[pepsi_junkie]

I know, I was a contractor systems engineer for navy surface ships combat systems for 25 years until about 10 years ago. So my info is stale. But I'm very well aware of the missions and capabilities of modern warships. The thing about a small ship is that there are some things you can't shrink. Missiles are one of those things. So inevitably you will have fewer of them on frigates. With the the current threats, I'm not even sure it's fair to call other navies "near peers", maybe WE are the near peers now.

It feels to me like the Navy would be well suited to cut the Littoral Combat Ships off, build more destroyers and frigates so we always have lots of missile platforms available to deploy to places where we will likely be needing to take lots of shots to knock out these newer threats.

But I'm probably wrong. Like I said, I'm an engineer, not a military strategist.

[Spktyr]

The Navy is already curtailing the LCS and has all but admitted they were a failure. This FFG(X) program is the Navy running a crash program to get frigates. The destroyer part of the fleet is a much larger problem because all destroyer development resources went into the Zumwalts, and those at this point are more than a little failure. Again, we don’t have a different design ready to go and we can’t afford more Zumwalts (not just in terms of money either).