Australian frigate decision analysed

World Naval Developments July 2018

By Norman Friedman*

At the end of June, the Royal Australian Navy announced that it had selected a version of the British Type 26 ‘Global Frigate’ as its next frigate. The ship is also in competition as the next Canadian frigate, and at least for a time it was the favored Royal Canadian Navy candidate. The Australian sale is the first major sale of a standard British warship design for decades, the last great success being the Leander class frigate.

Type 26 is not in the current U.S. Navy frigate competition because it is not yet in service in any form (the competitors would be considerably modified versions of current operational ships). In the Royal Navy, Type 26 is to replace the existing Type 23. It is much larger, about the size of ship that some navies still call destroyers.

So what is a frigate, and what sort of combat system does it need? The name ‘frigate’ was revived during World War II for an anti-submarine escort substantially more capable than the emergency-built corvette but substantially less sophisticated than the best existing special-purpose convoy escort, the sloop, which had a considerable anti-air capacity (never mind that the relative values of these types were utterly different from those of the sailing era ships whose names they had taken). Through the Cold War, frigates were generally specialized anti-submarine ships. The U.S. Oliver Hazard Perry class were given anti-air capability largely, it seems, to deal with Soviet submarine-launched missiles, and to defend the more anti-submarine oriented frigates from air attacks. At the end of the Cold War, NATO countries which had built large numbers of frigates discarded most of them because the rather specialized escort role no longer seemed relevant. The world had changed. The Gulf Wars seemed to show that the future of Western navies was to project power into an increasingly turbulent Third World. No rival sea power seemed to be on the horizon – until the recent rise of the Chinese navy.

Quite aside from the dramatic collapse of the Soviet naval threat to NATO, by the 1980s there was a growing concern that escorts might no longer be the best way to prosecute anti-submarine warfare. Nuclear submarines could outrun them, and the noise generated by a convoy might be the best shield such a submarine could exploit as it attacked. It might, moreover, be impossible to build enough of them to protect vital shipping. This was a controversial perception, supported far more by the U.S. Navy than by its European partners. It explained intense interest in choke points, in attacks on Soviet strategic submarines in bastions (as a way of concentrating Soviet submarine assets), and in maritime patrol aircraft vectored on the basis of long-range arrays and other sensors.

If the anti-submarine role is not central, the frigate is essentially another multi-purpose surface warship one size down from a destroyer, hence less expensive and suitable for purchase in greater numbers. That is not to be despised, but it raises the question of just what lower cost means and requires. At present the single most costly element of the destroyer is an area anti-air system, in the U.S. fleet Aegis. It demands a powerful radar and powerful computers, wielding a long-range missile.

The frigate cannot forego an effective anti-air weapon, because she cannot possibly be immune to missile attack. At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy discarded most of its missile ships because the new threat, the one associated with power projection, was sudden pop-up attacks, which might well come from concealed missile launchers ashore. Aegis alone could react quickly enough, because the Aegis system uniquely integrated the search function which created a tactical picture (showing the incoming missile) and missile control. Less capable systems, such as RAM, survived as elements of a layered defense behind Aegis and the Standard Missile.

Type 26 and other current frigate contenders benefit from enormous advances, largely in computer power, over the past quarter century. Aegis was built around a semi-active Standard Missile. The system coached the missile into a homing ‘basket,’ after which a slaved shipboard illuminator produced the signal on which it homed. Because there was so much illuminating power, this technique countered stealthy missile design to some extent. On the other hand, if the defending missile could guide itself to the incoming missile (or other target), the system could be simplified dramatically, its cost considerably reduced. The radar on board the ship might not have to be as powerful, because the missile it directed might not need quite so much guidance. Too, a missile which could guide itself could hit a target beyond the ship’s horizon, perhaps even on the surface of the sea.

Type 26 incorporates one approach to this kind of development. Instead of the four fixed arrays of the Aegis radar it has a fast-turning Artisan radar which scans constantly in elevation. Fast turning limits effective radar range, because the radar cannot stare in any one direction for very long, hence cannot put so much energy onto a target. However, as long as it can detect an incoming target, it can update the target’s position very frequently. On that basis it can create a tactical picture. How usable that picture is depends on how violently the incoming missile maneuvers and also on how close the defensive missile must get before it has to rely on its own seeker.

