The Common Combat Vessel will be the Royal Navy’s first hybrid warship, coordinating uncrewed systems in the air, on the surface and under the sea, with its arrival intended to coincide with the retirement of the Type 45 destroyers from the mid-2030s, the Ministry of Defence has said.
The description, the most substantive the government has yet given of the ship at the centre of the Hybrid Navy, came in a written parliamentary answer from Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard on 8 July, responding to Graeme Downie, the Labour MP for Dunfermline and Dollar, whose constituency neighbours the Rosyth yard building the Type 31 frigates and who had asked about the timing of the vessels’ construction against the completion of Type 31 orders and whether the design will be based on the frigate.
“Common Combat Vessel will be the Royal Navy’s first ‘Hybrid’ warship, coordinating uncrewed systems in the air, on the surface and under the sea to deliver more resilient air defence at the centre of the Hybrid Navy,” the minister said. “Whilst the CCV remains in the initial stages of design, the Navy’s aspiration is to sequence the arrival of the CCV and wider Hybrid Navy Integrated Air and Missile Defence capability with the out of service dates of the T45s in the mid-2030s onwards. There are options for hull forms we are exploring and announcements will be made in the usual way as the project progresses,” the minister said, with the reference to hull form options leaving open whether the Type 31’s Arrowhead 140 design is among those under consideration.
The industrial timing behind the questions is live, since the Type 31 programme’s five ships are due to complete in the coming years and the yard’s follow-on steelwork demand depends heavily on Denmark’s pending frigate decision, a dependency the Scottish Labour MSP Paul Sweeney highlighted to the UK Defence Journal this week in warning that core surface shipbuilding sites need a sustained drumbeat of work to avoid a return to boom and bust.
The Defence Investment Plan commits to six Common Combat Vessels as part of the transition to a fleet mixing crewed warships with uncrewed platforms, and the answers confirm the class is conceived first as an air defence ship, taking on the task of the six Type 45 destroyers, which a senior defence official confirmed last week will retire from 2035 without life extension. The vessel’s coordinating role connects to the wider architecture taking shape in public, from the Future Air Defence System work under which the department has asked industry for missile silos able to operate aboard uncrewed vessels and remain ready to fire for 30 days without human interaction, to the missile barges and sensor platforms ministers have described sailing alongside crewed ships.
With the design in its initial stages, no builder, displacement, weapons fit or in-service date has been announced, and the aspiration to match the Type 45s’ departure leaves little margin, as the first destroyers are due to leave service in the mid-2030s whether or not their replacement arrives on time.
From what I have been reading the idea for ballistic missile radar is very much to digitally mesh the separate arrays on the type 94 and the Command Ship into a single large array.
If this all works then any future RN task force could be very well protected from both ballistic and sea seeming targets.
This does sound much better to me than building two or three 10,000(t) cruiser for £6 billion.
£6 billion spent on this concept might produce something very powerful and very exportable. The T83 sounds more like a Trump class,
If this does not work out then we can just add some Canadian style River class T26 with bigger radars. The RN needs to get away from its own trick pony ethos on air warfare destroyers and BAE needs to adjust to not designing them on the government ticket.
The new radar panel technology BAE is designing sounds like it might be very useful though with the ability to fit different sized plates to both land and sea based platforms and work with a wide range of missiles families from Aster to CAMM. This is what we should really be focused on as opposed to which big floating metal box it’s going to be fitted to.
Smaller arrays, no matter how many you have, will suffer from range limitations.
You can work around this by building and distributing lots of radars, which is more survivable, but it much less portable and more expensive.
Tradeoffs.
Not with AESA radars, more arrays means more modules, more modules means more radar energy. More boats linked together means more power systems that can send power to their arrays, beam forming is likely to be affected somewhat with distance but spreading over a wider area probably also offers additional fidelity in tracking objects due to multiple surface reflection angles so better for stealth detection.
Main issue is going to be transmitting all that data between platforms and having a big enough computer to put it all together.
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In almost all operational and physical contexts, the networked array of radars spread across multiple vessels will be significantly more powerful and capable than a single ship’s AESA radar, even if that single ship has a massive aperture.
When you network multiple AESA radars together and distribute them, you aren’t just adding more transmit/receive (T/R) modules—you are fundamentally changing the physics of how the radar system interacts with the environment.
Here is a breakdown of why the distributed, networked array wins out, along with the one massive engineering catch.
1. The Physics: Power Density and Coherent Combining
If the networked vessels achieve coherent distributed MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) radar operation, the mathematical advantages are staggering.
Single Ship: Power scales linearly with the number of T/R modules (N). Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for a single radar scales by roughly N^4 (accounting for gain on both transmit and receive).
Networked Fleet: If multiple ships coordinate their radar pulses so they arrive at the target perfectly in-phase, the peak power focused on the target increases dramatically. Furthermore, because you have more total T/R modules spread across the fleet, the raw thermal and power generation limits of a single hull are bypassed. You can pump vastly more total energy into the sky without melting a single ship’s electrical grid.
