Fleet Tactics & Special Warfare
Naval Postgraduate School Essay Contest—First Prize
Sponsored by NPS Foundation and the Naval Institute
Naval Special Warfare can contribute much to the fight at sea.
By Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Walls Jr., U.S. Navy
June 2023 Proceedings Vol. 149/6/1,444
Since its first publication in 1986, the three editions of Captain Wayne Hughes’ Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations have become the definitive works on modern naval tactics in cyber, littoral, and fleet engagements. Despite the notable absence of Naval Special Warfare (NSW) from the text, NSW’s capabilities can support Hughes’ and coauthor Rear Admiral Robert Girrier’s six fleet functions: scouting and antiscouting; command and control (C2) and command-and-control countermeasures (C2CM); and firepower and counterforce.1 Fleet Tactics describes best practices for winning individual battles; NSW can directly contribute to naval victory in combat, especially in the littorals.2 Indeed, special forces contributions are most applicable within these confined coastal spaces crowded by commercial and military traffic—or, as Fleet Tactics puts it, “where the clutter is.”3
SEALs fast rope onto the deck of the expeditionary sea base USS Miguel Keith (ESB-5) in the Philippine Sea. ESBs are designed to facilitate aviation and special operations forces, including launch and recovery of small craft, and would be well suited for deploying Naval Special Warfare forces. U.S. Marine Corps (Christopher W. England)
The exclusion of special operations may result from the book’s heavy emphasis on missile warfare. Or perhaps it is because of the text’s assumptions that the purpose of naval operations, especially in littoral zones, is to support objectives on land.4 Special forces do not obviously fit into missile combat, and it is easy to assume any fleet effort that requires significant land forces would involve massed Marines or soldiers, eliminating the need for small units. It is an easy omission to make. Even retired Admiral William McRaven, perhaps the most notable contemporary scholar on special operations, sees special forces as small units capable of achieving victory over superior numbers through “relative superiority,” not as a component of a larger naval engagement.5
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/june/fleet-tactics-special-warfare
