Had ambition to blog a collection of ten articles I've collected over the holiday, but we've got something spreading through the ranks and several of us are suffering a variety of symptoms suggesting a virus of sorts, the kind that just hits you in the early evening and leaves you sort of funky through the next morning. So me and the boys are watching Jerry Lewis's "Nutty Professor" downstairs (really nice to see the widescreen version looking so sharp). Last night we watched "Master and Commander" (first time for me) and I was stunned how good it was, though I've expected the very best from Peter Weir, ever since "Gallipoli."
I know there is a point in there somewhere . . ..
Oh right, feeling kinda crappy so I'm just tossing out this article on a holiday-weekend Saturday (I'm told it's a low-traffic day, typically, so sue me for the lack of effort). This article by Chris Cavas stemmed off a series of interviews he conducted back in early November, me being one of them. I hadn't expected to make it into the article, as I had just chatted with him briefly by cell phone from my hotel in Princeton NJ the afternoon before my talk at the Woodrow Wilson School, and at the time, I didn't feel like I had offered him much worthwhile. But apparently I gave him what he needed, so here's the piece.
U.S. Fleet of Mother Ships: Will Swarms of Tiny Unmanned Vehicles Replace Large Vessels?
By CHRISTOPHER P. CAVAS
A professor at the U.S. Naval War College has some good news and bad news for young officers attending the Newport, R.I., school.
ìThe good news is, you may command several hundred ships in your career. The bad news is, there isnít anybody on them,î said Thomas Barnett, who spends a great deal of time analyzing naval trends.
The future U.S. Navy most likely will comprise fewer large ships, fewer traditional cruiser- and destroyer-sized warships and many ó perhaps thousands ó of small, unmanned vessels.
But donít be fooled by the small size or benign appearance of the unmanned craft. Plugged into worldwide communications networks, the craft can be ordered from afar to deal with a threat or summon heavy firepower from over the horizon.
So where does that leave the traditional, multirole warship?
ìI think theyíre going to have to rethink surface combatants,î Barnett said of Navy planners. ìI think submarines and aircraft carriers are going to have to be thought of as mother ships which send off swarms of unmanned things.î The result is a notion that only engineers will likely find inspiring.
ìThe Navyís going to be fundamentally a ferry,î Barnett said. Ships will just ìship things around.î
The Mother Ship
That trend already is apparent. The mission modules being designed for the new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) all use unmanned air, surface or underwater vehicles to carry out anti-surface, anti-submarine or anti-mine warfare. Nary a ship is designed today without a flight deck to launch unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Most new surface ship designs include stern ramps for launching and recovering small craft, plus large internal spaces to handle and maintain them.
The concept of a mother ship to unmanned systems isnít new, but how far that concept can be taken is only a guess at this point.
ìThe Navy used to call them Carriers of Large Objects, or Carriers of Small Objects,î said Robert Work, who studies future naval force structure issues for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) in Washington. Work sees great mother ship potential in the SSGNs, former Trident ballistic missile submarines now being converted to carry 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles and operate special forces teams. Work believes that rather than carry cruise missiles, the subs will bear torpedo-sized, reconfigurable unmanned underwater vehicles, or UUVs.
ìYou could put, potentially, 154 of these inside a single SSGN,î he said. ìAnd assuming you could control them ó and thatís a big assumption ó you would have a mother ship with 54 of these little things zooming around, 50 charging and 50 more on their way to replaceî the first group.
The mother ship doesnít have to be a warship either.
ìMaybe what you do is have a larger container ship thatís been designed to take care of a whole big number of UAVs. Or say you have another ship thatís designed to carry a whole big number of USVs,î or unmanned surface vehicles, Work said.
Command and Control
While it is possible to field swarms of unmanned vehicles, command-and-control issues need to be worked out before that becomes a reality. ìWe still donít know how to technically control processing memory and power,î said Cmdr. Greg Glaros, who works on future forces technology at the Office of Force Transformation. ìWhen weíre talking about smaller sizes, we havenít solved those issues,î he said, ìtechnically nor operationally.î
But thereís no question the day of the independently operated, multimission-capable warship is waning. Network-centric operations that connect ships, aircraft and sensors into vast command and communications systems are the order of the day. The result is likely to be a fleet of only a few large ships, many smaller ones and a galaxy of small unmanned sensors ó all ìnodesî to gather and relay information. Such a ìdistributedî system concentrates power on fewer hulls and spreads it over a potentially vast area.
