Distributed Combat Power

The US Navy's Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) was originally conceived as a small platform that would leverage networking and unmanned systems to fundamentally change how ships fight in some of the most demanding maritime scenarios, particularly in cluttered lethal environments just offshore. This chapter introduces a variant of Hughes’ Salvo Equations to show how distributing and reconfiguring combat power among a group of LCS platforms can dramatically improve LCS's ability to fight, survive, and fight again in high-end anti-ship missile combat. These results extend beyond naval warfare to any operational concept for unmanned systems in which host platforms control large numbers of independent, distributable, unmanned vehicles. The chapter shows, however, that a theoretical exploration of naval combat using a variant of the Salvo Equations is very useful in identifying sources of advantage in a new age of naval warfare that employs large numbers of unmanned systems.