As G points out in a tweet, the USS America will have a christening ceremony on October 20th.
While there could be some accuracy in his comment about amphibious ships being the most versatile in the fleet, the USS America won't be one of them. At $3.4B, USS America won't have a well-deck.
This is a huge problem and the U.S. Navy and United States Marketing Corps (if it is gold plated we want it) have recognized this multi-billion dollar error.
For $3.4B, We could have had maybe 5 Littoral Combat Ships (LCS). The LCS is a whole 'nother disaster but for littoral work in a low threat environment against small threats it is shocking that even 5 LCS offer more potential value than the USS America.
The USS America will be a big target in the future. It can't go anywhere in big wars without being a death trap for lots of Marines and Sailors. These kind of ships, in big wars don't go anywhere without a real aircraft carrier (Libya being not a real high-threat war btw). An aside to all that: the United States Navy is well on their way to creating an obsolete carrier air wing which will not be able to stand up to emerging threats.
Important portions of the U.S. Navy are becoming an outrageously expensive paper-tiger.
For small wars, without a well deck, USS America is useless. And if all we want is a helicopter carrier, we could make those for a billion a pop with smart thinking.
As for STOVL jets that the USS America will carry, they have little value in U.S. wars, can't stand up to high end threats, and well, because of the Just So Failed problems, we will be using the Harrier until 2030. Maybe by then, we can rid ourselves of that nonsense.
We can no longer afford such mistakes like the USS America. We can no loger tollerate such errors that give us a weaker U.S. defense posture.
USS America is symbolic of bad thinking by the U.S. Navy.
1 comment:
We have to thank the United States, pro-Super Hornet/Growler/JSF advocates and DoD bureaucrats that they are eroding our defence and the allies which is getting a lot weaker.
I'm not sure if you got my reply Eric, have you seen article of the Defence standing in region 'eroding' from The Canberra Times?
If you haven't seen it. You can research the article on Google, you'll find this interesting that goes to show you what we've done to purchase these useless boondoggles: the F-35A Just So Failed, the stingless F/A-18F and pre-wired EA-18G with obsolete ALQ-99 jamming pods.
Even though the Super Hornet/Growler are not mentioned in the article, its just the examples the way I mentioned about that they are the wrong aircraft for our nation needs which you can see the neighbouring countries are flexing their muscles arming and soon to be armed with far better Russian/Chinese fighters, advanced SAMs/AAAs and counter stealth radars proliferating which will very one day dispatch our ADF if the real war occurs.
Peter
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