Champion of "a new American way of war"

Sea Power, Jun 2003

A couple of centuries ago, Lord Nelson said, "a ship's a fool that fights a fort." Why? Naval gunpowder is very, very good and accurate. And the ship has the initiative. But the ship has a limited magazine. It's a depth-of-magazine problem. One of the things navies have always feared is having their defenses overwhelmed. As we shifted to the missile age, missiles that attack ships were very expensive. There weren't all that many of them. Coming through the 1980s, we felt reasonably comfortable that our magazine depth was appropriate to the level of the threat that we were facing. But with the advent of cruise missiles, and the advanced technologies that could be applied to them, the cost of the attacking missile is plummeting.

The cost of the interceptor missile is going in the other direction. It's a big number that's getting bigger. So large numbers of attacking missiles are a real possibility for the future. Therefore, you want to address this depth-of-magazine issue. And one of the ways to do that is with speed-of-light weapons. You can reduce your cost per shot and sharply increase the number of shots.

What else lies in the future?

Cebrowski: From the Navy's perspective, I can see a whole collection of interesting things happening. The most obvious one is that there is going to be tremendous pressure to improve high-speed lift. That will come in the form of very-high-speed ships and in work on airships-probably, but not necessarily, hybrid airships.

I can see alternative approaches to large multirole ships that don't look anything like current ship designs but that rival aircraft carriers in size. They probably would have high multirole capability and, almost certainly, lower cost. The ships would be reconfigured or would reconfigure themselves. The general approach is that you have a chassis or platform and then you can roll through different capabilities. The excitement isn't in the platform. The excitement is in what it carries.

Are you optimistic about the possibilities for change?

Cebrowski: Oh, yes. How could I not be? Five years ago, people told me that network centric warfare was silly. And now everybody is doing network centric warfare. Two or three years ago, nobody wanted to talk about high-speed transport. Now we are operating two high-speed transports and taking delivery of a third. People were actually somewhat vitriolic in telling me we aren't going to do a Streetfighter [a concept for smaller, faster warships for brown-water battles], and now we have a robust program [the Littoral Combat Ship] that has elements of that. And all this in just a matter of a few years. So I'm ready for somebody to start insulting me about airships, because that will be an early indicator that we are going to succeed.