, consistency of expectation, intuitive understanding of underlying precepts, and higher effectiveness in combat. • A firm footing in the reality of the present. Not a hobby shop for future system designers. Squeezing out as much capability from existing technology. Training crews to make the most out of what they are given. • A willingness to adapt and evolve. Recognizing that guidance is only that and there is no monopoly on good ideas and that success is often defined by failure. As Churchill said, “success is never final.” • Direct ties to the navy leadership and the fleet that bypass much of the design and acquisition bureaucracy to speed new capabilities to the fleet.72 In its DEVGROUP, the submarine force created a culture of learning while executing its campaign and conducting operations. The navy should move a much larger portion of its analysts, particularly officers educated in operations research, from the beltway making computer models based upon theoretical constructs and doing staff work, to assignments at sea writing exercise analysis guides and collecting consistent sets of data on actual events for critical analysis. Every exercise should involve experimentation with prototypes, developing tactics and technology, not merely training to the past. Exercises should be designed for innovation, to examine emerging concepts and exploit new capabilities, not casual box-checking to comply with some training directive. Train to replicate. Educate to illuminate. Learn to innovate.73 Following World War II, competition for budgets led OPNAV to focus the vast majority of its efforts on programming and budgeting. Each of the navy’s organs depends upon the others. OPNAV operating independently from the rest limits what the navy can do. Though needing to provide adequate resources, OPNAV should not be the focal point for the navy’s campaign of learning. The organization proposed in the Education for Seapower strategy reporting directly to the CNO and secretary of the navy should orchestrate education. A modern general board with the presidents of the Naval War College and Naval Postgraduate School, the navy’s chief intelligence officer, heads of systems commands, the chief of Naval Research, and regional fleet commanders convening to inform the CNO on what problems “Big Navy” should focus upon in the near future to align their efforts would accelerate the learning campaign.

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When the navy focused on naval warfare innovation in the later 1990s, CNO Jay Johnson expanded the mission of the Naval War College “to lead strategy development, serve as a focal point for navy warfare innovation, and include the Naval Doctrine Command’s mission.”74 The intent was to capitalize on fleet battle experiments and talent at Naval War College, including the Strategic Studies Group, the faculty, war gaming and research capabilities, and the students. He reformed the Naval Doctrine Command into the Navy Warfare Development Command in 1998 and moved it from Norfolk to Newport under a three-star Naval War College president reporting directly to him. In 2002, CNO Vernon Clark reassigned the Naval Warfare Development Command from the Naval War College to Fleet Forces Command, and then moved it back to Norfolk to place it closer to the fleet. In doing so, the command distanced itself from the intellectual resources and conceptual work ongoing in Newport, and the gaming resources. Without these resources, success of the Naval Warfare Development Command has depended on personalities.75 Today the location of the command may be less important. However, close relationships between the Center for Naval Warfare Studies, the Naval Warfare Development Command, and the fleet are essential to recreate the navy learning organization as it was during the interwar years. The Naval Postgraduate School is a valuable source for technological developments and prototypes. That naval and other military offices develop these technologies and prototypes enhances their value. The Naval Postgraduate School should be integrated into the campaign of learning, conducting its architecture analyses and developing prototypes to provide swappable applications to retain fleet advantages. The navy must invest more in sustainment concepts such as those promoted by the SSG in 1996 and 1997 to allow ship’s forces to focus on war fighting. The shore establishments should exist to reduce the administrative loads on ships’ forces, not to increase them by multiple demands for the same data. Most of that data should be collected automatically rather than manually for accuracy and timeliness. Creating data streams for AI should reduce administrative and maintenance demands on crews that allows them to focus their intellect on war fighting. Part of a culture of learning involves inspecting to learn what resources commands need to succeed, not merely to grade them. The navy should have a strategy for how to accommodate those personnel, principally in the shore-based administration, that will be displaced as the navy adopts digital technologies and artificial intelligence. Both those who fear losing their careers and congressmen fearing the

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loss of jobs in their districts have and will frustrate efforts to create efficiencies and improve productivity. The greatest potential for returns on investment in AI are in routine processes that can be done by algorithms rather than people, a characteristic of most administrative tasks. With more time to devote to operations and war fighting, wardrooms should be employing games for contingencies that could arise in upcoming influence operations, such as freedom of navigation operations and coalition exercises, as well as intellectually exercising their roles in war plans. Field forces gaming at all echelons was employed very successfully by the Prussians, and particularly by the Wehrmacht prior to World War II when forces for major exercises were limited by treaty.76 Adaptive capacity is the key to dealing with a rapidly changing security ecosystem, particularly as the scope of security changes to include issues as broad as the implications of rapid climate change. The Cold War system of taking decades to field new capabilities is grossly inadequate. Delays intended to reduce risk create unacceptable risks producing materiel unfit for the need. Using prototypes in the manner that Rickover did to get the first nuclear submarine in the water in a few years will be essential. As Arleigh Burke said, “There’s no trick to Navy long-range planning. You get the Navy ready to fight today, and then you keep it ready to fight every day thereafter.”77 Given the churn created by defense acquisition reforms and mismanaged efforts to move from platforms to capabilities (applications), the navy’s equipping strategy also needs a campaign of learning. The Defense Acquisition University focuses on training individuals rather than understanding agents and organizations interacting within the ecosystem. It teaches acquisition professionals that following processes rigorously will keep them out of trouble. In dealing with an increasingly complex ecosystem, the incentives for acquisition professionals are to comply with checklists rather than innovate and adapt the system to the requirements of the new environment, such as acquiring software. Management processes have replaced technical competence. The secretary of the navy, OPNAV, systems commands, and program offices should employ agent-based models and games to understand likely outcomes of competing interests when considering new programs or policies. The navy cannot maintain its force structure while spending 50 to 100 percent more on the next generation of its major platforms. Agent-based models can expose ecosystem behavior resulting from each agent following their own rules. Bringing together those MICE agents who affect decisions and actions in games would

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stimulate creativity, improve communications, and contribute to forming a consensus and commitment to concerted action. A technique called Confrontation Analysis developed for the Balkans conflict has been used to address situations ranging from Lebanon, to Libya, to the South China Sea.78 Designed to resolve dilemmas created by both emotional and rational actions, its use by the acquisition community and the MICE could be effective. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that one cannot measure the spin and position of a particle at one time. Just as the nation cannot successfully address issues like pandemics and climate control without understanding the broader ecosystem and contributions needed from those whom it does not control, the navy cannot succeed by returning to its past independence at a time when the ecosystem increasingly requires the services and the broader national security establishment to work together to counter threats and take advantage of opportunities. The navy cannot protect itself against cyberattacks independently. Spinning the navy’s story rather than taking action to learn, improve, and accelerate its evolution inevitably will lead to greater fragility. Navalists must recognize the fragilities of the networked ecosystem and accelerate its learning, improvement, and evolution to turn challenges into opportunities. It can only do this through a campaign of learning across its enterprise. Only through campaigns of learning focused on wholeness will the navy be able to support the existing forward force, finance research into likely valuable future technologies, recruit and train personnel suited to a high-technology military world, and modernize with the funds Congress provides. Educating higher authorities on better alternatives when the full capabilities of the carrier strike groups are not required and exercising and operating in forward areas as part of a naval influence campaign are examples. Schemes such as these offer prospects for accomplishing naval influence while controlling the operations tempo of the fleet and allowing the navy to weather its current storm. Whether the schemes proposed for adapting readiness, engagement, and equipping are the right ones should be subjects for the navy’s campaign of learning involving the Naval War College and the Naval Postgraduate School playing central roles in concept generation, analysis, and gaming with fleet participation, and the navy’s operational research community designing, collecting data, reconstructing, and analyzing exercises and operations employing prototypes. Antifragility comes not from preventing mistakes, but by establishing a firm foundation for learning and learning from reversible mistakes.

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Adapting Paradigms Paradigms are accepted models forming beliefs that guide action.79 “Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute.”80 They are notoriously difficult to change. In a study of the navy’s resistance to changes in the national security and defense establishments, Peter Swartz and his colleagues identified paradigms that inform navy thinking.81 Paradigms that continue to serve the navy well involve modular task forces providing optionality required for antifragility. They include a force employment paradigm that requires its fleets to move where needed across and between the world’s oceans and seas, and a deployment paradigm that requires forces forward with main battle forces positioned to respond to crises in a timely manner while routinely deploying less powerful forces to perform a range of tasks not involving fleet battles. These paradigms allow the navy to continue its Jeffersonian/Hamiltonian roles through forward operations across the full range of military operations to influence outcomes advancing US interests. That the secretary of defense decides where fleets operate, by procedure if not in practice, does not constitute fettering them. Combatant commander boundaries are irrelevant to employing naval assets where they are needed, as the routine reassignment of deployed naval forces and changes to combatant commander boundaries over the past several decades have demonstrated. A force packaging paradigm that organizes naval forces into unitary task organizations on various scales underpins the optionality for constituting task forces tailored to the missions at hand, providing swappable hardware and applications. The navy’s infrastructure paradigm of maintaining forces on coasts around the United States and overseas also serves the navy well, considering the time required for scheduled deployments and to surge for crises, obtaining domestic political support, recruiting, and for limiting damage to the ecosystem from an attack on any one facility. However, other paradigms require refinement or significant change (Figure 7.1). The fundamental paradigm change is from the industrial age to an age of information and AI. Where the paradigm for the industrial age was characterized by order and stability, the age of information and AI is becoming characterized by chaos and emergence of new forms and dynamic behaviors. Whereas design in the industrial age called for machines with synchronized parts, the new age is one of multilevel,

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Figure 7.1

Adapting Paradigms

networked, complex adaptive systems with agents acting on the information that they believe to be true. An essential perspective is the recognition that security involves a series of wicked challenges and opportunities to be governed, not problems to be solved. As with all wicked problems, the “end state” of one series of events is the starting point for the next iteration. Clausewitz’s treatment of absolute and real war has been a matter of serious debate. One novel observation is to treat absolute war as a social function. Clausewitz focused on the commander-in-chief. Subordinate command-

