One of the reasons for developing and maintaining navies is the nation’s aspiration to help shape the context in which it operates, and generally to have strategic effect. Unless navies can do that there would be little point in having them. However, they are shaped by that context too, since this determines what their leaders think the context requires by way of naval missions and also decides whether they are willing to provide the resources with which they can be performed.
Today’s naval planners have to deal with a particularly difficult and complex strategic context, and there seem to have emerged at least two and possibly three visions of the maritime future for which nations have to prepare their navies.
The first vision is post-Westphalian and system-centred. It focuses on mutually beneficial free trade, with the least barriers between states as possible. The more states trade, the argument goes, the less they fight. It is about multilateral cooperation between states in which common problems such as economic recession, climate change, food, energy and water shortages, pandemics, international terrorism and other such threats to international peace and stability are addressed and managed cooperatively.
This creates a need to protect the international sea-based trading system against a spectrum of threats ranging from the depredations of maritime criminals at one end of the scale to inter-state war at the other. These strategies are often based on the need to react to distant crises lest their effects come home. The ability to do so depends on ‘the capacity to manoueuvre’, namely the ability to do what must be done to protect the system. Protecting the system might require humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HADR), ‘Maritime Security operations’ against disorder at sea, where the emphasis is on collaboration with others against common threats like piracy and people- and drugs-smuggling – and capacity building so that the locals are better able to police their own regions. It might require maintaining ‘good order from the sea’ against developments ashore that threaten the system. These all depend on a newer version of the traditional concept of sea control which is less about one nation or group of nations commanding or dominating the sea and more about making it safe and free for legitimate use by all peoples. Because this vision is essentially global the ability to operate in a sustained way a long way from home is often critical.
Against this comes the second vision of the maritime future – which by contrast reverts to a competitive Westphalian world dominated by considerations of who gets what, when and how, in which traditional nineteenth- and twentieth-century balance of power conceptions will be expanded to draw in and to hopefully manage the rising powers of the Asia-Pacific region, particularly China, the possible re-emergence of a revitalised Russia and the growing impact of Brazil and other countries in the Middle East, South America and, perhaps, Africa.
This is a world in which the ultimate naval duty is to protect the people, territory and interests of the state. It is essentially competitive and largely based on the maintenance and development of traditional war-fighting capabilities against possible adversaries. The emphasis will be on deterrence. Si vis pacem, para bellum as Heraclitus once said 1500 years ago or, in the current narrative of the revitalised US 2nd Fleet, navies must be ‘Ready to fight … so we don’t have to.’1
Two quick points need to be made about this. First, and contrary to common political usage, both these visions of the maritime future can be thought of as international systems. In both cases, there is an international order and it does have rules. They are both ‘rules based orders’ – only those that apply in the traditional, competitive vision are rather harder-headed, more about political expediency and what works, than expressions of well-meaning liberal moral values. Second, virtually all states, no matter their size, are concerned not just about themselves, but about their place in the wider world. Accordingly, they will behave and prepare in possibly contradictory ways that suit both visions of the maritime future.
China can be taken as an example. On the one hand, it seems to be carving out a sphere of interest for itself in the Western Pacific by strengthening its holdings in the South China Sea, by challenging the status quo in the East China Sea and setting up the capability to contest access to the waters within the second island chain that would make life potentially hazardous for unwelcome naval forces operating within it by means of a variety of ‘Anti-Access and Area Denial’ (A2/AD) strategies. At the same time, in order to protect their wider interests, the PLA Navy is forging into the Indian Ocean, coming up against India and starting to construct the basis of a permanent more sustainable presence there.
At the same time, the Chinese also advocate a more benign image of the ‘harmonious ocean’ in which they and others come together for such things as the counter-piracy campaign off Somalia, disaster relief in Southeast Asia and capacity building in Africa. This is allied to the stupendous Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which they present as a ‘win–win opportunity’ for everyone to benefit by ‘getting aboard the Chinese economic express train’. The two policies are potentially contradictory in that their hard behaviour in the South China Sea -makes it more difficult for local states with competing claims in that area to trust them.
The Russians, on the other hand, present a rather clearer case. Although their navy can behave in a professionally cooperative manner when they choose to (as in fact it is generally agreed they do in the Arctic2), there is much less stress on the cooperative vision of the maritime future and much more on presenting a quite combative challenge to US and Western leadership in Europe and the world and a greater willingness to use force where and when considered necessary.
