Reforming the Department of the Navy

This post originally appeared one year ago today, and it was posted then in no small measure to be timed to the arrival in office of the new Under Secretary of the Navy, Dr. Janine Davidson.  Janine is someone I admire quite a bit, and she and I discussed these reforms in detail as she prepared to take office. A new Secretary of the Navy nominee was announced yesterday, and Mr. Bilden and his team will have a significant opportunity to move forward on necessary reforms. This is reposted to provide that team with a few things to consider. 

Introduction
This post is a summary of ideas that have been germinating in my mind for a while. I have been arguing for a powerful vision of American Seapower for some time now, and closer Navy/Marine Corps integration has consistently been at the heart of it. I have come to conclude that the benefits of what I argue are worth pursuing, but that achieving them is unlikely as long as the two Services are not invested in a common understanding of American Seapower and led by an organization dedicated to discerning one.

In the Navy, I enjoyed four tours in Washington. Admittedly, none of them were on the Navy Secretariat, and so I do not write from a position of great authority on its inner workings. My observations are those of an interested observer who has worked around and in the vicinity of this staff. I welcome factual refutations of my opinions and observations.

Theory of the Case:
• America plays a critical and leading role in the world
• It is in America’s interest to continue to execute this role.
• America has interests that are thousands of miles from its own territory.
• America’s sovereign territory is relatively safe from military threat.
• The rise of China and a resurgent and belligerent Russia present a new era of Great Power competition.
• America is likely to encounter China and Russia as an adversary in areas contiguous to the world’s oceans, as this is where the majority of the world’s population lives.
• The Department of the Navy has within it two Armed Services that specialize in operating from the sea.
• These Armed Services provide the world’s most powerful naval force, the world’s most feared middleweight land force, and the world’s most mobile and lethal air force.
• These forces—if properly resourced—are capable of servicing the majority of U.S. presence, conventional deterrence, assurance, and crisis response requirements.
• In order to do so, these expeditionary capabilities must be more closely integrated into a cohesive and integral maritime fighting force, a new vision of American Seapower.
• In order to achieve a new vision of American Seapower, a closer alignment of all aspects of organizing, training, and equipping the Navy and Marine Corps must be considered. Planning, programming, and budgeting must also be included. Redundancy, overlap, and conflict must be minimized.
• The Department of the Navy Secretariat, under the Secretary of the Navy, is the organization that must bring about this closer integration and alignment.
• Process and administrative changes in the Secretariat and throughout the two Services will be required.

Explanation
America’s role in the world and its favorable geography create the conditions under which Seapower can and should play a central and distinct role in its security and prosperity. By combining the capabilities of the world’s most powerful Navy, the world’s most feared middleweight land force, and the world’s most mobile and lethal air force, the Department of the Navy plays a leading role in all of the missions of the Department of Defense:
• Counter terrorism and irregular warfare
• Deter and defeat aggression
• Project power despite anti-access/area denial challenges
• Counter weapons of mass destruction
• Operate effectively in cyberspace and space
• Maintain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent
• Defend the homeland and provide support to civil authorities
• Provide a stabilizing presence
• Conduct stability and counterinsurgency operations
• Conduct humanitarian, disaster relief, and other operations.

This is not to say that the Department of the Navy performs ALL of all of these missions. Its role varies from mission to mission. What should not be disputed however, is the fact that the primary operational formations derived of the forces organized, trained, and equipped within the Department perform these missions as a matter of routine on a global basis. The very nature of American Seapower offers the nation the ability to field and operate forces that can protect and sustain American interests thousands of miles from its own shores, at the point of impact where the overwhelming majority of the world population lives. And while the Seapower resident in the Department of the Navy cannot perform all of the missions above in their totality all of the time, it can perform them to a greater degree than any other aspect of American military power most of the time in most places most efficiently.

In not recognizing the unique and foundational contributions of American Seapower to the nation’s defense, duplication, and waste are promoted as precious resources are inefficiently allocated, rendering the nation somewhat less capable of defending its interests for a given investment.
It is therefore essential that the an integral and coherent vision of American Seapower be formulated and espoused, one that presents the case that the nation can and should lean more heavily on the Department of the Navy for its peacetime crisis response and security requirements, while the forces of the other military departments prioritize preparation for the conduct and winning of largescale conflict.

Such a vision is however, insufficient, as the current organization of the Department of the Navy and its subordinate Armed Services (the Navy and the Marine Corps) does not adequately support the integration of capabilities that would be required in order to bring it about. Simply put, a coherent vision of American Seapower at the operational level demands a greater degree of integration at the very top, in efforts including planning, programming, budgeting, organizing, training, and equipping. By thinking more expansively about the utility of American Seapower and how it can best serve the needs of the Republic, pressures arise on the Navy and Marine Corps to work more closely together bureaucratically and organizationally in order to bring about the operational results desired.
Such integration is unlikely to occur from the bottom up. Service cultures and comfortable roles and missions create a situation in which the promise of American Seapower is unlikely to be achieved if the Navy and Marine Corps are left to themselves to bring it about. A forcing function is required.

