Should the US Navy move the fleet out of harm's way?
 

What do you think about moving the majority of the USN Pacific fleet to Alaska?

I know we don't qualify for telling the US Navy what to do, but I don't see this terroist tactic of fear going away anytime soon.

So I was just thinking what if the USN moved everything to Alaska to defend against terroism. A little rough on the families, but they could transfer the families every time a ship deploys back to warmer areas round trip using US Navy air transportation.

Build large indoor shopping centers for the crews and families of the new Navy town ... up keep and maintence is the biggest concern.

What do ya'll think?

Not sure I understand this. Why would you centralize all of your forces into one area? Isn't that putting too many eggs on one basket? Pearl Harbor ring a bell.

As far as I am concerned the Navy can and go wherever they damn well please regardless of what anyone says because you don't mess with the US Navy.

who pays for it?

We are talking many hundreds of billions here.

Of course

http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/256...oleholeqh5.jpg

Yeah, cause that brought us to our knees. ^^

You're in need of some basic knowledge of what modern chinese and Russians missiles and torpedoes can do to this navy that nobody wishes to mess with.

I also remind you that the British thought much the same way when heading for the Falklands, and in the end they were close to getting defeated - only wrong cables attached to torpedoes on an Argentine sub prevented them from loosing their flagship carrier, which then would have demanded the fleet'S retreat, the British admiral later admitted.

And a single Type 209 some weeks ago completely sank a NATO flotilla of fifteen ships or so in an excercise in South Africa. British and American units participated, but that did not save them.

The US navy also currently has leased a Swedish diesel sub, and still is unable to detect or destroy it, afetr over one year of testings. The Swedes say they can run circles around American ships at will, and so far never were detected, I think. they also say they are so quiet that they would be able to run up the Mississippi without the US navy being able to do anything about their invisibility.

The thought of being invincible is the first step towards total defeat.

However, I agree that a useless centralization of forces is not a clever thing to do, an turns them into an invitation to strike.

While at sea it may be a bit more different, in general Iraq war and Afghnaistan war and Lebanon war illustrate one thing: that expensive high tech military is no guarantee to be able to defeat a low budget guerilla army operating with primitive weapons like road bombs, mines, and ATGM ambushes. Especially for america, which has made a fetish of technology, this is an ugly fat, heavy, painfully big pill to swallow. Especially with regard to submarines and missiles, there may be a similar trend. The way we currently arm up maybe is a relic from the cold war, and an assumed enemy equal in design to ourselves. Hightech can compensate numerical inferiority only to a certain level, and not more. but today's conflicts are being fought beyond that level, and also on the ideological level, in the media, in virtual space. A massing of forces in alaska probably does not help in that dilemma.

If by 'us' you mean Monica Lewinsky, I'd say yes it did.:D

Wall of text.......must resist....getting sleepy............. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Alaska? You're gonna have every sailor who ever enjoyed R&R in San Diego or Honolulu or any other warm water port jumping ship.

With global warming....maybe. :cool:

By the way what's to stop a terrorist attack in Alaska? I wouldn't be surprised to find that vast portions of the Alaska-Canadian border probably aren't patrolled at all.

No (modern) precident exists for terrorist attacks in domestic ports on naval assets in Western states AFAIK. Really if you ask me the terrorist "threat" is really overblown and if they haven't launched another strike by now then I don't think they ever will. If the Mexicans can get in undetected, where are the terrorists?

With the amount of security in naval ports these days I would say the potential for an event there would be practically nil anyway. If there were some glaring fundamental flaws pointed out in port security in San Diego, Pearl, or Norfolk, then maybe it might be an option to relocate the fleets. But I feel evidence of a terror threat in the U.S. is really not there, and ergo it seems to me that the U.S. Navy is not in "harms way" to begin with.

I imagine that's exactly what a terrorist would like the US Navy to think, and I daresay the sailors on the USS Cole thought that five minutes before they were attacked.

Well that's true, but it didn't stop the IRA blowing up Lord Louis Mountbatten's boat slap bang in the middle of when the UK was on high alert to specific threats from that organisation, killing him and Baroness Brabourne among others, and on the same day also killing eighteen soldiers from the Parachute Regiment at Warrenpoint. This, in the same year that the INLA also blew up MP Airey Neave's car on the ramp coming out of Parliament, killing him too. All these being just a small selection of the bombings which took place that year in the UK, despite security measures and awareness of threats.

When the US Air Force can forget about some nuclear weapons slung under an aircraft and leave it sitting unguarded on the apron at a base for hours before anyone thought something was amiss, it's not a stretch to imagine that the security at Naval bases might have a few gaps in it. Complacency concerning enemies and potential enemies is just asking for it.

:D Chock

Didnt say it did
The quote included with the pic said no one messes with the USN

:roll:

personnaly i think ships are more at risk tied up in home port, at least when they are at sea they can move out of the way of an incoming threat like a motor boat full of explosives, you cant do that tied to a dock.

Whats more you need to have your forces spread out slightly what would happen if they moved all the pacific fleet to alaska and another country over ran hawai ? be falklands repeat.

whats more the wosman really need to take a reality check SS-N-19 and 22's are fully capible of putting a carrier out of action, and with the chinese and russians getting close along with the indians theres going to be some worrying problems to come.

