The U.S. Navy Just Gave Us the Inside Scoop on the 'Distributed Lethality' Concept

Dave Majumdar

Security,

Ultimately, the Navy has a simple goal for distributed lethality: additional options for the national leadership.

Faced with growing challenges to its domination of the world’s oceans, the United States Navy is once again focusing its efforts on gaining and maintaining control of the seas.

Since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Navy’s mastery of the seas has been unchallenged by any other power. Without a rival, the U.S. Navy focused the efforts of its surface fleet on power projection and defending its aircraft carriers—with the overwhelming majority of the service’s offensive firepower increasingly concentrated in the air wing. However, with great power competitors such as Russia and China increasingly developing surface warfare capabilities that might one day challenge the U.S. Navy’s dominance of the waves, the service is returning to its core mission of sea control.

“Our Navy controls the sea for the benefit of our nation and for the benefit of our allies,” Vice Adm. Tom Rowden, commander, Naval Surface Forces, told The National Interest during an Oct. 25 interview. “So how do we get after that in the surface warfare community?”

Rowden’s answer is a concept called distributed lethality, which he developed while serving as the Navy’s director of surface warfare (N96) in the Pentagon. “As I reviewed the requirements for our surface ships, we had a tendency to move away from offensive capability—or what I would refer to as sea control capability—to more defensive capability, which is defending those power projection assets. And I think that was a natural evolution that we executed in the wake of the Cold War in the wake of the wars that we were involved in Iraq and Afghanistan.”