Rumsfeld peace dividend forced The Navy to revolutionize and embrace technology that The Navy had no foundational plans how to integrate into training, maintain it or how to apply it at sea or in combat. So billions spent to labeled “technology demonstrator “ Today, it’s one of the reasons lasers, drones etc. Congress slows down. Have a plan then come back for funding otherwise here is enough funding to keep R&D.
No peer thinking went further cutting into skill sets such as ASW and legacy systems such as S-3, ES-3 and KA-6D which were sent to the boneyard stressing both carrier and air wing. Today Boeing reaps a tremendous revenue stream thanks to those cuts.
Cuts didn’t stop there. Support auxiliaries were sent to scrapping or mothballed along with the skill sets. Something breaks back to the yard except the yard wasn’t ready for the increase in maintenance and repair.
Now I would not lay everything at Rumsfeld’s feet , Congress is also to blame for they reaped savings in one hand and gave a blank check to the USN with the other hand. Always have to keep those home districts eating .
But let’s get back to USN mis -management. Nobody in USN Intelligence saw the western banks lending China huge sums of of money to expand its merchant marine, improve its ports and expand its ship building ? Nobody saw that once expensive technology was getting cheaper and becoming available to many bad players including those in the 3rd world? It took two years into President Obama’s first administration to pivot national attention to the Pacific (2011) . A little late.
I forget the name of the admiral and will paraphrase his quote . “We train and prepare for war everyday in The Navy”. Thanks to many contributors that was lost.
Acquisition reform is coming , a unified war fighting vision is not there yet.
I disagree that “40 years of Navy mismanagement … discarded a sea control strategy.” What happened to us was the “peace dividend.” At the end of the Cold War, those who were ignorant of 50 years of history (and the operational philosophy that underpinned the Maritime Strategy) concluded that we had a "blue water" Navy solely optimized for some sort of cataclysmic engagement with the Soviets somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. Without that "blue water" threat, what had to follow was a new "reality:" we would operate “from the sea” in support of operations ashore. “Littoral” quickly became a budget analyst’s weapon and marketing catchphrase. Pity the program that could not reinvent itself by inserting the word somewhere into its requirement. Notice how quickly AEGIS became theater missile defense.
Yes very well said but you missed the 40 years of Navy mismanagement that discarded a sea control strategy . Maybe a good face can be put on the lack of numbers and call it distributed lethality or something like that .
Well said (as usual!), Ralph. I would add that a naval strategy that is an element of a well-publicized overall national military strategy is essential before we talk about force levels and funding. A primary reason for the success of the Maritime Strategy of the 1980’s and the force structure it rationalized, besides the tenure of Navy Secretary Lehman, was that it was understood by those who would execute it (the Navy), by those who were paying for it (the American public), and by those who were the objects of it (the Soviet Union). Creating this environment today will be an all-hands effort, but as the Maritime Strategy showed, it can be done.
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