Naval Readiness and the 5th Fleet
June 28, 2019 12:13 AM Subscribe
The Navy, overstretched, had just removed a carrier strike group from the regionHow the fuck does a navy with 11 carrier battle groups become 'overstretched'? Did the US discover a new ocean?
posted by um at 1:57 AM on June 28, 2019 [17 favorites]
I wish my brain didn't keep replacing "uniformed" with "uninformed" as I read this...
posted by Molesome at 2:04 AM on June 28, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by Molesome at 2:04 AM on June 28, 2019 [3 favorites]
um: How the fuck does a navy with 11 carrier battle groups become 'overstretched'?
A carrier battle group can't function without a carrier. That's axiomatic.
Carriers are only actually available (deployed at sea and fully operational) about a third of the time. This is because they're really complex machines and things break at sea. They spend about a third of their time in port, undergoing refit and repair. (A chunk of this is down to their nuclear reactors; reactors mean they can stay at sea indefinitely when they're working, but refueling can involve shutting them down and waiting for the secondary radiation to subside enough, then cutting holes in the hull: it's the kind of thing that happens every decade or two but takes a carrier out of service for a year or more.)
Worse: a carrier is useless without a carrier air wing. You're looking for 100-400 flight crew and a couple of thousand maintenance crew plus varying numbers of aircraft—up to 100, ranging from F-18s (90 hours of maintenance per hour in the air) to helicopters (not much simpler). New sailors/aviators join up and retire all the time, so a lot of effort goes into ensuring that everyone is properly trained and working together as a team.
Upshot: roughly a third of the time, a carrier is sailing home at the end of a tour/in dock/undergoing maintenance. Another third of the time it's actively working up (training/shaking down) to operational status. And finally there's the third of the time when it's on station.
(The rest of the ships in the group have similar maintenance/training needs.)
11 carrier groups therefore mean three or four carrier groups ready to go to war at the drop of a hat, and another three or four in various states of unreadiness that can be slung into a fight in a matter of weeks to a couple of months.
For a planetary hegemon, that's not a lot of leeway, and it's certainly not enough to cover the US military's pre-2001 goal of being ready to fight two wars simultaneously anywhere on the planet.
posted by cstross at 3:49 AM on June 28, 2019 [66 favorites]
A carrier battle group can't function without a carrier. That's axiomatic.
Carriers are only actually available (deployed at sea and fully operational) about a third of the time. This is because they're really complex machines and things break at sea. They spend about a third of their time in port, undergoing refit and repair. (A chunk of this is down to their nuclear reactors; reactors mean they can stay at sea indefinitely when they're working, but refueling can involve shutting them down and waiting for the secondary radiation to subside enough, then cutting holes in the hull: it's the kind of thing that happens every decade or two but takes a carrier out of service for a year or more.)
Worse: a carrier is useless without a carrier air wing. You're looking for 100-400 flight crew and a couple of thousand maintenance crew plus varying numbers of aircraft—up to 100, ranging from F-18s (90 hours of maintenance per hour in the air) to helicopters (not much simpler). New sailors/aviators join up and retire all the time, so a lot of effort goes into ensuring that everyone is properly trained and working together as a team.
Upshot: roughly a third of the time, a carrier is sailing home at the end of a tour/in dock/undergoing maintenance. Another third of the time it's actively working up (training/shaking down) to operational status. And finally there's the third of the time when it's on station.
(The rest of the ships in the group have similar maintenance/training needs.)
11 carrier groups therefore mean three or four carrier groups ready to go to war at the drop of a hat, and another three or four in various states of unreadiness that can be slung into a fight in a matter of weeks to a couple of months.
For a planetary hegemon, that's not a lot of leeway, and it's certainly not enough to cover the US military's pre-2001 goal of being ready to fight two wars simultaneously anywhere on the planet.
posted by cstross at 3:49 AM on June 28, 2019 [66 favorites]
Cstross gives a good overview of that part of the picture. At the same time it's useful to keep in mind that that the US Navy has more combat power than the rest of the world's navies combined. The US Navy aircraft component alone would be the world's third largest air force if you pulled it out of the Navy and deployed it on it's own. But it still can't keep a fleet on the coast of every other nation in the world all the time.
