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I bring that up every time I hear people talking about how the US needs a 300 ship navy because we had more ships than that in WWI.

• vonmoltke 7y ago
  The issue is power projection. What the US Navy needs more of are cheaper, less powerful ships. Sending Arleigh Burke-class destroyers to protect ships from Somali pirates is a waste of resources, both in terms of what is committed to the effort and the need to build more Burkes to fill the inevitable gaps elsewhere. Unfortunately, we seem to be incapable of actually producing such vessels, as too many of the people advocating for naval expansion are advocating for more of the big, over-capable ships (often for selfish reasons).
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • smacktoward 7y ago
    They tried with the Littoral Combat Ship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littoral_combat_ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littoral_combat_ship), but even when explicitly trying to design a ship that's cheap, easy to build and relatively disposable, they couldn't restrain themselves from larding it down with features until it was fat and expensive. And of course most of those features ended up not really working right anyway. Sigh.
    • learc83 7y ago
      For Anti pirate work near the coast we have patrol boats that would work fine for coastal anti-pirate roles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_VI_patrol_boat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_VI_patrol_boat
  • learc83 7y ago
    If we're talking anti pirate roles, we're talking jobs suitable for patrol boats. If we're including those, then we have way more than 300 ships already.