Navy leaders want a more flexible fleet.

• Author: Beidel, Eric

After fighting two land wars for a decade, the military is putting an emphasis back on the sea and is shifting its focus to the Asia-Pacific region and to a more maritime-weighted mission in the Middle East.

A new defense strategy calls for a more agile force that can rapidly deploy and plug in capabilities as needed. The military must have the ability to project power in contested areas and strike quickly from over the horizon, the strategy says.

For the Navy, this means investing in directed energy perfecting an electromagnetic railgun, maintaining the existing number of aircraft carriers and large-deck amphibious ships, and increasing the cruise missile capacity of future Virginia-class submarines. It means upgrading radars and designing a conventional prompt-strike option for subs, senior Pentagon officials said.

In the near term, the Defense Department has decided to keep all 11 aircraft carriers and their 10 air wings, each of which consists of about 60 aircraft. In the future, a significant portion of the fleet will be forward based in places like Europe, Singapore, Bahrain, the Diego Garcia territory and Japan. Officials announced that they will convert an amphibious assault ship into an "afloat forward staging base" to support mine-sweeping operations in the Persian Gulf

"We span the globe," Undersecretary of the Navy Bob Work said in January at the Surface Navy Association's annual symposium in Arlington, Va. "We get there quicker," with smaller assets such as the Joint High Speed Vessel and the Littoral Combat Ship, which can travel at 35 and 40 knots respectively.

The country is on the verge of a golden age in sea power, Work said. The current fleet is like no other in the history of the world, he said. And a mix of high-and low-end ships designed for what Work called a "total force battle network," will play a major role in a concept of open payloads that can be used by everything from unmanned systems to Marines. It fits right in with a defense strategy that stresses smaller, agile, innovative forces, he said.

Ships are just one piece of a larger network that includes other important weapon systems such as P-8s, BAMS [broad area maritime surveillance] unmanned aircraft, Fire Scout drones, remote mine-hunting systems and unmanned surface vessels, Work said.

The Navy has to make smart investments in anti-torpedo torpedo defense, directed energy and electromagnetic rail guns. Those three research areas will allow the surface fleet to be dominant for some time to come, he said.

"We have plenty of strike," Work said. "I need theater ballistic missile defense that I can fire without breaking the bank."

A fleet that can intercept missiles and deploy lasers that can "kill anything from horizon to horizon" will be able to get into denied areas and exert its firepower on enemy targets, he said.

"We don't need to say, "Oh my...