> Ford-class carriers have high-end radars with similar capabilities as the radars of guided-missile destroyers.

Well, yeah. They have an air wing to keep track of.

> the emissions from these radars make them easier to detect, track, and target…

Is finding a US Navy battlegroup a challenge in the modern era? And won't the nearby escorts still have their radars on?

> The helicopters add significant cost, weight, and crew to the ship.

Sure. And capabilities.

> Rather than outsourcing design to third parties, ship design should be brought in-house, and NAVSEA should expand its staff of Naval Architects from around 300 to closer to 1200.

Abundance makes this point about many government projects' inefficiency.

I’ve started to think that the Gov. needs to act more like a pseudo open source maintainer rather than customer or designer. Competition helps on many different axis, but the gov not owning the designs (whose R&D we paid for) drastically limits future competition.

Not so sure about

      A specialized ballistic missile defense platform based on a commercial ship hull — 
      The US military has historically preferred to intercept ballistic missiles outside 
      the atmosphere. The advantage is that one missile defense battery can cover a 
      very wide area. A specialized ballistic missile defense ship could be kept farther 
      back from more forward groups, protecting them without giving away its position 
      with easily detectable radar emissions.

One thing about BMD systems of all kinds is that the footprint they protect is smaller than you wish it was

https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/22265/17_Simple_Model_Calculat...

part of the reason why the US has BMD ships is that they can placed in places such that the footprint works since the ocean covers like 75% of the Earth's area. To really be out of range of aircraft, anti-ship missiles and all that you'd have to be hundreds of miles away from the threat and that could well put you out of the footprint. Not to say that you couldn't have clever answers such as the launch vehicle being separated by the radar though most BMD systems use track-with-missile guidance that require the missile be in close communication with the radar for the terminal phase.

If you really want to improve Naval ship acquisition, then go back to when the US Navy had its own navy yards - which were full-bore shipyards, capable of constructing anything up to the largest aircraft carriers. So any time the defense contractors were getting greedy or moving slow, the USN could just build ships in-house.

Unfortunately, the old navy yards could not <cough/> generously support <cough/> our self-serving congressmen. Vs. the defense contractors could. Guess which one got phased out.

I like the idea of certain types of ships being superstock Maersks that launch air or sea drones from the rear. Quantity may be useful in the drone and AI era.

Written by someone naive who just wasted his time writing all that, all through not understanding it isnt a problem. Its by design.

The problem with the distributed battle groups problem is that there is minimum capability that is needed to be viable warship. The LCS are a failure partly because they were designed for low intensity conflict. They only have point defense and not medium range air defense. The Houthis have shown in Red Sea that higher level of defense is needed against cheap anti-ship missiles and drones.

The other part is that ships provide interlocking sensors and defense. The carrier's AWACS cover a long distance. The long range missiles mean that the destroyers can spread out and cover large area.

The U.S. Naval Institute has their own proposals.[1]

Everybody has to rethink sea power now that attacking ships from shore is working. The Moskva was sunk by a missile mounted on a truck. That was a wake-up call for the world's navies. China has a lot of anti-ship missiles mounted on trucks. Any naval ship in range of a hostile shore is in trouble today. The US will never again be able to send a parade of ships through the Taiwan strait as power projection.

It's also a big setback for the MAGTF concept, where a Marine unit is based from a group of medium-sized helicopter carriers and boat carriers. Those craft sit offshore and send out boats and helicopters. This works great against minor enemies with no air power. Against ones that can shoot ship-sinking missiles, or swarms of drones, it's not a good strategy. Houthi drones have become a serious threat. Ships go through a lot of expensive missiles shooting down cheap drones. Running out of missiles has become a serious problem. Underway replenishment of vertical launch tubes at sea is difficult, which means ships may have to return to a base to reload.

The Ukraine war, with large numbers of cheap drones and small missiles, has changed land warfare. There's no such thing as air superiority any more. If it flies, it will be shot at. No more flying helicopters over the battlefield with impunity. On the ground, nobody can move in the open. Tanks are easy to kill for anyone with the right weapons. Ukraine has turned into a war of attrition, where both sides keep steadily killing troops without accomplishing much. The side that wins will be the one that runs out of resources last.

All those problems are coming to naval warfare.

[1] https://www.usni.org/american-sea-power-project

This is bad analysis.

