Sea Shield will project defense beyond what any navy has been able to accomplish—i.e., deep inland against cruise and ballistic missiles. This Standard Missile III fired from the USS Lake Erie (CG-70) successfully intercepted an Aries ballistic missile target earlier this year.
Editor's Note: The Naval Institute published Admiral Vern Clark's "Sea Power 21" in the October Proceedings, pages 32-41. Future articles in this series, in upcoming issues, will address elements of "Sea Power 21."
"Sea Shield is about projecting defensive power from the sea. It is key to protecting our nation at home, assuring allies overseas, and dissuading and deterring potential adversaries in multiple theaters."
— Admiral Vern Clark
In his October 2002 Proceedings article "Sea Power 21," the Chief of Naval Operations prescribes a broadened naval strategy that will fully integrate U.S. naval forces into joint operations against regional and transnational dangers. He rededicates the Navy to a global focus that will dissuade, deter, and defeat a growing array of potential threats, including weapons of mass destruction, conventional warfare, and widely dispersed and well-funded terrorism.
Three interwoven operational concepts lie at the heart of his vision: Sea Strike, Sea Shield, and Sea Basing. Sea Strike, the projection of precise and persistent offensive power, will punish aggressors swiftly and decisively. Sea Shield will provide a layered defense to protect the homeland, sustain access to contested littorals, and project a defensive umbrella over coalition partners and joint forces ashore in distant theaters. Sea Basing of joint warfighting capabilities by way of a widely distributed and netted fleet will increase the operational independence of U.S. forces and serve as the foundation for the projection of offensive and defensive fires—making Sea Strike and Sea Shield a reality.
Sea Shield embraces emerging technologies and concepts that for the first time have the potential to extend naval defensive firepower beyond the task force. Sea Shield encompasses some things great navies always have tried to do—sea control off hostile coasts and maritime defense of the homeland, for example—and some that no navy has ever done, such as projecting defense deep inland against cruise and ballistic missiles. But whether new missions or traditional ones done in new ways, these enhanced warfighting capabilities will play an increasingly central role in U.S. national security in the decades ahead.
Layered Global Defensive Assurance
U.S. national strategy is founded on our advantages of forward-deployed forces, sea and air supremacy, and information superiority, allowing us to fight and win thousands of miles from our shores. Our enemies know this, and they are working to circumvent our strengths by denying our forces access to their regions and by developing asymmetric strategies to conduct attacks on our soil.
Future adversaries will strive to hold our deployments at risk by interdicting air and sea lines of communication, rendering debarkation points unusable, and delaying or denying political access. By projecting defensive power, Sea Shield will defeat these efforts and enable the U.S. Navy to "climb into the ring" to conduct Sea Strike and Sea Basing in forward theaters of operation, setting the stage for combat victory.
Theater Air and Missile Defense. Effective theater air and missile defense is critical to achieving the vision for Sea Shield. This is a challenging task, as countering emerging cruise and ballistic missiles will require advanced network-centric operations and high levels of weapon-system technology, seamlessly fused to produce a single integrated air picture available to all elements of the force. Air defense in the 21st century will require missiles that reach ranges, altitudes, and speeds never before seen. Networks will pass vast volumes of precise data to achieve near-instantaneous speed of command, ensuring targets are destroyed in the fleeting moments when successful engagements are possible.
Experts in Navy laboratories and private industry are hard at work on the next generation of theater air and missile defense. Sensors will include upgrades to the Aegis weapon system and the DD(X) destroyer's volume search radar; the Radar Modernization Program (RMP) for the E-2C Hawkeye aircraft; and the advanced electronically scanned array (AESA) radar for the F/A-18E/F and Joint Strike Fighter. Networks will encompass the cooperative engagement capability (CEC) and Link-16 systems. And weapons will be the extended range, over-the-horizon, and ballistic missile defense versions of the Standard missile, and new models of the advanced medium-range air-to-air missile (AMRAAM).
Capability advances in these programs are impressive. The AESA radar, for example, will extend air detection ranges by a factor of two to three over current fighter radars. When employed together, these transformational capabilities will produce a system referred to as Navy Integrated Fire Control-Counterair (NIFC-CA). It will emerge over the next decade as each component is developed, and it will deliver fully networked, distributed, long-range defensive firepower to keep our Navy well ahead of anticipated aerospace threats. It will ensure future battlespace dominance, allowing aircraft to shift from defensive combat air patrols to attack missions, amplifying the striking power of the fleet.
Our Navy already is fielding CEC on deploying battle groups, and it is working well. CEC integrates the radar sensor data of ships and E-2C aircraft into a real-time, fire-control quality composite track picture that is distributed to each participating unit. This allows target engagement well beyond a ship's radar horizon, enabling carrier strike groups to act as integrated and distributed combat systems in countering ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and stealthy aircraft. It also enables smaller ships operating in the littorals to share the sensing capacity of an entire group rather than relying solely on organic sensors. CEC and Link-16 are critical first steps in the development of a joint single integrated air picture that will lead to profound advances in joint force decision making, speed, and engagement lethality.
