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The surface Navy’s top officer announced on Tuesday the deployment of a surface action group this spring in a move to make the surface fleet more formidable against sophisticated adversaries.

Three destroyers set for independent deployments are being banded into a surface action group under Destroyer Squadron 31 and sent out to test new concepts of hunter-killer groups of ships designed to confuse and scatter adversaries’ resources, Vice Adm. Tom Rowden told the annual meeting of the Surface Navy Association. The SAG is to consist of destroyers Spruance, Decatur and Momsen.

Rowden has been championing a concept that breaks up traditional carrier strike groups and amphibious ready groups and joins up surface combatants that can spread out the enemy’s surveillance assets and ships, and adds long range anti-ship and anti-sub weapons to make the ships more deadly.

“Our goal is to deceive the enemy, target the enemy and destroy the enemy,” Rowden said. “If we can execute that, we can change the calculus of our adversaries and our potential adversaries.”

In an interview, Rowden said the surface action groups will add capabilities to combatant commanders, four-stars who oversee operations in their regions around the world.

"We need to deploy the ships and begin to understand the effects we can achieve," Rowden said. "We can then begin to articulate those to the combatant commanders. So when the combatant commanders say, 'I need this capability,' we can say, 'This is the capability I can deliver with this adaptive force package, this is what we can deliver with the other package.' That way we can express to the combatant commanders the options available beyond the carrier strike groups."

This is part of a larger push inside the Navy to offer up more options to COCOMs to ease the burden on the aircraft carriers, which have been taxed over the past five years. Today, six of the Navy's 10 carriers are in some kind of extended maintenance as a result of the heavy optempo — namely the COCOMs' insatiable demands for flattops in the Middle East and in the Asia-Pacific.

"It's about being able to understand and articulate the different capabilities that different adaptive force packages offer, and being able to articulate that so we can build confidence among the [COCOMs]," Rowden said.

Rowden also announced a pilot program to add a new department head billet on ships, the plans and tactics officer, part of an effort to beef up the tactical expertise on board surface ships.

The Surface Navy Association gathers in Crystal City, Virginia, each January to discuss the future of surface warfare.

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Jeff Head said:

It's been largely overlooked...but the US Navy put three Burkes in the water in 2015.

What is amazing is that Ingalls showed it can do two ships in nine months. (That would be four every three years if they maintained that pace)

Here are the three

DDG-113 in March by Ingalls

View attachment 23765

So far, 37 Burke IIAs have been put in the water, and 28 Burke I and II before that. 65 Burkes currently in the water and that was done since 1989, or in 26 years.

A phenomenal run.

Eight more Burke IIAs are on order (with two of them already under construction. That will make 45 Burke IIAs altogether, and 73 all told.

Three Burke IIs are already approved, funded, and ordered. Probably 17 more of them will be built after that.

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Jura said:

according to NavyTimes (I put one sentence in boldface):
Navy to deploy hunter-killer pack of ships to Asia-Pacific

source:

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Vice Admiral Thomas S. Rowden
Commander, Naval Surface Forces

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Brumby said:

I am having a hard time conceptualizing this approach as it is basically a semi disaggregated SAG. In other words it is part of the CBG in providing protection but yet will operate independently in surface operations.

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Brumby said:

I am having a hard time conceptualizing this approach as it is basically a semi disaggregated SAG. In other words it is part of the CBG in providing protection but yet will operate independently in surface operations.

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Jura said:

I would add three AFB Destroyers mount up to 24 Harpoons only, not that much plus they would have to be launched at much higher risk as compared to an air-strike from the aircraft carrier instead (the article mentions "sophisticated adversaries"!)

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The Navy is currently charting its new roadmap for a family of future surface ships it hopes to enter the fleet sometime in the 2030s.

The future surface combatant study – set to complete in the late summer or early fall – is the early work that will lay out in detail a picture of the world and threats the next set of surface combatants will face and what the ships of the future will need to look like to combat them, the Navy’s director of surface warfare, Rear Adm. Peter Fanta (OPNAV N96) told USNI News in an interview last week.

“The future surface combatant study looks at all of the capabilities that we need to get across the board – from replacing [Cyclone-class patrol craft (PC-1)], all the way up through what we do with cruiser follow on and what do we do for the next destroyers,” Fanta said.
“We’re looking at a family of options. I have family of requirements. Now, for the large surface combatant, it’s both capacity and capability that we have to look at.”

The current generation of large surface combatants – Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyers (DDG-51) and Ticonderoga-class (CG-47) guided missile cruisers – have been in the fleet for decades and were all part of a surface-wide shift in capabilities across several different sizes of platforms.

