Ep 105: Dmitry Filipoff on Modern Naval Tactics
Dmitry Filipoff, head of online content at the Center for International Maritime Security
Aaron MacLean:
How is combat at sea actually going to work if there is a great power war, say between the US and China within the next decade? What does the evolution of precision standoff weapons mean for naval tactics? How is the US Navy doing in its preparations? How about the Chinese? It's back to war fighting on School of War today as we get into what fleet tactics look like or could look like. They're sure to evolve in the crucible of battle in 2024.
Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today, Dmitry Filipoff. He is the head of online content at the Center for International Maritime Security. He's written some really thought-provoking pieces about enable tactics, operations, strategy in CIMSEC publications. And Dmitry, I'm delighted to have you on the show today.
Dmitry Filipoff:
Thank you for having me, Aaron.
Aaron MacLean:
So let's start really big picture, because you've written things that are big picture. So this is fair game. I'm going to make an assertion. You feel free to challenge the premise here, but my assertion is the United States surface fleet effectively last fought a war, as most people would understand the term war, in 1945. There's a general expectation that there's going to be another war here pretty soon, probably in the Pacific, where the United States surface fleet will play an important, if not the central role. There's obviously been plenty of fighting on the surface of the seas between 1945 and today, to include a lot of fighting by the US Navy. And I feel like a lot of, I mean I'm not a navel guy, so I feel like a lot of listeners, I can picture surface naval warfare because I can picture World War II movies, essentially, in the era where planes launched from carriers, and submarines and ships, for the most part, were activating their weapons systems with eyes on the adversary, and a series of tactics and operational concepts that flowed from that reality.
The new reality, in whatever year it's going to be, 2024, 5, 6, 7, 8 will look very different. My first question to you is what are the big evolutions that have occurred over the course of America's holiday from major surface war?
Dmitry Filipoff:
No, thank you for that question. There's been an absolutely tremendous amount of change in terms of capability, in terms of tactics. And as you rightly point out, the lack of experience and the lack of seeing a lot of this stuff actually playing out in the real world and real world operations. There are so many capabilities, you could pick out electronic warfare, cyber, space. All of this has had a tremendous impact on how a major war at sea would be fought, but we don't actually know too well with how all of that's actually going to come together to produce specific tactical dynamics and combinations. What kinds of capabilities and methods are going to be superior in that? And so we don't really know with a lot of confidence of just how a lot of this war fighting is going to work out.
When you ask that question, a certain quote comes to mind that was made by Navy Captain Tom Shugart, where he made an interesting point saying if US Navy Jammers can be made to make China's anti-ship ballistic missiles consistently miss, that's a completely different war than if that were not the case. And there are so many different variables like that, probably dozens of variables of capability of methods where if you just take just one thing and it goes in a different direction, you have a completely different kind of conflict. And so there's just a lot of unknowns there. I would say not just of the surface fleet, but with the Navy in general. Naval aviation does have the benefit of the Vietnam experience, was a very hard wake up call for them in a lot of respects and they learned a lot from that.
But you are right to folks on the surface Navy and their state of experience and understanding here. And it's important to think about then specifically, because if you think about war of China, the surface Navy is going to bring most of the maritime air defense capability and most of the maritime long range cruise missile launch capability as well. And so a lot of the firepower that the US Navy can bring to that contingency is going to be based in the surface fleet. And so you're right that there is a lot of riding on them.
Aaron MacLean:
I want to get into the specifics of how you envision the major conceptual scenario as working out in the present day in a minute. But before we get to that, I mean you highlight how other services or even other components of the Navy have historical experiences they can latch onto, obviously in the ground context, not only are there historical experiences that our services have directly participated in, but we can watch today, you can watch the war in Ukraine and see what drone integration and counter UAS stuff looks like. There's a naval component in Ukraine as well, in the Black Sea. There are other, within the last generation, plenty of other naval engagements. If you go back to the '80s, obviously we have the Tanker Wars, you've got the Falklands, you've got stuff that is closer to the present day, such that the technology is relevant. What historical examples do you think are most relevant when thinking about surface combat, the kind of surface combat we're likely to see? Where are you going? Where should people be going to mine insights for the present?
Dmitry Filipoff:
Yeah, it's hard to say. There's three examples that stand out. The first one is the Arab Israeli War, 1973, was the first time you saw ships dueling with anti-ship missiles in a pretty consistent way. Basically, Israeli missile boats fighting Arab missile boats. You saw uses of electronic warfare being used to spoof attacks and defeat attacks without any kinetic counters to incoming missiles. So that was a very interesting experience because it's the first real case we have of these missiles being used in a force on force conflict. But that said, and this is true of almost every single case of anti-ship missile warfare that has happened since the capability was invented, is that involved very low volumes of fire. We're talking a couple missiles fired per ship at most. When you look at how high-end naval conflict has been envisioned since the '60s and '70s, and you're talking about the Soviets and the US Navy, you're talking much larger volumes of fire. You're talking 100+ missiles going per carrier battle group.
