Defense Technology International - September 2007 - (Page 66) INSIGHT EDITORIAL W hen Fred Jane, that marvelous eccentric, started Jane’s Fighting Ships in 1895, gunarmed warships were the way nations protected their trade and projected power. Then came the submarine, the aircraft with ship-killing bombs and torpedoes, the aircraft carrier and the guided missile. In Cold War navies, submarines threatened and defended the sea lanes, aircraft carriers projected strike power, and surface combatants switched to a defensive role as anti-air warfare (AAW) or anti-submarine escorts for carriers and amphibious warfare ships. Heavy armor and heavy guns disappeared. Gunboat Diplodocus The U.S. Navy’s new DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer, due to go to sea in 2012, represents a break with the centurylong trend. The Zumwalt ships will have 80 vertical-launch missile tubes and a pair of 155-mm. Advanced Gun System mounts. AGS is the biggest new naval gun, and the only naval gun dedicated to land attack, designed since World War II. Its rocketboosted, guided 260-lb. shells fly farther than any other gun projectile. Two guns and missile mounts come at a cost—even downsized from the original design, the 14,500-ton Zumwalts are the biggest U.S. surface combatants in almost 40 years, bigger than the Navy’s last cruiser class. (Don’t even try to make sense of the frigate/destroyer/cruiser classification any more. You classify upward to show how strong your fleet is, and downward to sell the project to the politicians.) The ships will cost $2.7-3.7 billion each, depending on whose estimates you trust. Only seven DDG-1000s are planned. The design will then be adapted into a cruiser (there they go again) equipped for air and missile defense, with no big guns. The entire development program for AGS and its guided shell will result in 14 production units at most. While AGS should be spectacular in its range, accuracy and rate of fire, it has limitations. It can only fire its specially designed projectiles, and the fire-and-forget rounds are usable only against fixed land targets. Given an effective range of about 80 mi. (129 km.) and a 25-mi. standoff distance, AGS is useful against such targets up to 55 mi. inland. Forty percent of the world’s population lives in that area. The bad news is that the 60% who don’t in66 DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL SEPTEMBER 2007 cludes most of the people whose addresses end in “stan,” and a lot of the people in the “arc of instability,” as strategy wonks define the area stretching from Central Asia into Africa. The Navy has halved the number of AGS rounds on each ship, to 600, and talked about resupplying the ships by helicopter. The who-hangs-the-bell-on-the-cat problem is that it will take a lot of sorties by heavy-lift helicopters the Navy hasn’t got: The CH-53 Echo fleet is being flogged to death and the CH-53K won’t be around until 2015 at best, which is not a good bet given the history of the V-22 and AH-1Z/ UH-1Y. The ever-optimistic Government Accountability Office, in a November 2006 report, had a more basic criticism: Given the Navy’s multiple changes in the number of land-attack-capable ships—including the Zumwalts and the long-range-gun-equipped Burkes—in its plans, does the Navy have any clear idea of how much land-attack firepower it needs to provide, and do the Marines know how much they want? Some people in Congress have a plan to fix Navy shipbuilding: Make the CG(X) cruiser even bigger and nuclear-powered. (Can’t afford a $3-billion destroyer? Let’s build a $5-billion cruiser. You have to love Congress.) Bob Work of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has what seems to be a more sensible plan. His conclusion: Extend the life of the current fl eet of Ticonderoga and Burkeclass warships, including improved guns; build just one Zumwalt, as a demonstrator, and get serious about deciding what kind of future combatant is needed and is affordable. Work’s postulated Large Battle Networked Combatant starts with a common “sea frame” that can accept a variety of existing and future weapons and sensors, both to cover multiple missions and accommodate improving technology. A plan like that incorporates economies of scale. It makes room for existing weapons like Standard and Tomahawk, evolutionary weapons like missile-defense interceptors and Rattlrs, and revolutionary weapons like railguns. For the time being, though, the Zumwalt class looks like a very expensive way of building a small number of specialized platforms. It sounds like the way that the B-2 ended up—and, at least, the creators of the B-2 did not plan it that way. I —Bill Sweetman www.aviationweek.com/dti http://www.aviationweek.com/dti
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