Posted on 11/04/2019 8:30:14 AM PST by robowombat
Heritage Index Rates Navy, Marines ‘Marginal’ In Ability to Counter Current Threats
By: John Grady October 30, 2019 8:01 PM
The Navy and the Marine Corps have been assessed as “marginal” in their ability to meet the challenges from rival powers in Beijing and Moscow, as well as regional threats coming from Tehran and Pyongyang, according to annual report on U.S. military strength from The Heritage Foundation.
The rating for the Marine Corps was an improvement over last year’s assessment of “weak” as part of the 2020 Index of U.S. Military Strength. That rating and the sea services’ commitment to improving readiness across the board were among the few examples in the Defense Department of improvement from last year’s assessment.
The annual assessment weighs military strength and the operating environment American forces would most likely operate in: Europe, Asia and Middle East. There are five tiers to assessing the strength: very strong, strong, marginal, weak, very weak.
“We think we have a one-war force” in explaining how the index judged the strength of the individual services and Pentagon capabilities, like nuclear deterrence, against what would be required to meet the requirements to successfully engage in two major regional conflicts almost simultaneously, Dakota Wood, a senior fellow at Heritage, said on Wednesday. Not included in the Index are logistics, medical support, etc.
“We look at hard combat power,” Wood said.
Describing the overall picture of American military strength as “marginal,” Wood said, “we chose that word intentionally” in assessing the United States had the capacity and capability to meeting the Pentagon’s former stated goal of having enough forces to sustain two wars simultaneously.
The 2018 National Defense Strategy does not address the possibility of two major regional conflicts at the same time, the co-chairmen of a commission assigned to review it told Congress.
“Budget constraints are a big deal” and they have an effect on what can be done now and future including DoD investments in artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, hypersonic weapons and other future technologies.
“Modern technologies are kind of a leveler,” he said, noting that $13-billion aircraft carriers remain vulnerable to anti-ship cruise missiles that cost a bare fraction of the vessels. “Our competitors have really been muscling up.”
The report this year discusses the need to increase the number of Marine infantry battalions above 24 to “the mid-30s” to reduce the pressure of constant deployments with little time at home for Marines, he added. It would also mean the “almost exclusive focus on the Indo-Pacific” of the Marine Corps’ current posture could be adjusted to address conflicts in other regions, read the report.
“Despite an increase in manpower, the Corps continues to operate with less than 67 percent of the number of battalions relative to the two major regional conflict benchmark,” read the report. Based on that decficit, Hertitage scored Marine Corps capacity as “weak.” The authors noted that to meet the needs of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 66,000 Marines were deployed to that mission. In addition, about 27,000 more Marine were assigned to the region at the time.
More battalions also can translate into a “ready bench,” in the report’s phrase, to a host of contingencies that are not directly connected competition with China and Russia.
For the Marines, Wood said the importance of “adjusting ship architecture” with the Navy over what kind of vessels will be needed in the future cannot be overlooked.
Marine aviation, “has been particularly stressed by insufficient funding” noticeable in troubling readiness rates of its F/A-18 squadrons. While introducing “the F-35 platform into the fleet … the F/A 18 Hornets remain ‘the primary bridging platform’ [to that end and] will remain the force until 2030.”
The U.S. Navy’s fleet size is a concern to meeting the challenges posed from the Chinese with the Peoples Liberation Army-Navy at 300 ships and the China Coast Guard at 175.
The report envisions a 400-ship fleet to meet the Navy’s existing global requirements, but recent statements from service leaders indicate that a 355-ship fleet may become a “nice target” as the goal is outside the range of affordability with current ship budgets.
Following two deadly collisions in 2017, Wood said, “the Navy has gotten serious on training sailors” on their seamanship skills and that is reflected in the assessment. “But it will be several years before they can fully change the culture and raise the level of the fleet’s overall professional knowledge and experience,” he said.
The report also noted the impact of so much delayed maintenance on a fleet that is “used harder and is aging,” Wood noted. He said 57 percent of the American fleet is 20 years old or older; and the newer ships tend to be smaller vessels, such as the Littoral Combat Ships. The report said without the necessary increased and sustained funding to meet recapitalization requirements and “improvements in shipyard maintenance capacity, the readiness of the Navy’s fleet will remain compromised.”
The impact of all this creates “a kind of death spiral” of readiness, especially among heavier vessels like aircraft carriers and cruisers for surface vessels. The delay and time in shipyards for needed repairs “are very problematic.”
The Navy needs “about a 30 percent increase in their shipbuilding accounts” to account for the impact of developing and building the Columbia class ballistic missile submarine and the Ford class aircraft carrier that would allow other classes of ships to be designed or modernized.
