So this isn't entirely the Navy's fault, but I've had at least three briefs on the next-generation surface combatants from three different surface warfare directors over the last decade. https://twitter.com/USNINews/status/1316405728584896512

Surface warfare is arguably the Navy's toughest problem as the ship is about as equally vulnerable from the air as it is from the surface and the undersea.

At the start of the Navy's recapitalization effort in the 2000s the big deal was the ballistic missile threat.
The SPY-1 series proved to be a muscular radar w/ enough capacity to grow the CG/DDG mission to include BMD.

The Next Big Deal for tippy top of the surface force was a big old ship swung for BMD that would be loaded with enough missiles to blot out the sun and a radar that could read the serial number of a coms satellite.

Before it got canned, the CG(X) would have just less the tonnage of a San Antonio amphib, cost about 6 billion and probably be nuclear powered.

Around the same time, the Navy was considering the arsenal ship, a 500 VLS monster that would be a magazine ship for the high-end fight.

The idea was big ships, big radars and lots of power centered on fewer ships.

That's when the national focus was on low-intensity ground wars and the Navy was largely in the support role.

In 2008, CG(X) was scrapped and the DDG-1000, swung to do the naval surface fire support work in a world of low-intensity groud conflicts, was capped at three and the Burkes were started up again.

Shortly thereafter there was the hull-radar study, to see if it made more sense to cram the next big deal radar into a Zumwalt-hull or a backfit it into a Burke.

Burke's won out requiring the Navy to cram in the power for an active electronically scanned array that would already push the margins of an already tight hull.

While the Navy was crafting the Flight III Burke as an acceptable 80 percent solution for the fleet in terms of getting
a capable next-gen air search radar there was a lot of back and forth as to what the follow-on hull needed to be.

At the same time, there was still some question as to what threat should drive the Navy's next surface combatant.
The submariners had an easier time of resetting their acquisition programs after the Cold War.

The Navy was well into construction of the first Seawolf, the baddest attack submarine ever built when the wall fell.

Seawolf was made to dive deep, go fast and pack up to 50 torpedoes. Hunt 'n kill under and on the surface.
One-stop fleet killer.

Wall fell, the mission changed and the community made a smart pivot to Virginia attack boats optimized for SOF, land strike and SIGNIT. They had a clear eyed view of their mission and went for it. In that sense their task was easier than the surface folks.

So the list of what a surface ship needs to do for AAW, ASW, SUW is complex and changing and the threat has taken on an extra dimension with the threat of the Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles and just regular cruise missiles.

Swarm boats, gray zone shenanigans, pirates.
A big part of the thought process of the Zumwalt's 155mm monster guns was to swat, low-tech jungle-based insurgents.

Faced with the DF-21s/26s the vulnerability of a big-ass radar that can light up the moon -- the key feature of the last two generations of surface ships to find and kill Backfire bombers -- doesn't look so enticing.

Add on top of the murky theory of victory for the Navy's part of the national defense strategy, all signs point to surface ship recapitalization as perhaps the most complex acquisition problems in the Pentagon.

Complex, not only in terms of the technical skill required to cram all that stuff to fight airplanes and subs and surface ships and ground targets and electrons and hackers, but also in terms of imagination.

Because these ships will not only have to kill EVERYTHING when the balloon goes up they don't have the luxury of chilling out in garrison but operating out to maintain to try and keep the shooting from starting in the first place.

(Subs don't do presence).

In summation, talking less about how tough this problem is rather than more is not going to solve the dilemma any faster.
-Fin-