Get ready for a new era in naval warfare
We may be on the precipice of a
major shift in naval warfare that is
every bit as disruptive and significant as the armored battleship and
submarine in World War I, and the
aircraft carrier in World War II.
The idea revolves around real-time secure networks of manned
and unmanned aircraft, surface
ships, and submarines able to attack
and defend vast areas of the world’s
oceans to hold enemy ships and submarines at risk over wide contested
areas. This is the core concept of the
Cross Domain Maritime Surveillance
and Targeting (CDMaST) Phase 2
project of the U.S. Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in
Arlington, Va. It could lead to a new
era of global sea control, and could
be a fundamental step forward in
maritime combat.
CDMaST would augment aircraft
carrier battle groups and manned
submarines with networked manned
and unmanned systems of systems (SoS) that work collaboratively
to control the seas. This approach
has the potential to render previous
forms of naval warfare obsolete.
The advent of shipboard nuclear
power in the 1950s leads us to today’s
most modern aircraft carriers, fast
attack submarines, and ballistic mis-
sile submarines that can operate for
years without refueling. These ves-
sels have been kings of the ocean
now for nearly 60 years. Everything
changes, however, and it’s unlikely
that nuclear-powered aircraft carriers
and submarines will remain the cen-
terpieces of naval power.
U.S. sea-control today revolves
around carrier battle groups and
nuclear submarines. Basing the
Navy’s survival on these assets, however, increasingly is difficult because
of the many enemy long-range anti-ship missiles they face. Adversaries
also are quickly enhancing their
anti-submarine warfare capabilities.
To overcome these obstacles,
the CDMaST program seeks to
move away from a centralized
defensive battle group posture to a
more distributed and agile approach
to hold the opponent at risk over
ocean areas as large as a million
square kilometers.
Think of it: The Navy no longer
would have to base its global strategy on 12 aircraft carriers, 52 attack
submarines, and 18 ballistic- and
cruise-missile submarines. Instead,
the heart of U.S. naval power would
be rapidly reconfigurable forces of
size and scope to meet specific challenges when and where they are
needed most.
The concept is to distribute com-
bat ability across many low-cost sys-
tems to threaten the opponent and
put him on the defensive. This will
involve a combination of manned
and unmanned systems to form
SoS architectures able to conduct
wide-area surveillance and targeting,
and cause the opponent to expend
resources trying to defeat the low-
cost systems.
Today’s aircraft carriers and
nuclear submarines would become
platforms for deploying manned and
unmanned surveillance and strike
assets. Meanwhile, they would retain
their offensive and human leadership
capabilities. These expensive vessels
wouldn’t have to operate close to the
enemy; instead they would send their
unmanned systems to do that in the
air, on the water, and under the surface. It’s doing more with less.
Such a future naval strategy also
would use pre-deployed hidden sensors and weapons like those envisioned in the DARPA Upward Falling
Payloads program. DARPA researchers are considering networked systems of new anti-ship missiles; fast,
long-range undersea weapon systems; unmanned, long-endurance
air, surface, and undersea vehicles;
and prepositioned seafloor systems.
Combined with manned platforms,
these systems can provide the surveillance and targeting needed to
exploit new weapons.
New technologies would come
to bear in communications; battle
management; command and control; position, navigation, and timing; logistics; sensors; manned and
unmanned systems; and weapons.
It’s a new day for which we
should prepare ourselves. The era
of distributed networked naval systems is not far off. Í