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Panels, seminars, conferences, reports, speeches, and emotion do not build a navy. Even shipyards do not build a navy. In the American system of government, if you want a navy you have to go up to Capitol Hill and get Congress to fund it. Without money, everything else is just a PDF. What is the state of play in bringing the argument for sea power to Congress? Returning to the Midrats Podcast just in time for the Senate’s August recess will be Brent Sadler, CAPT, USN (Ret.). You can join us LIVE today from 5-6 PM Eastern at this link. If you can’t make the live show, check the Substack later Sunday for all the podcast links and make us part of your commute listen. Brent is a Senior Research Fellow for Naval Warfare and Advanced Technology in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for National Security at The Heritage Foundation, and a retired U.S. Navy Captain. Leave a comment Share This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. View the full article

A patch of forest and lakeshore in northern Michigan has become one of the most important pieces of real estate in the U.S. military’s race to catch up with China on drone warfare. Camp Grayling and the National All-Domain Warfighting Center, a sprawling military training complex in Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula, has been selected by […]View the full article

An Israeli drone maker best known for building some of the quietest tactical aircraft in the sky is now pouring fresh money into scaling up how many of them it can actually build, ramping up serial production at home while pushing into new markets across Europe and Asia, Israel Defense reported in an article by […]View the full article

A Florida company that started out printing furniture with giant robotic arms is now applying that same technology to something considerably more consequential, building drone boats for the U.S. military layer by layer instead of piece by piece. Haddy, a digital manufacturing company based in St. Petersburg, Florida, announced on Saturday that it has produced […]View the full article

A small Indian defense company has built a weapon that looks like it walked straight off a battlefield in Ukraine, a portable, gun-shaped launcher that fires its own miniature drone to physically hunt down and destroy enemy aircraft in midair. Picraft Technology Pvt. Ltd., a private Indian defense technology company, developed the system, called Harpy […]View the full article

A soldier in the California desert flips a switch, and a small drone lifts off the ground carrying the ability to see through darkness and, if commanders choose, to strike a target without ever putting a human pilot in harm’s way. That was the scene at Fort Irwin, California this summer, where soldiers from the […]View the full article

A Russian tank that Ukrainian and Western observers had already written off as another failed experiment in anti-drone armor may actually have done exactly what it was built to do, just not enough of it. New battlefield testimony from a combat drone specialist who spoke directly with the Ukrainian unit involved in the fight suggests […]View the full article

A Russian air defense battery that had been launching missiles at Ukrainian cities for days finally went up in flames, and Ukraine’s drone operators are taking credit for putting it there. Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, a dedicated branch of the country’s military built specifically around drone warfare, struck a Russian S-400 Triumf air defense position […]View the full article

The Pentagon’s most futuristic research arm has put out a call for a missile that can outrun and outsmart the very air defenses that increasingly threaten American pilots and ships. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon office famous for turning science fiction concepts like stealth aircraft and self-driving cars into real military hardware, […]View the full article

Getting a fighter jet part built faster in America might soon depend on cutting through a mountain of paperwork that has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with accounting. The Department of War wants the companies that build its weapons to tell it exactly which forms and financial audits are slowing them […]View the full article

A missile that first destroyed tanks in the jungles of Vietnam more than five decades ago just landed another half-billion-dollar contract, and the Army plans to keep firing it well past the year 2050. The U.S. Army awarded Raytheon, the missile-making arm of aerospace giant RTX based in Tucson, Arizona, a $536 million modification to […]View the full article

A British engineering company that spent decades building Formula 1 race cars has announced it will start delivering a weapon that flies faster than 460 mph, carries a 300-kilogram (661-pound) payload, and never comes back from its mission. MGI Engineering, a defense firm based in Witney, Oxfordshire, announced that its TigerShark autonomous strike drone is […]View the full article

