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i 

98–280 2016

[H.A.S.C. No. 114–75] 

GAME CHANGING INNOVATIONS AND THE 

FUTURE OF SURFACE WARFARE 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON SEAPOWER AND 

PROJECTION FORCES 

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

HEARING HELD 

DECEMBER 9, 2015 
(II) 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON SEAPOWER AND PROJECTION FORCES 

J. RANDY FORBES, Virginia, Chairman 

K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas 

BRADLEY BYRNE, Alabama 

ROBERT J. WITTMAN, Virginia 

DUNCAN HUNTER, California, Vice Chair 

VICKY HARTZLER, Missouri 

PAUL COOK, California 

JIM BRIDENSTINE, Oklahoma 

JACKIE WALORSKI, Indiana 

RYAN K. ZINKE, Montana 

STEPHEN KNIGHT, California 

STEVE RUSSELL, Oklahoma 

JOE COURTNEY, Connecticut 

JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island 

RICK LARSEN, Washington 

MADELEINE Z. BORDALLO, Guam 

HENRY C. ‘‘HANK’’ JOHNSON, JR., Georgia 

SCOTT H. PETERS, California 

TULSI GABBARD, Hawaii 

GWEN GRAHAM, Florida 

SETH MOULTON, Massachusetts 

DAVID SIENICKI, Professional Staff Member 

PHIL MACNAUGHTON, Professional Staff Member 

KATHERINE REMBER, Clerk 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

Page 

STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS 

Forbes, Hon. J. Randy, a Representative from Virginia, Chairman, Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces ........................................................ 1 

WITNESSES 

McGrath, Bryan, Managing Director, The Ferrybridge Group, LLC .................. 1 

Solomon, Jonathan F., Senior Systems and Technology Analyst, Systems 

Planning and Analysis, Inc. ................................................................................ 3 

APPENDIX 

PREPARED STATEMENTS: 

Courtney, Hon. Joe, a Representative from Connecticut, Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces ............................ 21 

Forbes, Hon. J. Randy ...................................................................................... 19 

McGrath, Bryan ................................................................................................ 24 

Solomon, Jonathan F. ....................................................................................... 39 

DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD: 

[There were no Documents submitted.] 

WITNESS RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS ASKED DURING THE HEARING: 

[There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.] 

QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING: 

[There were no Questions submitted post hearing.] 

(1) 

GAME CHANGING INNOVATIONS AND THE FUTURE OF 

SURFACE WARFARE 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES, SUBCOMMITTEE ON SEAPOWER AND PROJECTION FORCES, Washington, DC, Wednesday, December 9, 2015. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 3:30 p.m., in room 

2212, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. J. Randy Forbes (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. J. RANDY FORBES, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM VIRGINIA, CHAIRMAN, SUBCOMMITTEE 

ON SEAPOWER AND PROJECTION FORCES 

Mr. FORBES. We would like to welcome our witnesses today to 

this hearing on game-changing innovations and the future of surface warfare. 

As we have previously told you, we may be interrupted with a 

vote. So Mr. Courtney and I both have agreed that we are just 

going to put our opening statements in for the record so that we 

can go ahead and begin and try to get all the testimony in and then 

hopefully get to our questions and answers. 

Today joining us are two thought leaders in the area of surface 

warfare, Mr. Bryan McGrath, the Managing Director of the FerryBridge Group, and Mr. Jonathan Solomon, Senior Analyst, Systems 

Planning and Analysis, Incorporated. 

And gentlemen, both of you, we appreciate you being here today. 

And Bryan, it is my understanding you are going to start us off. 

So with that, we yield the floor to you. 

First of all, Joe, did you have anything you wanted to add? 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Forbes can be found in the Appendix on page 19.] 

Mr. COURTNEY. No—I waive my opening statement. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Courtney can be found in the Appendix on page 21.] 

Mr. FORBES. Okay. 

STATEMENT OF BRYAN McGRATH, MANAGING DIRECTOR, 

THE FERRYBRIDGE GROUP, LLC 

Mr. MCGRATH. Great. Chairman Forbes, thank you. Ranking 

Member Courtney, members of the subcommittee, thanks again for 

the opportunity to testify with you on a matter of importance to our 

Navy and to the Nation. 

The discussion today revolves around game changers and innovations in the future of surface warfare. And I have a few of those 
2 

in my written statement that I submitted. I’d love to answer some 

questions about them if you have them later. 

Some of those game changers include—they flow almost all from 

the concept of Distributed Lethality which is something I know you 

have heard a lot about lately, including long-range surface-to-surface missile improvements, multi-source maritime targeting and 

tracking, real-time ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] vulnerability assessment, electromagnetic spectrum warfare 

and medium-altitude long-endurance UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]. 

