The Navy is thinking about distributed lethality as a fleet concept, as opposed to simply a surface force concept, according to the head of the service’s Fleet Forces Command.
Adm. Philip Davidson said Friday distributed lethality, in addition to integrated fire control networks and maneuverability, are concepts the Navy is starting to rally around in fleet design. Davidson said when the Navy war games a fleet that has more lethal force that is also more widely distributed, its commanders are much more confident and its adversaries are much more conservative.
Manueverablity is also key, he said, because the Navy is the maneuver force inside the joint force. Davidson said the Navy’s ability to exploit the electromagnetic spectrum and the physical spectrum while being able to maneuver at will is important to the service’s ability to achieve its objective and deny an adversary.
Davidson said he talked with Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work last week about the organizational construct that personifies the Third Offset strategy, the Pentagon’s idea for maintaining its technological superiority. Davidson said the fleet is that organizational construct as the various geographies around the world where the Navy travels, including the eastern Mediterranean and western Pacific, all bring markedly-different physical challenges.
“What we would put into the battlespace has to be effective in all those environments, not to mention the electromagnetic environment,” Davidson said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.
Davidson believes speed of decision and action and the human-machine symbiosis will be incredibly important moving forward. He said the Navy used to prepare a group, get it up to speed in its warfare areas and deploy it to sea with all functions existing inside that group. In the future, he said, it is important for the power of all these platforms like submarines, surface forces or aircraft, to come together and inform the whole of the fleet. This, Davidson said, will allow the fleet commander to operate that fleet integrated, distributed and maneuverable in a way that delivers his or her objectives.