Sloops of War: Now More Than Ever

retro is the future

It is amazing where one article can take you.

In the Western Pacific, the Royal Navy continues to help reinforce a point to the People’s Republic of China:

China's military has called a British warship's recent passage through the Taiwan Strait a disruptive act of "intentional provocation" that "undermines peace and stability".

The British Royal Navy says HMS Spey's patrol on Wednesday was part of a long-planned deployment and was in accordance with international law.

The patrol - the first by a British naval vessel in four years - comes as a UK carrier strike group arrives in the region for a deployment that will last several months.

If you have spent a quarter century in a Don Quixote-like pursuit of the perfect and have failed over and over and over, perhaps it might be time for some humility? Perhaps time to back away from your primacy in decision making? Perhaps time to consider the “good enough?”

Not everything requires a carrier, or a destroyer, or a nuclear submarine. As a matter of fact, a balanced fleet will make sure you have enough tools to give you an appropriate option for the mission at hand.

HMS Spey is such a ship, and it reminds us that for many of the US Navy’s challenges, there are ready solutions. Much of what prevents us from reaching for them comes from our institutional mindset when it comes to producing things that displace water and make shadows on the ramp.

At least for the displaces water problem, again, there is a solution.

Behold the Sloop of War!

OK, officially it is the known by the bureaucratic and clunky “Offshore Patrol Vessel” OPV. That has to stop. Produces more cringe than LCS, THAAD, etc. We need to stop with that foolishness. It is emblematic of a problematic era known for bad programmatic leadership and worse vision.

No. That is a Sloop … a Sloop-of-War if you will.

What would a USN Sloop-of-War look like? Take the best lessons from the Royal Navy and other allies’ use of OPV and then fold in some of the ideas from the Royal Navy’s Black Swan CONOPS from 2012.

Like I said at the time, this is the proper intellectualization when it comes to smaller warships.

From a little side-bar I was having with our buddy Galrahn - we wandered in the Royal Navy's VERY retro sounding Joint Concept Note 1/12: Future 'Black Swan' Class Sloop-of-War: A Group System. OK, the only retro use is "Sloop-of-War" - which I fully support. It ain't a corvette ... and it is almost more like the exceptionally poorly named LCS.

Read the whole thing - but without picking it apart all over the place - right or wrong I like some of the intellectual work behind it. The Brits have done some good, modest, and reasonable intellectual ponderings;

As a matter of fact, let’s take a quote from that document to let you know exactly what we’re talking about:

Ship

• Size: 2,000 to 4,000 tonnes – the ship needs to be big enough to fly the White Ensign and act as a visible presence across all 3 maritime roles.

• Propulsion: diesel electric – though hopefully during the platform’s life, technological advances will allow diesel to be replaced by an alternative energy source. Transit speed of 10 to 16 knots, operating speed below 6 knots and top speed of 18 to 24 knots; however, speed should be sacrificed in favour of reduced costs.

• Port Facilities: no reliance on host-nation port facilities, such as tugs and water.

• Endurance: unsupported 90 days (crew), min 30 days (fuel).

• Performance: globally deployable, able to operate both in the marginal ice zone and in hot and humid conditions with minimum survivability characteristics. The unmanned systems, rather than the ship, should be capable of operating in areas of denied access.

• Crew: a core crew of around 89 with accommodation for those additional personnel required for each module, plus basic dormitory style accommodation for a further 60.

• Cyber: secure from cyber attack.

Internal Weapon Systems

• Sensors: basic sensors to support navigational safety standards and selfprotection weapon systems.

• Weapons: a visible deterrent in the form of a gun; self-protection weapon systems such as small arms, directed energy weapons, lasers etc.

• Mission Bay/Hangar: a mission bay to act as a hanger/repair facility for unmanned systems10 (able to accommodate at least one medium and one small rotary wing unmanned air system).

• Flight Deck: large enough to accommodate a Chinook-sized helicopter, with personnel access to rear ramp.

• Mission Planning Room: a mission planning space for up to 30 people to plan and execute missions.

• Communications: basic communications facilities supplemented by essential unmanned systems’ mission support architecture; the major capability will be invested in the external systems.

Support to External Weapon Systems

• Boats: the capacity to launch and recover 2 large Rigid Inflatable Boats.

• Unmanned Systems: capacity to launch, operate and recover.

• Manned Helicopters: capacity to launch and recover.

Pros and Cons:

The decision to change the emphasis from platforms to systems needs to be carefully considered; therefore, the concept has been rigorously tested by red teaming. The pros and cons identified during this process were:

• Pros

  • The concept delivers a balanced surface fleet with war-fighting at its core that is able to deliver maritime power in support of political objectives.

  • Increased operational capability by providing numbers, conducting tasks more covertly and efficiently, and reducing the risk to other assets and personnel.

  • More platforms for maritime security and international engagement.

  • An agile procurement cycle focused on updating individual systems rather than whole platforms.

  • An affordable solution to ensure that capabilities are able to remain relevant to a future that cannot be predicted. The life of the ship is typically fixed at 30 years yet the rate of change of technology in installed systems means that the ship is either quickly outdated, or requires costly upgrades. Most of this ship’s upgrades would be confined to the capability packages.

