A contributing factor to the failure of modern sea combat systems is the integration, connectivity, and redundancy junction. The perennial desirability of the construction of still more powerful “super-ships” is based upon an easy pledge: Concentrate sensors, guns and command post in one hull, and leave engineering genius to do the work. The environment in which such vast numbers of small and networked systems become semi-autonomous undermines that pledge.
Distributed Maritime Operations goes in the other direction: spread sensing and striking power in such a way that the force is more difficult to detect, paralyze and scale. Practically, dispersion never causes the loss of complexity- it simply transfers it to the connective tissue. The relocation of the Navy to prototype Networked Expeditionary Routing and Exchange undersea systems or NEREUS indicates that bet: link underwater drones, fixed sensors, and expeditionary nodes via routing and networking beyond point-to-point acoustics. The mentioned goal – the “dependable exchange” of information over extensive locations – is also indicative of the danger. Even a fleet based on “distributed” power can become centralized in the event of a failure in its networking assumptions due to pressure, congestion or interference.
The exposure is initiated prior to firing of a weapon. A force which can be followed immediately becomes a force which must fight and be hunted. Within such a framing, ship survivability cannot be considered as a factor of defense thickness as much as it can be considered as the ability of the targeting process of the adversary to be upset. One recent argument specific to the Navy is that vessels in lethal weapons engagement areas will not last long in a massed over-the-horizon precision fire unless space operations and counter-targeting become the staple of the fleet fight; the critical issue, it is proposed, is the long-lasting surveillance, tracking, and targeting made possible by multi-phenomenology satellites and networked command systems. A “super-ship,” according to that opinion, is not a costly piece, but a showy piece. The more persistent detection the less forgiving concentration.
Droneswarm dynamics construct a more engineer-unfriendly engineering dilemma: defense turns into a throughput problem. It is no longer sufficient to deploy brilliant interceptors or place an extra sensor in the mix, the system must consume, categorize, prioritize and act at a large scale, multiple times over, and be safe to do it. This is the reason behind the attraction of the directed energy though it comes with serious integration costs. Lasers on shipboards and high-power systems that utilize microwave/radio-frequency systems require a keen consideration of size, weight, power, and cooling (SWaP-C), battle-management, and safety factors. According to one of the leaders of the integration, James Brenkert, interfacing with an existing and sometimes antiquated combat system can require substantial modification, not only to ensure compatibility but also interoperability with other systems not originally designed for augmentation.
Even the nature of integration can be a single point of failure, when considered as a bolt-on. A similar trend is noted in the case of safety investigators in commercial maritime operations: the failure of the system is due to the fact that critical components have never been identified as not having a sufficient backup. One lesson that was repeated, as summed up by TAIC Chief Commissioner David Clarke, “A recurring theme in recent TAIC maritime inquiries is that those managing safety systems have not identified safety-critical components that lack adequate backup or redundancy – single points of failure.” The engineering logic is transferred, but warships are not merchant ships. Assuming that a combat system, a data path, a power subsystem, a sensor-fusion pipeline, or some other aspect of the ship becomes the way that the ship fights, then a swarm does not require perfect weapons- it only has to cause “the” ship to enter the wrong failure mode.
There is a second collision point, degraded states, which are added by autonomy and remote operation. A thorough safety analysis of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships states that degraded conditions occur when a subsystem operates outside its design space, even though it operates within its larger operational space, and points out repeated hazards as loss of situational awareness, delayed response, information asymmetry and inter-system coordination failures. The focus on the systemic interaction of the study, instead of the component breakdown, curves onto the naval combat systems, the performance of which relies on the close integration of sensors, networks, operators, and automation.
The “super-ship” strategy presupposes dominance by loading more “capability” into one hull. The drone-swarm reality favours design that continues to work as the communication becomes weaker, the sensors overcome each other, the operators become overloaded, and the power margins become narrower. Designing to that fact eliminates not ships, it modifies the meaning of capital. Resilience is evolving to platform prestige to architecture: redundant paths, graceful degradation, safer autonomy and networks that fail without collapsing the force they are supposed to connect.
