America's Phantom Fleet: Dream Comes True
Yes, we will now talk about the descendants of the Mary Celeste, the Flying Dutchman, the Sea Bird, Octavius and other sea legends of the past. True, in a slightly different vein, although even though we will be talking about modern ghost ships, meeting them will not bode well either.
We have already said more than once in our materials that the US shipbuilding industry is experiencing big problems, and the US agrees with this. It’s strange, but they talk about the problems of this plan quite openly, but some gentlemen have drawn conclusions that are completely surprising.
If today in the United States there are not enough people to build warships, and even more so, to sail them on the waves, bringing the triumph of the ideals of democracy and order to the whole world, then we need to build a second fleet! Which will not need crews.
The idea is this: Cheaper and faster to build than traditional ships, unmanned/autonomous vessels could help the navy the fleet increase firepower while shipbuilders work on the more expensive and slower conventional fleet.
And the idea was accepted. The United States has begun to build autonomous ships without a crew, which have already begun to be called the “Ghost Fleet.”
In general, it looks like sea legends, only these ships lost their crews not due to a curse or anything else, but completely intentionally. The US Navy wants to have a fleet of these autonomous ghost ships, sailing on command orders to high-risk areas so that real human sailors don't have to. Here's the initial plan.
In fact, unmanned reconnaissance aircraft controlled from command centers located thousands of kilometers away, receiving control signals via satellites, are already commonplace. A kamikaze drone with an operator is capable of destroying a tank that costs thousands of times more – this is already a reality. Why not do something similar at sea?
The US Navy's littoral combat ships, once seen as a low-cost means of replenishing the fleet, have proven to be a costly failure, providing neither reliable ships nor capabilities. Alas, today “Independences” and “Freedoms” are slowly heading to where their fate will be unenviable - for disposal.
The US Navy is experiencing a shipbuilding crisis. The Navy has repeatedly tried (and failed) to significantly increase the size of its combat forces, ease the burden of deploying existing ships and act as a counter to the explosive growth of China's navy, now considered enemy number one at sea.
In 2016, the American navy had a combat force of 275 ships. The Trump administration made a 2017-ship fleet a national goal in 355, but now, seven years later, the fleet has increased by just 17 ships for a total of 292 ships.
A static shipbuilding budget, hiring problems, shipyards overloaded with repairs to old ships, and management problems have all contributed to the failure of President Trump's shipbuilding program, but the bottom line is that the situation is not going to improve any time soon.
As a result, the US Navy command is placing a big bet on autonomous ships, which are smaller, cheaper, do not require a crew at all, and are easy to build. And here it is difficult for military officials to refuse such a solution to the problem. The service is so optimistic about the future of unmanned ships that by 2045 it forecasts a fleet of 373 manned ships and another 150 unmanned ships.
To get an idea of the 2045 ghost fleet, let's look at the 2024 ghost fleet.
"Sea Hunter" and "Sea Hawk"
The Navy's first unmanned ship was Sea Hunter, which entered service in 2016, beginning life as a DARPA program before moving to the Office of Naval Research.
Trimaran design, the ship is equipped with outriggers on both sides to improve stability in the open sea. Sea Hunter is 40 meters long and displaces 145 tons when fully loaded. It has a maximum speed of 27 knots and is designed to operate solo on the high seas up to 9 nautical miles from the control center, moving autonomously. In 000, Sea Hunter sailed from San Diego to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and back, completely unmanned.
The unmanned medium-displacement surface vessel Sea Hunter is berthed at Naval Station San Diego in 2023.
Sea Hunter was originally purchased for the Anti-Submarine Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel program, which was intended to test unmanned submarines as a platform for tracking (and presumably targeting) enemy submarines.
Anti-submarine warfare is notoriously slow and laborious in nature, requiring long hours of patrolling, data collection and analysis. An unmanned submarine hunter, using artificial intelligence to process data from various sensors, could be used to detect and track a conventional submarine, and then destroy it with anti-submarine weapons. weapons, such as the light homing torpedo Mk. 46.
In 2021, the Navy took possession of the Sea Hawk, a sister ship to the Sea Hunter. Sea Hawk is an enhanced version of Sea Hunter, incorporating over 300 improvements derived from the Sea Hunter program.
