Navy lacks enough ships to land Marines where needed

 Military.com:

The Marine Corps' top general expressed serious regrets over the fact that Marines were not available to help in two major crises in recent months because of a lack of available Navy ships to position units in nearby waters.

"Places like Turkey or, the last couple of weeks, in Sudan -- I feel like I let down the combatant commander," Commandant Gen. David Berger told members of the House Armed Services Committee on Friday.

"[Gen. Michael Langley] didn't have a sea-based option -- that's how we reinforce embassies, that's how we evacuate them," Berger added, referring to the head of U.S. Africa Command.

The remarks come amid a growing debate in the halls of Congress over how the Navy is meeting the legal requirement to operate 31 amphibious ships for the Marines, designed to be used as maritime operations hubs. Corps leaders and even lower-ranking officers have been stressing that they need those ships at sea to fulfill their missions.

In this year's budget proposals, the Navy suggested that it would drop its amphibious ship numbers below that 31 ships threshold by retiring older dock landing ships, or LSDs, while pausing orders of the replacement San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ships, or LPDs.

"We have some LSD platforms, for example, that cannot be made operationally available to fulfill the requirements that we need," Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro said in the same hearing.

Meanwhile, reporting from USNI in March revealed that the pause in buying more LPDs didn't come from the Navy but rather from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Pentagon leaders told reporters at the time that they felt that the current array of amphibious ships was "sufficient."

The devastating earthquake that struck Turkey in February and killed more than 50,000 people and the more recent civil conflict in Sudan that prompted the evacuation of 70 people from the U.S. embassy in Khartoum have provided clear examples for Berger of the value of always having a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) nearby.
...

It is up to the Congress and the president to supply the necessary ships for Marine landing parties.  The story does not indicate why the funding for the shgips was not there. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more