The Navy and Marine Corps are preparing to conduct a second globe-spanning exercise to simulate conflict with a near-peer adversary, running from actions at the unit level up to high level strategic decisions.
This effort, called Large Scale Exercise (LSE) 2023, will cover 22 time zones, six combatant command areas of responsibility, seven fleets, over 25,000 sailors and Marines, and a combination of both live and virtual training. The event will run Aug. 9 – 18.
This includes exercises in Indo-Pacific Command, NORTHCOM, SOUTHCOM, EUCOM, AFRICOM and CENTCOM along with nine Maritime Operations Centers (MOC)s, which will act as nerve centers to route fleet maneuvers.
The effort will specifically include six carrier strike groups, two live and four virtual; three Amphibious Readiness Groups (ARG), one live and two virtual; 25 ships and submarines; and another 50 virtual ships.
Adm. Daryl Caudle, commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, argued this is part of an effort to continue strategic learning that has been going on for over five years. That training has been “trying to work on demonstrations and exercises at the local and tactical level, think Type Commanders, numbered fleet exercises where we demo new capabilities, learn from that, test out new concepts,” he told reporters on July 24.
He said the Navy continues to package that testing and demonstrating together into the Fleet Battle Problem exercises at Pacific Fleet and U.S. Fleet Forces.
“Now we’re kind of bundling that up to what we call the globally-enabled large scale exercise,” Caudle said.
He argued the Navy thinks this is important “because…the amount of military capacity and capability is going to be strained in any conflict with a near-peer competitor. The ability to synchronize those operations is extremely important. There is an old boxing analogy that goes precision beats power and timing beats speed every time. And so to conduct high-end modern warfare in the Distributed Maritime Operational [DMO] construct, you have to work on precision and timing.”
Caudle said to do that they have to link together the MOCs so the leaders have the same operational picture, which will make the event relatively accurate to the pressures of such a scenario.
“So we want to know what’s out there, red and blue forces, we want to build to devolve to another operational center if one would be taken out. So that is a kind of operational aspect of this as well. And we want to be able to command and control this across those 22 time zones, because that’s how you fight in a global environment against competitors.”
This exercise will rely, in part, on the Live Virtual Constructive (LVC) training environment to connect the personnel and platforms around the world with computer-generated entities, both the virtual U.S. forces and all enemy forces.
Capt. Chris Narducci, the lead planner for LSE 2023, said LSE 2023 aims to integrate the DMO, Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment (LOCE) and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) concepts together to demonstrate a synchronized worldwide naval force.
“We want to be able to demonstrate that we can globally synchronize this exercise. And then finally, we want to be able to show that we can fight and win against our adversaries using the live virtual constructive training environment.”
The previous LSE 2021 first linked the DMO, LOCE and EABO concepts together in a unified global event.
Naval Warfare Development Center at Naval Station Norfolk will be the hub of LSE 2023, supported by six control nodes around the world. The exercise will be managed by 1,080 personnel at those facilities in addition to the thousands of sailor and Marine participants.
The controllers will run the scenarios, simulate adversaries, run modeling and simulation and replicate higher headquarter and combatant commands.
Narducci said this exercise will not involve joint combatant command staffs, but the controller staff will include 13 supporting retired generals and admirals from the Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force.
This includes Adm, James Foggo (Ret.), former commander of Naval Forces Europe and Africa, who will serve as the senior higher headquarters role player, and Adm. (Ret.) Scott Swift, former Pacific Fleet head, who will be the exercise steering group lead.
Caudle explained the last LSE in 2021 taught him they need to better represent higher level leadership pressures on operations, thus the inclusion of what he called the graybeards, or retired officials.
“We needed better representation of our leadership at the combatant command, Secretary of Defense, Chairman level, to put pressure on the Navy component commanders who are going to be trying to service their combatant commanders, with very low density, high demand resources, and make decisions in what we think would be the real way that’s going to be done in a high end conflict. So that’s why we spent so much time bringing in these 13 experts to go play all those. So that was a big part of this,” he said.
Caudle added that at the operational level the MOCs will help inform the commanders’ decision cycle and how they ask to move or keep forces in place.
He said without all these objective tensions it is like the Navy phrase of a “self-licking ice cream cone.”
“And so then we tend to not have a good representation of how our senior leadership will want to take risks in various areas of operations, and thinking of the geopolitical element is occurring. And so I’m going to have a very focused view, but we want that geopolitical view put down on us so that this is as realistic as possible.”
While Navy and Marine Corps officials would not reveal many details about the scenario, Caudle said, “what we’re trying to do is have an area of responsibility that has a very aggressive percolating event that will eventually turn into kinetic warfare. Simultaneously with that area of responsibility, where that event is happening, there will be opportunistic, second, and third parties that are taking advantage of that, with the hope that the United States has got its eye off the ball a bit, and doesn’t have the capacity to deter those other opportunistic events going on.”
Those opportunistic events aim to stress resource allocation in a realistic manner and “fairly challenge” the commands to get the right allocation of resources for the overall scenario.
Caudle also disclosed the event has a sort of “road to war, where we’re getting intelligence injected into the scenario.”
Earlier stages of LSE 2023 started with the base plans commanders conduct operations from, then the event planners use real world intelligence to do “branch and sequel planning” and then riff off that for the overall scenario context.
Earlier in the spring, the Navy and Marine Corps had a senior leader seminar as the first event with a similar event and more recently they conducted crisis action planning leading up to the actual event next month.
Caudle said the exercise will involve kinetic activity, with “plenty of opportunity to deter aggression in other areas of responsibility. And there can be things that we do that are flexible response options, and flexible deterrence options and dynamic employment of our forces to try to actually dissuade opportunistic adversaries from taking advantage of the thing that’s going on in another part of the world.”
However, Narducci confirmed there will be no large live fire events.