Road to 350: What Does the US Navy Do Anyway?

[phrogdriver]

You've lost me when you're going to cut snippets out of context.

In your entire post, you missed the point - is the CG a capability that we need? I think that answer is yes, or else we would have fully mothballed all of them years ago.

And if it is, then we need to replace them. Operational necessity is what drives the procurement. Flag officers having 'fully-informed' conversations are saying they need this capability. It's possible that dozens of people got it wrong, but I doubt it.

I get that Trump is calling their replacement a 'battleship,' but modern CGs are already the size of WWII era battleships.

Yes, it will require investing into shipbuilding and infrastucture to get there. There is quite a bit of risk in execution that's quite easy to poo poo on. But I think that criticism is more easily levied on someone who can't accept that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed at the antique desk in the WH, and not the Gettysburg Address. Which is why I postulate: let's strip back the emotion in assuming / thinking that Trump, Hegseth, and Phelan are incompent idiots, and have a more rational discussion in the CG(N)'s role in modern naval warfare. To the extent that's not possible *shrug*, you're part of the problem.

As for qualified nukes - we have already met FY26 recruitment goals for nukes. There are more people who want to be nukes than jobs available.

When our core gap is in numbers smaller surface combatants, why suddenly take a left turn into a needlessly large and expensive ship?

We can’t build frigates, and our current destroyer fleet has no room for growth? How about we address those problems before wasting money on a ridiculous boondoggle.

If we need more VLS cells, unmanned ships would be far better choices that a massive gold plated monstrosity.

This administration has no strategic vision other than its own self-dealing and glorification. I’d be shocked if a single simulation or war game was done to justify what could be an immense program.

 

[123412131]

You've lost me when you're going to cut snippets out of context. When they say people can't read above a 7th-8th grade level, they mean that people can't synthesize ideas more than 1-3 lines apart nor understand literary devices like inference, hyperbole, and metaphor.

You’ve lost me with the “out of context” thing. I quoted your whole comment and responded to each claim in the exact same commenting format you used. Every word you wrote was included.

In your entire post, you missed the point - is the CG a capability that we need? I think that answer is yes, or else we would have fully mothballed all of them years ago.

The point is whether this specific program makes any sense. These are not cruisers in any meaningful Ticonderoga-replacement sense, and they are clearly not being pushed as a replacement for the Ticos, all of which are being retired by the end of the decade. They are roughly twice as long, around four times the displacement, nuclear-powered, anywhere from 6x to 8x as expensive, and potentially 3x as manpower-intensive. That is not a CG replacement.

And if it is, then we need to replace them. Operational necessity is what drives the procurement. Flag officers having 'fully-informed' conversations are saying they need this capability. It's possible that dozens of people got it wrong, but I doubt it.

You brought up the LCS. If your argument is that dozens of informed people in the Navy and DoD probably cannot get something badly wrong, then what happened there? What happened with A-12? Zumwalt? Seawolf? The requirement can be real and the procurement answer can still be bad. Those are not mutually exclusive.

Yes, it will require investing into shipbuilding and infrastucture to get there. There is quite a bit of risk in execution that's quite easy to poo poo on. But I think that criticism is more easily levied on someone who can't accept that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed at the antique desk in the WH, and not the Gettysburg Address. Which is why I postulate: let's strip back the emotion in assuming / thinking that Trump, Hegseth, and Phelan are incompent idiots, and have a more rational discussion in the CG(N)'s role in modern naval warfare.

Phelan was fired so I can’t speak on how his competance was viewed by the administration. As I’ve already stated, BBG(X) isn’t a CG program and you’re misrepresenting the program by saying it is.

As for qualified nukes - we have already met FY26 recruitment goals for nukes. There are more people who want to be nukes than jobs available.

I’m not going to directly doubt your knowledge but I’m having a hard time believing this. It’s also retention just as much as it’s recruiting. Nuke Os are still getting 200,000+ to sign on for their DH tour.

 

[exNavyOffRec]

I’m not going to directly doubt your knowledge but I’m having a hard time believing this. It’s also retention just as much as it’s recruiting. Nuke Os are still getting 200,000+ to sign on for their DH tour.

The USN always screams they need more nukes or they need to keep more nukes. Now if they really needed to keep more they wouldn't let nukes lateral to other designators, or the advancement rates for enlisted would be very high and they just aren't for all designators and paygrades.

The best one was when I was on sea duty and I was in my office hearing the RO talk to all the JO's about staying in and how the USN needed you to stay in so they needed to all go talk to the detailer when he came aboard in June I believe? Then when my DIVO went to talk to the detailer and asked about orders he was told this is what we have, he asked the detailer about different order since they needed JO's to stay in, what the detailer told him was that the USN already met the goal for JO's to stay for that FY and if he wanted to stay in or get out it didn't matter to him.