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ers must be consumed with winning battles. Commanders-in-chief must be fully aware of political aims and policy that tempers their plans and actions. As Clausewitz wrote: “Even the ultimate outcome of a war is not always to be regarded as final.”82 Winning battles is insufficient for accomplishing political objectives in war. The paradigm of transitioning between states of orderly peace and the finite game of winning a war has found its limits in an age of “gray zones” and “hybrid warfare” where employing influence to gain strength and advantage short of armed conflict is an infinite game. “The decision by arms is for all major and minor operations in war what cash payment is in commerce.”83 The price is the consequence of a bargain. Since combat is the ultimate means, influence derives from the ability to prevail in combat. Naval forces must be designed for combat and employed across the full spectrum of military operations to create conditions for prevailing in combat through engagement with allies, partners, and adversaries. Through engagement, they promote international justice while protecting America’s honor and interests. Intelligence, information, and misinformation will play a much larger role in sea control than they did in the industrial age. Greater humility and appreciation of the limitations of military and naval force with a focus on influencing successful outcomes are necessary and sufficient, where founding strategy on winning battles is merely necessary. Moving from the fragile paradigm of optimizing efficiency to antifragility affects mental and materiel readiness, engagement, and equipping the forces. Key are adopting antifragile architectures and the employment of barbell strategies conservatively protecting resources while aggressively tinkering with concepts for producing large returns on investment of time, personnel, and fiscal resources. The nation’s “unipolar moment” led the DoD and the navy in the 1990s to hubris in the use of supremacy and dominance, to the point that building US military capabilities was to “dissuade” nations like China from pursuing military modernization. With supremacy and dominance, one needs little strategy. Classic theories of maritime strategy emphasizing sea control over specific sea areas for specific durations and purposes have always been more appropriate. The treasured 1980s Maritime Strategy employed a barbell strategy of protecting the surface fleet while employing survivable submarines and aircraft forward using combined arms with other ASW and land-based forces to peel back the onion of Soviet layered defenses thereby threatening core Soviet interests. In a war with the Chinese Communist Party, the prime directive must be Nimitz’s barbell strategy of calculated risk—avoiding exposure of the

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force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting greater damage on the enemy. To deter war with the Chinese Communist Party, Burke’s admonition to keep the fleet ready every day is essential. As part of a barbell strategy, keeping the fleet ready means finding every opportunity to achieve convex returns in investments in readiness, engagement, and equipping. For readiness, this means targeting the sweet spot that simultaneously accomplishes readiness, engagement, and retaining advantage objectives. For engagement, the architecture involves coalitions built upon successes like NATO, but not more NATOs where all nations must agree for action to occur—where Turkey can veto the addition of Finland and Sweden to the alliance. For equipping, the virtue of larger numbers of smaller, optionally inhabited vessels is their versatility. In addition to their role in fleet battles, their engagement with smaller navies and coast guards to conduct constabulary operations and training allows the battle fleet more time to train while the gunboats strengthen international partnerships for providing order on the seas. For antifragility, the industrial age paradigm must shift from integrated systems to architectures that provide modular, swappable options. Insisting on changing only the nuclear reactor while employing proven steam propulsion and submarine system components, Rickover used a barbell strategy in building and commissioning the USS Nautilus within five years. He then used similar modular approaches to rapidly build multiple classes of submarines for different applications. The rate of adaptation determines who best retains an advantage. The navy needs to jettison the paradigm of the fleet being composed of platform species that dominated in World War II. The MICE major system acquisition paradigm of taking decades to incorporate the latest technology into the next generation of each species of platform increases fragility as the affordability of each generation results in smaller numbers of vessels and aircraft with features fitted to the past rather than for the rapidly evolving future. Platforms designed for decades-old threats are not fit for current battles. The secretary of the navy and CNO have acquisition authorities to adapt in years vice decades. They can equip the fleet with significant numbers of prototype uninhabited and optionally inhabited air, surface, and undersea platforms to redress the fragility that the MICE ecosystem has inflicted. Modular designs allow the navy to modernize major platforms employing Rickover’s barbell strategy. Adapting the analytic paradigm from the implicit order required for prediction to employing analysis to eliminate the infeasible and

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undesirable in the emerging world should be a priority. Critical analysis, the application of theoretical truths to actual events, improves judgment. However, unwarranted belief in quantification, particularly when using synthetic data and not quantifying uncertainty, is pernicious. Operations research and systems analysis use common techniques but are fundamentally different. Operations research employs data collected from actual events allowing critical analysis. The data used for systems analysis for future systems relies principally on conjecture applied to laws of physics. Either through incompetence or malfeasance, systems analysts ignore inherent uncertainties. The most common treatment of random processes is through the use of expected values, ignoring the uncertainties and dependencies inherent in each random variable. When competing, each player seeks advantages they can derive from doing the unexpected. The use of expected values to quantify prediction produces fragile results, as the financial and MICE ecosystems have demonstrated. The navy needs to get beyond its current vogue of mathematics that uses isolated causes to determine predictable effects to again develop strategic skills for dealing with situations where one can govern, but not control, much less optimize, an outcome. War games have advanced little beyond Prussian Kriegsspiel, but remain well suited to informing courses of action for governing wicked problems by simulating behavior of complex adaptive systems. Hence, changing the paradigm of the navy from a fighting machine to an organism whose behavior evolves to improve its fitness and resilience in a changing environment is a first step. The navy’s computer-based combat and campaign simulations should incorporate nonlinear dynamic systems models that highlight sensitivities while exposing unpredictability. Agent-based models and games based upon understandings of rules provide much greater appreciation for uncertainties inherent in the world of becoming. As important is returning to the analysis of operations at sea to inform organizing, training, and equipping decisions. Learning is the foundation of antifragility. Adapting paradigms of specialized training to broader learning is also necessary. The navy correctly believes that understanding and using sea power are best implemented by a corps of men and women trained, experienced, and specialized in the employment of their particular instruments. The other services have similar valid claims. However, the emphasis on specialization results in officers who spend twenty-year careers only in their specialty and know little of the navy and sea power beyond their specialty, or how to fight a fleet, much less a joint and combined theater campaign.

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Special recognition of those qualified in naval air and submarines underpinned legitimacy during the creation of those communities in a navy dominated by battleships, literally by providing warfare specialty pins to those so qualified. Similar routines for surface warfare qualification pins did not occur until the 1980s. Before World War II, officers were expected to serve initially aboard surface ships before specializing. The most senior admirals during World War II were qualified in multiple warfare specialties. As the newest specialty whose success is critical, ensuring that personnel in the navy’s Information Warfare community achieve the status and recognition of their peers is essential. Notably, partially due to it being a new community, many officers and enlisted have served in other warfare specialties. Transitioning personnel between warfare specialties should be encouraged without prejudicing their careers. Captains and commanders with flag potential selected by the CNO to serve on the SSG noted that one of the most valuable parts of their experience was broadening their knowledge of naval operations by serving with top navy, marine, and coast guard officers who spanned warfare specialties. They were top performers in their specialties but knew little of the navy beyond those specialties. Efforts to expose officers to a range of specialties should be a priority. As a captain commanding a submarine squadron, Bill Owens exchanged officers with a nearby maritime patrol aircraft squadron, which both increased the experience of the officers involved and promoted opportunities to work on combined-arms ASW. Similar exchanges among squadron staffs should be routine. What skills does a flag lieutenant need that they must serve a flag in their community? This model extends to learning about other services. The GoldwaterNichols Act made joint duty a requirement for promotion to flag rank. As commander of Sixth Fleet, Owens exchanged officers with similar-echelon army and air force staffs and exercised with army helicopters on aircraft carriers. Part of the early success of the submarine force was including a British Royal Navy submarine officer in the DEVGROUP to take advantage of their superior knowledge of sonar at that time. The arrangement continues to benefit both navies. Again, such exchanges should be routine. What skills are required to serve as a flag aide of another service? Many successful CNOs and combatant commanders served as military assistants to senior political appointees. This practice should continue to target officers with the greatest leadership potential. The navy evolved type-commanders for air and submarine communities that contributed significantly to establishing the legitimacy of

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new naval arms. These communities became tribes. The Information Warfare community is in the process of establishing itself on an equal footing with the other long-established warfare communities. While essential for establishing communities, the navy needs a culture of learning that rewards both specialized knowledge and broader learning. For this to work, promotion boards for officers beginning at lieutenant commander need to balance deep proficiency in a warfare specialty with breadth of knowledge. The senior officers of the various warfare specialties should be selected for demonstrated breadth of knowledge and dedication to the navy beyond their tribe. Loyalty to the nation and the navy should supersede loyalty to the tribe. While selection boards overseen by the various warfare communities provide deep knowledge of the personnel and standards for advancement in that community, including officers from other warfare communities on selection boards should contribute to valuing broader sets of knowledge. In particular, organizations within OPNAV focus on supporting their tribe’s programs and budgets within the navy. This narrow focus conflicts with readying and equipping navy operational commanders for near-term joint war-fighting situations.84 To place war fighting before office budgets and programs, OPNAV officers need to appreciate the value of specialties beyond their own. The 1980s Maritime Strategy was powerful because underlying it were strategic, operational, organizational, and tactical concepts, which included the roles of other services and allies, derived from study, critical analysis, games, and fleet exercises. Focusing on Soviet sensitivities and weaknesses, it aimed to influence a favorable outcome of a global war employing only existing and programmed forces with marginal recommendations for changes to the program of record. The strategy was not joint in the sense that it sought a role for other services’ forces. It was joint and combined because the naval officers formulating the strategy appreciated capabilities that other forces could provide in enhancing the strategy’s success. Thus, the navy can hold fast to its allergies to centralized control implied by some forms of “jointness,” stressing the value of the navy’s architecture (hardware, operating systems, and applications), while incorporating joint and combined capabilities into their schemes. The navy and marine corps bear the responsibility for developing schemes (operating systems) for the best employment of naval forces. The combatant commanders bear the responsibility for ensuring that the schemes of the various services provide swappable hardware options and applications fitted to the command’s strategic concept.

