Awaiting the next Revolution in Naval Affairs

摘要

As we began, this paper submits that a reconceptualization of the warship conceptual design space; shipyards and build techniques – a Revolution in Naval Affairs – is overdue. Only by restoring political, economic and military affordability of ships and potential losses, will usability be restored [5]. We further submit that, for Australia, such an investment programme would restore industrial co-adaptive advantage, at scale and be good for our existing, highly productive, competitive, commercial ship-building yards. In other words, thinking what we would be doing if we were at war… We make five points:rn1. Generally there is a Revolution in Naval Affairs underway marking the chaotic state at the end of the Information Age;rn2. While many of these features add intelligent, new software-intensive, deployable systems, scaling and composing the size of future fleets through versatile intermodalisation becomes crucial, as a distributed and networked force is more defendable and in peer-warfare, numbers do matter;rn3. Rescaling fleets and affordability, are serious design challenge as befits the word revolutionary, but it has like the FFG-7 been done before;rn4. Some compromise must occur soon in ship design where singular ships are less defendable but synergistically scaled and composed much more dangerous;rn5. This revolution also requires Navies to commit to LBTS that precede ship build and manage system threats and obsolescence through-life. LBTS are particularly key to revolutionary design, since they verify and validate informed decision-making based on iterative T&E and remove the illusionary and ephemeral promise of “off-the-shelf”.