NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The advances in shipbuilding technology and investments in facilities, training and tools is helping Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS) — a Huntington Ingalls Industries (Booth 1323) sector — keep up with the demands of the present and prepare for the future, according to its president.

“We are busier than we have been in my 34 years [with NNS], said NNS President Jennifer Boykin, speaking to reporters Aug. 2 at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Expo in National Harbor, Maryland.

NNS currently is building or overhauling 34 ships, including 27 at the shipyard in Newport News, Virginia, and 14 elsewhere at other sites.

That capacity is enabled by new technology, including additive manufacturing, laser scanning, augmented reality, 5G shipyard connectivity and data analytics.

Boykin said NNS has the capability to use additive manufacturing to produce components of more than 600 pounds. The capability is awaiting certification from the U.S. Navy to use on its ships.

She also pointed out that the third Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier, the future USS Enterprise (CVN 80), is the first aircraft carrier being built by workers using digital tablets.

With these new technologies, Boykin noted that “many refer to this as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

NNS has invested $1.9 billion in physical plant infrastructure since 2016. Those funds have been devoted to submarine facility expansion, a joint manufacturing and assembly facility, a new 310-ton crane replacement, machine shops, foundry and steel fabrication improvements, new automation, and digital infrastructure throughout the shipyard.

NNS builds nuclear-powered ships including Ford-class aircraft carriers and — teamed with General Dynamics Electric Boat (Booth 1023) — Virginia-class attack submarines and Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines. NNS also conducts refueling and complex overhauls of Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and depot-level maintenance and refueling of some Los Angeles-class attack submarines.

The shipyard is on track to deliver two Virginia-class submarines and re-deliver the Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Helena to the fleet in 2021.

Asked about what would be needed in terms of shipyard investment to increase capacity to build three Virginia-class submarines per year if so funded, Boykin said significant investment across the submarine construction enterprise — including the supply chain — would be required.

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The Navy’s massive Large Scale Exercise 2021 kicks off this week and the sea service’s top officer said Monday the exercise represents a “path to the future” for the service.

It’s the “biggest exercise we’ve done in a generation,” and the Navy will benefit from its lessons for years to come, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday said while speaking at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Expo in National Harbor, Maryland.

The exercise will involve 25,000 sailors and Marines and will span 17 time zones in the Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, and Mediterranean Sea. The exercise begins Aug. 3 and will finish on Aug. 16.

While the Navy plans to test warfighting concepts like it would with any exercise, one of the main purposes of the event is to put Sailors and Marines in a two-week live virtual constructive exercise, Gilday said.

“At an individual level, it allows sailors and combatant commanders” to experiment with warfighting concepts and generate lessons learned, he said.

“That’s the key to this,” he said. “It’s to take this warfighting concept, which is quite frankly going to be foundational to everything that we buy, everything we invest in, and it’s going to inform how we’re going to fight.”

The exercise provides a rare opportunity where service members can train together regardless of their role.

“We think this constructive training is really a path to the future for us,” Gilday said. “You can imagine that sailors and lieutenant commanders and their COs can conduct integrated training — air wing and submarines and surface ships and cyber units. Any time they want thousands of repetitions, we can learn from that, and bring back those lessons to how we fight.”

According to the U.S. Coast Guard’s 2020 “Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing Strategic Outlook,” IUU fishing has replaced piracy as the leading global maritime security threat. Saildrone uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) have sailed more than 500,000 nautical miles collecting valuable data about the marine environment for fisheries research, climate science, and ocean mapping. Now, a new class of Saildrone vehicles equipped with radar, 360-degree cameras, Automatic Identification System (AIS) and proprietary machine learning algorithms makes Saildrone a unique solution for combating IUU fishing, narcotics interdiction, and other maritime domain awareness (MDA) activities, anytime and in any ocean.

The Saildrone Voyager is a 33-foot sailboat-like vehicle predominantly powered by wind for propulsion and solar energy for electronics, communications, and navigation. With an average speed of up to five knots, the Saildrone Voyager can operate continuously in the open ocean for up to 180 days while producing a minimal carbon footprint. Saildrone USVs can be deployed and retrieved from any oceanside dock and transit autonomously to and from the operating area.

