FriedRiceNSpice
Major
Monkeys are vicious creatures. I remember a few years back reading an article about a monkey that escaped from a zoo in China and turned a young boy into an eunuch.
US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
Seems a group of Senators led by Senator Ted Budd are purposing something called the Airpower Acceleration Act would. This looks to increase the F-15EX fleet to 329 aircraft and expand the size of the fighter fleet to 1,558 aircraft by 2035 (currently 1,298 active). This would be achieved by bringing F-15EX production to 36 aircraft per year. They also talk of buying more F-35's per year.
Lethe
Captain
I think it is probably a mistake to regard this as a serious shipbuilding program, when all indications are that it either originated from Trump's mind as his personal folly, or was at least invented to appease him. If one of the key challenges facing the United States Navy, by its own account and that of most of its advocates, is its relatively low number of hulls by historical standards, building a handful of enormously expensive "battleships" is a good way to exacerbate the problem. It is perhaps ironic that a project of this nature would be more plausible under a Chinese flag, where it would be executed alongside a diverse array of smaller modern surface combatants.
That said, several curious and apparently contradictory features have recently emerged in the public domain. First is the apparent intent to award the construction contract for the first BBG(X) in April 2028, and to commence construction in August 2028. Notably, both of these dates are within Trump's term of office and are plausibly a function of his desire to ensure the program is pushed through. Second are , to the effect that a high level of design maturity is desired before construction begins. Needless to say, this is at least in tension if not outright incompatible with the intent to begin construction by August 2028, which would imply that the program had proceeded from ideation to construction in roughly three years.
Third is Phelan's recent rumination on the prospect of nuclear power, having previously ruled that out. Given the size and role of BBG(X) nuclear power would seem at least a plausible option, and its omission from the ship's otherwise luxuriant specifications was therefore somewhat curious. Plausibly, nuclear power was a necessary sacrifice to make it even remotely plausible to get the first ship under construction within Trump's term of office. Nuclear reactors are the very definition of long-lead items, and a new or modified reactor design would further complicate matters. Before his sudden dismissal, Phelan also ruminated on the potential involvement of Japanese or Korean shipbuilders in USN shipbuilding programs, which was apparently a .
Putting these pieces together, one possible narrative is that overgrown toddler Donald Trump did not like being told that his ship cannot be nuclear-powered if he wants it anytime soon, nor does he want to hear about woke nonsense like risk mitigation and design maturity. He certainly does not want to hear about the potential contributions of foreign shipbuilders in bolstering the nation's shipbuilding efforts. He wants the big, beautiful and preferably nuclear-powered ship bearing his name to be far enough along before he leaves office that it can't be cancelled. Plausibly, Phelan's mistake was in being too deferential to the reality that exists outside of Donald Trump's insatiable ego.
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Lethe
Captain
The one thing I take issue with from this account is the word "deliver", which surely can't possibly mean what it ordinarily means in this context, i.e. to deliver a ship from the contracting yard to the navy. To award the contract and start construction on the first BBG(X) in 2028 as described in the budget materials () may be an implausibly ambitious folly, but to deliver the first BBG(X) boat in 2028 would require Trump to enter a TARDIS and travel back in time to his first administration to get the program underway then. Trump clearly lives in a world of his own imagination, but surely even he can't be so delusional as to think that Phelan or anyone else can conjure a battleship from nothing in three years.
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Not even China can deliver a battleship in three years…
If the design was already set in stone and you pay the big money for Jiangnan Shipyard to drop everything else and put all effort in getting a 35k ton battleship built, they may be able to get it done in 3 years, just barely.
Back during WW2 US could build an Iowa in 3 years, with war time level economy and all of society effort it should be possible, of course today's US is very different from 1940s US.
Ah yes, the Nobel Peace Prize should be renamed to "Bombed The Most Schoolchildren Prize" if Drunktard Pete gets the award.
Riding the wave of that bullshit news about America dropping $17 billion to revive battleships, I'm here to unload a hot take I've been sitting on for a while: the biggest problem facing BBG-1 — the bastard child of DDGX — during its design and construction phase is that the US military appears to have not completed a single new-design major surface combatant in the last 15 years (LCS doesn't count because that piece of shit isn't even in the running), which means the entire talent pipeline — from the bureaucrats signing off, to the product managers, to the engineers — has suffered a complete generational collapse.
With FFG-62 declared a program failure and jettisoned at light speed by Hegseth, the last time the USN actually completed a new-design surface combatant program you'd have to go all the way back to the 2000s with Zumwalt and Ford. As for the last surface ship overall design program fully led by a US government/military-run design bureau, you'd have to go back even further — decades — to DDG-51.
Looking back from where we stand now, the consequences of dismantling the design bureaus have been far worse than anyone imagined. Sure, the galaxy-brained gentry over at the Zhihu "think tanks" can argue that the three-generation reign of the Burke class is simply because our great American empire, with its invincible ships and cannons, could wipe out the CCP and crush Iran like taking candy from a baby (we now know that's not the case), and therefore had absolutely no need for updates. But even if that were true, the question now is: if DDG-51 hasn't managed to complete its grand mission of annihilating the CCP, flattening North Korea, Iran, and other dictatorial regimes within its entire service life — and at this rate, it looks like it never will — then what the hell comes after?
In truth, America had two chances to answer this question. The first was Zumwalt — whether you're talking about the original Ultra Max Pro top tier tech proposal or the actual bait-and-switch poor man's version that actually got built, if you look past the cost overruns, the delays, and the gutted specs, at least we got a product out of it. The only problem is there weren't nearly enough of them. The second was Constellation, which turned into an outright shit-show of a program.
