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2005-04-19 Home Front: WoT
Navy of Tomorrow, Mired in Yesterday's Politics
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Posted by too true 2005-04-19 9:06:06 AM|| || Front Page|| [11136 views since 2007-05-07]  Top

#1 All of these cold hard facts and troubles aside, asthetically the DD(X) is one pug fugly boat.
Posted by JerseyMike 2005-04-19 9:45:07 AM||   2005-04-19 9:45:07 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 Ironically, with the proliferation of light anti-ship missiles, after the first sea disaster we will once again have to take our WWII battleships out of mothballs. It's a purely practical thing: you can't hide forever, so you have to just assume that you're going to take some lumps. Even if ships are invisible, *somebody* is going to figure out a way to find them, and then, without armor, bye-bye. Technology is all well and good, but sometimes you just have to bare knuckle fight. The US defeated Japan because they only had a few, high quality ships; whereas ours were mass-production hunks of junk, but a LOT of them.
Posted by Anonymoose 2005-04-19 9:54:03 AM||   2005-04-19 9:54:03 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 I disagree Anonymoose...I don't think the ships mass-produced in WWII were "hunks of junk". We gave Japan hell with the fleet we had then. And regardless if the DD(X) or the CVN-21 is built or not, we could zap any countries navy with what we have right now.
Posted by shellback 2005-04-19 10:10:11 AM||   2005-04-19 10:10:11 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 The Navy's new destroyer, the DD(X), is becoming so expensive that it may end up destroying itself. The Navy once wanted 24 of them. Now it thinks it can afford 5 - if that.

Sounds like a variant of the "Bay Bridge Syndrome".
Posted by Bomb-a-rama 2005-04-19 10:14:55 AM||   2005-04-19 10:14:55 AM|| Front Page Top

#5 Article: The Navy now hopes to build five DD(X) destroyers, one a year, at a total cost of $20.6 billion, including research and development.

25 units at $3.3b a pop totals $83b. Spread out over their 30-year life spans, that comes to about $3b a year of capital expense for the entire force. I think we can afford this.
Posted by Zhang Fei  2005-04-19 10:39:04 AM|| [http://timurileng.blogspot.com]  2005-04-19 10:39:04 AM|| Front Page Top

#6 I think it was Adm. Raeder, in late 1943 or early 1944, who said something to the effect of 'I knew the war was lost because America was building ships faster than Germany could build torpedoes.'

Not Rolls-Royces, but not junk - more like Model T Fords. Cheap, no frills, but got the job done. My father was an engineer on them in the North Atlantic during that time.
Posted by glenmore  2005-04-19 10:42:31 AM||   2005-04-19 10:42:31 AM|| Front Page Top

#7 ZF the Fed's don't do capital budgets, too hard.
Posted by CPA Barbie 2005-04-19 11:18:43 AM||   2005-04-19 11:18:43 AM|| Front Page Top

#8 The US defeated Japan because they only had a few, high quality ships; whereas ours were mass-production hunks of junk, but a LOT of them


Liberty ships were junk. Carriers were a mixed bag: there were escort carriers who were junk and then there were the big ones like Lexington or Enterprise. A thing to notice is that in the hard fought battles between Coral Sea and Guadalcanal American carriers ever seemed to be able to take more punishement than the Japanese ones before being disabled or sunk (could have been the effect of better damage control in American ships) and after suffering damage American carriers were returned to service much faster than Japanese ones (look at Yorktown versus Shokaku and Zuikaku after Coral Sea). This can be attributed to better shipyards and to the efforts of the people working in them but it is not impossible that the design of American carriers allowed for easier and faster repairs.

About battleships the South Dakota class ships could make mincemeat of "normal" Japanese battleships (cf the sinking of the Hiei around Gauadalcanal). They would have probably been outclassed by the Yamato and Musashi but by then the Americans were no longer interested in the battleship arms race: they were building carriers so fast that if had the war lasted one year longer Americans could have invaded Japan just by walking on a bridge of carrier decks extending from California to Japan.
Posted by JFM  2005-04-19 11:26:36 AM||   2005-04-19 11:26:36 AM|| Front Page Top

#9 "Unless the costs are controlled, some in the Navy and the shipbuilding industry say, the better alternative may be to finish none of them and skip to the next-generation destroyer."

