The Great Shrinking Of The US Navy Begins

11 ships, 6 Perry Class Frigates, the aircraft carrier Enterprise and 4 Ticonderoga Class Cruisers, will be decommissioned next year alone.

Now the frigates and the Enterprise are at the end of their useful life. They've done their time and it makes sense for them to go. But 4 Ticonderoga Class Cruisers (CGs), each with at least another decade of useful service left? What the hell.

From Information Dissemination:

In my opinion, unless there are serious undisclosed material condition problems on these ships [the cruisers], this is a Bullshit Popsicle. The over 500 VLS cell missile capacity of these 4 warships exceed the combined missile capacity of the Royal Navy, the French Navy, the Italian Navy, the Spanish Navy, the Dutch Navy, the German Navy, the Turkish Navy, or the Danish Navy. These four ships are about equal in total missile capacity to the existing surface combatant force of the Royal Navy today.

That's a lot of bang going bye-bye in one year.

It's especially puzzling since the Navy is picking up an increased Ballistic Missile Defense mission and 3 of the cruisers can be cost effectively upgraded to the mission while the fourth, Port Royal already is BMD capable (of course Port Royal has it's own problems).

The oceans aren't any smaller and our interests and missions haven't decreased at all, so I'm not sure how shrinking the Navy makes any sense. You can say today's ships are more capable and able to perform multiple-missions than ever before but one thing they can't do is be in more than one place at one time.

History has a way of repeating itself and I'm sure that in due time people will look back at this time as we look back on others and wonder what in the world we were thinking. Of course the answer is...save money. Of course, it's funny how we never hear about these kinds of cuts coming out of any other federal departments.

Priorities.

posted by DrewM. at 12:01 PM

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