By Admiral
Jonathan Greenert, U.S. Navy
An August article in Proceedings
laid out “Ten Realities for the New CNO.” Here, the new CNO offers his vision
of the Navy 15 years hence, which touches on several of those same issues.
The Navy Support Activity in
Bahrain may not be the first thing one thinks of when considering the Navy of
2025. Our operations from that small Persian Gulf island may seem like a
holdover from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—something that will end as we
complete those conflicts and enter an era of fiscal austerity. Nothing could be
further from the truth. Bahrain has
been a steadfast U.S. partner for six decades, and our presence there
exemplifies some of the key and enduring attributes of the U.S. Navy, whether
the year is 1825 or 2025. Our sailors and Marines in Bahrain, and their
complement of helicopters, strike-fighters, patrol aircraft, minesweepers, and
coastal patrol ships, are forward, ready, and focused on warfighting.
In 2025 the Navy will operate
from a larger number of partner nations such as Bahrain to more affordably
maintain our forward posture around the world. Our future Fleet will remain
ready, with the maintenance, weapons, personnel, and training it needs,
although it may be smaller than today as a result of fiscal constraints. Our
sailors and civilians will remain the source of our warfighting capability, and
the Fleet of 2025 will be even more dependent on a motivated, relevant, and
diverse force. The ships and aircraft of 2025 will predominantly be the proven
platforms of today, but with greater reach and persistence thanks to new
payloads of unmanned vehicles and weapons.
The future Fleet will maintain our current advantages in the electromagnetic
spectrum and cyberspace, but will fully operationalize them as warfighting
domains. We will remain dominant under the sea, but the capability of
our submarines will be expanded as they become part of a network of platforms,
unmanned systems and sensors.
While the characteristics of
the Navy will change over the next decade or two, our contribution to the
nation’s defense will not. The
Navy–Marine Corps team will remain vital to our national security and economic
prosperity. Operating globally at the front line of our nation’s
efforts in war and peace, the Fleet will continue protecting the interconnected
systems of trade, information, and security that underpin our own economy and
those of our friends and allies. The
Navy and Marine Corps will still be the first responders to international
crises through combat operations—as in Libya—or with humanitarian assistance—as
in Japan or Haiti. And after U.S. ground forces have drawn down in Iraq
and Afghanistan, the naval services will remain on watch with offshore options
to deter aggression and—as necessary—to fight and win on, over, and under the
sea.
Operating
Forward with Our Partners
A navy is
most effective when it is forward, especially at the strategic “maritime
crossroads” where shipping lanes, energy flows, information networks, and
national security interests intersect. Being
forward is critical to deterring aggression without escalation, defusing
threats without fanfare, and containing conflict without regional disruption.
In addition to obvious choke points such as the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca,
U.S. naval forces will support our allies and partners in protecting the
freedom of new crossroads that will emerge by 2025 as Arctic ice recedes and
the Panama Canal is widened. With their maritime focus, Navy ships and aircraft
have a smaller footprint and pose less of a concern to host nations than ground
forces—and routinely operate with their host on common concerns such as
maritime security. Being forward is an essential element of building
partnerships, because, as my predecessor Admiral Gary Roughead would say,
“Trust cannot be surged.”
The Navy will need innovative
approaches to staying forward around the world to address growing concerns
about freedom of the seas while being judicious with our resources. Because we
will probably not be able to sustain the financial and diplomatic cost of new
main operating bases abroad, the fleet of 2025 will rely more on host-nation
ports and other facilities where our ships, aircraft, and crews can refuel,
rest, resupply, and repair while deployed. This will help the Navy sustain its
global forward posture with what may be a smaller number of ships and aircraft
than today.
