Posted on 04/12/2018 9:11:52 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
We’re going to need them.
Good move. Though less capable, the FFGs were retired at too early an age years ago.
Too late for Spruance/Kidd.
Don’t forget the old Gearing class!
Forget making more copies of the ill-conceived Zumwalt. That thing belongs in the same display case with the city softball shorts worn by the White Sox in the 70’s.
The FFGs were retired because the hulls were literally worn out.
Even with life extensions, we would have been decommissioning Spruance/Kidds, at the latest, in 2019. Same reason - the hulls would be worn out.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the Gearing wouldn’t be good either. Not economically viable to upgrade it to where it could provide significant firepower or fight in sync with the rest of a modern carrier battle group - and without that, it is a gaping hole in CBG air defense and a munition magnet.
If war comes, and I believe it will be a naval war, we will need every hull we can send into harms way. We will need the ships and men to fight them. We will be turning yachts into gunboats. cruise ships into troop carriers, container ships into carriers (Drones & helicopters), and museum pieces into seagoing ships. The war be US vs Red China. With Japan and India playing a role (maybe Russia will join with China?) England and France will stay neutral—is my guess.
I just want to see more Balao-class submarines back in service.....
This is good to hear.
Now all they have to do is fix the massive training failures, not to mention spare part problems. Then they will actually have to find the deployable bodies to man the ships ...
And meanwhile, NONE of the Little Crappy Ships will be able to make a deployment this year due to poor material conditions (i.e., broke or never actually worked), none of the miraculous ASW or MIW modules are operationally functional, and hiccups in the specialized training pipeline. Recommend all take a look at today’s edition of CDR Salamander. When senior personnel know the truth and refuse to acknowledge it, they are part of the problem, not the solution.
Then why were they bought up or given to navies all over the globe? I thought they were retired because there was a cost to upgrade missile systems and because at the time the navy was capped on the number of vessels.
That is the bigger issue.
All the fancies gizmos in the world don’t help you if you are not able to get out of the way of a supertanker.
What we really need to do is take and run with the Arsenal Ship concept.
Put a couple of those with each CBG, and we’ll have a good chance of defeating anything that attacks them.
A step toward cutting USN’s losses on the LCS?
Um, most of them weren’t picked up by foreign navies. The supermajority were scrapped.
Turkey got eight from the US Navy and ended up having to completely rebuild them including replacing the hull plating. They could have had more but after realizing they’d basically bought the equivalent of a car that needs a complete frame off restoration they decided they didn’t want any more.
Poland got two and they’ve found they needed rebuild as well. Another “thanks but no thanks” situation.
Bahrain got one and didn’t want any more. Same thing with Pakistan - got one, supposed to get six, didn’t want any more. Egypt got six and last I recall was looking at decommissioning them as unserviceable soon.
You may be seeing a pattern.
The rest of the 51 OHP FFGs were scrapped or are to be scrapped. As I posted a couple months ago:
Some of them actually had hulls worn so thin (remember, this class was basically unarmored) that at the time they were decommissioned you could dent the hull with your fist or punch through it with a screwdriver. The shortest service life of one was about 15 years and they weren’t designed to take tech upgrades either.
Some of the few in better condition were sold off to foreign navies. Most were so bad off that there was no point to keeping or selling them and they were just scrapped. Of the 51 that served in the US Navy, we only have 12 in the mothball fleet - when they looked at reactivating 7-8 of them last year, they discovered that they would basically have to rebuild the ships with new hull plating and massive internal retrofits, which would not make economic sense. We were going to give two from the mothball fleet to the Mexican Navy and two to the Thai Navy, but during the examination prior to the transfer, the ships were found to be beyond repair and all four have been sunk as SINKEX targets or are awaiting disposal.
Yep.
5.56mm
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