US navy released worst rust photo to date
gcaptain.com
gcaptain.com
The simple truth of the matter is that the US surface Navy has, for the last 20 some years, been deferring maintenance and training of its core assets in order to fund prestige projects like the super carriers. 7th fleet is particularly egregious on this front, but this comes down to a resource allocation issue. Congress and the admiralty have shrunk the surface Navy, and forced the existing fleet to "do more with less." What this means is a higher operational tempo, with no down time, no repair schedule, and no training. In the investigation into the most recent destroyer crash, the board found that the bridge crew hadn't been trained on the basics of navigation, but rather on the basics of how to operate the computer system that navigated for them. Additionally, because of man power constraints, where junior officers would once spend the first few months of their career shadowing a senior officer, now they're thrown into command of a watch with no physical training, just a stack of DVDs they're supposed to go through before deployments.
It's an embarrassment, but it's an embarrassment of command, not to the sailors who are trying to make do with no time to do their jobs.
[1] whenever money and mission are involved, so is politics
we've already lost a $2 billion ship because the crew wasn't capable of following their proper firefighting procedure, in addition to the numerous crashes due to poor training and lack of sleep for crew
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/12/05/navy-accept-r...
From my comfy armchair, for a peacetime navy ship cruising around, there is "nothing" to do, but keep the lights running. Routine maintenance, monitor foreign ships, etc. I would expect boredom to be a more significant problem than overwork. Clearly, I am missing something.
https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crash...
A quick break down:
* chronic understaffing - ships have a certain number of billets. 7th Fleet in particular has been sending ships to sea without all their billets filled, particularly in the junior officer ranks. This means that you're not just doing your job, but also doing the job of the person who isn't there
* deferred maintenance - there's a lot of redundancy on these ships (warships tend to like that) so if something breaks it's not catastrophic - you can just use the back up until the sophisticated main system is repaired in port. However, after years of "just using the back up," those systems are failing, and HAVE to be repaired, often at sea. So, in addition to your job, and the job of the person who isn't there, you might also have to go help fix the HVAC or some weapon system or what have you.
* aggressive operational tempo - the Navy has said they need X number of boats to do the tasks required of them. They are funded for/have X-N boats. In order to make up the deficit, the ships they have are deployed on longer cruises, with less time to fix things. This is the core issue that's the root cause of these other failure cases, in my opinion.
Probably not, but maybe it's possible to give a taste. My perspective is all submarines, which is certainly different. Maybe read this and assume that the superficial details are the only exaggerated parts: https://subpargroup.substack.com/
Your core 'job' underway is being 'on watch': think tollbooth operator, maybe. You show up to work 45 minutes early so you can talk to everyone at work and learn everything that's abnormal or broken from the night before. Then for 8 hours a day, you're a tollbooth operator. When you finish up with that, you step next door to have dinner. Then, half the booth operators go to run street sweepers for an hour (again, this is after the toll booth shift) while the other half go to consolidate all the handwritten toll records made during the shift. On a simple day, that's 30 minutes, but it could be 3 hours if some of the numbers don't add up. Now you're ten hours in, and that's not too bad if all you had to do is collect tolls. But good luck with that.
Because you're also the guy who keeps all the lifting gates in good repair, or the guy who maintains the internet infrastructure or cooling or lighting to the tollbooths. And some jerk crashed through one of the gates last shift, breaking the arm off. In case that wasn't bad enough, the arms for your tollbooth were last produced in East Germany in 1987, and now you've been coasting on the fumes of that stockpile for 30-some years. The other toll plazas in your consortium probably have some, but they'll all lie and say they don't because their lives become more inconvenient in every way if you take their spare parts. But you have to find a way to make one shake out anyway. Don't sleep until you know how. You can send three emails per day to figure out how to fix it.
By the way, you have to go take your monthly tollbooth operator knowledge test. And be up one hour early to practice putting out tollbooth fires tomorrow morning.
Finally, the tollbooth consortium also operates ICBM silos, and you have to be ready at a moment's notice to remember how to do that.
Also, the guy who keeps the internet running is home for 3 weeks with his new baby, so you'll have to fix that too before you can email people about those toll gate arms.
All the people who failed in the past at what you're trying to fix are hanging out in a lounge playing Xbox and mostly getting paid the same as you.
