Improving Naval Ship Acquisition | Hacker News Reader

Improving Naval Ship Acquisition

construction-physics.com

72 pointsLuc130 comments

The U.S. Naval Institute has their own proposals.[1]

Everybody has to rethink sea power now that attacking ships from shore is working. The Moskva was sunk by a missile mounted on a truck. That was a wake-up call for the world's navies. China has a lot of anti-ship missiles mounted on trucks. Any naval ship in range of a hostile shore is in trouble today. The US will never again be able to send a parade of ships through the Taiwan strait as power projection.

It's also a big setback for the MAGTF concept, where a Marine unit is based from a group of medium-sized helicopter carriers and boat carriers. Those craft sit offshore and send out boats and helicopters. This works great against minor enemies with no air power. Against ones that can shoot ship-sinking missiles, or swarms of drones, it's not a good strategy. Houthi drones have become a serious threat. Ships go through a lot of expensive missiles shooting down cheap drones. Running out of missiles has become a serious problem. Underway replenishment of vertical launch tubes at sea is difficult, which means ships may have to return to a base to reload.

The Ukraine war, with large numbers of cheap drones and small missiles, has changed land warfare. There's no such thing as air superiority any more. If it flies, it will be shot at. No more flying helicopters over the battlefield with impunity. On the ground, nobody can move in the open. Tanks are easy to kill for anyone with the right weapons. Ukraine has turned into a war of attrition, where both sides keep steadily killing troops without accomplishing much. The side that wins will be the one that runs out of resources last.

All those problems are coming to naval warfare.

[1] https://www.usni.org/american-sea-power-project

> Ships go through a lot of expensive missiles shooting down cheap drones.

When will we have cheap drones that can take out other cheap drones?

Only when we're forced. There's an ego problem with military acquisitions, people want big fancy things. When million dollar missiles are outmatched with thousand dollar drones and that becomes an actual threat is when these things change. Ukraine is working as a reality check and learning experience for what modern war would actually be like on a large scale.

This, agree completely.

History is rhyming with the WW1 generals who viewed machine guns as an irrelevant distraction from the main job of getting the cavalry charging.

It's fascinating seeing the nature of warfare literally changing before our eyes in Ukraine and still everyone's focused on building big beautiful weapons

You won't, because that necessitates a faster drone that your adversary might already be fielding.

This is incorrect. You have layered responses. Faster drones mean less range, speed, or payload. So you layer your defense response to account for the different categories.

This won’t be a game of mine is better faster like marketing pukes like to pretend. Just like memory caches one size does not solve all problems.

Missiles, small kinetic drone interceptors, AA guns, lasers, shotgun drones, gps spoofing, jammers, and high power microwaves just to name some options. Each has its place and saying drone interceptors won’t work shows you have no idea what you are talking about.

We're talking about surface vessels, here. What layer can a drone even occupy? Close-in intercepts are handled with CIWS systems, BMD is covered by VLS, AA handled by SAMs. Drones do not handle any of those mission profiles better than their counterparts, cost be damned.

I'm entirely willing to write off drone interceptors for the foreseeable future. Layered defense certainly presents opportunities, but not for low-reliability expendable doodads.

They have been demonstrated already. Lasers for small/medium drones are already being tested live in conflict regions as well.

We are only a few years in to the state change. Militaries take time and the big ones are learning cost lessons right now.

There is a significant asymmetry in the requirements: cheap attack drones only have to succeed once, cheap defense drones have to succeed every time (or intercept sufficiently far out that some more reliable backup can be deployed when they fail).

But the same is true of expensive missiles, which are apparently what's used now.

Seems like having a magazine of 1000 defense drones would be a good addition to a ship already armed with anti-aircraft missiles, so you don't have to shoot a missile unless you really have to. It would level out the economics.

The difficulty is choosing to fire a lower probability of kill weapon while defending a high-value asset (the ship) during a limited window of engagement.

By definition, cheaper interceptors are shorter range, which means you have less time for a Plan B if it fails.

The historical solution was to push air defense pickets farther out around high-value ships, but the US hasn't had anything affordable in that class since the Perries referenced in the article.

Aka, if you have an SM-2 or ESSM to fire to defend an Arleigh Burke+ at maximum range... you're going to fire it.

I don’t think it’s even theoretically possible to defend an aircraft carrier sized target against a sufficiently concentrated missile/drone attack within say a 5 minute window 200 km offshore.

Even if we assume absurdities like quadrupling the number of reactors, 100% efficient lasers, a dozen escort ships also with their own lasers, etc…

I expect that's a big part of the SEWIP Block III upgrade: high-power EWAR being seen as the most effective current point defense against swarms.

Presumably you can pump enough energy through naval AESAs to do bad things to drones and cruise missiles, and they have the advantage of being electronically steerable and volumetrically targeted.

https://www.twz.com/41829/this-is-what-the-navys-new-shipboa...

How does this work against a sufficiently concentrated attack?

I think the point is that the ship is itself an expensive and vulnerable method of delivering drones to a target (because warfare has become all about delivering more drones to the target than the other guy can cope with).

If you deployed 100 patrol boats, each with 100 drones and no missiles, that is a cheaper, more efficient, more resilient solution that one ship with 1000 drones and a bunch of missiles.

Define drones. Define missiles. How big are these drones? Are they group 1? Group 3[0]? Can this ship with missiles use its group 4 drones to find and fix these patrol boats so it can toss missiles at the opposing patrol boats? Can the patrol boats do anything about the missiles incoming at M3? Can I use some group 4 drones to drop a bunch of group 1 drones in the vicinity of those patrol boats, where they have no response because they don’t have medium anti-air capability?

Vulnerable does not mean obsolete.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAS_groups_of_the_United_State...

