It’s not really a top end thing. The current fleet of ships are running WAY more than they were designed to be. The Navy needs more ships to be in more places to meet it’s requirements. Even worse, a lot of the expensive warships that were designed for very advanced warfare (CGs, DDG, SSNs) are performing things like…

They’ll be fortunate to break even. LM and Austal will make building the rest of the LCS extremely expensive.

“This isn’t that hard. 4-6” of armor will defeat 98% of deployed anti-ship missiles”

THIS! For all the lethality criticisms the LCS got, it answered the Navy’s need of presence. The next class of ship will be around 6,000 tons and we’ll be lucky to get 15 of them.

“I thought interchangeable parts was a good thing...I guess not so much.”

This one actually blew my mind. Most times when you see an actor and later discover that they served you’re not all that surprised. This though, this was not that situation.

Go to internet hell (aka Reddit)!!!

Minor correction, congressmen don’t have clearances. They can be read in on certain things, and certain committees have increased access to classified material (e.g. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence). However, candidates running for president that don’t hold congressional office don’t have this sort of access.

It went from having a 30mm gun to a .50 cal. That’s a pretty bad relaxation of requirements. It’s not so much about protecting the Marines on board, but rather eliminating defenses once disembarking.

I don’t think the 30 mm could have been relaxed in all honesty. The Marines needed the punch on land and during transit. Additionally, the Navy was actually planning on using the EFV as a form of defense for it’s ESGs.

I think this article would benefit from describing the impacts of the unique procurement strategy’s impacts on the designs that were submitted. It’s a weird phased approach.

Not really. It’s procurement strategy thing. This is ACV 1.1 it’s supposed to be commercially available and “good enough.” ACV 1.2 will come later and be more advanced. Perferably tracked.

My biggest issue with the current ACV is survivability. You gave up a nasty 30mm gun for machine gun. Had the 25 knot speed been relaxed to say 15 knots, than the Marines would have ended up with an affordable vehicle. Although, the engines they had were the best in the business, MTU.

I was referring more to independence from OPEC, what OP was asking about. We’re at a trade deficit for petroleum products, but that’s mostly because NG sector has been stalled (thanks OPEC). The fact of the matter is that the US imports more from Canada than we do all of OPEC. With the former on the rise and the…

“That was the plan in the last two great naval wars.”

I won’t speak to the Zumwalt class, but there are tons of active stabilizing systems available. There’s internal gyros that are used to resist rolling, there’s hull penetrating in water stablaizing “fins”, I even seem that look like spinning tubes in the place of stabalizing fins.

You mean the Expeditionary Fast Transport (EFT), they got renamed recently. I always thought JHSV sounded nice, and EFT sounds too much like EFV.

“A great lesson of naval war has largely been MORE SHIPS, even if they are smaller and weaker.”

This will, more than likely, not be part of a battle group. Ships with extremely high capabilities like the DDG-1000’s and the Ballistic Missile Defense ships tend to travel with one or two of their own escorts so they can perform their highly specialized mission while the other ships “keep watch”.

Sorry, but we get more oil from Canada alone than we do the entirety of OPEC. The only reason we continue to buy OPEC oil is to keep the market balanced. We could easily make up the difference between Canada, Mexico, and domestic production. Also keep in mind that we export quite a bit of petrol products, we’re still…