And so it plays into this theme of the deficit of experience, that we really haven't seen large scale missile warfare, even though we've seen a little bit of any ship missiles being used. The second good example is the Falklands. You see a lot of interesting combined arms, naval war fighting examples there, lots of unexpected surprises, and just in terms of how well the Argentines were able to damage the British and sink British warships, just how poorly British warships did in some respects when it comes to air defense. There were some interesting examples there that are definitely instructive.
And the most interesting one to me is actually one that's taking place right now, which is the attacks in the Red Sea, where you're seeing for the first time, I'm pretty sure ever, where you're seeing large scale salvo engagements between warships and missiles and drones. You're talking a dozen plus missiles and drones being launched and you're seeing US Navy warships having to shoot down a relatively large scale volume of fire compared to the historical experience. And so we're still in the middle of that. It's still a pretty new experience and there's still a lot of lessons learned, but we should be mining that very carefully for lessons about what this kind of conflict will look like.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, let's linger there for a second. What are we learning? What are you learning, watching the day to day right now in the Red Sea?
Dmitry Filipoff:
Yeah, it's hard to say exactly because a lot of the details are, they're hard to perceive. When you talk about naval warfare, it's not like in land warfare where you can have embedded journalists and you can have videos on telegram or something. War at sea is remote and so you have a harder time getting open source data on what exactly is going on. And so you have to rely a lot on what the government's willing to say. And it's interesting to see basically these large scale missile attacks being launched against commercial vessels and the US is putting itself in a position to intervene there.
So maybe not so much in terms of combat lessons learned, but in terms of as an element of strategy where we can use the US Navy ships as a way to launch limited intervention into the strike campaign of another country or another entity. That's an interesting strategic innovation for the surface fleet where we're basically going to put ships in the position of shooting down someone else's missiles and attacks even if they're not directed at those ships exactly. So that's a strategic innovation that is probably worth considering.
Aaron MacLean:
I want to ask you a really, it's a stupid question, but I feel like your answer to it is going to be interesting. Which is, given how we all expect that anti-ship missiles, one way or another, are going to be at the center, they are at the center of the story right now and they're going to be the center of the story of any major naval engagement in the Pacific, what does that mean? What does the rise to significance of anti-ship missiles mean for naval warfare?
Dmitry Filipoff:
Yeah, it's a very important question. It's a first order question to understand how this all works. What the anti-ship missile did that was really unique and powerful was that it marked a break in naval history. Where up until the point of the anti-ship missile, the major ship killing weapons of the day, the dominant capability was always concentrated in capital ships, the big gun battle ship, or the flat top aircraft carrier of World War II. Now you have relatively small warships or planes or land-based launchers that can launch basically the premier weapon of a new age of warfare. And so you have a lot more distributed capability there. You have the ability to launch large volumes of fire from a lot of spread out assets, whereas before naval warfare was very concentrated in a handful of capital ship platforms. The anti-ship missile, it's interesting because basically if you're a warship carrying a couple dozen of these things in your vertical launch cells, you have to almost think in the vein of being a carrier commander, where you're basically launching a one-way airstrike of very intelligent kamikaze type missiles.
And so you have to think in terms of missile firepower as another expression of air power. And when you think about anti-ship missiles, they're becoming very intelligent, they're becoming very automated. It's not just something that shoots in one direction and it just figures it out on its own. We're starting to see behaviors from enemy ship missiles where they can coordinate attacks, they can do jamming, they can fly in certain formations that make them more lethal. It's a very interesting space when you talk about AI or autonomy. Enemy ship missiles have been an area of autonomous capability that is extremely lethal in a place that's definitely a place of interest to look at. So this is a capability area that we need to pay pretty close attention to.
Aaron MacLean:
You are an advocate for, I take it, and a kind of explicator of something called Distributed Maritime Operations. Which I personally, I see a term like that and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, because I just have kind of a horror of jargon, and yet you do need technical terms. And I take it that this technical term is very important and ought to be properly understood. And it points in the direction of what you were just pointing to, which, just precision weapons in general, whatever domain we're talking about, have led to dispersion on the battlefield. That is a big and obviously longstanding historical pattern which we addressed here on the show in various ways over the course of our existence. How is this playing out at sea and what does Distributed Maritime Operations really mean?
Dmitry Filipoff:
Yeah, so DMO is the Navy's main war fighting concept right now. I'll admit that as a little bit of an outsider, I don't know exactly what it means to the Navy. I wrote a series on this concept called Fighting DMO, and the big reason I wrote it was that a lot of people in the Navy were telling me that there's a little bit of room for more precise definition here. We need more specifics, we need to be able to explain this thing in a concrete way. When you think about war fighting concepts like AirLand Battle or Force Design 2030, those are things that have pretty... There are specifics to it. The level of in-depth understanding that there is about DMO is not to the level of those concepts, for example. So there's an opportunity here to kind of figure out, what does this mean? How do we define this? And what does it mean for how we should be changing the Navy on how to fight?
And the reason the anti-ship missile goes so well with DMO, or at least the idea of it, is that up until very recently, the US militaries anti-ship missile firepower was completely concentrated in aircraft carriers. It was the only platform that had the weapons and the doctrine to basically launch these things at standoff range, and with enough volume of fire. The US military, pretty much for the entire Cold War up until the modern day, has had virtually no anti-ship missiles in its surface warships, in its bombers and its submarines and its land-based forces. By comparison, the Soviet Union, Russia and China have had all of that for decades. And so only with the advent of things like LRASM and the maritime strike, Tomahawk, recently, are we starting to see US military anti-ship firepower finally go beyond just the flight deck of the aircraft carrier.
