The US Navy has an insurmountable problem internally that keeps it from any innovative exploration of changes to the reigning paradigms: the power of its 3 dominant warfare communities.

Over the decades, naval air, submariners, and the surface navy have found an isostatic balance that let's them play (fairly) well together. But all 3 communities are absolutely wed to the existing force types, an arrangement tightly bound to the long-gone Cold War and more generally to bluewater offense on the high seas, never mind there's no one out there to contend with.

The loyalties demanded for promotion and success are such that any internal argument for fundamental change condemns the proponent to outer darkness. Your hint is right: the blue-suiters have quit thinking.

In the '70s, CNO Bud Zumwalt said that unionism was the biggest problem he faced. It's worse now. Navy officers are no longer naval officers but rather submariners, aviators, or skimmers. It is tribalism gone mad.

See Proceedings' lead article May 2005.

What will those controllers in Virginia do when China shoots down or otherwise disrupts out satellite-based C2 system? I realize that the thought of UCAVs and unmanned this and unmanned that is very appealing, but the reality is that by doing so you trade one set of vulnerabilities with another, greater, set of vulnerabilities. With unmanned systems "cyberspace" becomes much, much more important and cyberspace is the one area where the Chinese can seriously compete with us.

So it's not wise to insert a vulnerable critical node between your operator and equipment unless you can be certain that node can function 100% of the time in a high-intensity conflict. We're definitely not there yet and we won't be for quite a while, if ever.

...it has China written all over it. I don't think war with China is very likely either, but I'm aware enough of history to know that one's next adversary is often not projected years in advance (Japan in the 1930's, Iraq before Aug. 1991, etc. Besides, who do you think China's military buildup is designed to counter? It's not the Russians.

Regardless, a UCAV carrier "whose hull and aircraft would both be stealthy" isn't needed to police the global commons from the so-called hybrid/asymmetric/irregular threats - one doesn't need carriers for that at all in fact. Stealthy carriers along with stealthy strike aircraft are needed for war against an adversary with a decent military capability, not policing.

My point was, however, to question the basis for the adoration among some for unmanned systems - particularly UAV's. I say this as someone who works within the UAV community, specifically Predator. The utility of unmanned systems is fantastic for our current conflicts. Our adversaries have zero capability to impact UAV ops. For other conflicts they will be much less effective unless and until the technology becomes much more robust and reliable at a minimum.

Suggest this frames the Navy's fundamental mission identification challenge. It starts as a technology then runs for a mission upon which to use it. Until the last 50 years, a Navy was about trade, commerce. Power projection was a element of maintaining the movement of trade.

It has fallen out of that business to concentrate upon the profligate world of armada fleets and many admirals. It is the military equivalent of investment banking - one gets to live very, very well on the side of commerce while taking a very large piece of the action and no one asking for much of a return.

Serve coffee now and then, dress well for conferences, fly high altitude missions, operate a gulag at an old country club, name the biggest ships after the largest benefactor, fly a jack to look a victim....and cash continue to flow.

To change what the Navy does and where it points itself, you have to change the wetware.

Zumwalt understood this and through his Z-grams and other personnel initiatives shook up the old order, drove the racists out, and heightened the status of the common sailor to make embrace of technology at the man-machine interface possible. The techie sailor of today is a far cry from the knuckle-draggers I joined with many years ago. Credit Zumwalt.

Likewise, Frank Kelso took on the internal power structure in his downgrade of the three platform fiefdoms from three to two stars in OPNAV. Right move, but he didn't follow through with changes in the personnel system itself and so the platform leaders in Navy's Bureau of Personnel were (and are) able to thwart any moves to downplay existing platforms in favor of innovation and the repackaging of force.

Today we see no change in the power of the platforms. Gary Roughhead, otherwise a fine CNO, seems content to screw around with sailors' uniforms rather than challenge the 3-great-apes paradigm. In the realm of recasting the Navy for a future world, we bow to the power of the Navy's own Iron Triangle and play trivial pursuit.

It took WW-II to kill the Gun Club and bring aircraft carriers to the fore. It took the Vietnam War to bring about the shift from grease pencils to computers in managing shipboard conbat operations. It took the Cold War to bring modern submarines to a paramount role. Maybe the next war will force the Navy to internal reorientation for greater relevance. In the meantime, one cannot find great harm in the Navy's current irrelevance. But it's still irrelevant, this said by someone with 37 years' active-duty time in the Navy..