Military Quick Hits

* The Navy has put the Light Amphibious Warship a.k.a. Landing Ship Medium program to build a new class of Marine transport ship on hold because the initial bids were far more costly than the Navy had expected. 

“We had a bulletproof – or what we thought – cost estimate, pretty well wrung out design in terms of requirements, independent cost estimates,” Assistant Secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition Nickolas Guertin said at an American Society of Naval Engineers symposium last week.

“We put it out for bid and it came back with a much higher price tag,” he added. “We simply weren’t able to pull it off. So we had to pull that solicitation back and drop back and punt.” . . .

The idea was for the Navy to buy a smaller, less expensive amphibious ship that could shuttle Marines around islands as they set up ad-hoc bases on islands and fire weaponry like anti-ship missiles in a potential conflict and quickly move to new locations. The Marines Corps has converted two of three planned Marine Littoral Regiments that would rely on the LSMs to move across the Pacific.

At a lower price point, the Navy could buy more ships, and current requirements call for 18 to 35 LSMs. The Congressional Budget Office projected the lead ship in the class costing anywhere from $460 to $560 million, according to an April report. If the Navy buys the 18 to 35 ships according to current plans, each hull could cost $340 to $430 million. Initial plans in 2020 called for each ship to cost $100 to $150 million. . . .

Last fall, the Navy put out a request for proposals to the shipbuilders after finalizing requirements for the Landing Ship Medium earlier in 2023, USNI News reported at the time. Those requirements called for a platform that could haul 75 Marines and 600 tons of equipment, and have a cargo area of about 8,000 square feet, a helicopter pad, a 70-person crew, spots for six .50-caliber guns and two 30mm guns.

“Specific configuration details will be determined during the detailed design phase, but generally the ship will be less than 400 feet long, have a draft of less than 12 feet, an endurance speed of 14 knots, and roll on/roll off beaching capability,” Naval Sea Systems Command told USNI News at the time.

* One of the main driver's of new weapons developments in the U.S. military is the termination of the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2019. This has driven a host of intermediate range missile programs.

* It would be interesting to see what could be done for aircraft and drones that rather than primarily having a low radar threshold, would be quiet and hard to see in visible light (perhaps with a so called "invisibility shield"), possibly with a fairly slow moving, small drone that with only modest attention to reducing a radar signature would blend in with the bird background. Locating targets stealthily is increasingly key.

* A key issue in drone warfare is jamming of GPS signals and of control signals. High quality inertial guidance, AI driven multi-domain sensors (radar, sound, heat, visual), satellite mediated rather than ground sourced communications (possibly with lasers), and AI driven controls to reduce the need for communication, as well as interference hardened shells for drone avionics and electronics, could all play a part in these developments.

* Active defenses for ground vehicles, ships, and point defense seem to have made a lot of progress, but active defenses for warplanes from anti-aircraft missiles and shells, less so. This seems like an area where there is room for technological progress. One step further - imagine a suicide drone, basically a cruise missile, with active defenses against missile defense interceptors.

* What is the smallest ship that could be sea worthy in high seas and travel blue sea distances? Could it get smaller than the roughly 3,000 tons of a frigate? Could it be smaller if it were unmanned? Could it be as small as say a 100-500 ton missile boat?

* Should the Navy switch to bidgets to reduce the need to resupply with TP? Likewise, should it use air flow based hand dryers instead of paper towels to dry hands?

* One plausible way to reorganize the U.S. military would be based upon the anticipated capabilities of the opposition. One component of the force could be optimized to deal with low end counterinsurgency type conflicts efficiently, while another could be optimized to deal with so-called "near peer" conflicts. The conventional wisdom seems to be that if you can deal with the "near peer" conflicts that you are equipped to handle anything, but that encourages asymmetric warfare tactics in which inexpensive opposition forces drive our force to spend extreme amounts of money to counter them resulting in a losing war of attrition.