Studying foreign experience in naval development is extremely useful, especially now, when, on the one hand, there is an ideological crisis in naval development, and on the other, a certain turning point is clearly outlined.
It is especially important to study the experience of the most successful states in naval affairs. Currently, this is clearly the late Cold War United States. It was then that the Americans managed to show the highest level of organization since the Second World War, the correct setting of goals, the economical spending of budget funds on secondary projects and the concentration of efforts on the main, breakthrough areas.
One of the brightest pages in the history of the construction of American post-war naval power is the program for the creation of frigates of the "Oliver Hazard Perry" class. Although such a frigate itself would hardly find a place in the Russian Navy, the approaches that were used in its design and creation would be more than useful. It is worth examining the issue in more detail.
Zumwalt's fleet
In 1970, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt became Commander of Naval Operations. His main concern was the creation of a decisive superiority in forces over the intensively developing Soviet Navy. To this end, Zumwalt proposed the concept of the High-Low Navy - a fleet that would have a number of complex, expensive and highly efficient strike ships, and a large number of massive, simple and cheap warships, the technical excellence and combat power of which could be somewhat cut in order to reduce the price. …
This approach allowed the US Navy to have "the maximum fleet for the same money" and not lose in striking power - mainly expensive and complex ships could operate in the direction of the main attack, while simple and cheap ships could operate on the rest.
Of all Zumwalt's projects, only one was able to be realized - a "patrol frigate", and then just a frigate of the "Oliver Hazard Perry" class. It was one of the low navy ships, a low tech ship that was simplified to lower prices. And precisely because of the low price, it became massive, like few other ships of the missile era - 71 units, of which 16 are ships built outside the United States, by allies.
In conditions when the war in Vietnam had already been lost, and Reagan had not yet come to power with his "Reaganomics", such a scale could only be ensured by creating a really cheap ship. And the Americans did it.
“Design for a Value” as a benchmark
In the article “ We are building a fleet. Forces of the poor", The issues of creating ships" at a given cost "are designated as fundamentally important. This is so, and you can use the example of "Perry" to see how it works.
From the very beginning, to reduce the price, the Navy took the following measures: the preliminary design was created by the officers of the Navy, it was decided to limit the maximum cost and not step over this bar, changing the design of the ship to match the required prices, to reduce the required power of the power plant and, according to its size and mass of fuel, it was supposed to fight for every pound of mass of the frigate.
At the same time, an innovative solution was made - the preliminary design of the ship according to the given criteria was compiled by a computer in 18 hours, people then only finalized it. This led to a record time for the development of the ship and low costs. Notably, the naval engineer who created the necessary software was a 36-year-old African-American woman, Ray Jean Montague, in fact the "mother" of the modern American school of warship design.
The strange and unconventional design of the Perry is largely due to the fact that it was not “invented” by humans.
At first glance, controversial decisions were used in the design of the ship, but then they justified themselves.
The most famous such solution is the single-shaft main power plant.
This decision has been criticized and criticized by domestic experts to this day. However, Americans should not be considered clumsy. They thought it over very well.
The single-shaft power plant "Perry" was created on the basis of the "half" of the power plant of the destroyer "Spruence". This automatically guaranteed the Americans huge savings both on the development of the power plant itself, and on the cost of its life cycle later, during operation. Savings on everything - from spare parts to personnel training. In addition, this saved the displacement, which means that it made it possible to get by with less power and smaller dimensions of the power plant. According to the calculations of American specialists, the minimum increase in displacement, which could be required for any two-shaft power plant on such a ship, would be 400 tons. Without any increase in useful volumes in the ship.
From the point of view of operation, the Americans had a great and positive experience with single-shaft installations - single-shaft power plants were equipped with "Knox" class frigates and the previous types "Brook / Garcia".
Of course, it was necessary to make sure that it was the single-shaft gas turbine power plant that would not throw any surprise, for which special ground test stands were built. These structures, simple from an engineering point of view, have saved a lot of money on fine-tuning the power plant.
There was a question about the survivability of a ship with such a power plant.