In the British case, the missile is Sea Ceptor, derived from the ASRAAM infra-red guided air-to-air missile but provided with a radar seeker and a larger motor. It is vertically launched, and (as in Aegis) the anti-air system can update it as it flies, to bring it into homing range of a target. The active seeker can also be used to attack ships, although the warhead is not very large. BAE makes Sea Ceptor, and in cooperation with the European missile company MBDA it has developed an extended range version using a booster. The original Sea Ceptor was conceived to replace Sea Wolf, a point defense missile with a range of a few miles (effective range depends on the target). The boosted version is presumably at least equivalent to the U.S. Enhanced Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM: RGM-156), which is probably effective out to fifteen miles or more. It can be quad-packed in a standard Mk 41 modular launcher.

Like Sea Ceptor, ESSM has an active seeker. It is currently used by the Royal Australian Navy on board upgraded frigates, and it is compatible with the Aegis system on board new Australian destroyers. It seems to be an excellent way of multiplying firepower in the face of relatively short-range threats from shore-based missiles. Presumably the Australians plan to arm their new frigates with ESSM, adapting the BAE combat system to control the missile. That is largely a software issue; it is not clear whether it will be particularly difficult.

Type 26 is part of a considerable departure in Royal Navy ship procurement. Up to about 1990, ships were almost always designed by the navy’s Ships Department or its predecessors, who received staff requirements and negotiated with other departments to determine the appropriate combinations of weapons and sensors. This process became more and more difficult as sensors and weapons came to represent a larger and larger share of the cost and complexity of warships. The perception seems to have grown within the British Government that something different was needed, a single agency which would handle both the weapons/sensors side and the ship design side. The British may have been affected by the U.S. Navy’s shift from designing its own ships to managing designs created outside. The Type 23 frigate was the last major design for which the Ships Department was responsible.

BAE, formerly British Aerospace, became the design agent for the Ministry of Defence. It produces most British weapon systems, and it has a considerable share in U.S. weapon production. For example, BAE owns the company which produces the standard U.S. Navy 5in/62 naval gun. It may be that the adoption of this weapon for Type 26 reflects the company’s familiarity with its own product line. It is certainly an advantage in selling Type 26 to the Royal Australian Navy, which already uses the same gun. BAE also produces the Artisan radar and the Sea Ceptor missile. Using its own systems probably makes it far easier to integrate them effectively into a new ship. In some sense BAE is now doing what the Royal Navy did when it designed its ships using weapons it also designed, except that it also develops the combat systems which integrate them together, something the Royal Navy could not quite do. The counter-argument is that BAE lacks the lengthy experience the Ships Department and its predecessors had. In effect the choice has been made that it is far more difficult to make sensors and weapons work together effectively than to design a satisfactory hull. Much the same argument is being made in the United States, except that the design and development of weapons and sensors and the command systems which tie them together is far more widely dispersed. That was the logic of giving contractors complete control over the design of the two alternative versions of the LCS.

The rub in either case is logistical. Maintaining and training a fleet requires standardization. In the British case there is no rub, because British ships already use standardized systems and weapons most of which have been developed by BAE. The weapons not developed by BAE are standard anyway. The U.S. case, exemplified by LCS, is more difficult; the two contractors who developed the two versions of LCS employed their own systems, such as their own radars and their own combat control systems. The original idea was to choose one or the other, but that did not happen, and it is not clear that there will ever be mass conversion of one type to the other’s sensors and systems to solve the logistical and training problem. This type of problem is likely to haunt the U.S. frigate program. The U.S. Navy has tried to solve it by specifying a Lockheed Martin combat system, and by trying to convince the Australians, the British, and the Canadians to buy systems compatible with it, so that the four navies can work together effectively.

* Norman Friedman is author of The Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapon Systems. His column is published with kind permission of the US Naval Institute.