387 Guillem Colom Piella Defining the US Navy in the 21st Century of overheads in infrastructures and the reform of the process of acquiring armaments and materiel. In other words: “…today, the Navy and the Marine Corps are on the threshold of a revolution fuelled by truly revolutionary developments in information technologies. This transformation involves much more than the acquisition of new military systems; it calls for harnessing new civilian technologies to support the Navy-Marine Corps Team’s advanced concepts, doctrine, and operations. The full potential of this RMA can be realised, however, only by exploiting information superiority and by achieving an integrated set of systems founded on a common C4ISTAR architecture. To this end, the Navy’s evolving concept of Network-Centric Warfare will provide the foundation for future exploitation of today’s and tomorrow’s RMAs. The Navy’s RMA will be nurtured by a similarly far-reaching Revolution in Business Affairs that will support the transformation of the Navy for the 21st century.” 34 In relation to the transformation, drawing from the forces structure proposed by the Quadrennial Defence Review35 and the roadmap drawn up by the National Defence Panel, this work considered that the Navy had to rely on the Revolution in Business Affairs36 – that would sanitise the Navy’s financial situation, accelerate the entry into service of new equipment, lower the life cycle of systems and make more flexible the acquisition and funding of materiel –to accomplish the process towards achieving a Revolution in Military Affairs and adapt its infrastructure, capabilities and forces to the challenges of the 21st Century. These changes would build a Navy with an expeditionary vocation, logistically self-sufficient, modularly organised, network-centric, prepared to operate in the entire range of operations and capable of imposing itself on any adversary in whatever contingency, present and future. To embark on this process without degrading the capacity of the fleet to fulfil its present duties, the document proposed working in three separate areas in parallel: Force Readiness; Force Structure; and Force Transformation. This strategy, coherent with that proposed by the Quadrennial Defence Review and endorsed by the National Defence Panel a year earlier, would guarantee the maintenance of a sufficient volume of troops to ensure forward deployed presence, deterrence and crisis response during 34 Department of the Navy, Vision…op. cit., p. 2. 35 The proposed structure of forces consisted in twelve air-sea groups, eleven carrier air wings, twelve amphibian groups, fifty nuclear attack submarines, fourteen missile-launch submarines and one hundred and sixteen warships. 36 Conditioned by the application of information technologies in business management, the Revolution in Business Affairs is based on promoting streamlining, centralising processes of armaments’ and materiel procurement, the simplifying and flexibilising of administrative procedures, employing dual-use technologies and the outsourcing of certain services to optimise defence management and guaranteeing the necessary funding to cover the RMA (CARTER, Ashton and WHITE, John (eds.): Keeping the Edge: Managing Defense for the Future, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
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