CDR Salamander - I'll take LCC-21, 22, and yes, 23 and 24, thank you

Last week we started things off with a discussion of the 18 battle force and 16 non-battle force ships. Let’s look back at that.

It may have taken nine years, but there was a post of mine from 2017 that finally got a smile:

On the list of "unsexy but important" are many items from icebreakers, to command ships, to hospital ships, that every POM cycle get left on the cutting room floor by the gaggle of cats chasing laser pointers we have in charge of building our fleet.

When you look at the list from last Monday and the news from last summer about icebreakers, we seemed to have one ship that still is not getting the investment it needs—command ships.

We’re running out of time.

Even “Golden Fleet” documents that include such Salamander requirements like destroyer tenders right keep missing something that the new realities of war that we have learned in the last half-decade have shown are not a luxury, but a requirement for warfighting success—our command ships.

As Brent Sadler mentioned over the weekend,

Today there are only two of these ships in the Navy - the Mount Whitney (LCC 20) as 6th Fleet Flag Ship in Europe, and the Blue Ridge (LCC 19) as 7th Fleet FlagShip in Japan.
…
These existing flag ships have modern communications and staffs capable of running a prolonged war from sea - making it a harder target for cyber attacks, strikes and terrorist attacks - a valuable feature in modern warfare characterized by increased importance of connectivity with unmanned assets, dispersed logistics ships, and the strictest of communications requirements of frontline warships.

The argument for command ships has never been stronger.

In the age of precision warheads on conventional S/M/R/ICBM & the whole constellation of attack drones/cruise missiles, the utility of static shore-based higher headquarters is not just questionable; it is suicidal.

We will not be given many more clear warnings as we saw over the last few months with the limited Iranian attacks against our land-based facilities in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, just to mention two.

Never forget, the Chinese have already dialed in every static U.S. military facility inside the range of their rocket forces.

While there are threats to anything afloat, in today's threat environment, command ships should be many and redundant in number. Not two replacements, but four.

We don't even have to design a new ship. We have the LPD-17 design ready to go as a baseline. Slight mods...and there you go. Other designs can work as well, but the LPD-17 is a proven design, hardened, and easier to add additional self-defense systems to…including anything you can put in a MK-41 VLS cell.

We don’t need to continue to appreciate the problem. We don’t need multi-million to billion-dollar studies. No. We just need to accept that previous generations dithered and we will not.

Heck, I even know where to get $1.85 billion from to get things started.

Cut steel.

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