Designing the Future U.S. Naval Surface Fleet for Effectiveness and Producibility

Abstract

David Taylor Research Center is just commencing investigations into a new manner of defining future fleet architectures. The cost of current performance-driven ship designs has increased at a rapid rate. While it is true that a warship designed with insufficient performance is of meager utility, it is also true that the best performing warship design is of no utility if never built. Both performance and affordability are required if sufficient numbers of ships are to be built to counter the threat. By designing a future fleet architecture with producibility as a major requirement from the start, we hope to impact the acquisition cost significantly. One battle force concept titled "Distribute, Disperse, Disguise and Sustain" suggests two fundamental surface ship types; the Carrier of Large Objects (CLO) and the Scout Fighter. A CLO feasibility design in progress, Carrier Dock Multimission, is outlined to inform shipbuilding researchers of an initiative that promises to have significant impact on naval ship procurement and provide increased visibility within the U.S. Navy on producibility issues. Before an attempt is made to conceptualize a future U.S. naval surface fleet, to help create a vision of the U.S. Navy for the year 2030 and beyond, the shortcomings of the current surface Navy must be addressed first. An honest assessment of where we are now is a must for us to determine where we need to be in the future and how to get there. Current shortcomings THE SHORTCOMINGS of greatest significance in the curren~ surface Navy that are related to hull, mechanical and electri cal (H,M&E) technologies are: • highly observable ship signatures, • easily discriminable ship signatures, • concentration of operating functions, • logistically demanding, and • programmatically inefficient and expensive to acquire. The ships of the surface Navy are highly observable by radar, acoustic, infrared, magnetic, and electro-optical sensors. As the enemy's surveillance, tracking, and classification capabilities increase with time, the advantage will continue to shift more and more to the enemy. The result is that the enemy can, in most cases, engage our surface forces outside the battle space of our own weapon systems. This forces us into a defensive posture that requires us to shoot down the "arrows" (cruise missiles) rather than the "archers" (aircraft, submarine and surface ship launch platforms). Forty-two classes of surface ships currently operate in our carrier battle groups, surface action groups, amphibious task forces, logistic support groups, and convoy escort groups. Each of these ship classes (and, indeed, most of the ships within a particular class) has unique signatures that allow the enemy to discriminate ships within a surface force. This plays to the enemy's strength of massing firepower on whatever type of ship their strategy calls for. We have generally concentrated required operating functions on large ships. This platform architecture, coupled with the high observability and discriminability , results in an in