Well this isn’t the first time a White House appointee has suggested a vast increase in the number of ships in our Navy and I expect pushback from the admirals who prefer a smaller fleet of expensive capital ships.
But wow.
480 to 534 ships, when manned and unmanned platforms are accounted for
moving toward lightly manned [ships], which over time can be unmanned
Both fleets significantly expanded the logistics force, with big increases coming from smaller ships similar to offshore or oil platform support-type vessels. The fleets called for anywhere from 19 to 30 “future small logistics” ships. The CAPE and Hudon fleets increased the number of fleet oilers anywhere from 21 to 31, up from today’s 17.
The Hudson fleet called for a significant boost to the command and support ship infrastructure from today’s 33 ships to 52 ships. CAPE called for the fleet to remain about the same. Those ships include dry cargo ships, the expeditionary fast transports, expeditionary transfer docks and expeditionary sea bases.
These numbers are ridiculous but… less carriers, more cheap convoy destroyers, no more “superships”, lots more merchant ships, low cost usmc logistics delivery platform, reduced navy ship manning… I like this plan!
I’m not going to like it after the navy admirals and congress strip out the merchant and working ships then balloon the cost and capabilities of the warships.
And all that autonomous technology sounds cool but I’m an adviser at an MIT startup that has the best autonomy algorithms in the world yet nobody from the navy has called our phone… but they have already signed deals worth billions with the big defense contractors who will probably stall the project countless times them fail to deliver and end up just buying the code the next startup like us (After we have to close shop) for $0.005 on the dollar.
And what’s the point of investing billions in automation software knowing the defense contractors will end up leaking our code or outright selling it overseas?
It used to be that the smallest warship that can remain at sea and keep a crew at operational readiness for a year is a frigate. Anything smaller would need to be unmanned but both need a fleet train for operations in the Pacific.
Of course they will strip out the stuff they don’t want, and turn this acquisition into a bloat-fest, meaning that the concept of simple, relatively small, affordable vessels will become LCS 2.0.