You are incredibly short-sighted.
Piracy is our business, when American Merchant Marine sailors die, when our cargos are hijacked, when everybody’s insurance rates skyrocket.
Here’s some links on the topic.
Does ITR stand for Integra Type R? Sorry, nothing to do with the OP but I really need to know.
Why do we keep paying that network administrator so much?
We never have any problems with our network!
Ponder for a moment why you can’t think of any sea-going threats.
“The neocons hold power”? Really? When did this happen.
Name me a neosonservative in the Cabinet. In fact, I’ll make it weasy: name a neoconservative who’s EVER held a Cabinet position in the Bush administration.
Hint: Paul Wolfowitz never held a Cabinet position, so don’t start there.
It’s this rock I’m holding. It also keeps tigers out of the yard.
I have one of those! Mine’s grey…what color is yours?
It’s worth noting that not only are there many countries out there with navies, and even growing, modernizing navies (Iran and China are in a naval arms race at the moment, with both developing submarines, aircraft carriers, and various smaller combatants), but many of those navies have submarines that are damned difficult for our own submarines to detect and sneak up on.
American naval doctrine generally calls for very long-legged ships, which means we have nuclear submarines, but not diesel subs (diesels have shorter range because, well, they CAN run out of fuel in less than 20 years, and thus require refueling relatively often). The thing is, Diesel subs are VERY sneaky. Much quieter than a Nuke sub, as in, it’s possible that they might hear our sub before our sub knows it needs to be listening for theirs (to be fair, our sonar and audio listening tech is probably a good bit better than those of many third world nations). The Euros have some very fancy stuff, including diesel submarines that don’t need surface air to run their diesels. The US Navy currently includes one Swedish submarine, along with it’s Swedish crew and officers, which is being leased to us in order to help us develop doctrines and techniques for dealing with these guys.
And as for piracy existing only in faraway places, and not in our own backyard. How far away is the Carribean from the US? Here’s a tip, stand on the beach in Puerto Rico and spit really hard into the sea breeze. Hell, give a rock a really good throw from Miami, if you want to inform my various Puerto Rican friends that they aren’t American. Aside from that, piracy generally exists where there are lots of ships to be pirated, which is in bottlenecks in less civilized areas. The US depends on a great deal of overseas trade, thus our merchant ships often find themselves in these waters as a matter of financial necessity. You would have us depend on the incompetent and possibly corrupt goofs in the navies of such highly developed nations as Somalia?
And yeah, modern surface combatant ships are designed to engage enemies many many miles away, theoretically the Ticonderoga cruisers could attack an enemy ship from 100+ miles away with a Tomahawk if it felt so inclined (and assuming it has a means of targeting said ship, which could be done with reconnisance planes, helicoptors, or maybe even satelites if they know where to look for the enemy ship).
Plus, I know a few guys in the Navy. If you get rid of the navy, you give all those guys nothing to do but hang around HERE :eek: . Trust me, this is a poorly thought out idea. 
Here’s a potential real world conflict: let’s say China decides to take “back” Taiwan, how is the Air Force without a Naval service going to deal with this?
By having a bunch of airmen storm the beaches? After flying there?
If you want to roll the Navy and USMC into the Air Force, you can work out the command chains.
Hijackings aren’t happening in our waters because of the Navy. Piracy anywhere in the world is lousy for the economy, and US business interests extend over the entire globe. And why would we spend billions training, equiping, and supporting other countries who could turn that training and equipment against us? It’s sure happened before- Osama bin Laden was originally a “freedom fighter” that we funded and supplied.
You contend that we don’t use massive battleships anymore, and you would have a point there, except that battleships are already being phased out in favor of smaller task-specific craft. But we still used Naval artillery bombardment to soften up the Iraqi beachheads when we invaded Iraq. We still need Naval supply ships for logistics or our grunts are going to run out of K-rations and bullets. We need submarines and specialized surface craft to protect from other surface craft and submarines. The fact that we haven’t had a serious threat to our navy in years partly signifies that it is an effective deterrent- no one’s stupid enough to get into a naval war, because our navy is ridiculously powerful. No one can challenge use at sea, and so the world’s oceans have mostly become “friendly territory.”
Besides, you act as though a US ship hasn’t been attacked in decades. USS Cole, anybody? Our ships are not untouchable, even as big and scary as our navy is.
As to folding the Navy into the Army or Air Force… why bother? You still have to deal with the same kinds of work, and the guys in Navy already know how to do it.
Boomer subs still provide pretty swell nuclear deterrent. Reason enough to have a navy.
Transfer the ships to the USAF? Well, then, as another poster mentioned above, we would still have a navy, just as the People’s Republic of China still has a navy. In the case of China, their navy is part of the People’s Liberation Army.
Think about the different functions of the ships involved. The aircraft carrier, obviously, functions to carry aircraft. However, there are more ships composing the carrier battle group. They have nothing else to do with air power than the fact that they’re sometimes deployed in a carrier battle group.
