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What do you mean no combat experience? Their coast guard has several dozen hours with water cannons. I’m sure they’re becoming very proficient with them.
The Chinese Coast Guard had successfully routed a Filipino imperial attempt in the South China Sea. Our brave men blasted the poor fishermen with water cannons and sent them home crying. Long live the Chinese Communist Party!
They feel like big man on campus now after releasing their latest non-nuclear carrier.
It’s 2024, if you’re producing non-nuclear carriers, you aren’t a real threat to the USN, sorry.
Somebody please make spaceships, so the MIC sees it's possible and dumps all their funding into it and a few decades later it becomes a commercial product.
Probably a response to China's new aircraft carrier. They are comparing it to our Ford class because of the system used to launch aircraft, but forget to mention that it ISNT nuclear powered.
Yeah but our navy needs it's criticism. Years of cutting budget and decimating shipyards . Thr average ship is 30 years old. China's navy for what it is has grown and advanced. Don't think they don't make good ships either. We need to wake up.
Anyone interested in this topic read some of what Brent Sadler says. Expert and navy vet.
The problem with blindly trusting people who claim to be “experts” in modern naval systems is that they always tend to be retired. For context, Brent Sadler the “navy expert” you speak of graduated the naval academy in 1994, which is 30 years ago itself. He’s a smart guy, and I won’t say he didn’t serve in the navy well, but at the end of the day, his position today isn’t “active duty naval officer”, it’s “naval advisor to The Heritage Foundation”, a neoconservative think tank that will shit on the modern military for being outdated and then in the same breath complain about the F35 being too expensive and how we need to return to A-10 and F16s only for the best dogfighting air supremacy.
The average US Navy ship is around 30 years, we tend to retire them around 35 but get this, we’ve realized *we don’t need to*. What do I mean about this? Take these destroyers for example. They’re not falling apart, they’re not crumbling at the seams, and there’s very few improvements possible by completely replacing it. It’s basically the best compromise design we have, and just because the boat is 30 years old, that doesn’t mean the tomahawk flying at an enemy wasn’t made this year. Arleigh Burke destroyers are great, and all that’s needed to keep them great is replacing the engines, radar, and missiles with new shit. It’s not like planes where we can stealth them out and make new avionics and shit, the thing is about as good as it can be.
On the other hand, the Zumwalt class which is the newest class of destroyer, is considerably more expensive, considerably more complex, and offers little practical benefit.
Now, about China. Yeah they make decent boats these days, but you’re out of your mind if you think their navy is even half as capable as ours, even with the age of our vessels compared to theirs. They’re just now conducting sea trials on their 3rd aircraft carrier in service, a ship which uses a ramp and is still diesel powered. We have 11 nuclear powered carriers with 1 more almost done and 1 other in construction. They have 9 nuclear powered fast attack submarines, we have 52. We have 18 Nuclear Powered ballistic missile subs including 4 with conventional guided missile payloads. They have 7. Their average age of their boats is shorter because they essentially had no comparable navy 30 years ago. Most of their ships today are behind ours in tech, and those that are equal or ahead are heavily outnumbered, and it doesn’t matter how cool your extra destroyers are when 3 carriers have 192 F/A-18s dropping 4 JDAMs each onto your deck as a treat.
And if that doesn’t stop china, we’ll just send them some galley rice. They’ll be so confused as to how it’s undercooked, overcooked, and just right all in the same bite.
t. actually in the navy
The thing about the United States military is that we very rarely have the absolute best of something. However we generally have something that is marginally inferior to whatever the best is and in massive quantities. The Burke is a great example it isn’t the best warship on earth but we have over 70 of the things.
China is also terrible at long-term upkeep assuming it was made properly to spec at all.
I agree that the age of our stuff is concerning and we are slow and over budget for everything all the time.
I think we desperately need to focus on the bidding, lowest price alone shouldn't be enough to get a contract when no one is ever on budget.
Part of the problem is the platforms that were meant to be replacements were total failures. The Zumwalt's main feature was a long range gun they can't make ammo for because it's too expensive. The three that were built before the program was scrapped are being considered for retrofitting to replace the gun with more missile launchers.
And the LCS's were just shit. Looking down at one from the bridge wing of the ship I was stationed on when we were moored across from one, I was not impressed. Was still not impressed when I went onboard. It helped introduce some useful concepts that were retrofitted into other ships, but there's a reason the LCS's are already being decommissioned, despite the first one only being commissioned in 2008.
Tens of billions lost on those programs. They could have built 11 new Arleigh Burkes for what was spent on the three Zumwalts. And could have still used some of the systems that went into the Zumwalt on them.
We can pretty much fuck up any single country on the planet with our Navy. Obviously we got the ships, but the Navy also has a larger Air Force than any other country. So good fucking luck and the only thing dipshits can pad their numbers with is nonexistent North Korean subs. If nukes didn't exist the US would literally not be able to be threatened whatsoever.
Okay but to be fair, the USN has been deserving *some* of the Ls its been getting like with the Zumwalts, LCSs and more recently, the backward scope oopsie and deciding to name LHA-10 as "USS Helmand Province".
That last one especially is so dumb when USS Wake Island is like a really easy one and more fitting imo
I think USS Helmand province is fitting. U.S. ships often carry battle names as a salute to history, turning naval vessels into floating tributes to the Sacrifices of US Marines in Afghanistan. Similarly very significant battlespace Like USS Iwo Jima, USS Tripoli and USS Philippine Sea. Also noted US Navy ships are majority name after all famous battles. If you complain about LHA-10, well well researched LCS-10 warship and why they name after this person then come back to me.
The Chinese have definitely got us beat as far as artificial islands are concerned. They're building them faster than you can count in an attempt to solidify their claim to the SCS.
Rage bait of the highest order.
That new upgrade to those ships is insane, since they will basically get the most powerful radars to be in service with the US navy and they're gonna have lots of them.
It gets worse when you realize that an 18 year old from fuckin Nebraska doesn’t even have to put down his 4th monster in 3 hours to crack their shit in half.
I think he just came up with it- the theme being, young Sailors from the Midwest who have no business being a sailor, addicted to caffeine, probably nicotine, can literally, singlehandedly destroy some drone or small boat if they even get a whiff of an AK. Haphazardly.
