The Ship Characteristics Board was a unit of the

United States Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage ...

. The purpose of the Ship Characteristics Board was to coordinate the creation of 'ship characteristics' that are essential to the design of naval

combatants Combatant is the legal status of an individual who has the right to engage in hostilities during an armed conflict. The legal definition of "combatant" is found at article 43(2) of Additional Protocol I (AP1) to the Geneva Conventions of 1949. It ...

and

auxiliaries Auxiliaries are support personnel that assist the military or police but are organised differently from regular forces. Auxiliary may be military volunteers undertaking support functions or performing certain duties such as garrison troops, u ...

. Coordination was required because the operators and the designers of ships had different interests, perceptions, and concepts: as summarized by the naval historian

Norman Friedman Norman Friedman (born 1946) is an American internationally known author and analyst, strategist, and historian. He has written over 30 books and numerous articles on naval and other military matters, has worked for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps ...

, "How to achieve the best possible compromise among competing bureaus has been one of the great dilemmas of 20th-century U.S. naval administration." This list of SCB projects is a useful exposition of the U.S. Navy's shipbuilding priorities in the first half of the

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History

The Ship Characteristics Board was founded in 1945 under the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations / OpNav. It was created after the body previously responsible for coordinating ships characteristics, the

General Board The General Board of the United States Navy was an advisory body of the United States Navy, somewhat akin to a naval general staff and somewhat not. The General Board was established by general order 544, issued on March 13, 1900 by Secretary ...

, had been seen as ineffective in a series of earlier Navy bureau miscoordinations. The SCB would adjudicate between operational requirements set by the ship operators ( the fleets and other operational forces) and the technological and fiscal constraints imposed on the ship designers (the Bureau of Ships / BuShips and the Bureau of Ordnance / BuOrd). The SCB assigned numbers to its projects beginning in 1946. Not all projects would result in the construction of ships: some projects would remain conceptual only, or would be superseded by later projects. In 1966 the successors to BuShips and BuOrd ( NAVSHIPS and NAVORD) were moved to report to OpNav. The SCB role as an adjudicator became less relevant. During the development of the ''Oliver Hazard Perry'' class frigates it was renamed the Ship Acquisition and Improvement Board (SAIB). In the 1980s it was revived as the Ship Characteristics Improvement Board (SCIB), but without its former authority.

USS ''Thresher'' loss

A decision by the SCB likely contributed to the 1963 loss of the

nuclear submarine A nuclear submarine is a submarine powered by a nuclear reactor, but not necessarily nuclear-armed. Nuclear submarines have considerable performance advantages over "conventional" (typically diesel-electric) submarines. Nuclear propulsion, ...

''Thresher''. The SCB had ordered BuShips to study increasing the

test depth Depth ratings are primary design parameters and measures of a submarine's ability to operate underwater. The depths to which submarines can dive are limited by the strengths of their hulls. Ratings The hull of a submarine must be able to with ...

for future submarines from 700 to 1,600 feet, and this increase was approved after November 1956. ''Thresher'' components were too far along in design to accommodate this change, but it was decided that they could be modified to enable a test depth of 1,300 feet. The irony is that the SCB's motives for this change were to enhance safety: not only to support greater combat survivability, but also out of a concern that the increased speed of nuclear submarines could cause them to inadvertently exceed the more shallow test depths while maneuvering.

List of SCB projects

Review of the following lists of SCB projects will show: *SCB projects which are 'follow on' to earlier projects may be given a new number, or may reuse an earlier number with an appended letter. For example, a project to develop a new Landing Craft Utility (LCU) was begun in 1946 as SCB 25, follow on LCU projects include SCB 25A (unknown date), SCB 149 (August 1954), and SCB 149B (March 1962). Note the eight-year gap between SCB 149 and SCB 149B. *The start date of an SCB project can be several years before it became a budget line item or an actual ship construction. SCB 157 began in July 1955 as a study for a new

amphibious assault Amphibious warfare is a type of offensive military operation that today uses naval ships to project ground and air power onto a hostile or potentially hostile shore at a designated landing beach. Through history the operations were conducted ...

helicopter carrier A helicopter carrier is a type of aircraft carrier whose primary purpose is to operate helicopters, and has a large flight deck that occupies a substantial part of the deck, which can extend the full length of the ship like of the Royal Navy ( ...