Global Fishing Watch uses a combination of publicly available AIS data and satellite imagery to expose areas of illegal fishing activity. The Voyager fuses optical data and machine learning to detect targets that are otherwise not transmitting their position in real time. These detection events are then fused with other data sources — AIS and acoustics — to deliver a fully informed picture of the surrounding maritime domain. Stationed strategically, a group of Voyagers can deliver 24/7/365 protection of marine assets.

Saildrone possesses the world’s largest data set of images of the open ocean. Tens of millions of images, collected by the Saildrone fleet deployed all over the world during more than six years of operational missions, have been annotated with human analysis highlighting anything of interest — vessels, birds, icebergs, etc. With this enormous data set, Saildrone’s ML model automatically recognizes objects in real time, providing unprecedented situational awareness to remote command centers.

In October 2020, Saildrone performed a successful 30-day demonstration of MDA capabilities for the U.S. Coast Guard off the coast of Hawaii. Each week highlighted a specific real-world use case for persistent MDA: general traffic monitoring, IUU fishing, search and patrol and port security. Additionally, Saildrone USVs can conduct long-duration intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions enabling narcotics interdictions.

Saildrone USVs also carry a robust payload of oceanographic and meteorological sensors for continuous high-resolution environmental monitoring above and below the sea surface. Optional sensors include an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP), which can help to identify conditions in which a loitering vessel might drift into a protected area, and multibeam sonar for high-resolution ocean mapping, necessary for improving safety of navigation.

Data is transferred in real time via a secure satellite network. Saildrone data can be viewed in the proprietary Saildrone Mission Portal or linked directly into existing architecture, for example, Minotaur via an API interface. The Saildrone Mission Portal provides a variety of tools — overlays of satellite products, model GRIB files, and ingestion of other assets such as ships, buoys, tagged animals, or other autonomous platforms — for on-the-fly mission analysis and fleet management.

Saildrone USVs are rugged and have a proven track record of performing long-duration missions in remote areas and extreme conditions. The Saildrone fleet has logged more than 13,000 days at sea in some of the most extreme weather conditions on the planet. They have tracked fish in the North Sea, surveyed ocean eddies off Africa, air-sea heat transfer in the Gulf Stream and discovered a shipwreck in the Gulf of Mexico. They have crossed the Atlantic Ocean in both directions, sailed up to the Arctic ice edge setting a northern latitude record for an autonomous vehicle of 75.49°N and survived Southern Ocean storms to circumnavigate Antarctica.

The robustness of the underlying core components, a wind-powered vehicle capable of long-duration missions and a machine learning-based approach to vessel detection, makes Saildrone an ideal solution for persistent maritime domain awareness in any ocean.

The Navy requires a single, strategic-scale, sustainable design for supply-chain management, with the right mix of commercial and organic activities to project and sustain the force required for war fighting.

With that in mind, Naval Supply Systems Command (NAVSUP) kicked off the newest vice chief of naval operations-led naval sustainment system in October 2020. Naval Sustainment System-Supply (NSS-Supply) aims to unify numerous independent supply-chain functions under the leadership of NAVSUP Commander Rear Adm. Pete Stamatopolous, with the goal of improving end-to-end supply chain readiness and affordability.

As NSS-Supply nears its first anniversary in operation momentum continues to build as NAVSUP and mission partners have progressed through several waves of deliberate transformation.

“The Navy’s supply chains lacked end-to-end coordination and alignment for decades, which has created numerous issues: insufficient and inefficient organic repair capacity, high rates of part cannibalization, an excess of unrepaired parts, a cash shortfall and, ultimately, degraded readiness,” Stamatopoulos said.

“Over the past several years, uncoordinated decisions made upstream were constricting our supply chains and causing significant downstream inefficiencies. NSS-Supply is working to better orchestrate, integrate and synchronize the many functions of our supply chains to correct these issues and deliver higher readiness at lower costs throughout the lifecycle of the weapons systems.”

