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By Norman Friedman, Author, Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapons Systems
Italians Launch Destroyer A nimoso
The Italian Navy’s guided-missile destroyer Animoso, huilt by Fincantieri, was launched in October 1989. She will carry two EH-101 helicopters armed with antiship missiles.
^all-out from the Cold War
ist^C ",ar ^roze European politics. It made the numerous national- carnovements °f Central Europe, the movements whose irresponsibility £ U.sed both World Wars, apparently irrelevant. In retrospect, then, the ers ^ar was a relatively safe time, since neither of the two great pow- fich ^ ^ov'et Un>on and the United States, had any real interest in 8 lng a new hot war. As the period of cold war continued, rules of
conduct
of th emerged which maintained stability. The human and fiscal cost Wei at stabil'ty was very high, which is why the current thaw has been so lea C°me' However, the stability itself has also been quite valuable, at st to Western Europeans.
iion°W s'tuati°n is fluid once more. Germans can talk of reunifica- aj, as something other than a fantasy, and some of them are also talking reUt regaining territory lost to their country in 1945. Hungarians are no ,embermg their border problems with Rumania. The old rules clearly for °18er aPPty’ hot no new ones have been forged. The Soviets have Cz> u ■^ renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine (under which they invaded reuecbosiovakia in 1968), but they have also warned the Germans that With' ICat.*on 's unacceptable. How can such a warning be reconciled Proh Nonintervention? The answer is probably that it cannot, and also cati a° ^ t*lat *be Soviets would not be alone in Europe in finding reunifi- less than satisfactory.
East m.Uc*1 °f Europe, it is assumed that the present liberalization of the n0 ,W|E secure peace, and that its continuation requires sufficient eco- East'?;SUf,f,0rt to avoid the sort of unemployment that the bare facts of
■ European economics would seem to demand. Although the argument iSr- c
less *’ normaHy made in humanitarian or abstract political terms, it is no requ°ne °f security than the argument about how many divisions NATO curnIreS ^'nce ,be money is expected to buy security, naturally it will tyes® ^l|t °f defense funds. This argument is being felt most strongly in Pfugra Crrnany ’ wtlich may wel1 drastically reduce its current military
bc<toh'nteresl'n® effect of the economic opening to Eastern Europe may Teak up the Common Market (the European Economic Commu-
nity); the integration planned for 1992 may never quite arrive. The Community has been able to accept members one at a time, but the mass integration of a very poor (and economically very different) Eastern Europe would be difficult at best.
For the moment, the Soviets may well be forced to withdraw many of their troops from Eastern Europe. For the moment, too, it will probably be difficult for the Soviets to be sure of their wartime lines of communication. That has two interesting implications for NATO. One is that the landward threat is declining, at least for the present. Governments, such as those of Britain and the Netherlands, which have cut their maritime forces to invest more heavily in army and in tactical air forces, may now reassess their positions. A second implication is that the sea may now be the most effective means by which a future less friendly Soviet Government can exert pressure on the West. The Soviets are, it is true, scrapping ships, but the units they are discarding would long ago have been stricken by any Western navy. What is left is still formidable, perhaps even more so than before if the better officers and sailors can be concentrated to man it. At least in Britain, some voices are now being raised in favor of increased maritime spending, at the cost of the army and the Royal Air Force.
At the same time, the weakening of alliance ties both East and West awakens (or strengthens) traditional tendencies toward regional conflict which had been submerged, or at least weakened, by the sense either of a common threat (in the West) or of a common imposed purpose (in the East). The most important Western example is the continuing tension between Greece and Turkey. The NATO view is that the only threat is from the Soviets and their allies in the East, and therefore that any reduction in that threat can be balanced by alliance-wide cuts. The Greeks and Turks argue that matters are more complex, and their disagreement may ultimately slow or even derail an alliance-wide conventional anus reduction package. In the East, the most obvious site of tension is the Hun- garian-Rumanian border. Reportedly the Hungarians have recently shown particular enthusiasm for their army on the theory that it might actually be employable against the Rumanians.
