Whether it is the intelligence community, the military, industry, or just individuals attempting to get some notion of what the future holds, extrapolating current trends to determine likely outcomes in years “downstream” is absolutely essential to stay one step ahead of any current – or future – adversaries. This is the work of military and intelligence analysts and is more essential today than ever before.
The Navy (and the other four armed services, as well) confronts two stark realities: a gradually devolving geostrategic landscape coupled with a rapidly weakening budgetary position. Through one geostrategic lens, we see the defense environment’s future characterized by the AirSea Battle Concept (ASBC), which has been gaining traction over the past several months. The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) directed the development of the ASBC to defeat “adversaries across the range of military operations, including adversaries equipped with sophisticated anti-access and area-denial capabilities. The concept will address how air and naval forces will integrate capabilities across all operational domains—air, sea, land, space, and cyberspace—to counter growing challenges to U.S. freedom of action.
In cooperation with the CNO’s Naval Warfare Integration Group (N00X), the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) addressed the hard question––“At what point might the U.S. Navy cease to be globally influential?”––and examined the dynamics that would shape five possible futures for the U.S. Navy:
• Status Quo Navy that lets the bets ride
• 2-Hub Navy maintaining combat-credible hubs built around carrier strike groups (CSGs) in the Central Command (CENTCOM) and Pacific Command (PACOM) areas of responsibility (AORs)
• 1+Hub Navy built around a CSG in PACOM or CENTCOM, but not both
• Shaping Navy focused on peacetime engagement activities and crisis response
• Surge Navy with most naval forces brought home.
But confoundingly, CNA did nothing to attempt to sort out which of these alternative futures would be the most likely and therefore where the U.S. Navy would operate for the next several decades. We did, and analyzed these options in our article.
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