Military

US Navy, Air Force team up on new ‘Manhattan Project’

 The U.S. Navy and Air Force are teaming up to rapidly develop a network that can link together Air Force and Navy assets during battle, an effort the Navy’s top officer compared to the 1940s program to develop an atomic bomb.

Adm. Michael Gilday, the new Chief of Naval Operations, told an audience Thursday that in order to take on China, the Navy will have to spread out and rely on networked weapons and sensors distributed over a wide area. But doing that would rely on a network architecture that doesn’t yet exist.

To be the most effective force, the Navy acknowledges it must be able to connect with Air Force bombers and aircraft, leading the two services to an agreement to join forces.

“I think the biggest challenge for us is to join all the main command and control,” Gilday said. “We’re building netted weapons, netted platforms, and netted [command-and-control] nodes, but we don’t have an adequate net, and that’s a critical piece.”