Absolutly agree with you on there being no substitute for a 16" gun. But, there are just so many targets that require 16" guns. Getting more 8" guns to the various deployed Expeditionary Strike Groups would be more effective than 2 or at most 4 BBs (by the way the only 2 gun cruisers left are the Des Moines and Salem, I've seen them both and they are toast. The other BBs - Alabama, Massachusetts and North Carolina are pretty rough and are best left as museums). I made the case on another post that keeping all four Iowas in good shape is a good idea. If we need them they will be there. With 10-15 years of a fifty year service life used, that means if we had kept them in service they would be approaching 30 years now. They would be done by 2025. China will be approaching real parity by then, by more than a few estimates. What do you do then? We have carriers in real need of replacement, and they don't come cheap. Save the BBs for a rainy day.
I don't consider the Ticos or Burkes anything like being on the cheap (The Knoxs, Spruances, and Perrys, now they were a Navy bought on the cheap, but we still won the war with them). They are extremely capable ships that can be spread around where you need them. They are in fact cruisers in many other navies. The planned DDX is stealthy but not for "daylight ops" instead they are harder to find at sea with satellites from not just a Radar perspective but also IR and wake generation. Admittedly all good things, but not when the carriers and other high value units are distinctly un-stealthy.
I am not a fan of 14,000 ton 'destroyers', that is a cruiser and I would like to see CGX/DDX rolled together to be the Tico replacement with full multimission capability. The DDX will be too limited in AAW. The plan to get 30 DD21 is now 24 DDX at about 3 BILLION bucks each. Almost certainly this will be chopped back. I would rather see 24 CGX and have some more Burkes and maybe a stretched (DLG?) with some of the DDX tech stuff incorporated into them. The LCS is our low end mix and I'm still waiting to see how that works out.
Money, it always come down to money. Money for ships, money for R&D, money for crews it never ends. Yes, I would love to give my navy everything they want/need but facts are facts we don't have the bucks (yes, I know that unconstitutional social dogooding is eatting away at the constitutionally mandated defence of this nation, but we can't even manage to do away with the universally hated IRS, try springing an extra 100 Billion to get more and better ships out of Congress). Reality bites, we need to build the best military we can with what we can get. That means probably no BBs and no 8" MCLWGs. We get DDX with 6" AGS and 5" ERGMs on the rest of the fleet. Hope the 'pop guns' and "Super Hornets" can save the day.
But the ground-pounders were duly grateful when the New Jersey showed up just as an NVA human-wave assault across the DMZ was reaching its climax. One of the good guys reported that there was suddenly a bass rumbling sound, "like a thousand freight trains passing overhead" -- and then the entire valley just disappeared. Crisis over.
...the only 2 gun cruisers left are the Des Moines and Salem, I've seen them both and they are toast
How the hell did that happen? They had low steaming hours in the '40's and '50's and then got laid up when MacNamara got in there and started screwing around with what was left of the cruiser fleet. Although it might have started before him. Anyway, they're both sisters of the Newport News, which did strong work during Vietnam and which Hanoi Hannah dubbed "the grey ghost from the East Coast".
I made an error in an earlier post -- the Oregon City class was a postwar class of three ships including the Albany, which was one of the three CA's (including a couple of older Los Angeles class) converted to straight "double-ender" CG's and given tall "macks".....they needed cruiser hulls to accommodate a Talos launcher, or more than one Terrier launcher, I guess. Although Talos was one hell of a missile -- a former weapons watch officer in the USS Horne told me the North Vietnamese MiG drivers would simply eject when they found out a Talos was on the way. The expanding-rod warhead reached a radius of 100' before it disintegrated. Very nasty. The normal deployment for picket duty on the Gun Line was, cruiser with Talos outboard, DLG with Terrier closer to the beach, and a Tartar-armed DDG or DEG inboard. Sometimes, just to bag a MiG, they'd do a switch and station the cruiser inboard, relying on the inability of the Soviet radars to discern the size of the target, which would put the NVAF training lanes within range of the Talos ships.
I don't consider the Ticos or Burkes anything like being on the cheap (The Knoxs, Spruances, and Perrys, now they were a Navy bought on the cheap, but we still won the war with them).
No, I wouldn't call them "cheap" either -- both those classes represent best efforts technologically. The Kidd class that we were going to give the Gearwheel Chinese, I'm not so sure about. They were latterday improved Spruance-class ships or something -- all the ships from the late 60's forward had NTDS, the Naval Tactical Data System, a forerunner of Aegis, so they weren't exactly blind in a fight, but the lack of Aegis was, I gathered from reading, a primary reason the Kidds were laid up -- and a prime reason for substituting them for the Aegis technology that, given to the Taiwanese, would be in Peking before you knew it (although they don't seem to have any trouble getting information out of Los Alamos, since we're supposed to be so nonracial and look the other way and all, while Chicom agents go around making overtly racist Great China pitches to Chinese-American potential informants).
