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| USS Sacramento rearming two Iowa class battleships |
Without underway replenishment ships, America’s ability to project power in wartime will shrivel.
If the United States wants to escape the danger zone in its strategic competition with China — disproving Beijing’s fancy that it can rule the Western Pacific — decommissioning the U.S. Navy’s fastest, most capacious combat logistics ships is no way to do it. Just the opposite. It telegraphs that America is no longer serious about fighting far from North America for long spans of time. Competitors will take note.
Yet budget-cutters in Washington are compelling naval leaders to consider narrowing this competitive advantage. And they’re doing so at a time when China finally appears to be putting its own combat logistics house in order after decades of neglect. Over at Defense News, Chris Cavas reports that U.S. Navy officials are considering decommissioning — or laying up, a halfway status between active service and the boneyard — the workhorse Supply-class T-AOEs.
T-AOEs are big, fast ships. In effect they’re mobile, floating warehouses that deliver fuel, ammunition, and stores of myriad types to task forces underway at sea. They displace about the same as a big-deck amphibious carrier such as USS America, a newcomer to the active fleet. And unlike their slower, smaller brethren, they can keep up with the speediest non-nuclear ships in the U.S. Navy fleet. The picture at the top depicts USSSacramento, one of the Supply‘s forebears, rearming not one but two Iowa-class battleships at the same time, in the Persian Gulf in 1991. That gives you an idea of the size and capability of these vessels.
Read the full story at The Diplomat