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While it is true that the sailor, airman, and soldier will have their different perspectives based upon the character of their forces and their missions, the idea that they will ever fight large battles independently is misguided. Each has strengths that the other needs to prevail. While appropriately guarding against over centralization in defense organizations, navalist efforts to reverse joint operations and organizations are similarly misguided. The navy need not fear other services. It has a compelling case when focused on genuine national security rather than bureaucratic competition. It needs to make its case clearly. The navy culture of independent command leading to independent thought and internal debate on practically every issue other than the Army-Navy football game can muddy the message, reducing the navy’s influence with Congress. However, like democracy, the plurality of views leads to a more vital and valid argument for action when made coherently. This was the experience with the 1980s Maritime Strategy. The Chinese Communist Party is achieving the equivalent of a Pearl Harbor attack without creating the significant emotional event required to trigger US mobilization. Delays may well lead to MADness before the Chinese lose momentum and the navy steers clear of the rocks. Keeping calm but carrying on coherently with a clear-headed purpose is a basis for optimism. When faced with a similar challenge from the Soviets, the nation and the navy took the measures needed to regain the advantage. Similar measures, fit for the age of information and AI, can achieve this again. Notes 1. Thomas C. Hone and Curtis A. Utz, History of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (Washington, DC: Naval History and Heritage Command, 2020), 477. 2. Offices in OPNAV that wrote and approved this plan received an early version of this manuscript. 3. Peter Ong, “U.S. Navy’s New Task Force 59 Teams Manned with Unmanned Systems for CENTCOM’s Middle East,” Naval News, September 9, 2021, www .navalnews.com/naval-news/2021/09/u-s-navys-new-task-force-59-teams-manned -with-unmanned-systems-for-centcoms-middle-east. 4. John Hanley, “An Alternative History for U.S. Navy Force Structure Development,” Center for International Maritime Security, July 14, 2021, https://cimsec .org/an-alternative-history-for-u-s-navy-force-structure-development. 5. Eric Labs, “An Analysis of the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2023 Shipbuilding Plan” (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, November 2022). 6. Thomas B. Modly, “Department of the Navy Education for Seapower (E4S) Study,” memorandum for distribution (Washington, DC: Secretary of the Navy, April 19, 2018), www.documentcloud.org/documents/4444635-DON-Education-for -Seapower-E4S-Study.

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7. The quotes in this bulleted list are from the Education for Seapower Study. 8. John Kroger, “Ten Take-Aways: The Education for Seapower Report,” America’s Navy, October 17, 2019, www.navy.mil/Resources/Blogs/Detail/Article /2268200/ten-takeaways-the-education-for-seapower-report/. 9. Richard V. Spencer, “Education for Seapower Decisions and Immediate Actions,” memorandum for distribution (Washington, DC: Secretary of the Navy, February 5, 2019), https://media.defense.gov/2020/May/18/2002302022/-1/-1/1 /e4ssecnavmemo.pdf. 10. Secretary of the Navy, Education for Seapower Strategy 2020 (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 2020), https://media.defense.gov/2020/May/18 /2002302033/-1/-1/1/naval_education_strategy.pdf. 11. Johnathan Mun, “Gray Hulls and Gray Matter,” Center for International Maritime Security, September 13, 2021, https://cimsec.org/optimizing-the-warfighters -intellectual-capacity-the-roi-of-military-education-and-research/. This article reports on a study done for the Office of Naval Research suggesting that every dollar invested in Naval Postgraduate School education returns between 5.7 and 7.7 times the investment. 12 Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, The Age of AI and Our Human Future (New York: Little, Brown, 2022). 13. Ibid., 49. 14. Peter Norvig and Stuart J. Russell, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003). 15. Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher, The Age of AI, 49. 16. Ibid., 23. 17. Ibid., 26. 18. Ibid., 150. 19. A. M. Turing, “Can a Machine Think?” in James R. Newman, The World of Mathematics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 2099–2123. 20. John von Neumann, “The General and Logical Theory of Automata,” in Newman, The World of Mathematics, 2070–2098. 21. John H. Holland, Emergence (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998). 22. Matthew Hutson, “AI Learns the Art of Diplomacy,” Science, November 22, 2022, www.science.org/content/article/ai-learns-art-diplomacy-game. 23. Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher, The Age of AI, 50. 24. Ibid., 56. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 57. 27. Ibid., 72. 28. Katherine J. Wu, “Google’s New AI Is a Master of Games, but How Does It Compare to the Human Mind?” Smithsonian Magazine, December 10, 2018, www .smithsonianmag.com/innovation/google-ai-deepminds-alphazero-games-chess-and -go180970981. 29. A. B. Frank, E. M. Bartels, et al., Adaptive Engagement for Undergoverned Spaces: Concepts, Challenges, and Prospects for New Approaches (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2022), 43. 30. Ibid., 156. 31. John T. Hanley, “Games, Game Theory, and Artificial Intelligence,” Journal of Defense Analytics and Logistics 5, no. 2 (2021). 32. Robert F. Richbourg, Deep Learning: Measure Twice, Cut Once, IDA Document NS D-9138 (Alexandria: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2018). 33. Bernard O. Koopman, “A Study of the Logical Basis of Combat Simulation,” Journal of Operations Research 18, no. 5 (1970): 855–882, https://doi.org/10.1287

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/opre.18.5.855; John T. Hanley Jr., “Changing DoD’s Analysis Paradigm: The Science of War Gaming and Combat/Campaign Simulation,” Naval War College Review 70, no. 1 (2017): 64–103. 34. E. Geist, “Why Reasoning Under Uncertainty Is Hard for Both Machines and People—and an Approach to Address the Problem,” in A. B. Frank and E. M. Bartels, eds., Adaptive Engagement for Undergoverned Spaces: Concepts, Challenges, and Prospects for Approaches New, 265–283 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2022). 35. Aaron B. Frank, “Building Strategies for Long-Term Competition: Infinite Games and Adaptive Planning,” in Frank and Bartels, Adaptive Engagement for Undergoverned Spaces, 141–178. 36. Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher, The Age of AI, 24. 37. James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (New York: Free Press, 1986). 38. Muandet Krikamol, “Impossibility of Collective Intelligence,” DeepAI, June 5, 2022, https://deepai.org/publication/impossibility-of-collective-intelligence. 39. Martin Shubik, Game Theory in the Social Sciences: Concepts and Solutions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982). 40. John H. Holland, Signals and Boundaries: Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 114. 41. Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher, The Age of AI, 67–68. 42. Ibid., 27. 43. Ibid., 44. 44. Ibid., 140, emphasis in original. 45. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Human-AI Teaming: State-of-the-Art Research Needs” (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2022), https://doi.org/10.17226/26355. 46. Garry Kasparov and Mig Greenard, Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins (New York: PublicAffairs, 2017). 47. Special Competitive Studies Project, Defense Interim Panel Report (Arlington, VA: SCSP, 2022), www.scsp.ai/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Defense-Panel -IPR.pdf. 48. As director for strategy at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the author promoted moving open-source intelligence out from under the CIA as, given the choice, the CIA would spend the next marginal dollar on stealing secrets rather than exploiting open information sources. 49. John Bicknell, “Satellite Ecosystem Entropy,” More Cowbell Unlimited (accessed November 18, 2022), https://morecowbellunlimited.com/ecosystem-entropy. 50. Joint Staff, Joint Planning, Joint Publication 5-0 (Washington, DC: Joint Staff, 2020), provides guidance on global force management procedures. 51. The author was special assistant to Admiral Blair as commander in chief of US Forces Pacific. 52. The author and Admiral Jon Greenert concurred on this approach during a phone conversation. Jon Greenert, phone conversation with author, September 10, 2021 (author’s collection). 53. Mackenzie Eaglen, “Putting Combatant Commanders on a Demand Signal Diet,” War on the Rocks, November 9, 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/11 /putting-combatant-commanders-on-a-demand-signal-diet/; Elbridge Colby and Jonathan F. Solomon, “Avoiding Becoming a Paper Tiger: Presence in a Warfighting Defense Strategy,” Joint Force Quarterly 82 (2016), https://ndupress.ndu.edu /JFQ/Joint-Force-Quarterly-82/Article/793233/avoiding-becoming-a-paper-tiger -presence-in-a-warfighting-defense-strategy.

Adaptation in an Information Age of Great Power Competition

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54. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). 55. Knowing terms for ending at the start of armed conflict is unrealistic, as humans adjust their aims based upon their successes and failures. Chinese success has led to greater ambitions. Ending the war in Ukraine will depend on reaching an equilibrium in the fighting. 56. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 57. CNO Trost did have the navy stand down after a series of accidents, including the USS Iowa turret explosion, but otherwise was active in supporting operations such as Ernest Will protecting shipping in the Persian Gulf and similar demands for naval forces, while working to limit naval deployments to planned schedules. 58. Department of the Navy, Report to Congress for Fiscal Years 1987 and 1988 presented in 1985 and 1986, respectively. 59. Bryan Clark, Dan Patt, and Harrison Schramm, Mosaic Warfare: Exploiting Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems to Implement Decision-Centric Operations (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2020), https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/Mosaic_Warfare.pdf. 60. Bryan Clark, Peter Haynes, Bryan McGrath, Craig Hooper, Jesse Sloman, and Timothy A. Walton, Restoring American Seapower: A New Fleet Architecture for the United States Navy (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analyses, 2017), https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/CSBA6292-Fleet_Architecture _Study_reprint_web.pdf. 61. Elaine Luria, “Rep. Luria’s CIMSEC Op-Ed: A New U.S. Maritime Strategy,” July 12, 2021, https://luria.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-luria-s-cimsec -op-ed-new-us-maritime-strategy. 62. “Acquisition Category,” AcqNotes, November 25, 2021, https://acqnotes .com/acqnote/acquisitions/acquisition-category. 63. Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies (New York: Penguin, 2017). 64. Robert L. Axtell, “Short-Term Opportunities, Medium-Run,” in Frank and Bartels, Adaptive Engagement for Undergoverned Spaces, 469–505. 65. “Wayne Porter,” ResearchGate (accessed November 23, 2022), www .researchgate.net/profile/Wayne-Porter. 66. Richard D. Duke and Jac L. A. Geurts, Policy Games for Strategic Management: Pathways into the Unknown (Amsterdam: Dutch University Press, 2004), 32. 67. Pierre Wack, “Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead,” Harvard Business Review 63, no. 5 (1985): 73–89. 68. Peter Schwartz, Art of the Long View (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1991). 69. Joint Staff, Joint Planning. 70. John F. Schmitt, A Systemic Concept for Operational Design (Maxwell, AL: Air University, 2006), www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/mcwl_schmitt_op _design.pdf; John Schmitt and Gary Klein, “A Recognition Planning Model,” Defense Technical Information Center, 1999, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2 /a461179.pdf. Though not using the term logical tact, the reflective judgment they employ in their technique is the foundation for logical tact. 71. John B. Hattendorf, The Evolution of the U.S. Navy’s Maritime Strategy, 1977–1986, Newport Papers no. 19 (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2004), https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/newport-papers/35. 72. Submarine Development Squadron TWELVE, “A Look—Past, Present and Future,” Proceedings of the Submarine Development Group TWO & Submarine

