U.S. Naval aviation crisis

I'm a Navy brat. Do you know how many times I have heard this story over the years?

 

Not a Brat, I am IN the Navy, and have heard this argument since I was commissioned.

"Severe cutbacks from the last administration." Hogwash. We've been at war (or at least acted like it) for the last decade. The bill for that is now coming due, and starting to bite.

 

Sequestration is the big factor, as noted in the article. When the budget cutting exercise was done a few years back, Obama stipulated that 50% of sequestration cuts would come from the military. He figured that would kill the issue with the Republicans. Lo and behold, they agreed to it and we have been paying ever since. When it first hit, it virtually crippled all the services, but was worse for the Navy and USAF, whose O&M costs are much higher.

 

Meanwhile, McCain wants to cut the number of F-35s for USAF, which will drive up the price for everybody else. First the B-2, then the F-22, now the F-35. He has done more harm than any bad guys.

For the Navy, their aircraft fly in the toughest environment, which is rough on them all the way around. The age and scarcity of parts also increases the accident rate in two ways, less reliability and less training hours for the aircrews. When a large portion of your parts come from cannibalization, you have problems.

 

I'm sure the military cut all the chaff (non-value added) before cutting critical readiness budgets, just like every big corporation would.

 

Jim- You cannot cut staff overnight and save money. You can cut O&M overnight and save money. You just do not fly or float. USAF is at its lowest level of manning since before WW-II, around 316,000 last time I looked, and most of the services are around their lowest manning levels, too.

 

No, not exactly. The Admiral states it "is a reflection of how hard we’ve flown these jets over the last 15 years." That's not unusual in wartime, it's happened since at least WWII.

While sequestration had an effect, and a significant one at that, the current situation was over a decade in the making. We've been diverting funds from non-essential functions to 'programs', i.e. buying equipment and trying to make up the difference with war funding.

In very simplistic terms, we've been mortgaging our future readiness to pay for current operations. And that we (Congress) charged all on the taxpayers credit card. Sequestration was just the first time you started to see the bill. Wait till you see the balloon payment....

 

Gentlemen, I can assure you the man on white horse has arrived and it will be fixed faster than a 4 am tweet.

 

If only it were that easy. Reagan faced the same situation and the ghost of his buying spree still haunts us. While his strategy worked on some level - an economic war of attrition with the Soviet Union - we're not in that kind of situation now.

 

Certainly not to make this a political discussion, but a few things to consider when it comes to military spending...

1. Job 1 of POTUS is ensuring the safety of Americans and our way of life. The best way to accomplish this is, arguably, through a strong military. This includes advanced weaponry, training and all the support that is required to feed, move and enable our forces to do their job swiftly, efficiently and effectively. We have, sadly, under-spent on re-equipping and developing new technologies. Our competitors (like China, Russia, N Korea and Iran) are certainly doing what they can to narrow the gap between themselves and us. Therefore, the prudent course is to expand that gap ASAP.

2. Military spending is stimulative, economically speaking. If the goal of this administration is to push GDP growth up to ~4%, infrastructure and military spending are aspects of that initiative. There are others, but government spending on the military puts money into the hands of military contractors and their employees who then spend it. There's taxable transactions at each level. Spending through re-equipping and developing new technologies is a good thing. And, technologies trickle down (jet engines, GPS, Internet, etc.).

3. The full faith and credit of USD is no longer backed by gold. I suggest to you that the US military, in general, and the US Navy, in particular, has replaced gold in this role. Trade and commerce are made possible by safe, secure shipping routes around the world. Without them, goods simply cannot be transported around the globe on the scale necessary to sustain a global economy and a population of 7+ billion.

4. Military has been called a social program. There are, roughly, 1.4+ MM personnel in the US military. There are, also, numerous other contractors and support staff that feed off of the DoD. It has been called the largest social program we have.

5. Total National Debt is relative to a) GDP and b) Total Asset Value. Much is made of the debt we now have. And, generally, I agree that debt is something to watch. That said, a Government is unique in that has the potential to print more currency to pay down that debt. Doing so will have an inflationary effect, but it's an option unavailable to mere citizens or businesses. Still, the question isn't what our absolute level of debt is. Rather, it's what our level of debt is to GDP (cash-flow based lending model) or total asset value (asset-based lending model). These are two most common lending criteria. There are standard lending limits (2x this, 5x that, 70% of such and such, etc.), but, again, for a Government, the rules are different (because they can print money). So, standard lending limits are probably just suggestions and rough guidelines (if relevant, at all, even) in the instance of Government debt.

In other words, I'm less concerned about the amount of debt as I am in what we buy with the money we've borrowed. Is it productive? What's the return on investment? Some of these questions are impossible to answer. However, spending on unemployment benefits hasn't produced the GDP growth we need to see in order to grow out of the high debt-to-GDP ratio and poor economic conditions we are experiencing.

