Perhaps rather than a "High-Low" mix, the Navy needs a "Fast-Slow" mix? Nuclear cruisers/destroyers and resupply vessels for CSGs, conventional for amphibious groups and commerce escort.
Big/Small, High/Low, Fast/Slow will all be the same by a matter of degree. Nuclear for the carrier has many benefits improving the cost benefit. With directed energy, the case again build for a nuclear escort, but there is still a tipping point, and in the end a cost in quantity and manning.
Commander, you’ve done the republic a service by translating Congressional Budget Office prose into something a person can actually feel in their chest, which is more than can be said for most of what emerges from that building. The Dock Twelve point deserves to be read aloud at every shipyard groundbreaking between now and 2056, if only as a reminder that America’s entire nuclear surface fleet ambitions currently rest on the good behavior of one dock, which is either impressive planning or a very expensive game of Jenga. Your airwing arithmetic on the Ford comparison is the kind of correction that should embarrass whoever let that comparison stand uncorrected this long, though embarrassment has never been a renewable resource in Washington. As for the Mark 41 density upgrade sitting there unused on every Burke headed into the yard, I share your bewilderment entirely. Some opportunities are so obviously worth taking that watching them go unclaimed stops looking like an oversight and starts looking like a considered decision, which is somehow worse.
1. As with CVNs, any cost comparison between nuclear and conventional propulsion needs to include the added oilers…and their escorts.
2. Strategic mobility is undervalued by Goldwater-Nichols. A CVN with a BBGN escort can move 700+ nm/day. A CVN tied to conventional escorts is good for ~500nm/day.
3. We need a second yard building nuclear combatants. The Nimitz-class CVNs are facing a serious block obsolescence issue. Not to mention having a 10-carrier Navy against 15-18 carriers of need. And HII needs the competition.
4. NAVSEA needs a brain transplant. NAVAIR has its problems, but the ship community seems clueless when it comes to systems engineering.
5. Acccording to AvWeek, the Navy is requesting bids for a next-generation SAM family that can be multi-packed in Mk 41 VLS cells.
5. The NMM family, yes. They plan to have a common upper stage with interceptor unit, used on several different missile bodies. There are four missiles in concept (including one, designed for underwater launch), one of them would be a replacement for SM-2/PAC-3 MSE, being medium-range missile, capable of double-packing into Mk-41 cell. Another is ESSM replacement, a short-range missile, capable of quad-packing.
The quad pack is not an ESSM replacement in mission capability. Roughly the equivalents are: the quad pack is the MR SM-2 replacement. The dual pack is a SM-6 ER replacement and the single cell is a 21" diameter SM-3 B2A replacement.
Notably, so few ESSMs have been shot in the PG and RS the last few years compared to Standards that one has to wonder if the Navy should even be buying them anymore.
TLAM-N was certified for both Mk-36 (ABL) and Mk-37 (VLS). The BB system was essentially four DD fire control / launcher (2x ABL) units. Probably should add also CCS Mk-1 and Mk-2 if memory serves me right.
Buy 500 Marauders from Saronics. A mix of loadouts, they can build 20 PER YEAR NOW. After deal with Hyundai, 500 per year. 128 VLS cells in four containers, or . . . $15 million a copy. We can never have enough VLS cells, or magazine depth - ALSO at sea replenishment! No more $25 billion warships, of any type, the world has changed. Or $2 billion destroyers . . . it's so damn dumb!!
the money is of course, a grave concern always....but, the TIME needed to field even a reasonable portion of the ships planned should be of STAGGERING concern. China ain't waitin.
agreed, the idea is not to match China in shipbuilding, it's to transcend their advantage. make it a negative . . . become the world leader in AUTONOMOUS SHIPBUILDING. Anduril is making some cool subs by the way, same issue, $10's of millions vs $billions. 100's vs a handful of deployable ships. And we can ramp up in times of war, the most important metric of them all.
Well, duh - however you (and most of those expressing opposition to the battleship idea) are completely missing the point. These ships are only incidentally intended as weapons of physical war - they are intended as weapons for psychological war. Having one sail into your harbor makes a point - and the fact that they're easy targets has nothing to with that.
I'm going to challenge your math because you forgot one thing: Aviation gas. a BBGN is a tempting target, and will have to fly her ASW helicopters (and hopefully someday her SV-22s)--that burns AV gas--JP 5. you have to CONREP for the AVGAS, just like a CVN. I'd love to see what the CONREP rate is for AVGAS alone, and if it looks like the CONREP rate for DFM if she were conventionally powered vice a Nuke. My guesstimate is that they are similar. I also appreciate CBO's unwillingness to hedge on future oil prices to inform their cost offset predictions.
