I prefer sharks with laser beams on their foreheads.
But bee guns are always cool.
It sure goes better with the whole nautical theme.
You would think so, but the U.S. Navy hasn’t put out a new, successful class of ship to replace the old Ticonderoga-class cruisers (which are mostly gone now) and the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers despite decades of trying and many billions of dollars spent.
Other than the Ford-class carriers, I don’t think they’ve had any successful surface ships in that length of time. They keep canceling them due to scope creep and exploding costs.
This includes the Zumwalt-class of stealth destroyers, of which 32 were ordered, but only three were built (one of which has already been decommissioned). The whole program cost over $22.5 billion, and construction costs alone ended up climbing to $4.24 billion per ship.
It also includes the CG(X) program (announced in 2001 and cancelled in 2010 with no ships built), and the FFG(X) program, which to tried to reduce costs by basing them on an Italian ship design. All but two of the resulting Constellation-class frigates were cancelled, which ended up cost over a billion dollars each.
And the troubled modular littoral combat ships of the Freedom and Independence classes, which were built at least, but are being retired long before their projected end-of-service life due to huge maintenance costs and poor performance.
Now the DDG(X) program is imperiled by the Trump-class “battleships.” The Trump administration actually announced these nuclear-powered gold-plated monstrosities would replace the DDG(X) program, but since the Trump ships are completely unworkable, it is likely that lots and lots of money will be spent and nothing will get built.
So rather than fixing something that has admittedly been a problem for decades, Trump’s policies hamstringing the DDG(X) program and the Ford-class aircraft carriers will certainly make things even worse.
That seems to be the general trend across the board. Why should the Navy be an exception?
The trouble is, the Navy is always fighting the last war. I am not a Naval Expert, but I get the feeling carriers are obsolete. Projecting power with airplanes is good, but one hypersonic missile could send the whole thing to the bottom. So are “drone carriers” the future? Who knows. The Navy sure proves it doesn’t. What with them actually taking trump battleships seriously and wasting money on them. Who are the battleships, er..battling? What is their mission? Big guns are not the last war, or even the last last war. They’re WWI.
I believe this has been a cause of anxiety ever since an Exocet missile sent the HMS Sheffield to the bottom during the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas war.
Trump’s “battleship” is more of an oversized Guided-Missile Cruiser than a classic WWII battleship.
I know nothing about this subject and I’m going to commit the cardinal sin of repeating, from memory, something I saw on the internet so please be gentle :-).
This video pointed out that our current ships can’t easily reload at sea. Each ship only has a limited number of missiles and when they’re gone the ship has to return to a port to reload. The new Battleships are supposed to address this issue either by carrying a lot more missiles, or at least being able to stay on station longer by being resupplied at sea.
I just wanted to put that out there since the ship is supposed to address a real concern even though it’s been enshittified by Trump.
Maybe it’s time to move to an all-submarine navy.
WAG: Small submarine drone-carriers are the wave of the future
From that article:
Nope, they don’t pick and choose, they just violate all of them.
Thinking further, how do you deploy troops in this scenario?
WAG2: you don’t
Couldn’t the Navy then use the arsenal ship concept? I recall reading many years ago about the concept of a ship whose job it would be to solely pack hundreds, maybe even thousands, of missiles (that could be guided by other ships in the nearby fleet,) but would have only a crew of a few men, and avoid most of the manpower and other logistics problems of a battleship.
So, the flagship tells the arsenal ship, “Okay, fire a hundred Tomahawks at Iran,” and it does so, and then an incoming enemy antiship missile barrage is coming, the arsenal ship could also fire a lot of SM-2s and SeaRAMs, guided by the fleet’s Aegis.
Eggs, baskets…
No, they really can’t. The Navy could easily afford fucking up on a design or 2 in the aftermath of the Cold War without it being a terribly big deal. What it can’t afford is not having a single successful ship design to replace any surface combatant since the Cold War ended. Which is, amazingly, the situation the Navy has found itself in. @robby did an excellent write up on how the Navy has squandered the past 30+ years of ship designs. I’d only really add two things.
One is that the idiocy of the Defiant-class battleships, who’s only saving grace will be that they will never see active service, but will suck up billions of dollars and vital time isn’t restricted to the Defiant-class itself. They are going to be the high part of the high-low mix of obscenely expensive ships that, even if the systems needed for them to be effective actually existed (the railguns, lasers, hypersonic missiles and the advanced ammunition for the 5" guns don’t actually exist yet) would make the ships absurd overkill for any role they would actually fill. The official plan of the USN for the ‘low end’ of the high-low mix with the Defiant is now the FF(X), which is a barely modified Coast Guard Legend-class cutter that is barely armed, horribly unsuited for its planned role, and the words “modular containerized mission payloads” should have been setting off alarm bells for anyone remotely familiar with the failures of the Littoral Combat Ships that they are in theory going to be replacing.