The crew isn't a navy crew. The uniforms shown are not navy uniforms. In fact this is likely some kind of repair crew of some sort.
Secondly, this ship is in port, with the anti-skid coating on the deck apparently not visible meaning that this ship is already a non-operational ship.
https://twitter.com/manimota/status/1131343812025081856
This is definitely not in port or under repair. It's embarrassing.
The optempo of US Navy vessels is inconceivable to foreign navies.
Practically every second of every day while underway the ship is expected to be operational and a ship's itinerary is pre-determined down to the minute. Delays are not tolerated.
The fleet keeps getting smaller but the workload remains the same. The Navy is burning out its personnel and equipment trying to keep up.
The records for both longest deployment (215 days) and longest time at sea with no port calls (208 days) were both broken in 2020.
From 2017:
> The Navy has doubled its number of forward deployed naval forces ships operating out of Japan since 2006 – a bump from 20 to 40 ships – but those ships do not follow the Optimized Fleet Response Plan readiness generation model that includes dedicated time for ship maintenance and crew training ahead of rotational deployments.
https://news.usni.org/2017/09/20/cno-richardson-high-optempo...
The problem has only gotten worse since then.
The Navy used to heave to and have a day or two to clean up before entering port but they don't do that anymore. Those days cannot be wasted on cleaning.
As for the picture, if you told me that there were individual members of the US Navy crew that had more time at sea than the entire combined crew of the Polish ship, I would not dismiss that comment immediately as being implausible.
Online busybodies, like those commenting on the tweet you linked to, will bitch and moan about the navy going soft but they would crumble into dust under the pressures the Navy is operating under today.
The worst are the old-ass "CoLd WaRrIoRs" who spent 20 years in the navy doing a 3-month med cruise every year who got less time at sea than the 19-year old deck seaman on the rusty ship in that photo got before they pinned on E-3.
They would have gone AWOL if forced to go 200 days without touching dry land.
This only supports the idea that the tempo is so high the crews have little time for basic repairs and maintenance.
The USN has plans to limit the risk to the carriers, but most of those also limit the usefulness extensively. Even still, a maneuvering and properly-escorted CVN is not an easy target.
>>Seems like the focus should be on the stealthy underwater stuff that can pop up and deliver payloads like missiles and drones but what do I know.
I fully expect our submarine force to do most of the heavy lifting, especially in the critical early months of a hot war with China. But the problem is their limited ordnance. USS Ohio after her SSGN conversion only carries ~150 Tomahawks @$2 MILLION per missile for Block V versions. So that's 150 targets, max, before she has to slink away from the conflict zone and find a resupply ship or port. A Nimitz has a sustained sortie generation rate of ~80 sorties per day, and while I can't say what their typical ammo stores are, the carrier air wing should have more than enough bombs and guided munitions to strike 150 targets, and many targets can be prosecuted with fairly cheap JDAMs, SDBs, Mavericks, etc...
While our pilots still possess the essential skills and munitions to peel back an Integrated Air-Defense System (seems the Russians lack both of those), I don't think we are prepared for the ridiculous numerical disparity we will face here in the First Island Chain, combined with the reasonable qualitative parity of Chinese assets.
In fact, the old S-300s and Buks in Ukraine have been pretty effective and probably what spooks the Russians from using their air force in mass. Even those old systems are probably better than the Patriot for a lot of tasks. There's even been talks of sending more S-300s from Greece because they work and Ukraine knows how to operate them.
That would be unwise from a Greek perspective, because of Erdolfs ambitions and posture.
Most people seem to think it'll be a walk in the park for either the US or China, but I think it'll end up a kind of stalemate, with China and Taiwan both facing extreme privation from sea blockades, the Strait and SCS being a charnel house, and the world experiencing a massive economic disruption; domestic politics in democratic states would determine the terms of the final resolution.
Well, honestly your next sentence is pretty on the mark in broad terms: sea blockades, massive asset destruction in the main conflict zone, global economic impacts and political chaos.
I think the Chinese are using Russia's Ukraine failure to re-do their math about an amphibious assault aimed at Taipei (100x more difficult than driving across a land border into Kiev). I still expect their combination of ballistic missiles, land-based airpower (including old aircraft converted into drones/guided bombs), and a metric boatload of surface ships to wreck most US combat power in the region with sheer mass. We simply don't have enough assets or enough AMMO forward deployed here to maintain supremacy right on China's doorstep.
