Posted on 11/02/2019 6:11:18 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Like a Christmas wish list, the Navy wants a fleet of 355 ships. It just can’t afford it.
“Will we get to 355 ships?” asked Admiral Robert Burke, the Navy’s Vice Chief of Naval Operations, at a recent conference. “I think with today’s fiscal situation, where the Navy’s top line is right now, we can keep around 305 to 310 ships whole, properly manned, properly maintained, properly equipped, and properly ready.”
The $205.6 billion for Fiscal Year 2020 that the Navy has requested – bigger than the economies of the majority of nations on Earth – would seem to be plenty. But even if Congress approves that amount, it would only bring the Navy’s battle force of warships and support vessels to 314 by 2024. That’s more than the current 280-strong force, but only about four-fifths of the 355-ship goal by 2047.
Burke’s conclusion was logical: more money equals more ships. “If our top line does not go up, if it remains where it is now and is projected to remain in the future defense plans, that’s about where we can get to and do it right, in terms of man those ships and maintain them and have all the ordnance for them and generate readiness,” he said. “We would need an increased top line.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalinterest.org ...
At that point, the annual military budget was 50% of the economy. It’s now about 3.5%. If we went back to 50%. I expect we could have a 5,000 ship navy. But we’d need to sell a lot of war bonds.
Note that a lot of that was due to scale economies. We were making many dozens of a given ship type. Today, it’s a few these, a few of those.
lol
Didn’t we once have a 600 ship Navy back in the 70s or 80s?
Plenty of money for illegal immigrant healthcare and transgender prison inmates,though.
Aircraft carriers didn’t cost $13 billion dollars either. The light carriers were built on cruiser hulls and the escort carriers were converted merchant ships. The Battle of Leyte Gulf showed that they could still pack a wallop.
Reagan called for a 600 ship Navy after the Carter malaise. Came close, but not quite.
Hugh Hellit will be crushed....
Give him time, he does6 bother with small dreams.
305 into 355 is 86%. So the Navy got 86% of what it wanted out of the budget. To me, “sunk” is an exaggeration. Besides, he’ll get another four years to rebuild the naval command.
Good God , I went to this .org’s site and they are all chicken little stories of woulda’/shoulda’ and coulda’.....Chicken little has nothing on this group of yahoo’s...they have a section labled “the skeptics”.....Now that I think of it we only have 11 some odd years left anyway....why worry?. More subversive claptrap which will be quoted somewhere on the main stream propaganda pushers show.
Develop a flight deck that can be quickly laid over the top of shipping containers.
The latest cruise ships have elevators that are attached to the side of the ship.
Put fuel bladders and pumps in some of the containers.
TAKE MY MONEY!
Dude, I understand you live in China. I also heard China banned FR. How are you here? Glad you are, of course.... but how?
Oh wait, I’m sorry, I mixed you up with that Chinese national who used to post here.
LOL, in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, they very nearly became the ones that got walloped!
But they did throw back enough harassing planes (even though they didn’t have useful ordinance in the initial attack and were forced to try to drop depth charges on the ships and strafe them) at the oncoming Japanese heavyweights.
They even managed to score a few hits from their five inch guns on the pursuing cruisers.
But after the carrier planes refueled and reloaded with real weapons ashore on Leyte, they came back and pasted a few cruisers and by that time, Kurita lost his nerve and withdrew.
Pretty amazing all those carriers weren’t sent to the bottom, but...we hit back with everything but the kitchen sink that day in an effort to stave off disaster...and it worked.
Propose to SECDEF to investigate cutting deals with countries to base overseas, which will cut down operating costs. Tell POTUS to call in some margins and make it happen. The main threat is China. So Okinawa, South Korea, Australia, Philippines for starters. Then look around the globe and find other places so that the fleets are where we need them.
And if you believe government inflation statistics, the best airplane of the war, the P-51 Mustang, cost approx $680,000 in today’s dollars and we built 15,000 of them.
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