U.S. Navy Office Naval Intelligence Worldwide Threat to Shipping (WTS) Report 18 October - 16 November 2016

U.S. Navy Office Naval Intelligence Worldwide Threat to Shipping (WTS) Report 18 October - 16 November 2016... by lawofsea on Scribd

Logistics Week at EagleSpeak Begins with a Plan

A hallmark of the U.S. Navy is its ability operate for long periods of time away from its own shores. The ability to sustain such operations involves logistics, which, as we all know, is what professionals talk about when amateurs are discussing other things.

How do we plan to sustain our forces? Is the current logistics force large enough to support a far-flung fleet?

Some say it is not - for example, Bryan McGrath in his "You're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat": Principles for Getting the U.S Navy Right wrote:

Logistics, logistics, logistics. Because Navy leadership seems to agree that the Navy needs to grow and be more widely distributed geographically, it is rational to consider the logistics necessary to support such a fleet. Today’s logistics force is pitifully small to support even the peacetime operations of our too small Navy. Should that fleet be called into war, we would quickly realize that our reach exceeds our grasp and that the culprit is insufficient prepositioning, forward-based ship repair and re-arming capacity, and oilers and other logistics ships designed to supply the fleet. Navy leaders must account for both the actual requirement and combat attrition, the latter of which has been (in my experience) consistently hand-waved in previous force structure assessments.

Well, then, we'll spend a week looking at U.S. Navy logistics. A good place to start is with a plan:

U.S. Navy: Naval Logistics Integration 2011-2015 Strategic Plan by lawofsea on Scribd

Well, it's a start.

Other item of interest:
Naval Operations Concept 2010
A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower

Saturday Is Old Radio Day: Gettysburg Address and "Mr. President" (1950) Tells a Tale of a President Fighting Congress

President Lincoln gave his "Gettysburg Address" on 19 November 1863:




Here's one show from a old radio series dealing with "Mr. President" which presented history as a challenge to the listeners, this episode is "Advice and Consent" -

On Midrats 20 Nov 2016 - Episode 359: A Foreign Policy Short List for the New CINC, with Mackenzie Eaglen

Please join us at 5pm EST on 20 Nov 2016 for Midrats Episode 359: A Foreign Policy Short List for the New CINC, with Mackenzie Eaglen:

Old foreign and defense challenges return, new ones emerge, and existing ones morph in

to something slightly different. The only thing that is constant is that there is no opportunity for a learning curve for the Commander in Chief of the United States of America. From the first day in office to the last, a needy, grasping, and unstable world will look to or at our nation.

What are those challenges that will test President-Elect Trump in his first few years in office, and what in the background is waiting for the opportunity to spring to the front?

Our guest for the full hour will be Mackenzie Eaglen, Resident Fellow at the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute where she works on defense strategy, defense budgets, and military readiness.

Eaglen has worked on defense issues in the House of Representatives and Senate and at the Pentagon in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and on the Joint Staff. In 2014, Eaglen served as a staff member of the congressionally mandated National Defense Panel, a bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission established to assess US defense interests and strategic objectives. This followed Eaglen’s previous work as a staff member for the 2010 congressionally mandated bipartisan Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel, also established to assess the Pentagon’s major defense strategy. Eaglen is included in Defense News “100 most influential people in US Defense” both years the publication compiled a list. A prolific writer on defense-related issues, she has also testified before Congress.

Eaglen has an M.A. from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a B.A. from Mercer University.

Join us live if you can or pick the show up later by clicking here. You can also pick the show up later from our iTunes or from Stitcher pages.

