The U.S. Navy plans to publish a paper in mid-May that will lay out a “vision” for its future force, service officials said April 27.
The article will explain how the Navy intends to pursue two key but expensive goals — expanding the fleet and incorporating new technology into those ships — within a “budget-informed” environment, said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson.
“We’re all over the world … and you have to have capacity to be there,” Richardson said at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “But you have to have the right capability set as well. And [the Navy’s strategy] has got to be mindful of the resources that are available. That’s our challenge. And we should be coming out with something compelling over the next couple weeks.”
The Navy’s recent force structure assessment calls for a fleet of 355 ships, up from 275 ships today. But building and operating that many more ships will require tens of billions of dollars a year in additional funding, which will be difficult to obtain in today’s political climate. And that money does not include the advances in cyber security, directed energy, space systems, unmanned systems and other technologies that the Navy seeks to keep its edge over adversaries. As a result, the upcoming paper, roughly 2,000 words in length, might indicate that the Navy could have to relax its 355-ship target to achieve its desired capabilities.
“I think there’s an almost unanimous consensus that the future security environment is going to demand more Navy, a bigger Navy,” Richardson told the Brookings audience. But “if I built 355 of today’s ships, operated them under today’s concepts and projected that forward into the mid- to late-2020s, that’s probably not the force that would be decisive, that would be able to protect America from attack and promote our interests around the world. We have to innovate; it’s absolutely essential that we do so. Otherwise, we will have an irrelevant Navy out there that will not be competitive in the future environment.”
Richardson, a former submarine commander, said the Navy retains an advantage over its adversaries in the undersea domain, “but that’s fleeting. And if we don’t continue to mind that closely, that advantage will evaporate.”
Cutting the cost of missiles is also a Navy priority. “We are on the wrong side of the cost curve on this,” Richardson said. “Interceptors are very expensive and few and they have to go up against potentially much less expensive and many missiles. How do we turn that around? I think that there are some solutions right around the corner that will allow us to do that.”
The Navy is also trying to figure out how to streamline and speed up its acquisition process. For example, the Navy is looking at whether it could design a ship in half or even a third of the time it takes now.
“We have got to challenge all of our assumptions,” Richardson said. “Why does it take us so long to design a ship these days? Why does it take us so long to build that ship once designed, or aircraft or whatever? We’re working very hard with industry right now to really do a full-court press on those assumptions and get things done faster.”