House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Expeditionary Forces

That's kind of a mouthful, but basically, in the House there is a committee on the Armed Services. Within this committee is a subcommittee whose responsibility is the oversight of the US Navy, US Marine Corps, and US Coast Guard. Well they had one of this blog's favorite strategic thinkers over to testify on Thursday, and a lot of important things got said there. I wasn't there personally, but Thomas P.M. Barnett testified and has a couple blog posts about the hearing on his weblog if you want to clicky the link on the left.

Notable was the agreement that the budget will be reduced. Naturally, there were differing opinions on where the cuts should come from. This blogger supports a drastic decrease in Carrier Strike Groups. Currently the requirement is 12 Carrier Strike Groups, and 11 Expeditionary Strike Groups. The standard 1/3 operating ratio means that only 4 Carriers are deployable at any given time. That is an awful lot of power concentrated on very few platforms. And any risk to these platforms in necessarily utterly unacceptable. Expeditionary Strike Groups are divided among 3 major vessel types in addition to their surface combatant escorts:

• LHA/LHD's are like smaller aircraft carriers that bring helicopter and fixed-wing close air support.
• LPD's carry tanks, vehicles, and the hovercraft we use to put them ashore. The big ship in the center of the picture above is a San Antonio-class LPD.
  
• LSD's carry additional hovercraft and equipment. The ship in the lead of the formation in the picture is a Whidbey Island-class LSD.
  

This means that for 11 Expeditionary Strike Groups you actually get 33 major platforms that can spread US influence and operate with Global Partnership Stations, support Marines or other ground forces, hunt pirates, or look for terrorists. The only thing they can't do is carry the larger fixed-wing aircraft needed for long range air support. At the beginning of the century the battleship replaced the dreadnought. Following Pearl Harbor, the Battleship was replaced by the Aircraft Carrier as the primary means of force projection. And even though it never fired a shot, the real key to naval power projection during the Cold War was the nuclear submarine, both attack and ballistic missile types. Today, it is the Amphibious warship that most represents the means by which we project power and influence. They alone, among major naval platforms can exert influence in the littoral regions. In combination with the LCS, they provide a powerful tool for exerting control in the most important regions of the world's ocean's, the places where the people are. For this reason, I believe the number of Carriers should be reduced from 12 to 6, and the number of Amphibious warships expanded from 33 to 45, for a total of 15 Expeditionary Strike Groups.