It has become clear that adversaries across the board have invested in symmetric and asymmetric capabilities at scale to effectively challenge the U.S., its partners, and its allies. Conversely, the U.S. manufacturing and industrial base is unable to match the capacity of adversaries, such as China, to manufacture new military equipment, especially those ships, aircraft, and weapons systems that would confront our maritime forces.
The conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and the Red Sea have provided strong indications and warnings related to the sectors where the U.S. needs to invest to ensure the ability to manufacture critical lethal and nonlethal weapons systems. This, coupled with the clear trajectory of China to expand its total capability and capacity to outproduce the U.S. (along with its allies and partners) in the construction of lethal/nonlethal weapons systems, is a cause for grave concern. These trends will not improve in the near term or be rectified in the long term without substantial investment by the naval services, other executive branch departments, and Congress across both the defense and commercial industrial sectors. Learn more here.
Department of Defense goals to leverage regional sustainment frameworks with allies and partners to conduct “maintenance, repair, and overhaul forward” will not substitute for lack of domestic investment. Trends in manufacturing technology and workforce demographics are leading to the conclusion the U.S. maritime community must incorporate technologies within the organic industrial base as well as encourage collaborative investment with other cabinet-level agencies to ensure the capacity of industry to support national defense requirements. This section provides cross-cutting recommendations that can be applied to the defense industrial base and the service-level organic industrial base for capabilities that support both industry and military maintenance and production centers. These recommendations relate to the following:
Additive Manufacturing
5G and NextG Connectivity
Mixed Reality Technology
Human and machine teaming through robotics, autonomy, and artificial intelligence
At-sea repairs and maintenance
Learn more here.
The mix of advanced weapons needed in the current threat environment run the gamut from lethal and nonlethal, high-end and low-cost, and offensive and defensive. The U.S. must deter escalation from below the threshold of armed conflict while demonstrating capacity to deliver overwhelming lethal force when deterrence fails.
• Adversaries are not exclusively dwelling on the use of lethal systems to apply coercive force in the pursuit of their ambitions. Their nonlethal means and methods are highly effective in enabling them to achieve influence over territory or disrupt our allies and partners’ access to their maritime claims.
• Adversaries are not relying on expensive high-end weapon technologies. For example, using expensive American missile defense systems to counter low-cost Houthi drone attacks in the Red Sea is not sustainable.
• Adversaries are increasing the scope of offensive operations across the information, communications, and electronic warfare domains, alongside threats to space assets.
The force must be capable of addressing those adversaries across the complete spectrum of their operations, above and below the threshold of traditional armed conflict, with lethal and nonlethal means achieving decisive effects both physical and nonphysical. This section delves into the most critical considerations for both offensive and defensive technologies. Learn more here.
Since the unfortunate collisions of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) and USS McCain (DDG 56) in separate incidents in 2017, there has been a growing awareness of the reduced industrial capacity of the U.S. to produce and repair vessels for service. This has been accompanied by a larger acknowledgement of the lack of industrial capacity in the U.S. to maintain the defense industrial base as the nation examines its ability to succeed against peer adversaries. The naval services have received conspicuous criticism from Congress on their shipbuilding practices from design to manufacture followed closely by a lack of preparedness to ensure resilient supply chains to maintain the force during armed conflict scenarios.
The conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and the Red Sea have provided strong indications and warnings related to the sectors where the U.S. needs to invest to ensure the ability to manufacture critical lethal and nonlethal weapons systems. This, coupled with the clear trajectory of China to expand its total capability and capacity to outproduce the U.S. (along with its allies and partners) in the construction of domain lethal/nonlethal weapons systems, is a cause for grave concern.
These trends will not improve in the near term or be rectified in the long term without substantial investment by the naval services, other executive branch departments, and Congress across both the defense and commercial industrial sectors. Compounding these problems are the demographic and workforce trends impacting the sufficiency of personnel to maintain the ecosystem of industries and military positions vital to the maritime enterprise from the battle fleet through the support vessels to maintain the force. Ultimately, these recommendations for industrial technology and weapons procurement are not only considered feasible and attainable but are assessed to be vital to ensuring the health of the maritime enterprise to meet its role in defense of the nation and its interests.
