Distributed Maritime Operations: How the U.S. Navy Plans to Fight and Win in the Pacific
The U.S. Navy faces its most serious strategic challenge in decades. China’s military has spent 30 years building a dense web of missiles, sensors, and warships specifically designed to keep American carrier strike groups far from the Western Pacific — and that investment is paying off. The era when the Navy could sail a few massive, centralized task forces into harm’s way and dominate through sheer firepower is over. Enter Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO): the Navy’s answer to this new reality, and arguably the most significant shift in American naval warfare doctrine since the Cold War.
At its core, DMO is about flipping the script. Instead of concentrating power in a few high-value targets that China’s DF-21D “carrier killer” missiles can hold at risk, the Navy plans to spread its combat power across dozens — potentially hundreds — of platforms operating across enormous swaths of ocean. Think less “armada” and more “swarm.” But DMO is far more than just scattering ships across the Pacific. It’s a sophisticated concept that integrates survivability, lethality, information warfare, joint force coordination, and logistical innovation into a coherent warfighting approach designed to win against a peer competitor.
This is the story of how Distributed Maritime Operations actually works — not just the theory, but the operational mechanics, the technological enablers, the genuine challenges, and what “winning” actually looks like when this concept succeeds.
What Is Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO)?
The Congressional Research Service defines DMO as the Navy’s overarching operational concept for achieving sea control and sea denial against advanced adversaries. But that clinical definition understates how revolutionary the underlying logic really is.
Core Principles: Distribution, Integration, and Deception
DMO rests on three interlocking pillars that work together to create a fundamentally different kind of naval threat.
Distribution means spreading combat power across many platforms and geographic areas rather than concentrating it. When your forces are dispersed, the adversary faces an impossible targeting problem: they must find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess not one carrier strike group but dozens of smaller, mobile units — all capable of delivering lethal fires.
Integration means those dispersed units don’t fight alone. They share intelligence, coordinate fires, and act as a networked whole. A destroyer 400 miles from a submarine and a Marine Corps missile battery on a Pacific island all contribute to the same kill chain. The fires are distributed; the effect is massed.
Deception is the underappreciated third leg. As the Atlantic Council’s 2024 report on DMO emphasizes, distribution and deception are natural partners. Unmanned systems, decoys, and electronic warfare signatures can overwhelm an adversary’s sensors, making it nearly impossible to distinguish real threats from false ones. The adversary doesn’t just face more targets — they face a targeting puzzle they cannot reliably solve.
The Strategic Imperative: Countering China’s A2/AD Threat
The primary driver of DMO is China’s Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) strategy in the Western Pacific. Over three decades, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has built overlapping layers of sensors, anti-ship missiles, submarines, and air defense systems that can threaten U.S. naval forces across enormous distances.
The geography is brutal. Taiwan sits roughly 6,000 miles from Hawaii. A carrier strike group operating within range of Taiwan would be well inside the reach of China’s DF-21D and DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missiles, land-based air assets, and submarine forces. Traditional concentrated naval power becomes a liability when the adversary has specifically engineered their force to destroy it.
DMO acknowledges this reality and responds by denying China the concentrated targets their A2/AD system was built to destroy.
Evolution of Naval Warfare: From Centralized to Distributed
To appreciate how significant DMO is, it helps to understand what it replaced. For most of the post-World War II era, the carrier strike group was the fundamental organizing unit of American naval power. Carriers provided air superiority, strike capability, and command authority. Everything orbited around them.
The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) era represented an earlier attempt to diversify platforms, but it was incomplete — a procurement decision more than a doctrinal revolution. DMO represents something deeper: a fundamental rethinking of how naval power should be organized, commanded, and projected when the adversary can reach out and threaten your most valuable assets at ranges previously unimaginable.
The “How”: Operationalizing DMO in the Pacific
Understanding DMO in the abstract is one thing. Understanding how it actually works in practice — how ships, aircraft, submarines, Marines, and unmanned systems would actually operate in a contested Western Pacific environment — is where the concept becomes genuinely illuminating.