But I think before we jump into the sort of tactical and operational stuff, I would like to elevate it back to some first things. 

I realize no one was being glib when the title of this hearing was 

chosen, but I think it is important that we think about exactly 

what game it is that we are seeking to change. 

And as we watch China reprise its ancient role of dominance in 

the East and we watch Russia exhibit its modern version of its historic geographic paranoia, we are confronted with the obvious reality of multi-polar, great-power competition. 

This reality leads me to conclude that the game, for want of a 

better term, is conventional deterrence. This is a game for which 

I think the United States Navy is somewhat less prepared than I 

would like. 

There are many reasons for this, and we can discuss them as you 

desire. Among them, however, is the accreted effects of decades 

without a competitor and the Navy’s slow realization that this is 

no longer the case. 

That this realization has occurred late is bad enough, but it is 

compounded by the impact of ruinous resource constraints. 

The second issue, and what I would like to close on in this statement, is I think we have a little bit of a collective fascination with 

technology. Senior officials in the Defense Department will tell you 

with a straight face that the Third Offset Strategy is not all about 

technology and then commence a 40-minute discussion about the 

Third Offset Strategy that is all technology. 

Offset strategies one and two occurred when the United States 

dominated the technology world worldwide. And even within the 

United States, technology was dominated by the government and 

by the military. Neither of those conditions applies today. 

Technology has been commercialized and globalized. And trying 

to pull a rabbit out of the technology hat again is going to prove 

much more difficult this time. There is no substitute for the Nation 

spending what is required in order to see to its security and prosperity. There is no substitute for the time-honored contributions of 

stockpiled weapons, powerful, forward-deployed surface ships, combat-ready surge forces, and a robust industrial base. 

There is no substitute for the psychology of conventional deterrence, which suggests to potential aggressors that not only is your 

aggression going to be punished, but it is likely to be unsuccessful. 

I counsel against ignoring these simpler notions while we search 

for technological silver bullets. World leadership cannot be had on 

the cheap and we must decide whether we continue to value our 

position and role in the world and then resource it accordingly. 

Thank you, and I look forward to your questions. 
3 

[The prepared statement of Mr. McGrath can be found in the Appendix on page 24.] 

Mr. FORBES. Mr. Solomon. 

STATEMENT OF JONATHAN F. SOLOMON, SENIOR SYSTEMS 

AND TECHNOLOGY ANALYST, SYSTEMS PLANNING AND 

ANALYSIS, INC. 

Mr. SOLOMON. Thank you. Thank you, Chairman Forbes—— 

Mr. FORBES. Mr. Solomon, can you pull that a little bit closer and 

make sure it is turned on? 

Mr. SOLOMON. First, I apologize. Okay, I thank you, Chairman 

Forbes and Ranking Member Courtney, and all the members of the 

Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee for granting me the 

honor of testifying today. 

I am going to keep my remarks about 31⁄2 minutes because I am 

very excited to go forward into the open question-and-answer. 

So a bit of background. I am a former U.S. Navy Surface Warfare 

Officer and I served as Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer and a fire 

control officer of destroyers during my two division officer tours before leaving active duty. 

My civilian job for the past 11 years at Systems Planning and 

Analysis, Incorporated, has been to provide programmatic and systems engineering support to various surface combat systems acquisition programs within the portfolio of the Navy’s Program Executive Officer Integrated Warfare Systems. 

This work has provided me an opportunity to participate, however peripherally, in the development of some of the surface Navy’s 

future combat systems technologies. It has also enriched my understanding of the technical principles and considerations that affect 

cost and performance. This is no small thing considering I am not 

an engineer by education. 

Before I continue, I want to make clear that the views I express 

today are presented solely in my personal capacity. They do not reflect the official positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, Incorporated, and to my knowledge do not reflect the positions or policies of the U.S. Department of Defense, any U.S. armed service, or 

any other U.S. Government agency. 

In recent years, and with the generous support and encouragement of Mr. Bryan McGrath, I have taken up the hobby of writing 

articles that connect my academic background in maritime strategy, naval history and naval technology, and deterrence theory, 

with my professional experiences. 

One of my favorite topics concerns the challenges and opportunities surrounding the potential use of electronic warfare [EW] in 

modern maritime operations, a subject that I first encountered 

while in active duty and later explored in great detail during my 

master’s thesis investigation, how advanced wide-area oceanic surveillance-reconnaissance-targeting systems of systems were countered in the Cold War and might be countered again in the future. 

