The U.S. Naval Institute has their own proposals.[1]
Everybody has to rethink sea power now that attacking ships from shore is working. The Moskva was sunk by a missile mounted on a truck. That was a wake-up call for the world's navies. China has a lot of anti-ship missiles mounted on trucks.
Any naval ship in range of a hostile shore is in trouble today. The US will never again be able to send a parade of ships through the Taiwan strait as power projection.
It's also a big setback for the MAGTF concept, where a Marine unit is based from a group of medium-sized helicopter carriers and boat carriers. Those craft sit offshore and send out boats and helicopters. This works great against minor enemies with no air power. Against ones that can shoot ship-sinking missiles, or swarms of drones, it's not a good strategy. Houthi drones have become a serious threat. Ships go through a lot of expensive missiles shooting down cheap drones. Running out of missiles has become a serious problem. Underway replenishment of vertical launch tubes at sea is difficult, which means ships may have to return to a base to reload.
The Ukraine war, with large numbers of cheap drones and small missiles, has changed land warfare. There's no such thing as air superiority any more. If it flies, it will be shot at. No more flying helicopters over the battlefield with impunity. On the ground, nobody can move in the open. Tanks are easy to kill for anyone with the right weapons. Ukraine has turned into a war of attrition, where both sides keep steadily killing troops without accomplishing much.
The side that wins will be the one that runs out of resources last.
> The Ukraine war, with large numbers of cheap drones and small missiles, has changed land warfare. There's no such thing as air superiority any more.
This might be correct but I don't think the Ukraine war is demonstrative because neither side had the capability to establish air superiority.
palmotea · 2h ago
> Ships go through a lot of expensive missiles shooting down cheap drones.
When will we have cheap drones that can take out other cheap drones?
owlbite · 1h ago
There is a significant asymmetry in the requirements: cheap attack drones only have to succeed once, cheap defense drones have to succeed every time (or intercept sufficiently far out that some more reliable backup can be deployed when they fail).
palmotea · 1h ago
But the same is true of expensive missiles, which are apparently what's used now.
Seems like having a magazine of 1000 defense drones would be a good addition to a ship already armed with anti-aircraft missiles, so you don't have to shoot a missile unless you really have to. It would level out the economics.
elictronic · 1h ago
They have been demonstrated already. Lasers for small/medium drones are already being tested live in conflict regions as well.
We are only a few years in to the state change. Militaries take time and the big ones are learning cost lessons right now.
jandrewrogers · 1h ago
Not drones, high-power lasers. The US has been testing laser weapons for terminal defense extensively, with quite a bit of success. A laser shot has about the same cost as a single 20mm cartridge and you don’t need to reload.
Animats · 1h ago
That may work, but the enemy might attack with a thousand drones at once. So far, laser mounts are one per ship, and need several seconds on target to take down a drone.
This drone video is seven years old.[1] It's a hobbyist jet aircraft. 415 mph top speed. You have to expect that by now there are militarized versions.
A drone with sufficient range, payload, and protection against the standard litany of modern EW and counter-measure systems would be quite expensive. Even the crappy non-survivable drones used in Ukraine are tens of thousands of dollars and that would probably tip north of $100k each if they actually had to be hardened against modern countermeasures, which aren't really a thing in Ukraine. Aside from the cost issue, launching thousands of them against a single naval target is unlikely to be feasible due to the weight and volume considerations alone. The largest drone attacks ever mustered across an entire theater of war, never mind against a single target, were in the hundreds and those didn't have to contend with much in the way of serious broad spectrum countermeasures or point defenses.
You would likely be better off with several actual anti-ship missiles. A Harpoon only costs $1.4M and those are dedicated platforms purpose-built to defeat state-of-the-art defenses and countermeasures.
The US Navy is testing the lasers against cruise missiles and other systems with much more protection and capability than the typical cheap drone. Current versions are lower-power testbeds but production versions are expected to be several hundred kW.
Animats · 3m ago
> A drone with sufficient range, payload, and protection against the standard litany of modern EW and counter-measure systems would be quite expensive.
Not any more.
DJI drone able to return home using visual navigation without GPS.[1] Unarmed. About US$1000.
Small lightning-proof drone.[2] Aims lightning strikes. Cost not give.
