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Sensors are key to fleet future, admiral says

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — Adm. Gary Roughead, the new head of Fleet Forces Command, said American warships need better capabilities to detect contacts, process data and distribute the information where it’s needed.

In an address at a conference on “transformation warfare” here Tuesday, he expressed concern that the fleet needs a better picture of what other ships and aircraft are at sea and what lurks below.

“Our strike groups are challenged in persistent surveillance today. And in 2010, I believe that we’re going to be suffering even more so in the area of persistent surveillance,” he said. “Maritime domain awareness is where it all begins. We cannot conduct the operations that we must if we don’t have a good sense of what’s out there, moving on, above or under the sea.”

Roughead also pointed to networks as the battlefields of the future.

“We must take into account a network approach that goes from the sensor to the network to the weapons platform to the weapon itself and the decisions we make in each one of those must be integrated,” he said. “The war will be won and lost on the initial battles that take place on that network battleground. That is something that we must all be mindful of and ask ourselves the question, ‘Are we prepared to fight in that environment?’”

He also said the latest in low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles, target recognition and anomaly detection systems are needed for the future fleet.

“We have some tremendous opportunities ahead of us. We have some great technologies there,” he said. “But I would submit that we have to maintain the focus on the war fighter and also look at how we come at the network solutions that are going to be so much a part of our future.”

He spoke at a three-day conference produced by the U.S. Naval Institute and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

Roughead took over as the commander of Fleet Forces on May 17, but many observers believe he’s a likely candidate to replace Adm. Mike Mullen as chief of naval operations, who has been recommended as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.