And so there's a lot of room to be done in terms of thinking about, what does this mean? Because this is a major evolution that's happening. There's a lot of options that you're opening up here and it's really important to figure out how do we put all of this firepower together now that we have all these communities that are going to be getting these new tools. And it's important to figure that out because it'll give you some insight into maybe how the Chinese and the Russians have been thinking about this for some time, and what their options are for fighting the US Navy.
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah, well, we'll get to them in a minute. I am very curious to your thoughts on how our adversaries are doing, but sticking with us for now. Another first order question for you. I want to step back for a second from operational concepts and then we return to it. But let's think about the Western Pacific for a second. We have this navy, what are we going to use it for? What's its purpose? What is the Navy doing in the Western Pacific, we're going to conduct these distributed operations in order to achieve? As opposed to, why don't we just have an air force or just have land-based facilities? What is the navy, the surface Navy specifically, actually going to do that is going to then require it to fight with this distributed approach?
Dmitry Filipoff:
Yeah, so the value proposition of the fleet and the service fleet in this concept is basically, it gives the US some ability to contest something like a Taiwan contingency or some China contingency. Because there's a concern that the US has a lot of allies, it has a lot of forward bases in the area, but China has a tremendous capability to range those bases with their own missile firepower, which is very considerable. And it's also a question of maybe some allies may not want to let the US use these bases in a time of war because of how politically sensitive it is, or how foreign policy calculations or so on.
And so this is basically a hallmark of the Navy's value proposition to the nation. And its options is that it can use the open oceans to provide some options to decision makers. And in the case of something like this, the Navy can provide a tremendous option for long range cruise missile fires, for example, around Taiwan or the Chinese mainland, if the national leadership wants those kinds of options. And so that's the main scenario that I think about when I'm framing these things. There are many other ways it can play out, but basically I'm trying to figure out how does DMO work in a Taiwan contingency? And you can see that there's a lot of benefits there.
Aaron MacLean:
So in order to achieve these things, we're going to do these distributed maritime operations. Let's go back to that and let's say more about that. Presumably, as you suggest, it means at the most basic level, spreading things out. It means more than that. Put some color on it for us, would you? What will it actually look like in practice? What is required to do to spread things out and then make them fight effectively? Can you spread them out too far? Just explain to us what we're really talking about.
Dmitry Filipoff:
Yeah, when you're talking about distributed, it is an amorphous definition. And it helps to think about it that there is such a thing as being too distributed, which means that you're stretched thin and you can't combine effects, and it's more of a liability than an asset at that point. So you have to be able to understand that there is such a thing as too much distribution. And when you take it in the other direction, you're too concentrated, and of course that creates its own set of liabilities. You have to think about distribution as a happy medium between the two. When I think about it in terms of massing fires and anti-ship fires, basically what you're trying to do is taking a variety of platforms, service warships, aircraft carriers, submarines and so on, and you're trying to create some combined arms firing scheme that gives you a lot of options to put firepower on an opposing fleet.
And so in the specific operational context I was thinking about, there's an operational imperative for China to keep the US Navy at least a thousand miles away out from the mainland or else they're going to have to be dealing with maybe hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles, for example. So there's an operational imperative for China to be able to contest the US Navy out to that rank. And so when you think about that as a point of departure, how do you layer different capabilities from different platforms on top of one of another to have options for China, for example, being able to mass fires at a thousand miles away. And so, one way you can think about it is that the surface fleet, in particular, is a really key part of that combined arms team because they can maintain basically a pretty deep base of fire that undergirds the rest of the mass firing scheme.
When you look at things like submarines, submarines are valuable, you don't want to betray their location. When you look at airplanes, there's logistical requirements for maintaining a lot of airplanes over the ocean for a long period of time to have on-call fires. And so that surface fleet is really important in helping get around the weaknesses and the disadvantages of the other platform. Now the challenge is that when you have two combined arms teams of fleets engaging with each other and one of the fleets substantially outranges the other, which means that one surface fleet is outranged by the capabilities of the other, the scheme, it falls apart or it twists into something that's very disadvantageous. Because if you're fighting a navy that outranges your anti-ship missile firepower, that means that you have to rely on platforms that have a better ability to strike ships first by circumventing the anti-ship firepower.
So for example, that means more dependence on airplanes, more dependence on submarines, and that forces you to depend more heavily on, and deal with those disadvantages I mentioned earlier. And so you really want to have a range advantage so you can have a superior combined arm scheme of massing anti-ship fires against another [inaudible 00:19:33]. So that's one point of departure I had to think about this.