Ukraine EW-resistant drone.[3] Drops bombs. Currently about US$30,000.
Also EMPs and microwaves to fry swarms of drones at once.
bigyabai · 2h ago
You won't, because that necessitates a faster drone that your adversary might already be fielding.
elictronic · 1h ago
This is incorrect. You have layered responses. Faster drones mean less range, speed, or payload. So you layer your defense response to account for the different categories.
This won’t be a game of mine is better faster like marketing pukes like to pretend. Just like memory caches one size does not solve all problems.
Missiles, small kinetic drone interceptors, AA guns, lasers, shotgun drones, gps spoofing, jammers, and high power microwaves just to name some options. Each has its place and saying drone interceptors won’t work shows you have no idea what you are talking about.
bigyabai · 11m ago
We're talking about surface vessels, here. What layer can a drone even occupy? Close-in intercepts are handled with CIWS systems, BMD is covered by VLS, AA handled by SAMs. Drones do not handle any of those mission profiles better than their counterparts, cost be damned.
I'm entirely willing to write off drone interceptors for the foreseeable future. Layered defense certainly presents opportunities, but not for low-reliability expendable doodads.
colechristensen · 2h ago
Only when we're forced. There's an ego problem with military acquisitions, people want big fancy things. When million dollar missiles are outmatched with thousand dollar drones and that becomes an actual threat is when these things change. Ukraine is working as a reality check and learning experience for what modern war would actually be like on a large scale.
colechristensen · 2h ago
I think it's been obvious for quite a while that in a real war ships are now going to be pretty useless as they're far too vulnerable to cheap and easy weapons. The Houthis demonstrated this to folks who weren't aware or in denial, but it's been true for a while.
jltsiren · 1h ago
Vulnerable is not the same as obsolete.
Surface ships are still the only way to transport large quantities of troops and equipment over long distances. If you want to maintain the ability to project force beyond oceans, you need a navy to escort the vulnerable transport ships and to fight whatever threats they would be facing.
AtlasBarfed · 2h ago
Ukraine drones aren't even submersible with attention to stealth afaik.
The navy is going to be, uh, already is a totally different battlefield.
Even deep water flotillas maybe maybe vulnerable to extremely low-tech long loitering naval drones. If you want to defend against us carrier groups, do you build your own carrier group or design a long loiter submersible activatable drone that you can build insufficient numbers to basically cover your the entire strategic theater of the ocean that you need.
How much is a full carrier group or a sufficient Navy to fight them, $100 billion?
Drunks are simply going to make power projection a lot more difficult outside of strategic nuclear weapons. If Taiwan is on the ball, they should have thousands if not more anti-ship drones ready to be launched. The second they see invasion operations by mainland China crossing the channel.
I do disagree with air power: I believe there is substantial air power superiority now and in the medium term future with advanced high altitude high-speed Jets. That still requires a huge amount of engineering investment and technological infrastructure to compete in that theater, and dominance of that provides vast tactical advantages.
And, despite how much I hate musk, if the starship SpaceX rocket achieved some measure of its payload and launch goals it enables military dominance of low orbit for a couple decades.
scheme271 · 1h ago
Forget long range drones, the Chinese have worked on a ballistic anti-ship missile (DF-21D) that can credibly threaten or destroy a carrier from 1000 miles/1600km away. It uses a conventional warhead and would limit carrier operations. Or at the very least, would make the US Navy think very hard about the risk/reward ratio of deploying a carrier group.
jandrewrogers · 46m ago
Color me skeptical. That missile has to be actively guided in using external systems. The US has extensive defenses in-depth designed to defeat systems that work this way. The Soviets were doing it long before the Chinese were. It is a threat but I don't think the US Navy is losing sleep over it. The US deprecated systems with similar guidance models a long time ago because of their intrinsic vulnerability to defenses.
Also, it can't credibly "destroy" a carrier. The warhead is much too small. You could launch dozens, at high cost, but this is where the attackable single point of failure of these missiles start to become a problem.
oatsandsugar · 3h ago
> Rather than outsourcing design to third parties, ship design should be brought in-house, and NAVSEA should expand its staff of Naval Architects from around 300 to closer to 1200.
