The US Navy's surface force has been working hard over the past year to
bring its idea of distributed lethality to fruition. Jim Holmes wrote about
it here on wotr last year at this time and his overview hinted at some of
the promise that more lethal surface forces could deliver, along with some
cautions about how that promise might be realized.
What is distributed lethality it is a concept that holds that a greater
number of individual surface ships should see their lethality increased as
efficiently and opportunistically as possible and that these more lethal
ships should be operated in novel force packages operating independently
from the main body of the battle fleet.
This dispersal of combat power requires an adversary to account for many
more targets. There in diluting available weapons assignment against any one
platform while also stressing the adversary's intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance.
Simply put a more lethal and distributed surface force gives an adversary a
much more difficult operational problem with which to contend. a week or so
after holmes wrote his piece, a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) was
launched from a us navy destroyer and flew for hundreds of miles before
impacting a target barge.
This demonstration was a huge step forward for distributed lethality in that
a tried and tested land attack weapon was modified and repurposed into a
subsonic, anti-surface warfare weapon.
In doing so the surface navy's ability to target and destroy adversary
surface ships increased from a maximum range of approximately 75 miles on
the 50 or so cruisers.
While the harpoon has a special canister launcher on ships so equipped, many
destroyers all built since 2000 are not Harpoon capable. Nowever all
cruisers and destroyers have the vertical launch system enabling them to
fire the tlam missile meaning that all 90 of those ships would gain the
capability of targeting and attacking adversary surface platforms to the
maximum range of the missile.
Yesterday, another critically important capability was announced. This time
by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter himself during a press availability after
a ship visit on the San Diego waterfront.
Carter revealed the heretofore highly classified fact that the long-range,
supersonic SM-6 missile designed to counter air, cruise missile and
ballistic missile targets, also capable of being fired from the vls equipped
cruisers and destroyers has been modified so that it too can be fired
against surface combatants.
What this means is that in the space of a year, the navy's surface force
which many including Mi had believed was becoming outsticked by adversary
surface forces has gone from 50 ships capable of firing missiles out to 75
miles to 90 ships capable of firing a subsonic anti-ship missile to nearly a
thousand miles, in addition to a devastating supersonic missile to ranges in
excess of the harpoon missile, the SM-6s range remains classified.
Add to this the navy's plan to upgun the literal combat ship with
medium-range surface-to-surface missiles and we see that the promise of
distributed lethality, as evaluated by Jim Holmes right here at wotr last
year is beginning to be realized.
So while the navy will build fewer ships than it had hoped, significant
resources are being devoted to increasing the lethality of the ones it
already has or is building.
Increasing surface force lethality increases the effectiveness of our
nation's most important conventional deterrence platforms. The modest
investments necessary to do so equip the surface force to more effectively
fight in high-end environments, but equally as important, they present
adversaries with powerful incentives not to commit aggression in the first
place.