None of those. As we're seeing in Ukraine, the new drone wars are all about tiny commercial/consumer drones being repurposed as weapons in huge numbers [0].

Obviously, everyone scoffed at this when reports first came out. How can a $250 consumer drone take out a multi-million-dollar modern tank?

Yet here we are. Neither side are fielding tanks any more because they're vulnerable to drones, and therefore obsolete [1] (caveat: we haven't seen the end of this cycle of development and response, so it's possible that tanks work out how to defend against drones and continue being relevant. I suspect it's more likely that tanks go the way of cavalry. Machine guns were the answer to cavalry. Tanks are an answer to machine guns. Drones are the answer to tanks. The answer to drones won't be better tanks).

The Ukraine war is not a naval war, so we're not seeing the same rapid development of new naval military doctrine. But if a naval war kicked off, it's reasonable to expect the same rapid adoption of new technology would play out, with the same results. Large, expensive, weapon systems (in Ukraine tanks, in naval war ships) are vulnerable to massed attacks by smaller, cheaper, weapons using new tech that we haven't used like this before.

[0]https://theaircurrent.com/ukraine-special-report/ukraine-dro...

[1] https://www.army-technology.com/features/mbts-vs-drones-are-...

Patrol boats are fine for low intensity coastal security missions but mostly useless in any high intensity conflict. They can't operate effectively far from shore. And close to shore you might as well use land based aircraft and missiles.

Not drones, high-power lasers. The US has been testing laser weapons for terminal defense extensively, with quite a bit of success. A laser shot has about the same cost as a single 20mm cartridge and you don’t need to reload.

That may work, but the enemy might attack with a thousand drones at once. So far, laser mounts are one per ship, and need several seconds on target to take down a drone.

This drone video is seven years old.[1] It's a hobbyist jet aircraft. 415 mph top speed. You have to expect that by now there are militarized versions.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k

A drone with sufficient range, payload, and protection against the standard litany of modern EW and counter-measure systems would be quite expensive. Even the crappy non-survivable drones used in Ukraine are tens of thousands of dollars and that would probably tip north of $100k each if they actually had to be hardened against modern countermeasures, which aren't really a thing in Ukraine. Aside from the cost issue, launching thousands of them against a single naval target is unlikely to be feasible due to the weight and volume considerations alone. The largest drone attacks ever mustered across an entire theater of war, never mind against a single target, were in the hundreds and those didn't have to contend with much in the way of serious broad spectrum countermeasures or point defenses.

You would likely be better off with several actual anti-ship missiles. A Harpoon only costs $1.4M and those are dedicated platforms purpose-built to defeat state-of-the-art defenses and countermeasures.

The US Navy is testing the lasers against cruise missiles and other systems with much more protection and capability than the typical cheap drone. Current versions are lower-power testbeds but production versions are expected to be several hundred kW.

> A drone with sufficient range, payload, and protection against the standard litany of modern EW and counter-measure systems would be quite expensive.

Not any more.

DJI drone able to return home using visual navigation without GPS.[1] Unarmed. About US$1000.

Small lightning-proof drone.[2] Aims lightning strikes. Cost not given.

Ukraine EW-resistant drone.[3] Drops bombs. Currently about US$30,000.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWIYOOKItM

[2] https://dronexl.co/ja/2025/04/23/ntt-lightning-triggering-dr...

[3] https://interestingengineering.com/military/meet-the-shoolik...

None of these are applicable to the naval context here. That $30k drone has a measly 10km range. You can't navigate visually on the open ocean. The payload requirements are at least 100kg if you want to do any damage, which none of these come close to. None of them can withstand modern military countermeasures; the "EW resistance" in this case just means operating in a denied environment, which is pretty old and basic tech.

Completely different class of drone capability. Something that could actually do damage in a naval context against modern countermeasure tech would be much more expensive.

Ok. Flying drones that we've seen in Ukraine lack the range to survive a naval deployment.

Ukraine has had some success engaging Russian surface warships with small aquatic craft type drones.

Does a ground-based operator pose a threat to modern navies by means of some swarm of jet-ski robots?

Yes, but only in the littorals or protected waters. Small unmanned surface vessels can't really operate effectively out in the open ocean. They lack the necessary sensors, endurance, and sea keeping ability.

for now

What does that even mean? There isn't any magic technology on the horizon which will allow small USVs to operate effectively in blue water.

How much does a swarm of extremely long range jet ski robots with hardened military electronics and large explosives packages cost?

Getting enough of anything that can do serious damage to a ship to overwhelm the defenses is going to be an expensive undertaking. Maybe if some idiot sails a $10 billion aircraft carrier close to shore such a mass attack is justified, but it is simply not at all evident that "some success engaging Russian surface warships" equates to posing a serious threat to modern navies.

> That $30k drone has a measly 10km range.

You don't necessarily need a lot of range if you launch them from a small drone vessel[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY0JP__hm4s

I literally had this exact same discussion here about 3 years ago when people were scoffing about the idea that tanks would become unusable archaic white elephants because they're vulnerable to drones.

At the moment, yes, if you want to field a drone that can kill a ship then it's going to be expensive. But we haven't seen any real development of ship-killing drones because the Ukraine conflict is land-based with only limited naval conflict.

Military doctrine only really advances during wartime, by people in the field desperately trying new things to survive. If we had a naval war you'd very quickly see new advances in all this tech and I think you'd very quickly end up in the same situation; that large ships become useless archaic white elephants because they're vulnerable to drones.

Also EMPs and microwaves to fry swarms of drones at once.

What EMPs? This is the real world, not some sci-fi movie. Due to the inverse square law, generating an EMP powerful enough to act as a weapon takes an extremely powerful explosion.

