[HN Gopher] Improving Naval Ship Acquisition
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Improving Naval Ship Acquisition
Author : Luc
Score : 37 points
Date : 2025-05-15 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.construction-physics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.construction-physics.com)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Is a creme de la creme radar really required for air traffic
| control? They can launch E-2s anyway, they're a carrier.
| schainks wrote:
| 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.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| 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
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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.
| stackskipton wrote:
| 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.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > commonalty reasons
|
| Probably, though CVN-78 doesn't have it. It's an odd
| duck.
| stackskipton wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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")
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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?
| andbberger wrote:
| > 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
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.)
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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?
| dmd wrote:
| > nobody wants to kick off Kessler syndrome
|
| Except the Trump administration, you mean.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/07/space-
| pollut...
| Symmetry wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| oatsandsugar wrote:
| > 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.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| 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.
| oatsandsugar wrote:
| 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
| davemp wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| nickff wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| bell-cot wrote:
| 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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| ArthurStacks wrote:
| Written by someone naive who just wasted his time writing all
| that, all through not understanding it isnt a problem. Its by
| design.
| ianburrell wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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
| palmotea wrote:
| > 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?
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| bigyabai wrote:
| You won't, because that necessitates a faster drone that your
| adversary might already be fielding.
| elictronic wrote:
| 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.
| elictronic wrote:
| 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.
| owlbite wrote:
| 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).
| palmotea wrote:
| 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.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Also EMPs and microwaves to fry swarms of drones at once.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| jltsiren wrote:
| 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.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| 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.
| scheme271 wrote:
| 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.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| jemmyw wrote:
| > 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
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