The big question marks are the responses from other local powers. We expect the Japanese to help if attacked, but what if they aren't targeted directly by China? The Japanese -N-a-v-y- "Maritime Self-Defense Force" is large and competent and we need them to counter the Eastern Theater Command Navy. Will the Philippines let us stage combat power in their territory? What will Vietnam do in the SCS? Will India distract China in the Himalayas?
Even if we get the upper hand in combat, maybe after 90+ days when we've gotten reinforcements from allies, from the continental US, etc....at BEST the situation becomes "Well China, we sank your entire Navy and Marine Corps, and killed most of your Air Force pilots......can we consider this 'Taiwan unification' issue settled?". The concern is that Xi Jinping and the CCP have staked their regime's reputation on this one goal. It's the same problem with Putin and Ukraine: failure is a guaranteed regime-ending scenario from domestic discontent, so they might just double down no matter how irrational it appears, and if the CCP can foster sufficient nationalism from the population, we could be looking at a LOOOOOONG bloody conflict and total economic chaos.
Not to say that's impossible, just that it's currently an unsolved problem.
Something else that's probably over - parking an amphibious assault ship offshore and using it as a base for USMC operations. The USMC and USN invested huge resources in that concept, and it's been very useful in small wars. Those ships are now vulnerable.
A LTJG writes in Naval Institute Proceeding on this.[2] If a carrier is close enough to do anything useful, it's vulnerable to shore-based attack. A Coast Guard officer worries about attacks by drone swarms launched from fishing boats.[3] China has a large fleet of small coastal vessels, the "People's Armed Maritime Militia", which are used for observation and other tasks.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61141118
[2] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/december/eye...
[3] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/december/res...
I agree that in a US-China war, the US will stay very far away from Chinese land-based platforms. The surface fleet would mostly remain outside the first island chain and fly sorties to take advantage of US air superiority.
That all said, none of this is impossible, and first tier militaries are putting a whole lot of effort into this problem; in a sense, "it's just engineering." But so far no first tier military has actually seen how their system would work in the field, and the results remain to be seen.
Particularly, if China were sure that it could sink American carriers at will, it would already be invading Taiwan.
The US Navy is actually pretty good at avoiding that.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/navy/...
It's much harder than it sounds.
A ballistic hypersonic missile isn't like a TV-guided cruise missile that can track a moving target or a HARM that will seek out RF signatures. You'd basically have to wait until the carrier is parked somewhere for an expended period (multiple hours at a minimum), otherwise you'll waste a $100M hypersonic missile.
If carriers were useless, China would not invest in them. But what does China know?
As you mentioned, carriers are good for dunking on low/mid tier powers that can be dismantled and then bombed on budget. Questionable if it's good for peer warfare with powers that can take out carriers.
And if you look at numbers, PRC is not really heavily investing/committing in carriers. 3 hulls over 10 years and ~50 J15s is very conservative relative to PRC MIC building prowess. For comparison, USN laid down and completed 4 Forrestal within 5 years. Nimitz was being launched every 3-4 years. Compare PLAN submarine fleet with huge tech gap that never the less commissioned many new hulls in same period because there's recognition that mass subsurface capability (and thus need to build up talent pool) is integral to future force composition.
IMO right now they're prestige projects used for peacetime "diplomacy" and building up carrier infra if PLAN ever decide to go super carrier power projection route. But it could just as well as be dead end trial/experiment with future oriented towards UCAV carriers like Type 76 and long range bombers like H20.
In 20-30 years, 100 B21s could probably drop cheap ordances more efficiently than carrier groups. IMO it will get hard to rationalize super carriers. But USNavy is a seperate branch with their own budget and desire to remain relevant, so US ends up with trillion dollar "presence" / photo ops platforms when the money could be best spent elsewhere.
> IMO it will get hard to rationalize super carriers.
It's a know-how preservation program. The US Navy could easily refit the old Nimitzes and extend their life by 3 decades. Instead, they are building new Fords at the most glacial pace that makes sense. One every 4 years means 3 billion spent per year. The Navy has a budget of $250 BN or so, so that's about 1%.
