US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

S

SlothmanAllen

Junior Member
Registered Member
A great feature piece by United States Naval Institute News (USNI News) on the state of military shipbuilding the United States.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


The first shift at Ingalls Shipbuilding starts two hours before dawn in the summer. Around 4 a.m. workers begin to arrive at the 800-acre shipyard – an incongruous white square in the middle of brown-green Mississippi swampland. Welders, pipefitters, machinists and painters hustle to work on ships that tower skyscraper-high over the concrete of the shipyard.
Click to expand...

Giant movable shades cover open spaces. The shipyard has made an effort to improve the available creature comforts. Ingalls has just wrapped a multi-year $1 billion capital investment that includes efficiency and work quality improvements for its 11,300 workers.

“Shipbuilding is hard work. It’s never going to be easy. We’re trying to make it as not-hard as it can be,” Ingalls president Kari Wilkinson told USNI News during a late August tour of the yard.
Click to expand...

“We haven’t made material improvements in retention over the last couple of years. We’ve gotten some stabilization, but it’s not where it was before the pandemic,” she said.
Click to expand...

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
found that the workforce had significantly shrunk since peaking in 2016. The report found numerous causes for the decline in the number of shipyard workers.

“Changing patterns in U.S. military ship buying, new trends in the domestic and global commercial ship market, social and cultural perceptions favoring non-vocational training, and economic downturns have combined to exert significant strain on the shipbuilding industrial base labor force. Conditions have been further exacerbated due to the damage wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic,” reads the report. “The potential imbalance in labor supply and demand projected over the next five years for two of the four trades assessed could result in construction delays for ship classes built on the Gulf Coast.”

The study found that machinists, metal fabricators and shipfitters are in the shortest supply.
Click to expand...

There is really just so much great content in this piece that quoting it does not do it justice! I recommend anyone here go and read it.

AM1A1464-scaled.jpg


AM1A1417-scaled.jpg
 
R

RobertC

Junior Member
Registered Member
SlothmanAllen said:
A great feature piece by United States Naval Institute News (USNI News) on the state of military shipbuilding the United States.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
Click to expand...
It is a great feature piece and here's another by the navalists at Cdr Salamander
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
as the reread page one of CNO's Navigation Plan for 2024. You know, the page asking for the "more money" euphemism known as resources.
Without substantial growth in Navy resourcing now, we will eventually face deep strategic constraints on our ability to simultaneously address day-to-day crises while also modernizing the fleet to enhance readiness for war both today and in the future.
Click to expand...
I'm not going to pick things apart -- the two feature pieces SlothmanAllen and I cited are clear and unambiguous. Instead I'll repeat what I've said before: "In the unlikely event there is a military conflict within the 1IC, the safest place for the islanders is on Taiwan itself." The CPC has set the goal and the schedule for the province's reunification and it will be peaceful and graceful and unexciting.

But keep up the excitement on the PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency thread -- I wouldn't want to spoil your fun.
 
S

SlothmanAllen

Junior Member
Registered Member
RobertC said:
It is a great feature piece and here's another by the navalists at Cdr Salamander
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
as the reread page one of CNO's Navigation Plan for 2024. You know, the page asking for the "more money" euphemism known as resources.

I'm not going to pick things apart -- the two feature pieces SlothmanAllen and I cited are clear and unambiguous. Instead I'll repeat what I've said before: "In the unlikely event there is a military conflict within the 1IC, the safest place for the islanders is on Taiwan itself." The CPC has set the goal and the schedule for the province's reunification and it will be peaceful and graceful and unexciting.

But keep up the excitement on the PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency thread -- I wouldn't want to spoil your fun.
Click to expand...

I think these articles are great because they give you a sobering picture of the situation. It is going to take a long time to make changes to the US naval shipbuilding capacity. These things take time to build out and require constant support. I don't want to say it is impossible that US could see a big change in shipbuilding output, it is just that if it happens it is going to take place 10+ years from now after a lot of investment and development of talent.

I personally don't see the US involved in any sort of Taiwan war scenario... at least not directly. Way too much risk for very little reward.
 
broadsword

broadsword

Brigadier
HighGround said:
When political egos are involved, particularly in our country, where this sort of thing destroys political careers, military action is definitely a strong possibility IMO.
Click to expand...

It all depends on China's firepower now. It can win by simply staring down if it has the overwhelming advantage.
 
L

LuzinskiJ

Junior Member
Registered Member
RobertC said:
I'll repeat what I've said before: "In the unlikely event there is a military conflict within the 1IC, the safest place for the islanders is on Taiwan itself."
Click to expand...
Would you mind expounding on that? I had always envisioned at least a blockade, then what happens after that is just guess work. But in any scenario I can imagine, Taiwan is going to get hit. And probably by both China and the US
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top