Today I'd like to start a quick dip into the quagmire that is Naval Surface Fire Support. This is a topic that has been touched on fairly regularly on this blog, and obsessively elsewhere, especially with regards to the DDG-1000 and its notional fire support capabilities. I'd like to step back for a moment and have a look at the problem not through the lens of shipbuilding or even the Marines' manifest need for the capability, but from the point of view of both national and maritime strategy.
First, a quick recap of the situation for those who don't follow it closely. If you do, feel free to skip this post and come in at the next one.
NSFS is the use of naval fires (gun and missile, but not aviation) to support troops ashore. This typically has meant Marines, but can include any forces within range of Naval assets who need fire support. Going back to World War II, NSFS was carried out by whatever naval units were within range of the targets. This was possible because the primary weapon system of most ships - the naval gun - was directly applicable to the task of fire support against shore targets. The targeting systems as well as the weapon effects matched up nicely - shells and guns designed to penetrate armor belts on enemy ships could throw heavy shells at high speed, and a land-based target was even easier to hit than a moving one at sea. As a bonus, the ships themselves were armored to withstand these same weapons, so most shore-based weapons would be hard-pressed to do them significant damage when they closed.
As the missile supplanted the naval gun as the primary ASuW weapon aboard ship, the organic fires capability of the fleet began to decline for two reasons. First of all, the number of tubes capable of performing well against ground targets began to shrink, as guns were increasingly viewed as AAW weapons, or for use against small soft targets. Secondly, the ships themselves began to give up their armor in order to increase maneuverability and stability and lower cost, especially since missiles could be addressed via interdiction (jamming, AAW) rather than armor. As a result, ships began to become more vulnerable to land-based weaponry, especially as those same missiles began to find their way onto cheap and mobile coastal defense launchers (think pickup truck with Exocet option).
The present bugbear for the NSFS argument is the Battleships, specifically the Iowa-class BBs that the U.S. Navy reactivated in the late 1980s. Although they were excellently suited for the NSFS role, that wasn't their only mission. As heavily armored and relatively fast large ships, the BBs were used to anchor task forces that didn't contain carriers - for example, it made sense to pair them with Marine task groups both as protection and for fires. This worked well for a time, until the Navy decommissioned them again in the early 1990s for cost reasons, largely over crewing requirements and upgrades that the ships would have required to remain viable in the modern fleet.
That set up the current brouhaha over NSFS. Without the battleships, the only guns remaining in the fleet were a very small number of 8" tubes on cruisers and the vast majority were the Mk. 45 5"/54 mounts as are found aboard both the DDG-51 and the CG-47 platforms. These guns, while rapid-firing in order to perform last-ditch AAW duties, fire shells which are miniscule compared to the 16" guns aboard the BBs, and have a range of around 13 NM compared to around 26 miles for the BBs. As a rough comparator, the 5" shells weigh around 70 lbs. in a unitary warhead, whereas the 16" shell weighed in (in their later incarnations) at around 1,900 lbs. Despite the much greater proportion of weight used for the shell construction in the latter, the size difference is still instructive.
This is the current situation. In the 1990s, a proposal was made for a dedicated NSFS platform which was named 'the Arsenal Ship.' What that was going to look like vacillated fairly rapidly - some proposals had it carrying an all-missile armament using Tomahawks and a cheaper navalised version of the ATACMS (the Army medium-range bombardment missile). Others had it fielding gun systems ranging from the mundane (remounting BB guns or minimally-changed versions of the Army's 155mm tubes) to the exotic, such as railguns or the less-futuristic Vertical Gun System. This latter would rely on guided munitions which would be fired straight up from the ship, using their onboard navigation to 'tip' towards their targets and glide down from their maximum elevation. This system had the advantage of being able to support larger propellant charges (since the gun mechanism wasn't required to be traversed or offset) as well as enabling the gun to 'hide' behind side armor.
The Arsenal Ship as a named platform was shot down in the 1997/1998, taking a while to die. However, as Galrahn has noted, the concept of the Arsenal Ship may well be alive and kicking inside the Navy bureaucracy. If so, however, it isn't usually spoken of using that name, as killed programs bear a superstitious weight all their own. As a result, in order to determine what is actually being done on this front, analysts sometimes need to resort to reading tea leaves rather than directly reading budgets or program descriptions.
This is a much-abridged version of the history, but for my purposes (soon to be revealed) it covers the major phases. Next up: laying out my argument.
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