US/South Korea exercises in March. (US Navy)
James Seddon, Task & Purpose: The Navy Needs To Stop Buying Big Ships To Do All Its Small Jobs
As a Navy “blackshoe” surface warfare officer, I saw firsthand how our fleet’s leaders have more missions than they have ships to fill them. I watched flag staff in a command center wrestle with operational problems that would have been easier if they’d had more hulls, more ships, of just about any kind of surface combatant. The Navy’s go-to workhorse destroyers are too expensive to fill the gap, and its recent small-ship programs have been plagued with problems.
There is one possible solution: Steal a page from the Russian navy’s shipbuilding strategy and focus on raising a fleet of corvettes — the diminutive warships, not the sportscars that newly minted ensigns dream of sticking in their driveways. Alas, the U.S. Navy seems to be going in the opposite direction, turning small-ship plans into big, costly headaches.
To understand the way forward, first you have to dig into how the Navy got into this fix.
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WNU Editor: A good summary on why the US Navy si addicted to building big ships.
Better chances of promotion if you command many people and a large ship (or factory) than a small ship.
ReplyDeleteIt is stupid, but even analytical people fall into that trap.
A very large corp. once started a project to triple is warehouse space at a location. They framed it and then other people woke up. the skeleton sat for a long time. The project was not about business projections but empire building.
The biggest problem of US is to rebuilt his "military industrial base" which is full of "hole". The scary thing is, it will take a long time for doing so.
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