Therefore, a reorganization of the Department of the Navy, undertaken with support of the President, the Secretary of Defense, and appropriate Congressional Committees is necessary to take positive steps designed to ensure that within the Department of the Navy, a greater level of Service integration is achieved, while also working to obtain the resources necessary to field the capabilities and capacities necessary to more effectively service the nation’s peacetime security and presence needs. It is not enough to say that we need a larger Navy and or Marine Corps. We must ensure that the American people understand what will be done with such an increase, why it is in the nation’s interest to do so, and how doing so will make a given level of defense spending go further.

Pathologies

Strategic Thinking
There is no organization within the Department of the Navy dedicated to thinking about integrated American Seapower.
Both the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant of the Marine Corps maintain three star directorates with “strategy” within their mandate, in addition to small, highly influential strategic cells that report directly to the Service Chief. In none of these organizations is there a meaningful representation of officers from the other Service.
The Department of the Navy Secretariat has no such organization.
The lack of such an organization has not however, resulted in no strategic thinking in the Department. Quite the contrary, two maritime strategies have been produced in the past ten years (2007, 2015). These were however, ad hoc efforts that do not appear to have influenced fleet operations or force structure, and in at least the 2007 instance, was undertaken around and without the inclusion of the Service Secretary.

Strategic Communications
Under the Secretary of the Navy, there is a Chief of Information (CHINFO) and a Chief of Legislative Affairs (OLA). These officers report directly to the Secretary, with dotted line reporting responsibility to the Chief of Naval Operations. Neither organization is responsible for Marine Corps affairs, as the Commandant of the Marine Corps has his own legislative assistant and his own public affairs assistant.
In essence, the organizations charged with Department of the Navy strategic communications represent only one Service (the Navy), and to the extent that the other Service—the Marine Corps—requires these functions, they are creatures of the office of the Commandant, not the Secretary of the Navy.
In essence, any strategic communications efforts are derived of three disjointed and unaligned efforts—Department of the Navy, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Marine Corps.
Additionally, no one person in the Department of the Navy is charged with the creation and implementation of a coherent strategic communications plan including legislative affairs, public affairs, and international messaging. Put another way, even if there were a coherent strategic narrative promoting the benefits of American Seapower, there is no process, organization, task force, or group responsible for carrying it out.

Planning and Programming
The Navy and Marine Corps do not receive adequate planning and programming guidance from the Secretary of the Navy at the beginning of the annual budget cycle, guidance designed to achieve a coherent vision of American Seapower. Secretary priority items are included in current guidance, but the degree to which the Services respond to a coherent and integrated vision of Seapower is minimal at best. There is little evidence that the Services are instructed what to devalue or cut.
The Navy and Marine Corps maintain separate planning and programming functions designed to create inputs (known as a “program objective memorandum” or POM) to the annual defense budget. There is little or no coordination between the Services during the development of Service POM’s, and there is limited interaction between the Services and the Navy Secretariat.
The Navy Secretariat does not have an organization staffed to issue such guidance, monitor its implementation, and remedy shortfalls. To the extent that any changes are made to the Service POM’s, they come late in the process and are generally made within individual Service POMs.

Acquisition
Meaningful reform to the acquisition system is essential to achieving alignment within the Department of the Navy, as a vision of American Seapower would create derived requirements and the opportunity for capability trades between and among USN and USMC acquisition efforts.
This currently happens to some degree within the office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition. This work is however, undermined by the disjointed strategic communications efforts described above.
Captain Mark Vandroff, USN and I laid out a proposal for reforming Department of the Navy acquisition elsewhere, and rather than repeat it here, readers are urged to review it. Though not mentioned in that article, the need for an integrated strategic communications/legislative relations effort is essential to achieving some of the benefits of the recommended reforms.

Recommendations
• Revive the Office of Program Appraisal (OPA) on the Navy Secretariat at the two-star level. A staff made up of USN/USMC and civilian experts in strategic thinking and budgeting. Headed by a two-star with a one-star deputy who fleets up. Alternates between Navy and USMC. Billets would come from USN (N3/N5, N8) and USMC (P,P,&O/P&R). This organization would have the dual mission of aligning the American Seapower strategic narrative and providing oversight of Service POM development in order to achieve it.
• Empower the Under Secretary of the Navy to manage Navy Department Strategic Communications.  VCNO, ACMC, CHINFO, OLA, N3/N5, and PP@O would all serve on a DON strategic communications Board of Directors. Public, legislative, and international messaging would be aligned within this BOD.
o Both CHINFO and OLA would become truly Departmental organizations. The Commandant would lose the Assistant for Legislative Matters and the Assistant for Public Affairs. The two-star heads of these organizations would have a one-star deputy who fleets up. The heads of these organizations would be filled by officers from the two services, with no more than 90 days at a time in which officers from one of the Services are in both positions.
• Empower the Secretary of the Navy as the single responsible party for Departmental capability definition and its acquisition, subject to overrule only by the President or the Secretary of Defense (within the Executive Department). This is described more fully in the previously linked to USNI News piece.