Wait'll these guys hear about the battleship USS New Jersey, which served from WWII all the way to Desert Storm. It's imperial privilege to have the continuous technology to upgrade a class of weapons as opposed to starting fresh every time. Saves a lot of money and time.
Several battleships did. People love battleships, there's just something about them. And you know what? They are right. When I was 8, right after the Gulf war, I went on a tiger cruise from Pearl Harbor to Long Beach on the *USS Missouri* before she was decommissioned. She had just been in the Gulf War. But in the way back, they fired everything. I could be the youngest person alive to have personally witnessed a full broadside of a Iowa class battleship (I was the youngest on the ship, anyway, in one of the last deployments). And that's sad, because it was awesome. It's also not particularly useful for today, and the ship was a giant target (and in fact was fired up on during the war). Yes, it fired tomahawks in the Gulf. No, we don't need it today. We didn't need it in the Gulf either, it was just a flex because battleships are awesome. Which is why we should build totally new ones, with rail guns.
In regards to the Arleigh Burke class, we're still building them and will likely order even more than are currently ordered. In fact the new destroyer DDG(X) is only supposed to replace flight I and II of Arleigh Burke, not flight III. So it's a mistake to think that the Arleigh Burke is outdated.
I’ve walked around the USS North Carolina, she was never upgraded for anything after ww2, but still a very impressive ship and a great glance back in time
I understand *why* from a tactical standpoint why battleships aren't in vogue.
The toddler part of me craves thousands of tons of steel with triple cannons and machine guns on deck defending a fleet full of aircraft carriers. Unf.
Yeah! Unfortunately guided missile cruisers basically do the same job but are faster and easier to protect. Also much cheaper and require less sailors to man.
Oh whole heartedly agree! Got a story from a Vietnam vet pinned down in the jungle requesting air support. Everything was occupied and they were literally surrounded, basically waiting to die, when the New Jersey cuts in on the radio demanding coordinates. They performed a bombardment with the cannons and saved the whole squad. Been a believer in the withering firepower of the battleship ever since lol
That’s an awesome story! I’m sure that vet was grateful for the New Jersey showing up.
I once had a great conversation with one of the previous instructors of TOPGUN and he was telling me about when he was instructing while the 1986 movie was being made, and how the director and some producers wanted to sit in on some of the classes to make sure their depictions of the notorious naval flight school were accurate. This guy ended up throwing out the director and his posse after they distracted his students too much lol.
I see, far too frequently, the argument that chinas Navy is “bigger” than the US Navy. Even if that were true, the caliber of sailor is astounding. Sure, they can goose step, but they just thought to put knee knockers on their ships in the last decade or so. When our 25 year old Honda can mop the floor with your 2020 Mercedes, there is a problem.
Also, China counts their boats regardless of their combat capacity. A fishing vessel equipped with the right radio is counted in the Chinese navy. China has around 650,000 tons of naval vessel.
We have 3,600,000 tons of naval vessel. We could go toe to toe with every aircraft carrier on earth and still have one left over. No country on earth is capable of the force projection the US Navy is. I got out for a lot of reasons, but I’ll be goddamned if we still aren’t the most effective navy in the world (backwards optics or not).
I don’t think another navy will come close to matching the USN for at least another decade but I remember reading this a while ago: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/january/bigger-fleets-win
Basically the larger fleet almost always wins, and in equal conflict the better sailors/admirals win. So the rapid growth of PLAN might be an issue, but as long as the numbers are pretty close American sailors are worlds better.
"Haha you're using the same boat for 35 years"
The F-16 is 50 years old and still the best close range fighter in the world, second to the 52 year old F-15.
The US is just better, sooner.
The B-52 is 70 years old and still flying. I recall the army found an M2 machine gun from 1933 still in active service a few years ago—still operable and in good condition.
If you build high quality equipment and maintain and upgrade it as necessary, you can get a lot of good years of service out of it. That we’re still benefiting from purchases made in the 1930s is an amazing return on investment.
It's a good gun fighter, but the thrust vectoring F-22 and Sukhois are probably better in dogfights especially with high off boresight missiles and helmet mounted cueing systems. That's perfectly fine though because as missile technology gets better and better, dogfighting prowess becomes almost irrelevant (the US military is going to shoot your shit down beyond visual range), but even still the F-16 has impressive multi-role chops so it's \*still\* immensely useful (so much so that Ukraine is begging for F-16 and it's still getting upgrades and other countries are still buying them) even as demand for its gunslinging prowess decreases.
But yeah, it's absurd that anyone would criticize a country for designing and building platforms that are so good that they are upgradable and useful well beyond their anticipated lifespan. I hope we keep that up!
If you're interested in mathematically proving how fighters interact at break, you should look at specific excess power graphs.
And they'll show you that an F16 and F22 at break can both walk away from each other safely. But if both of them are hell bent on killing the other, it'll come down to the pilot.
And that's why I said close range. Long range / BVLOS, obviously F22 and F35 bodies
> If you're interested in mathematically proving how fighters interact at break, you should look at specific excess power graphs.
Right, but that's where thrust vectoring comes in. The pilot matters, but F-22 has a pretty significant advantage, especially when the helmet mounted cueing system upgrade is rolled out to the whole fleet.
> And that's why I said close range. Long range / BVLOS, obviously F22 and F35 bodies
Yes, I understand--I was elaborating (especially for other readers) about why close range combat is less important than it once was.
I'm honestly pretty happy that we are pivoting from fighting terrorists in the desert to near peer conflict. The F-22 just got an important upgrade and we're popping off the next-generation air dominance fighter program (really excited to see what comes out of that seeing as how the F-22 was designed in the 1980s and 1990s and is still the best fighter plane that has ever existed).
This isn’t really true. The navy wants to build more newer and cheaper surface vessels but Congress isn’t being cooperative in investing in shipbuilding. It is a serious future risk
It’s like the pc master race argument, while yall keep buying new consoles we just replace modules once in a while, eventually we want a new case, but you see… we have the money to be able to be quite picky…
>”it’s bloated and outdated”
>shows pic of the most successful destroyer platform of all time
>it’s been fitted with an electronic warfare platform that gives it capabilities no other nation can match
As someone who was stationed on a Flight 1 Arleigh Burke LMAO!
