You may have read that the US Navy is drastically cutting back its Fleet Auxiliary by 17 or so ships. Why? Because no one wants to join the Rainbow Unicorn Sea Force and swear fealty to the Walking Corpse and Kackling Whore? Possibly, but maybe not so fast. Armchair Warlord offers trenchant analysis:
News came out recently that the US Navy is planning to mothball seventeen fleet auxiliaries - including an entire class of new fast transports - due to manpower shortages.
Contrary to what one would first think, this is not related to the "DEI recruiting crisis." This is due to a separate recruiting crisis in Military Sealift Command caused by the extreme workloads the civilian mariners who crew these ships are subjected to - far in excess of what military sailors or mariners working in the civilian sector are expected to do.
With that being said, let's take a look at what's potentially going away and what it can tell us about the USN's priorities going forward.
1. All 12 currently-active Spearhead-class fast transports. These ships are militarized fast catamaran ferries and largely intended for use rapidly moving troops and equipment around inside of a given theater. The class is apparently a perfectly workable port-to-port ferry but totally unsuitable for the various amphibious warfare schemes the USN and USMC have tried to patch it into, which - to be fair - it was not designed for.
The upshot of this is that the US military is going to lose enough high-speed, shallow-draft sealift capacity to move a brigade at a time* from Point A to Point B. This suggests that we're (1) deprioritizing actually defending the Baltic States and Finland; (2) equally deprioritizing the defense of the Southwest Pacific on land; or (3) both, given that seaborne troop movements are now going to have to rely on far more conventional amphibious shipping that will be wasted on ferry duty, or highly vulnerable commercial shipping.
* approximately 7200 tons of cargo and 3700 personnel for all 12 ships in a single lift.
2. The two forward-deployed Expeditionary Support Bases, which are basically oil tankers converted into Special Forces lilypads. The obvious reason for this is that the Navy has run the numbers and concluded that these ships - which are slow, enormous, and have little defensive armament - would be sitting ducks against the Houthis, let alone a first-rate enemy.
This is mostly infuriating because these ships are brand-new. In fact they actually commissioned a new one in February. Bluntly, the Navy seems to have wildly miscalculated what the "low-end" threat actually is, and assumed these ships would be able to fly off SOF and marines into hostile territory in Africa while not having to fend off anything more dangerous than pirate speedboats.
What's interesting here is that there are actually six of these ships extant or under construction but only the two forward-deployed hulls have been mentioned as in line for mothballing. I'd be on the lookout for the rest of the class being similarly deactivated in the near future, even though some of them are literally still on the slipways.
3. Two dry cargo replenishment ships and one fleet tanker, which I think is simply due to manpower issues and the low-hanging fruit of the ESBs and EPFs already having been plucked. Losing these directly impacts the USN's ability to sustain combat operations at the high end. They need these ships out in the fleet.
With the exception of those cuts (which make up a small amount of the total), however, the obvious conclusion is that the US Navy is cutting auxiliary vessels that don't directly support its high-end battle fleet. This sort of retrenchment and specialization onto the "core mission" of fighting World War Three, however, carries the risk that - as usual - the next war will be with the people we weren't planning to fight. The USN has already struggled mightily doing what was, objectively, a very simple humanitarian aid/disaster relief mission in Gaza... and equally-mightily keeping the Bab al-Mandeb open to Western shipping.
I know nothing, but found the above engaging.
LSP
PS. Some years back, my eldest was out of Basic on Christmas leave. There we were around the family table in Dallas with some old friends from England. My boy said the discipline at Benning was pretty thorough, which it is. I replied, "B might want to speak to that, he was in the old Navy." And he was, back when Great Britain ruled the waves. He joined as a junior rating (is that the rank?) at the age of 15 and graduated up to command a nuclear sub.
B looked at us both and grinned, a little, so it was. His people are out of Camberwell; Londoners of an age will know what that means. If you search the internet you'll find photos of my friend celebrating the last issue of rum in the RN. I won't go on.
