> I'm a guy that loves to learn about new things and occasionaly write about them.

I read a lot of foreign policy, which often overlaps with military. The author's facts and assumptions are often in conflict with everyone else, and the author seems unware of that - not addressing very many essential issues.

> Block-Style Construction / Parts of the ship (or "blocks") are made in workshops and then transported to a dry dock. Cranes move the blocks into place, and workers connect them.

The US Navy's shipbuilding contractors (the Navy doesn't build its own ships, or at least not ones of any significance) have been doing that for many years, at least on some kinds of ships.

> Lack of Integrated Testing / The Navy is infamous for its paperwork. It prefers standards and supplier certifications instead of actual testing (and often drags its feet on testing even when Congress mandates it).

I might misunderstand the author's intent, but the US Navy does extensive testing and qualification of new ships, sometimes a year or more, just like the rest of the US military. For example, the latest aircraft carrier, the Gerald Ford, went through eight years of tests (it was a new model of carrier). For an idea of what that means,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Gerald_R._Ford_(CVN-78)#Op...

Here's one test I won't be doing on my new sailfish: On 18 June 2021, Gerald R. Ford completed her first Full Ship Shock Trial ... to ensure that she is able to withstand battle conditions. 40,000 lbs. (18 tonnes) of TNT was detonated underwater, measured as a 3.9 magnitude earthquake by USGS. Additional tests were conducted in July and August, with the test detonations set off closer to the hull.

> Single-role ships [instead of multi-role]

I've never heard anyone else ever suggest that. Thoughts based on what I have read:

The US military is moving aggressively in the opposite direction. They want people and machines to be highly flexible. The main reasons is the advent long-range precision missiles - once the enemy sees you, they now can pretty reliably hit you now.

That means you can't concentrate large forces, including lots of specialized personnel and equipment. You can't move and resupply, or even communicate. What does work is smaller units operating within the range of fire, with the personnel you have, and moving and attacking faster than the enemy can react (within their 'OODA loop').

You need highly flexible generalists who take initiative and make decisions on the spot, not rigid specialists coordinating with higher-ups. It also is believed to play to US strengths as a free-thinking, entrepeneurial population; the US trusts its sergeants to make the decisions.

Applied to the Navy, they are switching to more, smaller ships. Due to the new precision, long-range (hundreds or thousands of miles) anti-ship missiles, big ships risk too much. For similar reasons, the Navy wants 'distributed lethality', deploying weapons, if even a few, to every ship imaginable. They want to make it hard for an enemy to disable the Navy with missiles.

All services report encountering minimums in size, including the Navy: When ships shrink too much, for example, they lack the powerplant for peak power necessary to capabilities like high-end radars, future directed energy weapons, etc.

Alsdo, the oceans are an enormous area (2x the land area!). The US Navy has a ~250 ships, and moving a ship to the place it's needed can take weeks. If the available nearby ship is single-role, and it's the wrong kind, what then? Maybe the enemy won't attack it, being the wrong kind of ship for the fight, and will wait for the other ships to arrive.

> Speed is the defining feature of some ship classes, like the American Littoral Combat Ship (LCS)

> New form factors and propulsion designs are available if missiles devalue top speed. Boxier ships can carry more mass and provide more internal space for crew, armor, and armaments.

Again, this author is the only place I've ever heard that. In my limited experience, almost all Navy ships advertise similar top speeds (around 30 knots), to the point that I wonder if there's a reason for it - possibly they are just not revealing the true speed.

Again, oceans are enormous; moving a ship on-station can take weeks. The idea is to delay that even more?

The LCS's defining feature was to reduce the cost of low-end missions by using low-end ships, instead of wasting multi-billion dollar warships on (e.g.) chasing smugglers in powerboats. The other defining features were a non-very-successful attempt at modular, swappable equipment for different capabilities, and armor insufficient for a real naval battle (not really their purpose).

> An alternative option is to use electric motors powered by diesel generators.

> Inexpensive marine diesel engines can power the generators. These engines are reliable and can efficiently burn a wide range of fuels.

Newer navy ships already use direct-drive shafts for propulsion, IIRC. Regardless, the warships may have requirements beyond the niceties above. For example, each Ford-class carrier uses (looking quickly) four 30-ton propellers. Maybe they can use some inexpensive marine diesel engines?

> Use Radar Judiciously

> Moving to smaller radars (150 km range?) on most ships would have significant benefits with few drawbacks.

The US military's fundamental approach is to use sensors to see the enemy before they see us, network those sensors in a mesh network (satellites, planes, ships, ground-based), and use computers to integrate, filter, and present all this info into real-time situational awareness to all units.

Saying 'maybe we should cut back radars' is like telling OpenAI 'maybe we should cut back on GPUs'. Next!

> Missile Armor

> Missiles aren't too destructive because the Houthis have fired anti-ship missiles at dozens of cargo ships in the Red Sea, most sailing away with minor damage.

And I shot my sibling with a sling-shot, and they survived, so who needs body armor - or cover for that matter? I suspect the Russian and Chinese anti-ship missiles might be a little different than the Houthi ones.

I've never seen anyone suggest that armor was an effective counter-measure against missiles (or mines). Maybe this author knows something that everyone else overlooked.

> Artillery shells and gravity bombs can replace cruise missiles

Not very useful when the enemy has precision missiles with hundreds to thousands of miles in range. Artillery? Like WWI?

> Limit Software

Again, the author is going in the wrong direction; it's unthinkable, IMHO.

Could you imagine doing this for any modern business? 'Hey boss, my proposal for our disruptive strategy is - minimize computers!' The Navy is just going to give up all the capabilities of computers?

In fact, they see it (rightly) as the present and the future, with many military assets being essentially flying/floating on-site computer platforms. Software also has the advantage of being far easier to deploy, upgrade, and repair remotely - as in thousands of miles away, under fire in a war zone - than hardware.