EMP weapons are directional, and thus aren't affected by the inverse square law. Further, the power that a ship can output can exceed what a drone could tolerate by many orders of magnitude. EMP weapons do not require an explosion.

You appear to be referring to some sort of jammer or directed energy weapon, not an "EMP" as the term is usually defined.

I think they were conflating EMP with directed RF weapons. The latter is a standard feature set for anything with a beam steering transmitter. Those can dump a lot of focused RF energy on a targets. That has been an automated defense response since the mid-20th century and would likely kill most drones.

EMP is, of course, extremely inefficient no matter how you pump it.

You can direct an EMP so it’s close to linear losses — the difference between a laser and a lightbulb.

You wouldn't want your EMP devices to have the range to go from your position to enemy object, you would mostly be fucking all your stuff up. What you would want to do is lob an EMP device at the enemy object, and detonate it as close as possible. Not only does it minimize damage to your own equipment, you need a MUCH smaller device. And it can be done without a ton of effort with a fast explosive, a neodymium magnet, and some copper wire to blast the magnet through, potentially launched mortar style.

I think the only reason we don't see more EMP devices is because it will screw up all your communications and potentially other equipment too, and piss off every other country within 1,000 miles with all the EM noise. You can't really protect your radios equipment from EMP devices other than to coordinate taking them all down and shielding them all. It could also potentially be a prelude to nuclear EMPs and thus nuclear war but im not all that sure what a countries response would be to EMP weapons and attacks.

You can want those things, but outside of nuclear weapons they don't actually exist. Practical and effective conventional (non-nuclear) EMP weapons remain in the sci-fi realm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compre...

Also I don't want them, nmobody wants them. They will mess up all your own stuff just as good as the enemies and piss off the entire world with the EM noise.

Yes, I am aware of those experiments. They are not really effective because the pulse range is miniscule. So you're not making any sense.

a.k.a... cheap missiles. They don't even need to have a payload, they just need to hit the enemy drones before they get to close.

I think it's been obvious for quite a while that in a real war ships are now going to be pretty useless as they're far too vulnerable to cheap and easy weapons. The Houthis demonstrated this to folks who weren't aware or in denial, but it's been true for a while.

Vulnerable is not the same as obsolete.

Surface ships are still the only way to transport large quantities of troops and equipment over long distances. If you want to maintain the ability to project force beyond oceans, you need a navy to escort the vulnerable transport ships and to fight whatever threats they would be facing.

The Houthis haven't actually managed to hit any warships. In fact the opposite of what you claim has been demonstrated. The defenses work well, although at great expense.

Of course whether they can survive a determined attack from a near-peer adversary remains to be seen.

> Houthis demonstrated this

The Houthis have sunk 2 civilian ships, out of 30 damaged.

It's hard to sink a ship.

It's even harder to sink a military ship in prepared condition with a crew trained in damage control.

The USS Cole was reportedly hit with 1,000 lbs of C4 against the hull [0], while presumably not at battle stations, yet still managed to stay afloat.

Watch some of the sinkex's for what it takes to send a ship to the bottom (read: heavyweight torpedo). There's a reason they usually burn before they sink.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing#Attack

Holes full of air tend not to do a good job of sinking ships. Holes full of water are good at sinking ships. Small warheads aren’t going to be effective at making holes full of water. They may be good at blowing up stuff on top, that make the ship not useful for doing it’s mission though.

$1000 drones laden with explosives aiming for just above the waterline would seem to put holes in appropriately dangerous places.

You could launch a thousand of them for the cost of a single anti ship missile.

A reasonable thing to do in a modern war would be to launch 10,000 drones all at once at an aircraft carrier, even at a very low success rate that's a lot of little holes.

Just ask yourself how many you're going to need and what defense exists for them currently.

Shitty self-guided weapons can be made very easily these days and in tremendously large numbers. The defense industry focus is presently on very advanced things that it seems could trivially be overwhelmed by volume.

Double layer hulls? Compartmentalization? 1-8" thick steel plate?

When something floats, there are fewer restrictions on weight. CV-66 took a lot of direct explosions before going to the bottom.

The easiest way to think of modern carriers is ships inside ships, such that the entire thing stays buoyant even if most of the outside compartments are compromised.

Navies have been building steel ships for a minute... and are pretty good at it.

Welcome to the jeune ecole. The problem of $1000 drones is range and speed. A carrier is moving at 20kt, regularly. More if conducting flight operations. $1k drones are group 1 drones in DoD classification. There are limited in speed and range. If they teleported into range of the carrier, sure, they could reach it, and keep up with it. But if they don’t start near the carrier, how close do they need to start to do so?

To get holes at the water line, you’re going to have to take your drone down to the water line. Which means you’re going to have to deal with the waves and spray from being down there. Cheap drones are not notable for dealing well with hitting the water.

Beyond the thick steel plating, and compartmentalization, there’s also the fact that little holes just won’t let in much water. If you want to sink a ship, you need to let in more water than the pumps can take out.

If you start talking about $50k drones, then a bunch of these objections start changing. You can get much more range, much more speed, much larger warheads, and much greater capabilities in general. But your cost curve has changed a bunch, so you get 200 drones instead of 10k drones for a given amount of cash.

And at some point of additional requirements, you've come full circle back to the low-cost, rapid-production cruise missiles that most militaries (including the US) have been developing for the last 5 or so years.

You grossly underestimate how hard it is to sink a warship. During SINKEX live fire exercises that use a retired US Navy ship as a target, they will usually absorb many hits with state-of-the-art weapons without sinking, even though the active defenses are turned off. This is several thousand kilograms of explosive with terminal guidance smart enough to find the most vulnerable part of the ship.

Typically, they have to send a specialized demolition team to actually sink the ship after the exercise is over.

