Welcome to mid Rats with Sal from Commander Salamander and Eagle One from Eagle Speak
at Seer Shore your home for a discussion of national security issues and all things
Maritimes. And welcome board everybody. I am the aforementioned Sal along with my
co host, the Aborgini Eagle One of Eagle Speak both with you today and
we are live. So if you are with that esteemed cohort that made the
extra effort to arrange your schedules to be with you, I'd like to be
with us. I'll I'd like to invite you to scroll down to the bottom
of the show page. That's where you will find a link to the chat
room. We've already got four folks in there that'll be glad to welcome you
on board. And if that is a great venue. In case you have
any questions you would like for us to address to our guests, or you
just have some observations you'd like to share with everybody else during the course of
the show, that is the perfect place to do it. And on today's
show, it's going to be a great mid Rats because we're having one of
our friends come back to talk with us and we're going to talk about a
subject that if you ever find yourself at a table full of navalists, if
they're the right kind, you roll out this one word and you got at
least a forty five minute conversation out of it, if not longer, depending
on how many adult beverages you have on the table. But we're going to
talk about presence today. The know everybody says it's a naval mission. It's
gone by that various names for a few thousand years, but in the modern
context, that's what we refer it to. We'll dig in a little bit
of the history over the course of the next hour about what it meant,
what it means now, and what we need to look at towards the future
if this is something that is important for the world's premier naval power, depending
on how you measure it going forward for the rest of the century. And
we'll also probably touch on things that you can do to properly resource that if
it's not properly resourced the way you want it to. Right now and join
us today is returning to guest doctor Jerry Hendrix, Captain US Navy, retired.
He is a president of Hendricks and Associates and on the show page,
you'll find a link to the document that he authored recently with some assistance with
a good group of folks. You can read about on the inside cover for
the Sagamore Institute titled Measuring and Modeling Naval Presence. Jerry, welcome back to
Midrights. It's great to be here, and it's great to be with this
particular audience talking about the report, because I think that if anyone is going
to have one a grasp of what I was trying to accomplish, and also
the ability to pick it apart, it's not only these you two hosts,
but also your your audience. Well, we will do our best to meet
that high standard. But it's always great when you have somebody who's authored a
book, a report like this, because the opening questions, at least the
easiest for the hosts to do, give you a chance to step the table,
some tell us about your report? What will the reader find it?
Well, So I set out and proposed almost two years ago now to actually
the Smith Richardson Foundation that we find a way of measuring the value of naval
presence. We say it's important. The Regional Combatant Commander says it's important we've
written about it for the better part of fifty years now as a mission of
the Navy, and yet when we say, well, what is it worth,
how do you measure it? It's it's it's so much as a hand
wave or the ultimate These aren't the drawings you're looking for type of moment,
you know, it's it's more ephemeral, even than the idea of those definitions
of a pornography that the Supreme Court would say, you know, I'll know
it when I see it. And so I thought that there should be something
more to this. And despite the fact, as an analyst, I had
been looking for, you know, beyond just a definition of naval presence,
but some means to measure it, whether there was a model of it for
the better part of the last five years, and I did not find it.
So I made this proposal that to Smith Richardson Foundation, that I that
I would set about to go and try and create a model that could be
you know, placed into a computer simulation and we could then try to determine
the value of various different platforms or formations of Navy ships. Smith Richardson found
it very intriguing. They enthusiastically embraced it. I will tell you that we
went back and forth several times on this because originally I proposed that I would
come up with a model of the presence for the new Constellation class frigate,
which has always intrigued me. But due to members of the reviewing committee at
Smith Richardson, we actually came back and said, no, you will.
You will model the arley Bird class destroyer, the ubiquitous sort of centerpiece of
the US Navy, and and and then you know, go forward from there
and also try to figure out, you know how you know, if you're
modeling, you know, you have to model it against something else. And
so we very carefully looked at the lu Yang two from the People's Liberation Army
Navy, and then the more I got into it, began to realize that
you can't really create a model without also trying to find some way of measuring
the environment, because there's various different types. So anyways, I underwent about
eighteen months of research where I reviewed the historical literature associated with this. I
interviewed six former regional combatant commanders, three Navy, two Army, one Air
Force to get their views on naval presence and then also with several modeling and
simulation experts, individuals from Purdue University, the Naval Postgraduate School, as well
as the Santa Fe Institute of Modeling and Simulation. I also talked with a
sort of a very ancient wargamer who had actually created some of the original Atari
software and then did some models and simulations in the nineteen nineties on diplomacy,
and then out of that generated this that's got, you know, an algorithm
in it that runs through and we were able to sort of run through the
bird class versus the lou Yang in several different environments, uh and sort of
test some of these things. So it was a very long drawn out process.
It was very uncomfortable for me as a humanities major to do this,
but in the end I was quite pleased with the final report. Yeah,
I think, uh. I think when I first looked at this, Jerry,
that I was stunned by how audacious you were and taking on this stas
because I don't know, I didn't see any way to measure presence uh as
a as an end result of this. Now I think I think, uh,
some of this was driven I guess because I was reading Bob Work's uh
piece from Proceedings about our our over the navy's over over zealous approach to presence
and and Adam Fogo's response to that. But I think what you've done is
really provide a tool, as I understand what your goal was. You're not
necessarily a complete answer, but a tool for someone to use. And who
is that someone? Well, so a great you know, first of all,
great observation and if you you know, for those who get a chance
to read the report, you will note as I go through the literature review
that I talk about those who are for naval presents and there those against and
and Bob Work gets about two and a half pages of the report for his
essay on the slave slavish devotion to naval presence and how it's breaking the Navy,
which which I I know mister Work. I respect him tremendously. I
consider him a mentor and friend. But I disagreed with that essay, and
so in many ways, this proposal Smith Richardson came out of my response somewhat
knee jerk emotional response to that that essay and Proceedings, But in reality and
your your perceptive to point out, I don't actually come up with the conclusion.
