We're just about getting to the point where our surface fleet will be a couple super carriers escorted by a few Littoral Combat Ships each, which lack even mission modules to make their bare-bones armaments sufficient for the purpose.
Our new Ford class super carriers are super expensive:
The Navy’s next-generation aircraft carrier is mired in a pattern of inadequate testing, developmental delays and cost overruns that may hinder its effectiveness when it joins the fleet, the Government Accountability Office says in a scathing report.
The USS Gerald R. Ford, which is still under construction, is now expected to cost $12.8 billion — a $1.3 billion increase since 2011, according to the report, released Thursday.
The higher cost comes as the Navy searches for ways to make a congressionally mandated $14 billion cut in the upcoming fiscal year as a result of the automatic federal budget cuts known as sequestration.
It's insane. It's like committing to designing and building a revolutionary new (and expensive) saddle after the invention of the machine gun.
If we have to build new super
I know. The Fords significantly increase sortie generation capacity. Which might have been really important before the proliferation of precision missiles and bombs, I suppose.
Add to this the LCS cost overruns that mean we don't seem to have the money to buy the mission modules that were supposed to be inserted into the big gaping holes in the LCS to make them real warships, and we have the ingredients for a fleet of misplaced quality and no quantity--the worst of both worlds.
We need to pick a number and build whatever mix of ships we need to reach that number given financial resources available rather than pretending that funding will come on the wings of Unicorns.
And no, drones don't save super carriers!
The current budget squeeze has revived the debate about whether to reduce the number of the Navy’s aircraft carriers, but the prospective addition of unmanned aerial vehicles to the flattop’s arsenal will make the ships even more valuable in coming years.
Seriously? Putting more of our aircraft eggs in fewer carrier baskets makes no sense at all. At least not in a world where enemies shoot back.
UCAVs in fact, along with precision weapons, make smaller and more affordable carriers more effective (and less likely to cripple our fleet if lost in battle).
