The beat-down goes on administered by the non-naval armories of the Houthis in Yemen.
Geoff Ziezulewicz avers:
Those SM-6 missiles are a cool four million dollars a pop.
A rather chilly one third of a billion dollars in SM-6 expenditures alone.
320 million dollars.
Guns are economical, reliable, versatile, and proven. Did I mention economical? Any kind of guided missile/munition is expensive. 5-inch guns are good. Might 6-inch or 8-inch be better? And why only one turret? Granted, going back to building ships around big-gun turrets probably isn’t a good thing (an Iowa-class with 16″ guns will just be a missile sponge as most surface navies will discover in the 21st century) but maybe two turrets?
The current state-of-the-art 155mm artillery round is the XM982 has a nominal range of 12nm when fired by the M777 howitzer. But I don’t believe it has a proximity fuze option for air and small high speed surface targets. As Army/USMC howitzers are not designed to engage targets while rolling and pitching, an entirely new weapon would have to be designed to use the 155mm rounds that may be size analogs to 4-6″ guns. DDG 1000 had a variation on the 155mm theme in the 155mm Advance Gun System, but that weapon was uniquely designed for much longer ranges and thus was too specialized for general shipboard installation a million dollars a round. Things *could* have been different, but weren’t and won’t be.
US Navy destroyers and cruisers needing to leave the ongoing battle against Iran-backed Houthi rebel missile and drone barrages in the Red Sea to reload their Mk 41 Vertical Launching System (VLS) missile cells are causing a presence gap and “a real challenge,” Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said Wednesday at the annual Surface Navy Association conference. That challenge extends not only to the Red Sea campaign, he said, but especially to a future war with China across the vast West Pacific expanse as well.
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At-sea reloading would cut down on the transit time for re-upping a warship’s munitions, while allowing such ships to stay at least closer to the action, even though rearming would likely take place at least some distance from the core of the fighting.
“The opponent would have weakened our fleet even without scoring a punch” if warships have to leave the battle to reload, James Holmes, a maritime strategy professor at the Naval War College, told Navy Times in 2017, after then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson announced the effort that would become TRAM. “If we keep having to rotate cruisers or destroyers back to rear areas to reload, the opponent has subtracted that much combat power from the fleet.”
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/so-were-going-to-screw-up-ddgx-too
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