Disperse, disperse, and disperse again. Disperse firepower among surface warships, making every vessel a combatant. Disperse the fleet into compact surface action groups. Disperse surface action groups across embattled theaters. That’s how you cope with contested waters and skies, the offshore zone where anti-access forces roam. In the bargain, you compel opponents to disperse as well—thinning them out and dizzying them while limiting the damage they can do to the fleet’s aggregate striking power. If successful, you confound their efforts to compile a complete picture of what’s happening and to find, target, and pummel U.S. naval forces prowling nearby.
Disorienting and riding out anti-access measures are critical to prying control of embattled seas and skies from a local adversary—and thus to projecting power onto foreign shores from the sea.
Or that seems to be the message emanating from U.S. Navy surface-warfare potentates, who explain their concept of “distributed lethality” in the Naval Institute Proceedings this month. The conceit is that shipbuilders will spread firepower and reconnaissance assets throughout the surface navy rather than concentrating them in a few top-end combatants such as guided-missile cruisers and destroyers—ships that can be singled out, targeted, and overwhelmed with barrages of anti-ship missiles, torpedoes, what have you. Put the fleet’s “shotguns” out of action, and you cripple its defenses—balking American operations while exposing the remainder of the fleet to destruction.
That’s the logic of anti-access. Defeat one ship, or a few, and you defeat them all. And indeed, U.S. commanders stay awake nights worrying about “saturation” missile attacks of this type. But if every surface ship—not just cruisers and destroyers but littoral combat ships or even amphibious transports—boasts offensive firepower, manifest in anti-ship and land-attack missiles, then local defenders will confront a dilemma: what to attack? They can take out segments of the fleet without disabling the organism as a whole. Individual ships may die, yet the fleet lives—and may accomplish its goals even in fiercely contested expanses.
It’s hard to gainsay the logic of distributed lethality. Putting it into practice, however, is another story. Strategic concentration and dispersal also count. The Navy and the Pentagon must exercise the strategic wisdom to concentrate the fleet close to likely scenes of action in troubled times, rather than scattering it across the map as they customarily do. Surface action groups will take casualties, no matter how dispersed their armaments and no matter how cunning their tactics and operations. With only 288 ships—about a third of which are undergoing upkeep at any time, with another third working up for overseas duty and not fully combat-ready—the U.S. Navy’s margin to take a punch and keep fighting is dubious. It’s doubtful the fleet possesses enough assets to overpower, say, a China without concentrating resources in likely theaters of action.
Yet shifting assets to one region may mean leaving commitments elsewhere unmet. No seafaring power can do everything, everywhere. But it takes gumption, and discipline, to pronounce one region more important than another—and to siphon resources from less important regions to protect U.S. interests where it counts most. Washington must summon up that self-discipline, allocating forces where needed most while making shift elsewhere. Whether it will remains a matter of conjecture. The sea services are poised to release a revised maritime strategy. Parsing its language will furnish clues about the leadership’s attitude toward the fleet’s disposition on the map.
So we’ll see. The other caveat is technological. The Proceedings authors list six pieces of kit—weapon systems, sensors, capabilities—the fleet needs to make distributed lethality a concrete reality. These include extended-range anti-ship missiles—the navy is outranged after failing to field a new anti-ship missile for twenty-plus years—a standoff anti-submarine weapon, electromagnetic railguns, and surveillance and command-and-control assets of various sorts. Fair enough. Except none of these systems is ready for sea. These are implements of the future—and it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. A railgun exists in experimental form, as do unmanned vehicles suitable for reconnaissance. The rest remain at the conceptual stage.
Which means developing them will consume time—and have uncertain prospects for success. Concepts must be vetted and approved; defense manufacturers must draw up designs and win contracts; prototypes must be developed and tested; and working models must be built and deployed. The defense sector’s and the Pentagon’s capacity to develop and deploy the requisite hardware swiftly appears doubtful. For instance, the progress toward fielding a new long-range anti-ship missile, or LRASM, has proved fitful. Not until 2019 will an air-launched LRASM go to sea aboard F-18E/F fighter/attack jets. Competition has yet to begin for a ship-launched missile. New weaponry typically has a long gestation period—and that will postpone efforts to make distributed lethality a working concept, not just something that makes sense in the abstract.
In short, no tactical or operational idea succeeds absent strategic wisdom and the technological wizardry needed to execute it. Sea-service leaders may muster the former, but the latter remains years off in the best of circumstances. Bad things, like a maritime war, may happen in the interim, leaving U.S. Navy surface action groups at a marked disadvantage. What happens then? One hopes the service is drawing up interim measures to span the danger zone when antagonists—mindful that new U.S. Navy weaponry and assets are in the pipeline—find themselves tempted to act before distributed lethality is a fact.
