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.