After analyzing the experience of World War II, where single-shaft warships were also used, the Americans found out that not a single ship was actually lost due to the single-shaft scheme. Ships with a similar scheme sank, but an analysis of their combat damage showed that a twin-shaft ship would not have survived this. On the other hand, cases when ships with a single-shaft power plant experienced extensive damage and remained afloat were also not uncommon. The conclusion was simple - a single-shaft power plant has almost no effect on survivability - combat experience spoke of just that.
However, there were still issues of loss of speed and maneuvering during mooring. In order for the ship with one propeller and one rudder to obtain the necessary maneuverability, in the front part of the hull, propeller-driven units with a capacity of 380 hp were provided. each electrically driven.
These devices were also used as a backup, if the power plant failed, the ship on them could go through calm water at a speed of up to five knots. A little later, these calculations were confirmed in a combat situation.
Thus, the decision to use a single-shaft power plant was not only correct, it also saved a lot of money and about 400 tons of displacement.
A similar solution is to place weapons on board the ship.
Domestic experts criticized it no less than a single-shaft power plant, pointing out the small and suboptimal firing angles of the air defense missile system and the Mk.75 artillery gun (76-mm, produced in the United States under license from the Oto Melara company).
They are partly right, the angles are not optimal. But such questions cannot be considered in isolation from the conditions under which and against which enemy this ship was to be used.
The US Navy saw the USSR Navy's naval missile-carrying aircraft as the main and most dangerous enemy. However, the actions of single frigates or groups of them against the Soviet Navy were not planned."Perry" could be in a battle against Tu-22 and Tu-16, but with the maximum degree of probability they would be part of a large battle group, which would include missile cruisers and destroyers, and there would be a lot of frigates in the order … And with collective defense, neither their air defense systems, nor their guns would simply not have to repel all-aspect attacks. And in relatively simple conditions, against a weak enemy, limited angles would not be a problem - the ship can turn rather quickly and take an air target into the firing sector, and this speed usually surprises an unprepared person.
A certain disadvantage can be considered one channel of guidance of the air defense system - "Perry" could not fire at more than one target at the same time with their anti-aircraft missiles. But - again, the purpose of the ships must be taken into account. The frigate was not supposed to fight the way the British later fought in the Falklands, for this the United States had other ships.
And the typical opponent of the Perry would be a single Tu-95RTs, or Tu-142, directing Soviet submarines to an American convoy in the ocean - in the 70s, when these frigates were being designed, the Americans saw the Soviet threat just like this (which was, basically, is incorrect, but they learned about it much later). That is, everything here was "to the point." In general, the air defense "Perry" cannot be considered weak, it could hit an air target at a distance of up to 80 kilometers, and the fire performance of the Mk.13 launcher, the famous "one-armed bandit", was high at that time - according to American data, it could shoot one missile defense system every 10 seconds, although some domestic experts believed that it was faster, up to 7.5 seconds per rocket. Themselves SAM SM-1 even now can not be considered bad, although compared with modern missiles are significantly outdated.
The universal launcher, with which "Perry" used missiles, made it possible to assemble any combination of missiles and anti-ship missiles "Harpoon". The drums of the installation contained 40 missiles, while the time to launch the "Harpoon" was high - reloading the installation with this missile and its launch required 20 seconds of time instead of 10 for the SAM. But there could be a lot of these missiles. In the Russian Navy, for example, only rank 1 ships have a larger total number of missiles.
Thus, the placement of weapons on board the ship corresponded to its purpose, despite all the external irrationality.
But at the same time, like the single-shaft power plant, it helped to significantly reduce the displacement. So, an attempt to transfer the gun to the bow of the ship would lead to a significant lengthening of the hull, which would increase the cost of the ship, would require an increase in the power of the power plant and would increase the required amount of fuel on board. In general, based on the results of the design of the frigate, the Americans came to the conclusion that when using traditional approaches to design, the frigate would have about 5000 tons of displacement with the same composition of weapons, while when "designed at a given cost" it has a total displacement of 4200 tons …
Moreover, with such a displacement, the Americans were also able to reserve a place on the ship for a towed hydroacoustic station, which later turned the "Perry" into an anti-submarine, although he was not intended to be such.
