Our current military readiness

Neither is your comment about the Chinese and Russians.

 

[video]

 

I accept your concession. You got beat

 

Please don't confuse die-hard, anti-military, anti-Americans with facts. Especially if those facts include negative things about the Russians.

 

If you see some let me know

 

"I accept your concession. You got beat" ROFL

 

You are just sitting on the sidelines. Lol

 

You forgot to add "I accept your concession. You got beat" then do you happy dance.

 

Thank you for adding all you have to the debate. Lol

 

You forgot to add "I accept your concession. You got beat" then do you happy dance.

 

Flinty nipping?

 

I was thinking the same about your post:

 

Hobbits glob bits?

 

Meanwhile, for the sane, pro-Americans on the forum:

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/orde...-the-current-state-of-u-s-military-readiness/
While the current U.S. defense budget remains unparalleled globally and relatively large in U.S. historical terms, whether the U.S. military is ready for the challenges that confront it has increasingly become a topic of debate. Some allege the military is nearly “broken,” or hollow. Critics say the 2011 Budget Control Act—or sequestration—diminished training opportunities and resources for the services and contributed to a small force structure relative to the tasks demanded of them over 16 years of war. Others have concerns, too, but view military readiness through a more nuanced lens.

On November 13, the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings hosted an event to discuss the military readiness debate. The event convened a panel of experts, including from several branches of the military. Brookings Senior Fellow Michael O’Hanlon moderated the event.

O’Hanlon asserted that although readiness is an important concern, it should not take away from all the other important issues the military faces, such as long-term innovation and modernization. He said: “While sharing a lot of the concerns that readiness has severe problems and strains, I also think that we do not want to overstate the problem.”

Dan Keeler, a commander in the U.S. Navy who is currently a Federal Executive Fellow at Brookings, expressed more concern, particularly about his own service branch’s readiness.

Among key concerns, Keeler pointed to the 2011 Budget Control Act and associated sequestration, a well as general budget insecurity as primary causes of strained Navy resources. These issues, he argued, cause the Navy to fully fund only those units in deployment, or those next to deploy. “If you’re on the bench, you don’t get what you need right now,” commented Keeler.

He further explained that funding deficiencies often mean fewer aircrew flight hours and less personnel education, which ultimately hurts readiness. Keeler did acknowledge that readiness has improved: “[T]hey’ve put another $3 billion into [Operations] and [Maintenance] accounts to keep that going. That’s vitally necessary,” he remarked. Readiness today in the Navy? “It is improving, but it is very fragile,” he said.

Tim Hayden, a Federal Executive Fellow at Brookings and a colonel in the U.S. Army, expressed a more optimistic view. “Your army has never been better trained, better led, and frankly from my most recent experience forward deployed, better resourced for the current fight,” he claimed. He went on to note that “personnel issues do remain our most pressing current challenge, however we are seeing incremental improvement in that area as we have halted the drawdown of force structure and we are improving our personnel readiness.”

He attributed much of his optimism to the Army’s transition to a sustained readiness model. He stated, “Under the Army’s prior resourcing model, Army Force Generation, we trained and resourced units for discrete readiness for a defined mission over a defined period of time.” Whereas “under Sustained Readiness, we maintain a much higher degree of overall readiness focused on being ready for missions across the full range of military operations all of the time.”

Further, Hayden went on to state that “what we’ve done is we have rebuilt the cadre of our junior, mid-grade, and senior leaders on the fundamentals of war fighting tasks.” These changes combined, he argued, will allow the U.S. Army to stay on track to meet its goal of a full return to readiness by FY2021-2023.


Kate Higgins-Bloom, Commander in the U.S. Coast Guard joined the conversation next. Higgins-Bloom is also a Federal Executive Fellow at Brookings this year.

Speaking to the condition of the Coast Guard today she said: “Our state of readiness is decent.” She attributed much of this readiness to the Coast Guard’s culture of Semper Paratus, which means “always ready.”

Higgins-Bloom identified unpredictability and the need to recapitalize in the long term as the main challenge to readiness in her service, pointing to Coast Guard cutters that have been in operation for over 50 years as one example of many in the increasingly aged fleet. She also cautioned that the scope of Coast Guard missions continues to expand, which forces the service to spread itself thinner and thinner. “We need more Coast Guard, and we need more Coast Guard pretty much everywhere,” she noted.


Mara Karlin has spent a lot of time at the Department of Defense figuring out where money for defense should go. Now a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings, she emphasized the importance of defining readiness. While the debate is quite complicated, Karlin pointed to key questions to get the conversation started: “Ready for what? Ready for when? And what is everyone else doing?”

Karlin particularly stressed two areas of defense that worry her. Those areas are aviation and munitions. Karlin went on to state that the U.S. Air Force has been operating in an up-tempo environment as far back as the 1990s, and that aviation in the Marine Corps faces particularly notable challenges. Lack of congressional support for munitions is another case that she considered especially worrisome.


