I proudly served in USS Niagara Falls (AFS-3). Our winches were our main battery. During one combined VERTREP/CONREP event, we transferred 600 pallets of food and aviation and general stores in a 10 hour period. Good day.
Lets do a FleetEx, and declare one of the supply ships (pick one) a casualty. Doesn't even have to be enemy action - a prop gets bent, a bearing spun....Takes it out of action in the middle of catching up to the fleet.
CLF tends to be low priority except for Mine Warfare. Even with the possibility of using US owned ships to augment, we are still woefully short, and nothing active can run with the carriers. I commanded two CLF ships and was XO of one--as I told my crews:"Nobody goes very far, stays very long, or does very much without us.". Or, as WSC put it in The River War :" Victory is the bright flower, supply is the stem without which it would never had bloomed".
I was a POL troop for about a year, before I was commissioned and went to UPT. I learned that without POL and Weps, the Air Force was just a very, very expensive museum. And while maintenance is important, the birds fly all the time with some maintenance deferred, but they don't fly at all without gas.
I feel like the misspending of the money and general mismanagement weve had over the past decades is the culprit... I think if the Porch, or someone...anyone with common sense, had been making big decisions since about '95, we wouldnt have nearly as much to complain about!!
Given the realistic timeline (call it 2-3 years, optimistically), I’m curious what the Porch thinks the best COA available to a truly clear-eyed DOD / USG even is re: materially improving the state of our maritime logistics. Fund an aggressive build program (slow)? Buy up existing stock and retrofit (as needed) to our requirements? Some sort of technology solution that can move the needle?
Genuinely curious and starting to feel like too much of the discourse (broadly, not singling out CDR S or the Porch) is focused on hand-wringing rather than what we might feasibly do about it in time to make a difference vis-a-vis China
It's a legitimate point. Protecting/escorting those vulnerable logistics ships seems to have an even lower priority than the logistics ships. The British can testify how the failure to adequately protect logistics ships such as SS Atlantic Conveyor can have serious consequences.
And the USN has stated that they have no intention of escorting them because they have better things to do then ensuring their ships have fuel during a high intensity conflict. The fact that they scrapped all the vessels that would have escorted them and replaced them with little crappy ships that have neither AA or ASW capability or enough range to reach across the Pacific might have something to do with this. The program that never stops giving....
So, how long can the USN operate in a war against the PLAN if they have no at-sea refueling?
No, it’s not. Nihilism may be justified, may even be realistic given the realities of our naval situation. But the inability to turn it off for long enough to even consider a good faith thought experiment is sad, not helpful.
The Maritime Militia has deployed 400 ships at once, and the Chinese have a Geo SAR sat staring at whatever part of the Pacific they are interested in at any given moment, but it seems capable enough to track a collection of basically merchant ships while still doing other things. So your critical minimally-armed or unarmed logistics ships set out to sail unescorted across the Pacific...
How do you ensure each doesn't 'accidentally' meet up with a PAFMM vessel or two with some laser guided ATGMs with a lot of ammo? Or a sub? And how does the willingness of the mariners to approach unprotected into missile and long-range strike aircraft range match the USN plan for how they will be operated in combat? How does this change after the first one gets blown up?
Does it matter how many ships you have if your plan is to allow the enemy to methodically hunt them down and destroy them en-route?
Try not to get too hysterical. One comment hardly qualifies as "nihilism". More like cynicism, if anything. And, by the way, are you claiming the Navy has the capability to adequately protect/escort the merchant shipping that keeps the country, not just the military, running?
"The doctrine that nothing actually exists or that existence or values are meaningless. Relentless negativity or cynicism suggesting an absence of values or beliefs."
Id think in a pinch, there are a lot of tankers out there for sale for a song. For the price of an LCS, you could buy a few of them. Fitting them out with a couple UNREP stations and some comm gear cant be that spendy or take that long. Jonathan Shipyard in Norfolk built a fueling station on an M-Frame and plumbed it onboard my ship, Sylvania, in about a month, at a peacetime pace.
Sure, theyd be civilian grade, but we could have them in months, not years. And with Red Hill being deactivated, having more tankers than we need (since we will likely lose some) seems a good idea...
Have to agree here. The few existing oilers are decrepit ancient leaky and rotten. No oiler is survivable when attacked by heavier weapons, military build or no.
