The Electric Ship Concept and architecture has been pushed for many years as the key building block on the way to the All Electric Ship (AES). The selection of an Integrated Electric Propulsion (IEP) system for the UK's T45 Destroyer Project shows the UK's commitment and belief in the technology and concept, but doesn't fulfil the final goal. Since the inception of the Electric Ship Concept in the early 1990s the environment that it has progressed in has changed. The Strategic Defence Review of 1998 and the introduction of SMART Procurement, now SMART Acquisition, has introduced new challenges to the technology, systems and platform designs that make up the AES. One of these challenges is flexibility of the platform (warship swing). In SMART Acquisition this is facilitated by incremental acquisition and technology insertion. This paper looks at whether the All Electric Ship Concept, and T45 in particular, can adapt to the new challenge of Technology Insertion, or is fatally flawed by it.
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