the US Navy's warship production is in its worst state in 25 years. Why
apnews.comIn Alabama the LCS was being built - it took roughly twenty years end to end to deliver. Aside from giant cost and time overruns since it was completed there’s been a struggle with learning to effectively use the ship.
All in all though seeing a tri-hull warship on your morning commute is a cool treat. It had been front and center of Austal’s hangar doors for a long time.
Isn’t this entire class of ships due to be decommissioned, due to huge cracks and other issues?
I think USNI recently released report that PRC now has 630x more ship building capacity (up from 300x estimate last year), Jiangnan Shipyard itself has more capacity than _entire_ US ship building, PRC shipbuilding last year was something like ~40M dead weight tons which is around US 5 year ship building during WW2. All of which is to say US ship building is indeed in the toilets, but also PRC ship building / industrial output is _significantly_ greater than US at her most productive.
IMO which really begs the question... why is the PRC navy so small? Yeah PLAN has the most hulls, but still ~2/3 the displacement. One would expect projected gap would trend to _multiple_ times larger than USN, not just current prediction of PLAN ~400 vs USN ~300 by 2030. Why is PLAN building carriers so slowly? Why are they building lots of smaller surface combatants and about to spam a lot of subs. Why are they not urgently rushing the carrier + large surface combatant displacement game despite being able to build entire USN displacement in a few months. IMO maybe they don't think surface combatants are going to survive in a shooting war either. Maybe US planners knows this to, but can't admit it publically, but directing aquisitions behind the scenes accordingly. Meanwhile you're going to get lots of navy folks who likes their big ships advocate for building big ships, which granted, having at least semi competent shipyards is real need to sustain current USN global posture even if it's not appropriate for a future peer war.
I recommend this podcast with people from congress on the topic:
https://warontherocks.com/2024/03/win-wind-how-a-bipartisan-...
I realize the answer to this is probably very obvious to others but hope they can explain it here: why is the US not nationalizing warship production? And more ports? The infra for air cargo (airports, atc) is largely government owned, why can't water cargo infra be?
> why is the US not nationalizing
That is essentially blasphemy in terms of US politics.
And the corruption. The amount of dollars the war-industry has spent to buy members of congress. The revolving door between military / civilian brass & the war industry. How projects subcontracted over as many congressional districts as possible.
A lot of ports are government owned. Port of Oakland is department of Oakland. But that doesn't have anything to do with warship production.
The first problem is that the US is doing lots of new classes of ship and those always take more time and budget. The US has built the Burke destroyers for decades without much trouble.
The second problem is that the US has low number of shipyards. Opening up new ones or expanding existing ones would be better than nationalizing. But that would take a long time. This makes new classes worse because have to schedule space and that can screw the long-running classes.
The US should also get rid of the Jones Act. It was supposed to protect the commercial shipping but that has dwindled to only inter-US shipping. The shipyards should be made to compete, and maybe that will improve their efficiency. Or the shipyards should be converted into military.
Another suggestion I heard was to have Japan and South Korea build hulls and the US can finish them.
lower-cost warships. They have lost the ability to build horse carriages too, but then they are both kind of useless, and think of the money they save? They have saved a hell of a lot of money complaining while doing nothing.
There are diminishing returns with cheaper warships. The LCS cost $400 million each but Burke destroyer, $2 billion, could sink a dozen of them. Aircraft carrier, $13 billion plus planes, could sink all of them. More importantly, the destroyer could protect the carrier from attack.
Small warships are useful for low-intensity conflict but Red Sea conflict shows that they need more defense and offense.
And a couple of $5M apiece hypersonics could easily sink a destroyer, even with a conventional payload. Red Sea has shown just how useless warships are nowadays against an adversary with any kind of long range anti ship capability. The entire strike groups had to hightail outta there once the more potent stuff started flying
The Red Sea has shown how important warships are. They have been successful at shooting down missiles and drones and protecting ships. I think a single cargo ship has been hit and sunk.
The Houthis have mostly been using drones which don't work well against ships. But they have used a few Iranian anti-ship missiles.
The Eisenhower withdrew in June and Roosevelt arrived in July.
Yeah, so important that commercial traffic is impacted to this day, in spite of billions of dollars in ammo and other costs.
Look at the implications of what you're arguing though. Without protection, you don't have wartime logistics. Without logistics, you don't have force projection. Without force projection, you're missing a central pillar of US international relations and the current world order.
Shipbuilding deeply tied into the US military's goals.
Sometimes implication follows conclusion and it's not a matter of argument but facing reality. If conclusion is large surface combatants aren't survivable, then maybe bad idea to double down on large surface combatants. Problem is navy institutional inertia/identity depends on building big ships, with 11+9 carriers mandated by law. The other implication is if large surface combatants, and US to some degree needs largish combatants with high endurance to run global missions, is not survivable, then maybe US naval/expeditionary model is not viable and if there's no alternative (can't protect global basing without survivable global navy) a lot of dominos start falling.
That's just lack of political will to engage and collateral effects on non-combatants.
The carrier group could have stayed in position and inflicted enormous damage in retaliation, but no one wants nukes used
A single well-placed rocket/missile/drone crater in the deck of a carrier, without sinking or even seriously wounding it, is enough to render it useless and put it out of comission for months if not longer. Keeping a carrier group in a place where this is even remotely likely is a huge risk from a naval strategy perspective.
"The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats. " The Navy is propanganding into Fear, Uncertainty and doubt. They said the exact thing about Nuclear Weapons. So... if we do not build them, then diplomacy becomes more important. What would we do without global war?
To a certain extent diplomacy requires intimidation. If both parties benefit from the negotiations but there would be no downsides to defying agreed upon terms the diplomacy has failed. The entire point is to place restrictions to discourage or disable externally harmful behaviour. You can't do that if you can't place hard boundaries, and sadly enough one of the few ways to place those hard boundaries is with the threat of violence. Be that economic, cultural, physical, or mental.
The dominant power in an era has always used that intimidation performed via the implication of violence to force everyone into the boundaries of the agreed upon terms.
The goal would be in the end transitioning away from tools of war to tools of enforcement. The issue is that the overlap between the two is vast and repurposing the latter for the former is very easy. Which brings things full circle when the diplomacy required for enforcement fails and intimidation has to be used. There is a time for one and a time for the other, but we as a species are really bad at transitioning because being the intimidator is incredibly advantageous and thus very alluring for the leading party responsible for enforcement. The only ways to stop it are for another party to exceed the limits of the enforcement too quickly to react to (what the U.S. did to the British), marathoning an expansion of violent capabilities (what the U.S. did to the USSR and what China's currently doing to the U.S.), or factions within the dominant party starving the faction responsible for enforcement before said faction turns to war (the only time I can think of this happening being Luxembourg to Prussia). As we can see from the article the most common tactic is the second.
lower-cost warships.
tl:dr insufficient pay to quality of life at work ratio to attract sufficient workers of sufficient quality.
Expect the same article about nearly everything as the proportion of younger people decreases.
reddit.com/r/stupidquestions/comments/17ik4q2/after_most_of_the_boomers_pass_on_will_gen_x_be/
After most of the boomers pass on will gen x be blamed for all of societies problems?
Then another 20 or so years after that will it be the millennials fault followed then by gen z?