The U.S. Navy is adapting in real time amid battle in the Red Sea

The Navy is looking at everything from new weapons to software as they wrestle with ways to keep ahead of an extended sea battle in the Middle East.

ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:

The Navy is scrambling to protect international shipping in the Middle East as U.S. ships counter missiles and drones fired by Houthi rebels. But the conflict is also an opportunity for the Navy to figure out its future in real time. Steve Walsh with WHRO in Norfolk, Va., has the story.

STEVE WALSH, BYLINE: Sometimes war is about software.

TIM BENTJEN: When you’re talking anti-ship missiles, you’re talking seconds of reaction time. So software plays a key role in that – the detection of a threat and neutralizing the threat within a matter of seconds.

WALSH: Tim Bentjen runs an engineering team in Virginia. His programmers are in daily contact with ships in the Red Sea. Sailors in the Red Sea alert the engineers to changes in tactics as the U.S. tries to keep commercial shipping lanes open. There have been well over 150 attacks on U.S. ships since October, part of a campaign that Houthi rebels say is in protest of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Back in April, the USS Bataan was test-firing its machine gun, called a CIWS, before deploying to the Middle East. Navy defensive weapons like the CIWS haven’t been involved in combat on this scale until the Red Sea crisis. Bentjen has worked on these types of systems for 30 years. He says he’s proud and a little relieved.

BENTJEN: It works, right? Everything that we’ve done, all the systems that we’ve designed, that we’ve installed, that we maintain on the ship – they work. You know, they’re protecting the sailors.

WALSH: Bentjen’s division at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dam Neck, Va., creates software that runs the weapons on the USS Bataan. The ship deployed in July to the Red Sea and then was stationed off the coast of Israel and is now headed home to Norfolk. The division also handles the weapons…