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Development Squadron TWELVE 50th Anniversary Symposium 1949–1999 (Groton, CT: Submarine Development Squadron TWELVE, 1999), 104–105. 73. Adapted from a conversation with Paul Vebber. 74. CNO memorandum for distribution, Subj: Establishment of the Naval War College/Naval Doctrine Command Reorganization and Implementation Group, December 10, 1997 (SSG archives sent to Naval Heritage and History Command). 75. Naval Studies Board, The Role of Experimentation in Building Future Naval Forces (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 2004). 76. Rudolf Hofmann, War Games, MS P-094 (Washington, DC: Office of Chief of Military History, 1952). 77. Arleigh Burke quote provided by David Rosenberg email to author, April 1, 2021 (author’s collection). 78. See John Curry and Mike Young, The Confrontation Analysis Handbook: How to Resolve Confrontations by Eliminating Dilemmas (2017), www.wargaming .co, for a brief tutorial on the technique; and Nigel Howard, Confrontation Analysis: How to Win Operations Other Than War (Washington, DC: DoD C4ISR Cooperative Research Program, 1999), for a more extensive discussion of the underlying theory. 79. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 80. Ibid., 23. 81. Peter M. Swartz, Chester L. Eiland Jr., Michael C. Markowitz, and Maureen A. Wigge, Drawing Lines in the Sea: The U.S. Navy Confronts the Unified Command Plan (UCP), 1946–1999 (A Sourcebook for Navy Planners, with Recommendations), DIM-2019-U-022389-1 Rev. (Arlington, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 2021), www.cna.org/CNA_files/PDF/Drawing-Lines-in-the-Sea-The-US -Navy-Confronts-the-Unified-Command-Plan-1946-1999.pdf. 82. von Clausewitz, On War, p. 80. 83. Ibid., p. 97. 84. Swartz et al., Drawing Lines in the Sea, 338.

Acronyms

ACTD AI ANZUS ASDA ASW ATD CENTO CEP CNO COMINCH DDG DEVGROUP DoD DOTMLPF-P FDNF JCS JWGA MAD MICE MSG NATO OEG OPNAV ORO

advanced concept technology demonstration artificial intelligence Australia, New Zealand, and United States Security   Treaty act-sense-decide-adapt antisubmarine warfare advanced technology demonstration Central Treaty Organization CNO Executive Panel chief of naval operations commander in chief (US Navy) guided missile armed destroyer Submarine Development Group TWO Department of Defense Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel,   Leadership, Personnel, Facilities–Policy forward deployed naval force Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint War Games Agency mutual assured destruction military industrial congressional enterprise model, simulation, and game North Atlantic Treaty Organization Operations Evaluation Group Office of the Chief of Naval Operations Operations Research Office (army) 313

314

Acronyms

OSD PLAN RMA SEAL SEATO SECNAV SSBN SSG SSGN SSN TAC D&E TAG UPTIDE USAF USN VCNO

Office of the Secretary of Defense People’s Liberation Army Navy Revolution in Military Affairs Sea, Air, and Land Team of Special Forces in the   US Navy Southeast Asia Treaty Organization secretary of the navy nuclear powered submarine with ballistic missiles Strategic Studies Group nuclear powered submarine with guided missiles Nuclear Powered Submarine Tactical Development and Evaluation tactical analysis group Unified Pacific Fleet Project for Tactical Improvement   and Data Extraction US Air Force US Navy Vice Chief of Naval Operations

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Index

accidents: USS Iowa explosion, 128 acoustic studies, 101–103 acquisition process, 192; adapting to equipping, 287–290, 299–300, 304; adding complexity without adding efficiency, 239; capability-based planning, 200–202, 205; effect of Goldwater-Nichols, 99, 137; 1990 reforms, 209–210(table); outsourcing, 206–210; readiness wholeness, 179; shifting the current paradigm, 304 Act-Sense-Decide-Adapt (ASDA) cycle, 231 adaptation: adapting analysis for great power competition, 290–294; adapting engagement in great power competition, 283–287; adapting paradigms, 301–308; antifragility, 227–232; building antifragile ecosystems, 231; Clausewitz’s view of a military system, 22, 24–25; constituents and functions of the navy ecosystem, 9– 12; creating a culture of learning in a changing ecosystem, 299–300; emerging threats from China, 1–2; Navigation Plan 2022, 266–269; readiness and engagement architectures, 240–241; resilient systems, 225–226 advanced concept technology demonstration (ACTD), 139, 183(n54) Advanced Technology Demonstration (ATD) program, 141, 183(n54) Advanced Technology Panel, 112 advantages, retaining, 243–244 Aegis air defense, 253 Afghanistan, US involvement: airborne surveillance, 170–171; Operation Enduring Freedom, 167; operations

analysis, 202; US intelligence infrastructure, 175 Age of Artificial Intelligence, 272–279. See also artificial intelligence agency theory: defense contract management, 234 Agenda for Peace (Boutros Boutros-Ghali), 125 agent-based systems models, 290–291, 299–300 air combat patrols, Iraq, 170 Air Force, US, 76–77, 79 air surveillance, Afghanistan, 170–171 aircraft carriers, 51, 58, 97–98, 105, 134–135, 141, 143, 180, 191, 193, 211, 231–232, 240, 245, 252–253 aircraft programs, prototyping, 214 air/sea/land war game, 43 Akhromeyev, Sergey, 97 Aldridge, Pete, 200–201 Aldridge Study and Aldridge Process, 200–201 AlphaDogfight, 274 American Defense Reform (Toprani and Oliver), 293 amphibious forces, 5, 47–49, 67, 94, 97–98, 143, 180, 184(n69), 191, 281, 285 Analysis of Alternatives, 201–202 Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Taleb), 227–228 antifragility, 12–14, 227–232, 237, 241, 255, 280, 282, 291, 293–294, 300–305 antisubmarine warfare, 99, 101–102 ANZUS Pact, 74–75 Arab-Israeli War (1973), 230 architecture, systems: an antifragile equipping architecture, 232–239; antifragility, 227–232; complex adaptive systems, 219–222; reading and

329

330

Index

engagement, 239–244; resilience, 225– 227; robustness, 222–225 Aristotle, 204 Arleigh Burke class destroyers, 153, 184(n62), 188(n155), 191 Arms and Influence (Schelling), 8, 284 arms control, 97, 230 arms treaties, 45 Army, US: emergence of the Soviet threat, 66; navy adoption of army staff procedures, 132–133; unification debates, 77–78 Army Training and Doctrine Command, Fort Monroe, Virginia, 135, 182–183(n41) Army-Navy Staff College, 59, 67 Arnold, Hap, 58 artificial intelligence (AI): adapting analysis for a great power competition, 290–294; adapting paradigms, 301–303; CEP naval warfare innovation initiatives, 143–144; cognitive maintenance systems, 144–146; computer simulation, 219; effect on civilian jobs, 237; gathering and adapting intelligence, 279–280; the imperative of military education in the age of artificial intelligence, 272–279; limitations of, 277– 279; observe, orient, decide, act cycle, 231–232; personnel displacement through increased use of, 298–299; pioneering work, 88; SSG naval warfare innovation proposals, 164 Asiatic Fleet, 53–55 Aspin, Les, 4, 80, 125 asymmetric information, 280 Atlantic, battle of the, 45 Australia: Act-Sense-Decide-Adapt (ASDA) cycle, 231; ANZUS Pact, 74–75; SEATO, 73 automated information systems, 169 Balisle Report, 177–178 Balkans: acquisitions contracts, 210 Barabási, Albert-Lásló, 256–257 barbell strategy, 228–230, 280, 303–305 Barber, Arthur H., III, 202–204 Base Realignment and Closure Commission, 129 Berlin Wall, 124 billeting, 147, 149–150, 157, 175 biological systems, 223–224, 226–227 Black Swans: The Impact of the Highly Improbably (Taleb), 227–228 Blackett, Patrick M. S., 84 Blair, Dennis C., 202, 216(n27), 246, 280–281, 310(n51) Bliss, Tasker, 37 Boorda, Jeremy “Mike,” 5, 130, 133, 135– 137, 139, 141, 270 Boyd, John, 231

Bremer, Lewis Paul “Jerry” III, 167–168 Bretton Woods Agreement (1944), 69 Brown, Harold, 110 Budget Control Act (2011), 178 budgetary concerns: acquisitions outsourcing, 207–212; Balisle Report on Surface Forces Readiness, 177–178; Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, 180; capability-based planning, 195–197; defense contractor management, 234–237; financial crisis of 2008, 176; Kelso’s post-Cold War planning, 127–128; Navigation Plan 2022, 268; navy equipping strategy, 189–192; shifting from short-term to long-term priorities, 165 Burke, Arleigh, 51, 91, 98, 112, 168, 299, 303–304 Bursts (Barabási), 256–257 Bush, George H.W., 124; increased use of military force in global actions, 165–166; post-Cold War security strategy review, 126; review commissions, 129 Bush, George W.: increased global military presence, 166–167; navy equipping strategy, 190 campaigns of learning, 55; Clark’s fleetcentered reorganization, 168–172; Cold War-era submarine forces, 100–105; current focus on and nurturing of Navy learning, 269–272; Enlightenment-era influences on, 17–19; force analysis at the naval Postgraduate School, 194; interwar period, 42–51; maritime strategy of the 1980s, 108–109; Naval War College war games, 51; Navigation Plan 2022, 266– 269; 1980s maritime strategy, 116; post-Cold War jointness, 132–133; preWorld War II naval influence, 52–55; reinvogorating for the current environment, 294–300; shifting paradigms for antifragility, 305–306; SSG role in the 1980s maritime strategy, 115; submarine force development, 107 capability-based planning, 194–206, 233–234 Carman, James, 152–153 carrier-based aircraft, 190, 281–282 Carroll, Penn L., 90 Carter administration, 110 Cebrowski, Arthur, 5, 15(n14), 159–160, 162– 163, 197, 169, 186(n93) Center for Naval Analyses, 5–6; Horizon concept, 147–148; SSG innovation concepts, 151–152 Center for Naval Warfare Studies, 94–95, 110–112, 131, 278–279 Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), 71–72, 97