With arrival of the E-2C Radar Modernization Program in 2011, the Navy will deploy an unprecedented capacity to conduct defensive air warfare deep inland against cruise missiles and aircraft. The range and overland detection capabilities achieved through RMP, combined with the networking of CEC, will expand significantly our ability to defend critical ports, airfields, and joint forces ashore—initially with F/A-18E/Fs using AESA radar and AMRAAMs, and ultimately with a next-generation over-the-horizon ship-launched Standard missile. Naval forces then will be capable of projecting wide-area defense, more effectively assuring allies and protecting the deployment of U.S. forces into forward theaters.
Ballistic missile defense is yet another potential breakthrough on the horizon. Over the next decade, we will use our Navy's globally deployed, mobile infrastructure of sea-based radars and missile launchers to field ballistic missile defense, for both forward theaters and the U.S. homeland. Linked to a network of space and airborne sensors, and directed by highly responsive command-and-control systems, a family of sea-based interceptor missiles will provide options for boost phase, midcourse, and terminal defense as part of an overall joint force ballistic missile defense system. Tests of this capability are ongoing, and recent successes indicate that sea-based missile defense will strengthen U.S. security in the years ahead.
Sea and Littoral Control. Battlespace control near land is essential to ensure prompt access and freedom of maneuver for joint forces moving from the sea to objectives deep inland. Surface and subsurface threats include small, fast surface combatants, modern ultraquiet submarines, and an array of floating, moored, and buried mines.
To detect and defeat these threats, force sensors and weapons will be integrated to produce battlespace dominance on, above, and below the sea. This is a challenging goal because sensors and weapons in the littoral environment have limited ranges as a result of environmental conditions and the clutter of maritime traffic. The most effective approach to countering these limitations is to network large numbers of distributed sensors and weapons. The Navy is pursuing this approach through programs such as the expeditionary sensor grid, the Advanced Deployable System for the detection of submarines and mine-laying activities, and the development of a family of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). In addition, the new MH-60 helicopters, which will carry reconfigurable sensors and weapons customized for the littoral environment, will link their data to the force as they perform antimine, antisubmarine, and antisurface sea control missions.
Stealthy and lethal Littoral Combat Ships (LCSs) will add new dimensions to our ability to counter enemy submarines, small craft, and mines. Designed to be smaller and far faster than any current U.S. warship, they will have the maneuverability and signature reduction to take the fight to the enemy. They also will have reconfigurable mission payloads, including unmanned vehicles, to win in this challenging arena. In an environment where numbers matter and distributed capability has special value, LCSs will complement our larger, multimission ships by providing both. Our fleet will gain more combat effectiveness from LCS units operating forward for extended periods, experimenting with innovative crewing methods, and swiftly reconfiguring to obtain required mission capabilities.
The key to future effectiveness against modern, quiet diesel submarines in shallow waters once again will be the application of advanced sensor and networking technologies. These will contribute to building a common undersea picture that fuses the information from distributed sensors, platforms, and command elements to permit collaborative mission planning and tactical decision making. New, longer-range individual sensors such as the low-frequency active ship-mounted sonar, the advanced low-frequency sonar (ALFS) for the MH-60R helicopter, and new acoustic processors on nuclear submarines will complement the distributed sensors of the expeditionary sensor grid, Advanced Deployable System, and UUVs. ALFS, for example, will increase area search rates by three to five times that of current helicopterborne sonars. In addition, multistatic and advanced signal processing technologies will extract every possible element of information from the surrounding environment, making the water column increasingly transparent. None of these approaches will make antisubmarine warfare easy, but in the aggregate, these technologies, combined with well-trained sailors using realistic simulators to refine their skills, can sustain assured access for U.S. forces in the face of diesel submarine threats.
Mine warfare is on the verge of a revolution in the U.S. Navy. This decade will see the progressive fielding of new systems that will make mine countermeasure (MCM) capabilities integral to forward-deployed strike groups. While dedicated MCM forces will remain vital to keeping open the sea lines of communication, surface and subsurface combatants will detect and avoid mines on their own, sustaining the critical tempo of operations early in crises. Both dedicated and organic MCM forces will use new generations of sophisticated UUVs—eventually to be joined by unmanned air and surface vehicles—to detect, avoid, and neutralize mines at all depths.
