Prompted by the unfortunate accidents occurring in the Pacific during 2017, recent articles in Proceedings have focused on the surface warfare officer (SWO) career structure and the debates over the value of the “fleet-up” concept and the specialized career models used by many nations (including the Royal Australian Navy) versus the line officer concept used by the U.S. Navy. It is important what SWOs are asked to do to in the contemporary environment to ensure that any changes flowing from these reviews do not prepare Naval professionals to “fight the last fight” but equip them for future challenges.
Surface warfare officers need the ability to operate at sea (mariner skills) and to fight at sea (warfare skills). Operating at sea is difficult and dangerous, part art and part science, and cannot be distilled into a formula or fully automated. It takes training, experience, and practice in foundation skills such as shiphandling, terrestrial and astro navigation, blind pilotage, collision avoidance, damage control, emergency procedures, and a working knowledge of the ship’s engineering plant to be a successful mariner. Technology makes life at sea safer and easier than ever before, but there is an art of seafaring that can only be learned through experience and mentorship.
For any navy, however, operating ships at sea is only a means to an end. Navies exist to fight and win at sea, and SWOs need to fight their ships while simultaneously navigating them.
As U.S. dominance at sea is challenged for the first time since the Cold War, this shift in focus is necessary, both to be successful in any fight or, just as importantly, to be a credible deterrent. But the realities of today’s environment mean navies need to do much more than just prepare for high-end combat operations against a peer competitor. Sea control always has been the raison d’être for navies but the way to achieve it today has been fundamentally altered by the nature of our competitors and technology.
Threats to national security during previous great power struggles were primarily nation-state based, using traditional military capabilities and were waged against clearly defined enemies across the maritime, land, and air domains. Today is markedly different, with a multitude of both state and non-state actors using a variety of tools to challenge interests in myriad ways. National security threats now are ubiquitous across the electromagnetic, space, cyberspace, social media, and information domains, in addition to the physical environments. They are propagated by a variety of actors—sometimes coordinated and sometimes not—who operate below the threshold that would invite a traditional military response, and are ever-present. In short, grey-zone operations are the new normal.
Grey-zone operations capitalize on the openness of liberal democracies. In the South China Sea China, despite international legal rulings against its behavior, has successfully managed to expand its maritime influence through island building and militarization. China’s creeping influence has been insidious and gradual, using the People's Liberation Army and Navy (PLAN), coast guard, fishing fleets, information warfare, and diplomatic pressure to achieve its aim. This is the nature of grey-zone operations; the Chinese operate below the radar and push the envelope to the point where there starts to be push-back and then they ease off.
In a sense, the challenges of grey-zone maritime activities are similar to those that armies face in counterinsurgency operations, where the opposition is a mix of military and civilians intermingled, blending with legitimate activities making it difficult to maintain situational awareness and to know whose activities are legitimate and whose are not. In short, the three-lock war has gone to sea and is here to stay.
As a consequence, the fundamental skill contemporary warfare officers need is to understand the totality of the environment they are operating in (physically, politically, and militarily) and the consequent decision making to further our strategic aims—not the mechanical execution of a weapon’s engagement. Once a decision is made to engage, the mechanics of conducting the engagement increasingly will be automated. Computers are good at firing and controlling weapons—that is science. But warfare is a human activity that is as much art as science.
In the future, ships, aircraft, and submarines will operate in a continual grey-zone environment where maintaining situational awareness (SA) is the task our to which warfare teams must be devoted. CIC teams must be building SA through operating organic sensors, fusing information from other network sensors, and incorporating knowledge and intelligence products. In addition to what is happening in real time, our warfare teams also must be well schooled in the culture and mindset of all potential adversaries to better provide context to what they are seeing. This can only be achieved by reading, studying, and debating all aspects of the geopolitical environment and by operating in the likely operating areas to build our collective experience base. We need exercises that create decision making dilemmas to practice our warfare teams in building SA and producing a holistic understanding of the threats they face.
In addition, SWOs need to review the balance between the art and science of maritime warfare. We need to practice decision making in difficult, ambiguous, and confusing circumstances, and take independent action when needed. Standard operational procedures, drills, and processes can only do so much. It is important that SWOs develop that “sixth sense” or “feeling in the water” that only comes from experience. This is the only way warfare teams will be able to distil what they see, what they know, and what they are told into an accurate understanding of the totality of what they face and be able to react accordingly in this period of continual grey-zone operations.
While the consequences from the fatal accidents in 2017 are being used to improve the mariner skills focus within the SWO community, mariner skills are only a means (albeit a vital one) to an end. The end is to be able to fight and win at sea. Training, preparatory activities, and culture are needed to achieve exactly that. Balancing the science and art of maritime warfare against the threats that are expected is well worth undertaking.
Commodore Leavy is a surface warfare officer who has commanded HMAS Stuart (FFH-153) and HMAS Sydney (FFG-03). He has worked extensively with the U.S. Navy, including as the Expeditionary Strike Group Commander for RIMPAC 14 and Deputy CFMCC for Talisman Saber 15. He currently is the Australian naval attaché to the United States.