In the same displacement, it turned out to pack two helicopters. For comparison, in the Soviet Navy, two helicopters carried a Project 1155 BOD with a total displacement of 7,570 tons.
A major drawback was the ship's lack of ASROC anti-submarine missiles. But initially the frigate was not conceived as an anti-submarine, firstly, it had to act in conjunction with ships that had such missiles, and secondly, it had a "long arm" in the form of two helicopters carrying torpedoes in the third and its own 324-mm torpedoes for self-defense and close combat in the fourth. When working in a group, the presence of a large number of helicopters and highly efficient towed GAS in frigates made them effective anti-submarine warriors and without PLUR, and reduced to zero the value of a weak sub-keel GAS. Even later, the introduction of systems for the mutual exchange of information between ships of the US Navy turned any naval combat group into a single complex and reduced the disadvantages of a single ship to zero.
Vitality
The frigates were in great demand in the US Navy's combat operations. They were used to protect shipping during the "tanker war" in the Persian Gulf and during the 1991 Gulf War.
In doing so, there were a number of episodes that well characterize how well this ship was made.
The first of these can be considered the incident with the frigate "Stark", belonging to this type of ship, which was hit by Iraqi missiles "Exocet". A lot has been said about this, so it's worth just giving an assessment of what happened.
The plane from which the missiles were fired was discovered by the frigate at 20.55, and the attack took place only fifteen minutes later. All this time, the ship's radar was "guided" by an Iraqi plane. At the same time, monstrous mistakes were made in the organization of the watch in the CIC in the performance of their duties, for example, when an unknown plane turned over to the frigate, the operator of the air defense missile system was in the toilet and no one took any measures to get it out of there or replace it with someone before the rocket attack itself.
With average discipline and at least somehow performing their duties, the plane would have been shot down long before the missiles were launched at the ship.
The attack of the "Stark" does not in any way indicate its weakness as a warship, it is not for nothing that they wanted to bring the frigate commander to justice for everything that happened.
But the combat survivability of "Perry" incident characterizes very well. About five years earlier, the Exocet missile struck the British destroyer Sheffield for the same reason (blatant carelessness of the personnel). As you know, this ship was lost. The Stark was rebuilt and returned to service.
True, here you need to make a reservation - the Americans were infinitely better than the British in terms of the fight for survivability. In part, the smaller amount of damage to the "Stark" is due to this. But only partially.
More interesting from the point of view of Perry's ability to "take a hit" was another incident in the Persian Gulf - the explosion on the Iranian mine of the frigate "Samuel Roberts" on April 14, 1988. The ship ran into an anchor mine, which exploded under the keel. The results of the detonation were: partial separation of the keel from the hull, rupture of the welded seams of the hull and the slow destruction of the ship's set, the breakdown of the main power plant from the foundations, its failure, flooding of the engine room, shutdown of diesel generators and de-energization of the ship.
For the vast majority of ships in the world, this would be the end. But not in this case. The destruction of the hull turned out to be slow enough so that the Americans had time to pull the diverging elements with cables from the inside and prevent the complete destruction of the ship. In five minutes, the emergency parties restored the power supply. After that, the ship on the auxiliary rudder propellers left the minefield. Later, the ship was restored and continued to serve.
The US Navy traditionally pays great attention to damage control, as most American sailors are also qualified firefighters, damage control training takes place simply in sweatshop mode, and very stringent requirements are imposed on the design of ships in this part. So, in 1988-1991, three American ships were blown up by mines and not one was lost.
"Perry" for all its cheapness and using less expensive grades of steel than is usually used on warships, was also created in compliance with all standards in terms of combat survivability. Like all American ships, frigates of this class underwent shock trials - tests with a powerful underwater explosion next to the hull, which should not have caused the ship any malfunctions.