ìI think over time, whatís going to happen is thereís going to be a group of manned nodes
and thereíll be some large powerful nodes,î Work said. ìThereíll be an increasing number of smaller unmanned nodes. And then thereís going to be an even more increasing number of unmanned systems. The Navy that figures that out first is going to have a step ahead on the next stage of naval competition.î
The possibility that a small, foreign competitor could quickly develop a cheap, deployable ability to challenge the United States has planners worried.
ìThe uncertainty there is that, although we right now are very good in very large complex ships,î Work said, ìover the next 20 years ó once nano-robotics and high-speed computing machines start to be kludged together ó you could see a Navy challenge emerge a lot quicker than it could in the past.î
After a number of analysts inside and outside the Navy criticized the service for concentrating on near-term programs, several studies now are under way to look at the long-term issues of what the future threats could be and what should be built to counter them. Among the groups looking at the issue are the Center for Naval Analyses and the Office of Force Transformation. None of the studies are complete.
Workís CSBA is looking at what the Navy needs ìwith an eye towards the industrial base and keeping it vibrant,î he said.
Affordability is key to the projections. During the past two years, the Navy has allocated between $11 billion and $12 billion a year for shipbuilding, according to CSBA, and the ìNavy plan is to go up to somewhere between $16 [billion] and $20 billion. And we just quite frankly think thatís unaffordable,î Work said. ìWe have done some preliminary analysis that says we think $12 billion a year, steady-state, is what we can reasonably expect to sustain over time.î
The Opposition
Perhaps the most fundamental question in planning the future fleet is determining who the enemy could be. Some strategists foresee a possible large-scale confrontation with China or India, in which case a conventional fleet of submarines, aircraft carriers and large surface warships would be useful.
But Barnett is among those who downplay this idea. Rather than developing into adversaries, ìIndia and China [should] become more important players for us,î Barnett said, in ìinvestment, partnership. Weíre not going to be more strategically inclined to compete with them.î
Strategists who see no potential large-scale adversaries say the Navy instead will face opponents with less concentrated war-fighting power. ìMost of the navies of the world are shifting to gray coast guards,î Work said. ìThey have some capability but certainly not enough to stop a U.S. push into the littoral.î
The challenge for the Navy is to keep or develop the ability to meet a huge variety of threats or missions ó and keep it affordable. That means keeping some of the very expensive, power-projection fleet now in service, and developing newer, cheaper systems to meet the range of threats.
The Big Unknown
While the DD(X) and LCS are meant to support operations near and on land, the Navy and Marine Corps are developing the Sea Base, a concept that envisions groups of large ships stationed near a potentially hostile coastline that will serve as a preparation and launch point for special operations and major combat efforts.
Manned and unmanned vehicles would operate from Maritime Prepositioning Force (Future), or MPF(F), ships, which also will support special operations forces. The ships ó probably built with large flight decks ó would support Marines and troops ashore in a role that transcends that of existing prepositioning and assault ships. But how the ships will do that ó along with logistics issues such as how materiel will get from ship to shore and what defensive capabilities the ship should have ó remain unanswered.
ìSea Basing is the big unknown at this time,î Work said. ìI think there needs to be a lot more clarification on just what the Sea Base is designed to do.î The Sea Base concept fits squarely into planning for the next Quadrennial Defense Review, now being launched inside the Pentagon.
ìWhatís driving Sea Basing is the 10-30-30 requirementî at the heart of the new review, Work said. ìThe 10-30-30 is a stretch goalî . . . where ìyou want to be able to seize the initiative within 10 days, you want to be able to solve the objectives of the first war in 30 days, and you want to re-cock the force and go and fight another war in the next 30 days. The only way you can get forces anywhere in the world within 10 days is with a thing like sea basing.î
Doing all these things, the analysts said, is expensive, and feelings persist that the Navy will lose funding in the upcoming 2006 budget battle to support an expanding Army and ongoing operations in Iraq. That could force the Navy to choose between surging ahead with big ships like the DD(X), MPF(F), new assault ships and the next aircraft carrier, or smaller platforms like LCS and a host of unmanned concepts.
