As noted, most of the frigate designs being evaluated for FFG(X) use automation extensively and have surprisingly small crew compliments. Not so great for damage control and prize crews, buuuut you can get more hulls in the water for the same amount of crew. Also, less casualty risks per hull.
A horde of frigates would also be an answer to the Chinese Type 22 missile boat swarms - the Type 22 is designed (in part) to swarm a single large target or concentrated group of targets and unload 4-8 shipkillers per hull in a tsunami of missiles to saturate and overload CBG defenses. And they made 83 of the damn things so far. A couple hundred frigates coming over the (radar) horizon, fighting datalinked with networked target assignment and spraying clouds of anti-missile missiles would solve that problem rather quickly.
Good. Makes sense so far.
Let’s examine that small ship role. They take hits and are designed to be relatively cheap metal.
Each unit within this fleet is not very defensible: they don’t have individual Aegis or similar. They can’t individually defend themselves from e.g. cruise missiles.
The concept is networked attack and defence: perhaps these “Spktyr” class frigates act in concert with high value Frigates with classic Aegis.
All of which sounds similar to LCS. Wasn’t that supposed to be a networked platform?
But maybe LCS wasn’t low cost per unit?
We should maybe examine why LCS is being deprecated. I read that it was because LCS units have low individual survivability.
Which of course they do, but it turns out that that’s a feature, not a bug.
Maybe some FReeper can chime in on why LCS doesn’t work.