When on recruiting duty each year we always met our Nuke O goal with many months to spare.

 

[Brett327]

You’ve lost me with the “out of context” thing. I quoted your whole comment and responded to each claim in the exact same commenting format you used. Every word you wrote was included.



The point is whether this specific program makes any sense. These are not cruisers in any meaningful Ticonderoga-replacement sense, and they are clearly not being pushed as a replacement for the Ticos, all of which are being retired by the end of the decade. They are roughly twice as long, around four times the displacement, nuclear-powered, anywhere from 6x to 8x as expensive, and potentially 3x as manpower-intensive. That is not a CG replacement.




You brought up the LCS. If your argument is that dozens of informed people in the Navy and DoD probably cannot get something badly wrong, then what happened there? What happened with A-12? Zumwalt? Seawolf? The requirement can be real and the procurement answer can still be bad. Those are not mutually exclusive.



Phelan was fired so I can’t speak on how his competance was viewed by the administration. As I’ve already stated, BBG(X) isn’t a CG program and you’re misrepresenting the program by saying it is.



I’m not going to directly doubt your knowledge but I’m having a hard time believing this. It’s also retention just as much as it’s recruiting. Nuke Os are still getting 200,000+ to sign on for their DH tour.

It's a waste of time arguing with him. His ideas are as outlandish as they seem, and he cannot be reasoned with. I'm impressed by your level of knowledge on this stuff and I think it makes a meaningful contribution to the thread.

 

[Spekkio]

When our core gap is in numbers smaller surface combatants, why suddenly take a left turn into a needlessly large and expensive ship?

We can’t build frigates, and our current destroyer fleet has no room for growth? How about we address those problems before wasting money on a ridiculous boondoggle.

If we need more VLS cells, unmanned ships would be far better choices that a massive gold plated monstrosity.

This administration has no strategic vision other than its own self-dealing and glorification. I’d be shocked if a single simulation or war game was done to justify what could be an immense program.

I don't think that the majority of senior SWOs would agree that the 'core gap is number of smaller surface combatants.' And they're the ones putting the demand signal into the CNO, SECNAV, and SECDEF on what to buy.

You're describing an engineering unicorn in your post if you think we can mass produce frigate-sized ships with equal to or more ordnance capability than a DDG while operating with less manpower and sustainment costs. The LCS class kind of proved that there's not much room for small ships in our force given that our doctrine requires operating thousands of miles from shore. Small ships are a pain in the ass to sustain (less space for fuel / food) and they actually lose a lot of cost efficiency for manning and weapons loadout. If your only design criteria was to maximize VLS tubes for minimum cost and manpower support, you'd want to build one ship the size of a super tanker.

The technology isn't there for fully unmanned ships, not to mention working through the policy and legal issues with using an autonomous robot to engage a target. When we've effectively replaced FTs / FCs with AI to execute a TLAM strike package on a manned ship, we can talk about transferring that capability to a fully unmanned system. But as of right now, we're still using a half dozen human beings (not counting the people operating the rest of the ship) to launch TLAMs.

The vision for unmanned ships in the near-mid term is to operate in conjunction with manned forces as a force multiplier. That takes up space - hence you might want to procure a ship the size of a CG or battleship to employ them.

The procurement of a battleship does not pose an existential threat to naval aviation nor submarines.

 

[Spekkio]

The USN always screams they need more nukes or they need to keep more nukes. Now if they really needed to keep more they wouldn't let nukes lateral to other designators, or the advancement rates for enlisted would be very high and they just aren't for all designators and paygrades.

The best one was when I was on sea duty and I was in my office hearing the RO talk to all the JO's about staying in and how the USN needed you to stay in so they needed to all go talk to the detailer when he came aboard in June I believe? Then when my DIVO went to talk to the detailer and asked about orders he was told this is what we have, he asked the detailer about different order since they needed JO's to stay in, what the detailer told him was that the USN already met the goal for JO's to stay for that FY and if he wanted to stay in or get out it didn't matter to him.

When on recruiting duty each year we always met our Nuke O goal with many months to spare.

Retention and recruiting are two different issues and it's important not to muddy the water between them.

It is true that retaining JOs for DH tour has been a consistent issue since the early 2010s as retention fell from 30-35% to 20-22%. Aside from a recovered (and still booming) economy, the additional of female officers mathematically was going to make retention fall into the 20-25% realm as historical data shows that you need 8 female JOs vice 3 male JOs to make a DH. The military tends not to be a desirable career for women just like career fields like auto mechanics and plumbing. We did not increase JO inventory high enough to account for this (we need 25-28% to be 'healthy').