A very interesting example of the survivability of Perry-class frigates is given by their use as floating targets. In the video below, the results of many hours of air strikes inflicted on the empty hull of the ship, on which, of course, no one is fighting for any survivability. During the SINKEX-2016 drowning exercise, this frigate was successively attacked by a South Korean submarine, which had planted a Harpoon into it, then the Australian frigate hit Perry with another Harpoon, and the helicopter from it hit the Hellfire ATGM, then Orion sequentially hit the frigate "Harpoon" and UR "Maverick", then "Harpoon" flew into it from the cruiser "Ticonderoga", then American helicopters hit it with several more Hellfires, after which it worked with an unguided bomb F-18, then a controlled heavy bomb The B-52, finally, under the curtain, an American submarine hit it with a Mk.48 torpedo.
The frigate then remained afloat for another 12 hours.
As you can see, "design for a given cost" does not mean low survivability of the ship.
Construction
"Perry" was supposed to become a mass series of ships of the US Navy and they became it. In many ways, this was due to the fact that even during the design of the ship, the possibility of its construction at the largest possible number of shipyards was foreseen. In addition, the design of the ship was created taking into account the need to save money on its construction. Even outwardly, "Perry" looks like a ship formed by simple shapes, the superstructure has a shape close to rectangular and is formed by flat panels, which in a significant number of cases intersect at right angles.
This was due to the need to simplify the production of hull structures and reduce metal consumption, and this goal was achieved.
However, something else was more interesting - the design of the ship provided for its block assembly, but it also made it possible for the shipbuilding company to form these blocks in different ways. At its discretion, the shipyard could enlarge the blocks, or vice versa, divide each block into smaller blocks during assembly and splicate them in the desired order. This made it possible to build "Perry" anywhere.
During the construction of the ship, there was only one major design change when the hulls of the ships were lengthened to accommodate the longer SH-70 helicopters. PF apart from this, the Perries were built in a long standard series, which again led to savings.
Not surprisingly, these ships were also built in Australia, Spain and Taiwan.
"Perry" was repeatedly used in combat. During Operation Praying Mantis in the Persian Gulf, a Perry-class frigate destroyed an oil platform used by the Iranians as bases for attacks on shipping, and another ship of this class participated in a naval battle against an Iranian destroyer. During the 1991 Gulf War, the frigate was used as a carrier for helicopters operating against Iraqi platforms, landed amphibious troops by air, and destroyed Iraqi facilities on oil-producing platforms with artillery fire. In fact, "Perry" had to fight exactly in accordance with what it was originally intended for, even when it was invented in the Navy led by Elmo Zumwalt.
Currently, these ships are still in service with the navies of Turkey, Poland, Taiwan, Egypt, Pakistan and Bahrain. Their military career continues.
Lessons for Russia
What conclusions for the domestic fleet and shipbuilding can be drawn from the program of these frigates? Of course, the Russian Navy does not need such ships, our tasks differ significantly from the American ones. But the approaches would be quite nice to borrow.
Firstly, it is “Design for a given cost” itself. When, relatively speaking, the power plant can be any, but not more expensive than a certain price, and with a limited cost of operation. And also weapons, hull and all other subsystems. For ships performing strike missions "at the forefront of the main attack" this is often inapplicable, in their case you have to sacrifice economics for the sake of efficiency, but for ships performing various less complex tasks, "Design for a given cost" is what allows you to have "more fleet for those same money”, which is often critical, but for Russia with its specific problems it will always be critical.
Secondly, standardization. Identical ships, modernization by "blocks", impossibility of revising the performance characteristics on each order, as is the case with us. In principle, this has already been said more than once, but it will not be superfluous.
Thirdly, designing ships in such a way that it can be built in as many shipyards as possible.… If an aircraft carrier in the United States can only be assembled on one slipway, then small ships can be built in many places. As a result, it becomes possible to receive large series of ships in a short time. A large series is a price cut, and a serious one.
In our country, it is at any plant that only MRKs can be built (in the form in which the rest of the ships are designed), the same corvette 20380 in Zelenodolsk can no longer be built, on the other hand, even when it was possible to lay ships at different shipyards, they are mainly were given to Severnaya Verf.
But most importantly, the Perry was the result of a vision of the future of the US Navy for the next decade at least, and a vision that came true. This project was part of a large and completely unrealized High-Low Navy concept, the purpose of which was to find a way out of the contradiction between the required number of ships and the budget for them. And the Americans eventually found this way out. We, with our incomparably less money, with our gigantic gaps in the combat strength (the same minesweepers or ships capable of fighting submarines), with our neighbors from Turkey to Japan and the absence of allies, do not even see any problem.
