All pretty much moot for the Army is still having teething problems with the hypersonics which same will be passed to the Navy who will have to adapt to it sea duty. Hopefully.
I will give you argument right back at you , why are not the Zumwalts forward deployed ? Why do you think Congress halted the purchase maybe because cost was escalating out of control? And a good thing they did because that duck can’t float reliably.
Its not that Congress is against revolution , Congress is against waste and their mission is (or at least was) to spend national treasury wisely Zumwalt was an unwise buy because The Navy went full throttle with untested revolution and then could not control the expense.. So chop. That is why Congress now mandates all proposed major infrastructural equipment is to be tested ashore before being given the green light to design in and install. If it doesn’t work ashore it damn well won’t work at sea. Congress did not say it could not be revolutionary infrastructural equipment but it has to work consistently and be affordable to maintain.
Wait until when the Ford’s operational bill is made public and then ask was revolution worth the expense?
You are correct The Navy no longer designs internally but turns to the public sector.. The last internal design was the AB destroyers. The Constellation is a foreign design which beat out other public design offerings probably because of expense and many other factors. The Navy has to get back designing their own ships and placing the design out for comment and then bid . If the design ages or does not work as expected or even industry offers a new bread box of reliable revolution you design something else. Open architecture, plug and play are solutions but that increases the price tag in build. You can check with Ralph on that.
Congress did not get The Navy into the fix it is today. They are at fault only because they trusted The Navy that it knew what it was doing. And to be honest The Navy has not known what to do with itself since end of Cold War. China gave them a wake up call.
Zumwalt was more expensive than the old Arleigh Burke design - and it got even more expensive, when the number of ships was reduced to 3. Apparently old people prefer old designs from their youth...
The US Navy has a severe problem, because it fails to continuously develop new ship types, but instead continuous to built old designs.
That is the reason why a design like a Zumwalt appears revolutionary, whereas in reality it is only similar in many aspects to designs of other navies.
The Zumwalt was designed as a replacement for the Spruance class. It would have been - if it would have got it complete radar set - a word-class anti-aircraft, anti-ship, anti-land-targets and anti-submarine design.
A simple gun/missile monitor would have been a very specialised, in most cases completely useless design.
The hypersonic missile launchers replace the 155 mm guns - they will keep the Mk 57 VLS! That means they will have 80 normal VLS cells PLUS 4 hypersonic missile launchers!
Responses