Grounded in commercial best practices pioneered by industrial companies such as Caterpillar, Delta Tech Ops and John Deere, NSS-Supply elevates supply chain management into the Navy “C-Suite.” Designated as the Navy’s single end-to-end supply chain integrator, Stamatopolous is responsible for elevating the visibility of supply-chain performance by holding supporting functions accountable.

Stamatopoulos leads an organization of supply chain professionals responsible for providing responsive logistical support worldwide, through a global network with a presence in more than 17 countries and 21 states, districts and territories.

NSS-Supply is also moving supply-chain decisions upstream to better shape and design life-cycle logistics strategies for which the costs are lower. To hold the Navy accountable, NSS-Supply has created a cash-based metric to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of its supply chain in the long term. This north-star metric, the Supply Chain Effectiveness Figure of Merit (SeFOM), is the Navy’s first enterprise-level metric that balances readiness and costs. For every dollar put into sustaining a platform, the SeFOM measures the value of readiness generated.

In addition, NSS-Supply is driving unity of effort across six pillars that dissect and transform different functions of the supply chain.

• The Achieve End-to-End Integration pillar.
• The Demand Management pillar aims to reduce demand fleet-wide and increase predictability through improving reliability and maintenance.
• The End-to-End Velocity pillar focuses on accelerating the movement of material and parts in the Navy supply chain by lowering repair turnaround times and repair, overhaul or reconditioning queue times.
• The Optimize Working Capital Fund pillar reorients financial management to a commercial cash flow-centric approach designed to improve transparency of cash allocation, collections, expenditures and pricing for long-term stability.
• The Optimize Organic Repair pillar rebalances organic depot repair volume to fully utilize capability and capacity.
• The Shape Industrial Base pillar, the most aspirational pillar, aims to expand competition and deepen partnerships with strategic suppliers to make acquisition and sustainment more efficient, cost-effective and affordable.

NSS-Supply is a hugely ambitious project for the Navy, due both to its broad scope and the speed at which it moves. While NSS-Supply is a multiyear undertaking, it’s divided into three-month “waves” during which three to five initiatives run simultaneously across the six pillars.

The timelines for the waves’ initiatives are based on an agile framework (another commercial best practice). Each initiative has multiple two- to four-week sprints, with clear outcomes at the end of each sprint that define and shape the work of the subsequent sprints.

Although this is a new approach for the Navy, it’s already yielding positive change and realizable gains since launching last fall. With each wave and sprint, NAVSUP and Navy are gaining new supply-chain competencies and confidence in the effectiveness of this way of doing business.

“These first several months of NSS-Supply have given me great confidence and optimism that we are finally within reach of a decades-long goal of achieving a fully integrated and sustainable Navy-wide supply chain,” Stamatopoulos said. “I look forward to its continued success.”

ARLINGTON, Va. — The nation’s submarine construction capacity built up for the Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarine (SSBN) program eventually will help the U.S. Navy to increase production of attack submarines (SSNs) to alleviate a shortage of attack boats, according to Navy and shipbuilding officials.

Under current planning, the Navy’s force structure studies have shown a need 70 SSN. The service currently fields about 50 SSNs, which are heavily used by regional combatant commanders, being only able to meet about 50% of their deployment requirements.  

The Navy is building two Virginia-class attack submarines per year, and soon both, in the Block V version, will be equipped with the Virginia Payload Module, which will add cruise missile capacity and hypersonic missile capability to the force, among other payloads.

The Navy would like to procure three SSNs per year but currently is constrained by budget capacity to two per year while the Columbia-class SSBN is under construction. The Columbia program is a once-in-a-generation recapitalization program for the nation’s strategic deterrent force.

“We’re working very closely with industry to make sure we’re making the right long-term decisions, said Rear Adm. Bill Houston, director, Undersea Warfare, Division, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, who has been selected to be the Navy’s next commander, Submarine Forces, speaking in a pre-recorded webinar of the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Prequel.

