The SteelNavy.Com Message Board: Re: Our option

The article talks broadly about our lack of civilian shipping capacity, both ships themselves and mariners. It talks about the shipping cartels, and lays out who the US obtains goods from.

In one paragraph, it states that the lack of trained US mariners is a result of reduced US ship inventory. And that would indeed be a big factor. However, I looked up Military Sealift Command. While you need Merchant Marine qualification (handled by the Coast Guard) you do not need experience for entry level positions. They will happily train. And they are hiring. So, this is a "career choice" issue. We need to do more to attract young men and women to want "a life at sea." Military Sealift Command would put such people right into "the pipeline," and right to work. The paragraph dealing with all this even states that MSLC let go ships for lack of personnel. So, that is the first problem, and not entirely related to the loss of a broader US civilian ship making industry. MSLC would function fine, independent of a larger US Merchant Marine, if it could attract enough people. It is a career choice in its own right, and right out of the gate would have more ships if it had more people. It could also be grown further with more ships, if it had the personnel supply. And MSLC is the UNREP part of the picture. When you are talking about sustaining the fleet at sea in combat, you are talking about MSLC, not the greater world shipping picture, which is the topic of the article. It devoted but a paragraph to this specific issue, which is a topic in its own right.

Cartels can still run the world's shipping, but we can supply the Navy just fine if Military Sealift Command were healthy. And that is more of a personnel problem than one of ships. During WWII, there were those who signed up for the Merchant Marine to avoid the draft and direct military service. So, a draft, especially a wartime draft, would help funnel a few more people off into MSLC. And, to my knowledge, direct Navy sailors can also be used. So, this whole topic in depth goes outside the scope of the article.

Even with underway replenishment and MSLC squared away, you will still need forward bases. The UNREP ships themselves have fuel and range limitations, and the longer the distance they must travel from being loaded to doing the resupply, the more time it takes. Keeping the UNREP ships close by for quick resupply is highly desirable. And the forward bases need supplies, and those would be coming from bulk carriers, and those would be the scope of what most of the article addresses.

I agree completely that we need to fix Military Sealift Command. That is fundamentally a personnel issue, with ships then being secondary. And if push comes to shove, a draft solves personnel issues. There was no USNS in WWII. Fleet support ships like refueling and ammo were USS, and drafted Navy personnel crewed them. The Merchant Marine were the civilian ships in the convoys. That can be recreated easily enough.

The broader part of what the article deals with...world shipping handled by cartels...is not overly troubling me, for reasons I have already given.

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To run a naval war the way the UK did in WWII. the Royal Navy never developed underway replenishment until late in the war. Thus, in the Mediterranean the ships were tethered to Alexandria and Gibraltar (Malta was often unavailable due to Axis bombing). In the Bismarck chase King George V and Rodney came close to running out of fuel on their way home.

This means our fleet will be tethered to bases, and this did not work well in the Red Sea fracas. Our Pacific bases are hurriedly being reinforced with advanced anti-missile systems because they would come under heavy attack by China.

The Russians in 1904-5 were hamstrung having to depend on fickle foreign shipping contracts to supply the movement of the Baltic fleet to the Pacific.

Right now we can posture as a nation with a functioning oceanic fleet, just like the UK in the Pacific in December 1941, but this is very dangerous because we are not prepared for war against a first class opponent, after decades of colonial warfare. A smashing defeat along the lines of what happened to Russia in 1904-5 would be a disaster. America was superbly prepared for world war in 1941, with production well underway. The homeland was untouchable. In 1917 the German fleet was contained in the Baltic, with only submarines left as an offensive arm. The movement of the arms and men to Europe was never cut.

The Chinese and Russians developing operations from the Arctic to the South Pacific would put the US in a precarious position. What we need is time, and lots of it.