The Royal Navy has some excellent Weapon systems and one of the most powerful Navies left. The French, Russians, Chinese and very few others are even in the conversation these days, to my knowledge. I do not know the official rankings. I would guess Russia might still muster the second best anti-ship Navy and the Brits the second best Power Projection Navy. I have heard, the Royal Navy might build a full size carrier again. Does anyone know if this is true?
Jim
Keep in mind that’s trained Sailors. From E-1 just out of school to aviators with 30 years of experience. Impossible to duplicate in a few months. The other part we are missing is the aviation side. Say we do get an old carrier out of mothballs and underway. What are you going to put on it? I have no idea, but I don’t know if we mothball to any great extent older fighters. I know we have a bunch out in the desert, but I don’t know their readiness. And can they compete with (Chinese) aircraft? And with JSF at $200M a copy, don’t know how many of those we are going to buy.
True, lack of experienced manpower would be a serious problem, but in all likelyhood, if we had to rebuild our Navy from scratch, so would anyone else we’d be fighting with it. Also, I’m almost certain that there are numerous Navy and Marine carrier-operable squadrons based on dry land, though I’m not sure how many there are compared to squadrons serving on carriers. As for the mothballed planes out in the desert, who knows, but they’re probably in better shape than the mothballed ships (the desert in Arizona is known for it’s lack of corrosive salt water). Not really sure how they’d compare to modern Chinese jets, but even if we lost most of the aviators based on carriers, between the Air Force and what was left of the ground-based Naval squadrons, we’d still have a fairly combat-experienced core of aviators to work with.
That said, this would all be mind-numbingly expensive to do.
Recalling Jane’s Fleet Command, a wonderful game, circa early '90s you had the world’s 3rd best blue water navy after the USA and the USSR.
China had a noteworthy navy, but it seemed to be more of a well-armed Coast Guard oriented at coastal defense without substantial force projection capabilities.
The rest of the world… it seemed like I could have taken out any county’s entire Capitol-class navy using a single US carrier group, WITHOUT having to use the carrier itself.
The French navy has a fleet carrier (Charles DeGaulle) and modern nuclear powered submarines. it also has modern anti-ship missiles. waht are the chances of a war between the US and France? Things could get rather nasty! Another question: how long would the RN SEA HARRIER aircraft last against the latest JSF?
I mentioned France, **Mr. Slant ** is just refering to an outdated game. It was fairly accurate for the time.
The Forrestal class can (and did) fly off anything in todays carrier airgroup inventory.
The ships were decomissioned because they were old, not small. The ships major components become more and more expensive to maintain, especially when parts have to be custom made for the old (out of production) systems. I’m talking boilers, water evaporators, catapults, elevators, and so on.
Eventually, a major rebuild becomes more necessary, and with more frequency. Example: A propeller shaft or two loosens up, a “wobble” developes, and that shaft(s) has to be shut down. (And ship’s top speed and cruiseing endurance drastically effected. Until it is fixed, more stress is placed on the remaining shafts.) To fix it, the shaft has to be removed, the seals and bearings replaced, and a new shaft (remember, the old one sagged and got bent) put in. That’s a major dry dock operation.
A further consideration is this: The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 put serious brakes on Capital ship construction. Great Britain had the largest (and constructurally, the oldest) fleet in the world at the time. As she was not allowed to replace the older ships (except for adding the HMS Rodney and HMS Nelson) for some time, no new battleships were laid down until 1935 for the HMS Ark Royal (a carrier) and 1937 (King George V class Battleship). One of the main problems preventing Britains rebuilding their fleet (when they realised Hitler might be a problem) was that the military ship building industry was allowed to whither.
The US might be hoping to avoid a similar problem by continually ensuring that some construction is always ongoing for CVN’s, subs, and surface combatants. Therefore, as a new ship (like the USS Ronald Reagan CVN-76) becomes available, you retire some older ship (like the USS Constellation CV-64), as an increase in overall manning levels have not been provided or authorised.
For the topic at hand, the US could reactivate and rebuild the mothballed ships (like the aforementioned Constellation). In a long war of attrition, this might be necessary. But reactivating these ships would probably take at least a year, probably two. The cost in money would be high, but if the need was dire enough, then the cost would have to be born…
Caveat: The longer a hull lies in a mothballed state, the more work has to be done to refurbish it, and make it suitable for active duty use. The ships decommissioned in the 90’s can be brought back online relatively painlessly, but something a tad older (decommissioned in the 70’s) is gonna be problematic, IMO.
