Date: 2025-05-09 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00027647
YOUTUBE COMMMENTARY / FEEDBACK
ABOUT US NAVAL POWER
World Made Simple ... THE US NAVY
THE NEED FOR MORE WORKING SHIPS!!!!!!!
ABOUT US NAVAL POWER
World Made Simple ... THE US NAVY
THE NEED FOR MORE WORKING SHIPS!!!!!!!
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
This feedback is very thought provoking ... very disturbing.
This feedback puts into words and practical terms something that has been bothering me more and more as I have aged ... and to some extent gained more and more understanding of the issues that are ccnstraining the progress of people almost everywhere in the world.
This feedback describes an 'action plan' to improve a real problem in the US's military situation. The elements of this plan are 'very concrete' and actionable. This is so different from most of the dialog that dominates the media where there are a lot of words but not much substance.
Fifty years ago in the mid-1970s I wrote that the OPEC oil disruption of 1973 was the biggest economic event in all of history. At the time, not many people appreciated how much this event would realign geopolitics and disrupt essentially eveything!
In parallel with the OPEC oil disruption, the USA also had its own Nixon crisis and then ongoing economic turmoil under President Ford and then President Carter.
President Reagan got elected and became popular with his eloquence ... but for me, the Reagan eloquence masked a massive misunderstanding of what it was that ailed the United States and to a great extent most of the 'free world'!
The economic solutions that emerged under Reagan in the 1980s had the appearance of being good, but in fact merely masked chronic problems that remain unresolved several decades later.
I was born in the UK in 1940 in the early days of WWII when all of Europe had fallen to Hitler's Third Reich, the United States was not yet in the war and Britain with the leadership of Prime Minister Winston Churchill was alone standing up to Hitler and his war machine. We lived in a place called Surbiton in the outskirts of London and by the time I was 3 years old I had a (wooden) machine gun which I used to shoot down German planes ... mainly the 'doodle bugs' that would overfly our neigborhood, run out of fuel and then drop out of the sky blowing up whatever they landed on! I was fearless ... I did not understand that these flying bombs and associated explosions killed people. It was only much later that I got to appreciate what it must have been like for my parents and all the other adults!
My father was a schoolmaster. He was too young to be a soldier in WWI and essentially too old to be a front line soldier in WWII. As a schoolmaster he worked with young boys who went straight from school into the army and into the war. My father taught in the classroom, but also trained the school rugby and cricket teams. More than half the students that were in these teams in their last year of school were dead ... killed in action ... within a year of leaving school!
Compared to this ... I have had it easy!
But the Ukraine War has reminded me that the world ramains fragile and is perhaps more dangerous now than any time since the early 1940s. Most of the old folk that experienced the horror of war in WWII are now gone. Veterans still 'get it' that war is ugly ... but most of America, and Western Europe and indeed, most everyone have little meaningful experience of how awful war is and how damaging! I was a few days too old to be 'called up' and serve in the British military when I was of that age ... so I have never had the experience of real war and fighting. Very few people in total have experience of 'hot' war and decision makers in the political arena get security decisions wrong most of the time!
As I was composing this I am reminded of the stark contrast between former President Donald Trump and the late Senator John MacCain. Trump avoided military service. MacCain served, and after being shot down spent seven years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam.
Peter Burgess
World Made Simple ... THE US NAVY
Feedback from @MultiCconway
12 days ago (edited) ... around 20th October 2024
TODAY . . . the Chinese outnumber our total surface combatant count world wide. The Chinese are building the equivalent of the entire French Navy every four years. The U.S. Navy is under 300 surface combatants and have been shrinking. The U.S. Navy cannot even replace attrition at present. Our Logistics Support Fleet mostly run by the Military Sealift Command is old, shrinking, and must grow to support current operations . . . forget about trying to support a growing Navy. The Frigate was supposed to be coming out very soon, but as it is . . . we MAY see one in five or six years…so expensive Destroyers is the only game in town with their high Operations and Maintenance budget that goes with them.
We have NO CAPABLE SMALL SURFACE COMBATANTS!!!!
The fastest way to turn around the deficit in Surface Combatant numbers is to build for the ESCORT requirement that the Navy let go over a decade ago, and told the Military Sealift Command - Merchant Marine Fleet to steam alone and afraid. With friends like that who needs enemies. That solution would look like a more heavily armed USCG Offshore Patrol Cutter painted grey and having a multi-warfare capability.
The U.S. Navy needs a new Aegis Destroyer Escort that can be built quickly, built in more than one shipyard, can be based at smaller ports like USCG Cities as we stand-up a new Reserve Destroyer Escort Program. Eastern Shipbuilding has delivered the first OPC to the USCG with a complete Technical Data Package (TDP), which is something that the LCS never accomplished, and the FFG-62 program is still struggling with . . . and the frigates are already under construction(?).
Eastern should be provided the opportunity to build the balance of the USCG OPCs (10-units) and develop the TDP for an Aegis Destroyer Escort. An abbreviated SQQ-89(V)X Anti-Submarine Warfare Control System (ASWCS) should be installed on all USCG OPCs to increase Anti-Submarine Warfare capability.
Now we do not have enough of MSC ships to support our fleet with NO SPARES in the wings. GREAT PLANNING? The new John Lewis T-AO must be upgraded to AOE capability and another shipyard brought on line to build them.
The Marines want a new next-generation medium amphibious ship. Study and development is taking way too long and they are still years out from anything. We should buy 'off the shelf' and bolt on upgrades. Multiple capable candidates exist with designs that are already mature. Select one and move out.