12/09/2022
Credit to the Owner
Responsible Statecraft
Facing the hard facts about the 'world class' US Navy -
In a 2007 book, Lessons Not Learned: The U.S. Navy’s Status Quo Culture, in war games and mock attacks from 1966 to 2006 — a forty year span — submarines and surface warships from the Soviet Union and Russia, China, Chile, Holland, Australia, and Canada theoretically destroyed the carriers Saratoga, Independence, John F. Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Forrestal, Constellation, Carl Vinson, Theodore Roosevelt, Kitty Hawk and Abraham Lincoln.
There are reports of the continuing problem of the Navy’s inability to protect its high-cost core assets. There are also credible reports that aircraft carriers are becoming vulnerable to China’s anti-ship ballistic missiles and other systems. Part of the problem is also the Navy’s poor anti-submarine weapons.
A scathing article called “The United States Navy — Feet of Clay,” published in The Naval Review in 2004 by then-Lieutenant Commander Aidan Talbott of the Royal Navy, hit the nail on the head, and even though it is an older account, recent Navy disasters such as the tragedies involving the McCain,
Fitzgerald, and the Bonhomme Richard amphibious vessel, which was destroyed in port last year by fire, bear many of his criticisms out.
According to a 2021 survey of current and retired Navy officers: “Concern within the Navy runs so high that, when asked whether incidents listed above part of a broader cultural or leadership problem in the Navy, 94% of interviewees responded ‘yes.’”
Commander Talbott concluded in his article “The United States Navy — Feet of Clay,” by saying: “The USN clearly can be a world class organisation in terms of output — their ability to surge and support extensive assets globally and to put ‘warheads on foreheads’ is unmatched but they are emphatically not world class in terms of the human, financial and managerial resources consumed to achieve that output.
Allies cannot divest themselves of the inextricable levels of support they now rely on from the US but they must always be acutely conscious of what the US cannot do as much as what it can.
On balance, allies sure would want to be with them rather than against them but thru must remain in this partnership with eyes wide open and a healthy awareness of where the strengths and the weaknesses lie of their Number One friend and ally.”
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/09/08/facing-the-hard-facts-about-the-world-class-us-navy/
