The Degraded Warship

Officially, the Navy’s equipment is near perfect, almost flawless in its performance.  Why?  Because either the equipment is tweaked ahead of inspections and exercises or because the exercises are largely simulated and every piece of equipment works perfectly in simulations.  Thus, Navy leadership has no reason to believe that when real combat comes, the equipment won’t work perfectly.

 

You and I, however, know that it is an absolute given that when war comes, our systems will be degraded across the board.  We get hints of this when ships are forced to perform real operations (like sailing through a navigation channel) and wind up running aground or colliding and the incident reports inevitably wind up citing a litany of degraded or non-functional equipment that contributed to the incident.

 

The inevitable combat degradation may result from a variety of reasons:

 

• enemy electronic warfare
• battle damage
• confusion (the fog of war)
• panic (the Vincennes and Mason scenarios)
• weather conditions (our technology hasn’t risen above the effects of weather yet)
• lack of maintenance
• self-imposed degradation such as from EMCON (Emissions Control)
• degradation due to removal of expert contractor support
• crew attrition due to battle casualties

 

Given the absolute certainty of degraded systems, the naval ship designer would be wise to design in degradation resilience.  How, you might ask, can we design a WARship that can function degraded?  What features and characteristics are needed?

 

Here are some features that will make a WARship more resilient in the face of inevitable system degradation:

 

Backups – Anything critical to combat must have at least one backup, meaning, an alternate (preferably, dissimilar technology) way to accomplish the same task.  When systems are degraded, having an alternate way to accomplish a task is a good way to increase the likelihood of success.  For example, when the ship’s radar is degraded due to jamming, lack of maintenance (no civilian contractors that we’ve come to depend on will be aboard ship during war), or lack of highly trained technicians (again, a fateful dependence on contractors) it will be critical to have a backup sensor like a 360 degree electro-optical and/or infrared scanning system to supplement or replace the radar.

 

Redundancy - When systems are degraded, having more than one of them is a good way to mitigate the impact.  For example, when the ship’s radar is destroyed, a second, redundant system could be the salvation of the ship.

 

Targeting – This blog has long identified targeting as the Achilles Heel of modern weapon systems.  A million mile missile is useless when all you have is a horizon targeting system.  We’ve also noted that modern ships have very few targeting systems, regardless of range.  For example, the trend towards collapsing all radar systems into a single radar is the opposite of what we should be doing with WARships.  Alternate targeting systems can provide targeting options and flexibility.  For instance, onboard optical sensors are an effective supplement to conventional radar targeting.  Add to that various sensors mounted on small UAVs that can extend and supplement the ship’s targeting sensors and you have the makings of a robust and flexible targeting system.

 

Armor – There is no better way to mitigate degradation due to battle damage than by the routine and extensive use of armor.  We knew this lesson in WWII and have forgotten it, today.

 

Manning - Increased manning is the only counter to battle casualties.  It is also the number one requirement for successful damage control

 

Internal Communications – Having ridiculed external communications (data links, networks, regional command and control, etc.), we must recognize that internal ship’s communications are vital during battle.  We need resilient internal comms using extensive sound powered phone circuits and hand held radios (kept sealed away until battle to avoid unwanted emissions).

 

Power – One of the most common and crippling conditions a ship can face is loss of power during battle.  We need an extensive and robust cross-connectable power grid throughout the ship.  The ship should be designed with hundreds of connection nodes so that power can always be quickly and easily re-routed around cable breaks. 

 

We need backup generators that are physically widely separated and scattered throughout the ship.  No single hit should be able to leave a ship without power.

 

UAVs - Organic UAVs can provide remote sensing and situational awareness when our regional networks fail and we can’t get outside data.

 

Propulsion – A backup propulsion pod, located on the forward half of the ship, for limp-home use will save a ship’s life.

 

Distributed Sensors – The current trend is towards having a single sensor replace multiple sensors.  For example, the Ford’s dual band radar was claimed to replace several separate radars.  This is a good business/budget case but an exceedingly poor combat case.  Distributed sensors provide resilience as battle damage occurs.  For example, the RAM launcher which depends on the ship’s main radar for targeting is a very poor choice for a combat weapon.  The better choice is the SeaRAM which, like the CIWS, has its own, self-contained radar sensor.  It doesn’t matter what happens to the ship’s main radar or any of the other sensors on the ship.  The SeaRAM will continue to function perfectly because it has its own radar.  We should have multiple, distributed, small radars (SPQ-9B or TRS-3D/4D, for example) dedicated to providing horizon targeting for the VLS system so that they can continue to function when the main radar is damaged or destroyed.  Optical systems tied into the VLS can provide yet another level of resilience for when the radars are jammed or degraded by enemy electronic warfare attacks.  We need to abandon the misguided trend of centralized sensors and the single, overarching, master sensor.

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

Degradation is the norm during war.  Heck, let’s be honest.  Degraded systems are the norm right now, during peacetime due to lack of maintenance, lack of contractor support, lack of spare parts, and lack of expert level trained Navy technicians.  Recall the Port Royal grounding incident where the ship had multiple degraded systems despite having just come out of a dry dock availability (see, “Port Royal Grounding Lessons”)!  Given our woeful current state, why would we think ships won’t operate degraded during war?  Of course they will !  It is our responsibility to design ships that can absorb degradations and still function with at least a reasonable degree of effectiveness.  We have to stop designing ships to budgets and business cases and return to designing to combat requirements.