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Increasing IW Competencies
Written by Scott R. Gourley
While the majority of existing maritime capabilities were and will continue to be developed in preparation for major combat operations against a near-peer nation-state’s military forces, some maritime elements are seeking to develop, enhance and optimize existing and future capabilities to increase competency in irregular warfare (IW) campaigns.
In the case of the Navy, these enhanced capabilities to conduct IW are evident across the spectrum of materiel, organizational and training arenas.
One of the most obvious examples in the materiel arena can be found in the conversion and “return to fleet” of the Navy’s new Ohio-class SSGN guided missile submarines. Described by the Navy as providing “an unprecedented combination of strike and special operation mission capability within a stealthy, clandestine platform,” the SSGNs are equipped with an impressive combination of cruise missile, communications and special operations support capabilities.
Under the SSGN program, the Navy has leveraged available platforms by converting four existing SSBNs [submersible ship, ballistic missile, nuclear powered] into SSGNs [submersible ship, guided missile, nuclear powered]. Of the 24 missile tubes that previously carried Trident missiles, tubes 3 through 24 are configured to carry tactical Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles. Each tube carries the missiles in a seven-shot multiple all-up-round canister (MAC), for a total platform capability of 154 missiles. In addition, tubes 1 and 2 are converted to lock out chambers to allow clandestine insertion and retrieval of SOF personnel. Dry deck shelters (DDS) and the advanced can mount atop the lockout chambers. Together with additional SOF berthing in the missile compartment, those changes greatly enhance the SSGNs’ SOF capabilities.
USS Ohio (SSGN 726) entered the shipyard on November 15, 2002, completed conversion in December 2005 and deployed for the first time in October 2007. USS Florida (SSGN 728) commenced its conversion in August 2003 and returned to the fleet in April 2006. Conversion of USS Michigan (SSGN 727) started in October 2004 and the ship delivered in November 2006. USS Georgia (SSGN 729) returned to the fleet in March 2008.
ORGANIZATIONAL AND OPERATIONAL EVOLUTION
While these four new platforms provide a significant expansion of U.S. Navy IW capabilities, senior service representatives are quick to note that Navy contributions in this arena stretch back well over a decade.
“If you think back, from a Navy perspective, we have been ‘in the fight’ for a pretty long time,” observed Rear Admiral Mark W. Kenny, director, Navy Irregular Warfare (N3/N5) in a recent industry briefing titled, “Engaging Terrorist Threats from the Joint and Maritime Environment.” Kenny noted, “We conducted operations against Osama bin Laden in ‘98 … sensitive operations, including strikes … We were embarked with teams; looking at Tomahawk strikes and a number of operations. Unfortunately, we did not get him.”
Explaining the changing and expanding emphasis on IW within the Navy, he observed, “The bottom line is … you have got the Navy, with about 278 ships and 5,000 aircraft, that is focused principally on major combat operations [MCO]—scenarios tied to places like Iran or North Korea. A small piece of that navy is focused on IW—irregular warfare. And a small piece of that is focused on counter terrorism [CT]. [The CNO’s] vision is, through optimizing the fleet, to have a Navy that can do both [MCO and IW].
“The Navy IW Office main focus is on counter insurgency, counter terrorism, foreign internal defense, unconventional warfare, information [operations] and intelligence operations,” he added.
Drawing an IW heritage from those 1998 Naval TLAM strikes, Kenny continued, “Then, about 9/11, Admiral Grossenbacher’s time, [On October 1, 2001, Vice Admiral John J. Grossenbacher, commander, Submarine Forces U.S. Atlantic Fleet, assumed additional duties as commander, Naval Submarine Forces] they formed an organization to better use Navy submarines and SEALs to go after al Qaeda in the littorals.”
Choosing his words carefully, he explained that the 2002 COMSUBLANT CT Initiative led to the “first dedicated CT missions” in 2003–2004.
“We went after that. We found a lot of gaps and seams between inter-agencies, country teams and the uniformed services, and worked hard to bridge those seams.”
The need to bridge those gaps and seams led to the March 2005 creation of the Cell for Submarine Counter-Terrorism Operations (CSCO).
With the first SSGB still six months away from completion of conversion, early CSCO efforts focused on other available submarine platforms. An example could be seen in the “surge deployment” of USS Memphis (SSN 691), which departed Naval Submarine Base New London on May 6, 2006 “in support of the global war on terrorism.”
“Surge deployments are made to support real-world taskings from combatant commanders,” said Commander Joseph Wiegand, deputy commander for operations and training for Commander, Submarine Development Squadron (DEVRON) 12.
Memphis’ surge deployment coincided with the scheduled deployment of USS Alexandria (SSN 757), also of DEVRON 12, and the surge deployment of USS Louisville (SSN 724) of Submarine Squadron 3 in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
According to a service release, for the six months prior to deployment, “the crew of Memphis and the staff of DEVRON 12 have trained closely with the newly activated Cell for Submarine Counter-Terrorism Operations. The CSCO continuously worked with Memphis in training for mission planning, special forces certifications, and presented real-time lessons learned from other currently deployed submarines.”
“The nuclear-powered submarine continues to bring a lot to the table when it comes to the day-to-day operations in the global war on terrorism,” explained Lieutenant Commander David Kelly, deputy director of the CSCO. “Our submarine force has never been in higher demand than it is today, including in the heyday of the Cold War.”
Kelly added that nuclear-powered submarines are unique in that they are the one platform that can conduct forward missions against threats from traditional naval forces as well as engage in missions against the more elusive and scattered terrorist threats.
