At Aviation Week today, Bettina Chavanne reports that the US Marine Corps commandant, General James Conway, has convinced the head of the Navy, Admiral Gary Roughead, that those Netfires boxes destined for littoral combat ships (LCSs) aren’t just for killing small boats. They’re absolutely useful for fire support ashore. The commandant says that there may be issues with storage and elevator capacity aboard the two models of LCS—the Freedom and Independence classes—and that the box itself may not be quite right for the mission. Otherwise, what works for the Army and Marines ashore should work for the Navy afloat.
In this case, necessity has begat innovation. In the past two years, the Navy has suffered two serious setbacks to its plans to reinvigorate naval surface fire support (NSFS). The Zumwalt-class destroyers are still each intended to carry two of BAE Systems’ impressive 155 mm Advanced Gun Systems (AGSs) with 600 of BAE and Lockheed Martin’s Long-Range Land-Attack Projectiles (LRLAPs), but the program is being cut short at two or three ships. Most of the 127 mm guns on Arleigh Burke and Ticonderoga-class ships were supposed to get Raytheon’s Extended-Range Guided Munitions (ERGMs)—conceivably hundreds each for the NSFS mission—but that program was cancelled last year after repeated failures in testing. That left the Navy with only unguided, unboosted rounds in existing 127 mm guns, and a handful of 155 mm AGSs with LRLAPs on the way.
I will gloat a bit about having predicted this development several years ago. With rocket propulsion and precision guidance in 127 mm form factor, it seemed clear that the Navy was asking Raytheon to stuff a proverbial ten pounds of kit into a five-pound bag. With the AGS destined for only the fabulously expensive Zumwalts, the Navy was never going to get the number of guns it wanted. Netfires, as soon as it was announced for the LCSs, was the obvious solution.
Rockets-in-a-box is the colloquial name for this missile system from Netfires LLC, a joint venture of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. The US Army prefers the term Non-Line of Sight Launch System (NLOS-LS), which says a lot about the Army’s sense of style. Specifically, if you haven’t been following the program, the Netfires is a box of fifteen missiles with integrated GPS, inertial, and infrared precision guidance. Each missile packs the effect of a 155 mm artillery shell, and flies at least as far: 40 kilometers or more, depending on conditions (and which source one is checking). Sixty such boxes are meant to supplement the howitzers in each of the US Army’s towed artillery battalions. In the longer run, missiles like this have been suggested as complete replacements for all tube artillery larger than heavy mortars.
The logistical footprint is a large part of the attraction. The ‘net’ part comes from the missiles’ concept of operations: after emplacement from a crane-equipped truck or a sling-equipped helicopter, each box requires no manning, and fires its rounds by radio signal. The boxes are effectively disposable, in that each costs only a few thousand dollars. The missiles themselves, of course, cost quite a bit more How much more is not clear at this point, at least not publicly. The development contract was for $1.1 billion, but almost all of that is already a sunk cost. A recurring figure of $100,000 per missile was suggested some time ago; while pricing data are hard to come by, this seems reasonable given the costs of comparably powerful but shorter-ranged missiles. It also seems reasonable pricing for the customers. The cost of a LRLAP round is difficult to discern, in that the Navy’s reported data on the AGS and the LRLAP have conflated all costs in a single line. Estimates of the ERGM costs are, of course, meaningless at this point. What’s clear, though, is that whatever the price, the Netfires missiles should be even more economically attractive to a navy than an army.
This is because guns ashore merely require trucks to tow them, while guns at sea require whole ships, which are rather more expensive. Missiles like the Netfires can be placed on vessels much smaller than those that can support 155 mm (or even 127 mm) guns; smaller vessels can be more easily obscured from enemy sensors, or alternatively, more cost-effectively hazarded closer to shore. Forty kilometers approaches the over-the-horizon standoff that a navy should want when approaching a coastline with anti-ship missile batteries, even if it isn’t quite ideal. Eventually, those assault troops will move further ashore, and the ships will have to close a bit to continue to support them.
This, though, is where the Netfires concept gets even more interesting. The missile boxes can be lifted from ships and placed ashore once a beachhead has been secured, simultaneously keeping the fleet from harm’s way and extending the range of missile batteries. The modularity of the system is simply brilliant, and has implications well beyond the system itself. Consider that there are basically three reasons for building bigger ships: to cost-effectively produce longer range, better seakeeping, or greater payload. The range and seakeeping requirements of most navies are met by ships the size of large corvettes or small frigates. Surface combatants not meant to carry area air defense systems—and not meant for hybrid roles like that of the Danish Absalon-class—need not be much larger than a large corvette to accomplish the wide range of missions for which they are intended. This is rather borne out in the patterns of naval procurement worldwide: many fleets are converging on this size as appropriate for most ships. The Netfires boxes, after all, won’t be specific to LCSs, but could be deployed on any ship with a helicopter flight deck, or just enough flat topside space for the installation. Assault ships, that is, could reasonably be expected to bring their own fire support.
If modular missile launchers can both destroy small boats at standoff range and support troops ashore, then larger surface combatants will only be required for area air defense, not fire support. At that point, it would not be clear why anyone would put a major-caliber gun on an air-defense ship: any target large and threatening enough to need a 127 mm round would call for an anti-aircraft missile fired in the anti-surface role. As we have seen from past incidents, one or two of these is enough to cripple a large combatant. More so, at that point, navies actually could begin removing large guns from their ships, rather as the US Navy removed the SM-1 launchers from its Oliver Hazard Perry-class ships after they became obsolete air defense weapons. They might be replaced with medium or even minor caliber weapons, or they might not be replaced at all. The cost savings would be considerable, in that not just the weapons, but all their depot infrastructure and associated staff could be let go as well.
The big gun business is thus about to come under severe pressure. In the long run, without counteraction by artillery manufacturers or suppliers of precision-guided cannon rounds, weapons like Netfires have the potential to kill much of the major-caliber gun market. While a client in the business once reminded me that the whole guns-versus-missiles debate has been underway for decades, the technological balance may finally be shifting sharply. This shift—to the considerable detriment of big-gun manufacturers—may not be inevitable, if they can innovate competitively to secure for their products a continuing role, whether afloat or ashore. Competition here will be on cost as much as capabilities: as accurate and flexible as the missiles are, producers of cannons and their ammunition will need to show how shells can be more cost-effective under the more plausible scenarios. If they’re up for the challenge, the dissimilar competition will be intriguing to watch, and could produce some excellent solutions for the troops.
Comments