Abundance makes this point about many government projects' inefficiency.
Of course there are ways to bridge this gap, including close collaboration and frequent back-and-forth between groups, but then when the spec has been fine-tuned for one manufacturer it can end up nearly impossible for third parties to competitively bid for a contract.
I think the navy can probably do design as well as anybody, but then they'd probably have to run the shipyards too.
You probably need that anyway, because congress will never allow key personnel to be paid enough on the gov payroll.
I think government focusing on specifying interfaces for modular components (in hardware and software) might be a good paradigm, though it probably has drawbacks which I haven't considered.
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.
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.
That said, it is clear that the US has been leaning heavily into moving more defense to airborne missile carriers. For example, the SM-6 can now be launched directly from F-18s instead of destroyer VLS cells, which greatly extends the potential range of ballistic missile defense coverage. The B-21 Raider, while it can carry bombs, is essentially an extremely stealthy missile launcher with a very long range and loiter time.
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.
And got the first naval drone anti-aircraft kills recently.
Drones are likely to change the whole look of naval warfare a lot more than a new type of frigate in the near future.
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.
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.
When will we have cheap drones that can take out other cheap drones?
This won’t be a game of mine is better faster like marketing pukes like to pretend. Just like memory caches one size does not solve all problems.
Missiles, small kinetic drone interceptors, AA guns, lasers, shotgun drones, gps spoofing, jammers, and high power microwaves just to name some options. Each has its place and saying drone interceptors won’t work shows you have no idea what you are talking about.
I'm entirely willing to write off drone interceptors for the foreseeable future. Layered defense certainly presents opportunities, but not for low-reliability expendable doodads.
We are only a few years in to the state change. Militaries take time and the big ones are learning cost lessons right now.
Seems like having a magazine of 1000 defense drones would be a good addition to a ship already armed with anti-aircraft missiles, so you don't have to shoot a missile unless you really have to. It would level out the economics.
This drone video is seven years old.[1] It's a hobbyist jet aircraft. 415 mph top speed. You have to expect that by now there are militarized versions.
You would likely be better off with several actual anti-ship missiles. A Harpoon only costs $1.4M and those are dedicated platforms purpose-built to defeat state-of-the-art defenses and countermeasures.
The US Navy is testing the lasers against cruise missiles and other systems with much more protection and capability than the typical cheap drone. Current versions are lower-power testbeds but production versions are expected to be several hundred kW.
Not any more.
DJI drone able to return home using visual navigation without GPS.[1] Unarmed. About US$1000.
Small lightning-proof drone.[2] Aims lightning strikes. Cost not given.
Ukraine EW-resistant drone.[3] Drops bombs. Currently about US$30,000.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWIYOOKItM
[2] https://dronexl.co/ja/2025/04/23/ntt-lightning-triggering-dr...
[3] https://interestingengineering.com/military/meet-the-shoolik...
Completely different class of drone capability. Something that could actually do damage in a naval context against modern countermeasure tech would be much more expensive.
Surface ships are still the only way to transport large quantities of troops and equipment over long distances. If you want to maintain the ability to project force beyond oceans, you need a navy to escort the vulnerable transport ships and to fight whatever threats they would be facing.
The navy is going to be, uh, already is a totally different battlefield.
Even deep water flotillas maybe maybe vulnerable to extremely low-tech long loitering naval drones. If you want to defend against us carrier groups, do you build your own carrier group or design a long loiter submersible activatable drone that you can build insufficient numbers to basically cover your the entire strategic theater of the ocean that you need.
How much is a full carrier group or a sufficient Navy to fight them, $100 billion?
Drunks are simply going to make power projection a lot more difficult outside of strategic nuclear weapons. If Taiwan is on the ball, they should have thousands if not more anti-ship drones ready to be launched. The second they see invasion operations by mainland China crossing the channel.
I do disagree with air power: I believe there is substantial air power superiority now and in the medium term future with advanced high altitude high-speed Jets. That still requires a huge amount of engineering investment and technological infrastructure to compete in that theater, and dominance of that provides vast tactical advantages.