Electronic warfare receives remarkably little attention in the ongoing debates over future operating concepts and the like. Granted, 

classification serves as a barrier with respect to specific capabilities 

and systems. 
4 

But electronic warfare’s basic technical principles and effects are 

and have always been unclassified. I believe that much of the 

present unfamiliarity concerning electronic warfare stems from the 

fact it has been almost a quarter century since U.S. naval forces 

last had to be prepared to operate under conditions in which victory, not to mention survival, in battle hinged upon achieving temporary localized mastery of the electromagnetic spectrum over the 

adversary. 

America’s chief strategic competitors intimately understand the 

importance of electronic warfare to fighting at sea. Soviet Cold 

War-era tactics for anti-ship attacks have been leveraged with 

what they termed ‘‘radio-electronic combat’’ and there is plenty of 

open-source evidence available to suggest this remains true in today’s Russian military as well. 

The Chinese are no different with respect to how they conceive 

of fighting under ‘‘informatized conditions.’’ 

In a conflict against either of these two great powers, U.S. maritime forces’ sensors and communications pathways would surely be 

subjected to intense disruption, denial, and deception via jamming 

tactics. 

Likewise, ill-disciplined electromagnetic transmissions by U.S. 

maritime forces in the combat zone might very well prove suicidal 

in that they could provide an adversary a bull’s-eye for aiming its 

long-range weapons. 

To their credit, the Navy’s senior-most leadership have gone to 

great lengths to stress the importance of electronic warfare in recent years, most notably in the new Maritime Strategy. 

They have even launched a new concept they call electromagnetic 

maneuver warfare, which appears geared toward exactly the types 

of capabilities I outline in my prepared statement. 

It is therefore quite likely that major elements of the U.S. Navy’s 

future war, surface warfare vision, Distributed Lethality, will take 

electronic warfare considerations into account. 

I would suggest that Distributed Lethality’s developers do so in 

three areas in particular: command and control doctrine, force-wide 

communications methods, and over-the-horizon targeting and 

counter-targeting measures. 

I want to be clear that the tools and tactics I advocate for in my 

prepared statement will not serve as silver bullets that shield our 

forces from painful losses, and there will always be some degree of 

risk and uncertainty involved in the use of these measures. It will 

be up to our force commanders to decide when conditions seem 

right for their use in support of particular thrusts. 

Such measures should be viewed as force multipliers that grant 

us much better odds of perforating an adversary’s oceanic surveillance and reconnaissance systems of systems temporarily and locally, if used smartly, and thus better odds of operational and strategic successes. 

And with that, I look forward to your questions and discussion 

that will follow. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Solomon can be found in the Appendix on page 39.] 

Mr. FORBES. Thank you. 
5 

Mr. McGrath, you have talked a lot about Distributed Lethality 

as kind of a game changer for surface fleet operations, especially 

with our carrier groups. There is a huge risk to that, however, 

though. For Distributed Lethality to work, we are going to have to 

distribute our force away from the carrier where we have normally 

used it for protection. 

Two questions I have for you. Describe that risk. How do we 

know that that risk is worth taking? Because do we not increase 

the vulnerability that we would have for a carrier in that particular situation? 

And the second thing is we don’t get to tell the Navy how to 

fight, we simply help provide them resources for them to utilize 

when they have made those decisions. What shifts would we have 

to make in our resourcing if we were to move to a Distributed 

Lethality concept or operation of fighting? 

Mr. MCGRATH. The risks, your first question, Chairman Forbes, 

the surface leadership has been very clear from the beginning that 

job one remains high-value unit protection, that the anti-surface, 

anti-submarine, integrated air and missile defense capabilities that 

they provide to the strike group through the ships of the surface 

force cannot and will not be diminished. 

But there are other surface ships in the war plans that are not 

necessarily allocated just to supporting high-value units. It is with 

these ships and hopefully in a future where we build more ships 

that Distributed Lethality will have its greatest impact. 

The second question with respect to where you might shift your 

resources, long-range, surface-to-surface missiles, job one, the 

quicker the better, more pressure on the Navy rather than less. 

You don’t get to tell them how to fight, but you can ask really hard 

questions and make them give really hard answers. 

Why would we not harvest low-hanging fruit in order to take our 

longest-range, surface-to-surface weapon from approximately 70 

miles to a thousand miles in 5 or 6 years? That seems to me like 

it is worth considering. That is turning the Tomahawk land-attack 

missile into a hybrid surface and land-attack missile. 

So I would urge you to push hard on surface-to-surface missiles, 

and I would urge you to push hard on closing the grand fire control 

loop. 

