Automating Future Aircraft Carriers 571
Roland Piquepaille writes "Britain and France will jointly build three new huge aircraft carriers which will be delivered between 2012 and 2014. With their 60,000 tonnes, these 275-meter-long carriers will be the largest warships outside of the U.S. Navy. They're going to cost about $4 billion each, but with their reduced crews due to automation, they'll save lots of money to taxpayers during their 50 years of use. StrategyPage tells us that these ships will need at most a crew of 800 sailors instead of 2,000 for ships of that size today. At a cost of $100K per sailor per year, this represents savings of more than $6 billion. Impressive -- if it works."
They miss the point entirely ! (Score:1, Insightful)
Future renovations? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would guess they would be.
the question isn't CAN you do it.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the end of the month (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The US Navy has a better new toy (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you deal with battle damage? (Score:3, Insightful)
This boat only costs $8 billion over fifty years.
Seems to me that the answer isn't "figure out how to do damage control with 40% of a regular crew complement." Seems to me the answer is "You were gonna send three of these things to blow up the bad guy good; send five instead, it's still cheaper."
-JDF
bad trend (Score:3, Insightful)
The more money we have to pay and the more lives we have to put at stake in order to go to war, the less likely it is that we actually do go to war.
The only way that war becomes "fair" is if both sides incur the same 'cost' of the war (monetary, soldier deaths, civilian deaths, etc.). If 33,773 [iraqbodycount.net] American soldiers or civillians died because of our involvement there, we'd be pulling our troops out as fast as we possibly could.
With this, we're spending less money and putting fewer lives at risk to kill a proportionally higher number of foreign militants. At what point does war become a targeted genocide? We're putting our enemies in a position where their only method of directing their anger twoard us is by targeting civillians in suicide attacks. This scares the hell out of me.
You guys don't get it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The wonders of automated systems... (Score:3, Insightful)
The British invented the angled flight deck layout on modern carriers.
Re:The US Navy has a better new toy (Score:3, Insightful)
What computer lasts 50 years? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:bad trend (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, when facing a country such as the US or EU which has basic respect for the rules of war (eg, the Geneva Convention), a "fair" war pretty much maximizes the number of people killed.
Look what happenned in the Pacific during WW2. American, Commonwealth, and Japanese soldiers got fed into a meat grinder for 4 years because they were reasonably well-matched. Then the Americans got the ultimate weapon, and their absolute air superiority allowed them to use that weapon with impunity. That doesn't sound very fair, does it? No big surprise: the war ended about a week later. This saved the lives of not only countless American GIs, but millions upon millions of Japanese soldiers and civilians.
Another Use (Score:3, Insightful)
Substitute astronaut for sailor in that. Automation will be critical to space flight, for all the reasons it's useful here. Fewer astronauts means fewer people to send to Mars for 3 years, or at least it'll allow those people to get more done. This will make spaceflight cheaper, and it'll increase range, because it's easier to supply ten people for 3 years than it is to supply 15. Less food, less fuel, less money.
As if things couldn't get any stranger (Score:2, Insightful)
Useless (Score:3, Insightful)
Carriers are only useful against countries that don't have (or can't buy) such rockets / torpedoes / subs and don't have decent airforce or submarines. Those countries can be "shocked and awed" without aircraft carriers, though.
Re:the question isn't CAN you do it.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Very true. However, considering modern weaponry, weapons that would inflict the amount of damage that would require those extra damage control specialists, would probably render it combat ineffective, and in bad need of a shipyard. My guess is it won't be a torpedo hitting the most heavily armored part of the hull, it will be a missile slamming into the superstructure. Also, in the event that there is major, repairable damage, since it is an aircraft carrier, there should be plenty of escorts nearby that can offer assistance.
Imagine if you have a gastro outbreak onboard and 400 of your crew are down.
You are missing the point that at this scale you don't talk about absolute numbers, but percentages of the total crew. So if an epidemic would sideline 400 of the original 2000 crew (20%), then it would likely only affect 160 of the reduced crew of 800. So you only have to cover 160 watches instead of 400. Why is this? Some percentage won't eat the "bad" meal, some percentage will have a different food, and some percentage will be immune/not affected. You can't assume that it will affect the same overall number if your population size is different.
