ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58
Let me address some of what you said... some of it I agree with, some of it I don't necessarily disagree with, I just think it does not tell the whole story.
1. The Millennium Challenge
No doubt a lot has changed since this exercise; however, I would like to point out that, at least from my recollection, the exercise was not quite as you described. It was meant to simulate the full start of a war with a country like Iran.
In fact, the exercise began with blue team issuing a diplomatic ultimatum to red team as would be done in a real world scenario. Blue team assumed that Gen Van Ripper--the man in charge of Red team--would act how Blue expected Iran to act, which is to do nothing until they were attacked; however, coming on the heals of Bush's preemptive doctrine, Van Ripper decided to act "preemptively."
So he located the Blue forces and took the initiative by launching a full scale attack on Blue, overwhelming their defenses--and only a portion of that was with "suicide" boats. Mostly it was overwhelming Blue with ASCMs launched from patrol boats, the air, and the ground.
Most of the "suicide" damage was done during the following day,
after the carrier had already been sunk.
What is more, on day 3 Blue was magically re-floated and the rest of the exercise scripted, the results of which were used initially to
justify pre-established American doctrine.
2. Virginia Class
While the USN certainly would argue your point, the Virginia was absolutely designed around it's cruise missile capacity and it's littoral role. Much of the ships design is dedicated to this.
This is a very sharp departure from the last (and most advanced) actual purpose built SSN--the Seawolf; However, the Navy not only decided the Seawolf is too expensive, which fair enough (I'm no proponent of inflated military spending), but also they wanted something to fit more in-line with what my original post was responding to--"we need force projection more than anti-ship capabilities in the modern navy."
3. MK48
No doubt the MK48 can sink ships; however, nearly every other ocean going navy has traditional torpedoes that function just as well as the MK48. They chose to arm their submarines with SLASCMs because it extends the submarine's standoff range to up to 300km. Not only that, with super cav torpedoes, their torpedoes far out range the MK48 and close target so quickly that typical anti-torpedo countermeasures are much less likely to be deployed, let alone work.
4. Surface Forces
None of this, of course, addresses the USN's weakness in terms of anti-surface warfare. The USN currently uses the Harpoon system--a system dating to the year of my birth some 38 years ago.
Problems with the Harpoon:
Speed
Harpoons are subsonic. With a speed of .7 mach it is the slowest ASCM currently in use; this gives opponents ample warning and increases the likelihood the ordinance will be interdicted. By contrast, Russia, China, and even Iran have modern ASCM capable of mach 3.
Range
Harpoons have a range of 70nm, while both Russia and China can stand off at a range of between 194nm and 300nm. In the world of naval tactics, this disparity is the absolutely terrible. Russia, Chinese, Iranian (almost whomever you pick) land, air and sea forces can stand off over a 100 miles outside the range of any USN anti-surface ordinance.
In other words, they can kill us from a place that we cannot kill them back.
Supply
Not every USN surface combatant carries harpoons. That's right, the Arleigh-Burke, for example, has zero anti-surface capability. This violates the idea of the distribution of deterrence in modern naval tactics. In other words, it makes choosing targets for any potential enemy
really easy.
On top of this, assuming in a shooting war any anti-surface capable USN ship lives long enough to close within 70nm of an adversary's navy, these ships only hold 7 or 8 harpoons. So about enough for a
single exchange of fire.
Needless to say the navies of the world who still build themselves around the idea of sea denial can
vastly out perform the USN in this regard as well.
Conclusion
*I* think the USN is seriously inadequate in terms of preparedness to fight either large surface denial navy still around--both China and Russia. From what I read, there is growing recognition of that within the navy and some steps are being taken to rectify this. Until the new generation of missile comes online in 2021 (sure thing just like the F-35) there are no real stopgaps... though their working on dual purposing AAM systems.
In 2021 the new missile will help (there will probably be a sub launch variant too), but until the USN decides that it is worth designing ships around actual sea denial, it will only go part way to addressing the "issue."
Playing at war is a far better vocation than making people fight in them.
" - BBfanboy