The HN crowd should be very familiar with management frequently changing requirements especially when it's far too late in the process forcing reworks.

Instead of middle managers, shipbuilders have the whole Navy, the personal egos and career ambitions of captains and admiralty, Congress, and the ever changing president and party in power to deal with. The author suggests we don't start building a ship until the requirements are done... my sweet summer child they're never done. There are way too many cooks in the kitchen and that's the problem that needs to be solved, ships are being designed and redesigned by committee nearly endlessly. Most things are.

To make acquisitions cheaper this fiddling needs to be curbed, just saying "don't start building" misses the problem and the point.

In this article, the approach to streamlining USN ship design looks like reduced survivability to me, a random voice on the internet who has never seen combat. Or naval ship design.

Of course, the LCS hull was considered less amenable to damage control than more traditional designs, but its multi-mission modules feature made it huge, complicated, and expensive anyway.

Automation is supposed to decrease the number of Naval personnel required to fight the ship; streamlining by reducing automation may run into problems. If the Ford-class carrier design is already set in steel, how do you back off on staffing implications of reduced automation?

> 2. Rather than outsourcing design to third parties, ship design should be brought in-house, and NAVSEA should expand its staff of Naval Architects from around 300 to closer to 1200.

What are the pros and cons of also in-housing building of ships?

One aspect not covered by the article is fictitious economies of scale. Designing a new ship class, like any other such large project, is an expensive undertaking. To try and make this number more palatable, it is typically proposed to build large numbers of ships over many years. Of course this makes the overall project very expensive, but the per unit price doesn't look too bad. The issue is because these ships will be in production for so long, there is a need to make the ships extremely capable as future needs are difficult to determine. Further because the overall project is so expensive, there aren't many concurrent projects, so this one projects has to be everything for everybody. Of course this further drives up costs and produces compromises that make no-one happy. Then invariably once these overpriced and underpowered ships start getting delivered and people complain, there is a strong call to cancel some of the ships planned, which means the cost of the remaining ships go up, which leads to further cancellations. This is how you wind up with a multi-billion dollar single ship class that has no weapons.

There are further disadvantages. Since these projects are large and infrequent, there are few opportunities to train up people in actually handling such projects. The shipyard that wins the contract will grow fat and lazy while those that didn't will shrivel up and die, leading to a very unhealthy ecosystem when the next big project comes around. Because the project goes on for such a long period of time, leadership priorities both within the navy and in the government are likely to shift, meaning long term consistent support can not be counted on. And finally, the large number of ships that are unlikely to ever materialize allow planners to hand waive away real gaps in capability that realistically still need to be filled.

By starting out with a commitment to small ship classes, all these issues get reversed. Since you expect to be doing projects frequently, they are low stakes, meaning it is okay to take risks, learn lessons, and make a tool for dealing with your current, real problem. You can maintain a health ecosystem of many shipyards and a large population of experienced individuals who have a few such projects under their belt. Lessons learned from each project can be applied to future ones, both allowing for improved ships and improved project management. You can always produce more of a class if you really need it, but if you do the cost savings are merely a bonus.

There are cases where the benefits of standardization and mass production are just too critical to pass up. You don't want to have to worry about 37 different types of ammunition for your frontline troops for example. But warships are few enough in number and high in value - the managerial resources necessary to handle variety are easily justified.

I feel I should point out, with all this talk of "sinking ships", that it is mostly unnecessary to sink a single ship. All you need to do is spoil their mission capability. This could be as simple as a fragmentation munition peppering the radar or other critical system with shrapnel (which can be targeted specifically). A $50 munition on a $500 drone damages the $50m radar on your $500m vessel, and now you are out of the fight until a repair which will 1 year. Someone with more domain expertise, feel free to adjust those numbers.

One thing I don’t understand about modern warships - why do they carry so few offensive weapons?

American ‘Burkes and peer destroyers from some Asian navys have a shitload of VLS cells, but my understanding is that the majority of these hold anti-aircraft (defensive) missiles?

Russian ships seem to have an extremely powerful, but limited load of anti-ship and cruise missiles.

But most other navys (see - especially Europe) have rather poor armament.

In the case of the USN, you could argue that a ‘Burke’s primary role is carrier escort, and that the carrier air wing is the real offensive punch. But most other navies don’t have carriers.

we're going to need more boats