Index CEP Naval Warfare Innovation Task Force, 136 Chandler, W.E., 36 chaos and complexity sciences, 219 chatbots, 274 checkers program, 274 chess, 29–32, 274 Chiang Kai-shek, 70, 244–245 Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), 4; capability-based planning, 195; center for naval warfare, 110–112; Clark’s campaign of learning, 168–171; CNO Executive Panel, 135–142; Cold War learning societies, 100, 104; Cold War strategies, 65–66, 78–80, 82–83; element in the navy’s campaign of learning, 297–298; innovation after the Cold War, 133; interwar exercises and planning, 47; maritime strategy of the 1980s, 108–109, 112–115; moving toward the information age, 255; National Security Act reducing control, 98; navy ecology, 10–11, 98; navy warfare innovation implementation, 157– 159; post-Cold War naval warfare innovation, 123, 139–140; postwar Naval War College, 91–93; SSG innovation concepts, 151–154; symbiotic relationships, 5–6; Total Quality Leadership, 129–130; war games, 39–40; World War II operations, 55–58 China: achieving supreme excellence without fighting, 249–251; arms control and confidence-building agreements, 230; changes in the character of armed conflict in the information age, 254–260; constabulary role of the US Navy, 172; global role of the navy, 1–2; gray zone and hybrid operations, 227; history of military modernization, 244–249; increasing threat, 174; Japanese invasion of Manchuria, 55; prime directive for maritime strategy, 303– 304; Solomon Islands engagement, 242–243; triggering US mobilization, 308; UN response to the Korean War, 70; US competition with the PLA navy, 251–254; US interwar deployment, 54–55; US sharing military equipment with, 243– 244; war preparation strategy, 7. See also PLA Navy Chinese Naval Research Institute, 185(n81) Churchill, Winston, 70 civilian defense analysts, 65 civilian sector, 83–84; Cold War-era submarine force mission, 100–105; increasing role in national security, 83–84; operations research and management science, 84–87; postwar shift in War College curricula, 91–92 Clark, Bryan, 6, 288

331

Clark, Vernon E., 163, 168, 173, 190, 255, 270 Clausewitz, Carl von, 17, 21–25, 31–32, 37, 44, 83, 302–303 Claytor, Graham, 110 Cleveland, Grover, 38 Clinton, William J. “Bill,” 4, 125–126, 212 CNO Executive Panel (CEP): naval warfare innovation development, 137–139, 142– 146; SSG innovation concepts, 151–152 coast guard, China’s, 247 Coast Guard, US: unified maritime strategy, 174 Code for Preventing Unplanned Encounters at sea, 230 cognitive maintenance systems, 145–146 Colbert, Richard G., 92 Colby, Elbridge, 6 Cold War: arms control and confidencebuilding agreements, 230; China’s influence, 250; effect on Navy operations, 66–68; establishing civil-military relations, 75–83; extending the submarine force approach, 105–108; forward operating encounters encouraging deterrence, 257; Goldwater-Nichols Act, 80–83; Maritime Strategies, 108–112, 286–287; naval mission after the end of, 123–124; Naval War College and Naval Postgraduate School revitalization, 88–95; navy expansion and reorganization, 4; operations research and management science, 84–87; post-World War II environment, 65; prewar and Cold War Navy ecologies, 95–100; Revolt of the Admirals, 77–80; the rise of digital computers, 87–88; shifting security environment and alliance formation, 68– 75; submarine force changes, 100–105; warfare innovation process, 184(n66) collective and cooperative security, 68–75 combat credible forces, 58, 68, 97, 126, 289 Combat Information Center, 51–52, 58 Committee on Roles and Missions, 198 communications: increasing global complexity, 220–222; merger with intelligence, 175–176; Naval War College war games, 51; ship maintenance technology innovations, 144–145 comparative reasoning, 35 comparative study, 93, 114 complex adaptive systems, 219–222; resilient systems, 225–227; using strategic indeterminacy, 292 Composite Warfare Commander Concept, 108 computer technology. See artificial intelligence; digital technology concept development: SSG role in the 1980s maritime strategy, 115

332

Index

conflict arenas, increasing complexity of, 220–222 counterterrorist operations, 171–172 Covid-19 pandemic: evolution of robustness and fragility, 223 Coyote obscurant system, 204 critical analysis, 25–26, 84, 104, 114, 140, 164, 294–295, 297, 305 Crowe, William, 80, 127 culture of learning, 294–300, 307 cyberwarfare: antifragility investment, 230– 231; attacks on layered network systems, 227; parasitic attacks, 227, 230–231, 244, 249–250 Dalton, John, 128–129 DDG(X) design, 190–192, 260 deception: Navigation Plan 2022, 266–267 decision advantage: Navigation Plan 2022, 266–267 deep-fake test, 280 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 79, 274, 288 defense contract management, 234–239 Defense Reorganization Act, 79–80 democratic theory of peace, 126 democratization: end of the Cold War, 123–124 Denfeld, Louis E., 78 Deng Xiaoping, 245 Desert Storm, Operation, 170; China’s military modernization following, 246; navy adoption of army staff procedures, 132; post-Cold War activities, 125; precision strikes, 134; war game simulation, 94 determinate judgment, 17–18 deterrence policy: China’s military growth, 258; Cold War relevance of the navy, 98– 99; combining deterrence forces and maneuver forces, 289–290; forward operating submarine during the Cold War, 257; Truman Doctrine, 66–68; US-China relations, 250–251 DEVGROUP, 101–105, 296–297, 306 digital technology: adapting paradigms, 301– 303; CEP naval warfare innovation development, 142–146; complex adaptive systems, 219–220; computer simulation of theoretical combat, 201–202; computerbased operations analysis, 201–203, 207; machine learning, 87–88, 219, 274, 290– 291; net-centric warfare innovations, 162–163; nuclear submarine games and tactics, 103; personnel displacement through increased use of, 298–299; the rise of digital computers, 87–88. See also artificial intelligence direct support elements, 146–147

disinformation attacks, 257–258, 280 distribution, geographic: Navigation Plan 2022, 266–267 Doolittle raid, 254 Dorsett, David, 175 drone use, 231, 254 dual use technology, 250 East Asia: Horizon deployment concept, 148 Eccles, Henry E., 89 ecology: major features from 1873 to 1941, 55; prewar and Cold War, 95–100 economic growth: China’s slowing and declining growth, 259 economic practices: increasing complexity, 220, 222 ecosystem, the navy as, 9–13, 65 education: adapting operational and material readiness, 280–283; Fleet Cyber Commander/Tenth Fleet, 176; following the Prussian system, 35–39; Greenert’s promotion of electronic maneuver warfare, 179–180; Horizon concept, 149– 151; the imperative of military education in the age of artificial intelligence, 272– 279; operations research and analysis, 85; Prussian system of military instruction, 34(fig.); Total Quality Leadership, 129; war chess, 29–34. See also campaigns of learning Education for Seapower Strategy 2020, 272 efficiency, 223, 303 Egypt, 72 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 206 electronic maneuver warfare, 179–180 electronic technology. See artificial intelligence; digital technology; machine learning emergent system behaviors, 290–291 Enduring Freedom, Operation, 167, 171, 175 engagement strategy, 3–4, 9, 239–244; adapting engagement, 283–287; deterring war with China, 304; open-ended engagement, 276; use of AI, 272–273 Enhanced Naval Warfare Gaming System, 93– 94, 262(n49) Enhanced Planning Process, 201 Enlightenment, 17–20, 22 entitlement programs, 190 equipping strategy, 3–4, 189–192, 219; adapting to great power competition, 287– 290; an antifragile equipping architecture, 232–239; capability-based planning, 195; maritime strategy of the 1980s, 108–109; readiness and engagement architectures, 239–240; use of AI, 272–273 Erickson, Andrew S., 267 ethnic rivalries: end of the Cold War, 124–125

Index Evaluation of Alternatives, 201–202 evolvability, 223 Exocet attack, 252 failed states: post-Cold War security strategy review, 125 false information, 230–231 family separation, 284–285 financial crisis (2008), 176, 223, 227–228 Fiske, Bradley, 9–10, 41 Fleet Cyber Commander/Tenth Fleet, 175–176 Fleet Forces Command, 168–169, 173–174 Fleet Operations Intelligence Centers, 174–175 fleet problems for war preparation, 47 Fleet Readiness Units, 146, 150 Fleet Response Plan, 168–169 fleet size, 4–6, 171, 189–192, 268; Navigation Plan 2022, 267–268 force analysis: Naval Postgraduate School, 192–194 force packaging paradigm, 301 force reductions, 124–125, 180, 269 force structure development and assessment, 13; capability-based planning, 205; competing models, 299–300; navy equipping strategy, 189–192, 287–289; PLA Navy, 252, 259; post Cold War, 123, 125, 127–131, 190, 192; readiness and wholeness, 179 FORCEnet concept, 169, 173–174, 192, 204, 255 Ford-class aircraft carriers, 191 Forrestal, James, 76–79 forward deployment, 289; Clark’s vision, 168– 172; Horizon concept, 146–151; Mediterranean operations, 68; prewar operations, 52–53; readiness, 241 fragility, 223–224, 227–239, 288–289 France, 19–23, 29–31 Frank, Aaron, 275 Frederick William III, 30 free will, Kant’s notion of, 33 freedom, the concept of, 17–18 French Revolution, 21–23 friction: Clausewitz’s theory of war, 24–25 game theory, 273–274 games: machine learning, 87–88. See also war games Garrett, Lawrence III, 127–129 Gates, Robert, 246 Gehman, Harold, 151–152 general board, 39–40, 42, 46–47, 51, 57–58, 78–79, 98–99, 194 general staff, 19–22, 30–33, 40–43, 76–77 geopolitical strategies and policies: increased US involvement under Bush, 165–167; increasing global complexity, 220–222;