Maybe I'm missing something, but how is that going to fix the problem long-term? Any next-generation whatever is going to cost even more than a current whatever. Somebody is going to have to pay for it.
Posted by Xbalanke  2005-04-19 11:29:54 AM||   2005-04-19 11:29:54 AM|| Front Page Top

#10 'Moose: not true about ship quality. Japan had the best-trained carrier pilots in the world in 1941, and cruisers and destroyers with the world's best surface ship torpedoes, and used them all quite effectively in the early months and years of the war. However:

-- Japan's battleships were only fair to middling compared with ours because they lacked radar gun directors, advanced gyroscopic fire-control computers, and remote-powered gunlaying (I'd take an American Iowa or even a South Dakota against the much-vaunted Yamato in a straight-up fight any day);

-- Japan never got an improved carrier-based fighter plane into production, and never produced trained pilots in sufficient numbers to replace their losses at midway;

-- they never developed a decent medium AA gun like the 40mm Bofors or a dual-purpose secondary like the 5"/38, with the result that Japanese AA was not enough to protect their ships once the Zeroes got knocked out of the sky (by contrast, a US Sumner-class DD (1944) had more AA "throw-weight" than some prewar battleships!);

-- Japan never organized a proper convoy system, and Japanese ASW was, to put it charitably, pathetic;

-- the much-vaunted I-boat submarines were never properly used against Allied shipping;

-- Japan never built enough carriers after the start of the war; and,

-- in the Japanese Navy, damage control was considered a second-class specialty, and wasn't developed to the high art it became in the USN (see, e.g., USS Franklin)--with the result that Japanese ships sank from damage that would have been survivable for a US ship. (Don't forget, too, that Japan couldn't build replacements as fast as we could.)

There's a lot of information on these points at this site, including a fascinating "world's baddest BB" comparison.
Posted by Mike  2005-04-19 11:44:18 AM||   2005-04-19 11:44:18 AM|| Front Page Top

#11 Yes the high tech is great - and sorely needed to maintain our edge. But...

Damage control is what worries me about the new ships. A crew of 125, after taking crew injuries, will be hard pressed for DC action to sustain the ship's in the event of a powerplant or other central system casualty. And God help them if they take water integrity hits - DC for that is a matter of lumber, patches, clamps and muscle; the latter of which they will be missing with all the "deck apes" (Bosun's Mates for you non-swabbees) that these new ships supposedly will not need.

These new ships seem nice, but also seem very brittle. And with fewer of them, they bceome all that much more important and precious, like the "Big Carriers" of WW2.

Color me doubtful on this whole thing.
Posted by OldSpook 2005-04-19 12:11:10 PM||   2005-04-19 12:11:10 PM|| Front Page Top

#12 I have to question the viability of spending 3.15 billion on what is essentially an expendable screening ship. Hell, the CVN Ronnie Regan only cost 4.5 billion...
Posted by mojo  2005-04-19 1:00:43 PM||   2005-04-19 1:00:43 PM|| Front Page Top

#13 This is like spending 1.5 billion per aircraft which can only bomb at night, is a siting duck if spotted and a crew of 2 is forced to fly alone for 20 hours.
Posted by Shipman 2005-04-19 1:04:01 PM||   2005-04-19 1:04:01 PM|| Front Page Top

#14 First was "fly-by-wire" now its "sail-by-wire" - the crux of GMD > space- and high- atmospheric laser defense backed up by hi-tech BMD, which means that, in the long run, all the US armed services have to do is clean up the mess once GMD and "Metal Storm", etal. gets thru with 'em. The Commies know GMD means they and their nuke bully stick is history, finis, goners - 9-11 and WOT is not somuch about Radical Islam, but the Left's and Commie's "final conflict" and struggle to conquer America and Western DemCapitalism before GMD kills the Leftist-Socialist-Communist universe! Radical Islam are just PC, PDENIABLE, DIVERSIONARY PSEUDO-SPETZNATZ, A PRE-CONVENTIONAL "SAPPER-COMMANDO" SELECTIVE MIL STRIKE!?
Posted by JosephMendiola  2005-04-19 10:06:01 PM|| [http://n/a]  2005-04-19 10:06:01 PM|| Front Page Top

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