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Comment by ianburrell | Hacker News Reader

There are diminishing returns with cheaper warships. The LCS cost $400 million each but Burke destroyer, $2 billion, could sink a dozen of them. Aircraft carrier, $13 billion plus planes, could sink all of them. More importantly, the destroyer could protect the carrier from attack.

Small warships are useful for low-intensity conflict but Red Sea conflict shows that they need more defense and offense.

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And a couple of $5M apiece hypersonics could easily sink a destroyer, even with a conventional payload. Red Sea has shown just how useless warships are nowadays against an adversary with any kind of long range anti ship capability. The entire strike groups had to hightail outta there once the more potent stuff started flying

That's just lack of political will to engage and collateral effects on non-combatants.

The carrier group could have stayed in position and inflicted enormous damage in retaliation, but no one wants nukes used

A single well-placed rocket/missile/drone crater in the deck of a carrier, without sinking or even seriously wounding it, is enough to render it useless and put it out of comission for months if not longer. Keeping a carrier group in a place where this is even remotely likely is a huge risk from a naval strategy perspective.

The Red Sea has shown how important warships are. They have been successful at shooting down missiles and drones and protecting ships. I think a single cargo ship has been hit and sunk.

The Houthis have mostly been using drones which don't work well against ships. But they have used a few Iranian anti-ship missiles.

The Eisenhower withdrew in June and Roosevelt arrived in July.

Yeah, so important that commercial traffic is impacted to this day, in spite of billions of dollars in ammo and other costs.

Look at the implications of what you're arguing though. Without protection, you don't have wartime logistics. Without logistics, you don't have force projection. Without force projection, you're missing a central pillar of US international relations and the current world order.

Shipbuilding deeply tied into the US military's goals.

Sometimes implication follows conclusion and it's not a matter of argument but facing reality. If conclusion is large surface combatants aren't survivable, then maybe bad idea to double down on large surface combatants. Problem is navy institutional inertia/identity depends on building big ships, with 11+9 carriers mandated by law. The other implication is if large surface combatants, and US to some degree needs largish combatants with high endurance to run global missions, is not survivable, then maybe US naval/expeditionary model is not viable and if there's no alternative (can't protect global basing without survivable global navy) a lot of dominos start falling.

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