Warship classification systems

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There have been a couple articles over the past few years complaining about the quite useless warship classification systems. Big and small carriers with totally different capabilities are being lumped together as "aircraft carrier" when people talk about them loosely, while the official classifications can be as ludicrous as helicopter destroyer.

Europeans often call a warship of theirs a "frigate" when they could just as well call it "destroyer".

The list of inadequacies is long, and it's entirely believable that the classification system(s) serve little purpose. They don't inform politicians and taxpayers well, for sure.

Some alternative classification systems have been proposed, often oriented at size or inspired by a pre-19th century system for ranking ships of the line by the quantity of their guns.

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Symbol picture*

None of these proposals have convinced me so far. The only classification system which appears to be intuitive and have information value is in my opinion is the one in widespread unofficial use: Distinguishing warships by the focus of their capabilities or tasks.

A division of warship classes into

AAW (anti aircraft warfare; ships with a good area air defence capability),

ASW (anti submarine warfare, typically with powerful sonar and helicopter component), 

GP (general purpose),

mine countermeasures,

coastal attack craft (missile boats, coastal corvettes) and

OPV (offshore patrol vessel)

appears to be quite intuitive and informative.

Submarines are different; their big division is between nuclear and conventional, and this stems mostly from the nuclear subs' ability to deploy much quicker from one region to another and the conventional subs' ability to be practically noiseless. The difference between conventional with or without air independent propulsion (AIP) as well as the difference between nuclear-powered subs of the 'attack' and 'ballistic missile' varieties is rather small nowadays. Both pairs appear to consist of subs which are largely interchangeable for post-Cold War missions. A difference such as the equipment with submarine-to-surface missiles or not is of greater interest than the difference between conventional subs with or without AIP in my opinion.

I see no really informative classification system for carriers, albeit one could divide carriers into small ("light", "CVL"), big (or CVB) and amphibious ones. The current diversity of carrier classifications is so great that we're not far from assigning every carrier class its own.

One might consider calling them ACsomething (aircraft carrier ...), for "carrier" might become a handy term if mothership concepts become more popular in the future and I have a feeling that navies run by old admirals won't like to call their precious ships 'mother'-anything.

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The inadequacy of the classification systems which have grown and diversified over more than a century of warship novelties ("destroyer" goes back to "torpedoboat destroyer"!) isn't only a nuisance to naval enthusiasts with too much idle time.

As mentioned before, there's some reason to complain about the lack of information value for the public. Few newspaper or TV news journalists convey the impression that they understand what a particular warship class can do or shall do, save for the difference between carriers, surface ships and subs. How could the public or the media keep an eye on military spending if even a rudimentary idea of what the billion dollar ship is capable of or meant to do is absent? A more informative classification system which is intuitive enough to not offend the taste of all people interested in naval stuff  is likely overdue.

Classification systems like "Warship 1st class, 2nd class ..." and similar are not going to be any improvement, though.

S Ortmann

*: One of the confusing things about the human mind is that actually rather distracting symbol pictures make long texts much more pleasant to read. This pic came up when I looked for "beautiful warship".

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