Editor’s Note, 04 November 2019: this is timely and goes in front of the roll-out of the Mac Showers biography trilogy which has slipped to tomorrow.

– Vic .

Author’s Note: Several long talks with a couple of old friends (Navy and Marine) this week – we are much worse than it looks I’m afraid…

-Arrias

Elevators, Bureaucrats and Great Power Confrontation

Over the past 50 years the Navy bureaucracy – NavAir, NavSea, etc., the bureaucracies which design and procure aircraft, weapons, ships and systems for the Navy, have become more insular and more distant from the fleet. This is the common refrain you hear when you talk to folks who are involved in the daily grind.

Whatever conversation that does take place between, for example, NavAir and the Fleet, takes place because individuals insist it happen; the conversations, the information exchanges, take place in spite of the organization, not because of it.

And it’s visible from the outside. Not an issue of Aviation Week or Defense News goes by that there isn’t some new story that suggests a program that is disconnected from the fleet, or not up to the mark, or simply another episode in the ongoing soap opera which is US Navy readiness.

Consider our aircraft carriers in the news: USS Truman, scheduled to deploy earlier this year, remains pier side with a major electrical problem. This has forced the slowing of the RCOH (Refueling and Complex OverHaul) of USS Washington, which will also affect the RCOH of USS Stennis (next in line).

Add this on top of the now nearly legendary problem called USS Ford. Recently, the US Navy congratulated itself that USS Ford has 3, and soon 4, (out of 11) ammunition elevators now functioning, and the Secretary of the Navy assured everyone Ford will deploy before 2024 – seven years after commissioning.

How do you explain the procurement of 3 destroyers, at $22 billion, purchased without an anti-ship weapon?

What about the under-gunned, thin-skinned, Edsel of the US Navy – the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) – deemed by an Assistant Secretary of the Navy as being incapable of fighting anything larger than a small boat; of which not even 1 (of 14 in the inventory) was able to deploy for more than 19 months, and a series of cost overruns and late deliveries in virtually every acquisition program in the department, and the US Navy comes off as the “Gang that couldn’t shoot straight?”

Meanwhile, in Germany, Die Linke (“the Left” – a far left, socialist party) has called for the US to withdraw forces from that country. As an astute friend of mine noted, this sort of thing has come up regularly in the past, but there’s a certain sense that there’s more traction now. Die Linke argues that the presence of US forces on German territory invites a Russian attack; they favor removing US forces, thereby removing Russia’s incentive to pre-empt. There’s another name for that: “appeasement.”

Some respond that the right answer is to, in fact, leave Germany; move US forces to Poland – the Polish want US forces in their country; still others respond that moving eastward into Poland would indeed prompt a response from Russia.

In East Asia the US is attempting to re-gain military-political ground, in particular the South China Sea, ground that was lost when the US simply nodded and departed the Philippines more than 25 years ago – with not much thought involved.

We have since invested heavily in the Balkans, followed with a massive investment in the Middle East, during which the US Navy became a force provider to the Joint force while ignoring the needed presence in the South China Sea and elsewhere; a political vacuum that China is now filling.

Russia, China, Middle East, Africa – what to do and where to do it? And will confrontation prevent war, or provoke it?

The world’s problems don’t go away. Appeasement simply will get you more bad behavior from your would-be enemy. That’s a truth we ignore at great peril. If we wish to avoid war we need to stand up to bad actors and bad behavior. And the core of standing up to bad actors – particularly without generating more long-term commitments – is a question of Sea Control – a Navy problem.

Deterrence – and Sea Control – are based on credible threats, and credible capabilities. Yet the Navy’s performance in the past decade leaves that in doubt.

We need a more robust, combat capable, operational Navy. Yet the Elmer Fudd-like leadership of the US Navy has shown itself to be incapable of effectively and efficiently procuring weapons and ships, maintaining those ships once procured, training the bulk of its personnel for combat, and deploying those ships when promised.

There are a host of problems – they begin with leadership…

There hasn’t been a real war at sea since 1945. Navy leadership is arguably ill prepared for one; this on top of all our other problems. We need to get rid of the fat, strip the bureaucracies of power, get rid of a host of tasks that have nothing to do with defending our national interests, and in several cases, stop doing certain things. We may need to add some more money as well. But it begins with this: we need a Navy leadership that is focused on the Naval component of our national interests, and nothing else. The rest will follow, but that is the beginning.

Copyright 2019 Arrias
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