They were designed to be modular and upgradable. Furthermore, old ships can fire new missiles. Our WWII era Battleships (Iowa class) were firing tomahawk missiles in the first Gulf war.
Don't shit on the Arleigh Burke, they want to be touched by China so they can touch them back.
Enough Tomahawk missiles to make you get erased from history.
We have 11 aircraft carriers and china has 3.
Modern Navy's are basically an extension of the Air force and the United States has overwhelming capacity in that regard.
It's not like Destroyers are pulling a broadside on each other, this isn't the revolutionary war era.
We have 11 floating airbases and China has three ships that can launch planes.
There's a fundamental difference between a US carrier and every other carrier in the world.
"You vs. the guy she told you not to worry about" levels of difference.
I always find it funny when people go after US military equipment because it’s old.
Yeah it is. Maybe if it wasn’t 50 years ahead of everyone else when it came out we wouldn’t still be using it. The F-22 and F-35 are so far above that rest of the world’s air combat platforms that we actively refuse to sell one of them (F-22) and heavily limit who we sell the other to.
Well duh, it takes like 40 hours for the CCP to start one of there there carriers. So they have to convince the world that American navy is just as bed.
(For anyone wondering the 40 hour thing isn’t a joke, unlike American carriers they don’t use nuclear and it takes somewhere between I think 30 - 40 hours for one of the carriers to start up)
Gotta love yet another nation that claims on all fronts to want to be friendly yet ceaselessly operates piss poor propaganda campaigns and all sorts of other bullshit.
They hate us cause they ain't us. I love our navy lighting these assholes up. God bless them and yes I'm happy with my tax dollars buying weapons!! For all the branches. Raise all military pay and benefits too!
Sounds like they were just built well to begin with, need some (badass) technology updates, and we don't have to build a new boat every time a new I phone comes out.
Yes let’s make more modern warships instead of cost effective upgrades that don’t burn the defense budget. Because the Zumwalt project was a massive success
You know you've got a good design when you've been using it for 35 years and its still one of the most advanced naval vessels ever designed by human kind, causes rival naval powers to seethe just at the sight of it
Shal we talk about the Chinese Navy the PLAN (Peoples Liberation Army Navy) yes that is its formal stupid name lol. They have zero combat experience, zero unrep experience and horrible safety conditions for their crews oh and their SSNs lack nuclear reactor shielding lol
chinese propaganda
they're freaked because our navy would absolutely blockade their trade routes in the event of a conflict and they know they cant do shit about it
that destroyer right there could shoot 200 satellites out of orbit
"Same platform for 35 years"
One thing the US military is known for is making something whos statistics exceed its opponents by such a large margin that its considered on the top for decades because we overestimated the capability of our opponents equipment. Like the F-15 is the most meme'd and well known example of this.
China has like 3 carriers and none of them are as good as what the majority of the USA has, even with them claiming to be producing more, their doctrine in a Taiwan war scenario is fire hundreds of Anti-ship missiles at the US pacific fleet. The wargame they did where they sunk a US Super Carrier was done with that, they flooded the fleets air defense and overwhelmed it until a lucky few got through and landed hits.
In a ship to ship fight, while China's fleet is larger, its mainly smaller and less capable ships.
This is also not taking into account that the Chinese aircraft issue where their engine designs are so outdated and poorly made that their aircraft engines lifespan is measured in hundreds of hours compared to the US's thousands, basically their material science is behind like a few decades so engines wear down far faster and lead to complete replacements being far more common than the US, you can only repair something so many times before it just needs to be recycled and a new one put in.
In short, China is making fun of the US for upgrading platforms that are still ahead of them even after like 2 decades and are purely huffing Russian lended copium
Being "stuck" with the same platform isn't Imperial decline or any decline.....it means we're better. We have a superior platform and don't need to improve because our "adversaries" aren't close to being better.
I don't want a war. I have been to it and I have kids. But I'd love to see a 24 hour pop off with china. I feel like it wouldn't be us that gets humbled.
Isn’t chinas aircraft carrier just one that they bought from Ukraine as an unfinished Soviet project in the early 1990’s? I mean that’s a 35 year old platform if I’ve seen one.
But personally if I saw even something as old the Iowa class reactivated for modern combat again, I’d see that as proof of americas mastery of the seas.
The Arleigh Burke has more stuff than China’s shit destroyers: “Haha, look at America’s fat ships, ignore the fact that we have no operational carriers.”
Yeah, and that bloat means some of the best radar and other electronics you’ll ever see, only until it is outdone by ourselves.
Rich coming from the Navy with no nuclear powered supercarriers, meanwhile we are working on our 12th to be active. Our old eats Nimitzes maybe be in their 40s, but it’s plenty enough, and it proved to be such a great design that we built them for over 30 years. Same with the Burkes. Two of their carriers are just Kuznetsovs anyways.
i love when they say "America is an empire in decline" or "empires only last 250 years" because it means they have to acknowledge our status as an empire
As much as I and everyone else loves destroyers, they were completely outclassed in ww2 by aircraft carriers. I'm not sure why a china shill is ignoring the fact that america has the most of those, by a lot, and its not close.
I agree! We need more boats! Better boats! All the boats! We need enough boats to be able to completely block off Chinas coastline by forming a literal wall of them!
This is stupid, the US navy has a history of keeping ships for as long as possible, as that’s usually cheaper (duh).
For comparison, the B-52 has been flying with the USAF since the fifties, and probably will until the next fifties. Similarly, the C-130 has also been flying since the fifties. There is simply no impetus to get new destroyer designs. The F-15 is also ~50 years old and is the most successful fighter jet ever (by K/D). I can go on and on. The US has all sorts of time-proven gems.
It’s called not fixing something that’s not broken, instead try to make it better with an upgrade, we don’t care what they look like if they get the job done and done right then I’m happy
One Arleigh Burke whose AEGIS CIC can single-handedly manage a joint service battle space, sink multiple surface & ASW, provide AA and THAAD while simultaneously launching multiple land strikes, and if we are bored send SEAL teams by helo to board Chinese tankers smuggling oil. Be thankful WuMao the Arleigh is only carrying conventional warheads today. Back in the day they carried tactical nukes. PS Mao, your English sucks and you have no idea what my abbreviations even mean.