Plus most of these studies tend to ignore hte fact that less crew means more and longer watches for the duty stations that remain.
I haven't read these studies, (do you have any links), but it seems they would continue with the same watch schedule, and just reduce the number of stations required. The drop in efficiency that is a result of having too much time on duty is well studied, and I doubt that would be ignored. Now, what might be a factor is that it is "easier" to sit in a single location and monitor several things remotely, than to walk rounds and check on each one. This would reduce physical fatigue so longer watches could be maintained.
Designed to fight who? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are no major nation states left that could maintain a sustained war a la WWI or WWII any more. Every European state lacks the trained cadre of military personel to field a major army. Any every small nation is so outclassed by even 20 year old US/NATO equipment that spending billions on "next generation" systems makes no economic or military sense. Russia lacks economic power to play, and China lacks the geographic location to every conventionally threaten the US or Europe.
Example, the US Abrams tank is 2-3x better than any other tank it will meet except perhaps the British Challenger tanks. The US could build a tank for a fraction of the cost that would still outclass anything it will face.
The sheer military and technological superiority of even decades old weaponry is why most of the world has shifted to guerrilla or terrorist political tactics.
No mechanical part on the carrier does either (Score:1, Insightful)
There are parts that are replaced almost as often as they're used. There's a hook on the bottom of the jets which catches a cable stretched across the deck. That's how the jets land on such a short runway. The hook is replaced something like every five landings.
Aircraft carrier personnel are far more used to maintenance schedules than anybody you'll meet... well, anywhere. Computers are far from the most finicky items they have to deal with.
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
I know that Lockheed-Martin engineers their naval systems to take more shock/damage than a human could take and be functional. I saw a video where the equipment was placed on a barge and explosives were detonated underwater only a few feet away. The barge was lifted up several feet, and the plume of water from the blast was over 50 feet high. That close, a human would be temporarily deaf and have a lot of inner-ear problems. The system continued working.
Also, while humans are incredibly adaptable, they can't always replace the equipment. For example, there is no way a person could replace the automated aircraft-landing computer from your example. While a person may be able to work "beyond their limits", there is no way for them to manually commmunicate to a remote plane attempting to land - they need equipment to do it.
Why stop at $6 billion? (Score:4, Insightful)
$6 billion is pretty good savings, but if they were to skip building the ships entirely, they would save another $12 billion on top of that, for a total of $18 billion saved. I'm sure people can think of lots of uses for $18 billion that are more valuable than deploying aircraft carriers...
Re:bad trend (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously, you have never been in the military.
The last thing anyone in the military wants is a "fair" fight. Technology and training are used to tip the odds and make the fight as unfair as possible.
And I suppose if you ever have to fight for your life you will agree.
Re:bad trend (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the best way to put it is that everybody (with the possible exception of arms suppliers) wants there to be as little violent conflict as possible. War is a terrible waste of resources, and war against a nuclear-armed nation is likely suicidal.
In fact, when facing a country such as the US or EU which has basic respect for the rules of war (eg, the Geneva Convention), a "fair" war pretty much maximizes the number of people killed.
I agree. The question is, is fighting against such countries really the threat that we need to prepare for? Or is the era of large-scale country-to-country warfare over (due to MAD if nothing else), and the real threat these days comes from terrorism? And if that is the case, wouldn't this money be better spent on combatting terrorism, rather than on building ships for wars that won't happen?
Re:The US Navy has a better new toy (Score:3, Insightful)
These things are used to KILL PEOPLE! Real People! Not on TV, not in a "reality" show. For real! People like you and me, even if they dont like a lot like us, still humans.
Please don't allow the media to lull you into this sense of complacency about monster weapons of any kind. Be they owned by so called "bad folks" like Iran, or the supposedly good folks (yeah right), like the US or UK.
