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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."
The US Navy's main project right now is the DD(X) destroyer. It uses advanced automation (damage control, weapon countermeasures), stealth, advanced radar, reduced crew, full control/integration with the rest of the fleet. The best toy: Its capability for rapid-fire, pinpoint 155mm shell attacks from up to 100 miles away may sometimes eliminate the need for aircraft carriers entirely, resulting in an operational cost probably an order of magnitude or two cheaper than a carrier, and with very little chance of any casualties. Of course many of those same capabilities are also going to soon be added to cruisers, aircraft carriers, etc.
It doesn't sound as impressive as a new aircraft carrier, but for most scenarios it's going to have amazing results. It's meant to be the first ship to arrive, and carriers will only be used for prolonged engagements.
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
Not sure what I think of this... On the one hand, if it's possible to save loadsamanny by automating non-critical jobs, then fair-enough, sounds cool. And the brits have something of a history in designing warships - presumably they'll not have forgotten too many of the important bits ...
:( ] 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 ... Yes, I'm being facetious, but the point isn't. Machines can only perform within their limitations, and people frequently perform outside their normal potential when (a) their life depends on it, and (b) there's no other option...
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
So, as long as we don't go to war, it'll probably be excellent. If we do, I hope they've thought of the consequences...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
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.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
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.
Alright, so the way I see it, the news here is that they're building these carriers. Good for them. I don't particularly care, but I understand that others here do. My complaint, rather, comment, is that the focus is on the money. The summary claims that the governments will save $6 billion by building these, but neglect that they could save $8 billion in building costs + billions more in employment costs.
So shouldn't the news be that the carriers are being built, not about how much the UK and French governments are "saving"?
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.
Computer, fire two missles
hacked by chinese, you 1s 0wn3d
Oh Shit!
Table-ized A.I.
...the article paints the picture this is something that happened today, but it's not - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4780630.stm
In fact, the carriers are already being built - all that's been signed is a formal agreement, with France giving Britain payment for prior research and development. They've actually been under construction since December!
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.
is because the "missing" half of the crew will actually be outsourced to India.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
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.
The role you're thinking about for the Navy has also changed. Their is much less of a demand for huge "blue water" flotillas, and much more of a demand for smaller, lower-draft vessels to support shore operations.
The big carriers are nice, and I don't think anyone is suggesting that (at least in the USN) that they're going anywhere, anytime soon. The new destroyers are aimed at "littoral dominance," that is supporting ground troops and amphibious operations in coastal waters, in areas where you just can't take a carrier or a submarine. Right now we have to do most of that sort of warfare (patrolling near shores) with aircraft, and that gets expensive and impractical if you want to maintain a continuous presence.
The idea of the new destroyers is that they would allow us to maintain a presence and establish a platform for operations (e.g., special ops divers, artillery bombardment) in areas where right now we're limited to a temporary presence.
Nobody is really suggesting that we roll out a new round of Iowa-classes, as cool as I think the idea of 16" dia. naval gunnery is (find me an aircraft that can lay down 243,600 lbs. of ordnance every five minutes onto a target, near continuously).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
When they modernized USS Missouri in the mid-80s they cut the crew complement roughly in half. It didn't mean longer watches; it meant fewer duty stations. The new automation systems on board (and fewer small guns to man) meant that it didn't take as many crewmembers to perform the same tasks any more.
New engineering technology, for example, can cut the number of men it takes to operate an engine room from 25-30 down to 5-10. And more of those jobs are monitoring systems jobs, as opposed to manual labor, which reduces fatigue and reduces the chance of injury.
It works fine if it's properly designed and managed.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
From the article:
"An aircraft carrier must fight, and find the enemy, and do a lot of other stuff."
Brilliant writing there. Very eloquent. No, really, I mean it, and other stuff.
$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.
They can travel hundreds of miles before striking a ship, way beyond any ship's detection range, similar to cruise missiles. That's the whole point of having them - to not have to send expensive ships that can be easily destroyed by aircraft or cannons or missiles.
I cost my employer close to £100K a year, yet my salary is less than a third of that. Most of the extra costs go on training, accomodation costs (services, heating, etc), employment taxes, pensions, and providing me with the IT I need to do my job.
I imagine that most jobs are the same. Pretty much every job has overheads...
No, they won't. Here's what will happen:
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
You certainly don't need a battleship anymore. Sea-skimming missles, torpedos, and automatically operated defense guns have changed things over the years. This isn't 1945.
True, battleships at the end of WWII were pretty much obsolete against airpower. However, with the advent of SAMs, a properly designed battleship (utilizing heavy armor) with vertical launch SAM systems would be nearly invulnerable to anything short of a submarine attack or a nuke in coastal areas. Most modern warships are so thin skinned that heavy bombardment from shore artillery could do some heavy damage. A battleship would be tough enough to take some hits while pounding targets within a few hundred miles with a combo of cruise missles and heavy shells. They'd even be big enough to house a couple of anti-sub helicopters!
Battleships of this class would be horribly expensive, but it might not be a bad idea to have one of these instead of five of these fancy destroyers, simply for the survivability of the platform.