Besides the air power bit, the Navy does serve an important function, also mentioned upthread: guarding the sea lanes. I really don’t see the Air Force being all that concerned with a non-flying maritime mission.
This PO1, USN(Ret), thanks you from the bottom of my sea-going heart.
I think it might be more because of the Coast Guard.
Where exactly are these figures coming from? How on earth does it cost “untold billions” to offer training and technological support, put pocket change to float a world-wide Navy of our own across every shipping lane on the planet? Polycarp has already lectured on how expensive our warships are, and now they’ve suddenly gotten cheap?
Training is less expensive than doing it ourselves. Common sense. If we train Signapore, Signapore is providing most of the resources. As an example, the United States has been providing training and support for anti-terrorist forces fighting Islamic extremists in the Philippines for the last five years. Would it have been cheaper if we launched a full-scale invasion? Obviously not.
As for effectiveness, I note in the first link in Bosda’s post that insurance premiums for piracy have recently gone down. And the reason? “Better coordination among authorities in Signapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.” So plainly the locals are capable of policing their waters.
The only cite we’ve seen for “piracy” in the Carribean was three guys with machetes stealing some equipment from a yacht in Trinidad. Now maybe I’m just showing my ignorance of military affairs again, but I don’t think that’s the sort of thing we use aircraft carriers to deal with. Maybe there are hordes of pirates getting ready to swarm the harbors of the United States and steal radios and fishing rods from our yachts. If so, that’s the business of civilian authorities.
BTW, have you figured out who is going to sail these floating Air Force bases for you yet?
First, some piracy data:
From: IMB Piracy Reporting Center
Granted, piracy in the Caribbean is not as common as it is in the Malacca Strait, the South China Sea, or the coasts of Africa, but that’s somewhat besides the point. International shipping is the target of many modern day pirates, and loss of those cargos and ships, regardless of where it happens, affects everyone with a stake in international businesses and economies. However, attacks on merchant ships do in fact occur in the Caribbean.
Piracy is most definitely a job for a powerful navy or coast guard, as pirates are often armed to the teeth with modern weapons. This has always been the case, just as it is now. Leaving the problem to local authorities is begging for trouble and further corruption. Especially given that sometimes the coastal state is the problem, and sometimes the local navies are the actual pirates! coughIndonesiacough
The locals, in many cases, are most definitely not capable of policing their own waters.
With the exception of the Russians and Israelis, merchant ships refuse to protect themselves with firearms. Therefore, they make for easy prey who must rely on foreign navies/coast guards for protection and assistance. The U.S. Navy, IMO, is perfect for that mission. In fact, after the attack on that cruise ship not long ago off the coast of Somalia, the U.S. Navy started patrolling those waters. Not wasting any time, they’ve already nabbed some bad guys. Good for them.
As people have cited China as the country with the big, bad, threatening Navy that we must defend against, I say that war with China is not a realistic scenario. Sure there’s been some scare-mongering, but it’s mostly gone away since Bush took office and the Pubs and the media stopped trying to frame Clinton for some unspecified crime involving ties with China. Now the countries are linked economically. China doesn’t need submarines; if war erupted, they could simply cut off our supplies of underwear, processed food, light bulbs, and other vital junk. As our national leaders have decided to continue exporting jobs to China, plainly they don’t view war with China as a possibility.
As for Russia, I’m lacking any explanation of how war is going to erupt there either. Dubya keeps telling us that Putin is a steadfast ally in all respects, which may slightly overstate the degree of affection, but I see no reason to plan for open war.
And from what I’ve seen, if war broke out with Iran tomorrow, we could eliminate their navy with airstrikes in short order.
Frankly I’m not sure what’s so difficult about this one. All the aircraft carriers have crews. I don’t imagine they’d jump overboard just as a result of being put under Air Force command.
If we’re going to have the same fleet, what do we save by eliminating the “name” Navy from the roles?
If you’re going to “save” by eliminating a duplicate officer corps, you’re going to wind up with a bunch of people in charge whose training for strategic missions is totally unrelated to the troops and equipment serving beneath them.
Funny, I thought it was the businessmen who made that call, and not the national government.
Folding the Navy in to the Air Force doesn’t make any sense to me, but what about folding the USAF, which is apparently undergoing a significant force reduction at the moment, back in to the Army?
Another thing that is often ignored, is that the current US Armed Forces operational doctrine already emphasizes “Joint Commands” with division-of-labor among the participants. So institutional unification a-la-Canada/PRC/Israel would not * really* save *that * much. And like tomndebb said, we’d still have to train the crews that are going to operate this force, and the flag, sory, general officers who will command it, for maritime operations.
Even then that would make better sense than just eliminating every naval mission other than the Carrier Battle Groups. If I understand this correctly, we’d essentially the idea is that we’d handle any needs for managing such types of missions by outsourcing them to regional militaries, because any plausible maritime threat is just beneath us.
Firstly, what happens when we get into a fight that is not THEIR fight?
Secondly, a nation with interests to protect dismisses and looks down on possible threats, at its own risk.