At the September 1999 British defense show at Chertsey, Marconi displayed a model of a possible Royal Navy Future Surface Combatant. This ship is to replace the Type 22 antisubmarine warfare frigate, but it is likely to be a very different type of ship because British defense priorities have shifted drastically since the Cold War. As laid out in the recent Strategic Review, power projection, often as part of a coalition, is to be the main priority of British forces.
Power projection embraces modern peacekeeping or peace enforcement efforts, such as the NATO operation in Kosovo and the present operation in East Timor. The Future Surface Combatant is to be the next major British surface warship program after the Type 45 frigate, which replaces the aborted Project Horizon (and is intended to replace aging Type 42 missile destroyers in the fleet antiair warfare role). Note that when the Future Surface Combatant was conceived during the Cold War, it was seen as a direct replacement for Type 22, and was called the Future Escort. The new name indicates just how much the Royal Navy has changed since the end of the Cold War.
The Marconi model shows a ship displacing 8,000 to 10,000 tons, armed with numerous vertical missile launchers, and carrying its Merlin helicopter in a below-decks hangar (presumably to minimize radar cross section). The missiles are supplemented by a five inch gun that can fire guided rounds. At least some of the missiles are antiaircraft weapons (presumably Asters of the primary antiair warfare missile system controlled by a Sampson multirole electronically scanned radar. This combination is not too different from that represented by the U.S. Navy's Arleigh Burke (DDG-51)-class guided-missile destroyers or the service's planned DD-21, which is to be a multipurpose surface warship with considerable surface-to-surface firepower, which can be projected from her vertical missile tubes and, not insignificantly, from her gun.
In the U.S. case, the principal land attack missile is likely to be Tactical Tomahawk, supplemented by a shorter range missile such as the Land Attack Standard Missile (LASM) or a version of the U.S. Army's Tactical Missile System (ATACMS). The British Defense Minister, John Robertson, recently announced that Britain would not buy Tactical Tomahawk. The U.S. missile apparently cannot be (at least, has not been) adapted for submarine firing, which is the way the Royal Navy employs its current Tomahawks. Robertson's comment would seem to confirm reports that the Anglo-French Storm Shadow/Apache cruise missile is being adapted for vertical launching, initially for the French Silver launcher. If the reports are correct, the Anglo-French missile might well be the most viable competitor to Tactical Tomahawk, which many navies may come to see as vital if they are to maintain the ability to hit targets ashore. The only other shipboard missiles currently advertised with significant land-attack capabilities are the German Taurus, the Russian Yakhont, and the U.S. Standoff Land Attack Missile (SLAM). All have relatively short range (Yakhont has the longest, at about 300 kilometers). SLAM is operational, but only in an air-launched version; the other two apparently are at the offer stage (the Russians claim to have sold Yakhont to one navy, and to be negotiating with India).
Ship-launched land-attack missiles are likely to become more important, because carrier-based strike aircraft, the primary alternative delivery system, are unlikely to be available to most navies on the scale enjoyed by the U.S. Navy. That already is evident for France, whose nuclear-powered carrier Charles de Gaulle may actually have cost more than the U.S. Navy's Nimitz (CVN-68) class but has far less strike capability.
If a carrier cannot provide much in the way of strike firepower, then the only alternative is to rely on accompanying surface combatants such as the British Future Surface Combatant. In this combination the carrier provides vital air cover and over-the-horizon radar support, the latter much more than defensive. Under emerging concepts of deep battlefield support, strike missiles such as Tomahawk may become extremely important as ways of cutting off enemy mobile forces approaching a battle area. To be effective, they would need some means of targeting, which in turn would mean that a command center afloat would need a way of detecting moving enemy vehicles. At present, U.S. forces rely on shore-based E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (J-STARS) aircraft.
There is a pressing need for some organic means of detecting concentrations of enemy vehicles, but J-STARS depends too heavily on nearby airfields. Some years ago the U.S. Navy experimented with a podded APG-76 radar carried by an S-3 Viking under the Gray Wolf program. The British have just bought their equivalent of J-STARS, Raytheon's ASTOR, but it, too, is carried on board a land-based airplane. That is unfortunate, because the whole point of buying a power-projection navy is to gain the ability to operate without relying on shore bases. The British currently are beginning work on a next-generation airborne early warning radar, to replace the helicopter radar currently in service (and its immediate successor, which is to be carried by upgraded Sea King helicopters). The tentative specification now being drawn up includes, as a secondary role, ground moving target indication (described as mini-ASTOR).
The U.S. Navy ultimately may rely on an alternative. The U.S. Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are developing a warfighter support satellite, Discover 11; if it proves effective and affordable (a major if), then deployed forces will have something approaching an organic J-STARS capability. Discoverer 11 is scheduled to become operational about 2005.
There remains a major gap in shipboard firepower. Today, it is far easier to replenish carrier-borne weapons at sea than to replenish surface combatant missiles; vertical-launch systems almost always are reloaded in port. The only surface combatant weapon really suitable for underway replenishment is a shell fired from a gun. An alternative formulation might make the shell in effect the upper stage of a missile, so that that the gun-cartridge combination replaces the massive lower stage (or much of the airframe/engine) of a conventional missile, becoming small enough to transfer under way; and more could be carried. The standard load-out of a U.S. 5-inch magazine is 600 rounds, compared to 40 missiles in a typical Mark 13 frigate launcher or perhaps 64 in a large vertical launcher nest. Guns do not fire quite as rapidly as vertical missile launchers (say 20 rounds per minute vs. one round per second at peak rate), but they can keep firing for much longer, thanks to their much greater magazine capacity.
To the extent that this formulation is correct, guns firing guided shells should become extremely important within a few years, and considerable resources ought to go into developing guided shells (in effect, guided missiles). That this has not yet happened suggests that the connection between guided shells and a fleet's ability to provide sustained support to a ground force is as yet insufficiently well appreciated; guns are still widely perceived as obsolete vestiges of past practice, rather than as particularly efficient missile launchers.
The current guided-shell program, for example, envisages a rocket-boosted projectile carrying a few bomblets guided by the Global Positioning System (GPS). If the shell becomes a missile, however, then different propulsion technologies, such as scramjets, become much more important, because they offer much higher sustained speeds and much longer ranges.
The gun's traditional role justifies, for example, rifling its barrel for accuracy (a guided shell, in contrast, needs fins partly to stop spinning so that its guidance system can work). Eliminating rifling would simplify the design of guided shells, but it would ruin the accuracy of the much less expensive unguided shells. Rifling also reduces tube life, which might be an important consideration in sustained firing. Is the gun mainly a missile launcher or mainly an inexpensive weapon, effective at short range? This question is bound up with the issue of the gun in fire support. If fire support is to be delivered at short range, over the beach, then it can be argued that unguided shells are the most economical means of delivering it. If most amphibious forces are to be delivered from well beyond the beach, and if warships are generally to stand well offshore, then it is difficult to see the value of a conventional gun—nevertheless, the gun as missile launcher makes excellent sense. It might even be argued that the gun firing over the beach is useful mainly as an area weapon, to keep defenders' heads down, and thus that even in this application accuracy gained by rifling is of limited value. What irony if the land-attack warship of the future is armed mainly with guns—that fire missiles.