What will it take for America to be able to build warships again? There are several answers but each is merely a reflection of the underlying basis for building ships. Is there a compelling need for warships today or tomorrow?
Up in the Great Lakes they were building a new Constellation class frigate. It was to an Italian design that Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) and the dedicated work force of 80,000 people all of whom worship at the alter of NotInventedHere made every effort to sink before it even left the building ways in Marinette, Wisconsin. The trolls of NAVSEA are a well known hazard to navigation but the real downfall is probably one that can be laid at the feet of the shipyard selected as the Prime to build the damned things. They failed across the board.
In the real world of accomplishments, builders are forced to pay for what they need and they don't get to whinge about having to pay too dearly for things that are absolute requirements. For instance, when building the Alaska Pipeline there was a need for skilled welders and other trades all along the route and you don't hire a workforce like that from the leavings at the 7/11 employment line. You pay enormous wages and benefits to attract the workers you need. It is obvious that Fincantieri Marinette simply declined to follow this path.
The problems as I see it are:
– There is no compelling need to build surface force warships given the nature of the threat and the paralyzed infantile state of national will and leadership. The business of a Navy is to control the seas and the only reason to control the seas is to deny them to others and permit your trade to pass freely. We don't have much outgoing seaborne trade and our leadership thinks it is against some law to order the death or destruction of our enemies. Navies cannot survive in that kind of environment yet that is what the US is like today.
– The modern threat environment militates rather heavily against surface warships and projecting into the future, their survival on the surface is one that looks pretty bleak. In the littoral seas they can be tracked and attacked at will from drones launched from the shore. It is easy to say that drones can be suppressed as easily as ever we talked about suppressing shore batteries of anti-ship missiles but then we NEVER went up against dozens of shore batteries of anti-ship missiles in a drone environment and people have literally no conception of how cheap and easy it is to mass manufacture long range attack drones and fire them off in waves of hundreds.
– I used to laugh at the idea of our modern navy enforcing EMCON. I still laugh at it. Home on Jam was easy, Home on ELINT signals was even easier and you know why of course.....NAVSEA probably doesn't but I'll share it with you. Drones do not shift into Terminal Homing and a final course to target the way that an ASCM does. A drone, unless jammed, can also furnish the operator with video of the target in final acquisition and the operator knows if it is being spoofed.
The massive battles of WWII that saw our Navy essentially ward off attacks by thousands of manned drones reflect something not seen since the late days of the Cold War; redundancy and layers of it applied over a real Battle Group. Long Range Naval aviation is long gone. The layers of frigates and destroyers providing anti-missile and anti-aircraft defenses are now just one or two ships close in and the fleets combat logistics train of endless resupplies of missiles and ammo are long gone.
The doctrine is now so outdated as to be almost useless. The tactics and methods are astonishingly weak and probably completely ineffective against a real bad guy. You can look around now and you'll hear everyone in the trade whining about China and what a terrible threat China is because it has a big navy and once again I would be asking, why? It was our biggest trading partner and shipped us millions of tons of goods in thousands of its own commercial ships. Are they going to attack their own ships to deny us the trade? Are we going to attack China for some reason?
Look at who talks about attacking China or needing a Navy to fight China and ask yourself, what do they get out of such a silly posture? Why do they want this thing? Who benefits from such a war? Who loses the most in such a war?
So the Soviet Union is no more and Europe is the most pathetic excrescence ever and the question being asked again, why do we need this large and powerful Navy? We have raised a third generation now since Vietnam that does not believe that we should police the world and make it safe for Soros and Bill Gates. A lot of them would not fight for the USA so why does anyone think they would fight to the death for Ukraine?
The Pentagon has carefully selected the very worst people to be admirals and generals for 25 years now and there is no real way to stop that except to send all of the current ones home and convene a board of terminal Captains to select the next future leaders of the Navy and only select the best without any resort whatsoever to the DIE and sex of the future admirals. One helpful aspect to this would be the final understanding and realization that we only need a couple of dozen admirals since that is about all the Navy we have and/or need. We might also begin to accept that we don't need perfect angels at the top of the pyramid. A few personal foibles and an interest in pretty women should not be disqualifying.
You know what else we don't need? Yeah, we don't need 80,000 people whose job it is to tell industry how to build ships. Not one of them ever built a ship, the vast majority never served at sea and probably fewer than 100 have sailed off a lee shore in a storm.
I read a story in the Surface Forces Pacific Maintenance Quarterly about one of our Missile Patrol Hydrofoils that had run into a difficulty getting up on its foils. The Fleet engineers had investigated and researched and delved into the reason for some time before they concluded that everything was working exactly according to spec and design but the ship would not come up on its foils and reach anywhere near full speed......until they removed 11 tons of unnecessary paperwork, manuals and files from the ship. That pretty much describes NAVSEA at this point and most of the Navy.
NOW we have hardly scratched the surface and that is the point that the Navy would make. Drones attacking ships can really only scratch the hulls and superstructure they will claim but warships are no stronger now than merchant ship hulls are and we have seen just how flimsy merchant ships can be when attacked. The not invented here also applies to our naval architects and specifiers who simply decline to believe that we have made giant strides in strength of materials and that other forces can contribute to a real modern lethal warship design other than EM cannons and lasers that seemingly never work at sea for some damned reason. Oh yeah, salt air and humidity. Maybe if we had the deck force paint them....