So overstretched in the sense of furthering the goals of the US political leadership? Probably. Overstretched in the sense of "keeping the United States safe from harm"? That's a harder pill to swallow.
posted by Harald74 at 4:14 AM on June 28, 2019 [8 favorites]
So overstretched in the sense of furthering the goals of the US political leadership? Probably. Overstretched in the sense of "keeping the United States safe from harm"? That's a harder pill to swallow.
posted by Harald74 at 4:14 AM on June 28, 2019 [8 favorites]
I'm glad that cooler heads prevailed in 2016. I wonder what the response would be today?
And good on Nartker for standing down. Reminds me of the story of James Blunt not firing on the Russians at Pristina airport and thus averting a major war (seriously!)
posted by Harald74 at 4:22 AM on June 28, 2019 [5 favorites]
And good on Nartker for standing down. Reminds me of the story of James Blunt not firing on the Russians at Pristina airport and thus averting a major war (seriously!)
posted by Harald74 at 4:22 AM on June 28, 2019 [5 favorites]
Fair enough I suppose in WW2 the US had over 30 aircraft carriers, but I think the overall tonnage has remained about the same.
posted by um at 4:27 AM on June 28, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by um at 4:27 AM on June 28, 2019 [1 favorite]
um: not only did the USN have over 30 carriers in WW2; at the end of the war, in August 1945, US shipyards had seventy fleet carriers under construction. And although the first nuclear powered supercarrier didn't come along until 1957 (USS Enterprise (CVN 65)), some of the carriers that were cancelled at the end of the war were nearly as large.
posted by cstross at 4:45 AM on June 28, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by cstross at 4:45 AM on June 28, 2019 [3 favorites]
James Blunt not firing on the Russians at Pristina airport
Just reading this headline, I envision a guy with an acoustic guitar over his shoulder, a pistol held out at arms length in a Mexican standoff with a bunch of guys in Adidas tracksuits with guns of their own, everyone yelling in English and Russian, in the middle of a busy public airport with other travelers zipping buy on their way to catch their flights -- but then I read the article, and, woah, a guy who writes inoffensive pop songs had like a literally army under his control not long ago.
posted by AzraelBrown at 4:56 AM on June 28, 2019 [10 favorites]
Just reading this headline, I envision a guy with an acoustic guitar over his shoulder, a pistol held out at arms length in a Mexican standoff with a bunch of guys in Adidas tracksuits with guns of their own, everyone yelling in English and Russian, in the middle of a busy public airport with other travelers zipping buy on their way to catch their flights -- but then I read the article, and, woah, a guy who writes inoffensive pop songs had like a literally army under his control not long ago.
posted by AzraelBrown at 4:56 AM on June 28, 2019 [10 favorites]
Reminds me of the story of James Blunt
Reminds me of McHale's Navy. They have almost no weapons, they don't know how to work their own navigation system, they have no idea where they are, they have to look up the approaching boat's flag in a manual, and... they cruise right up to "a naval outpost for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite force of the Iranian military that Trump recently declared a terrorist organization." Oh, hi. Sorry. Do you speak English?
posted by pracowity at 4:59 AM on June 28, 2019 [6 favorites]
Reminds me of McHale's Navy. They have almost no weapons, they don't know how to work their own navigation system, they have no idea where they are, they have to look up the approaching boat's flag in a manual, and... they cruise right up to "a naval outpost for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite force of the Iranian military that Trump recently declared a terrorist organization." Oh, hi. Sorry. Do you speak English?
posted by pracowity at 4:59 AM on June 28, 2019 [6 favorites]
ProPublica and specifically the team of Robert Faturechi, Megan Rose and T. Christian Miller has been doing sterling reporting on the state of the US surface fleet. It really does look like fundamentals of seamanship just aren't being maintained. You assume with a competent navy that moving your ships around to where you want them without colliding with things or wandering off course is a basis and then you build combat capability on top of that. The US Navy seems to be struggling even with those basics.
posted by atrazine at 7:01 AM on June 28, 2019 [6 favorites]
posted by atrazine at 7:01 AM on June 28, 2019 [6 favorites]
… “the RCB is a boat and boats float.”Translation: I don't know shit, sir. [emphasis mine]
“Navigation is navigation,” Moses, an explosives expert, later told investigators.
