Replacing The Battleships
The navy sees the battleships as prohibitively expensive, it is working to persuade Congress to allow it to remove Iowa and Wisconsin from the Naval Vessel Register by developing extended-range guided munitions and a new ship to fulfill marine corps requirements for naval surface fire support (NSFS).
The navy plan originally called for the extension of the range of the 5-inch (127 mm) guns on the Flight I Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers (USS Arleigh Burke to Ross) with Extended Range Guided Munitions (s) that would enable the ships to fire precision guided projectiles about 40 nautical miles (70 km) inland. The program was initiated in 1996 with a preliminary cost of US $78.6 million; however, the cost of the program increased 400% during its research and development phase. The results of the program had been similarly disappointing: the original expected operational capability date was pushed from 2001 to 2011 before being cancelled by the navy in March 2008 for budget-related reasons and an apparent shift by the navy from the program to the Ballistic Trajectory Extended Range Munition program. These weapons are neither intended nor expected to satisfy the full range of the marine corps requirements.
The result of the latter effort to design and build a replacement ship for the two battleships was the Zumwalt-class destroyer program, also known either as the DD(X) or DDG-1000 (in reference to the hull number assigned to Zumwalt ). The DD(X) was to mount a pair of Advanced Gun System turrets capable of firing specially designed Long Range Land Attack Projectiles some 60 miles (100 km) inland. Originally, the navy had planned to build a total of 32 of these destroyers, however the increasing cost of the program led the navy to reduce the overall number of destroyers built from 32 to 24. In 2007 the total procurement of Zumwalt-class destroyers was further reduced to a total of seven, before being discontinued at a total of two destroyers in July 2008 as a result of the high cost of building each of the two ships. In September 2008 the navy and the House of Representatives reached an agreement which will allow for the construction of a third DD(X) destroyer, bringing the total number of Zumwalt-class destroyers to three.
The discontinuation of the class is due in part to concerns that the Zumwalt ships may deprive other projects of needed funding, a concern that has been raised by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Congressional Research Service (CRS), and the Government Accountability Office, all of which have issued reports that suggest that total cost of each ship could be as high as $5 billion or more. In addition to the high cost, naval officials discussing the cancellation of the DD(X) program cited the inability of the DD(X) to fire the Standard missile or provide adequate air defense coverage, and a "classified threat" which the navy feels can be better handled by the current Arleigh Burke-class destroyers than by the Zumwalt-class destroyers. The article also reported that the Marine Corps no longer needs the long-range fire support from the Zumwalts’ 155 mm Advanced Gun System because such fire support can be provided by Tactical Tomahawk cruise missiles and precision airstrikes.
Read more about this topic: United States Naval Gunfire Support Debate
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“I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“By and by when each nation has 20,000 battleships and 5,000,000 soldiers we shall all be safe and the wisdom of statesmanship will stand confirmed.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)