The US Navy has long been derided for have a mindset around its requirements that is a century out of date, but it is still the largest navy on the planet by a massive amount. That’s unsurprising, as the US military is the largest everything on the planet at any given time.
But they can always be bigger. And facilitating that effort is the Heritage Foundation, whose new study declared 355 ships to be “woefully short” of the need, based on the idea of fighting two simultaneous major conflicts and its normal rotational presence, and the capacity for surge operations.
This would mean a 12% increase to the Navy’s shipbuilding budget, and a goal of 400 ships. This involves another aircraft carrier, but the real focus is on logistics ships. Those ships are necessary, the study argues, to support all of those small littoral combat ships the Navy built in recent years in an attempt to get larger numbers of ships by just building small riverine boats and putting them in the ocean.
Spending more money is right down the Pentagon’s alley, and they’ll likely be only too happy to embrace the idea of huge naval wars against Russia, and China, or both, with substantial naval operations being done beside that.
I say let Navy have their toys, and more of them which means less money toward forces which invade and occupy countries.They can just sail around and look important when they aren’t in maintenance which they usually are (especially carriers, four years at a time). Those small littoral combat ships are useless and can’t hurt anyone. The day of naval wars is over; drones rockets and missiles rule. Ships make nice targets for rockets and missiles, should the need occur, as with HMT Rohna here.
They are ridiculous and Russia makes this perfectly clear, but that won’t stop American politicians doling out “jobs” to make these rust buckets.
This bodes ill for container ships worldwide…
Spain and France and possibly Portugal went bankrupt at least once because of the exorbitant costs of their armadas. Apparently nothing has been learned here.
PS the English got cheap wood from North America. Officers of the English navy went through the woods to select the best trees for the masts of their warships. When they found one they branded a crown into the bark. The penalty for cutting that tree by others was execution. I did see such a preserved tree in Pennsylvania.
Just an excuse to channel more tens of billions to the war Corporations. More money will be taken from infrastructure.
Those massive arms merchant profits aren’t going to come in just by free people voluntarily buying stuff from them.
We probably shouldn’t be planning on fighting two major wars at once; we can’t even handle fighting a successful third-rate war on its own. With all the problems we’ve had just dealing with lightly-armed militias in the Middle East, can anyone possibly imagine us fighting, say, Russia AND China at the same time? How about this for a radical war-fighting strategy: don’t put us in situations where we have to fight? How about conducting ourselves like good neighbors and not reaching for the bombs and missiles every time we don’t get our way immediately? How about realizing that the vast majority of the world’s problems have nothing to do with us?
“You can’t be too rich or too thin.” or “A woman can never be too rich or too thin.”) It’s attributed to Wallis Simpson, the American heiress for whom Great Britain’s King Edward abdicated his throne in 1936.Apr 21, 2014, I say that our country can never have enough Aircraft Carriers and Ballistic Submarines posted as close as possible to enemy shores to protect our homeland.
I tried to write a report proving that the USN needed fewer ships, but no corporation would fund it. Strange!