The US Relies on 51 Forty-five-year-old ships to Transport its Military Overseas [video] | Hacker News Reader

The US Relies on 51 Forty-five-year-old ships to Transport its Military Overseas [video]

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42 pointstoomuchtodo31 comments

Something I learned from trying to learn how military equipment works is that "fifty-year old" and the likes aren't necessarily synonymous with "obsolete".

The problem isn’t the ships’ age per se and more the concern that we lack the industrial base to replace them if faced with a war of attrition.

This. We don’t have the shipbuilding capacity to replace our current navy as it wears out. We are living in a twilight period while our adversaries build like it’s the 1960s.

But, also, seagoing stuff just tends to get worn out in ways that land or even air assets don’t. So 50+ years for a ship is remarkably old and probably quite close to the end of its life, even assuming that the shipowner is taking measures that wouldn’t be economic in the commercial world.

How much ocean shipping of troops do we expect, though?

I think there are lots of real concerns about fleet construction, and fleet construction capacity [1]; but if the troop carriers we have work well enough, and we generally airship troops, I don't think we need to be building new ocean going troop carriers with any urgency. As these age out, it may not make sense to replace them.

[1] In WWII, existing shipyards retooled to make warships (as well as replacement cargo ships), and new shipyards were built. In 2025, there are few shipyards in the US and building new shipyards would be challenging... most of the suitable coastal properties are developed.

> How much ocean shipping of troops do we expect, though?

How much ocean shipping of tanks is expected? How much ocean shipping of trucks is expected? How much ocean shipping of jeeps is expected? How much ocean shipping of artillery is expected? How much ocean shipping of ammunitions is expected? How much ocean shipping of fuel is expected?

How much ocean shipping of food is expected? Because how many commercial carriers will want to sail into an active war zone?

> don't think we need to be building new ocean going troop carriers with any urgency

If air lift is denied and our troop transports get potted, we’d essentially have outsourced our ability to fight to Tokyo and Seoul.

Troop transports are kind of a red herring here. The issue isn’t moving troops, it’s moving their equipment. You can pretty easily move a division’s worth of troops by air (activate CRAF and requisition a few dozen 777s, boom, done), but it’s a lot harder to move their equipment (tanks, helicopters, artillery, air defense, ammo, etc.) that way. If the troops don’t have pre-positioned equipment in the battle area, then it really needs to get there aboard ships.

I’m of two minds about re-creating the logical and industrial capabilities of World War II (or, at least the subset of them needed to fight a major conflict with a near peer). On the one hand, I’m pretty sure that enough money could and would be thrown at the problem to solve it. On the other hand, I’m not sure any direct confrontation with a near-peer military would last long enough for that to matter.

> On the one hand, I’m pretty sure that enough money could and would be thrown at the problem to solve it.

I'm skeptical that this is the case. Supply chains for goods have become much more intricate than they were a hundred years ago and America has completely ceded them to China.

At the same time by ceding these supply chains America has let manufacturing skill sets completely atrophy and with it has seen the evaporation of institutional knowledge necessary to train new generations of blue collar workers necessary to scale up manufacturing.

This isn't even a 'nine people can't make a baby in one month' type scenario, this is more like 'we just plum forgot how to make babies' scenario which is disconcerting to say the least.

> On the other hand, I’m not sure any direct confrontation with a near-peer military would last long enough for that to matter.

Hasn’t Ukraine shown us the opposite? Drones of all typees covering the battlefield have reset military doctrine once again. That war has been anything but quick.

Yup. An example of this is the Air Force’s B52 which has lived longer than many of its immediate successor program (B1 non B) and is scheduled to live longer than the successors to its successor (B1-B, B2) alongside the B21.

We have plenty of mothballed chassis for parts and a seemingly never ending series of modernization programs. A new engine has been proposed repeatedly and is maybe finally happening.

However what we can simply never do is make another one from scratch as all the tooling has been gone since the 1960s. They could do an “inspired by the B52” replacement like the B21 is to the B2, but much like the B2 and F22 we just won’t make more of them for practical and Military Industrial Complex reasons.

>However what we can simply never do is make another one from scratch as all the tooling has been gone since the 1960s. They could do an “inspired by the B52” replacement like the B21 is to the B2, but much like the B2 and F22 we just won’t make more of them for practical and Military Industrial Complex reasons.

iirc they are doing this with the new F-15's they are producing, the F-15EX Eagle II

They aren’t “obsolete” but at that age they become difficult or impossible to source spare parts for. Particularly because we seem to have such a variety of differing ship designs in the fleet.

The video mentions several ships being laid up to be cannibalized.

The B-52 will likely reach a century of service. It's really good at what it was designed to do and any wholesale replacement would be extremely expensive for not a lot of benefit.

