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Originally Posted by The WosMan
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.
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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.