This is an ongoing issue with the US Navy, and mirrors similar post hoc justifications from organizations that use political[1] justifications to rationalize slipping standards - NASA changing their go/no-go criteria in order to achieve a Shuttle launch cadence that upper management had promised comes to mind.
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
it's only going to get worse, the military is desperate for recruits and lowering standards to unprecedented levels. We're going to see Project 100,000/McNamara's morons 2.0
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
With no disrespect to anyone involved, can someone explain to me what the navy crew are doing that leaves them sleep-deprived leading to these incidents?
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.
A good article, and part of what turned me onto this issue a few years back, is this piece by ProPublica investigating the USS Fitzgerald and McCain crashes
* 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.
>With no disrespect to anyone involved, can someone explain to me what the navy crew are doing
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.
With Russia letting 50yr+ olds join I wonder what's more preferable. Older experienced but out-of-shape guys coming out of retirement or recruiting younger people but with lower mental and medical score testing?
I'm not sure why so many are replying to this so I'll hijack the top comment. To talk some sense into people.
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.
Why do you say it isnt a navy crew, and those arent navy uniforms? Not in the USN so not able to tell quickly, but it seems that they are in a mix of the USN NWA Type IIIs, Navy Whites, and then working overalls. They almost all seem to have some sort of rank insignia, though the only ones I can make out are the LT, the CDR or possibly CAPT, and then maybe a cadet to his left?
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.
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.
I'm no Navy expert but the carriers seem extremely vulnerable to anti-shipping missiles - especially of the hypersonic variety. In a hot war with a capable near-peer, the carriers will be sunk right away (possibility every single one of them). 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.
>>>In a hot war with a capable near-peer, the carriers will be sunk right away (possibility every single one of them).
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...
A big issue is there's not really been a peer on peer large air battle until very recently in Ukraine and that's shown how difficult it is against an even mildly capable air defense system to deploy and use jets to deliver those cheaper munitions. The complete dominance of the US Airforce has been against pretty soft targets with Iraq being the only real air defense challenge but that's nothing compared to what it would face in China or Russia.
I absolutely expect us to not achieve our usual Air Dominance when this fight with China inevitably goes kinetic.
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.
If the data is correct, Russian integrated air defense is better than what the US or west can muster at the moment (just read up a little on these systems and how they integrate, Russians math good). They might suck at practically everything else, but not air defense. This is pretty widely acknowledged by western experts.
In fact, the old S-300s and Buks in Ukraine 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.
I re-read my post and I can see that it is unclear. I meant the Russians lack trained PILOTS, not that they lack decent IADS. I agree that Russian/Soviet SAMs are overall pretty damn good, and deserve to be respected. I think Soviet doctrine of robust air defenses at all ranges/capability levels is proving prescient. The US in particular finally realized they need to play catch-up when it comes to SHORAD.
Speaking more generally, I'm curious to hear what your speculations are in terms of a war with China.
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.
>>>I'm curious to hear what your speculations are in terms of a war with China.
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.
Key phrase here is kill chain. Finding a moving carrier on the open ocean is hard, even with modern satellite technology. And getting a missile launched from hundreds or thousands of miles away to hit it once you do know its position (10 minutes ago) is harder.
Not to say that's impossible, just that it's currently an unsolved problem.
Bringing a carrier anywhere near a hostile shore is now iffy. There are too many truck-mounted ship killers now, as the Russian Black Sea fleet found out the hard way.[1] Sailing US carriers up the Taiwan Strait as a show of force is over. The US last did that in 2007.
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.
I was limiting my scope to hypersonics, which are hyped compared to more conventional threats.
I agree that in a US-China war, the US will stay very far away from Chinese land-based platforms. The surface fleet would mostly remain outside the first island chain and fly sorties to take advantage of US air superiority.
The Chinese land-based platforms now have more range than the US carrier based platforms. See the first article I linked from U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. If a carrier is close enough to do anything useful, it's close enough to be hit.
Doubt that it is hard. A carrier must send out an emense amount of RF. There are satellites that have large antennas (probably when deployed bigger than football fields. “Think something like a large net made of thin wires”) listening in to the things that happen here down on the ground.
Even if satellites did have exact, continuous data on the location of a target (they don't, and in wartime there would be aggressive countermeasures being used against them), the targeting data has to be relayed to the launch facility/missile itself and the human components of the chain. Then, once launched, it takes at least minutes for the missile to reach its target. You can imagine the satellites automatically sending data to the missile in flight, but hypersonics aren't particularly maneuverable. If you're ten seconds from reaching the target and it's a mile away from where you thought, it's not trivial to reroute. And your $100M missile just explodes in the open ocean, a very expensive tea kettle.
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.
The challenge is that targets look smaller the faster you go. Small errors quickly produce deltas larger than the target. Hypersonic missiles, at least the ones we know about, are not like aircraft that can miss, turn around, and try again. They’re more like bullets, and it’s pretty well understood how hard it is to hit an erratically moving target with a rifle round.
