US military budget: How would you change it?

[Asher]

Weren't there a number of occasions with "noisy" diesel subs slipping through the protection and "pinging" US carriers on exercise? That doesnt invalidate your argument to get rid of them, I just recall it happening and the embarrassment it caused.

Yes. At the very least, a Canadian diesel sub successfully attacked a US carrier in wargames. The problem was they're not nearly as noisy as you think they are when operating on battery. They snuck up on the carrier and unleashed a devastating simulated torpedo attack without ever being detected.

[Asher]

In 1981, The NATO exercise Ocean Venture ended with much embarrassment for the U.S. Navy, and more specifically, its enormously expensive aircraft carrier battle groups.
During the exercise, a Canadian submarine slipped quietly through a carrier's destroyer screen, and conducted a devastating simulated torpedo attack on the ship. The submarine was never detected, and when the exercise umpire, a U.S. Navy officer, pronounced the carrier dead, his official report was promptly stamped classified to minimize the potential fallout. Unfortunately, a Canadian submariner leaked the story to a local newspaper, and indicated that this successful Canadian attack on an American supercarrier was by no means an isolated incident. This news caused quite a stir in Congress, and the U.S. Navy had a lot of explaining to do. Why indeed had a small, 1960s-vintage diesel submarine of the under-funded Canadian Navy been able to defeat one of America s most powerful and expensive warships, and with such apparent ease?
There are several possible answers. Firstly, Canadian submariners are extremely well trained and professional. Secondly, at that time, the Oberon submarines used by the Canadian Navy were probably the quietest in the world. A third possible reason, not so commonly stated, and with all due respect, is that the mighty U.S. Navy is simply overrated. It is my humble contention that the U.S. Navy is not all it's cracked up to be, and that is the focus of the present article.

Diesel Subs Feast on U.S. Carriers
While Canadian submarines have routinely taken on U.S. Navy carriers, other small navies have enjoyed similar victories. The Royal Netherlands Navy, with its small force of extremely quiet diesel submarines, has made the U.S. Navy eat the proverbial slice of humble pie on more than one occasion. In 1989, naval analyst Norman Polmar wrote in Naval Forces that during NATO s exercise Northern Star, the Dutch submarine Zwaardvis was the only orange (enemy) submarine to successfully stalk and sink a blue (allied) aircraft carrier Ten years later there were reports that the Dutch submarine Walrus had been even more successful in the exercise JTFEX/TMDI99.
During this exercise the Walrus penetrates the U.S. screen and sinks many ships, including the U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt CVN-71. The submarine launches two attacks and manages to sneak away. To celebrate the sinking the crew designed a special T-shirt. Fittingly, the T-shirt depicted the USS Theodore Roosevelt impaled on the tusks of a walrus. It was also reported that the Walrus also sank many of the Roosevelt's escorts, including the nuclear submarine USS Boise, a cruiser, several destroyers and frigates, plus the command ship USS Mount Whitney. The Walrus herself survived the exercise with no damage.
Not to be outdone by the Canadians and Dutch, the Australian submarine force has also scored many goals against U.S. Navy carriers and nuclear submarines. On September 24 2003, the Australian newspaper The Age disclosed that Australia's Collins class diesel submarines had taught the U.S. Navy a few lessons during multinational exercises. By the end of the exercises, Australian submarines had destroyed two U.S. Navy nuclear attack submarines and an aircraft carrier. According to the article: The Americans were wide-eyed, Commodore Deeks (Commander of the RAN Submarine Group) said. They realized that another navy knows how to operate submarines

They went away very impressed.
Not surprisingly, NATO and allied submariners are extremely confident in their ability to sink American carriers. In his book The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine, Andrew Cockburn wryly noted that European submariners on NATO exercises were far more concerned about colliding with noisy American nuclear submarines (running fast and therefore, blind) than about being attacked by American ships.

