Seriously?
Quantity has a quality all its own. The Navy announced this afternoon that it has changed the arcane rules by which it counts ships, adding 10 coastal patrol craft, two hospital ships, and a high-speed transport to what it calls the “battle force.” The new rules would also keep 11 cruisers the Navy plans to not-quite-mothball on the rolls.
Even more bizarrely, the Navy will count ships in the battle force in some cases only when the ship is overseas. When back in the United States, the same ship would not be counted in the battle force.
This concept has always been somewhat fuzzy:
What is a warship, anyway? Aircraft carriers clearly count, with their on-board squadrons of attack planes. So do missile-laden submarines and destroyers. Whether the Navy’s smaller and more fragile Littoral Combat Ship is a “real” warship has been hotly debated. Hospital ships? Coastal patrol boats that aren’t seagoing ships at all? As strategically important as they are — hospital ships for disaster relief, the patrol craft for guarding the Gulf against Iran — designating them as “battle force ships” does muddy the waters, at least metaphorically.
We count amphibious warfare ships in the "battle force." While a ship capable of carrying strike aircraft in addition to Marines is arguably a ship that can battle enemy fleets, I don't like counting other ships purely designed to move Marines. And I have no problem counting the fairly flimsy LCS. But that's me. I discuss the concept a bit here.
Yet the Navy will count 11 cruisers laid up (essentially shrink wrapped) as in the battle force on the theory that they will eventually be upgraded and put back in the fleet to preserve this class' numbers as others are decommissioned as they age.
The new rules are just ridiculous. Nobody is saying that ships and craft not in the battle force are not useful. But such a flexible concept makes accountability too slippery to make leaders explain why the fleet is getting smaller.
This measurement is made to be manipulated to keep a presidential candidate from challenging a sitting president over the fleet size by making the count vague enough to manipulate for political purposes. Keep this up and we'll start counting Coast Guard vessels forward deployed as part of the Navy battle force.
Our enemies won't be fooled by such manipulations. The danger is we will as we focus on that simple number which gives the impression of precision and hard reality that just isn't there the way the number is to be calculated.