To a first approximation, US Navy ships are demonstrably unsinkable. That has always been a hallmark of US Naval architecture, and they are rightly proud of it. The idea that it is possible to destroy these ships with tens of kilos of explosives delivered by cheap drones isn’t serious.

Ukraine drones aren't even submersible with attention to stealth afaik.

The navy is going to be, uh, already is a totally different battlefield.

Even deep water flotillas maybe maybe vulnerable to extremely low-tech long loitering naval drones. If you want to defend against us carrier groups, do you build your own carrier group or design a long loiter submersible activatable drone that you can build insufficient numbers to basically cover your the entire strategic theater of the ocean that you need.

How much is a full carrier group or a sufficient Navy to fight them, $100 billion?

Drunks are simply going to make power projection a lot more difficult outside of strategic nuclear weapons. If Taiwan is on the ball, they should have thousands if not more anti-ship drones ready to be launched. The second they see invasion operations by mainland China crossing the channel.

I do disagree with air power: I believe there is substantial air power superiority now and in the medium term future with advanced high altitude high-speed Jets. That still requires a huge amount of engineering investment and technological infrastructure to compete in that theater, and dominance of that provides vast tactical advantages.

And, despite how much I hate musk, if the starship SpaceX rocket achieved some measure of its payload and launch goals it enables military dominance of low orbit for a couple decades.

Forget long range drones, the Chinese have worked on a ballistic anti-ship missile (DF-21D) that can credibly threaten or destroy a carrier from 1000 miles/1600km away. It uses a conventional warhead and would limit carrier operations. Or at the very least, would make the US Navy think very hard about the risk/reward ratio of deploying a carrier group.

Color me skeptical. That missile has to be actively guided in using external systems. The US has extensive defenses in-depth designed to defeat systems that work this way. The Soviets were doing it long before the Chinese were. It is a threat but I don't think the US Navy is losing sleep over it. The US deprecated systems with similar guidance models a long time ago because of their intrinsic vulnerability to defenses.

Also, it can't credibly "destroy" a carrier. The warhead is much too small. You could launch dozens, at high cost, but this is where the attackable single point of failure of these missiles start to become a problem.

Just aim for the thermal exhaust shaft, you womp rat.

"and would limit carrier operations"

Do you have any idea how small a carrier is when you are hypersonic at, say, 100,000 feet above sea level? And the bloody thing is moving too.

Naval mines that launch torpedoes have already been a thing for decades so you're not suggesting anything new. But not even China can afford to build enough of those to achieve a useful level of protection. The ocean is big. Look at a map sometime.

> The Ukraine war, with large numbers of cheap drones and small missiles, has changed land warfare. There's no such thing as air superiority any more.

This might be correct but I don't think the Ukraine war is demonstrative because neither side had the capability to establish air superiority.

Just two days ago: "F-35 Had To Maneuver To Evade Houthi Surface-To-Air Missile", "Several American F-16s and an F-35 fighter jet were nearly struck by Houthi air defenses" [1]

They also shot down seven MQ-9 drones [2].

I don't know how close Houthis were to actually shoot down that F-35 (probably not that close). But if their Iranian SAMs can threaten F-35s, what can state of the art Chinese or Russian systems do? Could NATO even establish air superiority in Ukraine?

[1] https://www.twz.com/air/f-35-had-to-maneuver-to-evade-houthi...

[2] https://www.twz.com/u-s-mq-9-drone-shot-down-by-iranian-back...

US isn’t deploying its best SEAD tech against Houthis either, though.

I don’t disagree with the general discussion; but it’s worth remembering the US would also change tactics against Russia or China.

I don't disagree with what you are saying, and tactics also evolve a lot during conflicts.

But my point is that the actual effectiveness of US forces against top-tier Russian or Chinese integrated air defense systems is unknown. And getting more unknown by the day rather than less.

I would say though that we can probably look at the Ukraine war and understand how their air defense systems are working. And the answer to that seems to be: not as well as previously assumed, they do work but have been vulnerable. This is mainly the S300 and S400. I couldn't find much about the newest system, Russia isn't able to do much manufacturing of the most complex weapons at the moment. If I had a guess, based on what we've seen in Ukraine, US forces would shred the Russians in the air and water, but ground forces would be far behind when it came to drone warfare. I'm just a chump sitting at home though so...

China is a whole other story and honestly I'm ok never finding out that answer.

Losing air assess is a given. Package Q alone lost two F-16s. We lost an F-117 in Bosnia. But run enough Wild Weasel and eventually we did establish air superiority.

In Ukraine there is no establishing superiority without occupying Russian territory.

I used to draw mushroom clouds against hills in the 80s. I do not want to see NATO in Russia. I only want Russia out of Ukraine.

> Everybody has to rethink sea power now that attacking ships from shore is working.

Nothing new there. Attacking ships from shore worked fine in WWII. (And in dozens of wars, over multiple centuries, before that.) Operationally, the drones and anti-ship missiles look very similar to WWII Axis shore-defense batteries and air forces. The latter included both kamikazes and stuff like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_X - both of which knocked out multiple Allied capital ships. Major Allied air and naval forces could spend month wearing shore-based defense down, in preparation for amphibious invasions.

One major thing that's missing from this analysis is the rise of cheap mobile laser defense systems that can stop these missiles/drones pretty quickly. If the weather isn't ideal for lasers a ship can just move out of range.

Wasn't the Moskva caught sitting there with its defence radars switched off? I think that was a big fumble by the Russian navy but not necessarily reflective of any fundamental shift in the broader landscape of ships vs missiles.

> The Moskva

Crew of 500 and one helicopter.

> The US will never again be able to send a parade of ships through the Taiwan strait as power projection.

Crew of 10,000 plus an entire airwing.

> The Ukraine war

A "war" in which civilian casualties are intentionally limited. This serves as a very limited example of what modern full out war would entail.

