Distributed Lethality and Beyond: The U.S. Navy's Surface Fleet Is Evolving Right Before Our Eyes

Dave Majumdar

Security,

The Navy's vision for the fleet in 2030, in many respects, is right before our very eyes. 

In many ways, the United States Navy of the 2030s will closely resemble today’s fleet. But while many of the ships, aircraft and submarines will be the same, those platforms will evolve over time. Moreover, the service will use those machines in entirely new ways.

“Clearly, the Navy that we’re going to have in the ‘30s is foundationally existing and it’s floating in the water today,” Vice Adm. Tom Rowden, commander, Naval Surface Forces, told The National Interest during an Oct. 25 interview. “But we have to continually look at the evolving threats and make sure when we lay down keels in the future, we have the capabilities and capacity built into those ships in order to be able to do that.”

One example Rowden pointed to is the Aegis combat system onboard the CG-47 Ticonderoga-class cruisers and DDG-51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. While originally intended as an area air-defense system to defend carrier strike groups from a Soviet onslaught, the Aegis has evolved into a potent ballistic-missile defense platform. “A testament to our engineers is the evolution of the Aegis weapons system, I don’t think that it was envisioned initially that we would utilize those—that weapon system—for ballistic missile defense,” Rowden said. “But it handles that job very very well right now.”

Indeed, the DDG-51 is continuing to evolve into an even more formidable warship. The Navy is starting to build Flight III DDG-51s—the first of which is budgeted for fiscal year 2016—which includes a host of upgrades. The most significant of those is the immensely capable Raytheon AN/SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR)—a Gallium Nitride-based active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar that is expected to be 30 times more powerful than the current SPY-1D(V).