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"sunk carriers, dead sailors"!

Well no, not really.

The Burke-class "Destroyers" are 90+% of the size of these Cruisers, newer, more capable and easier to maintain.

And that's the problem...we have an entire FLEET of what are essentially Cruisers. At 8,500 - 10,000 tons many of these ships are bigger than the Cruisers being retired and certainly as big as any Cruiser-class ship we've ever put to sea.

We have 60 in the water today and another 15 on the way.

What we NEED is 50-100 of what would have been called a Destroyer in any other era...but would now be called a Frigate. 4,000 tons with a crew of 120, VLS and all the new Aegis voodoo.

The National Security Frigate now being proposed by Ingalls would be an EXCELLENT choice, but alas the brass is wedded to the LCS concept.

You noticed that, huh?

And it's the manpower demands that are the US Navy's problem.

Back in the 17th Century when Samuel Pepys reorganised the Royal Navy he introduced the idea of rating ships into classes by crew size - even when that was changed to number of guns it amounted to much the same thing.

Now today Tico cruisers, Burke "destroyers" (and Burke derived ships of the Korean, Japanese navies) run 300-400 crew. Which isn't a pronlem for ROKN and JMSDF as they use these ships as cruisers.

There are actually destroyers these days - the large AAW "frigates" Spanish F-100, Dutch LFC, German F-124, Framco/Italian Horizon, and similarly sized British, Korean, Japanese ships actually called destroyers running crews of 200-250

Then these navies have actual frigates similar size but 150-200 crew, similar to the Perry's

Below them: "light frigates", 100-150 crew; corvettes with less combat capability and 50-100 crew

Below these surface combatants is the LCS 35-50 crew.

The future US Fleet: Cruisers and the LCS, Is everyone at BuShips completely stoned?

The Burke-class "Destroyers" are 90+% of the size of these Cruisers, newer, more capable and easier to maintain.

Remember that the Ticonderogas are really Spruance-class destroyer hulls with Aegis and larger CinC facilities. In fact, the first four were originally assigned DDG prefixes, which is why DDG-47 through DDG-50 were "skipped" and the Burkes started with DDG-51.

The last ships that could have been really considered "cruisers" and then only by a stretch of the traditional sense of the word were the Belknaps and Leahys. Even those started life as "Destroyer Leaders" (DLGs), commonly referred to as Frigates (until "Frigate" was applied to Destroyer Escorts). The last true cruiser was the USS Long Beach (CGN-9).

The big reason why the Ticos wear the "Cruiser" monicker is to keep the "Cruiser" name in Naval Service and permit at-sea surface combatant billets for O-6 SWOs.

The Ticos have a somewhat larger missile capacity (of negligible use in today's environment - if we want to rain massive amounts of Tomahawks down on an enemy the Ohio-class SSGNs are a much better option) and somewhat larger CinC facilities than the Burkes. But they also tend to be overweight and are at greater risk to combat damage (significant amount of aluminum in their structures, a pretty high center of gravity).

Going further, there are 22 Ticos left in the fleet (the first five, which didn't have VLS, were retired years ago) to support 10 (and about to be 9) active carrier strike groups. That's a hair over two ships per CSG. USS Port Royal is really messed up, as mentioned. USS Princeton was never quite right either after eating that mine in Desert Storm - I assume that she'll be one of the seven as well.

Given that additional Burkes are now being built, it seems to me that the Navy can absorb the "hit" from retiring these ships early. The overall capability is still there, just in a somewhat reduced state ... unlike say what the Royal Navy did to itself with ditching the Invincibles and Harriers/Sea Harriers.