In this report, I don't suggest what the alternative fleet structure and architecture
should look like because I wanted the model to be there and in the hope
that someone else would pick it up. Now, who is that someone else?
I can tell you that the three entities I would like is one N
eighty one inside the Pentagon's OPNAV staff that would they would pick up this model
and fund having it run through a succession of iterations. I would also suggest
that either Fleet Forces Command or the US Pacific Fleet pick up the model,
fund it, adapt it, you know, work with the staffs at the
Naval Postgraduate School or or any other modeling and simulation academic centers, you know,
to build this out and then run these tests. I was quite frankly
frustrated that no one had done something like this before, and then as I
moved my way through this, I came away somewhat suspicious that perhaps someone had,
and that the results of running these models in the past may have not
come out in line with current fleet architecture and budgetary decisions. So I believe
that this type of work needs to be done. I believe that the fleet
could look significantly different and perhaps even have a different price point. If someone
were to pick this model up and run with it and the three entities I
mentioned. Quite frankly, I think maybe the second half with his new analysis
shop, could be another entity could pick this up. But you know,
I did this really with relatively little financial resources, and I think you know,
if someone took it and put a larger team and more financial resources be
it in a little time in a supercomputer, they could come up with something
that would be quite illuminating. Yeah, for those that have again, the
link is at the show page. If folks don't have the report up towards
the end, we're maybe geting ahead of ourselves. That's okay, it's our
show. We do what we want to. But you get to the modeling
portion at the engineering I thought, what was nice about this is, yes,
there is math there that our friend Mark Vandroff would would like to roll
around in. There are little little delta signs and a couple other Greek numbers
in there, but it's understandable. You don't have to have one hundred pound
math head to understand it, because you know, I'm like you, I
come from the other side of the brain. But in this discussion that we
have about naval missions and presence. I think what was nice about this and
where this can be used as a tool by others. There's a lot of
this, and we talked about this on other subjects and offline as well.
A lot This is telling a story. And humans are right brain or left
brain people. They're They're not better or worse depend upon how they look at
things. Are just different, which is which is great. Some people they
need to be told a story and that's where you know, the liberal arts
side of explaining things. But also there is and especially in a highly technical
area like like the Navy, there are people who think in numbers, they
think in graphs, and they need to have it explained with some metrics.
And this offers a tool. And I think well meaning people can look at
what's offered here and say, you know this variable is off by you know,
it's not four point six, it should be a five point seven.
Okay, fine, argument, But you've created a structure here, and I
think you're right that you know, people can can take this model and they
can customize it as they wish, but at the end of the day,
it can bring on additional conversations additional storytelling, so you're able to communicate to
people who think both ways, both one side of the brain and the other,
because you mentioned for the last forty years, and another valuable part that
you find in the early part of the report is there's some history here.
The Presence mission as it's modernly constructed goes back to early nineteen seventies and Stansfield
Turner, but you rightfully point out and I like how you structured the errors
of the last ers of the last century, where we went from command of
the Sea to the Cold Cold War power projection era from the sea era and
what we now call presence. Different generations of people thinking about the navy and
naval power. They use influence, showing the flag, demonstrations and then finally
at presence and the one thing that came up, and I think it's a
byproduct of the critique that you brought on. I know Varney Rebel and Bob
Work who you just mentioned, with two of the critics of it, and
having they both prior guests on mid Rath, I might want to say up
over the years and talk to them a lot of their critique. I think
a lot of the critique of the presence mission really is, and please tell
me if I'm off here. It's almost a byproduct of the frustration that we
can't do it simply because we don't have the numbers and something if you do
a letter search in the document, but you don't have to because it's so
obvious. A number comes up constantly, which I think is related to Rubbel
and works critiques about, you know, wearing out a navy that goes from
from readiness focus to a deployment focus. And that number is between one hundred
and thirty and one hundred and fifty ships at sea. That keeps coming up
in your research and your discussions. Talk a little bit about that number one
two fifty and when you reverse engineer that where that comes up with some numbers.
