Its more accurate, I think, to say they’ve been doing it because political leadership and/or senior military leadership trying to anticipate rather than advise, is working to reduce the visible financial impact of optempo.
...are the hallmark of a dying Empire
What we’re seeing with the Navy is the result of a US disinterested in flexing any sort of naval muscle for but its most strategic allies in the traditional realms like securing shipping lanes.
“Hallmarks of a dying empire” implies, somehow, a loss in territory or capability. Neither is true for the US. There just simply isn’t a compelling reason to maintain the same level of naval readiness that they had in the last.
We don't need to worry about China, they'll handle ending themselves themselves.
The national debt is far lower, as a percentage of GDP, than in the 1950s.
U.S. GDP grew at 3.2% annualized rate in the most recent quarter, negating fears of a recession.
When I worry for the future of the U.S., it is mostly because I see so many Americans willing to confidently assert untrue things.
You should be worried… without out it we will fail to address our failures and accelerate our loss of influence.
If aliens came to earth no matter where they land. Really they ought to go see the US president.
Russia was always a counterpoint to that but while obviously a super power it didn't have the same military and political power as the US does.
They achieve that through multiple means mostly cash cash money money. But also creating organisations and influencing participants to make the decisions it wants.
Stuff like getting everyone to agree to using dollar under Bretton woods system.
It's copyright beliefs, it's war on drugs etc.
The US rejected imperialism but insisted on global reserve currency status in 1944. Bretton Woods and later the petrodollar is how the US can benefit from a consistent trade deficit and its Navy is how the system is enforced. (see what happens to countries that think otherwise over the past 50 years).
Nothing? Because none of the wars that the US has been involved with in the past 50 years has involved a country that took any steps to avoiding the use of dollar in international trade [1]. And several countries have taken such steps without much reaction from the US.
Why the hell does this canard keep living on?
[1] Well, okay, you might count the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a US-involved war. But an exemplar of the supposed US penchant for invading countries that dare thumb its nose at its hegemony it is very much not.
The entire point was to create a system to defend against the Soviets effectively by bribery via the US economy.
Empire is when you keep people subjugated against their will. The US is the opposite of an empire.
arrow sharpened this result to a needle point in the 01940s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
the nature of government is that it keeps people, individually, subjugated against their will; police that can only arrest people who want to be arrested, prisons who can only imprison people who want to be imprisoned, or armies that can only beat armies that want to be beaten, are not effective police, prisons, or armies
(democracy is still better than dictatorship or other forms of monarchy)
people are forgetting their history
Now, here's the funny thing. Lots of people who hold the view that the US imperialistic, find various excuses for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Some even go as far as claiming that the US aid to Ukraine is nothing but some further proof of the US imperialism.
I'd be very curious to hear where you are on that.
I can speak to my experience in Hawaii (that is the only place on the list I have lived). There is a significant and vocal minority of Native Hawaiians (and supporters) that would very much like to have their country restored. The Kingdom of Hawaii was illegally overthrown and the US apologized for its direct involvement in the overthrow: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-107/pdf/STATUTE-....
To the point of preference of staying a part of the United States, the majority in all of the Territories (and the State of Hawaii), I assume, would prefer to remain in the United States, yes. However, that is a disingenuous question. The most recent territories have been a part of the United States for almost 100 years, that is, several generations. What else would these populations be in favor of? Indeed, the people of Hawaii, given a choice in 1875, would have preferred the reinstatement of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
That to me shows a lot of enthusiasm for joining the US.
But of course, 60 years later, you can always find some vocal minority with a nostalgia for an idyllic past that never existed.
Those you mention do not want to leave the United States.
The United States extends tax to citizens and businesses living or operating outside its sovereign territory. United States citizens and businesses are large property and commerce owners in countries globally.
While the United States is not directly appointing governments and directly managing policy language, it does influence indirectly. This is one pillar of difference between how it operates and a traditional empire. My perspective is this is a difference without distinction.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/03/28/all-th...
Strictly speaking, that makes it a hegemony, not an empire.
1865? Military suppression of secession is not a voluntary federation... it sure looks like an empire to me since then. The focus on non-contiguous regions to meet the definition of empire feels beyond what is required given empires can be contiguous.
Can a state democratically secede in the modern age? My (non-US) understanding, is no, it's "unconstitutional". Pfft.
