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Automating Future Aircraft Carriers
Roland Piquepaille writes "Britain and France will jointly build three new huge aircraft carriers which will be delivered between 2012 and 2014. With their 60,000 tonnes, these 275-meter-long carriers will be the largest warships outside of the U.S. Navy. They're going to cost about $4 billion each, but with their reduced crews due to automation, they'll save lots of money to taxpayers during their 50 years of use. StrategyPage tells us that these ships will need at most a crew of 800 sailors instead of 2,000 for ships of that size today. At a cost of $100K per sailor per year, this represents savings of more than $6 billion. Impressive -- if it works."
Aircraft carriers are obselete.
So, is there any chance at all that the Aircaft Carriers will actually stay in use for the entire 50 years? Won't be replaced by anything newer or better?
I would guess they would be.
The real problem with this mentality is that these are warships. Smaller crews are vastly less efficent at damage control and have much smaller margins for casualties before the ship ceases to be combat effective. Automation is all well and good but ships that size NEED vast crews simple due to the unpredictable nature of sea service. Imagine if you have a gastro outbreak onboard and 400 of your crew are down. Larger crews can absorb unexpected events much more easily than smaller ones. Plus most of these studies tend to ignore hte fact that less crew means more and longer watches for the duty stations that remain. The US is moving to this right now with the new San Antonio LPDs and DDX program but they are facing the same choices. Reality wise we'll probably see much more automation and relyability but I have serious doubts if anyone will field a warship of this size without a crew of at least 1/2 the normal rate.
Roland's rent is due
Except wasn't the reason carriers were so effective in the first place because 100 miles is almost nothing compared to the strike range a carrier can put out? (not sure what it is, 700 or so?) Plus, sometimes it helps to have eyes in the sky on the situation, and a large object on station at the same time. How many people could you evac to a DD(X) via helicopter? Does it even carry them? (Plus, when was the last time somebody on board a carrier died as a result of a strike on that carrier? sixty years ago?)
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
If a sailor averages $100k in upkeep a year, then sailor costs per year were $10 billion per 50 years. It costs $4 billion to build a boat, so figure it was $14 billion over fifty years.
This boat only costs $8 billion over fifty years.
Seems to me that the answer isn't "figure out how to do damage control with 40% of a regular crew complement." Seems to me the answer is "You were gonna send three of these things to blow up the bad guy good; send five instead, it's still cheaper."
-JDF
I don't like this trend at all.
The more money we have to pay and the more lives we have to put at stake in order to go to war, the less likely it is that we actually do go to war.
The only way that war becomes "fair" is if both sides incur the same 'cost' of the war (monetary, soldier deaths, civilian deaths, etc.). If 33,773 American soldiers or civillians died because of our involvement there, we'd be pulling our troops out as fast as we possibly could.
With this, we're spending less money and putting fewer lives at risk to kill a proportionally higher number of foreign militants. At what point does war become a targeted genocide? We're putting our enemies in a position where their only method of directing their anger twoard us is by targeting civillians in suicide attacks. This scares the hell out of me.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
This gives them the ability to project power. Which is something England and France cannot currently do.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
The British invented the angled flight deck layout on modern carriers.
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The British took a beating in the Falklands because they didn't have a carrier to protect the other ships. The carriers do need other ships for ASW support and the like, but being able to establish air superiority for hundreds of miles is a big step up from "virtually defenseless".
What computer lasts 50 years? Steel plate, sure, but silicon and plastic?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
The sea is a place it's expensive to send sailors. After all, we have to house, feed, and entertain them when they're off duty. Building more housing for sailors increases size, which increases fuel use, and decreases operational range.
Substitute astronaut for sailor in that. Automation will be critical to space flight, for all the reasons it's useful here. Fewer astronauts means fewer people to send to Mars for 3 years, or at least it'll allow those people to get more done. This will make spaceflight cheaper, and it'll increase range, because it's easier to supply ten people for 3 years than it is to supply 15. Less food, less fuel, less money.
After hundreds of years of compertition the Brits and the French are working together in improving their Navies? Talk about setting your pride aside for the sake of strength. The French must really be getting sick of being second rate naval powers. This must be part of the Projet de loi de programmation militaire 2003-2008
For some reason I refuse to use either spell check or the spacebar properly.
