US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

RobertC said:

SWO veteran proposes lesson-learned from China Preserving Peace Through Naval Power (Type 22 rationale and design reprised)

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I do not think small missile boats is the right approach for the US Navy since most of the operations it wants to conduct will be done far away from US shores.

RobertC said:

However as the navalists at Cdr Salamander keep moaning A Constellation of Challenges, with Emma Salisbury - on Midrats! the USN is struggling to build its new frigate from an existing design base.

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One of the main issues for the US Navy, the reason why it has less operational ships than it should have, is the failure of the frigate program. They took the Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates out of service without having a replacement for them. The later LCS program was also an utter failure. There is no reason why this cannot be fixed, US allies have several decent frigate designs, including the FREMM. If need be they could also have repurposed a US Coast Guard hull design and turned that into a frigate.

The other problem the US has is their cruise missiles i.e. the Tomahawks are obsolete. As is the Harpoon. New programs to design replacements for both missiles are necessary.

RobertC said:

Meanwhile its sibling service the USCG is having a sad because U.S. Coast Guard Arctic Presence Goes Up in Smoke As Icebreaker Healy Suffers Fire

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Nothing new here. The US icebreaker fleet was always a bit of a disaster. Canada, Norway, have decent patrol icebreakers. Finland also designs and builds icebreakers. If the US wants to solve this problem it is possible. Just order the icebreakers from someone else and equip them with your own equipment. I think the shipyards in Finland are mostly without orders for example.

RobertC said:

And the USCG has fallen victim to the USN disease

Awarding FPIF new-design contracts and then shifting builders post-award is a sure-fire method for increasing costs while extending schedules. And this contract is no exception.

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Drats.

SlothmanAllen said:

Hiring and retaining workers seems like a big problem for them in general and while they try to paint shipbuilding as a "good" job I think it really struggles to be worthwhile career in Western nations.

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From what I have read elsewhere ever since they stopped providing shipbuilding workers with proper pensions and started switching them to 401ks to save money the amount of shipyard workers started falling off a cliff. Sending them home during COVID-19 did not help either.

Overbom said:

the quickest solution would be to turn to Japan and S.Korea to build their naval ships. yes, it's a humiliation, but sometimes you gotta sacrifice your dignity..

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Obviously, if there was an urgent need for these ships, there would be no question. A lot of the industry in Japan and Korea was built to sustain US wars in Asia. Despite the harping on China, there is no immediate sense of conflict. Even with the feigned urgency over Taiwan, there is an overarching of “we can take it or leave it” attitude in the US mindset, which is why Taiwanese politicians are so afraid of being abandoned.

Is it common for Aircraft Carriers to have boats on deck? I assume they must be using the carrier to move the boats to wherever the carrier is goin.

gelgoog said:

One of the main issues for the US Navy, the reason why it has less operational ships than it should have, is the failure of the frigate program. They took the Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates out of service without having a replacement for them. The later LCS program was also an utter failure. There is no reason why this cannot be fixed, US allies have several decent frigate designs, including the FREMM. If need be they could also have repurposed a US Coast Guard hull design and turned that into a frigate.


From what I have read elsewhere ever since they stopped providing shipbuilding workers with proper pensions and started switching them to 401ks to save money the amount of shipyard workers started falling off a cliff. Sending them home during COVID-19 did not help either.

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Moreso than anything, the business case is simply too imbalanced. Without any real civilian side work, then the shipyards are geared solely towards military production. All the contractors are publicly owned companies with shareholders demanding big returns (Look at LMT's 10 year numbers). If you want to build smaller boats, then only a large number over a long period of time will deliver the desired returns, problem with long timelines is that the opposition has completely changed in that timeframe. Then the alternative is massive contracts (Zumwalt), but they become albatrosses in times of austerity.

The other thing that we have to realize is that China is full of failed projects: too ambitious, took too long, etc. We just don't hear about them as much because they are not too open about it, and the government is able to accept the cost of failure. If a project in the US fails, it will be a public embarrassment that threatens electability of the ruling party, legal battles, shareholder battles, etc.

As is apparent in this forum, the US military/civilian acquisition organizations and their industrial and political partners have, for the last few decades, dug themselves into a hole and, not only they can't get out, they can't stop digging.

supersnoop said:

The other thing that we have to realize is that China is full of failed projects: too ambitious, took too long, etc. We just don't hear about them as much because they are not too open about it, and the government is able to accept the cost of failure. If a project in the US fails, it will be a public embarrassment that threatens electability of the ruling party, legal battles, shareholder battles, etc.

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Not in the Chinese naval sector. At least not recently. The Chinese are way more incremental when developing ships. They also test things exhaustively on land based test rigs before anything is ever put onto a ship.

At best you might claim the Type 051B and such ships from three decades ago were failures in that they resulted in a single ship being built. But back then the program was seen as an insurance in case the gas turbine destroyers were a failure. The steam turbines they developed for propulsion also ended up being used in the carrier program. Since the gas turbine destroyer program was a success the steam turbine powered destroyer ship designs were cancelled. This is totally different from how US naval shipbuilding has been done.

Why the hell is Constellation getting a full sized SPY-6 plugged in? Does frigate needs to be AEGIS?

TK3600 said:

Why the hell is Constellation getting a full sized SPY-6 plugged in? Does frigate needs to be AEGIS?

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I am not sure about the size, but aren’t AESA radars like SPY-6 becoming the standard for modern naval vessels.

From what I understand, SPY-6 is scalable to the platform so they likely wouldn’t be the same size as those on Burke III’s or the notional DDG(X).

We can argue acquisition dysfunction but my choice for putting frigates at sea quickly and cheaply was Spain's F-100. Already had Aegis combat system (SPY-1D radar, Link-16) integrated with Raytheon LF sonar, 48-cell VLS (SM-2 and Harpoon) and two twin-tube OTST (Mark 46) plus propulsion isolated on anti-vibration mounts, ballistic resistant steel in hull and an ASW helicopter (SH-60). Yeah the Helge Ingstad incident indicated some damage control improvements were needed but this ship had minimal training and logistics impact on existing USN resources. Instead the USN wanted to roll their own and now is facing another LCS/Zumwalt acquisition fiasco.

WRT having other nations build ships for the USN, Congress has laws against that. Those other nations aren't partners, they're vassals.