I can easily imagine how you could keep the mission crew out of the ship, having every operations being remote controlled.
But this is only a part of the crew: on a ship you have plenty of sailors who are onboard not because they are needed for the mission itself, but because you need them to keep everything running.
Having no one onboard means you cannot fix anything that starts misbehaving on the ship, and the likelihood of the ship being at least partly unavailable grows with the duration of the mission.
You can work around that with redundancy or thanks to dedicated support ships with technicians onboard not too far away that can intervene when needed, but that needs to be taken into account.
I'm not saying that this kind of automation isn't possible or even desirable, just that it's in no way magical and it will need a complete rethinking of how military vessels operate, because if you just expect a warship to sail autonomously for 3 months without issues, you're going to be disappointed.
The part you quote is explicitly not about the engineers of the vessel. It's about everybody else in the Navy!
What I'm saying is that we are all used to operate in a certain way, and you cannot really expect the automated system to fawlessly adapt to the way you already operate. To benefit from the automation you need to change the way you operate in depth, and that's a much harder thing to do in the military than in the civilian world (where it's already not that easy in practice).
The engineering side of things is always the easiest part of the job, no matter how challenging one particular engineering achievement is.
There is no doubt that such a ship must store spare parts for most things that can break during operation and that everything must be designed so that such spare parts should be replaceable by robots, after running diagnostics that identify the faults.
This is not simple, but it is feasible. It would be feasible much more frequently than currently used, but typically human technicians are cheaper than complex fail-safe automation. Presumably, at least in the beginning, such ships will not be used far from their bases, so they will return there after any defects that cannot be repaired.
All essential functions should have enough redundancy so that the ship should be able to return to the base even when only partially operational, e.g. with some engines or propellers disabled.
All branches of the military have been pushing for automation. As an example, 6th gen fighters are expected to either be crewless or to control swarms of smaller crewless drones from a distance and relay information.
It's obvious to everyone that remote-controlled weapons are the future. My point is that a remote-controlled ship isn't going to be a 1 for 1 replacement for a crewed one anytime soon, and it's going to need a gigantic organizational and mindset change to deploy them at their full potential.
Moving from a navy ship model to an air force plain model where the vehicles rarely undergo maintenance or repairs during operation is plausible, but salt tends to be bad, and over longer operations the errors are more likely to accumulate to a point of capability loss.
Is this a fighting ship, or materials transport, or something else? Is it intended to go from A to B, or to go out and patrol around and come back? How far away does it go from its base?
This would be great for civilian shipping in certain areas, as modern piracy seems to exclusively focus on holding crew members for ransom.
Lots of comments here raise good questions about its fitness as a military vessel, but maybe the point is to develop tech that civilian vessels can use? Preventing piracy has always been viewed as a task of the military, and piracy-proofing civilian vessels would go a long ways towards meeting that goal.
If so, that means the ship cannot visit any port, harbor or waterway which requires a locally qualified marine pilot onboard.
It also likely affects international treaties regarding the obligations of the master or officer in charge.
If the computers go down, and with no one aboard, is it considered abandoned? Can anyone claim salvage rights by hooking up a tow?
Currently, "vessels have an international duty to give reasonable assistance to other ships in distress for saving lives" (quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_salvage). How does that duty extend to uncrewed vessels?
I'm sure there are lawyers salivating at the chance to resolve these questions.
You only, but automatically, forfeit the ownership of you ship when you (as captain) accept a rope from somebody else and let you tow with it. You always have to throw your own rope to keep ownership.
> Anyway, if I were to design such a thing for military, it would probably have some self-destruct option
I'm reminded of the classic evil-overlord design mistake of putting a large self-destruct button very prominently on the big control panel that is close to the cell where you keep 007 Bond to gloat and give away your plans instead of just shooting him.
While in the Hollywood movies people always succeed to miraculously enter heavily guarded objectives without being detected, in real life this should be impossible.
With a well designed system of redundant sensors of multiple kinds, it should be impossible for anyone to come aboard such a ship without being instantly detected as a foe and without having their movements tracked with precision.
The ship should have some self-defense system, but when that defense system is overwhelmed and it is impossible to prevent enemies to enter certain critical zones, self-destruction should be activated. When the internal communication between certain parts of the ship is lost, presumably due to damage inflicted by attackers, self-destruction may also need to be activated.
This seems as one of the easiest parts to design of such a ship. Designing various sub-assemblies to be repairable using automatic means will be more challenging, especially in their mechanical design.
Could it even compete with modern submarine drones/underwater gliders that are thousands of times cheaper/smaller and can cripple these bulky ships in seconds?
Someone once said that looking for a ship on the ocean is like trying to find your car keys in a field with a pair of binoculars.
Obviously this applies less to littoral waters (1.5 dimensional instead of 2 dimensions of open water) but still: how does scale factor into trying to task sea drones with hunter/killer roles?
Also, always worth pointing out that while tactical warfare is a technological battle — in which drones may indeed be superior — war is also a strategic, political act and as such the presence of large scary ships — even 250t ones — is often enough to achieve ones strategic aims.
Love that analogy. But on the topic of your final point - I agree with you, but I do think we're rapidly approaching the era where ships of this size will be difficult to defend from a mass drone strike, easily coordinated via a combined air/surface/submerged drone swarm.
