FAR FROM THE SEA

I no longer live by the sea and haven't for over many years. I wonder how the sea services are doing these days and there is nothing online that I find particularly believable on that which doesn't speak well of the world we live in today. I lost faith in all the institutions and sadly the military was the last of the ones that had retained any credibility and that's gone now too. 

I see ongoing signs that recruiting everywhere is missing a significant metric but that is all I see. Nobody ever goes so far as to wonder, what happened to all those missing young men and where did they go and what are they doing now in lieu of going to college, joining the Armed Forces and finding work in the trades? 

I see their attendance and induction numbers dwindle year after year and nobody mentions what happened to them. Back when I was in the Navy when we were suffering a manpower shortage it was no joke and shortages were acute. My first ship had just about every watch underway manned port and starboard. The only people in more than 2 watches underway were the officers. When we got the boot after almost a month in Diego Garcia we headed back to our Operating Area in the Persian Gulf at the height of the Tanker War and we were about 60% manned. Just as we reached the equator we were called back because an entire planeload of men arrived to fill all of our gapped billets.

My old mine sweeper in San Diego was down to getting underway for NAVSEA testing of sweep gear when we were at about 25% peacetime manning. I was the only qualified Engineer Officer of the Watch onboard and we were steaming nonstop for 24 hours a day for 4 days of Exercise Gallant Eagle/Gallant Knight. Who doesn't think I was sleeping on watch in Main Control? In the Persian Gulf while conducting MCM operations we had a crew in excess of 100. In peacetime our normal crew was about 45. We were still getting underway with 17.

I suspect that the Navy today is suffering from similar manpower shortages but is able to eke out ongoing operations because so many of its warships are welded to the piers and unable to get underway. Sailors are fungible and more-so when a Navy only has 5 different types of ship classes all of which are near enough to identical as to allow cross-decking sailors from broken ships to operational ships in the Pacific and Middle East. That means however that there is zero surge capability and when those ships break down or come home that there isn't a ship and crew trained and ready to take their place.

Have you noticed just how few ships we have out there operationally deployed and underway despite waging some kind of shadow war against Yemen and 'deterring' Iran? Where are the 11 Carrier Battle Groups and all the Expeditionary Strike Groups that used to be deployed all over the world?

Expeditionary Strike Group 3 in 2014

I think we can say the same sort of thing about the Army and the Air Force. We now have Pentagon spokeswogs stating that 2 bombers have been deployed to X for contingency operations. Think about it. 2 bombers flew to join a couple others ones based in Guam or Diego Garcia. We used to rotate whole divisions of Army troops (sure by the subunits but we're talking tens of thousands of soldiers and their equipment). Where are they?

I used to live and breath the air in a number of places that are almost gone now. How many deployable soldiers does the First Infantry Division actually have? How many of their battalions, brigades and Brigade Combat Teams are C1 in Readiness, Training, Personnel and Material? Ditto the 2nd, 3rd ID.

I was surprised a few months ago to read that the Coast Guard was either laying up or discarding a large number of its ships. It seems they no longer have sufficient manpower to crew those ships so they're just welding them to the piers somewhere like Coast Guard Island in Alameda or some similar port on the Atlantic seaboard.

As a reasonable confidence building measure, perhaps the Secretary of Defense could tell us how many operational aircraft carriers, attack submarines, ballistic missile submarines, cruisers and destroyers we have left now and what the plans are to restore the rest to operational condition. I don't think he knows to be honest.

The filthy dirty rotten secret of course is that the Chinese know. So do the Russians. So do the Iranians. So do the Israelis. The only people who have no clue are you and me. I don't believe an honest word has dribbled out of Lloyd Austin's mouth in the last 20 years and I don't think I believe anybody that speaks for the Department of Defense anymore. The truth is not in them. Just look at the link and see what his priorities are and ponder the realities that face this country with him more or less at the helm.