Combined Seapower: A Combat Power Perspective

Abstract

SynopsisPower and energy have become a strategic and operational imperative for both the Royal Navy and United States Navy. The 21st century pace of change is unparalleled, with threats evolving at increased range, complexity, and sophistication. State and non-state adversaries are gaining technological advances and expanding their ability to conduct combined operations. Rapid fielding and seamless integration of advanced power and energy capabilities, such as power continuity across systems and electrically-powered weapons and sensors, will be critical for allies and partners to keep pace. As energy is one of the primary drivers for enhanced warfighting capability, these capabilities will be spurred by advances in power, energy and integrated system level controls. Further, the evolution of asymmetric threats will require disruptive and technologically superior solutions that create resilient networks and operate in a fully distributed manner.

Naval Engineering and Ship Control Special Edition Editorial

“…Electric weapons, such as railguns and high power lasers, and high power radars have driven the power requirement of naval platforms (Lowe et al 2018). In order to achieve maximum flexibility of power supply between high power weapon, sensor and auxiliary systems on one side and propulsion systems on the other side, the development of integrated power systems started in the 90's and led to the application of integrated power systems on the UK Type 45 (Vanderpump et al 2002) and US DDG-1000 Zumwalt class destroyers (Doerry et al 2015), and on the UK Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carriers (Sears et al 2010;Hodge and Mattick 2008).…”