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Sea Waves said:

Groton May 30, 2014 - Today, the Navy announced changes to the inactivation timelines for two Los Angeles-class submarines that are scheduled to retire from active service.

The service life for USS Dallas (SSN 700) has been extended to fiscal year 2017 and USS Norfolk (SSN 714) will begin inactivation in early 2015. Dallas and Norfolk were most recently slated for inactivation in fiscal years 2015 and 2017 respectively.

Inactivating Norfolk in the upcoming fiscal year, in place of Dallas, enables the Navy to meet mission needs, balance workload and workforce requirements for shipyards across the force, and lower projected pre-inactivation availability costs.

The Navy is projected to save $10 million in Pre-Inactivation Restricted Availability (PIRA) costs as a result of the change. Submarine force leaders and planners continually monitor all aspects of the force and refine plans to optimize readiness and capabilities.

Norfolk is currently completing her last scheduled overseas deployment, which began in February. After returning to her homeport of Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, she will transit to Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine to undergo inactivation. Norfolk was commissioned May 21, 1983.

Dallas, which is currently based at Naval Submarine Base New London in Connecticut, completed her most recent overseas deployment last November. She was commissioned July 18, 1981.

Los Angeles-class submarines represent the bulk of the Navy's attack submarine force. They are equipped to hunt adversary maritime vessels, strike targets ashore and support special forces. Their capabilities also include covert surveillance and contributions to mine warfare missions.

Sixty-two Los Angeles-class attack submarines were constructed from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s. Forty-one are presently in active service.

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White House petition calls for Bergdahl's punishment
Jun. 2, 2014 - 01:06PM |


By Kevin Lilley
Staff report Military times
FILED UNDER
News
Congress & DOD
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More than 2,300 people had signed a petition on the White House’s official website as of noon Eastern on Monday demanding the Obama administration punish the man it recently traded five terrorism detainees to free.

The petition asks the White House to “Punish Bowe Bergdahl for being AWOL/Desertion during Operation Enduring Freedom.” It went live Saturday and needs 100,000 signatures by June 30 to garner a White House response.

It alleges Bergdahl violated multiple articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and is “directly responsible for several military members [sic] death.” It also says, in quotation marks, that he “did not earn the rank of SGT”; Bergdahl was promoted twice while in captivity, most recently in June 2011.

The petition is making the Facebook rounds. A post linking to the petition on the “Bowe Bergdahl is a Traitor” Facebook page, which launched Saturday and had more than 15,000 likes as of noon Monday, had been shared about 130 times. Even on a page which likely would appeal to those supportive of the petition, many commenters took issue with its tone and grammatical errors.

It’s far from the first time the WhiteHouse.gov petition program has been used for military-related issues. More than 100,000 people signed a recent petition seeking the release of a Marine being held in a Mexican prison on weapons charges, which means the White House will respond to the request. Roughly 2,400 signatures support giving free health care from all providers to veterans of foreign wars, and about 300 people have backed a proposal to nominate retired Marine Gen. James Mattis to run the Veterans Affairs Department.

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Report: Chinese cruise missiles could pose biggest threat to U.S. carriers
Jun. 2, 2014 - 12:32PM |


By Wendell Minnick
Staff writer Navy times
FILED UNDER
News
Military Technology
TAIPEI — Saturation strikes from Chinese anti-ship cruise missiles could become the biggest threat to Navy carrier strike groups (CSG), according to a paper issued by the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at the National Defense University.

The paper, “A Low-Visibility Force Multiplier: Assessing China’s Cruise Missile Ambitions,” draws from both Western and Chinese-language open source documents and concludes, “experienced Aegis warriors will respect China’s emerging capabilities.”

Written by cruise missile specialist Dennis Gormley, and China military specialists Andrew Erickson and Jingdong Yuan, the paper states that, due to the low cost of developing, deploying and maintaining cruise missiles, the Chinese believe that cruise missiles possess a 9:1 cost advantage over the expense of defending against them. China assumes that “quantity can defeat quality” by simply saturating a CSG with a variety of high-speed, low-altitude, cruise missiles.

The common belief in Navy circles that China would “need to approach parity in deck aviation capabilities” to defeat a CSG “may no longer be valid.”

China has “clearly” elevated cruise missile development “over an organic carrier capability with the apparent goal of acquiring the capability to neutralize US carrier strike group forces through overwhelming” cruise missile attacks.

