CHECK this: After cutting the number of active air craft carriers from 12 to 11 last year, the Navy is now requesting Congress' permission to go down from 11 flattops to 10 for the years 2012 to 2015.
It gets worse.
Maintenance required on nuclear-powered carriers means one ship is always in overhaul in the yards - so we'd actually only have nine carriers available for those years. And some fear that the drop to a 10-carrier force would wind up being permanent.
Good grief. We had 12 carriers near the end of the Cold War when we faced the Soviet navy. Our margin of naval superiority is so great today that no nation can challenge us. No combination of nations can challenge us.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to draw down to bare superiority, but I'm far more worried about leadership in the Navy that allows modern surface warships to be judged not ready for combat. Strategypage provides some background that I didn't have at the time:
The U.S. Navy has suddenly discovered that its officers and NCOs have dropped the ball and allowed the readiness of warships to deteriorate to an alarming degree. Admirals and staff officers are scrambling to discover what went wrong. Asking the chiefs (Chief Petty Officers, the senior NCOs who supervise the sailors) might provide some illumination. Except that, over the last decade, officers have been less inclined to ask their chiefs much. The "zero tolerance" atmosphere that has permeated the navy since the end of the Cold War, has led officers to take direct control of supervisory duties the chiefs used to handle. The chiefs have lost a lot of their influence, responsibility and power.
The Navy really does need to cut officers some slack if the mistake made is due to aggressiveness in ship handling. That is a good quality to have in war. Instead, we have ships that rot under the command of captains who fail to use their crews. That is a defect we should have zero tolerance for.
But back to the carriers, there is no magic number for carrier hulls. We had 12 at the end of the Cold War. We were aiming for 15, true, but remember in those days a naval strike to really harm an enemy needed a full-blown "Alpha Strike" package of planes. Precision weapons today make each carrier far more potent than a task force of yesteryear.
Second, carriers are no longer our sole strike asset. Anti-surface missiles spread throughout the fleet long ago ended our near-sole reliance on carrier air wings to generate offensive power. In the years ahead, big-deck carriers may be too vulnerable to risk in combat.
Third, if your worry is about hulls, we are building a stealth carrier fleet of medium-sized carriers that match or exceed the tonnage of every other non-US carrier sailing right now except for the French fleet. These are called amphibious warfare ships but they will be able to carry F-35s and will be carriers in all but name.
Fourth, our new Fleet Response Plan is designed to keep most of our carriers ready to surge in case of a crisis instead of the old Cold War rotation that kept 3-4 at sea globally, but with little ability to put the remainder on station quickly.
I want a Navy second to none. I want a Navy second to no conceivable coalition of potential enemies. But let's worry about the right things and stop basing an assessment of our naval strength based on the single measure of the number of super carriers we have. Is our leadership up to the task? How is our anti-submarine warfare capability? What about defense against high-speed anti-ship missiles? What about anti-mine capabilities?
The number of hulls surely matters. Two excellent ships can't be in three places at the same time. And so the number of carrier hulls matters. But watch how you count those. And remember that times--and the Navy--change.
