“You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat”: Principles for Getting the U.S Navy Right

Sir what I didn't see mentioned in this is funding. You could have 18 carrier battle groups, but if you only have the funding to man, equip, train, and maintain four of them, then having all of this hardware is pointless. We need to properly ID National Interests vs. national interests in support of Big Business. You loosing money isn't a solid reason to deploy a MEU and a carrier battle group. I think we forgot that somewhere. Stationing ships in Europe. Solid idea, but it goes back to funding. Where are they going to go, who's responsible for the maintenance of the harbors, security of them, and a ton of other items, that all evolve around money.

Col Joseph Lenertz In a perfect world this would be great. Unfortunately, we have the real world. I do think that there is nothing (short of dropping a nuclear warhead) better to show the ire of the American People than parking a carrier battle group with an amphibious readiness group off someone's coast, that is expensive. Training alone you are talking about ships with huge crews. Training in the billions of dollars. Then you are talking about hardware. One thing the U.S. Military has is the best equipment. Unfortunately, the biggest price tag comes with that equipment. The United States already spends almost twice what the rest of the world COMBINED spends on defense. The only way to say we want to build a larger naval force would be if they cut back somewhere else. Where would that be? More than that, how would that be? I was in the Navy, and I would love to see a WWII style fleet where three or four carriers are in the same place at the same time. The problem with that is that to budget that, sacrifices would have to be made elsewhere. I would not want to see the Air Force phase out the A-10 to pay for it. I would not want to see the Army forced to recycle Armor from damaged vehicles to pay for it. I don't want to see that casualties are higher than they have been in the past because of our shiny new forward projected force. We deal with an every changing world. Adaptability to the threat is the most important projection of force any nation can have. Showing that we can still park a carrier off your coast while bombing you into the stone age, and surgically using Special Operations Command to remove other threats. Show the world that we can perform any combat mission better, longer, and with fewer casualties. That is how you scare them into not starting shit.

One SSN submarine and this monster becomes sea bottom clutter.