Beadwindow, for some time, has preferred to define the littoral as a place with ‘dirty spectrum’, ‘dirty water’ and high probability or incidence of encountering ‘white’ shipping and aircraft.
Weapon ranges become irrelevant due to the challenges of traffic, topography, acoustic and electronic propagation. A warship needs to ‘fight for the tactical picture’ to simply observe its surroundings.
The first stage of Boyd’s OODA Loop model of decision making is Observe. The nature of littoral warfare demands a ‘defensive-first’ posture where Orienting oneself within the scene is king. It often rubs against the doctrine of a ‘good defence is a good offence’, where decisive action is king.
Situational awareness is incomplete if the algorithm-driven tactical picture is relied upon solely – in such instances, you remain dangerously unbalanced in your preparations to create and decide courses of action. Much like navigating using radar, GPS and ECDIS, you won’t encounter trouble on the screen; you need to look out the window and actually avoid the rocks.
In the littoral, it’s not just rocks giving you trouble, it’s the adversarial humans deployed or living in the area of operations. Longitudinal intelligence can greatly assist reducing the human threat; it’s very ‘Marko Ramius from Red October’. Maybe not as theatrical, but certainly as vital. You need to put yourself in their shoes to hope to orient properly.
It may come across as trite to many of our community, but we completely agree with James Holmes (author of the article below). You can’t ignore the human element, even when the situation appears benign: such as when two fishing vessels travelling as a pair, held visually and on radar, suddenly split to take offensive positions at the entrance to a crowded, constrained African harbour.
But, that’s another story.
For more click here – http://nationalinterest.org/feature/dont-remove-the-human-element-coastal-combat-16549
