A 200 mile 5 inch is an incredible tool for cheap and devastating fire support of marines ashore.
It lets you do fun thing like cover close to 80% of Somalia with cheap pinpoint fire support just the size a grunt needs.
It realistically lets you cover almost every inch of land from Mexico City south through Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, etc all the way south to Columbia.
Every inch of the Philippines, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, England
It lets you cover all the apace in Egypt where people live. It lets you pound Damascus all day long. Or Paris, Berlin, and if you live in Spain, you better not stray far from Madrid.
In Vietnam, everywhere we had troops would have been covered. Ask any nam vet who got naval gunfire support how much they loved it.
It’s a cheap effective tool that the Navy badly needs.
Ok, I’ll even give you that it could do all that. Cool Beans!
However, You sound like a wife who continually buys new clothes and shoes because they are on sale.
Don’t we have other weapons already on line—Apaches, A-10s, F111s, F18s, MA1 Battle tanks, the new howitzers, all of which are equipped with smart ammunition—that can support a land force?
And putting a big capital ship within 200 miles of land-based missiles and planes doesn’t seem like a good tradeoff of risk to me.
I mean, do we absolutely have to have every weapons system known to Man or Capt. Kirk’s Starfleet? Or can we survive without another pair of Jimmy Choos shoes?
At some point in time we conservatives have to confront the issue of an ever increasing budget for the defense department vs. the reality that we’ll probably never need to bombard 90% of those locations you mention from the sea.