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I love/hate these types of articles. In this case, “hate”....
The US Army is preparing to fight in Europe, but can it even get there?
WASHINGTON — With Russia’s reemergence as a menace in Europe, the U.S. Army has been laying the foundations to fight once again on the continent it defended through most of the 20th century. But if war were to break out tomorrow, the U.S. military could be hard-pressed to move the number of tanks, heavy guns and equipment needed to face off with Russian forces.
And even if the Army could get there in numbers, then the real problems would start: how would the U.S. sustain them?
The U.S. sealift capacity — the ships that would ultimately be used to transport Army equipment from the states to Europe or Asia — is orders of magnitude smaller than it was during World War II. Combine that with the fact that the commercial shipbuilding industry in the U.S. is all but gone, and the U.S. can’t launch the kind of massive buildup of logistics ships it undertook during wartime decades ago.
Among the ships the country has for sealift and logistics forces, the Government Accountability Office has found a steady increase in mission-limiting equipment failures, which raises questions about how many might actually be available if the balloon goes up
“The American people far too often seem to believe that we could fly everything we needed over to Europe but that’s just not the case,” Hendrix said. “We’ve been practicing with Brigade Combat Teams but if we needed to respond to a large-scale contingency with Russia, you’d be looking at the need to move a corps — two or three divisions.”
The US Army is preparing to fight in Europe, but can it even get there?
WASHINGTON — With Russia’s reemergence as a menace in Europe, the U.S. Army has been laying the foundations to fight once again on the continent it defended through most of the 20th century. But if war were to break out tomorrow, the U.S. military could be hard-pressed to move the number of tanks, heavy guns and equipment needed to face off with Russian forces.
And even if the Army could get there in numbers, then the real problems would start: how would the U.S. sustain them?
The U.S. sealift capacity — the ships that would ultimately be used to transport Army equipment from the states to Europe or Asia — is orders of magnitude smaller than it was during World War II. Combine that with the fact that the commercial shipbuilding industry in the U.S. is all but gone, and the U.S. can’t launch the kind of massive buildup of logistics ships it undertook during wartime decades ago.
Among the ships the country has for sealift and logistics forces, the Government Accountability Office has found a steady increase in mission-limiting equipment failures, which raises questions about how many might actually be available if the balloon goes up
“The American people far too often seem to believe that we could fly everything we needed over to Europe but that’s just not the case,” Hendrix said. “We’ve been practicing with Brigade Combat Teams but if we needed to respond to a large-scale contingency with Russia, you’d be looking at the need to move a corps — two or three divisions.”