General David H. Berger’s Commandant’s Planning Guidance (CPG) says “The Marine Corps will be trained and equipped as a naval expeditionary force-in-readiness and prepared to operate inside actively contested maritime spaces in support of fleet operations.” The CPG also highlights force design and the need to divest the Corps of legacy equipment and programs that do not meet future requirements. And it repositions the Marine Corps’ Fleet Marine Forces under the operational control of the Fleet Commander.
As the naval service reflects on potential operations inside an adversary’s antiaccess/area-denial (A2/AD) weapons engagement zone, it needs to consider what systems and platforms will be required. The amphibious fleet and littoral maneuver craft must be more agile and more lethal, present reduced signatures, be more specialized and affordable/maintainable, and some may be optionally manned.
General Berger has noted: “We’re going to need more unmanned. We’re going to need more, smaller, low-signature, capable ships that can fight dispersed. The trend lines are really clear.”
To meet this requirement, the Navy should purchase and convert commercial, offshore supply vessels (OSVs) to missile vessels—"missile cutters,” even if they might become known to our adversaries as “phantom ships.”
OSVs are the state-of-the-art standard for moving large crews and delivery of high-priority cargo to and from deep-water oil drilling platforms hundreds of miles from shore. Many are catamaran-hull designs, around 180 feet long with maximum and cruise speeds of 42 and 35 knots, respectively. These are aluminum-hull vessels with two engines driving two water jets in each hull. This variant affords higher speed and a lower draft—2.0 meters at load—than a monohull and offers redundancy should the engine(s) in one hull receive battle damage.
As configured for commercial users, OSVs have long, wide cargo decks and recliner seating for as many as 150 passengers for a cost of $20 – $23 million new. The Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office and the Navy’s Program Executive Office Unmanned and Small Combatants (PEO USC) have studied these vessels as part of the Project Ghost Fleet Overlord program, which is developing autonomous technologies for medium and large unmanned surface vessels (USVs). As a result, the Navy has developed significant knowledge of the capabilities of these vessels.
“Navalized” versions, minus some of the OSV requirements but plus Navy-specification electrical power/cooling systems and close-in defensive weapons, could cost about $18 to $20 million. Missile launch cells would add another $20 million to the cost. The Mk 41 vertical launch system (VLS) would be impractical on the shallow-draft OSV, but BAE Systems has developed a “bolt-on” system that brings much of the same capability, the Adaptive Deck Launcher (ADL).
Deployed in numbers, these vessels would help satisfy the evolving vision for “distributed lethality” placing missile systems on vessels that have not been shooters, presenting adversaries with a far larger threat envelope and giving fleet commanders much greater tactical flexibility.
Under the distributed lethality concept of operations, sensors and shooters can be physically separated. The systems that detect and target an adversary’s aircraft, missiles, ships, ground vehicles, or structures no longer need to be physically proximate to the system whose weapons actually attack the enemy. The targeting coordinates and telemetry are data-linked, but the sensor and shooter can be hundreds of miles apart. For example, an F-35 might detect a cruise missile approaching an amphibious assault ship and trigger an SM-6 surface-to-air missile launch from the VLS on an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer (DDG) without the amphib or the destroyer ever having seen the approaching missile. But that SM-6 need not be on a DDG at all.
While the Ghost Fleet Overlord concept envisions missiles loaded vertically in shipping containers, BAE ADL cells mounted athwartship, alternating port and starboard, going aft from the cabin, would make good use of the available deck space. BAE has developed the Mk 25 quad-pack canister to carry four Evolved Seasparrow Missiles (ESSMs) in a canister space that normally contains a single weapon. BAE also offers an eight-canister unit with longer, strike-length cells on the top (that can carry bigger missiles such as Standards and Tomahawks) and four shorter, tactical-length cells on the bottom (for some antiship missiles and the ESSM quad packs).
An ADL-equipped OSV would provide the Navy a highly lethal, low-cost, reduced-signature, and agile platform while “bolting on” between 8 and 32 missiles per vessel. To further reduce observability, the hull should receive a radar-absorbent coating and a camouflage paint pattern.
At an acquisition cost of $40 million per hull/ADL system, a significant portion of a DDG’s 96 cells (depending on missile loadout) could be purchased for about 6 percent of the cost of a $1.8 billion destroyer. The mix of weapons would vary depending on the mission. For example, these vessels might provide defensive fires for a distributed landing force during the approach to an expeditionary base, then remain in the operating area to provide offensive and defensive support for forces ashore.
Unlike the Ghost Fleet Overlord vessels, these would be manned. Removing the autonomous node would significantly reduce the bandwidth required to support the operation of the vessel, reduce its vulnerability to adversary cyber intrusion, and permit operations in littoral operational areas. It also would put a human in the launch-decision loop, which should overcome the reluctance to place fully autonomous systems into service and make them acceptable for operations in partner nations’ waters.
With no gearboxes, maintenance is greatly reduced, and this configuration provides a low underwater acoustic signature. Venting the main engine exhaust through the sides of the hulls would reduce the infrared signature as well. The navalized OSVs would retain their existing dynamic positioning systems, which should reduce crew workload and fatigue, the two firefighting water cannons that have a capacity of 5,300 gallons per minute (controlled remotely from the aft station of the bridge), and a davit-launched rigid-hulled inflatable boat. A commercial gyro-stabilized, cooled thermal camera system would be added to the bridge. To reduce the logistics “tail” to a minimum, there will be a workspace for a 3D printer on the main deck.
Unlike the GFO vessels, these would have robust self-defense capabilities. In addition to the OSV’s missiles, the ships could incorporate elements of the Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System (LMADIS)—which uses a combination of electronic warfare tools and Stinger missiles—to counter the close-in low-altitude airborne threat. Port and starboard Mk 2 .50-caliber machine guns would also help defend the boats. It may also be feasible to add a smoke generator tank within each hull to provide the capability to disburse an obscurant to screen surface operations.
At maximum speed, the OSV’s range is around 1,600 nautical miles. They could be refueled by autonomous submersible/semi-submersibles and rearmed by small magazine ships that would be dispersed in the operating area. The ADL can be reloaded at sea with much less complexity and more safety than the Mk 41 VLS, according to The War Zone’s Tyler Rogoway. The ADL canisters load sideways, making them much easier to handle.
In civilian service, OSVs are manned by a master, a mate, and two to three deckhands. In naval service, they would have a Navy officer in command, two sailors, and a Marine infantry squad to defend the boat and cross-trained in vessel operations and damage control. The Marines would include a squad leader, a squad systems operator who would operate UAVs and also work tactical-level electronic warfare jamming gear, and enough Marines to adequately man all weapons. The Marines also could provide security in port.
These state-of-the-art boats are available now, and they satisfy the requirement for smaller, faster, distributed highly lethal vessels that offer an over-the-horizon kill capability at a low cost and limited developmental risk. They could be integrated into the fleet in less than two years.
As General Berger has noted: “This is the time when we have to get smaller to get better. If we’re going to actually contribute to sea control, sea denial, then we’ve got to have capabilities we don’t have right now. We’ve got to hold at risk naval platforms, a body of water, a piece of littoral terrain—and those are capabilities we don’t have right now but need to get.”
The immediate path forward for the GFO is to continue the integration of the command, control, and communications nodes required for possible unmanned surface vehicle programs and to assign the missile cutter “phantom” program to the Navy’s Surface Development Squadron to determine how to best use this type of asymmetric capability against an adversary.