US Navy Unveils "Sea Strike" Vision of Future Warfare

Two research and development arms of the U.S. Navy have teamed up to produce a four-and-a-half-minute video illustrating how it thinks naval warfare might look in the 2040s.

The “Sea Strike” video posits a hypothetical situation where in 2043 the U.S. has been at war with an unnamed adversary for the last 12 months.

The imagined scenario features officers on board the future USS John F Kennedy aircraft carrier tasked with fending off an attack on an unidentified “strategic U.S. island.”

It features the aircraft carrier’s crew conceiving and coordinating a multi-domain counterattack using a range of next-generation technologies, including autonomous uncrewed air systems acting as loyal wingmen to F-35s, directed energy weapons, AI, electronic and cyber warfare capabilities, and more.

The video’s full title reads ‘Sea Strike: Exploring Future Naval Operations.’ As per DVIDS, it “showcases a future naval battle and how emerging technologies may be incorporated at every level of the warfighting domain.”

The clip, released last week on the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)’s Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS), was put together by the Naval Air Warfare Center, a research organization within Naval Air Systems Command that tests and evaluates air warfare capabilities for the United States Navy, and the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, its center of excellence in weapons development.

• You can find out more about the Sea Strike video on the DVIDS website