Remember Millennium Challenge? That war game back in 2002 in which an entire US Navy fleet was sunk by missiles and kamikaze runs from a “swarm” of fast boats and small planes? Most war games fade into memory, going largely unnoticed outside of the realm of defense analysts and military historians. Millennium Challenge, however, ended up with acquiring a certain degree of notoriety amongst a larger section of the general public. For critics of the US military – especially those inspired by the “reformer” camp – Millennium Challenge was an ideal illustration of everything wrong with the Pentagon. A large, clumsy, high-tech conventional force was demolished by a flexible enemy led by a gutsy Marine Corps general using clever tactics, cheap assets, and “old fashioned” technology (such as messenger bikes, quite famously), and the top brass responded not by learning their lessons but by comically “refloating” their fleet for a staged redo. It’s almost the perfect narrative.
This is the narrative that entered the public conscious, in large part thanks to interviews with the aforementioned commander of the Redfor (enemy) forces during the war game it self, Marine General Paul Van Riper. Even my high school military history teacher mentioned Millennium Challenge in class, strangely claiming that Redfor was modeled after the Israeli military (it wasn’t). As Millennium Challenge’s publicity coincided with the rise of blogging and social media in the 2000s, all sorts of amateur defense analysts (that is to say, random people posting their opinions online, much like myself) feasted on Riper’s story of Navy admirals failing to adapt to a clever, low-tech enemy and complaining about how the fight wasn’t being fought according to the “rules.” This all reminds me of nothing so much as how many Americans (incorrectly) think about the Revolutionary War – the idea of brave American riflemen hiding in the woods and picking off the stuffy British Redcoats who insisted on fighting in blocks due to their aristocratic honor. According to Riper’s fans, the big carriers and destroyers of the US Navy are the 21st century Redcoats, with honor substituted out for technology.
Of course, those who have bothered to dig further into what actually happened during Millennium Challenge have found Riper’s story leaves out a lot of important details. You know, like how the Blufor fleet essentially just teleported right into hostile territory without prior warning, or how a flaw in the simulation prevented them from using most of their defensive weapons, or how the Redfor forces had access to physics-defying equipment like Cessnas carrying Termit missiles. If Millennium Challenge is viewed as an embarrassment for the US Navy, the bulk of that embarrassment should come from the actual design of the wargame itself, not its outcome. Of course, this isn’t as catchy of a story as “dumb admirals pout after their big ships get sunk by guerrilla speedboats,” so the more fantastical story remained the dominant one in popular discourse.
One of the things to spin off from the publicity garnered by Millennium Challenge was a fascination with – and fear of – fast attack craft. “Fast attack craft” is a bit of a vague term, but it essentially refers to small surface vessels – anything smaller than what is generally considered a “ship” instead of a boat – armed with heavy anti-ship weapons, typically missiles. Many fast attack craft are commonly also referred to as “missile boats” as a result. If carriers and destroyers were the Redcoats of the sea, these fast attack craft would be the crafty riflemen. The idea was that small, fast vessels would be able to “swarm” a larger fleet and defeat it with their missiles or even kamikaze attacks. Many in particular looked to the naval forces of Iran, particularly those of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard’s Navy, as an example of a Millennium Challenge Redfor-type force that could seriously threaten a US fleet. This fear was not totally without reason, as the enemy in Millennium Challenge was based in part on Iran. It’s not a totally new idea either – its intellectual origins can be traced all the way back to the Jeune École concept of the late 19th century.
While it seems downright quaint to think about in an era in which individual Chinese dockyards are pumping out warships at a prodigious rate, there once was a time when a few dozen Iranian fast attack craft were perceived by many as perhaps the most serious threat faced by the United States Navy. This thought process was, of course, a product of its time, a bygone era when the Middle East dominated discussions of national security and “great power competition” was yet to become a buzz-phrase. Many even advocated downsizing the top end of the Navy’s forces and instead embracing smaller vessels. After all, if you can’t beat them, join them.
As much of my upbringing in the world of online military nerds took place in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the Millennium Challenge story and the naval reform advocates that it spawned are very familiar to me. I can recall browsing several blogs and forums full of people talking about swarms of small attack boats. I even once leaned more towards their line of thought, before coming to my own, generally differing conclusions.
Nowadays the legacy of Millennium Challenge has begun to fade, probably thanks to the shift in focus away from the Middle East and towards China. So why talk about this now? My reason is that two recent stories brought back all those memories of old debates. The first being the destruction of multiple Russian Raptor-class patrol boats getting nailed by Ukrainian TB2 drones, and the second being General Atomics’ unveiling of a STOL package for their MQ-9B SkyGuardian and SeaGuardian UAVs.