Doing it all at once, said a Washington-based naval analyst, would meet the 10-30-30 requirement, ìbut itís also going to be the unaffordable Navy.î ï
E-mail: ccavas@defensenews.com.
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The Facts: Driving Design
Robert Work of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Washington, sees four basic ìfleetsî driving U.S. naval design and acquisition:
ï The Dissuasion Fleet. Work views this as a ìfleet in being,î able to ìdissuade someone from mounting a global open ocean challenge against us. The best way to do that is to have a strong nuclear-powered submarine fleet. A fleet of fleet-killers,î he said. But he thinks the current U.S. fleet of more than 50 attack submarines isnít necessary, and recommends a fleet of between 33 and 44 subs. A ìvibrant shipbuilding capability,î along with ongoing efforts in technical research and development, is also necessary. ìThe dissuasion fleet is having the industry to build more subs if youíre met by a challenge,î he said. Also included is the fleet of strategic submarines armed with nuclear ballistic missiles, although that number could drop from the current 14 missile boats to 10 subs, he said, which would allow four more hulls to be converted for the SSGN cruise missile and special operations forces mission.
ï The Global War on Terror/Homeland Security Fleet. The SSGN and LCS are keys to the ìGWOTî fleet, Work said. ìPlus the Coast Guard cutter fleet, which is very big and should be a complementary investment.î New threats also could emerge to emphasize the importance of this mission. ìOne of the things that may happen over time is that protection of offshore infrastructure is going to be an important mission,î Work said. ìTwenty-five percent of our oil and gas comes from the Gulf of Mexico. If somebody was operating in there trying to destroy that infrastructure, the Coast Guard would be overwhelmed. They could not do it. So in that case, you could easily see the LCS fleet being called back because itís very ideally suited for that type of mission.î
The Coast Guard is just starting to build the first large cutter under its Deepwater modernization program. During the next decade or so, the service plans to construct eight large cutters, 25 medium cutters and about 58 smaller patrol cutters. Work would like to see the modular mission systems of the LCS concept incorporated into the Coast Guard fleet. He also envisions a homeland security role for the LCS. ìThe LCS becomes the gunboat of the GWOT,î he said. ìThey can be everywhere. We can afford enough of them [at $220 million per hull] so that we can really control chokepoints.î
ï The Contested Access Fleet. Conceptually, the LCS is at the heart of the Navyís ability to fight its way into defended areas near shore. Stealthy designs with stand-off weapons that operate unmanned systems, such as the large DD(X) destroyer, are also designed with this mission in mind. ìThe contested access fleet will be a lot of experimentation,î Work said. The new integrated power system for DD(X), for example, will make available much more power for weapons and sensors, and will allow designers to mount new systems such as railguns, which have the potential to hurl projectiles more than 200 miles. General Atomics, San Diego, is working on an electromagnetically propelled railgun using pulsed power that, the company claims, removes propellants and explosives from the weapon system, leading to greatly increased magazine capacity.
ï The Sea-based Power Projection Fleet. The current fleet, built to defeat other navies on the high seas and strike targets on land, is ìway too muchî for littoral missions against non-traditional opponents, Work said. ìIt is an extremely powerful fleet that has way too much capability compared to the other three. If there are any changes, I would believe that that is where we would cut.î While dropping the numbers of attack submarines, Work also sees a drop to 10 aircraft carriers from the current force of 12, but continuing improvements in precision weapons wouldnít necessarily mean a drop in striking power, he said.
COMMENTARY: I came away pretty impressed by the article, and even more by Bob Work, whom I've heard about but never met. I think his analysis of the four fleets is dead-on. Funny for me, but I've been talking about the "smart dust Navy" (lotsa sensors) for several years now, just sort of tossing it out there without a whole lot of understanding of what was possible, much less actually happened, but it was just something that both appealed to me and seemed a logical next evolution. When I saw my quotes up front (the usual misquote: I always say, "The bad news is, most of them will be unmanned."), I thought, "Oh no, this guy is going to make me seem like some sort of futuristic nutcase!" But to my relief, my ideas are just where I want them to be typically located: just beyond the foreseeable horizon but not so far that people aren't working in this direction. That sort of info appeals to investment firms, which is why I tend to get a lot of invitations to speak in such settings. But when I speak of the future Navy being more ferry than warship, you can see why I have a tendency to piss off more than a few people up on top in the Department of Navy.
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