This section is not a total diagnosis of all the industrial base challenges affecting the national security maritime enterprise. The focus is to simply identify and isolate investments helpful to mitigate the trends noted in the introduction. It is essential to consider investments that mitigate the current imbalance in capacity and capability of the industrial base as well as buy time for long-term solutions to reverse the trends previously noted and deliver on their promise of exponential change in productivity and quality. Further, these investments can substantially improve the posture of the force to balance the resources to maintain current readiness and sustain progress toward future readiness. These are cross-cutting recommendations that can be applied to the defense industrial base and the organic industrial base for capabilities that support both industry and military maintenance and production centers.
Department of Defense goals to leverage regional sustainment frameworks with allies and partners to conduct “maintenance, repair, and overhaul forward” will not substitute for lack of domestic investment. Trends in manufacturing technology and workforce demographics are leading to the conclusion that the U.S. maritime community must incorporate technologies within the organic industrial base as well as encourage collaborative investment with other cabinet-level agencies to ensure the capacity of industry to support national defense requirements. The wave of “smart manufacturing” is the next iteration of industrial practices that, when supported by investment, will allow unprecedented collaboration and synergy between the maritime services and the industries that support them.
From printing one-of-a-kind parts to enabling rapid, on-site repairs, additive manufacturing is disrupting the manufacturing base in positive and hopeful ways. Innovations in material and process have opened new possibilities, which in turn are fueling greater interest in this technology. The military and industry are betting on its potential to solve long-standing supply chain issues. Despite steady progress to introduce micro-manufacturing aboard ships and ashore installations, the failure to scale with additive manufacturing over the past 10 years has been an issue. Challenges remain in achieving authority to operate on networks for printers and supporting systems, sufficient network connectivity and speeds, licensing of parts from manufacturers, ensuring the quality of materials to meet military specifications, etc. The technology to manufacture is not at issue, rather it is the lack of addressing the entire approach systemically that has caused delays in achieving the potential for additive manufacturing to be implemented. The services have all stipulated in testimony that additive manufacturing will be key in overcoming challenges related to contested logistics at the tactical edge and reducing costs for maintenance and sustainment at home. The investment needs to be made not only in acquiring additive manufacturing systems and materials but in enabling manufacturers to license production of key components, the security to protect manufacturing plans and specifications, and streamlining the authority to place systems on military networks and execute operations using appropriate communications means. This requires a sustained test and digital evaluation process to finally move additive manufacturing from a potential solution to standard process at scale.
The latest generation of wireless connectivity — 5G — enables data to travel at vastly higher speeds, with near-instant responsiveness, while supporting exponentially more Internet of Things devices and connections. 5G will soon be superseded by the next generation of wireless communications, or NextG. In this instance, the need for 5G investment enables a range of outcomes for the transmission of data for speed and security. For military industry, supply, and maintenance enterprises, the ability to transmit supply requests or support troubleshooting of critical systems by having access to manufacturer support a world away with no latency in communications or data is critical to sustainment and maintenance of the force. In a vessel or a warehouse, 5G connectivity enables the introduction of the military Internet of Things and portable devices (e.g., phones, tablets, inventory systems) that will maximize the ability of the force to have needed data and updates that will improve everything from asset visibility to maintenance procedures.
The integration of virtual and augmented reality, when available from the same device or platform, is often referred to as “mixed reality.” Regardless of the term, the investment in mixed reality has high potential to improve everything from industrial design, workforce upskilling, and execution of production and maintenance operations. Imagine any space on a ship or industrial floor where a service member or worker has mixed-reality goggles on their head with the full library of information they need to perform a task — everything from maintenance tutorials, procedure checklists, and tool accountability in a format most applicable to them. With the correct investment in 5G/NextG, workers can have persistent communications with master artisans and supervisors interacting with workers across the deck plates or on the shop floor, saving countless hours in lost productivity or efficiency. As demographic shifts impact the nature of the workforce, any worker, regardless of origin or language, can conduct complex operations with their fellow workers as the mixed-reality environment compensates for things like language or variables in workforce training standards. Additionally, supervisors can ensure workers have safety requirements overseen and confirmed via virtual inspection conducted at speed based on the capacity of these systems for near simultaneous visual and auditory support. Further, new techniques and procedures can be uploaded instantly to a worker’s display. This ensures service members and industrial workers have the latest approved methods and can practice virtually prior to actual operation on a physical system. Additionally, with augmented reality features, service members and workers can scan the equipment or system they are working on, and with embedded computer vision, the system can assess anomalies and provide recommended actions. Troubleshooting, manufacturing, or repair of an item can be streamlined, and repair histories and procedures can be immediately logged and visually captured for future assessment if needed. This technology should be as common as a welder’s mask or a mechanic’s toolkit in the modern era. The ability to improve workforce efficiency, training, and quality are all at hand with a readily available technology.
