by Carl Prine...23 June 2017..Spun up as a training command in 2014 and armed with increasingly advanced software to simulate combat at sea, Carrier Strike Group 15 toils to teach warships how to fight and win wars in the Pacific.
But it can’t always overcome an ongoing global gap in American flattops.
In fact, the Navy might be forced to extend the planned tour for the carrier Nimitz and its escorts — the cruiser Princeton and destroyers Kidd, Shoup, Howard and Pinckney — to eight months, at least a month longer than expected.
That was the message from the group’s skipper, Rear Adm. Ross Myers, and his boss, Third Fleet commander Vice Adm. Nora Tyson, during a presentation in Point Loma before the San Diego Military Advisory Council on Thursday.
“The day the Nimitz deployed, the discussion started about extending the Nimitz,” said Tyson, referring to the carrier’s departure on June 5 from North Island for a deployment to the Indian Ocean.
As the commander of Third Fleet Forward’s Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group from her headquarters in Point Loma, Tyson made the decision to prolong the flotilla’s tour of the Western Pacific by several weeks so it could act as a message of deterrence against missile testing by North Korea.
The Vinson, the cruiser Lake Champlain and the destroyer Wayne E. Meyer are slated to return to San Diego on Friday. Their deployment was initially scheduled to last only five months because the strike group is slated to return to sea in January, but rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula nixed that timeline.Back in 2011 when Tyson commanded the George H.W. Bush Carrier Strike Group, the Navy deployed two flattops in the Persian Gulf.
Today, the waters off the Middle East and East Africa often go months without any flattops, a “presence gap” caused by a lack of adequate funding for a 12-carrier Navy, high demand for the warships worldwide, increasing maintenance delays for carriers between their deployments, and technological glitches with the newest carrier, the Virginia-based Gerald R. Ford, that postponed its arrival in the naval fleet.
In 2014, Navy leaders told the Pentagon and lawmakers that unless they accepted carrier gaps, they were going to break the force. The brass has scrambled since then to make a modified deployment schedule work, trying to keep flattops at sea for no longer than seven months per deployment.
The chronic lack of deployment-ready aircraft carriers ripples throughout the fleet. Extended deployments for flattops mean prolonging the tours of aircraft crews, cruisers, destroyers and submarines, too.
What’s helping Tyson and other fleet commanders mitigate the carrier crunch is a string of innovations in both technology and military organization during the past 13 years.
Rear Adm. Myers’ Carrier Strike Group 15 has deep roots in the modern Navy.
Formerly Carrier Division One, it was the first flattop formation in the United States when it was launched in late 1930 and its warships saw action in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
At other times, however, it served as a training group, honing the tactics of warships. Between 2004 and 2014, it was known as Strike Force Training Pacific and it certified for combat deployments carrier strike groups, amphibious readiness groups and surface ships that deployed independently.
It was resurrected as Carrier Strike Group 15 three years ago and Myers took the helm on June 17, 2016, with Tyson urging him to hike the intensity of training for all warships sailing into the Western Pacific.
For most warships, that means 30-day blocks of exercises, including an eight-day span of “free play” war games that are conducted without a script, much like the skippers would face in a real war against a near-peer rival like China or Russia.
The warships start hundreds of miles off the California coast and have one mission — get back to port.
“At some point in time, you’ve got to pull back into San Diego. So fight your way back into San Diego,” said Myers.
Increasingly, the scenarios play out as simulated combat on the warships’ display screens thanks to advanced software created by San Diego-based Cubic Global Defense and other developers. And those computer games save the Navy money because it reduces the need for “OPFOR” — opposition force — warships and aircraft and puts them back in the fleet for overseas deployments.
“We don’t have a hundred aircraft we can use,” Tyson said. “We don’t have 20 cruisers. We don’t have an opposing carrier strike group. We don’t have 20 submarines that we can put out there that will really put these guys to the test.”
since 1991 end of Cold war the number in the main historic navies/Western had always decreased from 15* and 3 for USN/UK, 2 for France up to 10, 0 and 1 - identical number for Italy and Spain to 1 - and for severals few years USN have 11 and UK 2 so a total of 16 for NATO, in 1991 was 21 but British and French less capable more small.
