Fiscal pressures on military budgets around the world have the potential to impact advances made in global maritime partnerships if all the parties don’t take on some difficult questions, according to the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO).
“Here in the U.S. we must juxtapose the reality of compressed defense budgets against a growing demand for military and especially naval power to maintain world order,” Adm. Gary Roughead told attendees at the Mast Americas Maritime Systems and Technology conference in Arlington, Va.
Without diligence, this juxtaposition could easily become mismatch for resources, he added.
“All of us, all countries, face this to varying degrees,” Roughead said. “A cursory reading of any front page of any newspaper on any day will reveal that finances available to defense have changed. This is a common challenge and only becoming more acute. As such, I think it is time for some provocative questions, creative thinking, and new processes, but most importantly it is time to act.”
Roughead told attendees the Navy started down this path programmatically by truncating the DDG-1000 combat ship and canceling two Littoral Combat Ships due to excessive cost. Additionally, the Navy canceled an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) because it was non-producing and cancelled missile programs because there was no return on the investment that we were providing, Roughead noted.
And Roughead acknowledged that as the Navy ventures into cyber defense and unmanned systems, officials must ask some fundamental questions. “Can these capabilities come from the sea?”
If the answer is no, Roughead said, then he doesn’t even want to bother bringing them to the table. “It must come from the sea.”
UUVs are more challenging, he added. “Can these systems integrate with the fleet that we have? It’s always easier to envision the new fleet we can build, but if you take into account the 288 ships that serve in our Navy today, about 220 of them will still be on [rolls] so you can’t forget about the fleet we have today.”
Can the systems the Navy develops be common and used across all platforms? Roughead asked.
“The biggest question I believe in all of this is what are we willing to afford,” he said. “No navy today can afford to spend its way out of this challenge. We have to think our way out and we have to maintain affordability.”
Roughead said navies might have to spend a lot on countering potential adversaries that are able to acquire counter capabilities for very little investment. “This means we cannot afford tailor-made solutions for every need that we have.”
“Especially in the software applications we use. We cannot afford to build a new program for every process,” he added.
Navies must find ways to improve the affordability of the forces they are developing, Roughead said.
“We must exploit open architecture efficiencies, identify common components where possible and investigate common hull forms and common airframes,” he explained. “All of this will require a renewed commitment on the part of maritime nations to maintain the capabilities in sufficient capacity.”