The Russians mug the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk
These examples provide ample evidence of the vulnerability of U.S. Navy carrier battle groups to attacks from diesel submarines, but of course there are other ways to sink a carrier, as the Russian Air Force knows well. In October 2000, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Kitty Hawk was mugged by Russian SU-24 and Su-27 aircraft, which were not detected until they were virtually on top of the carrier. The Russian aircraft buzzed the carrier s flight deck and caught the ship completely unprepared. To add insult to injury, the Russians took very detailed photos of the Kitty Hawk s flight deck, and very courteously, provided the pictures to the American CO via e-mail. In the December 7, 2000 edition of WorldNetDaily, Jon E. Dougherty said that the Russian photographs made it clear that there was panic aboard the Kitty Hawk. As one U.S. sailor quipped, The entire crew watched overhead as the Russians made a mockery of our feeble attempt of intercepting them.
Russia's air force is now only a faint shadow of what it once was, but even now, they can demonstrate that they can, if necessary, do significant damage to the U.S. Navy. It's little wonder then that a Russian newspaper gloated that If these had been planes on a war mission, the aircraft carrier would definitely have been sunk. Perhaps they are right. But it s not just the Russians, Canadians, Dutch and Australians who think the U.S. Navy s carrier battle groups are over-rated, expensive and extremely vulnerable. Admiral Hyman Rickover himself didn t think much of the American carrier-centered Navy, either. When asked in 1982 about how long the American carriers would survive in an actual war, he curtly replied that they would be finished in approximately 48 hours.