Russians, for one, have missiles that fly just above water and only go up when they're close and it's time to attack. They're impossible to intercept because radars can't see them due to reflections from water. Launch a few of these and this $4B toy will sink like a fucking rock. US, no doubt, has similar tech. Russians also have supercavitation torpedoes which no one can intercept because of their speed. This is not even taking submarines into account. A sub can stay close to the sea floor with motors turned off. Once this thing goes above it, it will just launch half a dozen torpedoes and move on.
Carriers are only useful against countries that don't have (or can't buy) such rockets / torpedoes / subs and don't have decent airforce or submarines. Those countries can be "shocked and awed" without aircraft carriers, though.
Who exactly is this aimed at?
There are no major nation states left that could maintain a sustained war a la WWI or WWII any more. Every European state lacks the trained cadre of military personel to field a major army. Any every small nation is so outclassed by even 20 year old US/NATO equipment that spending billions on "next generation" systems makes no economic or military sense. Russia lacks economic power to play, and China lacks the geographic location to every conventionally threaten the US or Europe.
Example, the US Abrams tank is 2-3x better than any other tank it will meet except perhaps the British Challenger tanks. The US could build a tank for a fraction of the cost that would still outclass anything it will face.
The sheer military and technological superiority of even decades old weaponry is why most of the world has shifted to guerrilla or terrorist political tactics.
Not even the hinges on the doors last fifty years. An aircraft carrier is a serious exercise in maintenance.
There are parts that are replaced almost as often as they're used. There's a hook on the bottom of the jets which catches a cable stretched across the deck. That's how the jets land on such a short runway. The hook is replaced something like every five landings.
Aircraft carrier personnel are far more used to maintenance schedules than anybody you'll meet... well, anywhere. Computers are far from the most finicky items they have to deal with.
On the other hand, during a conflict, a carrier is a pretty juicy target, and one thing humans *are* good at in combat [apart from dying :( ] is being adaptible. It'd be a real shame if the plug fell out of the automated aircraft-landing computer because of a nearby explosion ...
I know that Lockheed-Martin engineers their naval systems to take more shock/damage than a human could take and be functional. I saw a video where the equipment was placed on a barge and explosives were detonated underwater only a few feet away. The barge was lifted up several feet, and the plume of water from the blast was over 50 feet high. That close, a human would be temporarily deaf and have a lot of inner-ear problems. The system continued working.
Also, while humans are incredibly adaptable, they can't always replace the equipment. For example, there is no way a person could replace the automated aircraft-landing computer from your example. While a person may be able to work "beyond their limits", there is no way for them to manually commmunicate to a remote plane attempting to land - they need equipment to do it.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
$6 billion is pretty good savings, but if they were to skip building the ships entirely, they would save another $12 billion on top of that, for a total of $18 billion saved. I'm sure people can think of lots of uses for $18 billion that are more valuable than deploying aircraft carriers...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Urrgh. I think I am going to become a "WeaponNazi" and take to reminding people everytime they call a monster weapon a TOY that:
These things are used to KILL PEOPLE! Real People! Not on TV, not in a "reality" show. For real! People like you and me, even if they dont like a lot like us, still humans.
Please don't allow the media to lull you into this sense of complacency about monster weapons of any kind. Be they owned by so called "bad folks" like Iran, or the supposedly good folks (yeah right), like the US or UK.
Repeat after me: A Weapon is NOT cool! It is NOT a toy.
And spouting that bull about "bullets don't kill people, blah blah blah". Bullets helps people kill other people faster, more safely, dependably, in larger numbers. Advanced weapons like these reduce the emotional cost of killing someone even further.
The problem is, most software out there is hopelessly bug-ridden. Even the military stuff. I know - I helped debug some of it. Until there are enough highly competent programmers that "zero defect" can have a literal meaning, computer-controlled warships are going to be a fiasco.
