Defense Primer: Navy Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) Concept

Introduction

Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) is the operating concept of the Department of the Navy (or DON, which includes the Navy and Marine Corps) for using U.S. naval (i.e., Navy and Marine Corps) forces in combat operations against an adversary, particularly China, that has substantial capabilities for detecting and attacking U.S. Navy surface ships with anti-ship missiles and other weapons. An issue for Congress is whether Congress has sufficient information about DMO to assess its merits, and whether DON has adequately aligned its programs and budget with DMO.

Terminology: Operating Concept

An operating concept is a general idea for how to use certain military forces (in this case, U.S. naval forces) to conduct operations, particularly in combat situations. An operating concept can support the implementation of a strategy or war plan for fighting a specific conflict, and the tactics used by individual military units (such as Navy ships and aircraft) can reflect an operating concept.

DMO: A Brief Description

A 2022 Navy document refers to DMO as "the Navy's foundational operating concept" (Chief of Naval Operations, Navigation Plan 2022, p. 8). A 2024 Navy document states that DMO

describes the fleet tactics that capitalize on the diverse capabilities provided by the Navy and our unique partnership with the Marine Corps. As the reach of missiles gets longer, and lower-cost robotic systems make ship defense costlier, we must put more munitions on more platforms in more places to prevail on a globalized battlefield. [DMO] animates our ecosystem, enabling the levels of distributed warfare and mission command that we need to gain and exploit sea control. As the Navy Warfighting Concept describes Navy operational integration up and out (with the Joint Force, Allies, and partners), [DMO] describes the Navy's fleet tactics down and in.

[DMO] means dispersing the fleet while concentrating effects. The approach demands distributing, integrating, and maneuvering people, platforms, munitions, and data across time, spectrum, and space. Supporting that fight requires new ways of operating, from sustaining the fleet in contested environments, to an understanding that our installations and Maritime Operations Centers are themselves warfighting platforms. Information dominance is the key enabler in this new form of maneuver warfare, by which we confound the adversary's ability to find, fix, and attack our forces. In other words, [DMO] is complex, fleet-level warfare on a scale we have not executed in nearly a century, blending decentralization and unity of effort in a way that places intense new demands on fleet commanders.

In response to our five-year campaign of learning, we will refine [DMO] and its implications for fleet tactics.

(Chief of Naval Operations, Navigation Plan 2024, pp. 14-15. Emphasis as in original.)

Key features of DMO appear to include the following:

• Dispersing Navy units over a larger area within the theater of operations, so as to make it harder for an adversary to detect and target Navy units, while still permitting Navy units to support one another and concentrate their fires on adversary targets.
• Spreading the Navy's sensors and weapons across a wider array of ships and aircraft, so as to reduce the fraction of the Navy's sensors and weapons that would be lost due to the destruction of any one Navy ship or aircraft (i.e., avoid "putting too many eggs into one basket").
• Making greater use of longer-ranged weapons, unmanned vessels, and unmanned aircraft in support of the previous two points.
• Using resilient communication links and networking technologies to knit the resulting widely dispersed force of manned and unmanned ships and aircraft into a coordinated battle force that can withstand and adapt to enemy attacks on Navy communications and networks.

One observer writing about DMO (see the first Filipoff citation in the Other Resources box below) states that "the concept suffers from a wide variety of interpretations across the service and needs more specificity regarding what warfighting approaches it is concentrating on. While the concept describes mass fires and decision advantage as core themes, DMO lacks sufficient coherence and concrete focus to effectively guide the Navy's development."

Other Service Operating Concepts

Other U.S. military services have their own operating concepts for conducting their own operations in potential future conflicts. For more on these concepts, see the CRS Products box below.

Some Navy Acquisition Programs Associated with DMO

Examples of Navy acquisition programs that appear associated with DMO include programs for acquiring longer-ranged weapons such as the Maritime Strike Tomahawk and the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM); the Large Unmanned Surface Vessel (LUSV) and Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel (MUSV); the light replenishment oiler (TAOL) shipbuilding program for building a new class of smaller oilers; and the Medium Landing Ship (LSM) program for building a class of smaller amphibious ships. For more on some of these programs, see the CRS Products box below.

Potential Issues for Congress

Potential oversight issues for Congress regarding DMO include but are not necessarily limited to the following:

• Does Congress have adequate information from the Navy about DMO to assess its merits? Has the Navy provided Congress a classified report describing DMO in detail? Should the Navy release a more extensive unclassified description of DMO?
• What analyses did the Navy conduct to assess whether to adopt DMO as the Navy's foundational operating concept? To what degree have these analyses been confirmed by Navy exercises?
• Is DMO adequately coordinated with other U.S. military service operating concepts? What steps are the services taking to coordinate their operating concepts?
• Are DON budgets and programs adequately aligned with DMO? Does Congress have sufficient information about DMO to assess this question? What implications might DMO have for Navy shipbuilding and weapon acquisition programs and associated industrial bases?
• To what degree might the Navy's ability to implement DMO be constrained over the next 5 to 10 years by limits on the number of long-range weapons in the Navy's inventory? Under current Navy plans for procuring new weapons, how quickly would any such constraints be eased?
• What are the technical challenges and risks of the communications and networking technology needed for DMO? Does DMO adequately account for the possibility of wartime degradation in the network due to enemy attacks?
• One observer writing about DMO (see the second Filipoff citation in the Other Resources box below) states: "Warfighting concepts can be abused, acting as little more than bumper stickers attached to initiatives in service of preconceived interests." How much risk is there of this occurring with DMO?
• To help implement DMO, some observers have suggested adding missile batteries to Navy ships that currently do not have them. What are the relative merits of these proposals?