Aaron MacLean:
Got it. And well, say more, if you would, about massing fires then, because obviously integral to this concept. I mean at some basic level it just makes sense, right? You've got a target, you don't want to just shoot one. There's an infantry way of understanding this, anything that's worth shooting once is worth shooting 20 or 30 times. I take it that at some base level that's what you're talking about, but say more and put it-
Dmitry Filipoff:
Yeah, it's important to note that this is one of the biggest things you have to understand about modern naval warfare and how it's different than modern land warfare in some respects, is that it's not enough to be accurate, it's not enough to have good target information, because the warships that you're shooting at have dozens of missile launch cells. They have many layers of defenses, soft kill, non-kinetic defenses as well. If you're going to kill a modern warship today, you're going to have to launch a lot of missiles at it to be able to break through a lot of defenses, in the hopes that maybe a couple of missiles can actually score the killing blows. And so when I talk about massing fires, it's a principle operational challenge. How do we get enough missile firepower together that we can overwhelm the defenses of these very powerful surface warships?
And that's a major challenge, and that's a key point of logic in trying to figure out how our navy is going to fight each other today is, how are they going to break through these extremely robust missile defenses? And I would also suggest that it's not something that's that sustainable. There's a lot of talk about industrial base, and can we really build enough things for a contingency? And there's a pretty good chance that we could blow through a lot of the missile ammo in a couple of weeks of trying to mass fires against navies. It's such an extremely expensive and attrition centric form of warfare that we have to be mindful of that. And so we have to think about, do we really want to do fight this way or are there ways to offset naval salvo warfare? Or circumvent it?
So for example, if you're using a submarine to sink a warship, using a torpedo launch from a submarine, it's probably maybe 5% of the cost of launching a massive salvo to kill the warship from above the waterline. Because there's a lot fewer defenses below the waterline than above the waterline when you're trying to overwhelm with missiles. And so you're trying to think in terms of efficiencies. Submarines are actually a really good way to just get out of this dynamic and have a much more cost-effective way of not having to deal with mass fires.
Aaron MacLean:
That's really interesting. Well, let's come back to this issue of scarcity in a minute, because obviously it's on everyone's minds and it's critical. So we'll add that to our list, along with China, of things we're going to come back to. But before we get to that, what might be helpful, it'd be helpful for me, can you walk us through a scenario and describe...? Pick a target, can be a Chinese target from your imagination or a generic target with a standard set of missile defenses for 2024, and describe how, realistically, you would go about trying to defeat it, in a little bit of detail.
Dmitry Filipoff:
Sure. No, that's a good question. So let's say we have a trio of Chinese Type 052D destroyers. Baseline capability of that unit, we're looking at about 180 launch cells, many layers of missile defenses, and you have to figure out how are you going to break through those defenses to defeat it. You can't use the US Navy surface fleet because they're outranged by those Chinese destroyers. Those Chinese destroyers have YJ-18 missiles, which are far longer range, and they have much more of them than what the US Navy destroyers have. And so you have to figure out, how am I going to sink this most likely using carriers? And so basically what that involves is that you have to figure out... In order to overwhelm just a single surface action group, you're getting most of the strike fighters on deck for that. You're talking about three to four squadrons of F-18s and F-35s that have to come together, loaded out with anti-ship missiles, and basically trying to concentrate them so they line up the timing of their launches.
So all those missiles basically break over the horizon of the warship right around the same time, and can overwhelm the defenses. Because if you do some missiles here, some missiles here, you're not going to overwhelm those defenses, they'll be able to defeat those missiles in detail. You really have to line up the timing of these launches so they can be able to mass effectively. Now, what's really interesting about this is that from the perspective of the defending surface warships, they have a very lethal problem to deal with, even if it looks like, on paper, they have a lot of defensive capability. So what happens is that basically, because radar for the most part is a line of sight system, and if these missiles are sea skimming, they don't see those missiles until they're about 20 miles out. Which is a remarkable thing, that the curvature of the earth and the horizon is literally one of the deadliest things to a warship.
And so basically if you have subsonic missiles crossing that 20 mile horizon limit, those ships have about two minutes to shoot down the entire salvo or they're going to be taking hits. And so as those missiles are closing the distance, the ships are engaging their defensive systems and the missiles could be jamming, the missiles could be conducting maneuvers, making it a much more complicated problem. The service warships have to figure out, on the spot, a precise distribution of fire so they don't deplete their magazines all in one go. And so it's a very complicated and highly automated process of trying to do that missile engagement in those final few miles. It's something that Aegis does for the service fleet. China has something similar. And basically as the missiles get closer and closer, it becomes a much harder challenge. The missiles have the ability to basically pick out a specific part on the warship, to hit it, and conduct the most damage.
Basically it's a one-shot kill type of thing. With naval warfare, people don't realize that the emphasis in naval warfare is not about taking hits and keeping fighting, it's about not getting hit at all. Because there's almost no chance of surviving a single hit from an anti-ship missile, especially one that is smart enough to strike you and your magazines on purpose, for example. And so it's a very lethal engagement. Now in terms of who has the advantage between three destroyers of the Chinese Navy and the entire air wing of a carrier, it's hard to say without more specifics. But it gets to the problem that is at the heart of the issue, that you cannot spend the entire air wing of a single carrier sinking just three destroyers, but that is what it's going to take right now without the capabilities organized.
