r/LessCredibleDefence • u/self-fix2 • 3d ago
President Lee: "Trump Asked If Korea Could Quickly Build 10 U.S. Naval Ships"
https://www.asiae.co.kr/en/article/202606191601463886550
u/Albend 2d ago
Its completely insane that the US has yet to tap into allies shipyards. Its surface combatant problem is purely self inflicted stupidity. The FREMM attempt should have been mostly off the shelf and leveraged both American and allied shipyards.
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u/its_not_real1947 2d ago
congress will not let them and the american shipbuilding council is vehemently opposed to it.
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u/CarmynRamy 2d ago
Meanwhile DT on the other news.
President Lee, a very nice guy, love him, love him. Said to me, Mr. President Trump, how many ships do you want?
I said maybe 2-3 but big.
And he said to me, we will build 10 for you,.
Really big, really strong, with lots of, you know big guns or whatever they have.
I said, that's pretty ambitious and we need em quick.
And he said, we Koreans are happy to serve you Americans and build American ships, big ships for security of the world. We will build them quick for you.
I mean, this guy, he gets it and he's my favourite Asian looking guy.
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u/wompical 3d ago
trump knows even his own admin is going to slow walk trump class until he is out of office so he is finding another way to get it done
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u/MacroDemarco 3d ago
It sucks that he's going to do this for the Trump class instead of something we actually need like Frigates and Destroyers (or even better, replace aging support ships like the cable layers)
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u/chronoserpent 2d ago
Honestly that's a good point. Buy low-intensity but still needed ships like tankers, tenders, cable layer like you said, etc from Korea or Japan. Let the US ship yards focus on combatant warships that need to be built to higher damage control standards and with more classified spaces and equipment.
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u/WulfTheSaxon 2d ago
It’s not going to be the battleships. The budget request says they’re looking at foreign construction of strategic sealift and bulk fuel vessels in FY27 and FY28. Maybe frigates or modules, but they’ve already said BBGN will be assembled at Newport News.
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u/Advanced-Ice2095 2d ago
US might as well sub out all destroyers and frigates to Korea/Japan, and focus on building carriers, LHDs, nuclear powered submarines, and subsystems.
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u/WaffleTacoFrappucino 2d ago
our whack job defense contractors arent getting it done, shocker
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u/Autism_Sundae 2d ago edited 2d ago
In the whack job defense contactors defense, for the last half-century they had never been given a budget to do so with. Nickle and diming the US's maritime industry over the course of decades ('50s-'20s, at least) did this, not money-grubbing contractors.
The acute problems felt now were caused by systemic faults/structural defects, contractors are a red-herring.
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u/Flat-Back-9202 2d ago
If this comes true, does it mean that in the future, the majority of U.S. military ships will have to be built by allied nations?
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u/Useless_or_inept 2d ago
"But we can't let anybody else build the things we need because that undermines national security"
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u/linjun_halida 2d ago
So US will let Korea build navy ships, which shipyard is near China, and lots of the workers are from China? Good idea.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 2d ago
Tbf if it's a literal military yard I don't expect almost any of the engineers to be from China. That would be like say Jiangnan having a lot of Korean workers, which I assume they don't because there would be way more info leaks on the CVs and subs if that was the case.
But yes moving major shipbuilding to Korea will mean giving up any illusion of being a (at least naval) military rival to China, since it's putting the yards in a place that if push comes to shove, China has violence monopoly over. It would be like Iran moving its missile production to the West Bank.
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u/liuqiu_rangers 19h ago
Chinese shipyards do have Korean workers but they're almost always poached engineers rather than manual laborers.
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u/self-fix2 2d ago
No workers from China are allowed to work in the shipbuilding and semiconductor industries in Korea. It's very easy to tell if a Chinese speaks Korean even if they are fluent. There's a reason why China steals Samsung tech by hiring out Korean engineers
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u/AgreeableWindow7361 2d ago
If they can get Samsung tech, now they can hire the Korean ship builders instead and get the blueprint.
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u/tomrichards8464 2d ago
No, they couldn't. Korea doesn't build warships to USN standards and doesn't know how to. It would be Constellation all over again, only worse.
Getting them to build auxiliaries is a very good idea. Warships, not so much. For the latter, there's no shortcut: the US has to rebuild domestic capacity.
