EXPERTS from navies, academia and industry are meeting in Tokyo to examine the unique challenges of operating in the littoral or coastal environment.
The Littoral OPTECH East workshop is being held in Tokyo, Japan this week with the academic leadership of the Littoral Operations Center (LOC) at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
OPTECH East has the support of the U.S. Office of Naval Research Global, and with the participation of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, Swedish Navy and the defense company, Saab.
Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, who commands the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet, was the keynote speaker for the first day.
Aucoin said events such as Littoral OpTech East are a valuable forum to share ideas and examine potential solutions to urgent operational requirements. “We need to get emerging operational capabilities out to the Fleet more quickly, and we need to create breakthrough warfighting concepts,” Aucoin said.
He stressed the importance of innovation, and recognized the contributions of young Sailors and officers who are identifying creative solutions to problems new and old. “We need to figure out how to harness these innovations and then rapidly transition them into action”.
Dr. Wayne Porter, director of the LOC, discussed the need to build stronger international naval, academic, industry partnerships for cooperative defense, and the exponential development of enabling and disruptive technologies.
The agenda featured representatives of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force and Ministry of Defense.
Panels examined the surface, air, undersea, land and electromagnetic domains. Panelists discussed the littorals of the Western Pacific; the expansion of the complexity and the threat; the underwater advantage; the littorals as maneuver space from the sea to the shore; and situational awareness and command and control.
The NPS Littoral Operations Center played a key role in OPTECH West 2014, hosted by the Swedish Royal Society of Naval Sciences in Stockholm in September 2014. OPTECH East 2015 is the first to be held in the Asia Pacific region.
