TDLR: We shouldn't be building this stuff. Go ahead and downvote this. Mods, you do you.
But why are we doing this? Why are we cheering this?
What is the purpose of a navy? To defend our coastal waters, to defend our trade routes, to impose our will militarily from the seas. Sailors, if your Naval Academy days tell you to correct this, have at it. Our coasts are well defended with the current fleets. That's true both in the Atlantic and the Pacific. In fact, we're more than adequately equipped to control the waters of both N. and S. America.
Achievement Unlocked! Monroe Doctrine: Naval :check:
Can we defend our trade routes? Sure. That's what the 11 aircraft carriers we have do. We patrol the Panama Canal, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the Straits of Malacca. The world's trillions of dollars of maritime trade are all protected at enormous expense by the US Navy. We saw that when the Yemenis got frisky and started shooting. No one else had anything meaningful to contribute. It was the US Navy that did the work defending the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. About the only thing we really don't do is control the Arctic and that's because nothing goes there except Russian icebreakers. Fine. Let them have that.
Can we impose our will from the seas? Yes. We have 11 aircraft carriers. If we want to put ordnance on a target anywhere on the planet, we can do it. We park a carrier offshore, and it's a floating airbase. We use them to threaten other countries all the time. Even with regular rotations for maintenance, we maintain this capability all over the world.
Achievement Unlocked! Gunboat Diplomacy :check:
But here's the catch.
High-speed, high-accuracy missiles negate the surface fleet. We've watched this in Ukraine. Cheap, unmanned drones and precision-guide anti-ship missiles cut Russia's Black Sea fleet to shreds. Russia has pulled it all back to the Russian coast because the Ukies keep blowing holes in these very expensive ships with explosives they taped to dinghies patched up with Flexseal. ANYONE can do this. The Yemenis were launching cheap homemade rockets at our carrier battle group. We sent billions to clear that Strait out. They spent a few yuan on Chinese parts. Well, Iran spent it, but you get the point. We don't win that battle in the long run - and we certainly don't win it against China or Russia.
We don't build battleships anymore. Air power negated them in WW2. They were relics of the Age of Sail when you put cannons on a boat in order to bombard fixed positions. For the last 80 years, we used planes to do that. Now we use precision-guided missiles and drones.
You keep missile cruisers to launch your own missiles. You keep destroyers to take out subs. Even the carriers are seen as giant floating targets now. Other tech simply does everything they do better and cheaper.
These things cost a king's ransom. And we're broke. Every ship we build costs billions. The new aircraft carriers are $10-15 billion. Subs are $2+ billion. Then you have to pay to operate and maintain them. The cost to do that is eye-watering. Now that's a cost of doing business if you're protecting your coasts and protecting your trade routes. But for the last 80 years, we've used our navy as a force multiplier so we could be the global police and fight more than a few totally unnecessary wars for the bankers and the Israelis. We can't afford that.
Eisenhower warned us about the Military-Industrial-Complex in the 1950s. We all know the message. Money, prestige, and tradition are powerful corrupting forces. We end up maintaining what is effectively a wartime military at wartime cost when we don't need it. We support legacy technology meant to win the last war we fought instead of innovating to fight real and current threats. We're wasting money so that rich boys can play with expensive toys.
There's no near-peer threat. No one else has a Navy that's even worth talking about compared to ours anywhere in the world except China. And that Navy is guarding China's coast. It's all in the South China Sea guarding what they call their first island chain. To the extent it's threatening anyone, it's our allies and friends in Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc. In fact, it's helping us guard maritime trade because China's just as interested in protecting those trade routes to the Chinese coastal cities as we are. While they have a lot of ships, the Chinese Navy has no combat experience and no long naval tradition to draw upon. Could they fight? The only ones at risk of finding out anytime soon are the Taiwanese, and we've turned that island into a fortress. Remember point 1? Missiles. Lots and lots of missiles and drones sink surface fleets. If there's no competition, why are we feverishly building like there is a need for it other than some admiral's vanity?
If Trump wants to build a few modern subs to modernize the nuclear triad and our own hunter-type anti-submarine boats, I have no problem with that. Russia's subs are quite capable and the Chinese diesel attack subs are apparently quite advanced as well. Nukes are a cornerstone of diplomacy with other nuclear powers. That makes sense. If he wants to maintain the 11 carriers with China threatening SE Asia and our allies there, I'd support it.
But these surface vessels... we've been playing around with new destroyer classes and littoral combat ships for over a decade. The Navy keeps fumbling these and wasting money. Remember the "stealth" ship that was supposed to be the next evolution LCS? They'd planned for hundreds of them. We got 3. It was the Navy's version of the F-35. It was an industrial scale dine-and-dash and the taxpayer got stuck with the check.
