FEATURE ARTICLE

June 2005

Security Operations In Persian Gulf Require a Broad Coalition

By Roxana Tiron

Continuous operations in the Persian Gulf are reshaping the U.S. Navy’s maritime security tactics and its approach to forming coalitions.

These operations “connote a range of things required of the military related to law enforcement and border security that haven’t been in our mission set before, nor do we have legal authority to do that right now,” said Vice Adm. David Nichols, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and the Fifth Fleet. His area of responsibility encompasses the Middle East, Eastern Africa and Southwest Asia.

“Ten years ago, we were focusing on standard Navy tactics, but after 9/11, the type of operations we do have changed to what may be more aligned with Coast Guard missions,” said Rear Adm. Bruce Clingan, commander of Strike Group Three and the head of Task Force 152 in the central and southern Persian Gulf. “Now, we are in the business of finding terrorists using the maritime domain. It now takes all of our naval capability to do that,” he told a National Defense reporter onboard the USS Carl Vinson.

Based on ship boardings in the Gulf, the Navy has found that there is capacity to move terrorist material throughout the region, said Clingan.

“The sea is a huge ungoverned space, and there is all kind of activity that is going on out there that is illegal ... There is terrorist activity also,” Nichols said in an interview at his headquarters in Manama, Bahrain.

The Navy and its coalition constantly change their tactics so that “the enemy does not template our behavior,” Clingan explained.

In the Persian Gulf, scrutiny is raised not only because of ongoing U.S. operations in Iraq, but also because 90 percent of that country’s economy is tied up with two offshore oil terminals in the northern part of the Gulf. But the other areas under Nichols’ responsibility pose heightened concern about illegal arms movement, especially through the Gulf of Aden, into Somalian arms markets and ultimately into the hands of terrorists.

Even though a few solutions, such as drafting regional maritime security laws, are in the works, they fall short of regulating these waters and providing enough authority for the U.S. Navy to step in. “But we do find ourselves doing some workarounds to make up for authority that we do not have, and that is why we need regional authorities, regional coast guard and law enforcement participation in all of this,” he said.

Therefore, in the Persian Gulf, involving the Gulf Cooperation Council countries—Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Kuwait—in maritime security operations is of utmost importance, said Clingan.

More focused cooperation on the part of some of these countries stemmed from warnings they received from the United States last year. Information indicated Al Qaeda was interested in attacking their oil infrastructure, said Nichols.

“We were able to share that intelligence with the regional countries, and it made it clear to them,” he said. “Our goal was to partner with the regional nations so that we coordinate and complement what we do.”

The information that the United States shared with the GCC countries brought forth heightened awareness that these nations are “targets of terror” just as the United States and its allies are, said Clingan. Even though these countries are considered as having a “longstanding relationship” with the United States, the awareness of their vulnerability has changed their level of cooperation and operational pattern, he said.

While almost all the regional nations agreed to work with the United States, “it overstates it to use the term ‘integrated ops’ to describe what we do with the regional navies and coast guards, but we certainly coordinate our operations in a complementary fashion,” Nichols said.

These countries grapple with some of the same challenges the United States faces in synchronizing multiple agencies. “Border security, law enforcement, coast guard and additional military in an interagency [framework] help work the terrorist problem,” he said.

As part of his task force, Clingan said he maintains a relationship with the senior leadership in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and UAE. “We have operational planning group meetings and tactical meetings,” he said. “The interaction varies across the nations: some of them are vibrant, some of them are periodic.”

Clingan structures the task force’s cooperation with the Persian Gulf countries around several levels of interaction, or what he likes to call “pillars.” The U.S. Navy sends out mobile training teams that demonstrate how to perform damage control on a patrol craft and show other nations’ forces how to conduct boarding procedures. “After that, these nations demo their [own] procedures with us. It’s reciprocal,” he said. “That is part of an effort to enhance interoperability.”

The shared skills then are used during “at sea interoperability periods,” when combined operations take place, Clingan explained. Additionally, the personnel exchange program lets the U.S. Navy and GCC countries swap crew officers. “It is designed to generate awareness, to know what it is like in the day of a coalition sailor,” he said.

“The capabilities of regional nations are an asset to us,” he added. Somebody from the region knows whether a dhow—a traditional fishing boat in the Gulf—behaves suspiciously.

With the instability in Iraq overshadowing the region, these GCC members have limited cooperation with that embattled country. “They make some of their cooperation public, and sometimes it is done in private forum,” Clingan said. But Iraq is preparing to launch its own maritime forces into the Northern Arabian Gulf and eventually will take responsibility for defending its oil infrastructure and maritime domain.

The new Iraqi maritime forces already have about half a dozen patrol boats that work with Task Force 58 in the Northern Arabian Gulf. The British Navy has the lead in training and helping the Iraqi navy to come on line, said Nichols. “There is a long way to go there, but on the other hand, they have come a long way in the last year or so.”

The goal is to have only Iraqi maritime forces guarding the two main offshore oil pipelines in the Northern Arabian Gulf—the Al-Bazra and the Khawr Al Amaya terminals.

“It depends on how they come along, but we are looking at this summer to be phasing that in,” Nichols said. But the Navy’s security detachments are not going anywhere anytime soon, because those “two platforms are very critical to the way ahead economically for Iraq,” he said. “We will still be involved on the waterside security, and we will integrate more of the Iraqi patrol boats into that piece. We work very closely.”

The small Iraqi navy will not be able to patrol the Northern Arabian Gulf by itself, he added. But it is not only a matter of capacity. It is also important to take requirement into consideration, Nichols explained. “The draw down in U.S. presence and capability in Iraq is tied to the buildup of Iraqi capacity, but it is also driven by the level of security and stability,” he said. Nichols added that during the next year, the need for a continued U.S. and coalition presence will be significant.

