The U.S. Navy’s Future Fleet May Run Aground In Heavy Weather

The article by Hooper doesn’t discuss carriers at all. It does mention carrier groups so it apparently assumes their use. The focus of the article is on destroyers.

But back in the early 1980’s, when the U.S. Navy was a bit more concerned about the impact of storms and high seas upon the operational capability of U.S. Navy ships, studies cautioned that even the Spruance Class destroyers were only fully operable 80 percent of the time at Sea State 5 and barely operable 20 percent of the time at Sea State 6.

Cold War naval designers had “super-sized” the destroyer, to, in part, fight better in high sea states. But while America’s giant nuclear carriers were barely affected by heavy seas, their escorts—even the big new Spruance class destroyers—still struggled to remain effective.

EDIT: I don’t have an opinion about the article one way or the other, just posted it (without comment) because I though it was interesting.

Had you been in the engineroom, you wouldn’t have cared. Or known.

Right there. That’s the problem with nefarious black gang reprobates. They just want to be left alone in the basement so they can tinker with machinery using wrenches and such. :smirk:

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Unless you were the Oil King.

Never once saw a nuke oil king. They were A-gangers on nuke ships.

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I stood watch in the Hole and on the Bridge.

Hooper’s barely veiled argument is we need carriers and other large capital ships. He’s trying to support the big ship lobby.

Many in the Pentagon want to reduce carrier reliance and reduce the number of carriers (see the fight over USS TRUMAN’s refueling and if we should build more FORD class carriers). In exchange they want to focus on smaller, cheaper but more numerous ships like destroyers, surface and undersea drones and their weaponry.

No one like to see their projects shut down. (See the recent Night Court bloodbath.) TRUMAN was only saved because of furious lobbying to Congress by ‘interests’ and the good citizens that were moved by lobbyist’s propaganda.

That’s what his sea-state argument is all about.

Just an aside, the USN is very clear on ship “systems shock” survival. More to the point, LCS 108 “USS Milwaukee” used hurricane force winds generated from Hurricane Matthew to test the ship systems.

Which is of course why they took the gun off the LCS before doing shock testing, and stopped the test before they got up to the specified shock level because the partial level messed things up considerably.

Not so. Battleships remained an existential threat, particularly to merchant shipping. They were useful throughout WWII but…

The issue was that battleships were vulnerable to airpower and submarines. The navies knew that but didn’t always have the luxury of deploying battleships with air and anti-submarine cover eg HM Ships Repulse and Prince of Wales lost off Singapore to airstrikes and your very own Pearl Harbour. Battleships only rarely did the job they were designed for - sinking enemy battleships eg Bismark & Surigao Strait.

Tirpitz hardly ever went to sea but sat heavily defended in a Norwegian fjord posing such a threat to vital Arctic convoys to Murmansk that the allies were obliged to heavily defend the convoys with battleships and carriers (after re-learning basic lessons eg PQ 17). She was invulnerable there and doing a magnificent job by her very presence.

Battleships contributed essential shore bombardment to amphibious landings in every theatre, but needed to be heavily escorted.

It’s all very well to pontificate what the ideal naval force composition should be today (or back then) but any enemy has a way of proving your flawless theories (dare I say it?) obsolete.

Don’t forget that in the end naval shipbuilding is decided by politicians and bureaucrats. I’ve mentioned previously on these pages my battles with them (happily successful in this case) to get it accepted that a frigate needs a gun. I’m not joking.

The Navy has a very clear program for shock hardening. LCS was NEVER required to be shock hardened and is not built to the same standards as a DDG, FFG, CG or CVN. Shock hardening costs money and weight.

Shock loading and sea state loads are apples and oranges.

The biggest problem with most LCS systems is that Sailors simply don’t know how to operate the ships. It’s not all their fault, it just is.

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Not necessarily. If Hooper wishes to show that the logic of the Navy’s argument is invalid he could start by accepting that the assumptions the navy is using are correct for the sake of argument. That doesn’t have to mean Hooper agrees with the assumptions the Navy is making.

Here is another article by Hooper.

That last couple lines of the article Hooper is saying the Navy need to either fix the ship or change the assumption that the ship is needed.

With regards to shock testing:

The Nation has time to go and try and break the Ford class aircraft carriers and build the next ones better. Either that, or it is time for the Navy to go build something else.

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