333

post-Cold War priorities, 133–134; postCold War security strategy review, 125–126 Germany: Naval War College interwar use of games in war planning, 45–47; Prussian military, 19–30, 32–34, 34(fig.), 35, 42, 51; US War Plan Black in the Caribbean, 53; World War I naval offensive, 53–54 Gilday, Michael M., 164, 266, 267 global force management system, 6, 282 Global War Games series, 93, 110, 114, 130– 131, 262(n49) Global War on Terror, 171, 269 Gneisenau, August von, 21, 23 Goldwater, Barry, 80 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act (1986): capabilitybased planning, 198; CNO role after the Cold War, 127; Cold War navy ecology, 98–99; demand for naval forces exceeding availability, 281; fleet demands exceeding availability, 285; history and terms of, 80– 83; joint duty acquisitions requirements, 206–207; jointness, 233–234, 306; Naval War College education standards, 130–131 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 97 graceful extensibility, 225–226 Gray, Alfred, 127 gray zone operations, 227, 260, 303 great power competition, 13–14, 164–168; adapting analysis, 290–294; adapting engagement, 283–287; adapting equipping strategy, 287–290; changes in the character of armed conflict and competition, 254– 260; reinvigorating campaigns of learning, 294–300; training for fleet battles against China, 285–286. See also China Greenert, Jonathan W., 6, 178–180, 183(n55), 188(n152), 206, 255, 270, 281, 285, 310(n52) Halsey games, 204, 246–247, 262(n49) Hamilton, Alexander, 3 Harpoon missiles, 99, 103, 108 Harris, Ronald R. “Robby,” 152–153 Harrison, Todd, 190 Harvey, John, 177–178 Hattendorf, John, 180 Haystack Exercises, 99 Hayward, John T., 91–92 Hayward, Thomas, 15(n14), 110–112, 269, 295 Heisenberg uncertainty principle, 300 Hendrix, Jerry, 6 Hill, Harry W., 67 Hoff, William B., 37 Hogg, James, 136–137, 139–140, 153–154, 160–163 Holland, John, 88 Holloway, James, 110

334

Index

Holmes, James R., 267 homosexuals in the military, 129 Hone, Tom, 5, 207 Horizon concept, 146–151 House Armed Services Committee, 78 Hu Jintao, 248 Hughes, Wayne P., Jr., 192–194, 252, 287– 288 human information entropy, 256–257 humanitarian peacekeeping, 125–126 Hussein, Saddam, 124, 165–168 Huttenlocher, Daniel, 273, 277 hybrid warfare, 227, 260, 303 hydroponics, 145–146 indeterminacy: DoD analysis paradigm, 290– 291 inductive reasoning, 35 industrial outsourcing, 207–210 The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (Mahan), 7–8, 38, 248, 251 information age: changes in the character of armed conflict, 254–260; human information entropy, 256–257. See also artificial intelligence; digital technology information-based maintenance, 144–145 infrastructure paradigm, 301 innovation, 22; avoiding, 265–266; CEP naval warfare innovation, 142–146; China’s cybertheft, 249–250; CNO Executive Panel, 135–142; failure of Clark’s campaign of learning and, 172; Horizon concept, 146–151; Hughes’s force analyses, 193–194; Naval War College mission including, 298; Navy Warfare Development Command analysis of SSG concepts, 154–159; NWDC/NWC/SSG organizational cooperation, 159–164; OPNAV response to SSG initiatives, 151–154; Sea Power 21 concept, 169–173, 190–191, 270; ship maintenance technology, 142–146 integrated power systems (IPS), 188(n155) intelligence sector: AI gathering and adapting intelligence, 279–280; center for naval warfare, 111; merger with communications, 175–176 internet architecture, 223–225 intuitive judgment, 24–25, 30 Iran: capability-based planning, 197–198; Soviet occupation, 67–68 Iranian Revolution, 72 Iraq, 165–167; operations analysis, 202; peacekeeping and enforcement operations, 125; US intelligence infrastructure, 175; US role in regime change, 167–168 Iraqi Freedom, Operation, 171, 175 Iron Curtain, 70–71

isolationism, 48, 54, 69 Israeli naval battles, 252 Japan: China’s missile tests, 246; invasion of Manchuria, 55; Kamikaze tactics, 48; naval ecology during World War II, 58; Naval War College interwar use of games in war planning, 45–47; Naval War College war games success, 59; US and German interwar learning campaigns, 42, 51; US deployment after World War I, 54; US interwar view of, 46 Jefferson, Thomas, 2–3, 14(n3) Johnson, Jay, 126, 141, 154–163, 168–169, 270, 298 Johnson, Louis A., 77–78 Joint Campaigns and Operations publication, 276 Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System directives, 199–201, 233 Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), 99; deterrence policy, 66; Goldwater-Nichols Act, 80–83, 233; National Security Act, 76–77; operations research and analysis, 85; revolt of the admirals, 78 Joint Defense Capabilities Study, 200–201 Joint Forces Command, 182–183(n41) joint mission assessment, 129–130 Joint Operation Planning and Execution System, 132 Joint Strike Fighter, 190–192, 239, 250 Joint War Games Agency (JWGA), 86, 88 jointness, 155, 233–234, 307–308 Jomini, Antoine-Henri, 37 Jones, David, 80 Jones Act (1920), 251–252 Kalbfus, E.C., 58–59 Kamikaze tactics, Japan’s, 48 Kant, Immanuel, 17–19, 23–24, 30, 33, 49, 273, 277, 290 Kasparov, Garry, 274, 279 Kelso, Frank Kelso II, 127–130, 136, 181(n17), 189–190, 207–208, 269–270 Kennan, George, 66 Kenney, George, 43 King, Ernest J., 46–47, 49, 58, 94 Kissinger, Henry A., 273, 277 Kline, Jeffrey, 193–194 Knox, Dudley W., 48, 59–60 Knox, Frank, 59 Korean War, 68; acquisitions contracts, 210; naval and marine cutbacks, 78; UN position and actions, 70 Kriegsspiel, 32–33, 38–39, 50–51, 279. See also war games Kuehn, John T., 6, 286

Index Kuwait, Iraq’s invasion of, 124 language programs, 274–276 Laning, Harris, 47 Last Supper, 208 layered systems, robustness in, 223–227, 244, 303 League of Nations, 69 Leahy, William, 58 learning, Clausewitz’s method of, 25–31 learning culture, 294–300; post-World War II environment, 65 Lee Teng-hui, 246 Lehman, John, 4, 110, 113 Little, William McCarty, 34, 37–39 Littoral Combatant Ship, 191 Liu Huaqing, 245 Livermore, William R., 38 logical tact, 18, 20, 29, 33, 44, 50–51, 93, 100, 154, 208, 229, 278, 293, 311(n70) London Naval Treaty (1930), 52 Long, David, 40 Long, John D., 40 Long Telegram, 66–67 Lorenz, Edward, 219 losing wars, 8–9 Luce, Stephen B., 12–13, 17, 35–39, 89–90, 93 Luria, Elaine, 289 MacArthur, Douglas, 43 machine learning, 87–88, 219, 274, 290–291 Madison, James, 2–3 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 3, 7–8, 37–38, 41–42, 248, 251–252 Mahnken, Thomas, 6 maintenance: Balisle Report on Surface Forces Readiness, 177–178; Greenert’s sustaining forces forward agenda, 180; minimizing overseas base deployment, 188(n152) Manhattan Project, 83 Mao Tse-Tung, 244–245, 262(n41) maps: Naval War College curriculum, 37–38 Marine Corps, US: air surveillance over Afghanistan, 170–171; naval warfare innovation under Hogg, 137–139; navy equipping strategy, 190–191; post-World War II maritime strategy, 68; relationship with the navy, 16(n33); SSGs, 296; unification debates, 77–78; unified maritime strategy, 174 Marine Corps University, 271 Marines Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, 191 maritime armed forces: China’s irregular forces, 247 Maritime Battle Center, 154–155 Maritime Strategies, 110–113; air carrier wing positioning, 252–253; joint and combined

335

strategy, 307–308; joint operations debate, 286–287; maritime strategy of the 1980s, 108–112; OPNAV deficiencies, 195–196 Marshall, Andrew, 244 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 145 mathematics, military, 11–12, 19–20, 27, 305 Matthews, Francis P., 78 McCormick, Lyle, 91 McKinley, William, 40 McNamara, Robert, 12, 88, 92, 127–128, 237 memoirs, military, 23 merchant ship protection, 2–3 Meyer, Wayne, 232 MICE (military-industrial-congressional enterprise) ecosystem, 13, 164, 294; agentbased models and war games, 299–300; China’s military cybertheft, 250; conflicting incentives, 235(fig.); fragile equipping system, 233–235; layered systems, 223–225; naval equipping system, 236–237; Navigation Plan 2022, 269; Navy Force Development and, 206– 213; OPNAV deficiencies, 195; ship replacement strategy, 260 Middle East Treaty Organization, 71–72 Mies, Richard, 296 military spending, China’s, 245–246 military theory, 20 millennials, 282–283 Missile Defense Agency, 259 missiles: China’s PLA Rocket Force, 259; China’s tests, 246; navy vulnerability to, 252 modeling theoretical combat, 201–202 modularity, 223, 237 Monroe Doctrine, 45 Moore, George, 88 moral values, 24, 26 Morgan, John G., Jr., 171–172, 289 Morgenstern, Oskar, 87, 276 Morrow, Walter, 136, 152, 156 Müffling, Karl von, 32 Mullen, Michael G., 170, 173, 191–192, 255, 265 Murray, Robert J., 110–111, 295 mutual assured destruction (MAD), 258–259, 308 Napoleonic Wars, 19–23, 29–31 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 72 Nathman, John, 172 National Air and Space Administration (NASA), 145–146 National Defense Strategies, 276; Navigation Plan 2022, 266–269 National Security Act (1947), 75–79, 98 National Security Council (NSC), 76–77

