(09-10-2020 07:03 AM)TexanMark Wrote: (09-09-2020 11:25 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: I am a retired naval officer and I have tremendous respect for out military. I have little respect for out current senior officer corps. I would probably use a worse term than Trump did to describe our current lot of flag and general officers.
From the navy perspective, at least the last three CNOs (Greenert, Richardson, and Gilday) have made idiotic decision after idiotic decision. Consider the procurement decisions:
- Four $14B Ford aircraft carriers that can't arm, launch, or recover aircraft because their catapults, arresting gear, and weapons lifts don't work; now the toilets don't work either (although the idiot Rumsfeld deserves a lot of the blame for this one)
- Thirty-two $800MM Littoral Combat Ships that are of no use in the littorals or in combat, and the only reason to send them on deployments is to give our fleet tugs practice towing them home when their engines fail
- 693 $125 MM F-35s, that should have been three different aircraft--a fighter/interceptor with long-range sensors, stand-off weapons, and great visibility and maneuverability in case it got into a dogfight; an attack/bomber with stealth, long range, and a big bomb load; and a rugged STOVL "Marine A-10" with a big gun and weapons load
- Five $3.8B LHAs/LHDs amphibious ships, that can carry a lot of Marines and equipment from Point A to Point B, or actually 25-50 miles offshore from Point B becuase they are too expensive and carry too much stuff to be risked in closer, and from 25-50 miles offshore they have no way to get tanks and heavy artillery ashore--boats are too slow, helos and V-22s can't lift the weight, and LCACs are too unreliable--so the Marines are having to reconfigure themselves as ultra light infantry, and there just aren't many missions for a bunch of Boy Scouts with BB guns.
That's almost $200B of procurement mistakes alone.
The last two Commandants of the Marine Corps (Neller and Berger) have caught a lot of flack for coming up with fanciful missions that make no sense and cannot be executed, but given what they are forced to work with by the Navy, I'm not sure they have any viable alternatives.
It runs deeper than procurement. Political correctness has replaced military and professional competence as the standard for promotion and selection for command. As a result, look at the Navy's performance in the last 10-15 years. We have:
- The Fitzgerald and McCain collisions
- The grounding of the Port Royal in full sight of Honolulu airport
- The debacle with two gunboats and the Iranians at Farsi Island
- Our carriers, attack submarines, and other ships are sitting in port for years because they can't get major maintenance done
The idiots are truly running the asylum. We don't know how to fight, but our sensitivity training is top notch. Trump needs to fire the lot and start over.
As a retired Air Force aviation officer I agree. Most of our G.O.'s are self serving chameleons. It is very political and many made rank to O-6 and above under Obama by doing stupid PC things to the troops. Hopefully under Trump we can promote more Warriors and less political and diversity imposters.
I'm worried that the PC SJWs are now too well entrenched in the top echelons. It's going to take a while to purge them. And that was not at the top of Trump's list. If he get re-elected, I hope it becomes a priority. If Biden wins, and pzrticlulary if Harris replaces him, I'm afraid we may all need to learn Chinese.
We are in Cold War II, and this time the enemy is China. For all of the "Trump-Russia" noise, I think there is a very real possibility that we could turn Russia into an ally against China (the Tom Clancy "The Bear and the Dragon" scenario). I'm way more worried about Biden's connections to China than about Trump's alleged connections to Russia. The 1980s called and want their foreign policy back.
What's worse is that we are still trying (unsuccessfully) to impose our will militarily on the Mideast, while China is pursuing an economic strategy that is buying up everybody around us. Ross Perot said something in 1992 that I had believed for some time, "In the post-Cold-War era, economic power will be more important than military power." China understands that. We don't.
Having blasted a bunch of procurement and other military decisions in my post above, I probably should tell you what I'd do instead:
- Build more Nimitz carriers ($9B, and everything works) instead of Fords; increase carrier numbers by converting LHAs/LHDs to "Lightning Carrier" STOVL carriers or CVLs (like 1960s British Ark Royal or conventional French CDG), and building some modernized Kitty Hawk conventional carriers; ideally you'd want 12 2-carrier battle groups (CVBGs) which could combine to form 6 4-carrier fast carrier task forces (CTFs)
- Spend the difference on buying enough airplanes and training enough pilots to put full air wings on them; a carrier's fighting capacity is its airplanes, not itself
- Give the LCSs to the Coast Guard, and if they don't want them (and they probably won't, although their egos might drive them to want to take them and show the Navy how to make them work) offer them for sale to allies; just get rid of them
- Take the 3 Zumwalt destroyers (another $10B boondoggle) and deploy two of them to WestPac and the Med as flagships for the 7th and 6th Fleets, and put the third in San Diego as a test bed for new systems (lasers, rail guns, etc.)
- Instead of the overpriced Zumwalt and LCSs, build 20 escort squadrons, each including 1 cruiser (enlarged Ticonderoga, with 8" guns, more VLS cells, and extensive UAV/USV/UUV facilities), 2 AAW destroyers (could be Burkes), 3 GP frigates (could be FFG(X)), and 4 ASW frigates (single purpose ASW ships)
- Replace the LHAs/LHDs and San Antonio class LPDs with 10 squadron-sized amphibious ready groups (ARGs) including a smaller LHA/LHD like the Spanish Juan Carlos, an LPH like the French Mistral, an LPD/LSD like the British Albion, a real LST with a bow that permits beaching, an LPA/LKA conversion of a merchant ship, and a naval gunfire support (NGFS) frigate; convert the San Antonios to ABM/BMD ships per the HII proposal
- I'd also build some real littoral combat ships, including corvettes, missile patrol boats, mine countermeasures ships, and air-independent propulsion submarines for use in areas like the first island chain, the eastern Med, or the Baltic
With this configuration, we could build a 600-ship navy for less than the cost of the Navy's currently proposed 355-ship fleet. More combat power, less cost.