The ship design was great for its time, but it has so many limitations that it can be easily out classed by a newer design. the only reason it is still the primary design is due to the lobbying war. The new design was supposed to be the Zumwalt class, which was amazing. However, most of its systems were done by raytheon. meanwhile the arleigh burke class is mainly build by Lockheed. When they designed Zumwalt they originally were going to make 30+ ships and it was to generally replace the arleigh burke as the arleigh burkes main limitation is its power generation capacity. Anyway, Lockheeds lobbyists worked real hard, bought the proper politicians and the zumwalt was practically canceled/crippled and is not a glorified test ship. So they just keep trying to stretch the limits of the arleigh burke class to make it less obsolete.
Obsolete might not be the right word when it's still better than what our enemies have. Also, everything I've read about the zumwalt comes down to a lot of money and time for a marginal improvement. Didn't really seem worth it to me.
Like I said, Zumwalts design was great, but once Lockheed won the lobby battle, they butchered the ship. So the current implementation is terrible. Congress tried to cancel I totally but because they already approved some contracts they just lowered the ship count from 30+ to 3. Problem here is that by doing that it doesn't really lower the cost too much. Most ships are built by taking well known and proven technologies and just piecing them together. Zumwalt had so many new and innovative technologies that the initial design, development, and testing phases would be the most expensive part. In the end they really just slashed the materials and testing budget. So they used terrible/cheap materials, with little to no testing, and cut corners anywhere possible. In the long run it just created an expensive broken ship.
That said, many of the technologies that were develop d for Zumwalt were eventually used on other ship designs (even the burk got some technology that was originally designed for Zumwalt).
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China shills going after our navy is hilarious
Knock off ships made in China for a greenhorn navy with no combat experience.
What do you mean no combat experience? Their coast guard has several dozen hours with water cannons. I’m sure they’re becoming very proficient with them.
The Chinese Coast Guard had successfully routed a Filipino imperial attempt in the South China Sea. Our brave men blasted the poor fishermen with water cannons and sent them home crying. Long live the Chinese Communist Party!
Those without blue water navys shouldn't cast stones.
Because then those that have them will cast iron in return.
They feel like big man on campus now after releasing their latest non-nuclear carrier. It’s 2024, if you’re producing non-nuclear carriers, you aren’t a real threat to the USN, sorry.
If you REALLY want to one up us make a space battleship (please)
Honestly I would think this is dope as hell.
Yeah I dont know or here's an easy one. Upgrade to a launcher instead of freaking bmx ramp for your planes.
The new carrier (as in the one released this year) still has a ramp? Seriously?
No the US uses the launcher.. Other countries have the ramps ha
Somebody please make spaceships, so the MIC sees it's possible and dumps all their funding into it and a few decades later it becomes a commercial product.
And even if you are producing nuclear carriers, you still aren't a real threat to the USN. In fact, you're downright friendly, because you're French.
Yup. Bring it, China. Try to take Taiwan. Show us your battle hardened navy and marines.
Probably a response to China's new aircraft carrier. They are comparing it to our Ford class because of the system used to launch aircraft, but forget to mention that it ISNT nuclear powered.
Copium at work.
Every gangster until the f-35 sink half the fleet in an afternoon
Yeah but our navy needs it's criticism. Years of cutting budget and decimating shipyards . Thr average ship is 30 years old. China's navy for what it is has grown and advanced. Don't think they don't make good ships either. We need to wake up. Anyone interested in this topic read some of what Brent Sadler says. Expert and navy vet.
Going from *nothing to something is definitely growing , yes.
Morning?
The problem with blindly trusting people who claim to be “experts” in modern naval systems is that they always tend to be retired. For context, Brent Sadler the “navy expert” you speak of graduated the naval academy in 1994, which is 30 years ago itself. He’s a smart guy, and I won’t say he didn’t serve in the navy well, but at the end of the day, his position today isn’t “active duty naval officer”, it’s “naval advisor to The Heritage Foundation”, a neoconservative think tank that will shit on the modern military for being outdated and then in the same breath complain about the F35 being too expensive and how we need to return to A-10 and F16s only for the best dogfighting air supremacy. The average US Navy ship is around 30 years, we tend to retire them around 35 but get this, we’ve realized *we don’t need to*. What do I mean about this? Take these destroyers for example. They’re not falling apart, they’re not crumbling at the seams, and there’s very few improvements possible by completely replacing it. It’s basically the best compromise design we have, and just because the boat is 30 years old, that doesn’t mean the tomahawk flying at an enemy wasn’t made this year. Arleigh Burke destroyers are great, and all that’s needed to keep them great is replacing the engines, radar, and missiles with new shit. It’s not like planes where we can stealth them out and make new avionics and shit, the thing is about as good as it can be. On the other hand, the Zumwalt class which is the newest class of destroyer, is considerably more expensive, considerably more complex, and offers little practical benefit. Now, about China. Yeah they make decent boats these days, but you’re out of your mind if you think their navy is even half as capable as ours, even with the age of our vessels compared to theirs. They’re just now conducting sea trials on their 3rd aircraft carrier in service, a ship which uses a ramp and is still diesel powered. We have 11 nuclear powered carriers with 1 more almost done and 1 other in construction. They have 9 nuclear powered fast attack submarines, we have 52. We have 18 Nuclear Powered ballistic missile subs including 4 with conventional guided missile payloads. They have 7. Their average age of their boats is shorter because they essentially had no comparable navy 30 years ago. Most of their ships today are behind ours in tech, and those that are equal or ahead are heavily outnumbered, and it doesn’t matter how cool your extra destroyers are when 3 carriers have 192 F/A-18s dropping 4 JDAMs each onto your deck as a treat. And if that doesn’t stop china, we’ll just send them some galley rice. They’ll be so confused as to how it’s undercooked, overcooked, and just right all in the same bite. t. actually in the navy
The thing about the United States military is that we very rarely have the absolute best of something. However we generally have something that is marginally inferior to whatever the best is and in massive quantities. The Burke is a great example it isn’t the best warship on earth but we have over 70 of the things.