As demographic trends push changes in the workforce, the services and manufacturing base have seen a decrease in the quantity of workers available and with the propensity to serve in military or industrial positions. The mitigation to a diminishment in the workforce is to augment the capacity of those who are serving and working with improved technological aids. In this instance, the solutions are likely to be found in cross-cutting investments in the application of robotics, autonomy, and artificial intelligence — specifically, the use of “co-bots” to accompany workers that provide additional support to perform tasks and procedures as directed by a trained worker. This is the human-machine teaming necessary to improve workforce efficiency and capacity.There is also a need to reduce human involvement and oversight in tasks that can be automated and managed by robotic systems or intelligent networks enabled by autonomous platforms and AI-driven operations. Industrial and military investments in these systems will ensure they are highly compatible and interoperable across the defense industrial base and organic industrial base. Thus, the value is not only magnified, but the costs can be ameliorated by widespread government and industrial adoption.
Arguably the industrial applications of co-bots and automated supervisory systems are somewhat less challenging than the battlefield applications of human-machine teaming, which require immediate recognition capability to conduct offensive, lethal, and network operations and inform split-second discrimination of targets and surrounding objects. By the same token, these systems may support improved industrial safety by having robotic operators conduct certain dangerous tasks or provide secondary confirmation that safety requirements have been met.
Adversaries across the board have invested in symmetric and asymmetric capabilities at scale to effectively challenge the U.S., its partners, and its allies. Conversely, the U.S. manufacturing and industrial base is unable to match the capacity of adversaries, such as China, to manufacture new military equipment, especially ships, aircraft, and weapons systems that would confront our maritime forces. Second only to the decline in U.S. manufacturing is our capacity to conduct at-sea repair and recovery for disabled vessels both in the surface and subsurface fleets. The expected distances at which the force will conduct operations will place the force far from the industrial facilities and repair yards that are needed to make timely repairs and return a ship to the fight at a time when operations could at least accommodate a delay. The need to recover, repair, and return vessels to the fight is essential to the viability of operational plans. The demand for this capability is equal to the similar investment needed for the logistical support vessels required to refuel and re-arm at sea. This is even more true given the fact that no facilities and ports where Navy and Military Sealift Command vessels would seek repair can be considered permissive and protected from adversary action. Consequently, this is driving the need for mobile and capable at-sea repair and recovery capability to mitigate the expected lack of access to safe and protected facilities. Further, the lack of investment even in firefighting capability on the water with large volume systems was most evident in the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6) fire in 2020 when the Navy had no firefighting vessel capacity even in its own ports. The need for investment in kinds of vessels and means identified in a 2021 Government Accountability Office report is essential and should probably be given consideration over some offensive capabilities if the U.S. is to even sustain critical operational plans and maritime campaigns.
Key to properly investing in weapons technology is understanding there is no location where the maritime services will operate that is not impacted by threats that can be delivered from all domains. Further, the U.S. must deter escalation from below the threshold of armed conflict while demonstrating capacity to deliver overwhelming lethal force when deterrence fails. This is placing a need for all vessels operating within the fleets and for all bases and stations supporting power projection to possess weapons systems suitable to their role and threats. That changes the scope of consideration for the scale of weapons technology requirements across naval and overall maritime forces. The Navy League concurs with the naval forces investment in weapons systems across all domains and all layers of the maritime environment but adds the following set of considerations to encourage a broader appreciation of the need for lethal and nonlethal weapons systems.
The challenges of industrial capacity and persistent investment necessary for our forces to replenish current stocks and acquire new capabilities is paramount. Additionally, our adversaries are dynamically introducing new capabilities or showing accelerated improvement in their existing capabilities. That is compounding the calculus for the speed at which we must invest and the range of systems that must be considered for both offensive and defensive actions.
Adversaries are not exclusively dwelling on the use of lethal systems to apply coercive force in the pursuit of their ambitions. Their nonlethal means and methods are highly effective in enabling them to achieve influence over territory or disrupt our allies and partners’ access to their maritime claims without tipping the balance toward regional or global armed conflict. This deft use of means below the threshold of armed conflict are not ambiguous or benign in their intent to control or seize territory. However, our naval forces are not armed or equipped with nonlethal alternatives that can be applied in those times where physical force is necessary to manage escalation or that also pre-empt lethal escalation and larger conflict. The ability to proportionately and physically confront malevolent acts short of lethality with a reciprocal and effective nonlethal counterforce is warranted and desired.