Enhancing Survivability Through Distribution
Imagine China’s sensor network as a targeting system that needs to solve a math problem. When U.S. forces concentrate in a carrier strike group, that problem is manageable: find the carrier, fix its location, and engage with appropriate weapons. DMO makes the math exponentially harder.
Instead of one carrier strike group in a defined operating area, picture 15 surface action groups, each comprising one or two surface combatants, spread across hundreds of thousands of square miles. Add submarines operating independently across multiple patrol areas. Add Marine Corps forces on dispersed island positions across the First and Second Island Chains. Each unit constantly moves, reduces its electromagnetic signature, and provides only a fraction of the overall combat power.
To kill the same amount of combat capability, China would need to successfully engage all 15 surface groups — requiring 15 separate targeting solutions, 15 successful salvos, and the consumption of enormous quantities of expensive missiles. The mathematics of attrition start working in America’s favor.
Reducing electronic emissions — known as EMCON (Emissions Control) — is central to survivability. Units that aren’t broadcasting their position are dramatically harder to find. This creates a direct tension with the command and control requirements of a networked force, a challenge we’ll address shortly.
Increasing Lethality with Massed Fires
Distribution creates survivability. Integration creates lethality. These aren’t in conflict — they’re designed to coexist.
The operational vision works like this: dispersed units each carry long-range precision weapons. When a target presents itself — say, a Chinese surface action group — multiple distributed units coordinate to launch near-simultaneous salvos from different bearings. The adversary’s defensive systems face incoming missiles from multiple directions, dramatically reducing the effectiveness of their point defense systems and electronic countermeasures.
The weapons enabling this vision are increasingly mature. The Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) can be launched from surface ships, submarines, and aircraft, providing standoff capability that keeps launch platforms outside many threat envelopes. The Naval Strike Missile (NSM) provides a shorter-range but highly capable option for surface combatants. Both can be cued by targeting data from platforms nowhere near the launch ship — enabling exactly the kind of distributed-but-integrated fires DMO requires.
The Marine Corps’ contribution here is critical and often underestimated. The Marine Littoral Regiment (MLR), specifically designed to support DMO through Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO), can position ground-based anti-ship missile systems on Pacific islands. A Marine battery launching NSMs from a defended island position, coordinating with a submarine-launched LRASM and an F-35 strike package, creates a multi-domain kill chain that no single defensive system can reliably defeat.
Achieving Decision Advantage: Information Warfare and Deception
DMO’s third competitive dimension operates in the information environment. “Decision advantage” — out-thinking and out-maneuvering the adversary — requires superior situational awareness combined with the ability to deny that same awareness to China.
The deception component works by flooding PLA sensors with contacts. A handful of unmanned surface vessels (USVs) broadcasting radar signatures consistent with surface combatants forces China’s targeting system to process dozens of potential threats, consuming sensor time, analytical bandwidth, and — if they engage — expensive missiles against decoys. This is information warfare as force multiplier.
On the intelligence side, distributed forces can exploit their geographic spread for persistent, wide-area surveillance. A submarine monitoring one approach, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) covering another, and a P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft building the tactical picture from a third angle collectively create a sensor network far more comprehensive than any single platform could achieve.
Advanced networking ties these sensors together. When a P-8 detects a Chinese submarine, that contact data flows through resilient communications networks to every relevant platform in the operating area — cueing a submarine to intercept, alerting surface ships to change course, and updating the tactical picture for the theater commander. The speed of this information flow, compared to an adversary’s ability to process and respond, creates the decision advantage DMO seeks.
The Role of Unmanned Systems
Unmanned systems aren’t just a supporting element of DMO — they’re potentially the concept’s most transformative enabler, and the Navy’s investment in them reflects that understanding.
UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) like the MQ-4C Triton provide persistent maritime domain awareness across enormous areas. The Triton can maintain station for 24 hours or more, covering ocean areas that would exhaust human crews. In DMO’s context, this persistent ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) capability is essential for finding adversary forces across the vast Pacific while keeping manned aircraft further from threat envelopes.
