Just recently, Mark Eser of the US Secretary of Defence announced a quite ambitious plan to actually expand the whole US Navy with a huge range of both unmanned and also autonomous ships. The plan also includes adding submarines as well as aircrafts in order to face the growing maritime challenge they are experiencing from China.
The Pentagon's own chief recently said that a sweeping review of the known US naval power is dubbed as the "Future Forward" as it laid out the new "game-changer" plan that would potentially expand the whole US sea fleet reaching over 355 ships from the current amount of 293 ships.
The full plan
The plan actually includes adding tens of billions of US dollars to support the Navy's own budget between now up to 2045. This budget is aimed at maintaining superiority over the certain Chinese naval forces that are currently being seen as a primary threat towards the United States.
According to Esper's speech at the Rand Corp located in California, the future fleet will become even more balanced in its own ability to be able to deliver certain lethal effects from the air, the sea, and even under the sea itself.
The expansion involvement
The expansion is said to add "more and smaller" surface ships including more submarines, surface as well as subsurface vessels, that are all optionally either unmanned, manned, or maybe even autonomous. This includes a broad range of different unmanned carrier-based aircrafts.
The actual plan is for a whole fleet of ships that are more capable of surviving a certain high-intensity conflict, to actually project US presence and power, in order to deliver precision strikes at a much longer distance, according to the statement.
The plan to upgrade
Esper said as an example, the plan includes new guided missile frigate programmes as well as producing more ships with an improved lethality, survivability, capability, and also the capacity to conduct certain distributed warfare.
It was also stated that certain trials were still under way on the different Sea Hunter, a 132-feet or 40-metered trimaran drone that can actually be autonomously used to survey the sea for certain rival submarines for a span of two months at a given time.
According to Esper's statement, these particular efforts are the very next step in actually realising the future fleet, one that actually includes a more unmanned system performing a wide variety of different warfighting functions.
These functions are said to include delivering lethal fire as well as laying mines. It does not stop here, Esper noted that it also includes conducting resupply or even surveilling the enemy themselves.
According to Esper, this will become a major shift in how people actually conduct naval warfare in the upcoming years and decades. Esper then reiterated taht the Chinese ios definitely the top US security threat and that the current Indo-Pacific region is actually a "priority theatre" for the known US military.
Read Also: Ex-Tesla and SpaceX Engineers Team Up to Develop Self-Flying Planes with a $33.5 Billion Funding
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Urian Buenconsejo
