I’m a big believer right now that the United States Navy is probably gonna have to get smaller before it gets bigger. Right now the United States Navy is broken.
… Navies are very expensive. They take a lot of money to maintain and building the right platforms is a huge risk. It’s not a gamble, it’s a risk because you can always repurpose platforms because you always have to do in war anyway. As Wayne Hughes famously said, the only thing that did what it was designed to do in World War II in terms of naval shipping was mine craft. Everything else did something different than was planned for what it was going to do in World War II including aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers were supposed to fight air defense against fleets of bombers coming from land bases. That was their job to protect battleships from B-17s and that was disproven at Midway.
My position is that that you know we really need to look at what we build because when you build a $16 billion dollar platform [i.e., CVN-78 Ford], you’re going to have to maintain the life cycle on that thing for 40 or 50 years. You’re reading the future in some sense with those kind of expenditures and you have to really look at it. What does that really give us?
… I emphasized that the platform that I thought we got the most bang for the buck out of in this nation is the smaller service combatants. I think we’re gonna go places with unmanned. I think unmanned is an imperative, it’s not the only thing but is a thing for the future. And undersea warfare is still pretty much our domain. So submarines. If you’re going to build anything, build submarines. You can’t build too many submarines that’s my position. You can build too many aircraft carriers.
That was former Acquisition Talk guest John Kuehn giving a talk at Ft. Leavenworth, Alfred Mahan and Naval Theory.
It’s interesting that virtually no WWII-era ship was used in the way it was anticipated — even aircraft carriers which were one of the bright spots in the interwar Navy transformation. This should give policy-makers pause before talking about “firming up requirements” ahead of budgeting and acquisition, or even budgeting to specific program outputs at all.
Kuehn makes the good point that large platforms have optionality built into them. They can be repurposed with new technologies or for new concepts of operations. I think this “repurposing” idea of modularity is different that the “economies of scale” idea found in the Littoral Combat Ship, which sought to use one hull form to house various mission modules. Yet the only functioning module the LCS is fielding is for mine countermeasures and many ships will be retired early.
The alternative is to purpose build a ship for what is known today, but consciously use that as a test bed for new components and subsystems until there is a critical need that it can’t fulfill. The requirements for a new purpose-built ship are thus discovered.
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