The United States is not an empire, it has an empire (that is, it is the hegemonic power that functions as the metropole of an empire.)
Another evidence point is the poisoning of Hawaii’s water supply with tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel when a maintenance worker bumped into a cob-job PVC pipe in a tunnel. Thousands of people poisoned and I imagine leaky jet fuel tanks aren’t t great for fleet readiness. The commander who oversaw that disaster was promoted.
Prove the money was redirected and that the new funding amount for maintenance is insufficient that it caused the rust you specified, and that the rust levels are greater than other time periods.
You want to me to look at a photo of rust and get mad and then believe you about funding?
There’s a wide variety of material available from GAO regarding the many issues that the Navy has with maintenance. Feel free to read it.
The captains have enough leeway, they can get the deck stripped and repainted if they prioritized it.
Of course, their commanders provide the environment that allows or requires them to do other things instead.
Probably too many other ‘must do’s’ and other problems.
If the command gives a rip about its reputation then these things will be addressed first. Everything from swabbing and sweeping decks, high dusting, polishing fittings, etc. It will look immaculate. Only on deployment do these appearance priorities start to drop due to operational concerns or tempo.
But the surface Navy is not a good community and is filled with self-interested officers that are more concerned about progressing their careers than training their people or maintaining their gear. It's why the collisions happened and it's why people died because of those.
The Navy has a huge culture problem in the surface community and until someone with the authority to address it decides to, things won't get better.
It's a big factor that led me to leave the Navy and go onto other things.
I'd constantly be trying to do something a different way that I could prove was more effective and be told not to do it.
Anyways that's my two cents on the topic.
There is no smoking gun of "aha! you cut funds for needed repairs!" here - just a series of operational and organizational priorities that have resulted in ships being at sea for longer and longer deployments, and resources allocated to prestige projects like carriers, instead of resolving the less sexy issue of manpower, and lack of "work horse" destroyers in the fleet.
ProPublica has a good piece going into some of the details of this if you'd like to know more, specifically as it regards the 7th Fleet.
https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crash...
I'll assume that's a reasonable take but the person I replied to went for an overly simplistic "government bad" line hence the style of my life
Air power is great but incredibly dependent on logistics.
The navy is and always has been essential to protecting trade and maintaining global supply lines So long as the sea remains the dominant method of transporting resources around the globe, sea power will remain essential.
It's economic, it's political and social influence, it's positioning yourself as the root in supply chains.
All of the USs classic enemies are playing asymmetric war against you for a while now.
Not to say that's impossible, just that it's currently an unsolved problem.
That all said, none of this is impossible, and first tier militaries are putting a whole lot of effort into this problem; in a sense, "it's just engineering." But so far no first tier military has actually seen how their system would work in the field, and the results remain to be seen.
Particularly, if China were sure that it could sink American carriers at will, it would already be invading Taiwan.
It's much harder than it sounds.
A ballistic hypersonic missile isn't like a TV-guided cruise missile that can track a moving target or a HARM that will seek out RF signatures. You'd basically have to wait until the carrier is parked somewhere for an expended period (multiple hours at a minimum), otherwise you'll waste a $100M hypersonic missile.
The US Navy is actually pretty good at avoiding that.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/navy/...
Something else that's probably over - parking an amphibious assault ship offshore and using it as a base for USMC operations. The USMC and USN invested huge resources in that concept, and it's been very useful in small wars. Those ships are now vulnerable.
A LTJG writes in Naval Institute Proceeding on this.[2] If a carrier is close enough to do anything useful, it's vulnerable to shore-based attack. A Coast Guard officer worries about attacks by drone swarms launched from fishing boats.[3] China has a large fleet of small coastal vessels, the "People's Armed Maritime Militia", which are used for observation and other tasks.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61141118
[2] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/december/eye...
[3] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/december/res...
I agree that in a US-China war, the US will stay very far away from Chinese land-based platforms. The fleet would mostly remain outside the first island chain and fly sorties to take advantage of US air superiority.
Sinking an aircraft carrier, let alone most of them, is also such a big loss of life and material, it could easily lead to WW3/nuclear boogaloo.
There are also anti-anti-shipping missile cruisers, CIWS, AWACS, etc. around aircraft carriers all the time.
