James J. Wirtz argues the U.S. Navy should stop incrementally upgrading traditional frigate designs. Instead, the Navy should design an FFX optimized to operate as the local hub for human-machine teams alongside large and medium unmanned vessels in an era of AI-driven warfare.
The Navy’s recent shipbuilding record and limited industrial capacity mean trying to build a cheaper, smaller ship by iterating on old designs will likely fail.
FFX’s unique value should be its human crew and command functions — a local headquarters to form human-machine teams and manage a distributed force of unmanned systems.
Wirtz No one disagrees that the Navy has not had much luck constructing warships this century. It also continues to face significant challenges when building the next small surface combatant, the Future Frigate (FFX). industrial base and shipyards lack the wherewithal to build more than a few ships at a time, and even then, only at a measured pace.
Those imagining, designing, and building the FFX confront a wicked problem: efforts to balance competing missions, construction costs, and time requirements tend to produce a suboptimal outcome that satisfies none of them. Today's effort to update well-known design and operational concepts with more advanced and expensive weapons, propulsion systems, and electronic accoutrements will likely produce disappointing results. Navy must look toward the future by ending the effort to gussy up old ways and rethink the role of the FFX in an AI world.
3 The results are staggering: in the first 11 days of the war against Iran, U.S. forces struck more than 5,500 targets, including mobile missiles and drones on land and over 60 ships at sea. 4 This stands in stark contrast to the fact that no SCUD missiles or their transporter-erector-launchers were destroyed on the ground by Coalition air attack or special operations during the 1991 war against Iraq.
By Admiral Massimo Vianello, Italian Navy (Ret.) and Master Chief Petty Officer Giovanni Giorguli, Italian Navy (Ret.) Introduction Throughout naval history, few weapons have demonstrated the strategic endurance of the naval mine. Despite successive advances in military technology, it remains a highly effective instrum
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — Both U.S. and foreign designs for the next small-surface combatant are under consideration after the cancellation of the Constellation-class guided-missile frigate, the new head of the Navy’s shipbuilding enterprise said this week. A foreign design study is running in parallel with the development
The first thing that stands out when you walk through a modern shipyard isn't the technology – it's the sheer scale of the work and the size of the parts going into these massive ships the size of city blocks. I recently visited a Korean shipyard watching teams of workers join two 50-foot-tall…
Smack Technologies' CEO said its AI modeling tool will help commanders decide not just which targets to strike, but how to sequence strikes over time.
Technology, such as AI and autonomous systems, is changing the character of war, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine said.
Officials from the UK’s Ministry of Defence, the Royal Navy, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, and Navantia UK gather at the Appledore shipyard on September...
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