Abundance makes this point about many government projects' inefficiency.
mitthrowaway2 · 3h ago
In my (admittedly not ship-building) experience, big problems happen when design and manufacturing are done by different organizations. The designer has to make guesses about the tools and processes at the manufacturer, and the manufacturer has little flexibility to make small changes to the design to improve manufacturability.
Of course there are ways to bridge this gap, including close collaboration and frequent back-and-forth between groups, but then when the spec has been fine-tuned for one manufacturer it can end up nearly impossible for third parties to competitively bid for a contract.
I think the navy can probably do design as well as anybody, but then they'd probably have to run the shipyards too.
oatsandsugar · 2h ago
The alt case isn't the shipyard doing the design; it is gov't working with consultants on specs, working with designers who work with engineers who work with manufacturers who work with subcontractors
ceejayoz · 4h ago
> Ford-class carriers have high-end radars with similar capabilities as the radars of guided-missile destroyers.
Well, yeah. They have an air wing to keep track of.
> the emissions from these radars make them easier to detect, track, and target…
Is finding a US Navy battlegroup a challenge in the modern era? And won't the nearby escorts still have their radars on?
> The helicopters add significant cost, weight, and crew to the ship.
Sure. And capabilities.
Symmetry · 3h ago
The idea isn't to remove the radar entirely but make do with something not much better than what the Nimitz class has. Without launch tubes with SM-3s no need to track things out past the atmosphere.
> AN/SPY-6(V)1: Also known as the Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR).[21] It is 4-sided phased array radar, each with 37 RMAs... planned for the Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
> AN/SPY-6(V)2: Also known as the Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar (EASR).[23] Rotating and scaled-down version with 9 RMAs estimated to have the same sensitivity as AN/SPY-1D(V) while being significantly smaller.
Same tech, just fewer modules.
andbberger · 3h ago
> Is finding a US Navy battlegroup a challenge in the modern era? And won't the nearby escorts still have their radars on?
> China appears to be working hard to deal with this problem, and it’s very possible that they can locate the carriers reasonably effectively, but they have dozens of satellites and large, expensive over-the-horizon radar systems, which any other power is unlikely to be able to match.
Seven years after this article's writing, "dozens of satellites" doesn't seem like that high a bar given Starlink's many thousands. (And we've seen huge bandwidth increases, too, which makes real-time imaging and analysis looking for ship wakes etc. far more doable.)
bee_rider · 3h ago
Since we haven’t had a war against a peer in like 80 years, we have basically no idea what it’d look like, right? I mean, everybody has a bunch of satellites up there right now, and nobody wants to kick off Kessler syndrome. But if two sides with serious navies started fighting and everybody’s carriers were getting spotted by satellite, is it obvious that nobody would start running that calculation?
Is a creme de la creme radar really required for air traffic control? They can launch E-2s anyway, they're a carrier.
psunavy03 · 3h ago
Carrier radars are not "just for air traffic control." The CVN needs its own way of being able to see its surroundings and cue its own self-defense weapons. Technology evolves, and the means to do this evolve with it. The reason carriers are getting SPY-6 is to replace other radars that are older and have the same job: letting the ship see what is around it.
As another poster mentioned, redundancy is a thing. Suppose you don't have an E-2 up and you need to launch a fighter alert. Someone needs to direct that intercept and it's better not to have a single point of failure. Better for those fighters to have the ability to be directed from an E-2, or the CVN, or the shotgun cruiser . . . whatever makes sense at that time.
And the Navy trains for emissions control or EMCON for short. There are tactics, techniques, and procedures not appropriate for discussion here about how ships and formations of ships are expected to do their business when it doesn't make sense to be radiating sensors.
stackskipton · 3h ago
What CVN self defense weapons need full SPY-6? It got Sea Sparrows and RAMs which are not very far range and not many of them. DDGs have long range stuff that really need SPY-6 capabilities.
My guess is SPY-6 was put on Ford just for commonalty reasons.
ceejayoz · 2h ago
The Fords don't get "full SPY-6". It's a modular radar, made of 2x2x2 foot modules; the Burkes have 37 modules, the Fords have 9.