Technical note: AVGAS (and MOGAS) is not JP-5. I think the last AVGAS requirement was for the S-2 Tracker. MOGAS lingered on in the Amphib fleet for a while longer. I want to say the LSTs were the last ships with MOGAS pumprooms. For a while the Marines also would carry some MOGAS in drums after the pumprooms were decommed.
Surface navy had P-250 firefighting/dewatering pumps that used gas in cans for a while longer.
Back in the day, AVGAS was treated as an explosive. I’m told that when RQ-2 Pioneer UAVs were in the Fleet, the fuel supply was mounted on quick-release davits so the entire tank could be jettisoned overboard.
Two thoughts: 1. The term Achilles Heel doesn’t begin to state the problem. Every ship inbound or outbound In Chesapeake Bay becomes a potential Campbelltown. 2. Since L-M has this wondrous new VLS design, why aren’t we backfitting every Burke with them? Not to mention change orders for every one not yet at that point in construction.
Agree with most of this. We do need a large surface combatant, but maybe a cruiser vs a battleship (I know the politics for the next three years won't allow that.) I also don't think we need CPS on a surface combatant. As a weapon system it's overrated. It carries a few thousand tungsten cubes (I have a few) that work great against unhardened surface targets, but not so much against buried targets. Finally, every time a hypersonics guy said they have a pK of 1.0, I wanted to smack him. Russian Kinzhals have proven the point.
There was always the worry, now amplified by the presence of drone swarms and hypersonics, that CVs of today are the BBs of the WW 2 era in terms of vulnerability. When you combine that evolving asymmetry with the high cost of a ship that can only be one place at a time, the hill seems to steepen.
A Large Surface Combatant is not needed. The SSBN is our capital ship. With the state of our Navy it is unwise to pour time and money into one big beautiful boat.
There is a certain minimum number of ships the USN needs to be a world-wide presence. How many, is something we can debate, but the Lehman/Webb number was 600. It sure ain’t 290. How many of the 310 missing ships are large surface combatants? Three?
The imperative is to get hulls in the water. If your BBGN is a 160 shot battery, then four Burkes are better. Four DDGs are a disbursed 340 shots, plus three extra drone/helo decks and four platforms that can tow a sonar.
Building a new Arleigh Burke-class (DDG-51) guided-missile destroyer currently costs $3 billion per ship. Today’s report shows that building a BBGN will cost us $235 billion per ship. For the price of one BBGN we could have Seventy-Eight DDGs.
Ask for the big BB dollars, then spend them on a multi-year shipbuilding plan which speeds up the Burkes and builds Heritage-class cutters for the USN. (How many diesel engines can you buy for the price of one nuke?) Now, let’s toss in a few bucks to keep the Grifter-Class BBN on the planning board, but fund cutting steel on more of the ships we are now building.
BBGN will never be built. But the real story of the FY 2027 shipbuilding plan is the extension of building ABurke III procurement past 2037 now encompassing 2038-2056. 38 more for a total of 80!!! That means the USN will still be building Burkes long after Im dead if their plan actually becomes reality.
Because Iowa-class hulls are impossible to recommission. Their equipment wasn't serviced for decades. There are no spare parts for most of their systems left. Most importantly, the last generation of sailors that worked on them are already old mens, and as one of those battleship sailor noted, "you don't want old men like me training rookies in things that he already half-forgot".
"...See the good stuff you get for free by reading CDR Salamander every day? "
well duh! yeah!
Perhaps rather than a "High-Low" mix, the Navy needs a "Fast-Slow" mix? Nuclear cruisers/destroyers and resupply vessels for CSGs, conventional for amphibious groups and commerce escort.
sounds like twice the RDTE for first ship.
Big/Small, High/Low, Fast/Slow will all be the same by a matter of degree. Nuclear for the carrier has many benefits improving the cost benefit. With directed energy, the case again build for a nuclear escort, but there is still a tipping point, and in the end a cost in quantity and manning.