As far as manning levels go, the Navy has a large reserve: http://www.navy.mil/navydata/navy_legacy.asp?id=146
Which will tide them over until draftees come online. It was the policy in WW2 to “seed” experienced active duty and reservist personnel into newly commissioned commands in an attempt to mitigate the “newb” factor of the new recruits. It was largely successful.
mlees: Great post, thank you for the details. I really hope you decide to stick around.
Jim
Gee… if we’re going to all that trouble, why not recommission the BB-60 Alabama, the BB-59 Massachusetts, the BB-55 North Carolina and the BB-35 Texas? All are museum ships and are still afloat.
Think about how long it took to de-mothball the 4 Iowa Class battleships in the 80s- something on the order of several years each, and a bundle of money.
Plus, what would you use them for? They’re not really any more useful in surface warfare than a smaller ship mounting an equivalent number of Harpoon missiles, and the surface bombardment role is pretty much non-existent anymore.
The money would be better spent on the same money’s worth of Arleigh Burke destroyers or the Zumwalt(DD(X)) class ships.
I thought I mentioned up to 4 years due to limitations on Dry-dock facilities, maybe I just think I did. Nope, post 50.
The Iowa class might or might not be worth bringing back. They were a combination of Missile platform and shore bombardment. I went through the Navy’s list quickly and provided what I found with the link for more thorough checking by anyone interested. I think the Iowas might provide some value in the scenario that **Raguleader ** laid out. That will be a decision for the Pentagon to make.
The Carriers would obviously be of prime importance. The Forrestal class should be brought back on line as the highest priority in the scenario suggested. I am reasonably sure that we would have the ability to roll out the mothball carriers as we are building new small boys.
We also have a lot of Mothballed DDs and Frigates lying about. I imagine they could be returned to duty as needed.
Raguleader seems to be describing a situation that is extremely unlikely to happen, but would require the US to use every possible method to put a sizeable fleet back out to sea. This would mean recommissioning, building new and conversions. I will agree that I see no value at all in the pre-Iowa class BBs being recommissioning.
Jim
Well, if you have VTOL aircraft and your freighter is a container ship, you might not need to modify it at all. Harriers and helicopters can fly off the top of it with no more difficulty than they would have flying from a forest clearing.
Sticking on a few defensive systems, fuel and munition storage, an ATC system and so on would be a good idea, but conveniently most of those are available in containerised units.
The biggest drawback from a USN perspective is that the most suitable air wing would probably be drawn from the USMC…
I’m glad to see that the various navies are continuing to adapt to a changing world. Given how such things sometimes go, I had feared that everyone was going to continue preparing to fight the last war.
PS- Anyone written anything to rival Fleet Command recently? I’m dying for a replacement.
According to the way my father fished, so are submarines.
As I recall, the United States currently has the four largest navies in the world, and then the British, and Russians are more or less tied in terms of who can actually put something somewhere in a reasonable length of time, with China in the running if the somewhere is within two thousand miles of China, and no one is actively looking for them.
I believe France has a navy as well, and Germany is probably the up and coming team, as far as cruiser/sub navies. (Lots of innovation and some pretty nifty technology.) Since Britain, Germany, and to some historic extent France are our allies, this leaves us fairly well off navy wise.
But the problem is we have more commitments now, before any putative war starts than we can afford to operate in actual available dollars. So, we got a great big navy sittin’ in the driveway, and can’t afford the gas to actually use it. (Russia has the same problem, but their navy needs some mechanical work, and they can’t afford that either.)
Tris
A couple of thoughts:
Man, I sure hope we wouldn’t be in a situation where recommissioning the Texas would seem like a good idea. Dreanaughts like her were outdated before WWI ended (replaced soon after by “Superdreadnoughts” like the USS Arizona and USS Pennsylvania, which featured All or Nothing Armor and Raft-style hulls, making them MUCH harder to sink, and even then could prove to be spectacularly vulnerable with the maturation of air power).
Me, I’m a big fan of building a large reserve navy of cheap, easily upgradable ships, assuming the hulls can be protected from the elements easily enough and up-to-date weapons sysems and such easily installed. Then you just build some fancy state-of-the-art destroyers, subs, and carriers, and keep some of the not-quite-fancy-state-of-the-art capital ships in mothballs so they can be brought out if you need it. If a large floating war breaks out, drop in the new weapons systems into their pre-designed modular slots and then send them out to sea until things cool down.
I’m speaking out of school here but I was under the impression that carrier groups are fairly large chips to play in geopolitical strategy.
Used for good, strategic placement of overpowering force can cause a lot of would-be conflicts to not happen.