![]() ![]() The cost of a single new, Ford-class carrier – $10.5 billion without cost overruns – would consume nearly 20 percent of Trump’s proposed $54 billion increase in next year’s defense budget. The Navy currently has 277 deployable ships. Trump has said he will make good on his campaign promise to increase the Navy’s fleet to 350 ships. Swift said he would order carriers into close battle “in a heartbeat.” Nevertheless, citing the new anti-ship weapons, Swift says the carrier “is not as viable as it was 15 years ago.” Swift says they remain “very viable,” sufficiently impregnable to be sent into the thick of combat zones. Pacific Fleet, lauded carriers’ versatility. In an interview late last year, Admiral Scott Swift, commander of the U.S. Secretary of Defense’s office from 1966 to 1986 and is a longtime critic of U.S. “Beyond a shadow of a doubt, a carrier is just a target,” says defense analyst Pierre Sprey, who worked for the U.S. Surface Ships,” found that if hostilities broke out, “the risks to U.S. The torpedoes cannot be guided, but if aimed straight at a ship they are difficult to avoid.Ī 2015 Rand Corporation report, “Chinese Threats to U.S. These form an air bubble in front of them, enabling them to travel at hundreds of miles per hour. Russia, China, Iran and other countries also have so-called super-cavitating torpedoes. Certain Russian and Chinese submarines can fire salvoes of precision-guided cruise missiles from afar, potentially overwhelming carrier-fleet anti-missile defense. ![]() The new weapons include land-based ballistic missiles, such as China’s Dong Feng-21 anti-ship missile, which has a claimed range of 1,100 miles (1,770 kilometers) and moves at 10 times the speed of sound. enemies, including China, Russia and Iran, increase carriers’ vulnerability. Roger Thompson, a defense analyst and professor at Kyung Hee University in South Korea, says the array of powerful anti-ship weapons developed in recent years by potential U.S. fleet of 10 active carriers is 10 times as big as those deployed by its primary military rivals, Russia and China, who field one active carrier each. Today, the United States is the only country to base its naval strategy on aircraft carriers. The exact total is unknown because the Navy classifies exercise reports. and British carriers have been sunk at least 14 times in so-called “free play” war games meant to simulate real battle, according to think tanks, foreign navies and press accounts. In other naval exercises, even old-fashioned diesel-electric submarines have beaten carriers.Īll told, since the early 1980s, U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and half of its escort ships. In a combat exercise off the coast of Florida in 2015, a small French nuclear submarine, the Saphir, snuck through multiple rings of defenses and “sank” the U.S. And as they have been for decades, carriers remain vulnerable to submarines. Trump’s expansion plans come as evidence mounts that potential enemies have built new anti-ship weapons able to destroy much of the United States’ expensive fleet of carriers. The second Ford-class carrier, the John F. Ford alone is $2.5 billion over budget and three years behind schedule, military officials say. And he promised to bring down the cost of building three “super-carriers,” which has ballooned by a third over the last decade from $27 to $36 billion. Trump vowed to expand the number of carriers the United States fields from 10 to 12. Relatives seek the truth about Irish babies 'discarded like litter'Ĭhina gives greenlight to dozens of Trump trademarks ![]() ![]() “We’re going to soon have more coming,” Trump told an enthusiastic audience of sailors, declaring the new carriers so big and solidly built that they were immune to attack. Trump vowed that the newest generation of “Ford Class” carriers - the most expensive warships ever built - will remain the centerpiece of projecting American power abroad. ![]()
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