Wars often offer glimpses into the future. World War I, for instance, initiated the age of tanks, submarines and airplanes, while World War II began an era of computers, missiles and atomic energy. The Ukraine war is still raging, but already strategists are drawing lessons such as what the conflict means for war in the age of social media and whether the warship is about to go the way of the horse cavalry. Indeed, almost immediately after the dramatic sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, those two issues came together.

Even as the cruiser was on fire — but before it sank — news of the attack broke on social media by way of announcements from Ukrainian government sources on Twitter, followed by reports from multiple open-source-intelligence analysts. The two combatant nations immediately began arguing about the cause. While Russia laughably claimed that the Moskva had been lost to an accidental explosion, more credible reports validated the Ukrainians’ claim that they had taken out the heavily armed 11,000-ton warship by hitting it with two Neptune cruise missiles, each packing 330 pounds of high explosive.

Soon after, a larger argument began to burn over what this news meant beyond the Black Sea. It was “a ‘wake-up call’ for the world’s top navies,” experts told Business Insider. The pundit Matt Yglesias tweeted that the episode had convinced him that even America’s prized aircraft carriers were now “basically useless in a wide range of scenarios,” while Nikkei’s former China bureau chief reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s confidence in carriers was also “shaken” by the attack. Xi is supposedly concerned that China’s carrier program, derived from the Soviet-era Kuznetsov-class carrier — ironically, made in Ukraine — is now wasted yuan.

In general, the argument that surface ships are now obsolete has been framed in an unhelpful all-or-nothing way. Our fleet is certainly threatened by a new generation of missiles, including some far more dangerous than those the Ukrainians used to such effect, such as hypersonic missiles that can travel five times the speed of sound. But analysts have prematurely announced the death of surface ships before — as far back as 100 years ago, when early air-power theorists like the U.S. Army Air Corps’ Billy Mitchell and Italian Gen. Giulio Douhet said the advent of the plane called into question the value of the fleet. Then as now, the reality is more complex. The naval warship, even the frequently maligned aircraft carrier, has a future, but its key tactics, systems and even form may shift, in large part because of those same threats that supposedly have killed it. As the sea warriors of “Game of Thrones” pledged: “What is dead may never die. But rises again, harder and stronger.”

The first looming change in war at sea — already well underway in the U.S. Navy — involves new ideas transforming old technology. Consider, for example, that problem of a missile fired at your warship. You could do what the Russians tried to do — namely, rely on one ship’s radar and defensive systems to react in time. Or you could bring software and networks that are common in business into this problem of war, so as to move the needed information at machine speed. A reconnaissance satellite can pick up the infrared bloom of the heat from the missile launch. That information can then be seamlessly tied into the radar on an F-35 fighter or AWACS plane flying off an aircraft carrier, which can detect and extrapolate the missile’s trajectory. Finally, the data can be combined with the insights of an Aegis Combat System on board an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer escorting the larger task force that your ship is networked into, which, now forewarned, can fire a defensive missile well before the threat arrives. None of the ships or even their core weapons have changed (the Burke is more than three decades old, as was the Moskva). But through new software and innovative ideas, our sensors and shooters can reach drastically further, creating a bigger bubble of lethality.

A different — and timely — example of using older ships in novel ways came in early April, when a record 20 F-35 fighter jets flew off the USS Tripoli. Swapping the ship’s normal complement of troop-carrying helicopters and tilt-rotors for fighter jets transformed an amphibious assault ship originally designed to move a Marine unit ashore into an equivalent of a light aircraft carrier. This proof of concept shows that a whole new set of aircraft carriers can be added to the fleet, without having to build them from scratch. This gives an enemy the challenge of more mobile air bases to find and counter. What’s more, experience dating to World War II proves that pairing light carriers with traditional carriers has a force-multiplying effect; the move adds more deck space and allows the planes from different carriers to focus on offensive strikes or defense.

The second transformative path involves adding cutting-edge new hardware to old warships. The day before the Moskva’s defenses failed her, the U.S. Office of Naval Research announced the first successful test of an all-electric, high-energy laser weapon: It shot down a target much like the Neptune cruise missiles used in the Black Sea. The appeal of directed energy is that it alters both the odds and the cost equation of defending ships against missiles. You get only one chance to hit an incoming missile with a multimillion-dollar defensive missile, after all, and ships can carry only a limited supply. With a laser, you get unlimited shots, each at the mere cost of producing the electrical charge.

Unmanned technology will also transform what flies off our warships — and could change the definition of an “aircraft carrier.” Even as the U.S. Air Force rushes to send to Ukraine a new type of drone, the Phoenix Ghost — packed with explosives, they can attack kamikaze-style — the Pentagon has revealed the latest generation of autonomous “tiltroter” drones that can be deployed at sea. Sized to fit into the same space as the military’s workhorse helicopter, the manned MH-60, the V-247 Vigilant will be able to fly not just from a traditional aircraft carrier but from almost any warship. It can carry a variety of weapons, from anti-submarine armaments to Sidewinder air-to-air missiles to Joint Strike Missiles (cruise missiles similar to those that took out the Moskva). They’d give a warship the reach of the missile’s range, plus the drone’s range, akin to doubling the length of a boxer’s punch.

The final change for the future of the warship will come from bringing increasingly capable and intelligent robotics from the air to the waves. Indeed, future naval historians may view other developments in April 2022 as more momentous than the sinking in the Black Sea. For instance, the U.S. Navy delivered to Congress its 30-year shipbuilding plan, which, depending on which path is taken, envisions a fleet with 81 to 153 unmanned surface ships and 18 to 50 unmanned submarines.

The Navy had the confidence to make this move because of the successes of tests involving unmanned vessels that it has collectively dubbed its Ghost Fleet. A novel Navy organization working in the Persian Gulf, Task Force 59, is now taking those tests to a new level, exploring how best to use robotic warships in a range of scenarios, both on their own and integrated into new kinds of units made up of unmanned and manned ships. In a sense, these exercises echo the learning experiments of the 1920s — in which strategists found that the airplane actually hadn’t rendered the warship obsolete but instead revealed the need for new types of ships as well as new tactics.

The same day that the Moskva’s sinking prompted questions for so many, the Pentagon announced a package of military equipment being sent to Ukraine. Alongside the old howitzer cannons and Soviet-era helicopters was a set of new “unmanned coastal defense vessels.” Ukraine had already shown that it was quite capable of fighting today’s battles at sea. The coming task, not just for Ukraine but for the United States, is to get ready for tomorrow’s.

P.W. Singer is strategist at New America and a managing partner at Useful Fiction, a firm that aids the military with foresight and communication.

Copy the Story Link