EDITOR’S NOTE
How to Get Where the
Navy Needs to Go
BY BRETT DAVIS, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
The point has been made time and again:
The United States doesn’t have all the ships it
needs to accomplish its goals and project the
strength it needs to project. But what to do?
One of the more obvious options is to include more uncrewed systems into
the mix, particularly uncrewed surface vehicles, or USVs. They can be built
in greater quantities than crewed vessels and at much reduced cost and
can take on a great variety of missions, and if they sink nobody gets hurt.
Frequent contributor Dan Taylor notes the U.S. Navy may be becoming
more interested in fully uncrewed ships, not just optionally crewed ones.
Writer George Galdorisi shows how the Navy is trying to improve the
autonomy of such ships, allowing them to work effectively on their own or
even in swarms.
Writer Taylor also reviews whether the Navy might want to think smaller
when it comes to building crewed ships, namely by building corvettes,
which have long been extinct in the fleet.
Corvettes are also on the mind of contributor Bryan Clark from the
Hudson Institute, who say one way ahead for the Navy is to use its core
f
leet (essentially today’s Navy) to deal with its deep-water challenges
while creating purpose-built hedge forces to deal with specific scenarios,
such as an invasion of Taiwan or further attacks by Houthi rebels. Many
of those hedge force ships could be robotic, but smaller ships such as
corvettes might also have a role to play.
Rounding things out, rust never sleeps, as the saying goes, and the Navy
is using high-tech means — or at least high-tech coatings — to combat
its age-old enemy, as writer Peter Ong shows us. And rust might not sleep
but Sailors need to, and writer Jamie Pfeiffer brings us up to date on Navy
efforts to make sure they get enough shut-eye to be effective.
There’s more news in this issue than will fit on this page, so please read on
to see it all in this issue of Seapower.