That wise man is a fool, no one sees the future.

The wise man was Lt-General Martin Steele and he’s been correct so far 15 years after he first made this statement.

War has degenerated into counter insurgency with conventional warfare virtually extinct.

Your average opponent’s most high tech and most lethal weapon is a phone activated car bomb.

And if war, should ever come, then see my post below:

Concerning weapons, in a war, it is better to have them and not need them, for if you need them and do not have them, you are dead.

Having advanced equipment is meaningless if you posses that equipment in pitifully small numbers.

Belgian AF had relatively advanced Hurricanes at start of invasion. However there was no way in hell that 20 Hurricanes was ever going to even dent the Luftwaffe, let alone gain air superiority over battlefield.

Similarly Bismark and Tirpitz were advanced battleships but generally a waste of steel and men as they could never match British numerical superiority.

Extrapolate to 2013 and you’re looking at medium powers with 40-50 jets and 4-6 surface ships.

It’s like the debate that Philippines buying 12 F/A-50s will deter PLAAF.

Yes and what are you going to do about it with your fleet of corvettes/light frigates?

Frigates were generally tasked with anti-submarine warfare.

You can’t cope with the bombers, eventhough you might know where they come from. If you don’t have your AAW destroyer, you’re also unlikely to have a carrier or air superiority to take care of those bombers before they take care of you.

If you’re tangling with Russia or China, you’re probably the USA and it’s WWIII.

In that case you have carriers etc.

We are talking about Netherlands or Spain or Norway or even UK etc i.e. small to medium navies with dwindling numbers of ships and no real current threats.

But even with the US in mind the seas are huge – Lots of space for subs to hide, especially when other resources are limited.

In this case, lots of smaller ASW vessels will be required as was in the Cold War, WWII and WWI. Unfortunately LCS doesn’t really cut it here.

Nowadays it doesn’t really need a bomber to a real threat to shipping and it’s a lot easier/cheaper for any country to buy a couple of anti-ship capable fighter bombers than to establish or maintain a submarine arm. It only requires a couple of fighters to get a missile in a 300,000t ore or oil carrier or a 12,000 TEU ship, the effect of that is pretty big nowadays.

Most countries don’t even have airforces.

And land based AShMs are actually the easiest option – e.g. Hezbollah attack on Israeli corvette a while back.

And again what’s tiny Dutch or Spanish Navy doing tangling with someone by themselves?

Yes and that’s why we should all drop the capabilities and go fishing with our corvettes (difference between corvette and light frigate is rather vague nowadays).

Difference between frigate and destroyer (and cruiser) is vague these days too.

By light frigate I mean something ala ANZAC or Gepard class frigate (c. 4,000 ton) rather than 6,000- 8,000 ton destoyers/heavy frigates. I’m not talking about shiups smaller than that/

Nice but as you mentioned, they still needed those destroyers and frigates as a cover. Nowadays there is no money, nor public support to keep both types. As you said, you want to replace ships, not add ships, so who will deliver the escorts’ escort in this case? Count on US “because they already have them”?
The frigates of today deliver more capability on tonnage, but so do their adversaries… All together it comes down to similar capabilities, at a higher price. Tonnage has little to do with usefulnes.

Their adversaries are pirates in speed boats and cargo ships involved in smuggling as well as occassionally fishing vessels (either loaded up with illegally caught fish or illegal refugees).

This is probably the most active most NATO navies have been since WWII. Before that it was Cold War ASW patrol and they never fired shots in anger (not talking about USN).

As Jonesy mentioned you won’t be buying 2 or 3 frigates for 1 destroyer. You’ll have to buy 2 or 3 times the amount of engines etc. And these don’t come at half or a third of the price of the destroyer’s engines, same counts for other systems, a navigation radar costs the same for about any ship, so instead of buying 2 you’re going to buy 4 or 6 and not gain much capability.

You’ve got capability to maintain everyday operations and meet international commitments. Which is more than some NATO navies can do now.

Yes, but then we come to the old saying: better to have and not need than to need it, but not have it…

As a finance manager, I would call that an innefficient usage of resources.

As mentioned before, I think you’re not getting the real big picture. Economy is nowadays a lot more important, the changes in shipping have been so huge that it’s not even comparable to WWII scenarios anymore. Back then you had two types of ships, a cargo ship, and a tanker. Nowadays you have a billion types of ships, structures etc. at sea that are all very valuable and extremely vulnerable. Ever thought of how vulnerable an oil drilling rig or even a full field is to submarine attack or air attack? How much economic and supply damage it would do when one full oil field was wiped out? Or those ships that carry vital factory parts, cars, etc. etc. back in WWII there was hardly any such trade or activity going on.
In any case nowadays no army/armed forces are going to fight WWII style all-out wars. If a bomb hits a civilian nowadays, that’s a big shame and disaster, I doubt they’ll change their minds in larger scale conflicts.

And last but not least:
The MCM capability is already there, and up till now we’re still mostly cleaning WWI and WII stuff. In the end you could say the same about MCM ships than about your AAW destroyer. We didn’t need them since 1992 so we should not build them anymore?

Your point of going from 18 frigates to 6 destroyers doesn’t seem right either. It just shows the lack of budgets for most armed forces and they’re trying to get the most out of it. Practically (not taking in account the real prices), if they had gone to 18 smaller frigates/corvettes do you think that would have made it any better? I doubt it. As mentioned above, you’re dropping a huge amount of knowledge/capabilities and there might be a time when you need those… And then you paid for 18 propulsion plants, 36 navigation radars…

All this proves my point even further – the current best option is the OPV. The destroyer is a pointless battleship designed for wars that no longer happen.

As a wise man said, “the future is not Son of Desert Storm, it’s the stepchild of Somalia and Chechnya.”