https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aapVW8WrxnA

There is, at first glance, a stark difference between the world’s leading navies when it comes to building cruisers—the biggest, most heavily armed surface warships now that battleships are long gone.In just three years starting in mid-2017, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy launched eight new Type 055 cruisers. Each Type 055 displaces 12,000 tons and packs 112 vertical-launch cells for anti-air, anti-ship and land-attack missiles.Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy hasn’t launched a ship it calls a cruiser since 1992, when the last Ticonderoga-class vessel slid into the water. And over the decades, several attempts by the Americans to sustain a new cruiser program have foundered.U.S. naval leaders insist they’ll follow through on their latest effort to develop a large surface combatant—the long-delayed DDG(X) program—and finally, belatedly, deploy a direct replacement for its aging Ticonderoga-class cruisers.But from a certain point of view, the fleet already is replacing the old cruisers. It’s just not saying so.It’s a matter of nomenclature. The way the Navy describes and classifies its ships has a tendency to obscure how big and powerful many of these ships are—and what roles they perform.From a certain point of view, the latest Flight III variant of the U.S. fleet’s workhorse Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, or DDG, could—and should—qualify as a cruiser. If naval leaders and lawmakers started thinking of the latest Burkes as cruisers, it might help to clarify naval planning and ease the transition from the Ticos to the large surface combatants that come next.All the information in this video came from the:https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe…