SC-21 (United States) - Arsenal Ship

Arsenal Ship

In a separate study in 1993, two French students had been assigned the design of a Large Capacity Missile Ship, a 20,000-tonner with 500 VLS cells filled with land-attack missiles. This design was inspired by a RAND paper in that year, which suggested a land invasion could be halted by destroying 20% of its vehicles with precision munitions. This would take several days with aircraft, but a surface ship with large numbers of land-attack missiles could achieve the same effect almost instantly.

This design was apparently included in the SC-21 assessment as an afterthought - it was not included in the original list of concepts. Two designs were considered, both with 512 VLS cells - Option 3A6 was a minimal version of 13,400 tons with no self-defense capability, Option 3A5 was a 30,000 ton "goal ship" with many more survivability features. The latter Maritime Fire Support Ship became the basis of the Arsenal Ship championed by CNO Jeremy Boorda. In fact he was so enthusiastic that the rest of the SC-21 program was suspended in favor of development of the Arsenal Ship.

The Navy set up a joint venture with DARPA on March 18, 1996. The Arsenal Ship would be acquired as a prototype under DARPA's Other Transaction Authority under Section 845 of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 1994 (Public Law 103-160), which allowed them to bypass much of the bureaucracy involved with defense procurement, enabling a prototype to be built by the end of 2000. The requirement was for a network-capable ship with around 500 VLS and less than 50 personnel, for a cost of less than $520 m for the lead ship. A further five ships would be acquired at a later date.

In July 1996, five consortia were awarded $1 m to come up with some concepts. Three received follow-on contracts in January 1997, but the Navy had lost enthusiasm for the project with Boorda's suicide in May 1996, and in April 1997 the Arsenal Ship was redesignated as the Maritime Fire Support Demonstrator (MFSD), which would be a technology demonstrator for a revitalised SC-21 program. As a result, Congress cut funding to the project and it was finally canceled in October 1997. The Arsenal Ship concept was revived in 2002 by converting four Ohio-class submarines into SSGNs carrying 154 VLS tubes.