Firepower crisis: The US Navy will lose 1500 missile launch tubes in the next few years

[rangerrebew]

 Firepower crisis: The US Navy will lose 1500 missile launch tubes in the next few years
Story by David Axe • 3h •


The US Navy is already smaller than China’s by count of ships. But that’s not a valid way to measure naval power: it makes more sense to look at missile firepower. Unfortunately that’s not a happy story either.

The end is in sight for the US Navy’s long-serving Ticonderoga-class cruisers, icons of the US fleet since the 1980s. A new plan anticipates that the last of the 12 active cruisers – remaining from 27 built between 1980 and 1994 – will decommission in 2027.

Warships come and go, and the 567-foot Ticonderogas with their distinctive blocky superstructures were never going to last forever. But losing the cruisers is especially painful for the US fleet as it struggles to keep pace with the fast-growing Chinese one.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/firepower-crisis-the-us-navy-will-lose-1500-missile-launch-tubes-in-the-next-few-years/ar-AA1o15IX?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=f68dd94b46d7493ffff98f4cf1a404c1&ei=17

[Smokin Joe]

We're in poo. Deep poo.

What the Japanese failed to eliminate in Pearl Harbor was the maintenance and refitting spaces. By failing to do that, they enabled the US to repair ships and return them to the fray (albeit the really serious cases went back to the states).

Since then, our maintenance facilities have suffered, and now we're retiring some serious offensive capability? All that gee whiz stuff is nice, but (as I have repeatedly said), quantity has a quality of its own.

Those lost tubes were for fleet defense and offensive operations. In the days of kamikaze drones (and even kamikazes, back when) the more tubes that can be devoted to fleet defense, the fewer vessels will be lost or damaged. Without the ability to repair, without the ability to defend, we will be in serious trouble in any protracted peer to peer naval conflict. Retirement should be limited to what capabilities have been replaced, hull for hull.

In the meantime, pilots in the USAF are flying grandpa's planes....