WASHINGTON — While the carrier strike group will remain the backbone of naval power projection, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle says its time to look for alternative options, especially unmanned systems, for more specialized regional scenarios — part of a Tuesday preview of what he called his forthcoming “hedge strategy” for the Navy.
“If I had a lot of strike groups” — the standardized formation consisting of a 100,000-ton carrier, a cruiser, and at least two Aegis destroyers — “I could place these things all over the world,” Caudle said on stage at the Apex Defense conference here. “But we don’t have enough, [and] as you think about these various missions around the world — whether it be choke point defense or protection, sea lines of communication, anti-submarine warfare, ISR, maritime domain awareness — I just, quite frankly, don’t need a strike group to do all those.”
Instead, Caudle continued, the service should supplement the carrier strike groups with smaller, cheaper, and more specialized “tailored forces,” many of them unmanned “tailored offsets.” (“Offset” is a decades-old Pentagon term of art for new tech used to counter a previously unmet challenge).
“They are capabilities like attritable and easily replenishable USVs [unmanned surface vessels]; MUSVs [Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels] designed for scouting, screening and striking; UUVs [Unmanned Underwater Vessels] for area and water-space denial are [or] countering mines; and low-cost high volume interceptors for counter-drone defense,” he said. “Together, these tailored capabilities will amplify and complement the main battle force.”
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So the surface Navy needs to learn from submariners — like Caudle himself — and adopt a more flexible “hedge strategy,” he said, one that pulls together smaller “tailored forces,” specially trained and organized as needed for missions that don’t require a full strike group. A big part of those “tailored forces,” in turn, will be “tailored offsets” composed of specialized, low-cost unmanned surface vessels, mini-submarines, and drones.
As Caudle described it, those specific capabilities could range from clearing mines from a “maritime chokepoint” (think the Strait of Hormuz), to stopping subs from breaking out past Greenland into the North Atlantic, to providing “supporting fires” in defense of Taiwan.
“We want to remain very flexible, plug and play,” Caudle said. “The challenge historically with the Navy is, I mean, we’re 250 years old, we’re quite parochial.”
That traditionalism manifests today as “this mindset that what we do is create these very large strike groups,” the CNO continued. “We love this conveyor belt of the strike group generation process.”
The flipside of the surface fleet’s fixation on a regular cycle of standardized training for a fixed carrier strike group formation, he said, has been an aversion to “tailored” training programs for small, ad hoc forces — which is more how the submarine force deploys.
“Submariners, we do not share that vision,” Caudle said. “Now there’s a submariner, you know, at the helm here. I’m trying to enlighten people that we can do this safely, effectively and in conjunction with the conversation with the gaining commander” — typically, the four-star theater Combatant Commander — by giving them more options than the standardized carrier strike group.
Getting buy-in from those theater commanders and the Joint Staff will be critical to the reform’s success, Caudle made clear.
“Combat commanders have to know how to ask for this,” he said. “So it’s got to be packaged in ways that they’re familiar with, they’re comfortable with, it delivers, and then at the end of the day, I can actually convince the Joint Staff and the [Secretary of Defense] that that’s a sufficient thing to do what the combatant commander needs.”
Equally important will be how to adapt the Navy’s supporting organizations to train, maintain, and supply the new tailored forces, especially the unmanned ones.
“What does that look like in the future?” Caudle wondered aloud. “A fleet commander, a resource sponsor and an acquisition team — that’s the standard model.” But unmanned assets, by definition, don’t have a crew aboard to handle routine maintenance, so they may need a different model. The CNO noted that the service is still standing up new unmanned-systems squadrons to figure that out.
“We’re not currently built that way,” Caudle cautioned. “The challenge with any unmanned [system is], how do I get it to the point of need and sustain it once it’s in that area? Who is responsible when the battery runs out, it tips over, it fails?”
“That’s the holy grail of questions,” Caudle said.