Um… what?
By Vice Admiral Barry McCullough:
However, in the current program of record, the DDG-1000 cannot perform area air defense; specifically, it cannot successfully employ the Standard Missile-2 (SM-2), SM-3 or SM-6, and is incapable of conducting Ballistic Missile Defense. Although superior in littoral ASW, the DDG-1000 lower power sonar design is less effective in the blue water than DDG-51 capability. DDG-1000’s Advanced Gun System (AGS) design provides enhanced Naval Fires Support capability in the littorals with increased survivability. However, with the accelerated advancement of precision munitions and targeting, excess fires capacity already exists from tactical aviation and organic USMC fires. Unfortunately, the DDG-1000 design sacrifices capacity for increased capability in an area where the Navy already has, and is projected to have sufficient capacity and capability.
Say again? We’re spending untold billions on a destroyer that has, apparently, no air defense capability, and that is less capable than its immediate predecessor of hunting submarines? That the DDG-1000 cannot employ the Standard air defense missile is simply shocking, and runs counter to the claims that the Navy has been making about the destroyer’s capabilities for the past several years.
Galrahn is beside himself:
Who would possibly confuse the 6 small combatants with 500 missiles that is dependent upon escorts for defense from air attack as outlined in the arsenal ship program, with 7 enormous independently capable stealth combatants with 2 big guns and 750 shells? After all, as long as the enormous stealth combatants had SM-2s they were completely different ship profiles. Without the SM-2, what is the difference between the Arsenal Ship and the DDG-1000? Different primary weapon, the DDG-1000 is bigger, and the DDG-1000 costs more. That’s about it.
The distance between a DDG-1000 cited with SM-2s on every public website on the internet, and a ship that cannot support SM-2s is the same distance in the Navy’s credibility gap when it comes time to discuss surface combatant requirements. Keep in mind, the existence of the SM-2 has driven every assumption in the public domain about the DDG-1000 for the last three years. How is it possible the DDG-1000 is a “ship which meets the requirements for which it was designed” and the whole time Congress and the American people have been told the cost of the DDG-1000 is justified because the DDG-1000 has all kinds of multi-mission capabilities that it really doesn’t have? Allison Stiller testified the Navy has already spent $13 billion in both R&D and SCN budget funding to build the first two DD-1000 Arsenal Ships, and apparently Congress didn’t even know what they were really doing. Is the DDG-1000 really a “ship which meets the requirements for which it was designed?”
This is absurd. Whereas we thought we were getting a warship intended to destroy the Iraqi Army as it invaded Kuwait but also capable of a number of other missions, it turns out that we basically get nothing. I’m wondering now whether we’ll see a housecleaning in the Navy similar to the one that Robert Gates has performed on the Air Force…