How would this fit with the concept of Distributed Lethality (see:
USN pdf on Surface Force Strategy)? Could you explain a bit more to a layman like me?
Would an arsenal ship be a single point of failure? Or can this risk be easily mitigated by keeping them on the move, to evade targeting efforts? The US Marines are moving away from the 38 amphib requirement as they don’t want a single point of failure — from load port to delivery of Marines. Which means the USN is certain that China can attack multiple key capital ships once. I am asking as I don’t have enough understanding to grasp the details that may be self evident to a navy person.
Distributed Lethality's intellectual basis comes from the work of Capt Hughes & Co. at the Naval Postgraduate School, with their salvo model. In a nutshell, the side with the greater number of ships has more combat resilience (aka "staying power"). Capt Hughes & Admiral Cebrowski went as far as proposing a small missile ship they termed "Streetfighter". The problem here, of course is they're talking in abstract about fleet vs fleet combat. They don't take into account the real issue of how you keep large numbers of small ships deployed forward, especially when you have basing limits and you're dealing with areas covering thousands of miles.
The Navy took this in a different direction, though, arguing they can increase the "lethality" of the fleet by adding offensive weapons to more ships. To some extent this is true, but to me it seems like a cop out. They don't want to dramatically change the fleet architecture, so proponents call for just bolting weapons on anything that's currently floating. However, in practice, "Distributed Lethality" mostly means adding anti-ship missiles to LCS and the forthcoming FFG, and re-adding them to DDGs. Calls to add them to CLF ships, and amphibious ships have gone nowhere, to my knowledge. And by-and-large, many of these weapons will be relatively short ranged (e.g. NSM, Harpoon), though DDGs and FFGs could carry some Martime Strike Tomahawks.
But what DL doesn't do is fundamentally alter the "staying power" of the fleet. We'll still only have a handful of LCS's/FFGs/DDGs in the Pacific. So even if they aren't completely helpless, they'll still be overwhelmed by Chinese numerical air/sea/subsea superiority.
So, in summary, DL as it stands, is valuable but hardly revolutionary. Really it's just restoring capabilities that should've been there all along. True DL would require redesigning the fleet, which the Navy doesn't want to do.
Arsenal ships, IMHO, really address a different issue. That is, simply having
enough offensive weapons in theater, that can be launched quickly against preplanned or popup targets (e.g. an amphibious fleet heading towards Taiwan) and whose primary means of survivability is simply standing off far enough, at the edge of the Chinese A2/AD zone, and being able to dump their offensive payload in a short enough period, thus reducing the chance they'll be sunk before completing their launches. We simply can't afford to buy enough FFGs and DDGs to bring 6,000 offensive VLS cells, especially when each ship only devotes 20-50% of its cells to offensive weapons. It'd take 125 DDGs to bring that many offensive missiles (assuming 50% devoted to defensive weapons).
Now from a salvo model standpoint, there's nothing saying a fleet of "arsenal ships" couldn't be smaller and more numerous. There are some interesting cost variables at work. In general,
larger ships are cheaper, per unit of payload, to buy and operate. "Steel is cheap and air is free", and a 512-cell arsenal ship probably has a similar crew size and only incrementally larger operating cost to a 128-cell arsenal ship. But building
more ships, at a higher build rate, reduces costs as well (both in terms of learning curve, as well as potentially employing multiple, competing yards, and simply having a larger, supporting industrial base). So i'm not personally wedded to any specific size of arsenal ship, more to a
capacity of offensive weapons.
But ultimately, I think we need to look at it from the standpoint of how many offensive weapons we can keep on station, the full-spectrum survivability/staying power of the
overall capability (e.g.. number of ships, stealth, defensive systems) instead of the survivability of individual ships, and finally, the cost of said capability.