It should be familiar to most listeners here on the rests Well, I
mean, the history of this is, first of all, naval presence as
a mission has almost always inherently been there. In fact, there is a
great quote that I used from Oliver Cromwell that a line of battleship is perhaps
the nation's best ambassador. So this idea of using ships as a means of
messaging or influencing was right there. I mean, obviously, you know,
even Mahind's seminal work. The influence of seapower upon history is about influence,
this idea of our ability to manipulate or massage the environment around us through the
introduction of naval platforms and hints, the introduction of our interests, demonstration of
our interest in a particular region. The reason my presence came out in a
more articulate way in the early nineteen seventies, first with Stansfield Turner and then
also from Edward Loopwalch's early paper on suasion. The idea of naval presence as
a suasion is because the Navy leadership at that time elmar Zumwalt and then his
very close acolyte, Lieutenant Stansfield Turner, then president of the Naval War College,
We're looking at these declining number of ships, and so you know,
we had come out of World War Two with a thousand ships. Eisenhower sort
of nexus down to about nine hundred. We kept that nine hundred through about
nineteen sixty eight. But as the cost of the Vietnam War started to mount,
those ships also started to age. We began to see the size of
the fleet decline. Well, the problem was is during the Cold War in
the nineteen fifties, sixties and to the seventies, the Navy either had signed
up for or had been volunteered for a number of these presence missions. You
know, these regional combatant commanders, whether it was Pacific Command, or whether
it was Yukam, or whether it was any other things that started to grow
up, they all wanted these ships to show up, and they'd set these
schedules and put in their requests, and so we had to maintain about one
hundred and thirty to one hundred and fifty ships at sea at any given time
during this time period in order to service these requests from the four Stars around
the world. And also the political leaders had begun to really lean on the
Navy for messaging and you know, and of course the ultimate case was the
Cuban Missile crisis, where we used the Atlantic Fleet combined second in six fleets
so essentially send this dramatic message to Khrushchev. And there was a lot of
control over the political importance or the tone that was set even with that.
But there were all these other different incidents where we were using ships to send
signals and so in seventy three, Turner and zoomwald A like, hey,
look, the fleet's coming down. I still got this demand signal to be
out here with one hundred and thirty of one hundred and fifty ships on any
given day, and I don't have the ships to do it. Something's going
to have to give. And so, because we had never spoken of presence
before, suddenly we start speaking about it. It was a clarion call to
the political leadership that if you find value in this, in using the Navy
in this way, you're going to have to invest in the navy. Well
pretty soon someone did you know, when Ronald Reagan runs in nineteen eighty,
you know he runs explicitly on a six hundred ship, maybe because he had,
you know, his trustee deputy there, John Lehman, who had spent
the four years between the Carter administration coming in and Reagan coming in sort of
getting his ducks in a row about what size the fleet we need and how
we would use it. And so we built that maybe back up to five
hundred and ninety four ships, and we were out there to meet that one
hundred and thirty one hundred and fifty ships. And this audience knows, you
know, to keep you know, one hundred and thirty one hundred and fifty
ships at sea, you need about four times in number ships, so that's
six hundred. So that's the reason why these arguments started being laid out,
is that we had to come up with the fleet behind the one hundred and
thirty to one hundred and fifty per day, and so that's that's where that
came from. Well, let's talk a little bit about a definition of presents
and what you used to work through to get to the formulas you developed in
your work, because presence means a lot of different things to different As you
talked to your cocoons, they all seemed kind of nonplussed, maybe the right
word to have to answer that question. I mean, we assume a lot
of stuff about presents, but what did you find in your work is what
a good definition of Well, before I get into the good definition, let
let's talk about the interview with the co coms first, because that was an
eye opener for me because when I jumped into this, you know, one,
I wanted to make sure I spoke with several co combs. The second
thing I wanted to do was I was kind of interested to see how they
viewed it based upon their service backgrounds. And so, you know, I
interviewed three, you know, three retired Navy admirals, William Fox Fallen,
Harry Harris, and Jim Stavardis. But I also interviewed Mike Scaffriotti, Army
General, Carter Ham, Army General, and Phil Breedlove Air Force General.
What I found in asking them their questions, and I gave the same twelve
questions to each one of them in order just to keep a standard in the
way that I was approaching them, was that in many ways the Navy guys
gave with the exception of Savatus, in many ways gave me sort of more
of what I would almost turn canned answers. And I don't mean that in
a negative way. It's that they had grown up in this culture, they
had grown up with this terminology. They were talking with me, a retired
Navy captain who they are familiar with, and so in many ways there was
sort of a hand wave and a shorthand conversation back and forth about a lot
of these talks. In many ways, the conversations with the Navy retired COCOMs
were shorter in terms of length than they were with the Army and Air Force.
What I found with the Army and Air Force was that because this was
a new tool for them, this was and it was something that they had
had to study, they were much more articulate about their answers to this.
They had taken the time later in their career intellectually to grasp the concepts of
presence how they would use it. When the Navy staff would come in and
brief them about presence missions, I got the sense that they were more engaged,
and so they were taking the time and not to mention they knew who
I was, retired Navy Captain PhD. And I think they wanted to demonstrate
to me that they had a grasp of this topic that we were going to
talk about in this hour hour and a half long conversation. And so I
found it interesting that they were willing to dive down and again be much more
articulate in this. Now, the idea of the definition of naval presence,
you know, is very much you know, this idea of both you know,
active and latent presence. This idea the presence is there to provide influence
in the region, to it, and presence is really measured in the reaction
of the environment to your arrival. And so presence in many ways is is
defined by you know, who you are and what you're bringing to the area,
and also whether you're you're coming in a proactive or in a reactive manner.
And so we get into that, you know, within the literature review
section of this, and it also shows up later when we start building the
model about because there's, you know, a physical characteristic to presence, but
there's also an ephemeral characteristic to presence, and we had to find a way
of sort of measuring both and then integrating them along that vein you know of
presence and showing up. One of the things that that had me thinking about
something I was like, God, why not thought of that before? Is
as you discussed about the reaction to presence, it's it's not a binary thing
where where you're there're not and there's just a nuance, you know,
the old argument, you know, can submarines do the presence mission if you
can't see them? Type of thing is deeper than that, it's psychological.
