A Warship By Any Other Name

The Navy is weird.

I've been reading about Navy ships a lot recently (thanks to the History Channel's miniseries Battle 360) and I think the Navy might be too bound to traditional names for things. You see they can't seem to agree on how to classify their ships.

Starting small, some navies have corvettes but Americans don't. Or at least we don't call them that. We're designing the first of a new kind of ship, the Littoral Combat Ship, which will take the place of our frigates but does a lot of the close-in-to-shore work that corvettes and large cutters. A cutter, by the way, is a coast guard ship that ranges from 65' to over 300' in length and sometimes over 2000 tons displacement. So basically any big ship painted orange and white is a cutter.

Which bring to mind the use of the word "ship." Apparently, no large vessel is ever called a boat. Boats are little things that can be launched from a ship. Unless of course you're talking about a submarine, in which case even a ballistic missile sub the size of a WW1 battleship is still called a "boat."

Frigates are popular with some navies but the American Navy was confused for years about whether a frigate should be smallish or huge. In the end, our frigates are to be smallish, though they've grown to twice the size of a WW2 frigate. The Navy obviously needs numerous smaller, cheaper ships, but they seem intent on not calling them "frigates." So in the future we'll have LCS and HSV and all kinds of other small, fast, specialized ships.

The next ships, getting bigger as we go, should be destroyers, cruisers, and battleships. Destroyers have also grown significantly, from something like a coast guard cutter to a monstrosity twice as long and fifteen times as heavy. How can a fifteen thousand ton, $3 billion warship be called a little ol' "destroyer?" Tradition!

The term cruiser is too widely used to unpack here. But cruisers vary from the 300 foot, 6,000 ton Maine (remember the Maine?) to the 800 foot, 30,000 ton battlecruiser Alaska, which was almost indistinguishable from a battleship. Today's guided missile cruisers and guided missile destroyers are almost the same size, but future cruisers may be the size of WW1 Dreadnought battleships so why not just call them that?

To make it easier for us land-lubbers, let's call the small LCS ships "destoyers," the DDX ships "cruisers" (which they are really) and if we can afford to ever build a larger, guided missile DDX-style ship then lets call it a "battleship." It would be simple; it would make sense. The sizes of the ships would even line up historically. But in one word there's a reason why the Navy is highly unlikely to reclassify all of their ships: tradition!