Navy’s Atlantic fleet mulling new, high-readiness force

The U.S. Navy has long sought more flexibility in how its deployable ships are used, but it’s been hard to break out of the mold: the high-demand destroyers, for example, go through maintenance and training, most likely deploy as part of a carrier strike group, have a few months of free time upon their return, and then start the process all over again.

Slowdowns in maintenance work have exacerbated the problem, the commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command said. Whereas ships should be cycling through that process and heading out on deployment every 36 months, maintenance backlogs and delays have pushed that to an average of 45 months. With more ships stuck in maintenance for longer, assembling a full strike group for deployment might now take up all the available destroyers on the waterfront.

That leaves few ships to pursue Navy priorities, Adm. Daryl Caudle said, from at-sea command courses to experimentation with new tactics to missions in less-frequented locations like South America or the Arctic.

But Caudle said he has two ideas to try to free up more bandwidth for the fleet.

Tweaking the carrier strike group

First, he told Defense News, he wants to make the carrier strike group staff more “self-contained” and less reliant on the destroyers and cruisers they operate with. This would mean ships could come and go from the strike group rather than be tethered to the aircraft carrier for a whole deployment.

Today, a carrier strike group staff is headquartered on the aircraft carrier, but the air defense commander is located on the cruiser. The sea combat commander, though located on the carrier, also serves as the destroyer squadron commodore and works closely with the destroyers’ commanding officers.

Caudle is mulling creating “surface ships that are a little bit more fungible — where I can have surface ships that can be independent deployers, but they can plug into the strike group a little more seamlessly without necessarily having to matriculate through the [training and deployment process] with them.”

By NC ScoutPublished On: July 13, 2022Categories: Uncategorized6 Comments

About the Author: NC Scout

NC Scout is the nom de guerre of a former Infantry Scout and Sergeant in one of the Army’s best Reconnaissance Units. He has combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He teaches a series of courses focusing on small unit skills rarely if ever taught anywhere else in the prepping and survival field, including his RTO Course which focuses on small unit communications. In his free time he is an avid hunter, bushcrafter, writer, long range shooter, prepper, amateur radio operator and Libertarian activist. He can be contacted at [email protected] or via his blog at brushbeater.wordpress.com .

6 Comments

FlyBy July 13, 2022 at 06:53

Anyone else think this is a bad idea? There is a reason that one trains with those whom he will deploy with. It builds cohesion and confidence in the group and familiarity with the response given any number of circumstances that may occur. If this paradigm is adopted, the Navy will lose ships when the shooting begins.
- mike July 13, 2022 at 08:16
  
  Everything they have done in the last few decades has been a bad idea. There are whole classes of worthless fantasy warships that have no utility to speak of in the real world. They retired the F-14 and Phoenix Missile system that provided a large airborne standoff radius and replaced it with a less capable aircraft and missile combination as far a range is concerned. There was no urgency to keep ASM development on par with or ahead of enemy ASM development and we are now seriously outgunned with the old and short ranged Harpoon. Russian surface ships in the Black sea or the Caspian Sea can hit our ships in the Eastern Med with ASM missile barrages with impunity. There is no way our Navy goes into battle with anyone possessing modern ASM capability without losing some ships. This includes non-state actors like Hezbollah and the Houthis. If we go up against Russia we are gonna be in for a few tragic national shocks, maybe more than a few.
  As bad as all of that is, the real problem is the institutional changes instituted by our political masters. The spate of surface warship collisions in recent years reflects this. In the case of the fatal cruiser collision off Japan, The OD on the bridge was not on speaking terms with the officer running the CIC over a romantic rivalry. In typical woman fashion, the CIC officer failed to make sure the OD was aware of the surface contact that was on a collision course with them and the OD failed to keep in touch with the CIC during a low visibility transit of a shipping lane. That one was fatal and I think the CO was the only one who paid a reasonable disciplinary penalty. The women “officers” who caused the fatal collision with their high school girl BS got off easy.
SOG July 13, 2022 at 08:16

a f/18 just fell off a carrier at sea i dont think they are ready
boss21 July 13, 2022 at 13:47

Carriers are eating the Navy.
- NC Scout July 13, 2022 at 13:53
  
  Its predicated upon the idea of ‘force projection’. The flaw in that that is there’s no more force to be projected.
  - boss21 July 13, 2022 at 15:15
    
    Roger. The blank check made us stupid. Ten state of the art missile cruisers bristling with weapons could be had had for the price of of one carrier. Modern missiles reach beyond the range of carrier borne fighters and get there at least five times faster. Moot anyway as you say , nothing to project.