And, yes, it was BHO who suggested sequestration. He didn't think the GOP would go along. They called his bluff. Our military is paying the price for that, now.

CW

 

This crowd will agree with the big strokes of what you just said but at the same time a significant portion of the people do not and believe we have far better places to spend money. To them as for those that don't like us we can quit meddling in their affairs and give everyone a hug and it will be ok.

It is a policy far easier said than done. We have a lot of air heads in DC and a lot of air heads voting for them. And hey, don't forget, we have a lot of snowflakes that need a free PHD in some useless field of study.

 

In life, I have yet to see how a weaker position is one of greater strength. It's not only oxymoronic, but also naive and dangerous, I think. The law of nature is that the weaker is killed by the stronger. There may be exceptions to the rule, and a more capable AC that can handle more threats reduces our fleet need. Potentially.

But, at the same time, if we're doing more with less, what happens if we have losses, too? We're then at even greater risk. Sink one carrier, and how many are left? It's not like we can just launch another one in two weeks, if we lose one.

There are indeed people who believe differently, but I cannot, for the life of me, understand the experiences that would lead them to that conclusion.

CW

 

Most of the general press does not understand what we learned from the Syrian adventure by the Russians. The Russians are at about the same level of conventional capability (except much smaller numbers of aircraft) as we were in Desert Storm 26 years ago. They have a few aircraft that can deliver PGMs, but the vast majority of what they have dropped in Syria has been unguided bombs with miserable CEPs, as were ours in Desert Storm. First, all their aircraft are not PGM capable, and second, they do not have vast stores of PGMs. This is much like what the UK and France demonstrated in Libya, where they ran out of PGMs very quickly, even in that limited engagement, and had to ask for more from us. There are parallels in air to air refueling, too, with our allies and Russia having a limited capability.

Everything we have, from heavy bombers to A-10s to RPAs, can and do use PGMs nearly exclusively. As we learned in Desert Storm, if you did not have PGMs, you did not kill much. Putin understands he will never be able to match US conventional capability, one of the reasons he is diligently upgrading his nuclear forces. Taking Crimea and badgering Ukraine is one thing, invading a NATO nation is another.

 

But, while the PGM is more accurate, the point of using them is to not only be more efficient but also to reduce collateral damage, correct?

Putin probably doesn't care much about collateral damage. His way, I imagine, is to just throw more and more ordnance at the problem. So much, maybe, that it's just overwhelming and, eventually, connects with the intended target. If he blows up a few schools and hospitals, I doubt it would bother him much.

But, it's a good point (and one that's good to hear) that our capabilities are, at the moment, beyond those of our potential adversaries. How do you assess China's capabilities?

CW

 

I think the general press understands that Putin couldn't care less about Syria. Their only objective is to keep the current leadership in office in order to maintain their base and influence in the Med/region....

And in a cost effective way....having PGMs is a "nice to have" if you need to explain yourself, Putin doesn't have that "problem".

 

Correct. In fact we could go one step further and say Putin would prefer not to use PGMs, collateral damage of epic proportions is how you alter mindsets get them to give up. Same strategy he used in Checnya..

 

PGMs are only important if you actually want to kill something you are aiming at, so you two missed the point completely. If you want to blow up random buildings, some several times over, and kill random people, dumb bombs are great. If you have to fight a near peer, they are pretty useless. Putin understands this but does not have enough money to do anything about it. If you think he had the option to use only PGMs, you are sadly mistaken.

Of course Putin cares about Syria becoming stable with Russia in the catbird seat, but not about the Syrian people. He needs airbases, ports and it might ultimately give him a launch site that can get him into low inclination orbits. Something he now pays a huge price in energy to do. Why do you think the ISS orbit is inclined at 57 degrees? Because that is where Russia's primary launch site is located (57 deg N latitude). Syria is in the mid-30s in latitude.

 

Yup- Kennedy/Cape Canaveral is at ~28.5 degrees N latitude. Their launch sites are one of the reasons the Russians came up with semi-strange orbits like the highly elliptical Molniya orbit . For the same mission, we would just have used GEO, except Molniya orbits provide better coverage at near polar latitudes, like much of Russia.

 

Oil <$50/barrel, the US now a net exporter of refined fuels, natural gas almost free, energy independence in sight.
How much longer will we want to spend ~$80B annually to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to protect... China's oil supply?
There may be other policy reasons to project power in the middle east, but raw economics is diminishing as one of them.

 

instead of building more f35's right now,

how we take 20-100 f16's out of mothballs and use those,where they're sitting [in az] I was told [last tour] they could do that?