Out of 61 Russian cruise missiles fired at Ukraine in a single wave, Ukrainian air defenses shot down 54, and F-16 fighter jets alone accounted for 38 of those kills, Militarnyi reported, citing a statement from Yevhenii Karzhau, deputy commander of Ukraine’s Air Force. The figures place the American-made jets at the center of one […]View the full article

One of my evergreen arguments is over the use of, “kids” to describe those who serve. I’m sorry, 18, 19, and even 25-year-old men and women are just that, men and women. We all put our lives in their hands every day, I find the paternalistic “kid” a bit insulting and can cause some to expect less of them. Perhaps it is just me being pedantic, it probably is. “Kids” is better than “boy” and “girl,” I suspect—but maybe it isn’t just me, maybe it is just “us.” We don’t expect much from our young men and women as a society compared to what was expected just a few generations ago. Adult college graduates—especially the young men—still living at home. They have the car, clothes and the external trappings of an adult, but they live as small children with no plan or drive. Waiting for the roast-duck of life to fly in their mouth, making excuses for their own timidity and poor decisions. Don’t even get me started with the men and women in their early twenties, smart and well educated, who can’t even deal with different opinions or little words that seem to send them into a spiral. Do they behave as such because we let them, or do we encourage them to never rise to adulthood? Either way, it is mostly the fault of poor leadership from their elders. Back to boys and girls—but in this case let’s look at the term “boy” as it was used just over 100 years ago. A first class boy, or as it were, a Boy First Class; At the outbreak of war, Jack’s father Eli, an ex-soldier, re-enlisted as a Private in the 57th Coy. Royal Defence Corps. It was The Royal Navy that appealed to Jack and at the age of 15 he took references from his Headmaster and his employer along to a local recruitment office and enlisted. He was sent to Keyham Naval Barracks in Plymouth for his basic training where he earned sixpence a week as a “Boy Second Class”. He passed out as Boy First Class J. T. Cornwell J/42563 and when he left Keyham, (referred to in naval terms as H.M.S. Vivid) he was posted to H.M.S. Lancaster which was moored at Chatham. Jack was later ordered to join the fleet at Rosyth in Scotland and on the 2nd of May 1916 he joined the newly commissioned H.M.S. Chester. The Battle of Jutland began on the 31st of May 1916, the first shots being fired at 14:28. H.M.S. Chester was stationed ahead of the fleet in The North Sea. Lookouts reported distant gunfire and her Captain ordered “Action Stations” before setting off at full speed to investigate. Close ahead they encountered four German cruisers. Jack took orders via headphones from his Officer on the bridge. He was fully responsible for setting the gun’s sights and his speed and precision would determine whether they were to hit or miss their target. The German cruisers opened fire and Jack’s gun was one of the first to be hit before it could be brought into action and he suffered a serious wound to his chest. H.M.S. Chester simply could not match the firepower of the four enemy cruisers. A report from the Commanding Officer of H.M.S. Chester: “Boy (1st Class) John Travers Cornwell of the “Chester”, was mortally wounded early in the action. He nevertheless remained standing alone at a most exposed post, quietly awaiting orders till the end of the action, with the gun’s crew dead and wounded all round him”. H.M.S. Chester sustained severe punishment, being hit seventeen times. She was ordered back to the port of Immingham on the Humber. Jack was taken to hospital in Grimsby and attended by Dr. C. S. Stephenson, but he could not be saved and died of his wounds on June 2nd, 1916. His body was brought back to East Ham in a naval coffin and his family buried him in a private ceremony at Manor Park Cemetery, in a communal grave numbered 323. When the story of Jack’s heroism and somewhat humble burial was publicised, it was decided, due to strong public opinion that Jack should have a burial fit for a hero. On the 29th of July 1916, Jack Cornwell’s body was exhumed and carried by gun carriage from East Ham Town Hall to Manor Park Cemetery where he was reburied with full naval honours. In the procession, along with members of the family were: Mr. R. Banks Martin the Mayor of East Ham, Sir John Bethell M.P.,The Bishop of Barking, boys from Walton Road School, local cadets and scouts and boy sailors from H.M.S. Chester. The Admiralty was represented by Dr. Macnamara M.P. On the 15th of September 1916, the official citation appeared in The London Gazette stating that John Travers Cornwell had been posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross by King George V. What about his mother? On the 25th of October 1916 Jack’s father Eli died whilst on active service. The following month, on the 16th of November 1916, Jack’s mother received her son’s V.C. from The King at Buckingham Palace. By 1919, Jack’s mother Lily, was living in reduced circumstances and working in a sailors’ hostel to supplement a very small pension awarded for her son. She was found dead at her home in Commercial Road, Stepney, on the 31st of October 1919 aged 48 and never saw the memorial erected on her son’s grave. She shares a grave with Jack and Eli at Manor Park Cemetery, although her name is recorded as Alice. The memorial stone was unveiled on the 31st of December 1920, by Dr. Macnamara M.P. with members of the family present and A.H. Wiseman, the Mayor of East Ham. The Boy Scouts and Sea Scouts provided a guard of honour. Finally, a little note for you next time you are in London. It’s right across from Captain Bligh’s house; The gun that Jack manned from H.M.S. . Chester, was taken to the Imperial War Museum in March 1936 and is still on display today, along with Jack’s medals which were deposited in the museum by Jack’s stepsister Alice Payne on the 28th of November 1968. Now I am mad at myself. When I was at the IWM, I walked right past his gun. When you get a chance, take up my slack and visit a bit of what a “boy” can do. Fullbore. First posted APR2016.Leave a comment Share This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. View the full article