The alliance was never directed at the growing problem of Third World instability, yet that problem seems likely to grow considerably over the next few years. To the extent that the countries of the West constitute an integrated economic system, that system is often endangered by warfare in the Third World.
The Gulf War is probably the most prominent example. In theory the integrated Western economic entity should have some joint approach to Third World conflict, but in fact the framers of the NATO Treaty excluded the alliance from operation south of the 25th parallel. The reason was almost certainly fear of internal conflict over the remains of the French and British colonial empires. Now that the empires are gone, the reason for the restriction may also be gone, or at least relaxed. That is not to deny that there is still considerable disagreement as to the extent to which the allies should become embroiled in the Third World.
One development in the direction of increased Third World emphasis is the suggestion, now being raised in Britain, that if the British Army of the Rhine becomes redundant, it should be reshaped as a French-style rapid intervention force. The corresponding Royal Navy restyling would presumably re-emphasize power projection at the expense of antisubmarine warfare. The new Spanish rapid intervention force may also be intended for Third World operations. There is an interesting twist here. Spain recently joined the Western European Union (WEU), which some might see as the future military arm of a more integrated Economic Community. Some European commentators saw the formation of Spain’s force, which might be part of an intervention arm of the WEU, as an important factor in Spanish acceptance into the WHU.
Finally, it is impossible to summarize last year’s events in Europe
without reference to a series of industrial restructurings in the West. Many of the important electronics firms, which produce a large share of the total value in any warship or naval aircraft, are changing ownership.
feedings / March 1990
171
That is partly due to a sense, in some organizations, that defense spending will decline so rapidly that defense work cannot continue profitably. However, there have also been takeovers of the sort which so plague the U.S. defense business.
Philips, the very large consumer electronics company, decided to sell off its defense arms. PEAB, in Sweden, went to Bofors in July; it was renamed BEAB. Majority ownership of Signaal, in the Netherlands, went to the French company, Thomson-CSF. The future ownership of MEL, in the United Kingdom, remains uncertain. MEL currently produces important British and Canadian electronic countermeasures.
Another important company, Plessey, lost a hostile takeover fight against Siemens (German) and GEC (British). As a result, Siemens will take over the company’s radar and communications business, while GEC will get its avionics and ASW divisions; the remainder of the company will be jointly owned. Plessey produces many important naval radars and command/control systems, and the division between Siemens and GEC may not prove entirely natural.
Fall-out from the NATO Frigate
The great prize in the NATO frigate program has always been its antiaircraft system. The air threat at sea is becoming much more difficult, as time lines become shorter (due to higher missile speed and lower missile altitude) and as saturation becomes easier (due to developments such as way-pointing). Such developments push navies toward greater automation, from radar detection to the decision to fire. Presumably it was only due to a quirk in NATO cooperative project procedures that the ship embodying the system, rather than the system proper, became the subject of collaboration.
Two alternatives have emerged. One is the family of antiaircraft missile systems (FAMS), a French-led consortium employing a new Aster vertically-launched command-guided missile. FAMS is designed to use either a French (Arabel) or Anglo-Italian (Empar) phased-array engagement radar. Empar stands for European multipurpose array radar, a name that suggests the association between ideas of European unity and hopes that Europe can produce a new-generation fleet air defense system. FAMS is a self-contained system that would be connected to a separate ship tactical data system.
The alternative is the NATO antiaircraft weapon system (NAAWS), a program sponsored by the U.S. Navy as a successor to the current NATO Sea Sparrow. At this writing, NAAWS is still subject to competition between three multi-national teams. Compared to FAMS, it is to be a fully integrated combat system, similar in spirit to the U.S. Aegis.