(Those with LOOONG memories, old copies of Practical Computing from the 1980s, and a fondness of sci-fi might come up with another reason it's a bad idea. There were several military scenarios in the short story section, over the years, that would definitely be valid today.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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The very point of these carriers will be to help control the regions on earth where the last oil is to be had. As is obviously already happening in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others." --Groucho Marx
On the last NATO manouvres on the north atlantic (in the 80s), the first ships simulated sunk (on the first day, too) were the aircraft cariers. Sunk by diesel subs, I might add.
Sure, times have changed. These days, aircraft carriers are used to, um, protect themselves. The aircraft are very rarely used for actual missions (bombers and the like are flown in from Far Away). An AC is an easy ship to sink - it's an enormous and slow target, and modern bombs and missiles are ore than accurate enough to quickly and cheaply dispose of these $xx billion toys.
Besides - what's this about SAVING taxpayers money? You save it by building three aircraft carriers? Are you nuts? Are you expecting another major war?
There are two sides to this: if you get involved in a major, serious war (not the idiotic one-sided bombings the USA has been up to in order to increase some company profits), the carriers will be sunk reasonably soon.
If there is no major war (well, I do have some hopes left), they'll be an enormous cost (*much* higher than expected), and then they'll be scrapped.
Bah.
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The Royal Navy were way ahead of you - they thought that aircraft carriers were redundant in the late 1970s. Then the Falklands War broke out and they discovered otherwise.
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You know, you are correct. Real war truly sucks. The problem is, most of the people on Slashdot have no idea how much it sucks.
The problem is, they don't show any of this on television. Check out for instance John Simpsons report from Kudistan during the beginning of the Iraq war. They were in a Peshmerga/US special forces convoy and got hit by friendly fire. The whole thing was a huge mess, really bloody, and yet an incident hardly worth mentioning, except that there were reporters there. He caught the whole thing on film.
I don't think anyone on Slashdot would find being in that situation terribly cool or fun.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
Aircraft carriers are obselete.
In a major fleet engagement against a worthy adversary (Which the US and NATO hans't had since the demize of the USSR) yes, one suspects the US super carriers of today are excessively vulnerable and losing even one of them would certainly be extremenly painful experience for the Americans both in terms of money and expecially prestiege and civillan morale/political support on the home front. They are, however, valuable when it comes to projecting strategic air power agianst third world dictatorships and regional powers such as Iran that cannot or have, at most, only a limited chance of penetrating the protective screen of a super carrier and seriously threatenting it. Basically super carriers are still useful for quiclkly making air support available for conflicts such as the US led wars in Iraq. Conflicts which a 19th century British general of the Victorian army would instantly reckognize as being similar in character to the a colonial punitive expeditions of his own time. What is really interesting is how would one of these new carriers would cope when hit by, say, a salvo of large sized modern ASW missiles? I mean one would expect that the skeleton crew would have extreme troube coping with the extensive damage since most of the automated systems would either be out of commission or working at limited capacity.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
They're going to cost about $4 billion each, but with their reduced crews due to automation, they'll save lots of money to taxpayers during their 50 years of use.
This is like my girlfriend. She's telling me she has saved money when she has bought a skirt from a sales. I never can convince her that she would saved even more money by not buing a fucking skirt.
Seems to me that politicians are to useless war machines as vain girls are to clothes.
The GP never said it wasn't. Point was, how does being first to think of painting lines on the deck at a 10 degree angle fifty years ago demonstrate skill at automation.
Oh, the RN was also the first organization to land a jet aircraft on a carrier.
Again, how does being first at a non-automation related feat demonstrate skill at automation?
And they also invented a lot of the automatic guidance equipment used to guide pilots to safe landings on carriers.
There you go, there's something more relevant. Now is there something not from the 1950's?
Their carriers in WW2 had armored steel flight decks during a time when most US carriers had wooden decks
Oh deal, now were in the FORTIES, and talking about building materials...
Someone else has already mentioned the steam catapult.
Ingenious to be sure, but again, 1950's. The OP asked whether the brits have the technological know how to build such an automated carrier. Like the GP poster, I think they undoubtedly do, but this absurd parade of non sequitur "proof" is laughable. It like asking an Italian engineering firm for references of their experience building modern long-span suspension bridges and having them hard you a book on 2000 year old Roman engineering.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.