Apparently, the Navy can’t even hear its own words. If they did, the contradictions that leap out of them would shame even the Navy. For example, let’s take a look at a recent Navy Times article.[1]
The U.S. Navy sees the 2020s as presenting the “peak risk” for China making a move against Taiwan, driving the service’s effort to prioritize readiness over fleet size … [1]
“The Navy brings a strong view that the decade of concern is 2020 — and in some respects, that’s not a universal view in the department, but we consistently believe and have thought that that’s the decade that we see of peak risk and that we’re going to be ready for.”[1]
So, lacking even an internal consensus, the Navy has decided that China will invade Taiwan before the end of the decade. Okay, that sets the stage for the article. The Navy has established a clear objective: to get ready for a major war that will occur sometime in the next 8 years. Common sense suggests that most of us would put an immediate halt on ship retirements for the next 8 years, right? So, what did the Navy opt to do?
In its budget request for this fiscal year, the Navy asked to decommission 15 ships, including seven [Aegis] cruisers.[1]
So, the Navy’s approach to getting ready for a major war in the next 8 years is to early retire 7 of the most powerful ships in the world and 15 ships in total. Given that our build rate is around a half dozen ships per year, few of them actual warships, can you see any problem with that approach? Any, at all? Even a tiny bit? The Navy can’t.
How did the Navy justify these ship retirements during a time of maximum need?
He [Adm. William Lescher, Vice Chief of Naval Operations - VCNO] did not specifically address why cutting the cruisers made sense for a near-term fight, though Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday told Defense News last month the cruisers were eating up time and resources the Navy didn’t have. With the cruiser modernization program facing significant challenges and cruisers experiencing maintenance emergencies during training and on deployment, Gilday said tens of millions of dollars were being rerouted to repair them instead of paying for important fleet training, maintenance and operations.[1]
You know … I might buy into Gilday’s thinking about spending on training and maintenance except for the fact that the Navy has claimed to be focused on training and maintenance for the last several years and not only has there been no improvement in training or maintenance, there has been a noticeable degradation in training and maintenance. Throwing more money at a proven losing proposition is insane.
By the way, did you catch Gilday lumping ‘operations’ in with training and maintenance? What operations? What are we doing, operationally, that is preparing us for this monster fight in the next 8 years? I don’t know of any operations. Freedom of Navigation operations (FONOPS) are certainly not preparing us for peer war.
Did you also catch Gilday’s bit about the cruisers ‘eating up time’? Do you recall several years ago when the Navy sold Congress on the 2-4-6 cruiser modernization plan? Do you recall that we documented that the cruisers were left idle, literally rusting away pier side for four years (see, “Ticonderoga Class Modernization”)? There’s your window of time, Adm. Gilday. You had years of time to modernize the cruisers but you didn’t. Of course, this was because the Navy didn’t really want to modernize the cruisers. They wanted to retire them either officially or, when Congress wouldn’t allow that, unofficially by letting them sit idle and rotting with no crews. You did that and now you complain about the lack of time, Admiral? What a deceitful hypocrite.
As I’ve repeatedly stated, we need to stop deployments, bring our Navy home, and focus on actual training and maintenance instead of continuing to send ships on nearly year long deployments that … wait for it … degrade our training and maintenance! You know … the exact opposite of what the Navy claims to have prioritized.
Is ComNavOps the only one who doesn’t believe the Navy is actually preparing for war in any serious way? No …
Rep. Rob Wittman, the top Republican on the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee, remains skeptical of the Navy’s approach. In opening remarks at the hearing, he said it was “disheartening” to see a perceived lack of urgency from the Navy in preparing to deter or fight China.
“Last year, the Navy requested only one destroyer, no amphibs, and proposed to retire seven large surface combatants whose firepower exceeded that of the entire British Navy. The Navy provided a ‘30-year shipbuilding plan’ that was only good for one year,” he said. “The Navy submitted a shipyard recapitalization plan with little financial backing. And the Navy continues to underman our surface navy who currently is lacking over 5,000 sailors.”[1]
Now, the cynical among us might suspect that the Navy is simply crying wolf about the Chinese intentions and timetable in order to coerce Congress into increasing the Navy’s budget. On the other hand, I do believe the Chinese are looking quite seriously at moving on Taiwan and nothing we’ve done with respect to Ukraine has given them any reason to think we’d attempt to stop them. Heck, we won’t even recognize Taiwan as a country! That’s not exactly a commitment to defend the island, is it?
