A very good video. The problem is bigger than supply ships. The US Navy has an enormous and worsening shipbuilding problem in general. We have built ships that do not work for far too much money. A case in point being the Littoral Combat Ships (LCS).
Back in the early 2000s, the Navy decided to build a class of small, fast, shallow draft, and inexpensive (planned for less than $200 million for each) ships with interchangeable "mission modules" to operate close to shore (the littoral area). They contracted with two separate ship builders, which produced two separate and entirely incompatible ship designs (one regular hulled, one trimaran hulled), which costs about $700 million each. The idea was that the Navy would test out these first two ships and then pick one design and build it. Did that happen? No, it did not. Due to pressure from the contractors and politicians, they decided to reverse course and build both types. It soon became obvious that the new LCS were incapable of doing the jobs for which they were designed or surviving in a combat situation. The mission modules were never developed. Even worse, the propulsion system regularly failed on them, resulting in several having to be towed back to port. As of today 9 of the first 11 ships have been taken out of service for decommissioning or sales to another country, some having been in commission for less than 5 years.
A second debacle was the Zumwalt class destroyer. Originally conceived in the 1990s as a means of replacing our old battleships to provide naval gunfire support, they were built to be stealth ships (not easily visible to radar) and were supposed to mount a 6 inch gun. The Navy originally planned to have 32 of them. The first two ships were ordered in the late 1990s, but it soon became evident to the Navy that they were not needed and would cost too much. So the Navy told Congress in 2005 they wanted to stop the program. Did that happen? No it did not. Congress not only insisted on moving ahead with the first two ships, but added a third. The first hull was not laid down until 2011 and that first ship was commissioned in 2016. The third ship is still not commissioned. As it turns out, each of these three ships cost over $7 billion. And they don't even have the gun to provide gunfire support, because it would cost $1 million per round to make the specialized ammunition for it.