We have national technical means, we have UAVs, we have battle group assets, theater assets, fleet assets. All of these assets are 

creating data, taking measurements, information. We need to make 

sure that that data is fused and that fire control quality tracks are 

sent back out to the ships in a way that can be tactically useful 

and relevant. 

We have all the pieces, they are just not very well connected yet. 

And you should make the Navy tell you how they are going to do 

that. 

Mr. FORBES. So let me just make one clarifying or add one clarifying question. As I hear you, you are suggesting that we are not 

taking away any of our defensive capabilities, we are simply adding 

a supplement to that, which would have offensive capabilities. 

Because it was my understanding from most of the briefings that 

I have gotten from the Navy on Distributed Lethality that they 

were talking about something a little different, where they were 
6 

trading off current defensive capabilities for more offensive capabilities. 

But that is not the way you see Distributed Lethality? 

Mr. MCGRATH. Not at all. 

Mr. FORBES. Okay, good. 

Okay, Mr. Courtney. 

Mr. COURTNEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

And thank you to the witnesses. 

The title of the hearing is about game-changing innovations. And 

I think, again, we have heard a good discussion about offensive sort 

of game-changing innovations. 

In terms of, you know, electronic warfare, in terms of hardening, 

I think that was the term that Mr. McGrath used in his testimony, 

our fleet, maybe you could talk a little bit about that sort of piece 

of game changing. 

Mr. SOLOMON. So I think it is twofold, it is both technological 

and psychological. 

From the technological standpoint, and this is my personal opinion again, the Navy has not invested in electronic warfare to the 

extent that it did during the Cold War over the last 30 years or 

so. 

There is certainly fantastic capabilities out there and certainly 

new fantastic capabilities in the development path. But you get the 

sense that the Navy is a little bit behind in terms of pacing types 

of threats that we are seeing right now from other great powers. 

So there is certainly a technological aspect to it, and procuring 

new systems will give us the new capability. But I personally see 

that the psychological is actually perhaps the more disconcerting 

one. And that is, again, in 30 years we haven’t conditioned our 

forces for operations under opposed electromagnetic conditions. 

You know, back in the Cold War we routinely operated our carrier battle groups at emissions control conditions, EMCON. They 

would be dark for days on end driving around the Atlantic, driving 

the Soviets nuts in terms of trying to find them. 

During my research, I found that in 1981, this has, again, not 

been confirmed by the Navy, but it is enough anecdotal evidence 

to show that something like this probably happened, we drove a 

combined U.S. naval battle force up into the Norwegian Sea right 

out of Norfolk and the Soviets didn’t find it until we started running offensive drills right off of the Northern Cape. 

And the amount of discipline required to do that is just kind of 

staggering. It is disciplining when we talk on the radio, when we 

radiate, who radiates, flying an E–2 off the carrier using an emissions control profile so it gets outbound, pops up to make it difficult 

for the opponent to figure out where it is actually flying from. 

These are all tactics that you don’t get proficient overnight, it 

takes a long time. 

And on the other side of the coin, it takes a long time to build 

up the psychological hardening for when the adversary starts jamming your communications, jamming your radars. 

You know, we used to have drills where we would jam ourselves 

harder than, you know, the Russians might have, you know, so I 

have been told. And certainly they used various tricks when they 

came out to visit us back in those days I have been told as well. 
7 

And I am not sure we have done that type of training in the last 

couple of decades. Certainly when I was on active duty we didn’t 

do that. 

So if you look at what we would have to be able to do, both in 

terms of hardening ourselves against the adversary’s electronic 

warfare and being able to do the kinds of things we did to the Soviets, to great powers today, I am not sure we are there. 

I think it requires a great deal of training, a great deal of experimentation, and a great deal of just basic conditioning from the 

highest levels of the Navy on down where we let captains and deckplate sailors and officers know that it is okay to take some risk, 

it is okay to take the tactical mission out. 

You are not going to have some senior officer back on the carrier 

even further away micromanaging your decisions over a comms 

[communications] net because we know that net wouldn’t be survivable in the event of war. 

And so we are willing to take some of those tactical risks to do 

that. And I think that that is a big missing piece of that. 

Mr. COURTNEY. Okay. 

Mr. McGrath, I mean, you were sort of alluding to the same sort 

of innovation. It is not all about technology, it is also about, I 

guess, a psychological frame of mind. I don’t know if you want to 

just maybe embellish on that. 

