Building more of our expensive submarines, carriers, and multi-mission surface warships may not be the way to go to defeat China at sea. Perhaps a dramatically larger networked fleet is needed.
Maybe more of our big ships are the key to sea control in a hard battle against another sea power. But what if they aren't?
In a world where the large and the complex are either too expensive to generate en masse or potentially too vulnerable to put at risk, “the small, the agile, and the many” has the potential to define the future of Navy formations.
The Navy needs formations composed of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of unmanned vehicles above, below, and on the ocean surface. It needs to build collaborating, autonomous formations, not a collection of platforms.
As you might expect because I wrote about this over twenty years ago, I agree:
Under the conditions of today’s platform-centric warfare, dispersal weakens a force and makes it slow to respond and mount a concentrated attack. In order to concentrate effect in an attack with platforms, forces need to be collocated or, if dispersed, near the enemy (or collocated with or near the friendly asset to be defended). Aircraft carriers overcome this problem of delivering massed effect by collocating a powerful air wing on a mobile airfield that, on its own, can deliver strong blows. ...
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. ...
The [National Defense Panel] 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.
My focus was on the danger of building the Ford-class carrier and putting so much of our fleet power into a few vulnerable assets. I wanted cheaper, dispersed assets that we could afford to lose and still win the sea control battle.
At the time, autonomous ships, subs, and aircraft were not on my radar screen to get numbers. Modularized auxiliary cruisers were. But autonomous assets make my hopes for network-centric dispersed assets more effective.
Not that carriers are useless. But their value is in power projection--or after sea control is won to exploit the control.
Let's get moving on that Plan B. You never know when an enemy attack will make our Plan B the only plan we have left.
