US military advantage has eroded, study says

The flying wing bomber was an instability death trap and only when fly by wire computer technology came into exist could such a craft be flown without the real danger of killing it crews.

 

That's another one. Artillery range finder devices back in the days were also computing device. The name of the profession of those creating the artillery range charts was "computers". They computed the angle of elevations and other factors.

 

Except they didn’t do both. The Republicans care only about tax cuts, not defense (unless that defense brings pork barrel spending to their districts).

 

Most warships had analog computers during WW ll.

 

That's the whole of it. Nice post. Since gaining the authority, Trump and Republicans have increased military spending.

 

Military spending increased every year Obama was in office.

 

But it's going to cost trillions of dollars to repair the damage Obama and Congress inflicted on our military.

It's cheaper in the long run to spend the money maintaining our military than spending hundreds of millions or trillions every time a Democrat leaves the White House.

 

They are not concerned, they pander. Six years ago they pandered their base by talking about debt, and wrote sequestration into law to slash spending, including military spending. Now of course they hope no one remembers and they blame Obama. It's ridiculous, and it surprises me people still take them seriously.

Vote in more people like Rand Paul. At least he doesn't pander, but sticks to his guns.

 

I concur...on liberal social engineering of the military.

 

I have already agreed with you that our cyber security is weak

Thanks in part to bad primary and secondary schools in the US not producing the best students in the world

 

Rand Paul is one of the Republicans in Congress who has to share a little blame along with Obama and the liberal Democrats who get most of the blame.

Rand Paul has some strong arguments.

 

It has every thing to do being a Marine or even a soldier especially if your a grunt.

You can spend years preparing for combat but it takes around 3 to 6 months of On the Job Training in actual combat before you get good at it.

That's what pissed me off about the Vietnam War.
One day you were standing on the "yellow footprints" at MCRDSD or MCRDPI and six months later you were landing at the DaNang Air Base in a Boeing 707.

You can't train and prepare someone for war in just 6 months. It took another 3 to 6 months to learn the job of fighting a war while fighting the war.

50% of the American soldiers and Marines who were killed in action (KIA) during the Vietnam War were killed during the first 90 days being in-country.

Once you made it through the first 90 days in Vietnam your survival rate significantly increased.

 

Exactly. Obama plays the flute and GOP dances. I remember differently.

Partisan finger pointing is a road which leads nowhere.

 

I'm pretty sure Trump is President now and that over the last 2 years the Republicans have controlled the purse strings.

 

With Democrats controlling the House it's predicted that their will be cuts in defense spending as usual.

What the Democrats will do is demand that for every dollar spent on the military that a dollar has to be spent of social programs and illegal aliens.

 

I'm pretty sure Trump is President now and that over the last 2 years the Republicans have controlled the purse strings.

 

Getting back on topic...

U.S. Aircraft Carrier Deployments at 25 Year Low as Navy Struggles to Reset Force
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This post has been updated to include an addtional statement from the Navy as well as an explanation of how USNI News tabulated its data.

THE PENTAGON – Aircraft carriers – the most visible tools of U.S. military power – are spending more time in maintenance and at home even as the Pentagon has declared it’s entered a new era of competition with China and Russia.

According to a USNI News analysis of more than 50 years of carrier air wing deployments over the last 15 months, the Navy has seen the lowest number of carrier strike groups underway since 1992, the year following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.


*Year to date USNI News Graphic

The Navy has deployed about 22 to 25 percent of its carriers since 2013. That total — which excludes training missions and exercises — is down from a 28-percent average for the rest of the era of the global war on terror. In 2018, to date, that number has been down to an average of about 15 percent of the Navy’s carriers committed to operational deployments.

For 22 days this summer, the Navy did not have a full carrier strike group deployed anywhere in the world available for national tasking, the service confirmed to USNI News. That’s the longest gap in the years USNI News studied.

In a late Thursday statement, after publication, the Navy said it was prepared to deploy forces at any time.

“The Navy is the nation’s global maneuver force and has the capability and capacity to respond to worldwide requirements at any time,” Navy spokesperson Capt. Greg Hicks told USNI News.

How We Counted:
In analyzing the deployment numbers of U.S. carrier strike groups, USNI News used a specific methodology that measured operational combat power.

The totals used in this story do not count training exercises, certification cruises or other qualification underways, but rather only include operational carrier deployments focused on national tasking.

For example: For 22 days this summer — under those counting rules — the U.S. did not have a fully certified carrier strike group underway available for national tasking.

During that period USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) was underway certifying its airwing and not available for tasking. Also in that period, USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) was participating in the Rim of the Pacific Exercise and not in direct control of its escorts. Neither of those underway periods was counted in the USNI News counting of full carrier strike groups capable of national tasking.

According to service leaders, the drop in presence comes as the Navy is struggling to pay off the maintenance tab for the carrier force that the Pentagon ran up during the 17 years of the global war on terror.


*Year to date USNI News Graphic

“After 9/11 – and all those evolutions for the ground team, our focus was supporting the ground fight, which meant we were operating that force a lot, and when you operate the force a lot it eats up a lot of your cash, it eats up a lot of your service life,” Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Bill Moran told USNI News in an interview last week. “The Navy got smaller to help offset the cost of a lot of those things. So, modernization wasn’t coming along at the same pace as it might have, with forces that were faced with the adversary every single day. Our job was to support [ground forces], and we have done it really well. But it’s against a team that’s maybe a minor league team, when it comes to maritime forces, not the major league team that we want to be ready for.”

The Chinese and Russian navies are those major league teams, and both have been expanding their maritime forces while the U.S. Navy largely marked time in a supporting role.


U.S. carrier strike group operational deployments from June 2017 to September 2018. The underways depicted do not note training exercises such as this year’s Rim of the Pacific exercise. USNI News Graphic

“This has all been building up over the last 17 years through overuse of the carrier force and naval aviation and a desire to have more forces ready,” former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work told USNI News in a recent interview.
“When we kept two carriers in the Persian Gulf for a period of time, we kept telling the senior leadership that this was going to have a downstream effect, and it would really put a crimp maintenance-wise, and there would be gaps both in the Pacific as well as the Middle East. That is coming home to roost.”...

continue -> https://news.usni.org/2018/09/26/aircraft-carrier-deployments-25-year-low

 

We haven't really been on the winning side in a war since WW2.

 

What did President Truman do to the U.S. military after WWll ?

 

GOP has controlled the purse strings since 2010, and yes, the debt has doubled.

 

Obama's sequestration actually controlled the purse strings.

 

We can also thank Republicans who vote for overly expensive weapons systems that only serve to line the pockets of defense contractors, not to mention the lax accounting they also support. Rather than trash Democrats and make in yet another mindless partisan mudslinging exercise, we could get to the bottom of what's wrong. (Yeah, Democrats haven't met a defense program they aren't primed to cut, but that's another matter.)

Yep, lots of bloviating.

If you really cared about the issue, you'd drill down on what's wrong and stop bashing Democrats.

Still fighting the 2018 election? If it blew past you last week, Republicans didn't do too well in the 2018 election.

 

Interesting, so you are claiming Obama did not increase funding on any aspect of the military save “liberal social engineering”?

 

We should definitely gut school funding like the GOP prefers to do.

 

He wasn’t hired to work in an aircraft machine shop because he was a Marine. He was hired because he’d already do it before he joined the Marines.