Mr. MCGRATH. I have sort of a vignette for you. In March of 2014 

when the Navy went up to the Naval War College to do the LCS 

[Littoral Combat Ship] war game that was directed by the Secretary of Defense when he first started to truncate the LCS program, they played the game in a manner in which at some point 

they gave the U.S. Navy side a medium-range, 130-or-so nautical 

mile, surface-to-surface missile and put it on the previously not-soarmed LCSs. 

And they looked at the psychological difference between how the 

blue commander operated that force and then also how the red 

commander responded to that force. 

And what was interesting about the blue commanders was those 

ships were no more capable of taking a punch than they previously 

were. They were capable only of delivering a punch more effectively 

at a longer range. 

But what that did for the risk calculus in their minds was for 

them to say it is harder and he is going to pay a higher cost if he 

initiates conflict. Therefore, I can take more risk with my force. I 

think that is important. 

Mr. FORBES. Mr. Bridenstine is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. BRIDENSTINE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

I am a Navy pilot myself. Loved your discussion about the E–2 

Hawkeye. I was one of those guys that flew off the carrier. And of 

course, we did tactics so that they wouldn’t know where we were 

coming from necessarily. 

And then, of course, doing the EMCON recoveries required highintensity operations from the Hawkeye because we would offset a 

pretty significant distance and then control the recovery. 

I would just share with you, one of the challenges we faced over 

and over again with network-centric warfare as a capability was 

the interoperations of all the different systems. 
8 

We would have, you know, one kind of system for the E–2 Hawkeye, and then the other systems weren’t necessarily interoperable 

with what the Hawkeye was using at the time. 

Is there evidence today that there is more interoperability and 

integration in this network-centric capability that we are developing? 

Mr. MCGRATH. Sir, I think you and I are probably—I am probably a little bit older than you are. 

Mr. BRIDENSTINE. Not probably much. 

Mr. MCGRATH. But we probably served as contemporaries. And 

I underwent the same nightmare that you did. 

It is primarily a function of the way we buy and develop systems 

and the way we implement standards, technical standards. This 

ship, this version of this ship implements the Link 16 standard to 

this degree. 

Mr. BRIDENSTINE. Yes. 

Mr. MCGRATH. The E–2C to this degree, the AWACS [Airborne 

Early Warning and Control System] to this degree. Where there 

are implementation differences, there is mischief. 

Mr. BRIDENSTINE. Right. 

Mr. MCGRATH. And my ship shows the track as a neutral, yours 

shows it as an unknown, assumed friend. These are things that 

take operator time. 

We work through that. I think you are seeing more integrated 

development, more adherence to standards, better what we used to 

call SIAP, one and only one track per object. 

Mr. BRIDENSTINE. Single integrated air picture. 

Mr. MCGRATH. Right, single integrated air picture. That sort of 

thinking is much more well-established in the fleet and in the joint 

force. 

One of the things that really drove that was CEC [Cooperative 

Engagement Capability]. 

Mr. BRIDENSTINE. Right, which was the Hawkeye initiative. 

Mr. MCGRATH. The Hawkeye, what you had were a bunch of 

nodes in the system who had the same exact computer algorithms 

in their combat systems. 

Mr. BRIDENSTINE. Right. 

Mr. MCGRATH. And they were sharing data so that they all 

reached the same conclusion. That is not the way it happens in 

most combat systems out there in the fleet and in the joint force. 

But within CEC, the Cooperative Engagement Capability developed 

in the early 1990s and worked out through the 1990s and 2000s. 

That is what we got to use during that time. 

Mr. BRIDENSTINE. So when we network together sufficient target 

information to where we have got actually fire control coordinates 

that we can launch on from a non-associated platform, obviously 

that extends the stick out a lot further, which is optimum given the 

threats that we face. We need to be able to effect lethality much 

further away. 

And the challenge that we have in that environment is ID [identification], whether it is maybe emitting something, we can ID it, 

there are non-cooperative means that we can ID. But as you push, 

you know, the engagement further away, the ID piece gets more 

and more difficult. 
9 

Are there thoughts about how to solve that issue? 

Mr. SOLOMON. So I agree with you wholeheartedly. One of the 

chief problems with the Soviet approach, which was to try and 

build a remote picture using electronic signals, direction finding, 

remote radar, they had their radar ocean reconnaissance satellites 

during the 1970s and 1980s, was, you know, they wanted to be able 

to build their picture remotely and shoot from a distance, because 

they knew if they got close they would get whacked. 

Mr. BRIDENSTINE. Right. 

Mr. SOLOMON. But they couldn’t do it because the technology 

wasn’t there and their command and control architecture wasn’t 

there. And so they had to rely on Pathfinders. These suicidal bombers were tattletale surface combatants that they pushed in and 

really would only work in peacetime once, where it is marking the 

carrier, marking whatever important surface force that they see 

important in the given area and passing the coordinates and the 

contact identification back to a centralized controller, who then 

uses that to generate the ray targeting. 

