They're also deeply unsexy. And how could NAVSEA shoehorn some cool whiz-bang toy onto one? Or better still, two *dozen* brand new supercool whiz-bang toys?!
The problem is that nobody does force design anymore. I honestly don't think anybody's done force design since before WW2. We've just been winging it.
Force Design:
Who is the enemy? Well, historically we haven't wanted to SAY who is the enemy until relatively recently because we're doing billions/trillions of dollars of business with them.
What do we need against that enemy? If we can't acknowledge the enemy, we get vagaries like 'fight two wars at the same time'.
What are the two wars we're supposed to fight? I dunno. Make it like Desert Storm.
Ok, we're fighting Desert Storm again, but doing it twice in different places. Did we need drydocks? Nope. We just lobbed TLAMs from Burkes positioned offshore.
Ah!!! We need lots and lots and lots of Burkes!!!! Maybe something with a gun that can pretend to be a battleship and lob artillery shells to support the Marines.
In a world where we can't even name the people we're supposed to be fighting, common sense is a very scarce commodity indeed.
CDR: Excellent piece. A note: floating dry docks were built before the Civil War. I believe they were ordered in 1855. I saw a picture from the early 1870’s of USS Hartford in a floating dry dock at Mare Island. It speaks volumes about the imbecility in the 1990’s military and civilian elites that we let those and other assets go. Look at the “Big 3” who did so much to win WW2 now struggling to make workable engines. Toyota, wipe that grin off your face. Finally, you might wish to read some of Bob Lutz’s books, one of them on the damage the bean counters have done. By the way I’ve been a CPA from 09-28-1982 so I’ve been there and done that.
Doubt the author approves of my missives...but regardless...this topic absolutely should be backed up by perusing his book, as the WWII docks are a central topic:
Concur 100%. Future ABSD will also need the supplies to patch up battle damaged warships: Steel, wiring, piping, ladders, etc. And here's another question: Who is going to do the battle damage repairs? Will it be civilians or ratings? And what defenses will these have? You made a valid and poignant point about the Oerlikons on the World War Two vessels. She'll need CWIS and RAMs at a minimum. A lot of tail to this tooth.
Orders from the Unsexy But Important alone would rebuild American shipbuilding. Resupply freighters and tankers (for the ships that go to the bases Fleet Resupply load at), Tenders, Troop transports, and PCs could take up current yards and require 1 or 2 more.
Just a small historical note: The first commander of AFDB-2 was Commander Joseph Rochefort. The Same Commander Rochefort of HYPO Fame. This was his "reward" for demonstrating the Redmond brothers in Washington were incompetent glory hounds.
That today's USN is so disinterested in the subject that they contract it out is a solid indicator its not interested in being an actual 'Navy', but instead fashions itself a "Joint" land attack force that happens to be based at sea.
My military career started out as an enlisted fuels (POL) guy, for about a year. No tech school, direct duty assignment and OJT.
POL is not the glamor job in the military. Not at all sexy when you've been doused in JP4 or Diesel (or both) and try to wash it off.
But what is a military without fuel? A very, very expensive museum. Weapons handlers were much the same: Unsexy, out on the ramp work in terrible weather, generating sorties.
What is an Air Force without weapons? A very expensive flying club. Without mechanics? A static display.
The people in supply? Same deal. Essential. No fuel, no ammo, no spare parts, no food, no silly assed hats for the cops to wear.....no military. The rest of the odds and sods - personnel, finance, 4500 people in a wing supporting perhaps 200 fighter pilots.
Now, what does a military do? Hopefully, projects sufficient force so combat is not begun. We are not doing that, and haven't in this century. When combat comes, a military wins the war. Can we do that?
Can we even protect our assets in CONUS? How about forward deployed? The Russians thought their strategic aircraft were safe around Archangelsk (literally on the other side of the continent from Ukraine), a few thousand dollars worth of drones destroyed a billion or so dollars worth of bombers and AWACS aircraft. A few thousand dollars worth of different drones destroyed the Russian Black Seas Fleet.
In the pacific, the CVN's are N, after all. But the reason they are there at all requires a near constant stream of JP8 deliveries, food, weapons. Not sexy at all. Not even considered a Navy mission (USNS ships). And we don't have enough of them. We don't have enough CVN's either - a 15 ship (minimum) need vs an 11 ship reality today and we can barely supply the 11 ships.
Logistics is not the red-headed stepchild. Logistics is the mother, and the father......without it nothing else is possible.
