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WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
Invisible, smart, deadly and loaded with AI – the new autonomous-capable USS Zumwalt.
The look of the new 600 foot, $4 Billion USN destroyer Zumwalt, official designation DDG-1000, is easy to explain. The ship is designed to be stealthy and all of its sharp angles are meant to deflect radar beams sent out by anyone trying to find it but while that’s one of the ships most noticeable features it’s the features on the inside that herald the next evolution in warfare.
“The ship has a radar cross section one-fiftieth of its previous classes of destroyers,” said its captain, James Kirk.
Although, at a time when China has announced that they’ve managed to build the first Quantum Radar, if true, then all of the stealth technology that helps “hide” the $4 Billion destroyer would be rendered useless.
Fortunately the vessels composite armour hides other advances, especially in artificial intelligence, automation and command and control, all of which are perfectly augmented and complimented by America’s first fully autonomous warship, the Sea Hunter, which launched earlier this year and Americas next generation multi-role aircraft carriers.
At the moment the USS Zumwalt is on its way from Norfolk, Virginia up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore, where it will be commissioned as a “ship of the line” and, bristling with the latest tech, the 600 foot vessel is manned by just 147 sailors – less than half the normal number of crew needed to man conventional smaller vessels such as the Arleigh Burke Class destroyers. Or, alternatively, and perhaps a sign of just how far automation has already come, it’s just 10% of the crew needed to man the old World War II Cleveland destroyers.
“The previous class of destroyers have about 300 sailors, so we have about half the number of sailors running a ship that’s one and a half times the size,” says Kirk.
Among the new technologies are automated gun mounts whose gun barrels are hidden from sight and which can hurl a satellite guided shell more than 60 miles.
The star of the show though, and the one that allows such a reduction in the amount of crew needed to man the ship, is the new state of the art Ships Mission Center (SMC) which replaces the previous Combat Information Center (CIC) design – a fixture for many decades on past US Navy ships.
The SMC looks like a miniature version of a war room at the Pentagon and works in a similar fashion to the bridge seen on Star Trek. Gone are the purpose built heavy consoles used in a ship’s dark and cramped CIC, such as those still found today aboard AEGIS combat system equipped cruisers and destroyers. In their place the new SMC is entirely re-configurable and features streamlined consoles and workstations running on an incredibly powerful array of custom-built software and advanced off the shelf hardware.
Dozens of individual three screen work stations, called Common Display Stations (CDS) fill the majority of the SMC, and commanding officers have their CDS’ built right into their chairs – from which they can fire the ships guns, slew its sensors, launch missiles and change the ships ‘signature’ profile – and much, much more. The ship can even be steered from the SMC if need be.
As a result there will be no individual radio rooms, no gun control stations or other discreet control stations or interfaces squirreled around the ship that have for over a century been the standard for naval warfare. Even the Chief Engineer’s station will be located in the SMC during times of combat and intensive operations, not down in the engineering spaces as used to be the case. This is all part of the futuristic destroyer’s automated, and streamlined, functionality.
The SMC, and the whole ship for that matter, runs on the Linux based, Raytheon built, Total Shipboard Computing Environment (TSCE). This is a powerful software and hardware suite that features 16 large hardened, coffin-like IBM blade servers, called Electronic Modular Enclosures (EME), distributed around the ship. These modular super-computing units power the ship’s proprietary intranet, and because of their open architecture and cloud-like design, every CDS can be rapidly configured to display anything from weapons diagnostics to sensor pictures and everything in between.
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