Together We Must Design the Future Force

Within my planning guidance, I noted that “the character of war is increasingly dynamic, and the rapid advance of new technologies has accelerated the rate of change, ensuring that the character of war in the future will be much different than that of the recent past.”¹ While some may argue that discussion related to the changing character of warfare should be confined to the academic halls of Newport or Quantico, I disagree. A recognition and shared understanding of that change are essential to our naval force development—and, more important, an integrated naval force design. Failure to create this shared understanding will result in the continued pursuit and procurement of capabilities that no longer are “modern” despite being “new”; that are exquisite but not risk-worthy; and that consume billions of dollars but are not remedies to current or projected operational problems. This is unacceptable. Simply reacting to the latest threats and seeking a technological remedy to each adversary advancement is folly—and fiscally unsupportable. The solution lies in creating advantage and causing potential adversaries to react to our collective naval—Navy and Marine Corps—efforts.

As I also stated in my planning guidance, “the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps do not seek to merely discern the future operating environment, but are determined to define the future character of maritime conflict, so that naval forces will deter or fight from a position of enduring advantage.” This is our collective naval force challenge—to define the future character of naval warfare. Our adversaries have initiated a new paradigm, based on long-range precision weapons and information-related capabilities. The extended range, quantity, and accuracy of these fires impose new challenges and necessitate significant changes to the concepts and capabilities by which we will conduct fleet and expeditionary operations.

In future conflicts, the Navy and Marine Corps will be challenged to achieve sea denial and control in close, contested, and confined maritime regions such as the South China Sea, East China Sea, Baltic Sea, Persian Gulf, and Black Sea. The Navy and Marine Corps together will need to fight for sea control from within contested spaces. Our war games highlight the real threat of long-range missiles; to succeed, we must possess the capability to persist within the arc of adversary fires. We must evolve into the nation’s “stand-in” force.

Our forward bases and infrastructure—including large runways, deep water ports, and all associated large and exquisite platforms resident at our forward-deployed locations—within adversary weapons engagement zones are vulnerable targets. Withdrawing such capabilities upon indications and warnings of conflict does not comport with favorable deterrence options.

These observations and assumptions are consistent with those previously articulated during testimony by Navy Admirals Phil Davidson, Harry Harris, and Scott Swift and current Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday. We are in an era of high-volume, extended-range missile warfare—a change in the character of naval warfare. Our adversaries have attacked the primary assumptions on which the legacy U.S. joint force has been built—presumptive sea and air control and assured access. They can negate our advantages with overwhelming capacity and generate prohibitive cost impositions. But this can be reversed.

The ascendance of missiles and other long-range precision fires has made our service’s approach to amphibious operations and power projection and previous concepts to support fleet operations anachronistic. To facilitate deterrence, we must turn our adversary’s near seas into mutually denied spaces. Better strategic options depend on our ability to create an integrated maritime defense-in-depth within the arc of adversary long-range precision fires. We must develop the tactics and capabilities to create these conditions.

We must get our critical infrastructure and vulnerabilities “off the X” by establishing mobile, low-signature forward presence. We must develop distributed, low-signature, lethal, networked, persistent, and risk-worthy joint expeditionary capabilities that can persist and operate within the adversary’s weapons engagement zone. We must introduce uncertainty into the adversary risk calculus with more expeditionary bases, distributed signatures, and operationally relevant capabilities and posture. We must maintain persistent, forward forces with high lethality and operational reach to ensure we keep “a foot in the door” and don’t have to risk “kicking in the door.” We must provide resilience to our forward stand-in forces with relative economy.

Critical to serving as a credible deterrent is partnership. Therefore, our new naval capabilities must empower our partners and allies as much as ourselves.

Success will be defined in terms of finding the smallest, lowest signature options that yield the maximum operational utility, potentially including long-range unmanned surface vessels, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, unmanned underwater vessels, loitering munitions,
directed-energy weapons, and precision strike with ranges in excess of 350 nautical miles. We must always be mindful of the ratio of operational contribution to employment cost. We will test various forms of expeditionary advanced base operations (EABO) against specific threats in war games and experiments and ask ourselves whether EABO contributions to the joint force are worth their logistical and security burdens. This ratio should be more favorable than other joint force options, and if it is not, we will have the moral courage to say so and seek other remedies.

Finally, my guidance states, “Our ambitions are more aggressive than preserving status quo options, and we seek to restore the strategic initiative by establishing a disruptive and highly competitive space where American ingenuity can capitalize on the new capabilities that U.S. naval forces will exploit to deter conflict and dominate confined seas.” I welcome and encourage spirited debate on the merits of this vision and invite any and all to counter my observations, assumptions, and conclusions using facts, analysis, and evidence.