So, let me see if I’ve got this right …
The Navy claims to anticipate a peer war in the next few years and their response is to retire as many powerful ships as possible?
The Navy claims to anticipate a peer war in the next few years and their response is to attempt to early retire a carrier, as they’ve proposed on multiple occasions?
The Navy claims to anticipate a peer war in the next few years and their response is to scrap nearly brand new LCS ships while continuing to build brand new LCS ships? Which is it? If the LCS is so worthless that they need to be dumped, why are we continuing to build new ones? Alternatively, if the LCS is worth continuing to build, why are we dumping nearly new ships? You can’t have it both ways, Navy.
The Navy claims to anticipate a peer war in the next few years and their response is to restructure our fleet around small, weak, unmanned ships that, at the moment, exist only on paper as developmental concepts?
The Navy claims to be prioritizing maintenance and yet keeps degrading ships by sending them on several month long useless cruises and executing double-pump, back-to-back carrier deployments?
The Navy claims to be prioritizing training while barely – or not even – providing enough flight hours for non-deployed air wing pilots to stay flight certified?
The Navy claims to be prioritizing training and maintenance while showering waivers around as if they were confetti?
The hypocrisy and duplicity of Navy leadership is breathtaking.
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[1]Navy Times, “Navy says China fight is most likely in 2020s, sharpening its focus on readiness”, Megan Eckstein, 3-Mar-2021,
March 3 article Defense News "How mistakes in modernizing a US Navy cruiser can benefit destroyers", think more properly should have been titled Navy planned mismanagement of the Tico cruiser modernization program, its not as if Navy has no experience in modernization of ship classes in the past and how trying to get it right for the Burke DDG Mod 2.0 program.
ReplyDeletePS Surprised the DDG Mod 2.0 program would appear to include the much larger/expensive SEWIP Block 3? with jammers on the first Burkes IIA in program and later ships will also add SPY-6(V)4, might be needing ballast to counter the extra top weight.
PPS Capt. Megan Thomas, CG-64 Gettysburg’s commanding officer, mentions crew of 338, 25% higher than the 270 quoted in 'At Sea Billet Gaps'
https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2022/03/01/how-mistakes-in-modernizing-a-us-navy-cruiser-can-benefit-destroyers/
It's usually good to have extra crewmen aboard a warship on deployment, in case we lose some due to illness, injury, or death- like what happens ALL THE TIME in war. The "minimal manning" the USN keeps trying, ignores hard-won lessons from history.
DeleteThe people running the Navy couldn't run a bake sale. They are totally ignoring war preparation to focus on diversity, inclusion, and equity (D-I-E, which is exactly what is going to happen).
ReplyDeleteCould it be that this is a fairly recent decision? Perhaps it came after the plan calling for all the retirements?
ReplyDeleteMy impression was that the Navy was all into "divest to invest" in preparation for fighting a war in the 2030's or 2040's. I know that a few Congress critters were talking about the 2020's but it wasn't clear to me that the Navy had bought into it. Divest to invest does NOT make sense if you expect to have to fight in the next few years.
"Could it be that this is a fairly recent decision? Perhaps it came after the plan calling for all the retirements?"
Delete1. It's been obvious for the last 10-20 years, that China is the number one, and existential, threat so the ship retirement decisions have come after the Chinese threat was well known. Now, if you refer specifically to the 8 year period, well, I don't know when the Navy came to that conclusion. Many other people and organizations came to the conclusion that Taiwan is under imminent threat many years ago and that an invasion would happen as soon as China felt they had built up sufficient military strength to make it happen.
2. Even if the Navy had ineptly only just come to the conclusion about the timetable, they could instantly halt any retirement plans and, in fact, start reactivating recently retired ships that hadn't yet been disposed of. It's not as if a retirement decision is an irreversible, binding contract.
RE: the cruisers rotting at the pier. Any chance that they got some preservation work, like what happens for category B maintenance in the reserves, to prevent at least some of the corrosion?
ReplyDeleteI can't speak to internal preservation efforts but photos of the exterior of the idled cruisers are painful to see. They clearly had no external preservation program in place. That makes it unlikely that there was any internal preservation taking place.
DeleteIn addition, Gilday has stated that the cruisers were in far worse shape than expected. Well, duh, you left them unpreserved for four years!
The only reason I can think of that it would be justified to retire these ships now would be if they had been so poorly maintained that corrosion was too far advanced to be fixed by any reasonable amount of repair. Of course, that would also be a scandal. We give the Navy billions of dollars to buy ships, and then they don't bother taking care of them.