The ships – though multi-mission — are optimized for anti-air warfare and built around a large radar array and a battery of vertical launch system (VLS) missile cells that field a variety of weapons. The ships centered on the Aegis combat system were part of a generational shift in thinking that traded boiler power for gas turbines and single purpose ships for multi-mission combatants.

And now, “we’re about at that inflection point again,” Fanta said.

What’s different in this generation of combatants is how Fanta and the Navy will tackle the problem of the next wave of ships. – constrained by budgets but buttressed by new networked weapons and technologies like directed energy and electromagnetic railguns.

“We’ll see a slightly different fleet [in the 2030s] but we’re going about it differently and how do I plug that together,” he said.

The New Threat
The U.S. surface warfare threat set is drastically different than it was merely five years ago.

While the emphasis from 2001 to 2010 for the broader military was low intensity ground combat in Iraq and Afghanistan the surface fleet was mostly tasked with providing long-range strikes with its Raytheon Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAM) and ballistic missile defense (BMD) protection roles.

Meanwhile other countries spent their development dollars in perfecting new and lethal weapons that put the U.S. surface force at risk.

While Fanta and other Navy leaders rarely mention a particular adversary in discussions of future capabilities or threats in the context of the development of U.S. capabilities Russia and China are the chief considerations for new platforms– especially China.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has undergone a rapid development of new surface platforms that are catching up to U.S. dominance in guided weapon technology.

“In the last several years, China has invested in rapidly expanding its anti-surface cruise missile (ASCM) stockpiles with an emphasis on anti-surface warfare (ASUW), according to a report on the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN)

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,” USNI News

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.
The task for the Navy now is how to leverage its shrinking technological edge on a budget.

Capability, Capacity and Cruisers
For the moment, the Navy’s Burkes are on track to be the most technologically adept large surface combatant in the fleet with a Flight III variant currently under development with a much more powerful air defense radar — the Raytheon SPY-6 — than the current SPY-1D resident on current ships.

Eyes are now on what will replace the older, but more heavily armed, Ticonderogas that – unlike the Burkes – are designed to handle the air defense commander role that directs the air war around a carrier strike group (CSG).

“For the large surface combatant, it’s both capacity and capability that we have to look at,” Fanta said.
“I get asked, ‘Why don’t you take a Flight III destroyer and turn it into a cruiser?’ What people forget is there is a lot of capacity difference between a cruiser and a destroyer.”

Burkes field about 94 VLS cells while the much larger Ticondergoas have 122 (depending on the ship). Each additional cell means more missiles the ship can fire.

For future ships, “I need both the capacity and the capability. So how do you do that?
The future surface capability study tells me how many missiles I’m going to have to have out there,” Fanta said.
“I don’t know that. But yes I recognize the cruisers coming out of the inventory sometime, starting in the 20s going through the 30s are going to leave me with a deficit if in nothing else VLS cells and command planning spaces and watch standers to handle that air defense commander role”

For the next large surface combatant, the Navy knows what it doesn’t want – a repeat of the Navy’s last attempt at developing a cruiser, the estimated $6 billion-a-hull CG(X).

“Last time we looked at a cruiser replacement we spent $30 million on a study to tell us a cruiser replacement was unaffordable… You can’t spend $6 billion on a first of class cruiser,” Fanta said.
“We looked at everything from nuclear power to advanced weapon systems to huge arrays to multiple numbers of VLS cells and it turned out to be so large that we might as well have plopped a deckhouse on an aircraft carrier.”

As the surface navy establishment puzzles through the threat picture, the ships that will replace the capabilities and the capacity are next on the development list and it might not look like the cruisers the Navy is familiar with.

“Have we come to a single point solution? No not yet. It will probably be a series of solutions,” he said.
“Being able to call something a cruiser is very comforting but what happens when one of them just carriers missiles that shoot down incoming air things and another one carries just anti-submarine warfare (ASW) weapons – or one of them carries every thing? I don’t know.”

The Modular Fleet
The trick for the Navy with its new family of ships will be to balance capabilities and capacity in systems that make sense fiscally.

That means not building ships that can only do one thing and have the capacity to grow as new weapon systems and sensors are developed.

“Look at what we had do to with the Spruance-class destroyer, he said.
“Originally that was just for hunting submarines but there’s a lot of real estate – you put in a VLS launcher in there and what do you get? A lot of multi-mission capability. They’d be long gone if you hadn’t put VLS on them. Everything has to do at least two things…. The advantage of things like vertical launch cells is they bring modularity by themselves. I can stick a new missile in there. As long as I leave the deck space on there, I can bolt on other weapons. As long as I leave my self with a deckhouse with the structural capability of handling a bigger array or an upgraded array, I can unbolt one and put another one in.”

He used the Flight III Burkes as an example of taking existing designs and tweaking them for greater capability. The new ships will field the emerging crop of Raytheon Standard Missile 6s and the new SPY-6 Advanced Electronic Scanning Array radar.

