How Unmanned Platforms Affect Future Naval Warfare
2023-06-29
The US Navy's "Sea Hunter" unmanned vessel under testing. In several regional conflicts that have erupted in recent years, unmanned platforms have performed well in combat fields such as sea, land, and air. Unmanned platforms, represented by suicide drones and unmanned aerial vehicles, have repeatedly posed serious threats to traditional naval vessels and become a new combat force that cannot be ignored on modern battlefields. In view of the huge operational application potential of unmanned platforms, countries attach great importance to the construction of unmanned combat forces. For example, the US Navy plans to build the first unmanned surface fleet in history and prepare to build a training base for unmanned platforms before the end of this summer. These measures will further promote the change of the Morphogenesis of future naval warfare. "Traditional threats" and "emerging challenges" There are mainly two kinds of traditional threats faced by naval Surface combatant, represented by destroyers and Corvette. One is anti-ship missiles, and the other is torpedoes. When facing these two threats, modern Surface combatant have formed a relatively complete defense system, including anti-aircraft missiles, rapid fire anti-aircraft guns and their "hybrid scheme" - anti-aircraft missile gun integrated system. This set of defense system with both offensive and defensive capabilities enables Surface combatant to have better resistance efficiency against anti-ship missiles, torpedoes and other traditional weapons. Unmanned platforms can form a scale advantage with lower costs and can perform covert assaults with strong maneuverability and weak infrared and radar signals. When such "low, slow and small" unmanned platforms adopt a large number of multiple penetration strategies to attack, the traditional means of resistance of Surface combatant will face the dilemma of "cannon attacking mosquitoes" and low cost efficiency. One of the main reasons for this situation is that the operational cost of Surface combatant equipped with naval guns, air defense missiles and anti-ship missiles is much higher than that of unmanned platforms; Secondly, the traditional targets of resistance are mainly anti-ship missiles, torpedoes, and combat aircraft with obvious target characteristics. "Low, slow, and small" unmanned platforms are easily submerged in radar clutter or infrared detection image backgrounds, making it difficult for shipborne reconnaissance equipment to detect and locate targets; Third, a large number of unmanned platforms occupy a large number of anti attack channels. Once the unmanned platforms and anti-ship missiles attack together, traditional Surface combatant will be difficult to resist their attacks. Therefore, it can be said that unmanned platforms are new challenges faced by Surface combatant beyond the traditional threats, which will have an important impact on the entire modern maritime combat system. How to counter the threat of unmanned platforms is an important part of the design of future Surface combatant. The key is that weapons that resist such targets need to have advantages such as fast reaction speed, high detection accuracy, large firepower projection, and low cost. Even Laser weapon, which are popular at present, cannot meet the requirements due to their high cost. From this, it can be seen that the best way to combat unmanned platforms is to "treat the other person with the same method", that is, to use unmanned platforms to deal with unmanned platforms. The concept of its combat style is as follows: a cluster consisting of several unmanned platforms with different mission capabilities and traditional manned ships constitutes the basic unit of naval warfare, with manned ships serving as command nodes, and unmanned platforms implementing operations. By transforming the internal formation of the unmanned platform cluster and conducting different combat tasks, control of the sea area is achieved, thereby improving the survival ability and agility of the maritime combat system and countering attacks from enemy unmanned platforms. Or change the shape of the future naval war and the huge size of the World War II period
Edit:XiaoWanNing Responsible editor:YingLing
Source:China Military Online
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