"Is Joe Biden to blame for this mess? Not totally - not even close. This is a national problem with our national will being to blame. No foresight. Not enough money wisely spent. I really hope Pete can do something about the way the Pentagon plans and then spends the money we give them. Our troops deserve better. Our citizens deserve better. Our Navy deserves better."
Pop the corks, light the candles on the cake! For it is birthday time for the United States Navy! 250 years old! Wait - the Navy, just like the Army, can't be older than the country itself! Well - they are. In any event, the President and the First Lady were on the USS George HW Bush for a bit of a show on how much cool stuff our modern-day Navy has to use. To keep us safe with. To project power with. It was quite a show and quite a party!
Now for the bad news. Our once 600 ship Navy is woefully behind schedule in replacing needed ships. All kinds of ships and submarines. In fact, the latest dustup between the US and Canada involves submarines. Canada has decided it needs to spend billions to get twelve brand new diesel submarines. So, they are buying them from Germany instead of us. POTUS was not happy about that, not at all. But here is the reality. Sleepy Joe had cut down our build rate for subs to be one per year instead of two per year. Why? Who knows. Bottom line is we can't even make enough subs to fill out our Virginia Class attack subs quota as well as our Columbia Class "boomers". And that is a cold, hard fact.
Our Los Angeles Class attack subs are aging out. So are our Ohio Class "boomers". That is a huge problem. But it is just not subs - we need something to replace our Ticonderoga Class cruisers. They too, are aging out. And the new Constellation Class of frigates? Forget about it! The first ship is not yet built and is three years behind schedule. Meanwhile, our Arleigh Burke Class of destroyers are getting long in the tooth, and the Navy would love to start replacing them with the new (yet to be developed), DDX destroyers.
As the old saying goes, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Or in our case, the Navy is willing, but our national production base is lacking. And lacking badly. Right now, instead of a robust and state of the art 600 ship fleet, we are headed to an aging fleet of under 300 ships. That is just a shadow of what China has recently built. It is true with our newer ships, they are the finest in the world. But it comes down to a game of numbers. Even though they are not as good as ours, China will soon outnumber our ships by 2 to 1.
Is Joe Biden to blame for this mess? Not totally - not even close. This is a national problem with our national will being to blame. No foresight. I really hope Pete can do something about the way the Pentagon plans and then spends money. Our troops deserve better. Our citizens deserve better. Our Navy deserves better.
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