“Some people [ask], ‘are you designing the modular ship?’,” he said.
“Well sort of. I can do that now. I can unbolt an array and put on a new one. I’m doing it with DDGs.”

The fleet of the 2030s will be set to take advantage of the modular aspects of current ships and build in those capabilities in the new ships to allow for more frequent upgrades. But beyond individual platforms, the Navy is set to exploit future networked weapon systems.

In 2015, the Navy’s first Naval Integrated Fire Control Counter Air (NIFC-CA) carrier strike group – the service’s concept of linking ships and aircraft sensors to create a network of spotters and shooters that can share targeting information – completed a successful deployment. As the concept evolves more networked weapons will be in the offing and fit into the modular fleet of the future.

“Given our ability to shoot any weapon off any sensor using the [current] trends in technology, maybe I carry a whole bunch of missiles on one [hull] and then the sensors are somewhere else,” Fanta said.
“It’s a group of capabilities I have to cover and it maybe a family of systems that allows me to cover those – all of them being upgradable when the next weapon shows up or the next sensor shows up.”

That means adopting design models that will allow ships to shed and take on weapon systems with minimal amount of work to integrate them on hulls.

“The key element of that is do I understand my interfaces between the weapon and the combat system so I don’t have to redo every single time,” Fanta said.
“Is it plug-and-play? Do I have to redesign all the software and test all the software or do I understand that software tells this weapon to do something and now the next weapon better know how to do it with the same software.”

New technologies like directed energy and electromagnetic railguns would factor into the new designs as well.

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Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus said the service is still on schedule to reach its shipbuilding goals despite a Defense Department directive calling for a reduction in littoral combat ship buys.
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in a December memo asked the Navy to reduce its procurement of littoral combat ships from 52 to 40 in the fiscal year 2017 budget.

Mabus was unwilling to comment directly on the LCS numbers. “The 2017 budget … hasn’t gone in yet. It is pre-decisional," he said Jan. 14 during his keynote address at the 2016 Surface Navy Association Symposium.
Regardless of the fiscal year 2017 budget, “The decisions that we have made over the past seven years [through fiscal year 2016] will ensure that our fleet gets up to more than 300 ships," Mabus said.

Shipbuilding is not the work of one person or one administration, he noted. It has to be maintained and continued over the course of many years. “If you don’t, the effects aren’t immediately apparent, but they are in a decade or so,” he warned.

During his tenure as secretary, the fleet has grown faster than any other time in modern history, Mabus said. In the seven years from 9/11 to 2009 the Navy only put 41 ships under contract. The fleet declined from 316 to 278 ships. That was "not enough to keep our fleet from declining or keep our shipyards open and healthy,” he said.
“In the seven years following 2009, we will have contracted 84 ships, more than the last three Navy secretaries combined. And we will have done so while increasing aircraft purchases by 40 percent, and with a 20 percent smaller top line,” he said.

He highlighted the achievements of the LCS program as an example of the Navy’s success, while emphasizing the increased capability of future ships in the class.

Last month, LCS 6, the USS Jackson was commissioned. Its predecessors, LCS 1 through 4, were under contract before 2009 at an average ship construction cost of $548 million, he said. In comparison the USS Jackson was $432 million, and there are now 19 of those ships authorized and appropriated at an average ship construction cost of $337 million, Mabus said.

Though there have been criticisms of LCS, including issues such as survivability, he said the newer frigates will have more fire power, can deploy with a carrier strike group, and have robust anti-mine and anti-submarine capabilities. “They are longer, faster, heavier, more maneuverable than many destroyers in the world today.”

He agreed with Rear Adm. Peter Fanta, director of the surface warfare division, who earlier in the week said: “a group of small surface ships like LCS … [is still capable of putting] the enemy fleet on the bottom of the ocean.”

Mabus also addressed the hot-button issue of presence versus posture. In the December memo, Carter criticized the Navy for “overemphasizing resources used to incrementally increase total ship numbers at the expense of critically needed investments in areas where our adversaries are not standing still, such as strike, ship survivability, electronic warfare and other capabilities.”
The service has been prioritizing quantity over lethality, and its latest program submission is unbalanced, creating risk and exceeding the numerical requirement of 308 ships, Carter said. “The Navy’s strategic future requires focusing more on posture, not only presence,” he said.

Mabus argued that the Navy’s presence is its posture. “I think that those two concepts may be broken apart for other services, but for the Navy and the Marines there is a whole lot of overlap. It’s almost exactly the same thing.”

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Jura said:

I would add three AFB Destroyers mount up to 24 Harpoons only, not that much plus they would have to be launched at much higher risk as compared to an air-strike from the aircraft carrier instead (the article mentions "sophisticated adversaries"!)

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