> The side that wins will be the one that runs out of resources last.

This is true for any military conflict and always has been. It's basically a game of resource denial/destruction.

If you poke through all the propaganda, ideology, etc. most wars boil down to which side has the best economics and can best deny access to essential resources for the other side in order to gain access to resources the other side controls (oil, minerals, land, water ways, trade routes, etc.).

Many modern conflicts are actually proxy wars where large countries subsidize minor conflicts in a plausibly deniable but otherwise very open way. China, the US, EU, Russia, the Saudi's, etc. are all parties in such conflicts and they are fighting against each other and with each other depending on where you look (Middle East, Africa, South America, etc.). In the background you have trade relation ships, oil & minerals, and economical sanctions. And in some parts of the world water access. Those are the resources that sustain conflicts.

Modern weaponry changes the tactics. But the strategy is always the same: go after resource access and you might win. You can see that happening in Ukraine and if China goes there, it will be a factor in Taiwan. It's why they mainly talk about that without going there. China is much smarter than Russia on this.

Outside of the initial stages of the conflicts this is usually. One of the most interesting facts of the Rhodesian Bush war was they only really gave up when the fuel refinery and depot was destroyed.

That isn't all that new, HMS Glamorgan was hit by a missile mounted on a truck in 1982 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Glamorgan_(D19)#Falklands_...

I don't see any USNI articles that echo your comment, so idk why you linked them as a source...

If you really want to improve Naval ship acquisition, then go back to when the US Navy had its own navy yards - which were full-bore shipyards, capable of constructing anything up to the largest aircraft carriers. So any time the defense contractors were getting greedy or moving slow, the USN could just build ships in-house.

Unfortunately, the old navy yards could not <cough/> generously support <cough/> our self-serving congressmen. Vs. the defense contractors could. Guess which one got phased out.

Not so sure about

      A specialized ballistic missile defense platform based on a commercial ship hull — 
      The US military has historically preferred to intercept ballistic missiles outside 
      the atmosphere. The advantage is that one missile defense battery can cover a 
      very wide area. A specialized ballistic missile defense ship could be kept farther 
      back from more forward groups, protecting them without giving away its position 
      with easily detectable radar emissions.

One thing about BMD systems of all kinds is that the footprint they protect is smaller than you wish it was

https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/22265/17_Simple_Model_Calculat...

part of the reason why the US has BMD ships is that they can placed in places such that the footprint works since the ocean covers like 75% of the Earth's area. To really be out of range of aircraft, anti-ship missiles and all that you'd have to be hundreds of miles away from the threat and that could well put you out of the footprint. Not to say that you couldn't have clever answers such as the launch vehicle being separated by the radar though most BMD systems use track-with-missile guidance that require the missile be in close communication with the radar for the terminal phase.

This partly gets into the reason why exoatmospheric intercept is preferred. In order to maximize the useful coverage envelope, they need to maximize missile speed. Unfortunately, there is a speed threshold beyond which endoatmospheric terminal guidance becomes extremely challenging due to limitations imposed by material physics. If your terminal guidance is exoatmospheric, you can mostly avoid those issues.

That said, it is clear that the US has been leaning heavily into moving more defense to airborne missile carriers. For example, the SM-6 can now be launched directly from F-18s instead of destroyer VLS cells, which greatly extends the potential range of ballistic missile defense coverage. The B-21 Raider, while it can carry bombs, is essentially an extremely stealthy missile launcher with a very long range and loiter time.

Relatedly: if you park an AEGIS BMD ship off the coast of San Francisco, how far inland can they defend with SM-3 against an ICBM? Approximately eastern Kansas. Same question, but Hampton Roads: approximately western Kansas.

The footprint defended by SM-3 is actually fairly huge.

Footprint charts here:

https://mostlymissiledefense.com/2016/06/30/strategic-capabi...

what I find suspicious though was up until 2000 or so there was a doctrine that midcourse intercept was unworkable because ICBMs could be supplemented with a large number (hundreds) of lightweight decoys that would be impossible to discriminate from a real warhead. That led to systems like Sprint that would wait until the warhead was re-entering the atmosphere and easy to discriminate because it was not slowed down so much by the atmosphere, doesn't burn up, etc. I dunno if the sensors really got better or if they just decided to go ahead anyway for political reasons.

The terminal guidance sensors could pretty trivially discriminate decoys since the 1980s, when they stopped using radar guidance and switched to broad-spectrum imagers. The decoys really only worked on radar. A decoy capable of spoofing the imagers would have to be so large, complex, and heavy that it would be tantamount to adding another warhead which defeats the purpose.

This is why they stopped testing against decoys. They had tons of test data that the terminal guidance systems could reliably discriminate them so it didn’t add anything to the tests other than cost.

This source would argue the other way

https://cissm.umd.edu/sites/default/files/2019-08/2000-UCS-C...

It seems that a warhead or decoy would fill a single pixel on the sensor until you got very close to the target, 1 km or so, at which case you have to execute a high-g maneuver in a few ms. The state of the art is a "two color" system where you could make either the warhead or the decoys any "color" you want with surface treatments and/or thermal management (worst case: put the warhead inside a shroud cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature and fire the weapon at night when it won't be illuminated by the sun.)

There was a test in the early 2000s I read about where they were able to pick out a warhead which was intermediate in properties with a set of decoys with various surface treatments. That 's great but they knew exactly what they were up against which we wouldn't know if it was a North Korean missile.

I'd have more faith in the discrimination abilities of ground-based radars in the 12 GHz range than in the "two color" focal plane imager system.

This gets deep into the classified domain, no one is going to be talking about it here. :)

> Ford-class carriers have high-end radars with similar capabilities as the radars of guided-missile destroyers.