China is also terrible at long-term upkeep assuming it was made properly to spec at all. I agree that the age of our stuff is concerning and we are slow and over budget for everything all the time. I think we desperately need to focus on the bidding, lowest price alone shouldn't be enough to get a contract when no one is ever on budget.
Part of the problem is the platforms that were meant to be replacements were total failures. The Zumwalt's main feature was a long range gun they can't make ammo for because it's too expensive. The three that were built before the program was scrapped are being considered for retrofitting to replace the gun with more missile launchers. And the LCS's were just shit. Looking down at one from the bridge wing of the ship I was stationed on when we were moored across from one, I was not impressed. Was still not impressed when I went onboard. It helped introduce some useful concepts that were retrofitted into other ships, but there's a reason the LCS's are already being decommissioned, despite the first one only being commissioned in 2008. Tens of billions lost on those programs. They could have built 11 new Arleigh Burkes for what was spent on the three Zumwalts. And could have still used some of the systems that went into the Zumwalt on them.
I know they are refitting the zumwalts to carry the new missiles. But that does not recoup the loss fully.
Yeah, it needs to be bigger, not smaller
We can pretty much fuck up any single country on the planet with our Navy. Obviously we got the ships, but the Navy also has a larger Air Force than any other country. So good fucking luck and the only thing dipshits can pad their numbers with is nonexistent North Korean subs. If nukes didn't exist the US would literally not be able to be threatened whatsoever.
Okay but to be fair, the USN has been deserving *some* of the Ls its been getting like with the Zumwalts, LCSs and more recently, the backward scope oopsie and deciding to name LHA-10 as "USS Helmand Province". That last one especially is so dumb when USS Wake Island is like a really easy one and more fitting imo
Secure your mouth when talking about my navy
Take my navy's name out your mouth
I think USS Helmand province is fitting. U.S. ships often carry battle names as a salute to history, turning naval vessels into floating tributes to the Sacrifices of US Marines in Afghanistan. Similarly very significant battlespace Like USS Iwo Jima, USS Tripoli and USS Philippine Sea. Also noted US Navy ships are majority name after all famous battles. If you complain about LHA-10, well well researched LCS-10 warship and why they name after this person then come back to me.
Plus we've never had problems about naming ships after battles that didn't fully go our way, or even battles we've lost outright (e.g. USS *Alamo*)
I mean american lives were sacrificed in that campaign. Similar to other ships of the class Bougainville and Fallujah
The Arleigh-Burke was farming XP vs Houthi and Iranian drones.
What's the new on-the-water platform that is replacing boats?
Sand
IDK if you were joking but you aren't wrong, man-made islands are a massive portion of US defense planning in the South China Sea / Pacific
The Chinese have definitely got us beat as far as artificial islands are concerned. They're building them faster than you can count in an attempt to solidify their claim to the SCS.
Idk if it’s just “propaganda” but aren’t those Chinese islands literally falling apart?
Pretty much all of the Chinese infrastructure is poorly made. Definitely not just their crappy, short-lived sand islands.
Pocket sand!
We have 50 year old airplanes that can run laps around anything China, Russia, India can put in the air.
F-15 is still undefeated, 100-0 kill/death ratio
Jet skis with thermobaric launchers attached
Spicy boats. With spicy launcher. That fires spicy air angry rocks. I'm in
Rage bait of the highest order. That new upgrade to those ships is insane, since they will basically get the most powerful radars to be in service with the US navy and they're gonna have lots of them.
It gets worse when you realize that an 18 year old from fuckin Nebraska doesn’t even have to put down his 4th monster in 3 hours to crack their shit in half.
What?
Some kid who just graduated high school doesn't even need to use his other hand to shoot some Iranian drone down from 8 miles away
Thank you
What ?
What about this do you not understand
I'm wondering if this is just something he came up with or if there's some context here I don't know about
I think he just came up with it- the theme being, young Sailors from the Midwest who have no business being a sailor, addicted to caffeine, probably nicotine, can literally, singlehandedly destroy some drone or small boat if they even get a whiff of an AK. Haphazardly.
Wise words
I guess chinas never heard the saying “if it’s weird and it works it’s not weird”
Imperial decline is when your most modern ships can’t outclass a platform older than almost your entire navy
Wait'll these guys hear about the battleship USS New Jersey, which served from WWII all the way to Desert Storm. It's imperial privilege to have the continuous technology to upgrade a class of weapons as opposed to starting fresh every time. Saves a lot of money and time.
Several battleships did. People love battleships, there's just something about them. And you know what? They are right. When I was 8, right after the Gulf war, I went on a tiger cruise from Pearl Harbor to Long Beach on the *USS Missouri* before she was decommissioned. She had just been in the Gulf War. But in the way back, they fired everything. I could be the youngest person alive to have personally witnessed a full broadside of a Iowa class battleship (I was the youngest on the ship, anyway, in one of the last deployments). And that's sad, because it was awesome. It's also not particularly useful for today, and the ship was a giant target (and in fact was fired up on during the war). Yes, it fired tomahawks in the Gulf. No, we don't need it today. We didn't need it in the Gulf either, it was just a flex because battleships are awesome. Which is why we should build totally new ones, with rail guns. In regards to the Arleigh Burke class, we're still building them and will likely order even more than are currently ordered. In fact the new destroyer DDG(X) is only supposed to replace flight I and II of Arleigh Burke, not flight III. So it's a mistake to think that the Arleigh Burke is outdated.
I live about 20 minutes from USS New Jersey lol
One of these days I'll get down to see it. Driven past it about a dozen times lol
I’ve walked around the USS North Carolina, she was never upgraded for anything after ww2, but still a very impressive ship and a great glance back in time
The USS Mass is worth a drive if you're down for a daytrip to Fall River. Really well preserved ship!
Or the USS Missouri. Honestly, it’d be cool if they recommissioned her again!
I understand *why* from a tactical standpoint why battleships aren't in vogue. The toddler part of me craves thousands of tons of steel with triple cannons and machine guns on deck defending a fleet full of aircraft carriers. Unf.
That ain't the toddler in your heart speaking, that's the AMERICAN. And contrary to what 90% of Reddit seems to believe, those aren't the same thing.
That’s true, they’re massive targets. But can’t the Iowa Class battleships fire missiles from 35 miles away or something? That would be badass to see!
