Posted on 06/20/2016 9:16:02 AM PDT by sparklite2
The U.S. Navy has fallen into a troubling pattern of designing and acquiring new classes of ships that would arguably best be left as single ship or at most in limited numbers. It’s also building several types of new aircraft that fail to meet specifications.
The Navy is developing a new class of supercarriers that cannot function properly, and has designed them to launch F-35 fighters that are not ready to fly their missions. This is all happening during an era of out-of-control budgets, which bodes poorly for American sea power and leadership ahead.
That the Navy is concentrating larger percentages of its total force structure on large, high signature and increasingly vulnerable ships endangers America’s future. Fortunately, there’s better options to the status quo if the Navy moves now.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalinterest.org ...
Unless you are in the business of building ships.....................
Sort of a sinking ready jobs program I suppose. Makes perfect sense to most government thinkers.
Well, we spent a lot on battleships prior to WWII. The leadership always prepares for the last war. We were fortunate 75 years ago in that we could quickly manufacture aircraft carriers. If we suddenly need to make whatever replaces or displaces aircraft carriers we could be in trouble as we no longer make much steel.
Electro motive launching systems are fubar and unreliable. It will cause many crashes and deaths of aviators.
The 2002 Millennium Challenge proved that carriers were extremely vulnerable.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2002/020906-iraq1.htm
Dude! It means lots of retirement jobs for Admirals and others involved in procurement. Get your priorities straight!
Will the designers of the Little Crappy flammable Ships
be used?
Or the ones who designed the F-35 guardian’s range to be
half the distance required to get to, and take out,
the Iranian (Obama’s) Silkworms?
WAKE UP, AMERICA.
We need cruisers with a big punch good speed and long range.
The Zumwalt class destroyer is another example. They were going to build 32 but now only 3. The most expensive destroyer ever built. 22.5 Billion for 3 ships.
Long-range Hypersonic antiship missiles used to be incredibly expensive. that is not true today.
even very poor coastal countries can now afford these missiles.
the new carriers are valuable only if they have new long-range robotic aircraft which keep the carriers very far offshore beyond the range of such missiles.
Production of those new robot aircraft was cancelled.
our carriers are vulnerable because they cant loiter super far offshore, manned aircraft don’t have the required range.
If oasshole keeps poking the russians in syria we will find out how vulnerable a carrier is in projecting force.
Drones and submarines waging war in the future? How do they take territory?
I remember when Sen. Gary Hart wanted to build much smaller aircraft carriers during the Reagan years.
Then Navy Secretary John Lehman called them, “Gary Hart carriers.”
What ever happened to the old “Arsenal ship” concept.
Stay well the heck off shore, pump out ~100+ missles. . .
The Navy is there to project air power and artillery or missiles so that the ground troops can get it.
To put it bluntly, we've underfunded the Navy for decades, so now we have to put up or shut up.
This, by the way, really is Bush's fault. He could have asked for all the funding needed to re-equip the armed forces after 9/11 but sought to fight on the cheap, delaying or cancelling program after program. There's no need for armor in the 21st century, right? My guess is we're in even worse shape than after Carter.
Not sexy enough I guess.
Setting aside who's asking for it...
Would this be a good idea? Along the line of the "escort carrier" principle in WWII? A workhorse that could provide helicopter and maybe VSTOL support, rather than a fleet-sized carrier?
I dunno, just asking, I'm sure that there are plenty of former navy FReepers that can weigh in. It just strikes me that lately we've been sinking money into smaller numbers of specialized WhizBangs, when what we really need is an abundance of Swiss Army Knives.
Actually, that was along the lines of what I was thinking. Or one of the idling Container Ships. . .
Designing ships around the F-35. Utterly idiotic. Besides the 35 being a national embarrassment and giving us the weakest air wing in US history, traditionally the plane had to adapt to the ship.
One does not attack a carrier. One may, if one is crazy enough, attack a carrier group but is almost certain suicide and will remain so for a very long time.
According to the article, anti-ship missiles have a longer range than the distance carrier attack planes can travel to a target and knock it out and get back to the ship. Also, with mobile launchers, they won’t stay there in place, anyway. Plus, firing salvos of missiles, the anti-missile shipboard defenses can be overwhelmed. Like the article also says, carriers are on the wrong side of physics and math.
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