How Individual Amphibs Survive & Attack On Open Sea

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

The US Navy has in recent years been making rapid progress implementing new concepts of operation and tactics designed to align with the services Distributed Maritime Operations strategy, a strategic approach based on leveraging emerging networking technologies, wide-spread use of unmanned platforms and increasingly long-range precision weaponry.

DMO was first outlined in the Chief of Naval Operations 2020 Navigation Plan as a way of thinking designed to expand formations into more disaggregated operations fortified by networking technologies, unmanned systems and improved multi-domain connectivity. Secure networking is now able to connect platforms across much greater distances and newer weapons systems such as the deck-launched Naval Strike Missile are able to attack enemy targets with precision at much greater ranges. 

DMO can be seen as part of a broader, long-standing trajectory of evolving Navy thinking, as it was preceded in 2015 by a surface warfare weapons strategy known as Distributed Lethality. Distributed Lethality, which arguably wound up being extremely successful, was intended to arm the entire surface fleet with new, more capable weapons to strengthen the services “open” or “blue-water” maritime capabilities. The idea was to shift Navy thinking, planning and weapons development to a new paradigm following 15 years of counter-terrorism operations. Many weapons were upgraded and many new ones were added over the course of several years during Distributed Lethality. The Navy’s SeaRAM was upgraded to hit greater ranges, surface ships such as the Littoral Combat Ship were armed with longer-range over-the-horizon offensive strike capability and closer-in ship defenses such as Close-In-Weapons-Station (CIWS) was upgraded to counter surface targets as well as incoming air threats. 

Building upon this, DMO enables maritime attack formations to “distribute” into less condensed, linear formations, something which makes them more survivable. At the same time, should individual maritime warfare platforms such as surface ships operate more independently with greater levels of autonomy in disaggregated formations … will they be more vulnerable to enemy attacks?

Former director of Expeditionary Warfare for the Navy, retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. David Coffman, argues in favor of operating with an interconnected network of maritime platforms designed to support, protect and further enable forward operating single platforms. Coffman explained some of the key variables likely informing the current Chief of Naval Operations intent with DMO in the context of how longer-range networking technology increasingly spreads throughout space, air, surface and undersea platforms to enable single disaggregated platforms to operate as part of a layered protective system.

Analyzing the Navy’s maritime warfare capability in terms of a “multi-domain” integrated system is a much better lens through which to evolve DMO.

“Ships are not alone. So I always hear the critique of ‘let’s look at the survivability.. that ship can’t survive a missile.’ It’s not designed to survive a missile barrage,” Coffman said.