Conclusion

The promise of powerful, integrated American Seapower tending to the nation’s peacetime presence and crisis response missions while it creates the conditions for garrison forces to fall in on for warfighting, will not occur organically. There are powerful interests aligned against it, and as this article may reveal, potentially good arguments against it.

I look forward to those arguments being made, and to those arguments in agreement with the central proposition of this proposal but with doubts about the offered solutions.

In the end, this nation’s geography, interests, and role in the world demand more of its naval services.  Seapower advocates must not shy away from the benefits conferred to this nation by a powerful naval force, even if it means relative comparisons with other elements of military power.

Why Does the Navy Have to Be So Big? (Segment 4)

What Does America Need Its Navy To Do? (Segment 3)

Freedom of the Seas is the Purpose of American Seapower (Segment 2)

Some Thoughts on the McCain White Paper

Bryan Clark of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) and I (Bryan McGrath) put together a few thoughts on the recent White Paper from Senator John McCain (R-AZ) entitled "Restoring American Power".

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The Trump Administration began work this week on its promise of an across-the-board enlargement of the U.S. military. The President-elect has thus far described his plan only in the broadest of terms, but those terms portend a sustained period of higher defense spending—something Congress has been unwilling to approve since it passed the Budget Control Act (BCA) in 2011. Chief among those who will shape the future of the American military is Senator John McCain (R-AZ), the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who waded into the debate last week with a strong, coherent outline that not only aims to restore the capacity of a significantly hollowed-out force, but also provides direction for how the force should evolve as it grows. There is a lot in this report, but we will restrict our comments to the larger context of the plan and its impact on American Seapower.

Hope versus strategy

Senator McCain’s report begins by rightly highlighting the fundamental disconnect in today’s U.S. defense planning between resources and objectives. Hoping revanchist regimes in Russia and China would not be able to act effectively on their objectives for more than a decade, Congress and President Obama passed the BCA in 2011, reducing military budgets by about 10 percent for the subsequent decade. The BCA, in turn, contained the a ticking time-bomb known as Sequestration, which implemented another 10 percent cut starting in fiscal year (FY) 2013 if the Department was not able to meet BCA targets for spending. Because FY 2013 was already halfway over, services had to immediately cut their spending, creating maintenance depot backlogs, personnel shortfalls, and training shutdowns from which DoD is still recovering.

As the impact of the BCA’s cuts became clear, DoD and Congress experienced buyer’s remorse, turning to various budget gimmicks and abuse of the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budget to pay for expanding U.S. involvement in regional conflicts, growing compensation costs, and to allow for modest modernization of the force. McCain excoriates both Congress and the Executive Branch for these measures. Issuing a clear call to action, his report states “This law (BCA) must be repealed outright so we can budget for the true costs of our national defense.”

The most significant problem with the BCA’s reductions, McCain argues, is they do not allow modernization to address the rapidly improving capability of great powers such as Russia and China and regional powers such as Iran and North Korea. The BCA also does not provide the resources for U.S. forces to sustain the operational tempo to conduct daily strikes and raids on terrorists in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere. Notably, despite the hopes that underpinned the BCA, Russia’s attacks on Ukraine and China’s aggression in the South China Sea show, in McCain’s words, “A better defense strategy must acknowledge the reality that we have entered a new era of great power competitions. China and Russia aspire to diminish U.S. influence and revise the world order in ways that are contrary to U.S. national interests.”

McCain’s focus on great power competition is important in two ways. First, it draws a distinction between the Obama Administration’s approach and McCain’s more forward-leaning view of great power dynamics. Second, it sends a signal to the incoming administration of McCain’s wariness of Russia in clear and unambiguous terms. This could ultimately prove to be a contentious issue between Congress and the Trump Administration, which has indicated it may view Russia as a partner rather than a competitor or adversary.

Strategy and Fleet Architecture

McCain argues for a new set of defense strategies to address great powers, regional powers, and transnational terrorists, rather than a single U.S. security strategy. In CSBA’s upcoming study of alternative Navy fleet architectures, we argue the most important of these is a strategy to deter great power aggression, which could potentially have the most catastrophic consequences of these security challenges. With the realignment of American bases since the Cold War, U.S. ground and air forces overseas are less numerous and more easily suppressed than when they last faced a great power adversary a quarter century ago. Thus, naval forces will assume a more prominent role in conventional deterrence.

