Every new weapon provokes an invention to defend against it – the sword begets the shield. Naval warfare is no exception. The development of mines and torpedos in the nineteenth century led to the development of a variety of countermeasures and increases in armour and detection capacity to defend against them. The invention of the submarine has meant that Antisubmarine Warfare (ASW) was a dominant theme in the twentieth century. Developing a means for detecting a platform designed to be undetectable is an enduring challenge.
The advent of the aircraft carrier changed the nature of the fleet. No longer a simple agglomeration around a capital ship, the carrier group is very much a ‘system of systems’, a floating network of interconnected sensors and weapons designed to project force wherever the carrier group travels.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, theorists spoke of ‘network-centric warfare’ (NCW) to describe this approach. Nowadays, one hears talk of ‘distributed lethality’ (DL) to describe the ways in which naval forces accomplish a concentration of effects across an array of targets within and beyond a single theatre of operations.
These tendencies have only been increased by the development of uncrewed or autonomous platforms, which can produce swarming effects that are typically distant from the locus of command. Moreover, as lasers and innovations in directed energy challenge the prevalence of traditional munitions, naval platforms must find ways to fuel and power such weapons at sea.