There is also a lot of stealthy underwater stuff that is indeed ongoing. A big question on that front of course, is how would you know how it’s doing, or what it’s capable of, when it’s by its nature stealthy and hidden.
So, if we had 500000 geosynchronous satellites, with a 1pbs link we could find carriers in a good fraction of the Pacific — maybe 10 or 20% of it?
The USN has plans to limit the risk to the carriers, but most of those also limit the usefulness extensively. Even still, a maneuvering and properly-escorted CVN is not an easy target.
>>Seems like the focus should be on the stealthy underwater stuff that can pop up and deliver payloads like missiles and drones but what do I know.
I fully expect our submarine force to do most of the heavy lifting, especially in the critical early months of a hot war with China. But the problem is their limited ordnance. USS Ohio after her SSGN conversion only carries ~150 Tomahawks @$2 MILLION per missile for Block V versions. So that's 150 targets, max, before she has to slink away from the conflict zone and find a resupply ship or port. A Nimitz has a sustained sortie generation rate of ~80 sorties per day, and while I can't say what their typical ammo stores are, the carrier air wing should have more than enough bombs and guided munitions to strike 150 targets, and many targets can be prosecuted with fairly cheap JDAMs, SDBs, Mavericks, etc...
While our pilots still possess the essential skills and munitions to peel back an Integrated Air-Defense System (seems the Russians lack both of those), I don't think we are prepared for the ridiculous numerical disparity we will face here in the First Island Chain, combined with the reasonable qualitative parity of Chinese assets.
In fact, the old S-300s and Buks in Ukranine have been pretty effective and probably what spooks the Russians from using their air force in mass. Even those old systems are probably better than the Patriot for a lot of tasks. There's even been talks of sending more S-300s from Greece because they work and Ukraine knows how to operate them.
That would be unwise from a Greek perspective, because of Erdolfs ambitions and posture.
Most people seem to think it'll be a walk in the park for either the US or China, but I think it'll end up a kind of stalemate, with China and Taiwan both facing extreme privation from sea blockades, the Strait and SCS being a charnel house, and the world experiencing a massive economic disruption; domestic politics in democratic states would determine the terms of the final resolution.
Well, honestly your next sentence is pretty on the mark in broad terms: sea blockades, massive asset destruction in the main conflict zone, global economic impacts and political chaos.
I think the Chinese are using Russia's Ukraine failure to re-do their math about an amphibious assault aimed at Taipei (100x more difficult than driving across a land border into Kiev). I still expect their combination of ballistic missiles, land-based airpower (including old aircraft converted into drones/guided bombs), and a metric boatload of surface ships to wreck most US combat power in the region with sheer mass. We simply don't have enough assets or enough AMMO forward deployed here to maintain supremacy right on China's doorstep.
The big question marks are the responses from other local powers. We expect the Japanese to help if attacked, but what if they aren't targeted directly by China? The Japanese -N-a-v-y- "Maritime Self-Defense Force" is large and competent and we need them to counter the Eastern Theater Command Navy. Will the Philippines let us stage combat power in their territory? What will Vietnam do in the SCS? Will India distract China in the Himalayas?
Even if we get the upper hand in combat, maybe after 90+ days when we've gotten reinforcements from allies, from the continental US, etc....at BEST the situation becomes "Well China, we sank your entire Navy and Marine Corps, and killed most of your Air Force pilots......can we consider this 'Taiwan unification' issue settled?". The concern is that Xi Jinping and the CCP have staked their regime's reputation on this one goal. It's the same problem with Putin and Ukraine: failure is a guaranteed regime-ending scenario from domestic discontent, so they might just double down no matter how irrational it appears, and if the CCP can foster sufficient nationalism from the population, we could be looking at a LOOOOOONG bloody conflict and total economic chaos.
If carriers were useless, China would not invest in them. But what does China know?
Occam's razor would suggest China invests in aircraft carriers because it sees an actual benefit.
As you mentioned, carriers are good for dunking on low/mid tier powers that can be dismantled and then bombed on budget. Questionable if it's good for peer warfare with powers that can take out carriers.
And if you look at numbers, PRC is not really heavily investing/committing in carriers. 3 hulls over 10 years and ~50 J15s is very conservative relative to PRC MIC building prowess. For comparison, USN laid down and completed 4 Forrestal within 5 years. Nimitz was being launched every 3-4 years. Compare PLAN submarine fleet with huge tech gap that never the less commissioned many new hulls in same period because there's recognition that mass subsurface capability (and thus need to build up talent pool) is integral to future force composition.
