SAN DIEGO—Sailors aboard the USS Stockdale were tapping threat data analysis from a local naval base hours before their destroyer came under attack by Houthis in the Red Sea—and it was a “game changer,” the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command said Thursday.
“I can think of no less than three times in the six to nine hours before the ship went in harm’s way where they were able to leverage tactical feeds back to headquarters there locally to make adjustments on the radar” and in tactics, techniques, and procedures, Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, deputy commander for U.S. Central Command said at the WEST 2025 conference. “That would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.”
Over the past 15 months, Houthis launched 140 attacks on international shipping vessels and 170 attacks on U.S. Navy warships with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and one-way attack vehicles, he said. U.S. forces, in turn, shot down 480 Houthi unmanned aerial vehicles.
Cooper said that overall “tactical reachback” ability led by the Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center in San Diego, was valuable while embarked on Stockdale before Houthis attacked the ship last November while moving through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. The Houthi attacks have stopped in recent weeks due to a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.
“This tactical reachback—if you’re somewhere around my age or [more] senior—is something you didn’t have growing up. But it has been a game-changer in creating tactical advantage at sea,” Cooper said.
Tight relationships with commercial companies and military operators has helped “reshape the way we fight” and engage with threats, Cooper said.
He singled out Maven, a tool that’s part of the Pentagon’s connect-everything or joint all-domain command and control effort, saying that it has “supercharged” domain awareness, all the way from CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to components, operations centers and tactical units.
“It takes data from multiple assets and sensors, [a] massive fusion effort into a single pane of glass,” he said. “We use this thing every day, if not every hour, every day when tactical intensity increases on decision-making.”
Cooper was likely referring to the AI tool that intelligence community and military services use to sift through image data. That system also incorporates the Maven Smart System from Palantir, which received a $480 million Pentagon contract in May and a five-year, $100-million contract to expand its use across the military services in September.
Sam Tangredi, a U.S. Naval War College professor who specializes in military strategy and technology, said while such data-analysis tools can be beneficial there’s also a risk.
“The good CO knows that at the moment that you need it, your high-technology system might fail you. So you already need to know what you’re gonna do when the missile doesn’t come out of the box, how you maneuver the ship, what your options are,” Tangredi said. “That’s the whole thing about fighting from the [maritime operations center] and networks that are tightly coupled: There’s gonna be a problem.”
