For the U.S. Navy, a principal lesson from the past decade has been the importance of being able to respond effectively to the unexpected. Naval forces have protected important national interests and ensured continued access from northeast Asia to the Caribbean, from the Balkans to the Central Asian steppe. And as the world has witnessed during the past year, the Navy has been a key combatant in the Afghanistan campaign and the wider war on terrorism, while simultaneously performing homeland security duties off the U.S. coast.
The first decades of the 21st century promise to be equally rigorous. U.S. naval power will include traditional fleet missions—establishing and maintaining maritime air, surface, and undersea superiority in deep waters as well as the littoral, protecting vital sea lines of communication, and ensuring access for follow-on forces—but the reality of the war on terrorism and uncertainties in the national security landscape will force us beyond our core competencies. The Navy will have to be able to respond rapidly and effectively to unscripted events, as well as to varied and asymmetric threats with which sea forces traditionally have not dealt. The challenge before us, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has noted, is to recognize that "likely" dangers may be quite different from "familiar" dangers of the past.
For the surface Navy, this means building a balanced force that retains proven strengths but also is equipped to ensure access, effect forcible entry, deliver responsive long-range fires, and conduct precision strike during campaigns characterized by indefinite length and logistical challenges. At the core of this force will be a family of multimission surface combatants that can dominate both blue water and littoral battle spaces, while projecting power abroad or defending the homeland. Hosting a sophisticated command-and-control capability, including mission planning and command applications riding on secure networks, these combatants will serve as cornerstones of the joint task force but still be capable of independent operations. They will meet current and future threats and will demonstrate the high operational availability that is vital to meeting the Navy’s global commitments.
Complementing these multimission combatants will be focused-mission ships, designed with modular mission capability. These revolutionary platforms will provide specific warfighting capabilities and add speed, reduced signature, and focused lethality to the netted force. In addition, transformational technology gleaned from the parallel development process for these future ships will be incorporated into the Aegis fleet, maintaining its combat effectiveness well into the 21st century.
Together, these combatants will provide the naval and joint force commander an array of firepower options, as a sea-based deterrent force or as one tasked to gain forcible entry to enable the flow of land and air forces into a contested theater.
Developing the Family of Ships
The surface Navy's original entry to this transformed force was to have been DD-21, the 21st-century land-attack destroyer. In November 2001, however, after extensive deliberation, the DD-21 program was restructured to broaden its focus from a single ship class to several classes. The Navy recognized that a complementary family of surface combatants was required to meet the demands of power projection and access in light of emerging threats. The service needs these combatants in the near term, but they also must be designed to take advantage of future technological developments so that they remain capable well into this century. Thus, the Surface Combatant Family of Ships concept was born.
The family of ships will be comprised of DD(X), a multimission destroyer with an offensive focus, providing precision surface fires in support of forces ashore; CG(X), a multimission surface combatant with a sea-based theater and area air defense capability and a ballistic missile defense suite; and the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), a networked, fast, modular, focused-mission ship. This family construct will better address technology risk mitigation by applying a spiral development approach, leveraging common systems and equipment where possible, and inserting new technology as it becomes available.
The Navy will develop DD(X) following an evolutionary requirements definition process, in which decisions on operational capabilities will be determined within the context of the entire family of ships. This program will introduce cutting-edge technological initiatives, expediting their introduction to the fleet. It also will implement processes for the modular introduction of key ship systems based on these rapidly evolving technologies, without disrupting shipyard production or increasing cost. Spiral development, which can increase capability exponentially through periodic upgrades, will require the efficient and expeditious transition from rapid prototype to production systems.
DD(X) will not be the only beneficiary of the spiral design process. The analysis and evaluation of technologies within this process will identify equipment and systems that can be applied to both in-service and future fleet assets. Once identified, these technologies will be incorporated into in-service assets relative to threat level, force structure, and budgetary factors. In this manner, spiral design will ensure the flexibility and formidability of our surface force against tomorrow’s threats.
The DD(X) program will pursue risk mitigation through rigorous land-based and at-sea testing of engineering development models for systems such as the radar suite and integrated power system. The lead DD(X), with a contract award scheduled for fiscal year 2005, will be funded with research, development, testing, and evaluation appropriations, similar to the aviation acquisition practice. This decision gives significant flexibility to the DD(X) program manager, but it also compels the program office to justify progress yearly to defend the acquisition program budget.
The introduction of DD(X) will signal a profound transformation within the fleet, creating new capabilities and competencies and yielding significant combat advantage at sea, in the air, and over land. These warships will incorporate dramatic signature reductions for multispectral stealth, revolutionary integrated power systems to facilitate the rapid reconfiguration of electricity and power distribution, and adaptable and scalable total-ship computing environments that will accommodate new mission requirements efficiently. Automation technologies will permit significant reductions in crew size, with attendant reductions in operating and support costs.
