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After reading that article, I have no doubt the Navy will end up ordering a couple dozen of those things, wasting tens of billions of dollars. The govt doesn’t care about how much money they waste. Theres no reason to do the right thing, just whatever will fatten up their buddies pocketbooks.

We should save a bunch and just sub the building out to China..

I’m sure they already have the plans.

And we’d probably be buying all the materials to build from them anyway. Just avoid the hassle of bringing those over.

. . . the Navy will end up ordering a couple dozen of those things, . . .

Probably not. If they did, they'd at least get a couple dozen ships.

The Navy's practice is:
1) Continue building one class of ships until they can cry about how out of date they are - meanwhile getting some good ships.

2) Pack all the latest toys into the replacement ship, which grows and grows in both size and cost.

3) Build just three of the oversized/overpriced ships. Always three.

The first post-WWII class of USN destroyers was the Mitscher class, which was bigger than most WWII cruisers. They built three.

The first post-Los Angeles class submarine was the Seawolf class - bigger and better than anything that had gone before. They built three.

The first post-Arleigh Burke class of destroyers was the Zumwalt class - bigger than most WWII cruisers. They built three.

I did a study once (when I was still a working engineer) and found out that military systems (fighters, destroyers, tanks) are bought by the pound. The number of dollars per pound changes with time (always goes up) and by systems (aircraft are higher dollars/pound), but for any particular time, there is a dollars/pound number and it applies to all similar systems.

The way to get affordable, cost-effective systems is to have someone with strength of character be the program executive, and then have him be ruthless about keeping the size down. The cost will follow.

As an example of how this works, the Virginia class of submarines is 2/3 the size of a Seawolf, costs about 2/3 as much, and is at least as effective.