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USA THE US NAVY World Made Simple: The State of the US Navy PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h-7WFGlb3M Peter Burgess COMMENTARY The US military is big ... and the US military is expensive. It is less clear whether it is effective and good value for money! This is not an easy, simple question. My own view is that the US military is far less effective than it ought to be, given the huge amount of money that it is costing. Most of the ineffectiveness of the US military is caused by issues outside its control ... notable the US political process and the influence some powerful elected politicians have on the allocation of money and the determination of priorities for the use of money by the military. I am a strong critic of the US role in international affairs. Though the US has military power, and the US has economic power, it is suprisingly weak in terms of diplomacy and international influence. My impression is that this is caused in lage part by the role that domestic US politics plays in the appointment and assignment of ambassadors and other senior diplomats. In the UK and many other countries, senior diplomatic positions are filled by career civil servants who have a lot of expertise. By contrast, most of the US equivalents are incompetent amateurs! My hope and recommendation is that the US will upgrade cooperation between the US military and US diplomatic teams with the simple but important goal of making international cooperation more effective. During my adult lifetime, I worked in many different parts of the world ... more than 50 countries ... and only one time was I impressed by the US Ambassador in the country. Even in this case, the core reason why I was impressed was that the Ambassador was willing to take issue with instructions from Washington that were quite ridiculous given the actual situation on the ground in the country! I am convinced that the US military would be a lot more effective and valuable in the broadest sense if there was a stronger US diplomatic program in the lead rather than more and more military sabre rattling and worse! This video was archived on October 4th 2024 together with the above observation. I am looking at the video again about a month later and am seeing the US Navy in a much more positive light and much more 'fit-for-purpose' than I thought the first time through! In terms of the US role in geopolitics, I remain of the view that the US Diplomatic Service and the political dimension of the United States, both domestic and foreign, are serious weaknesses that need to be addressed. It has been said that 'knowledge is power' and I would agree that knowledge is a good start. Unfortunately many people seem to subscribe to the idea that 'Ignorance is Bliss ... 'tis Folly to be Wise'. This was the tag line to a BBC radio programme from the 1940s that my adult relatives would listen to every week when I was growing up! The matter of 'knowledge' is a serious problem for the United States and certainly not understood very well. By world standards the United States has had a poor educational system for a very long time. When I first visited Canada and the United States when I was 20 years old, I became friendly with some Canadians in Montreal of my age. We compared the curriculum content of the UK with the curriculum content of Quebec Province, Canada and concluded that the UK was a year ahead! Later in that summer we travelled by car south to Florida where we went through the same exercise with Americans of our same age ... and concluded that Canada was a year ahead of the USA. But I think it gets worse. Many of the countries of the world have improved their system of education significantly over time ... including the UK and Canada, but not so much in the United States. Many States in the United States have degraded their education systems from the already low levels of the 1960s to something even worse. The politicians that have promoted this may be popular, but they are stupid, and these people are doing serious damage to the country. This has been on display during the US election season of 2024. There are a lot of candidates running for office who are not very bright but who are popular and may well be elected. Hopefully enough Americans will make the effort to understand the big issues and vote for candidates that have the intelligence and integrity needed. From my perspective, it looks like the United States has more 'potential' than any other geography in the world. The region has a low human population density. Many aspects of the region can be considered positive. The way the powerful people in the United States have chosen what to prioritize is an issue because in recent times ... like the last 50 years ... the big decision makers have chosen to embrace decisions that have been good for the 'top' at the expense of everyone else. The result is that most people in the United States have become poorer with each passing generation ... exactly the opposite of what should have been accomplished! President Biden has implemented policies that will change this significantly ... over a period of time, but not instantly. I am of the view that a repeat Trump Presidency will reverse all Biden era progress, both short term and long term ... potentially to the detriment of the United States, the 'West' and likely the whole world! Hopefully Kamala Harris will win the upcoming election and set the stage for broad-based prosperity! Peter Burgess
