The SteelNavy.Com Message Board: Re: The Navy was finished way before BBGX

The Navy never had strategic vision. We had a "strategic adversary." The Cold War went on for more than 40 years. We got very good at countering them. After that ended, we truly had no competative adversaries. "From the Sea" was ordered of the Navy by politicians. They demanded the Navy "justify its existence." They wanted to know what it was needed for, and why it should have a budget:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/44642730?seq=1

The Navy came up with that. No one can predict the future, not even you. Even if it could be forseen that we would eventually have "an enemy," who that specifically was, and the exact nature of the threat they would present was unknowable. In the mid 1990s, no one had heard of or seen an antiship ballistic missile. "Expected threats" were "big fleets of some sort," and not necessarily carrier based like our own.

The enemy which showed up was Al Qaeda. They were not a naval power. The Navy took a back seat with the budget. With time, those in power realised that Al Qaeda was diminished, and China was rising. We did our "Asia pivot." Even then, while focus had now changed, how to confront the problem was not at all obvious, nor was budget all that readily forthcoming. We "tried ideas." I do not agree with your list of failures. Even the Zumwalts have provided us with working experience with new technologies which has better informed decision making. You must also account for the fact that our ballistic missile subs needed replacement, and they were given the highest budget priority. The Columbia class consumes 40% of our ship building budget. This nation's strategic nuclear triad is given the top spot on the list of "mission needs."

I have told you before that the mid-90s was 30 years ago. 30 years from now will be the mid-2050s. Tell us all exactly who our chief opponent will be, and exactly what threat they will pose...naval, land, or even space based...and the exct force composition we will need to successfully counter that, and how that force will align with the nation's political and diplomatic strategies.

And if you can't do this, then what the heck are you complaining about?

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I have to hand it to you that you don’t give up hope. The Navy lost billions in investing in hulls like LCS, San Antonio and Zumwalt. Game over. Distributed this or that does not really matter when you produce 300 missiles a year and the Chinese produce 300 missiles every two weeks.

I will bet a week’s pay few in the Navy 30 years ago or even today read Mahan. “ From the sea” and “In From the sea” were the nails in the coffin. The Navy lost strategic vision, investment dollars, cohesion and 30 year of time. No hull can bring those assets to the table.

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Until the announcement of this thing, I had a nearly religious faith the we might yet "pull a rabbit from a hat," and fix up the Navy. Distributed Lethality is exactly the asymetric answer to China. It entails cheaper weapons, which we have the capacity to produce, and in quantity. And numbers win wars. It allows us to endure attrition and survive.

Since the carrier group structure is still also very useful and necessary, the new general purpose escort in the form of DDGX was also welcome news to me. It offered future growth which the Burke hull is no longer capable of. Between this upgrade to our carrier groups, and the investement into USVs and UUVs with suitable affordable manned accompanyment, it looked to me like we were on exactly the right track.

Now, there's this thing. If it gets going, it will be the ruin of the US Navy. We barely have enough budget to keep DDGX alive. This will replace it outright. There will be no "still keeping DDGX on the drawing board as a backup." This will tie up our resources on a wild goose chase that won't produce needed near-term results, and as the article noted is most likely to end up canceled, or severely truncated in numbers. Just a waste of time and resources. It kills the general purpose escort program we now need even more desperately to escort this thing on top of our carriers. It is ridiculous.

My former optimism is gone. If I see this thing actually ramp up and get going, then I will abandon what hopes I had. Distributed Lethality by itself is wonderful, but as noted, not enough. The existing carrier force is also necessary. This will destroy that. I may well live to see incompetence (at many levels) destroy the US Navy. It was certainly "fun while it lasted."

Chinese is not a fun language for most westerners to learn. Tonality is an extremely unfamiliar aspect. I suppose I could be dead before that really becomes an absolute necessity. A silver lining in everything.

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Here, another interesting article about the BBG(X) aka Defiant class aka Trump class:

The strategic logic and industrial peril of Trump’s battleship plan for the US Navy

The interesting final sentence:
"If industrial realities don’t halt the BB(X) project early on, then it’s quite likely future administrations will cancel, and a contingency plan is needed."

According to the article, the best contingency plan would be to continue the development of the cheaper and fast to built DDG(X).

The article discusses e.g. that this class is an departure of ‘distributed lethality’ concept - which would make the class a high priority target.

Compared to a Chinese Type 055, the BBG(X) cannot ship that much more missiles (16 more cells in the VLS plus the 12 CPS missile launchers), i.e. two Type 055 would be superior. It is high likely that China can built more than two Type 055 (or a future large PLAN destroyer) in the time the US is building one BBG(X).