US Navy Oiler Grounded

[Jarhead0331]

The implications of this are staggering. What a tremendously weak link in our chain of defense. Why worry about attacking super carriers when you can target a single weakly defended ship and essentially bring the entire Navy to a standstill?

[Tripoli]

The scary thing is that the USN has known about our logistics vulnerability for years/decades.  It has/is a massive failure in leadership across administrations to have not been actively working on this issue.  Also there is the fact that we have 17 USNS ships that will be withdrawn from active service due to crewing issues.  The USN has refused to build a fleet capable of carrying operations against a peer competitor for some time now.  Hopefully, this error will not come back to bite us in the butt.

[Redwolf]

There has been talk a few years ago that the US Navy should run a massive, worldwide oil company.

That way they can have, without spending extra budget, as many tankers and as much stored oil and fuel as they want.

[Jarhead0331]

There has been talk a few years ago that the US Navy should run a massive, worldwide oil company.

That way they can have, without spending extra budget, as many tankers and as much stored oil and fuel as they want.

Seems like overkill. All they need are a few more vessels that are relatively cheap and easy to build.

[JasonPratt]

The point to that theory is that the Navy wouldn't have to be dependent on Congressional wrangling to get even those few more relatively cheap and easy to build vessels -- which has now failed across multiple administrations leading to the current crisis.

[Skoop]

I think our Navy gets by because everybody else's sucks ass.  Which isn't the way to be, accepting low standards cause no other power can compete is how you get surprised like we did at pearl harbor.   

[CptHowdy]

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[ArizonaTank]

The point to that theory is that the Navy wouldn't have to be dependent on Congressional wrangling to get even those few more relatively cheap and easy to build vessels -- which has now failed across multiple administrations leading to the current crisis.

I think it is the same old readiness story that has plagued almost all nations since the industrial revolution; in peacetime, spending on logistics is just never a priority.

The only reason they get away with it is because the other guy is usually in the same situation.

In terms of sealift capability, I guess that somewhere in the Pentagon there is a plan to take over US flagged ships in a dire emergency. And this is allowed by long-standing US Law. According to Copilot (my AI friend), there are about 185 US flagged cargo ships. Of course the time it would take to integrate these ships in real life, means that it may be many months before any of these ships could be used.

Copilot also says (hopefully it is not hallucinating):  In the event of war or a national emergency, the U.S. government can activate the Merchant Marine Act of 1936, which includes provisions for the National Defense Reserve Fleet (NDRF) and the Maritime Security Program (MSP). These programs ensure that U.S.-flagged cargo ships and their crews are available to support military and emergency operations.

A similar program exists for commercial cargo and passenger aircraft.

For a really bad....must scrape the bottom of barrel type of war, the National Defense Reserve Fleet has about 90 old ships (built in the 70s and 80s mostly) in various readiness states. About 50 of the ships are part of the "Ready Reserve Fleet," and are ships are almost ready to go in theory. While others are various states of mothball. Somewhat alarmingly, there are only 5 oilers in the entire program. Here is the January 2024 inventory with detailed info on location and state if you are interested:

https://www.maritime.dot.gov/sites/marad.dot.gov/files/2024-02/2024_01%20Public%20NDRF%20Inventory.pdf