Well, yeah. They have an air wing to keep track of.

> the emissions from these radars make them easier to detect, track, and target…

Is finding a US Navy battlegroup a challenge in the modern era? And won't the nearby escorts still have their radars on?

> The helicopters add significant cost, weight, and crew to the ship.

Sure. And capabilities.

Is a creme de la creme radar really required for air traffic control? They can launch E-2s anyway, they're a carrier.

The assets that leave the ship could get shot down, so the ship needs to be self-sufficient, too.

Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. Ford class EMALS systems have redundant power supplies, for example. That's a huge expense in both weight and operations.

Not saying this is smart or 'right', but I imagine that's the logic behind the decisions for this stuff.

In general the US carrier force in ww2 was well known for having excellent redundancy and damage/fire control. Its a doctrinal thing, and a legacy they're quite proud of.

For example, USS Yorktown (CV-5) - took bomb and torpedo hits, with flooding and fires. Limped to pearl harbour, Was repaired in !!3 days!! and sent right back out to battle, where she was extremely heaviliy damaged again, but kept afloat through several days of bombardment before sinking.

USS Enterprise (CV-6) - hit by several bombs, a large fire in multiple compartments started. Fire control and damage repairs got the flight deck partially operational for launcing and recovering flights within an hour

USS Franklin (CV-13) - took almost 600 casualties, and had massive fires and ammunition explosions and fuel explosions. Despite extreme damage, she limped back to home port. Her survival is considered one of the greatest acts of shipboard damage control in naval history.

there are several more. A part of this is a difference in their design - british and french carriers used thick armoured flight decks, wheras the americans sacrificed these for speed and internal machinery space

If you invent a creme-de-la-creme radar, there's not much reason to avoid using its components wherever you need one. E-2s get shot down; escorts get sunk. Jamming makes it so you can't get data from the E-2s, and ships can pump a lot more electrical power into their array.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-6 does indeed have variants for carriers that are smaller and cheaper; the ones going on the Burkes have 37 radar modules to the carriers' 9.

Carrier radars are not "just for air traffic control." The CVN needs its own way of being able to see its surroundings and cue its own self-defense weapons. Technology evolves, and the means to do this evolve with it. The reason carriers are getting SPY-6 is to replace other radars that are older and have the same job: letting the ship see what is around it.

As another poster mentioned, redundancy is a thing. Suppose you don't have an E-2 up and you need to launch a fighter alert. Someone needs to direct that intercept and it's better not to have a single point of failure. Better for those fighters to have the ability to be directed from an E-2, or the CVN, or the shotgun cruiser . . . whatever makes sense at that time.

And the Navy trains for emissions control or EMCON for short. There are tactics, techniques, and procedures not appropriate for discussion here about how ships and formations of ships are expected to do their business when it doesn't make sense to be radiating sensors.

What CVN self defense weapons need full SPY-6? It got Sea Sparrows and RAMs which are not very far range and not many of them. DDGs have long range stuff that really need SPY-6 capabilities.

My guess is SPY-6 was put on Ford just for commonalty reasons.

> commonalty reasons

Probably, though CVN-78 doesn't have it. It's an odd duck.

Looks like Raytheon convinced USN that everyone rocking SPY-6 was going to save a ton of money due to commonalty but Ford was already commissioned so it's got old system. Probably will install it during it's next yard time.

The Fords don't get "full SPY-6". It's a modular radar, made of 2x2x2 foot modules; the Burkes have 37 modules, the Fords have 9.

https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/sea/spy6-radars (see "A closer look at the SPY-6 variants")

From my reading of naval strategy, the carrier wouldn't want to be sending out that much radar for SigInt purposes. Radar can be detected much further away than what can be detected by the carrier. That's one reason why they use the E2s. The E2s can fly off and see over the horizon, and then just link their data back to the fleet.

So why would the carrier need this additional expense?

> Is finding a US Navy battlegroup a challenge in the modern era? And won't the nearby escorts still have their radars on?

yes https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1

A challenge for our likely opponents?

Per your article:

> China appears to be working hard to deal with this problem, and it’s very possible that they can locate the carriers reasonably effectively, but they have dozens of satellites and large, expensive over-the-horizon radar systems, which any other power is unlikely to be able to match.

Seven years after this article's writing, "dozens of satellites" doesn't seem like that high a bar given Starlink's many thousands. (And we've seen huge bandwidth increases, too, which makes real-time imaging and analysis looking for ship wakes etc. far more doable.)

Since we haven’t had a war against a peer in like 80 years, we have basically no idea what it’d look like, right? I mean, everybody has a bunch of satellites up there right now, and nobody wants to kick off Kessler syndrome. But if two sides with serious navies started fighting and everybody’s carriers were getting spotted by satellite, is it obvious that nobody would start running that calculation?

> nobody wants to kick off Kessler syndrome

Except the Trump administration, you mean.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/07/space-pollut...

In any major near peer conflict the satellites will obviously be among the first casualties. The USA and China have been quietly engaging in an ASAT arms race for several years.

At some point the ICBM nuke exchange happens, as well.

This adds a sort of weird bit because, of course, it isn’t really clear why we’d care about carrier performance against China, if we assume it would be an ICBM war anyway.

Maybe a proxy war or some sort of limited thing could be envisioned… but it seems really risky. I hope we don’t do it obviously.

Nuclear war may happen. I am giving more than a 50% chance that some form of nuclear weapon use in war will happen in my lifetime. But there are so many ways this could happen, from just a resumption of underground testing, to atmospheric testing, to dropping a bomb on an uninhabited island of the adversary, to detonating a bomb in space, to detonating a bomb inside your own territory while it's being overrun by the adversary, to detonating a bomb undersea with plausible deniability, and all the way to wiping out one city, or lots of cities. Nuclear war does not mean automatically end of civilization. Russia would like you to believe so, so they can prepare for all contingencies, but we don't.