USVs (Unmanned Surface Vessels) like the Medium Unmanned Surface Vehicle (MUSV) and Large Unmanned Surface Vehicle (LUSV) serve multiple roles simultaneously. They extend the sensor network, provide decoy signatures, can carry payload modules for strike or electronic warfare missions, and — critically — they are expendable in ways that $2 billion destroyers are not. Sending unmanned vessels into the most contested areas while keeping manned platforms at standoff distances is a risk calculus that DMO actively encourages.
UUVs (Unmanned Undersea Vehicles) represent perhaps the most sensitive capability. Operating in the acoustic environment that submarines have traditionally dominated, UUVs can conduct persistent undersea surveillance, mine-laying or mine countermeasures, and communications relay functions without risking human crews in the most dangerous operating environments.
The integration challenge — getting these platforms to communicate, coordinate, and share data reliably — remains an active area of development, but the operational logic is sound and the technology is advancing rapidly.
Adaptive Command and Control (C2)
The C2 challenge is where many analysts believe DMO faces its most serious test. Traditional naval C2 relies on robust communications networks connecting ships to shore-based commanders and each other. In a contested environment, China’s cyber capabilities, electronic warfare systems, and anti-satellite weapons could degrade or deny those networks.
The Navy’s response involves several overlapping solutions:
Mission command principles — a concept borrowed from land warfare — push decision authority down to the platform level. A destroyer’s commanding officer who loses communications with fleet headquarters shouldn’t be paralyzed; they should have clear enough commander’s intent to act independently, then re-synchronize when communications are restored. This requires intensive training and doctrinal change, not just technology.
Expeditionary and afloat Maritime Operations Centers (MOCs) distribute the command function itself. Rather than all command authority residing ashore in fixed, potentially targetable facilities, forward-deployed command elements afloat or on defended islands maintain theater awareness and can assume command functions if primary nodes are struck or disrupted.
Platform-level C2 capabilities matter too. The Navy’s E-2D Advanced Hawkeye carrier-based early warning aircraft, F-35s with their advanced sensor fusion and data sharing capabilities, and P-8 Poseidons are all capable of serving as distributed command nodes, integrating fires and coordinating engagements even when traditional command networks are stressed.
JADC2 (Joint All-Domain Command and Control) — the Department of Defense’s overarching framework for connecting sensors and shooters across all services and domains — is the technological backbone DMO ultimately needs. When fully realized, JADC2 would allow a Marine on a Pacific island to cue a Navy submarine using Army satellite communications, all flowing through an AI-assisted picture that any authorized commander can access. The concept is sound; the implementation remains a work in progress.
Critical Challenges and Solutions for DMO
Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that DMO faces genuine, serious challenges. The gap between the concept’s ambitious logic and operational reality is real, and some critics argue it’s larger than the Navy publicly acknowledges.
The Logistics and Sustainment Dilemma
The Pacific Ocean is simply enormous. From Hawaii to Taiwan is roughly 6,000 miles. From Guam to the South China Sea is still over 1,500 miles. Keeping distributed forces fueled, armed, and supplied across these distances — particularly when China’s missiles can reach most fixed logistics nodes — is arguably the hardest problem DMO presents.
Military Strategy Magazine has pointed out a fundamental tension: the same distribution that makes DMO forces survivable also makes them logistically difficult to sustain. A supply ship that knows where the fleet is concentrated can deliver efficiently. A supply ship trying to find and service a dozen dispersed units, each maintaining emissions control, faces a much harder problem.
The Marine Corps’ EABO concept provides one answer. Expeditionary Advanced Bases — defended positions on Pacific islands that can store fuel, ammunition, and supplies — act as forward logistics nodes that don’t require the sustainment network to reach all the way back to Guam or Hawaii for every resupply cycle. The V-22 Osprey’s tiltrotor capability, able to operate from both ships and short airstrips, is specifically valuable for this role.