The problem the Navy has is: right now they don't need new carriers, but what if one day they'll need 3 or 4 new carriers per year. It happened before. It's much easier to scale from 2 per decade to 4 per year than from absolute zero.
On top of that, the Fords are a pretty flexible platform. They can carry now 75 manned jets. But you can easily see one day they can switch to 25 manned jets and 150 drones.
> 100 B21s could probably drop cheap ordances more efficiently than carrier groups
100 B21s will cost about $70 BN. And a lot to operate on a per hour basis. They might be cost effective for some missions, but they are not going to make carriers obsolete anytime soon.
Occam's razor would suggest China invests in aircraft carriers because it sees an actual benefit.
I'm not a naval expert either, but I would be strongly cautious of writing the carriers' obituary just yet.
So, if we had 500000 geosynchronous satellites, with a 1pbs link we could find carriers in a good fraction of the Pacific — maybe 10 or 20% of it?
I remember being told that terrorist wouldn't eavesdrop on undecrypted satellite communication something that I didn't believe at the time. I consider underestimating adversaries to be a time honored military tradition.
Sinking an aircraft carrier, let alone most of them, is also such a big loss of life and material, it could easily lead to WW3/nuclear boogaloo.
There are also anti-anti-shipping missile cruisers, CIWS, AWACS, etc. around aircraft carriers all the time.
There is also a lot of stealthy underwater stuff that is indeed ongoing. A big question on that front of course, is how would you know how it’s doing, or what it’s capable of, when it’s by its nature stealthy and hidden.
Its more accurate, I think, to say they’ve been doing it because political leadership and/or senior military leadership trying to anticipate rather than advise, is working to reduce the visible financial impact of optempo.
That is exclusive to a small amount of public companies without a stable business model. So a tiny percent. That has little to do with "acting like a private business" in a competitive market. At least when you compare it to how 95%+ of business operate.
Ask yourself, why would a healthy business sacrifice long term value for short term stock price gains? I highly doubt the answer is "that's what the free market demands". No serious bank or investor would touch a business otherwise if that was a rational incentive (besides ponzi schemers).
Even among public companies (which is itself a small percentage of all businesses) that is rarely the modus operandi. It's just a meme that comes out via the inverse of survivorship bias...aka news stories of obvious failures. The only ones that could stick with pro-short-term-investor anti-consumer tactics like that around are monopolies and/or mega corporations friendly with government.
Another evidence point is the poisoning of Hawaii’s water supply with tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel when a maintenance worker bumped into a cob-job PVC pipe in a tunnel. Thousands of people poisoned and I imagine leaky jet fuel tanks aren’t t great for fleet readiness. The commander who oversaw that disaster was promoted.
Prove the money was redirected and that the new funding amount for maintenance is insufficient that it caused the rust you specified, and that the rust levels are greater than other time periods.
You want to me to look at a photo of rust and get mad and then believe you about funding?
There’s a wide variety of material available from GAO regarding the many issues that the Navy has with maintenance. Feel free to read it.
If the command gives a rip about its reputation then these things will be addressed first. Everything from swabbing and sweeping decks, high dusting, polishing fittings, etc. It will look immaculate. Only on deployment do these appearance priorities start to drop due to operational concerns or tempo.
But the surface Navy is not a good community and is filled with self-interested officers that are more concerned about progressing their careers than training their people or maintaining their gear. It's why the collisions happened and it's why people died because of those.
The Navy has a huge culture problem in the surface community and until someone with the authority to address it decides to, things won't get better.
It's a big factor that led me to leave the Navy and go onto other things.
I'd constantly be trying to do something a different way that I could prove was more effective and be told not to do it.
Anyways that's my two cents on the topic.
The captains have enough leeway, they can get the deck stripped and repainted if they prioritized it.
Of course, their commanders provide the environment that allows or requires them to do other things instead.
Probably too many other ‘must do’s’ and other problems.
There is no smoking gun of "aha! you cut funds for needed repairs!" here - just a series of operational and organizational priorities that have resulted in ships being at sea for longer and longer deployments, and resources allocated to prestige projects like carriers, instead of resolving the less sexy issue of manpower, and lack of "work horse" destroyers in the fleet.
ProPublica has a good piece going into some of the details of this if you'd like to know more, specifically as it regards the 7th Fleet.
https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crash...
