Disruptive Technologies: The Navy's Way Forward

In 2010, the Center for Naval Analyses published “The Navy at a Tipping Point,” in which the authors noted that the current force composition was fiscally unsustainable and needed to be altered. They presented several trades that would allow the service to be restructured around future strategic goals.¹ Now, with the projected budget shift to the Pacific, the Navy has more or less implemented those recommendations. Historically, as the CNA authors noted, globally dominant navies have been the leading innovators of their day because they introduced important new classes of ships. Technologically disruptive, those made prior classes obsolete and changed the way navies were organized. Today the era of industrial navies is over, and the time has come for a new kind of Navy.