For those who remember the dawn of the Age of Transformationalism at the turn of the century, this sounds familiar;
Under the Navy’s DMO vision, rather than deploying concentrated strike groups to a few places around the globe, the Navy would have many dispersed ships and planes that could share data to create a combined picture of the battlespace.
He described the future fight as a combination of aircraft, ships, submarines and ground vehicles – manned and unmanned – all with sensors and communications devices, feeding data into a battle management system. The challenge will be the ordnance-to-target ratio and picking out the right targets to control the fight. Before the fight starts, the U.S. needs to ensure it has control of the EM spectrum so that network of platforms can communicate, sense and target.
It is enticing to believe that one is at the cusp of a revolution, generational jumping, making all before obsolete, but that process through history is shown to be an oversold siren’s song more than not. For each submarine you have a blimp. For each nuclear bomb, you have the proximity fuse. Even the revolutionary may not be all that useful or effective for the war you have at hand.
We’ve been here before. We’ve seen this movie.
With all the billions of dollars spent on the Maritime Tomorrowland in the last two decades, how many depot level maintenance facilities could we have supported? How many more Sailors would show up at their commands with the training they needed? How many more families would have been able to PCS during the summer, vice waiting until the next FY, ripping kids out of schools in October?
It a world where the electromagnetic spectrum can no longer be taken for granted and satellite vox and data bandwidth is unlikely to survive the first week of war – are we going to man, train and equip our fleet around a warfighting architecture that at best might be useful only in peacetime?
How do we change a mindset as opposed to doubling down on a thinking of “all is new” that has failed us so clearly?
This quandary brings me back to Tom Wolfe’s 1987 article, “The Great Relearning.” ;
“Start from zero” was the slogan of the Bauhaus School. The story of how the Bauhaus, a tiny artists’ movement in Germany in the 1920s, swept aside the architectural styles of the past and created the glass-box face of the modern American city is a familiar one, and I won’t retell it. But I should mention the soaring spiritual exuberance with which the movement began, the passionate conviction of the Bauhaus’s leader, Walter Gropius, that by starting from zero in architecture and design man could free himself from the dead hand of the past. By the late 1970s, however, architects themselves were beginning to complain of the dead hand of the Bauhaus: the flat roofs, which leaked from rain and collapsed from snow, the tiny bare beige office cubicles, which made workers feel like component parts, the glass walls, which let in too much heat, too much cold, too much glare, and no air at all. The relearning is now underway in earnest. The architects are busy rummaging about in what the artist Richard Merkin calls the Big Closet. Inside the Big Closet, in promiscuous heaps, are the abandoned styles of the past.
What can we find in our Big Closet?
