Posted on 05/07/2010 5:30:56 PM PDT by Kaslin
Military Advantage: Our defense secretary proposes doing what no other foreign adversary has done: sink the U.S. Navy. We don't need those billion-dollar destroyers, he says. Meanwhile, the Chinese navy rushes to fill the vacuum.
Once Britannia ruled the waves, later to be replaced by America and its Navy. From the Battle of Midway to President Reagan's 600-ship fleet that helped win the Cold War, naval supremacy has been critical to the protection and survival of our nation.
Which is why we find the recent remarks of Defense Secretary Robert Gates to the Navy League at the Sea-Air-Space expo so disturbing. He seems to think naval supremacy is a luxury we can't afford and that, like every other aspect of our military, an already shrunken U.S. Navy needs to downsize.
"As we learned last year, you don't necessarily need a billion-dollar guided missile destroyer to chase down and deal with a bunch of teenage pirates wielding AK-47s and RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades)," Gates quipped.
We are not laughing.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
Gates and all the current idiots in the Obama administration are clueless intellectual dreamers with no anchors anywhere in reality.
He has 'em, they are "nerfbles" guaranteed not to damage or harm.
1. Faisal Shahzad spent a night in the Lincoln Bedroom.
2. Pres_ _ent Obama will each day decrease US security as he (directly or indirectly) releases or defends another terrorist.
3. Pres_ _ent Obamal will willingly release his birth certificate.
Gates works for Obama now. He is a stooge.
If Obama says crap. Gates says where and how high.
Sad, but true
Gates is the consummate bureaucrat waiting for orders. He’d blow up the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, and burn the original copy of the constitution if either a Dim or Republican president told him to.
Indeed
Or "What color?"
Sounds like Gates has the common sense of a block of cheese.
There is some reality here. To start with, US Navy ship procurement has turned into chaos. There are far too many individuals with a say in ship design, and there is no design stability, which drives the cost of ships through the roof.
Imagine how expensive a car would be if at intervals during its assembly, a half dozen major changes were made to its engines, power train, body, electrical system, interior design, and even wheels. You would end up with a million dollar Frankenstein monster that was a technical mess.
There has to be design and budget finalization. This means that any new changes or modifications must be made to the next ship design, as the current ship design and budget are frozen, and must be built to existing specifications and the budgeted cost. And *then* to start to actually build the ship.
This being said, to put it bluntly, the US Navy needs more expendable ships. As Gates pointed out, sending billion dollar ships to police up some pirates is not cost effective. By using “cheap ships” to do that work, that are low cost to build, low cost to maintain, and low cost to use, the good ships are kept in reserve.
An excellent comparison is the Air Force’s B-52 bombers. Cheap, easy to maintain, reliable. Even though we have advanced bombers, the B-52s still do most of the work, because we just don’t need all the expensive high tech bombers, with expensive maintenance, and expensive use, to do ordinary and boring jobs. We should keep them in reserve for when they are needed, and save a fortune.
Now here’s the real zinger. Our potential enemies #1 enemy is the US Navy. And naval strategy tells us that the first engagement with your enemy will often determine the outcome of the war. But if our peacetime front line are “cheap ships”, it is a problem for the enemy.
If they hit our “cheap ships”, it would be as if the Japanese had hit a different Hawaiian port, and blown up a bunch of tugboats. They would have wasted their attack, and the US Navy would have really nailed them.
With most of our “high quality” navy in Reserve, to attack our “cheap ships” would be insane. And yet such ships would be just fine for doing the ordinary, boring jobs, like policing pirates.
Gates is a whore. God bless our military-what will be left of it when this commie bastard leaves office.
THe Chinese are building up their navy and the Russians are modernizing and expanding theirs. The Russians have 3 carriers on the way, and the Chinese at least that many.
You have to remember that Gates probably has stopped even worse from coming from Obama-EG complete scrapping of our nuclear arsenal, and to the heart defense cuts. (Sad to say that, but it probably is true). He is better than Wes Clark (The one 0 originally wanted as SECDEF)
For a different perspective, current CNO and the Director Naval Warfare Integration Group both praise the new QDR and its role for the Naval Service in the pages of this month’s Proceedings.
Why not just take some of the ships we have in mothballs and put them out to sea? You don’t need an Aegis class cruiser to take out a Somali pirate.
I think they mean, Anchors Aweigh.
Aweigh
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