This isn't Top Gun
As we ve seen, U.S. carriers are remarkably vulnerable to attacks by submarines and aircraft, but what about the much-vaunted American naval aviators? How would the U.S.N. pilots fare in a dogfight with a well-trained enemy? The evidence is not encouraging. Canadian pilots routinely outperform U.S.N. aircrews in exercises, and have done so for many years. During the days of RCN carrier aviation it was well known that H.M.C.S. Bonaventure could put more planes in the air than much larger U.S.N. carriers. In the early 1980s it was revealed that the average pilot in the Canadian Air Force flew about 300 hours a year, whereas his U.S. Navy counterpart flew only about 160 hours annually. Even in this day of advanced flight simulators, there is still no substitute for the real thing (flying).
U.S. Naval aviators pride themselves as being supposedly far better than any Air Force pilots, but one merely has to look at the Canadian, Israeli and Chilean air forces to cast doubt on that assumption. The Israeli Air Force has bested the pride of the U.S. Navy, and they have done so even with less capable aircraft. A joint U.S.N.-I.A.F. air combat exercise in 2000 underlines and highlights the thesis that the U.S. Navy is overrated. On September 14, 2000, The Jerusalem Post announced that the Israelis soundly dispatched the air wing from the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt (which, incidentally, was the same carrier the Dutch destroyed in 1999). Israeli F-16s squared off against American F-14s and F-18s, both of which are said to be more capable than the F-16. The final results were astonishing. The Israelis shot down a whopping 220 U.S. aircraft while losing only 20 themselves. The 10:1 kill ratio was so embarrassing that the results were not officially published to save the reputations of the U.S. Navy pilots.
Chile is certainly not a great military power, but its air force is well trained, and they too have given the U.S. Navy reason for pause. In the late 1980s, it was reported that Chilean Air Force pilots, flying the relatively unsophisticated but nimble F-5, had trounced an American carrier air group in air combat exercises. Like the Israelis, the kill ratio was 10:1 in favor of the Chileans. As usual, this incident did not receive much press coverage in the United States.
Lack of Training
Despite its vastly superior numbers, resources and weapons, the U.S. Navy, the world s only true heavyweight navy, continually fails to vanquish welterweight and lightweight naval powers. This would indicate that training, not big, expensive ships, is the key to naval power. It is training, or lack thereof, that truly undermines the performance of the U.S. Navy. For example, even though the U.S. Navy maintains the most capable submarine fleet in the world (because the Russian fleet is mostly tied up at dockside), their submariners do not currently receive escape training. The Canadian submarine force is tiny, and yet it has the most advanced submarine escape training facility in the world.
The U.S. Navy boasts that its Blue Angels flight team is the world s best, but with their preference for high speed maneuvering over aerobatic artistry, combined with the team's grossly inflated number of maintenance technicians, one has to wonder. The Blue Angels perform with only six F-18 jets, whereas the Canadian Snowbirds fly nine Tutors, which are much older. The Canadian team flies more airplanes, but has a much smaller maintenance team. The Blue Angels have approximately 100 technicians, but the Snowbirds have only about ten.
American technicians are very specialized, and as a result they need lots of them to do the same job that just one Canadian technician can do. This does not sound like an efficient or cost-effective arrangement, to say the least. Through his many best-selling books and movies, author Tom Clancy has created a crisp, sharp, spit-polished, efficient, and patriotic image for the U.S. Navy. Some think he should be a paid Public Relations consultant or recruiter for the U.S. submarine force. It may come as a shock to some of his readers, however, that the American sailors in his books are too good to be true, and that even some American submariners admit their training is not very good. Several recent books have effectively stripped off much of the shiny Hollywood polish on the American submarine force, most notably Petty Officer Andrew Karam s account of life on the USS Plunger, Rig Ship for Ultra Quiet (2002), and Douglas C. Waller s Big Red (2001). Both authors (Karam served on the submarine USS Plunger) said that there is a lot of hype regarding U.S. submarine training, but the reality is much less impressive. As for the legendary assertion that all U.S. submariners are experts on every system in their boats, one sailor told Waller that was All bunk. Waller explained that The (submariner s) qualification only made you familiar with the rest of the boat. It didn t mean you could actually run other parts. If (the sailor) and the other missile techs suddenly died, those nukes in the back wouldn't have a clue how to fire these rockets. Petty Officer Karam, an Engineering Laboratory Technician, concurred, and acknowledged that he could only work on other systems in a pinch . He continued The Plunger, and, for that matter, any nuke boat, was sufficiently complex that one person simply could not learn everything to that level of detail in the 14 months we were given to qualify. Not if they were doing their own jobs, too.
British allies, of course, have long ridiculed American submariners for spending too much time and effort learning about nuclear reactors. Surprisingly, Waller wrote that some U.S. Navy officers quietly agree. The Drill Coordinator on the USS Nebraska, Lieutenant Brent Kinman, told Waller that American submariners talk too much about the reactor, like mechanics, and not enough about how to fight the ship effectively: That was the problem with today s submariners, Kinman thought. They were technicians rather than warriors. The average lieutenant riding these boats considered himself a nuclear engineer first and a submarine officer second. It almost feels like we re out there just driving the reactor around This overemphasis on engineering might explain why diesel submarines are so often triumphant against U.S.N. nuclear submarines during exercises.
Conclusion
The U.S. Navy is the largest navy in the world, and on paper, certainly the most powerful. Of that there is no doubt. With the Russian Navy all but gone, the American navy remains the dominant sea power in the world. Yet, as we have seen here, this heavyweight navy often has great difficulty handling the little guys. Indeed, if the U.S. Navy were a boxer, one might say that his dominance is due mostly to his sheer size because he punches well below his massive weight. In this era of asymmetrical warfare, of David versus Goliath conflicts, perhaps it is time for America to rethink its naval strategy, lose some weight, and as sports announcers say, focus more on the fundamentals.
For all the money America spends on its huge navy, it really needs to be much better.

The Author
Roger Thompson is Professor of Military Studies at Knightsbridge University and a Fellow of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society. His book Brown Shoes, Black Shoes, and Felt Slippers: Parochialism and the Evolution of the Post-War U.S. Navy was published in 1995

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[Asher]

Sidenote, my maternal grandfather served on the HMCS Bonaventure.

[MikeH]

Everyone I know who's served in British forces, alongside US forces has had the same opinion that they are overly reliant on technology and poorly trained

[Asher]

Sounds to me like an overreliance on the US carrier fleet is an Achilles heel. They don't seem all that difficult to sink with even cheap submarines, but their cost is enormous and it seems the vast majority of the US Navy is built around a handful of carriers. Sink the carriers, and suddenly the US' power projection falls dramatically.

You can bet in any nation's war plans for the US, one of the first things on their list is sink the carriers.

[Al B. Sure!]

Sounds to me like an overreliance on the US carrier fleet is an Achilles heel. They don't seem all that difficult to sink with even cheap submarines, but their cost is enormous and it seems the vast majority of the US Navy is built around a handful of carriers. Sink the carriers, and suddenly the US' power projection falls dramatically.

