Inside the U.S. Navy's Radical Plan for ‘Moore’s Law’ Warships

Dave Majumdar

Security, United States

Information technology incorporated into the “DNA of the ship” at a fundamental level.

The U.S. Navy’s next generation surface combatants will be developed with information technologies baked into the core of their designs.

While the Navy’s current generation of warships like the Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers use digital information technology, they were designed in a different era when technology did not evolve as rapidly as today. The next generation replacement for those vessels will have to incorporate digital-information technologies from the outset—and will have to be able keep pace with rapid technical advancements.

“That’s going to be a key part of the next generation of warships,” Adm. John Richardson, U.S. Navy’s chief of naval operations, told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute on February 12. “It will also be digitally native—or information native.”

The Navy’s current generation of surface combatants are capable platforms—and they are becoming ever more effective with the addition of new information technologies, Richardson said. However, the next generation of warships will have to have information technology incorporated into the “DNA of the ship” at a fundamental level.

“We’re going to have to move to an overall concept where we might deliver a platform. . . That platform might last the life of a traditional ship—twenty-five years or thirty years,” Richardson said. “But inside that—I think increasingly so—we have to make it very much more modular or adaptable to improving technologies.”

That means that while the Navy recognizes that a hull might remain in service for three decades, the service will have to swap out the sensors, weapons and computer networks onboard the vessel periodically. That suggests that the underlying hull form will have to be designed with the space, weight and power margins from the outset to accommodate new and upgraded technologies.

“There will be some aspects of that ship that will last twenty-five, thirty years, but there will be an increasing percentage of that ship that will be riding that Moore’s Law curve—if you will—and refreshing in terms of payload, in terms of sensors,” Richardson said. “All of that will be improving much more quickly.”