What would have happened if Russia had been guided by "American" approaches in building its surface fleet? How would a similar approach to shipbuilding programs look like in a domestic version? Would he be successful?
We can easily answer this question. In the chaos of military programs, we have one positive example, very successful, whose success is due to approaches to work similar to American ones. They were formed largely by accident, but even in this form, they led to success.
"Varshavyanka" as a domestic "analogue"
In the midst of the stupidity and chaos of our military shipbuilding, there is an example of the opposite phenomenon. Long standard series of ships, modernization by "blocks" from series to series, and not on every ship is crazy, calm evolution of an initially not ideal, but generally quite successful project and as one of the results - fast construction if necessary, at a quite reasonable price. And serious combat effectiveness.
We are talking about submarines of the 636th series "Varshavyanka". Initially, they were not intended for the Navy, but were an export project, perhaps that is why no one from the High Command or the Ministry of Defense got into the evolution of the project with their hands in the gloomy 2000s and later, and foreign customers calmly and measuredly paid for the construction of ships, unlike regularly falling into various fornication like "Poseidon" or racing with madly changing projects of ships of the Ministry of Defense, which in many respects because of this always did not have enough money to fulfill contractual obligations.
Since 1997, 20 of these boats have been built for foreign customers. Of course, their equipment differed from Customer to Customer, but not so much, and as a result, all "foreign" boats belong to the three projects 636, 636M and 636.1. When the project to create a submarine 677 "Lada" for the Russian Navy stalled, someone very clever organized the purchase of these submarines for the Navy. The first six left for the Black Sea Fleet, and on Monday, November 25, another such boat joined the ranks of the Pacific Fleet.
"Varshavyanka" with all their shortcomings still retain their combat potential. They carry the KR "Caliber" on board, and even today they have good stealth. Their hypothetical modernization could leave them valuable warships for decades to come. They, of course, are already outdated, but they will still serve with rearmament.
Let's compare approaches to their design with "Perry". As well as "Perry", Project 636 boats have design features that appeared as a means to reduce the cost and simplify their design - for example, the absence of a hatch for loading torpedoes.
As in the case of Perry, the Varshavyanka used more or less industrialized subsystems. Like the Perry, they are built in large series. Like the Perry, they are not super-efficient warships or overloaded with the latest technology.
The bottom line?
And the result is this. The first "Warsaw" for the Navy was laid down in 2010. Today there are already seven of them in service, the eighth is preparing to launch. The term of construction of the boat is 3 years. The price is quite affordable for our military budget. And if suddenly right now they start equipping them with anti-torpedoes, which they really need, new more efficient batteries, modern torpedoes with modern telecontrol, improved computing systems capable of increasing the efficiency of the SAC, they will still be built in three years.
At the moment, since 1997, 27 such boats have been built, one is almost ready and two are under construction. At one shipyard. In 2020, when the Admiralty Shipyards will hand over the Volkhov to the Pacific Fleet, the statistics of this series will look like this - 28 boats in 23 years.
"Varshavyanki" is a domestic "Perry", just underwater and mostly export
This is direct evidence that when we start working as Americans, we get the same results as Americans. Absolutely the same, no worse. This is a gag that should be gagged to anyone who doubts aloud that Russia can, if it wants, calmly and measuredly, without tears and super-efforts. Can't we work like them? We are already working like them, just at separate "Admiralty shipyards" and at their subcontractors. And the ships are quite valuable, never missile gunboats or some kind of "patrol" squalor.
Of course, the Perry frigates were built in a much larger series than our submarines, and faster. But the similarity of the success of "Perry" with them and "Varshavyanka" is surprising here.
When in Russia the naval construction madness finally ends, when the orders of ships and their number will be derived from a sane and realistic concept of the development of the Navy, and not like now, then we will be able to learn from the American experience a lot of useful things for ourselves as well. Not by grasp and by accident, but systemically and consciously. And some of this, albeit not in surface shipbuilding, we have already successfully tested in practice.
