No no, you got this backward. This article does not mention what the Admirals want, it is an article telling you what the U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper wants. The Admirals don’t answer to anyone but flag officers in the rest of the pentagon and the big defense contractors who hire them after they retire. Esper doesn’t answer to the defense contractors, he answers to the White House.
There is a major battle going on inside Washington right now and this battle is part of the reason I made this video.
The Admirals want fewer ships but they want these ships to be more expensive. What they really want to do is build more ships like the $8 billion USS Zumwalt and fewer inexpensive ships.
The chief proponent of shipbuilding inside the White House is Peter Navarro, who wrote a book that concludes that a war with China is inevitable and we need to prepare.
China realizes that the Pacific Ocean is enormous so it’s building hundreds of inexpensive destroyers and missile ships to cover the vast expanse of the western pacific and south china sea.
The Chinese navy talks about things like swarm tactics and decentralized operations. They are basically preparing to fight a guerilla war in the pacific.
The Navy doesn’t think like that. They think of the small highly concentrated battles between capital warships. More importantly, they think too much about post-retirement jobs as big $ defense industry consultants.
Defense contractors don’t like the white house plan. They aren’t set up for it. The white house plan requires more yards and more of an assembly line type production schedule to turn out more ships at a greatly reduced cost. That’s not how yards today operate. Yards today are like the modern artist who spends years handcrafting a mug that works the same as a wall-mart mug but looks a lot cooler and costs 100 times the price.
More yards mean more competition for existing yards. Further, the yards have no clue how to build ships faster and on tight production timelines so they would have to rethink everything and rebuild their operations from scrap… rebuilding anything from scratch comes with a lot of risk (also a lot of potential rewards but fear is a stronger emotion than greed).
I agree with the “number of ships” doesn’t mean much (e.g. we have 20 LCS’s and they are total pigs - and we also have one Zumwalt which is also a pig)… what matters is being agile and able to defend the country in an uncertain future.
For that, I don’t know if we need “over 350 ships,” but I do know we need to end the era of single ships costing $8B a pop, and get back to the fundamentals of seapower.