we're just shooting up the horse

Where is Admiral No?

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As an institution, do we have a memory that lasts longer than a Flag Officer’s PCS cycle?

No, I’m not being flippant, I’m serious as FORD’s plumbing issues.

How many times in the last half decade have you read about how serious our Navy was about not burning out Sailors and ships with long deployments?

How many times since the inexcusable professional and institutional failures of 2017 that led to the drowning of 17 Sailors in their own berthing have you heard somber pronouncements about addressing latent causes of overwork, over-extension, and committing too few ships to too many questionable missions? We all know what this means and where it leads for deployment times and wear on our ships. With nothing but declining budgets on the horizon, we’re just shooting up the horse.

How long have you been waiting for the acts to follow the words about stewardship, sustainability, and long-term focus?

Yet, here we are, at the end of 2QFY20 doing this;

The Navy announced March 20 that aircraft carriers Dwight D. Eisenhower and Harry S. Truman, and their respective escorts, are operating with a B-52 bomber in the Arabian Sea to demonstrate “combined joint capability and interoperability to plan and conduct multi-task force operations in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility.”

The image of two carriers operating together in the Arabian Sea recalled the late-2010 decision by then-CENTCOM head Gen. Jim Mattis to force the Navy to surge two carriers to the Arabian Gulf as the Obama administration pursued a carrot-and-stick approach to force Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear program.

The two-carrier presence requirement in place for more than two years exacted an enormous toll on the service, with Navy leaders warning it was unsustainable.

Gen. Kenneth McKenzie told House lawmakers that the aircraft carrier “has a profound deterring affect principally upon Iran.”

“They know what the carrier is. They track the presence of the carrier. And I view a carrier as a critical part of a deterrent posture effective against Iran,” he said.

McKenzie went on to tell lawmakers he believes that the reduction in Navy carrier presence in early 2019 and years prior may have contributed to the latest cycle of escalation from Iran that came to a head with the U.S. assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander Gen. Qasem Soleimani and a retaliatory strike from Iran on U.S. bases in Iraq.

Any well caffeinated J2 shop at a COCOM can generate a RED MOST DANGEROUS COA that blends in to a RED MOST LIKELY COA that never really plays out … yet we respond and commit blood and treasure we don’t have to cover a low probability risk – opportunity cost be damned. We flood the zone with zombie CONOPS for the equally meandering strategic thinking that supports it.

Iran is buckling under a COVID-19 infection well beyond any impact we are seeing here from the virus. They are buckling under an already crushed oil market. They are buckling under crippling economic sanctions. They are insecure as the Iranian people’s already soft support softens with each month. Even if they did make the mistake of military adventurism … they are in no condition to sustain it – much less to a degree that requires such a short term, unsustainable, and counterproductive surge on our part.

Is it worth it, to us?

I know, 1,000 times I know – I am not privy to the briefings, but I’ve been there before; I’ve seen their ancestors. We’ve almost been at war with Iran since I was 13. We stumble from one recycled breathless quad-chart to another.

We cannot continue to rail against our inability to have the financial resources to man, equip, and maintain our fleet on one hand when we continue to do this with the other.

This is the correct read;

“It’s an asinine strategy,” said Bryan Clark, a former senior aide to the chief of naval operations and now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

“The Iranians don’t perceive carriers and a threat to their ability to project power because they project power through gray zone activities and terrorism — the kinds of things that carriers aren’t very good at dealing with.”

“And when they are inside the Persian Gulf, the Iranians perceive them as being an easy target. They can range the entire gulf with shore batteries along the coast in caves and other terrain where it’s hard to root them out,” he added. “So the Iranians see the carrier as a way to get the Americans to spend a lot of money on a show of force that doesn’t really impact their strategic calculation.”

In the end, this results from our archaic Goldwater-Nichols construct that has COCOMS running their own lobbying efforts to “sell” why they need more now … because.

Our Navy is being bled white while its Admirals make excuses or be silent.

Who will be our VADM Connolly or Gen. Shinseki who is willing to say in public what needs to be said?

Read all of David Larter’s summery of the topic.

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