Small, fast enemy surface combatants represent another threat to operations in geographically confined areas, where their size and the surrounding clutter of geography and traffic make long-range detection difficult. While destroying these craft in port or at long range is the preferred solution, a dispersed force of smaller platforms such as the LCS and the MH-60, networked with distributed, unmanned sensors, offers promising response capabilities once enemy vessels are under way. In addition, the highly effective Close-In Weapon System Block 1B antisurface-capable gun, rapidly entering the fleet, provides a lethal inner layer of defense against these craft. Revolutionary new technologies, such as directed-energy weapons, also offer promise as the next generation of systems for precise close-in defense against both combatant craft at sea and waterborne threats to ships pierside.
Extended Homeland Defense. Homeland defense relies on many of the elements that will make Sea Shield effective in a forward battlefield environment, such as expanded sensor coverage, increased situational awareness by networking, and rapidly deployable defensive assets and weapon systems. Sharing information with other services and agencies will extend the security boundaries of the United States far seaward, using the time and space afforded by naval forces to shield our nation from impending threats.
In close coordination with Northern Command, naval forces will establish comprehensive maritime domain awareness, to include the tracking of surface vessels, aircraft, and subsurface units approaching the United States. Interagency communication reach-back systems will send the latest intelligence to and from naval assets. This will integrate afloat forces into joint, interagency, and civil efforts to a far greater degree than today, providing the situational awareness, agility, and timeliness so vital to countering terrorist threats.
As suspect vessels close our coasts, naval defense in depth will allow boarding, inspection, and neutralization of dangers. To coordinate this task, the Navy has assigned 300 sailors to the National Maritime Intelligence Center, working alongside U.S. Coast Guard personnel, to track and identify potential threats on the high seas. In addition, more than 10,000 antiterrorism and force protection professionals afloat and ashore protect today's fleet. The Navy also has numerous qualified personnel capable of assisting civil authorities during emergencies, such as those assigned to the Marine Corps' Chemical Biological Incident Response Force and Radiological Emergency Response Teams on Navy shore installations and tenders.
Key homeland defense assets in years ahead will include ballistic missile defense ships, U.S. Coast Guard Deepwater units, the new Multi-Mission Aircraft, and the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance UAV that will provide long-dwell coverage of very large areas of the ocean because of its high-resolution sensors and unprecedented flight endurance.
Fleet Leadership in Concept Development
Aggressive fleet leadership will be critical to realizing the full capabilities of Sea Shield. To provide such leadership, the Chief of Naval Operations has tasked Commander, Third Fleet, to work in concert with Commander, Seventh Fleet, to accelerate the development of all facets of Sea Shield. Third Fleet is an ideal venue for advancing such capabilities, because the innovation command ship USS Coronado (AGF-11) already hosts the U.S. Pacific Command's Joint Task Force for Experimentation and the Navy's Sea-Based Battle Lab.
To accelerate the delivery of Sea Shield capabilities, Third Fleet will address the CNO Action Steps specified in "Sea Power 21." These include:
- Expand combat reach.
- Deploy theater missile defense as soon as possible.
- Create common operational pictures for air, surface, and subsurface forces.
- Accelerate development of sea-based unmanned vehicles to operate in every environment.
- Invest in naval self-defense capabilities to ensure sea superiority.
Deployment and validation of Sea Shield capabilities will require strong partnerships with Commander, Fleet Forces Command, the Navy Warfare Development Command, the Office of Naval Research, Navy Headquarters, the system commands, counterpart organizations in other services, and key allies. Such efforts will build on recent events including Millennium Challenge 2002, Fleet Battle Experiment Juliet, and successful ballistic missile defense test firings from the USS Lake Erie (CG-70).
Enhanced Security, Stability, and Engagement
Yesterday's Navy defended itself and the sea lines of communication. Tomorrow's Navy will do much more. It will provide assured access for joint power projection forces in an environment where threats increasingly hold land bases at risk. It will protect friends and partners from enemies armed with an array of advanced and deadly weapons. And it will provide the first, critical layer of defense against asymmetric threats to the U.S. homeland.
Sea Shield will extend homeland defense, sustain access to contested littorals, and project security deep inland. In short, Sea Shield will provide the capabilities needed for the United States to deter, dissuade, and decisively defeat adversaries in the decades ahead, providing stability and security in an uncertain century.
Admiral Bucchi is Commander, Third Fleet. Admiral Mullen is Deputy CNO for Resources, Requirements, and Assessments.
Sea Power 21 Series:
Part I—Projecting Decisive Joint Capabilities
Part III—Sea Strike: Projecting Persistent, Responsive, and Precise Power
Part IV—Sea Basing: Operational Independence for a New Century
Part V—ForceNet: Turning Information into Power
Part VI—Global Concept of Operations
Part VII—Sea Warrior: Maximizing Human Capital
Part VIII—Sea Trial: Enabler for a Transformed Fleet
Part IX—Sea Enterprise: Resourcing Tomorrow's Fleet