In principle both FAMS and NAAWS are short-range systems, sufficient to protect one ship and a few consorts very close by. Neither bears
172 comparison to a modem area-defense weapon such as the Standard missile and Aegis. Adoption of either system, then, would remove the European navies from the area defense role unless they also bought some longer-range extension, such as a larger missile sharing the same basic control system. That may be the case; at one time General Electric was offering the West German Navy a system employing an Aegis-like phased array radar and controlling a mixture of area defense (SM-2) and shorter-range (Sea Sparrow) missiles, all fired from a common vertical launcher. Without some form of area defense to dilute saturation air attacks, it would seem that any point defense system would be fairly easy to overwhelm.
In September, 1989 the British Government announced its withdrawal from the frigate program. Britain had been the second largest partner, expected to build twelve ships (the United States is the largest, with an 18-ship share). Reportedly the decision was made at the Cabinet level; the Admiralty Board was not consulted. The argument made public at the time was that the design had progressed far enough for the Government to be sure that it would not meet national requirements. However, more likely it was killed by those in the Ministry of Defense who considered multi-national programs unworkable. Their arguments will not be made public for thirty years, but some speculation is possible. Britain has had extensive experience with such programs (examples include the Concorde, the Airbus, and the Jaguar and Tornado strike fighters). In each case, once the program had begun, it cost much more than expected and it was very nearly impossible to kill. At the same time, national requirements could very easily fall victim to the views of the other partners. Indeed, it was widely reported that the Royal Navy liked the NATO Frigate precisely because the British Government could not afford to kill it, and thus would have no choice but to build twelve ships to replace the twelve ageing Type 42 fleet air defense destroyers. The Admiralty was probably suspicious that a Government which had consistently failed to order enough ships to maintain its stated policy of keeping “about 50’ destroyers and frigates in service would be quite happy to kill the new program. In recent years there has been widespread sentiment in Great Britain to the effect that real defense economies could be achieved only by slashing away a massive piece of the defense establishment. The surface fleet was a popular candidate.
The British Government had already demonstrated its willingness to kill off multinational programs when it cancelled the Anglo-American Advanced Sea Mine (of which the U.S. Navy had paid the bulk of the costs) in 1988. It probably cannot kill off the other big multi-national program to which it is committed, the new European Fighter Aircraft (EFA), which promises extremely large expenses, but which also promises the survival of an important national asset, the British military aircraft industry. Nor is the British Government very likely to withdraw from the Anglo-Italian EH-101 helicopter program.
France and Italy withdrew from the NATO Frigate early in October- They had signed for, respectively, four and eight hulls each. France had already indicated that she was in the program mainly to promote FAMS- With the major potential European FAMS buyer out of the NATO frigate program, there was little point in continuing. Italy withdrew on the ground that the ship was unacceptably large (5,000 tons compared with the upper limit of 4,300 tons set by the Italian Navy) and also that it would not be available in time. However, the Italian role in FAMS was probably at least as important in this decision.
Early in December, having withdrawn from the main frigate program- the British Government also withdrew from NAAWS. Reportedly the Royal Navy is dissatisfied with the likely NAAWS development schedule. The British Government may also consider it significant that FAM > is a less integrated system, and thus can accept a greater proportion 0 domestic equipment (e.g., main search radar and tactical data system'- Presumably it would be much easier to adapt FAMS to work with th1- SSCS command and control system, which has just been adopted at gr® expense for the Type 23 frigate (and which the Royal Navy probab ) hopes to use, in different versions, for all of its later major combatants^
The U.S. Navy is being badly squeezed, and it will probably prefer buy full fleet escorts (later versions of the Arleigh Burke [DDG-5 1 rather than frigates. ..
Ironically, there already is a multinational frigate program wrt NATO, albeit not by NATO fiat: the Blohm & Voss MEKO 200 P^\ gram. Ships are being built for Greece, Portugal, and Turkey, and n for Australia and New Zealand, each with a combat system meeting 1 requirements of the individual navy.
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