Posted: December 2, 2015 4:47 PM
Navy Aegis Manager: ‘We Need to Re-Arm the Surface Navy’
By RICHARD R. BURGESS, Managing Editor
ARLINGTON, Va. — The Navy needs to pursue placing more offensive armament on its surface warships to give them a formidable offensive capability and change the defense mindset of the Navy’s surface fleet.
“Every ship has to have some punch, so we need to re-arm the surface navy,” said CAPT Tom Druggan, the Navy’s major program manager for Aegis Integrated Combat Systems in the Program Executive Office for Integrated Warfare Systems.
A heavily armed surface action group in a region, “any one of which can sink an entire foreign navy, really makes the adversary think” when deciding whether to make a move, Druggan said Dec. 2 at the Combat Systems Symposium sponsored at the Washington Navy Yard by the American Society of Naval Engineers. “If it’s only carrier strike groups, they [an enemy] will complete their objective within their timeline before we get there.”
Arming surface combatants with more offensive firepower allows them to bring to bear a greater distribution of lethality in sea control strike capability in addition to their resident land-attack capability.
“The carrier may not be there. We’re going to fight with the forces that we have. If we’re out of firepower, we’re out of the game,” he said. “Defense is not good enough anymore.”
Regarding the advances made in situational awareness, Druggan said that “being able to see a target is necessary but not sufficient to shoot it down.”
Druggan noted that the Navy lacks an electro-magnetic pulse weapon that could defeat a mass strike and appealed to the defense industry to develop one.
He also said that Navy acquisition has benefitted by giving its program acquisition resource managers more freedom to “race forward on their own with general requirements from the combat system but not detailed engineering requirements. In my opinion, that has been to our great advantage.
“As a result of that,” Druggan said, “we have SM-6 [Standard Missile-6], ESSM [Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile] Block 2, SEWIP [Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program] Block 2 and Block 3, [and] AMDR [Air and Missile Defense Radar], all being delivered asynchronously, with general requirements rather than a host of engineering requirements. As a result of that, we are getting phenomenal capability. What it has enabled is that generational leap from MilSpec [Military Specification] and analog systems to software-controlled, solid-state systems. Whenever you are software-controlled, it opens up future growth paths that are very affordable.”
He noted that there is a “five-to-seven-year lag between a combat system configuration and a shipbuilding contract and delivery to the fleet for use. So our only options there are software upgrades.”
Druggan praised open-architecture systems but cautioned about pushing them too far.
“I believe that we are open enough,” he said. “We’re [sourcing] multiple classes of ships from two computer code libraries.”
He noted that the Navy equipped new-construction destroyers, destroyer modernization, cruiser modernization, [and] Aegis Ashore 97 to 99 percent common code.
“In a different world, those would have been four separate development programs,” he said.
http://www.seapowermagazine.org/stories/20151202-surface-arms.html