“We also have to look at it from a budget aspect [and] maintenance capability,” Houston said. “What our concern is that if you go to three [SSNs] per year in trying to peak out [the submarine force] with Virginia — with a 33-year life of ship — when you start building three per year, you’re ending up with a force structure of 99. So, as we’re reconstituting Columbia, and building two Virginias per year, when [construction of] the last Columbia hull commences in ’35, we’re going to have significant capacity then. So, we have the capability to go to three per year right now. The issue is that we’ve got Columbia under construction, so we’re just doing that balancing right now. Working with industry right now to make sure that stability that’s out there for [submarine builders], we’re trying to avoid those peak/troughs.

“As part of our private [shipyard submarine maintenance] plan, that workforce is highly skilled and we can’t go from periods when we have the private industry doing maintenance and then it’s not doing maintenance, because that is a fragile skillset,” he said.

Houston pointed out that stability in work orders is key to shipyard health and performance.

“We’re capable of going to three Virginias [per year] right now, [but] it would impact Columbia, so we’re concentrating on doing the Columbia and two Virginias per year,” he said. “We’re looking [at] how we can get up to three, but we’re sure that when that last Columbia hull is under construction, we’re going to have significant capacity.”

Houston noted that a Block V Virginia SSN displaces 10,000 tons submerged, equating to about half that of the Columbia SSBN, so every Columbia equates to two Virginia SSNs in displacement. Accordingly, with one Columbia and two Block V Virginias under construction, “we’re essentially building the equivalent of four Virginias,” he said.

“So, the capacity is there,” he said. “It’s more about the stability and avoiding the peaks and troughs.”

“I think our industrial base is somewhat fragile as we’ve gone from low-rate production in the 90s to now a two-per-year Virginia, a two-plus-one Virginia and Columbia,” said Kevin Graney, president of General Dynamics Electric Boat, whose company, teamed with Huntington Ingalls Newport News Shipbuilding, is building the Columbia-class SSBN. “That’s requiring us to bring in an awful lot of new suppliers across the industrial base in order to support that.”

Graney also said Electric Boat has been investing in additional facilities including construction halls and laid-out space in Groton, Connecticut, and Quonset Point, Rhode Island; upgrading a floating drydock from which the Columbia will be launched; and purchasing a new transport barge. The company has invested “about $250 million in training programs over the last five years and we’re developing active learning shipyards within the shipyards that have proven effective in improving our proficiency.”   

ARLINGTON, Va. — The U.S. Navy’s next-generation nuclear-powered attack submarine, SSNX, will combine the best technologies and capabilities from earlier submarines to produce the finest hunter the world’s oceans have ever seen, according to the service.

“We’re looking at the ultimate apex predator for the maritime domain,” said Rear Adm. Bill Houston, director, Undersea Warfare, Division, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, who has been selected to be the Navy’s next commander, Submarine Forces, speaking in a pre-recorded webinar of the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Prequel.

Houston said the SSNX has “got to be faster, carry a significant punch, a bigger payload, a larger salvo rate. It’s got to have acoustic superiority and simultaneously we’re going to work on operational availability with respect to maintenance and life of the ship.

“We’re taking what we already know how to do and combining it together,” he said.

The Seawolf-class SSN, which entered service in the late 1990s, “has incredible speed and payload,” he said. “We’re going to take that Seawolf trait of payload and speed; we’re going to take Virginia class acoustics and sensors; and then we’re going to take Columbia’s [nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine, or SSBN] operational availability and life of ship.

“We’re going to put that all together [for SSNX] — the apex predator — because it really needs to be ready for major combat operations,” he said. “It’s going to need to be able to go behind enemy lines and deliver that punch that is going to really establish our primacy. It needs to be able to deny an adversary’s ability to operate in their bastion regions.”

Houston said that the Navy is “confident we’re going to be able to do that because we’ve already built that on those platforms. We know how to do that. We just have to mesh it together with one platform. The systems we have, with electronic design, the tools, the stuff that we’ve already developed, we’re going to capitalize on that.”

The admiral explained that the SSNX is timed to capitalize on the ‘very robust” design team for the Columbia-class SSBN when that program is ramping down amid production of the SSBNs.

