Are there flaws within the US Navy’s distributed maritime operations?
Distributed maritime operations is now the U.S. Navy’s principal idea and doctrine in organizing and preventing. However regardless of all of the rigorous and in depth warfare gaming and evaluation, is DMO viable in an period of precision weapons and almost ubiquitous surveillance? Or, just like the Nationwide Protection Technique’s pursuit of “built-in deterrence” and “campaigning,” is extra effort wanted in defining and understanding the place DMO is efficient and the place it isn’t?
DMO goals to extend fight effectiveness by dispersing fleet forces over massive areas to deceive and confuse an adversary, and thus scale back detection. In flip, naval models will likely be exhausting to find and thus exhausting to kill, drastically growing naval lethality by means of multidirectional, coordinated assaults. Denial of enemy intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities is crucial to DMO.
Historical past and concept, nonetheless, can present one other approach to take a look at DMO. Through the late Fifties and early Nineteen Sixties, Navy plane carriers “hid” within the Mediterranean Sea in Operation Haystack to launch retaliatory nuclear strikes in opposition to the Soviet Union within the occasion of warfare. To justify the 600-ship Navy, then-Secretary John Lehman willingly embraced the Maritime Technique. A part of that technique borrowed from “Sea Strike,” a four-carrier battlegroup assault on the Soviet Navy’s Petropavlovsk base in Kamchatka within the northwest Pacific envisioned by then-Command of U.S. Pacific Fleet and future Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Thomas Hayward.
The idea was that the specter of a traditional strike in opposition to Soviet naval amenities in Russia would improve deterrence. Two deadly flaws, nonetheless, have been dismissed. The primary was ignoring that the Soviet Union was ready to make use of nuclear weapons. A technique of immobilizing any floor pressure was to detonate an exoatmospheric megaton explosion that created a adequate electromagnetic pulse to blind the pressure.
Second, Soviet wartime technique was not a replay of the World Warfare II-ear U-boat battle of the Atlantic. As an alternative, the Soviet Navy was designed to guard the ballistic missile submarine bastions within the North Cape and disrupt or destroy the deployed U.S. Polaris pressure largely with nuclear barrages in opposition to their working packing containers at sea. Due to the notorious Walker spy ring working out of the submarine headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia, the Soviets knew the placement of these Polaris working packing containers. Fortuitously, no Polaris was ever detected.
About DMO, different questions must be requested: The place do the rules of mass and economic system of pressure apply, and when does dispersal of a pressure so dilute offensive and defensive functionality to render each ineffective? And what about nuclear weapons?
There is no such thing as a proof that the Russians have modified their doctrine. Russia has concluded a few of its warfare video games and workouts with a nuclear scenario. About China’s Individuals’s Liberation Military, it isn’t clear what its doctrine would require if warfare got here; however China is increasing its nuclear weaponry.
The U.S. Marine Corps’ Pressure Design 2030 is predicated on DMO. Nevertheless, geography stays a problem. The closest islands to China from which the Marines would initially function are Okinawa and Guam. However what’s the most vary of present Marine standoff weapons? Even with Tomahawk, the PLA’s intercontinental ballistic missiles far outrange Marine weapons.
Clearly classification limits public dialogue. Nevertheless, whether or not trying to strengthen and resupply Taiwan or launching Sea Strike-like missions in opposition to the Chinese language mainland, it might appear that China has a dominant cost-exchange benefit.
How then is DMO built-in and coordinated with the Nationwide Protection Technique and regional warfare plans? Or may DMO develop into a present equal of the Eighties Maritime Technique — a superb advertising plan and doubtless a whole catastrophe in a warfare in opposition to the united states?
The Navy has analyzed and warfare gamed DMO at each stage and in nice element. However has it been sufficiently purple teamed? Have all of the assumptions been ruthlessly examined? And has this evaluation been supplied to the fleet and inside the bounds of classification to the general public?
Additional, how is DMO built-in with the joint pressure and the opposite companies by way of prepare, man and equip? A place to begin is Pressure Design 2030. Are Pressure Design 2030 and DMO carefully coordinated operationally and inside the shipbuilding plan? And the way does DMO relate to the Military’s Undertaking Convergence and the Air Pressure’s Superior Battle Administration System?
Solutions to those questions are inadequate to conclude how related and efficient DMO is — or might show to be. Nevertheless, of their absence, probably the most prudent plan of action is additional due diligence on DMO. The standard bureaucratic response will likely be to observe the established order and take no extra motion. Nevertheless, that may show to be a nasty thought if the final word take a look at is available in battle, and we had not achieved all of the wanted homework.
Harlan Ullman is senior adviser on the Washington-based Atlantic Council.