The authors invoke a football analogy to illustrate distributed lethality. They enjoin commanders to “spread the playing field.” But if you want to run a spread offense, you have to do more than just disperse. Such offenses are founded not just on spreading out to overextend defenders but on fooling them through speed, deception, and misdirection. Executing the spread offense demands a number of things. For one, coaches need outstanding players at the skill positions: quarterback, running back, and receiver. People execute strategy and, to a great extent, are strategy. For another, mass counts. Recruit a deep roster to beat an opponent on his home field. And an offense needs blockers to protect the quarterback and create holes in the defense through which runners can flit. An enterprising offense, then, must feature a stout defense.
And when running the offense, you’d better cultivate numerous options. Run the ball, and toss the short pass, sure. But if a coach relies solely on the short game, the defense will concentrate players in space to stop it. If offensive threats are few and short-range, that is, the defense will stack up near the line of scrimmage in order to stuff the run and the passing game. Progress downfield slows or stops altogether. An effective offense, consequently, can also throw the long ball. That deep threat stretches out the defense while confronting defenders with more challenges than they can handle. Prospects of victory brighten.
You get the analogy. To absorb combat losses while outmatching opponents on their home fields, assemble a deep roster of ships in the theater. To block out the defense, protect the fleet against anti-access measures. To go long, equip as many surface ships as possible with long-range missiles, augmenting the short-range “birds” that now constitute the main battery. Only then can surface action groups lurk off enemy shores with impunity.
Great concept, kid. Don’t get cocky.
James Holmes is professor of strategy at the Naval War College. The views voiced here are his alone.
Photo credit: Official U.S. Navy Imagery
ntenghtim 
I have also read the releases by Navy leadership on “Distributed Lethality” and would provide a few comments/concerns of my own. This concept essentially looks like a de-facto acknowledgement that we won’t have enough ships to operate with an acceptable level of risk in a highly contested area. Our naval history buffs will probably helpfully explain that there is nothing new here; the equation of the “whale versus the elephant” is always tilted in favor of the elephant when he is defending home turf. However, as a result of this calculus, we have apparently convinced ourselves that the combination of a smaller number of more lethal, networked ships and an offensive mindset is the best way to balance the risk equation. In this sense, there also is nothing new here. You can watch this trend everywhere on the modern American battlefield – we face the fundamental challenge that we can’t afford both quantity and quality at the same time.
Along these lines, some of the concept makes me nervous as it portends a continuation of the Navy’s current efforts to build a highly networked force. To be sure, networking is a good thing and some level of connectivity is important, but combat-system-related networks should be built with the understanding that each additional networking layer provides an exponential set of opportunities for an adversary to deny or exploit (or additional channels for self-inflicted confusion). The other reason the title makes me nervous it because it seems that we might be on the way to the abandonment of the classic military value of “force concentration.” I acknowledge that force concentration does not require that we gather our ships of the line anymore, but the belief that an adversary will have a more difficult time hunting and killing our widely scattered platforms is a little disingenuous in a world where artificial intelligence, robots and ubiquitous sensors will soon be working tirelessly on the task of sorting wheat from chaff.
One heartening line from the pitch is the discussion of autonomy. There is no doubt that we are headed back to an environment where a commander’s tactical understanding of the battlefield will be based on a combination of what he/she is pre-briefed and what they collect themselves with unit level sensors. In this fight over the horizon connectivity is likely to be the exception, not the rule. As a result, we can clearly see that we must begin to reverse several decades of the gradual centralization of our command and control. These efforts have weakened our unit commander’s ability to conduct independent actions and have diminished our strongest warfighting advantage – i.e. the individual authority for a commander to take the fight to the enemy (an advantage that can’t be technologically countered). In the future, like the past, we need to be prepared to operate the fleet via a well-crafted “commander’s intent” as opposed to being driven around by some omniscient Maritime Operations Center that is thousands of miles away.
The best thing I hear from the surface force is a shift to an offensive mindset; putting the adversary at risk is not just an important component of naval presence…it is the KEY component of presence. The wailing about the deficient combat survivability of some of our new weapon systems is defeatist. We should have always been much more concerned with how well these platforms take the fight to the enemy rather than how well they take hits. When it comes to training to meet this ideal, Top Gun is a good model. As a product of failure over the skies of Vietnam, Top Gun successfully made the combination of tactical proficiency, standardization and aggressiveness the yardstick for the Naval Aviation. However, it is also a cautionary example an organization that is very aware of its particular rice-bowl and, as a result, has become increasingly reluctant to adapt or support tactical innovation by the fleet or “non-patch-wearers.” Today, it may have become as much a part of the problem as it is part of the solution (a topic for another day).
It is in this sense that the emphasis on people in “Distributed Lethality” seemingly falls short. There is an entire culture to change and this change will require investment, years of experimentation and constant attention from leadership. The intent to change will have to be balanced with the day-to-day necessity of operating the fleet in the real world – this will be tremendously hard. We have spent decades building ideal career paths for “DC” admirals, now we need to split this effort and figure out a way to build the next Admiral Nimitz as well as the next Admiral King… this means we must create space in navy careers to innovate, fail, learn and try again – at the tactical, operational and strategic levels of war. Why, because the smaller and more distributed the force gets, the more important it is that we don’t learn the hard way when projectiles start flying.