30-Year Navy Plan Cuts Subs, Carriers

Newport News Daily Press ^ | 3/24/2005 | David Lerman

[Light Speed]

About halfway thru my 2 decade plus stint in the oil/gas fab sector...noticed a trend where Grays hairs went out one door with young kids coming in the front.
The quality of worked dropped off.
Management ran around with their hair on fire screaming.
Contracts were lost afterwards...as consortiums saw problems with *That shop.

We could never keep up with the steel shortage.
Crappy steel would show up from Brazil,Ukraine etc.
Then the Oil firms would see the metallurgy on them and go ballistic.....as critical medium numbers in their percentile were inconsistent.
Now we are doing metallury assay...ultasound inspection .
spending oodles of time to meet contract stipulations.

If Q.C. [Quality control] is not on the ball...all kinds of mistakes occur.
especially with *Stainless.
Where welder see's a 4 in Stainless pipe ...fits it..welds it.
Later...its the wrong grade.
Welders become paranoid after....won't touch nothing until God comes down to confirm its the right material given them.

To make a project succeed...you need the Gray Hairs calling the shots.
Experience = success.

[GOP_Party_Animal]

Okay you guys with more Navy smarts than me... How about the IOWAs?

My father, who served on the IOWA in Korea, has always maintained that they are still very practical capital ships. Newer power plants would drastically reduce crew and maintenance costs and may make them faster as well.

The 16" guns could accommodate sabots of smaller caliber JDAM-style warheads, making any target within 60 miles of the coastline eligible for a precision strike. No carrier pilots to risk, no Tomahawks getting shot down. The kinetic energy of that weapon would be nicely applied to the target. Cheap and effective.

Lastly, the armor on the IOWAs may not be the latest tank armor, but is still very effective. The rules of physics still apply; it would take an awful lot of pepper to put down an IOWA.

I think it's reasonable to say that these four ships could be modernized and put back to sea for less than the construction and operational cost of one CVN.

[Chode]

of course it is... but then the Navy didn't have NUKES in 1945 either!!! 8^)

[Prophet in the wilderness]

I was trying to see if anyone knew that correct quote or remembers it.

[tortoise]

MY COMMENT on this asserted development. How long then before we see Russian cruise missiles which incorporate this feature? And are we ready for it?

Our military systems increasingly rely broad-spectrum infrared imaging, exactly because it is essentially impervious to spoofing or jamming. RF has great range and is relatively cheap and simple, but it also has a lot of weaknesses. It seems obvious that this plasma technology would also interfere with RF technologies on the vehicle itself.

The trend in combat systems has been toward hyperkinetic platforms and infrared imaging precisely because there is little in the way of practical countermeasures. The plasma trick may allow the aircraft or missile to get closer before detection by ground-based sensor systems, but that is all. Our defensive missile systems would still be able to smack it down with ease. Against a modern US military, this technology doesn't buy you much. Against an adversary that uses older technology, it might buy you a good bit more.

[Paul Ross]

To make a project succeed...you need the Gray Hairs calling the shots. Experience = success.

Too bad the CATO-types disagree. They believe in "creative" destruction, "conceptual" economies, firing all the old "over-paid" farts, the innate superiority of "fresh" points of view (no matter how stupid, ignorant, etc), the "inevitable" adjustment of the market to fix such problems...

Completely anti-historical industrial nonsense, palmed off as wisdom. And these doctrinnaire types are running Wall Street....

[Chode]

i know... i's just bein a wiseass

[Arthalion]

Who in the Army has a laser energy weapon capable of bringing down an aircraft in flight. I hadn't heard that there was anything other than in the testing phase.

The Army has two tactical laser systems in a functional state that I know of right now. The Grumman THEL system has already been tested to shoot down incoming mortars and cruise missiles, and another larger system (can't remember the name ATM) recently brought down a complete missile. These systems work by superheating the rockets and mortars until a fuel or warhead breach occurs, and there's no reason to believe that such a tactic won't work on a fighter jet as well (it would be like having a hole blowtorched through your fuel tank in the middle of a flight).

The systems haven't been deployed yet, but they have been tested, verified to work, and found to be highly effective.

As for force projection, we'll just find other ways to do it, I'm sure.

[Arthalion]

No, the problems that obsoleted the battleships the first time around still remain, the biggest being the danger of ground to ground missiles. You're right that it would take a lot of flak to sink one, but it would only take a single, well placed cruise missile to send it to the bottom. When you have to get that close to the shore, targeting is easy.

The real fighting future of the Navy will lie in floating missile platforms and stealth ships.

[Mulder]

As this nation's manufacturing and technology base continues to be shipped overseas, and the turd-worldization of America continues, I'd be surprised if we could even field 5 carriers in 30 years.

[GOP_Party_Animal]

A single, well-placed cruise missile to sink an IOWA?

I suppose... if its warhead is nuclear. The ship's armor is designed to protect against hits from shells that are nearly of the same caliber that they use. A cruise missile traveling at 500 mph simply does not have the same penetrating power that a shell has at Mach 3. That's why the armor would be effective against anti-ship missiles, and the guns would be more effective against hardened shore targets than cruise missiles (provided the GPS guidance would work).

Besides, ANY ship today has to worry about a cruise missile attack, not just battleships. That's why God made Aegis cruisers...

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[lepton]

The main reason that Battleships were abandoned was that they were simply too expensive to risk using them and losing them.

We could easily put longer-range weapons on them, and Aegis-type systems to protect them, but they'd eat huge amounts of fuel.

One of the problems I've heard regarding upgrading the Battleships power systems is that we'd have to cut the armor open, and the type of armor has to be one piece - and we having no capacity to remake it.

[Paul Ross]

No reason to upgrade the powerplant of the Iowa class battleships...they already are able to easily keep up with the Nimitz class supercarriers. And they are already equipped with the Tomahawk boxes. And RAP/Smart rounds could easily give them an inexpensive, but devastatingly accurate punch with more clout than the Tomahawks.

At the rate the DD(X) ships are being priced upwards of $1.5 billion each, we could likely rehabilitate and update all four Iowas for less than the price of one DDX...for a similar punch as they promise...with more fuel efficiency and a more survivable platform to go in harms way. The biggest reason they were retired was because the powder satchels from the old WW-II days they were using has become unreliable...and needs to be replaced. They didn't want to fire up an assembly plant to replace their stockpiled old munitions!!