Obsolete?
In what way is this concept obsolete?
It’s just a 30,000-35,000 ton vessel which should equal more stows, greater endurance, and with more displacement and hull size the ability to accept upgrades in the future.
I could certainly entertain arguments about the relative value of large surface combatants vs aircraft carrier vs smaller surface combatants vs submarines if we had the ship building capabilities to say that building a larger surface combatant would cost us the ability to build some higher quantity of smaller ships. However we don’t have a lot of shipyard capacity, so maybe at this point it makes more sense to utilize the shipyard space we have to more capable vessels.
I can see arguments either way, but we desperately need to get back to building ships both military and merchant.
A detailed discussion by more educated guys than me can be had here:
