Dr Robbin Laird, Building Combat Mass: A Navy Perspective, 30 September 2024
When you are a medium-sized force and not adding a lot of manned platforms in the next five years, how to you enhance combat mass?
Or put another way how does the ADF as a ready force create mass effects with what they must fight with tonight and what they can plus up with in the short to mid-term?
This was the focus of the panel chaired by AIRMSHL (Retd) Darren Goldie with participation from the commander of the Royal Australian Navy, RADM Christopher Smith and the commander of the Royal Australian Air Force, AVM Glen Braz.
In this piece, I will deal with RADM Smith’s remarks and in the next with AVM Braz’s remarks.
Let us start with RADM Smith’s remarks and then unpack them.
Considerations of agility are paramount to our force structure. But how is this achieved framed against the scope and the pace of today’s military challenges, while preserving the flexibility to respond to contingencies of climate change and mass migration>
How do we generate the necessary mass to deliver on this broad remit of diplomatic constabulary and warfighting missions?
Generating mass will continue to challenge us, but I will attempt to articulate specific methods I think can assist. I’ll focus particularly on generating mass by increasing survivability of our forces, generating mass through partnerships, both with industry and in our region, and finally, generating mass by developing multistage force structures that add scalability, resilience and agility relative to our traditional conceptualisation of mass. Today, the challenge we face pairs near persistent, wide area surveillance capabilities with advanced, long range precision strike.
Moreover, the volume and pace of the PRCs naval program has altered the landscape in which we must conceive of mass. Collectively, these challenges require us to reappraise our methods of confronting that challenge.
The first way in which today’s RAN in is able to build combat mass and depth by incorporating distribution forces operating across the maritime domain aim to defeat our adversary’s ability to find, fix, track, target and engage Australian forces.
This methodology seeks to distribute our forces in less detectable, less targetable means that present no clear center of gravity to the opposition. This approach eschews optimizing defeat of the adversary’s missiles in lieu of defeating their ability to effectively employ them.
Distributed forces are also able to match their firepower across a wider area compared to denser concentrations.
In this way, our forces become more survivable and better able to safeguard our maritime communications and trade. Echoing the wisdom of the classic theorists, distributed maritime operations places emphasis on massing effects vice platforms to generate the necessary depth of lethal force at the decisive point.
Distribution as a core concept of our operations therefore seeks to manage a defensive problem while seizing an offensive opportunity.
But there is tension between greater distribution and effective c2. Distributed forces will need to be supported by scalable and flexible c2, elements able to operate, either ashore or afloat and remain connected by resilient, low signature, redundant data networks that can withstand the contest for spectrum.
To support our survivability and decision advantage, we must dominate the various spectra in which our forces operate, employing techniques of deception and maneuver to install doubt in the mind of our adversaries.
The contest for spectrum will impact the wider contest for decision making advantage critical to our ability to dictate the tempo of conflict.
Together, these concepts will enable the RAN to achieve electromagnetic mass simultaneously flooding the spectrum and manipulating the pace of decision making of our adversaries. Decision superiority and the ability to dictate the scale and tempo of operations will thus be generated through distribution and manipulation of the perception of mass that we present to our adversary.
This brings me to the second point on how we will deliver mass. The concepts I’ve outlined will require leveraging our critical partnerships across industry and across borders.
The pace and scale of change is perhaps nowhere where more obvious than in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Of particular note is the ability of Ukrainian forces to generate a sea denial capability against the Black Sea Fleet through employment of remote and autonomous systems delivered by industry partners to fill a critical capability gap for Ukraine.
The full impact of what these developments may mean for potential great war conflict in our own region may not be fully known yet it appears there are. Opportunities available for their employment as a complicating feature of the contested physical and informational battle space.
The potential of these systems to raise the noise floor for our opposition may go well beyond their presence in the physical domain to what signatures can be synthetically manipulated and what synergy may be found with loitering munitions and decoys.
The full realization of these capabilities to generate electromagnetic mass will necessitate the type of technology and information sharing with our partners that AUKUS can deliver and will be reliant on our continued engagement with domestic industry partners to push the boundaries of what is viable.
Finally, pairing the two points above, the RAN will seek to generate mass by reshaping its multistage system that leverages the potential of modern, uncrewed systems and spectrum manipulation with the long range understood benefits of distributed forcesin the maritime domain.
A multistage system can be understood as a combat force that maximizes the versatility, adaptability, survivability and controllability of multiple layers of the fleet and maritime forces.
The combat power of a stage system is simultaneously concentrated and distributed to generate mass in the battle space that commanders will leverage to dictate and scale the the tempo of combat.
Importantly, a multistage system requires all components to be defeated in order to negate its combat power. This increases the resilience of the systems, degradation and attrition.
The next evolution in a multistage combat systems will almost certainly involve increased reach, persistence and agility by inclusion of remote and autonomous systems that are able to pair with or operate independently from their associated crew platforms.
Future multistage systems will incorporate adaptability and interchangeability that goes beyond the power of carrier centric forces, as the diminished size and the crewing requirements make this capability available and affordable additions to even frigate and destroyer sized platforms.
But more than just uncrewed systems, future multistage forces will leverage the joint capabilities of distributed land and air assets throughout the maritime environment. The ability of future ground and air forces to contribute essential kinetic, non-kinetic effects to multi domain strike missions in the maritime environment will be essential to improve the economy of effort and generate sufficient precision and firepower at the decisive points.
The conception of mass in modern maritime combat demands clarity in the development of our doctrine and concepts. As past examples have shown us, challenges Australia faces today are not unique, and our thinking around combat, mass and depth should be informed by previous incarnations of this conundrum. We so we must again today, reconceive our thinking around mass.
Our fleet has embarked on this journey, but full clarity around the destination remains ambiguous.
Concepts of distribution and spectrum manipulation will support our requirement for decision superiority. Uncrewed systems will add complexity to the adversary’s situational awareness while simultaneously refining our own.
Pairing these ideas as a network of scalable and adaptable teams to form multistage systems will build necessary depth, versatility and resilience.
Yet the final product remains to be fully conceived, articulated and engineered to success.
Engagement with industry and coalition partners will remain pivotal to delivering this end state. Along the way, we will require no small amount of innovation and an appetite to deal with the concomitant risk.
What makes this presentation so interesting is that it combines ways to enhance the current force going forward with the end state which he sees as necessary for the Royal Australian Navy. In the near to mid-term, one needs to enhance the ability of the fleet to be augmented with the additional of uncrewed systems but do so by having significant creativity in creating combat clusters afloat which can leverage ground and air capabilities as well supporting distributed fleet operations.
While not talking directly about ship building his emphasis on mass effect is upon what he calls a multi-stage system or what I would call a maritime kill web. The idea is simply that through ISR, C2 and Counter ISR, the maritime maneuver force is able to mask, and to integrate with joint or coalition forces to deliver the mass effects necessary to confuse, mis-direct and defeat adversary forces.
It is really about building kill web maneuver forces. In a recent interview I did with LtGen (Retired) General Heckl, the recent head of the USCM combat development command underscored that what Force Design for the USMC is really all about was creation of a maneuver force able to operate against a force with better ISR and significant long-range precision strike.
And in that interview, we focused on what I see is a major unsolved problem – the need to use autonomous systems now as part of the maneuver force and how to begin solving the ability of manned and autonomous systems to work effectively in crafting the required capabilities of a successful maneuver force.
One problem he highlighted was the following:
“How we effectively communicate with autonomous systems is the key to using them effectively. We don’t want rogue robots in the battlespace. And bandwidth is a key challenge. How do I work with multiple autonomous and manned systems? How do I communicate? How do I exercise fire control? And how do I provide the kind of interactive support and guidance with the Ground Combat element as it works the kind of offensive-defensive maneuver required in the conditions of being threatened by adversarial long-range fires and capable surveillance systems?”
This is a key element for working the kind of multistage system Smith is talking about. And this is not a long-range problem. It is part of the challenge in the next 2-5 years and as it is worked, the scope and nature of the future force will change significantly in ways no future force planner can now accurately predict.
This raises what I think is a key conundrum: If the force structure in being is modernized through the digital enablers for an integrated force –- C2, ISR, and Counter-ISR – and autonomous systems which are also software upgradeable payloads, how then do you know what exquisite platforms to buy for the future?
Featured Image: RADM Christopher Smith speaking to the Sir Richard Williams Foundation September 26, 2024
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