Technology for the United States Navy and Marine Corps, 2000-2035: Becoming a 21st-Century Force: Volume 1: Overview (1997)

The future national security environment in which the naval forces will play a key part is likely to change much more rapidly than the naval forces themselves can be changed. A great deal of adaptability must therefore be incorporated into them from the start. Their form, modes of operation, and military capability will also be driven in large part by the rapidly advancing technology that will build them. This study explores the nature of the future environment in which U.S. naval forces will have to operate, and it examines how technology can be applied to restructuring the naval forces to better position them to meet the challenges of that environment.

The tasks that naval forces are required to perform have changed little over the decades and are expected to continue in the future. They will include:

• Sustaining a forward presence;

• Establishing and maintaining blockades;

• Deterring and defeating attacks on the United States, our allies, and friendly nations, and, in particular, sustaining a sea-based nuclear deterrent force;

• Projecting national military power through modern expeditionary warfare, including attacking land targets from the sea, landing forces ashore and providing fire and logistic support for them, and engaging in sustained combat when necessary;

• Ensuring global freedom of the seas, airspace, and space; and

• Operating in joint and combined settings in all these missions.

Without the focusing effects of the Cold War, existing instabilities in the international situation are being accentuated and new ones are appearing. Many conflicts arising from disputes over resources, ethnic and religious hatreds, and drives for regional dominance can be expected. Strong, regional power centers can be anticipated; they are emerging even now. New kinds of warfare, some carried out by terrorist and organized criminal groups that are not parts of any recognized government, will pose new kinds of problems for U.S. naval forces.

An overseas U.S. military presence ashore is not assured; it will be constrained or contested in many locations where it may be needed. A global U.S. naval force capability and presence will be needed, to support our allies and exercise U.S. influence among other nations, and for projection of U.S. naval power ashore when needed. The United States will usually operate in coalitions overseas, so that combined operations will be the rule for our naval forces. The naval forces ' forward posture will likely make them first on the scene in many crises.

Resources for building and sustaining U.S. naval forces are expected to be tight into the indefinite future. This constraint, together with technical developments that demand interoperability and cost sharing, will require naval forces to be designed for and to operate in a fully joint environment with the other military Services under the command of regional commanders-in-chief (CINCs). Tight resources may also limit the overall size of the naval forces, requiring that they be spread more thinly to meet their global responsibilities.

Advanced technology is spreading worldwide. In key areas, it will come to the naval forces mainly from the civilian, including the international civilian, world. U.S. military technological superiority will not be assured without significant, focused, and sustained effort. The naval forces will have to be alert for significant technological change and be ready to exploit new technologies expeditiously.

Burgeoning military capabilities elsewhere will, in hostile hands, pose threats to U.S. naval force operation. The most serious are as follows:

• Access to and exploitation of space-based observation to track the surface fleet, making surprise more difficult to achieve and heightening the fleet's vulnerability;

• Increased ability to disrupt and exploit technically based intelligence and information systems;

• Effective antiaircraft weapons and systems;

• All manner of mines, including “smart” minefields with networked sensors that can target individual ships for damage or destruction by mobile mines;

• Antiship cruise missiles with challenging physical and flight characteristics;

• Accurately guided ballistic missiles able to attack the fleet;

• Quiet, modern, air-independent submarines with modern torpedoes; and

• Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

The naval forces will have to be designed to meet the kinds of opposition these threats will pose.