Satellites require uplinks. You don't have to destroy anything in orbit if you can destroy the control station on the ground.

Plus if we can hack into it and force it into graveyard while expending all it's fuel that's obviously the opening move.

The count and function of China’s satellite fleet is no mystery. We see their payloads go up, same as they see ours.

Very much the same way they see our boats leave port, in fact.

They’re certainly working on it.

https://www.theverge.com/news/669157/china-begins-assembling...

This starts with the false premise that the adversary needs to search the entire ocean.

In reality, the comings and goings of our ships are as public as it gets, and our peers quite easily track and maintain awareness of the locations of all our battle groups.

There's a huge difference between knowing the general location of a ship and generating a track good enough for weapons guidance. And much of the searching is done by reconnaissance satellites, which are highly vulnerable and likely to be destroyed in the opening moves of any major conflict.

Well they don't just know the "general location" of a ship. The article addresses the problem of terminal guidance (using out of date information) but it seems to treat targeting issues as fatal flaws, rather than acceptable risks. It doesn't matter if it the hit rate is 25%, they're going to fire ten of them. There might be collateral damage due to misidentification? Boo hoo, you're in an all out war.

I get it, you're convinced ASAT warfare is inevitable. The reality is it's akin to MAD. No one's going to start that war because it's lose-lose.

Nah. The whole "Kessler Syndrome" thing is overblown. No one is going to refrain from shooting down satellites if it will gain them a temporary military advantage in a hot conflict. This is not even remotely close to MAD.

It’s not just Kessler syndrome, it’s that GNSS would be targeted and losing that is catastrophic for the civilian economies.

The problem is that to saturate the defences of a carrier's escorts you need hundreds of missiles not dozens. The Chinese have lots of missiles but not an infinite amount; especially not of the modern, purpose-built weapons that can pose a real threat to the carriers.

In reality they're going to have just a few tries before they run out of ammo. Just shooting at everything that might be a carrier is a great way to lose the war.

To actually pull this off you need to be able to rapidly locate and identify the target, communicate it's location to all your various launchers, then coordinate a complex time-on-target attack between all of them.

Any mistakes or disruptions in the chain can ruin your whole attack; misidentify the target and your attack misses, fail to communicate and a portion of your launchers never fire, fail to coordinate and your missiles arrive too spread out and are shot down, take too long to do all of this and the carrier will clear datum and you're stuck waiting for the next pass of a recon satellite that may never come.

This is all extremely difficult even under ideal conditions let alone when Uncle Sam is jamming your comms and blowing up your servers.

Not to say it's impossible, just that it's not as easy as you may think and that accurate targeting is a major factor.

The idea isn't to remove the radar entirely but make do with something not much better than what the Nimitz class has. Without launch tubes with SM-3s no need to track things out past the atmosphere.

And we do precisely that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-6

> AN/SPY-6(V)1: Also known as the Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR).[21] It is 4-sided phased array radar, each with 37 RMAs... planned for the Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.

> AN/SPY-6(V)2: Also known as the Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar (EASR).[23] Rotating and scaled-down version with 9 RMAs estimated to have the same sensitivity as AN/SPY-1D(V) while being significantly smaller.

Same tech, just fewer modules.

> Rather than outsourcing design to third parties, ship design should be brought in-house, and NAVSEA should expand its staff of Naval Architects from around 300 to closer to 1200.

Abundance makes this point about many government projects' inefficiency.

In my (admittedly not ship-building) experience, big problems happen when design and manufacturing are done by different organizations. The designer has to make guesses about the tools and processes at the manufacturer, and the manufacturer has little flexibility to make small changes to the design to improve manufacturability.

Of course there are ways to bridge this gap, including close collaboration and frequent back-and-forth between groups, but then when the spec has been fine-tuned for one manufacturer it can end up nearly impossible for third parties to competitively bid for a contract.

I think the navy can probably do design as well as anybody, but then they'd probably have to run the shipyards too.

The alt case isn't the shipyard doing the design; it is gov't working with consultants on specs, working with designers who work with engineers who work with manufacturers who work with subcontractors

I’ve started to think that the Gov. needs to act more like a pseudo open source maintainer rather than customer or designer. Competition helps on many different axis, but the gov not owning the designs (whose R&D we paid for) drastically limits future competition.

I think it might actually improve competitive aspects by allowing parts of it to be bid out.

You probably need that anyway, because congress will never allow key personnel to be paid enough on the gov payroll.

Government holding competitions for design, build, and maintenance separately was done for missiles, and it did not work well. Government has also designed at least one missile (Sidewinder by the Navy at White Sands), and the missile turned out well, although that was an example of a relatively simple device, designed for low-cost.

I think government focusing on specifying interfaces for modular components (in hardware and software) might be a good paradigm, though it probably has drawbacks which I haven't considered.

What I’m thinking is more like the Gov being able to furnish key designs to organizations that can plausibly iterate on them. So orgs don’t have to make massive investments to catch up to and integrate SotA phased array radars, flight controls, etc. Specific systems would still have single integrators.

There are probably a bunch of problems with this, but it’s certainly better than a specific organization vendor locking the Gov down a multi decade rabbit hole where key capabilities are proprietary designs and the vendor gets to dictate the direction/terms because it would take anyone else 5-10 years to catch up.

In this article, the approach to streamlining USN ship design looks like reduced survivability to me, a random voice on the internet who has never seen combat. Or naval ship design.

Of course, the LCS hull was considered less amenable to damage control than more traditional designs, but its multi-mission modules feature made it huge, complicated, and expensive anyway.