IMO right now they're prestige projects used for peacetime "diplomacy" and building up carrier infra if PLAN ever decide to go super carrier power projection route. But it could just as well as be dead end trial/experiment with future oriented towards UCAV carriers like Type 76 and long range bombers like H20.
In 20-30 years, 100 B21s could probably drop cheap ordances more efficiently than carrier groups. IMO it will get hard to rationalize super carriers. But USNavy is a seperate branch with their own budget and desire to remain relevant, so US ends up with trillion dollar "presence" / photo ops platforms when the money could be best spent elsewhere.
> IMO it will get hard to rationalize super carriers.
It's a know-how preservation program. The US Navy could easily refit the old Nimitzes and extend their life by 3 decades. Instead, they are building new Fords at the most glacial pace that makes sense. One every 4 years means 3 billion spent per year. The Navy has a budget of $250 BN or so, so that's about 1%.
The problem the Navy has is: right now they don't need new carriers, but what if one day they'll need 3 or 4 new carriers per year. It happened before. It's much easier to scale from 2 per decade to 4 per year than from absolute zero.
On top of that, the Fords are a pretty flexible platform. They can carry now 75 manned jets. But you can easily see one day they can switch to 25 manned jets and 150 drones.
> 100 B21s could probably drop cheap ordances more efficiently than carrier groups
100 B21s will cost about $70 BN. And a lot to operate on a per hour basis. They might be cost effective for some missions, but they are not going to make carriers obsolete anytime soon.
I'm not a naval expert either, but I would be strongly cautious of writing the carriers' obituary just yet.
That is exclusive to a small amount of public companies without a stable business model. So a tiny percent. That has little to do with "acting like a private business" in a competitive market. At least when you compare it to how 95%+ of business operate.
Ask yourself, why would a healthy business sacrifice long term value for short term stock price gains? I highly doubt the answer is "that's what the free market demands". No serious bank or investor would touch a business otherwise if that was a rational incentive (besides ponzi schemers).
Even among public companies (which is itself a small percentage of all businesses) that is rarely the modus operandi. It's just a meme that comes out via the inverse of survivorship bias...aka news stories of obvious failures. The only ones that could stick with pro-short-term-investor anti-consumer tactics like that around are monopolies and/or mega corporations friendly with government.
we've already lost a $2 billion ship because the crew wasn't capable of following their proper firefighting procedure, in addition to the numerous crashes due to poor training and lack of sleep for crew
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/12/05/navy-accept-r...
From my comfy armchair, for a peacetime navy ship cruising around, there is "nothing" to do, but keep the lights running. Routine maintenance, monitor foreign ships, etc. I would expect boredom to be a more significant problem than overwork. Clearly, I am missing something.
Probably not, but maybe it's possible to give a taste. My perspective is all submarines, which is certainly different. Maybe read this and assume that the superficial details are the only exaggerated parts: https://subpargroup.substack.com/
Your core 'job' underway is being 'on watch': think tollbooth operator, maybe. You show up to work 45 minutes early so you can talk to everyone at work and learn everything that's abnormal or broken from the night before. Then for 8 hours a day, you're a tollbooth operator. When you finish up with that, you step next door to have dinner. Then, half the booth operators go to run street sweepers for an hour (again, this is after the toll booth shift) while the other half go to consolidate all the handwritten toll records made during the shift. On a simple day, that's 30 minutes, but it could be 3 hours if some of the numbers don't add up. Now you're ten hours in, and that's not too bad if all you had to do is collect tolls. But good luck with that.
Because you're also the guy who keeps all the lifting gates in good repair, or the guy who maintains the internet infrastructure or cooling or lighting to the tollbooths. And some jerk crashed through one of the gates last shift, breaking the arm off. In case that wasn't bad enough, the arms for your tollbooth were last produced in East Germany in 1987, and now you've been coasting on the fumes of that stockpile for 30-some years. The other toll plazas in your consortium probably have some, but they'll all lie and say they don't because their lives become more inconvenient in every way if you take their spare parts. But you have to find a way to make one shake out anyway. Don't sleep until you know how. You can send three emails per day to figure out how to fix it.
