The Future Maritime Operating Environment and the Role of Naval Power

otherwise submerged platform is likely to continue. 390 Improved surface fleet lethality by
developing longer-range weapons and sensors, and combining platforms in novel ways, is another
response to the challenges associated with littoral warfare. 391 Such approaches to naval operations
underscore the reality that the proliferation of affordable sophisticated military technology has
levelled the zone of battle, and has significantly reduced the element of surprise as well as the
strategic mobility that naval forces traditionally enjoyed. 392 “Probably by 2030,” a leading US
naval thinker has argued, “we would have to accept that ships are visible, identifiable and
trackable within a few hundred or a few thousand miles off-shore of anyone willing to make the
effort to do so.” 393
As a conflict zone, the littorals will be characterised by opacity. It has always been very
challenging to find hostile forces on the high seas, but will be even more difficult to “see” (i.e.,
identify) hostile forces in the littoral battlespace, because “radars, sonars and optical sensors are
presented with environmental, topographic and hydrographic variations that are more marked
inshore than they are at sea.” 394 Significantly, that problem will not affect land-based systems that
will be able to track and target slow-moving naval vessels. Naval commanders and planners will,
therefore, confront a complex, dynamic, cluttered and extremely dangerous environment in which
friendly, adversarial and neutral forces coexist. 395 The “bystander problem”—“civilian tankers,
freighters, fishing boats and aircraft going about their daily business”—will constantly obscure a
friendly vs. hostile picture of the situation. And, unlike blue water operations, where the conflict
is largely fleet-on-fleet or platform on platform, fighting in the littorals will probably be
multifaceted. It could include “irregular, hybrid and state-centric threats [that] will need to be
confronted both at sea and ashore in a human landscape where the consequences of massive
change and disruption in all its social, climatological and technological dimensions will play out
in the coming decades.” 396
Littoral operations will also involve conflict at much closer ranges than in the open ocean,
significantly reducing the time for command (i.e., detect, identify, track and engage) decisions,
and decreasing the tactical freedom upon which the success of naval operations depend. 397
Because threats can come at any time from any direction in the littorals, ships operating in that
environment will need to maintain “a constant, all-dimensional state of alert” that will lead to “a
degradation of crews, equipment and readiness that makes the ship particularly vulnerable.” 398 As
no Great Power has engaged in a war with a peer competitor in a littoral setting since 1945, much
of the technology and weapons that exist today are untested in combat—and the thinking and
planning of strategies for battle are largely conceptual. It is nonetheless acknowledged by naval
390 James Holmes, “Hail to the Deep: A Strategy for Submarines”, The National Interest (online), 25 June 2014.
391 Grace Jean, “USN set to bolster surface fleet lethality”, Jane’s Defence Weekly, 21 January 2015, p. 11.
392 Rear Admiral Yedidia ‘Didi’ Ya’ari, Israeli Navy, “The Littoral Arena: A Word of Caution”, US Naval
War College Review, Vol. 67, No. 3, Summer 2014, p. 83.
393 Norman Friedman, “The U.S. Navy of 2030”, Defense Media Network, 21 June 2012 [accessed on
6 January 2015 at www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/the-u-s-navy-of-2030/].
394 Norman Friedman makes the observation about the difficulty of finding an adversary at sea in “Naval
Strategy”, Andrew T. H. Tan (ed.), The Politics of Maritime Power: A Survey (Routledge: London, 2001),
p. 29. The quotation is taken from Horizon 2050: A Strategic Maritime Concept for the Canadian Forces, p. 27.
395 Vego, Operational Warfare at Sea; Theory and Practice, p. 221.
396 Horizon 2050: A Strategic Maritime Concept for the Canadian Forces, p. 25.
397 Horizon 2050: A Strategic Maritime Concept for the Canadian Forces, p. 27
398 Ya’ari, “The Littoral Arena: A Word of Caution”, p. 83.
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