Despite the increase in nonlethal engagements being applied against our allies and partners’ naval forces, civilian mariners are becoming increasingly subject to lethal attacks by our adversaries. The actions of Iran and its proxy, the Houthis in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, have altered the need for Military Sealift Command and Maritime Administration vessels to have effective defensive countermeasures for airborne, surface, and subsurface assaults by unmanned and autonomous systems. In an already fraught manpower market to maintain our civilian mariner crews, increasing exposure to lethal risk may challenge recruiting and retention and cripple an already fragile sustainment and supply system that depends on an overstressed and diminishing national security maritime fleet.
Additionally, some of the largest engagements conducted by the battle fleet in recent memory have been primarily defensive, supporting air and missile defense against the Houthis and an Iranian-initiated large-scale retaliatory strike against Israel. For the first time since the Vietnam conflict, naval aviators gained “ace” status by engaging unmanned aerial threats launched by Iran. Iran is not only investing in land-based systems but is expected to deploy a ship dedicated to carry unmanned systems similar to efforts reportedly being pursued by Russia and China. However, there is a valid criticism that our defensive systems are not only deficient in quantity to continue to respond in this fashion but are economically unworkable in the long run. The need to have a robust, ubiquitous, and economical defense against missile threats and drone swarms is an essential focus in weapons investment over the next five years.
There is a school of thought that a force optimized for high-end conventional combat is capable of fighting or deterring all lesser forms of conflict. Thus, it is deemed both the most pragmatic and economical approach to construct a force capable of performing in a least likely/highest risk scenario since those means are universally applicable across the spectrum of conflict. However, peer adversaries do not subscribe to that model, and they have proven repeatedly that theory is ineffective at anything other than conventional armed conflict. Chinese application of nonmilitary forces to control access to the South China Sea is a case in point. The force must be “combat credible” rather than “conflict credible” forces capable of meeting the nuances of a peer challenger using less-than-lethal capabilities to intimidate allies and partners as well as to control or seize territory.
Peer and near-peer adversaries have all developed similar approaches to challenge the U.S. in the modern era. Everything from long-range precision fires to small boat swarms are common capabilities among the three priority adversaries identified in the 2022 National Defense Strategy. The force must be capable of addressing those adversaries across the complete spectrum of their operations, above and below the threshold of traditional armed conflict, with lethal and nonlethal means achieving decisive effects both physical and nonphysical. Further, every vessel in the fleet and every supporting installation must be capable of defense given the fact that there are no truly permissive locations for operations fully removed from the actions of an adversary. The proliferation and effectiveness of cyber, space, and land/maritime unmanned systems create compounding dilemmas for operational forces and critical infrastructure on our installations daily. These are also applicable threats to the civil industrial base, but the mitigation of those threats falls out of the purview of this document and engenders complex jurisdiction and authority challenges outside periods of national emergency or mobilization.
Investment considerations largely fall under two broad categories of offensive and defensive systems. The following are our recommendations for investment in research and procurement.
Offensive systems
The Navy League sees no issues related to the current investment focus areas of the naval services to experiment with and acquire lethal systems across all domains and missions. The current industrial base will require years of expansion to meet the growing demand and address the replenishment of munitions recently employed from Ukraine to the Red Sea. Therefore, any investments now will take at least 18 to 24 months to implement and likely will not see the first effective surge in production for up to 30 months. Further, the fiscal environment and uncertainty of budgets is requiring an adjustment to weapons and launch platform procurement and a shift to mitigation strategies such as investment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense-led Replicator program. The issue is not the selection of weapons systems but the need to rectify the industrial base challenges necessary to even begin producing at the scale of need in time to either deter conflict or meet it in the next three to four years.
The associated need to address the resilience of supply chain challenges impacted by long lead times, parts obsolescence, and supplier limitations is as important as the production of munitions. These challenges can also have compounding effects on the security challenges presented by having to rely on foreign suppliers, like China, who can compromise our capacity to sustain protracted conflict. The Navy League is also concerned about the under-utilization of multiyear procurement to stabilize demand in the industrial bases, support investment in industrial capacity, and mitigate the effects of inflation on the cost of systems. The Navy League also encourages the increased focus on supply chain resilience in weapons procurement and the actions by the naval acquisition enterprise to complete the Wartime Acquisition Sustainment and Support Program and robustly test its feasibility and accuracy. Additionally, the efforts to develop the Regionals Sustainment Framework and cooperative weapons production with allies and partners needs to be vigorously pursued to ensure the ability to prevent adversaries from disrupting weapons-focused supply chains from single points of failure.
