Road to 350: What Does the US Navy Do Anyway?

[Uncle Fester]

Sal using a second hand number that PRC is "moving toward" to continue passive-aggressively beating the drum for making the navy great again....yes, yawn indeed. I was somewhat disappointed to see VCNO testifying this week that we need (in this order) more ships, and then more money to take care of what we've got rotting on the line. If you've paid attention to hull counts over the last decade you know it's a shell game and can manipulated quite easily to match political winds. Are we chasing a number to make ourselves feel better about ourselves, or are we pursuing capabilities that are based on threat assessments and anticipated operational reqs?

My sense is that the Navy is trying to strike while the political iron is hot. There's a new administration that will push for more ship construction for its own sake, budget or strategy or threat assessment be damned. Thus this sudden, simplistic drumbeat of "the Chinese have/will have a bigger Navy than us". I doubt anyone in the building thinks they'll actually get to 355, or whatever the buzz-number is right now; but maybe they can move the chains and get some more long-lead money committed before reality sets in.

 

[Recovering LSO]

but maybe they can move the chains and get some more long-lead money committed before reality sets in.

Then what? More of what we're dealing with today - cool shit with no back-end supply/support?

 

[Randy Daytona]

A thought provoking article Friday from a famous author detailing possible shifts in the Navy's priorities.

http://www.realcleardefense.com/201...y_to_go_the_way_of_the_battleship_290270.html

Also out today.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/th...d-light-aircraft-carriers-armed-stealth-19413

https://warontherocks.com/2017/02/a-guide-to-the-fleet-the-united-states-needs/

 

[Uncle Fester]

Pundits have been declaring the carrier obsolete for over fifty years now. They were too vulnerable to nuke subs, ICBMs and long-range bombers meant there was no need for them, cruise missiles would be the death of them, etc and so on. Now it's ASBMs - a new weapon that's unproven in combat of any kind. Yet for an 'obsolete' weapon, its odd that the combatant commanders complain we don't have enough of CVN/CVW teams, they're in such high demand that we're wearing ours out, and several countries are building them as fast as they can.

 

[BigRed389]

Pundits have been declaring the carrier obsolete for over fifty years now. They were too vulnerable to nuke subs, ICBMs and long-range bombers meant there was no need for them, cruise missiles would be the death of them, etc and so on. Now it's ASBMs - a new weapon that's unproven in combat of any kind. Yet for an 'obsolete' weapon, its odd that the combatant commanders complain we don't have enough of CVN/CVW teams, they're in such high demand that we're wearing ours out, and several countries are building them as fast as they can.

To be fair, I think the gist of those articles is follow up on the CSBA/MITRE studies on what a 350+ ship Fleet should look like.

And none of those are actually talking about getting rid of the carrier...the big change from CSBA is actually the push to make CVLs a regular thing.

I think it's fair to say our Fleet employment through the past 20 years or so has been less than optimally efficient.

 

[Uncle Fester]

I think it's fair to say our Fleet employment through the past 20 years or so has been less than optimally efficient.

Perhaps; but that's the reality of budgets, current ops demands, and a fucked-up procurement process. Until at least two of those things change, "the perfect Fleet" is an exercise in fantasy.

 

[Randy Daytona]

The administration seems receptive to both increasing DoD budgets as well as focusing more on near peer competitors instead of Afghanistan/Iraq/Libya so perhaps there is hope for more hulls/spare parts/flight hours.

 

[Uncle Fester]

I haven't heard much of what SECDEF has said on this...if anyone's going to get a vastly increased defense budget past the budget hawks on the Hill, it's going to have to be him. The Joint Chiefs have been pretty consistently saying 'more planes, ships, troops would be nice, but we really need O&M money to get what we have back into shape.'

 

[Flash]

The administration seems receptive to both increasing DoD budgets as well as focusing more on near peer competitors instead of Afghanistan/Iraq/Libya so perhaps there is hope for more hulls/spare parts/flight hours.

