Carrying On. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead last week dismissed notions that the sea service’s carrier force was quickly becoming a relic of warfare. After his speech at an unmanned technology symposium at the Brookings think tank in Washington, Roughead said the Navy’s carrier fleet would become more, not less, important in future conflicts. Aircraft carriers, he argued, were essentially “moveable sovereign airfields” and were not hamstrung by the various lease and host nation challenges that other installations have to deal with. As a number of host nations begin to revisit a number of those lease agreements with the U.S. military, the carrier force will be necessary to make up for that potential loss of access across the globe, Roughead said.
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…Sinking EW. With the Navy putting on display its bolstered air-based electronic warfare capabilities in Libya to devastating effect, the service’s top officer says it is time that the sea service began looking at focusing that capability in other warfighting domains. During his speech this week at an unmanned technology symposium in Washington, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead says the service needed to increase the impact of its EW technologies in its surface and underwater warfare portfolios. On underwater EW capabilities, the four-star says that a submarine-based EW application would be “an extraordinary system” when used in operations such as Odyssey Dawn. During the speech, he adds that an additional underwater cyberwarfare capability also had the potential to be a game changer for the Navy. 


Giving Notice. As the Air Force moves ahead with its long-awaited development of its new aerial refueler, Congress wants to make sure it does not get left out of the loop. As part of the HASC’s version of the fiscal year 2012 defense bill, lawmakers included language requiring the Pentagon to notify Capitol Hill of any changes to the program. According to the legislation, DoD acquisition chief Ashton Carter must inform Congress of any “major engineering, design, capability or configuration change” made to the KC-45 program of record. Additionally, Air Force program officials must also submit the cost difference associated with the change, compared to the program baseline, “when it becomes known.” House committee members unanimously adopted the measure into the bill. The full House will vote on the defense spending legislation later this month.
Home Port. Tensions between the Florida and Virginia delegations of the HASC came to a head this week, over proposed legislation to increase funding for construction work at the Navy’s shipyards in Mayport, Fla. Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) proposed an amendment to the panel’s version of the fiscal year 2012 defense bill to finance work at the Mayport installation, which would allow nuclear-powered carriers to dock there. The legislation would have given the Navy two locations on the East Coast to service the nuclear-powered carrier fleet. The other location is in Norfolk, Va. Miller and others argued that the two locations would ensure that carrier maintenance could be carried out at a faster clip, while ensuring that the service’s carrier fleet on the East Coast would not be centrally located at one facility. However, members of the Virginia delegation opposed the legislation, noting the Navy had more pressing funding requirements, and that such work at the Mayport shipyards would only be duplicative. Miller eventually withdrew the legislation, but is expected to raise the issue back when the bill comes to the full House.