A navy patrol P525 warship on the Copenhagen waterfront, Copenhagen, Denmark on February 7, 2020. (Photo by Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
EURONAVAL 2022 — A Danish defense company here announced today it had launched the second iteration of its unique system designed to rapidly move containerized payloads on, off and around warships.
The system, produced by SH Defence and dubbed “The Cube,” uses steel tracks and hydraulic pulleys to quickly — around 10 minutes — load and place containerized payloads onto a ship equipped with the system’s infrastructure.
The upgrades between the first and second iterations allow for modules to be loaded directly into the mission bays from side of the ship as well as from the stern and the top.
The utility of a system such as “The Cube” comes from the diversity of payloads that can be installed in the containers. Renè Bertelsen, the company’s CEO, told Breaking Defense in an interview that the 300 payloads currently available range from torpedoes and anti-torpedo torpedoes to unmanned systems to mine countermeasures and anti-submarine warfare.
“We make a lot of agreements with [original equipment manufacturers] and it’s not an exclusive” deal, he said. “Everybody comes with their OEM product and we integrate it into our modules. The idea is to have a module standard where you’re able to replace whatever kind of equipment you have, and modules into that platform. That’s the key.”
The system is particularly useful for a small Navy, such as Denmark which only has a few dozen warships, Commander Senior Grade Jakob Rousøe, a senior acquisition official in the Royal Danish Navy, told an audience today at SH Defence’s booth here at Le Bourget on the outskirts of Paris.
“And last, but not least, when we now invest in ships, [the ships] will have to last for 30 years or more,” he continued. “And that means that we need to sort of figure out what we are going to use them for, or we need to appreciate that we don’t know what we’re going to use or shoot for in the future. So therefore, by putting flexibility and modularity into these ships, we make them relevant also in 20 to 30 years.”
And that flexibility will be important for the Kingdom of Denmark moving forward as Nordic nations rework their national security approaches amid Sweden and Finland’s entrance into NATO, as Robbin Laid wrote in a column for Breaking Defense.
