The Navy Needs Sloops-of-War
I've long said the Navy needs to pick the number of ships it needs and build accordingly
Commander Salamander highlights the ingloriously named British “Offshore Patrol Vessel” represented by HMS Spey that at the end of June defied Chinese territorial claims in the Taiwan Strait as a class of ship the Navy needs. Hear, hear! The Commander is preaching to the TDR:E choir, although I’ve long worried that American ships need a minimum size to self-deploy overseas, ruling out as models a lot of allied patrol vessels that really just need to leave port to be in their patrol area. But with the hymnal filled with carrier worship songs, I have my doubts the Navy will willingly do what it takes to build those Sloops-of-War.
That River-class type of modestly capable ship can address numerous problems the Navy has, the Commander writes:
So, we need a larger Navy. What are the other lesser-included problems?
We need more shipyards in more locations: ships of this size can be built in far more locations than a DDG.
We need a larger presence: we can buy a lot of these and they can go more places than larger warships, at lower cost.
We need to improve interoperability with allies: more nations will be more approachable with this pulling into their port.
We need more at sea commands for more junior officers before they get to Commander Command: make no mistake, this is perfectly sized to give our best LT and LCDR command at sea early.
Funny enough, the ship uses the mission modules in standard shipping containers that was the design foundation that failed on the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship for adding capabilities that remain state of the art.
I’ve long wanted more numbers, recognizing that the U.S. Navy suffered from grade inflation that made the fleet top-heavy with capital ships:
[Prior] to Pearl Harbor, our fleet had a half dozen carriers and a dozen battleships plus some cruisers and lots of destroyers in the surface fleet. We had few ships above 10,000 tons (the heavy cruisers and up) while the rest were 5,000-ton light cruisers and destroyers of less than 3,000 tons. One thing you have to remember is that the 55 "destroyers" of the Arleigh Burke class and the 3 Spruance class that we still have weigh in at 8-9,000 tons. These ships are only slightly smaller than our 24 Ticonderoga class cruisers that tilt the scales at 9,600 tons. [These numbers are slightly different from the Strategypage numbers below.]
Our destroyers are really major capital ships and quite capable. It is a mistake to think that the terms are comparable from pre-WW II days.
The United States Navy is shrinking and our missions aren't.
So we have to do something. This article lays out the somethings options.
I have another idea. Set a number of platforms that we need to perform the missions we need to protect ourselves. Then build ships to reach that number.
Oh, they don't all have to be Ford super carriers or high end Aegis cruisers/destroyers. We really can build some less capable and cheaper ships for many missions. …We already use neutered Perry frigates that no longer have their missile launchers. Why not build new, cheap, frigates designed to accommodate mission packages that turn them into potent warships in war time?
The top-heavy Navy was forced to put high-capability warships into a forward presence role that wore them out and tempt enemies to strike to begin a war. Sad to say, we need expendable warships when fighting peer enemies.
It seemed like the LCS might have provided exactly that. But the Navy effed it up and gave us an expensive ship that couldn’t fight anything much tougher than a drug smuggling ship or pirates—as long as the LCS engines didn’t seize up.
The skunk at the seapower garden party is how the expensive super carrier can fit in with the need for numbers. I think the super carrier is too vulnerable and a mismatched platform-centric weapon in the emerging network-centric world that I saw developing when the Ford class was still a blueprint.
Face it, unless the role of our carriers is settled to recognize its power projection role while admitting its limited sea control role, the Navy isn’t going to get the numbers it needs in the fleet even if Congress strips the Army for parts.
One thing I worry about is messing with the definitions to pretend we are expanding the fleet. And counting unmanned vessels to reach a larger fleet number worry me, too. In many ways, unmanned systems are really rounds of ammunition. How many of the unmanned ships the Navy may get will be true ships and how many will be closer to sophisticated ammunition?
My model for the actual ship to get numbers has long been the World War II destroyer, which could escort fleet carriers even though bad storms could handle them roughly. The Fletcher class was 2,050 tons displacement, reaching 2,500 fully loaded. Now our “destroyers”—DDGs, or guided missile destroyers—are the size of World War II heavy cruisers and are our surface warfare capital ships rather than cheap and numerous escort and detached duty destroyers.
The British OPV Sloop-of-War weighs in at 2,000 tonnes (so pretty close even if British terminology is annoyingly a bit off) but Fletchers were a quarter longer. I don’t know if that difference matters. And modern weapons give this size ship a limited capital ship punch, which the destroyers could only inflict at super close range with their torpedoes.
So yeah, I’m all in favor of building sloops-of-war—absolutely ditch the OPV term that only a bureaucrat could love. But I doubt seapower proponents will be willing to bite the bullet on the super carrier.
NOTE: Britain’s OPV Spey, from Getty Images.