The
Navy–Marine Corps team will take advantage of ports and airstrips in places
such as Diego Garcia to sustain deployed ships and aircraft and support prompt
crisis response. We will also expand our forward-stationed
forces to improve our posture and responsiveness. In Southeast Asia, we will station several of our newest littoral
combat ships at Singapore’s naval facility, and as announced in
November by President Barack Obama, begin rotational deployments of Marines to
Darwin, Australia. In the Middle
East, we will send littoral combat ships to replace our Bahrain mineseweepers
in the coming decade, while in Europe we will station four destroyers at an
existing facility in Rota, Spain. Those
places, along with our longstanding homeports in Japan, Guam, and Italy, will
allow U.S. naval forces to maximize our forward presence while strengthening
our alliances and partnerships.
Between now and 2025,
forward-deployed forces will be critical to our geographic combatant
commanders, or COCOMs. As the strategic environment evolves from Cold War
bipolarity and post–Cold War unipolarity to one with multiple centers of power,
COCOMs will continue shifting their planning and operations away from only
being ready for stereotypical warfighting. COCOMs will increase the stress
placed on shaping the environment to prevent conflict.
Critical to shaping the
environment is cooperation with partners and allies across the range of
operations. At the high end, we will expand our combined efforts with allies in
Japan, South Korea, and Australia to train and exercise in missions such as antisubmarine
warfare and integrated air and missile defense. Over the next decade, we will
also increase deployments of ships and aircraft for the cooperative missions
our other allies and partners need most. Our
ships ships in Singapore will conduct cooperative counterpiracy or
countertrafficking operations around the South China Sea. Similarly, 2025 may
see P-8A Poseidon aircraft or unmanned broad area maritime surveillance aerial
vehicles periodically deploy to the Philippines or Thailand to help those nations
with maritime domain awareness. Our small combatants, which in 2025
will predominantly be littoral combat ships, will deploy globally to counter
terrorism, combat narcotics trafficking, and cooperatively train with partner
nations to improve their capacity for those important missions.
As Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton noted in a recent Foreign Policy article, the Asia-Pacific
region will be emphasized in our forward posture. In addition to being home to
five U.S. treaty allies, the region boasts six of the world’s ten largest
economies—with China projected to be the largest by 2025. We will continue our robust rotational deployments to the western
Pacific, complemented with our forward-stationed Navy and Marine forces in
Japan, Guam, Singapore, and Australia.
We also will maintain
rotational deployments in the Middle East and Indian Ocean. In 2025 those
forces—along with our forward-stationed patrol boats, minesweepers, and
littoral combat ships—will deter aggression in the region. With our local Persian
Gulf partners and international allies such as the United Kingdom and Japan,
those forces will also help ensure the Strait of Hormuz remains open; oil will
remain the world’s most versatile fuel and chemical feedstock.
Although the
Fleet may be smaller, the 2025 Navy will remain engaged in places such as
Guantanamo Bay, Naples and Sigonella in Italy, Souda Bay in Greece, and
Djibouti in Africa to maximize the presence from our periodic deployments and
transits. The destroyers in Spain will not only provide ballistic-missile
defense, but will be available for security and training operations with our
European and African allies and partners.
Keeping Our
Warfighting Edge
Being forward to deter,
assure, and influence only works if the forces we deploy are credible and
relevant to the tasks they have to do. Between now and 2025, the Navy will have
to sustain its current dominance of the undersea domain, improve its ability to
project power despite growing threats to access, operationalize cyberspace and
the electromagnetic spectrum, and increase the reach and persistence of today’s
Fleet.
By 2025,
precision-guided weapons will be the norm among our adversaries and
competitors—from terrorist groups and criminals to our maritime peers. Combined
with widely available radar, as well as electronic and optical sensors, such
weapons give adversaries an unprecedented ability to attack ships, aircraft,
and ground forces and to deny access to certain areas of sea or land.
With that emerging capability,
regional powers in 2025 could use ballistic and cruise missiles, submarines,
and guided rockets and artillery to prevent military forces or legitimate users
from entering an area (“anti-access,” or A2) or operating effectively within an
area (“area-denial,” or AD). Those capabilities can be characterized as
defensive, reducing opposition to them, and they can be deployed from the
country’s mainland territory, making attacks against them highly escalatory.
