A transformation limited by legacy command and control

Naval War College Review,  Wntr, 2006  by Charles D. Sykora

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A pivotal tenet of the new defense strategy is the ability to respond quickly, and thus set the initial conditions for either deterrence or the swirl defeat of an aggressor.... Today we increasingly rely on forces that are capable of both symmetric and asymmetric responses to current and potential threats.... Such swirl, lethal campaigns ... clearly place a premium on having the right forces in the rightplace at the right time.... We must also be able to act preemptively to prevent terrorists from doing harm to our people and our country and to prevent our enemies from threatening us, our allies, and our friends with weapons of mass destruction.

ANNUAL REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS, 2003

As budget challenges put increasing pressure on the operational forces, the ability to deter both potential adversary nations and terrorists will require the warfighting platforms of the United States to be ready to perform diverse missions in parallel. Transformation of operational and tactical precepts will be required to support these increasing demands. The nuclear-powered guided-missile (actually, cruise-missile) submarine, or SSGN, is just such a transformational asset. Indeed, the converted Ohio-class cruise-missile-carrying submarine is in many ways a "poster child" for transformation, particularly in its employment of existing and new technologies in innovative ways to bring new combat power to bear. However, taking full advantage of this order-of-magnitude increase in power available from a single platform will require new command and control methods, as an imaginary but realistic vignette will illustrate. That said, however, even rather minor modifications to existing command and control architecture--a negotiated mission-prioritization matrix defining multiple simultaneous operational control relationships--would produce a revolutionary advance over existing methods.

SSGN: TRANSFORMATION'S POSTER CHILD</p> <pre> Transformation is a process that shapes the changing nature of military competition and cooperation through new combinations of concepts, capabilities, people and organizations that exploit our nation's advantages and protect against our asymmetric vulnerabilities to sustain our strategic position, which helps underpin peace and stability in the world.

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, TRANSFORMATION PLANNING GUIDANCE, 2003 </pre> <p>The SSGN is the first weapons platform to represent in itself a truly transformational, order-of-magnitude advance. Why? After all, the submarine is not the only asset capable of multiple missions. In fact, the services today build every platform with an eye toward mission versatility. Most naval assets (unlike those of other services that must routinely return to an operating base for rearming or retraining for new missions) deploy with the equipment and training to fulfill multiple roles. So what makes the SSGN unique in this way?

The first aspect of the SSGN's order-of-magnitude transformational ability stems from its "presence ratio," the fraction of time it will operate forward deployed and fulfilling requirements of operational commanders. Its presence ratio is the best in the business: the four converted Ohio-class submarines leverage the logistics infrastructure of the Trident ships to achieve a forward presence of 2.65 with only four boats. (1) That is, an average of 2.65 of these four submarines will he on the job at any given moment, a rate no other platform can match for prolonged periods. The SSGN achieves this astonishing ratio by capitalizing upon an earlier transformational change, one made decades ago at the onset of the ballistic-missile submarine (SSBN) program. It will use a modification of the SSBN blue-crew/gold-crew patrol cycle--the progenitor of today's Sea Swap (crew rotation to extend the forward presence of deployed ships). (2)

The SSGN's enormous potential is what drove the conversion of excess Trident submarines into cruise-missile arsenal ships, despite opposition from notable defense analysts. (3) The president himself advocated the idea: "President George W. Bush's statements on transformation of the U.S. military rarely are associated with specific programs, with two exceptions--the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle and the conversion of Ohio (SSBN 726)-class ballistic missile submarines to conventionally armed guided-missile submarines." (4)

Similarly, the Department of Defense Annual Report to the President and Congress for 2003 highlights only the SSGN and two other platforms (the CVN-21 aircraft carrier and UCAV-45, an unmanned combat aerial vehicle) as examples of progress toward the transformative operational goals specified in the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review. (5) Even before the internal report, the National Defense Panel, congressionally chartered to provide a second opinion on the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, specifically advocated only two new programs in its report, and one of them was the SSGN (the other was CVX, an advanced aircraft-carrier design). (6) The panel also reaffirmed the urgency of the need to pursue transformation, which had been introduced in the 1997 Defense Reform Initiative and was then a topic of academic debate in connection with the concept of a "revolution in military affairs." (7) Since then, many decision makers have firmly associated the SSGN with transformation. Now that the administration's recent departure from the two-major-theater-war force structure has freed up resources to finance transformation, the Defense Department, the Navy, and especially submariners can ill afford for the cruise-missile submarine to be anything but a complete success when it reaches initial operational capability in 2007. (8)