“We’ll be ramping up in SSNX because we’ll have the design and the RDT&E [research, development, test and evaluation] done,” Houston said. “It takes a significant amount of time and effort for that RDT&E to develop this apex predator. That’s what we’re going to do over the next decade working on the systems for SSNX. We’re very confident we can get there. It’s a daunting task, but the team is more than capable of doing it.”    

Three top female service officials said the sea services and military can provide great opportunities for women and minorities, but more work needs to be done to encourage those people to join the armed forces and help them meet their goals once inside.

“I think it’s really important for us to recognize the value and significance of the leadership opportunities that we get in the military and in the Department of Defense as civilians, at a much more junior age, much younger than our civilian counterparts ever would,” said Vice Adm. Nancy Norton, who retired as vice director of the Defense Information Systems Agency and commander of the Joint Force Heaquarters Department of Defense Information Network after a 34-year career.

“What we want to do, as women, is be great leaders, just like any man or woman in the military, and look for opportunities to better enable men and women across the board in all leadership opportunities,” she said.

Norton spoke on the “Women and Warfare” session as part of the Sea-Air-Space 2021 Prequel, along with Rear Adm. Melissa Bert, judge advocate general for the U.S. Coast Guard, and Col. Kelly Frushour, deputy director of the Communications Directorate at Marine Corps headquarters.

All the women said they weren’t expecting to make a career of it when they joined the military, but once inside what kept them going were the opportunities and the people.

“I never actually made a conscious decision to stay in the Navy, I just kept doing things that I loved, and the Navy kept giving me opportunities to do new things and to see new places, to go places I would never have had the opportunity to experience,” Norton said.

Bert joined the Coast Guard at a time when it was only 10 percent female and did two tours on ships where she was the only woman on board. That helped her decide she didn’t want a seagoing career, so the Coast Guard sent her to law school.

“Through a lot of great friends and mentors and coaches, I just stayed with it, and it’s been fun. My closest friends are in the Coast Guard and I met my husband, who is not in the Coast Guard, but I met him through the coast guard, so it’s just a second family to me, that’s why I stayed,” Bert said. “It wasn’t even the mission as much as the people.”

Frushour said she was an Air Force brat who attended a “hail and farwell” ceremony at the U.S. embassy in Norway, her father’s last posting, for a departing Marine and his replacement.

For the new arrival, “it didn’t seem like a start over for him, it seemed like he had moved into a new family, into a new group of friends. As a military brat who had grown up all over the place, that really stayed with me. What a great thing, to be able to join an organization that is doing good work, to be able to serve my country, be able to travel, and wherever you go, you’re just joining friends and family that are already there.”

Norton said the military really is a meritocracy, and “frankly, one of the reasons I’ve loved being in the military is from the time I started I’ve always felt like the military has led society in diversity and equality in many, many ways … If you work hard and are dedicated to the people and the mission, you can be successful, and I think it’s important that we in the military, and those of us who are retired and continue to influence the Department of Defense, continue to make it a leader in our social change and social justice across the board.”

However, changes still need to be made, Bert said.

“We still have model, because it was formed by men, we have a model that is for a stay at home person, whether it’s a husband or wife, who’s raising the kids, we don’t really acknowledge that having a family is part of most people’s lives,” Bert said. “It should not be a choice … either six years at sea as a SWO [surface warfare officer] and then deciding, I can’t have this lifestyle, or just moving all the time.”

That model is “a great way to drive out really talented people, not just women. It’s not a lifestyle choice [where] we’re going to get the best in American society. … We need to start listening to women and underrepresented minorities and look at ways we can change.”

ARLINGTON, Va. — The U.S. Navy urgently needs to modernize its battle force in order to meet the near-term challenges of China and Russia if it is to continue to dominate the maritime domain and protect the freedom of the seas, two Congress members and a naval analyst said.