From reading this, one might think that the US Navy was underfunded. One is also somewhat surprised that the navigation system didn't have any warning about territorial waters.
posted by scruss at 7:13 AM on June 28, 2019
ProPublica keeps doing good work.
posted by doctornemo at 10:00 AM on June 28, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by doctornemo at 10:00 AM on June 28, 2019 [2 favorites]
It seems that the modern US military has fallen victim to the cult of the missile in a similar way to how the entente powers gambled hard on the cult of the offensive a little over 100 years ago.
posted by feloniousmonk at 10:33 AM on June 28, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by feloniousmonk at 10:33 AM on June 28, 2019 [2 favorites]
You assume with a competent navy that moving your ships around to where you want them without colliding with things or wandering off course is a basis and then you build combat capability on top of that. The US Navy seems to be struggling even with those basics.I especially like that they’re highlighting that the problem is the system rather than blaming low-level sailors. Each of these articles really covers the degree to which people are trying to make things work but are being failed by poor management and support.
posted by adamsc at 10:40 AM on June 28, 2019 [2 favorites]
Well this reflects another aspect of the US navy that is as old as it gets: the contempt for the Brown Water Navy forces.
The US admiralty is dominated by Top Gun types, naval aviators. CVN's are what have all the prestige and glamour. They're what's known as blue water navy forces.
Brown water navy is small boats and riverine operations. They don't have the glamour of the carrier groups.
With the exception of the American Civil War, when riverine operations were paramount to victory, the brown water navy has always been the neglected child of USN resource allocations.
Also, cstross: you're making a slight exaggeration. As of August 1945, the USN had 17 CVs, 2 CVL (light carriers), and 23 Escort Carriers (essentially merchant ships with flight decks) under construction. Still a ridiculous number...essentially building for a conventional invasion of Japan.
But yeah, modern carrier groups essentially need to be in four places at once: S. China Seas, Persian Gulf, Eastern Mediterranean, and the Sea of Japan, for effective force deterrence. That, combined with the aforementioned cycles, means that there are gaps in force deployment.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 10:59 AM on June 28, 2019 [3 favorites]
The US admiralty is dominated by Top Gun types, naval aviators. CVN's are what have all the prestige and glamour. They're what's known as blue water navy forces.
Brown water navy is small boats and riverine operations. They don't have the glamour of the carrier groups.
With the exception of the American Civil War, when riverine operations were paramount to victory, the brown water navy has always been the neglected child of USN resource allocations.
Also, cstross: you're making a slight exaggeration. As of August 1945, the USN had 17 CVs, 2 CVL (light carriers), and 23 Escort Carriers (essentially merchant ships with flight decks) under construction. Still a ridiculous number...essentially building for a conventional invasion of Japan.
But yeah, modern carrier groups essentially need to be in four places at once: S. China Seas, Persian Gulf, Eastern Mediterranean, and the Sea of Japan, for effective force deterrence. That, combined with the aforementioned cycles, means that there are gaps in force deployment.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 10:59 AM on June 28, 2019 [3 favorites]
Each of these articles really covers the degree to which people are trying to make things work but are being failed by poor management and support.
My experience is in a different military branch, but I realized recently that there were several times in my career that I realized that I would fail a mission because of a lack of resources. On some of those occasions, I told my boss, "I cannot do this thing, and here's why, and here's what I would need to do it.", and on other occasions, I did not tell my boss about my reservations. I failed in most of those missions, pretty evenly split between the told-the-boss side and the didn't-tell-the-boss side. The bosses who I told gave me consistently worse evaluations than the ones I didn't tell.
It would have been better for my career if I had never given my boss a warning that I couldn't do something, even if I knew it was coming.
posted by Etrigan at 11:29 AM on June 28, 2019 [13 favorites]
My experience is in a different military branch, but I realized recently that there were several times in my career that I realized that I would fail a mission because of a lack of resources. On some of those occasions, I told my boss, "I cannot do this thing, and here's why, and here's what I would need to do it.", and on other occasions, I did not tell my boss about my reservations. I failed in most of those missions, pretty evenly split between the told-the-boss side and the didn't-tell-the-boss side. The bosses who I told gave me consistently worse evaluations than the ones I didn't tell.
It would have been better for my career if I had never given my boss a warning that I couldn't do something, even if I knew it was coming.
posted by Etrigan at 11:29 AM on June 28, 2019 [13 favorites]
It seems that the modern US military has fallen victim to the cult of the missile in a similar way to how the entente powers gambled hard on the cult of the offensive a little over 100 years ago.