The U.S. Army has put more money behind a flying bomb that can circle over a battlefield for an hour, watch its target the entire time, and abort the strike mid-flight if something looks wrong, one day after the weapon proved it could pass every test the Army threw at it. Mistral Inc. and Uvision […]View the full article

A seven-ton U.S. Marine Corps supply truck can now creep past enemy positions in near silence, running purely on battery power with its diesel engine switched off entirely, and the company that built that capability is about to show it off in Michigan. Eaton, an intelligent power management company, announced its Mobility segment will display […]View the full article

Poland’s state-owned defense conglomerate is convening its entire arms industry around one table next week to answer a question with real stakes for the continent’s future: can Polish factories help Europe build a missile shield without depending on Washington to do it? Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa, known as PGZ, Poland’s state-controlled defense holding company that oversees […]View the full article

A laser sight small enough to mount on a rifle just got its moment on Capitol Hill, and the story behind how it got there says a lot about how the Pentagon is trying to fix a problem that has quietly killed off some of America’s most promising defense technology for years. B.E. Meyers & […]View the full article

Indonesia cut the first piece of steel for its own submarine on Aug. 7, 2026, marking the moment the Southeast Asian nation moved from training its engineers in France to actually building a warship on home soil. The steel-cutting ceremony took place at PT PAL’s shipyard in Surabaya, officially launching construction of Indonesia’s first Scorpène […]View the full article

ASELSAN, a Turkish state-affiliated defense electronics company, announced that its TOLUN-P munition is mission-ready, describing the weapon as delivering precision deep strike capability against hardened battlefield targets including armored vehicles, bunkers, and structures protected by reinforced concrete. The company said TOLUN-P combines GNSS and INS guidance, satellite positioning paired with an internal inertial navigation system […]View the full article

Taiwan’s Army deployed M1A2T Abrams tanks to Taoyuan International Airport for the first time during the third day of the Han Kuang No. 42 exercise, Taiwan’s annual live combat drill, joining Yunpao wheeled armored vehicles in a defense exercise built around a specific nightmare scenario for Taiwanese planners: Chinese forces attempting to seize the airport […]View the full article