336

Index

National Security Strategy, effect of 9/11 on, 166 National War College, 67 nationalist movements: end of the Cold War, 124–125 natural kinds, 275 nature, rules of, 223 Naval Academy, US, 35, 94, 271 Naval Command Course, 91 Naval Doctrine Command, 135–137, 139– 140, 151–152, 154–157, 159, 198 Naval Electronic Systems Command, 204–205 Naval Electronic Wargaming Simulator, 90– 93 naval influence, 6–8, 52–55, 75, 93, 283–287, 300 Naval Network Warfare Command, 174 Naval Ordnance Laboratory, 84–85 Naval Postgraduate School: adapting equipping in a great power competition, 287–288; adapting to the current environment, 294–300; educational focus, 270–271; force analysis, 192–194; history of, 94–95; nonlinear dynamical systems models, 290–291; post-Cold War evolution, 130–132; post-Cold War naval warfare innovation, 137–140; SSG innovation concepts, 151–152; technological developments and prototypes, 298 Naval Sea Systems Command, 169 Naval Simulation System, 204–205 Naval Tactical Support Activity, 159 Naval Underwater Sound Laboratory, 101 Naval University System, creation of, 272 Naval War College: adapting to the current environment, 294–300; addressing curricular shortcomings in ethics and leadership, 178; campaign of learning in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, 278– 279; Center for Naval Warfare Studies, 110–112; civilian involvement in analysis and research, 87; Clark’s reorganization initiatives, 172; Cold War shift in curricula and methods, 99–100; current focus on and nurturing of Navy learning, 269–272; establishment of, 35–39; fleet design, 194; Fleet Operations Intelligence Centers, 174–175; Halsey games, 204, 246–247; interwar campaign of learning, 42–51; maritime strategy, 267; mission for innovation, 298; Mullen’s 1000-ship navy concept, 173; naval warfare innovation under Hogg, 137–139; navy four-star conference, 113–114; navy warfare innovation implementation, 157–159; NWDC/NWC/SSG organizational cooperation for innovation, 159–164; post-

Cold War evolution, 130–132; post-Cold War naval warfare innovation, 139–140; post-World War II curriculum and direction, 88–95; SSG innovation concepts, 151–152; use of war games in planning, 34, 39–41; World War II navy ecology, 55, 58–59 Naval War College Foundation, 92 Naval Warfare Development Command, 173, 270 Naval Warfare Innovation Task Force, 155– 156 Navigation Plan 2022, 266–269 Navy Advanced Technology Panel, 108–109 The Navy as a Fighting Machine (Fiske), 10 Navy Doctrine Command, 130, 132 navy equipping strategy, 189–192 Navy Force Development, 206–213 Navy Warfare Development Command, 159– 164 Navy Warfare Innovation Panel, 155 net-centric warfare, 13, 162–163, 167, 222, 288–289 neural nets, 87–88, 143, 219, 273–274, 290– 291 New Zealand: ANZUS Pact, 74–75; SEATO, 73 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 204 Nimitz, Chester, 46, 58–59, 66–67, 88–89, 228–229 Nitta Maru (fishing sampan), 254 nonlinear dynamical systems models, 290–291 nonoperational duty, 149–150 North Atlantic Squadron, 36–37, 52–53 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 70–71; fragile systems, 229–230; prewar and Cold War naval ecologies, 97; readiness and engagement strategies for deterring war, 304; SEATO, 73 North Korea: capability-based planning without the Soviet threat, 197–198 nuclear submarines, 102–105 nuclear weapons: changing nature of conflict in the digital age, 255–256; civilian defense analysts, 83–84; Cold War relevance of the navy, 98–99; Cold-War era agreements, 8; effect on policy formation, 83–84; Horizon deployment concept, 146– 147; naval and aviation unification, 77–78; Naval War College’s war games, 90; New Zealand’s ban, 74; prototypes, 213; Soviet atomic bomb test, 78 Nunn, Sam, 80 Obama administration: defense and foreign policies and strategies, 176–177 observe, orient, decide, act loop, 231 oceanographic institutes, 101 Office of Force Transformation, 167

Index Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), 37, 174 Office of Naval Research, 85, 95, 99, 103, 137–139, 143, 151–152, 169 Office of Net Assessment, 134 officer corps, 17, 34, 305–308 Ogarkov, Nikolai, 134 Oliver, Dave, 293 On War (Clausewitz), 21–22 1000-ship navy concept, 173, 289 OnStar system (General Motors), 144–145 operational duty, 149–150 operations research: Naval Postgraduate School curriculum, 95; systems analysis differing from, 305 Operations Research Group, 85 OPNAV (Office of the Chief of Naval Operations), 95, 295–296; broadening knowledge of naval operations, 307; capability-based planning, 195–196, 205; CEP innovation implementation, 153–157; Clark’s fleet-centered reorganization, 168– 172; Clark’s vision for a fleet-centered organization, 168–171; development of the 1980s maritime strategy, 113; element in the navy’s campaign of learning, 297; Fleet Cyber Commander/Tenth Fleet, 176; Goldwater-Nichols Act, 82–83; Kelso’s alignment with the “joint” world, 129– 130; 1980s maritime strategy, 112; nurturing modern navy education, 270; Pentagon centralization, 80; post-Cold War naval warfare innovation, 139; World War II navy ecology, 55, 58 OPNAV N81, 129–130, 190, 202–205 OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense), 78, 82, 84, 98, 134, 139, 201–204, 213–214, 255, 290 outsourcing, 207–210 overseas bases, 188(n152); China’s, 248; World War II bases in Eurasia, 74 Overseas Contingency Operations, 165, 203 Owens, William “Bill” A., 15(n14), 129–130, 134–135, 197, 198, 306 PAC-10 tactical doctrine, 41, 51, 58 Packard Commission, 80–81, 129, 207 Paisley, Melvyn, 128 Panama, military operations in, 124 Pandolf, Frank, 169 paradigms, adapting, 301–308 parasitic attacks, 227, 230–231, 244, 249–250 peace, conducting operations during, 283–284 peace enforcement operations, 125 Pearl Harbor, attack on, 58, 228–229 People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN): accelerating global presence, 7; aircraft carriers providing combat stability, 253; changing nature of conflict in the digital

337

age, 255–256; intelligence gathering and readiness for, 279–280; post-Cold War buildup, 259; reforms, 262(n45); shifting to an active defense strategy, 245–248; US competition for size and power, 251–254 Perry, William, 126, 208 Persian Gulf: Horizon deployment concept, 148 personnel deployment: effect on families, 284–285; Horizon concept, 146–151 Philippines: SEATO, 72–73; US interwar planning, 47–48 Pilling, Donald, 152–153 piracy: China’s maritime geostrategy, 7; historical roots of the navy, 2–3; humanitarian assistance and global trade, 126–127; PLA Navy antipiracy operations, 247–248 Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System, 88, 216(n35), 233 platform barons, 83, 129, 179, 205 platforms and systems: AI systems decreasing fragility, 288–289; Horizon concept, 146– 151; maintenance needs, 145; naval ecosystem, 1–2; navy equipping strategy, 191–192; navy wholeness, 178–179; netcentric warfare, 162–164, 169, 174; planning warfare transformation, 140; post-Cold War mergers, 234–235; sensors and weapons, 193–194; shifting away from, 304. See also weapons systems Porter, Dixon, 38 Porter, Wayne, 290–291 Powell, Colin, 4, 127 practical reason, Kant’s, 18, 23, 25, 28, 35, 50, 55, 228, 269, 277–279 Pratt, William, 47 precision strikes, 134 preemptive military action, 165–166 presence operations and strategies, 6 preventive defense, 4, 126 Priest, Dana, 4 probability, 227–228 program management, 236–238 prototyping, 213, 218(n72), 219, 232, 261– 262(n38), 298 Provincial Reconstruction Teams, Afghanistan and Iraq, 171 Prussian military, 19–30, 32–34, 34(fig.), 35, 42, 51 psychological dimension, 23 Pudas, Terry, 162–163 punctuated evolution, 11, 13, 65, 226–227, 256 Pye, William S., 59–60 Quadrennial Defense Reviews, 191, 198–200, 231–232, 246–247 RAND Corporation, 85, 202

338

Index

Ranney, Jeffrey, 127–128 Rapid Decisive Operations, 201 readiness, 3–4; adapting equipping in a great power competition, 287–288; adapting for great power competition with China, 269; adapting operational and material readiness, 280–283; Balisle Report on Surface Forces Readiness, 177–178; deterring war with China, 304; Greenert’s “wholeness” priority, 178–180; Horizon deployment concept, 146–151; readiness and engagement architectures, 239–244; use of AI, 272–273 Reagan, Ronald, 4, 80–81, 110 reconnaissance-strike complexes, 134 Reduced Ship’s Crew by Virtual Presence, 143 reflective judgment, 18 regime change, 167–168 regional conflict, sustaining naval influence in, 172–177 reinforcement learning, 274–275 Reisswitz, Georg Leopold von, 17, 29–33, 83 reliability, 223 resilience, 12, 225–227, 237; Navigation Plan 2022, 267 Resources and Requirements Review Board, 130 restricted waters: post-Cold War security strategy review, 126 Revolt of the Admirals, 77–80 revolution in military affairs (RMA), 134, 243 Richardson, John M., 135–136, 178, 228–229 Rickover, Hyman, 207–208, 213, 233 Ridderhof, Phillip, 6 risk, fragile systems and, 228–230 robots, maintenance and fabrication, 145 robustness, 222–225 Rocket Force (China), 259 Rogers, Bernard W., 115 Rogers, Raymond, 39 role of the navy: post-Cold War review, 125–126 Roosevelt, Franklin, 55, 58 Roosevelt, Theodore, 38, 53 Roughead, Gary, 173–177, 192, 255 Royal Dutch Schell, 292 Royal Navy (Britain), 172 Rumsfeld, Donald, 5, 167, 200–202 Russia: introduction of Prussian war chess, 30; US deployment after World War I, 54 Russian Revolution, 54 Samuel, Arthur, 274 Santa Fe Institute, 223 scalability, 223 Scharnhorst, Gerhard Johann David von, 19– 23, 31 Schelling, Thomas, 8, 216(n35), 251, 283–284 Schmidt, Eric, 273, 277

