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Old 02-04-2021, 10:37 AM
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Arrow The U.S. Navy Can’t Seem To Build Cruisers—Here’s Why

The U.S. Navy Can’t Seem To Build Cruisers—Here’s Why
By: David Axe - Forbes Staff News Reporter - 02-04-21
Re: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidax...h=2ad72fe02d36

Photo link: https://specials-images.forbesimg.co...91&cropY2=2994
The guided-missile cruiser USS 'Princeton' in the Persian Gulf in 2020. U.S. NAVY PHOTO BY MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 2ND CLASS LOGAN C. KELLUMS|
(Wow - she's looks old & rusty - could use an overhaul in dry dock for 3-6 months - Boats)

In just three years starting in mid-2017, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy launched eight new Type 055 cruisers.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy hasn’t launched a cruiser since 1992. And over the decades, several attempts by the Americans to sustain a new cruiser program have foundered.

There’s a growing gap between the world’s leading fleets. One manages to build really big, heavily armed ships. The other struggles to match that output.

So why can’t the U.S. Navy—inarguably the world’s most powerful maritime force—build cruisers? The answer, of course, is it can. But for a long time, it chose not to.

The U.S. fleet has 22 Ticonderoga-class cruisers. The oldest launched in 1986.

The 9,800-ton Ticos aren’t the biggest surface combatants in the fleet—that honorific belongs to the three 15,900-ton Zumwalt-class destroyers. But the Ticos are the most missile-heavy.

Each Tico packs 122 vertical cells for launching anti-air missiles and cruise missiles. The Zumwalts have only 80 missile cells. The current Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, each displacing around 9,500 tons, boast 96 cells apiece.

Perhaps more importantly, the Ticos have a full suite of radars in the L, S and X bands, plus the space and communications equipment they need to function as “air-defense commander” ships for aircraft carrier battle groups. The ADC ship coordinates air-defense for a carrier.

The Ticos, which borrow their hull-form from the long-gone Spruance-class destroyers, are old and wearing out. The Navy has fixed superstructure cracking, replaced old pipes and machinery and swapped out failing radar components.

Several times in the past decade and a half, fleet leaders have asked Congress for permission to begin decommissioning the cruisers, only for lawmakers to push back.

Legislators’ skepticism is understandable. What would replace the Ticos?

The Navy consistently has screwed up new cruiser programs for two decades. The CG-21 concept from the 1990s made little headway before becoming the CG-X program under the administration of Pres. George W. Bush.

Pres. Barack Obama canceled the CG-X in 2010. Eight years later the Navy began defining a new “large surface combatant.” But the concept is vague. And Congress has chipped away at the Navy’s funding requests.

The sea service once hoped to start buying new cruisers in 2023. The new start date is 2028. The program’s name has changed to—take your pick—either “Future Large Surface Combatant,” “DDG-Next” or “DDG(X).”

During these decades of confusion and delays, the Chinese navy took an existing destroyer design—the 7,500-ton, 64-missile-cell Type 052D—and more or less scaled it up to produce the 12,000-ton, 112-cell Type 055.

The Type 055s basically are Chinese Ticos, and could function as air-defense-command ships for the PLAN’s new carrier battle groups or lead powerful surface action groups.

They’re entering service as the American cruisers are exiting.

The Navy tentatively plans to decommission 11 Ticos between 2022 and 2026, and the balance of the class shortly thereafter. In the span of time between the Ticos’ decommissioning in the mid-to-late 2020s and the possible commissioning of the U.S. Navy’s first new large surface combatants in the mid-2030s, the Type 055s arguably will be the most powerful surface ships in the Pacific region.

“We’re really behind,” said Eric Wertheim, author of Combat Fleets of the World.

This gap became inevitable when, for around 15 years starting in the early 2000s, the U.S. Navy focused its time, energy and money on the Littoral Combat Ship, a 3,000-ton, shallow-water vessel with swappable “modular” sensors and weapons plus a complex, diesel-and-gas propulsion system giving the vessel a sprint speed approaching 40 knots.