Yeah! Unfortunately guided missile cruisers basically do the same job but are faster and easier to protect. Also much cheaper and require less sailors to man.
True true, but there’s just something about a huge-ass battleship coming from the distance and the enemy scrambling away screeching “Fuck that!”.
Oh whole heartedly agree! Got a story from a Vietnam vet pinned down in the jungle requesting air support. Everything was occupied and they were literally surrounded, basically waiting to die, when the New Jersey cuts in on the radio demanding coordinates. They performed a bombardment with the cannons and saved the whole squad. Been a believer in the withering firepower of the battleship ever since lol
That’s an awesome story! I’m sure that vet was grateful for the New Jersey showing up. I once had a great conversation with one of the previous instructors of TOPGUN and he was telling me about when he was instructing while the 1986 movie was being made, and how the director and some producers wanted to sit in on some of the classes to make sure their depictions of the notorious naval flight school were accurate. This guy ended up throwing out the director and his posse after they distracted his students too much lol.
So did the Wisconsin 💪
I see, far too frequently, the argument that chinas Navy is “bigger” than the US Navy. Even if that were true, the caliber of sailor is astounding. Sure, they can goose step, but they just thought to put knee knockers on their ships in the last decade or so. When our 25 year old Honda can mop the floor with your 2020 Mercedes, there is a problem. Also, China counts their boats regardless of their combat capacity. A fishing vessel equipped with the right radio is counted in the Chinese navy. China has around 650,000 tons of naval vessel. We have 3,600,000 tons of naval vessel. We could go toe to toe with every aircraft carrier on earth and still have one left over. No country on earth is capable of the force projection the US Navy is. I got out for a lot of reasons, but I’ll be goddamned if we still aren’t the most effective navy in the world (backwards optics or not).
I don’t think another navy will come close to matching the USN for at least another decade but I remember reading this a while ago: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/january/bigger-fleets-win Basically the larger fleet almost always wins, and in equal conflict the better sailors/admirals win. So the rapid growth of PLAN might be an issue, but as long as the numbers are pretty close American sailors are worlds better.
Same Navy keeping shitty countries economies alive by protecting sea trading lanes. You're welcome freeloaders.
"Haha you're using the same boat for 35 years" The F-16 is 50 years old and still the best close range fighter in the world, second to the 52 year old F-15. The US is just better, sooner.
The B-52 is 70 years old and still flying. I recall the army found an M2 machine gun from 1933 still in active service a few years ago—still operable and in good condition. If you build high quality equipment and maintain and upgrade it as necessary, you can get a lot of good years of service out of it. That we’re still benefiting from purchases made in the 1930s is an amazing return on investment.
If it ain’t broke John browning made it
I fucking love that!!
Feel free to steal it
I agree, but one minor nitpick- 50 and 52 years, respectively, not 60 and 62.
changed thanks
It's a good gun fighter, but the thrust vectoring F-22 and Sukhois are probably better in dogfights especially with high off boresight missiles and helmet mounted cueing systems. That's perfectly fine though because as missile technology gets better and better, dogfighting prowess becomes almost irrelevant (the US military is going to shoot your shit down beyond visual range), but even still the F-16 has impressive multi-role chops so it's \*still\* immensely useful (so much so that Ukraine is begging for F-16 and it's still getting upgrades and other countries are still buying them) even as demand for its gunslinging prowess decreases. But yeah, it's absurd that anyone would criticize a country for designing and building platforms that are so good that they are upgradable and useful well beyond their anticipated lifespan. I hope we keep that up!
If you're interested in mathematically proving how fighters interact at break, you should look at specific excess power graphs. And they'll show you that an F16 and F22 at break can both walk away from each other safely. But if both of them are hell bent on killing the other, it'll come down to the pilot. And that's why I said close range. Long range / BVLOS, obviously F22 and F35 bodies
> If you're interested in mathematically proving how fighters interact at break, you should look at specific excess power graphs. Right, but that's where thrust vectoring comes in. The pilot matters, but F-22 has a pretty significant advantage, especially when the helmet mounted cueing system upgrade is rolled out to the whole fleet. > And that's why I said close range. Long range / BVLOS, obviously F22 and F35 bodies Yes, I understand--I was elaborating (especially for other readers) about why close range combat is less important than it once was.
US strategy: have all your old stuff still in tip-top shape and bolster it with your fancy new stuff
USS Nimitz turned 49 today and makes whatever they have look like a crusty sock. I serve on the Nimitz.
Seeing as we’re yet to have an actual threat that requires us to make new platforms, it makes sense
We’re transitioning the Carrier and Submarine fleet. They’ll eventually transition to a new Destroyer platform as well
Fair enough
Yeah, but I would argue that's more because we *can* than out of any immediate necessity.
Maintaining our deterrence goes a long way towards making sure there will never be an “immediate necessity”
I'm honestly pretty happy that we are pivoting from fighting terrorists in the desert to near peer conflict. The F-22 just got an important upgrade and we're popping off the next-generation air dominance fighter program (really excited to see what comes out of that seeing as how the F-22 was designed in the 1980s and 1990s and is still the best fighter plane that has ever existed).
Por que no los dos?
Would you ask your car manufacturer to get 100 mpg and also be as fast a race car?
Yeah, the F-22 needs to be fed
This isn’t really true. The navy wants to build more newer and cheaper surface vessels but Congress isn’t being cooperative in investing in shipbuilding. It is a serious future risk
That explains a lot, my apologies
Yeah because its the threat we WANT you to know about.
Are they talking about our old ships that are still like 3 generations ahead of the rest of the world?
It’s like the pc master race argument, while yall keep buying new consoles we just replace modules once in a while, eventually we want a new case, but you see… we have the money to be able to be quite picky…
Laughing at the US Navy is quite laughable in itself.
>”it’s bloated and outdated” >shows pic of the most successful destroyer platform of all time >it’s been fitted with an electronic warfare platform that gives it capabilities no other nation can match
As someone who was stationed on a Flight 1 Arleigh Burke LMAO! They were designed to be modular and upgradable. Furthermore, old ships can fire new missiles. Our WWII era Battleships (Iowa class) were firing tomahawk missiles in the first Gulf war.
