Arsenal ship
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An arsenal ship is a concept for a floating missile platform, intended to have as many as five hundred vertical launch bays. Such a ship would initially be controlled remotely by an Aegis Cruiser, although plans include control by AWACS aircraft such as the E-2 Hawkeye and E-3 Sentry.
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History
Proposed by the US Navy in 1996. It has since had funding problems, with Congress cancelling some funding, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) providing some funding to individual contractors for prototypes.
Design
Such a ship would be low-profile, stealthy, and double-hulled, to provide it a high degree of survivability. The strategy would thus be to move the ship into a theatre as fast as possible, combined with either airborne (such as AWACS) or seaborne (such as a Ticonderoga-class cruiser) remote control and guidance. This provides an enormous amount of force projection, and would put minimal personnel in danger. The benefits of this are many, but perhaps the most significant is the possible obviation of the need for the standard carrier battle group and associated costs.
The Tomahawk has a range in excess of one thousand kilometers.
The estimated cost of these ships is on the order of $500 Million each, with a roughly $500 Million cost for the armaments, which would include Tomahawk and other cruise missiles.
Criticism from American Point of View
Critics of the Arsenal Ship claim that the concept suffers from many severe drawbacks. Most notably, the total lack of defensive systems would make the Arsenal Ship exceedingly vulnerable to attack if it was discovered despite its stealth characteristics. Whilst the design is intended to be able to withstand at least one hit by a mine, torpedo or missile, it is unlikely that the ship would remain serviceable after such an attack. Vertical launch missile systems are highly vulnerable to shock damage, and it is likely that even a single weapon would damage almost the entire armament of the Arsenal Ship.
The usefulness of the ship is also questioned by some. The Arsenal Ship is touted as being able to make a decisive difference in a campaign, for instance delaying an advance by North Korean forces invading the South for long enough to allow reinforcements to arrive. Yet the ability to place 500 warheads of some 1,000 lbs each onto enemy targets seems insufficient to accomplish this. This is most especially true as the cruise missiles carried by the Arsenal Ship are of limited value against tactical targets as it would be incapable of redirecting the missiles throughout their flight time. Given this limitation the Arsenal Ship would be capable only of targeting roads or bridges to slow an oncoming enemy; it would be completely unable to engage tanks, armoured personnel carriers or mobile artillery unless they chose to remain in position for hours on end.
In the long range precision strike role the Arsenal Ship concept competes with several other weapons systems, including both long range bombers and other navy ships which already carry cruise missiles. As there already seems no shortage of such platforms, the usefulness of the Arsenal Ship is questionable even in this role.
Alternative Use Against American Forces
It has been pointed out by critics of American reliance on carrier battle groups, that a potential enemy could sacrifice an arsenal ship (estimated $1 billion US and zero crew) with a high chance of overwhelming parts of a CVBG: American carrier ($4.5 billion US and 6000 crew); destroyers and cruisers ($1 billion US and 350 crew each), etc. In fact, to claim victory, the arsenal ship may only need to inflict enough damage on the CVBG to ruin flight operations, and perhaps even force it to return to port for repair.
Alternatively, if crew were needed for the arsenal ship, it could be used to support a naval group engaging a CVBG. The ability to launch a devastating salvo of missiles would still represent a significant threat, regardless of the need to be more conservative when crew are aboard.