DESIGNING ADAPTABLE SHIPS: MODULARITY AND FLEXIBILITY IN FUTURE SHIP DESIGNS

The American Navy is currently encountering significant challenges in acquiring and maintaining the appropriate number and types of ships necessary to fulfill national security obligations. Warships are costly, often amounting to billions of dollars, which forces the Navy to make difficult decisions each year about which vessels to purchase with limited defense budgets. These challenges would be formidable under stable circumstances.

However, the changing landscape of adversaries, mission requirements, and advancing technologies necessitates new capabilities for naval vessels. Given the steep expenses associated with procuring new warships, the Navy aims to prolong the service lives of existing ships by modifying them to address emerging threats, undertake new missions, and integrate advanced technologies.

Nevertheless, such modernization efforts are also costly and may be limited by existing support systems and the ships' configurations. The essential concepts of flexibility and modularity have been significantly promoted as potential strategies to decrease both the time and expense involved in modernizing active ships and to better prepare for future uncertainties.

The Navy has implemented these ideas in various programs, and they are increasingly being acknowledged and incorporated into ship design and construction initiatives. However, modularity and flexibility can mean different things to different stakeholders, and they may not, by themselves, ensure future adaptability. Additionally, there are obstacles to the broader application of modularity and flexibility across different classes of ships.