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

Brett327 said:
I'm not saying we don't need more and better ships... just that whatever hare-brained version of that which is conjured by Trump should (and will) be aggressively discarded as soon as Trump is gone. Whatever one thinks of the President, his ideas about most things having to do with the military come from a child-like understanding of mission and requirements. None of us should want politicians defining what our future capabilities ought to be.
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Trump speaks in hyperbole like everyone else from NYC. It's part of his populism platform, and the media can't help themselves from latching onto phrases taken completely out of context and misrepresenting the truth. It's quite infuriating because a) I have to fact-check everything that gets put into a headline and b) if they didn't do this, Trump probably wouldn't be president right now.

This article is another example of that. First, Trump did not specifically say he wants a 15,000 ton warship, he said he wants to build a Golden Fleet. There's the hyperbole - taking something that is done on a routine basis and making it sound like it's his grandoise idea to save American prosperity. The people working in acquisitions (i.e. not Trump) are discussing the design criteria of the next DDG / CG, and it could be as big as 15,000-20,000 tons.

The fact that people continue to under-estimate him for his boisterous rhetoric is why he has been so successful in politics. Granted, the President shouldn't talk like a construction worker arguing about politics on the 7 train, but he does, and his base loves him for it.

Secondly, a 15,000 ton warship would be marginally bigger than the Renhai in tonnage, but since the authors of the article do not know that (and 99% of their audience does not either, including @Griz882), they use a bunch of colorful adjectives to exaggerate the project and make it sound ridiculous. By the way, both authors are young and are openly Democrat on their social media pages, which provides further motive to misrepresent the scope of the story, either out of ignorance or politics.

No one working on the next-gen DDG / CG wants to make the ship heavier than the absolute minimum it needs to be. But that minimum is going to be based on some kind of design criteria, like whether we want it to be capable of carrying long-range ASCMs / ASBMs like our Chinese counter-parts and what kind of unmanned systems we want it capable of employing.

And thirdly... whatever does come out of this will last longer than Trump because people serve in Congress for a really long time (an average of 8 years in the House and 12 in the Senate), and these programs live and die with the HASC / SASC, which are probably the most bi-partisan committees in Congress you can possibly find.

This is not a defense of Trump, it's a rant that the editors of the WSJ allow this trash to be published.
 
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Spekkio said:
Secondly, a 15,000 ton warship would be marginally bigger than the Renhai in tonnage, but since the authors of the article does not know that (and 99% of their audience does not either, including @Griz882)
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Not sure why I was singled out for this since I basically wrote, in maybe 20 words, what you took a few hundred to do.
 
Spekkio said:
The fact that people continue to under-estimate him for his boisterous rhetoric is why he has been so successful in politics.
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He is profoundly ignorant on a range of basic topics. This has nothing to do with boisterous rhetoric. He is objectively the stupidest and least informed person to hold the office. He is functionally illiterate in the American form of government.
 
Brett327 said:
He is profoundly ignorant on a range of basic topics. This has nothing to do with boisterous rhetoric. He is objectively the stupidest and least informed person to hold the office. He is functionally illiterate in the American form of government.
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Nothing adds to a discussion like intelligently structured facts that solicit thought, analysis, and well crafted responses. As always, well done Brett.
 
PhrogPhlyer said:
Nothing adds to a discussion like intelligently structured facts that solicit thought, analysis, and well crafted responses.
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Shouldn't we at the very least expect these traits and abilities from the President of the United States? I think you'd be hard pressed to accurately characterize him using any of those terms.

If you can't admit that the President is a dullard (and that's being charitable)... you're in a cult... which we already knew.
 
Brett327 said:
you're in a cult... which we already knew.
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Once again, you lower yourself to personal attacks, that I find tiring. If you don't like me or my opinions, that's fine. But do you have to wear you opinion of me as a badge of honor? Plus I have no idea what these attacks bring to the discussion at hand.

As for Trump, I am not a dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporter. I just do not subscribe to your assessment of the President.

I find your stating that "He is objectively the stupidest and least informed person to hold the office." in light of the preceding four years, reeks of being on the spectrum of TDS. Considering the abject failures of nearly all the post Reagan presidents, and Reagan wasn't perfect either, your comments concerning Trump are just plain stupid on your part.
 
Brett327 said:
Run along now.
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Now why would I do that? It's much more enjoyable to stay here and see how many ways you can come up with to demean and denigrate those who's opinions do not coincide with yours.

Can you find a way to return to the discussion of Trump's desire for a Golden Fleet (i.e. the future of the Navy)? I found @Spekkio 's comments interesting and thought provoking as to exactly what the next DDG/CG should look like. We've had some real disasters in design, like the LCS. Any new construction needs to be founded on mission, capabilities, and sustainability.
 
Faded Float Coat said:
What Does a Navy Do? Burns up resources posturing against a failed state that poses no strategic threat to United States....add it to the list.
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I mean, this just shows the power of media in shaping public opinion. The fact that the media doesn't report on South America doesn't mean there is no strategic problem going on down there. There has been for about 15 years, and I've often thought about why we got so heavily involved in the Middle East when the same thing we were fighting over there exists in South America, but taken to 11.

Congress thinks it's important.

Here's General Kelly's assessment back in 2015. He became very unpopular for writing that.

The failed state of Venezuela helps fund TCOs in Mexico, which economically and politically destabilizes America's largest trading partner. They are also disrupting the security and crime rates in their border nations in South America, which could lead to regional instability, a risk which normally triggers U.S. intervention.

So if your vision is to de-couple the U.S. economy with China you need something to supplant those resources with someone else and Latin America would be a great alternative if it weren't so overrun with organized crime and corrupt pseudo-democracies. You certainly don't want them to build close alliances with China. And if your number 1 national concern is border security, you want to eventually play offense. I'm going to give our military and intelligence communities the BOD that Venezuela and Maduro are somehow linked to a COG in both of those goals.

This might not cross your threshold for military involvement, and it's fair to criticize Trump for flip-flopping on his platform of restraint. Or perhaps you'd prefer a more neo-liberal approach like we take with Russia because our neocon military interventionalist approach in the 1970s and 1980s led to many of the conditions we see today... but saying that Venezuela has no strategic threat is just ignorance.

Back to Trump not understanding some basic premises - he didn't do a good job selling this to the public like Bush did with Iraq because, in a general sense, he doesn't think that garnering public opinion is important.
 
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