Redesign the Fleet
Proceedings Magazine - January 2019 Vol.
By Captain Arthur H. Barber III, U.S. Navy
The U.S. Navy’s current fleet design does not match today’s conditions, much less those expected over the next 20 years. Today’s fleet—a mix of ship types that are simply evolutionary improvements and larger versions of designs from two or more decades ago—is too small, and the ships on average are too large. It is time for the Navy to make broad, significant changes in the fleet’s design.
The rapid rise of global connectedness—and the technological progress and proliferation that it has sparked—raises new challenges for designing a fleet with the capabilities required to execute its missions across the globe. The ability to detect warships at long ranges or even globally is no longer a U.S. monopoly. Commercial space sensors are burgeoning, and their data is available in the marketplace. Many nations have sophisticated military space programs, distributed networked sensor fields, and long-range unmanned aerial vehicles that can search far from shore. Sensor capability is advancing faster than the ability to elude detection. Long-range precision-guided weapons are proliferating and can be brought to bear in numbers against what these sensor systems detect. Weapon speed is increasing while weapon signature is decreasing.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019-01/redesign-fleet