So it really is a multidisciplinary approach to understanding this. Because you outline a
bit that it's just not you're there as a presence, but who you are.
Are you from a nation that has a three hundred ship navy? Are
a fifty ship navy? You know, the Japanese versus the American Arlely Bird
class destroyer. You know, on paper, same ship. But you know
what is that that addition to that modifier. But you know, so that's
what you bring with you when you show up and where you're coming from.
So a lot of the it sounds harsh to call it a coping mechanism because
I actually believe part of it. But the discussions of a thousand ship navy
are being able. You know, yes, we only have X number ships,
but our allies have navies like this. One does not equal one in
that regard when you're looking at the presence mission describe a little bit how those
variables can change. When if you look at a map it just says there
are two blue destroyers there, that doesn't mean that number really equals too.
Yeah, So you just raised up about four things there and let me kind
of cycle back and go through them, because they're they're all interesting points of
the conversation. The first point is is sort of talking about the impact and
the presence isn't just being there, but in fact presidence has a bow wave.
There's an anticipatory aspect of presence, of temporal and it also has a
residual that after a ship leads. You know, I actually compared it to
a radioactive height half life within it. There are incidents, you know,
for instance, the visit of the battleship Missouri to Turkey and Constantinople back during
the nineteen forties is still spoken of today in that broader Black Sea region.
Same thing with the passage of the carrier Shrik groups through Taiwan Straits in the
mid nineteen nineties. Although that occurred some thirty five years ago, thirty eight
years ago, that still has a residual effect. So there's very much like
this isotopial half life aspect of these things, depending on how you do it.
The second thing I would say is interestingly enough, in a lot of
the research and review of the professional literature is that a lot of the thinkers
who had written about this in the past made the point that the arrival and
departure of ships almost always has a bigger impact than ships that are just there.
So Ken Booth and Edward Lukewalk both in their treatments of presence, talk
about the fact that, for instance, the FDNF force in the Western Pacific
may not be as influential as let's say, a fleet surging out from the
from the west coast to surge over and arrive into the arena, that that
would have more presence because it's causing a change in the environment, is perceived
as a change in the background ambient noise in the environment, rather than the
fact that Desron fifteen simply by its existence there sort of has faded in the
background noise. It is part of the status quo, and that presence is
very much about changing the status quo. And so you you know, you
know, you get into a lot of these different types of conversations about what
is effective naval presence, you know, in the way that you present it.
And we have to be in many ways much more articulate about the way
that we use our assets. Yeah. I'm sitting there looking at at a
map that discusses one of that discuss It shows where our ships are. And
you know, right now we've got the Ford and the Eisenhower in the Middle
East. The Eisenhower was there or any the ford showed up recently or vice
versa. I can't remember the order, But did the impact of bringing that
in your view of presence? Did the impact of bringing that second carrier as
a has a message to the neighborhood, is that that had more impact than
just we had a carrier kind of there already. Well, what was interesting
about that is that Eagle one is that the research showed, and this even
predates in the nineteen seventies, there was a number of studies on this,
is that moving from one carrier in an area to two carriers did not double
your naval presence value in that region that it was It was more it was
more of like a moving from a one point zero to a one point five
in the way that it was perceived. However, three carriers in a region
demonstrated in an exponential rise because there was a perception or an understanding that three
large deck aircraft carriers provided you with an opportunity to go twenty four to seven
with carrier operations, and the day were aware of this. They knew that
one deck had an ability to essentially fly ten to twelve hours a day,
two decks had the ability to perhaps go twenty four hours a day, but
perhaps only for five days. But three decks gives you ability to cycle those
carriers in such a way as that you can now provide twenty four to seven.
So when when we searched four strike groups over to the Middle East after
Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in ninety that was seen as a shout, very
loud shout in the international environment. But surging one carrier into a region is
not necessarily a big deal. So what I would say is that stationing the
Ford off the east coast, off the west coast of Israel certainly got someone's
attention. But when the word was out that the Ike was coming over the
hill, well, then suddenly people are beginning to get nervous. And then
when I think it was Carl Vincent took off from the west coast, that
it's either Vincent or Stennis that started moving out across the west coast, and
everybody started to watch, i think in the international arrival, to see what's
the deal with that West coast carrier, what's going on with that deployer,
where's it going? Because if the Americans start showing up with three point zero,
well hey, game on at that point in time, and that's the
way that's perceived even within the model. Yeah, I'll go ahead and quote
from the report for you kiddies who have your hymn handy. It's at the
top of page forty seven. It's a quote Modern policymakers understand that if four
carrier strike groups operating together is a war cry, one amphibious ready group is
a growl, and a surfacing submarine in the right place is a terrifying lethal
whisper unquote. I thought that was a great outline. I played on using
that in the future. But you also brought something something in that I think
goes into that. Again. You know, numbers don't matter what they are
an intent, but also there's the perception of it, and I believe it
or not, there's there's something about dinosaurs and everything. But you brought in
the concept of something you learn from your daughters that you I don't know if
you coined it, but it's the serotopian impact or in advanced Serotopian advantage I
think it is. Yeah, so this is actually I get more reaction to
this part of the paper, this one page that I wrote up about my
daughters and their their online gaming community. Almost everyone notices it. So I
have two daughters, both are adults, you know. One is a practicing
paleontologist at a dinosaur museum in North Dakota, and the other one is a
sophomore this year studying wildlife biology up in me And so, but these two
sisters get together online like every night and they play a game called the Visa
Bermuda, which is a dinosaur and they have dinosaur avatars in the game.