Foreign military sales, International Traffic in Arms Regulations, and other programs and procedures are important for protecting sensitive U.S. technology and ensuring fairness. But they need to be nimbler in the current security environment. The exercise of “maritime statecraft” as encouraged by the secretary of the Navy is essential in this effort to ensure the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard are equipped for the challenges ahead regarding needed weapons systems. This is built not only on steady investment in domestic industry and production but in leveraging the capacity of allies and partners to diversify the locations and means of weapons production.
Drone defense: Defense against unmanned and autonomous systems is a concern for the force, and it’s a growing threat daily. Defensive systems need to be considered not only for battle fleet vessels but also for Coast Guard and civilian mariner-crewed vessels. Naval convoys provided layered defense to merchant mariners as part of naval convoys during World War II, but the ability of today’s fleet to provide persistent protection from all-domain threats will be challenged by both the capacity of the force and the expanded means by which drone threats may be delivered. We need to accelerate the investment in such solutions as electronic countermeasures to disrupt drone operations or directed energy weapons to damage control surfaces or sensors.
Although the Defense Department is to invest nearly $1 billion annually in directed energy research, including high-energy lasers and high-powered microwave systems, the ability to transition from limited prototypes to something that provides competitive and cheaper alternatives to kinetic and explosive missile or gun systems is essential. Further, the potential to provide robust defensive systems that also conform to rules of engagement for self-defense while minimizing the risk of collateral harm is beneficial. Directed energy systems add an ability to defend in confined seas or in port and bring counter-drone defensive capabilities to every vessel in the fleet while providing deeper alternatives to the limited “magazine” of legacy kinetic systems. The lack of requirement to carry live ammunition or provide for the storage of such also has the potential to ease the burden on supply chains and mitigates the risk of operating in locations where partners or allies may limit the displays of lethal force. Marine Corps investments in similar ground-based systems are considered of equal utility for both point and area defense capabilities as part of an overall ground-based air and missile defense network as evidenced by the battlefield lessons learned in Ukraine.
Finally, directed energy systems are a capable alternative to protect critical infrastructure and prevent harm to tenant activities on our installations. Investment in these systems has broader promise and greater application across the range of platforms and functions in the maritime enterprise and enables collective development opportunities for all the services and stakeholders in need of these solutions.
Intermediate force capabilities: Intermediate force capabilities are a range of nonlethal and nondestructive options that can be used to achieve military objectives while limiting harm to people and objects. IFCs can be used in naval and maritime operations to help manage escalation and disrupt instances where adversary tactics and means are evading lethal response but need intervention with some form of physical force or electromagnetic warfare capability. Most IFCs are viewed as hand-held and individually employed, such as bean bags, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and electric stun guns. Nonlethal weapons are means to reinforce deterrence and expand the range of options available to commanders. They enable the ability to adapt and tailor escalation of force options to the operational environment or preclude the unnecessary application of lethal force by offering an intermediate level of force to fill the gap between presence and lethal effects.
The joint force is trained and equipped to provide a response employing either lethal force or no force at all. IFCs could be used when a mission of presence is insufficient or the use of lethal force is undesired or risks unnecessary escalation. IFCs can encompass the disciplines associated with information warfare operations, but the recommendations here encompass the means to physically intervene to halt the application of nonlethal force often observed by adversaries, such as fishing fleet swarms, use of water cannons, and boardings conducted with melee weapons. Maritime applications to counter these types of engagements could include:
Long-range acoustic hailers paired with translation devices for clear verbal warnings.
Dazzling lasers for visual warnings and obscuring glare to personnel, windshields, and optics of approaching vessels or unmanned aerial system.
Nonlethal flash-bang warning munitions could be fired directly in front of, or over, vessels instead of using a lethal shot across the bow.
Next-generation high-power radio frequency–directed energy weapons to disrupt electronic controls and shut off vessel engines without harming occupants.
Millimeter wave active denial–directed energy to physically, but nonlethally, repel personnel on approaching vessels.
