If this ship lives up to its billing, its going to be "superfreaky", like the F117 was to aircraft. This thing will be a new and unique design which will make it very stealthy and also use rail-guns.
My question is this...." What did Hurricane Katrina do to the ship yards in mississippi?" can they build a ship there?
Ping!
Nuclear subs would be cheaper. Just slap a 6" gun on the deck like the WWII boats.
The Navy hopes to drive down the price of future ships to $2.2 billion.
I don't think they'd have any trouble getting them quite a
bit below that if they ordered a thousand of them...
Ping!
Steely-eyed Killers of the Deep PING
The Navy certainly needs next generation firepower but I think the DDX is $20B of "winning the last war technology." The next war between two technical nations will be won by the side that masters the battlespace with thousands of unmanned drone weapons, both sea and airborne. If I were taking bets on this Death Star from Pascagoula vs 300 inbound stealthy drones, I'd bet on the drones.
If you take China for the next contender (another good bet) there are a lot of things pointing towards this type of warfare. The US and Israel have proven drone technology in battle, including low cost ultra-small drones. It has been our method to use them in individually and in small numbers, but think of the evolution of air warfare from the solo dogfights of 1914 to the 1000 planes bomber masses of 1944. The war in Iraq has shown the continued vulnerability of conventional weapons and tactics to asymmetrical attack. China has massive manufacturing capability with increasingly high technology. Should they put their mind to it they would have no problem producing drowns in the hundreds of thousands. Anyone familiar with Chinese infantry tactics knows that despite modern reforms they still love the human wave approach. It won't take much genius to convert the old tendency sending 5000 infantrymen charging up a hill to sending 5000 drones toward an American carrier battle group. The Soviet Union trained to make an attack on a US carrier battle group and hopefully overwhelm its defense with dozens or hundreds of anti-ship missiles. Luckily we never had to see how that would have worked. In the period since then close in weapons and ship defenses have been greatly improved, but next generation drones will be very small, very maneuverable and hard to hit. We train and design weapons to stop a mass inbound attack but I fear that number of bogies we are capable of stopping may be off by factor of 10 from what can be launched at us. It is not just the Navy who needs to make this paradigm shift. Air Force bases, masses of ground troops and even individual aircraft in flight or armored vehicles may become the targets of these swarms.
will it turn China into a lake? that is the question