However, because the Russians are in a much weaker position than the Chinese economically and even militarily in some respects they have sought other ways of outflanking the West’s military advantages. In Russia, General Gerasimov has articulated the idea of ‘hybrid warfare’ where states make use of the methods used by non-state actors which are militarily weak – the use of proxies – the so called ‘little green men’ in the Crimean and Eastern Ukraine cases, of denial of service cyber attacks and informational ‘maskirovka’ campaigns such as over the Salisbury attack.3 The Chinese do this too, with their great fleets of controlled fishing boats in the South China Seas – the so-called ‘people’s militia’ – but their special line, developed over 20 years, is what they sometimes call the ‘three warfares’, which incorporates political persuasion with psychological pressure but puts a special emphasis on ‘weaponising’ maritime law, particularly in the Western Pacific, as a means of bolstering their claims to the area and what they think those claims entitle them to.4
Russian and Chinese behaviour is set against a background of concern about the independent rise of global crime networks in the shape, for example, of drugs- – and people-smuggling organisations often endowed with resources greater than those of many states. The problem of international terrorism and religious extremism continues, despite the containment of ISIS in Syria. Additionally, there is growing concern about the so-called ‘Truth Decay’ resulting from the irresponsible use of social media, which leads people to believe only what they want to believe and to the consequent decay of authority.5 Putting all this together with some worrying aspects of international behaviour, there may well emerge a third, bleaker, more terrifying vision of a maritime future, in which there is no order and no rules. It would comprise a state of anarchic lawlessness at sea and on land – a Hobbesian ‘anti-system’ characterised by globalised insecurity and bewilderingly distributed and ever-changing threats at every level. Because it would lessen every state’s capacity to control its own destiny, none would wish to see this third vision finally materialise, but all the same some are prepared to take greater risks of it happening,6 while others find it difficult to prevent in places like the Sulu Sea.
If they wish to matter, to be able to make a difference, to deliver strategic effect, irrespective of their size, navies have to prepare, according to their circumstances, for all three visions of the maritime future, the traditional competitive vision, the cooperative alternative and the newest, bleakest anarchic possibility. Because they have responded to the full spectrum of possible contingencies at sea, today’s navies have to develop an enormously wide range of capabilities. This requirement is not of course entirely new since much of their historic value has derived from their essential flexibility and ubiquity, but is arguably more demanding now than it has been before.
It requires the performance of five sets of sometimes related tasks. First, and, because of the overriding need to protect the state, usually foremost, are the continuing requirements to maintain the capacity to control the sea in order to project power ashore, or to prevent an adversary from doing so, to defend – or possibly attack – the capacity to use the sea as a form of transport. This requires an emphasis on high-end warfare capabilities such as Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW), Anti-Air Warfare (AAW) and surface warfare. These are always expensive options that set quality against quantity or mass and longer sustainability. This is particularly so with the advance of possibly transformational technology in the shape of hypersonic missiles, unmanned systems, distributed lethality around dispersed fleets of perhaps smaller vessels, artificial intelligence and so on.
Second, the maintenance and development of nuclear deterrents at sea and the correspondingly enhanced need to protect oneself against them can be teased out of this set of traditional mission requirements partly because they take a very different form and partly because they apply only to a small but growing proportion of the world’s fleets. The existing nuclear powers seek to maintain and sustain their capabilities while newer ones like North Korea and possibly Iran seek to develop them whatever its consequence would be in the Gulf, the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. These and other advanced navies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific also seek to extend their capacity to defend the fleet against air attack into regional Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) systems.
Third, all states wish to maintain good order in their own offshore estates, particularly when the resources they contain have become so important. Increasingly they also accept the need, if they can, to contribute to the away game as well, partly as a means of protecting domestic peace and prosperity against approaching threats and partly to have an influence on proceedings at a regional or global level. In an age when even non-state actors like Yemen’s Houthi rebels can mount a serious challenge at sea,7 the inherent difficulty and potential hazard of such operations encourages nations and navies to develop higher-end capabilities because that makes them more confident in their operation and less at potential risk.
Fourth, quite apart from straight humanitarian considerations, there is ample evidence of the destabilising effects of disasters and catastrophic weather events that result in the fall of governments, the sudden widespread movement of affected people and the prospect of disease pandemics. Accordingly, it is no surprise that Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief (HA/DR) operations figure increasingly strongly in the world’s more active navies, and that there are also clear incentives among them to develop the capacities of the largely inactive so that they too can play a bigger role.