You run into a similar issue for zone B reenlistees for enlisted nukes. Zone A is over 100% thanks to STAR reenlistments.

However, this is the first year in over a decade that NR is denying students at USNA / NROTC who want to be nukes and the DEP pool is filling up.

 

[exNavyOffRec]

Retention and recruiting are two different issues and it's important not to muddy the water between them.

It is true that retaining JOs for DH tour has been a consistent issue since the early 2010s as retention fell from 30-35% to 20-22%. Aside from a recovered (and still booming) economy, the additional of female officers mathematically was going to make retention fall into the 20-25% realm as historical data shows that you need 8 female JOs vice 3 male JOs to make a DH. The military tends not to be a desirable career for women just like career fields like auto mechanics and plumbing. We did not increase JO inventory high enough to account for this (we need 25-28% to be 'healthy').

You run into a similar issue for zone B reenlistees for enlisted nukes. Zone A is over 100% thanks to STAR reenlistments.

However, this is the first year in over a decade that NR is denying students at USNA / NROTC who want to be nukes and the DEP pool is filling up.

People do always confuse retention and recruiting, if you lose a 6 year fully qualified LT you just can't immediately replace with a brand new Ensign.

I should have clarified that when I was talking about Nuke O goal I was specific about OCS as each accession source has it's own goals.

 

[phrogdriver]

I don't think that the majority of senior SWOs would agree that the 'core gap is number of smaller surface combatants.' And they're the ones putting the demand signal into the CNO, SECNAV, and SECDEF on what to buy.

You're describing an engineering unicorn in your post if you think we can mass produce frigate-sized ships with equal to or more ordnance capability than a DDG while operating with less manpower and sustainment costs. The LCS class kind of proved that there's not much room for small ships in our force given that our doctrine requires operating thousands of miles from shore. Small ships are a pain in the ass to sustain (less space for fuel / food) and they actually lose a lot of cost efficiency for manning and weapons loadout. If your only design criteria was to maximize VLS tubes for minimum cost and manpower support, you'd want to build one ship the size of a super tanker.

The technology isn't there for fully unmanned ships, not to mention working through the policy and legal issues with using an autonomous robot to engage a target. When we've effectively replaced FTs / FCs with AI to execute a TLAM strike package on a manned ship, we can talk about transferring that capability to a fully unmanned system. But as of right now, we're still using a half dozen human beings (not counting the people operating the rest of the ship) to launch TLAMs.

The vision for unmanned ships in the near-mid term is to operate in conjunction with manned forces as a force multiplier. That takes up space - hence you might want to procure a ship the size of a CG or battleship to employ them.

The procurement of a battleship does not pose an existential threat to naval aviation nor submarines.

You think there was a demand signal for a battleship from naval leadership? Really?

Our biggest gap is in the number of hulls. The surface Navy simply can’t be everywhere it’s needed. Buying a class of ship that will be 5x the cost of a DDG and 10x the cost of an FFG only makes the problem worse.

Unmanned ships don’t need to engage targets. They only need to hold the missiles. VLS capacity was the ONLY positive of a BBG, and USV can do that part for a fraction of the cost.

This is a fucking boondoggle. Nobody wants it, but they also want to keep their jobs, and don’t dare tell Cheeto Jesus that the emperor has no clothes/is fat/senile/corrupt.

 

[Spekkio]

You think there was a demand signal for a battleship from naval leadership? Really?

I think that there's a demand signal to replace CGs, as they are materially unable to be put to sea in most cases.

Our biggest gap is in the number of hulls. The surface Navy simply can’t be everywhere it’s needed. Buying a class of ship that will be 5x the cost of a DDG and 10x the cost of an FFG only makes the problem worse.

We have 82 active CRUDES in the US Navy and we put around 20 of them to sea at any one time. The biggest issue is that we need to get that number closer to 35.

I also reiterate that you're doing a lot of hand waiving for the logistical issues that come with smaller combatants. How we're going to sustain ships inside the WEZ of a near-peer conflict is one of those 'oh shit, we didn't think about that' problems that people are trying to solve right now.

 

[Randy Daytona]

I think that there's a demand signal to replace CGs.

I also reiterate that you're doing a lot of hand waiving for the logistical issues that come with smaller combatants. How we're going to sustain ships inside the WEZ of a near-peer conflict is one of those 'oh shit, we didn't think about' problems that people are trying to solve right now.