Added to the problem of the Navy having to rely on the Arleigh Burke for missions that should be handled by smaller, less capable vessels that the Burkes are overkill for is the fact that not only is the Burke now a 40-year-old design that is having to cover the roles of cruisers, destroyers and frigates because the Navy hasn’t come up with a successful design for any of those types of ships in 40 years, US shipyards cannot build enough of them to fulfill the need for them. Sounds insane, but it’s true. Only 2 a year can be built in US shipyards, leading to the embaressing situation of South Korea having to offer to build up to 5 Arleigh Burkes a year in its own shipyards for the USN.
According to various reports, the U.S. Navy has plans to build 364 ships over the next 30 years, in response to the growing naval power of the People’s Republic of China. However, although the stated objective is to build at least 12 ships per year, these projects are currently experiencing delays due to various factors. For instance, only two U.S. shipyards—General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls Industries—construct Arleigh Burke-class AEGIS destroyers, but their combined capacity is limited to just two ships annually, well below the Navy’s projected demand.
In line with this, Jeong Woo-man, Executive Vice President of HD HHI’s Special Ship Division, stated that their facilities are capable of producing at least one 9,800-ton Arleigh Burke-class AEGIS destroyer per year, and that this capacity could be expanded to five units annually if cooperation with the United States deepens.
If you’re thinking surely US civilian shipbuilding capacity is still there and can be tapped to expand military ship building capacity, think again.
Cutting and pasting from what I wrote in the “Bring back the battleships?” thread in GD a couple of months ago:
You might think that hey, why surely these shipbuilding skills are being retained in the US by the merchant shipbuilding industry, right?
Ranked: The Countries That Dominate Global Shipbuilding
Yeah, about that. You might not be surprised that the US is no longer a dominant producer of merchant shipping. It might shock you just how far down the list the US is. Numerically we’re in 14th place. Doesn’t sound that bad, right? At least until you look at gross tonnage produced and % of the world market. The US produced 64,809 gross tons in 2023, with 0.1% of the world merchant shipping production. We barely managed to edge out Iran’s 64,760 gross tons.
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The battleships can’t reload VLS cells at sea either.
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The provisional figures are 128-200 VLS cells on the battleships on a 34,000+ ton hull, with a per unit cost that I don’t even want to think about, and the only slipways in the US that can currently build warships this large are the ones currently building nuclear aircraft carriers.
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The Arleigh Burke class destroyers that are being produced at 2 per year each have 96 VLS cells. So, 2 Burkes either have 1.5 times as many VLS cells or the same number of cells as one of these monstrosities. And one thing I can absolutely guarantee is that 2 Burkes are going to be a hell of a lot cheaper than one of these battleships. And can be at two places at the same time.
The biggest problem with the arsenal ship concept apart from all your eggs in one basket thing was and is that the limiting factor is the cost of the missiles, not the number of launchers. See where we are now in the war with Iran with the stockpiles of THAAD and Tomahawk missiles (which go in these cells) being heavily depleted because we’ve fired off well over a decade’s worth of production and are having to adjust our strategy (giving the benefit of the doubt to this administration by calling what they’ve done a “strategy”) because it is going to take many years to replenish the stockpiles so pointlessly squandered.
Add to that, the advantage of VLS cells is that you can already put whatever missiles in the cells that you want. There was nothing stopping the USN from loading all 128 VLS cells on a Ticonderoga-class with Tomahawks and calling it a day, while retaining the versatility of a ship with a full sensor suite, anti-submarine helicopters, etc. and just using it as a big Tomahawk launcher, then refilling it will a more normal mix of missiles in a friendly port. Oh, for the days when they could just pull up a friendly port, like, I don’t know, the one in Bahrain that now needs extensive repairs and is on the wrong side of the Hormuz Strait.
Oh yeah, the other nail in the coffin of the arsenal ship concept was that the end of the Cold War meant we didn’t need so many SSBN, so 4 Ohio SSBNs were converted to each carry 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles instead of Trident SLBMs at a per unit cost of $1 billion, which was still a hell of a lot cheaper than designing and building arsenal ships of dubious utility. And being the quietest submarines in the world at the time, made them much more survivable.
Actually, the US just doesn’t have the same shipbuilding capacity it used to. China makes an insane number of commercial ships and more tons of warships than the US.
The US makes less than one percent of the world’s commercial ships and may be number four for military ships.
Bill Toti used to be one of the hosts of the Unauthorized History of the Pacific War channel on YouTube. He was a captain of a submarine and then the commodore of a submarine squadron.
From May this year, he’s acting Under Secretary of the Navy, and he said his purpose was to revamp the ship building system.
The USS Abraham Lincoln will dock in Thailand tomorrow, near Pattaya, and the crew will have shore leave until Sunday. (Gift link for the New York Times article.)
Welcome news for the crew. Of course everyone should realize the whole crew can’t just lock up and leave for the week. They have to maintain something like one-quarter to one-third of the crew onboard at all times. The main reason for an extended shore leave is to ensure that everyone onboard gets some time off the ship.