It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.
Overhauls are Jackie Fisher, Auxiliaries Part 2, Impressment, The 3T Missiles - Introduction and for 2025, my reviews of Fort Point and Nike Site SF88, Thoughts on the Israel-Iranian War and The Tanker War Part 1.
Comments
What off the shelf ship could the US Navy buy? Are there any ships in operation in allied naval fleets that nearly serve to fill American naval fleet gaps? If the US decided that buying foreign ships was ok for now, are there any that could be bought that would meet US needs without major redesign?
Way Off Topic
If you haven't already, check out the reactions of the World Cup visitors to being in the US on the various social media. A pleasant reminder that we have it pretty good here in the US.
@Yosef, the short answer is "yes" plenty of allied naval fleets have offshore patrol vessels, frigates, destroyers, amphibs.
The keywords are meet US needs and as we just saw with Constellation, the current USN does not believe that foreign ships meet their needs. And this is hardly unusual, almost all navies that can build ships have their own special requirements that can't possibly be compromised on. See FREMM, or Type 26, for how much redesigning different countries require for nominally "shared" designs.
I think the USN is only going to buy foreign ships/designs if they can be convinced to change their requirements.
Every so often, I search this site, and I wish search worked.
Example: search for
drone. Lots of hits. Click on one. I'm back at the home page.Search items look like this: Main-DASH-20260224T100039 Main-Distributed-Maritime-Operations-20240610T105254 Main-Dont-Overread-Moskva-20220525T164132 Main-Drone-Countermeasures-20251006T144117
The actual URL for the last one looks like this: https://www.navalgazing.net/Comments/Main-Drone-Countermeasures-20251006T144117
I can make it work, mostly by cutting out "/Comments" and the hyphen and date at the end. This won't take me directly to a comment containing the search, but there are few enough comments that just searching that page is good enough.
I should probably just PM obormot on DSL and he could fix it in a few minutes, but in the meantime, this is the workaround.
(Sigh. Now I also wish multi-line displays worked.)