Repeat after me: A Weapon is NOT cool! It is NOT a toy.
And spouting that bull about "bullets don't kill people, blah blah blah". Bullets helps people kill other people faster, more safely, dependably, in larger numbers. Advanced weapons like these reduce the emotional cost of killing someone even further.
Wrong wuestion (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is, most software out there is hopelessly bug-ridden. Even the military stuff. I know - I helped debug some of it. Until there are enough highly competent programmers that "zero defect" can have a literal meaning, computer-controlled warships are going to be a fiasco.
(Those with LOOONG memories, old copies of Practical Computing from the 1980s, and a fondness of sci-fi might come up with another reason it's a bad idea. There were several military scenarios in the short story section, over the years, that would definitely be valid today.)
Re:the question isn't CAN you do it.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, an Aircraft Carrier isn't suitable for this sort of escort / patrolling mission. The US mainly keeps their carriers in operation globally to maintian a high state of readiness to respond, as you alluded to. Someone starts some shit, the fact that we've got aircraft response 16 hours away will make em think twice. Air superiority is, as I'm sure you know, tantamount to success.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Designed to fight who? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:what about energy crisis? (Score:2, Insightful)
ACs ceased to be useful (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, times have changed. These days, aircraft carriers are used to, um, protect themselves. The aircraft are very rarely used for actual missions (bombers and the like are flown in from Far Away). An AC is an easy ship to sink - it's an enormous and slow target, and modern bombs and missiles are ore than accurate enough to quickly and cheaply dispose of these $xx billion toys.
Besides - what's this about SAVING taxpayers money? You save it by building three aircraft carriers? Are you nuts? Are you expecting another major war?
There are two sides to this: if you get involved in a major, serious war (not the idiotic one-sided bombings the USA has been up to in order to increase some company profits), the carriers will be sunk reasonably soon.
If there is no major war (well, I do have some hopes left), they'll be an enormous cost (*much* higher than expected), and then they'll be scrapped.
Bah.
Re:The US Navy has a better new toy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The US Navy has a better new toy (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is, they don't show any of this on television. Check out for instance John Simpsons report from Kudistan during the beginning of the Iraq war. They were in a Peshmerga/US special forces convoy and got hit by friendly fire. The whole thing was a huge mess, really bloody, and yet an incident hardly worth mentioning, except that there were reporters there. He caught the whole thing on film.
I don't think anyone on Slashdot would find being in that situation terribly cool or fun.
Re:You guys don't get it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Others have already mentioned the whole Falkland thing, but that was 25 years ago, back when we were armed up in case of World War 3. Things are different now.
I'd suggest looking up the British intervention in Sierra Leone, in 2000. Quite a small war that's been all but forgotten about - because it was done properly. Park a carrier offshore, fill the capital with marines, lend the local government some helicopters and patrol vehicles, make it clear to the rebels that shooting at any of these will be taken very personally, and when they do so anyway then locate the bandit HQ and send in SAS death squads.
I gather it's this sort of operation that guides a lot of British defence thinking. What we need nowadays is not the ability to take on the Russians in massive air, sea and land warfare - what we want is the ability to materialise off the coast of some trouble spot and deliver some highly mobile badasses. The 21st century equivalent of the Victorian imperial fleet, basically, back when a British gunboat was more than enough to scare the average local warlord into line. And for that, we'll want some bigger carriers.
Obsolete?? Depends on your point of view. (Score:5, Insightful)
In a major fleet engagement against a worthy adversary (Which the US and NATO hans't had since the demize of the USSR) yes, one suspects the US super carriers of today are excessively vulnerable and losing even one of them would certainly be extremenly painful experience for the Americans both in terms of money and expecially prestiege and civillan morale/political support on the home front. They are, however, valuable when it comes to projecting strategic air power agianst third world dictatorships and regional powers such as Iran that cannot or have, at most, only a limited chance of penetrating the protective screen of a super carrier and seriously threatenting it. Basically super carriers are still useful for quiclkly making air support available for conflicts such as the US led wars in Iraq. Conflicts which a 19th century British general of the Victorian army would instantly reckognize as being similar in character to the a colonial punitive expeditions of his own time. What is really interesting is how would one of these new carriers would cope when hit by, say, a salvo of large sized modern ASW missiles? I mean one would expect that the skeleton crew would have extreme troube coping with the extensive damage since most of the automated systems would either be out of commission or working at limited capacity.