, but a resultant ship (the future ''Iwo Jima'') was not laid down until 2 April 1959. An even more extreme example is SCB 123, which began in 1954, but which saw last ship reconstruction delayed until 1966. *Close examination of SCB projects will occasionally demonstrate that ship design history is more complicated than first appearances show. For example, the ''George Washington'' class of fleet ballistic missile submarines was the first such class to be launched. However, the history of SCB 180 shows that the ''Ethan Allen'' class was the first to be designed, and the ''George Washington'' class was a subsequent design made for a quickly implemented mobilization effort. * The budgetary pressures of the

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, including war driven

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, are demonstrated in the cancellation of SCB projects 003.68 and 101.68, and the partial cancellation of SCB 002 (the age of the ships was also a factor). All ship

hull classification symbol The United States Navy, United States Coast Guard, and United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) use a hull classification symbol (sometimes called hull code or hull number) to identify their ships by type and by ind ...

s shown (CLK, SS, DL, CVA, DE, etc.) are the symbols in use at the conception of the project, rather than when construction started. Explanations of these symbols are usually to be found in the linked articles on each ship or class.

Sequential numbering of SCB projects

SCB projects began in numeric sequence in 1946, and were originally listed in descending priority (the ''Norfolk'' cruiser/destroyer leader having top priority, the ''Tang'' submarines as second priority, etc.), but such prioritization was eventually dropped. Several of the early projects actually began in 1945 - for example, the ''Mitscher''-class destroyer (which in 1946 was assigned the project number SCB 5) was the ship design that out-performed the projected CL-154 class light cruiser design and led to that cruiser's cancellation in September 1945.

Block numbering of SCB projects

By 1965 the numeric sequence was abandoned and SCB projects were organized by block numbers which arranged projects by ship types (valid until the 1975 ship reclassification), and a two digit suffix denoting the

fiscal year A fiscal year (or financial year, or sometimes budget year) is used in government accounting, which varies between countries, and for budget purposes. It is also used for financial reporting by businesses and other organizations. Laws in many ...

of the construction phase of the project. This suffix is ''not'' the start date of the project as a concept: SCB 400.65 actually began in November 1962, not in 1965, and SCB 409.68 actually began in February 1965, not in 1968. The existence of successive suffixes also does ''not'' necessarily mean that the design of ships of a class in any way changed, such suffixes are listed here for historical note only. In effect, this new numbering scheme changed the focus of the SCB from design and development to procurement and budget compliance. As a result, concept-only designs would disappear from the historical record.

CIP

The SCB also had a list of projects called Class Improvement Projects. These were usually changes of a lesser scope or risk than SCB projects; many were contingency plans to refurbish reserve ships had it been necessary to reactivate them.Friedman, Destroyers, p. 161 No list of CIP numbers is available.

References

Notes

Sources

* Crierie, Ryan.
US Navy Ship Characteristic Board (SCB) Numbers
Accessed 22 September 2008. * * * * * * * * * * * Roberts, Stephen S.

Accessed 12 July 2008. * Roberts, Stephen S.

Accessed 12 July 2008. * Roberts, Stephen S.

Accessed 25 July 2008. * Roberts, Stephen S.

Accessed 29 December 2008. * Roberts, Stephen S.

Accessed 4 August 2010. * Roberts, Stephen S.

Accessed 11 October 2022. * {{cite book , last=Wildenberg, first=Thomas , author-link= , title=Gray Steel and Black Oil , publisher=United States Naval Institute , year=1996, location=Annapolis, Maryland , url= , doi= , isbn=1-55750-934-4 Bureaus of the United States Navy