"I would concentrate the bulk of my efforts on interdicting U.S. and allied resupply lines, on the logic that naval combat forces wither on the vine if deprived of ammunition, fuel, and stores for long. "
If the Japanese had done this from Dec. 41 into '42, then Guadalcanal would have been an impossible proposition for the USN.
As it was, the loss of the Neosho at Coral Sea -which the Japanese mistook for a Cruiser- spooked Fletcher enough at the Guadalcanal landings that he bailed leaving the landing in jeopardy.
There were just a few AO's to bag, and the war would've been very different.
The SL-7's can keep up with carriers if someone is willing to foot the fuel bill. Like many of our sealift ships they're steam powered antiques, but they'll hustle when goosed.
From what I was told by a retired SIGINT guy who was teaching my GMDSS class, the SL-7's at speed can be heard by our subs from several hundred miles away. They haven't been pushed all out in years because of the fuel bill and wear on the plant.
Wouldn't surprise me. Anything screaming along is going to be loud as heck, and surface and mercantile designs aren't exactly built for sound silencing.
I feel as though the state of the Sealift Command is the elephant in the room. Our Sealift fleet has an average age of just under 50 years. No mention of the horribly-failed activation exercise last year, when we were unable to put sealift ships to sea and some suffered total plant failure when attempting to sail for the first time in decades. No mention so far of the slave-labor complaints that have caused the massive manpower shortfall in the sealift fleet (13 months on, 2-3 weeks off? Gee, why can't we find people? The rampant criminality on board, prostitution complaints aboard... how many people realize that our sealift ships' unlicensed crews are now frequently recruited out of criminal diversion programs, rehabs and the like? Or that our maritime administrators overseeing the fleet are a sectrans that has never worked in logistics and a MARAD admin who is not viewed as having enough related experience by mariners under her administration? Show of hands, who notices that the logistics fleet is 90% civilian crewed?
I feel as though the focus on MSC might benefit from speaking with people who have, in fact, worked for MSC.
Sal Mercogliano and RADM Mark Busby would be a valuable addition to this discussion.
The navy really does not have a maritime strategy that would suggest how its distributed maritime operations (DMO) scheme would be used, and therefore has no idea of how many more CLF ships it needs. It of course does not help that all current CLF ships are USNS vessels manned by CIVMARS who may or may not go into battle if called.
Publishing a formalized maritime strategy for the next decade will be a rainbow-chasing exercise. We don't have time to bother with it.
The challenge facing us right now is to adapt the naval resources we will actually have available to us over the next ten years to cope as best we can with the threats we know we will be facing.
Any CLF ship we sent into a combat zone will become a prime target for enemy combat action. It's the easiest and the quickest way to shut down USN forward-deployed combat power.
The obvious near-term solution is to equip the Gator Navy's ships for part-time duty as combat logistics support ships. These ships already embark some level of combat capability and are crewed by US Navy personnel.
If a near-term dust-up with China happens within the next decade, the ad-hoc repurposing of the Gator Navy fleet for CLF support roles is a certainty. We should get ahead of the curve and start planning for it now.
Honest question, what is left of the gator navy? The army sold off their best boats with oceangoing capability. While some of the flat-bottomed old remnants can be put to sea, survivability in weather is a question. From what I remember, the remaining army navy is almost as aged as the MSC RRF.
It would be helpful for the navy to provide some idea of what objectives its DMO concept is designed to produce at the operational level of war to support strategy goals. That's what a maritime strategy would state. Right now there are lots of tactical concepts out there but no one concept connecting them. Yes, Prof Holmes is right in saying more are needed, but what types and how many? Present gator ships are not set up to do CLF at all. They are too slow and big targets themselves.
"Do our budgets and plans match realistic requirements?"
I’m losing my confidence, and I’m sad.
I proudly served in USS Niagara Falls (AFS-3). Our winches were our main battery. During one combined VERTREP/CONREP event, we transferred 600 pallets of food and aviation and general stores in a 10 hour period. Good day.
A sister... I did my Meds aboard Sylvania!!
Lets do a FleetEx, and declare one of the supply ships (pick one) a casualty. Doesn't even have to be enemy action - a prop gets bent, a bearing spun....Takes it out of action in the middle of catching up to the fleet.
Now what?
