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RobertC

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The navalist forum Cdr Salamander featured an assessment by "Robert Work spent 27 years on active duty in the Marine Corps as an artillery officer. He was the undersecretary of the Navy in the first Obama administration and the deputy secretary of defense from 2014 to 2018, serving alongside three different secretaries across two administrations."
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It was not yet apparent the DD-21/DDG-1000 was too expensive to build and the Navy would never see the 32 ships that were projected to replace the Spru-cans and Shermans. The design for the Seawolf-class SSN also proved too expensive to build, so it was truncated to three boats and would be replaced by the Virginia class, the first of which was laid down in 1999.

Not to beat a dead horse, Sal, but these failures had less to do with the transformation problem and more to do with a failure in cost-informed ship design and inability to contain operating costs. That’s the original sin, and one the Navy continues to commit.
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The next important shift in the Navy’s post-Cold War sediment occurred in 2016, when the Navy published Force Structure Assessment with a battle force inventory target of 355 ships. There was one big problem with this assessment…and it was a big one. The FSA was neither vetted nor approved by OSD. This pissed off the powers to be in the Pentagon. So much so that OSD ultimately took away the responsibility and authority to perform force structure assessments from the Department of the Navy.

So, here we stand, seven years later, with no approved force design or battle force inventory target. And, As Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, wrote, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” (this is now commonly believed to be a misattribution, but if the shoe fits….)
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But it’s important we acknowledge all is not lost. The U.S. Navy is still the finest Navy in the world. It may have lost a step, but it’s hard to think they’ve lost their lead. For goodness sake, we plan to maintain 10-12 CVNs with the most capable and lethal airwings in the world (although this is an opportunity cost we should think hard about). We are going to have 80+ Burke-class DDGs, with nearly 8,000 VLS cells among them. We have over 50 SSNs and SSGNs, including three Seawolfs and 21 Virginias (6 more building and still more planned). And they are all crewed by the finest sailors anywhere.

So yes, the Navy is comfortable with…and perhaps even a bit arrogant… about these ships. Mainly, Mr. Lipton, because they are the best in the world and form the basis for a world-class sea control battle force. And guess what? The PLAN is intent on challenging us for command of the seas once the Taiwan question is settled. We’d be happy to have this Navy when and if they do.
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SlothmanAllen

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Registered Member
First pictures of the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile. Could be a test article or even just a mock-up, but these are the first pictures of the weapon realeased.

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Hypersonic-Missile-USAF.jpg
 
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