Well, like I said, it only works once. And if you are reliant on 

long-range exploitation of someone’s emissions, maybe they won’t 

oblige you. 

Mr. BRIDENSTINE. Right. 

Mr. SOLOMON. If you are reliant on a radar picture, well, radars 

can be deceived. You know, jamming a radar is one option. You 

can, you know, throw out a lot of noise, but there are ways of overcoming that. Deception is a lot harder. 

One of the great tricks we used in the Cold War was putting an 

integrated cover-and-deception system package onboard destroyers. 

It is called, I believe, the AN/SSQ–74. It is not really talked about 

much, but existed. 

And this trailer was able to emulate the, later versions, acoustics, but even the electronic emissions. 

Mr. BRIDENSTINE. Well, I am out of time. But I want to get this 

on the record just so everybody is aware and for the chairman’s 

sake as well. 

The greatest network-centric capability pushing the threat out as 

far as we can get it, we all love that. 

At the end of the day, if you have to send a pilot to the merge 

in order to get a VID [visual identification], that is not the answer 

we are looking for. So we have got to have solutions for that. 

And with that, I will yield back, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. FORBES. I thank the gentleman for his questions. 

The gentlelady from Hawaii is recognized, Ms. Gabbard, for 5 

minutes. 

Ms. GABBARD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Thanks, gentlemen, for being here. 

You know, Mr. Solomon, you made a lot of references to the Cold 

War and some of the things that we were able to do then. Can you 

talk about the contemporary environment that we are operating in 

with both our advanced technology and others and either really 

what the differences are when you are talking about deception, between now and, you know, a previous generation? 

Mr. SOLOMON. Well, the focus hasn’t changed. We are still dealing with electronic emissions exploitation, direction finding. Per-
10 

haps they have become more accurate in their ability to refine 

areas of uncertainty, where a given emitter might be. 

Certainly during the Cold War, the Russians only had a couple 

of satellites up at a time. Now it looks like various competitors 

might have satellite constellations capabilities, these types of triangulations up more regularly. 

We are still looking at space-based radar, the use of synthetic aperture radar to build a picture. But it only visits a certain area of 

ocean space for a given period during the day. And so that really 

hasn’t changed, it depends upon how many satellites you have up 

there. 

The ability to use unmanned vehicles, whether surface, subsurface, aerial, that is kind of different. You know, there might 

have been a little bit more hesitance perhaps to use a manned 

bomber in that role, although the Soviets didn’t seem to have that 

hesitance. 

Now that you can perhaps use an unmanned system in that role, 

that is a major concern. But it also flips it around, from our perspective, and getting back to the gentleman’s point, you know, if I 

can’t be absolutely sure of what I am targeting using remote 

means, using an unmanned system to do a relatively close range, 

whether visual, infrared, electrical optical, whatever identification, 

make sure I am looking at a real contact as opposed to a decoy or 

someone pretending to be something that they are not. That is a 

bit of a difference. 

And the technology in that realm is certainly more advanced 

than it was during the Cold War. I am not sure who is ahead in 

that regard. I certainly think that is an area of important investment for us. I don’t have a sense of where potential adversaries are 

on that. 

Ms. GABBARD. Thank you. 

Mr. McGrath, with the Distributed Lethality concept, what are 

the major points of resistance within the Navy to adopting this? 

And building off the chairman’s question, how do those changes 

really come about? 

Mr. MCGRATH. You know, the more I hear it talked about, the 

more it seems like the surface guys are pushing on an open door. 

I think there are some bureaucratic and budgetary rice-bowl 

issues. If we spend X amount of dollars on increasing the lethality 

of the surface force, those dollars have to come from somewhere, 

where will they come from, whose ox gets gored in that process? 

So I think that would be—but you know, that is the Pentagon, 

you know, that is just overhead associated with the way that the 

Department is run. That sort of stuff gets worked through. It is 

pretty much an open door. 

Ms. GABBARD. I think the Navy Institute has a quote, saying 

that there are no leaps of technology required, no massive funding 

increases necessary. Do you think that that is accurate? 

Mr. MCGRATH. I think it is accurate to a point. I think there are 

a whole slew of technologies and capabilities that are 7 years and 

in that the surface force could integrate that aren’t—there is no 

magic involved, there is no, you know, leap of faith required. 