A South Korean tank crew scrambled out of their vehicle and ran for safety early Thursday after flames broke out inside one of the military’s frontline main battle tanks during a live-fire training exercise just a few miles from North Korea, though officials confirmed nobody was hurt. A K1E1 tank operated by South Korea’s Army […]View the full article

A ballistic missile alert sent Japan’s government scrambling into emergency mode on the evening of Aug. 6, triggering crisis meetings at the highest levels within minutes of the launch, even though the missile ultimately posed no direct threat to Japanese territory. Japan’s Ministry of Defense and Cabinet Secretariat announced that North Korea launched at least […]View the full article

Japan’s government has used its most authoritative annual security document to declare that China and Russia are no longer just cooperating occasionally near its shores, they are actively strengthening coordinated military activity, Nikkei reported. Japan’s Ministry of Defense published its 2026 Defense White Paper on Aug. 4, expressing new alarm over deepening military cooperation between […]View the full article

One of the least helpful aspects of the modern-day battleship debate is the fact it has been so highly politicized. Whenever an announcement of a milestone comes up, the first thing that has to be done in the search for useful information is to filter out the rabid partisans on the left and right who will support or oppose anything strictly through a partisan lens. Both sides have two subspecies: mindless partisans to just call names and flick spittle about, and the professional partisans who will make an argument based on fact or well-founded opinion…filtered, but useful in the broader discussion. One of the more valuable reference documents on most issues involving warship development continues to be the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Yes, yes, I know the critiques, but their record is better than most. No need to plow into that again, I will just reference you to the interview we did on the Midrats Podcast with Eric Labs back in February of this year. Well, if you’re looking for a good reference document on the state of play of BBGN-1, this is your week. Yesterday, the CBO put out their report, The Navy’s New Battleship Program: Costs and Implications for the Shipbuilding Industrial Base. What is good about it from my point of view at least, is it gives you a set of about as objective facts as you can find inside a commute of DC. As such, it gives you the opportunity to discuss choices. There are a lot of choices and decisions to be made about fleet design, some of them involving BBGN-1 that we’ve made here which you can find at the first hyperlink at the top of this post. Before we get to some pull quotes, I want to lead with a point I originally put at the end of this post. To a fault, I look for patterns, habits, recurring issues. If significant changes are not put into a system with regards to people, policy, or procedures, then the odds are that past patterns, habits, and recurring issues will reappear. As you would expect from CBO, you have a numbers based argument, a foundation that has enabled the disastrous Cult of Efficiency and Transformationalists to create a disgraceful breaking yard of failed and cancelled programs. LCS, DDG-1000, CG(X), FFG-62. Poor program management and weak-hand leadership destroyed the utility of three of them, lack of vision, control, and salesmanship killed the 4th before a design was ever even finalized. The result was billions of dollars spent for limited to no combat utility, generations of advanced designs never making it to the fleet, and an industrial base flat-footed in the face of the greatest challenge to our nation on the high seas in four decades. Speaking of billions… The total cost of the Navy’s new nuclear-powered battleship program would be about $275 billion (in 2026 dollars) over the 2027–2056 period. The first ship would cost about $23 billion. For the 15 ships that would be purchased through 2056, the cost would average slightly more than $18 billion per ship. How does that compare to the other large nuclear powered warship? The only Navy ships whose costs are comparable to CBO’s estimate for the BBGN are the Ford class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. The Navy currently has 11 Nimitz class aircraft carriers and 1 Ford class aircraft carrier, with 3 more under construction. CBO estimates that future Ford class ships under the Navy’s 2027 shipbuilding plan would cost about $22 billion each. Aircraft carriers do not carry missiles, unlike surface combatants and most submarines, but they have an air wing composed of several dozen aircraft that can fly hundreds of sorties over days or weeks to launch bombs and missiles. An aircraft carrier is