For the US military, Constellation should have been a golden opportunity: through multinational cooperation, America could have used this program to rebuild its processes and pathways, and in doing so, regrow its own product manager and engineer corps. In hindsight, for the first batch of Constellation, the USN shouldn't have issued any detailed requirements at all — beyond designating certain subsystems and a broad specs framework, they shouldn't have provided any guidance whatsoever. After all, a bunch of bureaucratic hacks who've never seen a new ship program through a full cycle from start to finish in their entire careers trying to direct every phase of design and construction was always going to be pure fart-gas. But that's exactly where things went to shit.
After the dissolution of the in-house design bureaus that interfaced directly with end users, the pure-contractor-subcontractor development model might still be manageable for something on the scale of LCS, but it was clearly out of its depth when faced with a framework of Constellation's magnitude. As for what kind of mess a new-design DDGX or this so-called battleship will turn into, even the US military has a pretty good idea. Last year, Guancha.cn translated a news piece about NAVSEA attempting to claw back its surface combatant design capabilities. But a vision is just a vision. The Constellation shit-show has come to an end, and the product manager and engineer pipeline still hasn't been rebuilt. Even if you've got the bureaucratic apparatus on paper, the people who actually do the work are still nowhere to be found. And here's the truly tragic part: real-world engineering capability doesn't magically ride your inflation rate into the stratosphere.
I'll say it plainly now: from the perspective of overall naval ship design capability, the US military's own engineer teams currently sits somewhere below Russia and above India. And if you're operating at India's level, you'd better start thinking the way Indians do — because the world is, in the end, a material one. If you refuse to face the hard reality that your engineers has already deeply dissipated, then I'm afraid we're about to watch a comedy encore where FFG-62's turned right back into the lumber to build it.
With FFG-62 declared a program failure and jettisoned at light speed by Hegseth, the last time the USN actually completed a new-design surface combatant program you'd have to go all the way back to the 2000s with Zumwalt and Ford. As for the last surface ship overall design program fully led by a US government/military-run design bureau, you'd have to go back even further — decades — to DDG-51.
Looking back from where we stand now, the consequences of dismantling the design bureaus have been far worse than anyone imagined. Sure, the galaxy-brained gentry over at the Zhihu "think tanks" can argue that the three-generation reign of the Burke class is simply because our great American empire, with its invincible ships and cannons, could wipe out the CCP and crush Iran like taking candy from a baby (we now know that's not the case), and therefore had absolutely no need for updates. But even if that were true, the question now is: if DDG-51 hasn't managed to complete its grand mission of annihilating the CCP, flattening North Korea, Iran, and other dictatorial regimes within its entire service life — and at this rate, it looks like it never will — then what the hell comes after?
In truth, America had two chances to answer this question. The first was Zumwalt — whether you're talking about the original Ultra Max Pro top tier tech proposal or the actual bait-and-switch poor man's version that actually got built, if you look past the cost overruns, the delays, and the gutted specs, at least we got a product out of it. The only problem is there weren't nearly enough of them. The second was Constellation, which turned into an outright shit-show of a program.
For the US military, Constellation should have been a golden opportunity: through multinational cooperation, America could have used this program to rebuild its processes and pathways, and in doing so, regrow its own product manager and engineer corps. In hindsight, for the first batch of Constellation, the USN shouldn't have issued any detailed requirements at all — beyond designating certain subsystems and a broad specs framework, they shouldn't have provided any guidance whatsoever. After all, a bunch of bureaucratic hacks who've never seen a new ship program through a full cycle from start to finish in their entire careers trying to direct every phase of design and construction was always going to be pure fart-gas. But that's exactly where things went to shit.
After the dissolution of the in-house design bureaus that interfaced directly with end users, the pure-contractor-subcontractor development model might still be manageable for something on the scale of LCS, but it was clearly out of its depth when faced with a framework of Constellation's magnitude. As for what kind of mess a new-design DDGX or this so-called battleship will turn into, even the US military has a pretty good idea. Last year, Guancha.cn translated a news piece about NAVSEA attempting to claw back its surface combatant design capabilities. But a vision is just a vision. The Constellation shit-show has come to an end, and the product manager and engineer pipeline still hasn't been rebuilt. Even if you've got the bureaucratic apparatus on paper, the people who actually do the work are still nowhere to be found. And here's the truly tragic part: real-world engineering capability doesn't magically ride your inflation rate into the stratosphere.
I'll say it plainly now: from the perspective of overall naval ship design capability, the US military's own engineer teams currently sits somewhere below Russia and above India. And if you're operating at India's level, you'd better start thinking the way Indians do — because the world is, in the end, a material one. If you refuse to face the hard reality that your engineers has already deeply dissipated, then I'm afraid we're about to watch a comedy encore where FFG-62's turned right back into the lumber to build it.
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As you correctly point out, those ships were build during World War II in which the economy was basically 100% dedicated to wartime production. On top of that, despite having less advanced technology, the US capable of incredible industrial feats. In many ways the US of World War II closely resembles China today in terms of industrial dominance. They really didn't have any competition in terms of industrial output.
I remember a quote from a German POW who had been transferred to work in the United States. I believe they had worked in some capacity at the Krupp steelworks before joining the war effort. The journal he kept mentioned something along the lines of the steel plant in the US he witnessed had more waste steel produced in a week than Germany produced in a month.
Kind of off topic, but I find World War II information interesting, and I think US of that period and China of today have many parallels in terms of industrial dominance.