ARTICLE

December 2002

Naval Transformation Gets Boost from War on Terror

by Harold Kennedy

Efforts by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to transform into organizations better prepared to fight wars of the 21st century may have gotten a badly needed push from the war on terrorism.

Before 9/11, transformation had been widely discussed in general terms. But the conflict in Afghanistan helped turn transformation from rhetoric to reality.

In landlocked Afghanistan, Navy and Marine units were forced to fight far from the sea, often under harsh, primitive conditions. They adapted quickly, developing creative strategies and combining space-age technologies with ancient tactics in innovative ways to defeat the enemy, according to officials from the two services.

Meanwhile, Congress approved an increase in defense spending by $37.5 billion to $355.1 billion for fiscal year 2003, the largest hike since the Cold War.

The appropriation includes significant plus ups for development of advanced ships, aircraft and other equipment that “present impressive technological leaps in warfighting capability” for the Navy and Marines, according to Chief of Naval Operations Vern Clark. Among its provisions are:

• $733 million for the Navy’s next-generation surface combatant, DD(X), and its related family of ships.
• $404 million to continue conversion of four Cold War-era Trident submarines to enable them to fire conventional cruise missiles, rather than nuclear ballistics.
• $3.5 billion for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which includes Navy and Marine Corps variants that can operate from aircraft carriers or can take and land vertically, like helicopters.
• $1.6 billion for the MV-22 tiltrotor Osprey, which is designed to take off and land like a helicopter and fly like a fixed-wing transport.

• $42 million to accelerate development of development of a Navy variant of the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle.

The drive to transform the military services began to pick up momentum during the past presidential election campaign, when Bush promised “to challenge the status quo and envision a new architecture of American defense for decades to come.”

Change is needed, he said in words that seem now eerily prophetic, because “we may not have months to transport massive divisions to waiting bases or build new infrastructure on site. Our forces in the next century must be agile, lethal, readily deployable and require a minimum of logistical support. We must be able to project our power over long distances, in days or weeks rather than months.”

After the election, however, change came slowly, despite a great deal of talk, noted Gen. Michael J. Williams, assistant commandant of the Marine Corps. “For those of us inside the Beltway, the word ‘transformation’ became an overused term,” he told a recent symposium in Arlington, Va., sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute and the Marine Corps Association.

An Unexpected Challenge
Then, suddenly, in September 2001, the services were forced to transform their operations to meet an unexpected challenge.

“Somebody launched the first successful attack on the continental United States since the War of 1812,” said retired Marine Maj. Gen. Tom Wilkerson, a homeland security consultant.

In reply, U.S. forces had to mount a massive counterattack, within weeks, against enemies located halfway around the world, deep in Central Asia.

During Operation Enduring Freedom, Navy and Marine aircraft and ground units had to travel more than 400 miles inland from the Arabian Sea to reach their targets in Afghanistan.

U.S. advisors to Northern Alliance forces rode into battle on horseback, using handheld global-positioning systems to call in strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban positions.

“This ... shows that a revolution in military affairs is about more than building new high-tech weapons, though that is certainly part of it,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told an audience at National Defense University in Washington, D.C. “It’s also about new ways of thinking and new ways of fighting.”

Vice Adm. Dennis McGinn, deputy chief of naval operations, cited another transformation example from Afghanistan. “Our F-14s often found themselves ‘out of Schlitz’ and heading back to their carriers, as the Air Force’s B-52s were heading in,” he told the Navy-Marine symposium.

Although they had run out of bombs, the F-14s sometimes still had targets that needed to be hit, so they passed the coordinates for those targets along to the B-52s.

“A lot of that stuff goes on day in and day out during operations,” McGinn said.

An Unusual Choice
Still another example of transformational thinking was Task Force 58, which took Kandahar, said Vice Adm. Charles W. Moore Jr., who is now deputy chief of naval operations for fleet readiness and logistics. In 2001, he commanded the 5th Fleet, the naval component of the U.S. Central Command. To lead the task force, which included 8,000 sailors and Marines, Moore made an unusual choice—Marine Brig. Gen. James N. Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Brigade.

“It was the first time that a Marine officer had ever taken command of a Navy-Marine task force,” Moore said. It made sense, he said, because the task force was primarily a ground-combat operation, located far from the sea.

“I stuck to my guns,” he said. “And the rest is history. Everybody loves a winner.”

The task force coordinated its efforts in the area with U.S. special operations troops, coalition units and agents from the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Agency, said Mattis, now a major general, heading the 1st Marine Division, at Camp Pendleton, Calif.

“I did not command all of those people,” Mattis said. “We were able to do the job based on handshakes and trust.”

Early on, Mattis said, he ran into a SEAL commander. “I asked him, ‘What are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I’m trying to find a way to get into this war.’ I said, “Follow me.’”

A lot of the troops, he said, were still very angry about the terrorist attacks. “They just wanted to go whack bad guys.”

