The US Navy has fallen victim to a British procurement disease
Story by Tom Sharpe • 1h
If you were to delete every capability the Royal Navy has starting from the least important and working your way up, frigates would be the last capability to go. They are totemic and define navies. They are fast, lethal, flexible, survivable and often cheaper than their destroyer siblings. They are the backbone of the ability to project power and deter potential adversaries that extends far beyond their core ability to ‘just’ hunt submarines.
You can’t – or shouldn’t, anyway – have aircraft carriers, supply or amphibious ships without frigates. You can’t escort merchant vessels or protect shipping lanes or underwater infrastructure without them. My nuclear submariner friends will challenge for the top spot but their tasking is much narrower and we can afford far fewer of them.
Admiral Lord Nelson agrees with me: ‘Were I to die at this moment, “want of frigates” would be stamped upon my heart’.
It was therefore an interesting decision when the largest navy in the world (then) called time on building frigates by electing not to replace the Oliver Hazard Perry class (OHP) frigate, decommissioning the last of 61 hulls in 2015. The US Navy had clearly decided that anti-submarine warfare could be done instead by their fleet of nuclear attack submarines (correct but an expensive way to do it) an array of aircraft (correct but reduced persistence) and the mighty Arleigh Burke class destroyer (not correct) – and that Arleigh Burkes could do all the other surface combatant warship-type things very well (correct).
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-us-navy-has-fallen-victim-to-a-british-procurement-disease/ar-BB1nnrGW?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=HCTS&cvid=ea5f9e5396f94926b523ae6d35b942e6&ei=38
