If the Navy continues on the current shipbuilding course of about six or seven ships per year, the battle fleet will face a steady decline over the next two decades that will see it go from 286 ships today to around 230–240 ships from 2025 and out.We did not get here by accident. We got here through spotty leadership and professional malpractice of an unprecedented scale - with little to no accountability.
What to do? The Navy must change its strategy. CNA offers five strategic options for the future Navy: Two Hubs; One Plus Hub; Shaping; Surge; and Status Quo Shrinks. Each option involves either a significantly reduced force structure or a significant change in strategy.
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11 comments:
Rest at ease boys, rest at ease. We will have the most diverse navy in the world. We will have more female sailors to ship ratio than we've ever had and we will have way more admirals than we do ships. What could possibly be wrong? With that big an admiral and female ratio to warship we must be strategically better than everybody else.
Talk about misalignment of goals and strategy.
Even if the diminished USN won't amount to much...It sure will look COOL!!!!
The one thing I was suprised that the study did not look at was more overseas homeporting, which, while it won't stop the long term drawn down would at least mitigate the demand on ships like BMD ships.
Call me what you want, but I am for enhancing low-end capabilities, corvettes, frigates, landing ships, minehunters!!!, you name it. Chinese have yet to build their big blue water navy, pirates are hunting merchants already. Just no more LCS, please...
It's disappointing that the New Navy Fighting Machine options highlighted here recently don't get a mention, except maybe under the "Shaping" option. It had a good hi-low mix and came in with around 600 ships, albeit not the same 600 ships of the Reagan years. Like E40's comments, it emphasizes more smaller units for inshore capabilities.
I also think we need to look at the officer:enlisted ratio and especially the admiral:ship ratio.
RANT ON
Little men dream little dreams.
Send every odd digit lineal number flag officer home (Ok Admirals, tell the fleet why this wouldn't be jettisoning dead wood. Time to stop politikin' and LEAD by sticking your neck out. Habitually hanging the nearest lowest ranking ship CO isn't getting us anywhere (HAG excepted)). 4 stars need to start talking (out of school and LOUD) about how the naval shipbuilding increases and the aircraft acquisition programs that built up the fleet and replaced biplanes with monoplanes in the late thirties drove nails into the great depression's coffin, one ship and new plane type at a time. Not to mention saving our collective butt in 1942. Push back, dammit. If you crap out, at least get a footnote that you fought for what was REALLY needed along with your retirement check.
Assigned to a shipyard, project office or new construction? Simple rule, every day your project goes late and overbudget, you lose a lineal number, that's every officer in the command. Every day you go early and under budget you gain a lineal number. One up, one down, stand pat. Payoff at end of tour.
Make ONE officer recruiting commercial "The Navy is looking for the best, and we don't care about color, gender or anything else... except loyalty, patriotism, ability and a proven track record of performance. If that means we pick nothing this year but redheaded freckle faced irish catholic girls from parochial schools (background shot, parochial school with red headed, etc.).....or NOT (flash across faces of every possible race and physical type in a mid's uniform) that's fine...as long as they meet what we're looking for. We offer long hours, great danger, modest pay, huge responsibility and the knowledge that you are part of the shield of the NATION...IF you can cut it... One other thing, we don't care about winning any football games, except possibly beating the army and the air force with players who intend to make the Navy a career. We have far more important things to worry about (cut to shot of a kindergarten playground and a thanksgiving dinner, the pirate under naval guard, then F18's in flight, sub deploying SEAL's, etc.) If you think you can cut it, see your Navy recruiter...We just might like the cut of your jib (series of JO action cuts in working uniform)....BUT no guarantees, EVER. You have to EARN it. (cut to Navy ACE and "Anchors Away" instrumental, then cut to black.)
RANT OFF
(I feel better now.)
over to you all...
Grandpa, I owe you a lot of beer. That was Sierra Hotel.
I am speechless. I wanna see that commercial tonight on TV. :-D
I'm retired now but spent over 18 years here in Miss. working at Ingalls (now NG) shipyard. I have a home in New England and one here is Mississippi. Would you believe how PC our NORTHROP GRUMMAN-NAVY shipbuilding "team" had become in the past decade ? Our QA dept "used" to write things called QDR (Quality Deficiency Reports). And it turned heads ! Well, our kinder-gentler-NG-Navy team now has the Navy inspectors writing something PC called a CAR ( Corrective Action Request). So the governmemt Navy inspectors now write Pretty-Please-REquests (CAR) vice an embarrassing fix-this-you-dummy (QDR).
Wouldn't want to hurt the shipyard's professional feelings would we ? This change is 99 percent the fault of the Navy-govt-inspectors, and not the shipyard, too.
"<span> We got here through spotty leadership and professional malpractice of an unprecedented scale - with little to no accountability."</span>
But enough about Obamacare.....
"..or, if you just wanna blow stuff up and drive over it, maybe you can be a Marine!"
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