That’s probably because trying to compare maintenance and repair of a ship that is 4 times larger (displacement), responsible for launching and recovering aircraft that are 7 times heavier, carrying modern electronics, weapons, and sensors to a ship built almost 100 years ago when carrier warfare was in its infancy, during a period when there were no alternatives is really pointless. The scope and scale of what you are trying to compute is like comparing an Iowa class battleship to the USS Constitution.
Who, among the senior staff in this administration, is not?
Kind of where I am.
In general, I figure that whatever I (a reasonably-intelligent ignoramus) can come up with in 15 minutes as a solution to a problem, has already been considered and discarded by career experts who have spent weeks, months, or years working on the same problem.
There is zero chance that I’m gonna say, “Why don’t you send cargo planes with food?” and they’re going to be say HOLY SHIT THAT’S SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK WHY DIDN’T WE THINK OF THAT unless they say that right before smacking me upside the head.
Why don’t they just load up a SpaceX Starship with MREs and land it on the deck of the ship on a suborbital hop?
Even with all of that this will be 180x longer than it took to put the Yorktown back to sea in fighting shape after it had major battle damage (the Lincoln has no battle damage).
Look, I get it: different ships, different tech, different times, different pressure to do things. Apples and oranges.
That said, it is worrisome (to me) that it seems our navy is so fragile. We have little ship building capacity and little ability to repair our navy. If a serious war broke out and our ships started taking real damage I doubt we can handle that in any reasonable time-frame to get them back out to sea. This just shines a light on this problem.
And all the ones within range have been bombed to hell. Or close to it, we don’t have good information on how bad the damage is because our government is lying to us about it. But this is a sign that they are not functional.
That’s a key element. Crew morale is important. But if the Lincoln were unable to carry out its mission it would have already been relieved. The mission always comes first, just as it did in WWII.
You’re not wrong. I’m a veteran of Reagan’s 600-ship Navy, and the state of the current fleet concerns me too. But I also recognize that the mission of today’s Navy is vastly different than it was even during the Cold War. Which leads me to…
And when was the last time that happened at any kind of scale? Sure, you can cite the epidemic of collisions and breakdowns over the past few years, or even go back to the USS Cole or USS Stark, but naval warfare today is very different than it was during WWII. Even our Cold War mission of “Projecting Power” is nearly non-existent today*. Modern naval power is almost exclusively limited to regional conflicts, and how we handle those is bound to evolve even more in the next few decades.
ETA: I would say that shows of force are still relevant in the South China Sea, but on a global basis that has pretty much evaporated since the 90s.
Really? I might have missed that news. I know this is the Pit but can you link some articles that this has happened? Not saying none have been hit but not sure about “bombed to hell” either.
I can believe the cost figures, but I’m skeptical of hundreds of military deaths.
That’s a lot harder to hide and a whole lot more damning in the public’a eyes than merely cooking the books.
How many empires have fallen to this thinking?
Everyone assumes country-A are too powerful to challenge so no one does. Then, one day, someone does and finds a paper tiger.
I think it is bad policy to rely on the past as protection against the future.
There’s been something wrong with the Navy for a while now. Reading about the littoral combat ship debacle points that out clearly enough.
If you think that was my point, you missed the point entirely. Warfighting strategies evolve because they have to. If you are thinking of modern naval warfare in the context of WWII you are making a grave mistake.
I am not sure what you think will happen if a shooting war with, say, China starts. They will certainly poke holes in our ships. Naval warfare 101. Put holes in the other side’s ships. Never changes. Same 2000 years ago as it is today.
That’s partially why I added the addendum about the So. China Sea, but that’s not really relevant to the Lincoln’s deployment or how long it will take to get her ready for another one is it?
Except now we can do that without ever seeing the other ship. And vice versa.
I dunno, in the Punic Wars the Romans determined their best strategy wasn’t trying to poke holes in the Carthaginian ships, but instead to drop boarding bridges and run a bunch of legionaries over to capture them.
To be fair, the Carthaginians were trying to poke holes in the Roman ships, but look how that worked out for them.
Because they’re using their slide rules to finish the calculations on my Snickers bar plan outlined above, no doubt
Well, I can link things hinting that they may not be worth rebuilding at this point. This one is probably as straightforward as you are going to find. It takes a little knowledge of DC-speak to see what I am seeing. Very little.
The primary piece was the immobile base in Bahrain that was taken out by the Iranians on day one. The Lincoln wasn’t the most important US asset in the theater; that base was.
This morning’s New York Times podcast, The Daily, was very informative.
I assure you that weight is not the problem. Keeping a Snickers bar in a consumable state for more than 2 minutes in the proximity of non-skid in the Persian Gulf is the real problem.