Washington will soon decide whether to sell several advanced weapons systems, most prominently four Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, to Taiwan.
The Arleigh Burke-class vessels are equipped with launch tubes for Tomahawk cruise missiles, Harpoon anti-ship missiles and gun placements for close combat.
Cancellation of the Zumwalt DDG-1000 program was the right move with more focus on building Arleigh Burke DDG-51 missile destroyers and improving their defensive capability.
The Navy built two classes of warships around the Aegis combat system, beginning with the Ticonderoga class of cruisers in the 1980s and then the Arleigh Burke class of destroyers in the 1990s.
On the other hand, the secretary failed to mention the skyrocketing cost of the 30-year-old-design Arleigh Burke DDG-51 restart program, which has been endorsed as the way to meet current and future threats.
The US Navy has expanded the role of its destroyers and the Arleigh Burke-class of vessels is designed to launch simultaneous attacks against targets on land, in the air, at sea and below it.
The facts show that while the Aegis DDGs are adequate to the task today, these "new" Arleigh Burke DDGs and the radars they can physically support will quickly become obsolete against emerging high-end threats, e.g. anti-ship ballistic missiles.
The Navy, driven to meet a near-term requirement contained in a dramatically changing national ballistic missile defense (BMD) strategy, has, without any supporting analysis, chosen to back-fit and concurrently build more of the 30-year-old-design Aegis Arleigh Burke class DDG51 destroyers with only the most basic BMD capability.
The US Navy regards the Arleigh-Burke destroyers as the most "survivable" warships in the world because they are designed to withstand all manner of attacks and then escape.
"The Iraq War is not over and it is not 'won, ' " wrote Anthony Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
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