Some more detailed information about the project can be found here: the British part (aka CVF) and the French part (aka PA2).
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Somone should mod up the grandparent here...
One Electro-Magnetic Pulse will wipe out all their
Off-The-Shelf network equipment making the grand armada worthless.
Although i doubt that they will be using off the shelf equipment... having 2000-4000 people on a ship does wonders when the shit really hits the fan and you find that all electronics are wiped out by EMPs, most of your civilians are killed from nukes, biologicals etc, your C&C centers are nuked or compromised... and you still want to keep fighting.
Humans are reasonably resiliant/self replicating/autonomous machines with a great hive and survial instinct. Having a few hundred extra around is great for carrying stuff, fixing things low tech when it requires them all to use sledge hammers, duct tape, bondo and WD40, and of course the general mayhem they can do when they reach land (whether at war or not!)
I doubt that telli-commuting officer can do any of that...
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
Nobody is really suggesting that we roll out a new round of Iowa-classes, as cool as I think the idea of 16" dia. naval gunnery is (find me an aircraft that can lay down 243,600 lbs. of ordnance every five minutes onto a target, near continuously).
Which is sort of unfortunate, because the new boats are soft targets; they can't absorb fire and keep on fighting -- the assumption is that they won't get hit by anything, which seems like a dubious assumption. The battleships were heavily armored gun platforms -- it was assumed they'd be hit, and designed so that wouldn't keep them from fighting.
The Navy's inability to provide meaningful gunnery support is why the Iowa and Wisconsin haven't been stricken from the naval registry. It's not clear that the new destroyers will fill this void, although it is pretty clear they won't even begin to have the near-shore potency of a battleship and its 16 inch guns, but the Navy is hoping they'll be just enough to convince those pesky congressmen to let them get rid of the two sort-of remaining battleships.
Battleships were used extensively in ground support operations in WWII. Interestingly, no American battleship has been lost on patrol (out of port) since the 1800s.
Agreed. Building new aircraft carriers - especially big ones like these - more than 60 years after the end of WW2 demonstrates a profound lack of imagination. In fact, it is a perfect illustration of the dictum that nations always prepare for the last war.
In WW2, carriers were very important, as witness the fact that there were only a handful in 1939 but hundreds in 1945. Aside from the US Navy with its 100-plus carriers, even Britain's Royal Navy had over 70 carriers at the end of the war. (Admittedly, most of them were small escort carriers, but still - the Royal Navy doesn't have 70 warships in all nowadays).
The only reason the US Navy maintains its big carriers, and countries like France and Britain are planning new ones, is that there has been no serious naval warfare since 1945. Carriers are big, fat targets which positively invite attack by tactical nuclear weapons - whether delivered by torpedo, cruise missile or even ballistic missile. It's not necessary to get a direct hit - anything within a mile or so should do the trick. Anyone who has seen "Top Gun" even once must realize that, without the director on their side, Maverick and his friends should have failed to defend their carrier. The odds were all on the side of the attackers - who could, for instance, have split up and come in individually. How do three or four defending aircraft intercept six or more attackers, all widely separated? The real truth is uttered by CAG when he says "this whole thing will be over [in a few minutes]".
In this day and age, big carriers are reminiscent of the "mighty Hood" in the interwar years 1919 - 1939. Universally admired as the epitome of British naval power, Hood toured the world on goodwill visits, stopping off at many foreign ports where visitors marvelled at her huge guns, glistening brasswork and holystoned white decks. When she was put to the test at the battle of the Denmark Strait, however, Hood was sunk within minutes. Ironically, she may have been sunk not by Bismarck (a real battleship), but by a shell from the cruiser Prinz Eugen - precisely the class of ship that battlecruisers like Hood were originally intended to hunt down and destroy.
Armed forces always tend to forget their proper role in peacetime. Instead of genuine capability, they begin concentrating more and more on the show of force. This tendency is well described in Norman Dixon's superb book "On the psychology of military incompetence". Then, when a real war starts, it takes a while for the "parade ground" generals to be dismissed (or killed), and replaced by real warriors coming up from the ranks. Similarly, the floating gin palaces that look so impressive in peacetime are quickly sunk, to be replaced by ships that can survive and fight effectively.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The French and British co-operate on a lot of military ventures and despite what you may hear about famous Anglo/French rivalries actually have a good working relations. In fact I think we'd probably trust the French much further than we'd trust the US or Israel, not least because we can always hop across the channel and kick their little froggy arses if they get too uppity.
>> 50-75 mile effective range when flying low-profile
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-N-19
This baby is supersonic, can be launched in "flocks" of 20 with one missile flying high and conducting reconnaissance and others flying low. If the high flying one gets hit, another one takes its place. It has AI, it maneuvers in flight, it can carry 500KG regular or 620KT nuclear warhead. And believe me, even 200 of these don't cost as much as one fully loaded aircraft carrier. And it has attack range of 360 miles.
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
I'm guessing the poster you're responding to was making a joke. Before WWII, it was thought that battleships, not aircraft carriers, were the way to go. Like the poster before you was saying, it was felt that aircraft carriers could not withstand the onslaught of a battleship with huge guns.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Anyone who has seen "Top Gun" even once must realize that, without the director on their side, Maverick and his friends should have failed to defend their carrier.