CLF tends to be low priority except for Mine Warfare. Even with the possibility of using US owned ships to augment, we are still woefully short, and nothing active can run with the carriers. I commanded two CLF ships and was XO of one--as I told my crews:"Nobody goes very far, stays very long, or does very much without us.". Or, as WSC put it in The River War :" Victory is the bright flower, supply is the stem without which it would never had bloomed".
I like that quote.
I was a POL troop for about a year, before I was commissioned and went to UPT. I learned that without POL and Weps, the Air Force was just a very, very expensive museum. And while maintenance is important, the birds fly all the time with some maintenance deferred, but they don't fly at all without gas.
America. Has. No. Money.
All we have is debt.
It should be no mystery why we haven't got the fleet we need for the missions we intend to accomplish.
I feel like the misspending of the money and general mismanagement weve had over the past decades is the culprit... I think if the Porch, or someone...anyone with common sense, had been making big decisions since about '95, we wouldnt have nearly as much to complain about!!
Given the realistic timeline (call it 2-3 years, optimistically), I’m curious what the Porch thinks the best COA available to a truly clear-eyed DOD / USG even is re: materially improving the state of our maritime logistics. Fund an aggressive build program (slow)? Buy up existing stock and retrofit (as needed) to our requirements? Some sort of technology solution that can move the needle?
Genuinely curious and starting to feel like too much of the discourse (broadly, not singling out CDR S or the Porch) is focused on hand-wringing rather than what we might feasibly do about it in time to make a difference vis-a-vis China
It doesn’t matter, because the Navy will just let them all get sunk without defending them.
Thanks Kevin, appreciate the helpful input.
It's a legitimate point. Protecting/escorting those vulnerable logistics ships seems to have an even lower priority than the logistics ships. The British can testify how the failure to adequately protect logistics ships such as SS Atlantic Conveyor can have serious consequences.
And the USN has stated that they have no intention of escorting them because they have better things to do then ensuring their ships have fuel during a high intensity conflict. The fact that they scrapped all the vessels that would have escorted them and replaced them with little crappy ships that have neither AA or ASW capability or enough range to reach across the Pacific might have something to do with this. The program that never stops giving....
So, how long can the USN operate in a war against the PLAN if they have no at-sea refueling?
It's OK that they don't have the range! They couldn't handle the sea states, anyway!
No, it’s not. Nihilism may be justified, may even be realistic given the realities of our naval situation. But the inability to turn it off for long enough to even consider a good faith thought experiment is sad, not helpful.
The Maritime Militia has deployed 400 ships at once, and the Chinese have a Geo SAR sat staring at whatever part of the Pacific they are interested in at any given moment, but it seems capable enough to track a collection of basically merchant ships while still doing other things. So your critical minimally-armed or unarmed logistics ships set out to sail unescorted across the Pacific...
How do you ensure each doesn't 'accidentally' meet up with a PAFMM vessel or two with some laser guided ATGMs with a lot of ammo? Or a sub? And how does the willingness of the mariners to approach unprotected into missile and long-range strike aircraft range match the USN plan for how they will be operated in combat? How does this change after the first one gets blown up?
Does it matter how many ships you have if your plan is to allow the enemy to methodically hunt them down and destroy them en-route?
Bro seriously rtfq
Try not to get too hysterical. One comment hardly qualifies as "nihilism". More like cynicism, if anything. And, by the way, are you claiming the Navy has the capability to adequately protect/escort the merchant shipping that keeps the country, not just the military, running?
"The doctrine that nothing actually exists or that existence or values are meaningless. Relentless negativity or cynicism suggesting an absence of values or beliefs."
Id think in a pinch, there are a lot of tankers out there for sale for a song. For the price of an LCS, you could buy a few of them. Fitting them out with a couple UNREP stations and some comm gear cant be that spendy or take that long. Jonathan Shipyard in Norfolk built a fueling station on an M-Frame and plumbed it onboard my ship, Sylvania, in about a month, at a peacetime pace.
Sure, theyd be civilian grade, but we could have them in months, not years. And with Red Hill being deactivated, having more tankers than we need (since we will likely lose some) seems a good idea...
Have to agree here. The few existing oilers are decrepit ancient leaky and rotten. No oiler is survivable when attacked by heavier weapons, military build or no.
The unstated assumption is that our Political representatives actually want us to Win the next conflict.
That seems foolish given all the evidence to the contrary.
