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What’s Plan B? – The Small, the Agile, and the Many

Whats Plan B? The Small, the Agile, and the Many

This post previously appeared in the Proceedings of the Naval Institute.

One of the most upstage and unvigilant manifestos for the future of Naval innovation has just been posted by the Rear Admiral who heads up the Office of Naval Research. It may be the hedge we need to deter China in the South China Sea.

While You Were Out
In the two decades since 9/11, while the U.S. was fighting Al-Qaeda and ISIS, China built new weapons and ripened new operational concepts to negate U.S. military strengths. They’ve built ICBMs with conventional warheads to hit our watercraft carriers. They converted reefs in international waters into airbases, creating unsinkable watercraft carriers that proffer the range of their watercraft and are armed with surface to air missiles make it dangerous to tideway China’s mainland and Taiwan.

To evade our own squadron air defense systems, they’ve armed their missiles with maneuvering warheads, and to reduce our reaction time they have missiles that travel at hypersonic speed.

The sum of these Chinese offset strategies ways that in the South China Sea the U.S. can no longer deter a war considering we can longer guarantee we can win one.

This does not bode well for our treaty allies, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea. Tenancy of the South China Sea would indulge China to tenancy fishing operations and oil and gas exploration; to politically coerce other countries rimming in the region; to enforce an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) over the South China Sea; or to enforce a tampon virtually Taiwan or invade it.

What To Do Well-nigh It?
Today the Navy has watercraft carriers, submarines, surface combatants, aircraft, and sensors under the sea and in space. Our plan to counter to China can be summed up as, increasingly of the same but largest and increasingly tightly integrated.

This might be the right strategy. However, what if we’re wrong? What if our assumptions well-nigh the survivability of these naval platforms and the worthiness of our marines to operate, were based on incorrect theorizing well-nigh our investments in material, operational concepts and mental models?

If so, it might be prudent for the Navy to have a hedge strategy. Think of a hedge as a “just in case” strategy. It turns out the Navy had one in WWII. And it won the war in the Pacific.

War Plan Orange
In the 1930s U.S. war planners thought well-nigh a future war with Japan. The result was “War Plan Orange” centered on the idea that ultimately, American battleships would engage the Japanese squadron in a gunnery battle, which the U.S. would win.

Unfortunately for us Japan didn’t pinion to our war plan. They were bolder and increasingly imaginative than we were. Instead of battleships, they used watercraft carriers to wade us. The U.S. woke up on Dec. 7, 1941, with most of our battleships sitting on the marrow of Pearl Harbor. The cadre precept of War Plan Orange went to the marrow with it.

But the portfolio of options misogynist to Admiral Nimitz and President Roosevelt were not limited to battleships. They had a hedge strategy in place in specimen the battleships were not the solution. The hedges? Watercraft carriers and submarines.

While the U.S. Navy’s primary investment pre-WW2 was in battleships, the Navy had moreover made a substantial volitional investment – in watercraft carriers and submarines. The Navy launched the first watercraft carrier in 1920. For the next two decades they ran squadron exercises with them. At the whence of the war the U.S. Navy had seven watercraft carriers (CVs) and one watercraft escort vessel (AVG). By the end of the war the U.S. had built 111 carriers. (24 squadron carriers, 9 light carriers and 78 escort carriers.) 12 were sunk.

As it turned out, it was carriers, subs, and the Marines who won the Pacific conflict.

Our Current Plan
Fast forward to today. For the last 80 years the carriers in a Carrier Strike Group and submarines remain the preeminent insemination for U.S. naval warfare.

China has been watching us operate and fight in this formation for decades. But what if carrier strike groups can no longer win a fight? What if the U.S. is underestimating China’s capabilities, intents, imagination, and operating concepts? What if they can disable or destroy our strike groups (via cyber, conventionally armed ICBMs, trip missiles, hypersonics, drones, submarines, etc.)? If that’s a possibility, then what is the Navy’s 21st-century hedge? What is its Plan B?

