Seems like a waste of effort to me, but there it is.
Why?
I don’t think it is a good use of those hulls and assume it will be a very expensive modification.
Dropping a missile into a VLS is hardly going to break the bank. And what would be a better use of them, if not to take advantage of their larger cells?
It looks like this is going to be more involved than that. The missiles being discussed are not going to fit in the Mk 57, which is why the discussion is about removing the AGS turrets and magazines and replacing with something very much like the SSGN MACs.
Now, I think that's worthwhile, because it's better than any other option for putting those missiles on surface ships in a survivable way (and the sub force is already sufficiently tasked even before the SSGNs time out in a few years). But it's not going to be super cheap either.
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If only.
"future payload" may be the lower end VLS demand of the future...thus a Larger Large Surface Combatant (LSC). Future survival requires serious standoff and therefore larger rocket engines, especially if hypersonic/hypersonic defense. Smaller ships will simply not carry enough to survive.
A Marshal Island during WWII was bombarded for 2 mths before the Marines hit the shore.. Future bombardments my require much more..... Where are those types of effects going to come from?
To be fair the ww2 bombardments were very much a, to whom it may concern, deal. With most of the projectiles fire from the battleships outright not hitting anything but empty jungles doing no useful effects.
Modern weapons even without GPS is a, with your particular name on it, deal. A modern weapon has a better then 90 percent chance of ruining you day.
Basically Quality replacing Quantity.
And the US prefers to have both when it cans, see the PGM spamming once it was shown how much better a F16 with four JDAMs was better then a fully loaded B52. Then we made the B52 able to carry all JDAMS to just be able to ERASE cities. I believe just a handful of planes out right delete over half of an Iraq city (want to say Mosul) using nothing but JDAMS. A Trick that took over 50 fifty Strategic bombers to do in WW2.
I can see the Hypersonics taking out the AA emplacements and radars before the TOMAHAWK SPAMMING happens, which then be followed up by Air Strikes and the landing for the encore.
Modern Warfare allows you to do FAR more with far less then war fifty years ago.