Fifth, it is all too easy for conventional sea-going navies to forget the domestic role that many navies have in maintaining good order within the state, particularly by means of its rivers, lakes and estuaries. This is a major role for many of the navies of South America for example, where rivers remain the only way to bring relief to otherwise inaccessible areas that are often all too susceptible to penetration by terrorists, drugs smugglers and other types of criminal. Nor should we forget the possibility that such expertise can be exported, hence the role of the Uruguayan Navy in maintaining riverine order in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Trying to cope with such a broad range of contingency is difficult for all navies, irrespective of their size, whether they are: great, essentially global in their outlook; medium, if principally regional; or small, if preoccupied with local concerns. The balance they strike between these missions and the way in which they interpret them reflects the characteristics of the nations they seek to defend, characteristics which bear some passing resemblance to the elements of seapower identified by Mahan. One of the most important characteristics is the extent to which they see themselves as outward-looking trading countries such as Singapore and Oman.8 The geographic location of both states, near key choke-points but in Oman’s case with open access to the world ocean reinforces this sense of identity. But both, like Israel, also face neighbours that are much larger and which in the past have been troublesome, and so need to be guarded against. States next to large assertive powers like Russia, such as the Baltic and Scandinavian countries, generally have a much greater sense of threat than countries such as Ireland which are sheltered by their location. Some, like Belgium and the Netherlands, seek refuge in the company of others in such organisations as NATO and the EU. Others in similar strategic circumstances such as Finland accord a much higher priority to decisional sovereignty. Many of these attitudes can be attributed to accumulated experience and what some would call ‘strategic culture’.9
The extent to which the outside world is seen as a threat or an opportunity probably also reflects their economic, industrial and social strength and so to the extent to which they can invest in substantial defence. Many African states simply do not have the resources even to guard offshore riches in the way of fish, oil and gas, which if properly exploited would do much to compensate for their current economic difficulties. By contrast, Singapore is in a much stronger position than many of its neighbours, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, which though much larger are plagued with internal dissent, institutional weakness and political centrifugalism. Other states, like Colombia, Mexico, Peru and others in Central and South America, are, or have been, troubled with massive internal levels of threat from transnational criminal organisations that distract their navies from conventional roles on the open ocean, while providing them with demanding and distinctive domestic roles.
Enough has been said to show that, both in the challenges they face and in the mixture of their responses, small navies are likely to be so individually unique in deciding and realising their operational priorities that only the loosest of generalisations can safely be made about their operational priorities or their strategic effect and consequence. Even so, some generic observations may aid understanding about the often inter-related issues that many of them need to consider if indeed they want to be able to make a difference. The first is perhaps the most obvious; it is that the size and nature of their fleets is more a consequence of their policy than a driver, although that size will necessarily help shape their responses to the subsequent issues they face since being small can bring its own perspectives and problems.
Chief amongst these is usually the fundamental issue of how smaller navies can improve their chances of having strategic effect against their peers, but more ambitiously against stronger forces. In short, to have a reasonable prospect of success in seeking to matter, what particular issues do smaller navies have to consider?
An obvious one is the familiar requirement to balance commitments against resources. Many navies, small ones included, have a severe and increasing problem here since when operating on the ‘can do’ principle, they end up with more politically directed tasks than their resources allow them to perform as they would wish. The developing shape of the navies of Europe illustrates the point that defence inflation outstrips all other forms of inflation and this is particularly evident in the procurement of high-end ASW, AAW and anti-surface warfare capabilities characteristic of sea control aspirations. The result is a series of fleets that are certainly capable but at the same time much smaller numerically.10 This reduction in mass also reduces the sustainability that in the past has often (though not always) proved key to success in sea control operations.
Resorting to expedients such as reduced training and maintenance or more over-use of the assets that are available is dangerous as the recent misadventures of the Aegis cruisers of the 7th Fleet or the loss of the Argentine submarine San Juan show all too clearly.11 Inadequate maintenance is a feature of many of the world’s small navies and clearly limits their strategic effectiveness, especially in Africa, in the performance, even of lower intensity taskings, such as maritime security operations.
