Is the Future of the U.S. Navy Feasible?

[rangerrebew]

Is the Future of the U.S. Navy Feasible?
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By Adam Taylor
October 22, 2020
 

Last month the House Armed Services Committee released its “Future of Defense Task Force Report 2020,” which sought to evaluate the strategic priorities of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to better match national resources to next-generation threats.  Among its many recommendations includes the need to “prioritize the development of emerging technologies over fielding and maintaining systems” by requiring “significant changes to force structure, posture, [and] operational plans…complemented by a tough and fulsome review of legacy systems, platforms, and missions.”  This is prescient given the ongoing debate about the future of the U.S. Navy (USN) and the merits of the recently proposed “Battle Force 2045” by Defense Secretary Mark Esper, which calls for a 500-ship fleet.  Although bold for its scope and vision, further analysis illustrates that the Battle Force 2045 fleet concept raises just as many questions as it seeks to answer.

A brief review of how the USN arrived at a 500-ship fleet construct, however, is first in order.  In 2016, the USN released its Force Structure Assessment (FSA), which outlines the balance of existing forces, ships currently under construction, and future procurement plans needed to meet the service’s responsibilities.  This FSA led the Navy to support a 355-ship fleet requirement that Congress adopted as national policy in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).  Since that time, the USN has developed plans to acquire unmanned surface and subsurface vehicles that would increase the total number of ships counted in the future fleet and embarked upon a new Integrated Naval FSA (INFSA) in 2019 to assess what a fleet with unmanned ships would look like.  DoD, however, did not release INFSA’s findings, instead choosing to commission new studies on the future fleet from the Pentagon’s Office Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation and the Hudson Institute to inform its Battle Force 2045 proposal.  These studies influenced the Navy’s departure from a target of 355 conventionally crewed ships to a 500-ship fleet composed of both crewed and minimally manned or autonomous platforms.   

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2020/10/22/is_the_future_of_the_us_navy_feasible_581633.html

[AL]

With all this modern technology being put on warships, I wonder about dependability.  In combat there is no time for re-boots, software updates, bug fixes and all the other failures technology brings with it.  A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.