Some Naval Gazing

This sounds like the setup of a huge crossover between the Love Boat, Supercarrier, White Lotus, NCIS: Bangkok, and JAG:

At Pattaya’s Hard Rock Cafe and hotel, the city’s mayor and police officials, along with women in traditional Thai dress, waited to greet the sailors who were arriving in civilian clothes, bags slung over their shoulders, off the buses.

The USS Abraham Lincoln’s crew of 5,000 had not been on shore for nearly nine months, a record-setting uninterrupted time at sea.

Crew appeared to have been told not to speak to the gathered journalists about the reportedly deteriorating living conditions onboard but said they were looking forward to being on dry land, sleeping and going home.

One sailor, Breese, who did not want to give his surname, said “it’s a fever dream right now” and he was looking forward to trying Thai food for the first time and meeting new people.

Let there be no shaming of sex workers in these comments, please. In other news, this is actually, like, good:

The White House and U.S. Navy are considering frigate designs from South Korea, Japan and Turkey for a new class of warships, USNI News has learned.

An international warship competition could include building up to two of the ships in foreign shipyards before transitioning to domestic yards as part of the Trump administration’s push to rapidly expand the fleet, three industry sources familiar with the deliberations confirmed to USNI News this week. The move would break with more than a century of U.S. domestic naval construction.

Potentially buying frigates abroad follows an August White House memo that opened the door for the Pentagon to consider foreign designs by invoking a “national security interest” waiver to bypass a U.S. law prohibiting foreign-built warships from entering naval service.

After the White House issued the memo, Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao directed the office of the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition William Mahan to oversee a study of international combatants, roll-on, roll-off cargo vessels and consolidated cargo replenishment at sea (CONSOL) tankers for Military Sealift Command, according to memo language reviewed by USNI News. That assessment is due Nov. 12, 2026.

Three sources told USNI News that the international designs under consideration include the export version of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ FFM Mogami-class guided-missile frigate and the Chungnam-class guided-missile frigate built by a variety of South Korean shipbuilders. The Istanbul-class guided-missile frigate built by several Turkish shipyards is also in the mix after a conversation between Turkish leadership and President Donald Trump on the sidelines of July’s NATO summit, two sources told USNI News.

This is tough for me because I’m very much of the “you don’t gotta hand it to ’em” school with regard to Trump’s Pentagon. But… this is both good on the merits (US military shipbuilding is a disaster and could use the competition), and something that likely would only have happened under an administration as insensitive to norms and Congressional preferences as this one. See also the deal with Finland for icebreakers, a priority that everyone has been talking about for two decades and that has gone absolutely nowhere. Were a Democrat to do either of these things the cries of rage and despair would echo from Newport News to Pascagoula to Bath to Marinette. There are of course plenty of opportunities for graft and everything may blow up before the first hulls hit the water, but good lord something had to be done about the Navy and this is a better something that the Trump Battleships or Steam Catapult Nostalgia.

Also please see Bret Devereaux’s excellent discussion of what seapower does in general and what the US Navy has done in particular since 1945:

All of that seaborne trade, however, is the product of a long period since 1945 in which there have been relatively minimal disruptions of the security of civilian ships moving over the world’s oceans. What I want to note is that this is not automatic, it is an outcome that has been produced. Instead, the historical pattern has generally been that in the absence of major powers exerting themselves to keep sea lanes open (because it benefits them to do so), what we see is that sea trade fragments, with polities sitting on maritime choke-points moving to exploit that control (at the expense of everyone else) and both pirates and privateers disrupting shipping more generally.

Piracy, of course, is extremely old: it is treated as a well-established and perfectly normal thing to be doing in Homer, for instance. We actually have references to sea raiders and pirates even farther back, including in the Amarna tablets (c. 1350 BC). Now I should note that while we generally think about piracy as ships attacking ships, there is a land based component to it: piracy often also includes the raiding of coastal settlements and at the same time pirates themselves need coastal bases (often with friendly local populations) in order to operate out of.

There’s a LOT more and while I have some quibbles here and there I’ll address those in a future post.