The paper also delves into a darker future that includes nuclear-armed cruise missiles. Noting that the former Soviet Navy emphasized the employment of nuclear-armed cruise missiles against a CSG, the paper suggests the possibility the Chinese Navy might pursue the same option in the future. The argument against China pursuing this capability is its weakness in command and control and the fact that such a capability would be “inconsistent with [China’s] current nuclear doctrine.”

The possibility, according to the paper, cannot be ruled out. Quoting retired Navy Rear Adm. Michael McDevitt, China is “likely already ‘arm[ing] nuclear attack submarines with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.’” The paper’s authors could find no evidence of “substrategic nuclear weapons,” but the “Soviet Navy has clearly influenced” the thinking of the Chinese Navy.

The paper looks at the publications of Senior Capt. Liu Yang, a Chinese naval officer at the Wuhan Office of the Naval Armaments Department. Liu’s writings suggest that “all options are on the table” for the “special anti-aircraft carrier mission.”

Liu outlines three courses of actions, such as a cruise missile armed with a low-weight nuclear burst warhead, a fuel-air explosive warhead, and an undefined “special type of warhead with even greater power to inflict casualties.”

The fact that Liu is associated with the Wuhan Office suggests his writings should be “under serious consideration and may even have moved beyond the theoretical stage.” However, Beijing’s history of centralized control of nuclear weapons argues against allowing deployment of sea-based nuclear-armed cruise missiles. ■

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Al-Qaida decentralized, but not necessarily weaker
Jun. 1, 2014 - 03:26PM |


By Deb Riechmann
The Associated Press
FILED UNDER
News
World News
WASHINGTON — Al-Qaida has decentralized, yet it’s unclear whether the terrorist network is weaker and less likely to launch a Sept. 11-style attack against the United States, as President Obama says, or remains potent despite the deaths of several leaders.

Obama said in his foreign policy speech last week that the prime threat comes not from al-Qaida’s core leadership, but from affiliates and extremists with their sights trained on targets in the Middle East and Africa, where they are based. This lessens the possibility of large-scale 9/11-type attacks against America, the president said.

“But it heightens the danger of U.S. personnel overseas being attacked, as we saw in Benghazi,” he said, referring to the September 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Libya that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.

Experts argue that this restructured al-Qaida is perhaps even stronger than it has been in recent years, and that the potential for attacks on U.S. soil endures.

“We have never been on a path to strategically defeat al-Qaida. All we’ve been able to do is suppress some of its tactical abilities. But strategically, we have never had an effective way of taking it on. That’s why it continues to mutate, adapt and evolve to get stronger,” said David Sedney, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia.

Decentralization does not mean weakness, he said.

“I think Americans think al-Qaida is no longer a threat — that Osama bin Laden’s death means al-Qaida is not a big thing anymore,” Sedney said.

He believes al-Qaida is gaining strength in Pakistan, is stronger in Iraq than it was three or four years ago and is stronger in Syria than it was a year or two ago.

“This is a fight about ideology. Al-Qaida is not this leader or that leader or this group or that group,” he said.

The experts say al-Qaida today looks less like a wheel with spokes and more like a spider web stringing together like-minded groups. But they believe there are several reasons that those who track al-Qaida warn against complacency.

While bin Laden was killed and his leadership team heavily damaged by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, the drawdown of American forces in neighboring Afghanistan will dry up field intelligence and restrict the effectiveness of U.S. counterterrorism operations. There is a worry that a pullback could allow al-Qaida to regroup.

Moreover, they worry about the thousands of foreign fighters flocking to the civil war in Syria, which has emboldened the al-Qaida breakaway group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant to expand its cross-border operations into neighboring countries such as Iraq.

U.S. officials also are concerned about Westerners who have joined the Syrian fight because they may be recruited to return home and conduct attacks.

When the U.S. counterterrorism strategy was conceived, it was thought that if al-Qaeda’s core leadership was dismantled or killed, then affiliated groups would simply become localized threats, said Katherine Zimmerman of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

At that time, there wasn’t a network of connections among all the groups, said Zimmerman, who specializes in the Yemen-based group, Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, and al-Qaida’s affiliate in Somalia, al-Shabab.

“As the network has become more decentralized, it’s become much more reliant on these human relationships and the sharing of resources, advice and fighters, which means that you no longer need bin Laden sitting in Pakistan dispersing cash to various affiliates,” Zimmerman said. “They have developed their own sources. … You can’t simply pound on part of the network and expect to see results.”

