What is the result of the best defence of a fleet being to cease acting like a fleet? That question is the key point in the transition of the Navy to the concept of Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO), a strategy that is designed to operate in a maritime environment where long-range targeting and anti-ship weapons challenge the traditional formations. According to the self-definition of the Navy, the core operating concept of the service is currently Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO): scatter the forces and make the target harder to hit, but nevertheless focus the effects with networking, long-range fires, and mission command.
The attractiveness of the idea is not fussy. Power of combat is concentrated in concentrated formations, and so is risk. DMO rebuts that dispersing sensors and shooters to a more diverse range of platforms will increase the area the fleet has to observe and lessen the operational cost that would follow in case of the loss of either a single ship or an aircraft. The same reasoning drives the urge of the Navy to load more munitions on more platforms and to use longer-range weapons, such as Maritime Strike Tomahawk and LRASM, as well as unmanned systems and closer coordination of Marine Corps land-based contributions. The reward is the sea control that is gained by a network of mutually reinforcing units instead of the small number of centres of gravity that are well fortified.
However, the bet of the “distributed fleet” collapses in case of failure of the connective tissue.
DMO is inherently a time-sensitive information problem. The operational speed of weapons and the reduction in the timeframe to engage widen the operational edge to those forces that are able to discern, determine and designate impacts quickly. The request to support decision tools left of the kill chain is indicative of that fact: commanders require near real-time information on the healthiness, survivability, supportability, and communications selectability of their units, not as a slide at their side, but as continuous updates to tasking. That burden of analysis grows very rapidly in a widely dispersed force. A few task groups turn out to be dozens of nodes, each having a particular inventory, emissions, and schedule.
Networking cannot help the problem, but it transfers the risk. DMO has relied on robust communications connections that can withstand destruction and still assist in coordinated fires. The route of the Navy traverses joint and service-specific architectures, with Project Overmatch being the Navy contribution to an integration of the style of JADC2. Already at the time, short-term development has been characterized as a journey of improving on the existing rather than waiting until totally new structures come, a fact that fleet-scale transformation has to be digested as deployments and training periods persist.
The less obvious engineering aspect of survivability within DMO is that of the environment. The electromagnetic manoeuvre warfare (EMW) is often referred to as jamming, deception, spectrum management but this is also referring to the prediction of the propagation of signals in the real world. The Surface Navy concern in remote meteorological measurements of atmospheric conditions at numerous levels, including but not limited to, pressure, temperature, wind, visibility, humidity, is a manifestation of the requirement to provide high-fidelity prediction of radar, electronic warfare, laser, and communications capability. That is explicitly stated in a Navy SBIR topic which seeks automated profiling of the ocean surface to at least 1,500 meters (with updates within 30 minutes) to gain a better insight into refractivity and anomalous propagation phenomena which can determine what ships can sense and what senses them.
The most tangible weakness of DMO is sustainment. Distribution adds both the number of places where fuel, weapons, parts, and maintenance must be available, as well as the probability that a single fortified facility can safely cater to the entire force. It should be noted, that acquisition work connected with DMO entails a novel type of smaller oilers, the TAO(L) light replenishment oiler and smaller amphibious connectors like the Medium Landing Ship. Those shows are a portent of an unpleasant reality: even an armed, fueled, and connected distributed fleet can only be as survivable as the logistics system that is able to support it when there is pressure on it.
The second major threat to the Navy is not the capability of ships to be dispersed. Whether it is possible to make dispersion routine without turning the command-and-control of the fleet and spectrum advantage and sustainment architecture into a single point of failure is a risk, which DMO was intended to remove.
