Tongdao Think Tank 2024-02-07 11:29 Shanxi.
According to Popular Mechanics on February 5, the U.S. Navy wants to have an entire fleet of autonomous "ghost" ships.
The US Navy's Littoral Combat Ship was once seen as a cheap means of adding ships and capabilities to the fleet, but its failure proved to be costly, providing neither reliable ships nor capabilities.
The US Navy is in a shipbuilding crisis. There have been several unsuccessful attempts by the service to meaningfully increase the size of its combat forces and reduce the deployment burden of existing ships. In 2016, the number of warships was 275 units. In 2017, Trump** made a navy with 355 ships a national priority, but today, seven years later, the fleet has only increased by 17 ships, bringing the total to 292.
Static shipbuilding budgets, hiring issues, shipyard capacity and management issues are all contributing to failures, but most importantly, the situation is not going to get better anytime soon. As a result, the service has invested a lot of money in unmanned ships because they are smaller, cheaper, do not require any crew at all, and are easy to build. The department is very optimistic about the future of unmanned ships, and by 2045 it is expected that the fleet will have 373 manned ships, with an additional 150 unmanned ships.
Ocean hunters and sea eagles
The first unmanned ship in the US Navy's inventory is the Sea Hunter, which was first commissioned in 2016 as a DARPA project and later transferred to the US Office of Naval Research. It has a trimaran design with outriggers on both sides to improve stability on the high seas. The "Ocean Hunter" is 132 feet long and has a full load displacement of 145 tons. It has a top speed of 27 knots and is designed to operate alone on the high seas, allowing it to sail autonomously for up to 9,000 nautical miles. In 2019, the Ocean Hunter sailed from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and back, completely unmanned.
Ocean Hunter was originally procured for the service's anti-submarine continuous tracking unmanned ship program, which was designed to test unmanned submarines as a platform for tracking (and possibly engaging enemy submarines). Anti-submarine warfare is notoriously slow and painstaking in nature, requiring long hours of patrolling, collecting and analyzing data. Unmanned submarine hunters use artificial intelligence to interpret sensor data, which can be used to detect and track submarines, which can then be used with MK1st class anti-submarine ** attack it.
In 2021, the U.S. Navy took possession of a sister ship, the USS Seahawk. The Sea Eagle is an improved version that includes "more than 300 lessons" learned from the Sea Hunter program. Together, the two ships represent a subclass of unmanned surface ships called medium unmanned surface ships (MUSVs), which are 45 feet to 190 feet long and have a displacement of about 500 tons, which is equivalent to the size of a patrol boat.
Rangers, sailors and vanguards
The next pair of unmanned warships are the Ranger and the Mariner, which are essentially the same. Each ship is 193 feet long and has a displacement of 673 tons, capable of fast sailing at speeds of 37 knots. Unlike the other two vessels, both the Ranger and the Mariner have long, flat bays that occupy two-thirds of the rear of the ship, allowing them to carry a variety of payloads, especially those that use a standard ISO container footprint.
Both ships are equipped with a "virtual" version of the Aegis combat system, a computer that connects the ship's radar, sonar, electronic warfare and ** systems to a centralized system. The early Aegis combat systems were built in the 70s and 80s of the 20th century and used computers as large as a room to operate. Thanks to Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors in silicone computer chips will double every two years as technology advances, the computers needed to run Aegis have shrunk to packages as small as a large suitcase. Aegis also allows two ships to take control of other unmanned ships.
In 2021, the Ranger became the first unmanned ship to launch missiles. One SM-6 anti-aircraft anti-ship missile, loaded in the payload compartment. If the Aegis combat system of an unmanned ship can extract data from nearby ships, then it can launch its own missiles at enemy targets. This does not mean that the ship can be autonomous** – just that the Aegis can coordinate the combat systems on board the ship through the Aegis. In other words, the combination of Aegis and payload capacity can turn two unmanned boats into small destroyers.
On January 15, shipbuilder Austal unveiled the unmanned vessel Vanguard. The ship is similar to the Ranger and Mariner, but unlike other ships converted from merchant ships, the "Pioneer" was built specifically for unmanned ships. The Ranger, Mariner, and Vanguard are all large unmanned surface ships (LUSVs) that "have a length of 200 feet to 300 feet and a full load displacement of 1,000 to 2,000 tons, which makes them the size of a frigate." ”
The U.S. Navy's Ghost Fleet is focusing on addressing two weaknesses in the service: anti-submarine warfare and missile capabilities. The future MUSV will constitute one aspect of the service's submarine pursuit capabilities and may even escort convoys for dangerous crossings in submarine-infested waters, while the LUSV will enhance the destroyer's firepower by providing additional missiles ready for launch. Ghost ships will never replace manned ships, but there is still room for the two to work together.
February** Dynamic Incentive Program