And, despite how much I hate musk, if the starship SpaceX rocket achieved some measure of its payload and launch goals it enables military dominance of low orbit for a couple decades.
Also, it can't credibly "destroy" a carrier. The warhead is much too small. You could launch dozens, at high cost, but this is where the attackable single point of failure of these missiles start to become a problem.
This might be correct but I don't think the Ukraine war is demonstrative because neither side had the capability to establish air superiority.
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.
ceejayoz•4h ago
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.
2OEH8eoCRo0•4h ago
schainks•4h ago
Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. Ford class EMALS systems have redundant power supplies, for example. That's a huge expense in both weight and operations.
Not saying this is smart or 'right', but I imagine that's the logic behind the decisions for this stuff.
RugnirViking•4h ago
For example, USS Yorktown (CV-5) - took bomb and torpedo hits, with flooding and fires. Limped to pearl harbour, Was repaired in !!3 days!! and sent right back out to battle, where she was extremely heaviliy damaged again, but kept afloat through several days of bombardment before sinking.
USS Enterprise (CV-6) - hit by several bombs, a large fire in multiple compartments started. Fire control and damage repairs got the flight deck partially operational for launcing and recovering flights within an hour
USS Franklin (CV-13) - took almost 600 casualties, and had massive fires and ammunition explosions and fuel explosions. Despite extreme damage, she limped back to home port. Her survival is considered one of the greatest acts of shipboard damage control in naval history.
there are several more. A part of this is a difference in their design - british and french carriers used thick armoured flight decks, wheras the americans sacrificed these for speed and internal machinery space
ceejayoz•4h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-6 does indeed have variants for carriers that are smaller and cheaper; the ones going on the Burkes have 37 radar modules to the carriers' 9.
psunavy03•4h ago
As another poster mentioned, redundancy is a thing. Suppose you don't have an E-2 up and you need to launch a fighter alert. Someone needs to direct that intercept and it's better not to have a single point of failure. Better for those fighters to have the ability to be directed from an E-2, or the CVN, or the shotgun cruiser . . . whatever makes sense at that time.
And the Navy trains for emissions control or EMCON for short. There are tactics, techniques, and procedures not appropriate for discussion here about how ships and formations of ships are expected to do their business when it doesn't make sense to be radiating sensors.
stackskipton•3h ago
My guess is SPY-6 was put on Ford just for commonalty reasons.
2OEH8eoCRo0•3h ago
Probably, though CVN-78 doesn't have it. It's an odd duck.
stackskipton•3h ago
ceejayoz•3h ago
https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/sea/spy6-radars (see "A closer look at the SPY-6 variants")
dylan604•4h ago
So why would the carrier need this additional expense?
andbberger•4h ago
yes https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1
ceejayoz•4h ago
Per your article:
> China appears to be working hard to deal with this problem, and it’s very possible that they can locate the carriers reasonably effectively, but they have dozens of satellites and large, expensive over-the-horizon radar systems, which any other power is unlikely to be able to match.
Seven years after this article's writing, "dozens of satellites" doesn't seem like that high a bar given Starlink's many thousands. (And we've seen huge bandwidth increases, too, which makes real-time imaging and analysis looking for ship wakes etc. far more doable.)
bee_rider•3h ago
dmd•3h ago
Except the Trump administration, you mean.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/07/space-pollut...
relaxing•18m ago
Very much the same way they see our boats leave port, in fact.
relaxing•22m ago
In reality, the comings and goings of our ships are as public as it gets, and our peers quite easily track and maintain awareness of the locations of all our battle groups.
Symmetry•4h ago
ceejayoz•4h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-6
> AN/SPY-6(V)1: Also known as the Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR).[21] It is 4-sided phased array radar, each with 37 RMAs... planned for the Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
> AN/SPY-6(V)2: Also known as the Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar (EASR).[23] Rotating and scaled-down version with 9 RMAs estimated to have the same sensitivity as AN/SPY-1D(V) while being significantly smaller.
Same tech, just fewer modules.