A Vastly Superior Dramatically Cheaper Naval Vessel

The 21st century military will include remotely controlled, deep submersible, super cannons capable of shooting multi-ton munitions at hypersonic velocities to distances of thousands of miles. These cannons will be able to hide on the ocean floor, deliver overwhelming force within minutes, and can be built for nearly the cost of a tank. This paper describes such a vessel.

It is possible to build a vastly superior naval vessel for 100 times less and 10 times more quickly. As such, a much more capable Navy can be rebuilt within the span of this administration for the cost of a single Zumwalt Class destroyer. It is not enough to just give the military more money, that money needs to be spent much more wisely. The deep state military industrial complex is broken and needs new management. It is hoped that the Trump administration will take advantage of this engineering opportunity both for the betterment of the nation and because it may very well earn him points with swing voters who question the vast sums squandered in the name of national security.

An ideal naval vessel is submersible, can project force with maximum speed, accuracy, and magnitude, can support land, air, and sea engagements, is undetectable, invulnerable, poses a minimum risk, and is cheap. This paper describes a vessel that outperforms conventional naval vessel in every single metric.

A thick-walled concrete tube is the ideal construction for a naval vessel, primarily because it is submersible to great depths, is very inexpensive, it can be built quickly, it is much more survivable, and it offers vastly superior force-projection capabilities. In contrast to conventional submarines built of steel, that carry uranium to provide enough weight to submerge, this proposal uses concrete, as it provides both the hull strength and the weight needed to submerge, for very nearly a penny on the dollar.

It can dive to great depths because the pressure exerted on the outside of the tube due to the pressure of the ocean causes symmetric, strain free compression of the walls of the tube and concrete is a super-cheaper, heavy, high-compression material. As a result, such a tube would have an intrinsic dive limit of 7800 feet below sea level, or about 1.5 miles. This is 10 times the unclassified depth limit of a submarine. If such a tube were automated, it's ultimate dive depth can be unlimited.

It is inexpensive because the tube is made of concrete. Such a tube can be constructed for very nearly just the cost of mixing concrete, or about $50 per cubic yard. This is accomplished by hanging a smaller pipe within a larger pipe, underneath an ocean barge and pouring cement between the walls of the two pipes. As the concrete is poured and hardened, it extends out the bottoms of the pipes into the ocean depth. The only overhead involved is the use of the barge and some iron reinforcement.

A tube can be made to any size and its ability to resist pressure is simply dependent on making the thickness of the tube walls less than 1/6th the inner diameter of the tube. This means that a tube the size of an aircraft carrier could be built and would have over 25-foot-thick walls. A tube the size of a conventional destroyer (30 ft wide by 500 ft long with 4 foot thick walls) would contain $250,000 worth of concrete and could be cast in a week. That is 5000 times less than the price paid for a Zumwalt class destroyer. A tube large enough to launch aircraft would contain $15 million worth of concrete and could be built within a month. That is 1300 times less than the cost of the last aircraft carrier.

  

Now consider the military advantages. Because the tube is very long and rigid, it is possible to attach to the tube, very long cannon barrels. The Guns on a battleship were 60 ft long and shot 2000 pound shells 23 miles. A 2000 ft long barrel would make possible, ballistic, hyper-sonic, long-range, guided artillery shells for which there would be no defense. It would be able to shoot 2000 pound munitions thousands of miles in minutes or 10,000 pound shells hundreds of miles in minutes. It would be much more lethal, much faster, and much, much cheaper than a $1.5 million cruise missile or an F-16. Furthermore, it would not require placing, at risk a pilot, or a $50 million aircraft. Additionally, these munitions would be hypersonic, traveling at speeds of 3 miles per second, and impossible to defend against. Currently, it would take time frames of hours to attack targets within a range of 500 miles. In contrast, a ballistic, guided artillery shell might have a range of several thousand miles that can be struck within 15 minutes. Lastly, a 2000 pound explosive impacting a target at miles per second speeds would deliver the destructive force of a conventional 10,000 pound explosive. This is a fantastic, non-trivial advantage that is hard to overstate.

A single, maybe $10 million vessel, could deliver the lethality of a carrier without even needing a single plane. Additionally, a deep submersible tube would not require support ships. A conventional aircraft carrier requires an entire battle fleet for protection, and yet, the entire fleet cannot defend against a single ballistic nuclear missile. In contrast, a submersible concrete tube would not need even one support vessel and could very likely be immune to even a nuclear ballistic missile. 

Then there is the amphibious assault advantage. A 30-foot-diameter tube could carry 50 main battle tanks. Because one end of the tube can be made to come out of the water as much as a 100 feet, simply by submerging the other end of the tube, a tube could be extended to reach almost any shoreline, even a cliff shoreline. Then, the 50 tanks could be directly driven off, perhaps within 5 minutes. Compare this to the current capabilities of delivering 2 tanks within, at best, 1 hour.

Almost as important as lethality, is survivability. The USS Cole was put out of commission by a small boat full of explosives. A concrete tube with 4 ft thick or even 30 ft thick concrete sides would be much less vulnerable. But more importantly, being able to dive deeper than a mile means that it can literally disappear on the Ocean floor and the only way to attack it is with a torpedo. Since a torpedo can only travel, at most, 100 mph, it would take at least 40 seconds to reach a mile of depth traveling straight down. It also means that it is a simple thing to see the threat and launch an anti-torpedo torpedo. Also, even if a torpedo were to hit a concrete tube, it would take a direct hit with a large warhead to penetrate 4 to 30 feet worth of hardened concrete.

Additionally, a concrete tube that can sit on the ocean floor is nearly invisible as it consists of the same material as the ocean floor and is not floating ‘in’ the ocean, so that the only way it can be seen, is with ground mapping radar. A conventional sub submerged 1000 feet in an ocean 10,000 feet deep can be seen with active sonar at great distances whereas a sub sitting on the bottom can only be detected by a vessel directly overhead.

Lastly, if a tube were intended just as a super-artillery platform, it could be an unmanned, zero-maintenance, super battleship that could be permanently moored on the bottom of even the deepest ocean; An unlocatable, nearly unsinkable super asset with more force projection capabilities than anything currently in the U.S. Navy.

From this brief description, it is clear that a concrete tube naval vessel concept surpasses the capabilities of any naval vessel in operation by a significant margin. Being able to cast a tube the size of a destroyer in a week for $1 million, being able to project huge bombs for which there is no defense, hundreds of miles, within minutes, for a tenth the cost of a cruise missile, being able to dive so deep as to be untouchable, and being able to place on land an entire armored division in a matter of minutes are all military advantages that dramatically surpass conventional vessels.

A working prototype could be built and demonstrated before the 2020 election for 20 times less than was squandered on the Solyndra heist. Imagine if the president could demonstrate a hypersonic artillery shell that can hit a target 1000 miles inland in five minutes, from a vessel that can literally disappear. Such a prototype would nearly eliminate the need for both a conventional Navy and a conventional Air Force. The overall costs would easily be a 100 times less than current expenditures. 

The American public deserves the best military and they deserve to not be swindled in the name of national security. The public needs a president who is willing to build a better, cheaper Navy instead of serving the military industrial complex and President Trump needs people who are willing to see that he has an opportunity to hear proposals that do not originate from the military industrial complex. Imagine, not even needing combat aircraft, carrier task forces, or even foreign military bases because they had been replaced by something so amazingly superior, that could project tremendous force to any point on the globe from nearly any ocean on the globe.