CNO Discussing the Future Navy

If you haven't read the transcript from the CNO's speech at Brookings institute from Monday, you need to. A lot of focus will be given to what the CNO said about unmanned systems, indeed that was the direction Wired took in discussing the CNOs speech, but there is a lot more here than meets the eye.

Observe some of the key points made when discussing unmanned systems, specifically that he discusses both Cyber and C2. He addresses the culture of naval aviation to a small degree, but more importantly he addresses joint services approach not only with the Marines and Coast Guard, but the Air Force.

One of the topics I just can't seem to find time to write about is the development of the AirSea Battle doctrine under discussion right now inside the DoD. The AirSea Battle doctrine is, in my opinion, the single most important discussion right now in the Pentagon with enormous ramifications for the Navy, Marines, and Air Force. While there are some who make comparisons between the AirLand Battle doctrine developed during the cold war on how the Army would fight in Europe and AirSea Battle doctrine currently under discussion, the AirSea Battle doctrine is very different. The most important point on this is to understand the AirLand Battle doctrine was developed solely by the Army, and AirLand told the Air Force what was expected of them. It was not jointly developed. The AirSea Battle doctrine is an actual joint service effort - read shared - which in theory should give it both staying power as a battle doctrine and credibility in driving budget decisions.

This is Lieutenant Colonel Brad Beech's question and ponder the answer given by the CNO.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL BEECH: Lieutenant Colonel Brad Beech, Headquarters, Marine Corps Aviation Unmanned Aircraft Systems. This morning my program has moved under N2N6. One of the concerns is that some of the operational capabilities of those platforms may be moved more toward information, intelligence and network-centric and we lose some of those operational capabilities such as the delivery of kinetic and nonkinetic fighters. Do you share those same concerns? What are some of the things that we can do to mitigate these platforms becoming too information-centric and then we don't have something to affect that information?

ADMIRAL ROUGHEAD: I think it comes down to the concepts of operations that we as services employ and being able to make the tradeoffs as to what is the most effective platform that we have. The fact that they being moved under N26 I think has the potential to enhance their capabilities because we can make more coherent decisions on how the information is going to be moving on and off, how the control systems will be robust enough to ensure that they give us the level of confidence to employ kinetic effects, to get to a previous question. And so I think that it actually allows us to make better investments and better decisions in that regard, and it will be a question of do we need a manned or an unmanned system to go in and do something kinetically and if the desire is for the unmanned system to do that because of the concept of OPS, then are we moving in the right direction with the investments that we have to make there? Also to be able to think in terms of the operating environment and the support requirements that we particularly in the Navy and Marine Corps will have in being able to operate systems like this off of ships which is a different kettle of fish than taking off and landing at a land base. These airplanes operate in very, very complex electromagnetic environments, they have to be able to recover on something that is moving around, and so I think it puts us in a much better place to be able to make those decisions.

This topic, and many like it, go to the main issue in the development of the AirSea Battle doctrine as it is being developed between the services as a cooperative effort... specifically this is where we find the Division of Labor.

As the DoD continues to be tasked to do more and more around the world while budget resources are scare, the services are pooling resources to meet the political obligations they are tasked with globally. The Division of Labor discussion is part redundancy, part requirement, part role, part training, part cooperation, part communication, and part consolidation of resources. There are still many questions without answers whether one can take the sum of these many parts and find a whole, or whether one is left with just holes.