not really a warship without its carrier airwing. Baking the cost of the aircraft should be done, otherwise it is like estimating the cost of a surface ship without factoring in the cost of VLS cells and gun mounts. Let’s be conservative and state that a low-end carrier airwing has: a mix of 44 F/A-18E/F and F-35C, 5 EA-18G, 4 E-2D, and eight MH-60S with the MH-60R distributed amongst the small boys and of course, the supporting COD Ospreys who are usually ashore. If you just count the carrier based aircraft, that gives you: 44 Super Hornets at $67.5 million each = $2.97 billion 5 Growlers at $68 million each = $340 million 4 Hawkeyes at $80 million each = $320 million 8 Seahawks at $30 million each = $240 million That exceptionally low-balled figure for the capital costs of an airwing adds up to $3.87 billion per carrier additional cost to deploy, for a follow-on FORD Class unit cost of $25.87 billion compared to the follow-on BBGN ships estimated $18 billion. Last October before the announcement of BBGN-1, I made a few guesses that actually didn’t turn out too off the mark. One of them was a planning proposal benchmark that we should expect a BBGN-1 to cost about 2/3 the cost of a Ford CVN. $25.87 x .6667 = $17.24 billion. My estimate for the cost back last October—done with a gun to my head, was not that bad. As such, no one is allowed to blanch at the cost of BBGN. See the good stuff you get for free by reading CDR Salamander every day? If that doesn’t encourage you to become a paid subscriber, I don’t know what will. NB: I am not going to use the cost of the initial ship, there are all sorts of issues involved with that cost for every class that skews discussion. It is the follow-on ship cost that matters.One more comment on that last pull quote, specifically nuclear power. Our carriers are nuclear powered and can, ahem, go much faster then any of their escorts…and keep at it for a very long time. However, because they don’t have a single escort that can keep up with them in contested seas, they cannot take full advantage of their speed. Instead, they must slow to the best speed their conventionally powered escorts can sustain…and at those speeds those escorts will consume exorbitant amounts of fuel, further tethering the strike group to their few and fragile oilers. After announcing the program, the Navy indicated that it would award sole-source contracts to Leidos Gibbs & Cox for assistance with surface ship design engineering and to Bath Iron Works and Ingalls Shipbuilding for assistance with designing the ship. Bath and Ingalls currently build many of the Navy’s surface combatants and amphibious warfare ships. In its budget submission to Congress, the Navy estimated that the first ship of the class, known as the lead ship, would cost $15.1 billion (in 2026 dollars) and that the average cost of the second and third ships would be $10.2 billion. Those estimates were for a conventionally powered ship—that is, one without nuclear propulsion. … By comparison, CBO estimates that for a conventionally powered battleship with a full-load displacement of 35,000 tons, the lead ship would cost $21.3 billion, and the 14 follow-on ships would average $15.9 billion each, for a total of $243 billion. The total cost of $275 billion estimated for the 15 nuclear-powered ships would be about 13 percent greater. Switching to nuclear power would reduce the battleship’s operating costs over time by eliminating the need to purchase fuel. CBO does not have enough information to estimate those potential savings, which would depend on the final design of the ship and the specifications of the conventional propulsion plant it otherwise would have used. Nuclear power is worth it…and as we discussed earlier…is a long-standing requirement. We’ve gotten this far without reminding everyone of the scale of BBGN-1, so let’s reestablish that baseline understanding. The battleship would have a full-load displacement of 35,000 tons or more, a length of 840 to 880 feet, and a sustained speed in excess of 30 knots.3 The Navy revealed those specifications before deciding to use nuclear propulsion on the ship, a change that would significantly increase the cost of the ship and affect its design. If built to those specifications, the ship would be the largest surface combatant in the world and larger than any surface combatant built for the Navy since World War II.4 It would be more than three and a half times the size of the Navy’s Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer and more than twice the size of the Zumwalt class guided missile destroyer A few notes on the above. 