2. Beating the Earth’s Curvature (The Horizon Problem)
The greatest limitation of any shipborne radar isn’t power—it’s the horizon. A single ship, no matter how powerful its radar, cannot see a low-flying anti-ship cruise missile or drone tucked under the radar horizon 50 km away.
The Network Advantage: By spreading the radars across multiple vessels spaced miles apart, you create a massive distributed baseline. If Ship A’s line of sight is blocked by the curvature of the Earth, Ship B (positioned 30 miles further downrange) can detect the target and instantly share the tracking data via high-speed datalink.
3. Angular Resolution and “Distributed Aperture”
In radar physics, the angular resolution (the ability to distinguish between two targets flying close together) depends on the size of the radar antenna relative to the wavelength.
By networking radars across multiple ships, you effectively create a virtual aperture that is miles wide. This technique (similar to interferometry used in radio astronomy) allows the fleet to achieve an incredibly fine angular resolution that is physically impossible to achieve with a single antenna array bolted to a single superstructure.
4. Geometric Diversity and Stealth Countermeasures
Stealth aircraft and missiles are designed to deflect radar waves away from the transmitting source. A single ship firing a radar pulse at a stealth target might receive virtually no return signal.
When you have multiple ships surrounding a target area, Ship A can transmit the pulse, and even if the stealth target deflects the energy away from Ship A, it will likely deflect it directly into the receiver of Ship B or Ship C. This is called bistatic or multistatic radar, and it completely undermines traditional geometric stealth shapes.
The Catch: The Synchronization Nightmare
While the networked array wins on paper, it relies entirely on mastering one of the hardest engineering problems in modern warfare: precise time and phase synchronization.
To work as a single, ultra-powerful virtual radar, the ships must know their exact relative positions down to the millimeter and sync their atomic clocks down to fractions of a nanosecond while tossing around on ocean waves.
If the sync is imperfect (incoherent combining), you don’t get the massive power amplification, though you still keep the benefits of horizon-busting, stealth countermeasures, and redundancy.
If the sync is perfect (coherent combining), the networked fleet behaves like a terrifyingly powerful, god-eye radar grid that no single ship could ever dream of matching.
Absolute crap Jim, complete rubbish from start to finish
This is Ajax for navy. An unproven concept with an unrealistic in service date and will undoubtedly cost considerably more and probably still not work as intended. The T83 was a better idea 6-10k ton upgraded destroyer/ light cruiser x6 with integrated sensors and able to co-opt other weapons systems. Comparisons with Trump’s proposal are daft. His 30k ton plus large surface combatant, hardly.
The T83 was pretty much undefined. A ‘6-10k’ displacement is so widely varied as to be entirely useless as a indicator of what was wanted.
Similarly, 70-128 VLS is so non-specific as to be meaningless.
T83 was going to have to be a complete redesign at 10,000 (t) But you were never getting 6X T83 because of the cost.
What you describe is much more like what I’m saying as a back up based on the T26 hull just like the Canadian River class.
A T26 that is a proper destroyer. For all we know that is what the Command and Control ship will be.
If the RN wants to hedge against future failure whilst still cutting costs in the present, they could build the CCV as the ultimate ‘fitted for but not with’ warship.
As a preliminary disclaimer, this sketch of the vessel acknowledges the impossibility of mounting a very large radar system.
– Start with a T31 hull.
– Drop the current mast, whack on something equivalent in size to the Dutch SM-400 being used by the Poles.
– 16 VLS cells for self defence.
Simple! 😉
If the T9X ships fail, you add another 16 VLS, anti-ship missiles, et cetera, and build six more of these pocket air defence frigates.
I call BS.
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You cannot design, build and operate the type of vessel[s] the UK is proposing – It reminds me of the genesis for the T23s where different combinations of engines, trackers, adding a Merlin capable flight deck, adding a gun changed the design entirely from a towed sonar tug which it evolved from.
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The critical flaw in all this is in a heavily suppressed electronic environment, robot ships will need to fall back to their programming, AI probably, which will enivably lead to a unit, or fleet!, doing something a human would simply not do and compromise subsequent operations – reminds me of AI trials in the 90s which impacted the intended use case.
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Again, as per one of my earlier comments on another thread, the main driver for the newly announced approach to future RN warships, is some penny pinching tunnel visioned sea-blind idiot, or bunch of idiots, which should be called, like crows, a murder having the ultimate approval in military matters they are incapable of comprehending..
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I know from experience, things systems at sea, and no amount of automation can replace a crew on hand; how does one engineer a battle-short arrangement which doesn’t result in the complete loss of the the asset during a particular fault, either anticipated or enviably one the designers didn’t consider or include in the design v1.001.33.62, just when the assets reason for existing is required? Rhetorically, you cannot and that is exactly why you need feet on deck – to ensure success.
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War is not a video game.
Fantastic news and so positive, now lets get them built and show the World our Technical prowess and cutting edge World class capability.
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