"Road to 350: Can the US Build a 350-Ship Fleet the ..." Topic

…Navy Actually Wants?.

"The incoming Trump administration has stated that one of its goals is to increase the size of the United States Navy from its current 272 ships to 350. Last week, I wrote about the current status of the U.S. Navy, its size, makeup, missions, and distribution around the globe to help give context to the competing wisdom, plans, and advice that has begun to percolate on how that growth can be achieved. Before Trump's election victory, I had also written about the fiscal challenges that the Navy's current 308-ship plan faces. Beside the budgetary problems with building a larger fleet, it is unclear whether the U.S. shipbuilding industrial base could construct that larger fleet before President Trump and even one or two of his successors are out of office and there is an open question as to whether the additional ships would necessarily be ones the Navy wants.

Does the Navy need 350 ships?

Various defense panels and private analysts have advocated for a fleet of around 350 ships over the years. Trump campaign advisors cited one of these review panel's endorsement of a 350-ship fleet in justifying the campaign's plan. According to a pair of Congressional Research Service studies completed this fall on Navy force structure and fleet size, all the government panels that have recommended a 350 ship fleet turn out to refer back to a government analysis called the Bottom Up Review, conducted in 1993, that recommended a fleet of 346 ships…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Basically the the US needs to define 3 components:
Number of ships which, together with allies such as Japan, will contain China.

Number of ships which, together with allies such as UK and France, will contain Russia.
Number of ships which are needed to maintain a general US presence in the rest of the world at an acceptable level, including the ability to launch foreseeable campaigns.

That should be what is used to determine the number and types of ships the US needs – plus a few others as the above reasons are not fiuxed in terms of future requirements.

This is assuming that containing Russia will still be a priority. We do not yet know foreign policy direction.

I suspect so, but the more important questions are:

1. will we need 50 or 100 tugboats to haul all the new designs back to port;

2. will they every be able to stray more than 4 hours from a naval base, or into non-coastal waters;

3. will they ever become operationally viable, or just continue to be glorified yachts and naval test-beds;

4. will they be able to afford the ammo to be fired from their gun(s);

5. and finally, for now (though there are tons of other similar questions) will anyone in the naval hierarchy/Pentagon be held accountable, and actually fired, for all the major procurement screw-ups, poor designs, cost-overruns, and other mismanagement of taxpayer dollars allocated to the USN?

The tug boats should be included in that figure of 350 ships.

One fleet for the Pacific, one for the Atlantic and one to rotate between the two for maintenance, training and contingencies

The Burke-class destroyers work pretty well. Just keep ordering more of those.

350 is the new 600: link

Yes, but do we need 50 or 100+ new tugs for all the coming breakdowns of the new vessels?

On a 1:1 ratio…

If you want to keep the sea lanes open as China, for example, lays claim to key shipping routes, or as piracy continues apace -- then you need ships that can be on station without coverage gaps or risking attrition losses from maintenance, etc. And we need ship with SSMs. Check out this thread:

TMP link

Only half of the USN surface combatants have an ASM capability as this article details.

A THOUSAND SPLENDID GUNS
Chinese ASCMs in Competitive Control
…(PLAN) is a simple hull count: the United States has 101 in its inventory, while China comes to the table with 184. China's numerical advantage gives it more flexibility in distributing its surface forces to contest or exercise sea control while maintaining an adequate coastal defense. Taking size (displacement measured by tonnage) into account yields a superficial advantage for the United States: nearly
800,000 tons of warship compared with China's 362,000 tons. Taken together, however, the distribution of greater U.S. tonnage into fewer hulls means a more vulnerable concentration of power and faster losses in war.

OUR KNIFE AT THEIR GUNFIGHT
The various vessels' antiship cruise missiles (ASCMs) are the key differentiator when comparing their organic lethality. Only fifty of the U.S. Navy's 101 surface combatants are equipped to carry a dedicated ASCM: the Flights I and II Arleigh Burke–class destroyers and the Ticonderoga-class cruisers. These ships each carry eight 1990s-era RGM-84 Harpoons capable of delivering a 488-pound warhead over sixty-seven nautical miles (nm)…

…By comparison, all 184 ships listed for the PLAN have an ASCM capability. Most carry the YJ-83, a domestic version of the C-802A that advertises a 419-pound warhead and a 100 nm range. Some vessels have older missiles, but the Luyang II and Luyang III destroyers carry the modern YJ-62 (661-pound
warhead, 150 nm range) and the YJ-18 (661-pound warhead, 290 nm range).

link

While I generally agree that the USN ASCM capability is long neglected, that surface ship comparison ignores that most of our striking power comes from the 48x Hornets on every carrier, with a strike radius of ~500nm. Plus we have better ISR assets to ensure we can find & fix enemy ships more reliably. I expect the J-20 to change that balance somewhat.

We could start by making 3x Virginia-class a year to get back to the 70ish SSNs that the warfighter commands wanted back in the late 1990s.

Those are actually coming in under budget now!

True about the jets, but sadly those F-18s have rather short legs compared to the older, scrapped, F-14s, and those beautiful, Russian or Chinese made Sukhois.

Appears the Chinese are trying to make our AWACs and refueling aircraft very vulnerable as well, with their "stealth" aircraft, and ultra-long range AAMs.