The New NOC

Operations concept seeks ‘to unlock the innovation … of sailors and Marines’

By MATT HILBURN, Associate Editor

The Navy and Marine Corps have established a new operations concept that “describes how the Navy-Marine Corps team will contribute to the defense of our nation.” The 36-page document calls for “more widely distributed forces” and “increased forward presence” as the guiding principles of how the services will operate in an ever-changing national security environment.

Signed before Labor Day weekend by Adm. Mike Mullen, chief of naval operations, and Gen. Michael Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, the “Naval Operations Concept 2006” (NOC) supersedes a similar document issued in 2002.

It reflects “a continuing evolution of the Department of the Navy away from its Cold War practices,” said Dr. Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute in Washington, D.C. “Today’s Navy is less and less about conventional warfare and more and more about unconventional, asymmetric challenges.”

Reflecting that sea change, the NOC outlines a broad set of missions for the Navy and Marine Corps, broken down into their more traditional missions — forward naval presence, expeditionary power projection, crisis response, maritime security operations and sea control — as well as nontraditional missions such as counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, civil-military operations, security cooperation and counter proliferation.

Of particular note in the document is what appears to be the evolution of the sea basing scheme into a concept called Global Fleet Stations (GFS), mentioned by Mullen in May.

“We are evaluating a new concept called Global Fleet Stations — which would establish forward-deployed small draft ships and support vessels able to be stationed where most of our allies are right now — in green and brown water,” Mullen said in remarks at the World Affairs Council in Pittsburgh. “Historically, we have been a blue-water Navy. … We must do more in the green and brown water. Frankly, we also need to do more ashore.”

Sea basing traditionally has been thought of as a large Maritime Prepositioning Force (Future), a planned squadron of 14 vessels including amphibious ships, transport vessels and connectors. Supply depots, headquarters and troop staging areas would be created at sea rather than on land, and a typical sea base would be capable of moving two battalions totaling 2,400 Marines to an objective ashore overnight.

According to the NOC, GFS would comprise at least one modularly configurable command ship — an amphibious transport dock, dock landing ship, high-speed vessel or Littoral Combat Ship — and one or more small surface units, including Littoral Combat Ships or frigates. A GFS would also be fitted with small units such as an entire riverine squadron or a helicopter detachment. The GFS could provide classroom space, medical facilities, an “information fusion” center and some combat service support capability.

The services envision “a persistent sea base of operations from which to coordinate and employ adaptive force packages within a regional area of interest. Focusing primarily on Phase 0 (shaping) operations, theater security cooperation, global maritime awareness and tasks associated specifically with the war on terror.”

A GFS could be supplemented with personnel from joint, governmental, multinational and nongovernmental organizations.

Navy spokeswoman Lt. Sarah Self-Kyler said there could be five GFS, and that they could be developed within five to seven years. They would be positioned in locales such as Southeast Asia, East Africa and the Arabian Gulf, South Asia, West Africa and Central and South America, and would be used principally to respond to humanitarian crises, natural disasters and counterterrorism missions.

Self-Kyler stressed that GFS is only a concept, but said it might be introduced in the new maritime strategy, which is being developed for completion next summer.

The NOC is sprinkled with hypothetical situations to which the Navy and Marine Corps might have to respond. It describes one such event in which five coastal nations, all with considerable natural resources, request assistance in countering challenges to their sovereignty caused by “poverty, disease, poor governance, insurgency and terrorism.”

The Navy would respond in concert with an array of federal agencies, including the State Department and FBI. Initially, the Navy establishes a GFS, anchored by the USS Shreveport, which is manned by specially trained sailors and Marines who can take on the missions of civil-military operations, maritime security and security cooperation. Before the arrival of the GFS, service members coordinate with U.S. Embassy personnel, representatives from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and FBI agents — all with considerable time in-country as well as language and cultural fluency — to help the sailors and Marines “focus their actions on the immediate needs of alleviating distress and improving security.”

Examples of how the GFS could pinpoint the locals’ needs include calling in U.S. Army veterinarians to curb livestock disease and bringing in Coast Guard small boat specialists to assist local forces in patrolling their coasts.

The GFS, according to the document, could also serve as a launching platform for civilian health care professionals who could provide assistance in preventative medicine as well as international legal experts to promote better governance.

Thompson said the Navy appears to be “scaling back the sea basing concept” to something more affordable and feasible. “I think the [old] notion of a sea base is dying a slow death, mainly due to a lack of money.”

Rear Adm. Philip Hart Cullom, head of the Navy’s strategy and policy office, said in a statement to Seapower that sea basing is a broad concept that can take many shapes and forms.

“Sea basing is not tied to a single procurement program,” he said. “Sea base missions range from contingency surge operations (Hurricane Katrina), to anti-access (Operation Enduring Freedom), to persistent presence and Emory S. Land’s West African deployment.”

Emory S. Land deployed to the Gulf of Guinea last February on a mission to foster better relations with West African nations through bilateral exercises in counterterrorism and maritime awareness, as well as humanitarian missions that included providing medical care to the local populations.

Cullom said GFS is not a scaled-down version of sea basing but rather an “innovative combination of the concepts of sea basing and adaptive force packaging. The GFS concept provides a leveraged, high-yield sea-based force option that achieves a persistent presence in support of national objectives utilizing the full spectrum of interagency assets.”

What is striking about the document, said Thompson, is the way the Navy, like other military services, is forced to use old systems in new ways, because of budget and time constraints.

“When we send a Los Angeles-class attack submarine, obviously a Cold War weapon, to sea today, chances are it’s going to be doing eavesdropping on insurgents or other emerging threats,” he said. “Nobody was giving much thought to those threats when the ship was designed and built, but that’s what we have, and we need to be able to address the threats as they exist today.”

“The real point of the NOC is to unlock the innovation, judgment and creativity of sailors and Marines,” Cullom said during remarks at a defense forum for military officers and industry representatives sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute and Marine Corps Association Sept. 5 in Arlington, Va. “[It will] help them help us come up with creative ideas.”

According to Thompson, the NOC reflects a Navy that has to prove its relevance as the world changes.

“It’s tough to adapt quickly when it takes years to build one of your signature weapons systems,” he said. “Just the fact that the Navy is returning to an emphasis on riverine capability after decades of neglecting it tells you they know they’ve got to be relevant. They’ve got to earn their budget every day by proving that they have something to say about the threats of the day.”

Cullom agreed that in the past the oft-changing requirements for weapons systems was difficult, but said “the Navy has always excelled at adapting its current force to meet today’s challenges.”

The NOC “is intended to capture the full potential of our capacity for organizational innovation to meet the diverse array of challenges in the strategic landscape,” he said.

“The emphasis on riverine units and other programs such as Foreign Area Officers is a recognition of the increasingly asymmetric threat emerging as part of the global war on terrorism,” Cullom said.