And so I'm listening in on them because they talk with each other on discord
and no one, no one messes with the Hendrickx squirrels in this in this
environment. But one of the things that they I found was that they first
they prefer to play as ceratopsians, essentially large horror fores, the the cows
as it were, of the of the dinosaur community, rather than sort of
the larger, more sexy, more lethal Tyrannosaurus wrecks or velociraptors with everyone seems
to pay attention to. And I finally said, well, why are you
doing that? And they said, well, because the ceratopsians, each one
of them has a very inherent intimidation or in tim score, and that if
we operate together, everyone stays away from us because, you know, acting
as a herd, we can intimidate them. And in fact, if someone
messages with us, we get a large enough herd and we'll just circle this
carnivore diet or this carnivore dinosaur and we will kill them through intimidation. And
it's like, wow, that's pretty amazing. So my key thing was is
I wanted to know how in that computer game did they mathematically model intimidation.
How did they actually write the code into that analogue to be able to do
that? And I started trying to work with them as well as the game
designers to figure that out because they found that really intriguing. But this idea
of maintaining the piece through lethal you know, intimidation, the ability that that
I don't want you to mess with me, but I need to be large
enough and strong enough, and that I need to combine my effects in such
a way that you won't jump ugly with me. And so that particular game
really convinced me that in fact, this thing naval presence, actually can be
modeled, and so that had encouraged me in my own research. Yeah,
I was laughing at that part, because I was thinking, you know,
we often are sending things like lcs's into areas where we want to intimidate,
and I can't think of a less intimidating ship right now. So you know,
I think one of the good aspects of your research is that somebody on
one of these staffs has got to think should be thinking, well, yeah,
I got to add in intimidation, and we need to add something bigger
and better than an LCS out there patrolling an area. Can I stopped you
right there, because one of the things that's important to understand is that,
up until the early nineteen eighties, in none of the literature dealing with either
influence or presence or suasion or any of the different words or phrases we used,
no one spoke about the naval presence value of destroyers or cruisers. Up
until the nineteen eighties, it was either if you talked about presidents, you
were either talking about carrier strike groups or you were talking about marine amphibious ready
groups. Carriers are ours. And then suddenly in the nineteen eighties, then
we started talking about destroyers like Spruance class destroyers or Titano Roga class cruisers or
quite frankly, you talked about the battleships as well, and why was that?
And it was because, and I went into the literature, I reviewed
it, it was explicitly because of the integration of the Tomahawk lot Land Attack
missile into the inventory of those ships. And so the moment that you put
a power projection weapon on board a vessel, and then I would submit that
lcs could actually have a presence capability if in fact you had an ability to
project power from it that actually held your competitor's interests at risk. But if
you have a vessel out there that essentially is just a seagoing vessel that can
only operate our influence the immediate water area around it, it does not exert
a presence on the environment. You really need that power projection capability to,
you know, to make the other guy stood up and listen to you or
pay attention to you. So it was Tomahawk that I think changed the way
that we valued presence in the fleet, and the spruit cans and then the
typos and ultimately the birds are all considered to be presence vehicles today, despite
the fact that they would not have been during the sixties and seventies. Yeah,
it goes back to something that I think we could do an entire show
one And you know something you and I Jerry talked about before range matters,
it's it's it's underappreciated and so many things involving the Navy, but we talked
about, you know, let's go back to the original seventies. And for
the listeners, they're probably aware of Stansfield Turner. They could remember to google
some of the stuff that he wrote. It's all available online. We've discussed
Zoomwalt, but there are two other people who are part of this discussion.
They're kind of on a similar school that I would encourage the listeners to look
up and I wanted to get your your take on their perspective of it.
And that was in nineteen seventy one. There was James Cable's Gunboat Diplomacy and
also Commander James McNulty at the time, he had an initial reply to Stanfield
Turner's earlier work on Presence Mission where he argued, for you know, we
can see echoes and influenced squadrons here. The value of more numerous ships for
the mission vice just these large you know, nuclear era Cold War units that
most people were thinking about when they talked about presence. Well, so Cable
wrote an entire book on gunboat diplomacy and did a really great study and mostly
of the of the British Empire and its use of small vessels and medium sized
vessels and cruisers to sort of uphold its diplomacy. And obviously he made the
point that this term gunboat diplomacy cuts both ways. It's a two edged sword
because it was viewed both positively uh and negatively. So you know, the
idea that you know, we're going to, you know, put these gunboats
up on some of the rivers of China. There's a lot of imperial over
tones that go along with that that were viewed very negatively. But I think
he did a great job of fimly historically sort of reviewing some of these policies.
By the way, I think that Captain VJ. Armstrong out of the
United States Naval Academy has just recently done this as well with his book about
American naval operations in nineteenth and early twentieth century and looking at presence missions there.