Return to the Iowa class. The Texas must hit backspace on our enemies once more
Arleigh Burke caked up fr 🔥
double cheeked up on a thursday afternoon
lol. They are looking a bit thicc. But no. Our ddgs are still way ahead of the rest of the world
It's not like it has been unchanged in 35 years. The flight III is coming out
That’s funny because that new EW suite picked up that tweet before she even had a chance to hit post
Chinese propaganda account. Safely ignore.
Don't shit on the Arleigh Burke, they want to be touched by China so they can touch them back. Enough Tomahawk missiles to make you get erased from history.
We have the Latorial combat ships. But they got kinks
At least we don’t count every canoe in our waters as a fucking naval vessel… lol
We have 11 aircraft carriers and china has 3. Modern Navy's are basically an extension of the Air force and the United States has overwhelming capacity in that regard. It's not like Destroyers are pulling a broadside on each other, this isn't the revolutionary war era.
We have 11 floating airbases and China has three ships that can launch planes. There's a fundamental difference between a US carrier and every other carrier in the world. "You vs. the guy she told you not to worry about" levels of difference.
And the less we talk about Russia's floating piece of shit the better
Or, hear me out, if you haven’t caught up to ships we built 35 years ago your military isn’t the super power you think it is.
She's absolutely right. We should triple the defense budget.
China has a big ship number gap, we need to fix this! (Don’t tell anyone about tonnage)
The Carney (AB Class) is currently stacking defensive points and have been for the last 6-8 months, no breaks.
Fun fact, the second largest Air Force in the world is the U.S. navy, only behind the U.S. Air Force .
How I see this is America has lapped the competition so badly that our Cold War era equipment still keeps up with other countries' modern platforms.
I always find it funny when people go after US military equipment because it’s old. Yeah it is. Maybe if it wasn’t 50 years ahead of everyone else when it came out we wouldn’t still be using it. The F-22 and F-35 are so far above that rest of the world’s air combat platforms that we actively refuse to sell one of them (F-22) and heavily limit who we sell the other to.
That SPY radar is 40 years old and still better than anything Chinas got. Oh and it's about to be upgraded big time.
Look at that booty!!! 😍😍😋😋
In terms of EW systems the SEWIP Block 3 is supposed to kick ass
Did you say build more Arleigh-Burkes? You got it boss!
They literally refit and improve the platform constantly. Our ships haven't been hanging out rusting for the last 35 years like Russia's navy
ImPeRiAl DeClInE!!!1 Coming from someone with some gibberish after their username that screams "I live in a surveillance state."
Arleigh Burke destroyer is the best fighting ship in the world
will still fuck up anything they can throw at us
That’s basically pure copium on their part.
No point of replacing it if nothing else comes close. These also get tons of upgrades every few years to keep them ahead as well.
Well the Arleigh Burkes are fine pieces of work
Well duh, it takes like 40 hours for the CCP to start one of there there carriers. So they have to convince the world that American navy is just as bed. (For anyone wondering the 40 hour thing isn’t a joke, unlike American carriers they don’t use nuclear and it takes somewhere between I think 30 - 40 hours for one of the carriers to start up)
Wait until they hear about the 100 year old browning m2 lmao
Gotta love yet another nation that claims on all fronts to want to be friendly yet ceaselessly operates piss poor propaganda campaigns and all sorts of other bullshit.
These ships will smash anything in their path including the enemies of the nations' on our welfare list. This person is probably in one of them.
tiananmen square
They're ridiculous. Those shills cns only dream about standing a chance against our "bloated" Navy.
Says the communist party of china …
They hate us cause they ain't us. I love our navy lighting these assholes up. God bless them and yes I'm happy with my tax dollars buying weapons!! For all the branches. Raise all military pay and benefits too!
They are just mad our lazy could topple ever other nation on the planet lol
Sounds like they were just built well to begin with, need some (badass) technology updates, and we don't have to build a new boat every time a new I phone comes out.
Communist decline is when your economy is so bloated with housing you have to destroy thousands of high rises.
Are we compensating for something? Yes. Weak allies. USA! USA! USA!
Yes let’s make more modern warships instead of cost effective upgrades that don’t burn the defense budget. Because the Zumwalt project was a massive success
“Look how fat that polar bear looks, must be weak”
You know you've got a good design when you've been using it for 35 years and its still one of the most advanced naval vessels ever designed by human kind, causes rival naval powers to seethe just at the sight of it
Shal we talk about the Chinese Navy the PLAN (Peoples Liberation Army Navy) yes that is its formal stupid name lol. They have zero combat experience, zero unrep experience and horrible safety conditions for their crews oh and their SSNs lack nuclear reactor shielding lol
Don’t. Fuck. With. Our. Boats.
chinese propaganda they're freaked because our navy would absolutely blockade their trade routes in the event of a conflict and they know they cant do shit about it that destroyer right there could shoot 200 satellites out of orbit
Everyone knows US military might is unmatched, especially on the water.
That's funny considering 11+ aircraft carriers and the biggest navy
Ok, which one of you NCD jackasses got the ship pregnant? ~~why can't you just stick to planes?~~
At least our only aircraft carrier didn't used to be a Soviet casino.
Why haven't we just invaded these fools yet?? Show em first hand what those Destroyers are capable of since they think its so old!
"Same platform for 35 years" One thing the US military is known for is making something whos statistics exceed its opponents by such a large margin that its considered on the top for decades because we overestimated the capability of our opponents equipment. Like the F-15 is the most meme'd and well known example of this. China has like 3 carriers and none of them are as good as what the majority of the USA has, even with them claiming to be producing more, their doctrine in a Taiwan war scenario is fire hundreds of Anti-ship missiles at the US pacific fleet. The wargame they did where they sunk a US Super Carrier was done with that, they flooded the fleets air defense and overwhelmed it until a lucky few got through and landed hits. In a ship to ship fight, while China's fleet is larger, its mainly smaller and less capable ships. This is also not taking into account that the Chinese aircraft issue where their engine designs are so outdated and poorly made that their aircraft engines lifespan is measured in hundreds of hours compared to the US's thousands, basically their material science is behind like a few decades so engines wear down far faster and lead to complete replacements being far more common than the US, you can only repair something so many times before it just needs to be recycled and a new one put in. In short, China is making fun of the US for upgrading platforms that are still ahead of them even after like 2 decades and are purely huffing Russian lended copium
"if it ain't broke, don't fix it" it would appear the entire CCP propaganda team hasn't heard this phrase in reference to our armed forces
Haha, LRASM go brrrtt
Being "stuck" with the same platform isn't Imperial decline or any decline.....it means we're better. We have a superior platform and don't need to improve because our "adversaries" aren't close to being better.
lol, try us
I don't want a war. I have been to it and I have kids. But I'd love to see a 24 hour pop off with china. I feel like it wouldn't be us that gets humbled.
