"the new amphib should blend in with commercial ship traffic."
The U.S. Marine Corps wants a whole lot of new amphibious ships. Small ones that, in wartime, would sail alone with a couple platoons of Marines aboard, skipping between secretive islands outposts in the Western Pacific where the Corps would set up missile batteries and airfields
inside the outermost ring of Chinese forces.
If that sounds like a dangerous mission, you’re not wrong. Now consider that the ships also need to be cheap so that the U.S. Navy, which operates amphibs on the Marines’ behalf, can afford to buy up to 36 of them and spread them out across the Pacific.
To be cheap, the Navy plans to build the Light Amphibious Warfare vessels to commercial standards, with thinner hulls, fewer flooding and fire countermeasures and practically no armament beside a 30-millimeter gun.
So how would the small amphib survive in wartime? The LAW “has to look like everything else,” Jay Stefany, the Navy’s acting acquisition chief,
told a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee last week.
In other words, the new amphib should blend in with commercial ship traffic. The Chinese wouldn’t be able to target it because they’d never be able to tell it apart from many thousands of fishing boats, trawlers and coastal tankers that also ply the Western Pacific.
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What the customer asked for. One of hundreds operating in those island waters.
What the project delivered - a ship that looks like nothing else, and to help it stand out it is painted battleship gray.
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Meanwhile
"Images have emerged of a Chinese medium-sized cargo ship, docked at Shanghai’s Hudong-Zhonghua shipyard, fitted with a modular electromagnetic catapult for launching advanced combat drones, or perhaps even fighter jets.
"This vessel, roughly 100-metres long and built as a container ship, has been reconfigured in just days to include a train of four connected vehicles secured on deck to form the launch track. This is probably an
electromagnetic aircraft launch system (Emals). Pictures show stealth drones next to the launcher as if ready for take-off. The ship also has the recently fitted, containerised 30mm close-in auto cannon system, phased-array radar and frigate-like amounts of vertical launch missile cells, that I commented on last week.
"As a merchant mariner friend of mine commented, “the hull is rubbish, common and cheap. It’s therefore perfect for mass and disguise. It also needs very few people to run it”."
"....Add to this (the PLAN's military navy) China’s 4,000-plus merchant vessels, many of them built in dual-use yards to military specifications including reinforced hulls and extra compartmentalisation for improved damage control. These could convert en masse to warship-like levels of capability, like this drone ship."
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Civilian ships, subsidized to military standards, that can earn their keep in peace time, hide in plain sight, travel the world's oceans freely, and can rapidly unmask military capabilities.
Containerized missiles. Containerized drones. Containerized LAA/C-UAS systems. Containerized radar. Containerized comms. Containerized gensets. Containerized boats. Containerized vehicles.
Containerized little green men?
The navies of the West – even the mighty United States – are lagging well behind
www.telegraph.co.uk
news.usni.org