I think that Vj's kind of come alongside cables book and sort of provided
an addendum, an annex further exploration of it, which is not surprising because
VJ and I actually worked on a paper on naval presence almost a decade ago
when I was at the Center for New American Security called the Presence Problem,
where we started to first map out our interest in this topic. Now McNulty
looks at this and again he's critiquing this idea that you know, a out
what the implications are here, which is numbers, And you know, I
think that he's actually calling calling us out about that isn't just an argument for
for for numbers at this point in time. And then he also wants to
understand that, you know that the modern world was fundamentally different than the pre
World War two world because of nuclear weapons, and he wanted to make sure
that we were understanding that the oceans were no longer barriers but in fact part
of a global environment that we're all operating in. But he thought that the
Navy was making wrong headed decisions. Then that at presence was what we were
going to be doing our our investment in more technical, high end ships that
we were starting to make huge investments in in the Taekwondo roga and Egis at
that time was going to price us out of the ability to do the presence
mission in the long run. That we needed a force that had a lot
of cheaper vessels that we can buy in bigger numbers. If you're really going
to do presents, you really needed to pay attention to the low end of
the high low mix. Yeah, that that strikes me. I mean,
here we are talking about surge being important, that if you can surge forth
power, you know, I'm thinking, well, you know, the easiest
and least problematic way to have a force that surges is if you have nuclear
powered shifts, so the carriers the days when we had power nuclear power cruisers,
I think nuclear power destroyers a few of them, but we had a
whole bunch of of those new cruisers. You know, that seems to me
you could if the concern is that work had, which was that we can't
maintain our force and use it at the same time, that if you're gonna
if you need a force you can surge that you want a force that you
can send that doesn't have a big logistics train behind it. Those those types
of ships would would be very important to that. But and I would think
that that somewhere would be worked into your formula as a part of the environment.
Yeah, so it's it's actually there. So in in the in in
the formula there's an area that deals with sustainability sustainment, so it's part of
the ephemeral side of the equation, but the ability of a nation to support
it's it's four deployed forces at sea for sustained periods of time. And I
actually raised the point that the US that that really the ability to do underway
replenishment, specifically replenishment alongside is sort of the you know, where you can
figure out who the major LEA players are versus Triple A and Double A,
and that one of the things that I'm really disturbed about is that China's increasing
proficiency and underway replenishment and the growth their ability to just add replenishment ships and
tenders and sustainment because of their large shipbuilding industry. So when I scored that
out, you know, I made the point that you know, while we
are very good at underway replenishment and we have a strong tradition with sustainment,
we're facing the problem in that the percentage of the sustainment part of our fleet
is getting smaller and there's more stress upon it, and that we're not paying
enough attention to that side of the fleet equation. And so you know,
China is looking at that as much as we are, and I'm looking as
much at their the size of their sustainment fleet and their ability to have overseas
bases and hubs of logistical support hubs UH to support their operations. So yes,
sustainment and logistics is a is a very large portion of the ephemeral side
of the conversation. I think something else, you know, we're talking about
explaining this problem and we have the war gaining, for lack of a better
phrase, that that as you try to work this out and gain the system,
look at the different various variables that were going in. But there's also
trying to visualize it because it's part of telling the story and an interesting way
to look at it. A lot of people who look at a variety of
statistics. One way they graft things is a thing you know, heat maps,
looking at UH, you know, crime rates, for instance. You
can pull up a city and has the various heat maps and you came an
interesting way as you you know, come through this this algorithm that you've developed,
which you know people can be can fiddle around with it. They want,
you know, how do you visualize this? How do you explain this?
And you know, going back to interdisciplinary ways of explaining things, you
actually tapped into the meteorology side of the house. What are other ways of
visualizing the outcomes of this exercise you think might be useful to help more people
understand what you're trying to explain to them. Well, ultimately, the model
that I'm using is an agent based model, and so there's a number of
characteristics of that particular modeling that are important. But the key thing is is
that I settled on a concept that's called emergence, which is that it's nearly
impossible, you know, to one for one model every aspect of of of
an environment, and so you have to focus on certain key characteristics of the
environment and say that I'm going to zero in on this, I'm going to
measure that, and those factors will be representative. So, for instance,
you know, the weather is perhaps you know, the most complex thing on
the planet, very difficult, you know, to try and model if you
try to go one for one because there's just so many variables. However,
meteorologists for years have noted that if you look at temperature and wind direction and
speed and humidity, that in fact you get a fairly representative model of the
weather. And by you know, so you get temperature, barometric pressure,
whend direction. It's feed. So so those things right there are going to
tell you, you know, what that weather looks like. And we see
that every night on the six o'clock news in the last ten minutes, so
as I started to bring this out, and by the way, there's a
couple of other things that emerge, you know that would be very similar.
Like there's a model that was done on forest fires, and based upon the
density of a forest and how many trees and how close they are, you
can create that and you can see what the what the proclivity of a particular
forest is to kind of have on a flash fire that cannot be controlled,
or for that matter, there's some other things that do modeling dealing with earthquakes
that based upon the number of volcano reactions you can tell what the likelihood is
of an earthquake in an area. A lot of small volcano reactions will lead
to a lesser of large earthquakes. And vice versa. So there's a number
of these emergence factors that I came across when I was doing the reading,
and so that allowed me to try and form in my own mind both sort
of broad categories of the physical characteristics of naval presence and then also some broad
categories of what we would call the non corporeal or the ephemeral characteristics of naval
presence and so and those were what I used to kind of drill deep.
So, for instance, you know, on the physical characteristics, I looked
at the lethality, the awareness, the rediness, and the range of the
platforms of the navies carriers, cruisers, destroyers, frigates and corvettes or the
loatoral combat chip. Lethality is essentially a measurement of how much ordinance you know
is onboard, how much hurt can that particular platform visit upon someone else.
