Killed a pirate in a knife fight

It's easier to defend versus the pirates than in WWI/WW II against U-boats or blockade runners, they are more limited in thier radius and their goal is to capture ships, not sink them.  So the scale would be smaller, though it does add to the cost of everything going through there.
 
It's still a lot of ocean and not so many military ships. So it's one of the two things - and to be honest, with Persian Gulf commitments, I don't see how we could get more ships there at current funding levels NATO-wide.
 
LooseCannon said:
It's still a lot of ocean and not so many military ships. So it's one of the two things - and to be honest, with Persian Gulf commitments, I don't see how we could get more ships there at current funding levels NATO-wide.
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Perhaps defense spending is lower than it needs to be in some countries to defend their interests ... looking at you Japan (and France, and really most of Europe outside of the UK).  The ability to protect trade on the high seas have been national imperatives going back to the time when the second country/tribe put a ship at sea
 
See, I think the converse is true; military spending in general is too high, especially in the Estais Unis. Naval spending might need to be a priority, but military spending? Probably too high overall. It's more about priorities; NATO shouldn't need to have such a high percentage of their naval power diverted to the Persian Gulf. A lot of that could be reassigned to the Arabian Sea.
 
I would agree to replace military to naval.  Bottom line, a country should be able to defend it's own interests, either on its own or through treaty. The US has always based defense on a two theater premise, I am not sure if Europe has, but it seems in terms of Navy, it has not and to a large degree has counted on the US to pick up any slack since WWII ended.  This water is certainly important to the US, but it is more important to Europe and countries like India, China , and Japan

Those countries should take the lead on this and the US/Canada should as good allies and with their own interests assist as much as possible.
 
I'm at work so I can't quite reply properly: however, suffice to say, the reason Euro navies are the way they are is b/c of US leadership in the early NATO era - will extrapolate shortly :)
 
I have no doubt about that, my point is that needs to change, times have changed since the Soviet Union went under, military tactics/power/technology/etc need to change with it.  The way armed forces were handled from 1945 to 1990 did what they needed to do vis-a-vis the threat at the time.  Now that the main threats are in the Middle East and not even countries but terrorists orgs and pirates (really who would have thought 20 years ago that pirates would be a legit threat) things need to change.
 
Oh yeah. For sure...NATO-organization is still based on the concept of anti-Warsaw Pact warfare. I have studied this somewhat extensively; the armies of all NATO countries really need to be scaled back, the navies strengthened - the US Navy on its own is the most powerful military in the world (incl. Marines), and there is a very good reason for that.
 
LooseCannon said:
Oh yeah. For sure...NATO-organization is still based on the concept of anti-Warsaw Pact warfare. I have studied this somewhat extensively; the armies of all NATO countries really need to be scaled back, the navies strengthened - the US Navy on its own is the most powerful military in the world (incl. Marines), and there is a very good reason for that.
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Part of that is history and extension of hte Pacific War.  While the rest of Europe was primarily engaged in a land war and the Sea consisted of convoys and a few mass landings (D-Day/N. Africa/Italy), the US gained quite a bit of experience in the Pacific and a good portion of our armed forces has followed two models 1) the land war with for prep versus the USSR 2) to defend the Pacific.  From that standpoint, the US has a historical advantage that with the possible exception of the UK, most of Europe does not have. 

For most militaries, it seems important to have a tradition in certain fields for them to excel in them, though sometimes (as in WWII), that needs to be forced upon them.

The other side of the equation is that the countries on the other side need to contribute.  This seems like a great opportunity to work on a common goal with China, but it should also include Japan, India, Packistan, Indonesia, etc.  A fair amount of the traffic heading past Somalia is headed to/from their direction
 
I finally have time to put up a post here.

The reason Europe is less able to field a blue water force is because of its historical roles within NATO. The US Navy is the prime strike force of NATO; all other navies are designed to slot into it. The French Navy has gone their own way, which is why they have fleet carriers; the English are preparing to launch two new fleet carriers, but by and large, most of NATO's carrier force is the USN.

This is by design.

All navies in NATO have a role. Canadian/German navies, for instance, are anti-sub forces specialized in the North Atlantic and Baltic Sea specifically. Italian/Greek/Turkish navies are specialized on holding the Bospherous against the Black Sea fleet. Royal Navy serves as a secondary function to the USN - capable of issuing strikes and supporting amphibious capability, but the USA has always taken the lead.

You're right in this is an extension of the Pacific War. After WW2, the USN had the lead in carriers by leaps and bounds - 24 Essex class carriers and 2 Midway classes. This meant that restructuring the navies for the cold war naturally gave the USN the core concept, since it was far cheaper to have one navy that worked together on an operational scale than to have 4 major Western navies (US, UK, French, Canadian).

Of course, that concept no longer works, in that we're not going to ever have a war with Russia or China, not as we currently understand war. The foreign policy aberrations in Iraq/Afghanistan (whatever else you want to call it, they are certainly aberrations) have led to the US having to focus power in an area that is not strategically important for shipping. What is it, 3 carriers in the Gulf?

Then there is North Korea keeping several carriers there.

Anyway. The point is that NATO is still running ships that were built in the 1990s, designed in the 1980s to do the tasks of the 1970s, and it is going to take a huge amount of money and effort to redesign our militaries to be what they need to be for the post Cold War era. The USA is not leading the path in this aspect (consider the Ford-class supercarriers currently under production/order), but the UK and France are. It will be interesting to see if we return to an era of independent naval concepts, or if anti-piracy/terrorism creates a new NATO force.

(PS, the US is doing someone awesome with their littoral combat ships, USS Freedom and Independence. Amazing vessels. Zumwalt-class destroyers are bitchin awesome too.)
 
To a degree, the US will always have a need for the large carriers if anything as floating runways for operations in areas without enough friendly airbases/countries that do not grant flyover permission.  Wars like Afghanistan, Iraq currently could be N. Korea, Libya, Iran, who knows where in the future. 

For example, depending on how Libya goes, NATO/the US could end up enforcing a no fly zone there in the near.

We cannot totoally discount land wars, but we do not need to be looking at tanks rolling through Europe any more. From a tactical standpoint, these smaller/mobile craft could operate from an x radius from a large carrier easier if they had air cover versus w/o.  My area of study has always been more land basd, I may be wrong here.

What does seem to be the case is that we are either missing the proper craft or  enough craft are not deployed from enouigh countries if land conflicts are stretching the Navy thin

In the case of the pirates, since most of this stuff is coming from/to Asia, this would seem to be a great opportunity to work with China/India/Japan on a common threat (and the subject for another topic, see Japan redo the military clauses in their constitution which have been used as an excuse to not maintain a miliary large enough for the country ... yes I know the US wrote the cosntitution at the end of WWII, there is a lot of good stuff in there, but it needs to change with time).
 
Japan has a huge military, they just don't call it that. I agree that this is an area where international cooperation could become key - very much so. I think it would be awesome to see south-east Asian countries working with NATO powers to make the Arabian safer.
 
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