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| Image: Wiki Commons |
By Franz-Stefan Gady
The U.S. Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan does not meet requirements for amphibious warfare in the Pacific.
The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps do not have enough amphibious assault ships to conduct full-scale combat operations in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a retired senior U.S. military official quoted in National Defense Magazine.
“Shipbuilding — we never get it right. … We need to start getting it right,” retired Marine Corps Lieutenant-General Thomas Conant, the former deputy commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, told an audience during a panel discussion in Washington, D.C., National Defense Magazine reports.
The reason is simple. The U.S. Navy’s fiscal year 2016 30-year shipbuilding plan does not take into account the U.S. Navy’s and Marine Corps’ capability requirements for executing an “opposed amphibious assault” [PDF] with two Marine expeditionary brigades (each brigade consists of roughly 14,000 men) in the event of war.
According to U.S. Navy plans, conducting such combat operations would require a fleet of 38 vessels rather than the 30 amphibious assault ships currently in service. However, due to fiscal constraints, the navy compromised, requesting a mere 34 ships in the latest 30-year shipbuilding plan.
“If 38 ships is the requirement … in the most engaging and most hard-to-fight plan, then that’s a reality. It’s not just a Marine Corps requirement. It’s a requirement for the nation and we ought to think about how we’re going to approach that,” Conant stated.
Read the full story at The Diplomat