Abe Lincoln sailed through the Strait of Hormuz Sunday and absolutely nothing happened:
Cmdr. Amy Derrick-Frost said the USS Abraham Lincoln entered the Gulf on Sunday without incident to conduct scheduled maritime security operations. Derrick-Frost is a spokeswoman for the Navy’s 5th Fleet, based in the Gulf state of Bahrain.
U.S. warships frequently operate in the Gulf. But when the carrier USS John Stennis departed the Gulf in late December, Iranian officials warned the U.S. not to return. On Saturday, however, Iran indicated that it viewed U.S. naval operations in the Gulf as normal.
The mullahs may be crazy, but they are not obviously stupid.
ABOARD THE USS ENTERPRISE (Reuters) – The United States will not cut America’s fleet of 11 aircraft carriers to help trim the budget deficit, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Saturday, citing tensions with Iran as an example of why the massive ships are so critical to national security…
The Enterprise’s last deployment comes at a moment of heightened tensions with Iran, which has threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil shipping lane. That’s something the United States says it will not allow.
“You’re part of what keeps our force agile and flexible and quickly deployable and capable of taking on any enemy, anywhere in the world,” Panetta said, speaking about 100 nautical miles off the coast of the U.S. state of Georgia.
Nice words of course, if you’re a proponent of sea power. But if the US military is to take at least $400b in cuts across the next decade – and potentially as much as $1 trillion, if Congress can’t get its act together, and we remain “fully committed” to the F-35 series, you kind of have to wonder where those cuts are to occur.
Like any large organisation consultants will be bought in to identify and trim the fat, these will morph into full time permanent positions. Higher ups will retain their acolytes and a staff large enough to befit their ego.
People that actually get work done will buy their own stationary in order to continue doing actual work.
Unfortunately all too true. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy at work…it’s worse than thermodynamics.
Ah, but Honest Abe was not the one that was threatened. It was that other guy. Who, we all know, went home with his tail between his legs.
/sarcasm off
“Honest Abe?” I thought its new name was “Baberaham Lincoln.”
I expect the budget cuts to result in what budget cuts have done in the past. Cut training hours, cut flight hours, ship deployments become periods of extended port visits with little sea time in between (makes for much entertainment watching the plat camera, particularly that first night back at sea). Cut parts acquisition so that every squadron has two or three hangar queens to keep the rest of the planes flying. Start three aircraft in the hope that two will make the launch, and those that launch only have defects that don’t prevent flying. (Sorry for sounding bitter – I can’t forget flying 40 miles off Benghazi in 1978 as the ONLY flyable CAP for a period of about 30 minutes, seeing about a dozen Libyan bogeys on the radar when we turned toward the coast.)
Land forces spend less time in the field, less time shooting guns and using other things that make loud noises. Hopefully we don’t get to the point we were at in 1940 when Army recruits were training with sticks instead of guns.
What I can’t figure is where the next round of massive funding will come from to correct the problems with a massive drawdown. Reagan’s defense buildup corrected the contraction of the post-Vietnam period and Carter administration. Given the deficits and national debt of today, which are truly enormous against the deficits of the Reagan years, how can the damage of a large contraction in defense spending be corrected?
George V.
It’s obvious where the funding SHOULD come from: eliminating the tactical arm of the US Air Force. USAF is incapable of rapid reaction. Their basing has to be approved by the host country, then their infrastructure brought in. Or they can fly super-long-range strikes like they did in 1986 against Tripoli–once. If the US was to take the strategic position that we will no longer engage in PROTRACTED military conflicts, the elimination of tactical USAF capabilities would be a painless (except to them) logical conclusion. USAF keeps their strategic and logistical missions, and starts taking space seriously. Everyone understands that carriers are vital for the short, decisive military interventions that will continue to be necessary. It’s a win-win. And it won’t happen in my lifetime.
A not indefensible point. About 20 years ago, there was an article in the USNI Proceedings written by a USAF officer. He argued that B-2s and CVNs were not rival systems (as many thought), but complementary. That the USAF should shift resources to strategic bombers and let the Navy have more of the TACAIR mission.
Events proved this to have been a brilliant, if unimplemented, idea.
I’d turn TacAir back to the Army. The Navy and Marines already have theirs, and the AF gums things up for the Army. Turn all the Tactical fighters and Tactical transports over to the Army, then the AF can go on to being the strategic service they wanted to be in 1947.
Actually, I’m expecting the budget cuts to come mostly out of the Army. Specifically, a cut of 20-30% in their end strength. Long overdue, too – we’re FINALLY breaking free of the 1985 force balance designed to fight the Soviet Union in Europe.
And we get the money for a build-back by building the economy. When you run a welfare state with an income tax, you have a recipe for massive swings in deficits and surpluses. When times are good, revenues are high, welfare spending is low. When times are hard, revenues are low, welfare spending is high. Get the economy moving, and the deficit solves itself.