Recognition of this leads many smaller navies, not least in Europe, to conclude that coming together with others in collective security organisations like NATO and the EU may be a way of compensating for such deficiencies, but this is much less of a realistic option elsewhere, in South America or Southeast Asia for example, although in cooperative responses to piracy in the Straits of Malacca or the Sulu Sea, and more generally in the slow development of a military dimension to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) we can possibly see glimmerings of this response.12
But, with togetherness necessarily comes constraint, because in order to survive, coalitions have to impose their own requirements, most obviously mutual trust, a willingness to allow others to perform tasks on your behalf, a readiness to perform tasks possibly more in the immediate interests of others than yourself and, finally, to lose in decisional sovereignty.
Now that the concept of security has widened to take in so much more than the military defence of territory and people, the contribution of the military line of development has to be woven into all the others, political, economic, social and legal, in a properly integrated and mutually supportive way. Hybrid challenges require hybrid solutions. This requires accommodating the aspirations, operating characteristics and procedures, bureaucratic needs, mentality and information-sharing attitudes of other government agencies and non-governmental organisations, very possibly of other countries. This is far from easy, but the physical capabilities and campaign planning experience of navies should be useful for multi-agency and perhaps multinational activities in addition to the basic provision of sufficient security in which other organisations can make their contributions. Indonesia is an example of a smaller navy seeking to develop just such an integrated approach in pursuit of President Widodo (Jocowi)’s aspirations to develop the country as a ‘maritime fulcrum’ but, in this, it is far from alone in having to deal with a host of bureaucratic and social difficulties that get in the way.13
Such expedients are unlikely to prevent smaller navies having to make choices, in setting their priorities, a problem especially acute when the gap between resources and commitments remains wide. The technologies and skill sets required of the varying missions outlined earlier can be very different and investment in one does not necessarily result in progress in another, indeed sometimes the opposite. The neglect of ASW and conventional amphibious capabilities among European navies during their involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is an obvious example of this.
Another of the basic issues confronting navies of whatever size is the issue of the balance to be struck between focusing on the immediate dangers of the here and now on the one hand and tomorrow’s problems on the other. The tyranny of the immediate commitment and the pressing needs of the present, if only because it is here and real, as opposed to some distant and possibly hypothetical future, can lead to fatal underinvestment in the technologies and tasks of that future. On the other hand, focusing on the future could well mean having to accept ‘capability holidays’ now, which others could exploit. Their narrower margins in fleet size means that smaller navies are probably more susceptible to such troubles than larger ones.
A particular example of this is the problem of preparing their people for a complex and unpredictable future. Everyone from Field Marshal von Moltke to Sir Michael Howard have made the point that, rather than try to train your people to get it right in the future, it is probably more important that they be able to adapt and respond efficiently when things go wrong. As Mike Tyson once graphically remarked, ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’14 Hence the need for serious investment in professional military education, something that is difficult for small navies to arrange cost-effectively because of the relatively small number of people involved when compared to the costs of setting up the necessary infrastructure. Even the Professional Military Education (PME) programmes of larger navies can suffer when budgetary times are hard, not least because, as just discussed, the needs of the immediate present can prevail against projects that only deliver their payoff in what seems a remote future.
The relative importance of the logistic tail in terms of the national defence industrial capacity to deliver the equipment they need to the military in a timely manner and for the military to be able to get it to where it is needed, especially in times of unexpected contingency or conflict, emerges in countless reviews of past and recent experience. Thus, James Holland attributes the defeat of the Wehrmacht partly to defective command, but mainly to lack of the strategic wherewithal in raw materials, industrial capacity, a tendency to over-engineer and a long failure in developing support infrastructure.15 Much the same has also been said about the Japanese in the Second World War. Navies have a role to play here, too, and not just in being a ‘smart customer,’ difficult though that is. The need independently to liaise with industry and to contribute to the formulation of the state’s policy towards the development of a sufficient industrial base is critically important. But this is especially difficult for smaller navies since they have fewer people and will usually start from further behind the standards of larger navies and have fewer opportunities for economies of scale. In the case of countries like Malaysia, the government’s desire to set up a sovereign defence industrial base can sometimes conflict with the navy’s desire to acquire the platforms it needs cheaply and quickly from established and experienced foreign suppliers. The experience of Canada, however, suggests that a conscious intent at the highest level to develop a national ship-building strategy does pay off in the long run.16
Finally, all navies have to try to ‘future-proof’ their fleets as far as they can. The long lead-times and operational lives of most naval platforms underline the need to tackle this problem. The level of this challenge will of course depend on the capacities of the putative adversary. If this is another smaller force, then the level of operational challenge would be the same as it would be for any other navy. It is more interesting though to consider the generic challenge faced by a small navy up against a larger one. On the face of it, smaller navies are at a disadvantage here as the larger ships characteristic of larger forces tend to have more built-in space for growth and larger navies have greater resources to devote to technological innovation.
