Second Fleet is intended to escort American troops and supplies across the Atlantic.
The Russian fleet that might threaten our line of supply is in a bit better shape today in terms of readiness (even as it shrinks in numbers and tonnage) than when it was a joke, but our ability to escort logistics vessels is kind of a joke now, too. So we are being totally sporting.
And our actual sealift is kind of--as in totally--shaky:
The U.S. military in September ordered the largest stress test of its wartime sealift fleet in the command’s history, with 33 out of 61 government-owned ships being activated simultaneously. The results were bad, according to a new report.
In an unclassified U.S. Transportation Command report posted to its website, the so-called turbo activation revealed that less than half of the sealift fleet would be fully prepared to get underway for a major sealift operation in a crisis.
In our post-Cold War operations we have been able to hire private ships for our logistics needs. But that relies on safety at sea because our opponents have lacked the ability to pose a serious threat to sea lines of communication.
That changes in an era of great power competition against great powers with the ability to contest for control of the seas or at least deny us free use of the seas. Private entities are less likely to risk their ships in such a dangerous environment.
And our approach to military operations relies on expending stuff rather than the lives of our troops. So we can't just dump them on a foreign shore with ammo and canned goods and tell them to charge the wire to win or die. We expend money rather than lives (and that approach reduces civilian deaths because of our precision firepower that costs money).
So yeah, we need to get on this sealift problem.
UPDATE: We're thinking about how to fix the problem, including this:
“We're looking at, maybe it makes more sense rather than invest all our money on the back end and trying to keep ships going and modifying them, … we [instead] partner with commercial operators to build new ships on the front end,” he said.
“We [could] make some investments in military utility on the front end, build that in in the beginning much like China is doing with their merchant marines, and those commercial operators operate those ships for 10, 15, 20 years — whatever is economically viable — and then they roll to us” when the commercial firms no longer want them, he explained.
Those up front investments would aid the commercial shipbuilding industry, he noted.
I've noted the Chinese effort.