Probably, though CVN-78 doesn't have it. It's an odd duck.
stackskipton · 2h ago
Looks like Raytheon convinced USN that everyone rocking SPY-6 was going to save a ton of money due to commonalty but Ford was already commissioned so it's got old system. Probably will install it during it's next yard time.
schainks · 3h ago
The assets that leave the ship could get shot down, so the ship needs to be self-sufficient, too.
Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. Ford class EMALS systems have redundant power supplies, for example. That's a huge expense in both weight and operations.
Not saying this is smart or 'right', but I imagine that's the logic behind the decisions for this stuff.
RugnirViking · 3h ago
In general the US carrier force in ww2 was well known for having excellent redundancy and damage/fire control. Its a doctrinal thing, and a legacy they're quite proud of.
For example, USS Yorktown (CV-5) - took bomb and torpedo hits, with flooding and fires. Limped to pearl harbour, Was repaired in !!3 days!! and sent right back out to battle, where she was extremely heaviliy damaged again, but kept afloat through several days of bombardment before sinking.
USS Enterprise (CV-6) - hit by several bombs, a large fire in multiple compartments started. Fire control and damage repairs got the flight deck partially operational for launcing and recovering flights within an hour
USS Franklin (CV-13) - took almost 600 casualties, and had massive fires and ammunition explosions and fuel explosions. Despite extreme damage, she limped back to home port. Her survival is considered one of the greatest acts of shipboard damage control in naval history.
there are several more. A part of this is a difference in their design - british and french carriers used thick armoured flight decks, wheras the americans sacrificed these for speed and internal machinery space
ceejayoz · 3h ago
If you invent a creme-de-la-creme radar, there's not much reason to avoid using its components wherever you need one. E-2s get shot down; escorts get sunk. Jamming makes it so you can't get data from the E-2s, and ships can pump a lot more electrical power into their array.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-6 does indeed have variants for carriers that are smaller and cheaper; the ones going on the Burkes have 37 radar modules to the carriers' 9.
dylan604 · 3h ago
From my reading of naval strategy, the carrier wouldn't want to be sending out that much radar for SigInt purposes. Radar can be detected much further away than what can be detected by the carrier. That's one reason why they use the E2s. The E2s can fly off and see over the horizon, and then just link their data back to the fleet.
So why would the carrier need this additional expense?
PaulHoule · 3h ago
Not so sure about
A specialized ballistic missile defense platform based on a commercial ship hull —
The US military has historically preferred to intercept ballistic missiles outside
the atmosphere. The advantage is that one missile defense battery can cover a
very wide area. A specialized ballistic missile defense ship could be kept farther
back from more forward groups, protecting them without giving away its position
with easily detectable radar emissions.
One thing about BMD systems of all kinds is that the footprint they protect is smaller than you wish it was
part of the reason why the US has BMD ships is that they can placed in places such that the footprint works since the ocean covers like 75% of the Earth's area. To really be out of range of aircraft, anti-ship missiles and all that you'd have to be hundreds of miles away from the threat and that could well put you out of the footprint. Not to say that you couldn't have clever answers such as the launch vehicle being separated by the radar though most BMD systems use track-with-missile guidance that require the missile be in close communication with the radar for the terminal phase.
jandrewrogers · 2h ago
This partly gets into the reason why exoatmospheric intercept is preferred. In order to maximize the useful coverage envelope, they need to maximize missile speed. Unfortunately, there is a speed threshold beyond which endoatmospheric terminal guidance becomes extremely challenging due to limitations imposed by material physics. If your terminal guidance is exoatmospheric, you can mostly avoid those issues.
That said, it is clear that the US has been leaning heavily into moving more defense to airborne missile carriers. For example, the SM-6 can now be launched directly from F-18s instead of destroyer VLS cells, which greatly extends the potential range of ballistic missile defense coverage. The B-21 Raider, while it can carry bombs, is essentially an extremely stealthy missile launcher with a very long range and loiter time.
davemp · 3h ago
I’ve started to think that the Gov. needs to act more like a pseudo open source maintainer rather than customer or designer. Competition helps on many different axis, but the gov not owning the designs (whose R&D we paid for) drastically limits future competition.
nickff · 1h ago
Government holding competitions for design, build, and maintenance separately was done for missiles, and it did not work well. Government has also designed at least one missile (Sidewinder by the Navy at White Sands), and the missile turned out well, although that was an example of a relatively simple device, designed for low-cost.
