This is awesome:
The folks over at BAE Systems have come up with a fairly novel way to give any ship with some deck space Mark 41 vertical launch system (VLS)-like capability without having to make huge alterations to the guts of the ship, which in many cases wouldn't even be possible. Dubbed aptly the Adaptive Deck Launcher (ADL), the system provides four cells positioned at an angle that can accommodate the same all-up missile canisters used by standard Mark 41 vertical launch systems like those found on the U.S. Navy's cruisers and destroyers, as well as many allied surface combatants.
Or, as I suggested in this 2007 essay that was rejected by the United States Naval Institute Proceedings, on container ships converted to auxiliary cruisers.
And "distributed lethality" is an aspect that I addressed in the submission (although "network-centric" was the term of art then) which is discussed in The Drive article:
Under this concept of operations, the sensor and the shooter are increasingly decoupled. In other words, the sensor—or sensors—that detect and target an enemy aircraft, missile, ship, ground vehicle, or structure are attached to platforms that may not actually launch an attack on said target. Instead, the targeting coordinates and telemetry are data-linked from the sensor platform to a platform that has a weapon that can prosecute an attack. What this means is that an F-35 can ask for an SM-6 surface-to-air missile from a ship far away to prosecute a target in their vicinity deep over the battlefield. Or an Aegis-equipped destroyer detects an enemy ship closer to a logistics ship outfitted with an ADL that is carrying Naval Strike Missiles and the destroyer instructs the ship to fire one of its missile at the target.
Without its own sensors, the modularized auxiliary cruiser could be pretty cheap. And the BAE ADL--while not purely speaking a system based on standard shipping containers as I suggested--is in line with deck-mounted systems as I proposed.
If used for auxiliary cruisers it would add lethality to our fleet to end our reliance on a small number of high value carriers for offensive power.