There are leaps of faith in the 2030, 2040 force that we have to 

invest in S&T [science and technology] and R&D [research and de-
11 

velopment] to get to. But a good, solid instantiation of Distributed 

Lethality in the 2025 timeframe is not a budget breaker. 

Ms. GABBARD. Thank you. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. FORBES. Mr. Conaway is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. CONAWAY. All right. Thank you, Chairman. 

Can you talk to us about where lasers and electromagnetic 

railguns and even improvements in powder projectiles fit within 

this innovative timeframe? And are those something that the Navy 

is serious about? Where do they fit? 

Mr. SOLOMON. Okay. Well, I personally think the Navy is very 

serious about those technologies. You know, the Navy leadership is 

very, very excited, from what I have seen in the open press, about 

railgun in particular and there are plans to demo it onboard, I 

think, the JHSV [Joint High Speed Vessel] Millinocket next year. 

And there are certainly, you know, people looking at how to get 

that into the fleet sometime in the late 2020s. I think it is to be 

determined what type of combatant you put that on, you know, 

whether you might use a DDG–1000, in my personal opinion, or 

whether we look to a new combatant sometime in the late 2020s 

that, if this technology proved out, that you could put that on. 

But for railgun, I think we alluded to this earlier, that the projectile itself is probably even more important, the ability for the 

projectile to survive these electromagnetic forces in the barrel and 

do all kinds of things we want it to do, whether it is land attack 

or missile defense, that is an open question. 

As for laser, I think the Navy is also very much in support of 

that. You see the talking points on what we have done out in the 

Persian Gulf on AFSB [Afloat Forward Staging Base]. And I certainly think that the Navy is looking at, you know, solid-state laser 

technologies that might be used for point defense, because that is 

really what it seems like laser would be best capable of doing, especially, in my opinion, for unmanned aerial vehicle defense. 

You don’t want to be burning up hard ordnance shooting a bunch 

of UAVs out of the sky. So I think there is a lot of enthusiasm for 

that in Navy leadership. 

Mr. CONAWAY. So where do both these technologies fit in the existing structure? I mean, are there—you said the DDG–1000 for the 

railgun or whatever. Is that adaptable to everything that is in the 

fleet now, or do we have to have a whole new class of ships to 

make this deal work, make those weapons work? 

Mr. MCGRATH. I don’t think we need a whole new class of ship, 

we need to bring the integration costs down. The railgun is not a 

cheap capability. It is a wonderful capability and it is something 

that will and should join the fleet, but it is expensive. 

And when you start to look at the trades and what you could get, 

what other things you could get, those trades sometimes look less 

attractive. 

Mr. CONAWAY. So in terms of the weapon itself, but not the 

usage? Because the idea with the railgun is that you could shoot 

a lot of them for less than—— 

Mr. MCGRATH. And you would wind up spending less per shot 

than you would with a missile, that is for sure. 

Mr. CONAWAY. Okay. 
12 

Mr. MCGRATH. And that, in the long run, it is hard to get organizations in the Department of Defense to think life cycle. They like 

to think acquisition and they like to think, you know, the budget 

that is in front of them like this. 

But when you start to bring in those longer-range life cycle 

things, they make a compelling case for both lasers and the 

railgun. 

Mr. CONAWAY. Okay. 

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Mr. FORBES. Mr. Russell is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. RUSSELL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

And you know, I had almost identical questions, so along that 

vein, and then I will add an extra in. 

It would seem to me in a 40- to 50-year overmatch capacity, you 

know, we are going to continue to have diminishing budgets, China 

will continue to have increasing budgets. That will create a delta 

that will be double between now and 2030 probably of $2 trillion. 

Given that, we have got some great potential with the railgun 

technologies. So when you talk expenses, are you saying is that 

based upon the power generation piece of this? Is it based upon the 

ordnance piece of it? Where would that be? 

Mr. MCGRATH. It is an expensive piece of gear to buy and integrate. Over the cost of operating it over 20 or 30 years, its per-shot 

versus a missile system is a great savings. And we have to think 

more like that. I am not saying that the railgun shouldn’t be integrated. I am trying to give an idea of why it isn’t happening faster. 

Mr. RUSSELL. But don’t you think it would even go beyond that 

when you look at terms of versatility? You can use it for air defense. You can use it for direct fire. You can use it for long distance. You can use it for land-based interservice use. 

It would seem that if it had the appropriate level of, look, as you 

say, to look at life cycle, that there would be great utility, great 

overmatch and, in the long run, maybe even a cost saving. 

Mr. MCGRATH. My personal view is that the railgun’s greatest 

contribution is going to be in missile defense. 

Mr. RUSSELL. Yes, which is our number-one threat towards our 

carrier fleet—newsflash. 