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah, I'm struck in... I mean, feel free to keep going if you've got more to say there. But let me throw in, and you can respond to this as well, that an answer ago, when you were talking about cost-effectiveness, you immediately went to submarines, and said basically it's more efficient to use submarines to kill Chinese ships. And now when I asked you how you're going to... Just pick a generic example, how do you kill a bunch of Chinese ships? You went to the air wing. It's striking to me that in neither scenario, you're not advocating for the use of surface ships to kill China. What are the other navy...? The other Navy surface ships are out there defending the carriers? What is their purpose?
Dmitry Filipoff:
It's interesting, because the high-end missions of the surface fleet, since the end of World War II all the way through the Cold War until today has been almost exclusively anti-air warfare and anti-submarine warfare. With how US doctrine has been designed for the Navy and the US military in general, carriers are what sink ships with missiles at long range. The surface fleet is almost exclusively a defensive player in US Navy high-end war fighting doctrine since the Cold War. And that's why having things like maritime strike Tomahawk is such a big deal. In other navies, that's not necessarily the case. I would say a lot of allied navies have a similar approach, but when you look at Russia, when you look at China, they have some very serious anti-ship firepower on their surface warships. And they want them to be more offensive in design than what the US Navy has in line for its own surface warships. But now with these recent capabilities, you can see the US Navy trying to do something similar to what the Chinese and the Russians have been doing for a long time.
Aaron MacLean:
So there's two obvious, probably more, but two that occurred to me that are obvious problems with the operational concepts that we're talking about here. The first you've already alluded to. In a way you've already alluded to both, but the first is the scarcity issue, that in a conflict that lasts more than a couple of days, pretty shockingly soon, from the perspectives of most Americans who are only just starting to wake up to this reality, we start to run out of stuff. And that's not even counting losing stuff in combat, that's just counting using munitions. So that's issue one, which we should address, and I'm curious how you think that... And then issue two, which I want get into is, and presumably we are thinking about this offensively as well, this distribution and the clever way in which mass fire solutions are going to be found and coordinated and everything. Well, that all depends on the existence of the network and the communications and the whole cycle of sensors and analysis and communication, et cetera, that the network provides.
So obviously having your network attacked is something that you're going to anticipate, and then we're also going to be going out and looking to attack somebody else's network. And the moment somebody succeeds in really significantly jamming up someone's network, either in the literal sense of jamming it in the electromagnetic spectrum, or in some other sense, cyber or whatever, all of a sudden your fancy distributed fleet is just a bunch of ships out sailing alone in the water. So two kind of obvious challenges. I'm sure we're not breaking any news here on either front. How do you think about these things? How do you think the Navy is thinking about these challenges? I guess you could see, certainly the latter one is also an opportunity. It's as much an opportunity as a challenge. The former one I worry is more just a challenge.
Dmitry Filipoff:
Yeah, yeah. I'm not totally sure how the Navy is thinking about this stuff, but they're definitely thinking about it in some way. To the scarcity question, when we're talking about naval salvo warfare, when we're talking about massing fires, we're talking about a type of combat where you can blow through 10 years worth of weapons procurement in about a couple of minutes. And so it's an extremely depleting form of warfare, it's extremely expensive. And something you hear in the discourse of defense analysis issues is that there's a bias toward short-term thinking. We're only going to think about this war maybe a month or two out, the high end conflict, because we're just going to run out of stuff. Well, what if they choose to keep on fighting, right? Are we going to be going back to the days of guns and torpedoes for surface warships because they run out of missiles?
We need to think about how does the lack of munitions force us to adapt in some really hard ways? And I don't know if enough thinking has been done on that, and it's a really important question to ask because it's really underappreciated how China probably has a better industrial base than the United States when it comes to maritime power and navies in particular. To give you some quick statistics, in the past 10 to 15 years, the Chinese Navy has built 40 large surface warships, so destroys and cruisers, about 30 frigates, about 70 corvettes, and that's 100+ warships they've built in about 10 years. I don't know what the exact figure is for the US Navy, but it's nothing close. And so when you think about sustainability, when you think about scarcity, they can crank out warships. They've got the facilities.
China has almost half of the world's market share in commercial ship building industry. They have a massive industrial base for this kind of thing, if they really need to dive into it. In terms of missiles, that's harder to gauge, of course, with China. But an interesting factoid on this is that when you look at the annual China military power report, there's always a line there that says how many ballistic missile tests that China has done, and it's a number that's in the hundreds. And there's always a line that says, "Oh, by the way, and this is more ballistic missile tests than everyone else in the world put together." And you see that, if you go back a couple of years, the line appears again and again and again. So China has a really massive industrial base. And there is a real problem, probably a real threat that they can outlast us in this kind of warfare.
Going to the question about the network, that is something that's a huge part of it, of course. We should maybe lean into it a little bit more and recognize that it's probably a question of when, not if. And we should have doctrine for it. If the fleet gets split apart and everyone has to do their own mass fires, if these standalone forces have to figure out, "How do I put this together on the spot without having to be able to call fires from people who are far away?" They need to be able to be prepared to do that. We don't want to have single points of failure here, we want to have redundancy. And so we need to be able to train people and exercise people in such a way that they know how to handle themselves when a network goes down. And that's going to be a challenge in a form of warfare that's dependent so much upon being able to bring a lot of capabilities together.
