mnztr wrote:Well the USN has always felt secondary need for such missiles as it always assumes airspace dominance in its conflict equations, the Italians alwasy assume they will be with Uncle Sam if fighting a scary opponent. Russia and the Chinese assume they will be facing either land based aircraft or a CBG or 3. Therefore they are preparing ways to neutralize the centrepiece of that force, at sea, the carrier, for land based, AWACS and Tankers. Take those main pieces out and the US fighting machine starts to struggle. Just like a chess game, the Queen (carrier) Rook and Bishop (tanker and AWACs) ...
The US military is a massive logistics engine, the strategy is built around extending and defending that logistics chain. Rip out the means of projecting that defence and they have to pull back. You are not gonna defeat them completely, but they cannot attack you with full force.
Although I am agreeing with most of what you say I can assure you of just the contrary for what my own country's navy is concerned: our ships are built at the most compelling constructive standard in NATO and are armed to their teeth EXACTLY because we always considered that in the our main theatres of operations (Sicily Strait, Adriatic sea, Red sea, Hormuz strait and Persian Gulf) each of our ship or task force would be basically alone to face enemy menaces of different nature popping up at very close distance due to the small spaces in which they would have to operate.
The idea of relying to american air cover was not even took into consideration when operating there.
That's was the reason of a lot of ad Hoc designed systems like OTOMAT, DARDO, ASPIDE launcher and all the different version of 76mm gun we introduced, to put it simply american equivalent ones , widely used by other NATO navies were just not enough for what we asked for.
And no, our Navy will not struggle if USN is not around, while others NATO navies (see previous post) are actually struggling even in peacetime due the conflict between their deluded ambition of retaining a long bygone status (see QE and CDG white elephants) and the idiotic idea of compensate such an imbalance adopting cost saving measures of the rest of their own fleet with the result of getting ships not up to their minimum task and so to have their own programs cut in half or even cancelled.
Actual ntroduction of very long range ASM, supersonic or not, transforming the whole Mediterranean in a Green Sea operation scenario would just confirm us in our path.
A path, I repeat, that has always been the most similar to the Sov/russian one between all NATO Navies.