The Influence of History

Our First Look at the United States Navy's DDG(X) concept The first public concepts for the United States Navy's DDG(X) program have been unveiled, and they reveal quite a lot about the Navy's thinking on this critical program as well as the future of ship design and fleet architecture. Overall, the concept (the images are quite clearly not a final or even preliminary design) has a lot of potential and could shape up to be an excellent successor to the current fleet, but it remains to be seen whether that potential will actually materialize. In many ways the DDG(X) concept attempts to straddle a fine line, paving the way for the introduction of revolutionary new systems while simultaneously appearing extremely conservative and evolutionary. It is understandable why the Navy chose this approach, but it there is no guarantee the gamble will pay off. The State of the Surface Fleet Before diving into the details of the DDG(X) concept, we should take a moment to consider where ...

The recent United States Navy Fiscal Year 2020 budget proposal has unleashed the usual flurry of articles analyzing and discussing its ramifications. However, while the vast majority of these have focused on the same details, particularly the proposed early retirement of USS Harry Truman (CVN-75) and the introduction of large unmanned surface vessels, I will instead point out various minor pieces of information that have caught my eye. Missiles The greatest change is that antiship missiles are indeed back with a vengeance. In FY20, the Navy is proposing to procure no fewer than 216 antiship missiles of 5 different types and has stated a desire for an overall inventory of over 2000 dedicated antiship missiles. This is quite obviously aimed at the rapidly growing Chinese Navy. However, by my rough estimation, this is actually enough weapons to sink every non-US warship in the word twice over. Tomahawk Tomahawk production is restarting after a lapsing for FY19. A total of 180 weapon...

As the US Navy's FFG(X) program heats up, I've been digging through the Navy's FY19 budget submission to get an idea of various costs trade offs involved in designing a modern "medium end" warship. While none of the information that I have found is particularly revolutionary, I thought I would post my conclusions were still worth posting. Today, the Navy only has two active production lines for surface combatants - the DDG-51 Flight III  Arleigh Burke  and the LCS Flight II Freedom / Independence . However, since these two designs are on opposite ends of the spectrum (one widely acknowledged as the most capable warship in the world and the other routinely criticized for its lack of capability), comparing them directly is remarkably valuable. A DDG-51 Flight III has an official Gross Unit Cost of $1,747 million while an LCS Flight II is $565 million (all figures in this post are an average of the 7 DDG or 6 LCS in FY17-19). However, the actual amount spent p...