  • With technology residing primarily in the systems rather than the ship, the basic model version will be an attractive purchase for many less advanced navies; and the more ships that are built, the cheaper the overall unit cost becomes.

  • Resilience of capabilities – there is no single point of failure; instead capabilities are delivered by a greater number of assets.

  • This concept is a necessary counter to the philosophy that even if it means fewer platforms, bigger is better.

  • It is at the crest of a wave of challenging the previous orthodoxy.

  • Will prevent the Royal Navy from going into terminal decline, unable to protect the UK’s vital interests.

• Cons

  • The concept is untested – as navies are always in contact and rely on credibility and capability to deter, any change needs to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

  • It goes against the universal tendency, both from allies and potential adversaries, to procure fewer, but bigger platforms.

  • Previous attempts to re-adjust the balance have failed due to an overriding conservatism that sees bigger, and hence more expensive, as better. Implementing the concept will require challenging ingrained thinking.

  • Loss of versatility – offset by increased presence and the ability to switch between roles?

  • Loss of resilience in the ship – true, but the investment will be in protecting the crew rather than the ship.

  • Risk of the uneducated still seeing the ship as the capability and therefore constraining the Naval Plan to platform numbers rather than capability.

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Much of the intellectual work was done early on in the previous decade here and in the Mother Country.

Heck, just a few years after the Black Swan work, our friend Jerry Hendrix was seeing the same thing in Influence Squadrons Are Here, But Will We Use Them?: All the components seem to be in place to make ‘payloads over platforms’ a reality for the Navy. Give it a read. 2014 was not the start of the conversation. It is one Jerry, myself, and others have had for over a decade and a half.

Even better,

So, we have a problem—a problem a quarter century in the making. It compounds with other problems, also of our making. They all flow together. They have multiple causes and no one thing will solve them, but there is something that can help almost all of them.

Some of the problems.

We need a larger Navy. That is the core problem, and we didn’t get here by accident.

Our leaders were distracted by other things. Our supporting processes and organizations were allowed to act as if they were the supported. We demanded the perfect while damning the good. We basked in our arrogance of presentism, buzzwords, and Tomorrow Land fantasies — at the expense of a century of best practices, iterative improvement, and a mindset founded on stewardship.

We threw away our frigates for Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) —and got a rump class of ships that cannot conduct combat in the littorals. We tried to license build a EuroFrigate, but instead handed it over to the same people, organizations, and processes whose failure with LCS required it. They ruined it.

We threw away our Spruance DD and killed and then restarted our Arleigh Burke DDG for the DDG-1000, and got a three-headed white elephant instead.

We spent billions upgrading swayback Ticonderoga CGs until they couldn’t get underway. We didn’t replace them because the same people, organizations, and processes behind LCS and DDG-1000 ran wild and offered a CG(X) that never left the PowerPoint slide.

The ships we wound up with at the end of the first quarter of the 21st Century were either unusable at war, or the late Cold War Arleigh Burke class.

While we pulled down the glory of previous generations in our hubris, we lost our shipbuilding and maintenance industrial base—waking up to becoming no longer the world’s largest navy, but the second largest to the rising power in the East.

So, we need a larger Navy. What are the other lesser-included problems?

• We need more shipyards in more locations: ships of this size can be built in far more locations than a DDG.

• We need a larger presence: we can buy a lot of these and they can go more places than larger warships, at lower cost.

• We need to improve interoperability with allies: more nations will be more approachable with this pulling into their port.

• We need more at sea commands for more junior officers before they get to Commander Command: make no mistake, this is perfectly sized to give our best LT and LCDR command at sea early.

Just look at her! If you are not inspired, then perhaps you need to find a new area of interest to invest your one mortal life in.

The River-Class Batch-2 OPV is a solid benchmark. As usual, Wikipedia has a good summary of characteristics:

Displacement: 2,000 tonnes

Length: 90.5 m (296 ft 11 in)

Beam: 13 m (42 ft 8 in)

Draught: 3.8 m (12 ft 6 in)

Speed: 25 knots (46 km/h; 29 mph)

Range: 5,500 nmi (10,200 km; 6,300 mi)

Endurance: 35 days

Boats & landing craft carried: Two rigid hull inflatable boats (RHIBs)

Troops: up to 50

Crew: 34-50

Sensors & processing systems

• Kelvin Hughes Ltd SharpEye navigation radar

• Terma Scanter 4100 2D radar

• BAE CMS-1

• Shared Infrastructure operating system

Armament

• 1 × 30 mm DS30B gun

• 2 × general purpose machine guns

• 2 × miniguns (originally fit; retired as of 2023)

• 2 × Browning .50 caliber machine guns

Aircraft carried: Merlin capable flight deck; small UAVs may be embarked^[15]NotesFit with 16-tonne crane

Look…shipping containers. You can fit all sorts of goodies in there.

So, time to stop appreciating a problem and time to address it…and give it a proper name.

What should we call our first Sloop-of-War? Well, Jack Aubrey's first command was HMS Sophie, a brig-rigged sloop, which is a sloop-of-war.

So, let it be known, USS Sophie (SL 1), lead ship of the SOPHIE Class Sloop-of-War.