Structuring a Flexible, Affordable Naval Force to Meet Strategic Demand in the 21st Century

Abstract

“While defending our homeland and defeating adversaries in war remain the indisputable ends of seapower, it must be applied more broadly if it is to serve the national interest.” This concept from A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower (Conway et al. 2007), stresses the importance of protecting the interests of the United States while promoting security, stability, and trust. This paper explains the challenges faced by the naval enterprise, methods for improving our force planning and acquisition processes, and the need for naval capabilities to be transformed through the co‐evolution of technology and organizational cultures. A force structure framework that provides a flexible, adaptive, and affordable force without regard to the future state of the world is a critical requirement in the “Next Navy” and the “Navy after Next.” The agility, scalability, and flexibility of an adaptive force provide commanders a range of options when responding to a crisis situation. This paper will identify characteristics and capabilities required to address the range of threats that exist today as well as threats expected in future environments.

Framework for Mission Engineering Competencies

“…The mission engineering and system-of-systems engineering literature include the following defense topical areas: anti-submarine warfare, electronic warfare, ballistic missile defense theater missile defense, counter-air, brigade combat team air and missile defense, joint fires, strike, "always on" battlespace integration, and common operating picture. Non-defense topical areas include space exploration and the US national airspace system (NAS) (Deiottte and Garrett, 2013;Garrett et al, 2011;Marvin et al, 2014aMarvin et al, , 2014bMarvin et al, , 2016Mindell, 2015;Moreland, 2009Moreland, , 2014Moreland, , 2015Neaga et al, 2009;Parnell et al, 2016;Powers, 2014;Rebovich, 2014;Richards et al, 2009;and Spaulding et al, 2011).…”

Institutionalizing Modular Adaptable Ship Technologies

“…Rhodes and Ross refer to Epoch and Multi-Epoch modeling to address the changing properties of the contextual aspects. Within the naval engineering community, this type of modeling has been incorporated into Future Force Formulation (Rice 2005, Moreland 2008, and Doerry 2009. In Future Force Formulation, alternate futures are postulated.…”

Managing the interstitials, a System of Systems framework suited for the Ballistic Missile Defense System

“…Systems integration is performed at all levels and utilizes tools, techniques, and processes to integrate between the levels during the acquisition process. The complex nature associated with the myriad of technical disciplines and processes necessary to develop, technically husband, and ultimately bring to fruition a large scale, highly complex SoS is identified in a recent American Society of Naval Engineers article on structuring a flexible, affordable force [Moreland, 2009].…”

“…This paper is one in a series of papers [Zilic and Baron, 2009; Moreland, 2009; Ormsby, 2008] developed by the Naval Warfare Center to coalesce current thoughts on the numerous technical disciplines and processes necessary to develop, technically husband, and ultimately bring to fruition a large‐scale highly complex system of systems article of war. The origin of these papers came about in response to the ever‐increasing development cost and technical complexity of major weapon systems and the increased role of systems integration in achieving a successful outcome.…”