However, for some small navies, technology when allied to commitment and an imaginative approach can come to the rescue. The fact that Russian Kalibr long-range land attack cruise missiles were fired into Syria by small Buyuan-M corvettes operating in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Caspian Sea shows that small warships these days can ‘pack a relatively greater punch’ than they used to.17 Norway’s Skjold Fast Attack Craft (FAC) and Sweden’s Visby corvettes are formidable craft in the unique topographical conditions for which they are designed and a tendency in the world’s smaller navies to invest in larger and more capable Offshore Patrol Vessels (OPV) suggests a tendency to adopt this kind of approach more widely.18 When this is added to the asymmetric tactics practised, for example, in the Sri Lankan Civil War or possibly by Ukraine,19 major strategic effect may be achieved even when the smaller forces are used in an offensive rather than defensive mode.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE) developed a very effective, agile maritime wing – the so-called Sea Tigers. Initially charged with bringing supplies and personnel over to the island from southern India, they rapidly developed into a force that was capable of directly contesting sea control with Sri Lankan Naval (SLN) forces that were trying to patrol local waters in order to interdict LTTE shipments. Far from trying to avoid Sri Lankan warships, these were naval guerrillas seeking them out in a bid to control the sea through a strategy of ambush. Profiting from the financial support of the Tamil diaspora, the Sea Tigers invested in the production of small FACs that were often better equipped than their SLN targets, technologically and conceptually.20 They disguised and hid their boats among the great fleets of fishing boats that frequented the Palk Strait and Gulf of Mannar. They sought to isolate and sink individual SLN FAC on patrol in swarming attacks, often including suicide boats that were designed to ram and sink. The Sea Tigers even attacked the SLN in their own harbours. Shocked by this and its losses in patrol craft and personnel, the SLN first fell back on defensive methods that left the seas open to the Sea Tigers to bring in further fighters and weapons shipments and to a deteriorating situation in the critical land war. While, by sheer determination and an ability to improvise and adapt to an unconventional enemy displaying very innovative and effective tactics and weaponry, the SLN was able eventually to recover the situation, by investing in asymmetric tactics themselves and beating the Sea Tigers at their own game, the difficulties in dealing with such hybrid adversaries were manifest.21
In consequence, wise naval planners must seriously consider the possibility that the gap between large and small navies has narrowed and that the latter represent a much greater threat to the former than they used to. This may well be further sustained by access to the improved technologies of sea denial, when the smaller force is principally preparing for defensive rather than offensive operations. Some would argue that recent developments, technical, political and legal, have made sea denial, or A2/AD as it is now often called, much more effective against the aspirations for sea control and forward deployment entertained by larger fleets than it was before. In the Gulf, for example, the Iranian Republican Guard Navy, with its ideas about ‘distributed lethality’ and proclivity for the use of massed swarms of little boats against a few much larger targets that look suspiciously like US carriers, represent a level of threat to much larger US or Western forces that has to be taken seriously.22 In such circumstances, the nimble if weaker side can sometimes secure significant coups de theatre as in the case of the apprehension of a boarding party from HMS Cornwall in 2007 or two US Navy patrol boats in 2016 and to exercise a general deterrent effect.23
For smaller navies, however, the acquisition of small diesel-powered coastal submarines is often said to be a particularly attractive way of reducing the operational gap they may have with stronger fleets.24 Such submarines are held to be effective force-multipliers, able to hold the apparently stronger surface forces of a putative adversary in check and this has resulted in a noticeable trend in their acquisition, particularly in the Indo-Pacific.25
This is not an easy option, however, for submarines are demanding vessels to operate and maintain, especially for navies that have not done so before; they require an expensive supporting infrastructure and can usually only be acquired in small numbers, which reduces their operational availability. Canadian experience with the Upholder/Victoria class shows that reviving a submarine capability is demanding even for established and sophisticated navies, and the problems are much worse for those developing the capability for the first time.26 But, if properly inducted, there seems little doubt that, operating in their own near waters, they will at least complicate the calculus of stronger forces. Moreover, if all these technological possibilities are linked to effective strategies and encompassed in the political, legal and psychological framework envisioned by the ‘three warfares’ thinkers discussed earlier, smaller navies, in the right general context, could aspire to significant strategic effect even when confronting apparently much greater navies.
