Ron Paul: "We Spent a Billion Dollars Fighting the Houthis…and Lost'
(ronpaulinstitute.org)
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Like the atomic bomb, missiles trump guns when your enemy doesn't have them. You can hit them while they can't hit you.
Our peers have it too, so it's not great.
There's a whole very technical conversation to be had here. The Navy developed and then abandoned a class of "littoral" combat vessels in the mid aughts. These ships would have been designed to handle exactly what is happening in the Red Sea. The problem is that these vessels would have to be "fighting" ships. They would have had to rely on a combination classic naval guns for offence and CIWS guns for defense. Its a workable system but not perfect. They would not have been "superior" and I think thats why they were abandoned in favor of more "modern" fleet solutions.
That's what the Iowa class battleships were before they were mothballed. Had the big guns and Tomahawks
As much as I love the Iowa class, there's a whole lot of design space between an old school battle ship and a design for an modern in shore fighting frigate(?).
The point is that they knew it could work, they just didn't do it because gotta spend da money.
Plus, maintenance costs are going to be vastly higher for a battleship than a frigate or a cruiser, almost regardless of what kind of weaponry it's fielding.
A classic battleship have huge amounts of armor. Modern navel engagements don't require a ship to be able to shrug off 20mm cannon fire, they require surviving a Harpoon missile.
...meaning the politicians in the top brass found a petty flaw to give them plausible deniability when they killed the project so their arms dealer buddies could keep raking in money on one-size-fits-a-few solutions, right?
Seems like that's how it usually goes...