Recognizing both the Trump goal of a 350 ship Navy and the Navy’s own recently released 355-ship Force Structure Assessment (FSA), McCain lays out a plan that over the next five years that: 1) increases the size of the fleet over the final plan of the Obama Administration by building 59 ships as opposed to the Obama Administration’s 41,  2) truncates the current Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program and accelerates the Navy’s move to an open-ocean frigate replacement, 3) funds design work on a new class of aircraft carrier, 4) increases Navy end-strength, 5) invests significantly in unmanned technologies of all varieties, and 6) provides additional, immediate funding to address fleet readiness and maintenance, and installations and infrastructure.

McCain’s plan aligns in large part with our proposed fleet architecture, and would improve the Navy’s ability to deter aggression by great powers, counter attacks by regional powers, and help keep terrorists on the run. Unlike the current fleet, McCain’s proposal would not focus on efficiently providing presence at the expense of the capability and capacity for combat against a capable adversary.

Three aspects of McCain’s force structure plan are of particular interest. First is its truncation of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) in 2017 with a follow-on frigate proposed for acquisition no later than 2022. It is essential that the Navy move as quickly as possible from the LCS to a proper blue-water frigate capable of anti-submarine warfare and local air defense, but it must also continue to increase the size of the fleet and ensure the frigate can be affordable and built in large numbers. McCain proposes an acquisition “bridge” for the two shipyards currently building LCS to continue between 2017 and 2022. This would expand the fleet and enable these shipbuilders to compete for the follow-on frigate, which could lower costs for the frigate and increase the number of shipyards at which it could be built.

The second initiative of note is McCain’s proposal to move to a mix of large, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and smaller, conventionally-powered carriers. As recommended in our fleet architecture study as well, conventional carriers would initially be based on current amphibious assault ships that carry short takeoff and vertical landing aircraft such as the AV-8B Harrier and F-35B Lightning II. As McCain argues, a smaller carrier would be suited to supporting many of the smaller steady-state operations that require naval air power, such as air strikes in Syria. Senator McCain is skeptical of the Navy’s new FORD-class carrier due to its high cost and poor management, but argues the fleet will continue to also need large nuclear-powered carriers to provide a mobile airfield for combat air sorties during larger conflicts in which host nation concerns or enemy actions prevent effectively using land bases.

Finally, though not mentioned in the narrative, a “patrol ship” of less than 800 tons appears in the McCain plan’s appendix for acquisition starting in 2020. The addition of this small combatant highlights the need for a larger, more distributed, and resilient force, which was also a finding of our fleet architecture study. A patrol vessel of 800 tons such as Sweden’s Visby-class would be able to defend itself against a salvo of a dozen or more anti-ship missiles and could carry 4 to 8 offensive strike or anti-ship missiles. This will make patrol vessels able to deny or delay enemy aggression while being too costly a target to be worth defeating in large numbers.

Overall, McCain’s proposal would grow the surface fleet by adding frigates and patrol vessels to the Navy’s current requirement of 104 large surface combatants and 52 small surface combatants. We agree a larger surface fleet is essential to conduct offensive strike and anti-ship attacks in a distributed manner that will make them harder to defeat in detail. But we would argue the Distributed Lethality concept and growing needs for logistics escorts suggest the surface fleet needs to both grow and be rebalanced, with more small surface combatants that can conduct widely distributed offensive operations and fewer large surface combatants that will tend to concentrate the fleet’s firepower.

A fleet for the future

A Navy is a capital investment that takes years to build and lasts for decades thereafter. Any plan for a future fleet should be based not on the world of today, but on a set of plausible futures that best represent the world of 15 to 20 years from now. Even with an aggressive shipbuilding increase such as envisioned by McCain’s plan, only ¼ of the fleet will change between now and 2030. McCain’s proposal considers the likelihood that the fleet of 2030 will need to deter revisionist great powers as its primary mission, while addressing the growing capability of regional powers and transnational terrorists. It appropriately invests not only in platforms, but across the board in the various enablers and extenders of maritime power, including ISR, networking, unmanned vehicles, cyber, and electronic warfare.

If the United States fails to make great power competition a priority in long-term force planning, rivals such as Russia and China will continue eroding American influence and alliances, with damaging economic and security impacts on the American people. McCain’s plan sets American Seapower (as well as the rest of DoD) on a solid course for an uncertain future. It remains to be seen the extent to which this thoughtful, strategic approach will be complemented by the other instruments of national power, or the degree to which the incoming administration will welcome it.