‘If It Floats, It Fights': Navy Seeks ‘Distributed Lethality’ « Breaking Defense - Defense industry news, analysis and commentary:
“If it floats, it fights,” Rear Adm. Peter Fanta says. “That’s ‘distributed lethality'[:] Make every cruiser, destroyer, amphib, LCS [Littoral Combat Ship], a thorn in somebody else’s side.”
“It just takes arming everything,” says Fanta, the director of surface warfare (section N96) on the Navy staff. “Lethality” simply means more and better weapons. “Distributed” means those weapons go on more ships, operating independently across a wide expanse of ocean to pose too many threats and too many targets for an enemy to cope with all at once.
While the Navy’s offensive ambitions are constrained by its budget, however, they’re still potentially revolutionary. After 20 years of playing mostly defensive supporting roles — carrier escort, ballistic missile defense, Tomahawk strikes on targets ashore — the Navy’s surface ships will take on a more independent and aggressive stance. That aggressiveness brings risk, especially in the face of well-armed adversaries such as China, especially for smaller and less robust vessels like the Littoral Combat Ship.
In wargames, says Fanta, “this is what we found: Without naming the adversary — you’re right, you lose some LCS in a full-up nation on nation war, [but] you put entire enemy fleets on the bottom of the ocean. Why? Because they come from everywhere and they’re all equipped with [anti-ship] weapons.”