I'll assume that's a reasonable take but the person I replied to went for an overly simplistic "government bad" line hence the style of my life
Air power is great but incredibly dependent on logistics.
The navy is and always has been essential to protecting trade and maintaining global supply lines So long as the sea remains the dominant method of transporting resources around the globe, sea power will remain essential.
It's economic, it's political and social influence, it's positioning yourself as the root in supply chains.
All of the USs classic enemies are playing asymmetric war against you for a while now.
In the day of billion dollar vessels, as a taxpayer, I would sort of demand that the navy do more so that the lifetime of these very expensive ships can be as long as possible. If they're going to constantly go back to congress for more ship money, they must demonstrate they can maintain the ones they already have.
But the contract "couldn't" be changed, and more money was paid out to the war profiteers to do what should have been done in th3 first place.
The military will always house rotten apples because it's ultimately an organisation made up of flawed humans. But you would expect for them to be dealt with accordingly. But for something like this to be allowed to get to the state it has means that leadership is turning a blind eye. And if leadership is turning a blind eye to this then what else are they turning a blind eye to?
This is just one story of many. If you want to pretend the military is some black and white evil entity to help you sleep at night then go ahead. But it is simply not the reality. The reality is that it is a group of humans who each have to constantly weigh the tradeoffs of horrifically impossible decisions every single day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_engagement
https://warontherocks.com/2017/07/when-can-a-soldier-disobey...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Red_Wings#Execution_...
But militaries do make smaller-scale ethical decisions all the time, e.g: “do we attack this compound that could contain civilians”.
The possibility or certainty of collateral damage never seems to stop much, whether it's wedding guests or fellow car passengers or Osama's wives, it's always bomb first and hand wave it away later, or so it seems.
the only way you could justify it was that maybe they knew people would get upset and it might bring some public attention on leadership to fix things?
I suspect it’s a mix of mismanagement and stretched resources, not strictly one or the other.
Apparently, they are doing neither
As an example, I swap my own winter and summer tires (mounted on separate sets for wheels; I have my limits) because it gives me a twice yearly opportunity to asses the condition of the brakes and suspension components while I'm mucking around with the wheels off.
Keeping your finger on the pulse of a machine by looking after it means you spot problems before they become disasters and inform how you operate it to make the most of its capabilities and avoid its weaknesses.
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Love. You can learn all the math in the 'Verse, but
you take a boat in the air that you don't love, she'll shake you off just as
sure as the turning of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta
fall down, tells you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens. Makes her a home.Shouldn't that matter much more than prestige? How much punch you can pack in the field, how safe it is for your troops,... not how it looks or feels.
Camouflage was once seen as not suitable for the morale of troops who were used to Napoleon-era bright colorful uniforms, now it's perfectly common.
And for the record I don't buy for a second it won't effect the operational readiness of the fleet.
https://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/camp-lejeune/
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/15/1064514935/water-contaminatio...
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/navy-aircraft-carrier-uss-ab...
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/navy-uss-nimitz-water-contam...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/06/military-bas...
Senior "leadership" is a mix of careerists who don't know when to push back against generals that demand a higher operational tempo, or who don't understand why constant 12-16-hour workdays are a problem, because that's how they came up the ranks.
Total failures of basic resource-to-task analysis and management. They want EVERYTHING done, and they want it all done last Tuesday, and they don't want to hear about how many man-hours that should take. "Stop making excuses, or it will be reflected in your next Fitness Report."
Is it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_involv...
It's almost funny to imagine what kind of war fantasy bubble those people exist in. Not going into the "best and brightest" which is just an insult to people doing much more meaningful work, maybe the history of politically motivated never ending or unsuccessful wars has anything to do with the "best and brightest" not wanting to sign up to be cannon fodder.
Is there any chance that these issues are not fleet wide? Like, did they figure out a coating system that works better and are deferring maintenance more on ships that are going to get it soon?
Probably not of course.
Seems like nothing can survive being pressure washed by seawater for several months.
[1] https://www.ferryl.com/products/ferryl-ferrycid-rustremover/
some inpainting should fix this nicely :)
Some of the analysis/conclusions about the Moskva sinking kinda confirm their problems: abysmal maintenance wasn't only surface-deep. She likely had major self-defense systems that were degraded, inoperable, or manned by unskilled sailors.
