The US Navy’s Next Large Surface Combatant
The Diplomat,
by
Robert Farley
Original Article
Posted By: StormCnter,
10/30/2020 5:00:20 PM
What will the U.S. Navy’s next large surface combatant look like?
The USN has cycled through a wide variety of plans for its next generation large surface combatant, including both cruiser and destroyer projects. Thus far, three decades of thinking about replacing the Ticonderogas and the DDG-51 classes have resulted in the Zumwalts, a three ship class widely regarded as expensive curiosities, and a third flight of Arleigh Burke destroyers.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
chance_232 10/30/2020 5:30:25 PM (No. 590068)
Cruisers used to be small battleships. Smaller, faster and almost as heavily armed. Today, only the Russians have real cruisers. America's cruisers would be hard pressed to go up against the Kirov without support.
1 person likes this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
DVC 10/30/2020 6:03:51 PM (No. 590093)
Surface ships are a pretty mature technology. Not huge amount of room for "breakthroughs". Attempts at stealth seem interesting, but with zippo for funding, lots of the gee-whiz stuff never got built. For example, the Zumwalt class stealthy ship had a fancy new self-loading cannon, a 155mm ultra modern gun with all sorts of "magical tech" in it.
Minor issue....the ammunition which gives it the 'magic tech' advantages costs $800,000 PER SHOT. So, they cancelled the ammo contract, and now the only significant gun on the new stealthy ship has zero ammo.
Not a minor issue, a major issue.
You CAN get too fancy with new gee-whiz, how cool is that, stuff.
The stealthy stuff appears to work making the 600 foot ship have the radar signature of a 50 ft fishing boat. That's a pretty good thing. Dramatically shortens engagement range by enemy weapons, can't see it well from far away, so can't shoot it from far away.
Dems being unwilling to spend one red cent on military has been crippling, as usual.
2 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
DVC 10/30/2020 6:20:25 PM (No. 590114)
#1, our battleships and cruisers, 75 years ago in WW2, rarely engaged in sea battles, and the ones that they did engage in were only significant in the first year and a half or two years of the Pacific war while we got our aircraft carrier production line ROLLING. Once we had lots of new carriers coming into the Pacific, the other surface combatants were primarily for either antiaircraft protection of the carriers or gunfire support of the Marines landing on islands. At the end of WW2 we had over 100 aircraft carriers, 56 of them the large, modern, fast Essex class carriers. These, with their aircraft totally obsoleted the large surface combatants, battleships and cruisers.
Only in the Battle of Leyte Gulf was there significant surface gunfire warfare in late WW2 without aircraft being the primary USN weapons. The Battle of Surigao Strait was the last hurrah of the battlewagons, and a number of the old battleships that had been sunk at Pearl Harbor were there, refurbished to get their revenge and slaughter the Japanese Southern Force in the last major battleship to battleship gunfire engagement without significant air power that the world has seen. This was one of the subsidiary battles that are lumped into the huge, multi-day Battle of Leyte Gulf.
After that battle, we still had battleships, but they only were used for gunfire support, shelling shore targets. In Korea and Vietnam and the Gulf War, this was their mission. No surface battle today would be fought without major missile and aircraft components. Gunfire just is outranged by those weapons to the point of near uselessness almost all of the time.
4 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
Vesicant 10/30/2020 6:31:05 PM (No. 590123)
If the Navy has any sense, the next surface combatants will be drones. You don't have to be a submariner to know that surface ships these days are expensive targets, especially with smart munitions fired from tubes now reaching the 100+ mile range. So I expect the Navy will build more "littoral combat" ships it can name after LGBTQs.
2 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
bad-hair 10/30/2020 6:54:50 PM (No. 590146)
I thought it was the USS Jerry Nadler.
2 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
bamboozle 10/30/2020 7:52:14 PM (No. 590180)
When you walk on the deck of the USS Wisconsin at Norfolk, compare the huge complexity of the 16" batteries (range of 20 miles) to what are essentially steel boxes housing Tomahawk missiles (range ?400? miles or more). The main batteries require dozens of well trained sailors to serve the guns. The Tomahawk requires a guy to push the button. Warfare has moved on from the days of the battleship.
5 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
MDConservative 10/31/2020 12:32:23 PM (No. 590798)
Unlike anyone else, the US needs to blanket the globe. I'm not anti-defense...I'm anti-pork, and these have the earmarks. More big ticket items for several Congressional districts and states to partake, great to stimulate the economy, too. Later there will be the usual wailing about lack of enlistments and availability of sailors, meaning more incentives to keep the expensively trained volunteers. The days of drafting and assigning "cheap" 90-day wonders in this technological age are long over. Our global "allies" are doing what? Besides freeloading.
1 person likes this.
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