Friday Double Feature Films: "Deploying Mines at Sea by Air" (WWII) and "Sea Mine Warfare" (1968)

Mine Warfare, the most underrated warfare community. Here are a couple of films on the topic:

Building a Temporary Larger Fleet While Waiting for New Construction Ships (A Reanimation of an Old Post)

There is a great deal of brilliant discussion of how to build the 350 ship Navy called for by President-elect Trump see Jerry Hendrix's 12 Carriers and 350 Ships: A Strategic Path Forward from President Elect Donald Trump and Bryan McGrath's Quick Hit: Small Surface Combatants and the 350-Ship Navy for what the smart kids in the room are saying.

And, if you need to ask why we need a Navy - well, I respectfully suggest you listen to the Midrats show with Bryan McGrath:


On the other hand, there is that part of me that keeps reverting to being smart in how we spend our money and still increase our striking power while waiting for a host of new construction ships to join the fleet.

Some of this lies in the world of "distributed lethality" in which we spread advanced weapons to platforms that have, historically, been under-armed for a world in which combat may come sooner and in places where it might be less expected. While "DL" is a good idea, it does not increase the number of ships in our fleets. As I have often said in these posts, even the most capable ship can only cover so much ocean.

Numbers matter.

So does assigning the right ship to the right mission - should a multi-billion dollar cruiser/destroyer be assigned to chase pirates in speed boats? Or to show the flag off some limited threat shore?

I have said "No" in the past - see Department of Cheaper Pirate Fighting and the links therein for earlier thoughts.

In keeping with this theme, I offer up a post from 2008, which, if not as smart as those of Hendrix and McGrath, may prompt some cost-effective short-term Navy expansion:

In the September 2008 issue of the United States Naval Institute's magazine Proceedings, the Secretary of the Navy looked at the issue of "An Affordable Naval Presence." It has a sub-head of "We need a more cost-effective Fleet."

The piece lays out the requirements imposed by our maritime nature:

Our nation's maritime strategy reaffirms the use of sea power to influence actions and activities at sea and ashore, including the need for our naval forces to support humanitarian operations, counter piracy, and assist in capacity building and training of partner nations. The requirement to support these missions moves us to adopt persistent global presence as a key tenet of our strategy. The increasing desire for U.S. Navy presence is one of the driving factors behind our decisions on Fleet size and composition.

The value of presence is under-appreciated by many, for they fail to recognize the role of maritime security in support of the world economy to protect it against the vulnerabilities that terrorism and rogue nations pose. Clearly, most would agree that the world is far more connected and interdependent than in years past. Nations have moved away from the idea that they must possess economic self-sufficiency and have largely recognized the value of trade and specialization.

***

The more dispersed nature of today's world trade patterns has major implications for our view of maritime security . . .

Ah, there's the rub. Too much ocean, too many shorelines, too many needs, too few ships. What's a navy to do?

Secretary Winter wants analysis of the right ships to build and a more efficient process to build them. All of which is fine, but - there is a faster, cheaper path to get bigger, sooner at lower cost - putting hulls in the water while awaiting that analysis.

Here's my modest proposal:

1. Take $250 million dollars and put it aside;
2. Of that $250 million, use $100 million to buy or lease 50 to 100 offshore crew boats as currently used in the offshore oil industry (many of them are reaching the end of their expected useful life in the industry - you might be able to pick up some bargains).
3. Invest $50 million in refurbishing the boats and in getting weapons for their decks. Turn them into "navalized" vessels. Make 22 knots the minimum acceptable speed.
4. Do not try to make these low cost littoral combat ships into battleships for all conditions. Talk to the LCDRs who will be squadron commanders and the LTs who will be the commanding officers about what they would need to provide a presence, fight in a low threat environment against modestly armed pirates and the like, support occasional missions ashore and interdict drug smuggler semi-submersibles. Give them what they need in terms of state of the art comms using COTS (heck, load put a communication van on board if so that no time is wasted trying to rewire the little ships more than needed). Put in some comfortable berthing suited for the sea states in which these things (I call them Special Purpose Vessels or SPVs) will operate.
5. Under no cirmcumstance should the total U.S. Navy investment in any single SPV exceed $2 million, excluding the cost of adding weapons systems (adding a M-1 Abrams, for example) and the personnel costs.
6. Make the project a 12 month "emergency" - and kill the bureacracy that would ordinarily take on this job - find a hard charging Captain, make him or her report directly to SecNav and tell them what the mission and the budget will be. Then get out of the way except for monthly status reports.
7. Find a group of O-3s who are ready for command and who can think for themselves and train the heck out of them by letting them go to sea in the type of ships that you are acquiring, let them learn from the masters of current offshore supply and crew vessels. Find some O-4s who can take hold of the idea of being a squadron commander of a 5 ship squardron and train them in mission like that being conducted by the Africa station.
8. Borrow some Army Rangers or fleet Marines and train them in the ship boardings, small boat ops, shipboard firefighting and ship defense. Treat them like the Marines of old. Stress people skills appropriate for counterterrorism work.
9. Lease some ships to be used as "tenders" for the SPVs - small container ships on which the containers can be shops, supply warehouses, refrigerator units, etc. Bladders for fuel. Use the Arapaho concept to set up a flight deck for helo ops.
10. Be generous with UAV assets - use the small "net recoverable" types.
11. Don't limit the small boat assets to RHIBs. Experiment with M-ships, small go-fasts captured from drug dealers, whatever. The idea is to have boats that can operate in one sea state worse than the pirates, drug smugglers, etc.
12. Use the MIUW van concept for adding some sonar capability. TIS/VIS is a necessity.

Start with a couple of squadrons, tell your O-6 that you want them ready in 6 months for operational testing. Unleash the budget dollars. For op testing, send one squadron off to the coast of Somalia for anti-pirate work. Send the other off Iraq. Put those expensive great big cruisers and destroyers currently in the area to work doing blue water stuff.

Paint Coast Guard like stripe on the hull of the SPVs - but make it Navy blue. If the Coasties want to join in, give them a boat and paint the stripe orange. Make the SPVs highly visible. Nothing deters crime like a visible cop on the beat.

Show the flag.

But wait, there's more! For only "shipping and handling" you can call these cheap ships "corvettes" and go really additive - as I set out in Cheaper Corvettes: COOP and STUFT Like That:

Looks like sea-going trucks to me

If the answer to the Navy’s future is robotics, then Admiral Greenert’s July 2012 U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings piece, “Payloads Over Platforms, Charting a New Course” opens up a whole new world of possibilities for using existing small ship platforms as “trucks” to deliver large numbers of modern weapons platforms to areas of interest.

As former Under Secretary of the Navy Bob Work emphasized during his recent appearance on MIDRATS, the Littoral Combat Ship is such a truck–a vehicle for delivering unmanned weapons system.

This post is meant to take that concept and cheapen it.

Now, I know that "Big Navy" like large platforms, but I assert that large platforms are mostly big targets.

Conversely, a fleet of small, well-armed. fast, expendable - and cheap - "platforms" is a smart, asymmetric response to the threats that exist now.

After all, one of our jobs is to make a potential enemy's task harder - and more fighting hulls in the water sooner works to that end.

See also The Small Ship Navy: Numerous and Expendable? Why not?

Anti-Submarine Warfare in the 21st Century, Sea "Gliders" Division

Or, as the Sam LaGrone USNI News piece is titled, Navy Deploying Unmanned Gilders from Destroyers to Help ASW Mission, and, no, these are not sail plane air craft, but rather mini ships:

The Navy is set to deploy unmanned buoyancy gliders from its guided missile destroyers in an effort to expand its anti-submarine warfare edge.

The service has used the gliders – that use wave action to travel under the water to record information like water temperature and pressure – to build complex models of the ocean depths the service uses as part of its ASW and mine warfare efforts.

Read the USNI News article for more on this promising use of unmanned tech to help expand the Navy's awareness sphere.