Their intended purpose, however, is clear—intimidation of neighboring
countries, including U.S. allies and partners. Aggressors can threaten to hold
key maritime crossroads at risk, render territorial claims moot, and assert
that intervention by the United States or others in these disputes can be
delayed or prevented. The stated or unstated implication is that their
neighbors should capitulate to the aggressor’s demands.
To help
defend our allies and protect our interests, U.S. forces in 2025 will need to
be able to operate and project power despite adversary A2/AD capabilities. Over the
next decade naval and air forces will implement the new AirSea Battle Concept
and put in place the tactics, procedures, and systems of this innovative
approach to the A2/AD challenge. Most important, sailors, airmen and Marines
will be prepared to adapt, take the initiative, and operate effectively in a
range of A2/AD environments.
Payloads
over Platforms
Over the next decade,
maintaining the Navy’s war-fighting edge and addressing fiscal constraints will
require significant changes in how we develop the force. We will need to shift from a focus on platforms to instead focus on
what the platform carries. We have experience in this model. Aircraft
carriers, amphibious ships and the littoral combat ships are inherently
reconfigurable, with sensor and weapon systems that can evolve over time for
the expected mission. As we apply that same modular approach to each of our
capabilities, the weapons, sensors, unmanned systems, and electronic-warfare
systems that a platform deploys will increasingly become more important than
the platform itself.
That paradigm shift will be
prompted by three main factors. First,
the large number, range of frequencies, and growing sophistication of sensors
will increase the risk to ships and aircraft—even “stealthy” ones—when
operating close to an adversary’s territory. Continuing to pursue ever-smaller
signatures for manned platforms, however, will soon become unaffordable. Second, the unpredictable and
rapid improvement of adversary A2/AD capabilities will require faster evolution
of our own systems to maintain an advantage or asymmetrically gain the upper
hand. This speed of evolution is more affordable and technically possible in
weapons, sensors, and unmanned systems than in manned platforms.
The third factor favoring a focus on payloads is the changing
nature of war. Precision-guided munitions have reduced the number and size of
weapons needed to achieve the same effect. At the same time, concerns for
collateral damage have significantly lowered the number of targets that can be
safely attacked in a given engagement. The net effect is fewer weapons are
needed in today’s conflicts.
Together, those trends make
guided, precision stand-off weapons such as Tomahawk land-attack missiles,
joint air-surface stand-off missiles, and their successors more viable and
cost-effective alternatives to increasingly stealthy aircraft that close the
target and drop bombs or shoot direct-attack missiles. To take full advantage
of the paradigm shift from platform to payload, the Fleet of 2025 will incorporate faster, longer-range, and more
sophisticated weapons from ships, aircraft, and submarines. In turn, today’s
platforms will evolve to be more capable of carrying a larger range of weapons
and other payloads.
Those other payloads will include
a growing number of unmanned systems. Budget limitations over the next 10 to 15
years may constrain the number of ships and aircraft the Navy can buy.
Expanded
(Unmanned) Reach
The future
Fleet will deploy a larger and improved force of rotary wing unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs) including today’s Fire Scout and soon, the armed Fire-X. Those
vehicles were invaluable in recent operations in Libya and in counterterrorism
operations around the Central Command area of responsibility. Deploying from the deck of a littoral
combat ship, a detachment of Fire Scouts can provide continuous surveillance
more than 100 miles away. Those systems will expand the reach of the
ship’s sensors with optical and infrared capabilities, as well as support
special operations forces in the littorals. Even more significant, the Fleet of
2025 will include UAVs deploying from aircraft carrier decks. What started a
decade ago as the unmanned combat air system will be operating by 2025 as an
integral element of some carrier air wings, providing surveillance and some
strike capability at vastly increased ranges compared with today’s strike
fighters. Once that aircraft is fielded, it will likely take on additional
missions such as logistics, electronic warfare, or tanking.
