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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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As I’ve posted before:
The day of the aircraft carrier has definitely passed. The only thing they’re really good at is bombing poor people. Submarines are, without a doubt, better at naval warfare.
However, missiles don’t have unlimited range, and you have to get them within range of the target somehow. A surface ship can carry more missiles than a submarine and can replenish faster.
Also, much like you can’t win a war with aircraft, you can’t win a war with submarines. In order to take and hold ground, you have to land ground troops, which you can only do with surface ships.
Combined arms win wars, not wunderwaffen.
The thing is people dont know what style of surface fleet is going to be useful for actually securing the seas. We only know subs are still good as is. I suspect many very small, missile armed boats.
Swarms of small, cheap boats shooting cheap missiles are extremely effective against larger, more expensive targets. The problem with that model is that you can’t do “force projection” with 200 guys on 100 jet skis as well as you can with 200 guys on one big boat. By that, I mean you can’t sail from Iran to Hawaii in a jet ski.
So, you start looking at corvettes and coastal patrol craft, make a ton of compromises so it can do a ton of different missions on paper, and end up with garbage like the LCS that doesn’t do anything well. Those fuckers can’t even make it from San Diego to Hawaii on a single tank of gas because they wanted to squeeze a few more knots out of it.
I think, ideally, you have a wide range of vessels that can cover a couple different types of missions each, concentrating most of your effort on domestic coastal patrol craft that can prevent enemy infiltration of your coasts and corvettes that can take the fight to the enemy. If you intend to engage in ground combat overseas, you’ll need a fleet of amphibious landing ships. These I would split into two categories: the smaller category focuses on carrying landing craft that can establish a beachhead, and the larger category focuses on ships that can get really close to shore and deliver large quantities of troops and materiel at a time. The second category can be converted civilian ships, and thus you don’t need to maintain an inventory, just a thriving domestic cargo transport economy. The rest of your naval budget goes to submarines and hospital ships (as hospital ships can actually do good things unlike every other navy ship).
A side benefit to having lots of small ships vs a small number of expensive big ships is that you develop more effective leadership skills in more junior officers, as you can have a Lieutenant (I’m using US Navy ranking structure out of convenience) captaining a coastal patrol craft with a few dozen crew, which then translates to more effective senior officers. In my ideal socialist navy, there wouldn’t be an officer/enlisted split. You would just have different career paths
Sounds expensive. Why not just make one ship that can fill all roles and keep manufacturing costs down? Like the F-35.
They tried to make a ship that would cover about 1/4th of tasks. Effect was LCS.
Because then you end up with an aircraft carrier
LCS was a failure because Secretary of the Navy Mabus was a total fucking moron and had no business developing ships. Repeat that, Ad Naseum, for every Navy ship. The US Navy's Bureaucracy is more of a threat to the US Navy than China--and I'm not disparaging China's capabilities here.
There is room for a concept like an LCS, but it needs built on OSVs, which are basically oceangoing tugs with relatively big decks and open cargo bays as a baseline ship and different packages that can be installed. In other words, build Ford F150s and then carry what is needed on the backs of them, whether vertical launch systems, anti-sub warfare, replenishment, vtol drones, etc.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-littoral-combat-ship
The US Navy won't do it, because it's not "sexy" like the LCSes.