I think government focusing on specifying interfaces for modular components (in hardware and software) might be a good paradigm, though it probably has drawbacks which I haven't considered.
Spooky23 · 2h ago
I think it might actually improve competitive aspects by allowing parts of it to be bid out.
You probably need that anyway, because congress will never allow key personnel to be paid enough on the gov payroll.
ianburrell · 2h ago
The problem with the distributed battle groups problem is that there is minimum capability that is needed to be viable warship. The LCS are a failure partly because they were designed for low intensity conflict. They only have point defense and not medium range air defense. The Houthis have shown in Red Sea that higher level of defense is needed against cheap anti-ship missiles and drones.
The other part is that ships provide interlocking sensors and defense. The carrier's AWACS cover a long distance. The long range missiles mean that the destroyers can spread out and cover large area.
bell-cot · 3h ago
If you really want to improve Naval ship acquisition, then go back to when the US Navy had its own navy yards - which were full-bore shipyards, capable of constructing anything up to the largest aircraft carriers. So any time the defense contractors were getting greedy or moving slow, the USN could just build ships in-house.
Unfortunately, the old navy yards could not <cough/> generously support <cough/> our self-serving congressmen. Vs. the defense contractors could. Guess which one got phased out.
unethical_ban · 3h ago
I like the idea of certain types of ships being superstock Maersks that launch air or sea drones from the rear. Quantity may be useful in the drone and AI era.
ceejayoz · 3h ago
Ukraine has been using jetski (remotely piloted) launched drones.
And got the first naval drone anti-aircraft kills recently.
Drones are likely to change the whole look of naval warfare a lot more than a new type of frigate in the near future.
ArthurStacks · 2h ago
Written by someone naive who just wasted his time writing all that, all through not understanding it isnt a problem. Its by design.
colechristensen · 2h ago
This is bad analysis.
The HN crowd should be very familiar with management frequently changing requirements especially when it's far too late in the process forcing reworks.
Instead of middle managers, shipbuilders have the whole Navy, the personal egos and career ambitions of captains and admiralty, Congress, and the ever changing president and party in power to deal with. The author suggests we don't start building a ship until the requirements are done... my sweet summer child they're never done. There are way too many cooks in the kitchen and that's the problem that needs to be solved, ships are being designed and redesigned by committee nearly endlessly. Most things are.
To make acquisitions cheaper this fiddling needs to be curbed, just saying "don't start building" misses the problem and the point.
Everybody has to rethink sea power now that attacking ships from shore is working. The Moskva was sunk by a missile mounted on a truck. That was a wake-up call for the world's navies. China has a lot of anti-ship missiles mounted on trucks. Any naval ship in range of a hostile shore is in trouble today. The US will never again be able to send a parade of ships through the Taiwan strait as power projection.
It's also a big setback for the MAGTF concept, where a Marine unit is based from a group of medium-sized helicopter carriers and boat carriers. Those craft sit offshore and send out boats and helicopters. This works great against minor enemies with no air power. Against ones that can shoot ship-sinking missiles, or swarms of drones, it's not a good strategy. Houthi drones have become a serious threat. Ships go through a lot of expensive missiles shooting down cheap drones. Running out of missiles has become a serious problem. Underway replenishment of vertical launch tubes at sea is difficult, which means ships may have to return to a base to reload.
The Ukraine war, with large numbers of cheap drones and small missiles, has changed land warfare. There's no such thing as air superiority any more. If it flies, it will be shot at. No more flying helicopters over the battlefield with impunity. On the ground, nobody can move in the open. Tanks are easy to kill for anyone with the right weapons. Ukraine has turned into a war of attrition, where both sides keep steadily killing troops without accomplishing much. The side that wins will be the one that runs out of resources last.
All those problems are coming to naval warfare.
[1] https://www.usni.org/american-sea-power-project
This might be correct but I don't think the Ukraine war is demonstrative because neither side had the capability to establish air superiority.
When will we have cheap drones that can take out other cheap drones?
Seems like having a magazine of 1000 defense drones would be a good addition to a ship already armed with anti-aircraft missiles, so you don't have to shoot a missile unless you really have to. It would level out the economics.
We are only a few years in to the state change. Militaries take time and the big ones are learning cost lessons right now.