Tom Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and senior editor of The Long War Journal, a website that tracks how al-Qaida and its affiliates operate around the globe, said he thinks the Bush and Obama administrations mistakenly defined al-Qaida as a top-down pyramid with a hierarchal structure — that “if you sort of lop off the top of the pyramid, the whole thing crumbles.”

Al-Qaida leaders have scattered to other parts of the world, he said, noting that Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is headed by a former aide to bin Laden, who is now general manager of al-Qaida globally.

More recently, the Treasury Department penalized a senior al-Qaida operative on the terrorist network’s military committee who relocated from Pakistan to Syria and is involved with a group plotting against Western targets, he said. U.S. officials have tracked communication traffic going back and forth between Syria and Pakistan and Afghanistan, he said.

“This shows, to my mind, that we’re not dealing with this sort of discrete core entity in Pakistan and Afghanistan that can be droned to death, but in fact an international network that poses a lot graver challenges,” Joscelyn said.

While Obama is keen to burnish his legacy as a president who ended U.S. involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and killed bin Laden, even he has softened his rhetoric on terrorism.

Two years ago, on a trip to Afghanistan, Obama said, “The goal that I set — to defeat al-Qaida, and deny it a chance to rebuild — is within reach.”

His administration’s most recent terrorism report, released by the State Department in late April, uses a less definitive voice.

“The al-Qaida core’s vastly reduced influence became far more evident in 2013,” the report said. “Al-Qaida leader (Ayman) al-Zawahiri was rebuffed in his attempts to mediate a dispute among al-Qaida affiliates operating in Syria, with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant publicly dissociating their group from al-Qaida.”

Michael Sheehan, a terrorism expert at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, said the top two groups he fears could attack the U.S. are “al-Qaida central” in Afghanistan and Pakistan and AQAP, which has attempted several attacks on the United States, including a failed airline bombing on Christmas Day in 2009 and the attempted bombing of U.S.-bound cargo planes in October 2010.

“The other organizations right now — although potentially very, very problematic — are currently focused on the local fight,” said Sheehan, the Obama administration’s former assistant undersecretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. “Whether eventually they shift to Europe first, then the U.S., we’ll see. But certainly a potential is there.”

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Navy leaders have considered implementing large-scale commercial components into a new amphibious assault ship as a way to both achieve performance goals and lower construction costs.

Called the LXR, the new amphibious ship could be a new design or configuration of several existing ships such as a version of the existing LSD 41/49 or a modified version of the Navy’s LPD 17 San Antonio Class amphibious transport dock, service officials said.

Weighing the need to keep costs as low as possible and still build a technically capable new ship, the Navy is considering using a commercially-designed ship propulsion system for the LXR, said Vice Adm. Willy Hilarides, Commander of Naval Sea Systems Command.
“You put the propulsion train on a commercial standard which is still very survivable. Commercial ship operators don’t want their ships to fail if they hit the rocks or get hit by a tug hard,” he said.

Using commercial technology could have the effect of lowering production costs for the new ship, as opposed to developing military specifications for the same system.

There are several current Navy ships which draw heavily upon commercial technologies, such as the large, 80,000-ton Mobile Landing Platform, or MLP and Afloat Forward Staging Base. The MLP is a 785 foot-long commercial Alaska-class crude oil carrier configured to perform a range of military missions such as amphibious cargo on-load/off-load and logistics support.

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Bernard said:

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Navy Considers Commercial Technology for New Amphib

What do you guys think about this?

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Jeff Head said:

If these vessels fill the role of the vessels they will be replacing, then they will be expected to go in harm's way. They will be in high threat envoironements on the point end of the sword landing troops.

Commercial grade for such vessels is a bad idea.

They will not take battle damage as well and they will not last as long.

The Mobile Landing Platform and Mobile Afloat Storage vessels are improtant logistical vessels, but they are not meant to be combat vessels.

If they are talking about a few COTS systems oin the ship, that is one thing. if they are talking about applying commercial standards instead of MIL-SPEC...that is completely different...and as I said, a bad idea.

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Brumby said:

Jeff,

I understand the plan is to put a cap of $1.4 billion per vessel to the LXR which in my mind is a LPD-17 (lite). When I look around what others are doing (not exactly comparable in terms of capabilities), the Dokdo cost around $300 million and the Mistral is around $800 million. I just can't reconcile why the US vessels are so expensive unless the others are not building to military grade. What is your take on this?

Brumby

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