A Pair of Good Things to Read

Here's an excellent argument about the high :costs of using the wrong tool for the job at hand by Mike Pietrucha, Logistical Fratricide: The Cost of Fast Jet TACAIR Measured in Purple Hearts. If you understand Maslow's quote ""I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail," you will see how having a limited tool kit has far-reaching effects - especially, as argued in this piece on the support forces.

Combat operations drive high fuel consumption. In 2006, as Central Command argued for a surge in Iraq, the majority of the U.S. military’s fuel use (58 percent) was jet fuel, dwarfing the next largest category (marine diesel) at 13 percent. In 2008, total fuel deliveries to Iraq and Afghanistan exceeded 90 million gallons per month — 20 percent of the entire Defense Department consumption. Because of the poor in-ground petroleum transport infrastructure in Iraq and especially in Afghanistan, the heavy use of fuel in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom can be directly tied to casualties incurred by ground operations required to get the fuel to U.S. bases, particularly airbases. Overall, roughly half of the total tonnage hauled overland was fuel, with the Army bearing the lion’s share of the ground transportation burden for all of the services. Air Force airpower supported the Army’s wider campaign, but the Army itself moved and protected the fuel needed to make that happen.

You might also find an underlying argument in this piece for some light tactical Navy planes flying off smaller carriers that mitigate that vulnerable Army log chain.

The other piece for morning reading is B.A. Friedman's John Boyd’s Revenge: How ISIS got inside our OODA Loop - which covers a lot more than ISIS:

But the most reliable test for one’s strategic ideas is history. Or in this case, history in the

making. John Boyd’s ideas are evident in three modern day strategic actors and the success they’re currently enjoying is self-evident. Despite the loyalty of his acolytes, the best advocates for Boyd’s ideas are Russia, China, and the Islamic State. Each of these actors, probably without knowing it, are demonstrating Boydian strategic methods. Each of them is using an adroit mix of ambiguity, deception, distribution, and propaganda, all while demonstrating a keen awareness of the moral plane of war and warfare in a way that is serving their ends. To those of us aware of Boyd’s ideas, it comes as no surprise. Everyone else is trying to figure out if there is even a war.

Probably could have included Iran in that mix, too.

So. Happy Tuesday.

Fun with Drones: Autonomous Undersea Vehicles Operating Cooperatively

The Ocean News headline understates the import of the exercise in Iver3-AUV Plays Active Role in Unmanned Warrior (UW) 2016

***
Multiple Iver AUVs were put in active roles by members of the Royal Navy, US Navy and the Defense Research and Development Canada (DRDC). The Iver-3 systems were used in a segment of Unmanned Warrior known as Hell Bay, during which groups of underwater vehicles demonstrate how they collaborate to carry out autonomous tasks like target location and recognition.

Several of the Iver3 AUVs were equipped with SeeByte Neptune, an open architecture enabling autonomous multivehicle collaboration. Designed to enhance Mine Counter-Measure (MCM) missions, the system offers launch and recovery software management, water column flight management, static and dynamic exclusion zones, survey and re-acquire tasks, and real-time progress and status monitoring. The Iver3 MCM systems come equipped with high resolution side-scan sonar, RDI Explorer DVL w/ADCP, WHOI Micro modem, Iridium Communications and an operator console.
***

The ON report is based on a Iver3-AUV manufacturer, OceanServer press release.

This is very cool stuff. Autonomous cooperation and deconfliction of the water space are vital for future ops.

More, please.

Fighting Pirates and Sea Kidnappers with a Private-Public Deal Off Nigeria

Maritime Executive reports on a Private Maritime Security with Active Duty Personnel off Nigeria:

***
. . .[T]he contractor may provide private patrol vessels, which are then "crewed, flagged and armed by the Nigerian Navy [who] use Nigerian national Rules of Engagement" on for-hire ship escort missions arranged by the PMSCs.