Noting that the evolution of the Navy’s IW effort continued through some “Deep Blue and Naval Studies Board” studies in late 2007, he continued, “We stood up an organization and then worked an organization with SOCOM, and eventually, the CNO stood us up last July.
On July 25, 2008, the CNO formally created the IW effort under N3/N5.
“Our [IW] mission is to synchronize and facilitate Navy support to the fight,” Kenny said. Acknowledging close coordination with SOCOM elements, he added, “Our goal is to optimize the Navy that we have today to continue to fight and be relevant to the fight.”
The effort includes helping to institutionalize IW in Navy’s planning, investment and capability development.
“We get input from the operators,” he said. “We have liaison officers stationed forward, shoulder to shoulder, in places like Africa and Afghanistan. And part of their mission is to identify the gaps. It may be an ISR gap or a C2 gap, but their strategy is a find/fix/finish methodology. They identify solutions. Those solutions could be tactics, training procedures; they could be doctrine; or they could be equipment. We find funding and then we work it through the Navy staff, the NAVSEA/NAVAIR Enterprises, and then deliver a capability.
“The CNO is driving us to a four-to-eight- month turnaround for what we call ‘combat assessments,’ where we are sending things into the fight and then assessing their value, much like SOCOM does routinely,” he added.
Depending on the assessed mission value, the process will stimulate a larger programmatic effort.
Kenny then highlighted the probable IW battlespace, identifying the so-called “arc of instability” that stretches east from the northern parts of South America, widening to encompass North Africa, the Balkans, Southwest Asia and Southern Asia, and then ending around the Indonesia Archipelago. He noted that the region is primarily located along the maritime domain, with resulting implications for ease of movement, supply and communication.
“The way we address that is not through large numbers of troops and boots on the ground but in the small application of force, leveraging our country teams, leveraging our coalition partners, and working with our host nations to create a security environment that, first of all, will prevent extremism, but when extremism does get a chance to grow to hit back, hit those targets, in cooperation with our forces from the sea,” he explained.
A key aspect of the Navy’s IW concept of operations planning is a “sensor network approach” in which the Navy provides expeditionary combat capabilities through access, persistence, fusion and analysis, and strike, all within the selected IW operational footprint. In addition to the Navy’s “onboard” capabilities, the network is expanded through “offboard” assets, including special operations forces ashore, unmanned air and undersea vehicles, unmanned sensors, and other national assets.
“That [information] is then fused onboard. We have fusion cells much like the Army and special forces have in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they are doing much the same thing, except for the language factor, to fuse that data and then do something about it. It’s all about near real-time actionable intelligence. We can’t afford now to have that data sent back, filtered, and then sent to the warfighter. So we’re doing that fusion forward, at the right level, with the speed and agility to respond,” Kenny said.
UNMANNED VEHICLES
Cautioning that “unfortunately these get classified real fast because we’re using these vehicles in operations,” Kenny then offered the example of the Sea Stalker “large diameter” unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) as one ongoing initiative with direct application to IW.
“What we’re doing is responding to needs from the front to send vehicles into the fight—doing combat assessments,” he reiterated. “We shifted to large diameter [38-inch tube], rather than 21-inch tube, because we need endurance and we need payload, and we couldn’t get it in a 21-inch [diameter] vehicle.”
Citing several large diameter platform activities, he noted an effort “to get those equipped with SIGINT collection and a command and control element to do real time exploitation of RF signals close to shore. We’re talking meters offshore, where ship platforms could be a few miles offshore. The alternative is to take this equipment onto the beach and either have surrogates or special forces hump it around at great risk—risk of compromise as well as risk to the safety of the individuals.”
“The CONOPS is to launch these from submarines at night,” he said. “They will transit to offshore, anchor, put their antennas out, and begin collection. Ideally you would have a series of these … to cover different ports or hotbeds of terrorist activity. And then you would collate that information onboard the ship.”
He added, “You could do detections from a SIGINT and RF. Then you could use UAVs to get eyes on those areas, and then use our forces ashore to kill, capture or turn it over to the locals to do the job.” In terms of the UAVs that might help get “eyes on” those areas, Kenny highlighted the ScanEagle [developed by Boeing and the Insitu Group] and the potential for upgrades to expand its Navy IW capabilities.
“Scan Eagle is a well-proven system,” he said. “We’re expanding ScanEagle in a few ways. One [is] to bring onboard capabilities, more than just full motion video and infrared, to other SIGINT/intercept packages. We’re also looking at the ability to weaponize ScanEagle. We’re looking at trying to get a heavy fuel version for a longer dwell time. And we’re looking at launch and recovery from an SSGN payload tube to allow clandestine close-in operations.”
He noted that this summer’s exercise Talisman Saber will include participation by two ScanEagles, providing alternating full motion video (day) and infrared (night) “eyes on” capabilities with the second vehicle shifting to the data relay mission.
In terms of smaller UAV activities, Kenny also pointed to recent Navy efforts involving the BUSTER small unmanned aerial system from prime contractor Mission Technologies Inc.
“We’ve deployed it on a number of naval vessels,” he said. “We’ve also done some very successful operations with allies, doing foreign internal defense, training them to operate this vehicle.
“You might ask why the Navy trains ground forces on a Navy UAV.” He offered two reasons: “First of all, because we have it and we have relationships with country teams and Special Operations Command— and confidence in the system. But more importantly, it allows coalition forces or surrogates to launch them from shore. Naval vessels have the ability to pull in the full motion video and the infrared, correlate it and fuse it in our battle management centers onboard.”
“We currently have got the system deployed on USS Florida and we’re looking at larger and more capable versions of that vehicle,” he said. ♦