Autonomous logistics vehicles — unmanned cargo submarines, autonomous surface resupply ships — represent a future capability that could dramatically ease the sustainment burden while keeping human logistics crews out of contested areas. Development is ongoing, but the timeline to operational capability remains uncertain.
The industrial base question is equally serious. DMO requires a larger number of platforms than the current fleet structure provides, and American shipbuilding capacity has atrophied significantly over the past three decades. Building the distributed fleet DMO envisions — more surface combatants, more submarines, more unmanned systems — requires sustained industrial investment that goes beyond any single defense budget cycle.
Maintaining C2 in a Contested Environment
Beyond the tactical-level C2 solutions described earlier, the systemic challenge is that China has invested heavily in the capability to disrupt American communications. Electronic warfare, cyber attacks, and anti-satellite weapons (China has demonstrated direct-ascent ASAT capability) could degrade the networked connectivity that DMO requires.
Resilient, redundant communications — including low-probability-of-intercept waveforms, undersea fiber-optic communications to forward bases, and satellite constellations that distribute connectivity across many nodes rather than relying on a few vulnerable satellites — are all part of the solution architecture. The Navy is also exploring mesh networking approaches where ships relay communications for each other, so the loss of any single relay doesn’t break the network.
The fundamental answer, though, is that units must be capable of fighting effectively even when network connectivity is degraded. This is a doctrinal and training challenge as much as a technological one.
Force Structure and Platform Requirements
DMO’s logic demands a different fleet than the Navy currently operates. More hulls, greater geographic distribution, and a mix of manned and unmanned platforms that can collectively cover the operating areas DMO requires. The current fleet, optimized around carrier strike groups, is a mismatch for the distributed approach.
The Navy’s ongoing force structure debates reflect this tension. Concepts like the Light Amphibious Warship (LAW) — a smaller, more austere vessel designed specifically to support Marine EABO operations — represent movement in the right direction. The large surface combatant vs. large unmanned surface vessel resource competition reflects exactly the kind of structural recalibration DMO demands.
Training, Doctrine, and Allied Interoperability
Perhaps the least visible but equally essential challenge is human: training sailors, officers, and commanders to think and operate in a distributed paradigm after decades of carrier-centric doctrine.
The Atlantic Council’s 2024 report specifically calls for reforming operational learning and wargaming to genuinely stress-test DMO concepts, rather than running exercises that validate pre-existing assumptions. Large-scale exercises like RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific) and Valiant Shield are increasingly incorporating DMO scenarios, but the doctrinal evolution is still in progress.
Allied integration is both a challenge and a significant opportunity. Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force operates in the same waters, from the same islands, and with many of the same sensors and weapons platforms. Australia’s submarine force, bolstered by AUKUS, extends the undersea presence across the southern approaches. South Korea’s advanced naval forces add capability to the northern flanks. A distributed force that can seamlessly incorporate allied platforms multiplies the targeting problem for China exponentially.
The QUAD (U.S., Japan, Australia, India) and AUKUS frameworks are building the interoperability frameworks, shared operating procedures, and exercises that allied DMO integration requires. Japan’s decision to acquire Tomahawk cruise missiles is particularly significant — it means the distributed fires network now includes Japanese surface ships as credible long-range strike platforms.
The “Win”: Strategic Outcomes of DMO
So what does “winning” actually mean in the context of DMO against China? This is where the concept’s strategic logic crystallizes.
Denying Adversary Sea Control
The first measure of DMO’s success is preventing China from establishing sea control in the Western Pacific. Sea control doesn’t mean sinking the entire PLA Navy — it means denying China the ability to operate its naval forces without unacceptable risk, protecting sea lanes, and preserving U.S. and allied freedom of navigation and overflight.
A successful DMO posture accomplishes this by making Chinese naval operations into the same high-risk proposition that China has created for U.S. forces. When PLA surface groups must worry about coordinated strikes from submarines, unmanned systems, Marine missile batteries, and surface combatants operating from unpredictable positions, their freedom to project power is severely constrained.