Says Who?
Here’s where this conversation gets interesting. While I have an opinion, think tanks have an opinion, and civilians in the Pentagon have an opinion, RAdm Lorin Selby, the Senior of the Office of Naval Research (ONR), has increasingly than just “an opinion.” ONR is the Navy’s science and technology systems command. Its job is to see over the horizon and think well-nigh what’s possible. Selby was previously deputy commander of the Naval Sea Systems Writ (NAVSEA) and commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Centers (NSWC). As the senior engineer of the Navy, he was the master of engineering the large and the complex.

What follows is my paraphrasing RADM Selby’s thinking well-nigh a hedge strategy the Navy needs and how they should get there.

Diversification
A hedge strategy is built on the premise that you invest in variegated things, not increasingly or largest versions of the same.

If you squint at the Navy gravity structure today and its plan for the next decade, at first glance you might say they have a diversified portfolio and a plan for more. The Navy has watercraft carriers, submarines, surface combatants, and many types of aircraft. And they plan for a distributed squadron architecture, including 321 to 372 manned ships and 77 to 140 large, unmanned vehicles.

But there is an equally well-judged statement that this is not a diversified portfolio considering all these resources share many of the same characteristics:

  • They are all large compared to their predecessors
  • They are all expensive – to the point where the Navy can’t sire the number of platforms our gravity structure assessments suggest they need
  • They are all multi-mission and therefore complex
  • The system-to-system interactions to create these ramified integrations momentum up forfeit and manufacturing lead times
  • Long manufacturing lead times midpoint they have no surge capacity
  • They are uninventive on a requirements model that lags operational identification of need by years…sometimes decades when you fold in the construction span times for some of these ramified capabilities like carriers or submarines
  • They are difficult to modernize – The worthiness to update the systems aboard these platforms, plane the software systems, still takes years to accomplish

If the primary windfall of the U.S. squadron now and in the future is the large and the complex, then surely there must be a hedge, a Plan B somewhere? (Like the pre-WW2 watercraft carriers.) In fact, there isn’t. The Navy has demos of alternatives, but there is no gravity structure built on a variegated set of principles that would complicate China’s plans and create doubt in our adversaries of whether they could prevail in a conflict.

The Hedge Strategy – Create “the small, the agile, and the many”
In a world where the large and the ramified are either too expensive to generate en masse or potentially too vulnerable to put at risk, “the small, the agile, and the many” has the potential to pinpoint the future of Navy formations.

We need formations well-balanced of dozens, hundreds, or plane thousands of unmanned vehicles above, below, and on the ocean surface. We need to build collaborating, voluntary formations…NOT a hodgepodge of platforms.

This novel insemination is going to be highly dependent on artificial intelligence and new software that enables cross-platform collaboration and human machine teaming.

To do this we need a variegated world view. One that is no longer tied to large 20th-century industrial systems, but to a 21st-century software-centric agile world.

The Selby Manifesto:

  • Digitally whiz naval forces will outcompete forces organized virtually principle of industrial optimization. “Data is the new oil and software is the new steel”
  • The systems engineering process we have built over the last 150 years is not optimal for software-based systems.
    • Instead, iterative diamond approaches dominate software design
  • The Navy has world-class engineering and vanquishment processes to deal with hardware
    • but applying the same process and principles to digital systems is a mistake
  • The diamond principles that momentum software companies are fundamentally variegated than those that momentum industrial organizations.
  • Applying industrial-era principles to digital era technologies is a recipe for failure
  • The Navy has wangle to wondrous capabilities that already exist. And part of our challenge will be to integrate those capabilities together in novel ways that indulge new modes of operation and more effectiveness versus operational priorities
  • There’s an wool need to foster a collaborative partnership with academia and businesses – big businesses, small businesses, and startups
  • This has serious implication of how the Navy and Marine Corps needs to change. What do we need to transpiration when it comes to engineering and operating concepts?