Those of you who are following the conflict in Ukraine probably seen this footage of Russian Raptor-class patrol boats being targeted and destroyed by TB2 drones. These boats have been carrying in supplies and equipment in an attempt to increase Russian air defenses on Snake Island, possibly in an attempt to compensate for the loss of the cruiser Moskva. In doing so, they were exposed to attack from the air.
These videos reminded me of the Millennium Challenge debate as they illustrate a key weakness of fast attack craft and other small surface vessels: namely, their typical inability to deal with aerial threats. While the Raptors are patrol boats, not fast attack craft per se (they lack significant anti-ship weaponry), most purpose-built fast attack craft don’t have much more in the way of anti-aircraft weaponry than these Russian boats – the reason being that the kinds of weapons and sensors needed to effectively deal with aircraft and missiles tends to be actually quite bulky and expensive. Iran’s fast attack craft, such as the Peykaap II-class pictured previously, lack any sort of anti-aircraft weapons. Even the vastly more sophisticated Chinese Type-022 and Taiwanese Kuang Hua VI-class missile boats lack credible means of reliably dealing with something like a TB2.
A TB2, for those unaware, is a Turkish-made UAV (or drone) that has made a name for itself in the skies over Syria, Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh, and now Ukraine. The TB2 flies at about 120 knots – about the same speed as the Fairey Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers used to hunt down down Bismarck – and is unlikely to be particularly stealthy due to being driven by a propeller. Any “stealth” that it has is mostly a side effect of its relatively small size. In other words, we’re not talking about the pinnacle of aviation here. It is, however, capable of carrying carry a small payload of guided munitions and flying high enough to put it out of the range of light anti-aircraft weaponry such as MANPADS. UAVs such as the TB2 are only becoming more common around the world, and few fast attack craft are capable of dealing with them. The most one could realistically hope to do is put a CIWS on one and hope to shoot destroy the incoming munitions, but even that would be too big and expensive for the smaller attack boats. Once you start adding credible ways of defending against aerial threats – air search radar and air-defense missiles – and you start leaving the realm of cheap, small boats.
The second story, as mentioned, was General Atomics’ unveiling of the MQ-9B STOL package, which gives their MQ-9B UAV the ability to operate off of small aircraft carriers and flat-deck helicopter carriers/amphibious assault ships. The MQ-9B SkyGuardian and SeaGuardian drones are a part of the famous Predator/Reaper series of UAVs, and are larger, more expensive, and more advanced than the TB2. The STOL MQ-9Bs offer navies a weapons platform that can operate off of smaller carriers than most fixed-wing aircraft and loiter above a combat zone longer than helicopters. In other words, they are ideal for defending fleets against small vessels such as fast attack craft. It’s not hard to imagine a relatively small flat-top ship – something along the lines of the Japanese Hyūga-class – operating these kinds of drones in support of a larger formation.
That small ships are vulnerable to airpower is nothing new, of course. Much of the Iraqi Navy was destroyed during the Gulf War by British and American helicopters. Yet advocates of naval doctrine based around small, cheap fast attract craft and critics of large, conventional naval forces have long overlooked the vulnerability of these small ships to airpower. The proliferation of UAVs and guided munitions makes fast attack craft ever more vulnerable. As the TB2 footage shows, no boat is fast or agile enough to dodge a guided missile. World of Warships torpedo drifting, this is not. You need larger ships to provide effective air defense.
This is not to say that fast attack craft are not a threat to larger ships, or that they are pointless. The sinking of Moskva shows the power of anti-ship missiles, missiles similar to those equipped by many missile boats around the world (though one should be wary of drawing too many conclusions from that incident, given that it seems likely that Moskva‘s radars were either not working or not even turned on). They are a threat, but one that has counters. Western Navies have long recognized the danger posed by small vessels, and various system have been designed to deal with swarming threats. Fast attack craft still have a role in various navies, especially ones that simply can’t afford many larger vessels. China, a country that can afford large surface vessels, still keeps around a large force of missile boats. While this could be seen as a relic of a time when the PLAN was a much smaller, defensive force, China may also hope that the mere presence of these boats would be enough to tie down a not insignificant portion of American aviation in a potential armed conflict.
If there is a future for the “swarm” of small vessels, it may come in the form of unmanned surface vessels, essentially the naval equivalent of drones. One can perhaps imagine naval warfare in the future morphing into some sort of attritional exchange between unmanned systems in the air, on the surface, and below the waves. The US Navy has spent a good amount of money on the development of USVs, some of which are now being given to Ukraine. However, this is a far cry from the missile boat swarms imagined by Millennium Challenge fans. As it turns out, the idea of swarms of low-tech fast attack craft overwhelming large fleets was questionable in 2002, and likely even more questionable today.
Jaesthetics 