128 VLS cells is what we had with the TICO CGs. There is expanded news here that I will cover with the sidebar at the end of this post…but stick with me here and don’t get distracted. We’ll get there in a bit. I remain unhappy with just 12 Conventional Prompt Strike missiles, but compromises must be made. That damn SLCM-N is still there. It is a bad idea, distraction, and unappreciated cost inflator. Again, just say “no” to the nuclear autists. One of the more important details of this discussion is hidden in page 5, and I want to make sure no one misses it: …the final assembly of the ship would be performed by Newport News Shipbuilding. That shipyard is the only new-construction shipyard already certified for work on nuclear-powered surface ships. The battleship’s final assembly would take place at Dock 12, which is currently used to build aircraft carriers.10 Newport News Shipbuilding is behind schedule on constructing three aircraft carriers, as well as many submarines. Adding the final assembly of a nuclear-powered battleship to the shipyard’s workload could lengthen the delays for those programs, in addition to delaying the construction of the battleship itself. Dock 12 is the Achilles' Heel of American sea power. This simple fact is unappreciated and it should give you nightmares. It is our version of the dry docks at St. Nazaire, and we should hope that no one has a Cambletown ready to head up the James River. This next paragraph is very hard to argue with, and can be disheartening: Given the history of the DDG(X) and the ongoing delays in producing ships, a clean-sheet design of a much larger ship is unlikely to be ready in time for production to begin in 2028. A ship as large as the BBGN would require significantly more work to design and more detailed digital models than the DDG(X) would have needed. To address concerns about the relatively short timeline for developing the BBGN’s design, the Navy plans to incorporate “modern digital engineering, advanced production practices, and [artificial intelligence]-enabled design tools to reduce cost and schedule risk from the outset.”17 But the Navy’s inability to complete designs for simpler ships, such as the FFG-62 Constellation class guided missile frigate, in a timely way suggests that the service will face challenges with the BBGN. The reality is, if we stick with the same people, processes, and procedures that we have so far this century, we will have this problem. Please tell me that there are plans to bring in the good folks from Palantir with ShipOS, and we’re not going to plow away with our legacy “system” that has failed us over and over. The Navy’s DDG-1000 destroyer … experienced substantial cost growth because of other factors, including construction that started early in the design phase and reliance on a number of technologies that were still being developed. If the Navy and shipbuilders incorporated producibility features into the BBGN’s design and avoided the challenges that affected the DDG-1000, the BBGN’s cost by weight could be lower than CBO estimates. “If” is carrying a lot here, and I hope it does…but we could help ourselves if we don’t make the mistake of the Transformationalists earlier this century. …if the Navy moves too quickly to start building, it runs the risk of cost growth from concurrency—that is, from starting construction before the ship’s design is complete. A substantial overlap between design and construction has caused construction problems and cost growth in other Navy and Coast Guard shipbuilding programs, including the littoral combat ship and the Constellation class frigate. …and yes, I acknowledge that the Constellation class frigate (PBUH) was not part of the Age of Transformationalism™, but it used the same people, processes, and procedures of them…with the expected results. There’s your CDR Salamander CBO Report Quicklook. There’s a lot more info there. You really should give it a read. Sidebar: Did you catch note 5? Lockheed Martin has developed a new method for building the Mark 41 system that could increase the number of missiles in a set physical space on a ship by 25 percent. Thus, a missile field on a DDG-51 class destroyer that contains 64 missile cells today could in the future be replaced with a system that contains 80 missile cells. If that method was used on the battleship, the 128 planned missile cells could potentially become 160 cells or, in the absence of CPS missiles, as many as 200 VLS cells. I got the brief on this earlier this year. I believe I have mentioned this before, but were I Emperor the one thing I would require is that every Arleigh Burke DDG that is going into the yard for an extended maintenance period should have this upgrade. Every Arleigh Burke presently under construction should as well. We have a problem—too few ships with too few VLS cells. There is a way to accelerate correction of the latter as we work on the former. I am simply gobsmacked as to why this isn’t happening. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Leave a comment Share View the full article