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Originally Posted by Molon Labe
Oh, I can assure you an ESG will be making an appearance. Given my tendency to try to fool around with real-life events, that would be the Tarawa ESG (although the Tarawa and Germantown will have to be played by similar ships (Wasp, HF), not sure what to do with the Cleveland (LPD 7)). I was thinking that the phibs would mostly be in port at the time, while the escorts Port Royal, Hopper, and Ingraham would be out doing other things.*
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Amphibs spend a lot of time poking into port for a lot of reasons other than exercises. The other thing they do in port is take everything off and rearrange how things are loaded inside the ship because there's not enough space to just take things off as you need them and rearrange things inside. As a result, they have to have a plan about what order things come off, and they do a lot of fussing with it.
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As for carriers, I was thinking that under these situations they would probaby hang back on the other side of Hormuz, where mosquito boats would be less of a factor, they can keep a safe distance from potential ASuW threats, where they will have an easier time reacting to land-based ASCM attacks, can establish a better CAP, and where the acoustic conditions will make it easier to spot submarines trying to sneak in.... IOW, my judgment had been that inside the Gulf is the last place a CSG wants to be when the shooting starts. Am I wrong about that?
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You're almost right, but the problem is that when the carrier stands off in the Gulf of Oman or North Arabian Sea, that increases the flight time for any sortie flown off a carrier. As a result, their sortie rate drops, which means that the aircraft carrier's effectiveness is decreased. That might mean there's times when ships don't have air cover, or they might not be able to deliver as much ordinance to targets. As a result there's always a compromise between wanting to get in closer versus the vulnerability to various threats. The existance of a threat does not mean you are necessarily totally vulnerable to it. You might only be partially vulnerable to it, and their attack might only be successful some fraction of the time. Where to put the carrier then is a risk management problem, where you might accept more risk if the payoff was deemed worth it.
I'm not saying they would necessarily put the carrier in The Persian Gulf, but they might depending on what they were trying to accomplish.