Not sure if I agree with that, exactly; I think if anything it's the cult of the manned aircraft, at the expense of missile frigates and other types of ship that might be more effective in littoral operations, but don't have a flight wing.
As LeRoienJaune correctly points out, the Navy leadership is dominated, somewhat perversely, by aviators. And as we saw with the actual Air Force during the era of the "Bomber Generals", an entire service's priorities—even its personality—can be shaped by those who run it. (I guess it would be weird if that weren't the case, but sometimes it can be overmuch.)
The Navy traditionally has had issues keeping up with the changing nature of warfare; when it was dominated by big-gun battleship commanders, it took Billy Mitchell's Project B (which figured into his later court martial), to prove the worth of air power, which caused the Navy to look to carriers to avoid being left out of the new regime. Absent this, the Navy would probably have gone into WWII without any significant air assets.
However, that was almost a century ago, and warfare has again changed, and the Navy seems poised to again try to ignore it. The supercarrier seems about as relevant to modern near-peer warfare as the dreadnought was after the Great War.
There's a reason that most of our adversaries don't build them: they're eye-wateringly expensive (not only to build but to maintain and deploy), highly vulnerable to modern missiles and emerging threats like drone and small-boat swarms, are largely incapable of offensive operations without putting pilots in harm's way, and just generally seem to be a product of a departed age. They're the Great White Fleet of the Pax Americana, and the Pax Americana is over.
In contrast, our adversaries have constructed much more cost-efficient vehicles for force projection, which are often nothing more than hulls stuffed full of vertical launch tubes and defensive systems. I suspect you could build a dozen high-speed (30+ kts) missile frigates for the cost of a supercarrier, once you got production ramped up, or 4-6 modified Ohio-class SSGNs (guided missile submarines, not ballistic missile boats), and you'd have the same degree of force-projection capability and much greater survivability in a shooting war.
The opening salvos in any fight are likely to be TLAMs anyway (e.g. we almost touched off a few last week at Iran), and while they're more expensive per unit than a 2,000 lb bomb delivered by an aircraft, I suspect that cost advantage quickly goes away when you include the cost of the delivery platform, carrier, aircraft maintenance, pilot training, etc. etc. I'm pretty confident for the flyaway cost of one F/A-18 and its lifetime maintenance budget, you could buy enough Tomahawks to cover all the bombs it's ever likely to drop, and still have money left over. Missiles and other forms of over-the-horizon death are the future. Manned aircraft are the past.
We need a new Billy Mitchell, someone who is willing to take on the fighter jocks, and usher the Navy, however unwillingly, into an era of hypersonic cruise missiles, supercavitating torpedoes, drone swarms, and mass-produced weapons. The longer they fight it, the worse the eventual lesson is going to be.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:31 PM on June 28, 2019 [4 favorites]
Not sure if I agree with that, exactly; I think if anything it's the cult of the manned aircraft, at the expense of missile frigates and other types of ship that might be more effective in littoral operations, but don't have a flight wing.
As LeRoienJaune correctly points out, the Navy leadership is dominated, somewhat perversely, by aviators. And as we saw with the actual Air Force during the era of the "Bomber Generals", an entire service's priorities—even its personality—can be shaped by those who run it. (I guess it would be weird if that weren't the case, but sometimes it can be overmuch.)
The Navy traditionally has had issues keeping up with the changing nature of warfare; when it was dominated by big-gun battleship commanders, it took Billy Mitchell's Project B (which figured into his later court martial), to prove the worth of air power, which caused the Navy to look to carriers to avoid being left out of the new regime. Absent this, the Navy would probably have gone into WWII without any significant air assets.
However, that was almost a century ago, and warfare has again changed, and the Navy seems poised to again try to ignore it. The supercarrier seems about as relevant to modern near-peer warfare as the dreadnought was after the Great War.
There's a reason that most of our adversaries don't build them: they're eye-wateringly expensive (not only to build but to maintain and deploy), highly vulnerable to modern missiles and emerging threats like drone and small-boat swarms, are largely incapable of offensive operations without putting pilots in harm's way, and just generally seem to be a product of a departed age. They're the Great White Fleet of the Pax Americana, and the Pax Americana is over.
