The USS Gettysburg Shootdown Through Chinese Eyes
Martial sage Carl von Clausewitz might be bewildered by high-tech aircraft, computers, and missiles. But he would instantly recognize the dynamics afflicting Gettysburg that fateful night.
What takeaways will Chinese military observers draw from USS Gettysburg’s accidental downing of a U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet in the Red Sea last December? You can bet that Beijing is poring over the incident and figuring out how to put the insights it gleans to work in the Taiwan Strait, in the South China Sea, or on some other future battleground. People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officers, not to mention Chinese think-tankers and scholars of military affairs, are attentive people. They are perpetually on the lookout for strategic advantage. They do their homework.
So should we.
The Red Sea incident remains under investigation, so no one has a complete picture of cause and effect as of yet. Firm conclusions are premature. The sharpest commentary I’ve come across to date comes from Kevin Eyer, a retired captain who commanded three Aegis cruisers like Gettysburg. I hope it attracts wide readership within the Beltway and prompts us to look in the mirror. It is doubtless making the rounds within the Chinese commentariat, which vacuums up and processes information as a matter of course.
Read the whole thing—and get the scoop straight from an experienced hand.
In all likelihood, studying the incident will convince PLA commanders to double down on their approach to naval competition and warfare. They will devise stratagems and operational practices to amplify the stresses on U.S. ship crews and task-force commanders while imposing a wearisome operational tempo on the U.S. Navy. In a sense, then, they will interpret the unfortunate Gettysburg affair as ratifying their existing way of war at sea.
Understanding the Gettysburg Incident
Captain Eyer starts off by observing that the U.S. Navy system of command at sea tends to discourage introspection about the larger causes of accidents at sea. Firing the skipper offers an easy escape from uncomfortable questions about subterranean troubles within the service. Eyer reports that commanding officers are known in the surface fleet as “sacrificial” captains, a convenient “single point of failure in any disaster.”
Affixing blame to the commanding officer and the crew under his stewardship, for which he is ultimately accountable, confines accountability to a single wayward command. It “forestalls further, probing questions that often don’t have easy answers.” And because of this escapism, “larger systemic issues” may go unresolved in the end—or even unexamined.
Having set the stage, Eyer spends the balance of his article cataloging systemic issues that may elude Gettysburg investigators’ notice. Let’s see what Chinese practitioners and scholars of marine affairs may learn from him, and from this blight on American naval history. For one thing, they will learn that despite its enviable record in war and peace, the U.S. Navy surface force can suffer catastrophic failure amid the clangor of combat.
As a general rule, any military cataclysm stems from some combination of human and equipment failure. In fact, that’s what I told an eagle-eyed Stars & Stripes reporter while spitballing in the immediate aftermath of the Gettysburg incident. After all, every tool is imperfect, and so is its wielder. Subject the matériel and human factors comprising a military force to intense stress—confronting them with high stakes, imperfect information, narrowing options, and scant time to react—and you increase the likelihood of a breakdown in the system. That’s what the hothouse climate of battle can do.
Eyer wonders why Gettysburg was even able to take a friendly Super Hornet under fire. For instance, the Aegis combat system interrogates aircraft in the ship’s vicinity through a system known, straightforwardly enough, as “identification friend or foe,” or IFF. “Mode V” IFF transmits an encoded query that only friendly aircraft can answer. The missile system aboard Aegis combatants will not even permit the crew to fire on an aircraft classified as friendly under Mode V, the gold standard. But things got messy that night. Gettysburg correctly identified the Super Hornet as friendly, only to shut down the rearward-facing sector of its radar to conduct flight operations. (So powerful is the SPY-1 radar installed in Aegis cruisers that it could play havoc with a helicopter if the system irradiated it.)
The watch team reactivated the radar once flight operations were complete, and reclassified the Super Hornet as a “vampire,” code for an incoming missile. Yikes.
Eyer holds human and equipment failings at fault for the misstep. One operator on board Gettysburg accurately identified the F/A-18F as friendly, but only notified the commanding officer and the tactical action officer—the officer in charge of sensors and weapons release, and thus with fighting the ship—through “push button action.” In other words, the operator sent a message through the ship’s computer system instead of speaking up. The electronic notification “got hung up in the computer system,” a known problem for some years. Had the operator spoken out more forcefully, opines Eyer, the shootdown may never have occurred. And to compound matters, the ship failed to report that its “cooperative engagement system,” another layer of protection against friendly-fire incidents, was offline that night.
That’s a lot of error.
Nor does Captain Eyer spare those outside USS Gettysburg from scrutiny. In fact, not exempting others seems to be his purpose for writing about the incident. The Super Hornet aircrew—who, mercifully, survived the incident with minimal injuries—evidently was not transmitting on Link 16, a computer link that automatically relays location and identification data from the aircraft to the task force. Nor was the aircraft crew communicating by voice with units charged with tracking and identifying aircraft in the carrier strike group’s vicinity. Nor did the admiral or staff in charge of the formation intercede to prevent the disaster. Why not remains a mystery.
So, as the Navy’s investigation into the incident gets underway, the questions before the investigators are legion.
What Can China Learn from the Gettysburg?