Imposing Unacceptable Costs on Aggressors
Deterrence through cost imposition is a second, equally important outcome. Even if conflict never occurs, a credible DMO capability changes China’s strategic calculus by making the cost of military aggression — particularly against Taiwan or in the South China Sea — prohibitively high.
This works through a specific mechanism: China’s A2/AD strategy relies on the ability to rapidly attrite U.S. forces in the initial phase of a conflict, creating facts on the ground before American reinforcements can arrive. If DMO’s distributed forces can survive that initial phase, continue fighting, and impose costs on Chinese forces simultaneously, the quick-victory scenario that China’s strategy depends upon becomes unavailable. A protracted conflict against the combined naval, air, and ground power of the U.S. and its allies is an outcome Chinese leadership almost certainly wishes to avoid.
Protecting U.S. Interests and Allies
DMO succeeds strategically when it convinces both allies and adversaries that the U.S. military commitment to the Indo-Pacific is credible and survivable. Allies who believe American forces can actually fight and sustain themselves in a contested Western Pacific are more likely to coordinate their own defense investments, participate in exercises, and accept political risks associated with standing alongside the United States.
This alliance management dimension is often undervalued in technical discussions of DMO. The strategy doesn’t just need to work militarily — it needs to be convincing enough that Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and others conclude that integrating with it is worth the diplomatic friction with Beijing.
Deterring Conflict Through Credible Capability
Ultimately, the highest expression of DMO’s success is that it is never operationally tested — because it deters the conflict it’s designed to fight. A distributed force that China cannot reliably suppress, that can sustain operations across the vast Pacific, and that can mass lethal fires from unexpected directions fundamentally changes the risk calculation that would precede any decision to use force.
Deterrence requires believability. The Navy needs to actually demonstrate, through exercises, deployments, and transparent capability development, that DMO is operationally real rather than a PowerPoint concept. That credibility is built over time, through consistent investment, genuine doctrinal change, and exercises that show allied and adversary observers alike that the United States has figured out how to fight effectively in the new environment.
The Future of Distributed Maritime Operations
DMO is not a finished product. It’s an evolving framework that will continue to develop as technology matures, as operational experience accumulates, and as China’s capabilities themselves change.
Ongoing Development and Adaptation
The Navy’s Unmanned Task Force, established to accelerate the integration of unmanned systems into fleet operations, represents institutional commitment to the innovation DMO requires. Project Overmatch — the Navy’s effort to build the networked, AI-assisted operating picture that DMO’s C2 requirements demand — is advancing through iterative development cycles that incorporate lessons from exercises and experiments.
Honest assessment matters here. The Atlantic Council’s 2024 report and Military Strategy Magazine’s analysis both note that DMO currently lacks the specificity and operational concreteness it needs to guide force development decisions and procurement priorities. Translating the concept into detailed operational plans — which platforms go where, how they communicate, what exactly they do when communications are degraded — remains an ongoing challenge.
Technological Horizons
Artificial intelligence and advanced autonomy are the most consequential technologies for DMO’s future. AI-assisted targeting — the ability to process sensor data from dozens of distributed platforms and rapidly identify, track, and provide targeting solutions for adversary forces — could dramatically compress the kill chain timeline that massed fires require.
Autonomous logistics vehicles, whether undersea cargo submarines or surface resupply drones, could solve the sustainment dilemma by making logistics less dependent on predictable patterns that adversaries can target.
Advanced hypersonic weapons, when they become operationally available, would add another dimension to the massed fires concept — weapons that travel at Mach 5+ are dramatically harder to intercept, changing the math of adversary point defense even further in DMO’s favor.
Geopolitical Implications
DMO signals something important to every actor in the Indo-Pacific: the United States is committed to remaining a Pacific power capable of contesting Chinese dominance, and it has a specific, serious plan for how to do that. The strategic investment in EABO positions, the restructuring of the Marine Corps around Pacific island warfare, the acquisition of long-range anti-ship missiles, and the development of unmanned systems all represent durable commitments that go beyond any single administration’s preferences.
