All in all though seeing a tri-hull warship on your morning commute is a cool treat. It had been front and center of Austal’s hangar doors for a long time.
IMO which really begs the question... why is the PRC navy so small? Yeah PLAN has the most hulls, but still ~2/3 the displacement. One would expect projected gap would trend to _multiple_ times larger than USN, not just current prediction of PLAN ~400 vs USN ~300 by 2030. Why is PLAN building carriers so slowly? Why are they building lots of smaller surface combatants and about to spam a lot of subs. Why are they not urgently rushing the carrier + large surface combatant displacement game despite being able to build entire USN displacement in a few months. IMO maybe they don't think surface combatants are going to survive in a shooting war either. Maybe US planners knows this to, but can't admit it publically, but directing aquisitions behind the scenes accordingly. Meanwhile you're going to get lots of navy folks who likes their big ships advocate for building big ships, which granted, having at least semi competent shipyards is real need to sustain current USN global posture even if it's not appropriate for a future peer war.
https://warontherocks.com/2024/03/win-wind-how-a-bipartisan-...
That is essentially blasphemy in terms of US politics.
And the corruption. The amount of dollars the war-industry has spent to buy members of congress. The revolving door between military / civilian brass & the war industry. How projects subcontracted over as many congressional districts as possible.
The first problem is that the US is doing lots of new classes of ship and those always take more time and budget. The US has built the Burke destroyers for decades without much trouble.
The second problem is that the US has low number of shipyards. Opening up new ones or expanding existing ones would be better than nationalizing. But that would take a long time. This makes new classes worse because have to schedule space and that can screw the long-running classes.
The US should also get rid of the Jones Act. It was supposed to protect the commercial shipping but that has dwindled to only inter-US shipping. The shipyards should be made to compete, and maybe that will improve their efficiency. Or the shipyards should be converted into military.
Another suggestion I heard was to have Japan and South Korea build hulls and the US can finish them.
Small warships are useful for low-intensity conflict but Red Sea conflict shows that they need more defense and offense.
The dominant power in an era has always used that intimidation performed via the implication of violence to force everyone into the boundaries of the agreed upon terms.
The goal would be in the end transitioning away from tools of war to tools of enforcement. The issue is that the overlap between the two is vast and repurposing the latter for the former is very easy. Which brings things full circle when the diplomacy required for enforcement fails and intimidation has to be used. There is a time for one and a time for the other, but we as a species are really bad at transitioning because being the intimidator is incredibly advantageous and thus very alluring for the leading party responsible for enforcement. The only ways to stop it are for another party to exceed the limits of the enforcement too quickly to react to (what the U.S. did to the British), marathoning an expansion of violent capabilities (what the U.S. did to the USSR and what China's currently doing to the U.S.), or factions within the dominant party starving the faction responsible for enforcement before said faction turns to war (the only time I can think of this happening being Luxembourg to Prussia). As we can see from the article the most common tactic is the second.
Expect the same article about nearly everything as the proportion of younger people decreases.
After most of the boomers pass on will gen x be blamed for all of societies problems?
Then another 20 or so years after that will it be the millennials fault followed then by gen z?