Cutting the Army also works, and is also consistent with avoiding the protracted engagements that (1) just result in prolonged misery for the troops, (2) do not necessarily add stability or safety, and (3) on the Asian land mass, we cannot win.
Dealing with Iran’s military reminds me of a certain character from Monty Python lore, Brave Sir Robin…..
Maybe the Mullahs could have their minstrels sing a battle song for them like Brave Sir Robin:
Bravely Iran’s Mullahs
Rode forth from Tehran
They were not afraid to die
Oh Brave Mullahs
They were not at all afraid to be killed in nasty ways
Brave, Brave, Brave Brave Mullahs
They were not in the least bit scared to be mashed into a pulp
Or to have their eyes gouged out, and elbows broken
To have their kneecaps split and bodies burned away
And their limbs all hacked and mangled, Brave Mullahs….
They’ve been waiting since c. 622AD…what’s a decade more at this point?
A lot of good points, most importantly about the differences between tactical and strategic air assets. Given we’re probably not going to find ourselves defending the plains in Germany against the Rampaging Russian Hordes and their fighters so vast, perhaps it is time the mission of the Air Force change a bit.
On the other hand, we mention Enterprise in the same breath we mention keeping 11 carriers. Enterprise is older than the sailors who serve on her. Many a salty chief I heard from 25 years ago opined she was ready for retirement then, little to know her career would extend beyond theirs. She has been an invaluable asset, some would snark mainly in giving real-world data on MTBF rates, but alas her time has come.
What to replace her with? There is a certain trickle-down, Keynesian economic school logic of shipbuilding being a perfect place for deficit spending, given a hard asset comes from it along with employment at shipyards, steel mills, skilled trades, small job shops and the like. Compared to such shovel-ready projects as building sidewalks and simple bridges this might be something all of Congress could agree upon. CVN-77 cost $6.7 billion, which isn’t chump change until compared against a $15 Trillion overall deficit. Adding the support ships, which like a belt and suspenders aren’t sexy but still necessary, might see between $10 and $15 billion needed to replace her.
Those are the numbers. Given the spending of late I suppose asking where you might cut is sort of an academic exercise, but the desire is probably there. Do you cut support ships, without which a carrier is one large floating target lacking her screen, or do you cut programs that affect the silo-sitters and air bases that contribute to the economies of fly-over states? Maybe you cut the Army, and as that new budget comes down they cut not only training and people but also equipment? I know many a rifleman who would have preferred an M-14 or even a BAR to the M-16, but I don’t know a one who wanted to face tanks with an M1 “bazooka” or eat C-rations.
One thing is for certain. If we were once the Arsenal of Democracy and could sit across an ocean making soldiers and weapons and shipping them to where they were needed (not that making soldiers was a sort of assembly-line operation, you understand — I’m talking training time here, not manufacturing), the grim reality of logistics today is that in a conventional, all-out war the supply lines run dry after a few weeks. In 1941 an ocean was a barrier to attack, today it’s a barrier to supply. Fuel then limited armies and navies, today it limits all aspects of supply and mobility right on down the chain. Then we had 9 weeks to train soldiers and a month to build a supply ship. Try that today and the war is over before replacement men or material reach the battle.
These are hard choices to make. Predicting the next war actually isn’t all that hard, but predicting the war after that or the war 20 years from now is. Leviathan is what we used to do best, and is no longer possible let alone affordable over any length of time.
One thing is for sure, the past is no predictor for the present. 70 years ago, during the four years of World War 2, we built 151 aircraft carriers (122 of them of the escort variety). It took 6 years to build CVN-77. By then, the war would have been over.
– Max
The discussion becomes even more complex when taking into account new threats to carriers. Here’s an excellent article from Aviation Leak:
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_generic.jsp?channel=awst&id=news/awst/2011/07/18/AW_07_18_2011_p24-347899.xml&headline=null&prev=10
But the biggest threat to carriers in Westpac is not really ASBM, nor even the 800 missile boats, torpedo and gunboats of the PLA Navy–it’s the 40,000 Chinese fishing boats, thousands of which could be covertly equipped with the 100-kg C-701 missile. It’s not a ship-killer, it’s a poke-holes-in-your-radars wear-you-down weapon. Unless the USN is going to sink fishing boats, this is a real problem.
Which raises the question, what do we really want to do with our carriers? The National Military Strategy isn’t a strategy, it’s platitudes. Defend Taiwan? Maybe, but that’s a red herring anyway. In the 21st century, which I call the “century of scarcity,” China is most likely to use its military to obtain basic resources. Rice from Thailand, oil from the Sea of Okhotsk, etc. And are we going to try and stop them?
More likely we are going to do anti-Khaddafi-like ops: “Bad, bad dictator, you’re not doing what we like.” Carriers very useful for that. Anti-piracy doesn’t call for carriers. So what’s the mission? Iran? Tehran is 475 miles one-way from the northern Persian Gulf. Maybe we should put a carrier in the Caspian.