TOC Ready Room 28 April 2022: How do you solve a problem like the Navy? (and other naval musings)

Modern naval problems, it turns out, look pretty much like naval problems from any time.  The parameters are resources, logistics, geography, and technology.

This will be a tweet-enriched lightning round.  The big punch comes at the end.  It’s a doozy (and yes, I know:  if I were tediously pedantic I’d spell it Duesy.  Life is short).

A number of negative things are happening in a concentrated burst.  One is that the Navy brass – “Big Navy” – has just proposed to whack out a big chunk of the fleet for the foreseeable future.  With a target over the last half-decade of 355 ships, the Navy would decline from its current 296 ships to 280 in Fiscal Year 2027 (FY27).  In the best case among three options proposed by the Navy, the fleet would recover to 299 by FY32, 10 years from now.

The “sounds” of silence: Russia gears up for a war game unlike any other

As the world careens through January 2022 waiting to see what will happen with Russia, Ukraine, and NATO, a side drama unfolding off the coast of Ireland may yield clues to the scope of operation Russia has in mind in the coming days.

The initial indication of it came in a form that, in different circumstances, is usually prosaic: a hazard notice to airmen (NOTAM) lodged by Russia for an area about 170 nautical miles (NM) southwest of Ireland’s southwest coast.

Time for another thread.

A live fire Russian naval exercise has been scheduled inside the Irish EEZ, at a time when tensions on Russian military build ups relative to Ukraine are high.

What do we know and what can we speculate on? pic.twitter.com/y6KA66mlry

— Robert Gilbey (@RobGilbey) January 22, 2022

The NOTAM indicates

TOC Ready Room 2 Nov 2021: Election 2021; geopolitics heat up in Middle East; sub said to collide with seamount

Here comes Tuesday 2 November 2021, general election day this year, and there’s no stopping it.

As mentioned in the TOC football forum, we plan to be watching the Toledo game.

But we’ll check in with the election results.  New Jersey’s not looking good for turning, but Virginia is a live prospect with the latest poll showing Republican Glenn Youngkin up on Democrat Terry McAuliffe 53%-45%.

…and this is us, checking in with the election in Virginia.

Lose the ‘quagmire’ theme; Russia can’t fall into one in Syria

Putin confers with his senior military officials. (Image: Kremlin/RIA Novosti, Alexei Druzhinin via Newsweek)

We’re going to keep this one (relatively) short.  I’ve written about Russia’s goals in Syria elsewhere (see here as well).

A Bloomberg article from Monday commendably recognizes that Russia’s goals in Syria are “far broader” than the official goal of fighting Salafi terrorists.  The authors fall short of “getting” what the Russian involvement there is about, but they’re on the right track.

The problem is that they, like almost everyone else, are still framing the situation in the terms of a U.S.-style expeditionary intervention.  This leads the authors to say something like this:

Obama demonstrates geostrategic incomprehension in webcast with Jewish groups

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on the march. (Image: AFP via Der Spiegel)

There was a lot to reject in the comments made by President Obama on Friday to the leaders of the Jewish Federations of North America, in a webcast sponsored by JFNA.  That’s putting it in the mildest possible way.

But we can gain invaluable perspective from focusing on one particular passage in the Q&A session.  It illuminates everything else that’s going on, and exposes the brittle emptiness of Obama’s rhetoric – because it betrays the anachronism of his view of the Middle East and Israeli security.  It’s as if Obama doesn’t realize it’s not 2009 anymore.

The topic is the security relationship of the U.S. with Israel: how strong it is, and how it can be reenergized.  Here’s Michael Siegal, Chairman of Jewish Federations of North America, asking Obama the question (from the White House transcript emailed after the webcast, which the Chicago Sun-Times has here):