Since the tragic 1937 fire and crash of German passenger airship Hindenburg at Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey, no one has given airships a fair shake. This is understandable—hydrogen is highly flammable. But the possibility of airships making a comeback lived on through science fiction authors. For example, in the best-selling 2017 novel New York 2140, author Kim Stanley Robinson confronts a world so utterly transformed by climate change that airships are the predominant form of transportation and housing.
The current generation of naval leaders grew up watching the Goodyear blimp fly above football stadiums. Sadly, that is still all the vast majority of people know about airships. But unlike semi-rigid dirigibles, such as the Goodyear blimp, a new generation of hybrid airships are shaped like aerodynamic lifting bodies and have quietly been making tremendous technological strides that demand renewed attention. Advanced fabrics and ballasting systems, significant payload capacities, and more have brought the airship industry to a point where it will have a transformative impact in both the commercial and national security spaces. Combined with lightweight sensors and other systems, hybrid airships have the potential to be vital assets in executing both Navy distributed maritime operations and Marine Corps expeditionary advanced base operations.
To better explain the potential hybrid airships have for today’s military, two myths first need to be dispelled.
Myth Number 1: Airships Aren’t Survivable
The Hindenburg disaster fed a belief that persisted for decades that airships could never survive long in war. Claiming airships could be viable battlefield assets brought scoffs and guffaws, with jokes of how a single bullet could take them down. Many contended that airships are simply too slow to be survivable, much less effective, on the modern battlefield. But a basic understanding of physics and meteorology help counter this uninformed concern.
The physical size and comparatively slow speeds of airships dictate that they operate in parts of the atmosphere where the prevailing winds are below 50 knots. Those conditions generally exist below 20,000 feet and above 60,000 feet because of the Jet Stream. Hybrid airships can accomplish a variety of missions in those altitude bands. From a survivability perspective, only a limited number of surface-to-air missiles can reach above 60,000 feet, and almost no man-portable air defense systems can reach an airship operating near 20,000 feet. Furthermore, small-arms fire is a minimal threat to a hybrid airship. Britain’s Ministry of Defence tested this theory in the 1990s against a semi-rigid dirigible and found that it was easy to control the airship to a landing point if it could no longer maintain altitude—a condition that occurred only after a significant number of small-arms rounds had penetrated the airship’s few low-pressure helium sacks, or ballonets.1 Hybrid airships, by combining an aerodynamic lifting body with buoyancy from helium, would be able to stay aloft far longer following a similar small-arms attack since the shape of the body produces substantial lift.
Modern technologies can mitigate the risks from small-arms fire, and potentially even missiles, to make hybrid airships more survivable. Additive manufacturing, captive air foams, and other technologies can produce both resilient structural elements and buoyant lift components. In addition, because of airships’ slow speeds and low radar cross-sections, modern antiair missiles may have difficulty distinguishing an airship due to targeting logic programmed to filter out slower targets, such as clouds.2 Installing new countermeasures suites, or potentially even modest point-defense systems, will only further improve their survivability.
Myth: Airships Lack Capacity and Capability
Airship development for military purposes essentially stopped in the 1950s after the dismal failure of the Air Force’s Project GENETRIX, an operation to obtain photoreconnaissance of the Soviet Union by balloon. The CORONA satellites and Central Intelligence Agency’s U-2 reconnaissance aircraft deployed shortly thereafter.3 For decades, satellites have provided significant worldwide coverage, but in recent years potential adversaries such as China have made significant progress with antisatellite technology.4 In a conflict, hybrid airships can reconstitute lost satellite capabilities more quickly than satellite redeployment.
Modern hybrid airships—such as those built by Aeroscraft, Airlander, SolarShip, or Lockheed Martin—also can provide payload capacities from 50 to 500 tons and can travel up to 3000 miles. For comparison, the payload capacity of the C-17 Globemaster is 80 tons. With a significantly greater payload capacity, combined with useful ballasting technologies, hybrid airships will be able to move large amounts of cargo without needing operational airports or port facilities so necessary to current joint operational planning.
Hybrid airships can fundamentally revolutionize naval logistics. The inclusion of today’s mature ballasting and cargo handling systems will allow the Navy and Marine Corps to move high volumes of cargo or personnel anywhere in the world. For example, following a hurricane, until airfields and ports are reopened, at present only helicopters can transport aid ashore. Airships can quickly establish disaster relief bases independent of infrastructure to allow aid and responders to move inland more quickly, especially to bring ashore heavy equipment such as power generators, construction equipment, and supplies.5
From a fleet-support standpoint, the ability of an airship to hover almost indefinitely above a particular point allows the Navy to rethink how it supports ships as it moves toward more distributed maritime operations. The ability to resupply ships operating outside of helicopter range would be a vital capability, allowing for greater mobility in seabasing or tending of smaller ships.
