The Multi Role Combatant - Jack of All Trades, Master or None?

For naval vessels Modularity is essentially a design style choice adopted to achieve both aspects of multi-role capability, namely, Flexibility (in deployment) and Adaptability (through life). This paper largely focuses on the second of these, which has been seen to be an attractive objective in Western naval vessel acquisition since the end of the Cold War. A paper to one of this series of warship conferences produced by the author a decade after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact was entitled “Adaptability – the Key to Modern Warship Design”. It particularly drew on the difficulties the author had experienced in establishing the case for the Future Surface Combatant (the precursor of the Type 26 Frigate), where the primary capability of this first post-Cold War combatant as a globally deployable class of warship was to demonstrate that Adaptability would be good value for money in an uncertain geopolitical environment. The current paper commences by revisiting the case for Adaptability nearly two decades on from that first consideration and whether the same drivers for Adaptability and advances in Modularity have made the case for multi-role combatants more convincing or whether they are still prone, if they are not truly “First Rate” designs, to be “Jacks of all trades, yet Masters of none?” Next the paper reviews past warship designs that have been inherently adaptable, leading on to consideration of "margins", the traditional way naval ship designers have been able to incorporate a measure of adaptability. However, non-ship design aware procurement authorities, have continued to squeeze seemingly generous margins as a short sighted means of achieving "savings" in the procurement element of defence budgets. There are of course other features, necessary to achieve Adaptability. Thus the paper explores how an adequate consideration of the ship architecture might provide an adaptable design and, specifically, how adopting Modularity to achieve this, can be explored early in ship design. Finally, leading on from the exploration of Adaptability, the paper concludes by a considering the Trimaran configuration. This configuration remains a highly attractive overall Style and ship configuration choice for future warships, precisely because it readily provides so many of the features that are seen to be appropriate in an Adaptable Multi-role Warship, which can be configured to avoid the Second-Rate “master of none” trap.