The introduction of this new generation of technology will follow an evolutionary approach that has served us well. The Spruance (DD-963)–Kidd (DDG-993)–Ticonderoga (CG-47)–Bunker Hill (CG-52)–Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) progression of ship design and development, when it has run its course, will have given us eight decades of the finest surface combatants the world has known. Our future application of common hull and propulsion system designs, and the evolutionary development of state-of-the-art combat systems over the ensuing decades, will provide the same economies of scale and maintenance in our 21st-century fleet.
Complementing the multimission ships, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) will be an adaptable, smaller surface combatant whose modular nature will allow various mission packages. We are just beginning to characterize the capabilities LCS will require, but we anticipate that its size will be determined by a combination of desired combat radius, persistence on station, the quantity and size of unmanned vehicles and manned aircraft embarked, and the quantity and types of sensors and weapons to be carried. We will develop modular packages of specific sensors, combat systems, and C4ISR systems, focused primarily on missions related to battle space access: countering mines, engaging surface combatants, and antisubmarine warfare.
With its size, speed, and modular design characteristics, LCS has the potential for mutual development with the U.S. Coast Guard’s Deepwater Program and foreign navies. In U.S. service, LCS will promote interoperability between Navy and Coast Guard forces engaged in homeland defense, while also fulfilling the sea control and interception missions associated with medium- and high-endurance cutters. We are continuing to explore these possibilities with the Coast Guard as we both move forward with these ship development programs. LCS also might be suitable for foreign military sales, providing our coalition partners with a state-of-the-art surface combatant that will ensure continued interoperability among our navies.
Parallel development of the DD(X), CG(X), and LCS will be complemented by increased efforts to conduct timely, rapid insertion of evolving technologies in our highly capable in-service fleet of Aegis cruisers and destroyers. The Navy might be able to adapt new systems developed for the family of ships for use in the Aegis cruiser conversion program, allowing us to extend the life of these superb ships and give them the critical air defense, command-and-control, and high-volume precision fires upgrades.
A Far-Reaching Naval Transformation
The powerful combination of our transformed surface combatant force and the Navy's new amphibious warships will increase U.S. sea-based power projection capabilities significantly. Future amphibious ship programs will provide naval expeditionary forces with the command and control, increased vehicle lift capacity, flight deck space, advanced survivability, and combat support necessary to enable the sea basing concept central to expeditionary maneuver warfare. The transformed U.S. Navy-Marine Corps team will ensure availability of the world’s oceans for expeditionary operations, and allow the joint force commander to use the littoral as a secure region from which to project power.
The future Navy will provide the war fighter and the nation with a balanced set of capabilities directed against a wide array of threats. Few, if any, of these threats would have been predicted even as recently as at the end of the Kosovo crisis, but the only constant in warfare is that it will always be different from what is expected. To fight and win on the 21st-century battlefield, at sea, or over land, we therefore must maintain a force that combines innovation and continuity. Bringing together the promise of new technologies and the reality of the world’s most powerful navy, the resulting system will be one of unsurpassed capability.
Like ships and weapons, war at or from the sea has changed dramatically over the past century. Yet one imperative is apparent: well-trained, experienced crews and incisive leadership, from the deck plates to the captain’s chair, have more often than not determined victor and vanquished. Drawing on this truth, and incorporating force structure projections and optimal manning initiatives, the DD(X) spiral development approach is focusing design criteria not merely on optimal manpower, but toward a sailor-centric architecture. In this manner, equipment and systems are planned, designed, tested, and evaluated with optimal manning objectives and sailor capabilities and limitations in mind. This approach differs from previous strategies under which manning levels were established in support of equipment, system operability, and maintainability requirements. Our forthcoming family of ships will employ new technologies that increase automation, redundancy, survivability, and persistent combat power while reducing personnel demands. These advancements will precipitate doctrinal changes regarding how we operate and fight our ships against developing threats.
The 21st-century surface Navy will deal with the unexpected by drawing from an expanding toolbox of capabilities. These tools, when put into the hands of our people, will be turned into war-winning capabilities. And while those capabilities will play a pivotal role in future conflict, it will be the spirit and determination of the sailors that, in the end, will win the day.
The surface Navy enters the new century at the top of its game. Our continued ability to establish and maintain battle-space dominance in blue water and littoral operations as an integral part of joint, allied, or coalition forces will depend on our capacity to provide maritime force protection, ensured access, and surface fires in support of the land campaign, and theater air and ballistic missile defense to the air, land, and sea elements of the joint task force. The family of ships, in combination with our Aegis and amphibious fleets, will give the surface Navy the capability to respond rapidly and effectively to the unforeseen, while emerging technologies and operational concepts carry us inexorably forward, the world’s preeminent navy, in both war and peace.
Admiral Hamilton is program executive officer for Surface Strike. Admiral Loren is deputy director, Surface Ships, Surface Warfare Division, in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations.