…THE FFX
"No one disagrees that the Navy has not had much luck constructing warships this century. It also continues to face significant challenges when building the next small surface combatant, the Future Frigate (FFX). It is becoming increasingly difficult to pack meaningful warfighting capability into a ship that is smaller and cheaper to build and operate than today's Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. Case in point: the Constellation-class Frigate program was terminated with two vessels under construction as the price per unit began to approximate the cost of a destroyer.1 Making matters worse, the U.S. industrial base and shipyards lack the wherewithal to build more than a few ships at a time, and even then, only at a measured pace. Those imagining, designing, and building the FFX confront a wicked problem: efforts to balance competing missions, construction costs, and time requirements tend to produce a suboptimal outcome that satisfies none of them.
Instead of hoping for different results from the same approach to force design by balancing competing requirements and ship construction, it is time to return to first principles to ask what unique qualities the FFX brings to the Navy in a future increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence (AI). Today's effort to update well-known design and operational concepts with more advanced and expensive weapons, propulsion systems, and electronic accoutrements will likely produce disappointing results. What is needed is not a better ship based on traditional thinking, but new thinking about how a frigate can contribute to future combat effectiveness and national security. The U.S. Navy must look toward the future by ending the effort to gussy up old ways and rethink the role of the FFX in an AI world. It is time for the U.S. Navy to build its first ship designed intentionally to exploit the synthetic reality created by AI and operate with Large Unmanned Surface Vessels (LUSV), Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (XLUUV), and Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels (MUSV), ships that can exceed frigates in terms of endurance and carrying capacities.
Already, AI is having a profound impact on conflict, especially when it comes to the science of war, that is, the domain of war that can be quantified. In maritime affairs, this manifests in growing platform and weapons autonomy. Range, precision, and lethality are increasing, while cost and the need for human direction are decreasing. When it comes to calculating combat power, the importance of relatively inexpensive and increasingly autonomous weapons in theater and magazine depth is superseding the number of platforms available.2 Additionally, AI is creating a new, synthetic reality as it curates and analyzes nearly limitless amounts of data from myriad sensors, while presenting tactically useful information at a pace that would completely overwhelm even the largest staff. Commanders need computer assistance to make sense of the massive amounts of data available to them. Well-implemented AI workflows can provide operators with superhuman situational awareness to identify thousands of targets in real time, allocate available weapons efficiently, and update this synthetic reality faster than opponents can respond.3 The results are staggering: in the first 11 days of the war against Iran, U.S. forces struck more than 5,500 targets, including mobile missiles and drones on land and over 60 ships at sea.4 This stands in stark contrast to the fact that no SCUD missiles or their transporter-erector-launchers were destroyed on the ground by Coalition air attack or special operations during the 1991 war against Iraq…"
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