The State of the US Navy World Made Simple Oct 4, 2024 302 subscribers ... 5,329 views ... 189 likes This video is going over the state of America's Navy and the different assets within it's fleet. New episodes every Monday and Friday! Feel free to comment below for discussion and debate. CORRECTION: Zumwalt class had 32 ships planned not 22! Transcript 0:00 hey guys bill here and welcome to another episode of World Made Simple today we're doing something new and that is going to be the start of at least I think a new series that I'm calling the state of so the state of what well today I'm going to set what that is but in the future that's kind of going to be up to you guys today we're going to start with the United States Navy though and it's because it's the armed service that I'm most familiar with and I think probably most my viewers are as well a lot of my viewers that I've seen are actually from overseas not just from the United States and the branch that anyone overseas usually intersects with the most is going to be the US Navy simply because it goes everywhere US army forces are localized to the base US Air Force normally just flies over there's not really much Stang power ships will sometimes anchor for weeks at a time so it's a lot more exposure than the other two branches so let's start with that and move forward but what does the US Navy do well the US Navy has one primary goal and that is to ensure the freedom of nav navigation and open use of the 1:01 seats it does this via power projection and the United States does a fantastic job with this great example is our carrier so let's start talking out with them whenever anyone thinks about American sea power they usually think about American aircraft carriers these are behemoths of ships 100,000 tons a piece we have 11 of them they are giants these ships each can carry up to around 80 aircraft a piece and we have two classes being the Geral our Ford class which we have one currently of in service with one almost no with construction two more on the way and we have the nits class that currently has 10 active vessels in the field with one of them in the process being decomission being the nimit itself these aircraft carriers are all nuclear powered and all over 100,000 tons very powerful very effective craft and are able to basically individually represent the strength of some national militaries we use these to basically be 2:00 a show of Force if an aircraft carrier shows up off a coastline it's to deter anyone from doing anything any of our adversaries are going to say it's us showing aggression often it can be viewed as that these are Big intimidating ships but more often than not usually they're deployed because of an aggressive act in that area or to show that the US presence is in that area now these carriers are not by themselves they're often surrounded by a floella of defensive screens notably Cruisers and destroyers let's start with the bigger of the two being Cruisers the United States Navy is the only Navy in the world to currently use Cruisers in the fleet the Japanese are actually building two more of Hier I believe they're over 30,000 tons our Cruisers are the Ticonderoga class I believe they're a little bit over 10,000 tons these ships are old around 40 to 30 years old depending on the ship and are we're actually in the process of phasing these ships out of the fleet there is a total of nine of them in active service with nine more in reserve serve totaling 3:00 to 18 ships. there are no plans to bring more of these ships into service and the reason is there's really not really a purpose for these ships. Originally they were supposed to deter larger assets but nowadays there really isn't anything larger than them in the sea so the Navy is retiring them and not planning on putting anything in their place so our Ticonderogas will be our last Cruiser class at least for the time being now let's move a step down to destroyers. our Destroyer type is the Arley Burke I've talked about it on this channel before she is a beautiful Workhorse by every definition. The Arley Burke is kind of our flag model if you see a destroyer it's probably an Arley Burke if it's waving the American flag it definitely is an Arley Burke now these ships are pretty effective they are armed with just about every American defensive system and defensive system on the planet you've got tomahawk missiles you got sea sparrows you got seawoods everything is on these boats they're well-armed well-defended ships and their 4:00 main job is to kind of do a bit of everything they're meant to do Fleet defense they're meant to do ground strike they're meant to do Recon they're meant to do anti-submarine missions Arley BG can pretty much do it all and it's been a fantastic standard ship for the US Navy however it is starting the show its age at around a 40-year-old design it was originally conceived in the 1980s and built starting in the 1990s so the class is starting the show her age additionally I mentioned this in our laser video the ship's starting to run out of power for the new systems including our upcoming laser defense systems so the Burke's going to be limited by that which means her time as our main State Destroyer is coming to an end and she's planned to be replaced by the DDX program however this is not coming out till the 2030s that's because the ship meant to replace the Arley Burke was the zwal class and the zwal class unfortunately proved to be way too costly to mass produce and went from 22 ships that were planned to just three so so we're kind of in a little bit of a 5:01 limbo until the finalizations for the DDX program come out now going to the next size down is where things start going to a little bit of a problem with the US Navy the US Navy had an idea known as L toal combat ship or LCS we had two ships in this class being the independence and the freedom these replaced are all of our Hazard Perry class frigs that we had back in the 9s and they really haven't done a good job with that and in fact almost all of them are in the process of being retired we have a grand total of 23 of them that are still in service more than half of them are slated to be retired within the next 5 years yeah not really good showing the main reason is because their engines and a modular system that was designed for them really did not work well it breaks quite frequently they're overpowered ships that cannot handle the strain of their own engine they're very fast ships which was what they were built to do but too fast for their Hulls and too fast for 6:00 their engines to be maintained properly so the LCS ships are being removed that means that we currently have really no good small scale ships in our Fleet we do have a replacement coming up which is the constellation class the constellation class is based upon the FR design from I believe