The Arsenal Ship Is Back—or Is It?
Decades ago, the United States explored a radical naval concept: a specialized warship built around one thing above all else—missile firepower.
The Arsenal Ship was intended to carry a huge weapons magazine while relying on other platforms to provide much of the sensing, targeting and command functions. The concept was ultimately abandoned, but the strategic problem it attempted to solve has not disappeared.
Today, naval warfare is being transformed by long-range precision missiles, unmanned systems, distributed sensors and networked targeting. The ship that detects a target no longer necessarily needs to be the ship that launches the weapon.
That raises a fascinating possibility: perhaps the Arsenal Ship does not need to return in its original form. Instead, its underlying philosophy could return through a distributed fleet of missile carriers, conventional warships, submarines and unmanned platforms.
The real question is no longer simply "Should we build an Arsenal Ship?"
It is:
Can a navy distribute enormous amounts of survivable firepower across a networked fleet?
Strategic Vanguard examines the history, logic, vulnerabilities and possible future of the Arsenal Ship concept.
Read the full analysis:
https://www.strategicvanguard.com/post/the-return-of-the-arsenal-ship
Watch the full video:
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