Battleships Are Back! Navy Abruptly Boosts DDG/CG Building Targets For 2045

[Tony]

Battleships are back! In little more than five months, the shape of America’s future Navy fleet changed. Between February and July, U.S. Navy leadership went from advocating for a modest fleet of 60 cruisers and destroyers to supporting a more robust vision of 96 large surface combatants by 2045.

Nobody really knows what, exactly, pushed the Navy to favoring large combatants—a rating traditionally comprised of high-value cruisers and destroyers. Neither the U.S. Department of Defense, the Secretary of the Navy, nor America’s Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Mike Gilday, has offered taxpayers any real detail on what spurred the Navy, after years of fretting over the relevance of large surface combatants, to redirect at least $70 billion in future funding towards building bigger ships.