I can obviously tell why you’d want a dedicated aircraft from a not, but trying to wrap my head around why you’d for example in the royal navy (UK) frigates are slightly specialised for anti submarine warfare whilst destroyers are slightly specialised for anti air warfare, why not have a single dedicated escort?.
And to mention historically, why would you have smaller ships alongside battleships (for example destroyers and torpedo boats in the battle of Jutland) when the battleships have a dedicated armament to combat destroyers?
Sorry if this seems stupid, I’m just doing my best to understand 🙂
In: 9
Containing costs.
Hunting submarines and patrols of any kind do require being more places, so you need many ships.
AA defense and submarine defense around main force does happen only around a main force. There you can afford better ships as you don’t need so many.
So makes sense to have slightly cheaper frigates to do scouting and patrolling in general, while using a more expensive destroyer as a jack of all trades to escort your main force.
Then your main force is basically few very powerful assets.
Consider that the price of vessels has escalated to the point that fleet do struggle being numerous, each ship needs to be super expensive to be a worthy asset in a era when a little defense hole means receiving a KO blow from a missile shot from 300km away. Each ship is filled with super expensive defense systems.
Destroyers originate from the torpedo-boat-destroyer which was the smallest possible unit to screen the main fleet from any threat. And still retain this role of absolute killer of anything that can harm your fleet.
Firgates and corvettes are basically a “can’t afford a destroyer” ship, a “gap-filler ship i wish was a destroyer but we can’t get any more broke than this”. And again, the escalation of weapons is at a point that affording frigates is becoming an issue for top-dog countries; let alone destroyers.
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