Pete, we need to back off a global strategy. The U.S. is no longer a world power in the classic sense. And we can't afford or support a 600-ship navy. Hell, we can't properly support a 300-ship navy! The Pentagon needs to look at risk like an insurance company. Let Europe be the primary defender, with U.S. as backup. Same for Japan/South Korea/Taiwan/Philippines/Australia. Let the primaries effect and absorb and initiate the first attacks and self-defense. Attrition warfare. We'll need to worry about patrolling our western shores as China forward positions their ballistic missile subs. Plus, expect North Korea to do the same, even with only a single sub rotation - just to make a public statement - to the world - that the U.S. is not to be feared.
Don't disagree with lack of priority or need, but original Navy was defensive and commerce oriented, not worldwide guarantor. And we employed letters of marque, which attacked commerce and supply chains.
TBF, the Navy already had a lot of ships when Reagan took office in 1981 (around 490 combatives, 535 total). Including those four BBs. So getting to 600 required building ~60 ships?
Today, we have 460 or so, counting 295 combatives. And no BBs (and they likely are not restorable, even if we had ammo for the 16” guns).
Speaking of BBs, I think I’d rather have ten more Burkes than one BBGN, but that’s just me. What I’d really like is 40 more upgraded Burkes, 60 FFGs and maybe 20 CGs, along with 150 auxiliary vessels to support the fleet.
As noted below we entered the 600-ship goal with a lot of lower cost, less technically outfitted ships and submarines. Since then we have been in a death spiral of uncontrolled, rising costs and technological complexity that results in fewer and fewer ships and aircraft. Now, as history reminds us, "new" technology is forcing a reassessment of force structure. Miniaturization, drones and tactics. Ukraine and Iran are teaching us but, highly invested in big and expensive toys, we are not listening. At least not totally. Our military needs some shock therapy. We need a major cultural, structural change, and IMHO means dumping at least three CVN's and their entire support to finance what need really need next. That's why I say we need to stand down from the current be-everywhere, all-the-time worldwide navy deployments.
For a Navy with a great history, shipbuilding has always been problematic. The first six frigates were behind schedule and over budget at a time when Benjamin Stoddart, our first SECNAV, declared we needed to "make up for the want of great force with great effort". It's a lesson we still haven't learned.
Once upon a time, the Seattle skyline had two stand-alone structures.....the Space Needle, and the black tower of the "Rainier bank". Joke was that the bank was the box that the needle had come in.
Mehbe we should require that any future warships, of any type, be delivered in their appropriate "box"
> Mehbe we should require that any future warships, of any type, be delivered in their appropriate "box"
Well, until we have at least a 5:1 ratio of ships to boxes, anyway. We probably don't need *quite* a 1:1 ratio. But there's a **lot** of catching up to do.
Maintenance and combat repair facility FORWARD is the biggest problem. The Navy divested itself of the people (expertise) and equipment at the end of the Cold War. We have never recovered them. Those who went to the shipyards with their skills have long since retired, and we have no Navy cadre to train the next generation. PRUDENT ? . . even wise?
We don't even have Destroyer Tenders (T-AD) today . . . and we have Destroyers all over the planet. Local shipyards is the answer given. Every shipyard is already on a target set. Destroyer Tenders MOVE . . . something the U.S. Navy have gone STUPID about! Intelligent ? . . prudent ? . . even wise?
AMEN . . . and that is how many of our systems are compromised. The Navy pretends they are protecting our secrets as they (in reality) are looking the other way and saying differently.
Current events have emphasized the issue of relying on foreign ports for any kind of support. The closest logistics hub for 5FLT is...Djibouti and Diego Garcia. One is plagued by unrelenting heat & within Houthi range, the other is 2000nm away with limited warehouse space. Applying the same issue to maintenance, the foot-dragging to tender builds, lack of other supporting assets to deal with battle damage is an indictment of prior leadership.
As the picture illustrates, its an 'Enterprise' of affiliated "communities" drafting along in loose formation acting as a "Joint" land attack force that is incidentally based at sea
A note and aside, when I first visited Djibouti in the '70s, there was pretty much only one wooden pier. I remember seeing the creosote bubbling up because it was so hot...
I'm gonna guess not a single O3/4 was involved so that they can bring some reality and insert a Van Ripper-esque wrench into the gears of their little exercise.
Absolutely agree. You can't fight without weapons, and weapons break or are broken and need repair. Typical bean-counter decision to save a few bucks and send them out unarmed.
