If the president wants to revive the Navy’s surface fleet, he could look to Asian partners to assist in building a reasonably priced and proven multi-mission frigate, such as the South Korean FFX Batch IV class or the Japanese upgraded Mogami class frigates.
Both of these ship designs meet the Navy’s warfighting-capability needs in a cost-effective manner.
This sort of partnership can be modeled on the president’s icebreaker deal with Finland: Build the first few warships in Asia, while training US workers there, then build the remaining 20-plus ships at an existing US military or commercial shipyard modernized with Korean or Japanese technology and processes.
Another opportunity for Asian partnership is in building support vessels — ammunition ships, refueling ships, hydrographic ships, etc.
When the Navy had 600 ships, 200 were support vessels — historically, they’ve been about 30% of the fleet.
As the Navy tries to grow back to 350 or 400 ships, it’ll need 100 to 125 support vessels to meet this ratio. Today, it has only 65.
Yet existing US military shipyards are not scaled to build these, and when they try, they tend to deliver them at double the cost of Korean or Japanese shipyards.
The most expensive element in the Golden Fleet plans is the Navy’s next generation of “large surface combatant,” and this design has also veered off course.
With unprecedented input from the president, the design morphed from a 15,000-ton destroyer to a supersized 35,000-ton “battleship,” likely costing $20 billion for the first ship and $13 billion per follow-on.
For the lower of those prices, you could buy five Aegis-equipped destroyers (DDGs).
And with the “battleship,” the Navy would get only 140 missile cells (as opposed to 480 cells with those DDGs) and one AEGIS air-defense system (as opposed to five with the DDGs).
At a time when the Navy needs to boost capabilities, an oversized ship like the battleship is tactically regressive, and consolidates more eggs in one basket.
A more effective way to maintain America’s dominance in large surface combatants is a three-pronged strategy. //
The president knows he needs to invest in a Navy, but if he wants to get the Golden Fleet right, he should reject much of what he’s hearing from the Pentagon and look to his Asian allies for help.
