Yeah, I wouldn’t be exactly surprised if training and funding for mine clearing activities is pretty low compared to training for submarine crews, carrier crews, destroyer crews, various missile countermeasures and etc.
It’s my understanding several European navies have invested heavily in mineclearing, but that isn’t based on anything other than just “stuff I’ve heard.” My understanding is a lot of waters in Europe’s sphere of interest were heavily mined after WWII, such that they still occasionally find mines. Because of this Europe developed a lot of mine clearing capacity and my understanding is built upon that and continued on with it into the modern day.
I’d actually also suspect there are private ventures out there that handle mine clearing to some degree. My thoughts were the U.S. Navy would be working in concert with other navies and even perhaps private contractors for the physical removal of the mines, with the U.S. Navy’s biggest contribution being its large fleet presence and all of the sophisticated technology the U.S. Navy has in the region for monitoring and finding stuff in the ocean.
I’ll be honest I read a bit about “cool” naval technology like the missiles and ships but mines are pretty uninteresting (but highly effective for their cost), and I wouldn’t pretend to know a lot about them other than general claims I’ve heard.
It’s an important shipping lane right in an area where we have a major U.S. fleet presence. We have allies in the region whose goodwill we would seriously hamper if we did nothing at all to help reopen the Straits of Hormuz. Note that if Iran did something truly foolish like mine the Straits, Iran probably lacks the capacity to quickly or easily remove their own mines–so someone with a lot of manpower is going to have to do it.
Our Navy is massively larger than any other Navy. If we’re going to have a Navy I can’t see how we ignore a major international shipping lane being shut down to international traffic.
Did we have mission creep in Libya? I wasn’t really in favor of us getting involved there (I don’t see how it helps us), but I also haven’t really seen a lot of the doomsaying scenarios about us having to occupy Libya and run the country playing out, either.
No, if we slacked off no other country could pick up the slack. Stuff just wouldn’t get done.
News reports that Iran has warned the U.S. against allowing another carrier to return to the gulf. As the U.S. is most definitely GOING to have another carrier in the gulf, what exactly does this warning mean? Is it just empty rhetoric?
I also have read that they’ve softened or backed down on their threat to close the straights …
(Just by the way, mine-hunting is a specialty of the Royal Saudi Navy.)
All in all, I have a bad feeling about this. The US is about to have elections, and other countries often think this is a time of weakness. The Saudis have just finished a new pipeline and may feel less constrained by the Straits. The world is in recession and so many may think we could withstand an oil disruption.
In some naval circles I’ve actually heard it said it isn’t smart that we actually have a carrier in the gulf. A carrier in the region? Sure. But my (non-sailor’s) understanding of it is the gulf isn’t a great arena for carriers to operate in and the fact that a carrier can be hit by land-based attacks practically everywhere in the gulf makes it particularly vulnerable there. Out in the Indian Ocean this risk is massively diminished and you still have the ability to operate in theater.
Heh. For my own edification, I found this Wiki page, with the number of combatant ships of the top 51 navies in the world. This counts, basically, everything with guns, from patrol boats and coast guard cutters up to carriers. It does not count transport, training, ceremonial, and ships under repair.
The US has 128 more combat ships then the next 50 nations combined.
I imagine the US Air Force would lend a hand as well - not to mention other interested nations. Many of them, by the by, would be Mid East nations more hurt by a closing of the Straits than most.
I dunno…The USA launched a surveillance satellite before the first Gulf War. Nobody told Saddam Hussein, “Oh Friend of God, we have twenty year old Russian tanks. They have Space Ships.”
I seriously believe that males in the middle east have testosterone poisoning like a middle schoolyard bully and will keep upping the stakes until they get their ass kicked by a bigger guy.
I think you misread that chart–the entire world has 2,848 warships, with the U.S. having the most at 341, but the Russian Navy in the number two position has 282.
That said, the chart really does show the U.S. with more aircraft carriers than everyone else on the planet put together (11 U.S. carriers vs. 10 carriers for all other navies put together). While I don’t know the sources of that chart’s numbers, from what I’ve seen elsewhere the aircraft carrier number is essentially correct–the U.S. has as many “capital ships” as everybody else put together. And the “Rest of World” aircraft carriers includes countries like Britain, France, and Italy, which are U.S. allies. That number also doesn’t count the U.S. Navy’s amphibious assault ships, which can carry helicopters and vertical take-off airplanes. If you count those as well, the U.S. may have almost twice as many “aircraft carriers” as everyone else put together (including its own allies, which have a lot of the rest)–and the American carriers are bigger, too.
Thats a very well researched thread but it doesn’t seem to mention ranges and numbers of ground launched anti-ship missiles.
The ironic thing about Iran “ordering” the John C Stennis Carrier Group to stay out of the gulf is that it’s just as dangerous to Iran sitting in the Arabian sea and out there it is out of range of Iran’s modified ground launched Silkworm missiles. I’d guess for exactly this reason they would move the carrier group out of the gulf before starting any action against Iran.