[quote=The WosMan]
Only reason your showing this sort of responce is because you to ignorant to want to know the facts, pull the head out of arse and go read a few articles on SS-N-19 and SS-N-22 you will see they are about 10x more capible than anything the USN has in ASM form.

One SS-N-19 would rip a carrier apart enough to render it inoprable, and with nuclear tips well.....

The USN is in no way invincible the russian navy also is not invincible, but the americans are partly trained by the british, so what ever we have going you do too so we know roughly what you think.

Well geez, we could just disband our navy altogether. Just think of how safe our ships would be from terrorism then!

Kapitan is right. Navy ships need to be at sea and on station not tied up in some tidy little anchorage waiting for someone to come and obliterate them in one fell swoop.

Look at the Pearl Harbor attack. The only ships that were safe that day were the carriers because they were at sea.

The ships at sea have a fighting chance ... I'm not worried about them. Ships in port have always been a target from Cuba "Remember the Maine" to the USS Cole in Africa.

San Diego is ground zero in any modern warfare scenerio, but a terroist can attack at will in San Diego Bay with two to three nuclear carriers already berthed there now, not to mention the rest of the third fleet.

The US Navy has finally seen the light and moved their Point Loma/Ballast Point submarine flotilla to Hawaii and Guam ... Long Beach is no longer a base, San Francisco is just a port of call leaving Seattle and Bangor, Washington as the only other major ports on the west coast besides San Diego. Those two ports are a long way from the Pacific Ocean.

They could carve a sea port out of raw land in Alaska ... where no man has ever been before ... Safely secure the area using submarines, security checks for all family members and base employees of which most would be retired civilians or even the family members themselves.

Check all food, check all supplies, air lift everybody and everything in, house everyone in comfortable quarters, stay warm and prepare for WW III

Don't wait for a terroist attack to sink a modern warfare vessel ... be prepared for one now ...

I have always had a fear of turning on the television and seeing a US Navy nuclear carrier smoldering on her side in San Diego Bay.

Don't be afraid be ready ... :yep:

That is fair, but what is the equivelant to the IRA in the United States? The situation is not that volatile in the U.S. that you can draw a comparison. We had a couple of guys fly planes into buildings and a handful of botched plots, nothing else. A simple risk assessment makes me believe that relocated the fleets or keeping more ships at sea is not worth the cost; there is low probability of a successful terror attack (in the 15 or so years that OBL and al Qaeda have been active, they have committed only one successful terror attack on U.S. soil) and low impact (we could lose a destroyer a la Cole to conventional explosives, and a nuclear, chemical, or biological device might ruin a lot of people's day, but aren't all sailors and soldiers trained to survive NBC attacks? And what are the odds of those occuring?). I just can't see it being worth shifting personnel and infrastructure and dredging a new port in the middle of nowhere.

Good points :yep:

Of course another problem is that even if it were tactically sound to pile all your ships in one place (Battleship Row anyone? and just across the water from the reborn Russian Air Force and Navy?), then the cost would be prohibitive to the US.

The United States is entering an economic downturn, owing to the continued outsourcing of manufacturing to Asia, and the continued importing of goods from China et al, which are flooding the country and devastating its indigenous industrial base. Couple that with the economic growth of China and Russia, and you have a Navy that cannot afford to keep pace and spend money on ambitious and vastly expensive undertakings such as a huge new Naval base.

The US military planners are already struggling to afford replacement equipment for all the Cold War stuff that is wearing out, and they are being told they must make do with far less numbers than they had previously had, in both men and materiel. And all this whilst being asked to fight two wars, plus maintain other commitments around the globe, all of which wears stuff out even quicker as less ships and aeroplanes do more work. Technological solutions cannot provide all the answers to these problems either. Granted, a shiny new F-35 may be able to conduct multi-role operations, but the five aircraft it replaces could be in five different places around the world, and as good as the F-35 may be, it can only be in one place at a time. Where, as noted, its airframe will be wearing out at five times the rate an older aircraft would have, because it will be doing a lot more work! Which means it will then cost even more money - money that the US simply does not have.

I'm sure the US Navy would love the kind of budget that would allow it to contemplate such possibilities as a massive shiny new Naval base, but it hasn't, so the question becomes academic really.

:D Chock

Well in all fairness to the 'poon its not designed for the same mission as the N-19 and N-22. It was designed for Anti-Sub work belive it or not. It was ment for P-3s to shoot at surfaced Russian subs back when they need to surface to fire their SLBMs.

The Harpoon has one advantage over the 19 and 22 in that it can be launched from many diffrent platforms most importantly from aircraft. I think the most any aircraft can carry is 1 or 2 N-22 while a simaler sized aircraft can carry 4+ Harpoons.

The US never had any reason to build weapons like the N-19 and N-22 because the Russians never had a huge fleet of advanced surface ships until the end of the cold war, which at that point the US Sub advantage negated them.

If the US built a ship along the same lines as a Russian Sov or Kirov at that time it probaly would have something like a couple of hundred Harpoons, four twin arm SAM launchers, three SH-2s and more ASROCs than you can shake a stick at. But we figure that a LA boat with a couple of dozen MK 48s would work much better.