At that point, the asymmetric reward of sinking one of those large scary ships is going to be irresistible for both state and non-state actors, specifically for those same strategic and political aims.
Or they just use Phalanx-like [0] close-range defensive aid suites which already exist?
Sure, that will consume a lot of bullets but swarms of defensive kamikaze drones will also get used up and need resupply. In which case the resupply ships themselves also become high-value targets.
I thought the Phalanx was exactly the type of defense system that drone swarms were more or less designed to penetrate. Sure, it can put out an unreasonable amount of lead (tungsten? uranium?) downrange but the number of disparate targets it can engage per second is actually quite limited. It's vulnerable to being swarmed.
I agree that a Phalanx can be swarmed but I'm having problems envisaging drone-on-drone attritional combat involving a capital ship lasting for vey long. If you (capital ship owner) are attacking a peer state it can probably afford to swarm you repeatedly over several days also throwing in plenty of additional standoff missiles, perhaps something ballistic, a sub or two, probably others I haven't thought of.
You'd probably get away with it handling intermittent Houthi attacks in the Red Sea but in a serious war I think the logistics would get you in the end.
There are multiple different drones. I bet phalanx will do nothing against small 10" drones which can target communications and sensors of the ship in a first wave. And second wave could have much heavier payload to target ship's structure
The person you're responding to basically says that “big ships won't be cost effective against small droneship” but they fail to realize that these “small” droneship themselves must be pretty bulky if they want to carry a warhead big enough to destroy a big ship at long distance, and they will be pretty cost-effectively be dealt with by much smaller kamikaze drones that will be protecting the big ships.
> Someone once said that looking for a ship on the ocean is like trying to find your car keys in a field with a pair of binoculars.
That is true if you try to look for a ship visually. But nobody would do that. Everyone uses radar. The radar can be mounted on the shore, on a rig, on a ship, on an airplane, or on a satellite.
Or you use underwater microphones. Those can be mounted on the ocean floor, or a ship, or a submarine.
Neither of these share much with looking for your car keys with a pair of binoculars. The keys don't emit sound and the field does not transfer the sound as well as oceans do it. And the keys don't light up as nicely as a ship on a radar image. So i'm not sure what aspect of maritime surveillance does that saying illuminate.
Just based on the wikipedia page it doesn't sound like it was lost?
"After the ship's seizure the Malta Maritime Authority stated that the security committee—composed of Maltese, Finnish and Swedish authorities—were aware of the ship's location at all times, but withheld the information to protect the crew."
Certainly a murky situation but doesn't feel like it demonstrates the complexity of finding a ship. Sounds like right away once someone wanted to find the ship they could find the ship no problem. Presumably using Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites and then the frigate's own radar.
> how does scale factor into trying to task sea drones with hunter/killer roles?
The Black Sea is a good example of how that went down; using US intelligence - could be sattelite imagery, radar, or a combination thereof - they were able to pinpoint the Russian ship(s), giving their drone ships enough guidance to head there. And as long as there's no signal jamming, it could be remote controlled to its final destination if needs be.
IMHO: Yes, subs are great when you need people to constantly be looking over their shoulder and spending tons of money on ASW. They are great at interdicting logistical shipping too. But, they are really really bad at being seen (that's kinda the point), and sometimes you want a unit to be seen to force an enemy to dedicate forces to take care of it. Look at the amount of forces the allies dedicated to sinking Bismark and Yamato. In both cases a not insignificant amount was dedicated to taking down a battleship and even then in both cases not without either significant losses on the allies side, or overwhelming force and waiting for the battleship to be uncharacteristically exposed.
Surface vessels can also provide direct fire which is actually a lot cheaper than a torpedo. The cost of a 5" shell is something like ~20k (2k per actual shell + fuse which I assume is at least 18k) vs $5.39M(2022, source wikipedia) for a MK48 torpedo. 5" gun mounts are pretty much fully automated at this point, they have places for sailors for emergency... but on a NOMARs ship you'd just YOLO on that and use a simplified version without the manual backups for weight savings.
One of the coolest things about this is not this operating on it's own, but operating with a larger manned surface vessel or sub. They act as a cheaper and disposable escort for a much more powerful vessel creating a force multiplier. This is pretty much identical to the "Loyal wingman" that has been under development for awhile.
TLDR: there is value in having a ship being a visible target and having a gun. There is also value in having both NOMARs and manned ships working together.
I'm apparently off by a factor of ten, but then again I'm including the fuse... which probably does cost the other 18k. I've updated my post to include that to make the distinction.
But this is only a part of the crew: on a ship you have plenty of sailors who are onboard not because they are needed for the mission itself, but because you need them to keep everything running.
Having no one onboard means you cannot fix anything that starts misbehaving on the ship, and the likelihood of the ship being at least partly unavailable grows with the duration of the mission. You can work around that with redundancy or thanks to dedicated support ships with technicians onboard not too far away that can intervene when needed, but that needs to be taken into account.
I'm not saying that this kind of automation isn't possible or even desirable, just that it's in no way magical and it will need a complete rethinking of how military vessels operate, because if you just expect a warship to sail autonomously for 3 months without issues, you're going to be disappointed.