The Naval Airship and the Revolution at Sea

Abstract

A system is proposed to combine an airship based fire control system (using-off-the-shelf hardware) with surface ship launched SAMs (NTU/SM-2-ER) to provide OTH wide area ASCM defense for convoys and surface battle groups currently without organic airborne AAW assets. The effectiveness of surface ship AAW area defense is compared, both with and without the airship system, against low-flying ASCMs. The proposed airship system is based on combining the F-14 fire control system (AWG-9) with extrapolations from the current DARPA sponsored design for an operational development model airship (ODM). The impact on the required airship size for obtaining a given level of performance from the airship/surface ship team is examined by varying the number of fire control units (AWG-9s) carried by the airship from 2 to 12. Costs of the proposed system are estimated. Scenarios are developed for convoy missions in a low to moderate ASCM threat environment and for surface battle group operations in a high threat (60, closely spaced ASCMs) environment.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 01, 1990
Accession Number
ADA239526

Entities

People

  • James R. Shelby

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aerial Warfare
  • Air Force
  • Airborne Warning And Control System
  • Aircraft Equipment
  • Aircraft Industry
  • Aircrafts
  • Airframes
  • Airships
  • Attack Aircraft
  • Attrition
  • Control Systems
  • Fighter Aircraft
  • Fire Control Systems
  • Fixed Wing Aircraft
  • Military Aircraft
  • Rotary Wing Aircraft
  • Tactical Aircraft

Readers

  • Irregular Warfare and Special Operations Cyberspace Operations against Adversarial Threats.
  • Maritime and Naval Warfare Studies
  • Software Engineering.

Technology Areas

  • Space