Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, penned a report last month detailing his plan to realign U.S. Navy surface warfare in a way that deals with the threats of a post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan world. The report is titled “Commanding the Seas: A Plan to Reinvigorate U.S. Navy Surface Warfare.”
We at Virtual Analyst discussed with him what his recommendations are for various types of ship programs. Here are Clark’s comments on the DDG-51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and the role he believes it should play in the future fleet, as well as the development of the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM).
“The Flight IIAs, I envision the weapons mix on those changing to give it more offensive firepower. What I envision there is a shift to a defensive anti-air-warfare capability that was mostly done with ESSM-type missiles, the Sea Sparrow, and instead of using SM-2s to shift to SM-6s for offensive anti-air warfare, so they’d be using those to shoot down enemy airplanes. So that means the weapons mix in VLS [vertical launch system] cells would involve a lot more ESSMs, then shift to more SM-6s rather than SM-2s.
“The main changes to DDG-51 Flight IIA would be in the VLS magazine, and then for the Flight IIIs, I recommended that put on a 300 to 500 kilowatt laser in place of a 5-inch gun.
“Then what I proposed is, as the Navy develops the surface-launched version of its anti-ship missile, LRASM [Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile], that they make sure that weapon is able to be multimission between land attack and surface attack, whatever the missile ends up being. It’s going to be developed very quickly, because there’s a lot of weapons out there that could be leveraged. The Tomahawk is out there, or you can take the JASSM [Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile] that’s being used right now and give that a longer range and smaller warhead, and it would be able to do land attack. So there’s a number of ways do that, but I recommended the Navy get away from these single-mission weapons for strike and anti-ship warfare.”