The Oliver Hazard Perry class was designed and built to be an open-ocean convoy escort, and to the best of my recollection, not a single one of those ships ever executed an open-ocean convoy escort. But we ended up doing a tremendous number of valuable missions with those ships. Today, and in the recent past, we’ve had these guided-missile frigates operating off of Central America, running down drugs with incredible success – something that wasn’t even envisioned when we started putting pen to paper in designing those ships. We’ve run those ships in support of our special operations forces because of the things that we have been able to put on them. They weren’t modular, flexible ships like we’re designing today with the littoral combat ship. Today, with LCS, we have the opportunity to more cost-effectively modernize the combat system on these ships – because the combat system is removable, upgradable ashore, and swappable. Our potential adversaries get a vote. So as other missions come into the field of view, we have a greater opportunity with these particular ships to either develop a whole new mission package, or modify a mission package as requirements emerge. Certainly we have to continue to have multi-mission guided-missile destroyers and cruisers. But like LCS development, the development of the AEGIS weapon systems has evolved on those ships. When Admirals Wayne Meyer and Jim Doyle first started working on the Aegis weapon system back in the late 60s and into the 70s, ballistic missiles weren’t a threat. And yet, this month, we took an AEGIS Baseline 9C destroyer named John Paul Jones and executed an engagement out on the Pacific Missile Range Facility that could not even have been envisioned when we laid the keel for John Paul Jones. [USS John Paul Jones (DDG 53) successfully conducted Flight Test Standard Missile-25 (FTM-25) from the Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) on Kauai, Hawaii, on Nov. 6. The test, which resulted in three successful near-simultaneous target engagements over the Pacific Ocean, involved one short-range ballistic missile target intercepted by a Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) Block IB guided missile, while two low-flying cruise missile targets were engaged by Standard Missile-2 (SM-2) Block IIIA guided missiles.] I think the littoral combat ships are going to prove extremely valuable. And I think that getting Fort Worth out for a 16-month deployment, executing the crew rotations, getting the opportunity to operate that ship with various countries around the western Pacific, will demonstrate tremendous value of the ship.

 

A recent CSBA study came out that said surface forces should be more offensive. And the theme for the 2015 Surface Navy Association symposium is “Distributed Lethality: Going on the Offensive.” What are your thoughts about the theme, and employing our surface ships offensively?

This has been occupying my thoughts for quite some time. About a year into my tour as OPNAV N96, I started to look at the evolution of requirements for our ships. Really studying them over time, going all the way back to the 1930s when the aircraft carriers were coming into existence. And if you recall at that time, there was a rather significant tussle between the battleship admirals and the carrier aviation admirals. The long-range striking power of carrier aviation was demonstrated at the Battle of Midway when the opposing fleets never even saw each other. With the rise of these capital ships came the necessity to ensure their proper defense. And so, while we continue to build ships with guns and long-range anti-ship missiles, we started to build more and more of the requirements into our surface ships to execute defense. Coming into the missile age, the development of Tartar, Terrier and Talos missiles, and transitioning to the Standard missile SM-1 and SM-2, we became more defensively oriented because we understood – and understood well – that we had offensive lethal striking power on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. But with that also came the recognition that we have to defend it as it rises to a significant operational center of gravity for the force. We continued to develop the Standard Missile 2, Standard Missile 2 Block 3, Block 3-A, Block 3-B, and as the anti-ship cruise missiles became more sophisticated, we had to become more sophisticated in our ability to address them. It’s clear in my mind that we have concentrated more and more on the defense on our surface ships, and have transitioned away from the long-range, or even the short-range, offensive capability. We stopped building ships with Harpoon launchers. While the Harpoon is a relatively short-range missile, it’s still a very capable anti-ship missile. For a while, back in the 90s, we had the Tomahawk Anti-Ship Missile, which we discontinued and is no longer part of the force. In my mind, one of the things that we need to do as we move forward is to think differently about how we might complicate the targeting problem for the enemy. If you give them one or two targets, you’re going to play defense all day. But if you give them 20 or 30 targets – and we can come at them from multiple directions – then all of a sudden their calculus on how they are going to defend themselves becomes much more complicated. As we distribute the lethality of our surface forces, and go back on the offensive, we can bring not only the ability to organically target, but to execute those engagements at ranges 100 or 1,000, via whatever means, and provide a significant complicating factor to our potential adversaries. They don’t just have to worry about the planes coming off the flight deck of the aircraft carrier. Further, we also have our magnificent submarines. And while we would like to have many more, they are limited in numbers. So we have to bring all the forces to bear to complicate the targeting problem and to make it very difficult for our potential adversaries. Part of our responsibility in the surface forces is to get back into that long-range offensive game. We need to continue to defend our high-value ships, aircraft carriers and amphibious readiness groups in the blue-green team, but also to ensure we have the offensive capability to cause adversaries many more problems to think about.

 

Does DDG 1000 fit into that equation with its long-range strike capability?

Absolutely. Not only will DDG 1000 have the advanced gun system (AGS), but it also has an improved vertical launch system – the Mark 57 VLS, with expandability beyond the bounds of the Mark 41 VLS that we have on our guided-missile destroyers and cruisers today.