Defense Industry Daily, commenting on the rumors first surfaced by Andrea Shalal-Esa of Reuters, had this to say about the presumed presumed cancellation of the CG(X) cruiser program:
The CG (X) follow-on cruiser... was initially supposed to replace the aging Reagan-era CG-47 Ticonderoga class with a larger version of the DDG-1000 Zumwalt class, before becoming the subject of resolutions from Congress requiring that it be nuclear powered. Stretched and modified DDG-51 Arleigh Burke class destroyers, whose 9,000-ton weight places them close to cruiser size anyway, are expected to replace it, while modernization efforts stretch the life of the Ticonderoga class. The effect of a CG(X) cancellation on related programs like the AMDR dual-band radar is not yet certain.
I have three comments myself about this bit of news, which is almost not news.
First, this was to be expected, as the US Navy has never laid out a convincing case that a ship larger than the Burkes would be required for any role but carrying the already-cancelled kinetic energy interceptor. That may have been a useful mission, but the Obama Administration has already left it behind. Moreover, the only navy with larger surface combatants today is Russia’s, and much of that fleet’s design concept is a holdover from the late Cold War. Everyone else seems to manage air defense just fine with a big frigate. This isn’t a criticism of the Burke class; it’s just a reasonable assertion that the ships aren’t undersized amongst the fleets of the world.
Second, the cancellation is further to be expected because the term cruiser is almost meaningless today. The US Navy’s only real distinction between cruisers and destroyers is that the former is supposed to be capable of serving as a flagship. Stretching an existing design to allow for a larger communications suite and a few more staterooms for the commodore or admiral’s staff does seem cheaper than starting fresh. After all, as the Zen Pundit put it last week, “America’s nine year drunken sailor spending spree is officially over,” so somebody had better start finding ways to save money, somewhere.
But perhaps most interestingly, canceling the CG(X) simplifies the Navy’s planning. If the service was to take those congressional resolutions seriously (as it more than occasionally does), then its next classes of cruisers and helicopter carriers would necessarily be designed with nuclear propulsion. For the relative merits of this policy, see my column “Nuclear-powered amphibs all around” of October 2008; what’s notable today is not the economics of the question, but its governance.
For a variety of reasons, the Navy is far less enthused about this policy than are the two congressmen behind it, Gene Taylor (D-Mississippi) and Roscoe Bartlett (R-Maryland). The next helicopter carrier to follow the America-class may not come for twenty years, so the Navy can continue to avoid the question with that type, if it continues to prefer gas turbines for these ships. Its options for the CG(X) were less clear. By basing the follow-on to the Ticonderogas on the Burkes, the Navy can reasonably call them destroyers, rather like the destroyer leaders of the early Cold War.
Back in 1975, the DLGs and DLGNs were reclassified as GGs and CGNs simply as a marketing move. The Soviet Navy had lots of smallish cruisers, so a few inconvenient congressmen were insisting that the Navy close the “cruiser gap”—by building more, larger surface combatants that the admiralty didn’t want. Reclassifying the ships neutralized that opposition with nothing more than some fresh ink for the hull numbers on the Naval Register. Today, the Navy is effectively repeating that move, whether it calls the future “command-and-control” Burkes DLGs or not. For the trouble of fudging the classifications lines a bit, the service gets to put off the nuclear propulsion question indefinitely.
Thus, the next time that a congressional committee wants to provide guidance that strong, the committee’s staff should take care in the language to delineate the boundaries tightly—not cruiser, but something like surface warship of greater than [insert preferred number] tons. Otherwise, the naval staff will play them yet again.
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