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Dysta -> RE: So which FFG(X) finalist design do you like the most? (2/21/2018 5:53:21 AM)
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It's no surprise that F100 is attractive to many people, but one of them address the real problem for US navy is they aren't building proper warships fast enough (not talking about LCS or OPV these kind of light-tons). 70 Burkes is surely more than many countries' navies combined, but station them all around the world is still far from adequate.
Also, it's no longer a Quality-Quantity debates, the technological gaps between major competitiors are getting thinner.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/navy-selects-five-contenders-for-lcs-follow-on-frigate-fight/
quote:
Fatesrider:
Specialty vessels are part of the package. A navy vessel almost never operates independently. They operate in groups, or fleets. It's a strategy that works well against various threats from direct to asymmetric. So you have dedicated sub hunter/killers, working with the SSN's that follow (or are under) every group or fleet, along with radar pickets to detect incoming threats that can hit those threats and reduce the number that get into the fleet. Each level is a specialty for a particular kind of ship, because a Navy isn't a bunch of ships each operating independently. It's a bunch of ships acting as ONE UNIT.
Multi-role ships are specialty ships in and of themselves. They're designed to augment areas of the operational fleet where weaknesses may be, filling in, albeit with less efficiency, for a lack of specialty ships.
So one ship does NOT need to "do it all" to survive. Not unless you only have a one-ship Navy.
The problem, however, is in the cost of the ships. Expensive ships that take years and years to build actually can be sunk just as quickly and easily as any modern ship that didn't cost nearly as much that was built much more quickly. He who gets the most ships in the water the fastest tends to win wars (at least on the oceans, which is probably still just as vital today as it's been before).
These ships are expensive. The U.S. can't afford to lose them. If someone can make 3 for the same price and in the same time, and the battle results in 1 of them being sunk, 1 severely damaged and the expensive one doing down, it's a major net victory for the cheap ships. The damaged one will be repaired faster, and and THREE MORE new ones can be made in the time it takes to replace the expensive ship - all for the same price. That's an advantage that is now 5:1 and not just 3:1.
Do that enough, and you've bankrupted the country with the expensive ships.
We need to learn to make our ships fast, and inexpensively. That doesn't seem to be much of a priority these days, mostly because I tend to think the Pentagon forgot the lessons of the past. One can only hope that major sea battles are a thing of the past, or else America is going to be seriously ****ed up by a bunch of cheap ships, even if we take them out by a 2:1 margin. That's because they can replace theirs faster and more cheaply than we can replace ours.
That's called the reality of war. The rest is window dressing.
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