The U.S. Navy Is Sinking in Middle East Sand

[RE]

As with England during the glory years when the sun never set on the British Empire, the key to power and economic control over far flung assets was their Navy.  The navy both allows you to project force and to patrol and control the sea lanes necessary to bring the resources strip mined from the rest of the world to be used on home soil.  In the aftermath of WWII, the FSoA Navy took over the role of global Naval superpower and policeman of the high seas.  The biggest and most powerful armada of ships ever built graced the 7 seas until just recently , when the PRoC Navy took over #1 with most ships floating, although the FSoA is still #1 in tonnage.

This impressive fleet is stressed out these days however, trying to keep the world safe for Exxon Oil fracked from North Dakota safely afloat when exported to Europe to make up for oil not coming through the Ukrainian pipeline from Russia.  This because said navy also has to protect ships floating past Yemen on their way to or from the Suez Canal and jostle with the Chinese boats motoring around the Sea of Japan.  Coast guard boats also very busy trying to keep migrants in SA on foot crossing 60 miles of jungle in the Darien Gap instead of taking a short boat ride from Colombia to Panama.

They are trying to do all these jobs while ever fewer HS grads want to sign up to be stuck for 2 years on an aircraft carrier group tin can dodging attacks from cheap drones and shoulder fired rockets coming from pesky Houthi rebels who are Janis Joplin's definition of free people, since they have nothing left to lose.

Meanwhile, they depend on and used up half a year's production of 80 expensive Tomahawk missiles to protect an even more expensive $13B aircraft carrier in ONE attack on Houthi bases in Yemen with little effect, since the cheap stuff they are using keeps rolling in from Santa Iran as gifts to harass the Great Satan.

Besides being a fabulous target for Houthi towel heads, these aircraft carriers have become of ever more questionable utility in the era of Cruise missiles and highly accurate ICBMs that can attack the boats from 1000s of miles away.  Gone are the salad days of WWII when the only thing a carrier had to worry about were Kamikaze pilots and Das Boot diesel powered U-boats.  I am not the only person who thinks all this hardware would go to the bottom of Davey Jones' Locker in a few days in a war with the Chinese or Russians, Adm. Hyman Rickover gave them 48 hours way back in 1982.

The utility and survivability of carriers in a major war are also in question. In 1982, the legendary Admiral Hyman Rickover stunned Congress by testifying that in a war with the Soviet Union, U.S. aircraft carriers would survive for "48 hours." In the four decades since, the carrier's vulnerability has dramatically increased. Anti-ship missiles have become far more accurate and long-ranged since Rickover's testimony, as the unrefueled range of an aircraft carrier's air wing has shrunk from well over 1,000 nautical miles to barely 600 now. This leaves carrier commanders with two unpalatable options: stay out of enemy range but become operationally irrelevant or sail close enough but put a $13 billion vessel and its 5,000 sailors at risk. The narrow waters of the Persian Gulf and chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz and Yemen's Bab-el Mandeb only magnify this dilemma.

To try and resolve the recruiting problem, the armed forces recently dropped the requirement they have a HS diploma, which doesn't really mean much since a HS diploma doesn't mean you can read or count how many shells are in the armory anyway.  Whether this will enable them to find enough warm bodies to swab the decks remains to be seen.  Perhaps they could offer a green card to migrants in the TX refugee camps if they enlist?

Paying the cost of maintaining this fleet and getting all the electronics necessary for guidance on the missiles and the planes they carry also are growing problems, so it's questionable for how long control over the high seas will be possible.  Without it though, you don't have an Empire.

https://time.com/6693320/us-navy-yemen-middle-east/

The U.S. Navy Is Sinking in Middle East Sand

RE