My impression so far is that the same can be said of SNA this year. While the first day focused primarily of professional issues specific to the SWO community, stuff I find interesting but also find myself hardly qualified to discuss, the rest of the week has also produced some interesting content.
I thought Phil Ewing did a great job with this article on Tuesday, because he made sure to highlight these very interesting and damn near unique (for an Admiral) comments.
Rear Adm. Thomas Rowden, the Navy’s brand-new boss of requirements for surface warfare, said one of its most important abilities was to show “American flags on halyards” atop Navy warships...Whoa, did a SWO with a star at SNA really just talk up the importance of small naval warships in the US Navy? My first guess is this guy spent a lot of time in 7th Fleet, and not 2nd or 3rd Fleet. A peek at his resume reveals that assumption is true.
“That means aggressively fielding the LCS fleet in order to meet our vital war-fighting gaps and forward-deploy additional American flags on LCS halyards,” Rowden said. “We must we must bring LCS into the fleet. We must control cost and build them in numbers.”
Not only could LCSes compose as much as half of the future surface force, making the program critical based on numbers alone, the smaller ships’ value in alliances only raises the stakes, Rowden said.
“LCS will be ships with which our partners will be comfortable operating … We have a number of ships that are simply overwhelming to friends and potential friends,” - as in, the blue water Cold War-era fleet. “LCS allows us the flexibility to begin working with friends, partner nations and potential friends on their terms - in the end, their terms must be considered if we’re to work with them...”
“There’ll always be a requirement for ships suited to intense phases,” he said - as in, full-scale war. “But we must have ships that can be adapted as the future transitions into the present.”
While this may or may not be a good argument for LCS, it is clearly a valid and very strong strategic argument for the utility of smaller naval vessels. While the strategic value of large warships is often highlighted in the context of warfighting capability, what is often missed is the strategic value of smaller vessels in the context of developing partnerships that are both strong can capable should the warfighting moment ever come. The comments by Rear Adm. Thomas Rowden strike me as the first time in a very long time an Admiral with solid SWO credentials has made a Navy force structure argument in favor of smaller warships.
Admiral Greenert's Navy is clearly different than Admiral Roughead's Navy. Time will tell if this is a new tone for force structure discussions by Navy leaders in public, or simply an Admiral who went off pitch and will inadvertently now become the black sheep of the choir. In the Roughead Navy, this guy would be labeled a black sheep, and would be accused of not being a 'team' player.
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