December 8, 2006
A central premise of this lecture is that the U.S. Navy can learn from previous historical successes and failures in order to provide guidance on how to best reinvigorate antisubmarine warfare (ASW) in the future. The lecture draws upon open sources to document capabilities and trends of the past and to identify the factors that most closely correlate to "health" in ASW. The lecture will highlight the following: the importance of ASW unity of effort, long term trends in ASW health, ASW threat developments, ASW force structure issues, the criticality of ASW surveillance/cueing and various ASW sensor technology enablers, the need for innovative ASW approaches including distributed ASW sensor developments, the importance of key elements of ASW support infrastructure including those associated with ASW environment/threat characterization and training and tactics/doctrine development (the "art" of ASW), and the need for disciplined ASW data collection/analysis (the "science" of ASW).
John R. Benedict, JR, is a branch supervisor and a member of the Principal Professional Staff in the National Security Analysis Department of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL). He is a specialist in naval operations analysis, primarily in the areas of undersea warfare (USW) and antisubmarine warfare (ASW), with more than 30 years experience in this field. He has participated in Naval Studies Board projects and served as a principal investigator in such Chief of Naval Operations-sponsored studies as Task Force ASW, ASW Transformation Perspectives, and The Way Ahead in ASW. He has been a frequent speaker at various naval forums. He has published in Naval War College Review, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, The Submarine Review, U.S. Navy Journal of Underwater Acoustics, ASW Log, Johns Hopkins APL Technical Digest and other journals. He has received various commendations and was a recipient of the Special Achievement "Bronze Medal" Award at the September 2002 National Defense Industrial Association USW Division Conference held at Newport. He has also received outstanding publication awards from JHU/APL (1992), the Naval Submarine League (1991), and from the Surface Navy Association (2005).