Commander, you’ve done the republic a service by translating Congressional Budget Office prose into something a person can actually feel in their chest, which is more than can be said for most of what emerges from that building. The Dock Twelve point deserves to be read aloud at every shipyard groundbreaking between now and 2056, if only as a reminder that America’s entire nuclear surface fleet ambitions currently rest on the good behavior of one dock, which is either impressive planning or a very expensive game of Jenga. Your airwing arithmetic on the Ford comparison is the kind of correction that should embarrass whoever let that comparison stand uncorrected this long, though embarrassment has never been a renewable resource in Washington. As for the Mark 41 density upgrade sitting there unused on every Burke headed into the yard, I share your bewilderment entirely. Some opportunities are so obviously worth taking that watching them go unclaimed stops looking like an oversight and starts looking like a considered decision, which is somehow worse.
1. As with CVNs, any cost comparison between nuclear and conventional propulsion needs to include the added oilers…and their escorts.
2. Strategic mobility is undervalued by Goldwater-Nichols. A CVN with a BBGN escort can move 700+ nm/day. A CVN tied to conventional escorts is good for ~500nm/day.
3. We need a second yard building nuclear combatants. The Nimitz-class CVNs are facing a serious block obsolescence issue. Not to mention having a 10-carrier Navy against 15-18 carriers of need. And HII needs the competition.
4. NAVSEA needs a brain transplant. NAVAIR has its problems, but the ship community seems clueless when it comes to systems engineering.
5. Acccording to AvWeek, the Navy is requesting bids for a next-generation SAM family that can be multi-packed in Mk 41 VLS cells.
5. The NMM family, yes. They plan to have a common upper stage with interceptor unit, used on several different missile bodies. There are four missiles in concept (including one, designed for underwater launch), one of them would be a replacement for SM-2/PAC-3 MSE, being medium-range missile, capable of double-packing into Mk-41 cell. Another is ESSM replacement, a short-range missile, capable of quad-packing.
The implications of the sub-launched version are…interesting. I can think of several nasty applications.
The quad pack is not an ESSM replacement in mission capability. Roughly the equivalents are: the quad pack is the MR SM-2 replacement. The dual pack is a SM-6 ER replacement and the single cell is a 21" diameter SM-3 B2A replacement.
Notably, so few ESSMs have been shot in the PG and RS the last few years compared to Standards that one has to wonder if the Navy should even be buying them anymore.
"A CVN with a BBGN escort can move 700+ nm/day. A CVN tied to conventional escorts is good for ~500nm/day."
This was the entire original premise of then CVANs accompanied by nuke escorts...
https://youtu.be/eG6k-RS7A9U?is=YVkrB3UvOwWuxNKE
Additional info from Norman Friedman...
https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/nuclear-power-for-surface-combatants/2/
Well there was a COC at NAVSEA HQ today. Not sure if that qualifies as a brain transplant but time will tell.
Didn't the Iowa-class refits install TLAM-N capability?
That's what Chief Casey Ryback taught us...when he wasn't down below in the galley.
TLAM-N was certified for both Mk-36 (ABL) and Mk-37 (VLS). The BB system was essentially four DD fire control / launcher (2x ABL) units. Probably should add also CCS Mk-1 and Mk-2 if memory serves me right.
Buy 500 Marauders from Saronics. A mix of loadouts, they can build 20 PER YEAR NOW. After deal with Hyundai, 500 per year. 128 VLS cells in four containers, or . . . $15 million a copy. We can never have enough VLS cells, or magazine depth - ALSO at sea replenishment! No more $25 billion warships, of any type, the world has changed. Or $2 billion destroyers . . . it's so damn dumb!!
the money is of course, a grave concern always....but, the TIME needed to field even a reasonable portion of the ships planned should be of STAGGERING concern. China ain't waitin.
agreed, the idea is not to match China in shipbuilding, it's to transcend their advantage. make it a negative . . . become the world leader in AUTONOMOUS SHIPBUILDING. Anduril is making some cool subs by the way, same issue, $10's of millions vs $billions. 100's vs a handful of deployable ships. And we can ramp up in times of war, the most important metric of them all.
Well, duh - however you (and most of those expressing opposition to the battleship idea) are completely missing the point. These ships are only incidentally intended as weapons of physical war - they are intended as weapons for psychological war. Having one sail into your harbor makes a point - and the fact that they're easy targets has nothing to with that.
The Soviets got it back in the day.