Aaron MacLean:
So back to the scarcity issue first. In a way, the good news scenario is everyone runs out of stuff, and we're there slugging it out with guns and torpedoes, and to the extent we have torpedoes left. But lower end systems at closer ranges, that's like the good news scenario, which is a crazy thing to say, because it's a long war where everyone's run out of stuff except for their most significant scenarios' thing that they prioritize the most. Everything else has to use what it's got. And we just had a really interesting conversation on the show with a guy named [inaudible 00:33:04] Raymond who wrote a really interesting book about how we should all just be expecting long wars of attrition, that that's the pattern in great power complex, historically speaking. And it's crazy that everyone, to include, apparently, the Chinese, seems to expect a short, sharp war. That's not what you would predict, looking at the historical record.
But what you're saying presents actually, there's a much more alarming scenario. The more alarming scenario is we run out first, we run out well ahead of when they're going to run out. So I'm going to make these numbers up. Let's say we've got four weeks of stuff at high intensity and they've got five months, six months. Well, that gap is long enough that you could just imagine being defeated, you're just simply defeated. The ranges are too long, the dominance and overmatch is too great for too long, and whatever, Taiwan falls, or the Philippines. You can come up with the strategic outcomes, the consequence of that many months of being outfought. But what's the good news here? Is there good news? Do you have any ideas to mitigate this, besides build more stuff more quickly?
Dmitry Filipoff:
We should be trying to figure out in terms of offset strategies, counters, go asymmetric somehow, try to go non-kinetic. Maybe think in terms of cyber or something like that. I personally don't have many answers in what that actually looks like, but that's how we need to be thinking about this. What can we do to get out of this dynamic where we are so dependent on material superiority to win kinetically? It's a very difficult problem to think about as you're pointing out. And it's going to demand a lot of creativity, and that creativity needs to happen now, not when we're running out of stuff in the middle of a war.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, of course, for long periods of the Cold War, we were outmatched in conventional forces on the European landmass, and there was an answer to this, and it was extended deterrence with nuclear weapons. And we have these commitments. For example, with Japan, we have treaty allies where extended deterrence is contemplated as a part of the strategy. It is nuts though, that we seem to have napped our way into a situation where that may be the only good solution because we simply didn't build enough stuff. That's pretty shocking.
Dmitry Filipoff:
People don't usually think about munitions inventories as a hard limit on strategy until it imposes on itself in a really tough situation. There's always some stories with Cold War history or recent history where some senior level official gets the briefing on how much stuff we have and they're like, "Wait, we only have enough for a week's worth of war?" And it's because there is a habitual tendency that when bureaucracies need money, they'd like to pull it from weapon stocks. Because it's not today's problem, it's tomorrow's issue down the line. So they're kicking the can down the road. And so we need more discipline in terms of foresight, but also just the mechanisms of budgeting and making priorities and understanding these stockpiles as a strategic asset or a strategic liability, we need to give that credit where it's due.
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah. Let me ask you about aircraft carriers, because in a way you've already pointed to the answer, you gave them a role in the fight when we were speaking earlier. But in this general process of dispersion and the way in which the battlefield is more scarcely populated for all sorts of obvious reasons, the aircraft carrier does stand out as a exception to the rule. It is an extraordinary concentration of really expensive stuff and lots and lots of sailors on one platform, which suggests that in the new scheme of things, it would be an extraordinarily valuable target and quite vulnerable. You suggested it has a role to play a few minutes ago, make the case or don't. What's your take? What is your input to this obvious discussion?
Dmitry Filipoff:
Yeah, no, I love this question, because what I said in my example there with the operational narrative is exactly how I want the Navy to stop using aircraft carriers, which is how it's always been using them since World War II. You don't want to be in a position where you have to launch the entire air wing just to kill a couple ships. And my vision of the aircraft carrier, of what it can be doing for distributed operations, is that when you finally have anti-ship missile firepower across surface warships, bombers, and submarines and land-based forces, you can use the aircraft carrier to quarterback that force, because you're talking about the network, you're talking about the sensor demands. When you're trying to hit targets hundreds of miles away with missiles, that's a very information intensive process. And so basically the aircraft carrier can play a really critical role in this in terms of scouting, in terms of queuing fires, in terms of using uplinks and data links to basically maneuver these missile salvos against targets.
Envision a combat scenario where you have a bunch of surface warships launching Tomahawk missiles at a range of 500+ miles, or even close to 1,000 miles. And the target is of course moving, the situation is changing, but you have maybe a couple F-35s that are closer to the targets, who can use the robust sensor fusion capabilities to make sure those missiles are on target, talk to the missiles, maneuver them into certain formations, make sure they're getting fresh targeting information so they arrive on target. And once they prosecute the target and the engagement, you can get immediate feedback. Aviation can be in a place to get feedback on the engagement and speed or decision cycle, because it's going to be frustrating if you go through all the trouble of launching these missiles and at the end of it, you don't even know if you hit the target.
And so there's critical information demands that go into this kind of warfare for salvo warfare, for massing fires and naval aviation. And specifically naval aviation from carriers is uniquely situated to work those kill chains. And this is something that is really underappreciated about the carrier and about salvo warfare in general, is that I don't think the carrier is dead. I don't think the carrier is necessarily obsolete. There is still a very important role for this platform to play in this form of warfare, but it's going to be more of a quarterbacking information centric kind of role rather than making them shoulder the burden of launching all the strikes.
