The following is the Jan. 11, 2022 U.S. Navy surface warfare vision, Surface Warfare: The Competitive Edge.
From the report
Global competition with China and renewed tension with Russia are the main strategic drivers for Navy planners. We are competing with first-rate navies—and other joint sea denial capabilities—whose reach extends far beyond territorial seas. China provides the pacing threat. We focus our discussion in this document on China while being mindful of the unique and considerable threats posed by Russia.
The United States is a global power with a bias to the Pacific, and maintains security interests throughout the Indo-Pacific region, including alliances with five nations and close friendships with myriad others. The peace and prosperity in the region since WWII are a tribute to both the energy and creativeness of the people who live there, and the stability and security provided by these alliances. The United States Navy has been crucial to that stability and security, and our Surface Force has anchored that effort.
Given China’s increasingly aggressive posture in the region, including the assertion of excessive maritime claims, militarization of disputed maritime features, acts of intimidation at sea, and of course, strident rhetoric over Taiwan reunification, the stability and security of the Indo-Pacific region is under pressure. To protect U.S. economic and security interests in the region, assure friends and treaty allies, and respond to man-made crises and natural disasters, the United States maintains military and naval power forward in the Western Pacific, much of it composed of the ships and Sailors of the Surface Force.
This force forms the vanguard of the Joint Force’s conventional deterrent in the region, and that deterrence takes the form of forces postured to deny or dissuade an adversary from opportunistic, limited aggression, as well as forces over the horizon that add to conventional deterrence by threatening escalated punishment. Conventional deterrence depends on the presentation of numerous operational dilemmas arising from present, powerful, networked, interoperable forces acting with immediacy to aggression.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
For the U.S Navy to maintain its warfighting advantage in the decade ahead as part of the nation’s forward conventional deterrence posture, the Surface Navy will integrate ten new or upgraded types of platforms into the existing force and large scale introduction of several key capabilities. This degree of complexity demands closer alignment across the Force and broader Enterprise, with implications for Personnel, Equipment, Supply, Training, Ordnance,
Networks, and Infrastructure.
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