Submarines
will deploy and operate in conjunction with a family of unmanned vehicles and
sensors by 2025 to sustain the undersea dominance that is a clear U.S.
asymmetric advantage. Large-displacement unmanned
underwater vehicles (UUVs) will deploy from ships, shore, or Virginia-class
submarine payload tubes to conduct surveillance missions. With their range and
endurance, large UUVs could travel deep into an adversary’s A2/AD envelope to
deploy strike missiles, electronic warfare decoys, or mines. Smaller UUVs will
be used by submarines to extend the reach of their organic sensors, and will
operate in conjunction with unattended sensors that can be deployed from
surface combatants, submarines, and P-8A patrol aircraft. The resulting
undersea network will create a more complete and persistent “common operational
picture” of the underwater environment when and where we need it. This will be
essential to finding and engaging adversary submarines, potentially the most
dangerous A2/AD capability.
The undersea picture is extremely
important in terms of countering enemy mining. The most basic of A2/AD weapons,
mines can render an area of ocean unusable for commercial shipping for weeks or
months while we laboriously locate and neutralize them. Even the threat of mines is enough to severely restrict ship
movements, significantly affecting trade and global economic stability if it
happens in key choke points such as the Malacca or Hormuz straits. The
mine countermeasure capabilities we are developing for littoral combat ships
and MH-60 aircraft rely heavily on unmanned sensors to rapidly build the
underwater picture, and unmanned neutralization systems to disable mines. By 2025 those systems will be fully
fielded, and their portable nature could allow them to be another swappable payload
on a range of combatants.
Mastering
the Electromagnetic Domain
Electronic warfare (EW) and
cyber operations are increasingly essential to defeating the sensors and
command and control (C2) that underpin an opponent’s A2/AD capabilities. If the
adversary is blinded or unable to communicate, he cannot aim long-range
ballistic and cruise missiles or cue submarines and aircraft. Today, Navy
forces focus on deconflicting operations in the electromagnetic spectrum or
cyber domains. By 2025, the Fleet
will fully operationalize those domains, more seamlessly managing sensors,
attacks, defense, and communications, and treating EW and cyber environments as
“maneuver spaces” on par with surface, undersea, or air.
For example, an electronic
jammer or decoy can defeat individual enemy radar, and thus an enemy C2 system
using the radar’s data. A cyber operation might be able to achieve a similar
effect, allowing U.S. forces to avoid detection. This is akin to using smoke
and “rubber-duck” decoys in World War II to obscure and confuse the operational
picture for Japanese forces, allowing U.S. ships to maneuver to an advantageous
position. The future Fleet will
employ EW and cyber with that same sense of operational integration.
Remaining
Ready
History is replete with examples
of how our Navy innovated operationally and technologically to win. The advent
of sea-based aircraft, radar, and submarines were step-increases in our
capability that took time, experimentation, and initiative to fully exploit.
Over the next 10 to 15 years, the Navy will continue to create new ways to
remain forward at the maritime crossroads, sustain our undersea dominance,
exploit the reach and persistence of unmanned vehicles, and operationalize the
electromagnetic and cyber environments. To operate this Fleet, we will develop
a motivated, relevant, and diverse 21st-century workforce through career-long
tactical and strategic training.
What will not change, however,
are the core attributes of Navy sailors and civilians and the Fleet in which
they serve. Next year we will commemorate the War of 1812, when our Navy faced
its first sustained trial by fire. After Britain attempted a blockade to
suppress American shipping, the United States declared war. Within a day (quick
in that era), the first blows were struck by Navy ships. Our Fleet was not
large, amounting to a half-dozen frigates and a larger number of gunboats and
other craft. It did, however, rapidly get ready and take the fight to the enemy
as our sailors aggressively employed creativity, innovation, and individual
initiative.
The Navy of 2025 will reflect
those same values. It will be ready, with the sailors, training, ordnance,
sensors, and communications it needs to fight and win the conflicts that may
arise. It will be forward where it can work to prevent those conflicts through
operations with our partners, the capability to respond, and the ability to
assure access for the joint force. And the Fleet will focus on warfighting to
deter aggression and if necessary engage and defeat those who would attack our
people, territory, allies, or partners.
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