Posted on 12/27/2006 7:37:33 AM PST by libtoken
Oh come on.
Are you saying an 80,000 ton oil fired Aircraft Carrier with 80+ aircraft aboard it is obsolete because it is fueled by Naval Distillate?
I'd convert it to a giant cruise missile launcher.
Yes. I am not sure where all of this pooh pooing of underway replenishment is coming from...
Most ships in the USN are NOT nuclear powered.
I thought the Navy kept a few oil fired carriers to be stationed in Japan. The Nips, excuse me, Japs, are a little sensitive about the whole nuclear thingy. I think the Kennedy is the youngest oil fired carrier we got.
True...we did refer to her as "The Big John", and...not in the complimentary way...:)
We have roughly half the oilers we had at the height of the fleet under Reagan/Bush. We also have about half the ships so the logistical capacity has not diminished proportionate to the ships requiring it.
Hence a contributing factor to the USS Cole disaster.
And that is pure nonsense. The oilers in the area were where they were supposed to be, with the fleet. You cannot detail an oiler to follow around each ship as its own personal gas station. Then you will certainly not have the logistical capacity for world wide operations you spoke of.
Captains think constantly of fuel states. So to task force commanders. The goal at the time was to have assets arrive in theater with their fuel tanks full or nearly full. Hence the decision to refuel ships at Yemen. Topping off there meant that they could be dispatched immediately to wherever the task force commander wanted them, and kept the oilers on station to service the task force. As it turns out it left the ships open to attack, so they've stopped it. Now I've no doubt that ships arriving on station have to seek out the nearest oiler and fuel before they can do anything else. And we probably have to have more oilers on station as a result.
It is my understanding that rather than get a much older ship such as the Kennedy in exchange for the Kitty Hawk, the current Japanese leadership is willing to have a newer carrier, even if it IS nuclear.
I believe that she was also referred to as "The Head of the Med", also not in a complementary way.
Carriers may be nuclear powered, their aircraft are not. They have to be replenished at sea with aviation fuel on a regular basis.
The minesweepers were an idea that seems not to have worked out too well in the past. They have their place, but I understand Navy has considered other means of dealing with the mine threat.
The old amphibs are being phased out in favor of the new ones, "old lamps for new".
During the Reagan years when the Navy was escorting tankers through the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf, the means of dealing with mines was letting the tankers go first so that they would hit them and not the escort.
We keep saying we don't need minesweepers because we have a deepwater navy. And yet we spend a whole lot of time in areas that could be closed off very easily with a few mines. And we're doing away with the resources that defeat them.
Not misleading at all. You cannot divide a larger tonnage vessel to go to two separate places. The British ruled the world BECAUSE of their navy. Neglecting the ability to project force (carriers are the best way to do that) is dangerous.
USS Independence CV-62 1992-1994
And sailors need food. And liberty.
There is a lot that can be done to improve the Military in general and the Navy in particular, but I think some things I have seen here are just ill informed.
Sure, I have been out of the USN since 1979, but...underway replenishment is done pretty much the same way it has been done since WWII. It was well planned and executed in the dark military days of the mid-late seventies, and I am sure they do it just as well today.
Well...well planned and executed unless you got too close to the JFK when doing it, like the USS Bordelon...:)
I was at the contractors kick off meeting for the CVN-77 and there was some discussion of whether the 77 was the last of Nimitz class or first to a new class. "They" wanted to replace the SPS-49 with a phased array, the VSR (volume search radar) which would have been a phased array conformal to superstructure, giving it an altogether different look. The shipyard guys (Newport News) maintained, correctly I believe, that a ship class is determined by the Hull, not the outfitting. A Nimitz class with a phased array is still a Nimitz class.
And like I said, the USN in terms of combat power right now is more dominant relative to the rest of the world than the RN ever had in its entire history.
And a general naval trend over time is, of course, smaller numbers of larger ships.
I guess we COULD crank out huge numbers of limited capability small ships with limited range, limited habitability, and limited ability to deal with seas, just to humor someone's odd desire that we have more numbers of ships than we had in 1914.
The JFK did have a thing for B's - the Belknap, the Bordelon. I served with a guy who swore they decommissioned the Basilone rather than risk having her sail with the JFK. But he always was one for sea stories.
No Loss.
U.S.S. Independence CV-62 1993-1995 V-1 Division.
The basic problem with mines is they aren't sexy.
You're never going to see a Navy recruiting commercial with a minesweeper put-putting along. And getting into minesweeping deesn't exactly fast-track someone for high command.
Mines have always been the great ignored naval superweapon. In both WWI and WWII the number of ships sunk per mine deployed was always amazingly high. It's never been something adequately funded between wars though.
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