I'm hearing about lasers. They're impractical on water. The Navy's own public research shows it and shows why. Atmospheric water, either as sea spray, water vapor, or rain scatters the beam and limits the range. The same for their rail gun experiments. The tech itself blows the barrels of these guns to shreds within a few dozen shots. They're trying to replace large ship-borne guns with these and they're not practical for that. Use missiles and drones. They're cheap and effective.
We're hearing we need these for ship defense now: anti-missile, anti-drone, etc. You know what they use for airborne drones in Ukraine? Shotguns. We're back to flak cannons with airburst munitions. Cheap and effective. We can use missiles to shoot cruise missiles. Hypersonics, there is no defense for. Neither lasers nor rail guns promise to change that.
These people have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on this over decades. The Japanese took what we made available to them and have a functional prototype right now on a ship. They're upgrading our F-16s to be more functional and working on a version of the F-23 we never should have scrapped too. Why? Because our defense contractors and the Congresscritters they bought off are robbing us blind rather than delivering what they promise on schedule and on budget.
TDLR: We shouldn't be building this stuff. Go ahead and downvote this. Mods, you do you.
But why are we doing this? Why are we cheering this?
What is the purpose of a navy? To defend our coastal waters, to defend our trade routes, to impose our will militarily from the seas. Sailors, if your Naval Academy days tell you to correct this, have at it. Our coasts are well defended with the current fleets. That's true both in the Atlantic and the Pacific. In fact, we're more than adequately equipped to control the waters of both N. and S. America.
Achievement Unlocked! Monroe Doctrine: Naval :check:
Can we defend our trade routes? Sure. That's what the 11 aircraft carriers we have do. We patrol the Panama Canal, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the Straits of Malacca. The world's trillions of dollars of maritime trade are all protected at enormous expense by the US Navy. We saw that when the Yemenis got frisky and started shooting. No one else had anything meaningful to contribute. It was the US Navy that did the work defending the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. About the only thing we really don't do is control the Arctic and that's because nothing goes there except Russian icebreakers. Fine. Let them have that.
Achievement Unlocked! Safe Passage: Maritime :check:
Can we impose our will from the seas? Yes. We have 11 aircraft carriers. If we want to put ordnance on a target anywhere on the planet, we can do it. We park a carrier offshore, and it's a floating airbase. We use them to threaten other countries all the time. Even with regular rotations for maintenance, we maintain this capability all over the world.
Achievement Unlocked! Gunboat Diplomacy :check:
But here's the catch.
We don't build battleships anymore. Air power negated them in WW2. They were relics of the Age of Sail when you put cannons on a boat in order to bombard fixed positions. For the last 80 years, we used planes to do that. Now we use precision-guided missiles and drones.
You keep missile cruisers to launch your own missiles. You keep destroyers to take out subs. Even the carriers are seen as giant floating targets now. Other tech simply does everything they do better and cheaper.
Eisenhower warned us about the Military-Industrial-Complex in the 1950s. We all know the message. Money, prestige, and tradition are powerful corrupting forces. We end up maintaining what is effectively a wartime military at wartime cost when we don't need it. We support legacy technology meant to win the last war we fought instead of innovating to fight real and current threats. We're wasting money so that rich boys can play with expensive toys.
If Trump wants to build a few modern subs to modernize the nuclear triad and our own hunter-type anti-submarine boats, I have no problem with that. Russia's subs are quite capable and the Chinese diesel attack subs are apparently quite advanced as well. Nukes are a cornerstone of diplomacy with other nuclear powers. That makes sense. If he wants to maintain the 11 carriers with China threatening SE Asia and our allies there, I'd support it.
But these surface vessels... we've been playing around with new destroyer classes and littoral combat ships for over a decade. The Navy keeps fumbling these and wasting money. Remember the "stealth" ship that was supposed to be the next evolution LCS? They'd planned for hundreds of them. We got 3. It was the Navy's version of the F-35. It was an industrial scale dine-and-dash and the taxpayer got stuck with the check.
I'm hearing about lasers. They're impractical on water. The Navy's own public research shows it and shows why. Atmospheric water, either as sea spray, water vapor, or rain scatters the beam and limits the range. The same for their rail gun experiments. The tech itself blows the barrels of these guns to shreds within a few dozen shots. They're trying to replace large ship-borne guns with these and they're not practical for that. Use missiles and drones. They're cheap and effective.
We're hearing we need these for ship defense now: anti-missile, anti-drone, etc. You know what they use for airborne drones in Ukraine? Shotguns. We're back to flak cannons with airburst munitions. Cheap and effective. We can use missiles to shoot cruise missiles. Hypersonics, there is no defense for. Neither lasers nor rail guns promise to change that.
These people have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on this over decades. The Japanese took what we made available to them and have a functional prototype right now on a ship. They're upgrading our F-16s to be more functional and working on a version of the F-23 we never should have scrapped too. Why? Because our defense contractors and the Congresscritters they bought off are robbing us blind rather than delivering what they promise on schedule and on budget.
We shouldn't be building this stuff.