Application of the advancing technologies that are described in Chapter 6 of this report can lead to a complete transformation of the naval forces, amounting to a breakthrough in naval force capabilities. Foremost among the breakthrough capabilities that could be achieved are the following:

• Sustained information superiority over adversaries;

• Major ships operated effectively by many fewer people, through the use of networked instrumentation and automated subsystems;

• A family of rocket-propelled, guided missiles, significantly lower in cost than today's weapons, that will greatly increase the responsiveness, rate of fire, volume of fire, and accuracy of strike, interdiction, and supporting fire from surface combatants and submarines;

• STOL or STOVL, stealth, and standoff in combat aircraft;

• Cooperative air-to-air engagement at long range using networked multistatic sensor, aircraft, and missile systems;

• Use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for both routine and excessively dangerous tasks;

• Greatly expanded submarine capability to support naval force operations ashore;

• Recapture of the antisubmarine warfare advantage that has been eroded by quieting of Russian nuclear submarines and by advanced air-independent nonnuclear submarines that are being sold by other nations on world markets;

• The ability to negate minefields at sea, in the surf, and on the beaches much more rapidly than has been possible heretofore;

• Novel weapons, systems, and techniques for fighting in populated areas, against organized military forces, irregulars, and terrorist and criminal groups; and

• Logistic support extensively based at sea that will provide needed materiel on time with far less excess supply in the system than has been the case in the past.

Operations during the Gulf War and since have shown that such capabilities, in the main, are still in rudimentary form. Broad implementation of all of them in integrated fashion must await full development, maturation, and application of the technologies described. This series of changes will add up to a revolution over the 40 years envisioned by the study.

Naval force operations using these new capabilities will be characterized by the following:

• Operations from forward deployment, with a few major, secure bases of prepositioned equipment and supplies;

• Great economy of force based on early, reliable intelligence; on the timely acquisition, processing, and dissemination of local, conflict-, and environment-related information; and on all aspects of information warfare;

• Combined arms operations from dispersed positions, using stealth, surprise, speed, and precision in identifying targets and attacking opponents, with fire and forces massed rapidly from great distances at decisive locations and times;

• Defensive combat operations and systems, from ship self-defense through air defense, antisubmarine warfare, and antitactical ballistic missile defense, always networked in cooperative engagement modes that extend from the fleet to cover troops and installations ashore;

• Marine Corps operations in dispersed, highly mobile units from farther out at sea to deeper inland over a broader front, with more rapid conquest or neutralization of hostile populated areas, in the mode currently evolving into the doctrine for Operational Maneuver From the Sea;

• Extensive use of commercial firms for maintenance and support functions; and

• Extensive task sharing and mission integration in the joint and combined environment, with many key systems, especially in the information area, jointly operated. (Operational “fallback” positions for naval forces whose joint support is delayed or prevented from arriving by the exigencies of conflict are discussed in Chapter 8 , in the section titled “Payoffs and Vulnerabilities.”)

Taken together with ongoing work on defense against cruise missiles and tactical or theater ballistic missile defenses, the vision evoked by these advanced capabilities, if they are implemented and used to enable leaner, more streamlined modes of operation, can position the naval forces to carry out their missions in the face of future international security challenges, threats, and fiscal constraints far more efficiently and effectively than today's forces could. Implementing the capabilities will require a stable, sustained R&D program, in areas that are described later in this report. Modeling and simulation (M&S) has become a foundation technology in naval system and force development and utilization. If developed in directions described in this report and used appropriately, this technology can greatly facilitate progress toward the goals described above; indeed, in some areas the capability sought will be difficult or impossible to achieve

within reasonable resource expenditures without the use of modeling and simulation.

The force development described will have to proceed on many fronts simultaneously. Otherwise, delays in advancing some capabilities —such as failure to establish information superiority, or to develop the responsive firepower needed to support dispersed forces ashore, or to meet the threats of mines, submarines, and missiles, or to be able to dominate populated areas quickly, or to advance the logistic system together with the combat systems—can turn into “showstoppers” for the entire naval force.

The resulting “lean” forces will inevitably have vulnerabilities that must be accounted for. The most serious of these will emerge from disruption of operations due to enemy action and the well-known “fog” and “friction” of war, and from failure of key force elements to perform when expected and as expected, for unforeseen reasons. Prudent steps (detailed in Chapter 8 of this report) can be taken to mitigate the worst effects of the vulnerabilities. Such mitigation efforts must be built into the system and force design. The character and cost of such “insurance” programs must be considered an integral part of the effort in implementing the new naval force capabilities.