The US keeps decent equipment readiness largely by throwing a fortune at contractors for maintenance, but overworked and poorly-trained Sailors at sea should be a major red flag (as if the numerous accidents in 7th Fleet wasn't sufficient wake-up call).
More Details:
(caveat, I'm not former military so if I get terms wrong, forgive me)
I looked through the last month of photos on the navy facebook page which is where this photo is supposedly from. All of them have clean decks. They have a mix of at attention and dress uniforms for ceremonies and many many more photos of sailors in a relaxed or work situations in non-dress uniforms... https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=535384871959649&set=pcb... is one.
The article links to a dude's tweet who does not source the image... but a google reverse search finds it from https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/... The dude's twitter's slogan is "Views my own, but really should be yours" draw your own conclusions.
Here's the photo source, https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/photos/pcb.6120716927952..., looks like a promotion ceremony for the younger man in white dress according to the caption and photos, the rest of the folks look to be friends or folks who were around.
Looking around more, mostly the deck is rusty and other surfaces look clean tho there are a few spots below the radar built into the side of the tower (I'm not navy so don't know terms, don't shoot me) https://www.facebook.com/USS.Hopper/photos/pcb.6120716927952....
Here's a photo of the ship in good form https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/image-resize?url=Images/... you can tell from comparing photos and by the folks in white that they have peeled the grey paint off the deck and it has rusted underneath, or it peeled itself and wasn't repainted. The ship is currently in port in perl harbor according to https://www.marinevesseltraffic.com/vessels/USS-Hopper-(DDG-...
The comments don't help, it's just all "not in my navy" or "I'll state my theory as fact" style facebook comments from people uninvolved with the ship (they mostly look 40+ from the comments). So again not much detail.
The fear is that bubbles of incompetence (incompetent people giving each other high-fives about how awesome they are) have grown large enough to start causing real physical and visible damage. Not sure if that's the case, though. Although I'm not buying the "rust has no operational impact" argument - as a sailor, you keep things neat and clean and tidy so that if something goes wrong it sticks out like a sore thumb. You want to catch problems early, and cleanliness helps. (Cleaning also has an inspection component that helps).
I mean, you could.
I stopped paying attention to politics when it became obvious that the two-party system is killing actual democracy.
But... If a candidate said they were going to prioritize rebuilding our failing infrastructure, to include roads, bridges, power generation and transmission, communications, and defense assets, they would certainly have my attention.
If they didn't follow it up with, "and your share of the bill will be...", then I'd be pretty skeptical. Stuff costs money and you can't cut taxes and expect the government to perform all that it did before you cut them. Of course, I might be the only person in America to vote for a politician who would actually say that.
As a former Navy sailor, enlisted, I find the photo shocking and terribly disconcerting. It feels like very recent years have seen Military moral lowered to a dangerous level with the constant political correctness brow beating.
Of course there has always been some baseline level of dysfunction in young adults away from home for the first time, but the trend we are seeing is that the various factors are definitely tipping towards an institutional breaking point. Even the great "spice epidemic" around 2012 didn't stress the system this badly, IMO.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/bath-salts-spice-us-military-servi...
For such high value assets, I'm honestly surprised to see that level of neglect. Particularly from a country whose national identity seems so intertwined with it's military.
Because a strong navy is crucial to US interest. A staggering amount of the world's petroleum products flow through the Straight of Hormuz.
Likewise, the majority of China's energy imports and manufactured exports flow through the tiny Straight of Malacca (or else around the countless other islands of Indonesia). If the straight is blocked, they have about 90 days of fuel reserves before rationing begins. That's why China needs force projection in the South China Sea if they want any hope for a Taiwan invasion to be successful.
More generally, US protection of international shipping is supposedly the basis for the petrodollar system.
When it comes to Russia, defending the GIUK gap is also crucial...
The military-industrial complex seems perfectly designed to go after very large and expensive projects. They’re great for creating jobs, keeping the politicians happy. Shareholders love it. And the military is far from innocent: I’ve heard that a common sentiment held by career officers is that you want to always attach yourself to the new, big project, as that’s how you advance up the ranks. Commanding a drone squad doesn’t make you a general.
Aegis ensures his first strike will not be completely successful, while Ohio/Virginia ensure that the counter punch would be so painful it’s not worth starting the fight.
Force projection is incredibly important, as long as we keep our leaders in check.