You will kill it if you hit it and you will hit if if you see it. But you have to see it, first.
This call for persistent surveillance to target enemy ships is obvious but no less necessary to say:
The United States’ military is evolving towards a new way of warfare designed to counter adversaries’ efforts to develop a dominant anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capability. This new approach focuses on the proliferation of land units, air and sea platforms employing rapid maneuver, long-range fires, and non-traditional effects such as electronic and cyber warfare to confuse, degrade and eventually disintegrate opposing forces. The pace and intensity of combat will be greater than ever before. This means that U.S. forces will need to see more, act sooner, and transmit target quality data in near real-time from any sensor to an appropriate shooter. The only way of doing this is by establishing a distributed, ubiquitous capability for 24/7 sensing across the theater.
I've been on this network-centric approach to sea control for a long time:
According to the United States Navy, the basic advantage of network-centric warfare is that the Navy will be able to deploy widely dispersed units that mass effect in a timely manner without needing to mass the components themselves, as platform-centric warfare requires, for coordinated action. Superior surveillance, communications, mobility, and weapons effectiveness and range will allow this geographic dispersal of units. Even before the dawn of network-centric warfare, the widespread deployment of surface-to-surface missiles throughout the Navy made the aircraft carrier an important asset rather than one vital for offensive missions. By allowing all the units in the network to fight as a physically dispersed but tactically unified force, networks will make the carrier platform’s ability redundant. Concentration of effect will no longer rely on concentration of forces. In addition to the evident offensive value, this characteristic has defensive value by reducing the footprint of our forces, thus avoiding giving the enemy an attractive, high-value target. Dispersed small units that can fight as one yet remain dangerous despite the loss of even many of the individually less capable platforms will confound the enemy's efforts to deliver a decisive strike against the Navy.
The NDP recommended accelerating network-centric operations linking sensors and weapons generally and, for the Navy specifically, recommended "small-signature ships capable of providing sustained long-range, precision firepower." The panel also recommended a new smaller carrier (CVX) for short take off/vertical landing (STO/VL) aircraft and various unmanned aerial vehicles, including weaponized versions. Clearly, a networked Navy built from scratch would look far different from our current Navy which has evolved over time with overlapping assumptions and new technologies governing ship design over a generation or two.
I've continued to advocate this approach to sea control. On the other side of the coin, carriers are clearly vulnerable to enemy persistent surveillance networks with precision missiles.
More recently I noted the importance of surveillance for dispersing assets for safety while still massing effort. The plethora of names for this is stunning.
I'm just hoping we get the capability before we update the name of the concept again.
