The Influence of History

With the US Navy's fiscal year 2021 budget proposal being recently released, combined with the latest news that the USN has dropped its previous plan to extended the service lives of its cruisers and destroyers to a historically unrealistic 45+ years, I thought I'd put up a quick post showing the likely future of the USN's surface fleet. Before delving deeper into the above graph, I should first make clear that the budget documents only give (somewhat) hard numbers on annual deliveries out to around FY2027, and everything past FY2031 is entirely my own projection. The assumptions I made are that CG/DDG retire after 35 years, LCS last 30 years, DDG and FFG production both stabilize at 2 ships annually, that 22 Arleigh Burke Flight III are procured to replace the Ticonderoga-class 1 for 1, and that the Future Surface Combatant phase in mirrors the planned LCS to FFG(X) transition. However, different assumptions will not change the overall shape of the future force...

Lebanon. The engagements mentioned below all occurred within 35 kilometers of Beirut. The 1982-1984 multinational intervention in the Lebanese Civil War has largely disappeared from the pages of history. When it is remembered at all, it is for the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. In many ways this neglect is understandable as the mission was both a complete failure and was overshadowed by the many high profile events of that period. However, this little-known conflict marked the most extensive use of naval gunfire since Vietnam, with at least eight warships conducting some fourteen missions and expended well over one thousand five hundred rounds of ammunition Today, the 5" deck gun on American warships is widely regarded as a relic, but in the early 1980's it was the only land attack weapon available. Tomahawk was not declared operational until March 1983, and for the duration of the Lebanon intervention there were just two active Tomahawk ships - the test ship Merill (D...

Over their thirty years in service, the missile armament of the Ticonderoga -class cruisers has experienced dramatic evolution and by the time the last one finally decommissions, it is quite possible that not one of the design's original missiles or launchers will remain. The Original Armament When USS Ticonderoga (CG-47)   commissioned in 1983, she was armed with two Mk 26 twin-arm launchers, each fed from a forty-four round magazine containing both SM-2MR surface-to-air-missiles and ASROC antisubmarine weapons (both nuclear and conventional variants). Finally, as with most USN ships of her generation, Ticonderoga  also carried eight Harpoon antiship missiles in Mk 141 canister launchers on the fantail. Ticonderoga in 1983: 72x SM-2MR, 16x ASROC, 8x Harpoon The Mk 41 VLS Is Introduced In 1986, this armament changed drastically when USS Bunker Hill (CG-52) commissioned with two sixty-one cell Mk 41 Vertical Launch Systems instead of Mk 26 launchers. This had the o...