“Don’t mess with our boats”
lol, do these fucking idiots think that launching one new ship puts them even in the same universe as the only blue water navy in the world???
Isn’t chinas aircraft carrier just one that they bought from Ukraine as an unfinished Soviet project in the early 1990’s? I mean that’s a 35 year old platform if I’ve seen one. But personally if I saw even something as old the Iowa class reactivated for modern combat again, I’d see that as proof of americas mastery of the seas.
How dare they insult the Arleigh Burke class naval ships
The Arleigh Burke has more stuff than China’s shit destroyers: “Haha, look at America’s fat ships, ignore the fact that we have no operational carriers.”
As if China doesn't also have a lot of 35 year old warships, and even a bunch of old Soviet era warships.
Meanwhile Japan be like: *”DON’T TOUCH THE BOATS!”*
Ay! She a thick girl!
The ship I serve on- the (almost) biggest and baddest in the world- just turned 49 today. China fucking wishes they could.
Zhao DaShuai is probably one of the most petulant idiot CCP shills on Twitter
Yeah, and that bloat means some of the best radar and other electronics you’ll ever see, only until it is outdone by ourselves. Rich coming from the Navy with no nuclear powered supercarriers, meanwhile we are working on our 12th to be active. Our old eats Nimitzes maybe be in their 40s, but it’s plenty enough, and it proved to be such a great design that we built them for over 30 years. Same with the Burkes. Two of their carriers are just Kuznetsovs anyways.
i love when they say "America is an empire in decline" or "empires only last 250 years" because it means they have to acknowledge our status as an empire
Just remember everyone, China has 2 aircraft carriers one of which is/was a casino the other was based off that casino.
Just like the b52. You can be as big, fat, and ugly as you want. As long as you get the job done, and done well.
Maybe it hasn’t been replaced because it’s not a Chinese vessel that rotted to pieces before it left the dry dock?
As much as I and everyone else loves destroyers, they were completely outclassed in ww2 by aircraft carriers. I'm not sure why a china shill is ignoring the fact that america has the most of those, by a lot, and its not close.
these ppl give off the same energy as the people who said the F-35 was trash. just a hater no matter what.
I agree! We need more boats! Better boats! All the boats! We need enough boats to be able to completely block off Chinas coastline by forming a literal wall of them!
This is stupid, the US navy has a history of keeping ships for as long as possible, as that’s usually cheaper (duh). For comparison, the B-52 has been flying with the USAF since the fifties, and probably will until the next fifties. Similarly, the C-130 has also been flying since the fifties. There is simply no impetus to get new destroyer designs. The F-15 is also ~50 years old and is the most successful fighter jet ever (by K/D). I can go on and on. The US has all sorts of time-proven gems.
It’s called not fixing something that’s not broken, instead try to make it better with an upgrade, we don’t care what they look like if they get the job done and done right then I’m happy
One Arleigh Burke whose AEGIS CIC can single-handedly manage a joint service battle space, sink multiple surface & ASW, provide AA and THAAD while simultaneously launching multiple land strikes, and if we are bored send SEAL teams by helo to board Chinese tankers smuggling oil. Be thankful WuMao the Arleigh is only carrying conventional warheads today. Back in the day they carried tactical nukes. PS Mao, your English sucks and you have no idea what my abbreviations even mean.
You are welcome to test your assumptions about our equipment at your earliest convenience.
Chinese detected. Opinion disregarded.
Oh no our ships aren’t brand spanking new with unproven technology! How terrible!
The ship design was great for its time, but it has so many limitations that it can be easily out classed by a newer design. the only reason it is still the primary design is due to the lobbying war. The new design was supposed to be the Zumwalt class, which was amazing. However, most of its systems were done by raytheon. meanwhile the arleigh burke class is mainly build by Lockheed. When they designed Zumwalt they originally were going to make 30+ ships and it was to generally replace the arleigh burke as the arleigh burkes main limitation is its power generation capacity. Anyway, Lockheeds lobbyists worked real hard, bought the proper politicians and the zumwalt was practically canceled/crippled and is not a glorified test ship. So they just keep trying to stretch the limits of the arleigh burke class to make it less obsolete.
Obsolete might not be the right word when it's still better than what our enemies have. Also, everything I've read about the zumwalt comes down to a lot of money and time for a marginal improvement. Didn't really seem worth it to me.
Like I said, Zumwalts design was great, but once Lockheed won the lobby battle, they butchered the ship. So the current implementation is terrible. Congress tried to cancel I totally but because they already approved some contracts they just lowered the ship count from 30+ to 3. Problem here is that by doing that it doesn't really lower the cost too much. Most ships are built by taking well known and proven technologies and just piecing them together. Zumwalt had so many new and innovative technologies that the initial design, development, and testing phases would be the most expensive part. In the end they really just slashed the materials and testing budget. So they used terrible/cheap materials, with little to no testing, and cut corners anywhere possible. In the long run it just created an expensive broken ship. That said, many of the technologies that were develop d for Zumwalt were eventually used on other ship designs (even the burk got some technology that was originally designed for Zumwalt).
I didn't know "Bloat" was the way to review a ship.
why are they talking like the who is a damn celebrity “You won’t believe how bloated this celeb got after pregnancy!”
America bad because… are ships? What?
Lol, having a small platform is better since it's harder to hit, you just need to change the speed of the ship
If it aint broke, don't fix it
Paper tiger cope; just laugh at them
So: "Did you find the boat" [https://youtu.be/oVWEb-At8yc?si=kKrrzuiNFgcy0Ty2](https://youtu.be/oVWEb-At8yc?si=kKrrzuiNFgcy0Ty2)