ReplyDelete"so poorly maintained that corrosion was too far advanced to be fixed by any reasonable amount of repair."
DeleteNo amount of neglect or corrosion repair would even begin to approach the cost and time required to construct replacement ships. It is ALWAYS cheaper (in the short run … like prepping for a war in the next few years) to repair than to build new.
A new construction ship that we contract for today will require a MINIMUM of 5 years to commission. That's almost the entire war risk period. We can repair corrosion in weeks to months, if we focus on it. If the Navy thinks war is imminent, the only rational action is to repair as many ships as possible. If the Navy is right, those ships only have to last a maximum of 8 more years and likely less.
Unfortunately, the Navy Managers are not interested in winning, they are only interested in the money flow. And not just any money flow. There is little to benefit later careers in boosting training, maintenance, or increasing purchases of existing weapons systems. Only big new pipe dream technical solutions or giant overpriced ships will benefit the MICC.
ReplyDelete"the Navy Managers are not interested in winning, they are only interested in the money flow."
DeleteThat's far too simplistic an explanation. I know that the pattern of flag officers and higher ranking officers getting cushy retirement jobs in the defense industry gets a lot of press and notoriety but it's actually only a small handful of the officers who retire every year. The vast majority simply retire and/or get jobs in totally unrelated fields. So, presumably, the vast majority of those officers were working the Navy for other reasons and a large part of those reasons has to be patriotism and the welfare of the country and Navy which would include training and maintenance. The question, then, is how/why we still fail to properly address training and maintenance when the vast majority of higher level officers have no reason not to do so?
I can observe the effects but I have no explanation.
The simplest explanation is the correct one.
DeleteBut you have a valid point, many officers do go on and do good work in either Defense or other companies. Leadership is a very valuable and scarce commodity.
However, when in the service, the group think takes over or even actively suppresses anyone that bucks getting and keeping the money flow from going. The good ones leave before they are permanently tainted and ruined. The others take that perverse careerist and political subservience mentality into whatever endeavors they go into. I hate pointing this out but there is no other explanation for the fiascos we have seen both in procurement, operations, and maintenance. And the first step in any 12 step program is to admit you have a problem. Hi we are the Services (not just Navy) and we have a careerist problem.
USN will never tell us more about this and what exactly "...that’s not a universal view in the department," means or entails but would be curious to know more.....
ReplyDeleteAre some thinking it will happen sooner? Not happen at all? Are we ready enough? Not at all and some want to take a different path than the official line?
My guess is some are opposed to what USN is doing but is being sidelined....just like USMC, I'm sure not everyone is buying Berger "vision".
The reunification of Taiwan will start with cement laden bulk carriers blowing their keels in the channels at Guam and Pearl.
ReplyDeleteMissile swarm on Kadena and the SDF/airport on Oki, as well as the non revetmented motor pools. Futenma is not even worth any missiles.
Thus, only the navy in Japan and already at sea can step in. None of the LCSs make the trek from the states, all having broken down.
8 Burkes sorte from Japan, 4 collide with each other because that is the Navy surface O way.
The carrier admiral wants to launch strikes. But the Chinese ambassador visits the White House and explains to Harris their concerns about environmental damage when they sink the carriers with Sunburn swarms, while showing her the current positions and loadout of the carriers.
"scrap nearly brand new LCS ships while continuing to build brand new LCS ships? Which is it?"
ReplyDeleteMilitary industry complex.
Military, Industry, and CONGRESSIONAL Complex - as Eisenhower first wrote it. He changed it because he was proud of his record of getting along with Congress and didn't want to ruin that part of his reputation.
DeleteBut I bet they are using the correct pronouns.
ReplyDeleteIs there no way that we could gift these ships to the Taiwanese, or sell them at a nominal price? The Taiwanese have good shipbuilding capacity, and modernizing or re-furbing them should be a manageable task.
ReplyDeleteOkay, maybe they're too big, or too complex, or maybe the Taiwanese couldn't crew them but surely anything's better than scrapping six good warships.
On the upside the Russians just knocked themselves out, which should free Atlantic based naval units.
ReplyDeleteAnd the other upside of Russian debacle is that no doubt the Chinese will now have to reconsider a lot of things:
a.) Unless they go nuclear, Russia is no longer a conventional threat that tie up resources in Europe. T
b.) The Russian debacle will no doubt need to be digested by the Chinese especially in relation to:
(i) Logistics (which in their case they have to sustain over a sea).