Its awareness is the sensory awareness around it, both in the air, in
space, under the sea, How aware of its environment, how far can
that awareness stretch out? And so I assigned scores to that. The readiness
of the platform obviously that goes to training of the crew as well as the
material condition of the vessel itself and then of course range, so what is
its ability to exert lethality at a distance? And so I use that to
generate platform scores for all these things within it. And then you turn,
because that's just the physical characteristics, you have to then pass those characteristics through
what I call the national lens, which are these more ephemeral characteristics things like
national will, combat credibility, the size of the fleet, UH, the
sustainment ability of that fleet, the economic security of the nation, and ultimately
an alliance score. So what what can it draw upon in the international environment.
And bringing all these things together with way to to average across those characteristics,
then you then you then take those two things physical and non physical characteristics,
and you have to compete them in the environment. And I actually defined
UH six environments on the ocean UH in which we competed, and those environments
have different levels of resistance or what I would call viscosity, you know,
that are helpful to us UH or are helpful to the other guy, and
you sort of have to factor in those scores, you know, as we
did. So, so that got into that aspect of the model and agent
based you know, characteristics of how to approcess. Yeah, I was looking
at it, at this stuff. I'm thinking, Okay, where are the
the the where do you add in threats like the shore based anti ship cruise
missiles that exist now? And what factory? What factor do you use for
our own air assets? You know those Air Force guys who are worldwide operators.
Of course you know in certain environments, where where does your factor those
in? Is that also part of the environment stuff? It is? And
in fact that goes to the oceanic environment. So you know, not everyone
seeing this, but I just point out to you Eagle one. You know,
page sixty five of the report, we started talking about the oceanic environment,
and there's a graph there where we talked about oceanic influence of viscosi and
friction. And the idea is that if I'm starting out in Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii, and I'm beginning to move towards the Chinese, you know, I
moved from an environment that's very helpful to me and my shifts or carrier strike
groups or independent sailors. But as I get closer that there is a turnover
point, as it were, where I'm entering China's sphere of influence and as
I move deeper into that sphere of influence, whether that's their range of their
weapons or their sensory awareness, then in fact I am encountering greater and greater
resistance to the flow of my influence into that region. And yes, there
are aspects of you know, whether I'm going to get support from inorganic assets
and so on, that can lessen that resistance or friction in support of me,
But there also is an idea that there's a temporal aspect of that that
that's cyclic. They're not going to be there always, and so that in
many ways what determines my presence value is simply my presence and how well I'm
able to sustain that presence as I get deeper and deeper into the influence of
the Chinese environment. Now, the one thing I can say, and it's
and it's in the graph that deals with this when I'm talking about the different
oceanic is that when I'm operating in proximity to an ally, even though that
ally is based deep inside the other guy's sphere. So for instance, Taiwan,
let's let's view Taiwan or Japan as an ally, that when I'm operating
in close proximity to them and their forces. To the degree that their interests
are aligned with me, uh and mine, then in fact I'm going to
pick up some aided you know, lessening of the friction to my presence there.
I think certainly the idea of us moving through the Taiwan Strait is aided
by the fact that the Taiwan Taiwanese are interested in us and supportive of those
operations, and so that sort of lessens the in those waters. Yeah,
Lee and Commas just mentioned something that kind of bounced off what you were just
talking about, you know, those things near in the far far western Pacific
that are closed to China. And it ties into a brief mention that Admiral
Fallon had in your interview, is there weren't any ships available at all,
but he was trying to create some positive effects in the Philippines not unimportant,
especially in the early part of the zero zeros of where I think we both
have a mutual friend who was actually there with the Special Forces in the Southern
Philippines. There was a lot going on there and he wanted to get some
naval presence to get there, and he wanted to send Well, if you
can't do anything else? Can you deploy a hospital that ship from San Diego
to me? And he mentioned, you know, big navy just quite get
it, and it's not amorphous blob. You know, we talk about national
will. A lot of national will derives from understanding and we hear, you
know, big Navy thrown around a lot. And it's also it's fun to
hear that phrase used by a four star because to ninety eight point seven percent
of people, he is big Navy. So when there are important leaders,
like a Navy four star who's trying to get an important ally further inside our
lifeline, who's under stress not just from an Islamic consurgency, but from a
surgey in China and quote big Navy unquote is throwing blocks in the way.
Who is this big navy that can thwart four stars who are trying to do
the right thing in such important areas well? I think the deck comes down
to opnav staff or for that matter, of political leadership that that's involved in
this. And yeah, that the exis samples of using the hospital ships.