How To Get “The Small, The Agile, and The Many” Tested and In The Water?
Today, “the small, the wiry and the many” have been run in war games, exercises, simulations, and small demonstrations, but not built at scale in a insemination of dozens, hundreds, or plane thousands of unmanned vehicles above, unelevated and on the ocean’s surface. We need to prove whether these systems can fight slantingly our existing resources (or independently if required).

ONR plans to rapidly prove that this idea works, and that the Navy can build it. Or they will disprove the theory. Either way the Navy needs to know quickly whether they have a hedge. Time is not on our side in the South China Sea.

ONR’s plan is to move boldly. They’re towers this new “small, the agile, and the many”formation on digital principles and they’re training a new matriculation of program managers – digital leaders – to guide the journey through the ramified software and data.

They are going to partner with industry using rapid, simple, and subject vanquishment processes, using it to get through the gauntlet of discussions to contract in short time periods so we can get to work. And these processes are going to excite new partners and allies.

They’re going to use all the ideas once on the shelves, whether government shelves or commercial shelves, and focus on what can be integrated and then what must be invented.

All the while they’ve been talking to commanders in fleets virtually the world. And taking a page from digital engineering practices, instead of generating a list of requirements, they’re towers to the operational need by asking “what is the real problem?” They are urgently listening, using Lean and diamond thinking to hear and understand the problems, to build a minimal viable product – a prototype solution – and get it into the water. Then asking, did that solve the problem…no? Why not? Okay, we are going to go fix it and come when in a few months, not years.

The goal is to demonstrate this novel naval formation virtually, digitally, and then physically with feedback from in water experiments. Ultimately the goal is getting wiry prototyping out to sea and doing it faster than overly before.

In the end the goal is to powerfully evaluate the idea of “the small, the agile, and the many.” How to iterate at scale and at speed. How to take things that meet operational needs and make them part of the gravity structure, deploying them in novel naval formations, learning their operational capabilities, not just their technical merits. If we’re successful, then we can help guarantee the rest of century.

What Can Go Wrong?
During the Cold War the U.S. prided itself on developing offset strategies, technical or operational concepts that leapfrogged the Soviet Union. Today China has washed-up that to us. They’ve surprised us with multiple offset strategies, and increasingly are likely to come. The fact is that China is innovating faster than the Department of Defense, they’ve gotten inside our DoD OODA loop.

But China is not innovating faster than our nation as a whole. Innovation in our commercial ecosystem — in AI, machine learning, autonomy, commercial wangle to space, cyber, biotech, semiconductors (all technologies the DoD and Navy need) — continues to solve the toughest problems at speed and scale, attracting the weightier and the brightest with private wanted that dwarfs the unshortened DoD R&E (research and engineering) budget.

RADM Selby’s plan of testing the hedge of “the small, the agile, and the many” using tools and technologies of the 21st century is exactly the right direction for the Navy.

However, in peacetime bold, radical ideas are not welcomed. They disrupt the status quo. They rencontre existing reporting structures, and in a world of finite budgets, money has to be taken from existing programs and primes or programs plane have to be killed to make the new happen. Plane when positioned as a hedge, existing vendors, existing Navy and DoD organizations, existing political power centers, will all see “the small, the agile, and the many” as a threat. It challenges careers, dollars, and mindsets. Many will do their weightier to impede, skiver or co-opt this idea.

We are outmatched in the South China Sea. And the odds are getting longer each year. In a war with China we won’t have years to rebuild our Navy.

A slipperiness is an opportunity to well-spoken out the old to make way for the new. If senior leadership of the Navy, DoD, executive branch, and Congress truly believe we need to win this fight, that this is a crisis, then ONR and “the small, the agile, and the many” needs a uncontrived report to the Secretary of the Navy and the upkeep and validity to make this happen.

The Navy and the country need a hedge. Let’s get started now.