Which leads to lesson #1 for the PLA: intensify the “fog” and “friction” endemic to war when engaging the U.S. Navy. Martial sage Carl von Clausewitz might be bewildered by high-tech aircraft, computers, and missiles, living as he did in an age of smoothbore muskets and cannon. But he would instantly recognize the dynamics afflicting Gettysburg that fateful night. These are eternal. “War,” he writes, “is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.”
Information is elusive while dark passions run hot. Decision-making under such circumstances is tough, to say the least. And despite advocacy from technophiles, the advent of high-tech sensors and computers has done little to dispel the fog of war.
And then there’s friction. “Everything in war is very simple,” Clausewitz observes, “but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.” Things that can go wrong have a way of going wrong. For the Prussian master, friction is something like Murphy’s Law teleported to the battlefield. “Countless minor incidents—the kind you can never really foresee—combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls far short of the intended goal.” Small mistakes and failures compound, adding up to something big.
The Clausewitzian remedy? There is no magic exemption from Murphy’s Law. He asks rhetorically, “Is there any lubricant that will reduce this abrasion? Only one, and a commander and his army will not always have it readily available: combat experience.” PLA commanders, who are great readers of Clausewitz and other teachers, will probably conclude they need to fling sand in the U.S. Navy’s gears whenever possible—compounding the friction that confounds their foe while amassing tactical advantage for forces under their charge.
Eyer goes on to allege that the Gettysburg crew not only had little combat experience as a team, but had deployed with the USS Harry S. Truman carrier strike group only half-trained. He reports that the ship had “completed all the pre-deployment training required for a ship to be certified to deploy,” checking all the boxes, but adds that the ship had performed at what would have been judged a failure level two decades ago. Yet Gettysburg got underway despite known deficiencies. The vessel and its crew—ill-trained, ill-prepared, and inexperienced—were doubly prone to Clausewitzian fog and friction.
Too Few Navy Ships, Too Many Commitments
For this, the author lays blame primarily on higher echelons of naval, military, and political leadership. There are too few hulls in the inventory, he says—and I agree—to meet the “unquenchable demand” for naval forces from regional combatant commanders. U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Central Command, et al. broadcast a demand signal that outstrips supply. Yet the Navy leadership is loath to turn down requests for ships, carrier strike groups in particular. Its “can do” culture is all-pervasive.
Saying “no” has consequences. So lean is the fleet relative to the demand that delaying a cruiser, destroyer, or carrier would disrupt the rhythm of workups, deployment, and maintenance throughout the fleet. That’s how tightly geared things are. To alleviate this, substandard ships get certified, rather than being held back for additional training that would ready them to navigate the fog and friction of combat.
And on the topic of training, Eyer faults the service for seeking false economies on that front. “In the past, operators went to long schools” so they understood their equipment and could maintain and repair it. “Not today. Schools are expensive.” Rather than train sailors to take ownership of their gear, “the navy has opted for ‘black box’ systems, in which the operators just try to effect repairs without much understanding of what exactly is wrong.” The approach goes like this: plug in new black boxes for old ones until the problem is fixed, or wait until technical experts can fly out from a shipyard or maintenance facility back home. That takes time that tends to be in short supply.
Self-help used to be U.S. Navy philosophy, but no more. Advantage: China.
This all illumines lesson #2 for the PLA and its Chinese Communist Party masters: keep cranking out ships like sausages and, as a corollary, employ the supersized PLA Navy fleet to goad the U.S. Navy, the Pentagon, and the administration in Washington DC into staying up-tempo. The classical Chinese general Sun Tzu advises field commanders to keep their enemies scurrying around. It distracts and exhausts them. Party leaders have made Master Sun’s approach their own. They have built the world’s largest navy, coast guard, fishing fleet, and maritime militia. Flooding the zone with ships and aircraft compels opponents with smaller forces to respond. China’s rivals are forced to operate at high tempo, incurring wear and tear on equipment, fatigue for crews, and heavy costs for fuel, spare parts, and stores of all kinds.
Best still, an antagonist might even suffer a Gettysburg disaster now and again—hurting its reputation as a competent fighting force.
As it is often said, quantity has a quality of its own. The PLA Navy is now substantially larger than the U.S. Navy by numbers of hulls, and its margin only looks set to widen, owing to Chinese shipbuilding prowess and America’s shipbuilding atrophy. Think about the strategic vistas a gargantuan fleet opens before Beijing. A bigger fleet could discharge its responsibilities in East Asia with a surplus of forces to spare for operations elsewhere on the nautical chart. China’s navy can even go global, taking on new expeditionary character. It can afford to prosecute operations in distant theaters without sacrificing the leadership’s top priorities close to home. It can advance Chinese interests in faraway regions like the Indian Ocean—or even the Atlantic.
Keeping things stirred up in multiple theaters, the Western Hemisphere in particular, would tempt Washington DC to subdivide and attenuate U.S. Navy forces at a time when the administration wants to concentrate scarce assets in the Pacific to deter or turn back aggression. And, in true Sun Tzu style, it would keep American forces scurrying around—“constantly occupied” to China’s operational and strategic advantage.
The greats of strategy agree: always look at yourself through the eyes of a potential red team. It’s the first step toward a cogent response.
About the Author: James Holmes
James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Faculty Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. The views voiced here are his alone.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
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