What then, on the other hand, should become of a fleet, whose missile defence, brain of command, and innermost magazine are crowded into a single unmistakable hull?
The concept of the Trump-class battle-ship is selling itself: a 30,000-40,000-ton battalion-ship would be commanded by the largest battle-ship since the time when a capital ship was able to bring sanity to the anarchy. The bundle of hypersonic weapons, high-energy lasers, railguns, and a deep vertical-launch magazine are dumped into a single command hub. In the sensor-saturated maritime sphere today, however, concentration turns the concept of “power” into something different. A big ship will no longer be a target since it is difficult to sink; it will be a target since it is difficult to neglect.
The engineering risk is initiated even prior to a shot. The current fleet air and missile defense requires continuous integration: sensors, combat-system software, data links, and weapons are all required to work as a system, at sea, under severe demand with minimal tolerance to failure. The recent U.S. experience already demonstrates how easily ambition turns into schedule and preparedness drag in case novelty is piled too high. The 23 new technologies built into the Ford-class carrier were the result of 23 new technologies, and then-CNO Adm. Mike Gilday summed up the implication, as Gilday said: “We had 23 new technologies on that ship, which quite frankly increased the risk … of delivery on time and cost right from the get-go.” Another Trump-class design would have the stakes even higher, with advanced power generation, cooling, EMP, and fusion of combat systems, not being a luxury, but the key to the combat capability of the ship.
That addiction contradicts an ancient surface-warfare instinct: do not build architectures that go to pieces. During an event at the CSIS, Rear Adm. Tom Druggan explained a common principle of Aegis: “build a little, test a little, learn a lot,” and gave the cautionary note: “beware of the single-point failure.” It is not that a big ship cannot be constructed with overlaps within the hull. The thing is that by classifying its protection around a single platform, one can develop another type of vulnerability a mission-destroy, software cascade, or battle damage that brings down the hub may wipe off not just interceptors and sensors, but the decision node of the formation itself.
It is a case of the magazine math being the clincher but it works both ways. The concept has been associated by public description with approximately 128 vertical launch cells. That figure is impressive until it is compared with current shooters: Arleigh Burke-type destroyers carry 96 cells on a third of the displacement, and similar strike capabilities broadly define other surface combatants. The process of consolidation of such cells into hulls minimizes the number of independent radars, combat, and firing nodes. It also makes the targeting problem of the adversary easier since it reduces the number of ships that need to be located, monitored, and destroyed down to be the ships that need to be found, tracked, and destroyed to put off the fleet defense.
The contemporary doctrine has been shifting the other way over years. The now-named Distributed Maritime Operations and the previously termed “distributed lethality” push were developed on the principles of dispersal, autonomous action units, and the more extensive distribution of combat power such that an adversary has to respond to a larger, more audible challenge. The deception, emission control, decoys, and unmanned adjuncts are not accessories in that model; they are structural benefits that fatten apparent targets and extend a destroy chain.
Even ship-based missile defense has an orientation towards mobility and flexibility, as opposed to the thinking in terms of a “hub.” The 2019 Proceedings case argument of dynamic employment cautioned against placing scarce multimission vessels on fixed defensive boxes as they emit strong sensors and become relatively vulnerable to attack, recommending a change to integrated air and missile defense, balancing hard-destroy armaments with signature control, maneuver, and nonkinetic impacts.
The main engineering lesson here is easy to grasp, however, when a single hull is assigned that of the shield, the magazine and the brain, then survivability becomes a binary. That system-of-systems is maintained in the fleet–or a disproportionate part of its power to see, decide, and protect is lost.