“We as a nation must become a sea power again,” said Dr. Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain, former director of Navy History and Heritage Command, and now vice president of the Telamus Group, speaking in a pre-recorded webinar of the Navy League’s Sea-Air Space Prequel event. “We’re facing a rising global competition right now. This [2022] budget quite frankly in reading of it, is just unserious. It’s unserious in that amount that was funded there and it’s as unserious in the terms of cutting back forces just as we should be adding forces, trying to keep the defense industrial base primed and, in fact, expanding. So, when we actually cut back on the number of surface combatants we’re building, we’re sending a mixed signal to the industrial base when we ought to be singing as a chorus right now about what is needed.”

Hendrix said the U.S. government “seems to be leaning toward a budget that is purely focused on 10 to 15 years out when, in fact, we’ve just had a significant warning from an outgoing retiring four-star [Adm. Phil Davidson, former commander, Indo-Pacific Command] that really the threat can exist six years from now. So, how are we going to meet that near-term threat? That calls for us to be looking at how we modernize and extend the lives of the platforms we have now, which is what we are not doing as a Navy or Department of Defense.”

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, also speaking in the webinar, said the Navy needs to “build a battle force for 2025, not 2045. As Adm. Davidson has warned, we may have six years or less before the PRC [Peoples Republic of China] takes action against Taiwan. We could have just years to prepare for a war that could decide the course of the 21st century, and that war would be waged, first and foremost, by the sea services. So, we can’t pay lip service to the idea of naval supremacy anymore, we have to earn it. We have to do better if we want to avert disaster and — make no mistake — that is where our present course leads us. We have to act with sense of urgency to advocate for, to build, and resource American seapower before it’s too late.”

Gallagher said Congress needs “to be honest with the American people about the stakes, what it’s going to cost, and the hard choices we have to make. If we fail to reverse the current trends, we’re going to wake up one day and we will either have lost a war or thrown Taiwan under the bus and, in so doing, destroyed American military deterrence in the process.”

“We need to take swift action to improve our fleet architecture to respond to the threats that China poses today,” said Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Virginia), vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee, also speaking at the webinar, noting the need to ready the battle force for 2025, not just 2045.

“The position we find ourselves in is no fault of today’s naval leadership. We’ve really lost a generation of shipbuilding — ship classes that haven’t been built to the same quantity or capability that was initially intended. There is a bigger debate going on in Congress about what the future Navy, the future force structure looks like, and I, myself, was quite disappointed with this [2022] budget from the Navy that in fact did not grow the fleet … and proposed to decommission more ships than it was going to build” in 2022.

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Navy’s top officer has described what he sees the U.S. Fleet will look like in 2025, a benchmark which he says the Navy will have made investments so that the fleet will have made notable strides with fielding increased combat capability.

CNO Adm. Michael Gilday, speaking in a prerecorded webinar of the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Prequel, listed some of the major platforms and weapons that will make the fleet more capable by 2025:

Under the sea:

• “All of our Block III and IV [Virginia-class attack submarines] should be delivered by 2025 with an undersea weapon that is more lethal and has greater range.”

On the sea:

• “We [will be] just on the cusp of delivering our first Constellation-class frigate.”
• “We will be delivering the [Arleigh Burke-class] Flight III DDGs in earnest.”
• “We are investing in a longer-range weapon, the Maritime Strike Tomahawk that gives us range and speed to reach out and touch an adversary.”
• “We believe that we will be delivering the Zumwalt-class destroyers with a hypersonic missile capability.”

In the air:

• “We’ll have half of our [carrier] air wings [with] a fourth- and fifth-generation mix [of strike fighters], which analysis has shown to be quite effective against our adversaries. Tied in with that is a longer-range air-to-surface missile that gives us greater reach and greater punch.”
• “Our P-8s [maritime patrol reconnaissance aircraft] we are investing in with an upgrade.”

“All of that is coming into play by 2025,” the admiral noted. “So, we do have an investment strategy that incrementally gets us to a more capable, lethal fleet — not necessarily a bigger fleet — unless we saw a rise in the [budget] topline.”

Top officials from several allied navies said cooperation and collaboration is one key way to bolster their capability in tough budget times.

U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Francis D. Morley, director of the Navy International Programs Office, led a Sea-Air-Space 2021 Prequel virtual session in July with international heads of navy, including speakers from the United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain and Japan.