In contrast, our adversaries have constructed much more cost-efficient vehicles for force projection, which are often nothing more than hulls stuffed full of vertical launch tubes and defensive systems. I suspect you could build a dozen high-speed (30+ kts) missile frigates for the cost of a supercarrier, once you got production ramped up, or 4-6 modified Ohio-class SSGNs (guided missile submarines, not ballistic missile boats), and you'd have the same degree of force-projection capability and much greater survivability in a shooting war.
The opening salvos in any fight are likely to be TLAMs anyway (e.g. we almost touched off a few last week at Iran), and while they're more expensive per unit than a 2,000 lb bomb delivered by an aircraft, I suspect that cost advantage quickly goes away when you include the cost of the delivery platform, carrier, aircraft maintenance, pilot training, etc. etc. I'm pretty confident for the flyaway cost of one F/A-18 and its lifetime maintenance budget, you could buy enough Tomahawks to cover all the bombs it's ever likely to drop, and still have money left over. Missiles and other forms of over-the-horizon death are the future. Manned aircraft are the past.
We need a new Billy Mitchell, someone who is willing to take on the fighter jocks, and usher the Navy, however unwillingly, into an era of hypersonic cruise missiles, supercavitating torpedoes, drone swarms, and mass-produced weapons. The longer they fight it, the worse the eventual lesson is going to be.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:31 PM on June 28, 2019 [4 favorites]
It would have been better for my career if I had never given my boss a warning that I couldn't do something, even if I knew it was coming.
Ain't that the truth. I tried a radical "report every problem, no matter how small, even (especially) when already solved" strategy at one command. So I had "more problems" than everyone else who had perfected the art of the cover-up and was obviously incompetent.
posted by ctmf at 11:33 PM on June 28, 2019
Ain't that the truth. I tried a radical "report every problem, no matter how small, even (especially) when already solved" strategy at one command. So I had "more problems" than everyone else who had perfected the art of the cover-up and was obviously incompetent.
posted by ctmf at 11:33 PM on June 28, 2019
“Worse than you thought: inside the secret Fitzgerald probe the Navy doesn’t want you to read,” Geoff Ziezulewicz, The Navy Times, 13 January 2019
posted by ob1quixote at 3:11 PM on June 29, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by ob1quixote at 3:11 PM on June 29, 2019 [1 favorite]
When Not To Obey Orders had me thinking of this.
“The mission and then the men” is the phrase dinned into all of us from our first days in uniform. It seems a rule whose validity is so obvious that it need hardly be stated. Good order and discipline — the very fabric of any military organization — depends on leaders understanding that there will be times when they have to order their subordinates to do things that will cause them hardship or worse. But if the mission involves risking subordinate lives for the pursuit of goals that are unobtainable or indecipherable, at what point does the leaders’ responsibility shift from the mission to the men? There may be officers who would reply “never,” but by doing so they miss the implications of an important distinction between their oath of office and that taken by enlisted personnel.posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:42 AM on July 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
The two oaths differ in one key respect. Both swear to support and defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, but while officers then state that they have no reservations about taking office, and promise to execute their duties to the best of their abilities, enlisted personnel pledge to obey all those placed over them. This distinction places an implicit burden of responsibility on officers to not ask them to do dumb things. The Seventh Fleet chain of command would have done well to bear this obligation in mind.
From the time I was in the service to now I could never square the obscene amounts of money that are thrown at the military with the general brokenness and staffing issues experienced by those expected to fight. River boats for open water maneuvers? 33% operational status for core equipment? Four rifles for eight crew? Jesus. It's like we're being supplied by the Salvation Navy.
But the REMFs are always fully staffed and fed. They live in relative luxury. Theirs is not the world of consequences. That shit rolls downhill is an axiom of military life but any fallout faced by folk O3 and below for this CF is seriously unjust.
posted by Fezboy! at 2:48 PM on July 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
But the REMFs are always fully staffed and fed. They live in relative luxury. Theirs is not the world of consequences. That shit rolls downhill is an axiom of military life but any fallout faced by folk O3 and below for this CF is seriously unjust.
posted by Fezboy! at 2:48 PM on July 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
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Nartker later told Navy investigators that he had considered grabbing his M4 assault rifle and trying to shoot his way out. But he thought that if he began shooting he could start a war. He had never received a briefing on the region from the Navy, but he had been reading The Economist magazine. He knew about the looming nuclear accord.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:57 AM on June 28, 2019 [10 favorites]