The US Navy is about to learn the same bitter lesson as the Royal Navy

The Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Bainbridge (DDG 96) transiting the Gulf of Oman. The oldest Arleigh Burke class ships will now be extended in service beyond their intended lifespan
The Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Bainbridge (DDG 96) transiting the Gulf of Oman. The oldest Arleigh Burke class ships will now be extended in service beyond their intended lifespan - MC3 Lasheba James/US Navy/AFP

“There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today,” said Admiral Beatty during the Battle of Jutland in 1916, as he watched the battlecruisers HMS Indefatigable and HMS Queen Mary blow up. If he were alive today and looking down on the collective Nato and Five-Eyes navies, I reckon he’d say something similar.

Everyone with a decent navy is discovering that the budgets and processes they had in place to run, build, sustain and crew their navies during the post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’ are now insufficient.

If we needed proof that even the mighty US Navy is suffering from the same problems, yesterday Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro approved a plan to keep 12 Arleigh Burke class destroyers in service for longer than their originally intended 35-year life span.

Credit: USNavyEurope/X

Let me start with the basics: extending warships beyond their intended lifespan is bad. The Royal Navy is living daily with the consequences of doing so with its Type 23 frigates. These workhorses were originally designed with a hull life of just 18 years, but due to delays in the Type 26 replacement, are now being asked to extend well past 30. A couple have gone into the huge maintenance periods needed to make this happen and on closer inspection have been deemed unsaveable. When Type 23s are saved, the necessary work costs more than it did to build them. Even after being rebuilt, the old Type 23s break down a lot and cost a lot to maintain. The result is that the RN has only a handful of operable frigates on any given day.

The US Navy for its part currently has 73 Arleigh Burke destroyers, 21 of which – the oldest – are designated Flight I. Now, 12 of the Flight Is will be extended. And they are getting on. USS Arleigh Burke herself, first of the class, was commissioned in 1991 just a year after the first Type 23, HMS Norfolk. Since then, the US destroyers have been incrementally updated and improved through Flight II, IIA and III tranches.

To say the Burkes form the backbone of the US Navy is no more than the truth. While the Nimitz class aircraft carriers (and now the Ford class) grab all the headlines, a carrier is not going anywhere without at least two Burkes in attendance. Over 90 per cent of the missile intercepts in the Red Sea have been by Arleigh Burkes, and 100 per cent of missile intercepts overland in Israel. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that they are the most important allied warship in the world right now.

When the Burkes first appeared on the scene, the SPY-1 phased array radar, Aegis combat system and Standard Missiles were unbelievably ahead of their time. The hull and propulsion were too. With double the displacement of the British destroyers of the time, the US ships had room to be improved and upgraded over time. They were also fast, well over 30 knots, and yet could do longer between refuels than our equivalent. The only weakness of the Burke design is that all that power makes them noisy and they would therefore need to be used with caution in a contested submarine environment. As a destroyer they were not designed primarily to fight submarines, but if you don’t have any frigates – and the US Navy currently doesn’t – then this is a weakness in an otherwise gleaming CV.

The problem now is that whilst the Flight tranches have incrementally kept the class ahead of the competition, the basic hull form and associated mechanical engineering remains largely unchanged.

A well-designed computer can be upgraded, often many times, but eventually, it is going to outgrow something: the power supply or some other basic architecture will reach maximum capacity and no further upgrades can be made. Or, things may simply start to break because they are too old. This definitely happens to steel hulls after decades of corrosion and the wrenching and battering of the sea. Those who have worked on the Flight I Burkes report that internally they are showing their age. At least that’s the printable version.

So why have they been extended?

Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the head of the US Navy, says: “Today’s budget constrained environment requires the Navy to make prioritised investments to keep more ready players on the field. The Navy is actively pulling the right levers to maintain and grow its Battle Force Inventory to support the United States’ global interests in peace and to win decisively in conflict.”

“Budget constrained environment”. And there it is – back to the squeeze. The simple fact is that for reasons of Congressional authorisation and yard capacity, the new Flight III Burkes aren’t coming off the chocks fast enough. The Ticonderoga-class cruisers – essentially extra-large Burkes – are being decommissioned as they are even older. The replacement destroyer, the DDF(X), won’t start being built until 2032 at the earliest. The Constellation-class frigate which could have eased much of this pressure has been fiddled with during the design and delayed and now won’t be entering service until 2029, some 10 years late. Of the two other ships that would have helped, the Zumwalt class turned out to be ruinously expensive and the Littoral Combat Ship ruinously useless. So this decision to extend the old Burkes is a gap filler, plain and simple.

To summarise, I would say that the decision to keep these old but excellent warhorses at sea is good news; the conditions that have led to it being a necessity are not. And it is a path that can lead to great expense and limited availability. I will rightly receive abuse from US colleagues now, starting with ‘how many ships do you have at sea today?’ and that’s fair enough. But it will be good-natured abuse because they, like us, feel this resource squeeze acutely and they, just like us, are furiously scanning the horizon for political signs that defence expenditure will increase meaningfully enough to remove it.

For now, though, the reality-to-finance gap is alive and well. If Beatty were to remark on the state of our ships today, one can easily imagine the Fleet Navigator WS Chalmers who overheard his remark replying: “It’s simple, sir, there’s no bloody money”.