{ii) Communications (noting Chinese army is actually on paper more poorly equipped than Russian one),
(iii) Their own technology base which is Russian and which is being compromised by Ukrainians managing to capture a lot of high tech equipment including T-90 tanks, KA-52 attack helos, Buk/Pantsir/Tor/Tunguska air defence systems, various battlefield comms vehicles and who knows what else.
(iv) Stocks of PGMs.
(v). Combined arms including and especially coordinating air and ground coordination which Chinese knew they were struggling with.
(vi). Ramping up SEAD/DEAD capabilities.
(vii). Ensuring they have sufficient ISTAR resources.
(viii). Ensuring ground and air forces are competent at urban warfare (MOUT)
(ix). Review of cyberwarfare and electronic warfare capabilities.
(x). Ramp up drone production to fill many of above roles.
Other than PGM stocks, all of these are things we assumed Russia to be able to do and they were all colossal cluster@#$s.
And the Russian military was supposedly more advanced than the Chinese - eg Chinese still have very dated J-7 (MiG-21) and J-8 (MiG-23 equivalent) in service. Type 59 (T-55 equivalent) is still in service as is HQ-2 (S75/SA-2 Guideline equivalent).
And the naval implications are clear above - ISTAR, command and control, air-sea coordination, SEAD/DEAD, battlespace management, logistics etc.
Type 055 destroyer may be super awesome but if it's blundering on its own without a clue as to where even friendly units are let alone the enemy, it's as dead as some many super hyped Russian weapons in Ukraine.
And striking at say Taiwan will require very competent troops.
In fact Taiwan is a far harder egg to crack than Ukraine - surrounded by sea, advanced fighter fleet supported by AWACS, EW, concentrated air defence network, and obviously a super western model that promotes merit instead of corruption and nepotism.
China going to be spending money on logistics for sure!!!!
DeleteI vaguely recall a story that USN wasn't happy when we gave the 4 KIDDs to Taiwan and they looked brand new and useful after a few months, after USN saying to the effect that they were no good which raised a few eye brows in Congress....my guess is giving old TICOs to Taiwan is running the risk that after 1 year, tops, they come out of dock looking tip top shape would make a few admirals in DC look bad....
DeleteYou may recall that the rationale for retiring the Perrys was that they could not operate the [then] newer Standard missiles. As it turns out, Australia upgraded their Perrys to use those same Standards and added an 8-cell VLS/ESSM in front of the Mk13 launcher! That made the USN look like idiots. Which, of course ...
DeleteAre we so sure Russia had a "debacle" already?
DeleteIt's a very simplistic notion to point at Russia's position and say China's will be worse off.
DeleteIt's always very puzzling as to why every makes China out to be second place compared to Russia military when in reality there is no evidence to support that claim.
China lacking in communications ? China had launched twice as much satellites than Russia, and most of them are government owned which have better security and links.
A lot of China's modern military equipment had already significantly diverge from the Russians since the early 2000. The only similarity their tanks share is the 125mm cannon, and they had never imported the KA-52 or any of the AA systems you listed apart from the Buk and Tor and as far as we know the Tor has not been lost in action or captured and Russia's Buk is at least a generation behind China equivalent the HQ-16.
" eg Chinese still have very dated J-7 (MiG-21) and J-8 (MiG-23 equivalent) in service. Type 59 (T-55 equivalent) is still in service as is HQ-2 (S75/SA-2 Guideline equivalent)."
All nations keep second hand weapons in stock and second tier usage for costs issues. All of these systems you listed are relegated to training and militia usage. The us still keeps variants of the M60 around for non-active military use, so are we to say that the US is second tier ?
Delete
"my guess is giving old TICOs to Taiwan is running the risk that after 1 year, tops, they come out of dock looking tip top shape would make a few admirals in DC look bad...."
ReplyDeleteWonder what would happen if we gave the LCSs to Taiwan?
"Wonder what would happen if we gave the LCSs to Taiwan?"
DeleteWe'd to to pay them to take em!! But maybe the could be loaded with some large FAEs and sent at a Chinese invasion fleet as remote control, modern day fire ships??
"But maybe the could be loaded with some large FAEs and sent at a Chinese invasion fleet as remote control, modern day fire ships?"
DeleteYes, kamikaze attacks will be the best way to get some use out of the LCSs.
Jesus Christ, did the USN screw up that program.