The Navy Is Still Focused on Exquisite Systems

For decades, Pentagon modernization has looked a bit like a family dinner where the Navy and Air Force order the expensive entrées, with appetizers and wine, while the Army gets told there are plenty of leftovers at home. Yet there is a funny thing happening on the way to the future. The Army is becoming the mother of innovation right as an era of cheap drones, autonomy, and rapidly changing threats is emerging.  

For too long, Washington has treated military innovation like a procurement question. Acceptable answers take the form of assuming the outcome and deciding which of the predetermined courses to follow and which company will go down that linear path. The soldiers from the 101^st offered an opportunity for a reframe. Instead of seeing innovation primarily in terms of platforms, people are what really count. The bets need to shift from ‘are we funding the right program’ to ‘are we funding the right people’.  

The Pentagon has begun to recognize this potential. Recent guidance reclassifying small drones as commodities rather than durable property is tapping into the creativity of America’s warfighters by pushing purchasing and operating authority down to unit commanders. Exercises like the 101st's are possible with the clearing of experimentation slowing rules.  

It’s a fair response that Replicator, the first mass-drone push, delivered a fraction of the systems promised. Ukraine’s staggering, decentralized production of drones suggests however that the goal is the right one and that the task is to reconfigure funding and authorities to achieve it. 

The Army has pushed the needle the furthest by cancelling the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft and pivoting the funds towards unmanned aircraft and launched effects. The bet is that scouting and short-range attack will be done by cheap, distributed systems. The Army did not abandon manned aviation. It’s keeping its lift fleet and is still debating whether to move forward with a new manned tiltrotor. They are rebalancing and this rebalance is a fight still being litigated in the halls of the Pentagon and in Congress. Change always encounters resistance.  

And the Army has not stopped at the shoreline. In the Pacific, soldiers have trained placing long-range fire systems on austere beaches from shallow-draft landing craft. The broader counter-targeting effort will be enabled by the Army’s desired 100 autonomous cargo boats. The efforts towards those craft show that a land service is building a distributed, attritable capability in a theater the Navy owns. The Navy should take the hint.   

To the Navy’s credit, they are not standing completely still. Admiral Caudle’s Instructions explicitly call for atrritable, even one-way-attack unmanned systems. The Navy has stood up a Portfolio Acquisition Executive responsible for Robotic and Autonomous Systems with greater flexibility to foster innovation. Sailors are experimenting with and using unmanned systems in real exercises and operations. The doctrine and machinery to realize it are emerging.  

The budget, unfortunately, tells a different story. Across the Navy's new five-year shipbuilding plan, unmanned vessels account for under two percent of the investment while the service launches a new class of nuclear-powered battleship that will absorb more than ten times the entire unmanned line. The doctrine says attritable. The checkbook says exquisite. Apparently, a service can write the right strategy and still fund the old one. 

The Navy continues to bias towards a handful of large, hard to produce platforms whose survivability is increasingly assumed rather than demonstrated. More dollars and attention need to go to cheap systems that can be produced en masse. From sensing to contested logistics, to short-range strike, the fleet needs to have more to draw from than just capital ships. The British Navy has taken the message and has recently announced that it will build ships to command and carry unmanned systems.  

Time is of the essence. Money is moving. The Pentagon’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request is seeking roughly $54 billion for the joint Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, on top of tens of billions more for unmanned systems across the force. This generational surge of resources, if passed by a wise Congress, will flow to the organizations that can absorb them and turn dollars into real capabilities.  

The Army is positioning to capture these funds, even perhaps for efforts at sea. The Navy has begun to build the capacity to absorb these funds. The risk they face is that half-hearted measures will leave them sitting in a drydock, watching the re-welds and paint drying on massive capital ships, while the Army’s filling maritime gaps in the Pacific.  

Finishing the job is hard work, not a slogan: moving real money behind the attritable systems the Navy already says it wants, building out the contracting and program staff to obligate a surge quickly, and fix the accounting so expendable boats are treated like the munitions they are rather than the ships they aren't. The Secretary of War gave the Army permission to innovate with his drone memo. A sea drone memo is what the Navy needs. 

The future fleet will not come only from shipyards. Part of it will come from workshops, software, and the operators closest to the problem. The instinct to innovate is alive and well in the American military, the soldiers building drones proved it, and the Army is now proving it at sea. For the Navy, the question is no longer whether to unleash it. It is whether to pay for it before someone else does.

MG John G. Ferrari (U.S. Army, ret.) is a senior nonresident fellow at AEI. He previously served as a director of program analysis and evaluation for the service.