Automation is supposed to decrease the number of Naval personnel required to fight the ship; streamlining by reducing automation may run into problems. If the Ford-class carrier design is already set in steel, how do you back off on staffing implications of reduced automation?

The problem with the distributed battle groups problem is that there is minimum capability that is needed to be viable warship. The LCS are a failure partly because they were designed for low intensity conflict. They only have point defense and not medium range air defense. The Houthis have shown in Red Sea that higher level of defense is needed against cheap anti-ship missiles and drones.

The other part is that ships provide interlocking sensors and defense. The carrier's AWACS cover a long distance. The long range missiles mean that the destroyers can spread out and cover large area.

I feel I should point out, with all this talk of "sinking ships", that it is mostly unnecessary to sink a single ship. All you need to do is spoil their mission capability. This could be as simple as a fragmentation munition peppering the radar or other critical system with shrapnel (which can be targeted specifically). A $50 munition on a $500 drone damages the $50m radar on your $500m vessel, and now you are out of the fight until a repair which will 1 year. Someone with more domain expertise, feel free to adjust those numbers.

This is bad analysis.

The HN crowd should be very familiar with management frequently changing requirements especially when it's far too late in the process forcing reworks.

Instead of middle managers, shipbuilders have the whole Navy, the personal egos and career ambitions of captains and admiralty, Congress, and the ever changing president and party in power to deal with. The author suggests we don't start building a ship until the requirements are done... my sweet summer child they're never done. There are way too many cooks in the kitchen and that's the problem that needs to be solved, ships are being designed and redesigned by committee nearly endlessly. Most things are.

To make acquisitions cheaper this fiddling needs to be curbed, just saying "don't start building" misses the problem and the point.

One thing I don’t understand about modern warships - why do they carry so few offensive weapons?

American ‘Burkes and peer destroyers from some Asian navys have a shitload of VLS cells, but my understanding is that the majority of these hold anti-aircraft (defensive) missiles?

Russian ships seem to have an extremely powerful, but limited load of anti-ship and cruise missiles.

But most other navys (see - especially Europe) have rather poor armament.

In the case of the USN, you could argue that a ‘Burke’s primary role is carrier escort, and that the carrier air wing is the real offensive punch. But most other navies don’t have carriers.

The air force does the offense.

We do probably need to have some conversation about "what is the Navy for", too- its not clear how useful it would actually be in anything approaching a peer conflict. If it's just for pirates and transport the whole thing could be much cheaper.

A remarkably large number of the weapons on a USN warship can be used offensively. Most of the anti aircraft missiles can be used in surface to surface mode. Given their high speed, they can do a large amount of damage, despite the small warhead, simply from KE. This is, in fact, why the US Army is acquiring the Typhon system with SM-6 missiles.

As for the Euro navies, I believe they are generally not designed for really offensive operations. They're generally conceptualized as fighting the Soviets, and so designed for fighting off Russian maritime attack regiments and submarines.

Most of the US Navy's offensive weapons are with the carrier air wings. The destroyers exist primarily to protect the carriers.

The Russians have to put their offensive weapons on surface ships because they're too poor to afford carriers. I mean they tried to build one but it never worked and was worse than useless.

Written by someone naive who just wasted his time writing all that, all through not understanding it isnt a problem. Its by design.

> 2. Rather than outsourcing design to third parties, ship design should be brought in-house, and NAVSEA should expand its staff of Naval Architects from around 300 to closer to 1200.

What are the pros and cons of also in-housing building of ships?

One aspect not covered by the article is fictitious economies of scale. Designing a new ship class, like any other such large project, is an expensive undertaking. To try and make this number more palatable, it is typically proposed to build large numbers of ships over many years. Of course this makes the overall project very expensive, but the per unit price doesn't look too bad. The issue is because these ships will be in production for so long, there is a need to make the ships extremely capable as future needs are difficult to determine. Further because the overall project is so expensive, there aren't many concurrent projects, so this one projects has to be everything for everybody. Of course this further drives up costs and produces compromises that make no-one happy. Then invariably once these overpriced and underpowered ships start getting delivered and people complain, there is a strong call to cancel some of the ships planned, which means the cost of the remaining ships go up, which leads to further cancellations. This is how you wind up with a multi-billion dollar single ship class that has no weapons.

There are further disadvantages. Since these projects are large and infrequent, there are few opportunities to train up people in actually handling such projects. The shipyard that wins the contract will grow fat and lazy while those that didn't will shrivel up and die, leading to a very unhealthy ecosystem when the next big project comes around. Because the project goes on for such a long period of time, leadership priorities both within the navy and in the government are likely to shift, meaning long term consistent support can not be counted on. And finally, the large number of ships that are unlikely to ever materialize allow planners to hand waive away real gaps in capability that realistically still need to be filled.

By starting out with a commitment to small ship classes, all these issues get reversed. Since you expect to be doing projects frequently, they are low stakes, meaning it is okay to take risks, learn lessons, and make a tool for dealing with your current, real problem. You can maintain a health ecosystem of many shipyards and a large population of experienced individuals who have a few such projects under their belt. Lessons learned from each project can be applied to future ones, both allowing for improved ships and improved project management. You can always produce more of a class if you really need it, but if you do the cost savings are merely a bonus.

There are cases where the benefits of standardization and mass production are just too critical to pass up. You don't want to have to worry about 37 different types of ammunition for your frontline troops for example. But warships are few enough in number and high in value - the managerial resources necessary to handle variety are easily justified.

I like the idea of certain types of ships being superstock Maersks that launch air or sea drones from the rear. Quantity may be useful in the drone and AI era.

Ukraine has been using jetski (remotely piloted) launched drones.

And got the first naval drone anti-aircraft kills recently.

Drones are likely to change the whole look of naval warfare a lot more than a new type of frigate in the near future.

we're going to need more boats

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