"I would concentrate the bulk of my efforts on interdicting U.S. and allied resupply lines, on the logic that naval combat forces wither on the vine if deprived of ammunition, fuel, and stores for long. "
If the Japanese had done this from Dec. 41 into '42, then Guadalcanal would have been an impossible proposition for the USN.
As it was, the loss of the Neosho at Coral Sea -which the Japanese mistook for a Cruiser- spooked Fletcher enough at the Guadalcanal landings that he bailed leaving the landing in jeopardy.
There were just a few AO's to bag, and the war would've been very different.
Recommend this, from the 'other' Sal...
https://youtu.be/gv6lfke6lEY?si=bmIijwuPydvirhc-
The SL-7's can keep up with carriers if someone is willing to foot the fuel bill. Like many of our sealift ships they're steam powered antiques, but they'll hustle when goosed.
Truth — Remember the first time I “saw” one of these Rocket Ships on radar back in the Med during the run up to DESERT SHIELD/STORM…
On the bridge of the SS SAM HOUSTON being over taken north of Libya, remember thinking WHAT THE HELL is that thing screaming along at 35 knots…
From what I was told by a retired SIGINT guy who was teaching my GMDSS class, the SL-7's at speed can be heard by our subs from several hundred miles away. They haven't been pushed all out in years because of the fuel bill and wear on the plant.
Wouldn't surprise me. Anything screaming along is going to be loud as heck, and surface and mercantile designs aren't exactly built for sound silencing.
I feel as though the state of the Sealift Command is the elephant in the room. Our Sealift fleet has an average age of just under 50 years. No mention of the horribly-failed activation exercise last year, when we were unable to put sealift ships to sea and some suffered total plant failure when attempting to sail for the first time in decades. No mention so far of the slave-labor complaints that have caused the massive manpower shortfall in the sealift fleet (13 months on, 2-3 weeks off? Gee, why can't we find people? The rampant criminality on board, prostitution complaints aboard... how many people realize that our sealift ships' unlicensed crews are now frequently recruited out of criminal diversion programs, rehabs and the like? Or that our maritime administrators overseeing the fleet are a sectrans that has never worked in logistics and a MARAD admin who is not viewed as having enough related experience by mariners under her administration? Show of hands, who notices that the logistics fleet is 90% civilian crewed?
I feel as though the focus on MSC might benefit from speaking with people who have, in fact, worked for MSC.
Sal Mercogliano and RADM Mark Busby would be a valuable addition to this discussion.
The navy really does not have a maritime strategy that would suggest how its distributed maritime operations (DMO) scheme would be used, and therefore has no idea of how many more CLF ships it needs. It of course does not help that all current CLF ships are USNS vessels manned by CIVMARS who may or may not go into battle if called.
Publishing a formalized maritime strategy for the next decade will be a rainbow-chasing exercise. We don't have time to bother with it.
The challenge facing us right now is to adapt the naval resources we will actually have available to us over the next ten years to cope as best we can with the threats we know we will be facing.
Any CLF ship we sent into a combat zone will become a prime target for enemy combat action. It's the easiest and the quickest way to shut down USN forward-deployed combat power.
The obvious near-term solution is to equip the Gator Navy's ships for part-time duty as combat logistics support ships. These ships already embark some level of combat capability and are crewed by US Navy personnel.
If a near-term dust-up with China happens within the next decade, the ad-hoc repurposing of the Gator Navy fleet for CLF support roles is a certainty. We should get ahead of the curve and start planning for it now.
Honest question, what is left of the gator navy? The army sold off their best boats with oceangoing capability. While some of the flat-bottomed old remnants can be put to sea, survivability in weather is a question. From what I remember, the remaining army navy is almost as aged as the MSC RRF.
Gator Navy in this case is LSD, LPD, LHD, and LHA type ships. Once the Marines are ashore, what's the role for them?
These ships do have Navy EW and point defense, a plus over MSC and merchant hulls.
It would be helpful for the navy to provide some idea of what objectives its DMO concept is designed to produce at the operational level of war to support strategy goals. That's what a maritime strategy would state. Right now there are lots of tactical concepts out there but no one concept connecting them. Yes, Prof Holmes is right in saying more are needed, but what types and how many? Present gator ships are not set up to do CLF at all. They are too slow and big targets themselves.
"Logistics is the ball and chain of Armored warfare" Guderian.
It is also the ball and chain of Naval and Infantry warfare.