[Foreign Policy Institute director Rovert] Zarate said that while the Navy is moving toward plans to put 60 percent of its ships into the Pacific and 40 percent in the Atlantic as part of the rebalance, it is reaching that goal by decommissioning ships from the Atlantic rather than adding to the Pacific.
And there's this fun with math for the Navy, too:
We're changing the rules on how we count our "battle force" ships that magically increases our fleet size? And this is supposed to hide the fact that our fleet is shrinking?
But on paper, everything looks great.
Say, paper militaries are pretty worthless, aren't they?
The major problem is that the South African armed forces have spent billions in the last decade to buy modern equipment without providing enough money to maintain and operate it. The major purchases include 26 Gripen jet fighters, three U209 submarines, four MEKO A200 frigates, and 30 AW109 helicopters. ...
South African politicians believed that having a lot of ships and aircraft in service, even if they didn't fly or go to sea much, provided the potential for putting a lot of ships and aircraft out there if the need arose. Left unsaid was the fact that sending a lot of inexperienced crews to sea or into the air increased the risk of accidents and failure in combat.
Yeah. But the shiny weapons look good as long as you don't need them. So you can pretend to have a real military.
Obviously, South Africa is just an extreme example and our military is not in that shape. But it's part of the same outlook that drives our leaders to defend their defense decisions on paper rather than in the real world.