I'm going to challenge your math because you forgot one thing: Aviation gas. a BBGN is a tempting target, and will have to fly her ASW helicopters (and hopefully someday her SV-22s)--that burns AV gas--JP 5. you have to CONREP for the AVGAS, just like a CVN. I'd love to see what the CONREP rate is for AVGAS alone, and if it looks like the CONREP rate for DFM if she were conventionally powered vice a Nuke. My guesstimate is that they are similar. I also appreciate CBO's unwillingness to hedge on future oil prices to inform their cost offset predictions.
Technical note: AVGAS (and MOGAS) is not JP-5. I think the last AVGAS requirement was for the S-2 Tracker. MOGAS lingered on in the Amphib fleet for a while longer. I want to say the LSTs were the last ships with MOGAS pumprooms. For a while the Marines also would carry some MOGAS in drums after the pumprooms were decommed.
Surface navy had P-250 firefighting/dewatering pumps that used gas in cans for a while longer.
Back in the day, AVGAS was treated as an explosive. I’m told that when RQ-2 Pioneer UAVs were in the Fleet, the fuel supply was mounted on quick-release davits so the entire tank could be jettisoned overboard.
Two thoughts: 1. The term Achilles Heel doesn’t begin to state the problem. Every ship inbound or outbound In Chesapeake Bay becomes a potential Campbelltown. 2. Since L-M has this wondrous new VLS design, why aren’t we backfitting every Burke with them? Not to mention change orders for every one not yet at that point in construction.
One of my nightmares is a merchantman headed outbound…covertly laying a delayed-activation minefield.
Agree with most of this. We do need a large surface combatant, but maybe a cruiser vs a battleship (I know the politics for the next three years won't allow that.) I also don't think we need CPS on a surface combatant. As a weapon system it's overrated. It carries a few thousand tungsten cubes (I have a few) that work great against unhardened surface targets, but not so much against buried targets. Finally, every time a hypersonics guy said they have a pK of 1.0, I wanted to smack him. Russian Kinzhals have proven the point.
There was always the worry, now amplified by the presence of drone swarms and hypersonics, that CVs of today are the BBs of the WW 2 era in terms of vulnerability. When you combine that evolving asymmetry with the high cost of a ship that can only be one place at a time, the hill seems to steepen.
Thinking about this I looked up the wiki on Beth Steel/GD Quincy yard that built Long Beach. Wish we had that today.
A Large Surface Combatant is not needed. The SSBN is our capital ship. With the state of our Navy it is unwise to pour time and money into one big beautiful boat.
There is a certain minimum number of ships the USN needs to be a world-wide presence. How many, is something we can debate, but the Lehman/Webb number was 600. It sure ain’t 290. How many of the 310 missing ships are large surface combatants? Three?
The imperative is to get hulls in the water. If your BBGN is a 160 shot battery, then four Burkes are better. Four DDGs are a disbursed 340 shots, plus three extra drone/helo decks and four platforms that can tow a sonar.
Building a new Arleigh Burke-class (DDG-51) guided-missile destroyer currently costs $3 billion per ship. Today’s report shows that building a BBGN will cost us $235 billion per ship. For the price of one BBGN we could have Seventy-Eight DDGs.
Ask for the big BB dollars, then spend them on a multi-year shipbuilding plan which speeds up the Burkes and builds Heritage-class cutters for the USN. (How many diesel engines can you buy for the price of one nuke?) Now, let’s toss in a few bucks to keep the Grifter-Class BBN on the planning board, but fund cutting steel on more of the ships we are now building.
One note, it is $25 billion for the first BBGN and $18 billion for follow on, not 235 billion..
BBGN will never be built. But the real story of the FY 2027 shipbuilding plan is the extension of building ABurke III procurement past 2037 now encompassing 2038-2056. 38 more for a total of 80!!! That means the USN will still be building Burkes long after Im dead if their plan actually becomes reality.
BTW that would mean 155 Burkes procured 1985 to 2056!!! 70 years!!! Of Burkes. That is truly insane.
Half of weapons - lasers and railguns - doesnt exist ust, if that's not a development disaster waiting to happen then nothing is.
And not enough vls to justify the cost.
Why not base the BBGN off of the Iowa Class Battleship and upgrade the weapons? Why does it have to be designed from scratch?
Because Iowa-class hulls are impossible to recommission. Their equipment wasn't serviced for decades. There are no spare parts for most of their systems left. Most importantly, the last generation of sailors that worked on them are already old mens, and as one of those battleship sailor noted, "you don't want old men like me training rookies in things that he already half-forgot".
He said nothing about recommissioning the Iowas; just use them as a starting point for the BBGN design.