If you read the investigative story [1] about how Russia's missile team's operate it explains they have to program their missiles with USB thumbdrives, targeting data comes from a small team in Moscow, then it gets sent to remote airbases/submarines, and targeting information is often 24hrs old by the time the missile is in flight.
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.
Carriers are the cheapest way to deliver lots of bombs over a target, when there are no air bases in the neighborhood. Being expensive, they would not be moved in until they are safe. To do that, the assets you mentioned would be employed first. Guided missile submarines, and long range bombers (accompanied in the near future by drones). Once the threats are eliminated, the carriers move closer.
If carriers were useless, China would not invest in them. But what does China know?
>If carriers were useless, China would not invest in them. But what does China know?
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.
If I was China I'd invest in carriers just to make the US invest even more in their own carriers as well invest more into anti-carrier capability. This sort of strategy is common in games, where a tactic is feigned in order to elicit a costly counter from the competitor.
That's a plausible strategy, but it has 2 problems. First is that China is not in a position to outspend the US in an arms race, at least not yet. Second is that the US does not show any signs of increasing its aircraft carrier procurement in response.
Occam's razor would suggest China invests in aircraft carriers because it sees an actual benefit.
China doesn't need to outspend the US to make it worthwhile, and you don't defend against aircraft carriers with other aircraft carriers. And Occam's razor is reductive here; it's politics not math.
Historically, the development of the torpedo in the late 19th century lead to the same sorts of consternation vis-à-vis the battleship (equivalents) of their day. A small boat armed with torpedoes could easily sink the most expensive ships in a navy's repertoire. But this didn't lead to the extinction of the battleship, it lead to the development of torpedo boat destroyers (now shortened to just "destroyer") that was designed to specifically target torpedo boats. After all, ships don't go it alone in a navy; they sail as part of the fleets, and if some elements of the fleet are capable of countering the threat, that doesn't mean that the big capital ship has to be capable of countering it by itself.
I'm not a naval expert either, but I would be strongly cautious of writing the carriers' obituary just yet.
I'm no expert either, so blind replying to the blind haha. Underwater stuff is at serious risk of being detected with modem satellite surveillance technologies. None I've seen, but none I'd expect to see either. So it's impossible to tell if it's just science fiction. Aircraft carriers rely on projected air power, and in the event of hypersonic missles, I guess lots of cwis in a carrier group?
I was chatting with my Uncle (ex-USGS) about this a few years ago. You're going to need ~1m data to resolve a carrier's heading. You'll need something in geosynchronous orbit. If your CCD is 100mpx, then you need 10000 acquires to cover a 1000km-x-1000km chunk of Pacific. If you had a 1gbps(!) connection, and you used 8x32b color (which ain't great), you'll need 72 hours do download the data. Assuming the carrier is underway, it could be as much as 2000km away, by then.
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?
1) compression massively reduces that data requirement. 2) relatively simple processing on the satellites itself can cut down most of that data by only downlinking interesting observations. 3) If you're looking to target a carrier with a missile you also only have to look where you can actually deploy that missile to drastically cutting down the area you'd need to search.
If you know where it is once it’s easier to keep track of it ships can’t teleport which substantially limits the search space. Then your limit is related to bandwidth but that seems to be a case for edge compute. And I assume there are a ton of sensors that could be tailor made for the purpose, wouldn’t radar be effective?, a low resolution IR?. And there is the ability to use other sources of intelligence in conjunction. And what’s to stop adversaries building a bunch of neutrino detectors which nuclear reactions cannot hide from, currently they’re slow to detect but it’s probably easier to fix that by building a ton of them. I suspect above ground neutrino detection technology is now good enough that stealth and nuclear are no longer compatible, and that includes nuclear powered submarines.
I remember being told that terrorist wouldn't eavesdrop on undecrypted satellite communication something that I didn't believe at the time. I consider underestimating adversaries to be a time honored military tradition.
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.
I remember reading an article a while back on HN about using ML to detect water disruptions to determine the location of underwater stealth vessels. I couldn't dig it up easily. Really cool stuff going on in that sector.
At the end of the day, the only things that matter are those that you let influence your operational tempo. Unfortunately, a wartime organization that is able to accept a certain level of fatalities in a combat situation has trouble adapting the mentality of "the mission must get done" to a non-wartime footing. Because of the lower stakes for surface vessels, there is a higher chance that the time allocated to maintenance (whether thats fixing running rust, overhauling a piece of equipment, or ensuring crew are trained) is whatever is left in the schedule after their operational needs have been met. Unless a skipper is willing to bet their career on saying "I wont sail until these repairs are done, operational schedule be damned", its not going to change. At the end of the day, someone needs to be willing to say no, and deleverage the commitments. All the services are seeing the "do less with more attitude" creep into senior leadership's thinking, and its causing both human and material assets to be depleted. Its no wonder theres a human resources shortfall - the value proposition is just not what it used to be, and the level of burnout of sailors has only increased.
> 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.
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.
I think it’s worth reconsider that because we have seen many examples of the same thinking throughout our society. The underlying problem is the same - hyper focus on short-term cost reduction even when it entails significant long term costs - but it doesn’t manifest identically in every sector. Once you see it however, you can recognize that pattern pushed by the same unaccountable consultants everywhere.