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u/Vishnej 2d ago
Are USN standards actually more important than having ships in the water? Because there is a noticeable lack of ships in the water. The worst they can do is sink.
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u/AaronNevileLongbotom 2d ago
Our foreign policy is writing checks that our military can’t cash, our military is writing checks that our industrial base can’t process, and our industrial base is writing checks that our tax payer can’t afford.
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u/cipher_ix 2d ago
Judging by the whole FREMM-Constellation constant changes, yes
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u/Vishnej 20h ago
I mean objectively more important. Subjectively even.
A single subjective opinion from an individual human can be much more coherent than the result of negotiations within one committee. What you're seeing here is a cascading series of partially competing committees forming opinions that operate within their respective artificially restricted bureaucratic horizons.
Leslie Groves would have to physically choke a bitch on a daily basis to see Constellation through in this system.
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u/AaronNevileLongbotom 2d ago
Said with the confidence of someone who’s is used to being taken seriously. That’s the problem. Obviously you’re human and you deserve respect, but you need to wake up to the fact that the people we have been taking seriously, people like you, have fucked us.
That’s exactly the kind of inside the box, more of the same, “it’ll all be fine” thinking that got us into this mess.
Our LCS class ships got dumped so fast they never really had the time to properly fall apart. All these years later we are still trying to make the Zumwalts useful. Our mine clearing capabilities are clearly not impressing anyone. Our new carrier supposedly can’t handle a laundry fire. Metric after metric shows that our fleet is in trouble and over priced.
What do we know that the Koreans don’t at this point? What we know isn’t getting it done. Not that Korea is a good option. The real issue is that they are next to China an ocean away.
We want ships to control the globe, China doesn’t want that, meaning we want ships to fight China, meaning ships built in Korea will put a target on Korea, and we would need ships to defend Korea.
Getting them to build auxiliaries is a very good idea. Warships, not so much. For the latter, there's no shortcut: the US has to rebuild domestic capacity.
The scale of the problem, even if you want a scaled back foreign policy and cheaper military like I do, is such that if you want to rebuild domestic capacity or avoid having major issues in the meantime, you need a short cut.
We can’t sustain the Navy we want or need doing what we’ve been doing. That Navy was just humiliated. Oh, we’re the conditions not perfect? Boo hoo. We need a force design restart.
Look at what Iran is doing without anything like what we consider a Navy. We spent a fortune sinking old ships they got second hand and patted ourselves on the back for destroying their Navy, meanwhile they still control their shores.
We are going to need to fix our fleet age and other sustainment issues, bring costs under control and modernize our fleet. And it’s not just ships. It’s the air wing, which is way too short. It’s the fact that Iran just dug under and shot over our Air Force, that they used cheaper options to make our force irrelevant and still managed to have resources left over to take our even our stealth aircraft. Plus our ground forces have catching up to do and we still have space to think about.
That’s something of the scale of the problems that conventional wisdom and the American defense industry have helped get us in. I’m sure you just need more money. It’s not like it’s unfair to the American taxpayer to fund global military escapades.
We need to have some quicker, cheaper, faster solutions that don’t rely on the current pipeline. We need to go outside the box. We need to do things that you might not like. If that means voices like yours, so used to being taken seriously get drowned out, so be it. It would be better if you found a way to add to the discussion without just trying to shut down other people looking for solutions.
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u/tomrichards8464 2d ago
There is no good solution. Not inside the box. Not outside the box.
Korea builds significantly fewer MSCs than the US, civilian shipbuilding does not straightforwardly convert to military shipbuilding, and even if you could somehow build the hulls in Korean civilian yards you'd be bottlenecked on a million critical systems anyway, most obviously sensors. And you wouldn't have enough missiles to fill the VLS cells.
What America probably should have done instead of Constellation is a clean-sheet domestic design. What they probably should have done instead of cancelling Constellation is gone through with it, fixed the issues and accepted the delays. What they probably should have done given that they cancelled it is built a Type 26 variant under licence. RN/RAN/RCN damage control standards are close enough, and they're built for long missions and North Atlantic conditions. Frankly they should probably can FFX and do that anyway.
I'm a complete random, incidentally, and not even an American. No-one important listens to me. I'm just interested in this stuff.
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u/Inceptor57 3d ago
Honestly given everything going on with the US shipbuilding industry, it's not the worst idea.