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Road to 350: What Does the US Navy Do Anyway?
- Thread starter Randy Daytona
- Start date
It isn't a practical plan, unless we're about to enter a war surge...
The O&M on that ship would eat us alive. If we want 350 above all else, bring back the older Ticos and other surface combatants, or better yet, start buying small surface combatants from other nations, because in America we apparently can't build a frigate or corvette for less than $1B.
The O&M on that ship would eat us alive. If we want 350 above all else, bring back the older Ticos and other surface combatants, or better yet, start buying small surface combatants from other nations, because in America we apparently can't build a frigate or corvette for less than $1B.
Don't really see this Admin or Congress pushing to repeal the Buy American Act.
There is also the domestic political angle. The Republicans narrowly won Pennsylvania and Florida last election. The Kitty Hawk being rebuilt in Pennsylvania and based in Florida would provide lots of good paying jobs to the blue collar workers that overwhelmingly voted for Trump. In this aspect, the billions upon billions spent to renovate her as well as a few Perry class frigates is a feature, not a bug.
Few problems with that. The Navy Yard at Philly closed over 20 years ago; even assuming the Navy could re-acquire the leases (remember the Cecil Field fiasco?) most of the skilled trades moved on or retired a long long time ago. And the Shityard didn't exactly have the best reputation for good work, on time even when it was open. So you're talking about re-activating a yard that was closed and never meant to be reopened, to provide political patronage jobs and money (you voted for me, here's your reward), to reactivate ships that were decommed and never meant to be reactivated, that the Navy doesn't particularly want back in service.
I get why the administration likes this idea, politically. That doesn't mean it's a good idea, either for the Navy or the taxpayers.
Edit: I am an idiot and didn't realize there were 3 more pages of posts after yours and this has been discussed already. Doh!
Interesting. I noticed the same and looked up his bio. You were right: "Moore’s personal awards include the Distinguished Service Medal, Legion of Merit (three awards), Meritorious Service Medal (four awards), and the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal (three awards)." That is odd, but perhaps not for an EDO, not to mention one of his SWO tours was during an RCOH.
That was season three of four of House of Cards? Then he "fell asleep" in a parking garage, right?
A SWO in my reserve unit did his first tour on the USS New Jersey and said the material condition of the ship was very poor, he described numerous issues affecting the mundane to the critical and they were common across the class. If a very well built class that had a fraction of the sailing time as most of the FFG's had issues like that I would hazard a guess that sinking money into upgrading the Perry-class would be along the lines of this movie.
The Turks?! HA! Just how often do they go out to sea? Or even beyond the Eastern Med and Black Sea? If you want to look at how difficult upgrading the Perry FFG's it would be instructive to look Down Under, where for a mere 50% cost overrun the RAN got 4 FFG's for an extra 10 years. That isn't a solution, it is a really crappy band aid.
I am a big fan of expanding the fleet and building more ships but nonsensical proposals like this waste everyone's time and effort and don't help with anything but scoring some cheap political points.
I still don't understand why we can't have something like this. $500mil each
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fridtjof_Nansen-class_frigate
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fridtjof_Nansen-class_frigate
There is a whole list of capable Euro FFG's that make more sense than the LCS route we seem to continue to go down, all for the same amount of money or a little bit more. The beefed-up LCS FFG's move towards that but still aren't the best solution I think.
Buy American Act of 1933
Berry Amendment (1941)
Plus a whole shitpot of other acts, amendments, NDAAs, and DoD procurement rules.
For recent examples of what an asspain this creates for foreign corporations even building in the US with US corporate partners:
VH-71 Kestrel
Independence-class
HH-65A re-engining program
That doesn't preclude us from license building one of those designs, just like the T-6. Or, heaven forbid, designing and building our own version.
No, it doesn't. But what winds up happening is the US-built versions get bogged down in politics and legal challenges (VH-71, A-29), or wind up as Frankensteined bastards (HH-65A).