US to have no carrier in the mid east for 1-2 months this fall.

[Belesarius]

http://www.defensenews.com/story/military/2015/06/05/navy-pulls-carrier-centcom-islamic-state-group-presence/28554047/

 

 

1-2 month gap in US Carrier presence in the mid east.  Cutting the budget while increasing demand results in shortfalls in capability. Who would have guessed?

[xthetenth]

Anyone with half a brain realized this was going to happen. It was a real problem looming on the horizon before we decided to pour huge sums of desperately needed money into a sandbox in a fit of insane optimism. There's a pretty good discussion of the subject of Surface Action Groups as a demi-replacement for Carrier Task Forces especially in the Middle East station in Friedman's Seapower as Strategy, copyrighted in December 2001.

[Virdea]

It is actually the terminal stupidity of sequestration.  The politicos of the time knew that they could screw the US government and when the rubber hit the road no one would equate that stupid time to them.  A lot of chickenhawks scream to their constituents about how they love defense, let that bit of stupid theatre mess up defense spending for decades to come.

[xthetenth]

I don't think a failure like that begrudges multiple major contributing factors, but yes, that is a more proximate cause. I'd contend that going to war right as the peace dividend was starting to wear off and things were in need of upgrade and replacement really hosed military funding to a point where the sequestration was a brutal blow. I seem to recall us shedding future capability throughout the war, like the F-22 buy getting halved from where it stood in 1997.  I'm not really that optimistic overall that we're going to recover from this as "quickly" as we did Vietnam either.