The LCS sucked tens of billions of dollars from Navy coffers while producing just 35 ships of, ahem, debatable quality, reliability and utility. It’s no accident that, at the peak of the LCS program, the Navy wasn’t buying many other surface combatants.

“There was very heavy investment in LCS—and not just financial,” Wertheim said. “This was our horse.”

No one pretends the smaller LCS can substitute for a cruiser. The LCS lacks long-range surface-to-air missiles, land-attack cruise missiles, a high-end radar suite and a combat system in the class of the Aegis system that gives the Burkes and Ticos much of their capability.

So why would the Navy spend so much capital on the LCS when the cruisers needed replacing? To understand that, you have to understand the thinking of U.S. military leaders around the year 2002. The “war on terror” was escalating. China and Russia seemed like strategic afterthoughts.

“LCS came out of the moment of change and transformation, almost as if, absent a real strategic threat, that change would be our strategy,” said Jerry Hendrix, author of the new book To Provide and Maintain a Navy.

The U.S. military’s future was on land, in deserts, chasing terrorists and insurgents. At sea, America had no rivals. The U.S. fleet could afford to experiment. A cruiser was a Cold War throwback—a wasting asset in this era of insurgency and transformation.

That was the consensus. It was wrong. Today the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan are the afterthoughts. Deterring China and Russia is the Pentagon’s priority. All of the sudden, building cruisers isn’t a waste of time and money.

Too bad the Navy doesn’t have a good cruiser program underway, ready to deliver actual steel hulls.

The new large surface combatant, whatever form it eventually takes, “will be somewhat of a throwback,” said Bryan McGrath, director of the FerryBridge Group naval consultancy in Maryland. But then, so is the current era of great-power competition.

U.S. fleet leaders have signaled they finally are serious about acquiring new cruisers. “Hard lesson on the Navy's part but, I think, learned,” McGrath said. The problem, from a peer-competition standpoint, is that Chinese fleet leaders all along were serious about cruisers.

There’s still plenty of time for the U.S. Navy to screw this up. There were a few possible approaches to cruiser design. A class with all-new tech always was a possibility. Alternatively, designers could have borrowed the Zumwalt’s hull and added new sensors and weapons. Or they could’ve invented a brand-new hull and ported over systems from the latest Flight III Burke.

Leaders wisely have signaled they prefer the latter option—a big new hull, displacing around 12,000 tons and packing the guts of a Burke. There should be plenty of extra space and power for new weapons, potentially including lasers, electromagnetic railguns and large-diameter hypersonic missiles.

It’s a sound approach. “Perturb either the hull or the combat system, but not both,” McGrath advised. Now we wait and see whether the Navy lets its ambition get the best of it—and starts adding a lot of unproven technology to the new vessel.

In any event, the next cruiser won’t be cheap. A Burke costs $2 billion. A new large surface combatant easily could cost $3 billion or more per hull.

But the cost of not building cruisers is clear—and climbing. When the Ticos finally bow out after four decades of hard service, they could leave gaps in the fleet. The carriers will lose their best air-defenders. The number of missile cells the U.S. Navy can send into battle could contract, by a lot.

Worse, the U.S. fleet will lose capability at the same the Chinese fleet is gaining it. All because the Americans wasted more than a decade building weird little ships at the expense of traditional big ships—and the Chinese didn’t.

About the writer: David Axe - is a journalist, author and filmaker based in Columbia, South Carolina.

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Personal note: Today our government is basing much on missile compliance rather than sea compliance. Cruiser's were always with Carrier Pac's in my day. We had the Tin Can's plus the cruiser always accompanying all carriers. They are basing much on missile tech rather than gunnery. The old battleships could destroy coastal cities and open doorways for ground troops. We are using aircraft today and missiles to do the same today - I presume?
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