Vice Adm. Nick Hine, second Sea Lord of the Royal Navy, said where possible, allies should move beyond interoperability and embrace interchangeability.

That is “not about individual naval units working together operationally, indeed tactically, but a strategic conversation about how we consider our entire approach to collaboration. This is about using our collective resource better to be more productive and deliver better security outcomes,” Hine said. “We have started that journey, but to be truly interchangeable with our allies, we must align strategic visions, cohere our planning and resources, jointly plan and execute operationally and technically, not only acting together but acting as one.”

That could include common doctrines, systems architecture, supply chains, data sharing as well as “common platforms and weapon systems that can be jointly developed and delivered to sovereign units,” he said.

As an example, he cited the U.K.’s Carrier Strike Group 21, led by the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, that has U.S. Marine Corps, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force F-35 pilots “flying and fighting together,” as the recently did in strikes against Daesh, the terrorist group also known as ISIS.

Another example he cited is the London Tech Bridge, an incubator which highlights American and British technology and rapidly exploits it.

“Even if we are unable to achieved interchangeability in full, the ambition and the drive towards it will strengthen interoperability between allied navies,” Hine said.

Rear Adm. Ignacio Villanueva Serrano, force commander of the Spanish navy, said a medium-sized navy such as his own needs to enhance several capabilities to stay relevant, including leveraging space as an extension of the air and sea, new “connectors and vectors for seapower projection” and unmanned systems, all of which, “one way or another, will be required in the new security and defense environment.”

Serrano and Hine both noted that technology is becoming more widely available across the board, to large navies and small actors alike.

The current environment is “marked by a struggle for technological superiority and easy access by all to emerging and advanced technologies, where it can be difficult to gain advantage in direct confrontation,” Serrano said. “In this context, the use of hybrid strategies will prevail and opposing actors will try to act at the limit of international legality, covered by fake news to manipulate public opinion and provoking critical doubts on the use of all military forces and capability.”

Navies such as those of Spain and Sweden need to modernize and beef up their capabilities, said Serrano and Rear Adm. Ewa Skoog Haslum, chief of navy for the Swedish Navy, the first woman to lead a branch of the country’s armed forces.

“Interoperability requires us to find both technology solutions and the continued develop of sharing recognized maritime picture with our different partners,” she said. “Together, we are not only stronger, but better.”

She cited the recent Baltic Operations (BALTOPS) exercise, which celebrated its 50^th anniversary this year and included 16 NATO nations and two partner nations, including Sweden.

Sweden is embarking on a military buildup that will see mid-life updates on corvettes, including adding electronic warfare suites and air defense missiles, four new surface combatants, with two arriving by 2030, operationalizing a fifth new submarine and re-establishing a marine regiment on the country’s west coast, among other changes.

Next year will mark the 500^th birthday of the Royal Swedish Navy, she noted, and a new defense resolution gives a clear growth goal for 2025 and beyond, “and we are now eager to grow.”

Spain wants to lean in to new credible landing forces and littoral strike capabilities, Serrano said, using short takeoff and landing aircraft and small landing platforms, as well as underwater vehicles for mine detection and unmanned surface vehicles for force protection.

“In our navy, we are aiming for those systems and concepts,” he said.

In a pre-taped segment, Adm. Hiroshi Yamamura, chief of staff of the Japanese Maritime Self Defense, said the Indo-Pacific region is “vitally important for our security.” To that end, the Japanese defense ministry recently unveiled a “free and open Indo-Pacific vision” to enforce regional prosperity and security in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean.

It would do this through defense cooperation and exchange activities and through active engagement in the region in cooperation with partner countries, Yamamura said.

Yamamura noted the many challenges in the region, from more assertive and aggressive actions by China and Russia to ongoing tensions in the Middle East to a “still unpredictable” North Korea.

As an “overreaching capability” to help counter these threats and defend Japan’s surrounding waters and territories, Yamamura said Japan will bolster its information warfare capability and its strategic communications.

“I am confident that the backbone of global security is to maintain the international maritime order of the world,” he said. “Cooperation and exchanges with neighbor partners are more effective that promoting efforts on our own.”