Schwartz, Peter, 292 science, war as, 11–12, 17–20, 26–27 Sea Enterprise, 169–170 Sea Plan 2000, 110 Sea Power 21, 169–173, 190–191, 270 Sea Trial, 169–170 Sea Warrior, 169–170 SEALS, US Navy, 171 Seapower Symposium, 92 security cooperation, 75, 242, 284–285 Selby, Lorin C., 267–268 September 11, 2001, 164–169, 244 Shaffer, Guy, 105–106, 108 Shannon, Claude, 87 shipboard maintenance systems, 142–146 shipbuilding: Blohm & Voss, 142; Horizon concept, 146; increase during World War I, 54; maritime power shifting to the Far East, 247; Navigation Plan 2022, 267– 268; navy equipping strategy, 191–192; 19th-century revival, 37; prototype development, 213–214 Sims, William S., 44 simulation technologies: Horizon’s virtual environment training support, 150–151; Naval Simulation System, 204–205 Sloman, Jesse, 6 slush funds, 237 Small, William, 112, 195–197 Smith, Bernard J., 162 social Darwinism, 46 social issues, 141; post-Cold War growth in, 133–134; Tailhook scandal, 128–129, 141 society of learning, 51, 106 Soley, James, 37–38 solid free-form fabrication, 145 Solomon Islands, 242–243 sound propagation, 101 South Asia: Horizon deployment concept, 148 South Atlantic Squadrons, 53 South China Sea, 9, 227, 231–232, 245, 247– 248 South Korea: capability-based planning with a North Korean threat, 197–198 Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), 72–74, 97 Soviet Navy, 295 Soviet Union: atomic bomb test, 78; formation of the Iron Curtain, 66–68; NATO formation, 70–71. See also Cold War Spanish-American War (1898), 53 Special Forces Command, 290 Spencer, Richard V., 272 Spruance, Raymond A., 58, 67, 88–90, 229 Squadron of Evolution, 52–53 Stark, Harold, 228 USS Stark, 252, 281 State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, 66

Index Stavridis, James, 270–271 stay-in-the-fray sustainment (CEP naval warfare innovation), 142–146 Stires, Hunter, 267 Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (1991), 126 strategic planning, 42–43, 81–82, 92, 199 Strategic Studies Group (SSG), 4–5, 278–279, 281; CEP naval warfare innovation, 137– 139, 142–146; CNO Executive Panel, 136–142; creating a culture of learning, 298–299; jointness implementation, 127– 130; navy warfare innovation implementation, 157–159; 1980s Maritime Strategy, 108–115; NWDC/NWC/SSG organizational cooperation for innovation, 159–164; OPNAV response to CEP innovations, 151–154; post-Cold War naval warfare innovation, 133–134, 141; slow naval response to implement recommendations, 169 strategy, maritime: aligning naval influence with national power, 8–9; balancing and aligning navy strategies, 3–6; capabilitybased planning, 194–206; post-Cold War review, 125; supremacy and dominance, 303–304 The Strategy of Conflict (Schelling), 283 submarine forces: broadening officers’ knowledge of naval operations, 306; CEP naval warfare innovation prototypes, 141; Cold War antisubmarine warfare groups, 99; Cold War changes in the campaigns of learning, 100–105; combining deterrence forces and maneuver forces, 289–290; developing a culture of learning, 296–297; extending the submarine force approach, 105–108; Owens’s innovations in the face of downsizing, 134–135; prototypes, 213 Sumida, Jon, 25–26 Sun Tzu, 249 supremacy and dominance practices, 303–304 system-of-systems concept, 134–135 systems analysis: adapting for great power competition, 290–294; complexity sciences and, 219–220; computer simulation, 201–203; incompatibility with AI, 293; increasing civilian involvement, 84; introduction of, 12; Naval Postgraduate School force analyses, 192– 194; Naval War College curriculum reform, 92; operations research and, 305; projecting force structures, 127–128; robust systems, 222–225 Systems Analysis Office (OSD), 84 systems implementation time, 211–212 Tactical Development and Evaluation (TAC D&E) program, 99, 104, 108, 132, 159

339

Taft, William Howard, 53 Tailhook scandal, 128–129, 141 Taiwan: China’s military modernization, 246; defense planning scenarios, 205 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 227–228, 238 Tansley, Arthur George, 10 Task Force 59, 266–268 Task Force EXCEL, 170 Taylor, Henry C., 38–40 Thailand: SEATO, 72–73 theater engagement plans, 284 theory of war: Clausewitz’s, 22–26, 28; Luce’s naval reform plan, 35–36 theory-practice balance, 23, 27, 33, 44 threat-based planning, 167, 198–199 Tiananmen Square massacre, 243–245 tiered readiness, 168–169 Tilsit, Peace of, 21 Title 10 games, 130–131 Tomahawk missiles, 99, 103, 108, 171 top-down programs, fragility in, 238–239 Toprani, Anand, 293 Total Quality Leadership, 129 totality of war, 83 Tracy, Benjamin, 52 trade, seaborne: post-Cold War expansion, 126–127 Trost, Carlisle A.H., 127, 184(n62), 188(n155) Truman, Harry S., 76–77 Truman Doctrine (1947), 66–68 Turing, Alan M., 87, 219, 273–274 Turner, Stansfield, 87, 92–93, 294 Turner Revolution, 93 type-commanders, 306–307 Ukraine, war in the, 254, 256 UN Charter, 70 UN Security Council, 70; peacekeeping operations after the Cold War, 125 unification: capability-based planning, 198; Goldwater-Nichols Act, 80–83; Revolt of the Admirals, 77–80; unification debates, 75–77 Unified Command Plan, 241 uninhabited strike aircraft, 140, 184(n61) unipolar moment, 303–304 United Nations, 69–70 unnatural kinds, 275 Upton, Emory, 37 Utz, Curtis, 207 Vice Chief of Naval Operations (VCNO), 170, 195 Vietnam War: acquisitions contracts, 210; computer modeling, 88; US rationale for engagement, 73 virtual environment training support: Horizon deployment concept, 150–151

340

Index

von Neumann, John, 87, 219, 273–274, 276 war as instrument of policy, 83 war chess, 29–34 war games: AI, games, and language, 273– 278; computational reproducibility, 203–204; creating a culture of learning, 299–300; decline during World War II, 59; development of the 1980s maritime strategy, 112–113; Enhanced Naval Warfare Gaming System, 93–94; expansion into civilian sectors, 85–87; Halsey games, 204; interwar campaign of learning, 44–51; Naval Electronic Wargaming Simulator, 90–93; Naval War College curriculum, 37–39; net-centric warfare innovations, 162–163; post-war changes in the Naval War College curriculum, 89–94; Prussian war chess, 29–31; shifting the paradigm for a modern navy, 305; strategic indeterminacy, 292; submarine tactics development, 103–104; use in war planning, 39–41; war chess, 29–34 war planning: early navy use of war games, 39–41; interwar campaign of learning, 42– 51; World War II joint planning, 58 war proper, 6–7, 84 warfare environment simulator, 204–205 Washington Naval Treaty (1922), 52 Watkins, James D., 110, 113, 281 weapons of mass destruction (WMD): missile strikes against Iraqi facilities, 170–171; post-Cold War strategy review, 125 Weapons System Evaluation Group, 85 weapons systems: building antifragility into the Joint Strike Fighter program, 239; CEP naval warfare innovation initiatives, 140–146; China’s cyberattacks and cybertheft on US systems, 249–250; evaluating foreign threats, 197–198; generalizing AI applications, 276–277; logistical and budgetary challenges of advanced systems, 212–213; net-centric

warfare, 222; prototype development, 213–215 Weapons Systems Acquisition Reform Act (2009), 211 Welch, Edward F., 93, 112 West, Bing, 110 Whitehead, Alfred North, 10, 223 wholeness concept, 178–181, 281–283, 285, 293, 300 Wilbur, Curtis, 45 Willard, Robert F., 191–192 Wills, Steven, 6, 286 Wilson, Woodrow, 53 winning wars, 8–9 Wirtz, James, 194 Wohlstetter, Albert, 244 Wolfowitz, Paul, 165–166 Wolfowitz Doctrine, 165–166 women: Tailhook scandal, 128–129 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 101 Woolsey, James, 110 World War I: German fleet actions, 53–54; interwar campaign of learning, 42–51 World War II: barbell strategy following Pearl Harbor attack, 228–229; civilian scientists’ work, 85; fleet command reorganization, 3; interwar campaign of learning, 42–51; naval use of war games, 41, 51; prewar and Cold War naval ecologies, 95–100; punctuated evolution of layered security networks, 226–227; shifting naval ecology, 55–60; Turing’s contribution to digital computing, 87; uncertainty in operations analysis, 203; United Nations creation, 69; US facilities in Eurasia, 74 Xi Jinping, 245, 251, 258–259 Yang Yi, 262(n48) Young, John, 201–202 Zakheim, Dov, 127–128 Zumwalt, Elmo, 4, 80, 92, 135, 195, 202 Zumwalt-class destroyer, 191–192

About the Book

The US Navy is the most formidable naval force in the world—yet, it seems ill-suited to face today’s challenges, especially the rise of China’s maritime power. What explains this paradox? Looking for answers, John Hanley explores how the navy has negotiated its place in the broad national security establishment, especially in the decades since World War II. Hanley is particularly interested in the evolution of the navy’s organizational and operational dynamics. Tracing how it has adapted to peace and war over time, he sheds light on its relationships within the ecosystem (Congress, the DoD, the defense industry, etc.) in which it operates, and how it has attempted to adapt and respond to shifting national and global environments. John T. Hanley, Jr., is nonresident research fellow at the US Naval

War College.

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