For China, DMO presents a genuine strategic challenge. Their A2/AD investment was optimized against a centralized, carrier-centric American naval force. A distributed, networked, joint-force approach that leverages unmanned systems and allied capabilities stresses that investment in new ways — requiring China to either expand their A2/AD architecture significantly or accept reduced confidence in its effectiveness.
Conclusion
Distributed Maritime Operations represents the U.S. Navy’s most serious reckoning with the realities of modern great power competition. It abandons the comfortable certainties of the carrier-centric era in favor of a more complex, more demanding, but ultimately more survivable approach to Pacific naval warfare.
The concept’s logic is sound: distribute combat power to complicate adversary targeting, integrate that distributed power into coordinated fires that mass effects on the adversary, achieve decision advantage through superior information, and sustain the joint force across the vast Pacific through logistical innovation. DMO’s success depends on the Navy solving genuinely hard problems — C2 in contested environments, sustained logistics across thousands of miles of ocean, force structure transformation, and the doctrinal change needed to make human crews and commanders think and act in a distributed paradigm.
The stakes are as high as they get. Whether DMO succeeds in deterring conflict in the Indo-Pacific or, failing that, in actually winning one, will depend on decisions being made right now about technology, procurement, training, and allied relationships. The Navy knows what it needs to do. The question is whether it can do it fast enough, with enough specificity, and with sufficient resources to make the concept operationally real before the security environment demands it be tested for real.
—
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly is Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO)?
DMO is the U.S. Navy’s primary operational concept for fighting in contested maritime environments against advanced adversaries like China. It involves spreading combat power across many dispersed platforms — ships, submarines, aircraft, unmanned systems, and Marine Corps ground forces — rather than concentrating it in a few high-value assets. These dispersed units then coordinate through advanced networks to mass fires on adversary targets simultaneously, combining survivability through distribution with lethality through integration.
Why is China the focus of DMO?
China has spent approximately 30 years developing Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) capabilities — specifically missiles, submarines, and sensors — designed to keep U.S. carrier strike groups far from the Western Pacific. Traditional American naval power, concentrated in a few large carriers, is exactly what China’s A2/AD architecture is optimized to destroy. DMO counters this by presenting a targeting problem — dozens of dispersed, mobile units — that China’s A2/AD system was not designed to solve.
How does the Marine Corps fit into DMO?
The Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) concept is integral to DMO. Marine Littoral Regiments can position ground-based anti-ship missiles on defended Pacific islands, acting as land-based fires nodes that contribute to the distributed fires network. They also establish forward logistics bases that reduce the sustainment burden on the fleet. The V-22 Osprey and future Light Amphibious Warships are key platforms for this role.
What are the biggest challenges facing DMO?
The three most significant challenges are logistics (sustaining dispersed forces across the vast Pacific when China can target fixed supply nodes), command and control (maintaining networked coordination when China’s electronic warfare and cyber capabilities can disrupt communications), and force structure (the current fleet is optimized for carrier-centric operations and needs significant investment in new unmanned systems and additional hulls to fully execute DMO).
How do unmanned systems support DMO?
Unmanned systems serve multiple roles: UAVs like the MQ-4C Triton provide persistent maritime surveillance across huge ocean areas; Unmanned Surface Vessels extend the sensor network and serve as decoys to overwhelm adversary targeting systems; and Unmanned Undersea Vehicles conduct undersea surveillance and communications relay. Their key advantage in DMO is that they extend the distributed force’s reach and sensor coverage without risking human crew in the most contested areas.
What does “winning” look like under DMO?
Winning under DMO has multiple dimensions. In deterrence terms, it means convincing China that military aggression in the Indo-Pacific carries unacceptable costs — that the U.S. distributed force can survive an initial attack and impose devastating losses in return. In combat terms, it means denying China sea control in the Western Pacific, protecting allied nations and sea lanes, and sustaining combat operations long enough for American industrial and alliance advantages to determine the outcome. Ultimately, DMO succeeds most completely if it deters conflict entirely by making the cost-benefit calculation of aggression prohibitively unfavorable for Beijing.