by admin on December 5, 2014
Did anybody notice how the Navy responded to the CSBA report, “Commanding the Seas: A Plan to Reinvigorate U.S. Navy Surface Warfare“? It seems the Navy’s CVN-builders are less than enthusiastic about Bryan Clark’s call to fundamentally shift the Fleet’s air-defense protocol. The CSBA report, as we have been discussing here and here, urges a […]
by admin on December 2, 2014
When confronted at sea, Americans have an unbroken, century-long record of building new maritime competitors–whomever they are–into ten feet tall, impossible-to-defeat monsters targeted directly at the good ‘ole U.S.A.. Maybe it’s some institutional holdover from America’s early underdog struggles against the British Fleet, but this habit of fearfully over-hyping anything and everything challenging in the […]
by admin on November 28, 2014
For the past seventy years, U.S. surface combatants have been focused on defending aircraft carriers from either airborne or submerged threats. This all-important defensive mission has–for better or worse–defined America’s Surface Combatant Fleet–the fleet’s platforms, weapons and (most importantly) it’s mindset. The Surface Fleet’s overarching protective requirement has permeated everything about the surface combatant fleet. […]
by admin on October 21, 2014
It will be quite interesting to see how the UK’s amphibious shipping/hospital ship hybrid, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Argus (A135), does in projecting biomedical support ashore in Sierra Leone. The ship is perfect for operations in an infectious environment–it is a 100-bed hospital ward, equipped to accept contaminated casualties, lashed to a right-sized aviation detachment, […]