Research for Future Navy

The then-Director of Force Transformation, VADM Arthur Cebrowski, USN (Ret), asked the author of this document to provide views on future fleet architectures, as a contribution to his response to the mandate from Congress for a study on alternative future naval fleet architectures. The outline of this report was dictated to the author by Admiral Cebrowski. His alternative futures were for (1) force building, (2) force operations in "The Gap," that is, across the seam of the world, and (3) force operations in "The Core," that is, the globalized world. He also set out criteria for fleet architectures, to include relevancy, preserving options, transaction rates, learning capability, complexity at scale, entity cost, and risk management. The bottom lines were that future hulls be either light and maneuverable or trucks that could be adapted to changing needs across the years.