381 Guillem Colom Piella Defining the US Navy in the 21st Century developing an antiballistic missile defence capable of covering the entire area of operations and contributing towards the defence of the U.S. national territory.15 • Enlarging the capacity for joint action between the Navy and the Marine Corps in littoral warfare operations and power projection deep inland, and for joint combined operations with troops from other countries on crisis management and peacekeeping missions. Finally, this roadmap not only vindicated the usefulness of armament and materiel programmes developed at the time, about which serious political doubts had been expressed regarding its technical and economic viability, –in particular the convertiplane V-22 Osprey, the fighter-bomber F-35 Lightning II, the attack submarine Seawolf and the plans for fast troop-transport catamarans, the CVN21 to build a new series of nuclear propelled aircraft carriers, the CS-21 to provide a family of combatant ships16 or the project Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), providing the Marine Corps with a new amphibian vehicle; it also claimed that these changes in the Navy’s orientation, structure, procedures, means and capabilities of the Navy would in a short space of time transform it into an expeditionary force capable of carrying out joint combined operations, projecting power on the coast and ashore, with an adequate structure and capabilities to satisfy the strategic post-Cold war requirements. The two previous works traced the Navy and Marine Corps joint roadmap because both are functionally dependent on the Department of the Navy. Nevertheless, in Challenge, Washington DC, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 2012. 15 This need translated into the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense project which, based on the Aegis combat system, rigged U.S. naval ships with the Standard SM-2 or SM-3 missiles, aimed at providing a theatre missile defence to the naval forces and amphibians deployed abroad as well as forming part of Bush’s Ballistic Missile Defense. Today, this programme constitutes a pillar of Obama’s anti-missile shield, and is at the same time the cornerstone of the Atlantic Alliance’s anti missile system. Furthermore, the naval base of Rota is to harbour four ships, – the first of these docking early in 2014. A more detailed analysis can be found in O’ROURKE, Ronald: Navy Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) Program: Background and Issues for Congress, CRS-RL33745, Washington DC: Congressional Research Service, 2013. 16 The CS-21 project (Combatant Ship for the 21st Century) was an ambitious initiative put forward by the Navy in 1994 to create a family of ships – corvettes, frigates, destroyers and cruise ships – optimised to operate in the littoral region and hit objectives onshore. This project was not only the direct predecessor of the cruise models CG(X), destroyer DD(X) and Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) currently under development; but one of the designs of the CS-21 was the ship Arsenal, a semi-stealth platform armed with cruise missiles and described by many defence analysts, by the 1997 National Defence Panel and by Secretary Rumsfeld as the paradigm of naval revolution. Although this controversial project was cancelled on account of its cost, vulnerability and military value, many of the solutions envisaged for this ship are now to be found in the Zumwal-class destroyers. A complete analysis of these naval programmes can be found in: SCOTT, Truver: “A Selected View of U.S. Navy Programs: Transformation for the Future”, Sea Power, nº 144, 1998, pp. 33-50.
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