Former Assistant Secretary for Installations Sandy Apgar reminded the audience that readiness partially depends on infrastructure. He argued that this infrastructure—broadly defined as the “environment that supports the war fighter” is vital—has increasingly been “the bill payer” when the department needs to cut spending. He argued that we should treat infrastructure as more eminently critical. “If you approach it on a purely annual budget basis, you don’t recognize the long term assets,” Apgar concluded.

In terms of solutions, Secretary Apgar primarily argued for an increased reliance on non-government resources. “The private sector has much more to contribute than the current budget and policy structure allows,” he noted. To further highlight this, Apgar used the example of historical changes to military housing. Over time, there has been increasing reliance on the commercial sector and its practices. This demonstrates that cooperation between the military and the private sector can be efficient and improve readiness.


As the event wound down, and several questions were taken from the audience, Karlin reiterated the necessity of accurately redefining the readiness debate. She also argued for a renewed focus on opportunity costs within the Department of Defense in order to properly and carefully plan for the future.

Commander Higgins-Bloom recommended formal recognition from U.S. Office of Personnel Management that the Coast Guard is a military service for budgeting purposes and that the service would benefit from “more consolidated, and therefore more focused, oversight from Congress.”

Colonel Hayden and Commander Keeler both emphasized the detrimental effect of continuing resolutions—which essentially continue pre-existing appropriations into a new fiscal year, regardless of specific need—pointing out that it is unpredictable compared to the normal budgeting process.

They concluded by asserting that this unpredictability in the budget causes inefficiencies, reduces readiness, and ends up costing the U.S. government more resources in the long run.

 

Cut it in half. We would be even safer

 

As this article points out, readiness is not as critical as some claim and it can be assisted with measures other than more money.

http://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/354042-military-readiness-crisis-a-risky-misdiagnosis
As we begin yet another fiscal year with a stopgap funding measure known as a "continuing resolution" rather than a proper annual budget, Pentagon leaders are understandably frustrated. Such interim arrangements are the new norm this decade.

They prevent the Department of Defense from entering multi-year contracts that can save the taxpayer money, and they also interfere with innovation, since they simply extrapolate the previous year's budget priorities into the future.

They also disrupt training and hiring by leaving planners unsure of what the future holds, once the temporary budget measures expire.

However, these budgetary shenanigans, combined with recent high-profile accidents like the U.S.S. Fitzgerald and U.S.S. McCain tragedies, have led numerous officials to wrongly declare a military readiness crisis.

To be sure, after nearly two continuous decades of war, the armed forces are under significant stress. But to exaggerate today's problems as a "crisis" is risky.

Doing so can divert attention from other military challenges, like long-term modernization. It may embolden foes who mistakenly conclude we are unprepared and lead to cynicism among taxpayers who wonder why a defense establishment consistently funded at more than $600 billion a year (well above the Cold War average, in inflation-adjusted terms) is sometimes described in terms reminiscent of the "hollow force" era of the 1970s.

Today's armed forces, while challenged, are far from hollow. They need more consistent and modestly higher budgets. But rather than wait for readiness salvation in the form of much higher budgets that are unlikely to appear, Pentagon officials also need to think of what they can do to mitigate readiness problems through better management of the forces at hand.

Current military readiness — i.e., the ability of the U.S. military, unit by unit, to carry out assigned tasks promptly and competently — can be summarized as follows: First, most major categories of equipment are in fairly good shape, in terms of their "mission-capable rates" relative to historical norms.

For example, major Army vehicle readiness rates typically exceed 90 percent today. That said, a number of categories of equipment across the services, like certain helicopter fleets, are not in good shape.

Second, funding for major training is being provided to the military at 85 to 95 percent of comprehensive rates. That is not perfect, but by historical standards, it is still rather good.

Third, the quality of our personnel is quite high, and recruiting as well as retention statistics are strong. Yet, we do not have enough people for some specialties, and we have real dearths in areas like certain types of pilots and equipment maintenance personnel.

This review is admittedly cursory and imperfect, partly because the Department of Defense has been classifying more readiness data than it used to or than it should. But my research suggests that it is correct in broad strokes.

Today's overall readiness, averaged across multiple categories, is probably something like a B+ — though that kind of broad assessment can admittedly gloss over specific problems that might prove disproportionately serious in a given mission or crisis.

What to do? As noted, more and steadier defense funding is needed to further bolster funds for training and equipment repair and to modestly increase some force structure — though that would not help if the money comes by slashing other key federal accounts, as the Trump administration has proposed.

As Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley told Congress last spring, "The conduct of war is not just a military undertaking. We have to use not only our military forces, but we need the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, Commerce and so on and so forth."

