The U.S. Navy is studying the ideas of pulling up to eight mothballed Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates back to service, extending the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers, and increased networking to achieve a larger fleet faster than expected, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) said Tuesday.
Speaking at the Naval War College, Adm. John Richardson said the service is looking at all of the options to both increase the number of platforms in the fleet as well as increasing their capabilities as the Defense Department plans a 355 ship fleet. In response to a question, Richardson said the Navy is “taking a hard look at the Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates. There’s seven or eight of those that I think we could take a look at. But those are some old ships and the technology on those ships is old.”
The CNO noted that the information technology environment moves in an exponential rather than evolutionary or linear progression, “ you know a lot has changed since we last modernized those. And so it will be a cost-benefit analysis in terms of how we do that.”
Richardson also talked about life extension of current ships, focusing on the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers (DDGs). “If we plan now, for instance, to extend the life Arleigh Burke DDGs beyond the current projections, the initial returns are we could buy 10 to 15 years to the left in terms of reaching that 350 ship goal.
Keeping ships out of mothballs for longer will be “money in the bank if we do that,” he added.
Richardson and a Navy spokesperson elaborated later on Twitter that bringing back the Perrys is not a foregone conclusion and efforts to extend service life are more mature. “We need to be deliberate as we work or way through these decisions,” Richardson said.
The bulk of the CNO’s speech focused on how important information technology growth is accelerating in an exponential way and what that means for how the Navy must operate.
Americans are learning to live with “smart” computer devices “but in terms of our business and fleet design, we may not have yet fully appreciated its impact, which were to date underpinned by superior access to data and a presumed advantage that it has in a military application.”
Richardson proposed that in an era of cube sats and zetabytes of information increasingly ubiquitous, the U.S. observational advantage is being eroded and the new contest will be in decision and who can make better sense and use of all that data.
“So how quickly we move to connect distributed sensors to capable payloads in the middle with orienting and deciding? That’s going to determine whether we prevail in this new era of competition,” he said.
Focusing only on superior observation is a losing strategy, but he said this is an additive challenge because the Navy cannot abandon precision as they move to faster filtering and understanding of observational data.
This fed into the CNO’s vision, earlier noted in the Future Vision Paper, that networking naval platforms together is a big part of how they can achieve the exponential growth necessary to increase capabilities (Defense Daily, May 17).
He said building more platforms and extending their capabilities are an important step in a more powerful Navy, noting tools like unmanned and autonomous devices, directed emergy weapons, and imaging radars. However, networking the platforms together is the final step and grows the Navy’s capability faster than any linear approach, he said. With networking, Navy platforms can operate in more adaptive and interesting ways.
Separately, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing this week on the fiscal year 2018 budget request, Secretary of Defense Mattis said he would assign an official to directed energy systems (Defense Daily, June 12).
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) noted that Section 219 of last year’s defense bill instructed the secretary to designate a senior official “to have principle responsibility for the development and transition of directed energy weapons systems.” However, the senator noted so far the position had not been filled.
“Yes sir, thanks for bringing it up. I didn’t know I had that responsibility, I’m learning more every day. But I will – if that’s a responsibility you’ve assigned it will be done,” Mattis responded.