China is building incredible 200x times more ships annually compared to the US. You can imagine what the military implications are.

In a Taiwan type conflict I'd be more worried about all the advanced Chinese anti-ship ballistic/cruise missiles if I was in the US Navy (not to mention submarine torpedoes and drone ships). That stuff can be launched from land/air even without the hundreds of new ships. I'm not convinced the Navy could operate anywhere close to China in a true conflicts. Those US ship VLS cells will empty out pretty fast trying to shoot them down and submarine detection would heavily slow them down plus limit any logistic chains to resupply. But admittedly I'm no modern expert on the topic, just like reading military wikipedia and twitter.

The US Military is very aware of this. The Next generation fighters and bombers all have longer ranges and longer ranged missiles. The Air-force is working on building more runways and hardened hangers

The Army and Marines are planning around having units on Islands that have to have their own anti-aircraft and anti-ship capability since they won't be able to rely on air or sea support.

That's all moot if the industrial capacity to produces missiles doesn't match the Chinese capacity to produce ships.

Recent wargames predict the US will exhaust regional supplies of antiship missiles within days to weeks and those missiles have a lead time of years to build and the US only has a capacity of a few dozen a year.

> Recent wargames predict the US will exhaust regional supplies of antiship missiles within days to weeks and those missiles have a lead time of years to build and the US only has a capacity of a few dozen a year.

We don't need to sink their warships, just their freighters leaving Brazil - which they cannot quickly replace.

An immediate lack of calories will sort out any military problem out remotely.

Sprinkle in ten thousand naval mines and things look very different.

China has been stockpiling commodities for a while[0] now in preparation for this kind of situation and that they are accelerating the rate at which they are stockpiling.[1]

It is also important to note that China is not an Island like Britain or Australia and can secure food from other locations over land.

This kind of thinking that military conflict with China would be trivial due to some simple ace in the hole like having many aircraft carriers or cutting off their food supply needs to stop. It is hopelessly naive and underplays the very real possibility of humiliating defeat in an impending conflict with China over Taiwan.

[0]https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/23/w...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-plans-acce...

There's a lot of stuff in the US military that's somewhat aged. The aircraft carrier Nimitz is still in service and was commissioned 50 years ago. The B-52 has been in service for longer than that (in fairness the design is that old; the actual airplanes, presumably not). The A10 Warthog was first released in 1977 and is still in use. The AR-15, embodied in the M16 and M4 goes back to the 1960s and the Browning M2 goes back to 1933.

No, most of the B-52s currently in service are well over 50 years old:

"The last production aircraft, B-52H AF Serial No. 61-40, left the factory on 26 October 1962."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress#Var...

Another weapons system: the M1 heavy machine gun is still heavily used, e.g., one on every Abrams tank, 4 or 6 on every aircraft carrier, and ISTR all of the US's inventory of it was made before and during WWII. I think maybe they use barrels that were designed more recently.

I don't watch YouTube but here a mariners take.

I notice that there is a very large Car Carrier in Norfolk Drydock getting painted white to grey.

Looks like they are converting commercial vessels to military use.

I can't imagine how they handle in big winds. A giant sail like surface.

Flickertail State Crane Ship was recently out doing testing. It is old but capable.

Gaza Pier help was a bust. Those piers are not meant to be installed long term. We looked like clowns. Not Omaha Beach.

During the Falklands War, the Royal Navy requisitioned a lot of civilian ships at short notice, the Atlantic Conveyor being the most famous after it was sunk.

The US Navy would likely do the same, the biggest issue could be retaining enough crew.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War_order_of_battle:...

> The US Navy would likely do the same, the biggest issue could be retaining enough crew.

It doesn't help that when the U.S. Merchant Marine was made a part of the U.S. Navy during World War 2, the U.S.M.M. mariners were entitled to Vetern Status and benefits, but the U.S. Navy denied them that. Some mariners were able to get it, but they had to fight for it.

The U.S.M.M. had the highest casualty rate out of all of the services during World War 2: 4% - double that of the next highest - the U.S. Marines with 2%.

http://usmm.org

The Gaza Pier failed because it was a PR stunt and not a serious attempt to get aid into Gaza.

Along with various medium to large cargo planes and the world's supply of flagged cargo carriers. I'm not sure there's that many "troops and other things" that require more transport, maybe heavy ammunition. Most of the military power sails or flies places.

Why do we need to transport our military overseas, anyway? We should close all our overseas bases and save the money.

Thanks Jones Act

> Thanks Jones Act

The problem is with Congress deciding to not contract to build replacement vessels. In this instance the Jones Act is not the problem.

See "Hawaiian Rum Company Challenges the Jones Act" (30m) from the same channel which really gets into the details and history of the act:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuvAY4k3KQ8

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