Aaron MacLean:
So about a year ago you wrote a piece called A Fleet Adrift about the current state of preparation for war in the Navy. The title suggests that you have some reservations. Assuming that everything we've discussed should be gospel, which all of my opinions should be gospel. So you have every right to think that of yourself, and that the Navy should be preparing to fight in the ways you're suggesting. How are they doing? How is the Navy doing, in your best estimate, in getting ready for what's to come?
Dmitry Filipoff:
Yeah, I'm actually worried that I'm wrong about everything, and it keeps me up sometimes. So yeah, I don't know if any of this stuff I'm talking about is the right answer, but it's worth thinking about. Yeah, what I talked about in that piece, it was about how the Navy prepares for war. What is the state of force development? What is the state of operational learning? And basically, is the Navy in a place where it can learn how to do these things? Is the Navy actually in a position to change itself as an organization and meet the challenge of getting good at high-end warfare? And it's something that, there are reasons for some reservations about that, and there's a lot of room for improvement. What I'm talking about with salvo warfare, and the ways you've described this, this is a very vicious form of warfare. This is a combined arms form of warfare involving a lot of teams playing together at the same time.
But the thing that I focus on in the A Fleet Drift piece is the state of Navy combat exercising, which tends to be scripted, tends to focus on one thing at a time, and it tends to be against opposition forces that are deliberately designed to lose. And this has been the norm of navy large scale exercises for many years, decades. And this is not at all realistic compared to the demands of high-end warfare at sea, and what we've been talking about. And so when you have these crucibles take on this format, it becomes problematic because you need these exercises to train people, to vet your concepts, to vet your capabilities, and you need them to set a standard. Rather than scripting the risk out of the exercise or watering things down so someone's idea works, you're supposed to be maintaining a standard. And if someone's idea doesn't meet that standard, you go back to the drawing board.
You don't script the exercise, you don't use exercises to validate something in some won and done event, you use them as a way to rigorously test things. And so that's just one important symptom of something that I'm concerned about in the Navy, which is the state of tactical focus. I talked to a lot of people in the fleet and there's a lot of concern over, "I spend my whole job worrying about maintenance and about administration, but I don't get enough time in the fleet thinking about tactics, thinking about war fighting." The incentives aren't set up to reward people or give people a place where they can distinguish themselves as above average tacticians. I would say naval aviation is better about this. I would say the surface fleet has more room for improvement, by comparison. But this is a really important conversation to have because we can talk about war fighting concepts all day, and what the fight's going to look like, but can the Navy actually teach its people how to do these things?
And it's a problem when you look at very flashy and high-end war fighting concepts like AirSea Battle for example, which envisioned very complicated and joint operations. But then you look at the Navy's combat exercises, and they're training only one thing at a time against opposition that always loses, and you see a major disconnect there. Where you see that, how does this concept make sense when they're not teaching it to people on the deck plate level? And the real problem is that these kinds of concepts, these kinds of war games, they influence the war plans, the O plans, the actual...
If the US goes to war against China tomorrow, they have playbooks and they have ideas on what they're going to do. And because of the nature of how force development and operational learning has been functioning, it's almost clear that there are tactics and operations in those war plans that have not been practiced, that have not been tested in real world exercises. They have not been taught to the force in a fleet wide level. And so we're running the risk of sending people into a fight that they don't really know what they're going to be in for. And that can be a strategic problem down the line.
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah, and just thinking about how you would design realistic exercises, based on everything we've discussed so far this hour, that itself is actually a challenge, because you're talking about a day one scenario that looks very different from a day 30 scenario. Of course, everything may be great on day 30 and you haven't run out of stuff and the other guy's network is screwed and your network is robust and you're just winning. There's just so much winning you don't know what to do with yourself. But it seems more realistic that even if you haven't lost, even if some things are going pretty well and you're still in the fight, you should be practicing for new scenarios where you have run out of stuff and you can't talk to the other... You need to have exercises that iterate in this way so that the crews can practice, and the various structures can practice at the various levels of resource access and communications access. And that would be, it seems both hard to design, just sitting here as a layman, and also critical of the essence.
Dmitry Filipoff:
Yeah, it's fundamental. It's fundamental. It is difficult. It is hard to do. It's a lot easier to keep a schedule and keep things on track when you don't take away any critical enablers and stuff like that. But you have to train for that. And that's sometimes a theme that I've heard from folks in the fleet is that some of these exercises, they make major assumptions about critical enablers, "Let's go into this with all our logistics intact, all our communications intact." Those are the explicitly... Those are going to be the main targets of an adversary that knows what they're doing. And so we need to be able to tolerate that discomfort and we need to deliberately design the system, that we are going to go into these things knowing that there's going to be some friction.
Because the thing that always comes up with navy exercises, that there's so many events stuffed into a tight schedule that if there's some friction in there, it derails the schedule and that causes problems down the line, and so on. And so that means that the schedules aren't designed for these things. And that's a frequent critique that you'll see from people inside the Navy is that a lot of the combat exercising and training has been almost relegated into a box checking exercise. It feels more of like a bureaucratic thing they just have to get over with rather than a really invigorating professional development experience for the war fighter. And so that's a major issue with this.