Taking on the realisticness of 'Top Gun'? Boy, you're a brave fellow.
$30 Off All Plans: Use code TRIPLESAWBUCK
The standard Navy joke is that they asked one of the Battleship CO's what he would do if his ship was hit by an Exocet. He replied that he'd call away sweepers. While they are expensive to operate, I still firmly believe that we should have kept all four of the (modified) Iowa-class on active service. Aside from their sheer survivability, they were also equipped with sixteen Harpoon missiles as well as sixteen Tomahawks which adds up to some serious long range striking power. The Navy was also in the testing phase, when I was medicaled out, for an 8" RAP (Rocket Assisted Projectile) discarding sabot round that would be fired from the 16" barrels, laser-guided no less, with a 250+ mile range. I don't know where you'd put the VLS launcher short of replacing one of the turrets which may not be a good idea, or replacing the amidships Tomahawk and Harpoon launchers which might not be too bad if you can stuff enough missiles in there. The only problem with that, from an Naval Engineering standpoint is that you'd be decreasing survivability of the platform if the ship took a hit to the amidships VLS launcher (which is where most cruise missiles are programmed to pop-up target, btw). Unless you armor plate the heck around and below the launcher. Interesting problem in moment-arms there as it would change the center of balance. Whatever. You'd also have to add the radar systems as well and Aegis ain't cheap although you might be able to get away with something like the SPS-49 (3-D Air Search). Possible. Likely? I think not. A long time ago ('80's) I had the idea of taking the various LPD's we were decommissioning and turning them into overgrown missile barges with VLS launchers. I did some back of an envelope calculations and you could have stuffed several hundred in each one. With our datalinks, any Aegis equipped ship could have controlled the launcher(s). The US Navy would have never gone for it, given the low top end speed of an LPD, but still an interesting idea and God knows we have a ton of them in mothballs. One Battleship, one Aegis Arleigh Burke destroyer, and one missile barge. Could definitely ruin somebody's whole day and you'd have all the threats covered. The Navy has always been fixated on new ships, rarely do they ever consider upgrading older ships. The last time that happened was the Spruance-class destroyers which Congress intentionally under-funded. It ended up costing them a lot more in the long run to upgrade them. [They were all supposed to be like the Kidd-class which are now going to Taiwan.] Aside from a few awaiting their turn, and one set aside for Museaum duty, the rest of them are on the bottom of the ocean (including my former ship ). We'll have to wait and see what they come up with. So far, I'm underwhelmed.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
no American battleship has been lost on patrol (out of port) since the 1800s
Nice way to leave out Pearl Harbor. My father was on the California that day.
The last time the English and French undertook a project like this i.e. Concorde - the costs soared five-fold between planning and implementation - to £1.134 billion - and the production models sold never even covered part of the cost. This has all the hall-makings of yet another Anglo-French financial disaster - although if they do as well with the carrier as they did with concorde we shall see some interesting technology. I lived under the concorde flight path for years - I could set my clock by it - and when it was retired I realised that I would miss it's elegant grace and beauty, the only SSL passenger transport in the world, as I would never see it fly again. Even if it was a little noisy ....
If Vista's unavailable, maybe XBox-360 based systems, and use the hull as the heat sink. You'll only be able to use it in the Arctic Circle with all systems active, though.
What are you talking about? Everyone knows that it takes five hits to take out the air-craft carrier, whereas a battleship will sink in four!
There's no emoticon for what I'm feeling! -- CBG, "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes"
...as the USS Enterprise, circa 2300. Capt. Kirk ran a tight ship with about 420 guys/gals/beings. Less than that didn't seem to work, as the M-5 automation experiment had some bugs.
But I don't think the Enterprise lasted anything like 50 years, did it? -A, -B, -C, -D, -E....
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.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
I will be the first to admit that the capabilities of the Iowa class battleship were
awesome -- especially their batteries of 16 inch guns that could propel VW
Beetle-sized (2,000 pound) shells.
The US Navy, however, has a brand new bag getting ready to be deployed --
electrically actuated railguns capable of firing aluminum projectiles at over
10,000 meters per second. At that speed, no explosives need to be used --
the sheer MxA of the projectiles are sufficient to destroy the target. Instead
of ballistic aiming, nearly direct aiming can be used once the earth's curvature
is taken into account. A rapid fire volley of such projectiles will actually create
its own weather pattern. (Think supersonic flight, partial vacuum behind the
projectiles, and shock waves.)
Modern Aegis class destroyers have power plants capable of generating over
30 MW of power, used for everything from propulsion to radar to ECM. Railguns
will make a far better fit on these destroyers than on the old Iowa class destroyers
of WW-II. The Iowa class destroyer was heavily dependent upon manpower --
with a standard crew of about 2,400 sailors, while aircraft carrier crews are
typically 5,000 or more (including air crews and pilots.)
The combined British-French project for highly automated aircraft carriers does
make sense, but only in conjunction with modern destroyers capable of providing
the necessary defensive screen.