I haven't heard much of what SECDEF has said on this...if anyone's going to get a vastly increased defense budget past the budget hawks on the Hill, it's going to have to be him. The Joint Chiefs have been pretty consistently saying 'more planes, ships, troops would be nice, but we really need O&M money to get what we have back into shape.'

Flat is the new up, at least that is the assumption by many who deal with budgets. We have so many really big bills coming due very soon to just maintain current capabilities, from nuke weapon modernization to SSBN replacement and replacing 500 tankers among others, that I don't really see many big plus ups in the defense budget no matter the vague dreams of some in the administration.

 

[Randy Daytona]

Flat is the new up, at least that is the assumption by many who deal with budgets. We have so many really big bills coming due very soon to just maintain current capabilities, from nuke weapon modernization to SSBN replacement and replacing 500 tankers among others, that I don't really see many big plus ups in the defense budget no matter the vague dreams of some in the administration.

If one thinks conflicts between great powers and/or civilizations are a constant throughout history, then the waste of trillions of dollars trying to nation build in the Middle East is an abomination. Those bills were known to be coming due. China was known to be rising. Russia periodically collapses and rebuilds. And yet the Neocons, who infect both the Republican and Democrat Parties, decided to ignore these in their hubris and folly, perhaps thinking it was "the End of History".

How they manage to finance the needed replacements as well as plus up the military is going to be tremendous challenge.

 

[Recovering LSO]

And now we have an administration that (at least at the very top) believes ISIL to be an existential threat to Western civilization. Listen to Spicey Spicer's presser from today. The President is more interested in cozying up to the Russians for the purpose of fighting ISIS than he is in countering their own adventurism.

 

[Randy Daytona]

And now we have an administration that (at least at the very top) believes ISIL to be an existential threat to Western civilization. Listen to Spicey Spicer's presser from today. The President is more interested in cozying up to the Russians for the purpose of fighting ISIS than he is in countering their own adventurism.

Previous presidents leaned towards the Chinese as a counterweight to the Russians which were traditionally the stronger power. As Kissinger said 40 years ago, sooner or later the Americans would reverse this arrangement when/if China became stronger and thus the greater potential threat.

 

[Recovering LSO]

Previous presidents leaned towards the Chinese as a counterweight to the Russians which were traditionally the stronger power. As Kissinger said 40 years ago, sooner or later the Americans would reverse this arrangement when/if China became stronger and thus the greater potential threat.

That still ignores the abject ignorance of considering ISIL as the greatest threat facing the west.

 

[Flash]

Previous presidents leaned towards the Chinese as a counterweight to the Russians which were traditionally the stronger power. As Kissinger said 40 years ago, sooner or later the Americans would reverse this arrangement when/if China became stronger and thus the greater potential threat.

The older I have gotten the more distasteful I have gotten of Kissinger's Bismark-esque foreign policy view. International relations aren't a zero sum game and we don't need to saddle up to one repugnant country to counter an disagreeable one nowadays. There is NO gain to allying ourselves with Russia in any way nowadays, we will only lose. Again, this isn't an unusual or uncommon view among pretty much everyone except a few in the administration and others who are deluded by Russian propaganda and easily fooled sycophants (Edit: I am referring to 'commentators' and others who seem to all of a sudden have an affection for the Russia and their lackeys, not anyone here).

 

[Randy Daytona]

The older I have gotten the more distasteful I have gotten of Kissinger's Bismark-esque foreign policy view. International relations aren't a zero sum game and we don't need to saddle up to one repugnant country to counter an disagreeable one nowadays. There is NO gain to allying ourselves with Russia in any way nowadays, we will only lose. Again, this isn't an unusual or uncommon view among pretty much everyone except a few in the administration and others who are deluded by Russian propaganda and easily fooled sycophants (Edit: I am referring to 'commentators' and others who seem to all of a sudden have an affection for the Russia and their lackeys, not anyone here).

Interesting. The older I have gotten, the more my perspective has shifted the other way - it is predominately zero sum. So do you consider China or Russia to be a greater threat?