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Arsenal Ship

The arsenal ship was a proposed US Navy concept featuring a floating platform with hundreds of vertical launch tubes that could remotely launch cruise missiles for shore bombardment. Congress cancelled funding for the project in 1998 due to budget issues. The Navy has since converted Ohio-class submarines to carry cruise missiles in former ballistic missile tubes, and a defense contractor recently proposed a modified amphibious ship with over 200 vertical launch cells.

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140 views1 page

Arsenal Ship

The arsenal ship was a proposed US Navy concept featuring a floating platform with hundreds of vertical launch tubes that could remotely launch cruise missiles for shore bombardment. Congress cancelled funding for the project in 1998 due to budget issues. The Navy has since converted Ohio-class submarines to carry cruise missiles in former ballistic missile tubes, and a defense contractor recently proposed a modified amphibious ship with over 200 vertical launch cells.

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razeemship
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Arsenal ship

An arsenal ship was a concept for a floating missile platform intended to have as many as five
hundred vertical launch bays for mid-sized missiles, most likely cruise missiles. In current US
naval thinking, such a ship would initially be controlled remotely by an Aegis Cruiser, although plans
include control by AWACS aircraft such as the E-2 Hawkeye and E-3 Sentry.

Proposed by the US Navy in 1996, it had funding problems, with the United States
Congress cancelling some funding, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
providing some funding to individual contractors for prototypes. Some concept artwork of the Arsenal
Ship was produced, some images bearing the number "72", possibly hinting at an intent to classify
the arsenal ships as a battleship, since the last battleship ordered (but never built) was USS
Louisiana (BB-71).

The arsenal ship would have a small crew and as many as 500 vertical launch tubes for missiles to
provide ship-to-shore bombardment for invading troops. The Navy calculated a $450 million price for
the arsenal ship, but Congress scrapped funding for the project in 1998. [1]

The U.S. Navy has since modified the four oldest Ohio-class Trident submarines
to SSGN configuration, allowing them to carry up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles using vertical
launching systems installed in the tubes which previously held strategic ballistic missiles.

In 2013, Huntington Ingalls Industries revived the idea when it proposed a Flight II version of
the LPD-17 hull with a variant carrying up to 288 VLS cells for the ballistic missile defense and
precision strike missions.[2]

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