This drone video is seven years old.[1] It's a hobbyist jet aircraft. 415 mph top speed. You have to expect that by now there are militarized versions.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k
You would likely be better off with several actual anti-ship missiles. A Harpoon only costs $1.4M and those are dedicated platforms purpose-built to defeat state-of-the-art defenses and countermeasures.
The US Navy is testing the lasers against cruise missiles and other systems with much more protection and capability than the typical cheap drone. Current versions are lower-power testbeds but production versions are expected to be several hundred kW.
Not any more.
DJI drone able to return home using visual navigation without GPS.[1] Unarmed. About US$1000.
Small lightning-proof drone.[2] Aims lightning strikes. Cost not give.
Ukraine EW-resistant drone.[3] Drops bombs. Currently about US$30,000.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWIYOOKItM
[2] https://dronexl.co/ja/2025/04/23/ntt-lightning-triggering-dr...
[3] https://interestingengineering.com/military/meet-the-shoolik...
This won’t be a game of mine is better faster like marketing pukes like to pretend. Just like memory caches one size does not solve all problems.
Missiles, small kinetic drone interceptors, AA guns, lasers, shotgun drones, gps spoofing, jammers, and high power microwaves just to name some options. Each has its place and saying drone interceptors won’t work shows you have no idea what you are talking about.
I'm entirely willing to write off drone interceptors for the foreseeable future. Layered defense certainly presents opportunities, but not for low-reliability expendable doodads.
Surface ships are still the only way to transport large quantities of troops and equipment over long distances. If you want to maintain the ability to project force beyond oceans, you need a navy to escort the vulnerable transport ships and to fight whatever threats they would be facing.
The navy is going to be, uh, already is a totally different battlefield.
Even deep water flotillas maybe maybe vulnerable to extremely low-tech long loitering naval drones. If you want to defend against us carrier groups, do you build your own carrier group or design a long loiter submersible activatable drone that you can build insufficient numbers to basically cover your the entire strategic theater of the ocean that you need.
How much is a full carrier group or a sufficient Navy to fight them, $100 billion?
Drunks are simply going to make power projection a lot more difficult outside of strategic nuclear weapons. If Taiwan is on the ball, they should have thousands if not more anti-ship drones ready to be launched. The second they see invasion operations by mainland China crossing the channel.
I do disagree with air power: I believe there is substantial air power superiority now and in the medium term future with advanced high altitude high-speed Jets. That still requires a huge amount of engineering investment and technological infrastructure to compete in that theater, and dominance of that provides vast tactical advantages.
And, despite how much I hate musk, if the starship SpaceX rocket achieved some measure of its payload and launch goals it enables military dominance of low orbit for a couple decades.
Also, it can't credibly "destroy" a carrier. The warhead is much too small. You could launch dozens, at high cost, but this is where the attackable single point of failure of these missiles start to become a problem.
Abundance makes this point about many government projects' inefficiency.
Of course there are ways to bridge this gap, including close collaboration and frequent back-and-forth between groups, but then when the spec has been fine-tuned for one manufacturer it can end up nearly impossible for third parties to competitively bid for a contract.
I think the navy can probably do design as well as anybody, but then they'd probably have to run the shipyards too.
Well, yeah. They have an air wing to keep track of.
> the emissions from these radars make them easier to detect, track, and target…
Is finding a US Navy battlegroup a challenge in the modern era? And won't the nearby escorts still have their radars on?
> The helicopters add significant cost, weight, and crew to the ship.
Sure. And capabilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-6
> AN/SPY-6(V)1: Also known as the Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR).[21] It is 4-sided phased array radar, each with 37 RMAs... planned for the Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
> AN/SPY-6(V)2: Also known as the Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar (EASR).[23] Rotating and scaled-down version with 9 RMAs estimated to have the same sensitivity as AN/SPY-1D(V) while being significantly smaller.
Same tech, just fewer modules.
yes https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1
Per your article:
> China appears to be working hard to deal with this problem, and it’s very possible that they can locate the carriers reasonably effectively, but they have dozens of satellites and large, expensive over-the-horizon radar systems, which any other power is unlikely to be able to match.