You can bet in any nation's war plans for the US, one of the first things on their list is sink the carriers.

Admiral Yamamoto hoped to take out the carriers at Pearl Harbor but none of them were there on Dec. 7th. The fact that the career fleet was safe was critical in that war.

[Hauldren Collider]

Sounds to me like an overreliance on the US carrier fleet is an Achilles heel. They don't seem all that difficult to sink with even cheap submarines, but their cost is enormous and it seems the vast majority of the US Navy is built around a handful of carriers. Sink the carriers, and suddenly the US' power projection falls dramatically.

You can bet in any nation's war plans for the US, one of the first things on their list is sink the carriers.

That's why the carriers travel in fleets, moron. You won't be able to slip your ****ty diesel subs past a huge picket of nuclear subs, arleigh-burke destroyers, frigates and a cruiser. Don't take a single wargame for granted. Not to mention I'm rather skeptical of the whole story in general...

[Asher]

That's why the carriers travel in fleets, moron. You won't be able to slip your ****ty diesel subs past a huge picket of nuclear subs, arleigh-burke destroyers, frigates and a cruiser. Don't take a single wargame for granted. Not to mention I'm rather skeptical of the whole story in general...

It was not a SINGLE wargame. It's been multiple (the ones reported at least, most are classified without leaks), by multiple countries, with multiple subs. In all of those scenarios, they had a full escort of nuclear subs, arleigh-burke destroyers, frigates, and a cruiser.

Be skeptical all you want, it's widely known to be true. The US obviously does not want to advertise it. I don't think you comprehend how quiet modern diesel subs are -- they're much quieter than nuclear subs.

The entire point, "moron", is that the fleets are useless if cheap diesel subs can slip past them. They'll certainly discourage battleships from attacking the carriers, but if they can't find the subs attacking it, what good are they?

[Jon Miller]

Except it has happened many times.

Diesel subs are quite decent at near shore defense.

The issue is that nothing provides the power projection of a Carrier. Even if they are a bit weak defensively once you find them.

JM

[Jon Miller]

Actually, the fault is the commanders.

The fleet should stay far enough out to see that it is difficult to find them...

JM

[Hauldren Collider]

Here's a really obvious observation about the whole retarded "make the US navy smaller = better" thing: The US Navy's equipment is already equal to or better than anything our allies have, and we have more of it. It's not a case of smaller and better, it's a case of larger and better. We have equally quiet if not quieter subs which carry tomahawks--see the new Virginia class. We have dozens of destroyers and frigates that are roughly equivalent to whatever our allies use. If your submarines can't be detected by our ships, our subs can't be detected by yours. Since we have craploads of subs, it's already game over.

[BeBMan]

I'm pretty sure we had a thread about a Chinese sub popping up in the middle of a US CTF on exercises some time ago causing quite some concern to navy officials.

[Hauldren Collider]

And yeah, what JM said. You don't park your carriers on the beach.

[Asher]

Here's a really obvious observation about the whole retarded "make the US navy smaller = better" thing: The US Navy's equipment is already equal to or better than anything our allies have, and we have more of it. It's not a case of smaller and better, it's a case of larger and better. We have equally quiet if not quieter subs which carry tomahawks--see the new Virginia class. We have dozens of destroyers and frigates that are roughly equivalent to whatever our allies use. If your submarines can't be detected by our ships, our subs can't be detected by yours. Since we have craploads of subs, it's already game over.

You're so...typical.

Yes, America would win in a war with most countries. Congratulations. Wars that don't happen, you would be the victor of. In the meantime, the other countries use the money you spent building a military for wars that don't exist to make the lives better for their citizens. They have better education systems with longer life expectancies. But damned if you don't have the biggest fleet in the water, protecting us from marauding Chinese battleships.

But the point is with cheap diesel subs, they can neutralize disproportionately large aspects of the US Navy power. That's a real issue that you choose to ignore.

[Asher]

And yeah, what JM said. You don't park your carriers on the beach.

Diesel subs go all over the world, not just on the beach...