The task force developed a very innovative command and control structure, Mattis said. “I’d hold a meeting with my coalition partners and say basically, ‘Who wants to do what?’

“They’d go off, and I knew what they were doing,” Mattis said. “They were calling Canberra or London for guidance. Then, they’d come back, and we’d decide.

“If there was any problem,” Mattis said, “I’d say, ‘You can go talk to Admiral Moore. He’ll give you a lot of sympathy. He’ll even show where to find it in the dictionary.’”

Innovative Thinking
The Afghanistan experience shows that transformation is as much about innovative thinking as it is about new weapons, Williams said. “We’re going to buy better equipment,” he said. “Most of that stuff was in our budget before September 11. But if you put all of that new stuff together in the same old way, without changing how you use it, you haven’t transformed anything.”

In 1939, for example, when Nazi Germany launched its blitzkrieg across Europe—transforming warfare for decades to come—”it wasn’t the equipment” that made the Germans so successful, “it was how they put it together,” Williams said.

For this reason, Navy and Marine Corps transformation plans are based on the concepts of Network Centric Warfare and Sea Basing, rather than specific ships, airplanes, weapons systems or other technologies, Navy Secretary Gordon R. England told the Senate Armed Services Committee. The two concepts “will fundamentally transform joint warfighting,” he said.

Network Centric Warfare, or NCW, will be a part of every Navy and Marine system and operation in the future, England said. NCW—also called FORCEnet—is intended to overwhelm an adversary rapidly by increasing the flow of critical information to U.S. combatants, allowing them to make accurate decisions before the enemy, England explained.

Future platforms—such as the DD(X), F-35, V-22, littoral combat ships, Virginia-class submarines and LPD-17 amphibious assault vessels—will include a wide array of electronic networks, sensors, decision aids and supporting systems designed to help warfighters achieve battlespace dominance, he said.

Sea Basing envisions that a U.S. naval force, with sufficient carriers, amphibious assault ships and logistical support, can attack and defeat an enemy located well inland without nearby land bases on friendly territory, England said.

The idea, he said, requires an ability to operate from farther over the horizon and deeper into littoral waters along enemy coastlines than ever before. Key components include the new advanced amphibious assault vehicle and an enhanced fleet of prepositioned logistics ships and high-speed catamarans to provide a more robust and rapid delivery and sustainment of Marine forces ashore.

To improve its ability to deploy quickly and with increased firepower, the Marine Corps in 1999 brought back its Marine Expeditionary Brigades, which had been disbanded in budget cuts after the Gulf War. Thus far, four MEBs have been established at Camp Pendleton, Camp Lejeune, N.C., and Okinawa. The Marines are considering standing up a fifth in Hawaii.

Ranging in size between 4,000 and 20,000 troops, the brigades are medium-weight fighting forces, including infantry, armored vehicles and aircraft. They are larger than Marine Expeditionary Units, with 2,000 personnel, and smaller than Marine Expeditionary Forces, with 50,000 or more.

Despite all of the talk about transformation, however, the two services are not getting everything that they seek. The Navy, for example, wanted a DD 21 Land Attack Destroyer, which was intended to become the first all-electric warship. But in 2001, that program was revised to include a whole family of advanced technology surface combatants, known as DD(X), rather than a single ship class.

“One fits all does not work on the future battlefield,” said Clark. “We must continue to exploit the robust R&D effort made on DD 21, even as we focus our research and technology funding of other approaches such as the littoral combat ship concept.”

The administration also is considering canceling or revising CVNX, the first in a new class of aircraft carriers, in order to develop a more advanced version. With this in mind, the White House, in its 2003 budget request, recommended delaying the start of CVNX construction from 2006 to 2007. Congress, however, disagreed, adding $160 million to the president’s budget to continue planning work on CVNX in 2003.

The Pentagon, in addition, remains skeptical about the MV-22. Defense officials suspended flight tests of the aircraft in 2000, after two crashes killed 23 Marines. Since then, several “blue ribbon” panels have recommended changes, and a new, two-year flight-test program began this year.

In August, Pete Aldridge, defense undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said he still has doubts about the MV-22’s reliability, but “the only way to prove or disprove my concern is to put it through a very thorough flight test program.”

In general, however, defense officials continue to stress the need for the services to transform their operations. “Innovation has to be encouraged and rewarded,” Ken Krieg, special assistant to Rumsfeld, told the Navy-Marine symposium. “We’ve got to challenge that attitude that, ‘Thou shalt take no risks.’ ... It’s OK to fail.”

To increase the velocity of change, Rumsfeld in 2001 named retired Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski—an outspoken advocate of naval innovation—to head a new Pentagon Office of Force Transformation. Cebrowski’s office evaluates the transformation activities of each military services and recommends ways to integrate them into an overall departmental strategy.

With all of this activity taking place, the largest budget increase in years and a war with unpredictable foes to fight, Williams said, “it’s time to walk the talk. The naval services have a historic opportunity. It’s a time to make big gains.”

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