REUTERS/Senior Master Sgt. Adrian Cadiz/Department of Defense
"We face competitors who are challenging us in the open ocean, and we need to balance investment in those capabilities - advanced capabilities - in a way that we haven't had to do for quite a while," Secretary of
As it is, Russia and China can effectively deny US forces access to militarily significant areas, like Eastern Europe and the South China Sea.
In response, the US Navy ran a "rigorous program of analytics and wargaming," and came up with a bold new strategy to turn the tables on these rising powers- distributed lethality.
Simply put, distributed lethality means giving every ship, from the smallest to the biggest, a range of advanced weapons that can destroy targets dependably, accurately, and without interference from enemy missile defense.
In the future, ships "will be equipped with the weapons and advanced capabilities that it will need to deter any aggressor and to make any aggressor who isn't deterred very much regret their decision to take us on," Carter said.
In the slides below, see the new munitions the US Navy wants to put aggressive authoritarian regimes in check.