Sorry, Jack. Not a bean-counters fault. I was a budget geek at the top of the Navy money chain and handled everything except ships and aircraft. Navy and Marine Corps R&D, weapons, ammunition, satellites and other (cats and dogs, SEABEE, nuclear reactors, sonobuoys, training eq, and more) procurement, operations and maintenance, military construction and housing, base closure, military personnel, war budgets (including Coast Guard funding) and disaster assistance. Bean counters highlighted development, procurement, execution and cash flow problems within a constrained budget. Political appointees, generals and admirals made all the big decisions about strategy, force generation and management, operational deployment, ship and aircraft designs, and everything else. Us bean-counters are what holds the center. Lack of effective leadership is the problem.
I probably misstated there. Not bean-counters in the service, bean-counters in appointed/elected positions in government who never did and never will actually get dirty protecting this country. Please accept my apology.
Common sense, relatively inexpensive force multiplier.... no wonder we have so few.
They're also deeply unsexy. And how could NAVSEA shoehorn some cool whiz-bang toy onto one? Or better still, two *dozen* brand new supercool whiz-bang toys?!
NAVSEA delenda EST!
The problem is that nobody does force design anymore. I honestly don't think anybody's done force design since before WW2. We've just been winging it.
Force Design:
Who is the enemy? Well, historically we haven't wanted to SAY who is the enemy until relatively recently because we're doing billions/trillions of dollars of business with them.
What do we need against that enemy? If we can't acknowledge the enemy, we get vagaries like 'fight two wars at the same time'.
What are the two wars we're supposed to fight? I dunno. Make it like Desert Storm.
Ok, we're fighting Desert Storm again, but doing it twice in different places. Did we need drydocks? Nope. We just lobbed TLAMs from Burkes positioned offshore.
Ah!!! We need lots and lots and lots of Burkes!!!! Maybe something with a gun that can pretend to be a battleship and lob artillery shells to support the Marines.
In a world where we can't even name the people we're supposed to be fighting, common sense is a very scarce commodity indeed.
All the stuff we don't have... What is it, exactly, that we DO have?
Enough to overwhelm a small Navy, like Iran had.
Which is still launching fast boats and missiles, btw.
Well, that's IRGC, which is different, or something.
Something
CDR: Excellent piece. A note: floating dry docks were built before the Civil War. I believe they were ordered in 1855. I saw a picture from the early 1870’s of USS Hartford in a floating dry dock at Mare Island. It speaks volumes about the imbecility in the 1990’s military and civilian elites that we let those and other assets go. Look at the “Big 3” who did so much to win WW2 now struggling to make workable engines. Toyota, wipe that grin off your face. Finally, you might wish to read some of Bob Lutz’s books, one of them on the damage the bean counters have done. By the way I’ve been a CPA from 09-28-1982 so I’ve been there and done that.
Doubt the author approves of my missives...but regardless...this topic absolutely should be backed up by perusing his book, as the WWII docks are a central topic:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591144485?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback
A review here:
https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1630&context=nwc-review
Another reference on docks:
https://theleansubmariner.com/2018/03/22/floating-drydocks-a-noteworthy-innovation-that-changed-the-course-of-two-wars/
Concur 100%. Future ABSD will also need the supplies to patch up battle damaged warships: Steel, wiring, piping, ladders, etc. And here's another question: Who is going to do the battle damage repairs? Will it be civilians or ratings? And what defenses will these have? You made a valid and poignant point about the Oerlikons on the World War Two vessels. She'll need CWIS and RAMs at a minimum. A lot of tail to this tooth.
Orders from the Unsexy But Important alone would rebuild American shipbuilding. Resupply freighters and tankers (for the ships that go to the bases Fleet Resupply load at), Tenders, Troop transports, and PCs could take up current yards and require 1 or 2 more.
Recommend a visit to this website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT784GgO8-o
Excellent discussion and analysis of the current logistics tail and it's problems.
Just a small historical note: The first commander of AFDB-2 was Commander Joseph Rochefort. The Same Commander Rochefort of HYPO Fame. This was his "reward" for demonstrating the Redmond brothers in Washington were incompetent glory hounds.
I didn't connect CDR Rochefort and HYPO so I checked Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rochefort
A good write-up.
The full story of the WWII USN logistics miracle:
https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/b/beans-bullets-black-oil.html
That today's USN is so disinterested in the subject that they contract it out is a solid indicator its not interested in being an actual 'Navy', but instead fashions itself a "Joint" land attack force that happens to be based at sea.
If you don't have time to read this tome, the introduction by Admiral Spruance is a good synopsis.
I'm sure it replaced one of the DivThur titles on the CNO's reading list. Snort! TIC
Woops, just posted that three days late myself. Twas my dad’s unit.
Can’t share other things with the attachments lockdown. And so.
A dry dock should not be looked upon as a red headed stepchild.
I think that building or repairing a ship or being part of a PCU should be a box that every SWO needs to check off not as something to avoid.