1 Vice-Adm. Andrew L. Lewis, Commander 2nd Fleet cited in Susan McFarland ‘Navy relaunches Atlantic fleet to eye Russia’ UPI, 25 August 2018.
2 Troy Bouffard and Dr Andrea Charron, ‘A tale of Two Russias’ Vanguard 24, no. 4, August/September 2018.
3 Peter Pomersantsev, ‘How Putin is Reinventing Warfare’ Foreign Policy, 5 May 2014; Luke Harding, ‘The Skripal poisonings: the bungled assassination with the Kremlin’s fingerprints all over it’ Guardian, 26 December 2014.
4 Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (FBIS Translation (Beijing PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999).
5 Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth (London: William Collins, July 2018).
6 Pippa Crane et al., ‘Russia accused of cyber-attack on chemical weapons watchdog’ Guardian, 5 October 2018.
7 Jeremy Binnie, ‘Yemeni rebels claim to have hit naval ship’ Jane’s Defence Weekly, 15 June 2018 and ‘Saudi large crude tankers diverted away from Red Sea’ Jane’s Defence Weekly, August 2018.
8 See, for example, Dr Khamis bin Salim Al-Jabri, The Role of Sea Power in Oman’s Security and Economy (Cairo: Nabta Publishing, 2018) pp. 122–128, 132.
9 For this see: Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 2002).
10 Jeremy Stöhs, The Decline of European Naval Forces: Challenges to Sea Power in an Age of Fiscal Austerity and Political Uncertainty (Annapolis MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018).
11 Steve Grant and Charles Strathdee, ‘We are a Navy that Learns From Our Mistakes’ Warships, December 2017; Jose Higuera, ‘Constrained Capability’ Jane’s Defence Weekly, 20 June 2018.
12 About ADMM+: see https://admm.asean.org/.index.php/about.admm/about.admm_plus.html.
13 I.G.B. Dharma Agastai, ‘3 Years later, Where is Indonesia’s “Global Maritime Fulcrum”?’ The Diplomat, 22 November 2017.
14 Quoted in Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), ix.
15 James Holland, The War in the West: the Allies Fight Back 1941–3. (London: Bantam Press, 2017); see also Max Hastings, All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939–45 (London: HarperPress, 2011) pp. 40–1, 99.
16 ‘NSS continues to revitalize B.C.’s shipbuilding industry’ and ‘Insights from Victoria Shipyards’ BS Shipping News, November 2018.
17 Eugene Gerden, ‘Corvettes & Frigates to form major strike force’ Warships, May 2018; Dr Lee Willett, ‘Punching up: Russia’s smaller surface fleet delivers a bigger impact’ Jane’s International Defence Review, January 2018.
18 Guy Torremans, ‘Mexico Pulls Many missions from a small package’ Warships, July 2017.
19 Guy Torremans, ‘Ukraine naval Boss Calls for “mosquito fleet” to counter Russia’ Warships, December 2017.
20 LTTE fast and light attack craft were armed with 12.7 mm machine guns and rocket launchers with reduced radar cross sections.
21 For this see: Jayanath Colombage, Asymmetric Warfare at Sea: The Case of Sri Lanka (Saarbrucken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2015). Also, Molly Dunigan et al., Maritime Irregular Warfare (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2012).
22 Dave Majumdar, ‘Navy Nightmare: Could Iran Sink a US Aircraft Carrier?’ The National Interest, 26 December 2018.
23 ‘The errors that let Iran seize 15 crew members’ Guardian, 20 June 2007; ‘Iran holds two US Navy boats’ Telegraph, 12 January 2016.
24 Kate Tringham and Richard Scott, ‘Underwater aspirations’ Jane’s Defence Weekly, 22 October 2018.
25 Geoffrey Till and Collin Koh Swee Lean, Naval Modernisation in Southeast Asia, Pt 2 Submarine Issues for Small and Medium Navies (London: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2018).
26 John Grevatt, ‘Manila considers Russian loan to support submarine buy’ Jane’s Defence Weekly, 22 August 2018.