You know, they bring a tremendous amount of influence and they have a very
strong form of presence and they influence in the local environment. So yes,
they still talk about the hospital ship's visits to the Southern Philippines, and it's
something that we've continue to do in the years hence. So I don't mean
to say that hospital ships don't have presence because they don't have Tomahawk, but
I would say that their presence, you know, has a different flavor to
it, and also the half life or or or the impulse that comes off
from that presence mission has a lower amplitude than those the presence that comes with
the ability to project power. So I would fully use the two hospital ships,
but I only have two hospital ships, and really I only have the
crew for one hospital ship to send it out there, which is one of
the limiting factors, gentlemen, Because I know that we're coming up the end
of the hour here in just a few more minutes, I didn't want to
highlight that in the conclusion that this report was deeply troubling to me as I
got to the end, because you know, I think it's suggestive in fact
that the value of our naval presence is really on on on a nice edge
right now, that because of declining perception of our national will and the combat
credibility. Let's face it, it's been, you know, seventy years since
there's been a major Navy sea battle, and also the declining side of our
fleet, that in fact, the value of our presence may be coming to
an end. And I think that that that should be deeply troubling to policymakers
and to navalists alike. Yeah, that's that's a great point, and I
think I think that from you and Bob Work and a bunch of other folks
have the same concern, which is, the overuse of the fleet is not
the fleets from not the Navy's problem. It is a department or defense problem.
Somebody has to say no to the cocombs and that's the only guy that
can do it, and that not saying no is causing a lot of the
problems that we're discussing, including the one you just mentioned. Yeah. The
thing that I worry now is that we actually may have had the moment when
naval presence declined to the point that it no longer is effective. And that
may have occurred some time ago and we just haven't noticed yet, but it
will quickly come to our attention. The first time that tiny Chinese type fifty
five cruiser comes alongside of Burke and just push us us out of the way,
and it says, what are you going to do about it? You
know, this is my water. You need to go away and don't come
back. The point here is that we no longer have the numbers to to
service all of the requests that are out there for naval presence, and that
yes, we are breaking the fleet trying to do that. But until the
Navy says no, are the CoCom say more and more and more, give
me more shifts, then political leaders are not going to free up the funds.
And right now, obviously you and I and everyone else knows the industrial
base is not there to just pour it on and start, you know,
building more destroyers and submarines tomorrow. And so you know, we need to
kind of come to grips with where really is naval presence crucial? You know,
I would submit that we need naval presence in the Western Pacific quite consistently.
We need to create a fleet to provide presents in the Arctic, for
instance, but we need to kind of look at other regions of the world.
You know, I think right now eight of the eleven aircraft carriers are
at sea, which means I am burning aircraft carrier utility right now. Everyone's
gonna have to go back in the ure in order to be ready for a
real contingency. If we don't start hurling some airplanes and weapons at the Iranians
soon, we're going to need to get a reset in the carrier strike group.
But we need a reset and across the entire fleet, and Jerry kind
of to end up the hour, we actually have a caller here, a
friendly neighbor from area code seven three. You might bring a little bit of
a joint flavor Area code seven oh three. You are with Jerry. I
have a question, Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. I kind
of had too, and it's in the same theme, the first being Captain
Hendrick. Sure you pointed out of how presence works episodically with a CSG or
are coming and going into a given the theater. But what about the persistent
presence of either the Army's Multi Domain Task Force or the MANE Force stand in
force having those sensors intruders granted, knowing that the range of certain systems might
not necessarily always be in the best interest of that Naval Task Force. But
how does that kind of get pulled into the calculations when they come online are
truly deployed, especially in the first island chain. Well, it's an excellent
question, and it actually came up in some of the studies of these operations
other than war, and again there was a growing perception that in fact,
it's the mobility of the force that sort of gives a sense of its fragility
or its vulnerability as well as its legality. And so the more land based
you are, specifically in the archipeologic areas of the Western Pacific, the more
vulnerable you are perceived, and so the idea of presence declines under those cases.
So that's that's not just me. That was actually there was these two
studies that came out that looked at these operations other than war that sort of
suggested that, you know, the concept of quote unquote army presence was stretched,
you know, in terms of its effectiveness, whereas the ability to rapidly
enter and depart was viewed more positively. So the Navy and Marine Corps team
was viewed as having more presence and influence because of its mobility, whereas the
Army in many ways was viewed as less present and more of a factor of
being there, and the hints fading into the background noise because of the perception
of their immobility. So to the degree that the Army today demonstrates that can
move and move quickly and remain mobile while also operating that I think its presence
score goes up. Well, Jerry, good answer. We've used up here
the hour pretty pretty thoroughly. I think. Before we go, though,
tell us what you're working on, where people can find what you're doing,
and what's next. Well, you know, the beauty of my situation as
both a consultant and as a senior fellow is you know, I've got about
nine nine ms in the fire right now. I'm currently working on another analytical
product for an office inside the Pentagon. I'm also got some proposals out to
some grant grant you know, issuing agencies on some other things I would like
to study. I'm actually trying to broaden my base a little bit right now,
looking not just at the industrial base in the Navy, but looking at
some of the larger questions about defense policy and strategy. You know, you
know, I'm getting I'm getting up there in years, and I'm getting tired
of talking about the same old thing. So I'm actually trying to grow and
stretch as I tried to grow and stretch with this paper by doing math,
which was hard for me. So so right now I've got a full book
for not only this year but next year of analysis and research. And I'll
let you all know when the next paper comes out, and make sure that
sal and you get early copies of it there there too. Well, Jerry,
thanks a lot. It's been absolute pleasure join you with you again,
and I hope you and yours have a great holiday season and look forward to
next time. I look forward to it. Thank you both, Eagle one
and Commander Salamon. It's a pleasure to talk with you and your audience.
Well, Thank you, Jerry, and thank you everybody for joining us for
another edition of mid Rats. And until next time, we hope you have
a great Navy day. Cures Mike my loney want to marry me and a
friend of Becaumily, for you'll be to blame love hold me, said folding
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