My military career started out as an enlisted fuels (POL) guy, for about a year. No tech school, direct duty assignment and OJT.
POL is not the glamor job in the military. Not at all sexy when you've been doused in JP4 or Diesel (or both) and try to wash it off.
But what is a military without fuel? A very, very expensive museum. Weapons handlers were much the same: Unsexy, out on the ramp work in terrible weather, generating sorties.
What is an Air Force without weapons? A very expensive flying club. Without mechanics? A static display.
The people in supply? Same deal. Essential. No fuel, no ammo, no spare parts, no food, no silly assed hats for the cops to wear.....no military. The rest of the odds and sods - personnel, finance, 4500 people in a wing supporting perhaps 200 fighter pilots.
Now, what does a military do? Hopefully, projects sufficient force so combat is not begun. We are not doing that, and haven't in this century. When combat comes, a military wins the war. Can we do that?
Can we even protect our assets in CONUS? How about forward deployed? The Russians thought their strategic aircraft were safe around Archangelsk (literally on the other side of the continent from Ukraine), a few thousand dollars worth of drones destroyed a billion or so dollars worth of bombers and AWACS aircraft. A few thousand dollars worth of different drones destroyed the Russian Black Seas Fleet.
In the pacific, the CVN's are N, after all. But the reason they are there at all requires a near constant stream of JP8 deliveries, food, weapons. Not sexy at all. Not even considered a Navy mission (USNS ships). And we don't have enough of them. We don't have enough CVN's either - a 15 ship (minimum) need vs an 11 ship reality today and we can barely supply the 11 ships.
Logistics is not the red-headed stepchild. Logistics is the mother, and the father......without it nothing else is possible.
Agreed. But promotions go to the warfighters and members of senior staffs.
The basic problem is that we have a global strategy that requires 600 ships and we at best 300.
The nightmare scenario is if NK and/or China attack the ROK and/or Taiwan.
Pete, we need to back off a global strategy. The U.S. is no longer a world power in the classic sense. And we can't afford or support a 600-ship navy. Hell, we can't properly support a 300-ship navy! The Pentagon needs to look at risk like an insurance company. Let Europe be the primary defender, with U.S. as backup. Same for Japan/South Korea/Taiwan/Philippines/Australia. Let the primaries effect and absorb and initiate the first attacks and self-defense. Attrition warfare. We'll need to worry about patrolling our western shores as China forward positions their ballistic missile subs. Plus, expect North Korea to do the same, even with only a single sub rotation - just to make a public statement - to the world - that the U.S. is not to be feared.
I disagree.
How were we able to afford a 600 ship navy under Reagan which included 4 battleships?
What we lack is a sense of priorities.
$12 billion for the LA Lakers would buy a carrier.
Alexander Hamilton said it all in federalist #11 as to why we need a navy and how it helps the economy.
Don't disagree with lack of priority or need, but original Navy was defensive and commerce oriented, not worldwide guarantor. And we employed letters of marque, which attacked commerce and supply chains.
When Elon Musk liquidated assets to buy Twitter, he paid for a Ford-class carrier ($11-bil).
Did we buy another Ford?
You're right about priorities.
My view is that the only thing more expensive than the very best military in the world, is the second-best
To paraphrase Putin. You feed your army or you will feed someone else’s army.
TBF, the Navy already had a lot of ships when Reagan took office in 1981 (around 490 combatives, 535 total). Including those four BBs. So getting to 600 required building ~60 ships?
Today, we have 460 or so, counting 295 combatives. And no BBs (and they likely are not restorable, even if we had ammo for the 16” guns).
Speaking of BBs, I think I’d rather have ten more Burkes than one BBGN, but that’s just me. What I’d really like is 40 more upgraded Burkes, 60 FFGs and maybe 20 CGs, along with 150 auxiliary vessels to support the fleet.
I expect disappointment.
That 60 included four new CVNs and a lot of the existing ships had to be replaced.
We could do 600 with a plan and sticking to it.
As noted below we entered the 600-ship goal with a lot of lower cost, less technically outfitted ships and submarines. Since then we have been in a death spiral of uncontrolled, rising costs and technological complexity that results in fewer and fewer ships and aircraft. Now, as history reminds us, "new" technology is forcing a reassessment of force structure. Miniaturization, drones and tactics. Ukraine and Iran are teaching us but, highly invested in big and expensive toys, we are not listening. At least not totally. Our military needs some shock therapy. We need a major cultural, structural change, and IMHO means dumping at least three CVN's and their entire support to finance what need really need next. That's why I say we need to stand down from the current be-everywhere, all-the-time worldwide navy deployments.