Seven years after this article's writing, "dozens of satellites" doesn't seem like that high a bar given Starlink's many thousands. (And we've seen huge bandwidth increases, too, which makes real-time imaging and analysis looking for ship wakes etc. far more doable.)
Except the Trump administration, you mean.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/07/space-pollut...
As another poster mentioned, redundancy is a thing. Suppose you don't have an E-2 up and you need to launch a fighter alert. Someone needs to direct that intercept and it's better not to have a single point of failure. Better for those fighters to have the ability to be directed from an E-2, or the CVN, or the shotgun cruiser . . . whatever makes sense at that time.
And the Navy trains for emissions control or EMCON for short. There are tactics, techniques, and procedures not appropriate for discussion here about how ships and formations of ships are expected to do their business when it doesn't make sense to be radiating sensors.
My guess is SPY-6 was put on Ford just for commonalty reasons.
https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/sea/spy6-radars (see "A closer look at the SPY-6 variants")
Probably, though CVN-78 doesn't have it. It's an odd duck.
Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. Ford class EMALS systems have redundant power supplies, for example. That's a huge expense in both weight and operations.
Not saying this is smart or 'right', but I imagine that's the logic behind the decisions for this stuff.
For example, USS Yorktown (CV-5) - took bomb and torpedo hits, with flooding and fires. Limped to pearl harbour, Was repaired in !!3 days!! and sent right back out to battle, where she was extremely heaviliy damaged again, but kept afloat through several days of bombardment before sinking.
USS Enterprise (CV-6) - hit by several bombs, a large fire in multiple compartments started. Fire control and damage repairs got the flight deck partially operational for launcing and recovering flights within an hour
USS Franklin (CV-13) - took almost 600 casualties, and had massive fires and ammunition explosions and fuel explosions. Despite extreme damage, she limped back to home port. Her survival is considered one of the greatest acts of shipboard damage control in naval history.
there are several more. A part of this is a difference in their design - british and french carriers used thick armoured flight decks, wheras the americans sacrificed these for speed and internal machinery space
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-6 does indeed have variants for carriers that are smaller and cheaper; the ones going on the Burkes have 37 radar modules to the carriers' 9.
So why would the carrier need this additional expense?
https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/22265/17_Simple_Model_Calculat...
part of the reason why the US has BMD ships is that they can placed in places such that the footprint works since the ocean covers like 75% of the Earth's area. To really be out of range of aircraft, anti-ship missiles and all that you'd have to be hundreds of miles away from the threat and that could well put you out of the footprint. Not to say that you couldn't have clever answers such as the launch vehicle being separated by the radar though most BMD systems use track-with-missile guidance that require the missile be in close communication with the radar for the terminal phase.
That said, it is clear that the US has been leaning heavily into moving more defense to airborne missile carriers. For example, the SM-6 can now be launched directly from F-18s instead of destroyer VLS cells, which greatly extends the potential range of ballistic missile defense coverage. The B-21 Raider, while it can carry bombs, is essentially an extremely stealthy missile launcher with a very long range and loiter time.
I think government focusing on specifying interfaces for modular components (in hardware and software) might be a good paradigm, though it probably has drawbacks which I haven't considered.
You probably need that anyway, because congress will never allow key personnel to be paid enough on the gov payroll.
The other part is that ships provide interlocking sensors and defense. The carrier's AWACS cover a long distance. The long range missiles mean that the destroyers can spread out and cover large area.
Unfortunately, the old navy yards could not <cough/> generously support <cough/> our self-serving congressmen. Vs. the defense contractors could. Guess which one got phased out.
And got the first naval drone anti-aircraft kills recently.
Drones are likely to change the whole look of naval warfare a lot more than a new type of frigate in the near future.
The HN crowd should be very familiar with management frequently changing requirements especially when it's far too late in the process forcing reworks.
Instead of middle managers, shipbuilders have the whole Navy, the personal egos and career ambitions of captains and admiralty, Congress, and the ever changing president and party in power to deal with. The author suggests we don't start building a ship until the requirements are done... my sweet summer child they're never done. There are way too many cooks in the kitchen and that's the problem that needs to be solved, ships are being designed and redesigned by committee nearly endlessly. Most things are.
To make acquisitions cheaper this fiddling needs to be curbed, just saying "don't start building" misses the problem and the point.