There is a demand signal for a larger surface combatant. The Burkes have limited range and limited magazines, so even though the carriers are nuclear powered, the escorts are not. And yes, I expect any future cruiser / strike cruiser / battlecruiser / battleship to have substantially larger magazines. The Navy needs both large and small combatants, not either/or - even if that means purchasing from civilian and international shipyards. Time is of the essence. And as a sidenote, with the Zumwalts called destroyers- but at 16,000 tons as big as a WW2 era heavy cruiser - do any of the Navy’s classifications make sense? (Don’t get me started on naming conventions)

The logistics issue is something, as you said, hand waived. There is no doubt China has studied the lessons of the last Pacific War and both our fuel depots and oilers at sea will be high priorities.

 

[123412131]

even if that means purchasing from civilian and international shipyards.

We can’t use civilian shipyards. Our civilian industry is in worse shape than our military yards. We have one major civilian shipyard in Philadelphia that someone in this thread has already brought up under the incorrect assumption it would be used for BBG(X), but it would take billions of dollars and at least a decade before we could seriously start talking about producing warships there. This doesn’t factor in how the government would navigate the problems of the yard being foreign-owned, especially if we’re talking about sensitive military systems or nuclear-related work. There’s also no guarantee Philly would even want the work. The Navy has burned the ship-building industry before, so why risk your business for a bad customer?

We also can’t use international yards either. Foreign construction of vessels for the armed forces is explicitly prohibited by law. Because the President can technically waive this, there is also specific language included in annual defense appropriations bills forbidding the use of SCN funds to construct naval vessels in foreign shipyards. This current administration has also been relatively hard-line against such a decision. The President himself rejected the idea when it was proposed by former SecNav Phelan.

 

[hscs]

The yard also needs a license to do work on / build nuclear systems.

 

[ChuckMK23]

Bob Gates tells us how it is.

 

[AllAmerican75]

I agree that 3M sucks but I disagree on the supporting details.

It starts with the mentality in your post that we (royal we) are smarter than the engineers, and you don't actually have to do that annual clean and inspect once a year. Nothing bad will happen if you defer it.

So from there we get into the 'put off maintenance requirements.' Not because someone wants to pad a fitrep or doctor numbers, but because we think we're smarter than the engineers. The last thing you need is to have to pull off station because someone gronked a bolt on a hydraulic filter that was perfectly fine, and now you can't use a tactical system. This has a second-order effect of breeding a culture of 'the CO says we can't do maintenance' and many sailors stop giving a shit about the program. Something something broken windows effect.

And sometimes, it's just not operationally appropriate to do the maintenance.

But let's peel one step further - why does a mechanic want to do an annual clean and inspect on month 2 of deployment? It's because SKED 3.2 sucks at actually scheduling maintenance. The program is meant to be sailor-proof: you do maintenance, enter the check, and it auto-schedules the next event in the future. It even locks the sailor from scheduling it outside of that window. It doesn't even have a calendar function like SKED 3.1 (or the reactor plant maintenance program that is still done with pen and paper). There's some buttonoloy to do a workaround and trick the program into allowing you to short-cycle PMS checks, but it is not well known and is akin to using MS Word to paint pictures. The program is designed for the crew to be passive bystanders in the scheduling process.

What right looks like is that the crew knows the ship is going to deploy and makes an intelligent decision on whether to short-cycle or defer maintenance on a case-by-case basis. When they enter a pre-deployment maintenance period, they use forecast features for what is due in the next 3-6 months and pull items left. But this rarely happens in practice because the tools we give people are not user-friendly to account for ship's operational cycles. The forecast feature exists, but the output is an eyesore of a spreadsheet of PMS checks. Oh, you mean you don't know what WLKJ-BAEWR S-2 is? Neither does your WCS.

Also don't get me started on the process to one-line PMS checks. There's absolutely nothing to audit against someone's deletions. Some WCS or Chief just 'knows' they don't have the equipment onboard and that's sufficient. If there's a piece of equipment in piss poor repair that looks like no one has touched it in years, there's a good chance it's because it's been erroneously deleted in someone's SKED deck.

