A Second Life for Retiring Burkes?

The Burke class will begin retiring soon.  The early Burkes were commissioned beginning in 1991 and are now approaching 30+ years of service with a scheduled 35 year service life.  The Navy does not maintain a reserve fleet so retiring Burkes will likely be scrapped or sold to foreign countries.  With the ever-shrinking size of the fleet, one can’t help but wonder whether we could bestow a second life on the Burkes when they reach the end of their front line service.
 
Let’s consider alternative, second life uses for the early Flt I and II Burkes (lacking hangars) which will be the first to be retired.
 
As a point of interest, we did a similar post for the LCS in which we considered alternate uses for the vessel (see, “LCS Alternative Uses”).
 
Before we go any further, we need to address, and dispense with, the belief that the ships will have reached the end of their life and that no further service is even possible due to physical constraints.
 
Despite the Navy’s dismissive and foolish attitude towards older ships, any ship, even one as poorly maintained as a Navy ship, can have its service life substantially (indefinitely) extended.  Consider a few examples of extended ship service lives that we’ve seen.
 

• WWII LSTs are still in service around the world. 
  
• The Perry class frigates, which the Navy claimed could not be upgraded, have been upgraded and still serve in various foreign navies.
• The WWII cruiser USS Phoenix, launched in 1938, served as the Argentine Belgrano until sunk in 1982.

 
We can renovate anything, if we wish.
 
Consider the example of the B-52 bomber which has been in active service since the 1950’s, some 70 years or so.  We can re-wing, re-instrument, re-fuselage, re-anything.  Similarly, we can replace a ship’s storage tanks, replace internal wiring and piping, replace corroded sections of hull plating, replace engines, upgrade computers, install new weapons and sensors, and so on and it’s still cheaper than building a brand new ship.
 
One valid concern regarding new construction is that we are currently limited not only by new construction budget but also by new construction shipyard capacity.  Congress, the Navy, and the submarine industry, for example, all want to increase submarine production by one additional submarine per year but the shipyard capacity simply doesn’t exist.  Upgrades and renovations suffer from this same constraint but to a lesser extent in that renovation/conversion work can be performed by more facilities than are available for new construction.  Thus, through renovation we can gain ‘new’ ships without having to tie up new construction facilities. 
 
The steady, reliable, additional work demand of constant Burke conversions would also encourage industry to expand their facilities to support substantial additional work.  Thus, we not only gain useful ships for a bargain price, we grow our shipbuilding industry.  Win, win!
 
Of course, there’s always the challenge of developing a sufficient skilled labor pool but we’ve already addressed how to accomplish that.
 
So, now that we understand and recognize that conversions are possible and that there is no actual physical service life limit, what specific alternate Burke uses could we imagine?  Here are a few possibilities:
 
 
ASW Helicopter Destroyer – The aft VLS could be eliminated and converted to a second flight deck with dual hangars each side of the stack housing.  With the existing, main level flight deck this would provide two flight decks and two hangars giving the ship the ability to operate 4-6 SH-60 type helos.  The forward 32-cell VLS could be used for a combination of AAW defense and anti-submarine VL-ASROC (we ought to develop a substantially longer range VL-ASROC!).  Adding Russian-style RBU or Hedgehog type close-in anti-submarine weapons would further enhance the ASW capability.

Concept Drawing of a Burke ASW Helo Destroyer - 
Note the second, raised flight deck in place of the VLS
 and room for two hangars either side of the stack

UAV Carrier – The ship already has a flight deck.  Addition of a half dozen or so small catapults and converting the VLS internal volume to UAV storage/hangar space would allow the operation of substantial numbers of small (Scan Eagle size) UAVs.  Retaining the forward VLS would allow the ship to contribute to AAW efforts and grant the ship a very credible self-defense capability.
 
Fire Support – The aft 40% or so of the Burke’s length is purely dedicated to the flight deck and one VLS cluster.  Eliminating the flight deck and VLS would allow up to 3-4 additional 5” guns to be installed.  Before anyone protests, recall that we mounted five 5” guns on a 376 ft Fletcher destroyer and three aft guns were sited within an 85 ft span!  The Burke is 505 ft long and the aft 40% represents 202 ft. of usable space.
 
Electronic Warfare – Remove the aviation components and, possibly, the aft VLS cluster, and install multiple, massive, high power EW emitters, signal collection sensors, and task force EW command and control facilities and produce an EW equivalent to the Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) which coordinates task force fire control.  The Burke could be the task force EW control vessel and main EW source with emitters sized to provide truly powerful active electronic defense.  One would hope this would also make for a very effective anti-drone capability.
 
Fast Minelayer – A Burke could be converted to use the entire aft half of the ship to store and lay mines.  With its forward gun and VLS intact, it would be well equipped to defend itself while minelaying.
 
Scout – Strip a Burke of every protruding piece of equipment to maximize stealth and then add every piece of passive signal intelligence collecting equipment we have to make a hard to detect, highly effective, independent, scout ship.  Once again, retaining the forward VLS would allow for effective self-defense.
 
 
Summary
 
Debating every proposed alternative is not the point of this post.  Some might not be effective but I’ve got to believe that most or all could be.  The larger point is that the Navy will not lay these ships up in reserve.  Instead, they’ll SINKEX or sell them and get no further use out of them.  In this time of declining fleet numbers and a looming war with China, it would be foolish and irresponsible not to get more life out of every ship.
 
My favorites are the ASW Helo Destroyer and the EW version.  It is noteworthy that most of the options could easily retain their forward gun and VLS cluster which makes the ships quite capable of self-defense and able to contribute to fleet area defense, as well.
 
For those who are going to attempt to argue that the conversion costs would be too high, ask yourself what the cost of a brand new class of ship for each of the alternatives would be?  We’re talking billions of dollars!  Even the hideously expensive Australian Perry upgrade was still cheap compared to new construction.  Conversions are a bargain! 
 
Let’s not throw usable Burkes away.