> hyper focus on short-term cost reduction even when it entails significant long term costs
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.
Believe your lyin’ eyes this time. Pictures of rusty underway US Navy warships is evidence.
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.
That's not evidence that money for maintenance has been redirected.
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?
Would such rust be tolerated if the funds for maintenance were available? Based off what (admittedly little) I know of the military from family members, no. They are generally proud of the aircraft/vessels they serve on, and rust appearing on the deck would be there only because they didn't have the time to remove it (other maintenance) and the funds to re-cover the exposed metal.
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.
That depends on the ships Captain and officers onboard, frankly. If those officers didn’t care, or said they cared but didn’t prioritize the work, instead having everyone run around like crazy doing other things, that’s how you get this.
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.
So you're changing the goalposts here and asking for defense of a statement the post doesn't make. The statement was that "the US surface Navy has...been deferring maintenance," not that it was cutting the budget for maintenance.
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.
"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."
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
The United States was never an empire. In fact the US rejected that ambition at the end of WWII, when the world laid in ruin. Occupation of foreign countries has always been tenuous.
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.
The United States is absolutely an Empire occupying territory, "...the U.S military has 200,000 active-service members deployed in at least 170 countries worldwide..." [1].
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.
> The United States is absolutely an Empire occupying territory, "...the U.S military has 200,000 active-service members deployed in at least 170 countries worldwide..."
Strictly speaking, that makes it a hegemony, not an empire.
It rejected traditional empires. But is basically leader of the world.
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.
> The United States was never an empire. In fact the US rejected that ambition at the end of WWII
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).
> (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.
Bretton Woods was financially damaging to the US economy, not beneficial. That's why we ended it. Bretton Woods was set up to help repair Europe by subsidizing it with US market access. Further the safety of the world's oceans were also subsidized by US Navy protection.
The entire point was to create a system to defend against the Soviets effectively by bribery via the US economy.
Tell that to: Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, cnmi, the U.S. Virgin Islands. Seems like the narrative of not being an empire might be a bit of a myth in practice.
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.
In 1959, when Hawaii was admitted as a state, there was a referendum and more than 93% of the voters were in favor of the admission. The attendance was more than 90% of the registered voters [1].
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.
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
empires have always worked by having subject governments willingly accept their subjugation by the empire; the 'willingness' of guam or samoa or hawai‘i to be governed by the usa is no different
democracy is still better than dictatorship or other forms of monarchy, but it is a mistake to confuse the decisions of democratic governments with the desires of their citizens
I guess you're trying to make a point. If my point was not clear enough: if the US was an empire, all these territories would continue to be under US occupation. Also Japan. West Germany too.
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.
Several of those territories came into US control after being controlled by an explicitly imperial power, namely Imperial Japan. And there have many territories that have seeked independence from the US following being recovered from Japan and have subsequently been granted it.
Those you mention do not want to leave the United States.
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 has definitely had an empire. It intentionally diminished it's role in some of the formerly controlled land and territories, but an empire the US has. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374172145/howtohideanempi... In case you want to read more
I think there's more to a 'dying empire' than losing territory or capability. The US is more politically polarized today, the National Debt is at 31 T, we're currently in a recession with no signs of easing, and China is making waves around the world - the culmination is daunting. I worry for the future.
China is facing a debt crisis that makes the US debt look like nothing along with a very rapidly aging population, one of the fastest aging in the world, despite not having reached the level of development of similarly aged populations. China's population likely has already started to decline.
We don't need to worry about China, they'll handle ending themselves themselves.
We can argue all day about polarization but it's very apparent.
We had 2 straight quarters of negative gdp growth and 2023 isn't looking good. I hope you're right and things look up.
The last part of your comment is completely unacceptable. You're calling me a fear monger in so many words. Great way to make intelligent conversation.
The US gdp grew in q3 more than it lost the previous 2 quarters and while the numbers aren’t out yet it likely will grow in q4. On the whole 2022 will go down as a positive gdp year so if there was a recession it was a very light one and it’s over already.
The reality is the next war won’t be won by sea. In fact, even the last war wasn’t won by sea. Air is the battle ground, we should be diverting funds from sea to air and it’s very possible accepting a little rust is a deliberate choice.
That’s akin to claiming we no longer need cargo ships because we have planes that can do overnight delivery.
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.
Yeah i guess the comment wasn’t well formed enough, i wasn’t suggesting sea plays no part, sea likely won’t be the main battleground, but it of course will be part of supply lines and protecting supply lines. I felt that some diversion of value to allow for bolstering another might be a reasonable trade off. Anyway, i really don’t care all that much but sorry for triggering so many folk!
Is there a global map or similar resource available showing where the US can’t force project without a surface navy? On air refueling, long range munitions, and one of the ~750 foreign soil US military bases (across 80 countries) gets the DoD a long way I’d imagine. Trade proximity for speed and force out of reach of an adversary. Use carriers for humanitarian efforts and soft power project in competition with Belt and Road (China).
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