But then we go even one step further... why is so much planning around the ship's operational cycle necessary? Why do we need a 24 year old WCS to comb through hundreds of PMS cards and determine what should or should not be moved? Why aren't there just sufficient, routine pierside upkeeps to get this stuff done? It's because we (royal we) signed out the optimized fleet response plan back in 2013, and since then have been running ships into the ground with inadequate pierside intermediate and depot repair periods. Things like SPRUCE avails - where you are supposed to spend 2-3 weeks doing painting and preservation - went away. If we were to follow the philosophy that we schedule PMS during pierside avails, a WCS of a larger work center will be scheduling dozens of PMS checks into what amounts to 12-15 weeks of pierside upkeeps throughout the FRTP (the last week before an underway is typically 'off-limits' for anything that isn't daily, monthly, or quarterly). For those workcenters, the idea that you're going to short-cycle your entire PMS deck to deconflict it with deployment would exceed the man-hours the division has, even if they worked 24-7 because the Navy manning system does not account for compressing 52 weeks of maintenance into 12 (if you're curious, each person in a maintenance center should have about 20-24 hours combined of scheduled preventative and corrective maintenance to perform per week... and I'd imagine a mechanic on a CG would scoff at that as much as an A-ganger on a 688).

I actually submitted a white paper on the topic many moons ago because the sub force was all like 'wtf, why aren't boats doing K-MRCs.' Well, part of it is you put the fear of god into COs that thou shalt not have lost Ao from doing infrequent (semi-annual or less) maintenance on deployment. But part of it is that there are deep, underlying structural issues to how maintenance is scheduled throughout a boat's FRTP and the tools we give sailors to manage the program. Sprinkle some 'shore duty, bruh' on top from the guys at PMT. Fast forward to today, and 7th fleet is constantly being briefed on optempo waivers due to material issues from subsequent deployers. I can only imagine the problem is worse for larger and more complex ships. Glad to see it was time well-spent. (/s)

Our ships are, for the most part, doing the best they can do under the current policy and resources allocated to them.

The issues of the 3M system go back into the mid 90's it is not only personnel to do the work it is also parts available to do the work, then trying to schedule the work around mandatory training while in port.

This is what I experienced and the difference between the early 90's to mid 90's and beyond.

In the early 90's we could just about any maintenance underway, off the coast of CA, Indian Ocean or Persian Gulf. We would go down to 1 Reactor for maintenance, shutdown a main engine for maintenance, just about anything we needed to do we could. It would get planned out to occur when there were no FLOPS, all parts were on hand, and then we would make it happen. Then bring everything back online and the planes would do their patrols over Iraq again.

Jump forward to late 90's when we couldn't do anything that would take any major equipment offline which meant most of that was pushed until we were back in port stateside, then we are compressing everything into a very short time like you mentioned. Then add in when we returned to port we would lose a few people to ASF, mess decks, then people on leave, so while we can do the work we don't have enough people to do the work.

I get that subs are limited as what they can do underway, however on a CVN we have options, we just weren't allowed to take advantage of those options due to our CO's wanting everything online all the time.

I did see a few instances where check were erroneously deleted only to be figured out later on, oops....

Some confounding variables to consider is that we have zero configuration management of our Surface Fleet. Having gone through SCLSIS audits, the pencil pushers NAVSUP sends down to do them 1) have no idea what they're looking at onboard and 2) lack the time and resources to actually perform an audit properly and update the ship's COSAL (list of all parts, machinery, and equipment on the ship). This means that your 3M program is calling for the wrong parts and that you can't actually order replacement parts because they likely don't exist in the stock system anymore due to replacements, contractor buyouts, production line shutdowns, and obsolescence. This is a routine problem with zero solution at the deckplate level.

In all honesty, this is a failure at the NAVSEA and NAVSUP level and the entirety of our ship maintenance program needs to be broken down and rebuilt from first principles. We've learned a LOT since 3M and the JFMM were first introduced and we need to implement those lessons learned. That said, I do not have faith that the Navy can fix these problems. We need strong, steadfast leadership who has Rickover-scale levels of authority to fix the systemic issues afflicting our fleet maintenance.

 

[IKE]

In all honesty, this is a failure at the NAVSEA and NAVSUP level and the entirety of our ship maintenance program needs to be broken down and rebuilt from first principles. We've learned a LOT since 3M and the JFMM were first introduced and we need to implement those lessons learned. That said, I do not have faith that the Navy can fix these problems. We need strong, steadfast leadership who has Rickover-scale levels of authority to fix the systemic issues afflicting our fleet maintenance.

WAYYY back when I was an ET3 on the ill-fated Bonhomie Richard, I inventoried the entire EXCOMM shop and updated P/Ns and S/Ns in whatever the 3M system was called (OMMS maybe?). 3 weeks later it reverted to the old wrong data -- something to do with a lowly ET3 on scene not having the digital authority, so the shore side backups were used as truth data.

We lost the bridge-to-bridge radio for a week because it had been "spliced" through an undocumented connection to share an antenna with SINCGARS.

I guess I'm saying I'm disappointed it's no better, but not surprised.