U.S. Naval Institute News has an interesting article out on a trio of studies commissioned to look at the future of the U.S. Navy fleet. The studies are a look into what the sea service could do with more money, including buying more existing ships, designing and fielding new ones,or leaning into technologies that don't quite exist now, but which the authors believe will be operational in thirteen years time.

The National Defense Authorization Act of 2016—the law that laid out 2016's annual defense budget—required the Navy to come up with these future-looking proposals and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis (CSBA), the MITRE Corporation, and the U.S. Navy each produced one. While all agree on growing the fleet with more ships, each has a different idea on how to get there.

U.S. Marine F-35s flying above the amphibious assault ship USS America. Two of the studies recommended using the ship class to develop a light aircraft carrier concept. US Navy photo by Andy Wolfe.)

Everyone wants more aircraft carriers. The CSBA study wants a so-called CVL, or aircraft carrier, light, to fill gaps in naval aviation capability. The CVL is based on the America-class amphibious assault ship hull and would support Marine Corps amphibious landings. The Navy on the other hand wants a CV-LX carrier, basically an amphibious assault ship meant to carry strike fighters, freeing up deck space on the big Nimitz and Ford-class supercarriers to carry specialized aircraft such as tanker and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drones. The MITRE Corporation wants 14 supercarriers, an increase of three.

From there, the studies go in all directions. CSBA wants small, stealthy, heavily-armed ships along the lines of Sweden's Visby class corvettes . MITRE, on the other hand, wants larger ships. CSBA and the Navy both want armed, unmanned undersea vessels. The Navy wants an aviation destroyer that has the front end of an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer but a back end devoted to two helicopters and four unmanned systems.

Arsenal Ship concept art, via Globalsecurity.org.

One particularly intriguing idea is what MITRE calls the "Magazine Ship." The MGX would be a "wingman" to surface ships and carry up to 4 railguns, 1,000 missile silos, or 96 Pershing-III intermediate range ballistic—or some mixture thereof. This is a rehash of the " Arsenal Ship " concept of the 1990s, a minimally armed ship whose armament can be controlled by other ships, vastly increasing a fleet's firepower.

Source: U.S. Naval Institute News

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