A Pentagon strategic review will seek to cut $400 billion from the defense budget over the next 12 years. The Navy expects to bear some of the sacrifice, but it does not intend to back away from its global presence or shrink its fleet of 11 aircraft carriers, said Navy Secretary Ray Mabus.
One of the lessons from the war in Libya is that the Navy demonstrated “how flexible and global our fleet is,” Mabus told reporters April 27. “We give options to the president in terms of the use of military force.”
I'm sorry, but we have a choice to make despite Mabus' assertion that we can have both. And by keeping the big deck carriers, we've made the choice. We will not have the numbers for global presence and we will have to back away from it or deploy ships at such a rate that they will rarely be in home port.
In my opinion, we need to pick a number for how many hulls we need for our global missions and then build the types of ships that can reach that number. If that means fewer super carriers, so be it.
Note to that Mabus' use of the Libya War as a defense of his decision to keep building the big carriers is ludicrous. While the Navy did a fine job with the few ships sent, not one of them was a super carrier. That is, we carried out our mission without the type of ship (the big carrier) that we will build at the expense of building more of the ships that actually fought in the Libya War opening operations.
Quantity has a quality all its own, remember.