Re:Designed to fight who? (Score:2, Insightful)
What do I mean? Well, consider this paraphrasing of your post: "Small states equipment sucks compared to US or NATO hardware." and "Russia and China pose little threat to the US or Europe." and "US tanks are better than all other tanks, except other NATO tanks like Germany and Brittish ones."
So, according to you, the small states are out, and Russia and China are out (Although, I would disagree with that.) leaving noone for the US or Europe to fight. Are you seeing where I'm going yet?
It's simple, really. In oh so many ways, the EU is becoming a powerful meta-state. If any state or meta-state has the economic and political ability to challenge the US, it is Europe. Now that a US/Europe alliance is no longer needed to counter the USSR and now that the US's leadership has adopted a screw everyone else in the name of padding Haliburton/KBR's pockets mindset, being competition to the US is looking more and more attractive.
A unipolar system is only stable when it is not an opressive, hirearchical system, but rather a cooperative confederation of equals (a liberal as opposed realist framework, if you will). A bipolar system is much more stable in many cases than the kind of autocratic, pax-Americana style unipolar system that the current American leadership seems to be trying to force.
So, who has the economic power, the political stability and the potential to develop a military might strong enough to act as a balance to US hegemony? Only the EU - assuming the member states are willing to relinquish enough of their internal and foreign-policy control. That has been the sticking-point, so far, as nationalism runs deep in Olde Europe.
Personally, I see the future of Global Politics as somewhat of a radical realignment into a tripolar system with the US, the EU and the PRC as the three main actors. I predict that in the short-term, as the US becomes more aggressive, the EU and the PRC will forge closer ties as one of the ways a tripolar system remains stable is when the sum of two of the actors power is roughly equal to that of the third. The scary thing, for me, is what will happen if/when the EU and the PRC each become powerful enough in their own right that they no longer need eachother to ballance out the US? Tripolar systems comprised of three near-equal powers are among the least stable.
Long-winded rant aside, this 'development', as it were (although it has been around for a few months now), simply feeds my belief that the EU (or a subset of its member states) is positioning itself to not just economically, but also militarially, challenge US dominance. As you implied in your post, the only real competition for these new ships would be the US navy!
Re:They miss the point entirely ! (Score:3, Insightful)
Taking on the realisticness of 'Top Gun'? Boy, you're a brave fellow.
Like my girlfiend on a cloths shop with sales (Score:2, Insightful)
This is like my girlfriend. She's telling me she has saved money when she has bought a skirt from a sales. I never can convince her that she would saved even more money by not buing a fucking skirt.
Seems to me that politicians are to useless war machines as vain girls are to clothes.
Re:The wonders of automated systems... (Score:3, Insightful)
The GP never said it wasn't. Point was, how does being first to think of painting lines on the deck at a 10 degree angle fifty years ago demonstrate skill at automation.
Oh, the RN was also the first organization to land a jet aircraft on a carrier.
Again, how does being first at a non-automation related feat demonstrate skill at automation?
And they also invented a lot of the automatic guidance equipment used to guide pilots to safe landings on carriers.
There you go, there's something more relevant. Now is there something not from the 1950's?
Their carriers in WW2 had armored steel flight decks during a time when most US carriers had wooden decks
Oh deal, now were in the FORTIES, and talking about building materials...
Someone else has already mentioned the steam catapult.
Ingenious to be sure, but again, 1950's. The OP asked whether the brits have the technological know how to build such an automated carrier. Like the GP poster, I think they undoubtedly do, but this absurd parade of non sequitur "proof" is laughable. It like asking an Italian engineering firm for references of their experience building modern long-span suspension bridges and having them hard you a book on 2000 year old Roman engineering.