What will become of a surface warship made, first of all a flagship, and, second, a hard-to-find shooter? The concept of the guided-missile battleship developed in the U.S. Navy, commonly called BBG(X), has been positioned as a reversion to sea power, which appears noticeably distinct. Paperwise, it was a ship designed to carry more missiles, more electricity, and more command and control space than the current cruisers and destroyers. The reference material in the congress tells about a hull that was 840 to 880 feet in length and displaced over 35,000 tons. Those dimensions put it more nearly in capital-ship territory than is habitually a feature in the current surface fleet except of carriers and large amphibious vessels. So is that scale the hook and the hazard.
Selling points of the concept are based, in part, on volume and electrical headroom because the fleet is grappling with where to transport air-defense command teams as well as strike-group staffs as legacy cruisers are retiring. A huge hull also provides space to install weapons that require power and cooling, such as a 32-megajoule railgun concept and high-energy lasers in the 300-600 kilowatt range. The burden of integration does not merely concern attaching systems but ensuring that power generation, thermal management, magazines, sensors and software of the combat system can work together as a team, under the conditions of shock, salt, extended high-tempo and battle-damage control. Once those subsystems are interdependent within one of the flagships that “must work” as a unit, the schedule risk becomes the operational risk.
The larger tale is survivability. The contemporary martial fighting is influenced by continuous sensing, anti-ship weapons, and networked targeting that may penalize foreseeable masses of strength. Large surface combatants already face the problem of being “seen first, fired upon first,” and all kinds of scale ups fail to repel the physics of radar horizons, wide area maritime surveillance, acoustic tracking, or even wake and infrared signatures. Stealth shaping may be used to minimize radar returns, by removing right angles and vertical areas, although ship stealth is a multi-domain, since there are numerous methods of making a ship be noticed when it emits or moves to an ocean and sky. The practical boundary is that the surface vessels may be difficult to categorize and monitor and are not out of the battlefield.
Modern example is used to demonstrate the promise as well as the trade space. The Zumwalt-class destroyer employs aggressive shaping and additional techniques that aim to reduce detectability; according to a spokesman of the Naval Sea Systems Command, the ship has a radar signature that is more closely resembling “that of a fishing boat,” which is reiterated in an overview of stealth ship design. However, Zumwalt also demonstrates that maintaining a low observability of a large, metal warship requires a lot of discipline regarding topside clutter, apertures, heat, and ship usage of its own sensors and radios. A larger vessel is capable of carrying a larger power and payload, and it also provides avenues to spill signatures by exhaust, cooling needs and even the mere complexity of an overboard deck fully supplied.
The concept is brought back to earth by industrial constraints. The implication of a new surface-combatant at this scale is a long design cycle and a long queue in the shipyards already preoccupied with submarines, destroyers and recapitalization. Even supporters admit that it would be only in the 2030s that a first ship would be able to be launched, and it would not be until later that a real fleet impact would be felt. The opportunity cost will be real, no matter what the final design is: yardage, quality labor, bandwidth to integrate hulls with high consequences will not be used to accelerate smaller combatants, capacity to carry munitions, or the distributed architecture the contemporary operational concepts insist on.
As it has been described, not even the historical battle ship is brought back by BBG(X). It re-consolidates firepower and command capabilities in one, visible, asset at just the point the surface combat is characterized by detectability management and the capability to continue to shoot after the initial exchange. The biggest aspect of the concept will be its mass, which can be the most difficult aspect to defend in that environment.
