Austal Pushes Big Missiles For Small Ships: LCS & VLS

Austal Pushes Big Missiles For Small Ships: LCS & VLS
Austal Pushes Big Missiles For Small Ships: LCS & VLS

NATIONAL HARBOR: How much firepower can fit on the Navy’s smallest warship? With the Chinese and Russian navies on the rise, American admirals want more “distributed lethality” from everything in the fleet, especially the controversial Littoral Combat Ship. Here at the Navy League’s annual Sea-Air-Space conference, the manufacturers of the two very different versions of…

414 Ships, No LCS: MITRE’s Alternative Navy

414 Ships, No LCS: MITRE’s Alternative Navy
414 Ships, No LCS: MITRE’s Alternative Navy

WASHINGTON: The Navy needs a vastly larger fleet — 414 warships — to win a great-power war, well above today’s 274 ships or even the Navy’s unfunded plan for 355, the think-tank MITRE calculates in a congressionally-chartered study. That ideal fleet would include: 14 aircraft carriers instead of today’s 11; 160 cruisers and destroyers instead…

Big Wars, Small Ships: CSBA’s Alternative Navy Praised By Sen. McCain

Big Wars, Small Ships: CSBA’s Alternative Navy Praised By Sen. McCain
Big Wars, Small Ships: CSBA’s Alternative Navy Praised By Sen. McCain

UPDATED with McCain praise WASHINGTON: The Navy needs a bigger fleet of smaller ships than envisioned in its official Force Structure Assessment, says a congressionally-chartered study from the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments. CSBA emphatically agrees with the Navy that the focus needs to shift from day-to-day counter-terrorism and presence operations to deterring (and if need be,…

Why Mattis Headed East: Time For China Strategy

Why Mattis Headed East: Time For China Strategy
Why Mattis Headed East: Time For China Strategy

Why is newly confirmed Defense Secretary Jim Mattis making his first overseas trip to the Western Pacific to confer with two of America’s key allies, Japan and South Korea? After all, both Mattis and Gen. Joe Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have declared Russia poses the greatest danger to the United States. But…

Fear China Most, ‘Flip’ Russia, Beware Iran: CSBA

Fear China Most, ‘Flip’ Russia, Beware Iran: CSBA
Fear China Most, ‘Flip’ Russia, Beware Iran: CSBA

WASHINGTON: Wealth, population and thin-skinned nationalism make China the number one threat to the US-led world order, not Russia or Islamic terrorism, writes leading military strategist Andrew Krepinevich. That means the US must build up forward-deployed forces in the Western Pacific, he writes, if necessary at the expense of defending Europe. Russia’s oil-dependent economy and…

Fixing The Ford, Getting Creative With Carriers

Fixing The Ford, Getting Creative With Carriers
Fixing The Ford, Getting Creative With Carriers

This week, the Navy finally announced a delivery date for the long-delayed and $2.4 billion over-budget aircraft carrier, the Gerald Ford (CVN-78). “In hindsight,” said Adm. Thomas Moore, head of Naval Sea Systems Command, the Navy should have tested the Ford’s ambitious new systems more extensively on shore before installing them aboard ship. But building a…

Best Of 2016: The Next War

Best Of 2016: The Next War
Best Of 2016: The Next War

What will the next war look like? Robots, lasers, hypersonic missiles, and stealth aircraft figure prominently, but what matters most isn’t the technology: It’s the concepts of operation that bring them all together — just as the German blitzkrieg combined tanks, aircraft, and the radio, or the Japanese at Pearl Harbor combined aircraft and ships.…

The 355-Ship Fleet Will Take Decades, Billions To Build: Analysts

The 355-Ship Fleet Will Take Decades, Billions To Build: Analysts
The 355-Ship Fleet Will Take Decades, Billions To Build: Analysts

WASHINGTON: The Navy’s new Force Structure Assessment calling for a 355-ship fleet puts an important intellectual arrow in Donald Trump‘s quiver as he campaigns for more ships. But it doesn’t put any more money in the budget to buy them, or any more machinery in shipyards to build them. The Navy analysis will shape the…

A Bridgehead Too Far? CSBA’s Aggressive, Risky Strategy For Marines

A Bridgehead Too Far? CSBA’s Aggressive, Risky Strategy For Marines
A Bridgehead Too Far? CSBA’s Aggressive, Risky Strategy For Marines

UPDATED with Brig. Gen. Turner remarks on the report WASHINGTON: Marines are famously aggressive, but a new battle plan from a leading thinktank makes Iwo Jima look low-risk. The Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments’ proposed concept of operations is imaginative, exciting and more than a little scary: In a future war, rather than stay far…

Army’s Multi-Domain Battle To Be Tested In PACOM, EUCOM Wargames

Army’s Multi-Domain Battle To Be Tested In PACOM, EUCOM Wargames
Army’s Multi-Domain Battle To Be Tested In PACOM, EUCOM Wargames

ARLINGTON: Harry Harris has to be the Army’s favorite admiral. The chief of Pacific Command has called for Army-owned anti-ship missiles. He has enthused over the Army’s new warfare concept, and now he is planning a major inter-service exercise to work out what that Multi-Domain Battle concept means in practice. “We are starting to put…

Marines Seek To Outnumber Enemies With Robots

Marines Seek To Outnumber Enemies With Robots
Marines Seek To Outnumber Enemies With Robots

PENTAGON CITY: Since World War II, the US military has always expected to fight outnumbered. Soon, however, expendable unmanned systems may change that. For the first time in 70 years, America could have numbers on its side. That turns traditional assumptions about tactics, technology, and budgets upside down. “It does flip things,” said Lt. Gen.…

The Next War? Trench Warfare With Smart Bombs

The Next War? Trench Warfare With Smart Bombs
The Next War? Trench Warfare With Smart Bombs

WASHINGTON: If you want a glimpse of future war, look back a hundred years to the bloody stalemate of the Somme, the cataclysmic battle of World War I. Instead of machineguns and artillery slaughtering soldiers in no man’s land, imagine smart weapons ravaging the air, land and sea. Instead of biplanes overhead, imagine swarming drones. Instead…

New Threats Spark DoD Spending Debate: Thinktanks Ponder $2 Trillion In Options

New Threats Spark DoD Spending Debate: Thinktanks Ponder $2 Trillion In Options
New Threats Spark DoD Spending Debate: Thinktanks Ponder $2 Trillion In Options

WASHINGTON: If you were hoping, after a bitterly contentious presidential campaign, that at least we’d have consensus on national defense spending…tough luck. Instead, teams from five leading thinktanks — spanning the political spectrum but all using the same budget simulator — came up with a more than $2 trillion spread of options. They debated their plans…

Fear Of Russia Drives Sweden Closer To NATO

Fear Of Russia Drives Sweden Closer To NATO
Fear Of Russia Drives Sweden Closer To NATO

WASHINGTON: The Russian threat has driven Sweden so close to NATO that the once-neutral nation is becoming an ally in all but name. While the current Swedish government won’t apply for NATO membership — a position it just reiterated Friday — every other kind of collaboration is not only on the table, but actually happening…