Today the Navy has aircraft carriers, submarines, surface combatants, aircraft, and sensors under the sea and in space. Our plan to counter to China can be summed up as, more of the same but better and more tightly integrated.
This might be the right strategy. However, what if we’re wrong? What if our assumptions about the survivability of these naval platforms and the ability of our marines to operate, were based on incorrect assumption about 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.
That was the excellent Steve Blank in the first white paper from Stanford’s Gordian Knot Center: The Small, the Agile, and the Many. Of course, planning in the 1930s often focused on battleship engagements but it was the hedge of aircraft carriers and submarines that became the decisive systems in maritime operations. I would add that the shipbuilding holiday and general lack of funds perhaps helped stimulate the Navy to experiment.
Steve questions whether the carrier strike group will remain the dominant force package in a future conflict with a near-peer like China:
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, cruise missiles, hypersonics, drones, submarines, etc.)? If that’s a possibility, then what is the Navy’s 21st-century hedge? What is its Plan B?
I think that’s the question a lot of people are asking these days. While Steve and ONR are using different words, I think they largely look like DARPA’s concept for Mosaic Warfare.
We need formations composed of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of unmanned vehicles above, below, and on the ocean surface. We need to build collaborating, autonomous formations…NOT a collection of platforms.
… ONR’s plan is to move boldly. They’re building this new “small, the agile, and the many” formation on digital principles and they’re training a new class of program managers – digital leaders – to guide the journey through the complex software and data.
They are going to partner with industry using rapid, simple, and accountable acquisition 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.
Read the whole thing! Not much for me to add except that what Steve is talking about is innovating the acquisition and military decision-making process as much as it is technical innovation. ONR primarily works with BA 6.1-6.3 S&T money, and also BA 6.4 prototyping. They do not control the larger funding that would initiate DD&C for a program of record and for systems that enter the fleet at scale.
It is interesting to hear that ONR is looking to train a new cohort of program managers that will take on the responsibility of rapidly moving through a very deliberate, consensus-based, documentation process. How will ONR work with ASN(RDA) who is formally the boss of the PEOs and PMs? Will ONR find willing partners all over big Navy that will help them move forward, or will the efforts hit a wall?
Ultimately, Steve says that money will have to be taken from the existing programs of record and their prime contractors. That means blowing up approved program baselines, telling PMs they won’t hit their milestones, telling functionals that their processes aren’t needed, and telling congressmen that their districts will lose money. That’s a tough pill to swallow unless everybody understands: (1) the capabilities they are working on will not meet the threat; and (2) the documentation they require is either pointless or downright destructive.
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