Mr. MCGRATH. You know, as a direct fire weapon from the sea, 

even at the energy levels that we are talking about and the biggest 

railgun that we are talking, I think we are talking about something 

like 200 miles. 

Two hundred miles from a land target in some of these fights 

that we are talking about in the future is pretty close. So I would 

like the IMD [integrated missile defense], the missile defense, capability as fast as we can get it. 

Mr. RUSSELL. And I will waive the UAV laser question because 

that got answered. 

But in terms of capability and capacity, we hear at all of these 

briefings about, you know, the 11th carrier and the turnaround, 

and now we are seeing allies, fortunately, like Great Britain to 

launch a couple, and France maybe they are going to get a different 

look at adding carrier number two, we don’t know. 

But regardless, with the amphibious assault ships and the last 

iteration of the Wasp class and then the America class that is roll-
13 

ing out, under terms of sea control and forward staging, you know, 

particularly in the Pacific, there is a lot of versatility there. These 

are Midway-size carriers. You know, in appearance they certainly 

provide an awful lot of capacity. 

What thinking is the Navy doing with regard to that, if we have 

forward staged-based stuff and now we can have sea control with 

the amphibious assault ships? Is that even part of the equation 

when looking at carrier structure and presence? 

Mr. MCGRATH. The amphibious assault ships with the F–35B 

embarked are going to be incredible assets in the Navy and Marine 

Corps—the maritime fight. 

That plane is a fantastic combat vehicle for doing a whole lot of 

things. It is not just air-to-mud. This stuff that it can do in terms 

of this anti-surface, integrated air and missile defense, there are all 

sorts of things that the Navy and the Marine Corps need to cooperate much more closely in order to get the benefits out of that to 

the warfight. They are thinking and working in that regard. 

I think, and I have written pretty widely about this, it is not correct to think of the America class with F–35Bs as a substitute. And 

I am not saying you said this—— 

Mr. RUSSELL. No, that is the versatility. 

Mr. MCGRATH. It is a—— 

Mr. RUSSELL. And a gap filler which we hear all the time we 

need. 

Mr. MCGRATH. It is an extender, a gap filler, it is a capability 

that we are going to get a whole lot more out of than we can get 

currently out of the AV–8Bs in that. 

Mr. RUSSELL. Okay, yes, thank you. 

Thank you, Mr. Chair. 

Mr. FORBES. Mr. McGrath, Mr. Solomon, thank you so much for 

your testimony. 

Ms. Graham has waived any questions she might have for you. 

And you heard the bells, they toll for us. But we want to make 

sure that we have given you a last couple of minutes for any wrapup that either of you might have before we adjourn. 

Mr. McGrath. 

Mr. MCGRATH. I would like to thank Mr. Courtney, in his absence, for using the phrase ‘‘hardening.’’ The Air Force, when we 

talk about air bases we talk about hardening, hardening air bases, 

air bases that aren’t going anywhere, they are just going to stay 

there. 

We talk about survivability with respect to ships. And I think it 

levies a rhetorical weight upon the Navy that I am personally trying to change by using the word ‘‘hardening,’’ we want to harden 

the surface force, make it fight through damage and deliver more 

damage to the other guy. And I thank Mr. Courtney for using that 

word. 

Mr. FORBES. Mr. Solomon. 

Mr. SOLOMON. I think that it is important to view Distributed 

Lethality as a set of options; it is not purely offensive, or at least 

it shouldn’t be. 

And I don’t believe, as Mr. McGrath said earlier, that it is going 

to be subtracting from defensive unless we, you know, make a mistake in how we define the concept. 
14 

I see Distributed Lethality as a tool for our force commanders, 

for our theater commanders, to give them more options at every 

stage of the conflict spectrum. And to the extent that electronic 

warfare supports that, you know, there are certainly less things 

you can do during phase zero, phase one, the shaping, the turns 

that you can do when you are actually in combat, but there are 

things you can do there. 

I think there are a lot of rich historical examples of how we did 

psychological shaping of the Soviets during the late Cold War to 

help deter them from any belief that they would be successful in 

a first salvo. I think that is pretty crucial. 

And so to the extent that the Navy can look at that rich history, 

which is still largely classified, and derive new ideas for how we 

might condition some of our great-power adversaries or potential 

adversaries, that today is not the day, using tools like these, I 

think that is very important to think about. 

Mr. FORBES. Okay. 

I thank you both for being here today and for the contributions 

you make to the national defense of our country. 

And with that, we are adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 4:10 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 
A P P E N D I X 

DECEMBER 9, 2015 

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