At the same time, the Navy alone would not achieve the same results as it does with the coalition, said Nichols. “About one third of my capacity is non-U.S.,” he said. “If we did not have the coalition, I would have to offset that with U.S. Navy ships.” The coalition also brings certain skill sets and new dimensions to maritime security operations.

“I am better off with a range of coalition ability than having 10 to 20 more U.S. ships in the area,” he said. Strong coalitions also are important from a political point of view, he added. “The terrorists are trying to exploit seams between U.S. friends and allies.”

Two of Nichols’ three task force commanders in his area of responsibility are not American. One is British and is running Task Force 150—from the Red Sea to the Eastern Arabian Sea, and from the Somali Basin to the Straits of Hormuz. The other commander is an Australian, who is commanding Task Force 58 in the volatile Northern Arabian Gulf.

Commodore Steven Gilmore is the first Australian flag officer at sea on a warship since World War II. Gilmore is running Task Force 58 from the guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam (CG 54), which also is making history as the first ship of its kind to be chosen as a flagship for a task force commander, said Antietam’s Capt. E.J. Quinn.

The Antietam was able to adapt to its new mission easily, said Quinn. Cruisers are multi-mission ships, he said. “An Aegis cruiser can do everything from tracking ballistic missile launches, to visits and psychological warfare packages,” he said on the ship’s bridge. “This ship and her sailors are trained to multi-task.” Before the maritime security mission, the Antietam was performing air-defense work for the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, which is part of Carrier Strike Group Three.

Having a flag officer on board has brought even more enhanced technology to the Antietam, noted Quinn.

“They helped us wire mostly laptop computers and connecting stations,” he said. “The rest of the capability is already inherent in the Antietam: the communications suite, the command-and-control stations, the habitability.” Gilmore runs the entire Northern Arabian Gulf from the cruiser. “He does not have to leave Antietam to have situational awareness, connectivity with headquarters and real time connectivity to his national command authority. He can do it all on Antietam,” Quinn said.

In order to install the right equipment, the Antietam and Australians did a site survey in Singapore, and once they had a good idea of what they needed, engineers in Bahrain then installed the technology over four days.

His ship has real-time connectivity with the Australian HMS Darwin and the British RFA Diligence. With the British destroyer Argyle, Antietam shares each other’s Link pictures and communication is constant, Quinn said.

Antietam’s model is not necessarily a panacea for how coalition operations should work at any time, but “this works for this case at this time,”’ Quinn said.

Meanwhile, the Australians have focused considerable attention on becoming interoperable with other coalition partners, said Gilmore in his first interview after he took command in early April. “It is the consequence of many years of training together and understanding the procedures each country pursues,” he said. In this respect, the information exchange is of great importance, he added.

“The commodore has all the access that his government and my government have deemed necessary for him to fully operate as a coalition commander,” said Quinn.

Nichols said the main challenge to coalition operations is technical interoperability. “We are in reasonable shape there,” he said. “The tactical backbone of all our operations command and control is CENTRIXS. We live on CENTRIXS.”

The combined enterprise regional information exchange system enables e-mail and web services, a common intelligence picture in the form of databases and imagery, a shared operational picture, secure voice, collaboration and a chat function. Information can be moved across combatant commands, other military components, allies and coalition forces.

The Navy’s space war command has responded to our “unusual requirements for CENTRIXS,” Nichols said. Before 9/11, the system had been used mostly in exercises. “Now, we use it day, in day out as our primary C4I backbone,” he added. C4I stands for command and control, communications, computers and intelligence.

Another important ingredient to coalitions working well together is to have each country’s doctrines interoperate. For Nichols’ area of responsibility, “that synchs up pretty well,” he said.

Meanwhile, the third and fourth factors—national authority and rules of engagement—”do not match exactly, particularly in the global war on terrorism and OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom],” said Nichols. “Part of the art of coalition warfare is to bring these different national equities and authorities together and raise them by the lowest common denominator.” In several instances, the appropriate action, under coalition authority, could not be taken. The result: “We chopped away U.S.-only forces to deal directly with that problem.”

As the Navy finds itself conducting more and more maritime security operations with the help of coalitions and regional powers, the question is being raised about what kind of capabilities the service will need in the future to fulfill its missions. In the process of a strategic review, Nichols has been working with the Naval War College to identify capabilities, effects and force structure options for these missions.

This means the Navy is looking at how to deploy what it currently owns, what new equipment it needs and what kind of skill sets are required to train, explained Nichols. A few of these skills already emerged from the review, and among them are chemical biological and radiological detection, cryptology, linguistics, and command-and-control interception. “Some of these have not necessarily been at the heart of our skill sets,” he said.

Also, the Navy has been “stuck” in the past with certain “clumps” of force packaging. “Right now, we have two principle force-packaging options—an expeditionary strike group and a carrier strike group, which is our new name for carrier battle group,” he said. “We think there are probably a couple more gradations there that could result in the Navy being able to save current operating capacity, but we would still get the capability we need.”

The intention is to be able to create other options to the expeditionary and carrier strike groups to get the needed effects “without this cookie cutter approach to force packaging,” he explained.

The Navy is balancing its traditional work in preparing to fight a peer rival with its newer missions of low-intensity and humanitarian operations, as well as consequence management. For the latter, the broader spectrum of tactics and procedures is chiseled down. Technology is applied accordingly. But making that happen also requires more subtle cultural adaptations.

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