Secretary of Defense James Mattis was even more pithy in telling Congress that if it doesn't provide adequate support for diplomacy and economic assistance, "I need more ammunition" to deal with the ensuing inevitable crises.

Thus, Pentagon leaders need to find new ways to manage the force more efficiently, in the expectation that large influxes of additional defense dollars may not be forthcoming. Fortunately, numerous ideas and options are available to them.

The Navy can lighten up its busy schedule, allowing sailors more time to train and technicians more time to maintain ships and aircraft, by modifying its forward presence operations abroad. Rather than having 100 out of 300 ships in a fleet at sea at a time, it can scale back by 10 to 25 percent.

First, without necessarily even announcing the changes, it can allow some gaps in forward presence rather than slavishly insisting on maintaining continuous operations in both the Persian Gulf and the Pacific. Second, it can use "crew swaps" more often, keeping surface combatants deployed abroad for one to two years at a time and rotating crews to them by airplane.

This goes against Navy culture, but so be it; the Navy already uses multiple crews for some types of submarines and minesweepers.

The Air Force can alleviate strain on the Navy's aircraft carrier fleet by stationing more combat aircraft in the Persian Gulf region in countries like Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and perhaps Bahrain. We rotate fighters through some of these places today but do not maintain a consistent, steady presence like we could.

The U.S. Army can permanently base one brigade of combat forces in South Korea and another in Poland, rather than maintaining its current presence in these countries with unit rotations.

The rotational approach preoccupies at least three units for every one that is deployed, since at any moment, one brigade will be forward, another will be preparing to deploy and a third will be recovering from a recent rotation abroad.

Operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere will still require deployments rather than permanent stationing and will keep the Army flexible and expeditionary.

Marines tend to celebrate their expeditionary mindset and often complain about readiness problems less than the other services. However, given their own challenges in domains such as helicopter fleets, they could use a bit of a break too.

One option is to scale back the permanent presence of Marine forces on Okinawa (where they number some 15,000 today, most on temporary deployment), if Japan would help by providing more space in ports for prepositioning and amphibious U.S. Navy ships that could allow Marines quickly to fly from California and marry with pre-stationed equipment in a crisis.

Today's military is indeed under strain, and we owe a huge debt to our sailors, soldiers, Marines, airmen and airwomen for all they do. But the American armed forces are far from unready, and where they have problems, the defense establishment has many options besides waiting like Godot for a big influx of additional dollars.

 

Cut and paste warriors aside.....cut it in half and we will be twice as safe

 

Then again, if Japan and Germany had won WW2 as on other threads you promoted, we wouldn't spend a dollar on an American military. We'd just be laboring for the Japanese and Germans. Unfortunately for you, the clock can not be turned back.

I'm am always astonished at how many liberals truly believe they were just entitled somehow to a privileged birth into a wealthy country and that somehow that USA is just entitled to more than almost everything else just because for some reason.

The USA became wealthy by being a kiss-ass country in the world and became THE world super power after winning WW2. You think all the wealth the USA has was because YOU were just owed it by the universe because you are extra special and thus deserve more than other people, don't you?

 

Maybe we need 30 carrier groups

 

19 is sufficient, albeit some may need to be replaced. Currently we have 10 nuke supercarriers and 9 various assault ships carrying Marines and Marine air assets.

 

Why is 19 sufficient? MERICA!!!!

 

But an amphibious warfare ship (such as the USS Bonhomme Richard LSD-6 pictured) is not a carrier. The loadout shown in your image has at least 10 F-35B fighters, which is not how they are normally configured. I can only imagine it was done as part of the F-35 trials.

The normal loadout complement is only 6 fighters, either AV8B Harriers or F-35B. When there are no Marine forces aboard and none of their airlift helicopters it can carry a maximum of 20 fighters.

But doing so removes the Regiment of Marines they are intended to carry in the first place.

 

There are not 19. 9 of those are not carriers.

And of those 9 ships he is talking about, there are in reality only 8. The ships of the Wasp class LHD.

We still have 1 of the Iwo Jima class LPH "in service", the USS Tripoli. But it is no longer in active service, it was loaned to the Army where they would drug it out every couple of years for a launch platform for testing missile defense systems. But that mission is now complete, and it is once again on the list for disposal.

 

Of course they are not. We NEED about 5

 

Dude, our LHA's are bigger and more capable than most foreign aircraft carriers, past and present.

http://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2008/pdf/navy/2008lha6.pdf
LHA 6 is a large-deck amphibious ship designed to support a notional mix of 12 MV-22s, six F-35B Joint Strike Fighters (Short Take-Off, Vertical Landing variant), four CH-53Es, seven AH-1s/UH-1s, and two embarked H-60 Search and Rescue (SAR) aircraft, or an F-35B load-out of 20 aircraft and two H-60 SAR aircraft.