Aaron MacLean:
Well, and this is something that's come up here on the show before and it worries me deeply. I spent a few years at a Navy installation at the Naval Academy, on the faculty there, and there's no particularly diplomatic way to say this, but the fact that there hasn't been a major surface war since 1945 does worry me in this regard. It worries me, is almost like talking about fundamentals, but at a human level, even beneath, there's a way in which... Look, Iraq and Afghanistan were not Normandy and Okinawa, but they had their serious moments, for sure, and a lot of marines and soldiers died. And it just introduces a seriousness to the enterprise that you can't get away from. And that is obviously salutatory to training and realistic exercises and the things that we're talking about here. You have a whole community, through no fault of its own, just as a function of American dominance, that has not had any kind of extended, or at scale kind of way.
I guess as you point out, what we're seeing in the Red Sea right now is maybe the closest, certainly since the '80s. You're the expert, not me, on this dimension of history, so correct me if I go wrong here. And even there, the Houthis ain't the PLA Navy, so I'm worried. Listeners to the show will know I'm worried about the Navy and worried about, at the sailor level, do these young people know what they've signed up for? What's it going to look like when some of these missiles hit? And what are the requirements for you on a human level going to be? I'm pretty confident in other components of the American Defense establishment because of these relatively recent experiences of combat. I'm confident that the answer to this question is yes, those young people are being prepared by people who've lived it. And I don't know the answer.
Dmitry Filipoff:
It's a major challenge and it's a problem. It's 30+ years of worrying about low intensity conflict on top of not having any major war since 1945, and that leaves a deep impression on an institution. And I understand if some things are going to atrophy, but when you think about militaries, we're thinking about organizations that they don't sometimes do as good of a job at remembering the lessons of their own history as you would expect them to. There's a lot of forgetting, which is unfortunate because sometimes you'll hear something like, "This doctrine is written in the blood of people who died to help us learn it." Right? Well, the Navy compared to the Army, for example, has a very flimsy relationship with doctrine. It doesn't have as good of relationship with lessons of its own history.
And it's not just the lessons of fighting wars and specific combat lessons, but there's a very interesting story behind how the Navy got ready for World War II in the interwar period, which is the closest parallel, arguably to where we are today. And when you compare the Navy of the interwar period and the preparations that were being done then and the level of tactical and operational literacy of the flag officers and of the admirals of that generation, and what was being done, it's very different than what we see today. And we need to be mindful of that disparity and we need to be making more of an effort to remember institutional lessons learned.
Aaron MacLean:
And that navy, the Navy that you were pointing to as a model is still a Navy that lost its crown jewel fleet. I'm not sure if my term is correct here, but a major collection of its most important assets on the first day of the fighting. Well, last question for you here. How's China doing? How's the PLA Navy doing in getting ready?
Dmitry Filipoff:
They have a tremendous amount of momentum and they deserve to be taken very seriously. I've already talked about the shipbuilding, which is tremendous and substantial. The anti-ship missile arsenal is superior to the US navy's in a lot of ways. And also in terms of the training and the mindset and the exercising, it's important to understand that the Chinese Navy is a Navy that has no real large scale overseas commitments. They spend all of their time concentrated in their kind of near abroad, and they are configured in such a way that they can spend most of their time on working on themselves, in the way that we've been talking about. Whereas the US Navy is spread thin, and it's conducting operations, which is not the same thing as working on yourself through focused reps and sets of difficult exercises. And so the disposition of the modern Chinese navy has a lot more in common with the interwar period US Navy than the modern US Navy does.
And that's very critical for understanding that, how they are set up to learn. And I also, I've spent a lot of time researching how they do their combat exercises and how they do things, and they're extremely hard on themselves. They will openly say that the habit of scripting victory into exercises on purpose is a counterproductive habit, and we've got to work on stopping this. When you look at the specific scenarios, the capstone scenario of a Chinese surface Navy warship after their six-month basic phase thing, that capstone event they do at the end of that, is extremely intense. It's multi-domain. They go into it not knowing what to expect. You have lots of live opposition forces going after the ship, and they have an assessment mechanism where the Chinese Navy found that making the training organization in charge of the assessment creates counterproductive incentives like we've been talking about.
If you're the training organization, you have an incentive to pass the people you are training to show that you're doing your job. What the Chinese Navy, the service fleet does in this event is that they have a third party assessment mechanism where they have senior level people come in and literally stand behind the decision makers in CIC and grade them, and they provide candid critiques and stuff. And so by and large, I would say that the way they do their exercises, the way that they are configured to learn in terms of their overall force posture, they're very formidable, and I would not count them out.
Aaron MacLean:
Dmitry Filipoff of the Center for International Maritime Security. You can see things that he's written @cimsec.org. This has been a really interesting conversation. Maybe you'd be willing to come back some time. We can do a whole episode on just the PLA Navy, that'd be really interesting.
Dmitry Filipoff:
Sure.
Aaron MacLean:
Yeah. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you joining.
Dmitry Filipoff:
Thank you, Aaron.