Your High Value Unit (HVU) May Not be What You Think it is
there is more than one way to kill a Carrier Strike Group (CSG)
This is a companion to yesterday’s post.
It popped into my head last night while I was reading through comments the superior coverage Sal Mercogliano gave of the USNS ships over the last year.
None of what the US Navy accomplished off Israel and in the Red Sea would have been possible without them.
However…they are unarmed and for a vast majority of the time, unescorted to and from the ports they use to “top off” before returning to the fleet to transfer the supplies that keeps the fleet in the fight.
Especially in the Pacific, the world’s oceans are no longer an 'American lake.' The Pax Americana—if it ever existed—is now an artifact of memory.
I don’t know how many more red lights we need before someone fixes this problem—that our most critical enabler is essentially unable to defend itself, even in a rudimentary way.
Wargame the vulnerability below and its first, second, and third-order effects if multiple ships like Supply were sunk.
There should be no counterargument.
When I commanded an AO during a North Atlantic exercise I made multiple trips into a Norwegian Fjord NATO fuel pier. I suggested that it might give the exercise more realism if I was escorted on each run. Nope. It seems that there were not enough escort assets to pull them out of the "shooting war" to exercise that lumbering AO into the pier. Of course, real world I would have probably made one of none successful trips, thus leaving the precious shooters dead in the water for lack of fuel.
Just sayin!
As I asked the strike group commander during my one and only waterside tactics symposiums, “nice plan Admiral, but where the fuck are the replenishment ships?” Crickets. I was “excused” from further mandatory circle jerks by the big XO.