You're right about the Knox/1052-class DEG's (or FF, I guess they were re-rated). They were the fourth incarnation of the Bronstein and McCloy, which were built by MacNamara as a proof-of-concept of what a single-screw "ocean escort" could do. The idea was, they'd cruise along at 30 knots under cheap diesel power in formation with the battle group, using their DASH helicopter drones and ASROC launchers to drop torps on troublesome Soviet submarines that tried to get close. One thing led to another, and pretty soon the diesels had gone away in favor of steam, the SQS-23 sonar had been replaced with a mighty SQS-26 with a transducer bulge the size of a house (there are stories about the 26 -- one of them once got a return off the African continental slope from U.S. coastal waters......lit one off under just quarter-power one day and killed every fish for 600 yards in every direction......etc., etc.), top speed had dropped to 29 knots with a tailwind.....and the ship still had no AAW capability. (Useful discussion here, much of which I'm pleased to discover I'd recalled correctly before I searched up the site.) The followon 1047's (Garcia class) had two 5" 38's in single mounts, that was all. Later the No. 2 mount was replaced by a Tartar launcher and associated radars: that was the Julius A. Fuhrer (DEG-1) class.....later refined as the 1052's (Knox class). Pure MacNamara, from the conceptualization to the final, awful realization. Obsolete the minute the Sovs figured out how to hang cruise missiles on an SSGN. The "ocean escorts" had no capability against vampires; the Tartar was an early beam-rider, and an unlikely bet to handle an inbound missile stream.
I made the case on another post that keeping all four Iowas in good shape is a good idea. If we need them they will be there. With 10-15 years of a fifty year service life used, that means if we had kept them in service they would be approaching 30 years now. They would be done by 2025. China will be approaching real parity by then, by more than a few estimates. What do you do then? We have carriers in real need of replacement, and they don't come cheap. Save the BBs for a rainy day.
The problem is that you don't know how long you have until you need them, when the other party is the aggressor and will call the shots on timing any lunge across the Formosa Straits. We need to plan, budget, and carry out whatever modernization we know we're going to need to perform on these ships, and we can't do that if they're rusting at a memorial pier in Pearl Harbor. We can do the other improvements you were talking about to the Burke class and build more CVA's (I agree we're in bad shape, with more of our mainstay CVA's going for reef projects), but keeping the BB option alive for when you need it is going to require more commitment than another coat of that fish-oil preservative paint and sealing up the hatches.
Where I'm coming from is, I saw what happened with the inactive fleet in Orange, Texas. (The Naval Inactive Ship Facility, or "NAVINACSHIPFAC Orange".) I was detailed there for a couple of months in 1971 and saw numbers of ships, including 55 DD's and DE's, that had played important roles at Leyte and Guadalcanal. They had been recently stricken from the lists and were waiting to be sold to the breakers or towed out and sunk as targets by NAVAIRLANT. The waste was immense -- everything from typewriters to wire rope to boat motors to brand-new bearings still in cosmoline in wax-paper wrappers in the SK cage. It was criminal, someone should have been hanged. This was our patrimony being flushed down the head. Someone had started pulling the CO2 fire extinguishers off the ships (we found a taker for them -- PHIBLANT whistled them up when they heard we had them already palletized and ready to go) and setting aside the fire-hose nozzles, fire hose, gas masks, and other training items, but that was just scratching the surface. We did what we could -- saved what we could -- even put the word out among the Navy Reserve centers and got one of them a 600-pound binnacle off the bridge of the USS Frankford to put on their reserve center's quarterdeck. Block and tackle, peloruses, OBA's, you want? We got. Ship 'em out -- we became a "Toys 'R' Us" for the weekend Navy, trying to redistribute materiel before the shipbreakers or Davy Jones got 'em. I'm sure someone in the Nam, though, could have used all the 5" 38's, 3" 50's, and 40mm gun barrels we saw being cut around with torches.
The Spokane was there, the last of the CLAA's, 500-foot-long, 36-knot hull and all, ready to go to the breakers, or to the target area south of NAS Pensacola. The chiefs and mustang officers in Orange told me Spokane had been redesignated a target in the 60's and used for close-aboard detonations of immense piles of HE to simulate nuclear weapons effects; her frames and hull had been weakened by repeated exercises of this kind. You'd think her engines would have been worth something to someone, though -- all that horsepower, and how many steaming hours? One of the DD's still in reserve, an "improved Fletcher" that I went aboard, had her logbooks still on the bridge, still in dehumidification and looking like they'd just been laid aside a few minutes ago by the departing XO -- 1450 total steaming hours from completion to layup. One round trip to Germany in autumn 1945 and straight into mothballs. No kidding. A lot of those ships were like that, or close to it, especially the 1600's that had been mothballed at the end of the war after perhaps three years' service. All those 35- and 38-knot hulls lying at the pier, and guys were writing articles in the Proceedings about not having enough SSW punch, not enough ships armed with Harpoon and able to accompany a fast carrier group. And we were building 1052's and paying Litton billions and billions of dollars for MacNamara's 3000-ton, 29-knot, single-screw wonders.
So I'm a bit of a turk on asset preservation, and I see the BB's, the CVA's, and our SSN's as national assets that need to be conserved and milked for the last of the good in them, since we've spent such a treasure to build them and in many cases have, even in their retirement, assets that few nations on earth could afford to scratch-build. Even the 638's, as we were discussing, may have value left, that have to be 30 years old now. I got to ride the Pargo in her glory days for a few days during testing of the Mark 48 torpedo, until I was called away by a family emergency. I didn't know how glorious those salad days were, until I realized after reading Blind Man's Bluff that, when I visited her, Pargo's crew was in between Ivy Bells missions both of which would earn them secret presidential unit citations.
The LCS is our low end mix and I'm still waiting to see how that works out.
LCS?
And I guess 5" ERGM means those 5" semiautomated OTO-type mounts? What's the range on those things, anyway? The effective range of the 5" 54's carried in the Charles F. Adams DD's and contemporary types was iirc 29,500 yards.
But yes to your proposal to put off ridiculously expensive new (untried) ship types and just incorporate the best ideas. The long-winded argument about the "ocean escorts" above applies.