By the way, you have to go take your monthly tollbooth operator knowledge test. And be up one hour early to practice putting out tollbooth fires tomorrow morning.
Finally, the tollbooth consortium also operates ICBM silos, and you have to be ready at a moment's notice to remember how to do that.
Also, the guy who keeps the internet running is home for 3 weeks with his new baby, so you'll have to fix that too before you can email people about those toll gate arms.
All the people who failed in the past at what you're trying to fix are hanging out in a lounge playing Xbox and mostly getting paid the same as you.
https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crash...
A quick break down:
* chronic understaffing - ships have a certain number of billets. 7th Fleet in particular has been sending ships to sea without all their billets filled, particularly in the junior officer ranks. This means that you're not just doing your job, but also doing the job of the person who isn't there
* deferred maintenance - there's a lot of redundancy on these ships (warships tend to like that) so if something breaks it's not catastrophic - you can just use the back up until the sophisticated main system is repaired in port. However, after years of "just using the back up," those systems are failing, and HAVE to be repaired, often at sea. So, in addition to your job, and the job of the person who isn't there, you might also have to go help fix the HVAC or some weapon system or what have you.
* aggressive operational tempo - the Navy has said they need X number of boats to do the tasks required of them. They are funded for/have X-N boats. In order to make up the deficit, the ships they have are deployed on longer cruises, with less time to fix things. This is the core issue that's the root cause of these other failure cases, in my opinion.
The crew isn't a navy crew. The uniforms shown are not navy uniforms. In fact this is likely some kind of repair crew of some sort.
Secondly, this ship is in port, with the anti-skid coating on the deck apparently not visible meaning that this ship is already a non-operational ship.
https://twitter.com/manimota/status/1131343812025081856
This is definitely not in port or under repair. It's embarrassing.
This only supports the idea that the tempo is so high the crews have little time for basic repairs and maintenance.
The optempo of US Navy vessels is inconceivable to foreign navies.
Practically every second of every day while underway the ship is expected to be operational and a ship's itinerary is pre-determined down to the minute. Delays are not tolerated.
The fleet keeps getting smaller but the workload remains the same. The Navy is burning out its personnel and equipment trying to keep up.
The records for both longest deployment (215 days) and longest time at sea with no port calls (208 days) were both broken in 2020.
From 2017:
> The Navy has doubled its number of forward deployed naval forces ships operating out of Japan since 2006 – a bump from 20 to 40 ships – but those ships do not follow the Optimized Fleet Response Plan readiness generation model that includes dedicated time for ship maintenance and crew training ahead of rotational deployments.
https://news.usni.org/2017/09/20/cno-richardson-high-optempo...
The problem has only gotten worse since then.
The Navy used to heave to and have a day or two to clean up before entering port but they don't do that anymore. Those days cannot be wasted on cleaning.
As for the picture, if you told me that there were individual members of the US Navy crew that had more time at sea than the entire combined crew of the Polish ship, I would not dismiss that comment immediately as being implausible.
Online busybodies, like those commenting on the tweet you linked to, will bitch and moan about the navy going soft but they would crumble into dust under the pressures the Navy is operating under today.
The worst are the old-ass "CoLd WaRrIoRs" who spent 20 years in the navy doing a 3-month med cruise every year who got less time at sea than the 19-year old deck seaman on the rusty ship in that photo got before they pinned on E-3.
They would have gone AWOL if forced to go 200 days without touching dry land.
The simple truth of the matter is that the US surface Navy has, for the last 20 some years, been deferring maintenance and training of its core assets in order to fund prestige projects like the super carriers. 7th fleet is particularly egregious on this front, but this comes down to a resource allocation issue. Congress and the admiralty have shrunk the surface Navy, and forced the existing fleet to "do more with less." What this means is a higher operational tempo, with no down time, no repair schedule, and no training. In the investigation into the most recent destroyer crash, the board found that the bridge crew hadn't been trained on the basics of navigation, but rather on the basics of how to operate the computer system that navigated for them. Additionally, because of man power constraints, where junior officers would once spend the first few months of their career shadowing a senior officer, now they're thrown into command of a watch with no physical training, just a stack of DVDs they're supposed to go through before deployments.
It's an embarrassment, but it's an embarrassment of command, not to the sailors who are trying to make do with no time to do their jobs.
[1] whenever money and mission are involved, so is politics