A Canadian submarine playing war with the British Royal Navy got close enough to kill the HMS *Illustrious *aircraft carrier. Bill Sweetman over at Ares has the scoop:
Had [submarine HMCS] Corner Brook been a hostile, rather than a participant in NATO's exercise Noble Mariner, taking place in the North Sea and Baltic in May, "Lusty" would have been a matter of seconds away from taking a Mk 48 heavyweight torpedo in what British naval folk technically describe as the Khyber Pass. This came after the RN had issued a press release praising the ship's ability to dominate the battlespace. It is doubly ironic in that Corner Brook is the former HMS Ursula*, one of four* Upholder*-class SSKs built at great trouble and expense by the U.K. and then sold to Canada when the U.K. government decided to standardize on nuclear boats.*
This raises an important point, driven home by columnist Robert Smith, a former destroyer captain, in the latest U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings: "Dominance of the seas inheres in those weapons systems that fly swiftly through the air or can hide in the depths." In light of this, the Navy's plan for building new ships is wrong, wrong, wrong, as illustrated by the massive, $4-billion DDG-1000 destroyer:
The [14,000-ton] DDG-1000-class makes plan the lineaments of our Navy's skewed vision: Remnants of sentiment clinging to a bypassed romantic ideal of the destroyer; and faith of those in its thrall that technology can overcome the impermeability of sea water and assure surface ships' survival in the environment of the missile and the submarine. ... Vision refreshed, the Navy's altered goal should be the creation of classes of affordable warships scaled back to capabilities realistically attainable.
Scaled back? Affordable? Sounds like the Navy's troubled Littoral Combat Ship, right? Too bad those vessels are now running 50 percent over budget thanks to the Navy's shifting requirements. To finally get an affordable surface ship into the fleet, Smith proposes the politically unthinkable: buy warships from foreign yards (gasp!) that have proved actually capable of building ships to budget.
Related:
Remember the land-attack destroyer?
Navy to blame for rising ship costs
Return of the battleship
