Evaluating effectiveness of a frigate in an anti-air warfare (AAW) environment

Abstract

Designing naval ship capabilities for shipbuilding is a challenging process requiring comprehensive technical and tactical studies. Technical studies involve ship design characteristics such as engineering, weapon, and support systems. Tactical studies include the anticipated area of operation, expected threat, the capabilities of the enemy, and potential missions to accomplish. Both studies are used in ship design to determine the ship's required combat capabilities before finalizing the hull design. This research uses the agent-based modeling tool Map Aware Non-Uniform Automata (MANA) to explore the best combat capabilities for a frigate in an anti-air warfare (AAW) environment. Regression and partition trees are used to analyze factors that influence the measures of the friendly frigate's survivability and number of enemy casualties. This study also investigates the use of a prospective ship-based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in AAW operations. We find that the inclusion of Point Defense Missile Systems with long and medium range surface-to-air missiles has the most positive effects on ship survivability. By contrast, we find inclusion of a UAV in this mission has little effect.