More articles of interest that detail the USN's plans to get to 355 warships, including estimates for coming decades by ship type:
Defense NewsQuote:
U.S. Navy to add 46 ships in five years, but 355 ships is well over the horizon
By: David B. Larter 3 hours ago
The Navy will grow by more than forty ships over the next five years, the Navy’s Budget director said Monday. But while the fleet will grow rapidly in the near term, the gains will sputter out shortly thereafter.
While the shipbuilding budget request saw a relatively modest increase in the service’s 2019 submission over the previous year, service-life extension programs, a bevy of new destroyers and littoral combat ships will push the Navy’s numbers higher rapidly to 326 ships in 2023. That’s a jump of 46 ships over just the next five years from today’s count of 280.
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The service will also buoy their numbers through service-life extensions on six of the older cruisers, meaning that in total the service will have modernized 17 of its 22 cruisers past their 35-year service life. The Navy is currently upgrading its newest 11 cruisers through a phased modernization plan.
It is unclear which cruisers will be modernized, and how it will affect the planned retirement of those cruisers starting in 2020, though the shipbuilding plan doesn’t show any large surface combatants retiring until 2024.
The Navy’s end strength will also increase over the next five years, adding nearly 17,000 sailors, an approached that Luthor said was disciplined to not add ships or equipment without the needed sailors to support them.
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Subs take a dive
The Navy’s 326 ships in 2023 will mark a high point under the current plan but a slew of ship retirements starting in 2024 will start to drag down the numbers again. Those losses are driven by the final Los Angeles-class attack boats leaving the fleet and a handful of large surface combatants – likely a combination of cruisers and oldest destroyers.
That will drag the fleet numbers to between 313 and 315 for a handful of years before the fleet is projected to start growing again in the 2030s.
Perhaps most distressing of all is that even with the Navy’s current plan to continue buying two Virginia-class attack boats per year, even during years when they buy the Columbia-class ballistic missile subs, the fleet of attack boats will still see a precipitous decline in numbers to 42 boats down from a projected 52 in 2019.
The fleet’s requirement is 66 attack boats, a number the shipbuilding plan doesn’t hit until 2048.
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Defense NewsQuote:
US Navy wants more sailors, jets and an extra ship in 2019
By: David B. Larter 12 hours ago
Correction: The U.S. Navy’s future frigate is scheduled to receive $135 million under the fiscal 2019 budget request.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy is getting larger and adding an extra ship to its fleet in 2019, over its 2018 request, but the total shipbuilding budget request seems to make little headway toward a 355-ship fleet called for in a review last year.
The Navy’s base budget request is $151.4 billion, with $15 billion in overseas contingency operations funding split with the Marine Corps. The total Department of the Navy budget request is $194.1 billion, including OCO.
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