“There are warning clouds of the horizon,” he said about the shipbuilding accounts. The study said the limits on the shipbuilding accounts even with the current budget agreement for the next two fiscal years “will make it extremely difficult for the Navy to increase capacity and field new lethal capabilities in the near term.”
In before all the old people claiming this can’t possibly be true and that we could fight every single country on the planet combined with one hand behind our back and win...
We’re in a lot better shape now than we were on December 7th, 1941.
I think a similar comprehensive audit of the Russians and Red Chinese would paint an even bleaker picture for them.
That said, we could do much better if we got the entitlements under control.
Really should learn to recognizance Military Defense industry lobbying propaganda. Just like all the other DC Swamp pigs, there plenty of people lining up at the “Defense” spending trough.
“Conservative Inc” really needs to address this blind spot that any spending, as long as the DC Swamp pigs slap a “military” label on it, is a “good” thing.
World military spending totaled more than $1.6 trillion in 2015. The U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the total. U.S. military expenditures are roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined. ... For every dollar China spends on its military, the U.S. spends $2.77.
Dakota Wood is a retired Marine LTCOL, so I’ll listen to what he says.
Adjusting for developments over time, I must disagree with you.
Do we need more defense spending or fewer commitments?
The point is we can ramp up very quickly if need be.
The problem with this is that a lot of the last decade went into projects that didn’t work out and now we have to scramble to fix them. The LCS is a sick joke that will get crews killed for no good return, the F-35 is a delayed disappointment, we’re never going to make enough DDX hulls and even if we did they won’t have a functional gun, the Ford class has major problems preventing operational deployment, we never made enough F-22s and now we can’t actually make more despite promises made by the Obama Admin, we went with the “cheap and cheerful” Virginia class attack subs instead of building more of the all-killing Seawolf class, we’re having to desperately play catch-up in vehicle APS because Syria has demonstrated that a front line NATO tank is easy, easy meat for a Konkurs or Kornet when we laughed at them as little as three years ago... The list goes on and on.
Ask baghdadi
Considering the worthless steaming pile of fecal matter who was SecNav during the BHO years it is amazing that things are not much worse than they are.
No, we can’t. Look at ships alone. We have exactly five shipyards that are even theoretically capable of building surface combatants and IIRC three of those require at least a year or two of major overhauls before they can even begin to produce one. Right now we can only make Arleigh Burkes (now *definitely* a second or third class ship in the world destroyer market), subs, and Ford-class carriers. Oh, and the LCS, piles of crap that those are.
We can’t build a new frigate because we don’t have a design for it - we’re working on buying one in from overseas because we can’t wait the 5-10 years to design and build another one of our own. We can’t build new cruisers because we don’t have a design for them either, and nobody else we work with builds cruisers any more so we can’t buy those in.
In 1941, we had tons of new hulls under construction due to prior years’ military expansion acts. Right now we can’t build anything new significant.
Do we need more defense spending or fewer commitments?
Who was one guy in a third world craphole and didn’t have major power backing. Yes, we have some excellent special forces, but at the expense of the heavier normal units in many cases.
How do you think those light special forces are going to do when they have to go up against a Russian or Chinese line battalion?
We need both, actually. But even if we pulled everyone home and only looked after our Atlantic and Pacific interests?
We still don’t have enough. Our mainline gear is old and worn out.
That worked for WWII and limited wars like Korea and Vietnam. Last time we were capable of going in and kicking ass was Desert Storm.
In heavy combat, losses would be huge and happen very quickly. We may not have the luxury of time to "ramp up" before it is all over in a major theater conflict.
You summarized the problems with increasing our defense budget.
So much money is wasted on worthless toys to feed what Ike warned us about, the military/industrial complex which has seemed to evolve in the Deep State telling us our enemies.
Also, this B$ about being the policeman of the world make the other countries too dependent on us.
Better intel and taking out the top dogs like we did with Isis recently solves a lot of problems.
We’ve been backing off of being world policeman of late - but I am saying that even if we dropped that entirely, went back to defending our borders and our trade as originally, we *still* don’t have the right gear to do that and this needs to be rectified. We have a bunch of old crap that is demonstrably worn out, we’re issuing second and third rate gear that no matter how good the crew is (or in the case of Navy destroyers, isn’t) will struggle to match mainline issue of other countries and the best stuff sold on the world arms market. This will end up with US troops getting killed for no good end.
Offing leaders and figureheads is fine, but I remind you of just how well that worked with Franz Ferdinand.
Please provide USA realistic senario coming up in the next 20 years where you think any such “main line” Russian/Chinese unit is going to get into combat with a US ground combat team.
The rest of the world is not that stupid.Was is a battle of economics and logistics. They don’t have the economic/logistics might to fight us head to head.
This is just like the French Generals prior to WW2, they planned to fight the next war with the last war’s strategy and tactics.
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