Damen FCS 3307

Diaplous Maritime Services Nigeria says that its security escort vessels have seven to 10 Nigerian Navy servicemembers on board and are armed and equipped to deter emerging threats. The firm uses Damen FCS 3307 patrol boats, the same model recently delivered to Nigeria's Homeland Integrated Offshore Services Limited (HIOSL).

In addition, in cooperation with the Nigerian Navy, Diaplous offers armed embarked maritime security teams of four to eight members. For unarmed options, it can provide security consultants – Hellenic nationals or former Nigerian Navy officers – who are experienced in operating in the Gulf of Guinea security environment. ***

However it happens, more forces on the water are a good idea to fight the bad guys in the Gulf of Guinea.

Hat tip to Claude Berube. , whose books you should buy.

Photo from Damen.

U.S. Navy Office of Naval Intelligence Worldwide Threat to Shipping (WTS) Report 11 October - 9 November 2016

U.S. Navy Office of Naval Intelligence Worldwide Threat to Shipping (WTS) Report 11 October - 9 November 20... by lawofsea on Scribd

On Midrats 13 Nov 2016 - Episode 568: Seapower as a National Imperative, with Bryan McGrath

Please join us on at 5pm EST on 13 Nov 2016 for Midrats Episode 568: Seapower as a National Imperative, with Bryan McGrath

Why a Navy? Why a strong Navy? Why is a strong Navy an essential

requirement for the United States Navy?

From its ability to project national will, to it hidden hand in the economics of every citizen's life, why is it so critical that we have a Navy second to none.

To discuss this and more - especially in light of the election - will be returning guest, Bryan McGrath, Commander, US Navy (Retired).

Bryan McGrath grew up in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, and graduated from the University of Virginia in 1987. He was commissioned upon graduation in the United States Navy, and served as a Surface Warfare Officer until his retirement in 2008. At sea, he served primarily in cruisers and destroyers, rising to command of the Destroyer USS BULKELEY (DDG 84). During his command tour, he won the Surface Navy Association’s Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Award for Inspirational Leadership, and the BULKELEY was awarded the USS ARIZONA Memorial Trophy signifying the fleet’s most combat ready unit. Ashore, Bryan enjoyed four tours in Washington DC, including his final tour in which he acted as Team Leader and primary author of our nation’s 2007 maritime strategy entitled “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower.”

Since retirement, Bryan has become active in presidential politics, serving first as the Navy Policy Team lead for the Romney Campaign in 2012, and then as the Navy and Marine Corps Policy lead for the Rubio Campaign in 2016.

He is the Assistant Director of Hudson Institute’s Center for American Seapower, and he is the Managing Director of The FerryBridge Group LLC, a small defense consulting firm.

Join us live if you can or pick the show up later by clicking here or pick the show up later from our iTunes or Stitcher pages.

Saturday Is Old Radio Day: The Lone Ranger "One Nation Indivisible" (1941)

With the stirring sound of the William Tell Overture - from the classic opera of the little guy standing against a tyrant- setting the scene, truth and justice rode through the Old West - in the form of a "masked man" - the Lone Ranger and his trusty sidekick and the best horse ever -

Veterans Day

Thanks to those who served and to those who now serve!

Marines!

Happy Birthday!

Post election news that doesn't involve idle speculation about how the world is ending

Seems appropriate to me:

You may now return to the "experts" on TV and in the media.

Post Election Song for the Winners

The Post-Election Song for the Losers

Election Day Special: "Seasonal Changes in Trees"

I'm sure there is some underlying message I'm trying to convey by posting this:



Perhaps it's the comfort of knowing that like the changes in trees, this election, too, shall pass.Or something.

U.S. Navy Office of Naval Intelligence Worldwide Threat to Shipping (WTS) Report 4 October - 2 November 2016

U.S. Navy Office of Naval Intelligence Worldwide Threat to Shipping (WTS) Report 4 October - 2 November 201... by lawofsea on Scribd