It’s not going to be the US that starts this dance…assuming any dancing actually takes place. It will be factions in Iran, or possibly some local yokel on one of the Iranian ships either acting on their own, or claiming to act on their own (or the government will claim that’s the case, assuming they don’t just say that the US did it) that sends up the balloon. Possibly if they get in the first licks they will actually have something to show for all the lumps they will get in return.
Perhaps they will be able to capture the carrier battle group intact and reverse engineer it…
Sure, but by that same token it doesn’t count such carriers owned by everyone else. Few countries have “real” flat tops, but quite a few have helicarriers and/or VTOL carriers to ferry AV-8Bs around.
Not that it really matters because Harriers are absolute crap, and “aircraft carrier” is codeword for “artificial reef” in any decent naval war anyhow, but still
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I dunno…The USA launched a surveillance satellite before the first Gulf War. Nobody told Saddam Hussein, “Oh Friend of God, we have twenty year old Russian tanks. They have Space Ships.”
[/QUOTE]
Preposterous ! Of course he knew all about that. As Baghdad Bob told him, the Americans were fleeing into space even before the first shot of the war had been fired !
Well, let’s hope the Iranians aren’t misreading their graphics.
“Ha! Look at this graph! Our forces are vastly superior to those of the Great Satan America! Launch the attack–at once!”
“Ah, Admiral–I think you are holding that chart upside-down.”
“Oh, crap.”
I like the fact that one of the carriers on the non-US side of the equation in the link you gave above is that Russian re-tread carrier that the Chinese have managed to get to sea for trials. I hope the Iranians aren’t just counting numbers when they make their calculations of comparative strength and relative force balances.
Typically (at least since the 19th century) naval strength is more often summed up by a combination of talking about capital ships and overall raw tonnage; namely because since the 19th century having a lot of small ships really isn’t as meaningful as having more really big ones, and in addition overall tonnage gives a better idea of overall force projection. This is mostly because the most important factor in naval power has been the power of the ships and the technology of the ships which often correlates with increases in size (dreadnoughts weighed a lot more than wooden frigates), I extend this to the modern day but with the caveat that you have to factor in any aircraft that a ship serves as a launchpad for as an extension of the ship’s power. Prior to the more modern era I’d say total number of trained and experienced sailors was the defining and most important factor. It’s the reason Napoleon couldn’t catch up to the British in naval matters, he was operating at far too great a deficit of trained sailors. It’s also the reason the Ottomans rebuilt almost the entirety of their losses at Lepanto within 24 months but never were quite the same scourge of the Mediterranean as before, the losses of experienced sailors and ship crews essentially required a generation to replace.
Just counting the ships puts the U.S. Coast Guard up there very high on world rankings, but their heaviest craft, the Coast Guard Cutters, are not really designed for serious warfare.
A more accurate picture of the relative strength of the U.S. Navy is created by the statistic that the U.S. Navy’s tonnage is equal to that of the next 13 largest navies combined. That is a lot closer in projecting the relative strength of the U.S. Navy, than is the misstated figure of the U.S. Navy being larger than the rest of the world’s combined.
[Semi-random fact: after World War II the U.S. Navy was pushing 70% of the world’s total naval tonnage by virtue of massive shipbuilding operations and everyone else’s navy being destroyed aside from the UK’s.]
The US navy is a high seas navy par excellence. I think this thread is indicative of to what extent ocean operations control the American thinking of naval power, the right (as far as I can see) conclusions have been made in the reverse order of importance. It started with big surface combattants (insanely expensive platforms carrying insanely expensive weapon systems), went thru aircrafts to trucks (cheap platforms carrying expensive weapons) to mines (cheap weapons without platforms).
Mine warfare is inherently non-sexy and has a low status in all navies. In ocean-going navies, it has two additional draw-backs, mines are inefficient in unrestricted waters and minesweepers are small vessels, difficult to deploy over the oceans. Still, mines typically cause most losses in non-ocean environment, e.g. to the US navy in the Persian Gulf in the last decades.
You need some hours of peace and quiet to lay minefields, so when you want to do it, it is not customary to attract publicity beforehand. So I’m pretty sure they are not planning a war.
The really fun, ironic response for an Iranian block would be to sit outside the Gulf and watch the Iranian economy explode. It would cause almost the same amount of economic damage as any non-civilian massacring bombing campaign and make th eadership look way more stupid.
You need to be a little careful about drawing the wrong conclusion from that fact, assuming it’s accurate.
Not too many nations ships attacked the USN recently, so any analysists graph is naturally going to skew towards mines, land based aircraft (USS Stark), and unconventional methods (USS Cole).
I hope the Iranians aren’t just counting numbers when they make their calculations of comparative strength and relative force balances.