For a Navy with a great history, shipbuilding has always been problematic. The first six frigates were behind schedule and over budget at a time when Benjamin Stoddart, our first SECNAV, declared we needed to "make up for the want of great force with great effort". It's a lesson we still haven't learned.
SECNAV, are you listening?
Historically, the US has lost the beginning of every war we entered - and won in the end. Pearl Harbor, Kasserine Pass --> Tokyo Bay, Berlin...
Aside from the loss of life that such a strategy entails, I fear that we won't have time to learn from our mistakes the next time around
Moms and Dads usually let the kids say and do stupid things.
Up to a point, anyway
I agree fully.
Once upon a time, the Seattle skyline had two stand-alone structures.....the Space Needle, and the black tower of the "Rainier bank". Joke was that the bank was the box that the needle had come in.
Mehbe we should require that any future warships, of any type, be delivered in their appropriate "box"
> Mehbe we should require that any future warships, of any type, be delivered in their appropriate "box"
Well, until we have at least a 5:1 ratio of ships to boxes, anyway. We probably don't need *quite* a 1:1 ratio. But there's a **lot** of catching up to do.
Maintenance and combat repair facility FORWARD is the biggest problem. The Navy divested itself of the people (expertise) and equipment at the end of the Cold War. We have never recovered them. Those who went to the shipyards with their skills have long since retired, and we have no Navy cadre to train the next generation. PRUDENT ? . . even wise?
We don't even have Destroyer Tenders (T-AD) today . . . and we have Destroyers all over the planet. Local shipyards is the answer given. Every shipyard is already on a target set. Destroyer Tenders MOVE . . . something the U.S. Navy have gone STUPID about! Intelligent ? . . prudent ? . . even wise?
And, how well are those yards' personnel vetted...
Really?
AMEN . . . and that is how many of our systems are compromised. The Navy pretends they are protecting our secrets as they (in reality) are looking the other way and saying differently.
Current events have emphasized the issue of relying on foreign ports for any kind of support. The closest logistics hub for 5FLT is...Djibouti and Diego Garcia. One is plagued by unrelenting heat & within Houthi range, the other is 2000nm away with limited warehouse space. Applying the same issue to maintenance, the foot-dragging to tender builds, lack of other supporting assets to deal with battle damage is an indictment of prior leadership.
The way the CNO and other top leadership are attired tells one and all they don't see themselves as particularly "Naval".
And, yes, it -DOES- matter.
So its not just "prior" leadership, its the guys filling the "new boss; same as the old boss" shoes (desert boots) today.
https://x.com/USNavyCNO/status/2081818600642359555?s=20
The USN is not a serious "Navy".
As the picture illustrates, its an 'Enterprise' of affiliated "communities" drafting along in loose formation acting as a "Joint" land attack force that is incidentally based at sea
A note and aside, when I first visited Djibouti in the '70s, there was pretty much only one wooden pier. I remember seeing the creosote bubbling up because it was so hot...
I'm gonna guess not a single O3/4 was involved so that they can bring some reality and insert a Van Ripper-esque wrench into the gears of their little exercise.
Absolutely agree. You can't fight without weapons, and weapons break or are broken and need repair. Typical bean-counter decision to save a few bucks and send them out unarmed.
Sorry, Jack. Not a bean-counters fault. I was a budget geek at the top of the Navy money chain and handled everything except ships and aircraft. Navy and Marine Corps R&D, weapons, ammunition, satellites and other (cats and dogs, SEABEE, nuclear reactors, sonobuoys, training eq, and more) procurement, operations and maintenance, military construction and housing, base closure, military personnel, war budgets (including Coast Guard funding) and disaster assistance. Bean counters highlighted development, procurement, execution and cash flow problems within a constrained budget. Political appointees, generals and admirals made all the big decisions about strategy, force generation and management, operational deployment, ship and aircraft designs, and everything else. Us bean-counters are what holds the center. Lack of effective leadership is the problem.
I probably misstated there. Not bean-counters in the service, bean-counters in appointed/elected positions in government who never did and never will actually get dirty protecting this country. Please accept my apology.
No problem. I knew what you meant, but felt a slight clarification was needed.
A benign threat environment within the Pacific adversarial zone?
Oh, you mean Kansas?
Defending these requires Aegis barges with better load outs than we currently have.
Honor the threat.
Agreed. Watch carefully the Ukraine war. In one month or so, Ukraine sank or disabled more than 200 freighters in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov.
“…operate in benign threat environments“ What is Kansas Air Defense?
Two Civil Air Patrol cadet squadrons?
We should be getting these built at barge yards in sections. This is good for Austal, but we need them on more challenging things.
And spread the wealth.