it's the Italian and the French navy no idea when this is going to get into active duty probably sometime in the 2030 so once again we have a bit of a time span between now and the activation of the first of the constellation class but the Navy might expedite that we'll see now in terms of the other ship classes we have where we start getting into the Marine side of things and I'm going to go over the Marines in a separate video If this series continues but the Marine ships that we have for the Marines are known as amphibious assault ships amphibious assault carriers whatever term you want to use there's a bunch of different variations more of the stories it comes down to the America wasp and San Antonio class that make up the backbone of this group 7:00 unlike the other ships in this lineup that are 30 40 sometimes 50 years old these ships are actually relatively new ranging from around 30 years old to just under 5 years old so these ships are still modern and in service this means that America's Navy so is a very effective way of deploying our Ground Forces on the Seas for example the American class can drop around a thousand Marines on any location with usually 24 hours to our adversaries that's a terrifying thought and I know the Marines who are watching this are loving that idea for example if we have one of our assault carriers off the coast of let's say Taiwan and we need to deploy those troops it'll take a few hours and then they're on Shore with armored and helicopter support these things are very very effective at moving these forces quickly and it basically means the United States can deploy huge numbers of forces anywhere on the planet and usually that's a very rare thing when it comes to Naval 8:01 Warfare so I'm going to leave the Marines here for now I know some people are already going that's not the Marines but it I know it's not the Marines it's still a Navy thing so I'm going include it on that side of things as they are listed as US Navy ships so moving forward I got to talk about the silent service and that of course being America's submarine Fleet our submarine Fleet is one of the most powerful in the world and it comprises of four different classes three of which being attack submarines being the Seawolf love that name the Los Angeles and the Virginia class all these ships are meant to go after enemy ships sink them and then Retreat to a fair distance wolf pack all that kind of good stuff these ships are all nuclear powered and extremely dangerous if they get anywhere near any vessel period on the flip side the other class of Submarine we have is the Ohio class we have 14 of these things and they're what's called Boomer Subs shut up one person in the comments saying okay Boomer okay moving forward Boomer sub s are continent Killers these things have 9:03 nuclear missiles aboard them in total at any point anywhere on planet Earth there is going to be at least six of these things deployed with nuclear missiles there are 10 total with nuclear missiles four of them have conventional uh tomahawk missiles which we've actually used before in combat the nuclear ones we've never used in combat thank God in fact the vast majority of America's nukes are not in the United States they're on board these submarines around a thousand nuclear warheads are somewhere randomly in the ocean at any given point in time it's an extremely good deterrence force and it keeps most of our enemies up at night if there's one ship that freaks the enemy out it's not the American carriers it's the American Boomer Subs so there's only one other group that we got to talk about in terms of the American Navy that's kind of the extra leftover ships that we have now we have some submarine tenters we have some M layers but one I want to focus on is the oldest currently 10:02 deployed ship in the fleet and that is the play blow and the play blow is kind of America's way of saying we're going to get it back eventually because this is a ship that was actually seized by the North Korean military during the Korean War it's still listed as inamerican service even though it's been basically a prisoner of war since that war so going on 70 years now it's a weird story but we still keep it and I'm not sure if it's at this point because of spite or because we just don't really want to remove it because it's kind of a tradition now that's it for the active ships but there's one kind of active inactive ship that I want to mention and that is the oldest ship in the American Navy and that's the USS Constitution so for those of you are unaware we are one of the few Nations to have an original ship from our first naval squadron still in active service and still in good condition the USS Constitution better known as old irons Ides is one of the 11:00 oldest serving ships in the world she is an old ship of the line one of the original six frigs designed by the United States of America for the first US Navy all the way back in the 1780s she is still maintained and in good condition she's often moored at Boston Harbor and is kind of a position of renown to be in within the United States ay and one other more fun fact the largest Naval facility on planet Earth is a forest in the Midwest and this specifically this forest is grown and maintained to make sure we have the Timbers to repair this ship. It's a fun little rabbit hole to go down but that's kind of the scope of the United States Navy we have very powerful surface Fleet in terms of carriers destroyers and cruisers we have a very potent submarine Fleet in terms of our Boomer subs and our attack subs and we have a very effective and very aggressive uh Marine Transport Fleet meing our amphibious assault ships so this is kind of a new thing that I'm trying to do see what you 12:00 guys think about this and see if simplifying these different groups into kind of a video like this would be something up your alley but ultimately that's up for you guys to tell me and that's all I got to say about the American Navy at least for today so with that I hope you guys have a good weekend and I will see you once again on Monday take it easy [Music] he

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