Surface navies need to become more lethal and less focused on their own defence. The U.S. Navy therefore plans to increase both the number of surface platforms at sea and their collective lethality.
By distributing enough long-range weapons around as many platforms as possible, it seeks to complicate an adversary’s problem. The conundrum is that sufficient numbers of missiles cannot be sent to sea in cruisers, destroyers or frigates because all these ships are too expensive to be produced in sufficient quantities to overcome their individual physical constraints of weapon capacity. Alternative weapon carriers therefore have to be provided—and they must be cheap.
I've droned on about that concept since before TDR was even a thought.
As for cheap, how about container ship-based modularized auxiliary cruisers (see page 50) in the Navy form that I initially thought about?
That first article on reconfiguring the Navy speaks of "large unmanned surface vessels (LUSV)" used as missile carriers. Wouldn't that be a perfect use of a modularized auxiliary cruiser based on container ships, using missiles in standard shipping containers?
The author points out the risk of unmanned surface vessels falling prey to enemy boarders who might then use the ship themselves against us, and is a useful warning to thinking such systems don't have real drawbacks.
Heck, are even minimally manned surface vessels vulnerable to enemy boarding parties? Maybe "minimally manned" or even "unmanned" will refer to Navy ship crews and not to the contingents of Marines that will have the job of repelling boarders.
I'll offer one problem with many small ships as the Navy solution: We really do have minimum sizes for hulls given the long distances our ships have to travel from the continental United States to overseas stations. Fleets that just have to leave their home ports to reach their battle stations can afford to have vessels that are rather small with heavy armament for their size.