Together, the two ships constitute a subclass of uncrewed surface vessels called medium uncrewed surface vessels (MUSVs), which “range from 45 to 190 feet in length and displace approximately 500 tons, making them about the size of patrol ships,” according to a Congressional Research Service report.
"Ranger", "Mariner" and "Vanguard"
An unmanned Ranger ship crosses the Pacific Ocean during Exercise Integrated Battle Problem (IBP), September 15, 2023.
The next pair of unmanned warships are the Ranger and Mariner, and the two ships are pretty much identical. Each is 59 meters long, displaces 673 tonnes and can travel at 37 knots. Unlike the previous two ships, Ranger and Mariner have long, flat compartments that occupy the aft two-thirds of the vessel, allowing them to carry a variety of payloads using standard ISO shipping containers.
Interesting feature: The Ranger is believed to have several shipping containers, which are likely the site of anti-ship missile launchers.
Both ships are equipped with "virtualized" versions of the Aegis Combat System, a computer that links the ship's radar, sonar, electronic warfare and weapons systems into one centralized system. Early Aegis combat systems, built in the 1970s and 1980s, used room-sized computers. Thanks to Moore's Law (which predicts that the number of transistors on a silicon computer chip will double every two years as technology advances), the computers needed to run Aegis have been shrunk to the size of a large suitcase. Aegis also allows two ships to control other unmanned ships.
In 2021, Ranger became the first unmanned ship to launch the SM-6 anti-aircraft missile, the launcher of which was placed in the payload bay. If an unmanned ship's Aegis combat system can collect data from nearby ships, it would be perfectly fine to fire its own missiles at targets identified as hostile.
This does not mean that the ship can fire autonomously, just that Aegis can coordinate the ship's combat systems through its data buses. The decision to launch the missile will still be made by the operator located in the command center.
Overall, the nice combination of Aegis and missile cargo bays can turn two unmanned boats into mini-destroyers.
Interesting feature: The Ranger is believed to have several shipping containers, which are likely the site of anti-ship missile launchers.
Vanguard at launch, January 2024
On January 15, shipbuilding company Austal launched the Vanguard, an unmanned ship that resembles the Ranger and Mariner. But unlike other ships that were converted from commercial ships, the Avangard was built according to its own design, as an unmanned ship. The Ranger, Mariner and Vanguard are considered large unmanned surface vessels (LUSVs) that are "60 to 100 meters in length and have a gross displacement of 1000 to 2000 tons, making them the size of a corvette."
Interesting developments, interesting plans.
The US Navy's "ghost fleet" is based on two of the Navy's weaknesses: anti-submarine warfare and missile defense. To provide anti-submarine defense, many ships are required. Missile ships... perhaps, when hostilities begin, there are never at least enough of them.
In the future, MUSVs will become one aspect of the service's submarine pursuit capabilities, perhaps even escorting convoys making dangerous passages in submarine-controlled waters, while LUSVs will increase the firepower of destroyers by providing additional missiles ready to fire.
Ghost ships will never replace crewed ships, but they have the ability to work together to fight future naval battles or simply perform daily security tasks.
No one is surprised by swarms of UAVs or the interaction between a UAV and a fighter. And attacks by unmanned boats. Why, in that future that will not come tomorrow, will there be no place for autonomous patrol ships that will search for submarines in their waters and attack them? If today the problem of rapid reloading of MLRS in the ground forces has been solved with the help of transport-launch vehicles, which are simply chassis with missile launch containers, then why can’t the same platforms appear at sea?
Moreover, the Aegis system will allow the autonomous ship to fully participate in combat operations with minimal correction from the operator ship.
In short, the future for the American Navy could come tomorrow. But only one question arises: how possible is it to build such a fleet of autonomous ships given the fact that in the United States today there is no opportunity to repair and maintain ships from the US Navy? The shipbuilding program is generally going to hell, because there are no shipyards and workers, so who will build these unmanned ships then?
Yes, they are smaller than corvettes, they are faster and cheaper to build, since there is no need to be distracted by life support systems and crew accommodations, but still, they need to be built. However, the next 4-5 years will clearly show whether the construction of one and a half hundred such ships by American shipbuilders is possible, or whether we will witness another failure in the American military program.
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