The Navy has concentrated more capability – and therefore more cost – onto a smaller number of ships, and that force design may not work well in a high-end fight against a peer adversary, the under secretary of the Navy said last week.
And more risk. I noted this trend to capital ships long ago.
Although expanding the carrier force to 12 as if the carrier is the best sea control platform in order to reach the 255-ship goal is a mistake, as I've long argued.
And this poses a problem for reaching a 355-ship fleet that goes beyond blaming funding:
A lack of funding will prevent the U.S. Navy from maintaining a planned fleet of 355 ships, Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Robert Burke said.
The Navy has 290 ships, with 300 projected by the autumn of 2020, but maintaining the ships, and expected declining budgets in future fiscal years, are a cause for concern, Burke said Friday.
We need to pick a number and build toward it. In a fight where losses are expected, quantity has a quality of its own,
Of course, with so many large and capable warships with decades of service left, it is difficult to reach the number chosen. We can't just build small ships because we have to build larger ships to replace the aging large ships already in the fleet. And it is a waste of money to decommission large ships with plenty of service life left in them.
And there is the elephant in the room--the large carrier task forces that consume 32% of the Navy operating cost (up from 14% in the 1980s). But rather than having another pointless carrier debate, we need a seapower debate to resolve that.
Evolving to a high-low mix will be hard. But we need to do it. Or at least make progress toward it.