Expeditionary Basing
Mobility, independence from traditional infrastructure, and cargo capacity make airships attractive for bringing Marine Corps elements ashore in a wide range of scenarios. For unopposed operations, the stern ramps on an airship’s cargo deck offer the Marine Corps more cargo capacity than what it gets with the MV-22 Osprey, landing craft air cushion (LCAC), or amphibious assault vehicle (AAV). Heavier vehicles can be airlifted ashore to areas without a suitable beach for amphibious operations. Hybrid airships would make the ultimate partner for the Corps’ future plans for expeditionary advanced base operations. For example, as the Marine Corps looks to get back into the sea-control game, airships offer the Marines the ability to bring the high mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS), at 18 tons per loaded launcher, ashore and make it operational in rapid fashion.6
Communication, Surveillance, Reconnaissance
Many in the military rightly worry that the foundation of American battle planning—the reliance on both GPS and satellite imagery and communications—will come under immediate attack in the opening salvoes of a major-power conflict. Hybrid airships provide the needed redundancy and complicate adversary operations to counter U.S. command-and-control, communications, computer, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting (C4ISRT) capabilities.
The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency in the past two decades, for example, has developed sensors that turn the entire skin of the airship into an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar.7 At 60,000 feet, an AESA radar has a line-of-sight range of more than 300 miles. The large array would make the radar extremely sensitive to small objects at very long ranges, providing unparalleled broad-area maritime surveillance. Hybrid airships have sufficient propulsive power to remain stationary within the Jet Stream, providing a stable antenna for long range sensing. Furthermore, the long line-of-sight from the high-altitude platform can provide more secure point-to-point communications.
The combination of these capabilities will enhance battlespace awareness and targeting, allowing airships to replace the Navy’s fixed-wing airborne command-and-control platforms. The extreme range of an airship’s sensors will also enable them to operate much farther from a carrier strike group, affording the strike group greater protection from stealth than the E-2 Hawkeyes provide today (today, detecting the E-2’s radar means the carrier is nearby).
Supporting and Executing Combat Operations
Hybrid airships can play more than a supporting role in combat. They could be perfect platforms for maritime combat operations using autonomous systems. Their high payload capacity and relative survivability make them uniquely suited to be motherships for unmanned aerial vehicles. The concept might seem ludicrous, but in December 2014, Amazon filed and was granted U.S. Patent Number 9,305,280 for an aerial fulfillment center: an airship using drones for delivery.8 It is not too far a stretch to imagine a similar approach for maritime combat, not unlike what was fictionalized in the 2017 video “Slaughterbots.”
Given the relative light weight of weapons such as the long-range antiship missile (LRASM) or future hypersonic missiles, hybrid airships are perfect platforms to employ standoff weapons for defensive or offensive operations. And as a mothership, airships can deliver massive swarms of drones to complicate adversary targeting and surveillance. For combat-loaded airships, the payload capacity will even allow them to deploy short-range point defenses like the SeaRAM point-defense missile system for greater protection. Finally, with their cargo-handling abilities, airships would even provide the Navy a far easier way to reload ships’ vertical launch cells at sea, reducing the requirement for protected harbors and vulnerable supply ships.
Hybrid airships will have a role in the future—provided the Navy is willing to give them a chance to succeed by investing a few million dollars for concept proofing. The requisite technologies are mature now. Embrace the hybrid airship and move boldly toward a new concept—our adversaries will not see it coming.
1. Lewis Jamison, Geoffrey S. Sommer, and Isaac R. Porche III, High Altitude Airships for the Future Force Army, RAND Corporation (2005), 31.
2. Jeffrey Lin and Peter Singer, “China’s New Stealth Fighter Uses Powerful Materials with Geometry Not Found in Nature,” Popular Science, 22 March 2018.
3. Dino Brugioni, Eyes in the Sky: Eisenhower, the CIA, and Cold War Aerial Espionage (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011).
4. Sandra Erwin, “U.S. Intelligence: Russia and China Will Have ‘Operational’ Anti-satellite Weapons in a Few Years,” SpaceNews, 14 February 2018.
5. Kaitlin Kelly, “MCSC Teams with Marines To Build World’s First Continuous 3D-Printed Concrete Barracks,” Marines.mil, 24 August 2018.
6. Sydney Freedberg, “Marines See Anti-Ship HIMARS: High Cost, Hard Mission,” Breaking Defense, 14 November 2017.
7. “DARPA Asks Raytheon to Develop Radar for Integrated Sensors-is-Structure Program,” Raytheon Corporation, 8 August 2006.
8. Jack Crosbie, “Amazon Has a Patent for Floating Blimp Warehouses,” Inverse, 2 December 2016.